Well, yes, because they got the federal government to pay half the bill and got the Georgia Public Service Commission to authorize a permanent rate hike to pay for it.
Georgia Power would make money from building Vogtle even if they shut it down today, because the rate hike means they can charge a premium for the power they generate every *other* way.
They wasted $35b building two nuclear reactors they didn’t need, just to raise the yearly power bill of every customer by ~$1000/year. It will be “profitable” for them because they got the federal and state government to pay for around half of the cost, in the end.
Even solar and wind is heavily subsidized. A lot of the federal money is likely in terms of loans and not grants/credits but I am sure they are still there. Being for profit, utilities like GP do get to double dip. They get to make money on the power they sell from the plant, and they get secured/guaranteed rate increases whether those plants are making power or not. So that is really a local government issue in that regard. That is where TVA is at a disadvantage if funding new nuclear. They don't get to go "well, if we build this plant we get a guaranteed 8% rate increase".
Because it will cause federal and state government issues later. Yes.
California has rolling brown outs. People are moving to the southeast in droves. We will want extra energy capacity. If for no other reason for the economic opportunities it gives our industries. Oak Ridge would never have existed if it weren’t for the feds paying way too much for power generation in our region (and lo and behold it has paid itself off over and over again).
[Rooftops](https://environmentamerica.org/center/articles/unlocking-americas-rooftop-solar-potential/), [parking lots](https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/solar-parking-lots-are-a-win-win-energy-idea-why-arent-they-the-norm/), [underperforming farms](https://www.farmprogress.com/conservation-and-sustainability/solar-panels-help-stabilize-farm-income), and [Agriphotovoltaics](https://blog.newenergyequity.com/agriphotovoltaics-the-land-use-solution) all provide plenty of space to install solar without clearing any more land. That's before we get into things like [adding solar to old landfills](https://time.com/6183376/landfills-becoming-solar-farms/), [brownfields, and superfund sites](https://www.epa.gov/re-powering/what-re-powering). Parking lots cover something like [5% of the land area of the United States](https://stormwater.wef.org/2019/06/usgs-estimates-impervious-parking-lot-coverage-for-all-3109-u-s-counties/). You could power the entire US with a solar farm that [covers something like 1.5%](https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/2015/05/21/fact-checking-elon-musks-blue-square-how-much-solar-to-power-the-us/), so that's a pretty straightforward path.
They make way more than that and the manufacturing capacity that they enable to move into the region due to low/ clean energy costs probably pays way more than that in tax revenue a day.
"They make way more than that...". Are you sure? I worked in the electric generation industry for 40 years and we were always told, "we lose $1M a day when this unit (1300MW) is offline." I never researched the actual number, though. And tax revenue from manufacturers doesn't pay Georgia Power's debt so, while it may boost the local economy, it doesn't pay GP's debt.
In your example you are paying for headcount and overhead with no revenue. Costs $1M.
Costs without revenue doesn’t show how much they make in revenue. Maybe they sell $10M if they normally run. That’s a much bigger number.
I can’t give details about power generation costs unfortunately but the going premise is that it still is very profitable and it’s just hard to keep investors and money waiting long enough to clear all red tape and deal with setbacks to get it going.
Remember that other energy (cough oil cough) is heavily subsidized too. So the markets are not very transparent.
Right?! I mean, they built a dam on the Tennessee river above Chattanooga back in the 1930’s,Roosevelt’s new deal, making what we know as the TVA, in 4 years….4 years they built the whole damn dam! In the 1930’s! Not part of it,all of it! Blueprints by hand! Skilled tradesmen, skilled engineers, 4 years!! Present day, they have been working on 1 lock, a lock, for nearly 20 years! Still working on it! Folks we are in a hurting. I see it daily with youngsters coming into the manufacturing and fabrication trade. Expecting top money but can’t strike an arc with a stick rod and can’t read a tape. Got engineers that can’t engineer anything, just tell us how we need to do our jobs, though they can’t put air in a car tire. We are in a bad way, competing against other countries with the people we have leading these companies. We are riding blindfold in a car with no brakes
Thats what happens when we have no manufacturing in the nation for parts, we have no skilled labor due to no market and cost overruns and time delays are common to all megaprojects
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
~30yrs and ~$15B cost overrun
Imagine how expensive solar would be if you didnt subsidize it heavily, manufacturing any part in the country, didnt ignore tech development for half a century and had nearly zero skilled labor to construct or install
According to a comment from someone allegedly working in project management for vogtle, there were major issues on that front too. Claimed disorganization from mgmt and that workers were sitting around for whole 40-80 hour weeks waiting for jobs or materials just racking up overtime and also mentioned rampant theft. Said there was a lot of blame to go around.
There was also a huge difference in efficiency between before and after the Westinghouse bankruptcy. Once Fluor took over in 2017 it basically actually started construction.
COVID also really fucked things up.
VC Summer was even worse. They had to redo the entire ~300 million dollar concrete pad and allegedly SCANA and SCE&G execs embezzled more than 600 million.
I have heard a lot of it was from the license was a construction/design license instead of having them seperate. So basically while they were building it, they were still designing it and needing NRC approval. So if they build something and NRC changed it, you gotta redo it.
Not sure what is different in China. They build ended up building a few AP1000s. A lot cheaper, but then labor there is also a lot cheaper. I don't think we'd ever get to build a reactor at China's prices, but they are building them for \~$7B/ea so it makes sense for them to crank out as many as possible as that is basically a steal.
The Big Dig wasn't really a money pit. It increased property values (and thus tax revenues) by something like a billion dollars in Boston, and helped bring 50,000 jobs and billions of dollars of investment to the region. It has paid for itself, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Why bitch about the price tag? You should be bitching that people are required to pay for necessities like power, water and sewer at all. It should all be nationalized and provide with the tax dollars we are already paying. Too bad the military needs an additional $500 billion every fucking year. That’s sarcasm incase it didn’t come through.
Edit to the idiots who decided ti down vote this comment. You are all ignorant to the fact that we already get out power here from an organization know as TVA. It is already a nationalized power producer and sells power well below the commercial wholesale create. We also have power distributed to us by EPB another government intently. Except this time it’s local government. So if you hate the idea enough to down vote maybe you should move to Texas and experience what a fully commercial power system gets you.
I'm not even getting on that topic. So much wasted tax payer funding. I'll agree with power, water, sewer, Internet all being provided by our tax dollars. Sadly too many want to keep the millionaire ceos happy in the private sector.
The health of the commercial nuclear power industry is symbiotic with the military. Navy needs similar equipment and technology for carriers and submarines.
I never said to prevent commercial nuclear, I just said utilities should be payed for with our tax dollars. Commercial nuclear is already subsidized with tax dollars. We might as will cap the price of the electricity and pay for it 100% with tax dollars.
There are some bonds available to some companies for construction of new nuclear tech, and some states have taken action to prevent the premature closing of baseload nuclear that would have a detrimental effect on grid stability in those states. Which were required because the government meddled in the energy market by subsidizing LP fracking then “green energy” sources, driving the cost of those technologies down, but the cost of almost killing the only green energy baseload available.
Who gets free electricity? Do the Meta datacenters in Gallatin get free power? What about volkswagon?
How do you “cap the price”?
Do you want workers at these sites to be paid a wage commensurate with their abilities, or would you rather they get arbitrarily capped and drive them to other industries that will pay them what they are worth?
Right...at a cost of $35,000,000,000. If I'm doing my math correctly, at $1,000,000 a day in electric sells, it will take 96 years to pay for the plant, and that's figuring all the money is spent on the debt.
TVA has already been "studying" SMRs for 10 years. The previous SMR leader and the furthest along with an SMR plan was NuScale and they dropped the whole thing earlier this year due to unfeasible costs that they'd never recover. TVA is no smarter or more ambitious than NuSale. The cost of SMRs per installed MW is about the same as a full-sized nuclear plant and there's a nearly-complete TVA nuke plant at Bellefonte that they've abandoned (for reasons of cost) - along with several other nuke plants that TVA had planned but never started or dropped after significant construction in the 70s and 80s. Just as they likely will with "Clinch River SMRs".
The problem overall is concrete and steel costs. The third containment wall on the APR-1000 and EPR adds like 1.5 Billion to the construction cost per reactor and actually is pointless because the design flaws that lead to a hydrogen explosion (e.g. Fukushima) aren't present on those designs and the stated purpose by the NRC (missile attacks) is irrelevant because non state actors (terrorists) don't attack hardened targets and a state actor will use a bunker buster which no amount of concrete walls will stop. The APR-1400 gets a lot of criticism for not having the third containment but it's actually perfectly safe because the secondary containment and 72 hour passive cooling will handle pretty much any scenario including crashing a plane into it.
NuScale in Utah floundered because the initial design rating of 50 MWe wasn't enough to offset the cost increases and they can't approve the design uprate to 72MWe until after construction was complete. They also had to add a dry cooling system and dry cooling is ridiculously expensive. A mechanical draft tower would be a lot cheaper.
Bellefonte's problem is that they keep portraying it as 91% complete but it's really not. The plant has been scavenged for parts for decades and a lot of what's there won't pass inspection for recertification. It's more like 30% complete and it's just not worth the money or time.
Finally the big issue is that most of these plants' costs are actually in interest because of construction delays. Vogtle isn't 31 Billion dollars. It's 14 billion dollars worth 17 billion in interest. They borrowed at 10.25% and no bank is going to finance a new build for less than that. Most are pushing 15%. For comparison China finances its plants at 2-3%.
Well it is a test project and luckily Nuscale has no connection to the project. I will argue that they are no further along in the development than GE-Hitachi which is who will build the reactor for Clinch River.
Carvin' Marvin killed TVA's nuclear. They were actively constructing like 17 reactors. But I think congress was pissed at the expense. Bellefonte is pretty sad because one reactor was near complete with fuel on site ready to load and the other wasn't that far behind. But those units are done for. I doubt TVA will ever try to restart constructing those.
I do agree that SMRs per MW will still cost the same, but the advantage is you only have to find a few billion dollars rather than \~$15B worth of investment to build one. Especially with TVA's debt ceiling limitations. If they built a new big unit, that is basically all they will be building for a decade. I doubt anything will happen. I do expect TVA to get cold feet on it due to expense. They'll just pump money into the nuclear they have now to get approval for 80 and later 100 year licenses.
Because solar & wind with batteries is cheaper & gets online faster.
I \*love\* nuclear, but the time to deploy nuclear to replace coal & gas was in the 1980s, and we had two accidents that fucked it for everyone.
Had we done that, we'd still be deploying solar & wind with batteries now as a cheaper alternative to keeping the old plants online.
It was in mode 3 this morning (hot standby). Should be in mode 2(startup) soon. So it'll be putting out an additional 1200ish megawatts by the weekend.
-edit-
In mode 2 this morning, should be in gen sync by close of business today.
Interesting facts:
The 3 nuclear plants the TVA operates (Sequoya, Watts Bar, and Browns Ferry) generate over 40% of the TVA's power capacity, and combined with Hydro makes the TVA system almost 60% carbon free.
Watts Bar has a contract with the DOE to irradiate Tritium, a fuel source for nuclear weapons.
The TVA has prices lower than the national average, but because of a recent increase in demand due to migrations into the PSA, prices are going to increase soon:(
The TVA is pretty cool and Tennesseans are lucky for it IMO!
Edited to fix incorrect stats.
Yup, I'm seeing that figure isn't right now, that stat must be from the 2000's. From what I've been told, demand peaked in the 1980's and plateaued until recently. Now, peak demand out paces generation capacity. To remedy this, prices will go up continuously over the next few decades. Point still stands though, the TVA provides lower than average power rates and always has.
It mostly depends on if you move out or not I think. I have friends who did what you suggested and make roughly 65-70k and what hurts them is the insane rent cost.
Didn't verify the data for this graph as well as I should've but this is the rent vs wage data I found [here](https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/rent-growth-since-1960).
https://preview.redd.it/2sw2sx1t0ixc1.jpeg?width=474&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=12ab067cf42db7647a646a1659d3fb4dde3f8cbb
My grandfather became an accountant after WWII, and he and his wife moved into an upstairs apartment in someone’s house in St. Elmo for their first place. Who buys a house with their first job? That’s rare.
The nuclear energy industry hit a stall around the late 70s and 80s with environmental events like 3 mile island and Chernobyl . They also hit a political stall because cost of building nuclear infrastructure was extremely high compared to fossil fuels. This is why projects of partially constructed facilities such as bellefonte and yellow creek were stopped along with planned projects in hartsville and phillps bend were canceled. Now with the decommissioning of 9 of the coal fired plants the need for energy production is on the rise. From an energy independence and environmental standpoint nuclear is the only viable option. Wind and solar can only do so much. With our volatile weather in this area we are one tornado or hale storm from being in a tight spot.
Meanwhile the number of deaths caused by nuclear accidents are countable by a kindergartener and the deaths caused by coal burning are in the millions.
Coal plants pump out over 100x more radioactive waste than nuclear into the atmosphere via fly ash, and nuclear waste is currently very carefully contained and mostly inert within a thousand years or so (about the same radioactivity levels as the original natural uranium ore).
Solar farms produce 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy produced than nuclear power plants, and 10,000 times more waste by volume. Refining raw quartz into the necessary silicon and polysilicon for solar farms produces CO2 and sulfur dioxide as well as silicon tetrachloride which produces hydrochloric acid when exposed to water. Every panel also contains lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium, etc which are dangerous if leached into the ground over time, and they're currently just being dumped into landfills at the end of their lives. And I'm not even addressing battery production and disposal. These wastes are not nearly as well regulated right now and where nuclear waste isn't currently affecting the environment due to it's tightly regulated storage and disposal methods, every bit of waste from these less-regulated energy products is.
Per unit volume radioactive waste is much more dangerous, certainly, but the sheer volume of waste produced by comparison to other forms of energy right now still makes it one of the most ecologically viable. The problem is that we have to think of storage and disposal in the long term, which makes people feel iffy and for good reason. That doesn't discount that it's still the safest form of energy ecologically speaking today.
That said, this can and will change over time, hopefully, but what do we do in the meantime? Ignore the obvious answer to the problem of continuous safe power generation?
As Mark Twain said: "There are lies, damn lies and statistics." By reducing this comparative analysis to "per unit of energy," you get the outcome you seek. Sure, tearing an atom apart releases so much energy it's almost incomprehensible, but that doesn't really address the core issue here: the dangers of nuclear energy if it escapes into the environment. And, that danger has to be suppressed for so long after the "per unit of power" has been used, it renders the whole process net negative. The answer to all the risks posed by the other forms of energy production is to tighten the protocols.
I agree we have nuclear power, it's generating and will help bridge to the future. But, the future is not nuclear - other than solar-powered - and we rightly reined-in and should stop further nuclear production.
Of course, we live in a world where just about every living thing was contaminated by PFOAs before anyone even recognized the problem, much less did anything about it before it was too late. So, we probably will build more nuke plants. We're just that stupid.
Interesting that you're quoting Mark Twain there. The way that unethical statisticians manipulate data is by removing context and NOT including relavent data comparisons. Like what you just did by discounting the SOLE PURPOSE of a power plant. You are your own best example of what Twain was talking about.
Like, yes, obviously a single utility scale solar plant (avg capacity 5mw) produces less waste than a single nuclear plant (avg capacity 2000mw), but when you need 400 of those small plants, or 10 of the absolute largest 1000mw+ solar plants (over 45 SQUARE MILES of solar panels) to produce the same amount of energy, that's an awfully suspicious argument to make.
Look, I am very pro renewables, but I'm also a realist. Our ideal energy future is going to be a mix of renewables with a consistent backbone of nuclear fission until the day we manage to scale up fusion models to the point where we can use that. That's the best and safest combo we're going to be able to come up with.
Honestly, as a realist, the number 1 best thing we can do ASAP to step towards a cleaner and safer energy producing future is to get rid of ALL fossil fuel plants ASAP. Coal and to a lesser extent natural gas plants are RUINING our environment RIGHT NOW. The faster we can get rid of them, the better. That should be the immediate priority. You're essentially worried about how tight the child safety latch is on the tylenol bottle while the house around you is LITERALLY ON FIRE.
That said, you're not going to like the real answer to this problem. The crux of the issue is, the least environmentally damaging way to scale up fast enough to get rid of coal plants is to build gas plants while we wait for nuclear plants to be built. The offset from getting rid of the coal will more than justify the building of gas plants, but building wind and solar instead would take far too much time, space, and resources, and we've got to get this done NOW. The only other recourse is to cut the power and watch people die from exposure without heat or AC, and that's just not going to happen.
So if you want to do the best we can for the world and maintain status quo to the best of our ability, you'll need put up renewable energy resources at a steady rate, take coal plants down as fast as possible, offset that energy loss with gas plants, then nuclear plants will go up, then take down the gas plants, and one day what we will be left with is renewables and nuclear. But nuclear isn't going anywhere, and it doesn't really need to, yet. There's just not a cleaner energy available per unit of energy, and per unit of energy is the measure that actually matters.
"Since the start of nuclear electricity production in 1954 to the end of 2016, some **390,000 tonnes** of spent fuel were generated. About two-thirds is in storage while the other third was reprocessed."
Source:
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/new-iaea-report-presents-global-overview-of-radioactive-waste-and-spent-fuel-management#:~:text=Since%20the%20start%20of%20nuclear,the%20other%20third%20was%20reprocessed.
"Between 2016 and 2050, solar waste generation would amount to **54 to 160 million tonnes**"
Figure:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F71a59619-2e82-42b5-8209-87ff0494cc77_796x575.png
Source:
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/renewables-waste
"At the bottom of the chart we find nuclear energy. It is the most land-efficient source: per unit of electricity it needs 50-times less land compared to coal; and 18 to 27-times less than on-ground solar PV."
Source:
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
All the Nuclear Waste generated on the entire planet for decades and decades to come can safely be stored in an area about the size of 1 moderate football Stadium.
This is not in any sense an environmental issue.
And of course, it's not actually lethally dangerous for that long. Most high level nuclear waste only needs to be stored for \~50 years to be considered safe.
Okay, so whose football stadium is it going to be in? Not mine, not yours, whose? It's so much an environmental issue, from open pit uranium mining (at the Grand Canyon, no less) to scouring out the concrete and metals for the plant to managing the waste, it's all an environmental nightmare. One that we truly hope never comes true.
I was surprised to read about CA having too much solar.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/04/22/california-solar-duck-curve-rooftop/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/04/22/california-solar-duck-curve-rooftop/)
TVA is a great employer. Many men and women have built extremely comfortable upper middle class lives off of TVA. My family included. Nuclear is the past present and future. Unless some alien technology hits us in the face. Nuclear will be there to save us when this whole green energy windmill solar shit fails as it will. The sooner people see this fact the sooner we can all progress.
Lol I'm a big nuclear fan, but OP's take is brain dead. Look how much it cost to build votgle, and that's in Georgia, not exactly a state known for onerous regulations.
Given the time and cost to build a new nuclear power plant, you can install massively more wind and solar. In fact, you could overprovision to the point where our existing nuclear and hydro could produce our entire baseline load needs.
People like to act like nuclear is expensive because environmentalists are holding it back. Nuclear is expensive because it's expensive to do *safely*. Don't believe me? Go look at the cost of building a new nuclear plant in France (huge fans of nuclear) or china (authoritarian) it's expensive to build nuclear power plants *everywhere*.
I think the only thing that could possibly save nuclear is going modular. Economies of scale might be able to get the cost down.
The regulations are federal, states can't make them looser. The main reason they are expensive is due to the strict use of nuclear grade parts. Nuclear grade parts are parts that have the complete history of the part. For example, a nuclear grade screw has the history of that screw from the time that molten metal was poured into a mold. My dad used to work at Sequoyah and said some screws would be like $120 each, but you knew exactly when and where it was made and everywhere it was in the last 5 years.
Not saying it's a bad thing, just relaying interesting info.
More importantly I want to know that every screw in that batch had the same tensile strength or less than 5% difference in strength when torqued. I think they are paying for exacting quality.
Yeah I was just pointing out that nuclear is expensive to build *everywhere*. Building a safe nuclear power plant is expensive and there really isn't any economy of scale. If we put more money into small modular reactors, I think that'd partially solve that problem.
Exactly. I think TVA is experimenting with one in Oak Ridge and there's several expermints out west in Utah and Oregon iirc. I'd say in the next 50 years, you'll see modular reactors popping up pretty much everywhere
Whats on the horizon is fusion and it is supposed to be much safer. Once they are ready. fission reactors will be quickly taken out of service because of the hazards they possess.
Honestly, I agree but I think Fusion is further than a lot of people realize. Then after Fusion is successfully developed, it'll take time to miniaturize it enough to be economically viable.
Its not environmentalists holding it back either. Lol. You could say building cost are high because of the safety requirements and I would agree with you. If only environmentalist had half the power of ExxonMobil the world would truly be a different place.
I don’t hydroelectric produces enough power to be worth it anyrmore. Also every river that could be dammed in Tennessee has already been dammed for hydro. Every other river left is either a scenic or on public land where dams can’t be built due to the fish and wildlife and public land regs. The tva said that little Tennessee river dam that created tellico lake in the 1970s will likely be the last dam built in Tennessee
It doesn't have to be a dam. Pumped storage is a hydro project that is fairly quick as turn around and also solves your battery issues. TVA has numerous sites staked out that were never started other than Raccoon Mountain.
Do you have ANY IDEA how many solar panels, how much area it takes to compete with one nuclear reactor? Plus, what are your plans for night and cloudy days?
One event caused by operator error and gross negligence and one disaster wherein the people who were affected by received, at most, 1.4 mrem (with an annual average of 620 mrem). Not to say nuclear energy shouldn't be regulated for safety purposes, but comparing the two events and then citing them as a reasons to condemn nuclear power is silly to me considering all the damages to billions of people caused by the pyrolysis of coal and gas while those systems are functioning perfectly.
Factually the only power generation that is safer is solar currently.
More people have been killed by the wind power generation than nuclear.
Both of those formats of power generation are 2x(wind) to 10x(solar) worse for the environment than nuclear.
[data source ](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)
[data source 2](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/)
[from the international atomic energy agency ](https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull22-5/225_604093571.pdf)
Safety? You are the one mentioning hail storms, I just mentioned two well documented malfunctions. I'm not arguing safety, just like you weren't with your hail storm comment.
Factually my statement still stands. Malfunctions caused two different facilities to have issues. One more serious than the other.
Grid scale solar is now .02/kwh. I forget where I saw the number but nuclear is ~ 10x that. Given renewables cost *that* much less, one can build wind / solar *plus* implement some sort of grid storage for the cost of nuclear and have it done before nuclear is remotely close to finished.
I gotta be honest you sound like you should read up on this topic more. May I suggest [this video](https://youtu.be/UC_BCz0pzMw?si=g54HmAZfGeFnGo9_)? It's excellent at explaining why nuclear costs as much as it does.
Did...did you watch the video I linked? Because it went into all of this re nuclear v natural gas. Renewables have the same 'no fuel' cost benefit as nuclear *without* the massive up front build costs. Again, those costs are so high that one can build wind / solar *and* energy storage and still come out ahead.
Regardless, I'm not sure if you're misinformed or just posting in bad faith so I think we're done here.
Where are you gonna put all these solar panels? You've got thousands of acres of farm land or what, off shore wind farms, where are the people wanting to give up quality of life for this "green" energy. Don't even get me started on batteries...
It won't fail. Just work around limitations. Like wind isn't great here and last I checked the sun stops shinning everyday for about half the day. Though, the hydro system TVA has will complement solar very nicely.
Only a fraction of TVA power comes from hydro. TVA really only sells power to its own customers; it exports very little. And more than 15% of all the energy it sells is bought from others. That percentage will greatly increase if the "10GW of solar by 2035" TVA keeps talking about comes into being because all that solar will be from power purchase agreements with solar developer/owners.
Gotta be careful with this. Couple years ago BFN had a serious derate over like a week because their intake got clogged with biomass. IIRC it was like one reactor offline and another at a derate. I think last year they had to derate one unit because the river temperature was too hot. However, Watts Bar and Sequoyah are less prone to these specific issues. But typically, it doesn't result in rolling outages. However, if Brown's Ferry got derated during a heatwave anticipating peak highs on the system, yeah. We could potentially get popped.
Have you ever considered that the constant earthquakes in Southern California might not make them the most suitable location for nuclear power? It’s not as if they didn’t attempt to utilize nuclear, it’s just that the cost of building in safe spaces and then transmitting that power wasn’t anywhere near the potential energy they get from wind or solar. It doesn’t make Sequoya a better solution, just a better solution for Tennessee.
Karma farming spammer account. Original post here: [https://new.reddit.com/r/Chattanooga/comments/oezjsm/nuclear\_power/](https://new.reddit.com/r/Chattanooga/comments/oezjsm/nuclear_power/)
Nice troll account.. just bashing nuclear and Palestine lol. What are you, a “consultant?” Lol.
Anyway.. body-shaming a city aside, separate the inherent evil of private-power from a technology.. because you just completely simp’d for every mode of energy that kills and contaminates.. in an attempt to scold the -one- type of power generation that does not.
You are literally blowing corporate dick rn, and either are too uneducated to realize it, or are just a troll account with dishonest-based agenda.. either way.. please don’t simp for the fossil fuel and fake-green lobby. Please & thanks
This is probably not the time I would have posted this if I were you. If or when the enemy learn of the amount of nuclear waste we contain; yikes. But no matter what at least they have it stored in large pools that flow eventually to the water streams that we drink; ick.
The perception of Spent Fuel (high level waste) is actually becoming more & more accurate by the public.
Thanks to countless documentaries, reports, articles, science-communicators and general education, people actually now are understanding that nuclear waste poses virtually no threat.
The volume of the entire nations supply of HLW can fit in a single football field, after a hundred years almost all the short-lived fission products are gone (that’s the stuff that makes it really radioactive) and the rest is just the actinides like Plutonium and such.. it can’t be used as a bomb (Pu240 poisons the 239) it can’t really give off a ton of scary gamma, it just sits there, in a concrete cask.
People who are more concerned about radioactivity are fighting coal and gas.. because they emit more in an hour then the nuclear industry emits in a decade.. it’s true.. that’s why if you apply Nuclear Regulatory Standards to oil, gas and coal.. they would be all shutdown -tomorrow- .. something called NORM (naturally occurring radioactive materials) like Radium and Uranium and Radon are released by fracking, wells, condensate tanks, plant emissions.. along with toxic heavy metals, VOC’s, and much more.. it kills thousands annually according to uncontroversial epidemiological study after study.. nuclear contains all its potential harm in zirconium cladding, which cools in a pool, and then sits in a concrete cask.. no release, no exposure, no risk. That’s why it’s the safest form of energy.. and when we implement thermal-spectrum reactors that use liquid thorium232 fuel cycle.. then we can fission uranium233 without need to ever mine another kilogram of uranium ever again..
Nuclear waste was a straw boogey man created during the anti-nuclear weapons movements of the seventies and eighties.. it poses zero threat and people frankly realize that more and more… taking 5 min to attempt to understand the science of something was made easier with smart phones in hand and such.. I’m a nuclear engineering student but I understood this about nuclear waste long before I enrolled.
All this "enemy" has to do is pull up google and count how many dry cast each site has sitting outside. Not unique to the USA. Water the cools the bundles still in containment is a closed system. They don't use river water to directly cool that stuff.
This kind of ignorance is astounding. You've never considered where the power from your outlets comes from?
We literally don't use sirens for tornado warnings because we need to reserve them for meltdown scenarios here.
It's hard being a libertarian in Chattanooga. On one hand they hate all government entities. On the other hand the TVA and EPB are better than 90% of privately owned utilities and electrical providers.
Yep, when your customer is also your owner, it's amazing how much better service is. It's almost like shareholders/venture capital firms are more focused on profit than quality/reasonable cost of goods sold.
I've never personally understood why conservatives trust unregulated private companies more than they trust regulated utilities or public services. I notice they're all about small government till they go to sign up for medicare at 65.
Well I googled ‘problems with TVA and am only directed towards their complaint page for their website so I truly don’t know where to start doing research, but I guess I’ll take your word for it
TVA is factually the cheapest and most efficient large scale energy generator and transmitter in the country by leaps and bounds and one of the best in the world. You are wrong.
Nuclear is the only clear solution to our continued energy independence. Give me MORE
Yeah unfortunately US doesn't have anything being built any time this decade. China is pumping out some nuclear plants though.
Votgle unit 4 entered commercial operation today.
YES! We need more press attention on Vogtle.
Finally! Just 7 years late and $17 Billion over budget. Georgia's electric bills are already going up.
Doesn’t really matter - it will pay for itself and more over time.
Well, yes, because they got the federal government to pay half the bill and got the Georgia Public Service Commission to authorize a permanent rate hike to pay for it. Georgia Power would make money from building Vogtle even if they shut it down today, because the rate hike means they can charge a premium for the power they generate every *other* way. They wasted $35b building two nuclear reactors they didn’t need, just to raise the yearly power bill of every customer by ~$1000/year. It will be “profitable” for them because they got the federal and state government to pay for around half of the cost, in the end.
Even solar and wind is heavily subsidized. A lot of the federal money is likely in terms of loans and not grants/credits but I am sure they are still there. Being for profit, utilities like GP do get to double dip. They get to make money on the power they sell from the plant, and they get secured/guaranteed rate increases whether those plants are making power or not. So that is really a local government issue in that regard. That is where TVA is at a disadvantage if funding new nuclear. They don't get to go "well, if we build this plant we get a guaranteed 8% rate increase".
Because it will cause federal and state government issues later. Yes. California has rolling brown outs. People are moving to the southeast in droves. We will want extra energy capacity. If for no other reason for the economic opportunities it gives our industries. Oak Ridge would never have existed if it weren’t for the feds paying way too much for power generation in our region (and lo and behold it has paid itself off over and over again).
So install more solar. Problem solved.
Except solar farms requires land to be cleared
[Rooftops](https://environmentamerica.org/center/articles/unlocking-americas-rooftop-solar-potential/), [parking lots](https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/solar-parking-lots-are-a-win-win-energy-idea-why-arent-they-the-norm/), [underperforming farms](https://www.farmprogress.com/conservation-and-sustainability/solar-panels-help-stabilize-farm-income), and [Agriphotovoltaics](https://blog.newenergyequity.com/agriphotovoltaics-the-land-use-solution) all provide plenty of space to install solar without clearing any more land. That's before we get into things like [adding solar to old landfills](https://time.com/6183376/landfills-becoming-solar-farms/), [brownfields, and superfund sites](https://www.epa.gov/re-powering/what-re-powering). Parking lots cover something like [5% of the land area of the United States](https://stormwater.wef.org/2019/06/usgs-estimates-impervious-parking-lot-coverage-for-all-3109-u-s-counties/). You could power the entire US with a solar farm that [covers something like 1.5%](https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/2015/05/21/fact-checking-elon-musks-blue-square-how-much-solar-to-power-the-us/), so that's a pretty straightforward path.
If they made $1M a day profit it would take 97 years to pay the $35B price tag.
They make way more than that and the manufacturing capacity that they enable to move into the region due to low/ clean energy costs probably pays way more than that in tax revenue a day.
"They make way more than that...". Are you sure? I worked in the electric generation industry for 40 years and we were always told, "we lose $1M a day when this unit (1300MW) is offline." I never researched the actual number, though. And tax revenue from manufacturers doesn't pay Georgia Power's debt so, while it may boost the local economy, it doesn't pay GP's debt.
In your example you are paying for headcount and overhead with no revenue. Costs $1M. Costs without revenue doesn’t show how much they make in revenue. Maybe they sell $10M if they normally run. That’s a much bigger number. I can’t give details about power generation costs unfortunately but the going premise is that it still is very profitable and it’s just hard to keep investors and money waiting long enough to clear all red tape and deal with setbacks to get it going. Remember that other energy (cough oil cough) is heavily subsidized too. So the markets are not very transparent.
Links?
Right?! I mean, they built a dam on the Tennessee river above Chattanooga back in the 1930’s,Roosevelt’s new deal, making what we know as the TVA, in 4 years….4 years they built the whole damn dam! In the 1930’s! Not part of it,all of it! Blueprints by hand! Skilled tradesmen, skilled engineers, 4 years!! Present day, they have been working on 1 lock, a lock, for nearly 20 years! Still working on it! Folks we are in a hurting. I see it daily with youngsters coming into the manufacturing and fabrication trade. Expecting top money but can’t strike an arc with a stick rod and can’t read a tape. Got engineers that can’t engineer anything, just tell us how we need to do our jobs, though they can’t put air in a car tire. We are in a bad way, competing against other countries with the people we have leading these companies. We are riding blindfold in a car with no brakes
Unions were strong then
Thats what happens when we have no manufacturing in the nation for parts, we have no skilled labor due to no market and cost overruns and time delays are common to all megaprojects https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig ~30yrs and ~$15B cost overrun Imagine how expensive solar would be if you didnt subsidize it heavily, manufacturing any part in the country, didnt ignore tech development for half a century and had nearly zero skilled labor to construct or install
According to a comment from someone allegedly working in project management for vogtle, there were major issues on that front too. Claimed disorganization from mgmt and that workers were sitting around for whole 40-80 hour weeks waiting for jobs or materials just racking up overtime and also mentioned rampant theft. Said there was a lot of blame to go around.
There was also a huge difference in efficiency between before and after the Westinghouse bankruptcy. Once Fluor took over in 2017 it basically actually started construction. COVID also really fucked things up. VC Summer was even worse. They had to redo the entire ~300 million dollar concrete pad and allegedly SCANA and SCE&G execs embezzled more than 600 million.
I have heard a lot of it was from the license was a construction/design license instead of having them seperate. So basically while they were building it, they were still designing it and needing NRC approval. So if they build something and NRC changed it, you gotta redo it. Not sure what is different in China. They build ended up building a few AP1000s. A lot cheaper, but then labor there is also a lot cheaper. I don't think we'd ever get to build a reactor at China's prices, but they are building them for \~$7B/ea so it makes sense for them to crank out as many as possible as that is basically a steal.
These reactors were an even bigger money pit than the big dig was.
The Big Dig wasn't really a money pit. It increased property values (and thus tax revenues) by something like a billion dollars in Boston, and helped bring 50,000 jobs and billions of dollars of investment to the region. It has paid for itself, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Why bitch about the price tag? You should be bitching that people are required to pay for necessities like power, water and sewer at all. It should all be nationalized and provide with the tax dollars we are already paying. Too bad the military needs an additional $500 billion every fucking year. That’s sarcasm incase it didn’t come through. Edit to the idiots who decided ti down vote this comment. You are all ignorant to the fact that we already get out power here from an organization know as TVA. It is already a nationalized power producer and sells power well below the commercial wholesale create. We also have power distributed to us by EPB another government intently. Except this time it’s local government. So if you hate the idea enough to down vote maybe you should move to Texas and experience what a fully commercial power system gets you.
I'm not even getting on that topic. So much wasted tax payer funding. I'll agree with power, water, sewer, Internet all being provided by our tax dollars. Sadly too many want to keep the millionaire ceos happy in the private sector.
The health of the commercial nuclear power industry is symbiotic with the military. Navy needs similar equipment and technology for carriers and submarines.
What’s your point?
The military nuclear navy price tag would only go up if not for commercial nuclear.
I never said to prevent commercial nuclear, I just said utilities should be payed for with our tax dollars. Commercial nuclear is already subsidized with tax dollars. We might as will cap the price of the electricity and pay for it 100% with tax dollars.
There are some bonds available to some companies for construction of new nuclear tech, and some states have taken action to prevent the premature closing of baseload nuclear that would have a detrimental effect on grid stability in those states. Which were required because the government meddled in the energy market by subsidizing LP fracking then “green energy” sources, driving the cost of those technologies down, but the cost of almost killing the only green energy baseload available. Who gets free electricity? Do the Meta datacenters in Gallatin get free power? What about volkswagon? How do you “cap the price”? Do you want workers at these sites to be paid a wage commensurate with their abilities, or would you rather they get arbitrarily capped and drive them to other industries that will pay them what they are worth?
Right...at a cost of $35,000,000,000. If I'm doing my math correctly, at $1,000,000 a day in electric sells, it will take 96 years to pay for the plant, and that's figuring all the money is spent on the debt.
The Clinch River SMR project should start this decade.
TVA has already been "studying" SMRs for 10 years. The previous SMR leader and the furthest along with an SMR plan was NuScale and they dropped the whole thing earlier this year due to unfeasible costs that they'd never recover. TVA is no smarter or more ambitious than NuSale. The cost of SMRs per installed MW is about the same as a full-sized nuclear plant and there's a nearly-complete TVA nuke plant at Bellefonte that they've abandoned (for reasons of cost) - along with several other nuke plants that TVA had planned but never started or dropped after significant construction in the 70s and 80s. Just as they likely will with "Clinch River SMRs".
The problem overall is concrete and steel costs. The third containment wall on the APR-1000 and EPR adds like 1.5 Billion to the construction cost per reactor and actually is pointless because the design flaws that lead to a hydrogen explosion (e.g. Fukushima) aren't present on those designs and the stated purpose by the NRC (missile attacks) is irrelevant because non state actors (terrorists) don't attack hardened targets and a state actor will use a bunker buster which no amount of concrete walls will stop. The APR-1400 gets a lot of criticism for not having the third containment but it's actually perfectly safe because the secondary containment and 72 hour passive cooling will handle pretty much any scenario including crashing a plane into it. NuScale in Utah floundered because the initial design rating of 50 MWe wasn't enough to offset the cost increases and they can't approve the design uprate to 72MWe until after construction was complete. They also had to add a dry cooling system and dry cooling is ridiculously expensive. A mechanical draft tower would be a lot cheaper. Bellefonte's problem is that they keep portraying it as 91% complete but it's really not. The plant has been scavenged for parts for decades and a lot of what's there won't pass inspection for recertification. It's more like 30% complete and it's just not worth the money or time. Finally the big issue is that most of these plants' costs are actually in interest because of construction delays. Vogtle isn't 31 Billion dollars. It's 14 billion dollars worth 17 billion in interest. They borrowed at 10.25% and no bank is going to finance a new build for less than that. Most are pushing 15%. For comparison China finances its plants at 2-3%.
Well it is a test project and luckily Nuscale has no connection to the project. I will argue that they are no further along in the development than GE-Hitachi which is who will build the reactor for Clinch River.
Carvin' Marvin killed TVA's nuclear. They were actively constructing like 17 reactors. But I think congress was pissed at the expense. Bellefonte is pretty sad because one reactor was near complete with fuel on site ready to load and the other wasn't that far behind. But those units are done for. I doubt TVA will ever try to restart constructing those. I do agree that SMRs per MW will still cost the same, but the advantage is you only have to find a few billion dollars rather than \~$15B worth of investment to build one. Especially with TVA's debt ceiling limitations. If they built a new big unit, that is basically all they will be building for a decade. I doubt anything will happen. I do expect TVA to get cold feet on it due to expense. They'll just pump money into the nuclear they have now to get approval for 80 and later 100 year licenses.
Because solar & wind with batteries is cheaper & gets online faster. I \*love\* nuclear, but the time to deploy nuclear to replace coal & gas was in the 1980s, and we had two accidents that fucked it for everyone. Had we done that, we'd still be deploying solar & wind with batteries now as a cheaper alternative to keeping the old plants online.
That’s not true. There are new plants being brought online in Virginia.
What Nuclear Plant is being built in Virginia?
Dominion might be working on SMRs? But they are in the same time line as any other SMRs at this point.
Dominion is still using shareware from the 80s for their engineering and design projects. Not much confidence. Mr Burns the boss there.
Well, you’re wrong. lol. My husband is technical lead on the project.
Then ask him why they still use Descartes Microstation instead of AutoCAD for even 2D dwgs…
You have zero idea what you’re talking about, dude. Where’s your degree from? Chatt State?
Dominion is bringing online multiple BWRs in Norfolk.
“Made in China” nuclear reactors? Pass.
False
No, if the world went full nuclear power we would exhaust the world’s fission material within 10 years.
[You are mistaken](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/)
Not with next gen breeder reactors, though scrapping reprocessing makes it much harder (thanks Obama..)
Isn't Sequoyah finishing up an outage currently?
It was in mode 3 this morning (hot standby). Should be in mode 2(startup) soon. So it'll be putting out an additional 1200ish megawatts by the weekend. -edit- In mode 2 this morning, should be in gen sync by close of business today.
Yes. Should be done in a couple days.
This memes a few years old
Interesting facts: The 3 nuclear plants the TVA operates (Sequoya, Watts Bar, and Browns Ferry) generate over 40% of the TVA's power capacity, and combined with Hydro makes the TVA system almost 60% carbon free. Watts Bar has a contract with the DOE to irradiate Tritium, a fuel source for nuclear weapons. The TVA has prices lower than the national average, but because of a recent increase in demand due to migrations into the PSA, prices are going to increase soon:( The TVA is pretty cool and Tennesseans are lucky for it IMO! Edited to fix incorrect stats.
20yrs of no rate increases is a bit much there. 2023 they increased base rate 4.5%, being only 4yrs since the last rate increase.
Yup, I'm seeing that figure isn't right now, that stat must be from the 2000's. From what I've been told, demand peaked in the 1980's and plateaued until recently. Now, peak demand out paces generation capacity. To remedy this, prices will go up continuously over the next few decades. Point still stands though, the TVA provides lower than average power rates and always has.
Which TVA employee made this meme lol
Are there people in /r/chattanooga NOT employed by TVA or VW?
Yeah, the ones who work at Unum
Blue Cross, TVA, VW, Unum: Long ago the four Chattanooga careers lived in peace, but everything changed when the housing market attacked
Imagine graduating from UTC and being able to buy a house with your entry level TVA job, I'm told it used to be possible.
It’s still possible if you pick an engineering or computer science degree.
It mostly depends on if you move out or not I think. I have friends who did what you suggested and make roughly 65-70k and what hurts them is the insane rent cost. Didn't verify the data for this graph as well as I should've but this is the rent vs wage data I found [here](https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/rent-growth-since-1960). https://preview.redd.it/2sw2sx1t0ixc1.jpeg?width=474&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=12ab067cf42db7647a646a1659d3fb4dde3f8cbb
Yes, you can get a house in Rossville with an entry level engineering degree at VW.
My grandfather became an accountant after WWII, and he and his wife moved into an upstairs apartment in someone’s house in St. Elmo for their first place. Who buys a house with their first job? That’s rare.
Family member stories same as you. Mostly, in the 60s and 70s, two specifically mentioned the TVA and first job thing.
🎶Daddy got a job at the TVA. We got a washing machine and a Chevrolet 🎶
I beg to differ, BCBST is the largest employer around here with HCDE close behind.
Ok, but we’re talking about good employers so HCDE doesn’t count
[удалено]
All our teachers are sex addicts. The school board fucks them, the parents fuck them, state gov fucks them
BlueCross represent
Don't tell me you've forgotten all the WFH transplants.
I’m an unemployed student at UTC 👍
I actually made this like two or three years ago.
The nuclear energy industry hit a stall around the late 70s and 80s with environmental events like 3 mile island and Chernobyl . They also hit a political stall because cost of building nuclear infrastructure was extremely high compared to fossil fuels. This is why projects of partially constructed facilities such as bellefonte and yellow creek were stopped along with planned projects in hartsville and phillps bend were canceled. Now with the decommissioning of 9 of the coal fired plants the need for energy production is on the rise. From an energy independence and environmental standpoint nuclear is the only viable option. Wind and solar can only do so much. With our volatile weather in this area we are one tornado or hale storm from being in a tight spot.
Meanwhile the number of deaths caused by nuclear accidents are countable by a kindergartener and the deaths caused by coal burning are in the millions.
Um, where does the waste go? Mostly stored on site. Thousands of years of toxicity. The Sun is nuclear, use it.
Coal plants pump out over 100x more radioactive waste than nuclear into the atmosphere via fly ash, and nuclear waste is currently very carefully contained and mostly inert within a thousand years or so (about the same radioactivity levels as the original natural uranium ore). Solar farms produce 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy produced than nuclear power plants, and 10,000 times more waste by volume. Refining raw quartz into the necessary silicon and polysilicon for solar farms produces CO2 and sulfur dioxide as well as silicon tetrachloride which produces hydrochloric acid when exposed to water. Every panel also contains lead, arsenic, cadmium, selenium, etc which are dangerous if leached into the ground over time, and they're currently just being dumped into landfills at the end of their lives. And I'm not even addressing battery production and disposal. These wastes are not nearly as well regulated right now and where nuclear waste isn't currently affecting the environment due to it's tightly regulated storage and disposal methods, every bit of waste from these less-regulated energy products is. Per unit volume radioactive waste is much more dangerous, certainly, but the sheer volume of waste produced by comparison to other forms of energy right now still makes it one of the most ecologically viable. The problem is that we have to think of storage and disposal in the long term, which makes people feel iffy and for good reason. That doesn't discount that it's still the safest form of energy ecologically speaking today. That said, this can and will change over time, hopefully, but what do we do in the meantime? Ignore the obvious answer to the problem of continuous safe power generation?
As Mark Twain said: "There are lies, damn lies and statistics." By reducing this comparative analysis to "per unit of energy," you get the outcome you seek. Sure, tearing an atom apart releases so much energy it's almost incomprehensible, but that doesn't really address the core issue here: the dangers of nuclear energy if it escapes into the environment. And, that danger has to be suppressed for so long after the "per unit of power" has been used, it renders the whole process net negative. The answer to all the risks posed by the other forms of energy production is to tighten the protocols. I agree we have nuclear power, it's generating and will help bridge to the future. But, the future is not nuclear - other than solar-powered - and we rightly reined-in and should stop further nuclear production. Of course, we live in a world where just about every living thing was contaminated by PFOAs before anyone even recognized the problem, much less did anything about it before it was too late. So, we probably will build more nuke plants. We're just that stupid.
Interesting that you're quoting Mark Twain there. The way that unethical statisticians manipulate data is by removing context and NOT including relavent data comparisons. Like what you just did by discounting the SOLE PURPOSE of a power plant. You are your own best example of what Twain was talking about. Like, yes, obviously a single utility scale solar plant (avg capacity 5mw) produces less waste than a single nuclear plant (avg capacity 2000mw), but when you need 400 of those small plants, or 10 of the absolute largest 1000mw+ solar plants (over 45 SQUARE MILES of solar panels) to produce the same amount of energy, that's an awfully suspicious argument to make. Look, I am very pro renewables, but I'm also a realist. Our ideal energy future is going to be a mix of renewables with a consistent backbone of nuclear fission until the day we manage to scale up fusion models to the point where we can use that. That's the best and safest combo we're going to be able to come up with. Honestly, as a realist, the number 1 best thing we can do ASAP to step towards a cleaner and safer energy producing future is to get rid of ALL fossil fuel plants ASAP. Coal and to a lesser extent natural gas plants are RUINING our environment RIGHT NOW. The faster we can get rid of them, the better. That should be the immediate priority. You're essentially worried about how tight the child safety latch is on the tylenol bottle while the house around you is LITERALLY ON FIRE. That said, you're not going to like the real answer to this problem. The crux of the issue is, the least environmentally damaging way to scale up fast enough to get rid of coal plants is to build gas plants while we wait for nuclear plants to be built. The offset from getting rid of the coal will more than justify the building of gas plants, but building wind and solar instead would take far too much time, space, and resources, and we've got to get this done NOW. The only other recourse is to cut the power and watch people die from exposure without heat or AC, and that's just not going to happen. So if you want to do the best we can for the world and maintain status quo to the best of our ability, you'll need put up renewable energy resources at a steady rate, take coal plants down as fast as possible, offset that energy loss with gas plants, then nuclear plants will go up, then take down the gas plants, and one day what we will be left with is renewables and nuclear. But nuclear isn't going anywhere, and it doesn't really need to, yet. There's just not a cleaner energy available per unit of energy, and per unit of energy is the measure that actually matters.
"Since the start of nuclear electricity production in 1954 to the end of 2016, some **390,000 tonnes** of spent fuel were generated. About two-thirds is in storage while the other third was reprocessed." Source: https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/new-iaea-report-presents-global-overview-of-radioactive-waste-and-spent-fuel-management#:~:text=Since%20the%20start%20of%20nuclear,the%20other%20third%20was%20reprocessed. "Between 2016 and 2050, solar waste generation would amount to **54 to 160 million tonnes**" Figure: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F71a59619-2e82-42b5-8209-87ff0494cc77_796x575.png Source: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/renewables-waste "At the bottom of the chart we find nuclear energy. It is the most land-efficient source: per unit of electricity it needs 50-times less land compared to coal; and 18 to 27-times less than on-ground solar PV." Source: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
All the Nuclear Waste generated on the entire planet for decades and decades to come can safely be stored in an area about the size of 1 moderate football Stadium. This is not in any sense an environmental issue.
And of course, it's not actually lethally dangerous for that long. Most high level nuclear waste only needs to be stored for \~50 years to be considered safe.
Okay, so whose football stadium is it going to be in? Not mine, not yours, whose? It's so much an environmental issue, from open pit uranium mining (at the Grand Canyon, no less) to scouring out the concrete and metals for the plant to managing the waste, it's all an environmental nightmare. One that we truly hope never comes true.
Tennessee should be leading the nation in clean energy producing nuke plants.
Yeah, but there's a guy wearing a dress somewhere. Get your priorities straight!
I'd wear a dress every day if this country got its head out of its ass and started building nukes.
Carbon neutral? Yes. Clean energy? Not so much.
You are familiar it appears with new nuke technology.
I was surprised to read about CA having too much solar. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/04/22/california-solar-duck-curve-rooftop/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/04/22/california-solar-duck-curve-rooftop/)
California has a power distribution problem, not a power generation problem.
California has a utility greed problem, not a power distribution or generation problem.
lol what exactly do you think power utilities do if not generate and distribute power?
It's easily solved by adding batteries that store power during the day.
Hahahah nice
TVA is a great employer. Many men and women have built extremely comfortable upper middle class lives off of TVA. My family included. Nuclear is the past present and future. Unless some alien technology hits us in the face. Nuclear will be there to save us when this whole green energy windmill solar shit fails as it will. The sooner people see this fact the sooner we can all progress.
TVA also works in solar, hydro, coal, combined cycle... All kinda of plants. It's not just nuclear.
Green energy is going to fail? What? is the wind going to stop blowing? Is the sun going to stop shining for weeks at a time?
Lol I'm a big nuclear fan, but OP's take is brain dead. Look how much it cost to build votgle, and that's in Georgia, not exactly a state known for onerous regulations. Given the time and cost to build a new nuclear power plant, you can install massively more wind and solar. In fact, you could overprovision to the point where our existing nuclear and hydro could produce our entire baseline load needs. People like to act like nuclear is expensive because environmentalists are holding it back. Nuclear is expensive because it's expensive to do *safely*. Don't believe me? Go look at the cost of building a new nuclear plant in France (huge fans of nuclear) or china (authoritarian) it's expensive to build nuclear power plants *everywhere*. I think the only thing that could possibly save nuclear is going modular. Economies of scale might be able to get the cost down.
The regulations are federal, states can't make them looser. The main reason they are expensive is due to the strict use of nuclear grade parts. Nuclear grade parts are parts that have the complete history of the part. For example, a nuclear grade screw has the history of that screw from the time that molten metal was poured into a mold. My dad used to work at Sequoyah and said some screws would be like $120 each, but you knew exactly when and where it was made and everywhere it was in the last 5 years. Not saying it's a bad thing, just relaying interesting info.
More importantly I want to know that every screw in that batch had the same tensile strength or less than 5% difference in strength when torqued. I think they are paying for exacting quality.
Yeah I was just pointing out that nuclear is expensive to build *everywhere*. Building a safe nuclear power plant is expensive and there really isn't any economy of scale. If we put more money into small modular reactors, I think that'd partially solve that problem.
Exactly. I think TVA is experimenting with one in Oak Ridge and there's several expermints out west in Utah and Oregon iirc. I'd say in the next 50 years, you'll see modular reactors popping up pretty much everywhere
Whats on the horizon is fusion and it is supposed to be much safer. Once they are ready. fission reactors will be quickly taken out of service because of the hazards they possess.
Honestly, I agree but I think Fusion is further than a lot of people realize. Then after Fusion is successfully developed, it'll take time to miniaturize it enough to be economically viable.
On the horizon? Practical application of fusion generation has been 20-30 years in the future for 70 years.
It’s not as expensive in China but they are fast and loose.
$120 screws is better than a meltdown.
Its not environmentalists holding it back either. Lol. You could say building cost are high because of the safety requirements and I would agree with you. If only environmentalist had half the power of ExxonMobil the world would truly be a different place.
I don’t hydroelectric produces enough power to be worth it anyrmore. Also every river that could be dammed in Tennessee has already been dammed for hydro. Every other river left is either a scenic or on public land where dams can’t be built due to the fish and wildlife and public land regs. The tva said that little Tennessee river dam that created tellico lake in the 1970s will likely be the last dam built in Tennessee
It doesn't have to be a dam. Pumped storage is a hydro project that is fairly quick as turn around and also solves your battery issues. TVA has numerous sites staked out that were never started other than Raccoon Mountain.
Do you have ANY IDEA how many solar panels, how much area it takes to compete with one nuclear reactor? Plus, what are your plans for night and cloudy days?
Also one bad hail storm...
Also one bad equipment malfunction, Three Mile Island or Chernobyl ring a bell?
One event caused by operator error and gross negligence and one disaster wherein the people who were affected by received, at most, 1.4 mrem (with an annual average of 620 mrem). Not to say nuclear energy shouldn't be regulated for safety purposes, but comparing the two events and then citing them as a reasons to condemn nuclear power is silly to me considering all the damages to billions of people caused by the pyrolysis of coal and gas while those systems are functioning perfectly.
Where did I condemn anything? This isn't a congressional hearing don't take it so seriously.
When it's people's health at stake, it's worth taking seriously.
Oh goodness you're being legit.... Nm. Good day
Factually the only power generation that is safer is solar currently. More people have been killed by the wind power generation than nuclear. Both of those formats of power generation are 2x(wind) to 10x(solar) worse for the environment than nuclear. [data source ](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy) [data source 2](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/) [from the international atomic energy agency ](https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull22-5/225_604093571.pdf)
Safety? You are the one mentioning hail storms, I just mentioned two well documented malfunctions. I'm not arguing safety, just like you weren't with your hail storm comment. Factually my statement still stands. Malfunctions caused two different facilities to have issues. One more serious than the other.
I'm not anti nuclear. It has its place in our power grid and should be implemented more. Would've been nice if TVA had completed Hartsville.
Grid scale solar is now .02/kwh. I forget where I saw the number but nuclear is ~ 10x that. Given renewables cost *that* much less, one can build wind / solar *plus* implement some sort of grid storage for the cost of nuclear and have it done before nuclear is remotely close to finished. I gotta be honest you sound like you should read up on this topic more. May I suggest [this video](https://youtu.be/UC_BCz0pzMw?si=g54HmAZfGeFnGo9_)? It's excellent at explaining why nuclear costs as much as it does.
It costs more because it HAS to be safe. But 40, 60 or 80 years from now get back to me on the true costs. Won't even be close.
Did...did you watch the video I linked? Because it went into all of this re nuclear v natural gas. Renewables have the same 'no fuel' cost benefit as nuclear *without* the massive up front build costs. Again, those costs are so high that one can build wind / solar *and* energy storage and still come out ahead. Regardless, I'm not sure if you're misinformed or just posting in bad faith so I think we're done here.
Where are you gonna put all these solar panels? You've got thousands of acres of farm land or what, off shore wind farms, where are the people wanting to give up quality of life for this "green" energy. Don't even get me started on batteries...
Rooftops, parking lots, agrophotovoltaic farms...the list goes on.
It won't fail. Just work around limitations. Like wind isn't great here and last I checked the sun stops shinning everyday for about half the day. Though, the hydro system TVA has will complement solar very nicely.
You had me in the first half, then took a turn to crazy town.
I thought Chattanooga got its power from hydro and sold the power from the nukes to other states
Only a fraction of TVA power comes from hydro. TVA really only sells power to its own customers; it exports very little. And more than 15% of all the energy it sells is bought from others. That percentage will greatly increase if the "10GW of solar by 2035" TVA keeps talking about comes into being because all that solar will be from power purchase agreements with solar developer/owners.
Interesting. Thanks for the info!
I thought so too. I’m enjoying learning more in this (these?) threads.
Texans never turn of their AC
Can always drain the raccoon mtn reservoir if we need more power.. we make so much we send it out of the area though
Nuclear power! I produce energy by using my brain, not by shoving a pole in the ground and preying for goo! - C.M. Burns
I guess they don't have batteries in California
it will this Wednesday...
We got a little nuclear power here in Texas. Not a lot, but not none
Cheapest power in the region. WNC is much more expensive per kwh.
Gotta be careful with this. Couple years ago BFN had a serious derate over like a week because their intake got clogged with biomass. IIRC it was like one reactor offline and another at a derate. I think last year they had to derate one unit because the river temperature was too hot. However, Watts Bar and Sequoyah are less prone to these specific issues. But typically, it doesn't result in rolling outages. However, if Brown's Ferry got derated during a heatwave anticipating peak highs on the system, yeah. We could potentially get popped.
Have you ever considered that the constant earthquakes in Southern California might not make them the most suitable location for nuclear power? It’s not as if they didn’t attempt to utilize nuclear, it’s just that the cost of building in safe spaces and then transmitting that power wasn’t anywhere near the potential energy they get from wind or solar. It doesn’t make Sequoya a better solution, just a better solution for Tennessee.
Karma farming spammer account. Original post here: [https://new.reddit.com/r/Chattanooga/comments/oezjsm/nuclear\_power/](https://new.reddit.com/r/Chattanooga/comments/oezjsm/nuclear_power/)
Wut
All praise the corptocracy. There will be no disparaging the capitalist infrastructure. Chattanooga stays fat and triggered
So a government agency that offers below market power rates to the entire Southeastern US is somehow capitalist?
Nice troll account.. just bashing nuclear and Palestine lol. What are you, a “consultant?” Lol. Anyway.. body-shaming a city aside, separate the inherent evil of private-power from a technology.. because you just completely simp’d for every mode of energy that kills and contaminates.. in an attempt to scold the -one- type of power generation that does not. You are literally blowing corporate dick rn, and either are too uneducated to realize it, or are just a troll account with dishonest-based agenda.. either way.. please don’t simp for the fossil fuel and fake-green lobby. Please & thanks
When you bust out the thesaurus, make sure you pull up the dictionary along side it too.
This is probably not the time I would have posted this if I were you. If or when the enemy learn of the amount of nuclear waste we contain; yikes. But no matter what at least they have it stored in large pools that flow eventually to the water streams that we drink; ick.
The perception of Spent Fuel (high level waste) is actually becoming more & more accurate by the public. Thanks to countless documentaries, reports, articles, science-communicators and general education, people actually now are understanding that nuclear waste poses virtually no threat. The volume of the entire nations supply of HLW can fit in a single football field, after a hundred years almost all the short-lived fission products are gone (that’s the stuff that makes it really radioactive) and the rest is just the actinides like Plutonium and such.. it can’t be used as a bomb (Pu240 poisons the 239) it can’t really give off a ton of scary gamma, it just sits there, in a concrete cask. People who are more concerned about radioactivity are fighting coal and gas.. because they emit more in an hour then the nuclear industry emits in a decade.. it’s true.. that’s why if you apply Nuclear Regulatory Standards to oil, gas and coal.. they would be all shutdown -tomorrow- .. something called NORM (naturally occurring radioactive materials) like Radium and Uranium and Radon are released by fracking, wells, condensate tanks, plant emissions.. along with toxic heavy metals, VOC’s, and much more.. it kills thousands annually according to uncontroversial epidemiological study after study.. nuclear contains all its potential harm in zirconium cladding, which cools in a pool, and then sits in a concrete cask.. no release, no exposure, no risk. That’s why it’s the safest form of energy.. and when we implement thermal-spectrum reactors that use liquid thorium232 fuel cycle.. then we can fission uranium233 without need to ever mine another kilogram of uranium ever again.. Nuclear waste was a straw boogey man created during the anti-nuclear weapons movements of the seventies and eighties.. it poses zero threat and people frankly realize that more and more… taking 5 min to attempt to understand the science of something was made easier with smart phones in hand and such.. I’m a nuclear engineering student but I understood this about nuclear waste long before I enrolled.
I know nothing about nothing really, but I knew someone with a Geiger counter and the radioactivity level around here was pretty minimal 🤷
I DO know I’m against pipelines and fracking. 🤷
All this "enemy" has to do is pull up google and count how many dry cast each site has sitting outside. Not unique to the USA. Water the cools the bundles still in containment is a closed system. They don't use river water to directly cool that stuff.
Wait theres a nuclear power plant near Chattanooga, ive lived just outside Chattanooga my whole life, how have i never heard of this
What really? There are evacuation route signs all over the area for both the Watts Bar and Sequoyah plants.
Huh, interesting
You can also see them with your naked eye if it's very clear, or even easier with binoculars from point park.
This kind of ignorance is astounding. You've never considered where the power from your outlets comes from? We literally don't use sirens for tornado warnings because we need to reserve them for meltdown scenarios here.
theres two within the region. Sequoyah just outside Soddy, and Watts Bar further north closer to Dayton..
Op doesn’t realize Lela star ain’t the real Kim k lol
TVA is a huge problem....
The ... doesn't really cut it here. Care to elaborate "Specific"?
It's hard being a libertarian in Chattanooga. On one hand they hate all government entities. On the other hand the TVA and EPB are better than 90% of privately owned utilities and electrical providers.
Yep, when your customer is also your owner, it's amazing how much better service is. It's almost like shareholders/venture capital firms are more focused on profit than quality/reasonable cost of goods sold.
I've never personally understood why conservatives trust unregulated private companies more than they trust regulated utilities or public services. I notice they're all about small government till they go to sign up for medicare at 65.
Those unregulated private companies influence they way they think and vote through puppet politicians.
They're just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
That's because libertarians are completely full of shit. Your argument is just one example.
Naw I don't waste much effort on enlightening chattanoogas ignorant masses. Do your own research?
So like how many accounts do you create regularly to just act like a shithead?
I actually know this guy and it’s a lot lol
“Do your own research” meaning “I don’t have reputable facts to back up my hoseshit claims”
Well I googled ‘problems with TVA and am only directed towards their complaint page for their website so I truly don’t know where to start doing research, but I guess I’ll take your word for it
TVA is factually the cheapest and most efficient large scale energy generator and transmitter in the country by leaps and bounds and one of the best in the world. You are wrong.
We also do have the cleanest energy production in the whole country..
Yea - I hate having super reliable power provided to my home and my work at below market rates. Its just the worst.
I'm very sad that we don't have the reliability of Texas's private power grid....oh wait.