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Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

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Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#351

Post by topspin »

trgn wrote: post #315
BirAdam wrote: post #299

Everyone focuses on the safety of power production, and I totally get that and think it's important, but the mining and enrichment of uranium should also be considered. Nuclear "disasters" aren't just 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. There are plenty of other disasters that aren't power plants. Growing up in the USA, my home town was contaminated with uranium, thorium, and radium due to a nearby uranium proce…

where was this?

There are a small number of such sites in the US. One that fits closely with this description is a legacy of the Manhattan Project: Coldwater Creek, MO. The Mallinckrodt Chemical Works refined a lot of uranium, and waste handling was about what you would expect given the prerogatives of the 1940's and the Cold War. They carried on refining for power plants after WW2.

Obviously, fuel refining hasn't just carried on like that, in the US and Europe at least. But it's one of many handy cudgels to use whenever folks get excited about nuclear.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#352

Post by SecretDreams »

dalyons wrote: post #228
SecretDreams wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power build outs are rarely driven by cost structures in a vacuum, or we'd all still be digging for coal. They're regularly driven by policy. It is a farce to think electricity choices are entirely capitalistic in nature, although maybe that's the case in some localized regions that probably (and regularly) hold other backwards policies in the name of "capitalism".

So your answer is use the state to force people to pay more for less competitive energy? There isn’t another choice here.

The state's role is to help shape policies that might help people over a time horizon greater than a couple of years. Often, this means current people are supposed to subsidize the world for future generations. This used to be the societal handshake that let kids have better outcomes than their parents. Somewhere along the way, the average joe seems to have lost sight of that societal contract and is more focused on instant gratification and short term payback.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#355

Post by arijun »

pqtyw wrote: post #338
cogman10 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime. Funnily, I have almost the opposite view. I'm terrified of old nuclear because those first gen power plants are all missing a lot of safety lessons. Nuclear disasters happen at old plants. I want old nuclear plants to be either u…

> Nuclear disasters happen at old plants. You used plural? What disasters are you talking about? Even Chernobyl wasn't technically first generation (not that it has anything to do with power plan safety in western countries anyway). Three Mile Island kind of proved it was fairly safe given that's the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors (like tsunamis or being designed and run by soviet engineer…

I may agree with your conclusion that old plants are safe enough (or at least take a deep dive study to see if their expected externality is worse than whatever would replace them). However:

> the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors

The problem is external factors happen. You can’t just raise your hands up and say “wasn’t my fault,” when they do. A tsunami washing over a solar farm would be a lot safer than what happened at Fukushima.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#356

Post by rapidaneurism »

foolfoolz wrote: post #323
Alexsky2 wrote: post #253

A bit unrelated to the Belgium story but I recently visited Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant near San Luis Obispo, CA and learned a ton about the technical details, safety systems, and policy decisions that go into operating a nuclear power plant. When operating at full capacity, it provides up to 10% of California power! While there is certainly always more such facilities can do for safety and efficiency, my impre…

diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously. about 2.2MW/hr they both aren’t always on but that’s the goal. It’s closer to 2MW/hr actual the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr. It would take 20 clones of Ivanpah to match one diablo canyon. Ivanpah took 4 years to build, cost 2.5B and was in discussions to close because it’s not cost effective. htt…

Watt contains time already so watt per hour does not make sense. You might mean MWhr/hr which is the same as MW

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#357

Post by dragonwriter »

foolfoolz wrote: post #323
Alexsky2 wrote: post #253

A bit unrelated to the Belgium story but I recently visited Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant near San Luis Obispo, CA and learned a ton about the technical details, safety systems, and policy decisions that go into operating a nuclear power plant. When operating at full capacity, it provides up to 10% of California power! While there is certainly always more such facilities can do for safety and efficiency, my impre…

diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously. about 2.2MW/hr they both aren’t always on but that’s the goal. It’s closer to 2MW/hr actual the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr. It would take 20 clones of Ivanpah to match one diablo canyon. Ivanpah took 4 years to build, cost 2.5B and was in discussions to close because it’s not cost effective. htt…

> diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously

MW/hr is a nonsense unit for generation capacity. The 2 reactors at Diablo Canyon each generate around 1.1GW of electricity (not MW, and not “per hour”, watts are already energy/time.)

> the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.

Ivanpah is a badly designed plant that isn't representative of CA’s solar generation (which is largely distributed, not large utility-scale plants) and is being shut down, but also these numbers are both nonsense units and unrelated to the actual stats.

Ivanpah’s peak output capacity is 397MW, it was intended to produce around 1TW-h per year, and it has actually produced an average of 732GW-h per year (equivalent to an average output of around 84MW).

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#359

Post by mpweiher »

crote wrote: post #209
mpweiher wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting fact: Finland just built one, for €1 billion. How can that be, if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this? The simple fact is that it has virtually nothing to do with any "difficulty" of finding a repository site, the problems are purely political, same as the US: "The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.[…

Oh, Germany did - see for example the Asse II mine. It just turned out that they weren't careful enough, so now they have got a giant nuclear waste storage pit which is unstable, is trying to leak into the groundwater, needs constant babysitting to prevent it from getting even worse , and will eventually need a nearly-impossible multi-billion-euro cleanup effort. At which point they'll be left with the original waste…

1. Asse does not house spent reactor fuel

2. It was an old mine turned into a research mine. It was never intended for actual use.

3. The waste there is mostly medical and low-level other waste like gloves.

4. It is actually safe where it is, moving it is another giant waste of time and money whose sole intent is to stoke fear and create costs.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#360

Post by mpweiher »

jonkoops wrote: post #325
crote wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, Germany did - see for example the Asse II mine. It just turned out that they weren't careful enough, so now they have got a giant nuclear waste storage pit which is unstable, is trying to leak into the groundwater, needs constant babysitting to prevent it from getting even worse , and will eventually need a nearly-impossible multi-billion-euro cleanup effort. At which point they'll be left with the original waste…

Why the hell did they build this in a former salt mine with known water intrusion.

They didn't. It's a research mine and never stored any spent fuel.
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