Shuttering of New York facility raises awkward climate crisis questions as gas – not renewables – fills gap in power generation
When New York’s deteriorating and unloved Indian Point nuclear plant finally shuttered in 2021, its demise was met with delight from environmentalists who had long demanded it be scrapped.
But there has been a sting in the tail – since the closure, New York’s greenhouse gas emissions have gone up.
Castigated for its impact upon the surrounding environment and feared for its potential to unleash disaster close to the heart of New York City, Indian Point nevertheless supplied a large chunk of the state’s carbon-free electricity.
Since the plant’s closure, it has been gas, rather then clean energy such as solar and wind, that has filled the void, leaving New York City in the embarrassing situation of seeing its planet-heating emissions jump in recent years to the point its power grid is now dirtier than Texas’s, as well as the US average.
Environmentalists wanted it gone because it was old, ill maintained, harmed wildlife by raising river temperature, and had leaks…
It faced a constant barrage of criticism over safety concerns, however, particularly around the leaking of radioactive material into groundwater and for harm caused to fish when the river’s water was used for cooling. Pressure from Andrew Cuomo, New York’s then governor, and Bernie Sanders – the senator called Indian Point a “catastrophe waiting to happen” – led to a phased closure announced in 2017, with the two remaining reactors shutting in 2020 and 2021.
A leaky nuclear reactor upstream from a major metro area isn’t a good thing…
The reason it was closed wasn’t carbon emissions, that would be ridiculous.
It was closed because it was unsafe
With that logic they should be ripping out every hydroelectric dam as well.
If ones cracked and keeps springing leaks, yeah, that shit needs fixed.
But you don’t exactly “rip out” a dam…
I think you’re just one of many people who think one bad nuke pant makes them all bad.
One flawed anything doesn’t make all of anything bad, especially when the bad one is one of the first made in the world and there have been ridiculous amounts of advancement in the field.
Hell, it was 20 years after we really figured out nuclear physics when this was built, and 3x that long till it was decommissioned. It just wasn’t good anymore.
You all treat energy policy like it was highschool sports rivals.
I trust nuclear can be built safely, problem is I don’t trust the humans building, maintaining, and running it to not cut corners. I flat out didn’t trust nuclear that’s run for profit as shareholders will demand cost cutting to maximize profits, and I didn’t know if I’d trust publication funded nuclear to stay properly funded.
It doesn’t have to be capitalistic.
Having our energy grid be for profit is a ridiculous idea anyways.
And the Navy has been training nuclear engineers for decades, without any major accidents despite almost all of their reactors being shoved into ships and submarines and training takes 18-24 months and being offered to kids literally right out of highschool.
Nationalize the energy grid and require government certification/contracts fornuclear plant operators.
Hell, most Navy nuclear engineers would literally jump ship to that just to be off a ship. But loads more would sign if the pay/bonuses was in anyway comparable to what Navy gets.
Just because capitalism makes something impossible doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Just that it’s incompatible with capitalism.
But you have to compare its safety with what will replace it. Gas is known to produce fumes that poison the air we breathe and warm the climate. This will lead to people dying.
So which is worse? I suspect the answer is gas because we consistently underestimate the danger from fossil fuels and overestimate the danger from nuclear. But you’d have to do some kind of risk assessment to be certain.
But you have to compare its safety with what will replace it.
Specifically this plant?
I’m hoping by “gas” you mean natural gas and not gasoline, but yeah, natural gas is better than an untrustworthy reactor because of the risk involved. Not forever, but right now it’s better than if we kept running a plant that will eventually have catastrophic failure.
Once turbines are spun up, it all pretty much runs itself. If you automated the oil purifiers it could conceivably run for years even decades on its on it’s own and not have any issues.
But we don’t take that chance, because something might go wrong.
The quality of this plant was shit, so the potential risk outweighed the known benefits and it needed shut down.
That doesn’t mean nuclear power is bad.
It means this one specific plant is bad after 60 years of operation and being one of the first plants constructed. It doesn’t mean we can’t build a modern plant that’s built to last and maintain it.
Shutting it down even if that means a temp return to fossil fuels for this one relatively tiny area for a few years is worth avoiding a nuclear meltdown a couple miles upstream of NYC…
It’s basic risk assessment
According to you. I believe the opposite.
We need to measure the actual dangers (in terms of lives lost, illnesses, etc.) and risks (in terms of probability of various outcomes) involved in order to arrive at an informed conclusion regarding this issue.
Natural gas kills people every day. This plant might, hypothetically, kill people in the future. Barring strong evidence that the second outcome is dramatically larger or more likely, the default should be to avoid killing people now.
According to you. I believe the opposite.
Welp…
The US government spent well over six figures teaching me nuclear engineering…
Seriously, it’s fucking expensive.
So if you think this comes down to a matter of opinion. That’s fine.
Feel free to keep thinking you’re the expert. It legitimately doesn’t matter in the slightest, I was just trying to help you understand.
Well I’m afraid you’re doing a very poor job of it. If you are truly an expert on this topic it should be easy for you to provide some research that supports your position here. If there is any. Or you can just assert you’re a brilliant expert who should be unquestioningly believed on the basis of a comment on Lemmy. We’ll have to see which is the more effective educational technique.
It does matter, unqualified opinions holding equal weight with expert opinions/analysis is a serious issue in society.
On a large scale, sure.
But I’m only going to sink so much time into explaining stuff for one person.
On Reddit it was different because 10s even 100s of thousands of people might read a chain of comments.
Smaller communities tho, if someone doesn’t get, whatever.
First we have no way of confirming that this person is really an expert and considering they have shown no real advanced knowledge of the topic, count me skeptical.
Second, this completely misunderstands the nature of science and expertise. Science works because it is a process that uses documentation of evidence to arrive at logical and probabilistic conclusions. Experts are not magical unicorns that spray forth truth. They are experts because they have a deep familiarity with the research in their field. Their roles is to share this research, not boldly state opinions and then fall back on their authority when challenged. That is the rhetoric of demagogues.
In fact, I think it is precisely this misunderstanding about the nature of expertise that has led to the problem you’ve described but misunderstood.
He absolutely isn’t an expert. He may very well have done what he claims, but if so the military training he received simply teaches him to diligently read from a book and follow the steps listed there. He’s no more an expert based on this training than someone is an artisan baker for following the recipe on the back of a box or Betty Crocker.
While it was a net benefit to close this specific plant, fossil fuel power plants pump radioactive particles into the environment along with other pollutants.
Oh good info. I am Pro Nuclear and Pro renewable. I think modern reactors have a real place in our future grid, but yeah old leaky reactors we should get rid of.
I beg you Lemmy, dont be like a redditor that just reads the purposefully inflammatory headlines and gets mad over it. Always assume a headline is supposed to get a specific emotional response from you and read the article.
For this one the environmental concerns people had were not about carbon emissions, they were about groundwater contamination
It faced a constant barrage of criticism over safety concerns, however, particularly around the leaking of radioactive material into groundwater and for harm caused to fish when the river’s water was used for cooling.
The plant as well as NYs other plants that face a lot of criticism were built in the 60s long before much of the modern saftey measures and building techniques that make Modern reactors so safe. And thats why they were decommissioned, they were almost 60 years old and way past their initial life span. Not because of “Dumb environmental activists think taking nuclear power offline will decrease carbon emissions” like whoever wrote this headline is trying to get you to assume.
You are not immune to propaganda.
Canada’s CANDU reactors were built in the 60’s and are providing Ontario 60-80% of its power.
Shitty design and build are the main problem. Not the age
Modern is a misnomer. Most of our plants are 30+ years old. After 3 Mile Island, nuclear development ground to a halt in the US. No new nuclear power began development after 1979 except 2 new reactors at the existing Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia that were approved in 2009.
And only one reactor at Indian Point came online in the 60s. Units 2 and 3 came online 12 and 14 years after unit one. And unit 1 was decommissioned in 1974 as it is, shortly after unit 2 came online.
In any case, why not fix the issue rather than just shutting the plant?
And that does not make the headline “inflammatory.” It is accurate. People just assume that nuclear will be magically replaced by renewables. But you can’t just do that. You can draw a direct line from the closure of Indian Point to the construction of 3 natural gas turbine plants.
Three natural gas-fired power plants have been introduced over the past three years to help support the electric supply needed by New York City that Indian Point had been providing: Bayonne Energy Center II (120 MW), CPV Valley Energy Center (678 MW), and Cricket Valley Energy Center (1,020 MW).
In any case, why not fix the issue rather than just shutting the plant?
Because just patching up an old faulty nuclear power plant thats past its expected service life is a recipe for disaster. Hence why we have service lifetimes for these things in the first place?
And that does not make the headline “inflammatory.” It is accurate
It absolutely is inflammatory. Its specifically trying to conflate environmental concerns of polluted groundwater with carbon emissions, to make it seem like the people who voiced those concerns are idiots.
thats past its expected service life
Citation needed. It received a 40-year permit to start because that was the max permit issued.
Lots of things last well past their “expected service life.” That is why there is the word EXPECTED. The problem was in the spent fuel pools. They could build brand new ones.
Tell me, what was the expected service life of the Brooklyn Bridge? Should people avoid it because continuing to use it is “a recipe for disaster?”
The fact is, intensive inspections would have been required for another permit to continue operating.
Listen, if you think we should build newer and better nuclear power plants, I am right with you. But until that happens, we cannot just flush what we have down the toilet.
Should we build wind and solar? Absolutely. But we also need green power that works when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, and that is what Indian Point gave the state of NY for decades.
It absolutely is inflammatory. Its specifically trying to conflate environmental concerns of polluted groundwater with carbon emissions, to make it seem like the people who voiced those concerns are idiots.
It cites a “green win.” The groundwater issue is absolutely a green issue.
But even then, those pushing to close it down claimed it would be replaced by green energy. The National Resourced Defence Council claimed that “Indian Point Is Closing, but Clean Energy Is Here to Stay.” The claimed that “because of New York’s landmark 2019 climate legislation and years of clean energy planning and investments by the state, New York is better positioned today than ever to achieve its ambitious climate and clean energy goals without this risky plant.”
So, yes, it was absolutely advertised as a climate win that the NY would easily replace it with renewable energy, even when those 3 gas turbine plants were being bought online.
In any case, why not fix the issue rather than just shutting the plant?
Because the bean counters counted the beans and found that it wouldn’t be profitable.
Besides the text of the article, there is the issue that environmentalist fear-mongering about nuclear energy caused extreme hesitance to build a new plant and that has lead directly to greenhouse gas emissions increases.
Indeed, we are not immune to propaganda.
Well when you consider that reactors at the time werent as safe as they are now, and that we had several high profile nuclear reactor failures at around the same time, that were all pretty narrowly stopped from becoming even worse disasters and all those reactors were “Perfectly safe” until they werent and also just how deeply awful the effects of radiation is. Do you think its actually “fear mongering” or reasonable concern? I suppose the difference depends mostly on which side of the argument you are on.
Environmentalists can’t stop oil and gas companies from drilling and fracking and spilling and polluting. If nuclear was profitable environmentalists wouldn’t be able to stop it either.
The only reason we have so many nuclear plants is because the government subsidized them because they produce material that can be used in weapons. Just the reactor on its own isn’t profitable for decades, which is too long for a company to wait for a return even in the good old days before profits needed to grow every quarter.
Well, nuclear can be profitable. It’s just that fossil fuels are more profitable.
But this is also where the government needs to step in. There should be a carbon tax to account for the climate change externality. Also, clean sources of power including nuclear should be subsidized.
Keep in mind that while environmentalists maybe can’t stop it, some of them happily join a coalition with NIMBYs and indeed, fossil fuel companies to stop nuclear.
Even if the government did start heavily subsidizing nuclear, it will take a decade for new plants to come online. In the meantime, hundreds of gigawatts of renewables will come online, and storage and efficiency technologies will improve immensely. Like I said in another comment, if renewable power lowers the price of electricity, the nuclear plant will take even longer to be profitable.
The plant should have been closed for updating and modernization, not just closed permanently.
Nuclear is the only way we will get to carbon neutral emissions anytime soon.
You cant really just keep “modernising” ancient reactor designs forever. Eventually you’ll need to close them down and build something else.
And realistically it makes way way more sense to build Wind power than nuclear to get us to carbon neutral. We can build a 50mw wind farm in 6 months.
For comparison Hinkley Point C in the UK was announces in 2010 and is currently expected to be commissioned by 2029.
That means if we built wind instead we would have built 1900MW of capacity in the time it would have taken to build the NPP and by the time the reactors would generate power for the first time the wind farms would already have generated 17 GW/years of power. If we stopped building more wind farms when the NPP completed it would take the reactor 14 more years just to catch up to the wind farms. And if we continue to build wind farms nuclear literally never catches up as total wind capacity would overtake the capacity of the NPP by year 13.
Yes you can make arguments about the uptime of wind, but I think ive made my point. And thats not even factoring in the cost/MW of capacity.
This is a great point about renewables: A partially finished solar or wind power installation can produce some power and start recouping costs. A nuclear plant doesn’t start bringing in income until it’s completely finished, so all those billions tied up in design and construction are a liability for a lot longer.
You didn’t factor in that nuclear only takes forever because we haven’t done it in a long time and have lost all of the knowledge and skilled builders that know how to do it. If we properly pursued new nuclear plants in the US on a federal and state level it would absolutely be the best option.
I know you touched on it but the battery storage needed to make wind reliable would be enormous.
I’m a firm believer nuclear and renewables are what we need to be spending our time and money, not one or the other but both.
You didn’t factor in that nuclear only takes forever because we haven’t done it in a long time and have lost all of the knowledge and skilled builders that know how to do it.
I didn’t, because its not true.
France has been building new reactors consistently since they started in the 50s and yet their latest reactor Flamamville 3 has been under construction since 2007.
The only people that can do Nuclear quickly are China through a combination of lesser safety standards, their totalitarian government, and the massive scale at which they are building them.
know you touched on it but the battery storage needed to make wind reliable would be enormous.
You don’t need batteries to make windows viable, there are lots of solutions, the most obvious being to just overbuild it.
I’m a firm believer nuclear and renewables are what we need to be spending our time and money, not one or the other but both
I’m not, nuclear just doesn’t make sense to build right now, nuclesr is a medium tern solution to a long term problem that needs immediate solutions.
You get way way more MWs per $ with wind. Wind farms can be built in 6 months and start generating power immediately. Even the fastest NPPs can’t compete. Wind farms can be built anywhere because they take no workers to operate and requite much less lightly skilled workers to maintain and no water to oeprate (so arent affected by droughts). They are less hindered by planning regulations, nimbys and protest groups, can be built onshore or offshore and also don’t have the chance to make an area uninhabitable for generations.
The only advantages nuclear has is a smaller footprint which is mitigated by wind being dispersed and stable output. Which is something that can be compensated for in wind.
environmentalists who had long demanded it be scrapped.
That doesn’t sound right, it’s fossil fuel simps that are anti-nuclear
More likely they wanted it to be updated
Environmentalists have only come around to nuclear in the last half-decade or so. For a long time after 3MI and Chernobyl, nuclear was the devil.
There was a genuine split on the issue in environmentalist communities. The Sierra Club, for instance, has pretty much always been an advocate for nuclear when it replaces coal. The WWF has also advocated nuclear as a means of reduced mining and drilling.
But both of these endorsements are predicated on long-term waste mitigation and clean-up of industrial sites. The Yucca Mountain waste deposit site that never got built, for instance. Or modernized thorium recyclers to handle the byproducts of traditional uranium waste that the US declined to develop or deploy.
They also almost universally disapprove of the manufacture of plutonium, both because it contributes to higher levels of plant waste and because the plutonium becomes fissile material capable of ending all life on earth.
So it isn’t just “environmentalists came around on this lately”. Its a whole host of modernizations and waste management actions that NEVER GET BUILT and are then used to prod environmentalist groups into protest.
As someone who was vehemently pro nuclear, unfortunately we missed the boat. The time to invest heavy in nuclear was 50 years ago and instead we did the opposite. Renewables have caught up and nuclear is so far behind that it makes zero sense to build any new reactors when we can just build out more renewable power gen and battery storage for less money and without the whole nuclear waste handling problem.
Best time to plant a tree was 50 years ago. Second best time is now.
Sure, if we could snap our fingers and have a bunch of nuclear plants it would make sense. But the tech is all ancient, and the regulatory structure is oppressive. It will take decades to build out the amount of nuclear capacity we need and cost inordinate amounts of money, and we’ve already passed the tipping point where renewables are the better choice.
Just as an example, it took us 14 years to build a single reactor in the Vogtle plant costing over $30 billion dollars. We’d need massive reforms to the regulations and supply chain for building reactors to bring those numbers down and that just won’t happen fast enough.
Even China, who is the world leader in nuclear power these days is slowing down building of new reactors in favor of renewables, and they do not have the regulations and supply issues we have in the USA.
Please don’t be so defeatist.
I wouldn’t call it defeatist, nuclear should never be more than a stopgap to 100% renewables. if anything, it’s awesome that we’ve gotten far enough with renewables that switching to them entirely is now a viable proposition. It sucks that we spent so much time dependent on fossil fuels when we could’ve been using nuclear, but the past is the past and the future is bright.
I will say, small modular reactors might have a place in the energy mix. They would be fantastic for more isolated grids where stability is difficult to achieve with 100% renewable energy. Think small island nations or remote areas. Also would be good for emergency and disaster recovery scenarios. We (as in the USA) also already have the supply chain to build them somewhat efficiently since we use them on our aircraft carriers. Just needs some tweaking to work well on land and for the regulations to loosen up to make it economically feasible.
Eh. No shortage of useful idiots on these forums saying solar should replace nuclear.
They just don’t understand how the power grid works.
One of the biggest environmental groups in the world is vehemently anti nuclear
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/fighting-climate-chaos/issues/nuclear/
Environmentalists are always and forever the prime movers in national politics, don’t you know? Cause they’ve got billions of dollars at their disposal and an enormous base of employees to draw on for electoral activism and lots of friendly former-environmentalists in positions of elected / appointed authority.
Who can forget the wise worlds of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he warned us all of the threat of the Environmentalist Industrial Complex?
Modern nuclear technology is much safer than older stuff, additionally when the older plants are well maintained they are much safer than they’re made out to be.
This is one of those cases where pop culture doesn’t match reality and as a result people who are half informed do more damage to their cause by rejecting the good in pursuit of the great.
additionally when the older plants are well maintained they are much safer than they’re made out to be.
This one was leaking radioactive matter into the river upstream of NYC…
Even just primary fluid leaking into secondary is a giant issue.
Radioactive matter in the river means containment leaked to primary, then leaked to secondary…
If you don’t know why that is so bad, you really shouldn’t be talking about how safe nuclear power is. Because even tho you’re right, you don’t know why.
If you don’t know why that is so bad, you really shouldn’t be talking about how safe nuclear power is. Because even tho you’re right, you don’t know why.
You’re kind of gaslighting people by equating “this instance of a 70 year old badly maintained plant” to “how safe nuclear power is”.
Besides, I am pretty certain some oil and gas lobbying prevented better maintenance here.
You’re kind of gaslighting people by equating “this instance of a 70 year old badly maintained plant” to “how safe nuclear power is”.
Where have I ever said nuclear power is unsafe?
You’re inventing me saying something and accusing me of gaslighting because it disagrees with an opinion you happen to have.
Do you have any idea how ridiculous that is and how unlikely it is now for me to ever attempt to try and help you understand anything?
The plant was from 1956, nearing a century of age by now. Old plants like this one explode in their running costs and typically accumulate more and more maintenance incidences each year, ultimately becoming a security risk.
The main problem though is that countries betting on nuclear power do fuck all with renewables, which makes it unsurprising that you have to resort to other means to fill potential gaps to replace them. In this case they could’ve built renewables, or even other nuclear plants, for several decades already in order to replace this ancient one.
Articles & comments like this are basically just paid propaganda pieces by the nuclear lobby.
Yeah, article just offhand mentions that radioactive material was leaking into the river…
That means there was multiple ongoing leaks between multiple systems that need to be completely separate for safe operation.
If the stacks were still good, they should have replaced the reactor. But if those leaks were ongoing and either weren’t addressed or couldn’t be fixed, then it’s incredibly doubtful any maintenance was being done.
Any nuclear plant that’s leaking radioactive material needs shut down till it’s repaired.
And this one was just in such bad shape it couldn’t be repaired.
Yeah, article just offhand mentions that radioactive material was leaking into the river…
Aww man, you were so close to having it figured out. It mentioned that in an off handed way because it left you, the reader, with an impression of what was happening without having to get into the details. Why would they do that? Because said details don’t line up with what you’ve been talking about.
If we look at the NY RiverKeepers website, a source biased towards getting rid of this plant, we find this article: https://www.riverkeeper.org/campaigns/stop-polluters/indian-point/radioactive-waste/radiological-leaks-at-indian-point/
In there is a leak to the radiological events since the plant opened: https://www.riverkeeper.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Indian-Point-Radioactive-Leaks-Sheet.pdf
Oh. No leaking reactors, no leaking primary or secondary cooling systems…most of the problem was with their holding ponds and there were some valve failures.
Now none of that is good but it’s a FAR cry from the “leaking reactor” narrative that you seem to have.
It’s paywalled, but that’s what the wiki point to.
If radioactive primary go to SSTG’s then it got to the discharge.
They also had an incident where they intentionally vented radioactive steam to atmosphere, but then a valve got stuck and it took them two days to notice.
That plant was a shit show and had been for decades.
But when you act like you’re acting, most people won’t invest too much time helping you.
Everything can be repaired. It just stops being cost effective at a certain point to do so.
A leaky containment unit isn’t a hole in a bike tire, you can’t just get it patched.
And to get a new one in, you’re going to have to be ripping out other systems and literally knocking down walls.
By “replace the reactor”. I meant containment and primary systems. Secondary system probably didn’t have major issues because it’s basically normal plumbing at that point. But it’s so cheap it would be stupid to not replace it as well.
But the carbon downside to nuclear is the carbon release from the concrete stacks (cloud makers). So even if literally everything else needed to be replaced, it still would have been worth it.
If the stacks were fucked, yeah, it’s not salvageable.
You’d literally be demolishing everything onsite and then building a new one. That’s not even ship of Thesius level “repair”. Everything would be removed and then you’d start fresh.
Indian Point was water cooled, hence the river water leakage and heating concerns. Water cooled plants don’t have those huge stacks you’re talking about. Those only exist on air cooled plants.
You’re right.
I saw the giant concrete enclosure in the pic and my brain just saw it as a stack.
So yeah, to get the actual containment unit replaced, everything would have to be destroyed and replaced.
There’s a reason someone as stupid as Homer can keep the plant working.
If you ever see someone shilling solar over nuclear, it’s because they are useful idiots succumbing to propaganda.
You can sell solar to any moron, which is why there are so many dipshits on these forums shilling it without understanding it.
Hard to imagine how anyone who’s concerned about climate change could see shutting down a carbon-free energy source as a “green win”.
Blame solarbros and their useful idiots.
There’s a SHIT TON of propaganda surrounding solar because average people can get duped into buying it.
It’s a lot harder to rip people off with other forms of energy because communities need to make a collective decision to use them.
Any moron can get suckered into buying solar, which is why you see so many scumbags and useful idiots shilling it on forums
I don’t think I can agree with you there. Solar power is an incredibly valuable technology, in many ways more so than nuclear. If we were replacing this nuclear energy with increased solar I’d have no complaint. The problem is solar is already growing as fast as it can with or without shutting down any nuclear plants, so what it’s actually replaced with as discussed in this article is fossil fuels. Hopefully the solar curve can catch up eventually and shut down those fossil fuels as well, but it’s ridiculous to ditch nuclear before then.
If we were replacing this nuclear energy with increased solar I’d have no complaint.
We got one, boys.
Learn how the power grid works before commenting further.
Here’s a video to get you started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1BMWczn7JM
Wow you are unpleasant
There’s a legitimate argument that we can’t grow our way out of climate change, and the real solution to our emissions problem is degrowth and descaling of our obscene rates of consumption. In that sense, had they been closing the plant with the expectation of drastically reducing energy demand, it might have made sense.
Its not as though nuclear energy produces no waste, just extremely low levels of CO2 waste. But if you’re just going to replace energy demand (and continue to grow energy supply) with new coal/gas consumption, who are you fooling except yourselves?
In that sense, had they been closing the plant with the expectation of drastically reducing energy demand, it might have made sense.
I really hate this kind of reasoning. Even if we do manage to reduce our energy consumption, closing the nuclear plant would still be more harmful to the environment because we could have closed fossil fuel plants instead. Unless, of course, we’d manage to reduce energy consumption so much that we wouldn’t need any non-renewable energy sources - which I don’t think is very realistic assumption. Certainly not realistic enough to make such a gamble on.
The only way closing the nuclear plant would have been beneficial to the environment would be if the act of closing it would have caused a reduction in our energy consumption that is greater than the energy the plant itself was producing (minus some extra energy from fossil fuel plants that take up its “emission budget” to increase their own energy production). Which is also quite unrealistic. I actually think it makes more sense that it achieved the opposite effect, since closing the plant took up activists’ effort and environmental publicity, which could have been used to push for reducing consumption instead.
Even if we do manage to reduce our energy consumption, closing the nuclear plant would still be more harmful to the environment because we could have closed fossil fuel plants instead
At some point you have to acknowledge nuclear power (particularly from planes dating back to the 60s/70s) as their own waste problem.
And you can try to address this waste with more modern clean up techniques. Or you can decommission these old plants. But just waiting for derelict facilities to crumble, on the ground that “Nuclear Good / FF Bad” means another generation of Fukushima like events that drive people further from nuclear as a long term solution.
That’s not a legitimate argument because the West combined emits less CO2 than just China. The economy of the West is growing, but emitting less carbon because of more green power sources, one of which being nuclear
A lot of that is still the Wests carbon, just because our products and materials are now coming from China doesn’t mean we are absolved from the responsibility of those emissions. This is why reduce was meant to be the biggest part of reduce, reuse, recycle, and this means degrowth.
the West combined emits less CO2 than just China.
Not even remotely true, per capita.
Because a lot of Chinese people still do sustenance farming. They don’t add to carbon, they actually might be carbon negative since they grow crops
Because a lot of Chinese people still do sustenance farming.
That hasn’t been true in decades.
I’ve met them in Yunnan last year, lmao, you have no idea, you’ve never been to China so shut the fuck the up
you’ve never been to China
It’s funny to hear folks call you a Wumao “never even been to China” in such short order.
It takes a lot of time and money to travel the world. But I’m sure you have an abundance of both, right? I certainly don’t, which is why I post Chinese Propaganda for a living.
Radioactive waste emissions went up? That’s pretty odd.
No really, coal has pretty high nuclear emissions, but these are vented into the enviroment, instead of controlled and contained.
That’s why they cordoned off half of 19th century Europe, they used coal stoves and had become an irradiated wasteland.
You can’t claim to be an environmentalist and be anti-nuclear energy at the same time.
Like I’ve said, most of the people who support nuclear energy are ANTI-environmentlists. They don’t support it for the world. They just support it to rub their dicks in environmentalism’s face.
Sounds like environmentalists need to support nuclear, a carbon-free power source. Then complaints like yours vanish.
I don’t understand where you think the most environmentally friendly power production option is anti environmental. It produces the least amounts of greenhouse and uses the least amount of land per kW produced. A properly run plant has no contamination of its environment, high level waste can be run through reactors again and again until fully expended and becomes low level waste that can be stored at the facility indefinitely. Where in the world are you getting the idea that nuclear power is bad for the environment?
Absolute horseshit take.
Of course. The problem with waste is still there and you can also replace Nuclear with renewables, like Germany did. Nuclear shut down, coal also 20 % down, renewables on record heights.
Nuclear waste is no where near the problem propagandist make it out to be. And Germany shutting down nuclear plants is not the benefit you think it is. They might be using less coal (all the 2023 stats I’ve seen do not reflect that) but they are still using oil and gas and their energy imports of fossil fuels went up in '23. Shutting down nuclear plants has caused them to become less energy green, not more.
I’ve always been pro nuclear. But what I’ve come to understand is that nuclear accidents are traumatizing. Anybody alive in Europe at the time was psychologically damaged by Chernobyl. Don’t forget also that the elder Xers and older worldwide lived under the specter of nuclear annihilation.
So you’ve got rational arguments vs. visceral fear. Rationality isn’t up to it. At the end of the day, the pronuclear side is arguing to trust the authorities. Being skeptical of that is the most rational thing in the world. IDK how to fix this, I’m just trying to describe the challenge pronuclear is up against.
You got it. I’ve had this discussion and the anti nuclear boils down to “somewhat, somehow, something, someone, maybe, possibly, perhaps may go wrong. Anything built by man could fail”. There’s no logic, just fear.
At this point, you can be economically anti-nuclear. The plants take decades to build with a power cost well above wind/solar. You can build solar/wind in high availability areas and connect them to the grid across the states with high power transmission lines, leading to less time that renewables aren’t providing a base line load. One such line is going in right now from the high winds great plains to Illinois, which will connect it to the eastern coastal grid illinois is part of.
We also have a hilarious amountof tech coming online for power storage, from the expected lithium to nasa inspire gas battery designs, to stranger tech like making and reducing rust on iron.
There is also innovation in “geothermal anywhere” technology that uses oil and gas precision drilling to dig deep into the earth anywhere to tap geothermal as a base load. Roof wind for industrial parks is also gaining steam, as new designs using the wind funneling current shape of the buildings are being piloted, rivaling local solar with a simplier implementation.
While speculative, many of these techs are online and working at a small scale. At least some of them will pay off much faster, much cheaper and much more consistently before any new nuclear plants can be opened.
Nuclear’s time was 50 years ago. Now? It’s a waste to do without a viable small scale design. Those have yet to happen, mainly facing setbacks, but i’m rooting for them.
there is one cool thing about nuclear though, if you know what you’re doing they’re ripe for government subsidy investment. One and done, they’ll run for like 30-50 years. No questions asked. It’s really just the upfront build cost that’s the problem.
While renewables get build without subsidies, because they pay off anyway.
there are a lot of subsidies for renewables right now. They both have use cases, and different advantages. Nuclear is just particularly apt for the exact situation we’re in right now.
As economists say, diversify investments.
FWIW, I’m an Xer against nuclear power, but not for the reason you outlined: it’s because it’s an overall bad approach to energy generation.
It produces extremely long-lasting waste, on timescales humans are not equipped to deal with. It has a potential byproduct of enabling more nuclear weapons. The risks associated with disaster are orders of magnitude greater than any other power generation system we use, perhaps other than dams. It requires seriously damaging mining efforts to obtain the necessary fuel. It is more expensive.
We have the tech to do everything with renewables and storage now.
It’s not my trauma, it’s my logic that leads me to be generally against nuclear. (Don’t have to be very against it, no one wants to build these now anyway.)
It produces extremely long-lasting waste, on timescales humans are not equipped to deal with.
Very little waste compared to burning coal or oil which also produces waste we aren’t equipped to deal with. See oh idk global warming.
A lot compared to renewables. Did you read what he said? “We have the tech to do everything with renewables and storage now.”
Nuclear is unexpectedly safer and less polluting than renewables. That’s including stuff like Chernobyl. Also less expensive overall. The plant itself is expensive yes but for the energy output/cost per watt it’s by far cheaper last I checked.
Shut up Xer they said it’s a security problem don’t use your logic
There have been more deaths and major environmental disasters with fossil fuels than with all nuclear accidents combined (including the less reported ones that happened in the 50s and 60s). Nuclear plants are generally safe and reliable. They do not produce excessive waste like wind (used turbine blades) and solar (toxic waste from old panels that cannot be economically recycled).
Nuclear is the superior non-carbon energy source right now. Climate change is an emergency, so we shouldn’t be waiting on other technologies to mature before we start phasing out emitting power plants in favor of emission-free nuclear plants.
Who would think that’s a green victory?
Because it was leaking radioactive matter into the river upstream of one of the most densely populated areas in this hemisphere…
Considering all releases to the environment from the plant, including the Hudson River, for 2010 Entergy calculated an annual dose of about 0.2 millirem whole body and 0.7 millirem to the critical organ. This compares to a normal average yearly dose per person of 620 millirem from background radiation and other sources such as medical tests.
As far as I can see that’s not a big deal. Just sounds scary right?
It assumes a normal distribution spread out over an equal area. Which isn’t really something we should be assuming.
But yeah. 0.7 millirem is the equivalent of eating 70 bananas.
So if that was the most anyone got, it’s not a big deal.
But we shouldn’t be assuming that.
It was under federal regulations, but this is American industry we’re talking about. “Within regulations” doesn’t always mean “safe”.
There are no drinking water sources that are affected, so the dose to the public would be from eating fish and shellfish from the Hudson River.
So it’s also only if you eat sea food from there.
It does sound like a lot of fuss over nothing tbh.
Mate, why keep asking questions?
If you want to learn more, try reading something more than a single article.
Like, nuclear engineering school sucked a lot, and was a while ago for me. You’re wanting to ask a teeny tiny question, wait for me to respond, re-read the same article, then ask a follow up.
This is the absolute least efficient way for you to learn things. Especially nuclear exposure and all the ramifications.
Like, it would be different if you had a simple question or two that you asked in one comment for someone to help you understand.
The people who wanted it shut down talked about local safety issues like groundwater contamination. Green advocates generally understand that nuclear is better for CO2 and it’s dumb to shut them down. Feel like the article is muddying the issue by using ‘green’ to mean multiple things.
YOU understands it is dumb to shut them down. You are not necessarily the average green advocate. The average anything advocate / activists these days are usually much dumber than the general concerned citizens.
I’d argue that impressions like that are given by somewhat misleading articles like this.
lets take bets. Was it scheduled decommissioning? i.e. EOL shutdown If so this entire article is kind of redundant. (it still serves a point in bringing awareness but it’s still funny)
Was it scheduled decommissioning? i.e. EOL shutdown If so this entire article is kind of redundant.
The operators of the plant applied for a 20-year license renewal. New York challenged that renewal due to “environmental and safety concerns.” As such, the plant was forced to shut down.
So, no this was not an EOL shutdown.
If they had to apply for a renewal, then their old license ran out.
That is exactly what EOL is.So when my driver’s license expires after 8 years, my driving ability has reached EOL, and I should not be able to renew. Sound logic there.
You clearly do not know what you are talking about. Other plants have been granted license renewals and are operating just fine.
I never claimed that the license couldn’t be renewed nor that it wouldn’t be running fine.
The license period had a pre-determined END and it’s LIFEtime has not been extended.
Surely the very existence of a time limit to the license must mean that the option to not renew it after a certain time has been anticipated when the license was originally issued.And for all that it does not matter, whether that was the correct decision or not, whether other plants had their licenses renewed orwhether these other plants are operating just fine.
You sounded like you were claiming that. Do you realize there is a difference between the end of a LICENCE and the end of something’s functional life? You were claiming that because the LICENCE was only good for 40 years (the longest license the feds issued) that it was somehow the end of the PLANT’S useful life.
As I said elsewhere, they applied for a 20-year renewal, NY sued, and the high costs of fighting for the renewal led them to settle and shut it down. But NONE of that means that the plant was some falling apart scrapheap that needed closed, which is what I took from what you said.
there is a difference between the end of a LICENCE and the end of something’s functional life?
This may be somewhat pedantic but the plant’s functional life ended when the license ran out.
The planned/ hoped for EoL may have been longer but if there was a 40 year license then the end of that license is also the end of the initially licensed lifetime. Otherwise they could have just issued a 50 or 60 year license.
That doesn’t mean lifetimes cannot be extended, many plants run longer than initially planned.
But not renewing a license is hardly a premature shutdown,But NONE of that means that the plant was some falling apart scrapheap that needed closed
As already stated, I didn’t make any argument about its functionality and it has no bearing to my argument.
That said, other have claimed that the plant was apparently leaking, which does sound like an argument against renewal.You are being intentionally obtuse. Thank for helping climate change to kill us.
why the fuck do people still think nulcear energy is bad for the environment? it scales easily enough to displace coal and gas and petrol.
I took a tour of this plant, having lived about 20mi south of it, little city called NYC. One issue this particular plant kept getting called out on, but couldn’t remediate (???) was low amounts of tritium leaking into the groundwater.
Even after installing a large network of sensors around the plant, they still could not identify the source, after several years… As an engineer, that’s the kind of ‘small’ detail which tickles the Spidey senses, indicating something more serious is afoot, organizationally.
Here is a copypasta from another user:
*When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.
If you’ve been told “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, you have been a victim of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.
This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream or potential future tech such as nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or breeder reactors.
Compared to nuclear, renewables are:
- Cheaper
- Lower emissions
- Faster to provision
- Less environmentally damaging
- Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
- Decentralised
- Much, much safer
- Much easier to maintain
- More reliable
- Much more capable of being scaled down on demand to meet changes in energy demands
Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. But at present, while I’m all in favour of keeping the ones we have until the end of their useful life, building new nuclear power stations is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.
Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on building nuclear power plants should be spent on renewables instead.
Frequently asked questions:
- But it’s not always sunny or windy, how can we deal with that?
While a given spot in your country is going to have periods where it’s not sunny or rainy, with a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.
- Don’t renewables take up too much space?
The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.
- Isn’t Nuclear power cleaner than renewables?
No, it’s dirtier. You can look up total lifetime emissions for nuclear vs. renewables - this is the aggregated and equalised environmental harm caused per kWh for each energy source. It takes into account the energy used to extract raw materials, build the power plant, operate the plant, maintenance, the fuels needed to sustain it, the transport needed to service it, and so on. These numbers always show nuclear as more environmentally harmful than renewables.
- We need a baseline load, though, and that can only be nuclear or fossil fuels.
Not according to industry experts - the majority of studies show that a 100% renewable source of energy across all industries for all needs - electricity, heating, transport, and industry - is completely possible with current technology and is economically viable. If you disagree, don’t argue with me, take it up with the IEC. Here’s a Wikipedia article that you can use as a baseline for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy *
Here is some info about the only construction projects in the US from the last 25 years:
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The V.C. Summer project in South Carolina (two AP1000 reactors) was abandoned after the expenditure of at least A$12.5 billion leading Westinghouse to file for bankruptcy in 2017.
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Vogtle project in Georgia (two AP1000 reactors). The current cost estimate of A$37.6-41.8 billion is twice the estimate when construction began. Costs continue to increase and the project only survives because of multi-billion-dollar taxpayer bailouts. The project is six years behind schedule.
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The Watts Bar 2 reactor in Tennessee began operation in 2016, 43 years after construction began. That is the only power reactor start-up in the US over the past quarter-century. The previous start-up was Watts Bar 1, completed in 1996 after a 23-year construction period.
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In 2021, TVA abandoned the unfinished Bellefonte nuclear plant in Alabama, 47 years after construction began and following the expenditure of an estimated A$8.1 billion.
who the fuck is downvoting this?
How much of those costs are due to obstructionism by anti-nuclear folks like yourself?
Also, breeder reactors are not “potential future tech”. There are numerous contemporary breeder reactors designs, and the very first nuclear reactor to generate grid power in the United States was a breeder reactor.
If you have any data at all that shows that the price is a function of regulation, I would encourage you to share it.
Nuclear costs orders of magnitude more than renewables. You need to offer strong evidence to account for that difference being due to regulation.
I never said the cost of nuclear was a function of regulation. I do believe that NIMBYism has a lot to do with it.
The thesis of your remarks seems to indicate that you think that nuclear power generation is inherently more expensive, and I’d be interested in hearing your non-circular reasoning for that implicit assertion. So far, all I’ve heard is “Nuclear is more expensive because it is.”
A study by MIT in 2020 found that most of the excessive costs related to building nuclear plants are due to lack of decent standardization. Part of the problem is that because of emotional opposition to nuclear, the industry has had little opportunity to actually deploy any of the modular reactor innovations that have been developed in the last 50 years.
Here’s a link to the MIT article: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
Again, I’m interested in hearing your reasoning for why nuclear is more expensive, other than “it just is” and “renewables are better”.
They went up because they turned on other non green energy instead. The ones who made this decision are the same who you are supposed to trust for nuclear energy.
