End-of-life for plants is a huge issue. The owners of plants are obligated to collect fees for cleanup, decommissioning, and remediation of power plant sites. But what has happened (unsurprisingly) is that operators will sell these plants to someone else, who signs a contract, accepting all future legal liability for any issues resulting from operations or cleanup, then those cleanup fees (which total in the hundreds of millions) get put into an escrow account.
Of course, these new owners are limited liability corporations who find that it's cheaper to provide campaign donations to high-level state officials who then pressure state agencies to allow half-assed measures to be used for containment of toxic chemicals. This is an ongoing issue in right now because so many coal plants have been driven out of business.
If these people won't spend an extra million bucks to line coal ash containment ponds appropriately, I have no faith they will do so with significantly more expensive nuclear waste.
The difference is that rightly or wrongly, the public doesn't see the military spending as wasteful government spending in the way they see spending on the Postal Service or for some, health programs like Medicaid.
There's an argument that a way to sell renewables to the climate change denying sections of the population is to have the military involved in its implementation.
If you think about it, the military has functions of 1) protecting the US against existential threats and 2) providing a path toward a dignified livelihood for a lot of the population. Climate change also poses existential threats, and there is an opportunity to create a path to a dignified livelihood for many people by tackling it with renewables.
US Naval reactors are not some silver bullet no one has thought of. They're a different tool, and it's not clear the Navy would be particularly more effective in creating a future of factory built small modular reactors vs any other company that's attempted it so far.
The complexity, capital costs and liability risks make commercial "small nuclear" unfeasible. It's "go big or go home".
I'd love it if someone shows up tomorrow with some clever idea that changes the capital costs and long timelines, but I don't think we should be allocating significant capital towards that as hope alone.
The US did have a floating nuclear power plant for a while, intended for disaster response and such. It ultimately didn't prove to be useful enough vs the cost and complexity of keeping it running. Russia recently completed fabrication of a modern take on the same idea, but it's not clear how useful that will be to them other than being as part of a suite of nuclear technologies they're marketing militarily.
Maybe funding it via the navy is politically palatable.
Also, the Navy isn't the the one actually building it. The contracting companies do that. Many of the people who run the systems in the Navy leave and become contractors/consultants for the higher pay.
They are also really good at the operational aspects.
There’s the problem, this kind of short term thinking that is just long enough to let someone else deal with it.
Also, guarantees on paper don’t mean as much as physical reality. Ask any native American or Fukashima resident about how much guarantees are worth.
This is what happens with nuclear power projects: They can take a dumb design, as you said, and people point out the problems beforehand, as you said, then it is built, as you said, regardless.
It's important that it was still built even though people said, beforehand, that it was, as you say, dumb. This is a key point really. These things are still built regardless of the quality of the design.
And then later, reality and physics have their say.
And all the guarantees and promises are broken, and the costs are way higher than were accounted for.
Of course some designs are better, and that is fantastic. I'm all for safety and predictability. I have other problems with nuclear, having nothing to do with radiation or safety, but I agree that there are much safer designs.
Even though there are better and worse designs, and Fukashima may be a bad design with a bad placement, this lack of full accounting for potential costs is a recurring pattern with these huge boondoggle projects.
Great argument.