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America's Nuclear Reactors Can't Survive Without Government Handouts (fivethirtyeight.com)
Slashdot reader Socguy shares an article from FiveThirtyEight:
There are 99 nuclear reactors producing electricity in the United States today. Collectively, they're responsible for producing about 20% of the electricity we use each year. But those reactors are, to put it delicately, of a certain age. The average age of a nuclear power plant in this country is 38 years old (compared with 24 years old for a natural gas power plant). Some are shutting down. New ones aren't being built. And the ones still operational can't compete with other sources of power on price... without some type of public assistance, the nuclear industry is likely headed toward oblivion....
[I]t's the cost of upkeep that's prohibitive. Things do fall apart -- especially things exposed to radiation on a daily basis. Maintenance and repair, upgrades and rejuvenation all take a lot of capital investment. And right now, that means spending lots of money on power plants that aren't especially profitable... Combine age and economic misfortune, and you get shuttered power plants. Twelve nuclear reactors have closed in the past 22 years. Another dozen have formally announced plans to close by 2025.
A professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University points out that nuclear power is America's single largest source of carbon emissions-free electricity -- though since 1996, only one new plant has opened in America, and at least 10 other new reactor projects have been canceled in the past decade.
The article also describes two more Illinois reactors that avoided closure only after the state legislature offered new subsidies. "But as long as natural gas is cheap, the industry can't do without the handouts."
[I]t's the cost of upkeep that's prohibitive. Things do fall apart -- especially things exposed to radiation on a daily basis. Maintenance and repair, upgrades and rejuvenation all take a lot of capital investment. And right now, that means spending lots of money on power plants that aren't especially profitable... Combine age and economic misfortune, and you get shuttered power plants. Twelve nuclear reactors have closed in the past 22 years. Another dozen have formally announced plans to close by 2025.
A professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University points out that nuclear power is America's single largest source of carbon emissions-free electricity -- though since 1996, only one new plant has opened in America, and at least 10 other new reactor projects have been canceled in the past decade.
The article also describes two more Illinois reactors that avoided closure only after the state legislature offered new subsidies. "But as long as natural gas is cheap, the industry can't do without the handouts."
they would have standardized on a single reasonably modern design ten of fifteen years ago
They did. It is the AP1000. It didn't solve any of the problems that you claim it magically would.
The future of nuclear power is still happening ... in China, where government subsidies are less controversial.
You're so full of shit.
https://www.livescience.com/59...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The lie that nuclear waste "has never harmed anyone in human history", comes from a industry lobbying group called, "The Center for Nuclear Science and Technology Information". It is pure horseshit.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Over 20 workers had been injured by 18 March, including one who was exposed to a large amount of ionizing radiation when the worker tried to vent vapour from a valve of the containment building.[1] Three more workers were exposed to radiation over 100 mSv, and two of them were sent to a hospital due to beta burns on 24 March.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_50
Maybe you don't know as much as you thought? Lol, impossible!
You're so full of shit.
Both of the sites your links refer to are so full of...nuclear weapons program waste. Militaries are not bound by the safety standards that apply in the nuclear power industry.
We HAD a very long term nuclear waste storage solution at Yucca Mountain until Senator Harry Reid killed it with the help of Barry 0bama after over $10 billion was spent developing it.
First I meant unspent fuel aka nuclear waste. We only use about 1%-5% of the energy in the fuel rods, hence the word unspent.
Second less than 60 deaths can be attributed to Chernobyl. Luckily the estimated deaths never occurred because the linear no threshold used to estimate radiation deaths is bullshit. More people died today from fossil fuels than have ever died from nuclear energy.
And third we have 4th generation reactors which cannot meltdown. NuScale is building their first Small Modular reactor in Idaho. These reactor have already been certified as being unable to meltdown and has passed phase 1 of the NRC review. They are factory built which will greatly reduce the costs. Are you suggesting we should not build these types of reactors because of an accident in the USSR that killed less than 60 people?
Do you know that climate change is real? And that the leading driver of climate change is from emissions from fossil fuels? And that the top climate scientists have called nuclear energy the only viable path forward on climate change?
How many people have died mining uranium? A lot more than you think.
That's the weird thing about these stats. You include any and all deaths by coal, either at the production of coal, shipping of coal, firing the boilers, the production of power, people killed by the resulting electricity...everything.
When you count the deaths due to nuclear you only count those deaths caused directly by someone standing next to an exposed fuel rod, and even then only when we knew about the fuel rod, and only after lots of deliberation as to whether it was a new fuel rod or a spent one. It's impossible to prove any given case of cancer was caused by radiation exposure so you can wave away the deaths as mere coincidence.
This is selection bias. You want to believe nuclear is safe so you distort reality to assist your belief. You're a tool for the nuclear industry, congratulations. Die in a fire.
China put all new nuclear that wasn't already under construction on hold after the Fukushima disaster, and eventually cancelled it.
They hit peak coal years ago too. They are concentrating on renewables now, which is both good for the environment and makes economic sense because that's where the growth is.
So even absent NIMBYism they decided nuclear was inferior.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The nuclear reactor in Japan exploded because the exposed nuclear core generated hydrogen, and that exploded. You don't need a nuclear explosion to have an explosion at a nuclear power plant.
Second less than 60 deaths can be attributed to Chernobyl. Luckily the estimated deaths never occurred because the linear no threshold used to estimate radiation deaths is bullshit. More people died today from fossil fuels than have ever died from nuclear energy.
Claiming that there were only 60 deaths from Chernobyl is a bit disingenuous. There were only 60 immediate deaths from Chernobyl. There were several thousand people who lived no more than a decade after their exposure at Chernobyl, but were otherwise young healthy men. I use the term men here, not because I ma being misogynistic, but specifically because the vast majority of those people whos lives were ended were military personnel who were tasked with the clean up and entombment of the reactor immediately following the accident. These men were exposed to lifetime doses in a matter of minutes, and many of them served multiple tours through the hot zone. Many of them knew what they were involved in and faked their dosimeter readings to go multiple extra times. They did this because they knew they were already badly exposed, and the extra dose would hasten their death, but would save some other individual the dose that could kill them. There were thousands of heros at Chernobyl that most of the world will never know about.
On the other side of that, the number of deaths from people who were exposed by virtue of living in Pripyat (The nearest real city), were remarkably small. There are people who still live in the exclusion zone, in all but the most heavily contaminated areas, and their life expectancy is not significantly shorter than it would have been otherwise.
We have seen similar results from 3-mile island and Fukushima. In both of those instances, there was very little reason to expose workers directly to the huge doses close to the core, and as such, there have been almost no deaths resulting from these accidents. Chernobyl was only the tragedy that it became because the core was detonated, and disbursed outside containment. Fukushima #3 blew material from the core directly into the atmosphere, and in spite of that, there have been and will continue to be almost no deaths because no one has to go into the hot zones to clean up the way they did at Chernobyl.
There is a lot of bullshit out there about nuclear power, on both sides, but the reality remains that nuclear meltdown is not really the tragedy that everyone thinks it is. Explosion is the real danger, and even then, only if the core is disbursed in such a way that people have to go in to the hot zones and clean it up.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Are you claiming, without evidence, that all of the deaths in Chernobyl were covered up by the USSR? That is a massive conspiracy. There have been cases of thyroid cancer, but that has a very low fatality rate and it is treatable.
Are you a moron? This was literally the first link in a google search for chernobyl deaths.
You can find some good information about the Chernobyl Liquidators. There are thousands of sites, articles, and studies, and god knows how many videos on you-tube from various sources, from the reputable to the downright dishonest. I have watched thousands of hours of related videos on every nuclear accident that I have been able to find. I have read tens of thousands of pages of documents, testimony and explanations. I am as close as you can get to being an expert in nuclear accidents as you can get without having a degree in nuclear engineering. There is no cover up, there are no conspiracies, just most people don't care about the gritty details the way I do. The WHO Estimates that there will be a total of about 4000 premature deaths, but this is a far cry from the Greenpeace estimates of 200,000. Greenpeace is completely bonkers (Think tin-foil hat levels of crazy). The WHO estimate is likely the most accurate estimate, as their methodology is by far the best, but only a head in the sand idiot believes the official death toll is anywhere near as low as 60. Even the soviets didn't try to keep that fiction going long.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
As much as a $2 million Bugatti with no breaks is an affordable family car, sure.
"New" designs are an old red herring. None of them makes nuclear power both safe and cost effective.
Which doesn't happen across an entire region. Which is why you simply build your renewable generating capacity across the grid - exactly as you do for coal or nuclear power. Back it up with a pumped storage facility if necessary - and if it's good enough for nuclear, it's good enough for wind and solar.