Slashdot Mirror
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
That belief _is_ reality.
Actual victims of nuclear power do exist, but their numbers are several orders of magnitude lower than the victims of fossil fuel. What he said about "More people died today from fossil fuels than have ever died from nuclear energy" is absolutely true, there is no way anyone can fudge the math to make that not reality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.