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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."
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.
There is another important thing to consider which is demand. Often demand is thought of as inflexible and that we must simply supply what people choose to use.
There is huge potential for power savings in efficiency. Take cooling costs, for example. Air conditioning is a huge part of electric demand. This cost could be greatly reduced in a number of ways:
1) Appliance efficiency standards. A more efficient air conditioner doesn't cost the owner much more up front and saves a bundle in the long run.
2) Insulation standards for new construction. (Its a whole lot cheaper to put it there before the walls are up.)
3) Energy use labeling for home sales. Imagine if the seller were required to provide an energy use estimate. Imagine if mortgage companies required these as part of the application process to see what you could afford. Now owners would be have a stronger incentive to improve the efficiency of their homes, even if they were not sure how long they would stay. Imagine if renters were required to receive the same information.
4) A lighter colored roof. Imagine how many fewer power plants would be required if buildings in warm climates had roofs that reflected more sunlight.
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.
Some of the old reactors are developing chinks due to the constant nips of the operating machinery. Sometime the equipment is hosed down so that they are soaking, with wet backs. Of course the owners don't want to put money into maintenance because most of them are quite greedy and niggardly.
I sit here, wearing my coon skin hat and drinking limey flavoured beverages as a froggie would go through water.
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.
1.21GW-- That's a Back to the Future reference.
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
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.