By Andy May
The financial risk is too great.
Updated post (2/21/2017)
In any discussion of the future of energy, nuclear power generation is brought up. Once a nuclear power plant is built and operating, it can produce cheap electricity reliably for decades. Further, in terms of human health, some claim it is the safest source of energy in the U.S. Others, like Benjamin Sovacool, claim the worldwide economic cost (worldwide total: $177B) of nuclear accidents is higher than for any other energy source and nuclear power is less safe than all other sources of energy except for hydroelectric power. Some of the costs could be due to an over-reaction to nuclear accidents, especially Chernobyl and Fukushima. Others have much lower fatality estimates than Sovacool, it is unclear how many later cases of cancer are, or potentially will be, due to Chernobyl.
Permitting a new nuclear power plant and building it is a problem because there have been more than 105 significant nuclear accidents around the world since 1952, out of an IAEA total of 2,400 separate incidents. Thirty-three serious nuclear accidents compiled by The Guardian are listed and ranked here and mapped in figure 1. As figure 1 shows these incidents have occurred all over the world, some are design flaws, like the Fukashima-Diachi 2011 disaster and some are due to human error, like the loss of a Cobalt-60 source in Ikitelli, Turkey.
Figure 1: All nuclear power plant incidents, source The Guardian.
There is an ongoing debate about the safety of nuclear power. Roger Graves has written persuasively that:
“… there is no justification for singling out nuclear power as being especially dangerous. The fear of nuclear espoused by much of the media is vastly exaggerated.”
There have been either 4,231 fatalities due to nuclear accidents since 1952 or fewer than 100 depending upon who is estimating. The biggest difference is how many died due to the Chernobyl disaster. Was it the 31 who died right away or were there thousands that died later due to radiation induced cancer as Benjamin Sovacool argues? Either way, this is small compared to the number of fatalities due to hydroelectric dam failures, like the 171,000 people who died when the Shimantan Dam and 60 other dams, including Banqiao, broke in China in 1975 or the 4.3 million who die every year due to indoor air pollution from burning biomass or coal indoors. So, do we irrationally fear anything that glows in the dark? Or, are Benjamin Sovacool’s arguments more valid than Roger Graves? The differences are mostly due to what fatalities and costs are included in the calculation, both use reasonable methods and criteria. Either way nuclear is different from other sources and the risks are different. I’m not sure a valid safety comparison between nuclear and other sources of energy can be made.
If we include all air pollution from coal as a cost, coal becomes the most expensive and dangerous, except for hydroelectric. Yet, most of the problems are from personal, household use of coal or antiquated coal power plants with no pollution control equipment. Modern coal plants, used in western countries for decades, produce very little pollution and are safe. Households do not have nuclear power, nor do they have personal hydroelectric dams, so this seems like an invalid comparison.
It seems that nuclear power is here to stay, there are nuclear power plants all over the world after all. Why is it so hard to permit and build one? Why did Germany shut down so many nuclear plants? How serious are the dangers? We will not answer these questions here, but we can present what data we could find.
By nuclear we mean fission reactors. Fusion reactors always seem to be 20 years away and this seems unlikely to change. The most recently completed U.S. nuclear power plant, Watts Bar Unit 2 in Rhea County, Tennessee entered commercial service October 19, 2016.
Figure 2: Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear power plant, source TVA.
Unit 2 was 80% complete in 1980. Construction was stopped at that time due to a projected decline in demand. Construction resumed in 2007. The Fukushima-Daichi disaster in 2011 caused construction to be halted again and the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) ordered some design modifications. The delays and the late design modifications caused the initial estimate cost of $2.5B to almost double. The final cost, when it was completed in 2016, was $4.7B. So, this older generation “2” nuclear reactor, from beginning to end, took over 40 years to build. Over the 40 years the cost doubled.
TVA has also spent more than six billion dollars on two partially constructed nuclear plants at their Bellefonte site near Hollywood, Alabama. These were to be Units 1 and 2. They have also applied for permits for two more plants, units 3 and 4. Recently, they announced they have no plans to finish the first two plants and withdrew their permit requests for the second two. Obviously, nuclear power plant planning and construction has its problems. The problems seem to be the uncertain permitting process, high initial costs, and the very long construction period. The long permitting and construction times complicate financing and mean that revenue, profit and demand forecasts are obsolete long before the plants are completed. Thus, as the plants are being constructed, markets change, there are periods when the project appears uneconomic, and construction is shut down. Once shut down, any project is hard to restart.
There are two big problems here. The first is a perceived danger to the public, that may or may not really exist. The second, partially caused by the first, is the huge length of time from inception to completion and the very high and uncertain front end costs. I think anyone who has ever worked in a capital-intensive business will instantly see the problem. The problem is not safety per se, it is risk. This is not an industry that can survive in the marketplace without government guarantees, the risk to capital invested and the potential liability costs are so large no private company would ever touch it. Or stated another way, only a government would be foolish enough to put their money into building a nuclear power plant.
Without a viable business outlook, nuclear is probably doomed unless the design to completion timeline is shortened. The permitting time needs to be shortened and made more certain. This means the industry needs to mature and standardize the components of their commercial reactor designs, so approval of the standard components is guaranteed. Second, construction times need to be radically shorter. Standard components will help here as well. You must be able to propose, design, permit and build a plant before your economic forecasts become useless. There is no way around this, cash flow is king, design to startup times must be short and predictable. Time is often the most expensive component in long term projects, ask any construction company or oil and gas company.
Consider what Hollywood, Alabama Mayor Frank “Buster” Duke, who worked as a pipefitter helping build Bellefonte from 1974 to 1984, said about the TVA Bellefonte construction site:
“I think this was one of the best nuclear plants TVA ever built, but it’s not looking good for any nuclear use of Bellefonte. I’m afraid everything is outdated there now like an old computer. I just hope TVA can do something with all [these] assets.”
The radioactive waste created by nuclear power plants is also a serious problem. Every year nuclear power plants, worldwide, produce 200,000 m3 of low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste and about 11,000 m3 tonnes of high level waste. In the U.S. there is no infrastructure to permanently dispose of the waste, some of which is dangerous for many thousands of years or more. Some countries, including the UK, France, Germany and Japan, reprocess their high-level waste and recycle the remaining uranium and plutonium which decreases the volume of waste. For a list showing how various countries dispose of their waste see this report by the World Nuclear Association.
Waste products are also a problem for thorium molten salt reactors. Besides generating waste, thorium reactors are a nuclear proliferation threat, as discussed by Ashley, et al., 2012 in Nature. This is because one of the waste products is 233U and 8 kg of 233U is enough for a nuclear weapon.
Nuclear power plants have many attractive features, if they don’t leak any radioactivity to the environment and their waste is safely disposed of, they are pollution free. If you can get one permitted and built (no small feat) it produces cheap power and little waste. But, it seems unlikely to be a significant source of new electricity generation due to the public fear of accidents and the high financial risk. To be sure, the actual accidents to date have not caused a lot of injuries or deaths, relative to other energy sources, but the economic cost of the accidents, and the builder and operators liability, is extremely high.
Nuclear power generation has produced no deaths in the U.S. or in the UK. A Caithness Windfarm Information Forum (CWIF) compendium tabulated a yearly UK average of 164 windfarm accidents from 2012-2016 inclusive. Over the same period, 34 of the UK accidents were fatal. In total, in the UK, there have been at least 170 fatalities due to wind farms, so by this measure nuclear is safer than wind. While the safety record of nuclear in the U.S. and in the UK is quite good, the concern is the potential catastrophe. Certainly, the economic costs of nuclear accidents are much higher than for any other form of energy at least according to Benjamin Sovacool here. Sovacool has also shown that 94% of accidental electricity generation fatalities are due to hydroelectric dams, especially one large accident at Shimantan Dam in China. The nuclear catastrophe that can be imagined is horrific, particularly with regard to terrorism. Plus, we have all that nuclear waste being stored on the surface in temporary facilities. To quote Sovacool (source):
“… , nuclear power is less safe than alternatives. When overall fatalities from other energy sources are compared independent of the amount of energy they produce, nuclear power ranks as the second most fatal source of energy supply – after hydroelectric dams – and is responsible for more onsite deaths than oil, coal, and natural gas systems (Sovacool 2008).”
Coal mining is very hazardous, especially in China. But, elsewhere it has become much safer, especially in the U.S., in recent years. Urban indoor pollution, from burning biomass (wood, dung and charcoal) and coal indoors, kills 4.3 million people each year per the World Health Organization. This is the largest killer of all energy sources.
So, although we have estimates of how many have been injured or killed by nuclear accidents that range from less than 100 to over 4,000, both numbers pale in comparison to the deaths caused by other power sources, especially biofuels, coal and hydroelectric. By this measure, nuclear is safer. The problem is the perceived danger from a possible nuclear accident or terrorist attack, not the actual safety record. This fear causes expensive actions (over-reactions?) to be taken when an accident occurs, raising the accidents cost and the potential liability of the operator and builder of the reactor.
It is unlikely, after 60 years of building nuclear power stations, that the cost and time to build them has to be what we see today. After this much time, there is no need for every reactor to be a one-off and approved piecemeal one at a time. But, this is where we are. It is a capital intensive business with high front-end costs and the regulations and lack of standardized pre-approved components drag out the construction (no-revenue) period and private companies cannot get into the business.
I suspect that if a standardized power plant design can be agreed upon by the government and industry, a permanent storage facility built for the waste and permitting and construction streamlined; nuclear would be a success. But, until that happens, I doubt it will ever succeed. No one, outside of government, is foolish enough to invest in the industry the way it is now.
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Most interesting thread, well prepared and thoughtful, regardless of the self-perceived road-blocks Janice chooses mendaciously(?) to trip you up.
My FLONUPS proposal ((Floating Nuclear Power Stations) answers most (all) of the problems raised. Let me briefly elaborate:
1. Location:
1.1. There’s many a nuclear reactor driving ships/submarines. Does Joe Public work about them? NOOOOO! Not even in Plymouth Sound where RN nuclear subs. dock for maintenance. My point is: OUT OF SIGHT, OF OF MIND!!!! Sooo….. FLONUPS!
1.2. Nuc. Power Stations have (without exception?) been land based world-wide. The Regulations, Approvals & Permitting processes are vastly complex when dealing with Land-Use issues, local Planning Regs., NIMBYists from a 50 km.(??) radius of the proposed site and their concomitant political pressure; land-acquisition & re-zoning processes, Nuclear Regulatory Authorities (the ultimate bureaucracy of sinecure-retainers?), never-ending ALARP hurdles …. a self-perpetuatiuing gravy-train of obstructionism aided-and-abetted by the Regulators themselves and the pols. who hide behind them. In short, Committee-fied forever.
1.3. Were the Gov’t to enact enabling legislation for offshore FLONUPS in 200 mile Teritorial Waters, the procedural road-blocks enumerated above would largely evaporate. Locate them just over the horizon (out of sight, out-of-mind!!) and the Average Joe couldn’t care less.
2. Safety & Containment Issues:
2.1. First & foremost, were there a catastrophic failure of a packaged, self-contained reactor unit in a FLONUP cell (one of six +/-?), it would be — what? — 25 km. removed from any significant community …. not ‘down the road’. (Tick one for ‘out-of-sight-out-of-mind!)
2.2. The closest we have got to complete nucler power-station failures have been Chernobyl & Fukushima. The learned debate is endless, but the consensus is that Safety Protocols were the root cause of melt-down at Chernobyl, and ‘What-If’ Disaster scenarios for Fukushima fell short in the Planning process.
2.3. Please excuse my ‘shouting’ BUT WERE THE FUKUSHIMA STATION PREDICATED ON FLONUP PRINCIPLES, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN ***NO*** DISASTER ….. and this is illustrative of my ALARP, Risk-Minimization Strategy with FLOUNPS.
2.3. In extremis, Chernobyl & Fukushima have demonstrated that MASSIVE WATER COOLING / CONTAINMENT IS THE FIRST RECOURSE. (Remember the pathetic images of helicopters dropping canvas-buckets of water? Nigh useless!) With a FLONUP unit, all marine-style package-reactor units will be located within the hull of the floating r.c. caisson SO AS TO BE BELOW EXTERNAL WATER LEVEL. In short, nigh-instantaneous gravity flooding of a rogue reactor WITHIN ITS RESPECTIVE SELF-CONTAINMENT CELL.
2.4. Geological Risks:
2.4.1. Earthquke direct: I am not a Geologist, but my reading leads me to conclude that a FLONUP offshore of Fukushima WOULD HAVE BEEN UNAFFECTED BY THE EARTHQUAKE per se ( I stand to be corrected, please.)
2.4.1. Tsunami: All studies I read indicate that IF LOCATED IN DEEP-ENOUGH WATER, the tsunami pressure-wave passes below a floating structure with minimal disturbance (tsunamis only become dangerous when the pressure-wave meets shallowing-water).
2.3. In Summary as to Safety & Containment, FLONUPS offer practical, fundamental, mantra-breaking solutions to both situational & operational isues in the context of Nuclear Power. Pack a bunch (6? 8?) of prefabricated marine-style power units into a massive reinforced-concrete floating caisson, each within its own r.c. containment cell, and you achieve an Nuclear Power Station with a fraction of the Safety & Containment isues encumbering a land-based alternative as perceived by the neighbours.
3. Construction & Cost-Control Advantages:
3.1 Land-based NPPs typically take — what? — 7-11 years to build a 2000MW (+/-) unit.
3.2. The revolutionary concept of FLONUPS is its PRODUCTION-LINE principle, USING PREFABRICATED COMPONENTS.
3.3. The reinforced-concrete (r.c.) caisson production technology dates back to the 1940s and Mulberry Harbour design (many units of which are extant despite the tests of time, 70 years later). Proven technology.
3.4. Marine-style, pre-packaged, nucler-power units are proven, reliable technology.
3.5. Marry the two in a production-line process established in traditional ship-building locations, where cellular-caissons can be slip-formed down ramps, floated and fitted with all electro-mechanical eqpt., before commissioning on-station offshore.
3.5. Tailor the production-line process to match long-term, power-demand growth. Say one FLONUP @ur momisugly 600 MW aggregate output per year?
3.6. Moor succesive FLONUP units into a FLONUP Flotilla, say 6 geometrically spaced FLONUPS in a circular array, 3km. dia??, cented on a Mother FLONUP (first unit produced) which is Control, Operations & Mainenance Centre.
3.7. Repeat FLONUP Flotillas ad infinitum ….. ALL ON STEADY-STATE PRODUCTION-LINE PRINCIPLES, OFFERING HUGE ECONOMIES OF SCALE COMPARED WITH ONE-OFF 2000 MW BEHEMOTHS EVERY 10 +/- YEARS.
You make some great points and the manufacturing of floating platforms for production is existing tech, think oil platforms and all the tech that is applicable to your suggestion. I like it!
What about those of us who live more than 100 miles from the coast?
Emsnews
Some fears are irrational, I wasn’t referring to the justifiable ones.
It is irrational to think humans can’t screw up things, we have tons of proof to the fact humans tend to screw up things. Forgetting about the dangers of humans deliberately attacking nuclear power plants is strange to me, if I were an evil person, that would be my #1 target and trust me on this: the world teems with nasty people who are evil.
That reason alone is good grounds for fear. Dams are another item for ‘bombing’ for example. But the after effects of nuclear failures last a great deal longer than dam breaks.
Again, I want you on the opposing side in a war. You have a one-track mind that’s easy to negotiate around.
If humanity followed your chain of reasoning, we’d still be living in caves.
Anything that might cause harm if mis-used must be banned.
Sheri, I would have said maneuver around. There’s no negotiating with this one.
MarkW: You’re right. Maneuver is a better word.
Ross King’s last …. P.S. to myself, and catching up with recent comments:
Yes, indeed, the Regulatory/Bureaucratic/Health&Safety tentacles are all-crushing. “Precautionary Principle” is the Death of Progress.
That’s why my FLONUPS proposal above has so much merit as it woirks around these obstacles …. for now, at least.
Re: Ross King & FLONUPS, I stupidly forgot to invoke Henry Ford. Mass-production brought affordable personal trnsportation to the masses. Revolutionary … and few wd disagree?
By extension, how about — gasp! — cheap energy for the masses? FLONUPS bringing affordable, reliable, non-polluting power to the Average Joes?
F*uck those who insist on driving the price of energy EVER UPWARDS out of some perverted campaign to starve/freeze the proles out of existence (genocide to the benefit of the Privileged and their silver-spooned descendants???)
Compiled by the Guardian. Says it all really; not like they’ve got an axe to grind.
Robert, please read the whole article. It actually supports Nuclear.
Oh the blathering and quaking about risk.
Go Nuclear!
I feel this article is misleading with respect to TVA’s Bellefonte Nuclear plant. While it is true the TVA withdrew the withdraw its application for a combined operating license for the reactors at Bellefonte in Feb of 2016. The author fails to observe that TVA sold the facility at auction to Nuclear Development LLC in September of 2016 and that the new owner plans to spend $13 billion to put the nuclear facility into production. (See http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/index.ssf/2016/11/an_unfinished_alabama_nuclear.html )
As a matter of ethical full discloser please be aware that I was a member of the TVA capacity planning team that dealt with decisions regarding Bellefonte. (I retired in 2014). Further be aware my observations reflect my personal views and are not to be confused with, or reflect, the views of the TVA.
I worked at Bellefonte, who didn’t?
I know what you mean, if you hung around TVA long enough you’d end up working on some aspect of the project. The difference, I suppose, is I was one of the people who recommended it’s permanent closure. Of course the darned thing hung around so long I suppose someone had to put it our of it’s misery. 🙂
I hope this site allows arguing points passionately. I can see people here are mostly in harmony with the idea that nuclear power is the answer to the need for energy and it can…to a point. But minimizing the downside of this isn’t good tactics, it makes people withdraw and look at you all in a way that isn’t flattering.
That is, it is not making your position credible if you act as if nothing bad has happened with nuclear power in the past or that it is a small matter.
Yes, there is a fair amount of agreement by the proprietor and main contributors, as well as most commenters, on a good many issues. What you are getting trashed for is accepting what are very weak to disproven claims about the health risks of nuclear power. The only theme of the anti-nuclear activists you seem to have missed is an old claim from the 1970’s that the backround rate of cancer is caused by the backround level of radiation, and the risk curve is dished in shape.
Nuclear war would be a horror, but much of the agitprop is suspected of being KGB sponsored from the Cold War.
What? The KGB and Soviets told everyone, their Tsar Bomb for example, was perfectly safe! I lived through those years and remember it very, very well. Stopping the above ground nukes was a hard battle.
emsnews
You’re getting push-back from a pretty educated & senior group of people who are used to dealing with chicken-littles. You come in here with a highly emotional argument and you won’t have much effect.
A bottom, we’re dealing with probabilities: you say we’re all going to suffer horrible nuclear deaths tomorrow; many of the rest of us are saying we do not believe you. You’ve responded with no reasonable evidence.
What do you expect? Infinite respect for your undocumented opinion just because you are you?
Exaggerating what my warnings are about doesn’t change what I am saying: the RISKS inherent in nuclear power plants when something goes terribly wrong is huge, not small. There is obvious proof of this. If you all want to persuade outsiders, that is, people not in your immediate circle, making light of this is not going to work.
Think! If you claim the problems are small, people will disregard all other information coming from you all! The concept that nuclear messes are terrible to fis, nearly impossible to fix in the case of Fukushima, for example, and that was due to a bad flood event, no less.
Now imagine a Fukushima event caused by terrorists. If you think there is zero chance of that happening, think a bit longer, I would propose it is quite likely to happen some year because it is a prime candidate for attack. See?
emsnews
Do you ever run out of hyperbole and exclamation points?
ems, This site gets hit by trolls like you quite frequently. Spew on until you cross the threshold and trigger the moderators to intervene.
We have no problem with passion. It’s accuracy that we want.
If bad things that happened with nuclear power are small matters, the position remains credible. It’s that you define “small matter” much differently than others and seem to apply it exclusively to nuclear power.
As far as I can tell right now, if an omniscient being arrived and declared nuclear power was sufficiently safe, you would still reject the idea. There is NOTHING that can change your mind—meaning the belief is based on feelings and faith. Only you can ever change your mind and you don’t seem so inclined. I suspect you’re going to “look at us in a way that isn’t flattering” unless we jump on board your fear wagon, so there’s no winning with you in any possible way. Complete capitulation is the only way we can look “nice”.
See my post below on Thorcon for an entirely different kind of nuclear power based on thorium and molten salt as a coolant. Vastly different from uranium water cooled reactors. The criticisms of uranium light water reactors have virtually no application to thorium molten salt reactors. None. The systems are that radically different.
Andy, you have been taken in by “fake news”. 4000 of your deaths are estimates made by UN experts (at the time) “likely to happen” because of Chernobyl. So far there have been 79 deaths – this was the figure in Wikipedia up until less than a year ago because I’ve commented on this at WUWT in the past. They’ve changed it because of the growing interest in nuclear, I’m sure). Still, look at the country list they still have and you will see that most of the deaths were caused by steam explosions. The most nuclear electrified country in the world – France had only one (now not shown by Wiki) and this was at a spent fuel plant (it could even have been a forklift accident – they don’t say nuclear). US had 3 deaths and this was from a steam explosion in a National testing plant at Idaho Falls. A number of accidents in Japan were steam explosions (bad engineering that could happen at a gas fired or coal fired plant). Please go to this Wiki and count the deaths and revise your post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country
Andy, while your are at it, check the deaths from coal mining until recent years there were over 4000 deaths a year in China alone. There have been hundreds of thousands of coal mine deaths. I don’t think report has been lazily researched – not up to your standards. Check out windmill and solar deaths – quite a few of the latter in California.
This is true of all energy systems: no one wants to live near any of these. They want them far away while enjoying the fruits of the systems. The question always is, when things go very wrong, how long does it take to recover to NORMAL.
And if the harm goes on and on and on. So far, every major nuke disaster is never ending. This is a gigantic problem that can’t be papered over with statistics. Almost all other accidents come to a close and can be fixed.
The two major examples of never ending nuke disasters are outstanding.
Any accident and/or power source can be made never-ending. Coal plants spewing pollutants years ago killing with cancer now. Make the time needed for the bad outcome last years. Asbestos comes to mind—never ending fear of mesothelioma that takes 30 or more years to show up. Explosion of a natural gas plant—make downstream pollution responsible for tainting water supplies and causing cancer 10 years later. Obviously, a dam that washes out an entire valley and miles of surrounding territory takes years to go away and may never be “fixed”, just worked around. Renewables using rare earths have reportedly resulted in the radioactive poisoning of areas of China—can’t clean that one up, but it wasn’t widely reported. There was no huge outcry to stop building wind turbines because the manufacture thereof irradiated an area. Seems radiation is mostly a problem when you can make huge political gains out of it. China and the people therein are apparently not in that category.
If by NORMAL you mean “like it was before the accident” I would argue that many accidents create areas that never return to normal. Also, Chernobyl and Fukushima are very small areas which might actually be habitable, but it will never be allowed to keep FEAR alive. There are people living inside the Chernobyl “no-go” zone. Eventually, there may be in Fukushima.
If by NORMAL you mean ZERO radiation, that exists virtually no where. Yet that is often the standard for judging “normal”, even with no pre-accident measurements made. All of this involved defining variables to make sure your conclusion is supported. I would say that is mostly a circular argument—it’s bad because I say it is and I say it is because it’s bad.
The difference between that all possibilities is nothing compared to Fukushima. Even when terrible pollution events happen, once the event is over, then there is a clean up or clear up. But Fukushima is quite different: it continues today. And will tomorrow. And so far, next year! And the years after that, as far as I can see since no robot or human can spend more than one minute near the source of the dangerous pollution.
It cooks away relentlessly…worse than a nuclear bomb which dissipates relatively quickly. This pollution also changes genetic life forms. No trivial matter. Quite the opposite.
I disagree. The difference is FEAR. Nothing more. You can’t go near a live volcano any more than you can Fukushima, nor can robots survive inside said volcano, but there’s no hysterics over not being able to live near a live volcano. People aren’t terrified of the volcanoes. Plus, every so often, areas get buried under tons of molten lava. The landscape changes for centuries. Again, there’s no terror of volcanoes, generally speaking. There are many places on earth that are not inhabitable. There are also places where radiation is naturally high, yet people do live there.
Mining in the early 1900’s dumped tons of arsenic and other toxic chemicals into streams, killed wildlife, and left a legacy that is still being cleaned up. I don’t see any difference here. A mess is a mess. The area with the mess is marked and people stay away.
Sheri, there are things you better fear. A nuclear reactor blowing up should be near the top of the list along with volcanic eruptions if you are nearby or standing below a dam as it breaks, etc.
emsnews,
Risk = severity x probability.
Nuclear accidents are low in severity, as they tend not to kill many people. Chernobyl used a design that would never be allowed in the US and was inherently prone to runaway. Fukushima has been emitting low-level contaminated water, and is hard to clean up. We are talking small potatoes in the realm of industrial accidents here.
They are also low in probability. The safety culture in nuclear power is better than any other major industry. Reactor operators train heavily and are held to exacting standards. The plants are designed with inherently safe systems and defense in depth that would be the envy of nearly any other industry.
These ‘inherently safe systems’ are not operational. There is obvious proof of this: Fukushima. There was no way to stop the events that happened once the wave came in. This is only one example of what can go wrong and how bad it is.
emsnews: There are things I fear—such as people who think nuclear power plants are sooooo dangerous and radiation is going to kill everyone no matter what the level. Those people will keep third world countries in dire poverty, killing millions to save themselves from dealing with reality. Those people SHOULD be feared.
“There was no way to stop the events that happened once the wave came in.” This is an extremely rare event. You are asking human beings to create completely fail-safe devices—an impossibility. You seem to care nothing about people dying from “normal” events, however, so your concern seems based on phobia, not rational thought. You don’t scream we should outlaw cars, or alcohol, or pain killers or…….These kill MILLIONS yet you’re okay with that. Your phobia is not a reason to abandon a useful source of power.
..Would it not be feasible to build Nuclear power plants deep underground, thus increasing the safety margin..?
There is tremendous power and energy in the core of the planet, so much, it periodically explodes to the surface via what we call ‘volcanoes.’ 🙂
EMS
Do you have an actual job with all the normal cares & concerns, or do you just fixate on nuclear plants melting down, blowing up, whatever?
The desire to not worry about possible future events similar to Fukushima is causing you to attack me for telling the truth about reality. This is called ‘being doctrinaire.’ It is how humans react to incoming information: they dislike this if it clashes with ideology which is why humans tend to get in trouble due to refusal to see what is happening.
People living in very dangerous places like California which has happy sunshine much of the time, are prone to this, for example. People living on the flanks of volcanoes or very, very close by like the many millions in Tokyo or Seattle, or Mt. Versuvius, live in denial, too. It is easy to fall into denial.
emsnews: Is there anything you know that is actually true?
Compare the total amount of energy in a nuclear power plant to the amount of energy released by a volcano. The power plant is so low that it won’t even show up in the rounding error.
We used to set off nuclear explosions underground on a regular basis, and not a single one of them ended up erupting like a volcanoe.
You are further discrediting yourself every time you post.
emsnews. Of course, you are the only person in the whole world who sees the truth and is capable of dealing with reality as it is.
The mere fact that so few people agree with you is just more proof of how smart and precious you are.
It’s what gives your life meaning and the only reason you have for getting up in the morning.
See my thorcon link below. It is underground just like the original molten salt reactor at Oak Ridge was.
If nuclear power was invented today it would be celebrated as the saviour of the world .
Funny how the earth has a fever cult is anti nuclear too .
It is only when you realize global warming fear mongering isn’t actually about the environment that
the eco-activists hypocrisy makes sense .
I’m with you on this one, Andy. My position is and has always been that the catastrophic potential downside of nuclear power production as we have employed it in commercial electric power plants is not worth the upside, so long as we have reasonably priced conventional alternatives. The Fukashima units some commenters are writing were “flawed” are almost exact copies of TVA’s Browns Ferry boiling water reactors that continue to operate today. The fundamental “flaw” was loss of coolant and no matter how many redundant cooling water means are installed, the finite possibility of a loss of coolant meltdown is shared by every pressurized-water (G.E. design) or boiling-water (Westinghouse design) reactor in operation anywhere in the world today.
note: I designed portions of all the TVA nuclear plants mention in this piece when I worked for that federal agency back on the 1970’s.
If only there were designs that had already been built and tested which weren’t PWR’s or BWR’s…
Thank you for the information. I have zero training in nuclear power plant technology beyond reading and figuring it out but I grew up inside the nuclear bomb research systems after WWII. I got to listen to the scientists discuss everything because my father took us all over the place with him and didn’t hide anything from us kids.
ems
With all due respect, being dragged around by your dad (?) is not how you learn about nuclear power plants (and bombs, for gods sake). How about starting with a degree in physics?
I build houses and other structures. I have a lot of training in that field. When discussing safety issues about any sort of structure, I have the information at hand and I have a lot of experience in this area.
Years and years ago, I got in a fight with the Port Authority over the design of the World Trade Center buildings. This was due to the ‘revolutionary new way’ of making a structure by not using the ‘honeycomb’ method but having it all hooked up to the elevator shafts with the floors ‘open’.
emsnews: You are the poster child for nuclear paranoia based on seeing nuclear as a BOMB and nothing else. That’s what happens when a parent fails to properly educate his child, showing only ONE side of an issue and creating a phobic adult. (Seems he hid a lot of things from you.)
Saying there is a finite probability does not tell you much. There is a finite probability of a gas turbine plant turning into a fireball as well, but we generally do not consider that because gas turbine plants are designed with safety systems to prevent that, and thus the finite probability is small to the point of insignificance. There is a finite probability that the elevator you take will fall as well – do you always use the stairs?
The flaw was the siting of the backup generators that were unable to power the cooling pumps. That has been corrected at all US nuclear facilities, and INPO / NRC inspectors will shut down plants that are not up to spec. There has also been discussion of natural circulation reactors, where there are no pumps needed.
One chance in a billion of an accident who’s only consequence is the loss of the core, completely contained within the containment vessel, is too much for some people to contemplate.
A worst case scenario happened at 3-mile Island, and the result was that a small amount of radioactive hydrogen was released and the containment vessel is now closed to the public for a couple hundred years.
Big freaking deal.
But the molten salt reactor at Oak Ridge operated at ambient atmosphere. See thorcon link below. As long as you use water as a coolant you are right. But not if you use molten salt as they did in the MRSE project at Oak Ridge.
Like claiming that a steam locomotive that derailed from hitting a herd of buffalo is a ‘Coal Power Plant Disaster’
Do I really need to say that I don’t find this articles arguments very convincing?
Tell the next anti-nuclear zealots you see that over 4000 potassium atoms emit radiation every second within their bodies. Then watch to see if they start distancing themselves from each other people. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium#Isotopes
Or maybe you put that on a sign for an anti-nuclear rally?
“4.3 million who die every year due to indoor air pollution from burning biomass or coal indoors.”
Do you have a source for this?
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/ World Health Organization
Thanks
People die of many things. But even when that happens, they do live for some time on the planet. On the other hand, anyone approaching the core of the Fukushima reactors would die instantly. This is a huge difference.
I can breathe bad air for years and have some health problems. But being wiped out before one breath…well…none of the pro-nuclear power people really address what Fukushima means.
Not only cannot anyone live in the power plant itself or even work for several years there…no one can live in a broad swath of ground for a very big perimeter from the still-gushing pollution plant.
True, animals and plants try this and they show a high level of genetic destruction and mutations and this can’t be minimized, it must be face squarely.
Be honest: no one here wants to live within 5 miles of Fukushima.
I would live within 5 miles of Fukushima. Radiation in the core is incredible – much like heat inside a gas turbine or coal boiler is incredible. Going inside one of those machines while they are working is a fast track to death. That’s why people do not work inside the reactor core or inside a combustion chamber! You say you could breathe bad air for years, but what you are referencing is equivalent to being INSIDE THE SMOKESTACK of a coal plant. You’d die just as fast as strolling into the reactor core.
Radiation is absorbed by water and concrete shielding, and drops off very rapidly with distance. If my radiation source is emitting a very dangerous 100R/hr 1ft away, it is emitting about 11 R/hr a yard away, 111 mR/hr 10 yards away, and only 1.1 mR/hr a football field away. And that is with no shielding whatsoever!
Where is your reference for the dose rate for the workers at Fukushima? Not inside the core, in the working spaces designed for people to occupy them. I want numbers determined by dosimetry.
Where are the references for the genetic destruction or mutations you claim?
I hope you call Tokyo and tell them you want to demonstrate how safe it is by moving there and showing the population, they are stupid to be afraid.
I have no interest in moving. Especially to a country where I don’t speak the language.
However, if you want to move Fukushima to my town, feel free.
Being afraid is proof that all fear is rational.
Gotcha.
233U is NOT a waste product of Thorium MSR’s. 232Th is fertile meaning it can be bred into a fissile daughter species and that species is… 233U (for the most part). Yes, Thorium MSR’s can have more proliferation risk than U and Pu burning MSR’s but that can be designed out. The problem comes with the chemical processing stage to maintain adequate neutron economy.
Thorium generally works by accepting a neutron and beta decaying to 233Pa which further decays into 233U. If the 233Pa absorbs another neutron it goes down another chain but has consumed two neutrons in the process which makes it more difficult (read inefficient) to maintain a chain reaction. You can solve this one of two ways: separate the 233Pa so that it is not exposed to neutron flux and can beta decay into 233U, or maintain a higher inventory of fissile material in the reactor to make up for the inefficient 2N absorption by some of the material. If you do the latter there is minimal proliferation risk because there is no reprocessing of the fuel. It’s only the former that has additional risk which could be partially mitigating by denaturing upon extraction.
Regardless, tying MSR’s to Thorium is stupid. Only zealots like Sorenson are so obsessed with that. We have plenty of safe, usable U and Pu that we can burn for hundreds of years before we need to worry about breeding/converting Thorium. And all of the other advantages of MSR’s are there with none of the reprocessing cost/risk.
Knowing what you know now, if you were required to specify a power plant for the first Mars colony, what would you send them?
Tsk Tsk,
You said, without qualification, “We have plenty of safe, usable U and Pu that we can burn for hundreds of years before we need to worry about breeding/converting Thorium.”
The longevity of any resource is a function of the rate of usage. If we banned nuclear reactors, then what we have would last forever. If we ramped up construction, then it might well be used up in much less than “hundreds of years,” depending on how much was consumed annually. A statement such as you made is meaningless unless you also state the assumptions about the rate of consumption.
U232 is an extreme gamma radiation risk and it will contaminate all U products as isotopic separation is very difficult an expensive. So thorium is not a proliferation concern at all. It was rejected as a source for bombs precisely because of the high gamma radiation risk from it.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/04/13/national/radiation-measured-at-deadly-9-7-sieverts-in-fukushima-reactor/#.WKuwVLGZNsY
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Monday that radiation in the primary containment vessel of the No. 1 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 power station gets as high as 9.7 sieverts per hour — enough to kill a human within an hour.
The radiation levels at six locations in the western section of the first floor of the PCV ranged from 7.0 to 9.7 sieverts per hour, the beleaguered utility said in disclosing data collected by a remote-controlled robot on Friday.
By contrast, the temperatures at the six locations monitored were cool, ranging from 17.8 to 20.2 degrees.
Tepco sent the robot into the primary containment vessel on Friday, expecting it to stay alive for 10 hours. But the robot failed within three hours after completing about two-thirds of its planned route. Tepco has given up on recovering the robot.
Just a few minutes ago, you were proclaiming that the radiation was so high it would kill you instantly.
The robot failed because one of the drive belts broke. They never planned on recovering any of the robots because they would be too radioactive to handle after spending time inside the reactor building.
The fascinating thing is that you actually seem to think that you are telling something that none of us already knew.
The fate of those robots was discussed on this site back when it happened.
That the inside of the reactor is highly radioactive is not a surprise to anyone.
Light Water Reactors (LWR) are inherently dangerous because there are 70~100 atmospheres of steam pressure ready to explode radioactive waste over huge areas, and the possibility of a core meltdown always exists.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs) operate at 1 atmosphere of pressure and the nuclear core is already in a molten state during operation. There is only one passive fail-safe system using the force of gravity, and as long as gravity exists, LFTRs’ fail-safe system will always work. Always…
Since LFTRs heat gas through heat exchangers to run gas turbines, there is no need for huge and expensive cooling towers, or huge and expensive containment rooms, so LFTRs could even be built very cheaply occupying minuscule land areas and operated in remote unpopulated desert regions.
LFTRs also convert 99% of thorium to energy (as opposed to just 0.5% of nuclear fuel pellets used in LWRs), so there is 200 TIMES less nuclear waste that needs to processed/stored compared to LWRs.
Thorium is also dirt cheap with 10’s of thousands of years of easily accessible deposits located all around the world, so we’ll never run out of the stuff..
LFTRs elegantly solve all the inherent dangers and expensive costs of LWRs, so the question isn’t, “is nuclear energy safe?”, but rather, “what type of nuclear energy is safe and inexpensive?”, and answer is LFTRs..
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/five-years-after-meltdown-it-safe-live-near-fukushima
Back to Fukushima: the more recent information is not so good. According to the article, it is 10% complete! What? Only 90% of the decommissioning work left? Wow.
They finally removed the spent fuel rods. Great. But no one can touch the actual reactor cores at all. From the article:
The biggest challenge at present, Ono says, is contaminated water. Cooling water is continuously poured over the melted cores of units 1, 2, and 3 to keep the fuel from overheating and melting again. The water drains into building basements, where it mixes with groundwater. To reduce the amount of contaminated water seeping into the ocean, TEPCO collects and stores it in 10-meter-tall steel tanks. They now fill nearly every corner of the grounds, holding some 750,000 tons of water. The government is evaluating experimental techniques for cleansing the water of a key radioisotope, tritium. Ono says a solution is sorely needed before the plant runs out of room for more tanks.
Translation: All of the problems are currently being handled.
Contaminated water is contained and purified before being released.
Decommissioning is proceeding on schedule.
Yet another big nothing from the master of irrational fear.
The argument about molten salt reactors being proliferation threats is pretty silly. The highly radioactive spent salts would have to be intercepted and refined. Nations could manage this, but nations are pretty good at making nuclear weapons already. Terrorists trying to do something with highly radioactive salt waste would most likely just kill themselves in the process.
Molten salt reactors can also be designed to be passively safe. As in, the operators could cause damage to the reactor, but there would be no possible way for them to cause a meltdown short of personally going to the reactor drain valve and intentionally plugging it. The radiation would kill them. After being brought back to life, they would then have to somehow drain the water from the waste heat removal system. Then they would have to remove the moderator. This still wouldn’t create a Chernobyl or even Fukushima scale event. It would be more like a Three Mile Island. Lots of fuss, no measurable harm.
An interesting reactor design I’d read about awhile back was ThorCon, thorconpower.com. The thorium cores for the reactor are sealed units produced in a factory using ship building type techniques. A power generator facility would have four+ power “cans”. Two operated at a time. After four years a switch is made to the second set, and the first set was allowed to cool until they could be shipped back to the factory for refurb, fuel reprocessing, and refueling. It seems to allow for a standardized design that lead to efficiencies in manufacture, and does require any handling of fuel at the power generator facility which should cut down on proliferation. I would think QA would be easier to accomplish at a central facility. A prefeasibility study was being done in Indonesia for a 500MW facility. http://thorconpower.com/itc-pre-feasibility-study
With this approach I would think it would lead to rapid deployment once adopted.
Sounds excellent. Modular, reusable, transportable. This is the sort of technology I’m recommending.
Simple answere to a complex question is ‘mainstream media’.
13.000 drowned, 16.000 due to Fukushima tsunami.
4 weeks TV novellas of the burning utility.
The real killer never shown:
https://youtu.be/w3AdFjklR50
We do have a permanent nuclear waste storage facility, it’s already been built and it’s in Nevada. If it wasn’t for Harry Reid and the Casino Industry, it would have been in operation for 10 years already.
They won’t even be necessary with thorium molten salt waste burners. Copenhagen Atomics is marketing them.
http://www.copenhagenatomics.com/?page_id=1181
There is bunk and there is bunk, depending on which side of a fence one chooses to sit, but this is pure bunk and deserves to be corrected by the author, on this list, in capitals:
“…or the 4.3 million who die every year due to indoor air pollution from burning biomass or coal indoors.”
This alarmist misrepresentation is repeated at the end of the article.
It is not that 4.3 m people die from indoor air pollution, it is that the lives of 4.3m people who recently died have had attributed to them a shorter life than they otherwise would have had if they had not been exposed to PM2.5 ‘pollution’.
To say that coal and wood smoke ‘kills 4.3m people per year’ is a bald-faced lie.
Further, this is an estimate based on ‘attribution’ not epidemiology. In other words these are not actual deaths but statistically attributed contributors to shortened lives. It is killing by numbers, death by attribution, and is based on the dubious assumption that all particles, whatever their source, are equally toxic.
When one starts digging into the layers of assumptions that underlie claims for the Global Burden of Disease (GBD, the root of that number) one finds more hocus pocus than a Houdini show. If you think climate models are bad, wait till you see the fundraising claims that underlie the health modeling industry. One of the originators of the GBD industry said, ‘We are getting away with murder.’ And the loot, of course.
You are certainly allowed an opinion, but the number is directly from the World Health Organization.