If only it were that simple. See this NRC backgrounder on decommissioning nuclear power plants and 26 CFR 1.468A-5. It is a fund owned by customers, held in trust for complete plant dissolution. It cannot be borrowed from or against or used to upgrade the plant, even if this would result in a longer useful life. Typically these funds are held conservatively, though there have been attempts to tax them to higher heaven or play risky games.

Don't get me wrong, decommissioning funds are a good idea in general for industry, especially for anything involving radioactivity or stored chemicals. But you have to ask yourself for anything, such as my water or sewer plant example, is it likely that we will really want this thing to close and completely disappear in (x) years? If the answer is NO, the return-on-investment burden costs everyone money over it's lifetime because it stifles renovation and innovation. The higher cost and lower profit margin repels good stewards and attracts bad ones (like Dominion). Just as for life insurance, it's not healthy for any one or thing that is truly useful to be considered worth more dead than alive.

If anyone would attempt to impose such a trust to coal generating plants over a pre-determined lifespan with subsequent greenfield decommissioning, you'd hear some real noise. Then when those numbers change, aside from CO2 everyone might conclude that nuclear IS cheaper than coal, today!

"The useful is as beautiful as the beautiful." ~apologies to The Little Prince

Okay, I'll wave my hands about and gobble about 'decommissioning'.

People tend to increase over time. Energy use increases over time. Globally we are not even close to providing the whole world with a grid coverage and capacity that provides the comfortable existence we ourselves would not tolerate losing. Every renewable dream has us whizzing around in electric vehicles. But this could come true only if the future is nuclear. The renewable numbers just don't work out, even when you imagine a magical solution to the storage problem, and especially when you include ground transportation.

So where did this 'decommissioning fable' come from? When was it decided --- and by whom --- that ~60 or so years hence there must be a desolate public park at every site chosen for a gigawatt nuclear plant, today?

Suggest to anyone that a water or sewage treatment plant cannot cost what it costs, it must also gather funds to fund its own destruction and demise and people will shake their heads. But this is crazy! The sewage will always flow downhill to here. We're not going to move a water plant, tear the pipes out of the ground and route them somewhere else. Oh, it's soo much different.

But is it really? Who is telling us we will be using less energy in the future? Should we listen to them?

Decommissioning funds gathered for nuclear plants may seem like a great idea, but it has also become an awful idea. It does not make nuclear energy any safer. It has promoted technological sloth, dissuaded investors from supporting (and injecting R&D to improve) the only clean base load energy source on the table. It has handicapped nuclear from being THE cheapest source of energy. It has enabled the most short-sighted and fuck-stupid forms of corporate vandalism. This is because when anyone owns or acquires an aging nuclear plant, they are faced with a choice --- whether to re-invest and re-structure to replace aging components, as they would for any other source, or trigger its destruction and unlock the magic chest of decommission funding. Getting a little kick to the balance sheet by rendering a productive energy source into a blight on the landscape, something intentionally broken that cannot be fixed.

Such as the Kewaunee Power Station which went offline in 2013 despite that it is in good condition, has maintained a healthy balance sheet, perfect safety record, operating license extended to 2033 and had six months' fuel left in the reactor. All because Dominion is riding the natural gas 'glut' at this brief moment in time. When the glut peaks out Dominion will invest in some other, dirtier short-term solution.

We should be upgrading these plants and taking them to the next level as we do with every other utility. Given the gigawatt-year track record they have demonstrated It is ludicrous to assume that any nuclear plant operating today deserves to be destroyed rather than upgraded. There are too few of them and they are too precious.

Do not feed the vultures.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security

BOTH in the future, but keep in mind that none of these day to day repairs have anything to do with re-tooling the grid, which would will take $ trillions of dollars.

Aerial power lines are the practical rule in many towns and cities because space is tight and there is already ~80 years of infrastructure under ground. Ours has two electric utilities, in some intersections their feeders cross on two upper levels. In new subdivisions electric primaries have been buried in alleys with ground level transformers but in most places it's pole transformers and drop wires.

I routinely dig water and sewer mains in these places and cannot describe the rush of raking a backhoe tooth against a buried primary that was ~2.5' off the mark crossing over our sewer main. No flash-pow, it was just there. When it was laid boring crew did not realize their tool had gone halfway through a customer's sewer tap, not plugging it completely but breaking our main and causing problems for years. Imagine a rotating plumber's snake grinding against a 7kV power line (not in conduit). I still feel that electricity needs to be underground as a rule but in these areas better mapping to the inch would be a plus, and each utility presents its own locating challenge.

Aerial lines suck during ice storms and high winds and there is a constant battle with trees, but the plus is that everything is out of reach of people and floods, and the power company can visually inspect everything right up to your home. Considering the level of danger this is a BIG plus. And when you realize that the cost of putting everything underground in your neighborhood is an incredible capital expense that would not yield a single erg of new energy... well, I say don't hold your breath, live with it.

High voltage pylons between cities are another matter entirely. If a few buildings in your neighborhood go dark it's an inconvenience, but what of when whole cities go dark? There are too few alternate paths in our long haul grid. There is also the need to move to HVDC to couple the grids, to build more redundant overlapping 'loops'. This would improve efficiency and survivability. Here is where State and Federal government could make a real difference.

We have these superhighways you see, and all that is missing is a method to cut-and-drop a channel into them. We should be building electric pipelines in addition to oil pipelines. Robert Faulkner is a lone voice in this HVDC wilderness, and I tell of his quest in this Slashdot post.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
  To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
  To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

So you're just a little rock drifting in space, perhaps you have a bit of slow elliptical gig with the Sun or some heavy vector from rude encounters with other Astrobumps and potato-lumps. But these vectors have mostly cancelled each other and you're copa-centric with the solar system, just chillin'.

Every now and then you wiggle-woggle as a giant vacuum cleaner that is Jupiter or Mars passes, which leaves you a bit perturbed but its song is so enticing. You do a little dusting now and then to spruce up the neighborhood and your day/night sides fill you with just enough electrostatic tickle and a tug of graviton tockle to gather little bits. Just a big lovable clump, like a giant iron-filled molar enjoying the solitude of space grooving on the universe.

But the groove is changing. You are humming with beacons and bitcoms and bacon commercials, ringing with SATCOM beams and HF RTTY streams, and music and bouncy over-the-horizon PAVE PAWS and wave claws of a modern age. And music, voices! Millions of voices. Single sideband gwobbles and gwerps, AM throbby-bumps and gurgle-beats, quavering FM and chaotic barking bursty bits channelized and encrypted for your protection. Lissen up party people, meat is in the house. And it's talking.

And IT is the source, that THING, a rolling blue ball with puffy white squiggles tumbling towards you. Clearly this is a bad place to be because it is headed in your direction and its inhabitants are too stupid or inconsiderate to move it aside.

Its mass tugs at you as a thin layer of atmosphere sears blazing heat through your little rocky self. It becomes thicker and you dissolve in an explosion of heat and light. Your elementary particles will add mass to this malevolent menace as a few creatures point their stubby fingers at your death and say, "Ooooooooooooooo!".

Then they will get on their cell phones and blabble over the radio accusing YOU of attacking THEM.

Stoopid PEOPLE on their BIG BLUE DEATH MARBLE.

Glad to hear it! If we love our children, there really is nothing quite as important.

For every 1000kg of U-233 bred with thorium in a LFTR, ~15kg of Pu-238 is produced. Here is Kirk Sorensen discussing the waste stream of a two-fluid LFTR and a series of slides.

So every 1 gigawatt LFTR reactor would produce the necessary amount of Pu-238 to fuel ~3 Voyager-class (4.5kg) space probes, every year. Beyond Voyager's simple purpose and its 400 watt electronics package, think of what our space probes could do with more energy. Locomotion, drilling, small maneuvering adjustments or a steady acceleration using ion thrusters.

For more, see my letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
and the the collected rants of the Trix Rabbit of Thorium.

[FIXED LINK]
Which is one reason we need LFTR to produce Pu238, among countless other reasons.

This is not really about the use of Lion batteries. So Facebook is going to change out lead-acid systems that give ~20-30 minutes (MY guess, TFA does not say) to one that gives only 90 seconds for generator start.

That 'dragster' remark is cute but it falls flat with me. There is a whole class of real-world fail opened up here. 90 seconds is scarcely enough time for humans to respond, let alone diagnose and solve a problem. As a critical infrastructure IT admin I'd never want to commit to this. It is an example of one of those 'Faustian bargain' compromises over time that are making modern technology fragile (in a sneaky way that is no one's fault) , where the UPS maintainers are 'absolved' of responsibility for the Big Fail when it happens. Blame is shifted onto the generator maintainers --- who might have been able to solve the problem had they had more than 90 seconds in which to do so.

If you design a commercial class server farm without a physical fire/vapor room/wall between batteries and servers and a real DC bus you have already lost the battle, abandoned Bell Standard Practice. I remember when telling someone they were violating BSP was the worst thing you could say. Now it's like, "Bell Standard Practice? What's that? Look it's cool, we just unpack this stuff from the box, snap it together and it works!" Until it doesn't. Or a single battery catches fire and you have to clear the room and don moon suits.

There are other issues too. It's an environmental loser. If you're championing Lion over lead acid for vehicles you're a winner because there is no other way. But this move to install Lion over lead-acid in places where the additional sqft is available is silly. Lead acid maintenance and recycling is a no-brainer. But Lion? Taks a look at this article on state-of-the-art battery hazards and recycling. "it takes 6 to 10 times more energy to reclaim metals from some recycled batteries than it does to produce it through other means, including mining" and thus only a few companies are doing it, probably living on subsidy. The Lion boom is driven by China's rare earth industry, and you can be sure they'll turn the screws when assimilation is complete. There are even some who claim that due to economic reality, many Lion batteries, even the heavy duty ones, are dangerously destined for the landfill, a place lead-acid batteries do not go because their recycle process is mature and chemically simple.

So from here it really looks like Facebook is trying to eliminate a few blue-collar battery maintainer positions in their Data Center, at great cost, to their ultimate peril. Never mind that extra time to keep servers running while you fix faults, just chuck the old stuff, install these things, and... relax. The Big Fail will be no one's fault because the accountants have signed off on it.

Story of the modern world.

This dialogue is straight from the United States' temperance movement that led up to a Constitutional amendment and a decade of peril, a black market economy comparable in size to the real one, and the Federally-subsidized ascension of organized crime. Some people think they are being proactive, easing their view of a world 'sin tax' as a way to stay global catastrophe. They are being hoodwinked into believing that unless they act soon by accepting some prepared package of countermeasures, some point of no return would be reached. This is being done in the traditional way, fronting claims that the (terrorists, evil corporations, fossil fuel interests) have "almost won".

But the real tripe, such as Perl spouts, misrepresents and marginalizes the personal motives among the poor and middle class folks who've managed to (just) stay afloat, and use their resources to acquire certain contested 'things'. Complicated and realistic motives, the whole spectrum of survival through pursuit of happiness (aka sanity) are reduced to some simple addict-reward-temperance model that suits the purpose. Then add a dash of global imperative and we have things like

Abolish slavery, then alcohol? This lady says this in 1897, a time when neither women nor former slaves in the US were permitted to vote. Priorities problem, much? Now cheap gas and pure-CO2 is the alcohol of the 21st century, and the same style of temperance movement is forming. It is hip and trendy. No one will confront you if you publicly picket for temperance in these matters.

Perhaps they should. Because where the rubber hits the road, such temperance movements are ultimately damaging to society. Phelps may have believed that the abolition of alcohol would magically 'elevate the human condition' to such a degree that other pressing issues of her day would be somehow solved, that it was drunkenness that was denying women the vote, or any other issue of the day to which she could have refocused her effort.

I'll say it flat out. Real people tend to have rational and understandable reasons for doing what they do. They will choose a vehicle that can hold a family and haul a load with a measure of real metal to stabilize it and protect them. They will choose a $30k truck or minivan over a $50k Tesla because... they have a choice.

Real innovation arises by pursuing real solutions to problems that result in the right choice being the cheapest one, not the one least encumbered by taxation. The future does not depend on the 'price of gas'. Temperance movements are ultimately about removing choice from the equation.

Science is finding new ways to tell us apart from one another.

Well Lordy be, they chose a Climate Change issue to do a psychological study of people-perceptions, again. What a surprise. Perhaps a disproportionately large number of Republicans have encountered various other analyses that plot observed reality against model projection and said, "well maybe that 3.2degC is not so scientific after all." How did/could they control for the participants' private assessment of the "scientific" statement they were given?

I'd be more curious about the pollution portion, there is far less scientific dispute about the effects particulates and aerosols on people and planet. Too bad the press release didn't cover that. At $11.95 for the PDF its TE;DR.

The hidden component to these studies is not necessarily political people-prejudices or even brain wiring, it is how people perceive and apply risk. Without a pivot of risk you're not going to get a straight answer on anything. None of these issues (climate, pollution, guns) are simple.

For pure-CO2 global average temperature causation my risk-O-meter is barely twitching, just enough that I'll glance out of the corner of my eye for the huge juggernaut of extraordinary evidence that would be required to prove it at this point. It would be large enough to see from a distance and would be a great deal slower than a speeding train .

My other risk-O-meter is PEGGED, the one that attempts to assess my personal risk from politically motivated shoddy conclusions, emerging secular belief systems, 'new' government regulation (by a government that seems to have forgotten how to repeal anything, preferring to tune legislation to greater heights of obfuscation and uselessness) ... some of the dumb-ass solutions being proposed out there are TERRIFYING.

So if someone drew me into a study where I'm expected to weigh a stated 'problem' with and proposed 'solution' empirically, expecting me to decouple one from the other so they can draw some sort of conclusion from it, forget that.

If I had grown up in a place where solutions did not often create their own set of problems, that need to be weighed and factored --- such as inside a comic book --- maybe.

And I'm not even a Democrat or a Republican or liberal or conservative. That's just me looking at the world.

Hm... could this be the result of clouds blocking the sun? See if the owner's manual has an appendix, that is often where you find a list of troubleshooting procedures --- since the appendices are often written by the engineers themselves, you often find useful tidbits of info there that didn't fit into the how-to narrative and are not part of the sales pitch.

I sympathize with your problem but I am also relieved that it is obviously a local phenomenon, since there are so many here on Slashdot who haven't experienced this, as they continue to advocate the use of solar energy for base load power generation for an industrial society.

Good luck to you friend and I hope you find the problem and get those panels back up to 4kW all day, every day since that is what you paid for... you might try mounting a large Fresnel lens over your kettle to help it come to a boil on those cloudy days.

Pure CO2 causation, the forced feedback in climate models and the machinations on the data that attempt to leverage a 400% CO2 rise into an extremely-slight-yet-lost-in-noise rise or flatline (depending on how you rearrange the noise) average global temperature... it has been like a bad dream that does not end.

Will the world end in ***FIRE*** or ***ICE***? Or will the world fail to end at all, that would be really embarrassing. It's time to put the steep rise in people-generated pure-CO2 and the observed not steep at all global temperature curve in proper perspective. As in, pure-CO2 causation is a non-starter yet worthy of study --- but it's time to focus on other aspects for awhile. Without all that 'climate denier' noise too.

Let's just talk about actual particulates and albedo. Stratospheric sulfur aerosols reflect more sunlight. In the Arctic, nearby soot may be a larger forcing than CO2. One effect would cause net cooling at the surface and the other a net warming as near-perfect blackbody particles settle on ice crystals. The photograph of a melt water canal with concentrated black carbon particles lining the bottom of the pool begs the question, does this melt channel owe its very existence to the presence of the carbon, or was it caused by other factors? I guestimate that the area of black is about 1/10 the size of the surrounding melt pit... so we are definitely seeing 'grey snow' in the Arctic here.

It has taken five years for the failed 'Glory' satellite mission to be re-launched as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory. It is my hope that OCO2 will help to answer these questions by showing where pollution plumes originate and how they move, so that we know where to take samples and what to look for.

Politics demands simplified models and pure-CO2 causation so they can tax everybody without pissing off the coal industry. F*ck politics. It is my view that pure-science demands a balanced approach that will reveal the true impact of coal, among other manmade and natural causes.

And the folks in California would really appreciate a green-tax refund for the 29% of their pollution that is actually from Asia.

When growing up at 15 degrees North in the Caribbean where we do not do DST, it was awkward at times to arrange business calls with the States... but no big deal, I couldn't understand why folks would want too go through all that twice a year.

Now I live 34 degrees North and see what the big deal is. I am on the road to work at 6:30am and come Monday I will not be seeing children walking around, crossing streets and standing around in the dark.

Anything that makes kids easier to avoid while driving in large portions of the continent is fine with me. All those other reasons like saving energy (NOT) can go stuff themselves.

"Welcome to the testing room of the Parallax Corporation's Division of Human Engineering. You will now please go up to the chair, and you will sit down, make yourself comfortable, be sure to place each one of your hands on the box on either side of the chair, making sure that each one of your fingers is on one of the white rectangles. Just sit back, nothing is required of you, except to observed the visual materials that are presented to you. Be sure to keep your fingers on the box at all times. All right, I hope you find the test a pleasant experience."

Take the test: Montage from the film, The Parallax View [1974]

More info about the 'test'