Conventional Nuclear (AKA Nuclear Fission) a thread for discussion of the pros / cons.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Nuclear now is safe: it has got so much safer since those early designs.

I do not think it is safe, given what happened at Fukushima. Some people claim that accident killed no one. That is not true, but even it it were true, the technology is still unsafe in the sense that it caused enormous property damage to 90,000 people, and it bankrupted the largest power company on earth. It has poisoned animals and plants. The NHK reported: "Tests of the meat from boars shot in Fukushima Prefecture show radioactive cesium at levels up to 61,000 becquerels, which is 610 times the maximum allowed by government safety standards."

That is not "safe."

Quote from THHuxleynew

The question is whether it is cheap enough, taking everything including disposal of waste into account.

Waste disposal is always taken into account. The power companies add a surcharge to your bill to cover it. The money goes into a fund which has been used to decommission several reactors. So far, all but three of them were decommissioned at the expected cost. There were no cost overruns, so it is reasonable to hope it will cover future decommissioning. The three exceptions failed catastrophically and cost far more to clean up than an orderly, planned decommission would. They were Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and Connecticut Yankee, a less well known disaster. The Connecticut Attorney General’s Office News Release, September 16, 1997, described it: "What we have here is a nuclear management nightmare of Northeast Utilities' own making. The goal is no longer to decommission a nuclear power plant, but rather to decontaminate a nuclear waste dump."

There have been other disastrous failures of U.S. reactors, including ones that had be abruptly decommissioned because of incompetent or criminal mismanagement, but as far as I know they did not cost huge sums of money. However, they make me think the power companies cannot be trusted.

The new nuclear power plants in Georgia cost a fortune. Far more than planned. About 10 times more than any other modern source, such as solar. Building more of them would be economic lunacy. You might as well burn furniture to generate power.

Quote from Shane D.

So why then the NRC makes it near impossible, and terribly expensive to build...they do not know. No one does. I am sure if you asked the NRC, they would say they do not know either, but that is just how beaurocracies work though.

On the contrary, go to the NRC, read the documents, reports and studies and you learn in great detail why reactors are terribly expensive. The NRC will tell you in enormous detail, running to thousands of pages. The reasons are too complicated to describe here in a few paragraphs, but I know what they are. Anyone who has followed the construction of the plant here in Georgia knows. We know why it bankrupted the only remaining nuclear plant construction company. It is a matter of public record. Every few months the business section of the newspaper prints another round of news describing the fiasco. The price goes up another billion dollars, another 6-month delay is announced, and Georgia Power executives and state and national regulators make more excuses, denials and evasions. The message is always: "It is all going according to plan. Things are splendid. Nothing to see here, folks, keep moving!" The regulators seem to think their job is to protect Georgia Power's profits and gouge ratepayers (me!).

As for the NRC's attitude, it is now and always have been a handmaiden for the nuclear power industry. It has always been staffed by experts and execs from the industry. The reports are always approved by industry. All of the regulations were proposed by and vetted by industry, and rubber stamped by the NRC. Mismanagement, huge mistakes, and criminal acts were facilitated by the NRC, and covered up by it. The managers at the NRC have said, on the record, to the Congress, that they consider their main task is to promote and expand the nuclear industry.

Read the details of the Three Mile Island. A low level NRC inspector saw that the valves at several plants were dangerous. They were not monitored properly at the control boards. They got stuck open. Several got stuck and almost caused catastrophic loss of coolant accidents. The procedures that the plant operators were given to deal with this would often make the problem worse. These are gigantic valves, the size of trucks, and when they got stuck open torrents of water would flood out. They would open periodically when there was overpressure from something like a clogged pipe.

The inspector wrote memo after memo, pleading with the NRC to fix this problem. It could have been fixed for a few thousand dollars per plant. The industry said "no." So the NRC management -- which always takes its marching orders from industry -- said "no." Nothing was done. One night they were cleaning the pipes at Three Mile Island when the plant was fully powered (which is a nutty thing to do), the pipe clogged, the valve opened . . . got stuck open, and there was no way anyone in the plant could know that. Not until hours later, when a third of the core had melted and the plant was destroyed. The operators went by the book, but they were not nuclear engineers, and they did not know what they were doing. The book was wrong.

The aftermath was what you expect from a government agency that is captive of the industry it supposedly regulates. The low level inspector was punished and forced out. The managers who did nothing to fix the problem were promoted and rewarded. The agency tried to cover up and make excuses. Industry resisted making changes to fix similarly serious problems that could destroy a plant. And, as I recall, four other U.S. nuclear plants such as Browns Ferry and Connecticut Yankee suffered catastrophic failures. Failures that could easily have been prevented if anyone at the NRC was seriously interested in preventing them. Browns Ferry was almost destroyed in by an electrician with burning candle, looking for air leaks. He set fire to insulation and -- what do you know! -- it turned out that all three redundant control cable controls ran down that one hall. And all were destroyed. (http://www.ccnr.org/browns_ferry.html) If Boeing made airplanes like that they would fall out of the sky more often than they do. All large airplanes have redundant controls, but they do not all go through the same conduit, for crying out loud! Who would rubber stamp approve such a crazy design? The NRC -- that's who!

That track record should not inspire confidence. It is typical of a government regulator, an industry organization, or a large corporation. The way the DoE handles cold fusion resembles this. The way GM handled electric cars and other new technology from the 1980 until it drove itself into bankruptcy in 2008 and wiped out the investors is typical of this. Large institutions have many benefits, but they often cause catastrophes, because they have so much power they become a law unto themselves. IBM's stranglehold on the computer industry up to around 1985 is another example. If IBM had had their way, we would still be using overpriced mainframes.

Here is an actual video made on the scene of typical "incident" at a nuclear plant. You see NRC inspector Frank Drebin handing the situation with the consummate professionalism you expect from the agency.

Here is a report from a group that is strongly opposed to the new Georgia reactors:

https://saportareport.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/GCV-Vogtle-Ratepayer-Robbery-Report-2.pdf

Quote from Shane D.

Heard this all before, many, many times, yet here we are 60 years later and solar is hardly >1% total electricity, and wind only 8%.

That's a little unfair. Solar just got started. It did not become cost effective until a few years ago.

Wind is 10% now. Solar 3.4%. Those two are growing rapidly. Nuclear power is 18%, so I expect wind and solar will soon catch up and surpass it. They will grow 5% more soon, I think. Probably by taking away market share from coal, which is 20% and falling. It was 50% in 2007.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

The thing about wind is that it is not available everywhere. It is regional. There is none in Georgia and other southeastern states. It is like hydroelectricity, which is plentiful in Washington state but there is hardly any in Georgia. So you cannot compare it nuclear power, which can be made anywhere. That is, any place where people want to pay 10 times more for electricity than they need to.

I agree that document was partisan. No worse than the Public Service Commission or the NRC though.

Quote from THHuxleynew

That was "old nuclear". (1960s designs).

We have, in 70 years, got better at making reactors safe.

Fukushima was a 1970s implementation. It was frequently brought up to date to meet the latest safety standards. The problems that destroyed it, and Three Mile Island, and the others, remain in present day designs. They would be just as bad, even though they do not depend on active cooling as much (as noted in this article).

We may be getting better after 70 years, but that is like saying rockets are getting more reliable. They are, but they still explode often, as did the Japanese H3 and Musk's rocket. You would not want to ride in one. "More safe" or "more reliable" are a relative thing. Nukes are more safe than they used to be, but far more dangerous than wind turbines or solar cells. You wouldn't mind having solar cells on your roof, but if you were not nervous living next to a nuke, you would be crazy. 90,000 people in Japan had their lives overturned, and lost their houses and farms because of Fukushima. However "safe" the present generation of nukes may be, you can be certain that if one of them fails, it will endanger everyone around it, the way other U.S. accidents did at places like Browns Ferry and Connecticut Yankee. The management and workers at Connecticut Yankee accidentally contaminated soil when nuclear debris leaked out into the surroundings. They did nothing for a years. One of them used a bulldozer to remove a truckload of that soil to build a parking lot for a kindergarten -- where his wife worked, as I recall. In other words, these were very stupid people. Criminally irresponsible, and totally ignorant of the danger they exposed the community and their own children to. Stupid people are everywhere, and always will be. No redesign and no futuristic nuclear plant will ever be made safe from idiots. Idiots also cause wind turbines to collapse, coal plants to explode, and rooftop solar installations to make leaks into living rooms. But that is the worse that can happen. Collapsing wind turbine towers seldom hit anyone. They do not irradiate kindergarten children.

The main thing is, nukes lost the economic competition with other sources. They are more expensive. Even if they start to fall in price, solar and other sources will fall even faster. Once a technology falls behind, it seldom catches up again. There is no point to trying to revive it. That would be like trying to make vacuum tube computers again.

A totally different fission technology such as pebble-bed might be competitive, but warmed-over 1970s designs will never be competitive. They have bankrupted the last company in the U.S. and Japan that can build them. (https://www.reuters.com/articl…estinghouse-idUSKBN17Y0CQ) Imagine how people would react if the only companies that tried to make a new kind of electric vehicle or a new CPU chip botched the job so badly they lost billions of dollars and went bankrupt. No one would say those technologies are viable and it is just a matter of getting it right. Yet that is what this article implies.

Quote from JedRothwell

Wind is 10% now. Solar 3.4%. Those two are growing rapidly. Nuclear power is 18%, so I expect wind and solar will soon catch up and surpass it. They will grow 5% more soon, I think.

Quote from JedRothwell

The thing about wind is that it is not available everywhere. It is regional. There is none in Georgia and other southeastern states. It is like hydroelectricity, which is plentiful in Washington state but there is hardly any in Georgia.

The point being, wind and solar are regional, like hydro, so they will never be close to 100%, the way coal once was. I think Iowa has the highest percent of electricity from wind. It is 62%. That's generated electricity, not capacity. There is no way Georgia could ever rival that, not matter how cheap turbines become, because there just is not enough wind onshore in Georgia. (Offshore wind worldwide could produce 18 times more electricity than the world now produces.)

I do not know if it is possible for Iowa to go much above 62%. Years ago, experts predicted that no place could go above 20% wind because of intermittency and because you have no control over weather and you can't turn wind on and off. I do not know how they managed to reach 62% in Iowa. There must be an upper limit to wind and solar unless cheap battery storage is perfected. So there will have to be other sources. You could produce all electricity from coal or natural gas, but I do not think other sources can do this.

You could not generate 100% of electricity from nukes. It would be uneconomical. Nuclear power becomes very expensive when you start to generate more than full nighttime demand. It is cheap as baseline power, but if it were 100% of daytime power, I guess you would have to throw away most of the energy at night. As steam, I guess? I don't know what they could do. They cannot turn off the reactors quickly, or even turn them down, except in a SCRAM emergency, and then they can't turn them on again quickly. That's what I read, and that is what the NRC SCRAM event reports seem to say. (All events are reported in the public record. Most of them are not serious. Mainly clogged pipes it seems, which are usually not serious, except at Three Mile Island.)

The NRC SCRAM report page has been modernized and improved:

https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/scrams.html

In France, they generate 68% of electricity from nukes. The highest percent in the world. I don't how they manage to do that economically, or what they do at night. They sell surplus electricity to other countries.

Nuclear power plants generated 68% of France’s electricity in 2021