Nothing we do is without risks. Human error, natural disaster or mechanical failure, things sometimes go wrong. We have learned through research and experience to mitigate the risks. The industrial revolution improved life on most of the planet, and it came with risks.
You still haven't explained why you think fossil/biomass must be exempt from the 13M deaths they cause every year due to mostly air pollution. You're a fanatic, a crackpot, damn near psycho.
Myself I'm pro-nuclear. I'm also pro rational energy policy, pro-gas, pro-oil, pro-coal, pro-hydro, pro-geothermal. We need all the help we can get. But I'm anti crazy energy policy like wind, solar, CCS, hydrogen, ITER, agrofuels, most biomass burning. Not a fanatic as you are.
Even wind & solar they are sane and sensible in certain niche applications like off grid homes, anywhere there is a diesel grid with a good wind or solar resource, on satellites, some space probes, isolated scientific instruments. In general on a standard coal/gas/nuclear/hydro grid wind & solar make no sense, a complete waste of money. That's a rational energy policy.
Key point is, though fossil & hydro are great rational energy sources, there is just no feasible way they will supply the 5fold increase in energy supply we need to meet the rapidly growing demand of developing nations. And as fossil supplies become more concentrated, mainly the Middle East & Russia, we need alternatives. The only viable alternative is nuclear. Indeed nuclear fission can supply the World's energy needs for a 100 Myrs. It's the only path forward. With the lowest deaths, injuries, health and environmental impacts. And if done properly, the lowest cost of ANY energy source. If scam artists, crooks, Fear Porn disinformation grifters, paid $billion lobby firms, must be marginalized, then we must do that. Ramping up nuclear energy is just plain survival of human civilization.
You welcome the losses of a $100T on useless wind & solar. The losses will be the destruction of the World economy. A Malthusian agenda. Billions of deaths. Compared to that a hundred Chernobyl's plus another 100 Fukushima's would be a triviality.
Good work, Robert. No path to decarbonizing electricity without it without wrecking living standards and keeping 6.5 billion people from reaching ours.
The reason these plants failed was that they were using a solid fuel system that generated hydrogen gas as the water level in the reactor fell. The combination of solid, zirconium clad fuel pellets, water and a poorly maintained unit (they could not open up the pressure relief valves because they were rusted shut) was an accident waiting to happen.
Great essay, very informative. Thank you. I too support nuclear. I believe we need more investment $’s from world governments to make it safer, cheaper and easier to use. I can’t see myself buying an EV car and using carbon sources to charge it, makes no sense. Glad to see Japan increasing its nuclear footprint. France is leading the way with 70% of its electricity coming from Nuclear.
Good article. I was involved in the US and worldwide Nuclear Industry for 45 years. While the industry does not want to have significant events for any reasons, the industry, industry groups like INPO ( Institute for Nuclear Power Operations), and regulators have incorporated the lessons from these events in the design, training, procedures, emergency response, and most importantly, leadership. The industry has developed and implemented design changes , new equipment, and enhanced emergency response training to address beyond design basis external events.
PRA's, they do these things you know, that's how they got men on the moon, in spite of a thousand points of total failure:
PRA (Probabilistic Risk Assessment) for the new GenIII reactors being built in the West:
Frequency of Core Damage for AP 1000
( 5.09 x 10-7 reactor years)
1 reactor -- once every 2 million years
10 reactors -- once every 200,000 years
100 reactors -- once every 20,000 years
1000 reactors -- once every 2000 years
10,000 reactors -- once every 200 years
Frequency of Large Release of Radioactive Material for AP 1000
(6 x 10-8 reactor years)
1 reactor -- once every 17 million years
10 reactors --- once every 1.7 million years
100 reactors --- once every 170 thousand years
1000 reactors -- once every 17,000 years
10,000 reactors -- once every 1700 years
Anyone who can't handle that level of risk might as well spend their entire life living in a cocoon. Unfortunately for them, that would be very unhealthy and they would die young after a short and miserable life.
(1) zero risk of a systemic event such as a tsunami clearing an undersized seawall
(2) failures are random
(3) all systems are truly independent (see (1) and (2) above
(4) zero human-triggered failure such as TMI which bankrupted Met Ed
(5) no sensitivity to component aging
(6) no defects in plant design or construction
Only "nuke nuts" who are ignorant of the data and nuclear risk management are still pitching that con,
Pretty hilarious
Radioactive cesium contaminated 11,580 square miles (about 30,000 km2) of the land surface of Japan, according to the Japanese Science Ministry (Asahi Shimbun, 2011).
An area of about 130 square miles (337 km2) is now designated as unsafe for human habitation. This area represents almost one percent of Japan’s scarce arable land (which is about 17,274 square miles (44,739 km2)) and is equivalent to the combined land area of the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn in New York City.
Restrictions likely will remain in effect for generations because the primary contaminant, Cesium-137, has a half-life of 30 years, requiring 10 half-lives to pass for most radionuclides to disappear.
A French study estimates direct damages from a generic major accident similar to a Fukushima-level event occurring at a French nuclear reactor could cost $515 billion, including $15 billion for on-site decommissioning and clean-up (IRSN, 2014).
A special task force sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) assessed a rough estimate of direct damages from the Fukushima Daiichi accident was about $500 billion (ASME, 2012).
According to the Japan Center of Economic Research (JCER), total cost for the Fukushima clean-up is ~$700 billion, excluding indirect and consequential damages. The JCER estimate includes reactor decommissioning and water decontamination ($320 billion), clean-up of contaminated land ($300 billion) and damage compensation ($80 billion, which is likely too low) (JCER).
Indirect and consequential damages from major environmental accidents are typically 2-3x direct.
Let's not lull ourselves into the believe that it is possible to find a bureaucratic solution to a bureaucratic problem. Only one thing drive the high cost of nuclear, bureaucracy. The promise of .02 cents per reliable kilowatt hour was met by some pre 1975 plant , reference, Bernard L Cohen. "The Nuclear Energy Option".
Well, the statistics reviewed in the peer-reviewed literature says it's simply a matter of undercapitalized vendors staffed by low quality engineers selling a plant without a detailed design and rushing it to the field with predictably low quality construction results.
Same overruns seen in France and Finland for the same reason.
And what peer reviewed literature is that? The only "peer reviewed" you know of is cherry picked versions that are so full of holes they'd make a great sieve.
“…I strongly object to Raugei’s comments to you re peer review. I have little respect for the entire peer review edifice, due to my unsatisfactory experience in trying to get critical analyses published. Very often I have found the comments of reviewers to range between nit picky imposition of the way they would have expressed things or gone about the job, through reasoning that I see as at least challengeable and at times dead wrong, to rejection on utterly idiotic grounds … such as being told that my recent 20 page detailed critique of the 2014 IPCC report on renewables was “not scientific”, after waiting seven months for review. (That phrase constituted the full case given for rejection.) On another occasion, where it took over a year to get through the difficulties, I was presented with a seven page essay disagreeing with elements in my case. If that reviewer wanted to express a different view he should have done it somewhere else, not try to insist that I say what he would have said. I have another case where a 50 word review from probably the most prestigious individual in the field said the paper was good, but the paper was rejected because a second even shorter review was unfavourable. The reasons were so unintelligible that I had to ask what they meant. It eventuated that the editor said he didn’t think it was the kind of paper his journal published … after I had waited seven months.
I see the process as far too prone to the whims, prejudices and in fact arrogance of reviewers and editors. They should get out of the way and let people say what they have found or think, and focus only on things like pointing out mistakes or pointing to overlooked evidence or assumptions, or logical errors. Their role should be to help get ideas and analyses out to others, and to block only as a last resort. Too often I have found that reviewers think their role is to make authors conform to their preferred style and they assume the right to condemn work that doesn’t proceed as they would have. I have written reviews in which I say I think the argument is wrong and the procedure not satisfactory but I think the paper should be published, because I could be mistaken and the paper does present a case that it is important for us to think about..."
Your Greenpeace literature is worth less than the paper I wiped my butt with this morning.
And yet nuclear has by far the best safety record of any energy industry, in fact of any heavy industry. That fact really ticks off your employer doesn't it?
Thanks for being polite in critiquing what I said. i don't place as much worth in peer review as you do, largely from the history of the theory of plate tectonics. Alfred Wegner? proposed it and was vilified by the geological establishment, dying before the theory was fully accepted in the 1960's.
I attended the international conference directly after Fukushima held in Washington, DC. I was amazed by the desperation exhibited by the attendees. Nobody seemed to have a clear head.
LOL -- most of the multidecadal warming observed through the 20th century into the first decade of the 21st is associated with increased solar activity from the Gleissbe
rg cycle.
NOT GH warming.
That warming ended about a decade ago and we face ~40 yrs of cooling by 1-1.5 C.
Per NOAA UAH dataset, peak climate temperature was in February 2016 at 0.7 C above the 40-yr satellite record.
January 2023 was -0.04 C.
That's 7 years of cooling even as GHG concentration is up ~12% over that period.
Moreover, there is no empirical evidence demonstrating anthropogenic GHG is material or that rationing controls climate tempetature.
Yet, you advocate building nuke power at $175/MWH -- 3x natural gas or coal.
IDGAF about CO2 compared to base load, load following, and safety. Done correctly, Cheaper Than Coal, cleaner than coal, safer than coal, etc. Not insane.
Do you define that phrase to mean successfully completed on-time and on-budget without a vendor or licensee declaring bankruptcy from the overruns, or an exec not convicted of felony Federal wire fraud, or simply without the 2-5x overruns and 2-3x schedule slip?
When has that ever happened?
LOL
From my experience consulting to nuke CNOs and CFOs, and as reported in the peer-reviewed literature, nuclear construction is never "done correctly", has no "learning curve" and is systemically uncompetitive.
I have no idea what "cleaner" or "safer" means to you.
But I know that coal plants comply with the Clean Air Act.
I know that population density in the vicinity of a nuke is up.more than 100% from when the plants were licensed,.
And I know that spent fuel requires perpetual storage on the taxpayer dime who are also on the hook for ~98% of third party losses should a Mark I containment fail and spray nuclides downwind on mid-continent US land, lakes, and rivers.
Unlike Fukushima, most US plants are NOT upwind of the Pacific Ocean.
Storage of spent fuel is a trivial expense. And you what containment failure are you talking about? Fuksuhima blew most nuclides into the NW not the Pacific Ocean and radiation dosages maxed at lower values than a popular beach in Brazil. You are spreading Fear Porn, you are worse at it than your Climate Change Alarmists.
Watch this video by the Illinois Energy Professor on Nuclear Waste storage and get the facts, not Fear Porn:
Dispelling the Myths of Nuclear Energy (Live Lecture):
People who use LOL as often as you sound like immature schoolboys.
Calling Robert Bryce, Meredith Angwin, David Blackmon, Robert Zubrin, Alex Epstein, Mark Nelson hilarious indicates you are not just a typical Neoliberal disinformation sockpuppet but a birdbrain as well.
Nuclear power plants unlike any other energy source pay for waste storage/disposal and decommissioning up front with ~ 1/2 cent/kwh fee. Why doesn't the same apply to all other energy sources. Nuclear is the only energy source that contains its wastes.
You're an expert witness in your own imagination. A Legend in Your Own Mind. Sure impress the hell out of me. Not.
Nuclear operators don't pay for waste storage under the Nuclear Waster Policy Act or decommissioning under . Those are fees ordained by Federal legislation that are collected from customers and conveyed to a trust fund or DOE.
And those fees are NOT considered in the LCOE calculation.
Throw them in and nuke busbar cost sink even further below LMP.
On reflection, maybe you're not lying. Maybe you're just ignorant.
You saying CO2 ain't a problem means ZIP because 99% of the nations (and even states, provinces and municipalities, including solid conservative/Republican ones) are committed to and are investing heavily in CO2 reduction methods, many draconian levels of CO2 reduction. Right now almost every one of them is pursuing nutty scams that destroy the economy while doing zip to reduce CO2 (outside of destroying the economy) chiefly wind & solar, but also agrofuels, hydrogen, ITER, battery storage and biomass burning. Made far worse by the Net Zero carbon trading, carbon credits MEGA-SCAM. Just a giant money-grubbing way to give government guaranteed profits to unscrupulous, connected large investors - the BIGGEST GRIFT in all of human history.
Nuclear is the one proven method, and very economical method to reduce emissions while greatly improving economic & industrial resilience.
Your "...nuke power at $175/MWH -- 3x natural gas or coal..." -- you pulled those numbers out of your butt. Admit it.
In the USA the problem with nuclear is the NRC = Nuclear Rejection Commission, the most corrupt agency in all of the US gov't. Gas does compete favorably in the US due to the cheap credit Banks have dumped into fracking in the past decade (no longer). That only worked when wind & solar didn't fail during cold or hot spells sending the price of gas and thus both electricity and heating fuel sky high, like well over $1/kwh, bankrupting business. In most of the World now they have to pay for LNG @ 4-6X the price of US piped gas. No more cheap Russian gas. So much for the reliability of gas. And coal is already more expensive than new Nuclear in the USA.
The World will have to increase its energy supply by 5X in order to supply the growing demand of developing nations. There is no possible way fossil can achieve that nor can fossil + renewables. The ONLY possible way to supply that much energy is through Nuclear. Factory built nuclear. Fortunately there is enough easily accessible uranium & thorium to supply that much energy for ~100Myrs.
I'm a physicist. I do commodity and climate risk management.
I'm saying the peer-reviewed literature reports <30% correlation with temperature anomalies. That means >70% of climate temperature variation is NOT due to natural and anthropogenic GHG.
For that 30%, the literature reports Granger causality of excess temperature on CO2.
Translation -- temperature leads CO2. Not the other way around.
That means rationing will not materially impact CO2 concentration, and has no impact on climate temperature
The literature does not report empirical data for anthropogenic emissions. Only speculative estimates and measurements of large point sources (e.g., OCO-2).
Bottom line -- climate solutions cannot control climate
---
$175/MWH:
That's LCOE from Lazard and US EIA based on current nuclear construction data.
Obviously, you're ignorant of nuclear cost data
---
Gas:
Russia never cut off Europe. They had 30-yr contracts.
As for elsewhere, pipeline gas is going into China ("Power of Siberia").
Japan was considering the Sakhalin-Hokkaido pipeline before suicidally cancelling.
India is getting the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.
You don't have to do LNG unless your government is on a suicide pact.
---
Only Nuclear?
No one will buy a construction bond for 18-20 years.
You ignored my entire argument. Tell your story to Republican politicians. Why in almost every state & federal are they pouring $billions into CO2 reduction? Why has Republican Texas destroyed their power grid with wind & solar, completely useless in Texas. The Bentek study showed emissions INCREASED in Texas after installing all that wind. A total waste of money. Why are your Republican politicians passing subsidy after subsidy for nutty scams: wind, solar, carbon capture, agrofuels, hydrogen, biomass burning? Why? Eh?
Lazard is well known as grifters, they cherry pick data to make wind & solar look cheap and nuclear look expensive. Complete garbage. Even Lazard admits their numbers are easily misinterpreted. You need to learn how the power grid works.
The EIA puts Nuclear at $88.24/MWh, Coal @ $82.61, Biomass @ $90.17.
I know all about the Russian pipelines. They were always vulnerable to political manipulation & war. The US decided to blow up the pipelines. And Germany/Europe could do ZIP about it. And Norway participated in the sabotage. Why is Germany quiet as a church mouse about it? And they were installed by corruption, Shroeder sold out to Russia and got a cushy job on Gazprom executive for doing so, while ordering Nuclear in Germany to be shut down.
Keep trying, you might eventually get one point right.
Jesus. Einstein here figures blowing >$100T on nutty energy scams in order to pretend to reduce CO2 is "not relevant to economics". Son, you couldn't manage a lemonade stand with your knowledge of economics.
China is beating US gas in LCOE from nuclear. So is the UAE (starting from scratch). The LCOE for even rip-off Vogtle and the rip-off Hollande EPR's in the EU are much lower than what they are paying in Europe now, because they listened to your belief that they can rely on Russian gas forever. Finland is doing very well with their VVER-1100, cheapest electricity in Europe. China is on a nuclear building boom, $3B/NPP, 4yr build time, 150 reactors in 15yrs, 1 reactor every 25day. Cheaper than coal, gas or wind/solar. According to you they use magic over there, the US & Europe are too primitive and stupid to do the same (even though they did even better than that in the 1970's). Funny how that magic appears when you don't have a corrupt NRC type regulator.
Why don't you get gas/wind/solar to guarantee their cost with a posted bond? No giant price spikes (like 1500% every winter). No economic disasters like happened in the 1970's when conventional gas in the US failed to deliver as promised by the industry. Followed by a big move to coal.
Listen to someone who unlike you actually knows something about the subject, Nuclear Engineer Dr. Robert Zubrin explain it to you, listen and learn:
Nuclear Energy, Space and Humanity's Future | Robert Zubrin | The Human Progress Podcast Ep. 30:
Here's Energy Expert Alex Epstein (not a Climate Change Alarmist) educating you on nuclear:
Fossil Future on the value of developing cost-effective alternatives:
" It’s crucial to identify how to liberate the use of fossil fuels while also fostering the ability of alternatives like nuclear to substitute where it makes sense today and to develop, if possible, into superior replacements in coming generations. [page 361]
Fossil Future on the imperative to “decriminalize nuclear”:
The key to decriminalizing nuclear is to have consistent safety standards across all forms of energy. It makes no sense to hold nuclear to thousands of times the safety standards of hydro or natural gas.
And
Safety standards must be based on the principles of “demonstrably and significantly harmful” and “reasonably preventable.” That means scrapping LNT (“linear no-threshold”) as well as ALARA (“as low as reasonably achievable”—which in practice is incredibly unreasonable, leading to unreasonably high costs that cause us to use far more dangerous nonnuclear energy).
And
If nuclear safety standards were based on these principles, we’d likely see unbelievable innovation as smart people all over the world were finally free to unleash the human flourishing potential of the atom. [page 390]
Fossil Future on the “freedom to develop,” which is crucial to liberating all energy potential, including “ultradeep geothermal”:
Human beings can only engage in cost-effective energy production and therefore modern productivity to the extent they are free to engage in the development that energy production requires. If and to the extent the freedom to develop doesn’t exist, energy cannot be produced cost-effectively or at all. [page 369]
And
As with solar, wind, and biomass, if geothermal managed to become ultra-cost-effective at some point, it would surely attract opposition from our anti-energy knowledge system due to the inevitably large impact on nature it would have. For example, advanced geothermal, like much oil and gas drilling, makes use of fracking in order to crack rocks and release heat. Does anyone believe that Greenpeace and the Sierra Club wouldn’t come after geothermal fracking if it were widespread? Is there any chance that anti-impact hostility won’t increase if deep geothermal projects are known to be drilling over ten thousand feet below the surface of the earth? [page 231]..."
Yes, this is where the alarmists have brought us. You cannot run modern civilization on renewables, it will break us long before we get there, so the only option is nuclear.
If the climate scientologists refuse to go by the science on CO2, which shows that everything to date, for whatever reason, has been entirely beneficial to the planet and us humans, there are currently no other viable options.
NOAA datasets (e.g., UAHv6 and HadSST) demonstrate peak climate temperature was in February 2016 after the end of the ~80 active solar phase of the Gleissberg cycle.
Average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly that month was 0.71 C above the 40-yr baseline.
Per NOAA, the year-over-year decline fits a linear trend of 0.02C/decade.
February 2023 was done to 0.08 C above the 40-yr baseline.
Sea surface temperature (SST) follows a similar trajectory.
This is all consistent with the weaked phase of the solar Gleissberg Cycle and is expected to cool for another 35-40 years before returning to warming.
Citations to the peer-reviewed literature available.
I think the real answer is “we really don’t know what happens next”, and anyone who says the science is “settled” and calls others “deniers” should be removed from public discourse and thrown into a pit.
As a physicist who has worked with climate data for the last 7 years, I certainly agree "nobody knows what happens next" applies to a lot of things.
I also know compelling evidence has been reported in the physics literature and in public data the Sun is now entering a low activity phase of the Gleissberg Cycle pretty much as forecast. That's evident in the solar wind speed, the exospheric data, and the coronal observations.
And I agree "denier" is a word that has no place in science. But it only has a place in theology and dogma.
From my limited understanding, the sun is affecting the climate not by large changes in the amount of heat hitting the earth but by the solar wind and magnetic affects changing how much radiation reaches earth which then changes the amount of cloud cover which then has magnitudes greater effects than any amount of change of co2, methane, or whatever greenhouse gas we choose to look at.
Tepco screwed up and put the emergency power apparatus down beside the reactors instead of up on the hill and so they flooded, no emergency power meant kaboom.
From that Germany and others made the decision to begin closing their reactors, saying they would switch to renewables but in reality the main switch was to Russian natural gas.
And here we are in 2023.
An example of how bad situations produce bad policy.
Really think risking a reactor accident at a geriatric nuke in high density Germany is a rational idea?
Or recapitalizing those geriatrics makes economic sense?
Really think buying cheap gas from Russia was dumb?
Cheap gas made Germany filthy rich.
Of course, that wealth has been evaporating when our obedient vassal cut off themselves off from the gas and remained quiet while the US and Norway blew up Nordstream.
Now, Germany is toast. They face a 5-8% economic contraction this year and things only get worse from here.
Nukes were never going to provide Germany security just as renewables can't carry the German grid.
"risk of a reactor accident" is ZERO. What fantasy world do you live in? Fukushima didn't kill even one person in the more dense Japan. That was worst case scenario for a commercial NPP, 3 total meltdowns, all EASILY avoidable. Zero deaths. Chernobyl was an illegal Soviet military reactor with no containment and a high positive coefficient of reactivity. Irrelevant for commercial nuclear power.
In 1999 Germany was 31% clean, zero emissions Nuclear electricity, 170TWh/yr. At that time they started their program to replace Nuclear with Wind & Solar, buffered with Russian gas. Now after having spent over $500B on wind and solar since then they are now at 28.8% wind + solar, 165TWh/yr. Zero achievement after $500B down the sewer. If Germany has spent $230B on Nuclear power they would now be 100% clean Nuclear electricity. 3X the results at <1/2 the cost. And now most of Germany's wind & solar will have to be replaced over the next decade. And of course they would now be much more resilient to Putin's natural gas pipeline blackmail.
In 1999 Gerhard Schroeder announces all nuclear will be shutdown in Germany by 2020 "replaced by wind & solar". [if you believe that I have 5 bridges to sell you, cheap]. Then just before Schroeder gets booted out of office he signs a $6B contract to build a NG pipeline from Russia to Germany with Gazprom, the Russia NG utility. Plus a $1.7B loan guaranteed by the German gov't. Then shortly after losing the election Schroeder signs on as a chairman with Gazprom at an undisclosed salary. And in 2003 Schroeder quashed an investigation into a company named SPAG in Frankfurt linked to money laundering in several countries run by St. Petersburg's Tambovskaya mafia group with links to Putin, who was on SPAG's advisory board. Schroeder still sits on Gazprom's executive board.
Nuclear is the only path forward for energy security in Europe. France realized that in the 1970's after the Arab Oil embargo. And replaced half their domestic primary energy supply, 88% of their domestic electricity supply in 20yrs with Nuclear. Do that one more time and they would be 100% zero emissions nuclear. The Bankster Malthusian creeps who own Hollande & Macron just can't allow that.
Again pulling numbers out of your butt, and ignoring every point I made.
You have no idea what Tepco is paying for. And it ain't $1T. You must have a sore butt. Like storing Tritium water with a much lower radiation than seawater's natural radiation. Like trucking off topsoil to contaminated storage with a lower radiation level than Colorado's topsoil.
Like paying a typical Fuku evac family $30,000 per month in basic payment. Another $1,000 per month per person for "anguish" giving a total of $34,000 per month for a typical family of four. A further lump sum payment of $60,000 for each evacuee for "emotional damage".
Meanwhile 60% of the 330 thousand who lost everything in the tsunami got ZIP from the Japan gov't. Their homes, their towns became wasteland. The lucky 40% got $400-650 per month. Otherwise a kick-in-the-butt. That's why they call the tsunami evacuees who lost 18,000 friends & family, Kimin: "The Forgotten People".
The radiation the Fuku evacuees were exposed to was typically 100X lower than on a popular beach in Brazil. And zero died from the FUKU incident, vs combustion fuels kill 13 million per year. And the evacuated region was less than one hydro reservoir = renewable energy, that is permanently destroyed land. One hydro dam failure killed ~200,000 people.
Where is the price-anderson for the 13M deaths per year from combustion fuel pollution? For the millions of Covid vaccine deaths? For hydro dam failures? For airplane crashes? For giant oils spills like Deepwater Horizon? Or railroad accidents like East Palestine or Lac Magentic Quebec? For wind & solar power failures costing 10's of $billions?
There may be fissionable material in waste. But the literature demonstrates it's not economic to recover nor does any recovery process reduce total high level waste volumes.
Certainly, DOE has been one trainwreck after another attempting an economic recovery.
As for yiur hilarious "government pays" claim, 60% of that money comes from taxpayers and 40% is additional debt which taxpayers pay interest.
A subsidy to increase nuclear operator profits.
I prefer seeing buclear operators paying all costs for perpetual storage of spent fuel.
Sure, a lot of subsidies flying around anyway.
But a Congressional Budget Office analysis of subsidies performed ~2018 (I have the study in my files) demonstrates nuke supoly chains enjoy ~10x the subsidies per kJ produced compared to oil and gas supply chains
They are working on designs that will use the “spent” fuel which actually has tons of energy capability still in it.
So that waste will be consumed down to a minuscule amount.
And why frown on the fact that governments manage the cost of waste, everyone in the country will benefit from the power produced.
The argument sound too much like those who accuse oil companies of forcing people to use their “disgusting” project when in reality the oil and gas is in heavy demand because it’s useful and people know it.
The world record seismic event in Japan did zip to its reactors, including ones right on the Eastern coast. Just because the Daiichi ones weren't prepped for a tsunami of that size (easily could have been done) is no reason to abandon nuclear.
Your 18-20yrs is nonsense. They are building them right now in China in 4yrs as South Korea has done. And France did 88% of their domestic electricity supply in 20yrs.
The UAE, starting from scratch, in 2012, with ZERO nuclear expertise, ZERO trained workforce, construction crews and minimal industrial infrastructure built for a total cost of $24.4B , 4 South Korean APR-1400's in 8 yrs for 5.6GW or $4.8B/GW-yr output @ 90% or 44 TWh/yr. That's 103% of Australia's current total annual wind & solar production. At $24.4B/$50B = 1/2 the cost of Australia's wind/solar. Not counting the additional $20B in transmission infrastructure they just announced to facilitate their wind/solar delusion. Which will actually cost more like $30B. With at least another $10B being planned.
Your 50% go bankrupt is based on the first 2 builds in the USA in 30yrs after an NRC imposed boycott. Tell us what Shale Gas & Oil would cost if they had an NRC type regulator that shut the entire industry down for 30yrs. No skilled workforce. No supply chain. No experienced contractors. No designs that meet newest safety & environmental standards. And then suddenly decide to restart the industry. How much do you figure that gas & oil would cost?
I explained all of that to you and as usual you ignored everything I said and then just repeat the same nonsense I just debunked, a typical disinformation specialist (Standard Motto: Repeat a Lie as often as possible in the hope that will delude most people into thinking it's the Truth).
And you have probably have an idea of reality, you just lie about it, because that's what you're paid to do.
I know how the industry works, as do the many people I linked, who unlike you are reputable. You just make shit up and hope you might convince some low IQ type.
You'd be an expert on low IQ, ignorance, baseless claims and non-sequiters since that's all we've heard from you so far. Keep trying though, one day you might get one thing right.
It was a management, not technological, failure that caused the reactor meltdown: had TEPCO moved the emergency power generation batteries from underneath the plant to higher ground (as suggested by the IAEA among others), this accident would not have occurred. As well, it was a failure of management and the government to support the industry in the court of public opinion, thereby causing Japan to increase reliance on imported Natural Gas to address their energy needs.
They didn't even need to do that, all they needed was diesel water pumps, a fuel storage tank and a swimming pool of fresh water. Now all Japanese reactors have that. They use 3 diesel fire trucks as water pumps.
Japan paid dearly by switching to imported LNG & coal. A major cost to their economy. And killed about 50,000 Japanese due to the mostly coal emissions.
True - the failure to maintain safety system redundancy and resilience under a tsunami or seismic threats was reckless.
No less reckless than running nukes in a seismically active area.
But who ever said the corrupt Japanese nuclear industry (along with widespread organized crime infestation) and its thoroughly co-opted nuclear safety regulator were anything but reckless?
Speaking about your "peer reviewed literature". Tell us how many "peer reviewed" science papers support Anthropogenic Climate Change vs those that don't? 10:1 or more likely 100:1? You've essentially just declared your own beliefs are nonsense. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
What a grifter. Yep the IPCC doesn't believe Climate Change is caused by human activities, according to Mr. Legend here. This guy just makes shit up, whatever suits him. Mr. Legend is so far out on the fringe he may be typing this from an institution for the mentally unstable.
Again with the Progressive crap. You don't know what a progressive is. The problem is Neoliberals like yourself.
Robert Bryce, author, film producer, and host of the Power Hungry Podcast, discusses his recent article "The Billionaires Behind the Gas Bans", and gives insight into the funding of massive NGOs such as Climate Imperative:
In Episode 24 of The Energy Question, David Blackmon interviews writer and electric grid expert Meredith Angwin, author of "Shorting the Grid." Ms. Angwin's book details the inner workings of the ISO-New England electric grid in a way that is both compelling and highly-readable for the average person:
I know, I know, it's Youtube. Mark Nelson, Robert Bryce, Meredith Angwin, David Blackmon therefore are all looney tunes, according to Einstein here.
"...incapable of reading the peer-reviewed literature..."
I can see you know nothing about "peer reviewed". You need an education. And I doubt one thing you said was "peer reviewed".
You know zip about economic, environmental and morbidity risks, so far all we have got from you is lots of Fear Porn and vigorous arm-waving. Innumerate.
The rest of what you wrote is egotistical gibberish.
Accident risk analysis isn't measured by how many people you might kill.
Before you even get there, you first consider how much damage is inflicted on third parties and the enterprise.
What will this cost to remediate.
Japan was lucky 90% of the payload went downwind over the Pacific.
At the time, we monitored met data and were ecstatic we drew 4 aces on wind speed and direction.
Our people were lucky.
But the 10% or so of the payload that hit Honshu still left contamination levels exceeding 185 kBq/m2 of 137Cs covering approximately 1700 km2 (Steinhauser et al., 2014) and deposits exceeding 10 kBq/m2 extending over 24,000 km2 (Champion et al., 2013).
Bad as that is to clean up, can't say it enough - Japan was lucky.
And you take that as a rationale to double-down?
Sounds like you live a "hold my beer and watch this" kind of life.
LOL
As I said, if you can't afford losses, stay out of a casino.
No nuclear operating company can afford a reactor accident.
The most important accident risk analysis is about deaths. And injuries is a typical multiplier of deaths. And property damage is extremely low in nuclear. Fukushima was trivial property damage off-site compared to the East Palestine recent event. By all rational measure.
And you're talking nonsense. 90% of the mild level of radioisotope emissions went to the NW overland. And none of it outside the plant gates was as high as a popular beach in Brazil.
" brazil 2012: sunbathing on radioactive beaches "
Even while Cs-134 was significant in April 2011 the highest readings outside the plant gates were 35 mSv/hr. That's largely gamma radiation. Look at the beach in Brazil measured right off someone sunbathing getting >50 mSv/hr, that's gamma. Plus a high dose of alpha radiation (think plutonium, radon) through ingestion and inhalation from thorium daughters in the air & sand, you don't get in Fukushima. People have lived right on that beach for thousands of years. They call it "The Health City". No indication of radiation induced health illness.
Yeah, but they can certainly afford a Bhopal, an East Palestine, a Lac Magentic, a Bhopal, a giant mud volcano due to gas drilling that buried an entire town, a hydro dam failure that killed 200k people and devastated 12,000 sq. km. Or a Deepwater Horizon blowout or Exxon Valdez or an exploding LNG tanker (= to an atomic bomb) or terminal, or Nordstream pipeline destruction, or any of the thousands of gas pipeline explosions and oil refinery explosions and fires ( a giant one happened same time as Fukushima) or 13M deaths/yr due to fossil pollution. Or several billion dead due to energy shortages. The press and Fear Porn Alarmists like yourself don't hype those. Come to think of it you sound EXACTLY like the Climate Change Alarmists you claim to despise so much.
Price Anderson is about the smallest liability cap in the USA. Look at Big Pharma, Big Aerospace, Weapons manufacturers, Big Oil, King Coal, many others for giant liability caps, that they don't even pay into unlike Nuclear.
Many nuclear experts figure they would compete better without Price-Anderson.
You still haven't explained why you blow a gasket crying about nuclear getting a MUCH LOWER exemption from accident liability than ANY of the above I mentioned. And you still haven't explained why you think combustion fuels deserve 100% liability protection from 13M deaths/yr, many more injuries (i.e. lung disease). Double standard much. Like all anti-nuclear types the irrevocable Double Standard against Nuclear is the basis of your entire argument. Hypocrisy is your middle name.
Yes, that too, although i don't think it was batteries it was the diesel gensets providing backup emergency power that got swamped. If they had placed those up on the hill, no issues would have happened.
No false. You don't know what you're talking about. The tsumami damaged their Diesel Generators. And they lost fresh water supply. All they needed was diesel pumps (fire trucks), secure fuel supply and a swimming pool of fresh water. Pretty simple minded stuff.
The earthquake triggered the reactor trips and sustaimed loss of offsite power.
Reportedly, cooling water pipes in Unit 1 failed before 3 PM ahead of the tsunami by 45 minutes.
TEPCo data records recirc pumps were triggered by the quake onna loss of coolant signal.
Containment sprays were activated after 3:04 PM.
IAEA came to different conclusion post-accident but the records stand.
And, sure -- a firemain header and diesel pumps might have been effective -- even with sea water.
The NRC Station Blackout rule envisioned that strategy as a part of an accident coping strategy if they had sufficient battery capacity for instumentation and control.
TEPCo went cheap on the seawall, and so emergency AC was trashed by the tsunami.
Reactor SCRAMs are part of the design during an earthquake. Worked as expected. The newer Dianni NPPs up the beach from Fukushima sustained a higher tsunami and shutdown with out any significant damage. And a giant refinery explosion & fire occurred at Chiba (videos of which were routinely shown under the Fukushima heading), it took them a week to get it under control. And a hydro dam failed. You're grasping at straws. Obviously totally irrational. A vested interest or a cultist, a cardboard cutout of your Climate Change Alarmists. Interesting how you have a meltdown talking about nuclear but could care less about wind & solar where all your Climate Change $trillions are going down the sewer. Telling.
Actually, a lot of BWR 3/4s failed to trip in years past due to low quality design and construction of the scram discharge headers.
But, sure, Unit 1 tripped.
And, sure, newer plants meet higher standards while BWR 3/4s like Unit 1 remain accidents waiting to happen.
What's your point?
That the accident was avoidable if nukes actually managed risk?
I agree.
Fact is TEPCo operated recklessly like any other nuke operating company hiding behind a grandfathered "licensung basis".
You bring up Chiba and suggest I don't care.
You're right - I don't care about Chiba.
I look at it this way. The third party damages TEPCo and the Japanese government dumped on Japanese citizeblns resulting from TEPCo's reckless behaviot totalled ~$1 trillion plus $50 billion or so over 50 years to clean up.
If Eneos loses Chiba, their insurance carriers or stockholders eat the loss.
That's the difference.
As for renewables, on one hand they are cheaper than nukes and don't need the subsidies they pig out on
Moreover, bad as renewables are, nukes are a fatter corporate welfare queen than renewables.
The batteries worked but had insufficient storage time. You can easily make critical electrical systems that function underwater, we use +4000 volt pumps that operate 5,000 feet underwater. You just need to design for that. Not really necessary at a Nuclear plant, easy to seal that from floods, it does have a large containment structure.
Likely both, When we do back up power systems, diesels are the long term supply and will be sized for the emergency cooling pumps as well as control systems for them but they take 30-60 seconds to come online, and so UPS battery systems kick in within milliseconds to keep all the plant controls powered until the gensets are spun up.
Those UPS systems needed to be in a raised building as well.
A simple sturdy building on a raised platform containing the ups and genset systems would have eliminated this disaster.
Nothing we do is without risks. Human error, natural disaster or mechanical failure, things sometimes go wrong. We have learned through research and experience to mitigate the risks. The industrial revolution improved life on most of the planet, and it came with risks.
True -- nothing is risk-free.
But if you can't afford losses, you don't go into a casino.
If a nuclear operator can't afford the multi-trillions in third party losses from a reactor accident, they have no business running a nuke.
You still haven't explained why you think fossil/biomass must be exempt from the 13M deaths they cause every year due to mostly air pollution. You're a fanatic, a crackpot, damn near psycho.
Myself I'm pro-nuclear. I'm also pro rational energy policy, pro-gas, pro-oil, pro-coal, pro-hydro, pro-geothermal. We need all the help we can get. But I'm anti crazy energy policy like wind, solar, CCS, hydrogen, ITER, agrofuels, most biomass burning. Not a fanatic as you are.
Even wind & solar they are sane and sensible in certain niche applications like off grid homes, anywhere there is a diesel grid with a good wind or solar resource, on satellites, some space probes, isolated scientific instruments. In general on a standard coal/gas/nuclear/hydro grid wind & solar make no sense, a complete waste of money. That's a rational energy policy.
Key point is, though fossil & hydro are great rational energy sources, there is just no feasible way they will supply the 5fold increase in energy supply we need to meet the rapidly growing demand of developing nations. And as fossil supplies become more concentrated, mainly the Middle East & Russia, we need alternatives. The only viable alternative is nuclear. Indeed nuclear fission can supply the World's energy needs for a 100 Myrs. It's the only path forward. With the lowest deaths, injuries, health and environmental impacts. And if done properly, the lowest cost of ANY energy source. If scam artists, crooks, Fear Porn disinformation grifters, paid $billion lobby firms, must be marginalized, then we must do that. Ramping up nuclear energy is just plain survival of human civilization.
You welcome the losses of a $100T on useless wind & solar. The losses will be the destruction of the World economy. A Malthusian agenda. Billions of deaths. Compared to that a hundred Chernobyl's plus another 100 Fukushima's would be a triviality.
Who ever said anyone other than nukes are exempt from torts from their actions?
Not me.
If a plaintiff has a claim, they can file it. Of course, they need to demonstrate a direct cause of action -- good luck with that.
Under our legal system, damages must be proved.
In contrast, nukes -- like Pfizer et al. with the mRNA jabs -- they are shielded from even bringing claims
What happens if a FPP breaks?!
Like anything else in this lovely Uman Civilization everything is awesome just until it breaks!
Good work, Robert. No path to decarbonizing electricity without it without wrecking living standards and keeping 6.5 billion people from reaching ours.
Stay the course.
The reason these plants failed was that they were using a solid fuel system that generated hydrogen gas as the water level in the reactor fell. The combination of solid, zirconium clad fuel pellets, water and a poorly maintained unit (they could not open up the pressure relief valves because they were rusted shut) was an accident waiting to happen.
Great essay, very informative. Thank you. I too support nuclear. I believe we need more investment $’s from world governments to make it safer, cheaper and easier to use. I can’t see myself buying an EV car and using carbon sources to charge it, makes no sense. Glad to see Japan increasing its nuclear footprint. France is leading the way with 70% of its electricity coming from Nuclear.
Good article. I was involved in the US and worldwide Nuclear Industry for 45 years. While the industry does not want to have significant events for any reasons, the industry, industry groups like INPO ( Institute for Nuclear Power Operations), and regulators have incorporated the lessons from these events in the design, training, procedures, emergency response, and most importantly, leadership. The industry has developed and implemented design changes , new equipment, and enhanced emergency response training to address beyond design basis external events.
How do you know all that reduces the risk of a reactor accident?
How do you know all that isn't just eye-wash?
PRA's, they do these things you know, that's how they got men on the moon, in spite of a thousand points of total failure:
PRA (Probabilistic Risk Assessment) for the new GenIII reactors being built in the West:
Frequency of Core Damage for AP 1000
( 5.09 x 10-7 reactor years)
1 reactor -- once every 2 million years
10 reactors -- once every 200,000 years
100 reactors -- once every 20,000 years
1000 reactors -- once every 2000 years
10,000 reactors -- once every 200 years
Frequency of Large Release of Radioactive Material for AP 1000
(6 x 10-8 reactor years)
1 reactor -- once every 17 million years
10 reactors --- once every 1.7 million years
100 reactors --- once every 170 thousand years
1000 reactors -- once every 17,000 years
10,000 reactors -- once every 1700 years
Anyone who can't handle that level of risk might as well spend their entire life living in a cocoon. Unfortunately for them, that would be very unhealthy and they would die young after a short and miserable life.
1 accident every 17 million years?
Sure - if you assume:
(1) zero risk of a systemic event such as a tsunami clearing an undersized seawall
(2) failures are random
(3) all systems are truly independent (see (1) and (2) above
(4) zero human-triggered failure such as TMI which bankrupted Met Ed
(5) no sensitivity to component aging
(6) no defects in plant design or construction
Only "nuke nuts" who are ignorant of the data and nuclear risk management are still pitching that con,
Pretty hilarious
Radioactive cesium contaminated 11,580 square miles (about 30,000 km2) of the land surface of Japan, according to the Japanese Science Ministry (Asahi Shimbun, 2011).
An area of about 130 square miles (337 km2) is now designated as unsafe for human habitation. This area represents almost one percent of Japan’s scarce arable land (which is about 17,274 square miles (44,739 km2)) and is equivalent to the combined land area of the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn in New York City.
Restrictions likely will remain in effect for generations because the primary contaminant, Cesium-137, has a half-life of 30 years, requiring 10 half-lives to pass for most radionuclides to disappear.
A French study estimates direct damages from a generic major accident similar to a Fukushima-level event occurring at a French nuclear reactor could cost $515 billion, including $15 billion for on-site decommissioning and clean-up (IRSN, 2014).
A special task force sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) assessed a rough estimate of direct damages from the Fukushima Daiichi accident was about $500 billion (ASME, 2012).
According to the Japan Center of Economic Research (JCER), total cost for the Fukushima clean-up is ~$700 billion, excluding indirect and consequential damages. The JCER estimate includes reactor decommissioning and water decontamination ($320 billion), clean-up of contaminated land ($300 billion) and damage compensation ($80 billion, which is likely too low) (JCER).
Indirect and consequential damages from major environmental accidents are typically 2-3x direct.
We're lucky to have the on-site reportage from someone with so much experience and context. Thanks Robert.
Let's not lull ourselves into the believe that it is possible to find a bureaucratic solution to a bureaucratic problem. Only one thing drive the high cost of nuclear, bureaucracy. The promise of .02 cents per reliable kilowatt hour was met by some pre 1975 plant , reference, Bernard L Cohen. "The Nuclear Energy Option".
Blame the system?
Well, the statistics reviewed in the peer-reviewed literature says it's simply a matter of undercapitalized vendors staffed by low quality engineers selling a plant without a detailed design and rushing it to the field with predictably low quality construction results.
Same overruns seen in France and Finland for the same reason.
And this time will be different?
I don’t object to you believing what you believe.
... and I only have confidence in peer-reviewed literature with transparent data.
So I guess it follows you don't object to data.
An admirable quality.
Too bad a lot of people believe in their hunches -- nonsense like red tape causes nukes to overrun.
And what peer reviewed literature is that? The only "peer reviewed" you know of is cherry picked versions that are so full of holes they'd make a great sieve.
For your education on "peer review":
https://wmbriggs.substack.com/p/paul-ehrlich-confirms-sciences-negative
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-chronicle-of-higher-education
https://sciencemadeeasy.kinja.com/peer-review-is-it-broken-1702634781
https://sciencemadeeasy.kinja.com/peer-review-fake-it-to-make-it-1700161119
Ted Trainer on peer review:
“…I strongly object to Raugei’s comments to you re peer review. I have little respect for the entire peer review edifice, due to my unsatisfactory experience in trying to get critical analyses published. Very often I have found the comments of reviewers to range between nit picky imposition of the way they would have expressed things or gone about the job, through reasoning that I see as at least challengeable and at times dead wrong, to rejection on utterly idiotic grounds … such as being told that my recent 20 page detailed critique of the 2014 IPCC report on renewables was “not scientific”, after waiting seven months for review. (That phrase constituted the full case given for rejection.) On another occasion, where it took over a year to get through the difficulties, I was presented with a seven page essay disagreeing with elements in my case. If that reviewer wanted to express a different view he should have done it somewhere else, not try to insist that I say what he would have said. I have another case where a 50 word review from probably the most prestigious individual in the field said the paper was good, but the paper was rejected because a second even shorter review was unfavourable. The reasons were so unintelligible that I had to ask what they meant. It eventuated that the editor said he didn’t think it was the kind of paper his journal published … after I had waited seven months.
I see the process as far too prone to the whims, prejudices and in fact arrogance of reviewers and editors. They should get out of the way and let people say what they have found or think, and focus only on things like pointing out mistakes or pointing to overlooked evidence or assumptions, or logical errors. Their role should be to help get ideas and analyses out to others, and to block only as a last resort. Too often I have found that reviewers think their role is to make authors conform to their preferred style and they assume the right to condemn work that doesn’t proceed as they would have. I have written reviews in which I say I think the argument is wrong and the procedure not satisfactory but I think the paper should be published, because I could be mistaken and the paper does present a case that it is important for us to think about..."
Which literature are you interested in?
Nuke overrun factors?
Absence of a learning curve?
Lack of competitiveness?
Statistucs of low quality engineering and construction?
Criminal conviction history?
Something else?
For over 60 years, nukes always had excuses for continuous screwups.
Name the topic and I'll drop a few citations
Your Greenpeace literature is worth less than the paper I wiped my butt with this morning.
And yet nuclear has by far the best safety record of any energy industry, in fact of any heavy industry. That fact really ticks off your employer doesn't it?
Thanks for being polite in critiquing what I said. i don't place as much worth in peer review as you do, largely from the history of the theory of plate tectonics. Alfred Wegner? proposed it and was vilified by the geological establishment, dying before the theory was fully accepted in the 1960's.
In my experience and training, the quality of peer-reviewed literature can vary.
But quantitative papers with quality data tend to hold up over time.
I attended the international conference directly after Fukushima held in Washington, DC. I was amazed by the desperation exhibited by the attendees. Nobody seemed to have a clear head.
Indeed.
I was pulled into a disaster response team through the accident.
I was stunned by the ignorance level onsite and among experts.
And also surprised by how fast instrumentation went down.
By that point, I was relying on my simulations and regression models to call out thevscenario unfolding.
Was quickly looking ahead at the weather to advise on the likely dispersion a day ahead of the first release.
Like watching "experts" predicting the CoVid pandemic.
Clueless.
And nuke groupies today down-playing Fukushima.
Again, anecdotal reports from someone who thinks he is a legend in his own mind. Just ask him how great he is, he'll tell you.
I'm not a legend in anyone's time.
I know you were not dealing with Fukushima as it played out - I was.
And, I was stunned by the ignorance level onsite and among experts.
And I was surprised by how fast safety-grade instrumentation went down.
As a nuclear engineer, I assumed the TMI standards would ensure safety-grade instrumentation would not fail in an accident.
That assumption was wrong - it did fail in the accident
Need nuclear?
Why?
Climate?
LOL -- most of the multidecadal warming observed through the 20th century into the first decade of the 21st is associated with increased solar activity from the Gleissbe
rg cycle.
NOT GH warming.
That warming ended about a decade ago and we face ~40 yrs of cooling by 1-1.5 C.
Per NOAA UAH dataset, peak climate temperature was in February 2016 at 0.7 C above the 40-yr satellite record.
January 2023 was -0.04 C.
That's 7 years of cooling even as GHG concentration is up ~12% over that period.
Moreover, there is no empirical evidence demonstrating anthropogenic GHG is material or that rationing controls climate tempetature.
Yet, you advocate building nuke power at $175/MWH -- 3x natural gas or coal.
LOL
Insane
IDGAF about CO2 compared to base load, load following, and safety. Done correctly, Cheaper Than Coal, cleaner than coal, safer than coal, etc. Not insane.
"Done correctly"?
Do you define that phrase to mean successfully completed on-time and on-budget without a vendor or licensee declaring bankruptcy from the overruns, or an exec not convicted of felony Federal wire fraud, or simply without the 2-5x overruns and 2-3x schedule slip?
When has that ever happened?
LOL
From my experience consulting to nuke CNOs and CFOs, and as reported in the peer-reviewed literature, nuclear construction is never "done correctly", has no "learning curve" and is systemically uncompetitive.
I have no idea what "cleaner" or "safer" means to you.
But I know that coal plants comply with the Clean Air Act.
I know that population density in the vicinity of a nuke is up.more than 100% from when the plants were licensed,.
And I know that spent fuel requires perpetual storage on the taxpayer dime who are also on the hook for ~98% of third party losses should a Mark I containment fail and spray nuclides downwind on mid-continent US land, lakes, and rivers.
Unlike Fukushima, most US plants are NOT upwind of the Pacific Ocean.
Storage of spent fuel is a trivial expense. And you what containment failure are you talking about? Fuksuhima blew most nuclides into the NW not the Pacific Ocean and radiation dosages maxed at lower values than a popular beach in Brazil. You are spreading Fear Porn, you are worse at it than your Climate Change Alarmists.
Watch this video by the Illinois Energy Professor on Nuclear Waste storage and get the facts, not Fear Porn:
Dispelling the Myths of Nuclear Energy (Live Lecture):
youtube.com/watch?v=c1QmB5bW_WQ
LOL
Love your videos -- they're hilarious.
Think spent fuel storage is cheap?
Well if that's true then it should be a no brainer for nuclear licensees to carry the cost.
I was an expert witness for a utility litigating DOE's breach of contract.
It ain't cheap.
People who use LOL as often as you sound like immature schoolboys.
Calling Robert Bryce, Meredith Angwin, David Blackmon, Robert Zubrin, Alex Epstein, Mark Nelson hilarious indicates you are not just a typical Neoliberal disinformation sockpuppet but a birdbrain as well.
Nuclear power plants unlike any other energy source pay for waste storage/disposal and decommissioning up front with ~ 1/2 cent/kwh fee. Why doesn't the same apply to all other energy sources. Nuclear is the only energy source that contains its wastes.
You're an expert witness in your own imagination. A Legend in Your Own Mind. Sure impress the hell out of me. Not.
LOL upsets you? Do you prefer LMAO?
OK, want LMAO, get LMAO
And you should stop lying.
Nuclear operators don't pay for waste storage under the Nuclear Waster Policy Act or decommissioning under . Those are fees ordained by Federal legislation that are collected from customers and conveyed to a trust fund or DOE.
And those fees are NOT considered in the LCOE calculation.
Throw them in and nuke busbar cost sink even further below LMP.
On reflection, maybe you're not lying. Maybe you're just ignorant.
LMAO
You saying CO2 ain't a problem means ZIP because 99% of the nations (and even states, provinces and municipalities, including solid conservative/Republican ones) are committed to and are investing heavily in CO2 reduction methods, many draconian levels of CO2 reduction. Right now almost every one of them is pursuing nutty scams that destroy the economy while doing zip to reduce CO2 (outside of destroying the economy) chiefly wind & solar, but also agrofuels, hydrogen, ITER, battery storage and biomass burning. Made far worse by the Net Zero carbon trading, carbon credits MEGA-SCAM. Just a giant money-grubbing way to give government guaranteed profits to unscrupulous, connected large investors - the BIGGEST GRIFT in all of human history.
Nuclear is the one proven method, and very economical method to reduce emissions while greatly improving economic & industrial resilience.
Your "...nuke power at $175/MWH -- 3x natural gas or coal..." -- you pulled those numbers out of your butt. Admit it.
In the USA the problem with nuclear is the NRC = Nuclear Rejection Commission, the most corrupt agency in all of the US gov't. Gas does compete favorably in the US due to the cheap credit Banks have dumped into fracking in the past decade (no longer). That only worked when wind & solar didn't fail during cold or hot spells sending the price of gas and thus both electricity and heating fuel sky high, like well over $1/kwh, bankrupting business. In most of the World now they have to pay for LNG @ 4-6X the price of US piped gas. No more cheap Russian gas. So much for the reliability of gas. And coal is already more expensive than new Nuclear in the USA.
The World will have to increase its energy supply by 5X in order to supply the growing demand of developing nations. There is no possible way fossil can achieve that nor can fossil + renewables. The ONLY possible way to supply that much energy is through Nuclear. Factory built nuclear. Fortunately there is enough easily accessible uranium & thorium to supply that much energy for ~100Myrs.
The "CO2 Clown World":
I'm a physicist. I do commodity and climate risk management.
I'm saying the peer-reviewed literature reports <30% correlation with temperature anomalies. That means >70% of climate temperature variation is NOT due to natural and anthropogenic GHG.
For that 30%, the literature reports Granger causality of excess temperature on CO2.
Translation -- temperature leads CO2. Not the other way around.
That means rationing will not materially impact CO2 concentration, and has no impact on climate temperature
The literature does not report empirical data for anthropogenic emissions. Only speculative estimates and measurements of large point sources (e.g., OCO-2).
Bottom line -- climate solutions cannot control climate
---
$175/MWH:
That's LCOE from Lazard and US EIA based on current nuclear construction data.
Obviously, you're ignorant of nuclear cost data
---
Gas:
Russia never cut off Europe. They had 30-yr contracts.
As for elsewhere, pipeline gas is going into China ("Power of Siberia").
Japan was considering the Sakhalin-Hokkaido pipeline before suicidally cancelling.
India is getting the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.
You don't have to do LNG unless your government is on a suicide pact.
---
Only Nuclear?
No one will buy a construction bond for 18-20 years.
End of story
You ignored my entire argument. Tell your story to Republican politicians. Why in almost every state & federal are they pouring $billions into CO2 reduction? Why has Republican Texas destroyed their power grid with wind & solar, completely useless in Texas. The Bentek study showed emissions INCREASED in Texas after installing all that wind. A total waste of money. Why are your Republican politicians passing subsidy after subsidy for nutty scams: wind, solar, carbon capture, agrofuels, hydrogen, biomass burning? Why? Eh?
Lazard is well known as grifters, they cherry pick data to make wind & solar look cheap and nuclear look expensive. Complete garbage. Even Lazard admits their numbers are easily misinterpreted. You need to learn how the power grid works.
The EIA puts Nuclear at $88.24/MWh, Coal @ $82.61, Biomass @ $90.17.
I know all about the Russian pipelines. They were always vulnerable to political manipulation & war. The US decided to blow up the pipelines. And Germany/Europe could do ZIP about it. And Norway participated in the sabotage. Why is Germany quiet as a church mouse about it? And they were installed by corruption, Shroeder sold out to Russia and got a cushy job on Gazprom executive for doing so, while ordering Nuclear in Germany to be shut down.
Keep trying, you might eventually get one point right.
I ignored your argument because it's not relevant to the physics or the economics.
Nuclear is as effective as any other "climate solution" in affecting GHG concentration or climate temperature -- zero impact on climate.
The LCOEs are what they are. Vogtle power is coming in at that LCOE as are the Euro trainwrecks in Finland and France.
Don't like EIA or Lazard? I can cite a half dozen peer-reviewed pspers reporting the same range.
Think the numbers are better? Well, then, get the vendors to guarantee their claim with a posted bond.
They can't so they won't.
Jesus. Einstein here figures blowing >$100T on nutty energy scams in order to pretend to reduce CO2 is "not relevant to economics". Son, you couldn't manage a lemonade stand with your knowledge of economics.
China is beating US gas in LCOE from nuclear. So is the UAE (starting from scratch). The LCOE for even rip-off Vogtle and the rip-off Hollande EPR's in the EU are much lower than what they are paying in Europe now, because they listened to your belief that they can rely on Russian gas forever. Finland is doing very well with their VVER-1100, cheapest electricity in Europe. China is on a nuclear building boom, $3B/NPP, 4yr build time, 150 reactors in 15yrs, 1 reactor every 25day. Cheaper than coal, gas or wind/solar. According to you they use magic over there, the US & Europe are too primitive and stupid to do the same (even though they did even better than that in the 1970's). Funny how that magic appears when you don't have a corrupt NRC type regulator.
Why don't you get gas/wind/solar to guarantee their cost with a posted bond? No giant price spikes (like 1500% every winter). No economic disasters like happened in the 1970's when conventional gas in the US failed to deliver as promised by the industry. Followed by a big move to coal.
Listen to someone who unlike you actually knows something about the subject, Nuclear Engineer Dr. Robert Zubrin explain it to you, listen and learn:
Nuclear Energy, Space and Humanity's Future | Robert Zubrin | The Human Progress Podcast Ep. 30:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMfdtyTpPhU
https://www.humanprogress.org/robert-zubrin-the-human-progress-podcast-ep-30-transcript/
How to liberate nuclear energy, with Robert Zubrin, Alex Epstein:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQtgkT8nqgc
Here's Energy Expert Alex Epstein (not a Climate Change Alarmist) educating you on nuclear:
Fossil Future on the value of developing cost-effective alternatives:
" It’s crucial to identify how to liberate the use of fossil fuels while also fostering the ability of alternatives like nuclear to substitute where it makes sense today and to develop, if possible, into superior replacements in coming generations. [page 361]
Fossil Future on the imperative to “decriminalize nuclear”:
The key to decriminalizing nuclear is to have consistent safety standards across all forms of energy. It makes no sense to hold nuclear to thousands of times the safety standards of hydro or natural gas.
And
Safety standards must be based on the principles of “demonstrably and significantly harmful” and “reasonably preventable.” That means scrapping LNT (“linear no-threshold”) as well as ALARA (“as low as reasonably achievable”—which in practice is incredibly unreasonable, leading to unreasonably high costs that cause us to use far more dangerous nonnuclear energy).
And
If nuclear safety standards were based on these principles, we’d likely see unbelievable innovation as smart people all over the world were finally free to unleash the human flourishing potential of the atom. [page 390]
Fossil Future on the “freedom to develop,” which is crucial to liberating all energy potential, including “ultradeep geothermal”:
Human beings can only engage in cost-effective energy production and therefore modern productivity to the extent they are free to engage in the development that energy production requires. If and to the extent the freedom to develop doesn’t exist, energy cannot be produced cost-effectively or at all. [page 369]
And
As with solar, wind, and biomass, if geothermal managed to become ultra-cost-effective at some point, it would surely attract opposition from our anti-energy knowledge system due to the inevitably large impact on nature it would have. For example, advanced geothermal, like much oil and gas drilling, makes use of fracking in order to crack rocks and release heat. Does anyone believe that Greenpeace and the Sierra Club wouldn’t come after geothermal fracking if it were widespread? Is there any chance that anti-impact hostility won’t increase if deep geothermal projects are known to be drilling over ten thousand feet below the surface of the earth? [page 231]..."
https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/how-the-establishment-uses-the-straw
I'm not the guy advocating blowing $100 trillion on "climate solutions".
Or $10 trillion on nukes.
Gas generation costs $50/MWH delivered in 3 years.
Nukes run >$175/MWH delivered in 18 years assuming nobody goes bankrupt.
Gas generation is bankable.
Nuke bonds are below junk.
That's the real world, Cupcake.
Now go watch some YouTube.
LOL
Yes, this is where the alarmists have brought us. You cannot run modern civilization on renewables, it will break us long before we get there, so the only option is nuclear.
If the climate scientologists refuse to go by the science on CO2, which shows that everything to date, for whatever reason, has been entirely beneficial to the planet and us humans, there are currently no other viable options.
More than just that.
NOAA datasets (e.g., UAHv6 and HadSST) demonstrate peak climate temperature was in February 2016 after the end of the ~80 active solar phase of the Gleissberg cycle.
Average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly that month was 0.71 C above the 40-yr baseline.
Per NOAA, the year-over-year decline fits a linear trend of 0.02C/decade.
February 2023 was done to 0.08 C above the 40-yr baseline.
Sea surface temperature (SST) follows a similar trajectory.
This is all consistent with the weaked phase of the solar Gleissberg Cycle and is expected to cool for another 35-40 years before returning to warming.
Citations to the peer-reviewed literature available.
I think the real answer is “we really don’t know what happens next”, and anyone who says the science is “settled” and calls others “deniers” should be removed from public discourse and thrown into a pit.
These people are destroying science
As a physicist who has worked with climate data for the last 7 years, I certainly agree "nobody knows what happens next" applies to a lot of things.
I also know compelling evidence has been reported in the physics literature and in public data the Sun is now entering a low activity phase of the Gleissberg Cycle pretty much as forecast. That's evident in the solar wind speed, the exospheric data, and the coronal observations.
And I agree "denier" is a word that has no place in science. But it only has a place in theology and dogma.
From my limited understanding, the sun is affecting the climate not by large changes in the amount of heat hitting the earth but by the solar wind and magnetic affects changing how much radiation reaches earth which then changes the amount of cloud cover which then has magnitudes greater effects than any amount of change of co2, methane, or whatever greenhouse gas we choose to look at.
That's correct.
Besides altering cloud dynamics, solar wind speed also attenuates the path length of high frequency solar irradiance.
That effect was particularly evidence in the last 20 years of the active phase of the Gleissberg Cycle..
Its amazing how the circle of life works.
Tepco screwed up and put the emergency power apparatus down beside the reactors instead of up on the hill and so they flooded, no emergency power meant kaboom.
From that Germany and others made the decision to begin closing their reactors, saying they would switch to renewables but in reality the main switch was to Russian natural gas.
And here we are in 2023.
An example of how bad situations produce bad policy.
Really think risking a reactor accident at a geriatric nuke in high density Germany is a rational idea?
Or recapitalizing those geriatrics makes economic sense?
Really think buying cheap gas from Russia was dumb?
Cheap gas made Germany filthy rich.
Of course, that wealth has been evaporating when our obedient vassal cut off themselves off from the gas and remained quiet while the US and Norway blew up Nordstream.
Now, Germany is toast. They face a 5-8% economic contraction this year and things only get worse from here.
Nukes were never going to provide Germany security just as renewables can't carry the German grid.
"risk of a reactor accident" is ZERO. What fantasy world do you live in? Fukushima didn't kill even one person in the more dense Japan. That was worst case scenario for a commercial NPP, 3 total meltdowns, all EASILY avoidable. Zero deaths. Chernobyl was an illegal Soviet military reactor with no containment and a high positive coefficient of reactivity. Irrelevant for commercial nuclear power.
In 1999 Germany was 31% clean, zero emissions Nuclear electricity, 170TWh/yr. At that time they started their program to replace Nuclear with Wind & Solar, buffered with Russian gas. Now after having spent over $500B on wind and solar since then they are now at 28.8% wind + solar, 165TWh/yr. Zero achievement after $500B down the sewer. If Germany has spent $230B on Nuclear power they would now be 100% clean Nuclear electricity. 3X the results at <1/2 the cost. And now most of Germany's wind & solar will have to be replaced over the next decade. And of course they would now be much more resilient to Putin's natural gas pipeline blackmail.
In 1999 Gerhard Schroeder announces all nuclear will be shutdown in Germany by 2020 "replaced by wind & solar". [if you believe that I have 5 bridges to sell you, cheap]. Then just before Schroeder gets booted out of office he signs a $6B contract to build a NG pipeline from Russia to Germany with Gazprom, the Russia NG utility. Plus a $1.7B loan guaranteed by the German gov't. Then shortly after losing the election Schroeder signs on as a chairman with Gazprom at an undisclosed salary. And in 2003 Schroeder quashed an investigation into a company named SPAG in Frankfurt linked to money laundering in several countries run by St. Petersburg's Tambovskaya mafia group with links to Putin, who was on SPAG's advisory board. Schroeder still sits on Gazprom's executive board.
Nuclear is the only path forward for energy security in Europe. France realized that in the 1970's after the Arab Oil embargo. And replaced half their domestic primary energy supply, 88% of their domestic electricity supply in 20yrs with Nuclear. Do that one more time and they would be 100% zero emissions nuclear. The Bankster Malthusian creeps who own Hollande & Macron just can't allow that.
No nuclear accident risk?
LOL
Like the $1 trillion in third party losses to date in Japan? No risk of that ever happening again?
Or the $50 billion to decon the site over the next 5 decades?
No risk of losses from decon ~200 km2 of land and waterways?
LOL
Well, if what you say were true, then no licensee needs Price-Anderson liability caps any more.
They should be happy to see that legislation expire without renewal.
Unfortunately for your silly claim, licensees would immediately shutdown their plants without P-A.
They said so every time P-A comes up for renewal
Simply put, licensees know their risk is not zero.
TEPCo and the people of Japan know that, too.
I agree Europe signed a suicide pact when they breached their Gazprom contracts in obedience to the Biden Regime.
And joining in to destroy Nordstream and lie about it.
Well, their renewables won't save their economy.
And at 190EUR/MWH LCOE, they can't afford to build enough nukes over 30 years to repower their grid.
Again pulling numbers out of your butt, and ignoring every point I made.
You have no idea what Tepco is paying for. And it ain't $1T. You must have a sore butt. Like storing Tritium water with a much lower radiation than seawater's natural radiation. Like trucking off topsoil to contaminated storage with a lower radiation level than Colorado's topsoil.
Like paying a typical Fuku evac family $30,000 per month in basic payment. Another $1,000 per month per person for "anguish" giving a total of $34,000 per month for a typical family of four. A further lump sum payment of $60,000 for each evacuee for "emotional damage".
Meanwhile 60% of the 330 thousand who lost everything in the tsunami got ZIP from the Japan gov't. Their homes, their towns became wasteland. The lucky 40% got $400-650 per month. Otherwise a kick-in-the-butt. That's why they call the tsunami evacuees who lost 18,000 friends & family, Kimin: "The Forgotten People".
The radiation the Fuku evacuees were exposed to was typically 100X lower than on a popular beach in Brazil. And zero died from the FUKU incident, vs combustion fuels kill 13 million per year. And the evacuated region was less than one hydro reservoir = renewable energy, that is permanently destroyed land. One hydro dam failure killed ~200,000 people.
Where is the price-anderson for the 13M deaths per year from combustion fuel pollution? For the millions of Covid vaccine deaths? For hydro dam failures? For airplane crashes? For giant oils spills like Deepwater Horizon? Or railroad accidents like East Palestine or Lac Magentic Quebec? For wind & solar power failures costing 10's of $billions?
So I guess you agree accident risk is not zero.
Fair enough.
As for your claims, losses incurred by TEPCo and third parties are well documented in public filings and the peer-reviewed literature.
The $1 billion/yr cost is also a public record.
Easy to find if you did your homework which you obviously are incapable of doing.
So I guess you agree risk is implicit in ALL energy tech, but as I proved to you the nuclear risk is far, far lower than any other tech.
And losses of TEPCO, irrational and stupid though they were are insignificant compared to losses in fossil, renewables & hydro.
Easy to see you are no physicist so quit pretending you are something you're not. And pretending you have data when you don't.
Not disagreeing with any of your comments.
Just saying that if the climate/insane insist on no gas/coal then fission is the only viable option for electrical generation.
There may be fissionable material in waste. But the literature demonstrates it's not economic to recover nor does any recovery process reduce total high level waste volumes.
Certainly, DOE has been one trainwreck after another attempting an economic recovery.
As for yiur hilarious "government pays" claim, 60% of that money comes from taxpayers and 40% is additional debt which taxpayers pay interest.
A subsidy to increase nuclear operator profits.
I prefer seeing buclear operators paying all costs for perpetual storage of spent fuel.
Sure, a lot of subsidies flying around anyway.
But a Congressional Budget Office analysis of subsidies performed ~2018 (I have the study in my files) demonstrates nuke supoly chains enjoy ~10x the subsidies per kJ produced compared to oil and gas supply chains
Renewables were ~6x that of oil and gas.
If the lunatics running this country insist on no gas or coal, the US power grid goes full-frontal third world.
Nukes take >15 years to build.
And at our peak nuclear construction, we could only put ~10 GWe per year into production.
Agreed
You and i can talk to each other all day and agree because we can do math, and think logically.
Not sure to help so many others.
So much cluelessness out there.
And eventually we will need nuclear if we don't come up with workable fusion, its inevitable.
So i'm not saying lets build a bunch more of the 40 year old tech.
I'm saying time out on the insanity, take a decade to figure out safe fission, whatever that ends up looking like, and proceed.
There are certainly many more useful things we can do with natgas than just burn it in a turbine
Nuclear fuel is at least 27,000 times more energy dense than coal or gas, and that is with old tech.
If what you is true -- that nuclear is inevitable -- this sector will attract the capital.
Capital attracts better quality engineers.
Capital delivers mature designs ahead of construction.
Capital improves process quality.
But all that only happens when the financial risk is reduced.
This country cannot afford the economic risk of a reactor accident.
If you can't afford the losses, stay out of casinos and taking bets where you might incur those losses.
Good young engineers will be attacked when we stop demonizing it
Same as will happen when we stop demonizing fossil fuels, many will return
And spent fuel lasts several hundred years at taxpayer expense.
You are still thinking old tech
They are working on designs that will use the “spent” fuel which actually has tons of energy capability still in it.
So that waste will be consumed down to a minuscule amount.
And why frown on the fact that governments manage the cost of waste, everyone in the country will benefit from the power produced.
The argument sound too much like those who accuse oil companies of forcing people to use their “disgusting” project when in reality the oil and gas is in heavy demand because it’s useful and people know it.
The tsunami was much higher than planned for because of the nature of this earthquake caused the land itself to drop after the slip.
Its like looking at sea level rise in New Jersey, the issue is NJ was south of the massive glaciation period ice sheets which levered the area upward.
Since it all melted this area is now sinking while further north rises, like a teeter totter.
Anyway, nuclear is the only option we currently have if CO2 is an issue, which of course it isn't, but that is the politics of the situation.
If you can't afford losses, stay out of the casino.
If you can't survive a seismic event, don't run your nuke in a seismically active area.
And you think building nukes are an option?
18-20 years to build.
50% go bankrupt before they finish or the execs are convicted of Federal wire fraud.
Nobody would buy the construction bond with that risk.
LOL
The world record seismic event in Japan did zip to its reactors, including ones right on the Eastern coast. Just because the Daiichi ones weren't prepped for a tsunami of that size (easily could have been done) is no reason to abandon nuclear.
Your 18-20yrs is nonsense. They are building them right now in China in 4yrs as South Korea has done. And France did 88% of their domestic electricity supply in 20yrs.
The UAE, starting from scratch, in 2012, with ZERO nuclear expertise, ZERO trained workforce, construction crews and minimal industrial infrastructure built for a total cost of $24.4B , 4 South Korean APR-1400's in 8 yrs for 5.6GW or $4.8B/GW-yr output @ 90% or 44 TWh/yr. That's 103% of Australia's current total annual wind & solar production. At $24.4B/$50B = 1/2 the cost of Australia's wind/solar. Not counting the additional $20B in transmission infrastructure they just announced to facilitate their wind/solar delusion. Which will actually cost more like $30B. With at least another $10B being planned.
Your 50% go bankrupt is based on the first 2 builds in the USA in 30yrs after an NRC imposed boycott. Tell us what Shale Gas & Oil would cost if they had an NRC type regulator that shut the entire industry down for 30yrs. No skilled workforce. No supply chain. No experienced contractors. No designs that meet newest safety & environmental standards. And then suddenly decide to restart the industry. How much do you figure that gas & oil would cost?
https://environmentalprogress.org/the-war-on-nuclear
Think 18-20 years is bogus?
How long has Vogtle been going on?
What happened to Summer? How msny Federal wire fraud convictions came out of that scam?
How many nukes started ever finished?
Do you know how many utilities declared bankruptcy trying to build a nuke?
How many nuke vendors and A&Es are still in business?
Think Korea is a model? How much corruption exists in Korean nuclear sector?
You have no idea of reality.
You have no idea how this industry works.
I explained all of that to you and as usual you ignored everything I said and then just repeat the same nonsense I just debunked, a typical disinformation specialist (Standard Motto: Repeat a Lie as often as possible in the hope that will delude most people into thinking it's the Truth).
And you have probably have an idea of reality, you just lie about it, because that's what you're paid to do.
I know how the industry works, as do the many people I linked, who unlike you are reputable. You just make shit up and hope you might convince some low IQ type.
As I said, I ignore baseless claims and non sequiters.
And I don't try to convince low IQ types like you.
I just highlight your ignorance.
You'd be an expert on low IQ, ignorance, baseless claims and non-sequiters since that's all we've heard from you so far. Keep trying though, one day you might get one thing right.
It was a management, not technological, failure that caused the reactor meltdown: had TEPCO moved the emergency power generation batteries from underneath the plant to higher ground (as suggested by the IAEA among others), this accident would not have occurred. As well, it was a failure of management and the government to support the industry in the court of public opinion, thereby causing Japan to increase reliance on imported Natural Gas to address their energy needs.
They didn't even need to do that, all they needed was diesel water pumps, a fuel storage tank and a swimming pool of fresh water. Now all Japanese reactors have that. They use 3 diesel fire trucks as water pumps.
Japan paid dearly by switching to imported LNG & coal. A major cost to their economy. And killed about 50,000 Japanese due to the mostly coal emissions.
True - the failure to maintain safety system redundancy and resilience under a tsunami or seismic threats was reckless.
No less reckless than running nukes in a seismically active area.
But who ever said the corrupt Japanese nuclear industry (along with widespread organized crime infestation) and its thoroughly co-opted nuclear safety regulator were anything but reckless?
Spreading Fear Porn nonsense about nuclear, in the face of those facts, is unforgivable and you should be ashamed of yourself. The facts:
Deaths per TWh:
Coal: 161
Oil: 36
Biomass: 12
NG: 4
Hydro: 1.4
Wind: 0.15
Nuclear: 0.04 (including Chernobyl = a military reactor, illegal for commercial nuclear power)
Dispelling the Myths of Nuclear Energy (Live Lecture)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1QmB5bW_WQ
YouTube as a source?
LMAO
That's priceless.
I take it you lack the training and are incapable of reading the peer-reviewed literature.
I'll skip the video.
I ran reactor accident simulations and risk models for more than a dozen years.
I know the economic, environmental, and morbidity risks from high energy reactor accidents and early containment failures.
I was drafted onto a disaster management team during the accident because I knew the accident progression.
Went to script right up to the steam explosions and drywell blowout.
You seem to have a odd fixation on acute radiation syndrome.
Speaking about your "peer reviewed literature". Tell us how many "peer reviewed" science papers support Anthropogenic Climate Change vs those that don't? 10:1 or more likely 100:1? You've essentially just declared your own beliefs are nonsense. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Can't recall seeing any papers in the peer-reviewed atmospheric physics literature claiming most warming is anthropogenic.
Even IPCC doesn't claim most warming is anthropogenic.
Can you cite any peer-reviewed atmospheric physics papers reporting most warming observed is anthropogenic?
I doubt you can.
You come across as someone untrained in and ignorant of physics.
Ironically, like a lot of Progressives who baselessly claim most warming is anthropogenic and will exceed 2 C by end of century.
What a grifter. Yep the IPCC doesn't believe Climate Change is caused by human activities, according to Mr. Legend here. This guy just makes shit up, whatever suits him. Mr. Legend is so far out on the fringe he may be typing this from an institution for the mentally unstable.
Again with the Progressive crap. You don't know what a progressive is. The problem is Neoliberals like yourself.
"youtube as a source" ?!?
Here's 3 excellent YOUTUBE videos for you to watch & learn a bit about energy, so you can quit making a fool out of yourself:
Robert Bryce: The Power Hungry Podcast: Mark Nelson
youtube.com/watch?v=UEFyz5LXvEQ
Robert Bryce, author, film producer, and host of the Power Hungry Podcast, discusses his recent article "The Billionaires Behind the Gas Bans", and gives insight into the funding of massive NGOs such as Climate Imperative:
youtube.com/watch?v=8CJG1y7vZeg&
In Episode 24 of The Energy Question, David Blackmon interviews writer and electric grid expert Meredith Angwin, author of "Shorting the Grid." Ms. Angwin's book details the inner workings of the ISO-New England electric grid in a way that is both compelling and highly-readable for the average person:
youtube.com/watch?v=zibC7EKuE3Q
I know, I know, it's Youtube. Mark Nelson, Robert Bryce, Meredith Angwin, David Blackmon therefore are all looney tunes, according to Einstein here.
"...incapable of reading the peer-reviewed literature..."
I can see you know nothing about "peer reviewed". You need an education. And I doubt one thing you said was "peer reviewed".
You know zip about economic, environmental and morbidity risks, so far all we have got from you is lots of Fear Porn and vigorous arm-waving. Innumerate.
The rest of what you wrote is egotistical gibberish.
Accident risk analysis isn't measured by how many people you might kill.
Before you even get there, you first consider how much damage is inflicted on third parties and the enterprise.
What will this cost to remediate.
Japan was lucky 90% of the payload went downwind over the Pacific.
At the time, we monitored met data and were ecstatic we drew 4 aces on wind speed and direction.
Our people were lucky.
But the 10% or so of the payload that hit Honshu still left contamination levels exceeding 185 kBq/m2 of 137Cs covering approximately 1700 km2 (Steinhauser et al., 2014) and deposits exceeding 10 kBq/m2 extending over 24,000 km2 (Champion et al., 2013).
Bad as that is to clean up, can't say it enough - Japan was lucky.
And you take that as a rationale to double-down?
Sounds like you live a "hold my beer and watch this" kind of life.
LOL
As I said, if you can't afford losses, stay out of a casino.
No nuclear operating company can afford a reactor accident.
Especially the stockholders.
The most important accident risk analysis is about deaths. And injuries is a typical multiplier of deaths. And property damage is extremely low in nuclear. Fukushima was trivial property damage off-site compared to the East Palestine recent event. By all rational measure.
And you're talking nonsense. 90% of the mild level of radioisotope emissions went to the NW overland. And none of it outside the plant gates was as high as a popular beach in Brazil.
" brazil 2012: sunbathing on radioactive beaches "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvgAx1yIKjg
Even while Cs-134 was significant in April 2011 the highest readings outside the plant gates were 35 mSv/hr. That's largely gamma radiation. Look at the beach in Brazil measured right off someone sunbathing getting >50 mSv/hr, that's gamma. Plus a high dose of alpha radiation (think plutonium, radon) through ingestion and inhalation from thorium daughters in the air & sand, you don't get in Fukushima. People have lived right on that beach for thousands of years. They call it "The Health City". No indication of radiation induced health illness.
Yeah, but they can certainly afford a Bhopal, an East Palestine, a Lac Magentic, a Bhopal, a giant mud volcano due to gas drilling that buried an entire town, a hydro dam failure that killed 200k people and devastated 12,000 sq. km. Or a Deepwater Horizon blowout or Exxon Valdez or an exploding LNG tanker (= to an atomic bomb) or terminal, or Nordstream pipeline destruction, or any of the thousands of gas pipeline explosions and oil refinery explosions and fires ( a giant one happened same time as Fukushima) or 13M deaths/yr due to fossil pollution. Or several billion dead due to energy shortages. The press and Fear Porn Alarmists like yourself don't hype those. Come to think of it you sound EXACTLY like the Climate Change Alarmists you claim to despise so much.
BTW, I don't despise anyone.
I do laugh at a lot of people.
Especially lunatics, psychopaths and other Progressives.
But inclusive of the grifter community of nuclear advocates.
Death is most important?
I presume you mean without restriction such as not just "death by acute radiation syndrome".
I would throw in injuries and morbidities.
Therefore, you should agree Price-Anderdon should be rescinded.
And why stop there?
Any and all economic losses from any tort should the responsibility of the nuclear operating company just like any other entity.
100% liability like BP in Deepwater Horizon which waived Jones Act liability caps.
Rescind Jones Act caps and Price-Anderson caps
Sounds like we have a consensus.
All governmental organizations become corrupt, its inevitable.
Often corrupt from the outset.
Which makes nuclear safety regulation the joke it is.
If you really want nuclear safety, rescind liability caps like Price Anderson.
Of course, if that ever happened, every US nuke would immediately shut down.
Price Anderson is about the smallest liability cap in the USA. Look at Big Pharma, Big Aerospace, Weapons manufacturers, Big Oil, King Coal, many others for giant liability caps, that they don't even pay into unlike Nuclear.
Many nuclear experts figure they would compete better without Price-Anderson.
I don't know any CNO who would have a job if he advised his board to lobby to rescind Price-Anderson.
I know every nuke would shutdown if it was rescinded to avoid a major rating downgrade.
You still haven't explained why you blow a gasket crying about nuclear getting a MUCH LOWER exemption from accident liability than ANY of the above I mentioned. And you still haven't explained why you think combustion fuels deserve 100% liability protection from 13M deaths/yr, many more injuries (i.e. lung disease). Double standard much. Like all anti-nuclear types the irrevocable Double Standard against Nuclear is the basis of your entire argument. Hypocrisy is your middle name.
Yes, that too, although i don't think it was batteries it was the diesel gensets providing backup emergency power that got swamped. If they had placed those up on the hill, no issues would have happened.
"No issues" other than the seismic event that trashed their AC power system and the tsunami clearing the undersized wall wiping out their heat sink.
Mark I containments fail real fast in a station blackout accident
No false. You don't know what you're talking about. The tsumami damaged their Diesel Generators. And they lost fresh water supply. All they needed was diesel pumps (fire trucks), secure fuel supply and a swimming pool of fresh water. Pretty simple minded stuff.
The earthquake triggered the reactor trips and sustaimed loss of offsite power.
Reportedly, cooling water pipes in Unit 1 failed before 3 PM ahead of the tsunami by 45 minutes.
TEPCo data records recirc pumps were triggered by the quake onna loss of coolant signal.
Containment sprays were activated after 3:04 PM.
IAEA came to different conclusion post-accident but the records stand.
And, sure -- a firemain header and diesel pumps might have been effective -- even with sea water.
The NRC Station Blackout rule envisioned that strategy as a part of an accident coping strategy if they had sufficient battery capacity for instumentation and control.
TEPCo went cheap on the seawall, and so emergency AC was trashed by the tsunami.
Reactor SCRAMs are part of the design during an earthquake. Worked as expected. The newer Dianni NPPs up the beach from Fukushima sustained a higher tsunami and shutdown with out any significant damage. And a giant refinery explosion & fire occurred at Chiba (videos of which were routinely shown under the Fukushima heading), it took them a week to get it under control. And a hydro dam failed. You're grasping at straws. Obviously totally irrational. A vested interest or a cultist, a cardboard cutout of your Climate Change Alarmists. Interesting how you have a meltdown talking about nuclear but could care less about wind & solar where all your Climate Change $trillions are going down the sewer. Telling.
So, Unit 1 tripped as designed.
Is it surprising to you Unit 1 did trip?
Actually, a lot of BWR 3/4s failed to trip in years past due to low quality design and construction of the scram discharge headers.
But, sure, Unit 1 tripped.
And, sure, newer plants meet higher standards while BWR 3/4s like Unit 1 remain accidents waiting to happen.
What's your point?
That the accident was avoidable if nukes actually managed risk?
I agree.
Fact is TEPCo operated recklessly like any other nuke operating company hiding behind a grandfathered "licensung basis".
You bring up Chiba and suggest I don't care.
You're right - I don't care about Chiba.
I look at it this way. The third party damages TEPCo and the Japanese government dumped on Japanese citizeblns resulting from TEPCo's reckless behaviot totalled ~$1 trillion plus $50 billion or so over 50 years to clean up.
If Eneos loses Chiba, their insurance carriers or stockholders eat the loss.
That's the difference.
As for renewables, on one hand they are cheaper than nukes and don't need the subsidies they pig out on
Moreover, bad as renewables are, nukes are a fatter corporate welfare queen than renewables.
And still can't compete.
Thanks for clarifying- on retrospect, I think maybe both batteries and generators were stored in the "basement"
The batteries worked but had insufficient storage time. You can easily make critical electrical systems that function underwater, we use +4000 volt pumps that operate 5,000 feet underwater. You just need to design for that. Not really necessary at a Nuclear plant, easy to seal that from floods, it does have a large containment structure.
Likely both, When we do back up power systems, diesels are the long term supply and will be sized for the emergency cooling pumps as well as control systems for them but they take 30-60 seconds to come online, and so UPS battery systems kick in within milliseconds to keep all the plant controls powered until the gensets are spun up.
Those UPS systems needed to be in a raised building as well.
A simple sturdy building on a raised platform containing the ups and genset systems would have eliminated this disaster.