3 ms·

Three Mile Island/The China Syndrome killed nuclear energy in the US. That was an interesting few weeks.

by smm11 4y ago

kristopolous 4y ago
Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste. https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal/?sh=55a6110829cf https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-stag... There's zero places even pretending to do this. There's one under construction that does 1/10th of that in Finland called Onkalo that's cost multiple billions and is years behind This waste procedure includes multi-decade long cooling requirements which require continuous power and water. Spent waste today won't be ready for storage here for about 120 years - mid 22nd century. All for something you could get with some windmills or solar panels The blind nuclear boosterism on Hn is absurd. We are well on our way to fully decentralized renewable electricity that's so cheap it won't be metered and instead there's this fetish for centralized plants that take 10 years to construct, have waste that takes 120 years to process, and lead to multi-continent ecosystem disasters when predictable natural events happen. Cool tech... Existing and deployed solar is 1/7th the cost of not yet deployed hypothetical advanced nuclear btw: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Capital_costs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc... Their best claimed future efforts make it 7x the cost. This is just about keeping power generation privatized metered monopolized centralized and boosted by the government while claiming it's a free market. Typical mindless libertarian drivel.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  > Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste. That had jack shit to do with the failure of nuclear in the US. The back end of the fuel cycle is a trivial cost that had nothing to do with the financial failure of nuclear here. And it's the financial failure that stopped it.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    So many things! The country that had generated the most nuclear power IS the United States and it's also the one with the highest capacity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country The depiction of it as a "failure" is the industry whining like the defense industry whines about not having 50,000 more airplanes Despite being at scale and having 70 years to bring down costs, it's still prohibitively expensive in the full lifecycle analysis of the LCOE and it gets heavily subsidized to keep plants open. People's energy prices have gone up because governments are Interfering With The Market in favor of nuclear: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the-us-is-spending-billions-to-keep-money-losing-nuclear-plants-open.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the-us-is-spending-billions-... Also it's not green. The mining of the fuel isn't, nor is its transportation, vitrification, fabrication, refinement or enrichment. The concrete and cooling of the plant isn't nor is the waste stream side of the equation. It's the classic hyperfocus on a small part of the chain and writing off everything else as externalities. Now on to the last point. Yes! The back end is a trivial cost because it Has Not Been Dealt With. Yucca Mountain 35 years in still has not been built and the only US site that currently exists is only for 10,000 years (1% of what's required), only does nuclear weapons, cost $19,000,000,000, took 29 years to build, and had a sealing schedule of 75 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant Currently the only US option is dry casks which have a shelf life between 30 and 100 years assuming no natural disasters, terrorist attacks, wars, or shoddy craftsmanship. We're leaving this problem for future generations. In the same way people used to hunt animals to extinction so they could sell them as culinary delicacies, future civilizations will look back on us and curse us for being so stupid when we had far more reasonable options readily available that didn't require literally centuries of management. Onkalo is going to get breached in the next ice age btw so let's just hope we figure out how to secure it against that in the next few generations I don't care what your sci-fi shows say, it's a shit technology. And I haven't even touched upon the insane corruption behind plants such as Diablo canyon. But hey call me an uninformed moron, I'm down
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      The point is that lack of a very long term solution to nuclear waste in the US has not been an obstacle that has impeded adoption of nuclear. It's a talking point, but if nuclear had otherwise made sense it would not have prevented it from going forward. If anything, the causation is in the other direction: we don't have Yucca Mountain because there are no stakeholders who really wanted it. The utilities don't need it. Dry casks work just fine for them, and are pretty darn cheap. The real problem with nuclear has been its overall poor economics, and a geological repository would not help with that.

Three Mile Island/The China Syndrome killed nuclear energy in the US. That was an interesting few weeks.

by smm11 4y ago

Three Mile Island/The China Syndrome killed nuclear energy in the US. That was an interesting few weeks.

Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste. https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal/?sh=55a6110829cf https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-stag... There's zero places even pretending to do this. There's one under construction that does 1/10th of that in Finland called Onkalo that's cost multiple billions and is years behind This waste procedure includes multi-decade long cooling requirements which require continuous power and water. Spent waste today won't be ready for storage here for about 120 years - mid 22nd century. All for something you could get with some windmills or solar panels The blind nuclear boosterism on Hn is absurd. We are well on our way to fully decentralized renewable electricity that's so cheap it won't be metered and instead there's this fetish for centralized plants that take 10 years to construct, have waste that takes 120 years to process, and lead to multi-continent ecosystem disasters when predictable natural events happen. Cool tech... Existing and deployed solar is 1/7th the cost of not yet deployed hypothetical advanced nuclear btw: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Capital_costs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc... Their best claimed future efforts make it 7x the cost. This is just about keeping power generation privatized metered monopolized centralized and boosted by the government while claiming it's a free market. Typical mindless libertarian drivel.

pfdietz 4y ago
> Along with things like the requirements of 1,000,000 year storage of nuclear waste. That had jack shit to do with the failure of nuclear in the US. The back end of the fuel cycle is a trivial cost that had nothing to do with the financial failure of nuclear here. And it's the financial failure that stopped it.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  So many things! The country that had generated the most nuclear power IS the United States and it's also the one with the highest capacity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country The depiction of it as a "failure" is the industry whining like the defense industry whines about not having 50,000 more airplanes Despite being at scale and having 70 years to bring down costs, it's still prohibitively expensive in the full lifecycle analysis of the LCOE and it gets heavily subsidized to keep plants open. People's energy prices have gone up because governments are Interfering With The Market in favor of nuclear: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the-us-is-spending-billions-to-keep-money-losing-nuclear-plants-open.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the-us-is-spending-billions-... Also it's not green. The mining of the fuel isn't, nor is its transportation, vitrification, fabrication, refinement or enrichment. The concrete and cooling of the plant isn't nor is the waste stream side of the equation. It's the classic hyperfocus on a small part of the chain and writing off everything else as externalities. Now on to the last point. Yes! The back end is a trivial cost because it Has Not Been Dealt With. Yucca Mountain 35 years in still has not been built and the only US site that currently exists is only for 10,000 years (1% of what's required), only does nuclear weapons, cost $19,000,000,000, took 29 years to build, and had a sealing schedule of 75 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant Currently the only US option is dry casks which have a shelf life between 30 and 100 years assuming no natural disasters, terrorist attacks, wars, or shoddy craftsmanship. We're leaving this problem for future generations. In the same way people used to hunt animals to extinction so they could sell them as culinary delicacies, future civilizations will look back on us and curse us for being so stupid when we had far more reasonable options readily available that didn't require literally centuries of management. Onkalo is going to get breached in the next ice age btw so let's just hope we figure out how to secure it against that in the next few generations I don't care what your sci-fi shows say, it's a shit technology. And I haven't even touched upon the insane corruption behind plants such as Diablo canyon. But hey call me an uninformed moron, I'm down
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    The point is that lack of a very long term solution to nuclear waste in the US has not been an obstacle that has impeded adoption of nuclear. It's a talking point, but if nuclear had otherwise made sense it would not have prevented it from going forward. If anything, the causation is in the other direction: we don't have Yucca Mountain because there are no stakeholders who really wanted it. The utilities don't need it. Dry casks work just fine for them, and are pretty darn cheap. The real problem with nuclear has been its overall poor economics, and a geological repository would not help with that.