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."

Comments

NIMBY

[fredgiblet]

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.

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

The failure to build new reactors is primarily driven by economics. Nuclear reactors require huge capital investment and take a long time to build. They also take a long time to turn on and off, so make an inflexible source of supply that integrates poorly with more variable sources, such as wind and solar. Natural gas, on the other hand, has a comparatively much lower capital investment and time to build for the same generation capacity. The low price of natural gas also makes it extremely competitive with other power sources. Natural gas turbines can also come to full power from a dead stop in 20 minutes and partial power sooner than that, allowing it it integrate gracefully in a world with variable power demand and supply.

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

2. Where are you going to put the nuclear waste? No, seriously, stop joking around: where are you *really* going to put the waste? This has been well-studied, and there's no good answer.

3. Improving efficiency is faster and more-effective than increasing output in the near term. Sure, we do need increased capacity, but instead of burning money in the form of subsidies lavished on for-profit energy companies, let's commit real public expenditure on real efficiency initiatives.

Re:NIMBY

[Zynder]

Oh well please, AC, enlighten us with how exactly you propose we generate and supply the 1.21 GW of power that each person will eventually need. Our society craves more power (of all kinds!) and capitalism flourishes when each participant is continuously consuming more and more. You will not get us, as a modern society with all of our toys, to take a step back in time and do without. It just won't happen. GP is correct, we have several technologies, such as pebble bed reactors, that are not the unsafe designs of the 50s and 60s. But when you try to tell someone that, all they can think of is Chernobyl and Fukushima. Both were outdated and should have been scrapped but due to irrational fear, were allowed to keep running past thier expiration date.

Re:NIMBY

[KiloByte]

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.

Like, say, burning coal and oil? Let's see what the price of those would be if you had to store the waste.

2. Where are you going to put the nuclear waste?

Burning coal produces a lot more of radioactive dust which is simply put into the air. Almost any solution for (relatively) easy to secure barrels is better to that. Oh, and besides radioactive stuff, you get carbon dioxide, sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides and a laundry list of other pollutants.

So any comparison that is not biased towards combusting carbon-based deposits by many orders of magnitude shows that if we had any shred of rationality we should replace those with nuclear power. Geothermal is better where it's available, wind not really.

Re:NIMBY

[Colonel Korn]

Here in the UK we enjoy almost uninterrupted mains power. No brownouts (a brownout perhaps every eight months which is usually due to maintenance, extreme weather or emergency works), no requirement for external generators nor for a UPS for your desktop PC.

I understand that the power supply in the US is patchy at best, with frequent brownouts. I think you guys really do need a stable source of power. Nuclear is a good way to supply this. Focusing on renewables won't begin to replace this, nor will it give an easily modulatable power supply that reacts to user demand. Sure they take a long time to build, and there's legislation preventing waste processing being done that would wring out more power from the same uranium. So you end up with large waste disposal sites where you wastefully allow spent rods to decay needlessly. That's assuming you still are building old-style reactors. Newer ones have much less waste, more power and frankly are less dangerous.

Gas Power? Coal Power? Great, Cheap to build but pollute like crazy. Not to mention coal burners actually more radioactive than nuclear power. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Solution lots of smallish pebble-bed nuclear reactors to do the heavy lifting, augmented with solar, with the odd gas & coal power stations taking up the slack.

I like a lot of what you say, but your "patchy at best" lead in isn't very convincing. An average American home that hasn't just been through a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake might see 5 minutes without power per year and no brownouts in the occupants' lifetimes. Yes, these things happen, but they're isolated and rare. The brownouts in California about a decade ago, which were the only widespread American brownouts in recent history, were caused by Enron manipulating power markets, not a lack of real power.

Re:NIMBY

[Sique]

You put the nail on the head and are summing up the article just nicely:

But when you try to tell someone that, all they can think of is Chernobyl and Fukushima. Both were outdated and should have been scrapped but due to irrational fear, were allowed to keep running past thier expiration date.

That's exactly what TFA is talking about: when calculating the gain-cost-ratio of any new technologies, you have to always calculate in a) the cost of getting the technology to mature and b) the cost of keeping the technology up-to-date and c) the cost of finally scrapping the technology. Yes, we have several technologies. No, those technologies are not mature (e.g. we have no clue how they will scale, how much fine tuning it will take until they are at their designed power output and for how long they will maintain this output). And we don't know which incidents will happen in the future that force us to retrofit the technologies, and more so, at which point in time it will be cheaper just to scrap the new technologies instead of continous retrofitting.

The experience with those mature technologies like the ones used in the U.S. (which didn't, with the exception of Three Mile Island, have had any large and costly failures) proves so far, that the time frame in which those technologies ran at least at 90% of their capacities were much shorter than expected, and 70% capacity would be a much more realistic assumption.

Re:NIMBY

[john.r.strohm]

With all due respect, you appear to fail to understand the distinction between base load plants and topping plants.

Base load plants supply the huge amount of power that MUST BE THERE 24x7. Topping plants supply the variable amount that is or is not needed depending on seasons, weather, uncharacteristic heat waves, sudden cold snaps, Pink Floyd concert light shows...

MOST of the power demand is base load demand. Heating and cooling don't stop. Water pumping doesn't stop. Hospitals run 24x7. Ditto traffic lights.

For topping plants, there are lots of choices, natural gas being a popular one. For base load plants, there are at the moment exactly three viable choices: hydroelectric, coal, and nuclear (to be precise, negative void coefficient pressurized water reactors). We are maxed out on hydroelectric power: every dammable river in the country has already been dammed. Coal is about the dirtiest power generation technology known to man, as well as one of the most dangerous (Google "black lung disease" someday). That leaves nuclear as Hobson's Choice, if you actually care about environmental and safety issues. (Hint: Of the three, only one emits significant quantities of carbon dioxide.) (For that matter, if coal plants were held to the radiation release limits applied to nuclear plants, it would be impossible to light up a coal plant, because of the radioisotopes in the coal (carbon-14 being the big one) that go straight up the smokestack and into the atmosphere.)

*ANY* base load plant costs a lot of money and takes a long time to build, because, by their very nature, they are BIG.

Finally, observe that wind and solar are utterly unsuitable for base load, because the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun effectively "goes out" for several hours every day.

Re:NIMBY

[Random Destruction]

I have no idea where your 1.2 GW per person figure comes from

Turn in your nerd card.

Re:NIMBY

[CodeBuster]

Nuclear reactors require huge capital investment and take a long time to build.

It's true that the capital costs of nuclear power are high, but in all fairness a substantial part of those costs and the time required to build are caused by anti-nuclear pressure groups and other NIMBYs who drag the process out for decades in courts and through environmental review boards as a delaying tactic to discourage development by artificially running up the cost. Meanwhile the world continues to burn ever more and dirtier fossil fuels to make up for lost nuclear generation capacity in national electric grids.

They also take a long time to turn on and off, so make an inflexible source of supply that integrates poorly with more variable sources

Which is why you don't turn them off and why the electric grid should never be entirely nuclear. Nuclear is for the portion of the demand that needs constant and consistent base load supply. Because the national energy grids never have zero energy demand at any time of day there will always be demand for some amount of base load power and nuclear fits that profile perfectly. The variable power sources, like wind and solar, can contribute as they're able with the remainder of variable demand being handled by natural gas turbines that can be turned on when necessary to fill in supply gaps and shutdown quickly and easily when not needed.

Natural gas, on the other hand, has a comparatively much lower capital investment and time to build for the same generation capacity.

Natural gas is also a valuable transportation, heating and cooking fuel. It's not just power plants that demand natural gas, so it would be unwise in the long run to replace base load nuclear with natural gas. We have many centuries of proven nuclear fuel, but natural gas supplies have waxed and waned over the years along with demand, depletion and development of new supplies. The lifespan of a power plant is measured in decades but nobody can tell you what the price will be for natural gas decades in the future.

The low price of natural gas also makes it extremely competitive with other power sources.

For now, but much of the newly drilled glut of natural gas comes from horizontally drilled and fracked wells in tight shale formations where the long term depletion rates are still poorly understood. We might have centuries of gas left in these formations or they might be depleted in a matter of decades; nobody's sure yet because we don't have enough data on depletion rates and demand is also uncertain. For example, increased use of natural gas in commercial transportation may eventually put upward pressure on natural gas prices as an alternative to diesel in those applications.

Natural gas turbines can also come to full power from a dead stop in 20 minutes and partial power sooner than that, allowing it it integrate gracefully in a world with variable power demand and supply.

Which is why there will always be a role for natural gas in electricity generation. My point was that we shouldn't lean too heavily on any one technology, but rather seek to optimize the grid by tapping into the different strengths of different generation technologies. We need nuclear, solar, wind, natural gas and even niche sources, like geothermal or tidal, where available. The best solution utilizes a mix of all of these technologies, but as long as there are ignorant, biased and uneducated people we will continue to "debate" whether eliminating one or more of these technologies from the mix is a "good idea", as in the case of the "no nukes" crowd.

Re:NIMBY

[CodeBuster]

Citation needed.

Oh please, really? Do you honestly believe that environmentalists don't deliberately delay power plant construction (especially nuclear) in the United States? Give me a break. Also, I said that it was a substantial cost, not the only cost. The problem is legal and economic, so it cannot be solved by a new reactor design because it wouldn't matter what design was proposed to the environmentalists, they'd still be against it. The legal problems require political not technical solutions and the economic problems are largely caused by the legal and political problems. Dragging out engineering projects, in the courts and through political maneuvering, is expensive and that's were the delays deal economic damage. The environmentalists wouldn't use those tactics if they weren't effective.

please explain how the failure of WPPSS in the late 70's and early 80's was the result of this versus economic, technical, and competency factors.

Are you going to tell me that there wasn't a single lawsuit filed or political agitation conducted by environmental groups opposed to a new reactor? I don't believe that the problem is entirely caused by technology or lack of engineering competency.

Then please explain how the new designs will escape this fate. After all, since there must be places which don't have this problem, these new designs must be operating successfully in large numbers. Where are these places?

Of course new designs cannot solve what amounts to a problem of politics. As for where nuclear power is widespread, how about France? I think that there are three basic reasons why France was able to build many reactors, using a modified US design (Westinghouse I think) no less, while things have been more problematic here in the US. First, France has almost no natural deposits of either coal, natural gas or petroleum and few rivers to be dammed so for the French it was pretty much nuclear or nothing. Second, the French have a much greater faith in their scientists and engineers than we do here in the United States. The French scientists and engineers in turn work hard to earn and sustain that trust by doing good work. I cannot recall there ever being a serious nuclear accident in France for example. Finally, it seems that the French legal system doesn't allow for NIMBYs to get in the way of projects that are deemed to be in the national interest whereas anyone with money for the filing fees can cause no end of legal trouble here in the United States.

In any case, it will still take decades for them to come on line in significant numbers at BEST (based on production estimates).

Wah, wah, wah it's too hard and it takes to long to get strated so why even try right? There's a productive attitude. You could use that argument against just about anything worth doing. Indeed, just imagine where we might be as a nation today if we allowed that objection to override all good sense. The difficulty of the task should inform our long term planning, but it shouldn't be taken as a reason to do nothing or not to get started. I could trot out that same argument for why we should do nothing about global warming, why bother to do anything now when the benefits won't be seen for decades, but I suspect that you wouldn't like the argument as much in that case.

Sure, it's not base load, but maybe we should be looking at a solution for that?

I don't claim to be omniscient, is there something else that we ought to be looking at? Something perhaps that all of the other scientists and engineers around the world have missed? I doubt it, but I'm willing to be surprised. Please tell us your brilliant plan for replacing all of the world's base load nuclear generation with fairy dust and unicorn farts (this ought to be good).

Re:NIMBY

[InvalidError]

What killed Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Miles Island isn't that they were particularly unsafe.

Chernobyl blew up mainly due to a whole bunch of human errors while preparing the reactor for a safety test - preparations were supposed to start nearly a day ahead of time and the chief engineer decided to rush it after preparation got delayed by a government request to run the reactor a few hours longer to accommodate peak hours. In their rush to bring down reactor output to test level, they accidentally radon-poisoned the core, power wouldn't come back up so they started removing control rods beyond GE's safe minimum and then got caught with their pants down in their attempts to restart it when the radon poisoning cleared up and reactor output surged out of control. This highlighted many design issues that could have helped the staff figure out what was happening a little sooner but the fundamental failure was human errors.

Three Mile Island's core issue was a flawed control/indicator pair for a discharge valve where the indicator tracked the control switch's state rather than the valve's actual state which caused the reactor to bleed dry without staff knowing it was happening. This got further complicated by lack of first-degree measurement of water level in the reactor core. How such a fundamental and trivial design flaw ever made it in an actual reactor design is beyond me. Without this vital bit of information, plant engineers had no way to know exactly what was going wrong when nearly every alarm, many of which contradictory, started going off at once.

For Fukushima, the single dumbest mistake and the root cause of most complications there was putting backup generators in floodable areas, causing the loss of nearly all backup power within hours. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the reactors themselves. Most nuclear plants house their backup generators in the turbine building precisely to shelter them from elements but Fukushima had theirs outdoors near sea-level. I'm still scratching my head about how the people who managed the site had the foresight to install wave-breakers off-shore but neglected to protect generators from potential flooding in some way.

Pebble and molten salt reactors still benefit from everything that was learned from past mistakes. If you had a pebble or MSR reactor with Chernobyl-era knowledge and experience, Chernobyl would likely still have happened: still stuck with a massive power surge once radon poisoning clears up. Same for TMI and Fukushima. Pebbles and molten salt may be more convenient and safer to handle and process but there is very little they can do to prevent operator, design and construction errors.

Following the procedures and operating manual would have saved Chernobyl by never allowing it to reach the highly volatile state it was forced into in the first place. A simple direct-observation water level gauge would have saved TMI by providing engineers the single most critical information they needed to know exactly what was happening. Putting generators indoors in a safe location would have saved Fukushima by keeping them safe from the salt-water ingestion that fouled them. Being "obsolete" played little to no part in any of those incidents; all the measures that would have prevented those incidents are very low-tech even for their original construction dates and could have been fixed at little to no cost if someone had simply thought of these being liabilities back then.

If you are going to defend nuclear as a safe energy source, I strongly suggest researching WHY those historic failures occurred before blindly tagging all "obsolete" reactors as intrinsically unsafe; otherwise you are simply contributing to the FUD about it. Old reactors are just about as safe as newer ones once retrofitted to address potential safety hazard as they are identified - and this applies to newer reactors regardless of type as well.

Newer reactors simply have the benefit of decades worth of safety enhancements being built-in from day-1.

Re:NIMBY

[uncqual]

And this makes me wonder why we still build refrigerators, and the place they sit in within homes, the way we do.

In some parts of the country, there are several months of the year when we try to remove heat from our homes. But the refrig goes to all the trouble (i.e., energy use) to "separate" heat from already air conditioned air. Then, what does it do with the heat? It dumps the "heat" back in to the conditioned air in the house to repeat the cycle!!! Stupid...

Why not put an exhaust vent (and maybe fan) to the exterior and an outside air intake, perhaps with remote actuated dampers, by the refrig in new homes (and kitchen remodels). Hook that to a new class of "integrated climate control" refrig that takes its condenser cooling input air from either the room or the outside source and exhausts it either to the room or outside -- all depending on input from the thermostat controlling that zone of the house. Obviously input/exhaust dampers would be closed except when the refrig was running (in case of failure, it would default to taking house air in and exhaust the hot air back into the house).

Seems more efficient - a bit of up front cost (and, unfortunately, a need for some simple standardization between architects, the HVAC industry, and appliance manufacturers) but over the years it seems like it would pay for itself in areas with much hot weather.

(Sorry for my likely abuse of the word "heat" et al)

Re:NIMBY

[hawguy]

And this makes me wonder why we still build refrigerators, and the place they sit in within homes, the way we do.

In some parts of the country, there are several months of the year when we try to remove heat from our homes. But the refrig goes to all the trouble (i.e., energy use) to "separate" heat from already air conditioned air. Then, what does it do with the heat? It dumps the "heat" back in to the conditioned air in the house to repeat the cycle!!! Stupid...

Why not put an exhaust vent (and maybe fan) to the exterior and an outside air intake, perhaps with remote actuated dampers, by the refrig in new homes (and kitchen remodels). Hook that to a new class of "integrated climate control" refrig that takes its condenser cooling input air from either the room or the outside source and exhausts it either to the room or outside -- all depending on input from the thermostat controlling that zone of the house. Obviously input/exhaust dampers would be closed except when the refrig was running (in case of failure, it would default to taking house air in and exhaust the hot air back into the house).

Seems more efficient - a bit of up front cost (and, unfortunately, a need for some simple standardization between architects, the HVAC industry, and appliance manufacturers) but over the years it seems like it would pay for itself in areas with much hot weather.

(Sorry for my likely abuse of the word "heat" et al)

Do you really want to install and maintain all of that duct work and automatic louvers for "several months of the year" when it would make a difference? Don't forget to take into account the energy use for the fan that you'll need to run to vent the heat outside, and to account for the fact that while you're saving a bit of energy by making your air conditioner work less hard, your refrigerator compressor will be doing more work when the evaporator coils are cooled by 95 degree outside air instead of 70 degree air conditioned air.

I'm not sure that the energy cost savings would be worth it - a modern energy efficient refrigerator uses around $60 of electricity/year (500KWh * 12 cents/KWh). Even if you saved 100% of that energy, it might take you around 10 years to recoup the cost of $500 worth of duct work, electronic louvers, vent fan, and associated control circuitry. If you run the air conditioning 4 months out of the year, then it's a 30 year payback time.

Re:NIMBY

[Sique]

I don't know if you really know about the problems with a grid. Most grids are designed with some big powerplants at one point and power consumers at the other ends. So you have high capacity cables only in a very limited part of the grid, and most other parts are of small capacity. But if you have several small power plants distributed in the grid, the local grid might not be able to handle the differences between the local small powerplant activated and deactivated.

One of our customers is a power plant operator, and they showed us the problems they have. Because of many small powerplants in regions where in former times only were consumers of eletrical power, they now have a huge balance problem. In the region, which uses at maximum about 100 MWatts of power, there are power plant installations of 400 MW. If there is a larger failure somewhere outside this region, and those 400 MWatts kick in as replacement power, the grid, which is fine for normal operation, will be completely overloaded, if all 400 MWatts suddenly push energy into the grid.

Another problem is the direction of power distributions. With a big plant design, the grid is built in a way that power runs only in one direction: away from the power plant to the consumers. Thus all regulation mechanisms are adapted to only one direction. If you have several power plants which run at different times, and consumers of power which sometimes take power from one plant, sometimes from others, you need a grid that is able to handle bi-directional or multi-directional power distribution. Most grids are not adapted to such a scenario.

This subject is shill ridden

[kurt555gs]

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.

 

Re:This subject is shill ridden

[gman003]

I don't think they're shills. Fanboys, perhaps, but not shills. Honestly, the nuclear industry just doesn't seem big enough to warrant forum shills. Talking heads or TV experts, yeah, possible shills, but not Slashdotters. We're not that important.

I, for one, think nuclear is something we need to be using more, but I'm advocating a nuclear+hydro+geothermal+solar+wind+tidal as a replacement for coal+gas+oil, not as a pure nuclear solution (at least, until we get fusion working - if fusion delivers on its promises, I would have zero issue with a pure-fusion power grid). But if you want to advocate a pure-renewable system, I wouldn't downmod you (I've actually got mod points right now).

Just a suggestion, though? Saying "we need more studies" or "what's the *real* cost?" tends to come across more like FUD than actual debate, particularly when you're coming from a position that is just as questionable in those areas. Maybe they're thinking *you're* the shill?

How about some actual research?

[imikem]

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".

Retirement isn't bad

[meustrus]

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.

GREAT SCOTT!

[Zynder]

1.21GW-- That's a Back to the Future reference.

And the best parts of smart meters!

[tlambert]

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...