Show me the places in your state where nuclear power will go unopposed. Also I’m not saying it’s not possible, things do get built. Nuclear power just takes a lot of time and money, which won’t change.
Yep. Targets aren’t zero. The world has an enormous capacity to absorb CO2. We just need to get and stay below that capacity, and it’s very, very difficult.
This is funny when you do the math.
The Nimitz cost about $1B in 1975. Translated to today, that’s around $4.5B.
It had two Westinghouse A4W’s, each rated at about 500MW.
So for $4.5B, we built a gigawatt of nuclear capacity, including 20 years of fuel… Plus an entire freaking city around it.
Also the city floats and carries planes and weapons and stuff. And can shoot the airplanes with giant steam catapults.
Only $2B for an Ohio class. I sense a plan coming together!
Sorry, but I still don’t really understand what this means. You know about coal ash ponds and the resulting disasters, right? The US has spent who knows how much and hasn’t begun to solve the problem of coal-fired energy waste, but that doesn’t man there are no coal plants.
The solution to nuclear plant waste is that it will have to be stored. That’s pretty much it.
I cannot recall if I saw this linked in this thread or somewhere else, but I’m posting it because I found it quite enlightening.
One of the things that stood out to me is that nuclear waste is being dealt with unlike the waste of other energy forms, which is just dumped back into the environment.
So what’s the verdict? We’re arguing the relative merits and generally agree nuclear is needed.
But the US is closing a bunch of nuclear power plants, and not building new. Six have closed since 2013. France, Germany, Japan are closing, not building. The UK is building one new plant costing $40 billion and 20 years of arguments. China is building 60 nuclear power plants (!) and also 259 new coal power plants.
How to turn the tide? Is there even time if they take so long?
In Ontario, Canada, the government was frustrated that transit projects take so long to plan, design, get approvals, and construct, and always went over budget. They created a new category of regulations designed specifically around speeding up transit, called the Transit Project Assessment Process or TPAP. Pretty cool.
So for everyone on the more-nuclear-power train here, how are you proposing that it be kept from causing environmental disasters? Fukashima was just a few years ago, caused by a natural disaster that no one anticipated could happen. Disasters are getting more severe and more common, so whatever you think of now, chances are very high something worse will happen to a plant in the next 40 years. How about human error? That’s how we got Chernobyl and (to a lesser extent) Three Mile Island. That’s a risk factor that never goes away.
I’ll answer my own questions - you have independent regulators overseeing safety, and engineer nuclear plants to be resistant to disasters. We have the technology, we can build it! But there’s plenty of examples where this has not worked…see above, plus plenty of “near misses” where we’ve simply gotten lucky that a disaster didn’t strike in the wrong place. (Want details? I refer you again to Jaczko’s book.) Those “independent” regulators are subject to political pressure, and putting the technological solutions in place is costly and therefore fought tooth and nail by the owners of the plants. So let’s modify the question - how do those of you supporting more nuclear power intend to ensure that the standards and technology required for nuclear power safety are actually implemented in all those new plants?
You could argue that this problem of regulatory capture is no different than other energy production industries, and there’s some truth in that. (And I’d argue they need more oversight, too, but that’s a different discussion.) But other industries don’t contaminate hundreds of square miles of countryside with radioactivity when even a single plant fails. Nuclear power needs to be held to a higher safety standard because of the greater impact when something goes wrong. All the new technology and better standards in the world are useless until you address the political and economic issues that fight against implementation.
Very few locations, if any, in the US are going to suseptible to being hit by the largest Tsunami in history. I’d probably avoid building the plants on the San Andreas fault line, or in Yellowstone. Other than that? I think we’d be fine.
The AP1000 has a maximum core damage frequency of 5.09 × 10−7 per plant per year. It’s designed such that it’s virtually impossible to suffer significant core damage, much less an uncontained melt down.
We’ve run tons of nuclear reactors for decades, with much older designs, and have had no significant environmental accidents.
Things are getting worse in terms of disasters. What’s worked up to this point isn’t any guarantee. You need to be constantly updating risk assessments and preventative measures.
Just because Fukashima was a tsunami doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of other potential disasters. Floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, maybe even volcanoes, and I’m sure there’s plenty more I’m not thinking of.
Again dude, it’s a core damage frequency of 5.09 × 10−7 per plant per year.
It means that they basically can’t melt down.
Probably don’t build it on a volcano.
Eh, screw it, I give up. “Nothing can possibly go wrong” isn’t an argument, it’s an article of faith. No arguing with zealots.
I’m not sure earthquakes are getting worse.
I mean, it’s a scientific study of the plant’s risk. It’s not like it’s just handwaving away everything.
It’s basically looking at the various risk failures of everything in the reactor. The thing is rock solid… as, generally, all US reactors are.
At some point, you need to accept that anything has some level of non zero risk. But one core damage event every 50 million years? I think that’s a risk we can take.
I think this is a very good discussion. I am of the mindset of right now, “government regulations are holding this up” is trivial. Obviously this will need to change, and I think with the support of politicians and the public, it can.
Right now the education level on how nuclear power works is low. If you ask someone what they know about nuclear power, they say Chernobyl. The basic mechanics of nuclear power isn’t super complicated, and when it is properly explained, it feels a lot less scary. I think that a majority of the public think that a nuclear meltdown is an explosion like Hiroshima.
I also think we should be looking into increasing grid power storage capacity, and investing in solar and wind as well. I am worried with the GND that nuclear is being sidestepped for some power sources that can’t compete with coal or gas in terms of baseline power. Hydro is another large scale option, but it too is costly, and impacts the environment pretty heavily.
The worst problem with fission right now is waste disposal, for which the ultimate NIMBYism applies, making it politically impossible to place a secure dump even in the middle of Nevada desert. Nevada’s votes would have to be sacrificed by the ruling party and even then it might be impossible to get anything done in the face of near-unanimous popular opposition in the waste-dump region.
But apart from waste, there’s also the problem of the operator and their ability to manage a potentially dangerous plant (even modern ones that supposedly can’t melt down can still release a lot of dangerous radiation if mismanaged). There have been many serious problems with operators over the years. Plus with well-known industrial vulnerabilities to Internet attack, every additional nuke plant you build is another radiation hazard made available to attackers. Of course this could theoretically be guarded against, but realistically it wouldn’t be any more than current plants are protected.
What’s the worst problem that you are aware of that has occurred?
Of course Chernobyl was an aberration under weird and incompetent administration anyway, so let’s ignore that one.
Most recently Fukushima involved a terrible series of lapses from a supposedly capable modern operator after the fact of the earthquake and tsunami. Many billions of dollars in costs due to the lapses, as well as fatalities and enormous human costs in terms of messed up lives and refugees. In the US, the most famous problem was at Three Mile Island back in 1979, but more recently the entire Crystal River facility had to be shut down permanently in 2009 when the building structure was damaged during generator replacement. Wikipedia lists dozens of incidents, mostly minor, but quite a number involving radiation leaks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_the_United_States#List_of_accidents_and_incidents
I don’t have references at hand, but there have been many distressing reports regarding both physical and internet vulnerabilities to these power stations. Supposedly any serious attacker can gain control of most of our infrastructure facilities.
Historically I think the US nuclear power industry is far safer than coal per kilowatt-hour, but then Centralia aside, nuclear power has the potential for more dangerous consequences in individual incidents, so it’s not something to just shake off as a concern.
I meant the US specifically. Fukishiima was just as much of an aberration as anything, given it was hit by the largest tsunami in recorded history, something that is basically never going to happen to likely US installations.
If you look at that list of accidents, you see that basically none of them actually resulted in what normal folks would consider “nuclear accidents”. They’re things where some localized problem occurred, and no radiation was leaked. Hell, some of them are things like “some guy fucked up doing maintenance, and electrocuted himself”. This kind of thing effectively has nothing to do with it being a nuclear plant at all.
For Crystal River, again, there was no environmental contamination. They attempted to replace a steam generator, and in the process of cutting the concrete, cracks formed and engineers observed delamination, so they shut down the reactor. Ultimately, this ended up just being an economic hardship for the company running the plant, because they broke their reactor. But it wasn’t dangerous or harmful to anyone.
The same goes for TMI. The most famous nuclear “accident” in US history had literally zero ecological impact.
Probably the worst actual accident was at the Army’s SL-1, since it actually had a minor melt down and killed 3 people from a steam explosion, back in the 60’s. But even then, the amount of radiation released was effectively nil, especially considering the location.
Nuclear power plants aren’t magical places where no accident can ever occur. There are people there. People have accidents. But this is not unique to nuclear power plants. If anything, nuclear plants have a far better record than any other industry I can think of.
Look at that list… the entirety of the nuclear power industry in the history of the US has a total of…13 fatalities? I’d have a really hard time thinking of any industry where you only had 13 folks die since the 60’s.