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Who needs Florida when we got New York...................nice temperatures,muggy weather,
sunshine and plenty of water..............approaching 8 months out of the year.
The Climate Change cartel and the going "Green" folks are part of the new cult of the 21st Century. We have wonderful and smart scientists, but many have been wrong about a lot of things. The climate is always changing and has so since life developed on this planet. Will NYC be under water someday, maybe? Will it be inland one day, who knows for sure though. Anyway, we have a lot to worry about right now. Inflation, crime and, oh yeah, the prospect of World War 3.
The Climate Change cartel and the going "Green" folks are part of the new cult of the 21st Century. We have wonderful and smart scientists, but many have been wrong about a lot of things. The climate is always changing and has so since life developed on this planet. Will NYC be under water someday, maybe? Will it be inland one day, who knows for sure though. Anyway, we have a lot to worry about right now. Inflation, crime and, oh yeah, the prospect of World War 3.
Shhh don't tell them about Continental Drift . And please don't mention the Yellowstone Caldera, they'll never sleep at night
So stop closing nuclear power plants. And build more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by prospectheightsresident
Yep. It's funny that so many in this country want the US to look toward Europe for "enlightenment," but fail to acknowledge that countries like France rely extensively on nuclear power.
Yea, nuclear power plants are and should be an extensive part of our electricity generation mix. I think what's missing is that nuclear power doesn't actually have very good cost effectiveness for levelizedcost of electricity (not including negative externalities) compared to other sources like solar, wind, and natural gas. It also takes a massive amount of upfront capital to put up in the first place so financing these are difficult and risky since you don't yield any useful product until you are totally finished and the current methods for managing spent fuel aren't great. Its benefits are little in effective emissions in operation and ability to provide a really solid foundation for base load. France does very well by nuclear power, but it's actually doing a bit of a gamble where it's right now collecting a lot of spent fuel for near-ish term managing it while still unsure of what the long-term solution is. Intentionally or not, they're basically betting on someone coming up with a good, long-term and possibly terminal solution for waste storage that would release them from the constant and growing cost of their management of spent nuclear fuel. At the moment, it's like someone accumulating constantly accumulating more junk and putting it in storage and buying more and more storage and paying for it with the idea that someday they'll figure it out and hoping it'll be soon-ish. Something like this working on an industrial scale and able to be cheaply and competently done would have them collecting some pretty wonderful winnings. I am very excited about a lot of the Gen IV reactor designs though and am pretty optimistic and think the US should be committing a lot more attention and resources to developing these. I think the right thing to do is to pilot many small reactor designs tucked away from major metropolitan areas, and if working, make them as many scattered SMRs running HVDC lines to where the energy is needed. With the steady exponential improvements in battery over the last several decades looking like they'll be continuing this decade and getting into the territory of cost competitiveness for utility scale use, intermittent generation sources like solar and wind as well as steady sources like nuclear will likely turn into cost-competitive dispatchable sources.
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NYC's nuclear history is pretty fascinating and is a microcosm of the larger factors and issues of nuclear power and has been involved in very pivotal moments. There's the fairly well known Manhattan Project that had its start in Manhattan, but there's a lot more to it than that.
Our friendly neighborhood (former) nuclear power plant, Indian Point, provides an interesting look at how things have developed since then. It was PWRs that provided a massive amount of power to downstate and was fantastic for base load churning out a hefty and constant source of power. It was built in an era where nuclear power plant construction was a lot more optimistic and freewheeling though it still wasn't cheap in terms of capital cost though its operating costs were pretty good. So why did it get shut down after already incurring the large capital cost?
It's basically its siting and what that means in terms of risk assessment and cost/benefits analysis. Risk assessment does include the probability of something happening, and it also needs to include what the magnitude of the repercussions are. In 1982, Sandia National Lab took another look at a possible, more dire scenario in case one of the reactors had a major incident and estimated that at the time, the possible immediate death tolls were in the mid five-figure range. However, that's just the near term loss of life for how densely populated the area was in the 1980s (it has grown since then). There are also knock-on effects and that needs to be weighed against the economic benefits of the stable and relatively cheap electricity provided. The siting of Indian Point was 30 something miles upriver from the heart of a massive metropolitan area that is crucial to the US economy. It's within affluent and economically productive Westchester County which has high property values, a pretty large measure of economic productivity and fairly large populations size in and of itself. Its site along a frequently used waterway, roads, and rail infrastructure from the heart of the metropolitan area to points north. Within a 5 mile radius is one of the major water supplies for that city. It's a lot of value and utility that plummets in a worst case scenario and the rapidity with which that disruption occurs is itself costly, so that needs to be weighed in the risk assessment and cost benefit analysis.
So what is the likelihood of something happening? NRC in response to coverage of that 1982 Sandia report noted that the odds of that worst case scenario were extremely low. Its reactor design is fairly proven technology made by a company that has a pretty good track record (the former Westinghouse). It arrived pretty early in the game, but there are certainly other reactors of the type that have and continue to last longer, so at least in the near term future that didn't seem to be much of the risk in case of closure. It did have some minor failures, but at least it was pretty closely monitored and those were relatively quickly pointed out. So in normal operation that probability of failure doesn't seem very high.
So what about extraordinary circumstances? It's not in an area strongly prone to natural disaster so it's not like Fukushima placed along the seismically really active Pacific Ring of Fire. NYC does have earthquakes, but they're fairly minor and the reactors were built to withstand what we knew of possible earthquake risk. That being in the past tense is part of the issue though--as it turns out, the fault lines are a bit more extensive than originally thought and so it turns out that Indian Point had the highest seismic risk of any operating reactor in the US, because it was built for withstanding seismic activity that was lower than what was later known to be possible (California has much stronger and more frequent earthquakes, but that was already known at the time so the plants were built to withstand such). Still, the odds of such happening are pretty low and certainly within NYC's recorded history of measured earthquakes we haven't yet gotten one of particularly large magnitude and there were some measures that were taken after the different risk assessment.
So not as great of news as one would hope for, but perhaps still worth it since the odds of that natural disaster causing a major incident occurring still aren't that high though the repercussions were it to happen are also still kind of hard to stomach. Here's the kicker though--and also once again, NYC specifically having a massive lasting impact on the history of the nuclear power industry. It's much more than operational mishaps or design flaws or the risk of natural disasters. It's man-made disasters. It's specifically 9/11. There are people who are so ideologically driven that they are pretty much insane. Large nuclear power plants were part of the considered targets for those attacks (in the US, they are pretty much all large) and the aftermath of 9/11 saw a feverish round of a different kind of risk assessment for nuclear power plants in the US (and globally). Here's a good time to go back to the NRC response to the 1982 Sandia assessment and how unfortunately prescient it was. NRC's response at the time, in order to note how extremely unlikely that major incident scenario was that it was less likely than a jumbo jet crashing into a football stadium during the Superbowl. That was meant to be a response to the low chances of it accidentally happening. However, 9/11 was no accident. It was not a pilot error or an operational error, it was strictly and insanely intentional. The visceral realization of those intentions also threw nuclear power plants for a loop. It meant that the already high costs of building new nuclear power plants now had to also consider and build for intentional attacks of incredible magnitudes of kinetic and thermal energy. It meant that existing plants had to undergo upgrades, but the economics of those upgrades aren't good and/or can only be done to a certain extent given their current designs.
Of course, it doesn't help to just be in absolute terror all the time and to do immediate kneejerk reactions, but it does change the risk assessment and the cost benefit analysis. It's also possible to change course in a steady, rational manner. I think many of the nuclear power plants that Germany closed in the wake of Fukushima were pretty ill-advised knee-jerk reactions. Unfortunately, steady, rational course change wasn't what happened with Indian Point either. The siting was bad, but a lot of the costs were already sunk. Risk also has a time factor to it where the larger the span of time it runs, the more likely the odds of an incident accidental or not. What probably should have happened was putting in the infrastructure for a replacement first without such risks and still with a good value especially in terms of providing for a steady base load, and *then* shutting down those plants. HVDC lines from Quebec and its massive surplus of cheap hydroelectricity had been suggested on many occasions. Many plans and studies were conducted on it. Somehow, even with all that time between 9/11 and the shutdown of those plants, it still never happened. Meanwhile, in other countries, many HVDC lines with massive throughput were put up and we're still working on the logistics of a pretty simple one from Quebec.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 03-04-2022 at 09:30 AM..
Yea, nuclear power plants are and should be an extensive part of our electricity generation mix. I think what's missing is that nuclear power doesn't actually have very good cost effectiveness for levelizedcost of electricity (not including negative externalities) compared to other sources like solar, wind, and natural gas. It also takes a massive amount of upfront capital to put up in the first place so financing these are difficult and risky since you don't yield any useful product until you are totally finished and the current methods for managing spent fuel aren't great.
Most of this is not true. For example, China's current nuclear costs about 9 cents per KwH, and they are trying to get it down to about 4-5 cents range with the newer gen stations. This is even competitive with US natural gas prices (when the gas prices are cheap!), let alone solar or wind, as our current prices are all 10+ cents KwH as it is. Spent fuel from modern reactors is absolutely not an issue either, especially not for the US. The nuclear waste for storage for a modern reactor, if constructed now, will only appear in about 80 years (after all of the modern cooling and reprocessing that can be done), which is the year 2100... I am sure by that point we will be able to figure out what to do with it.
Most of this is not true. For example, China's current nuclear costs about 9 cents per KwH, and they are trying to get it down to about 4-5 cents range with the newer gen stations. This is even competitive with US natural gas prices (when the gas prices are cheap!), let alone solar or wind, as our current prices are all 10+ cents KwH as it is. Spent fuel from modern reactors is absolutely not an issue either, especially not for the US. The nuclear waste for storage for a modern reactor, if constructed now, will only appear in about 80 years (after all of the modern cooling and reprocessing that can be done), which is the year 2100... I am sure by that point we will be able to figure out what to do with it.
To use a cliche': this is kicking the can down the road. Nuclear = bad idea. Folks on here need to stop pretending to be scientists and read the science. If it ain't a natural energy source, it ain't right!
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