Only tangentially related but: this kind of map is really a good use case for Wikidata and its query service, I think. For instance here's how to get something similar: https://w.wiki/4wz
Drawbacks: not all reactors are known and not all the data is currently here.
Advantages: took me 2 minutes to write, and the underlying data can be edited by anyone to keep it up to date.
Nice to see SPARQL getting used in the wild for real purposes!
I want to do this too, and have lots of questions. How do you look up relationship terms like "wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q134447"? Is there a graph or entity viewer somewhere that allows discovery based on browsing a particular entity's tuples?
Edit: In addition to Squad_Tamer's tip below, the things I've found:
1) removing the #defaultView:map comment results in a table
2) adding the `?x` back to the select will result in links to the full entity page, including all statements associated with the entity nicely organized.
3) The SERVICE statement was entirely new to me, but points to how difficult it is to do knowledge summary (I.e. wtf should I call this entity? let's write a service for that.)
I figured out that if you click the "info" icon at the top-left of the screen, it'll bring up a little GUI editor with dropdowns. Still not great for finding categories, but better than "wdt:P279"
To find the relationships and entity IDs, you can type the prefix like "wdt:" or "wd:" then type something in English and hit Ctrl-Space. For instance, wd:nuclear<Ctrl-Space>. Alternatively you can search on wikidata.org.
1) Indeed, there are many other kinds of visualizations available as well (have a look at the examples)
3) the SERVICE is just an easy way to retrieve the name, which is stored in Wikidata, in a reasonable language. You can also access the name directly in SPARQL
That is really nice. If the data is open, couldn't someone just migrate it over and use wiki data as the data source? I wonder if there's API support that can access data in JSON.
A singular voting issue for me would be replacing all the nuclear power plants in the U.S. Maybe even doubling the count over the next two decades.
We are running a huge risk not replacing them as they age. If one of the plants have a meltdown it's going to ruin any support to have them replaced. The U.S. keeps these plants so they can make nuclear weapons very quickly, but also the power is relatively clean / contained.
Although it's possible to make nuclear weapons from commercial reactor waste, they're really not a very efficient way of accomplishing that if it's your goal. Typically, at least historically, dedicated production reactors were used for that at sites like Hanford and the Savannah River Site. Those sites have all long since stopped production, but over their lives produced more than enough Pu to last us through one last war.
> We are running a huge risk not replacing them as they age.
We're mostly decommissioning them as they age, usually before the end of their design life. And there are legal requirements to do so at the end of their permitted period if they aren't refreshed. So, what's the risk?
> If one of the plants have a meltdown it's going to ruin any support to have them replaced.
Sure, but such support — particularly from industry in the absence of even greater subsidies for which there is no public support — does not exist anyway, nor is a meltdown even remotely likely.
> The U.S. keeps these plants so they can make nuclear weapons very quickly
The U.S. keeps shutting them down, and isn't replacing them, so I don't think that's accurate.
> Sure, but such support — particularly from industry in the absence of even greater subsidies for which there is no public support — does not exist anyway, nor is a meltdown even remotely likely.
Globally, we've had 2 major meltdowns in the last 25 years. There have been many near misses. Three mile island was only a 'partial' meltdown, but it happened right here in the US, in 1979.
I don't know why you think a meltdown is "not even remotely likely".
Newer reactor designs are less likely to have a meltdown. 1979 was 23 years into having commercial nuclear reactors. It's been 40 years, presumably we've learned a lot since then.
It's a little scary seeing that pretty much every US plant was built in the 60s-70s. I know Nuclear has been controversial for a long time but 50 years is a little ridiculous.
What's even more scary is the "new" Soviet-style plant just recently "finished" after 34 years in Slovakia[0]. Whistle-blowers have released photo evidence[1] showing major structural deficiencies. It was originally planned to come online this in June but because of pressure from the Austrian government has been thankfully pushed back. For the record I'm not against nuclear, aside from worrying about things like waste-management and outdated reactor designs, but overall they provide clean energy to a lot of people.
> What's even more scary is the "new" Soviet-style plant
I'd also suggest that the track record China has for corrupt/unsafe construction (e.g. https://chinaeconomicreview.com/china-housing-shoddy-buildin...) makes them the elephant-in-the-room as far as safety concerns go - especially considering how quickly they're springing up.
What is preventing new nuclear power plants from being built? Is it just fear/local opposition, or is there some regulatory or financial reason that new plants aren't being proposed?
I am under the impression that it's regulatory. Specifically, regulations adding time to get plants permitted and constructed. If you look at the graph of new nuclear power plants coming online, only look at the US, and squint just a little, it looks like the time of construction in the US starts growing right after Three Mile Island, and doesn't stop until any potential return is so far in the future that new plants stop being built.
This is a cool chart. So, there are still reactors getting built in other parts of the world, albeit fewer than in 70's and 80's.
If it's regulatory, I'm surprised that more climate focused candidates don't campaign on streamlining regulations to make it possible for more plants to get built. It's essentially zero cost in comparison to other climate efforts that will cost billions / trillions in re-investment.
I don't know a lot about renewables or energy production, but my understanding is that solar and wind are not good for base load unless there's a big improvement in storage technology (either batteries or some physical setup like the pair of lakes in West Virginia where they pump water around). So, nuclear is something we can do now that we know works. And since all these plants are at the end of their life, we can get a much more realistic picture of the total cost of ownership, instead of projections about what the produced power would cost.
The chart is misleading, 1 of those bubbles was canceled in 2017 (SUMMER 2-3). The other started in the 80's, got canceled, and then picked up again a few years back. The third is brand new
The approximate cause of Fukushima was a once-in-a-generation tsunami that exceeded the design constraints that the plant was built under.
Whatever did go wrong at Fukushima wasn't deregulation. That sort of mistake can creep through in even an extremely well regulated environment.
Also, the cost of the cleanup from the Tohoku earthquake that was linked to the tsunami was something like 300 billon; so maybe the fact that they had a design flaw in their nuclear plant maybe doubled the cleanup depending on what the figures on Wikipedia already factor the Fukushima clean up costs in.
Doubling the cost of something is significant, but for an event of that rarity not really a deregulation concern. If you told me that there was a risk of a city being leveled by a tsunami and there was a chance my taxes rising by, say, an unnecessary 10% for 12 months I might (depending on which city) squint at you in confusion about why the 10% was a problem. I've payed 1% disaster levies in my lifetime.
A slight chance of a moderate-in-context one off cost due to a series of unlikely coincidences just doesn't really rate as a major regulatory risk to me. I'd trust the regulators to deal with it for next time as part of their normal process. We have literally had to scour the globe for a decade to find an example where it matters.
Your plot is missing one key thing: are projects plotted at their start or date. In either case, I think that it looks like the delays started pre-TMI.
Other plots that I have seen show new additions slowing long before TMI.
Each pre-TMI project was managed with a different level of skill, or with better rolls of the dice on timing, and those that completed quickly were profitable, and the those that had long delays had huge cost overruns due to massive capital outlays and interest payments without any revenue to back it.
And another reason that I don't think we can blame regulation: look at Vogtle and Summer. You have to dig really really really far into backwaters of blogs before you can even find somebody saying "this regulatory process caused us to be delayed," and even those complaints are vague.
It's not regulation, it's the industry.
We can look elsewhere in different regulatory environments too: UK, France, Poland, all have the same huge difficulties we do when constructing nuclear. The places that seem to have fewer difficulties still have difficulties. China has long delays, that would still cause investors to lose money in the US. South Korea had been on a tear of seemingly good construction, but it turns out that the contracting process was rife with corruption and now there are worries that unqualified parts are stuck deep in reactors that are supposed to run for 60 years.
If there is a regulatory delay on these projects, I'm not sure that there's any sort of appropriate regulatory structure that would make them work. And you can tell because the industry insiders that complain about regulation don't have any fixes in mind.
They’ve been trying to get started on one in Utah, though it’s been hung up a few years in court with environmentalists fighting about the water usage.
It's complex construction projects in general. Regulation is a significant piece. We have a lot more worker safety, public safety, and environmental regulations. On the other hand, we also have loads more construction technology.
One thing no one ever talks about is environmental lead exposure. Just like it appears to have caused a huge crime spike, by impairing executive function, I think it may have impaired society's ability to manage complex projects.
No one wants to make the investment to build a plant that costs several billion dollars and will take up to 10 years to build. There have been attempts to build new plants in the US but the cost over runs have been huge. Rate payers are fed up with billion dollar cost increases.
Plus, many of the plants that are currently operating in the states are losing money because their electricity is too costly. We have had a series of nuclear plant bailouts in the past few years. If you can't make money after the construction costs have already be amortized, how can you make money on a new plant?
It's just a very poor financial investment to build a large reactor in the states (unless something changes).
Nuclear power is not cost competitive. Reasonably safe nuclear power plants require a lot of concrete and steel. A highly trained workforce and significant security 24/7. Quite a bit of land with access to water and or the construction of a huge cooling tower(s). Past all this you need a massive insurance policy or state backing in case something major goes wrong.
Without subsidies it’s a money losing proposition even if you can sell all power produced at a good rate. However, with renewables regularly pushing down the value of electricity for much of the day things have gotten even worse.
Or states are giving tax breaks to fracking (natural gas) companies in the name of “job creation”, only helping to lower the cost of electricity produced from natural gas. Basically we are subsidizing non-renewalable energy sources.... Also regulation drives a big chunk of the cost of nuclear. It’s not the cement and labor that drives the cost here...
I've observed a bit of an irony there - the fossil fuel industries generate political protection for themselves because of all the jobs they generate.
Nuclear is an order or two more efficient (you need a fraction of the mines, and a fraction of the work to keep the whole technology stack running). In practice this seems to mean that nuclear power doesn't have much of a lobby in favor of it even if it is established as an industry.
In Australia the coal lobby is a pretty noticeable force in two states and arguably influenced the last election. If we were 100% nuclear instead there wouldn't be enough people in the industry to make a political difference.
Globally the same amount of Nuclear power was produced in 2017 as 2002. That has little to do with local regulations and a lot to do with basic economics. As China etc have very different approaches to regulation.
While this is true, it’s only because non renewable fuel is “subsidized” by not being penalized on the massive negative externalities it creates. If a reasonable price for carbon is set, nuclear emerges as a very strong temporary complement to renewable sources
In the US, the answer is simple: the financial ruin from Three Mile Island. The reactor was brand new when it had the meltdown, so was a total loss and required billions to clean up. Who wants that risk?
I guess most people dont remember Three Mile Island - but that's why no one build a Nuclear power plant after that incident. Regulations became stricter and the risks of lawsuits... you can imagen...
Of the ones that are being built have caused an epic cascade of business failures from construction companies to Westinghouse (who was the leading reactor core design company in the US, not even a construction company).
As I understand it the USA has had a glut of skilled construction labor, all the expert laborers from the 70's never really had a chance to pass down their trade during the nuclear glut of the 80's - 00's
The first: no nuclear power plants to build, and an abundance of skilled and experienced blue collar labor available (but dwindling as time progressed).
Have you been living under a rock? There is no shortage of pro nuclear campaigns. The reason nuclear platns don't get built is that they are too expensive to build. Every pro argument is built around theoretical reactor designs that haven't been built yet. Building an old design is expensive, building a new design is even more expensive.
It’s a shame new ones can’t be built! New reactor designs are far more efficient and safe. There are designs you could leave unattended with no power indefinitely and they would never melt down
The problem is we can’t build them cost effectively. Toshiba had to sell it’s 18 billion memory chip business to cover the losses of its nuclear division.
Looking around Illinois I see most of the "connected to grid" dates in the mid-late 80s, which I presume represents the point at which construction ended. The mid-80s isn't that long ago for core infrastructure.
Reading the Wikipedia pages for these plants, many are slated to be decommissioned and some have uncertain futures due to economics; natural gas appears to be outcompeting nuclear in Illinois. Which goes towards explaining why there aren't new plants being built: they're hugely expensive and are not reliably profitable.
The economic projections were probably always too optimistic but nuclear power also became politically much more difficult. "Sitting US president has to personally show up at the site of an ongoing nuclear accident and it's not even his first ongoing nuclear accident rodeo" is not, as we now say, a great look.
I'm sure that's true, but am noting that in Illinois the competitive disadvantage nuclear has against gas has the state actively subsidizing some unprofitable nuclear plants just as (I assume?) a jobs thing. Exelon doesn't seem to be pushing that hard to keep plants it already owns online.
Right, I just mean the politics, technology and economics interact particularly strongly with nuclear energy. Illinois is, like, the France of US state nuclear energy production but the actual France makes money exporting nuclear-generated electricity.
The current construction being done in China is really interesting. Come what may, nuclear power it is a sophisticated and technically excellent way of securing energy. China's strategy of long-term technical success really shines through.
They might be serious about shutting down their coal burners. That is a real commitment to clean air and energy security - they are doing something different. Minor compared to the current business-as-usual perhaps, but they make iterative change work.
If the US hadn't stopped building nuclear and merely continued at the same rate, half of our electricity would be CO2-free. With even modest growth assumptions, 100% of our electricity would be CO2-free. Today. Not 50 years from now. Today.
It's a shame we decided nuclear was too dangerous and decided to pump our atmosphere full of carbon instead. I'm glad to see that China is making the right choice, I just wish we could have as well.
That's an impressive and surprising stat I've never heard before, and really puts the prospect of nuclear energy in perspective. Can you provide a source for this?
When did a new plant last come online in the US? I think it does count as stopped.
Prior to Watts Bar unit #2 coming online in 2016, the previous reactor was Watts Bar unit #1 in 1996. So that's one reactor in the past 20 years, and 23 years since we last opened a new plant.
So the one that started construction in 2013 doesn't exist?
20 years between plants isn't that big a deal. They're not building houses. Nuclear reactors take decades to built. It's one of the reasons they're so expensive.
It's possible to build these things in parallel, so "each one takes 10 years to build" doesn't mean you can't still bring one reactor online each year.
Either way, new reactor construction is not currently a significant source of new generation capacity in the US, and so I think it counts as "basically stopped".
n=1, but my general takeaway from the show wasn't that nuclear is fundamentally flawed, it was that a series of pretty questionable choices by management and egregiously eschewing safety protocol lead to the accident. The graphite-tipped rods were also essential to the accident happening as well, but only after that series of bad choices had put the reactor in a such an extreme state. (Reading about the event on Wikipedia seems to confirm this take, but, of course I'm not pretending to have any more than the most basic layman's understanding of all this)
"Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree
than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect."
This is 10x more true with nuclear power. And you can add malfeasance, graft, corruption, ignorance of basic science, and generally every other flaw inherent in humanity to the list.
It totally is though. The general public understand this intuitively. What goes up must come down. And for the industry to work it requires a staggering amount of effort, coordination and training. That safety record can never be taken for granted.
Poor Japan. I can understand taking plants down in the aftermath of Fukushima to fix them up and take safeguards that there wouldn't be a repeat, but what the hell are they doing letting all that generating potential sit idle years later?
What violation? So far maybe only one person died (not even certain) from radiations caused by Fukushima. 15 000 died in the tsunami. So why is Japan stopping nuclear power exactly? In the meantime they use way more dirtier sources of energy that will directly cause lung diseases and deaths to way more people.
* Official figures show that there have been well over 1000 deaths from maintaining the evacuation, in contrast to little risk from radiation if early return had been allowed.
* Almost 50k local residents still remain evacuees 8 years later
It's plainly obvious why a populace would no longer trust nuclear as a generation technology based on how it was managed, regardless of your air pollution arguments (which I agree with; Japan should move to wind, solar, and batteries rapidly instead of coal).
> Japan should move to wind, solar, and batteries rapidly instead of coal
There is no such technology Japan can move to at this stage, to cover the needs of major cities. DOn't forget that land is extremely expensive in japan (as it's rare to get stable and flat surfaces) and there is no place in which you can build large areas of solar farms just next to cities that need it. For high energy density production there's only fossil fuels (which is awful on so many levels) and nuclear (which is very safe even when accounting for Fukushima and Chernobyl and Three Miles Island). Pretending that there is right now more to renewables than just maybe up to 10% of energy needs is lying to the public.
Of course, we should continue to invest in renewables to make their costs drop as much as possible, but at the same time we all need to keep investing in nuclear too (and build new generations of reactors that reduce further the risk of meltdown).
Its easy for the public to be panicked by old unsafe plants causing pollution. They should have voted for new plants to replace the old ones. It was a choice, probably emotional. As is the reluctance to move forward with renewable nuclear plants as our energy future.
More people die from wind power than die from nuclear. Solar uses vastly more land area than nuclear, a major problem for an island nation like Japan. The varying power output from sources like solar/wind make them infeasible for a full grid.
If nuclear killed the same number of people as wind it would still be safe enough. So I am not sure that is a good reason for choosing nuclear over wind. Both energy sources have extremely small numbers.
Also, the deaths are workers. People who understand and have consented to the risk. And who can take some responsibility for their own safety. The death of a random member of the public is morally different.
Trust is about more than casualty figures. The industry did not promise low death rates following a meltdown. They promised no melt downs ever. They promised total safety again and again and again.
I think the public are intelligent enough to know that a meltdown must never happen. In the same way that they know that an airline must never run out of fuel. Of course that is going to damage trust.
Nuclear would not even be allowed to operate if they didn't claim to be that safe therefore they have to claim it, and the regulators have to claim it. This is because widespread misinformation about radiation in the population and among politicians.
Instead of a rational discussion politicians have abused the public trust by spreading more misinformation and making publicity stuns to keep plants closed even after significant security review and alternatives that are far more damaging.
Even if all that were true a meltdown is still going to damage trust.
You like to talk about rationality. But is it really? Do you have a thorough understanding of the model of reactor in question? Or various complex failure modes? Or the dozens of degree level specialisms involved in safety critical aspects? If you don't then you have to rely on a little blind faith. Even an aerospace engineer has to trust when they step on a plane. Breaking that trust is going to damage your industry.
Yes. But if a plane falls in Japan. Germany doesn't stop all planes from flying. At most you look at the specific model and ground that for a while. You do review and try to improve. Nuclear is simply treated differently then anything else.
Nuclear in the 'western' exemplary history of safety in the last 40 years and most of these plants have operated without fail for a long time.
The failure mode is not actually a mystery in this case and stopping plants where the same failure mode is impossible makes little sense for plants that have proven to run perfectly for 30+ years.
Not true: TRIGA reactors can be put into prompt critical but shut themselves quickly as they get hot. They do it on purpose with a pneumatically ejected control rod to generate a high neutron flux pulse:
You would have to get a license, either from the NRC or from your state regulator (it is different in different states). Oregon is an NRC agreement state, so in Oregon it would be from the state.
Typically there is a person whose name is on the license, who is responsible for the proper use of the reactor. At an organization this could be the boss, owner, or RSO. In theory, as a private citizen you could get a license, as long as you can prove to the regulator that you have the experience and training to operate the reactor properly.
Of course, you would have to comply with all the rules and regulations. This could be quite burdensome for a private citizen, especially with the additional security rules added post 9/11 (assuming you are not a billionaire).
Edit: removed link to quantities of concern, sorry, rules are different for reactors.
Yep, the map definitely does not include experimental reactors, of which there are as just many. For example, UWI CNS SLOWPOKE in Jamaica.
There are 200+ decommissioned experimental reactors, 240 operational, 200 shut down, and a few others in change. The more interesting thing is the variety, 70+ types, 20+ types of moderators, 80+ types of control rods, 20-ish types of coolants, 50+ types of reflector materials.
Edit: here's a full list of types and their counts.
+----------+---------------------------+
| count(*) | technical_21_reactor_type |
+----------+---------------------------+
| 4 | NULL |
| 3 | AIR COOLED |
| 1 | AQUEOUS BREEDER |
| 28 | ARGONAUT |
| 1 | BWR |
| 1 | BWR POWER |
| 2 | BWR-PROTOTYPE |
| 97 | CRIT ASSEMBLY |
| 9 | CRIT FAST |
| 1 | CRIT GRAPHITE |
| 3 | EXPERIMENTAL |
| 3 | FAST |
| 8 | FAST BREEDER |
| 9 | FAST BURST |
| 1 | FAST SOURCE |
| 2 | FAST, HG COOLED |
| 2 | FAST, NA COOLED |
| 1 | FAST, POWER |
| 1 | FAST, PULSED |
| 1 | GAS |
| 12 | GRAPHITE |
| 2 | GRAPHITE AGR |
| 2 | GRAPHITE CO2 |
| 4 | GRAPHITE PILE |
| 1 | GRAPHITE, AIR |
| 1 | GRAPHITE, PULSE |
| 1 | HE COOLED |
| 2 | HEATING PROT |
| 35 | HEAVY WATER |
| 1 | HEAVY WATER PWR |
| 2 | HIGH TEMP GAS |
| 3 | HOMOG |
| 28 | HOMOG (L) |
| 41 | HOMOG (S) |
| 2 | HOMOG PUL |
| 1 | LOOP TYPE |
| 9 | MNSR |
| 1 | MOBILE EDU. |
| 1 | N2 COOLED |
| 1 | ORGANIC MODER |
| 134 | POOL |
| 1 | POOL-2 CORES |
| 1 | POOL-VAR |
| 10 | POOL, IRT |
| 3 | POOL, MTR |
| 2 | POOL, PULSTAR |
| 1 | POOL, UZRH |
| 1 | POOL/CHANNELS |
| 1 | PRESS. VESSEL |
| 1 | PRESSURIZED |
| 9 | PROMPT BURST |
| 4 | PULSING |
| 3 | PWR |
| 1 | PWR POWER |
| 1 | PWR PROPULSION |
| 3 | SLOWPOKE |
| 7 | SLOWPOKE-2 |
| 1 | SPACE TEST |
| 12 | SUBCRIT |
| 56 | TANK |
| 10 | TANK IN POOL |
| 11 | TANK WWR |
| 2 | TRIGA |
| 2 | TRIGA ACPR |
| 8 | TRIGA CONV |
| 2 | TRIGA DUAL CORE |
| 1 | TRIGA MARK CONV |
| 3 | TRIGA MARK F |
| 20 | TRIGA MARK I |
| 24 | TRIGA MARK II |
| 6 | TRIGA MARK III |
| 1 | TRIGA MODIFIED |
| 1 | U-233 FUELLED |
| 1 | ZERO POWER D2O |
| 1 | ZERO POWER HTD |
| 1 | ZRH, AIR COOLED |
| 1 | ZRH, BE REFLECT |
| 1 | ZRH, H2O COOLED |
+----------+---------------------------+
.png){kind=link}
Drawbacks: not all reactors are known and not all the data is currently here.
Advantages: took me 2 minutes to write, and the underlying data can be edited by anyone to keep it up to date.