[GHung]

Ghung, you have been on this site for quite some time and have not been convinced at all about the safety of nuclear.

I'll skip the part about me being one of the only people on this site that has actually been trained in the operation of nuclear reactors, and all that. My doubts are based of humans' record of dealing with the messes we've made in the past: the complex and expensive processes that determines who cleans it up and who pays. See the recent case of Duke Energy and old/failing coal ash ponds in NC as a relatively minor example. Societies don't simply decide things will be made right and then do it. Alakazam! Bring forth your magic wands!

I, again, ask a simple question that requires no "nuance": Considering our record of such things, does anyone think, when things begin to fall apart, when we are struggling to even provide basic goods and services to the masses, that we will have the wherewithal and will to clean up the hundreds of sites that will require high levels of finance, expertise, and commitment?

Considering our current rather dismal performance on just about everything, that, in the US, we can't even BUILD new reactors without bankruptcies, cost and time overruns, and confusion, color me skeptical, at the least. I've yet to see a comment (or any evidence) presented here that even comes close to changing my conclusions.

A Table showing about 150 shutdown reactors is at the end of this paper. About 17 of these had the full decommissioning process completed by the end of 2016.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/informatio ... ities.aspx

[aspera]

Ghung: ...the complex and expensive processes that determines who cleans it up and who pays.

Consider the notion of Defensive Expenditures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_expenditures) which themselves do not generate common wealth or contribute to primary productivity. They just allow BAU to continue a bit longer.

Yet, since defensive expenditures consume money (i.e., make claims on future energy production), these expenditures become less possible as cheap energy ends. With time not just the "clean ups" discussed here but all forms of maintenance become problematic (i.e., you might have that Tesla Model 3 all charged up but no paved road to ride on).

[Tanada]

The problem with all these gloom and doom forecasts about how 'awful' nuclear waste is you can not point to any examples of massive death tolls from nuclear energy production. None. Zip. Zero. Nada.

The closest anyone can come is Chernobyl where at the very extreme limit of possible relation to actual events you might tacitly link a few thousand excess deaths to the disaster.

Meanwhile nuclear fission electricity has offset billions of tons of CO2 production and along with that it has offset hundreds of thousands, possibly million, of deaths from respiratory ailments that would have resulted from producing the same electricity with fossil fuels. That is not just coal, but also oil and natural gas all of which cause deaths from people inhaling the exhaust products as they are spewed willy nilly into the environment.

A more realistic look at Chernobyl's effects find less than 100 deaths from acute radiation sickness and a few hundred cases of thyroid disease because the population was deficient in dietary iodine and absorbed too much of the radioactive isotope in the first three weeks after the accident before it decayed away to safe levels. If you consume the appropriate amounts of iodine in your diet then you are relatively immune to the thyroid issue that caused most of the harm after Chernobyl. Nobody in Japan suffered the same issue as a result of Fukushima and with the media hysteria you must realize a mass breakout of thyroid illness would have been headlines around the world.

[StarvingLion]

EDF stock at time of 2008 financial collapse was 85. Now its 10.50.

Nuclear is dependent on oil which France doesn't have.

Thus France is bankrupt like America.

[StarvingLion]

5 years from now these useless contraptions will cost 50-100 billion

Toshiba Pays Up More Than $3B In Georgia Nuclear Expansion

https://www.wabe.org/toshiba-pays-3b-ge ... expansion/

Quote:
As of today, Toshiba has paid nearly $3.7 billion dollars to Georgia utilities. The Japanese company had promised the money to cover debt from its now-bankrupt subsidiary, Westinghouse. Westinghouse was the lead contractor building two nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, which is near Augusta. The company’s bankruptcy drove costs on the nuclear expansion higher and pushed the timeline for completion back. Now, Georgia Power says the reactors will be complete in 2022, five years behind schedule, and the expansion will cost at least $22 billion. Georgia Power owns 45.7 percent of the project.

[GHung]

The problem with all these gloom and doom forecasts about how 'awful' nuclear waste is you can not point to any examples of massive death tolls from nuclear energy production. None. Zip. Zero. Nada.

The closest anyone can come is Chernobyl where at the very extreme limit of possible relation to actual events you might tacitly link a few thousand excess deaths to the disaster.

Meanwhile nuclear fission electricity has offset billions of tons of CO2 production and along with that it has offset hundreds of thousands, possibly million, of deaths from respiratory ailments that would have resulted from producing the same electricity with fossil fuels. That is not just coal, but also oil and natural gas all of which cause deaths from people inhaling the exhaust products as they are spewed willy nilly into the environment.

A more realistic look at Chernobyl's effects find less than 100 deaths from acute radiation sickness and a few hundred cases of thyroid disease because the population was deficient in dietary iodine and absorbed too much of the radioactive isotope in the first three weeks after the accident before it decayed away to safe levels. If you consume the appropriate amounts of iodine in your diet then you are relatively immune to the thyroid issue that caused most of the harm after Chernobyl. Nobody in Japan suffered the same issue as a result of Fukushima and with the media hysteria you must realize a mass breakout of thyroid illness would have been headlines around the world.

Sounds like Tanada is saying it's no big deal if these sites are not cleaned up and nuke plants are not properly decommissioned. Turn them off and walk away?

[Tanada]

Sounds like Tanada is saying it's no big deal if these sites are not cleaned up and nuke plants are not properly decommissioned. Turn them off and walk away?

What do you imagine happens when you walk away from a defueled reactor either before or after decomissioning? You have a large steel vessel that has a mild radioactive output and a lot of concrete some of which may reasonably be classified as also emitting more radioactivity than it did when it was freshly manufactured. That is it. The radiation levels are low enough after a few weeks that workers can walk within meters of the reactor vessel in complete safety, and that vessel is encased in a several meter thick concrete shell. Close the door and walk away, nothing much is going to happen within the lifetime of the materials present.

[GHung]

Sounds like Tanada is saying it's no big deal if these sites are not cleaned up and nuke plants are not properly decommissioned. Turn them off and walk away?

What do you imagine happens when you walk away from a defueled reactor either before or after decomissioning? You have a large steel vessel that has a mild radioactive output and a lot of concrete some of which may reasonably be classified as also emitting more radioactivity than it did when it was freshly manufactured. That is it. The radiation levels are low enough after a few weeks that workers can walk within meters of the reactor vessel in complete safety, and that vessel is encased in a several meter thick concrete shell. Close the door and walk away, nothing much is going to happen within the lifetime of the materials present.

Oh,,,, and who is going to pay the de-fueling costs if everything has crashed and there's no money for it?

[KaiserJeep]

Far from being financial burdens, nuclear commercial power plants have long been profit centers for the utilities that own them. Nor have any decommisioned plants ever been abandonned or been any type of hazard for surrounding populations.

If you want to understand some real hazards, look into the management and mismanagement of coal ash from commercial power plants. They literally are the most dangerous form of power generation. Meanwhile fools obsess over nuclear power, in truth the safest by a huge factor.

The numbers say that coal kills ONE MILLION TIMES as many people as nuclear. If you know something we should be considering, or a better way of measuring safety than counting actual human casualties from energy generation, please share.

[GHung]

Far from being financial burdens, nuclear commercial power plants have long been profit centers for the utilities that own them. Nor have any decommisioned plants ever been abandonned or been any type of hazard for surrounding populations.

If you want to understand some real hazards, look into the management and mismanagement of coal ash from commercial power plants. They literally are the most dangerous form of power generation. Meanwhile fools obsess over nuclear power, in truth the safest by a huge factor.

The numbers say that coal kills ONE MILLION TIMES as many people as nuclear. If you know something we should be considering, or a better way of measuring safety than counting actual human casualties from energy generation, please share.

Assumes BAU for a long, long time.

[onlooker]

Assumes BAU for a long, long time.----
That is the conundrum isn't. Can Nuclear exist safely within the context of a declining and chaotic downturn of modern civilization. I am persuaded by Tanada that Nuclear could have been a real effective answer to humanities energy needs . But the caveat is that serious financial turmoil seems to be on the horizon and in this context it Nuclear may not be all that feasible

[StarvingLion]

Assumes BAU for a long, long time.----
That is the conundrum isn't. Can Nuclear exist safely within the context of a declining and chaotic downturn of modern civilization. I am persuaded by Tanada that Nuclear could have been a real effective answer to humanities energy. But the caveat is that serious financial turmoil seems to be on the horizon and in this context it Nuclear may not be all that feasible

Don't ya get it? Rockhead educated us that 99.999% of the populace believes in fake money and doesn't concern itself with peakoil.com

What kind of energy system can fake money buy?

Nothing, of course.

[StarvingLion]

I am persuaded by Tanada that Nuclear could have been a real effective answer to humanities energy.

I guess nobody told the idiots in Humanities that combustion is required for modern civilization. Nuclear doesn't solve any problems. Nuclear like "Renewables" is simply a parallel source of electricity that is no longer affordable. It can't replace coal, or gas or anything combustible.

[onlooker]

Don't ya get it? Rockhead educated us that 99.999% of the populace believes in fake money and doesn't concern itself with peakoil.com

What kind of energy system can fake money buy?

Nothing, of course.-----You are preaching to the choir SL. I am with you, perhaps I should have said devastating and not just serious
And a devastating financial collapse means NO transition of any kind
So, keep up the good work Starve, showing what a sham of a world economy, we have now!

[StarvingLion]

The EconoDunces retarded notion of Substitution isn't working very well....

Oil Industry: Bankrupt
Shale Gas "industry": Always was Bankrupt
Bird Choppers: Bad Loan Industry
PV Solar: Joke beyond Joke
Nuclear: Spinning its wheels or going splat.

Forget about the coal car (ev). You're all be loaded up in trains headed to closed cities in which people enter but do now come out. A zillion bad loans cannot be wrong.

[Tanada]

Sounds like Tanada is saying it's no big deal if these sites are not cleaned up and nuke plants are not properly decommissioned. Turn them off and walk away?

What do you imagine happens when you walk away from a defueled reactor either before or after decomissioning? You have a large steel vessel that has a mild radioactive output and a lot of concrete some of which may reasonably be classified as also emitting more radioactivity than it did when it was freshly manufactured. That is it. The radiation levels are low enough after a few weeks that workers can walk within meters of the reactor vessel in complete safety, and that vessel is encased in a several meter thick concrete shell. Close the door and walk away, nothing much is going to happen within the lifetime of the materials present.

Oh,,,, and who is going to pay the de-fueling costs if everything has crashed and there's no money for it?

If everything crashes that fast then you will have much bigger issues to worry about than whether the nuclear plant next door or three states over has been defueled and placed in cold shut down mode.

Provided things do not collapse in overnight fashion scramming the reactor and keeping the cooling system operating for 90-120 days even without defueling the reactor vessel will effectively make the system 'safe' as in the residual heat will no longer be a threat to the integrity of the fuel elements or pressure vessel.

Ceramic fuel pellets are frickin hardy material and so long as they get the minimum cooling needed during the few weeks when it is critical they become safe to mostly ignore after that point in time. Sure they are still radioactive and you shouldn't carry them around in your pocket, but they are locked inside a thick steel pressure vessel in water, not laying around in pieces small enough for some foolish person to pick up and carry away. It takes a lot of energy to breech that reactor vessel, break open the fuel bundle and then cut up a fuel rod into small enough pieces to carry away by hand. At the same time those elements are dangerous they are also physically quite hot, as in hot enough to cause some serious burns if you pick them up in your hands, which makes them even more difficult to extract, break open and carry off in small pieces. By the time 18 months has passed from shut down they are no longer in need of water cooling, simple air convection will be enough to keep them from warping and losing their zirconium cladding.

[StarvingLion]

Keep building nuclear reactors and the lights will go off for sure. Keep building "renewables" and the lights will go off for sure. This nuclear project is going splat

The lights are going off.

http://www.thestate.com/news/politics-g ... 40639.html

High power bills due to bungled nuclear project spark showdown at PSC

Quote:
Saying state officials are misguided in seeking to cut power bills for a bungled atomic energy project, SCE&G spent hours Tuesday explaining why it thinks the rate cut would hurt customers more than it would help. “There are real limits to what we can do here without causing the company to become insolvent,’’ SCE&G attorney Belton Zeigler said, noting that the power bill reduction could cost the utility $450 million annually and bring it to the brink of bankruptcy. But the company’s pleas, made during a hearing before state utility regulators, drew almost no sympathy from interest groups and state agencies that said people shouldn’t keep paying for a nuclear expansion project that won’t be built. The average residential customer pays SCE&G about $27 each month for the failed V.C. Summer reactor project. Big industrial users pay even more. All told, the nuclear charge adds up to about 18 percent of a customer’s bill.

[StarvingLion]

Think nuclear reactors are possible in the House of Saud? Hahahahaha....imagine long pipelines carrying meltdown preventing water from the coasts to the interior where the reactors can only be. Its suicide. They won't build a single nuclear reactor. SA is bankrupt.

http://lobelog.com/u-s-to-boost-saudi-n ... velopment/

U.S. To Boost Saudi Nuclear Power Development

Quote:
Another potential issue for Saudi Arabia, regardless of which contractor it selects, is where to put any reactors it decides to build. A nuclear plant requires an abundant supply of cooling water, which Saudi Arabia does not have except on its coasts. The country’s most prominent geophysicist, Dr. Abdullah al-Amri of King Saud University, argued in a 2011 interview that neither coast is suitable–the Red Sea coast because it is potentially volcanic, the Gulf coast because it is sedimentary and unstable. Al-Amri said there are geologically suitable sites in the vast interior, but cooling water would have to be piped to them. He said the government does not want to do that because a pipeline supplying cooling water to an active nuclear reactor in the sparsely-populated interior would be an easy target for terrorists. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia is committed–at least on paper–to constructing as many as 16 reactors by about 2040.

[pstarr]

Starve, you have to stop confusing these important issue with facts

[Subjectivist]

When he posts some actual facts I will take them into account. All I have seen so far is hysterical science denial expressed as babbling panic.