Biden To Offer $1.5 Billion Loan To Restart Michigan Nuclear Power Plant (yahoo.com) 275
The Biden administration is poised to lend $1.5 billion for what what would be the first restart of a shuttered US nuclear reactor, the latest sign of strengthening federal government support for the atomic industry. Bloomberg: The funding, which is set to get conditional backing from the US Energy Department, will be offered as soon as next month to closely held Holtec International to restart its Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, according to people familiar with the matter. Holtec has said a restart of the reactor is contingent on a federal loan. Without such support, the company has said it would decommission the site.
The financing comes as the Biden administration prioritizes maintaining the nation's fleet of nuclear plants to help meet its ambitious climate goals -- including a plan to decarbonize the electricity grid by 2035. More than a dozen reactors have closed since 2013 amid competition from cheaper power from natural gas and renewables, and the Energy Department has warned that as many of half of the nation's nuclear reactors are at risk of closing due to economic factors.
The financing comes as the Biden administration prioritizes maintaining the nation's fleet of nuclear plants to help meet its ambitious climate goals -- including a plan to decarbonize the electricity grid by 2035. More than a dozen reactors have closed since 2013 amid competition from cheaper power from natural gas and renewables, and the Energy Department has warned that as many of half of the nation's nuclear reactors are at risk of closing due to economic factors.
Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear is by far the most logical method of generating energy. Now if we could get some modern designs green lit we can take care of the bulk of the waste problem. New designs can use up most of the material.
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Let's look at the alternatives that complete morons came up with like 100 people drive their cars in to work, build a pipeline, run vacuum pumps and pressurizers to pump CO2 underground? Now that's some net sum positive bullshi
Re:Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm no fan of nuclear power. It has a problem with the waste, it has a problem with safety during its lifetime.
At the same time it's our only chance right now to keep our living standard while not trashing the planet for good.
But we should use that time nuclear power buys us to move on.
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it has a problem with safety during its lifetime
What safety problems? Don't mention anything outside of the USA because drunken Soviets breaking all the rules and having the result blow up in their face has nothing to do with how the USA runs nuclear power plants.
Re:Great! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's silly to think a Soviet RBMK reactor carries the same risks as anything in the USA.
We saw a piece of a Boeing 737 get torn off in flight, does that mean anything like this can happen with an AirBus aircraft? I guess in theory such things can happen. What are the chances of that happening though? If Airbus doesn't have door plugs like Boeing then the chances are zero.
The RBMK reactors had a "feature" that insertion of the control rods could cause a temporary increase in power. That's catastrophic for a power plant already beyond maximum rated power. Also a problem was the lack of a containment dome, allowing for the spread of radiation if the primary containment was lost.
What is the worst that can happen with a failure at an American nuclear power plant? With containment domes over the reactors? The investors lose a bunch of money. That's what happened at Fukushima, they lost a bunch of money. Much of that mess and money lost was from the damage caused by the tsunami, a cost they'd bear even if there was no loss of the reactor cores.
If old nuclear reactors scare you then perhaps we need new reactors. It's unfortunate to see that we've got so desperate for electricity production that we are refurbishing a nuclear power plant from the 1960s than building new power plants. We have seen a nuclear power plant built in at little as 3 years before, but that was a long time ago. The people that know how to build a nuclear power plant that quickly are likely senile or dead. Training a new generation to do that will take time, since we don't have that time we are refurbishing old reactors.
Keeping new nuclear power plants from getting built because of Chernobyl isn't just "silly", that is some kind of mental illness. That's some kind of phobia. That's like refusing to fly on an Airbus aircraft because of what happened on a Boeing 737. They are both passenger jetliners, right? So, they must carry the same risks, right? No, that is not right and you should understand that. A Soviet RBMK isn't the same as a Westinghouse PWR. Put drunken Soviets in charge of that plant and they might be successful in destroying the reactor, but it's not going to blow up in their faces. We have newer designs now that might be impossible for drunken Soviets to destroy. They could cause a loss of power, perhaps do some damage like contaminate the fuel with fire suppressant chemicals, costing the owners all kinds of money to clean up. What they won't be able to do is cause the plant to blow up by hitting the big red buttons that are supposed to shut down the reactor. Only the RBMK had that "feature".
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We need to demonstrate that you can have the highest standard of living with renewables, because nuclear won't work for much of the world. Either we won't let them have it due to proliferation fears, or it's too expensive, or they don't have a secure source of fuel, or they don't have the technical expertise, or their geography can't support it... They will just build coal and gas.
Yes. With that many excuses that is exactly what they will do.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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Uhhuh, I live in one of these countries with a high amount of renewables. But we've had that long before solar and wind was a thing.
Hydroelectricity is renewable. Biomass burning is renewable. Or it counts as such at least. And I'm pretty sure Iceland with its geothermal resources can easily beat even us.
Norway, Austria, Iceland... yeah, if you have the assets to draw power out of your environment, that's a great thing, and it's very "green" (but let's better not discuss just how "green" hydroelectricity re
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Yeah states and the federal government are two different entities not always with aligned interests.
I know Harris was looking into misappropriated funds in regards to the plant but why would the AG have final say over it's operating license or safety issues?
Re: Great! (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.kpbs.org/news/midd... [kpbs.org]
But haters gotta hate and his story doesn't involve adrenochrome, so I'll consider it progress
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Re:Great! (Score:4, Informative)
Every accusation is an admission.
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I tend to follow news and politics fairly closely and this is an allegation that I was not aware of.
Do you have anything substantial to back this claim with?
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Do a little googling....start with terms Kamala Harris and Willie Brown....and go from there.
Piss off! It's YOUR job to back your claims. I got better things to do than fact check RWNJ fiction.
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Kamala Harris had zero to do with the plant closing. The attorney general of California does not make decisions about whether nuclear plants have licenses.
Her sole connection is she didn't aggressively go after Southern California Edison executives who probably illegally settled over the pipe failure. If she had...the plan still would not have been reactivated.
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Nuclear tech isn't my field so asking honest questions here.
How much water does it take to run a plant? I assume water that's been heated gets dumped into a cool off pool and then put back into a source pool of already cooled water.
How can a system like that run out of water? It's just a cycle of the same water.
Re: Great! (Score:5, Informative)
There's two different "thresholds" when talking about temperature like this. The one that mostly comes up is discharge temperature limits, and those most revolve around wildlife considerations. That's something that hits any thermal power plant that uses natural waters for cooling. When you hear about water temperature issues in France for example, that's virtually always them throttling the nukes to keep fish safe because the power isn't vital. Those limits can and do get waived when the generation is needed.
More rarely certain plants can get into trouble because they were designed poorly. I think it's turkey point in flordia that's designed to use a series of man made meandering canals, basically like a big slow heat exchanger. Sometimes when ambient air temperature gets hot enough for long enough the outlet water doesn't cool fast enough to get within engineering spec by the time it fully transits to the intake. Similar issues happen to plants that use pond water for cooling, as droughts can drop the lake levels low enough that they struggle to maintain temperature.
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I have a solution for high ambient temperatures. Have a look at the graph here: https://www.renewableenergywor... [renewableenergyworld.com]
California is pretty much solar powered from March to May, during the day. Net demand goes close to zero, as solar powers nearly everything.
Of course, that's bad news for nuclear, because it can't ramp power down and back up that quickly. One option might be to add a massive amount of storage, but as in-building storage increases even that is going to become uneconomical.
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Of course, that's bad news for nuclear, because it can't ramp power down and back up that quickly. One option might be to add a massive amount of storage, but as in-building storage increases even that is going to become uneconomical.
I don't follow. If there's a supply of reliable nuclear power and enough storage on the grid to manage the peaks and valleys in the demand then what value is added with solar PV adding so much power to the grid around noon?
I see so many sing the praises of solar plus storage and then talk about how nuclear power is effectively worthless because it supplies power all the time. What happens to the problem of nuclear power if we put storage on the grid? The problem goes away. Maybe with nuclear and storage
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Or more likely, they will just install more solar and batteries.
People won't pay for nuclear because it's more expensive than everything else, and doesn't offer them a nice transition to solar. Remember that consumers don't choose who they get their electrons from, they just choose the most suitable tariff, which is usually the cheapest one.
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The point that you seem determined to miss is that as renewables increase, nuclear gets less and less viable. Sometimes there are issues where an existing plant that can be brought back online relatively quickly can help, but it's rare. New nuclear takes 20 years so obviously wouldn't apply here at all.
The only time nuclear gets used to charge batteries is when power is extremely cheap, usually due to renewables and low demand. It's hardly a great way to fund the most expensive source of electricity that we
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You are going cite what a political party does as proof of some sort of scientific consensus? That's rich.
It's "rich" that you maintain that nuclear power is too expensive and too dangerous to bother with in the comments below an article on how the US federal government is funding a nuclear power plant to open than fund more solar power. Someone in the government doesn't think nuclear power is a waste of time.
If you want to believe that nuclear power exists only to support some military efforts then look around on why the government might be interested in that. We have some mad men in charge of Russia, China,
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Cool, thank you. The Florida plant makes sense how you describe it vs ambient temperature.
But the French plants just take in more natural water (from nearby river?) and dump hot water back into the local river? Jesus... *boggle*
Yes. What they use it for is to cool and condense the steam that turned the turbine used to generate electricity. The resultant water goes back to the steam generator (n a pressurized water reactor) to be turned back into steam in a closed cycle. All steam turbine generators, coal, oil or nuclear work the same basic way. Some use cooling towers to teh same effect, and despite cooling towers being associated primarliy with nukes they are used quite a lot with non-nuke plants as well.
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No propaganda. I've seen a few infographics that describe how nuclear plants work. Very basic cartoon style. That's it. As I said, not my field. I in no way pretend to know anything more than some cartoons which is why I asked.
I am not in any way afraid to say I don't know something and ask what is probably a dumb question for those in the field or adjacent fields. Without asking experts, I would never know.
Re: Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
Comparisons of nukes versus renewables plus storage are effectively never apples to apples. Especially for reliability modeling something like solar+storage scores with basically no value in planning evaluations. A few hours of batteries simply isn't enough to make it through grid stress events without involuntary load shed (blackouts). These resources are, in effect, leaning on traditional resources like nuclear energy implicitly.
There is now serious work to reform payments in capacity markets, as those are supposed to be the mechanism by which we compensate reliability. They don't work well, currently. Part of that process is pricing the cost of a blackout (its high). Part of it is adequately assessing whether a resource class can be counted on during events (solar and wind score poorly here.)
Ultimately the spot price of electricity is only a partial metric for assessing what an asset is worth. The reason most experts advocate for tens of percent of nuclear baseload is the total cost of electricity without it is far higher without it when accounted wholistically. A pure renewables system either incurs tremendous costs maintaining whole other fleets of power plants for use in relatively short windows each year, or incurs cost via economic disruption from blackouts. Those costs are not accounted for in an average spot price for generation.
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It seems to be working in California. [slashdot.org]
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Battery storage is for short term use, and for smoothing the output of renewables. For longer term, start with what you already have - thermal batteries. Upgrade thermostats to be a little smarter, and you can pre-cool/pre-heat when energy is abundant, and coast through when it isn't.
For longer term storage you need to pump something, water or air usually.
What you need to solve this is better interconnects. Look at Europe. It's hardly perfect, but there is a lot of energy moving around. Long distance, high
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Pumped hydro has a round-trip efficiency of 70-80%.
http://www.economist.com/node/... [economist.com]
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
https://books.google.com/books... [google.com]
It actually says that on the Wikipedia page, by the way.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I forgot, nothing has improved since the 60's. Instead of insulting me (you @sshat) maybe you could provide some links to say how none of my claims are true. My claims being:
* most logical method of generating energy: Explain to me how a energy source that produces no CO2 is obviously not ideal.
* Modern designs handle the bulk of the waste problem: Explain how new designs don't reuse spent fuel to be more efficient.
While you're researching, maybe you could view an actual Nuclear energy professor's youtub
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You claims have been refuted countless times. You have conclusively demonstrated that you are incapable of seeing reality and are deeply stuck in your delusion. Arguing with you is pointless, you will just spew more lies.
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You are the one making claims. Thus, you need to be the one to back up your claims with facts, which you never do.
For example:
Modern designs handle the bulk of the waste problem: Explain how new designs don't reuse spent fuel to be more efficient.
You made the claim. Now point to even one operating commercial power plant that features a "breeder" reactor. Just one.
Spoiler alert: you won't be able to.
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Happy to provide some links now that work is out.
Start off by watching this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Then I spent like 10 minutes googling around:
* https://www.world-nuclear-news... [world-nuclear-news.org]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
* https://fissilematerials.org/b... [fissilematerials.org].
And there's a little website of a former encyclopedia I think:
* https://www.britannica.com/tec... [britannica.com]
Quote: " Although interest in breeder reactors waned after the 1960s as a result of the discovery of additional uranium reserves, Russia, China, India, and
Re:Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
Some new designs reuse the spent fuel as new fuel... It's a pretty neat concept.
Why did it close? (Score:5, Interesting)
Would be useful to have a better idea of why it closed in the first place.
The article says "Entergy Corp. closed it due to financial reasons." Wait, what? This is an already-built plant. It can't compete on cost even though the construction cost was already paid??
Re:Why did it close? (Score:5, Insightful)
Numbers, please. [Re:Why did it close?] (Score:4, Insightful)
Insurance and regulatory requirements are the most expensive line item in operating a nuclear plant. The amount of money they pay for premiums vs the cost of the 3-Mile Island incident is outrageous, but mandated by the Fed.
Numbers, please.
Re:Numbers, please. [Re:Why did it close?] (Score:5, Informative)
NRC Fees to certify the design of a reactor range from $50-$75m of light water reactors. Citation. [world-nuclear.org]
Three Mile Island, the only major incident involving large scale payments costs insurers $140m (max for two reactors, $70m each at the time) for a class action lawsuit and $300m for the operator as property insurance. That is $1,895,000,000 in todays dollars from 1979. Citation. [iii.org]
Re:Numbers, please. [Re:Why did it close?] (Score:4)
I'm not big on the Feds stepping in to do things like this in general, but insuring reactors seems like something maybe the government could do. (Yes, I know this would involve passing legislation, and that we're not keen on doing that anymore.) Especially as the outcome of a utility actually making a claim in the event of a catastrophic disaster (say, $2B in the case of a four-reactor plant) is reasonably likely to be "insurer fails and the US government is left holding the bag."
Yes the Feds would then also be in charge of assessing and managing risk but that's already in the purview of the NRC.
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It's only socializing the risk if the operator doesn't pay for the insurance.
There's no reason the government couldn't require premium payments just the same as a private insurance company does, and until there's a problem that money can sit there and be managed by the Treasury Department, growing interest, because the government isn't going to have the overhead and shareholder greed of a private insurer.
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Construction was started in 1967, so it's a very old design and a very old reactor. It appears to have had some updates over the years, but nothing to change the fundamental design.
For reference, Fukushima is around $500 billion, but many of the former residents got screwed and would doubtless get a lot more money in the US.
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A new nuclear plant would take a decade to build and cost $20 billion or so. Look at the price tag and timeline for Watts Bar plant for reference.
Exactly. This one is already built, meaning that you aren't paying that initial cost- it's already paid for. So, why was it closed "for financial reasons"?
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Two reasons, 1) restarting a plant takes time and money and 2) the majority of the costs are insurance ...
That's what the previous poster stated, without any actual numbers. Numbers. How much exactly is this cost?
and issues that happen when the energy can't be sold in bulk to the local energy carrier or transported to an energy market. .
Yes, if you can't sell the power that's a problem. Are you suggesting that the utility closed the plant because they couldn't sell the power or couldn't transport it to an energy market?
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A new nuclear plant would take a decade to build and cost $20 billion or so. Look at the price tag and timeline for Watts Bar plant for reference.
Maybe we should hire the Chinese to do it for us. They can (and are) build them much faster and much cheaper while still using Westinghouse designs.
Re:Why did it close? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sure. But the reason for that is that with this tech, it is _neccessary_. In fact, the safety requirements are a lot lower than on any other form of energy generation as soon as you take the actual risks into account.
Re:Why did it close? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ask, or pay for it. (Score:2)
So instead of the Fed simply working to modify or waive certain financial burdens imposed by themselves, we taxpayers are going to instead watch a few billion (this is only round one) get handed over to a company arrogantly coming with a ”Fuck You Pay Me” attitude, with the Fed being bought/pressured/guilted into funding their start-back-up costs, while no one questions a damn thing?
Yes. It’s worth finding out WHY they closed. Parent is right. Ask the damn questions, or never complain a
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Wait, so you're saying it's a perfect thing to co-locate with a nuke plant that can't easily load-follow, so you can use the waste heat and excess generation to desalinate water, and then stop desalination when electricity demand rises?
I'm not sure that what you said is a problem.
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Why did it close?
Because it's a market and every form of power generation that isn't "green" is getting out-subsidized.
Wait, what? This is an already-built plant.
Reactors have to be refueled, waste has to be handled, plant has to be maintained, etc. It's not free just because it's built. Also, it's a small, 52 year old reactor site that has always operated on the margin of profitability.
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Right, because there definitely aren't any subsidies on fossil fuels (the main competition).
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Indeed. The problem with nuclear power is that it is so excessively expensive that even keeping a built and running plant is not cost-effective to keep running. Unless you get a lot of hidden subsidies that is. The same is happening in other places. For example, the a Swiss operator did shut down a plant a while back they still had operations permission for several more years because it was simply not cost-effective at all and they would have lost a lot of money if they hat kept it running.
The dirty secret
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False assertion, smarter countries like China and S. Korea see costs a third of what USA. does. USA only has a stupidity problem, nuclear can be very cost effective.
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Nope. It cannot. You are not living in the real world.
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Why are you so anti-nuclear? Nuclear can be very compelling! It's 2024 and there are lots of new designs out there.
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I look at facts and see them for what they are. That is quite enough. And yes, I am quite familiar with those "new" designs.
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I'll reply to you once more because you are after all the kind of the Eagles
https://energyfromthorium.com/... [energyfromthorium.com]
And https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
And add to your facts.
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Here's a couple more facts for you:
There isn't a single shovel-ready design for a commercial thorium-fueled reactor in existence from any government, engineering firm, national laboratory, or otherwise.. This means you are at least 20 to 30 years from being able to build one AT ANY COST.
So until there's a proven NRC-licensed design, you're talking about vaporware. Please stop.
China and Korea [Re:Why did it close?] (Score:2)
False assertion, smarter countries like China and S. Korea see costs a third of what USA. does.
I'm not sure that I will believe any cost number from China.
South Korea... ok, I wouldn't mind seeing the citation for operating costs there. A third of US costs? You have a breakdown of that?
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
Interesting policy decision (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, it's way too late to affect the election, i'd have done this a year ago and gotten the plant restarted and trumpeted the news across the state, but at least they are trying to fight. I think it'll turn off some voters and whether it thrills more than it turns off is open to question.
It's a Carteresque move - good policy but too late and divorced from a firm political thrust, even though it's localized to a place where Biden is hurting. Objectively, Carter had lots of good policy which was overshadowed by economic and foreign policy considerations.
This is an extremely minor issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Biden's not doing this for the election, he's doing it because he thinks it's the right thing to do.
I know, it's weird to think that a politician might think and act that way in 2024, but here we are.
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Regardless of who is responsible for the policy - nothing happens in DC in a vacuum. And if they aren't thinking hard about the fact that Biden is 5-7% behind in the polls in MI, they should think harder.
Otherwise, why do you think the support for Israel has been muted? They sense the danger here.
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The good news for Biden is that the environmentalists will eventually figure out that comparing the two presumptive candidates still leaves them with one that actually listens to what they have to say before making decisions that they may not agree with; and the other who spews absolute lies and long-debunked made-up nonsense about literally every single environmental issue while spending 4 years ignoring every pro-environmental opinion while rolling back decades of environmental protections.
The environment
Re:This is an extremely minor issue (Score:4, Insightful)
So he's the head of a crime family that has managed to completely escape any form of accountability for all their crime, perfectly concealing any evidence of wrongdoing; but yet he's a senile fool who can't manage to string three words together?
Put the fucking kool aid down. And by the way, take a listen to Trump sometime while he mistakes private citizens for the Speaker of the House and talks absolute gibberish and nonsense that any objective person would be very worried about, and be demanding some kind of mental acuity testing.
In my opinion, if you're eligible for Medicare and still running for office, mental acuity testing should be a required annual event. I want to know that they guy in charge actually is in charge of both his own faculties as well as the office they've been entrusted to, and not blowing bubbles while unelected assholes with their own selfish agendas are really steering the ship.
Test them both, and half the god damn Senate while we're at it.
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The border deal (besides not being visible to normal people), has been leaked to contain provisions for 5 THOUSAND crossings per day and has support for Ukraine attached! That is a non-starter to really anyone who wants to discuss border control seriously. When the whitehouse press secretary was asked what the border patrol's job was - she said it was 'to process migrants'. This is also a non-starter. The majority of the American people want the border closed. The way it's being handled now is people c
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That's a compelling argument you have there. Whenever a real problem arises, bringing up racism is definitely the best way to argue your virtue.
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I expect and demand my country is as secure as my house, with no easy way for unknown people to just float in. I don't know if you leave your front door open but I don't. I expect migrants to come into one of the many ports of entry. No racism involved. When I go to Canada I have to cross a check point, as expected. I don't just take a dirt road in.
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And a government is a framework of laws. And if those laws do not allow the government to do the actions necessary to secure the border, the laws need to be changed by the legislative body in order to allow those actions.
Why is that hard to understand?
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The fact that an anonymous coward is on here spewing projectionist bullshit that they clearly have bought into from a 24/7 propaganda firehose is the biggest non-surprise of my day.
Please go watch 5 minutes of a Biden speech, uninterrupted, from a somewhat neutral news source - I'm not saying you need to trust MSNBC here, the BBC will do just fine. Then do the same with a Trump rally from the same somewhat neutral news source, and tell me who seems to be afflicted by "obvious dementia."
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I mean, it's way too late to affect the election, i'd have done this a year ago and gotten the plant restarted and trumpeted the news across the state, but at least they are trying to fight. I think it'll turn off some voters and whether it thrills more than it turns off is open to question.
It's a Carteresque move - good policy but too late and divorced from a firm political thrust, even though it's localized to a place where Biden is hurting. Objectively, Carter had lots of good policy which was overshadowed by economic and foreign policy considerations.
And here I was, naively thinking this sudden outbreak of common sense was about climate, planet, Gaia crying and so on, and not about the elections. But it's quite amazing how sensible leftists can become all of a sudden when faced with the threat of The Other Guy (imperial march playing in backgound) winning. Maybe we should do that more often to them.
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How would this help the election? Nuclear only has value versus other forms of power in the context of fighting global warming (otherwise it is too expensive) and if global warming is a primary concern to a voter then they'll vote Democrat either way as Trump is not at all a supporter of green policies.
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I'd have done this a year ago
Ideally that would have been better.
But it is possible that it took them that amount of time to verify that it was feasible and made sense policy wise.
I work for $LOCALUNIVERSITY and sometimes decision can take time because at the scale of ~50,000 people even a simple decision can have deep consequences.
Here we are talking billions and nuclear power plant. I would not be surprised if it took them a year to do understand the problem, understand the impact, see a possible solution and do the study by running
Seems odd (Score:3)
I support nuclear power, but this seems like an odd move. The plant is only 800MW, and IIRC it was shut down due to the lack of firm power purchase agreements. That might have been resolved, but why is this such a capital intensive process? It smells more of an operating subsidy, and at that something in the neighborhood of $40/MWh.
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Look at the "Carbon credits" bullshit where they gave people in Africa more efficient stoves so they just used the old one and the new one and cooked more, almost doubling emissions.
People in Africa started cooking twice as much food because they got a free new stove? Citation please.
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citations in the description
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None of the links (1/3 are broken) say anything about Africans cooking more because they received better stoves.
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Restart So Cal San Onofre Nuclear Generating next (Score:5, Interesting)
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I know a guy who was on the board for the Anaheim electric utility when the decision was made. San Onofre needs some serious work done to operate safely, and the cost was prohibitive.
Now, it would need even more. It might actually be cheaper to build a new one.
Re:Restart So Cal San Onofre Nuclear Generating (Score:2)
My recollection was that Toshiba screwed up the replacement generator design which was supposed to be identical to the old design. To compensate, they could have plugged some of the steam generator tubes and stopped the vibrations causing the problems (leaks?), albeit with slightly reduced power output.
Instead of fixing the problem by holding Toshiba's feet to the fire or patching up the existing unit as above, the engineering difficulties were used as a lever by those against nuclear power (both those a
Where will we src the enriched Uranium to run it? (Score:2, Informative)
“Today, nuclear fuel produced by Russia accounts for more than 20 percent of the fuel used by U.S. reactors."
https://mcmorris.house.gov/posts/house-passes-mcmorris-rodgers-bill-banning-russian-uranium-imports-to-united-states
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“Today, nuclear fuel produced by Russia accounts for more than 20 percent of the fuel used by U.S. reactors."
That is a problem that should be fixed irrespective of this one particular plant under discussion.
Call a spade a spade (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, fine, it's a loan guarantee, not a direct loan. But in the case of failure to repay, it amounts to the same thing. Worse, actually, because the US doesn't even get interest payments on a loan guarantee.
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I do not dispute the utility of the plant's carbon-free baseload electricity (potential - they aren't online yet). However, there is presently no market - either now or on the horizon - under which this plant's electricity will be compensated 1) commensurate with those benefits, nor 2) will allow this loan to get repaid without the taxpayer holding the bag.
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Indeed. But no one tries to call the federal funding for the highway system "a loan". A loan implies the expectation that it'll be paid back. The alternative names I used - "a grant, a handout, a carro
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Follow the money (Score:2)
Someone is gunna pocket a LOT of cash. I'll bet they're a big campaign contributor or some other political connection.
Nobody wants more China (Score:2)
I think the real reason this is happening is nobody wants more China.
No more Chinese Solar Panels
No more Chinese batteries
Especially our ally Japan. Japan REALLY doesn't want anyone supporting China anymore. To the point where Japan is hedging bets for Hydrogen. https://slashdot.org/index2.pl... [slashdot.org] .
All you need to make Hydrogen is electricity and water. Saltwater is even better.
Hydrogen also requires no change to our current production lines. Ford/GM can continue producing ICE engines, with just a simple
Re:Waste of $ (Score:4, Insightful)
We (as in you) aren’t sending California shit. California pays way more in federal money than it receives. Your figures are also off. Diablo Canyon provides 9% of the state’s total electricity. In clean energy terms that’s 17%. https://www.pge.com/en/about/p... [pge.com]
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