Should Disney World Have the Right to Build a Nuclear Power Plant?

What I never understood is why Exxon/BP/etc never positioned themselves to corner nuclear/solar/etc. At their level, pivoting from being a "Gas Company" to an "Energy Company" seems like a no-brainer. Who cares which energy source wins, if you own all the energy sources?

I would like to see a complete ban of all air and water pollution that can be sourced to power and heating plants. A zero tolerance policy. If alternative sources with storage can economically beat nuclear in such world then that is great. Lets put the regulations in place today. If not then lets still put the regulations in place because the environment really need us to do so, but we need something to fill demand when renewable alternatives can't produce.

We have literally built actual, real, currently operating plants almost 50 years ago for half the inflation-adjusted cost of some of the estimates. Even better than an estimate is real-world evidence.

If the numbers added up China would be doing it already, but even for them - where they can still socialize the costs of failure (i.e. if it blows up, oh well, whereas in the West there's $100B in lawsuits) - it's expensive.

From https://prod-ng.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access-control.cgi...

See also https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of...

It was not even human error for Fukushima, they had ignored experts because the solution would hit the company's bottom line.

So the solution is having it government owned. But unfortunately, there's a clear history of governments selling assets.

Sorry, but until there's tiny reactors, the risk is huge because; human nature not science.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japa-nuclear-risks/specia...

Of course. But what are the chances that almost every human in a big city get's struck by a lightning at the same time? It only has to happen once. I can't understand how people can think so carelessly when it comes to something this dangerous.

"It's really really really unlikely that something goes horribly wrong" something goes horribly wrong "welp."

We better find us some more planets to fuck up.

Is is really really hard to solve the problem of human mismanagement though. The technical challenges with nuclear are solvable, but the human factor is not. Take something like the space shuttle disasters - arguable both do to bad management. If NASA cant solve this problem even with the brightest minds and enormous resources, how can nuclear?

If someone can solve the problem of human mismanagement, I'm all for nuclear.

Interesting that I am getting downvoted without anyone providing any arguments or facts against my narrative.

I don't necessarily think nuclear energy on a large scale is more viable or more cost effective than renewables, however, I think you're overstating some of the issues you present. Based on the nuclear industry in the U.S.:

You say "No insurance company in the world will insure a nuclear power plant" which is false. Taken directly from the III website, "Nuclear insurance consists of two tiers. The first tier is private liability insurance coverage made available by a pool of U.S. insurance companies, called American Nuclear Insurers. The second tier is made up of an assessment on nuclear power plant operators... which is supplied by the nuclear power industry as a whole. Under the Price-Anderson Act, all reactor owners are committed to paying their share of any damages that exceed the incident reactor owner’s first tier limit of $375 million—up to $111.9 million per reactor. Since [there] are currently 104 reactors in operation, the amount that would be available in the industry pool to pay claims totals $12.6 billion (2011)."[1] Clearly the insurance arrangement for nuclear power plants is atypical, but they certainly do have coverage (both private and public) and really most everything about nuclear is treated as atypical anyway. Hydro dams have similar insurance issues, despite having nothing to do with the nuclear industry, and can't rely on normal insurance companies for worse-case scenario incidents like total retainment failures.

Building costs for nuclear reactors are certainly high, but they significantly drop after the first reactor is built. Each subsequent reactor added to an existing plant creates immense value at a fraction of the cost. I work for an energy company that owns several nuclear plants. A nuclear operator trainer once told me the "first reactor is built to get all the permits and licenses in order, the second reactor is built to print money." The French, who deeply invested into nuclear, enjoy one of the lowest electricity rates in Europe[2], so I would challenge how how are they managing that? An uncited statement from Wikepedia (my favorite type of statement) suggests insurance only accounts for 0.1% of nuclear costs. The upfront capital costs of nuclear are a given, but the point is that the costs are eaten away over the long-term, as the plant operates for 40, 50, or 60 years. The big financial issue here (i.e. political issue) is that the cost recoupment of nuclear is not designed to give the capital investor an ROI 4-10 years after construction, it's meant to pass on the ROI to the next generation 30 years later. This kills the lender. Nuclear is also a cornered niche market that allows major price gouging and lacks a decent-sized pool of experienced construction experts, which accounts for the construction issues and cost overruns that occur.

Regarding China, there is certainly evidence that their build rate has slowed, but this is less caused by nuclear pricing (otherwise why would they have committed to ((I think) 25 reactors!?) but rather caused by supply chain issues with fuel, building materials, and trained personnel who can operate and maintain the plants.[3]

I'm self-admittedly not a power pricing expert, but I do know that most cost calculations for energy do not account for site maintenance, decommissioning, waste management, and other similar long-term issues, with the exception for nuclear. Nuclear pricing often does have a lot of this built into its pricing models because these are all actions that are (1) highly regulated by the government, (2) legally required to be planned for, (3) will cause a company to incur fines if not managed correctly, and (4) have enough of an impact on price that they front-load the costs into nuclear pricing schemes specifically to avoid balloon pricing issues later in life (long-term lifecycle planning is a staple of nuclear management). So unless you can provide some specifically sourced dollar-to-dollar comparisons of energy commodity prices, I choose not to believe your statement on this. I would personally argue that nuclear is comparable in price to on-land wind generation, and slightly more expensive than solar at the $/kwh level. However, nuclear can produce significantly more power than solar in a similar physical space.

All of this ignores the low-carbon footprint of nuclear, and also assumes that battery and storage technologies that turn "renewables" into "reliables" are present (from my view they're barely here, and they're super expensive). Nuclear fears have also deterred nuclear R&D, which has left the industry slagging behind where it could have been by now. Nuclear also has one of the most fuel-efficient "burns", where the amount of mass required to "burn" to get energy is orders of magnitudes lower than other sources. The amount of waste from nuclear is also significantly lower than amounts generated by other sources, but obviously it can be highly hazardous. Though nobody really ever asked what power companies were doing with all that CO2 they were producing as a byproduct, it literally just floated away, and it was by volume significantly more than the amount of spent nuclear fuel sitting around right now. How much actual realized damage have we caused by CO2 emissions vs radioactive byproducts? I genuinely don't know.

[1] https://www.iii.org/article/insurance-coverage-nuclear-accid... [2] https://en.selectra.info/energy-france/guides/electricity/co... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-01-11/china-sho...

>Indeed, Walt's comments on a May 23, 1966, memo suggest that he himself had privately backed away from the model city vision before he died. In the memo, which was found in Walt's desk and is now kept at the Disney Archives in Burbank, Calif., Florida attorney Paul Helliwell sketched out the problem of allowing permanent residents at Epcot. If people lived there, they would vote there, diluting the company's political control of the property. It seems that Walt's thoughts were headed in a similar direction: On the memo, every time Helliwell referred to "permanent residents," Walt crossed it out and substituted "temporary residents/tourists."

[...]

>In that memo, Helliwell expressed concern about state and local laws that might limit the company's "freedom of action" in developing its 43-square-mile property. He proposed a Disney-controlled government with regulatory powers "superseding to the fullest extent possible under law state and county regulatory authorities." There was just one hitch: Under Florida law, as Helliwell explained, planning and zoning authority could only be exercised by a popularly elected government. To escape external land-use controls, the company had to submit to control by voters. Disney attorneys, however, found a clever way to avoid this fate.

[...]

>To acquire such powers, the company had to convince the Florida legislature that Epcot would be a bona fide community. Paul Helliwell, acting as lobbyist, frequently used the term "resident" in describing the company's plans. Disney lobbyists also told lawmakers that Disney would include "public school sites and other public needs in their two cities," according to an April 22, 1967, article in the Orlando Sentinel-Star. And Helliwell told legislators, few of whom had read the thick Reedy Creek charter, that the company was not asking for anything "that had not been done before." At best the statement was half-true: The charter combined the powers available in three kinds of special districts. But Florida had not combined those powers in one district before.

The CIA is actually hosting a formerly secret letter by Helliwell here[1] (you can find a full PDF on the linked page), but that's technically concerning the CIA predecessor the OSS. For a strictly CIA connection, we have to go pack to another Washington Post piece[2]:

>Castle Bank was set up and principally controlled by the late Paul Lionel Edward Helliwell, a Miami lawyer. Helliwell, who had longstanding ties to the U.S. intelligence community, was instrumental in helping to direct a network of CIA undercover operations and "proprietaries." (A proprietary is a concern secretly set up and controlled by the CIA, ostensibly as legitimate business.)

I haven't found a good source establishing Helliwell as a CIA recruiter -- my memory is that he was, but my memory is made of water and I haven't found bits and bytes backing it up yet, so who knows. It's late here, and I've gotta get some sleep. Hope that helps!

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/19...

[1]: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/0005657712

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/04/24/c...