Why California is shutting down its last nuclear plant
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
> By letting go of our nutty fears of nuclear waste we can save nuclear power. America’s nuclear waste fund — which is comprised of money paid into it by the operators of nuclear plants — still has $46 billion in it. It should be used to subsidize the continued operation of economically distressed nuclear plants, and subsidize the building of new ones.
> If such a fund paid out five percent interest per year — an amount the IRS requires philanthropic foundations to give away annually — then $2.3 billion could flow to the distressed or new nuclear plants. That amount would be enough to keep uneconomical nuclear plants operating while creating an incentive to build new reactors.
Both Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents will have trillion-dollar cleanups.
$46 billion is only 4.6% of each cleanup.
Can I send you the bills for those cleanups? If not, stop being a nuclear apologist.
But instead, idiotic politics has locked that money into an equally idiotic project called Yucca Mountain. In on of the most amazingly stupid sagas of stupidity in history.
You literally have the money sitting there to flat out solve the problem, but instead make a solution impossible trying to force something that makes non sense in the first place.
Its truly sad, like seriously, truley sad for the whole world.
The amount of nuclear advanced development one could make with $46 billion is insane.
Think about how NASA developed SpaceX with just a few billion. You could literally have commercial competition to develop next generation fast burners and thorium breeders.
The state of nuclear competency is one of the saddest things in the world today. We have the technology that could solve the majority of the world energy problems and essentially refuse to use it, all the way from popular to even technological elites (like HN).
[0] https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...
Perhaps blowing bubbles in the ocean dead zones [1] would be a productive use of excess power? The bubblers would be turned on and off to bleed off extra electrons from the grid.
[1] How big is the Ocean Dead Zone off the Coast of California? - https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AGUFMOS33D1492H/abstra...
From the cnbc submission:
> Finally, once the wheels are in motion to shut a nuclear plant down, it's expensive and complicated process to reverse. > > Diablo was set on the path to be decommissioned in 2016 and will operate until 2025. Then, the fuel has to be removed from the site.
If the next two winters are excessively cold [2], a real leader might arise to tell the anti-nuclear activists, 'you mean well, but we do actually need these thing for the next 20 years.' This leader would point out that the alternative is for all the Californians who are priced out of expensive electricity/natural gas to use coal from the Navajo Nation/etc to heat their homes [3].
[2] South Pole posts most severe cold season on record (seattletimes.com) (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28734308
[3] Coal Heating in the United States - https://forgreenheat.blogspot.com/2017/06/trends-in-heating-...
Peak energy prices are approximately double that of off-peak.
For example, if 50% of a standard Tesla 3 battery could be reserved for this, 31kWh, you could make about $8 per day, or $2,900/year, plus be contributing hugely to grid stability.
It could be as simple as setting cars to discharge back into the grid any remaining power from 4PM-8PM (depending on user preference), and charging from 11PM - 7AM.
It seems totally reasonable for regulators, grid operators, carmakers to collaborate and create standards and mechanisms for car owners to charge and discharge based on their typical driving needs and live pricing.
Look at the enthusiasm for GPU mining - people will flock to getting their cars to do this.
If people can make serious money from the vehicles just from charging/discharging, there's also a big motivation to design batteries with longer lifecycles.
No for-profit company that wants to stay in business is going to produce something that its customers won't buy.
Crazy how in the 60s reactors were build by small teams with low millions and today you need an army of people and 30 billion.
Nothing about a nuclear reactor in inherently expensive. The reason current PWR style reactors are expensive is because they require a gigantic civil engineering project, long term financing and very expensive costume steam turbines and costume reactor vessels.
We could live in world where conventional turbines from natural gas plants are used, a team of only a few people manage like 10 reactors at the same time and the capital build cost of the plant is less then that of a gas plant.
There is nothing based on first principle that prevents this. Sadly nuclear technology fell so out of favor, and at the same time the regulatory agency basically made progress on non PWR impossible that we are decades behind where we should be.
Thankfully Canada has realized this and has adopted a new framework for nuclear regulation. In the US FINALLY the DoE has admitted that their regulatory framework makes no sense and they are attempting to slowly change it as well.
The people who think climate change is important enough to not allow more coal, gas and oil to be burned.
If people can do so more cheaply through other means they should naturally do that first, through the common results of closing nuclear plants has always been an increase use of gas, oil and/or coal.