Save the nuclear power plants that generate 50% of America’s clean electricity | Hacker News Reader

Save the nuclear power plants that generate 50% of America’s clean electricity

vox.com

62 pointsjseliger72 comments

This needs to be said, and I’m glad Vox is finally saying it. The nearly 100ish nuclear power plants in the US generate almost 1/5 of the total electricity output. It irks me beyond belief when environmentalists try to close them down just for existing. There have not been any major incidents in the US (apart from Three Mile Island), and if Congress got its shit together and sacrificed a single mountain in Nevada for waste disposal we could finally stop all of the actual damage that the coal/oil industry has inflicted over generations.

People seem to overstate the risk of nuclear waste. Surely a few tons of radioactive waste is better than millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere? Nuclear could provide a solution to our energy needs NOW instead of having to wait around for solar and grid storage to be reliable on a nationwide scale.

Right now radioactive waste is stored in pools on site at the reactor. If the US government would actually fund the Yucca Mountain project [1] the risk would be negligible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

When you have too much CO2, there's a pretty obvious fix for that: plant a ton of trees.

When you have nuclear waste, you're stuck with it for at least a few thousand years, probably longer.

Assuming neither gets "fixed" to your satisfaction—we couldn't physically plant enough trees anyway—I'd rather deal with a few piles of inconvenient material over a planet-wide fucked up atmosphere.

Yucca mountain isn't a great solution... more of a stopgap really. Besides, how do you convince the fine citizens of Nevada to go along with having the nation's nuclear waste buried under their water table? We're not talking about Native Americans defending a river here, these are actual Americans we're talking about.

Low level waste (medical, scientific, etc) is such trivial matter that worrying about the water table is paranoid ignorant bunkum.

As for high level "waste" — it should be reprocessed and reused or burned as fuel in breeder reactors. Burying it underground is a criminal waste of productive resources.

This is what I dislike about current US policy on nuclear waste, there are no plans to store nuclear waste in a form suitable for reprocessing later on. If nuclear waste is vitrified or buried way underground I fear that digging it up, crushing it, and reprocessing it decades later will be economically prohibitive compared to just using fresh ore like we do today. The French already reprocess their waste and nuclear power provides the majority of electricity in France.

We have the same issues in France, or Yucca mountain is called "Bure" in eastern France, and the project is already a political mess.

Yes but you have way less waste to dispose of. In America, the Uranium and Plutonium that makes up the vast majority of spent nuclear fuel is not separated out from the fission products, we just get rid of it all. IIRC reprocessing is actually slightly more expensive than just mining fresh Uranium as now you need to re-enrich the fuel anyways and Uranium is plentiful enough at least for now. By separating out the spent fuel you isolate the most radioactive components and now you can avoid having to store the majority of the fuel for extremely long periods of time.

Reprocessing does not eliminate all nuclear waste, it just minimizes it to only storing the highly radioactive portions instead of the inert components. It also is a prerequisite for any of the proposals that I know about for actually eliminating the nuclear waste instead of just burying it. The long lived radioactive waste could be used as a blanket around a fusion reactor that is used as a neutron source to fission the waste and generate more energy from it.

American people seem to underestimate the damage and risk of anything they are doing. Producing tons of highly-toxic, highly radioactive elements with a lifetime of several the factor humans are living on earth and not the singles clue how to contain them safely even for a decade!

Sure – why save energy, why invest in renewable, energy. Because we have it and we can do it.

This arrogoance towards the subsequent and already generations of today makes me unbelievable angry.

Nuclear waste that is long-lived is by definition not dangerous.

We absolutely should improve energy efficiency and invest in renewable energy. We should be installing solar panels, wind turbines, utility-scale solar, batteries and storage as fast as we can.

But we can simultaneously construct new nuclear power without slowing down renewable deployment. We need a diversity of energy sources; nuclear is the ideal source of base-load power which is necessary to ensure grid stability and sufficient dispatchable power. It's the only way we'll ever kick the habit of burning coal, oil and gas.

The fundamental problem with nuclear power plants is that, even if you do count them as clean power, they're not an economically viable way of generating it in the modern renewable era. They have the same flexibility and operating cost issues that are killing coal, only more so, and there's no real way around this.

Sure, it's possible to operate them in load-following mode somewhat (though US regulations don't allow it), but even French energy giant EDF doesn't think that's going to be enough to cope with a grid with high levels of renewable generation; their proposed solution is to change the rules so solar and wind power has to shut down instead of the nuclear plants. (I think it may only get you to coal-power-plant levels of output modulation at best.) Output modulation also reduces plant lifespan and increases operational complexity; not good for something that's already too expensive to build and operate. Similarly, large-scale storage would substantially increase the price of nuclear power.

There just isn't any avoiding the fact that nuclear power is expensive, and the only to make it viable is to put up everyone's power bills substantially, whether it's by increasing the cost of other generation options via taxes and less favourable operating rules for renewables or just outright putting a tax on electricity that's paid straight to nuclear operators.

Most reactors in the US are old and require a lot of maintenance. I think that if the US built modern reactors like those in Canada and France nuclear could be more price competitive.

Unfortunately most proposals to build new plants are shot down pretty quickly by red tape and NIMBYs

New reactors are plagued by huge, hundreds of percent cost and schedule overruns, over originally expensive plans. See the current EPR projects.

> They have the same flexibility and operating cost issues that are killing coal

Do you have any references for this?

The common characterization that you hear is just the opposite: nuclear is expensive in upfront investments but cheaper to operate than coal.

In the future when the production mix gets more unpredictable, always-on generation should get a profitability boost. A producer who can promise 24/7 production is in a strong position on a market that is largely based on unertain producers trying to sell future uncertain output to producers whose demand is inflexible.

Hmmm. I can't get up-to-date operating cost figures for coal specifically, but US nuclear is barely cheaper to operate than fossil-powered steam generation in general these days: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_04.html (Coal is generally cheaper than the average.) The nasty catch here, of course, is that most of the fossil fuel costs are from fuel and most of the nuclear costs are operation and maintenance. Heavy load following decrease fuel costs but increases operation and maintenance costs - it's more complex to operate a nuclear plant that way, the added thermal stresses increase wear accelerate failures, and the total power generated is lower. That's why nuclear is usually treated as always-on baseload power; not because it's the only way it can be operated, but because it's the most economically viable one.

In that table, "Fossil steam" is 42.2% more expensive to operate than nuclear[1], that's pretty significant.

In jurisdictions that have already joined the carbon trading traties, there's an additional big operating cost in the emission credits that would make the coal position significantly worse still. USA and other lagging countries will have to join too soon or we'll all pay a vastly higher price in the form of deterioration of living conditions.

[1] "Total" value for the most recent available year is 25.36 for nuclear, 36.08 for fossil steam

In over 28 years in Nuclear Plant Operations I've never seen, or heard of, an incident that could be attributed to cost cutting. If anything nuke plants could be more profitable if they did cut some costs. Control room operators are, in some ways, over trained after obtaining a licence from the Feds to operate that plant. They then, and forever, spend one week in 6 in 40 hours of training. That could easily be halved after holding a license for 5 years or more. The admin size of each plant has ballooned over the years, in some cases more than tripled. Again, cost cutting is not on the list of nuclear plant troubles.

Nuclear reactors won't be politically feasible unless either a) we find a country that will sell us the rights to dump our nuclear waste there or b) launching nuclear waste into the sun becomes economically feasible. I just don't think it's possible to convince the lay American that nuclear waste can be stored permanently and safely (I'm not so convinced myself).

Not sure about a) but b) probably won't happen until all the reactors running today have been retired.

For me, it boils down to this: do you trust the persons responsible for the security and maintenance to do more than the bare minimum?

Do you trust the company execs to not cut corners and try to save a little more by switching to cheaper materials/labor/waste management?

Are you sure that the architects and engineers had enough foresight and put in enough wiggle room for changes in the enviroment?

How much are you willing to pay with your taxes when something goes wrong?

How is nuclear power „clean“ with all the radioactive waste that needs to go somewhere when burnt down?

When the used fuel rods are properly stored, even the primitive nuclear reactors we use today release quite a bit less radiation than burning coal (not event mentioning CO2 and so on). Even after including all major nuclear accidents, nuclear plants have saved lives compared to coal plants (and they have pretty good track record when compared against even renewable sources).

However, storing the fuel rods properly is borderline impossible due to politics, so your questions probably still stands.

I admit i don’t know much about the coal burning radiation output. And im even further away from knowing the perfect solution to the worlds energy needs. So i have many questions, driven by the wish to live in a intact environment and leaving it to those who come in a good state.

Where and how exactly is the radiation release of coal plants happening? I can imagine its maybe a difference if a smaller dose of radiation is put out slowly and spread more (in time and space terms)than if it’s concentrated on one point? Radiaton is anywhere thats clear... but we rarely get strong radiation caused illnesses from just catching cosmic radiation do we?

And how exactly are politics preventing proper storage?

I definitely don’t wanna promote coal, but where are these numbers proving coal killed and harmed more people than Fukushima and Tchernobyl and the many smaller incidents?

Also i often wonder - where could science of reusable energy and reduced consumption be if the billions invested in nuclear research were invested there instead?

> And how exactly are politics preventing proper storage?

Basically, NIMBY. Even if it's perfectly safe, some people will always worry about "but what if all physicists, seismologists etc. etc. are wrong (or lying)"?

Like with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine ?

> numbers proving coal killed and harmed more people than Fukushima

The number of people who died from the radiation which escaped during the Fukishima nuclear disaster is currently zero.[0] Even factoring in the worst-case projections for every nuclear energy disaster, nuclear power is still the safest—or certainly one of the safest—forms of utility-scale electricity generation.

If you're looking for a form of energy which is normally safe but kills thousands in a disaster scenario, the answer is hydro. In one instance, a dam failure killed 171,000 people.

Solar panel installers and wind turbine workers occasionally die from falls. (Also, solar panel manufacturing can be a dirty/toxic process.)

Fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas, biomass) kill because miners, workers and citizens breathe in coal dust and smoke particulates belched into the atmosphere.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

Mortality rate in deaths per trillion kilowatt hours:

  Source       Rate
  -----------------
  Coal      100,000
  Oil        36,000
  Biofuel    24,000
  Gas         4,000 
  Hydro       1,400
  Solar         440
  Wind          150 
  Nuclear        90
  -----------------

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

How are people being killed by Solar?

Panels dropped on heads? Pollutants from production? A proportion of deaths from mining and refining silicon?

Why is this downvoted? I have the same question.

I like to think the up button is small, and it was an accidental downvote, its happened to me a few times.

I don't know, there's the "unvote"/"undown" buttons to correct these kinds of mistakes, but I guess most people won't double-check.

I’ve been told not to discuss downvoting (see faq). That said i think too there should be a proposal to comment what you don’t like on downvoting as it is in stackoverflow... otherwise people neber know how to change their behavior.

falling from roofs

I believe it is mostly from people installing solar panels. It's pretty easy to fall off a roof if you're not careful

And given the comparatively modest energy output per unit, it wouldn't take many rooftop falls to put a substantial dent into the deaths per trillion kilowatt hours number.

Put it another way, if California produced 0.0004 trillion kilowatt hours of solar power every year, that would put the death rate of solar installers at one every five to six years. Sounds plausible.

> Where and how exactly is the radiation release of coal plants happening?

Coal plants don't burn pure elemental carbon, the black stuff that is dug up from the ground contains a lot of other stuff as well, such as sulphur (acid rain, etc.), and, yes, various radionuclides. So when the coal is burned, part of the radionuclides go up the smokestack, others are left in the ash.

Realistically, compared to all the other environmental destruction associated with coal power, the radioactivity release is a non-issue. At the same time, it's good to keep in mind that except for major disasters like Chernobyl, an operating coal plant releases orders of magnitude more radioactivity to the environment than an operating nuclear plant.

> I definitely don’t wanna promote coal, but where are these numbers proving coal killed and harmed more people than Fukushima and Tchernobyl and the many smaller incidents?

You cannot usually say that person X died due to coal power production (except for things like coal mining accidents (which are quite common), maintenance worker falling etc.), but at a population level coal pollution causes an increase in respiratory illnesses, strokes, etc. which, again, at population level kills people. If you want to learn more, you can start e.g. at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents

> Also i often wonder - where could science of reusable energy and reduced consumption be if the billions invested in nuclear research were invested there instead?

I'm not sure what "reusable energy" is supposed to mean, but yeah, sure, energy efficiency would probably be better than it is now. Would it be better enough to cover the loss of nuclear energy, and it's partial replacement by fossil power such as coal? I doubt it.

I'm not sure they actually do. The highest figure nuclear proponents have come up with for radiation exposure from coal is about three times nuclear power plants, if you only count the source of radiation exposure that coal and nuclear have in common, and that's for very polluting 1970s-era coal power plants of a type that probably wouldn't be allowed to operate today. Besides, coal power is dying out in the US anyway.

By that logic, solar, wind, and hydro aren't clean either; they all generate some amount of pollution and environmental side effects. And since nothing is truly "clean", I guess we can all just use coal, right?

Sarcasm aside, "clean" in this context has a very specific meaning, which nuclear meets. The fact that it isn't an entirely magical source of side-effect free power is not relevant.

solar, wind, and hydro don't leave a persistent waste product that takes hundreds of thousands of years to become safe to stand next to. Nuclear has a special class of unclean all on its own - it's both much cleaner than coal on the immediate term, and way less clean on the "beyond timescales that humans can understand" scale.

Sure they do. It's called buildings.

Some nuclear waste can be recycled to lower lifetime waste that degrades on sensible timescales, but let's hate on all nuclear power because it's not magical.

yes, let's confused my statement for hate on nuclear, despite being pro nuclear. Makes sense to me.

You do realise those “beyond timescales humans understand” substances are already in the Earth’s crust? And the longer something takes to decay, the safer it is. Long time scales are a plus.

Let's not fall for the "why are you worried about coal waste, there are layers and layers of soot in the crust already, and no one's bothered by those" excuse.

Pumping chemicals in the ground into the air is different from taking things in the ground from many places and hiding them away in one place.

It's possible to easily take the whole waste and safely store it until it breaks down (it takes a while, though) - that makes it clean as opposed to other kinds of plants that pollute the air.

The problem with nuclear power is not the techniques. The problem is the human part. At some point, some director of manager wants to save money, which can often be at the expense of safety. If you look at all indicents in nuclear reactor, one of the causes is often not having the money or the desire to safe some money.

Nuclear power is not a toy, and every expense should be made so that it is safe. You can't always prevent evidence, but with something so risky as nuclear power, having an indicent where money is (one of) the causes is just really stupid.

> At some point, some director of manager wants to save money, which can often be at the expense of safety.

This is true in any system. The downsides with nuclear don't seem to be as grave as the downsides that come with fossil fuels. (On a kilowatt-hour adjusted basis, at least.)

> having an indicent where money is (one of) the causes is just really stupid

Money is always a factor. Money represents resources. Finite resources. No problem can be worth infinity because we don't have infinity to play with.

I'll bet you could get California to vote for a ballot measure banning all finite things with a little work.

Finite things contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

It is impossible for modern nuclear reactors to fail like Chernobyl. In the worst case scenario, the damage would be negligible and the reactor would shut itself down.

No – nuclear is not "clean" energy. It's one of the messiest form of them. And coal is "clean" neither.

Nuclear power plants are not clean. Far from it. Radioactive waste is still an unsolved problem.

Here's a solution: You take the nuclear waste, and then you put it in a small pile somewhere geologically inactive, and then you don't touch it.

Problem solved.

The issues with nuclear are almost entirely related to cost.

But where can you find such a place? In Germany people believed to found such a place in an old salt mine, now they have to get the stuff back before the mine is completely flooded with water and will contaminate the area around it. And that wasn't high radioactive waste. You need to store is from 100,000 to a million years and you need to inform people about it. Which isn't easy b/c we couldn't really understand the writings on the Pyramids in Egypt which were build just a few thousand years ago. Nuclear power is also dangerous because you can't easily tell apart if a country use it to generate power or build a bomb.

What about space? And we're talking about plants in the U.S., I don't think there will be the problem with bombs.

> What about space?

Great in principle, but sending nuclear waste hurtling through the upper atmosphere strapped to a tank of rocket fuel seems like a really bad idea in practice. You'd be one mishap away from spreading radioactive dust over a huge area.

Some kind of railgun-like launch system big enough to achieve escape velocity could work, I guess - but that technology's not there yet.

We can store it on Earth until the technology is there, we don't need to wait until it breaks down

Waste that needs to be stored for "100,000 to a million years" is not particularly dangerous by definition. Either it's highly radioactive or it has a long half-life. It can't be both.

As for the hypothetical "future civilisation" which has somehow lost all our rudimentary knowledge of the physical sciences, but is still somehow capable of deep mining operations is a stupid, absurd canard. Any scenario whereby the knowledge about geiger counters is forgotten is one where that society's problems are going to be far, far more serious than a few deeply buried barrels of lightly irradiated surgical equipment that are statistically impossible to discover by accident.

Oh, and you do realise the stuff came out of the ground in the first place? Where's your concern for these future civilisations digging around in natural uranium deposits?

> But where can you find such a place?

It's not hard.

> In Germany people believed to found such a place in an old salt mine, now they have to get the stuff back before the mine is completely flooded with water and will contaminate the area around it

We're talking about the Asse II mine?

Yes, back in the 60s and 70s a research project was run to see if a salt mine would be a good place to store waste. In turns out it really, really, isn't because (spoilers!) salt mines aren't stable. Which is something we now know (and honestly could probably have figured out back then) which is why nobody is proposing on storing waste in salt mines any more.

And it's not completely flooded, and it isn't contaminating the area around it. It's in danger of collapsing, and now the waste needs to be moved somewhere else, yes., but it's not like it's hard to find stable locations; the issue with Asse II is they picked one that isn't stable.

> You need to store is from 100,000 to a million years

That's simply not a relevant concern.

It is being worked on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

That "waste" is fuel in a breeder reactor (or other advanced reactor designs). Current (ancient) reactor designs only recover a very small amount of the usable energy (something like ~3% of the U235, if I remember correctly?). Worrying about disposing of "spent" fuel out of fear for of it's current physical properties (radiation) is like worrying where we should store the "waste" 97% of the gasoline remaining in your car because you only allow an engine design capable of using 3%.

Waste has never[1] been a technical problem. The people creating the problem of waste are the people that push irrational fears about any new reactor designs that would solve the problem.

[1] a small fraction will always remain as waste, but that is something we have some control over by choosing the nuclear decay chain=, and it would still be a few percent of current reactor output. Even with current designs, the massive gain in energy density makes the current amount of waste trivial compared to the fly ash waste of coal power. Coal is worse even if you only consider radiation, and coal waste also contains heavy metals and other chemical waste that doesn't got away even with a long half life.

Keep them, but calling them "clean" is pure grade A bullshit. Sure, they're "cleaner" but they are absolutely not clean, yielding a waste product that stays a danger to every single living thing near it for tens of thousands of years.

It has fewest deaths per TWh, and zero carbon emissions.

It's safest the same way, airplane is safest form of transportation.

Pretty sure solar, wind, and hydro have fewer deaths per terawatthour, which also happens to be an absolute nonsense x/y plot to be looking at.

I am 100% pro nuclear power, but I'd love to see proper new approaches that don't lead to barrels of radiating waste that transporters seem to keep fucking losing, or dump in the ocean, or do any number of illegal other things with. I prefer to stay grounded in reality and look at the entire pipeline rather than naively just looking at what happens after the plant's been built, and only looking at the plant's site and not a millimeter beyond its perimeter.

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