Southern California Edison has finally admitted that their crippled rattletrap of a plutonium factory is no longer profitable enough, despite massive and continuing public subsidies, for them to keep 'rolling the dice' with the lives of millions of Californians.
But the danger is not past. The decommissioning process is slow and costly and the spent fuel stored at the plant will represent a threat to to people for hundreds of generations. Despite this, I can almost hear the bitter screeching of the pro-plutonium activists, with their inexplicable support for the corrupt operators and captured regulators of the nuclear cartel. They will claim the dumb hippies have doomed the planet to coal dust and global warming. Jump below the orange shielding for a little fun, and a look at why nuclear energy is not a solution to the problem of global warming and rising CO.
The all-powerful market is showing us that the aging US nuclear generator fleet is just too costly to repair, even with corner cutting and regulators who rewrite the rules to keep plants operating. Building new nuclear plants, which were never a cost-effective method of generating power in the first place, is an even worse idea as the world races to reduce the severity of the climate crisis. It is an expensive distraction whose costs and CO2 output are all front loaded, with the first actual generation coming in a decade or more. Don't just trust me and the market, look at the science.
Even PBS can't avoid it:
Nuclear plants are so slow and costly to build that they reduce and retard climate protection.
Here’s how. Each dollar spent on a new reactor buys about 2-10 times less carbon savings, 20-40 times slower, than spending that dollar on the cheaper, faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic: efficient use of electricity, making heat and power together in factories or buildings (“cogeneration”), and renewable energy. The last two made 18% of the world’s 2009 electricity, nuclear 13%, reversing their 2000 shares–and made over 90% of the world’s additional electricity in 2008.
Those smarter choices are sweeping the global energy market. Half the world’s new generating capacity in 2008 and 2009 was renewable. In 2010, renewables except big hydro dams won $151 billion of private investment and added over 50 billion watts (70% the total capacity of all 23 Fukushima-style U.S. reactors) while nuclear got zero private investment and kept losing capacity. Supposedly unreliable windpower made 43-52% of four German states’ total 2010 electricity. Non-nuclear Denmark, 21% wind-powered, plans to get entirely off fossil fuels. Hawai’i plans 70% renewables by 2025.
In contrast, of the 66 nuclear units worldwide officially listed as “under construction” at the end of 2010, 12 had been so listed for over 20 years, 45 had no official startup date, half were late, all 66 were in centrally planned power systems–50 of those in just four (China, India, Russia, South Korea)–and zero were free-market purchases. Since 2007, nuclear growth has added less annual output than just the costliest renewable–solar power –and will probably never catch up. While inherently safe renewable competitors are walloping both nuclear and coal plants in the marketplace and keep getting dramatically cheaper, nuclear costs keep soaring, and with greater safety precautions would go even higher. Tokyo Electric Co., just recovering from $10-20 billion in 2007 earthquake costs at its other big nuclear complex, now faces an even more ruinous Fukushima bill.
Since 2005, new U.S. reactors (if any) have been 100+% subsidized–yet they couldn’t raise a cent of private capital, becausethey have no business case. They cost 2-3 times as much as new windpower, and by the time you could build a reactor, it couldn’t even beat solar power. Competitive renewables, cogeneration, and efficient use can displace all U.S. coal power more than 23 times over–leaving ample room to replace nuclear power’s half-as-big-as-coal contribution too–but we need to do it just once.
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/...
To save a little time down in the comments, I'll reprise a reply from a previous diary to a commenter who had made an excellently clear and dubious set of claims that I had to rebut in detail. The comment and content are typical, but the exposition is good. This should not be construed as a call-out, but a gesture of respect. Nonetheless I will not name or link to anything. In fact this is probably all just made up.
How many people have been killed by operating nuclear power plants? Outside of Chernobyl, the total is ZERO.
This is a BS line. First the qualification 'operating power plant' is a legal squirm word that lets you dodge a huge part of the death toll. Second, peer-reviewed published research show many thousands of deaths in the US from Chernobyl, and it is still killing in Europe and Asia. Tepco has admitted that much of the fuel load in unit 3 and SFP4 were lost. Peer-reviewed research found increases in mortality in the US. There is no way that much poison can be released with ZERO deaths. So will you concede that that first point is untrue at least?
How many people were killed by the worst thing that can happen to a decades old nuclear plant: a triple meltdown caused by a once-in-500 year tsunami? The World Health Organization says ZERO.
Tepco has also admitted what the world observed, that the meltdowns were caused by the earthquake, though they have not admitted they were caused primarily by an endemic culture of corner-cutting corruption familiar in SONGS, so this is a doubly untrue claim.
The Fukushima evacuation zone is defined by 20mSv/year. This is many times SMALLER than the level that health-physics professionals know cannot cause any harm: 100 mSv/yr is accepted as a threshold below which no measurable harm is possible. The ultra-low levels in safety standards are based on precautionary principles - as low as reasonably achievable - even though there is no scientific evidence for public health benefits flowing from such low thresholds. Some areas in the world have natural backgrounds as high as 200-300mSv/yr and no observable negative health consequences are observed.
So you go live there. But seriously, you totally neglect internal radiation, bioaccumulation, and the well-known phenomenon of hot spots. In addition, dosage is cumulative, so adding a little bit always increases the risk, and thus the associated mortality. Claiming there are no health consequences to increased exposure is simply untrue, and undermines the credibility of your other arguments.
Radiation is in our food (e.g. potassium-40) and air (e.g. carbon-14). We live with it every day, yet low level radiation is treated like some incredible menace.
This is a standard disinformation factoid. I will take the time to briefly introduce you to the science, in case you are presenting this in good faith. Potassium 40 has an extremely long half life and is in equilibrium in the environment and our bodies, like 14C. Cesium 137, for example, has a much shorter half life, and is thus much more radioactive. While the potassium flows in and out of living beings in a sort of osmotic balance, cesium will be absorbed and stick around long enough, given its short half life, to do damage. Strontium 90 is worse, both were released, and continue to be released in massive quantities from the ongoing catastrophe in Fukushima. And again, dosage is cumulative, so saying it was 'not much' is just a way saying how many deaths are acceptable. 'Civilian' nuclear power was sold to the public as part of a cold war deception. No one agreed to the unnecessary risks they are now exposed to.
In proper context, I'd be more worried about mercury, fine-particulates, NOx, SOx, ground level ozone and other such crap that we have been conditioned to just accept as normal business from fossil fuel plants that dump their shit into our air and water as S.O.P.
How many people are killed by mining and use of fossil fuels?
Now the standard jump from radiation denial, to the fossil fuels concern, and the false but implicit claim that nukes are carbon free or that those who oppose them don't care about the climate crisis. Nukes produce about 1/3 the CO2 of gas plants, but the energy required for long-term storage and all the CO2 from generations of guarding weigh on the long end. New nukes contribute tons of CO2 for a couple decades before they produce their first watt, and the world cannot afford to waste that precious time and money on such front-loaded, over priced unsafe technology.
And your concern over mining, and the statistical results of particulate emissions is touching. Those same statistics must be applied to compute the death toll for nukes. But heck even James Hansen can forget to count the casualties on one side.
Lets take a look at SONGS: what is the actual risk posed to the public by the steam generators? How does that risk stack up against the amount of harm done by fracking and burning the equivalent amount of gas to be used to replace the power if that plant is permanently shut down? If it is shut down, who will end up making more money and who will pay?
Fracking will not be stopped by rubberstamping permits for a few more decrepit old nukes. SONGS cannot even afford to reopen. Economics are driving the shutdown of nukes. If you want to change that, ban fracking and institute a carbon tax. The solution is in efficiency and real renewables. And when you talk about estimating the risk from a plant that us demonstrably corrupt and poorly maintained, where an accident could take out a huge population/economic center, it seems cavalier. How could another earthquake or tsunami happen after all?
Lets say your agenda is successful and all nuclear plants are turned off. How does the world get its energy? Japan's CO2 emissions spiked dramatically by turning off ~50 plants. In the rest of the world, demand for electricity is expected to more than double by 2050, yet the world must cut CO2 by 80% to prevent climate change disaster, i.e. the end of habitability of this planet.
HOW do you do that? Do you care?
As I mentioned, efficiency incentives and a carbon tax would help a lot. Propping up crony capitalist rustbuckets that contribute marginal amounts of energy, compared to potential savings and renewable capacity, just doesn't make sense. The fact is that the plutonium and other long-lived radioisotopes we are making will be killing things long after global warming has become the next ice age. Even pretending to estimate the ultimate death toll from nuclear energy is fundamentally ignorant or deceptive.
Why must nuclear be off the table when by any honest fact-based COMPARATIVE measure, it is the least bad option?
Ask Wall St. Why do all NPPs get funded by governments producing/seeking nuclear weapons? Why can't they be insured? Must be all those greens running investment banks.
In fact the rational assessment has been and the nukes have lost. Now all we have are industry lobbyists and those they duped into believing that there are dumb, emotional anti-nuke hippies messing everything up.
I laud everyone's idealism desiring a world where we can have the energy we need but without ANY costs. But, such a world is IMPOSSIBLE. There are costs to any energy system. We have to tally all costs and pick the least bad as the perfect does not exist. In my opinion, nuclear has to be an essential part of that balance because, in spite of the best work of the fearmongers, nuclear power is far safer than fossil fuels with a hell of a lot less waste (about a few hundred thousand - to - one - to be more precise), which also is not dumped into our atmosphere as standard practice.
And your idealism and belief in the wonders and safety of Too Big To Fail technology in the hands of crony capitalists is truly terrifying. I actually hope you do not really believe all the deceptive talking points I just dismantled. I will summarize.
Nuclear energy, both in operation and accidents has a substantial and growing death toll. Nuclear energy is not carbon free, and the EROI, (ENERGY return on investment) is so poor that dollars spent on renewables are a much more effective way to reduce CO2. The nuclear industry is endemically corrupt and the regulators captured. They have even had their regulators capture the WHO, so that any nuclear health issues are now handled by an agency tasked with promotion of nuclear energy. Nukes could be safe, or they could be affordable, not both.
Nuclear Energy is not low carbon