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Some context: The Green Party had long been diametrically opposed to nuclear, to the extent that they have twice exited a coalition government in protest of gra

Some context: The Green Party had long been diametrically opposed to nuclear, to the extent that they have twice exited a coalition government in protest of granting additional reactor permits. Over the past ten years their position has gradually shifted though, thanks to STEM-oriented Greens in particular, as it has become obvious that AGW is a bigger threat than nuclear. This in spite of several setbacks: – Obviously, the Fukushima disaster of 2011. – The fact that the Olkiluoto 3 reactor project [1], a 1600MW PWR unit, was plagued by chronic delays and cost overruns – it is only now being connected to the grid, over ten years behind schedule. OL3's fundamental problem was that the European nuclear industry simply was not up to the task of delivering a first-of-its-kind, ambitious third-gen reactor after a fifteen-year hiatus during which no new nuclear power plants were built in Europe. – Another planned nuclear plant, Hanhikivi [2], had problems finding a Western reactor supplier; after some arguably rather shady dealings, a contract was made with Rosatom, the state nuclear corporation of Russia. This received some well-earned criticism, but Finnish decisionmakers (perhaps naively) wanted to think there was no political dimension to such an agreement. After February 24, the project is now almost certainly dead in the water, never having left the planning and design phase. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Gravityloss 4y ago
There have been some ideas floated around to use the Hanhikivi plant site for building small modular reactors (SMR:s).
ncmncm 4y ago
Now all the people who insisted the Greens had been co-opted by Big Oil will be completely silent about their having now been co-opted by Big Nuke. But Big Oil/Gas/Coal loves new nuke projects; each represents a decade or more of still buying fossil fuels, instead of incrementallly displacing fossil with renewables. What this really means is probably that their position is moot, because no new nukes are planned or likely. Delays and cost overruns on a nuke construction project are, for many stakeholders, the whole point of the project. Actually beginning to deliver power to the grid is the end of their income stream, thus to be fought tooth and nail. The larger a project is, the more stakeholders it usually needs, and thus the more active participants who do not want it delivered. The prevalence of this dynamic varies from place to place; it has long been dominant in the US, not just for nuke projects, but for urban tunnels and other big public works projects.
- Sharlin 4y ago
  Eh, many of the stakeholders of the Hanhikivi project were individual municipalities which very much would have liked to get their carbon-free source of electricity. In the case of OL3, the only winners were probably lawyers due to the years of court battles between Finnish stakeholders and the French reactor supplier Areva. Everybody else lost. The Greens' new position is mostly relevant in the context of small, modular reactor (SMR) units. Whether or not commercial SMRs ever prove feasible, I'd wager that right now their future looks brighter than that of huge gigawatt-scale reactor projects.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    The individual municipalities are not the ones driving up cost and delaying completion. They do not benefit from delays and cost overruns. It is not hard to find who does benefit from those. It is yet to be seen whether those empowered to gatekeep nuke projects will be able to identify enough places where they can extract graft from projects using from SMRs. If not, they will surely steer clear, even at the expense of having no nuke to milk at all.
  - RingoStar 4y ago
    Nuclear power plants are not “carbon free.” They do not emit carbon or other greenhouse gases as they split atoms during the fission process, but their carbon footprint must be assessed on the basis of their complete nuclear fuel life cycle. Significant amounts of fossil fuel are used indirectly in mining, milling, uranium fuel enrichment, plant, and waste storage construction, decommissioning, and ultimately transportation and millennia-long storage of waste. There is plenty of carbon in that footprint that is rarely acknowledged, computed, or mediated. You can read that Additionally, the industry’s rhetoric masks the astronomical costs for thousands of years of storage that could be better invested in rapidly developing renewable fuels with a lower carbon footprint such as solar, wind, geothermal, and Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, without any potential side effects. The prospects for SMRs are poor. Here’s why. *Economics and scale* Nuclear reactors are large because of economies of scale. A reactor that produces three times as much power as an #SMR does not need three times as much steel or three times as many workers. This economic penalty for small size was one reason for the early shutdown of many small reactors built in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. *Mass manufacturing aspects* If an error in a mass-manufactured reactor were to result in safety problems, the whole lot might have to be recalled, as was the case with the Boeing 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner jetliners. But how does one recall a radioactive reactor? What will happen to an electricity system that relies on factory-made identical reactors that need to be recalled? *SMRs and the climate crisis* The climate problem is urgent. The IPCC and other international bodies have warned that to stop irreversible damage from climate change, we need to reduce emissions drastically within the next decade. The SMR contribution in the next decade will be essentially zero. The prospects for SMRs beyond that are also bleak, given that entire supply chains would need to be established after the first ones have been built, tested and proven in the field. *Other concerns* Water use is another concern that is expected to intensify in the future. Nuclear plants have very high water withdrawal requirements. A single 300 MW reactor operating at 90 percent capacity factor would withdraw 160 million to 390 million gallons of water every day, heating it up before discharge. Reducing the demand for water by using air cooling will require the addition of a tower and large electric fans – further raising the construction cost and reducing output of electricity by up to 7 percent of the capacity of the reactor. Finally, SMRs will also produce many kinds of radioactive nuclear waste, because the reactors are smaller in physical size and because of refueling practices adopted for economic reasons. SMRs based on light water designs, such as NuScale, will also produce a larger mass of nuclear waste per MWh of electricity generated. The federal government is already paying billions of dollars in fines for not fulfilling its contractual obligations to take possession of spent fuel from existing reactors. The legislative plan in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act was for a deep geologic disposal repository to open in 1998. After nearly four decades, that plan has come to naught.
xorcist 4y ago
That reactor is on one of my favourite wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_buildin...
- Sharlin 4y ago
  Huh, I was unaware of Flamanville 3 [1]. Sounds like the exact same story as Olkiluoto 3, except even more expensive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
  - xorcist 4y ago
    They share a common main contractor and construction.
- gcanyon 4y ago
  No offense to Finland, but I was not expecting Finland to have three entries on the “most expensive buildings” list…
  - Sharlin 4y ago
    Honestly, me neither. There is likely some selection bias going on however. It's difficult to say how many expensive buildings are missing from that list.

Gravityloss 4y ago

There have been some ideas floated around to use the Hanhikivi plant site for building small modular reactors (SMR:s).

ncmncm 4y ago

Now all the people who insisted the Greens had been co-opted by Big Oil will be completely silent about their having now been co-opted by Big Nuke. But Big Oil/Gas/Coal loves new nuke projects; each represents a decade or more of still buying fossil fuels, instead of incrementallly displacing fossil with renewables. What this really means is probably that their position is moot, because no new nukes are planned or likely. Delays and cost overruns on a nuke construction project are, for many stakeholders, the whole point of the project. Actually beginning to deliver power to the grid is the end of their income stream, thus to be fought tooth and nail. The larger a project is, the more stakeholders it usually needs, and thus the more active participants who do not want it delivered. The prevalence of this dynamic varies from place to place; it has long been dominant in the US, not just for nuke projects, but for urban tunnels and other big public works projects.

Sharlin 4y ago
Eh, many of the stakeholders of the Hanhikivi project were individual municipalities which very much would have liked to get their carbon-free source of electricity. In the case of OL3, the only winners were probably lawyers due to the years of court battles between Finnish stakeholders and the French reactor supplier Areva. Everybody else lost. The Greens' new position is mostly relevant in the context of small, modular reactor (SMR) units. Whether or not commercial SMRs ever prove feasible, I'd wager that right now their future looks brighter than that of huge gigawatt-scale reactor projects.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The individual municipalities are not the ones driving up cost and delaying completion. They do not benefit from delays and cost overruns. It is not hard to find who does benefit from those. It is yet to be seen whether those empowered to gatekeep nuke projects will be able to identify enough places where they can extract graft from projects using from SMRs. If not, they will surely steer clear, even at the expense of having no nuke to milk at all.
- RingoStar 4y ago
  Nuclear power plants are not “carbon free.” They do not emit carbon or other greenhouse gases as they split atoms during the fission process, but their carbon footprint must be assessed on the basis of their complete nuclear fuel life cycle. Significant amounts of fossil fuel are used indirectly in mining, milling, uranium fuel enrichment, plant, and waste storage construction, decommissioning, and ultimately transportation and millennia-long storage of waste. There is plenty of carbon in that footprint that is rarely acknowledged, computed, or mediated. You can read that Additionally, the industry’s rhetoric masks the astronomical costs for thousands of years of storage that could be better invested in rapidly developing renewable fuels with a lower carbon footprint such as solar, wind, geothermal, and Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, without any potential side effects. The prospects for SMRs are poor. Here’s why. *Economics and scale* Nuclear reactors are large because of economies of scale. A reactor that produces three times as much power as an #SMR does not need three times as much steel or three times as many workers. This economic penalty for small size was one reason for the early shutdown of many small reactors built in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. *Mass manufacturing aspects* If an error in a mass-manufactured reactor were to result in safety problems, the whole lot might have to be recalled, as was the case with the Boeing 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner jetliners. But how does one recall a radioactive reactor? What will happen to an electricity system that relies on factory-made identical reactors that need to be recalled? *SMRs and the climate crisis* The climate problem is urgent. The IPCC and other international bodies have warned that to stop irreversible damage from climate change, we need to reduce emissions drastically within the next decade. The SMR contribution in the next decade will be essentially zero. The prospects for SMRs beyond that are also bleak, given that entire supply chains would need to be established after the first ones have been built, tested and proven in the field. *Other concerns* Water use is another concern that is expected to intensify in the future. Nuclear plants have very high water withdrawal requirements. A single 300 MW reactor operating at 90 percent capacity factor would withdraw 160 million to 390 million gallons of water every day, heating it up before discharge. Reducing the demand for water by using air cooling will require the addition of a tower and large electric fans – further raising the construction cost and reducing output of electricity by up to 7 percent of the capacity of the reactor. Finally, SMRs will also produce many kinds of radioactive nuclear waste, because the reactors are smaller in physical size and because of refueling practices adopted for economic reasons. SMRs based on light water designs, such as NuScale, will also produce a larger mass of nuclear waste per MWh of electricity generated. The federal government is already paying billions of dollars in fines for not fulfilling its contractual obligations to take possession of spent fuel from existing reactors. The legislative plan in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act was for a deep geologic disposal repository to open in 1998. After nearly four decades, that plan has come to naught.

xorcist 4y ago

That reactor is on one of my favourite wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_buildin...

Sharlin 4y ago
Huh, I was unaware of Flamanville 3 [1]. Sounds like the exact same story as Olkiluoto 3, except even more expensive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
- xorcist 4y ago
  They share a common main contractor and construction.
gcanyon 4y ago
No offense to Finland, but I was not expecting Finland to have three entries on the “most expensive buildings” list…
- Sharlin 4y ago
  Honestly, me neither. There is likely some selection bias going on however. It's difficult to say how many expensive buildings are missing from that list.