# New and improved nuclear plants may cost more than expected. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [June 5, 2009, 10:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880 "2009-06-05T22:35:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2009, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/121 "2009-06-06T20:20:22Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > I don’t think anyone has a good handle on the lifecycle cost for production PBMR type reactors at this point … Thank you for the detailed answer. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2009, 8:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/122 "2009-06-06T20:22:24Z")
> [@Una\_Persson](#): > > Oh, horseshit. It was not “shut down at a cost of 132 billion dollars.” Your own link says it was repaired for 132 MILLION dollars. Even the entire freaking Hanford cite, a disaster area incomparable with Fermi, will only cost $50B by 2035.[sup]1[/sup] > > You see, this is what I’m talking about. Posters are allowed to repeatedly over time either deliberately or sloppily post information which is incorrect, misleading, deceptive, or outright false, and nothing can be done because they “probably believe it?” You can bet that if no one responded to gonzomax’s “cite” above, a year from now “someone” would “cite” it as a “fact” in a future “debate” on here. > > 1. Guizzo, Erico. “The Atomic Fortress that Time Forgot.” _IEEE Spectrum_ (April, 2005): 42-49. What’s $50 billion between friends? Particularly when its “only” $50 billion. Besides which, I’ll probably be dead by then, so let’s leave it on the nation’s credit card cause we won’t have to worry about it. The cost of Chernobyl has been estimated in total at $200 billion. [Article: Chernobyl Day: Do Not Break The Nucleus | OpEdNews](http://www.opednews.com/articles/Chernobyl-Day-Do-Not-Brea-by-Shobha-Shukla--Ci-090425-3.html) Nobody has added up all the costs of treatments, lost wages, lost land use, etc., but it would not surprise me that this event was on that scale or even greater. But I suppose if we socialize that loss if it happens in this country that it won’t interfere with the profits of those too big to fail. The problem with a $100 million wind farm is that it risks losing its investors money if it is too small to socialize the loss should it be unprofitable. ---
**Author:** ![1010011010](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/1/ea666f/32.png) [@1010011010](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/1010011010)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2009, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/123 "2009-06-06T20:30:39Z")
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#): > > However, new reactor designs exist that are “inherently safe”. > > By this they mean the actual physics of the reactor preclude a China Syndrome or other meltdown. Even if the operators tried their level best to cause the reactor to go _foom_ they couldn’t do it. This is not the definition of inherently safe with which I am familiar. The definition I was taught is that, if they are in a safe condition and are left unattended the worst that they will do is shut themselves down. In any large scale reactor, deliberate operator misconduct can make them go _foom_. In some designs (e.g. pebble bed) the chances of this happening accidentally or sabotage going undetected long enough for a criticality excursion to occur are essentially zero. Essentially. If you burn off the graphite jackets of the fuel spheres, even pebble bed reactors can melt down (not to mention release a lot of fission products in the fire). There are scale-limited designs (hydride moderated comes to mind) that are safe in the manner you describe, but they are limited to a few dozen of megawatts … building them larger only extends core life. You could build _a lot_ of these small reactors and meet the energy demands in a safe and reliable manner, but NIMBYism and nuclear hysteria makes this politically infeasible. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2009, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/124 "2009-06-06T21:35:22Z")
I’m not sure I want to get into a full debate on this again, because it appears to be futile on this board. But I’ll toss out a few quick points. First, understand that arguments for wind or solar based on the total amount of wind energy or solar energy in the country are close to being useless. The fact is, the world is awash in energy. Not just solar and wind, but tidal, geothermal, wave energy, ocean currents, jet streams, rivers and streams, you name it. The amount of energy in various ongoing process on the earth absolutely dwarfs the amount of energy man produces. There’s enough energy in the gulf stream to power the world. The entire mantle of the earth is a giant energy source. The energy generated by hurricanes and tornadoes is absolutely astounding. In terms of energy, it’s raining soup out there. However, _this means nothing_. All that matters is how much of that energy can be economically extracted. Any argument that doesn’t start and end with the practical implementation details of extracting that energy is a waste of time. Take wave energy. There is a huge amount of power in the waves hitting the coasts of the continents. The problem is that it’s really hard to economically harvest it from what is a very hostile environment. Solar energy has many problems, which has be rehashed over and over. It’s not reliable. Large areas of the country don’t get enough solar flux to make it cost effective. The relatively low energy density of solar means that huge areas of land would have to be used to collect enough power. Solar energy advocates recently latched on to an EU study which says that all of Europe’s energy could be supplied by a solar farm the size of Austria in the Sahara desert. They say this like it’s a positive point in favor of solar power. Someone earlier in this thread said we ‘only’ need a square 161 kilometers on a side to provide the U.S.'s power. That’s an OUTRAGEOUS requirement! An industrial plant spanning 26,000 square kilometers? Do you have any idea how much raw material would be required for that? It would be an engineering project several orders of magnitude greater than anything ever attempted. It would probably create huge environmental changes in the region. If this is what is needed for solar power to provide all the power we need, it will never, ever happen. This is an important thing to understand. If you’re going to reject all other choices in favor of solar, you are basically throwing away the possible in favor of the impossible. It is not a rational position to take. Wind is better, but not by much. T. Boone Pickens is a salesman. You need to take what he says with a grain of salt, no matter how much you want to believe it. He has a very strong personal vested interest in his wind plan, and he plays fast and loose with the numbers. A few months ago I posted a detailed rebuttal to his claims of widespread wind power being available through huge swaths of the midwest. What he doesn’t tell you is that wind is only cost-effective in very specific conditions. The wind has to be relatively constant, at the right speed, in an area geographically close to the consumer of that power. The DOE has maps of wind power gradients you can look at, and from it you can see that the areas of cheap wind power are extremely small, and many of them have already been developed with wind farms. As the wind speed or consistency drops off, the price of wind power begins to go up dramatically. Wind and Solar both have a future. So does natural gas, coal, nuclear, and other power sources. The fact is that there is no one ‘winner’ among these technologies, and it’s time to get past the point where we argue in favor of one power source as our ‘next’ power and reject all the others. I think it’s possible that wind and solar combined could provide somewhere between 10% and 25% of the U.S.'s power needs. There are enough good wind sites and high-flux solar sites to do that. But that’s about as far as you’re going to get. So you need something else. And you need baseload power that is available rain or shine, windy or calm. The only non-fossil power source we know of today that can provide that power in the quantity required is nuclear. If anyone knows of another, let’s hear it. If you can’t, then you need to make the case that fossil fuels are better than nuclear, or that we should somehow scale back our energy consumption by 75%, and NO ONE knows how to do that without utterly destroying our modern economy. So enough sophistry, enough straw men. These are the real issues, and no amount of nitpicking or handwaving is going to make the need for power go away. If you’re going to stick with solar and Wind as your answer, you have to answer the questions about how to provide it in the stable quantities needed for a reasonable cost. If you can’t, you’re just blowing smoke and letting your knee-jerk hatred of nuclear blind you to the hard reality of our current situation. For me, when some environmentalists dismiss nuclear power in favor of power sources we don’t know how to implement, and in the next breath talk about how global warming is the biggest danger facing mankind, I simply don’t take them seriously. I assume they are either blinded by ideology, or too ignorant about engineering to be able to engage in rational discussion. As for nuclear plants withstanding direct hits from aircraft… Maybe they can, maybe they can’t. The containment domes in U.S. nuclear plants are concrete three feet thick. Their domed design makes them much stronger and resistive to impact than a flat concrete wall would be. They were certainly designed to withstand impacts from smaller aircraft, and from some larger aircraft. Also, they are very small, generally surrounded by other buildings, and would be extremely hard to hit with a larg ket aircraft. And, they might well survive the impact anyway. And if they didn’t, it’s not clear how much radioactivity would be spilled anyway. And there’s a bigger point - there are already enough nuclear power plants out there to provide terrorists with all the targets they could possibly ever hit. So adding more adds zero to the risk. There are lots of skyscapers too, but that doesn’t mean building another increases the chance that a terrorist will hit one - if they want to, there are already plenty to choose from. ---
**Author:** ![Una\_Persson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/una_persson/32/346_2.png) [@Una\_Persson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Una_Persson)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2009, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/125 "2009-06-06T22:28:33Z")
> [@The\_Second\_Stone](#): > > The cost of Chernobyl has been estimated in total at $200 billion. [Article: Chernobyl Day: Do Not Break The Nucleus | OpEdNews](http://www.opednews.com/articles/Chernobyl-Day-Do-Not-Brea-by-Shobha-Shukla--Ci-090425-3.html) Actually, the relevant portion of your cite says this: > [@](#): > > However, Dr. John Gofman, a renowned nuclear chemist, predicted that Chernobyl would cause 1,000,000 cancers and 475,000 deaths in its wake. The total cost of the disaster was estimated at $200 billion. Since I haven’t seen the 475,000 deaths and 1,000,000 cancers (FTR, when Cecil and I looked at it in some detail ([The China (Flats) Syndrome: Was there a reactor meltdown in Southern California? - The Straight Dope](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2690/the-china-flats-syndrome)) we found at most 4,000 deaths over time), can we also assume that the $200 billion number you’re introducing to the discussion is just as bogus? > [@](#): > > What’s $50 billion between friends? Particularly when its “only” $50 billion. Besides which, I’ll probably be dead by then, so let’s leave it on the nation’s credit card cause we won’t have to worry about it. I didn’t say it wasn’t a lot, but it’s $50 billion in 21st Century dollars, versus $132 million in 20th Century dollars. It’s not $132 billion. My point is if one is going to sloppily post cites that are off by 3 orders of magnitude, then how does that help finding the facts? And to sort of address your other points, you’ll have a hard time finding someone who wants more wind generation and more solar than I. I think nuclear, wind, biomass, and solar are four pillars of a solid energy future. ---
**Author:** ![Una\_Persson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/una_persson/32/346_2.png) [@Una\_Persson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Una_Persson)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2009, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/126 "2009-06-06T22:33:15Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > **Una** do you happen to have good estimates of how much an American version pebble bed reactor(s) would actually cost over the reactor lifecycle? I’ve been unable to find anything believable for that. I have no better, and possibly much worse, information than **Stranger** posted. ---
**Author:** ![sleestak](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/919ad9/32.png) [@sleestak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sleestak)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/127 "2009-06-07T00:29:06Z")
> [@gonzomax](#): > > [http://www.alternet.org/environment/134977/startling\_revelations\_about\_three\_mile\_island\_disaster\_raise\_doubts\_over\_nuke\_safety/](http://www.alternet.org/environment/134977/startling_revelations_about_three_mile_island_disaster_raise_doubts_over_nuke_safety/) > Heres an article that says 3 Mi. Island was not contained. That there was a cover up and people got sick and died. > It is not as safe as they are trying to make you think. There are billions of dollars to be made building and running them. I’m running that article by my Dad to get his view. My guess is that he is going to call B.S. Why my Dad? Well, he was at TMI the next day. He ran a nuclear reactor safety division for ~ 20 years. He got a call from the Vice President when this happened telling him to get on a plane and get out there. If there was a cover up, he’d know. He would also not stand for it. Side note, the link that **E-Sabbath** posted, my Dad ran that test. He got a call from, IIRC, a Japanese company asking what would happen if a plane hit a containment dome. Dad bought the F-4, got the guys who ran the rocket sled at Sandia to run the plane into the wall at ~ 580 (IIRC). The wall was 12 foot thick and the deepest dent was ~ 3.5 inches. My dad gave me a set of 8x10’s a couple months after the test\*. Slee - My girlfriend made my Dad a t-shirt with a pic of the F-4 hitting a wall. It has the comment ‘Some people work for a living. I smash things’. I love that shirt. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/128 "2009-06-07T00:35:47Z")
> [@Una\_Persson](#): > > Actually, the relevant portion of your cite says this: > > Since I haven’t seen the 475,000 deaths and 1,000,000 cancers (FTR, when Cecil and I looked at it in some detail ([The China (Flats) Syndrome: Was there a reactor meltdown in Southern California? - The Straight Dope](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2690/the-china-flats-syndrome)) we found at most 4,000 deaths over time), can we also assume that the $200 billion number you’re introducing to the discussion is just as bogus? > > I didn’t say it wasn’t a lot, but it’s $50 billion in 21st Century dollars, versus $132 million in 20th Century dollars. It’s not $132 billion. My point is if one is going to sloppily post cites that are off by 3 orders of magnitude, then how does that help finding the facts? > > And to sort of address your other points, you’ll have a hard time finding someone who wants more wind generation and more solar than I. I think nuclear, wind, biomass, and solar are four pillars of a solid energy future. Dr. Gofman is a real chemist who put his reputation behind his estimates. Calling his estimates bogus just off the cuff must be a little embarrassing for a scientist and newspaper columnist who both do not put real names and reputations behind their estimates. That is not to say that what you and Cecil say is not without merit, particularly in your field of expertise when you have done the work, but it carries the weight of a newspaper column, which is slightly above my post, ignorant as that is. With Hanford an agreed $50 billion (you did agree on that, didn’t you?) you dismiss the possibility of Chernobyl being $200 billion over the long term all future medical costs, cleaning costs, early deaths and lost wages as bogus? The 4000 deaths you admit at a value of $10 million each (not unrealistic in the US in the tort system) would come to $40 billion. You conveniently assume no one has a shortened life expectancy or medical costs, when entire swaths of Europe and Asia were exposed to unsafe levels of radiation, and you assume that there is zero cost for the 2 billion exposed people in the northern hemisphere (again, just refusing to pay people in the Southern Hemisphere? That is quite an assumption. If you had to put an ad in the newspaper saying that you would be exposed to a level of radiation that was given off by Chernobyl as a job and that it might, or might not affect your health and/or life expectancy, and setting up different zones and pay grades to simulate dosage levels at distances from the disaster in various fallout zones, what would be a fair price to pay to for this job? An average of $1000 bucks each? But remember, it is forced labor, so up it. The increased dosage has a cost to everybody for the rest of their lives, and that cost needs to be estimated. People and governments will have to pay that cost. $200 billion seems on the low side. The only modern disasters comparable to Chernobyl are the 2004 Earthquake, Rwandan genocide and the war in Iraq (for the Iraqis, our losses pale in comparison). We have not done a thorough US type study on Chernobyl and never will. Three Mile Island is trivial in comparison, with the damage being monetary and emotional fright in extent. Put another 1000 nuclear plants with a total of 2 to 4 terawatts of capacity in place and any risk manager will tell you that you will have more serious accidents. Remember that in the future will will need a lot more than 2 to 4 terawatts and you can see where that goes. While I enjoy Cecil’s columns, they are just that: newspaper columns. So is Dear Abby and Savage Love. Bogus on all estimates from us anonymous cowards. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/129 "2009-06-07T01:16:47Z")
> [@gonzomax](#): > > [Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi_Nuclear_Generating_Station) This is the beauty they built near me. It has gobbled up tax dollars and never delivered full capacity. It has been shut down at a cost of 132 billion dollars. Yes indeed ,it is proven technology. It is just Luddites who dare to question the absolute safety of nuke plants. **gonzo** , your post is wrong and your citation proves it wrong. I am not sure why you continue to post nonsense, but you need to knock it off. According to the link, the very old unit 1 suffered a breakdown that cost $132M (three decades ago), and it has since been retired (three decades ago). On the other hand, Unit 2 is currently operational with no indication that it operates at less than full capacity. So in three short lines you posted nonsense that **your own citations disproved**. This is not a matter of “interpretation.” If this keeps up, I am going to have to seriously consider accusations of trolling that have been lodged against you for this sort of thing. ---
**Author:** ![Una\_Persson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/una_persson/32/346_2.png) [@Una\_Persson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Una_Persson)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/130 "2009-06-07T01:28:38Z")
> [@The\_Second\_Stone](#): > > Dr. Gofman is a real chemist who put his reputation behind his estimates. Calling his estimates bogus just off the cuff must be a little embarrassing for a scientist and newspaper columnist who both do not put real names and reputations behind their estimates. So your argument is, in effect, “until you give us your IRL name, Una, your information is devalued?” And “Cecil isn’t so great because we don’t have his real name?” _Really,_ now. (And “off the cuff” is demonstrably false, since I posted that they had been researched by me and Cecil prior.) One source we looked at was the International Atomic Energy Agency, who researched and wrote about the situation here: [http://www.iaea.or.at/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf](http://www.iaea.or.at/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf) See pages 15-16 specifically. If you want to see highlights of the findings, and the findings of other groups who studied the issue, you can refer to the World Health Organization page here: [http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html](http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html) I’d ask you to explain why your chemist is right and the estimates from the IAEA are wrong IYO, but what’s the point? Clearly my information is derated because I “hide” behind my pen name, and to tell the truth I’m no longer spending any time on this if that’s the basis we’re on. If that bothers you, then that’s unfortunate. ---
**Author:** ![E-Sabbath](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e19adc/32.png) [@E-Sabbath](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-Sabbath)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/131 "2009-06-07T01:36:26Z")
> [@sleestak](#): > > Side note, the link that **E-Sabbath** posted, my Dad ran that test. He got a call from, IIRC, a Japanese company asking what would happen if a plane hit a containment dome. I demand stories! I demand stories! Correct me if I’m wrong, but if someone plowed a 747 into the dome, the fuselage, LARGELY, wouldn’t matter, but the engines would. I _think_ the military construction of the F-4 would more or less equal a 747 engine hitting, the F-4 was a really, really solid plane. Yes/no/maybe? I’d like your/his opinion of a larger plane hitting. Second Stone, Una’s name may not be known, but her expertise in this field is known and clearly apparent to us. To match her arguments, you’re going to have to do better than that. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/132 "2009-06-07T03:31:37Z")
> [@Una\_Persson](#): > > So your argument is, in effect, “until you give us your IRL name, Una, your information is devalued?” And “Cecil isn’t so great because we don’t have his real name?” _Really,_ now. > > (And “off the cuff” is demonstrably false, since I posted that they had been researched by me and Cecil prior.) > > One source we looked at was the International Atomic Energy Agency, who researched and wrote about the situation here: [http://www.iaea.or.at/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf](http://www.iaea.or.at/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf) See pages 15-16 specifically. If you want to see highlights of the findings, and the findings of other groups who studied the issue, you can refer to the World Health Organization page here: [http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html](http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html) > > I’d ask you to explain why your chemist is right and the estimates from the IAEA are wrong IYO, but what’s the point? Clearly my information is derated because I “hide” behind my pen name, and to tell the truth I’m no longer spending any time on this if that’s the basis we’re on. If that bothers you, then that’s unfortunate. No, you miss the point. I am not interested in your name, nor Cecil’s current beard. It is utter irrelevant and beside the point to what happened at Chernobyl. Your analysis consisted of calling a chemists’ report “bogus” and referring to the reports of others. The report states: > [@](#): > > It is impossible to assess reliably, with any > precision, numbers of fatal cancers caused > by radiation exposure due to Chernobyl > accident. Further, radiation-induced cancers > are at present indistinguishable from those > due to other causes. And they go on to make guesses anyway. But for the reasons they state, the lead sentence, which is quoted, is best: “it is impossible to assess reliably”. That is, with any degree of certainty. We don’t know how much it will contribute to future ill health. Nice of you to know precisely that the damage is no more than 4,000 dead, which _I call bogus_ on. It is just as internet anonymously cowardly ignorant as your calling bogus on someone who has put his name on something. The entire northern hemisphere received many times the normal dosage of radiation. We will never know how many people have and will have ill health from than over the lifetimes of the survivors, which are all of us. You concede a $50 billion cost to Hanford, yet call bogus on 4 times that for Chernobyl? Or are you just side stepping that still? This is not a scientific report with a scientific margin of error from a peer reviewed journal. It is a political statement from political bodies that contains a complete disclaimer of any scientific value in the topic sentence. ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/133 "2009-06-07T03:36:34Z")
I don’t think Chernobyl is a particularly relevant comparison. You need at least a dozen things in terms of design, operating procedure, etc. to go wrong that would almost certainly never happen in a US plant. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/134 "2009-06-07T03:40:24Z")
> [@E-Sabbath](#): > > Second Stone, Una’s name may not be known, but her expertise in this field is known and clearly apparent to us. To match her arguments, you’re going to have to do better than that. I don’t know her name, and don’t care. That’s not the point. She is not an epidemiologist (or is she, in which case, she can point us to her own studies on Chernobyl) and doesn’t know more about Chernobyl than is published and available to all of us. She misreads the report she cites, which states that it is impossible to reliably state the damages as the most important sentence that qualifies the speculation that follows. The fact is, the information simply is not available and the initial radiation fallout was enormous and access for independent investigation is unavailable. But we still have the completely alarming readings from the time it happened. You guys can claim all the expertise and niceness for Una and Cecil that you want to, and I won’t dispute either. But an expert without the data is somebody spurting about X, the unknown. It might as well be any of us, and in this thread, it is all of us. Any expert is only as good as their access to the data, and no good thorough independent investigation has been conducted and the report referenced says as much. Would I want to live within the exclusion zone with that information? No, absolutely not. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/135 "2009-06-07T04:01:24Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > I don’t think Chernobyl is a particularly relevant comparison. You need at least a dozen things in terms of design, operating procedure, etc. to go wrong that would almost certainly never happen in a US plant. I’m sure that if we could search the Soviet and Russian archives we would find similar statements about Chernobyl’s design. We’ve heard such about the Pebble Bed, yet the experimental version of that had a malfunction, and I think that the Pebble Bed is the best bet. Yet it did malfunction. If I know anything about the physical laws of the universe, it is that the unexpected will happen and fuck up your whole existence eventually. A complicated machine will tend toward disorder just like the rest of the universe. A thousand machines, of varying designs will multiply that factor. Chernobyl could have been much worse, it could have happened to all the reactors in the facility as people fled. I’ve mentioned the wind farms around my home, the refineries and the chemical plants. Of course, being in the East Bay, we cannot help these past few weeks noticing NIF, the National Ignition Facility, which will help us understand fusion. It is a baby brother to the recently opened CERN Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most complicated machine, and sold to the public as teaching us how to do fusion for energy. (It’s real purpose is to verify fusion bomb technology, and it will help us with understanding fusion, but it has nothing to do with fusion energy.) We already have fusion energy: the sun. In order to harvest fusion energy, which we currently do more or less directly through wind and solar, we have to be at an almost safe distance of 1 AU. Yes, there will be toppled towers and heavy metals leaching from mining, but between fusion (wind and solar) and gravity (tidal generators) all of our future energy needs can and will be met. I don’t think that the SDMB public sees wind farms going up as fast as I do in my neighborhood. The Altamont Pass had thousands of 10kw windmills dating back to the 70s. The smallest windmills put up in recent years are .5MW and those old crappy tax shelter windmills are giving their prime spots slowly to the newer ones, which at 1 to 3 million and up, are not left unrepaired. I see the ones in Solano on a daily basis, and they are turning at about a dozen RPM. All of them. All the time. (It is prime wind real estate.) Much of the mid-West is suitable for this and the landowners willing and anxious to add wind royalties to their farms and still use most of the farms. There is not the obstructionism for windmills that there is for nuclear, unless you have a million dollar ocean view. I remember reading every report on Diablo Canyon back when I was a shareholder. We were going to make a lot of money. It was a nuclear fortress and the hippy protesters didn’t know squat. Well it turned out the hippies were right. The cost was one order of magnitude higher and it wasn’t due to the hippy protesters. There were systemic welding problems. Some fool did something like turn the plumbing blue prints upside down. Eventually the engineers were fired and Bechtel brought it and one screw up after another fixed. The point being that in a zero error environment errors were made on a daily basis when we were assured nothing could go wrong. But if you get thousands of engineers and construction workers and operators and employees working together they will make errors that make Homer Simpson look on the ball, and they will not know that they have made errors. How bad can that spiral out of control? “It is impossible to reliably” assess that scenario. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/136 "2009-06-07T04:36:00Z")
“Dr. Gofman is a real chemist who put his reputation behind his estimates…” … well what is it about chemists? [Linus Pauling](http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.html) was a chemist too. Won two Nobel prizes no less. And he was still full of shit about Vitamin C. Maybe Dr. Gofman had a hero? > [@Dr. Goffman](#): > > … any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder. Oookay. As to the report on Cherbnobyl - indeed they state that an increase of a few thousand cancer deaths might be hard to detect but > [@](#): > > So far, epidemiological studies of residents of contaminated areas in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine have not provided clear and convincing evidence for a radiation-induced increase in general population mortality, and in particular, for fatalities caused by leukaemia, solid cancers (other than thyroid cancer), and non-cancer diseases. Let’s make this very clear for you: other than for thyroid cancer (which had a 99% cure rate) there is no evidence for an increase in mortality. The nature of the studies do not allow one to conclude that _no_ increase exists, only that there is no evidence for any - a few thousand extra cancer cases would be below the radar and cannot be ruled out - but “1,000,000 cancers and 475,000 deaths”, as predicted by your Dr. Gofman, would have been seen. I wouldn’t want a Cherbnobyl in my backyard but I’d rather have a modern nuclear plant in my neighborhood than a dirty coal plant anyway. I wouldn’t want to live in Belarus, Russia, or the Ukraine, but not because of radiation risks! And overall coal plants have caused far more illness (warning: pdf) than nuclear plants including an assumption of a few thousand deaths undetected from Cherbnobyl. > [@](#): > > We estimate that between roughly 6000 and 10,700 annual deaths from heart ailments, respiratory disease and lung cancer can be attributed to the 88 coalfired power plants and companies receiving public international financing. … Air pollution from coal-fired power plants is also associated with other health outcomes, including infant deaths, asthma and other lung diseases. I’d be all for a massive nuclear build-out replacing older coal plants if I thought it was the cost-effective and realistic way to go. The hysteria over safety is unfounded. ---
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 5:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/137 "2009-06-07T05:02:29Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > I don’t think anyone has a good handle on the lifecycle cost for production PBMR type reactors at this point, as a significant portion of the cost is the production of the pebble-ized fuel elements themselves. So far, no large scale production of fuel elements has been done, and the practical research designs so far have had significant problems with thermal stress and contamination of fuel elements, so the bugs are far from worked out. PBR- and PBMR-type reactors offer the potential for scalable, economic, and practically failsafe designs, but they also have some significant drawbacks. These include the requirement for very tight control on the mechanical properties and porosity of the pyrolytic graphite sheath and the protective silicon carbide capsule, initial annealing of the graphite to prevent the accumulation of defects from the Wigner effect, the use of very high pressure high temperature helium as a coolant, significant lead-lag feedback in control, the necessity to mechanical cycle the fuel elements through the system to maintain efficiency, and the difficulty of recovering and reprocessing encapsulated fuel for future use which results in a once-through uranium fuel cycle. The last isn’t a significant issue currently because it is more economical and safer to process virgin fuel material than to reprocess used fuel for reuse in commercial reactors, but greater dependence upon uranium ore for power generation may change that balance and recovery of fuel elements for reprocessing or fuel breeding may become viable and necessary in the future. > > The Integral Fast Reactor is probably the best move toward a failsafe fuel breeding reactor but still has significant hazard issues and requires technological development to demonstrate the viability of the fuel cycle. Currently, there is no fiscal justification for it, and opposition to a liquid metal cooled reactor is very strong owing to the fire in Chernobyl #4 and other accidents and problems. It is unlikely any full scale development could be politically approved regardless of whether the technical issues and risks could be adequately addressed. > > How about you just man up and admit that you were wrong? Or is your ego too big to discuss anything in a rational fashion? > > Stranger No ego involved. I typed b instead of m. I did it, I confess. ---
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/138 "2009-06-07T05:14:42Z")
When you compare coal plants and nuke plants, there is one comparison we neglected. The same people ,or the same type people will be building and running them. They are perfectly willing to run dirty plants, fight regulation with all the political power they can buy, and to cut training and maintenance. They have shown that for years. Coal plants could be run a lot cleaner. The politicians they own have made it possible for them to get away with running ugly. What makes you think the Nukes are any better. There is a long list of fines and shut downs for the same reason. Like health care, if you leave huge profits in it, it will become distorted and serve the builders and owners before it serves the people. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 6:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/139 "2009-06-07T06:21:56Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > “Dr. Gofman is a real chemist who put his reputation behind his estimates…” … well what is it about chemists? [Linus Pauling](http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.html) was a chemist too. Won two Nobel prizes no less. And he was still full of shit about Vitamin C. Maybe Dr. Gofman had a hero? > Oookay. > > As to the report on Cherbnobyl - indeed they state that an increase of a few thousand cancer deaths might be hard to detect butLet’s make this very clear for you: other than for thyroid cancer (which had a 99% cure rate) there is no evidence for an increase in mortality. The nature of the studies do not allow one to conclude that _no_ increase exists, only that there is no evidence for any - a few thousand extra cancer cases would be below the radar and cannot be ruled out - but “1,000,000 cancers and 475,000 deaths”, as predicted by your Dr. Gofman, would have been seen. > > I wouldn’t want a Cherbnobyl in my backyard but I’d rather have a modern nuclear plant in my neighborhood than a dirty coal plant anyway. I wouldn’t want to live in Belarus, Russia, or the Ukraine, but not because of radiation risks! And overall coal plants have caused far more illness (warning: pdf) than nuclear plants including an assumption of a few thousand deaths undetected from Cherbnobyl. > > I’d be all for a massive nuclear build-out replacing older coal plants if I thought it was the cost-effective and realistic way to go. The hysteria over safety is unfounded. Oooh, and Fritz Haber was a chemist too? Your point being that a chemist is completely unqualified to talk about the dangers of a nuclear reaction gone awry? Pauling put his reputation out there and took massive doses of vitamin C. This is relevant to what with respect to the dangers out hot uranium spread all over the northern hemisphere how? And I was supporting coal as a power source when? Coal is dirty, toxic, mountain range destroying and non-renewable. It’s advantage is that we have enough of it. ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 10:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880/140 "2009-06-07T10:19:34Z")
> [@The\_Second\_Stone](#): > > I’m sure that if we could search the Soviet and Russian archives we would find similar statements about Chernobyl’s design. Yeah, well, they’d be wrong then. The USSR was a brutal regime that didn’t care much about its people. They didn’t go to great lengths and expense to make everything safe to protect people - do you think their equivelant of OSHA made their working environments half as safe as ours? They built plants without some very basic safety features (like containment vessels) which wouldn’t fly in the west. Really, it was a ridiculous comedy of errors by incompetant asshats that lead to the incident. First, it was a crappy reactor design. Light (normal) water was used as both a neutron moderator and absorber and a coolant. If you start having a problem that affects your coolant temperature dramatically - like it turns more or less of the water to steam than you expect - then you can get a runaway reaction when the temperature problem causes the water to be in the wrong steam balance, which in turn reduces the effectiveness of your moderator/absorber, which in turn makes the reaction even more out of whack, and it becomes a positive feedback loop. There were other stupid design features, like control rods that moved through the moderating water - so that when you insert control rods it actually displaces coolant and temporarily makes any problem worse. And the reactor design meant that it needed cooling even when it was shut down. Oh, and the reactor roof was made with flammable materials. They were doing the test of an emergency cooling system (a way to keep the pumps flowing in the event that internal and external power was lost) - except that this system didn’t work and the people who ran the plant knew it. They forged documents saying it did work because, apparently, hey, it’s the USSR, who gives a fuck. They decided to do this experiment at the worst possible time - at the end of the fuel cycle for that reactor. A time when the radioactive heat generation of an inactive reactor would be at its highest. So they had an outside come in in the morning to do the experiment. But some other power plant in the area had some problems, so the grid couldn’t spare the Chernobyl plant going offline - so they delayed the experiment until around midnight. But now the night shift is there and they haven’t been briefed on the experiment. None of them know wtf is going on - and the guy in charge was basically wet behind the ears. The experiment team that was brought in to test the cooling equipment is now running after a long day of no sleep. They decide for somereason that they’re going to do the experiment now instead of waiting until the morning. From a Soviet scientist after the incident: > [@Valeri Legasov](#): > > I have in my safe a transcript of the operators’ telephone conversations on the eve of the accident. Reading the transcript makes one’s flesh creep. One operator rings another and asks: What shall I do? In the programme there are instructions of what to do, and then a lot of things are crossed out. His interlocutor thought for a while and then replied: Follow the crossed out instructions. Fantastic! What could go wrong? So they begin the experiment and they have to get the reactor to a reduced power state. Woops - for some reason the new guy running the night shift inserts the control rods too far, almost shutting down the reactor. When the power level gets that low, something called Xenon poisoning happens as the Xenon absorbs a lot of neutrons. Apparently the people running the place weren’t versed well in nuclear physics and didn’t know what that was. So they thought something must be wrong with the control mechanisms for the power to be that low - so in response they yanked out the control rods not only beyond where they should, but beyond the point where control rods should ever be removed for any reason. The automatic safety system wouldn’t even let them do that, so they disabled it. But because of the xenon poisoning and because they were using water pumps to cool it than they should’ve given the load, the reaction still wasn’t as high as they were aiming for. So they removed the control rods completely. Now only the water was moderating the reaction. But they didn’t have the correct amount of water cooling the thing and not enough of it was turning to steam - which would’ve triggered a safety system to halt the abnormal operation, except they said “fuck it!” and disabled that one too. The reaction is only being controlled at this point by excess water (coolant/absorber) and xenon poisoning. So now, with the night staff that has no idea what’s going on, the staff conducting the experiment being dead tired, the reactor operating abnormally due to several factors, and several safety systems disabled, they now decide to continue with their test of a safety system that has failed before and that the plant operators knew probably wouldn’t work. What could go wrong? So they shut down the steam turbines as part of the test. The water flow decreased, which decreased the amount of neutrons being absorbed, which leads to a hotter reaction, which leads to more water turning to steam, and steam absorbs fewer neutrons than liquid water. The reaction gets hot enough that xenon poisoning isn’t a big factor and as it gets hotter and hotter it boils away more of its coolant and absorber. Now things are getting nuts so they hit their last ditch “oh shit” button to reinsert the control rods. Except it takes a few seconds for the rods to reseat - and due to stupid design, the rods actually displace the coolant as they travel to the reactor. This actually speeds up the runaway reaction to the point where the steam pressure builds up enough to make the whole thing explode. This makes some of the half-inserted control rods break apart.The graphite and various structures catch on fire, and we’ve got a runaway reaction with massive steam explosions. There’s no containment vessel (a big concrete dome, basically) like we put in western reactors because it’s the USSR and again, who gives a fuck, so the explosion just launches material into the atmosphere. It’s such a stunning series of stupid decisions and design flaws that it’s hard to believe it ever happened, even as somewhere as indifferent and incompetant as the USSR. This scenario would not go down in the west - the designs are better to prevent this from even happening, the people who run our plants are far more competant and educated, and our nuclear regulatory bodies are actually fairly competant. > [@](#): > > We’ve heard such about the Pebble Bed, yet the experimental version of that had a malfunction, and I think that the Pebble Bed is the best bet. Yet it did malfunction. I’m not sure what malfunction you’re referring to. No one said pebble bed reactors could not have any sort of flaw or malfunction under any circumstances - only that they couldn’t melt down by design. I assume this malfunction you refer to wasn’t a meltdown. > [@](#): > > If I know anything about the physical laws of the universe, it is that the unexpected will happen and fuck up your whole existence eventually. The physical laws of the universe are pretty consistent. It tends not to throw monkey wrenches at you. Design and operation can be incompetant - but the west has a pretty damn good record. Even the supposed horror of three mile island - apparently a near worst case scenario in the west - didn’t actually hurt anyone. What a disaster! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880.md?page=6) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-and-improved-nuclear-plants-may-cost-more-than-expected/498880.md?page=8)