As Nuclear Reactors Age, the Money To Close Them Lags 292
Harperdog writes "A worrying bit of news about nuclear reactors in the U.S. from the NYT: 'The operators of 20 of the nation's aging nuclear reactors, including some whose licenses expire soon, have not saved nearly enough money for prompt and proper dismantling. If it turns out that they must close, the owners intend to let them sit like industrial relics for 20 to 60 years or even longer while interest accrues in the reactors' retirement accounts.'"
Two sides (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, ok, transporting radioactive waste is hazardous. So be careful about that.
Re:Two sides (Score:3)
no need to transport it - build a new gen reactor in situ. might as well use that land for something.
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Insightful)
No risk necessary. Just take the spent fuel and burn it in a newer-gen reactor.
What about the other large quantity of low-level stuff like the containment chamber, piping, etc. Really the fuel itself is the least of the cleanup problem.
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Insightful)
You forget the contaminated structure in the reactors. The fuel is a minor issue but the containment is more of a problem.
I suspect that the owners will end up going bankrupt and leave the problem to the government.
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Insightful)
The owners don't go bankrupt, just think psychopath corporate executives. When a nuclear power station is nearing end of life, they simply split if off as an independent company and sell it to the public based on current income and buried in debt with not of zero money left in the budget but in fact negative tens of millions left in the budget for shutdown.
Reality is the only safe way to do a nuclear power station is to have them totally under government control. Taxpayers pay the bill and taxpayers get the benefit of any positive returns during the life of the nuclear power station because at the end of the day it is taxpayers who will always get lumbered with the loses, while psychopath corporate executives wander of with multi-million dollar bonuses and golden parachutes.
Re:Two sides (Score:3, Interesting)
not quite;
Taxpayers' get the benefit, and taxpayers' children, grandchildren and great grandchildren get the expense of decommissioning and handling the waste.
This is the big problem with nuclear - it's broadly equivalent to taking out a huge loan which will be paid down over the next few thousand years.
Re:Two sides (Score:4, Insightful)
Government ownership didn't work out too well in the Ukraine.
Like socialism, nuclear is a great idea on paper. But once you get greedy and/or incompetent people involved, and it is pretty inevitable you will, you don't want to be living down wind of one.
If the companies building and profiting from nuclear had to pay the full costs of insurance and decommissioning they would never be built. Come to that, if open cast coal miners or oil shale producers had to pay the full costs of restoring the land solar would probably be cheaper than all alternatives.
Re:Two sides (Score:3)
Government ownership in the USA won't work either for the same reasons private ownership does not. Politicians will want to buy votes of individuals and industrial concerns a like under billing(taxing) for the true costs. They may even push rate reductions as 'economic stimulus' or other such nonsense. The end result will be the same. Through the life of the plant their will be maintenance problems due to budget deficiency and near the end of the plants life we will discover the trust fund for its clean up has been raided.
Only military projects seem to be able to hang on to their budget commitments in this nation and lately even some of them have seen the chopping block. Just look at Social Security. Left mostly to its own devices it would be solvent, but cuts to contribution, added benefits have left it financially hollow, on the books. That was all to buy votes. Off the books its assets are really government bonds because the CONgress has pulled out the cash and replaced it with the bonds. Now really the SSA is a whole owned subsidiary of the government if you will. Money is fungible within an entity. Its fine to say there is a huge heap of money in the trust fund but really its all got to come from the same general revenue as the money in the trust fund is just IOUs. That means current revenue has to cover the past expense and current operation, you see how that snow balls into a problem. This was all to lower taxes over the short term without giving anything up to cover the lost revenue, and long term the nation is bankrupt even if the SSA isn't. I think there is every reason to believe a federal nuclear power generation program would follow exactly the same pattern.
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar just passed the $1 per watt milestone so in fact it is now cost competitive with oil which is fully subsidized. And since the new cells can be deposited on a flexible plastic substrate, we can now cover all kinds of artifacts and structures with these new inexpensive solar cells. We live in a fantasy. The presumptions upon which our economy functions include infinite natural resources, infinite capacity to recover from prolific environmental abuse, and infinite capacity for the middle class to take the brunt of the fiscal misconduct of the wealthy and powerful.
There is a human tendency when raiding the cookie jar to just keep taking until nothing is left. This week the Cal State University Regents this week voted themselves a 10% increase in pay. This in a time where Universities across the state are being crushed by lack of state funding, teachers are being let go, classes eliminated from the curriculum and students everywhere are crumpling under draconian increases of tuition. Some of the top state CSU executives received raises as large as 22%. They had to close down several campuses for fear of violent protest. This is just one example of people who should be leading by example, instead using their position to take advantage of the public. These people all have salaries in excess of $250,000. You can't tell me that they were so underpaid that they couldn't keep a roof over their heads. I don't have a problem with people getting fair remuneration. Just not on the backs of the rest of society, and please stop at a fair share. Leave a couple cookies for the rest of us.
Re:Two sides (Score:3)
* Actual peak panel output varies by location. Please call one of our friendly representatives for a full quote.
Re:Two sides (Score:3)
The topsoil after a shale project may look beautiful, but the ground water is still unbelievably fucked. A couple of communities in Pennsylvania still have tap water that you can light on fire, but the land used for fracking looks pristine.
Also, if you take a core soil sample from those areas, you'll get a nice top layer of rich soil that isn't native to the area, a clay cap, more than likely some sort of thin buffer layer of chalk, talc, or some other very basic and cheap mineral, and then the local dirt and rock that is sterile and saturated with a stew of the same horrible crap you find in drilling mud.
Re:Two sides (Score:3)
That's almost never the case. A buddy of mine is a maintenance foreman for a nuke plant, and we talk about this a lot. There are tons of places that get hot where you'd never expect it. The power turbines are constantly being pulled apart and the blades inspected, as the neutron flux from the reactor makes the metal brittle much faster. Even the employee cafeteria and control room, two places that have the most shielding in the entire plant are weekly checked and scrubbed, as the chairs, benches, tables, and food prep equipment starts to get radioactive over time.
While it is all low level radiation, it can build up. Doubly so if you pile all of that stuff together for disposal.
Re:Two sides (Score:4, Informative)
Just take the spent fuel and burn it in a newer-gen reactor.
Can you name a single such site ? Could you possibly refer to the generation IV breeder reactors of which no commercial plant was yet built, or is even in the approval phase ?
Most importantly, the authors of generation IV projects planned a 20 years period of basic science research before their projects could become reality, starting with the year 2002. Since little of that research was actually accomplished [arxiv.org], it's prudent to say commercial gen IV breeder reactors are decades away.
The Generation IV Roadmap document can be summarized with the statement that the known technological gaps to construct even prototype breeder reactors were enormous at the time when the document was written. These unknowns are addressed with a detailed planning for the required research projects and the associated cost. Only after these problems have been solved a design and construction of expensive prototype breeder reactors can start.
We are now at the end of the year 2009 and almost half the originally planned R&D period is over. Essentially no progress results have been presented and the absence of large funding during the past 8 years gives little condence that even the most basic questions for the entire Generation IV reactors program can be answered during the next few years. Thus, it seems that the Generation IV roadmap is already totally outdated and unrealistic.
Re:Two sides (Score:3)
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Insightful)
The technology that dch24 mentioned already exists. European nations already do it. The United States has an outdated treaty with Russia that prevents us from doing it.
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't. Not always. Take the German AVR. The, where it comes to beta-radation, most contaminated place in the world. The fuel is partly still in the reactor, because it's jammed in cracks in the bottom of the reactorvessel. It's filled with concrete and labeled 'do not open until 2100' in the hope our great-grandchildren might know what to do with it.
A nice gift to future generations.
Re:Two sides (Score:3)
Wiki article [wikipedia.org]
The most worrysome line in there is "AVR was the basis of the technology licensed to China to build HTR-10"
But keep in mind that this was a research reactor. 10MW is a small reactor. Most Commercial reactors have more power e.g. the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant mentioned in the article is 2000MW. And thus you can expect that the radiation and costs to dismantle are also 200 times higher.
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly what happens in the gas business. For decades, gas stations were "independently owned", and when they closed, the owner never would have the money to clean up the site [as gas always winds up leaking into the ground from the tanks and the various lines]. Then the gov't would require a deposit, which was simply forfeited as it was too small to cover cleaning up the site. Finally, they forced the main petroleum industry companies to [whichever 'brand' was on the station] pay for cleaning up the sites. And what to they do...just flatten the buildings, put up a temporary fence around the now-vacant lot, and just pay the now-minimal property tax on the site indefinitely...
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Informative)
Excuse me, gas isn't toxic? Benzene is a serious carcinogen in fact the entire group of BTEX chemicals are known carcinogens and have known health impacts. Add to that the impact of MTBE (one of the most serious contaminants in ground water today), and gasoline leaks are a serious problem. By the way, though there is some metabolism of gasoline byproduct by some bacteria, it appears that fungus' do the heavy lifting when it comes to soil recovering from petrochemical spills.
Re:Two sides (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure there need be any risks. I see nothing inherently dangerous about nuclear reactors. We know sodium reactors don't go critical even when there's a total coolant failure. The only danger is that sodium and water shouldn't mix, so avoid using water in the reactor if you're using sodium.
Radioactive dust is a major hazard, but since there's no reason to expose the fuel rods to air, there's no reason for there to be radioactive dust.
Radioactive waste is another hazard, but if you reprocess the rods and separate the different radioisotopes, you can reduce the hazard. Unspent uranium can be put into a new fuel rod, a secondary reactor for consuming plutonium shouldn't be hard, several of the other isotopes have uses in industry, some plutonium can be used in nuclear batteries for space missions, and you only need to deal with what's left. Much less space than trying to store the lot - and it's probably a lot safer.
All safety and backup systems should be triply redundant (at least), with redundant systems NOT in the same place as each other. If by the beach or in earthquake zones, redundant systems should also be behind watertight doors and not kept at ground level. (Active earthquake protection is practical these days, but you need somewhere to put the shock absorbers and protection against sheer forces.)
All this adds cost, yes, but so does leaving a reactor unused for 20+ years. I'm fairly confident that the above is a damn sight cheaper.
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Insightful)
I see nothing inherently dangerous about nuclear reactors. We know sodium reactors don't go critical even when there's a total coolant failure.
Fukushima had a total coolant failure, and didn't go critical, but it was certainly dangerous. And there they had (and used) the option to pump cold water into the primary coolant loop and vent steam from it - an option which wouldn't be available with sodium.
Reprocessing fuel is in itself dangerous: the third worst nuclear accident [wikipedia.org] was at a reprocessing plant. I suspect your analysis of waste reduction through reprocessing is highly optimistic, but I lack the expertise to say for sure.
Re:Two sides (Score:2)
In newer sodium designs, the core is in part regulated by it's own thermal expansion. The sodium pool has sufficient area to radiate the heat away safely even if active cooling stops completely.
Fast reactors are fine running on mixed actinides, so the reprocessing is simpler and safer. A side benefit is that the mixed actinide fuel is harder to refine into weapons grade material than it is to produce it from scratch.
Re:Sodium ? (Score:3)
I think they will produce nothing but sunshine, lollipops, and unicorns!
As evidence, I cite absolutely nothing!
Re:Two sides (Score:3)
Radioactive building (Score:2)
The cost would be in either disposing of the rubble, having manned guards and maintenance crews for the building for centuries or a lot of deconstruction and reconstruction to replace the outer structure with an impenetrable concrete shell. Not disposing of the fuel rods, that is relatively cheap compared to what's left after that.
Re:Two sides (Score:3)
The idea here is that assuming molten lead or tin starts spewing out of the reactor, it will just sit there, solidify, and remain insoluble in both air and water. An area of a few tens of meters around the reactor will be contaminated. It will not burn with a radioactive graphite fire contaminating a whole continent (Chenobyl), it will unload the contaminated primary cooling water in the ocean (Fukushima), and it will not spontaneously burst into flames when encountering atmospheric oxigen and water, releasing poisonous smoke (Monju). It will not create air-born radioactive dust, and radioactive isotopes will not accumulate in living organisms, such as the case for tritiated water, carbon, potassium, iodine.
While lead is a neurotoxin, we know how to work with it, and there are already hundreds of thousands tons of lead in circulation due to it's use in lead-acid batteries around the world.
Re:Two sides (Score:2)
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Re:Two sides (Score:2)
Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, why pay for clean-up?
Much better to ride that "retirement fund" as a golden parachute for yourself, and externalise the actual costs onto the backs of taxpayers (and become the next superfund site).
Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)
They'll just use corrupt business laws and politics to rape the "retirement accounts" for their own benefit. Then they'll leave the dangerous corpses of their businesses as a warning to future generations on the stupidity of trusting your future to lowest-common-denominator businessmen.
Yep.
It's situations like this, and the revelation of how costs were cut on Fukushima's seawall by omitting the datapoint of the big tsunami in the 1800s, that made me realize something that shocked me:
Nuclear power is perfectly safe, ideal, and awesome... but nuclear power built by humans is NOT. As a species we are short-sighted venal lying scammers, so there are many glorious technologies (nanotech anyone?) that become liabilities in our hands.
Re:Unlikely (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unlikely (Score:3)
Instead, let's get rid of the dumb regulations stopping us from building breeder reactors and let the operators of those reactors FIGHT WITH EACH OTHER for the rights to get to all that "waste", with the end result being that they pay for clean-up and quite a bit more.
Re:Unlikely (Score:2)
Re:Unlikely (Score:2)
Mquote>Instead, let's get rid of the dumb regulations stopping us from building breeder reactors ...
Regulations have nothing to do with it.
In 1977, President Carter issued an executive order banning the reprocessing of nuclear fuel.
Three Republicans (including Saint Reagan) and two Democrats have seen fit to continue Carter's policy.
If you have a problem with the status quo, take it up with Obama or one of the Republican Presidential candidates.
Re:Unlikely (Score:2)
Re:Unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone uses a road *somewhere*. Why tax each road user for his particular stretch of road? Why not just tax everyone who uses roads, say through vehicle registration fees, and skip the costs associated with setting up infrastructure to monitor, track and charge each road user's particular use? Roads and other basic infrastructure have alwasy been, and *should* always be, free to all. Regulating use of the basic infrastructure assets of the economy slows down the process of doing just about anything by adding unnecessary management. To illustrate this point with an extreme example, how fast could you travel down the road at night if you had to stop to put a coin into every street light to turn it on as you passed by it? Would you rather not just pay an annual lump sum, even if it meant paying a little more or less than your fair share? To a greater or lesser extent, user-pays for basic infrastructure introduces these inefficiencies, creating frictional resistance to basic human activity.
But don't let these practical considerations stand in the way of fundamentalist privatism.
Re:Unlikely (Score:2)
Unless you are part of some sort of self-sufficient commune, you use the roads, that's how your food gets delivered.
Besides that, vehicle registration fees are supposed to cover road repairs.
Re:Unlikely (Score:2)
That is actually closer to the truth. The whole decommissioning process gets a lot safer and easier if you let the hotter waste decay for a half life or two in situ.
Like a wife (Score:5, Funny)
They might be expensive to keep around. Until you price a divorce.
Re:Like a wife (Score:5, Funny)
Where's "+1 Sad" when you need it?
Re:Like a wife (Score:3)
My ex-wife's student loan debt was around $65,000 and I never "made enough" for her and she had no real ambition really to ever work to pay off her debt herself. Which I wouldn't have had much of an issue with if she actually respected how hard I worked and the money I was able to bring in. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being a highly educated stay at home mom. The divorce cost $30K. The way I look at it, I saved $35K plus life long pain and suffering.
I also walked away with 50/50 custody of our 5 year old daughter, no child support and no alimony. So I also saved $10s of thousands on those areas by spending money on a good lawyer and by self-educating myself to properly handle the personal side of the divorce. It's the stupid shit you do after the divorce process starts that generally gets people in trouble. I also did a lot of work myself so the lawyer had less to do. He was pretty impressed with my fact finding and organizations skills. I didn't waste his time with useless unorganized crap.
So really, the divorce was a bargain.
A spouse should never be a financial or emotional drain.
PUC (Score:2)
Collecting interest (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Collecting interest (Score:5, Informative)
The UK's older reactors like the Magnox units are being decommissioned on a long-term basis, about 80 years from shutdown to final clearing of the reactor site. The delay is to allow the radioactivity in the core components such as the reactor vessel and primary steam piping to decay to virtually nothing which makes future dismantling easier.
After shutdown the spent fuel is removed and a start is made demolishing non-radioactive parts of the reactor complex such as the turbine halls, control rooms etc. What is left is no real danger to anyone; the reactor containment is sealed off and left to sit with a simple wire fence around it for the next fifty or sixty years before final demolishing of the rest of the reactor is carried out.
I imagine the US reactors are up for similar custodial treatment and the newspaper reports are sensationalistic garbage as they usually are. Some decommissioning is carried out more rapidly here and there in the world but usually because the site is going to be quickly reused to build a new reactor complex on it -- for example the Japanese are in the final stages of decommissioning and dismantling a small Magnox reactor at Tokai about ten years after it shut down but it is on the site of one of their nuclear research and development centres.
Re:Collecting interest (Score:2, Insightful)
That tends to be exactly what happens. In addition, replacement reactors are built on the same site next to decommissioned reactors making any security monitoring costs basically nil.
While it is quite possible to completely dismantle a reactor within 1 year, it is about 100x cheaper to wait 10 years and 1000x cheaper to simply wait 50 years. Unlike with conventional pollutants, nuclear stuff simply ceases to be the problem as a function of time.
Re:Collecting interest (Score:2)
The short half-life stuff tends to be the isotopes with market value in industrial applications. Cleaning these places up might recover enough material to cover the cost of the cleaning plus a bit extra.
Re:Collecting interest (Score:2)
It seems unlikely that interest will grow faster than the cost of dismantling increases.
It seems to me that the cost of dismantling will decrease. The core will become less radioactive with time, and 20 or 30 years from now we should be smarter about the process. Robotics should be much more advanced. There will be a larger market for more of the isotopes. Heck, 30 years from now most of the "waste" may be considered a valuable resource.
What is the hurry? It seems like waiting at least a few decades is a good idea.
Did the rules change? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easy to forget that when these reactors were set up the world was a different place. The "retirement" accounts for these reactors probably assumed a MUCH lower retirement cost. So it's not the fault of the utility if there isn't enough money in the accounts if the rules changed between point A and point B.
Something that is irritating about many regulations is that they're very casually passed sometimes without really considering what the rule actually costs. If these fellows didn't save enough by the standards of the old cost projections then I see no fault with them. This is a situation where the government should probably take responsibility for the costs IF they are in fact responsible for making them go up.
If they never were going to save enough even by the old rules then these utilities are at fault for mismanagement and I'd be fine with squeezing them to pony up the difference.
Regardless, the money required to dismantle these reactors is probably in excess of what the utilities are themselves liable. So the government should probably pay that difference.
I know a lot of people don't like this idea because budgets are getting tight. But when you pass regulations they cost someone money. If the government doesn't want to pay it can always relax the regulation in some circumstances. But short of that it isn't reasonable to change the rules on the utilities and then expect them to make up the difference.
Short of that, the utilities will do what they're already doing... just leaving the money in an account to mature until such time as it can cover dismantling costs.
So those are the options on the ground. Maybe I'm being unfair to someone... this is my impression of the matter.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems to me that the business plan for the building and operating the reactors should have included dismantling. It might have been, but maybe several corporate take overs and mergers raided the fund to fiance the acquisition. Or it was assumed from the beginning that the taxpayers would subsidize the clean up. That would mean just another case of corporate welfare at huge cost to the average American.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
Who can say. I'm sure that did happen in at least one case. If there is fraud or looting or mismanagement then I would of course agree the company is liable for that.
However, it is also very likely that they did plan for dismantling costs it's just that the costs have gone up radically in recent years because the rules have changed. Do you think the new regulations don't have a price? Who's paying for it? It has to come out of that dismantling fund and if they set it up assuming the old rules then they probably couldn't have enough in it.
The point is that an entirely responsible and honest company could find itself flatfooted if between point A and point B the rules change. They couldn't anticipate that the dismantling costs would double or quadruple.
So in the case of fraud or looting or mismanagment... yes... the company should be squeezed to pay the difference.
However, in instances where the company did save but the rules were changed... either the government should take responsibility for it's own decisions or you should simply accept the reactor sit there for 60 years while the fund gains value as a compromise.
Short of that, you can't make ex post facto regulations and then expect everyone to pay for it. A possible compromise would be to grand father all the reactors that were built prior to the new regulations... .that would be all of them because they're all pretty old.
Its very important in law to be reasonable. When you get unreasonable people stop obeying the law. Criminals don't get away with that because they're typically pretty stupid an a minority. But when laws get unreasonable for everyone then suddenly you find that law loses all it's teeth.
Just be careful... when you make everyone an outlaw you'll find that the outlaws outnumber everyone else.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:5, Informative)
One thing that was noted in the article is that a lot of the power companies HAD sufficient retirement funds, but a large portion of the value of their funds were wiped out in the economic crash of 2008. They mentioned one reactor's retirement fund crashing from $592m to somewhere north of 200m and even now not breaking 300m.
Thus, it's the economic turbulence weathering the vulnerable investments made on the retirement funds. This is not too far from a bunch of seniors who just had their retirement income wiped out, continuing to work after retirement to make up for the shortfall in their supposedly secure retirement funds.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
ah, in that case they're not at fault. They put their money into AAA investments considered equal to treasury bonds.
If this is the case then no one is at fault besides possibly the rating agencies. And that means the reactors will sit there for years until their funds recover unless someone can figure out a way to finance it that doesn't punish people who ultimately are not at fault.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
Yep, same kind of thing happened to my employer's retirement account. I work for a state university so we are all manditorily enrolled in a classic pension plan. The money we pay in is invested, of course. Well since the market went to shit we are short on what we need to cover obligations, so our contributions have gone up. When it recovers, they'll go down. Just how it works. I guess we could invest in nothing but AAA bonds or the like, but of course even with the volatility in general the investment fund means we need to pay in less than we would otherwise. In general the investment is pretty conservative, but the downturn was big, it hit everything.
So unless the power companies were stupid about it, I don't see the problem here. They were doing what is sensible and because of this downturn, now they have to wait longer. We could require that the money is invested only in high grade securities and so on, however we need to be prepared to pay more in that event. Nothing is free.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
Oh, the poor, poor things. Fortunately there is the government, who will step in and pay for decommissioning now with tax money. If we also privatize schooling and kill off social security, there will be enough money to spare for a tax cut. This way, the owners of these companies can find solace by buying some extra sports cars.
Yes, shit happens, that's life. Instead of bitching around we should all pray and be thankful. Its good to know that the safe decommissioning of these reactors was linked to something as reliable as the stock market. Well, it failed, but only a small minded person would see in this type of strategy anything but genius.
Reason for rule changes (Score:3)
Something that is irritating about many regulations is that they're very casually passed sometimes without really considering what the rule actually costs. If these fellows didn't save enough by the standards of the old cost projections then I see no fault with them.
That might be an irritating factor with many regulations but suppose the reason for the new regulation is well justified by science? For example if a factory was built several decades ago using asbestos and then decommissioned today the costs would be significantly higher than the original projections because, in the interim, we have discovered that asbestos is dangerous. So should a government be expected to pay the increased costs because they passed regulations to require asbestos to be safely removed? It's not their fault that asbestos turned out to be dangerous anymore than it is the company's fault.
I would argue that any increase in decommissioning costs due to regulations changing is a "risk of doing business" and therefore entirely the responsibility of the company who ran the plant. Governments are naturally motivated to keep these risks to a minimum in order to encourage businesses to flourish and keep costs to a minimum for their voters so there is a balance.
Re:Reason for rule changes (Score:2)
When a company sets up and agrees to follow all regulations including providing a fund for dismantling the reactor at the end of it's life they have to make assumptions about what that will cost.
if those assumptions are unreasonable and due to things outside of their control the costs are not sufficient to meet dismantling costs then that isn't their fault.
It's a question of determining responsibility and fault.
Is their liability for the reactor unlimited? No. It clearly isn't. I mean, that isn't a controversial point. It's a matter of contract that their liability has an exact dollar figure.
So if your policies even if they're scientifically valid happen to cause their expenses to exceed their liabilities they won't actually pay them.
In these matters, you might have to consider contributing public funds to the issue or simply accept that the reactor will sit there until such time as the fund can handle the expense. Or you can adopt a different dismantling procedure that is less expensive.
You literally will be unable to stick it to these guys if they held up their end of the contract. So "ideas" that aren't going to happen in reality because they're about as illegal as feeding radioactive waste to babies... it isn't going to happen.
Re:Reason for rule changes (Score:2)
Is their liability for the reactor unlimited? No. It clearly isn't. I mean, that isn't a controversial point. It's a matter of contract that their liability has an exact dollar figure.
Contract? Did the US government ask them to build and operate a reactor? If so then I agree with you - you follow the terms of the contract. I was operating under the assumption that they US government had simply permitted a company which wanted to build and run a reactor to do so in much the same way that it would permit a company to build a factory i.e. the company chose to do this because they think they can make money from it not that the government contracted with them to do it.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
Regulation is almost always written by industry representatives to be as beneficial as possible to that industry, see healthcare,mortgage, and automotive industry regulation.
We're willing to yell at some poor uneducated asshole who is homeless because he took on an investment he couldn't afford (apparently he is omniscient)
BUT
When industrialists fuck up in a fashion that may directly impact the health and safety of millions (let alone their finances), you "see no fault with them."
You're a horrible human being, eat shit.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
Not true actually. It's written instead by whichever interest group is most interested in that industry and has the most power.
That is USUALLY the industry's own lobby. However, the anti nuclear lobby is stronger then the pro nuclear lobby. As evidence, how many nuclear power plants have we built in the last 20 years? Exactly. Anti nuclear lobby is MUCH stronger. And because that lobby is stronger it writes the regulation and not the nuclear industry.
As to being a horrible human being, I don't think you're self aware, introspective, or conscious enough to judge another human being.
I'd tell you to eat shit but that would be cannibalism. ;-p
***BURN***
I win the flame war.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
so what your saying is, that I the consumer can pay for this because someone made a financial plan and didn't bother to fucking update it since 1958, or I as a taxpayer can pay for this because someone made a financial plan and didn't bother to fucking update it since 1958?
how about the shit for brains that ran the places, pay for their incompetence out of their own? Like I would if I set a retirement plan in stone and expected the entire world to not change a single bit in 50 years?
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
A question might be why they would be required to update it?
Look... if you change the rules. that is if you change the terms of the contract EX POST FACTO then you're responsible for those extra costs. They held up their end of the bargain. They didn't change the rules. The government did. So who's responsible? The party that changed the rules... eg the government.
Don't like that? Don't change the rules.
That's why contracts are written down. So everyone can remember what everyone agreed to in black and white.
A major problem with new regulation is that politicians and their supporters often don't grasp that new legislation has far ranging expenses. They don't care because in their mind it is someone else's problem. However, the buck will be passed around until it comes right back at the consumer or the tax payer.
You always pay for it in the end.
Lets say you get everything you want and you stick it to the evil nuclear power company. Guess how they're going to pay for it? They're going to charge you more for electricity. So you'll pay for anyway.
Mission accomplished?
Trust me... everyone is going to be happier if you find the most reasonable, low cost method of safely disposing of the waste. If you dick around with a lot of things that mostly exist to waste money it will all be passed on to you in your bill or your tax form.
The smart thing is to be efficient. Waste other people's time and money and they'll return the favor. The only people that actually get away with it are the politicians because they're screwing around with other people's money.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
if that's true then I'm all with sticking it to the pigs. Though that blade cuts both ways and if you're honest you'll have to admit the government does sometimes change the rules on people and someone else to pay for it out of their own pockets.
Neither policy should be tolerated. If they're scamming the government then by all means nail them. If the government screwed them then stick it to them instead. Someone else pointed out that "we" pay for the government's mistakes. That's true. Doesn't change who's responsible if the government caused the company to experience some new expense.
Someone also said that the issue is less either of these issues and instead it's just the economic down turn hurting the funds. If that's the case then no one is at fault. It's just a 'shit happens' situation.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
On the contrary, the utility is/should be very much responsible for this contingency. This is just like a margin call. When prices and regulations change, it's up to the utility to replenish the coffers *immediately* to guarantee that there are *always* enough funds to cover the final transaction cost.
A planned decommissioning is just another kind of futures contract, so there's no excuse to not use the standard rules of capitalism, especially since the utilities are private for profits.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
So you believe the utility has UNLIMITED liability?
*laughs*
Have fun enforcing that, sport. The buck will be passed. So while you're at it try to make it as expensive as possible.
Enjoy the tax hike. ;-)
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:3)
If you pollute it, you clean it up.
Do you really think it's ok to grab the profits now, and leave a mess for the next 50 years? Who are these business people who think they're owed special treatment? How about we break the corporate veil, post their names and addresses, and see if the public at large really wants to give them special treatment?
Re:THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T HAVE ANY MONEY! (Score:2)
True, which will make the real cost of regulation relevant. When people grasp that passing a given law means money out of their wallet they'll take the situation more seriously.
Re:THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T HAVE ANY MONEY! (Score:2)
either way, it seems the people are footing the bill - in your scenario because decommissioning is included in your cents/kwh, in GP's because the difference wasn't accounted for and must therefore come out of taxes.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
not sure how you read that into GP's post. it seems reasonable that if the goalposts are moved, the person moving them should be held responsible for the movement.
of course, the laws were bound to change along the line as more was learnt about the process. GP is simply stating that the responsible parties for the cleanup include the people that make the rules, should they change them halfway.
Re:Did the rules change? (Score:2)
I'm anti-libertarian and I think it was reasonable to call this a troll. It was fine up to the sentence starting "I suppose..."
I sure hope so! (Score:5, Funny)
Hell yeah! Nuclear power plants going for cheap. I'll take one! Surplus ICBM silos are interesting, but have far too many drawbacks. But nuclear power plants? Those things are bigger than a city block, above ground, extremely stable, etc. I'd love to buy one.
For starters, I think I'd start cutting up one of the cooling towers, until it looked like a giant medieval castle, just smooth and round instead of 4 stone walls. Re-enactments of Monty Python's & the Holy Grail are, of course, obligatory.
After that, I'd have to buy as much flesh-tone paint as I can afford. It would take some time, but just think of it... http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_omMU_7Vv1us/S7aqBJUCP_I/AAAAAAAAAIE/HMaftmCYRGM/s1600/san-onofre_songs.jpg [slashdot.org]">Giant nuclear boobies!
As an added bonus, nuclear power plants always need ample water, so you're guaranteed to get a private lake, river, or beachfront property, no matter which one you buy. They're also universally pretty close to mega population centers, so, while it's likely a nice quiet location, you won't be too far from a major city, unlike many of those silos.
Re:I sure hope so! (Score:3)
Link to the giant nuclear boobies. [blogspot.com]
Heck, maybe you could rent it out for The Abyss II [imdb.com].
Re:I sure hope so! (Score:2)
As an added bonus, nuclear power plants always need ample water, so you're guaranteed to get a private lake, river, or beachfront property, no matter which one you buy.
A fission hole?
Clean up is simple (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Clean up is simple (Score:2)
Re:Clean up is simple (Score:2)
This is just misleading (Score:3)
This happens with many places that work with at least moderately radioactive material (not just reactors). What you do is tape the building/site in question off and allow it to sit for 1-2 decades. In that time the radioactivity typically decreases by orders of magnitude from decay. I can't speak to the cost savings, but so long as the site is properly fenced the safety concerns from handling all that waste go down by a lot. It isn't a bad decision in theory, but many small outfits just go "woops, can't pay to clean this up" and stick the EPA with the bill. Which is ackward, because you can't very well require the funds for cleanup up front because it would make buisnesses that use radiation in any significant way (radiopharmaceutical companies, as an example) impossibly expensive to start.
But I suppose the point of this is to attack "evil nuclear," so I'm probably wasting my time even expaining the reality. That seems to be in fashion nowadays, reality be damned.
So why close them? (Score:2)
Pardon my ignorance on the subject, but why exactly must they be closed? I did some googling on this very question and couldn't find any straightforward answer.
let them sit while interest accrues (Score:2)
let them sit like industrial relics for 20 to 60 years or even longer while interest accrues
Wow, it's a good thing that interest rates are so high now that they will greatly outpace inflation and make the a reality. Time for the power companies to give themselves another round of bonuses for coming up with this one and making it someone else's problem. Oh, wait ....
Heh (Score:4, Insightful)
Their plan is to get the government, and by association the taxpayer, to pay for the shutdown.
There is, however, a flipside to this: should the need for energy suddenly sky-rocket, they will, no doubt, be recommissioned, with special permits to allow their continued operation (to the horror of the people who understand just how badly these reactors need to be replaced). The fun part is that we will then be continuing to run dangerously out of date nuclear power-plants, with all of the original design flaws; the government, with all of its spin, will play up the fact that they are saving the taxpayers billions of dollars in doing so.
Those of us who are proponents of nuclear technology will, of course, facepalm with the force of thousand Arnold Schwarzeneggers at this development. The green lobby, of course, will scream at this continued injustice.
Is this what they mean by a 'hot mess"? (Score:2)
As Nuclear Reactors Age, the Money To Close Them Lags
For many Slashdotters, money is usually what's needed to open lags, not close them.
"Too big to fail"? (Score:2)
"...including some whose licenses expire soon..."
Of course, just because they are up for renewal doesn't mean they are at the end of their useful life, just that a bunch of luddites are fearful of them continuing to supply electricity.
Guess it's time to renew those licenses instead of retiring the reactors, on the condition that all profits go to the retirement fund for the reactor in question?
-- Terry
Re:What?! (Score:2)
the capitalists behind these ventures didn't plan for the future in a manner that was beneficial for all!??!!!
No one asked for benefits for all. It would be nice if they planned in a way that used a portion of revenue to cover liabilities. You know, like a properly run business is supposed to do?
Nuclear energy is not going away. We need to deal these issues honestly and soon.
Re:What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you MAKE them do it, they won't.
Re:FTFY (Score:2)
Would you be so hard on the plight of retirees who lost their retirement savings and are forced to some measure of desperation because it's too late for them to make it up?
It says in the article that a lot of the funds earmarked for reactor dismantlement were mangled by the economic crisis, my guess is that they had significant funds in the market, which is usually a sure bet to accrue interest in the long term. Then the stock market crash came, and we all know what happened next.
It is the plight of age, your ability to recover from mistakes made late in your existence is diminished.
Re:I seem to remember (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I seem to remember (Score:2)
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. Interest is close to inflation, correct.
However, since wages haven been stagnant for years - and will continue to be - labour will be effectively much cheaper in 50 years!
Re:I seem to remember (Score:2)
Yes, but 80% of the cost will go to the senior managers who are paid $1M/hour.
Re:Is there anyone left that plays things straight (Score:4, Funny)
Nice of you to provide a comprehensive list.
Re:Standard practice (Score:2)
Like plutonium with a half life of 24,000 years?
Or cesium with an ecologic half life of 240 years?
Re:Standard practice (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends on what isotope of plutonium. If you burn the nuclear material through enough stages you're left with Pu-238 which has a half life of 88 years. I don't know of any Cesium isotope that has a half-life of 240 years (and you get to define what an "ecologic half life" is,) the primary concern with nuclear materials is Cs-137, which has a half life of 30 years.
Re:Standard practice (Score:2)
Please stop calling out idiots on Slashdot. Slashdot wouldn't be Slashdot without them.
Re:Standard practice (Score:2)
The stuff with a half life of 24,000 years is only very mildly radioactive. That is pretty much what "long half life" means. I'd be surprised if that plutonium wasn't more of a chemical hazard than a radioactivity hazard. GP says "the bulk of the radioactivity..." You can't invalidate that statement with examples of minor sources of radioactivity.