Well right now nuclear power is subsidized. According to this article it gets
The first part just gives them what the renewables get and seems fair to me, but the second does seem to be an unfair advantage.
But please explain what you’d be asking for. A law preventing public groups against nuclear from bringing up suits? Assurances in advance of the specific facts of the individual case of how the governmental agencies would rule? I do not quite see what mechanism could be put in place that would prevent the lawsuits.
Again, I am very open to nuclear, and to coal (whether the reduction is by carbon sequestration or by diverting exhaust to bioreactors that grow algae for biodiesel and/or cofiring biomass), or solar, or whatever combination of a variety of potential energy sources may exist. I do not know which will be the best choices.
Yeah?
The maximum allowable concentration of Uranium allowed in groundwater is 30µg/L, and that’s for an element with a 4+ Billion year half-life. What’s the maximum allowable concentration of Plutonium?
IIRC it isnt that long time wise before high level nuclear waste isnt anymore radioactive than the ORE that was dug out of the ground in the first place.
I forget the number of years. Anybody else here recall it?
Mother Nature has spread a butt load of that ore in all kinds of suboptimum locations all over planet Earth.
We will never produce that much waste. And I think we can probably come up with some slightly better long term places to put the stuff than mother nature did.
How do you think all that uranium got into our seawater in the first place?
But I suspect that value has little to due with the fact that uranium is very mildly radioactive, but the fact that is a heavy metal.
Solar power, wind power and others will generate a fair share of heavy metal waste as well. You gonna worry about keeping that sealed somewhere for a 100,000 years as well?
Oh wait, that stuff’s deadly FOREVER. Better get better tupperware.
Uranium concentration in public wells was unregulated until 2003. The 2003 EPA U limits were chosen based on the existing normal/natural levels in areas where they are >MDA, not necessarily the health risks associated with the chosen limits.
You’d do better to point at the combined Radium 226/228 (halflife 1602/5.75 years) of 5ppb… though Ra226/228 are decay products of U238/Th232. Aggregate beta/gamma is 4mrem/yr (which is about 50ppb excluding K40) and aggregate alpha (U/Rn excluded) is 15ppb.
Lead and Arsenic, for comparison, are 10ppb and 15ppb. Copper is 1300ppb.
Renewables are getting subsidies orders of magnitude greater than what nuclear gets. Obama is spending billions on them. There are all kinds of tax breaks and subsidies and incentives available. Farmers are subsidized to grow biofuel. Everyone knows that without these subsidies alternative energies would currently not be able to compete even remotely with nuclear or coal or natural gas.
There are a few things that have been proposed. One is to lift the Presidential order preventing reprocessing, signed into law by Carter. Another is to set regulations that give nuclear plants more financial stability. For example, if a nuclear reactor is approved, then others of identical design should get a highly streamlined approval process. Another is to make a ruling that after an initial time suitable for public review and complaint, a license is granted, and once that license is granted it cannot be revoked unless there are extenuating circumstances.
Another would be to recognize that nuclear competes against an externality - coal and gas plants are free to pollute the atmosphere, but nuclear must pay to store its own waste. A carbon tax would level the playing field and make nuclear much more attractive.
Yeah, he’s big on the whole ‘It’s all the evil corporations and their Republican flunkies’ theme. He never seems to want to look at the real issues, but instead wants to just make assertions about the subject. He’s convinced that CO2 Scrubbing and carbon sequestration were available under Clinton and that it was Bush who killed the whole thing, and no amount of logic or reason is going to divert him on this subject. It doesn’t matter that no one ELSE has put in place large scale carbon scrubbers or carbon sequestration either…wouldn’t want such facts to get in the way of a good argument.
Thank you for your take on this. It’s always great to get the thoughts from someone who is actually out there working in the real world on this kind of thing. From my own reading I seem to recall capital costs on the order of $250 million - several billion per plant in initial costs and power generation costs up to 50% higher…but as you said, no one has actually put any of this together into production (IIRC there is a test plant on-stream in Germany, but no idea how it’s doing…haven’t kept up lately with all the travel I’ve been going on). I didn’t realize that testing had gotten to the point where they were actually able to test how much leakage there was from carbon sequestration though…that’s definitely news to me.
In addition to what Sam posted, I would like to see the government protect investors from the excessive preliminary legal burden. The fear and loathing of nuclear is an externality that I think government needs to help with. Maybe a government program that guarantees loans during the planning and approval stages, taking the burden of the frozen capital during legal challenges off the investors and banks. I would also like some federal money put into basic research, design studies, and training programs. The field has stagnated due to the pressure against it. If we had been building the plants for the last 25 years, instead of practically banning them, we would have better designs and trained engineers and operators that are currently seriously lacking.
Basic principles, material design and affects of aging, could all carry over. I am not sure how much basic research the Navy is doing, but there was some in the areas of fuel design and whatnot as of 10 years ago when I left. For overall plant design, I think there isn’t as much that carries over. Naval plants are small and do not need to be cost efficient.
As for training, I know that the civilian plants try to scoop up all the Navy trained people they can, but the Navy can only train so many, and again the difference between is pretty big. We need operators and engineers trained on modern plants (which the US does not have yet) and large scale power distribution systems.
As for R&D nuclear certainly gets less now than it did in its emerging days. Even so that same nuclear industry mouthpiece states
and the lion’s share of “renewables” is not for electricity generation but for biofuels.
The only way to justify your claim of renewables getting “orders of magnitude greater than nuclear” is to lump all funding for a renewable source together (R&D along with production tax credits) and divide that by amount of energy currently produced. Do that and you can come up with this
But you really got to twist hard to put R&D in an emerging technology in the same basket as subsidies for production and to compare on a per megawatthour basis.
It takes a lot of spin to call your claim anywhere close to accurate.
As far as streamlining the approval process for plants of similar design, and a few others of your wish list - I could certainly support those. Reprocessing? That is a different discussion that I know too little about to engage in intelligently. I have been led to believe that it opens up greater potential for dangerous materials to spread but could not debate the point myself.
Strassia your proposal of loan guarantees seems to be the unfair advantage that I think nuclear does not deserve and which puts all the risk for the investment on the public unfairly. And as referenced above nuclear still gets a heap of R&D monies from the Feds even though it is a fairly mature technology at this point.
What I am thinking of is a program that would mitigate the risk of investors putting capital into a proposed nuclear plant that takes a decade longer to break ground and then another decade longer to build because of lawsuits and injunctions. The goal is not to give nuclear an advantage, but to mitigate a disadvantage. This should be a short term program as safer and newer designs go into production, hopefully unjustified fears will subside.
But Jonathan the cost of that capital is the cost of nuclear. There was a play to get $50 billion in loan guarantees for new nuclear in the stimulus package that was ripped out at the end. In contrast all of renewables, biofuels, and electric-power transmission facilities got a total of only $6 billion in loan guarantees. They are still there but obviously are smaller. (To be fair electric-power transmission also got some direct spending as well.)
Putting the risk of that investment onto the public’s back while keeping all the potential gain in the pockets of the utilities is both an unfair competitive advantage and a bad deal for the rest of us.
Putting all of the risk would be. But what if we assumed the risk associated with the extra fear the public at large, and anti-nuclear activists in particular, put on the industry. I only want the guarantee for to offset other external factors that unfairly discriminate against nuclear.
Let’s say we were talking about cars. You are looking at a Prius and Focus. The cost of the Prius is higher, but you save money with gas and maintenance. It is simple to compare costs, benefits, features, etc. But what if when you looked at reviews you saw that every time someone bought a Prius there were protesters that would block you from leaving the lot, after you paid for it. So now your choice is changed because people who hate Priuses are intentionally making the cost of them higher to prevent people from buying them. Then they can use the fact that few people are buying them as further justification for their protests, after all if they were safe, there would be more on the road. If I felt that the government should have an interest in the best car being on the road, I would not object to the government offsetting the effect of the protesters.
What I want is the government pushing nuclear power, but what I will settle for is an equal the playing field. I don’t think preventing people from protesting or tying up the process in the courts would work very well. And, some nuclear plans may need lawsuits, if costs are cut, or the plan is flawed. I think for the medium term, nuclear fission is going to be necessary for world energy production and the U.S. specifically if we are going to reduce emissions. At a minimum, I want the government to help this happen by removing the extra risk that nuclear investors assume because of irrational fear of the technology, not the risk of building too much plant for the market, or picking a design that is too expensive to maintain, only the risk of anti-nuclear sentiment delaying or stopping the plant.
If you think nuclear is mature in the sense of whats possible vs what has been done so far, you dont know diddly about nuclear.
AND
WHO do you think is taking ALL the risk associated RIGHT NOW by all those fossil fuel plants spewing out CO2?
Not to mention all the OTHER non CO2 crap they are spewing out or the waste they are creating.
WHO do you think is footing military/economic bill for insuring the USA (and the rest of the world) has access to a fairly stable supply (and most of) of the non-coal fossil fuels?
If all the external costs of fossil fuels were tallied up, nuclear would look so bright someone might need shades.
My biggest objections to nuclear power are safety and waste. I know that many (perhaps most) nuke plants are designed and operated safely, but the potential for disaster just isn’t the same as with solar or wind. What’s the worst that could happen if a nuke plant breaks down (I suspect that it could be worse than Chernobyl).
OTOH, what’s the worst thing that happens if a solar panel or a wind turbine breaks down? Glass on the roof? A tower falls over?
Also, we don’t want your waste here in Nevada. The casks designed to hold the waste are only good for 100 years, and they are not infallible.
(bolding mine)
If the waste isn’t harmful, store it where it was generated. If it is harmful, let’s not produce any more of it.
If you think it’s such a trivial thing to store thousands and thousands of casks of nuclear waste, and change them into new casks safely every hundred years or so, then please petition the government to store it in your backyard. We don’t want it in ours.
IMO the people who produce the waste should store and manage it.
Chernobyl required like 10 different things to happen, all of which would be extremely unlikely or impossible in a US plant. The odds of an accident with a hazard to the general area of a plant are very low.
I have to wonder - if someone conducted a poll asking people if they’d be okay with a plant releasing X amount of radioactive material, X amount of Co2, and X amount of other pollutants right into the atmosphere, they might say “omg no!” - but that’s what coal plants do. People are just ignorant, or uncaring about the waste.
But if you have nuclear - which produces no CO2, and the rest of its wastes are inherently in a caputable, storable form - people freak out because… I don’t know - 50s movies about giant radioactive ants?
People say “screw nuclear, there’s waste!” as if the current methods we use to generate power were waste free. Those things generate far more waste, and they RELEASE THAT WASTE DIRECTLY INTO THE ATMOSPHERE.
The whole thing is nuts. Like I mentioned upthread - just have nuclear plants dump their waste directly into the atmosphere so we don’t have to have these discussions on where to store it, and people might notice less, as absurd as it sounds.
Speak for yourself. I’m from Vegas, and assuming using Yucca mountain for storage is practical I’m all for it. Hell, store it in my closet. Our society is way too loaded with NIMBYism, everyone wants to benefit from everything but not suffer the cost. And in this case - the cost isn’t even high - it’s vague scares about OMG RADIATION AND STUFF.
