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It says: "These units are important to building the future of energy and will serve as clean, emission-free sources of energy for Georgians for the next 60 to

It says: "These units are important to building the future of energy and will serve as clean, emission-free sources of energy for Georgians for the next 60 to 80 years." Do nuclear power plants have an expected lifetime of 60 to 80 years? Then must be shut down, with all the radioactive problems that present and a new one must be built? That seems like a short time to make good on the investment of building it. (from an environmental standpoint, based on the lack of reuse of the real estate it was / is sitting on top of)

i_am_proteus 4y ago
Realistically, the site can be re-used for another power plant. Or cleaned up and used for something else. It's not particularly different from any other industrial activity that deals with hazardous materials.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > Realistically, the site can be re-used for another power plant. Or cleaned up and used for something else. Re-used for another power plant, sure. But cleaned up and used for something else? Has that even been done once?
  - i_am_proteus 4y ago
    Shippingport, although much of the site was used for a new nuclear plant because of all of the shared infrastructure. Yankee Rowe is largely clean empty land, with a small storage site for dry fuel casks. It doesn't happen much because it's economically smarter to keep operating a plant or replace it with another plant given that the site is already prepared for a nuclear power station.
ensignavenger 4y ago
I believe "these units" refer only to the nuclear reactors, not to the plant as a whole. The plant will likely need ongoing replacements, and more, newer reactors can be added over time. The same plant/real estate could serve as a power plant for many times that amount of time. It is also quite feasible to move the spent fuel and any other radioactive material to another location... there are politics involved, but the physics are pretty straight forward.
- dingaling 4y ago
  Ideally after the first era the plant would be rebuilt as a fast reactor and the spent fuel fed back into it.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
The lifetimes are consistently optimistic, so read it as 30 to 50 years with 30 to 50 more years at incredibly high maintenance cost. The nuclear industry is necessarily incredibly fastidious about where the radioactive stuff goes. Every milligram is accounted for in triplicate. If nothing goes wrong, after decomissioning you can be far more confident that the site is free of harmful levels of radiation than basically anywhere else on earth. Something will go wrong somewhere if we keep building them, and we'll have a multi trillion dollar publicly funded cleanup, a large area for forest to reclaim that used to be two large cities, and a few tens of thousands of people dead (which is a vanishingly low cost compared to an oil war or a lithium coup). There will be a lot of steel and similar that counts as low grade waste that will take decades to deal with, but can be moved around safely and wouldn't really do large amounts of harm even if it were lost. Then there will be 2000t or so of high grade waste. This is the really nasty stuff. The plant operator will claim that the tiny amount of money they put in a fund for it means that they have no responsibility. Everyone will point fingers at everyone else and it'll sit in some temporary site for a while. It will probably eventually find its way into a breeder reactor or some reprocessing method at horiffic taxpayer expense. Alternatively someone will put neutron emitter A in barrel type B and put them half a meter to close together for an instagram photo at some point, and we'll have a permanent no-no zone the size of a state.

i_am_proteus 4y ago

Realistically, the site can be re-used for another power plant. Or cleaned up and used for something else. It's not particularly different from any other industrial activity that deals with hazardous materials.

nicoburns 4y ago
> Realistically, the site can be re-used for another power plant. Or cleaned up and used for something else. Re-used for another power plant, sure. But cleaned up and used for something else? Has that even been done once?
- i_am_proteus 4y ago
  Shippingport, although much of the site was used for a new nuclear plant because of all of the shared infrastructure. Yankee Rowe is largely clean empty land, with a small storage site for dry fuel casks. It doesn't happen much because it's economically smarter to keep operating a plant or replace it with another plant given that the site is already prepared for a nuclear power station.

ensignavenger 4y ago

I believe "these units" refer only to the nuclear reactors, not to the plant as a whole. The plant will likely need ongoing replacements, and more, newer reactors can be added over time. The same plant/real estate could serve as a power plant for many times that amount of time. It is also quite feasible to move the spent fuel and any other radioactive material to another location... there are politics involved, but the physics are pretty straight forward.

dingaling 4y ago
Ideally after the first era the plant would be rebuilt as a fast reactor and the spent fuel fed back into it.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

The lifetimes are consistently optimistic, so read it as 30 to 50 years with 30 to 50 more years at incredibly high maintenance cost. The nuclear industry is necessarily incredibly fastidious about where the radioactive stuff goes. Every milligram is accounted for in triplicate. If nothing goes wrong, after decomissioning you can be far more confident that the site is free of harmful levels of radiation than basically anywhere else on earth. Something will go wrong somewhere if we keep building them, and we'll have a multi trillion dollar publicly funded cleanup, a large area for forest to reclaim that used to be two large cities, and a few tens of thousands of people dead (which is a vanishingly low cost compared to an oil war or a lithium coup). There will be a lot of steel and similar that counts as low grade waste that will take decades to deal with, but can be moved around safely and wouldn't really do large amounts of harm even if it were lost. Then there will be 2000t or so of high grade waste. This is the really nasty stuff. The plant operator will claim that the tiny amount of money they put in a fund for it means that they have no responsibility. Everyone will point fingers at everyone else and it'll sit in some temporary site for a while. It will probably eventually find its way into a breeder reactor or some reprocessing method at horiffic taxpayer expense. Alternatively someone will put neutron emitter A in barrel type B and put them half a meter to close together for an instagram photo at some point, and we'll have a permanent no-no zone the size of a state.