They haven't forgotten, they were fighting a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens. The same eco-ideologist that ruined Germany have made it impossible to properly invest in the nuclear plants in France and to ensure knowledge and expertise is properly transmitted and developed with the younger generation.
For years the message was "don't invest in nuclear, don't study nuclear, don't build nuclear, don't maintain nuclear". Now the message is "we can't even do nuclear properly", it's a disengenous argument.
What we need is a bit of future perspective: Nuclear is here to stay for the next decades (plural). Nuclear related jobs will be in high demand. Nuclear jobs will be well paying. Nuclear jobs will be safe. Nuclear formation is important, and here is money to ensure it happens. Maintenance of nuclear plants is important, it needs to happen and it will be financed. And that will lead to true expertise and safety.
We ended up with a group of people who would benefit a moderate amount from cheap power, and a fanatic anti-nuclear lobby that succeeded in scuttling decades of progress. The more motivated group won, as is predictable.
It is amazing watching Europeans trying to achieve energy poverty in defiance of their technical head start. The energy figures out of places like the UK, France and Germany are startlingly bad (eg, [0]). Especially considered per-capita.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Historical_D...
That's the problem with nuclear; even if every nuclear power plant on the planet were shut-down today, "nuclear" would still be here to stay for at least a century or two.
No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned. Decommissioning of the first UK nuclear power plants is expected to last another century. That's being paid for by taxpayers. The builders and operators of those plants were never asked to plan or pay for decommissioning; and anyway, 200 years is a long time to expect a corporation to stay alive.
So let's be quite clear: the cost of a nuclear power plant includes the cost of decommissioning. Since decommissioning takes such a long time, you can't rely on contracts with private companies to ensure they finish the job. Decommissioning is a horrible insurance risk; never having been completed successfully, there's no reliable guide to how much it might cost.
So, step forward, the insurer of last resort: my grandchildren!
>No nuclear power plant has ever been fully decommissioned.
There have been 10 plants in the US that have been fully decommissioned[1].
According to your link, there are 10 plants that have achieved "DECON status": that is, the spent fuel and machinery have been removed from the site (presumably to some other site).
I'm sorry, but that's a cop-out: it's cheating to say you've decommissioned a site, when what you've really done is transport the entire site, including topsoil, to a new location. That's like saying your plastics are green, because when they are no longer wanted they are all shipped to Indonesia. And apparently at least some of those "decommissioned" sites still have spent fuel stored on-site; I don't see how a site with spent fuel can be considered to have been returned to "greenfield" condition.
Same with solar. Spent solar panels don't go nowhere.
No other plant either.
> The DOE was required by contract and statute to begin removing spent nuclear fuel and GTCC waste by January 31, 1998. To date, the DOE has not removed any spent fuel or GTCC waste from the CY site, and it is unknown when it will.
The current 'plan' is for the companies looking after the waste on the original site to sue the government every few years to get paid for looking after the waste.
Meanwhile you are complaining about waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.
For example, it was forbidden to have more than 50GW installed capacity of solar. By Law.
oh and also destroying the industries building the solar panels, therefore losing the entire market to China…
Obviously, nothing can be done with nuclear power now to address that problem. Looking back, there is no reason to think that fossil fuel usage would have disappeared by now. Even the issue of climate change has had little impact. Nuclear is generally far more expensive.
Now if we had had made the fossil fuel industry pay the true cost of their waste products - greenhouse gases - then there might have been a market for nuclear.
> idealism
If you have a good argument, why disparage people who disagree? Why not address their concerns seriously?
The threat of nuclear waste is very real and serious. There are solutions, but these are serious issues that won't be addressed by disparaging other people.
> waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.
Nobody has died yet (is that even true?), so it's safe?
If you reckon it's OK to leave waste lying around, especially in constrained economic and political circumstances, that's a legitimate point of view. Argue for that. But don't declare that "decommissioning" simply means something like "Do your best, and then be done with it". That's dishonest (I'm not accusing you personally of any dishonesty).
If "decommissioning" doesn't mean complete reversal of all harmful results of the operation of a plant, then we need a new word that does mean that.
How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants we’ve been running for forty years while people like yourself threw ignorant tantrums over nuclear?
How would you “reverse all harmful results of the operation of a plant”?
How are you going to recapture all the pollution they dumped into our air, exactly?
The word apparently means whatever the responsible authorities want it to mean.
> How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants
We used to make gas by heating coal with steam; the result was a contaminated site, coal gas, and coke for steel. But the site was left contaminated with chemical waste - stuff that can in principle be chemically denatured, or buried fairly safely. Thing is, I'm against making new coal-to-gas plants, as much as I'm against new nukes.
I don't have to defend coal and gas power plants; I don't have to explain how to reverse their effects; I'm against building any new ones, and my lack of any remedies for the effects of plants built before I was born doesn't invalidate my stance.
[Edit] I think I missed your point, which was probably based on my use of the word "reversing". You're effectively asking me how to complete the decommissioning of plants that were put out of use before I was born. If you want childish, that's childish: you're asking me for a proposal for reversing climate change.
I'm talking about how to build a nuclear power plant that can be properly decommissioned, in the sense that there's no persistent environmental pollution, and the land can safely be returned to normal uses, such as agriculture and residential housing. I'm against repeating the mistakes my grandparents made, in all their ignorance.
You’re making the exact same mistake by rejecting today’s an attainable but imperfect solution in favor of an unattainably perfect one.
The end result is that we waste another few decades spewing pollution into the air.
1. Spew the waste into the air (fossil fuels)
2. Contain and bury the waste (nuclear)
3. Go without electricity when the weather is not favorable until major tech improvements in storage
So unless you want to argue for 3, and I don't think you do, 2 is clearly the best option.
We really need to get deep storage unstuck from the Yucca Mountain issue, but I think this still counts as decommissioned.
This attitude only makes sense if one's view is that humanity isn't going to last more than 10,000 years.
Unless we can find a way of rendering nuclear waste safe, then we have to find a way of making it so inaccessible that a future civilisation is unlikely to come across it by accident, and so secure that even a major earthquake won't cause it to leak into the environment.
Storing this stuff in metal tins on the surface isn't even a gesture at a solution.
At any point, if interest rates aren't pretty much exactly zero, it pays to delay burying waste. The present cost of guarding it at the surface is < the cost of burying it now. If, at any time, the interest rates do drop to zero and stay there, it can be buried then.
The only real argument against this is that the waste ceases to be self-protecting from "amateur" diversion of plutonium in about 300 years, which could greatly increase the cost of guarding. But that's no justification for burying it now.
Waiting also reduces the thermal output from fission products, which reduces heat buildup in the repository, at least a bit. And it would allow the waste to be reprocessed (and more easily) if that (perhaps unexpectedly) becomes appropriate. It would also allow time for other disposal methods, such as launching into space, to become competitive. How cheap will the descendants of SpaceX's launchers be in 300 years?
I think there may have been an argument for rapidly burying waste during the cold war, where surface waste could be volatilized by a direct H bomb strike, causing enhanced local long term fallout. That's more an argument against nuclear power itself, though, as NPPs could also be disrupted by direct strikes.
This is always a funny topic when people wax philosophical about dirty bombs as though you wouldn't get cooked trying to open a cask.
We’re the grandchildren of the eco-ideologists that spent the last forty years dumping coal and gas pollution into the atmosphere because they were afraid of nuclear power.
My grandparents were from the era of steam-powered mills; I doubt the word "pollution" had been coined before they died. I'm pretty sure the term "ecology" dates from the mid-20th-century, after all my grandparents had died.
So yes: my grandparents left me with a problem; but it's not their fault, because they didn't know. We do know, and my grandchildren would be right to curse me if I left a similar problem for them to solve, knowing what I was doing all along.
Trojan?
> The ISFSI storage pad is surrounded by a secured area, which is monitored and protected round the clock.
Same word games as the other one.
The reactor itself is temporarily buried awaiting movement to Yucca Mountain, which has no planned date.
Is this really a problem, though?
200 years is sorta manageable, I suppose, if you have the resources and longevity of a nation state. You can bury it under a mountain, and set a battalion of armed orcs to guard it. But nation states can change their minds; whether the cost of hiring those orcs is money well-spent is a political decision, and the politicians responsible may not have "the long view" in mind.
I think nuclear power can be done safely; but I don't think that's possible as long as the task is overseen by profit-making corporations or short-termist governments. And I don't see who else can do it.
As is, it seems that for you, dangerous waste is a deal breaker for something you are ideologically opposed to, but perfectly fine in other areas.
Meanwhile plans to get some foreign company to build giant new nukes here are pressing ahead. So yeah, my focus is on the imminent threat that I can do something about, not on old mistakes that were made before I was born, that I can't do much about.
> something you are ideologically opposed to
You're the second person that has accused me of being "ideological". Is that the same as "having opinions"? That word is generally used dismissively. It should mean that I subscribe to some ideology. What ideology is it that you believe I subscribe to? How could you know whether my views on nuclear are inspired by some ideology that I've bought into wholesale, or whether they are the result of thinking things through for myself?
Feel free to ask me about my opinions, but kindly refrain from telling me what they are.
It's the reactionaries that are in the way. Why blame the only people who have been concerned about climate change? Because it's easier to attack them; because people are scared of taking on the reactionaries.
> a witch-hunt orchestrated by the greens
This is just jumping on the bandwagon of demonizing the target du jour. Can you back this up? What do you mean by witch-hunt? Who in particular was attacked? By who?
I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" [1] by a Cambridge professor, it goes into great detail about the problems of matching electricity demand to supply day- & year-round.
This book has come up on Hacker News before, and I've read it, and it has a crucial flaw, well, two actually:
- It underestimates the efficiency of solar panels by quite a bit, supposing that 10% would be a lofty goal (and arguing on this basis that solar farms are not economically viable). In fact, panels on the market are approaching 20% [1], and 25% seems well within reach.
- It uses the United Kingdom, one of the dimmest countries in the world [2] and one of the most densely populated, as an index for the viability of solar power in any country. In fact, the UK is probably the worst-case geography+population for solar power, and almost every other country would have a better time of it. In this context, it is worth considering that nuclear power may be particularly appropriate for Europe specifically, since it is peaceful, densely populated, mostly north of the 45th parallel, and cloudy, but solar is probably more practical elsewhere.
The real problem with cost estimates for solar and wind power is that they do not necessarily adjust well for the rate of construction. They may be reasonably accurate assuming a constant rate of construction, but a truly worthwhile implementation of solar and wind power would require a much higher rate of construction than is currently being implemented. I rarely see much of the methodology of these studies, but what I have seen basically involves taking the current price of solar and battery installations, applying a few fudge factors, and scaling up linearly. That may not be realistic.
Meanwhile, the cost estimates for nuclear power are based on data from the construction of large facilities, and therefore necessarily incorporate a much more realistic high rate of investment. Nuclear plants are big.
1: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/photovo...
2: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/World_DN...
Where it feels a little parochial, is its focus on the UK as if the GDP or population of the UK matters in the context of a global issue like sustainable energy.
It simply doesn't and he has enough facts and figures available even at that time to put that together, but probably fell into the classic british position of assuming they are more important than they really are in a global context.
Anyone outside the UK must read it in the same way people in the UK would read a small island dweller writing "Yes this might work for most of the UK but the Isle of Man would need to import power, which is simply unthinkable, even though it already does, so maybe we should build nuclear there instead to maintain the islands sovereignty".
Or maybe we can discount the needs of half a percent of the population if they run counter to the needs of the other 99.5% and focus on the big picture?
In the end we didn't need to as the wind power, heat pumps, EVs and carbon fees required for the UK overlapped heavily with other nations but this was a clear blindspot which I think you are charitably interpreting as a silly mistake when really it's more akin to arrogance.
Once you update it with current figures I'm assuming it can only make a stronger case. So are you just using the old figures and pretending those haven't changed?
That's like trying to model the next iPhones specs from first principles with specs from the last century.
Well it won't have a very big HDD because all that spinning rust will really drain the AA batteries.
edit to add, but his basic strategy is sound:
> The principal problem is that carbon pollution is not priced correctly. And there is no confidence that it’s going to be priced correctly in the future. When I say “correctly,” I mean that the price of emitting carbon dioxide should be big enough such that every running coal power station has carbon capture technology fitted to it.
> Solving climate change is a complex topic, but in a single crude brush- stroke, here is the solution: the price of carbon dioxide must be such that people stop burning coal without capture
The UK basically did this. Note that it was found by the market that replacing the coal plants entirely was cheaper than adding carbon capture to them.
edit 2:
> The most promising of these options, in terms of scale, is switching on and off the power demand of electric-vehicle charging. 30 million cars, with 40 kWh of associated batteries each (some of which might be ex- changeable batteries sitting in filling stations) adds up to 1200 GWh. If freight delivery were electrified too then the total storage capacity would be bigger still.
> There is thus a beautiful match between wind power and electric vehicles. If we ramp up electric vehicles at the same time as ramping up wind power, roughly 3000 new vehicles for every 3 MW wind turbine, and if we ensure that the charging systems for the vehicles are smart, this synergy would go a long way to solving the problem of wind fluctuations.
The UK also did this.
I'm baffled at the books continued popularly with renewable "debunkers". The book clearly described the problems and solutions. The main skepticism was aimed at politicians being able to overcome the political power of fossil fuel lobbiest and do something sensible.
The only explanation is a willful disregard for the new knowledge we've acquired in the intervening time period, much of which the author guesses correctly but we now know for a fact.
There's an E (for economics) plan outlined as a proposed solution, that assumes we'll deploy a lot of the cheapest energy source, whatever that is. It then also assumes (!) that onshore wind will cost the same as Nuclear and offshore wind will cost more. Put those two assunptions together and you get a plan with lots of nuclear.
Note, he's not actually predicting this outcome, though it does seem to be his personal preference at the time. He mentions that cheaper solar-to-fuel might be an alternative, as what really mattered was which was cheapest, which he assumed, incorrectly, would be nuclear.
Actual reality looks a lot closer to his G plan, for 'greenpeace' named sarcastically because they just love wind power, because as it turned out wind was cheaper than basically everything else (until solar caught up in most of the world). Maybe Greenpeace got lucky, maybe they were just better informed.
So if he was to rewrite that same plan with today's figures, the Economist and Green party plans would probably agree. Amusingly ironic and a testament to his methods even if his clearly stated assumptions no longer hold true.
https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB
Also, UK has one of the best in the world conditions for wind power. Wind sucks in Poland or Czech Republic.
Batteries would be another candidate but again the required amount of energy and the power slew rate are enormous, so storage facilities would be extremely costly and would compete with electric car battery production. I don't have much faith in the idea of storing energy in electric vehicle batteries as most of these cars will be on the road when the energy is needed (7-9 am) and will be mostly plugged in to charge when renewable production is low (during the night). Also I'm not sure if the electricity grid would even allow such a conversion as it's not designed for many small producers arranged in a mesh.
And then lays out multiple solutions, including 20Kwh of EV battery storage for every person which must have been basically science fiction at the time of writing but now sounds entirely boring and inevitable for reasons entirely separate from power storage.
Yeah I'd say that holds up pretty well, but I'm still not seeing the problem it apparently poses for today's world of cheap renewables?
We need and want to produce lots of green hydrogen for non-burning purposes. That fits perfectly into the demand response idea he lays out in reasonable detail. So why do you seem to think pumped hydro storage was the only solution he mentioned?
Even with his dated view on PV prices, he raises the possibility of importing hydrogen:
> "Solar photovoltaics were technically feasible for Europe, but I judged them too expensive. I hope I’m wrong, obviously. It will be wonderful if the cost of photovoltaic power drops in the same way that the cost of computer power has dropped over the last forty years."
What a great quote to look back on from a future where his hopes came true.
If one also follow energy politics this has also been very clear by the politicians themselves. The green political movement has been advocating the concept of "reserve energy" over nuclear "base load". The strategy is to build out as much wind and solar as possible, while keeping natural gas and oil plant on subsidized plans. When the weather is bad for energy production, those natural gas and oil plant starts up and supply the missing supply.
For oil and gas operators this is a pretty great deal. They get paid twice, once by the government and then a second time by the market. They also only need to spend fuel when the market price is at its highest, reducing fuel costs and improving profits. It is pretty much a win-win situation for the government and power plants operators.
If that sounds idiotic to you, that's because the change in the EEG was created to make exactly this impossible.
> Weird, it’s almost like these ideological people were listening to the experts.
Go away, bully.
Weird, it's almost like these ideological people were listening to experts, but you didn't like what the experts were saying, and so you labelled 'following expert advice' as 'ideological' to help you continue to ignore expert opinion.