Hacker News Reader

Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

This brings to light a risk of nuclear power that's rarely mentioned: that the scale of practical projects is so great that the likely cost overruns and delays make the systems politically or financially difficult to fund. Not to mention the additional risk that when/if a nuclear power station goes offline (whether for maintenance, accident, or some other kind of failure), the gap in energy production is massive. Compare that to solar and wind energy projects, which are typically smaller scale (and can be much, much smaller), built with diverse technologies in multiple locations, in small units. The risks of disruption, project failure, cost overruns, and financial failure are all much smaller.

When we are seeking solutions to growing energy demand and climate change, the likelihood and ease of fulfilling the demand has to be included in the calculations.

View on HN

Most certainly, and this is what really stuck out for me:

>The nuclear project now accounts for 18 percent of the electric bills of South Carolina Electric & Gas’s residential customers. Santee Cooper, a state-owned utility, has increased rates five times to pay for the reactors.

The costs of mistakes like this are massive!

A failed $100 million storage experiment has little impact. This $9B experiment is a financial disaster. Heads should roll for such poor decisions.

Heads should roll for such poor decisions.

If that happens, no new nuclear project will ever be started in USA again.

And why is that bad?

Because some of us care about the environment more than we like populist posturing.

While it may be important to correct the record on the safety of nuclear, if one really cares about the environment, one shouldn't be attached to just one solution like nuclear.

In a political environment where approximately half of the country has been tricked by propaganda to disbelieve the basics of climate science, we can't get attached to expensive solutions like nuclear that require lots of public financial and political support. We need the carbon-free electricity to be the cheapest option, as dollars are probably the only thing that can overcome the anti-climate-change political ideology.

Market solutions are the best option now, and though well-sited solar and wind are the cheapest source of power at the moment, they need to be distributed properly both in time and in geography. Storage and HVDC are the solutions that make this possible. Storage is getting super cheap, and is on the cusp of becoming a universal install with all new renewables. HVDC is getting somewhat cheaper, and other countries are building tons of it. Getting HVDC built does require some political support, because it means getting different grids to interact with each other.

We need to be realistic about nuclear. Refusing to hold people accountable for bad decisions on nuclear isn't fighting against populist posturing, it's just protecting poor decision makers and preventing better ones from taking their place. These utilities have had poor decision makers that have been unfairly biased against renewable energy over the past decade, and are only ever so slowly awakening to the financial realities out there. South Carolina needs utility execs that are forward thinking, understand technology and how its changing, and are not stuck in the 80s or 90s. Only then will they be proper stewards of South Carolin's finances and environment.

Imagine if South Carolina had been building off shore wind, at $9B. They amount of industry that would have been gained off that would have been immense. South Carolina companies would have had the knowledge to build off-shore wind all over the East Coast. And it would be local corporations, not foreign contractors like Dong energy.

We need to get out of the past, and look to the future of technology. Nuclear had its day, and may again in the future, but for the coming decades it is not a terribly great option, at more than say 1%-5% of our energy supply.

When you show me how to safely store radioactive waste for the thousands of years that are required to make it safe, I consider nuclear power as a safe, effective and economically viable option.

If you care about the environment, tell me what would happen to all of the nuclear plants and the nuclear waste, if suddenly all or most of the people on this planet died?

Er... they would turn off?

The 1 lizard in 10,000 years that accidentally wandered into Yucca mountain might die?

I guess losing millions of acres of land and ecosystems to global warming is nothing, as long as we save that lizard.

Of, they will simply shut down. Right, and they not going to disintegrate within just a few decades.

Even Chernobyl’s New Safe Confinement is designed to last only 100 years. With almost 500 reactors in the world, with 100 years of our disappearance at least some of them would go into meltdown, and destroy most of the life on the planet.. Nuclear indeed is a very environmental option.

You need to do some research. I'm willing to debate points, but nonsense claims like "destroy most of the life on the planet" tell me you are an idealogue with no concept of the orders of magnitude involved in any failure scenario.

Chernobyl and Fukushima were mostly contained by people that were around, yet they still had a profound effect on the environment. Doesn't it make sense that uncontrolled meltdowns at ~ 700 reactors world wide would release so much radiation that pretty much all higher forms of life would die off?

>...When you show me how to safely store radioactive waste for the thousands of years that are required to make it safe, I consider nuclear power as a safe, effective and economically viable option.

Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:

"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.

> Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste

But it's not, and even when it was it would just reduce the amount not get rid of. Also it would make the whole nuclear energy economically unfeasible.

".Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components"

From your linked article: "At present there are no Integral Fast Reactors in commercial operation".

"While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least"

If it's overblown why it's not a solved problem already? Nuclear power currently is not safe, waste storage is a problem, and it's not by any means economical.

>But it's not,

Reprocessing is done in various countries around the world though right now it is cheaper to refine new ore.

>...Also it would make the whole nuclear energy economically unfeasible.

The fuel cost is a small part of the cost so I am not sure why you think it would be "economically unfeasible". Over time it will likely become cheaper and as we continue to use uranium, that price will likely rise so the economics will likely shift.

>...From your linked article: "At present there are no Integral Fast Reactors in commercial operation".

Sigh. I was hoping that you were actually interested in having a dialogue and understanding the current state of things and where they will be in a few decades. When you ignore what I write and cherry pick responses, it looks more like you have a deeply held belief and it really doesn't matter what anyone says to you. What I wrote was "Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:" - I did not say a 4th gen reactor that could burn waste was running right now. Most of the designs being worked on are generally not expected to be available for construction until the 2020s. Do you have any evidence that we can't store nuclear waste on site until a 4th gen reactor would be available?

>...Nuclear power currently is not safe, waste storage is a problem, and it's not by any means economical.

NOTHING is "safe" the way you define it. Walking across carries some risk, flying in a plane carries risk. The only thing you can do is to compare something it against its alternatives - flying a plane to go across the country is definitely safer than driving. When making a choice you need to worry about relative risk - rather than stay away from airplanes because they aren't "safe". Waste storage from any industrial process is a "problem" - the difference between nuclear and coal is that the industry and its regulators take the waste issue seriously and make sure no one is hurt by it. "and it's not by any means economical." - citation needed. France gets a majority of their power through nuclear power and has lower rates for electricity than its neighbors:

>...France enjoys one of the lowest electricity prices in Europe; at 14.72 euro cents per kWh, the average cost of electricity in France is 26.5% cheaper than the EU average (20.02 euro cents per kWh).

https://en.selectra.info/energy-france/guides/electricity-co...

(France also reprocesses nuclear waste.)

Your original comment was "When you show me how to safely store radioactive waste for the thousands of years that are required to make it safe, I consider nuclear power as a safe effective and economically viable option."

I have given you evidence that your original premise is false - we won't need to store high level wastes for "thousands of years". As I said, while there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. Hundreds of thousands of people have died from hydroelectric accidents, literally millions have died from burning fossil fuels, etc - in comparison I've never read of anyone who died from nuclear waste.

It's the best news I've heard so far this week.

As well as for the other obvious reasons mentioned, it's highly desirable to maintain a mix of energy supply. For both security reasons, technological know-how reasons, and who-knows reasons.

Security: distribution of energy sources, multiple options, no single majority dependency.

Who knows: how long will the natural gas supply last? We can speculate, that's all.

Know how: having a technological mastery of all the best sources of energy, is critical. What's the limit of nuclear power in terms of what we can accomplish with it and how safe we can make it? We don't yet know. That's very valuable technology ground that shouldn't be given up.

We can maintain all of the above without building any new power plants. We just need to maintain all of the ones that we currently have, and have few research reactors.

That's just fearmongering.

If nothing else, foreign contractors could be used to build nuclear in the US.

Not holding people accountable because it may look bad is one of the reasons that incompetence festers, and leads to failures like this one.

Westinghouse, by going bankrupt, has been held somewhat accountable, so perhaps my request was somewhat satisfied. I imagine that's little comfort to the utilities rate payers though.

>Not holding people accountable because it may look bad is one of the reasons that incompetence festers, and leads to failures like this one.

By the same token, finding a scapegoat to punish when something doesn't go right leads to a culture of extreme risk aversion in which no decisions are made and nothing actually gets done.

>Heads should roll for such poor decisions.

If it was an unreasonable risk (from their information) or incompetence, there's an argument for firing the person. But if they did everything right and the chances of financial disaster where reasonably low it would set very bad incentives to fire people over it.

If they did everything right, then surely their prototype would have cost less than a billion dollars?

The central challenge for new nuclear in the USA can be called the "chump search". You need to find some chumps to put up the billions.

The chumps footing the bill tend to be poor utility rate payers who are ignorant of the economics.

Well, the key feature is not that they are ignorant of the economics, it's that they have no control over the process, or what decisions are made on their behalf!

When two, incomplete, reactors account for 18% of rates while delivering 0% of the power, the bad decisions were made back when it was thought that gambling even 6% of the electric rate on one resource.

$9B on 2.2GW of generation capacity could have bought 36GWh of energy storage at current lithium ion prices. Match that with solar and HVDC to import wind on regionally cloudy days, and then even if the project "fails" they have some grid capabilities to show. Here, there is nothing.

The cost overruns for these plants were also increased by untested regulations -- that were designed to simplify and accelerate their development. Like all complex systems regulations need to get debugged and they threw a beta release at an advanced reactor design that was already a beta release itself. The regulations wound up needing to be patched which meant that the reactor designs had to change mid-project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com