Impressed £67.5 billion... nope... 263 billion, and rising.

[Scouse]

That's the current bill for cleaning up Sellafield*.

The cost of cleaning up the Sellafield nuclear waste site has reached £67.5bn with no sign of when the cost will stop rising

Guess who's footing the bills eh?

MOAR NUCLEAR! MOAR!!11!1!




*by "cleaning up" they mean "keeping all the waste there without a single clue what to do with it"...

 

[old.Tohtori]

I do believe the problem lies in this;

""There needs to be immediate change at the top of the consortium and a radical re-evaluation of the piecemeal hiving-off of the nuclear sector to private companies that are clearly ill-equipped to cope and have little interest in ensuring Britain has world-class nuclear facilities."

RAther then nuclear power itself.

Oh and;

 

[dysfunction]

I do believe you are correct Thot

 

[Gwadien]

For that amount of money, we could build a unmanned space ship and send it into space and just dump the nuclear waste in space, or randomly destroy planets, that'd be fun.

 

[soze]

For that amount of money, we could build a unmanned space ship and send it into space and just dump the nuclear waste in space, or randomly destroy planets, that'd be fun.

Yeah let's send all the waste to Pluto that fucker tricked us into thinking it was a Planet for years!

 

[Gwadien]

Yeah let's send all the waste to Pluto that fucker tricked us into thinking it was a Planet for years!

I mean, look at Mars, the yanks have the Buggy thing there drilling tiny holes and being yay we've drilled a hole, lets send a fucking spaceship there, nuke the planet and just be like, yo, we did that shit, if there was life, there's not anymore, yo.

 

[Job]

I don't think it's fair to judge by Sellafield, it was a one off, reprocessing centre and produced all our..and much of America's weapons grade plutonium, everything was dumped there and the original dumping was done with no thought whatsoever of the future, it was our..and many countries, nuclear pit. Calder hall was the worlds first reactor to produce electricity commercially and produced 60mw.

 

[Gwadien]

I don't think it's fair to judge by Sellafield, it was a one off, reprocessing centre and produced all our..and much of America's weapons grade plutonium, everything was dumped there and the original dumping was done with no thought whatsoever of the future, it was our..and many countries, nuclear pit. Calder hall was the worlds first reactor to produce electricity commercially and produced 60mw.

We have Americas? Really?

The size of that country, and we have Americas waste too?

 

[old.Tohtori]

We have Americas? Really?

The size of that country, and we have Americas waste too?

Don't worry, you repaid it in full with simon cowell.

 

[Chilly]

I wonder what the benefit of having our own nuke R&D start to finish on our soil, guaranteed power for certain parts of the country (not dependent on supply of coal or gas from wartorn countries) and the general expertise in nuke-tech is? Over the last 50-60 years? Probably more than £1bn a year. Fuck it. Cost of doing business.

 

[rynnor]

Much of it is the cost of pioneering a new industry - windscale was a testbed and horribly primitive by modern standards but clearly without it and other sites like it we wouldnt have the safe power of today.

63 billion sounds a rather high quote tbh - if you just buried it deep on-site it wouldnt cost a fraction of that but the costs are all driven up by enormous planning procedures etc. and all the hand wringing.

It happened - live with it - then sort it out - sod the planning system - find a decent spot and bury it deep.

 

[Hawkwind]

Thought they were storing much of it in Granite caves in Wales. Which they then flooded killing a student activist group (incl. Joanne Whalley) who were funded by the CIA.....

 

[rynnor]

Thought they were storing much of it in Granite caves in Wales. Which they then flooded killing a student activist group (incl. Joanne Whalley) who were funded by the CIA.....

???

 

[Hawkwind]

Edge Of Darkness - excellent drama series on BBC many many years ago.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/classic/edge/intro.shtml

 

[soze]

If the Falkland islanders ever vote to be handed back to Argentina then then have the perfect place to bury it all

 

[rynnor]

Realistically the best site would be sellafield itself because transporting the waste would be a nightmare but the geology isnt great there so you'd have to go pretty deep.

 

[Scouse]

Staggering the amount of idiocy in this thread. I guess 67 billion in ongoing costs for a single site and no end in sight, or technical fix (because it doesn't exist) just doesn't deserve proper thought.

Sixty seven billion. It is actually the proverbial black hole for cash written large.

Years of many on this board saying that nuclear is cost effective. The government's "independent" advisor blows their last leg out from under them (because cost, not safety, is what they back their views up with) - and it becomes a "meh" issue.

67 billion - and another 67 billion because we don't know what to do with it - and maybe another 67 billion after that, and ...

:facepalm:

the general expertise in nuke-tech

We have no expertise in nuke-tech. We need other countries to build our reactors for us.

if you just buried it deep

Get this through your head people - we don't have a fix for this problem.

This shit stays radioactive and lethal for geologic timescales. Even IF we could find a deep geologic repository (which we can't) we could not guarantee it's long-term safety.

 

[old.Tohtori]

http://www.popularmechanics.com/sci...-plan-to-make-nuclear-waste-disappear-8732655

Notable? " $3 billion price tag".

Problem might lay elsewhere as mentioned

 

[TdC]

I don't understand the argument: the problem exists and will not magically go away, ergo it will cost money and there is fuck all that can be done about it. There's a brilliant XKCD that came out recently about the comparative energies in stuff that can be used as fuel. Uranium is king.

 

[rynnor]

Get this through your head people - we don't have a fix for this problem.

This shit stays radioactive and lethal for geologic timescales. Even IF we could find a deep geologic repository (which we can't) we could not guarantee it's long-term safety.

There are plenty of technical solutions - there just isnt the political appetite to do anything about it so sucessive governments have kicked it into the long grass - ordering new investigations,enquiries etc.

Thats why the costs are ever increasing - political delays.

 

[Chilly]

We have no expertise in nuke-tech. We need other countries to build our reactors for us.

We build nuclear reactors for subs in Derby, we build our own missiles and bombs, we maintain many nuke plants in the UK, we have a large and active physics community researching various nuke-related theory. Don't be so shortsighted. There is a benefit to spending that money, it may or may not outweigh the overall cost but I'd rather have a home grown bomb that we can threaten anyone we fucking like with at virtually any cost. This planet is heading for some serious war in the next 50 years. Do you want to grow potatoes and wear a stop the war badge or tool the fuck up?

It's not just about energy and cost per kilowatthour.

 

[TdC]

http://www.popularmechanics.com/sci...-plan-to-make-nuclear-waste-disappear-8732655

Notable? " $3 billion price tag".

Problem might lay elsewhere as mentioned

as much as I love engineering, that just scares the shit out of me. tbh saying something will last X number of years is exactly the same as saying that consumption of GM will never harm you in your lifetime, or sugar replacements are harmless in your lifetime, etc, etc. You don't *know* because a complete test is impractical.

 

[Raven]

I think the amount is acceptable for what it has created and continues to create.

However, it should not be down to the tax payer to take on the entire cost...though if private companies got hit with it they would soon absorb it into our bills so it's kind of a lose-lose situation.

 

[old.Tohtori]

as much as I love engineering, that just scares the shit out of me. tbh saying something will last X number of years is exactly the same as saying that consumption of GM will never harm you in your lifetime, or sugar replacements are harmless in your lifetime, etc, etc. You don't *know* because a complete test is impractical.

Well you can't know anything for a 100%, but as stated there it would take such an event to dig out those canisters(sealed with best tech we got, encased in bedrock etc) that the nuclear waste would be a smallscale problem at that point.

When it's complete, there's no reason for people to go there and they probably won't even know(outside history books) that the storage even existed.

100k years is good enough for me as a solid storage

 

[Job]

My ex brother in law worked for bnfl..in charge of one of the disposal plants..the stories he told me you can be sure 61 billion is going in the pockets of advisors and lawyers..90% of the waste is low level but requires an army of suits just to bury a glove that is less radioactive than the ground it is buried in.

 

[rynnor]

Well you can't know anything for a 100%, but as stated there it would take such an event to dig out those canisters(sealed with best tech we got, encased in bedrock etc) that the nuclear waste would be a smallscale problem at that point.

When it's complete, there's no reason for people to go there and they probably won't even know(outside history books) that the storage even existed.

100k years is good enough for me as a solid storage

Exactly - tbh this is only for the High Level radioactive waste of which we dont have enormous amounts - most of ours is low level waste which you can pretty much landfill with a few extra precautions.

 

[Scouse]

I'd rather have a home grown bomb that we can threaten anyone we fucking like with at virtually any cost

Shit. Yeah. How wrong was I! That's certainly the most sensible intellectual argument I've ever heard when talking about a mammoth bill for the unrelated topic of our mahoosive nuclear fissile waste materials pools.

To (stupidly) humour you - we've already got nuclear weapons and very well armed allies and we could certainly retain that without a massive new nuclear build program.

This is about nuclear power generation capacity and our total lack of ability to deal with the waste issue (which, at SIXTY SEVEN BILLION (and rising) for ONE site is not going away) not additional retarded intercontinental-monkey-stick capacity.

I've been saying for years that the costs are astronomical - only for people like you and rynnor to jump down my throat telling me I'm a tin-foil hatter or that I'm talking shit, or that I'm a fucking hippie. But when I'm proven right you bleat on about nuclear weapons capacity like a nutty professor.

You're very much like your avatar in real life aren't you Chilly?

There are plenty of technical solutions

No. There aren't.

Deep geological storage has been found the world over to be an unmitigated joke.

We don't know what to do with the shit. The best containers we can make to hold it become nuclear waste themselves after 300 years - and that's a long way short of the additional 99,700 years we need to safely store the stuff. The existing (very well researched and planned out) geological stores are leaking caesium, strontium and plutonium all over the shop.

It's not a political problem - it's a scientific and engineering problem - we simply don't know what to do. So we go "bury it" - even though burying it isn't working - because we have no alternatives.


In other news Centrica are the latest to pull out of the bidding for new nuclear, today. Leaving the Frogs and the Chineese left. Not a single British bidder, Chilly.

Depsite the UK public promising that we will foot any bill for the decomissioning and storage of nuclear waste (which is nearly all of the cost) - and that we'd guarantee these companies a spodge of cash for the bulding and running - mahoosive energy corporations are running from it like nuclear was the plague of our time.

Which it is.

 

[Himse]

Surprise, government paying people serious money for doing minimal work.

I wonder what the true unemployment number would be if we cut all these 'experts' and 'advisors'

 

[rynnor]

Depsite the UK public promising that we will foot any bill for the decomissioning and storage of nuclear waste (which is nearly all of the cost) - and that we'd guarantee these companies a spodge of cash for the bulding and running - mahoosive energy corporations are running from it like nuclear was the plague of our time.

Which it is.

I am afraid its the disproportionate hysterics of people like you that means few companies want to get involved - they know it means years of opposition from the planning stage onwards, massive amounts of extra security required and a press ready to write hyped up nonsense stories about anything that happens.

 

[Scouse]

I am afraid its the disproportionate hysterics of people like you

Oh, I'm sorry rynnor. I was unaware that disgust at a taxpayer-funded SIXTY SEVEN BILLION (and rising) bill was disproportionate and hysterical rather than sensible and well-considered.

You're a denialist on a lot of things aren't you - even in the face of sixty seven billion pounds of fiscal evidence that nuclear is perhaps "a bit expensive".