Hacker News Reader

This highlights the real Achilles heel of the nuclear industry - it is a labour efficient power producer that it doesn't employ enough people to guarantee political protection.

We ended up with a group of people who would benefit a moderate amount from cheap power, and a fanatic anti-nuclear lobby that succeeded in scuttling decades of progress. The more motivated group won, as is predictable.

It is amazing watching Europeans trying to achieve energy poverty in defiance of their technical head start. The energy figures out of places like the UK, France and Germany are startlingly bad (eg, [0]). Especially considered per-capita.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Historical_D...

No, the real Achilles heel is that the nuclear power plants are too expensive and don't seem to be able to be built on budget in the West.

> Nuclear is here to stay for the next decades (plural).

That's the problem with nuclear; even if every nuclear power plant on the planet were shut-down today, "nuclear" would still be here to stay for at least a century or two.

No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned. Decommissioning of the first UK nuclear power plants is expected to last another century. That's being paid for by taxpayers. The builders and operators of those plants were never asked to plan or pay for decommissioning; and anyway, 200 years is a long time to expect a corporation to stay alive.

So let's be quite clear: the cost of a nuclear power plant includes the cost of decommissioning. Since decommissioning takes such a long time, you can't rely on contracts with private companies to ensure they finish the job. Decommissioning is a horrible insurance risk; never having been completed successfully, there's no reliable guide to how much it might cost.

So, step forward, the insurer of last resort: my grandchildren!

In the US operators pay into a fund for decommissioning.

>No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned.

There have been 10 plants in the US that have been fully decommissioned[1].

[1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792

"fully decommissioned" by some somewhat unintuitive definitions:

> The DOE was required by contract and statute to begin removing spent nuclear fuel and GTCC waste by January 31, 1998. To date, the DOE has not removed any spent fuel or GTCC waste from the CY site, and it is unknown when it will.

The current 'plan' is for the companies looking after the waste on the original site to sue the government every few years to get paid for looking after the waste.

http://connyankee.com/

The casks are safe where they are and should hold safely for at least 90 years according tot he notoriously conservative NRC. They should be moved, and congress needs to get its shit together, I agree.

We really need to get deep storage unstuck from the Yucca Mountain issue, but I think this still counts as decommissioned.

Why do we need to get deep storage unstuck? Putting the waste in dry casks is cheaper.

There are radionuclides in those casks with half-lives of 200,000 years - much longer than human civilisation, and much longer still than the lifetime of a human writing system. We don't even know how to make a label that will make sense in 200,000 years.

This attitude only makes sense if one's view is that humanity isn't going to last more than 10,000 years.

Unless we can find a way of rendering nuclear waste safe, then we have to find a way of making it so inaccessible that a future civilisation is unlikely to come across it by accident, and so secure that even a major earthquake won't cause it to leak into the environment.

Storing this stuff in metal tins on the surface isn't even a gesture at a solution.

I sort of mostly agree. Long term deep storage is nice because with a good design, we can pretty much set and forget. Most LLFPs aren't actually very dangerous as they don't emit gamma rays, but Tc-99 and I-129 are pretty nasty stuff. we could probably reprocess those into Ru and throw the rest of it into a deep geologically stable hole. Any society in 10k years that could find the stuff will be advanced enough to avoid or rebury it. As long as we don't store anything highly bioavailable near water, it should be fine. By 10k years from now the amount of radiation actually being released will be miniscule. But, I'm all for a big deep hole.

No, the attitude makes sense because of the time value of money.

At any point, if interest rates aren't pretty much exactly zero, it pays to delay burying waste. The present cost of guarding it at the surface is < the cost of burying it now. If, at any time, the interest rates do drop to zero and stay there, it can be buried then.

The only real argument against this is that the waste ceases to be self-protecting from "amateur" diversion of plutonium in about 300 years, which could greatly increase the cost of guarding. But that's no justification for burying it now.

Waiting also reduces the thermal output from fission products, which reduces heat buildup in the repository, at least a bit. And it would allow the waste to be reprocessed (and more easily) if that (perhaps unexpectedly) becomes appropriate. It would also allow time for other disposal methods, such as launching into space, to become competitive. How cheap will the descendants of SpaceX's launchers be in 300 years?

I think there may have been an argument for rapidly burying waste during the cold war, where surface waste could be volatilized by a direct H bomb strike, causing enhanced local long term fallout. That's more an argument against nuclear power itself, though, as NPPs could also be disrupted by direct strikes.

> "amateur" diversion

This is always a funny topic when people wax philosophical about dirty bombs as though you wouldn't get cooked trying to open a cask.

this is exactly the idealism thats causing problems -the energy futures in germany reaches the highest price in recorded history, the industry is being decimated and it's importing gas from a tyran that has started a war on Gemany's doorstep. Without Europe's gas dollars he would not be able to fund it's millatry and 12 million ukranians would never become homeless refugees.

Meanwhile you are complaining about waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.

No, what's creating the problems is the gas and coal lobby that dug into the conserveratives (CDU) and social democrats (SPD) to prevent the Energiewende from completion by creating burocratic and economical hurdles.

For example, it was forbidden to have more than 50GW installed capacity of solar. By Law.

oh and also destroying the industries building the solar panels, therefore losing the entire market to China…

I think that misses the point.

If you reckon it's OK to leave waste lying around, especially in constrained economic and political circumstances, that's a legitimate point of view. Argue for that. But don't declare that "decommissioning" simply means something like "Do your best, and then be done with it". That's dishonest (I'm not accusing you personally of any dishonesty).

If "decommissioning" doesn't mean complete reversal of all harmful results of the operation of a plant, then we need a new word that does mean that.

That’s not what decommissioning means and what you’re asking for is childishly ridiculous.

How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants we’ve been running for forty years while people like yourself threw ignorant tantrums over nuclear?

How would you “reverse all harmful results of the operation of a plant”?

How are you going to recapture all the pollution they dumped into our air, exactly?

> That’s not what decommissioning means

The word apparently means whatever the responsible authorities want it to mean.

> How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants

We used to make gas by heating coal with steam; the result was a contaminated site, coal gas, and coke for steel. But the site was left contaminated with chemical waste - stuff that can in principle be chemically denatured, or buried fairly safely. Thing is, I'm against making new coal-to-gas plants, as much as I'm against new nukes.

I don't have to defend coal and gas power plants; I don't have to explain how to reverse their effects; I'm against building any new ones, and my lack of any remedies for the effects of plants built before I was born doesn't invalidate my stance.

[Edit] I think I missed your point, which was probably based on my use of the word "reversing". You're effectively asking me how to complete the decommissioning of plants that were put out of use before I was born. If you want childish, that's childish: you're asking me for a proposal for reversing climate change.

I'm talking about how to build a nuclear power plant that can be properly decommissioned, in the sense that there's no persistent environmental pollution, and the land can safely be returned to normal uses, such as agriculture and residential housing. I'm against repeating the mistakes my grandparents made, in all their ignorance.

> I'm against repeating the mistakes my grandparents made, in all their ignorance.

You’re making the exact same mistake by rejecting today’s an attainable but imperfect solution in favor of an unattainably perfect one.

The end result is that we waste another few decades spewing pollution into the air.

It doesn't matter if something is "OK" or not. It matters what your options are. And they are:

1. Spew the waste into the air (fossil fuels)

2. Contain and bury the waste (nuclear)

3. Go without electricity when the weather is not favorable until major tech improvements in storage

So unless you want to argue for 3, and I don't think you do, 2 is clearly the best option.

> the energy futures in germany reaches the highest price in recorded history, the industry is being decimated and it's importing gas from a tyran that has started a war on Gemany's doorstep. Without Europe's gas dollars he would not be able to fund it's millatry and 12 million ukranians would never become homeless refugees.

Obviously, nothing can be done with nuclear power now to address that problem. Looking back, there is no reason to think that fossil fuel usage would have disappeared by now. Even the issue of climate change has had little impact. Nuclear is generally far more expensive.

Now if we had had made the fossil fuel industry pay the true cost of their waste products - greenhouse gases - then there might have been a market for nuclear.

> idealism

If you have a good argument, why disparage people who disagree? Why not address their concerns seriously?

The threat of nuclear waste is very real and serious. There are solutions, but these are serious issues that won't be addressed by disparaging other people.

> waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.

Nobody has died yet (is that even true?), so it's safe?

The US government made nuclear plants pay into a fund for long-term waste storage. Last I saw, that fund had accumulated over $40 billion. But since the Yucca Mountain facility was canceled, the government never provided the waste storage they were charging for. It's not surprising if nuclear operators don't want to pay twice.

Not only that, congress mandated that Yucca Mountain is the only allowable site, and has also prevented its use…

> There have been 10 plants in the US that have been fully decommissioned

According to your link, there are 10 plants that have achieved "DECON status": that is, the spent fuel and machinery have been removed from the site (presumably to some other site).

I'm sorry, but that's a cop-out: it's cheating to say you've decommissioned a site, when what you've really done is transport the entire site, including topsoil, to a new location. That's like saying your plastics are green, because when they are no longer wanted they are all shipped to Indonesia. And apparently at least some of those "decommissioned" sites still have spent fuel stored on-site; I don't see how a site with spent fuel can be considered to have been returned to "greenfield" condition.

No coal plant has ever been decommissioned either, because its radioactive waste, and other waste, is now in the air we all breathe.

Same with solar. Spent solar panels don't go nowhere.

No other plant either.

> even if every nuclear power plant on the planet were shut-down today, "nuclear" would still be here to stay for at least a century or two.

Is this really a problem, though?

Well, I think nuclear waste is a problem. It's highly toxic, and there's no process for detoxifying it. It has to be "got rid of", somehow, or put somewhere that humans can't accidentally encounter it. And it remains dangerous roughly forever, in terms of the span of a human civilisation.

200 years is sorta manageable, I suppose, if you have the resources and longevity of a nation state. You can bury it under a mountain, and set a battalion of armed orcs to guard it. But nation states can change their minds; whether the cost of hiring those orcs is money well-spent is a political decision, and the politicians responsible may not have "the long view" in mind.

I think nuclear power can be done safely; but I don't think that's possible as long as the task is overseen by profit-making corporations or short-termist governments. And I don't see who else can do it.

People would be less suspicious of your motives if you would spread the same amount of panic about coal industry ash ponds -- where arsenic and heavy metals will be lethal forever rather than just for thousands of years -- or mine tailings dams which burst with alarming regularity killing more people and devastating more square milege annually than nuclear waste ever did or will.

As is, it seems that for you, dangerous waste is a deal breaker for something you are ideologically opposed to, but perfectly fine in other areas.

I am from the UK. Our coal industry was almost completely destroyed by Margaret Thatcher. For many years, the notion of digging new pits has not been on the agenda. There is now a pit waiting for planning permission, but I don't think it will succeed (I hope not).

Meanwhile plans to get some foreign company to build giant new nukes here are pressing ahead. So yeah, my focus is on the imminent threat that I can do something about, not on old mistakes that were made before I was born, that I can't do much about.

> something you are ideologically opposed to

You're the second person that has accused me of being "ideological". Is that the same as "having opinions"? That word is generally used dismissively. It should mean that I subscribe to some ideology. What ideology is it that you believe I subscribe to? How could you know whether my views on nuclear are inspired by some ideology that I've bought into wholesale, or whether they are the result of thinking things through for myself?

Feel free to ask me about my opinions, but kindly refrain from telling me what they are.

>No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned.

Trojan?

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

WP says the plant has been "largely decommissioned". To my reading, that means the same as "not decommissioned yet".

The reactor and fuel were removed, and the reactor building and cooling tower were demolished. Maybe we need to use another word? Seems like that plant is pining-for-the-fjords.

From what I'm reading, that just means there are a couple of buildings (offices, warehouses, etc) left on the site. It hasn't been completely demolished yet, but it doesn't sound like there's anything extraordinary preventing that, either.

> The concrete casks sit on a heavy concrete pad, located adjacent to the former Trojan Nuclear Plant site.

> The ISFSI storage pad is surrounded by a secured area, which is monitored and protected round the clock.

Same word games as the other one.

The reactor itself is temporarily buried awaiting movement to Yucca Mountain, which has no planned date.

> So, step forward, the insurer of last resort: my grandchildren!

We’re the grandchildren of the eco-ideologists that spent the last forty years dumping coal and gas pollution into the atmosphere because they were afraid of nuclear power.

My father was born in 1914; they didn't invent nuclear power until he was 40. It wasn't until the early 2000s that there was consensus that coal and gas caused pollution that was a very serious problem, if you set aside the smogs of the early 50s.

My grandparents were from the era of steam-powered mills; I doubt the word "pollution" had been coined before they died. I'm pretty sure the term "ecology" dates from the mid-20th-century, after all my grandparents had died.

So yes: my grandparents left me with a problem; but it's not their fault, because they didn't know. We do know, and my grandchildren would be right to curse me if I left a similar problem for them to solve, knowing what I was doing all along.

The term pollution dates back to the 14th Century...

Thank you, I am now better-informed.

The message and reality have always been detached in Europe: almost every physics department I know has a nuclear institute. And funding is there, too. The know-how was never lost in my opinion.

I think the engineering know-how isn't there as much. When you haven't actually built a plant in 30 years and all the experienced building and designer engineers have moved on, you don't actually know how to build one any more. I feel the delays on the new projects are mostly caused by lack of experience, lack of clarity on actual risks, a lot of second system syndrome (we're doing it right this time, say the maintainer of the previous systems...) and also more regulatory oversight (which is IMO a gold thing). Let's see how these plants built with far more oversight age better than the old ones.

Hungary is just building one right now.

That's great news. I wish the European nuclear industry would have always 10 of these projects running at any time, so we could continuously learn, train and improve ever-so-slightly the designs.

We have many better solutions than nuclear, and have for decades. Why not use them - reduce energy consumption, use a market-based solution of making people pay the actual cost of greenhouse gas production (e.g., trading carbon credits), etc.?

It's the reactionaries that are in the way. Why blame the only people who have been concerned about climate change? Because it's easier to attack them; because people are scared of taking on the reactionaries.

> a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens

This is just jumping on the bandwagon of demonizing the target du jour. Can you back this up? What do you mean by witch-hunt? Who in particular was attacked? By who?

"Reduce energy consumption" is not a solution. The population is growing every year. Energy consumption is growing every year. Energy production has to grow to keep up. If it can't because the chosen technology doesn't scale, then that's a problem with that technology.

Money->safety is not a provable claim