UK Nuclear Site's Clean-Up Costs Rise To £136 Billion (theguardian.com) 103
The cost of cleaning up the U.K.'s largest nuclear site, "is expected to spiral to £136 billion" (about $176 billion), according to the Guardian, creating tension with the country's public-spending watchdog.
Projects to fix the state-owned buildings with hazardous and radioactive material "are running years late and over budget," the Guardian notes, with the National Audit Office suggesting spending at the Sellafield site has risen to more than £2.7 billion a year ($3.49 billion). Europe's most hazardous industrial site has previously been described by a former UK secretary of state as a "bottomless pit of hell, money and despair". The Guardian's Nuclear Leaks investigation in late 2023 revealed a string of cybersecurity problems at the site, as well as issues with its safety and workplace culture. The National Audit Office found that Sellafield was making slower-than-hoped progress on making the site safe and that three of its most hazardous storage sites pose an "intolerable risk".
The site is a sprawling collection of buildings, many never designed to hold nuclear waste long-term, now in various states of disrepair. It stores and treats decades of nuclear waste from atomic power generation and weapons programmes, has taken waste from countries including Italy and Sweden, and is the world's largest store of plutonium.
Sellafield is forecast to cost £136bn to decommission, which is £21.4bn or 18.8% higher than was forecast in 2019. Its buildings are expected to be finally torn down by 2125 and its nuclear waste buried deep underground at an undecided English location. The underground project's completion date has been delayed from 2040 to the 2050s at the earliest, meaning Sellafield will need to build more stores and manage waste for longer. Each decade of delay costs Sellafield between £500m and £760m, the National Audit Office said.
Meanwhile, the government hopes to ramp up nuclear power generation, which will create more waste.
"Plans to clean up three of its worst ponds — which contain hazardous nuclear sludge that must be painstakingly removed — are running six to 13 years later than forecast when the National Audit Office last drew up a report, in 2018... "
"One pond, the Magnox swarf storage silo, is leaking 2,100 litres of contaminated water each day, the NAO found. The pond was due to be emptied by 2046 but this has slipped to 2059."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.
Projects to fix the state-owned buildings with hazardous and radioactive material "are running years late and over budget," the Guardian notes, with the National Audit Office suggesting spending at the Sellafield site has risen to more than £2.7 billion a year ($3.49 billion). Europe's most hazardous industrial site has previously been described by a former UK secretary of state as a "bottomless pit of hell, money and despair". The Guardian's Nuclear Leaks investigation in late 2023 revealed a string of cybersecurity problems at the site, as well as issues with its safety and workplace culture. The National Audit Office found that Sellafield was making slower-than-hoped progress on making the site safe and that three of its most hazardous storage sites pose an "intolerable risk".
The site is a sprawling collection of buildings, many never designed to hold nuclear waste long-term, now in various states of disrepair. It stores and treats decades of nuclear waste from atomic power generation and weapons programmes, has taken waste from countries including Italy and Sweden, and is the world's largest store of plutonium.
Sellafield is forecast to cost £136bn to decommission, which is £21.4bn or 18.8% higher than was forecast in 2019. Its buildings are expected to be finally torn down by 2125 and its nuclear waste buried deep underground at an undecided English location. The underground project's completion date has been delayed from 2040 to the 2050s at the earliest, meaning Sellafield will need to build more stores and manage waste for longer. Each decade of delay costs Sellafield between £500m and £760m, the National Audit Office said.
Meanwhile, the government hopes to ramp up nuclear power generation, which will create more waste.
"Plans to clean up three of its worst ponds — which contain hazardous nuclear sludge that must be painstakingly removed — are running six to 13 years later than forecast when the National Audit Office last drew up a report, in 2018... "
"One pond, the Magnox swarf storage silo, is leaking 2,100 litres of contaminated water each day, the NAO found. The pond was due to be emptied by 2046 but this has slipped to 2059."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.
Re:Europe's most hazardous industrial site (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Europe's most hazardous industrial site (Score:2)
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Nigel Farage also works for the vested interests of the City of London. You know, they didn't want the EU with its rather awkwardly revealing transparency laws steppin
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Re: Europe's most hazardous industrial site (Score:1)
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UK is no longer in EUrope
They Brexited
Europe (a continent) is not the same thing as the European Union (an economic union of member states mostly in Europe of which the UK is no longer a part).
As much as we wish they would crack the continental shelf and float away into the ocean, the UK alas is still in Europe.
Re: Europe's most hazardous industrial site (Score:2)
If weâ(TM)re going to get all pedantic, Europe is really only a continent in name only. Eurasia is the physical landmass. If Europe is a continent then so is India.
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If Europe is a continent then so is India.
India, with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and any other bits I have missed, are often referred to as a "subcontinent".
The European subcontinent [Re: Europe's most h...] (Score:2)
If Europe is a continent then so is India.
India, with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and any other bits I have missed, are often referred to as a "subcontinent".
So, logically Europe should be called a subcontinent as well.
From the start... (Score:5, Informative)
Why are costs always higher than projected? (Score:4, Interesting)
Up-front starting costs, yearly maintenance costs, and up-front shutdown costs, are all known values at the time the design is finalized.
The story says the "known values" in 2019 were under current estimates by 20%. The reality is that the upfront cost projections are all based on theoretical models because there is no real experience with many of the costs. How do you accurately estimate the cost of permanent storage when no one has ever actually built a permanent storage facility. Your estimates are little more than educated guesses by people with an interest in low-balling the cost.
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The story says the "known values" in 2019 were under current estimates by 20%. The reality is that the upfront cost projections are all based on theoretical models because there is no real experience with many of the costs.
Nope. Several nuclear powerplants were dismantled down to the "brown lawn" state: https://world-nuclear.org/info... [world-nuclear.org]
Long-term nuclear storage has also been solved. Finland is doing it. Or we can just keep the spent fuel in dry casks for the next 100-200 years that they are supposed to last.
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Long-term nuclear storage has also been solved. Finland is doing it.
As I understand it from Wikipedia they started the process n the 1980's and will start storing fuel in 2026. So yes, in theory they will have solved it for Finland. But one of the issues with storage is the safe transportation of the spent fuel. So maybe not entirely. There are several plants that have been decommissioned and the site cleared. But none that have moved the nuclear material to a permanent storage facility. And, as I understand it, the actual costs already incurred have varied widely. So we kn
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As I understand it from Wikipedia they started the process n the 1980's and will start storing fuel in 2026.
The storage itself is straightforward, it was all the studies.
But one of the issues with storage is the safe transportation of the spent fuel. So maybe not entirely
Dry casks are designed to survive a plane crash.
Re:From the start... (Score:5, Interesting)
We'll be happy to explain to the rest of the world how to do it if they ask.
https://www.nwmo.ca/# [www.nwmo.ca]
Re:From the start... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in Canada every kWh of nuclear energy produced has included a surcharge for future waste handling.
The UK did that too. But the government raided that fund for other purposes.
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Here in Canada every kWh of nuclear energy produced has included a surcharge for future waste handling.
US government charges nuclear power plants a fee for waste disposal as well. They don't actually have any operational program for waste disposal, but the power plants still pay the fee.
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And this ended up generating a lawsuit by the nuclear plant operators because the promise was 'pay this fee and we'll handle the disposal', with no disposal it is a contract violation by the fed.
I think the result is that the fed pays for the "temporary" above ground storage caskets for now. But those are actually relatively very cheap.
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"the fed" is sometimes used to refer to the federal government. Others include fed.gov, Uncle Sam, etc...
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We had such funds as well, but they made nuclear power so unattractive that in the end the government had to agree to cover the cost and sold the plants for a token amount.
The question for Canada is if the fund will cover the true cost of clean-up and long term waste storage.
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https://www.world-nuclear-news... [world-nuclear-news.org]
Finland's storage repository should be in operation in another year or so as well.
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Those same governments lie about other things as well
Sellafield is one of those places which was operated with no oversight until it was too late - that does not mean that a nuclear facility built today under modern oversight will be as expensive as cleaning up the cockup that is Sellafield.
For example, in 1966, a coal spoil heap failed and slid down onto the town of Aberfan, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Near 60 years on, there are still dozens of spoil heaps positioned on the hills above Welsh and
Re:From the start... (Score:5, Funny)
...multiple governments in multiple countries have lied to their populations about the real costs & risks of nuclear energy. This is just one example of the lies being exposed. Expect to see a lot more like this in the not-too-distant future. 70 years of nuclear fetishism is costing us dearly.
Why are you whinging about nuclear energy when this article is about a nuclear weapons facility? They did produce power there but the primary purpose for the reactors was to to produce Plutonium for weapons and there was also an extensive nuclear processing plant on the site to enrich Uranium and extract Plutonium. The US has an similar weapons site at Hanford and the cleanup has also been very expensive. Comparing weapons production site decommission costs to nuclear power plants is silly -- there are different processes, experiments, contaminants, etc. at a weapons lab. There were also different regulations for these sites and completely different national priorities when these sites were in operation. I notice that the story fails to mention anything about nuclear weapons as well, using the same tactic as you to equate weapons production with power production. It's pretty sad that every story needs to have an agenda behind it, journalism has died and at at this point the media is just beating a dead horse to see if any more money will fall out.
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It was originally a site for weapons production, after the US screwed us on nuclear research. We assisted the US with the Manhattan Project, on the basis that the technology would be shared with us, but the US reneged on the deal (and did the same with supersonic jets too).
But later the site was commercialized and switched to generating power. The commercial aspects were supposed to be done properly and avoid these problems getting as bad as they have, but predictably they didn't put the required investment
I don't have any problem with the costs (Score:2)
The problem is we keep privatizing shit that shouldn't be privatized.
It's always so tempting. Some guy like the monorail man from Simpsons comes along and promises you lower taxes for the same service and more. Then what I actually happens is best case scenario you pay an extra 20 or 30% to get the work done because that's what he's skimming off your tax dollars. Worst case scenario he starts cutting corners on safety and you've got Fukushima.
S
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The waste from the reactors used for weapons production is a significant part of the problem at Sellafield...
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"It'll be safe in a few hundred years"
Uh huh. And even if I believed that (the worst stuff actually stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years), we haven't managed to reliably store such waste for mere decades. Telling me we'll be fine storing it for 10x as long? Fuck off.
Humans have a lot of trouble planning much more than a couple of decades out, and that's for people who are really abnormally good at it.
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.... the worst stuff actually stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years ... we haven't managed to reliably store such waste for mere decades.
The stuff that lasts longer is the stuff that has lower emissions because it has a lower decay rate. There is no technical problem with storing it, it is a political problem.
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I think it is insane to expect reliable storage of anything dangerous but with negative value for more than a few election cycles.
The 'technical problem' is ensuring the site is perfectly stable with zero maintenance because you can't be assured there will be any will to do anything for the full lifetime of the issue. Or even in a decade or so.
Without that, you have to anticipate the site will eventually leech into the local water table.
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Low decay rate is irrelevant.
Relevant is: what do they emit.
And relevant is: how much stuff is that?
And even more: is it "stored safe" as in, can not escape from the container into the environment.
And in case you missed it, that storage has a huge amount of plutonium.
And perhaps you might want to read something about nuclear waste instead of parroting false US school teaching, like "lower decay rate"
Plutonium ... what exactly does it radiate which makes it so dangerous? Hm?
You can google it, and you would b
Alpha emission [Re:Hurry up guys!] (Score:2)
Plutonium ... what exactly does it radiate which makes it so dangerous? Hm?
Depends on isotope, but for the long-lived plutonium isotopes, the decay product is primarily alpha particles.
You can google it, and you would be wrong, because your attention span would not allow you to read the "fine print".
Just for the moderators who like to mod me down for no reason: it is Neutrons. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_fission [wikipedia.org]
Spontaneous fission happens, but it's much much rarer. For 240Pu, for example (half life 6564 years), the branching ratio for spontaneous fission is 5.7E-6 %.
A good reference is here: https://pripyat.mit.edu/KAERI/... [mit.edu]
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Decay rate and 'how much stuff' is directly proportional though.
Something emitting, say, beta or gamma radiation that has a half life under a day is relatively blazing hot and will quickly kill even in tiny amounts.
It'll also be gone in a year or so.
Something with a half life of like 10k years will still be around for many, many lifetimes, but the 'heavy metal' toxicity is probably a bigger danger than the radioactivity.
You can handle unused fuel rods with gloved hands. One fresh out of the reactor you wan
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Probably about the same as the uranium mines. The Navajo have experience there. Also about the same for the bitumen sands, which is a huge disaster in slow motion easily visible from space.
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At least my waste has an expiry date. What was, again, the expiry date on heavy metals from runoff of mining for stuff needed for the various "green" stuff, like PV
Which heavy metals do you believe photovoltaics are made from?
Oh, right: silicon is not a heavy metal. The remaining components are glass, for the cover that keeps the rain off, and aluminum, for the frame.
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Which heavy metals do you believe photovoltaics are made from? Oh, right: silicon is not a heavy metal. The remaining components are glass, for the cover that keeps the rain off, and aluminum, for the frame.
There are other elements involved. You can't just stuck a bit of silicon under some silicon oxide.
Yeah? So name the "other elements" in commercial solar arrays that are heavy metals.
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Wait they don't know what to do with the existing decades old nuclear waste, STILL?!? Pro-nuke folks are pie in the sky impractical dolts.
As a pro-nuke dolt, and in fact working in the industry, we know how to deal with nuclear waste safely. The problem is that politicians won't allow us to do it because they are frightened of public opinion and the greenies. They just ignore the situation and allow it to become worse. The greenies actually want the problem to become worse as an embarassment to the industry and to government, because they are basically anti-establishment left-wingers.
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The greens do not want the problem to become worse.
They want it to be gone.
Like everyone else with sane mind.
because they are basically anti-establishment left-wingers.
In what country?
Certainly not in Germany or Thailand.
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It could be gone, within a year or so, but they oppose any of the solutions, because that might encourage more nuclear power.
It is like opposing humane execution methods because that might r3move opposition to the death penalty in general.
Meanwhile, we keep burning coal and natural gas instead, doing even more harm to the environment.
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It could be gone, within a year or so,
To where?
Do you own a personal black hole?
Can I borrow it? I will make a fortune dropping all the waste into it.
Call me skeptical (Score:2)
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they could bury the whole site under 100 feet of concrete for that much money.
A very tall parking lot is not the desired outcome.
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The problem is below, not above. Then it still has to go somewhere.
Re:Call me skeptical (Score:4, Informative)
Burying it in concrete would be a disaster, because all the waste would leak out of the bottom.
That's the core of the problem. It's already leaking badly, and it keeps getting worse as the site deteriorates. The people trying to clean it up are at great risk, and progress is slow.
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Distribute it to millions of locations to solve the long term problem by putting small portions of it in the backyard of everybody who has and continues to advocate for nuclear power as the solution to all our energy problems!
The never advocate the NEW plants be put in their backyards either...
Coal on the other hand has exposed all of us to more radiation than nuclear and we've been relatively ok with that. If gas had to be leaded we'd all still be 12 IQ points lower and likely denying global warming...
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NIMBY people are why I don't give a shit about climate change. Enjoy. You deserve it.
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We definitely need to get rid of coal ASAP, and not by burning it as the wags like to suggest.
Lots of these fans think they would love to have a SMR in their back yard, that lack of imagination is the problem with them in the first place.
Nothing where if you live near it you have to have signage about sirens and warning alerts is a good idea to build near habitation and run for profit. But people live everywhere now.
Just look left or right and pretend it's not there (Score:2)
It really works wonders!
Need to reprocess the waste not bury it (Score:3)
Considerable fuel can be recovered from so called nuclear waste products. Much better, lower risk, and cheaper long term that storing it somewhere for the future generations to deal with.
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Not economically though, that's the issue.
And if it was economical, they wouldn't start with with Sellafield because just getting the waste out of there is a hazardous job.
A lot of it isn't spent fuel, it's other high level waste that can't be recycled.
Sellafield is a reprocessing plant (Score:3)
Sellafield is a reprocessing plant. As TFS says, it's the world's largest store of plutonium, and that's because it's one of the world's biggest reprocessing facilities where they extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. The waste they're talking about is the really nasty stuff left over after the useful stuff has been extracted using the PUREX process. It's very nasty chemically as well as radioactively, due to all the acids and solvents required to separate the metals (particularly uranium and pluton
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It's all useful, if only for heat. The problem is it isn't economic to use most of it.
How about this: Melt it into a slurry and cast it into blocks the size of a sugar cube, Embed that cube in an outer layer of glass to double it's size. Bury them at the bottom of the asphalt in a road that you're building. Have a road with built-in deicing, and less environmental damage than spreading salt around. (If this proposal is too dangerous, put down a layer of asphalt before you put down the cubes, and space
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Perhaps you want to read up the properties of Plutonium.
Facepalm.
Re:Sellafield is a reprocessing plant (Score:4, Informative)
You're seriously underestimating how difficult this stuff is to work with. PUREX reprocessing involves dissolving the fuel in nitric acid, which is nasty at the best of times, let alone when it has fission products dissolved in it. Vitrifying it is slow and expensive at the best of times. There's no way you could just cast it into cubes - that's pure fantasy.
Anything producing a useful amount of decay heat will also be dangerously radioactive. You can't have it both ways. Even if you could, your road heated by decay heat would be completely impractical. Roads need routine maintenance and resurfacing, and eventual replacement. You've invented a road that you can't dig up because you'd shatter and disperse the nuclear waste from your cubes.
Nuclear plants increase the amount of radioactive stuff around because all the stuff exposed to neutron flux ends up becoming radioactive. Atoms capture neutrons, transforming stable isotopes into radioactive isotopes. That's why you end up with copious amounts of low-level radioactive waste from all the construction materials. You still need to store it because the radioactive isotopes often decay to radioactive gasses (e.g. Krypton-85) that you don't want to be exposing people to.
If it was really as simple as you seem to think, we wouldn't have a situation where every reprocessing plant ends up being a total clusterfuck. Sellafield is bad, the Hanford site is worse, and some of the facilities in the former USSR are probably worse again.
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They have a ton of mixed waste from early reactors and weapon development, not the clean fuel assemblies normal reprocessing plants are build for.
Maybe for a couple 10s of Billions you could make a reprocessing plant for the slop they have to work with, but will that be cheaper?
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From used fuel rods, maybe.
But tons of contaminated/activated lakes full of slightly radioactive, but highly toxic waste from fuel rod production: No. Probably enough "No" for the Bugs Bunny "Nope" meme
Send it to China (Score:3)
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China has plenty of their own crap that they can't deal with already
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That's a proposal dating back to at least the 1950's. But someone showed that eventually some of the stuff would leach out of the glass. The reports I read didn't estimate how much, or how long it would take, or how dilute the radioactive stuff would be. But it wasn't perfect, so people were scared.
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I have a friend who made a dissertation about that.
Our best friend in Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, asked/ordered her in person to "burn it". Otherwise he would make sure she would not get her PhD.
That is why we did not exit nuclear power in the early 1990s.
Waste management, is an completely unsolved thing.
P.S. she is still working in the nuclear research center in Karlsruhe. And that the asshole Chancellor, we had at that time, tried to ruin her career: is an open secret in European science community.
In
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I'm not sure that a comic that points out that the biggest risk of swimming in a nuclear waste pool would be the guards shooting you as you approach to be all that moving about the risk. Seems handleable by that standard.
And 40 years of waste in a pool isn't that big of a deal. We don't need to handle it instantly.
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France, UK and Germany: all have the same waste problem.
So. What is your point? How can you call something clean when we have waste we simple do not know how to handle?
How many thousand years do you want it in "swimming pools"?
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The problem and cost for this clean-up has nothing to do with where to put the waste and everything to do with handling it. China can't help there.
In any case you can't just take waste out of a reactor and toss it into a vitrification plant, much less ship it to the other side of the world. The waste is too sensitive for that. There's a reason why even in countries like France where nuclear reprocessing is common sites still store spent waste on site for a long period of time before sending it off.
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Can't really send it anywhere, it's liquid high level nuclear waste.
They would have to buy the Chinese technology, after just deciding to rip out all of Huawei's gear. I have a feeling the Chinese might insist they do the work.
Anti-nuclear sentiment (Score:4, Informative)
I am - and always have been - in favour of nuclear power. Somewhat. /. is demonstrably misguided.
But the unbridled enthusiasm ('nuclear for life') displayed by many on
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Remember, this mess isn't mostly about nuclear power, it is about nuclear weapons manufacturing. It seems around the world that doing things in a way to minimize future problems was thrown out when it came to weapons production. USA, UK, France, Russia, etc... I've seen stuff that indicates they all have huge messes from it.
Nuclear power is actually a lot cleaner.
Another example of the stupidity of nuclear. (Score:3, Insightful)
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More of an example of "failing to plan is planning to fail." The waste was never properly stored or managed, and as time went on the problem simply became more complex and ultimately complicated to resolve. Inconsistent commitment and support made the problem orders of magnitude worse.
Re:Another example of the stupidity of nuclear. (Score:4, Insightful)
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And because nuclear waste is essentially an eternal cost in human terms, that's not even the end of it by a long shot. Carbon, on the
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Regarding your example of radioactive pollution, coal versus nuclear has about a factor of 1e6 (1M) in terms of burning material for the same amount of energy. The rate of radioactive mmaterials in coal is about 1ppm, so for the same energy supplied, coal gets you stu
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The radioactives in fossil fuels are diffuse, and become even more diffuse as those fuels are consumed naturally or artificially. But fission fuel is not something you get in nature at all apart from rare, isola
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Couldn't compete with a single other energy source if projects had to account for eventual cleanup costs up front.
Nuclear weapons are of course more expensive than fuel-air bombs. I am unsure why you would think differently. They are considerably more expensive but on a price per damage scenario, they are pretty hard to beat. Just one nuclear bomb can devastate an entire population center whereas with fuel-air bombs, you will need hundreds of thousands of them.
And that absurd figure is just one site.
You should see what Hanford is costing the USA to get perspective.
OH!!!! You were talking about nuclear power generation when everyone else was talking about nuc
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Nuclear power is a huge lie, and always was. The same amount of money put into renewables and storage generates vastly more power, comes onlin
Plutonium is a resource (Score:2)
You can make energy out of it. big wealth!
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Very little of it is Plutonium. I'll agree that not using that is a combination of silly and cautious, but most of the stuff is too low level for any profitable use. But it could be used as a source of low level heat. It wouldn't pay for itself, but it would get rid of the problem.
They should just rename the site again ... (Score:1)
They could rename it to "Sunshine" or something.
Or "Bright Future".
Just an idea ...
Hey, Nuclear Fanbois ... (Score:1)
... so how is that feasibility of fission working out for you so far? Cost efficiency over lifetime? Got that epic waste problem solved? Nope? Oh, well, looky there. ... Guess the Germans were on to something when they cancelled fission, don't you think?
Absolutely maddening (Score:3)
Just to give a sense of what £136bn represents — that would pay for a solar deployment on every home in the UK. Which would not eliminate the UK’s need for power for domestic electricity, especially as demands increase with heat pumps, induction cooking and EVs, but would reduce it by at least 50%, probably higher. Plus there’d be the benefit of lower bills forever.
But oh no, spending public money on deploying solar in this way is obviously completely absurd, whereas spending it on cleaning up nuclear waste with absolutely no positive benefit, just an absence of horrendous harms, is completely sensible. What an idiotic world we live in.
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They just need another nuclear plant to make up for it.
Been at the beach (Score:2)
Has warnings all over it saying "do not take anything from this beach with you".
Gomen Corruption and ineptitude. (Score:1)
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Very eager fear mongering by the usual suspects - the Guardian and the MuhMuhGreenDot
And BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/artic... [bbc.com]
And World Nuclear News: https://www.world-nuclear-news... [world-nuclear-news.org]
And Barron's business : https://www.barrons.com/news/c... [barrons.com]