Oh wow, so even more radioactive waste that will afflict thousands of future generations and the environment for a tiny amount of produced energy now :(
Coal plants spread radioactive waste into the air.
Fission plants leave a hot turd behind, but at least it can be buried in one spot out of reach instead of everyone breathing it.
Yeah sure, coal plants obviously have to go. But why not invest in sustainable energy production?
Nuclear waste cannot just be buried, unless you don’t care about polluting huge areas with radioactivity. In Germany, there have been decades long debates where to store nuclear waste and even to this day there hasn’t been found a good storage for the waste we produced in the 70ies. And this shit costs billions of euros that the company profiting of the plant doesn’t have to pay but that in turn society has to pay.
Wyoming is investing heavily in wind even with the understanding that current turbine designs ultimately cost money to repair and operate as opposed to being a solution that pays for itself. The conversion of a coal plant to nuclear is part of a long term strategy to reduce environmental impact. They’re taking a long view approach that solar and wind can’t in the short term do what they need it to do but that continued use of coal, at all, even just for the short term, is untenable. Meanwhile, Wyoming is ALSO investing in research on using nuclear byproducts to generate electricity. I have a lot of complaints about Wyoming and how chill they are with the alt-right but I have to commend them that their energy strategy for their state basically reflects what we all need to be doing
I see fission as a transitional technology, like CFL light bulbs vs LED lighting.
The transition has been struggling for 60 years for political reasons.
That is simply not true, storage is a solved problem, and the reason for not having locations is a political problem. NIMBY (Not in my back yard) keeps the world from having permanent storage locations, not science.
So it’s just a nuclear plant and has nothing to do with coal?
I had to dig up some other sources for info, but this is the case. The new plant has nothing to do with coal, but it is being built to replace the power production and local power related jobs in that area.
Sources:
At first glance I thought it was reuseing the coal plants turbines, but looking though the article the only connection I can find is that it’s located several miles away and the only connection is that it plans to hire a hundred or so people from the coal plant it’s replacing and that Wyoming’s powder river basin is nearby and its associated highly automated low sulfur coal mines are in the vauge area.
All this to say, yes it has practically nothing to do with coal.
Coal plant burns coal to heat water, makes steam, and the steam powers a turbine to produce electricity. A nuclear power plant uses nuclear fuel to heat water and produce steam similar to a coal plant. It may do this indirectly (e.g. second loop between the nuclear fuel and water loop to prevent the water becoming radioactive). This means that to build a nuclear plant you essentially need to build a coal plant, and then also the nuclear reactor and safety stuff, which makes them more expensive. Since coal plants are being turned off anyways, it might be more cost effective to just retrofit old coal plants so the only cost is the nuclear reactor side of things (plus any necessary maintenance and upgrades)
This was posted in c/Environment yesterday. I bring that up to point you over to that thread, where @Powderhorn@beehaw.org had some great insights into why this move is more regressive than it sounds.
So originally I wasn’t federated with !environment@beehaw.org so couldn’t read the post, I’ve now read it and can understand everything I didn’t before. It’s disappointing. But I’m glad that wave power was mentioned as I think that will be huge in the coming years. Hopefully it’s not as far off as @Powderhorn@beehaw.org suspects. I feel like with ground source heat pumps, we have heating sorted, but we’re still looking for solutions in power and wave seems the obvious solution.
It’s an investment problem. No one is doing scalable wave power because the money is in offshore wind.
