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.
Dear Retired Kit P:
I am very ‘taken’ by yr experience and level-headed commentary on matters nuclear, esp’lly in the marine envt.
In my FLONUPS proposal (Floating Nuclear Power Plant) (see multiple postings in various threads) I propose pre-packaged, marine-style reactor units, one each located in its own ‘cell’ in a multi-cellular floating caisson constructed using reinforced concrete (for which WW2 Mulberry Harbours were the very successful, long-lasting prototypes).
R_K_P ….. what advice wd you give as to the best pre-pack’ed nuc. unit to use in each of — say — 6-8 cells in a FLONUP caisson? Obv’sly, the bigger the better (economies of scale?) MWe? Russian units perhaps?
P.S. To repeat myself (endlesly!) FLONUPS (aggregating sequentially into FLONUP-FLOTILLAS of — say — 6 FLONUPS encircling [radius = 3 km??] a Mother FLONUP as Command & Control Unit) are moored far enough offshore (out-of-sight, out-of-mind; remote from pop. centres) to satisfy the NIMBYs, and in deep enough water to be immune from tsunamis & e’quakes.
P.P.S. Nota bene that most Regulatory hurdles associated with Land-Based NNPs are circumvented by the FLONUP concept, WHICH IS PERHAPS BY FAR ITS MAJOR ADVANTAGE.
P.P.P.S. with someone sensible like Trump in power, I wd imagine it to be far easier to get FLONUPS certificated as marine units, thereby allowing the use of enriched Uranium fule rods. Nota bene that RN’s nuc.subs. sail in and out of PLymouth Harbour with nary a squeak, so locating a FLUNUP Flotilla 30 km(??) offshore ought to obviate their being ensnared in the Land-Based NPP Regulatory web.
R_K_P_ …. I look fwd to yr considered response, for which I thank you in anticipation.
R_K_P_ I forgot to remind you that any ‘rogue’ reactor can be instantaneously gravity-flooded within its respective cell, so overall containment risk is vastly enhanced. All r.c. walls are projected yo be 1m. th., and the caisson hull ditto, with massive sealing ‘lids’ that are occasionally removable for servicing. Thus secondary containment is assured.
Ross
Floating Nuclear Power Plants are are a bad idea. I know this because the navy would doing at navy bases around the world. Nuclear propulsion provides a huge tactical advantage.
Stationary power plants produce huge amounts of power and nuclear power has huge economies of scale. There may be a location where a small nuke power has an advantage but there is not a market for mass production.
R_K_P:
Thks yr reply ….. makes sense ….. had it been a good idead the USN wd have been all over it!
As a final kick at the cat, Kit, one element I omitted is the production cycle for a land-based behemoth, requiring a succession of trades like dinners moving down a python’s body.
today’s shortage of — say — steel-fixers is tomorrow’s redundancy slips ….. pending the next behemoth 2,000 miles away(???) in 5 years time.
As an Indusgtrial Strategy for a country the size of UK, my production-line process may be ‘short’ on economies of scale of the finished plant, but ‘long’ on stable, steady, across-the-board employment of tradespeople in one or two histroically relevant ship-building areas and N.Sea Oil Production facilities).
In short, FLONUPS will have its own economies of scale …. as Henry Ford discovered!
In regards to cost due to illness, it reminds me of the irrational focus by some on preventative medicine as a cost saving strategy.
Everyone will die, and more than half of all lifetime medical expenses are billed in the last 6 months of life. So whether that last 6 months happens when you’re 65 or 90 is almost irrelevant as far as cost is concerned. Preventative medicine may lengthen life, it may improve quality of life, but if anything it almost certainly increases the cost of health care for society, because you will consume more health care before expiring.
There is certainly a human cost to Chernobyl, no question. But as far as how to calculate the monetary impact of cancer that might be linked to Chernobyl, the only proper way to account for it would be to subtract the lifetime health care expense the person would otherwise have incurred, including end of life care.
I remember years ago debating how to make such calculations regarding various smoking bans.
The banners wanted to take most of the money being spent on caring for those with lung cancer and just declare that if we banned cigarettes altogether, society would save all of this money.
Others pointed out (as you do) that everyone dies of something, and that it wasn’t fair to merely subtract the cost of lung cancer care without adding back in the cost of whatever they were going to die from later on. Plus the additional cost of health care for all the years in between. It was also pointed out that lung cancer tended to kill people rather quickly, so over all it cost less than many other things you might die from.
Another group pointed out that the only reason why SS security hadn’t gone bankrupt already was due to all the people who died early and as a result were taking less out of the system.
This is not to say that we should encourage people to do things that will cause them to die earlier. Just to point out that the whole topic is a lot more complex than many do-gooders want you to believe.
As with any attempt at building some new power source, any cost/benefit analysis has to include dealing with those who will stand in the way of it’s construction/implementation.
There are those that are dedicated to little else. Doesn’t really matter what it is.
That is certainly true in the US.
Dr. James Conca, an expert in nuclear waste management issues and an opinion columnist for Forbes magazine, has written two recent Forbes articles which are pertinent to this topic:
SMR Smart: Small Modular Reactors Are Nuclear’s Future
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/02/16/smr-smart-small-modular-reactors-are-the-wave-of-nuclears-future/
A Nuclear Waste: Why Congress Shouldn’t Bother Reviving Yucca Mountain
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/02/09/americas-high-level-nuclear-waste-is-gone/
Regarding the latter Forbes article, spent nuclear fuel still has 90% of its energy content left in it. If the economics become favorable at some point in the future, SNF could be reburned in 4th-generation reactors or become feedstock for molten salt reactors.
Using a deep geologic repository as temporary interim storage space for spent nuclear fuel buys us very little additional risk reduction for the huge amount of money that must be spent to store and maintain that material underground in retrievable status.
The supposed dangers of storing spent nuclear fuel on the surface are greatly overblown, and monitoring the condition of SNF being stored on the surface is simply not that difficult or expensive.
If two hundred years from now, or even fifty years from now, some portion of the spent nuclear fuel now stored on the surface must be repackaged, so what? Environmental law and common sense consider active waste management as a normal cost of doing business.
A decision to restart Yucca Mountain would be a decision to restart a project that was nothing but a massive government boondoggle from the very get-go. We could spend more billions on Yucca Mountain if we want to, but the hard truth is that it will never open regardless of how much money we might spend.
Nevada doesn’t want the project, and the citizens of Nevada can throw up any number of roadblocks in its way that will keep final completion of the project in the hands of the courts for decades to come.
Why bother with Yucca Mountain when two other states, Texas and New Mexico, are giving serious consideration to hosting interim surface-based SNF management sites which will be much less expensive to construct and to operate than Yucca; and which will allow for easy retrievability if reprocessing or reburning of SNF eventually becomes economic.
If or when a future generation has clear evidence that reprocessing or reburning of SNF will never become economic, then they will have WIPP in New Mexico to use as their permanent geologic repository, one that is much better suited to the task of permanent SNF disposal than is Yucca Mountain.
Dr. James Conca is not an expert on making electricity with nuclear power or handling spent nuclear fuel.
How so I know? First of all, I am an expert and my BS meter went off. Second I checked his resume. He is a geologist.
If there was ever a boondoggle for geologist it is putting spent nuclear fuel. If fact we worked on Yucca Mountain at the same time. I spent a lot of time saying BS to Phd types. Too much education and not enough commons sense.
Now that the work for geologist is done on Yucca Mountain what does Conca want to do, put is someplace so we can spend billions more. What ever we do, we still have to store the fission products from making weapons.
We need a long term repository.
Dear R_K_P
Apropos underground storage of radioacative waste, a criterion you raise is to make it unavailable to ‘Tomb Raiders’. Surely this is easy: store it in standardized containment modules; stack ’em up tidily in underground bunker, build r.c. retaining walls, floor to ceiling to sub-compartmrnt the bunker into — what? — 5,000 sqm. areas, and grout the whole lot in, sub-compartment by sub-compartment to restore the geology to the solid integrity it once was.
Grout-pipes pre-installed of course.
As discussed multiply in these blogs, the geiger counter will barely twitch 10 m. away
In the grand scheme of things, this is merely returning the stuff whence it came …. deep in the Earth.
A seldom mentioned challenge is transport of spent fuel and other waste. This led to the need for cooling ponds in Japan, due to the no-nuke inspired ban on transport over public infrastructure. Take it to the mountain, no need for long-term ponds and their potential problems.
RKP, the approach the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) enforces for managing civilian spent nuclear fuel and for disposal of defense nuclear wastes is massive overkill relative to the true environmental risks posed by these radioactive materials.
The NWPA is a government boondoggle of considerable proportions, and it has been just as unsuccessful at managing the politics of nuclear waste as it has been in managing the actual nuclear waste itself.
We already have a functioning geologic repository at WIPP in New Mexico, and its geology is much better suited for permanent disposal of nuclear waste than is Yucca Mountain’s.
There is no technical reason why WIPP and the Salado Formation couldn’t be used for permanent disposal of all our nuclear wastes, and at less total lifecycle cost than Yucca Mountain.
If you want SNF to be moved off of currently operating plant sites, the only way that will happen is if the material is either reburned in 4th generation reactors; or else it is reprocessed; or else if it is moved into centralized interim storage awaiting a decision on its long-term final disposition.
Yucca Mountain has never been anything more than an excuse to spend money. The nuclear industry does itself no favors by continuing to support it.
A standardized design is a bad idea. Think about it like this: if we standardized the car design in 1990, what would we be driving today? Like any other field there are continuous advancements in design. The first reactor I operated had absolutely no computer what so ever and the only motors drove valves shut. They are better now. Secondly, when you talk of waste, there has to be a common sense approach. Currently they talk about areas that are stable for 15,000 years. That is longer than recorded history. They picked that date because they knew you could never show it would be safe so you could never store fuel. Fuel is fine at the plant. Why not reprocess? Because Jimmy Carter wrote an executive order out of fear we would make more nuclear weapons, that’s why. Anyway, nuclear is the best way to go.
“Donald Hanson February 21, 2017 at 4:53 pm
A standardized design is a bad idea.”
Absolutely not a bad idea. And you car analogy is a bad one for example the Ford Telsta uses the same floor pan as the Mazda 6, same engines, same gearboxes, same axles and is made in the exact same way. They look different because of outer panels/cosmetics and internal fittings but are fundamentally the same underneath. It’s how car makers can introduce “new” models at lower prices.
The same can be said for French nuclear installations, they are all fundamentally the same.
Standardised does not mean fossilised.
Nuclear plants should not be site-specific monstrosities requiring oversight of every step of construction. They should be standardized like batteries, with disposal cost factored in. More capacity? More batteries. Got a more efficient process? Design a better battery.
The current process has hindered technological progress.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors are coming. Thorcon has an agreement with the Indonesian government to begin work on a pilot project. Thorcon claims to be able to have one operational in four years based on a reproduction of the MSRE experiment at Oak Ridge in the sixties. They will build them in shipyards similar to ships, as no mausoleum is necessary since the reactor operates at normal atmospheric pressure. Look at the basic design here. Interesting stuff.
http://thorconpower.com/
Information about the MRSE at Oak Ridge is here:
http://thorconpower.com/
Advantages: Molten salt as a coolant with a 1000C liquid state needing no high pressure containment. Contamination of fuel with U232 makes bombs highly implausible due to gamma radiation. Meltdowns are impossible with fuel in a liquid state that can only freeze up once criticality stops which it does immediately in a safe drain tank. Transuranics (long lived waste) are infinitesimally small since the absorption of 7 neutrons are required to get there (232 to 239). Enough thorium to last 5,000 years. Can make hydrocarbon fuels if desired from CO2 in the air.
“…only a government would be foolish enough to put their money into building a nuclear power plant.”
Governments don’t have their own money, so there’s nothing foolish about it. The politicians and top bureaucrats invest nothing of their own, but get big rewards up front for relieving this industry of practically all liability. They bet the country and the health of its population and its ecosystem while stocking their lifeboats and distant hideaways.
If the nuclear power industry had to get liability insurance on the insurance market like everybody else in private business there would be no nuclear power industry.
Japan has the highest liability requirements for nuclear power providers of any country in the world, but it’s not even enough to cover this one incident at Fukushima that most posters here consider trivial.
Perhaps that is the same as saying building a reactor is a political decision and not one entirely based on power requirements?
The UK govt decided to build Hinkley Point, when pretty much everyone was againsat it, from climate skeptics like Christopher booker to Greenpeace and the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian newspapers…
Keeping reactors running is also a political decision: Germany scrapped nearly half of its reactors overnight in 2011: the French govt is frantically trying to shore up EDF/Areva…
Well griff, its more that the best way to stop someone building a reactor is to invoke a political process as Big Oil cant compete on cost grounds.
And in fact your example of Germany shows this clearly. The reactors were making profits in a free market. They needed politics to shut them down.
Not to keep them running.
“I suspect that if a standardized power plant design can be agreed upon by the government and industry” Special interest groups have owned the government for many years concerning nuclear power. Natural gas is a popular altertaive
Anybody here to help me with
Alexander, bitte langsam. Wenn ich’s versteh werd’ ich antworten.
Zitierten Text ausblenden
Am 19.02.2017 16:15 schrieb Alexander Steinböck :
Servus Hans
Mich nerft es das die Liste weil sie SLST Loc. auswertet so langsam ist, kann ich alle durch STSHT ersetzen ?
Bis bald Alexander
Here’s what Google Translate gives:
Alexander, please [go]slow. If I understand it, I’ll answer.
Hide cited text
On 19.02.2017 16:15 wrote Alexander Steinböck:
Servus [Hi] Hans
This is the list because they SLST Loc. Is so slow, can I replace all by STSHT?
[I’m frustrated(?) because the list is so slow because it uses(?) SLST loc., can I replace it all with STSHT?]
See you soon Alexander
[PS. Still Greek to me, too, since I’m not familiar with the acronyms or the abbreviation.]
There you got a problem.
Schei☆☆ Ausl☆nder.
I’m long time jobless 17+2/3 years.
Same time I answere such e-mails.
Huh?
I’m not jobless at all.
Austria is a place to live!
Too much wine ??
I quite agree.
My favourite place after the UK.
Regulatory Fortresses designed by sinecure-seeking b’crats:
In pursuit of support for my FLONUPS proposal (Floating Nuclear Power Plants) in the halls of power in UK, I was referred to some Institute in Leicester. I commented that if Winston Churchill were in power, and if he agreed with the proposal, Regulatory Approvals wd be granted in short order. The gist of the reply was: “Not these days. I reckon it wd take until about 2030 [repeat 2030] to establish the Regulatory Regime within which FLONUPS could start being construed.”
How long did it take to get Man on the Moon? With this lot, they’d still be arguing whether to use horses or elastic bands, both proven technology.
As Donald wd Tweet: “Very sad!”
Hollywood (Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon) destroyed nuclear power. One anti-business, alarmist movie was enough to place deep distrust and fear in the public, which in turn created an environment of overregulation. Emotions won the day over reason and logic.
“Then I suggest you take advantage of the really cheap property there, then…”
Do you think Griff ever reads what he post?
“The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011 and the 40-meter tsunami that followed left 15,893 dead and 2572 missing, destroyed 127,290 buildings, and damaged more than a million more.”
Since we like to live dangerously, we did the next best thing. Bought land in a tsunami evacuation zone in Washington State. Ocean on one side volcanoes on the other. I only wish it was cheap.
Griff, being an idiot, does not understand risk. For old retired people who can pick beautiful places to live, too hot and too cold is a huge risk factor. We need electricity that is reliable. About 10 years ago we were boat camping when there was a heat advisory. On the way to an air conditioned hotel, we made as far as the ER. She had three stents put.
This hospital was close to the nuke plant I used work at and we lived. My point here is that living close to a nuke plant is not some hypothetical thing. They are safer places than the cesspool where Griff lives.