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Japan Fukushima Nuclear Plant 'Clean-Up Costs Double,' Approaching $200 Billion (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Japan's government estimates the cost of cleaning up radioactive contamination and compensating victims of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has more than doubled, reports say. The latest estimate from the trade ministry put the expected cost at some 20 trillion yen ($180 billion). The original estimate was for $50 billion, which was increased to $100 billion three years later. The majority of the money will go towards compensation, with decontamination taking the next biggest slice. Storing the contaminated soil and decommissioning are the two next greatest costs. The compensation pot has been increased by about 50% and decontamination estimates have been almost doubled. The BBC's Japan correspondent, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, says it is still unclear who is going to pay for the clean up. Japan's government has long promised that Tokyo Electric Power, the company that owns the plant, will eventually pay the money back. But on Monday it admitted that electricity consumers would be forced to pay a portion of the clean up costs through higher electricity bills. Critics say this is effectively a tax on the public to pay the debt of a private electricity utility.
An off the cuff estimate of a complicated event with virtually no precedents. Made by an entity responsible for the disaster.
I think everyone who thought about it for more than a couple of minutes was figuring to multiply the 'estimate' by a factor between 2 and 10.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You see, the thing is, nuclear *is* a great idea.
However, putting 40 year old designs next to the ocean on an island chain on the Ring of Fire tectonic plate zone with a hundreds-year old history of tsunamis along that coastline *isn't* a great idea.
Pebble bed designs, CANDU reactors, SMR (Small Modular Reactors) and reprocessors are available today. Soon, Molten Salt reactors and Thorium reactors will be available. To top that off, on the other side of nuclear, ITER is coming along nicely with the promise of commercial level over-unity fusion.
Yes, Nuclear is a great idea, but one has to be smart about *where* it's built, not *whether* it's built.
Sorry mdsolar, we can't take that risk. And fusion is only 50 years away 50 years ago.
The supposed "critics" are fucking idiots. Thins as big and as costly as a nuclear power plant is not built on the whim of a corporation. Rate payers, government at all levels from the first responders that are funded to serve it to the indifferent elected officials the public put in office and who appointed the deficient regulators; everyone was at the table and everyone got the benefits for forty years. Japan used the power of those nukes to build its prosperity from the 70's to 2011 and there is a whole generation of geriatric Japanese living off the pensions built by that engine of wealth. The public is just as obligated to pay for the consequences as Tepco or anyone else involved in Fukushima.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Yes, Nuclear is a great idea, but one has to be smart about *where* it's built, not *whether* it's built.
there is a little problem, and you just nailed it. Where it is built. And smart. Sorry, but there are humans involved, and perhaps a nuc plant gets built in a certain place because the person who sold the land gave great head, or a fine ass contribution to one of his employees, also known as an elected politician. Added to the mix is the CEO of the project who demands the schedule is met, and the CFO who even thought they don'nt know a thing about niuclear power, knows exactly where to save money by cutting corners.
It's a mighty big damn genie in that bottle, and it wants out really bad. And while corporations are darn good at turning a profit, they aren't so good with genies. Samsung has problems with tiny little genies in their phones. So while they might be great at making sneakers or selling Pizza, corporate culture doesn't like engineers and scientists very much, and doesn't consider their input necessary on the "important matters"
Until that damn genie gets out of the bottle.
In hindsight of course, the Fukushima Power plant was simply going to fail. The walls were 100 percent certain to breach, the water was 100 percent going to settle where the emergency generators were. The design itself however, would still be working today if not for the terrible decisions made on siting and building the place.
Can a safe reliable nuclear based pwer generating plant be built? I'm pretty certain the answer is yes.
Will they be built? Having a pretty good grasp of human nature, my money is on only by accident.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yes, which is why they're supposed to be stupidly overdesigned and are given shutdown dates and whatnot.
Trouble is, we haven't been shutting them down. Strong political resentment makes it hard to build replacement plants (and those things produce a lot of power that has to be replaced in some manner.)
And if you get past that you get the beancounters looking at the multi-billion dollar price tags of a new reactor and they start wondering if the existing ones can't hold on just a few more years.
And when you get past that, you get the NIMBYs doing their best to make sure that the only place you can build the new plant is on the moon.. and someone would still likely complain about it.
Unfortunately the world has turned away from the idea of long-term investments in things like infrastructure. Anything that looks bad in the next quarterly report is highly questioned and anything the government gets involved in has to be able to show positive results by the next election season.
A project that won't show a profit for 10 or 20 years (or worse doesn't show a profit at all and is only being done because we don't want bloody nuclear explosions all over the place) is simply not given any political or economic weight these days.
Throw in the uphill battle I mention above and its hardly surprising that we keep trying to retrofit and upgrade existing ancient plants. Its nearly impossible to do anything else. But unfortunately there will be the odd occasion when "good enough" just isn't good enough anymore. And unfortunately when that occasion happens to hit a nuclear power plant, things get very ugly very fast.
Nuclear is still our cleanest, safest form of large-scale power. But only if its properly maintained, spent fuel properly reprocessed and properly disposed of when it can no longer be reprocessed, replacement schedules are followed and so forth. Unfortunately we've got an absolutely horrific track record on basically all of those points. Frankly its kind of amazing that we haven't had more disasters.
What about this tired, trite false dichotomy? The choice is not 1) nuclear 2) coal.
But it's simply not. Tout all the vaporware you can buzzword - breeder reactors, thorium reactors, etc etc - it's still going to be more expensive than wind and solar. Build nukes as safe as you want, they're still going to be more of a risk, and still be more expensive to decomission.
You anti fusion luddites are unbelievable with your snideness and negativity. The budget for nuclear fusion was cut by 90% in the 1970s. Have some patience, maybe it's just delayed by 50 years or 100years. So what, it hasn't been shown to be impossible and they are credible paths to acheiving it. Thank goodness you weren't around 125 years ago to ridicule the aviation pioneers like the wright brothers for their failures.
No, yet more people die in the production, installation (this is the big one for solar), and maintenance of solar per kwh generated than they do for nuclear power.
Radiation is scary because you can't see it, but the dead don't care whether it was radiation or a fall or electrocution that caused it. Want to save lives? Push for nuclear.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I love how people who tout solar and wind as "clean" are actually a form of NIMBY because they don't mind all of the strip-mining at slave wages for all of the rare earth minerals that have to me mined and transported to build them. Let alone all of the pollution created during that process.
Anyone with the simplest understanding of nuclear vs chemical bonds should understand that there is no comparison. We might as well be still running 8086--except nuke is even larger comparison. 1st-world countries should be capable of running nuclear power without serious problems if their governments actually demanded quality. Leave 3rd-world "chemical" power to 3rd-world countries that can't be trusted with nuclear weapons. (That is, if you already have nuclear bombs, there's ZERO rational argument against nuclear power. I'm not suggesting proliferation of more weaponry.)
And Japan? Japan put a ton of reactors on a freaking crowded island, and then didn't bother to inspect them properly. (Any moron with a badge could have noticed their backup generators weren't on the required stilts above the waterline--which failed when flooded.) The story of Fukushima is a failure of government to regulate greedy corporations, not an inherent failure of technology.
I'll never understand why slashdotters claim to love technology and "science" but eschew one of the greatest advances in the history of mankind. Nuclear power is the future. End of story. You can drag your feet all you want, but that doesn't make you progressive. The future will still win out one day--it's only a matter of when.
I admire your mathematics and reasoning, and I cry at the final monetisation of life-threatening danger being so many pennies a pound. :(
Beyond that, it's "all profit", eh?
Except for the dead, ill, dying, poisoned, forgotten.
And except the unspoken lost opportunities, sunken in nuclear denialism.
Cleaning up a nuclear accident isn't like cleaning out the toilet.
People don't usually die lingering painful deaths when you don't clean the toilet bowl properly.