Why is Nuclear Energy So Expensive?

[Rick C]

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 1:28:35 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:

On 10/13/19 12:49 AM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:06:27 PM UTC+11, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 16:49:35 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 10/12/2019 4:08 PM, Uwe Bonnes wrote:
Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear
power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and
risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab
for the overruns.

As long as there are countries trying to get or substain their nuclear
weapon arsenal, there will be nuclear (power) reactors.


I thought a lot of it was overcoming the lawsuits from people trying
to stop the nuclear plants.

And overcoming piles and piles of regulations placed on the industry
by lefists who are hell bent on bankrupting the industry and moving
civilization back into caves (everyone else, not them, of course).

Looking at it from a slightly more rational point of view, the regulations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

Quite how making nuclear power slightly more expensive would have moved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of caves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

Krw's read only memory seems to have programmed with a lot of misinformation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denialist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.


The public in the US pretty accurately recognized that the nuclear power
industry was staffed by ex-DOD people, "Neon Johns", Enron-style
predatory executives, and various fashions of megalomaniacs who
habitually underrepresented the real-life risks and would gladly tell
any lie and regularly sweep any safety issues short of a catastrophic
failure under the rug to get to play with their nuke-toys and make a
quick buck in the process, if left to their own devices.

This isn't even about the risk which is not as trivial as some would like you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US industry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't even the largest of the different sources of risk.

--

Rick C.

--- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 12:50:07 AM UTC-4, whit3rd wrote:

On Saturday, October 12, 2019 at 3:29:33 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:

I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and risks are untenable

Almost any 'seems like' scenario can be created as an exercise in spin.

If you don't like my evaluation, why not respond to the many facts provided?

A 2016 report said that the estimated construction cost of China's demonstration HTGR is about US$5,000/kW ‒ about twice the initial cost estimates."

If it produces for 20 years, 250 days/year, that amounts to $5000 for 1.2x10^5 kWh,
or about 4 cents/kWh; it doesn't kill the economics, unless another source is available cheaper.

That's the point. While you say $40 per MWh isn't a show stopper, that's on top of the many other expenses and right now power is going for more like $100 per MWh. I believe I read a number that was $200 per MWh for nuclear delivered.

The worst part of it is that these numbers are far above what was expected when the projects were started. It gets to be hard to find investors who will be willing to put money into such a risky investment. That is the reason why nuclear investment is all but dead in the US and is starting to look very bad to other parts of the world. Britain is looked to make the rate payers subsidize the construction of the next generation of nukes given the way Hinkley is going.

How can nuclear become a useful addition to our energy generation if we can't control the costs?

Every nuclear submarine comes online according to contract, though, so why are
you so sure 'we' cannot control (and who, exactly, is 'we'?) costs for nuclear?

Huh? What do the relatively small military reactors on subs have to do with civilian power plants? I'm "sure" that we have failed miserably based on the evidence. Do you not understand that an entire nuclear reactor company no longer exists because of a massively overrun project in South Carolina? There is no longer a Westinghouse nuclear reactor company.

It's not like I'm making this stuff up. Go out and look for yourself. Commercial nuclear in the US is all but dead. The EU is doing very badly as well.

--

Rick C.

++ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 19:09:51 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 8:35:26 AM UTC+11, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Saturday, October 12, 2019 at 4:21:27 PM UTC-4, omni...@gmail.com wrote:
On Saturday, October 12, 2019 at 9:29:33 AM UTC-10, Rick C wrote:

snipped long list of expensive nuclear reactors

How can nuclear become a useful addition to our energy generation if we can't control the costs? It is much cheaper to just build wind or solar and provide for backup generation.

Uranium energy production uses a process that is not stable.
The conditions for the core of the reactor are on a knife-edge.

That's total and pure BS.

The claim about nuclear energy production using a process that isn't stable isn't BS. Nuclear reactors have to be controlled - with control rods - to keep neutron production high enough to sustain the nuclear reaction at the desired level. If it starts speeding up, the control rods have to be pushed in further to soak up more neutrons. If it slows down - as it does as the fission products build up in the reactor - the rods have to be pulled out to let more neutons fission more uranium nuclei.

In pressurized water reactors control rods are needed mainly for
shutdowns. The day to day power control is by chemistry, i.e.
administering neutron absorbent chemicals into the reactor water. In
addition light water moderated reactors have also a negative
temperature coefficient, so as long there are not much load changes it
is quite self regulating.

The reason for Fukushima event occurred after the control rods had
been pushed in i immediately after the earthquake but before the
tsunami but the removal of latent heat failed due to lost diesel
generators.

Granite moderated reactors do not have such negative temperature
coefficient and the Chernobyl RBMK went wild due reckless operation.

 

On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 23:10:15 -0700 (PDT), Rick C
<gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 1:28:35 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:
On 10/13/19 12:49 AM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:06:27 PM UTC+11, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 16:49:35 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 10/12/2019 4:08 PM, Uwe Bonnes wrote:
Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear
power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and
risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab
for the overruns.

As long as there are countries trying to get or substain their nuclear
weapon arsenal, there will be nuclear (power) reactors.


I thought a lot of it was overcoming the lawsuits from people trying
to stop the nuclear plants.

And overcoming piles and piles of regulations placed on the industry
by lefists who are hell bent on bankrupting the industry and moving
civilization back into caves (everyone else, not them, of course).

Looking at it from a slightly more rational point of view, the regulations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

Quite how making nuclear power slightly more expensive would have moved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of caves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

Krw's read only memory seems to have programmed with a lot of misinformation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denialist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.


The public in the US pretty accurately recognized that the nuclear power
industry was staffed by ex-DOD people, "Neon Johns", Enron-style
predatory executives, and various fashions of megalomaniacs who
habitually underrepresented the real-life risks and would gladly tell
any lie and regularly sweep any safety issues short of a catastrophic
failure under the rug to get to play with their nuke-toys and make a
quick buck in the process, if left to their own devices.

This isn't even about the risk which is not as trivial as some would like you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US industry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't even the largest of the different sources of risk.

There are frequent earthquakes in Japan and even grade 9.0 did not
cause a nuclear accident.

The problem in Fukushima was that they relied on a single technology
(multiple diesel generator) for emergency cooling after emergency
shutdown. The assumption was that if there are an _independent_
failure in one generator, the rest could handle the emergency load.
Unfortunately, the tsunani took out all the emergency generators
simultaneously, so this was not a single generator failure. Things
went wrong because the emergency cooling relied on a single technology
installed in a single place.

After Fukushima, various different methods have been added to existing
sites to avoid those single point of failure issues.

At one site, in which they already have diesel generators, dedicated
HV lines to a local hydro plant, they now installed small air cooling
towers on the roof to handle the 7 % latent heat after emergency
shutdown, if the main cooling circuit to the sea fails.

On an other site, in addition to diesels and dedicated feed lines,
they also have two big gas turbines and if everything else fails, they
have a wind turbine on site . Actually the wind turbine is just for
PR, it is too small to run all emergency systems, even if the wind
happened to blow during emergency shutdown.

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 2:10:20 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 1:28:35 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:
On 10/13/19 12:49 AM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:06:27 PM UTC+11, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 16:49:35 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 10/12/2019 4:08 PM, Uwe Bonnes wrote:
Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear
power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and
risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab
for the overruns.

As long as there are countries trying to get or substain their nuclear
weapon arsenal, there will be nuclear (power) reactors.


I thought a lot of it was overcoming the lawsuits from people trying
to stop the nuclear plants.

And overcoming piles and piles of regulations placed on the industry
by lefists who are hell bent on bankrupting the industry and moving
civilization back into caves (everyone else, not them, of course).

Looking at it from a slightly more rational point of view, the regulations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

Quite how making nuclear power slightly more expensive would have moved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of caves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

Krw's read only memory seems to have programmed with a lot of misinformation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denialist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.


The public in the US pretty accurately recognized that the nuclear power
industry was staffed by ex-DOD people, "Neon Johns", Enron-style
predatory executives, and various fashions of megalomaniacs who
habitually underrepresented the real-life risks and would gladly tell
any lie and regularly sweep any safety issues short of a catastrophic
failure under the rug to get to play with their nuke-toys and make a
quick buck in the process, if left to their own devices.

This isn't even about the risk which is not as trivial as some would like you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US industry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't even the largest of the different sources of risk.

--

Rick C.

--- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

I'm sure others would love to see the "numbers" you ran to come to that
absurd conclusion. To start with, probably 1 in 10 reactors in the US
are not even in an area where a significant earthquake is likely during
the lifetime of the plant. And that's before we get to any failures.

Next!

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 12:51:17 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:53:09 AM UTC-4, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 23:10:15 -0700 (PDT), Rick C
gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 1:28:35 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:
On 10/13/19 12:49 AM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:06:27 PM UTC+11, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 16:49:35 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 10/12/2019 4:08 PM, Uwe Bonnes wrote:
Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear
power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and
risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab
for the overruns.

As long as there are countries trying to get or substain their nuclear
weapon arsenal, there will be nuclear (power) reactors.


I thought a lot of it was overcoming the lawsuits from people trying
to stop the nuclear plants.

And overcoming piles and piles of regulations placed on the industry
by lefists who are hell bent on bankrupting the industry and moving
civilization back into caves (everyone else, not them, of course)..

Looking at it from a slightly more rational point of view, the regulations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

Quite how making nuclear power slightly more expensive would have moved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of caves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

Krw's read only memory seems to have programmed with a lot of misinformation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denialist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.


The public in the US pretty accurately recognized that the nuclear power
industry was staffed by ex-DOD people, "Neon Johns", Enron-style
predatory executives, and various fashions of megalomaniacs who
habitually underrepresented the real-life risks and would gladly tell
any lie and regularly sweep any safety issues short of a catastrophic
failure under the rug to get to play with their nuke-toys and make a
quick buck in the process, if left to their own devices.

This isn't even about the risk which is not as trivial as some would like you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US industry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't even the largest of the different sources of risk.

There are frequent earthquakes in Japan and even grade 9.0 did not
cause a nuclear accident.

Yes, because the earthquakes caused an amount of vibration the plants were designed to withstand. But there is no guarantee that this will always be the case. Earthquakes are hard to predict in location, timing and Anna was a perfect example. They designed the plant to withstand any highly improbable East Coast earthquake. Over the 40 years the plant had been operating we finally had one and it was within 10 miles of the plant! The resulting shaking was twice what the plant was designed for. Fortunately there was enough reserve strength that there were no major system failures. There were numerous failures including one that lost power to the seismic recorders so know exactly how strong the shocks were. Dry casks were moved by the shaking and numerous other impacts that caused the facility to be offline for months. In other words, we dodged a bullet.

My point about the probability is that they give numbers for the chances of an accident separately due to a single cause, at a single reactor for a single year. Those numbers appears to be very conservative being 1 in some tens of thousands. But when you combine even just the number of reactors and number of years the results drop to 1 in 10!!!

Obviously you failed probability and statistics, if you ever took it.
If the probability of a failure is one some tens of thousands,, then having
N of them, the probability increases by a factor of N. There aren't
several thousand nukes operating in the US, which is what even your
numbers would require.







Hardly a conservative number. Then combine that with the many various ways an accident can occur and you get some very disturbing results indeed.

That's wrong too. The predicted accident number would already include
that, you don't then add it on.

The problem in Fukushima was that they relied on a single technology
(multiple diesel generator) for emergency cooling after emergency
shutdown. The assumption was that if there are an _independent_
failure in one generator, the rest could handle the emergency load.

Isn't that what they all do? I've never heard of any that use multiple cooling technologies.


Unfortunately, the tsunani took out all the emergency generators
simultaneously, so this was not a single generator failure. Things
went wrong because the emergency cooling relied on a single technology
installed in a single place.

You are the one who opened the Fukushima can of worms.

The point is that things DID go wrong. The designers of nukes would have you believe there was virtually no chance this could have happened, that it was unforeseeable, yet it did happen. We look back with 20/20 hindsight and say it was inevitable.

At North Anna they had a generator fail. When they looked into the cause it was found that the procedure for installing the head gaskets was faulty.. That procedure was a single point of failure for every generator and was not discovered until the plant was 40 years old during an emergency. What if every generator had failed because of a bad head gasket installation?

Seems to me if you believe the global warming folks, most of whom are the
same ones that are opposed to nuclear power, we're headed for a total
global catastrophe. In which case, the risks from nuclear power look
very acceptable by any reasonable standards. Or is all that global warming
stuff BS?

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:53:09 AM UTC-4, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:

On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 23:10:15 -0700 (PDT), Rick C
gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 1:28:35 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:
On 10/13/19 12:49 AM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:06:27 PM UTC+11, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 16:49:35 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 10/12/2019 4:08 PM, Uwe Bonnes wrote:
Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear
power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and
risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab
for the overruns.

As long as there are countries trying to get or substain their nuclear
weapon arsenal, there will be nuclear (power) reactors.


I thought a lot of it was overcoming the lawsuits from people trying
to stop the nuclear plants.

And overcoming piles and piles of regulations placed on the industry
by lefists who are hell bent on bankrupting the industry and moving
civilization back into caves (everyone else, not them, of course).

Looking at it from a slightly more rational point of view, the regulations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

Quite how making nuclear power slightly more expensive would have moved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of caves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

Krw's read only memory seems to have programmed with a lot of misinformation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denialist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.


The public in the US pretty accurately recognized that the nuclear power
industry was staffed by ex-DOD people, "Neon Johns", Enron-style
predatory executives, and various fashions of megalomaniacs who
habitually underrepresented the real-life risks and would gladly tell
any lie and regularly sweep any safety issues short of a catastrophic
failure under the rug to get to play with their nuke-toys and make a
quick buck in the process, if left to their own devices.

This isn't even about the risk which is not as trivial as some would like you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US industry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't even the largest of the different sources of risk.

There are frequent earthquakes in Japan and even grade 9.0 did not
cause a nuclear accident.

Yes, because the earthquakes caused an amount of vibration the plants were designed to withstand. But there is no guarantee that this will always be the case. Earthquakes are hard to predict in location, timing and Anna was a perfect example. They designed the plant to withstand any highly improbable East Coast earthquake. Over the 40 years the plant had been operating we finally had one and it was within 10 miles of the plant! The resulting shaking was twice what the plant was designed for. Fortunately there was enough reserve strength that there were no major system failures. There were numerous failures including one that lost power to the seismic recorders so know exactly how strong the shocks were. Dry casks were moved by the shaking and numerous other impacts that caused the facility to be offline for months. In other words, we dodged a bullet.

My point about the probability is that they give numbers for the chances of an accident separately due to a single cause, at a single reactor for a single year. Those numbers appears to be very conservative being 1 in some tens of thousands. But when you combine even just the number of reactors and number of years the results drop to 1 in 10!!! Hardly a conservative number. Then combine that with the many various ways an accident can occur and you get some very disturbing results indeed.

The problem in Fukushima was that they relied on a single technology
(multiple diesel generator) for emergency cooling after emergency
shutdown. The assumption was that if there are an _independent_
failure in one generator, the rest could handle the emergency load.

Isn't that what they all do? I've never heard of any that use multiple cooling technologies.

Unfortunately, the tsunani took out all the emergency generators
simultaneously, so this was not a single generator failure. Things
went wrong because the emergency cooling relied on a single technology
installed in a single place.

You are the one who opened the Fukushima can of worms.

The point is that things DID go wrong. The designers of nukes would have you believe there was virtually no chance this could have happened, that it was unforeseeable, yet it did happen. We look back with 20/20 hindsight and say it was inevitable.

At North Anna they had a generator fail. When they looked into the cause it was found that the procedure for installing the head gaskets was faulty. That procedure was a single point of failure for every generator and was not discovered until the plant was 40 years old during an emergency. What if every generator had failed because of a bad head gasket installation?

After Fukushima, various different methods have been added to existing
sites to avoid those single point of failure issues.

At one site, in which they already have diesel generators, dedicated
HV lines to a local hydro plant, they now installed small air cooling
towers on the roof to handle the 7 % latent heat after emergency
shutdown, if the main cooling circuit to the sea fails.

I always thought it was odd that during the earthquake the facility disconnected from the grid. Clearly they think that is the safest thing to do. Too bad there is no hydro anywhere near here.

Which reactor are you talking about? Which one site?

On an other site, in addition to diesels and dedicated feed lines,
they also have two big gas turbines and if everything else fails, they
have a wind turbine on site . Actually the wind turbine is just for
PR, it is too small to run all emergency systems, even if the wind
happened to blow during emergency shutdown.

Which system is this one? I'd like to read about these.

That only leave around 96 US reactors to deal with. The odds are still pretty bad.

--

Rick C.

--+ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
--+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 9:59:23 AM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 2:10:20 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 1:28:35 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:
On 10/13/19 12:49 AM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:06:27 PM UTC+11, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 16:49:35 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 10/12/2019 4:08 PM, Uwe Bonnes wrote:
Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear
power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and
risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab
for the overruns.

As long as there are countries trying to get or substain their nuclear
weapon arsenal, there will be nuclear (power) reactors.


I thought a lot of it was overcoming the lawsuits from people trying
to stop the nuclear plants.

And overcoming piles and piles of regulations placed on the industry
by lefists who are hell bent on bankrupting the industry and moving
civilization back into caves (everyone else, not them, of course).

Looking at it from a slightly more rational point of view, the regulations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

Quite how making nuclear power slightly more expensive would have moved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of caves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

Krw's read only memory seems to have programmed with a lot of misinformation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denialist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.


The public in the US pretty accurately recognized that the nuclear power
industry was staffed by ex-DOD people, "Neon Johns", Enron-style
predatory executives, and various fashions of megalomaniacs who
habitually underrepresented the real-life risks and would gladly tell
any lie and regularly sweep any safety issues short of a catastrophic
failure under the rug to get to play with their nuke-toys and make a
quick buck in the process, if left to their own devices.

This isn't even about the risk which is not as trivial as some would like you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US industry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't even the largest of the different sources of risk.

--

Rick C.

--- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

I'm sure others would love to see the "numbers" you ran to come to that
absurd conclusion. To start with, probably 1 in 10 reactors in the US
are not even in an area where a significant earthquake is likely during
the lifetime of the plant. And that's before we get to any failures.

Next!

They publish numbers for the various reactors being damaged in an earthquake. I started with the number for North Anna which is one of the least likely, around 1 in 70,000. Factor in the useful life of the reactor which presently stands at 70 years and now it's 1 in 1,000. There are 100 such reactors in the US, most of which have a worse risk factor and you get 1 in 10 approximately. Not high math.

While I was looking for the starting numbers a reference indicated the probability of something going wrong with the reactor itself was an even more likely event. So the ultimate odds are at best 1 in 5. You wouldn't even drive your car if the odds of a serious accident were 1 in 5.

This is one of the reasons why nuclear reactors are so expensive to design and build. To be safe they have to be designed so much better and to account for so many more problems than most anything we make.

Yes, too cheap to meter indeed. Tell that to Dominion who seems to be very happy billing their customers for half a billion dollars obtaining a facility approval that will likely never be built.

--

Rick C.

-+- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[bitrex]

On 10/13/19 9:59 AM, Whoey Louie wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 2:10:20 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 1:28:35 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:
On 10/13/19 12:49 AM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:06:27 PM UTC+11, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 16:49:35 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 10/12/2019 4:08 PM, Uwe Bonnes wrote:
Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear
power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and
risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab
for the overruns.

As long as there are countries trying to get or substain their nuclear
weapon arsenal, there will be nuclear (power) reactors.


I thought a lot of it was overcoming the lawsuits from people trying
to stop the nuclear plants.

And overcoming piles and piles of regulations placed on the industry
by lefists who are hell bent on bankrupting the industry and moving
civilization back into caves (everyone else, not them, of course).

Looking at it from a slightly more rational point of view, the regulations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

Quite how making nuclear power slightly more expensive would have moved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of caves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

Krw's read only memory seems to have programmed with a lot of misinformation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denialist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.


The public in the US pretty accurately recognized that the nuclear power
industry was staffed by ex-DOD people, "Neon Johns", Enron-style
predatory executives, and various fashions of megalomaniacs who
habitually underrepresented the real-life risks and would gladly tell
any lie and regularly sweep any safety issues short of a catastrophic
failure under the rug to get to play with their nuke-toys and make a
quick buck in the process, if left to their own devices.

This isn't even about the risk which is not as trivial as some would like you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US industry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't even the largest of the different sources of risk.

--

Rick C.

--- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

I'm sure others would love to see the "numbers" you ran to come to that
absurd conclusion. To start with, probably 1 in 10 reactors in the US
are not even in an area where a significant earthquake is likely during
the lifetime of the plant. And that's before we get to any failures.

Next!

Depends on how you define the lifetime and define "likely"; over the
span of 50 years from today say, the likelihood of an earthquake causing
significant damage in the Boston/Providence area is perhaps about 1 in
5. The plates are locked together tighter on the East Coast and damaging
shocks can propagate farther, a 6.0 with an epicenter within 150 miles
of either of those cities and you're looking at several hundred deaths,
thousands of injuries and maybe 15 billion worth of damage not a problem
at all, unfortunately. Loma Prieta times five, at least with the
structures that are there currently. It will surely happen at night
during a snowstorm, too.

There are few places in America that don't have a statistically
significant risk of a large earthquake over 50-100 year period. Remember
it's currently expected that some amount of waste will have to be stored
on site for longer than the plant's operational lifetime.

 

[bitrex]

On 10/13/19 1:00 PM, Rick C wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 9:59:23 AM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 2:10:20 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 1:28:35 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:
On 10/13/19 12:49 AM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:06:27 PM UTC+11, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 16:49:35 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 10/12/2019 4:08 PM, Uwe Bonnes wrote:
Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear
power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and
risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab
for the overruns.

As long as there are countries trying to get or substain their nuclear
weapon arsenal, there will be nuclear (power) reactors.


I thought a lot of it was overcoming the lawsuits from people trying
to stop the nuclear plants.

And overcoming piles and piles of regulations placed on the industry
by lefists who are hell bent on bankrupting the industry and moving
civilization back into caves (everyone else, not them, of course).

Looking at it from a slightly more rational point of view, the regulations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

Quite how making nuclear power slightly more expensive would have moved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of caves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

Krw's read only memory seems to have programmed with a lot of misinformation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denialist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.


The public in the US pretty accurately recognized that the nuclear power
industry was staffed by ex-DOD people, "Neon Johns", Enron-style
predatory executives, and various fashions of megalomaniacs who
habitually underrepresented the real-life risks and would gladly tell
any lie and regularly sweep any safety issues short of a catastrophic
failure under the rug to get to play with their nuke-toys and make a
quick buck in the process, if left to their own devices.

This isn't even about the risk which is not as trivial as some would like you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US industry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't even the largest of the different sources of risk.

--

Rick C.

--- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

I'm sure others would love to see the "numbers" you ran to come to that
absurd conclusion. To start with, probably 1 in 10 reactors in the US
are not even in an area where a significant earthquake is likely during
the lifetime of the plant. And that's before we get to any failures.

Next!

They publish numbers for the various reactors being damaged in an earthquake. I started with the number for North Anna which is one of the least likely, around 1 in 70,000. Factor in the useful life of the reactor which presently stands at 70 years and now it's 1 in 1,000. There are 100 such reactors in the US, most of which have a worse risk factor and you get 1 in 10 approximately. Not high math.

He's underestimating the risk of large earthquakes on places like the
East Coast. Just cuz it hasn't happened in living memory or recent
history doesn't mean the risk is infinitesimally low, it may just mean
it's overdue

While I was looking for the starting numbers a reference indicated the probability of something going wrong with the reactor itself was an even more likely event. So the ultimate odds are at best 1 in 5. You wouldn't even drive your car if the odds of a serious accident were 1 in 5.

This is one of the reasons why nuclear reactors are so expensive to design and build. To be safe they have to be designed so much better and to account for so many more problems than most anything we make.

Yes, too cheap to meter indeed. Tell that to Dominion who seems to be very happy billing their customers for half a billion dollars obtaining a facility approval that will likely never be built.

 

[bitrex]

On 10/13/19 1:08 PM, bitrex wrote:

   Rick C.

   --- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
   --- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

I'm sure others would love to see the "numbers" you ran to come to that
absurd conclusion.  To start with, probably 1 in 10 reactors in the US
are not even in an area where a significant earthquake is likely during
the lifetime of the plant.  And that's before we get to any failures.

Next!

They publish numbers for the various reactors being damaged in an
earthquake.  I started with the number for North Anna which is one of
the least likely, around 1 in 70,000.  Factor in the useful life of
the reactor which presently stands at 70 years and now it's 1 in
1,000.  There are 100 such reactors in the US, most of which have a
worse risk factor and you get 1 in 10 approximately.  Not high math.

He's underestimating the risk of large earthquakes on places like the
East Coast. Just cuz it hasn't happened in living memory or recent
history doesn't mean the risk is infinitesimally low, it may just mean
it's overdue

There have been several large quakes on the East Coast in the past 50
years with magnitude 6.0 and above, they just happened to occur in say
the Adirondacks or in relatively unpopulated area of Quebec or etc. They
can happen anywhere though, and the geology of quake production on the
East Coast is much less well-understood than e.g. California. Dodging
bullets.

 

On Sun, 13 Oct 2019 09:51:13 -0700 (PDT), Rick C
<gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:

The problem in Fukushima was that they relied on a single technology
(multiple diesel generator) for emergency cooling after emergency
shutdown. The assumption was that if there are an _independent_
failure in one generator, the rest could handle the emergency load.

Isn't that what they all do? I've never heard of any that use multiple cooling technologies.

I was referring to the electricity needed to run the circulation pumps
after emergency shutdown, this should have multiple different electric
sources.. There are other methods if some of the main pipes burst
inside the containment building.

Unfortunately, the tsunani took out all the emergency generators
simultaneously, so this was not a single generator failure. Things
went wrong because the emergency cooling relied on a single technology
installed in a single place.

You are the one who opened the Fukushima can of worms.

The problem was that this Fukushima plant was still 1970's technology.
It was soon going to be retired anyway, so the power company had not
made much upgrades recently.

In power plants in which the operation license is to be extended by 20
or 30 years, a power company has a great motivation in doing
significant rolling upgrades during annual service breaks. After 60 or
80 years of operation, there are hardly any original components left.

>The point is that things DID go wrong. The designers of nukes would have you believe there was virtually no chance this could have happened, that it was unforeseeable, yet it did happen. We look back with 20/20 hindsight and say it was inevitable.

It had a single point of failure. When working with redundant systems,
you should always be on alert to avoid single point of failures.

>At North Anna they had a generator fail. When they looked into the cause it was found that the procedure for installing the head gaskets was faulty. That procedure was a single point of failure for every generator and was not discovered until the plant was 40 years old during an emergency. What if every generator had failed because of a bad head gasket installation?

Exactly for that reason you should not rely on a single technology
from a single manufacturer.

After Fukushima, various different methods have been added to existing
sites to avoid those single point of failure issues.

At one site, in which they already have diesel generators, dedicated
HV lines to a local hydro plant, they now installed small air cooling
towers on the roof to handle the 7 % latent heat after emergency
shutdown, if the main cooling circuit to the sea fails.

I always thought it was odd that during the earthquake the facility disconnected from the grid. Clearly they think that is the safest thing to do. Too bad there is no hydro anywhere near here.

Which reactor are you talking about? Which one site?

This is Loviisa site in Finland with two reactors.

On an other site, in addition to diesels and dedicated feed lines,
they also have two big gas turbines and if everything else fails, they
have a wind turbine on site . Actually the wind turbine is just for
PR, it is too small to run all emergency systems, even if the wind
happened to blow during emergency shutdown.

Which system is this one? I'd like to read about these.

That is Olkiluoto site in Finland with two running reactors and one
(still) under construction.

Regarding emergency feeds from an external hydro power plant, make
sure that you have at least two voltage transformer so that all three
phases can be monitored. In Sweden they had a hydro feed with a single
voltage transformer between two phases indicating a healthy voltage,
but the third phase which was not monitored and it had been down for a
long time. Always make sure that all phases are present !

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

Uwe Bonnes wrote:

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear
power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and
risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab
for the overruns.

As long as there are countries trying to get or substain their nuclear
weapon arsenal, there will be nuclear (power) reactors.

Having no nuclear weapons didn't stop the Japanese from building them.

 

On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 21:29:58 -0700 (PDT), Rick C
<gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 12:06:27 AM UTC-4, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 16:49:35 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 10/12/2019 4:08 PM, Uwe Bonnes wrote:
Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear
power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and
risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab
for the overruns.

As long as there are countries trying to get or substain their nuclear
weapon arsenal, there will be nuclear (power) reactors.


I thought a lot of it was overcoming the lawsuits from people trying
to stop the nuclear plants.

And overcoming piles and piles of regulations placed on the industry
by lefists who are hell bent on bankrupting the industry and moving
civilization back into caves (everyone else, not them, of course).

Of course not. We will thrive on our wind and solar power while the rest of you retreat to your nuclear caves like the Morlocks you really are! Yes, the plan is working beautifully!!! Eloi rise up and take the world!

Of course. You're too blind to see.

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 1:00:34 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 9:59:23 AM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 2:10:20 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 1:28:35 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:
On 10/13/19 12:49 AM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:06:27 PM UTC+11, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019 16:49:35 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 10/12/2019 4:08 PM, Uwe Bonnes wrote:
Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear
power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and
risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab
for the overruns.

As long as there are countries trying to get or substain their nuclear
weapon arsenal, there will be nuclear (power) reactors.


I thought a lot of it was overcoming the lawsuits from people trying
to stop the nuclear plants.

And overcoming piles and piles of regulations placed on the industry
by lefists who are hell bent on bankrupting the industry and moving
civilization back into caves (everyone else, not them, of course).

Looking at it from a slightly more rational point of view, the regulations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

Quite how making nuclear power slightly more expensive would have moved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of caves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

Krw's read only memory seems to have programmed with a lot of misinformation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denialist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.


The public in the US pretty accurately recognized that the nuclear power
industry was staffed by ex-DOD people, "Neon Johns", Enron-style
predatory executives, and various fashions of megalomaniacs who
habitually underrepresented the real-life risks and would gladly tell
any lie and regularly sweep any safety issues short of a catastrophic
failure under the rug to get to play with their nuke-toys and make a
quick buck in the process, if left to their own devices.

This isn't even about the risk which is not as trivial as some would like you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US industry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't even the largest of the different sources of risk.

--

Rick C.

--- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

I'm sure others would love to see the "numbers" you ran to come to that
absurd conclusion. To start with, probably 1 in 10 reactors in the US
are not even in an area where a significant earthquake is likely during
the lifetime of the plant. And that's before we get to any failures.

Next!

They publish numbers for the various reactors being damaged in an earthquake. I started with the number for North Anna which is one of the least likely, around 1 in 70,000. Factor in the useful life of the reactor which presently stands at 70 years and now it's 1 in 1,000. There are 100 such reactors in the US, most of which have a worse risk factor and you get 1 in 10 approximately. Not high math.

Like I said, when you have a cite to the actual numbers, let us know.
We don;t know what numbers you used or what you did with them, nor
what quantifies as a radiation release. If it's popcorn fart, who cares?

While I was looking for the starting numbers a reference indicated the probability of something going wrong with the reactor itself was an even more likely event. So the ultimate odds are at best 1 in 5. You wouldn't even drive your car if the odds of a serious accident were 1 in 5.

This is one of the reasons why nuclear reactors are so expensive to design and build. To be safe they have to be designed so much better and to account for so many more problems than most anything we make.

Yes, too cheap to meter indeed. Tell that to Dominion who seems to be very happy billing their customers for half a billion dollars obtaining a facility approval that will likely never be built.

--

Rick C.

-+- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

Make much money with that Tesla spamming yet?

 

[bitrex]

On 10/13/19 2:59 PM, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:

On Sun, 13 Oct 2019 09:51:13 -0700 (PDT), Rick C
gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:

The problem in Fukushima was that they relied on a single technology
(multiple diesel generator) for emergency cooling after emergency
shutdown. The assumption was that if there are an _independent_
failure in one generator, the rest could handle the emergency load.

Isn't that what they all do? I've never heard of any that use multiple cooling technologies.

I was referring to the electricity needed to run the circulation pumps
after emergency shutdown, this should have multiple different electric
sources.. There are other methods if some of the main pipes burst
inside the containment building.

Unfortunately, the tsunani took out all the emergency generators
simultaneously, so this was not a single generator failure. Things
went wrong because the emergency cooling relied on a single technology
installed in a single place.

You are the one who opened the Fukushima can of worms.

The problem was that this Fukushima plant was still 1970's technology.
It was soon going to be retired anyway, so the power company had not
made much upgrades recently.

In power plants in which the operation license is to be extended by 20
or 30 years, a power company has a great motivation in doing
significant rolling upgrades during annual service breaks. After 60 or
80 years of operation, there are hardly any original components left.

The point is that things DID go wrong. The designers of nukes would have you believe there was virtually no chance this could have happened, that it was unforeseeable, yet it did happen. We look back with 20/20 hindsight and say it was inevitable.

It had a single point of failure. When working with redundant systems,
you should always be on alert to avoid single point of failures.

At North Anna they had a generator fail. When they looked into the cause it was found that the procedure for installing the head gaskets was faulty. That procedure was a single point of failure for every generator and was not discovered until the plant was 40 years old during an emergency. What if every generator had failed because of a bad head gasket installation?

Exactly for that reason you should not rely on a single technology
from a single manufacturer.


After Fukushima, various different methods have been added to existing
sites to avoid those single point of failure issues.

At one site, in which they already have diesel generators, dedicated
HV lines to a local hydro plant, they now installed small air cooling
towers on the roof to handle the 7 % latent heat after emergency
shutdown, if the main cooling circuit to the sea fails.

I always thought it was odd that during the earthquake the facility disconnected from the grid. Clearly they think that is the safest thing to do. Too bad there is no hydro anywhere near here.

Which reactor are you talking about? Which one site?

This is Loviisa site in Finland with two reactors.

On an other site, in addition to diesels and dedicated feed lines,
they also have two big gas turbines and if everything else fails, they
have a wind turbine on site . Actually the wind turbine is just for
PR, it is too small to run all emergency systems, even if the wind
happened to blow during emergency shutdown.

Which system is this one? I'd like to read about these.

That is Olkiluoto site in Finland with two running reactors and one
(still) under construction.

Regarding emergency feeds from an external hydro power plant, make
sure that you have at least two voltage transformer so that all three
phases can be monitored. In Sweden they had a hydro feed with a single
voltage transformer between two phases indicating a healthy voltage,
but the third phase which was not monitored and it had been down for a
long time. Always make sure that all phases are present !

WECGWWGW

 

[whit3rd]

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 1:30:43 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

Seems to me if you believe the global warming folks, most of whom are the
same ones that are opposed to nuclear power, we're headed for a total
global catastrophe.

The difference, is that one might be a problem by unlikely accident, the other
implements a deliberate injury

'Catastrophe' usually means sudden event, which is NOT the sole global warming
evil to be expected.

 

[whit3rd]

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:53:09 AM UTC-4, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:

There are frequent earthquakes in Japan and even grade 9.0 did not
cause a nuclear accident.

Well, not directly, but when the earth moves, so do the waters. The unlikely
magnitude 9 event created an unlikely fault tree (and modern designs
have already been modified so that fault scenario can be treated by
employing firefighting pump trucks).

I'd call the quake the proximal cause, though that is, of course, a judgement call
and not an observation.

 

[whit3rd]

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 2:06:04 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 12:50:07 AM UTC-4, whit3rd wrote:
On Saturday, October 12, 2019 at 3:29:33 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:

I wonder if we (the global "we") will continue to build nuclear power facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and risks are untenable

Almost any 'seems like' scenario can be created as an exercise in spin.

If you don't like my evaluation, why not respond to the many facts provided?


A 2016 report said that the estimated construction cost of China's demonstration HTGR is about US$5,000/kW ‒ about twice the initial cost estimates."

If it produces for 20 years, 250 days/year, that amounts to $5000 for 1.2x10^5 kWh,
or about 4 cents/kWh; it doesn't kill the economics, unless another source is available cheaper.

That's the point. While you say $40 per MWh isn't a show stopper, that's on top of the many other ...

Lots of 'estimate' costs turn out wrong, the magnitude matters; that magnitude isn't
a show stopper, IS the point.

> The worst part of it is that these numbers are far above what was expected when the projects were started.

But you expect overruns now and in the future? Why is that, I'm not seeing any known cause
that ought to persist/grow/shrink according to a timescale.

>Do you not understand that an entire nuclear reactor company no longer exists because of a massively overrun project in South Carolina? There is no longer a Westinghouse nuclear reactor company.

Yeah, but solar cell company Solyndra also no longer exists. Is there a known cause that
we should expect to repeat?

Understanding is deep stuff, not touched by casual rhetorical spin.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Monday, October 14, 2019 at 11:50:14 AM UTC+11, whit3rd wrote:

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 2:06:04 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 12:50:07 AM UTC-4, whit3rd wrote:
On Saturday, October 12, 2019 at 3:29:33 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:

<snip>

Do you not understand that an entire nuclear reactor company no longer exists because of a massively overrun project in South Carolina? There is no longer a Westinghouse nuclear reactor company.

Yeah, but solar cell company Solyndra also no longer exists. Is there a known cause that we should expect to repeat?

Understanding is deep stuff, not touched by casual rhetorical spin.

Raising Solyandra as a counter-example to failed nuclear power companies isn't exactly an exhibition of deep undertstanding - it looks much more like an example of rhetorical spin.

Solyandra failed because it's idiosyncratic technology was less good that that exploited by the numerous solar cell companies that are making money.

The nuclear energy businesses that have failed seem to share much the same tecnology as those that are still hanging on.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney