Japan Fukushima Nuclear Plant 'Clean-Up Costs Double,' Approaching $200 Billion (bbc.com) 302
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Japan's government estimates the cost of cleaning up radioactive contamination and compensating victims of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has more than doubled, reports say. The latest estimate from the trade ministry put the expected cost at some 20 trillion yen ($180 billion). The original estimate was for $50 billion, which was increased to $100 billion three years later. The majority of the money will go towards compensation, with decontamination taking the next biggest slice. Storing the contaminated soil and decommissioning are the two next greatest costs. The compensation pot has been increased by about 50% and decontamination estimates have been almost doubled. The BBC's Japan correspondent, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, says it is still unclear who is going to pay for the clean up. Japan's government has long promised that Tokyo Electric Power, the company that owns the plant, will eventually pay the money back. But on Monday it admitted that electricity consumers would be forced to pay a portion of the clean up costs through higher electricity bills. Critics say this is effectively a tax on the public to pay the debt of a private electricity utility.
Surprise, Surprise, Surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
An off the cuff estimate of a complicated event with virtually no precedents. Made by an entity responsible for the disaster.
I think everyone who thought about it for more than a couple of minutes was figuring to multiply the 'estimate' by a factor between 2 and 10.
Re:Surprise, Surprise, Surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because when I think of "things that are cheap to engineer and produce", I think of "a generation of rad hardened nuclear power plant disassembly robots"
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Hardly cheap, but less costly than the above-cited costs of letting melted cores sit there and fester.
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Hardly cheap, but less costly than the above-cited costs of letting melted cores sit there and fester.
They don't actually have any robots that can go dick with a core, especially after a meltdown which is what happened. We don't have any way to do that. Maybe you could do it with puppet technology, and drive the puppets with massive bowden cables. But you can't do it with a robot, at least not yet. Remember how they could only kind of get a robot semi-near the core at Chernobyl? A crappy little camera robot? Sure, robots have come a ways since, but not that far.
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The result of the on-going lawsuits are hard to predict as well. The initial estimate was based on people accepting TEPCO's compensation offer, but it was rejected (it really was a sick joke) and is now being thrashed out in court.
TEPCO had wanted to restore the affected towns and have people go back there, but many people don't even want to return because so many other people have moved away permanently there won't be viable communities. There is also the issue of property loss - TEPCO wanted to clean and
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How about diamond batteries? (Score:2)
Like the previous story?
Seize it! (Score:3)
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That's old-fashioned capitalism, and it's been dead for decades.
In today's late-stage capitalism, you can win if there are profits, and if the company goes bankrupt, you can win bigger.
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The government decided it was better to keep the company going because a) it delivers power to a lot of people and b) any profit it makes can go into the compensation fund.
Even so, the government will be on the hook for most of the cost, at least in the medium term. I doubt they will ever get the full cost back.
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Won't someone think of the Tepco investors? And their children?
I can think of some jobs for them.
This brings up an idea. A way to possibly remove the inherent corruption that makes it difficult to build safe and sensibly built nuc power plants. Require that the CEO's and CFO's, engineers and their families live on site, and not be allowed to leave during problems. IOW, they'd still be there right now.
I suspect that would take care of just about all safety problems.
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Their market cap is only 6 billion USD.
This is what would happen, if they have debts in excess of what they can ever pay, they'd go bankrupt, the investors would get nothing, and their assets would be sold to pay some of the debts. 6 billion is nothing compare to 200 billion though...
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Yes and that would leave the government and tax payers still with 100% of the bill. There's really nothing they could go after, whether it's blood or money, that could repay the cost. It just is what it is. And that's the way it works. If you force the company to shoulder the costs alone, it will have to pass those on to its customers. Either way, people pay for it. Taking a company's profits sounds good, but in reality it just costs everyone else.
Personally I think just eating the total cost and spre
That's not even all (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to see an honest calculation of how much nuclear power costs, because all the numbers I've seen never takes those into account.
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Well, if you simply divide the $200bn between every reactor in Japan, it works out as about $4.4bn/reactor.
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A solar panel never gave anyone radiation poisoning.
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No, yet more people die in the production, installation (this is the big one for solar), and maintenance of solar per kwh generated than they do for nuclear power.
Radiation is scary because you can't see it, but the dead don't care whether it was radiation or a fall or electrocution that caused it. Want to save lives? Push for nuclear.
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Do they go terribly wrong? Because nuclear power plants operate around the world 24/7/365 at 90%+ operating capacity without issue. How often are human lives lost due to nuclear power plant accidents?
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Do you believe this development and enforcement of safety does not come at a cost? If the solar power installers have to buy more safety harnesses and hire more safety inspectors then their costs will rise. Solar already costs 5x what nuclear does.
You are correct that the safety factor alone is not enough to move to nuclear power. It's the safety factor, cost, reliability, and abundance of nuclear power that is an argument to use more of it.
Just a side note, people will talk about how grid level storage
Re:That's not even all (Score:4, Insightful)
What about this tired, trite false dichotomy? The choice is not 1) nuclear 2) coal.
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For an island nation those are pretty much the two options they have.
Large nations like the USA, Canada, Russia, etc. have plenty of land mass to spread out variations in weather for things like wind and solar. Japan can't do that. They might be able to do something like rely on some tidal power, geothermal, and maybe wind and solar, but for the most part they are left with few options.
Japan must choose nuclear power, coal, or reverting to a preindustrial society. So, you are correct, they don't have to
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For an island nation those are pretty much the two options they have.
What? The average island nation pretty much always has either sun or wind, or both. You're talking nonsense.
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Japan isn't as small as you think. There is actually a huge variation between the climate in the south of the main island chain and in the north. They also have islands much further south out into the Pacific.
Japan actually has enough offshore wind energy to cover its electricity needs all year round, it's just not easy to find the money to develop it. They are also leading the world in utility scale battery technology so are well placed to integrate intermittent sources.
They have some issues, like the fact
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Yeah, those evil media and green types, who paid so much attention to a frigging tsunami overwhelming a nuclear power plant causing three meltdowns, the release of radioactive material and a series of hydrogen-air chemical explosions. Why would they do that? It was no biggie, obvs.
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Power density.
The largest solar PV station in the world is in China, covers almost 18 square miles and puts out 850MW.
We can build single reactors that output 1GW
The largest nuclear power plant in the world rings in at just under 8GW and covers about 1.7 square miles.
The largest operational power plant in the world rings in just north of 6GW and covers 3.5 square miles.
"Critics say!" (Score:5, Insightful)
The supposed "critics" are fucking idiots. Thins as big and as costly as a nuclear power plant is not built on the whim of a corporation. Rate payers, government at all levels from the first responders that are funded to serve it to the indifferent elected officials the public put in office and who appointed the deficient regulators; everyone was at the table and everyone got the benefits for forty years. Japan used the power of those nukes to build its prosperity from the 70's to 2011 and there is a whole generation of geriatric Japanese living off the pensions built by that engine of wealth. The public is just as obligated to pay for the consequences as Tepco or anyone else involved in Fukushima.
Re:"Critics say!" (Score:5, Insightful)
The public is just as obligated to pay for the consequences as Tepco or anyone else involved in Fukushima.
Then don't ask why the public isn't quite so interested in building more Fukushimas. Because when you add 200 billion as a oopsie payment, it makes nuc power not look so damn awesome.
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Perfectly put!
Fair, but they have to decide what instead (Score:2)
Because you don't get something for nothing. People can decide they are willing to use less power, decrease power usage enough and you can get away with less plants. However that does mean compromising modern lifestyle, as increases in efficiency only go so far (and many people have already done what they can to increase the efficiency of their use). They can use fossil fuel power instead, though that requires buying the fuel on a continual basis (Japan has no reserves to speak of) and dealing with the poll
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Thins[sic] as big and as costly as a nuclear power plant is not built on the whim of a corporation.
So you were also 100% for the bank bailouts, right?
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I agree with most of what you said, but I also vaguely recall reading some years ago that Japan basically doesn't have pensions - that getting 'retired' is not the sudden inflow of free time we know in the western world, but a degradation to working as a bagger in the local supermarket to survive.
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You are presenting a false dichotomy. It's not "have nuclear and get a nice pension, or don't have nuclear and no pension". If they had invested in other sources of energy it would likely have paid as much or more, and not resulted in this accident.
Japan tried to become a major player in the nuclear power building market, exporting its designs and expertise. It could have done the same with other sources of energy, which would now be in much greater demand than nuclear is. Hindsight and all that.
Government should get piece of the action. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Nuclear power stations can't get insurance, the liability is far too great. They typically have a small insurance fund covering smaller accidents, but if things go really bad the government is on the hook. The liability is virtually unlimited.
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Nuclear power stations can't get insurance, the liability is far too great
That should say enough. Risk = chance * impact * "repairability". Sure, the chance of a nuclear accident is low, but the impact is so huge that the risk is way too high.
They can't get private insurance (Score:2)
The potential costs are too high, private insurers aren't willing to underwrite it. Same kind of shit with flood insurance. In the case of nuclear it is really, really hard to price that shit as well. I mean problems with it happen very rarely, but when they do the potential costs can be huge and the costs can be difficult to estimate because you deal not with just actual costs, but with political/PR issues as well. Things like big exclusion areas are not the kind of thing that is necessarily mandatory as a
Two Million Man-Years? (Score:2)
I don't understand how the costs of this can approach that magnitude (using $100k / man-year as a generous number). The linked article was very sparse on numbers, so it's unclear how many people are being compensated, but even if you compensated ten thousand people 100 years worth of income each, that would only be half the cost, and I don't understand how any huge civil engineering project could cost 1 million man-years of effort. The Hoover Dam apparently only cost $700M in today's dollars - what is inv
Re:Two Million Man-Years? (Score:5, Informative)
Well since even TFS suggested that compensation was the lion's share of that amount, a quick Googling brings me to this article: which suggests, as of last year, that there was "still" 250,000 people displaced (the phrasing of which suggests that there was previously even more.)
So that's quite a bit larger than the 10k people you were suggesting. $200B/250k people works out to $800k per person. Which is still quite a lot, but not nearly as insane as it sounds if you'd been assuming only 10,000 people.
And of course that's not counting people who hadn't been displaced but may be getting compensated for some reason or other anyway.
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I fail at slashdot markup. Article is http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/09/japan-tsunami-radiation-fourth-anniversary-fukushima/24254887/ [usatoday.com]
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800k per person isn't all that much if you consider that perhaps it includes temporary accomodations (since 2011). Five years in a hotel room is gonna get costly.
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To be sure. Which is why anyone with any sense whatever would build quonset hut towns to house the displaced. That's what they did for the interned Japanese-Americans in WW II. And many Manhattan Project workers.
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$800k per person isn't that much really.
Consider that most of them lost everything. Real-estate, most of their property, businesses, jobs etc. Often they became ill as a result (stress). The compensation is supposed to help them rebuilt some of that, and of course with such a large number of people suddenly all looking for new property and new jobs prices have rocketed.
And that's before you get to any compensation for suffering.
Hardly matters (Score:2)
Taxpayers and customers are footing the bill. They might grumble a bit, but they'll still pay.
To big to fail? (Score:3)
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Maybe, depends on location. Consider if San Onefore would have gone tits up when it was running. How much would it cost to buy out all those people in San Clemente? SoCal beach front property is not cheap. Good land in Japan is expensive because it is such a scarce resource.
Re:To big to fail? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, which is why they're supposed to be stupidly overdesigned and are given shutdown dates and whatnot.
Trouble is, we haven't been shutting them down. Strong political resentment makes it hard to build replacement plants (and those things produce a lot of power that has to be replaced in some manner.)
And if you get past that you get the beancounters looking at the multi-billion dollar price tags of a new reactor and they start wondering if the existing ones can't hold on just a few more years.
And when you get past that, you get the NIMBYs doing their best to make sure that the only place you can build the new plant is on the moon.. and someone would still likely complain about it.
Unfortunately the world has turned away from the idea of long-term investments in things like infrastructure. Anything that looks bad in the next quarterly report is highly questioned and anything the government gets involved in has to be able to show positive results by the next election season.
A project that won't show a profit for 10 or 20 years (or worse doesn't show a profit at all and is only being done because we don't want bloody nuclear explosions all over the place) is simply not given any political or economic weight these days.
Throw in the uphill battle I mention above and its hardly surprising that we keep trying to retrofit and upgrade existing ancient plants. Its nearly impossible to do anything else. But unfortunately there will be the odd occasion when "good enough" just isn't good enough anymore. And unfortunately when that occasion happens to hit a nuclear power plant, things get very ugly very fast.
Nuclear is still our cleanest, safest form of large-scale power. But only if its properly maintained, spent fuel properly reprocessed and properly disposed of when it can no longer be reprocessed, replacement schedules are followed and so forth. Unfortunately we've got an absolutely horrific track record on basically all of those points. Frankly its kind of amazing that we haven't had more disasters.
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I love how people who tout solar and wind as "clean" are actually a form of NIMBY because they don't mind all of the strip-mining at slave wages for all of the rare earth minerals that have to me mined and transported to build them. Let alone all of the pollution created during that process.
Anyone with the simplest understanding of nuclear vs chemical bonds should understand that there is no comparison. We might as well be still running 8086--except nuke is even larger comparison. 1st-world countries should
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1st-world countries should be capable of running nuclear power without serious problems if their governments actually demanded quality. (...) And Japan? Japan put a ton of reactors on a freaking crowded island, and then didn't bother to inspect them properly. (Any moron with a badge could have noticed their backup generators weren't on the required stilts above the waterline--which failed when flooded.) The story of Fukushima is a failure of government to regulate greedy corporations, not an inherent failure of technology.
So first we need to get rid of greed and incompetence, then nuclear will be safe? Let's be honest here, before Fukushima everyone was dismissing Chernobyl as being the Soviet Union playing fast and loose with nuclear safety that would never ever happen in a first world country like Japan. But it did anyway. And after the next accident I'm sure that in retrospect we'll find some reason why it shouldn't have happened too, we usually do. That it won't happen in a perfect world is not applicable to the real wor
So Re:To big to fail? (Score:2)
You're rather spectacularly missing the point. Everyone understands that nuclear bonds release orders of magnitude more energy than chemical bonds. I mean, duh. That's the whole point: it's a high-beta technology. When things go well, you get loads of controlled energy. When things fuck up, you get loads of uncontrolled energy... and humans aren't that marvellous at operating complex systems without ever fucking up for decades on end. So we try all types of risk mitigations, and plan for bad actors etc etc.
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I love how people who tout solar and wind as "clean" are actually a form of NIMBY because they don't mind all of the strip-mining at slave wages for all of the rare earth minerals that have to me mined and transported to build them. Let alone all of the pollution created during that process.
You mean like Uranium mining, which is literally never done responsibly and which has all the same inherent problems on top of nuclear mining tailings producing radioactive contamination of waterways? The fact is that nuclear plants continue to be a bad idea, while newer solar panels use less and less rare earths all the time, and wind power uses practically none.
And Japan? Japan put a ton of reactors on a freaking crowded island, and then didn't bother to inspect them properly. (Any moron with a badge could have noticed their backup generators weren't on the required stilts above the waterline--which failed when flooded.) The story of Fukushima is a failure of government to regulate greedy corporations, not an inherent failure of technology.
Yes, this is why nuclear power is a bad idea — because humans are involved. You have all the facts to piece together the truth, that nuclear
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Then you should look into the Nuclear Industry's mining practices. Radon from mine tailing polluting waterways. Acid leech mining that leaves behind megalitres of radioactive sulphuric acid. Really bad stuff.
Slaves ar
Comments are bullshit ... (Score:3)
... because they skip right over human fallibility.
Look at Katrina.
Books were written about how New Orleans was a bowl below sea level, years and years ago.
The Army Corps of Engineers, their brothers, nieces, and adoptive children knew the score.
Look at the Mississippi floods. We know it does that and yet people live there.
Look at earthquake-prone California.
In the final analysis, we find that shit happens.
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Look at earthquake-prone California.
We regularly have earthquakes of magnitudes that knock down whole cities in other places, with literally zero property damage, because we have building codes that take earthquakes into account.
Maybe the rest of the country (and the world!) should give this some consideration given that there is no place in the world which cannot have earthquakes, only places where they occur less frequently.
$200 billion (Score:2)
FFF they coulda built a fusion reactor like ITER or even DEMO for 1/8th the cost.
Needs to be put in context (Score:4, Interesting)
#1 generated 460 MWe from March 1971 to April 2012, or 41.1 years
#2 generated 784 MWe from July 1974 to April 2012, or 37.7 years
#3 generated 784 MWe from March 1976 to April 2012, or 36.1 years
#4 generated 784 MWe from October 1978 to April 2012, or 33.6 years
#5 generated 784 MWe from April 1978 to Jan 2014, or 35.7 years
#6 generated 1100 MWe from October 1979 to Jan 2014, or 34.2 years
Multiply the generating capacity by the time in service and you get 165.7 TWh for reactor #1, 259.1 TWh for #2, 248.1 TWh for #3, 230.9 TWh for #4, 245.3 TWh for #5, and 329.8 TWh for #6. For a total of 1478.9 TWh.
Nuclear's capacity factor in Japan [world-nuclear.org] (ratio of actual electricity generated vs peak capacity) started around 46% in the mid-1970s, and had reached 79% by 2001. Assume a linear increase followed by it remaining stable from 2001-2014, and overall capacity factor over this timeframe (which conveniently breaks down into 26 and 13 years) is (26*(.46+.79)/2 + 13*.79) / 39 = 0.68.
So actual electricity generated by the plant would be about 1478.9 TWh * 0.68 = 1005.7 TWh. Round it down and call it an even 1000 TWh.
The average price of electricity in Japan is 26 cents/kWh [ovoenergy.com]. Yes the price was lower in the past, but we want the inflation-adjusted total value of electricity generated, so using today's price is valid.
1000 TWh * $0.26/kWh = $260 billion worth of electricity produced over the lifetime of the plant. Even with the second-worst and most expensive nuclear accident in history, the Fukushima Daiichi plant still produced more value in electricity than the cleanup cost.
Now consider that the world generated 2731 TWh with nuclear in 2008 [wikipedia.org]. If you go with 20 cents/kWh as a global average electricity price, that's $546 billion worth of electricity generated by nuclear power each year. Add up the cost to clean up Fukushima ($200 billion), Chernobyl ($200 billion), and Three Mile Island ($1 billion). Amortized over the 37 years since the first of those accidents, the cost of cleaning up these nuclear accidents only works out to ($401 billion / 37 years) / (546 billion / 1 year) = 1.98% of the cost of electricity produced.
Basically, the cost of cleaning up nuclear accidents is just 0.4 cents/kWh.
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I admire your mathematics and reasoning, and I cry at the final monetisation of life-threatening danger being so many pennies a pound. :(
Beyond that, it's "all profit", eh?
Except for the dead, ill, dying, poisoned, forgotten.
And except the unspoken lost opportunities, sunken in nuclear denialism.
Cleaning up a nuclear accident isn't like cleaning out the toilet.
People don't usually die lingering painful deaths when you don't clean the toilet bowl properly.
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#1, 2, and 3 sure as hell didn't generate until April 2012 because they were all utterly destroyed in March 2011. The others I am not sure about. Also, you didn't make any account whatever of capacity factor. It certainly isn't 100.0% for ANY nuclear power plants.
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Congratulations for your explanation. The conclusion is that nuclear power is OK, as long as you don't live close to a nuclear plant. You have made the perfect case for "Not in my backyard".
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We need a name for this, maybe "nuke maths"?
Your calculation ignores two important factors. Firstly, the accident didn't just have monetary costs. It resulted in many people's lives being ruined. It is difficult to put a price on that, although the courts will try.
Secondly, amoritizing over all nuclear energy generated, or even all energy generated by that plant, doesn't reflect the fact that the cost is not born evenly by all purchasers of said energy.
Thirdly, it's a useless number. It only has meaning whe
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I'm very excited that you've demonstrated that Fukushima Daiichi produced more value in electricity than its cleanup cost (even if that uses some quite heroic assumptions, such as continuous operation at 100% of capacity, etc etc). But why would we only care about cleanup cost? There is also the costs of commissioning, and operating the plant to account for. Both of those will be really quite a big number as well. There are no precise numbers available for Fukushima in the public domain, but it would be pre
How large is 200B? (Score:3)
Just wondering how large is 200B, then I search http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp
The 2016 Japanese GDP is about 4000B.
Comparisons (Score:3)
Anyone able to run the numbers properly? From my v rough back of the envelope, it looks like $200bn would buy you about 0.7TW of solar capacity in today's money, assuming no economies of scale (!!) Fukushima was about 5TW, I think.
Just curious to know what magnitude of solar capacity could be created if governments put the scale of investment into it that goes into nuclear.
Re:Comparisons (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone able to run the numbers properly? From my v rough back of the envelope, it looks like $200bn would buy you about 0.7TW of solar capacity in today's money,
And this is just for the cleanup cost. The total lifetime cost will be vastly higher. And let's not forget that Tepco has literally lied about Fukushima at every turn. (I defy any reader to find any moment at which Tepco told the whole truth, even as they understood it.) The total cleanup cost will likely be much, much higher.
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You see, the thing is, nuclear *is* a great idea.
However, putting 40 year old designs next to the ocean on an island chain on the Ring of Fire tectonic plate zone with a hundreds-year old history of tsunamis along that coastline *isn't* a great idea.
Pebble bed designs, CANDU reactors, SMR (Small Modular Reactors) and reprocessors are available today. Soon, Molten Salt reactors and Thorium reactors will be available. To top that off, on the other side of nuclear, ITER is coming along nicely with the promise
Re:mdsolar (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: mdsolar (Score:4, Insightful)
You anti fusion luddites are unbelievable with your snideness and negativity. The budget for nuclear fusion was cut by 90% in the 1970s. Have some patience, maybe it's just delayed by 50 years or 100years. So what, it hasn't been shown to be impossible and they are credible paths to acheiving it. Thank goodness you weren't around 125 years ago to ridicule the aviation pioneers like the wright brothers for their failures.
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They were taking a big lumbering wooden and wire frame of crap and trying to make it sail through the air like a bird. Have you seen the spirit of 76? It's a heap of crap glued together.
What's important is when people like the Wright Brothers decide that in the face of adversity, they're going to change the world.
Re: mdsolar (Score:4, Interesting)
There were numerous teams around the world actively working toward powered flight at the time. As for the apparent quality of their design, you're applying modern standards of what a prototype should look and feel like to a vastly more adventurous era. It's one of the reasons we made massive strides during the first half of the 20th and now typically make far more incremental advances: we're terrified of failure, particularly if there's any risk to any human life. It's the reason a design like the YF-12 would never be allowed to fly these days. On paper, the design decisions made to allow it to fly as high and as fast as it does are laughably insane. But it flew, and its 1950s design set records we still haven't broken.
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As for the apparent quality of their design, you're applying modern standards of what a prototype should look and feel like to a vastly more adventurous era.
First rule of product design: Fail fast, fail often. Companies that understand this are the ones that bring the 'must-have' products to market. This is true in the modern era too.
It's one of the reasons we made massive strides during the first half of the 20th and now typically make far more incremental advances:
Hmm, maybe, maybe not. An early test / improve loop when creating a product allows for more rapid advancement, and while those advancements are, for that product, all incremental the finished product is more than an incremental step forwards from the point before it existed.
...we're terrified of failure, particularly if there's any risk to any human life.
This is, I'd say, a twofold issue, each of which feeds int
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>> The budget for nuclear fusion was cut by 90% in the 1970s.
Nope sir.
The budget for nuclear fusion has shifted to fission and just quadrupled in Japan to 200 Billion dollars. And it will double at least two times more, at least.
And also in Ukraine, the estimated long term cost is close to 1000 Billions.
Let's say 1500 Billion Dollars total over only two countries.
Now that's a useful budget.
Who's next ? USA, China, and France are statistically good candidates.
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Personally I think some of the senior management and directors of Tokyo Electric should be stripped of all assets to compensate a small part of their criminally willful acts of greed.
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Tokyo Electric management was criminal in technically trivial ways that were long known,some obvious to even a beginning engineering student.
None of which turned out to be relevant to the magnitude nine earthquake, the resulting tsunami, the Fukushima accident, or the excessive reaction to the accident.
The industry magazine Nuclear Safety discussed some of these deliberate flaws over 40 years ago in their articles.
So in other words, these "deliberate flaws" were not only irrelevant but ancient.
Personally I think some of the senior management and directors of Tokyo Electric should be stripped of all assets to compensate a small part of their criminally willful acts of greed.
For what crime? There should be a crime first, not merely a bullshit assertion that there was crime. Obviously, the magnitude nine quake and the 15 meter tsunami was not due to TEPCO criminal greed. That leaves stuff like seawall height, generator placement (all the g
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It is unless you have for-profit corporations building and running them.
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Any specific reasons why you think the bad would outweigh the good regarding profiteering assholes running those? It seems it would be easier to pass and enforce regulation on the reactors given that circumstance.
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French nuclear plants are primarily owned and run by the government.
Re:mdsolar (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Nuclear is a great idea, but one has to be smart about *where* it's built, not *whether* it's built.
there is a little problem, and you just nailed it. Where it is built. And smart. Sorry, but there are humans involved, and perhaps a nuc plant gets built in a certain place because the person who sold the land gave great head, or a fine ass contribution to one of his employees, also known as an elected politician. Added to the mix is the CEO of the project who demands the schedule is met, and the CFO who even thought they don'nt know a thing about niuclear power, knows exactly where to save money by cutting corners.
It's a mighty big damn genie in that bottle, and it wants out really bad. And while corporations are darn good at turning a profit, they aren't so good with genies. Samsung has problems with tiny little genies in their phones. So while they might be great at making sneakers or selling Pizza, corporate culture doesn't like engineers and scientists very much, and doesn't consider their input necessary on the "important matters"
Until that damn genie gets out of the bottle.
In hindsight of course, the Fukushima Power plant was simply going to fail. The walls were 100 percent certain to breach, the water was 100 percent going to settle where the emergency generators were. The design itself however, would still be working today if not for the terrible decisions made on siting and building the place.
Can a safe reliable nuclear based pwer generating plant be built? I'm pretty certain the answer is yes.
Will they be built? Having a pretty good grasp of human nature, my money is on only by accident.
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We already have safe, reliable nuclear power plants. We have them all over the world. The challenge with nuclear is no different from any other project that deals with hazardous processes (and this includes coal and oil power plants among many other things): reasonable standards for building, operation, and inspection free from bribery, corruption, and incompetence, which are rigorously enforced. In some places (mostly the western nations), this isn't that hard to do. The designs are already rock solid and
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"We already have safe, reliable nuclear power plants. We have them all over the world. "
Exactly, and we will have to store and guard their ashes from terrorists for 184000 years, which won't come cheap.
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"We already have safe, reliable nuclear power plants. We have them all over the world. "
Exactly, and we will have to store and guard their ashes from terrorists for 184000 years, which won't come cheap.
Which is why it's nice that there are newer reactor designs that produce less long-lived waste.
Plus, there are new techniques coming out that allow us to further use certain types of waste in ways not imagined earlier.
Google "nuclear diamonds".
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Running coal and oil power plants affects (at the very least) the local environment horrifically if nothing goes wrong. What do you think happens in the case of a major issue with nuclear power? You think the whole world gets consumed by a black hole or something? Nuclear power is proven safe, effective, efficient, and capable of handling base power loads. It's safer and more scalable than any other option. We already have nuclear power plants on a large scale and in great numbers, but you don't hear about
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Contaminating the whole Pacific Ocean? ....
Were you absent the day they taught physics in physics class?
And again, nuclear power is safer for human life. Accounting for Fukushima, accounting for Chernobyl (which by the way wasn't a power plant - it was a research facility conducting extremely dangerous experiments and a weaponized plutonium factory which also happened to have excess power to dump into the local grid, but that's alright, we'll include that one anyway because it still doesn't change the outco
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You must know you're arguing with the strawman, not the reality. Nuclear may have killed fewer people to date, but it has the capacity to kill more people than other forms of power generation in the event of a catastrophic failure. And the probability of a catastrophic failure leading to many deaths must be assessed over the lifetime of operation+decommissioning of a plant, which is decades or more. Maybe that risk can all be mitigated, but it's pointless to deny that the potential severity of a nuclear pla
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Any tall building has the capacity to kill thousands of people. But we don't generally think of tall buildings as dangerous or having "high severity". In the context of a tall building, it is only "dangerous" if it wasn't done right. Yet with nuclear, this sort of reasoning doesn't seem to apply? Like, it doesn't matter how "done right" it may be, we always focus on the "severity" and "capacity", as if "doing it right" had no impact on those? And one could ask, yeah well where's the evidence that they're "d
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Contaminating the whole Pacific Ocean? ....
Were you absent the day they taught physics in physics class?
We've known since the 1970s that dilution is not the pollution solution. Currents and bioconcentration see to that.
It's not hard to understand: if it's safer per kwh generated, then scaling out with other options presents a greater threat to human life and supporting other options is directly supporting the needless deaths of human beings.
Well then, the safest possible kind of power will turn out to be offshore wind installed by robot ships and inspected by drones. You can't have a wind spill and if you build them over the ocean they can't start a fire by falling on something. And drone inspection of windmills is already a thing (In fact, a friend of mine is now operating an inspection company using drones, he was doing it with
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Let me take a moment to call bullshit on you here. I deal with this problem all the time and I spent years adapting and trying to learn to speak human to overcome it where I can.
Consider the different career tracks that people follow. A competent engineer or scientist spends probab
Cost is the Achilles heel of nuclear power. (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's simply not. Tout all the vaporware you can buzzword - breeder reactors, thorium reactors, etc etc - it's still going to be more expensive than wind and solar. Build nukes as safe as you want, they're still going to be more of a risk, and still be more expensive to decomission.
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You mean like a wildfire at a massive solar farm. Sure, the fire may not kill anyone. But if the power that's being generated is being COUNTED on in the base load, you're going to run short, you're going to have situations where power-critical events are disrupted and people are going to die.
Also, you're still conveniently ignoring that nuclear power has still killed fewer people than ANY other form of power extant.
So, as soon as you can point out these "multitudes" you're citing, we can move forward.
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I'd like to see a citation for the death rates. A citation that includes the uranium minors who died of cancer (uranium mining was quite unsafe back in the 50's, mostly out of ignorance), along with the Navajo who died of cancer when retaining ponds let lose. The citations I've seen don't even seem to admit that there were construction accidents during the construction of all the reactors in the world while counting the construction accidents involved with wind and solar. Perhaps there honestly was never a
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Yeah, let's hear it for all those poor six year old kids working those uranium mines!
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All four need to be built correctly and safely yet corners get cut, damns fail and eventually a nuclear plant will fail worse then the ones being discussed.
I hate it when my damns fail.
Tell me something, of all this safety that you think needs to go into the energy sector who is it that is supposed to enforce it? Government you say? Every nuclear power accident happened at a power plant that was government inspected and licensed. Every oil spill was from a drill, ship, pipe, train, or refinery that was inspected and licensed by a government.
TEPCO quite likely fucked up major here but they did so under government supervision. The government allowed the reac
Nope (Score:3, Interesting)
Pebble bed designs >> Nope. Germany still struggles to find what to do with the decomissionned experimental reactor. it's the radioactives thing on earth, contminated with dust that has potential to kill anything breathing on earth if released.
CANDU reactors >> Nope. Bad design, does not scale. Also, no proper waste reprocessing.
SMR >> Yeah, let's put a bomb in each backyard, great idea. Seriously, this thing is more of a financing for small military reactors (for submarines)
Molten Salt re
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Thorium reactors will be available >> breeders with sodium ? Yeah, no danger sir. We can wipe a continent if a bigger fire brakes out. We cannot put out this fire with water, or else booom :)
OMG! You're right! Because it's not like, in case of a fire the fuel can be dumped into a dump tank away from the reaction catalyst. Because fires really love to huff and puff and go after a double-walled dump tank inside a double walled containment vessel buried in concrete!
EUREKA! How could we have been so foolish!
ZOUNDS!
Rather than simply spouting a bunch of gobbeldygook in an attempt to sound educated, do some real research.
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You obviously never saw how a spill looks in a chemical plant.
This kind of reactor is not a single vessel, it's a complete chemical plant, and the contaminated dangerous chemicals would flow around everywhere.
It already happened at Monju, only the leak was a limited quantity.
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Nuclear power is great in theory, not so great when actual humans start implementing it.
A bit like communism, capitalism or any other pie-in-the-sky utopianism. That's basically what nuclear power is. A theoretical ideal not suitable for the real world.
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Well, as others will point out, nuclear actually still has one of the best safety records when you average it out over things and so on, and that is true - but it ia lilttle bit like saying, although your room is sometimes at 50 degrees centigrade and sometimes at 0 degrees, it is still comfortable, because the average turns out to be 20. I am not against nuclear, but I would much prefer something that allows us to clean up more easily when things go wrong. It may well be possible to think that into the des
Re:Critics not "exactly right" (Score:4, Interesting)
Damn it, point being consumers would have had to pay more for the electricity either way...
Yeah. Of course if they had an off grid solar installation, they wouldn't have to worry so much about post-kaboom subsidization.
Watching this conversation, it looks like the pro nuc zealots are now saying "Well sure, the plants blow up and you have to pay for all the damage - that's just how nuclear works. 200 billion? Of course you have to pay that!" Seems like paying it backwards. P I'm trying to imagine that might be a rather hard sell to a world that is steadily adapting to solar and wind.