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Stung By Scandal, South Korea Weighs Up Cost of Curbing Nuclear Power
mdsolar writes in about an ongoing scandal in South Korea that has rocked their nuclear power program. "It started with a few bogus safety certificates for cables shutting a handful of South Korean nuclear reactors. Now, the scandal has snowballed, with 100 people indicted and Seoul under pressure to rethink its reliance on nuclear power. A shift away from nuclear, which generates a third of South Korea's electricity, could cost tens of billions of dollars a year by boosting imports of liquefied natural gas, oil or coal. Although helping calm safety concerns, it would also push the government into a politically sensitive debate over whether state utilities could pass on sharply higher power bills to households and companies. Gas, which makes up half of South Korea's energy bill while accounting for only a fifth of its power, would likely be the main substitute for nuclear, as it is considered cleaner than coal and plants can be built more easily near cities."
It is South Korea. If you have a culture that will fuck up safety certificates at nuclear plants, do you think they are suddenly going to be better with natural gas plants?
Fix the fucking culture and kill the corruption. The technology was never the problem.
As far as I can tell, the problem is that nuclear plants were closed in the interests of safety while they await safety recertification - which seems like the straightforward thing to do in any case where safety requirements are found to be in violation.
Is it simply a matter of failure modes? That is, because the worst-case scenario for a fission plant is worse than that of a coal plant?
Yep.
I wouldn't be surprised if Russia is wetting themselves as more and more countries are abandoning nuclear power and switching to natural gas, which Russia has a monopoly over in Asia.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Seriously, the scandal is less of an issue with nuclear power, it could have happened to ANY of the generating systems they want to switch to as well. Privatizing power generation doesn't work. Its been proven by TEPCO, in the US, and now in South Korea, because the companies will skirt the law anywhere they can as long as they can until they finally get caught. Don't switch to fossil fuels like Gas or Coal, keep the Nuclear and take the plants away from the corporations and put them under strict government control.
It's becoming clear that where there are millions of dollars floating around, and there are humans, there is corruption and problems to be found wherever you look. Government or privately owned, human nature will take over if it's not tightly monitered. It's not even surprising anymore. Given that, religion is probably the worst, as no one monitors them at all.
Looking at this site, it looks like South Korea imports all its coal, old and gas, producing none at all itself. It only needs to look at its neighbor to the North to see what would happen if its energy imports were ever disrupted, so I'm surprised there is any thought to reducing their nuclear capacity.
No, they're probably wetting themselves because they drank too much vodka before passing out.
-- Ethanol-fueled
...and dangerous corner-cutting in the construction and operation of nuclear power plants is bad? Good thing that only happens in "backwards" little countries like South Korea. Right? I mean that could never happen here in the U.S. Right?
Or you could, I dunno, provide competent and effective _oversight_ to ensure the nuclear plants are being operated safely? I know - that's just crazy talk.
Their neighbors to the north have large coal reserves. Maybe they could look into that.
Why do governments insist on treating nuclear reactors like any other public works construction? They're big, they're expensive, and they absolutely abide no skimping or mistakes. Play by the rules and you get an abundance of cheap electric power. Fail and you have a century's worth of radioactive mess to clean up.
Nuclear power and a culture based on money can not work safely.
Humans are just too shortsighted, greedy, and unwise for nuclear power yet.
Evolve dammit.
It's not like they'd be hooking up extraction and capture devices to the back ends of people.... that'd be Japan.
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
There is a big difference between a nuclear accident and other power plant accidents. It puts a huge swath of land into an uninhabitable state for a long period. Think about the property value in the area surrounding the Indian Point plant in NY. A full payout of the Price Anderson Act liability for a large accident there would topple the treasury. An accident at a coal plant isn't likely to put our very government in danger.
We all know what moving off nuclear means: more reliance on fossil fuels.
But I guess that's what the environmentalists want. (It's obvious that the political right wants that.) I used to think that the scales tipped towards environmentalists being simply naive in their mistaken belief that renewables could handle the load nuclear currently does, but it's obvious at this point that they cannot, and that every time you shut down a nuclear reactor fossil fuels take their place. The inescapable conclusion is that environmentalists must want more gas and coal burned in the world.
You underestimate the alcohol tolerance of a typical Russian.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
The political right wants nuclear, but gave up fighting environmentalists over it long ago.
The article never loaded for me. Try this one: Stung by Scandal
Also, they aren't eliminating nuclear power. The article says:
The study recommended nuclear power capacity be kept between 22 and 29 percent of the total by 2035, well below existing plans to grow the sector to 41 percent in less than 20 years.
Although if they have a scandal going on, don't think that switching the power source will eliminate the underhanded behavior.
I'm not so sure the right wants nuclear. They've been letting the left crush it by proxy for decades.
One word: Enron
The US already tried privatizing public utilities like power. Look how it turned out and learn from that example. Utilities are just one important category that are much more efficiently managed in the public sector.
Besides, it has gotten to the point where mismanagement and government bailouts are effectively part of the new way of doing business. If the government is going to be paying anyway, it might as well become the owner. That's how it works when a company buys out another's debts, there's no reason not to apply that to the government. Going public sector from the beginning simply cuts out some wasteful missteps.
The environmentalists you're talking about definitely don't want nuclear. But they also don't want coal. Or gas. Or oil. Or hydro. Wind and solar are iffy. Basically they want us to use dynamos strapped on bicycles and maybe geothermal.
In other words, they don't seem to realize that their uncompromising attitude is marginalizing them all while making the situation worse.
IMO South Korea is just, like many nations before it, admitting it CAN'T PREVENT CORRUPTION INSIDE ITS OWN SOCIO-CULTURAL BACKGROUND, and throwing the towel is usually the better option. Except in a scenario where the trade-off is going back 100 years, multiplying national the energy bill by 10 and the certainty that the environment will be polluted (as opposed to the casual, totally avoidable nuclear disaster).
The right wants cheap power. Nuclear used to be the way to make that happen, but with all the problems with environmentalists gas is starting to look like a much better option.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I'm not sure they want cheap power inasmuch as they want profitable power. Nuclear may actually be too cheap.
Anyone for a Thorium reactor?
"...us to use dynamos strapped on bicycles and maybe geothermal."
No, large-scale geothermal often uses hydraulic fracturing, which they apparently also don't want.
Ah, the scientifically illiterate nukefan. Always focusing on single, small ideas and unable to see the bigger picture, or understand how we have already solved these problems.
Installing renewable capacity isn't just about building wind, wave, hyro, solar thermal, geothermal and biomass plants, or installing solar PV on buildings. It's about reducing energy consumption by making buildings more efficient and building a smart grid that can manage the load and store energy.
It's actually cheaper to save energy than add new capacity of any kind, and it makes everyone's lives better too. Some people baulk at the idea of anything so socialist, but just keep in mind that you are going to pay for it one way or another. Your choice is give the money to a power company to build some big plant that pollutes and damages your health while lining their pockets, or spend less money making your own life better.
Coal and gas do have a role to play as interim measures before we get very high levels of renewables, and even beyond that point to help smooth capacity. The caveat is that we need to build clean coal and gas plants with carbon capture. It works by capturing all the carbon and other emissions from the plant and storing them underground long term, much like nuclear waste. Of course, it has many of the same problems as nuclear waste does, but being realistic we will need that kind of bridge in the medium term.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Conservation?
The developing third world will eat you.
natural gas, killing people every day
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24702806
(and somehow people have the idea that nuclear is dangerous)
Cheap power is profitable power for the guys that own factories, foundries, datacenters, etc.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
How much does it cost to save a unit of energy of a certain type (heat, electricity, fuel)? How much does it cost to produce a unit of energy of the same type?
Don't be surprised if there's an order of magnitude difference in cost, and not in the direction that you might expect.
It's about reducing energy consumption by making buildings more efficient and building a smart grid that can manage the load and store energy.
That would be fine if the smart grid advocates ever got beyond a hand-wave "smart grid magically fixes intermittency" statement. Exactly *how* is this supposed to happen? We already have mechanisms for spreading the load (off-peak tariffs and so forth). The only technology that is even vaguely economic for storage is pumped storage hydro, which is limited in where you can put it and costs money. And building insulation isn't going to help with electicity as electricity generally isn't used for building heating precisely because it's a lot more expensive than gas.
Don't lump the environmentalists in with the NIMBY's. While its true many environmentalists oppose nuclear, they typically represent minorities of the general population. Everyone else is afraid the plant will go boom. Its fear that is driving this, not Greenies, not right wingers.
But management may have incentive to cut costs/employees (budget cuts) and employees may have incentive to fake reports (laziness/ineptitude). See also the issues in SK with the national airlines...
... they're doing it on everything.
It is arguably more dangerous to cut corners on, say, a natural gas pipeline than anything at a nuclear plant, because nuclear facilities have a lot more redundancy in their safety systems.
Consider that it is debatable whether the events at Fukushima nuclear plants killed anyone at all, whereas natural gas explosions kill and injure people on a regular basis - Google-searching for "natural gas explosion" turns up three distinct events in the US on the first page, one of which killed an 11-year old girl in West Virginia.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
And does the wind blow?
The fear is stoked by activists, and those activists are by and large from the left.
It's not like they'd be hooking up extraction and capture devices to the back ends of people.... that'd be Japan.
Or, The Matrix: Couch Potato Edition.
Ezekiel 23:20
nuclear energy was a libertarian issue not a right wing!
So they drank 2 Liters before they passed out and pissed themselves. Doesn't change the outcome.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Well, it's not that hard to understand, and it's not really my fault if you can't be bothered to find out about it. A smart grid is able to react to changing power availability and demands quickly. Say there is a momentary spike in usage, the smart grid can ask devices with a lot of thermal mass to back off a little if it won't cause them any problems, e.g. a fridge gaining 0.1C over ten minutes. There is also the ability to much more accurately predict demand and supply through monitoring and reporting. All that means you need less standby capacity and can tolerate some local variations in available power.
You are right that we try to balance load, but we are not very good at it. For example electricity is cheap at night but most people's hot water heaters come on during the day just before they need to use it. A well insulated storage tank can easily use cheap off-peak electricity and store that energy for later, especially if the grid itself can tell it when it is best to turn the heater on. At 2AM there might be a little drop in the local wind capacity, but we know it will pick up by 4AM, so the heater can just wait.
Water heaters will be partially replaced by solar anyway. Solar thermal heating is incredibly efficient and works even on heavily overcast days. Even when the sky is cloudy about 80% of the sun's energy still reaches the surface of the earth, and solar thermal can be 75% efficient.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yeah, why kill 0 people with nuclear power when you can kill thousands with coal, right!
Well, it's not that hard to understand, and it's not really my fault if you can't be bothered to find out about it. A smart grid is able to react to changing power availability and demands quickly. Say there is a momentary spike in usage, the smart grid can ask devices with a lot of thermal mass to back off a little if it won't cause them any problems, e.g. a fridge gaining 0.1C over ten minutes.
Momentary spikes in usage aren't the problem though - the existing grid can cope with these already. The problem is variation in supply - e.g. if the wind dies down for hours or days, or solar being unavailable at night or in the winter months. How will it help with this?
There is also the ability to much more accurately predict demand and supply through monitoring and reporting.
We're already good at accurate demand prediction - it's important in order to plan & control the output of current power stations.
All that means you need less standby capacity
How? This hasn't been shown.Turning fridges off for 15 minutes isn't going to help with the timescales that solar/wind/etc. intermittency operates on.
This is what I mean by "hand wave" - just words, no numbers or data, and the words aren't convincing. No, I don't expect full detail in a Slashdot post but I haven't seen it anywhere and it's not for lack of looking.
I was hoping for cheaper gas prices with oil volatility dropping (as predicted by the DoE). But, now SK is looking to go straight LNG. Hmm.
A real issue with nuclear safety or are the lined pockets of Big Oil thinning and they want moawr?
You are right that we try to balance load, but we are not very good at it. For example electricity is cheap at night but most people's hot water heaters come on during the day just before they need to use it. A well insulated storage tank can easily use cheap off-peak electricity and store that energy for later, especially if the grid itself can tell it when it is best to turn the heater on. At 2AM there might be a little drop in the local wind capacity, but we know it will pick up by 4AM, so the heater can just wait.
OK, but this isn't much "smarter" than the current off-peak system, and I very much doubt that anyone with an off peak tariff and an electric storage heater will run the heater at peak times unless the stored water runs out. That defeats the whole point of storage heating. Not to mention that using electric heating instead of gas just so you have somewhere to dump excess production is quite spectacularly inefficient and costly.
Water heaters will be partially replaced by solar anyway. Solar thermal heating is incredibly efficient and works even on heavily overcast days. Even when the sky is cloudy about 80% of the sun's energy still reaches the surface of the earth, and solar thermal can be 75% efficient.
Forgot to mention - according to this link, a typical solar water heating system will cost £4800 and save £60 per year. In other words, uneconomic - you'd never pay back the costs given typical interest rates. The system can't replace a conventional heater, only supplement it, so you don't even save on the capital costs of your gas or electric heater.
This is what I mean - stuff that sounds good superficially but just doesn't add up under closer scrutiny.
In the Midwest, wind power is helping to shut down nuclear power. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf
In 2013 Q1-3, solar is the second leading source of new generating capacity. http://solarindustrymag.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.13358
You seem to have assumptions that are misleading you.
I've got nothing to add on the nuclear tech v. bureaucracy, but if they're looking for alternatives, why not renewable energy?
> The only technology that is even vaguely economic for storage is pumped storage hydro
Am I the only one who thinks that something must be fundamentally wrong with the system if burning power in order to later generate power makes good sense. There are two mechanical loss stages in that process. It's basically a perpetual motion machine where the only input is some money.
Why aren't the biggest consumers flat demand 24/7? All the big industries that surround me are, I'm sure.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
For the electricity generators? Compare them to all the heavy industry that wants electricity as cheap as possible. Every time a power plant opens up people talk about how many homes it can light. Do you know how much of the electricity generated goes into three-phase industrial motors?
Since the right is a coalition of opponents to the progressive consensus, there isn't just one right. There are paleocons, theonomists, neocons, libertarians, and the upstart neoreactionary movement. Perhaps the theonomists could be convinced that nuclear is satanic, just like the proggies. But the rest of them? They agree that cheap energy is good for our civilization.
The left is not monolithic.
Koreans re-think procurement practices
You're sure? Absolutely sure?
Idiot. Not all large industrial processes are continuous.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes, quite sure. I've known people who worked in the overnight shifts when they were students. 1 second of downtime would cost them half a day - their entire job was just making sure nothing grinds to a halt. And that was in the single biggest industrial sector in the whole country.
Idiot. Not all countries are the country you live in.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
The last thing S. Korea or the world needs is caving to more nuclear power hysteria. Nuclear power safety record to date is three orders of magnitude better than coal and 2 orders of magnitude better than oil and gas. Yet everyone goes hysterical. And that is with so much hysteria, starting in the 70s, that no designs that are more modern can be approved for building in most countries. We are running 30-50 yr old designs. Fukushima reactor was nearly 40 years old and scheduled for decommission mere weeks after the once in 300 years mega disaster hit the region. Modern nuclear plant designs are failproof for such events and some designs produce 95% less nuclear waste. What waste they do produce has a half life 100 years instead of on the order of 10000 years. Yet their is too much hysteria to build them. Nuclear is also cost competitive with oil and gas despite the hysteria hugely driving up all costs of building and running a plan far beyond sane levels.
Oh, nuclear power also puts no CO2 into the atmosphere.
So if you want a future of clean, safe, and cheap enough power then go nuclear. At least until solar reaches grid parity which proponents say is not likely for 20-30 years.
is that South Korea is right up there with nations that I do not want to building reactors. And I am guessing that while they will quickly shut theirs down for not being good enough, they will be trying to sell the same design to 3rd world nations.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The problem is variation in supply - e.g. if the wind dies down for hours or days
Thing is that is never, every does die down for hours or days. At least, not everywhere. Part of the smart grid is being able move energy around more easily. The other extremely obvious point is that wind isn't best suited for countries where this kind of wind resource is not available. Fortunately most of northern Europe and the US is suited to it.
solar being unavailable at night or in the winter months.
Solar thermal is available 24/7. Solar PV is only available during daylight hours, but fortunately that is when demand for electricity is highest. In countries where air-con is common this is particularly true, but in most places industry, offices and appliances use most energy during the day. We also have storage, both in the form of batteries for homes (which double up as whole-house UPS systems) and large scale like pumping water for hydro.
Imagine if you could tell your car that it only needed 30% charge during the week because you were only going back and forth to work, so the other 70% could be sold back to the grid for a profit. The car and the smart grid automatically negotiate. On Friday the car makes sure it gets up to 100% so you can take that long weekend drive.
We're already good at accurate demand prediction
Not really. We need a lot of idling power (partly due to poor prediction, partly due to reliance on things like nuclear which can instantly drop gigawatts in the event of a fault). The guys doing prediction use historical data and the TV guide to try and guess when people will be turning their TVs on and making a cup of tea. We can only predict demand for large regions, not locally.
How? This hasn't been shown.Turning fridges off for 15 minutes isn't going to help
If a nuclear plant has some kind of fault you might loose 1000MW instantly. No warning, no opportunity to spool up a backup supply. Therefore you need 1000MW idling, just in case. With something like wind and individual turbine failing will drop maybe 20MW. Wind speed changes slowly, so if it is 20 knts now it won't be less than 18 or 19 knts in 20 minutes time, giving plenty of opportunity to spool up other sources.
As for fridges, if a popular TV show comes on there can be a spike as people prepare drinks and food, and turn their TVs on. Fridges turning off could smooth that out. You can also do things like staggering the switch on times of fridges, so that you don't get spikes as buildings warm up. Again, it also gives the grid time to bring more energy capacity on line.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yep.
I wouldn't be surprised if Russia is wetting themselves as more and more countries are abandoning nuclear power and switching to natural gas, which Russia has a monopoly over in Asia.
Since Russia also has a thriving nuclear export industry, its kind of a win-win scenario for them...
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Imagine if you could tell your car that it only needed 30% charge during the week because you were only going back and forth to work, so the other 70% could be sold back to the grid for a profit. The car and the smart grid automatically negotiate. On Friday the car makes sure it gets up to 100% so you can take that long weekend drive.
Sell back to the grid? If I had an electric car, I wouldn't be inclined to wear out the batteries (which have a finite life in terms of number of charge cycles) doing this.I once did a back of the envelope calculation using typical lifespan data for Li-ion batteries - I'd have to sell back at a ridiculously high price to justify the loss of battery life. And even practical storage schemes like pumped storage hydro need to sell at a higher price than they buy - a cost that typically isn't included in the cost of electricity estimates of wind and solar (which is fair enough as it's too dependent on other factors, but something that needs to be considered). Moot point though, as electric cars will stay uneconomic unless there's an huge and unexpected drop in battery costs or oil prices skyrocket.
We can only predict demand for large regions, not locally.
That's all we need, thanks to the grid averaging out demand fluctuations over space. The high reliability of the current grid is evidence for that.
Thing is that is never, every does die down for hours or days. At least, not everywhere.
Really? I've seen it happen on UK grid monitoring webpages (e.g. here)- wind generation under 10% of total installed capacity for hours at a time is quite common. In fact output varies quite savagely, presumably due to the cube-law dependence of output on wind speed. People often claim that "the wind is always blowing somewhere", but the data suggests "not enough it isn't".
With something like wind and individual turbine failing will drop maybe 20MW. Wind speed changes slowly, so if it is 20 knts now it won't be less than 18 or 19 knts in 20 minutes time, giving plenty of opportunity to spool up other sources.
Which other sources though? Renewables (except hydro and biomass, which are limited) can't be spooled up, they either generate or not depending on the availability of the resource. You can predict that you won't have power, but then you need to do something about it. Turning fridges off will only help on a much shorter timescale.
In contrast, handling a power station failure is a solved problem with the existing grid, as are demand surges. Solving problems that have already been solved isn't a compelling reason for something.
Try sustaining yourself with no energy at all. The fact is all modern societies need the extra power per capita to have elevated productivity and hence higher standards of living. But sure keep ignoring that while driving your SUV.
No kidding. I remember the solar water heater fad in the 1980s. It ended up pretty soon once the owners realized the maintenance costs and that it didn't work for all the hot water they actually required.