11 ms·

Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? I'm not really sure about creating radioactive waste that

Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? I'm not really sure about creating radioactive waste that has such huge half lives... From Wikipedia: Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 15.7 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few thousand years. The most troublesome transuranic elements in spent fuel are Np-237 (half-life two million years) and Pu-239 (half-life 24,000 years).[39] Nuclear waste requires sophisticated treatment and management to successfully isolate it from interacting with the biosphere. This usually necessitates treatment, followed by a long-term management strategy involving storage, disposal or transformation of the waste into a non-toxic form.[40] Governments around the world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, though there has been limited progress toward long-term waste management solutions.[41] Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Management_of_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Management_o...

transfire 11y ago
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187917-startup-gets-funding-for-its-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor-that-eats-radioactive-waste http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187917-startup-gets-fundi...
- jddw 11y ago
  This reactor eats some of the waste, but UPower can eat all of the waste, including this reactor's waste.
chinathrow 11y ago
Yes, multiple decomissioning projects are showing the true costs these days. Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant Decomissioned: 1990 Destruction started: 1995 Ongoing as of today....
- tim333 11y ago
  Yeah, I see from Wikipedia "In France, decommissioning of Brennilis Nuclear Power Plant, a fairly small 70 MW power plant, already cost €480 million (20x the estimate costs) and is still pending after 20 years." Plus it leaked into the lake nearby.
mikeash 11y ago
The half life of the immense amount of chemical toxic waste produced by industry each year is essentially infinite. And yet somehow we're mostly content with chucking it in a landfill (albeit ones regulated and built to safely handle it) and calling it good. Drop the dangerous period from "infinity" to "some millions of years" and suddenly people get more worried?
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  Who says I'm not worried about all the "bad" things(tm)? To be honest I'm just asking the question that while we can all say "isn't it great how safe nuclear is" we still haven't 100% figured out the waste issue. Fusion... well I'll believe it when it's powering my DeLorean.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    I'm not saying you're not worried, or trying to pull one of those "but this is worse, so you must only worry about it!" things. I'm just saying that you don't need to "solve" the problem, as demonstrated by how we deal with other toxic waste. Yeah, chucking it in a landfill and calling it good isn't ideal, but it's not terrible if your landfill is reasonably well designed. Nuclear waste is a problem, but not a big one, and not big enough that the continued use of nuclear power should be gated on some sort of definitive solution.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      How do I answer people who say that kind of thinking is what led to the fucking mess that is Sellafield? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31725365 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31725365 Behind schedule and over budget is totally normal of UK big projects. But still, £58bn is a lot of money to fix something that's not a big problem.
      - mikeash 11y ago
        Much of that high cost is because the waste is treated so delicately, while equally deadly non-nuclear waste is treated with much less care. I imagine there have been a lot of places in your country (as with any industrialized country) that have been horribly contaminated with non-nuclear pollution, then cleaned up. While these events can certainly be used as an argument for taking more care, they're almost never used as an argument to give up on the whole idea of industry. Nuclear waste is bad, but it doesn't seem to be on the level of "we must lock this up so securely that God Himself cannot access it" as people seem to try for.
DennisP 11y ago
Nuclear power plants in the U.S. pay a fee for waste disposal. Those fees have accumulated in a fund, currently amounting to over $30 billion. The money was going to go to Yucca Mountain, until that project was shut down. The long-lived fission products are a very small portion of the total waste, and if we only had fission products to worry about, the total waste would go back to the radioactivity of the original ore within three centuries or so, since most fission products are relatively short-lived. It's pretty easy to contain them for that long. The great majority of the total waste, and almost all the long-lived waste, is transuranics. Those can also be considered unspent fuel, and fissioned for energy in fast reactors or with neutrons from D-T fusion reactors. The Russians have a couple fast reactors in commercial operation, one of which has provided 560MWe to their power grid since 1980. They're working now on using them to process transuranic waste.
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  I really hope it's more than £30bn. No-one seems to know how much it costs to decommission one, but a link above says "range from $280-$612 million." Ouch.
  - DennisP 11y ago
    I'm talking about the fund for long-term waste storage. Operators pay for decommissioning themselves in most countries, and about 90 commercial nuclear plants plus various other reactors have been shut down, with 15 fully dismantled. Once the fuel is removed, the remaining radioactivity has a short half-life. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear-Wastes/Decommissioning-Nuclear-Facilities/ http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear...
rwcarlsen 11y ago
Power plants fund their own decommissioning [1]. And they also (in a way) already pay for disposal - a 1 mill per kWh fee on all energy generated payed to the federal govermnent in exchange for the feds taking responsibility for disposal [2]. This fee has been paid for decades - the industry has no problem supporting that level of disposal cost (and could even afford a higher fee if necessary). There has been an enormous amount of research into ways for dealing with the waste all kinds of disposal, treatments, recycling, etc. The only real blocker has been a lack of political/public will to make any decisions and move forward. [1] http://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html http://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  I'll counter your wikipedia links with the issues and costs associated with decommissioning in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Decommissioning_Authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Decommissioning_Author... Current estimates for one Nuclear Power Plant Site (Sellafield): £114bn which seems A LOT!
  - rwcarlsen 11y ago
    Sellafield is a large site consisting of many facilities [1]. These include Magnox reactors [2] which were historically used to create weapons grade Plutonium and are much "messier" than typical commercial power reactors. The Sellafield site has been and is still home to a very large spent fuel reprocessing plant that handles spent fuel from numerous UK reactors. Reprocessing plants are an entirely different beast. And a lot of the activity at the Sellafield site is generally from older, messier technologies as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnox
  - curtis 11y ago
    Sellafield isn't an ordinary nuclear power station. It was part of the UK's nuclear weapons program and contained some of the UK's earliest (maybe the earliest) nuclear reactors. It's not going to be representative of the decommissioning costs of modern generation II or generation III reactors.
hackuser 11y ago
> Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? That's an important question, but climate change is a far larger bill underwritten by the tax payer (and millions or billions more who can't afford taxes), so I don't think the question is a deal-breaker.
- chinathrow 11y ago
  Yes it surely is. We need to take everything into the equation on where to go. - grey energy invested - full lifetime costs from start of construction until fully recovered land - inclusive recycling costs - inclusive environmental impacts
  - jddw 11y ago
    This is one of the great challenges nuclear has to overcome on paper. Most of these costs are based on absurd standards that have consistently been proven wrong. Fukushima's cleanup would be orders of magnitude less if they didn't have to treat nearby soil as waste when its radioactive signature is far lower than the soil found at the ski slopes in CO, and even less than beach sand in Brazil. We treat low level radiation as dangerous, it really isn't. Nobody at Fukushima was exposed to high level radiation, and no one will die early due to the exposures they had. And if everybody moved back to the town and land that was evacuated, they could live their whole lives out and be fine! Why waste money on cleaning up things that are not dangerous, just lied about? Changing the standards to actually reflect science would eliminate so many of these "nebulous" costs and perceived indirect costs of nuclear power.
    - chinathrow 11y ago
      Why do you think those standards are absurd? Low level radion is dangerous. http://www.ianfairlie.org/news/recent-evidence-on-the-risks-of-very-low-level-radiation/ http://www.ianfairlie.org/news/recent-evidence-on-the-risks-... "However the latest study, (Zablotska et al, 2013) is very large (over 110,000 workers) and succeeded in finding statistically significant leukemia increases, even at the relatively low doses experienced by most of these adult workers (average dose = 92 mSv)."
donttrustatoms 11y ago
I am one of the UPower founders. There are two big stories here that most people don't know yet: 1) that a fast reactor can be waste-negative, I.e. transform existing waste to energy. 2) a fast reactor destroys the long lived waste- instead of trying to store waste for a hundred thousand years it's on the order of a hundred. Both of these are critically important for existing waste but also having an emission free energy source with a closed fuel cycle. No other energy source is better than a hundred thousandth as energy dense and no other energy source could produce clean energy for its own recycling. It's obviously just a cool technology but more than that it's amazing what that could mean for the environment and remote communities. Even for solar and wind materials mining, these remote mines generally have to burn tons and tons of diesel. That's what we are trying to fight.
- DennisP 11y ago
  UPower is a fast reactor? If so that's pretty encouraging!
  - donttrustatoms 11y ago
    Yessir!
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- aidenn0 11y ago
  What about transport of the waste? Isn't (nearly?) all waste in the US stored on-site?
  - donttrustatoms 11y ago
    Good question, and believe it or not there have been small reactor concepts that failed for not considering that exact point. Ours is designed to live in essentially a spent fuel cask. These things have been designed and tested to withstand being dropped from a thousand feet, being hit by missiles or airplanes. Seriously check out youtube there are crazy videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBp1FNceTTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBp1FNceTTA So from the time the reactor leaves our factory, to when it's put underground, till a decade later when it's taken out and shipped back for refueling, the fuel is locked in the reactor which is locked in this uber robust "cask". This design is a fast reactor which means it can recycle fuel. So beyond its first decade installation we can recycle the fuel approximately 6 cycles before there is any amount of leftover that must be removed. That would be about 70 years, and the volume would be about the size of a basketball (fully glassified) and the lifetime would be on the order of a hundred years. That could be stored at our central facility or another facility, as it would not be weaponizable.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
I'm surprised people are so worried about nuclear waste. It's literally the best type of waste imaginable - you can easily grab it, put it in barrels and store for possible future use as fuel source, and even if not, left alone this waste turns harmless with time, without reacting with anything. Compare that to waste generated from burning dead dinosaurs - its storage is not a problem only because it's dumped into the atmosphere to poison everyone. You can say that nuclear plants have one less externality here.

transfire 11y ago

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187917-startup-gets-funding-for-its-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor-that-eats-radioactive-waste http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187917-startup-gets-fundi...

jddw 11y ago
This reactor eats some of the waste, but UPower can eat all of the waste, including this reactor's waste.

chinathrow 11y ago

Yes, multiple decomissioning projects are showing the true costs these days. Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant Decomissioned: 1990 Destruction started: 1995 Ongoing as of today....

tim333 11y ago
Yeah, I see from Wikipedia "In France, decommissioning of Brennilis Nuclear Power Plant, a fairly small 70 MW power plant, already cost €480 million (20x the estimate costs) and is still pending after 20 years." Plus it leaked into the lake nearby.

mikeash 11y ago

The half life of the immense amount of chemical toxic waste produced by industry each year is essentially infinite. And yet somehow we're mostly content with chucking it in a landfill (albeit ones regulated and built to safely handle it) and calling it good. Drop the dangerous period from "infinity" to "some millions of years" and suddenly people get more worried?

andy_ppp 11y ago
Who says I'm not worried about all the "bad" things(tm)? To be honest I'm just asking the question that while we can all say "isn't it great how safe nuclear is" we still haven't 100% figured out the waste issue. Fusion... well I'll believe it when it's powering my DeLorean.
- mikeash 11y ago
  I'm not saying you're not worried, or trying to pull one of those "but this is worse, so you must only worry about it!" things. I'm just saying that you don't need to "solve" the problem, as demonstrated by how we deal with other toxic waste. Yeah, chucking it in a landfill and calling it good isn't ideal, but it's not terrible if your landfill is reasonably well designed. Nuclear waste is a problem, but not a big one, and not big enough that the continued use of nuclear power should be gated on some sort of definitive solution.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    How do I answer people who say that kind of thinking is what led to the fucking mess that is Sellafield? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31725365 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31725365 Behind schedule and over budget is totally normal of UK big projects. But still, £58bn is a lot of money to fix something that's not a big problem.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      Much of that high cost is because the waste is treated so delicately, while equally deadly non-nuclear waste is treated with much less care. I imagine there have been a lot of places in your country (as with any industrialized country) that have been horribly contaminated with non-nuclear pollution, then cleaned up. While these events can certainly be used as an argument for taking more care, they're almost never used as an argument to give up on the whole idea of industry. Nuclear waste is bad, but it doesn't seem to be on the level of "we must lock this up so securely that God Himself cannot access it" as people seem to try for.

DennisP 11y ago

Nuclear power plants in the U.S. pay a fee for waste disposal. Those fees have accumulated in a fund, currently amounting to over $30 billion. The money was going to go to Yucca Mountain, until that project was shut down. The long-lived fission products are a very small portion of the total waste, and if we only had fission products to worry about, the total waste would go back to the radioactivity of the original ore within three centuries or so, since most fission products are relatively short-lived. It's pretty easy to contain them for that long. The great majority of the total waste, and almost all the long-lived waste, is transuranics. Those can also be considered unspent fuel, and fissioned for energy in fast reactors or with neutrons from D-T fusion reactors. The Russians have a couple fast reactors in commercial operation, one of which has provided 560MWe to their power grid since 1980. They're working now on using them to process transuranic waste.

andy_ppp 11y ago
I really hope it's more than £30bn. No-one seems to know how much it costs to decommission one, but a link above says "range from $280-$612 million." Ouch.
- DennisP 11y ago
  I'm talking about the fund for long-term waste storage. Operators pay for decommissioning themselves in most countries, and about 90 commercial nuclear plants plus various other reactors have been shut down, with 15 fully dismantled. Once the fuel is removed, the remaining radioactivity has a short half-life. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear-Wastes/Decommissioning-Nuclear-Facilities/ http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear...

rwcarlsen 11y ago

Power plants fund their own decommissioning [1]. And they also (in a way) already pay for disposal - a 1 mill per kWh fee on all energy generated payed to the federal govermnent in exchange for the feds taking responsibility for disposal [2]. This fee has been paid for decades - the industry has no problem supporting that level of disposal cost (and could even afford a higher fee if necessary). There has been an enormous amount of research into ways for dealing with the waste all kinds of disposal, treatments, recycling, etc. The only real blocker has been a lack of political/public will to make any decisions and move forward. [1] http://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html http://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act

andy_ppp 11y ago
I'll counter your wikipedia links with the issues and costs associated with decommissioning in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Decommissioning_Authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Decommissioning_Author... Current estimates for one Nuclear Power Plant Site (Sellafield): £114bn which seems A LOT!
- rwcarlsen 11y ago
  Sellafield is a large site consisting of many facilities [1]. These include Magnox reactors [2] which were historically used to create weapons grade Plutonium and are much "messier" than typical commercial power reactors. The Sellafield site has been and is still home to a very large spent fuel reprocessing plant that handles spent fuel from numerous UK reactors. Reprocessing plants are an entirely different beast. And a lot of the activity at the Sellafield site is generally from older, messier technologies as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnox
- curtis 11y ago
  Sellafield isn't an ordinary nuclear power station. It was part of the UK's nuclear weapons program and contained some of the UK's earliest (maybe the earliest) nuclear reactors. It's not going to be representative of the decommissioning costs of modern generation II or generation III reactors.

hackuser 11y ago

> Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? That's an important question, but climate change is a far larger bill underwritten by the tax payer (and millions or billions more who can't afford taxes), so I don't think the question is a deal-breaker.

chinathrow 11y ago
Yes it surely is. We need to take everything into the equation on where to go. - grey energy invested - full lifetime costs from start of construction until fully recovered land - inclusive recycling costs - inclusive environmental impacts
- jddw 11y ago
  This is one of the great challenges nuclear has to overcome on paper. Most of these costs are based on absurd standards that have consistently been proven wrong. Fukushima's cleanup would be orders of magnitude less if they didn't have to treat nearby soil as waste when its radioactive signature is far lower than the soil found at the ski slopes in CO, and even less than beach sand in Brazil. We treat low level radiation as dangerous, it really isn't. Nobody at Fukushima was exposed to high level radiation, and no one will die early due to the exposures they had. And if everybody moved back to the town and land that was evacuated, they could live their whole lives out and be fine! Why waste money on cleaning up things that are not dangerous, just lied about? Changing the standards to actually reflect science would eliminate so many of these "nebulous" costs and perceived indirect costs of nuclear power.
  - chinathrow 11y ago
    Why do you think those standards are absurd? Low level radion is dangerous. http://www.ianfairlie.org/news/recent-evidence-on-the-risks-of-very-low-level-radiation/ http://www.ianfairlie.org/news/recent-evidence-on-the-risks-... "However the latest study, (Zablotska et al, 2013) is very large (over 110,000 workers) and succeeded in finding statistically significant leukemia increases, even at the relatively low doses experienced by most of these adult workers (average dose = 92 mSv)."

donttrustatoms 11y ago

I am one of the UPower founders. There are two big stories here that most people don't know yet: 1) that a fast reactor can be waste-negative, I.e. transform existing waste to energy. 2) a fast reactor destroys the long lived waste- instead of trying to store waste for a hundred thousand years it's on the order of a hundred. Both of these are critically important for existing waste but also having an emission free energy source with a closed fuel cycle. No other energy source is better than a hundred thousandth as energy dense and no other energy source could produce clean energy for its own recycling. It's obviously just a cool technology but more than that it's amazing what that could mean for the environment and remote communities. Even for solar and wind materials mining, these remote mines generally have to burn tons and tons of diesel. That's what we are trying to fight.

DennisP 11y ago
UPower is a fast reactor? If so that's pretty encouraging!
- donttrustatoms 11y ago
  Yessir!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
aidenn0 11y ago
What about transport of the waste? Isn't (nearly?) all waste in the US stored on-site?
- donttrustatoms 11y ago
  Good question, and believe it or not there have been small reactor concepts that failed for not considering that exact point. Ours is designed to live in essentially a spent fuel cask. These things have been designed and tested to withstand being dropped from a thousand feet, being hit by missiles or airplanes. Seriously check out youtube there are crazy videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBp1FNceTTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBp1FNceTTA So from the time the reactor leaves our factory, to when it's put underground, till a decade later when it's taken out and shipped back for refueling, the fuel is locked in the reactor which is locked in this uber robust "cask". This design is a fast reactor which means it can recycle fuel. So beyond its first decade installation we can recycle the fuel approximately 6 cycles before there is any amount of leftover that must be removed. That would be about 70 years, and the volume would be about the size of a basketball (fully glassified) and the lifetime would be on the order of a hundred years. That could be stored at our central facility or another facility, as it would not be weaponizable.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

I'm surprised people are so worried about nuclear waste. It's literally the best type of waste imaginable - you can easily grab it, put it in barrels and store for possible future use as fuel source, and even if not, left alone this waste turns harmless with time, without reacting with anything. Compare that to waste generated from burning dead dinosaurs - its storage is not a problem only because it's dumped into the atmosphere to poison everyone. You can say that nuclear plants have one less externality here.