Highlights
– Nuclear power plants are subject to different operational constraints than other power plants.
– We provide a mathematical representation of these distinct constraints on nuclear flexibility.
– Benefits of nuclear flexibility are significant in a power system with high shares of renewables.
– Benefits include lower power system operating costs and increased revenue for nuclear plants.
Abstract
Nuclear power plants are commonly operated in a “baseload” mode at maximum rated capacity whenever online. However, nuclear power plants are technically capable of flexible operation, including changing power output over time (ramping or load following) and providing frequency regulation and operating reserves. At the same time, flexibility is becoming more valuable as many regions transition to low-carbon power systems with higher shares of variable renewable energy sources such as wind or solar power. We present a novel mixed integer linear programming formulation to more accurately represent the distinct technical operating constraints of nuclear power stations, including impacts of xenon transients in the reactor core and changing core reactivity over the fuel irradiation cycle. This novel representation of nuclear flexibility is integrated into a unit commitment and economic dispatch model for the power system. In a case study using representative utility data from the Southwest United States, we investigate the potential impacts of flexible nuclear operations in a power system with significant solar and wind energy penetration. We find that flexible nuclear operation lowers power system operating costs, increases reactor owner revenues, and substantially reduces curtailment of renewables.
But as the headline says, there’s hope for the 98 US reactors in operation today. When the various countries of the world were selecting their preferred technology for nuclear generation, the US swung to light-water pressurized water reactors (PWRs). They were deeply familiar with them as they were the same technology used on nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers, something the USA had which most other countries didn’t.
And PWRs can be used to follow load. It’s a much slower response rate than peaker gas or using SCADA controls to curtail or spin up wind and solar, but it’s viable. They can drop or increase generation by 25% per hour, although when production is dropped they have to remain at the lower level for typically hours to allow xenon to dissipate before they can be increased again.
But unlike France, reactors are treated by grid operators as fixed, baseload generation, either on or off. There’s some limited seasonal load following related to hydro’s spring peak, but that’s about it. Part of that is purely economic. Load following with a nuclear reactor reduces the total GWh that are generated annually, and the only contracts they have are for committed baseload. If they were operated to follow load, they would lose money. Instead, renewables end up being curtailed when surplus baseload generation occurs. This is a somewhat reasonable approach, but it comes with an interesting wrinkle. Gas and coal reserve power is maintained for the nuclear plant and burn fossil fuels while wind and solar are curtailed.
So we have a technology that could load follow but isn’t allowed to by regulatory and contractual structures without economic penalty, and as a result lower-carbon forms of generation are curtailed while more gas and coal are burned. That’s an odd systemic choice in 2019.
Enter Jesse D. Jenkins of MIT and Zhi Zhou of Argonne National Laboratory, who led a team to model a Southwest alternative system management regimen, one which used real-world data from Arizona and New Mexico to project what would happen if Arizona’s PWRs were able to exploit their inherent technical abilities. They published their results in mid-2018 in the Applied Energy journal report The benefits of nuclear flexibility in power system operations with renewable energy. This peer-reviewed research paper crossed my screen this week and I dug into it deeply. It’s a solid paper in a rock-solid journal, not a think tank puff piece. Their conclusions are very worth assessing.
The big one is that if the PWRs were allowed to load-follow and bid on day-ahead reserve markets, the following would occur:
– A lowering of wind and solar curtailment
– A reduction of coal and gas being burned
– Overall electricity costs drop due to not burning coal and gas
– And a net revenue increase for the nuclear plants
This is a very good news story for the US PWR fleet and their owners. If they could convince regulators to allow this change in grid management and draw up new contracts to support it, they could keep more reactors running producing low-carbon electricity longer in the face of competition from cheap gas, wind, and solar. And the US overall would reduce its very high carbon pollution rate.
This would be a much better path forward than giving more public money in the form of subsidies or tax breaks to keep the nuclear reactors going. It’s non-trivial, as all things related to grid management and nuclear power are, but it’s viable. It would require regulatory changes, contractual changes, grid operation procedural changes and plant operation procedure changes, but that’s business as usual.
There are some wrinkles, both good and bad. As with many studies in this area, it assumes that there are no transmission constraints, which isn’t true in reality but is becoming more true. It also assumes a smaller regional grid without additional load balancing across a broader geographic region, something which is becoming less true with each passing decade. The load following ability for PWRs only applies for roughly the first year of their 18-month fuel cycle as in the last third they have to operate at or above 86% of capacity for technical reasons that are immutable. Only 20% combined wind and solar are assumed, so this is a next decade model, not a 2050 model. And for some reason they model in the PTC for wind energy despite that going away in 2020 and there being no possibility of this model being applied for any US region before then. This is very much a point-in-time approach and the basis for further studies specific to different plants in different regions as part of the assessment of viability and results, and the authors fully acknowledge this.
This doesn’t provide a path forward for new nuclear of course. That’s still too expensive and too slow to build. But it gives a path to a more leisurely retirement for the existing plants and lower overall CO2e emissions for the USA.
Load following wind and solar was tried in Germany, because the must-take fixed rates for solar and wind there were often pushing the wholesale price to negative values – the wind and solar providers still got paid their feed-in tariffs, but the nuclear plants had to pay for every kwh they put on the grid. That gets expensive if you’re pushing out a billion watts. ( They were also paying a ‘fuel tax’, imposed after the initial carbon tax gave them a competitive advantage over burning lignite.)
Trouble is, the fluctuations of wind and solar, combined with the demand movements of the grid, give much steeper ramping rates than demand changes alone. One of the reactors experienced fuel damage, from too sudden changes in temperature. The metal tubing around the rod cracks, exposing the ceramic ‘meat’. This is seen as a sharp rise in radioactivity in the primary circuit cooling water. The operators have to hastily drop control rods in to each section of the core, till they can determine where the compromised fuel rods are, and then shut that part down, and run on part power till the next refuelling shutdown – usually about every eighteen months. That’s probably a multi-million loss in fuel cost, especially if the reactor had been recently refueled, as is likely if it was being used for load following. Now they just run flat out all the time, same as in the US – it’s better for all the other components too. Anyway, all the German reactors are due to close by 2022 – unlike their lignite burners, which will still be fuming away in 2030.
Power generators have a perverse incentive to lower the amount of baseload they provide, since they get paid much more for peaking power. Wind and solar can help fill the gap, but their availability factor is well below that of gas. The most efficient way to reduce emissions from electricity would be to quickly build enough nuclear plants to cover minimum demand, and let hydro, solar, and wind add on to that where they could. France and Sweden showed that could lower the percentage of fossil power to ~5% within twenty years.
Commentators I’ve been following were always sceptical about the claims of Leslie Dewan, and, to a lesser extent, the Terrapower project. Dewan originally claimed better than twenty times the fuel utilisation of uranium, compared to current reactors – then they admitted it would only be twice as good, assuming the thing worked. Gates’ team has gone from the ‘candle’ or ‘travelling wave’, to having to do complex fuel shuffling during operation, to trying a molten chloride reactor.
The nearest new design to being built is Nuscale, spun out of Oregon University, and with an order to build a 600 MW plant in Idaho, at the Idaho National Laboratory. Their design is essentially the same as all the current light water reactors, except much simpler and smaller. No pumps to fail, just convection, no steam generators or pressurisers outside the pressure vessel, passive decay cooling. It’s still costing them a billion dollars just to get a licence. Several more radical designs are progressing, but in Canada, where licencing is easier.
“would be to quickly build enough nuclear plants”. whats that 20 years? and you still are ignoring the RADIOACTIVE WASTE THAT IS DANGEROUS FOR 25,000 years. care to store that in your bedroom!
‘..whats that 20 years?’ Twenty years to dump even fossil fuel electricity would be awesome. Germany introduced its feed-in tariffs for renewables first in 1991, and on current planning they’ll still be burning lignite in 2038 – that’s 47 years. When they quit gas, and what they’ll do about biomass pollution, are open questions.
France decided to go nuclear in late 1973, after the oil they’d been using for much of their power suddenly quadrupled in price. In ten years they were getting half their power from nuclear, and in sixteen years, three quarters. The only reason they still burn any coal, is because violent anti-nuclear riots in Brittany and Anjou stopped them from completing the planned reactor fleet.
https://energytransition.org/14electricitygenerationbyfuel/
My solar went up in 2 days would have been 1 if not for the problems with fossil fuel equipment. Provides all my power including plug in car. And the electric company gets free electricity from me! No waste storage necessary. And you still ignore that nukes are not 24/7. they are 21/24 meaning 3 months of ZERO power every 2 years for refueling, and again the fuel sits at each nuke plant waiting for AN ACCIDENT. NO THANKS. The next accident that happens in the USA and you will give some bull crap excuses!
Your solar provides ALL your power including plug in car. Really? Even at night and on rainy days? Maybe that’s a Flat Earth thing that those of us that live on a globe don’t understand.
The LAST accident that happened in the USA was forty years ago and didn’t kill anyone. Since you hold yourself out as all-knowing, please give us some warning of when the next one is coming so we can work on our “bull crap excuses”. In the meantime, try not to be one of the couple hundred thousan who die in this country every year from NON-nuclear accidents.
Thank you for continuing to be the Poster Child for Dunning-Kruger (or Poe’s Law).
How much storage do you have (EV battery + any home battery)? Do you have a reliable sunshine supply (like a desert)? How often do you have to clean your solar panels?
BTW, many people who worry about nuclear accidents are unaware of the much more likely harm from being downwind of industrial processing plants, and hazardous materials transported on old rail lines past their communities. Check out the Chemical Safety Board videos:
youtube.com/user/USCSB/videos
My panels produced over 8mw last year. More than my total usage. The power company got free electricity since they do t pay for excess. And the panels have never been cleaned.
Your panels produced EIGHT FREAKING MEGAWATTS in a year? (assuming that’s what the 8mw means—-it’s always hard to tell what smurfy is saying)
That’s enough to power 1,000 or more typical houses, so I call bullshit (again).
‘ they are 21/24 meaning 3 months of ZERO power every 2 years for refueling ‘
More like 17/18 – one month for refuelling every year and a half. That’s 94% capacity. Actual capacity for the US reactor fleet last time I checked was 92%, still better than anything else. You can plan the reload for spring or fall, unlike solar, where evening and winter are mandatory alternative time.
Spent fuel is very tough stuff. Critics act like all you have to do is evaporate away the twenty feet of water above the rods in a spent fuel pool, and it will go off like a box of matches. In fact, after a few months, it can air cool. The zircalloy cladding won’t burn if you hold a blowtorch to it. The fuel itself is 95% uranium oxide, which won’t burn any more than any other ceramic.
You need better math the current years downtime for refueling is 33.5 days it was as high as 44.5 in 2012. But some simple math puts availability at 90.1 percent. And in 2012 availability was 82% so if this is “baseload” power when you turn of baseload power where do you get the replacement? Is it magic? And if you can turn it off for a month plus every year with no effect then let’s leave these dangerous bombs shut down.
(sound of palm slapping forehead—-again)
Here’s the US nuclear statistics from 1971 to 2017. As you can see, they weren’t always this good, but they’ve worked on it. From 2011 to 2017, it was from 89% to over 92% every year, except 2011 and 2012. I’m assuming that after Fukushima, they spent more time doing checks and preventive maintenance.
https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generating-statistics
‘And if you can turn it off for a month plus every year with no effect then let’s leave these dangerous bombs shut down.’
Reactors are turned off one at a time, during the times of low demand. They have specialist teams refuelling one, then moving on to the next, so they back each other up. Solar shuts down over half a continent within a few minutes, at or before peak demand. The simultaneous plunge in generation with a surge in demand, the infamous ‘ California Duck’, will only get worse as the state imposes mandatory solar on all new buildings, and as the midday power glut takes other power sources’ lunch money. Wind is more random, but still coordinated over wide areas.
Nuclear actually provides slightly more power in winter, since its cooling water is a few degrees colder. The same would be true for solar panels, if it weren’t for short days, cloud, low sun, and snow on the panels.
Excellent information and presented with ENVIABLE clarity. Normal for ifon and Greenman, Greenman and ifon.
Conversely, utilities have an incentive to invest in their own plants with cheaper baseloads, since they pay much more for peaking power. 😉
From a few minutes of talk I heard the Three Mile Island one was insufficient redundancy, failure of a single multi-million dollar pump and this after the speaker had earlier stressed the redundancy aspect. If they were truly having it pumped by one pump rather than 3 multi-million dollar pump in parallel, or 33 multi-million dollar pumps in parallel for that application then they were courting disaster. The cost/benefit choices between under-engineering and over-engineering aren’t rocket science. There’s no such thing as “just right” engineering, it’s either over or under.
I performed safety inspections of elevators. Requirements are:
– redundancy
– inspectability
– graceful degradation
Software control is a huge issue though as evidenced by that aircraft that nose dives itself. I used to do some of that 51-23 years ago. It gets massively detail-oriented complicated. If you don’t plan it out right in advance or if it’s lacking enough modularity and there are holes in the isolation then any attempts to correct it just mess up something else. I’ve been there sorting out other people’s jumbled patched-up messes of computer programs.
‘According to ConsumerWatch.com, “U.S. elevators make 18 billion passenger trips per year.” Those trips result in about 27 deaths annually, according to estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. That works out to a fatality rate of 0.00000015% per trip.'(Wikipedia)
That’s pretty impressive engineered safety. Likewise, there hasn’t been an airliner crash in the US since 2009, though the 737 Max and 9/11 do blot that copybook more than a little. They’re both reckless cowboy industries compared to the US nuclear power industry, which has yet to kill a member of the public, after sixty years. Engineered safety can clearly work, but you can do better. You can’t fall to your death off an escalator, and if it stops working, you just walk off it. Newer passive safety reactor designs are similar – they use basic physical laws in their design to minimise the consequences of any failure. Gravity and convection always work. Molten salt designs go further – the troublesome volatile fission products, iodine and cesium, simply combine with fluoride, which will keep them from going into gas phase for any plausible temperature the reactor could reach.
“The US nuclear power industry has yet to kill a member of the public, after sixty years”. Yes—-that FACT makes it hard to understand why anyone is anti-nuke when it is not a danger. Mindless fear and ignorance, perhaps?
In addition to many tens of thousands of deaths from diseases that were caused or exacerbated by pollution from fossil fuels and climate change, in 2017 there were this many deaths from:
Accidents: 136,053 deaths
Suicide: 42,773 deaths
Can someone tell us why we should worry so IF IF IF IF IF nuclear power is not very dangerous?
Actually, the occasional person has fallen to their death off an escalator (people clown around) and a person was killed in Union Station Toronto simply because the escalator stopped (the brake did not hold the large passenger load, so it rolled). I suppose nuclear power stations have a safety advantage in that members of the public aren’t traipsing around them with their kids.
Yeah it looks like a GIGO problem, where the control software presumes that the sensor input is much more reliable than human pilots, and the overrides shut off too soon.
Tangent: People with OCD or Aspies can often be much better at dealing with such critical detail work than typical programmers or SWEngs.
UNTILL SOMEONE TAKES CARE OF THE NUCLEAR WASTE AT THE EXISTING PLANTS THATS DANGEROUS FOR 25,000 YEARS, NO. MORE. NUCLEAR!
YEAH! And no more vaccines! And wind turbines cause cancer!
We are going to take care of the nuclear waste by bulldozing it off the edge of the flat earth—will that satisfy you?
Like I told you before! Dont post on my posts!!!
And since when can YOU tell anyone on Crock what to do? Don’t you understand how blogs work? If you don’t want replies, don’t post anything—-especially stupid stuff as you are wont to do. Go to WUWT where your low 90’s IQ will put you in the top 10%.
EAT MASS YOU DUMBASS!
And a normal human would be considerate, you must not be!
Yes, rsmurf wants “consideration” and “normalcy” and fails to display either in his dumbass comments. I have reassessed, and his IQ looks to be below 90, and he’s therefore probably barely within the top 30% on WUWT (bpttom 10% on Crock)
‘UNTILL SOMEONE TAKES CARE OF THE NUCLEAR WASTE AT THE EXISTING PLANTS THATS DANGEROUS FOR 25,000 YEARS’
One of the nuclear startups going ahead in Canada is Moltex Energy. They propose building a ‘waste’ processing plant about the size of a billiard table, which in a year could extract enough plutonium and higher actinides to power their ‘ Stable Salt Reactor’ for its first fuel loading – about six years’ worth. ‘Spent’ fuel actually contains three times as much fissionable material as raw uranium out of a mine, it’s just mixed with other stuff that makes it unpalatable for todays thermal neutron spectrum reactors. A fast reactor is much less fussy – you just throw everything in, dissolved in common salt, and it turns it into power. The split atoms left over -‘ fission fragments ‘ – are mostly harmless within a year or two. Many are extremely useful. A couple have thirty year half lives, and could be used for heat batteries. A very few have thousand or million year half lives, but their activity is very low, and does not prevent them from also being used. Technetium, for example, is only available from nuclear fission, has a very low emission of low energy beta rays (electrons), and could be used instead of extremely rare metals like ruthenium, in high temperature alloys and catalysts.
If If if if if. It’s still messing with one of the most dangerous things on the planet to boil water. We can do better.
Right after I become Queen of the Universe, I’m going to require that no license for a nuclear power plant is issued unless its construction is preceded by a facility that can process waste faster than it would be produced by the plant.
I don’t consider myself innately anti-nuke, but I am so fucking tired of bullshit promises made about handling the waste since the time in the 70s when a nuclear energy advocate assured me that sealing the waste in glass blocks was just about to solve that problem.
—
The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than it is in theory.
rhymeswithgoalie = chica in English?
“rhymeswithgoalie = chica in English?”
Closer to an anciana than a chica.
Leaving aside your interesting desire for “queenness”, there is not really a whole lot of nuclear waste around to worry about. ALL of the waste EVER produced by nuclear power plants in the US amounts to 80,000 tons and if gathered in one place would cover a football field to a depth of 30 feet. In comparison, a 1000MW(e) coal plant produces 300,000 tonnes of ash PER YEAR.
Sealing the waste in glass or concrete blocks after a few years of “cooling down” WILL work—–fear-mongering and ignorance is SO much more fun though.
PS The US govt has a fund of about $40 billion set aside to deal with the waste problem—-it’s from a “tax” on the power plants—-it has been used for other things and is now just an IOU.
From a 2018 LiveScience article:
That’s 2018. I was told in the 1970s about sealing NW in class blocks to assure me that the NW problem was pretty much dealt with, and here they’re just now demonstrating proof-of-concept. I won’t believe any of it until they actually do it as an industrial process, rather than embrace it theoretically.
I don’t think of myself as anti-nuke, but anti-marketing-bullshit. I look forward to nuclear power built by organized fiat systems rather than the ad-hoc nature of US capital investment and cross-jurisdiction politicking.
They DID seal RW in glass and concrete blocks way back—not very difficult. The problem was and is that there have been no provisions made for a place to store such blocks long term.
So, most power reactor waste is “temporarily” stored on site in pools or “casks in the parking lot”. It has nothing to do with “marketing BS” (which is one of the things destroying society) beyond the fact that the fear-mongers used “marketing” techniques to build irrational fear of nuclear power and stall [;ans for lomg term storage.
DOG’s paws are stiff this AM (or keys are moving again) Sorry!
PLANS
To the contributor with the brilliant observation “the paperwork weighs more than the reactor”, can I steal it?
The biggest problem with NW is that is not ALLOWED to be solved! In the USA, there are thousands (?) of apparently dangerous stores to complain about. Then there is Yucca mountain, purpose built to SOLVE that particular problem, forced to remain unused so the favorite whine about ‘dangerous waste’ can be trumpeted. Hypocritical in the extreme!
Facts constantly ignored are that radioactive material comes from the earth and is natural and ubiquitous. The rare dangerous isotopes, increased by human persons, are short lived ( except Plutonium which is far to valuable to waste ) and are safe under a metre of dirt or on the other side of the road. Return it to the earth from which it came and if that worries you, stay away from it.
I am so tired of ignorant morons, with unscientific rationalizations, prepared to cook the planet to maintain their ideology!
Re “the paperwork weighs more than the reactor” -sure, I stole that line from the aircraft industry. ‘FAA paperwork is complete when it weighs more than the aircraft.’ There’s a comparison to be made between jets and nukes. They both started at the tail end of WWII, with the military. Both went civil, but jet aircraft just kept growing. Ironically, it could be partly because air travel is less safe than nuclear, so crashes are less newsworthy. I read once that passenger figures dipped after each major airline disaster, till the Turkish Air crash in the eighties, then they stopped worrying. Even after 9/11, when the industry far exceeded anyone’s predictions for how dangerous it could be, there was a lot of talk about how the highjackers flew straight over Indian Point reactor. Well, Al Qaida actually considered attacking IP, but concluded, correctly, that there was very little chance of doing significant damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25vlt7swhCM
Notwithstanding which, there was a lot of talk about shutting all nuclear down, and Greg Jaczko, appointed to head the Nuclear Regulatory Board by anti-nuclear Senator Harry Reid, brought in new rules on aircraft impact for the four reactors whose construction had already started in Georgia and South Carolina. That alone probably cost them a years delay and several billion dollars apiece.
The airlines were only shut down for three days – long enough to suggest that they have much more effect on the climate/weather than previously thought. https://globalnews.ca/news/2934513/empty-skies-after-911-set-the-stage-for-an-unlikely-climate-change-experiment/
I’m usually the one decrying overblown fear of nuclear radiation* from my wooful friends and family, but I will not let an example of the Naturalistic Fallacy pass in arguments defending nuclear power (or any other subject, for that matter). Natural isn’t relevant, especially if we’re talking about a substance which is unnaturally concentrated.
I recognize that the emotional/political problem with trying to explain relative risks to people, e.g., that mixing all medical waste in asphalt and spreading it on highways makes it about the least dangerous aspect of highway travel, or that driving your kids to protest the Cassini space probe launch puts the children at far higher risk than the probe ever possibly could. As for the “metre of dirt”, that’s all well and good if groundwater**, 1000 year floods and rainbombs are not an issue.
____
*I like pointing out that K is radioactive to the all-organic crowd.
**It doesn’t help that one of the groundwater flow analyses for a burial site appeared to use Darcy’s Law (used to characterize water supply characteristics of an aquifer) to calculate the fastest rate contaminated water could flow through the surrounding rock. That’s just…incompetent.
rhymeswithgirliewithmaturity. Yep, sealing in glass is…silly. One metre of dirt is simply sufficient to block the radiation, bit deeper is in order. Also, not in areas with floods or aquifers, especially as thousand year floods will happen within the next couple of decades. Checked Darcys Law, recognized it, understood it not, and brain cutout safety fuses kicked in. The Great and humungus Artesian Basin of OZ has water flows between 1 & 5 metres per year. Only example immediately familiar with. Uranium Oxide, yellow cake, is concentrated in 44 gal drums in warehouses and other person made fissionable’s decay rapidly and are to be avoided. AGW is THE thing to be avoided! Mixing medical waste with asphalt…BM.
Oh shit, wrong position. Absolutely not replying to you rymeswith somethingabscure . Sorry Sorry.
No matter—if we can follow the babbling of smurfy all over the place, we can certainly follow you.
“In the USA, there are thousands (?) of apparently dangerous stores to complain about”.
FYI, the number of not very dangerous “stores” of nuclear “waste” from civilian power plants in the USA is under 100. The far more dangerous nuclear weapons waste sites like Hanford also number only in the dozens.
Re waste sites USA, was a guess. Waste depository siting in OZ gets excessive debate and is not happening. It is reported there are around 133 official temporary storage’s and about double that for ‘unofficial’ ones. That’s for 25M people and one medical reactor. These sites predominately contain rubbish that could go to a landfill without changing it’s toxicity. But it is, or was, radioactive therefor we must run like a headless chicken around it. Matter of how one defines waste repository.
Some people cannot be considerate enough to be decent humans, they know who they are.
Some people aren’t intelligent enough to post anything but irrelevancies and inanities on Crock. They don’t know who they are because they are Dunning-Kruger sufferers.
Interesting you thought I was speaking of you.
No, you moron—-your command of the English language is so weak that it’s difficult to tell who or what you are “speaking” about. However, you can be sure that I WAS talking about YOU when I mentioned D-K sufferers. Unless, of course, you’re a POE and are just putting us on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
PS Stop giving yourself a thumb up when you post a comment—-it’s quite obvious that you’re doing so, and it only leads to more people giving you a thumb down.
We are talking about the existing U.S nuclear power facilities, and nuclear is certainly a useful tool to have in one’s kitbag, but “With great power comes great responsibility”.
With the final cleanup of the Japanese Fukushima reactor costing around $192 billion or even more, and countless disruption of lives, U.S has a responsibility to ensure it is as safe as possible, with no shortcuts.
Just because they have avoided disaster in the past does not mean they will continue to do so, for god’s sake don’t gamble. If money and time needs spending then do it.
If you are going to include Nuclear power in your toolkit then it must be safe.
“U.S. Nuclear Power Plants Weren’t Built for Climate Change.”
The chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, had to worry about two things: whether radioactive fallout would harm the U.S. and whether a similar accident could befall an American plant. The answer to the first question turned out to be no. The second question preoccupies him still.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-nuclear-power-plants-climate-change/
“Fukushima owner to allow overseas staff to work on disaster cleanup”
Three reactors at Fukushima had meltdowns in the 2011 disaster, which also knocked out power and cooling at the nuclear station.
The disaster forced 160,000 people to evacuate areas near the Fukushima plant. Many of them will never return to the most contaminated areas.
Japan’s government estimated in 2016 that the cost of dismantling Fukushima, decontaminating the affected areas and paying compensation would amount to 21.5 trillion yen ($192 billion), around 20 percent of the country’s annual budget. Tepco has struggled for more than eight years with rising levels of contaminated water that comes from its jerry-rigged cooling system for the melted reactor cores, in addition to power failures and water leaks.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-nuclear-disaster-workers/fukushima-owner-to-allow-overseas-staff-to-work-on-disaster-cleanup-idUSKCN1RV07D
The clean-up cost has been grossly inflated. For example, residents evacuated because of cesium contamination get much more generous government compensation than people whose homes have been destroyed by the tsunami, yet the contamination levels are below those experienced naturally in many parts of the world, where uranium or thorium are unusually abundant in the soil. Cancer rates there are no worse than in surrounding areas. Ramsar, Iran, is the most extreme example, but there are many others – Cornwall, in England, has higher rad levels than would be tolerated round any nuclear plant. Octagenarians were evacuated from their rest homes, through the snow, because of background levels outside that, on the worst interpretation, might give them a one percent increase in cancer rates over the next twenty years – if they spent all their time outside. Children from the area were declared to have tiny nodules, assumed to be precancerous, in their thyroid glands – though children in Hokkaido, 600 km away, when subjected to the same detailed tests, showed the same results. I was living in Queenstown at the time, and a local Japanese guy told me that he would never go back to Japan, because of Fukushima. Very wise – the radiation dose he would have got on the plane would be far in excess of anything he’s likely to get back home, now.
If you say that ‘ You can’t be too careful ‘, you’ll very soon find that you can be.
Radiation levels around Fukushima are falling and “will soon be lower than in Denver”. Colorado in general is one of the most “radioactive” places on the planet, and if you were an airline pilot based in Denver you would almost glow in the dark compared to living in Japan.
https://www.cpr.org/news/story/colorado-radiation-levels-are-high-and-thats-normal
Fukushima and Chernobyl would never have happened but for the stupidity of humans—-we are now compounded that stupidity by mindlessly rejecting nuclear power while the planet burns.
Cannot understand why you continuously act as if nukes are benign. THEY ARE NOT AND NEVER WILL BE!
OF COURSE you cannot understand. You operate from a base of feelings and emotions—-producing a cognitive bias that prevents you from “understanding” rational analysis of the FACTS about nuclear power, and I doubt that you have enough brains or science knowledge to understand the first thing about nuclear power beyond “it boils water”
So you stand up and SHOUT totally ignorant bullshit like “ARE NOT AND NEVER WILL BE”, which is nothing but an ill-informed OPINION and further proving that you are a WIFI of the first order.
“What went wrong? Critics blame politics, ideology, and environmental idealism. The reality: greed, corruption, and scandal. It’s a reminder that the grandest plans for fighting climate change can fall prey to simple human venality.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613325/how-greed-and-corruption-blew-up-south-koreas-nuclear-industry/
Funny I produce no carbon from my home its all solar powered, yet you promote the ignorance thy call nuclear power. it was installed in 2 days, leaves no material that is dangerous for 25,000 years (yes I know there are toxic things in solar panels) and you still think taking 10+ years to build something that can displace hundreds of thousands of people if “something goes wrong” is the SMART THING TO DO!
The best way to combat moral corruption is by ensuring that the incentives work in the same direction as your goals. This means thoughtful public policies and enforcement. Where public policy is perverse, corrupt, negligent, or ideologically blinded and combined with ulterior motive, the door has been opened wide to collateral effects and unintended consequences. It is always important to stress that in addition to calls for individual moral integrity, much more important is public policy that serves as foundation and scaffolding to maintain motivation.
Interesting how some posters immediately use personal insults, of which they clearly are showing their ability to project their own faults!
WTF are you talking about? Your cryptic little word puzzle comments are hard to understand. You need to do the “who-what-when-where” type of exposition if you want a response.
There was a big pile of crap on the sidewalk, I put a hundred signs around it that said “CRAP AHEAD DON’T STEP IN IT” And still they stepped in it! LOL LOL LOL
Another moronic comment from The Moron! Dare we ask where the BIG pile of crap came from? Is it possible that SFB stood on the sidewalk and carried on a conversation with himself and it was the “residue”?
And why a HUNDRED signs? Wouldn’t just a handful have done the job? And why doesn’t r,s,mur,f know how to use commas? And why use all caps and then put (“) marks around it? And why THREE LOL’s? So many questions for him about his meaningless defecation, and so little brain for him to use in answering them.
It stepped in the crap again! LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL “ha ha”, ?. shoot, rub the num..”go” (jjjj)…
ZZZZzzzzz…….!!!!!!
Just some basic math, kilo watt is 1000 watts the usual measure of electricity we buy. The average house uses some where around 900 KILO WATTS a month so thats 1000 watts times 900 or .9 mega watts. And if you buy 1000 kilo watts you get a MEGA watt. Sometimes its referred to KW/KWh or MW/MWh but its all the same thing. Lesson on watts, kilowatts and megawatts for the day!
WHAT?
Watts and watt-hours are NOT the same thing. Watts measure power – they can show your instantaneous, average, or peak use. Watt-hours measure energy supplied over time. One is your speedo, the other’s your odometer ( ‘trip meter’ in US-ese ? haven’t been there for a while.) Knowing the difference is a big part of recognising why nuclear is awesome.
And from your other post, my panels produce almost as much on a very cold day as I get during the spring and fall peaks. So dont talk about something you dont understand. And what DO YOU DO TO ALLEVIATE GLOBAL WARMING, nothing I assume.
WTF are these “spring and fall peaks” you’re maundering on about? The “peak” is when the days are longest, and that’s in the summer.
What’s your latitude, might I ask ? I’m at 46 degrees south, and a friend of mine gets roughly half the power in the month of June as in January. ( He has a windmill as well, which does better in winter, but 100% of the power on the grid here is hydro anyway.)
What do I do ? Gave away my 4WD van, so I can’t go skiing or hanggliding anymore. Bicycle everywhere. Don’t burn wood. Don’t eat meat. Don’t use aircraft. Grow a fair bit of my own food, plus some for other people. Going to a protest against oil exploration here next week. The usual.
33n outside Dallas. My peak last January when it was 20f degrees or so and completely sunny was 34.8, then a 39.4 in April, and then the peaks for the rest of the summer were all 31-33 with a slight drop for the fall.
Hybrid cars since 2004 and a fully electric hybrid so no co2 when in electric mode, no air travel, about 25% of my food is from our organic garden, including eggs, and chickens, no central air or heat, no chemicals in yard or house, recycling of everything, produce all power so no co2 from home, only purchase made in USA or do without unless absolutely necessary, dry clothes on a line, 200 plus mature trees on my small property, adding a water tank soon….
Are you in Argentina?