The real concern here is making sure the existing nuclear plants have a clear glide slope toward end-of-life. Nuclear power is an extremely tight community. On the nuclear carrier I was on (powered by Westinghouse plants), there was a valve (a valve!) malfunctioning and the tech rep flown out from the company took one look at it and said "This bit's in backward". "How do you know?" "I designed it". Which means the same guy had been working on that system for 30 years.
The people working for this company are a matter of national security. I sure hope Secretary Mattis understands that.
This, also, by the way, is a great illustration of Elon Musk's contention that these technologies don't just keep working. Brilliant, competent engineers and scientists have to invest themselves in making them work.
Living in a world where technology seems outdated after 3-4 years, having reactors reliably serving up power for several decades is kind of amazing.
On the other hand, this does keep the number of people in the industry small. Sure, demonization of the power source, and regulatory standards that inhibit the development of new technologies also help, but it seems like this would be a problem regardless.
I've always wondered what the demand/pay is for engineers looking to enter the nuclear industry is like.
Personally, I feel as though modern acceptable standards of near-immediate obsolescence as normal are kind of depressing and abnormal.
Seeing technology become outdated after 3-4 years is kind of amazing in all the wrong ways.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that what we're really seeing is explosive advances, and to think about being stuck where we were 3-4 years ago, frozen in time, without permission to advance is a horrible thought.
But at the same time, I hate not being about to used something I paid thousands of dollars for, less than five years later, because I scratched a CD-ROM, and downloads for compatible upgraded drivers are not supported.
True. My scanner is second hand. It was given to me because its drivers were not compatible with windows 7 onward. Thanks to linux and open drivers, this scanner got a life extension of 6 years so far and it's still doin' great.
There most be an increasing amount of hardware/software with egregious business value (hundred million+) with a decreasing number of surviving/available designers etc. Rationally if these people were required to fix or maintain such systems their yearly value would be in the millions wouldn't it?
For some reason I get the feeling that such people are not paid in the millions. Maybe double or triple a traditional salary but not in the executive-bonus tier. Do they deserve to be?
You jest, but my first job[1] was back in 2005-ish for a small company[2] in Slovenia building web dashboards for Slovenia's nuclear power plant[3]. PHP and good old forms. My job was parsing the XML data and feeding it into some sort of graph component. Can't remember if they gave me a built graph component or I had to build one from scratch.
Not the kind of startup you'd hear about on HN of course.
And no, I don't know what the motivation was for the nuclear power plant to issue a RFP that involved web dashboards. Maybe upgrading their interfaces from the analog ones built in the 80's?
of course, Berkeley will need to abandon its "nuclear free zone" policy. but i see that as a solvable problem, once they recognize the potential for revenue enhancement.
In all seriousness, there have been attempts at startups looking to disrupt the nuclear industry. It's hit several problems, in the form of bad science and harsh regulation.
Apparently hacking plutonium is not easily accomplished.
> There most be an increasing amount of hardware/software with egregious business value (hundred million+) with a decreasing number of surviving/available designers etc.
Yeah. I see a lot of COBOL guys that are extremely critical resources for big enterprises. As GP said, they are not paid like C-suite executives, but not very far from it, and no one asks them how they spend their time. Needless to say they are a very relaxed bunch.
A colleague of mine was involved in verifying the software that controlls the shut-down procedures of the Darlington [0] plant. Now he's working on proofs of block-chain ciphers of some sort or another. I don't believe he's quite rich but he can certainly be rather selective of job opportunities.
> For some reason I get the feeling that such people are not paid in the millions. Maybe double or triple a traditional salary but not in the executive-bonus tier
From stories I've heard, in these situations people like to come in not as employees but as consultants, at which point there are many hundreds of dollars per hour spent.
That actually relieves some concerns I had, given the root comment (which I have to admit, caused some distress). I imagine there are more people currently in the Navy that might leave if the demand and pay were high enough. Hopefully that covers enough of the important skill-sets needed.
Sure it has. Now it has a WiFi antenna and an embedded webserver so that you can see the temperature of the water on your smartphone(app installation required)
The boiler will get software updates until the next 3-4 year cycle, then you will need to buy a new boiler to get the latest BoilerOS(tm) that adds the ability to remotely set the temperature. No need for that to be secure...What's the worst that could happen??? It's just a boiler...
You just added another line to my face. So thanks for that. Just don't leave out the small openboileros crew serving up lawsuit magnet heat due to insurance issues of modifying your water boiling code.
Only officially sanctioned iBoiler parts may be used. Use of an unauthorized part will cause the boiler to enter DRM guard mode and cease operation for violation of the OpenBoilerOS software license.
You can expect a nastygram from the BSA(Boiler Software Alliance) for your attempt to circumvent their DRM.
Last year, I interviewed with one of the companies that was born by Westinghouse shedding units a couple of decades ago and they still do this kind of thing.
If a Naval unit has an issue, they'll attempt to reproduce it and develop a solution at a remote location. If they can't, they'll send an engineer across the planet to evaluate and fix it.
They do this even for not "critical" systems. I was impressed at that level of dedication.
It was this part that made me re-think whether or not I wanted the position. I wasn't ready to commit to being available to travel to the other side of the planet at a moment's notice if/when something goes wrong but I do appreciate the commitment.
The current rush to the bottom school of thought in cost-saving will have a serious detrimental effect on our military prowess. Sure, some people think that's a good thing but I do not.
I may be misreading your message, but this approach seems to be an example of rational, good engineering. If a system is broken in a faraway place it is best to analyze it and develop a fix in a well equipped lab convenient for experts to work in. Once the solution is known, deploy and validate it, ideally remotely or by shipping components, not by sending your experts on site.
Sending an expert to a remote site or a ship to fix a problem is a last resort.
When N=10, and each one is a strategic asset, which, if found disabled, would cause every major head of state in the world to reassess their long-term global postures on technology, defense, and relations with the US, it doesn't take much to buy that plane ticket.
I worked as a mechanical engineer in the nuclear power industry for a couple years and this happened frequently even for normal power plants.
Like, one of the first projects I worked on was diagnosing a malfunctioning valve where most of the work was finite element analysis on computers, but we still had to send someone to take measurements and temperature readings since the company that made the valve no longer existed (and I'm not sure how you'd ship something like that since it was very large and used with contaminated water)
I agree that the cost of the plane ticket is minor but this IMO makes the proper procedure starting with lab replication even more important.
You usually get much better results when you work in a well equipped lab and have access to the right experts. For anything non-trivial "replicate, understand, fix, deploy" is a much better approach. Not always possible, and when it is not going to site may be the only option, but it should be fallback, not primary path. My 2c.
I think you are misreading; my reading of the parent post is that their last paragraph has the meaning "the push to lower military spending will remove the ability to afford the current process, which is bad, because the current process works great."
You appear to be thinking that problems can typically be replicated in a lab without sending an expert to the remote site. My supercomputing startup (PathScale) made specialized networks for supercomputers. While most problems could be solved with remote diagnostics, I still spent a lot of time flying to customer sites. Sure, you can call it "a last resort", but it's necessary if the problem can't be replicated in the lab.
Agree completely. Sometimes you cannot replicate things in the lab; then you go. But you do this only if you cannot replicate.
I spend part of my time developing large, real time, visible systems and when things do not go as planned there is always a lot of pressure to go on site now and "just fix it". I have taken my lumps to learn that the right approach is to say "no, we will start in our lab".
If you can, take that job. You will not regret it. Consider this: that tech rep probably had a resume that a dozen companies would kill for, and he's still at Westinghouse. Flying across the planet, landing on aircraft carriers.
Take it. I worked in a job like that, the emergencies are few & far in-between. When there is one, there are probably multiple people on the team that can handle it.
My group used to have a list to sign up for going out on sea trials. I never got high enough on it to go. If you don't want to go, I doubt you would have to.
This is why I'm against nuclear power. As safe as the technology could be, it still run by humans who make errors.
If you think a bit being put in backwards isn't a big deal, check out the history of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
> The San Onofre station had technical problems over the years. In July 1982, Time wrote, "The firm Bechtel was ... embarrassed in 1977, when it installed a 420-ton nuclear-reactor vessel backwards" at San Onofre.
Backwards. The reactor was installed backwards.
It goes on.
> In 2008, the San Onofre plant received multiple citations over issues such as failed emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsified fire safety data. In its annual review of 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified improvements but noted that in the area of human performance, "corrective actions to date have not resulted in sustained and measurable improvement”.
I think this is not an argument against nuclear power, but an argument against the very complicated reactor designs that are in widespread use. Because they start with an inherently unsafe design, they can only be made safe with many layers of protective measures.
Newer reactor designs can avoid these issues.
On a personal note, I grew up about 10-15 miles north of San Onofre, and I don't think many folks had an idea of how poorly that facility was run.
Anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than the reality. A recent example would be the evacuation at the Oroville dam - almost 200,000 people were forcibly evacuated since the worst case failure scenario would have have been a tidal wave of water 30 feet high rushing down stream. This made the news for maybe a day. Can you imagine the type of coverage the media would have given if 200,000 people had to be evacuated near a nuclear power plant?
(And yes, I know the people who oppose nuclear power usually will say they don't like coal and natural gas either, but we are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time. One of these three ways of generating electricity has much less health consequences than the other.)
It's a little dishonest to state a casualty rate when the spent, toxic fuel going to be deadly for a few hundred thousand years yet. That problem is so very far from solved, and it's a massive problem.
It's also dishonest to claim (Without any qualifications) that spent nuclear fuel will be deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.
Which isotopes? Deadly in what amounts? How many people do you expect our spent fuel will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? ~100,000 years?
How many people do you expect coal pollution/AGW will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? How many people will hydro dam disasters kill over the next ~100 years? Because that's the alternative we're looking at.
Whilst we do know for sure that solar and wind have an accident rate per install. This is going to kill more people than spent nuclear fuel, which of course does not seem to matter. Turns out installing large pieces of glass high up on buildings is not the safest occupation on the planet.
If you calculate out the total amount of victims for this, it turns out that even if we melt down a nuclear plant in every capital on the planet, solar will still kill more people than nuclear would under those circumstances.
So the reasoning here eludes me: perhaps it's that people don't understand nuclear so it must be bad ? It's how we got to Trump ...
TLDR: public opinion takes an idea. It declares it a bad idea. Comes up with much worse ideas for it's given criteria and enforces conformance to those ideas. Solar and wind both kill more people than nuclear, short term and long term.
Solar and wind have a rate of zero nuclear accidents per install, and as that seems to be the only kind of accident you or anyone else counts towards nuclear power's total they're clearly better than nuclear in that regard.
Are you seriously suggesting that a Chernobyl in every capital on earth would still leave nuclear safer than solar? It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.
> It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.
There were only around 50 deaths directly related to that disaster. Certainly more people died (or will yet die) later due to exposure, but these are only estimates; on one end you may find estimates of "many tens of thousands" (e.g. 200 000 - by Greenpeace, of course), on the other end you may find estimates of around 4000 by WHO.
Even from those 50, a number died due to the physical effects of walking into vapor that was several thousand degrees. Yes, they would likely have died of radiation exposure, but they survived nowhere near long enough for that to occur. It is a VERY bad idea to spray water on something that is being fed with tens of megawatts of power. This is what happens, of course, when the government orders workers into a reactor they know nothing about. Of course those were also nuclear related deaths, but ... At Chernobyl at least the radiation death toll can realistically be claimed to be nonzero, but people dying from a direct consequence of the disaster, and actually dying from radiation exposure is low double digits. People affected by it, and having worse health as a result of it MAY be in the thousands. However, after decades of tracking, it will probably rather be in the hundreds.
The Fukushima disaster killed people, including 2 people who were outside of the walls getting a smoke when the wave hit and died from "sustained blood loss" (apparently they got lifted up, smashed, and there was no way to get help, given that there were thousands such cases along the entire coastline). More people died from food delivery problems following the disaster in Fukushima than are ever going to experience symptoms due to the radiation ...
For nuclear everything, everything, everything is counted. Uranium mining truck crashes into a car leaving the factory (before ever even seeing the mine) ? Nuclear accident.
The rate of solar accidents, on the other hand is the opposite. The thousands of dead resulting from the labour conditions in Chinese solar panel production factories ? Obviously nothing to do with solar ... The thousands who have died from pollution caused by solar panel production ? (solar power may be clean, producing solar panels is VERY dirty). Nothing to do with solar. And so on.
Furthermore, people don't understand that decommissioning coal reactors is also time consuming and dangerous. Here in Toronto, the Richard L. Hearn Generating Station was decommissioned in 1983 and remains quite radioactive, despite not even burning coal in its later years. There is a 24 hour guard presence.
Is there dispute over the long term toxicity of nuclear waste? It's not hard to find numerous toxic, long lived isotopes. The world has no shortage of waste and the volumes are growing, not shrinking.
Im not a proponent of coal, and at the scales my part of the world needs, hydro fills most the need. Yeah, it needs maintaining but that's unlikely to be more costly than nuclear.
No, but there is a dispute over how dangerous it is - or more specifically, how many people it's likely to kill.
We're close to capacity for the world's utilization of hydro. It can only grow ~20% in the next 30 years - which would let it... Take ~10% of coal's contribution to power generation.
Hydro power is generally cheaper then coal. If we could use more of it, we would be.
The original poster was talking about the possibility of human error (particularly the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station) so it was not "a little dishonest" to focus on the deaths from power sources that one could attribute to human error.
>...when the spent, toxic fuel going to be deadly for a few hundred thousand years yet.
Right now waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste.
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
(Funding for the integral fast reactor was killed by Bill Clinton, but there is no reason that the US or some other country couldn't fund this or any of the other 4th gen designs.)
>...That problem is so very far from solved, and it's a massive problem.
Right now nuclear waste is a very manageable problem and relatively soon the waste could be used to produce electricity if we so desire. Considering that no one of the general public has been killed from nuclear waste (and tens of thousands die each year from burning coal) why would someone consider nuclear waste a "massive problem"?
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.
The practical barrier to reprocessing and burning spent fuel isn't technical or political: it's economic. Fresh Uranium is just too cheap for reprocessed waste to compete.
>...The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.
Yes a breeder reactor was one of the first electricity-generating nuclear power plants, but that doesn't mean we need to rush. We have enough storage capacity for decades before we need to worry about the level of high level waste.
>...Fresh Uranium is just too cheap for reprocessed waste to compete.
At the present time. Even if plans like getting uranium have sea water work out, we might start burning high level at some point just to deal with the high level waste if we run out of room. It makes a lot more sense to burn waste for electricity than to spend millions to bury it in the ground for millennia.
> Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.
Soon is relative. Nuclear power has only existed for just over 70 years. These things take time, and progress is intensely stagnated because of the fear and regulation involved.
It's totally solved from a technical standpoint. Dig a hole half a mile deep in bedrock in a tectonically stable area, and whatever you put in that hole is safe forever. But that's kinda expensive, so we keep burying it in people's backyards and then going "gosh, this is hard!" when it bites us in the ass.
There's a fourth dimension to it - remembering why the hole needs to be guarded for 10000 years. And if you imagine trying to have a conversation with a human from 10000 years ago, you'll realize how non-trivial that is - no language, culture or knowledge capture system would survive for this long intact. There is a fascinating body of research about how to solve this problem (with no definite answer). E.g. see https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t...
> There's a fourth dimension to it - remembering why the hole needs to be guarded for 10000 years.
I can imagine some sort of post-apocalyptic copper age religion where the religious brotherhood exist to guard the 'cursed caves', without understanding why. But everyone knows that people who enter the caves either die at the hands of the strangely deformed beasts who live there, or of a mysterious sickness sometime afterwards.
Yeah, I probably played too much D&D as a child :)
The argument that we need to do something about this waste beyond the timeframe of our civilisation is mind boggling to me. This is the only risk we seem to take this seriously - in no other arena can I recall people arguing about what something will look like in 10,000 years. What about war between America and China? >1% chance, massive potential for death and destruction. Who cares if some poor person digs into an old nuclear waste dump in 500 years compared to that?
We can leave this problem to the future. If they have regressed so far that they can't detect nuclear then they have bigger problems than radiation poisoning.
Threats to energy security are so much more of a threat than potentially maybe not being able to figure out how to reprocess spent fuel until it isn't a health hazard.
This stupidly assumes that the people that dig the hole won't be able to communicate with generations after it.
The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet so the only reason this would be a problem is if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
> won't be able to communicate with generations after it.
Oh, they will be. But there must be specific structure to communicate this information, otherwise it is assumed "common knowledge" and nobody talks about it until suddenly everybody realizes nobody really knows anything about it because all people that knew it assumed it's obvious and nobody thought to talk about it explicitly and now they're all dead.
> The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet
Now. Will it be in 10K years? Who knows. Try to read works about 15th century life and see how much of that was obvious back then is obvious now.
> if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
The cultures that exist now won't probably exist in 10K years. Could we pass knowledge through if we took consistent effort - maybe. But the whole point is how to make sure it's a consistent effort over 10K years.
One can at least hope that humanity's level of technology does not regress. So then there is at least the fact that the radioactivity can be detected even after the signs have long gone.
Possibly, though not guaranteed - we have radioactivity detectors, but not many people carry them with them and use them on everything around. We'd still need to somehow communicate that this place needs detecting - and if people there would not be using nuclear energy for some reason, they might not even think about needing to check that place for radioactivity, at least not until there is some serious trouble.
The hole is already dug. Instead of going in the hole, the waste is sitting in collecting ponds or concrete casks very, very close (100 yards) from major waterways.
if we could use nuclear power exclusive to fix carbon, I think it would be worth it. I think a lot of people would say that this is worth it, and this inequality is in favor of nuclear power over the safest possible coal power.
> And yes, I know the people who oppose nuclear power usually will say they don't like coal and natural gas either, but we are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time
So what does that tell you about the motivations of much of the movement that opposes nuclear and fossil fuels? They're not motivated by continued human flourishing, that's for sure.
This. So much this. People don't know what the hell they're talking about when it comes to nuclear power, but it doesn't stop them from talking about it as if they were experts.
Every technology is subject to human error and inherently dangerous. In fact we have many technologies that are way more dangerous to humans than nuclear - cars, chemical plants, pharmaceuticals, etc. There is no rational reason to single out nuclear technologies as being in need of unachievable absolute perfection when we are fine (not ideal, but also not so bad that it's not worth it) with many dangerous ones the way they are. I think it has more to do with irrational fears than rational risk assessments.
Statistically there are far more large-scale hydroelectric projects in the US that will kill thousands of people if they fail if those facilities are not properly maintained. A dam failure is unavoidable without lots of pre-planning, and even then, as recent events have shown, you can anticipate a problem and still not be able to deal with it.
Nuclear plants can, in a worst case scanario, be given the SCRAM treatment to shut them down hard. If that procedure is successful then the reactor is off.
The worst case is probably like Chernobyl but involving multiple reactors. The probability of that is pretty low not only because Chernobyl served as a wake-up call, but because what happened at Chernobyl was an unfortunate chain of events that focused on only one reactor.
So in the worst case secnario you have a disaster which creates a new national park-sized area you can't live in. Compared with coal plants which used to render large portions of the continent unlivable for the hottest, haziest, smoggiest days in the summer, that's an acceptable risk.
> Nuclear plants can, in a worst case scanario, be given the SCRAM treatment to shut them down hard. If that procedure is successful then the reactor is off.
It isn't as simple as that, with a lot of reactors. The ones at Fukushima were SCRAMmed. A running nuclear reactor will build up a collection of fission products that have various half-lives that can cause problems. In Fukushima's case, these fission products continued to decay and produced lots of heat (about 6.5% of the heat produced during normal operation, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...). It was this heat that raised the temperature of the fuel and boiled off the cooling water and caused the disaster.
So basically, with lots of reactors, SCRAMming is not enough - you need to maintain cooling for quite a long time afterwards. It is entirely possible to build reactors where this is not the case.
We all know what happens to turkeys at thanksgiving, but we don't all know what the worst, or even average case is for a nuclear accident, nor how that is affected by the type of nuclear technology. This is an argument taking advantage of people's fear and ignorance.
An appropriate response to the turkey statement along these lines is to ask where the farm is and what people it serves. There are many farms in the world where statistically, Thanksgiving makes no difference to the mortality of the Turkeys.
The point being, historical statistics just don't tell you everything you need to make a decision…you need guarantees that all regimes have outcomes within acceptable parameters.
Accounting for Murphy's law, and that the worst case is always x% below your expectation (even after accounting for Murphy's law).
It's the only viable fix we have currently, and if I were elected god king of a nation I would push initiatives to build not only enough capacity with atomic power to meet demand but excess to keep costs very low.
People are worried about automation, the nation that can cheaply power automated factories and server farms in the future will prosper.
Solar and wind have no catastrophic downside, and storage is a tractable problem. A chronically small, grey-haired workforce that the population depends on both to power their lives and prevent catastrophe makes that workforce too powerful. It becomes a governance problem. I highly recommend The Dictator's Handbook for more insight on this.
Is large scale energy storage any better than just using nuclear energy?
They don't have the "nuclear" tag scaring people away, but modern batteries and capacitors are still very dangerous and have a lot of environmental hazards to go along with them.
Gravity based energy storage is inexpensive to construct and reliable. It is wasteful - but we're capturing an incredibly tiny proportion of the energy available from wind and solar for electricity.
> "Tesla set fire to a Powerpack to test its safety features – the results are impressive"
This is cherrypicking to make a point. The batteries still contain chemicals which are toxic to life and environment. There will come a time when those batteries are "consumed" and the chemicals within them need to be dealt with in some safe manner. As far as I know, there's no battery technology with any side effects.
Tesla's batteries are well designed and engineered. Batteries before them have exploded, caused fires and loss of life and property. As long as the nuclear plant was also well designed I can say
"I set fire to a nuclear plant to test its safety features. The plant shut down automatically – the results are impressive"
Isn't there large economic incentive to recycle large batteries?
I agree many won't be recycled, but until we snag ourselves and asteroid, we have a finite supply of lithium. People will do their best to not lose something worth money.
To be economically viable battery recycling is done in developing countries that don't enforce environmental regulations.
This is specifically talking about lead batteries, but Lithium-Ion is basically the same: http://www.okinternational.org/lead-batteries/Recycling
If you generated all of the energy you used via atomic power at the end of your life the total size of that waste is about the size of a coke can.
1. How much lithium waste will be produced each year by this process? Aren't we talking creating more batteries than we ever have before by several orders of magnitude here? We send most of our ewaste to the third world to be burned currently, this sounds like an ecological disaster.
2. Do you really believe that in 75 years time the United States won't have the ability to safely store or simply hurl 400 million coke cans at the sun? A big project for sure but the reward is virtually unlimited, virtually free energy.
> How much lithium waste will be produced each year by this process?
It doesn't matter. It can all be recycled.
> Do you really believe that in 75 years time the United States won't have the ability to safely store or simply hurl 400 million coke cans at the sun?
I don't believe we're competent enough to manage nuclear waste in any form.
It can be, it isn't happening currently: "As of 2017, the recycling of Li-Ion batteries generally does not extract lithium since the many different types of Li-Ion batteries require a different extraction process.[6] Another reason why it isn't being done is because the extraction of lithium from old batteries is 5x more expensive as mined lithium"
Even so when recycled it still creates toxic waste in large quantities. What shall we do with that?
I'm not sure what the comment about "grey haired workforce" is in regards too, but "storage is a tractable problem" is often said without evidence. I'd need to see a smaller nation decommission all of its base load generators before that claim can be considered valid.
there was talk in this thread about how the engineers that designed the systems in use are the ones servicing them and have been for 20-30 years or so.
Being against nuclear for trivial reasons like these is why we have the alternative: coal plants. Those kill an estimated 300,000 thousand people per year[1].
It's only recently that renewables have become a realistic alternative in some (but not all) cases, but for decades we've had people dropping like flies due to coal, entirely because the public is too science illiterate to understand that nuclear isn't anywhere as big of a deal by comparison.
Thanks. I was trying to find some source of worldwide data. This[1] more reliable source says over 10,000 deaths in the US alone every year. It's not implausible that it's in the low hundreds of thousands annually worldwide.
Pollution from fossil fuels kills relatively quickly. Pollution from nuclear fuels remains dangerous for thousands of years. The deadliness of all forms of power depend strongly on regulations.
The jury is still out on which will kill more in the end. Though so far nuclear is looking really, really good.
> The deadliness of all forms of power depend strongly on regulations.
If this your contention, then you immediately want to stop all coal and oil plants pending regulatory overhaul. Coal plants release 100x more radioactive material than any other source in the world.
And that's not even to mention the operating dangers, from poor work environments to accidents. And that's not even mentioning the environmental disasters. Fossil fuel accidents have routinely devastated entire ecosystems, from Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon.
Nuclear power has the 'airplane safety' problem, people are terrified of air travel despite repeatedly being proven to be the safest form of transportation. The same is true for nuclear power. It is by far and away the safest form of energy generation, with the common myths repeatedly debunked time after time.
If this your contention, then you immediately want to stop all coal and oil plants pending regulatory overhaul.
You have a rather large flaw in your logic.
The statement that you are quoting is directly supported by the data in my link. Fatality rates in the US are generally an order of magnitude lower than in the rest of the world, because of US regulations. This is a statement of fact, and not an argument for any random regulations that you just thought up.
On your statement about radioactivity, coal plants distribute more radioactive material than nuclear, but nuclear produces more nasty waste per gigawatt than coal. So far nuclear has been astoundingly safe, but the eventual damage from nuclear depends on our ability to safely store that waste for longer than human history.
Does nuclear actually produce more nasty waste waste, or does it merely produce more local waste? Coal produces a huge amount of nasty waste, but the disposal problem is "solved" for much of it by just venting it into the atmosphere to go wherever it will.
What really brings it home for me are the warnings to limit seafood consumption for pregnant women, children, and other vulnerable populations due to mercury contamination. About half of that contamination comes from coal power. Coal is so dirty that it has made an entire type of food dangerous to consume!
Do you have magical pixies to transport the nuclear material there that can ensure it won't be stolen in transit? Can you create a secure facility in one of the most hostile climates in the world? If not, that will never work.
(Shrug) We've been hauling not only fissionable materials, but entire working reactors around the oceans for decades with an excellent safety record. So far no one has tried to steal fissionable materials from the US Navy, but I suppose anything is possible in a world going crazier by the day.
The costs of creating and staffing a secure storage facility would not be trivial, but then, nothing else about energy production is.
The main concern with facilities like WIPP isn't so much security against dedicated assaults, but keeping future subliterate humans from stumbling across the material for the next 10,000 years or so. Antarctica solves that problem nicely. No one who isn't equipped to deal with hazardous technology is ever going to visit Antarctica.
The suggestion doesn't seem so obviously ridiculous that it should be dismissed that easily. Bear in mind that the total quantity of material we're talking about is relatively small: a few thousand tons a year, which is far less than the capacity of a single typical container ship.
The economic value of nuclear waste is basically zero, so you only really have to worry about theft for purposes like terrorism. And even if somebody does break into your secure facility, it's hard to imagine an easy way for them to get significant amounts of material out. Seems to me that you wouldn't have to try very hard to make a storage facility more secure than the nuclear plants themselves. Probably the biggest obstacles would be political, not technical.
> ...so you only really have to worry about theft for purposes like terrorism.
That's a pretty big worry. This stuff is super dirty and in the wrong hands could cause a lot of problems. Unlike a pressure cooker bomb which either kills you, maims you, or doesn't do anything to you, a radioactive bomb might kill you anywhere from now to twenty years from now and everyone exposed to it will be left wondering when their number comes up.
The smarter thing is to come up with better ways of reburning the fuel and storing it long-term on-site at the reactor which is already a secure facility. The total amount is small. They don't need tons of space to deal with it. The less you move this stuff around the better.
The risks there are more Fukishima in nature where if they lose power (at a power plant!) then they need some mechanism to circulate water in the cooling tanks to prevent a boil-off.
> a radioactive bomb might kill you anywhere from now to twenty years from now and everyone exposed to it will be left wondering when their number comes up.
I feel obligated to point out that this also applies to things like lead paint, mercury (got any CFL bulbs?), red meat, burnt toast, gasoline vapors, asbestos, new car smell, and sunlight.
Nuclear waste is dangerous, but not outrageously so. It's treated with a deference far beyond what's given to other stuff that kills us regularly.
Yes it is science illiteracy. It's being blind to a much larger diffuse harm in the face of some concentrated but much smaller harm.
It's arguably the most harmful kind of science illiteracy because it has the biggest impact on public policy. Everything from people opposing mandatory seat belt laws, to being overly concerned about e.g. genetically modified food or cell phone tower radiation.
I'm sure you mean well, but really, people who hold exactly the opinion you hold are in the aggregate the reason for literally millions of deaths that didn't need to happen worldwide since WWII.
We had all the data to indicate that burning fossil fuels was causing massive diffuse harm, nuclear was realistically the only alternative in most cases, but people didn't go for it because they were afraid, even though all the science showed that there was little to worry about in comparison to what we were already doing.
Sure someone installed a reactor backwards, but how are minor incidents like these at all relevant compared to literally tens to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year because we keep using the alternative?
I'm from the only remaining US state without a mandatory seat belt law, New Hampshire. As far as I can tell, we pair off equally with our neighbor to the west, Vermont, in road fatalities[1]. The two states are very similar in geography and population distribution, neither having much in the way of public transportation or large cities.
Regardless of the law, people are wearing seat belts at roughly the same rates. This is to say, at least in my corner of the world--seat belts save lives, but seat belt laws don't. People oppose these laws on philosophical grounds; the role of the state, acceptable levels of police discretion, etc.. Policy is messy, but at minimum must accommodate the values of those it represents.
In the meantime, in real world nuclear decommissioning currently increases the dependence on fossil fuels, and so every nuclear plant decommissioned in practice has a significant cost in lost lives from fossil fuels.
E.g. Germany's rush towards decommissioning after Fukushima has had a massively detrimental effect in Europe for this reason.
The death toll as a direct result of fearmongering against nuclear is by this point likely to be far larger than the total death toll of all nuclear incidents. If we hadn't had nuclear in first place, the cost in lives lost to other forms of plants would have been far greater than that again.
Yeah, it's a crazy decision resulting from "green groups'" radiophobia after Fukushima.
The government official estimated cost of shutting down all German nuclear plants is 55 billion Euros over the next decade. Although the (frankly more credible) 'unofficial' estimate puts the cost at 250 billion euros over the next decade.
Not to mention the fact it's resulted in their co2 emissions increasing in both 2015 and 2016 (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-greenhou...). This also means increased deaths from air pollution. The German environment ministry now predicts they will probably not make their 2020 co2 reductions targets.
So other than the enormous cost, increased co2 emissions, and needless human deaths, good policy.
EDIT: And as for the whole "let's just replace everything with wind and solar", I'm not sure people fully appreciate what will be involved. In Germany's case, on a monthly basis, their wind plants manage an average capacity factor of ~20% (std. dev. 7.65 percentage points) and their solar plants manage an average capacity factor of ~10% (std. dev. of 6.41 percentage points). They have had months where solar only managed a measly 2% cap factor and wind 11%.
So let's say demand is 1TW/hr per month. This means they need to build about 11 times that in nameplate solar capacity, or around 5-6 times that in nameplate wind. So you also need to build 11/6 times the transmission infrastructure. And even then you will still have random blackouts due to the high variance in generation, so you also have to spend a bunch of money on grid-level storage.
> E.g. Germany's rush towards decommissioning after Fukushima has had a massively detrimental effect in Europe for this reason.
This says that German emissions from electricity generation were down, but that was offset by heating increases from a cold winter and emissions from increased good transportation:
1) you can not look at Germany in isolation. You need to take into account the import/export market. Decommissioning nuclear plants at a faster schedule substantially altered that, which affected other countries dependency on fossil fuels.
2) Germany is to their credit aggressively trying to get rid of its fossil fuel dependency, but the decommissioning of nuclear meant they needed to offset a significant shortfall. To the extent that hole was plugged by new clean energy capacity, that meant delaying decommissioning of far more lethal coal plants.
Until fossil fuels is at 0, decommissioning nuclear is bad policy.
Statistical innumeracy is what causes the exaggerated categorical fear of nuclear's risks vs the empirical and very present risks posed by fossil fuels. You don't get to just "be against" fossil fuels; you have to propose a credible alternative. Wind and solar are just now starting to become credible, and aren't even all the way there yet. If we had had a less hysterical nuclear policy 40 years ago we would not be in as bad shape now as we are. AND we would also not be stuck with 1960s reactor designs.
Moving away from fossil is very hard. Essentially we have two power sources available to us - Sun and nuclear. We are not very good at capturing sun energy directly, and doing it on massive scale requires both huge investment and global size actions that would have very serious consequences on global scale - from trivial cases like dams changing the terrains to more subtle like massive wind/solar installs changing wind/reflection/heat patterns and thus influencing the climate. I don't think we have any good data on how that would work on the scales needed to replace fossil fuels. With fossil fuels we essentially are using solar energy accumulated for millions of years. Very long term there's an obvious problem there, but on shorter term if we want to make do with only solar energy that is incoming right now, we need to become drastically more efficient in capturing it, and I don't think current technologies are there yet, and that we know how to deal with it on scales required to cover all present energy needs.
You should read up on Browns Ferry Nuclear in Alabama. BFN has three reactors but one was taken out of service for decades because an engineer was checking for leaks on a hose using a flame and set the insulation on fire.
Also they had a fin on one of the turbines of another reactor break off and it the reactor wall in the mid-2000s.
Wind, solar, dams and wave. They may not replace coal and other fossil fuels today but we can substitute a lot of our energy needs with a concerted effort into those renewables.
Hydro is also terrible for river ecology. Egypt gained a multi-billion dollar fertiliser industry (that didn't exist before) after they added dams to the Nile.
Dams hold back silt and sediment essential to farm land and despite everything you learned about fish ladders and salmon, they don't really work as well as the power companies say.
That is brilliantly put and I'm totally using it next time I have the energy conversation, and if it works as well as I suspect then just about every time after that too!
In a situation where something that severe (and malicious) is found, what would even be the short-term response? Are the management of the plant completely replaced?
Well, falsification of certificates seems to be quite common by nuclear subcontractors, and depending of the number of alternative shops able to do (kind of) the same thing (minus or plus correct quality...) those who falsify stuff might get away with a mere slap on the wrist and safety authorities telling them that it is bad, don't do it again.
I'm saying it catastrophically destroys my trust in the industry.
You're saying that you trust an industry that...
> In 2008, the San Onofre plant received multiple citations over issues such as failed emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsified fire safety data. In its annual review of 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified improvements but noted that in the area of human performance, "corrective actions to date have not resulted in sustained and measurable improvement”.
There's a history of human error and negligence within the industry. That history of errors and negligence is why I am against nuclear power.
Another view is that this demonstrates that the plants are engineered to be safe enough that despite these types of mistakes, incompetence and fraud, nuclear costs far fewer lives than the alternatives.
That argument sounds precipitously close to the reasoning that led to the Challenger disaster: "Even though this isn't supposed to happen, we've seen it before and it was fine" leading to a slow eroding of safety margins over time until at some point the shit hits the fan.
Except the NRC doesn't have a tolerance for erosion of safety, at all. Look at history, if anything they've gotten more strict over time. Once identified, there is strict procedure about rectifying it.
The problem with nuclear is that it is so heavily regulated that every little mistake that would fly under the radar in any other industry is instead explicitly called out, cited, and a resolution demanded. Which gives great visibility. But then some people misleadingly characterize it as "more unsafe" simply because its more visible, when really the alternative (followed by coal, natural gas, solar, wind, hydro) is to not call problems out at all in the name of "deregulation" which is an absolutely more dangerous way to go about things.
We've seen what happens even when plants are mismanaged to the point of failure, and the total death toll has still been a tiny fraction of what coal causes every year.
I'm more worried about the coal plants that are still spewing ash and uranium into the atmosphere and killing people by the tens or hundreds of thousands every year.
That itself is not a strong argument against nuclear power - because the exact same thing happens in every industry. If you look around carefully - at your workplace, at the shop you buy your food in, at the construction workers building that block nearby - you'll find staggering amount of fraud and incompetence almost everywhere. It actually makes one wonder how our increasingly complex world still somewhat works.
So keeping in mind that incompetence and fraud are commonplace and not something industry-specific, you have to consider what the numbers tell you about the safety of each option, and those numbers turn out to favour nuclear energy. Keep in mind that those statistics implicitly take into account all that incompetence and fraud you're worried about.
Do you install your own brake pads on your car? This goes for a lot of parts on the car you may drive. Yes, it's just your passengers and the possible victims of an accident, but there are a lot of things that can go wrong on your car. Is your trust in the auto-repair industry similarly 'catastrophically destroyed'?
The last time I did that was in 1978 on a Rabbit - with no experience whatever. It was a piece of cake and they worked fine. I did the timing belt, too.
I sure as heck wouldn't try it on my 1999 Golf. I can't even change the headlight bulb.
It's not that hard, just a little awkward because you can't really see how it screws in while you're doing it because the light assembly is sealed except for the bulb hole.
There's a history of human error and negligence within the industry. That history of errors and negligence is why I am against (nuclear, coal, gas, wind, solar, tidal, hydro) power.
In case it wasn't clear, my point is that this history of errors and negligence is present in literally every industry. Literally all of them.
That was proven to be "fake news". Essentially someone talked to a source (Michael McKenna) that hadn't even talked to Perry after his name was floated. Later interviews with McKenna even had him saying that he was misquoted.
The DoE does lots of work in Texas, and as former governor Perry had experience in working with them on managing the US's nuclear weapons stockpile. Part of his campaign platform in 2011 was to split the National Nuclear Security Administration out of the DoE and give it to the DoD.
In his statement accepting the nomination, he specifically called out the role of the DoE in safeguarding the US nuclear arsenal.
Otherwise don't let me stop the "hurr Durr stupid Republicans" circle jerk.
"Oh. So you designed it so that it could go in backward, and that would cause it to malfunction? Must be embarrassing for you to come out and fix that now."
> He died of cancer as they didnt quite yet know that radiation was a problem for human health when they started out...
That's putting it a bit strong, after all Marie Curie died of "aplastic anemia brought on by exposure to radiation" in 1934. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie
And "actress Midori Naka, present during the bombing, was studied extensively for radiation poisoning. Her death in 1945 was the first to be officially documented as having been caused by radiation poisoning" http://www.news-medical.net/health/Radiation-Poisoning-Histo...
So they might not have had good statistics but they certainly had reason to be cautious.
Of course radiation is also used to treat cancer, there is a good side to many things.
And before that, women were poisoned with radium, which was used to mark watch dials with luminous paint. What's remarkable was that executives and scientists were aware of the toxic nature of the radioactive paint, yet the women were instructed to use their lips to form points on their brushes to make the painting more precise. Lawsuits happened in the 1930's.
well, yes - but maybe it was an issue of disclosure... my grandmother won a part of a class action lawsuit after my grandfather died where former GE nukes' families sued GE for wrongful death to to radiation....
They are all passed - so I dont have the details, I just recall having some minor conversations with my grandma about this.
That generation was fiercely quiet and corporate loyal...
Thats just a challenge to a construction worker. "Stupid pointy headed geeks got it backwards again dale! Help me get er in there right." Meaning only to keep the project rolling. This is why choice of crew, not just management, is critical in building.
Boeing is well aware of the problem with workers forcing things to fit the wrong way anyway, and take that into consideration, making it as hard as practical to do so.
For example, if the hydraulics are hooked up backwards, the controls are reversed, which is a disaster. So the design:
1. uses different port sizes for the input and output
2. one port uses left hand threads, the other right hand
3. the lines are physically not long enough to reach the wrong port
4. very clear labeling
5. inspections and signoffs
for westinghouse to file bankruptcy less than 90 days into a new republican administration with a focus on defense, nationalism, and domestic business is a pretty obvious move to get either a bailout or absorbed into DoD or DoE.
and i'm pretty sure the secretary of defense "understands" the people who run his entire nuclear fleet are sort of important, the question is, does rick perry? magic 8 ball says: reply hazy.
> This, also, by the way, is a great illustration of Elon Musk's contention that these technologies don't just keep working. Brilliant, competent engineers and scientists have to invest themselves in making them work.
Is this expressed in a paper, or conference that I can watch a video of?
Probably, but it's also intuitively obvious to anyone who's owned a car, or a house, or otherwise been responsible for the function of any reasonably complex machine. Things wear out. Things break. They have to be repaired or replaced if the process of which they're a part is to continue.
Knowledge is a crucial part of that, too. The Saturn rocket program is a great example - if we decided to go back to the moon tomorrow, we'd be a decade or more in the doing of it, because all the people who knew how to build those rockets, and the tools to build those rockets, and the tools to build those tools, and so on - are by now retired or deceased. We'd have to figure all that stuff out all over again, as nearly from scratch as makes no odds. There's no reason to imagine any other similarly complex technology would be different.
This is a great point, but I'm very pessimistic about existing infrastructure getting any attention from the administration. If we're unable to upgrade and secure our nukes (!), I don't see how this would be a priority for anyone. Until that is something goes bad...
I find the headline weird, "a blow to nuclear power". I feel like nuclear power is possibly the most attacked form of energy that exists, and that includes coal and petroleum, both of which are still heavily used despite any public outcry. Westinghouse has made some bad deals, sure, but the real "blow to nuclear power" has been the massive refusal by both citizens and governments to build new plants, and the few notable failures by plant operators to maintain safe operation.
Of course the company that builds nuclear plants can't succeed if new plants aren't being built. Westinghouse going under isn't going to destroy nuclear power, nuclear power was already dead.
I don't know if you have been following this saga over the past few years, but the reason that they're going bankrupt is they got several orders for new AP1000 reactors, but couldn't deliver on their planned budgets and schedules. (4 reactors under construction in China, 4 under construction in the United States, zero of them on schedule.)
Was it a court injunction that put the Vogtle project behind schedule? Local citizen protests? "Direct action" work disruption from Greenpeace hardliners? Nope! The locals are mostly looking forward to the tax revenue and employment boost from the new reactors. The project has had no legal interruptions nor on-site activist-disruptors. Whatever has gone wrong with these new reactor projects originates inside the nuclear industry itself.
(I was happy about the new AP1000 builds until they blew their budgets and schedules. Same with the disastrous EPR projects. I still believe that nuclear power is safe enough, certainly safer than continuing to burn fossils for electricity. But at this point I'll only believe the industry's next "this project will be faster and cheaper to build, I swear" promise five years after the project has met all objectives and demonstrated smooth commercial operation.)
I can't tell if your first sentence is implying that you did follow this saga over the past few years, but if so it's very strange that someone who professes to be intimate with the details here would leave out that the reason they couldn't deliver on planned budgets and schedules was massive accounting fraud, not a failure in their engineering or product management.
Yes, I have been following the progress of AP1000 reactor projects for years. The Toshiba accounting scandal surely doesn't help but I don't believe it is the proximate cause for Westinghouse's bankruptcy. Toshiba's accounting irregularities aren't even mentioned in the bankruptcy declaration.
From the bankruptcy declaration:
As described in more detail below, the Debtors’ need to avail themselves of the protections of the Bankruptcy Code arises primarily from a series of unforeseen challenges that significantly delayed and increased the cost of construction of the nuclear plants in Georgia and South Carolina (referred to as Vogtle and VC Summer, respectively). These challenges potentially expose the Debtors to billions of dollars either in (i) cost overruns to complete the projects or (ii) penalties and liabilities if they abandon the projects. The Debtors cannot afford either option. Notwithstanding that the Debtors’ other businesses are profitable and world-class, the Construction Business cost increases have led to a liquidity crisis that the Debtors can only solve in chapter 11.
...
The Construction Business division delivers both new-plant projects and major projects for new and already operating nuclear power plants globally. It consists of two business segments: (1) engineering, procurement, and construction (“EPC”) services for customers around the globe, primarily offering the AP1000 technology; and (2) engineering and procurement (“E&P”) services, such as design, equipment, and site installation and startup support, to both AP1000 and non AP1000 projects. While some portions of the Construction Business are profitable, the main portion of the EPC business, which constructs the Vogtle and VC Summer projects, has damaged the profitability of the entire Construction Business. As a result, the Construction Business generated EBITDA from FY2013 to FY2015 of negative $343 million. As described in detail below, these losses have accelerated in the past 15 months following the Company’s purchase of CB&I Stone & Webster, Inc. (“S&W”).
(Thanks to mikikian for linking this declaration elsewhere in the discussion. All of Part III, "Events Leading to Chapter 11", is worth reading.)
EDIT: if you're talking about the valuation dispute around the Chicago Bridge & Iron acquisition, pg 22, that is presented as a $2 billion problem. The construction projects have another $6 billion worth of expenses now estimated necessary to complete before 2020 (pg 23-24). It's not clear that Westinghouse could dig itself out of this hole even if the money pit was only $6 billion deep instead of $8 billion.
I don't know the specifics, but a big reason nuclear is more expensive is regulations. There are so many regulations it's safer per megawatt than even wind or solar.
Thus your argument does not support your conclusion, since regulations come from outside the industry.
"There are so many regulations it's safer per megawatt than even wind or solar."
This surprised me! So I Googled it. Is this your source? It is Wikipedia's source. Who are the 440 people dying per trillion kWh of rooftop solar? (note: this is rooftop solar; utility solar statistics aren't included in the below source)
There wasn't even a single tkWh of power produced by rooftop solar in 2012. The total solar (rooftop, commercial, and thermal) energy produced in the US in 2012 was 4,327 million kWh... or half a percent of 1 tkWh... making me think that the 'deathprint' of 440 deaths per tkWh for rooftop solar in 2012 was extrapolated by taking the number of people who slipped and fell off a roof and multiplying it by 200. My guess, based on the expression "Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)", and the fact that less than 4.3 billion kWh of solar energy was produced in 2012 by rooftop solar (Wiki doesn't break out production by method), is that approximately two people have died in the quest for solar energy.
Further - it is too soon to tell what the 'deathprint' for any given kWh of nuclear energy is. The method of production could kill someone for some time after the kWh is consumed.
More than 90% of world PV module production is based on refined crystalline silicon, and the United States is a top producer of refined silicon. (Silicon "ore", silica rich rock, is hyperabundant; refining rather than mining is the bottleneck.)
The highest quality silica crystals actually come from the US. They can be several meters across.
When you pick a rock off the ground there's about an 80-90% chance it's very good quality silicon carbonates. Silicon metal can even be made from sand, dredged from underwater or excavated from topsoil. Sand is a readily available resource.
Silicon mining is the greenest mining process we have, and on a mass basis is better than the metal required for nuclear plants and fuel. Silicon refining involves some nasty chemicals (one gas in particular turns into solid sand once it hits the water on the inside of your lungs), but they are located in very good, very expensive, very safe equipment. They get regenerated so no chemicals escape the machinery (99.9999% retention).
In the 1980s and later parts of the 1970s, nuclear projects in the US did face the impossible challenge of regulations that shifted as projects were underway. But that doesn't apply here, AFAICT. The American AP1000 projects began work on their nuclear sections, starting with basemat concrete, in March 2013.
The regulations haven't changed since the new American units began construction. Regulations were supposed to be factored in to the cost/schedule estimates. Yet the original cost/schedule estimates turned out to be badly mistaken. Being in a highly regulated industry (like making nuclear reactors, airliners, or pharmaceuticals) does increase costs over lightly regulated sectors. But it isn't an excuse for mis-estimating costs and schedules that were supposed to be developed considering those factors. Boeing would be in crisis too if every unit of its latest airliner were double-digit-percentages over budget and over allotted assembly time.
I've been following the American AP1000 projects for years. The contractors blame the sub-contractors. The new sub-contractors are behind schedule just like the old sub-contractors. Nobody actually involved with these projects, AFAICT, is blaming the cost/schedule problems on regulators. Pro-nuclear bloggers have still tried shifting the blame away from the industry and back to environmentalists/regulators/the public at large.
EDIT: here's what Georgia Power and Westinghouse alike believed about the new AP1000 design:
Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4 will be the first in the industry to use the Westinghouse AP1000 advanced pressurized water reactor technology. This advanced technology allows nuclear cores to be cooled even in the absence of operator interventions or mechanical assistance. The AP1000 is the safest and most economical nuclear power plant available in the worldwide commercial marketplace, and is the only Generation III+ reactor to receive Design Certification from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
The AP1000's simplified plant design results in a plant that is easier and less expensive to to build, operate and maintain. The plant's design has:
+ 50 percent fewer valves
+ 35 percent fewer pumps
+ 80 percent less piping
+ 45 percent less building volume
+ 70 percent less cable
than earlier-generation nuclear plants. The modular design also allows for faster construction.
The builder and the buyer both believed that these reactors would be faster and cheaper to build than past designs, before they actually tried to build them.
I don't think I've ever seen the prediction of such sentences bear out as planned. The word "modular" seems to have a way of taking big bites out a project's end performance and destroying budgets.
The regulations haven't changed since the new American units began construction. Regulations were supposed to be factored in to the cost/schedule estimates. Yet the original cost/schedule estimates turned out to be badly mistaken.
Maybe you weren't following closely enough...
John Ma, a senior structural engineer at the NRC was quoted on his stance about the AP1000 nuclear reactor:
"In 2009, the NRC made a safety change related to the events of September 11, ruling that all plants be designed to withstand the direct hit from a plane. To meet the new requirement, Westinghouse encased the AP1000 buildings concrete walls in steel plates. Last year Ma, a member of the NRC since it was formed in 1974, filed the first "non-concurrence" dissent of his career after the NRC granted the design approval. In it Ma argues that some parts of the steel skin are so brittle that the "impact energy" from a plane strike or storm driven projectile could shatter the wall. A team of engineering experts hired by Westinghouse disagreed..."
In 2010, following Ma's initial concerns, the NRC questioned the durability of the AP1000 reactor's original shield building in the face of severe external events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and airplane collisions. In response to these concerns Westinghouse prepared a modified design... In May 2011, US government regulators found additional problems with the design of the shield building of the new reactors. The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that: computations submitted by Westinghouse about the building's design appeared to be wrong and "had led to more questions."; the company had not used a range of possible temperatures for calculating potential seismic stresses on the shield building in the event of, for example, an earthquake...
In November 2011, Arnold Gundersen published a further report on behalf of the AP1000 Oversight Group, which includes Friends of the Earth and Mothers against Tennessee River Radiation. The report highlighted six areas of major concern and unreviewed safety questions requiring immediate technical review by the NRC...
In 2012, Ellen Vancko, from the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that "the Westinghouse AP1000 has a weaker containment, less redundancy in safety systems, and fewer safety features than current reactors"....
In October 2013, Li Yulun, a former vice-president of China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), raised concerns over the safety standards of the delayed AP1000 third-generation nuclear power plant being built in Sanmen, due to the constantly changing, and consequently untested, design...
So, a bunch of NIMBYs hire a professional witness/fraud like Arnold Gundersen (who stated in Al Jazeera that "Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind") to keep doing what he's been doing for his entire career, while other anti-nuclear groups (I mean, 'league of concerned scienticians') dogpile on. Then the NRC dogpile on too, because the AP1000 might not be able to withstand a plane flying in to it (a standard requirement of any self-respecting electric generation plant), and so Westinghouse redesign the containment structure to mercifully get regulatory approval.
Then one of their major buyers (CNNC) and owners of derivative intellectual property (the CAP1400 reactor) begins to raise concerns about delays and lack of testing due to the constantly changing design. From my point of view, it just looks like Westinghouse couldn't catch a break. In other words, par for the course in the nuclear power generation industry.
These people don't give a damn about the environment, climate change, human lives or rationality. They're far too busy keeping up their image as an 'anti-nuclear friend of the earth', an identity they've spent most of their lives investing in.
Those design changes from 2009-2011 happened before American AP1000 construction began in March 2013. The bankruptcy filing doesn't mention anything about the Chinese projects driving bankruptcy. It's due to problems at the American sites. Those problems occurred after construction began with finalized designs. If the design revisions that finished in 2011 mandated significantly higher complexity, higher costs, or longer schedules, then the cost/schedule estimates should have been updated before March 2013 and communicated to the utilities. Not modified reactively, repeatedly after the fact, as milestones kept getting missed.
All fair points; I basically agree with you. I probably went a little overboard in my reply to your comment. However, I think it would be fair to say that even though two years between re-design and construction commencement sounds like a lot of time, given the size and complexity of the project (and the time required to do a proper redesign and regulatory approval), much of their original planning and scheduling would have been thrown into disarray.
But your point is well taken; the obligation was on Westinghouse to communicate (probably in 2011) that delays were likely and to update their timing and cost estimates. In hindsight, staying quiet and hoping everything would somehow work out probably wasn't the best strategy...
I feel like the only thing you did read was the headline...
Westinghouse is a bit of a special case. There was accounting/financial fraud and they took on stupid fixed contracts that bit them in the ass when safety regulations forced them to spend more on design/construction.
For as maligned as the nuclear industry is, a lot of this was self-inflicted.
The headline doesn't explain my comment of "sure Westinghouse made some bad deals". I completely acknowledge that Westinghouse is a bad company. But nuclear isn't dying just because this company is going under, there are a lot more pressures killing nuclear power.
After reading years and years of discussions like this, it seems like the citizen opposition and (somewhat unfair) demonisation of nuclear power is endlessly repeated as the reason we don't have nukes anymore, despite them being a great source of clean(ish) energy.
However it seems the real reason, as in all things, is economics.
They're just too damn expensive to build and run, and the expected returns on investment take an extremely long time to materialise(20+ years) Noone wants to put up the enormous capital, with the very real risk that they'll never see returns as the alternative energy markets(gas, solar, etc) are evolving and dropping in price so quickly.
I know I'd be pretty hesitant taking a half billion dollar 30 year bet against technology.
At this point it seems like that would just mean nuclear losing to solar instead of natural gas. In both cases it's an extremely large investment and slow return, but solar PV juuuust seems to edge out nuclear. The numbers look like nuclear has a slight advantage, but that's skewed by underestimates of nuclear costs (or estimates that it'll come down in the future), as well as the rapid cost declines in solar power. Solar has a very wide price variation but the newest, cheapest stuff is better than nuclear.
I find myself in conflict with people a lot regarding nuclear online. I used to be one of those LFTR reactor guys but the facts are that nuclear reactors are always some newer, untested design that will require new untested innovations. On the other hand solar has an easily predicted, easily met roadmap to cheap power with existing tech. We know for a fact that solar can power the entire world's needs cheaply for many decades to come, but we are just guessing that the same can be done with nuclear. Why make that bet when we have a sure thing?
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
"According to the American Coal Ash Association's Coal Combustion Product Production & Use Survey Report, nearly 130 million tons of coal ash was generated in 2014."
No, anything that has residual radiation will be entombed in clay/rock/etc. The total amount of material and radiation from this will be trivial compared to coal waste.
"...Nearly every major river in the Southeast has one or more unlined, leaking pits on its banks filled with water and holding coal ash from power plants. Containing millions of tons of toxin-laden waste, these pits are unlined and have leaked arsenic, mercury, thallium, selenium, and other contaminants into the rivers and the underlying groundwater for decades. "
> No, anything that has residual radiation will be entombed in clay/rock/etc
Fine, it'll be an underground mountain :-)
> [...]compared to coal waste[...]Containing millions of tons of toxin-laden waste[...]
Holy shit, I had never even considered ash. It just never crossed my mind somehow. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
It doesn't make me any less opposed to nuclear energy, but you've given me one more reason to be against coal plants (as if there weren't enough already).
I am not an expert but many seem to consider the increased handling risk related to the toxicity and activity of plutonium and other products, especially considering terrorism, and also the risk for weaponizing the enriched plutonium.
I think you will agree there is no reason why we need to throw away 95+% of the fuel that is left in high level nuclear waste and bury it in the ground for thousands of years. There are better options.
>...I am not an expert but many seem to consider the increased handling risk related to the toxicity and activity of plutonium and other products,
I agree that nuclear waste needs to be handled carefully.
>...especially considering terrorism, and also the risk for weaponizing the enriched plutonium.
There is very little terrorism risk from nuclear waste. The weight, size and danger of high level waste means it would be beyond the capability of terrorist group to take advantage of it. Other sources of power have much, much more of a risk from terrorism.
>....also the risk for weaponizing the enriched plutonium.
None of the nuclear states got their start by using nuclear waste from a commercial reactor. This wasn't a coincidence - it is much easier to get nuclear fuel by using a special purpose reactor or enriching uranium.
This cost would be much easier to calculate if every country reprocessed spent nuclear fuel like France does instead of storing it. Reprocessed MOX fuel costs almost ten times as much as enriched uranium, but the left over waste products decay to levels similar to natural uranium in 300 years instead of 10,000. Molten Salt reactors would probably make reprocessing cheaper.
Yeah, Britain did that. The reprocessing plant has turned into another money pit full of leaking pipes and dubious practices, with a multi-billion pound decommissioning budget.
Plus, as you suggest, no-one wants to buy the MOX fuel product because it's more expensive than enriched uranium.
I'm not sure what you mean. We do establish the costs for carbon. In some countries you (or major users) must buy a permit to emit carbon. Some establish the maximum carbon the environment can handle, then auction permits, establishing a market price.
The U.S. effectively estimates zero cost (without looking into the details); that certainly is a bad estimate.
That's not the only cost of fossil fuel power plants. Coal plants kill huge numbers of people. The coal industry pumps huge quantities of uranium dust into the atmosphere alongside fly ash.
The biggest externality of coal in particular is not carbon emissions but the massive health costs and human suffering.
If fossil fuels were subjected to the same safety requirements as nuclear in terms of preventing public health effects, the cost would increase substantially.
> The biggest externality of coal in particular is not carbon emissions but the massive health costs and human suffering
The carbon emissions cause climate change, which causes human suffering at a scale, as I understand it, far beyond that of the pollution you describe (which is also substantial).
While that is true, coal is just one of the sources that play into that, and the point that you yourself made was that it can be offset.
While the dust and radioactivity released by coal plants kills hundreds of thousands of people now, and we can't meaningfully offset it by trading quotas - it's not like having more kids makes up for killing other people.
Well, it gives us cheap electricity, which helps us run our hospitals, for example. Thus helping kids live through the early years (where mortality is more likely).
But as we all know, replacing coal powered plants with safer things (nuclear, solar, wind, tidal) would cost nothing compared to healthcare costs.
This is a strawman - the discussion was not about investing more in alternatives, but about the effect shutting down nuclear has in prolonging the phase-out of coal.
Given that the shutdown of nuclear is extremely expensive, and that decommissioning before the planned lifespan also involves massive payouts to the owners and reduced time to amortise cleanup costs etc., the economics also vastly favour keeping them running.
It also ignores the vast healthcare costs involved in dealing with respiratory illnesses - including for children - as a result of coal. Few people fall over dead with no cost of care for respiratory illnesses.
So if your concern in healthcare spending, that's another reason to at a minimum not shut down nuclear plants until all of the coal plants are gone.
There is absolutely no reason to store anything for 100,000 years. If we were sane and reprocessed our fuel (like France), something like 400-500 years would put us below standard ambient radiation levels. Still a long time, but no we don't need to store anything for 100k years. Remember, almost all the long lived Transuranics are generally usable as further fission fuel. The other Transuranics and fission by products will typically decay rapidly to something stable or barely radioactive within a reasonable timeframe.
3) Nuclear power technology is running on technology half a century old.
This gives you a couple interesting points to consider:
- Once built, you have reliable baseload power for generations.
- Modernized power plants could be safer, more efficient, and smaller by orders of magnitude.
Demonization of nuclear power prevents improvements to nuclear power. The industry is stuck in the 60's. The real shame is that it's the only technology we have that is really future-friendly: Planetary colonization can't rely on wind, nor solar, and certainly not fossil fuels for power. Nuclear will really be the only option for reliable baseload power to extra-terrestrial colonies.
Absolutely, and even the new designs are multiple decades old. (But even those are a huge improvement over what we have from the 60s/70s).
Many of existing plants were at the time they were built considered to be important for national security (read: nuclear arsenal), which is much of why they're using the fuel they use and have the designs they have.
Civilian nuclear never really materialized in it's own right, which is certainly a shame.
A nuclear power plant disaster is pretty much going to bankrupt somebody, no matter who insures it. Even if the insurance is nationally subsidized, something like Fukushima is going to be a crushing burden on the whole country.
Their study looks at different forms of electricity generation from the perspective of 'costs avoided' (e.g. avoided carbon emissions), net cost of generation (e.g. nameplate vs. actual generation), and total system costs (e.g. grid balancing / stabilising costs). On 'costs avoided', their base-case assumption is a $50 per tonne price on co2 emissions.
The study concludes:
"Assuming that reductions in carbon dioxide emissions are valued at $50 per metric ton and the price of natural gas is not much greater than $16 per million Btu, the net benefits of new nuclear, hydro, and natural gas combined cycle plants far outweigh the net benefits of new wind or solar plants. Wind and solar power are very costly from a social perspective because of their very high capacity cost, their very low capacity factors, and their lack of reliability.
For example, adjusting U.S. solar and wind capacity factors to take account of lack of reliability, we estimate that it would take 7.30 MW of solar capacity, costing roughly four times as much per MW to produce the same electrical output with the same degree of reliability as a baseload gas combined cycle plant. It requires an investment of approximately $29 million in utility-scale solar capacity to produce the same output with the same reliability as a $1 million investment in gas combined cycle. Reductions in the price of solar photovoltaic panels have reduced costs for utility-scale solar plants, but photovoltaic panels account for only a fraction of the cost of a solar plant. Thus such price reductions are unlikely to make solar power competitive with other electricity technologies without government subsidies.
Wind plants are far more economical in reducing emissions than solar plants, but much less economical than hydro, nuclear and gas combined cycle plants. Wind plants can operate at a capacity factor of 30 percent or more and cost about twice as much per MW to build as a gas combined cycle plant. Taking account of the lack of wind reliability, it takes an investment of approximately $10 million in wind plants to produce the same amount of electricity with the same reliability as a $1 million investment in gas combined cycle plants."
While I don't disagree with your assessment of carbon-based energy, the same thing (externalising the cost of their downsides) happens with nuclear energy.
So if anything, they're equally terrible in that regard.
> the same thing (externalising the cost of their downsides) happens with nuclear energy. / So if anything, they're equally terrible in that regard.
That isn't true. There are externalities for both, but the externalities for carbon are far greater. The above statement is like saying: No houses are free to buy; therefore all houses are equally costly.
That's rather sweeping, don't you think? If anything, my statement might be an oversimplification. But untrue?
I wouldn't be surprised if they were of a similar order of magnitude. Like houses (Michael Jackson's mansion and similar outliers excluded).
> the externalities for carbon are far greater
Do you have numbers to back that up? (I don't).
But keep in mind that it's not yet clear how expensive it will be to de-construct reactors and store nuclear waste for millenia. Just that it's going to be very, very expensive. And probably footed by the taxpayer.
However it seems the real reason, as in all things, is economics.
Who's going to invest a billion dollars to build a new facility when they know that at any step along the way, some half-wit celebrity can decide that they want to buy property in the area and they don't want to live near a nuclear power plant, start protests and cause the project to be delayed or scrapped.
Continuing to run an old design is a very big part of how we ended up with the current situation with Fukushima.
Some evidence for the interpretation that construction and cost problems are the root is that even France has been having these problems with recent construction projects. France doesn't have the same NIMBY or regulatory problems as the U.S. with nuclear. It's a national priority, and the legal landscape is different, you can't sue to stop projects the way you can in the U.S., because direct authorizing laws are passed by Parliament, vs. it being up to a patchwork of agency decisions (which can be challenged in court), state regulations, etc. And yet their next-gen reactor project in Flamanville is going badly, with huge cost overruns and manufacturing problems, to the point where the contractor (Areva) is seeking some kind of bailout or state buy-out of its nuclear construction business.
This is also somewhat surprising because the previous-gen projects in France are usually seen as an example of a fairly well managed nuclear industry, with construction coming in reasonably close to budgeted cost, and a good safety record.
While your point is important, keep in mind that the value of nuclear safety (like so many other things the market puts a price on) is entirely determined by what people think. If they think the hazards are significant, because they hear alarming rhetoric, because the hazards actually are significant, or for any other reason, the value will reflect what they think. Regulations like the Price-Anderson Act[0] then formalize this value as insurance and construction and operational expenses, essentially defining many of the economics.
I don't disagree, the economic factors however go beyond scale. And I also agree that if we could agree on the 'externality costs' it would fare better in comparison but I have given up trying to have that conversation with people who can't or won't move past the emotional fear.
In many ways this wound on Westinghouse (and nuclear power) is self inflicted. As engineers moved out of senior management and politicians moved in in the late 70's, the company became less about moving technology forward and more about 'getting money for management'. It really lost its way.
I expect that the Chinese nuclear power industry will become nearly all of the civilian reactors by the end of this century.
To be fair, solar and wind are now approaching scale, whereas every nuclear power plant seems to be a bespoke special snowflake. The cost of nuclear would go down if R&D costs could be amortized over dozens or hundreds of reactors.
That was the hope with Westinghouse's AP1000. We shall see if this actually reduces costs. I'm skeptical it will though, as it appears that most of the cost is actually in construction, and not as much in the R&D. If there are specially constructed parts that benefit from producing a dozen at a time rather than one at a time, then perhaps there will be some savings there. At least in the US, large construction projects are expensive, and not getting cheaper. Battery-based storage and renewable energy is getting cheaper. Within 10 years I would expect that
solar/wind with 30-50% of the production stored in batteries will be cheaper than nuclear. It also deploys more quickly, in smaller amounts, and therefore poses less financial risk.
I would love to see a full breakdown of the budget on some nuclear power plants, but I have not yet seen anybody provide evidence that R&D or unnecessary regulations are significant enough of a cost burden that reducing them by a factor of 10 would make nuclear more cost competitive.
I am not a Nuclear Engineer...but here, again it seems like the operating factor is scale. If you were building many nuclear reactors, cost per reactor would perhaps go down. Not to mention: recent advances in technology and automation might help better monitor and operate the reactors, increasing safety and decreasing cost.
All of this is just armchair reasoning though. I have not the faintest idea what the most expensive parts of building a reactor are.
One of the reasons nuclear plants are so expensive to build is "citizen opposition and (somewhat unfair) demonisation of nuclear power". I'm all for making sure people who build and operate plants do so without cutting corners, but the US system makes it too easy to tie up a project for years with lawfare.
The problem isn't that westinghouse made a couple of bad deals. The problem is that westinghouse was completely incapable of finishing the nuclear plants anywhere near their budget or their scheduled time.
The cost overruns were absolutely ghastly and made the plants way too expensive. All the cost was charged to consumers on their electric bills. Nobody in their right mind will order more nuclear plants when they see the expensive disaster that the currently built nuclear plants are.
>The problem isn't that westinghouse made a couple of bad deals. The problem is that westinghouse was completely incapable of finishing the nuclear plants anywhere near their budget or their scheduled time.
There is also no accountability on the part of the customer companies either.
The public service commission pretty much votes to allow ga power to pass the costs to the rate payer.
Georgia Rate payers are already paying for the cost of votgle 3&4 in the form of rate increases when their completion is no where in sight.
If one is curious to see raw corruption on full public display, it's a sure bet to attend a state PSC/PUC meeting. It doesn't matter whether it's telecom or energy or whatever, if they're open for business then they are truly open for business.
> nuclear power is possibly the most attacked form of energy that exists, and that includes coal and petroleum, both of which are still heavily used despite any public outcry
It's interesting that the fossil fuels do far more harm, but nuclear is what everyone fears. (In fairness, nuclear problems do far more harm locally to the plant.)
As for instance half of Sweden still have increased levels of caesium 137 since Chernobyl, and I have just finished a spaghetti bolognese made from a moose from that area, I am not really impressed by average values.
The health effects have been small in Sweden, but it still affects our quality of life, in the sense that we have to be vary of what we eat.
If we keep having an incident every 15-20 years, it will potentially affect large areas, and another incident in Europe might be unfathomably expensive.
IEA says 6.5 million die per year from air pollution. WHO says it's 1 million deaths per year from specifically burning coal pollution. And it's roughly 1000 deaths per year from nuclear.
Air pollution deaths are "normal operation" not catastrophic event. Whereas normal operation deaths for nuclear is essentially 0, where deaths happen as a result of catastrophe. So there is something of a lizard brain mentality going on when it comes to near term risk assessment. I think the rational arguments pretty much are all economic: they're expensive and basically even a highly regulated and subsidized "free market" has said this isn't worth it and we can't make it work.
>Whereas normal operation deaths for nuclear is essentially 0, where deaths happen as a result of catastrophe. So there is something of a lizard brain mentality going on when it comes to near term risk assessment.
Has nothing to do with lizard brain mentalities but a lot with the history/culture in different regions of the world and the false dichotomy of "anti nuclear = pro coal".
The US never had a large scale catastrophic event like Chernobyl happen to it, something that's burned deep into many people of Europe to this day. From one day to another, millions of people had been told they shouldn't eat the "fruits of the land" anymore. When I grew up my family used to regularly gather mushrooms in the woods, that just stopped just like eating any game meat, that had a huge impact which can be felt to this day.
For most US Americans that scenario is only a theoretical one they played trough in pretend during the cold war but for many Europeans Chernobyl made it an way too scary actual reality.
Can't wait for an Elon Musk type investor tackle Thorium based Molten Salt reactors. The public opposition to nuclear needs to be changed with positive counter examples.
Thorium isn't rare. You probably have enough in your lawn to supply your lifetime energy needs. Also, it's a waste product of rare earths mining, and there's a United States stockpile of 3.2 million kg of thorium nitrate that nobody knows what to do with.
It's not dead in China. It's on the decline in Europe and Japan. And it's somewhere in between in the U.S.
What is probably dead is the idea of a highly regulated and subsidized monopoly nuclear industry. Whereas an entirely state own industry is still making a go of it, but we'll see what China does with all their nuclear power plants in 15-30 years.
What about the failure to find a solution for long term storage? 75 years later and we are still at the beginning of this important issue that hundreds of even thousands of future generations will be affected by if it isn't done perfectly.
There was massive financial fraud at Westinghouse. Even though the nuclear industry is in a downturn, the troubles at Westinghouse are self inflicted - Toshiba bought them, but found out almost all of the unit's profits are misreported, leading to them spending money on "nothing" basically. The unit earned no money and was threatening to sink Toshiba the entire keiretsu. This is Toshiba trying to save itself by closing down the tide of red.
The source of the troubles was Westinghouse's purchase of CB&I Stone & Webster, and it spun out of control.
Westinghouse only closed Stone & Webster acquisition in late 2015, so it seems like the fraud started while Stone & Webster was still owned by CB&I.
The whole saga is bizarre because CB&I sued Westinghouse claiming it was paid too little for S&W [1] a few months after the sale was finalized, and then a few months later sued Westinghouse again [2] seeking to wipe out their liabilities in the S&W's businesses.
It's fraud - people refusing to tell or put things down on official financial reports, writing false statements, signing false financial reports, using non GAAP, unusual accounting methods, etc. Also, audits and due diligence didn't uncover the magnitude of the problem. It took a whistleblower to get the story out to upper management.
It was the acquisition of an acquisition, really meta if you ask me. On its own, Toshiba acquiring Westinghouse was fine, but when Westinghouse acquired CB&I, it all went to hell.
I just don't think Japanese companies have a process on dealing with foreign M&As and fraud mitigation. When Hitachi acquired the spanish manufacturing company AnsaldoBreda, there were similar fraud accusations.
I don't know if that's fraud as much as they just aren't using that business right. Sony is weird, having an entertainment division they keep writing off when their only profitable consumer products division is PlayStation.
It may not have been fraud fraud, but they paid $4.8B and wrote off $2.7B of that within five years. Somebody didn't know exactly what he was buying...
As a Nikola Tesla fan, just a honorary mention, Westinghouse corporation is (one of) the (main) reason why we have AC. When nobody believed in Tesla, George did, even after the bullying by the Edison camp, the smear campaigns. I have read that per watt of AC current, Nikola Tesla was supposed to get some $2.3, but Westinghouse told Tesla that he would be bankrupt if Tesla was to be given that Royalty, the legend has it that Telsa tore the contract saying something like this, "You believed in me when the world didn't, I don't want the money", even if he didn't say something fancy during this time, but the act in itself, if it really happened, is touching. I nearly cried when I read it in a book a long long time ago.
It is sad to see that a energy giant is going bankrupt. End of an era for a Tesla fan, the company who believed in Tesla is going bankrupt.
This is terrible news. Nuclear power, while not perfect, is one of the best alternatives we have to carbon-emitting power plants. If there are no companies left to build them, the already impossible task of fighting climate change will get that much harder.
Every time I've look into it seems like this isn't the case. Nuclear plants are simply too expensive, have too many production bottlenecks, and take too long to construct (too name but a few issues). No serious analysis I've seen of how we meet emissions goals has ever placed a big emphasis on nuclear power. Probably one of the biggest parts of meeting the goals will be increased energy efficiency, but a lot of nuclear advocates I've seen seem to be under the mistaken impression that it's all about 100% carbon free electricity generation (something that's not going to happen either way).
I think only having power sources cheaper than carbon will fix it. Which could potentially include sources cheaper because a carbon tax forces carbon prices to include their externalities.
Studies show that efficiency initiatives can reduce emissions[1][2]. It's not going to solve everything, but as I said, it's going to be a major component, as will alternative energy sources like wind and solar (you won't be able to get 100% wind and solar, but you don't have to). Any serious analysis of ways to fight global warming looks at a variety of different actions. They don't pretend that there's a single component ("Have all electricity generation done by [X Type Power Plant]") that solves everything.
This is one of the things I've noticed about a lot of nuclear advocacy. Though there's often appeals to science and reason, the main driver appears to be an emotional one. There's the claim that the real interest is in combating global warming, but many advocates have shown no interest in learning about the best ways to combat global warming. Their interest seems to start and stop with advocacy for their preferred solution, whether or not it's even a good solution to the problem.
Global emissions are up, despite efficiency improvements. The proper level to look at the system is the whole earth. Those reports look at local instances.
Don't get me wrong. I think efficiency is good. I'm just not sure it actually can reduce emissions globally.
The huge risks (both financial type and "boom" type) with building and supporting nuclear reactors seems like pretty solid evidence that they are not "one of the best alternatives".
"best" is relative; what is better, that can scale up sufficiently to meet the world's energy demand?
Perhaps renewables can scale up, but last I heard that wasn't realistic on the time scale humanity needs. Does anyone have good information on that question?
Renewables haven't scaled yet, even if they are making progress.
Nuclear is interesting in that we have around 70-90 thousands years of fuel for the plants, which can only get cheaper/safer over time as the technology gets better. Currently, their capital requirements (they are expensive to build even if they are cheap to fuel) and waste problems make them fairly unviable. Couple that with being even less on demand than coal...
Oh come now. 70,000-90,000 years? If the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.
The article specifically mentions that pretty much every major builder of nuclear plants outside of China are in trouble and/or downsizing/restructuring in big ways.
Nuclear generates a lot more kilowatt-hours per square-foot than renewables, especially in places that aren't very sunny or windy. I am not advocating for a 100% nuclear grid, but I don't see how we can get rid of coal without a decent number of nuclear plants.
It's very relevant, because a) we need to reserve enough area for people to live, and for growing the food we need, and hopefully for a few parks as well, and b) transmission and storage of electricity across long distances is not trivial. It isn't feasible to, for example, cover the entire surface area of Africa with solar panels and use that energy to power the rest of the world.
That entire thinking is flat out wrong - even if we were 100% solar the idea we won't have any land left to live on is insane [1]. Solar will get more efficient and more dense, to what peak we don't know but even at current efficiency we could more than power the world in unused and unlivable land.
> pretty much every major builder of nuclear plants outside of China are in trouble and/or downsizing/restructuring in big ways.
The proximate cause AFAIK is lack of demand, which depends on politics, which depends on public perception of its danger. It doesn't depend on economics, or at least that's not the immediate problem.
It's okay China and France are still doing wepl I think. China especially seems quite bullish on nuclear so I guess there's still hope. Korea, India and Canada are still doing okay too.
France is doing so well that during last November's cold snap they were considering cutting power to industry and rolling power outages for the population because too many of their ancient, brittle nuclear power plants were out of commission and the import capacity from neighbouring countries was at its limit.
(Reuters claims that there wasn't enough spare capacity in Germany; in fact the transfer capacity of ~2 GW was the limiting factor; http://www.iwr.de/news.php?id=32860)
For what it's worth, I think the temperatures improved before the more drastic measures had to be implemented. And of course people are free to argue that taking those French plants down for review was an overreaction by an overly critical nuclear regulation regime.
Seems to me like the problem there stems from the French government skimping on maintenance, rather than their decision to use nuclear plants in the first place.
Built upon the technology of Germany's AVR[1]. We're still cleaning up that mess. "The total AVR decommissioning costs are expected to be in the order of 1.5 – 2.5 billion €, all public funds, ie to exceed its construction costs by far."
Nuclear power has no excuses. The cost of accidents is astronomical and uninsurable. That's not a regulatory cost unless you think a risk of that magnitude should "go naked" in some free-market fantasy of handling uninsurable risks.
It sure would be nice if there was a grid-scale power source that emitted no CO2. But it's not anyone else's fault but the nuclear industry that we don't have such a thing.
I'd much rather deal with fossil fuels than the catastrophic risks uniquely posed by nuclear power generation.
The excuse for incidents like Fukushima are "Well, they made these mistakes...". Personally, I'd rather not risk zero-notice forced evacuations, permanent quarantine zones, and making significant portions of populated land uninhabitable for centuries on some people not making mistakes.
For those who write this off, there are some very tragic photo essays from Pripyat and Fukushima that can make this impact feel very real. Do you want to risk that happening to your area?
That comparison is based on properly functioning nuclear power plants and coal. I daresay when you throw in the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, the balance shifts dramatically in the opposite direction. Also, the radiation from nuclear disasters is highly concentrated, while that from coal is distributed at far lower concentrations.
No, even including Chernobyl (an inherently dangerous design that would have been illegal to build anywhere except the Soviet Union) nuclear has been far, far safer than coal. As mikeash pointed out in another comment, "Put another way: coal kills about as many people each year as nuclear has in its entire history if you include the bombs dropped on Japan."
>...Also, the radiation from nuclear disasters is highly concentrated, while that from coal is distributed at far lower concentrations.
The radiation emissions from a properly working coal plant are high enough that the plant would be shut down if the NRC regulated coal plants. But the real danger from coal plants is the massive amounts of CO2 that they emit which is one of the biggest contributors to climate change that might end up destroying our future. It is pretty obvious which power source is more dangerous.
Although it's oil not coal, the deepwater horizon accident was probably worse than Fukushima from both an environmental standpoint and number of lives lost. The most tragic failure of a power generating facility of all time was probably the Banqiao Dam disaster, not Chernobyl.
Certainly true from a direct-deaths standpoint. There were zero killed by the Fukushima explosions, and zero acute deaths due to the radiation release. (It's a lot harder to settle on long-term chronic radiation sickness effects.) 11 were killed at Deepwater Horizon.
Not sure how you could quantify the respective environmental damage, either financially or ecologically.
But there is another effect to consider: total monetary damage. Deepwater Horizon cost BP $62 billion pre-tax[0]. The total cost of Fukushima including victim compensation is currently estimated at about $180 billion[1], but the estimate has skyrocketed over the past 6 years, so one could suspect further escalation.
>And it isn't like coal is immune from having zero-notice forced evacuation, and making land uninhabitable.
From your link:
>the spill caused a mudflow wave of water and ash that covered 12 homes, pushing one entirely off its foundation, rendering three uninhabitable, and caused some damage to 42 residential properties. [...] Though 22 residences were evacuated, nobody was reported to be injured or in need of hospitalization. [...] [T]he spill [...] covered an area of 300 acres (1.2 km2).
42 homes were damaged, 4 to the point of destruction, and 22 homes were evacuated. There was zero human injury from this incident.
Although Wikipedia tries very hard to make it sound like the spill was massive, if you look at the real area affected, 300 acres is less than half of a single square mile, and that area can be cleaned up (if it hasn't been already). People can walk on the ground affected without having to watch a geiger counter, and no exclusion zone is required.
For reference, Fukushima's exclusion zone is about 12 sq miles and Chernobyl's exclusion zone is 1,000 square miles. (both numbers from the relevant Wikipedia entries)
Are you really trying to compare this minor accident to large-scale international incidents that have made caused the permanent evacuation of entire cities? Humans will not safely be able to live in those areas for decades.
The point is not that industrial accidents never happen or that they're pleasant or inconsequential when they do happen. The point is that the cost associated with nuclear accidents is massively higher, and it's entirely reasonable to find that risk unacceptable v. more controllable risks like greenhouse gas emissions.
Even dam breakage, which is about the next-largest threat profile for industrial disasters, won't create a permanently uninhabitable radius of literally-irradiated land. Maybe the land gets too wrecked to rebuild on? OK, but you're not going to get cancer by going to check it out.
It's silly to pretend like you can't tell the difference. Nuclear may be safe while it works, but the question "What happens when it stops working?" is just as important, if not more.
Fossil fuel emissions and other pollutants build up gradually and can be controlled. You're not going to get kicked out of your home and neighborhood forever because of a malfunction at the coal plant.
And nuclear power generation also emits a very dangerous pollutant: nuclear waste.
I think you have a different definition of the word "emit" than I do.
Nuclear waste is stable, does not migrate when handled properly in containment pools, and can be reprocessed if required. All existing spent nuclear fuel in the united states is stored on-site. It's been that way since the beginning of the industry.
In contrast, particulate and greenhouse gas (including CO2) emissions from coal-fired plants migrate with the wind, often polluting areas far from the plant.
I don't see how you can compare the two.
It's true that spent fuel is very toxic but every single attempt to deal with this issue has been stymied with rampant NIMBYism and non-science based fear mongering.
You can control the operational risks associated with nuclear power. Doing so with fossil fueled plants is not nearly as easy.
That's the crux of the nuclear issue. Everything works great in the theoretical world where everything is handled properly, all factors are properly accounted for, and all tradeoffs were wisely made. That is simply not how the real world works, and Fukushima reminds us of that.
No matter how many failsafes you put in place, they will, at some point or another, be breached. The question is then "What happens when every failsafe fails, and is that risk acceptable compared to the alternatives?"
So long as it's stored in stable geologic formations, or controlled by stable human institutions. Where "stable" is a period of time longer than human history in many cases.
>does not migrate when handled properly in containment pools
Which are dependent on active management and security indefinitely. This is challenging as the service life of the plant where the pool is located and revenue is generated is less than indefinately.
Obviously you haven't looked into the cost of enriching nuclear waste. It is prohibitively high for all but dedicated nation-state actors, who if have the technology to enrich radioactive materials to weapon-grade material aren't going to use nuclear waste.
Worst case for proliferation is being used in a dirty bomb, which just kind of spreads the waste across a limited area. Even then you're looking at alpha-emitting particles that won't cause any radioactive damage unless you ingest it. Take a shower and you'll be fine.
>We've had not one but several nuclear disasters in the past several decades and in each case the sky hasn't come crashing down.
Unless of course you're one of the people who lived in the nuclear exclusion zones created by Chernobyl and Fukushima, in which case, yes, everything you own and possess, very potentially including your long-term health, were destroyed in a matter of hours. Those residents can never go back for more than a quick temporary visit, and they can not take back their belongings because they've been irradiated. They will always be asking themselves if they got enough of a dose of radiation to cause early disease.
Call that localized and controllable all you want, and if you propose building these plants in areas with no nearby inhabitants for many sq miles, maybe it works OK. The current system, where we say "Don't worry, it's all perfectly safe, we double-pinkie-promise that we won't make the mistakes those guys in Ukraine or Japan made, and if you disagree you're an idiot who hates science" is just not going to fly.
This is not general alarmism about being unable to mitigate every risk in life. This is a comparative analysis of the potential risk profiles of fossil fuels and nuclear, and fossil fuels being much better because the cost of a catastrophic non-nuclear failure is much smaller than the cost of a catastrophic nuclear failure.
I would argue that if you compared the risk profiles of fossil fuels vs nuclear power you'd come to the conclusion that nuclear has and continues to have, by a wide margin, the safest profile of ANY energy source except maybe wind and solar. I'm only excluding solar because I don't think we fully understand all of the safety impact of the construction of large windmills all over the windiest parts of the planet nor do we fully understand the impact of solar panel manufacturing.
When you account for the full lifecycle of fossil fuels, from the extraction, refining, transportation, and ultimate consumption and measure that impact in both short-term impact (coal-mining deaths) vs. long-term impact (climate change, pollution, cancer) you'd find that nuclear is the best option.
I'd risk a %0.00001 chance of dying by cancer sooner living next to a nuclear plant vs. a 1.0% chance of dying in a road collision with a fuel tanker or a 0.05% chance of dying sooner with emphysema by living close to a coal-fired plant. (I made those numbers up by the way; but my order of magnitude is spot-on)
As a person who worked in this industry, understands the economics of it, and has compared the costs of coal/wind/gas/nuclear, I can confidently say that nuclear can be safe and affordable as an energy source if we are committed to safe and conscientious use of it.
(BTW, for a month, I slept next to a nuclear reactor that was approximately 500 feet away from my bunk. My total radiation dose for that trip was less than I'd get in the same time hanging out at Grand Central Terminal (a location that would it to be certified as a functioning nuclear reactor would be out of specification as emitting too great a dose of radiation to those who work there)
>if we are committed to safe and conscientious use of it.
Ding ding ding. This is always the caveat tucked away in nuclear discussions. "It will be fine, as long as everything is going fine." Things don't always go fine. When they don't go fine at a coal plant, things are bad, but they are recoverable; they can be cleaned up, and that land can be repurposed, even if its prior purpose is no longer feasible due to structural changes or pollution. There is no permanent, decades-long exclusion zone.
>I'd risk a %0.00001 chance of dying by cancer sooner living next to a nuclear plant vs. a 1.0% chance of dying in a road collision with a fuel tanker or a 0.05% chance of dying sooner with emphysema by living close to a coal-fired plant. (I made those numbers up by the way; but my order of magnitude is spot-on)
Not going to nitpick your made-up numbers, but the difference is that this is a bigger thing "than I want to take this risk". This is taking the risk that the area become a nuclear wasteland (from radiation, not explosion) for the next 100 years, an area that no person can enter without risking their immediate health just by being present. If you get too close to the hotspots without the right gear and monitoring, you will die quickly.
Are other things dirty? Do other things have tradeoffs and downsides? Is there even some risk that nearby property will be damaged or destroyed? Sure. I'm not trying to say that other industrial accidents are no big deal. But nuclear is the only thing that can, almost instantly, take a big chunk of land and permanently and irrevocably irradiate it for 100 years (and, that's just the most severe risk with nuclear power generation; there are others that haven't been discussed).
You can say that greenhouse gasses have the same potential non-local impact, which is fine, but quite the inverse of nuclear power, greenhouse gas emissions take decades to effect this impact and are measurable and controllable. We know it's coming and can do things to stop it.
As far as I know, the most catastrophic failure at a conventional plant would impact local air quality temporarily. The most catastrophic failure at a nuclear plant can impact everything about the surrounding area (for loose values of "surrounding"; Chernobyl created a 1000 sq mile no-go zone) for generations. Those failures can and do happen overnight.
Risk assessment of probability of an incident and impact of an incident.
Chernobyl happened. Fukushima happened. If a similar incident happened at the plant just north of NYC, the evacuation zone would include hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
> You're not going to get kicked out of your home and neighborhood forever because of a malfunction at the coal plant.
Until we get a couple more of degrees globally and we'll see floods in many coastal cities. Not to mention destroying the stability of weather we had for ~12,000 years and allowed farming to thrive.
"Coal plants are the nation’s top source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the primary cause of global warming. In 2011, utility coal plants in the United States emitted a total of 1.7 billion tons of CO21. A typical coal plant generates 3.5 million tons of CO2 per year2."
Ever wonder why you read that you should avoid eating fish because of mercury?
"...Every state in America has issued health
advisories warning people to limit or avoid eating certain species of fish due to toxic mercury contamination, many of which cover every waterbody in the state.
...Coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of mercury contamination in the U.S., responsible for
approximately 50% of human-caused mercury emissions."
These are long terms effects of burning coal - in the short term tens of thousands die each year from the air pollution from coal plants.
The failure of government is that we allow coal and natural gas to be burned when there are alternatives that are much better for the environment and much better for the general health.
In hindsight, yes they should not have built a nuclear power plant in an earthquake-prone area like Japan. But there are plenty of places that are completely safe to build nuclear reactors, and given the alternatives, we should lend the advantages credence. Hopefully the whole debate will be moot when either solar/wind gets to a certain point or we figure out nuclear fusion.
The location of the plant, next to the ocean, placed it in greater danger from the tsunami. Had the plant been located up higher, above the centuries-old tsunami warning stones, then there maybe would have been a different outcome.
My understanding is that the plant was built seaside to make use of the ocean water for cooling. There are definitely alternatives to this, but in the cost analysis, how many other tradeoffs re: the expediency and safety of nuclear technology are we making that are going to prove to have been in the wrong direction? What is the failure cost going to be?
No place is "completely safe" to build a nuclear power plant (or anything else!). If nothing else, no matter where you build it, it is not 100% proof against attack by military action or evildoers.
This narrative holds only so long as one completely disregards the potential extinction-level event that continues at Fukushima. The simple fact of the matter is no technology exists to adequately and safely address the worst-case failure scenarios. We would do better to pump more CO2 into the atmosphere, whilst reversing deforestation during a transition to solar than to build even one more nuclear plant.
The Fukushima incident is very far from potentially extinction level. You provide no numbers just do the usual empty nuke-bashing. Germany does what you described. They are so green they emit more CO2 since they went green. I guess when it will turn out that pumping more CO2 wasn't the best idea it will also be nuclear industry's fault.
>Germany does what you described. They are so green they emit more CO2 since they went green.
In case people are curious about this claim the reason Germany's "renewable energy" releases so much CO2 is because a large portion of their 'renewable energy' is burning wood.
Most tree farms don't let trees grow 100 years either.
>Based on consumption trends in our region, using wood to generate power here or to make fuel pellets for power generation in Europe is projected to produce higher levels of atmospheric carbon(300%) than fossil fuels for 35 to 50 years. After that time, carbon levels will begin to fall as regrowing forests absorb CO2 from previous combustion, but it is likely too late to avoid irreversible effects on the climate system.
Ad hominem much? Try doing your own research rather than casting aspersions. Mutant fish turning up in the Pacific. Japanese fishermen unable to catch fish. Deleting that food source has very strong repercussions for the survival of the human race, let alone a highly radioactive payload that is god knows where and likely in the water table.
There was nothing ad hominem in my previous post, but now here is some: I'm talking about nuclear industry, but it seems you are talking about captain planet or teenage mutant turtles...
Mutations happen regardless of nuclear spills. They are a driving force of evolution.
Now more seriously:
The human race would easily survive without seafish. Maybe in smaller numbers, but for example in the inlands people eat much less seafish, as they don't have seas nearby ;) A century ago not much seafish was available in the inlands, yet the European inland population was comparable in numbers to the current population.
Radioactive materials were in the ground already, and have been solved into water, which people drank, and had comparable life expectency (shorter, but also due to numerous other factors).
Poisoning the wells and ocean is not very good, especially for business, as many people are irrationally afraid of radiation, and even suspicion of possibility of radiation hurts just as much as actual hazardous contamination to the sales of a product. Apart from that it would truly cause large economic problems, as large areas would have to be excluded from agricultural use, yet nothing like extinction would happen. Even after Chernobyl some people are still alive in Eastern Europe. Even animals live mostly happily in the zone...
>The human race would easily survive without seafish. Maybe in smaller numbers, but for example in the inlands people eat much less seafish, as they don't have seas nearby ;)
If you really want to go down that route then the human race can easily survive without clean air, water, ground or any animal life on this planet. Why would we need any of that? We, at least a few of us, could just as well be living in sealed underground bunkers powered by thermal energy while eating mushrooms all day and recycling our pee and sweat. Doesn't that sound like a lovely future? ;)
>A century ago not much seafish was available in the inlands, yet the European inland population was comparable in numbers to the current population.
They didn't need seafish because they did have enough land for agriculture, many other places, especially insular nation states and Asia in general, did not and do not have that luxury. I also doubt that current European inland population numbers are in any way comparable with the population numbers of a century ago, back in 1900 global population didn't even break 2 billion, now we are at over 7 billion.
Some local contaminations (Chernobyl, Fukushima) are not going to contaminate the whole planet, at most few hundred thousand square kilometers each. This is not in any way a desired event, and if nuclear technology would be developed, and not demonized, its probability could be far smaller, as many technologies are already available to avoid such accidents, which have all happened on old power plants.
The German population is about 30% larger than it was 100 years ago. The industrial revolution resulted in a population boom, which has had most if its effect already in Europe by that time, that is why I referred to Europe. On one hand the world wars have resulted in many lost lives, yet the population boom since then happened mostly in the developing world since then.
Now while this is not a desired development in human history, but inlands of continents could support life in large enough numbers to have civilization(s) survive, even if the net number of humans would be smaller than currently.
Please rest assured, we will not be forced to live in bunkers because of Fukushima, and even if another such tragedy would happen, we could mostly keep out lifestyles, until the global warming caused problems would cause much more changes in it.
Many a little makes a mickle, as such those "some local contaminations" can add up very quickly to a very large scale, especially considering how long these contaminations last.
> This is not in any way a desired event, and if nuclear technology would be developed, and not demonized, its probability could be far smaller, as many technologies are already available to avoid such accidents, which have all happened on old power plants.
There are still hundreds of these "old power plants" active, you want to replace them all with the magical new wonder power plants which never fail and are immune to human error? How is that supposed to work, considering the costs for decommissioning and long-term waste storage?
>Please rest assured, we will not be forced to live in bunkers because of Fukushima, and even if another such tragedy would happen, we could mostly keep out lifestyles, until the global warming caused problems would cause much more changes in it.
I never claimed that we'd be all forced to live in bunkers because of Fukushima. I merely took issue with your flippant statement of "humans can survive without seafish" because that's as much of a slippery slope as it can get, thus the "surviving in a bunker just eating mushrooms" example. Humans might be just fine without eating seafish, tho the rest of this planet's ecosystem (on which we still depend to function properly) probably wouldn't. As such I don't consider the "let's just poison the oceans because humanity can survive without seafish" approach as viable.
> potential extinction-level event that continues at Fukushima
That's an exaggeration. Even if containment were to fail completely on all reactors at Fukushima, the release of radioactive products would make some area uninhabitable and cost a lot of money, but won't lead to even a large loss of life, let alone extinction.
A difficulty I've always had with nuclear power is the problem of clean-up. I'm not scaremongering and saying it's impossible, but it is inarguably expensive. Having a large amount of costs after all the revenue has gone away is a huge regulatory red flag: it's simpler to just structure things so that you won't have to pay.
This problem applies to mining as well, but very little mining has to occur near residential areas.
Whatever estimates the nuclear power industry made in Germany, they're argued to be insufficient, so they're capping the upper liability limit for these companies. The government's own stress testing suggests there will be a shortfall that'll ultimately be picked up by taxpayers.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-utilities-buy-ou...
How about the mess that long term storage in Germany is in ?
The salt mine Assen that they put some nuclear waste in is now flooded. Getting the nuclear waste back out will cost several billions. I don't think they will even do it.
So they risk contaminating ground water. That alone can be a cost of several billion.
And even if they do clean it up they are back to square zero in their quest for long term storage.
Truth is that no one really knows. Deep storage is one alternative, but 100.000 years is a long commitment. Breed reactors might reduce that to 1000 years, but it's still a commitment.
You're citing a self-interested source. That's a nuclear industry trade association. Sort of like asking the Tobacco Industry Association about the healthfulness of cigarettes.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy might be a the best thing for a critical company like Westinghouse. Unlike Chapter 7 the operations continue but the entity gets debt relief.
"In Chapter 11, in most instances the debtor remains in control of its business operations as a debtor in possession, and is subject to the oversight and jurisdiction of the court." [1]
I'm sure you read the article, which indicated that Chapter 11 is what's being used. In the US, companies always go for Chapter 11 if it looks like it's going to work, i.e. that there's a viable business in there somewhere. In Westinghouse's case, the viable business is everything other than their civilian reactor construction business.
Westinghouse had severe technical problems with AP1000 and it's not alone. French nuclear reactor builder Areva was restructured after they could not get their new EPR reactors ready on time. Their flagship project Olkiluoto 3 is nine years late and several billions of euros over budget.
Chinese are building reactors as fast as they can. They are buying reactors designs from all main manufacturers. There are 21 reactors under construction and they are three years late on average because manufacturers can't get these next generation reactors ready.
Nuclear reactors being constantly late and exceeding their budgets is not new. This was true in 60's and 70's and it's true now.
First Magnox reactors had very low efficiency < 20% and their electricity production was not competitive. Their main use was to produce plutonium for weapons.
The nuclear industry was already having big issues, so I do not see this bankruptcy changing things much. The decline of nuclear wasn't even related to safety concerns, which I believe are largely exaggerated. Currently operating nuclear plants are losing money and needed to be bailed out in Illinois and New York because they cannot produce power for a low enough price. With that in mind, who wants to spend >$1B to build a new nuclear plant that will likely take >10 years to get permitted and built? For the industry to grow, there needs to be a big change in technology to decrease the capital costs needed to build plants and to decrease plant operating costs. If you cost more than a natural gas plant, you are not going to have much luck in today's market.
Bankruptcy doesn't mean closure. Someone will bring them out of bankruptcy, but a lot of their existing creditors (and their existing owner) will get stiffed along the way. Most airlines that went backrupt didn't disappear, but their owners took a haircut.
Without getting into mismanagement or environmental concerns, nuclear's economics continue to worsen.
1. The supply of nuclear expertise and trained professionals is shrinking. Thus, nuclear EPC + O&M goes up. This article cites this factor at least 3x in different paragraphs. Though, that's great news for current nukes!
2. LCOE (EPC + O&M) forecasts show nuclear on par with substitutes. I'm not taking on the ESG risks of nuclear to achieve price parity.
Here's the declaration by Lisa J. Donahue, Managing Director and the Leader of the Global Turnaround
and Restructuring Group at AlixPartners LLC, describing the circumstances leading up to the bankruptcy [1].
West badly needs not surrendering Gen IV development & commercialisation to Russia and China, for geopolitics reasons and Pu stockpile re-use. Westinghouse is a chip here, a prestigious one for sure, and Gov should step in. Time to drop the energy free-market drivel and act as a superpower in a world that is dangerously going towards aggressive local superpowers. Risk! game scenarios again.
Has HN ever looked into clustering news using Google News to do it?
Reason I ask is how HN's de-dup filter works is puzzling to me and related stories would likely be useful to pool comments/de-dup/etc on a single news event.
Now, in a sense, there was a duplicate, but because the URL didn't match, it didn't count. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2F*.nytimes.com%2F20... The de-dupe filter would've turned new submissions of your post into votes for your post, if it had caught the duplicate.
That being said, I don't think HN is designed to pool discussion over time, preferring to archive discussion of each story. At this point, you can't even upvote older posts; they can only be added to your favorites.
You raise an interesting point. I'd recommend shooting the HN team an email about making use of canonical URLs for de-duping. mailto:hn@ycombinator.com
Thanks. I'm aware of the HN support email, not interested in private dialogs; whole topic of being open, accessible, referenable, etc. is a different topic, and not something I'm looking to cover in the thread unless it's requested.
The two new Westinghouse Vogtle pants are too expensive, at $14 billion for 2.5GW of power. If you purchased $14 billion of Tesla powerpacks, you could get 35GWh of storage--enough storage to supply 2.5GW of power for 14 hours....
The latest estimates are over $21 billion when you include financing costs. They go out of their way to hide these numbers since $10k/KW is just insanely, idiotically expensive.
14 billion is a lot. For your storage alternative though, you'd still have to buy something to fill the storage up reliably in the other 10 hours of a day to be an even comparison.
There is a fantastic documentary on the namesake of Westinghouse and the company itself. I found it incredibly interesting! They go into topics such as his relationship with other inventors at the time and his perhaps philanthropic relationship with his workers, the different cycles of the company and it's various product pivots.
Tesla sells patents for A.C. Polyphase System to George Westinghouse for $25,000 in cash, $50,000 in notes and a royalty of $2.50 per horsepower for each motor.
Apropos of nuke subs and carriers, the thing that always blew my mind was learning later in life that they're only fueled once for their working life time...
Was/Is Westinghouse doing anything with smaller scale reactor technologies (Thorium,etc). If not, does this potentially open a door for those technologies?
Westinghouse is likely too large a company to experiment--probably a smaller company will be first. Perhaps Terrestrial Energy in Canada will get their molten salt reactor to work. In Russia, the Akademik Lomonosov, a nuclear barge, will replace the power plant in Bilibino Nuclear Power plant in a couple years. This qualifies as a small reactor.
No, Thorium is competition for them in an already difficult (economically) business. It might, maybe, indirectly shake something loose, but probably not.
The appliance division of Westinghouse was sold off in the 70's and is now managed by Electrolux. This division of Westinghouse was spun off in the late 90's and is now owned by Toshiba. The history and scope of Westinghouse is super interesting/confusing you can read the full details here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Corporat...
Its current incarnation is now CBS corporation which licenses out the Westinghouse name to other corporations.
Yes, but somehow the name today only survives for their nuclear operation:
> Westinghouse purchased CBS in 1995 and became CBS Corporation in 1997. In 1998, CBS established a brand licensing subsidiary Westinghouse Licensing Corporation (Westinghouse Electric Corporation). In 1997/1998 the Power Generation Business Unit, headquartered in Orlando, FL, was sold to Siemens AG, of Germany. A year later, CBS sold all of its nuclear power businesses to British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL). Soon after, BNFL gained license rights on the Westinghouse trademarks and they used those to reorganize their acquired assets as Westinghouse Electric Company. That company was sold to Toshiba in 2007.
I believe the nuclear power industry largely started out as a way to justify world's largest nuclear warhead stockpile. I believe it was on a show from Netflix that discussed the history of nuclear power. It worked remarkably well.
Really!? You don't think that people were honestly excited about the most energy dense fuel known to man as a low footprint clean energy source? Your lifetime of energy in 1.5 soda cans of fuel! To me this is extremely exciting and totally unrelated to weapons.
I'm definitely a nuclear power proponent, and not a militarist, and I think that the militaristic-ly driven decision to prefer the uranium fuel "cycle" exclusively is the reason we're stuck with these shitty BWR's and PWR's, to the exclusion of anything else. Nuclear as it exists today definitely doesn't live up to the hype, and that's because the nuclear power industry is essentially frozen on 1960's designs, with incremental improvements tacked on. If the auto industry were as slow as the nuclear industry, we'd all be looking forward to next year's new Ford Model C.
Why should we be worried? Nuclear power is a no go for civilized world. It is not insurable. It has well-developed, clean alternatives. Apart from carriers and subs, it has no good applications (it would be also be great to get back to nuclear missile cruisers and ideally even destroyers, but outside of the military, i can't see any use for it at all).
The people working for this company are a matter of national security. I sure hope Secretary Mattis understands that.
This, also, by the way, is a great illustration of Elon Musk's contention that these technologies don't just keep working. Brilliant, competent engineers and scientists have to invest themselves in making them work.