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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)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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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