Water leaks from Onagawa nuclear plant

[benwm]

the video from the link you provided, "Nuclear Cover Up: World's Largest Movable Structure to Seal the Wrecked Chernobyl Reactor" is kinda funny

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Not withstanding the use of the phrase, "Erection Area"...
the background music, lighting, graphics, it looks like one of those videos designed to entice you on holiday or to buy an "off plan" apartment/condo...

Time to invest in these guys...there's going to be plenty of demand for nuclear containment coffins...it's a growth industry folks!

 

[benwm]

Quote from jprad:


Toxic legacy of the Cold War
Ohio's Fernald Preserve has flowers, birds and tons of radioactive waste. Sites that once supplied the nation's nuclear arsenal now pose a staggering political, environmental and economic challenge...

Nobody can ever safely live here, federal scientists say, and the site will have to be closely monitored essentially forever.
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/20/nation/na-radiation-fernald20

Great article jprad.
I was joking when I made a reference to Keynesian economics, but upon reading the article..
"Nearly two dozen other sites still await cleanup. The Obama administration is using money from the economic stimulus package to add $6 billion to the effort over the next three years."

The clean up operations are the closest thing we have to "digging a hole, filling it in, and giving the economy a boost via the Keynesian multiplier"...

Not really an economic stimulus, is it?

So let's build more nuclear sites, as after all, when we get to clean up the nuclear waste it will cost billions, a massive boost to the economy.

Something went amiss here folks... The human race is shooting itself in the foot.

 

[benwm]

As you read about the inner workings of the nuclear industry, the more the Fukushima accident sounds like the tip of the iceberg...

More from that article:-

"The Energy Department is reducing its standards for nuclear-site cleanups, allowing ever more waste to be left in place, say critics, including Fettus. For example, the department used complex regulatory maneuvers, as well as a change to federal law in 2004, to reclassify highly radioactive waste at the Savannah River weapons plant in South Carolina so that dangerous residues can remain on site, entombed in concrete in underground tanks.

Inez Triay, the Obama administration's newly appointed cleanup chief, rejects criticism that the program is relaxing its standards and failing to protect the environment.

Triay, a chemist who has spent her career in the Energy Department's cleanup program, said that in some cases it is technically impossible to remove every last bit of waste from underground tanks and that leaving a small amount encased in concrete is 'a completely appropriate thing to do.' "

 

[dcraig]

Quote from benwm:

As you read about the inner workings of the nuclear industry, the more the Fukushima accident sounds like the tip of the iceberg...

Except you are not talking about the workings of the civilian nuclear industry today or mostly ever except for a very limited number of dual purpose reactors. You are talking about the cleanup of cold war era weapons facilities. In the haste to close the "bomb gap" all sort of stuff was done to make lunatic numbers of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear power plants today are almost all PWRs or BWRs and have no connection at all with nuclear weapons. You cannot make a bomb from new or used PWR or BWR fuel.

Lest we forget, the Fukushima problems are due to a 14m tsunami not to fundamental instabilities in plant design that made them go bang as was the case at Chernobyl. Modern NPPs such as Areva EPR or Westinghouse AP1000 would almost certainly would not have the problems of dealing with decay heat when cut of from power because they have passive emergency cooling systems.

Just what has cleanup of old nuclear weapons sites got to do with Fukushima?

 

[benwm]

Quote from dcraig:


Just what has cleanup of old nuclear weapons sites got to do with Fukushima?

This argument is not so strong. Fukushima is not an old nuclear weapon site, but it is an old nuclear power plant (40-50 years old?)

The point being, we will always be dealing with problems left over from the past, where the people who benefited (financially, career wise) will have since left the planet, but sadly do not take the uranium and plutonium with them to their grave. Enormous moral hazard issues here.

We cannot judge the nuclear industry by those with the highest standards, since it is the problems caused by those with the lowest standards that we need to clean up...and indeed we never really can clean up the mess in its entirety in most instances.

The excuse of the nuclear industry is always that technology is better today so these problems won't happen again. But our technology is obviously lacking because we cannot even put an end to radiation problems in Fukushima and Chernobyl...people cannot safely live within 10km of the reactors, so that is a problem.

If technology was so good, we would not even be having this discussion. Perhaps one day, but not yet.

 

[dcraig]

Quote from benwm:

This argument is not so strong. Fukushima is not an old nuclear weapon site, but it is an old nuclear power plant (40-50 years old?)

The point being, we will always be dealing with problems left over from the past, where the people who benefited (financially, career wise) will have since left the planet, but sadly do not take the uranium and plutonium with them to their grave. Enormous moral hazard issues here.

Unlike fossil fuel industries that pay for their external costs eh? They simply go on spewing CO2 into the atmosphere completely unimpeded generating environmental problems orders of magnitude worse and just as long lasting. This immense scale of pollution (nearly 1kg CO2 per kWh for coal) does not happen because of accidents - it is the normal way these industries operate. Of course no moral hazard here, though it will be vastly more expensive, even if possible, to scrub the excess CO2 from the atmosphere than to clean up every problem nuclear site in the world. Fossil fuels cause damage on a planetary scale. Nuclear power does not.

In fact in the US, nuclear power plant operators are required to pay $0.001 per kWh into a nuclear waste management fund. The fund stands at $24 billion dollars and US administrations have been extremely indecisive is putting it to proper use. This has generated considerable criticism from voices in the nuclear power industry and rightly so. There is much more to say on this topic, and the US government bears a heavy responsibility for it's foot dragging on nuclear waste management.

The excuse of the nuclear industry is always that technology is better today so these problems won't happen again.

The technology IS better today. Just like cars are much better today than 50 years ago or aircraft are better today. This is not an excuse for anything.

 

[futuman]

Have to agree with dc on one thing, we have to stop burning coal.
However, before you rush to buy dirt cheap shares of Tepco and other garbage companies better read this first:

http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/andrew-mckillop/nuclear-asset-proliferation

 

[jprad]

Quote from dcraig:

So, the reactor will most likely be safely contained for maybe 100 years and the situation monitored during that period.

The remains of reactor unit 4 will remain radioactive for some time. The isotope responsible for the majority of the external gamma radiation dose at the site is Caesium-137 which has a half-life of about 30 years. It is likely that with no further decontamination work the gamma ray dosage at the site will return to background levels in about three hundred years. However, as most of the alpha emitters are longer lived, the soil and many surfaces in and around the plant are likely to be contaminated with transuranic metals such as plutonium and americium, which have much longer half-lives. It is planned that the reactor buildings will be disassembled as soon as it is radiologically safe to do so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Decommissioning

As part of this project, at the end of 2007, Nukem handed over an Engineered Near Surface Disposal Facility for storage of short-lived radioactive waste after prior conditioning. It is 17 km away from the power plant at the Vektor complex within the 30-km zone. The storage area is designed to hold 55,000 m3 of treated waste which will be subject to radiological monitoring for 300 years, by when the radioactivity will have decayed to such an extent that monitoring is no longer required.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/inf07.html

 

[jprad]

Quote from dcraig:

Just what has cleanup of old nuclear weapons sites got to do with Fukushima?

Spent Nuclear Fuel: A Trash Heap Deadly for 250,000 Years or a Renewable Energy Source?
Scientific American
January 26, 2009
Finding an alternative or figuring out how to make Yucca Mountain work—there is already so much nuclear waste in the U.S. that, according to NRC, if Yucca were already open, by 2010 it would be filled to its statutory limit of 70,000 metric tons—will take up "a significant part of my time and energy," new Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu, a physicist, testified during his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this month. "We do need a plan on how to dispose of that waste safely, over a long period of time."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ethal-trash-or-renewable-energy-source&page=2

 

[dcraig]

Quote from futuman:

Have to agree with dc on one thing, we have to stop burning coal.
However, before you rush to buy dirt cheap shares of Tepco and other garbage companies better read this first:

http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/andrew-mckillop/nuclear-asset-proliferation

What to take away from this piece? Err ... just about nothing because at no stage does it refer to any authoritative source on costs. It is just opinion and poorly supported opinion into the bargain.

If you want to talk about electricity generation costs, there is one key figure that you need to mention and that is Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE). This is an estimate of what is the projected cost of generating a kWh (or MWh) of electricity taking into account capital and financing costs, operations and maintenance costs (including used fuel management in the case of nuclear) and decommissioning costs. The second most important measure is outright capital cost.

Generating electricity is both expensive and capital intensive - whatever the technology. To get any real understanding you have to compare apples to apples not apples to some pundits idea of what is expensive. But anti-nukes just wave around big numbers for nuclear, dishonestly avoiding comparative analysis. This is exactly what the linked article does.

Assessments by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the US EIA are a couple of the better sources for electricity generation costs. The IEA 2010 Project Costs of Electricity Generation may be found here: http://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/ElecCost2010SUM.pdf

The costs in the IEA report are based on a CO2 price of $30 per tonne - IMHO something that is inevitable though it could take some time before we get there. The IEA report also includes used fuel management and decommissioning in nuclear costs. Costs are region dependent, but in general nuclear is very competitive if not cheaper than other options in many cases. In Asia and in particular Sth Korea and China, nuclear is dramatically cheaper than any other technology. This has not escaped the attention of many developing countries in the SE Asian region such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia who all have nuclear plans at various stages. This is really important for curtailment of CO2 emissions.

I should also add that it has not escaped the attention of any Asian nation that they have a 700 lb gorilla in their midst - China - and competing with China in the future for the worlds fossil fuel resources mush be giving rise to some serious strategic thinking. With spot prices for thermal coal in excess of $100 per tonne, nuclear must look pretty good.

In the end dollars speak loader than words and the lowest cost low emissions technologies will win out. The evidence strongly suggests that nuclear is one of them.