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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'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...