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US Nuclear Power Industry Poised For a Comeback
ThousandStars sends us to The Wall Street Journal for a report that momentum for nuclear energy is waxing in the US. "For the first time in decades, popular opinion is on the industry's side. A majority of Americans thinks nuclear power, which emits virtually no carbon dioxide, is a safe and effective way to battle climate change, according to recent polls. At the same time, legislators are showing renewed interest in nuclear as they hunt for ways to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. The industry is seizing this chance to move out of the shadow of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and show that it has solved the three big problems that have long dogged it: cost, safety and waste."
absolutely correct.
The facts are still on the side of the pro nuclear camp.
"Dangerous Nuclear Waste" of the old plants remains active for thousands of years, we can't really be sure to contain it for that long.
Once fully processed through feeder-breeder plants, the waste will be of two types.
1: almost non reactive with a half life of hundreds of thousands of years. Its about as dangerous as normal granite.
2: highly radioactive stuff with half lives of decades, the stuff will be decomposed and safe after about 2 centuries. We can build safe containment sure to last that long.
I'll expand your idea to my local utility, Progress Energy in Florida. Progress Energy estimates that a two reactor plant is going to cost $17 billion (http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/993686.html)
At an 8% cost of capital, that is 1.36 billion a year. With a 35 useful lifetime of the plant, there is an additional .5 billion a year to repay the capital. Throw in some of the other costs you mention (fuel, labor, property taxes, etc) and let's say the plant needs to earn 2 billion a year with no profit for the owners.
The reactors are two Westinghouse AP1000 which produce 1154Megawatts each (http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/). If I recall correctly, nuclear plants are running about 90% of the time these days. That means the plants will produce in the ballpark of 2 reactors * 1154 MW * 1000Kw/Mw * 365 Days / Year * 24 hours /Day * .90 (availability derating) or 18.1 billion kilowatt hours per year. Given our cost estimate of $2 billion dollars per year, that works out to 11.04 cents per kilowatt hour.
Your 10 cent per kilowatt cost estimate is very close!
The scary thing is that I'm old enough to have lived through the last wave of nuclear plants being built. They almost all came in at two to four times the original cost estimates. If that happened again, we are talking wholesale electric rates of 22 to 44 cents per kilowatt. Solar PV (being stored in banks of lead acid batteries for night use) is already cheaper than 44 cents per kilowatt.
Well, since you asked...
Assuming one heavy waste atom per neutron converted to energy, and for the sake of argument let's say these atoms have an atomic weight of about 300:
1 neutron x c^2 = 1.67e-27 kg x 9e16 = 1.5 e-10 J/atom =
1.5 e-10 / (300*1.67e-27 kg) = 3e14 J / kg pure waste
Now, granted the efficiency with which we can extract pure waste from the rest of the spent fuel rod knocks down by a few orders of magnitude that figure. I don't know that number, but let's call it a thousand. So we have 3e14 J / metric ton waste. That's 3e5 GJ/metric ton.
For reference, total electricity produced per year in the US (source: DOE, http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html) is about 1.5e19 J / year = 1.5e10 GJ / year. If we're going to use all nukes, that would amount to 50,000 metric tons per year of the contaminated stuff, assuming 1 kg pure waste pollutes 1 metric ton of spent fuel.
Now, for coal:
1/2 of our electric output is coal right now. That's 0.75e19 J/year of coal. Coal uses a chemical reaction, not a nuclear reaction, so the mass of hydrocarbons is far greater than the number quoted above. For simplicity (and since I never took organic chem in college), let's approximate it by saying it's all clean-burning methane gas. ie CH4 + 2O2 = CO2 + 2H2O. The internets tell me (at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/energy/Companion/E06.1.pdf.xpdf) that this reaction yields 55 GJ/ metric ton methane.
Dividing through,
7.5e18J/year / 5.5e10 J/ton = 1.4e8 ton methane burned per year. Coal has higher energy content, but I'm going to make the unfounded guess that the inefficiency of the generator will balance out my assumption of using methane.(Corrections from chemists are welcomed.)
To review, we can spew out 1.4e8 ton of carbon (roughly), or 5e4 ton of dilute (factor of 1000) radioactive waste. So now the question is, how much radiation in that 1.4e8 tons of carbon. (http://www.docstoc.com/docs/4991532/radioactive-elements) tells me this is on the order of 10 ppm for thorium. So that's about 1.4e3 tons/year of pure thorium vs 5e1 tons/year of pure radioactive waste.
Again, corrections to false assumptions and math mistakes are most welcome from people who actually know what they're talking about more than I do (I'm an EE/software guy from 9-5).
Though Obama hasn't really shown his colors either way in regards to nuclear power (unless I missed that, been to busy to do much news recently)
Actually, he put the final nail in the coffin for Yucca Mountain.
Then he denied the feasibility of nuclear energy because there was no storage facility.
Kind of circular logic.
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