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The Aging of Our Nuclear Power Plants Is Not So Graceful
Lasrick writes "This is a very thoughtful article on nuclear power plant aging: how operators use early retirement of plants to extract concessions from rate-payers and a discussion on how California's 'forward-looking planning process' has probably mitigated disruption from the closing of San Onofre."
The aging of our reactors doesn't compare to T Hunter. Done.
It's going to be pretty ugly in a couple decades. It would be nice if people could be rational and let us build newer reactors.
At least the kind of jumbled-up ad hoc reactors Americans like to build. What's going on with space-based solar power?
Mostly random stuff.
That we need clean, renewable energy solutions. Shut down all the nuclear and coal plants and subsidize solar and wind energy, and by the end of this century we will have more than met our energy needs.
... California's 'forward-looking planning process' has probably mitigated disruption ...
This can't be right. California always seeks to maximize disruption.
ahh yes, san onofre. "everywhere I look, something reminds me of her."
The last time I commented to a post on this subject I saw my karma go from excellent to good because of rabid pro nuke folks modding down anything that asked questions of real long term cost and un subsidized cost of nuclear power per G/Watt versus wind or solar actual costs.
It would be nice to have a real discussion about this with citations to factual numbers, but there seems to be a foaming at the mouth "nuclear power is the only answer" bunch here that wat to obfuscate real data.
Even asking questions about factual discussion of long term nuclear power ACTUAL cost will prolly cost me Karma.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Quoth TFA:
It is unrealistic to assume that complex new technologies will have a significantly better experience.
I might be wrong, but I was of the understanding that the 1970's generation of nuclear reactors were mostly based on designs proven a decade or more earlier. Is the article suggesting that in fifty years there has been little progress in making them more economical to build and run? This seems hard to believe.
Nuclear power, for good or ill, strikes me as one of the few ways to lever ourselves out of the hole we dug mining fossil fuels. It boggles the mind that in Europe despite having the potential for clean, cheap and abundent energy in nuclear power we're still building fucking gas fired power stations.
Instead, what is needed is for us to produce new reactors such as thorium or the IFR, so that these can replace what is on-site and then burn the 'spent' fuel that is there. By doing this, we can cut our 70,000 tonnes of waste down to 5,000 tonnes of waste, while making a tidy profit and preventing any future accident.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What I find utterly baffling is that research in this field appears to be dead in the USA, Europe and Japan. We seem to be content to watch China, India and a few others design and build the next generation of nuclear reactors. Then we will have the privilege of spending money to decommission our own hopelessly obsolete reactors. We will pay higher rates as the availability and diversity of power sources is reduced. We will endure unreliable swings and reduction of supply. We will pay for electricity generated by the new guys on the block. We will watch as yet more industry moves where there is cheap, reliable power.
When we've had enough of all that, we'll spend money to license their designs since we made a point of making "intellectual property" central to our international agreements. Those countries will be more than happy to throw our IP regime regime right back in our collective face.
The NIMBYs, the willfully ignorant, and a few well-meaning critics have "won" in the West, and so thoroughly that even building research reactors has become impossible. The above will be their "prize".
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
The United States built a lot of nuclear power plants in the 60s and 70s, before nuclear power plant designs matured. Fortunately, the nuclear construction stopped. France picked up the torch, starting with a GE reactor, made dozens of identical nuclear reactors. They cooperated with Germany, and designed the EPR reactor in the 90s. The EPR is the culmination of several decades of light water nuclear research and design. The EPR has some bugs, that will be fixed. Then, we should build lots of EPRs.
There are still lots of small, unique, old nuclear power plants in America that will be retiring soon.
Please don't talk about "early" retirement like it's bad to retire nuclear plants too early. The real problem in the world is that they are not being retired at all long past their originally intended lifetime. These power plants are literally blowing up. Every first world nuclear disaster involves an old power plant that should have been retired a long time ago. This is a serious problem caused by people thinking that they can just eke a little more out of these reactors instead of spending the huge amounts it takes to build new ones. So please, don't tell the world that we should be wary of "early" retirement like there are even any reactors that young anymore.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Don't post (non-anonymously). Instead, mod.
Slashdot is a giant pro nuke circle jerk at this point. You standing in the middle and posting ideas that might rain on their circle jerk parade is just going to invite blue-ball wrath. Let them jerk each other off and then mod them accordingly. Eventually, things will even out or they will realize that circle jerking is not going to change the basic economics that are actually playing out here. At least, one can hope . . .
1.21GW-- That's a Back to the Future reference.
If it's hot outside, you won't be able to use your air conditioner because environmentalists have opposed every single method of electrical power generation. Eventually, we will be all shivering naked in caves because burning wood will violate the EPA's particulate emissions standards.
"early retirement of plants to extract concessions" -- leverage and coercion right there.
Number 3 will would really fuck up the housing market. An energy efficiency assessment will add several thousand dollars to the cost of selling ahome. Second, inflation is outpacing wage growth. There will no longer be a middle class, only the very rich and those making less than 35K per year. Most working class people can no longer afford any major renovations to their homes. Those days aren't coming back either. To make a home energy efficient to the green's standards would mean basically tearing it almost completely down and building it back up again. Personally, I think the end goal of environmentalists is to make single family homes completely affordable for all, but the elite. The rest get to live in Khrushchyovka style communal housing controlled by the government.
I don't understand this story. What does it have to do with Edward Snowden?
And yet you come here to whine that no one is listening and didn't even have the smarts to post AC. That kind of shit is why you get downmodded.
I have always been greatly disturbed that many of our nuclear reactors were built by General Electric, but they've assured us that they did not engineer them with their usual tight life-cycle controls.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
It's inevitable now. Western civilization is facing its collapse. The east is hungry for success and is building their economic empires, while the west is fat, complacent, lazy and is overwhelmed with guilt and self pity for its own past success and is willing to let its own economies and infrastructure crumble from decay. Building things in the west is impossible now that you have to you navigate the millions of pages of government regulations and consult multiple levels of government to see if you are actually allowed to do what you intend to do. Assuming you clear all those hurdles, then you have to contend with ideologues with deep pockets and lawyers who will then go to court and block you. Even if you build, the the ideologues and the government may make it all illegal or too costly tomorrow. It's not just nuclear reactors, its all industry.
No, it's more like an auction where you can program your appliances to stop bidding on electricity when the price gets too high. Allowing the price to fluctuate in response to demand gives people a greater opportunity to economize than exists with flat rates. If the fall of communism is any indication, the "one price fits all" model just doesn't work very well in the real world.
And the best parts of smart meters!
First, the utility can program them for differential rates, so if you are being antisocial to the grid by installing solar at your house, they can pay you less for the electricity you are generating than they charge you for the electricity you are consuming, which is something that's not possible without a smart meter!
Second (and this is the great part!), they can charge you less for electricity when you aren't there during the day to use it, and more, when you are home at night, and have no choice but to use it, since even with huge storage capacity, there's no way you are going to be able to recharge your car while you are asleep after lighting up your house and appliances after getting home from work, because, hey! The sun isn't out at night!
Good thing it's illegal for them to force you to install a smart meter in most places in the bay area...
You know, it could be that the author is somewhat biased... The entire article is about problems with the design of large nuclear plants-- hard to repair and expensive to build, it says-- so the obvious conclusion would be to build smaller, more flexible designs, right? But just to guard against Wrong Think it closes with this note:
And:
I might point out that since in fact, the safety of the nuclear industry is exlemplary by any reasonable standard -- like deaths/kilowatt -- maybe one should also be skeptical about these accusations of broken promises?
Niggard : (noun) an excessively parsimonious, miserly, or stingy person. See here
Christianity is 2000 years old. Nuclear power's maintenance plan is 100,000 years for each plant. Let that sink in. Think long and hard. For a moment, try to picture something bigger than you, bigger than your country, bigger than your religion, bigger than your physiology, bigger than your language, bigger than your species as you know it. Before humans existed. Think the age of *stars*. Take a slice of it and divide. That's nuclear power. Nuclear power cannot be harnessed.
Since the 50's we have neglected industrial consequence. This naivety is destructive.
Nevermind. It's not even worth typing. I retract my statements; and you can shove them up the hole of your civilization. In 5 years, you'll learn your lesson the hard way. Hell, mutants are already growing in Japan.
1) the reason for the cost of nuclear plant is because they are NOT spared any externalities. They have to forsee everything from insurance to waste to removing the plant.
Coal for example DOES NOT have to take into account externalities and pollute more radioactively the environment than a nuclear plant does. All fossile fuel plant do not take into account AGW and similar pollution externalities or CO2 production. It is a form of subsidy that is perverting the real cost estimate AND people are more ready to accept a plant (coal) which WILL give them cancer (read the estimate worldwide on number of cancer from coal power generation!) but refuse nuclear plant which will not kill as many people but are fightening.
2) in the USA there is this polituic of NAMING waste stuff which are not waste and could be reused in and recycled, but out of proliferation profile is buried. In reality long term "waste" are very weakly radioactive, you can litteraly touch U235, as long as you wash properly afterward as U235 is *toxic* more than radioactive. The very highly radioactive stuff, is actually the one with a very short half life. Cs, I, etc... And those are NOT long term concern.
3) Read up Jevons Partadox. empirical law showing that improving efficiency paradoxically increase the usage of a resource, RATHER than conserve it. If it applies here as it did for other domain, then improving efficiency WILL NOT lower the energy need.
There is barely any 14C in coal, less than in normal biological matter or CO2 in atmosphere by two order of magnitude. So 14C is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem with coal are the other isotope like uranium or thorium.
Given the 50 year design lifetime of a hydro installation, the amount of methane and CO2 released by sinking that much organic material exceeds the greenhouse affect of the equivalent coal plants. And TFA is a complete lie. When they say "early retirement", they mean "early retirement of the third extension of the operating license." Similarly, GP lies when they say it's "economic, not NIMBY", since the overwhelming cost of nuclear plants is not construction, but environmental compliance and court fees. We have, and through arrogant stupidity of the such "scientists" as the author, will continue to kill more people with coal and gas power than we would have with the predicted rate of mishaps from nuclear power for our baseload.
Everything I see reminds me of her.
dunno. but the transmission system itself needs a certain amount of constant power to stay operational or energized (weeeh star trek).
this is of course because there is resistance (and what not). so, not connecting anything at all, it still needs an amount of energy(?) to keep
it "alive".
my personal opinion is that it's COMPLETELY crazy to use non-renewable energy sources for this basic energizing requirement.
consider a stream of water, like a big river or even a small one that constantly represents a huge moving mass. not using this
just to keep the grid in a energized state is again CRAZY.
furthermore electricity is something dynamic. it needs constant movement (of somehowly created magnetic fields and kinetic input) to
be alive.
so definitely needs that base "carrier frequency" (basic energizing input with no load) coming from returnables (lol! i wanted to write "renewables", but returnables sounds good too!)
solar is prolly not reliable enough, but rivers are and so is tidal.
The epitome of crazy ideas is to NOT build (fresh water dams) and just let it turn salty (and non drinkable) in the ocean. everybody against dam construction should be sent to a beach without a fresh water source and having them stare at the freaking beautiful huge undrinkable salt puddle.
or even better tie them to a raft out on the ocean and let 'em stare at all the undrinkable water!
If the U.S shutdown every nuclear plant right now, there would NOT be enough power in the U.S. We would become like Venezuela with power outages on a daily basis.
Anti nuke people are ignorant and need to STFU, before they ruin it for the rest of us.
But you have to give our AC credit. His reponse was spectacularly funny in a whooshy kind of way.
These are not nuclear technology problems, they are toxic politics and even more toxic business practices.
The actual technical issue is failed replacement steam generators, in both cases due to management gambling on cheaping out and losing. Somehow though, it's 'impossible' to replace the defective steam generators even though they were already replaced once?!? I guess we';re getting stupid fast if we already forgot how.
Put the owners on the hook for it (rather than the ratepayers) and watch how fast they come up with a solution that gets the plants safely back online.
You're a moron.
What is your source for the wind gust behavior? (I mean this non-confrontationally, but my geeky lack of social skills betrays my intentions). I am an industry that occassionally intersects with wind power generation, and my understanding is that gust are universally bad - they want steady and reliable. Gust mean problems, period. If you have a source, it helps me learn professionally. I've been taught that they can't operate in gusty conditions, bad for the machinery as well as the grid.
someone on slashdot understanding peak shaving, yay!
I for one would be more content if universities were in charge of nuclear power plants instead of for profit industry. This would make all the difference in the world. For profit can and does cut corners, bend rules, and push the boundaries towards the aims of making profit. Universities not so much. I'm not against nuclear power, but I totally understand the environmentalists concern for safety.
Nuke plants are steam-based. Steam turbines have long startup and shutdown times as a consequence of the heat soaking requirements. The demands of rapidly changing the heat of different parts of the plant are very damaging. I only really know a little about the turbines themselves - the machines are so large and the steam so hot that you get differential expansion on the parts of the machine if you do not follow a very specific (and slow) regimen during startup. Heat to this temperature, this speed, soak for 3hrs, move to the next heat/speed, soak for hours, repeat 4 or 5 times to get to running speed where you can generate electricity. Other parts of the generation stream (the boilers, piping, heat exchangers, water treatment, water recovery, etc. all have demanding startup requirements of their own.
If you don't follow the plan, the rotor/blade-rotating part of the machine may thermally expand into the stationary casing (that isn't absorbing heat as fast, and consequently not expanding as fast). I've heard stories of machine trains where the expansion is measured in inches. If the innards grow an inch, but the case doesn't, well, it's bad. You will not be generating electricity today.
Power demand, for the curious.
http://www.caiso.com/SystemStatus.html
>>1. The reason reactors are not being built has to do with the cost -- they're not cost-effective for utilities unless they get huge subsidies.
---
Thank you for that brilliant observation.
I had forgotten how economically viable all those solar and wind farms are.
For some reason I thought they were based on huge subsidies.
No brain, no pain.
Consider New England (ISO-NE) requirements:
peak summer: ~27,000 MW
trough autumn: 10,000 MW
Less than half of the POWER demand is baseload. More than half of the ENERGY is baseload. New England doesn't have the air con that most parts of tUSA has, both because of climate and age of buildings. The extremes between peak and trough are even greater in other parts of tUSA.
Furthermore, in tUSA right now, a combined cycle natural gas plant has CHEAPER variable operating cost than many coal plants, and many vertically integrated utilities are building CCCTs to serve with capacity factors in excess of 70%. Not only are coal plants being retired because their costs to retrofit to modern safety and emissions standards are prohibitive, but the low cost of natural gas has pushed coal out of baseload into mid-range, and the economics aren't there to keep them running. This is, in many ways, the same reason why nuclear isn't attractive financially. The combination of $0 operating cost for wind and low operating cost for CCCTs are driving down the locational marginal prices (LMPs), which means that the electricity being sold by the nuclear and coal plants isn't generating enough revenue to justify the capital costs of building or even maintaining the plants.
Finally, observe that because building new coal or nuclear isn't economically efficient in tUSA in 2013, we're seeing a combination of (a) new natural gas, (b) new wind and solar, and (c) more/better/different use of storage. The end result is that "baseload" is no longer a positive -- it's a codeword which means "inflexible to change output levels, start quickly, stop quickly, be built quickly, or be built right-sized. Wind is inflexible but has low capital and operating costs, low environmental footprint, and can be scaled. Gas is flexible with relatively low capital and operating costs. Solar is expensive but well suited because it tends to generate during the highest demand hours. Storage is relatively expensive, but offers the ability to integrate renewables and provide important ancillary services. Nuclear has low operating costs, but tremendous financial risk because it takes so long to pay the thing off, and there's no guarantee that it will operate long enough to recover its costs. Unless we drive down the capital costs of nuclear substantially, there's just no way it can be a better investment than natural gas plus wind in a hydrofracking, no-price-on-carbon American system.
Note that this is an opinion not backed up by references. It smells like B.S., and I'm not talking Bank Speak.
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
Steam... I have to say once I learned the basics of Nuclear reactors I felt a little depressed.
I thought they were these cool things, like the equivalent of Solar Panels arranged in a sphere to absorb the radiation that was being emitted. Or some other really cool thing converting radiation -> electricity.
Instead, they are glorified steam engines only using hot radioactive rods instead of coal.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not belittling how complicated and advanced these reactors are. I'm just saying... it was like figuring out a magic trick as a young child... it sad.
As soon as you start using political campaign contributions from existing power brokers to design the system, you've left sound engineering and real science behind. I have just described corn ethanol schemes in a nutshell.
Solar + Wind + Hydro would have worked back when Jimmy the Peanut wanted to do it, but Reagan-style governments (such as we have today) have wasted precious time and irreplaceable resources to the point where it's hard to imagine getting the infrastructure up in time to decommission the aging fission plants before they fail. The numbers are difficult - look how many wind turbines in remote windy areas you need to replace even one BWR sitting right next to a major population center. I'm all in favor of trying, but then I'm all in favor of pursuing LENR, too - I just wouldn't bet the entire bank on it.
As for batteries, honestly energy storage is a solved problem, despite Exide's suppression of the nickel-iron battery (happily, once again available due to Edison's patents expiring) and Chevron's purchase and suppression of many of Ovinshky's key NiMH patents. If you don't like batteries you can always run a turbine backwards and pump water uphill; it's been done for over a hundred years now and it works. It's an interesting subject, yes, and important, but I don't think we need fuss over the details of energy storage in discussions about scheduled-to-fail nuclear plants.
Your remark about the land area required for agriculture based energy production is very relevant, though; even more so if you live in England - there just isn't room in the UK to do the job without major technology advances. I imagine many other nations have this problem as well. However, in the USA we already pay farmers tax dollars not to produce food; we have vast croplands that are simply not used, and even vaster areas that are not suitable for growing food which could be used for algae tank biogas and biodiesel production at less tax investment cost than the current expenditures on foreign military adventuring and various forms of corporate welfare.
Fundamentally, US taxpayers really can't lose by making more investments in all forms of distributed sustainable energy production. However, the tax allocations are controlled by people who can lose - and lose big - if energy production stops being a militarized, government protected and insured racket like nuclear fission plants are, and becomes a widely distributed, reliable and sustainable system employing huge numbers of people profitably at local levels.
While I wasn't a huge fan of the deal, Canada sold its nationalized nuclear reactor program CANDU to a corporation.
For peanuts (15$Million), royalty rights (so I guess if the manage to turn a profit we get some return), but did retain the IP.
So technically the IP is still Canadian. However now that a corporation has it, I am not sure how much pure R&D is going to be done now generating IP as I am sure it will be refocused to simply building more less current designs.
CANDU has build much more abroad than actually in Canada to begin with, likely now with a focus on China and India (who has built a bunch of them already in the past).