Slashdot Mirror
Economy Puts US Nuclear Reactors Back In Doubt
eldavojohn writes "Remember those 30 new nuclear reactors the US was slated to build? Those plans have been halted. A few years ago, it seemed like a really good idea to build a bunch of nuclear reactors. The environmental impacts of other energy production methods were becoming well known and the economy was tanking. Well, natural gas is now much cheaper, and as a result it looks like building a single nuclear reactor in Maryland is such a risky venture that Constellation can't reach an agreement with the federal government for the loans it needs to build that reactor. The government wants Constellation to sign an agreement with a local energy provider to ensure they'll recoup at least some of the money on the loan, but Constellation doesn't like the terms. So, the first of those thirty reactors has officially stalled, with no resolution in sight. It looks like it'd take an economic meltdown to trigger nuclear reactor production in the US."
So in another words we only have to wait a few months for the project to resume.
Reactors are always going to be expensive. At some point the cost will make the power generated by the plant to be not profitable enough to sustain the operation - and maintenance - of the plant. This isn't all that surprising al all. If other sources of power can be built less, and produce power for less, then reactors are going to sit and wait their turn again. Unfortunately for the nuclear industry the approval process takes longer than the economic swings that make their product desirable.
Umm...
Wasn't sustainable energy supposed to be the really expensive one? Wasn't nuclear supposed to save us while the real sustainable energy is being developed?
It's funny how the costs of nuclear energy are structurally underestimated, while sustainable energy (wind/solar) continuously has to fight the image of being expensive.
It says enough that all 28 business plans for nuclear reactors are halted, partially because a regulatory system for greenhouse gases (the "cap and trade" system) was not put into effect.
So... public perception in summary:
- sustainable energy: requires too much subsidies, too expensive
- nuclear energy: financially more interesting, needs no subsidies
Reality:
- sustainable energy: growing market, although expensive
- nuclear energy: market stagnation, too expensive
Back when nuclear reactors were falling out of fashion I ran into a study that showed a huge percentage of the cost of a nuclear plant in the US was the legal fees for all the government submissions and approvals. The number that sticks in my head was 90% but I hope this was wrong. I suspect what ever it was it is probably worse now due to the lingering induced paranoia about anything 'nuclear'. And the approval process for any project going through the entrails of government is probably vast. Remembering the Manhatten project, Hoover Dam and the Transcontinental Railway as examples of huge projects that were at the edge of capability (and affordability) and yet were done in a period of a few years. And yet building a nuclear plant takes decades... I think we have just lost our will to survive.
Everyone else manages to take a loan and roll it over. Sure there's a risk interest rates go up, but if you think that's the case then those bank rates aren't "crippling" they are just factoring that in.
If you need a government guarantee on your loan in order to afford it then whatever you are doing isn't viable. Whether it's building a nuclear reactor, buying a house, or going to college.
Only about 10% of the bailout money actually went to building things America needs rather than maintaining the illusion of prosperity in a number of states.
Imagine if the federal government had spent all $700B on infrastructure development. That would probably have put a few hundred thousand people back to work temporarily and gotten us at least the majority of those 30 nuclear reactors funded fully.
The federal government could easily then assign ownership of the loans to a corporation modeled on the Resolution Trust Corporation which was the federal corporation that liquidated the assets of the S&Ls.
I doubt it. Any project can be made arbitrarily expensive by political maneuvering, and selling a township or even a state on "Hey, we've got a brand new type of nuclear fission reactor we'd like to try out in your area" suffers from serious NIMBY effects, and thus politicians will try to be seen opposing it.
E pluribus unum
Yes of course, unproven reactor designs will certainly be cheaper!
I seriously doubt that westinghouse has anything to do with Thorium based reactors not being on the short list despite their many benefits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Key_benefits).
I would say it has far more to do with the lack of ability to produce weapons with their byproducts. The US would prefer to get a little something extra out of the deal.
Not going to happen in the US. Licensing costs are too expensive to justify anything but the 1600 MWe behemoths using standard fuel cycles with proven technology.
I don't know how many lobbyists Westinghouse has, but I do have an idea of how many engineers they have working to satisfy the NRC's licensing requirements for their own designs. Likewise with Mitsubishi and General Electric.
Everyone else manages to take a loan and roll it over.
Not reactor operators. Their income is controlled 100% by the govt. Not remotely a free market. Probably appropriate for that kind of technology.
If you need a government guarantee on your loan in order to afford it then whatever you are doing isn't viable. Whether it's building a nuclear reactor, buying a house, or going to college.
Ah but only a nuke has its revenue controlled 100% by the govt, both by regulation, enviroloonie protest suits, and monopoly public utilities commission defining what they charge.
A bit unfair to make the bank liable for the NRC's and PUC's decisions.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
They have had that in Victoria, Australia for about a year now. I haven't checked the other states.
In Victoria, the scheme is useless. While the power companies must offer a standard feed-in tariff for excess power, they are entitled to have different packages or terms and conditions than their usual accounts. In practice, that means that they charge more for the power consumed to offset what they pay back to the household. You don't go solar to save money in this country.
You can see why there is a trend towards voting for the Greens.
The problems with your theory:
#1 - Nuclear reactor production is put under more government scrutiny than any other energy production method. Not that it isn't justifiable in large degree, just that it increases the costs of running the reactor.
#2 - The US has no fuel recycling program. If we DID have a responsible fuel recycling program, we wouldn't have to worry about the whiny idiots going "but it produces nuclear waste", nor would we be having to dig up ore for fuel - reprocessed, recycled fuel can be extracted from "spent waste" over and over again, which would take care of 95% or greater of our current "nuclear waste" in storage.
#3 - Energy still isn't deregulated on the east coast. The government controls the pricing, therefore it makes sense that the people sticking their money out to build the reactor would want to have some guarantee in writing that the government isn't going to try to force them to operate at a loss.
The larger problem is that the idiot fringe currently in control of the Democrat Party - as evidenced by the current administration's reaction to basically everything energy-related - are a bunch of total morons who are so kooky that even the co-founder of Greenpeace recognized them for the wack-jobs that they are.
Of course, there are a number of other things that "could" be done on the energy conservation front. The US could outlaw residential air-conditioning/heating systems that don't incorporate a closed-loop ground heat pump, and require any legacy systems to be switched over at time of replacement. They could pass a national law protecting the right of all homeowners to implement "greywater" systems, rain cisterns, and solar collectors. They could focus in on outdated, inefficient "freeway flyer" bus routes and replace them all with electric train systems.
But then again, we live in a time when municipalities claim they are working for "safety" and put up red-light cameras and then shorten the yellow timing to get more tickets, despite every study out there showing that if you want to reduce accidents, lengthening the yellow time does much, much more than putting up a fucking camera. So I doubt the people would have any trust in their government that any of the other things I suggested earlier were done with the right motives...
The whole point of LEADERSHIP is not to invest in alternative energy when other energy sources are prohibitively expensive (how quickly we forget $150/bbl oil), but to shape the future so that when energy costs increase again the infrastructure is already in place.
I am disappointed that the US government believes that spending trillions of dollars to create inefficient, artificial jobs is more worthwhile than investing in the future of the country in terms of solid infrastructure. Those nuclear plants will not be cheaper to design and build in 20 years.
In the 1930's FDR went about building the interstate system, completing the Hoover Dam (which provided energy to California, Arizona and Nevada), the Tennessee Valley Authority which provided power to the South-East. This cheap power, as well as the roadways which permitted goods to be moved across the country cheaply, heralded new economic growth.
Today's government instead would have scrapped these types of projects in favor of repainting federal buildings in Washington, hiring analysts to make sure that homes didn't get foreclosed, while at the same time forking over more money to the banks.
While nuclear power may be expensive, peak oil is coming and there's no way to stop it. China continues to grow, and India will soon start demanding its share as well. There are not enough straws in the oil milk-shake, and putting more straws in only means that the shake will be finished a lot faster. When oil prices begin to rise again it will only be a matter of a few short months before we hit $150/bbl. In the meantime other "alternative energy" types (wind/solar) continue to be far, far less efficient than nuclear power.
But hey, we were warned.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Just because some politicians and monopolists spin something as "deregulation" doesn't mean that they actually did any such thing.
True deregulation means that there is no artificial barriers to entry. Without that "deregulation" is simply a bailout of a protected monopoly.
Price-Anderson to date has cost US taxpayers $0.00.
The US has never had a containment structure breech. In fact it has never had any reactor pressure vessel burst thus that is 2 barriers which would both have to be defeated to have a release like Chernobyl.
There are numerous factors that make an accident on the scope and scale of Chernobyl impossible in the US. This isn't to say some future US reactor couldn't have a core event but it would be more limited in scope.
Western reactors are all negative void coefficient designs. As the reactor heats up and water turns into steam this lowers the moderating effect of the water and slows down fission rate. Chernobyl was positive void design. As water flashed into steam the graphite in reactor continued to moderate the reactor. The fission rate (and thus heat) continued to increase creating a virtuous cycle.
Western reactors don't use graphite in the core (graphite burns when exposed to oxygen at reactor temperatures) this created an effective dispersal mechanism at Chernobyl for radioactive material.
Western reactors have containment dome. Once the core was breeched at chernobyl there was no barrier to radioactive dispersal.
Western reactors have redundant passive safety features. Chernobyl had safety systems but over the years many had been bypassed and jury rigged.
You'll see that an accident every 40 years comes to about $0.08/kWh.You'll see that an accident every 40 years comes to about $0.08/kWh.
Correction a Chernobyl sized accident every 40 years would cost $0.08 (I'll trust your math) however in the western world depsite hundreds of operating reactors (with combined operate life in millions of hours) that has never happened.
A smaller more contained accident (like say 3 mile island) every 50-100 years would be a rounding error on the cost of energy.
Nothing like the utterly staggering and completely unsustainable 1.25 cents per kWh given to sustainable energy.
I'm not being facetious, I've watched a few documentaries where the scientists guessed we'd have viable fusion technology in 10 years or so.
I remember when scientists said fission would produce power to cheap to meter. The moral is that scientists are human and not infallible.
Seriously, look at the size and complexity of any experimental fusion reactors and they haven't even reached breakeven yet, nevermind produced a net power output. Compare that with commercial fission power plants which many people believe are too expensive to build now.
For a fun comparison, compare any experimental fusion reactor with the first artifical nuclear fission reactor.
Having said all that, I have my fingers crossed for Dr. Bussard's Polywell reactor project.
Don't forget all the negative subsidies that greatly add to the cost of getting one of these plants built.
Because nuclear reactor technology stopped advancing in 1950 and there's no reason we'd want to use anything more advanced that's been invented since then.
FTFY
FTFY, again
One very small scale device that wasn't connected to any generation equipment and ran for only 5 years? That counts as "almost completely unproven" to me.
If that's your only criterion, the sodium fast breeder and RBMK reactors would have been declared complete successes decades ago.
"natural gas is now much cheaper" cheap does not mean better!! http://gaslandthemovie.com/
It looks like it'd take an economic meltdown to trigger nuclear reactor production in the US.
From where I sit (somewhere *outside the US of A*) that does not seem entirely unlikely in the reasonably forseeable future.
Seriously folks - how long, hard, and deeply to you need to fuxor your economy before *even the retarded aussie dollar* is starting to look good? (clue: you've done enough, you can stop now)
Or are you claiming that any economy that outdoes Zimbabwe is "in good shape".
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
But then again, we live in a time when municipalities claim they are working for "safety" and put up red-light cameras and then shorten the yellow timing to get more tickets
Sometimes I wonder how the people making these decisions can sleep at night. How can someone justify reducing the yellow light time, thereby increasing the likelyhood of an accident, all in the name of more revenue? It boggles the mind.