New Year, New Energy!
Today I am VERY excited to pick up where we left off in talking about energy, public utilities, and renewables. Why in particular? Because . . .
At long last after encouraging it, there is going to be a formal meeting of the Selectmen as Light Commissioners! It’ll be hosted in person and remotely. They’ll be talking about rates, incentives, substations, and all those topics that I’ve been discussing here on my site relating to the electrical grid and how it impacts the Town. I hope that the previous two posts gave you a good introduction to the moving pieces in play so that you can follow along more easily with the topics that will arise during such Commissioner meetings. And today I’ll give you even more info to digest. In this post, the third in my break out of Light Commission topics, we are going to start talking about the more qualitative, rather than quantitative, parts of energy management. See last time we talked about some ghosts of energy past and present. Today we’re going to get into the Future! Or I should say our … possible futures. Before I get started I do want to take one moment to digress . . .
A Special Thanks To You!
When I first started talking with some of the existing leadership and civically active folks around town about things like the Grid or digital infrastructure, one of the first push backs of advice I got was things like:
People aren’t interested in hearing about that
Voters don’t want to talk about those things, they’d rather [insert a different high visibility topic here]
But as I’m going along, I find it’s more a case of I don’t think people try to talk with residents about these things very often at all. I wanted to try something different. So I just started laying out what I knew here in the blogging portion of my site. I figured the worst that happened was nobody cared and nobody read it, and the best that happened was it got people thinking and talking about things.
My last update on these topics I didn’t spend as much time reworking the latter half of the write up. See I tend to write from memory first, then clean it up afterwards. I went back and forth in my head on whether to go dragging prehistoric geologic and fossil records into the carbon related parts of the energy puzzle. But I wrote my last energy post during an actual Election day, so I was running out of time for that clean up step. I kept hearing those phrases in my head “people don’t want that, just talk about how important the schools are and about what’s up with the Fire Department”. I gave into pessimism and went “bah, is anybody reading these? I’ll deal with it later if nobody’s reading it anyway,” and left the post be and went off to deal with election day tasks.
Well, I am pleased to see that you DO read these! I got messages from people not just like “oh thanks for running”, but actually going into the details discussed in my write ups here. One fabulous person literally went into a multi page note with source citations deliberating the culpability of other factors in the Great Dying, such as the Siberian Traps, and also about the quandary of utility scale solar pricing.
THE SIBERIAN TRAPS!
Okay that phrase may not be exciting to all of you, but it’s incredibly exciting to me because it is a level of discussion that requires more than surface level attention to have even crossed a person’s lips, you know? Like I didn’t even get into the Great Dying until way way way way down the VERY long post, so it means that person had to have read all of that. And it means that if I’m talking about methane output of methanosarcina microbes, instead of getting a blank stare, I’m going to get actual in-depth discussion and deliberation from residents. So thank you for being engaged citizens who aren’t afraid to dive into and ruminate on the complex topics of our world with me! Get ready for another long full breadth post today about energy!
For today’s energy discussion, we’re about to get into the part of the grid that is more art than science when it comes to power companies, energy policy, and public projects: The art of persuasion.
Words With Friends
You would be surprised how much terminology comes into play when dealing with the energy grid. One of the endearing (and at time frustrating) things about humans who have a hand in energy management is their creativity when it comes to words. Some of it is just innocent miscommunication. Some is born of creative problem solving. And some of it is just straight up malicious profiteering. Ultimately the motives kind of don’t matter because the impact is the same, and that is: you have to really pay attention to the details and the ways that people use various terms when you’re trying to determine just how “green” your energy is.
Let’s start with a perfect example, the recent “Next Gen Climate Roadmap” passed by our Commonwealth. It gets talked about in casual conversations as this big step forward in tackling the Climate Crisis by getting us to aggressively work towards “net zero” emissions targets and funding clean energy projects and such. And most people’s minds go right to things like solar and wind farms. But did you know that a perfectly viable permitted energy source under that Roadmap is: Nuclear? Bet that’s not a term that popped into your mind when you think about the environment right? How is Nuclear being put in the same bucket with things like a wind farm? Easy: it’s considered “non-carbon emitting”.
Now I want to take a moment to go even further into Nuclear energy for a moment. Partly because I think it’s important for us as Norwood residents who utilize Nuclear power and who live close to a Nuclear power plant (“close” is defined as within 50 miles) to really grasp these concepts, but also because I think it is a really really good example of several interesting things about how we as citizens engage with our power grid.
Nuclear Power
Remember how I said in a previous post that my favorite energy source is photovoltaic solar because of its innovation, as compared to other forms of just spin spin spin a magnetic generator? It’s not so much that I find them to be “the perfect solution”, I just really respect that it’s fundamentally different. Well my second favorite energy type to talk about is Nuclear. I have such a love hate relationship with it. Growing up in a town where Nuclear projects always were about war and were top secret, and during an era with major publicly visible disasters like the 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl, the goings on of Nuclear energy was always something that seemed VERY SCARY and WAY too complex to me as a kid. It wasn’t until I was much older that I really dove into the gory details of the workings.
I was so so underwhelmed at the time to learn that it was just a big ol steam turbine essentially. With some of the mystery pulled back, it was actually then pretty fascinating to really get into just how Nuclear plants are run, what the significance of concrete was, the ways that radioactive particles behave (and what we’ve learned about mitigating them), and other details I had just never spent time learning about. I ran across a tweet that really gets to the heart of things when it comes to Nuclear:
And it’s kind of a good example of how people use broad terms without getting into the details. “Nuclear waste” for some folks literally is this amorphous definitionless thing. It’s “bad”. It’s “dangerous”. But that’s as far as it gets for them. They know they need power, they know a Nuclear plant can make power, and they know that running a plant “makes Nuclear waste”. And if you ask them to get into what Nuclear waste is - like literally asked them to draw a picture of it or describe it - I sincerely doubt that you’re going to get anything that resembles the above photo from an average person. It really is easy to think of it as some kind of glowy green ooze factory right?
Now if you REALLY want to know about Nuclear power and such I’ll tack that on to the end of this write up, it is fascinating stuff and by learning about this intimidating-on-the-surface technology you will feel empowered knowing how it works. But I’d like to also take a moment to highlight a very fascinating thing about Nuclear energy that is worth keeping in mind. See here you thought I was going to write a big love letter to Nuclear right? And for certain aspects of it that’s true. But here’s a part that’s less romantic. This is a quote from the literal US Energy Department:
”For the foreseeable future, the fuel can safely stay at these facilities until a permanent disposal solution is determined by the federal government…”
I’ll never forget the first time I stumbled on that quote. Like “wait, what do you mean until a solution is determined?” Surely I must have misunderstood that. So I did some more digging around in other documentation from the various departments responsible for Nuclear materials, energy, and so on over the years. And again and again what you find is
They don’t have a plan.
We literally don’t have a plan for what to do with this stuff. We’ve come up with some mitigation ideas like entombing certain things with certain other minerals (requiring the building of big transportation systems to get it to said entombment facilities) or recycling it into other uses. There’s tons of R&D going on at the Office of Nuclear Energy. But at the end of the day, here we created all these Nuclear plants, have been running them for decades, but without a long term game plan for what the heck to do with the bi-products, and the answer we’re sticking with is that “we’ll just crate it up and shove it in temporary storage and some future people will figure it out.” That’s you and me. We’re the future people. It makes me laugh (so I don’t cry) to think about all these casks around the country chilling and waiting for us to agree on a plan of what to do, like thousands of PODS sitting in the Government’s driveways waiting for moving day, lol. There was a pretty cool plan called Atlas Railcar that the Office of Nuclear Energy put out in *checks notes* October of 2020. You’re telling me you’re still PROTOTYPING the solutions in 20 freaking 20?? O_O
And just so you know, we have said waiting-for-a-long-term-answer casks within range of us. There’s been some hot conversation that we’re tracking in LWV around their long term storage, since Norwood is within the 50 mile range of them (they’re in the Plymouth region). What happens with them while we await good game plans from the Dept of Energy and such? Welp, we’re relying on privately held companies to babysit them - they’re paid by us to do this by the way - until “some day” the Federal Govt figures out a plan of what to do with them. Good times. We’ll talk more about these casks as a post script to the end of this post. It’s fascinating stuff!
The reason I’m telling you about these things isn’t to scare you, nor to hate on Nuclear power, nor even to get you ringing up Stephen Lynch to get moving on the bi-product problem. It’s to get you thinking about how we deal with (or don’t in some cases) energy production. About how over simplified terms like “emission free” energy can get muddy. And to hopefully feed your curiosity around how energy creation works and what kinds of halo impacts it has. And how every aspect of trying to make “green” energy is a dance of terminology and lesser evils.
Energy Wordles
Now that you’ve learned a bit more about things like High Level Radioactive Waste (HLW) and Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF), doesn’t it make you feel really weird about using a term like “clean” in reference to Nuclear energy? Again, I can’t stress this enough, I am not hating on Nuclear energy. I might be picking on it a lot in this write up, but at the end we’ll talk about some really cool wonderful things about it too. I’m picking on it in the early parts of this write up to get you thinking about terminology and how closely it can match or miss the mark on expectations.
It’s really important for us to be on the same wavelength when it comes to energy terminology, because it is SO easy to not be. When you navigate the way it is being handled in practice, it’s very reminiscent of a scene from the Halloween episode of the Simpsons where Homer makes a wish using the cursed Monkey’s Paw after several previously disappointing results:
“I want a turkey sandwich …. on wheat … andAND … I don’t want any zombie turkeys, I don’t want to turn into a turkey myself, and I don’t want any other weird surprises, you got it??”
Welcome to energy portfolio management pain. Right away you will learn that there is a lot of definition word play happening in the marketplace, in the legislative space, and in the investment space, and many situations where people have gotten clever with wording to avoid being left behind as voters demand changes to the energy sourcing of the grid.
Here’s a few words you will see tossed around commonly:
GREEN
CLEAN
NETZERO
If you’re someone who cares about the Climate, what you’ll find is these terms are used pretty loosey goosey, even in public policy. “Clean” for example gets used in reference to the aforementioned Nuclear energy, but that’s because there aren’t any direct emissions from running the plant the way there are with say many fossil fuel plants. Those big clouds you see that come out of the top of Nuclear plants are just steam. So “clean” got used as the term for “non emissions emitting”. Oh except that label DOESN’T factor for the bi-products that we don’t know what to do with, but beyond that and more silly, doesn’t factor for emissions related to the production of the supporting equipment inside the Nuclear plant that’s made of plastics and such, which is definitely manufactured using emission emitting processes (because plastic is really good at protecting against certain radioactive particles, that’s why hazard suits are made of it. Welp, I assure you those plastic suits weren’t made from a wind powered oil rig. Although kudos to the new solar powered steel mill!). Or how about the term “Green”? You’ll see this in reference to things like bio fuels. But fun fact, if you burn a bunch of wood, that’s a “green” “renewable” source of fuel … that absolutely emits carbon into the atmosphere, which is what we don’t want. It’s like saying that a forest fire is green. Trying to get good energy policy that helps the planet is like the monkey’s paw lately.
And my absolute favorite term to hate on? Net Zero.
God how I hate the concept of Net Zero.
This is the worst of the worst right now because it’s a term literally being plugged into legislative documents and policy guidance. Why do I hate it so much?
Here, let me give you a really really good example of how “net zero emissions” works. The next time I go onto the Tom Cummings Show or the LWV Candidate’s Forum for this election cycle, I promise that I am going to drop Net Zero F-bombs on the air when I talk. Oh I’ll be saying the dreaded four letter F curse word, but don’t worry, I have offset my F words by paying someone else not to say F words on the show. That way I’ll be at Net Zero F words spoken because even though I’ll definitely be saying the F word, it will be “counter acted” by me paying someone else not to say the F word. Oh, important detail, the person I’m paying not to say the F word? Well they might not even have planned to say the F word in the first place. They might not even have been scheduled to be a guest on these broadcasts. But I still get the credit for paying them not to do something that they weren’t going to do in the first place, to offset the thing I am definitely doing a bunch of. It all balances out right?! I say the F word a bunch of times, I pay someone else not to say it, everyone wins! There’s net zero F words! And that my friends is how “net zero” carbon emissions targets work.
Net Zero is a principal that says if an organization, company, or person spends money on, invests in, or otherwise puts an effort towards something that in theory draws carbon back down equivalent to how much carbon they’re spewing out, that it will “balance out”.
Net Zero comes from a well meaning place, but in application it’s just an excuse not to change what we do in any meaningful way. And worse, it’s greenwashing that can be in practice net negative. A terrible example I ran across once was offset money spent by a carbon emitting company on this forest to protect it from being deforested right? Welp, our ever increasing wild fires (thanks Climate change!) burned that forest to the ground. So now not only did the organization still emit their carbon like usual, and not only did the money they spent not go towards R&D on ways to get carbon out of the atmosphere or get cleaner power sources, but the carbon that was trapped in their forest literally burnt up and went into the atmosphere with the carbon they were trying to offset in the first place. Oops. If we’re serious about this, we can’t play cute word games and pay indulgences to avoid dealing with the problem.
Here’s the list of terms that people are striving toward:
Renewable - The energy source is able to be replenished readily, repeatedly, and it is not finite.
Natural - The energy source is derived without the need for interim steps of human refinement or reprocessing significantly from its original form. (I really can’t explain how Fossil Gas managed to get the label “natural” in this regard, it’s a huge stretch)
Clean - The energy source, nor its bi-products, harm humans who have contact with it. (I really can’t explain how Nuclear managed to get the label “clean” in this regard, it’s a huge stretch)
Non Carbon - The energy source does not result in the atmospheric emission of carbon particles to utilize it or harvest it.
Steady - The energy source is available on demand at predictable intervals.
Utility Scale - The energy source is able to service the energy consumption needs of thousands, or even millions, of customers.
And what you’re going to find the more you learn about how we humans make energy is: we have almost nothing in our current array of tools that checks off all of the above boxes. This is particularly important to pay attention to when looking at the energy portfolio. For example . . .
Nuclear is non-carbon and steady, yet not renewable.
Bioplants are renewable and steady, yet not non-carbon.
Wind is non-carbon and renewable, yet not steady.
I feel bad for everyone involved because trying to power our grid while “doing the right thing for the environment” is a bit like that old riddle of the farmer trying to move the fox, goose, and grain across the river one at a time without the goose eating the grain or the fox eating the goose.
I can tell you this much though, growing up in a part of the country that had to deal with coal and gas over generations of family, NO THANK YOU. Bunch of nope to that. As much as possible I want us off gas and diesel. Thankfully we’re not using any coal in Norwood.
There are other tricky bits of energy to watch out for besides just what things are named.
The Ins and Outs of RECs
Renewable. Energy. Certificates. RECs. This is something that we’ve already been navigating at our power company for years. The idea is that by funding renewable projects, purchasers can get financial incentives for themselves. It was created as a way to encourage more development of environmentally friendly energy to be added to the grid.
The way this plays out is every power generating plant that has managed to get itself defined as being a “renewable” power generator has the ability to generate some monopoly money certificates that can be purchased by 3rd parties (like utility companies). These certificates are the “proof” that the 3rd party is “directly funding” the production of “renewable” energy for the grid. In some cases, the 3rd party don’t have to literally be receiving the power, what matters is just that they helped pay into the renewable plant. Welp, that’s where it gets trickier . . .
See, RECs come in different uh let’s call it “quality” tiers. There’s low tier RECs and higher tier ones. Low tier ones are cheaper, but they tend to just pay to keep existing plants in operation, while higher tier ones pay to actually see new plants set up and added, but are consequently more expensive. Additionally, in many cases RECs can be resold. So remember how I said a power generator makes certificates that someone else can pay to get? When that happens, those certificates kind of become a commodity. You can literally resell the ones you bought to someone else, so that that person can say “hey I’m supporting renewables too” and you recoup your costs (or possibly even turn a profit if someone pays you more than what you bought them for in order to green up their reputation). There’s an entire ecosystem of brokers who deal in this activity, and over time utility companies have gotten more cautious about how they participate, our Light included. There are horror stories of certificates being resold among brokers and utilities for renewable plants that went belly up and shuttered over a decade ago. So here these places were crowing about how they were supporting green energy when the money wasn’t going toward anything except resales at that point. So to cut down on that problem, there is a concept of “retiring” a REC. You buy the certificate, and pull it out of circulation and don’t resell it.
The retirement of RECs is an important factor in how a power utility company like the Light has their portfolio measured by regulators watching for compliance. If you’re reselling your RECs instead of retiring them, guess what? You don’t get to count them for the purposes of meeting your minimum thresholds of renewables in your portfolio. Therein lies the tradeoff. Either you resell the RECs to get some extra cash, or you retire them to stay in portfolio compliance. Usually as a utility you end up doing a bit of both really. Or at least you did.
One of the new things we’ll be dealing with at the Light is the fact that stricter requirements were recently placed on Municipal power companies in Massachusetts. It used to be that Commercial power companies were held to a different standard than Municipals. Now the Municipalities are being held to a more strict standard. It is important for you to note as a Norwood resident that you may, if you’re a civically active and curious sort, run across a letter that our Light Department signed onto a few years ago opposing the changes. It’s easy to look at that and say “ah ha! Our Light hates renewables!!” but the main beef the Muni’s had was about local control. Municipal power companies take a lot of pride in the fact that they can individually decide what to do in their community. There was worry that some of the proposed changes would strip the Municipal companies of their autonomy. A few more years have gone by and we’ve landed where we are today with the Next Gen Roadmap from the Statehouse, and the Norwood Light seems eager and ready to tackle the challenge. I am as well. I’m a realist when it comes to the dance of energy vs Climate, but also someone who digs into things. I despise greenwashing (the act of using clever marketing or wording to give the appearance of environmentally positive action, while functionally not helping or even making the problem worse). That means you can expect that any projects, suggestions, or plans that come before me will need to pass my well versed scrutiny for not just being financially sound, but also for not being greenwashy or otherwise emotionally-satisfying-but-ineffective.
In particular one thing I’m interested to see is how we can crank up our investment into higher impact projects. In my past conversations with staff at the Light, we’ve deliberated the frustration of how RECs tend to play out. Cheap RECs are cheap for a reason, they’re low impact. It’s like trying to fund your kid’s $40,000 college education by selling nothing but penny candy. To really make a dent in environmentally friendly energy, you have to be dealing in the tier of RECs that fund R&D. I can tell you that in ANY business, R&D is the hardest part. It takes experimentation. Failure. Repeated attempts. Prototyping. Retraining your talent or hiring in new talent that you didn’t already have. It is a lot to wrangle. And low tier RECs don’t pay for that level of effort. Low tier RECs just keep the lights on at a place, that’s about it. If that. Unretired low tier RECs are the worst sort. Nobody wins there except REC brokers. The trouble is, low tier RECs are appealing to bargain hunters and risk averse places. And I can’t think of a more risk averse environment than a Municipality. So it’s small wonder that Municipal utilities would lean towards those cheap sauce RECs and not the impact-making ones. And often without rate payers even realizing how it was all working, just that they were spending money to “be more green”. Rate payers didn’t necessarily know exactly how the money impacts the big picture of energy project development. But hopefully now you see how we as a Municipality can have direct impact on the way the grid continues to be updated through how we choose to invest in energy related projects!
I’m very excited to see how this Light Commission meeting goes tonight, because they’ll be talking about the portfolio during it, among other things. I’m very pleased that the town heeded mine and other’s urging to re-establish these more formal meetings of the Light Commissioners. The Light is just too complex to try and stuff in as a foot note to the Selectman’s meetings. There are a LOT of big things that will be coming to a head or hitting us here in town from further upstream. Emissions targets, transmission difficulties, portfolio wrangling, the expected drama of US nuclear plant licensing in the mid 2020s, and so much more.
Speaking of Nuclear, I promised to get into the “fun” “fascinating” parts of Nuclear power at the end of this post. I hope these posts have given you some good food for thought as you consider what sorts of people you want to see elected to the Board of Selectmen. Myself, I’m running for a seat in the April 4th 2022 election this year (there will be two seats open) in order to add my knowledge to the pool of knowledge available on the Board of Selectmen. I would be very honored to have your vote, so that I can contribute my skills and knowledge to the town in these important areas.
If you started with this post first, feel free to check out part 1 and part 2 of this series on energy. And if you’re ready for some Nuclear fun, read on!
How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Nuclear Plant
Okay so in part 1 of my write up about energy, I touched the surface of how Nuclear plants work. Radioactive materials are used to heat things up until you get steam to spin the turbines of generators. The far more interesting part is what happens around that.
Radioactivity is something frightening because most of the time that we hear anything about it, it’s usually due to something BAD. Sometimes it’s small scale bad, like Radon gas in a person’s basement. Sometimes it’s high profile bad, like what happened to the Fukushima power plant in 2011. Sometimes it’s horrifying, like radioactive material used as weapons. Sometimes it’s “oops, we should have known better” like antique glass dishes impregnated with uranium particles. And sometimes it’s just outright fictional bad, like time traveling apocalypses on tv (looking at you Dark. Man did I love that show though). So it is small wonder that for most people, radioactivity and nuclear energy just = scary bad, because scary badness is the only time we collectively talk about it.
The wild thing is, the more that you learn about radioactivity and nuclear energy, the less scary bad it feels emotionally. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still dangerous. But so is fire. So is electricity. By learning about them, it takes a lot of the fear factor away. It doesn’t make them less dangerous, it makes you better at being safe when dealing with them in any manner or when having to make decisions about them. That’s the joy of learning about radioactivity and nuclear technologies.
Here’s a funny story about the first step I took to getting more comfortable about radioactivity: As a hobby I collect sea glass right? And a lot of sea glass can be old. I learned about how some of it can be radioactive. I thought uh oh, what if I have some of that old vaseline glass in my collection and I don’t realize it? Is that a problem? Is it dangerous?? So I went down the rabbit hole of learning about how much a geiger counter would cost or how to make a DIY geiger counter if such a thing existed because that sounded like a neat science project. At some point along the way I stumbled on a video of someone with some vaseline glass demonstrating how their new geiger counter worked. During that, I was surprised to see that the radioactive glass was wrapped in ……………… plastic. Just some ordinary plastic bags. I was like wait, time out, flimsy plastic is going to stop the radioactive energy?
This of course lead me to learning more about radioactive particles. About how not all radioactive particles are created equal. Some are MUCH better at penetrating our bodies. Others can be stopped with as little as a piece of paper or just the surface of your skin. And pretty soon I was learning all sorts of amazing things. Like concrete … why the heck was concrete effective at shielding from certain radioactive particles? Turns out it’s because concrete has a high moisture content suspended in it.
Now things were starting to make more sense. Like the big water vats full of barrels in Nuclear plants. It always seemed so weird and scary when portrayed in media. What was in that pool of water??? What weird sciency cocktail was lurking?
It’s water. It’s literally just a swimming pool of water. Why? Because with enough feet of water, you can essentially block the radiation, kind of like what lead does. In particular it’s great against neutron radiation. The radioactive particles run into the dense concentration of hydrogen atoms that make up the water before said radioactive particles can bump into anything else more troublesome, like people. Hydrogen atoms are almost the same weight and size as a neutron, thus they are really good at sucking up all that energy from the neutron and keeping it from sprinting out into the world. The neutrons hit the hydrogen instead of escaping to slam into other things.
Now there’s just one problem with keeping a big old swimming pool full of radioactive materials. What happens if the water gets out? Well how would the water get out? The same ways it could get out of a regular pool: if something cracks the pool. Now we get into the topic of “dry casks”. At some point along the way we figured out that certain events are a big threat to pools of water. Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Sink holes. Settling of foundations. Basically anything that can cause the pool to warp and introduce cracks. If the water gets out, the radioactive things that were in the pool are no longer shielded. So a different solution was crafted.
Remember how I said that concrete is good at shielding due to its high moisture content? They figured out that they can take radioactive materials that need to be shielded, whether that’s pellets or hazard suits or just plain old dirt that has gotten irradiated from being around the radioactive materials, and surround it in concrete all the way around. Then, take that and put some more layers of shielding, such as metals, to form a cask. Since radioactivity isn’t the sort of thing that you can see or smell, they figured if they put another non radioactive gas substance in the outer layers of the casks that could be easily and quickly detected, it would let them monitor and respond if the cask was somehow penetrated in any way. And then for good measure, to keep it from having any risks from foundational issues, the casks are not permanently affixed to the ground. They’re free standing, so that if something happens, there’s not a risk of foundational cracking.
We always hear about Fukushima, but one thing that seems to fly under the radar was during that disaster, they had some things stored in the typical pools, and some in these dry casks. The materials in the pools got exposed when the water drained out of the pools from the earthquake. Meanwhile the casks got thrown to hell and back and didn’t get compromised. That’s why I only partially laugh at the Energy Dept being like “oh these dry casks can safely sit here long term for temporary storage”, because those types of casks have in fact been put through the ringer of major natural disasters without compromising.
Now that said, it’s not all happy and care free. The casks DO have a “life expectancy” so to speak. And who wants to be the one to find out what the maximum range of that life expectancy is before they fail? Definitely not me. But at some point someone has to, because those puppies are chilling right nearby. Geographically they’re on our doorstep. And we’re trusting that private companies being paid to babysit these casks neigh indefinitely will just keep doing an A+ job in perpetuity? (Since apparently it’s been over a decade since Congress even took up what to do about long term storage, yikes). I don’t know about you, but I can definitely foresee a situation where in addition to constantly kicking the can on dealing with this permanent storage problem, somebody in the Congress gets the “bright” idea to cut the funding that is paying for these places to keep babysitting their bi-products at the temporary storage too. So yeah, those parts of the Nuclear equation? Not great. But there’s some activity that is likely going to bring things to a head in the advancement front.
In the mid 2020s, the US Nuclear plant licenses are all going to begin hitting their max. Their 60 years is up. As this happens, each plant has to either decommission OR find a way to adapt their operations. Some of the things they’re exploring are things like micro-reactors, recycling spent materials (since in some cases the materials are reactive for like 10,000 years you’d THINK we’d have a way to keep taking advantage of that energy), and otherwise finding ways to improve operations. And there are continuing experiments with fuel sources, looking for materials that can give the same results as uranium but with less hassle and lower risk (thorium often gets pitched as a possible one).
Nuclear plants aren’t completely unaware of our perceptions of them either. They KNOW that we get all skived out by their presence, not knowing how they work and only knowing that they have “scary” radiation inside them. But you also can’t completely blame people for feeling like that when we literally can’t figure out where to put the leftovers. But knowing more about the plants and about radioactive materials can help demystify it and improve decision making around it. I also don’t think people have a great grasp of how much radioactivity is present in many of the other fuel sources we fiddle with. Pretty much most things that come from deep deep deep in the earth have some radioactive action going on. Like when oil or gas are brought to the surface, you can be exposed to radioactivity in a way that differs from how those materials existed when they were underground, because in the form of oil and gas as we use it, it’s all nice and heavily concentrated together (they call this “Technologically Enhanced Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material”). People try to use the whole “there’s radiation in bananas” analogy and that’s noooot quite what’s going on here. Imagine compressing a ton into a single point. Suddenly you’re not just dealing with the radiation of 1 banana or even a grocery store’s worth of them. Also, the radiation emitted from a banana is not necessarily of the same type as other radioactive materials, not all radioactive materials emit equally. Trying to do cross comparisons between various every day objects and known concentrated or problematic objects for radioactivity safety levels is kind of a losing battle because you have to know
What kind of radioactivity was (alpha? beta? gamma? neutron?)
What kind of shielding may be present (some particles are literally blocked by something as simple as your skin while others would take feet of concrete)
Alright I think I’ve managed to sate my love of bantering about energy topics for one night. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to vote on Monday April 4th, 2022!