Central New York Nuclear Plants Struggle To Avoid Financial Meltdown 270
mdsolar writes "As recently as four years ago, nuclear power companies were planning to spend billions of dollars to build a new reactor in Oswego County, alongside three existing nuclear plants. Then the bottom fell out. Natural gas-burning power plants that benefit from a glut of cheap gas produced by hydrofracking cut wholesale electricity prices in half. Now the outlook for nuclear power plants is so bleak that Wall Street analysts say one or more Upstate nuclear plants could go out of business if conditions don't change. Two Upstate nukes in particular — the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in Oswego County and the R.E. Ginna Nuclear Power Plant in nearby Wayne County — are high on the watch list of plants that industry experts say are at risk of closing for economic reasons."
So... (Score:5, Funny)
Who's it going to be this time?
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who's it going to be this time?
Gas. You're already subsidizing gas in that the government is providing a free license to trash the place with fracking and will eventually (i.e. you eventually) have to pay for the cleanup. They get to keep the profit.
The invisible hand: grabbing you by the balls since 1764.
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government is providing a free license to trash the place with fracking
Smith's 'invisible hand' has no relation to government shielding favored businesses from the costs of their process. If you are going to blame some for grabbing you by the balls, please take a look down and see whose hand it is.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
mith's 'invisible hand' has no relation to government shielding favored businesses from the costs of their process.
Depends on how you define "cost". It doesn't cost you anything to dump whatever crap you want into the air and water unless government regulation imposes a cost on you. Your results may cause others to incur costs. The thing is the invisible hand of the free market doesn't actually work well in this situation because it's a situation where people can save money by making others incur costs indirectly.
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"said, but I think you are wrong to assume there is no other way those things could impose costs on a polluter."
I'm sorry but in the real world you have limited ability to enforce behavior. The US is one of the most corrupt nations on earth, if you look hard enough you'll notice all companies engaging in criminal behavior, or making their criminal behavior legal through putting themselves in government. Reducing government won't change the fact that people with money tend to get what they want (human nat
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So large financial interests control the government to make their criminal actions legal, but we still need the government?
Yes and no. Yes we need a government (as shown by millennia of history), but we don't necessarily need this government. This statement is not a contradiction, no matter what you think.
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The "invisible hand" includes all of the factors which influence decisions. This includes both private profit motives as well as government regulations.
So in the case of fracking, the fact that the government has created a favorable legal environment (loose regulations, shielding from liability, tax incentives, etc.) all factor into the decision by the private sector to invest in this profitable activity. The fact that the government is doing a poor job of regulation (exemption from clean water laws, for ex
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because fracking fluid and methane in your drinking water is so much healthier?
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Or in your food.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/07/12-6 [commondreams.org]
Yay for gas power! (Score:2, Funny)
cheap gas produced by hydrofracking cut wholesale electricity prices in half
If this trend holds up, soon we'll have energy too cheap to meter!
Re:Yay for gas power! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yay for gas power! (Score:4, Insightful)
And you probably won't...the utility companies will come up with some justification for not passing the savings along to consumers.
Wholesale rates have bottomed out? (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I alone in wondering why the cost to the consumer remains the same?
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What the market (the top 20% anyway)* will bear...
*They're the bastards who set prices for the rest of us
Regulated monopolies (Score:5, Informative)
Am I alone in wondering why the cost to the consumer remains the same?
Power utilities are regulated and the prices they charge to consumers are typically regulated as well. Since in most areas they are a monopoly you should expect them to charge the highest amount permitted by the local regulating body and not a penny less. Not like you can go anywhere else. Where I live I have precisely one option for electricity and one option for natural gas. The power company knows this and behaves accordingly. Even in areas where there is more than one option they basically are an oligopoly which isn't much different from a pricing standpoint. They all know there is little incentive to compete.
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The location I live in has "choice" for natural gas and electricity - want to guess on how much we consumers are saving because we have that "choice"?
On the other hand we do reap the benefits have having far less reliable electric service that takes far longer to recover from an outage
I love those feel-good bullshit stories about line crews from other areas going into a storm hit location to help repair the outages....the electric companies have to do this because they have laid-off so many line crews that
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You are. The rest of us already know we're getting screwed.
"Nuclear" and "Meltdown" in the same sentence (Score:2)
Scary (Score:5, Insightful)
So what happens when a nuclear plant runs into financial difficulty? You cut your reactor monitoring staff? Drop to the cheap disaster management plan? Postpone the upgrade of the creaky boilers?
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So what happens when a nuclear plant runs into financial difficulty? You cut your reactor monitoring staff? Drop to the cheap disaster management plan? Postpone the upgrade of the creaky boilers?
when they run into financial difficulty? or when they want to increase their profits?
Decommissioning (Score:2)
So what happens when a nuclear plant runs into financial difficulty?
It gets decommissioned. Still expensive but less expensive than operating at a significant loss over time. Nuke plants aren't like gas or coal plants where they can be mothballed and then restarted later easily. (I'm sure it's technically possible but apparently very problematic)
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Mothballing a nuclear plant shouldn't be an issue at all, many plants have stayed offline for a year or more due to regulatory problems, if they can be kept offline for one year I can't see why they can't be kept offline for 5 and be brought online in the same manner. It's not like the startup procedure cares how long its been since the last criticality event.
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Because radiation causes things to get brittle and break down quicker.
Fixed costs with no profit (Score:2)
Mothballing a nuclear plant shouldn't be an issue at all, many plants have stayed offline for a year or more due to regulatory problems, if they can be kept offline for one year I can't see why they can't be kept offline for 5
There are a lot of costs with keeping them offline. Personnel, servicing, inspections, security, and lots of other high fixed costs that don't go away just because the plant is not producing electricity. For a relatively short time it might make sense to bear these costs but for periods of more than 1-2 years the economics start to look really bad. Nuke plants have huge operating expenses and they generate not a dime of profit unless they are producing electricity. Would you shut down your business for
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Two worlds collide (Score:5, Informative)
Two worlds collide :
In order to plan an energy strategy, you need to look 20-30 years ahead.
In order to avoid financial meltdown, you need to make Wall Street happy before next quarter.
Natural Gas Price Volatility (Score:5, Insightful)
The long run problem here is that natural gas prices are highly volatile. Prices are super cheap right now because of a big increase in supply while demand doesn't change much and storage costs are big. Prices may stay low for a few years, but nobody knows what will happen later. If we ramp up electricity production through natural gas though, that will increase demand driving up prices again. When natural gas prices go back up, that could be rough on consumers.
Here's a graph highlighting gas prices over the past 40 years [ourfiniteworld.com].
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Fracking seems to promise a continued glut of domestic Natural gas supply into the next few decades. Fracking has been the greatest single downward impact on Natural Gas prices domestically over the last decade. Consumption of NG is going up rapidly for electric generation, but domestic production has out stripped consumption, which has drastically lowered NG prices.
Developing natural gas production takes years. Drilling wells, building pipelines, constructing processing plants all take multiple years to
The key point in this story: (Score:2)
"Natural gas-burning power plants that benefit from a glut of cheap gas produced by hydrofracking cut wholesale electricity prices in half." ... while retail electricity rates continued to rise...
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Retail electric rates where I live have been steadily falling over the last decade. Of course, they've not fallen as much as NG prices, but I don't expect that.
So, I don't know where you live, but here in Texas I've seen the available electric rates continue to fall, and if you consider inflation, drop significantly over at least the last 5 years. It used to be that $0.20 kw/h was about the average rate, but now you can get $0.12 without trying hard and I've seen plans where they give you electricity fo
Now that my heart has started beating again (Score:2)
I would thank you to never use the terms "nuclear plants" and "meltdown" in the same sentence unless you're talking about a LITERAL MELTDOWN.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: its not fracking or the market, its superfund. (Score:2, Insightful)
There is an old joke: The problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.
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"A democracy fails once plebes figure out they can vote themselves bread and circises" has been sround for 2000 years.
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you forget the hidden costs of coal and oil (in dollars and human life) is astronomical in comparison to nuclear.
Re:its not fracking or the market, its superfund. (Score:4, Informative)
nuclear and other power plants should not be allowed construction without adequate consideration of cleanup cost. as it stands, superfund is a joke
Superfund has absofuckinglutely nothing to do with cleaning up nuclear plants.
I'm surprised there are so many people who modded up a fundamentally wrong post.
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/decommissioning.html [nrc.gov]
Decommissioning Funds
Each nuclear power plant licensee must report to the NRC every two years the status of its decommissioning funding for each reactor or share of a reactor that it owns. The report must estimate the minimum amount needed for decommissioning by using the formulas found in 10 CFR 50.75(c). Licensees may alternatively determine a site-specific funding estimate, provided that amount is greater than the generic decommissioning estimate. Although there are many factors that affect reactor decommissioning costs, generally they range from $300 million to $400 million. Approximately 70 percent of licensees are authorized to accumulate decommissioning funds over the operating life of their plants. These owners -- generally traditional, rate-regulated electric utilities or indirectly regulated generation companies -- are not required today to have all of the funds needed for decommissioning. The remaining licensees must provide financial assurance through other methods such as prepaid decommissioning funds and/or a surety method or guarantee. The staff performs an independent analysis of each of these reports to determine whether licensees are providing reasonable "decommissioning funding assurance" for radiological decommissioning of the reactor at the permanent termination of operation.
Before a nuclear power plant begins operations, the licensee must establish or obtain a financial mechanism -- such as a trust fund or a guarantee from its parent company -- to ensure that there will be sufficient money to pay for the ultimate decommissioning of the facility.
So, you're saying... (Score:4, Insightful)
Headlines (Score:3)
If every nuclear story needs 'meltdown' in the title, I propose every natural gas story gets 'explode'. This will help remind us of the thousands of people blown up in oil and gas accidents.
Natural gas, the explosive financial opportunity.
this might be good (Score:3)
I think that this could be good for energy industry because it could open the door to other means for producing energy. Nuclear reactor operators have opposed technologies that improve our energy grid because of the costs associated with running nuclear reactors. But they may have lost the battle anyways.
I think our energy policy that demands big massive producers are they only source of energy is wrong. And its strategically dangerous as well.
For the record, I'm not opposed to nuclear energy. I just don't believe an energy policy solely relying on big business is in the consumers nor countries best interest.
"cut wholesale electricity prices in half" ???? (Score:2)
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Two words: lead time.
Re:Economic Reasons (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Economic Reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that what the Free Markets are about? The most economically efficient survive and the least economically efficient do not?
Slap quite clean but unpopular energy with MASSIVE regulations, force them to clean up every single bit of pollution, etc. On the other hand, let the dirty variant pollute all they want, literally dumping everything into the air. Because, you see, campaign donations are not bribes but wisely taking part in the political process, right?
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quite clean(*)
* Clean in terms of other emissions/waste, but not so clean when it comes to the waste it actually produces.
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To be fair, a lot of the radioactive waste that a nuclear power plant kicks out is not fuel. Most of it is low level stuff, but some of the items like exposed steel will be radioactive for quite some time.
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Thank you, Jimmy Carter.
Which Reagan repealed in 1981. Makes you wonder why the commercial industry hasn't gone back to making weapons grade plutonium again...
Re:Economic Reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
The US nuclear industry committed suicide anyway by lobbying against development of smaller reactors and thorium. At this point nobody is going to put up the capital for the huge 1970s dinosaurs that are their preferred option.
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"Yep. Thorium LFTR is the nuclear reactor of the future. Small, affordable, and by design will never have a runaway meltdown."
Reminder: Thorium reactors cannot be built for at least another 40 years at the most optimistic. (India's about halfway there since starting work in the 1950's.)
"According to replies given in Q&A in the Indian Parliament on two separate occasions, 19 August 2010 and 21 March 2012, large scale thorium deployment is only to be expected “3 – 4 decades after the commercia
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LFTR is the nuclear reactor of the future.
Maybe. There have been may clever reactor designs, such as pebble bed and energy amplifier, that sounded great but didn't work out that well. Don't misunderstand me, of the proposed newer reactor designs LFTR sounds like one of the best. I'm also aware that an LFR (not thorium, but very similar) was built in the 60's and worked well. It was killed by Nixon. Damn shame we've lost 40 years when we could have tried to develop it. I'm all for full-bore research on LFTR and other promising reactor designs, but y
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force them to clean up every single bit of pollution, etc
To this date, the nuclear industry have not actually "cleaned up" a single gram of any of the spent nuclear fuel ever produced.
They've just neatly stacked it, waiting for someone else to deal with it.
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The coal burning power plants have not even done that.
What exactly do you suggest they do?
Re:Economic Reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly do you suggest they do?
Stop billing themselves as "clean" until they figure out what to do with their hoarded mess.
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Assumed Economic Reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
Corporations are pictures of inefficiency. Ask any employee of one.
You see financial success and assume (for no reason) that that success must be due to a superior product or value.
In America, gaming the system and cheating is now considered S.O.P. for a business....that's **NOT** 'just the free market working'....it's immoral and criminal and we let them get away with it b/c of people like you who look only at the superficial appearance and just assume from there.
Stop labeling all financial gain as 'just the free market' and start looking at what is really happening.
The 'free market' is a concept independent of any ONE economic theory...it's a fundamental aspect of human behavior in **all contexts**...even in Soviet Russia they had a booming black market.
Re:Assumed Economic Reasons (Score:4, Funny)
Viewed superficially, muggers might appear to be extremely efficient.
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They were very efficient in Kentucky Fried Movie.
false equivalence (Score:2)
Viewed superficially, you might appear to have made a contribution to the discussion.
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That makes one of us :-p
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Unfortunately we'll have released another few bazillion tons of CO2 by then.
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Unfortunately we'll have released another few bazillion tons of CO2 by then.
And the problem is? Oh all that global warming theory stuff eh? That theory that has a serious "problem" because it's predictions of huge increases in temperature have been materially incorrect over the last 15 years.
How about we just go back to the 1800's? Everybody turn off their electricity, start driving horses and all that? We can turn back the clock on 2 centuries of public health improvements, do without refrigeration and cell phones right? Right... After all, environmentalists where protesting nuc
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When has global warming predicted huge temperature increases? That's like saying evolution has predicted that a species will evolve into a new species every generation.
Global warming says an average of one or two degrees change over the course of decades. On the short term scale, not much a difference... local weather patterns are still dominant and can cause a harsh winter one year and no snow the following year. Like evolution, global warming is a very slow change over a fairly large (by human standards)
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Or we could go nuclear and supplement with renewable energy where practical. There's no need to ignore a power source that doesn't release CO2 and can run our civilization for centuries.
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New designs come from improvements on old designs and from the experiences of the engineers and workers who work on them. If the reactors are shut down and the best of the workers find gainful employment in another industry, we will not have a good starting point for the improvement process. There will be a few old coots who hung around and a bunch of new kids with book smarts and no practical experience.
Hardly a recipe for success.
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So then for a decade or so prices will simply be very high? That is how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant.
Gas is artificially cheap, from the driller who does not have to abide by the clean water act to the power plant burning it that does not have to deal with their pollution. Nuclear could be cheap too if you let them dump their used fuel into the air.
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And, as it happens, one of the things that utilities like about combined cycle gas turbine units is that (by power plant standards) you can knock 'em together extremely quickly and cheaply, and once constructed, you can ramp them up and down very quickly indeed.
It's kind of nuts that natural gas is cheap enough that these things would be competing with base-load units; but natural gas plants have been the peaking-load choice fo
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It's not a linguistic fault, it's the difference between milk and cheese. Both are dairy, but I don't tend to pour milk on my pizza nor do I dunk my Oreos in a glass of cheese. Gasoline and natural gas aren't transported in the same manner, used in the same applications or even measured in the same units.
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Gas companies can still raise prices as high as they want.
No they can't. Free markets make it impossible for companies to just adjust prices at a whim. As long as you preserve the free market and healthy competition you will generally keep prices as low as possible because no one entity has the final say about what price will be charged.
Now if you are claiming that the government will somehow step in and raise prices... That's possible... But that's not the fault of the evil rich gas production companies..
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What we need is competition.
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You're right about Obama not having any direct influence... but you'd be incorrect in saying that gas prices are 100% controlled by the gas companies. Get gas in Binghamton, NY and then jump the border to Pennsylvania for gas, just a few miles away, and you'll find the price is roughly $0.20/gal cheaper. The difference has almost nothing to do with gas companies and everything to do with state taxes. A lot of times, if gas prices make a sudden jump up or down, it's because of a change in the state tax rathe
Re:That popping sound (Score:5, Insightful)
Not at all. Of course you can produce energy cheaper by burning fossil fuels than with nuclear, because fossil fuel plants are allowed to externalize most of the costs of energy production, such as pollution. Once these externalities - such as turning every coastal city into a New Orleans - is taken into account, nuclear power is cheapest and safest.
Re:That popping sound (Score:5, Insightful)
Until, of course, you have a situation like Fukushima.
Decentralized renewables are cheapest and safest, when all risks and external costs are factored in.
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Until, of course, you have a situation like Fukushima.
Decentralized renewables are cheapest and safest, when all risks and external costs are factored in.
You are entitled to your opinions but not your own facts. Do you know how I know you're making up facts completely? Because the fact you've made up is not true.
It's very easy to check: google "deaths per kWh".
Nuclear comes up as the safest even when including Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even safer than decentralized renewables.
The thing with decentralised ren
Re:That popping sound (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering we don't yet know all the costs of clean up and impact for Chernobyl OR Fukushima, I'm not sure how you can state that nuclear is the cheapest.
Like how long until Japan can fish in the seas to the east of them?
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I'm not sure how you can state that nuclear is the cheapest.
I stated it was the safest. My reply didn't include anything about cleanest. That is far more hard to determine.
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So eating irradiated seafood, for possibly decades, is counted in that 'safest' statistic?
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So eating irradiated seafood, for possibly decades, is counted in that 'safest' statistic?
If you actually looked at the deaths per kWh figures you would see that they include deaths due to externalities like pollution from the various power sources if applicable.
The thing is nuclear is exceptioinally safe. Nuclear provides 12% of the entire electricity needs of the earth and there have been a handful of incidents. Of those a particularly notabli incident is Three Mile Island which despite being a severe acc
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Again, since you seem to miss the point, you can't actually calculate that when there's an entire generation that could be eating irradiated seafood. In the future.
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And again, you miss the point that that has been calculated for already. The field you're studiously ignoring is called Statistical Analysis. The only part that is difficult to calculate is how much the cleanup will ultimately cost. The deaths from radiation (whether from exposure in the greater environment or directly at the accident site), the projected damage to the local environment, etc., can all be determined with degrees of accuracy similar to those in the renewable energy field. People have spen
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Decentralized renewables are cheapest and safest, when all risks and external costs are factored in.
Huh? Problem with renewables is that they are hugely expensive to field on industrial scale. Not to mention that their environmental impacts are usually way under estimated. Somebody declares some system "Green" and presto, it's somehow devoid of environmental impact? Nothing is further from the truth. Not to mention that renewables are usually not reliable. We don't know when the sun will shine or how fast the wind will blow, at least not with enough certainty to know how much power we can count on gett
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The hybrid car is not such a thing. If that were the case than the cost of the car would be much higher.
You can get a hybrid for $15k-$20k, which is the same as many other cars. You want to talk about wasteful look at cars that cost that much or more and don't save gas.
Reinventing Fire (Score:2)
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Suffice it to say, I don't agree with his analysis. Renewable are NOT cheaper, even when looking at the long term.
What most of these snake oil sales men fail to account for is the recurring cost of maintenance and replacement of devices used to capture renewable energy. Solar panels have limited lifetimes measured in sub-decade number of years and operate at ever decreasing efficiencies. Eventually, they have to be replaced. How many folks understand the manufacturing process of taking silicon and mak
Re:That popping sound (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup. I live in upstate New York.
I'd rather have a nuke plant a mile away than gas drilling operations commencing anywhere upstream on the Susquehanna, even if I pay more, because with gas I know I'll be paying longterm for the contamination. Nuclear's track record per unit of energy produced is stellar compared to the track record of constant failure and environmental contamination the gas drillers have established so far.
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I used to live a half hour from the Oswego county plant and now I live a half hour from the Wayne county plant. I've heard people bitch and moan about fracking, wind farms and even hydro in the area but never once have I heard a complaint about nuclear like you hear elsewhere.
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Nuclear power has had a magnificent run of externalizing most of its costs (federal liability insurance, all of their basic research costs, uranium mining and refining costs and financial subsidies for construction).
In spite of all of these subsidies and benefits, it still is not "economic". The nuclear power has a negative learning curve when the cost of plants has been rising for years... unlike most industries such as solar and wind where the costs have been dropping dramatically.
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Except that Nuclear power would not exist at all but for its ability to externalize costs. Nobody will fund those things without a tax payer back loan guarantee. Because no investor wants to run the risk of getting wiped out if something goes wrong and the plant has to be shutter prematurely. Which could happen if cracks develop in the reactor casing etc. Then there is the possibility of a disaster that could easily get as big as the BP oil blowout in scale, during the plants life time, and even well af
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It's someone who disagrees with the parent poster, and therefore needs to be called names.
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What, exactly, is a nuke fanboi?
Oppenheimer
Re:That popping sound (Score:5, Funny)
You misspelled "Teller".
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Apparently not true. Natural gas prices have fallen to the point where it is lowering the cost of electric generation significantly. We are building natural gas plants and shuttering our existing coal, and apparently nuclear plants to take advantage of the drop in natural gas prices. The current view is that fracking will significantly impact gas prices going forward so we are building capacity to use the cheaper fuel. This is a cost effective move that make financial sense to electric producers who cle
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"barring any significant governmental regulation changes" is a cute way to say "They don't have to pay for their waste disposal".
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What waste? Burning Natural gas produces no ash or radioactive wastes so where are you going with this? (Here it comes.... Global Warming.. Right?)
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As compared to the subsidies the gas drillers get by being exempt from the clean water act?
Being allowed to externalize costs is a heck of a subsidy.
kwh (Score:2)