Carbon Sequestration

We could tell them that with any style reactor. We did, with Iran, for example (and several other countries, such as Iraq and Pakistan and India) - they were supposed to get their enriched fuel from somewhere else. And Iran quite correctly pointed out that it gained serious economic and political benefits from enriching its own native uranium, and thus was permitted to do so under all treaties relevant. That would be true if Iran's reactors were CANDU type as well - with the additional problem of an Iran capable of isolating plutonium from its CANDU debris, an easier task than bomb grade uranium enrichment anyway.

Of course not. The pumped water would be for storage - there's no reason to store huge quantities of pumped water in the middle of the desert.

Of course if you want to consolidate your generating facilities for some reason (store on capture site) and are willing to take a small hit on atmospheric absorption of solar flux, there are plenty of desert ocean coastlines in places like Baja California with hundreds of feet of relief available and short distances to consumption centers.

Easily is done - even at the current baby step research level. The setup only has to be cheaper than nukes, on a total cost basis - that's almost a given, as Japan is discovering. Nukes are incredibly expensive, and if they had to pay their bills and cover their risks they would have disappeared long ago.

Again: the waste is not handled, the decommissioning is not accomplished, the mishap cost and risk is not covered, the weapons proliferation continues. If you don't enter your costs in your books and pay your bills, you don't have commercial operation - you're just piling up debt.

Christ, no one is even talking about making nuke owners buy actual insurance like car owners and other business owners have to. There wouldn't be a nuke power plant on this planet. I was just pointing out some considerations of what it means to be in "commercial operation", such as the people who are going to be paying the bills and depending on these things would be well advised to take.

No plant has been decommissioned, unless you regard the job as finished when debris is still laying around on the landscape needing security and maintenance and posing risk to the general public.

It's not completely the FedGov's fault that the nuke industry painted itself into this corner, launching nuke power plants all over without having solved the waste problem and the risk problem and security problem and the proliferation problem and the cost issue. It's partly the Fed's fault, of course, in that the whole thing was a military/industrial complex with regulatory agency capture and tax avoidance clout in the first place. But blaming the Fed for the nature of this stuff is a deflection - if nukes are hard to handle politically, that's just one more strike against them.

 

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That would be somewhat illogical, since you cannot run a LWR with unenriched fuel.

Right; doesn't work well in the desert.

That would work fairly well for coastal sites, provided the real estate was available. Putting a pumped storage facility near the load increases efficiency but increases cost of the transmission lines from the intermittent source; putting it close to the source decreases system efficiency but results in less cost for power lines.

You can make the argument that "nuclear is not a good idea in the long run" - but that's not the same as claiming it is not commercially viable (which it clearly is.)

That was my point. Nuclear power plants DO have billion dollar insurance policies. (Twelve billion currently.)

Yes, one of the requirements to be in commercial operation is to be able to get insurance. And nuclear power plants can.

 

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I believe your data is wrong.

Not true. Every plant is required to buy $375M. Every other plant in the country is on the hook to pitch in on more coverage up to $12B+. The fact that the Price Andersen sets a value of liability insurance needed is not unusual. People wouldn't be able to afford drivers insurance if the law didn't set limits to the required liability insurance.

Really? Last time I looked, the Trojan Plant was gone.

Actually, the waste issue is TOTALLY the FedGov's fault. The FedGov has been making the NPPs pay into a waste fund, and has done nothing effective with it. In the mean time, the FedGov has prevented them from doing anything else about it. It is completely and totally, 100% the FedGov's fault.

As for the other red herrings mentioned, the risk in the US is lower than the risk from ANY other US energy sector. Expecting ZERO risk is just absurd. Plants are pretty damn secure. What threat do you think they are not secure against? And assigning responsibility for proliferation prevention is a pretty large slap in the face against the US security forces. They say it is their job. Let them do it.

Your data really sucks. Tax avoidance? NPPs are the most heavily taxed, licensed, and fee ridden energy system around. NPPs even have to pay for the engineering costs of the NRC when the NRC is reviewing their submittals. No other industry in the nation has that laid upon them. Please stop being a mouth-piece for the anti-nuke propagandists and study the subject before you speak. I would say "mouth-piece" for fossil fuels, but I am not sure who provides all the money for the anti-nuke efforts. I do know that in Germany, it was GazProm, the Russian Natural Gas company. I suspect it is the same here with a different company.

 

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The best way to deal with nuke waste is with a nuke device. You bury all the waste underground and then detonate a nuke device to neutralize and encapsulate the waste.

Radioactive decay needs to gain activation energy before it can move forward. This is a slow 1/2 life process causing the material to linger. We only need to spark the waste material over the activation hill, all at once.

However, there are treaties that no longer allow pilots tests of concept, since some countries will use such tests as a guise to test weapons. It would need to be international but it is do-able, quick and cheap.

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Burying all the waste underground in a 100 m^3 container is better than burying all the waste then blowing it across several cubic kilometers.

There is no such thing as "activation energy" with radioactive decay. You can transmute waste with neutron bombardment, but that goes both ways - you also create radioactive isotopes in rock where there once were none.

 

Well, it was standard practice during the last round of power nuke proliferation - the nuclear countries required Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, India, Japan, all of them, to purchase rather than manufacture their fuel. That was and is defied, the defiance justified on economic grounds.

That's how the last round of weapons proliferation got set up, and CANDU reactors are no different in their economic basics.

It can't pay its bills. It's piling up debt, and always has been. When a commercial venture can't pay its bills, it's not viable.

That's the whole industry policy - and it's a joke for even one major mishap at one plant, and even that had to be government set up and subsidized. And without that kind of coddling from the Fed, putting the taxpayer on the hook for major accidents, paying for research and waste overhead and so forth, winking at problems and cutting slack for violations and covering their asses, there wouldn't be a single nuclear power plant in the US.

"Gone?" You mean the reactor proper barged upstream to Hanford and buried whole on a leaking site, still there; or rather, not gone: the spent fuel is still sitting in place, right on top of the earthquake fault they discovered after building the damn thing and blowing all that money.

And that whole story is the closest anyone has come to decommissioning a nuke - or paying for one.

The basic situation is: any nuke you build you will be taking care of forever. They, their waste, and their risks, will essentially never be "gone". They will just not be producing power.

Plenty of excellent places for pumped water storage, btw, in the Portland region - a DC line to Baja or Nevada and they'd be in business.

You mean my physical observations? Counter them, then.

What has prevented them from doing anything else about it is the lack of options for anything reasonable to do. The FedGov has prevented them from dumping it in the deep ocean, mixing it with road construction materials and spreading it all over the place, burying it where it can get loose and end up in the aquifers, caching it in ways too readily threatening mishap and disaster, and so forth.

Granted the nuke industry is largely the government's baby in the first place - the military/industrial complex that spawned the ugly is at least half government, after all - but the waste problem is central to the industry as a commercial venture also.

Please - people (and especially, even universally, corporations) can easily and often do buy car insurance far beyond the government set liabilities, because unlike the nuke industry they are on the hook for the difference. And those liabilities are set in the first place to cover the actual costs of predictable mishap. 375 million for a nuke is joke coverage. 12 billion for each nuke would be joke coverage. Meanwhile, it was the taxpayers that covered (and absorbed) Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, just as they will cover and absorb Fukushima and the next one - just as they covered and are absorbing the handling of the Trojan Plant, btw. The nuke industry doesn't even pay for its own garbage disposal.

I expect risk commensurate with potential damage. The risk of core meltdown on a river island near the headwaters of the Mississippi has to be indistinguishable from zero, for example. It isn't.

Tsunami. Earthquake. Flood. Computer hacking. Military assault. Human error (discipline among power plant workers comes and goes with morale etc - the same kinds of problems that led to those live nuke missiles being flown cross country from North Dakota unwittingly are found in power plants). The plant nearest my house was not secure against the entire bus-sized many ton reactor control box breaking loose from its wall mounting and falling unto the pipes that fed cooling water into the reactor. By luck, not design, they held. By luck, not design, the automatic emergency shutdown sequence routed through that box and those pipes worked anyway. That was just a couple of years ago - current events.

Whoever has been responsible for preventing weapons proliferation from power plant proliferation has failed, so far, continuously and consistently, for the entire history of nuclear power in the world. Proliferation has not been prevented up to now. Plans that assume weapons proliferation being prevented now and from now on are delusional.

 

Please explain how an industry that has been paying into funds to accomplish things is "piling up DEBT"! If anything, they are piling up needless savings.

Please explain what bills it cannot pay? Indeed, the industry has prepaid bills that are not due for decades.

The single plant policy has been enough to pay the worst incident on record here in the States.

Boy you have a truly perverted impression of the situation. The only thing you said that was even partially true was paying for research. And the FedGov pays for all sorts of research, including MASSIVE amounts for "renewable" (aka unreliable) energy.
The FedGov has not put the taxpayers on the hook for major accidents. It has merely said they didn't have to pay excess insurance premiums for incredibly unlikely accidents.
The FedGov does not pay for waste "overhead" It has collected large sums in "per kilowatt hour" fees to handle a simple issue, but hasn't handled it. Get the FedGov out of the way and the issue will be gone in a few years.
The NRC does not "wink" at issues. It blows every issue up into a massive to-do; and costs, with capricious fines, massive amounts of dollars. This is at least partially due to the fact that it gets its money to handle "issues" from the people they take issue with. If they don't find any issues, they don't get a salary.
If it weren't for the ridiculous antics of the FedGov, the nuclear industry would probably have eliminated the coal industry by now; which may be one reason for said antics. The coal industry is much bigger than the nuclear.

Yes, gone. Taken to where it will decay into stability over the next few hundred years. And its not like the activated metal is going anywhere.

The spent fuel is exactly where the FedGov antics have needlessly caused it to be. That is not the company's fault. The FedGov was supposed to take it off their hands about a decade ago, and failed to like up to their side of the bargain. The fault is 100% the FedGov's.

Trojan is decommissioned. It is as done as the FedGov will allow. You have a problem with it, blame the FedGov for failing to meet its obligations... again.

Depends on whether the FedGov ever gets its s#!t together. The "waste" is not a technical issue and never was. It is now and always was a policy issue. Stupid policy, stupid results, you know, results that folks like you keep working toward.

You bitch and moan about it "never going away" but any proposal to make it ACTUALLY go away you bitch and moan about even harder.

I thought you deemed yourself an environmentalist! Do you know how destructive of the environment pumped storage can be? Shame on you for wanting to drown out some pristine natural valley.

 

Nope, what has prevented them is FedGov policy preventing it. SNF has only one significant issue, the presence of UNspent Uranium and the other minor actinides. These can be seperated easily and the fissiles and TRUs can be used as the seed for Liquid Fluoride Thorium Recyclers. LFTRs will burn those TRUs while not making more unwanted ones. The rest (the fission products, FPs) can be dry casked and stored for ~300-500 years at which time they will no longer be dangerous. Further, many of the FPs are valuable for their own properties. These can be beneficially used if economic to do so.

There is no "waste" problem, there is a policy problem.

In the 40ish years of nuclear power in the US, no accident has even gotten close to requiring to $375M, let alone the $12B. Your purpose is obvious. Price nuclear into oblivion with needless costs.

For Chernobyl, there was only the State, so of course the state paid for it... duhh!
Re TMI, wrong. The taxpayer paid nothing for TMI. Your pants are on fire.
Re Fukushima, see below. Re Trojan, do you have any indication that the cost to decomm Trojan exceeded their decomm fund contributions?

Actually, it probably is. Risk in this case is commensurate with the cost in money and human suffering. When all is said and done with Fukushima, the cost in money and human suffering will have been found to have been driven by needless panic, not actual danger. In other words, it is people like you who base their thoughts on lies who will have caused the cost and suffering. I hope that we learn the CORRECT lessons from it.

That is due to multiply redundant, exceedingly robust design, NOT luck.

Actually, it is the anti-weapons proliferation policy that helps that along. In effect, NPPs require by US pressure around the world, newly enriched fuel rather than reprocessed fuel. This means that pretty much every country that wants nuclear power will finally decide they need enrichment facilities. Enrichment facilities are the true road to weapons proliferation. So our anti-reprocessing policy developed "unintended" consequences. Oy vat a zurprise!

 

I agree with this, but the best nuke device to use is a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Recycler (aka LFT Reactor).

 

I did not know that, which makes my suggestion, posted long ago more than once, illegal.

Briefly I suggest carefully guarded "swimming pool" storage for about a decade to get level of radioactivity down to level that if something goes wrong in the automated chemical reprocess / concentration facility,* it would be possible for remotely controlled robots to fix (tolerable damage to their circuits). After that processing is done the long-lived, high- level, radiation is contained in glass that is formed into disk about an inch or two thick and at least a foot in diameter. (Thickness is set so that heat flux to surface, even in air, and certainly under water does not melt the glass even in the center of the disk.) The outer most layer, about one mm thick, is only glass with no isotopes - it stops any alpha particles from escaping. (Disks "leak" gamma rays only and probably a very weak flux of harmess pure helium too.**) One disk would hold all the high level isotopes produced during the lifetime of more than 100 people if ALL the energy they use is made by nuclear reactors!

Hundreds of these disk are loaded by automatic or remotely controlled "loaders" onto special ship(s) which at the stern have "disk hurlers" that operate only when over one of the deep ocean trenches. The disk shape will spread*** the disk more as they sink more than a few miles down into the trench. Once there some debris will soon cover them but not enough to let them melt until disk is at least 100 meters deep in the mud (hot or at least warm water ouzzes up so long as water contacts the disk.) The disk continues its slow progress downward for more than 100 million years in a journey deeper into the Earth where they do finally melt. Ocean trenches are places where two tectonic plates met and fold downward - compensating for other plate contacts that throw up multi-mile high mountains to keep Earth roughly spherical.

* I doubt people are rational enough to accept it but this facility could produce radiation sterilized sealed food packs, needing no refrigeration for decades too, as a side benefit.

** Perhaps the disk are with "micro defects" (spherical voids) that can hold He at many atmospheres if the isotopes have a lot of alpha decay per unit volume. (Foam glass is easy to produce and some is used as insulation.)

*** This "random spreading" makes it totally impossible for any terroist group wanting to make a "dirty bomb" even finding a disk even with millions of dollars worth to very deep ocean robots.

 

The funds are not adequate, the tasks remain unaccomplished, and the means of accomplishment remain undeveloped and in some respects undiscovered. So there's a large expenditure in our future, or a large incurred cost, currently unprovided for. "Debt" is an ordinary term for that.

Y'know, given the choice between freezing in the dark and dealing with the consequences of handing control of the country's power supply to such willful ignorance, a body would have to pause for thought, no? That kind of ridiculous shit from nuke supporters is why people get so adamant about just shutting that whole dirty, lying, criminally irresponsible industry down and damn the consequences.

Compare that insurance limit - 375 million in 2013 dollars - against the NRC's table of costs in 1996 dollars for peacefully and uneventfully "decommissioning" just the reactor and plant proper (that is, dismantling and scattering around the landscape and maintaining forever) when it hasn't gone kafllooey: http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/decommissioning/faq.html Apparently we are to assume not a single anticipated mishap would require even the decommissioning of the plant, let alone cause damages or require expensive response outside the facility.

The official cleanup cost of Three Mile Island - just the basic cleanup in immediate response that the official agencies admit to, not the externalized costs to the community, not the ongoing costs of the ongoing problems with the debris and other related factors, not the response expenses throughout the industry, none of the auxiliary costs included - was over one billion dollars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

And it was sheer luck that kept it so low - for example, the outer steel containment vessel was never designed to hold the melted core, but it did. An honest private insurance outfit would not assume such good fortune, in estimating coverage needs - hence the need for government protection and subsidy and liability limitation, and the fact that the nuke industry is not and cannot be commercially insured against mishap. Or as you put it:

That is, the taxpayer is on the hook for those "incredibly unlikely accidents". And if the nuke industry had to insure itself against against the potential losses from "incredibly unlikely accidents" such as we've seen a half dozen of among the ten dozen or so nukes the US has harbored these past forty years, it would be out of business.

We've heard that line from the apologists after every single nuke accident on record - including Chernobyl. It has proven wrong every time so far - maybe Fukushima will prove the first example otherwise?

The eventual cost to decommission the Trojan plant is not known - the taxpayer provided reactor burial site at Hanford has problems, the waste is still to be dealt with. Meanwhile, the ratepayers - not the operating corporation's resources or any previously established industry fund or any subtraction from the government guaranteed profits - covered the immediate bills from the mess through government established rate increases (Enron was involved): http://www.trojandown.org/history.htm http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/greenbaum1/docs/ML050980181.pdf

Having been lucky - with wind direction, especially, as well as the fact that so many of the reactors were not up and running when the wave hit - is hindsight. The danger to Tokyo, for example, was very real.

Meanwhile, as far as "panic", we saw once again (as with Three Mile Island) that most of the panic was generated by the operators and the "official" spokesmen for the industry continually and repeatedly lying to the public about the state of affairs and then getting caught. This pattern is perfectly general - even universal - in the nuke industry, and every time it breeds panic and overreaction to rumors and mistrust and the like, they blame their critics and the people who had been warning them for decades about their irresponsibility and dishonesty and excessive risktaking.

and about the little mishap in my neighborhood:

Uh, no - lack of redundancy was part of the immediate threat, as the pipe complex the control box landed on involved all of the cooling pipes for the reactor and the control box contained all the control hardware and switching etc. Meanwhile, the design was not robust enough to withstand the event, because the event had not been anticipated at all - by luck, the bolts failed and held in such an order that the box hit the right place and in the right way to avoid serious damage or even partial loss of emergency function.

A different bolt failure pattern, a corner-on drop on the other end or the wrong place, and we have another Three Mile Island. Sheer, dumb, unanticipated, undesigned, luck. As with the wind direction and reactors' status at Fukushima, as with the support and integrity of the containment shell at TMI, we lucked out. This time.

 

Right. Didn't work so well, did it? Perhaps a different approach (like no enrichment allowed at all) would be wise.

In that case airplanes, cars, coal and natural gas power plants, and hydro dams are not commercially viable either.

And if the Feds created the same atmosphere of fear that they have created around nuclear, then coal and natural gas would be out of business, too. The worst US nuclear disaster, ever, happened at Three Mile Island. No one died. No one was injured. And yet the government and media went insane for years, talking about all the horrors of nuclear power.

In 2000 ten campers were killed when a gas power plant pipeline exploded in New Mexico. If we applied the same level of hysteria to gas power as we did to natural gas power, every natural gas power plant in the US would now be shut down.

Yep. Just like the nuclear waste from all those coal fired power plants is stored in unsafe ponds, piles and landfills. And there's a lot more nuclear waste from coal fired power plants than there is from nuclear power plants.

I guess coal power isn't viable either.

 

So YOU say they are not adequate. You have provided a report that lists some plants that it says are not adequate, but provides no information on what they mean by that. How many other plants of any kind have ANY funds set aside for decommissioning? Dang few, if any.

 

Yup, I guess I either mis-read or mis-remembered the article I read several years back. The clean-up DID exceed the single plant insurance requirement, but was an order of magnitude less than the combined fund. And remember, it had not installed any of the many safety improvements that all current plants have.

 

No, the taxpayer is NOT on the hook for anything unless Congress decides AT THAT TIME to put them there. It has not done so at this time.

 

No enrichment allowed at all was the policy that didn't work. You can have policies up the wazoo, but the money will talk - and this is big money.

The practice of spreading nuclear power around is what led to weapons proliferation, in the real world. There is no extant form of nuclear power that does not embody, abet, cover, finance, and justify the technologies and the opportunities useful for weapons.

Bullshit. And irrelevant - what's relevant to assessing future investments is that we came an inch or so of steel plate from dumping a meltdown into the headwaters of the Ohio River just outside Pittsburgh, and spent a billion dollars cleaning up what we should recognize as an extremely lucky break, the best and cheapest possible outcome. Keep rolling the dice, snake eyes will show up.

I don't know if your idea is actually banned, so much as priced out of commercial viability. What the interfering FedGov kiteman is complaining about did is refuse to allow things like the direct piping of plutonium waste into near-shelf "deep ocean" ravines. The industry, left to its own devices, would have done exactly that. The Brits were not as fussy, and did exactly that for years - the project of tracking bad stuff around the North Sea is now one of those fascinating oceanographic research endeavors we all find so interesting when something is afflicting others.

None that I know of. Thermal solar plants wouldn't need them either. Something about "lethally hazardous for 25,000 years" goes here.

 

Because unlike The Soviet Government during Chernobyl, the Japanese Government OVER-reacted. It over-did the right things. Approximately 750 people died during the evacuation DUE TO the evacuation. Since then, some 250+ have died from stress related issues due to needless fear and social ostracism. The likelihood that 1000+ people will die due the radiation effects is negligible.

 

The Trojan Plant HAS BEEN DECOMMISSIONED. Done, finne, over. The cost is known. I don't know it, but I am sure you can find out somewhere.

Re Hanford problems, data please, or is this another example of your habit of mixing commercial with military?
Re "the waste is still to be dealt with": the waste has been dealt with to the requirements of the FedGov and final disposition, which has been paid for already, is awaiting action by the FedGov to fulfill its duty.
Re "immediate bills from the mess": what mess?

 

The danger of needless panic in Tokyo was real, the danger to health from the radiation release was a lot less so. But that needless panic danger can be laid at the doorstep of people who cling to the ridiculous Linear No-Threshold model. If the Japanese has simply implemented a policy based on a conservative Linear Threshold model, those thousand "panic driven" deaths could have been avoided. Oh, and most folks would be back in their homes by now.

 

Specifically?