New England's Last Coal Plant Has Stopped Operating, According to Its Owners

A large area was evacuated and "human costs" were great. But as I recall, no deaths from radiation.

Edit: Changed "linked to" to "attributed to", because this is the estimated count of people who would not have died of disease if coal power plants were not running.

Murphy's law is real...

LLMs!

Getting a design approved means a specific design is approved. So, the power plant must be built as designed, no changes. And apparently ensuring you built exactly what the design specifies is really expensive.

What's needed to reduce this cost is having some way to get a whole cloud of closely related designs approved, so that reasonable deviations from the design are also approved. This is equivalent to saying only the most critical part of the design would need to be built as designed, everything else would be allowed some slop. With something like this, one might (for example) be able to build the confinement building with less tight control on the configuration of the reinforcing steel.

I'm don't know how one would get such a cloud of designs approved. Maybe this is a problem that could be solved by massive computation? Run billions of mutant designs through a simulation gauntlet to see how sensitive it is to various perturbations? Or maybe add more defense in depth, like devices that scrub radioactive elements from steam (such things exist) so the tolerable chance of meltdown can be allowed to increase while keeping expected damage in check?

> This ”before regulations” time period seems to be made up on feelings about a rosy picture of the past rather than actual data.

No, we have data about costs in those earlier times, and we know what regulations came in when.

Acre-feet as a unit just made me realize how many options you get for volume with multiple base units (a foot-mile-inch is ~12m³ in case anyone was wondering). The non-metric system continues to impress (not in a good way)!

It's a bit dated (completed in 1978) and cost approximately $100 million. At one point it was the heaviest land vehicle, clocking in at 13,500 tons. It's since been succeded, but this bucket-wheel excavator needed only five people to operate. Those five people could mine 240,000 tons of coal[8] or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden (rock/soil on top of the coal) per day. That's 2400 coal wagons!

After totally tapping out all of the coal at the Tagebau Hambach mine, in 2001, it took a crew of 70 together to move it 14 miles to the next mine. This move cost 15 million German Marks.

(Just watch the linked documentary.)

Even better, if you have a functioning wholesale electricity market, you can put those batteries on the grid and benefit everybody.

An analogy here is natural gas pipelines with intermediate storage caverns, which allow the pipelines to operate more steadily even if demand various greatly over the year.