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Duke Energy Scraps Plans For Florida Nuclear Plant, Forced To Delay Others
mdsolar writes
"According to the Associated Press, 'The largest utility in the U.S. is scuttling plans to build a $24.7 billion nuclear power plant in a small Gulf Coast county in Florida, the company announced Thursday. Duke Energy Corp. said it made the decision because of delays by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in issuing licenses for new plants, and because of recent legislative changes in Florida.' Meanwhile, 'Duke Energy's plans to build two nuclear reactors in South Carolina have been delayed by federal regulators who say budget cuts and changes to the plans require more time. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Duke in a letter that a final hearing on plans to build the William S. Lee nuclear plant in Cherokee County would have to wait until 2016. The original target had been this past March."
Dance with the devil !!
Either these kinds of plants are ok or they are not. If not, ban them. If so, get the hell out of the way.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I don't think the gulf coast is a good place for a nuke plant anyway what with hurricanes getting stronger and more frequent
at a time when we need more power generating capacity, it's nice to see the relevant government agency doing its best to bottleneck the process!
It's such a shame that the far left has put such a stigma on nuclear power. All of the nuclear accidents in history have happened because of poor oversight, not to the fault of the technology itself. Oh well, I guess we can keep burning oil for the next hundred years.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
I think I played this one. It's the one where the power company turns everyone into mutants and a blond haired Bruce Campbell goes around cracking wise and blowing up the mutants.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
It's been paid for since... 7ish years ago. Higher taxes to pay for something that the tax payers didn't get so... Can we have the money back for the nuke plant we paid for but didn't get? No? I see. Again, where's the money?
Waiting for an amusing sig.
I wish environmentalists could decide if they really wanted to get serious about global warming. They should be out picketing the White House over this.
What's that? Not a single washer is in space yet? Well I'm sure it'll happen just in time.
Either these kinds of plants are ok or they are not. If not, ban them. If so, get the hell out of the way.
Not a matter of them being OK. Dismiss that right off.
I lived for years in a city where a battle was waged by the NIMBYs and a regional power company, with the state and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sitting on a fence like so many crows and cawing in some change to regulations every now and then. It nearly bankrupted the power company, submitting, resubmitting, re-resubmitting construction plans, plant wiring, cooling system designs and plumbing, environmental impact, etc, etc, etc. Effectively they would spend months building reactor housing and then have to tear it all out and start again. After years of this the writing was on the wall, it would never become a nuclear plant (at least, most likely) The plant became a gas generating plant, though most of the structure could be converted to nuclear if the present owners feel like going to battle again. The designs were fine, but courts and red tape can kill any project.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Expect the same thing to be repeated in West Virginia and South Western Pennsylvania coal belts. They will blame the government, onerous regulations, etc etc and claim "clean coal" was killed by enviro nazis. All the while the natural gas is getting cheaper than even the dirty coal. If you spend more money on cleaning up dirty coal how can you compete with another thing that burns more easily, transports more easily and costs less?
We may disagree whether this boom in fracking and natural gas abundance is a good or bad. But one thing we can be sure is, these entrenched interests would blame the government at every opportunity even when the true cause is thumping its chest like an 800 lb gorilla right on their faces.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
but without nuclear power in the U.S, there would be rolling blackouts everywhere. We would be no better than Venezuela.
Youtube
So, why is anyone surprised his executive agencies are putting up more roadblocks to building power plants? I mean, he said it in plain english.
Worth putting government money into it or not is another question that ends up being asked as well. Banks won't touch it.
So it's not about "get the hell out of the way" - it's about "get behind it in a huge way, or not".
All of the nuclear accidents in history have happened by accident.
See how worthless the above post is when it's distilled down to it's true meaning?
Is this one of those cases where the state allowed them to put a surcharge on customers' bills for years before they even built the plant?
I don't suppose we'll ever see that money back, will we?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Assuming an industry standard 92.1% uptime for the plant, an industry standard 0.85 CENTS per KWH operating & refueling cost and a 60 year lifespan, this plant with its two AP1000 reactors would generate 19.6 Billion KWH per year for 60 years. That works out to an installed cost of $6.91 per KWH of capacity.
Meanwhile, I just installed a 6.2 KWH solar array for $24,000, (before any tax rebates and including all engineering, labor and other parts like inverters). Factoring in its 30 year life span (meaning factoring in that I'd need to buy TWO systems to equal the 60 year lifespan of the reactor) and factoring in average solar availability here in Florida, my cost per installed KWH is $4.00.
Those are real numbers, not speculative. And they DON'T INCLUDE any transmission losses, which average 7% nationwide.
So it is cheaper for us as a nation to put solar panels on every roof than it is to build nuke plants.
You could cut nuclear regulation in half and it would still be the safest way to generate power. (as a bonus you would cut the price and time to build).
Factoring in its 30 year life span
Are you really expecting to go 30 years with absolutely no maintenance or breakdowns on your shiny new system?
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
The breakdown of U.S energy research and development subsidies reported by the US DOE is roughly 60% for nuclear, 25% to fossil fuels and 15% to sustainable energy sources.
Half a billion dollars worth of subsidies are available for procuring companies (i.e oil companies) proposing "pre-approved" reactor designs, even if they don't build it, and a 1.8 cent per kilowatt hour tax credit if they do.
In addition the 2005 U.S energy bill provided another $13 billion dollars worth of subsidies and revocation of the Public Utilities Holding Company Act (PUHCA, by George.W.Bush), put into law in 1935 to stop a re-occurrence of the 1929 stock market crash. It is this economic mechanism which allows the owners of nuclear power stations to syphon money from ratepayers in the same way utilities companies did in the 1920s.
For anyone whos says this is a problem of the "NIMBYs" (or the ratepayer) protesting the construction, it's not. Constructs in the law governing the location and construction of Nuclear Reactors specifically exclude ratepayer concerns in the consideration for approval. Utilities companies withdraw for their own reasons, usually insurance and liability as, even with the provisions of thePrice Anderson Act Nuclear power plants are too risky to operate.
The reality is if the Nuclear power industry was forced to cover it's own liability and fund itself it would cease to exist.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
If we banned unsafe energy production we'd have to turn off all the coal and gas plants, drain all the hydro dams (those things are nasty when they break) and stop building any renewable that required construction work (especially at heights, like roofs and tall wind turbines).
Don't get me started on the explosive liquids we put in our cars or the explosive gas that's piped to my house for heating/cooking.
Abso-fucking-lutely. Other than hosing off the panels a few times a year, there is no maintenance at all. It is an entirely solid state system with no moving parts.
What if something fails? The inverters and panels all have non pro-rated 30 year warranties. Real-time monitoring software lets me know if a panel or inverter fails. When, or if it does, it is replaced, for free as covered by the warranty---all of those costs are already included in the price.
Also you seem to think I am the first person in the world to install solar panels...there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of existing installations which have been installed for decades....this is not rocket science. It's good, proven, cost-effective technology.
Also the 42% lower price for solar vs nuke would indicate there's a little wiggle room for a higher failure rate than expected--and remember my numbers already include paying for the entire system TWICE. If I had to buy THREE systems in 60 years instead of TWO, my cost per KWH would still be $6 vs $6.90 for nuke (really $7.39 for nuke when you factor in transmission losses).
ALSO--the price of solar PV cells has steadily been dropping due to research and develpment. My replacement cost in 30 (or even 20) years for new panels will likely be significantly lower than $24,000. And the icing on the cake is that it's the panels and inverters that wear out, not the interconnect wiring, racks or engineering. Panels and inverters make up about 50-60% of the total installed cost. The upgrade I install 30 years from now when I'm in my 70s will likely be half the price of what I paid this year. The system after that one...I probably won't be around to see.
There's "unsafe" at the personal level, and there's mutagenic stuff that will leave the next 15 generations with 6 toes and leukemia if it goes wrong.
Like fly ash?
I'm here to build nuclear power plants and chew bubblegum... and I'm all out of patience for the plant construction licensing process.
FL residents have been paying for this new plant in our power bills, even though the project didn't get planning permission. I never understood how a private company was legally allowed to increase customer costs purely to charge people for something that didn't exist, and wasn't going to exist for decades, and without giving any ownership %age to those that were paying for it.
The remaining plants are nowhere near Lake Michigan.
In Illinois there are active three nuclear power stations (Braidwood, Dresden, and LaSalle) not far from Chicago. A serious criticality incident on any one of those three would likely affect Lake Michigan. There also are Palisades Power Station (Michigan), Point Beach (Wisconsin), Donald Cook Power Station (Michigan) which are all on Lake Michigan.
Personally I wonder if having nuclear stations so close to 1/5 of the world's fresh water supply is a good idea. I'm not opposed to nuclear power but I think some locations might be more sensible than others. The Great Lakes are hugely important, have often been environmentally abused and some of the power stations (Palisades in particular) don't have the best operating records.
... or cadmium telluride in the solar panels?
In your world is everything either safe or not. Is it really that binary? For instance do you think hand grenades and thermonuclear devices are both just unsafe weapons with the same thought and care required for each. Really, what's wrong with people?
The government is effectively denying nuke plants it doesn't have a right to deny by delaying hearings indefinitely.
In criminal trials, if the prosecution fails to make their case in a speedy manner the case is dismissed by default.
Likewise, these planning commissions should function like trials before an impartial judge concerned only with the law. The planning commission should have the ability to approve plans without a trial or if they wish to reject a plan they should bring it before a judge in a timely manner. If they fail to do so then they should wave their ability to stop the project.
A major problem with the US government at this point is that the checks and balances between executive, legislative, and judicial have broken down to some extent. Especially in these regulatory agencies, various departments are given the authority to be judge, jury, and executioner. In some cases literally. This is all a violation of due process.
These regulatory bodies are effectively members of the executive. They're cops. They have every right to respond to a situation but they do not have the right to pass judgement, set policy, or carry out a sentence without judicial review on a case by case basis.
Obviously people that are against the nuclear plant will say this is good and the executive should just do whatever it wants indifferent to judicial review because the executive is doing what they want at that time. That's fine. However, what happens when the executive does something you disagree with...? You have no recourse if the regulators are absolute.
It is in everyone's interest that this stop and that the system be held to some account. If the feds want to stall permits that's fine... they forfeit a right to contest projects in that event. If they want a say they can approve or deny permits AND offer reasons for doing so before an impartial judge.
Short of that... its a violation of our rights. End of story.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
All of the nuclear accidents in history have happened because of poor oversight, not to the fault of the technology itself.
The oversight IS a part of the technology. If the technology were flawless and relatively safe then extensive regulation and oversight would not be needed. I'm not opposed to nuclear power but pretending that the oversight can be separated from the equipment is naive.
WIll it be the carbon-free world, or the non-nuclear world?
I'm all for nuclear energy...but I want the most stringent regulations in place. I want those plants to be able to withstand earthquakes, missiles from cuba, etc.
Not necessarily wanting them to stay operational after such catastrophes. I just want to make sure they don't ever ever leak.
If we banned unsafe energy production we'd have to turn off all the coal and gas plants, drain all the hydro dams (those things are nasty when they break) and stop building any renewable that required construction work (especially at heights, like roofs and tall wind turbines).
Don't get me started on the explosive liquids we put in our cars or the explosive gas that's piped to my house for heating/cooking.
Please read up on the differences between explosive, combustible, and flammable...
You could cut nuclear regulation in half and it would still be the safest way to generate power.
The relationship between quantity of regulation and safety is not a linear one. There are three things to consider when evaluating risk: likelihood of occurrence, chance of detection, and severity of the problem. What makes nuclear power scary is that the severity of many problems can be extremely high so one has to be very careful to keep the other two factors (likelihood and detection) as low as possible. That is the purpose of the regulations. You cannot simply say that cutting the regulations in half would double the number of problems. The real world is more complicated than that.
If human CO2 emissions were really any kind of issue, we'd green-light new reactors as fast as possible.
The fact that the current administration tries to block construction of them shows all too clearly how the talk about CO2 reduction is all political posturing with motives that have nothing to do with CO2 reduction.
Obviously building nuclear plants is not helping Democratic donors enough financially.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Cheap gas good. Polluting ground water bad. Fracking bad. Destroying bedrock? Who knows?
Unfortunately because of the unpredictable nature of solar power generation, to have solar became any significant part of energy production you will either have to have a battery based short term storage system or the power company has to have a conventional plant sitting on idle ready to take over when power generation drops do to weather. Either way your cost calculations don't scale!
Typical slashdot:
3 postings filled with useful data and analysis of cost. Mod points assigned: zero.
One post, from a person ignorant of the technology, casting doubt on the data: Modded up 2 points.
Nothing costs $0.85/kW*hr, let alone $6.91/kW*hr, except for highly inefficient green energy boondoggles like solar or tidal plants. Typical nuclear costs around $0.10/kW*hr. Even San Onofre, which was recently decommissioned only half way through its original license, still generated a total profit over its lifetime.
Regulators Regulators Regulators Regulators ...... Regulators Regulators Regulators Regulators !
The two reactors were 1,100 MW each, a total of 2.2 GW.
The price tag was $24.7 billion.
So that's 24.7 / 2.2 = $11.23 per watt!
Natural gas turbines are about $1 a watt. PV's going in under $2. Wind is about $6.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/the-nuclear-reontinues-apace/
It does not necessarily mean the comment has been modded up by the community. If Slashdot judges you to have excellent karma than all your comments start at +2.
No one wants a nuke plant in their back yard, but IF we are going to use them they need to go somewhere, complaining about it and tossing it around just wastes time. The biggest excuse I hear is regulations.. well there are regulations everywhere too. The site located just north of Inglis, FL is only 10 miles or so north of the old site. The town is well known for drugs, fishing and lack of employment (largely due to stubborn locals that don't like new things - like a chain restaurant in town, but complain when they can't get work or find money).
Hurricanes? Well the old plant is in the same area, I lived there while it was hit by a few storms.. no problems, as I understand it the outside of the plant is made to withstand some serious force, like plane crashes, tornadoes and other highly unlikely things. That is the least of my worries. People are so paranoid about stuff that they really know little about, which again leads to senseless fear and more regulations... My biggest fear is that the area is notorious for a lack of education beyond high school, which makes me wonder about who will run (or ruin) the new plant (and why the old one is in such iffy condition).
My view is... the town is already close to the old site, and the new site is not really close to anything else. As far as employment.. well that remains to be seen, the town is close enough now that locals could work (or have worked) at the old plant... doesn't seem to make a difference. I only know a few people in that town that work there (or meet the education requirements). Of course it would probably help as far as temporary work... while they are building it. Really, you want more power.. put it near the old one away from most populated areas... just like they are trying to do. This way people that have jobs with the old plant (or use to have) won't have to relocate to work at the new one.
You clearly did not read, or properly understand my post. I am talking about INSTALLED COST.
If you want to talk actual cost OF PRODUCTION per KWH of energy, then my solar system comes in at 6 cents per KWH produced over its lifetime. And the nuclear plant is about 42% higher than that. Then add overhead, management costs and the 9.5% profit guaranteed by the state PUC and you get the cost to the consumer.
I also get the added benefit of skipping the middleman.
Bottom line is this: Solar is part of the solution.
Oh dear. We re-discovered the telcoms guy. Still can't figure out the difference between $ and cents...
Please read up on the differences between explosive, combustible, and flammable...
I understand the differences, but if you want to play semantic games then what is a B.L.E.V.E.?
Reminds me of Bruce Nuclear. That went on, and on, and on, and on, after they shut it down for refurbishment and replacing the reactors to a more modern design. And it wasn't the NIMBY's, it was the environmentalists making the NIMBY's froth all over the place. And it was the environmentalists spear heading it all in the courts too.
Om, nomnomnom...
They are not all in the same location. They are not all using the same resources. They are not all identically made up like they were made on an assembly line.
Each one is unique.
Each place they want to put one is unique.
If you ban all of them, you're saying that it is NOT POSSIBLE to make them safely.
If you think it MAY be possible to do one safely, then you make them prove safety.
Why the fuck do you think your effing sofa gets tested against fireproofing? If the fireproofing they use is not safe, then just ban sofas!!!
You fucking moron.
Not just opening a business (be it a pizzeria or a nuclear plant), even driving your own car is not a right, that could only be taken away by Judiciary, but a privilege, that requires an Executive-issued license. Which is all very convenient for the Executive — if they don't like an activity or a particular person/company engaging in it, they can simply withdraw the license without bothering with the pesky courts...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Even if it were 1/5 of the world's fresh water (which I doubt, unless you're specifically excluding frozen fresh water, such as is covering Antarctica and Greenland), the Great Lakes are not supplying fresh water to 1/5 of the world's population.
Frozen fresh water is called ICE and very little of the ice in Antarctica or Greenland is usable to humans (or most other animals) in liquid form. If it melted it would go into the ocean and become salt water. And the Great Lakes do contain roughly 21% of the fresh surface water on the planet. There was nothing inaccurate or misleading about what I said at all. The only people who might misunderstand what I said are people who are too dumb to even get being pedantic right. Like you!
OK solar power is fun! BUT I live (just) north of the 49 th parallel.
Our summers are quite warm, by Canadian standards, the sun shines
lots in the summer. However, in the winter, I am still sure the sun is
there but I see it fewer than 2 days a week. A little to the west
of here they get more sun in summer and less sun in the winter.
So using solar around here keeps you cool in both summer and winter.
Not what I had in mind when I retired here!
We are depending on you Kirk; LFTRs all the way!
PS I will leave the day/night problem as an exercise for the reader.
Either your calculations for production cost are incorrect, or the costs differ significantly between home solar PV and power plant solar PV. I suspect the latter.
That's not intended to argue against installing solar panels (I commend you for that), just pointing out that something isn't right with the numbers you've shown.
- T
Duke Energy, what a bunch of liars. The Crystal River plant was totally compromised when Progress Energy (who duke recently purchased) decided that it could refurb the plant itself rather than hiring experts to do it. As a result, the structural integrity of the containment vessels has been wrecked to save a few millions dollars.
However, that hasn't stopped Duke Energy from collecting fees from it's Florida customers to build power plants that those same customers will never see in their lifetime nor has it stopped Duke from saddling those same customers with the bill for it's bad decision and thus to pay for the decommissioning and cleanup of the plant they wrecked by being cheap.
All the thanks for this can be sent directly to the Republicans that control the Florida legislature as they have effectively screwed the citizens of Florida with the laws they passed to screw their constituents.
Don't blame all of nuclear energy because a couple freakin CEOs wanted to save a few bucks. They *knew* Fukushima was vulnerable. They *knew* exactly what happened was possible. They also knew what needed to be done to ensure the reactor would be able to withstand such a situation. They decided not to spend the money.
Saying Fukushima is a failure of nuclear energy is like saying the NSA surveillance scandal is a failure of electricity.
am I the only one that WANTS a nuclear plant in their backyard? it would drastically reduce the city's air pollution, would inject alot of money into the construction industry, would get rid of the massive amount of coal trains paralyzing the outer parts of the city, and would create a nice big park due to the safety exclusion zone (the greatest biodiversity in industrialized nations can be found near a nuclear powerplant, due to the amount of land the NRC insists on being between it and developments). As for safety, I am more likely to die from smoke from a coal fire, then from something happening to the reactor and the nuclear guys at least think about safety.
these nimby types are either being funded by morons, or by those with a vested interest in fossil fuels.
But, if every house was generating solar power (and was efficient with heat/cooling and other uses), the power plant can be far away and smaller to provide power when there are gaps if your neighbors can't provide the extra power.
I am generating more power than I am using right now, even in slightly overcast conditions.
Agreed... The Fukishima plant site was significantly higher in elevation before construction started. Tepco removed 25 meters of the original buff", thus saving some energy costs(pumping cooling water), while incurring the risk of a tsunami.
Sigh, as with anything else in life, you have to take the chances and determine is they are worth the costs. Take a car for example, we have the technology to ensure almost no one ever gets injured in an accident and that almost no accidents ever happen. Look at NASCAR where they roll the vehicles at 200+ MPH and smash into concrete walls and walk away. Now imagine that safety limited to 10 miles per hour in your every day driver. See, it doesn't make sense to increase the costs of the vehicle or slow the performance just because a life threatening injury could happen in an accident.
Take that example and figure the likeliness of something like Fukishima ever happening. You had an earthquake and Tsunami of large size. How often does that happen? How often will it happen in the future.
Not only did the energy company decide not to spend the money, the regulatory agencies and governments decided they didn't need to spend the money. This is because they thought the scenario that happened was unlikely to happen during the lifetime of the plant or the costs of protection outweighed the gains from it. This is something done every single day and something that needs to be done or else you will be riding in cars that only go 10 mph and have to dawn a fire suit, crash helmet, and 5 point harness to go to the corner store for a load of bread.
Duke's market capitalization is $50 billion and their annual earnings are $2.2 billion. How is $25 billion a pittance?
To that end, there are several companies trying to come out with pre-approved smaller reactor designs (50MW instead of 1100MW) which they would build for $1 billion apiece and then build them one after another on the same site until they had however many they wanted (could be 24, could be 6). That way, at any one time the financial risk is actually manageable.
They *knew* Fukushima was vulnerable. They *knew* exactly what happened was possible.
Where's your evidence?
Sorry, thought it was pretty well known.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/opinion/fukushima-could-have-been-prevented.html
According to the NYT it was passed by the regulatory agencies despite violating the regulations. That's not passing, that's failing in secret.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/opinion/fukushima-could-have-been-prevented.html
I do not think you understand the article you linked. There was no regulations ignored according to it.
There was international standards, industry best practices and studies performed by the utility company that was ignored. That is a big difference as they are not regulation until such time as a regulating autority makes them so. In the end, they did exactly as I said and balanced the risk and didn't implement or retrofit with the international standards available before the disaster.. It was the same thought process as determining that your car doesn't need a parachute installed from the factory in case you drive off a cliff but with different metrics. In this case, hindsight can show they were wrong in making those decisions, how many times have you driven off a cliff so we know if we are wrong about the parachute concept?
First of all, there is no such thing as kWh of installed capacity. kWh is a unit of energy. kW is a unit of power. Installed capacities for a power plant are given in terms of power. (Unless you're talking about batteries, in which case the installed capacity is given as the maximum amount of energy it can store.)
2 * 1000 MW * 0.921 * 8766 hours/year * 60 years = 968.8 billion kWh generated over the 60 years.
$24.7 billion for the cost of the plant (ignoring interest since you ignored it in the solar case) works out to $24.7 / 968.8 = $0.0255 per kWh. Add the $0.0085 per kWh operating and refueling costs and you get $0.034 per kWh. Or 3.4 cents per kWh.
It makes no sense to state this in terms of kWh per year, because that would be the cost for constructing a $24.7 billion nuclear facility, using it one year, and replacing it each following year with a new $24.7 billion facility.
Your solar panels don't put out 6.2 kW (6.2 kWh for an array makes no sense, unless you mean 6.2 kWh per month or year, which is a pittance). Assuming it's a 6.2 kW array (about 45 m^2 - reasonable for a large home installation), PV solar has a capacity factor of about 0.145 for the U.S (about 0.11 in the northern U.S., 0.18 in the desert southwest, 0.10 for northern Europe). That is, if you have 1 kW of nameplate capacity installed, over the year it will on average generate 145 Watts. So a 6.2 kW array will over the year only generate an average of 899 Watts.
6.2 kW * 0.145 * 8766 hours/yr * 30 yrs = 236.4 thousand kWh generated over 30 years.
At a cost of $24,000, that's $24 / 236.4 = $0.1015 per kWh, or 10.2 cents per kWh. Exactly 3x more expensive than the nuclear plant.
So your production costs are in-line with everything government and power company sources have been saying. PV solar costs about 2 to 5 times more than fossil fuels and nuclear.
There have been 10 fossil fuel accidents in the past year that have more deadly than fukushima.
TMI was most definitely an accident, just the outcomes were about as good as you could possibly get. It probably saved us from plenty of far more serious ones since it cured the "it's invincible so let's cut corners" attitude for probably two or three decades in the west. In the USSR they just wrote it off as Americans being fucked over by the lowest bidder and didn't learn the lesson as well.
TMI started off with some good ideas - containment strong enough to withstand a plane crash due to the nearby airport (which is what saved everyone's hides), but by the time it was finished the control systems were, quite frankly, utter shit that would not have passed the requirements for a fertilizer plant. It took days before the operators had a clue what was happening so if it had been a worse incident they couldn't have done a thing about it anyway.
People had been spouting "clean" and "safe" for too long and were cutting the corners that were there to make it clean and safe. Meanwhile places like fertilizer plants were blowing up on occasion so strict rules were put in place to avoid such problems - no such requirement for nuclear power since it was supposedly "clean" and safe" and immune to stupidity. Well TMI showed it wasn't immune to stupidity, so a long hard look was taken at 1950s and 60s death traps, which were shut down, and the more recent stuff was modified to make it safer. New rules came in that were stricter than fertilizer plants, maybe they went too far, who knows, but the existing ones were dangerous so anything was an improvement.
For a while things functioned well, then we had things like all those corners cut in Japan on the assumption that nuclear is "clean" and safe" even if you do something stupid.
It looks like we're due a civilian nuclear accident every twenty years or so due to people forgetting that they are riding a tiger instead of a sleeping housecat. Let's hope for more incidents like TMI instead of far worse.
The story in your link spins a great tale, but they don't actually mention anything about what TEPCO and the Japanese nuclear industry and regulatory agencies might have done or not done with respect to Fukushima aside from one very recent study. For example:
One year later, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the combined earthquake and tsunami that precipitated the Fukushima accident was not an âoeact of Godâ or Japanâ(TM)s bad luck. The potential risks of tsunamis to nuclear power plants are well understood and a set of international standards has been developed to mitigate those risks.
Yet, despite Japanâ(TM)s history of tsunamis, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Japanâ(TM)s nuclear regulator, did not apply those standards. It failed to review studies of tsunami risks performed by the plantâ(TM)s owner, Tokyo Electric Power, known as Tepco. It also failed to ensure the development of tsunami-modeling tools compliant with international standards.
Sounds bad until you realize that tsunami aren't "well understood" and the authors are just making shit up about the certainty of "international standards" in this area. Also, TEPCO doesn't have a responsibility to meet international standards. It has a responsibility to meet Japanese standards. Just because it didn't adhere to "international standards" doesn't mean that it didn't adhere to equivalent Japanese standards.
Tepco was also negligent. It knew of geological evidence that the region surrounding the plant had been periodically flooded about once every thousand years. In 2008, it performed computer simulations suggesting that a repeat of the devastating earthquake of 869 would lead to a tsunami that would inundate the plant. Yet it did not adequately follow up on either of these leads.
2008 is only three years before 2011. Keep that in mind when you consider the European response which is discussed next.
European states have recognized this. Their regulators have subjected 124 reactors to âoestress tests.â These confirmed the value of the plant design improvements ordered after the Blayais incident. Whatâ(TM)s more, they identified further upgrades to plantsâ(TM) physical defenses that are needed in order to prevent unexpected external hazards from causing serious damage. France alone will require its 58 reactors to make improvements that might cost $10 billion.
So the supposedly highly responsive Europeans identified a whole lot of things to do, but haven't actually done them yet despite having 13 years (the linked article is from 2012) to work on it. They get a pass despite being no further along than the Japanese. That means the Europeans haven't applied this "international standard" either. So we have one group that gets blamed for not following standards (that incidentally they weren't supposed to follow) because they have an accident and another group, does the same thing, but they didn't have an accident and thus, don't get blamed.
This is the sort of crap that has been going on ever since the accident though the agenda driving it is a little different than usual. It's shameless, irresponsible scapegoating.
Your units are completely bogus, a first sign you have no idea what you are talking about. KWh is a unit for energy. Power, installed powered and the like is measured in KW.
Assuming you've just installed a 6.2KW solar array for $24K, I've got some bad news for you right off the bat. The average solar insolation for Florida is about 5KWh/m^2/day year-round, assuming the panel is oriented and tilted just at the right angle. Not all roofs are appropriate, but let's assume your installation was perfect. So each square meter of panel receives 5KWh of solar energy a day. Since panels are rated at a standard constant flux of 1KW/m^2, you would need 24KWh per day solar influx to generate that 6.2KW nominal power. Since you only receive 5KWh, your panel generates an average power of 1.3 KW, or 31KWh/day.
At wholesale electric prices (5c/Kwh) that's 1.55 $/day and at Florida electric prices (12c/KWh) it's 3.72. At a 5% standard annual interest rate, your 24K investment costs you 3.3 $/day, so you would be barely recouping your investment (at current interest rates things looks better, thank the fed, but also watch your pension account). The whole scheme is predicated on a powerful fast grid that can absorb your excess and cover you consumption when clouds arrive - maybe a pumped storage unit, the enormous cost of which your are externalizing.
Meanwhile, Palo Verde nuclear plant, despite being in the middle of nowhere, produces electricity at a rate of 2.7c/KWh, including it's capital cost at 5%. A modern plant with better cooling (lake/ocean) can go significantly lower. And that's total price, including operating, decommissioning etc. for a plant capable of generating baseload, with a dependable schedule. While you are barely covering interest at retail prices.
There's a place (Arizona, Mexico) and a technology (CSP) that can make solar competitive, but photovoltaics in Florida ain't it.
Big, big problem: solar cells on your roof do not generate any profit for a centralized power company.
Or the mercury in new light bulbs.
Living in Marion County we use Homosassa's plant, we're building for the next plant, the one thing we all need to know is, how long is each plants warranty, now this plant we use needs repair, a new one is needed, OK change brings progress & we need electric, so quit messing around & start building this new plant.. Do you realize how many jobs this will provide?
problem is not the technology but an economic system run by sociopaths. nuclear is a safer tech' than the real-world options. i doubt if many of the eco extremists know anything about developments in the technology over the last five years. their ancestors were against fire, gossiping about mine as they sat around in the dark chewing raw meat. tom arnall
... these nimby types are either being funded by morons, or by those with a vested interest in fossil fuels.
How about both, "in bed" together ?
Quite a combination, the greens and the polluters...
One of the really crazy things about sequestration was that the NRC was not exempted. Their funding comes the industry and they need to be fully funded to oversee safety. Likely, they are missing safety issues and violations now owing to inadequate staffing. This is one of the few areas where I agree with Rod Adams. Sequestration should not have been applied to the NRC.
On the delayed plants, Duke changed the plans, so review had to start over again. Also, there is a new requirement to study seismicity, but given how much money was lost on Humboldt Bay owing to a failure to study that, the question should really be: Why is that a new requirement?