Uncle Sam lends $1.5B to reignite Michigan nuclear plant in 2025 The Biden administration has announced plans to reignite a shuttered Michigan nuclear power plant with a $1.5 billion loan that, combined with other nuclear announcements yesterday, suggests the US federal government is right now all in on nuclear energy. The 800-megawatt Holtec Palisades plant, located on Michigan's southwest …
> But running the thing and generating electricity, that is pretty, pretty clean.
Apart from the small problem of the waste material, which remains radioactive (more so than the ore the fuel was made from) for several hundred years.
Don't get me wrong - I'm in favour of nuclear power. The damage it causes the Earth is less than that of fossil fuels. But to say that it is "pretty pretty clean" is, I repeat, an exaggeration.
One football field sized bunker would be adequate to store all US nuclear waste for hundreds of years of generation times many gigawatt scale generators. Albeit one that needs to be left there for thousands of years. Yes, there is a tradeoff of "WHERE" that goes and securing it appropriately but this problem is generally overblown. The one thing the US is not short of is land, and certainly not of federal authority to reserve bits for things needed for national interest. (See Groom Lake, or the Manhattan Project among other examples).
Now, the UK, or other congested little countries it's rather more awkward to do I'll grant.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the article is that working nuke was shut down in favour of cheaper fossil fuel - this simply does not compute. The fuel costs for nuclear are negligible per MW output. The staff needed to maintain the plant in a mothballed state are still on the books. And so, where is the cost saving having already built the thing?
Or is fossil fuel REALLY that cheap in the US. I doubt it.
Something smells here and it's not obvious what.
"Or is fossil fuel REALLY that cheap in the US. I doubt it."
Not at the moment, but they will be again. DRILL BABY DRILL!!
'Old Equipment' and the outrageous costs and regulatory environment with respect to boiler/steam generator replacement caused the San Onofre power plant to shut down (just north of San Diego). Details are in the Wikipedia article.
I blame excessive regulation on the overall equipment replacement costs, and ultimately the shutdown and decommissioning of the power plant. SONGS wanted to operate a single plant at reduced power (to avoid further leakage) while re-replacing the defective boilers in the other plant [then switch operating plants and do the other one] but NRC said NO and they had to close. It was that simple. REGULATORS killed it.
Your post smells of popular perception and misinformation,, which is generally DEAD WRONG, and based on *FEEL* (not science) and F.U.D.
And fossil fuels [a misnomer, "carbon-based" is more accurate] are NOT "damaging the Earth". In many cases we avoid "damage" by pumping out liquid hydrocarbons before they leak to the surface and form TAR PITS. The Earth itself forms hydrocarbons and CO2 gas from within the mantle, which contains a LOT of carbon (it is the 4th most abundant element in the universe, behind oxygen, helium, and hydrogen). And man-made CO2 from burning carbon-based fuels is *NOT* causing any kind of 'Climate Change'. A plethora of supporting information on that topic can be found on Tony Heller's web site "realclimatescience.com" if you want to see it.
Since I used to operate nuclear reactors for the US Navy I know quite a bit about the topic. I also know that the biggest stumbling blocks for nuclear energy are political, from wacky environmentalists abusing court systems to keep plants from operating (or being built), to those who want to insert "Governmentium" into EVERYTHING.
The San Onofre power plant just north of San Diego should re-open NEXT. People I knew from the Navy had been working there. My electricity rates were lower when it was operational, instead of relying on UNRELIABLE wind farms, etc.. Instead my power bill has a "decommissioning fee/tax" on it. Yeah. Thanks "Gummy" [a portmanteu of 'Gummint' and 'Mommy']
It's not clean unless it generates zero waste, or waste that is harmless to the environment. Unfortunately uranium waste is neither zero waste, nor is it harmless (it causes cancer).
So what are you going to do with the carcinogenic uranium waste that nuclear reactors produce then? Fire it at the sun? Who's footing the bill?
I think that limits you to hydroelectric built with 19th Century techniques. Wind turbines produce huge amounts of composite waste (unless you want to run a literal wind mill) and solar creates heavy metal wastes. Both of these are harmful to humans and, unlike radioactive isotopes, heavy metals will never decay into something less harmful.
End-to-end, modern nuclear has a lower carbon footprint than anything but hydroelectric built under very specific conditions; namely, reservoirs built on rocky terrain in cold climates. That doesn't mean we should abandon these technologies but we should be realistic about their impact rather than going 'oooh radiation scary'.
Ehh. Speaking of heavy metals, tailings from uranium mining don't just magically disappear, either. Unless you are talking geological time, not human time. So I wouldn't call it a win for nuclear - at least there is the policy option of not allowing old cadmium-containing solar panels in general purpose waste dumps. Cadmium mining waste seems again to me to be the problematic thing.
When it comes to nuclear waste, at this point it is clear that the ever-dangled carrot of reprocessing old waste for new fuel is not going to happen for nuclear plants that were not designed for recycling from the ground up - it's just used as part of a tactic to avoid the expense of actually going to the Finnish solution or something similar. So until I see more and bigger countries actually adopt it I will consider the nuclear industry to be fundamentally unserious about handling the waste properly.
These are the same sort of tailings you get from coal mining, rare earth mining, titanium mining... Coal ash contains thorium, uranium, radium, lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium...
If we actually recycled our spent nuclear fuel rather than using the very wasteful once through model then we might not need to dig up any more uranium for a LONG time. And if we moved to a thorium fuel cycle the tailings from all sorts of mining could be cleaned up by extracting the thorium.
"Coal ash contains thorium, uranium, radium, lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium..."
Mostly due to the coal being burned out of the matrix which concentrates everything that won't burn. What's surprising is that the ash isn't being processed for those materials. Lead is still useful, Mercury is used in many places, thorium is likely what should be used in reactors and IS used for welding electrodes. Cadmium was used a lot more in the past for plating, but most plating companies I've worked with don't give off responsible vibes.
The US had banned reprocessing spent fuels and now that the ban has been lifted, the companies that would have been in a position to do it won't touch it with a barge pole. I'd not be angry if the US government set up a reprocessing facility at the Nevada Proving Grounds (or whatever they call it now). It's not like that land will be useful for anything this eon. Energy, and mainly electricity, is the foundation of civilization in this age. It's a good use of taxpayer money for government to support it.
Nearly the only reason fuel reprocessing hasn't worked out is anti-nuke hippies chaining themselves to the rails at every opportunity to stop fuel transports. It works, it has been proven to work. Almost reactor designed to be refueled can have it's fuel reprocessed. The majority of modern reactors still running today can run MOX fuel (Mixed-Oxide, containing a mix of plutonium and uranium) as a partial reactor fuel load (usually up to half). But "people" are scared of fuel reprocessing because it generates "nuclear bomb material" plutonium, ignoring that the normal reprocessing leaves a nuclear fuel that's too contaminated with other materials to be used in a plutonium nuclear weapon.
To expand on the comment above saying recycling "works, it has been proven to work", this isn't a lab-scale trial. Something like 15% of the electricity in France comes from recycled fuel rods.
So it's proven to work every day, and has been working for decades, at a national scale.
Protesters were playing on fears of Nuclear Weapons, a terrifying weapon with a total worldwide kill-count equivalent to three months of the world's coal power generation. Which means those hippies have caused orders of magnitude more deaths than the nukes they feared. Whoops!
"Protesters were playing on fears of Nuclear Weapons,"
All you'd have to do is get your hands on a number of tons of spent fuel rods, process them to extract the Pu and possibly do some isotopic separation. I'm not worried about that. Nation states with bombs aren't using spent fuel to the best of my knowledge.
"Nearly the only reason fuel reprocessing hasn't worked out is anti-nuke hippies chaining themselves to the rails at every opportunity to stop fuel transports."
Fertilizer!
“Mister Dent, do you have any idea how much damage this bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?"
"How much?"
"None at all.”
"I think that limits you to hydroelectric built with 19th Century techniques."
Even if you build dams with manual labour and hand carved stones, hydropower still has significant methane emissions - as covered in the study referred to in the link below.
https://www.hydropower.org/blog/new-study-sheds-light-on-reservoir-emissions-over-a-long-time-period
"Dont forget the environment problems with creating dams"
It changes the local environment, certainly, but I don't see that as particularly bad. We've found that when beavers set up dams and change environments it's actually a good thing. Perhaps not for land owners, but certainly for nature in the area.
Sorry for being unclear, that's what I meant when I mentioned cold, rocky reservoirs. It's why Norway can get away with hydroelectric that's relatively low carbon, while other projects emit huge amounts of methane.
And that's going to limit the scope for expanding clean hydropower because there's not that many locations where you have cold rocky wet terrain acceptably close, even hundreds of miles to population centres. Agreed, Norway exports a good proportion of power to neighbouring countries, but I can't see much capacity expansion in that country, and precious little opportunities where the world's largest or fastest growing population centres are.
Nuclear is the way forward, but we really need an international collaboration to standardise and reduce the costs of design, construction, and regulation of nuclear power across all interested Western nations. A disproportionate amount of the costs of nuclear are overheads of design, regulatory approval, or the manufacturing costs of complex but very low volume components. Design two different reactor/turbine sets that are standard almost to the foundations (which would need to reflect local geology), and build them in their hundreds with single suppliers taking the lead on specific components. Why two? Simply so that if one design has a flaw that becomes apparent sooner or many years later, you're not having to take out such a large proportion of the fleet for repairs at the same time.
We could have done this by now if we'd not spaffed so much money on partially effective renewables, and thus far no-effect fusion.
> I can't see much capacity expansion in that country, and precious little opportunities where the world's largest or fastest growing population centres are.
What about a $1.5Bn investment in building new fjords in Michigan ?
I think they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent
It's "clean energy" because it's a damn sight cleaner than fossil fuels or biomass, which are the only real alternatives to nuclear (baseload generation can't be provided by renewables as we all know, cos we can't ever build enough storage)
Even Wind and Solar produce 'waste' mind you, and a lot "more" of it than nuclear does. Of course it's not radioactive, but why should that be the only thing we care about?
Option A: Spend tens of billions subsidising a highly capital intensive industry, where the probability of being the “Winner” is known from historical data as 10% for investment above $250bn; and 0% for investment at the $10-$50bn level. CHIPS Act
Option B: Spend hundreds of billions subsidising endless Acronym Projects for prototypes of things in engineering science fiction magazines, which no voter in the history of ever even said they wanted. Smart Cities
Option C: Spend trillions subsidising the rollout of “Green” technologies which have some chance of working at industrial scale. But instead, implement as subsidies to middle-class rent-seeking skivers, for micro-scale vanity units that can’t “save carbon” even in theory. Smart Meters. 1kW wind turbines. 2kW solar installs without battery storage
Option D: *$1.5bn* on a known-technology energy project, zero risk other than waiting 20 years for a NIMBY public consultation. Produces something that we actually definitely need, no debate, and which we know we are short of; and no commercial entity wants to build - not because there’s no demand or it’s not commercially viable, but purely because they have a learned trauma response over two generations, of getting ten years through the project before being stopped by either government or people violently breaking the law and threatening the workforce.
I wouldn't say restarting an old plant -- that still needs major upgrades -- is "zero risk" (see below), but I agree with your larger point of Return on Investment and gave you an upvote.
Further supporting your point: the "smart meters" around here have only enabled two things: 1) checking if your power is actually "out"; and 2) "peak hour" billing. I'm definitely not a fan of the latter -- I understand the economics, but I'm paying more for using (mostly) the same power year-on-year.
Regarding that non-zero risk: most news sources are ignoring the "minority reports" of actual former employees who are pointing out exactly how risky this operation is. Yes, nuclear is, by and large, safe from major radioactive issues save for the spent fuel, especially compared to coal exhaust, BUT something can always go wrong, and with this older equipment the chances increase. Maybe not dramatically, but at least significantly. Being in the same state, I am watching this carefully. (The last time I commented on this particular project to make this point I got severely downvoted; maybe because I was trying to be dramatic.)
"BUT something can always go wrong, and with this older equipment the chances increase. Maybe not dramatically, but at least significantly."
Gas is fraught with danger as well. Power plants need a long pipeline to bring the gas in that leaks from one end to the other, it can go *boom* and it really isn't clean since something is being burned and vented into the atmosphere.
San Onofre in California shut down after a rebuild of their steam turbine had issues and was only good for 80% of nameplate generation. The nuclear side was fine, but certification for running at a lower level wasn't going to be allowed. Having a new turbine built didn't have an ROI so while the kettle had many years left in it, the decision was made to shut the whole place down. The reason I bring this up is that the plant in Michigan might be easiest to do a rebuild on the non-nuclear side with updates to better, more efficient piping, but the regulatory agency would likely make that a process far too complicated since it goes far beyond "repairs".
You're overthinking this. Michigan is a swing state. Home of Detroit (with all of those "good-paying union jobs") Michigan should be a slam-dunk for the Democrat party. The fact that it is not worries them.
From the BBC:
The Great Lakes state has picked the winning presidential candidate in the last two elections. Despite backing Mr Biden in 2020, it has become symbolic of a nationwide backlash over the president’s support for Israel during that country’s war in Gaza.
During Michigan’s Democratic primary contest in February, more than 100,000 voters chose the “uncommitted” option on their ballots, part of a campaign mounted by activists who want the US government to halt its military aid to Israel.
Notably, Michigan has the country’s largest proportion of Arab-Americans - a demographic whose support for Mr. Biden was in jeopardy.
No, that's inefficient. Big business lets the plebs elect whoever they want, and then purchases a suitable number of congressmen and senators, primarily but not exclusively from the winning party. Or, they can make a bet and fund campaign donations in advance.
Either way, far cheaper and more effective, giving a far better ROI than buying individual votes.
There are a couple of huge datacenters being built about 20 miles from where a nuclear reactor was decommissioned a few years ago - a victim of the cost of outfitting it for further operations along with massive amount of wind power the state has added in the past decade. But with all the datacenters (close to a dozen major ones built or in the planning stages) being built all over the state to take advantage of the cheap electricity, pretty soon they're gonna need more electricity!
>"We knew Palisades was shutting down in advance, so we deferred a number of maintenance tasks," Culp said. "Now we're going back and completing that work."
We knew that is we just shut it down when it began to need work, and sat on our hands collecting fat salaries for a few years, that we could get the government to pay for maintenance that we would never, ever do on our own dime. Are you crazy?
"Why waste resources on doing maintenance on something which likely never will be used again?"
That happen to some coal plants when politicians made it clear they wouldn't be re-licensed after a certain date. The operators of units coming up for heavy maintenance didn't see any ROI on doing that work so made the decision to shut them down before they had planned. All of a sudden, there was a big scramble since there was nothing in the works to replace that generation. Oops.
Thanks a lot - it is a team effort, honestly.
It helps that some of us have been here 10+ years though, and that we have the freedom to poke fun.
C.
Steam generators for PWRs last about 30 years in service before they need replacing. Reactors built in the 1970s and 1980s and still running today will already have had one set of steam generators replaced, some reactors being licenced for operation past the 60-year point will get their steam generators replaced a second time.
In contrast wind turbines are built for a 20-year lifespan with the blades needing replaced more often depending on conditions due to abrasion from the impact of insects, dust and smoke particles and the like.
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