Comment by Kon5ole | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kon5ole | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Sellafield also handles all waste from UK's nuclear plants. A site like that is needed whenever you have nuclear plants, bombs or not. In the US, the defence budget covers the storage of waste.

In Sweden the nuclear fund currently holds 7 billion and the estimated costs for storage are already at 12 billion euros and growing. Future taxpayers will pay the missing 5+ billion, but they will get no electricity from the plants that have been closed already.

France's EDF was recently nationalized for over 60 billion euros, which is also paid by taxpayers, not electricity bills.

Germanys taxpayers had to pay for the Asse II mine, long after the plants that produced the electricity that generated the waste were closed.

So as I said, best case you leave a large cost to future generations. We haven't seen a worst case yet but the fact that Saami people in Lapland had to feed their animals special food because 30 years after Chernobyl gives a hint about what a worst case could mean.

There are cheaper, safer, quicker and more stable options than nuclear, especially in Spain.

> Sellafield also handles all waste from UK's nuclear plants.

Let's see what you are trying to do here. If Sellafield handles both civilian and military waste, and Sellafield is bad, it follows that civilian nuclear waste is bad? That's your argument, right? And you see how it actually does not follow, logically speaking. It's like you saying this casino in Las Vegas is bad because there are lots of Mafia guys, and I say, yes, but at Carnegie Hall there are only musicians and ballerinas, and you say, sure but at at this Las Vegas casino there are musicians, ballerinas and Mafia guys, and it's a bad place, so Carnegie Hall must be a bad place too.

The vast majority of civilian nuclear power plants don't reprocess their spent fuel, and certainly not on site. They put the spent fuel first in some type of swimming pools with water, to allow them to cool down, and after a few years they put them in some dry casks.

The uranium from Sellafield was processed to extract the plutonium. That required huge amounts of chemicals, and there were some leaks. But those leaks are particular to the situation at Sellafield, and not relevant for the situation in Spain or other places that don't do reprocessing.

>If Sellafield handles both civilian and military waste, and Sellafield is bad, it follows that civilian nuclear waste is bad? That's your argument, right?

No my point is not about waste it's about cost. Every country that operates nuclear power hides costs from nuclear plants in other parts of their budget. Sellafield is just one example from the UK where we actually have numbers.

Countries that don't have a site like Sellafield must instead operate other storage facilities and handle unexpected costs related to them. Like Asse II in Germany or the 60 billion bailout of EDF in France or the underfinanced nuclear fund in Sweden, Rancho Seco in the US and so on.

Charting the actual true cost of nuclear power is difficult, but it's easy to see that there are large costs that are in fact hidden.

IMO this is very important to reveal, because many initiatives that could solve our problems are held back by the idea that they are "more expensive than nuclear", based on a fictional cost for nuclear.

Synthesized gas from renewables is an example that is very likely cheaper than nuclear as of 2023, even short-term.

You mention underfunded, but not overfunded.

The civilian nuclear reactor operators in the US used to have to pay to a waste disposal fund, that currently has more than $44 BN [1]. This is well above what one would need to do the job: the total cost of the WIPP, which is the disposal site for the military waste in the US [2] was/is $19 BN, and there's twice as much military waste as civilian waste.

> Countries that don't have a site like Sellafield must instead operate other storage facilities and handle unexpected costs related to them

Why? It's like saying that every state in the US needs to have a waste facility. One is enough. I don't see why every country in the EU that has nuclear power reactors needs its own long term disposal place. Finland built one, other countries could use it.

Plus, in the not so distant future we'll be able to significantly reduce the amount of high level waste by burning the actinides in it, and separating the unburned uranium (mainly U-238). This is not just pie in the sky, about 2 weeks ago Russia announced they have started manufacturing nuclear fuel with actinides extracted from waste [3].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/18/nuclear-waste-why-theres-no-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant

[3] https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Mixed-oxide-fuel-wit...

>You mention underfunded, but not overfunded. >The civilian nuclear reactor operators in the US used to have to pay to a waste disposal fund, that currently has more than $44 BN

The fund is supposed to finance Yucca Mountain but the current estimated cost of Yucca Mountain is over twice that at 96 bn:

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/wr-yucca_mountain_cost_es....

Furthermore, those 44 billion won't even cover 10 years of the current running costs of handling waste, even accounting for interests.

https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear...

So it seems the US fund is in fact massively underfunded, not overfunded, do you agree or am I missing something?

>It's like saying that every state in the US needs to have a waste facility. One is enough.

Every country that operates nuclear plants needs to manage the waste for at least a while. Currently most of them do so for the foreseeable future at the site where there is, or has ever been, a nuclear plant.

>Plus, in the not so distant future we'll be able to significantly reduce the amount of high level waste by burning the actinides in it

But if we can already now generate gas from solar panels cheaper than we can operate nuclear plants, why can't we put our efforts into that instead? Why does it HAVE to be nuclear at any cost?

An infrastructure that is massively overprovisioned from solar and other green sources and converts overproduction to gas whenever there is overproduction will be a gift to the future like hydropower dams have been (electricity-wise anyway). Once the investment is paid off it will keep giving cheap, reliable, distributed, failsafe electricity forever. That's better than even the most optimistic speculation for what can be done with nuclear.

> So it seems the US fund is in fact massively underfunded, not overfunded, do you agree or am I missing something?

Let's take that 96 billion at face value. I don't see why it needs to be so many times higher than WIPP, that handles more waste, but whatever, it's the official estimate of the DOE, from 2008.

Here's another statement from the DOE in 2011, stating that they find the current fee (0.1 cents per kWh) to be adequate.

The fee put on hold in 2017 due to a Federal Court ruling that the Government can't collect that fee and do nothing with it. If the Yuca Montain repository project is restarted, then one can see the fee being reinstated, and there's a good chance the fee that was uncollected over the last 7 years will be collected in arrears.

> Why does it HAVE to be nuclear at any cost?

It looks to me it's the other way round. I never heard a pro-nuclear guy (I'm one) saying don't build solar or wind. It's the anti-nuclear guys (presumaby you're one) that say "DO NOT BUILD NUCLEAR". Or am I missing something?

>It looks to me it's the other way round. I never heard a pro-nuclear guy (I'm one) saying don't build solar or wind. It's the anti-nuclear guys (presumaby you're one) that say "DO NOT BUILD NUCLEAR". Or am I missing something?

That's true, I'm basically saying do not build nuclear. But I feel like I have investigated it with an open mind, looked at the facts and reached the logical conclusion that spending money on nuclear infrastructure is a mistake.

Basically I am convinced that we can add more stable energy with less downsides in shorter time to the grid using other means than building nuclear plants. And the money we need to do that comes from the same purse that finances nuclear.

I agree with you.

But here we were not talking about building new nuclear. We were talking about discontinuing existing nuclear.

In my state, New York, they decommissioned two perfectly good gigawatt reactors in 2020 and 2021. The idea was to replace them with renewables. Guess what? They build 3 natural gas power plants and replaced 2 GW worth of zero carbon electricity with 1.8 GW worth of emissions.

  > As a result of the permanent shutdown of the plant, three new natural-gas fired power plants: Bayonne Energy Center, CPV Valley Energy Center, and Cricket Valley Energy Center were built, with a total capacity of 1.8 GW, replacing 90% of the 2.0 GW of carbon-free electricity previously generated by the plant. As a consequence, New York is expected to struggle to meet its climate goals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center

>But here we were not talking about building new nuclear. We were talking about discontinuing existing nuclear.

That's a fair point. The main argument in support of nuclear I can agree with is that once you've had nuclear operations in the country, you have to pay for it whether you continue or not, so you might as well continue. Some profit is better than no profit.

But even that argument depends on whether existing nuclear plants are in fact profitable, so it is still important to find all the hidden costs.

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting anyone ever replaces nuclear with fossil fuels. That said, Indian Point is interesting:

Entergy (the operator) cited sustained low market prices for electricity as the reason for the closure of the plant. But the average price of electricity in NYC has been 50% higher since about 2010 than it was for the 3 decades before 2010.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APUS12A72610

Why is an old nuclear plant unprofitable after 40 years despite electricity prices being higher than ever? One explanation could be that it was in fact never profitable, but the true costs haven't been accounted for until now. "We assumed the problem would go away but it hasn't and now it's kind of expensive".

This explanation also fits for France, who recently increased their state-dictated prices for nuclear from 44 euros per MWh to 70. Nuclear power estimates seems to get more expensive over time - which makes no sense unless the true costs were actually unknown/ignored when the initial estimates were made.

That's the theory that makes the most sense to me at the moment anyway, even though it might be a bit speculative.

If New York starts synthesizing hydrogen, they can use the new gas plants with up to 50% hydrogen in the mix with little or no alteration. At least that's something...

> If New York starts synthesizing hydrogen,

I perceive some double standards here. For green hydrogen to be economic, you need a 10x reduction in production cost. Would you treat the following hypotheticals as equivalent?

1. If green hydrogen were 10x cheaper to make then ... 2. If nuclear reactors were 10x cheaper to build then ...

I think we have passed the threshold for production cost. According to this overview [1] solar was at 1 cent per kwh a few years ago and panels are even cheaper now.

Hydrogen can be created at 80% efficiency, so it seems like we should be able to generate hydrogen for somewhere around 2 cents per kWh once the investment in electrolysers are paid off. Converting the hydrogen back to electricity triples that but even 6 cents is cheaper than nuclear.

Also, you wouldn't need to actually build solar specifically for this purpose. You could have the electrolysers run whenever the market conditions provide cheap electricity for any reason. Windy nights, warm winters, cold summers, economic downtimes, whatever - generate cheap gas to use later.

And again, this infrastructure will never get more expensive in the future. There are no leaking storage sites that have to be sanitized (Asse II), no cracks in reactors that cost billions to fix (France) no Sellafields, Fukushimas or Chernobyls will ever happen related to hydrogen.

If I interpret your question correctly you're basically saying "If nuclear was as cheap as green hydrogen, would I consider nuclear then"? The answer to that is no, I wouldn't, because I think that the orders of magnitude larger risks for unknown costs with nuclear also have to be considered.

Even if nuclear was half as expensive as green hydrogen to operate it would be better to go for hydrogen, and since it seems likely that nuclear is instead the MORE expensive one, the choice should be very easy.

At the very least I think the moment is ripe for a budget the size of a typical nuclear power plant to be spent on making a few large scale hydrogen facilities. Try it out at scale. It will take a few years but far less time than building a new reactor.

[1] https://commercialsolarguy.com/lowest-solar-power-prices-in-...

> you're basically saying "If nuclear was as cheap as green hydrogen, would I consider nuclear then"?

No, that's not what I was saying.

What I was saying is: both green hydrogen and nuclear are technologies that are currently too expensive compared to what the market can bear. But technology can evolve. If the cost of nuclear went down by a factor of 10, would you become a proponent of nuclear technology? What if it went down by a factor of 100? Is there any level where you would?

If not, and you concede that there's no way for you to change your mind, why are you trying to change my mind? Why are you debating? It does not seem honest to me to engage in a debate where your position is that you would never change your mind, but expect the other guy to be willing to change theirs.

Edit (to answer because we reached max depth limit): There's nothing for me to change my mind, I already think nuclear is too expensive to build. Here's my statement on HN a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38787356

But does nuclear have the potential to become 10, 100 or 1000 times cheaper? I think so. Just 3 weeks ago Kairos received an NRC permission to build a pilot FLiBe reactor.

https://www.powermag.com/kairos-hermes-secures-first-nrc-gre...

>If not, and you concede that there's no way for you to change your mind, why are you trying to change my mind?

I'm trying to change your mind because I honestly believe you are mistaken in your position on nuclear. Also because you are arguing well and seemingly in good faith, which I appreciate. We all have biases and you might show me my blind spots, it's important to challenge oneself.

If the truth turns out to be that nuclear is entirely safe and the cheapest option available, I wouldn't be opposed to it. I have seen absolutely nothing anywhere to indicate that this is the case.

Now, if the truth turns out to be that it is both much more expensive than we have been told, more so than many alternatives, as well as famously risky, would you stop supporting nuclear? If not, why?

I have found many many sources that indicate that the second scenario is true, but none that indicate that the first scenario is true. I sincerely hope that's the only reason why I have my opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com