>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.
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!