Interestingly, South Carolina produces most of its energy using nuclear already... It is too bad the broad public perceives nuclear as a 'risky' energy source. It is in fact the safest energy source we have ever developed, in terms of deaths per kilowatt hour. Its just that when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. That makes more of an emotional reaction in the general public than the scattered and sporadic deaths in other industries, in which there are sadly many, many more. So, it seems it is hard to get support to invest in newer, safer technologies in the industry. I do understand the short term economic incentives. Nuclear is expensive to build. However it is very cheap to operate, and relatively environmentally friendly. It takes long term planning on timescales of many years, and looking at safety data rather than focusing on the disasters on their own. Neither of which humans are any good at.
The one thing that turns me off nuclear power is how to store nuclear waste. The collapsed storage tunnel at the Hanford site this year is an example of how poorly this can be done. The waste will remain dangerous for thousands of years. How do you build a storage facility that keeps it contained for that long?
>Its just that when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. That makes more of an emotional reaction in the general public than the scattered and sporadic deaths in other industries, in which there are sadly many, many more.
I don't this explanation really holds true. For example, there is a single failure with a hydroelectric dam [1] that has killed more people than have died as a result of all nuclear-power related deaths, and in more spectacular fashion.
I think it has something to do with the expense and scale of nuclear power, but also something to do with nuclear energy being a thing far outside the natural experience of most people. Nuclear power is also connected to nuclear weapons, which, understandably, has a strong negative connotation to most people.
Better science education might resolve some of the emotional problems connected to nuclear energy.
While the full article is gated at WSJ, John Cochrane and David Henderson write about the lack of quantifying economic costs when it comes to addressing climate change. Their last paragraph:
Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis, and mushy thinking undermines their case. If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. It follows that the costs of genetically modified foods and modern pesticides, which can feed us with less land and lower carbon emissions, might be bearable. It follows that if the future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering should not be unmentionable. And it follows that symbolic, ineffective, political grab-bag policies should be intolerable.
I mostly agree with his paragraph above. But from your link,
"No. Healthy societies do not fall apart over slow, widely predicted, relatively small economic adjustments of the sort painted by climate analysis. Societies do fall apart from war, disease or chaos. Climate policy must compete with other long-term threats for always-scarce resources."
"Small economic adjustments?" How many large scale resources does preventing war or pandemics require? Is chaos a real threat?
Most of what he lists are effects, not causes. Here's an economic question for him: what happens when the area between the Mississippi and the Rockies returns to being an unusable semidesert? (That's not an if. It is all irrigated.)
And I'll just leave this comment here: "As I favor a uniform VAT in place of the idiotically complex income and corporate tax system."
> It follows that if the future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering should not be unmentionable.
Problem: the balance of the planet has been seriously disturbed in largely unexpected ways due to very complex processes.
Solving this problem by a method other than reversing out changes is an extremely risky proposition and is virtually guaranteed to produce unanticipated fallout. Even at the small scale when we try simple solutions to complex problems, they are fraught with effects that are often worse than the problem was.
Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis, and mushy thinking undermines their case. If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable.
I agree, but I'd also consider myself to be a "Climate policy advocate" with an "apocalyptic vision" so maybe he's conflating different groups for the purpose of argument?
What is the cost of genetically modified foods and modern pesticides? Sure you can imagine B-movies plots of bad things that we can do, but in the real world none of them have happened yet, and even if they do it would be a mad scientist who already has all the knowledge needed to do his evil scheme so this has no bearing on real uses.
> Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis, and mushy thinking undermines their case. If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. It follows that the costs of genetically modified foods and modern pesticides, which can feed us with less land and lower carbon emissions, might be bearable. It follows that if the future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering should not be unmentionable. And it follows that symbolic, ineffective, political grab-bag policies should be intolerable.
If climate change alarmists truly believed what they were saying, they wouldn't be using smartphones, internet or driving SUVs.
The climate change movement is nothing but globalists and the "clean" energy industry exploiting the environmental fanatics to get more grants/money for themselves.
The climate change movement is really the globalist "carbon energy/tax movement". It's a way for the political elite to control world energy use and energy production.
Just like the "priests" of olden times used the threat of "earthquakes/natural disasters" to dupe the masses into doing their bidding ( virgin sacrifices, building monuments, etc ), the globalists are using climate change as a scare mongering tactic to put the world's energy/industry/etc under their control.
If truly the crazy climate predictions are true and humanity's existence was at stake, would we stop mass production of trucks, SUVs? Wouldn't we immediately stop international trade and air travel. After all, container ships are the largest producers of carbon pollution.
This brings to light a risk of nuclear power that's rarely mentioned: that the scale of practical projects is so great that the likely cost overruns and delays make the systems politically or financially difficult to fund. Not to mention the additional risk that when/if a nuclear power station goes offline (whether for maintenance, accident, or some other kind of failure), the gap in energy production is massive. Compare that to solar and wind energy projects, which are typically smaller scale (and can be much, much smaller), built with diverse technologies in multiple locations, in small units. The risks of disruption, project failure, cost overruns, and financial failure are all much smaller.
When we are seeking solutions to growing energy demand and climate change, the likelihood and ease of fulfilling the demand has to be included in the calculations.
Nuclear energy has a small carbon footprint when compared to fracked natural gas. It is insane to cancel and abandon two reactors because natural gas prices are low.
Doesn't anyone think long term anymore? How much CO2 will be dumped into the atmosphere due to this cancellation? What will be the collateral damage due to the inadvertent release of methane in fracking.
Nuclear power is clean and safe relative to fossil fuel power generation.
Our long-term thinking is somewhat affected by politics. From the article:
President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, finalized in 2015, would have given South Carolina and Georgia credit against their state climate goals for finishing the new reactors, which may have persuaded local regulators to stick with the project. But the Trump administration is dismantling that plan.
A $18B budget buys a lot of solar panels. At the current price of $0.50 per W, you get 36GW. A 1GW reactor has a 80% capacity factor, solar more like 20%, so it is 7.2GW average vs 0.8 GW average for nuclear.
Of course, you need to install those panels, so you might end up with 2GW average output. And no fuel cost and minimal operation cost.
There is a reason solar installations are growing at 100% per year and existing nuclear plants are shutting down. It is economics.
"It is insane to cancel and abandon two reactors because natural gas prices are low."
Not if, for whatever reasons, it's impossible to build them on time and within budget. It's regrettable for a whole range of reasons, not least that it keeps older, less-safe nukes running when maybe they shouldn't.
Maybe recovering the cost of carbon fuel externalities would change the relative profitability of nuclear. But maybe the way we use nuclear power - the fuel, the safety issues, etc. - is wrong enough that it can't be fixed without a fundamental re-think.
If you're looking decades out, you need to think about all the potential competitors in the energy market. I'm not sure the case building these plants gets any better. Costs for solar, wind, and energy storage are coming down rapidly, and they can be built relatively quickly.
I live in the service area for this power company and toured the construction site last year. During the tour they told us that the reactors were "twins" of reactors under construction in China. In fact, they took regular trips to China to learn from the team there because they were further along in the construction process. I wonder how the Chinese project is coming along.
A lot of people were laid off yesterday and that's a tragedy. But even more tragic is that these reactors were supposed to be the solution for meeting the regions rising energy demands. Now what? There was no plan B.
note - this is a burner account for privacy reasons
"We’ve let our nuclear industry atrophy for 30 years, and we’ve lost the robust supply chains and expertise needed” in building reactors."
This can be said for lots of things. You put it on hold for a generation of engineers, and pretty much need to start from zero again. Imagine all the knowledge lost, as tradecraft is not recorded.
I see a lot of technocratie on this site bemoaning the dying of nuclear. We've tried for 70+ years and have as yet not succeeded to use nuclear as a financially feasible energy source. Anyone trying to argue against this please answer this:
Why has a nuclear facility never been able to be fully privately insured without government backing?! The answer is simple: nuclear is too risky as a technology such that even some of the largest companies in the world are unwilling to take the risk.
Nuclear is failing in the US currently because we have historic low natural gas prices. They spent 9 billion dollars on these plants. They didn't give up because of insurance. They gave up because they can't outcompete fossil fuels.
It is easy to talk software developers into nuclear. In the software world, if you have bugs, you fix them in the next patch, as they are discovered.
In the nuclear reactor engineering world, a failure (as the result of a single bug or engineering oversight) can result in a 60 year clean up project, make $100B in farmland unusable, and other problematic outcomes.
It is difficult to comprehend the sheer magnitude of difference.
>We've tried for 70+ years and have as yet not succeeded to use nuclear as a financially feasible energy source.
All forms of energy are highly subsidized. Wind, solar, nuclear, and fossil. The actual market forces, true costs and externalities are completely opaque, for all of the above.
Generally, from these conversations, I see anti-nuclear folks cheering for nuclear to go away and pro-nuclear folks voicing the opposite. Nothing new to see, here.
For one, I would like to see better control over project planning, estimating, and execution. I would also like to bring on-line newer technology that includes passive cooling etc. I do believe that those technologies will allow for higher margins of safety, which will eventually reduce the cost of operation.
> We've tried for 70+ years and have as yet not succeeded to use nuclear as a financially feasible energy source.
Nuclear is used widely. It is definitely a feasible energy source, by definition.
It is becoming financially infeasible because of cheap natural gas. The same is happening to coal.
> Why has a nuclear facility never been able to be fully privately insured without government backing?!
For something to be privately insured, there needs to be a statistically significant data set. We don't have that for nuclear incidents. There just aren't enough of them.
Downvoting for stating facts on postings about Nuclear is HNs standard modus operandi. I wish more people on HN had lived through Chernobyl. They wouldn't lap up the cool-aid quite as enthusiastically then.
> If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable.
This assumes that the costs are paid by the same group of people. The people who live within range of a meltdown might consider the threat of a meltdown a much larger threat to their future than the threat of a much more evenly distributed disaster. Alaskans didn't feel personally threatened by the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, but there certainly were New Yorkers who felt affected.
Also, "pose a threat" on the time scales of (Nuclear Power plant lifetimes and climate change) is as much about perception and values as it is objective fact. Different people and societies are likely to perceive different levels of threat from different sources. For example, rural Americans who fear ISIS and terrorism are least likely to be directly affected by it or to have actually seen it in person (excluding those individuals who sign up to be shipped to the place where those are actually existential threats), yet they overwhelmingly value policies which prioritize defense against terrorism over defense against climate change.
Discussions of nuclear power accidents and climate change generally should (but don't) include {probability, impact, and duration}. A nuclear power incident is likely to be low probability, high impact (within a state-sized region), and quick. Climate change is likely to be a high probability (of unknown effects), wide ranging impacts, and affecting many different regions of the world over a long timescale (perhaps longer than a lifetime).
Unfinished nuclear power plants are not uncommon and for anyone in Washington State, the Satsop plant near Olympia is worth a visit. The massive unfinished concrete containment buildings and cooling towers are awe inspiring, and on a quiet morning the place feels almost like some ancient monument. But then again, I'm a romantic.
Are there any technical solutions solving the nuclear waste storage problem yet?
Before following the HN crowd and becoming pro-nuclear-power, I'd like to understand what problems it is leaving to our children and their children and so on.
I have almost zero confidence in the humans involved. Operations, waste disposal, financials, turf wars, transparency, accountability, whatever.
Humans ruin everything. Even in my own (very low stakes) work as a programmer, the problem is rarely the tech, its the humans.
Whenever someone floats an idea, I wonder "What's the worst that could go wrong?" Solar panels becomes landfill and the silicon fabs become superfund sites. vs Chernobyl, Fukushima, Hanford Nuclear Reservation, proliferation, dirty bombs, etc.
Yeah, you can increase the safety of handling nuclear waste material, decrease its volume, increase its long term stability, and lower its surface mobility by turning it in to a glass-like material
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022311513...
Despite this however, I also recognize Nuclear is failing because of the Central Planning fallacy :( Instead of small, modular, flexible modules, we have one giant plant. I think we need to scale down, not scale up.
* = as in, if we're every visited by aliens their ships won't be powered by windmills :)
From an environmental perspective - I have always felt the failure to adopt nuclear power was a result of environmentalists that undervalued global pollution relative to localized pollution. Of course the safety concerns whether or not they are actually warranted may be just as big or more so the real culprit in the lack of nuclear dominance, but given the costs of switching the grid to solar and wind (the costs are as much the slow roll out as the actual dollars), nuclear seems reasonably priced. Cleaning up our atmosphere is going to be one hell of an endeavor.
I have to give the two utilities credit for pulling these projects. Sure they wasted $9 billion, but it would have been easy for them to keep building given the large amount of money and time already spent on the project. By cancelling the project, they avoided passing another $15 billion in costs onto rate payers. With this $15 billion saved, they can buy a hell of a lot of wind, solar, and batteries.
As a project management professional, I have to wonder why these project so-often fail to meet their objectives of cost, scope, and schedule? It makes you think that there have been so few of these projects, in the past 40 years, that any "lessons learned" from former projects are unavailable. Plus, the duration of such projects probably causes loss of knowledge via retirement of the smart people.
If you want to make these projects work, I would recommend spending much more time on planning and give project control to the project managers. My guess is, that since this was a "state owned project", they took a typical "state run" mindset, which always displaces the liability of incompetence and failure onto the endless bank account of the taxpayer.
Were the new molten salt reactors that require no cooling source ? Or were they the same old westinghouse models that require external cooling (and external power) and have the capability of melting down ?
Nuclear just can't succeed as long as every reactor is a custom job with unknown costs. Companies like NuScale are trying to fix this by creating modular plants with predictable costs. It is unfortunate (especially for my hometown of Pittsburgh) that Westinghouse didn't pursue a modular design for it's latest AP1000 reactors.
The cancellation means there are just two new nuclear units being built in the country — both in Georgia —
while more than a dozen older nuclear plants are being retired in the face of low natural gas prices.
So what is going to happen when gas prices skyrocket?
If it's anything like Australia, the high gas prices will cause electricity prices to skyrocket and then conservative politicians will blame it on renewable energy.
Then they'll attempt to put more nuclear plants in, then gas will plummet again and they'll abandon those plans and then gas will skyrocket and they'll make new plans and then gas will drop and
At current technology levels and known reserves, there's about 85 years of natgas. And it just keeps getting cheaper to produce and known reserves keep expanding far faster than it is consumed.
The only way gas prices could skyrocket are political caps on production or a cheap way to export natgas across the oceans explodes demand.
For better or worse, the regulatory environment ensures that "old technology" is the only thing getting built on a production scale. So yeah, it is a problem.
Since every plant is essentially a one-off * , the economics are doomed to be terrible.
Honestly, the UN should just annoint a multinational nuclear conglomerate composed of any volunteering existing nuclear companies. Standardize designs, share R&D costs across all, then use UN-approval for non-proliferation or assistance with waste disposal as the market carrot.
It's a bit crazy that for things like space and nuclear technology we're burning so many resources (physical and human) reinventing the wheel in 5 different places, and telling smaller countries they just can't be trusted with wheels.
* EDIT: Did some background reading and apparently this is one of the features of the AP1000 and its NRC certification. It's now certified to be built again as long as the design is not modified. Not sure if this was standard NRC practice, but the phrasing and context make this sound like a somewhat new approach.
well my take away was, don't start a project unless the design is understood. I am all for nuclear power but a utility company should not be the breaking ground for new designs that are untested and not fully understood.
If so, they the federal government should guarantee backing of a pilot plant/upgrade so that we don't end up with these fiascos
[+] [-] nprecup|8 years ago|reply
The one thing that turns me off nuclear power is how to store nuclear waste. The collapsed storage tunnel at the Hanford site this year is an example of how poorly this can be done. The waste will remain dangerous for thousands of years. How do you build a storage facility that keeps it contained for that long?
[+] [-] ImSkeptical|8 years ago|reply
I don't this explanation really holds true. For example, there is a single failure with a hydroelectric dam [1] that has killed more people than have died as a result of all nuclear-power related deaths, and in more spectacular fashion.
I think it has something to do with the expense and scale of nuclear power, but also something to do with nuclear energy being a thing far outside the natural experience of most people. Nuclear power is also connected to nuclear weapons, which, understandably, has a strong negative connotation to most people.
Better science education might resolve some of the emotional problems connected to nuclear energy.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
[+] [-] tvchurch|8 years ago|reply
Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis, and mushy thinking undermines their case. If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. It follows that the costs of genetically modified foods and modern pesticides, which can feed us with less land and lower carbon emissions, might be bearable. It follows that if the future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering should not be unmentionable. And it follows that symbolic, ineffective, political grab-bag policies should be intolerable.
Here's Cochrane's write up about the op-ed: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2017/07/on-climate-change....
[+] [-] mcguire|8 years ago|reply
"No. Healthy societies do not fall apart over slow, widely predicted, relatively small economic adjustments of the sort painted by climate analysis. Societies do fall apart from war, disease or chaos. Climate policy must compete with other long-term threats for always-scarce resources."
"Small economic adjustments?" How many large scale resources does preventing war or pandemics require? Is chaos a real threat?
Most of what he lists are effects, not causes. Here's an economic question for him: what happens when the area between the Mississippi and the Rockies returns to being an unusable semidesert? (That's not an if. It is all irrigated.)
And I'll just leave this comment here: "As I favor a uniform VAT in place of the idiotically complex income and corporate tax system."
[+] [-] hwillis|8 years ago|reply
Problem: the balance of the planet has been seriously disturbed in largely unexpected ways due to very complex processes.
Solving this problem by a method other than reversing out changes is an extremely risky proposition and is virtually guaranteed to produce unanticipated fallout. Even at the small scale when we try simple solutions to complex problems, they are fraught with effects that are often worse than the problem was.
[+] [-] QAPereo|8 years ago|reply
I agree, but I'd also consider myself to be a "Climate policy advocate" with an "apocalyptic vision" so maybe he's conflating different groups for the purpose of argument?
[+] [-] bluGill|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awkwarddaturtle|8 years ago|reply
If climate change alarmists truly believed what they were saying, they wouldn't be using smartphones, internet or driving SUVs.
The climate change movement is nothing but globalists and the "clean" energy industry exploiting the environmental fanatics to get more grants/money for themselves.
The climate change movement is really the globalist "carbon energy/tax movement". It's a way for the political elite to control world energy use and energy production.
Just like the "priests" of olden times used the threat of "earthquakes/natural disasters" to dupe the masses into doing their bidding ( virgin sacrifices, building monuments, etc ), the globalists are using climate change as a scare mongering tactic to put the world's energy/industry/etc under their control.
If truly the crazy climate predictions are true and humanity's existence was at stake, would we stop mass production of trucks, SUVs? Wouldn't we immediately stop international trade and air travel. After all, container ships are the largest producers of carbon pollution.
[+] [-] skywhopper|8 years ago|reply
When we are seeking solutions to growing energy demand and climate change, the likelihood and ease of fulfilling the demand has to be included in the calculations.
[+] [-] drallison|8 years ago|reply
Doesn't anyone think long term anymore? How much CO2 will be dumped into the atmosphere due to this cancellation? What will be the collateral damage due to the inadvertent release of methane in fracking.
Nuclear power is clean and safe relative to fossil fuel power generation.
[+] [-] sehugg|8 years ago|reply
President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, finalized in 2015, would have given South Carolina and Georgia credit against their state climate goals for finishing the new reactors, which may have persuaded local regulators to stick with the project. But the Trump administration is dismantling that plan.
The pro-fossil fuel take: http://www.heritage.org/coal-oil-natural-gas/commentary/trum...
And the pro-environment take: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2017/0...
[+] [-] marze|8 years ago|reply
A $18B budget buys a lot of solar panels. At the current price of $0.50 per W, you get 36GW. A 1GW reactor has a 80% capacity factor, solar more like 20%, so it is 7.2GW average vs 0.8 GW average for nuclear.
Of course, you need to install those panels, so you might end up with 2GW average output. And no fuel cost and minimal operation cost.
There is a reason solar installations are growing at 100% per year and existing nuclear plants are shutting down. It is economics.
[+] [-] Zigurd|8 years ago|reply
Not if, for whatever reasons, it's impossible to build them on time and within budget. It's regrettable for a whole range of reasons, not least that it keeps older, less-safe nukes running when maybe they shouldn't.
Maybe recovering the cost of carbon fuel externalities would change the relative profitability of nuclear. But maybe the way we use nuclear power - the fuel, the safety issues, etc. - is wrong enough that it can't be fixed without a fundamental re-think.
[+] [-] skybrian|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beat|8 years ago|reply
So, um.
[+] [-] someone443|8 years ago|reply
A lot of people were laid off yesterday and that's a tragedy. But even more tragic is that these reactors were supposed to be the solution for meeting the regions rising energy demands. Now what? There was no plan B.
note - this is a burner account for privacy reasons
[+] [-] madengr|8 years ago|reply
"We’ve let our nuclear industry atrophy for 30 years, and we’ve lost the robust supply chains and expertise needed” in building reactors."
This can be said for lots of things. You put it on hold for a generation of engineers, and pretty much need to start from zero again. Imagine all the knowledge lost, as tradecraft is not recorded.
[+] [-] ricw|8 years ago|reply
Why has a nuclear facility never been able to be fully privately insured without government backing?! The answer is simple: nuclear is too risky as a technology such that even some of the largest companies in the world are unwilling to take the risk.
Nuclear is dying for a reason.
Ps: thanks for the downvotes on stating facts
[+] [-] tptacek|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marze|8 years ago|reply
In the nuclear reactor engineering world, a failure (as the result of a single bug or engineering oversight) can result in a 60 year clean up project, make $100B in farmland unusable, and other problematic outcomes.
It is difficult to comprehend the sheer magnitude of difference.
[+] [-] SoMisanthrope|8 years ago|reply
All forms of energy are highly subsidized. Wind, solar, nuclear, and fossil. The actual market forces, true costs and externalities are completely opaque, for all of the above.
Generally, from these conversations, I see anti-nuclear folks cheering for nuclear to go away and pro-nuclear folks voicing the opposite. Nothing new to see, here.
For one, I would like to see better control over project planning, estimating, and execution. I would also like to bring on-line newer technology that includes passive cooling etc. I do believe that those technologies will allow for higher margins of safety, which will eventually reduce the cost of operation.
[+] [-] maratd|8 years ago|reply
Nuclear is used widely. It is definitely a feasible energy source, by definition.
It is becoming financially infeasible because of cheap natural gas. The same is happening to coal.
> Why has a nuclear facility never been able to be fully privately insured without government backing?!
For something to be privately insured, there needs to be a statistically significant data set. We don't have that for nuclear incidents. There just aren't enough of them.
[+] [-] beders|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thephyber|8 years ago|reply
This assumes that the costs are paid by the same group of people. The people who live within range of a meltdown might consider the threat of a meltdown a much larger threat to their future than the threat of a much more evenly distributed disaster. Alaskans didn't feel personally threatened by the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, but there certainly were New Yorkers who felt affected.
Also, "pose a threat" on the time scales of (Nuclear Power plant lifetimes and climate change) is as much about perception and values as it is objective fact. Different people and societies are likely to perceive different levels of threat from different sources. For example, rural Americans who fear ISIS and terrorism are least likely to be directly affected by it or to have actually seen it in person (excluding those individuals who sign up to be shipped to the place where those are actually existential threats), yet they overwhelmingly value policies which prioritize defense against terrorism over defense against climate change.
Discussions of nuclear power accidents and climate change generally should (but don't) include {probability, impact, and duration}. A nuclear power incident is likely to be low probability, high impact (within a state-sized region), and quick. Climate change is likely to be a high probability (of unknown effects), wide ranging impacts, and affecting many different regions of the world over a long timescale (perhaps longer than a lifetime).
[+] [-] mattbierner|8 years ago|reply
Some photos from Satsop a few years ago:
- https://photography.mattbierner.com/Satsop-Nuclear-Power-Pla...
- https://photography.mattbierner.com/Satsop-Nuclear-Plant-Mor...
[+] [-] willvarfar|8 years ago|reply
Before following the HN crowd and becoming pro-nuclear-power, I'd like to understand what problems it is leaving to our children and their children and so on.
[+] [-] specialist|8 years ago|reply
I have almost zero confidence in the humans involved. Operations, waste disposal, financials, turf wars, transparency, accountability, whatever.
Humans ruin everything. Even in my own (very low stakes) work as a programmer, the problem is rarely the tech, its the humans.
Whenever someone floats an idea, I wonder "What's the worst that could go wrong?" Solar panels becomes landfill and the silicon fabs become superfund sites. vs Chernobyl, Fukushima, Hanford Nuclear Reservation, proliferation, dirty bombs, etc.
[+] [-] briffle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pycal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GeneralMayhem|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|8 years ago|reply
Despite this however, I also recognize Nuclear is failing because of the Central Planning fallacy :( Instead of small, modular, flexible modules, we have one giant plant. I think we need to scale down, not scale up.
* = as in, if we're every visited by aliens their ships won't be powered by windmills :)
[+] [-] dmritard96|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jartelt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SoMisanthrope|8 years ago|reply
If you want to make these projects work, I would recommend spending much more time on planning and give project control to the project managers. My guess is, that since this was a "state owned project", they took a typical "state run" mindset, which always displaces the liability of incompetence and failure onto the endless bank account of the taxpayer.
[+] [-] rsync|8 years ago|reply
Were the new molten salt reactors that require no cooling source ? Or were they the same old westinghouse models that require external cooling (and external power) and have the capability of melting down ?
[+] [-] ethbro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] honestoHeminway|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intrasight|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodencafe|8 years ago|reply
The cancellation means there are just two new nuclear units being built in the country — both in Georgia — while more than a dozen older nuclear plants are being retired in the face of low natural gas prices.
So what is going to happen when gas prices skyrocket?
[+] [-] stephen_g|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] merpnderp|8 years ago|reply
The only way gas prices could skyrocket are political caps on production or a cheap way to export natgas across the oceans explodes demand.
[+] [-] kalleboo|8 years ago|reply
How quickly can wide-spread adoption of EVs change this part of the equation?
[+] [-] pavement|8 years ago|reply
This is pretty much the definition of "cruft." An accumulation of old defunct artifacts in the face of technological advances. [0]
[+] [-] ethbro|8 years ago|reply
Since every plant is essentially a one-off * , the economics are doomed to be terrible.
Honestly, the UN should just annoint a multinational nuclear conglomerate composed of any volunteering existing nuclear companies. Standardize designs, share R&D costs across all, then use UN-approval for non-proliferation or assistance with waste disposal as the market carrot.
It's a bit crazy that for things like space and nuclear technology we're burning so many resources (physical and human) reinventing the wheel in 5 different places, and telling smaller countries they just can't be trusted with wheels.
* EDIT: Did some background reading and apparently this is one of the features of the AP1000 and its NRC certification. It's now certified to be built again as long as the design is not modified. Not sure if this was standard NRC practice, but the phrasing and context make this sound like a somewhat new approach.
[+] [-] Shivetya|8 years ago|reply
If so, they the federal government should guarantee backing of a pilot plant/upgrade so that we don't end up with these fiascos
[+] [-] wantoncl|8 years ago|reply
The Abyss Part 2
Coming Summer 2029