But something interesting about nuclear power plants that everyone seems to gloss over when talking about how safe they are: 1. No bank or collection of Wall Street investors has or probably ever will bankroll their construction because of the long term potential costs,. And this includes a rather lackluster Price to Earnings ratio. Even with the Government behind them they tend not to turn a profit. Also, 2. no pubic insurance company will ever insure a nuclear plant for the same reason. The risks are too great.
Every nuclear power plant in the USA has been subsidized by enormous loans and tax subsidies by the US Government's Nuclear Regulatory Agency. It is the US Government that ensures (not insures) the safety and pays for any fuck ups.
These are rather the affects of nuclear alarmism. Nuclear is completely viable in many countries, and the rate per kW/hr is favorable enough that they pay for themselves over the life of the plant.
The reason that plants don't get built in the US is panic and fairly unrealistic levels of red tape involved in getting one done. Ever since the nuclear panic of Chernobyl and TMI, there is a strong NIMBY sentiment, and getting approval takes years, with tons of expensive studies and town meetings delaying things. Now keep in mind, I'm all for heavy safety precautions with nuclear, but it's a bit off the deep end over here.
Because of the extreme amount of perceived obstacles and risk, it's fairly hard to get the money together without subsidies.
So, for those who really want to extoll the virtues of nuclear power (and it does have some whiz-bang benefits) you need to ask yourselves, if nuclear power is just a happy gentle giant, why no US financial institutions are willing to pony up the money for their construction?
Some actually are. There has been a tiny flood of new development projects lately, as nuclear hysteria has died down.
They may, after the fact, buy utility stock in an entity such as Pacific Gas and Electric, but they don't hold those investments in perpetuity because as yet no nuclear power plant has produced a sustainable profit. Therefore, it makes good sense to ask why private enterprise isn't rushing in and making all the BIG BIG BUCKS promised by nuclear power.
In this country, that's probably true. But not so in many others.
And secondly, you also have to ask why US Nuclear Power is not taken on by the big insurance companies as clients.
Again, too much red tape. If I remember correctly, the regulations covering nuclear reactor insurance uses such broad terminology that the underwriter takes on a huge liability.
One immediate answer is that unlike countries where nuclear power has proven to be so successful is because the administration of those nuclear operations includes the refining and reusability of spent nuclear fuel. We don't do that in the USA. France and Germany have a remarkable track record of squeezing every bit of usefulness out of Uranium 135 and 125 and their subsequent off spring (plutonium anyone?) as well as the icky by products such as cesium, etc.
Correct. The US, due to nuclear proliferation fears, does not reprocess fuel. Basically we get rid of our fuel when only 99% or so of the total available fuel has been used. This is wasteful, but ideological.
What they cannot reuse or repurpose is encased in barrels of molten glass. Molten glass mixed in to stabilize the icky stuff. That super cooled liquid -- glass -- gives France and Germany plenty of time to deal with the worst of the worst later, which most likely means remelting the glass and enclosing it in more glass every two or three hundred years. They can do this for about 2,000 years. By that time stuff like Strontium 90 is as safe as dust bunnies.
Vitrification is generally used for lower level waste, but spent fuel rods usually sit in a pool until they're safe enough for dry storage.
In the USA the way we dispense of nuclear waste is to entomb it in concrete which eventually forms cracks. Despite what you may have been spoon fed by the US Government, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency is rather cavalier about how it contains stuff that, if it contaminates aquifers, (any kind of aquifer - above ground, below ground, your kid's plastic wading pool), contaminates it for millennia. Just read up on what's happening off of the Pacific Shelf west of Theattle, Portland, San Francisco (especially the Monterrey Trench) and Los Angeles. Before there was ever an Atomic Regulatory Commission the US Government had no problem dumping highly radioactive waste in the deepest trenches off of the Pacific Shelf. Supposedly, we don't do that anymore.
We have a great option for storage in Yucca Mountain..hell we could probably sell other countries that storage space. There's no ground water seepage issue there. The problem is, the Senate majority Leader comes from there, and it's a huge NIMBY issue.
A great deal of more thought needs to be put to work designing better than what is touted as "the new generation" of nuclear power plants and how to safely dispose of waste before we start building them all over the country. Oh, and there is still that thorny issue of how to decommission the current generation and the generation before that of nuclear power plants.
Waste storage is indeed the hardest issue to address as far as nuclear goes. Most is just store on-site, but solutions such as Yucca do exist. There's just no easy ones. I'm definitely not a fan of what we do now.
We'll undoubtably end up becoming a glow-in-the-dark Nation, but a lot more thought needs to be put into it.
I don't really think that's accurate. You don't need to solve all the issues for a technology completely before you can use it, and you never will anyway. It's more about mitigating your downsides.
The thing is, coal waste is a much, much bigger issue. If you want to generate power for a country, you basically have the choice of nuclear or coal, and coal is far, far more unsafe to humans and the environment. The amount of coal waste produced is staggering compared to nuclear. Carefully stored nuclear waste is fairly safe, while there really is no careful way to store coal ash, just big ass ponds, and when they break like in 2008, they'll utterly destroy an ecosystem for a very, very long time.
The 2008 Tennessee ash spill is generally agreed to be the worst ecological disaster in history, and you barely hear about it.
So anyways, no power generation tech is perfect, but Nuclear wins over coal hands down, and those are basically our only choices right now.
