6 ms·

> the highly technical French have forgotten how to build nuclear They haven't forgotten, they were fighting a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens. The same

by IMTDb 4y ago

> the highly technical French have forgotten how to build nuclear They haven't forgotten, they were fighting a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens. The same eco-ideologist that ruined Germany have made it impossible to properly invest in the nuclear plants in France and to ensure knowledge and expertise is properly transmitted and developed with the younger generation. For years the message was "don't invest in nuclear, don't study nuclear, don't build nuclear, don't maintain nuclear". Now the message is "we can't even do nuclear properly", it's a disengenous argument. What we need is a bit of future perspective: Nuclear is here to stay for the next decades (plural). Nuclear related jobs will be in high demand. Nuclear jobs will be well paying. Nuclear jobs will be safe. Nuclear formation is important, and here is money to ensure it happens. Maintenance of nuclear plants is important, it needs to happen and it will be financed. And that will lead to true expertise and safety.

denton-scratch 4y ago
> Nuclear is here to stay for the next decades (plural). That's the problem with nuclear; even if every nuclear power plant on the planet were shut-down today, "nuclear" would still be here to stay for at least a century or two. No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned. Decommissioning of the first UK nuclear power plants is expected to last another century. That's being paid for by taxpayers. The builders and operators of those plants were never asked to plan or pay for decommissioning; and anyway, 200 years is a long time to expect a corporation to stay alive. So let's be quite clear: the cost of a nuclear power plant includes the cost of decommissioning. Since decommissioning takes such a long time, you can't rely on contracts with private companies to ensure they finish the job. Decommissioning is a horrible insurance risk; never having been completed successfully, there's no reliable guide to how much it might cost. So, step forward, the insurer of last resort: my grandchildren!
- ch4s3 4y ago
  In the US operators pay into a fund for decommissioning. >No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned. There have been 10 plants in the US that have been fully decommissioned[1]. [1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    "fully decommissioned" by some somewhat unintuitive definitions: > The DOE was required by contract and statute to begin removing spent nuclear fuel and GTCC waste by January 31, 1998. To date, the DOE has not removed any spent fuel or GTCC waste from the CY site, and it is unknown when it will. The current 'plan' is for the companies looking after the waste on the original site to sue the government every few years to get paid for looking after the waste. http://connyankee.com/ http://connyankee.com/
    - ch4s3 4y ago
      The casks are safe where they are and should hold safely for at least 90 years according tot he notoriously conservative NRC. They should be moved, and congress needs to get its shit together, I agree. We really need to get deep storage unstuck from the Yucca Mountain issue, but I think this still counts as decommissioned.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        Why do we need to get deep storage unstuck? Putting the waste in dry casks is cheaper.
        denton-scratch 4y ago
        There are radionuclides in those casks with half-lives of 200,000 years - much longer than human civilisation, and much longer still than the lifetime of a human writing system. We don't even know how to make a label that will make sense in 200,000 years. This attitude only makes sense if one's view is that humanity isn't going to last more than 10,000 years. Unless we can find a way of rendering nuclear waste safe, then we have to find a way of making it so inaccessible that a future civilisation is unlikely to come across it by accident, and so secure that even a major earthquake won't cause it to leak into the environment. Storing this stuff in metal tins on the surface isn't even a gesture at a solution.
        4y ago
- the_gipsy 4y ago
  > even if every nuclear power plant on the planet were shut-down today, "nuclear" would still be here to stay for at least a century or two. Is this really a problem, though?
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    Well, I think nuclear waste is a problem. It's highly toxic, and there's no process for detoxifying it. It has to be "got rid of", somehow, or put somewhere that humans can't accidentally encounter it. And it remains dangerous roughly forever, in terms of the span of a human civilisation. 200 years is sorta manageable, I suppose, if you have the resources and longevity of a nation state. You can bury it under a mountain, and set a battalion of armed orcs to guard it. But nation states can change their minds; whether the cost of hiring those orcs is money well-spent is a political decision, and the politicians responsible may not have "the long view" in mind. I think nuclear power can be done safely; but I don't think that's possible as long as the task is overseen by profit-making corporations or short-termist governments. And I don't see who else can do it.
    - MagnumOpus 4y ago
      People would be less suspicious of your motives if you would spread the same amount of panic about coal industry ash ponds -- where arsenic and heavy metals will be lethal forever rather than just for thousands of years -- or mine tailings dams which burst with alarming regularity killing more people and devastating more square milege annually than nuclear waste ever did or will. As is, it seems that for you, dangerous waste is a deal breaker for something you are ideologically opposed to, but perfectly fine in other areas.
      - denton-scratch 4y ago
        I am from the UK. Our coal industry was almost completely destroyed by Margaret Thatcher. For many years, the notion of digging new pits has not been on the agenda. There is now a pit waiting for planning permission, but I don't think it will succeed (I hope not). Meanwhile plans to get some foreign company to build giant new nukes here are pressing ahead. So yeah, my focus is on the imminent threat that I can do something about, not on old mistakes that were made before I was born, that I can't do much about. > something you are ideologically opposed to You're the second person that has accused me of being "ideological". Is that the same as "having opinions"? That word is generally used dismissively. It should mean that I subscribe to some ideology. What ideology is it that you believe I subscribe to? How could you know whether my views on nuclear are inspired by some ideology that I've bought into wholesale, or whether they are the result of thinking things through for myself? Feel free to ask me about my opinions, but kindly refrain from telling me what they are.
- floxy 4y ago
  >No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned. Trojan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    WP says the plant has been "largely decommissioned". To my reading, that means the same as "not decommissioned yet".
    - floxy 4y ago
      The reactor and fuel were removed, and the reactor building and cooling tower were demolished. Maybe we need to use another word? Seems like that plant is pining-for-the-fjords.
    - duskwuff 4y ago
      From what I'm reading, that just means there are a couple of buildings (offices, warehouses, etc) left on the site. It hasn't been completely demolished yet, but it doesn't sound like there's anything extraordinary preventing that, either.
      - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
        > The concrete casks sit on a heavy concrete pad, located adjacent to the former Trojan Nuclear Plant site. > The ISFSI storage pad is surrounded by a secured area, which is monitored and protected round the clock. Same word games as the other one. The reactor itself is temporarily buried awaiting movement to Yucca Mountain, which has no planned date.
- teakettle42 4y ago
  > So, step forward, the insurer of last resort: my grandchildren! We’re the grandchildren of the eco-ideologists that spent the last forty years dumping coal and gas pollution into the atmosphere because they were afraid of nuclear power.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    My father was born in 1914; they didn't invent nuclear power until he was 40. It wasn't until the early 2000s that there was consensus that coal and gas caused pollution that was a very serious problem, if you set aside the smogs of the early 50s. My grandparents were from the era of steam-powered mills; I doubt the word "pollution" had been coined before they died. I'm pretty sure the term "ecology" dates from the mid-20th-century, after all my grandparents had died. So yes: my grandparents left me with a problem; but it's not their fault, because they didn't know. We do know, and my grandchildren would be right to curse me if I left a similar problem for them to solve, knowing what I was doing all along.
    - greedo 4y ago
      The term pollution dates back to the 14th Century...
      - denton-scratch 4y ago
        Thank you, I am now better-informed.
ricardobayes 4y ago
The message and reality have always been detached in Europe: almost every physics department I know has a nuclear institute. And funding is there, too. The know-how was never lost in my opinion.
- touisteur 4y ago
  I think the engineering know-how isn't there as much. When you haven't actually built a plant in 30 years and all the experienced building and designer engineers have moved on, you don't actually know how to build one any more. I feel the delays on the new projects are mostly caused by lack of experience, lack of clarity on actual risks, a lot of second system syndrome (we're doing it right this time, say the maintainer of the previous systems...) and also more regulatory oversight (which is IMO a gold thing). Let's see how these plants built with far more oversight age better than the old ones.
  - ricardobayes 4y ago
    Hungary is just building one right now.
    - touisteur 4y ago
      That's great news. I wish the European nuclear industry would have always 10 of these projects running at any time, so we could continuously learn, train and improve ever-so-slightly the designs.
YinglingLight 4y ago
roenxi 4y ago
This highlights the real Achilles heel of the nuclear industry - it is a labour efficient power producer that it doesn't employ enough people to guarantee political protection. We ended up with a group of people who would benefit a moderate amount from cheap power, and a fanatic anti-nuclear lobby that succeeded in scuttling decades of progress. The more motivated group won, as is predictable. It is amazing watching Europeans trying to achieve energy poverty in defiance of their technical head start. The energy figures out of places like the UK, France and Germany are startlingly bad (eg, [0]). Especially considered per-capita. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Historical_Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Historical_D...
- pfdietz 4y ago
  No, the real Achilles heel is that the nuclear power plants are too expensive and don't seem to be able to be built on budget in the West.
lwswl 4y ago
Money->safety is not a provable claim
wolverine876 4y ago
We have many better solutions than nuclear, and have for decades. Why not use them - reduce energy consumption, use a market-based solution of making people pay the actual cost of greenhouse gas production (e.g., trading carbon credits), etc.? It's the reactionaries that are in the way. Why blame the only people who have been concerned about climate change? Because it's easier to attack them; because people are scared of taking on the reactionaries. > a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens This is just jumping on the bandwagon of demonizing the target du jour. Can you back this up? What do you mean by witch-hunt? Who in particular was attacked? By who?
- naasking 4y ago
  "Reduce energy consumption" is not a solution. The population is growing every year. Energy consumption is growing every year. Energy production has to grow to keep up. If it can't because the chosen technology doesn't scale, then that's a problem with that technology.

by IMTDb 4y ago

denton-scratch 4y ago

> Nuclear is here to stay for the next decades (plural). That's the problem with nuclear; even if every nuclear power plant on the planet were shut-down today, "nuclear" would still be here to stay for at least a century or two. No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned. Decommissioning of the first UK nuclear power plants is expected to last another century. That's being paid for by taxpayers. The builders and operators of those plants were never asked to plan or pay for decommissioning; and anyway, 200 years is a long time to expect a corporation to stay alive. So let's be quite clear: the cost of a nuclear power plant includes the cost of decommissioning. Since decommissioning takes such a long time, you can't rely on contracts with private companies to ensure they finish the job. Decommissioning is a horrible insurance risk; never having been completed successfully, there's no reliable guide to how much it might cost. So, step forward, the insurer of last resort: my grandchildren!

ch4s3 4y ago
In the US operators pay into a fund for decommissioning. >No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned. There have been 10 plants in the US that have been fully decommissioned[1]. [1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  "fully decommissioned" by some somewhat unintuitive definitions: > The DOE was required by contract and statute to begin removing spent nuclear fuel and GTCC waste by January 31, 1998. To date, the DOE has not removed any spent fuel or GTCC waste from the CY site, and it is unknown when it will. The current 'plan' is for the companies looking after the waste on the original site to sue the government every few years to get paid for looking after the waste. http://connyankee.com/ http://connyankee.com/
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    The casks are safe where they are and should hold safely for at least 90 years according tot he notoriously conservative NRC. They should be moved, and congress needs to get its shit together, I agree. We really need to get deep storage unstuck from the Yucca Mountain issue, but I think this still counts as decommissioned.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Why do we need to get deep storage unstuck? Putting the waste in dry casks is cheaper.
      - denton-scratch 4y ago
        There are radionuclides in those casks with half-lives of 200,000 years - much longer than human civilisation, and much longer still than the lifetime of a human writing system. We don't even know how to make a label that will make sense in 200,000 years. This attitude only makes sense if one's view is that humanity isn't going to last more than 10,000 years. Unless we can find a way of rendering nuclear waste safe, then we have to find a way of making it so inaccessible that a future civilisation is unlikely to come across it by accident, and so secure that even a major earthquake won't cause it to leak into the environment. Storing this stuff in metal tins on the surface isn't even a gesture at a solution.
        4y ago
the_gipsy 4y ago
> even if every nuclear power plant on the planet were shut-down today, "nuclear" would still be here to stay for at least a century or two. Is this really a problem, though?
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  Well, I think nuclear waste is a problem. It's highly toxic, and there's no process for detoxifying it. It has to be "got rid of", somehow, or put somewhere that humans can't accidentally encounter it. And it remains dangerous roughly forever, in terms of the span of a human civilisation. 200 years is sorta manageable, I suppose, if you have the resources and longevity of a nation state. You can bury it under a mountain, and set a battalion of armed orcs to guard it. But nation states can change their minds; whether the cost of hiring those orcs is money well-spent is a political decision, and the politicians responsible may not have "the long view" in mind. I think nuclear power can be done safely; but I don't think that's possible as long as the task is overseen by profit-making corporations or short-termist governments. And I don't see who else can do it.
  - MagnumOpus 4y ago
    People would be less suspicious of your motives if you would spread the same amount of panic about coal industry ash ponds -- where arsenic and heavy metals will be lethal forever rather than just for thousands of years -- or mine tailings dams which burst with alarming regularity killing more people and devastating more square milege annually than nuclear waste ever did or will. As is, it seems that for you, dangerous waste is a deal breaker for something you are ideologically opposed to, but perfectly fine in other areas.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      I am from the UK. Our coal industry was almost completely destroyed by Margaret Thatcher. For many years, the notion of digging new pits has not been on the agenda. There is now a pit waiting for planning permission, but I don't think it will succeed (I hope not). Meanwhile plans to get some foreign company to build giant new nukes here are pressing ahead. So yeah, my focus is on the imminent threat that I can do something about, not on old mistakes that were made before I was born, that I can't do much about. > something you are ideologically opposed to You're the second person that has accused me of being "ideological". Is that the same as "having opinions"? That word is generally used dismissively. It should mean that I subscribe to some ideology. What ideology is it that you believe I subscribe to? How could you know whether my views on nuclear are inspired by some ideology that I've bought into wholesale, or whether they are the result of thinking things through for myself? Feel free to ask me about my opinions, but kindly refrain from telling me what they are.
floxy 4y ago
>No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned. Trojan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  WP says the plant has been "largely decommissioned". To my reading, that means the same as "not decommissioned yet".
  - floxy 4y ago
    The reactor and fuel were removed, and the reactor building and cooling tower were demolished. Maybe we need to use another word? Seems like that plant is pining-for-the-fjords.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    From what I'm reading, that just means there are a couple of buildings (offices, warehouses, etc) left on the site. It hasn't been completely demolished yet, but it doesn't sound like there's anything extraordinary preventing that, either.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      > The concrete casks sit on a heavy concrete pad, located adjacent to the former Trojan Nuclear Plant site. > The ISFSI storage pad is surrounded by a secured area, which is monitored and protected round the clock. Same word games as the other one. The reactor itself is temporarily buried awaiting movement to Yucca Mountain, which has no planned date.
teakettle42 4y ago
> So, step forward, the insurer of last resort: my grandchildren! We’re the grandchildren of the eco-ideologists that spent the last forty years dumping coal and gas pollution into the atmosphere because they were afraid of nuclear power.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  My father was born in 1914; they didn't invent nuclear power until he was 40. It wasn't until the early 2000s that there was consensus that coal and gas caused pollution that was a very serious problem, if you set aside the smogs of the early 50s. My grandparents were from the era of steam-powered mills; I doubt the word "pollution" had been coined before they died. I'm pretty sure the term "ecology" dates from the mid-20th-century, after all my grandparents had died. So yes: my grandparents left me with a problem; but it's not their fault, because they didn't know. We do know, and my grandchildren would be right to curse me if I left a similar problem for them to solve, knowing what I was doing all along.
  - greedo 4y ago
    The term pollution dates back to the 14th Century...
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      Thank you, I am now better-informed.

ricardobayes 4y ago

The message and reality have always been detached in Europe: almost every physics department I know has a nuclear institute. And funding is there, too. The know-how was never lost in my opinion.

touisteur 4y ago
I think the engineering know-how isn't there as much. When you haven't actually built a plant in 30 years and all the experienced building and designer engineers have moved on, you don't actually know how to build one any more. I feel the delays on the new projects are mostly caused by lack of experience, lack of clarity on actual risks, a lot of second system syndrome (we're doing it right this time, say the maintainer of the previous systems...) and also more regulatory oversight (which is IMO a gold thing). Let's see how these plants built with far more oversight age better than the old ones.
- ricardobayes 4y ago
  Hungary is just building one right now.
  - touisteur 4y ago
    That's great news. I wish the European nuclear industry would have always 10 of these projects running at any time, so we could continuously learn, train and improve ever-so-slightly the designs.

YinglingLight 4y ago

roenxi 4y ago

This highlights the real Achilles heel of the nuclear industry - it is a labour efficient power producer that it doesn't employ enough people to guarantee political protection. We ended up with a group of people who would benefit a moderate amount from cheap power, and a fanatic anti-nuclear lobby that succeeded in scuttling decades of progress. The more motivated group won, as is predictable. It is amazing watching Europeans trying to achieve energy poverty in defiance of their technical head start. The energy figures out of places like the UK, France and Germany are startlingly bad (eg, [0]). Especially considered per-capita. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Historical_Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Historical_D...

pfdietz 4y ago
No, the real Achilles heel is that the nuclear power plants are too expensive and don't seem to be able to be built on budget in the West.

lwswl 4y ago

Money->safety is not a provable claim

wolverine876 4y ago

We have many better solutions than nuclear, and have for decades. Why not use them - reduce energy consumption, use a market-based solution of making people pay the actual cost of greenhouse gas production (e.g., trading carbon credits), etc.? It's the reactionaries that are in the way. Why blame the only people who have been concerned about climate change? Because it's easier to attack them; because people are scared of taking on the reactionaries. > a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens This is just jumping on the bandwagon of demonizing the target du jour. Can you back this up? What do you mean by witch-hunt? Who in particular was attacked? By who?

naasking 4y ago
"Reduce energy consumption" is not a solution. The population is growing every year. Energy consumption is growing every year. Energy production has to grow to keep up. If it can't because the chosen technology doesn't scale, then that's a problem with that technology.