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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."
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 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.
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
Unless you live in Hawaii very little oil is burned for power. It would be far too expensive. Natural gas and coal are far bigger. Even wind and solar are bigger than oil for electric generation in most states.
Many coal plants are now mostly natural gas anyway with the low prices on the stuff and they have preheaters that burn it anyway.
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.
Like it or not, poor oversight can't be removed from a discussion of the technology. If you are building a nuclear plant, you need to be confident that you will be able to maintain responsible oversight/operations/maintenance of the facility for 60 plus years, with oversight/maintenance/storage of the waste for longer. You can have every confidence in the design, in the current owners and the operators when it begins operation, but they will likely be retired if not dead by the time the plant closes. All it takes is one few year period where bad management / operations / regulation comes in and a disaster can happen.
For the record, cheap natural gas and a general lack of growing electricity demand is making developing a nuclear plant pretty questionable at the moment. You have to spend (i.e. borrow) a ton of money up front, on the expectation you will need the energy in 5-10 or more years and that the price of power will have increased sufficiently. Alternatively you can wait it out, see what happens to demand and if needed throw up a gas-fired plant quickly for much less capital and a pretty reasonable operations costs.
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.
I'm here to build nuclear power plants and chew bubblegum... and I'm all out of patience for the plant construction licensing process.
... or cadmium telluride in the solar panels?
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.
All of the nuclear accidents in history have happened because of poor oversight, not to the fault of the technology itself.
So what you are saying is that we need to solve the oversight problem. What progress has been made towards doing that? I don't see any really... In my own country the nuclear industry seems to be just as cock-up prone as ever. Still no plan to deal with waste either.
The only solution on offer seems to be to make nuclear power cheaper for companies to operate and then they will... Actually I'm not sure what the rest of the plan is, I just keep hearing people moaning about the cost due to regulation.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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/
The Great Lakes region is one of the most benign regions on the planet. Volcanic/Tectonic activity is practically non-existent. Weather extremes are rare. I'd say its one of the best places to put nuclear power plants.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Living within 10 miles of a 800MW oil burning power plant. Yes it's in the minority and right now it's only used for peak loads and as a backup for when they have to shut down one of the nuclear reactors used for base load in our region.
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.
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.