Oh sure. But you linked to a list of 56 incidents. Since the beginning of this decade there have been 4, totaling to over $700 million in damages. Sure, the latest involved a part of a generator falling when it was being moved, killing one and injuring two. Were procedures lax? I don’t know. I’m certainly not happy when “Deteriorating underground pipes from the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant leak radioactive tritium into groundwater supplies.” Or even when, “Unusual Incident reported at Byron Nuclear Generating Station. Loss of off-site power caused unit 2 to run a shut down cycle and release tritium steam into the atmosphere”. I’m not panicking, but I’m not all rosy either.
I haven’t exactly shown a systematic cost benefit analysis here. I’m just saying I’m skeptical of those who say the industry is too safe and over-regulated. World wide, we have a 50-50 chance of another big nuclear accident by 2050. Though that study doesn’t focus on the US. At any rate we need to calmly improve our nuclear disaster planning; ignoring a problem won’t make it go away.
I would need to see how much radioactivity was released, and compare that to the amount of radioactivity released by any of the alternatives, like coal plants, or the toxic chemical wastes produced by the solar industry, before we can evaluate the relative risk of these incidents.
We need to compare apples to oranges. Your cite says -
It would be interesting to apply the same metric to other industries. Given that there are 100-150 deaths a year in California alone from installing solar panels on rooftops, I doubt that the metric is going to show anything different from almost all other comparisons, in which nuclear comes out significantly ahead in terms of deaths per kilowatt-hour produced (cite).
Regards,
Shodan
The thing I wish was a chart show amount of radiation released. I bet its lower for most of them than background radiation.
The chance of meltdown increases dramatically every time we renew a license on an old plant rather than build a new one with a better design. It’s been 30 years since a new plant went online due to politics rather than science or economics. The new designs are orders of magnitude better than the old designs. Rather than burying spent fuel we could build new plants that will use the spent fuel and remove 95% of the energy and render the remainder in decades rather than centuries.
True.
But there is a big difference between nuke subsidies and the others. Take away oil subsidies and the US would still produce oil. We know this because foreign countries charge steep royalties for the privilege of pulling the oil out of the ground, and those wells remain economical. Take away solar and wind subsidies, and we’d still have solar and wind. It would be a smaller market, more of a niche market. But it would exist.
No nuclear plant would be constructed anywhere without governmental subsidies. Won’t happen. And I’m not including R&D. I am including liability caps. Nuclear proponents claim that nukes are squeeky clean and ultra safe. Financial analysts know better.
The US has never had a moratorium on nuclear construction. There have been many years when Wall Street was uninterested because it was an expensive form of power. Mostly due to construction costs, construction cost overruns and high interest rates in the late 20th century.
Today interest rates are a lot lower, plant operating costs are down, and the US extended sweeteners last decade in the form of loan guarantees presumably to help cover typical underestimates of construction costs. So now there are 5 plants being built, with cost overruns that I fully anticipated though they went unmentioned by nuke proponents. I support this form of big governmental intervention, because it retains the skill base that we’ll need if we want to ramp up our exposure to this power source. I expect that nukes will remain mediocre, even for next generation power. But I could be wrong. It makes sense to keep our options open. And again, I’d like to increase R&D funding.
That’s the right sort of question. I’d quibble by saying that we need to consider exposure rather than emissions, but apples to apples comparisons are good.
Nukes were billed in the 1960s as clean, safe and cheap. They’ve been relatively clean, even on a global basis. Sure we had a Chernoble disaster, but that pales next to deaths from other fuel sources. It’s sort of like terrorism: it isn’t a big problem in the US relative to auto fatalities, but it gets all the headlines because it’s scary.
Nukes were more dangerous than we thought in 1965 and we’ve had to ramp up regulations accordingly. The US historical track record isn’t bad in terms of human health. True, US plants share some of the weaknesses that were exposed in the Japanese nuclear disaster. But we’re ramping up safety standards in response.
But as I’ve tried to indicate above, I’m concerned with costs. And making vast tracts of land uninhabitable in the Ukraine and Japan was expensive. As was Three Mile Island. As were multiple nuclear incidents over even the past 10 years. As are initial construction costs.
I still say we should have a small nuclear construction program, because a diversified energy portfolio makes a lot of sense. But I’m not starry eyed.
As opposed to a 99.99% chance of a disaster created by CO2. Nuclear power sounds better all the time.
Let me help you out here a little bit.
According to a couple guys at ETH Zurich, the chance of another Chernobyl is 50/50. Of course, these guys redefine what constitutes an accident. Their definition is:
and
So a miner blows up a truck that costs more than 50 grand? That is a nuclear accident.
I looked for the list of accidents but they were not in the paper I found online. Without the list of accidents (the full list, not the top 10 listed in the paper, though I gave it a really quick read and might have missed something) it is impossible to tell what these folks are doing. This study, at first blush, stinks.
I emailed my father and we will see what he thinks. Dad ran a nuclear safety division at a national lab for 20 some odd years and was, until he retired, one of the top two or three guys on the planet when it came to nuclear plant safety. He ran this test(which I always include just because it is cool). He ran that test to test the wall (well, more accurately, to get a baseline so they could interpolate). He was also at TMI.
Slee
Um not by that logic. There are many cheaper methods of cutting CO2 than nuclear power. It’s by no means a slam dunk. In either direction in my view.
Gosh darn it, I linked to MIT Technology Review because I thought it would be a decent source.
That’s a very weird study. For one thing I’d put the odds of another Chernobyl by their cockeyed and bogus definition at a lot higher than 50%.
Two things to bear in mind about evaluating the probability for nuclear accidents is the criticality of accidents and the relatiely sparse amount of history we have as an empirical basis to estimate risk. We’ve treated nuclear power generation with great care from the early days because of some of the accidents that were experienced, like the Windscale fire; we’ve been very aware that nuclear fission can be difficult to control with even slight variations from the theoretical baseline, and so the safety and operating procedures have focused on safety and redundancy to failure to an extent not seen in any other industry except for nuclear weapons and rocket launch systems. In fact, most of the modern risk evaluation methods that are used in the launch industry are actually derived from the nuclear power risk evalution process.
Even with that focus, we’ve had a handful of serious accidents and an unacceptably large number of potentially dangerous incidents and oversights (almost all due to human error), and the problem with a serious accident is that it will likely have enormous cost and the potential to leave significant residual radiation in the environment for decades or centuries, not withstanding the issue of remediating or storing the normal waste products from nuclear fuel processing and ‘spent’ fuel. It is tempting to point to the events like the Windscale fire, the Lucens meltdown, Three Mile Island Reactor 2 meltdown, Chernobyl #4 criticality excursion, and the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns, and point out that off them, only Chernobyl resulted in any deaths directly, and then conclude that nuclear fission power generation must be safe. It is instructive to note, however, that each of these disasters has been subsequently more serious than the last; and that we’ve actually kind of lucked out on several of them; at TMI, the meltdown of the core advanced further than predicted and was essentially at the outer limit of the protective capsule. Chernobyl was fortunately located in the ass end of the Ukraine with the only nearby habitation being the worker town of Pripyat which could be readily evacuated. Fukushima was the least fortunate but still occurred far enough from any major city not to cause a massive disruption, but many people will not be able to return to their homes even after cleanup of the tsunami damage, and there are serious questions about how much radiation is leaking and the impact on the fishing industry in the area; every time the government renders an estimate of the leakage, they then have to come back and revise it upward, so I don’t think we’ve seen the end to either the estimate of hazard or final cost of remediation, which is already at multiples of the expected economic value of the plant over its intended operational lifetime. Of course, fossil fuels pose the known hazard which we’ve come to recognize despite the best efforts of the American Enterprize Institute and the Heritage Foundation (among other fronts for the petrochemical and coal industries), and the potential effects are global in nature, reaching far beyond what any single worst case nuclear accident could cause. Nor do we have a ready replacement for all petrochemical and fossil fuel energy generation in the form of renewables without drastically reducing our usage beyond what would be feasible from a conservation standpoint.
So the logical conclusion is that until something better comes along (and it is not clear when nuclear fusion will be a practical source of energy much less anything beyond it) then we need to utilize nuclear fission energy generation into our trick bag as a major source of low carbon energy production. But we cannot be blasé about the risks, hazards, and costs, and especially those associated with the existing nuclear fission technology, which is essentially in the same state it was circa 1975. There are great advances we could and should make in efficiency, safety, and mitigation of hazardous waste to make nuclear fission the least bad solution to transition away from coal and oil. We need to recognize that handwaving and pointing to political opposition does not address the real techincal problems; problems that are soluable (and for which many proposed methods exist) but not just by blythly insisting on building existing Generation III designs as quickly as possible regardless of the hazards, risks, and their own impact on the environment. And we also need to recognize that the future solution for energy sources does not begin and end wiht nuclear fission; we still need transportation fuels, and we still have to address the new geopolitics that will arise when nations are focused on the unevenly distrubuted resources of uranium instead of petroleum.
In short, we don’t need a singular solution; we need a long term plan based upon a comprehensive and coherent energy policy. Unfortunately, when someone in authority starts talking about long term diversified planning, they are shouted down by pundits on all sides, each screaming for their favored solution to all problems, all insisting that we don’t have time to develop better methods and technologies, and eschewing long term research as “pie in the sky” in seeming ignorance of history where the notions of a civilizatoin powered on petrolum, or effective use of biofuels and solar power were deemed nothing but fantasies. We need to start thinking beyond tomorrow because our appetite for energy is only going to grow as we become more dependant on technology, and can’t just assume that someone will just come along and fix it all for us later.
Stranger
But none as effective. If people weren’t unreasonably afraid of NP we could be almost completely carbon-free right now, outside of automobiles (which could be carbon-free in the near future).
No. There was bipartisan support for a so-called nuclear renaissance last decade: the result was the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Wall Street and the industry requested and received loan guarantees. There wasn’t much wrangling about public pressures.
Here’s a subsequent 2014 NYT article. The Obama administration added to the pot in 2011. But while we have 5 plants currently under construction, the expected nuclear renaissance never materialized. Admittedly, one regulated utility in South Carolina is building a nuke without federal loan guarantees: they didn’t want to deal with the financial disclosures.
It’s not public opposition that’s stopping nuclear power, it’s insufficient private incentive combined with the industry’s bad track record for construction cost overruns.
The silver lining is that muddling through favors a diversified energy base. As does political sausage making.
It’s almost completely public pressure (read: fear) that keeps us from having nuclear power. You mentioned Obama; he killed the Yucca Mountain project due to public pressure and no other reason.
Pro-nuclear power op-ed in The Guardian: Why it's time to dispel the myths about nuclear power | David Robert Grimes | The Guardian
Some highlights:
Despite the preponderance of breathless headlines since the reality is that five years later, radiobiological consequences of Fukushima are practically negligible - no one has died from the event, and is it extraordinarily unlikely that anyone will do so in future.
Our reliance on fossil fuels is particularly costly, not only to the environment but to human health; each year, at least 1.3 million people are estimated to die from air pollution. More recent estimates put this figure at 5.5 million.
So while some people worry about the tiny number of nuclear power accidents, 1.3 million people die every year from air pollution. Think about that: more people die every week from air pollution (~25k) than all nuclear power accidents ever combined.
Can you imagine the uproar if 1 million people died from nuclear power every year?
Heck even if you take the most liberal estimates if you combine all the people who ever did die or will die, from an increased chance of cancer, from nuclear accidents and bombs you get about 1,231,000 which is still less than air pollution in a year. That’s assuming almost a million people get cancer from Chernobyl which only directly killed 56.
I’m sorry, but TriPolar declared that Death Rates are not a valid proxy for General Safety when comparing different energy production methods, back in post 44. It simply cannot be done.
I suppose you could measure safety by how careful the groups are. Cinderblocks, which come from the smokestacks of coal plants, would be considered low level radioactive waste if they came out of a nuclear facility due to the high uranium content in coal. Yet people build buildings from them because nobody worries about it when it comes out of a coal plant.
In short (I haven’t read the thread, yet):
Nuclear power is necessary to bridge the gap between fossil fuels and renewable resources. And it’s much safer than the media makes it out to be.
Not bad. And natural gas is the bridge between fossil fuels and other power sources.
And nuclear energy is expensive, and is not a particularly cheap way of reducing CO2 emissions. Just like the no-mans land around Fukushima is expensive, as is the cleanup. As are the inevitable cost overruns associated with plant construction.
Your first sentence is at variance with the facts. There was a pro nuke bill passed in 2005 which the public basically didn’t notice. It was a gimme for the nuclear power industry and what they demanded were loan guarantees. They got them. Construction of 5 plants ensued, but only under regulated utility regimes, where ratepayers would be stuck with the bill for cost overruns. You vastly overstate the relevance of public fears.
Yucca Mountain actually does have some long running technical problems – apparently the water level was a lot higher tens of thousands of years ago. The failure of the Screw Nevada Act hasn’t stopped nuclear power, mainly because on site storage is viable over the foreseeable future. Over the longer haul the US should follow Japan’s lead and form partnerships with locals. Yes, they need to be bribed with federally paid for recreation centers and the like. That’s fair and as I see it part of the cost.
Yucca Mountain has no major flaws, or even minor ones. The problems cited are extremely small (and unlikely) that opposition groups leveraged to kill it. As I’ve posted numerous times, the GAO said YM was shut down for “strictly political” reasons.
Meanwhile, while short-sighted environmental groups oppose nuclear power, we keep dumping hazardous waste into the air, killing millions every year.
There are two major problems with the Yucca Mountain Repository. One, although it may be true that the cancellation of the repository was political, so was the selection of the site to begin with. It wasn’t the best site for long term sequestration of high level nuclear waste (which would be a variety of impermeable salt basins which would seal the repository off from any potential ground water intrusion for hundreds of thousands of years by which time the radioactivity of the material would have decayed to background levels) but rather the best site in a state with the least political influence against nuclear contamination, the assumption being that since we had performed a variety of aboveground and underground nuclear tests that we might as well just deposit nuclear waste there as well. It is exactly this kind of “out of sight, out of mind” mentality that prevents us from putting the effort into developing technology to make effective use of the residual nuclear material from which less than five percent of the energetic output has been extracted. It also makes it very easy for states like Illinois and California to propose developing an extensive array of nuclear plants without any practical concern for disposal of the waste.
The other even more significant problem is that the capacity of Yucca Mountain (which is not a mountain) isn’t even sufficient to store the nuclear waste currently sitting on site at plants and processing facilities, much less future waste products, and certainly not waste from a vastly expanded nuclear fission power generation capacity. The Yucca Mountain Repository is a red herring; the reality is that we need to develop ways of remediating waste (and hopefully economically viable methods of extracting the unused energy) that are more effective than simply burying waste in the ground. Unabashed apologism for business as usual by a nuclear power industry that resists innovation and spends more effort downplaying concerns than addressing them is not helpful to anyone except the shareholders in that industry, and they are far from the only interests who should have a say in how nuclear fission power generation should be employed and regulated.
Stranger