Sellafield Cleanup Cost Rises To $175 Billion Amid Tensions With Treasury (theguardian.com) 73
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The cost of cleaning up Sellafield is expected to spiral to 136 billion pounds ($175 billion USD) and Europe's biggest nuclear waste dump cannot show how it offers taxpayers value for money, the public spending watchdog has said. Projects to fix buildings containing hazardous and radioactive material at the state-owned site on the Cumbrian coast are running years late and over budget. Sellafield's spending is so vast -- with costs of more than 2.7 billion pounds a year -- that it is causing tension with the Treasury, the report from the National Audit Office (NAO) suggests. Officials from finance ministry told the NAO it was "not always clear" how Sellafield made decisions, the report reveals. Criticisms of its costs and processes come as the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, prepares to plug a hole of about 40 billion pounds in her maiden budget. Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said: "Despite progress achieved since the NAO last reported, I cannot conclude Sellafield is achieving value for money yet, as large projects are being delivered later than planned and at higher cost, alongside slower progress in reducing multiple risks."
He added: "Continued underperformance will mean the cost of decommissioning will increase considerably, and 'intolerable risks' will persist for longer."
David Peattie, the NDA's chief executive, said: "Sellafield is one of the most complex environmental programs in the world. We're proud of our workforce and achievements being made, including the unprecedented retrieval of legacy waste from all four highest hazard facilities. But as the NAO rightly points out there is still more to be done. This includes better demonstrating we are delivering value for money and the wider significant societal and economic benefits through jobs, the supply chain and community investments."
He added: "Continued underperformance will mean the cost of decommissioning will increase considerably, and 'intolerable risks' will persist for longer."
David Peattie, the NDA's chief executive, said: "Sellafield is one of the most complex environmental programs in the world. We're proud of our workforce and achievements being made, including the unprecedented retrieval of legacy waste from all four highest hazard facilities. But as the NAO rightly points out there is still more to be done. This includes better demonstrating we are delivering value for money and the wider significant societal and economic benefits through jobs, the supply chain and community investments."
Re:Nuclear is clean (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nuclear is clean (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell even if we pretend all the studies showing that wind and solar can provide base load even in places with poor wind and sun conditions The fact of the matter is we have limited funds to spend on clean energy and wind and solar even in a worst case scenario are a much better investment of those limited funds.
At a bare minimum we should max out the wind and solar we can roll out before we start looking into nuclear. At best Europe might use a few nuclear reactors that they had mothballed to make up for the lost energy resources from Russia while they get as much wind and solar online as they can.
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We have a number of grids now routinely approaching 100% renewable. So, the OP is correct, it does appear that wind and solar can provide base load or, perhaps stated more directly, we can run a grid without the concept of base load.
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Scotland is "100% renewable". As in total renewable electricity generated is about 104% of total electricity used in the country.
But it also has non-renewable generation, and exports a lot to England and Northern Ireland, and sometimes imports from England when the wind isn't blowing.
Of course we should all produce as much renewable electricity as we can, but it doesn't mean you can get rid of the other sources altogether, it just means you don't need to switch them on as often.
Iceland is another country th
Right now it's zero sum (Score:2)
Those finite resources need to be spend in the safest, most effective way. And that's Wind & Solar.
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perhaps stated more directly/correctly, we can run a grid without the concept of base load.
Yes, the concept of "base load" and special base load plants gets more and more unimportant.
Demand Response vs. Baseload (Score:2)
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If you ever want to shut down one of those pro-nuclear jackasses who love to drone on about how the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow, just ask them if they can point to a single nuclear plant that was built on time, on budget and produces electricity at the promised price.
Hilarity ensues.
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Wind and solar do not provide base load.
But "base load" gets less and less important as a term, as wind and solar are so abundant that we can scale down on base load plants.
Re:Nuclear is clean (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you ever seen coal mine, or even coal town.
That is a dumb comparison since no one is proposing new coal plants as an alternative to nuclear power. The alternative is renewables + storage.
But the Sellafield comparison is also dumb since much of the contamination is from building nuclear weapons and reactors designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
Re:Nuclear is clean (Score:4, Informative)
The only reason the Brits ever got into nuclear power is the Bomb. Maintaining their nuclear arsenal is also the only reason for the massively too expensive Hinkley Point power station. The ugly truth is that in order to maintain a nuclear arsenal, you need nuclear reactors. Hence the comparison ist apt. Also, some people (Macron) are honest about nuclear power being non-viable unless you add military applications. Most simply lie about that blatantly obvious aspect.
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The only reason the Brits ever got into nuclear power is the Bomb. Maintaining their nuclear arsenal is also the only reason for the massively too expensive Hinkley Point power station. The ugly truth is that in order to maintain a nuclear arsenal, you need nuclear reactors. Hence the comparison ist apt. Also, some people (Macron) are honest about nuclear power being non-viable unless you add military applications. Most simply lie about that blatantly obvious aspect.
I believe the UK enriches it's weapons fuel at the AWE Burghfield facility in Berkshire, bit south of Reading, just off the A33. Use J11 if you're on the M4, take a right at the 2nd set of lights. if you reach Burghfield Common you've gone too far and need to turn around and come back towards the A33.
Also remember that nuclear reactors also produce medical isotopes.
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Sigh, well I find it quite depressing how hard it is to get even simple reliable answers about anything. So traditional nuclear is for weapons and hence very contaminating. What about the fabled new generations of nuclear? Do they have the same issue?
Re:Nuclear is clean (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the full story. The point is not that creating nuclear weapons is contaminating and creating power is not. It's that the process behind chasing the bomb was a shitshow that caused contamination the world over. The issue isn't what was built, it is how it was used.
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What about the fabled new generations of nuclear? Do they have the same issue?
New-generation nukes, including SMRs and MSRs, haven't been proven.
Maybe they'll fix the problems. Maybe not.
China is building an SMR.
The NuScale SMR has been approved for construction in America, but construction hasn't started because of ... soaring costs.
India and China are building thorium MSRs.
Re:Nuclear is clean (Score:4, Interesting)
In the 1950s the UK and France undertook a program of building graphite moderated reactors for electric power generation. There were a number of reasons for this: they were cheaper and faster to build than developing light water technology (which took the US another 15 years with heavy Navy subsidy) but also because their waste output is better suited to reprocessing into weapons-grade material. This made it easier to increase production of bomb stuff when needed and also easier to hide the weapons production and budget inside a nominally civilian operation (the UK's various Electric Generating Boards).
All well and good except that graphite has a tendency to catch fire and that happened several times creating massive messes and vast areas of contamination. The reactors were also inefficient and hard to operate compared to light water reactors. The French figured this out earlier and switched into developing light water technology (Framatom, EDF's partner in light water technology, was incorporated by Westinghouse Nuclear as their European engineering, sales, and licensing arm). The UK persisted with the MAGNOX technology into the late 1970s, then made a not-very-successful pivot to light water by licensing the SNUPPS standardized PWR design. Which semi-failure is its own story.
Re:Nuclear is clean (Score:4, Insightful)
Sigh, well I find it quite depressing how hard it is to get even simple reliable answers about anything.
I think the honest truth about that is that reality is really difficult and complex and nobody really knows. For example, the big problem with modern small reactors is the chemistry of the radioactive products. If they turn out to be really aggressively corrosive then this makes it very difficult to run the reactors. If they turn out to be something that can be easily treated then it will be okay. You don't really know that until you see how they actually work in real life including when you start adding other chemicals to counteract whatever you see. You might think that it will be easy but it turns out to be hard or even the other way round.
That is exactly what happened last time they tried alternative types of reactors. Everything that was expected to be easy ended up really toxic, nasty and radioactive. People now think that they have better ideas which will avoid those problems, but perhaps their models of what will happen are wrong in important ways. You only find out by trying things.
So the simple answer is that "it's an experiment and you won't know till you try it". The problem with that answer is that it doesn't sound great for getting investment so there's a big temptation to provide a different answer which attracts more money.
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What about the fabled new generations of nuclear? Do they have the same issue?
The biggest issue they have is that they are fabled, in that they do not exist.
All of the full-scale nuclear plants being built now are basically the same old stuff with some minor revisions.
The SMRs that claim to solve the problems with those plants a) don't exist and b) require more enriched fuel (HALEU) than those prior plants do. They are starting out with a more hazardous beginning.
What do I mean by "don't exist"? I mean nobody has ever built even one of them. NuScale even got type approval for their p
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Sellafield isn't the only nuclear site in the UK that is costing a fortune to clean up. It was also used to produce power and many of the problems developed due to the behaviour of the commercial owners and operators, not the nuclear weapons.
The UK has a bad history with nuclear power. In the 60s we picked the wrong technology and bought into the hype about it being extremely cheap. By the 80s it was being sold off for a nominal sum and with a promise that the taxpayer would foot the bill for cleaning it up
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Yep, compare the worst option with the second worst one. That will make for an _honest_ argument!
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Have you ever seen coal mine
I've seen whataboutism. I'm seeing it right now. It's still a logical fallacy.
Fossil energy is not clean
I'm also seeing a false dichotomy.
I've said before and will say again, if you have to compare nuclear to coal to make it look good then it is in fact not good.
lol troll (Score:1, Troll)
The trolls have modpoints again.
They can't fault my logic, so they try to bury my comments.
Let's keep this going (Score:2, Insightful)
I will get more karma. You only have so many mod points. Unless of course you're an "editor" in which case why not go do something useful like detect a dupe?
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Now only if there was an energy generation choice besides coal, and nuclear.
Re:Nuclear is clean (Score:5, Informative)
Basically every large scale industrial plant that started 70+ years ago is a massive superfund site nowadays. For lead, asbestos, mercury, and/or a dozen other things.
Also, this plant made nuclear weapons, and those plants have historically been incredibly dirty because the government doesn't have to worry about things like a private company, especially in the late 1940s.
If they were building large scale solar panel or wind turbine factories 50+ years ago, they would also be covered in toxic waste. Just like old battery plants, synthetic rubber plants, and basically any other large scale manufacturing.
I worked somewhere that used methanol to clean things, and I guarantee you that if they could legally dump the waste out back, they would've.
40 billion out of 1 trillion budget (Score:2)
How can they not find 4% of wasteful spending to cut from other parts of the UK budget?
It may be more difficult now that deficit spending and borrowing cannot be done with near 0% government debt.
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Finding the 4% is really easy, just ask the gov. departments which part of their spending is wasteful.
This reminds me of a political cartoon after Reagan won and Carter lost. They are both riding horses in a corral of cows. Reagan asks Carter, "Which ones are the sacred cows." Carter responds, "It is easy, you just have to ask them."
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Finding the 4% is really easy, just ask the gov. departments which part of their spending is wasteful.
Not actually totally wrong. Mostly the reason we have civil servants is so that they can identify and cut the spending which is wasteful. Mostly they have already done a good job of that, so when someone comes along and tells a farmer that vegetables are much more profitable than sheep so she should sell all her flock and move to growing courgettes. She's probably already thought of that. She probably knows that there aren't enough workers in her area, her soil isn't fertile enough and that she gets too man
4% cut (Score:2)
Agree, the entrenched bureaucrats don't have any reason to improve productivity, keep costs down and determine which programs are ineffective and should be pared back or stopped.
Add in an ageing population and a higher old-age dependency ratio and you have a declining incentive for people outside of government jobs and government contractor jobs to work.
Re:Nuclear is clean (Score:5, Insightful)
We have regulation & red tape for a reason. Industrialists may complain about how it reduces their profits & makes them have to work harder but they're f**king great for the rest of us who don't want to have to live with the pollution & disasters.
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Sellafield, site of the Windscale nuclear fire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... [wikipedia.org]
This is one of the oldest nuclear sites, and a lot less was known about the risks of radiation back then.
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Nuclear sites are a bit different though, because the nature of the waste is that you can't just don a hazmat suit or use a normal robot to clean it up. There is no chemical process to neutralize the waste or process it into something safe.
Sellafield was used for generating electricity as well as for weapons. A lot of the problems developed during the period of commercial ownership and operation, due to a lack of proper maintenance and investment.
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The problem is that a lot of the waste is stored in pools, and the pools are leaking. There is also a risk of a runaway reaction starting, so they can't just build a box and lob all the waste in it.
They need to take the waste, repackage it safely, and then build new and secure storage facilities. They then need to drain the pools and process the water, creating more waste.
And that's just the existing waste, there is plenty more that will be created as they dismantle the plant.
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Sellafield has the same problems that DOE Hanford in the US has. They have big tanks and pools of caustic mixed radioactive shit from decades of weapons production, and some of it is from an era before electronic records were kept, meaning they have no idea what the hell is in some of these containers, other than it being very toxic, very radioactive, and very deadly if it gets out.
We have the technology to clean it up now, but it's expensive. Hanford is starting up their waste vitrification plant now to
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Indeed, but it is worth noting that nuclear plants do present a specific elevated risk and thus elevated cost for cleanup. Sellafield may be an extra special case, but that doesn't mean every other nuclear plant can be compared to an old battery plant.
Most remediations came in at a fraction of the cost.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
It is also cheap! Or at least some pathological liars keep claiming so ...
It had a good run (Score:2)
Personally I thought it was a decent sitcom, but the courtroom finale was a little cliched.
Wait, Sellafield? Sorry, I got nothing.
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Also named "Windscale" when it very nearly depopulated a rather large area due to a reactor core on fire.
Re:It had a good run (Score:5, Interesting)
The disregard for sensible safety & blunders didn't end with the Windscale fire. It's one of the main reasons the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was established. It had wide popular support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Just like Hanford Washington cleanup (Score:4, Interesting)
Budget hole (Score:1)
Of that £40 billion, ca. 13B was a budget hole from the previous government. The difference is because the new government has decided to increase spending. I.e. it's self inflicted. This article simply says that they haven't prioritised spending on Sellafield.
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13bn the previous government failed to admit to prior to the election,
This is the huge thing and that's just the stuff that can be proven as actually deleted from the record. Remember, if they were doing that there will be tonnes more that was just never written down and will turn up later as something that needs to be fixed by "nobody ever knew". The last conservative government were a complete fraud with the only mitigation being that they were coming after Liz Truss, the UK conservative politician who was defeated by a lettuce (look it up) and who's now stumping for Trump,
Regulations (Score:2)
In the end, you dig up stuff from one place, and move it to the other place. You move your radiation stuff from here. You move it to there.
When you move dirt, it costs $8 a yard.
When you move dirt with radiating elements, its $250+ a yard.
We all want to be good stewards. Nothing wrong with regulating radiation Making it cost so much that it gets in the way with quickly and economically fixing these things, is a problem.
--
It's about dribbling. -- Ronaldinho
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And if it were that easy, things would be a lot cheaper. The nice thing the nuclear power/weapons industry (they are closely connected although people lie about it) does is make the stuff they dig up massively more dangerous and poisonous.
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Non-honor liars like you do not like to get called out and respond with primitive aggression...
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you forgot to check "Post Anonymously"
Ah, yes, "cheap" and "clean" nuclear (Score:2, Troll)
The lie does not get more obvious than here.
Externalities (Score:2)
Yeah, just ignore the "externalities" :)
Details
Dupe (Score:2)
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Oh well... (Score:1)
That is sort of upsetting (Score:2)
The UK has built a total of 19 civilian reactors. This means the cleanup cost of this one site, not entirely civilian I'm aware, adds about 7 billion GBP to the sticker cost of these reactors. That's more than the reactors cost. If we properly accounted for cleanup, none of these would have been built in the first place.
Re: That is sort of upsetting (Score:3)
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If we properly accounted for cleanup, none of these would have been built in the first place.
Untrue. You aren't accounting for the thirst in the late 1940s and 1950s for weapons-grade nuclear material for building bombs. That material is made in reactors.
The electricity being produced was the secondary objective. Bombs were the primary. And nobody - literally nobody - gave a shit about the waste in that era. "Dump it into tanks in the ground and we'll deal with it later" was the most complete strategy anyone came up with for 50 years.
ROI on a waste cleanup? (Score:2)
How does one calculate an ROI on a waste cleanup? It is either needed or not needed, and if it is needed the required monies must be spent whether or not it is generating a "return" for the taxpayer however that might be defined.
(the idea that government expenditures are supposed to generate a measurable positive "return" is one of the most pernicious of the last 70 years)
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ROI = Whatever you invest, the problem will return (Score:2)
>> How does one calculate an ROI on a waste cleanup?
In this context, it means "Whatever you invest, the problem will return"
because it will never be completely gone. Facts.
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The return is in terms of getting something done, making progress. No matter how much more they spend, that return is not improving.
What? (Score:2)
Britain is part of Europe? Sonofa...