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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!
And yet mdsolar still thinks Nuclear is a great idea?
Like the previous story?
Prepare for the worst instead of bullshitting risk assessments. The actual, absolute worst. This wasn't it, and it's still PLENTY bad and PLENTY expensive.
Learn the lesson. Some endeavors cannot have corners cut nomatter the business SOP rhetoric du jour.
If Tepco's profit are not enough to fill the bill, then there is a good case to go after Tepco's capital. Japan's state could seize the company.
What about the lost productivity of the land that's now quarantined? Or the tourism money that would've went to Japan if it wasn't for Fukushima?
I'd like to see an honest calculation of how much nuclear power costs, because all the numbers I've seen never takes those into account.
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!
When dealing with Utilities, there is no way for the company to pay back without taking the money from the rate payers. The only real way to do it is for the government ot require the company to issue stock representing a percentage of the company value that would go to the government. Therefore the owners of the company ie stock holders pay for the damage they caused by placing idiots in charge and the government can then sell the stock to pay for the cleanup or hold it in trust to ensure this does not happen again.
It's completely standard that any and all fees against corporations are passed along to the customers. It is sales tax, not purchase tax, after all.
In times like this we must remember that corporate profits are the most important thing, and anyone saying otherwise is simply a commie. The beauty of the free market is that if the customers don't like their new rates, they can just quit their jobs and move their families to a part of the country not served by Tokyo Electric. (And then later to South Korea when all the other power companies take the opportunity to jack their rates up in kind.)
"But on Monday it admitted that electricity consumers would be forced to pay a portion of the clean up costs through higher electricity bills." Which is exactly what would have happened before the accident if the company had not been externalizing it's costs. I am no fan of corporate welfare, and I am smart enough to know I am below average IQ for a 6 digit Slashdot user. But - They could "pay now or pay later." The argument could be made the plant would not have been built because of the costs. But these costs would never have been forecast, because the event was not forecast. Just $.02
So much for the Japanese Miracle
I don't understand how the costs of this can approach that magnitude (using $100k / man-year as a generous number). The linked article was very sparse on numbers, so it's unclear how many people are being compensated, but even if you compensated ten thousand people 100 years worth of income each, that would only be half the cost, and I don't understand how any huge civil engineering project could cost 1 million man-years of effort. The Hoover Dam apparently only cost $700M in today's dollars - what is involved in the cleanup of things that has the equivalent cost of about 100 Hoover Dams? $200B is also roughly equivalent to the entire Apollo space program.
Mind boggling... that's just how big $200 billion is.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Taxpayers and customers are footing the bill. They might grumble a bit, but they'll still pay.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
45% of that increase could be depreciation of the Yen against the US Dollar, roughly from $75 Yen per USD to $110.
Were 2011 and 2016 estimates in USD compared, or was the comparison made in Yen and then only the difference converted to USD?
Does this mean that every nuclear power plant is "too big to fail," with each installation possibly representing a trillion+ dollar liability?
... because they skip right over human fallibility.
Look at Katrina.
Books were written about how New Orleans was a bowl below sea level, years and years ago.
The Army Corps of Engineers, their brothers, nieces, and adoptive children knew the score.
Look at the Mississippi floods. We know it does that and yet people live there.
Look at earthquake-prone California.
In the final analysis, we find that shit happens.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I assume that any government project will cost 10x more than projected.
People saying we shouldn't do nuclear power is like someone saying we should not buy 2016 Volvo's or Subaru's because 1970 rust buckets were death traps.
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.
Yes, nukes are so economical. Japan has just paid $2 Billion extra for each reactor in the country.
FFF they coulda built a fusion reactor like ITER or even DEMO for 1/8th the cost.
Yes the cost is big. But everything about nuclear is big, including the amount of power generated. Fukushima Daiichi consisted of 6 reactors:
#1 generated 460 MWe from March 1971 to April 2012, or 41.1 years
#2 generated 784 MWe from July 1974 to April 2012, or 37.7 years
#3 generated 784 MWe from March 1976 to April 2012, or 36.1 years
#4 generated 784 MWe from October 1978 to April 2012, or 33.6 years
#5 generated 784 MWe from April 1978 to Jan 2014, or 35.7 years
#6 generated 1100 MWe from October 1979 to Jan 2014, or 34.2 years
Multiply the generating capacity by the time in service and you get 165.7 TWh for reactor #1, 259.1 TWh for #2, 248.1 TWh for #3, 230.9 TWh for #4, 245.3 TWh for #5, and 329.8 TWh for #6. For a total of 1478.9 TWh.
Nuclear's capacity factor in Japan (ratio of actual electricity generated vs peak capacity) started around 46% in the mid-1970s, and had reached 79% by 2001. Assume a linear increase followed by it remaining stable from 2001-2014, and overall capacity factor over this timeframe (which conveniently breaks down into 26 and 13 years) is (26*(.46+.79)/2 + 13*.79) / 39 = 0.68.
So actual electricity generated by the plant would be about 1478.9 TWh * 0.68 = 1005.7 TWh. Round it down and call it an even 1000 TWh.
The average price of electricity in Japan is 26 cents/kWh. Yes the price was lower in the past, but we want the inflation-adjusted total value of electricity generated, so using today's price is valid.
1000 TWh * $0.26/kWh = $260 billion worth of electricity produced over the lifetime of the plant. Even with the second-worst and most expensive nuclear accident in history, the Fukushima Daiichi plant still produced more value in electricity than the cleanup cost.
Now consider that the world generated 2731 TWh with nuclear in 2008. If you go with 20 cents/kWh as a global average electricity price, that's $546 billion worth of electricity generated by nuclear power each year. Add up the cost to clean up Fukushima ($200 billion), Chernobyl ($200 billion), and Three Mile Island ($1 billion). Amortized over the 37 years since the first of those accidents, the cost of cleaning up these nuclear accidents only works out to ($401 billion / 37 years) / (546 billion / 1 year) = 1.98% of the cost of electricity produced.
Basically, the cost of cleaning up nuclear accidents is just 0.4 cents/kWh.
If the friends of the owners decide about (non) enforcement of the regulations?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Yeah, hazardous processes are run everywhere. But nuclear energy is so terribly hazardous that one accident can affect life all over the world.
I don't like to experiment with that risk, and therefore I am against the use of nuclear energy. Especially on a large scale and in great numbers.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
No it's not. With large scale wind and solar implementation you can affect a certain number of lives, true.
But with one accident with a nuclear reactor you can destroy a multitude of that number of lives.
Try that with a solar or wind 'accident'.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Running coal and oil power plants affects (at the very least) the local environment horrifically if nothing goes wrong. What do you think happens in the case of a major issue with nuclear power? You think the whole world gets consumed by a black hole or something? Nuclear power is proven safe, effective, efficient, and capable of handling base power loads. It's safer and more scalable than any other option. We already have nuclear power plants on a large scale and in great numbers, but you don't hear about them because they run for decades without incident. They run at 90%+ capacity day-in and day-out quietly providing power for people around the world.
Nuclear power results in less loss of human life per kwh generated than any other source of power. That includes solar, wind, hydro; you name it. Nuclear power is simply safer. We can make it even safer by stopping the resistance to replacing older nuclear plants with newer, better ones.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Per kwh generated, nuclear power results in less loss of human life than wind or solar. It's per kwh generated, so as you scale out, things only get worse for wind, solar, hydro, etc.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
...as in Fukushima which is contaminating the whole Pacific Ocean.
I don't care if a nuclear reactor is able to handle base loads for 40 years on a row.
If it is also able to totally destroy human life with its fall-out from a severe accident, then I simply don't want them.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Contaminating the whole Pacific Ocean? ....
Were you absent the day they taught physics in physics class?
And again, nuclear power is safer for human life. Accounting for Fukushima, accounting for Chernobyl (which by the way wasn't a power plant - it was a research facility conducting extremely dangerous experiments and a weaponized plutonium factory which also happened to have excess power to dump into the local grid, but that's alright, we'll include that one anyway because it still doesn't change the outcome), nuclear power is the safest source of power generation we have. Per kwh generated, it causes less loss of human life than anything else, including wind, solar, and hydro.
It's not hard to understand: if it's safer per kwh generated, then scaling out with other options presents a greater threat to human life and supporting other options is directly supporting the needless deaths of human beings.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
So don't do it, come on lets see how fucked shit can get.
I'd like to see a citation for the death rates. A citation that includes the uranium minors who died of cancer (uranium mining was quite unsafe back in the 50's, mostly out of ignorance), along with the Navajo who died of cancer when retaining ponds let lose. The citations I've seen don't even seem to admit that there were construction accidents during the construction of all the reactors in the world while counting the construction accidents involved with wind and solar. Perhaps there honestly was never a construction accident while building reactors, which would be pretty amazing.
Wind and solar, if good practices such as safety harnesses and ropes, are followed, should be as safe or safer then building a large reactor. Hydro as well as long as the locations are well thought out, much like nuclear. All four need to be built correctly and safely yet corners get cut, damns fail and eventually a nuclear plant will fail worse then the ones being discussed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Yeah, let's hear it for all those poor six year old kids working those uranium mines!
Pebble bed designs >> Nope. Germany still struggles to find what to do with the decomissionned experimental reactor. it's the radioactives thing on earth, contminated with dust that has potential to kill anything breathing on earth if released.
CANDU reactors >> Nope. Bad design, does not scale. Also, no proper waste reprocessing.
SMR >> Yeah, let's put a bomb in each backyard, great idea. Seriously, this thing is more of a financing for small military reactors (for submarines)
Molten Salt reactors >> Nope. There is no containment material that can hold the molten core at scale. Also, it implies a chemical processing plant with gigantic contamined waste integrated with each reactor. Tritiated Fluorhydric acid, anyone ? Nice cocktail, but no thanks.
Thorium reactors will be available >> breeders with sodium ? Yeah, no danger sir. We can wipe a continent if a bigger fire brakes out. We cannot put out this fire with water, or else booom :)
ITER ... the promise of commercial level over-unity fusion. >> what an empty promise. ITER is an experimental, not a commercial plant. And it's a failed one, at this. It will not sustain overunity for longer than a minute. Which every scam artist on youtube can also do for a lot less money by storing some energy in a flywheel.
aaaaaaa
Just wondering how large is 200B, then I search http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp
The 2016 Japanese GDP is about 4000B.
You must know you're arguing with the strawman, not the reality. Nuclear may have killed fewer people to date, but it has the capacity to kill more people than other forms of power generation in the event of a catastrophic failure. And the probability of a catastrophic failure leading to many deaths must be assessed over the lifetime of operation+decommissioning of a plant, which is decades or more. Maybe that risk can all be mitigated, but it's pointless to deny that the potential severity of a nuclear plant failure is much higher than for other forms of power generation.
Risk = frequency * severity
You mean like a wildfire at a massive solar farm. Sure, the fire may not kill anyone. But if the power that's being generated is being COUNTED on in the base load, you're going to run short, you're going to have situations where power-critical events are disrupted and people are going to die.
Also, you're still conveniently ignoring that nuclear power has still killed fewer people than ANY other form of power extant.
So, as soon as you can point out these "multitudes" you're citing, we can move forward.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You're rather spectacularly missing the point. Everyone understands that nuclear bonds release orders of magnitude more energy than chemical bonds. I mean, duh. That's the whole point: it's a high-beta technology. When things go well, you get loads of controlled energy. When things fuck up, you get loads of uncontrolled energy... and humans aren't that marvellous at operating complex systems without ever fucking up for decades on end. So we try all types of risk mitigations, and plan for bad actors etc etc. But while we can reduce the likelihood of a severe incident, we can't eliminate it. And then we have to fork out $200bn as a consequence.
Anyone able to run the numbers properly? From my v rough back of the envelope, it looks like $200bn would buy you about 0.7TW of solar capacity in today's money, assuming no economies of scale (!!) Fukushima was about 5TW, I think.
Just curious to know what magnitude of solar capacity could be created if governments put the scale of investment into it that goes into nuclear.
All four need to be built correctly and safely yet corners get cut, damns fail and eventually a nuclear plant will fail worse then the ones being discussed.
I hate it when my damns fail.
Tell me something, of all this safety that you think needs to go into the energy sector who is it that is supposed to enforce it? Government you say? Every nuclear power accident happened at a power plant that was government inspected and licensed. Every oil spill was from a drill, ship, pipe, train, or refinery that was inspected and licensed by a government.
TEPCO quite likely fucked up major here but they did so under government supervision. The government allowed the reactor to operate as it did, where it did, because it met all safety requirements imposed upon it. If it hadn't then it would have been shutdown.
What is ironic is that it is quite likely because of the safety protocols imposed on it that the reactor melted down. The reactor itself survived the quake, what didn't survive was the backup power and the power lines to the facility. When the control systems detected the quake an automated scram was initiated. This shutdown the reactor but the fission products continued to produce heat. Without the power provided by the fission reaction the boilers could not maintain a head of steam to run the turbines. When the turbines came to a halt their was not enough electricity to drive the cooling pumps. No cooling and the reactor gets hot. So hot that safety systems start to fail and fission restarts on its own. Then things get real hot, hot enough to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Without power from the reactor to vent these gasses, or run the recombiners, and it builds up until something ignites it.
If the reactor had not been shutdown as required by law then perhaps none of this would have happened. I could argue that the government caused this, therefore they should have to pay for it.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Any tall building has the capacity to kill thousands of people. But we don't generally think of tall buildings as dangerous or having "high severity". In the context of a tall building, it is only "dangerous" if it wasn't done right. Yet with nuclear, this sort of reasoning doesn't seem to apply? Like, it doesn't matter how "done right" it may be, we always focus on the "severity" and "capacity", as if "doing it right" had no impact on those? And one could ask, yeah well where's the evidence that they're "done right"?? And as the earlier poster says, just look at the 450 or so existing plants around the world and take that as evidence that they are being done right. Because if you mitigate the risk, then that's an actual outcome. It means people won't die. Like how flying is safer, even though the potential for horrific crashes is much greater. The risk is actually smaller, even if the "potential" is greater. But the "potential" is something your and my imagination are processing, just like the potential for becoming a millionaire is what drives people to play the lottery, even though the objective "risk" of winning is tiny. The fact that 450 plants are running, that's something about reality. The "potential for catastrophic failure" is more about the imagination. If anything, we ought to be looking at the safety culture, like the airline industry does. They don't just say, oh you must not fly, there is huge potential for crashing, no, they say, let's look at the culture and the systems and keep trying to better understand how to improve actual safety. In effect, nuclear is great, and let's keep trying to improve it.
Because you don't get something for nothing. People can decide they are willing to use less power, decrease power usage enough and you can get away with less plants. However that does mean compromising modern lifestyle, as increases in efficiency only go so far (and many people have already done what they can to increase the efficiency of their use). They can use fossil fuel power instead, though that requires buying the fuel on a continual basis (Japan has no reserves to speak of) and dealing with the pollution it produces, particularly when you are talking a smaller nation like Japan with less places to put power generation far away from people. Renewables are an option, but only to an extent. Again there's the space issue but also none of them so far are reliable for generation at all times. You can use them to deal with peak loads of various kinds, but they don't work well for continuous generation and thus don't tend to be a solution all on their own.
There are lots of feasible options, but they all have tradeoffs and that is the problem. People who dislike nuclear power are made about its tradeoffs (the danger in the event of a catastrophic failure and the high cleanup cost mostly) but often don't have an alternative solution. I see a lot of "we don't want that" or "we should do something else" but little of what that should be. It isn't magic, there isn't some great solution that we could all have if we just wanted to. We have to deal with the tradeoffs.
Personally, I imagine that while there will be complaining, in the long run Japan will continue to use nuclear for a lot of its power needs as they are not going to be willing to make big, permanent, reductions in power use and none of the other options have tradeoffs they are going to want to take.
Contaminating the whole Pacific Ocean? ....
Were you absent the day they taught physics in physics class?
We've known since the 1970s that dilution is not the pollution solution. Currents and bioconcentration see to that.
It's not hard to understand: if it's safer per kwh generated, then scaling out with other options presents a greater threat to human life and supporting other options is directly supporting the needless deaths of human beings.
Well then, the safest possible kind of power will turn out to be offshore wind installed by robot ships and inspected by drones. You can't have a wind spill and if you build them over the ocean they can't start a fire by falling on something. And drone inspection of windmills is already a thing (In fact, a friend of mine is now operating an inspection company using drones, he was doing it with a pilot's license before these new rules that let you get a UAS operator's license and had a couple of other private pilots working for him on a contract basis) so this stuff is well-solved.
It's not hard to understand: if it's safer per kwh generated, then scaling out with other options presents a greater threat to human life and supporting other options is directly supporting the needless deaths of human beings.
So you're with me? Great!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The potential costs are too high, private insurers aren't willing to underwrite it. Same kind of shit with flood insurance. In the case of nuclear it is really, really hard to price that shit as well. I mean problems with it happen very rarely, but when they do the potential costs can be huge and the costs can be difficult to estimate because you deal not with just actual costs, but with political/PR issues as well. Things like big exclusion areas are not the kind of thing that is necessarily mandatory as a public health measure, but can be necessary because people are really, really scared of radiation.
There are some things the private industry just won't do, or at least won't do well, for better or worse. Well, that's part of the reason we have a government: to deal with those cases.
For nuclear power what should happen, and indeed may happen in some places I don't know, is that they should pay in to a government sort of fund/insurance. That doesn't mean they will (or indeed could) pay up front any and all amount that could be needed to cover any disaster, but that they've helped defray costs in the event the government does need to provide disaster assistance.
Regulation and operation is a co-operative process in the Nuclear Industry between the regulator and operator.
Correction: TEPCO fucked up. No weasel words thank you. Some board members have been charged with negligence, which in reality, should be criminal negligence. Government operated in collusion with TEPCO. You need to read the report from the Japanese government.
Hydrogen production was an expected outcome from exposing the *TWO* basis design issues of that reactor type. What happened to the reactors is exactly what the manufacturer said would happen if the reactors lost power and why operators are supposed to make sure this doesn't happen. That is why TEPCO are negligent. That they had well over a decade to perform the modifications is why it is criminal - that is the nature of corruption and why regulations exist. The regulations weren't made or enforced, and the reactor went boom.
Otherwise they'd still have a functioning nuclear reactor plant, it survived the quake but not the TEPCO board.
I think you will find that it was shut down because there was an earthquake and since the operator decided not to comply with the regulation laid down to operate the reactor safely it is quite reasonable to ask the operator to pay for everything. It also means the regulator has to be given more impetus for performing its duties in preventing these accidents.
The regulation is made to institutionalize the knowledge to operate these things without killing the communities around them. If you undermine that process and refuse to stamp out the corruption then it is impossible to have a safe nuclear industry. TEPCO just reminded us why, so yeah, they should pay.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well, the ocean is now magically radioactive, and that must have caused the coral reef death in Australia, so we can go ahead and spew billions of tons of CO2 a day into the air to avoid the risk of a nuclear accident?
My are you stupid. By the way, there has been no measurable impact to sea life anywhere due to the tepid iciest.
Well, the ocean is now magically radioactive, and that must have caused the coral reef death in Australia, so we can go ahead and spew billions of tons of CO2 a day into the air to avoid the risk of a nuclear accident?
How do offshore wind farms spew CO2 into the air? I don't think you know how this stuff works.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What possible nuclear disaster could kill more than the tens of thousands of people coal pollution is killing every single year?.
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There are no nuclear accidents. People worked really hard to make Fukashima happen.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Of *course* we think of tall buildings as being more dangerous and having higher severity outcomes than other buildings, if the risks aren't adequately mitigated! Go look at the history of the 1906 SF earthquake, for example. Or the Rana Plaza disaster. That's why we have building codes.
You are rather missing the point: the outcomes from a failure in a nuclear power plant can be orders of magnitude more severe than the outcomes from the worst conceivable building or aviation failure. They therefore require much more stringent mitigation. The question at hand is, can such mitigation ever be adequate?
In the round, nuclear is better than coal, but worse than renewables, bearing in mind factors such as human health effects and carbon intensity.
Yes, its a real problem. Even with a competent government, the next election is likely to bring in an incompetent government that implements self-regulation by industry. Seen it here where the railroads were allowed to self-regulate and pretty quick you have a train with only one engineer who doesn't correctly set the handbrakes and a town burns down, or a railroad that ignores a flood and runs a train over a weak and collapsing bridge.
Then you have the dam down the road, built by private industry a century ago and they didn't bother sinking the west side down to bedrock. 100's of millions of dollars to fix.
So we're left with governments that have a habit of incompetency or industries that are motivated to cut corners and push for incompetent government so they can be more profitable, usually by cutting corners and socializing the costs. Then there is the plain old corruption, whether in government, industry or suppliers.
Taking the various failure modes, it seems smarter to stick with stuff that under the worst scenarios can't produce too much damage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
That would be great if Tepco had been charging the 0.4 cents/kWh all along. They didn't and suddenly Japanese taxpayers are on the hook for $200 billion.
As the phrase goes, you are trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. No one is buying it, but they will buy the $200 billion cleanup, and will be most unhappy about that.
All of this so plant management could save face by not admitting that they needed help, admitting that there were problems on their watch.
Worse than renewables?
So you are ignoring:
- CO2 released by dams used for hydro?
- Lives, and land, lost when a dam for a hydroelectric plat fails?
- Pollution produced with Solar-panels?
- Pollution produced / environmental effects with wind-turbines being built?
- Environmental effects with wave-generators are build?
Sure we can improve all of these, but so can we do with nuclear-power... Today we have a few type of reactors, all based on the same concept of boiling water at a very high pressure and driving turbines with that. If we allowed the effort of researching and building new, safer, nuclear plants that would allow us to leave the 40+ year nuclear old technology behind and start constructing new reactors that would be safer and produce less waste.
Why do we have to compare 40+ year old tech with today's latest finds in solar/wind/hydro? I would say human ignorance and politics that vilify nuclear. (See what oil and coal companies sponsor and you might start wondering what we are doing.)
Of course I'm not ignoring the downsides of renewables. But they're not as bad as the downsides of nuclear, including of course the risks of catastrophic failure. If a wind turbine goes kaput, we have a brownout. If a reactor goes kaput, we've got a wildly expensive mess to clean up if we are very very lucky.
As to your rhetorical question: we have to compare 40+ year old tech with today's latest in renewables because nuclear infrastructure is built to operate for decades. We are stuck with its legacy for decades (and for many types of waste, centuries).
I really really really doubt that number very much.
Go ask the Japanese how much nuclear is costing them. Right now.
Add to the 200 (and growing) billion dollars to clean up Fukushima the lost income from tourism, lost land due to contamination, containment, hidden costs of polluted ocean, health care expenses, lost quality of life of all the children getting radiation disease right now and/or being mutilated from birth due to radiation effects etc. etc. etc. and I doubt you get any cheaper than 10 x solar.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
As if with the planning of nuclear reactors there are no provisions foreseen in the event of temporary reactor stops in case of problems?
It's a total non-argument that you are posting here.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Then I'm against it.
Contaminating the whole Pacific Ocean? ....
Were you absent the day they taught physics in physics class?
Meh... have a look at this, or is this not the Pacific?
http://blog.safecast.org/2014/...
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Nuclear power is proven safe, effective, efficient, and capable of handling base power loads.
Sign us up. I'll fill out the forms if you get them for me. We really need this safe option, and you have convinced us. The forms are here http://tinyurl.com/j3hbdlj Its building three of the proven safe effective, and efficient place. I think it's in the basement, but the people there can tell you.
Man, you should quit while you are ahead.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
But nuclear energy is so terribly hazardous that one accident can affect life all over the world.
Which, let us note hasn't happened yet. I notice your threshold for "affect" is barely detectable. Well radiation is detectable at levels that are quite irrelevant.
but it has the capacity to kill more people than other forms of power generation in the event of a catastrophic failure.
In theory. In practice, hydro power has been far more dangerous for catastrophic failures.
Uh, yeah. Who were you thinking - the Easter Bunny?
Hmm, sounds like Randian Dumbfuckery. Blame the results of monied interests buying off government officials - on the institution of government, rather than on the institution of capitalism.
Considering the sheer amount of land use required for PV solar (or even solar thermal), capacity planning a a bit more involved than simply dropping a couple extra gigawatts of reactor capacity.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
To be fair, large hydro infrastructure is built to last for decades, too, and also carries very large safety risks. One good example of this is Kariba Dam on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. There are concerns that the plunge pool is going to undercut the foundation and cause a dam collapse, threatening an estimated 3.5 million people living downstream. So the governments are investing another almost $300 million to reshape the pool. The dam was built before 1960, although part of the powerhouse was upgraded in the past few years. Large dams last for decades, and it seems people are trying to push them to a century or more now.
Or what about Mosul Dam, in Iraq? People debate over which one is more dangerous.
I think large hydro carries the potential for significant loss of human life if not done well. Returning to your original point, though, large hydro does have one advantage over nuclear in this department: the parts with changing technology are not the ones that will cause catastrophic failure. If a turbine fails, you lose power production. It takes a breach of the dam itself to threaten massive amounts of life. I'm not convinced that dam construction has undergone revolutionary changes in the past half century, but I'm happy to be convinced otherwise.
"Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist." -Indiana Jones
And then there's also wind energy...
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
And any rise in background radiation will 'affect' more lives, killing and maiming people and making them ill.
Fukushima and Chernobyl are the empirical proof that all safety analyses and regulations are worthless, hence there is no guaranteed safe nuclear energy, hence we should just choose something else to supply our energy as it's simply too dangerous.
I'm not wanting to wait for the inevitable, so let's just stop it here.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
This is one of the fundamental problems with the nuclear industry. My own opinion is no nuclear facility should *ever* be run by private enterprise. The common thought is that the private sector would run it more efficiently. This is a fallacy. They run it cheaper because they do not bare the responsibility. In the event of something like fukushima by default (pardon pun) the nation and the taxpayer are the ones on the hook, *not* the private company. This disconnect between responsibility and operation is almost certain to produce situations where the company is willing to cut corners in favor of profit because of the fact that should anything go wrong, they are not really the ultimate responsible party. Until this fundamental issue is resolved this will always be of concern. There are a number of ways to address this without totally nationalizing everything, such as imposing very harsh non-monetary penalties to private companies in charge of the operation. Such as strong criminal legislation for any executives involved in a decision that ends up compromising safety, same goes for employees tasked to do the work if done so knowingly. However I suspect at such a point the "efficiency" of said private company will start approaching that of whatever it would be if run nationally anyway, as they would be just as risk adverse at that point.
And any rise in background radiation will 'affect' more lives, killing and maiming people and making them ill.
Unless, of course, they don't do that. Unsupported assertions are like that. It's worth noting, of course, that the world has considerable variation in background radiation well beyond any temporary contribution from Fukushima or Chernobyl and that doesn't have a significant effect.
Fukushima and Chernobyl are the empirical proof that all safety analyses and regulations are worthless, hence there is no guaranteed safe nuclear energy, hence we should just choose something else to supply our energy as it's simply too dangerous.
And the fact that there are 400-500 reactors operating in the world today with meltdowns being a very rare thing, are evidence that nuclear power is far less dangerous than you suppose.
So let's build some of the new type of reactors that don't have the flaws of the current generation...
We do have things that can be shown down in a instance and can handle a complete loss of power or complete failure of the control-system...
Problem we have now is that we are banning *everything* related to nuclear power based on the old crap designs we have without looking at what the other options are..
They don't do that? There is no such thing as a safe threshold. We already have to live with an increased background radiation level thanks to those idiots testing these nuclear weapons in the 40's and after, then Chernobyl added some, and here you come saying "that doesn't have a significant effect".
Any increase in background radiation leads to increased cancer rates.
And 'meltdowns being a very rare thing' isn't good enough. The fact that we have had two meltdowns already means that it does happen, contrary to what all those probabilistic risk analyses for the reactor designs have said and have tried to prevent.
In other words: safety isn't sufficiently guaranteed so we should simply terminate the use of nuclear energy.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
When these 'crappy' reactors were introduced the gospel wasn't that they were 'crappy', the gospel was that they were the best of the best, the safest of the safest, and that no harm would come over us.
Well, that turned out differently, and now you come with the same story again:
"This new design is the safest of the safest and nothing can happen."
Yeah, right...
Nuclear industry had their chance and they blew it, and let the population pay for it.
Are TEPCO or General Electric or whoever built that crappy reactor on a major fault line going to reimburse the Japanese people those more than 200 billion dollars?
No way.
Nuclear? Just don't do it.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
There is no such thing as a safe threshold.
And there is such a thing as a completely unsubstantiated statement too.
We already have to live with an increased background radiation level thanks to those idiots testing these nuclear weapons in the 40's and after, then Chernobyl added some, and here you come saying "that doesn't have a significant effect".
Or those idiots who choose to live above sea level or on top of igneous rock. There's a lot of things that result in higher background radiation levels, for which we don't see a significant effect.
And 'meltdowns being a very rare thing' isn't good enough. The fact that we have had two meltdowns already means that it does happen, contrary to what all those probabilistic risk analyses for the reactor designs have said and have tried to prevent.
You said it right there. "Probabilistic". The point is not to make it completely impossible, but to make it rare enough. The world didn't end when Chernobyl or Fukushima happened. We can handle a rather high rate of ongoing meltdowns without significant change in background radiation levels and our current rate is well below that.
There is no such thing as a safe threshold.
And there is such a thing as a completely unsubstantiated statement too.
Sorry, I think you're a blathering idiot who has no idea what he is talking about and for some reason just wants to have nuclear energy with a reckless disregard and a blind eye for the dangers that it entails.
Let me refer you to the Australian National Academy of Sciences:
"According to the National Academy of Sciences, there are no safe doses of radiation. Decades of research show clearly that any dose of radiation increases an individual's risk for the development of cancer."
Good, I think I've had it with you.
Goodbye.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Further, "no safe dose" is an unusually irresponsible claim since no other human activity is held to that level of safety. For example, an obvious problem is that even if you accept without evidence as you did here that there is no harmless dose, there is still the matter of how much harm. Just how many people are expected to die of cancer over the next fifty years because of Fukushima? 10? 100? Fukushima would have saved more lives than any number you can come up with during its lifetime.
Good, I think I've had it with you.
I think what's particularly idiotic about your posts is the theater. Yes. Please go away and take your ignorance with you.
Let us note further, that the claim of "no safe doses" comes from the group, Physicians for Social Responsiblity, not from the Australian National Academy of Sciences. They are incorrectly interpreting the research, completely disregarding the actual levels of risk and harm supposedly approximated by the study, and of course, misrepresenting their interpretation of the research as having come from the original research itself.
That's typical dishonesty from anti-nuclear groups.
They are incorrectly interpreting the research, completely disregarding the actual levels of risk and harm supposedly approximated by the study, and of course, misrepresenting their interpretation of the research as having come from the original research itself.
Yes, of course, they must be idiots.
:)
Especially this Associate Professor Tilman Ruff of University of Melbourne's Nossal Institute for Global Health, who says there may be a threshold for some effects of radiation, but not for cancer. Ruff "...is also a member of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War."
Yeah, he must have totally missed the point.
Or this character Burns, a former chair of United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), former acting CEO of Australia's nuclear safety agency, ARPANSA, who on the one hand indeed says that "...the media lack[s]* scientific understanding and [that] coverage has tended to overplay the health effects from small amounts of radiation."
BUT that "...on the question of whether there is a safe threshold for exposure to radioactivity, Burns agrees with Ruff."
Or take 'the' (I think WHO) expert, Professor Robert Gale of Imperial College London who "...reported in The Australian this week [that] he would be happy to drink the water, even if it exceeded the maximum contamination levels set by the Japanese government."
""We live with radioactive water all the time," he was quoted as saying."
And of course, it wouldn't do him much harm if he came to Japan and took 1 or 2 gulps of that water. Statistics, you know.
Now in effect, "The Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) question Gale's position."
"His position illustrates very neatly the divergence between individual and public health risk," says PSR's Dr Ira Helfand.
Oh, look here, that must be another expert who has made it her job but 'got it all wrong'?
"The risk to any one individual from drinking water with this much radiation is indeed very low. The problem comes when 40 million people in the Tokyo water district drink the water and get this much radiation."
So, what if you'd raise the background radiation level from contamination for the whole world population?
A little increase would 'only' kill a few tens of thousands of people.
Countries go to war for the death of a few thousand people (9/11, Pearl Harbour), a few hundred people (USA, WWII), or even (allegedly) 1 person (WW 1).
And we were still lucky that all these spent fuel rods didn't blow up in the air...
But no, here comes a 'khallow' stating that all those experts incorrectly interpret research, disregarding existing levels and even maliciously (my interpretation) misrepresent their knowledge on the matter.
Yeah right. Let me go with the real experts please, thank you very much.
(Text within [square brackets] are my edits of quotes from the abc.net.au article.)
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Yes, of course, they must be idiots.
Oh look, another slashdot poster who has never heard of conflict of interest or adversarial debate.
A little increase would 'only' kill a few tens of thousands of people.
Or actually help tens of thousands live longer (radiation hormesis) . That's possible too especially given the complete lack of evidence for your claims.
But no, here comes a 'khallow' stating that all those experts incorrectly interpret research
You do recall I already found one example in your linksv where they did just that?
Oh look, another slashdot poster who has never heard of conflict of interest or adversarial debate.
Well, we also don't know where you stand in this respect...
Or actually help tens of thousands live longer (radiation hormesis) .
Is that the new 'fallacy ad absurdum'?
I do recall you alleging misinterpretation, yes.
But anyway. I argued already why a 'scientific and technical approach' to make safe reactors can and always will be defeated by 'management decisions', so you won't be able to rationalize-away my fears for nuclear, hence you won't be able to change my opinion.
Thanks for the discussion, I'd like to move on now to other topics.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Argument by pseudo science? Look at the actual research, there is no benefit to radiation exposure.