Michigan could provide $300M to reopen nuclear power plant
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For some reason it seems like there is very little middle ground between “Nuclear power is dangerous. We shouldn’t have any.” And “Nuclear power isn’t dangerous. It poses no threat.” Let’s hedge our bets here.
This states governor is the one against Enbridge keeping a pipeline in Lake Michigan, citing environmental concerns despite no prior issues and a deal to sure-up the existing pipeline. In the case of the pipeline, there is no alternative to crossing Lake Michigan. Not so for a nuclear plant.
Edit: point is being proven in the replies. Why so much hostility to safeguarding our environment against the worst case? Why not place it somewhere where an accident wouldn’t have such devastating consequences?
You mean by the water? I’m hardly an expert on the subject, but pretty sure you need a large water source for a nuclear plant both for the turbines and excess cooling.
Let's hedge our bets here - by placing nuclear power plants near abundant sources of water, as the original builders of the Palisades nuclear plant did.
There are also high temperature reactor designs that use air cooling.
The need to place nuclear near significant sources of water doesn’t mean that every large body of water is a good location.
That's fairly close, but it also ends up involving quite a large volume of water.
Yes, of course.
Bets are already hedged intrinsically. The data is clear, nuclear is the safest, cleanest, lowest-carbon and most reliable form of energy we have. [1]
There's far worse than slighly warm clean water going into Lake Michigan.
The reactors are much more advanced designs, and the US and much of the world has been focused the opposite direction: on very simple, very safe, lower cost designs. Making a fast neutron reactor is just a different class of beast, and it's unclear where the appetite is for it. (Which is a shame.) Japan, China, India, and Russia are the only countries to have started new breeder reactors projects since Franc'es last reactor Superhenix in 1985.
Most breeder reactors use a reprocessing mechanism that is somewhat akin to the enrichment used for weapons. It's goal is to extract the good & enriched stuff & leave the rest of the fission product out (which still have hundreds of years to be dealt with). There's still justifiable hesitancy about developing such technology further. Even if we feel like we can use it safely in X Y and Z countries, once the technology becomes more proven (particularly if it can be shown to be cost effective) it's hard to imagine it won't become more available, and that has a real & scary risk.
Ask yourself how many of the above countries that started breeder reactors do we want making new nuclear weapons? And note how many have kicked out nuclear weapons inspectors (Russia, China).
One of my favorite candidate designs was the Integral Fast Reactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor), began in 1984 as a faster fast reactor which was considerably safer by default, and which was capable of a lower-refinement (lower proliferation concern) burning of already spent fuel (including a wide range of medium-lived/longer-lived transuranic wastes). But almost all indicators are that we try for simpler & dumber designs, not to improve & refine what we could do.
I also think it's a huge disservice only identify short half-life products as dangerous. Yes they have the most immediate threat, but we generate plenty of other wastes that are severely scary, particularly among the transuranics, and plenty of even the "low" nuclear wastes will quickly ruin an area & spread if mistakes happen. The variety of different nuclearly active chemical wastes we have to deal with is vast (those pesky transuranics). I'd love to be talked down here some, I think this is one place I'm best able to be convinced with good science, but my reading of information like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio... is that there is just so much to be dealt with, such a pesky variety. And yes fast reactors help a lot here, if we can deploy them at scale effectively, but again I just question whether on a cost basis that will happen.
I agree with you in principle that nuclear has amazing potential to be handled well. But in fact, most of the world takes the shortest route they can & thinks nothing of how much or what kind of waste is generated. It's a network externality, foisted off onto the government to deal with. Even in France, the one beacon of breeder reactors, there's been scant investment in improving iterating or refining what mechanisms they have; continuing to use one centralized PUREX refining center to do most of the work. Meanwhile we have few positive indicators elsewhere about good nuclear. IFR derived designs like PRISM, S-PRISM and Versatile Test Reactor have repeatedly stalled.
To provide some counter to my own general thread, Japan has shown again and again a willingness to try & try hard that I respect. They recently started working with TerraPower on a PRISM/IFR based design that could potentially go somewhere. But this is a faint ray of hope in a gloomy low-tech unglorious nuclear landscape. https://neutronbytes.com/2022/02/03/terrapower-teams-up-with... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35430993
This to me is the single biggest reason to pursue the tech. The genie is out of the bottle.
Right now there's not success. To say the genie is out of the bottle ignores how new these experimental Russian, Chinese, & Indian reactor projects are. Most are not online. How well they operate now or will operate as they really go online unknown. How refined their refinement is is unknown. How much would these authoritarian entities share with the rest of the world? If heavy-industrialists like GE Hitachi & others start cranking out ultra-successful PUREX breeder reactors, find how to make them cost efffective, and then really many many nations start having these capabilities, doesn't that worry you, just a bit?
The Russian projects I know of are 60+ years old now. They've been plenty successful.
> How much would these authoritarian entities share with the rest of the world? If heavy-industrialists like GE Hitachi & others start cranking out ultra-successful PUREX breeder reactors, find how to make them cost efffective, and then really many many nations start having these capabilities, doesn't that worry you, just a bit?
Not any more than it concerns me that the nations that already have these capabilities do. The non-authoritarian entities of today are the authoritarians of tomorrow and vice-versa. Eventually, this technology will make it out there in a cost-efficient and easily-reproduced manner, it's mostly just a matter of time.
And even if some less-than-friendly nations get access to this, and use it to make nuclear weapons, and then deploy them, unless we're talking about the deployment of a world-ending number of nuclear weapons (an arsenal that would need to really rival the current major nuclear powers) should not lead to a global nuclear exchange. Or more correctly, if it does lead to a global nuclear exchange, we deserve it for being so stupid as to escalate like that.
Is proper processing free or profitable? Nuclear is already unprofitable, in fact, in the history of nuclear energy, it has never been profitable. This is why it requires nations to build nuclear power plants, and investors are only interested in taking the money from selling electricity and not in building the plants, storing the waste, security for storing the waste, being responsible for decommissioning old power plants, and thus it is highly unlikely they'd be interested in paying for properly processing nuclear waste into tough ceramics.
Pro-nukes love to waste their time arguing about this and that. But they only need to do one thing to have all the nuclear power they can use: make it profitable. Nothing else matters, not NIMBYS, not the safety, not the waste, only economic viability.
It's included in the price of operation. Is the processing of CO₂ emissions included in coal or gas generation? Of course not, because it's dumped in the atmosphere.
> Nuclear is already unprofitable
French electricity is cheaper than Germany's. Also the government has been taking EDF's money for decades to cover budget shortfalls, so it's not even subsidised, quite the opposite in fact.
...but thinks that Chernobyl was only responsible for 433 deaths, and they fell asleep at their computers before considering the carbon footprint of uranium mining and enrichment (and unlike materials used in permanent magnets and batteries, which everyone loves to get excited about - uranium is not recycled, nor can it be at least in the US without enormous infrastructure and policy changes.)
That's how hard they had to reach for "deaths caused by wind and solar" - helicopters crashing into wind turbines.
You can point to "research" like this all you like. Power companies in the US are shutting down nuclear power plants because they're not economical and installed wind/solar capacity is outpacing the shutdowns capacity-wise 6:1, and growing.
Why? Because solar and wind cost a fraction of what nuclear does, and are getting cheaper every year. Meanwhile, nuclear is getting more expensive, and that's with the enormous subsidization of the entire nuclear energy program because of its importance to "defense" for weapons and propulsion.
> There's far worse than slighly warm clean water going into Lake Michigan.
And if a "once in a thousand years" storm (which is happening every few years) happens, and the plant does a Fukashima, and pollutes the largest fresh-water lake with radioactive waste, rendering a water supply for tens of millions of people undrinkable, then what?
I can't say I've ever seen 433? About 50-ish people died from the acute effects of the disaster and over time, the number came in around 4000 according to UNSCEAR.
Note for comparison that coal kills 24,000 in the US each year, and no other nuclear power accident in history has killed anyone. Maybe 1 person in Fukushima, depending on how you do the attribution. Zero at Three Mile Island.
The Bangqiao dam killed 240,000 people in one fell swoop but nobody holds that against hydro. We assume we've learned from that and engineered a better dam. We seem to have different standards for the spicy rocks for some reason.
> ... and they fell asleep at their computers before considering the carbon footprint of uranium mining and enrichment (and unlike materials used in permanent magnets and batteries, which everyone loves to get excited about - uranium is not recycled, nor can it be at least in the US without enormous infrastructure and policy changes.)
Err, no, that's factored into the numbers. It still has a lower carbon footprint than wind and solar, let alone storage. Because uranium is so incredibly energy dense.
> Why? Because solar and wind cost a fraction of what nuclear does, and are getting cheaper every year.
Not for the same profile of generation, no. A pure wind and solar grid plus storage would cost dramatically more than nuclear does today. In fact even a 90% renewable grid plus storage is dramatically more expensive that nuclear today. So yeah, an incomplete solution is cheaper than a complete solution, I guess.
> And if a "once in a thousand years" storm (which is happening every few years) happens, and the plant does a Fukashima, and pollutes the largest fresh-water lake with radioactive waste, rendering a water supply for tens of millions of people undrinkable, then what?
This is a silly hypothetical with no basis.
Anyways, the data is clear.
By your own citation, solar is safer. I realize graphs can be tricky to read, but come on. The fact that nuclear requires so much concrete also means solar and wind use less carbon. And you're missing a data point: nuclear is also the most expensive form of energy ever conceived.
I would consider them equally safe, and both the safest form of energy. If you really want to get technical this graph excludes rooftop solar which has about 20X the fatality rate of industrial solar in terms of deaths per TWh. [2] But I don't really care, they're equally the safest form of energy.
> The fact that nuclear requires so much concrete also means solar and wind use less carbon.
This is factored into the calculations I linked and no, they don't.
> And you're missing a data point: nuclear is also the most expensive form of energy ever conceived.
Again, not accurate. Solar and wind are bursty and sometimes just drop to zero. Solar at night or when it's cloudy, and wind when it's not windy.
If you actually want a 100% renewable grid you need storage. And adding this storage makes wind + solar + storage combo significantly more expensive than nuclear. In fact even a 90-something% renewable grid with storage is more expensive than nuclear. [1]
Also there's nothing intrinsically expensive about nuclear, you put the spicy rocks in the water and it gets hot. The cost is all up-front in plant construction and as the DOE's head of the loans program Jigar Shah says, there's an easy path to reducing that cost: stop building one-off plants in each location, design cookie cutter plants and drop them down where it makes sense. The actual cost of uranium input into a nuclear plant is $0.005/kWh.
I have nothing against renewables, why would I? They'll be part of the solution. But let's at least have an honest conversation about the facts.
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/what-energy-storage-would-have-to-...
[2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...
But it is.
The generation of electricity through nuclear power plants in the United States cost 29.13 U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour in 2021.[1]
Oh, but there certainly is. The historically high cost of nuclear power electricity is largely due to capital costs (that you would be paying for whether the plants produced electricity or not), and because plants in the US have often not been designed to ramp up and down easily, they tend to be operated continuously. It takes $10B before the first watt of electricity is generated. Uranium costs a fortune. Waste storage is astoundingly expensive due to amount of time it must be stored, not to mention the cost of security for that storage.
Meanwhile,
a typical solar system in the U.S. can produce electricity at the cost of $0.06 to $0.08 per kilowatt-hour.[2]
[2] https://www.electricrate.com/solar-energy/price-per-kwh/
Until then it's just lies and whining to demand handouts.
Also, how bad would it actually be if the plant melted down into the lake? There would be a lot of dilution.
The alternatives in that area included unfiltered trash burning plants back when the nuclear plant was installed. It’s not obvious whether the trash burning plant running for 30-50 years would be worse than a meltdown.
Not contesting your actual point about situating the plant, but the midwest has more lakes than any other (similarly sized) region in the US, and particularly with the Great Lakes has access to the largest surface freshwater resource in the world.
https://teddit.net/r/MapPorn/comments/gu3ve3/number_of_lakes...
I think it makes sense to build the tunnel and continue operating the pipeline, but "no alternative" goes too far, you need to condition it somehow (like no profitable alternative or whatever).
This of course adds another danger to nuclear plants -- flooding. Because the plant is next to a large body of water, there is always danger of the water going up and flooding the pumps, which usually break down and fail to pump water. Then ironically the plant will overheat for lack of cooling while being flooded. This is what happened to Fukushima.
This is what would have happened in Missouri just several months after Fukushima, but we got lucky then -- the plant flooded and the pumps failed but by pure luck the plant was shut off for refueling when the flood happened. [1] Most people do not realize how close the USA was to having its own Fukushima.
Anyways the point of this rant is that there really isn't much room for compromise. Nuclear power is just not safe, and it is really stupid in the presence of ever more affordable renewables.
[1] https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0627/Missouri-River-soaks...
With the one exception of Arizona’s Palo Verde generating station. It’s the US’s largest power plant (by actual production, not nameplate capacity) and it is the world’s only nuclear power station not located near a body of water. It’s right in the middle of the desert. It’s cooled by evaporating waste water from Phoenix.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generatin... 2. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
I don’t know that this plant should be restarted though. They were trying to bury the spent fuel in the sand dunes next door at one point because they were out of space.
Even more recently (10 years ago?) I could see outdoor cement casks for storing the spent fuel.
Nuclear could be great, bit the spent fuel issue, NIMBY problems and insane costs will probably close the door on nuclear energy unfortunately.
1- Select a not-so-random place in middle of the desert with stable geological ground
2- Make a tunnel 600m underground.
3- Put the dumps here
4- Congratulations: your nuclear waste problem is not a problem anymore.
You solved it in the scientifically recommended way. And the same way than France, Sweden, Finland and China did it.
Up to my knowledge, spent Fuel and plutonium are first sent for recycling in France and not burry as such.
Spent fuel is currently sent to La Hague, where afaik they store almost all of it in warehouses surrounded by barbed wire, just like everybody else. It'll take decades to move all of it to Bure, or wherever else they decide to put it.
[1] https://www.base.bund.de/DE/themen/soa/endlager-weltweit/fra...
To my understanding, the tag "research project" has been mainly used to avoid a crowd of NIMBYs from day one. There is already nuclear waste in the tunnels and not in small quantities. It does work and is used for what it has been designed.
Budget is hardly surprising when we talk about a facility supposed to store the garbage of a country that has been running full nuclear for 40 years.
> Spent fuel is currently sent to La Hague, where afaik they store almost all of it in warehouses
Part of it is there are to be recycle in Mox. An other part is to be re-enriched. The rest will very likely be buried underground since the Fast Neutron reactor plans are unlikely to happen any time soon due to short term politics.
Radiation corrodes metals much faster than usual and in ways that are not predictable. It is dangerous to run these things longer than their designed for lifetimes.
It is not predictable because with radiation you are deep in quantum physics territory, and a lot of things depend on chance. Things may be perfectly fine if only isolated atoms are kicked out of their lattices, but if you are unlucky some atoms along a line get kicked out and you get a crack.
Similarly you are not sure exactly what atom will get energized by some high energy electron and what other atom it will react with. Once you get into high energies, you can get a lot of chemical reactions that seemed impossible otherwise, or that nobody has ever thought of. There again usually you get some isolated strange compound. But if you are unlucky you get something that can act as a catalyst for further reactions and spread around like rust.
Interesting. Can you share some examples of this?
The NRC itself made the report - https://www.science.org/content/article/spent-fuel-fire-us-s...
Utter insanity. Regulatory capture is a hell of a thing when it comes to nuclear.
This is why I file nuclear power under "nice things" - and we can't have nice things.
1. Declaring ICE vehicles dead and EVs as the future, and setting hard dates for sunset of ICE (with no legitimate infrastructure plan).
2. Declaring point of use natural gas evil and phasing out natural gas heating and cooking.
3. Declaring all fossil fuel power generation sources (coal, natural gas) as evil and demanding their elimination.
4. Declaring nuclear power as dangerous and unfit (you are here).
5. ???
6. Switchover to green-friendly all-electric architecture complete.
People love to offer criticism but propose no practical solutions. Emphasis on practical.
Renewable energy is a drop in the bucket and cannot possibly serve the steady and sharp increase in load demand.
Unless the US intends to have widespread mandatory rolling blackouts like third world countries, something's gotta give.
No more criticisms without solutions.
Nuclear is great tech, but isn’t financially viable today in most situations. I would love to see it in the mix above somehow if new designs were cheaper and safer. Also, energy can’t just increase forever. We have to force reductions in use where practical via the means above.
vs.
> The US is spending $369bn on subsidies for green technologies under the Inflation Reduction Act
“No more criticisms without solutions” is not a real argument. Obviously criticisms must be considered. And the magnitude of the risks is obviously important.
> Nuclear energy is expensive, dangerous and will only work with massive taxpayer subsidies.
It's unhelpful and doesn't move the discussion forward to unilaterally label something as shite and provide no viable alternative.
That's a weird way of spelling "is serving the entirety of increase in load demand".
They don't run the plant past their lifetime. $300M is going to be spent to increase the lifetime.
That said, 800 MW doesn't sound much for a nuclear plant.
nope given that nuclear has been a negligible part of the German energy mix for a long time now. (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...)
According to the article where I guess that headline came from E.ON even says that the reason is that they cushioned prices last year during the height of the energy crisis and that this is higher prices from wholesale markets from last year coming through.
Also the prices in Germany vary between hundreds of providers, you can get electricity from any one of them. They supply it by purchasing electricity on the market, some had long term contracts to weather the storm last year, some didn't and hiked prices early, some went bankrupt etc. The problem right now often is that it's difficult to switch contracts - my local provider is not taking on new customers, my guess because they are losing money and hoping the situation will improve.
I was just listening to a podcast on battery storage and apparently continental Europe is behind on grid-scale battery installations because the power market design isn’t there to support it yet (as compared to the UK, the USA and particularly the Texas grid, and Australia).
Germany is apparently doing pretty well on “behind the meter” home battery storage, and to be honest as long as there’s storage in the system it’s OK to do it with either 100,000 10kWh home batteries or a gigawatt-hour in a single grid battery facility.
Batteries don’t make a lot of sense for long-duration storage however; for seasonal storage you want some other technology (hydro, hydrogen, demand management etc).
Solar or wind plus storage is significantly more expensive than conventional nuclear and worse for the environment. [1]
[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9
Nuclear has never been economically viable. It's been subsidized, enormously, for close to a century as the stepchild of the "defense" nuclear weapon and propulsion industries. It continues to get more expensive, whereas wind/solar/energy storage are plunging in cost.
Nuclear would also still require energy storage because it can only fulfill base load; nuclear takes days to change power levels, and running at anything other than full capacity drastically impacts its economic viability.
You can point to research all you like. US power companies are buying wind, solar, and energy storage. Not only are they not buying nuclear, they're shutting down plants because they are not economically viable.
It's funny how HN is all "free market!" when it comes to things like renewables and decarbonizing transit (ie "why muh tax dollars going to this?!")...but nobody seems to acknowledge that the nuclear industry is massively subsidized and Biden is proposing throwing billions more at the industry because of lobbying.
Also, that paper was published four years ago, which means it was based on even older data, and the cost of renewables and energy storage is plunging while nuclear goes up in cost...
An order of magnitude worse than the shills claim, but still fine.
Much worse for locals than imaginary cobalt mines for LFP batteries though.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/electricit...
Also, do you know how many people died in France over 40 years due to a nuclear power accidents? 0.
How many died due to German coal pollution? It's at least in the tens of thousands.
Though they have a rough road ahead of them. The fleet is getting old. Most likely the share of nuclear power in France will drop going forward.
Again we should all applaud France for making the right call in the 1970s.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/03/08/france...
[3] https://mobile.twitter.com/LionHirth/status/1635363963058950...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/strikes-hit-french-n...
While the generation is fairly constant, if there is an excess of power (which there historically has been) then you can import a variable portion based on the European grid and electricity market pricing right?
I could be missing something.
[1] https://www.energate-messenger.com/news/223699/nuclear-power...
What people sometimes like to do is take a snapshot at a certain date and time and try to make a broader point, but overall Germany has been a net exporter of electricity for years and years in a row.
Compare it to France which has the highest market prices in Europe right now [1] (and also last year) but allegedly the customers pay just 22c. It can't work - the nationalization of the EDF was started last year [2] and it posted a 20 billion loss [3]. The true price will be paid one way or the other, through taxes in this case.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/energy_charts/status/163859905194...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-to-p...
[3] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/17/france-s...
Now instead of taking the cost of decommissioning it (which costs lots of money) they are now looking to reopen it using public funding. So, they are happy to profit from this deal but not without public funding. The permit is probably less of an issue than finding the hundreds of millions needed to refurbish this plant. Kind of weird if you look at it like that. Until of course you realize that the prospect of public funding was the whole reason for this company to buy this plant. Basically, tax payers and consumers take all the risk. They take the profit. That's how the nuclear business works. Never mind that this plant still needs to be shut down and decommissioned eventually. Who is going to be paying for that?
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
The recent uptick in fossils is largely to make up for the combined shortfall of hydro and nuclear elsewhere.
See France, for example, which tops up its nuclear grid with gas, hydro, import/exports etc.
Storage only becomes an issue when you get to the last 20% or so of decarbonisation and if you're down at 5% you're better to focus on electrification of fossil fuel using industry than worry about that last 5% of gas used for electricity.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/04/14/sunshine-vs-the-gr...
You'll notice the headline isn't "Czech Republic runs on 100% carbon free energy", which would be a much more interesting headline.
I'm not sure how to check Czech Republic generation mix at that time but I wouldn't be surprised to see fossil fuels still being burnt for "contractual reasons". (edit: I'm estimating that there was at least 1.5GW of coal generation at the same time this solar was curtailed, so about 10x as much coal being burned as solar curtailed)
But, even if it was curtailed for genuine reasons, that still doesn't mean storage would make financial sense. See France, where they 'curtail' nuclear power. Does that mean they "need" batteries?