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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."
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.
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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.
There are 99 nuclear reactors producing electricity in the United States today.
99 nuclear reactors.
If one of those reactors should happen to fail,
98 nuclear reactors producing electricity in the United States.
Sing it with me!
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Unless you're a Dominionist and actually believe that the Earth is going to end soon anyway, you can't defend saying that it's okay to keep burning fossil fuels, even so-called 'clean burning' natural gas. It's just plain stupid. Meanwhile I'm not going to defend the long-in-the-tooth nuclear reactors that are still operating; they're outdated designs, they're flawed designs to start with, and should be retired -- after being replaced, that is. There are better designs, and better fuels than what they're using. We can't keep relying on fossil fuels, we can't run everything off solar, wind, and hydroelectric, and if anyone thinks that there's ever going to be less of a demand for electricity, then they're dreaming, there will only ever be more demand, unless there is a die-back of homo sapiens sapiens around the world. So come on you NIMBYs and nuclear power-haters, it's time to bite the bullet and admit that there aren't any other alternatives at the moment , and nuclear power in one form or another is what the situation calls for. Stop being irrational about it and accept the logic. The alternative is an energy crisis.
Fission is just treading water until then.
Blame NIMBYs or whatever .... the fact is that nuclear just isn't there yet.
That's it.
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.
If you really were scared of CO2 emissions, you would be fine with 100% of nuclear power costs being subsidized, to reduce emissions.
Why? sounds much more practical to tax fossil fuels instead. And use that money to reduce other less efficient taxes, such as income taxes.
I would be fine with 100% of the nuclear power costs being subsidized... but you realize, that means they'd be owned by the government. That means no private company making a penny off them, and that translates to cheaper electricity.
But, it's not a single choice.... nuclear OR carbon dioxide. Wind, solar, geothermal, wave.... all of those things provide the same "no CO2" benefit, and none of the "radioactive contamination for 10,000 years" downside. Additionally, solar can be applied small scale, like solar panels on rooftops, which is an immense benefit as you don't have to invest billions just to get a single site up and running.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/so... read the Carbon Debt section to see why your "nuclear has a smaller footprint than any other" is wrong. The first generations of solar panels, for example, are made using energy from conventional power generation (whether it's coal or natural gas in that area), BUT, as those solar panels get put into use, the origin source for the energy to make the next batch changes... it no longer comes exclusively from coal or natural gas. And that process accelerates.
Showing concern that the first of something is going to be more expensive than the 100th, or 1000th (whether in actual dollars, or in this case a carbon debt) really is only an argument for never, ever, doing a damn thing to innovate anything.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
If you really were scared of CO2 emissions, you would be fine with 100% of nuclear power costs being subsidized, to reduce emissions.
Why? The risk that you and I die due to CO2 emissions is basically zero.
The risk to die in an reactor accident or due to fall out is higher than that.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Wait, free energy in my backyard? I say awww hell yesss!
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
All of these nuclear plant operators have enough money saved up to pay for full decommissioning and waste treatment, right?
I mean, there's no way they would have paid out every cent of their profits during the last six decades, and are expecting to just shut up shop and leave the taxpayers to socialise the clean up bill, right?
There's definitely enough money put aside in their government-mandated sinking fund, right?
Who's this imaginary person you're addressing?
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?
High up front capital costs have been a primary problem for nuclear power generation for most of its existence. The Washington Public Power Supply System lead to a massive multibillion dollar municipal bond default in the 1980s.
It takes a lot of time and money to build traditional nuclear power plants, so if the financial and political system shifts underneath a potential plant builder then they can go bust with a partially built plant and nothing to show for it. The financial risk is huge and has already been painfully realized in the past.
So you're saying that you, of all people, care even one iotoa about CO2 emissions?
Government handouts are A-Ok as long as they are given to the rich, large corporations, or defense contractors. Just like Jesus taught.
The vast majority of nuclear waste is not spent fuel, it is decommissioned equipment and disposable maintenance supplies that have been made radioactive by exposure to ionizing radiation. None of this stuff can be reprocessed in any meaningful way. Yet, frustratingly, it is still dangerous.
While I am pro-nuclear, I do not think we win when we make strawman arguments.
"Nobody I know is scared of CO2 emissions. A few melting glaciers flooding a few beachfront homes on some far away coast is an "I don't give a shit" issue"
What SuperReductionist Self-Aggrandized Moron Kendall said is even more retarded than the above, amazingly.
Did you really just say that they are lowering their prices to keep up their profit margins?
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.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I don't see any mention of what I understand to be the single greatest cost in running a nuclear facility - namely, insurance.
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Funny how you don't understand that cost of operations are the same whether it's publicly or privately owned, but if it's privately owned you have this little additional thing called PROFIT needed. Honestly though, i'm not talking about allowing a private company to run it with subsidies... i'm talking actually government owned. Then all we'd need are people in the government who give a shit about this country as opposed to the worthless pieces of shit now who are only in there for the power and money.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Damn you are fucked up in the head. Are you physically incapable of admitting you are wrong? When confronted with facts which contradict your preconceived notions you go straight to kill me.
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?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
Here in the Pacific Northwest the government is doing a horrible job of handling the waste, so I don't think it is a good idea to ask the government to run it unless you're going to mandate that they use specific technologies; preferably with an emphasis on reusing existing waste as fuel!
Hanford is a mess, but it also highlights the biggest problem with nuclear... the waste. Most of it is low level stuff that can't be used for fuel. I'd certainly rather have the government run it, but here again, it'd require competent people in office to do that... not the anti-science, anti-intellectuals that have been put in there now. When things are private, there's the need for profit, and given the general level of greed in private corporations, cutting corners is a bottom line booster.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
If you agree to store all the spent nuclear waste in your backyard
I live near Rocky Flats. Bring it on.
I'm also not a little baby-man scared of a little radiation that might affect a mile or two of land instead of the entire earth like CO2 effects. The U.S. had a great plan to store ALL the U.S. nuclear waste in a salt cave in Utah, meaning it would be sealed essentially forever. Great idea? "Environmentalists", bent on polluting the earth with CO2 and killing the entire planet, did not agree and killed the project. One can only assume some kind of bond-level villainy there.
I would love to see an updated Dante's Inferno with a special hell built just for the people who killed off so many nuclear power options...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The concrete can of course be modern carbon-neutral stuff that actually absorbs concrete.
But the point is that for the power produced from a CO2 plant you build once, you would be dumping many orders of magnitude more CO2 into the atmosphere building the 5000 acres of solar panels needed to make as much electricity as one nuclear plant (and modern panels do not have the same lifespan as a plant, so every 10-20 years you'd be replacing that - triple that figure).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Commercial endeavors typically want a return on investment in as few years as possible, or else a really big return. Nuclear power gives neither. That doesn't mean it's not "worth it", it just means it doesn't fit our current business system.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But nuclear plants can't compete with the subsidies that wind and solar receive in the form of exemptions from onerous environmental regulations.
Have gnu, will travel.
Currently the fund is underfunded by about $22 billion out of the $76 billion that is estimated to be required.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Gas prices are set globally. Nations pay for that and exports win over domestic use. Why sell locally when exports make real profits.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Do you know who is consuming most of the electricity ? The Industry. Count about 10% residential , 25% commercial and 65% industrial. While residential can do with solar/wind and storage of local small capacity and top off on the grid, industrial and partly commercial need the base load. And therein lies the Problem. Solar and wind due to their intermittency cannot be used as base load, unless you get physical/chemical/thermal battery to store energy when it is in excess and reuse it when it is not shiny/windy. Beside the case of hydro (which is AFAIK had its potential completely used) and geothermal which is a very localized use case, Gas, coal, oil, nuclear are base load plants. And from those only one is not emitting tons of CO2 per kwh. There are limited use case for solar to cut through industrial process which use a lot of energy (like the Bayer process to smelt bauxite, usage of concentrated solar array can help cut energy usage, but those situation again are very limited geographically and limited in time). As for GAS plant and similar plant they are so cheap because they are allowed to burn and emit CO2 without consequence. Tragedy of the common. Not imposing a tax on CO2 polluting plant *IS* a form of subsidy frankly even if most of the US does nto recognize it.
TL;DR : without an effective way of storing energy in massive amount, the only base load plants are either nuclear or emitting CO2.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
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.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Except:
Airlines offer the fastest travel available - nuclear doesn't offer anything you can't get from other renewable energy sources for a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time.
Airlines aren't setting the world up with a hazardous waste problem that will last thousands of years.
The difference is that nuclear power cannot be justified based on cost alone. It costs too much to build, secure, maintain, decommission and that's before getting to the radioactive waste.
None, because the USG doesn't give the tiniest, greenest little shit about people or activists when there is corporate money involved. See DAPL or Occupy Wallstreet for two recent examples. Or the FBI charging people with terrorism for protesting factory farms. Or leaving BP in charge of cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico they worked hard to destroy.
Not so much x2. The first problem with the death penalty is that its still being carried out. The second problem is that there is a cheap, basically fool-proof execution method that's not being used: nitrogen asphyxiation. However, it causes a sense of euphoria before death, which is why death penalty states wont use it. The writhing pain suffered by those given a cocktail from Dr. Nick is a feature, not a bug, for these authoritarians.
Economical belongs in the same sentence as nuclear power as much as "humanitarian" and "bombing" do. Nuclear power simply costs too much to build, maintain, decommission and that's before getting to your thousand-year-waste problem. You can build out wind and solar power in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost with none of the long term or safety issues.
"New designs" are an old red herring. Of course new plants are going to be safer than the 50 year old dinosaur that should have been taken offline ten years ago. Until your "new" plant is the old one, and suffering the same problems. Because there isn't a design that avoids the problems with nuclear power (meltdowns, decommissioning, waste) while being cost effective.
The FUD on wind and solar can be answered with 70's technology - 1870's. Specifically pumped storage hydroelectric power. If it's good enough to back up nuclear power plants, it's good enough for renewables. That and building out your generating capacity across the grid - same as you do for coal and nuclear power.
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.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I get it that you want the best for everybody, however transposing your belief system onto reality and then subjecting everybody to it is propagating the PR the Nuclear Industry has concocted to conceal their failures. Unlike shills, they get paid.
From that perspective, it's immoral to support Nuclear Power.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I didn't realise the Russian Army had fallen on such hard times.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Already debunked. You can stop repeating yourself now.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
While we run around closing down nuclear power plants and replacing them with solar the environment gets no benefit at all. I recently read the statistical review on world energy that BP has been publishing for the best part of 50 years now, interestingly they dedicated a graph to the power fuel mix (probably political to get governments of the oil industry's back about CO2, but probably also correct).
In the past 20 years we have gotten nowhere. ~38% of power was generated from coal in 1998, about 38% is generated from coal right now. We can thank India and China, but we can also thank the anti-nuclear west which are falling over themselves to close down nuclear power and put more green energy online, bonus points if you're germany and use coal as a semi-temporary stopgap in the process.
https://www.bp.com/content/dam... Sad summary on page 6.
Why? The risk that you and I die due to CO2 emissions is basically zero.
The risk to die in an reactor accident or due to fall out is higher than that.
That is like saying that the risk of dying due to a madman with a gun is basically zero since it was the bullet that killed people, not the madmen with guns.
It isn't CO2 poisoning that is going to kill people, it is the increase in natural disasters and the relocation of people that is going to cause the deaths.
That belief _is_ reality...
to you. That's why it is a belief system, a Nuclear Ideology.
All of you afflicted with this Nuclear Ideology refuse to acknowledge the facts placed before you and take rhetoric as truth. When confronted with fact or an analysis I've observed Nuclear Ideologists descend into babble and double speak hardly worthy of spending anytime wading through. This has been consistent on slashdot for over a decade. NIMBY blah GREENIES blah, breeder blah, new reactor babble ignor anything you don;t understand or pretend it doesn't exist.
For example the numbers cited for Chernobyl were reported by the WHO over which the IAEA has publishing interdiction orders on so the WHO's findings on all things nuclear has to be viewed through the same lens you would observe any PR effort. This is an interstitial agreement between the two organizations named WHA12-40 was signed in 1959, if you need a citation.
We could probably discuss the IAEA's own charter says that it is a organization that exists to promote Nuclear Power, so the only conspiracy you could chant is if they went *against* their own charter, which they are unlikely to do.
We could discuss the work of the Ukrainian scientist's that is ignored because it is not written in English that puts the death rate at 10's of thousands, but what would they know about science of the nuclear reactors built in their own territory with their own cultures engineering practises.
Of course we could talk about the math of how many fatal doses of pu-239 were released into the environment but that would depend a lot on the accuracy of a model to track it propagation through the environment to be ingested by people through progressive bio-accumulation into the food chain. Maybe cancer, maybe not.
You might reduce it to a compassionate level and look at the complete destruction of the communities that used to be around these reactors and whether the people who lived there actually consented to the reactor being there in the first place and how many people died simply from the stress of having their lives completely obliterated - but that doesn't count, does it?
Or you could try to do the math of statistically how many births don't come to term because the mother ingested Plutonium Clorides but you don't have a model to track them either, which would be the honest thing to say.
For some really radical thinking you could try to extrapolate deaths from the transgenic disease caused by gene mutation from beta radiation emiters but that's Not.In.My.Generation so it's easier to wave it off as a fiction even though we know know that effect is real.
It's all a bit too difficult really.
Much easier to adopt a less cognitively expensive route and adopt an Ideology, put the brain into neutral then offer a political position based on a belief system. Just like an Ideology not everyone subscribes to it or wants it so it is evil because it is forced upon people who object to it, by people whose belief system obscures their knowledge of facts or who just don't want to know.
Which probably means you transpose the same Nuclear Ideology onto reality.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Its age is zero milliseconds old, since it refreshes continually as time passes.
Did you mean "The average age of a nuclear power plant in this country is 38 years", or perhaps "The average nuclear power plant in this country is 38 years old"?
At the bottom of the
Might be of interest, came across this in reddit/r/ontario yesterday. Live data on Canada's province of Ontario power generation by industry. Note about 74% nuclear and ~1% wind and solar which should pick up through the day: http://live.gridwatch.ca/home-... This one isn't as pretty but gives more detail by plannt: https://cns-snc.ca/media/ontar... After all these years of wind and solar installations, the small amount being produced by those technologies would make me think we need more nuclear.
If nuclear "industry" would have had to do the initial investments instead of getting a state-sponsored Manhattan program, and if they would have gotten the same scientific scrutiny for risks and long-term problems which e.g. chemical industry got, they never would have turned on even a single reactor.
I have been hearing good things about thorium.
California is facing massive lift as both annual rainfall and well taps into the groundwater are being used to funnel water to the southern parts of the state, as well as to unsustainable agricultural practices.
You mean "agriculture is using most of California's water" don't you? But you're afraid to say that.
By putting in nuclear reactors that could provide the energy for 24/7 desalinization plants, both boiling and reverse osmosis type, California could not only provide water for its most in-demand regions (LA, San Diego and the Bay Area/Silicon Valley) but also begin semi-permanently pumping water inland which can be reallocated around the state to help pump freshwater back into the water table, eventually helping to restore some of the damage done by overextraction, while also insurinng a permanent future supply of water until the oceans go dry.
Ah, the pipe dreams of fantasy. By putting in a single nuclear reactor, they'd be adding billions in expenses just to cover for what you already said is an unsustainable industry. That's like buying an extra HVAC unit because you won't close your windows during the day. The smart choice, closing the windows, never occurs to you, because????
Well, nobody can figure out your madness.
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.
Or they could stop selling their water to farms at 1/10 the fair market price. Growing rice in the desert is crazy.
For the massive cost to build a nuclear plant there are much better ways to spend the money. I used to be for nuclear power but it's just become too expensive. Five or six years ago the province of Ontario sent out a request to build a new plant with two reactors and the least expensive reply was two to three times the maximum amount they were willing to spend.
The better thing to do is take the money and spread it out over solar, wind, geothermal, micro hydro, storage, and conservation. All the talk is about supply but very little is done about demand, at least seriously.
A couple of years ago there were approximately 20 condo units built. 10 units long, two high. Each unit had a small air conditioner on the outside. This is very inefficient and waste of energy. A better system would have been to use geothermal heating and cooling. Each unit could still control their temperature but it would be much more efficient. Instead of building a nuclear plant the money for it could be used to subsidize the installation of the heating and cooling system in those units as they are built. As it is those units will be stuck with those inefficient air conditioners for the life of the building without a massive renovation. There isn't even room on the upper condos to install a more efficient air conditioner. Helping a project like this saves energy for much longer than a nuclear plant would exit. Longer than it's replacement would exist too.
There are still office buildings being built that have the air conditioners being installed on top of the building. They should be using geothermal heating and cooling or some similar system. Toronto uses Lake Ontario for cooling. In Ottawa there is a chilled water loop downtown for computer centres that uses the river. Things like this should be encouraged and helped financially.
Solar doesn't get government subsidies? It does.
Wind doesn't? It does.
Hydro doesn't? It does.
Fossil fuel gets the most.
There is no valid point to this article.
I'm kind of tired of all of the bickering. We live in an imperfect world. The perfect solution would be for most people (corporations, etc.) to stop being so wasteful and careless. In particular, since this applies to the United States, let's talk about the US. We emit 2x the carbon emissions of lots of other wealthy industrialized countries. Why?
Because we like to drive large cars (no, most people do not need them) and/or want to disregard public transportation, we eat a lot of meat and beef, we live in McMansions (and many other wasteful living arrangements).
So you don't like nuclear? Well there is a far cleaner option (stop being so wasteful)--but people like that even less.
We are at a technological point that we should actively work on phasing out these old/large reactor installations. If nuclear is used, make much smaller, less radioactive, Thorium based, localized installations that power suburbs. And of course keep expanding solar/wind power because of it's obvious benefits.
Unfortunately the designs that are actively used are really dual use, civilian and military for weapons programs. Breeder reactors and thorium reactors don't have strong military significance, so their designs and fuels are not subsidized by the iceberg of the economy that is our military budget. Most effective political support for nuclear power is generated by the military contractor lobby.
Fusion reactors are right around the corner and are a far better long term choice. Solar and wind with natural gas backup for peak loads are the right choice for today. This is also the opinion of the invisible hand of capitalism because that where the money is invested.
Fission reactors based upon today's designs are a bad idea at this point because the waste issue is intractable.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Fuck you dead baby asshole
Properly designed, or at least, not wildly improperly designed, they can't explode.
In the late 1950s, the Soviets had a massive nuclear waste accident.
The Japanese had thermal and hydrogen removal issues that didn't work out so great either. Granted they had long standing engineering design and negligence issues, known in the west in the 1970s. Described in the now defunct Nuclear Safety magazine.
No moron, I'm not "immune to radiation".
What I'm saying is that just a few miles away from one of the more irradiated sites on the planet, the air and water and soil are all fine and free of radiation. That's why I don't care if you put more there, because it would have zero effect on me, or anyone nearby.
All that in an area that has nothing much special except for decent clay soil that keeps runoff from spreading things much. In a really sealed area like a salt cave none of that radiation is going anywhere...
What should be your everlasting shame is you have no concept of the distance squared law in terms of the effect of radiation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Fuck you dead baby asshole
You're a prime example of an ideologue whose belief system can't handle the reality of the situation and all you have is ad-hominem attacks. You have no rational argument to offer, you can't accept facts and debate them and, I can argue your side of the argument better than you can. Your entire position is constructed upon arguments you borrowed from me when I demonstrated that to you. Now you make comments based on a false reality you constructed from cognition you borrowed for me.
You're a perfect example of how empty and useless Nuclear Ideology is. I encourage you to continue to show everyone as your "advocacy" really shows everyone how uninformed and lacking in compassion Nuclear Idealist are in pursuit of a technology they don't even understand.
If you can't face the reality you have no business talking about nuclear power.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
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the wealthy don't like the wind farms messing with their view of ocean though.
They NIMBY's have a point. America has a poor track record of safety, especially in poor counties. Sooner or later some politician gets bought off, privatizes the thing and looks like other way while a plant that should have been shut down decades ago keeps running. You're a couple of elections away from disaster.
If you want nuke plants make one that's cheaper to run safely than not. Either that or fundamentally change American culture and politics to do away with the problem if privatizing stuff that has no business being privatized. Until then I don't want them in anybody's back yard.
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in that we privatize it just enough that a select group of lucky people get to skim 20% off the cost. This works because wealthy people fly too and they want to be safe when they fly. Nuke plants can be kept away from where the well to do live, allowing them to avoid the consequences of their corner cutting.
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You are using the current version of the old nineteenth-century argument that New York City would soon become uninhabitable because of accumulated horse manure. Once we get full-burnup reactors going, all forms of fission waste will become new fuel. This will include Chernobyl and Fukushima. If Fukushima had occurred first, we would already be using the rad-hard robots that Japan is developing for dismantling the high-radiation parts of the site.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
So emotional. I might look at some of your other comments and collapse you ideology even further.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
He loves this, use it to trigger him randomly.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I guess I must have hit a nerve too.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
AtomicAsshole - that's priceless. By means of thanks for this send this asshole random link to babies with birth defects from DU, that really triggers him.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
What about these babies have you fully researched how this happens.
Clearly you don't understand how soluble Plutonium Chloride is. That's why someone has called you AtomicAsshole. See, it's not just me that thinks you don't know what you're talking about. Maybe it's time to admit to yourself that You're wrong.
But you can't and it has nothing to do with nuclear power either. I know your little secret.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
First link:
Second link:
Roh roh.
Technologies like PV solar are great, but they're really best used as supplements to other, primary power generation sources. Yes, there are cases where given the right conditions, a large solar power plant makes sense to build. But overall, this technology requires a whole lot of open space where the sun can shine down on many rows of expensive panels, unobstructed -- and obviously, it can't generate a thing after dark. Also going to have poor performance on cloudy/overcast days.
Hydroelectric power is a good option, but I believe we've already constructed hydro plants just about everywhere they're viable. So not much room for growth there.
I think the biggest, unfortunate problem with nuclear power is all of the opposition to it ran its cost WAY up to deploy it. All the F.U.D. from protesters for so many years didn't accomplish anything except causing a lot of expensive studies to get run that probably weren't really necessary, and big legal battles fought over plant locations, objections to any plans to handle or transport nuclear waste or fuel rods, etc.
Now, you're stuck with power companies who dumped SO much investment into putting the plants online, they're all trying to run them past their original expected lifespans and caught in a catch 22. More costly to keep repairing than it's really worth, yet not sensible to just shutter the whole thing and dismantle it, when there's no cost effective way to build a new plant and throw it online quickly.
It's clear there are more modern, safer ways to construct a nuclear plant -- and that's what we need to be doing. But the utility companies are kind of screwed from going over-budget with the existing reactors, plus using poor projections for power usage needs for various locations. (I know a number of nuclear plants rarely ran at more than 50% capacity or so because they falsely expected a doubling of power demands in the surrounding area that didn't materialize.)
Meanwhile, China has 20 new nuclear power plants under construction, and more about to start construction.
Of Chinese nuclear plants, almost 70% (865 GWe) was built within the last decade, whereas in the United States half of the fleet (580 GWe) was over 30 years old.
Longer-term, fast neutron reactors (FNRs) are seen as the main technology for China, and CNNC expects the FNR to become predominant by mid-century. A 65 MWt fast neutron reactor - the Chinese Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR) - near Beijing achieved criticality in July 2010. Based on this, a 600 MWe pre-conceptual design was developed, the CFR600 began construction in December 2017 at Xiapu in Fujian province, and commissioning is expected in 2023.
My school didn't usually usually call it "the Standard Oil strategy". We generally referred to it as Monopoly strategy or Dominance strategy. There are lots of more recent examples to use (lookin' at you, Microsoft).
Here's the problem. You can't 'maintain' high profit margins by driving your prices 'artificially low'. When your prices are artificially low, you have low profit margins .
You have high profit margins when your prices are artificially high.
I likewise assume he is trying to make a case for monopolistic behavior. Monopolistic behavior happens in two phases, one with low prices to remove competitors, one with high prices (and high margins) to realize economic profits (as opposed to accounting profits). If you're actually seeing these phases alternate, you should see a long period of high prices (profit taking) interspersed with short periods of low prices (to discourage some competitor from entering the market). What he is describing is the opposite. He then says it's 'unsustainable', which is the OPPOSITE of a monopoly market position. Monopolies are super-sustainable; free markets have no mechanism to dislodge a solidified monopoly.
As far as the reference to Proverbs, in my opinion it is discussing moving around on the demand curve, and that is fine. I prefer the differentiation strategy to cost leadership, but that's just a personal preference.
Well, I don't think I selectively read his post, I think you selectively read mine. That's OK.
For the record I also have MBA on my transcript:
MBA - concentration in Computer Information Systems - Georgia State University, 2005
You understand that if the government makes money with the carbon tax, other taxes can be reduced instead?
So you are against carbon tax, we get it. Which form of tax do you prefer? Income tax? Sale tax? Import tax?
because Solar and Wind are replacing them without the risks involved in nuclear. That was my implied point, but I'll state it bluntly if need be. China's moving to wind and solar as fast as they can. It's a country of over a billion people. It's going to take a while. They're moving faster than we are.
As for why it has to be "backstopped" by coal & gas, that's because of politics. There are people who's jobs and livelihoods depend on overvaluing natural gas and coal deposits. Those people are in swing states and disproportionately affect the outcome of the American presidential election. If we had proper systems to social welfare and training programs it wouldn't be an issue. It's an artifact of our screwed up political system.
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If you really were scared of CO2 emissions, you would be fine with 100% of nuclear power costs being subsidized, to reduce emissions.
So very much this.
The energy source that is cheaper than nuclear right now is natural gas -- and it *got* cheaper by fracking.
Guess what natural gas technology is in the crosshairs of the no-energy folks. Bingo. Fracking. Got it in one.
And natural gas is not no-carbon, it's less-carbon. Obviously, the people claiming to be oh so very very very concerned about CO2 ... have another agenda entirely.
These should have been replaced with Molten Salt Reactors decades ago. MSRâ(TM)s are cheaper than all the bandaids necessary to make a LWR look safe. Molten salt reactor - Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor) #1:MSRâ(TM)s donâ(TM)t use water as a coolant⦠Every (LWR) incident to date has had (water at x50â"70 atmospheres!) coolant containment failure explosion! and hydrogen (from radiated water) explosion. (Idiotic! Maybe ok for submarines⦠but land based? No⦠justâ¦Âno.) #2: A MSRâ(TM)s fuel is chemically part of a molten salt. Itâ(TM)s canâ(TM)t âoemelt downâ. #3: MSRâ(TM)s are self regulating: As they get hotter the fuel salt expands and reactions slow; as they get cooler the fuel salt contracts and reactions quicken. (This also means that they can load balance quickly; something that LWRâ(TM)s canâ(TM)t do.) #4: Passive safety: At the bottom of an MSR a salt plug is kept frozen by an external fan. If the reactor gets too hot or the fan stops (external power loss?) the plug melts and all the reactor fuel (salt) drains into a storage tank designed to inhibit further reactions. #5 MSRâ(TM)s burn almost 98% of the Uranium fuel and all transuranics (plutonium and minor actinides)Âand transmutes long-lived fission products (lanthanides) into shorter-lived fission products that generally decay to background levels in about 300 years,Âas opposed to conventional reactors that consume less than 2% of its Uranium fuel and leaves one hundred times the waste that requires over 10,000 years to decay to background levels. #6: CARBON-FREE ENERGY! Addendum: Because of #1 MSRâ(TM)s donâ(TM)t need a huge expensive (to design, construct and regulate) containment structure (that never works).
This question is also haunting me a lot. That is the Government close the Subsidy then the Americas Nuclear Reactor might not survive. So Government Handouts are very much needed. But currently I am also read an article about this topic and there various advantages and disadvantages are told with an explanation. So if anybody willing to read that article can visit https://netgears.support/netge... Here all things are explained in a very good manner.
Nuclear waste also includes gloves, syringes, hospital uniforms. It's not just fuel rods.
"You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs"
DU munitions spread dust that is very dangerous and it is easy to argue that they should be banned, but that isn't the question now.
AtomicAsshole denies these effects and then uses that denial as a claim to moral superiority.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Sure, but the low-level waste isn't where the biggest dangers are.
Also the French have a substantial reprocessing industry even without many reactors in the world designed to use reprocessed fuel. If you look into it, most of the waste that is left over from fuel can be reprocessed and used again.
Plus the low-level waste can be reduced substantially if needed.
When has the private sector done anything without the need for profit above and beyond what it would cost the government to do?
They privatized several aspects of medicare/medicaid back in the 90's. The argument by republicans was that private companies would do much more, and more efficiently, than government could. Within 3 years the private companies needed subsidies, then more subsidies.. BIG subsidies... of course, they also had to cut the benefits while getting these bigger subsidies. So they were doing much less, while costing taxpayers more.
Now, i'm sorry if you weren't alive and/or thinking back then... but i was. It was as much bullshit as Reagan's trickle down voodoo bullshit economics. Private companies NEED profit, the government doesn't. Insurance companies pay around 30% of their money on operations (including profit)... Medicare about 5%; and while you may hate the US government, Medicare does a damn good job at what it does. What we need to do is prosecute all the fraud committed by private companies taking advantage of medicare/medicaid/the_US_taxpayer in the most severe way possible.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's