The main difference is in my opinion the visible action - reaction relationship. If a nuclear power plant blows up, the whole area is going to look for years to come like a scene from a apocalyptic movie, while with coal plants you might have just people to "cough a bit more".
The only thing I do not get is why energy companies are not forced to carry more extensive insurance policies to the long term damages/risks they cause. Pushing this through all the way should provide enough incentives to move towards renewables.
> The main difference is in my opinion the visible action - reaction relationship. If a nuclear power plant blows up, the whole area is going to look for years to come like a scene from a apocalyptic movie, while with coal plants you might have just people to "cough a bit more".
Not really. Nuclear disasters are bad for the environment, but considerably less bad than say... Building a city somewhere.
And "cough a bit more" is probably the understatement of a day. Those fuckers even create more radioactive waste (which won't get collected) when they work as intended, than nuclear plants when they break down. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...)
You are on track with the insurance policy. Though it's pretty safe to assume, that real costs of coal and carbon-based fuels are not calculated very well for insurance purposes either.
The end-point of unstoppable climate-change could potentially render the entire earth inhabitable via the Venus-effect. Even most apocalyptic local consequences are pretty minor compared to those.
Those fuckers even create more radioactive waste (which won't get collected) when they work as intended, than nuclear plants when they break down.
How about reading your own linked article before making a fool of yourself with claims like that? It says coal plants create more radioactive waste than a nuclear plant that has not broken down.
It's true for common failure modes. Three Mile Island, for example, did leak less radioactive waste than a correctly working coal plant.
The problem is that it's so politically difficult to build new nuclear plants so that old ones can be retired, that we're still using poorly designed plants from the 1960s that are already past their design lifetime. And then people are surprised that they're problematic.
Your numbers are incorrect. The cost for nuclear is cheaper than oil and gas, and only somewhat more expensive than coal, when factoring in the full lifecycle costs.
And Finland's reactor is remarkably cheap, if it only cost $4.1B. I believe typical plants cost closer to $10B. Nuclear plants are not cheap to build.
The equation breaks down when you factor in any of the following:
A) Waste handling and disposal
B) Reactor upgrades and replacement on a sane schedule (i.e. more frequently than the current ~35 years)
C) Hardening against deliberate attacks such as airplanes
or
D) A single catastrophic event due to continued negligence of B and C
The nuclear industry operates on the premise of being able to push the cost for all of the above upon society at some indefinite point in the future (cf. Fukushima). You may or may not agree with that approach (i.e. you could argue "it's worth it"), but let's not drink their kool-aid please.
If you didn't factor those in, then the cost would be almost nothing, even when compared to coal. Almost all the cost of nuclear power is in the construction and decommissioning.
When you factor those in, it becomes more expensive than coal, and slightly cheaper than oil or gas.
Also, airplanes pack very little punch compared to other things like internal steam buildup that plants are already hardened against. In a properly designed plant, you get airplane tolerance effectively for free.
When you factor those in, it becomes more expensive than coal, and slightly cheaper than oil or gas.
And that magic knowledge you take from... where?
Last time I checked there was no solution to the waste issue; we simply have no idea what to do with it in the long term. Meanwhile in most countries the transport and "temporary" storage of the waste are conveniently paid for by the tax-payer.
Last time I checked most reactors are destined to be running for 40 years. Except when, like in USA and France, they decide to extend that to 60 years. So much for replacing ancient reactors with safer designs.
Last time I checked most reactors were not hardened against deliberate attacks. And Fukushima was supposed to be one of the few specially hardened sites - we have seen how that went.
In a properly designed plant, you get airplane tolerance effectively for free.
> And that magic knowledge you take from... where?
Studying the viability of, of all things, solar power, and comparing the costs of various competing technologies. (The school I studied at is quite involved in solar research. It's price needs to drop by a significant factor before it becomes competitive, but it's on the way.)
> Bullshit
To borrow your words: "And that magic knowledge you take from... where?"
When you design a reactor to take the rather substantial internal steam explosions (and the associated water hammer) that might happen in a complete failure scenario, you end up with quite a solid building.
Okay the reactor core MIGHT sill be contained but you still probably have a huge fire, inaccessible critical machinery and tons of damage to other essential equipment surrounding the reactor, like coolant valves. Besides, if you avoid the reinforced reactor and take out, say the control room or a cooling tower you can cause enough damage to shut down the power plant for some years.
>Not really. Nuclear disasters are bad for the environment, but considerably less bad than say... Building a city somewhere.
Only you have to built a city to house people, whereas you don't have to build a nuclear reactor to give them energy, there are other options. Next argument?
>And "cough a bit more" is probably the understatement of a day. Those fuckers even create more radioactive waste (which won't get collected) when they work as intended, than nuclear plants when they break down.
Not so. The article you link to says the researchers found comparable or slightly higher levels to that of a nuclear factory in normal operation. And it goes on to say:
McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors.
Quite quaint. Not at all what happens in a nuclear plant accident.
A lot of geek people like to support nuclear plants because they think it's the pro-science thing to do ("oh, those ignorant masses, they are afraid of science"), and will twist the facts as fast as any bible-yielding evolution-denier to do so.
Well, nuclear plants are not science: they are technology, that is applied science.
Unlike, say, math, technology is not perfect: it's shaped by private interests, it's prone to human error (from the design to the development, to the operation stage), and it can also do a lot of bad shit, from blowing up people a la Challenger to Chernobyl.
That's for a single coal power plant many areas have dozens of them near coal rich areas. Also, they dump most of this stuff in the upper atmosphere so the majority of pollution ends up more than a thousand miles from the actual plant. Is it a big deal? probably not. Sure, statistically speaking radiation exposure from coal power plants has probably killed more people than from nuclear accidents. But, impossible to track who specifically was killed which limits their liability.
PS: Of course this is also because the nuclear industry has killed so few people.
The reason is that the costs of a failure of a nuclear power station are such that no insurance company would take on such a risk on commercial basis and even if they did, no energy company would be able/willing to pay the premiums.
It all works only because government(s) get their bombs, energy companies in cahoots with the government get their unrealistically low 'production costs' and the suckers taxpayers pay for any accidents and cleanups, whose costs are therefore never included in the accounting when making the comparisons.
German electors still have some say in the matter and they did their sums.
> The reason is that the costs of a failure of a nuclear power station are such that no insurance company would take on such a risk on commercial basis and even if they did, no energy company would be able/willing to pay the premiums.
I'm not sure how you can assert this to be true. Because it is a rare event, the premiums won't be that obscene, particularly if the carrier isn't carrying related policies.
The expense of a nuclear plant failure is most certainly high but, for example, can't match the impact of say Katrina (and while no insurance company was carrying all the impact of Katrina, several of them bore far more than the costs of pretty of completely destroying an entire major city, which is more than any nuclear power plant failure).
Certainly the money to be made from producing that much energy that cheaply outweighs the insurance costs.
Ironically, I'd argue this is part of the problem with nuclear energy. If left completely unregulated, I could see that a typical nuclear power station would be built with quite spare safety precautions, with the expectation that it likely would fail within a certain period of time, with an insurance policy in place to cover the expenses when that occurs.
It is demonstrably true that no insurance company is willing to take on the full risk of insuring a nuclear power plant against disaster.
The reason for this is that insurance companies aren't gamblers - they don't like insuring against minutely-likely but stratospherically-high-cost events, even if they can charge a premium that gives them a positive expected value. That's because they have to factor in that with such a high payout, there is a risk of destroying their business altogether. You can't capitalise on the positive expected value over 1000 years if you went bankrupt in year 3, even if that was just due to "bad luck".
This is just like the understanding that poker players have, that you need a considerably larger bankroll than the stakes you are playing in order to ride out "variance", as it's known.
It's worth noting that it is common practice for potential large claims capable of sinking a single insurer to be distributed over the wider market.
Other than that, you make a good point, and history bares it out. Insurance companies aren't gamblers, they aren't willing to support minutely-likely but stratospherically-high-cost events, even if they can see high profit margines. Bottom line: they really understand risk.
It turns out that Fukushima was 'insured' but the insurers won't be paying anything. It is all excluded, see?
To prove your assertions, you need to come up with an example where a major nuclear disaster was actually cleaned up at the insurers expense. Till then, I stand by my statements.
How many nuclear power plants are their in the world? How many have had failures from "earthquake shock, fire following earthquake and tsunami"? How many failures have occurred for other reasons? From that standpoint it is hard to argue that the premiums would have been significantly different without that clause. I'd also point out that such a clause is hardly unusual in the insurance business. You'll see the like on all kinds of property and liability policies.
To prove your assertions, you'd need to come up with a nuclear reactor which was constructed in an unregulated environment. ;-)
Look, I'm not making claims one way or another. I'm simply suggesting that your claim doesn't seem very credible once one has applied some very simple logic. I could be missing something, but I think you ought to have some evidence to back up such an extraordinary claim. As someone else pointed out, your typical coal operation ought to have a higher incident rate and cost, which means it ought to be even more expensive...
Realistically, you can calculate the costs without coming up with your silly example. It is sufficient to simply add up the costs needed to cover the disaster, and then look at the premiums paid for covering similar sized disasters with similar rates of occurrence, making your best effort to extrapolate over any gaps.
Alternatively, speak with an actuarial who works in the business and they can extrapolate what the premiums would be. In a truly unregulated market, I'd imagine the incident rate would be higher and the recovery costs a bit lower, so it might be hard to get a real cost, but go for the costs in the existing regulated market. I have a hard time imagining they'd be prohibitive, but I'd be intrigued if you proved otherwise.
How many nuclear power plants are their in the world?
436 plus 63 in construction (as of 2010).
It is sufficient to simply add up the costs needed to cover the disaster
The total cost for the Chernobyl incident was estimated at $235 billion[1] in 2006 and the figure only keeps growing.
Since 2007 they're building a new sarcophagus (because the old one is falling apart). The costs were estimated at another $1.4 billion for that alone. But they're late already, and well, you know how it goes.
In contrast Hurricane Katrina was a bargain at $150 billion dollars [2].
The Fukushima incident is estimated to cost $257 billion dollars [3] and that's probably a little optimistic.
and then look at the premiums paid for covering similar sized disasters with similar rates of occurrence
See, here is your problem. At these scales there is no coverage and no reference; these are disasters of national scale. For Katrina the insurance industry paid $41 billion dollars [2], guess who carried the rest.
And the real question is: What happens when some confused individuals somehow manage to smuggle nail-clippers onto passenger planes and then fly them into multiple reactors, in densely populated areas, at the same time?
> And the real question is: What happens when some confused individuals somehow manage to smuggle nail-clippers onto passenger planes and then fly them into multiple reactors, in densely populated areas, at the same time?
It's worth noting that the US military has at times very deliberately attacked nuclear facilities with armaments much more deadly than nail-clippers or a passenger plane that you might obtain from them. The damages are not the stuff of legend.
The US government has done the test, granted an F4 isn't a passenger jet but it probably has similar kinetic energy to a smaller passenger plane as it was going rather fast.
probably has similar kinetic energy to a smaller passenger plane
The most widely used passenger plane is the Boeing 737.
F4 Phantom empty weight: 29,500 lbs
Boeing 737 empty weight: 62,000 lbs
The average operating weight difference is probably quite a bit larger. You know, fuel, baggage, passengers.
You may want to review those videos from 9/11 to see what a passenger plane does to a building. You may also want to listen to the narrative of your video: The wall in your video is a specially hardened wall. Your reactors are not equipped with such walls because that would be cost prohibitive. And even these hardened walls are unlikely to withstand a passenger plane (ever wondered why the US government selected such a small plane for your video?).
I listened. Kinetic energy is the mass times the square of the velocity. F4's go way faster than 737's. Thus kinetic energy is comprable between the two.
"The containment building itself is typically an airtight steel structure enclosing the reactor normally sealed off from the outside atmosphere. The steel is either free-standing or attached to the concrete missile shield. In the United States, the design and thickness of the containment and the missile shield are governed by federal regulations (10 CFR 50.55a), and must be strong enough to withstand the impact of a fully loaded passenger airliner without rupture.[3][not in citation given]"
It's also not my nuclear reactor. My power comes from hydroelectric thank you very much.
Also I'll ask you a very simple question: Why did the US Government not use a passenger plane for that video-demonstration, which would undoubtedly be a much more realistic scenario?
737's don't go that fast at sea level. Air is too dense. An f4 could probably go 2-3x as fast as a 737 at any altitude. I'm too lazy to look up the specific values.
As to why they used an f4? Probably a heck of a lot cheaper than a 737 at the time.
Sometimes the government isn't out to screw you you know...
As to why they used an f4? Probably a heck of a lot cheaper than a 737 at the time.
It would seem like there are plenty of scrapped 737s available[1] to carry out such a test. I'm too lazy to look up prices on these things, but I'd be very surprised if those were significantly more expensive than a scrapped Phantom.
Also we're not only talking about the main reactor housing. Much more radioactive material resides in spent fuel pools which might not be as well protected as the reactor, see also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool#Risks
Actually, most of the damage came from the burning of the fuel. It's worth noting that most nuclear plants have very different construction and design that make them far more resilient in the face of such a disaster... like significant portions being designed to operate continuously at high temperatures...
It's worth noting that most nuclear plants have very different construction and design that make them far more resilient in the face of such a disaster
We've seen how these designs fare in the face of an earthquake and flood.
We're both arguing on the grounds of mere guessing here, but my guess would be that a plane crash might very well cause similar disruptions.
Also if I was a terrorist plotting such an event, I might just fly two planes into the same reactor - because, why not?
The question is not about how such an event is executed but how likely it is. I hope we can agree that a dedicated team of individuals will find a way to cause a catastrophic event in these facilities.
And that's precisely the problem; Nuclear plants require something that we can't provide: Perfection.
We may be able to keep the nominal failure rate at the level that we've seen (Chernobyl, Fukushima). But all economic calculations that these plants have going for them are immediately invalidated when you start considering a single successful deliberate attack.
A dedicated group of individuals capable of harnessing a number of planes in the air simultaneously and get them on a trajectory to a nuclear plant, with an impact exceeding a military bombing attack...
...can probably just build a bomb on their own just fine.
Nuclear power plants don't require perfection. There are minute possibilities of terrible disasters with almost any facility. Nuclear plants do have some particularly disconcerting problems that seem fairly obvious and must be mitigated against, but I think we can allow for the fact that with or without a nuclear plant, bad shit can happen, and actually without said plant, bad shit will happen.
Bhopal didn't have a nuclear power plant, just a measly ol' pesticide plant.
...can probably just build a bomb on their own just fine.
Building a bomb with effects comparable to a reactor meltdown requires significant resources. Running a few planes into a building requires - plane tickets.
You do remember that 9/11 thing, do you?
There are minute possibilities of terrible disasters with almost any facility
You pull every last ridiculous straw, don't you?
Yes, other bad things happen, too. If you think long and hard then you might grasp the difference in magnitude.
Hint: Chernobyl is estimated to have caused 250.000 deaths. 1700 square miles of land have been rendered permanently inhabitable. The numbers for Fukushima are still outstanding.
Thank you. The final figures for Chernobyl and Fukushima will no doubt be higher. Not to mention the cost of people dying of cancer. Nevertheless, let's just take these figures for now.
They work out at well over a billion per commissioned plant.
It is hardly a low risk, is it?
Estimates of Chernobyl's costs have been exacerbated by a number of factors, not the least of which was a number of ridiculous things that were done to cover up the mess.
The $150 billion Katrina estimate is ignoring a number of factors including things like... loss of life, which you know, tends to impact the costs of things.
Just the Federal government has spent >$100 billion and nobody in the area even tries to pretend that they've restored it to its previous state or undone the economic harm. Insurance companies, as you said, have paid $41 billion, so there you're at $141 billion and you've barely scratched the surface as compared to the things factored in to that $235 and $257 billion figures.
But let's cast all that aside. Let's assume the cost is 2-3x Katrina. The incident rate is obviously not that high (there's a reason basically all nuclear plant failures trace back to a design from the 60's), but I'm sure you can plug that in.
Now, I haven't done the math for how many aggregate plant-years of operation we've had, but let's say your average plant has been in operation for 10 years (which is definitely low-balling it in the US, but the mere fact we run these old nuclear power plants is exactly why they are so much more likely to have problems). That's 4360 plant-years. The Wikipedia page has 20+ incidents listed, but that includes a lot of cases that are tiny compared to the disasters you are thinking in terms of (and of course, ironically, anyone who is insuring these things will tell you that those smaller incidents are the primary drivers of the costs in an insurance policy). I count 5 cases throughout history with costs >$1 billion. That works out to a very exaggerated rate of one incident every 972 plant-years.
So, with all those "tie your hand behind your back" factors, a premium of $50 million/year would cover costs very well and leave the insurer rolling profit margins that'll probably create a congressional investigation. That's a lot of money, but compared to the economic output of a power plant, isn't prohibitive.
Realistically though, newer reactor designs, particularly post-3 mile island, have a much lower incident rate than their predecessors and much better mechanisms for containing damage. If insurers were driving the design of plants, it'd probably be even lower (or costs would drop). Most insurers would probably also adjust their premiums based on the age of plants, which at some point would make it more cost effective to build a new one than to keep operating an old one. They'd also reduce costs by establishing rules that would limit their liability in circumstances where the failure was due to some other party not managing their responsibilities.
I'm curious what the real numbers are, but you can see that even being grossly unfair, insurance costs for disasters are not going to make nuclear plants economically non-viable.
You're ignoring the elephant in the room that I mentioned in my last paragraph: We have no idea what the worst-case looks like. We only know it will be beyond imagination.
Please do your math again, and now factor in 3 simultaneous meltdowns in USA reactors, due to plane hits.
Yes, this is exceedingly unlikely. I'd say about as unlikely as passenger planes deliberately crashing into the WTC.
It looks like the Fukushima meltdowns, which with better reactors design would have been manageable.
If you want to get worked up about risks, do the math on meteor and comet impacts. There is a reason that American defense planners are blasé about nuclear reactors and worked up about extraterrestrial impactors. It's only a matter of time before we lose a city to a meteor. That's lose, not temporarily evacuate or have an unfortunate increase in cancer rates.
It looks like the Fukushima meltdowns, which with better reactors design would have been manageable.
Perhaps. An energy shield (like in starwars!) would also make them safe. But we don't have these things. Most reactors are over 20 years old[1] and not going to be replaced with better designs any time soon.
If you want to get worked up about risks, do the math on meteor and comet impacts
We can't do anything about meteors and comets.
But we can get rid of nuclear plants.
Newer designs are not used because the environmentalists would rather have political power than electrical power. We have the know-how to design standardized reactors and build them by the hundreds, but not the will.
The meteor problem is even easier to solve. We need to build observation telescopes, lots of them. We then use off-the-shelf rockets to paycheck off-the-shelf nuclear bomb interceptors mounted on almost-off-the-shelf delivery platforms.
Yes, why use simple cheap solar panels that can easily be replaced if we can over engineer everything to the nth degree?
Thank you for illuminating the core difficulty of too much centralisation: mounting problems and mounting costs.
Looking at Fukushima, it is not the terrorists and the meteors that frighten me the most. It is the simple combination of the everyday events like earthquakes, with corruption, inefficiency, cost-cutting and the culture of secrecy that fosters and supports it all. These are the real but invisible dangers that you cannot shoot down from your robotic space platforms.
Covering up the Chernobyl mess? What makes you think covering up Fukushima has cost a lot? I mean, yeah the nuclear industry has a lot of free PR drones in IT for some reason, but still, it's gotta be pretty costly to run the kind of shit they did.
The problem is that being insured reduces incentives to not make a mistake. Nuclear companies are already often better at covering things up (look at Tepco, and Chernobyl for extreme cases, but also the ongoing poor disclosure in the uk). Thats why insurance wont happen, not some actuarial issues about probability.
The US is just starting a trade war with China over solar where they are putting a 31% tariff on Chinese panels, which will hugely increase the cost of solar in the US.
If a nuclear power plant blows up, the whole area is going to look for years to come like a scene from a apocalyptic movie
Chernobyl is actually a wildlife wonderland now people can't live in the area. Animals don't deem to have a problem living in highly radioactive environments. They have more immediate issues than getting cancer. But for humans a nuclear meltdown is bad news.
So its not through environment that suffers on the whole, more that it is no longer suitable for humans.
But yes, the result of a nuclear disaster is much more dramatic in the short term, making it scarier than the same amount of damage that a coal powerplant dripfeeds.
> "Many people come here expecting to see a lunar landscape, so when they see trees, and birds and a few mammals, they're surprised.
> "They think, 'ah well maybe it's not so bad'.
> "But what we're finding is that there is a significant impact on both the population and the biodiversity - the number of species - in the zone. And it's directly proportional to the level of contamination."
(But the article mentions that this is a polarised debate, and that this is only one side.)
Agreed. I visited Chernobyl two years ago, and in all of Europe I've never seen a place so verdant, and teeming with wildlife. The canal especially had many large fish.
Friend of mine studied mice in a nuclear disaster zone.
Basically, mice adapted and there was no statistical difference compared to a control population (outside the zone).
The only thing I do not get is why energy companies are not forced to carry more extensive insurance policies to the long term damages/risks they cause. Pushing this through all the way should provide enough incentives to move towards renewables.