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Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power

nytimes.com

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Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power

#351

Post by vidarh »

hackuser wrote: post #249
vidarh wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the only cost of fossil fuel power plants. Coal plants kill huge numbers of people. The coal industry pumps huge quantities of uranium dust into the atmosphere alongside fly ash. The biggest externality of coal in particular is not carbon emissions but the massive health costs and human suffering. If fossil fuels were subjected to the same safety requirements as nuclear in terms of preventing public health…

> The biggest externality of coal in particular is not carbon emissions but the massive health costs and human suffering The carbon emissions cause climate change, which causes human suffering at a scale, as I understand it, far beyond that of the pollution you describe (which is also substantial).

While that is true, coal is just one of the sources that play into that, and the point that you yourself made was that it can be offset.

While the dust and radioactivity released by coal plants kills hundreds of thousands of people now, and we can't meaningfully offset it by trading quotas - it's not like having more kids makes up for killing other people.

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power

#352

Post by lostlogin »

candiodari wrote: post #301
vkou wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also dishonest to claim (Without any qualifications) that spent nuclear fuel will be deadly for hundreds of thousands of years. Which isotopes? Deadly in what amounts? How many people do you expect our spent fuel will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? ~100,000 years? How many people do you expect coal pollution/AGW will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? How many people will hydro dam disaster…

Whilst we do know for sure that solar and wind have an accident rate per install. This is going to kill more people than spent nuclear fuel, which of course does not seem to matter. Turns out installing large pieces of glass high up on buildings is not the safest occupation on the planet. If you calculate out the total amount of victims for this, it turns out that even if we melt down a nuclear plant in every capital…

Are you seriously suggesting that a Chernobyl in every capital on earth would still leave nuclear safer than solar? It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power

#353

Post by pas »

vidarh wrote: post #351
hackuser wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The biggest externality of coal in particular is not carbon emissions but the massive health costs and human suffering The carbon emissions cause climate change, which causes human suffering at a scale, as I understand it, far beyond that of the pollution you describe (which is also substantial).

While that is true, coal is just one of the sources that play into that, and the point that you yourself made was that it can be offset. While the dust and radioactivity released by coal plants kills hundreds of thousands of people now , and we can't meaningfully offset it by trading quotas - it's not like having more kids makes up for killing other people.

Well, it gives us cheap electricity, which helps us run our hospitals, for example. Thus helping kids live through the early years (where mortality is more likely).

But as we all know, replacing coal powered plants with safer things (nuclear, solar, wind, tidal) would cost nothing compared to healthcare costs.

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power

#354

Post by makomk »

candiodari wrote: post #301
vkou wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also dishonest to claim (Without any qualifications) that spent nuclear fuel will be deadly for hundreds of thousands of years. Which isotopes? Deadly in what amounts? How many people do you expect our spent fuel will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? ~100,000 years? How many people do you expect coal pollution/AGW will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? How many people will hydro dam disaster…

Whilst we do know for sure that solar and wind have an accident rate per install. This is going to kill more people than spent nuclear fuel, which of course does not seem to matter. Turns out installing large pieces of glass high up on buildings is not the safest occupation on the planet. If you calculate out the total amount of victims for this, it turns out that even if we melt down a nuclear plant in every capital…

Solar and wind have a rate of zero nuclear accidents per install, and as that seems to be the only kind of accident you or anyone else counts towards nuclear power's total they're clearly better than nuclear in that regard.

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power

#355

Post by vidarh »

pas wrote: post #353
vidarh wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that is true, coal is just one of the sources that play into that, and the point that you yourself made was that it can be offset. While the dust and radioactivity released by coal plants kills hundreds of thousands of people now , and we can't meaningfully offset it by trading quotas - it's not like having more kids makes up for killing other people.

Well, it gives us cheap electricity, which helps us run our hospitals, for example. Thus helping kids live through the early years (where mortality is more likely). But as we all know, replacing coal powered plants with safer things (nuclear, solar, wind, tidal) would cost nothing compared to healthcare costs.

This is a strawman - the discussion was not about investing more in alternatives, but about the effect shutting down nuclear has in prolonging the phase-out of coal.

Given that the shutdown of nuclear is extremely expensive, and that decommissioning before the planned lifespan also involves massive payouts to the owners and reduced time to amortise cleanup costs etc., the economics also vastly favour keeping them running.

It also ignores the vast healthcare costs involved in dealing with respiratory illnesses - including for children - as a result of coal. Few people fall over dead with no cost of care for respiratory illnesses.

So if your concern in healthcare spending, that's another reason to at a minimum not shut down nuclear plants until all of the coal plants are gone.

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power

#356

Post by mnw21cam »

astrodust wrote: post #274
RockyMcNuts wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistically, it's very safe to be a turkey on a turkey farm until shortly before Thanksgiving. A lot of stuff that is theoretically guaranteed to be a disaster looks very safe and profitable until shortly before disaster strikes.

Statistically there are far more large-scale hydroelectric projects in the US that will kill thousands of people if they fail if those facilities are not properly maintained. A dam failure is unavoidable without lots of pre-planning, and even then, as recent events have shown, you can anticipate a problem and still not be able to deal with it. Nuclear plants can, in a worst case scanario, be given the SCRAM treatment…

> Nuclear plants can, in a worst case scanario, be given the SCRAM treatment to shut them down hard. If that procedure is successful then the reactor is off.

It isn't as simple as that, with a lot of reactors. The ones at Fukushima were SCRAMmed. A running nuclear reactor will build up a collection of fission products that have various half-lives that can cause problems. In Fukushima's case, these fission products continued to decay and produced lots of heat (about 6.5% of the heat produced during normal operation, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...). It was this heat that raised the temperature of the fuel and boiled off the cooling water and caused the disaster.

So basically, with lots of reactors, SCRAMming is not enough - you need to maintain cooling for quite a long time afterwards. It is entirely possible to build reactors where this is not the case.

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power

#357

Post by kruczek »

lostlogin wrote: post #352
candiodari wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst we do know for sure that solar and wind have an accident rate per install. This is going to kill more people than spent nuclear fuel, which of course does not seem to matter. Turns out installing large pieces of glass high up on buildings is not the safest occupation on the planet. If you calculate out the total amount of victims for this, it turns out that even if we melt down a nuclear plant in every capital…

Are you seriously suggesting that a Chernobyl in every capital on earth would still leave nuclear safer than solar? It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.

> It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.

There were only around 50 deaths directly related to that disaster. Certainly more people died (or will yet die) later due to exposure, but these are only estimates; on one end you may find estimates of "many tens of thousands" (e.g. 200 000 - by Greenpeace, of course), on the other end you may find estimates of around 4000 by WHO.

Also, it is not true you can't safely go there now. In fact you can go there for a vacation trip: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/ukrain... "More than 10,000 tourists now explore the disaster site every year."

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power

#358

Post by kalleboo »

ben_jones wrote: post #183
killjoywashere wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ones I know, ex-Navy, are living pretty high on the hog.

There most be an increasing amount of hardware/software with egregious business value (hundred million+) with a decreasing number of surviving/available designers etc. Rationally if these people were required to fix or maintain such systems their yearly value would be in the millions wouldn't it? For some reason I get the feeling that such people are not paid in the millions. Maybe double or triple a traditional sala…

> For some reason I get the feeling that such people are not paid in the millions. Maybe double or triple a traditional salary but not in the executive-bonus tier

From stories I've heard, in these situations people like to come in not as employees but as consultants, at which point there are many hundreds of dollars per hour spent.

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power

#359

Post by candiodari »

kruczek wrote: post #357
lostlogin wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously suggesting that a Chernobyl in every capital on earth would still leave nuclear safer than solar? It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.

> It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now. There were only around 50 deaths directly related to that disaster. Certainly more people died (or will yet die) later due to exposure, but these are only estimates; on one end you may find estimates of "many tens of thousands" (e.g. 200 000 - by Greenpeace, of course), on the other end you may find estimates of around 4000 by W…

Even from those 50, a number died due to the physical effects of walking into vapor that was several thousand degrees. Yes, they would likely have died of radiation exposure, but they survived nowhere near long enough for that to occur. It is a VERY bad idea to spray water on something that is being fed with tens of megawatts of power. This is what happens, of course, when the government orders workers into a reactor they know nothing about. Of course those were also nuclear related deaths, but ... At Chernobyl at least the radiation death toll can realistically be claimed to be nonzero, but people dying from a direct consequence of the disaster, and actually dying from radiation exposure is low double digits. People affected by it, and having worse health as a result of it MAY be in the thousands. However, after decades of tracking, it will probably rather be in the hundreds.

The Fukushima disaster killed people, including 2 people who were outside of the walls getting a smoke when the wave hit and died from "sustained blood loss" (apparently they got lifted up, smashed, and there was no way to get help, given that there were thousands such cases along the entire coastline). More people died from food delivery problems following the disaster in Fukushima than are ever going to experience symptoms due to the radiation ...

For nuclear everything, everything, everything is counted. Uranium mining truck crashes into a car leaving the factory (before ever even seeing the mine) ? Nuclear accident.

The rate of solar accidents, on the other hand is the opposite. The thousands of dead resulting from the labour conditions in Chinese solar panel production factories ? Obviously nothing to do with solar ... The thousands who have died from pollution caused by solar panel production ? (solar power may be clean, producing solar panels is VERY dirty). Nothing to do with solar. And so on.

e.g. https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/chinas-solar...

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power

#360

Post by Tepix »

freehunter wrote: post #4

I find the headline weird, "a blow to nuclear power". I feel like nuclear power is possibly the most attacked form of energy that exists, and that includes coal and petroleum, both of which are still heavily used despite any public outcry. Westinghouse has made some bad deals, sure, but the real "blow to nuclear power" has been the massive refusal by both citizens and governments to build new plants, and the few nota…

What about the failure to find a solution for long term storage? 75 years later and we are still at the beginning of this important issue that hundreds of even thousands of future generations will be affected by if it isn't done perfectly.
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