[HN Gopher] Georgia's Vogtle plant, a $35B nuclear project
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Georgia's Vogtle plant, a $35B nuclear project
Author : rntn
Score : 36 points
Date : 2024-04-09 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (grist.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (grist.org)
| itsanaccount wrote:
| I think its interesting when reading The Expanse that its
| mentioned fundamental technology is advanced by "tech
| collectives." Like all organization in that scifi, its touched on
| only briefly, but reading articles like this and the recent
| Boeing madness makes me think that the future of humanities
| technologic progress is not something to be left to the
| marketplace of capital, where people are fungible, because
| they're not. That to succeed in complex endeavors we need more
| complex organizations than gov, business, nonprofit.
|
| Probably off topic but if you find yourself in some kind of
| monastic tech co-op that builds things because they are good
| first and valuable second, hmu.
| Arnt wrote:
| There's a nice posting bunniestudios.com about how the city of
| Shenzhen is such a collective for electronics.
|
| There are others. I live in an area with a lot of small
| companies that build complicated expensive products for small
| audiences. Want a croissant-baking machine? There's long
| institutional knowhow here.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| What would be specialized about baking a croissant? Or do you
| mean you put in flour and butter and croissants come out? I
| would pay handsomely for the second.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| croissants (and any other delicate pastry) require precise
| humidity and temperature control for reliable results.
|
| Think PID controllers which control the heat/humidity
| through the baking cycle, or, conveyer-based systems with
| zones of specific temperature/humidity.
|
| In addition, very modern systems, they are using computer
| vision systems to dynamically analyze the baking to ensure
| perfect doneness.
|
| More repeatable results with less skilled labor is less
| waste is more profits.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| HMU, can't find your contact details ! anucleonfreezer at
| gmail.com
| wkat4242 wrote:
| The expanse doesn't really paint a very nice picture of the
| future of human society though :)
| loeg wrote:
| It's also, you know, fiction. You can tell because of the
| wormholes and aliens and magic.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| You should take a look at:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
|
| There is a template for running a business in a new way.
| Mondragon has sort of reached the limit of what they can do as
| a single institution.
|
| Farmers, have been running coops for a long time. They work and
| are very effective. Again nothing new here just not in the
| headlines. I will say that the irony should be lost on no one
| that rural farmers have a form of working corporate socialism
| that most urban professionals desire.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| How? How how how?
|
| This silly debate comes up everywhere these days as railing
| against the current western economic system has come in vogue
| on the web. But it's not enough to complain, I can fill
| bookshelves with Reddit comments that do that, we need to
| imagine solutions!
|
| A sibling comment pointed out Mondragon which uses the ParEcon
| form of economic management which _is_ an actual answer to the
| question. I 'd love to see other answers.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Bog standard industrial protectionism, as used by Alexander
| Hamilton to industrialize the United States.
|
| They don't often mention that part when they talk about trade
| liberalization, do they? This shit has been understood for
| centuries, but asset-owners just can't help themselves when
| they get a chance to pump at the expense of export-makers,
| even if it's _literal communists_ they are selling us out to.
| I 'd rather not sell out to the _literal communists_ , so
| let's (continue to) roll back the changes. If we don't do it
| voluntarily, our hollowed out industrial base will eventually
| start losing us wars and it will happen involuntarily, with a
| lot more pain.
| fineIllregister wrote:
| >I'd love to see other answers.
|
| Workplace democracy is the only answer. Any other system is
| just some form of private ownership, with all the same
| problems. If we have a different system for choosing owners,
| it's either not private ownership or we arrive right back
| where we started.
| mettamage wrote:
| Direct democracy at a company would be a fun experiment
| that I'd love to be a part of.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Early in the piece it makes the fairly standard pro-nuclear claim
| that nuclear is "... historically been among the safest forms of
| power generation" [1]. It bases this claim on three criteria: (1)
| air pollution (2) accidents and (3) greenhouse gas emissions.
|
| Greenhouse gas emissions is an obvious win. But let's look at the
| other 2. Both are quantified in terms of deaths, which is the
| most favorable metric to nuclear because it says nothing about
| clean up costs and ecological or environmental damage.
|
| Case in point: almost 40 years later, the Chernobyl Absolute
| Exclusion Zone is still quite literally 1000 square miles.
|
| A worse example (for the nuclear industry) is the Fukushima clean
| up costs. The core is still incredibly dangerous and will
| continue to be probably for centuries. It needs to be actively
| cooled. This feels a bunch of tanks with radioactive water that
| is expensive to treat and controversial to release back into the
| ocean once its deemed "safe". We have no way of removing the core
| so this will continue for decades to come, possibly over a
| century.
|
| Fukushima will cost billions in maintenance for decades to come,
| so far has cost >$70 billionn and will likely approach $1
| trillion byh the time it's all over [2].
|
| Now, consider US nuclear power regulation. The Price-Anderson Act
| limits liability for nuclear power incidents to $500 million per
| site with a separate total ($10 billion?) per year [3]. The
| industry has a self-insurance fund to pay for disasters like
| these but the size of that Fukushima clean up cost to date would
| have exceeded that multiple times already.
|
| So who picks up the check? The government. Nuclear power simply
| transfers wealth to private industry while private industry
| assumes almost none of the risk. We would need to trust such
| companies to maintain and operate plants safely when we all know
| that economic incentives will be to cutback on safety,
| inspections and maintenance to maintain and increase profits.
|
| That's why nuclear power is a terrible idea.
|
| [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| [2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-
| costs-...
|
| [3]:
| https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821#:~:te....
| Sakos wrote:
| The only reason why you can say any of this with a straight
| face is because the externalities to almost every other
| alternative are invisible or easy to brush over or to ignore
| outright.
|
| Fossil fuels are obscenely expensive in financial cost in
| direct subsidies as well as in these externalities in
| environmental effects which are going to cost us hundreds of
| billions if not trillions upon trillions. An unfathomable
| amount of money is being lit on fire and will be collectively
| annihilated as the effects of climate change continue to grow
| more and more dire.
|
| And "green energy" can only pretend to be green because we've
| moved much of the world's manufacturing overseas. Even with
| China's staggering pace of nuclear power construction, even as
| the third largest producer of electricity from nuclear power on
| the planet, it fills a single digit percentage of their power
| needs.
|
| What would be the financial and environmental cost to trying to
| replace all that fossil fuel powering countries like China with
| green energy outside of nuclear?
|
| I can't take you seriously in the face of what is going to
| happen to us in the next 30-100 years.
| lokar wrote:
| The fact that the industry is only (possibly) economically
| feasible with this limit on liability tells you everything you
| need to know.
| echelon wrote:
| I live in Georgia. I'm happy we built this, but I'm so unhappy
| about the mismanagement and the added cost to my power bill.
|
| Despite the danger, nuclear is exactly the kind of thing I want a
| SpaceX-type company to tackle. Nuclear should be orders of
| magnitude cheaper. It should be developed at a frenetic pace,
| with even the scary failure modes being tolerated.
|
| Safety doesn't matter to the degree we think it does when
| literally thousands of people die in traffic accidents, and
| hundreds of thousands to preventable diseases.
|
| We don't even need to build near population centers to get this
| off the ground. We have so much space to build and test safely in
| complete isolation.
|
| We're in this spot because of the decades of fearmongering from
| the greens and the geopolitical adversaries masquerading(!) as
| greens. We also have this deeply-held reverence, and perhaps even
| guilt, because we built the bomb.
|
| This thinking has held us back so unfathomably much, and for
| nearly a century. Nuclear could propel us forward as a
| civilization if we'd just let go of the fear.
| renewiltord wrote:
| There are a bunch of Small Modular Reactor companies (Nuscale
| is probably the most well known in the media but venerable
| Westinghouse has one too). Elon Musk might be the world's
| foremost genius at handling government-related businesses (i.e.
| identifying where a startup can unblock government leaders who
| want things done but can't use existing orgs - electric /
| space) and he's stayed away from nuclear. I suspect a SpaceX
| analogue cannot be built in this field.
|
| Part of why renewables are beating SMR companies is
| incrementality. You can build and expand power projects and
| scale up from small installations up high.
|
| It's surprisingly hard to find economical places to build this
| in the US. Even geothermal in completely uninhabitable places
| gets met with opposition from groups like the Burning Man guys.
| I'm sure we'll conquer these regulatory things within the next
| half century, but until then we're in trouble and insistent on
| walking the precipice.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _There are a bunch of Small Modular Reactor companies
| (Nuscale is probably the most well known in the media but
| venerable Westinghouse has one too)._
|
| SMRs are mostly useful for small grids. Efficiency for large
| grids comes from large reactors (>700MW, and perhaps even
| 1000MW) that are built in a pipeline (I've heard the term
| "Large Modular Reactor").
|
| When the province of Ontario built out its CANDUs it built
| them in pairs, and plants had 'packs' of fours and eights. It
| was a fairly standardized design and so the supply chain
| settled down and could churn out components.
| nwiswell wrote:
| > Safety doesn't matter to the degree we think it does when
| literally thousands of people die in traffic accidents, and
| hundreds of thousands to preventable diseases.
|
| I vehemently disagree. Another major disaster is all it will
| take to finish off nuclear for good.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| How so? Even if we include Chernobyl (which emitted so much
| pollution because it didn't have secondary containment,
| something Western reactors have) nuclear is still one of the
| safest form of energy production, beating out pretty much
| anything except non-rooftop solar.
| adventured wrote:
| Because as Japan and Germany demonstrated, nuclear events
| cause masses of people to become hyper emotional, hyper
| irrational in their thinking. The Japanese and Germans are
| not known for their wildly emotional thinking, to emphasize
| the context.
|
| You're trying to apply logical thinking to a subject that
| historically has been governed by emotion: how people feel
| about it.
| bradfox2 wrote:
| You are looking for Kairos. They are iterating and succeeding.
| Most of the hurdles are not engineering but licensing and
| regulatory.
| throw0101d wrote:
| The _Decouple_ podcast recently had three-part series on Vogtle:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGySq7QBRiY
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfkoMUmmUCI
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbKf_TbI000
|
| It mentions a few 'macro' issues with Vogtle: the first being the
| choice of using an AP-1000 design (Westinghouse Toshiba). Not
| because it is/was necessarily 'inherently' a bad design (the
| guest, James Krellenstein, describes himself as an "AP-100
| fanboy"), but rather because it was (at the time) never built
| before. That, combined with the fact that the US had little/no
| institutional knowledge of building nuclear plants means that a
| whole lot of learning needed to be done.
|
| Contrast this with another available (at the time) option, the
| ABWR, which GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy had building been for over
| a decade in Japan. Between ABWR build beginning and commercial
| operations it took about 4-5 years on average:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
|
| They had a ready-to-go supply chain, with plenty of experience.
|
| Tied into the fact that the AP1000 was a new design, they decided
| to start building before 'detailed' drawings were only ~40% done.
| So they had the high-level view design done, but the drawings for
| machinists and pipe fitters needed were not ready, and so that
| added to delays, as they had to first create them, and then there
| was all sorts of back-and-forth to refine them. These issues were
| called out in the article:
|
| > _When Vogtle's Units 3 and 4 were approved by Georgia
| regulators in 2009, the reactor model, known as an AP1000, had
| never before been built. (It was Westinghouse's flagship model,
| combining massive generation capacity with new "passive safety"
| features, which allow reactors to remain cooled and safe without
| human intervention, external power, or emergency generators in
| the case of an accident.) It later emerged that the reactor's
| developer, Westinghouse, had not even fully completed the design
| before starting construction, causing a significant share of the
| project's costly setbacks. While that was bad news for Georgians,
| it could mean a smoother path ahead for future reactors._
|
| > _"In the course of building Vogtle," Kozeracki told Grist, "we
| have now addressed three of the biggest challenges: the
| incomplete design, the immature supply chain, and the untrained
| workforce."_
|
| Somewhere in the podcast they also go over some interesting
| 'bureaucratic minutiae': the plant was originally approved under
| a part of the regulations where everything is submitted 'all at
| once' and approved 'all at once', but any later changes to the
| design may take longer. As opposed another part where the design
| is submitted in parts, which may have been better as it would
| have allowed for gradual refine of the plants and submission when
| they were 'actually' finalized.
|
| It also doesn't help that the US has so many 'one-off' nuclear
| plants, so that experience in one cannot be directly transferred
| between them. Contrast that with France, which has a fairly
| cookie-cutter fleet, or even (closer to home) the province of
| Ontario which has CANDUs everywhere (which were generally
| constructed in pairs and were often ordered in four- and eight-
| packs).
|
| Some CANDUs are currently undergoing refurbishment, and the
| project is on-/under-budget and ahead of schedule. Interview with
| the fellow in charge of the refurb program:
|
| > _Gary Rose, VP New Nuclear Growth at Ontario Power Generation,
| walks us through the CANDU refurbishment program whose stunning
| successes have laid the foundation for deployment of the west's
| 1st grid scale SMR, the GE Hitachi BWRX-300._
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHTtthahwjs
|
| Of course now that the AP1000 has been built twice (Vogtle Units
| 3 and 4), plans exist and there's experience. The question is
| whether any new plants that are going to be built will use that
| experience, or choose yet another design.
| dhc02 wrote:
| I find it fascinating that you forgot to type the same word
| twice: build (different conjugations, but still).
|
| "...which GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy had been [building] for
| over a decade in Japan."
|
| "Of course now that the AP1000 has been [built] twice..."
|
| I would not comment just to "catch" you making a typo. I really
| think it's interesting that your brain slipped over the same
| idea twice in such a short span.
| epistasis wrote:
| IMHO this podcast is way too biased in favor of nuclear, and
| exemplifies the entire problem with the nuclear industry: too
| much magical thinking and not enough hard retrospective self-
| criticism.
|
| Are we going to be able to construct nuclear in the future?
| Probably? Maybe? But if folks like this are in charge of the
| efforts, then my answer is a firm "never."
|
| Take for example when Jigar Shah went on their podcast. Shah is
| a huuuge nuclear fan, and IMHO is way too optimistic too (for
| example the DoE's LPO Liftoff report on nuclear gave it a
| 30%-50% cost advantage out of nowhere in order to make it look
| the least bit plausible). But for all of Shah's blind spots on
| nuclear, at least he tried to give the Decouple podcast a small
| shower of reality:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwN1MCtBkVk
|
| (BTW, Shah has said on recent podcasts that there will be more
| announcements of new AP1000s soon, and since he's giving out so
| much money to get them built, we should probably believe that.
| IMHO, I'd bet 10:1 that it will be wasted money that would be
| better spent on batteries and solar, but when it comes to
| subsidies and government spending, money is not actually
| fungible, so I support more shots on goal, even if they are
| very very long shots)
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Nuclear power, despite its larger costs, is the only form of
| non-intermittent green energy production other than
| geographically limited options like dams and geothermal. Once
| wind and solar start saturating energy markets during peak
| hours of production, each new wind and solar plant has
| diminishing returns. While the plants themselves are
| expensive, producing wind and solar power at large scale and
| offsetting intermittency incurs costs in the form of
| increased transmission capacity and storage requirements.
|
| People really often don't comprehend just how titanic the
| storage requirements are just to provision half a day's worth
| of energy to offset daily solar fluctuations. The globe
| currently uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. That's 30,000
| GWh for 12 hours of storage. Keep in mind, electricity is
| only about half our total energy use, heating and
| transportation also need to be electrified which will drive
| this number up. And lastly, diurnal storage isn't the only
| storage we'll need. We'll also need seasonal storage to
| offset weather fluctuations.
|
| When we stop asking "what's the most cost-efficient way to
| reduce CO2 emissions by a percent or two?" and start asking
| "how will we build a 100% carbon-free grid?" nuclear becomes
| a much more attractive option.
| fineIllregister wrote:
| > While the plants themselves are expensive, producing wind
| and solar power at large scale and offsetting intermittency
| incurs costs in the form of increased transmission capacity
| and storage requirements.
|
| My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper than
| nuclear even when accounting for storage.
|
| That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as
| waste disposal and decomissioning.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper
| than nuclear even when accounting for storage.
|
| This understanding is either based on geographically
| limited storage options (hydroelectric storage), or is
| incorrect. The amount of batteries required to even out
| intermittent sources is many times more than the amount
| of batteries produced. The cost of a 1 GWh facility is
| very different from a 1 TWh facility. The latter is 2x
| the amount of batteries produced worldwide each year. But
| it's only 2 hours of the USA's electricity consumption.
| That's how big of a mismatch there exists between battery
| supply and the demands of grid storage.
|
| > That's before you get to the externalized costs, such
| as waste disposal and decomissioning.
|
| Waste disposal and decommissioning are already factored
| into nuclear power's cost. They have to pre-pay the cost
| of disposal and decommissioning.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper
| than nuclear even when accounting for storage._
|
| In Ontario nuclear costs 10C//kWh while wind costs 15C/
| and solar 50C/:
|
| * https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-
| report-2022...
|
| And when wind goes to zero at night, then
| (natural/methane) gas generators are often spun up.
| epistasis wrote:
| > is the only form of non-intermittent green energy
| production other than geographically limited options like
| dams and geothermal
|
| That "is" should be a "was".
|
| > The globe currently uses 60 TWh of electricity per day.
| That's 30,000 GWh for 12 hours of storage.
|
| Bloomberg New Energy Finance tracks battery production
| capacity announcements, and has a total world capacity of
| 7.9 TWh/year by the end of 2025 [0]. With a warrantied life
| of 12-20 years, that 2025 manufacturing capacity would
| support 95-158 TWh of ongoing storage.
|
| Keep in mind that the talking points you are drawing from
| are several years of out date and assume an audience that
| knows little about the world of energy. HN is not the right
| place to pull out the standard bag of tricks from the
| electronic information toolkit.
|
| For example, you claim a need for "seasonal" storage out of
| nowhere, but do not consider the obvious (to the HN audince
| at least) idea of overcapacity such that there's enough
| generation at the seasonal minimum to cover needs, and
| oversupply the rest of the year.
|
| Already, many countries in Europe have seen single-digit
| /MWh average prices this month [1]. That's going to become
| far more common during most of the year.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/colinmckerrache/status/177588088816
| 26562...
|
| [1] https://x.com/LionHirth/status/1777309657804992969
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _IMHO this podcast is way too biased in favor of nuclear,
| and exemplifies the entire problem with the nuclear industry:
| too much magical thinking and not enough hard retrospective
| self-criticism._
|
| Why do things have to be balanced or unbiased? The anti-
| nuclear folks have their platforms, why can't the pro-nuclear
| people have theirs?
|
| It is "biased" because it is run by a _nuclear advocate_? But
| given they had a three-part series on _the problems_ and
| _what went wrong_ with Vogtle, it 's not like they're trying
| to hide everything under the rug.
|
| A little while ago they published a video on a debate with an
| anti-nuclear individual:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfL40rSFT00
|
| > _Take for example when Jigar Shah went on their podcast._
|
| I have not gotten to that episode (yet?), but have heard Shah
| on podcasts like _Odd Lots_ discussing his work more
| generally.
|
| > _IMHO, I 'd bet 10:1 that it will be wasted money that
| would be better spent on batteries and solar, but when it
| comes to subsidies and government spending, money is not
| actually fungible, so I support more shots on goal, even if
| they are very very long shots)_
|
| As someone who lives in Ontario (same as _Decouple_ host), my
| experience with renewables haven 't exactly been thrilling
| (click on "Supply"):
|
| * https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
|
| Every time wind goes down (including down to zero),
| (natural/methane) gas generators tend to have to be powered
| up (putting junk into the atmosphre). I'd rather we just
| build more CANDUs for base load and let hydro take up more of
| the variable load.
| epistasis wrote:
| Sure, have a pro-nuclear platform, but it would actually be
| productive it it attempted to improve the field instead of
| tilting at windmills of political goals.
|
| That's the difference between the success of renewables and
| the failures of nuclear. The renewable folks went out and
| built the stuff, made it scale, and fixed the problems. The
| nuclear folks are star-gazing, hoping and dreaming, without
| executing at all.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Sure, have a pro-nuclear platform, but it would
| actually be productive it it attempted to improve the
| field instead of tilting at windmills of political
| goals._
|
| If there are factual issues with what they say, feel free
| to post a comment correcting them. Just because something
| is (allegedly) "biased" does not make it wrong.
|
| > _That 's the difference between the success of
| renewables and the failures of nuclear._
|
| There's also a difference between the _failures (and
| inadequacies) of renewables_ and the _success of nuclear_
| :
|
| * https://www.ieso.ca/power-data SS Supply
|
| When wind goes to zero at night (which it has done in
| Ontario), what are the options for keeping people warm in
| January and cool in July?
| zer00eyz wrote:
| The elephant in the room is really the cooling pools at all the
| plants. And there is the rub, a lot of that nuclear fuel could
| be "recharged" but no one wants to build those sorts of
| reactors either. I think France shut their last one down a
| while ago.
|
| There is no scale of nuclear that really makes sense.
|
| Look at Fukushima. Not only is the whole area a mess. No one
| knows what to do with the mess. There's a lot filled with
| radioactive metal scraps and a security guard. Tell me does
| that seem cleaned up and dealt with to you?
|
| Nuclear power creates a problem so big, that lasts for so long,
| that it is on a time scale beyond peoples comprehension. Look
| at the efforts that were being proposed to mark the site at
| Yucca Mountain. You remember Yucca Mountain, the hole in the
| ground where we were gonna burry this problem. Yea we didn't do
| that.
|
| So right now nuclear waste is everywhere. And it is becoming
| more prevalent, and less controlled. How long before we have
| another one of these
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiania_accident ... how many
| more generations are going to be cleaning up Chernobyl? That
| fancy building that we slid over the site. It's not even gonna
| make it 100 years before it needs replaced. We're going to be
| dealing with the site for generations to come.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Look at Fukushima. Not only is the whole area a mess. No
| one knows what to do with the mess._
|
| As someone who lives in Toronto, Canada, which is ~50km (as
| the crow flies) to a nuclear plant, I have no qualms about
| nuclear, and wish we'd build more in the province.
|
| As for waste, they have an entire episode called "What About
| the Waste?":
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2t2tYQsK94
|
| At the end of the day, we can just bury it:
|
| * https://globalnews.ca/news/10191441/site-canada-nuclear-
| wast...
|
| It's currently not economically viable to reprocess it
| because uranium is so cheap, but having it available for
| possible future needs would be nice.
|
| > _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiania_accident_
|
| You are comparing apple to orange: the above was a tiny
| module. Nuclear "waste" from reactors is stored in cement
| cylinders that weight _tonnes_.
|
| And we need radioactive materials, like the one in the above
| incident, for many applications, including medical treatments
| as well as for things like sterilizing things. Canada, which
| has a nuclear industry, provide a lot of the world's medical
| isotopes:
|
| > _The deal to produce the isotope at Darlington will ease
| concerns about access to the raw material for TheraSphere,
| which has been provided to more than 100,000 liver cancer
| patients worldwide, said Peter Pattison, president of Boston
| Scientific 's interventional oncology franchise in Ottawa._
|
| * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-darlington-
| nu...
|
| * https://www.canadianisotopes.ca/isotopes-in-canada/
|
| * https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-
| resources/en...
|
| Unless you wish to deprive people of possibly life-saving
| treatment options?
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_therapy
| zer00eyz wrote:
| At the end of the day, we can just bury it: *
| https://globalnews.ca/news/10191441/site-canada-nuclear-
| wast...
|
| Can.. CAN???
|
| This is the sort of magical thinking that the pro nuclear
| crowed cant come to terms with. Yes you can, why didn't you
| did this hole in the ground in 1980 when the first reactor
| went on line... Looking for a site to dig at next year does
| not solve the 40 years of waste (public electric, Canada
| has waste going back to the 50's) sitting on the ground
| outside at every nuclear site out side the baltic. (they
| dug a hole, and guess what its filling up pretty fast cause
| they built more stuff after they started digging).
|
| Who pays to clean all this up? Who is going to foot the
| bill for the hole? who is going to fund security for it for
| the rest of time. Show me that math before we build one
| more plant. Dig the the hole. DO IT don't TELL ME ABOUT IT.
|
| SEE: Every project in the world that was going to do it,
| France, USA, USSR, Japan, Canada... and one working hole in
| Finland that will fill up in half the expected time.
|
| >> It's currently not economically viable to reprocess it
| because uranium is so cheap, but having it available for
| possible future needs would be nice.
|
| https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=
| 0...
|
| Dig it up, and then leave a mess for someone else to clean
| is no different than the economics of coal, it's just on a
| smaller scale. And thank god cause uranium has a half life.
|
| >> You are comparing apple to orange: the above was a tiny
| module. Nuclear "waste" from reactors is stored in cement
| cylinders that weight tonnes.
|
| There is no amount of "safe" nuclear material. Full stop.
|
| >>> The nation's spent nuclear fuel is initially stored in
| steel-lined concrete pools surrounded by water. It's later
| removed from the pools and placed into dry storage casks
| that are made of steel and concrete or other materials used
| for protective shielding.
|
| From: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-
| about-spent-...
|
| The waste isnt embedded in cement, Its in a cement
| container with a cement lid. They used to use (and may
| still be made by a company that makes) septic tanks. Your
| nuclear waste has the same protective storage as a rural
| house puts its shit. The only reason it goes in this sort
| of housing. Because it makes it hard to causally fuck
| something up (see every pre 1970's nuclear accident, and
| there are LOTS OF THEM, including at the same site as the
| next point).
|
| You mean this reactor that Canada shut down: https://world-
| nuclear-news.org/Articles/Canadian-isotope-rea...
|
| This was vital, maybe for the public good sure. And leaking
| heavy water. In the grand scheme of things not THAT bad,
| but should not be happening... was this a systemic failure
| or a true accident? The reality was that the the economics
| to run it safely weren't there.
| epistasis wrote:
| There's two separate ideas when it comes to technology: what it
| can be, and what it actually is.
|
| After nearly 70 years, I think we need to take a hard look at
| what nuclear _actually_ is. And it 's a fantastically complex,
| wondrously large, construction project, that has to last a long
| long time without big repairs.
|
| To the best of our knowledge of technology and industry,
| something like that does not typically get cheap. We may get
| slightly better at doing it, but there's a vanishingly small
| chance that we will hit a 10x reduction in cost for nuclear, and
| almost certainty that we will _not_ hit a 100x reduction in cost.
| For anything like that, we 'd need a massive new tech
| breakthrough such that it would be considered an entirely new
| technology. That breakthrough would be the underlying tech, not
| using neutrons and chains of nuclear reactions to generate heat.
|
| In contrast, we have several technologies in hand that are going
| to see a 10x-100x reduction in cost, and even at current prices
| are competitive or the market leader: wind, solar, and batteries.
|
| Look at any part of the country where there's an electricity
| market with any sort of freedom of generation, and new generation
| is dominated by wind, solar, and batteries. That's going to get
| more extreme in coming decades. Energy generation is going to get
| ever cheaper. (That doesn't mean that grid electricity will
| necessarily get cheaper, utilities will recoup lost revenue by
| making transmission and distribution more expensive, because they
| are very good at tricking regulators.)(
|
| In any case, give nuclear a shot. But current attempts are
| skating to where the puck was 5-10 years ago, and they won't
| finish until the puck has spent 10-15 years more of shifting
| towards ever cheaper solar, wind, and batteries.
|
| We all grew up with nuclear as the power source in our science
| fiction stories. But without a SF level advance in nuclear
| technology (e.g. direct neutron momentum-->electricity), we know
| that nuclear will at the very best be a tiny player in the future
| energy world.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > To the best of our knowledge of technology and industry,
| something like that does not typically get cheap.
|
| History demonstrates otherwise, though: nuclear _was_ cheap in
| the late 1960s and early 1970s [1]. This is a period of time
| where nuclear power was built at scale, with the same designs
| built repeatedly. A production run of 40 steam generators is
| much cheaper on a per-unit cost basis than a production run of
| 4 steam generators. Lower numbers of nuclear projects following
| 3 Mile Island reduced this economy of scale, resulting in
| higher costs per unit.
|
| It's quite amusing to see someone talk about a 10-100x
| reduction in the cost of intermittent sources so confidently,
| yet discounting the possibility of cheaper nuclear power
| despite the historical precedence. Unfortunately, renewable
| costs have largely flatlined and started to increase [2].
|
| 1.
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
|
| 2. https://www.economist.com/business/2023/12/04/the-
| renewables...
|
| Relevant chart: https://www.economist.com/cdn-
| cgi/image/width=600,quality=80...
| epistasis wrote:
| > It's quite amusing to see someone talk about a 10-100x
| reduction in the cost of intermittent sources so confidently,
| yet discounting the possibility of cheaper nuclear power
| despite the historical precedence.
|
| Sure, find it amusing, but your own sources demonstrate a 5x
| difference in the past "cheap" era of nuclear to its more
| expensive current era. Even if we could somehow go back to
| knowing less about nuclear, or get to an era of cheaper
| labor, then we are only looking at a 5x decrease. And the
| trend is for higher costs, now lower costs with nuclear.
|
| TMI is a completely irrelevant event in the ordering of new
| nuclear, the real problem was that too many reactors had been
| ordered, too many of them got behind schedule, and there was
| a massive oversupply of electricity, and not enough demand.
| In 1985, a Forbes cover story by James Cook called this
| misprediction of demand "the largest managerial disaster in
| business history."
|
| https://rmi.org/insight/nuclear-follies/
|
| >Unfortunately, renewable costs have largely flatlined and
| started to increase
|
| In order to make such a claim you have to really cherry pick,
| which is why you are using an out-of-date image during a
| global supply crunch. There have been several points in
| history where solar power had a year or two of stalled or
| even increased prices, only to drop precipitously soon after
| the supply-chain crunch had been solved.
|
| So are you predicting both a reversal of nuclear cost
| increases, and even decreases to the point of a 10x drop? And
| that the trend of the past decades for renewables will stop?
| To predict two such very large reversals, without evidence,
| is not atypical in the nuclear fan crowd, but I do not
| operate with such faith, and prefer data.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > but I do not operate with such faith, and prefer data.
|
| And what data is telling you that wind power is going to
| see a 100x drop? The reality is that only one of us has
| backed up our claims about the feasibly of lower costs with
| data. I pointed to the historical precedence of cheaper
| nuclear power. Your claim of 10-100x drop in costs is not.
| Retric wrote:
| Comparing the construction cost of nuclear with the lifetime
| cost of renewables gives wildly inaccurate cost estimates.
|
| Historically nuclear required ~500 highly skilled workers per
| GW _for 50 years_. Call it ~50 million / year * 50 years and
| labor alone is 2.5 Billion dollars. Fuel rods, replacement
| equipment, insurance, decommissioning, etc all add up.
|
| You want really cheap nuclear, find out how you can safely
| operate a nuclear power plant without 24/7 armed security,
| enrichment, etc. Lower construction costs alone just won't
| cut it. We're rapidly approaching the point where handing
| someone a fully built reactor for free and they can't operate
| profitably without subsidies.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Quite the contrary, the cost of construction accounts
| 60-80% of the cost of nuclear power [1]. Operating costs of
| an individual nuclear plant may be large compared to an
| individual wind farm, but the former produces a _lot_ more
| electricity. The operating costs of a nuclear plant are
| actually quite small compared to the amount of electricity
| they produce. That 's why most of the talk is around
| reducing construction costs.
|
| 1. https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/
| rich_sasha wrote:
| > In contrast, we have several technologies in hand that are
| going to see a 10x-100x reduction in cost, and even at current
| prices are competitive or the market leader: wind, solar, and
| batteries.
|
| Isn't it a bit crazy to assume such a huge drop in costs? The
| same thing was done with nuclear: electricity too cheap to
| meter. Only it never materialized.
|
| Also, wind and solar are cheap, but they lean on fossil fuels
| for random dispatch. Basically we produce as much wind and
| solar as the weather permits, then top it up with gas or coal.
| But what is the cost of providing base load via
| renewables+batteries _right now_ (and if it 's competitive then
| why aren't there more such installations, apart from a few
| unusually sunny places).
|
| Don't get me wrong, a future with 100% renewable, cheap energy
| sounds great, but I think nuclear getting cheaper is no more
| optimistic than banking on a 10-100x price drop for renewables
| and batteries.
| epistasis wrote:
| The difference is that wind, solar, and batteries have a
| history of getting 10x cheaper, and they are continuing on
| that trend. And the way that these tech curves work is that
| we will see a slowing of the decrease in prices before it
| stops, and we haven't seen that yet. A 10x fall in solar and
| at least a 5x fall in the cost of batteries is baked in at
| this point, even if the tech curves started to slow today.
|
| Nuclear _never_ had that trend of getting cheaper. And the
| only person that said anything about it being too cheap to
| meter was probably talking about fusion instead of fission,
| and would have been even more wrong than about fission. (It
| was said by Lewis Strauss, who was recently depicted
| /demonized in the movie Oppenheimer).
|
| People continually underestimate solar/wind/batteries, as in
| the actual industry analysts that make predictions _always_
| underpredict, every year, year after year after year. If you
| want to know the future of solar, find the _most_ optimistic
| prediction you can, and go bigger, and you 'll be a better
| forecaster than the rest of the industry.
|
| I don't know if electricity will ever be too cheap to meter,
| that sort of overpromising is what the nuclear industry does,
| not what the renewable industry does. (And I'm not in the
| renewables industry, just an interested observer.)
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _After nearly 70 years, I think we need to take a hard look
| at what nuclear actually is. And it 's a fantastically complex,
| wondrously large, construction project, that has to last a long
| long time without big repairs._
|
| Why "withougt big repairs"?
|
| The province of Ontario is in the middle of refurbishing their
| CANDU reactors (with the project currently on-budget and ahead
| of schedule). This will make them useable for another few
| decades.
|
| Depending on the design, there's no reason why (at least in
| some cases) components can't be replaced regularly to keep
| things going (Ship of Theseus-like):
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoU3U7TYNLA
|
| > _But current attempts are skating to where the puck was 5-10
| years ago, and they won 't finish until the puck has spent
| 10-15 years more of shifting towards ever cheaper solar, wind,
| and batteries._
|
| Japan was finishing (A)BWR nuclear plants in 4-5 years:
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
|
| The reason why things take so long in the US is:
|
| * things start and stop (versus just deciding on a course of
| action of going for it)
|
| * having so many 'one-off' designs, so experience cannot be
| transferred between plants (settled on one design, like France
| and Canada did; _maybe_ two)
|
| * ordering one unit at a time ( _maybe_ two), so economies of
| scale cannot be started (build in pairs, with a goal of having
| 4 /6/8 reactors in one location)
| jpdus wrote:
| This is such a good comment and should be auto-posted to every
| pro-nuclear thread. I get why people want to believe in nuclear
| and i'd wish that we invested a lot more in development,
| security and scaling of this technology.... 30 years ago. Now,
| it's just too late and we have better viable alternatives.
|
| One additional argument that's mostly missed: every fission
| reactor is only economically viable (if it is at all) when
| discounting the implicit state guarantee, that's necessary as
| no insurer will take on the risk. Adding a theoretical risk
| premium paid by taxpayers to the calculation, nuclear will
| never be competitive.
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