Frightening on many dimensions
Frightening on many dimensions
So with £60k salaries all round costing the employer £120k in total and a 25 year work schedule — that’s £3m per worker. Does that mean 90k people are involved?
Maybe the only part of this that’s so crazy is the 25 year project timeline? By contrast the British Armed Forces must be employing about the same number of people over about the same amount of time?
So basically every single step is much more complex with the associated cost.
> The size of the nuclear decommissioning liability reflects the expected future costs in relation to decommissioning activity, spanning over 100 years. This means actual annual expenditure is much lower than the total liability as noted earlier in this chapter.
So it's a cost over 100 years.
This is how public works capital projects are typically quoted in the United States, and it's one reason budgets grow so quickly, especially if timelines keep getting stretched out into the future--e.g. California High-speed Rail.
EDIT: The report's figures are discounted. From the report[1], page 8: "Many of the larger items described represent spending commitments spanning years into the future (in some cases, beyond 100 years). In accordance with accounting rules, these items are adjusted to reflect the time value of money, where expected future payments are discounted to provide a present value. "
[1] https://www.ukgi.org.uk/download/5767/?tmstv=1701723390 via https://www.ukgi.org.uk/2023/11/22/clccs-annual-report-on-th...
On other hand for this insane money a capable group could automate all the machines and do the cleanup without humans on-site. Especially when it is not the only one site worldwide for cleaning.
The safety concerns here are significant and complex. For example, remediation efforts in Los Alamos have struggled with a high rate of rotator cuff injuries among the workers due to the placement of pass-through locks in the gloveboxes. This has necessitated development of a new glove box design.
When working with dangerous materials, every individual step of the process becomes much more complex. You end up with more staff to perform safety and environmental monitoring than to actually do the work. Workers need more workers to help them don and doff protective equipment. It's a bit like working in space.
Nuclear only looks so bad because we ignore the externalities of the alternatives we currently price based on just extraction cost.
That said many of these sites are so polluted due to fast & loose early nuclear weapons programs.
Also the costs given are total over the span of 100 years. That’s quite a pittance from the perspective of annual government cash flow.
You don’t need to sequester things long term for nuclear. First, waste has lots of uses and isn’t just discarded (eg medical applications). Secondly, we will build breeder reactors which can reuse spent fuel decreasing radioactivity further. Also, the most radioactive waste decays very quickly and the remainder isn’t as toxic. Most of the complexity of water management is that people hear “radioactive waste” and instantly enter NIMBY fear mode instead of figuring out how to manage the risks.
But sure, if we strangle nuclear then we’ll never improve our ability to solve and mitigate problems associated with energy production.
You don't just need to keep tabs on it for 100 years. Much longer & ideally in a coordinated fashion.
If there's such demand for nuclear waste, why aren't companies making bank off of it? The demand isn't as high as you think.
We'll build magical breeder reactors that aren't actually commercially viable & use reprocessing facilities with the same process drawbacks that created some of these messes in the first place? Sounds like a bad idea.
Poo pooing the fears and dangers of nuclear is how we got into this mess where nuclear has a bad rap, deservedly so, from very poor management of very powerful substances.
The realities are that nuclear is incredibly complex & costly to implement & manage in a way where its full potential is realized. That's not a reason we shouldn't do it, but let's stop pretending commercial nuclear is viable.
As for why I ignore Fukushima or Chernobyl, that's because for the next phase of scaling out nuclear, we shouldn't really be building LWRs. We should be building nuclear designs that fail safe (e.g. nuclear reactors). Even still, LWR designs being built today are much much safer than the designs used for Chernobyl and Fukushima. As for cost overruns and scandals, I can't really comment on them as I don't know any details except to say that cost overruns and scandals are not unique to large scale nuclear projects. Solar has it's own share of problems where grid operators are struggling with rooftop solar (see the political battle in California) & figuring out how to handle the variability of solar plants since we still don't really have scalable storage solutions (arguably maybe we should be mandating that some solar and wind plants have onsite storage to more accurately represent the cost of adding those renewables to the grid & is an externality frequently ignored when discussing the cost of solar/wind).
Don't get me wrong - solar & wind are great. If we can do more of it then great. I just think at a fundamental technological level it can't scale as quickly to replace fossil fuel dependency in the energy grid on any timescale that matters for us addressing global warming.
I am not entirely sure what your point is about reactor design. Did you mean we shouldn't build more BWRs? Agreed. If you mean we should focus on HWR like CANDU or experimental molten salt reactors, those have their downside. Deuterium is expensive & molten salt is corrosive & not commercially proven. If you really want nuclear you go with off the shelf proven designs like AP1000, but even then there are hurdles to build these as these boondoggle projects have shown. Yes every sector has scandal, but massive rate hikes & tens of billions in overruns is atypical & undermines the promise of what nuclear was sold as to those ratepayers.
Nuclear is go big or go home, and we can't socialize losses & liability while privatizing profit. Nuclear is also unattractive to the commercial market due to long-term ROI & project/liability risks. Effectively it needs to be a massive energy independence program funded by the government. I don't see that happening though.
Framing it as a question of fossil fuels vs nuclear is building a strawman.
This, quite biased, article has an interesting take on the question. Look to flows rather than stocks.
> Rarely mentioned is the fact that renewables have been taking an increasing share of the growth in energy supply, and all of the growth in 2019-21. Moving the focus from stocks to flows moves the conclusion from no change to radical change. Concentrating on the size of the fossil fuel system today is like focusing on the large number of horses in 1900 — it was as good a guide then as it is now.
But I guess it's fine if you pay with your tax bill rather than electricity bill.
France is also the world's largest net exporter of nuclear energy, bringing in more than €3 billion per year."Any unexpected sudden disconnect of the NPP from an otherwise stable electric grid could trigger a severe imbalance between power generation and consumption causing a sudden reduction in grid frequency and voltage. This could even cascade into the collapse of the grid if additional power sources are not connected to the grid in time."
Basically NPPs are designed to SCRAM for all sorts of reasons, then the sudden loss of multiple GW really ruins the grid managers' day. The first paragraphs of [1] make it clear that a large, stable, grid is a pre-requisite for NPPs not a result of NPPs.
[1] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/gc/gc53inf-3-att5_e...
There are a variety of very real problems with nuclear power. But pointing those out does nothing to make renewables viable as a base load source.
[1] https://physicsworld.com/a/a-glassy-solution-to-nuclear-wast...
What I think you're referring to is processing of spent fuel, which is a smaller item in these types of projects since the spent fuel is already packaged for storage. I'm not an expert on the UK situation but I wouldn't be surprised if spent fuel management is a tiny portion or not included in that estimate at all, it's usually already covered out of operating budgets.
The primary argument against nuclear made here on HN is cost.
Because it's the easiest one to make, and most importantly, the easiest one to prove. Talking about cancer rates and whatnot, there's many a way to debate oneself to death about which study has greater trustability... but no way around the numbers: dealing with the waste is expensive, acquiring the fuel is expensive (and incredibly damaging to the environment), constructing NPPs is expensive and a multi-decade project, operating them is expensive, insuring them is expensive (or one runs the Soviet Russia model and has the government/tax payer as the insurance of last resort), keeping them and the fuel secure is expensive (which is an issue with the much-hyped small reactors - a prime target for any terrorist looking for some material for a dirty bomb), and taking them apart is expensive.
Nuclear power is only so "cheap" because of the extremely long life of a NPP and because a lot of the mentioned expensive parts has been externalized or not properly accounted for at all.
The Butex process ran at sellafield from 1951 to 1964, only the period of 1951 to 1958 was producing material for the UK nuclear weapons program, after the successful hydrogen bomb tests the UK signed an agreement to a) use US nuclear warheads in UK bombs/missiles, and b) provide the US with plutonium from sellfield in return.
The Purex process, which ran from 1964 til last year at the Magnox plant, and til 2018 at the THORP plant for AGR reprocessing, was the reprocessing process that replaced it, and only ever provided nuclear material to the US*, the UK never used it domestically.
* I'm not 100% sure on this, since several EU nations used Sellafield/THORP to process their waste, I would imagine France at least wanted their plutonium for their own nuclear weapons back, but I don't know to what extent France used sellafield vs their own reprocessing facility in Marcoule
The vast, overwhelming, majority of waste was created by processing nuclear fuel into plutonium (and other radioactive elements) for bombs. The UK was under enormous pressure in the 50s and 60s to keep up with both the US and USSR so they cut tons of corners to have a domestic bomb.
The article "for some reason" conflates the two: the waste from their nuclear weapons research and development and (extremely minimal) environmental impact of commercial power generation.
The real reason is that the UK (and France) wanted and still want a seat an the big boy's table. I.e. the UN security council etc.
Maybe, maybe not? Until tested it's hard to know if a nuclear umbrella is more than bluff.
That said, with US indifference from 1939 fresh in the memory I can see how they wanted the bomb.
Nuclear bombs from the US were always under US control, even if positioned outside the US.
They really weren't, the nominal US control over them was always a figleaf to appease the requirements of Congress.
If you look into the history of US nuclear sharing you'll find that what these NATO countries wanted was independent nuclear capabilities in the event of an emergency. That's what they got in every way except formally on paper.
A relevant excerpt from "Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser:
> [...] Congressman Chet Holifield, the chairman of the joint committee, was amazed to find three ballistic missiles, carrying thermonuclear weapons, in the custody of a single American officer with a handgun. “All [the Italians] have to do is hit him on the head with a blackjack, and they have got his key,” Holifield said, during a closed-door committee hearing after the trip. The Jupiters were located near a forest, without any protective covering, and brightly illuminated at night. They would be sitting ducks for a sniper. “There were three Jupiters setting there in the open—all pointed toward the sky,” Holifield told the committee. “Over $300 million has been spent to set up that little show and it can be knocked out with 3 rifle bullets.” Foreign personnel weren’t supposed to enter the nuclear weapon igloos at NATO bases. But little had been done to stop them. A lone American soldier manned the entrance to the igloos, serving as a custodian of the weapons, not as an armed guard. Once again, security was provided by troops from the host nation, who also moved weapons in and out of the storage facilities. Senator Albert A. Gore, Sr., could hardly believe the arrangement: “Non-Americans with non-American vehicles are transporting nuclear weapons from place to place in foreign countries.”
This was especially annoying from an ally which had learned much of the foundation essential to the endeavour from British Tube Alloys research.
France saw this happen and drew a very similar conclusion.
Yes.
That statement is correct.
Literally, actually, and factually the techniques and technologies used in the 1940s and 1950s that led to the Windscale fire at Sellafield, which is the root of most of the cost are gone. Dead.
The bulk of the cost are the remains of the Windscale Piles (1950/1951) and the Legacy Ponds (1960). Little that people did 70 years ago when it comes to nuclear waste storage and disposal is acceptable or legal today.
What you yourself wrote is true.
Sad to see this sort of alarmist “journalism” from a publication that aligns with green energy.