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."

Comments

I don't have much of a problem with this

[rsilvergun]

though I'd rather they were just gov't operated instead of letting a private citizen skim 10-20% off the top. Anyway, if we're gonna run nuke plants I want them run without a profit motive. Otherwise there's too much incentive to cut corners on safety. And if we're gonna have the gov't run every aspect to prevent that from happen then what's the bloody point of letting private companies run them? If we want to hand out free money we can do that with food stamps and then at least poor people are fed.

Re:I don't have much of a problem with this

[atomicalgebra]

Climate change is real. There is a reason the top climate scientists support nuclear energy and the fossil fuel industry opposes it.

Re:I don't have much of a problem with this

[dwywit]

OK spent/unspent is a bit of a misnomer, though. If it's removed from a reactor because that reactor can't make use of it anymore, I'd call it spent. If it can be re-processed and put in another reactor to continue to provide energy, then it's fuel.

I'm really not disputing your overall position - you're just over-stating your case and that harms your position. The first responders at Chernobyl were exposed to high doses of radioactive material, which causes cell damage both immediate and long-term. I think it's settled that they died from damage caused by radiation exposure. Arguing statistics and methodology isn't helpful. Point is, you said "no-one" and that's simply not true.

And I've been living off-grid on solar PV for >20 years. I ride a motorcycle instead of driving a car when and wherever I can. I take climate change seriously and I agree that nuclear energy plants are one of the least polluting options - but they've *never* been able to deliver on "too cheap to meter" promises, so between media meltdowns about accidents, and the less serious but real consequences of those accidents, broken promises about abundant energy, and all the other BS from lobbyist-influenced politicians, I'm not surprised that people don't trust the proponents of nuclear energy, and I'm not surprised at the surge in wind, PV, and gas-sourced electricity.

Re:I don't have much of a problem with this

[AmiMoJo]

In other words nuclear power is brittle and the very high safety standards needed to keep it safe can massively increase costs.

Compared with the alternatives it's not very attractive.

Re:I don't have much of a problem with this

[swillden]

In other words nuclear power is brittle and the very high safety standards needed to keep it safe can massively increase costs.

Except it's really not clear that the insanely high safety standards are actually required. The regulations have created an industry that is orders of magnitude safer than any other large scale power generation industry. That indicates significant over-engineering. And given that regulatory-based engineering is never efficient in the sense of minimizing cost for a given level of effectiveness, looking only at the safety record almost certainly underestimates the excess.

The fact that Congress has to approve any design changes is mind-boggling. In any reasonably-regulated industry, Congress creates an agency and directs it to do the job of rulemaking and enforcement, then lets it do its job. There is absolutely no reason for Congress to get involved beyond that... it's not like the politicians can evaluate the design changes in any meaningful way. The only reason for that requirement is to place arbitrary bureaucratic and political obstacles in the way of construction.

Re:I don't have much of a problem with this

[AmiMoJo]

Your Wikipedia link says that nuclear is the most expensive in many other countries too, including poster child France that is supposed to be a model for others to follow.

Your pdf link is produced by the nuclear industry, which has been shilling for decades. Got any independent sources?

Re:I don't have much of a problem with this

[CrimsonAvenger]

Second less than 60 deaths can be attributed to Chernobyl.

It also left us with a 1000 square mile exclusion zone.

Of course, that "exclusion zone" looks a lot like a National Park, in that the wildlife seems to be doing much better there than outside the exclusion zone.

Plus there's the people living in the exclusion zone in violation of the law. And with nary a trace of radiation poisoning, much less heavy metal poisoning.

And it should be noted that Chernobyl didn't just bake off on its own. It required the operators to do some dangerously stupid things as part of a test to determine how much power could be extracted from a meltdown-in-progress to fight said meltdown-in-progress. IOW, it wasn't caused by a failure in design, or a failure in operations, it was caused by their version of the NRC mandating an idiotic (and unnecessary) test....

Blame the lawyers

[Snotnose]

Doesn't matter if its safe or not, the lawyers can tie things up in court for decades. When you;re looking at $x for building the plant, and $x * 100, for legal fees, it's kinda hard to keep going. Doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, when you're outspent you lose.

Do you believe in global warming from CO2 or not?

[SuperKendall]

If you really were scared of CO2 emissions, you would be fine with 100% of nuclear power costs being subsidized, to reduce emissions.

In fact you would insist on more such plants being built as they have a lower carbon footprint than ANY alternative energy source, when you factor in amount of CO2 produced as a result of production of things like solar panels and the like in relation to the sheer amount of power reduced.

And of course, a decent number of nuclear plants in California could have happily powered a few desalinization plants to give as California the cheapest water in the nation, instead of having to choose between showers of laundry for the day.

The fact that we have so few nuclear power plants is criminal, a crime for which the so-called "environmentalists" who are at fault will sadly never pay.

Global warming doesn't require a moron's belief

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a moron. The costs of dealing with climate change SO GREATLY surpass whatever difference in cost of power generation so completely it's really not comparable. You're repping short-sighted as if it's a virtue. So stupid.
It's entirely conceivable that everyone you know is also a moron. Kendall here shines in that regard.

In both the short run and the long run solar is obviously and easily the cheapest power source for the next 100 years. You have to invest in anything up front, whether it's firewood, gasoline, nuclear, or panels. Learn basic shit please.
Global warming doesn't need a moron like you to believe it's real to have real world effects. Your opine just doesn't factor in, sorry.

Re:Do you believe in global warming from CO2 or no

[Applehu Akbar]

We're about to see electricity become a much larger fraction of the nation's total energy requirements. If Los Angeles is not to be the next large city after Cape Town to run out of water, it will have to start desalinating to supply its 14 million population. Other coastal cities will follow. Car and truck traffic, a huge user of energy, is starting to move from the ICE column into the electricity column. We're not going to be able to fulfill current power demand by paving over the sacred Environment with mirrors and pinwheels, let alone all this new usage.

Our choice, people: will we have to open enormous new coal mines to generate baseload power, as Germany is doing even after massively subsidizing renewables, or do we burn the lawyers (with carbon capture, of course) so that we can cooperate with China in building a new generation of nukes?

If Only We Had A National Policy to Reduce CO2

[careysub]

Handing money over to private businesses to achieve some public policy goal should be on the table as policy option, but only if it is a cost-effective way to achieve that goal. But before that discussion can even begin here we need to have a government that recognizes that reducing CO2 emissions is extremely important as a public policy goal. Only then can actual goals be set, and the cost of policy options drawn up to meet them.

Subsidizing existing nuclear power plants may be a cost effective way of reducing CO2 emissions. I am not saying it is (or isn't) but it should be evaluated along with all of the other options. Even building new nuclear power plants should be considered - but cost-effectiveness should be the ruling criterion.

The current administration's scheme to subsidize both coal and nuclear power is incoherent and obviously a case of political corruption -- transferring money to a private company from the public purse simply as pay-off for support. That one part of it, nuclear power, reduces carbon release is merely accidental.

One could imagine what an optimal plan (most cost effective) for nuclear power to contribute to CO2 emissions would look like. In addition to simply keeping current plants operating, building new ones would break from past practice by building a single standardized design that has passed all design approvals (siting approvals will always be necessary), and would build them on a regular schedule so that the production infrastructure can be built, and efficient production techniques instituted, and replacement parts kept available at reasonable cost.

Each nuclear power plant unit produces 0.2% of the nation's annual electricity consumption, 66% of which is supplied from a carbon releasing source. If you build 5 units a year, that would knock 1% off of that 66%, and after 25 years, would have made a major contribution toward getting it down to zero.

A long term public-private partnership to accomplish a public policy goal is a pipe dream in the U.S. for the forseeable future, but it isn't impossible. U.S. governments can carry out expensive long term plans. New York City's Water Tunnel No. 3 is a very costly and complex engineering project to dig a 24 foot wide tunnel, deep underground, 60 miles long, running the length of New York City, that has been under construction for 50 years (almost completed now). A national plan to build nuclear reactors could be created - Republicans have always been nuclear power enthusiasts, and Democrats support CO2 reduction - so the basis for the broad support required exists.

How much of that is the anti nuclear lobby?

[Karmashock]

Literally how much of the cost inflation is the effect of political activism?

We have the same problem with the death penality where interference with the logistics is so heavy that they are having a hard time getting their hands on the drugs required to perform a lethal injection.

Some of the drugs have dual uses for other medical proceedures... and the shortages are so heavy that patients that need those drugs to treat them can't get access to the drugs.

Here is another point on that, look at countries outside of the US regulatory system... say in China etc... they're clearly highly econonical absent anti nuclear activism inflating costs. We can see that very clearly in nations where it is not politically relevant.

You can also talk to nuclear engineers that have designed newer reactor designs and they'll validate this position.

Here is what we need to fix the situation:
1. We need a reasonable place to store spent fuel.
2. Life time of reactor regulations that don't change after the fact. An investment problem is that you can sink billions into a reactor and then the regulations change which make a good financial move a bad one. This ex post facto legislation makes nuclear more risky than other systems that don't suffer from that pattern. You fix this by locking relevant regulation to what it was when the reactor was built. New reactors would follow new rules but older reactors would be shielded from changes because it impacts costs dramatically sometimes. Subsidizing reactors that follow new rules is a good compromise. So old reactors follow new rules but you make the situation whole by paying for the cost of new regulation.
3. Smaller new reactors instead of the giant old reactors. They're safer, less conspicuous, and a much smaller investment.
4. The Not In My Back Yard ism (NIMYism) is out of control with nuclear. No one wants to live next to an airport or a water treatment facility, but we need them. If we place it 10 miles away from you, then that should be good enough. Often people complain about reactors that are 400 miles from them. Its fucking stupid.

Naturally none of this is going to happen. The environmental lobby wants to reduce CO2 but doesn't want to use the only technology that will actually do it.

its a giant stupid shit show. Cue lots of ignorant people saying wind and solar. Which is just a vote for natural gas and coal. Which means the CO2 argument is at best inconsistent.

And yes, I know you're angry and about to post about how great wind and solar is and how wrong it is for me to call you ignorant. But what you've probably failed to do is address the natural gas and coal issue. If you can't answer why every solar and wind project has to be backstopped by as much coal and natural gas... and really everything is just an emotional sputter of mindless outrage... it just validates my point.

So seriously, if you think I'm wrong... natural gas and coal... why are they rolled out to back stop the solar and wind?

And yet we fly...

[Applehu Akbar]

The basic argument against the nuclear industry boils down to the idea that nuclear is a complex, unforgiving technology whose safety depends on constant monitoring.

I have an even better example of this kind of industry for you - aviation. Today, because of the elaborate precautions we take with air safety, most people feel perfectly safe on commercial aircraft. Yet we all know that somewhere in the world, about once a year, a planeload of people is lost. That's 200 or more at once each time, yet we generally feel that such numbers are not significant enough to worry about, even though most air accidents occur near airports, and can involve urban ground fatalities.

What would happen if a nuclear accident killed 200 people - just one? Now look at the converse: 6.5% of Americans are afraid to fly and opt to never get on a plane. When was the last time you saw even one of them protesting at an airport?

The difference between these industries is all in the politics.

Point is solar has a CO2 cost too

[SuperKendall]

Building solar panels produces CO2. You need about 5000 acres of solar panels to equal one nuclear power plant - assuming the sun shines 24x7. Wait, it doesn't? Make it 20,000 acres then... That's a vastly greater amount of CO2 generated from even solar power than a nuclear power plant produces in construction.

Re:Point is solar has a CO2 cost too

[CanadianMacFan]

You don't think CO2 isn't produced when making a nuclear plant? There's a lot of concrete and steel in a plant and both of those create plenty of CO2 when being made. I'd like to see the numbers you are using to say that solar panels creation makes vastly more CO2 than the construction of a nuclear plant. Land use shouldn't be part of the calculation.

As for the land, you can put the solar panels in places where it doesn't stop it from being used. For example on top of large buildings (schools, factories, shopping centres, grocery/large stores, etc), in fields with grazing animals, or even floating on bodies of water (reservoirs for drinking water which would have the added bonus of cutting evaporation).

Have you read the article you linked ?

[aepervius]

This was the USSR doing what they doing best , utterly neglecting basic security , basic anything, and it was 1957 to boot. The other incident I can remember involving waste was Goya hospital in Brazil, again not properly stored, and some reclaiming tank with nytril uranium which went critical due to somebody not knowing it was more concentrated than it should have been at the surface. Factually if you look at all our long term waste storage , none of them harmed human. And please stop looking at USSR or Russia for example, or short term storage, that would be another kind of lie, shifting the goal. When we speak of storage we usually speak of long term storage of waste.

Re:Do you believe in global warming from CO2 or no

[blindseer]

Right, let's do what Germany did and tax fossil fuels. That means people with low incomes get saddled with higher costs while the government makes gobs of money on the taxes. Of course the government wants to tax carbon emissions, it's something that people will have to buy to fuel their cars, cook their food, and heat their homes. There's no escaping a carbon tax.

Maybe people could just buy an electric car, a heat pump, or whatever, to replace the fossil fuel equivalents they have now. To do so they'd have to save up some money for these big purchases. It's kind of hard to do that if the government is taking a bigger chunk of their income in taxes.

If you want more people to "save the planet" then they need resources to do it. I suppose instead of "resources" I could use the word "capital" but capitalism is bad. Can't have capitalists get capital, they might build an electric car factory with it.

Sorry, the government isn't going to save us. We're going to have to save ourselves.

Oh, and Germany did in fact lower their CO2 output with a carbon tax. That's because people have less money to spend on things like heating their homes, or cooking their food. We don't need to "save the planet", the planet will be just fine. We need to save ourselves, because the government isn't going to do it.

Re:Do you believe in global warming from CO2 or no

[Zontar The Mindless]

A few melting glaciers flooding a few beachfront homes on some far away coast is an "I don't give a shit" issue.

TFTFY.

(SPOILER: About 40% of the world's population lives within 100 km of a coastline. That's about 60 miles.)

Fallout is also not very attractive.

[emil]

Fukushima has shown us that a loss of power for 36 hours at any of these facilities will cause them to boil off all their coolant, melt their containment vessels, and poison the surrounding environment for thousands of years. This includes both the reactor vessels and the waste/spent fuel rods in the local storage ponds.

The exact same GE model that failed in Fukushima runs 30 miles upstream from me on the Mississippi. Should it lose power as Fukushima did, the Mississippi river will be lost to our country. This reactor was scheduled for closure and was saved by my state legislature, and it should not be running.

Re:Well, no

[Solandri]

That stuff is classified as low-level nuclear waste. Generally, you just dig a big hole and bury it, because after a few hundred years it'll decay to background levels of radiation. (France would classify it as intermediate-level waste, though with similar disposal requirements.)

High-level nuclear waste is spent fuel. That's the stuff which can remain "hot" for tens of thousands of years if it's not reprocessed.

If it's not clear

[rsilvergun]

than I can honestly say I want to err on the side of caution. Nuclear disasters can't be cleaned up easily if at all.

I keep saying this, but I won't trust nuclear in America until we can run a safe plant cheaper than a dangerous one. Americans have a long history of privatizing crap that shouldn't be privatized. Hell, look at our response to Flint, MI's water crisis or the PR hurricane. I don't trust Americans with anything dangerous (and yes, I'm an American). We're cheapskates who like to tell ourselves God will take care of it. And in 2018 the rich don't have to live near the damage they cause.