A nuclear plant’s closure was hailed as a green win. Then emissions went up

Sounds less like it needed to be closed than that it needed to be repaired. It wasn't a problem because it was a nuclear plant, that was actually good and we need more nuclear plants. It was a problem because it was poorly maintained.

It doesn't have to be capitalistic.

Having our energy grid be for profit is a ridiculous idea anyways.

And the Navy has been training nuclear engineers for decades, without any major accidents despite almost all of their reactors being shoved into ships and submarines and training takes 18-24 months and being offered to kids literally right out of highschool.

Nationalize the energy grid and require government certification/contracts fornuclear plant operators.

Hell, most Navy nuclear engineers would literally jump ship to that just to be off a ship. But loads more would sign if the pay/bonuses was in anyway comparable to what Navy gets.

Just because capitalism makes something impossible doesn't mean it's impossible. Just that it's incompatible with capitalism.

But you have to compare its safety with what will replace it.

Specifically this plant?

I'm hoping by "gas" you mean natural gas and not gasoline, but yeah, natural gas is better than an untrustworthy reactor because of the risk involved. Not forever, but right now it's better than if we kept running a plant that will eventually have catastrophic failure.

Once turbines are spun up, it all pretty much runs itself. If you automated the oil purifiers it could conceivably run for years even decades on its on it's own and not have any issues.

But we don't take that chance, because something might go wrong.

The quality of this plant was shit, so the potential risk outweighed the known benefits and it needed shut down.

That doesn't mean nuclear power is bad.

It means this one specific plant is bad after 60 years of operation and being one of the first plants constructed. It doesn't mean we can't build a modern plant that's built to last and maintain it.

Shutting it down even if that means a temp return to fossil fuels for this one relatively tiny area for a few years is worth avoiding a nuclear meltdown a couple miles upstream of NYC...

It's basic risk assessment

"Afraid" after seeing unfettered capitalism cut corners in every way it can, with zero regard for human life.

I am not sure it's fear so much as it is a logical response to the current situation to not want more nuclear in this context when renewables are so much cheaper.

I am not "afraid" of nuclear power, I just think it's a really bad option right now and that its risks, like all other forms of power generation, need to be considered carefully, not dismissed out of hand.

And let's not forget that every reactor type was "very safe" at the time. It's true, every power plant can have problems and fail, but if a nuclear one does, consequences could be WAY worse.

At this point, you can be economically anti-nuclear. The plants take decades to build with a power cost well above wind/solar. You can build solar/wind in high availability areas and connect them to the grid across the states with high power transmission lines, leading to less time that renewables aren't providing a base line load. One such line is going in right now from the high winds great plains to Illinois, which will connect it to the eastern coastal grid illinois is part of.

We also have a hilarious amountof tech coming online for power storage, from the expected lithium to nasa inspire gas battery designs, to stranger tech like making and reducing rust on iron.

There is also innovation in "geothermal anywhere" technology that uses oil and gas precision drilling to dig deep into the earth anywhere to tap geothermal as a base load. Roof wind for industrial parks is also gaining steam, as new designs using the wind funneling current shape of the buildings are being piloted, rivaling local solar with a simplier implementation.

While speculative, many of these techs are online and working at a small scale. At least some of them will pay off much faster, much cheaper and much more consistently before any new nuclear plants can be opened.

Nuclear's time was 50 years ago. Now? It's a waste to do without a viable small scale design. Those have yet to happen, mainly facing setbacks, but i'm rooting for them.

Not quite the same level as the cold war, but yeah, it's back baby

Disagree, sorry.

Thorium is unproven in a commercial setting, molten salt reactors in general are plagued with technological difficulties for long term operations and are limited currently to just a few research reactors dotted about the globe.

There's no denying that originally a lot of the early nuclear reactors chose uranium because of its ability to breed plutonium for nuclear weapons proliferation but nowadays that's not a factor in selection. What is a factor is proven, long-lasting designs that will reliably produce power without complex construction and expensive maintenance.

It produces extremely long-lasting waste, on timescales humans are not equipped to deal with.

Very little waste compared to burning coal or oil which also produces waste we aren't equipped to deal with. See oh idk global warming.

There have been more deaths and major environmental disasters with fossil fuels than with all nuclear accidents combined (including the less reported ones that happened in the 50s and 60s). Nuclear plants are generally safe and reliable. They do not produce excessive waste like wind (used turbine blades) and solar (toxic waste from old panels that cannot be economically recycled).

Nuclear is the superior non-carbon energy source right now. Climate change is an emergency, so we shouldn't be waiting on other technologies to mature before we start phasing out emitting power plants in favor of emission-free nuclear plants.

thermal reactor skill issue, just use a fast reactor design.

Btw the mining is vastly less significant to something like coal, oil, and probably even natural gas production. It's just a fraction of the volume being mined, to produce the same amount of energy.

You make a really good point with the comparison to dams. It's not that it's not a great way to generate power, but it is a fact that the worst case scenarios for failure are really really bad. It's perfectly rational to worry about that. Consider, for example, how both dams and nuclear plants have been targeted by Russia in Ukraine. No one is worried if they smash a few solar panels

In any case, why not fix the issue rather than just shutting the plant?

Because just patching up an old faulty nuclear power plant thats past its expected service life is a recipe for disaster. Hence why we have service lifetimes for these things in the first place?

And that does not make the headline “inflammatory.” It is accurate

It absolutely is inflammatory. Its specifically trying to conflate environmental concerns of polluted groundwater with carbon emissions, to make it seem like the people who voiced those concerns are idiots.

Environmentalists can't stop oil and gas companies from drilling and fracking and spilling and polluting. If nuclear was profitable environmentalists wouldn't be able to stop it either.

The only reason we have so many nuclear plants is because the government subsidized them because they produce material that can be used in weapons. Just the reactor on its own isn't profitable for decades, which is too long for a company to wait for a return even in the good old days before profits needed to grow every quarter.

You cant really just keep "modernising" ancient reactor designs forever. Eventually you'll need to close them down and build something else.

And realistically it makes way way more sense to build Wind power than nuclear to get us to carbon neutral. We can build a 50mw wind farm in 6 months.

For comparison Hinkley Point C in the UK was announces in 2010 and is currently expected to be commissioned by 2029.

That means if we built wind instead we would have built 1900MW of capacity in the time it would have taken to build the NPP and by the time the reactors would generate power for the first time the wind farms would already have generated 17 GW/years of power. If we stopped building more wind farms when the NPP completed it would take the reactor 14 more years just to catch up to the wind farms. And if we continue to build wind farms nuclear literally never catches up as total wind capacity would overtake the capacity of the NPP by year 13.

Yes you can make arguments about the uptime of wind, but I think ive made my point. And thats not even factoring in the cost/MW of capacity.

I don't know if heavy water plants leaking tritium in their wastewater should be used as a good standard for the longevity of old reactor designs.

If you don’t know why that is so bad, you really shouldn’t be talking about how safe nuclear power is. Because even tho you’re right, you don’t know why.

You're kind of gaslighting people by equating "this instance of a 70 year old badly maintained plant" to "how safe nuclear power is".

Besides, I am pretty certain some oil and gas lobbying prevented better maintenance here.

Calling 68 years 'nearing a century' as a comparison is a bit of a stretch.

It is really old in nuclear power plant tech terms and needed to be replaced. A combination of renewable amd nuclear is the way forward, but people treat nuclear safety concerns like they do airplane crashes, acting like the sky is falling even when there are no deaths for years and safety keeps increasing.

Yeah, article just offhand mentions that radioactive material was leaking into the river...

That means there was multiple ongoing leaks between multiple systems that need to be completely separate for safe operation.

If the stacks were still good, they should have replaced the reactor. But if those leaks were ongoing and either weren't addressed or couldn't be fixed, then it's incredibly doubtful any maintenance was being done.

Any nuclear plant that's leaking radioactive material needs shut down till it's repaired.

And this one was just in such bad shape it couldn't be repaired.

Building new nuclear plants isn't particularly easy when there are environmentalists clamoring to shut them all down and a general public that's scared of atoms.

Also, don't accuse articles of being "propaganda" and then call 68 years "nearing a century" to fearmonger for your own view instead.

FYI: The Simpsons wasn't real.

Nuclear engineers and techs are highly trained. Even the ones at Chernobyl were exceptionally good at their jobs; they were just fucked over by a broken system and hidden effects.

You sure can indeed. But running with one leg isn't as efficient as two.

Nuclear is is the most stable and carbon neutral form of energy production to date. Not to mention the safest. And that's not even considering EOL disposal and recycling figures that always get brought up with Nuclear but no one ever seems to talk about for Solar and Wind when their components reach end of their service life and have basically no plan for how to recycle or dispose of them in any way that isn't a landfill.

In that sense, had they been closing the plant with the expectation of drastically reducing energy demand, it might have made sense.

I really hate this kind of reasoning. Even if we do manage to reduce our energy consumption, closing the nuclear plant would still be more harmful to the environment because we could have closed fossil fuel plants instead. Unless, of course, we'd manage to reduce energy consumption so much that we wouldn't need any non-renewable energy sources - which I don't think is very realistic assumption. Certainly not realistic enough to make such a gamble on.

The only way closing the nuclear plant would have been beneficial to the environment would be if the act of closing it would have caused a reduction in our energy consumption that is greater than the energy the plant itself was producing (minus some extra energy from fossil fuel plants that take up its "emission budget" to increase their own energy production). Which is also quite unrealistic. I actually think it makes more sense that it achieved the opposite effect, since closing the plant took up activists' effort and environmental publicity, which could have been used to push for reducing consumption instead.

That's not a legitimate argument because the West combined emits less CO2 than just China. The economy of the West is growing, but emitting less carbon because of more green power sources, one of which being nuclear

I don't think I can agree with you there. Solar power is an incredibly valuable technology, in many ways more so than nuclear. If we were replacing this nuclear energy with increased solar I'd have no complaint. The problem is solar is already growing as fast as it can with or without shutting down any nuclear plants, so what it's actually replaced with as discussed in this article is fossil fuels. Hopefully the solar curve can catch up eventually and shut down those fossil fuels as well, but it's ridiculous to ditch nuclear before then.

Best time to plant a tree was 50 years ago. Second best time is now.

Battery tech isn’t there yet, the production and sourcing isn’t green enough and the assurances aren’t there

Building the same capacity in renewables

People do not realize this is a tricky question. Because, no, replacing, say, 1000MW of nuclear with 1000MW of solar and wind actually DOES NOT give you the same capacity. You have to consider capacity factor, which is a measure of how much power it produces versus its theoretical maximum.

Nuclear generally has a capacity factor of 90%. They are essentially always pumping out their nameplate capacity except during shutdowns for maintenance and refueling.

Solar and win have capacity factors of 20-30%. They spend most of their time producing less than their nameplate capacity.

So you need ~3.5 times the amount of solar and wind to match the lost capacity of a nuclear plant. And that does not even consider the issue of storage.

You sure, though? "Not least as a result of the energy crisis, greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector rose by 11 million tonnes of CO₂equivalent or 4.5 percent in 2022. This was due to the increased use of coal. "
Which is not surprising due to volatility of renewables and closing last nuclear power plants. They also import a lot from ... France AFAIK.

The reason waste isn't being brought up is because modern designs do not produce nearly as much waste, and much safer waste, than previous technologies. Breeder reactors are able to produce more fissile material than they consume, and produce only waste products that have short half lives (less than 100 years). This is a long time from human perspectives, but it means that we do not have to design functionally indefinite storage for these materials any longer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

If they had to apply for a renewal, then their old license ran out.
That is exactly what EOL is.

Considering all releases to the environment from the plant, including the Hudson River, for 2010 Entergy calculated an annual dose of about 0.2 millirem whole body and 0.7 millirem to the critical organ. This compares to a normal average yearly dose per person of 620 millirem from background radiation and other sources such as medical tests.

As far as I can see that's not a big deal. Just sounds scary right?

The cheaper renewable energy gets the less economic sense a nuclear power plant makes. If you design a multi-billion-dollar plant for an expected electricity price and that price drops in half before the plant is completed now it won't make a profit for twice as long.