James McGill Buchanan - Architect of Far Right Economics

[Cheerful Charlie]

The Nuke industry in the US seems to have a bit of a competence problem. Sorry bout that. Going bankrupt, economically unfeasible in some cases.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...r-power-fleet-could-disappear-in-38-years-s-p

Nuclear operators have been shutting plants as their profits have been eroded by generators burning cheap natural gas and by weak demand for electricity

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Meanwhile, back at the reactors....

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/judecl...subsidies-are-bad-energy-policy/#1c5d0c157b2c

"The nuclear species is going extinct,” Mycle Schneider, lead author, World Nuclear Industry Status Report, September 12, 2017
The "nuclear renaissance" that we have long waited for is falling short. In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the number of new projects has drastically dropped. Among other things, they’ve been plagued by huge cost overruns, lower cost competitors, public fear, an aging workforce, rare required materials, and often unmanageable waste problems.
According to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, the number of construction starts of nuclear reactors worldwide has sunk from a high of 15 in 2010, to 10 in 2013, to 8 in 2015, to 3 in 2016, and to just 1 in the first half of 2017. And most tellingly, premature nuclear shutdowns are occurring in even the richest nations.

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Meanwhile, Rick Perry, secretary of the US Energy department is asking for massive subsidies for coal and nuclear energy. But NOT solar or wind. Long ago, proponents of nuclear claimed nuclear energy would be so cheap, we wouldn't bother to meter it. Now it needs taxpayer $$$ to go toe to toe with natural gas and renewables.

 

[bilby]

The Nuke industry in the US seems to have a bit of a competence problem. Sorry bout that. Going bankrupt, economically unfeasible in some cases.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...r-power-fleet-could-disappear-in-38-years-s-p

Nuclear operators have been shutting plants as their profits have been eroded by generators burning cheap natural gas and by weak demand for electricity

Great. Let's allow gas companies to keep prices artificially low by not paying for polluting the planet. Brilliant idea

----

Meanwhile, back at the reactors....

----
https://www.forbes.com/sites/judecl...subsidies-are-bad-energy-policy/#1c5d0c157b2c

"The nuclear species is going extinct,” Mycle Schneider, lead author, World Nuclear Industry Status Report, September 12, 2017
The "nuclear renaissance" that we have long waited for is falling short. In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the number of new projects has drastically dropped. Among other things, they’ve been plagued by huge cost overruns, lower cost competitors, public fear, an aging workforce, rare required materials, and often unmanageable waste problems.

Cost overruns and lower cost competitors, due to unreasonable burdens placed on nuclear power alone; public fear that is counter-factual and moronic; an aging workforce due to public disapproval of the industry (also counter-factual and moronic); Rare required materials that are more common than those used for wind and solar installations; and lies about nuclear waste, which has been completely safely managed without a single accident, injury or death for sixty years.

Oh, and the Fukushima 'disaster' was nothing of the kind. What sort of 'disaster' doesn't kill anyone? Only nuclear 'disasters' are fatality-free, but still classed as 'disasters'. Meanwhile, business as usual by coal power alone kills more people every single day than all of the nuclear power accidents in history. But that's not a 'disaster', because reasons. WTF?

It's all a pack of lies, fear, and nonsense.

According to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, the number of construction starts of nuclear reactors worldwide has sunk from a high of 15 in 2010, to 10 in 2013, to 8 in 2015, to 3 in 2016, and to just 1 in the first half of 2017. And most tellingly, premature nuclear shutdowns are occurring in even the richest nations.

----

Meanwhile, Rick Perry, secretary of the US Energy department is asking for massive subsidies for coal and nuclear energy. But NOT solar or wind. Long ago, proponents of nuclear claimed nuclear energy would be so cheap, we wouldn't bother to meter it. Now it needs taxpayer $$$ to go toe to toe with natural gas and renewables.

None of these should be subsidized. Coal should pay an appropriate pigouvian tax for the harm they do by pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere; Wind and Solar should pay similar taxes to clean up the mess made by mining the materials they require, and to dispose of their toxic waste, and to cover the cost of grid stability and storage services that their intermittency demands.

Long ago, proponents of nuclear energy didn't realize the sheer depth of the stupidity and baseless venom that would be directed towards their industry. They also didn't realize that metering wouldn't require an expensive workforce of people walking from house to house reading meters (be honest, would you have imagined that in the 1950s?).

Nuclear power doesn't need a cent from the taxpayer to go toe to toe with any other generation technology. It just needs equal treatment. Right now, nuclear power manages to be almost as competitive, despite the massively biased marketplace, in which they must cover their entire lifecycle cost, plus a MASSIVE and needless regulatory expense; While other technologies are free to leave their pollution cleanup in the hands of the taxpayers without a second thought.

If you want to claim that something is uncompetitive, first you need to establish a fair competition. Usain Bolt would be an uncompetitive sprinter, if the IOC said that Jamaicans (and ONLY Jamaicans) had to carry an anvil when competing.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Part of the problem with nuclear energy is that as plans age, they need more expensive maintenance to stay running. And many of US nuclear plants are now reaching that age where they are becoming more costly to keep operating. When operators of such plants are struggling with this real issue, the idea of creating new plants and facing these problems in the future becomes far less attractive. It is not regulation killing the nuclear industry, it is the fact that the costs of maintaining old plants are not cheap and decommissioning old plants at the end of their life or spending huge amounts of money to get an aging plant back to good condition is not economically attractive.

 

[bilby]

Part of the problem with nuclear energy is that as plans age, they need more expensive maintenance to stay running. And many of US nuclear plants are now reaching that age where they are becoming more costly to keep operating. When operators of such plants are struggling with this real issue, the idea of creating new plants and facing these problems in the future becomes far less attractive. It is not regulation killing the nuclear industry, it is the fact that the costs of maintaining old plants are not cheap and decommissioning old plants at the end of their life or spending huge amounts of money to get an aging plant back to good condition is not economically attractive.

Sure. Keep telling yourself that.

Your lack of actual knowledge need not be an impediment to lobbying against the technology that is our best option on every count for making electricity.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Here in Texas, wind already supplies more electrical power to Texas than nuclear. 18% vs 12%. We are dealing with it all rationally in Texas.

 

[bilby]

Here in Texas, wind already supplies more electrical power to Texas than nuclear. 18% vs 12%. We are dealing with it all rationally in Texas.

HA!

Where does the other 70% come from?

You are are dealing with 12% of it rationally.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Here in Texas, wind already supplies more electrical power to Texas than nuclear. 18% vs 12%. We are dealing with it all rationally in Texas.

HA!

Where does the other 70% come from?

You are are dealing with 12% of it rationally.

Coal and natural gas. Natural gas from fracking is our main source at 34%. 32% for coal. Coal used to be the biggest contributor but natural gas and wind have been displacing that and that trend will continue. Every gigawatt of wind power capacity added will mainly come at the expense of coal. Texas still has vast wind resources untapped.


https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...-of-its-energy-from-wind-and-solar-last-year/

 

[dismal]

Anyone want to take a shot at what Buchanan got so wrong in his economics? And how these errors led us down the path of ruin?

I find it surprising someone could win a Nobel Prize based on things that were obviously wrong.

 

[laughing dog]

James M. Buchanan received his Nobel Prize in economics for his work (basically establishing) Public Choice Theory. The fact that a person is recognized in one subfield of a discipline does not mean that person is an expert or knows much about any other subfield in the discipline.

 

[SimpleDon]

My guess is that this two hundred years of burning coal and oil will be viewed in the future as a necessary transition period to more sustainable energy sources which will almost certainly be some kind of inherently safe fusion nuclear power, most probably a distributed system.

I am doubtful about whether controlled nuclear fusion will ever be practical. We know what to do: heat some hydrogen, squeeze it, and keep it at that state long enough. But it has been *very* difficult to do that well enough to do nuclear fusion, despite well over half a century of research into doing so.

But some renewable energy sources have been having some remarkable recent growth: wind and solar. So they may eventually take over, though with the help of good energy-storage technologies and likely also synfuel ones.

Fast fusion will happen. They are ever closer with magnetic confinement from electromagnets formed with high-temperature superconductors. There is too much going for power from fusion, no radiation, no pollution, widely available fuel - basically, water, easily processed fuel, makes more fuel than it consumes - so infinite available fuel, no proliferation problem, etc. The science was nailed down in the 1950's, it just needs money and engineering, it has been just twenty years from the commercial application for nearly seventy years now, but someday it will be true.

You only need to have the conditions of temperature and pressures for only some nanoseconds. They have achieved 50 million degrees C, the threshold of self-heating.

You don't have to rely on fast fusion, we can use slow fusion, which takes months to increase a heavy element into heavier fissible element, which are then burned by fission in the same reactor or removed and burned in another fission reactor. It works at atmospheric pressure and temperatures of 600 degC, which is well under the working temperature range of most stainless steels.

Solar is only now reached par with fossil fuel generation on a kW basis. One power unit of power, kW, of solar costs about the same as one power unit of fossil fuel. Unfortunately for your argument, we need energy, kWh, power times hours, delivered over time, not just kW. Solar is only capable of generating its rated power for about eight hours a day. This means that if we had perfect, cost-free batteries, we have to have three times as many solar panels of a certain power rating as we have fossil fuel generating of the same power rating, because the solar panels have to generate power for the immediate consumption and two times that amount to store in the batteries. And we are a very long way from perfect batteries, at the current state of the art the cost of the batteries in a solar generated kWh of electrical energy is three to four times the cost to generate the same kWh with fossil fuels. Combining these two doses of stubborn reality together means that solar costs 9 to 12 times more today than generating with fossil fuels on the basis of how we use electrical energy. And we haven't even gotten into the questions of a 100% back up system that would be needed to account for long periods of overcast. Wind is not dense enough and it doesn't always happen.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Part of the problem with nuclear energy is that as plans age, they need more expensive maintenance to stay running. And many of US nuclear plants are now reaching that age where they are becoming more costly to keep operating. When operators of such plants are struggling with this real issue, the idea of creating new plants and facing these problems in the future becomes far less attractive. It is not regulation killing the nuclear industry, it is the fact that the costs of maintaining old plants are not cheap and decommissioning old plants at the end of their life or spending huge amounts of money to get an aging plant back to good condition is not economically attractive.

Sure. Keep telling yourself that.

Your lack of actual knowledge need not be an impediment to lobbying against the technology that is our best option on every count for making electricity.

I think that you probably know more about nuclear power than I. But my concern has always been that it's my understanding that most nuclear power plants require a grid to provide the power to them to cool them down. Is that correct?

 

[bilby]

Part of the problem with nuclear energy is that as plans age, they need more expensive maintenance to stay running. And many of US nuclear plants are now reaching that age where they are becoming more costly to keep operating. When operators of such plants are struggling with this real issue, the idea of creating new plants and facing these problems in the future becomes far less attractive. It is not regulation killing the nuclear industry, it is the fact that the costs of maintaining old plants are not cheap and decommissioning old plants at the end of their life or spending huge amounts of money to get an aging plant back to good condition is not economically attractive.

Sure. Keep telling yourself that.

Your lack of actual knowledge need not be an impediment to lobbying against the technology that is our best option on every count for making electricity.

I think that you probably know more about nuclear power than I. But my concern has always been that it's my understanding that most nuclear power plants require a grid to provide the power to them to cool them down. Is that correct?

It is.

If you are still living in the 1950s thru '70s.

Modern reactor designs have multiple redundant cooling systems. Some of the latest designs cannot melt down under any circumstances.

And even old designs - like the ones at Fukushima Daiichi - are contained in a loss of cooling event. That's why nobody died at Fukushima, despite just about the worst possible scenario (a world record breaking earthquake and tsunami, total loss of power, to a very old plant running first generation BWRs).

If that didn't cause loss of life, it's hard to imagine what could. I guess if you were actively trying to make a disaster happen - say by running unauthorised experiments on an inherently unsafe design without a secondary containment, as they did at Chernobyl - you could actually manage to kill people with a nuclear power plant. But even at Chernobyl, the death toll was tiny in comparison to other commonplace industrial processes.

The routine burning of fossil fuels kills as many people every ten minutes as Chernobyl killed. And that's without any kind of accident.

No technology is perfectly safe. But nuclear power is inherently far safer than any other way of making electricity, or indeed any other industry.

Picking a less safe option on safety grounds is literally insane.

 

[SimpleDon]

My guess is that this two hundred years of burning coal and oil will be viewed in the future as a necessary transition period to more substainable energy sources which will almost certainly be some kind of inherently safe fusion nuclear power, most probably a distributed system.

I am doubtful about whether controlled nuclear fusion will ever be practical. We know what to do: heat some hydrogen, squeeze it, and keep it at that state long enough. But it has been *very* difficult to do that well enough to do nuclear fusion, despite well over half a century of research into doing so.

But some renewable energy sources have been having some remarkable recent growth: wind and solar. So they may eventually take over, though with the help of good energy-storage technologies and likely also synfuel ones.

Well given that fission power is better than any of these options already, by any reasonable measure, it's hilarious that people are still debating how to get power for the future.

It's here. We have achieved all of the things we need. All the putative benefits of some 'future energy sources' already exist as a mature technology.

The only remaining problem is to persuade people that the problem has been solved, and that their opposition to the implementation of the solution is unreasonable, irrational, and harmful.

Even if we could develop cheap fusion power, it would be in no way preferable to fission power - unless it was even cheaper to implement, which seems highly implausible.

We're like a bunch of people wandering through a forest bemoaning the difficulty in finding any trees.

As an entrenched opponent of fission power, Mr Suzuki and his ilk are the entirety of the problem that he is concerned about.

Every single point on his website's page about why he opposes fission power is either the direct result of anti-nuclear lobbying; or is a metric by which fission power looks bad ONLY if you ignore the fact that all other power sources look worse.

Refusing to pick the best option available because it isn't perfect is just fucking stupid. Complaining that it is too expensive, when the reason for that is that you have spent decades lobbying to make it needlessly expensive, is worse than stupid.

I didn't intend it to be funny.

I answered ipertrich in a separate reply on the advantages of fusion power.

I agree about the nuclear fission. It is more expensive compared to burning coal, unless you consider the damage from global warming, then it becomes the cheapest option. The opponents of nuclear power, because they consider it to be unsafe, have effectively undone themselves. The reactors that they consider to be so unsafe, which are orders of magnitude safer and less polluting than fossil fuel generation, have continued to be operated long past their due date because the opposition to nuclear power has nearly stopped the development of intrinsically safe nuclear power. Sodium moderation, molten salt, continuous fuel cycle, etc.

I consider power generation too important to leave to private enterprise. I always try to empathize that the very thing that makes capitalism successful is that stupid people can be successful in it. You don't have to be a genius to grasp the motive of making money for yourself. But it also means that there are things too important for the economy that this simple motive doesn't produce the best outcomes from, health care, jurisprudence, education, etc.; add power generation to the list. The market can't make a judgement which method of generation is best over the long term. The market is so heavily invested in processing fuel for our generation II nuclear reactors to the point that they often lobby against funds for Gen IV & V research and development.

 

[bilby]

Well given that fission power is better than any of these options already, by any reasonable measure, it's hilarious that people are still debating how to get power for the future.

It's here. We have achieved all of the things we need. All the putative benefits of some 'future energy sources' already exist as a mature technology.

The only remaining problem is to persuade people that the problem has been solved, and that their opposition to the implementation of the solution is unreasonable, irrational, and harmful.

Even if we could develop cheap fusion power, it would be in no way preferable to fission power - unless it was even cheaper to implement, which seems highly implausible.

We're like a bunch of people wandering through a forest bemoaning the difficulty in finding any trees.

As an entrenched opponent of fission power, Mr Suzuki and his ilk are the entirety of the problem that he is concerned about.

Every single point on his website's page about why he opposes fission power is either the direct result of anti-nuclear lobbying; or is a metric by which fission power looks bad ONLY if you ignore the fact that all other power sources look worse.

Refusing to pick the best option available because it isn't perfect is just fucking stupid. Complaining that it is too expensive, when the reason for that is that you have spent decades lobbying to make it needlessly expensive, is worse than stupid.

I didn't intend it to be funny.

I answered ipertrich in a separate reply on the advantages of fusion power.

I agree about the nuclear fission. It is more expensive compared to burning coal, unless you consider the damage from global warming, then it becomes the cheapest option. The opponents of nuclear power, because they consider it to be unsafe, have effectively undone themselves. The reactors that they consider to be so unsafe, which are orders of magnitude safer and less polluting than fossil fuel generation, have continued to be operated long past their due date because the opposition to nuclear power has nearly stopped the development of intrinsically safe nuclear power. Sodium moderation, molten salt, continuous fuel cycle, etc.

I consider power generation too important to leave to private enterprise. I always try to empathize that the very thing that makes capitalism successful is that stupid people can be successful in it. You don't have to be a genius to grasp the motive of making money for yourself. But it also means that there are things too important for the economy that this simple motive doesn't produce the best outcomes from, health care, jurisprudence, education, etc.; add power generation to the list. The market can't make a judgement which method of generation is best over the long term. The market is so heavily invested in processing fuel for our generation II nuclear reactors to the point that they often lobby against funds for Gen IV & V research and development.

I agree. Infrastructure should be built and operated by governments, on the advice of experts and specialists.

Highly technical decisions about infrastructure should not be made by populist mechanisms, such as market forces or universal suffrage democracy.

Let the people decide how much stuff we want; then let the experts provide it as safely and cheaply as possible.

Airline customers influence the decision to have a flight between two different cities; but their opinions are not required or requested regarding the actual flying of the plane. The pilots shouldn't take a poll amongst the passengers as to how many degrees of flap to apply, or when to raise and lower the landing gear.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Let it be written that environmentalists didn't kill the nuclear power industry, economics did.

South Carolina Electric and Gas Co. and partner Santee Cooper abandoned work on two new nuclear reactors this week, not because of public protests, but because the only way to pay for them was to overcharge customers or bankrupt both companies.

The decision comes after the main contractor, Westinghouse, has completed a third of the work at the V.C. Sumner Nuclear Station. Of course, the project has already bankrupted Westinghouse due to missed deadlines and costs spiraling out of control. Westinghouse parent Toshiba Corp. had to pay $2.7 billion to get out of its contract.

Protests don't kill them. Lawsuits that delay things do.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Oh, and the Fukushima 'disaster' was nothing of the kind. What sort of 'disaster' doesn't kill anyone? Only nuclear 'disasters' are fatality-free, but still classed as 'disasters'. Meanwhile, business as usual by coal power alone kills more people every single day than all of the nuclear power accidents in history. But that's not a 'disaster', because reasons. WTF?

Contaminating a city is a disaster.

Nothing like the threat posed by the contamination from coal, though.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Part of the problem with nuclear energy is that as plans age, they need more expensive maintenance to stay running. And many of US nuclear plants are now reaching that age where they are becoming more costly to keep operating. When operators of such plants are struggling with this real issue, the idea of creating new plants and facing these problems in the future becomes far less attractive. It is not regulation killing the nuclear industry, it is the fact that the costs of maintaining old plants are not cheap and decommissioning old plants at the end of their life or spending huge amounts of money to get an aging plant back to good condition is not economically attractive.

Sure. Keep telling yourself that.

Your lack of actual knowledge need not be an impediment to lobbying against the technology that is our best option on every count for making electricity.

I think that you probably know more about nuclear power than I. But my concern has always been that it's my understanding that most nuclear power plants require a grid to provide the power to them to cool them down. Is that correct?

It's a safety measure. They want to ensure power will be available for the cooling systems even if the reactor goes offline. An extended shutdown without cooling power is what caused Fukushima.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Let it be written that environmentalists didn't kill the nuclear power industry, economics did.

South Carolina Electric and Gas Co. and partner Santee Cooper abandoned work on two new nuclear reactors this week, not because of public protests, but because the only way to pay for them was to overcharge customers or bankrupt both companies.

The decision comes after the main contractor, Westinghouse, has completed a third of the work at the V.C. Sumner Nuclear Station. Of course, the project has already bankrupted Westinghouse due to missed deadlines and costs spiraling out of control. Westinghouse parent Toshiba Corp. had to pay $2.7 billion to get out of its contract.

Protests don't kill them. Lawsuits that delay things do.

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...rojects-bankrupted-westinghouse-idUSKBN17Y0CQ

In a letter to the NRC, Shaw’s then-executive vice president, Joseph Ernst, wrote: “The level and effectiveness of management oversight of daily activities was determined to be inadequate based on the quality of work.”
He laid out a laundry list of deficiencies ranging from Shaw’s inability to weed out incorrectly made parts to the way it stored construction materials.
Ernst did not respond to a phone call seeking comment.


Over the next four years, regulatory and internal inspections at Lake Charles would reveal a slew of problems associated with the effort to construct modular parts to fit the new Westinghouse design, NRC records show.
When a sub-module was dropped and damaged, Shaw managers ordered employees to cover up the incident; components were labeled improperly; required tests were neglected; and some parts’ dimensions were wrong. The NRC detailed each one in public violation notices.

Then there was the missing and illegible paperwork.
The section that was delayed more than eight months by missing signatures would become one of 72 modules fused together to hold nuclear fuel. The 2.2 million pound unit was installed more than two years behind schedule.
...


Engineering incompetence kills projects like this.

Many years ago, here in Texas, a nuclear reactor being built by Brown and Root was so botched that a very expensive concrete containment building had to be torn down and rebuilt correctly at great cost. Blaming over regulation for the nuclear industry's problems and ignoring engineering fiasco's like this is not really a good way to understand all of what is happening.

 

[bilby]

Oh, and the Fukushima 'disaster' was nothing of the kind. What sort of 'disaster' doesn't kill anyone? Only nuclear 'disasters' are fatality-free, but still classed as 'disasters'. Meanwhile, business as usual by coal power alone kills more people every single day than all of the nuclear power accidents in history. But that's not a 'disaster', because reasons. WTF?

Contaminating a city is a disaster.

Nothing like the threat posed by the contamination from coal, though.

Pripyat is more of a town than an actual city.

No other cities have been contaminated. The evacuations in Fukushima province were completely unnecessary.

Unless you count as contamination measurable but harmless increases in radiation; in which case it's most assuredly not a disaster.

Needlessly evacuating people because of mindless fear is a disaster.

Anything that causes zero deaths and zero injuries does NOT qualify as a disaster.

I spilled my tea this morning and had to mop it up. I am amazed that it didn't make international headlines. It would probably have done so, if I worked at a nuclear power plant.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Oh, and the Fukushima 'disaster' was nothing of the kind. What sort of 'disaster' doesn't kill anyone? Only nuclear 'disasters' are fatality-free, but still classed as 'disasters'. Meanwhile, business as usual by coal power alone kills more people every single day than all of the nuclear power accidents in history. But that's not a 'disaster', because reasons. WTF?

Contaminating a city is a disaster.

Nothing like the threat posed by the contamination from coal, though.

Pripyat is more of a town than an actual city.

No other cities have been contaminated. The evacuations in Fukushima province were completely unnecessary.

Unless you count as contamination measurable but harmless increases in radiation; in which case it's most assuredly not a disaster.

Needlessly evacuating people because of mindless fear is a disaster.

Anything that causes zero deaths and zero injuries does NOT qualify as a disaster.

I spilled my tea this morning and had to mop it up. I am amazed that it didn't make international headlines. It would probably have done so, if I worked at a nuclear power plant.

Even having to abandon a town is a disaster. I do agree Fukushima was an overreaction but they probably should have done a temporary evacuation while the hot stuff died down.