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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/

• 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.
• mdavis6890 4y ago
  While these comments probably do apply to a great many government sponsored/financed projects like bridges and such, probably not as much in the case of for-profit nuclear power. The company in charge of the plant project will be eager to get the power revenue flowing.
• belorn 4y ago
  I would not invest in fossil fuel in a country that is heavily investing into nuclear power. Most of the costs associated with nuclear is in the constructions, so once they are built those costs are already sunk and they will deliver maximum energy at what ever price point that the market sits at. Fossil fuel can not compete against nuclear power on price after construction is completed, especially if paid by a budget a few governments ago. I would however consider fossil fuels as a great investment if a country is heavily invested in renewables. Someone has to operate as reserve energy for when the weather changes and the season change to winter. Politicians in northern countries has already demonstrated a great unity in spending a lot of subsidies on "reserve energy" plans. You do not even need to spend fuel to get paid. And then we the market price do rise above that of fossil fuel costs, you get paid again by producing energy at the point where the market is at its highest. It is hard to optimize more for profit than those operating a fossil fuel power plant in those reserve energy plans. The Swedish environmental minister last winter, who was also the spoke person for the green party, said something like: Oil power plants are and will continue be a natural part of the Swedish reserve energy plan. It is nothing abnormal to use oil when demand exceeds supply. It is hard to get a better political endorsement than that.