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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.

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?

marze 9y ago
The "cheap to operate" myth has long been debunked by all of the 100% depreciated nuclear plants closing, because, they are not cheap to operate.
- bluedino 9y ago
  Although at the current time, low natural gas prices make natural gas plants very attractive, most nuclear plants are closed because of public outcry. A lot of these plants are nearing 50 years old as well.
  - beat 9y ago
    Per the article, old nuclear plants are being closed because they are not cost-competitive with natural gas. If you're saying they're actually being closed due to public opposition, you should cite a source. Preferably one as non-partisan as the NYT.
    - epistasis 9y ago
      You are correct, they are being closed due to financial reasons, not due to public outcry. However, there is an argument that they should get the economic benefit of being carbon free, something that is granted to solar and wind. Right now we subsidize two technologies, rather than taxing the externality. It would be far more economically rational to tax carbon emissions, and for coal to also tax the other costs it imposes in non-carbon emissions. There's currently a legal battle going on to allow nuclear plants to have Zero Emmisions Credits (ZEC) in several states where nuclear plants can no longer compete in the marketplace: http://www.utilitydive.com/news/zecs-appeal-illinois-new-york-nuclear-cases-could-shape-power-market-juri/448096/ http://www.utilitydive.com/news/zecs-appeal-illinois-new-yor...
      - freeflight 9y ago
        > However, there is an argument that they should get the economic benefit of being carbon free, something that is granted to solar and wind. They already have the benefit of not having to pay for their long term waste disposal and being bailed out in the event of a critical failure, which is arguably among the biggest long-term costs for nuclear. Not too long ago German energy companies paid a flat fee of 24 billion Euros to absolve them from any future responsibility to pay for end storage. The US nuclear industry does pay a tax for disposal but that doesn't cover anywhere near the actual costs of storage. We are talking about materials that need to be stored thousands of years here, a couple of dozens billion Euros (or Dollars) are peanuts in that regard. The timescales are just insane with this stuff and make it very likely that we still gonna have to pay for keeping disposal intact many thousand years after we phased out of nuclear into something we can't even fathom right now. Isn't that a nice vision of the future? We might manage to get our cheap, clean and renewable energy, but we will still be stuck taking care of very dangerous and expensive waste for thousands of years.
        opo 9y ago
        >...We are talking about materials that need to be stored thousands of years here, a couple of dozens billion Euros (or Dollars) are peanuts in that regard. The timescales are just insane with this stuff and make it very likely that we still gonna have to pay for keeping disposal intact many thousand years after we phased out of nuclear into something we can't even fathom right now. Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel: "...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor The worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. To put it into perspective, no one of the general public has ever been hurt by nuclear waste and you definitely can't say that about coal waste.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    Changes in technology have made natural gas cheap. But I think that's temporary - twenty years from now we're probably going to regret shuttering our nuclear plants and will be stuck with coal for at least a decade.
- pm90 9y ago
  Coal plants would not be cheap to operate either if they had to pay for all the environmental damage they actually cause. Natural gas plants... they seem to be a good compromise for now, but we just cannot depend on fossil fuel to meet the electrical needs of future generations. It is my sincere hope that we continue having a nuclear power industry to maintain the know-how learned over several generations. This would be useful not just for domestic power generations, but e.g. generating power for space stations, lunar/martian bases etc.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    There is always the Navy. Or at least, I would expect them to continue operating nuclear vessels for quite some time.
    - pc86 9y ago
      Part of the appeal of nuclear operations for the Navy (aside from the prestige) is the lucrative private sector opportunity. You'll see fewer folks going into that field if those private sector jobs dry up.
- mseebach 9y ago
  Has it, though? Keep in mind the difference between "expensive" and "a lot of money". Nuclear costs a ton to build and a ton to decommission, but in between is a very long period of nearly constant very high power production. New-built nuclear costs around €5.3b (Finland[1] and France[2]) to €9.3b (UK[3]) per installed GW, and France, Germany and UK estimates €300m, €1.4b and €2.7b (respectively) pr GW installed to decommission. That's €6-€13b/GW total + operating costs -- and those costs will come down as (if) we start ramping up construction and learn to avoid the cost overruns and get experience decommissioning plants. New-built offshore wind costs €3-4.7b/GW[4] -- and these prices are set to go up, as the easy sites for installation are running out. Capacity factors are only around 50%, so already there offshore wind is roughly on par with fully loaded nuclear (which has capacity factors of 90+%), and that's without counting decommissioning, extremely high operating expenses and the extra infrastructure and pollution required to deal with the unreliability of wind (typically, gas plants), and, most severely, the expected lifetime of ~25 years[5] compared to 60+ years for nuclear. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in_the_North_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in... 5: http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1320109/question-week-offshore-projects-built-last http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1320109/question-wee...
  - epistasis 9y ago
    Thank you for injecting some great numbers! One minor quibble though, as offshore construction procedures improve, and get cheaper, it looks as though more sites are becoming "easy." And in the US, off-shore wind construction hasn't even really begun. Nuclear is also similarly "non-dispatchable" when compared to wind; nuclear has to be run at maximum capacity in order to get to those numbers, just as wind's energy has to be used to get to its numbers, and neither of these follows the demand. So both nuclear and wind require other dispatchable resources. Though it's gas plants at the moment, it seems very likely that battery storage will take over quite soon from gas plants. In many markets, peaker plants are already more expensive than battery storage. As batteries get cheaper, and more technologies (like flow batteries) mature, gas's days are numbered (except perhaps for combined-cycle gas turbines). I also can't share your optimism about nuclear construction costs going down. The numbers you are citing already are best-case scenarios, of well-managed projects without huge cost overruns like what happens in the US. The promise of the AP1000 reactors which were just abandoned in South Carolina was that it was a modular, consistent design, implemented around the world. The cost savings for that have not materialized. Meanwhile, the tech curves for wind, solar, and storage technologies have had more than a decade of proof of declining costs. Even in "modular and reusable" designs, every nuclear plant seems to be a one-off, due to the massive scale.
ImSkeptical 9y ago
>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. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
- ardit33 9y ago
  All that, and Chernobyl. I was a kid when it happened, but it affected most of Europe, (the radiation ended up going all the way to Sweden and Italy). It is hard to measure the cancer rates due to it, but the numbers are significant. " (The 95% confidence levels are 27,000 to 108,000 cancers and 12,000 to 57,000 deaths.) In addition, as of 2005, some 6,000 thyroid cancers and 15 thyroid cancer deaths have been attributed to Chernobyl. That number will grow with time." Nuclear power failure has the power to create a wasteland of its surrounding for millennia, that's why nobody wants them on their backyard.
  - elsonrodriguez 9y ago
    Nuclear power creates a wasteland of surrounding areas. Fossil fuels create a wasteland of the world.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      The fight is no longer between fossil and nuclear; its nuclear versus renewables. And renewables are winning.
beders 9y ago
" 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." And there goes the misinformation campaign again. The issues is not 'deaths per kw hour'. The issue is the unpredictable outcome of a single reactor incident. How many more do we need to endure? How many more areas becoming radiated for generations? How much more radioactive waster water? How many more cancer deaths? And how much more need tax payers pay for cleanup before we realize: Let's stop using this energy source. Let's go renewals. It's the only sane option.
jartelt 9y ago
Actually it is NOT cheap to operate a nuclear power plant after it is built. That is why nuclear plants in Illinois and New York have been bailed out recently and why utilities in other starts are looking for similar bailouts. These utilities could not profitably operate existing nuclear plants in the current market. I totally agree that nuclear power has a much better safety record than most would believe and that nuclear power is a great low carbon electricity source, but it is not a cheap power source. Maybe modular reactors can compete sometime in the future, but we really have no idea until some are built and operated.
- thephyber 9y ago
  > Actually it is NOT cheap to operate a nuclear power plant after it is built I would argue that the innovations in rival energy sources have made it comparatively expensive, but the cost was largely established when the plant was built (likely in the 1960s - 1970s). In other words, it was cheap, but the fact that nuclear requires such a massive outlay to build the facility means that nuclear is a very long term financial gamble and assumes that a variety of other energy sources don't fundamentally change their cost curve (like oil and natural gas did in recent decades).
  - freeflight 9y ago
    It's only "cheap" as long as you can outsource the long-term costs, like for waste storage or in the case of a disaster. As is, these plants are barely profitable, imagine they'd be forced to set funds aside for clean-up operations in case something goes really wrong, talking about real funds here that would make an actual difference and not some token amount. They don't do that because they know it would totally ruin their bottom line but by any metric they should be doing exactly that because it would be their mess that needs to be cleaned up when something goes wrong. These costs are very real and in the case of catastrophic failure can be so high that even major economies are struggling to pay them (like Japan has been). And it's not like we have any good ways to hold anybody responsible when something actually goes wrong. The responsible company can just declare bankruptcy and have somebody else deal with the costs and long-term ramifications of the clean-up efforts aka the tax payer.
pps43 9y ago
> when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. That makes more of an emotional reaction The reaction can be completely rational. It depends on your estimate of the probability of a nuclear accident worse than Chernobyl. Officially it's around 10^-9 per reactor-year, but it's clearly an underestimate, if only because of the unknown unknowns. Get a more realistic probability estimate, multiply by cost of all real estate in a large metro area, and you can get a pretty large expected loss. > How do you build a storage facility that keeps it contained for that long? This is a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
grecy 9y ago
> Its just that when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. Not only does it go wrong, we have absolutely no way to stop it. It's literally out of our control. I was a supporter of Nuclear, though Fukushima taught me a very important lesson. When things went bad there, we literally stood back and said "well, damn. There is nothing we can do" and watched it melt for weeks and weeks. Nobody could go in, and we had no robots that could go in and do a thing. It was lucky it's close enough to just pump endless water into it. Then a few weeks later the experts said "oh, all that highly contaminated water is going straight into the ocean. We wondered where it was going". As it were the Japanese had elderly people volunteering to go in, essentially committing suicide. It's also worth remembering that at Chernobyl there was also nothing we could do - other than force people to commit suicide by going in where it was deadly. That won't fly today. While the chances of things going that wrong are very low (it's only happened twice, maybe three times in history) I think the consequences are too great to justify it. We can't even control it when it goes bad!
- iooi 9y ago
  A bit more than twice, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
- cjslep 9y ago
  This seems like cherry picking and the innate human bias at play. Given a big enough disaster, there isn't anything anyone can do as it unfolds. And spectacular failures stick in our mind. Here's some non-nuclear disasters that happened that people could only watch: * Taum Sauk hydro pump-storage collapse * Duke Energy's 30k+ tons of coal Ash spill into the Dan River * But that was tiny, try Kentucky's 306 million tons of coal Ash spill or Tennessee's 525 million. People can only stand and watch that unfold, no modern robot is going to stop that either. * Gas pipes in San Bruno, New Jersey, and Colorado exploding, killing families instantly * Deepwater Horizon and the Valdez. Again, not much to do but stand and watch as it unfurls. I could keep Googling more but every source of energy has its gigantic catastrophes where no amount of human bodies or robots will save the day (well, I guess a large enough pile of bodies would plug a hole in a collapsing dam).

marze 9y ago

The "cheap to operate" myth has long been debunked by all of the 100% depreciated nuclear plants closing, because, they are not cheap to operate.

bluedino 9y ago
Although at the current time, low natural gas prices make natural gas plants very attractive, most nuclear plants are closed because of public outcry. A lot of these plants are nearing 50 years old as well.
- beat 9y ago
  Per the article, old nuclear plants are being closed because they are not cost-competitive with natural gas. If you're saying they're actually being closed due to public opposition, you should cite a source. Preferably one as non-partisan as the NYT.
  - epistasis 9y ago
    You are correct, they are being closed due to financial reasons, not due to public outcry. However, there is an argument that they should get the economic benefit of being carbon free, something that is granted to solar and wind. Right now we subsidize two technologies, rather than taxing the externality. It would be far more economically rational to tax carbon emissions, and for coal to also tax the other costs it imposes in non-carbon emissions. There's currently a legal battle going on to allow nuclear plants to have Zero Emmisions Credits (ZEC) in several states where nuclear plants can no longer compete in the marketplace: http://www.utilitydive.com/news/zecs-appeal-illinois-new-york-nuclear-cases-could-shape-power-market-juri/448096/ http://www.utilitydive.com/news/zecs-appeal-illinois-new-yor...
    - freeflight 9y ago
      > However, there is an argument that they should get the economic benefit of being carbon free, something that is granted to solar and wind. They already have the benefit of not having to pay for their long term waste disposal and being bailed out in the event of a critical failure, which is arguably among the biggest long-term costs for nuclear. Not too long ago German energy companies paid a flat fee of 24 billion Euros to absolve them from any future responsibility to pay for end storage. The US nuclear industry does pay a tax for disposal but that doesn't cover anywhere near the actual costs of storage. We are talking about materials that need to be stored thousands of years here, a couple of dozens billion Euros (or Dollars) are peanuts in that regard. The timescales are just insane with this stuff and make it very likely that we still gonna have to pay for keeping disposal intact many thousand years after we phased out of nuclear into something we can't even fathom right now. Isn't that a nice vision of the future? We might manage to get our cheap, clean and renewable energy, but we will still be stuck taking care of very dangerous and expensive waste for thousands of years.
      - opo 9y ago
        >...We are talking about materials that need to be stored thousands of years here, a couple of dozens billion Euros (or Dollars) are peanuts in that regard. The timescales are just insane with this stuff and make it very likely that we still gonna have to pay for keeping disposal intact many thousand years after we phased out of nuclear into something we can't even fathom right now. Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel: "...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor The worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. To put it into perspective, no one of the general public has ever been hurt by nuclear waste and you definitely can't say that about coal waste.
- gozur88 9y ago
  Changes in technology have made natural gas cheap. But I think that's temporary - twenty years from now we're probably going to regret shuttering our nuclear plants and will be stuck with coal for at least a decade.
pm90 9y ago
Coal plants would not be cheap to operate either if they had to pay for all the environmental damage they actually cause. Natural gas plants... they seem to be a good compromise for now, but we just cannot depend on fossil fuel to meet the electrical needs of future generations. It is my sincere hope that we continue having a nuclear power industry to maintain the know-how learned over several generations. This would be useful not just for domestic power generations, but e.g. generating power for space stations, lunar/martian bases etc.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  There is always the Navy. Or at least, I would expect them to continue operating nuclear vessels for quite some time.
  - pc86 9y ago
    Part of the appeal of nuclear operations for the Navy (aside from the prestige) is the lucrative private sector opportunity. You'll see fewer folks going into that field if those private sector jobs dry up.
mseebach 9y ago
Has it, though? Keep in mind the difference between "expensive" and "a lot of money". Nuclear costs a ton to build and a ton to decommission, but in between is a very long period of nearly constant very high power production. New-built nuclear costs around €5.3b (Finland[1] and France[2]) to €9.3b (UK[3]) per installed GW, and France, Germany and UK estimates €300m, €1.4b and €2.7b (respectively) pr GW installed to decommission. That's €6-€13b/GW total + operating costs -- and those costs will come down as (if) we start ramping up construction and learn to avoid the cost overruns and get experience decommissioning plants. New-built offshore wind costs €3-4.7b/GW[4] -- and these prices are set to go up, as the easy sites for installation are running out. Capacity factors are only around 50%, so already there offshore wind is roughly on par with fully loaded nuclear (which has capacity factors of 90+%), and that's without counting decommissioning, extremely high operating expenses and the extra infrastructure and pollution required to deal with the unreliability of wind (typically, gas plants), and, most severely, the expected lifetime of ~25 years[5] compared to 60+ years for nuclear. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in_the_North_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in... 5: http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1320109/question-week-offshore-projects-built-last http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1320109/question-wee...
- epistasis 9y ago
  Thank you for injecting some great numbers! One minor quibble though, as offshore construction procedures improve, and get cheaper, it looks as though more sites are becoming "easy." And in the US, off-shore wind construction hasn't even really begun. Nuclear is also similarly "non-dispatchable" when compared to wind; nuclear has to be run at maximum capacity in order to get to those numbers, just as wind's energy has to be used to get to its numbers, and neither of these follows the demand. So both nuclear and wind require other dispatchable resources. Though it's gas plants at the moment, it seems very likely that battery storage will take over quite soon from gas plants. In many markets, peaker plants are already more expensive than battery storage. As batteries get cheaper, and more technologies (like flow batteries) mature, gas's days are numbered (except perhaps for combined-cycle gas turbines). I also can't share your optimism about nuclear construction costs going down. The numbers you are citing already are best-case scenarios, of well-managed projects without huge cost overruns like what happens in the US. The promise of the AP1000 reactors which were just abandoned in South Carolina was that it was a modular, consistent design, implemented around the world. The cost savings for that have not materialized. Meanwhile, the tech curves for wind, solar, and storage technologies have had more than a decade of proof of declining costs. Even in "modular and reusable" designs, every nuclear plant seems to be a one-off, due to the massive scale.

ImSkeptical 9y ago

>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. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

ardit33 9y ago
All that, and Chernobyl. I was a kid when it happened, but it affected most of Europe, (the radiation ended up going all the way to Sweden and Italy). It is hard to measure the cancer rates due to it, but the numbers are significant. " (The 95% confidence levels are 27,000 to 108,000 cancers and 12,000 to 57,000 deaths.) In addition, as of 2005, some 6,000 thyroid cancers and 15 thyroid cancer deaths have been attributed to Chernobyl. That number will grow with time." Nuclear power failure has the power to create a wasteland of its surrounding for millennia, that's why nobody wants them on their backyard.
- elsonrodriguez 9y ago
  Nuclear power creates a wasteland of surrounding areas. Fossil fuels create a wasteland of the world.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    The fight is no longer between fossil and nuclear; its nuclear versus renewables. And renewables are winning.

beders 9y ago

" 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." And there goes the misinformation campaign again. The issues is not 'deaths per kw hour'. The issue is the unpredictable outcome of a single reactor incident. How many more do we need to endure? How many more areas becoming radiated for generations? How much more radioactive waster water? How many more cancer deaths? And how much more need tax payers pay for cleanup before we realize: Let's stop using this energy source. Let's go renewals. It's the only sane option.

jartelt 9y ago

Actually it is NOT cheap to operate a nuclear power plant after it is built. That is why nuclear plants in Illinois and New York have been bailed out recently and why utilities in other starts are looking for similar bailouts. These utilities could not profitably operate existing nuclear plants in the current market. I totally agree that nuclear power has a much better safety record than most would believe and that nuclear power is a great low carbon electricity source, but it is not a cheap power source. Maybe modular reactors can compete sometime in the future, but we really have no idea until some are built and operated.

thephyber 9y ago
> Actually it is NOT cheap to operate a nuclear power plant after it is built I would argue that the innovations in rival energy sources have made it comparatively expensive, but the cost was largely established when the plant was built (likely in the 1960s - 1970s). In other words, it was cheap, but the fact that nuclear requires such a massive outlay to build the facility means that nuclear is a very long term financial gamble and assumes that a variety of other energy sources don't fundamentally change their cost curve (like oil and natural gas did in recent decades).
- freeflight 9y ago
  It's only "cheap" as long as you can outsource the long-term costs, like for waste storage or in the case of a disaster. As is, these plants are barely profitable, imagine they'd be forced to set funds aside for clean-up operations in case something goes really wrong, talking about real funds here that would make an actual difference and not some token amount. They don't do that because they know it would totally ruin their bottom line but by any metric they should be doing exactly that because it would be their mess that needs to be cleaned up when something goes wrong. These costs are very real and in the case of catastrophic failure can be so high that even major economies are struggling to pay them (like Japan has been). And it's not like we have any good ways to hold anybody responsible when something actually goes wrong. The responsible company can just declare bankruptcy and have somebody else deal with the costs and long-term ramifications of the clean-up efforts aka the tax payer.

pps43 9y ago

> when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. That makes more of an emotional reaction The reaction can be completely rational. It depends on your estimate of the probability of a nuclear accident worse than Chernobyl. Officially it's around 10^-9 per reactor-year, but it's clearly an underestimate, if only because of the unknown unknowns. Get a more realistic probability estimate, multiply by cost of all real estate in a large metro area, and you can get a pretty large expected loss. > How do you build a storage facility that keeps it contained for that long? This is a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

grecy 9y ago

> Its just that when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. Not only does it go wrong, we have absolutely no way to stop it. It's literally out of our control. I was a supporter of Nuclear, though Fukushima taught me a very important lesson. When things went bad there, we literally stood back and said "well, damn. There is nothing we can do" and watched it melt for weeks and weeks. Nobody could go in, and we had no robots that could go in and do a thing. It was lucky it's close enough to just pump endless water into it. Then a few weeks later the experts said "oh, all that highly contaminated water is going straight into the ocean. We wondered where it was going". As it were the Japanese had elderly people volunteering to go in, essentially committing suicide. It's also worth remembering that at Chernobyl there was also nothing we could do - other than force people to commit suicide by going in where it was deadly. That won't fly today. While the chances of things going that wrong are very low (it's only happened twice, maybe three times in history) I think the consequences are too great to justify it. We can't even control it when it goes bad!

iooi 9y ago
A bit more than twice, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
cjslep 9y ago
This seems like cherry picking and the innate human bias at play. Given a big enough disaster, there isn't anything anyone can do as it unfolds. And spectacular failures stick in our mind. Here's some non-nuclear disasters that happened that people could only watch: * Taum Sauk hydro pump-storage collapse * Duke Energy's 30k+ tons of coal Ash spill into the Dan River * But that was tiny, try Kentucky's 306 million tons of coal Ash spill or Tennessee's 525 million. People can only stand and watch that unfold, no modern robot is going to stop that either. * Gas pipes in San Bruno, New Jersey, and Colorado exploding, killing families instantly * Deepwater Horizon and the Valdez. Again, not much to do but stand and watch as it unfurls. I could keep Googling more but every source of energy has its gigantic catastrophes where no amount of human bodies or robots will save the day (well, I guess a large enough pile of bodies would plug a hole in a collapsing dam).