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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."
Of course the public won't understand something as complicated as nuclear reactors. Science is over their heads.
Me: "I work on stem cells in adult mice"
"Average" citizen: "Stem cells? You're going to hell, euthanizing senior citizens is wrong!"
Me: "Wow... I don't... uh, I'm going to..."
There's a reason nobody is investing in this great deal.
The interest on a $8B loan at 8% is about 1.8M per day.
The amount of power made is about that much, at the wholesale rate of .10/KWH
And that's not counting the cost of uranium, labor, maintenance, decomissioning, or insurance .....
Not to mention that it takes many years to build one, with the 1.8M accruing each day.
See this on a ./er's sig so I can't take credit for it, but it sums up the situation nicely: Nuclear power. Global warming. Agrarian society. Pick one.
The enviro-nazi's would seem to prefer the Agrarian society option. We can't use nuclear, we can't use coal, we can't use natural gas, we can't build more hydro -- so what exactly is going to replace the base load part of the power grid? Solar and wind will never scale that well and aren't appropriate for base load anyways. We never should have stopped building nuclear power plants. The environmentalist movement really shot themselves in the foot with that one. How much CO2 has been released into the atmosphere by the coal/gas power plants brought online to replace the nuclear ones that we never built?
We should also extend a nice fat middle finger at Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford for unilaterally abandoning reprocessing technology. How does the United States not reprocessing our spent nuclear fuel prevent nuclear proliferation anyway? Was there some third world dictator who thought to himself "Gee, I'd like to have a nuclear bomb but the US abandoned reprocessing technology so why should I even bother to try?"
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'm a supporter of widespread nuclear power. However, the industry hasn't solved two major issues:
-Hazards of mining the fuel
-Political viability of fast breeder reactors
If we could get robots to mine the fuel, great. Right now, mining heavy, radioactive material is a hazardous occupation with long-term health effects.
Fast breeder reactors are the way to minimize nuclear waste to easily manageable levels. It is also an efficient generator of weapons-grade fissile material. The international community has proliferation concerns associated with this.
I hope to see these issues addressed in the future for ushering in widespread nuclear power along with solar, wind, and geothermal energy.
Who cares about polls? The laws of physics don't care about public opinion. Neither do the laws of economics.
And the later is clearly a problem. We just went through this here in Ontario, with a new set of reactors planned to go in about 50 k east of Toronto at Darlington. Darlington A, the original set, was enormously over-budget, and if I'm doing the math right, will never pay itself back in inflation-adjusted dollars. All of us Ontarians have a little line item on our bills called the "debt retirement charge" as a result. In order to prevent this occuring again, Ontario Power Generation (via Infrastructure Ontario) demanded that the quotes include overrun insurance. That drove the price up over $26 billion.
I'm a failed physicist and I'm very much aware of the realities of nuclear power. It IS safe, and the waste is NOT that big a problem. But $26 billion is a REALLY BIG PROBLEM. I'm not the only one believing that; after the bill was presented, they cancelled the project.
Here's something to think about. Darlington A and B together would have produced about 7 GW peak. The site occupies 1200 acres, or just under 5 million square meters. 5 million square meters of 8% average solar panel will produce about 3.8 GW peak. Yeah, it's not baseload. Yeah, it's only during the day. Now here's the kicker... ready? Solar costs a dollar a watt wholesale, so the price of that plant is about, oh lets round up some, $10 billion.
It gets worse. We already get about 60% of our power from hydro. In fact, there's more _spare_capacity_ in the generator plants in northern Quebec than there would have been in Darlington. All we'd need is a cable to get it. How much? Mmmm, 500 million, tops. Newfoundland and Manitoba also have oodles of spare capacity that they would love to sell us. Arco say's there's another, ready for it? 25 GW continuous in northern Canada lying undeveloped. That's more than all the power the province uses. But they can't get a red cent to develop it, because OPG want's it all in house.
*sigh*
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 ... our cost estimate of $2 billion dollars per year, that works out to 11.04 cents per kilowatt hour.
This reasonable cost analysis illustrates the TRUE fundamental reason why nuclear power construction has been dead since the 1970s: the high capital cost. Coal power currently costs around 4 cents per kilowatt hour. Under current regulatory conditions coal power plants are always cheaper to build which means not only do they produce electricity more cheaply, but the risk to the utility is lower since the payoff on the investment is faster. And utilities are generally under a legal requirement that their investment decisions pass the muster of regulators who represent the rate-payer -- if the decisions are not found to be reasonable from the rate-payers view point the utility CANNOT recover the investment! In effect this regulatory regime prohibits the construction of nuclear power plants for practical purposes.
Reforming this situation requires at least one of the following:
Currently item 2 has been the only technique put into practice, and only spottily.
BTW, there is no inherent reason to suppose that huge cost overruns are an inevitable part of nuclear power plant construction. The common occurrence in the 1970s was an artifact of several conditions of the time: high inflation and thus punishing interest rates, the immature regulatory environment (safety changes were needed at the time, but this has been stable now for over 25 years), and immature (one might say poor) plant design. The first few plants might still be prone to overruns, but it is reasonable to expect this to disappear with practical construction experience.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
1. Those are reserves, not resources. (Look up the difference sometime).
2. Breeder reactors extend this 20-fold.
3. Thorium extends this further 5 times so that now we're looking at 5000 years of *reserves* (e.g. the amount that can be economically mined at present day price)
4. There are billions of tons of uranium in seawater.
5. Finally, advances in nuclear fission based power generation technology are a prerequisite for nuclear fusion.
Some more information:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Couldn't it be dropped into a undersea subduction zone, where the tectonic plates meet?
Circulation of very heavy metals at the deeper locations is going to be almost zero and there's no (?) biological activity that could bring it into contact with our biosphere...
Chernobyl blew up because the operators tested the emergency cooling facilities at 200Mw instead of at 750Mw like the test scenarios proscribed AND after they Xenon poisoned the reaction. By the time the were able to restart the reaction there was a shift change from the more experienced crew (who were dead tired by this stage) to a less experienced crew.
Stubbornly the manager persisted with the test, we know this can only be the case because of the shift change, they didn't recognise the danger of the ratio of control rod extraction to low thermal power output was because they were creating steam voids in the reactor core. No water, no reaction moderation. When they tried to scram the reactor the graphite tipped control rods displaced the little the steam was doing to moderate the reaction, thermal power spiked to 30Gw and ***BOOM***.
From memory 750Mw was proscribed because of the time it took to spin down the cooling system for the reactor down was matched to the start-up time of the diesel pumps that would take over. Operator error introduced a new failure-mode into the system and as all these reactors age, those failure modes will change up to and beyond the time for decommissioning.
In other words, the engineers specify sequences for a reasons based on the characteristics of the machine. This is of course just from memory the Chernobyl wiki probably does a better job remembering than I do.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.