PSEG wants you to pay a subsidy for nuclear plants

Although nuclear power is becoming more expensive than natural gas, PSEG wants us to subsidize its two remaining nuclear power plants.

http://www.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2017/12/15/nuclear-subsidy-would-cost-typical-new-jersey-household-35-year/955381001/

I don't think a country has ever screwed up a technology the way the U.S. has with nuclear power. How did we get it so wrong?

drummerboy said:

I don't think a country has ever screwed up a technology the way the U.S. has with nuclear power. How did we get it so wrong?

We did screw it up. Politics, cost and resistance to change. American companies want quick returns on their investments.

Look at France. Over 75% of their electric power is nuclear. Their electricity cost is the 7th cheapest in the 28 member EU. They have 78 nuclear reactors. They export electric power.

We're trying to help the environment by converting to EV cars. But how much will that help if much of our electric power is gotten from carbon dioxide generating natural gas, oil or coal plants? Solar, wind farms and hydro will help but they are limited as stable source by the environment.

I've been studying the political and technical history of nuclear power in this country.  It is very hard to summarize the screwups in one post, but it started down the road due to military wants and stayed wrong because if corporate interests.  We are almost out of the Thorium research route after having the first successful test reactor in the late 60's.

Feel free to add more details. I'd be interested in reading them.

I've always felt that part of our problem was what in retrospect (at least to me) was a misguided No Nukes movement in the early 80's. (I went to the No Nukes Washington march in '79) That, fed by the 3-Mile Island debacle, pretty much sank nuclear power for good in the US.

FilmCarp said:

I've been studying the political and technical history of nuclear power in this country.  It is very hard to summarize the screwups in one post, but it started down the road due to military wants and stayed wrong because if corporate interests.  We are almost out of the Thorium research route after having the first successful test reactor in the late 60's.

I don't have enough info to jump into the nuke debate as such but considering what I'm about to start paying for next year's incredibly crappy pseudo-insurance ACA plan, another $3 a month to PSEG is like throwing a penny in a fountain.  

By the time of three Mike island nuclear power had already atrophied here.  There were no pending applications for new plants at that time. 

  We owe most of our nuclear program to immigrants.  Mostly Eastern Europeans who fled fascism.  Fermi built the first reactor as a proof of concept in Chicago on 1942.  It followed his calculations for critacality and performance absolutely perfectly.  

   Our nuclear bomb project was scientifically complete by 1943.  It took until 1945 to produce enough material for the actual bombs.  During that lull they pursued all sorts of bomb and power ideas.  When the war ended and the atoms for peace initiative started the reactor design chosen was the one that would yield material for bombs.  That's what the military needed, so that is where the effort went.  

  The next player was Admiral Rickover, but I have to go watch my boys' hockey game now.

About 10 years ago PSE&G led the way for utility-owned power plants to be sold and operated in a competitive power market, not as regulated companies.  PSE&G put on a full-court press, and for the nuclear units got ratepayers to compensate them for "stranded costs", that is, the extra costs of nuclear plants that were incurred from earlier, when they were financially regulated.  The "benefit" was that prices for buying electricity would be lower.  The nuclear plants now are owned by an unregulated sibling company of PSE&G.

Now, PSE&G having been paid for taking the nuclear plants private, wants additional money for its unregulated sibling because - prices for buying electricity are lower.  Sort of a "heads they win, tails we lose" proposition.

Yep.  They made out like bandits.  It's why there is no incentive to change the system.  Old style nuclear plants are expensive to build and cheap to run.  They shifted all of the expense on to us.

And the waste? Also mostly a matter of politics?

Experts agree that today’s stop-gap solutions are unsustainable — and more dangerous than building long-term depositories deep underground where radioactive material can spend tens of thousands of years decaying, protected from natural disasters and out of reach of criminals and terrorists.

But try telling that to anti-nuclear campaigners and the communities living near where such a site might be constructed.

Burying the Atom: Europe Struggles to Dispose of Nuclear Waste (Politico, 7/19/17)

I will jump to the end of my exploration.  I think the solution is the Liquid Flouride Thorium reactor.  In a regular reactor, 97% of the fuel becomes waste.  In a Thorium reactor, 97% of the fuel is burned, and the 3% left has a much shorter half life.  They are extremely safe by design, and can even be configured to burn nuclear waste.  The problem is that the nuclear industry has no incentive to change horses and develop this.  They are making a killing with the current plants.  

Watching the video ads from PSEG makes me angry.  They positively promote no carbon dioxide pollution, and don't bother to come clean about the nuclear waste disposal dilemma.  Remember the Fukashima explosions?  Caused by nuclear waste stored onsite because there is no way to dispose of it.

Come on, PSEG.  Get real about nuclear.

Fukashima was not caused by the on-site storage of waste, though it did play into the eventual disaster.

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

Fukushima, initiated primarily by the tsunami following the Tōhoku earthquake on 11 March 2011.^[6] Immediately after the earthquake, the active reactors automatically shut down their sustained fission reactions. However, the tsunami disabled the emergency generators that would have provided power to control and operate the pumps necessary to cool the reactors. The insufficient cooling led to three nuclear meltdowns, hydrogen-air explosions, and the release of radioactive material in Units 1, 2, and 3 from 12 March to 15 March. Loss of cooling also caused the pool for storing spent fuel from Reactor 4 to overheat on 15 March due to the decay heat from the fuel rods.

The issue of storage needed to be weighed against the benefit of not emitting CO2. Easier said than done of course, since global warming was not very widely accepted 40 years ago, when nuclear power stopped becoming a factor in the U.S.

My guess is that many people in New Jersey don't know that there are still active nuclear power plants in the state.

yahooyahoo said:

My guess is that many people in New Jersey don't know that there are still active nuclear power plants in the state.

Wishful thinking 

New Jersey's Oyster Creek nuclear plant was licensed for 40 years which expired in 2009.  License was renewed for another 20 years, now to expire in 2029.  It is possible that we New Jersey residents may find out the practical life of a nuclear plant the hard way.

And there is still no practical answer to the waste disposal problem.

Nuclear is not the panacea promised by our utility company.

Everyone keeps talking about the same type of nuclear power.  That's part of the problem.  We have to get past these legacy plants and into Thorium reactors.   But there is no cost to nuclear operators that drives them to innovation.  Waste really isn't their problem, they have handed it off to us, along with legacy costs.