The Boston Globe is reporting today that operators of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant lied to “misled” Vermont officials about the leak of the radioactive isotope tritium from the plant in 2005.
Granted, the technology involved in nuclear power has improved since the time the Vermont Yankee plant was built. But, what do we do about companies and operators who “mislead” regulators about the safety of these plants?
For that reason alone, I don't understand how President Obama can credibly call for “financing safe, clean nuclear facilities…across America.”
Please share widely!
Nukes might be the biggest bang for the buck (so to speak) right now for power generation with little greenhouse gas emissions. (I’d like to see a comparison between how long it would take to get Cape Wind on line and how long it would take to get a new nuke plant going; and how much power each would generate.)
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p>What do we do about people who “mislead” regulators? How about charge them with perjury, put them in jail and fine their companies? That works for me.
you’ve got to make sure it comes out of shareholders, not ratepayers. How?
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p>How about you seize dividends directly?
Straight from profits. There are already mechanisms for rate regulation, so this might be easier to accomplish with utilities than with other industries.
But this isn’t a case like Enron, where the victims simply lose their pensions because of theft by company executives. The cost of an accident at a nuclear plant can involve people’s lives. Yes, these plants largely have a safe record and the technology is getting better. But how has advanced technology worked for Toyota, for instance?
something very odd.
In other words, “technology isn’t 100% foolproof, so we shouldn’t use technology to make it safer to do potentially risky things.”
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p>(Besides, are you sure “simply” losing pensions can’t “involve people’s lives” in its cost? Are you suggesting no one with a pension relies on that pension to afford food, housing and/or medicine?)
to make it safer to do risky things. But while the risk may be relatively low in some cases, the cost of realizing that risk may be unacceptably high. I think that’s the case with nuclear power today. Sure, no technology is foolproof. But in the case of nuclear technology, it ought to be close to foolproof because of the potential cost of failure. And how can we be at all sure of the quality of that technology if our regulators are being misled about it?
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p>Also, to clarify my comment above: What I meant to say was that a catastrophic nuclear accident could cost (not just involve) hundreds or thousands of lives. I didn’t mean to minimize the impact of losing a pension.
I’m fairly agnostic on nuclear myself, except insofar as I’m not sure what other currently available technology could be rolled quickly enough and on a sufficient scale to totally or near-totally replace coal, oil and gas. That’s one of my major concerns: we need to get off fossil fuels yesterday, and if we don’t the worldwide death toll from climate change – lowland flooding, crops dying in unaccustomed temperatures, worsening storms – will be a lot bigger than hundreds or thousands. But nuclear waste is a serious problem, as is the threat of nuclear reactors failing catastrophically.
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p>So let me ask: is there a level of risk you would consider acceptable? I admit I don’t know the statistics on reliability, risk of incident, etc., at modern nuclear plants, but I’ll try to look up some stuff on that; but if you don’t think the current safety levels are good enough, what would be?
I’m not sure there is any level of risk in this case that I would consider acceptable, again because the cost of failure is so high. I agree that global warming is our greatest looming danger; but I don’t think that expanding nuclear power is the answer to it.
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p>You talk about finding other alternative technologies to coal and oil being rolled quickly. There is nothing quick about building nuclear power plants, though — just look at the history of Seabrook Unit 2 as an example of the tremendous cost and difficulty in developing just one nuclear power unit in this country.
On which planet do you spend most of your time?
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p>You want quickly, buy some energy efficiency.
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p>”Long lead time” is one reason nuclear power can’t make it without subsidies.
Really? You’re going to try to dining-room-table me? Look, by all means I welcome corrections when I have wrong information, and it sounds like my impression that nuclear plants, if not super quick to build, produced a lot of energy once operational, potentially more than other non-greenhouse-emitting generators would have over the same time scale, was mistaken. That’s fine, I’m glad for the correction, but talking to me as though I’m completely disconnected from reality seems uncalled for.
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p>And you’ll never hear me say a word against investing in improved efficiency. Efficiency is great, and it’s the low-hanging fruit we should absolutely be picking. But efficiency alone doesn’t get us off fossil fuels, and I’m just not convinced that nuclear is necessarily invalid as part of an energy solution that does. As I’ve already said, the waste and the dangers of reactor failures are serious problems. I’m just not as certain as Dave is that they’re insurmountable – I think, though again I’m willing to revise my opinions given new information, that probably the short-term risks are low enough, and the likelihood of developing better ways to manage those risks in the medium term is high enough, that it’s sensible to look at building some new reactors.
I regret my flippancy. Sincerely. My post would not have suffered had I left that line out.
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p>Here’s something to chew on. Nuclear plants are stunningly expensive and slow to build. The $8.5 billion Obama just sent to Georgia might buy half a nuke, and that’s being generous. Seabrook took decades to complete and in the process bankrupted its owner.
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p>Because they take so long to build they do not meet the need to start cutting greenhouse-gas emissions soon. Because they divert today’s resources away for efficiency and renewables plans for nukes have the regrettable effect of leaving us worse off.
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p>Then there are the safety and health issues you cite. I’d add ethical issues about subjecting indigenous peoples to radiation from uranium mining, nuclear proliferation, and threats to civil liberties as other important considerations.
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p>But as Amory Lovins says about these concerns,
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p>Glad to see the Vermont legislature standing up to the industry for once. I guess there are some things even a state legislature can’t ignore.
Thank you for bringing them to my attention.
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p>I suppose the question then is, where’s the bang for the buck? What, if any, non-greenhouse-emitting, non-fossil-fuel-burning energy tech can be rolled out quickly, on a large scale?
Is the left’s version of “abstinence only”: it rests on the naked utopian hope that human nature is going to somehow, after all these years, change.
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p>Energy efficiency is a different way of saying “reduced living standards” and any politician who pushes that is going to be quoted, in short order, as “really looking forward to spending more time with my family.” In the end, increased efficiency will simply mean that we can do more stuff for the same BTU, which, collectively, we will.
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p>It sure seems like, to the left, the rather low risk posed by nuclear power– even if in smaller plants than Vt Yankee– remains greater than that of climate change.
issue. You can be a conservative and worry about the ultimate safety of this technology.
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p>My question to advocates of building more nuclear plants in this country is: what would your reaction be to a proposal to build a new reactor ten miles from your house? Would you be perfectly fine with it, or would you start thinking about the best highway evacuation routes?
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p>I think that I would most definitely learn evacuation routes. That’s just sane. I don’t think I’d consider moving altogether tho…. I’m pretty sure, thought, that I’d most certainly move if the proposal was to build a coal-fired power plant.
I’m not an expert, but it seems to me there are plenty of alternatives that don’t involve the negative environmental tradeoffs of nuclear and coal. There is solar and wind, fuel cells, conservation, cogeneration, biomass, etc.
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p>The argument I’m seeing most often against those alternatives is that the technology doesn’t yet exist to use them on a sufficiently large scale. But I thought President Obama was going to promote a major effort to develop this greener technology quickly. The problem with expanding nuclear power is that the more we rely on it, the less urgency there will be to develop those safer alternatives.
if someone wanted to build a new nuclear reactor ten miles from my house, the first thing I’d do would be to look up all the relevant local, state and federal laws and regulations on permitting and safety, and find out if they could legally build one that close. If that was legit, I’d see whether I could find out what studies those regulations were based on, and whether there was newer data; and I’d review those data, and any relevant medical literature I could find, to understand what the risks were. I can’t say for sure right now, without the numbers in front of me, where my cutoff would be, but as a rough guess, I’d probably only worry if it looked like my risk of health problems from the reactor over the next five to ten years was greater than a few in a thousand. I think your framing of “perfectly fine with it, or…thinking about the best highway evacuation routes” is a bit of a false dichotomy; for one thing, depending on where I live it might be a good idea to keep evacuation routes in mind anyway, but for another apathy and panic are not the only two possible reactions, and perhaps most importantly I suspect that catastrophic meltdowns are by far the least likely occurrence, and small, slow leaks are a greater concern.
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p>Now, I don’t have, and don’t currently plan to have, kids. If I did, or if I just had a different level of risk-tolerance, or for whatever reason, I might think a few-in-a-thousand chance of deleterious effects over five to ten years was too high, and either try to get the project scuttled or plan to move, accordingly.
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p>But I just don’t think alarmist, sensationalist framing like “…but what if they built one IN YOUR BACKYARD?!?” is helpful.
I’d like to know if nuclear power advocates truly believe these plants are as safe as they say they are. If so, they would presumably not object to living within a few miles of them.
It’s not necessarily inconsistent to be in favor of something, yet think it wouldn’t be appropriate for that thing to be built very close to people’s homes.
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p>And look, I want to emphasize again, I’m actually not an advocate of nuclear; I’m pretty agnostic there. I’m just not automatically opposed to any and all nuclear power.
The nuclear industry has a remarkably safe record, domestic and international.
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p>Mistake free? Nope. A few major disasters? Yup (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl). A few minor disasters (Salem, Kashiwazaki). Some worse than minor, but not major (Tokaimura). Still, I don’t think that the problem is the safety of operations in nuclear power plants — they remain remarkably safe.
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p>The problem is that the industry has developed a bit of a reputation for violating regulations and then lying about it. Over and over again. This is the real problem in my mind, and I haven’t the foggiest idea how to remedy it. Harsher penalties? Maybe, or maybe that makes the coverups that much less likely to be uncovered. Gov’t run? Maybe, but it’s not like government agencies have never covered up internal violations.
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p>Nuclear supplies about 20% of the electric load — 17 times more than wind and almost 100 times more than solar. It ain’t going anywhere anytime soon. Besides, given the long term dangers of coal and oil fired power plants, even if we could eliminate the power generated by nuclear, we’d be better off removing that generation in coal fired power plants instead.
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p>I thought that Obama should have used nuclear as a carrot. You want to build 1000 MW of new nuclear power? Great. (1) you upgrade a grandfathered 1000 MW of coal to current Clean Air Act standards or take 200 MW of grandfathered coal fired power plant completely off-line, and you (2) run an efficiency program to reduce demand by 100 MW and/or build 100 MW of renewable (based on 100% capacity factor).
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p>The numbers are arbitrary and probably not optimal; the idea is sound. Want nuclear? Cool. We can work with that. But, you’ve got to do other things right too. And yes, this threat of a tax (or cap) on carbon ain’t going away, so it would be in your best interest to migrate away from fossil fuels. This’ll help.
ya ya we don’t agree on much, but I’m proud to say our energy committee just won an award from the state (EECBG) for almost $150K for solar panels on one of our school roofs. This comes on the heels of us buying about $15K worth of “awareness” products for the schools through the Clean Energy Choice program.
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p>Franticly trying to coordinate everything now for the 88 panels. We know it’s only about 22kW but it’s a start.
This is what he said. Pretty damning testimony:
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p>Full interview here:
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While having companies mislead state officials is obviously troubling, tritium is not especially harmful. The amount of radiation you would be exposed to by drinking water contaminated with tritium from a nuclear power plant is about hundred times lower than what you get from a dental x-ray.
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p>http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/…
If they’re willing to lie about something that is less harmful, why wouldn’t they be willing to lie about something that is even more dangerous (and, likely, more costly to fix)?
I live about ten miles downriver from VY, and I don’t want any tritium in my water and I don’t want the plant operated by some clownbrains from Louisiana who routinely lie to the people regulating them. That said, a large fraction of the electrical demand of Vermont is met by the thing, without any carbon emissions.
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p>The ideal thing, in my view, would be if the US government confiscated the plant as a fine for the lying, and had the US Navy operate it. The Navy, as I understand, has an admirable record of managing nuclear power facilities.
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p>But I suppose that’s not very realistic.
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p>A main reason no new nuclear plants have been built in many years is that the private sector won’t insure them at any price. Thus the need for the feds to guarantee their loans to get any built. Is this just correcting a market failure, or a hidden subsidy to an industry operated by clownbrains?
it’s leaking
it’s falling apart
it’s license is expiring.
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p>So, let it expire. Not
nuclearrocket science, sheesh.<
p>”Nationalizing” this turkey is not the answer, though we may be stuck with a “nationalized” cleanup.
I have a more basic question about this as an investment decision.
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p>We have limited funds to invest in limiting carbon emissions and establishing independence from offshore fossil-fuel providers. It seems to me that we should therefore be optimizing the maximum return, measured in reductions in carbon emissions and offshore fossil-fuel consumption, for each dollar invested in our energy strategy.
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p>By that standard, nuclear power is among the least attractive alternatives. In comparison to other alternatives, it:
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p>While there have been modest recent improvements in nuclear power plant design (mostly in control systems), the fundamental technology is forty years old and has been mothballed for most of that time. There has been essentially zero progress in resolving the serious nuclear waste handling issues during the same time period.
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p>The costs of siting, designing, and building a new nuclear power plant are staggering. The timeline is measured in decades (unless we jettison virtually all regulatory and environmental safeguards). The likelihood of gaining any economy of scale is vanishingly small; there is very little chance of finding a way to build a large number of inexpensive nuclear generation facilities — especially when the safety and waste handling costs are folded in.
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p>It seems to me that investing a smaller (but still significant) amount in, for example, solar and wind facilities is far more likely to:
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p>It looks to me as though the recent noises about investing in nuclear power have more to do with political horse-trading than any serious cost-benefit analysis.
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p>Until somebody shows me a more compelling investment analysis, I’m opposed to expanding nuclear power at the expense of solar and wind.
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p>Saying nuclear is an ‘obsolete technology’ is a little like saying high-speed rail is an obsolete technology since it’s ‘a train’. While we (the US) have not built any new (civilian) reactors in quite some time, the rest of the world, most specifically France, former Soviet states and the far east, just as they’ve done with high speed rail, has continued to build and improved upon the technology. But they, unlike US, have a far more sane view of regulations.
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p>So I think the model you’re working from, that of 30 or 40 years ago, doesn’t speak to the level of technology.
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p>The issue of nuclear waste is a serious one. But, if the ‘green revolution’ means anything at all, it means taking a good long (scientific) look at what is meant by ‘waste’. The entire premise of throwing something away, or merely releasing it into the atmosphere (the common definition of ‘pollution’ and ’emissions’) to be forgotten, it seems, has come back to give us a serious bite in the backside. Rather than avoiding the issue, I say we meet it head on.
The technology improvements you cite are small and incremental changes to a fundamentally unchanged design. To use your example, it’s like arguing that because China and India have given steam locomotives 15% more tractive effort, we should invest in steam rather than look at maglev.
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p>I’m curious, just what is it about the regulations of the France, the former Soviet states and the far east that you find more “sane”?
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p>Have any of those states found a solution or even an improvement in waste handling?
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p>I listed three points, you’ve addressed just one. Nuclear plants still cost more than all the alternatives. It still takes decades to bring even a single new nuclear plant online.
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p>If there is a case to be made, then make it. I haven’t seen it yet.
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p>Even if you were correct (and you’re not) that would still be a far cry from ‘obsolete’, which is the word that you used. There is not a single, “fundamentally unchanged design”. There are a number of reactor types and differing fuels. There are, likewise, a number of different ways to moderate the reaction. There are a number of coolant processes that can be used. There are a also a number of containment strategies. And for each of these categories there has been, worldwide, a great deal of research, funding and implementations, small and large, incremental and wide-ranging.
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p>Since we last built reactors in the States, we’ve also seen genuine advances in civil, electrical and nuclear engineering, metallurgy, solid-state physics, as well as manufacturing and construction techniques. Most importantly we’ve made leaps and bounds with respect to computers: the last time we built a reactor in the US, you couldn’t find a commercially available computer with enough memory to read this one post, never mind the entire thread. Now we have computers that can precisely model nuclear reactions in exacting and painstaking details for whatever amount of reaction you want, available at Best Buy… Whatever mobile device you use is many orders of magnitude more capable than the computer that last rode with the Apollo astronauts to the moon…
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p>… yeah, WOW! I know…
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p>I said nothing about the regulations. I said the general view of regulations is saner: meaning they take them seriously. The regulations are respected and the regulators have teeth. Here, we water the regs down first, then we neuter the regulators and then we generally disregard them altogether. If you need proof simply scroll up to the top of this diary…
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p>The time frame to bring a plant online isn’t appreciably larger than the time to build equivalent wattage hydroelectric, or what would be the equivalent wattage of solar and/or wind (assuming you could do it…) Costs and time-to-build of coal fired plants have been artificially suppressed because of the grandfather clause in the clean air act: existing plant exemptions moved expansion away from new construction and into ‘repair and modifications’ on the old… We’re actually in the middle of a building boom of new coal-fired plants for this reason… and it’s taking quite a long time, mostly because there’s a regulatory tussle going on, involving the supreme court and whether or not the EPA can regulate CO2…
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p>It’s not at all clear that nuclear costs more than all the alternatives. It seems to be on par, with respect to initial cost and time to build, with large scale hydroelectric and, since it scales better, can actually be cheaper when measured on a comparison of cost of watts. We’ve been seeing the move to smaller-scale hydro-electric but that’s still about the same on a per-watt basis: Hydroelectric is dirt cheap only after all the dirt has been moved. The win for nuclear is in cost-effectiveness: coal fired plants and hydroelectric are generally smaller wattage per plant so you have to build several to get the same wattage (sometime per reactor) . It’s unclear if we can efficiently corral that much wattage out of wind power and extremely clear that existing solar cells simply can’t do it with any appreciable efficiency.
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p>And a whole lot of the cost of coal fired plants has been at the back end in the case of pollution mitigation and emmission reduction (think acid rain…) Coal fired plants are also, by a large margin, decidedly much less safe with a horrendous record of workplace deaths, sickness and hazards… and that’s just IN the plants and not counting pollution effects.
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p>Given the choice between coal fired and nuclear, I’ll chose nuclear. I continue to have concerns regarding nuclear waste, but I’ve addressed those concerns previously.
Actually, the Green Revolution refers to the use of modern agricultural practices to boost food production in the third world. Unfortunately it relies on many inputs into the soil and is probably not sustainable.
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(link)
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p>Make whatever parallels you want to the nuclear industry. But it is pretty much a failure economically, except for the shareholders of the companies getting those subsidies.
… There are a great deal of unsavory practitioners in the agribusiness and a great deal of evidence to point to the manipulation of poor indian farmers… and others. It’s rather frightening.
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p>But my point wasn’t to use the specific term green revolution (which is why i put it in quotes) but to discuss the ‘renewable’ in ‘renewable energies’.
Yeah, I don’t expect too much from politicians. I admit, however, I was bamboozled but good with this last one. Not that I’d ever considered voting for the comedy team that was the opposition. Really, it didn’t matter who we voted for – same wars, same economy people, same corruption, same lies.
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p>Here we are, being told that the stuff that was bad for us a few years ago is the stuff of the future. “Get the mercury out!” – bring thermometers and thermostats to the recycling centers – too dangerous to have in your home. Now it’s time to bring back the mercury into our homes in lighting fixtures. “Fission reactors are dangerous!” – Whoops!, we meant Green.
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p>What’s next, lead paint candies?
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p>”Misled”? Government agencies misleading the citizens? Has that ever happened before? Isn’t that what they’re for? Maybe we should ask the good people at DoD, CIA, SEC, FDA, FDIC, (well, you get the picture…) (Why are people getting crotchety?)
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p>“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” –George Washington