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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."
I really hate the comparisons of Three Mile Island to Chernobyl. Three Mile Island was an example of a failure at a nuclear facility that was solved correctly. Chernobyl was an example of a failure that was caused by extraordinary stupidity and handled as badly as you could handle such an incident.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This needs all the political momentum it can get. Nuclear power is one of the areas I have strong disagreements with the current administration. Considering how much Uranium (and thorium, but lets not get into that) we have available domestically, this is such a fundamental and simple (albeit expensive) steps we can take to reduce emissions (I'm looking at you, coal) while decreasing our energy dependency. It has been so long since we have built a new reactor in this country that the safety of the newest designs, particularly the pebble bed reactor makes the still operating relics of the 60s and 70's look like potential Chernobyls (Of course, they're not, but I'm speaking relatively and the safety aspects have come quite a ways since then)
I think it's tragic that a plant from that era has come to symbolize nuclear power for the entire nation when the technology has advanced so considerably. If we applied that line of reasoning to automobiles, we'd close all the freeways because the Corvair was unsafe.
The simple truth is that nuclear power is good technology that solves a variety of sticky problems. Anti-nuclear propaganda films irrationally scared the public in to rejecting a highly beneficial and useful method of power generation. With the passage of years, the public has come to the realization that the sky isn't falling and that a modern, safe nuclear power system is good economics and good social policy. We should celebrate this return to sanity: it's reason triumphing over irrational fear.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
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.
... he then proceeded to shoot flames from his eyes in order to warm a cup of coffee while the small, winglike appendages growing from the sides of his neck flapped excitedly.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
"Congratulations Homer! You've turned a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island!
Want to improve your life? This guy will show you how!
They haven't solved the environmental issues. They might have better safety, but what about the fact that they use massive amounts of water, and heat it up about a degree before returning it to the river that the plant is inevitably next to? How about the waste? They still haven't solved that one; all our old waste is still sitting on site at current plants.
Palo Verde. 3 units, no river.
The waste is sitting there because politicians refuse to deal with the issue; not because it is unsolvable. Personally, I think we should rethink breeder reactors.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Oh they don't like wind generators either. Apparently they kill some incompetent, slow bird once in a while.
As far as solar power is concerned, its just a matter of time till some environmentalist will oppose it on the basis of toxic substances produced during manufacture.
Agrarian society here we come...
"You can't recycle the fuel indefinitely, eventually you will have waste. And eventually it needs to be dealt with."
But that waste you eventually have to deal with is almost completely different stuff. Instead of being a highly radioactive mess for a hundred thousand years, it's a much less radioactive mess for a thousand years (and during that last 500 years, it's pretty 'cool' anyhow). I don't know about you, but I suspect we *probably* have the engineering know how and materials science to contain stuff safely for 500-1000 years. I don't think anyone really thinks we currently have the knowledge to solve the problem of containing waste safely for 100,000 years.
I'd much rather try to solve the problem of containing waste safely for 1000 years than 100 times that.
I've asked that question myself, for many years. For the most part, people would just say, "No, they don't do that," and ignore my response of, "Why not?"
Finally, I got an answer: those pools get near the boiling point of water, but no further, and you're not going to get enough energy for the generators to pay for themselves unless they're running on super heated steam. Yes, there's a fair amount of energy there, but it's not concentrated enough to use. Sigh!
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Personally, I think we should rethink breeder reactors.
Hell, no! Pretty soon we'd have reactors running around everywhere!
You can't build them until you can find an effective method of birth control for them!
That is all.
Even without further technological advance, nuclear power will suffice for several millennia. It produces zero emissions (except a little hot water) and produces a tiny volume of solid waste that doesn't escape into the environment. It runs silently all day and all night. If you were handed a datasheet for a nuclear power plant with the source of power blacked out, you'd jump at the chance to build the thing.
Nuclear power produces long-lived, dangerous waste, doesn't it? Dangerous and long-lived are mutually exclusive when it comes to nuclear materials. That's just the way the science of radioactive decay works. After being taken out of the reactor, the waste that remains can be reprocessed into more fuel. But if it isn't, then you can leave it in a cooling pond for a few years, and after that point, it's safe enough to handle, store, and bury. There are far worse industrial outputs than cooled-down nuclear waste.
But it's still dangerous and we have no place to store the waste! What's wrong with a cave in the middle of the desert? There's no water table. The area is seismically stable, and there's no life where we want to store the waste. And by itself, nuclear waste will do nothing. It won't make your children glow in the middle of the night. It won't contaminate your crops. It won't do anything because it's inert.
What about the risk of nuclear meltdown? Won't that destroy cities? Well, what about steam boiler explosions? What about refinery disasters? What about train disasters? Do those keep your up at night? They all killed people regularly back in their early days. But we don't worry about them now because improved safety technology has reduced the risk to an acceptable level. The same principle applies to nuclear power: another disaster like Chernobyl could never happen to even a 1970s-era American reactor, much less the far-improved versions we have today. The risk of being injured by a nuclear meltdown today is on par with being injured by lightning.
Wait -- won't we run out of fuel? Don't we only have reserves for a hundred years? You don't understand how much energy is contained in nuclear fuel. You need so little of it that the fuel is dirt cheap. The price of uranium could increase a thousandfold without affecting a nuclear plant's bottom line. And because uranium is so cheap, there's been very little prospecting. The reason our proven reserves are relatively small is that nobody has been looking very hard, because uranium is dirt cheap. In fact, for the past few decades, the nuclear power industry has been running on decommissioned nuclear warheads. That's how little fuel you really need for nuclear power.
Sure, nuclear might be okay, but wind power! It's decentralized, and therefore better! And it appeals to my philosophical sensibilities because it's not a big evil industry!Wind power can't provide baseload power. Plus, it's limited by the number of sites with good winds. You can, on the other hand, build as many nuclear plants as necessary without severe geographic constraints. As for nuclear being centralized, big, and therefore evil: big isn't necessarily bad. Properly regulated, a huge nuclear plant can provide inexpensive power to millions far more efficiently than many small ones, or thousands of turbines, coal-fired power stations, and natural gas generators. Furthermore, there's no particular reason nuclear stations need to be private per se: consider the Tennessee Valley Authority model.
If nuclear power is so great, why does it take two decades to build one, and why does the government have to subsidize the insurance?In terms of physical build time, it only takes a few years to erect a power plant. The delays come from hysterical opponents using every possible legal avenue to block new nuclear plants. The complaints have no basis in fact, but the courts have to hear them just the same. Often, legal delays are so severe that projects are abandoned altogether (which is, of course, what op
Or we could use the technology that we know works instead of investing in your ideas that have no existing economic infrastructure or history of successful deployment.
Seriously, build batteries? That's your bright idea? Why don't you stop and think about the environmental impact of building enough batteries to store millions of megawatt hours worth of electricty. Even if we invent a better battery chemistry that results in a massive increase of energy density there's no way that will scale in an environmentally friendly manner.
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, 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.
It goes something like this:
In reality, X produces far less overall pollution than Y.
I've seen this argument used to oppose:
All of these are great technologies. If we're ever to make any progress, we have to learn to think past the environmentalist's fallacy.
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*
If nukes are not economically feasible, why does France get ~80% of their power from them?
Because they made a policy decision to do so based on their particular economic situation and resources. I give them kudos for doing it but like any policy decision it has it's upside and downside. France has been trying to privatize their energy sector recently but the primary energy company EDF is still 70% owned by the French government. Were it private to the degree the US energy sector is, the liability costs would be more difficult to justify.
Countries have to use what they have. The US, Russia and China are INCREDIBLY rich in coal deposits. The US is to coal what Saudi Arabia is to oil. The US has about 27% of the known deposits. This makes energy derived from coal cheap in the US compared to France which has virtually no coal of its own. Hence US policy is going to favor coal more than French policy and nuclear in the US becomes less attractive thanks to the economies of scale coal has achieved in the US.
There are actually quite a few successful deployments of power-storing technology -- ones that aren't even batteries. After all, batteries are really only useful for certain applications. Capacitors are nice, but not always appropriate. On the other hand, expending unused power on a reversible, bulk physical process -- like pumping water from a low-altitude body of water to a higher-altitude one -- and then generating power from the reverse process is fairly straightforward.
I partially agree with you. 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), I expect him to do exactly what every president since carter has (including Reagan and both Bush's) and utterly ignore it as an option.
Photovoltaic solar is currently and will likely remain a niche market due to cost to manufacture and rareness of materials (rare earth metals, etc) for the higher performing panels.
Solar thermal is generally much better than PV for large scale energy production, as it uses proven technology, and does not require batteries to produce power at night or for a few days of reduced light (the thermal mass of molten salts can keep the boilers going for some time, depending on the design and insulation of course).
Nuclear plants have an advantage over solar thermal in that they are largely impervious to hazardous weather and use much less space for a given amount of power, particularly in more northern or overcast areas.
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.
If I were President, I'd tax the crap out of imported oil, and open up Anwar and California. You might not like everything about it, but sitting complaining about EVERY SOLUTION presented is NOT an option any longer.
ANWR is just a drop in the bucket. It's so not-a-solution to foreign oil that it makes no sense to damage that ecosystem just to immeasurably affect our situation. In fact I'd much rather save that drop until a single drop would affect our situation because we're gagging for any fuel at all, a 'who cares about environmental concerns if we can't deliver groceries' situation. Heaven forbid it comes to that. But even worse is burning up our own reserves, and then having to come begging to the foreign powers we were trying to be free from.
Treating ANWR as a "solution" for today's problems only makes such a situation more likely. We need not-oil to be the solution. All the not-oil solutions you proposed are fine, great even (cept hydro simply because nearly all the best locations are already tapped, so the opportunity here is much less). But more drilling isn't the answer, because we can't drill enough to free ourselves of foreign oil. The only way to end our addiction to foreign oil is to end our addiction to oil.
The enemies of Democracy are
Let's take a look at ANWR...
Oil reserves are estimated at 5 to 10 billion barrels of oil, with the number of those barrels that are economically feasible to extract rising and falling in line with the price of a barrel.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-0028-01/fs-0028-01.htm
Now let's take a look at our oil consumption...
We are the leading consumer of oil in the world, with a consumption rate of around 20 million barrels a day.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html
Hypothetically speaking, if all 10 billion barrels are extracted in ANWR, this gives us 500 days worth of oil. This is not something that will make a bit of difference to our reliance on foreign oil reserves, especially when you consider that it wouldn't be possible to add this oil to the market all at once.
"If I may be allowed to pursue the idea of 'addiction to oil,' I think the nation just reached the point where we sold our wedding ring for one night's fix."
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
My friend, radioactive waste will always be dangerous.
Solar and wind are still underexploited resources in this country. Combine them with better use of the energy we currently make and we will be energy independent and cleaner.
Installation of residential solar generation is ideal. It places the generation at the place of its consumption. And the use of geothermal heat-exchange heating and cooling should be mandatory.
Best regards.
If you don't like the two wars, then let us drill here, drill now
The problem is you're just delaying the inevitable - Oil is a finite resource. Sure, you could drill up Alaska like swiss cheese, but what does it buy you? Another 20 years? We need to move to renewables.
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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