> “With the goal of completing the decommissioning in 30 to 40 years [...]"
Can't decide if it's a success of nuclear or a failure. Leaning towards success:
- ~900 tons of super duper radioactive material is more or less safely sitting in steel enclosures
- we're (as a global civilization) slowly but surely figuring out how to move the hazardous waste to a safer storage, and it may only (ahem) take a couple generations
- OTOH another big earthquake/tsunami can potentially wash it all away and release clumps of radioactive and poisonous metals to the environment...?
The "super duper radioactive material" you're so afraid of is what's left of the fuel. It's full of energy.
The precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets hot ("decay heat"). Without cooling, it melts. Cooling was lost during the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded anywhere.
Meanwhile, the precious fuel remained safely entombed within the concrete and steel vessel that was designed to contain it. Without cooling, the fuel got hot ("decay heat") and melted, always safely enclosed within the vessel.
Unfortunately, during attempts to cool the fuel in the aftermath of the earthquake, some radioactive fission products were released into the environment: caesium, iodine, xenon, etc. These fission products have been diluted and are harmless. See the section "Radionuclide release" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
How much harm did the radioactive fuel cause? Quoting Wikipedia:
No adverse health effects among non-worker Fukushima
residents have been documented that are directly
attributable to radiation exposure from the accident,
according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on
the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
Insurance compensation was paid for one death from lung
cancer (4 years later), but this does not prove a causal
relationship between radiation and the cancer.
Six other persons have been reported as having developed
cancer or leukemia. Two workers were hospitalized because
of radiation burns, and several other people sustained
physical injuries as a consequence of the accident.
The "super duper radioactive material" you're so afraid of is what's left of the fuel. It's full of energy.
This precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets very hot ("decay heat").
Fresh reactor fuel is even more full of potential energy but it doesn't get hot because uranium 235 and 238 have very long half lives. Fuel that has been used in a reactor gets hot primarily due to fission products (lighter elements formed when fuel atoms split apart) that undergo faster radioactive decay. There's also some decay heat from the production of transuranic elements (elements heavier than uranium, generated by neutron capture). But the fission product decay heat dwarfs the transuranic element contribution until several decades have passed.
It makes sense to be more afraid of the super duper radioactive material from spent fuel than the slightly radioactive material in brand new fuel. The radiotoxicity is vastly higher, the heat generation complicates handling/storage, and the chemical composition has gained dozens of elements scattered around the periodic table. In terms of usefulness, a fresh fuel rod is like a clean cardboard box and a used rod is more like a cardboard box that held a hot pizza. It's so dirty that it costs more to recycle it into something usable than to just sequester it and start with fresh material.
Yeah it’s all fine, it only displaced a few thousand people from their homes and made an area an uninhabitable wasteland. It’s only going to cost ~$500 billion in total for cleanup[0]. Nevermind the capital loss from the destruction of the power plant itself. Nuclear is definitely a great idea.
Sarcasm aside, it's extremely frustrating when deaths are the only dimension people use to compare with other electricity sources. You can't just put on a blindfold and ignore all of the other factors. Just because only a handful of deaths can be directly attributed, doesn't mean nuclear isn't an absolute nightmare when it goes wrong.
To add to your point. Disposal of nuclear waste at sea was common up until 1993. There is still a couple hundred thousand tons of such waste sitting in the ocean right now. In addition, about 214 times as much radioactive material was generated by nuclear testing than the Chernobyl breach. Fukushima wouldn't even come close to the waste that has already been released prior to the 1994 ban on Oceanic dumping.
If you were a Japanese tax payer, would it be a success ?
The total cleanup costs were estimated to be between 50.5 and 71 trillion yen ($470 to $660 billion). For the cleanup, only 184.3 billion yen was reserved in the September supplementary budget of prefecture Fukushima, and some funds in the central government's third supplementary budget of 2011.
The Fukushima #1 meltdown was man-made, namely the absolute ineptitude of the Japanese government at the time. As disasterous as the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami were, those were not what ultimately caused the meltdown.
The government was no more or less inept than any other organisation - government or private - anywhere in the world.
When faced with pressure to save money but still deliver, weighed up against a very low risk of catastrophe in their time, they did the mental math and cut corners, found ways around the safeguarding policies previously put in place and kicked infrastructure spending down the line.
The big problem with nuclear is not technological, it’s guaranteeing that whoever is responsible for it will be competent, capable and solvent for hundreds of years.
The anti-nuclear movement succeeded in Germany and they’re reaping the crops now. Nobody will go back to 1800s quality of life willingly if they can help it, be it by burning coal, trash, plastics, tires or paint cans for heat or electricity.
Japan has (within reason) concerns other than the total cost of electricity: having to haul in coal, oil and LNG over an ocean contested by an increasingly hostile neighbor must be very worrying to them.
Money is numbers in computers, joules and watts are real things.
Coal, gas and oil is full of externalities which are nowhere near being correctly included in the nominal prices of these commodities. Arguably neither are solar panels and wind turbines.
On the other hand, the existence of coal power proves that releasing small amounts of radiation is fine, really. So we should be able to build a lot more nuclear power plants; it would take a lot of accidents like these to match the releases from coal.
Once you decide to run nuclear power in a country you have centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what the next government, or next ten generations of citizens decide to do.
This is a unique cost consideration for nuclear power, which IMO is rarely considered by the proponents.
If you think Hollywood accounting is opaque and full of shenanigans, look into electric utilities. Nuclear power is not conventionally insurable. The NRC has the most understandable explainer I have found here: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
The current fad of buying old nukes to power data centers is going to be a learning experience for the tech industry about taking on the liabilities entailed.
They import about 90% of its energy requirements. This includes nuclear fuel. So this is far away from "perfect" if you can get wind and sun without having to import it.
At least in the US such costs are factored in. First of all, after Fukushima, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) performed a huge "Lessons learned" exercise, and asked all the power plants to do various upgrades. Here are some links [1], [2]. The ask was not "pretty please, can you do this if it's not much of a trouble for you", it was "you have to do this by this date if you want to continue to operate".
Second, it's the nuclear insurance. The scheme is codified in the Price-Anderson Act [3]. Basically, all the nuclear power plants need to purchase insurance for $0.5 BN per reactor. If anything happens, and the cleanup costs exceed this number, then the rest of the industry has to chime in, and the total is up to $16 BN per reactor. So, if 3 reactors were to have a core meltdown, the industry would have to pay close to $50 BN. The total estimate of the Fukushima cleanup stands currently at about twice that, so one can say that $50 BN is too little, but it certainly is not nothing.
Edit: the efficacy of the Price-Anderson Act was tested at the Three-Mile Island. Virtually no taxpayer money was used in the cleanup [4]. Of course, there were other costs incurred, such as in collecting data, doing investigations, upgrading regulations and enforcing them, but that's how Government should work.
According to [3] the industry is liable for 16b per reactor but the industry doesn’t have that much money to pay out. Entergy for example operates its nuclear plants in a subsidiary that generates about 100 million in revenue per year. They would have to raise the price of nuclear electricity by orders of magnitude to gave any chance of paying 16 bn, let alone the 10x more for a Fukushima-esque incident.
So when things go pearshaped the operators will undoubtedly go bankrupt, and since the cleanup is very mandatory the taxpayers end up paying basically everything.
Also consider who has paid for the decades long paperwork around Yucca mt, who pays the military that has had guards stationed at closed plants for decades (rancho seco) and so on and so forth.
In short, even in the US, the hidden costs of nuclear power are immense.
Japan needs nuclear to have more reliable power source as they have limited land and natural resources. The government may have to just pay for this and learn from the mistakes that led to it. Nuclear is the future.
> TEPCO speculates that radiation passing through camera semiconductor elements caused electrical charge to build up, and that the charge will drain if the cameras are left on in a relatively low-dose environment. It was the latest setback in a very long project.
I found this interesting. I wonder how many of the ICs onboard the robot are radiation hardened, and how many are just COTS with the hope they'll last for the brief mission.
As I understand it, part of the problem is that the vast majority of components simply don't exist in rad-hardened versions. The cost of having a hardened part manufactured and qualified is high, and demand is low; only a few manufacturers bother.
This information is definitely dated and I might be misremembering (but it was given to me right next to the clean room where ICs for satelites were being prepped), but for ICs from a certain manufacturer "rad-hardened" was basically "we take ICs from our normal production batch, and do even more tests on them".
The idea being that failure is bimodal: most stuff fails very quickly, _or_ after a long time, but rarely in the middle. So they just do 100 test cycles in a messy test environment.
ICs for "normal use" also got tests like this, but generally the test suite was a bit nicer. The rad-hardened ones got way nastier tests done to them, and the yield was (of course) much lower. So you charge way more for them.
There's a company selling a radiation-tolerant TV camera for use inside nuclear reactors.[1] It uses a vacuum tube imager (a vidicon?). But it may be too big to put on the pointy end of the long, thin Fukushima manipulator.
Readit News
Can't decide if it's a success of nuclear or a failure. Leaning towards success:
- ~900 tons of super duper radioactive material is more or less safely sitting in steel enclosures
- we're (as a global civilization) slowly but surely figuring out how to move the hazardous waste to a safer storage, and it may only (ahem) take a couple generations
- OTOH another big earthquake/tsunami can potentially wash it all away and release clumps of radioactive and poisonous metals to the environment...?
The precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets hot ("decay heat"). Without cooling, it melts. Cooling was lost during the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded anywhere.
The "Great East Japan Earthquake" and its tsunami killed 19,759 people. The earthquake was a terrible tragedy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
Meanwhile, the precious fuel remained safely entombed within the concrete and steel vessel that was designed to contain it. Without cooling, the fuel got hot ("decay heat") and melted, always safely enclosed within the vessel.
Unfortunately, during attempts to cool the fuel in the aftermath of the earthquake, some radioactive fission products were released into the environment: caesium, iodine, xenon, etc. These fission products have been diluted and are harmless. See the section "Radionuclide release" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
How much harm did the radioactive fuel cause? Quoting Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accidentThis precious fuel is so full of energy that it gets very hot ("decay heat").
Fresh reactor fuel is even more full of potential energy but it doesn't get hot because uranium 235 and 238 have very long half lives. Fuel that has been used in a reactor gets hot primarily due to fission products (lighter elements formed when fuel atoms split apart) that undergo faster radioactive decay. There's also some decay heat from the production of transuranic elements (elements heavier than uranium, generated by neutron capture). But the fission product decay heat dwarfs the transuranic element contribution until several decades have passed.
It makes sense to be more afraid of the super duper radioactive material from spent fuel than the slightly radioactive material in brand new fuel. The radiotoxicity is vastly higher, the heat generation complicates handling/storage, and the chemical composition has gained dozens of elements scattered around the periodic table. In terms of usefulness, a fresh fuel rod is like a clean cardboard box and a used rod is more like a cardboard box that held a hot pizza. It's so dirty that it costs more to recycle it into something usable than to just sequester it and start with fresh material.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_c...
Sarcasm aside, it's extremely frustrating when deaths are the only dimension people use to compare with other electricity sources. You can't just put on a blindfold and ignore all of the other factors. Just because only a handful of deaths can be directly attributed, doesn't mean nuclear isn't an absolute nightmare when it goes wrong.
Long-term effects on health are disputed: http://csrp.jp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-UNSCEAR-Repor...http://www.fukushima-disaster.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/e...https://apjjf.org/thierry-ribault/4761/article
The nuclear accident cleanup cost is very high ad raising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cle...
The reactor itself is high enough to be safe from tsunamis.
The total cleanup costs were estimated to be between 50.5 and 71 trillion yen ($470 to $660 billion). For the cleanup, only 184.3 billion yen was reserved in the September supplementary budget of prefecture Fukushima, and some funds in the central government's third supplementary budget of 2011.
Subsidizing Japanese companies to develop technologies that may be exported elsewhere isn't that bad of a deal actually.
When faced with pressure to save money but still deliver, weighed up against a very low risk of catastrophe in their time, they did the mental math and cut corners, found ways around the safeguarding policies previously put in place and kicked infrastructure spending down the line.
The big problem with nuclear is not technological, it’s guaranteeing that whoever is responsible for it will be competent, capable and solvent for hundreds of years.
Seems to me like it should, so that generations-long decisions are not made from overly optimistic numbers.
Coal, gas and oil is full of externalities which are nowhere near being correctly included in the nominal prices of these commodities. Arguably neither are solar panels and wind turbines.
These is a constant whataboutist argument from nuclear apologists, but it falls apart when examined closely, as all pro-nuclear power arguments do.
The current fad of buying old nukes to power data centers is going to be a learning experience for the tech industry about taking on the liabilities entailed.
They import about 90% of its energy requirements. This includes nuclear fuel. So this is far away from "perfect" if you can get wind and sun without having to import it.
Second, it's the nuclear insurance. The scheme is codified in the Price-Anderson Act [3]. Basically, all the nuclear power plants need to purchase insurance for $0.5 BN per reactor. If anything happens, and the cleanup costs exceed this number, then the rest of the industry has to chime in, and the total is up to $16 BN per reactor. So, if 3 reactors were to have a core meltdown, the industry would have to pay close to $50 BN. The total estimate of the Fukushima cleanup stands currently at about twice that, so one can say that $50 BN is too little, but it certainly is not nothing.
Edit: the efficacy of the Price-Anderson Act was tested at the Three-Mile Island. Virtually no taxpayer money was used in the cleanup [4]. Of course, there were other costs incurred, such as in collecting data, doing investigations, upgrading regulations and enforcing them, but that's how Government should work.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2132/ML21322A288.pdf
[2] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/fukush...
[3] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821
[4] https://www.gao.gov/products/117345
According to [3] the industry is liable for 16b per reactor but the industry doesn’t have that much money to pay out. Entergy for example operates its nuclear plants in a subsidiary that generates about 100 million in revenue per year. They would have to raise the price of nuclear electricity by orders of magnitude to gave any chance of paying 16 bn, let alone the 10x more for a Fukushima-esque incident.
So when things go pearshaped the operators will undoubtedly go bankrupt, and since the cleanup is very mandatory the taxpayers end up paying basically everything.
Also consider who has paid for the decades long paperwork around Yucca mt, who pays the military that has had guards stationed at closed plants for decades (rancho seco) and so on and so forth.
In short, even in the US, the hidden costs of nuclear power are immense.
I also doubt that coal includes the health costs associated with many decades of emissions.
The odds of some weird future generation digging this stuff up for bad reasons already adds enough incalculable costs.
I found this interesting. I wonder how many of the ICs onboard the robot are radiation hardened, and how many are just COTS with the hope they'll last for the brief mission.
The idea being that failure is bimodal: most stuff fails very quickly, _or_ after a long time, but rarely in the middle. So they just do 100 test cycles in a messy test environment.
ICs for "normal use" also got tests like this, but generally the test suite was a bit nicer. The rad-hardened ones got way nastier tests done to them, and the yield was (of course) much lower. So you charge way more for them.
[1] https://diakont.com/nuclear-services/radiation-tolerant-cctv...