8 ms·

Michigan could provide $300M to reopen nuclear power plant

93 points by jseliger 4y ago

nine_k 4y ago
Germany, in the meantime, decides to shut down three remaining nuclear plants. No news about major electric storage capacity yet, so I wonder how solar + wind would fare.
- hintymad 4y ago
  "E.ON Hikes Energy Prices 45% As Germany Winds Down Its Last Nuclear Plants". Note that the news title may intentionally muddy the water and I don't have enough knowledge to tell if the price hike and the shutdown of Germany's last nuclear plants have any causal relationship. That said, I know E.ON has already hiked its price due to the Ukrainian war. It looks at least the green energy didn't help enough.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    >have any causal relationship nope given that nuclear has been a negligible part of the German energy mix for a long time now. (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig1-installed-net-power-generation-capacity-germany-2002-2022.png?itok=5BA4OuEZ https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...) According to the article where I guess that headline came from E.ON even says that the reason is that they cushioned prices last year during the height of the energy crisis and that this is higher prices from wholesale markets from last year coming through.
  - locallost 4y ago
    It's muddying the water. The hikes are for the so called "Grundversorgung" where providers are required by law to provide you with electricity (and gas) basically without a contract. For instance my local provider hiked prices to 42-43 cents for regular customers at end of last year and "Grundversorgung" to 80 cents. I noticed various nuclear lobbyists were very active spreading false news in recent days, these people have no morals. Also the prices in Germany vary between hundreds of providers, you can get electricity from any one of them. They supply it by purchasing electricity on the market, some had long term contracts to weather the storm last year, some didn't and hiked prices early, some went bankrupt etc. The problem right now often is that it's difficult to switch contracts - my local provider is not taking on new customers, my guess because they are losing money and hoping the situation will improve.
- rgmerk 4y ago
  Germany is part of the broader European grid, and solar/wind is backed by interconnections to hydro etc etc. I was just listening to a podcast on battery storage and apparently continental Europe is behind on grid-scale battery installations because the power market design isn’t there to support it yet (as compared to the UK, the USA and particularly the Texas grid, and Australia). Germany is apparently doing pretty well on “behind the meter” home battery storage, and to be honest as long as there’s storage in the system it’s OK to do it with either 100,000 10kWh home batteries or a gigawatt-hour in a single grid battery facility. Batteries don’t make a lot of sense for long-duration storage however; for seasonal storage you want some other technology (hydro, hydrogen, demand management etc).
- arcticbull 4y ago
  They're just importing nuclear from France now. Solar or wind plus storage is significantly more expensive than conventional nuclear and worse for the environment. [1] [1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    The only way you can pretend nuclear is "better for the environment" is if you ignore most of its supply chain and only point a finger to "what comes out of the stack." The fuel supply chain is incredibly energy-intensive, expensive, and environmentally unfriendly, and unlike the materials used for rare-earth magnets and lithium ion batteries which everyone here loves to bleat about...the material is not recycled (nor can it be without significant changes that will take decades) whereas rare earth magnets, lithium ion batteries, and now windmill blades, are all recyclable. Nuclear has never been economically viable. It's been subsidized, enormously, for close to a century as the stepchild of the "defense" nuclear weapon and propulsion industries. It continues to get more expensive, whereas wind/solar/energy storage are plunging in cost. Nuclear would also still require energy storage because it can only fulfill base load; nuclear takes days to change power levels, and running at anything other than full capacity drastically impacts its economic viability. You can point to research all you like. US power companies are buying wind, solar, and energy storage. Not only are they not buying nuclear, they're shutting down plants because they are not economically viable. It's funny how HN is all "free market!" when it comes to things like renewables and decarbonizing transit (ie "why muh tax dollars going to this?!")...but nobody seems to acknowledge that the nuclear industry is massively subsidized and Biden is proposing throwing billions more at the industry because of lobbying. Also, that paper was published four years ago, which means it was based on even older data, and the cost of renewables and energy storage is plunging while nuclear goes up in cost...
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Energy and emissions wise it's still fine even using a filthy open pit mine fuelled by coal and diesel in Nigeria. An order of magnitude worse than the shills claim, but still fine. Much worse for locals than imaginary cobalt mines for LFP batteries though.
- frozenport 4y ago
  German has among the highest electricity prices in the world. This is not a success story: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/#:~:text=The%20world%20average%20price%20is,1%2C000%2C000%20kWh%20consumption%20per%20year https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/#:~:te....
  - nullc 4y ago
    $0.55/kWh is in line with California PG&E peak residential rates.
  - locallost 4y ago
    These are the prices for end customers and contain various taxes, surcharges for transmission and various other things. All of these costs are real and it's good to have them as a part of the actual price. You know what it actually costs and it's a good motivation to be energy efficient. Compare it to France which has the highest market prices in Europe right now [1] (and also last year) but allegedly the customers pay just 22c. It can't work - the nationalization of the EDF was started last year [2] and it posted a 20 billion loss [3]. The true price will be paid one way or the other, through taxes in this case. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/energy_charts/status/1638599051946893314 https://mobile.twitter.com/energy_charts/status/163859905194... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-to-pay-nearly-10bn-to-fully-nationalise-edf https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-to-p... [3] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/17/france-s-edf-posts-record-annual-loss-debt-swells_6016197_7.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/17/france-s...
    - jillesvangurp 4y ago
      The US indeed has a similar cost level but it just puts that out in tax form or takes on more debt. Result: lots of outdated infrastructure and plants like this and companies that leave their mess for tax payers to clean up rather than investing themselves. Like in this case with a nuclear plant that was bought last year and promptly shut down by its new owner. Why would they buy such an old plant at the end of its life? Now instead of taking the cost of decommissioning it (which costs lots of money) they are now looking to reopen it using public funding. So, they are happy to profit from this deal but not without public funding. The permit is probably less of an issue than finding the hundreds of millions needed to refurbish this plant. Kind of weird if you look at it like that. Until of course you realize that the prospect of public funding was the whole reason for this company to buy this plant. Basically, tax payers and consumers take all the risk. They take the profit. That's how the nuclear business works. Never mind that this plant still needs to be shut down and decommissioned eventually. Who is going to be paying for that?
- mayama 4y ago
  Germany is digging up coal and increasing coal power production short term. They have longer term plans to go green, but most of those are highly optimistic.
  - locallost 4y ago
    Not true at all: https://twitter.com/LionHirth/status/1642786817681379328 https://twitter.com/LionHirth/status/1642786817681379328
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Renewables have replaced every joule of nuclear and some. https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&chartColumnSorting=default&year=-1&interval=year&source=public&legendItems=011001111100000000110&stacking=stacked_grouped https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE... The recent uptick in fossils is largely to make up for the combined shortfall of hydro and nuclear elsewhere.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Renewables don't need more "storage" than nuclear grids, though this is a bafflingly common belief. See France, for example, which tops up its nuclear grid with gas, hydro, import/exports etc. Storage only becomes an issue when you get to the last 20% or so of decarbonisation and if you're down at 5% you're better to focus on electrification of fossil fuel using industry than worry about that last 5% of gas used for electricity.
  - rendang 4y ago
    And yet I saw an article only today about the Czech Republic suffering from a lack of storage, on a grid which is only 18% renewable https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/04/14/sunshine-vs-the-grid-why-the-czech-republic-had-to-shutdown-their-solar-plants-over-easter https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/04/14/sunshine-vs-the-gr...
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      They've been publishing stories like this for years. They'll generally not mention that they are still burning fossil fuels. You'll notice the headline isn't "Czech Republic runs on 100% carbon free energy", which would be a much more interesting headline. I'm not sure how to check Czech Republic generation mix at that time but I wouldn't be surprised to see fossil fuels still being burnt for "contractual reasons". (edit: I'm estimating that there was at least 1.5GW of coal generation at the same time this solar was curtailed, so about 10x as much coal being burned as solar curtailed) But, even if it was curtailed for genuine reasons, that still doesn't mean storage would make financial sense. See France, where they 'curtail' nuclear power. Does that mean they "need" batteries?
nonethewiser 4y ago
Do we really have to put these plants on critical natural resources? I realize the plant is already on Lake Michigan. For some reason it seems like there is very little middle ground between “Nuclear power is dangerous. We shouldn’t have any.” And “Nuclear power isn’t dangerous. It poses no threat.” Let’s hedge our bets here. This states governor is the one against Enbridge keeping a pipeline in Lake Michigan, citing environmental concerns despite no prior issues and a deal to sure-up the existing pipeline. In the case of the pipeline, there is no alternative to crossing Lake Michigan. Not so for a nuclear plant. Edit: point is being proven in the replies. Why so much hostility to safeguarding our environment against the worst case? Why not place it somewhere where an accident wouldn’t have such devastating consequences?
- koolba 4y ago
  > Do we really have to put these plants on critical natural resources? I realize the plant is already on Lake Michigan. You mean by the water? I’m hardly an expert on the subject, but pretty sure you need a large water source for a nuclear plant both for the turbines and excess cooling.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    It’s easiest to put it near the largest fresh water system in the world. It’s also easiest to use coal and oil. But are these the best options overall?
- timerol 4y ago
  What critical natural resource is the plant currently on? Are you suggesting that "the shoreline of Lake Michigan" is a bad place for a nuclear plant - an industrial facility that uses water, and where continuous supply of water is a mitigation to the most common failure modes? Let's hedge our bets here - by placing nuclear power plants near abundant sources of water, as the original builders of the Palisades nuclear plant did.
  - p1mrx 4y ago
    For new reactors, we could put an abundant source of water inside the building, like NuScale is planning. There are also high temperature reactor designs that use air cooling.
downvotetruth 4y ago
It should have been built closer to St. Joe or South Haven to provide district heating as wasting the heat is an argument for keeping it shut. But, never would have happened with the Greenpeace scare tactics.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  District heating? Why can’t it do that where it currently is?
  - downvotetruth 4y ago
    It could be built now at cost, but large district heating systems in older (eastern) U.S. cities, such as New York ..., and Indianapolis, are mostly medium-pressure steam systems (150 psi to 400 psi), and extraction and long-distance transport of steam with those parameters is not economical. See https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclear-power-plants-technical-and-economic-aspects/ https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...
hristov 4y ago
This is incredibly dumb. These plants were only designed to run for 40 years. This particular one was extended to 51 years. Restarting it will be very dangerous. Nuclear energy is expensive, dangerous and will only work with massive taxpayer subsidies. But running old plants many years after their designed for lifespans is especially stupid. Radiation corrodes metals much faster than usual and in ways that are not predictable. It is dangerous to run these things longer than their designed for lifetimes.
- richk449 4y ago
  Why does radiation corrode metal in ways that are not predictable?
  - hristov 4y ago
    Radiation will send high energy particles that may displace metal atoms from their lattices. This may cause weakening, embitterment etc. Also shooting high energy particles at atoms will cause atoms to get into chemical reactions that they would have never gotten into before. This may cause new and unusual forms of rustlike behavior. It is not predictable because with radiation you are deep in quantum physics territory, and a lot of things depend on chance. Things may be perfectly fine if only isolated atoms are kicked out of their lattices, but if you are unlucky some atoms along a line get kicked out and you get a crack. Similarly you are not sure exactly what atom will get energized by some high energy electron and what other atom it will react with. Once you get into high energies, you can get a lot of chemical reactions that seemed impossible otherwise, or that nobody has ever thought of. There again usually you get some isolated strange compound. But if you are unlucky you get something that can act as a catalyst for further reactions and spread around like rust.
    - Kamq 4y ago
      It's true that it's unpredictable for a single atom, but when you're dealing with a macroscopic object (say, a metal part), it's quite predictable. The law of large numbers helps out quite a bit here (and the number of atoms is very large).
dismalpedigree 4y ago
Oh man. This brings back memories. I spent a few weeks every summer for 20 years about a mile south of the plant. Before 9/11 you could go down by the warm water discharge, plop down a beach chair and hang out in the 100 degree water. The guards would give you dirty looks but they never bothered anybody. I don’t know that this plant should be restarted though. They were trying to bury the spent fuel in the sand dunes next door at one point because they were out of space. Even more recently (10 years ago?) I could see outdoor cement casks for storing the spent fuel. Nuclear could be great, bit the spent fuel issue, NIMBY problems and insane costs will probably close the door on nuclear energy unfortunately.
- adev_ 4y ago
  > Nuclear could be great, bit the spent fuel issue, NIMBY problems and insane costs will probably close the door on nuclear energy unfortunately. 1- Select a not-so-random place in middle of the desert with stable geological ground 2- Make a tunnel 600m underground. 3- Put the dumps here 4- Congratulations: your nuclear waste problem is not a problem anymore. You solved it in the scientifically recommended way. And the same way than France, Sweden, Finland and China did it.
  - daemoens 4y ago
    We did do that. The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository was constructed but no nuclear waste was actually transported there because of once again, NIMBYs.
    - andromeduck 4y ago
      Thanks Obama
  - morsch 4y ago
    None of the European countries "did it" w.r.t. spent fuel, none of those sites are in operation yet. Though Finland is planning to start operation soon, after 7 years of construction and 3.5 billion EUR in construction costs. Searching for what they now consider a suitable site took decades.

93 points by jseliger 4y ago

Germany, in the meantime, decides to shut down three remaining nuclear plants. No news about major electric storage capacity yet, so I wonder how solar + wind would fare.

hintymad 4y ago
"E.ON Hikes Energy Prices 45% As Germany Winds Down Its Last Nuclear Plants". Note that the news title may intentionally muddy the water and I don't have enough knowledge to tell if the price hike and the shutdown of Germany's last nuclear plants have any causal relationship. That said, I know E.ON has already hiked its price due to the Ukrainian war. It looks at least the green energy didn't help enough.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >have any causal relationship nope given that nuclear has been a negligible part of the German energy mix for a long time now. (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig1-installed-net-power-generation-capacity-germany-2002-2022.png?itok=5BA4OuEZ https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...) According to the article where I guess that headline came from E.ON even says that the reason is that they cushioned prices last year during the height of the energy crisis and that this is higher prices from wholesale markets from last year coming through.
- locallost 4y ago
  It's muddying the water. The hikes are for the so called "Grundversorgung" where providers are required by law to provide you with electricity (and gas) basically without a contract. For instance my local provider hiked prices to 42-43 cents for regular customers at end of last year and "Grundversorgung" to 80 cents. I noticed various nuclear lobbyists were very active spreading false news in recent days, these people have no morals. Also the prices in Germany vary between hundreds of providers, you can get electricity from any one of them. They supply it by purchasing electricity on the market, some had long term contracts to weather the storm last year, some didn't and hiked prices early, some went bankrupt etc. The problem right now often is that it's difficult to switch contracts - my local provider is not taking on new customers, my guess because they are losing money and hoping the situation will improve.
rgmerk 4y ago
Germany is part of the broader European grid, and solar/wind is backed by interconnections to hydro etc etc. I was just listening to a podcast on battery storage and apparently continental Europe is behind on grid-scale battery installations because the power market design isn’t there to support it yet (as compared to the UK, the USA and particularly the Texas grid, and Australia). Germany is apparently doing pretty well on “behind the meter” home battery storage, and to be honest as long as there’s storage in the system it’s OK to do it with either 100,000 10kWh home batteries or a gigawatt-hour in a single grid battery facility. Batteries don’t make a lot of sense for long-duration storage however; for seasonal storage you want some other technology (hydro, hydrogen, demand management etc).
arcticbull 4y ago
They're just importing nuclear from France now. Solar or wind plus storage is significantly more expensive than conventional nuclear and worse for the environment. [1] [1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  The only way you can pretend nuclear is "better for the environment" is if you ignore most of its supply chain and only point a finger to "what comes out of the stack." The fuel supply chain is incredibly energy-intensive, expensive, and environmentally unfriendly, and unlike the materials used for rare-earth magnets and lithium ion batteries which everyone here loves to bleat about...the material is not recycled (nor can it be without significant changes that will take decades) whereas rare earth magnets, lithium ion batteries, and now windmill blades, are all recyclable. Nuclear has never been economically viable. It's been subsidized, enormously, for close to a century as the stepchild of the "defense" nuclear weapon and propulsion industries. It continues to get more expensive, whereas wind/solar/energy storage are plunging in cost. Nuclear would also still require energy storage because it can only fulfill base load; nuclear takes days to change power levels, and running at anything other than full capacity drastically impacts its economic viability. You can point to research all you like. US power companies are buying wind, solar, and energy storage. Not only are they not buying nuclear, they're shutting down plants because they are not economically viable. It's funny how HN is all "free market!" when it comes to things like renewables and decarbonizing transit (ie "why muh tax dollars going to this?!")...but nobody seems to acknowledge that the nuclear industry is massively subsidized and Biden is proposing throwing billions more at the industry because of lobbying. Also, that paper was published four years ago, which means it was based on even older data, and the cost of renewables and energy storage is plunging while nuclear goes up in cost...
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Energy and emissions wise it's still fine even using a filthy open pit mine fuelled by coal and diesel in Nigeria. An order of magnitude worse than the shills claim, but still fine. Much worse for locals than imaginary cobalt mines for LFP batteries though.
frozenport 4y ago
German has among the highest electricity prices in the world. This is not a success story: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/#:~:text=The%20world%20average%20price%20is,1%2C000%2C000%20kWh%20consumption%20per%20year https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/#:~:te....
- nullc 4y ago
  $0.55/kWh is in line with California PG&E peak residential rates.
- locallost 4y ago
  These are the prices for end customers and contain various taxes, surcharges for transmission and various other things. All of these costs are real and it's good to have them as a part of the actual price. You know what it actually costs and it's a good motivation to be energy efficient. Compare it to France which has the highest market prices in Europe right now [1] (and also last year) but allegedly the customers pay just 22c. It can't work - the nationalization of the EDF was started last year [2] and it posted a 20 billion loss [3]. The true price will be paid one way or the other, through taxes in this case. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/energy_charts/status/1638599051946893314 https://mobile.twitter.com/energy_charts/status/163859905194... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-to-pay-nearly-10bn-to-fully-nationalise-edf https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-to-p... [3] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/17/france-s-edf-posts-record-annual-loss-debt-swells_6016197_7.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/17/france-s...
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    The US indeed has a similar cost level but it just puts that out in tax form or takes on more debt. Result: lots of outdated infrastructure and plants like this and companies that leave their mess for tax payers to clean up rather than investing themselves. Like in this case with a nuclear plant that was bought last year and promptly shut down by its new owner. Why would they buy such an old plant at the end of its life? Now instead of taking the cost of decommissioning it (which costs lots of money) they are now looking to reopen it using public funding. So, they are happy to profit from this deal but not without public funding. The permit is probably less of an issue than finding the hundreds of millions needed to refurbish this plant. Kind of weird if you look at it like that. Until of course you realize that the prospect of public funding was the whole reason for this company to buy this plant. Basically, tax payers and consumers take all the risk. They take the profit. That's how the nuclear business works. Never mind that this plant still needs to be shut down and decommissioned eventually. Who is going to be paying for that?
mayama 4y ago
Germany is digging up coal and increasing coal power production short term. They have longer term plans to go green, but most of those are highly optimistic.
- locallost 4y ago
  Not true at all: https://twitter.com/LionHirth/status/1642786817681379328 https://twitter.com/LionHirth/status/1642786817681379328
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Renewables have replaced every joule of nuclear and some. https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&chartColumnSorting=default&year=-1&interval=year&source=public&legendItems=011001111100000000110&stacking=stacked_grouped https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE... The recent uptick in fossils is largely to make up for the combined shortfall of hydro and nuclear elsewhere.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Renewables don't need more "storage" than nuclear grids, though this is a bafflingly common belief. See France, for example, which tops up its nuclear grid with gas, hydro, import/exports etc. Storage only becomes an issue when you get to the last 20% or so of decarbonisation and if you're down at 5% you're better to focus on electrification of fossil fuel using industry than worry about that last 5% of gas used for electricity.
- rendang 4y ago
  And yet I saw an article only today about the Czech Republic suffering from a lack of storage, on a grid which is only 18% renewable https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/04/14/sunshine-vs-the-grid-why-the-czech-republic-had-to-shutdown-their-solar-plants-over-easter https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/04/14/sunshine-vs-the-gr...
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    They've been publishing stories like this for years. They'll generally not mention that they are still burning fossil fuels. You'll notice the headline isn't "Czech Republic runs on 100% carbon free energy", which would be a much more interesting headline. I'm not sure how to check Czech Republic generation mix at that time but I wouldn't be surprised to see fossil fuels still being burnt for "contractual reasons". (edit: I'm estimating that there was at least 1.5GW of coal generation at the same time this solar was curtailed, so about 10x as much coal being burned as solar curtailed) But, even if it was curtailed for genuine reasons, that still doesn't mean storage would make financial sense. See France, where they 'curtail' nuclear power. Does that mean they "need" batteries?

nonethewiser 4y ago

Do we really have to put these plants on critical natural resources? I realize the plant is already on Lake Michigan. For some reason it seems like there is very little middle ground between “Nuclear power is dangerous. We shouldn’t have any.” And “Nuclear power isn’t dangerous. It poses no threat.” Let’s hedge our bets here. This states governor is the one against Enbridge keeping a pipeline in Lake Michigan, citing environmental concerns despite no prior issues and a deal to sure-up the existing pipeline. In the case of the pipeline, there is no alternative to crossing Lake Michigan. Not so for a nuclear plant. Edit: point is being proven in the replies. Why so much hostility to safeguarding our environment against the worst case? Why not place it somewhere where an accident wouldn’t have such devastating consequences?

koolba 4y ago
> Do we really have to put these plants on critical natural resources? I realize the plant is already on Lake Michigan. You mean by the water? I’m hardly an expert on the subject, but pretty sure you need a large water source for a nuclear plant both for the turbines and excess cooling.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  It’s easiest to put it near the largest fresh water system in the world. It’s also easiest to use coal and oil. But are these the best options overall?
timerol 4y ago
What critical natural resource is the plant currently on? Are you suggesting that "the shoreline of Lake Michigan" is a bad place for a nuclear plant - an industrial facility that uses water, and where continuous supply of water is a mitigation to the most common failure modes? Let's hedge our bets here - by placing nuclear power plants near abundant sources of water, as the original builders of the Palisades nuclear plant did.
- p1mrx 4y ago
  For new reactors, we could put an abundant source of water inside the building, like NuScale is planning. There are also high temperature reactor designs that use air cooling.

downvotetruth 4y ago

It should have been built closer to St. Joe or South Haven to provide district heating as wasting the heat is an argument for keeping it shut. But, never would have happened with the Greenpeace scare tactics.

nonethewiser 4y ago
District heating? Why can’t it do that where it currently is?
- downvotetruth 4y ago
  It could be built now at cost, but large district heating systems in older (eastern) U.S. cities, such as New York ..., and Indianapolis, are mostly medium-pressure steam systems (150 psi to 400 psi), and extraction and long-distance transport of steam with those parameters is not economical. See https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclear-power-plants-technical-and-economic-aspects/ https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...

hristov 4y ago

This is incredibly dumb. These plants were only designed to run for 40 years. This particular one was extended to 51 years. Restarting it will be very dangerous. Nuclear energy is expensive, dangerous and will only work with massive taxpayer subsidies. But running old plants many years after their designed for lifespans is especially stupid. Radiation corrodes metals much faster than usual and in ways that are not predictable. It is dangerous to run these things longer than their designed for lifetimes.

richk449 4y ago
Why does radiation corrode metal in ways that are not predictable?
- hristov 4y ago
  Radiation will send high energy particles that may displace metal atoms from their lattices. This may cause weakening, embitterment etc. Also shooting high energy particles at atoms will cause atoms to get into chemical reactions that they would have never gotten into before. This may cause new and unusual forms of rustlike behavior. It is not predictable because with radiation you are deep in quantum physics territory, and a lot of things depend on chance. Things may be perfectly fine if only isolated atoms are kicked out of their lattices, but if you are unlucky some atoms along a line get kicked out and you get a crack. Similarly you are not sure exactly what atom will get energized by some high energy electron and what other atom it will react with. Once you get into high energies, you can get a lot of chemical reactions that seemed impossible otherwise, or that nobody has ever thought of. There again usually you get some isolated strange compound. But if you are unlucky you get something that can act as a catalyst for further reactions and spread around like rust.
  - Kamq 4y ago
    It's true that it's unpredictable for a single atom, but when you're dealing with a macroscopic object (say, a metal part), it's quite predictable. The law of large numbers helps out quite a bit here (and the number of atoms is very large).

dismalpedigree 4y ago

Oh man. This brings back memories. I spent a few weeks every summer for 20 years about a mile south of the plant. Before 9/11 you could go down by the warm water discharge, plop down a beach chair and hang out in the 100 degree water. The guards would give you dirty looks but they never bothered anybody. I don’t know that this plant should be restarted though. They were trying to bury the spent fuel in the sand dunes next door at one point because they were out of space. Even more recently (10 years ago?) I could see outdoor cement casks for storing the spent fuel. Nuclear could be great, bit the spent fuel issue, NIMBY problems and insane costs will probably close the door on nuclear energy unfortunately.

adev_ 4y ago
> Nuclear could be great, bit the spent fuel issue, NIMBY problems and insane costs will probably close the door on nuclear energy unfortunately. 1- Select a not-so-random place in middle of the desert with stable geological ground 2- Make a tunnel 600m underground. 3- Put the dumps here 4- Congratulations: your nuclear waste problem is not a problem anymore. You solved it in the scientifically recommended way. And the same way than France, Sweden, Finland and China did it.
- daemoens 4y ago
  We did do that. The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository was constructed but no nuclear waste was actually transported there because of once again, NIMBYs.
  - andromeduck 4y ago
    Thanks Obama
- morsch 4y ago
  None of the European countries "did it" w.r.t. spent fuel, none of those sites are in operation yet. Though Finland is planning to start operation soon, after 7 years of construction and 3.5 billion EUR in construction costs. Searching for what they now consider a suitable site took decades.