Georgia's Vogtle plant, a $35B nuclear project
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Probably off topic but if you find yourself in some kind of monastic tech co-op that builds things because they are good first and valuable second, hmu.
There are others. I live in an area with a lot of small companies that build complicated expensive products for small audiences. Want a croissant-baking machine? There's long institutional knowhow here.
Think PID controllers which control the heat/humidity through the baking cycle, or, conveyer-based systems with zones of specific temperature/humidity.
In addition, very modern systems, they are using computer vision systems to dynamically analyze the baking to ensure perfect doneness.
More repeatable results with less skilled labor is less waste is more profits.
I think we all know deep down that the current ultracapitalist model will bring us to doom. Because we're already most of the way there. That gets incorporated in to Sci-Fi because people will feel it's more realistic.
I always loved the more socialist take of Star Trek (especially TNG). They even did away with the whole concept of money "We work to better ourselves". Pretty revolutionary in the 80s but it feels even more so now.
There is a template for running a business in a new way. Mondragon has sort of reached the limit of what they can do as a single institution.
Farmers, have been running coops for a long time. They work and are very effective. Again nothing new here just not in the headlines. I will say that the irony should be lost on no one that rural farmers have a form of working corporate socialism that most urban professionals desire.
This silly debate comes up everywhere these days as railing against the current western economic system has come in vogue on the web. But it's not enough to complain, I can fill bookshelves with Reddit comments that do that, we need to imagine solutions!
A sibling comment pointed out Mondragon which uses the ParEcon form of economic management which is an actual answer to the question. I'd love to see other answers.
They don't often mention that part when they talk about trade liberalization, do they? This shit has been understood for centuries, but asset-owners just can't help themselves when they get a chance to pump at the expense of export-makers, even if it's literal communists they are selling us out to. I'd rather not sell out to the literal communists, so let's (continue to) roll back the changes. If we don't do it voluntarily, our hollowed out industrial base will eventually start losing us wars and it will happen involuntarily, with a lot more pain.
These are not the 1940s, you cannot convert a car plant to produce jet fighters. So the industrial base writ large is irrelevant. If you are really afraid of losing a world war, you are advocating for expanding the MIC specifically. Problem as Eisenhower put it is that you would hang humanity from a cross of iron. MIC spending necessarily crowds out economic activity for civilian benefit.
Anyway, our MIC is quite large already.
If your understanding of supply chains is so poor that it does not encompass more than a single vertically integrated entity, this deficiency will lead you to catastrophically incorrect conclusions like:
> the industrial base writ large is irrelevant
This in particular:
> If you are really afraid of losing a world war, you are advocating for expanding the MIC specifically
is an egregiously inept straw man. Not only are many industrial machines dual use, most are dual use. In fact, I propose a challenge: I'll name an industrial machine that is dual use and you respond with one that isn't. We go back and forth until we have settled the matter.
I'll start: plastic injection molding machine
Second, if there is a war between US and China we are fighting with the military we brought to the party. Concretely, in the scenario of a hot war over Taiwan we either break a Chinese blockade in relatively short order or Taiwan is forced to capitulate and we have nothing left to fight over. Taiwan cannot last long enough for us to shift to a war economy.
Third, even if we were to assume Taiwan could last, or that we would undertake to eventually liberate Taiwan, a total war where we are rushing to re-purpose our plastic injection molding machines is fantasy. A total war between nuclear powers? It is IMO an irresponsible concept. The eventual escalation would render industry (again) irrelevant.
Fourth, even with dual use technology you cannot convert civilian industry to military industry on a reasonable timescale for such a fight - not in the Cold War and certainly not today. Spinning up new production of jet fighters is one example. But then think about the USN - a critical branch in a fight over Taiwan. Naval strategy is built strategy. I do not think you produce a single carrier before the war is done, not even from existing yards unless work started before the war.
This is relatively well-trodden ground since the Korean war. The entire Cold War, we tried in various ways to reckon with the fact that military preparedness now required a permanent investment in arms production. So yes, I think if you want to be better prepared for war with China you should advocate for a permanent expansion of the MIC, and I further think our MIC is large enough already.
Workplace democracy is the only answer. Any other system is just some form of private ownership, with all the same problems. If we have a different system for choosing owners, it's either not private ownership or we arrive right back where we started.
After nearly 70 years, I think we need to take a hard look at what nuclear actually is. And it's a fantastically complex, wondrously large, construction project, that has to last a long long time without big repairs.
To the best of our knowledge of technology and industry, something like that does not typically get cheap. We may get slightly better at doing it, but there's a vanishingly small chance that we will hit a 10x reduction in cost for nuclear, and almost certainty that we will not hit a 100x reduction in cost. For anything like that, we'd need a massive new tech breakthrough such that it would be considered an entirely new technology. That breakthrough would be the underlying tech, not using neutrons and chains of nuclear reactions to generate heat.
In contrast, we have several technologies in hand that are going to see a 10x-100x reduction in cost, and even at current prices are competitive or the market leader: wind, solar, and batteries.
Look at any part of the country where there's an electricity market with any sort of freedom of generation, and new generation is dominated by wind, solar, and batteries. That's going to get more extreme in coming decades. Energy generation is going to get ever cheaper. (That doesn't mean that grid electricity will necessarily get cheaper, utilities will recoup lost revenue by making transmission and distribution more expensive, because they are very good at tricking regulators.)(
In any case, give nuclear a shot. But current attempts are skating to where the puck was 5-10 years ago, and they won't finish until the puck has spent 10-15 years more of shifting towards ever cheaper solar, wind, and batteries.
We all grew up with nuclear as the power source in our science fiction stories. But without a SF level advance in nuclear technology (e.g. direct neutron momentum-->electricity), we know that nuclear will at the very best be a tiny player in the future energy world.
History demonstrates otherwise, though: nuclear was cheap in the late 1960s and early 1970s [1]. This is a period of time where nuclear power was built at scale, with the same designs built repeatedly. A production run of 40 steam generators is much cheaper on a per-unit cost basis than a production run of 4 steam generators. Lower numbers of nuclear projects following 3 Mile Island reduced this economy of scale, resulting in higher costs per unit.
It's quite amusing to see someone talk about a 10-100x reduction in the cost of intermittent sources so confidently, yet discounting the possibility of cheaper nuclear power despite the historical precedence. Unfortunately, renewable costs have largely flatlined and started to increase [2].
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
2. https://www.economist.com/business/2023/12/04/the-renewables...
Relevant chart: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80...
Sure, find it amusing, but your own sources demonstrate a 5x difference in the past "cheap" era of nuclear to its more expensive current era. Even if we could somehow go back to knowing less about nuclear, or get to an era of cheaper labor, then we are only looking at a 5x decrease. And the trend is for higher costs, now lower costs with nuclear.
TMI is a completely irrelevant event in the ordering of new nuclear, the real problem was that too many reactors had been ordered, too many of them got behind schedule, and there was a massive oversupply of electricity, and not enough demand. In 1985, a Forbes cover story by James Cook called this misprediction of demand "the largest managerial disaster in business history.”
https://rmi.org/insight/nuclear-follies/
>Unfortunately, renewable costs have largely flatlined and started to increase
In order to make such a claim you have to really cherry pick, which is why you are using an out-of-date image during a global supply crunch. There have been several points in history where solar power had a year or two of stalled or even increased prices, only to drop precipitously soon after the supply-chain crunch had been solved.
So are you predicting both a reversal of nuclear cost increases, and even decreases to the point of a 10x drop? And that the trend of the past decades for renewables will stop? To predict two such very large reversals, without evidence, is not atypical in the nuclear fan crowd, but I do not operate with such faith, and prefer data.
And what data is telling you that wind power is going to see a 100x drop? The reality is that only one of us has backed up our claims about the feasibly of lower costs with data. I pointed to the historical precedence of cheaper nuclear power. Your claim of 10-100x drop in costs is not.
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=80...
The slope has largely flatlined, solar panels aren't getting much cheaper and neither is wind.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/solar-panel-prices-r...
https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-...
This is not nearly the same thing as saying costs were reduced by 70%. I'm very interested in where you read that total installation costs were reduced by 70%
Historically nuclear required ~500 highly skilled workers per GW for 50 years. Call it ~50 million / year * 50 years and labor alone is 2.5 Billion dollars. Fuel rods, replacement equipment, insurance, decommissioning, etc all add up.
You want really cheap nuclear, find out how you can safely operate a nuclear power plant without 24/7 armed security, enrichment, etc. Lower construction costs alone just won’t cut it. We’re rapidly approaching the point where handing someone a fully built reactor for free and they can’t operate profitably without subsidies.
They are comparing 3 costs for different power sources (construction, fuel, O&M) but decommissioning for example isn’t included and it’s far high for nuclear than the others.
Risk is another. Several nuclear reactors including Three Mile Island suffered catastrophic failure and not only failed to produce power but added explosive cleanup costs.
1. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/d...
2. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
Nuclear regulators let operators create a fund to eventually pay for cleanup after letting a site sit for decades to let shorter lived isotopes decay. The industry has convinced regulators to essentially let them off bathe hook assuming significant positive returns will eventually supply ~1-1.5 billion for cleanup efforts, with the government covering any gaps.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152...
Lumping all costs before the plant is operational into construction costs is similarly misleading. If your proposed solution drops physical construction costs by X%, but you talk about “construction costs” including land etc in other locations then the full X% savings isn’t there.
IE: The maximum possible cost savings on construction is someone saying they will build it for you at zero cost. But if you’re forced to pay for the land and zoning etc to enable them to build then the “construction cost” bucket isn’t going to 0. Similarity when people say some tech like small modular reactors reduces the cost of building a reactor, but it still needs a cooling tower then it’s optimizing an even smaller bucket under construction costs dramatically reducing the actual benefit.
Land is not a big factor in nuclear power plant cost. Not even remotely.
The upfront land cost isn’t that big I think that 1980 estimate had 0.2%. Except lands gone up a lot faster than inflation and loans are setup so you pay interest on that land for several years of construction and only after operating do you start paying down those loans.
Land costs and plant sizes vary wildly let’s suppose you’re going to spend 100m on land and you’re paying 6%. Construction takes say 7 years from purchase though it can get a lot worse. By the time you have an actual power plant that’s 150m, but you still haven’t actually paid for the land you take another 30 years to pay off the loan so it’s more like 330 million. Not a huge number, but many different not huge numbers add up.
Again, I am not saying land costs themselves are that significant, just that lumping those in when you talk about saving money on construction is misleading.
There is nothing of substance in your comments that contradicts the claim that 60-80% of nuclear power's cost is in construction.
But there’s no reason to be abstract, let’s see a breakdown for the full lifecycle of a single rector and see what all the individual costs add up to. I’ll even let you pick any fully decommissioned reactor for cost comparisons to find one within that 60-80% range.
Isn't it a bit crazy to assume such a huge drop in costs? The same thing was done with nuclear: electricity too cheap to meter. Only it never materialized.
Also, wind and solar are cheap, but they lean on fossil fuels for random dispatch. Basically we produce as much wind and solar as the weather permits, then top it up with gas or coal. But what is the cost of providing base load via renewables+batteries right now (and if it's competitive then why aren't there more such installations, apart from a few unusually sunny places).
Don't get me wrong, a future with 100% renewable, cheap energy sounds great, but I think nuclear getting cheaper is no more optimistic than banking on a 10-100x price drop for renewables and batteries.
Nuclear never had that trend of getting cheaper. And the only person that said anything about it being too cheap to meter was probably talking about fusion instead of fission, and would have been even more wrong than about fission. (It was said by Lewis Strauss, who was recently depicted/demonized in the movie Oppenheimer).
People continually underestimate solar/wind/batteries, as in the actual industry analysts that make predictions always underpredict, every year, year after year after year. If you want to know the future of solar, find the most optimistic prediction you can, and go bigger, and you'll be a better forecaster than the rest of the industry.
I don't know if electricity will ever be too cheap to meter, that sort of overpromising is what the nuclear industry does, not what the renewable industry does. (And I'm not in the renewables industry, just an interested observer.)
I'm sorry, what does this mean? Yes, solar and batteries got much, much cheaper, and I agree, it might continue in that path, but to assume it will... I just don't see the rationale, not in general and not in your post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
And if they slow down, it's going to be gradual, not a sudden "oh we just finished the last of the innovation yesterday, we are done now" stop.
Many people assumed that nuclear would have a positive learning curve, but instead it has turned out to have a negative learning curve, where it got more expensive the more it was built.
In general, every body underestimates the advancements and installations of solar and battery to a degree that is nearly comical. It's incredibly consistent in the underestimation. If I could figure out the right trade to capitalize on that, I'd be much richer...
All such estimates are backwards-looking, and it's true, historically people assumed much lower growth rates. But equally, if you assume this rate of cost decrease as infinitum, well, global warming is solved and we can out our feet up.
There are plenty of things that got cheaper, then didn't. Cars, laptops, phones, healthcare...
I admit it's a common trope to simply take some number N~10 and claim renewable energy will inevitably become Nx cheaper. It just seems delusional to me to take it as a fact.
This is not correct, a good chunk of the lowering costs comes from lowering both the amount of material used and in further decreases in the amount of labor to install. That's the fundamental source of innovation driving down prices.
To assume that there's going to be a sudden stoppage of all these improvements, without at least some sort of slowdown first, requires an astonishing strong belief not backed by any sort of inspection into the actual reality of these things.
It's rather remarkable how absolutely pessimistic people are about renewables in spite of the evidence, and how people are proven wrong year after year with their bad assumptions, but there's so little learning.
Go and find the most optimistic person about the potential of solar and batteries, and there's a 90% chance that solar and batteries will outperform their expectations. Go and find the most pessimistic person's estimates about nuclear, and there's a 50% chance that nuclear will underperform their already low expectations.
Just read through the tragedy of the original article to see how overly optimistic the nuclear folks are.
To me it's madness to ignore the evidence directly in front of you and continue to put all your hopes in a dead-end technology. The idea that we need to spend billions on billions of dollars in decades long super projects while renewables grow by leaps and bounds every year is madness. We have an observable reality. We'd be far better off if we'd pay attention to that reality and make decisions based off of it rather than holding on to some sci-fi promises from decades ago.
When I worked for a power company as a teenager, they saw the one nuclear power plant they owned as a lead weight around their necks.
If you wanted to keep it running, there was investment required to upgrade it to new regulations.
If you didn't want to keep it running, that was a multi-year decommissioning project, for which there would be no profit, only a major cost center.
Nuclear regulations are no joke, and like the airline regulations, the electrical safety code, etc, they're written in blood.
What worked in the 1950s, won't work today, since we know more about all the ways a nuclear plant can fail.
The problem is that they had one plant. If they had a dozen then knowledge could be amortized between them (see France, Japan, Canada-Ontario: all fairly standardized designs).
Part of the problem in with US nuclear: a whole bunch of one-offs, with little-to-no economies of scale to leverage.
People say "Nuclear" because TINA (There is no alternative). But given what's going on with this plant, even if they can recoup the $35B in 20 years, given the risk and the debt load on the company, I wouldn't be surprised if they cancelled it before it went online.
And generally, after watching enough documentaries about nuclear power plant disasters, I think I don't want to live anywhere near one. Truth is the first casualty during an accident.
Why "withougt big repairs"?
The province of Ontario is in the middle of refurbishing their CANDU reactors (with the project currently on-budget and ahead of schedule). This will make them useable for another few decades.
Depending on the design, there's no reason why (at least in some cases) components can't be replaced regularly to keep things going (Ship of Theseus-like):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoU3U7TYNLA
> But current attempts are skating to where the puck was 5-10 years ago, and they won't finish until the puck has spent 10-15 years more of shifting towards ever cheaper solar, wind, and batteries.
Japan was finishing (A)BWR nuclear plants in 4-5 years:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
The reason why things take so long in the US is:
* things start and stop (versus just deciding on a course of action of going for it)
* having so many 'one-off' designs, so experience cannot be transferred between plants (settled on one design, like France and Canada did; maybe two)
* ordering one unit at a time (maybe two), so economies of scale cannot be started (build in pairs, with a goal of having 4/6/8 reactors in one location)
One additional argument that's mostly missed: every fission reactor is only economically viable (if it is at all) when discounting the implicit state guarantee, that's necessary as no insurer will take on the risk. Adding a theoretical risk premium paid by taxpayers to the calculation, nuclear will never be competitive.
PV modules have long been manufactured in fully automated factories, and even 131m rotor blades are now produced with the help of industrial robots. Small units allow for a large number of innovative competitors, resulting in astonishing scaling effects.
In contrast, the nuclear industry suffers from monopoly-like structures which, coupled with regulatory requirements, extremely delay innovation. This makes it difficult or even impossible for the nuclear industry to regain the ground it has lost.
I think this is where the nuclear field should look too. Can they make robots to weld and inspect and drive down costs? Can construction be automated and inspected more cheaply? Can robots be used to put steel in place before concrete pours? Can advanced IT reduce delays in logistics? I don't know. Sounds hard yet feasible. But I never hear nuclear folks dive into the nuts and bolts this way. In the renewable space, such innovation is the only thing people talk about.
Despite the danger, nuclear is exactly the kind of thing I want a SpaceX-type company to tackle. Nuclear should be orders of magnitude cheaper. It should be developed at a frenetic pace, with even the scary failure modes being tolerated.
Safety doesn't matter to the degree we think it does when literally thousands of people die in traffic accidents, and hundreds of thousands to preventable diseases.
We don't even need to build near population centers to get this off the ground. We have so much space to build and test safely in complete isolation.
We're in this spot because of the decades of fearmongering from the greens and the geopolitical adversaries masquerading(!) as greens. We also have this deeply-held reverence, and perhaps even guilt, because we built the bomb.
This thinking has held us back so unfathomably much, and for nearly a century. Nuclear could propel us forward as a civilization if we'd just let go of the fear.
Part of why renewables are beating SMR companies is incrementality. You can build and expand power projects and scale up from small installations up high.
It's surprisingly hard to find economical places to build this in the US. Even geothermal in completely uninhabitable places gets met with opposition from groups like the Burning Man guys. I'm sure we'll conquer these regulatory things within the next half century, but until then we're in trouble and insistent on walking the precipice.
SMRs are mostly useful for small grids. Efficiency for large grids comes from large reactors (>700MW, and perhaps even 1000MW) that are built in a pipeline (I've heard the term "Large Modular Reactor").
When the province of Ontario built out its CANDUs it built them in pairs, and plants had 'packs' of fours and eights. It was a fairly standardized design and so the supply chain settled down and could churn out components.
I vehemently disagree. Another major disaster is all it will take to finish off nuclear for good.
You're trying to apply logical thinking to a subject that historically has been governed by emotion: how people feel about it.
First,
> The Japanese and Germans are not known for their wildly emotional thinking
Okay. But the French, uh, sorry, but IMHO, the French are "known for their wildly emotional thinking", e.g., French music, painting, cooking, ballet, wines, architecture, perfume, women's fashions?
Second, it's the French who have done especially well with nuclear power!
Doesn't match!
How? Why? How could that be?
Uh, a guess: From the old French kings to Napoleon and DeGaulle, the French have had, have put up with, relatively strong, maybe autocratic, governments.
So, the difference might be that the French have autocratic governments. Uh, right, Japan and Germany have had governments that were even more autocratic, that is, until the end of WWII. Since then, maybe France has been the more autocratic.
So, why might autocracy help in being successful with nuclear power and, in the US, our democracy has fumbled, dropped, tripped over, kicked, fell over the ball?
Obvious suspicion: The US has had (A) too many politicians, lawyers, and news journalists causing trouble just because they like causing trouble and (B) too little strong leadership, e.g., autocracies, able to make the decisions mostly via the science and engineering to get the real work done without being blocked, attacked, misled, dragged around, kicked, etc. by (A).
Just a guess, guys!
The evidence is sitting there: Emotional France has done well. Rational Japan and Germany, not so good. US, with plenty of science and engineering smarts, fell over the ball, might have been cheaper to generate the energy just by burning dollar bills in a coal plant! WHY??? Got a better explanation?
With regards to the German and Japanese response to Fukushima. It happened to Japan, that explains their emotional response quite easily. Germany could afford to be skittish and shut down nuclear, although with a price to pay for less energy security in the short-term. Not enough of the German economy was powered by nuclear for it to be a terminal threat to their economy.
France can't afford to consider shutting down 70% of their energy generation any time soon. There's a lot less room for emotional debate there. Sure some people can get upset about it, doesn't matter, they're not closing down their economy. The French are not stupid, they're often practical when it's time to be practical; they're fully aware their economy rides on nuclear.
So, the issue I addressed was WHY for the building or not building, nothing about shutting down.
Sooo, the lack of fit was that emotional France built lots of plants and rational Germany and Japan didn't -- in addition, the US, awash in science and engineering smarts, has been slow to build the plants and, in the Georgia example, spent way too much money and took way too long, dropped the ball.
My explanation was -- France had a government with more power, closer to an autocracy. Explanation in one word, autocracy. Why claim that France can be autocratic? DeGaulle ... Napoleon, Kings.
Soooo, if an autocracy had an advantage, why??? It's common, a usual thing: Any major project needs some strong defenses or will get picked on, picked nearly to death, by attackers. Where are the attackers? Easily, politicians, lawyers, and journalists -- on average, attacking is a big part of their jobs. This need for defense against these three sources of attackers holds for essentially any large project of any kind. One source of the defense -- autocracy.
Is this more clear???
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
Note that the age of reactors is calculated based on the date they were completed, not on the date that construction began.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGySq7QBRiY
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfkoMUmmUCI
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbKf_TbI000
It mentions a few 'macro' issues with Vogtle: the first being the choice of using an AP-1000 design (Westinghouse Toshiba). Not because it is/was necessarily 'inherently' a bad design (the guest, James Krellenstein, describes himself as an "AP-100 fanboy"), but rather because it was (at the time) never built before. That, combined with the fact that the US had little/no institutional knowledge of building nuclear plants means that a whole lot of learning needed to be done.
Contrast this with another available (at the time) option, the ABWR, which GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy had building been for over a decade in Japan. Between ABWR build beginning and commercial operations it took about 4-5 years on average:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
They had a ready-to-go supply chain, with plenty of experience.
Tied into the fact that the AP1000 was a new design, they decided to start building before 'detailed' drawings were only ~40% done. So they had the high-level view design done, but the drawings for machinists and pipe fitters needed were not ready, and so that added to delays, as they had to first create them, and then there was all sorts of back-and-forth to refine them. These issues were called out in the article:
> When Vogtle’s Units 3 and 4 were approved by Georgia regulators in 2009, the reactor model, known as an AP1000, had never before been built. (It was Westinghouse’s flagship model, combining massive generation capacity with new “passive safety” features, which allow reactors to remain cooled and safe without human intervention, external power, or emergency generators in the case of an accident.) It later emerged that the reactor’s developer, Westinghouse, had not even fully completed the design before starting construction, causing a significant share of the project’s costly setbacks. While that was bad news for Georgians, it could mean a smoother path ahead for future reactors.
> “In the course of building Vogtle,” Kozeracki told Grist, “we have now addressed three of the biggest challenges: the incomplete design, the immature supply chain, and the untrained workforce.”
Somewhere in the podcast they also go over some interesting 'bureaucratic minutiae': the plant was originally approved under a part of the regulations where everything is submitted 'all at once' and approved 'all at once', but any later changes to the design may take longer. As opposed another part where the design is submitted in parts, which may have been better as it would have allowed for gradual refine of the plants and submission when they were 'actually' finalized.
It also doesn't help that the US has so many 'one-off' nuclear plants, so that experience in one cannot be directly transferred between them. Contrast that with France, which has a fairly cookie-cutter fleet, or even (closer to home) the province of Ontario which has CANDUs everywhere (which were generally constructed in pairs and were often ordered in four- and eight-packs).
Some CANDUs are currently undergoing refurbishment, and the project is on-/under-budget and ahead of schedule. Interview with the fellow in charge of the refurb program:
> Gary Rose, VP New Nuclear Growth at Ontario Power Generation, walks us through the CANDU refurbishment program whose stunning successes have laid the foundation for deployment of the west’s 1st grid scale SMR, the GE Hitachi BWRX-300.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHTtthahwjs
Of course now that the AP1000 has been built twice (Vogtle Units 3 and 4), plans exist and there's experience. The question is whether any new plants that are going to be built will use that experience, or choose yet another design.
"...which GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy had been [building] for over a decade in Japan."
"Of course now that the AP1000 has been [built] twice..."
I would not comment just to "catch" you making a typo. I really think it's interesting that your brain slipped over the same idea twice in such a short span.
Are we going to be able to construct nuclear in the future? Probably? Maybe? But if folks like this are in charge of the efforts, then my answer is a firm "never."
Take for example when Jigar Shah went on their podcast. Shah is a huuuge nuclear fan, and IMHO is way too optimistic too (for example the DoE's LPO Liftoff report on nuclear gave it a 30%-50% cost advantage out of nowhere in order to make it look the least bit plausible). But for all of Shah's blind spots on nuclear, at least he tried to give the Decouple podcast a small shower of reality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwN1MCtBkVk
(BTW, Shah has said on recent podcasts that there will be more announcements of new AP1000s soon, and since he's giving out so much money to get them built, we should probably believe that. IMHO, I'd bet 10:1 that it will be wasted money that would be better spent on batteries and solar, but when it comes to subsidies and government spending, money is not actually fungible, so I support more shots on goal, even if they are very very long shots)
People really often don't comprehend just how titanic the storage requirements are just to provision half a day's worth of energy to offset daily solar fluctuations. The globe currently uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. That's 30,000 GWh for 12 hours of storage. Keep in mind, electricity is only about half our total energy use, heating and transportation also need to be electrified which will drive this number up. And lastly, diurnal storage isn't the only storage we'll need. We'll also need seasonal storage to offset weather fluctuations.
When we stop asking "what's the most cost-efficient way to reduce CO2 emissions by a percent or two?" and start asking "how will we build a 100% carbon-free grid?" nuclear becomes a much more attractive option.
My understanding is that solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear even when accounting for storage.
That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as waste disposal and decomissioning.
This understanding is either based on geographically limited storage options (hydroelectric storage), or is incorrect. The amount of batteries required to even out intermittent sources is many times more than the amount of batteries produced. The cost of a 1 GWh facility is very different from a 1 TWh facility. The latter is 2x the amount of batteries produced worldwide each year. But it's only 2 hours of the USA's electricity consumption. That's how big of a mismatch there exists between battery supply and the demands of grid storage.
> That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as waste disposal and decomissioning.
Waste disposal and decommissioning are already factored into nuclear power's cost. They have to pre-pay the cost of disposal and decommissioning.
Vogtle is $170-$180/MWh. https://www.powermag.com/blog/plant-vogtle-not-a-star-but-a-...
New solar is on average $40/MWh: https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/utility_scale_solar_...
Back in 2022 when prices were higher, NREL put batteries at $482/kWh:
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf
That's $87/MWh for storage, backing out the battery lifetime and round trip efficiency from the same report.
So depending on the time usage of electricity, the average solar+battery installation will have an averaging of $40/MWh and $127/Mwh electricity.
That's using old prices. It's cheaper today, and will get cheaper in the future.
And we're not even talking about electrifying other fossil fuels uses like heating, transportation, etc. That's going to make electricity demand even larger.
1. https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-manufactur...
In Ontario nuclear costs 10¢/kWh while wind costs 15¢ and solar 50¢ (Table 2):
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2022...
And when wind goes to zero at night, then (natural/methane) gas generators are often spun up.
> That's before you get to the externalized costs, such as waste disposal and decomissioning.
Which wind and solar also have. You may be able to extract some metals from solar panels, but turbine blades are not (AFAICT) recyclable.
That "is" should be a "was".
> The globe currently uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. That's 30,000 GWh for 12 hours of storage.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance tracks battery production capacity announcements, and has a total world capacity of 7.9 TWh/year by the end of 2025 [0]. With a warrantied life of 12-20 years, that 2025 manufacturing capacity would support 95-158 TWh of ongoing storage.
Keep in mind that the talking points you are drawing from are several years of out date and assume an audience that knows little about the world of energy. HN is not the right place to pull out the standard bag of tricks from the electronic information toolkit.
For example, you claim a need for "seasonal" storage out of nowhere, but do not consider the obvious (to the HN audince at least) idea of overcapacity such that there's enough generation at the seasonal minimum to cover needs, and oversupply the rest of the year.
Already, many countries in Europe have seen single-digit /MWh average prices this month [1]. That's going to become far more common during most of the year.
[0] https://twitter.com/colinmckerrache/status/17758808881626562...
No amount of overcapacity will make solar panels produce electricity at night. You'll at least need diurnal storage, no amount of overproduction will help solar power offset the day and night cycle. Overproduction is also not a silver bullet: solar production during cloudy days and wind production during still winds are often under 10% of average output. You'd need a massive amount of overproduction in order to avoid building large amounts of storage.
As for your battery production predictions, these seem very far-fetched given the history of lithium ion battery production. Bear in mind that production capacity is a different figure than actual production. Production capacity is what factories theoretically could make if given unlimited input materials. But that's not what matters, what matters is actual production figures - how much battery capacity was actually built.
2023 saw 680 GWh of lithium ion batteries produced worldwide: https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-manufactur....
2021 this figure was 476 GWh: https://interactanalysis.com/insight/lithium-ion-battery-mar....
Will we actually see 7.9 TWh of batteries produced annually by the end of 2025? The growth over the last two years was only about 200 GWh of capacity, so seeing over 7,000 GWh of production increase over the next two years seems a bit far fetched.
Why do things have to be balanced or unbiased? The anti-nuclear folks have their platforms, why can't the pro-nuclear people have theirs?
It is "biased" because it is run by a nuclear advocate? But given they had a three-part series on the problems and what went wrong with Vogtle, it's not like they're trying to hide everything under the rug.
A little while ago they published a video on a debate with an anti-nuclear individual:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfL40rSFT00
> Take for example when Jigar Shah went on their podcast.
I have not gotten to that episode (yet?), but have heard Shah on podcasts like Odd Lots discussing his work more generally.
> IMHO, I'd bet 10:1 that it will be wasted money that would be better spent on batteries and solar, but when it comes to subsidies and government spending, money is not actually fungible, so I support more shots on goal, even if they are very very long shots)
As someone who lives in Ontario (same as Decouple host), my experience with renewables haven't exactly been thrilling (click on "Supply"):
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
Every time wind goes down (including down to zero), (natural/methane) gas generators tend to have to be powered up (putting junk into the atmosphre). I'd rather we just build more CANDUs for base load and let hydro take up more of the variable load.
That's the difference between the success of renewables and the failures of nuclear. The renewable folks went out and built the stuff, made it scale, and fixed the problems. The nuclear folks are star-gazing, hoping and dreaming, without executing at all.
If there are factual issues with what they say, feel free to post a comment correcting them. Just because something is (allegedly) "biased" does not make it wrong.
> That's the difference between the success of renewables and the failures of nuclear.
There's also a difference between the failures (and inadequacies) of renewables and the success of nuclear:
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply
When wind goes to zero at night (which it has done in Ontario), what are the options for keeping people warm in January and cool in July?
The decisions that will determine how many new AP1000s get ordered in the US or BWRX300s get ordered in Canada come down to financial and logistical and contractual issues around their construction. The decisions will be made in utility board rooms, not in the court of public opinion.
To improve those chances, there needs to be serious introspection on how to drive down construction costs, prevent construction delays, etc. etc. etc.
Maybe there are regulatory changes that could help, but I'll be damned if the show ever talks about those in concrete constructive ways, instead regulations are merely an obstacle and an excuse for failure.
In the renewable space, the hurdles are talked about in ways that they can be overcome, addressed, side stepped. In the nuclear podcast promotion space, the hurdles are immovable, somebody else's fault, and an excuse for the failure of current projects.
I never hear a podcast about renewables extolling the nature of solar tech as something that just needs to be done because the tech is so cool, or repeating the failures of nuclear tech as inherent to the technology, because that's a pointless waste of time. Yet that sort of navel gazing is the only type of pro-nuclear podcast I have ever found, of about five that I have stumbled on over the years.
Nuclear does not need any more cheerleaders. It needs more hackers.
Build the same designs repeatedly. No other major changes need to be made IMHO.
It worked for France, Ontario, and Japan ((A)BWRs consistently built in 4-5 years)[1] in the past, and it works for every modern widget we produce in factories now.
Ontario's refurbishment is on-time and on-budget because of a repeatable process:
* https://archive.today/xoQDQ / https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-darlington-...
And sometimes not only on-time, but finishing early:
* https://www.ebmag.com/darlingtons-unit-3-back-online-nearly-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
There is no scale of nuclear that really makes sense.
Look at Fukushima. Not only is the whole area a mess. No one knows what to do with the mess. There's a lot filled with radioactive metal scraps and a security guard. Tell me does that seem cleaned up and dealt with to you?
Nuclear power creates a problem so big, that lasts for so long, that it is on a time scale beyond peoples comprehension. Look at the efforts that were being proposed to mark the site at Yucca Mountain. You remember Yucca Mountain, the hole in the ground where we were gonna burry this problem. Yea we didn't do that.
So right now nuclear waste is everywhere. And it is becoming more prevalent, and less controlled. How long before we have another one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident ... how many more generations are going to be cleaning up Chernobyl? That fancy building that we slid over the site. It's not even gonna make it 100 years before it needs replaced. We're going to be dealing with the site for generations to come.
EDIT: I love the down votes but show me the link to the safe, long term, paid off nuclear storage that address the needs of the plants that we have running today never mind the ones people want to have built.
As someone who lives in Toronto, Canada, which is ~50km (as the crow flies) to a nuclear plant, I have no qualms about nuclear, and wish we'd build more in the province.
As for waste, they have an entire episode called "What About the Waste?":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2t2tYQsK94
At the end of the day, we can just bury it:
* https://globalnews.ca/news/10191441/site-canada-nuclear-wast...
It's currently not economically viable to reprocess it because uranium is so cheap, but having it available for possible future needs would be nice.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident
You are comparing apple to orange: the above was a tiny module. Nuclear "waste" from reactors is stored in cement cylinders that weight tonnes.
And we need radioactive materials, like the one in the above incident, for many applications, including medical treatments as well as for things like sterilizing things. Canada, which has a nuclear industry, provide a lot of the world's medical isotopes:
> The deal to produce the isotope at Darlington will ease concerns about access to the raw material for TheraSphere, which has been provided to more than 100,000 liver cancer patients worldwide, said Peter Pattison, president of Boston Scientific's interventional oncology franchise in Ottawa.
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-darlington-nu...
* https://www.canadianisotopes.ca/isotopes-in-canada/
* https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-resources/en...
Unless you wish to deprive people of possibly life-saving treatment options?
Can.. CAN???
This is the sort of magical thinking that the pro nuclear crowed cant come to terms with. Yes you can, why didn't you did this hole in the ground in 1980 when the first reactor went on line... Looking for a site to dig at next year does not solve the 40 years of waste (public electric, Canada has waste going back to the 50's) sitting on the ground outside at every nuclear site out side the baltic. (they dug a hole, and guess what its filling up pretty fast cause they built more stuff after they started digging).
Who pays to clean all this up? Who is going to foot the bill for the hole? who is going to fund security for it for the rest of time. Show me that math before we build one more plant. Dig the the hole. DO IT don't TELL ME ABOUT IT.
SEE: Every project in the world that was going to do it, France, USA, USSR, Japan, Canada... and one working hole in Finland that will fill up in half the expected time.
>> It's currently not economically viable to reprocess it because uranium is so cheap, but having it available for possible future needs would be nice.
https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...
Dig it up, and then leave a mess for someone else to clean is no different than the economics of coal, it's just on a smaller scale. And thank god cause uranium has a half life.
>> You are comparing apple to orange: the above was a tiny module. Nuclear "waste" from reactors is stored in cement cylinders that weight tonnes.
There is no amount of "safe" nuclear material. Full stop.
>>> The nation's spent nuclear fuel is initially stored in steel-lined concrete pools surrounded by water. It's later removed from the pools and placed into dry storage casks that are made of steel and concrete or other materials used for protective shielding.
From: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
The waste isnt embedded in cement, Its in a cement container with a cement lid. They used to use (and may still be made by a company that makes) septic tanks. Your nuclear waste has the same protective storage as a rural house puts its shit. The only reason it goes in this sort of housing. Because it makes it hard to casually mess something up (see every pre 1970's nuclear accident, and there are LOTS OF THEM, including at the same site as the next point).
You mean this reactor that Canada shut down: https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Canadian-isotope-rea...
This was vital, maybe for the public good sure. And leaking heavy water. In the grand scheme of things not THAT bad, but should not be happening... was this a systemic failure or a true accident? The reality was that the the economics to run it safely weren't there.
Yes.
> Who pays to clean all this up? Who is going to foot the bill for the hole?
The people who use the electricity that is generated.
Just like they'll pay for solar panel recycling (if such a thing exists) and for burying wind turbine blades (which are not, AFAIK, recyclable) that were also used in creating electricity for the grid, as well as for dealing with the end-of-life batteries that are used for energy storage when it comes to renewables.
Which is why I'm also pro-carbon pricing: the people polluting need to cost-in externalities. (Which, if you have wind and solar you'll also be paying, since backup gas/coal/oil plants are needed for windless nights.)
> SEE: Every project in the world that was going to do it, France, USA, USSR, Japan, Canada... and one working hole in Finland that will fill up in half the expected time.
If you don't want to bury it in a central location, then let the casks sit in situ where they are.
> Dig it up, and then leave a mess for someone else to clean is no different than the economics of coal, it's just on a smaller scale. And thank god cause uranium has a half life.
What is there to "deal with"? It's an inert object: just let it sit there. The various forms of radiation are a known quantity, as is how to deal with them. Again, see "What About the Waste?":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2t2tYQsK94
> There is no amount of "safe" nuclear material. Full stop.
Better ban bananas then. And smoke alarms.
> You mean this reactor that Canada shut down: https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Canadian-isotope-rea...
Nope, the one at Darlington that just signed a deal a few weeks ago to provide isotopes for medical treatments (which I linked to already, but you failed to notice):
> The deal to produce the isotope at Darlington will ease concerns about access to the raw material for TheraSphere, which has been provided to more than 100,000 liver cancer patients worldwide, said Peter Pattison, president of Boston Scientific's interventional oncology franchise in Ottawa.
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-darlington-nu...
See also press release from 2023:
* https://www.bwxt.com/bwxt-medical/news/2023/02/01/BWXT-Medic...
Half of the world's Cobalt-60 is produced by Ontario nuclear power generation:
> Ontario Power Generation (OPG) and Nordion (Canada) Inc. have signed an agreement to expand production of Cobalt-60 to the Darlington Nuclear Station. Currently, approximately 50% of the world’s Cobalt-60 is produced in Ontario.
> Cobalt-60 is a life-saving isotope responsible for sterilizing approximately 40% of the world’s single-use medical devices, including syringes, gloves, implants and surgical instruments. It is also used to treat a variety of food and consumer products for the reduction of harmful pathogens.
* https://www.nordion.com/darlington-to-become-new-source-of-l...
There is no hole to put it in. And talking about the hole to put it in that does not exist is magical thinking.
>> What is there to "deal with"? It's an inert object: just let it sit there. The various forms of radiation are a known quantity, as is how to deal with them. Again, see "What About the Waste?":
https://www.propublica.org/article/uranium-mills-pollution-c...
Again, see the actual harm already done...
>> If you don't want to bury it in a central location, then let the casks sit in situ where they are.
How's that working for Fukushima, and Chernobyl. How is that working when we close plants now. Again magical thinking that keeps kicking the ball down the field.
>>> Just like they'll pay for solar panel recycling (if such a thing exists)
I will happily put a whole bunch of 20 year old solar panels on my roof. Are you willing to put a cooling pool in your back yard?
This is very simple: where are we going to store the nuclear waste for 100k years and where is the money that covers its expenses going forward.
Show me that facility BUILT, show me the bank account FUNDED, show me the insurance contract for when your wrong and I will get behind nuclear. Till then lets stop pretending that were gonna solve it later. We aren't.
Very hard to build a hole. All that digging and stuff.
> https://www.propublica.org/article/uranium-mills-pollution-c...
This is about nuclear weapons, and nothing to do with nuclear power and the storage of spent nuclear fuel. Countries can have nuclear power without nuclear weapons: see Canada, Japan, Brazil, Finland. Please stop moving the goal posts.
> How's that working for Fukushima, and Chernobyl. How is that working when we close plants now. Again magical thinking that keeps kicking the ball down the field.
The effects Chernobyl are overblown:
* https://archive.today/hYZls / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nu...
So says the co-founder of Chernobyl Tissue Bank, Geraldine ("Gerry") Thomas:
* https://blogs.imperial.ac.uk/imperial-medicine/2019/12/09/ra...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas
Fukushima is generally the same:
* https://archive.is/mpCeG / https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...
* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761136
More people died in the earthquake-caused tsunami (and tsunamis in general) than the Fukushima nuclear incident and yet people still live by the coasts. More lives would probably be saved in Japan by heeding the historical warnings of Japanese 'tsunami stones' than by closing nuclear (especially since closures would increase fossil-fuel generating plants):
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnin...
More people have died from the evacuation than from the nuclear incident, see [3][4][5][6][7][8] in:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
> This is very simple: where are we going to store the nuclear waste for 100k years and where is the money that covers its expenses going forward.
Cooling ponds are needed for a ~decade or two. After that casks work just fine. All that "100k years" is just non-sense: at those time scales all that's left is alpha radiation (which can be stopped by pieces of paper) and maybe beta radiation (stopped by aluminium foil). The only way that the "100k years" (or even 10k years) stuff can harm you is if you eat it or grind it into a powder and snort it like cocaine.
Stop being so over-dramatic.
We need to deal with climate change in the short term, and renewables will not provide a complete solution (I have no problem with them generally, just with treating them as a sort of panacea): they are intermittent and need fossil fuel backup capacity ((natural/methane) gas, coal, oil) as there is not enough battery capacity on the planet to keep things running over longer time durations. Ontario was able to shutdown all of its coal plants because of the capacity that nuclear provides, and even though it built out lots of (e.g.) wind infrastructure, there are often times that it drops to zero (this week, 2024-04-08, it's been pretty good so far).
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply
> Show me that facility BUILT, show me the bank account FUNDED, show me the insurance contract for when your wrong and I will get behind nuclear. Till then lets stop pretending that were gonna solve it later. We aren't.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickering_Nuclear_Generating_S...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darlington_Nuclear_Generating_...
I live a few dozen kilometres from Pickering. It's fine. Again, see "What About the Waste?":
>> "What About the Waste?"
Two people who 1. are not scientist 2. are not in the industry are giving their thoughts on something. (Nuclear is safe, but the nuclear industry doesn't agree with us is a very bad selling point)
https://energy.sandia.gov/programs/nuclear-waste-management/...
Or this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
Another sandia project.
So you want to get advice from randoms on the internet, I want my advice from the lab that has been working on this for its entire existence. The lab (and its adjacent labs) that mint most of the PhD in and around high end nuclear research. I'll listen to actual experts, you can listen to the internet ones.
-------------
IF they shut down pickering tomorrow, and decon the site, where does the material go? It's a question that the Japan does not have as it takes apart fukushima. They are building more plants to further dewater the concentrates from cooling. They have 800 tons of building that is highly contaminated that has to go somewhere for a few 1000 years. Again nuclear is safe till we stop keeping all those materials tightly controlled.
The thing is there is a place in the world where there is a LOT of loose spent nuclear material just floating around in the open: https://hir.harvard.edu/depleted-uranium-devastated-health-m...
Candidly if nuclear is safe then we could go to Iraq and do the study and have the result that "it's not that bad". No one seems keen to fund this study, and likely for a good reason.
And as for Chernobyl: https://blog.ucsusa.org/lisbeth-gronlund/how-many-cancers-di...
Or this from 2016: https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:49089634
All of that and any number your going to site for Chernobyl is nonsense. 20 year old data tracking excess cancer deaths is going to be really stale. Here's what you can know, that even in 2005 the people who would have been most impacted, the liquidators, were calling those numbers into question. Much like any good insurance company if you reject the claim till the victim dies then you dont really have to pay...
I suspect that in 20 years we're going to get a VERY different story out of Japan. That the cost is going to be measured, tracked and look much different. In fact were already seeing some of that today: https://apnews.com/article/science-health-accidents-tokyo-dd...
But the UN said it was fine... sadly the latest research just shot most of the defense for this down: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6694/15/18/4583
Greenhouse gas emissions is an obvious win. But let's look at the other 2. Both are quantified in terms of deaths, which is the most favorable metric to nuclear because it says nothing about clean up costs and ecological or environmental damage.
Case in point: almost 40 years later, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is still quite literally 1000 square miles.
A worse example (for the nuclear industry) is the Fukushima clean up costs. The core is still incredibly dangerous and will continue to be probably for centuries. It needs to be actively cooled. This feels a bunch of tanks with radioactive water that is expensive to treat and controversial to release back into the ocean once its deemed "safe". We have no way of removing the core so this will continue for decades to come, possibly over a century.
Fukushima will cost billions in maintenance for decades to come, so far has cost >$70 billionn and will likely approach $1 trillion byh the time it's all over [2].
Now, consider US nuclear power regulation. The Price-Anderson Act limits liability for nuclear power incidents to $500 million per site with a separate total ($10 billion?) per year [3]. The industry has a self-insurance fund to pay for disasters like these but the size of that Fukushima clean up cost to date would have exceeded that multiple times already.
So who picks up the check? The government. Nuclear power simply transfers wealth to private industry while private industry assumes almost none of the risk. We would need to trust such companies to maintain and operate plants safely when we all know that economic incentives will be to cutback on safety, inspections and maintenance to maintain and increase profits.
That's why nuclear power is a terrible idea.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
[3]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821#:~:te....
> Case in point: almost 40 years later, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is still quite literally 1000 square miles.
Whole 1000 square miles? Looks like the habitable area of Earth is 24,642,757 square miles. That only leaves us with 24,642,757 - 1,000 = 24,641,757 square miles to work with. We are doomed.
> Fukushima will cost billions in maintenance for decades to come, so far has cost >$70 billionn and will likely approach $1 trillion byh the time it's all over [2].
That's it?
"The United States' reliance on coal to generate almost half of its electricity, costs the economy about $345 billion a year in hidden expenses not borne by miners or utilities, including health problems in mining communities and pollution around power plants, a study found." [1]
"[...] in the United States, particle pollution from existing coal power plants is expected to cause some 13,200 premature deaths in 2010, as well as 9,700 additional hospitalizations and some 20,000 heart attacks.
[...]
The report found that the total monetized value of these adverse health impacts add up to more than $100 billion per year." [2]
"Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil was responsible for 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, a staggering one in five of all people who died that year, new research has found." [3]
"Between 1999 and 2020, 460,000 deaths among people who got health coverage through Medicare were attributable to coal-fired plants, the new [US] study showed." [4]
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-coal-study/coals-hidden-...
[2]: https://www.gem.wiki/Health_costs_of_coal_plants
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-f...
[4]: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/23/health/coal-fired-plants-..., https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf4915