from the not-quite-too-cheap-to-meter dept.
EcoWatch reports (while wearing their green-tinted glasses):
The Vermont Yankee atomic reactor goes permanently off-line today, Dec. 29, 2014. Citizen activists have made it happen. The number of licensed U.S. commercial reactors is now under 100 where once it was to be 1,000.
[...]Entergy says it shut Vermont Yankee because it was losing money. Though fully amortized, it could not compete with the onslaught of renewable energy and fracked-gas. Throughout the world, nukes once sold as generating juice "too cheap to meter" comprise a global financial disaster. Even with their capital costs long-ago stuck to the public, these radioactive junk heaps have no place in today's economy--except as illegitimate magnets for massive handouts.
[...]Vermont Yankee is the fifth American reactor forced shut in the last two years. Two at San Onofre, California, were defeated by citizen activism. Wisconsin's Kewaunee went down for economic reasons. Crystal River in Florida was driven to utter chaos by incompetent ownership.
Five reactors are officially under construction in the U.S. But their fate is also subject to citizen action. Two others targeted for Levy County, Florida, have recently been stopped by ratepayer resistance.
Throughout the U.S. and the world, the demise of atomic energy is accelerating. Some 435 reactors are listed worldwide as allegedly operable. But 48 in Japan remain shut in the wake of Fukushima despite the fierce efforts of a corrupt, dictatorial regime to force them back on line. Germany's transition to a totally nuke-free green energy economy is exceeding expectations. The fate of dozens proposed and operating in China and India remains unclear.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @01:22AM
How do we mod the summary as "biased"?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday January 01 2015, @09:03PM
Its already modded as Biased, because it was submitted by gewg_
Citizen activists have made it happen.
Thanks "Citizen activists"
for exacerbating global warming.
for requiring more gas and coal to be burned and polluting our air and water
for depleting non renewable resources for future generations
for negatively impacting the health of your fellow man
for justifying more fracking
for requiring more pipelines and oil trains
Someone needs to follow the money to find how these professional protesters [goo.gl] support themselves.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02 2015, @03:26AM
Gas the kikes! Race war now!
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 03 2015, @08:24PM
Sign your own name, shithead.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @01:30AM
Good for you, gonna get might cold when then wind dies down and the gas stops flowing.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Thursday January 01 2015, @02:34AM
Problem is "trusted sources" are now telling us there is a *lot* of gas down there.
The same "trusted sources" that told us a few years ago that people need to hear loud and clear, its that America is running out of energy in America. [theglobalist.com]
Even Warren Buffet got in on the act. [google.com]
I have to admit I fell for Matthew Simmon's book "Twilight in the Desert" hook, line, sinker, fisherman, boat, motor, and tackle box.
Matthew Simmons was an investment banker specializing in petroleum. It seemed if anyone knew the latest facts of worldwide oil reserves, Matthew would be one of them.
A lot of bad financial decisions have been made on the trusting of the wrong sources.
I am certainly not the only one who heeded the advice of "leaders" and made poor financial decisions. I think I fouled up? Look as Solyndra!
We have had a tendency to trust our leaders to have a more than speculative insight into our state of affairs. They are supposedly paid to make that their job-front and center.
Not even the POTUS can be trusted to be knowledgeable.
I do not know if Bush was being misleading to promote someone else's business model, but he sure gave all appearances of ignorance, with his family fortunes centered on oil.
If the big guy stubs his toe, he can count on Congress to bail him out.
The little guy is expected to pay his taxes anyway as he loses his house to the banks playing games by printing money that was never there.
This kind of stuff goes on when one can not trust anything. Its like me trying to design circuits with test instruments that are terribly miscalibrated and nonlinear.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @06:18AM
The Northern border of Vermont is 45 degrees North.
As demonstrated by the Drake Landing (51 degrees North) Solar Community (since 2008) [google.com], you can meet your energy needs from renewables without burning anything or irradiating anything.
The first 100 percent wind-powered city was Rock Port, Missouri (again, 2008). [google.com]
You're years behind the curve.
Too bad your King Canute act failed and now you're all butthurt about your favorite non-renewable energy source being obsolete.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by fnj on Thursday January 01 2015, @12:42PM
Everybody knows New England is cloudy almost all winter.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday January 01 2015, @09:18PM
We are a long time from 2008. Its time you update your sources.
Nobody believes we can meet all energy needs strictly with renewable sources any more.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change [ieee.org]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @11:09PM
"Nobody" based on 2 ideologs with a Neoliberal agenda?
Pffff.
There are lots of folks at high latitudes (who you'd assume would be the most dependent on dirty energy) who harvest enough of the petawatts of naturally-occurring energy in order to run their lives, providing the proof that the Neoliberals are just blowing smoke.
The number of those people and their renewables-based installations continues to expand, displacing the dirty obsolete techniques.
Despite the denialists, the trend is toward clean, renewable, distributed energy.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday January 01 2015, @02:22AM
Gas is a finite resource. Uranium is too but it lasts longer. So in the feature the state will have gas less power plants and scrapped nuclear plants. That still cost to cleanup. So it might actually be profitable to keep running them as the cost won't go away.
Wind and solar power is to spotty to be used in the large scale. Though good batteries may turn around this. And coal power spews mercury and CO2 all around, they are not really a good alternative.
Building the latest generation-4 [wikipedia.org] reactor might be a feature option which will be safer and more efficient.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @02:51AM
To build one of those you need to trust engineers, and sadly many many people today don't. We live in the 21st century but the pitchfork mob is still with us.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mojo chan on Thursday January 01 2015, @12:30PM
You have to trust engineers, then you also have to trust the builders, and the management who run the plant for 40-50 years, and the contractors who maintain it, and the contractors who decommission it, and the government that is responsible for organizing storage of spent fuel and other waste, and the regulators who are supposed to oversee it all and enforce the rules... And you have to be willing to pay for it all with massive subsidies. The free insurance that nuclear plants enjoy is literally priceless.
It's an entirely pragmatic decision - on paper nuclear looks good, in reality it doesn't turn out that way.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @08:00PM
on paper nuclear looks good
Not really.
If you include the $billions that insurance would cost them without the gov't waivers, it quickly becomes obvious how the subsidies are propping up that industry.
If the USA hadn't been so anal about building and maintaining tens of thousands of nuclear warheads (which could never actually be used), the nuclear power plant industry would never have gotten off the ground.
For reference, note the "success" of the (propaganda) Atoms for Peace program.
You can start with the NS Savanna and the Ford Nucleon.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday January 01 2015, @09:07PM
As opposed to trusting the oil industry?
I'll trust the nuclear industry every time, thank you.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by ghost on Thursday January 01 2015, @02:30PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @08:14PM
Scene: An astronomer is giving a talk to a citizens group.
Astronomer: In about 5 billion years, the Sun will expand and engulf the Earth.
Woman: How long did you say we have?
Astronomer: About 5 billion years.
Woman: Oh, thank goodness! I thought you said MILLION.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @08:50PM
The moon will escape it's orbit
And hopefully so will that apostrophe.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday January 02 2015, @01:55AM
The need for nuclear power plants may turn around in decades. The time horizon for the the Moon and Sun is long enough to come up with solutions to the problems associated with them.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday January 01 2015, @02:41AM
Any time anyone recommends a technology that produces dangerous waste that will be dangerous longer than human have had metal tools, we need to seriously examine their heads. Yes, the nerdy nuclear cool factor is there, just as it was for Madame Curie. She died of radiation poisoning. So what are a few Three Mile Islands, Chernobyls, or Fukushimas? What are the odds? How much does the insurance cost?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @04:32AM
Nuclear waste is containable. Coal plants put out far, far more pollution.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @05:14AM
We have had catastrophic failures (melt downs) in over 1% of the worlds commercial nuclear reactors. There are 437 commercial nuclear reactors in the world. Of these, there have been, at least, 6 meltdowns-- Three Mile Island (partial reactor melted down), Chernobyl (partial meltdown reactor 1 in 1982, and then, the massive disaster in 1986 of full meltdown in reactor 4) and Fukushima (full meltdown in three reactors). Lots of radiation releases as well, e.g., a recent release at San Onofre in San Diego County.
Imagine if 1% of the cars on the road randomly burst into flame while driving on the freeway, or if 1% of the commercial airliners would just drop like rocks out of the sky. It is insane to promote fission power with the existing safety record (1.3% catastrophic failure rate), the huge costs and energy requirements to build/process fuel for the plants, and that little problem mentioned in the parent, of dangerous waste that will outlive all of us many many times over.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @05:36AM
You just have to wait ~700 years for the strontium 90, and cesium 137 to decay away. Then, the nuclear waste becomes something you just have to be wary of. The 10,000 years is just paranoia, on the part of some. On the other hand, it is a good idea, to over engineer nuclear waste disposal sites.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aristarchus on Thursday January 01 2015, @07:08AM
wow, only 700 years! Well, that puts us back to the era of the Black Death, so I guess it must be a good thing. But the Strontium and cesium are not even the main products of a nuclear fission pile. Do try to keep up on the science of the technology you are seeking to defend. Mistakes like this make you look, well, stupid.
(Score: 2) by subs on Thursday January 01 2015, @12:41PM
But the Strontium and cesium are not even the main products of a nuclear fission pile.
Yes, the majority by mass (95%) is just pretty harmless uranium, and I don't see you worrying about natural uranium in the rocks. They are, however, by far the most radiotoxic as well as most readily biologically absorbed and hence represent a vast majority of the danger. Sorry, but the stupid is right back on you.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday January 01 2015, @07:27PM
Thanks for the stupid back. So it wasn't a mistake on your part? Wait, doesn't that mean . . . oh, dear! See, this is why we just cannot trust nuclear power.
(Score: 2) by subs on Thursday January 01 2015, @08:52PM
See, this is why we just cannot trust nuclear power.
You can't trust it because you don't understand it? Are you serious? Also, I'm not the guy who wrote the thing you responded to in the first place, I merely pointed out that that person was indeed correct in that the vast majority of the danger goes away after a few hundred years. It's small volume (1 truckload per reactor per year vs. 30 railroad car train per coal-fired boiler PER DAY) combined with another 20x reduction in the amount through the use of some smarter techniques for managing it results in a situation that's quite tractable and straightforward to resolve. In fact, that's what all the nuclear pioneers in the 50s and 60s envisioned. Unfortunately, given how the political process works and uninformed voters can be swayed with fear in the fact of a complex technical and scientific issue, it's no wonder we can't have good things. Now if you look at places which are more amenable to these kinds of technocratic approaches, you'll see progress [world-nuclear-news.org].
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday January 01 2015, @09:20PM
Thank you for your comment. Don't trust it because I don't understand it? Or because "vast majority of danger" is not the same thing as "danger"? And after this amount of time, if nuclear energy could be safe and profitable, it would have been, regardless of public fear and ignorance.
But really, I am struck by the vociferousness of proponents on this topic. It seems to be similar to the debate over firearms in the United States. Why do you think that is?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday January 02 2015, @10:56AM
But really, I am struck by the vociferousness of proponents on this topic. It seems to be similar to the debate over firearms in the United States. Why do you think that is?
That is a complete and utter misrepresentation of both issues.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by subs on Friday January 02 2015, @11:28AM
Or because "vast majority of danger" is not the same thing as "danger"?
Everything has danger associated with it. Simply walking down the street carries with it a significant danger of becoming a pedestrian casualty in a traffic accident and they happen far more often than any fatalities associated with nuclear power. Perspective.
And after this amount of time, if nuclear energy could be safe and profitable, it would have been, regardless of public fear and ignorance.
This is more of a political statement than a statement of fact, but are you even remotely aware of the amount of red tape associated with anything containing the word "nuclear"? Even just getting a new plant of an existing and already licensed type approved can take up to a decade. Meanwhile a coal or gas plant takes a couple of weeks. Do you think anybody in their right mind would try something radically different in such a stringent regulatory environment? GE for example has had a modern 4th gen plant design ready to roll for the past two decades. But there isn't the utility to try and get it licensed in the current regulatory environment, because they know that the expense and time associated with that is so exorbitantly high that a coal or gas plant is much easier to build.
But really, I am struck by the vociferousness of proponents on this topic.
IMO it's because the opponents of nuclear power are mostly similarly progressively-minded people as the proponents of nuclear power, however, they've been sold fear and false arguments by the professional anti-nuclear campaigners such as Lovins and Caldicott. Also, the media love to give the illusion of every issue having two equal sides, so whenever some sensible environmentalist who supports nuclear power speaks, they also put up a nutjob to counter them.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday January 02 2015, @05:08PM
Don't forget that the traffic accident is not only more likely than a nuclear accident, it's also FAR more harmful. Look at the incidents listed earlier in this thread. Three Mile Island is up there as one of the worst nuclear disasters the world has ever seen. It released as much radiation to the nearby public as a hospital X-Ray. Surely you don't consider getting an X-Ray to be a catastrophe, right? Sure it's not healthy to do it every day, but once or twice in your life is perfectly safe. Unlike pretty much every other power source, the deaths attributed to nuclear are almost all *statistical*. They're counts of how many people will *probably* die of cancer, years or decades later, which they might have had anyway but are slightly more likely to have now due to the radiation exposure. Even *solar* kills more people per KWh than nuclear, and the deaths from solar are largely workers falling off of roofs, breaking their necks and dying pretty immediately. Personally, I'd prefer to take the risks with nuclear.
Granted, the way nuclear is currently implemented kinda sucks. Same could be said of most power generation technologies. For nuclear, a large part of that is because nobody wants to fund them and nobody wants one in their backyard, because so many people have been trained to associate anything with the word "nuclear" in it to the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But personally...you give me my electricity for free and that's all it'd take for me to accept one of those shipping container reactors buried in my backyard. It's a HELL of a lot better than the 40 fracking wells they're building within ~2000 feet of my hometown's water supply....and a bit better than covering millions of acres with wind or solar. We can't exactly just convert the entire state of Nevada into one giant solar plant...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @10:10AM
The only real question to ask:
Is the risk/benefit of nuclear energy better than existing sources of energy?
a. Yes.
b. No.
c. Sometimes.
I would probably pick "c", so I guess I need my head examined.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @08:48PM
Any time anyone recommends a technology that produces dangerous waste that will be dangerous longer than human have had metal tools, we need to seriously examine their heads.
I know! CO2 will continue to warm the planet for longer than people had metal tools. But there will be almost nothing left of either Charnobyl or Fukushima disasters because all their radioactivity will decay away. Hot Cesium and Strontium will be all gone, leaving only ever so slightly elevated levels from the cool rest.
(aside, there are methods of dealing with any "long term waste" but it's cheaper to dig up fresh uranium than burn the "waste" (I mean 98% fuel))
So what are a few Three Mile Islands, Chernobyls, or Fukushimas? What are the odds? How much does the insurance cost?
I don't know. How many quintillions will it cost to deal with 450ppm CO2? What about 550ppm? And how much to clean it up? Good luck with that!!
As I said, Fukushima is a short term pain for the generation that caused it by not planning for a tsunami in a nation that invented the word. But the coal Japan is burning will force the evacuation of Tokyo in few hundred years. So I guess if you are OK with not paying the price yourself for the energy you use, then I guess nuclear is evil.
Anyway, repeat after me "ignorance is bliss!" "IGNORANCE IS BLISS!!"
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday January 02 2015, @07:47AM
I'm quite sure we had metal tools 500 years ago. If we would actually reprocess the 'waste', that's how long it would take to decay to background levels. Long before that it would be more or less safe.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday January 01 2015, @03:16AM
I searched for some evidence, managed to find just:
So... are more details available?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @05:13AM
My search string (restricted to 1 year) [google.com]
Nippon Television Network Corporation 2014/03/18 [ntv.co.jp]
...yet Ah-bay is continually pushing to allow the incompetents at TEPCO et al to charge ahead.
Washington Post 2014/08/15 [washingtonpost.com]
Where I come from, we call 66.66 percent a supermajority.
We call politicians who ignore supermajorities "tyrants" (when we're feeling generous).
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @05:25AM
Dude, why do you post as Anonymous Coward and then sign it "-- gewg_"? Why don't you create an account with a name and use that to post?
This way we don't actually know if it's you, or if it is just someone who wants to put words in your mouth. That's a risk you run by doing this weird anonymous-but-signed thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @06:24AM
The people that count can tell a gewg_ post from other ACs.
This is especially true when I include a link.
If you can't tell it's me, you must have been in the slow class in school.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @12:45PM
The above guy is not really gewg_
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @07:38PM
That is all.
gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @09:57PM
The people that count can tell a gewg_ post from other ACs.
This is especially false when I include a link.
If you can tell it's me, you must have been in the slow class in school.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 03 2015, @08:31PM
You, child, are not one of the people who count.
That might be different--if you had ever had an original idea in your life.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @09:11PM
Where I come from, we call 66.66 percent a supermajority.
We call politicians who ignore supermajorities "tyrants" (when we're feeling generous).
Dude! Something like 80% of Americans believed that G.W. was right to invade Iraq because it was clearly going to nuke America. Then 3 years later, they changed their minds and said that G.W. was not right to invade Iraq!
Public opinion is nothing but opinion of idiots manipulated by people in power. You can convince people of anything, and they will believe you provided you have the correct message. Do these people know of trade balances and link to their standard of living? Do these people know that if Japan starts to spend all their foreign reserves to import coal and gas that it will lead to large unemployment *in* Japan? And when you quote your stats, do you know that the people questioned had *nothing* to do with nuclear power in the first place? Do you know that people living next to these power plants want these plants to be made safe against incidents like Fukushima and they want them open and build more? That's where these towns get most of their money from. That's why the largest worry for areas with nuclear reactors is the worry that Japan will not be building new ones any time soon.
Anyway, calling policies like nuclear power "tyrannical" because of whims of public opinion is fucked up. Your logic sir is fucked .. up ...
PS. By your definition, Hitler and Stalin were not tyrants as they had very positive public opinion. To this day, on Nov. 7th, people will march with portraits of Stalin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @11:21PM
Did I say that was the *only* definition?
No, I did not.
Thanks for playing.
As a parting gift, here's a link to a useful page: Tyrant [wikipedia.org]
...and you have a really twisted view of Democracy.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1, Troll) by Techwolf on Thursday January 01 2015, @04:15AM
You can thank the environments for that. By blocking new plants and better technology, these now aging plants that should have been shut down and "recycled" by the income of the new plant are really becoming a financial burdensome. These environments in some cases are really terrorists by the technical term, it just they use long term planning to unleash there hell.
Best long term base energy I think is still Thorium plants. Best market stragity to allow that is not to push it as a "nuclear" plant. MRI was successfully done that way, they drop the word "nuclear" in front of it and it was much better received by the public.
(Score: 2) by datapharmer on Thursday January 01 2015, @02:56PM
I'm not anti-nuclear, but there is something wrong with counting on the next generation to pay for the last. If it is so profitable, who stole from the coffers and why aren't they paying for the cleanup instead of tax payers or the next generation plant?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday January 02 2015, @03:20PM
The fossil fuel people get to put all their carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) straight into the atmosphere, causing global warming thus making things very dangerous and expensive for very many generations to come.
Imagine how expensive electricity would be if the fossil fuel people had to collect and store their carbon dioxide?
The fossil fuel people are well-connected. They have friends in banks, governments and other industries who are helping them to spread propaganda that this carbon dioxide is not the cause of global warming.
The nuclear people have always had to account for, and to store securely, all of their dangerous waste. They've got very good at it too.
In the 1990s, apparently cheap and plentiful gas was used as an excuse to run down the state-owned nuclear power industry here in the UK. I was there at the time.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @06:16AM
People who hate and fear nuclear power (I'll call them "anti-nuke activists") applied every form of pressure they could think of short of actual violence. Nuclear plants are subject to lawsuits, demonstrations, endless bureaucratic red tape. (You couldn't even build a parking garage at a profit if you had to operate under these crushing levels of red tape.)
As a result, companies try to keep ancient reactors operating as long as possible, even after their design lifetime.
Then an aged nuclear plant has some disaster (Fukoshima) and the anti-nuke activists feel vindicated. "Ha, we told you those things aren't safe."
In some parallel universe, the Fukoshima first-generation power plants were shut down years ago; and when the tsunami killed almost 16,000 people, a fourth-generation plant had no shutdown incident. Too bad that isn't our universe.
The lesson I learned from Fukushima: if you take a first-generation power plant, and it has the worst possible disaster happen to it, a couple of hundred people will have a slightly increased cancer risk. And this will be much more important and gain much more news coverage than ~16,000 deaths due to the tsunami.
Then there's Three Mile Island. No deaths. But it sure was scary! Or something.
Meanwhile, we need reliable power, and we don't have enough nuke plants, so we keep burning coal and sending coal ash into the sky for us all to breathe. Coal ash is radioactive, so we have a worse health problem than nuclear power. According to the Huffington Post, pollution from power plants (mostly coal plants) causes 13,000 deaths per year [huffingtonpost.com]. The rational thing to do is to build fourth-gen safe nuke plants and shut down all the first-gen nuke plants and all the coal plants; but the anti-nuke activists have made the rational thing impossible, and they are damned proud of it too.
P.S. It's true that some forms of radioactive waste are so "hot" that they would kill you in seconds. It's also true that some forms of radioactive waste will still be radioactive in 30,000 years. But guess what, both those are not true at once. If the waste is really "hot" it has a short half-life and will decay away to almost nothing within a few hundred years, not "longer than our civilization has existed". If the waste will take a really long time to decay, then it's not that "hot" and it's not really dangerous.
And with "breeder reactors" or the new "traveling wave reactors" it would be possible to re-use what is currently considered "waste" to generate more power.
So yes, if you do nuclear power in the worst possible way, it's expensive and kind of dangerous. And the very people who think it's unacceptable are forcing a vicious cycle keeping it as dangerous as possible.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @07:04AM
Yes, that is the way it is. Nothing to do with the inherent dangers of nuclear power, just a bunch of environmentalist greenies standing in the way of cheap power for all! Except, the plant in question is shutting down because, and here i emphasize because, it was not economically feasable! Darn environmentalists, messing with the economics of nuclear power! If I had a nickel for every escaped bit of radioactivity, well, I would be dead by now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @09:04AM
Nothing to do with the inherent dangers of nuclear power,
I'll be as polite as I can be, despite the temptation to return abuse for abuse.
Nuclear power has inherent dangers. However, a fourth-generation plant will be much safer than a first-generation plant. We should be building fourth-gen plants and retiring first-gen plants. We aren't doing that. We aren't doing the rational thing to reduce the danger. And still fewer people die due to nuclear power than the 13,000 per year claimed by Huffington Post to be killed by non-nuclear power.
Nuclear power isn't perfect. Nothing is perfect. But we're doing it wrong. We aren't taking the steps to mitigate the risk. And much (note I didn't say "all" but I did say "much") of the blame for that is on the anti-nuke activists, who have tried to block all improvements to nuke plants. They don't want any nuke plants, so they don't want any new nuke plants, which means they don't want safer new nuke plants. But they are happy to complain about how dangerous the old first-gen nuke plants are.
Did you know that aircraft companies don't produce safety upgrades for old plane designs? They used to, and then lawyers sued them on the theory that if the manufacturer was offering a safety upgrade, the planes must have been unsafe before the upgrade. Since the manufacturers don't get sued if they do nothing, they do nothing, so nobody gets safety upgrades. Pilots just keep flying the planes without upgrading them. The pilots could be safer if the companies had more freedom to operate. (Planes wouldn't be 100% safe, because planes aren't perfect.)
Except, the plant in question is shutting down because, and here i emphasize because, it was not economically feasable!
It damned well would be much less expensive if it were less regulated. I don't claim that nuke plants should be unregulated, but they could be a lot less regulated than they are now. In particular, streamline the regulatory process to get rid of "surprises" and delays. As I said, you couldn't even build a parking garage at a profit under that much red tape, let alone something like a nuclear reactor.
I Googled and found this: [world-nuclear.org]
If I had a nickel for every escaped bit of radioactivity, well, I would be dead by now.
And if you had a nickel for every bit of radioactivity that goes up a smokestack at a coal power plant, you would really be dead now. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ [scientificamerican.com]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 01 2015, @10:24AM
Number of deaths alone does not make for a good safety measure. You have to consider the total harm caused. Otherwise, Hurricane Andrew at the official count of 26 direct deaths rates as a lesser disaster than some bus crashes. And by a measure of total harm, nuclear does not do so well. Hundreds of sq km of land is unsafe, for centuries. No other power generation method has done that.
The big problem is not that a nuclear power plant can't be run safely. It's that it won't be run safely. Human nature is the biggest danger. The temptation to cut corners is too much for fools to resist, as Fukushima showed. To save a few cents, some management teams will skimp on maintenance. Backup systems will not be tested or kept in working order, reporting will be falsified, and engineers who know better will be subjected to unfair pressure to keep quiet. Minor incidents are hushed up. At Fukushima, they made a time bomb as the sea wall was not built high enough to start with. And they should have known, but they dismissed all warnings as overblown. When disaster struck, the incompetent lying hacks responsible for managing the plants tried to claim that the tsunami was unprecedented in size. No, it wasn't. There was plenty of historical data, even relatively recent data that showed tsunamis could be that high. Even after this disaster, sooner or later, probably sooner, another set of bozos in charge of a nuclear power plant will not take the lesson to heart and will cut corners again, rationalizing away the dangers just as before. Imagine the chief position at such a facility being treated by politicians as useful for rewarding supporters with an easy, cushy job. Then we would eventually get a person like Michael Brown (Heck of a job, Brownie) in charge.
As to that Scientific American article, I've seen it before. I hope you read the correction at the bottom. Coal waste does NOT contain 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste, as originally and wrongly stated. What the corrected version says is that waste from coal releases 100 times more radiation into the environment than a properly run nuclear power plant. Technically true, but a bit misleading. Nuclear waste has to be stored, and it's obvious they are not counting that as "released into the environment". If they said "generated" instead of "released into the environment", a nuclear power plant would would come out far, far worse than all other methods combined.
Waste storage is a huge problem with nuclear power, and all the worse because it's prone to being overlooked while everyone concentrates on the reactor. It doesn't matter how much safer the AP1000 is, if the waste isn't also stored very very securely and safely. I think the most likely nuclear accident in the near future is not another reactor meltdown, but an accidental release from waste storage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @09:31PM
Number of deaths alone does not make for a good safety measure. You have to consider the total harm caused.
Coal causes a lot of harm. I hate coal. You aren't convincing me that we should just keep burning coal.
And by a measure of total harm, nuclear does not do so well. Hundreds of sq km of land is unsafe, for centuries.
Citation absolutely fucking needed. You're just making shit up.
The big problem is not that a nuclear power plant can't be run safely. It's that it won't be run safely.
Then where are all the dead people killed by all the nuclear plants? There have been nuclear plants over half a century. Even if you count the dead from Chernobyl, one tsunami killed more.
Imagine the chief position at such a facility being treated by politicians as useful for rewarding supporters with an easy, cushy job.
Blah, blah, blah. Okay, we will keep burning coal and letting the coal ash kill people because you imagine nuclear power chiefs being treated to a cushy job. That's great.
Nuclear waste has to be stored, and it's obvious they are not counting that as "released into the environment".
Why should they? What we actually do with nuclear waste is store it in a stable underground cave or something like that. What we actually do with coal ash is let it fly up a smokestack and poison the people around the coal plant. Which one hurts more people?
Also, in the near future, the traveling wave reactor technology will be available to use what is currently considered waste as fuel.
I think the most likely nuclear accident in the near future is not another reactor meltdown, but an accidental release from waste storage.
The actual ongoing harm from coal is less scary than some event that has not occurred but worries you. Got it.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 02 2015, @12:02AM
I'm not trying to convince anyone to keep burning coal. Coal is not the only alternative. I forgot to mention that point, so I'm posting again. Nuclear proponents love bashing coal-- it's such a great punching bag. And love to ignore the existence of other power generation methods. How does nuclear compare to wind, water, and solar? Not so good. Not once do you mention any of those. And no, you can't dismiss them as too small to matter. They're big, and getting bigger.
Cites? You want a LMGTFY link? However, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is about 2600 sq km. Fukushima is more difficult to get numbers on, but it is a radius of 30km, which is 2827 sq km, of which slightly less than half is land, so it's about 1400 sq km. That doesn't quite cover all the affected area, so the final figure is a bit higher.
There you go counting number of deaths again. I suggest you look at damages. For instance, land values vary widely, but 4000 sq km of farm land is worth very roughly $5 billion. That's thousands of families that, although they lived, can never go back to their land. What's all the infrastructure on that land worth? Many more billions. The total cost of the Fukushima disaster is estimated at least $105 billion, and may ultimately end up over $200 billion. Chernobyl may be over $500 billion. You can't just clean up and move on from these disasters either, they're gifts that keep on giving.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday January 02 2015, @08:19AM
There are people living in the exclusion zone right now. Perhaps they shouldn't be, but there they are well less than a century later.
Reactor number 3 at Chernobyl remained in operation until 2000.
And that is at the worst run nuclear plant EVER using a terribly outdated design that was far more inherantly dangerous than anything permitted in the west (with the possible exception of Windscale).
My point is that there certainly are dangers but let's not exaggerate. As for technology related damage, leaded gasoline probably ranks worse than Chernobyl if we're being honest.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday January 02 2015, @03:29PM
The Chernobyl RBMK and Windscale proto-Magnox designs were very different. Both had serious problems, but the Windscale one was much simpler (designed and built in a hurry to produce weapons-grade plutonium).
In both cases, it was human error that caused the accidents, though. In Chernobyl, the human error was severe and more like willful stupidity and arrogance whereas the Windscale one was the result of performing a procedure that turned out to be unnecessary with hindsight, but was done because the physics suggested it was prudent. Lack of instrumentation lead to the fire. Chernobyl was caused by drunken lunatics.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04 2015, @05:32AM
How does nuclear compare to wind, water, and solar? Not so good. Not once do you mention any of those. And no, you can't dismiss them as too small to matter. They're big, and getting bigger.
They have their place, but they cannot be depended upon for reliable base-load. I am hoping that technology will be developed to permit storing city level amount of power, then solar and wind will work a lot better.
But meantime consider Germany, which is trying to build out solar and wind and shut down nuclear. Result, their power is really really expensive, and they are burning more coal than ever to try to manage base-load. God save us from going down the same road. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/high-costs-and-errors-of-german-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html [spiegel.de]
There you go counting number of deaths again.
Oh, silly me for using death counts to quantify harm. People who die from coal "don't count" or something? Only nuclear related deaths matter to you?
The total cost of the Fukushima disaster is estimated at least $105 billion, and may ultimately end up over $200 billion. Chernobyl may be over $500 billion.
My original point is that nuclear power plants could be a lot safer, but anti-nuke activists have caused enough hassles that the old gen 1 plants are just still operating. Disasters are more likely with old gen 1 plants than new gen 3 or gen 4. I am in favor of building lots of gen 3 or gen 4 plants and shutting down both coal and gen 1 plants. It's hard to put numbers on the harm caused by coal, other than the death toll number from Huffington Post so I keep using that. Build modern safer plants, shut down dangerous plants.
I want the best for as many people as possible. That means the best, as possible with current technology. (The very best would be solar power built everywhere with city sized batteries plus fusion power for base-load. But fusion is just science fiction right now and so are batteries holding enough electricity for a city.)
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday January 02 2015, @03:19AM
Unless accelerator technology gets used we will have "peak uranium" in 2035-2050. With accelerator technology the waste will be used and nuclear power generation will work for 3000 years before the fuel is used up.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday January 01 2015, @08:17AM
Yeah, activists are so totally at fault. I mean, I hear Paul Watson once showed up at Vermont Yankee with a flare gun, held it right up to the CEO's head and told him that if he didn't cut corners to save costs, he was going to light up his skull like the 4th of July. And don't get me started on Green Peace -- those fuckers are always getting up in shareholder meetings and demanding that maintenance costs be postponed, at the minimum, and better yet, permanently slashed. Then there was Tepco management -- they really wanted to get their diesel generators and tanks up the hill even though it would cost millions, but those PETA fuckers were so all ready to hurl gallons of red paint at the blue sky mural, that they decided to leave that stuff where it was despite the real threat of tsunamis.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Thursday January 01 2015, @08:35PM
There's a clear tactic in American politics, and likely in any democracy, where if one side cannot convince the middle to outright ban something, they will get the middle to agree to "reasonable restrictions" that cause a limiting effect.
Anti-abortion activists push hospital-admitting requirements and ultrasound requirements to make abortion less accessible. They know they cannot get the majority to agree to ban abortion.
Anti-gun activists push training and paperwork requirements, as well as background checks to make guns less accessible. They know they cannot get the majority to agree to ban firearms.
Anti-alcohol activists push ever-stricter alcohol laws, including taxes, to make alcohol less accessible. They know they cannot get prohibition back.
Anti-sprawl activists push environmental impact study requirements to make suburban expansion less profitable. They know they cannot get the majority to agree to stop growth completely.
Incumbent companies in mature industries push regulations and patent laws that favor them. They know they cannot get the majority to give them a government monopoly.
So too do anti-nuclear activists push restrictions to raise the regulatory bar to make nuclear less profitable and thus nuclear power less accessible. They know they cannot get an outright ban without a replacement energy source. So it isn't too hard to see Greenpeace and similar "green groups" putting up any roadblocks they can.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday January 01 2015, @11:29PM
You miss the point. Describe the circumstance in which a potentially dangerous activity when essentially run solely by bean counters and MBAs, is safe? Feel free to not limit yourself to the Nuclear industry -- Bhopal, that nitrogen plant in TX, practically every mine ever dug, etc. etc. If the buck stopped at actual nuclear engineers, Nuclear power might be better off today, but it doesn't and nor will it ever.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday January 02 2015, @03:24AM
Bean counters and MBAs are probably one of the larger deadly risk in the operation of a nuclear plant or any other dangerous activity.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday January 02 2015, @03:12AM
We also need a solution for non-engineers meddling with the design and operation of a power plant. One could require that the CEO of a nuclear plant has an engineering degree and a few years of practicing to be allowed at that position for starters. Add generous severance package by law to deter any firing threat.
Engineers need to decide what needs to be done, period.
Some countries require by law that the head of lawyer firms is a lawyer..
And you may not buy them, by law.
Nuclear power plants at gen-3/4 can probably be run safely provided the people building and operating them do it right.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday January 01 2015, @09:58AM
What, not enough room on the internets for the word "nuclear"?
It's not just that it looks sloppy, but also that "nuke" typically refers to nuclear bombs, so it sounds like the story is about a nuclear bomb factory, not a nuclear power plant.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @01:43PM
electricity is dynamic ... something has to spin. it's called electromotive force.
you cannot just "put it in a bucket" for later use .. like gasoline or oil or gas.
if you want electricity (good stuff) in two thousand years, then you need to find a "dynamic" source to make the electricity "spin".
it's plain stupid to use finite stuff like nuclear fission. it's VERY polluting! like A grade polluting.
coal, gas and oil are renewable, it just takes along time. they are polluting also, but the "pollutants" ARE used automagically to regenerate oil-gas-coal.
on the other hand, the dinosaur that invested in solar derived electricity 10 million years ago is having a good laugh right about now.
probably same w/ the dolphines that forgot how to build the ocean-wave generators.
best to call a donkey a donkey when it's a donkey:
since gold isn't fundamental anymore and doesn't get destroyed it is not a anchor to keep forcing the sheeples to work.
rather use finite resources that drive inflation to keep the sheeples in line and working.
or for that matter shit with a button that can xplode and wipe them out if they get out of line.
hell, blow one nuke plant and say:"Give us money to fix it else you will all be deformed in a few generations ..."
...
PROFIT! nuclear contamination (spreed across the lands or in a drum in cave) can be used as a new fundamental to derive that value of dollars.
the more radioactive pollutants are generated the more money need to be printed to manage it and no-one will complain because if we don't print the money and "manage" the "new-gold" we'll all die!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2015, @02:19PM
that the safety problem with nuclear, isn't the technology. It is the lack of will to use it correctly.
There is no question in my mind that at some point during the design cycle, one or more engineers mentioned that cooling pumps driven by diesel generators wasn't a reliable solution in a tsunami prone area. Further, it is likely that somebody brought up the fact that if the cooling pools were built below sea level, there would be abundant emergency water supply with zero pumps in service. Those guys were probably fired because the added cost would have queered some executives bonus.
Nuclear can be done safely. Nuclear isn't done safely. The latter negates the relevance of the former.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02 2015, @02:23AM
energy of the future