Until 2013 they also paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund, which currently has $46 billion. Since politicians killed Yucca Mountain and didn't come up with an alternative, a federal court in 2013 said they have to stop collecting fees until they come up with a use for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act#Nucle...
Regarding insurance, I'm in favor of internalizing costs if we take a rational approach to actual damage. Specifically, if something happens and causes radiation levels that occur naturally in cities with normal cancer rates, then don't evacuate the city. If cancer rates are unchanged after an accident, throw out claims that particular cancers were caused by the accident. In general, reexamine the linear no-threshold hypothesis, which is looking increasingly shaky. (However, some GenIV plants look so inherently safe that this might not be worth fighting about.)
> a federal court in 2013 said they have to stop collecting fees until they come up with a use for them
This is fascinating! I didn't realize that killing Yucca Mountain triggered lower taxes for the companies producing the waste. That's pretty poor incentive alignment. It also might help explain the seemingly excessive amount of ad-spend against Yucca mountain when I lived in Nevada.
There are a lot of people who've campaigned against nuclear over the years, including fossil fuel companies. I think it's a stretch to think nuclear companies campaigned against waste storage in hopes that a future court case would eliminate their fees...especially since the consequence is that they have to store the waste locally at the plant site, which isn't free either. It's reasonable that if they're paying for that, they shouldn't also have to pay for a repository that doesn't exist.
Meanwhile, fossil plants dump their waste into the atmosphere and don't pay a dime for it.
Campaign against it? While in the short term they certainly don't want to pay for a non-service, they are 100% behind the government taking away their waste problem.
There is a bunch of defense-related politics here. The US doesn't generally reprocess nuclear waste into useful things (ie new fuel). The DOE, who control nuclear weapons, like to have a huge pile of waste lying around because some of it can be reprocessed into weapons-grade material. Yucca would have been more a stockpile than disposal site. That's why more practical means of burial (deep cores) were never really discussed. They didn't want to put it somewhere out of reach.
The waste management fee is not a tax. It is payment for a service that the government declared can only be provided by the government, but that it is too inept to actually provide.
I don't know, fellow Nevadan here and I didn't feel like I got a lot of ads on Yucca but I did feel like the way it was framed made it such a non-starter for any politician so it became impossible to back.
No one wants to be the Senator who voted to let nuclear plants dump their toxic waste near Las Vegas, especially given the atomic testing history of Nevada already
> In general, reexamine the linear no-threshold hypothesis, which is looking increasingly shaky.
I reckon we'd all be surprised by how many people are killed by a lifetime of shaking hands under a linear no-threshold hypothesis applied to Newtonian force.
I really don't understand how anyone can bring that model up seriously without adding in "and this highly unusual choice of model is justified by ...". It is an extraordinary claim in my book.
Linear no-threshold actually maps fairly well to skin cancer which is a direct proxy. What differentiates things from a slap is each event is very energetic, and operates independently on each of your 30 trillion cells. Like shooting at random they mostly don't hit anyone, until the one just happens to be in the wrong pace.
At a lower level their are many systems that both cause and reduce the risks of cancer. However, over a lifetime the odds of getting cancer end up being fairly high and most people end up a single mutation away from cancer. At which point every even is just another roll of the dice.
1) A slap on the wrist is highly energetic, and speaking from an understanding of basic materials physics it seems very likely that it damages cells, ligaments and bones. We just heal from it very easily because the damage is completely trivial.
2) Skin cancer can't be reasonable proxy. I live in Australia, and it is well-known here that skin cancer is frequently caused by sunlight.
Now the dose of radiation you get from sunlight is huge. On a typical day, you are exposed to enough radiation that you can detect it as heat (ie, we associate heat with sunlight). I've only ever been exposed to enough artificial radiation to feel heat in dental X-Rays. The LNT model is going to be operating at much lower levels, because the theoretical damage is being done to people who cannot detect it.
That link alone is surely going to overwhelm the effect of tiny doses of radiation and make it impossible to detect low-threshold increases.
1) Cells are elastic and suspended in water which allows them to survive what you might think of as extreme trauma. (Ever seen someone hammer a nail with a glass bottle filled with water?) Combine that with the elastic nature of connective tissue is what allows you to for example jump without killing off of the cells at the bottom of your feet.
2) Sunlight is EM radiation like X-Rays. However, the vast majority of the energy is harmless and and even UVA / UVB is limited to the top layers of skin. But, as far as those top few layers of skin are concerned it's like your constantly getting very weak X-Ray when standing in sunlight making it a great proxy for low level radiation exposure.
linear no-threshold is weird & unusual for most processes, but it meshes perfectly well with what I understand about radioactivity in general- that is, random & cumulative. See half lives for example.
Yes. The human body has DNA repair mechanisms that work fine if not overwhelmed. There's also lots of data showing low cancer rates despite higher-than-normal radiation exposure; e.g. some cities have quite high naturally occurring radiation, but low cancer rates.
Hahaha, amazing. I'm adding this to my repertoire. I just started using the aspirin analogy. If you take 100 aspirins at once you'll die so what are the odds that you'll die if you take 1? Is it 1/100? Or is it 0?
It's definitely not 0. Taking an aspirin will thin your blood just slightly, and irritate your stomach lining just a little bit. There's a chance (though of course only a small chance) that one of those things will have consequences that kill you.
There's also a chance that it'll have consequences that save your life -- e.g., making congestive heart failure a little bit less likely.
It seems uncontroversial that there may be nonlinear effects at large doses -- after all, if some dose is large enough that it almost certainly kills you then it's simply not possible for twice the dose to be twice as likely to kill you. But surely the estimates you're concerned about are not obtained by linear extrapolation from such large doses; they're the result of extrapolating from known statistics for doses small enough to be unlikely to kill, but not so small that the risk can't be measured because it's overwhelmed by background noise.
Those extrapolations could still be wrong, of course. But comparing against something that's obviously wrong like going from 100 aspirins to 1 aspirin is not a fair comparison, and scores much better on rhetorical effect than on actual evidential force.
There are reasons to dispute the linear no-threshold model, but there are specific justifications involving ideas about cancer risk that are much more reasonable than your aspirin example.
I'm generally in favor of Nuclear, but they need to complete their whole-life planning before opening new plants. Presently, the status quo plan is to store nuclear waste at or near where it is generated in perpetuity. That's a pretty big unfunded liability in terms of risk management, security and maintenance. What is the future present value of managing a nuclear waste site for several hundred thousand years across risks we can't even imagine? That's a pretty big known unknown.
That's the status quo only because the government shut down its long-term storage facility, for which nuclear companies have already provided $46 billion.
However, for the fast neutron reactors supported by this new law, long-term waste storage is less of a problem. 99% of our nuclear waste is U238 and transuranics, all of which are fissioned in fast reactors. The remaining 1% is fission products, which have much shorter half-lives. For those, the general idea is to encase them in glass blocks and bury them; they'll be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in 300 years.
Are you saying that 99% of hazardous nuclear material is consumed in its own process? What does 'fissioned' mean in this context? Also can you comment on whether this requires more or less uranium ore inputs than prior generation reactors?
"Fissioned" in any nuclear context means big atoms are split into small atoms.
Natural uranium is 0.7% U235, and the rest U238. Only the U235 is fissionable by the slow neutrons in conventional reactors. For a nuclear plant, we have to enrich the uranium until it's at least 2% U235 (or a little more, depending on reactor design...the top is about 5%).
The U238 in the reactor doesn't fission when hit by a neutron, but may absorb it and turn into plutonium, which is fissionable. About a third of a conventional reactor's energy output comes from fissioning plutonium.
Other transuranics (elements heavier than uranium) are also produced in a conventional reactor as nuclei absorb neutrons without fissioning. The end product is a mixture of U238, unfissioned U235 and plutonium, other transuranics, and fission products. There's some fissionable material left over because some fission products absorb neutrons, poisoning the reaction; some countries, like France, "reprocess" this mixture to pull out the remaining fissionables.
A fast reactor changes all this. In a conventional reactor, neutrons are purposely slowed down by materials like graphite and water. In a fast reactor, the neutrons from fission are left at the high energies they start with. These neutrons can fission U238 and all the transuranics.
So the fast reactor can use all of the uranium, instead of just 1% percent of it (U235 plus some U238 that gets converted to plutonium). That does mean it only needs about 1% as much uranium input.
A 1 GW coal plant uses a 100-car trainload of fuel every three days. A conventional nuclear plant uses an 18-wheeler load of fuel rods every 18 months. But a 1GW fast reactor uses just one ton of fuel per year, about the size of a beach ball. It can supply all the energy you need for your entire life, transportation included, from a piece of fuel the size of a golfball.
Small point - we replaced about a third of the fuel each refueling. That is about 70 fuel assemblies. If memory serves me right there were about 10 or so assemblies per truck. The are shipped in large, accident proof, casks and each assembly is individually packed. They take up a lot of room.
This is very helpful, thank you and I hope you continue to broadcast this message. It is definitely changing my thinking and I don't see major media outlets working to explain the technical advantages of these new technologies. It is, after all, a public outreach problem to get new sites approved.
It's amazing isn't it, a golfball sized material to power your life. Unfortunately, we again bump up against the problem of a single actor having too much power (literally). Sadly, someone will try to use their golfball to blow up a large city. We might have some amazing batteries otherwise. As is, I imagine we'll have to parcel out energy in small quantities to individuals.
It's not bomb-grade material. In fact, after startup the reactor can be fed by natural uranium, depleted uranium, or nuclear waste.
(And I'm not suggesting that individuals would get their own golfballs. I'm just pointing out the amount of material required to fuel each person's lifetime usage.)
>> ...just one ton of fuel per year, about the size of a beach ball.
Well, one hell of a hot beach ball. While the numbers are correct, that is how big one ton of uranium would be, for all practical purposes the fuel would be much bigger. The rods aren't 100% uranium. And they certainly aren't all transported in one spherical mass (boom). It would be moved a few kilos at a time, under escort. So there would still be lots of shipment/trucks transporting fuel to the reactor.
It won't be pallet delivered by fedex ground every other year.
For solid-fueled designs like the Integral Fast Reactor, the fuel is metallic uranium in steel-encased rods. For fast molten salt reactors, it's pretty much just pure fuel, since it gets melted into the liquid reactor fuel.
After startup, the fuel can be unenriched uranium, so there's no concern about an explosion, or any significant security concern. The only part that requires care and high security is the startup fuel, which has to be enriched to about 20% U235. (Bomb-grade is over 90%.)
Even so, the fuel isn't shipped in paper bags. It moves inside containers, insider other containers. If you saw it heading down the road on a truck it would be a much larger/heavier object.
I would still not recommend assembling a beachball-sized mass of any sort of uranium. It may not be critical, but you are heading in that direction. The local criticallity officer will not be happy. Even depleted uranium, the stuff once used in bullets, probably shouldn't be so assembled.
I read that an awful lot of it was fired into Iraq by the US in the last 'war' there, and will be causing birth defects there for a long time. I don't think someone reading the calm sentence Depleted uranium is still used in military large-caliber bullets would have any idea of the horrifying reality.
(Depleted) Uranium is a pyrophoric material - it spontaneously ignites in the right conditions (e.g. when it's shot at a tank and penetrates it), making a better job of killing said tank's occupants. This causes it to vaporize, and can now be breathed in - the exact set of circumstances where its nature of alpha emitter is dangerous for health.
While this is horrific, and I hope it stops, please keep in mind that any other use case which doesn't involve burning it or aerosolizing it creates no health hazard - you can build glassware with a high U content and drink from it.
any other use case which doesn't involve burning it or aerosolizing it creates no health hazard
That doesn't sound quite right:
"Normal functioning of the kidney, brain, liver, heart, and other systems can be affected by uranium exposure, because, besides being weakly radioactive, uranium is a toxic metal. Uranium is also a reproductive toxicant. ...Uranium metal is commonly handled with gloves..."
UK: 15 reactors, ~10300 gross MWe. They analyzed and now think that decommissioning will cost £234 billion (309 billion USD).
USA: 98 reactors, 100350 gross MWe. 46 billion USD (Nuclear Waste Fund) are in provision. One order of magnitude more power produced by the stuff to decommission, and nearly 7 times less money to do so. Decommissioning small and old reactors costs more, and ENTOMBing may, at least apparently (short-term), reduce the cost. In theory. Let's check a real and ongoing case: Oyster Creek. According to the EIA its construction costs were $488 million (2007 USD) ( https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/state/archive/2010/newjersey/ ). As soon as the decommission project started the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it will cost "about $1.4 billion to shut down the plant". Not for an immediate and complete decommission, because the plant will stay in a “safe store” condition until 2075, with dismantling ((...)) set for a period between 2075 and 2078 ( https://www.powermag.com/oldest-u-s-nuclear-plant-shuts-down... ). Then new problems (costs!) may arise. Let's bet that, as usual, the taxpayer will pay.
There is a nuclear plant decommissioning line item in my So Cal Edison bill that confirms that customers are paying, but invalidates that a sufficient amount was collected during the operating lifetime of the plant.
If the linear no-threshold theory (i.e. if 100 people taking 100 aspirins each kills 100 people then 1 person taking 1 aspirin will kill 1 person) was reconsidered then it'd be ok to treat background-level radiation more reasonably. Then I think these costs would be much much less. To get here I believe someone's going to have to convince the public of low-dose hormesis convincingly enough (that is, if it's real) that they'll start making radiation dose appointments at the salon for health reasons.
> Since politicians killed Yucca Mountain and didn't come up with an alternative
Harry Reid. It's important to emphasize that this isn't a complex or bipartisan problem. It's one very powerful individual supporting his states NIMBYism, and a party (the Democratic Party) which is unwilling to stand up to it's leadership amid mixed overall opinions on nuclear.
Perhaps most painful for my sanity: the event that would be best for nuclear power in the United States would be Trump deciding he wanted to stick it to Harry Reid.
Until 2013 they also paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund, which currently has $46 billion. Since politicians killed Yucca Mountain and didn't come up with an alternative, a federal court in 2013 said they have to stop collecting fees until they come up with a use for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act#Nucle...
Regarding insurance, I'm in favor of internalizing costs if we take a rational approach to actual damage. Specifically, if something happens and causes radiation levels that occur naturally in cities with normal cancer rates, then don't evacuate the city. If cancer rates are unchanged after an accident, throw out claims that particular cancers were caused by the accident. In general, reexamine the linear no-threshold hypothesis, which is looking increasingly shaky. (However, some GenIV plants look so inherently safe that this might not be worth fighting about.)