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Decommissioning Nuclear Plants Costing Far More Than Expected
Lasrick writes: "This article takes a look at cost estimates of nuclear power plant decommissioning from the 1980s, and how widely inaccurate they turned out to be. This is a pretty fascinating look at past articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that consistently downplayed the costs of decommissioning, for example: 'The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it. And decommissioning the plant—constructed early in the 1960s for $39 million—cost $608 million. The plant's spent fuel rods are still stored in a facility on-site, because there is no permanent disposal repository to put them in. To monitor them and make sure the material does not fall into the hands of terrorists or spill into the nearby river costs $8 million per year.'"
Kill all the lawyers.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
It's all your fault Harry Reid.
Is there a shortage of concrete?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Of course it is going to be wildly expensive and take forever. Plus, it will be over budget, over due, and a basic cock-up because the government takes the lowest bidder regardless of past performance.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The costs associated with Nuclear energy are always downplayed.
The truth is we have no coherent plan of what to do with the waste products. Lots of good ideas, but that ain't a plan.
Not to mention when things go wrong, it is VERY wrong.
How about a study on the cost of upgrading? All that infrastructure, real estate, containment vessel, gen set, distribution hardware, cooling .... has to be worth something?
How about reprocessing the fuel to reduce its volume and remove the plutonium?
I agree with first poster, killing each and every lawyer peripherally involved with the project is the first step.
This is a solid fuel water cooled reactor problem. Ok, that's 95% of current reactors, but there are many alternatives.
We must see all water cooled, solid fuel reactors as a legacy.
LFTR Molten salt reactors running primarily on Thorium could take 3% of it's fuel as spent nuclear fuel from water cooled reactors are fission that completely (99%). There is so much nuclear energy on accumulated depleted uranium and spent nuclear fuel to produce a trillion dollars worth of electricity.
Remember, it's not nuclear waste, its mostly unburned fuel, a result of extremely inefficient solid fuel reactors cooled by water.
I'm not against nuclear power per se but the more I learn the more it seems that it's just too expensive and won't be able to compete with other forms of power production. Many blame anti-nuke and environmental activists for the fact that no nuclear plants have been built in the US since the 1970's but I think most of the reason was that it was just too expensive compared to coal plants and now natural gas plants. They still can't be built without government guarantees for the loans to build them and government subsidies for liability insurance. I don't see how they're going to bring the cost down enough to be competitive.
Nuclear power has always been a pipe dream of some sort. Once it was "power so cheap we won't even bother to meter it". The fact of the matter is cleaning up a mixed bag of uranium, plutonium, and whatever isotopes is a complicated matter that costs a shitload of money. The pie-in-the-sky promoters of nuclear energy have always underplayed the costs. No reactor has ever been built under budget. No clean-up has been under budget. It is just incredibly expensive to build, operate, and decommission a nuke plant. The promoters just don't want to deal with realistic figures. And, then there is the cost of disposing of the spent fuel....
The plant's spent fuel rods are still stored in a facility on-site, because there is no permanent disposal repository to put them in. To monitor them and make sure the material does not fall into the hands of terrorists or spill into the nearby river costs $8 million per year.
4th generation reactors can use this material as fuel and the new waste created will only be dangerous for hundreds of years rather than tens of thousands.
Hoover Dam cost $49m to build. Today, the price tag would be over $10b. Stuff gets more expensive over the years. Today the power plant produces 4.2TWh per annum. At $100/MWh, that's $420,000,000 of power per year. Kind of significant ROI.
The bottom line is, long term projects like nuclear or hydro will always cost massively more in the future than today simply because of inflation. This is another reason why these are strategic assets to invest in.
As for decommissioning of nuclear power? It sits there for a few decades with a few guards on duty. Then you haul it away and melt it down and make new steel out of it.
Now, how much would it cost to decommission our coal and oil facilities?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
Sorry, but waiting for some nuclear isotopes to decay vs. literal, irreversible destruction of entire ecosystems is kind of cheap to me.
PS. And worrying about "terrists" getting waste products from nuclear plant is crazy. You can't do anything with it! You might as well start panicing about all the radioactive Americium in each smoke detector.
counting for inflation to 2007 dollars it took 267.7 million to build, not to mention the safety risk of disassembling an irradiated environment that probably had every square inch covered in asbestos and lead paint, in the day and age where a contractor cant even scrape a window sill without getting it lab tested ...
If nuclear plants were held to the radiation standards of coal plants and if fuel reprocessing had actually been implemented, it would be a lot cheaper.
Send the waste to Mexico! Win! Win!
that 39 million dollars earmarked back in the early 60s would easily pay the full current cost in today's dollars at today's prices.... so what's the problem? they ONLY HAVE that 39 million today? 40 years later? wtf?
plant will cost a hundred billion trillion gazillion dollars (yikes! - the sort of numbers children use to mean "really really big")
You see, it does not actually take that long or cost that much to dismantle a reactor; The U.S. government does it all the time with retired nuclear powered ships and submarines. The navy decomissionings are still artificially inflated by govt regs and so-forth but because the govt wants them for national security it limits the interference by "activists" and the activists themselves spend less time fighing those fights which they know the government will not let them win - plus the people who'd eat the extra artificial costs are the taxpayers and not some "evil" corporation who the activists get pleasure from attacking. The reason the costs and time required are so incredibly huge is that anti-nuclear activists (and their armies of lawyers) have used every single legal and political opportunity they could possibly find to MAKE this stuff expensive and time consuming.... which suits their anti-nuke agenda even further because they then point to the costs they themselves inflated as further evidence that nuke==bad, and nuke==expensive. If there were big international organizations and armies of ignorant-but-easily-razzed-up "activists" who were equally anti-solar power there would be an un-ending barrage of legal and political challenges over every aspect of the siting, construction, operation, and de-domissioning or solar plants. The legal actions would drive-up the costs of solar so high that nobody would want to use it... companies would fear building solar facilities for fear of decades-long fights over sighting, the potential that activists could use lawsuits to shut the plants down before they even "broke even", and potentially unlimited lawsuits and liability over the chemicals used to make the panels, and the disposal of old panels (the groundwater contamination alone might "last a million years!", they'd scream).
When society makes decisions about what tech to use, those decisions should be based on REAL numbers, not artificially and politically inflated numbers applied to only certain options - such manipulations can lead to the selection of sub-optimal solutions just so some protest group can be "happy" or some connected industry can get subsidies.
From Wikipedia:
The eight-year $500 million decommissioning process spanned from 1997 until 2005.[6] In 2000, the first structures were gutted out by workers. In 2003, the reactor pressure vessel was shipped to Barnwell, South Carolina via barge. Finally, in 2004, the facility's containment building was brought down by explosives.
Maine Yankee shut down after about 25 years of operation due to significant deficiencies and cost to correct them. Younger, but no one seems to claim that decom was easier because it was younger.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"physics" does not make it expensive, mis-guided political activists, their lawyers, and the "soccer-moms" they scare make it expensive.
Nuclear power is actually remarkably simple and straight-forward. If you want extreme safety and are willing to sacrifice some efficiency, then you can even build a nuclear generator with no moving parts and that is incapable of melting down (ever hear of an RTG? the Voyager probes? ring any bells?). As for waste disposal: nuclear fuel is remarkably dense and as a result, it does not take much space to store it. You could store all the spent fuel rods the US has ever generated and all the rods we'll likely use over the next century in an area the size of a football field. Nothing says you have to store that in salt mines - you sould store it in sealed casks above ground with continual monitoring for leaks and automated systems to transfer the waste of any leaking cask to a new one (perhaps less hands-off than the bury-and-forget model, but still not a major burden). Of course the very radioactivity of "spent" fuel that makes so many ignorant people afraid of it is the plain evidence that it should not be disposed of at all; it's still FULL of usable energy that can be obtained by re-processing the rods. If you actually consume all the energy available (by use, re-processing, use, re-processing, etc), then the "spent" fuel would no longer be highly radioactive (duh).
If we used only a small portion of the energy available in another source and then fussed about how to store all the "spent" material, we'd be nuts. Nobody could operate a car if all the "spent" fuel had to be captured and stored for a thousand years to "save the planet". If we treated all the toxic effects of ANY other power source with the same level of paranoia, we'd all move back into caves and give-up on that crazy new-fangled "fire" stuff that some people recklessly use to stay warm and cook food. Wanna store all the tailings of a rare-earth minerals mine as a "cost" of operating wind farm?
As for safety: Nobody has ever died from a nuclear power accident in the U.S. The same cannot be said for any other industrial-scale power source - people in the petroleum industry die every year, same for coal - we've even had people killed in wind farms. Fatalities at Chernobyl simply cannot be used as a mark against US nuclear - no plant like Chernobyl would have ever been built in the U.S.
After all, it seems the only advantage of nuclear energy was to avoid emitting greenhouse gas (which is a big advantage). It is not cheap, and as usual, the cost overhead will not be payed by the one that benefited from selling it once.
The estimates assumed current regulations, a minimum of graft, and a reasonable place to put the spent fuel.
Those are reasonable assumptions. We could decommission these plants for the cited price. It would require doing things efficiently however...
Given that for political reasons we can't do anything efficiently... just take all prices cited by government offices and assume conflicting regulations will slow everything down, the majority of all money spent will be stolen, and that when complete whatever it is won't actually work properly.
Because that's how we do things now.
It took us 4 years to build the golden gate bridge... now it takes us 15 years to decommission a power plant.
Its pathetic. Queue some witless fucktard that is going to defend the decay, the delay, the incompetence, and the waste. Let me stop you right there. It is people like your inevitable self that make this situation even possible. If people like you kept your mouths shut then maybe just maybe the system could be shamed into doing its actual job. But you won't be quiet. Sure sure... keep it up... we can't stop you from shitting all over everything. But it doesn't mean we ever forget things were better and could be again.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It is hard to understand how we have arrived at this point. When we were developing the shipping containers for the spent elements we made it a simple process with simple tools. Normal trucks could be loaded with existing equipment. The thermal heat was to dissipated by the same type of radiators that were used in schools and office buildings. The cask crash frame was specked to survive a drop test from several floors. Every one in the Lab wished they could have one at home. No more heating bills for sure. Others argued that they could be used for Aquaculture in cold climates. Since the dimension's and materials are well known, it should be a fairly simple industrial process to salvage and reprocess the spent elements without endangering life. The problem is that a closed loop energy source like this could destroy the fossil fuel industry. BTW, I was one of the Lab Techs building and operating rig's to gather heat transfer data.
Nuclear power has always been a pipe dream of some sort.
Not in France.
"France derives over 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. This is due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation, and gains over EUR 3 billion per year from this.
France has been very active in developing nuclear technology. Reactors and fuel products and services are a major export.
It is building its first Generation III reactor.
About 17% of France's electricity is from recycled nuclear fuel."
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Manhattan or Chicago to a "greenfield state"?
It's stupid to spend piles of money turning a useful facility into a "pristine" grassy prarie just so some eco-friendly big city dwellers can celebrate that butterflies and jackrabbits are happy in some far-off bit of countryside those "city folk" are never going to visit anyway. If we must spend a small fortune turning a nuclear plant into a grassy parkland, I vote we do the same to Manhattan. The people in NYC can find other places to live and work; the place they currently contaminate with their buildings and streets and sewers etc USED to be pristine "wetlands" and were almost certainly home to many endangered species.
Once society decides to place a nuclear plant (or a city) on a particular site then the best thing would be to permanently use that site for that purpose.
These comments are a bunch of ignorant crap.
First: Yucca Mt. was not stopped because of NIMBY-ism. It was stopped because it was found to be technically infeasible. This was learned by studying the spread of contained waste at Hanford, and some of the same issues will occur in Yucca Mt. Since that time, a similar storage facility in New Mexico; WIPP, just had a major accident last year. This "disposal" technology is, unfortunately NOT proven. Leaving it on site at each plant, is, unfortunately, the ONLY "proven" disposal method.
Second: The original costs were determined based on past costs, in smaller test labs and NOT 40-year-old production sites. These costs do not account for things like; oh our steam generator tubes fractured and spewed actual, deadly radiation through the whole primary cooling system (SONGS). Or; after routine use, damaged fuel rods (which is the case at Fukushima; even BEFORE the accident). Or even cases like the Humbolt Bay Nuclear Power Plant, where they spent $1 million, JUST investigating the loss of three fuel rods. (they still don't know where these rods went - maybe a bookkeeping error? oh well. Just some fuel rods, eh?)
I know that when I started my career, I was not very good at estimating how many hours I would spend on a given task. After years of experience, I learned how long things really took, I applied that experience in my estimates, and I'm much more accurate now. Sample-size matters. (and so does process). And both of these apply, in the case of estimating costs of decomissioning nuclear reactors; and dispositioning waste. Unfortunately, in the latter case, because we don't have experience in successful waste disposal, we're stuck with hundreds of thousands of tons of the stuff. Sitting out; pretty much our safest known option at this point.
First, are we talking inflation adjusted dollars? Second, a large part of the problem is the continued ever since the 70s anti-nuclear power hysteria. This has greatly inflated costs, danger estimates, required procedures and so on. It is also why we have no spend fuel repository although we no several ways to create a quite good one. And it is also why all forms of breeder reactors, even those not good for making weapon grade materials, were killed. That move means there is around 20x more "nuclear waste" than there would otherwise be as 95% of it would have been used in a breeder. Lastly it is why we can't build any more modern designs that are much safer and more efficient. Even though nuclear with the antiquated designs has a three orders of magnitude better safety record in terms of number of deaths per TwH generated than coal and two orders of magnitude better than oil and gas.
So don't let this railroad you to the wrong conclusion.
This is about the funds reserved for decommissioning out of the profits made from the plant while in operation. The idea is that you create a fund where you put in money for every KWh sold. Then, by the end of the lifetime of the plant, you use those funds to adequately deal with what needs to be done to keep the radiation and poison out of the environment. If those funds aren't sufficient because of miscalculations or bad fund management (sub prime mortgages anyone?) Houston won't help you with your problem and Washington will have to step in.
As far as I know this hasn't resulted in any nuclear facility being abandoned and the rods exposed to the elements, but it's something we need to look at in order to avoid state and federal tax money having to be spent. We all know that the guys cutting the corners in budget estimates will grant themselves big bonuses for saving so much money and they'll be long gone when the radiation hits the fan. In the end citizens will pay for those bonuses and keeping the situation safe, so getting the calculations redone and adjusting the funds percentages is in order.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
You must be cheap labour, Bangladesh rates? A typical restoration costs way more in time and material than an equivalent new vehicle would cost. Not only that, you'd be left with an inefficient design that wouldn't benefit from 30-40 years of improvements in efficiency and safety. This applies both to cars and nuclear power plants. What you *could* do however is use the same location (providing it's a safe location according to current standards) and share spent fuel facilities and such. That way you would save money by building your new plant right next to the old one and only have a few decommissioned buildings on the site and re-use what is smart/cheaper to reuse.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The Space Shuttle was a partial failure because it was a compromise. The military wanted a weapons platform. NASA wanted a research platform. What each got was a compromise. It wasn't really great as a weapons platform, and wasn't really great as a research platform. The US energy-from-nuclear strategy is a similar partial failure, except that its a more expensive one. The US government wanted a nuclear energy program that could be used to build things that go boom (big big boom!). They had the experimental reactors in the 1960's that were better at producing electricity, but no earth-shattering kaboom! They had reactors too that could make products that were really good at making the stuff for the kaboom, but they wanted electricity customers to pay for it, so the compromise. It was the US secretary of defence in (I think 1974) that put the final nail in the coffin for reactors that were really good at making power. Along with that, easy-to-recycle nuclear products, and by that I mean either 1) highly radioactive with a very short half life, you you keep it behind 4 meters of lead for 3 years, then its inert, or 2) its almost indistinguishable from background radiation, and if you ate it every day of your life, you would have less extra radiation in you than you would by living in a concrete rather than wood basement (concrete naturally gives off very small amounts of radiation). The high expense is needless and stupid and a bad compromise.
Why don't we use the lawyers to line the containment facility? There is a near limitless supply of lawyers.
Not talking main structure here, just internal, cosmetic purposes.
There has to be a huge cost saving this way.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
'The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it.
Of course it takes longer to decommission than to build. When it was built all the materials were essentially safe, non-toxic materials where handling is easy, well-understood, and well supported by standard systems, factories and the like. When it is torn down much of the material is unsafe or toxic to some degree, some is extremely unsafe and toxic, and all of it must be dealt with in situ using systems that are not commonly used elsewhere. Handling toxic material safely takes more time than handling safe materials. The extended time leads naturally to extended cost. As wise people have observed, time is money.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Blame environmentalists, when the Koch Brothers are spewing out the bird killing mantra,
These decommissioning costs should be compared to the annual profit. I don't know a lot about the development in power costs and wages in the US. Let us assume a profit of $100 million per year for the power plant. Then you are still left with $2 billion of profit minus the construction cost, which seems ok ;)
were right again.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
Well, it would vary quite a bit - how much space each plant 'takes up', how much is owned around it varies by OOMS. Palo Verde has 4k acres.
Surry Power Station, on the other hand, only has 840 acres. Commissioned in 1972 it's more likely to be decomissioned sooner than Palo Verde.
Still, per the NEI all nuclear waste nuclear fuel for the last 50 years would fit in a football field to a depth of 7 yards. Given that a football field is 1.3 acres, I'm confident that you could fit a few eons worth of waste fuel into the Surry site. Accepting low and medium level waste would shorten the ability to store it substantially.
I don't read AC A human right
"Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000-7.04 million deaths and 80-240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces."
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/...
Why not build a damn plant that won't need to be knocked down in half a century?
The goddamn Egyptians constructions are still highly visible thousands of years later, it isn't a hard ask is it?
Considering how important nuclear is, I think the extra expense - which would likely be half as much as the cost of decommisioning it and leaving it in semi-permanent ruin - is TOTALLY worth it to keep it around for longer than most of us, our kids and kids kids will live.
Oh noooo, we gotta save money NOW, can't be wasting extra money on those thousands of pointless reports to some twat behind a desk that will never read them and lead to a partially-global disaster if it fails. All he is doing with it is buying an extra large train set so he can eat expensive steaks and drink expensive drinks while watching his life go through the 1:25 scale tunnel and never return.
Why is the damn world so against building ACTUAL permanent structures when they are so hugely important like this?
Make it easy to upgrade THE INSIDES of it, make it secure, make it even lock-down and implode in on itself if requested to prevent disasters. (with obvious safety structures all around it to prevent leakage. NOT CONCRETE DAMN IT)
Don't build a power station, build a home to HOUSE the power station for a few centuries.
Also, use a breeder instead of the crappy old ones. I think that is more or less implied though.
The plants are breaking down. They are used. Decommissioning Maine Yankee (900 MWe) took eight years and cost $500 million. It ran for 25 years. For Humboldt Bay(63 MWe) it is $982.3 million http://www.dra.ca.gov/general.... it ran for 13 years. Vermont Yankee (620 MWe) is expected to cost $1 billion to decommission http://cleantechnica.com/2014/... after a run of 42 years. This estimate will likely balloon. There is severe ground contamination at the plant site and perhaps beyond its perimeter as well. Crystal River (860 MWe) ran for 32 years and is estimated to cost $1.18. billion http://www.tampabay.com/news/b... This is low ball because sea level rise will make the site vulnerable to storm surge and letting it sit for 60 years will not be an option. The more contamination, the greater the decommissioning cost. Extending licenses for power plants may double or triple the decommissioning cost owing to larger contamination and for sea level plants, a rush to decommission as the storm surge risk becomes higher.
Really simple method of disposal is incineration of high level nuclear waste:
1. it solves the long term storage problem as there is no longer any reason for long term thinking.
2. it solves the human overpopulation problem (creating real zombies with flesh hanging off 'em)
3. since huge radiation release is guaranteed, no need to build expensive containment vessels for nuke power stations...
4. more nukes, more incineration, more more MORE MORE moar! MOAR !! MOAR !!!.
Argh! Mein Fuhrer I kann valk!
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
I graduated from an engineering course many years ago. Some of the people I went to school with went on to work in the nuclear industry. Many years later we are attending the annual alumni dinner and get to swapping "war" stories. One of the nuke types had been on a project to estimate the cost of refurbishing a nuclear plant. The numbers were submitted to the executives who then submitted something to the politicians. The numbers bandied about in the media as stated by the politicians were about 30% of the originals. The project was approved, several years of hard work and "going over budget" later the job came in at less than 1 million from the original estimate. The dinner conversation revolved around whether the execs had cooked the numbers to make it look good or whether the politicians had told them to cook the numbers to make it look good.
Do you think the coliseum came in at the price announced by Caesar or the one the engineers submitted? Same dance different partner.
Yes I know engineers screw up but you have to exame the entire chain to find all the weakest links.
To monitor them and make sure the material does not fall into the hands of terrorists or spill into the nearby river costs $8 million per year.'"
And dealing with the aftermath of letting them spill into a river or fall into the hands of terrorists would cost less???
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I sure hope the people aren't fronting the bill of the decommissioning of these plants. The people that got paid for the electricity should be paying to remove the plants no matter how much it cost.
If the green-weenie's could get over themselves and let the grown-ups transport the stuff to that site, we would be fine. Have you seen the destructive tests that they have been done by the Feds with the rod-transport vessels? Hit by a 55 MPH freight train then placed in a pool of diesel fuel and burnt for two hours... still didn't impinge upon the contents???! We have a viable solution, now we need to clear the way for the adults in the room to use it.
It is the cry babies who are holding things up. Yucca was doomed as soon as they started reporting fake data. Get over it. Let's look for something viable.
Instead, replace the current OLD gen I and II reactors with new gen III+ and IV reactors. mPower would be a great one to add. More importantly, thorium reactors would allow these companies to burn up most of their 'waste', all of which would allow these companies to make loads of money, while providing cheaper power.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Burying the CURRENT waste, is just wrong. Instead, burn up 95% of the current 'waste', and then bury what is left, which would only be 5% volume and would be safe in under 200 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
... the money. The technology is only touted in service to the pursuit of the money. Is that a paradigm that should be trusted? Is it any wonder that it always costs more than advertised in the recruitment brochure?
You don't know what you are talking about, clearly. They never reported fake data. I personally know the program manager who was in charge of the design and construction phases. Yucca mountain is entirely safe, especially in relation to the alternatives. It's not about crying, it's about dealing with facts and not NIMBY emotionalism or environmentalist emotionalism.
Another inaccurate article. It even contradicts itself. The spend fuel rods will cost money whether the plant is decommissioned or not. To decommission a power plant, you remove all the radioactive stuff, destroy all the sensitive nuclear equipment, and knock down the building like any other building.
Sort of the same way pensions work right? Unless you're company decides to raid the pension for short term financial issues and goes bankrupt...
Unlike pension funds, decommissioning funds aren't really raidable.
Claiming that the original estimates didn't include inflation is a a minimum disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.
Didn't claim that. Didn't word it right, but construction costs* have risen above inflation for quite a few years.
As for new developments- I believe it's a mix of many things. Safety standards increased, in some cases above what I'd consider 'sane'. Parts became contaminated that wasn't forseen in the original plan. No long term storage site ever opened up(Yucca Mountain), which increases costs because there's often no where to move the waste, so it has to be kept on site. Construction costs soared past expectations. Etc...
*And deconstruction is a form of construction, utilizing much of the same equipment and labor skills.
I don't read AC A human right
I know that you probably meant that in jest. But this line is confused almost as often as 'beware fighting monsters lest you become a monster yourself'. The point being that it is good to become a monster and stare into the abyss.
In the play Henry VI that line is spoken by Dick the Butcher and the point was if you cleared out the lawyers it would be even easier to install a new king. Lawyers and Judges being a good line of defense for the common people.
Your friend must be lying to you then. http://www.nature.com/nature/j...
France's large nuclear program goes back to 1973, Middle East BS, the "oil shock." Most of its electricity came from oil burners. They had a choice of being dependent on foreign oil, or nuclear. Decommissioning costs are an issue there, too. Brennellis is at 20X estimates, still going. Over the next ten years 22 of France's 58 reactors will turn 40. Funding is insufficient, as here.
The problems are different, but all involve dollars. France politically could maybe pull off rate increases, but in the current US environment? Trouble. Not just NIMBYs wielding BANANAS. Closed five last year for economic reasons, canceled another 8. Natural gas is killing them. So much oil is being shipped from Canada, Detroit has cars sitting and waiting for available trains. Nukes need 600 people to run a plant, others get by with 100. They are stuck with large inventories of spent fuel, resisting the move to cask storage, as they are well aware stashing it "temporarily" in the parking lot will become the defacto storage solution. There is no place to put it. There are zero dollars in private money for new stuff, which start at 10 billion, and 10 years before a payback.
Exelon's Nuclear Matters lobby org has just drafted Carol Browner to hellp legislate the thing back in their favor. Efforts include getting rid of solar and wind subsidies, getting themselves considered as "renewable" (New York) and pushing to receive some sort of credit for being "reliable". The effort to squash renewables will likely cause some conflicts their "green" selling point.
In this environment, nobody wants to talk about pre-existing troublesome expenses.
Decommissioning costs are high because anything even with fairly low radioactivity must be disposed as if it were profoundly dangerous.
If we adopt radiation standards that consider living in Denver and SLC safe, nuclear site decommissioning costs would drop perhaps by 40%.
Environmental Standards for Uranium Fuel Cycle Facilities: Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) http://www.epa.gov/radiation/l...
EPA establishes certain generally applicable environmental standards to protect human health and the environment from radioactive materials. Issued in 1977, “Environmental Radiation Protection Standards for Nuclear Power Operations” (40 CFR 190) limit the radiation releases and doses to the public from the normal operations of nuclear power plants and other uranium fuel cycle facilities—the facilities involved in the manufacture and use of uranium fuel for generating electrical power.
mac, you are a student in this field, IIRC? What do the folks from within that circle think? Who has run the numbers on this, where did the "40%" come from? Thanks.
Besides that silly little issue that there is no safe way to store nuclear waste that has a half life that will probably outlive humanity, it has often proven to not be cost effective when you add up construction, INSURANCE and decomishining costs. Plants have a limited life and can't be refurbished as other energy producers. Very few sane people want to invest in such a sketchy investment.
I have been studying nuclear power since the outrageous absurd statements that were made anti nuclear power back them.
The more I dug the cleared it became that most of the nuclear cost problems are a result of way too zealous nuclear regulation.
Like 99% of the knowledge I accumulated after high school, I learned by myself.
I recently completed a college intro course to nuclear technology, with an A+ grade:
https://class.coursera.org/nuc...
It made those same claims in general terms. What the course and you'll see.
Radiation is everywhere, alpha, beta, gamma, x-ray, microwave radiation isn't something we can avoid.
Our body is constantly producing beta and gamma radiation.
Anybody that learn the basics about radiation quickly sees all the anti nuclear BS from a far more logical lenses, and see how much the anti nuclear prey on our ignorance.
BTW its Marcelo. m.a.c.pacheco
I will check it out. Good work there. The difference between what folks say is striking. This one says Chernobyl killed 60 or so, that one, a million. We are blessed to have all this information, this great tool, our struggle is to know what is true.
1986, word leaked out about Chernobyl. They were lying, trying to cover it up. Weatherman on TV talked about the passing air, the clouds, it is there, in the clouds, in the air over my head. He advised, if it rained, do not go outside.
It rained. Radoiactive rain. That was my moment of decision on the matter.
Chernobyl, Fukushima are an unacceptable. Leave your home with the clothes on your back, never return. Then, as soon as possible, get rid of the clothing. Tech can only be as good as the people. Repeatedly, the industry folds safety concerns for economic reasons, Japan and here. They lie. Japan lied, is still lying. There are three people I trust on the matter, Arnie Gunderson, Bob Alvarez and Dave Lockbaum. I should note that none of those three trusts them either. Listen to them, listen to their words, their arguments.
Gunderson called every aspect of Fukushima from the first month. Contradicting all the official, and expert statements at the time. Meltdowns, containment lost, radioactivity from groundwater to the sea. Tepco over their head, a management firm, not engineers. Spent fuel found all around. The amount of radioactivity far higher than stated.
And, that unit three was a prompt criticality. Yup. Black mushroom cloud, volatilized fuel. The world has not caught up with that, yet. NRC says it never happened, can't happen. I would be interested to hear your input. http://vimeo.com/22865967
The United States, due to the cold war escapade, our gift for spending Ten Trillion dollars, Ten Million Million dollars, for that we have an area the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, reeking with the stuff. Crap from the Manhattan Project is still a problem. They do not take care of business, they do not get it done. Then, they lie. There are virtually no variations from this.
Alvin Weinberg, a notable exception, a great and good man. Yanosuke Hirai of the Onagawa NPP. Closer to the quake center, a larger tsunami, instead of folks having to flee in terror, it became a sanctuary from the cold. MR Hirai is credited with that. He is described as a stern, old school man who was not to be contradicted. Alas, there seem to be few like those two great and good men.
It would be significantly better if it all of this stuff actually was not that dangerous. But, as should be clear by now, I do not trust them, it is too convenient. I immediately reject it as an effort to legislate the problem away. Hey, nobody can prove they got cancer from it, right? Japan has raised the "safe" level, cut off payments to folks and said, Okay, move back home now.
I am not neutral in the matter, I do not trust them. I am listening. But I will be damned, going forward? It will Not be business as usual. Past performance forces me to no other position than to say to the industry, to advocates, prove it. Get it done. Deal honestly with the existing issues, then talk to me about more, better newer, whatever. But until then? The answer is a definitive and unqualified No.
Marcelo, it is good to speak with you, my name is Jimmy. You keep at it, be one that listens to both sides, because both have serious people, worthy of our attention.
Later.
Current nuclear is the only non fossil fuel electricity source that is reliable, trustworthy.
Coal = tens of thousand times more lethal than nuclear, extremelly filthy (specially for those living close to a coal power plant or mine)
Natural gas = if you don't think more CO2 in the atmosphere is a problem, then natural gas is ok until we run out of it, yet it's about 5x to 10x more deadly than nuclear
Hydro = cheap, clean, great, if you have it, tap it, some countries have lots of it, like my Brazil, but most can't even get 1/3 of their electricity from hydro, but there is always the risk of the worst drought that happens even decade or two (happening right now), but it's actually extremely deadly to people living downstream from the Dam (even more deadly per GWh produced than natural gas)
Solar = Great for daylight electricity, but what about the night, kills a dozen solar panels installers every year
Wind = Turbines seldom produce over 20% of name plate capacity (even in areas with strong winds), unless wind is very strong, power = wind speed cubed, so any tiny oscilations in wind speed = large fluctuations in power output, so it's suicide to get even 40% of a country's wind from wind, since millions of wind turbines are required worldwide to make a dent in electricity production likely kill dozens per year due to maintenance accidents
Geothermal = much like hydro, except no drought problem (only available in rare places)
Biomass = very limited resource, we must take full advantage of waste -> biodigestor -> natural gas sources
Nuclear = only baseload power source that doesn't produce CO2, modern nuclear plants operate with 97-98% uptime, only stop on scheduled maintenance or in scenarios that require preventive shutdowns (earthquakes, hurricanes for instance). No modern nuclear power plant suffered a meltdown. Only old plants (AKA Gen II nukes) ever suffered meltdowns, Gen III nukes are immune to every known nuclear accident scenario. Just existing depleted uranium, plutonium and spent nuclear fuel stockpiles enough to power the earth for hundreds of year using fast reactors (not my favorite, but better than existing light water nukes).
Anti nuclear pundits are effectively being pro coal and natural gas. Being anti nuclear in Europe = relying on Mr Putin or using filthy coal.
The big issue about nuclear is its complex, so it's easy to form an anti nuclear opinion. I'm yet to discover anybody without an STEM college degree that is pro nuclear. It's easy to get distracted by the miss information.
Don't get me started on energy storage using batteries, the cost x benefit analysis just don't add up. Perhaps in another 15 years.
Prompt criticality accidents doesn't mean nuclear explosion. A nuclear explosion would have incinerated all of the reactors containments (internal fuel integrity, primary reactor containment, secondary reactor containment aka reactor building).
Plus once a reactor is shutdown, prompt criticality is impossible. Perhaps on Gen I reactors (all retired for at least 25 years now), but not even on any of Fukushima reactors.
If the radioactivity were that bad, where are the radiation deaths ? Where are the thousands of cancers ? That's the beginning of the anti nuclear BS.
Today radiation even a mile from the Fukushima reactors have a much lower health risk than living in downtown Tokyo, yet it's ok to live in Tokyo, but people can't even opt to return to Fukushima ! If you realized how much of a health hazard coal mining, coal powerplants and every chemical industry dealing with chroline / fluor gas, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, lead. Those are generally an order of magnitude more serious health hazard. But they don't have the nuclear is dangerous media sensation target painted on them.
If we realized that we need thousands of Gen III / Gen III+ / Gen IV reactors to provide baseload power worldwide, and that those are SAFE, we could move on from this nuclear is risky generalization. And start a campaign to migrate Gen II reactors to Gen III+ reactors ASAP.
My bottom line is that even current light water reactors like an AP1000 are a necessary evil. I call them somewhat evil not because they are unsafe (they are safe enough I would live right at the fence post), but because they only use 0,5% of mined uranium without reprocessing (like done in France, Japan, Russia, UK and a few more countries), a little over 1% with maximum reprocessing. The nuclear waste problem is mostly a result of choosing not to reprocess. France produces half as much GWh / year as the USA, yet all of its long lived nuclear waste is kept in a single site, without need for deep geological storage.
Using more advanced reprocessing and separation of fission products would result in 81% of nuclear waste needing storage for just 10 years, 19% would need storage for 300 years, and all the remaining materials that require longer storage are still fuel, and can be burned using either molten salt or fast reactors.
Cancer? A useless argument. Who can really say what causes this or that? It is a booming cause of death since 1950. Why? Who knows? Twinkies? Coca cola, that and steak sandwiches. Alexey V. Yablokov 2006 book, says a million died from Chernobyl. Jay M. Gould , Benjamin A. Goldman did an "Excess death study". Claim 40,000 US deaths after Chernobyl.
I do not know the truth about this. But the difference of opinion, the different numbers from this scientist and that could not be more stark. Maybe one is correct maybe this other. How do we know? i have given up on that.
Hang out at Lake Karachay for one hour. Die. At some point, we all agree, it is possible for this stuff to kill. All agree. There is an amount that is too much.
It is Not Acceptable to have to abandon New York City. No amount of coal or fossil fuel or natural gas, or low fat artificially flavored strawberry yogurt poses this level of threat.
That is my bottom line.
If radioactivity from nuclear power stations posed even a small health hazard, there would a pattern of elevated cancers among nuclear workers. There is none.
Living at 4000 meters altitude (12000 feet) results in a radiation dosage 6x higher than radiation standards from a nuclear power plant.
The NRC essentially believes living in Denver and SLC is risky and living in Aspen is deadly. No it's not a different type of radiation, it's all gamma, beta, alpha, radiation. Cosmic rays (specially at high altitudes) contain lots of high energy gammas. Yes, the same NRC that is blamed to being buddies with the nuclear industry. It's actually quite hated by the industry for their utter lack of commonsense.
Flying in an airliner subjects people to 20x the radiation dosages than a sea level. Where is the pattern of airline pilots / flight attendants with huge cancer levels ?
People have returned to the closest villages near Chernobyl where radiation is over 10x above nuclear radiation standards for the public. Watch Pandora's Promise, please.
What you are defending we call the FUD anti nuclear campaign. They have to prove nothing, spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt is enough.
Go attack head on every coal power station first. Get rid of all coal in the world. Then get rid of natural gas.
Current solar/wind efforts in Germany lead to higher CO2 emissions due to the hash decision to shutdown the oldest nuclear power plants.
If we assume all nuclear electricity would otherwise have been provided by coal, then nuclear have saved millions of lives.
Think about that !
A Chernobyl like accident has a chance of happening again like one in a million. It's zero reason to kill future nuclear power.
It's like saying no to every new Hydro dam due to the Baqiao-China dam burst in the 70s that killed 170k people. Wait, actually Green Peace considers big hydro power stations murderous too. It provides 70+% of my Brazil's electricity production.
A Chernobyl like accident has a chance of happening again like one in a million.
Probabilistic Risk assessment. I love that stuff. Lets call it one in a billion. Give each employee one opportunity to completely screw up per day...
435 nukes x 10 years x 365 days x 600 employees equals...
A Billion!
So based on my billion wild ass guess, and three generally bullshit things I multipled together I came up with what? The Bullshit that there should be an accident every 10 years. Well, that turns out to be actually true, but nevemind that. The problem is, some hungover idiot is going to put a forklift through it.
So, should Japan not evacuate Fukushima? Should Putin start a Discount Homestead act for Chernobyl?
Please go out and complete an into to nuclear technology course, show you can actually grasp all technical parameters of a reactor. That you know the difference between the really disastrous pre-Chernobyl RBMK, to a way safer Three Mile Island/Fukushima Gen II to an AP1000 to a fast sodium reactor to a FLiBe Molten Salt reactor.
https://class.coursera.org/nuc...
Plus once a reactor is shutdown, prompt criticality is impossible. Perhaps on Gen I reactors (all retired for at least 25 years now), but not even on any of Fukushima reactors.
This is the official position, NRC. Proof of concept was in the Borax experiments, years ago. The criticality was in the fuel pool. Not the reactor. The reactors just melted. Harmlessly, except the building is cracked, and ground water is flowing through.
Pumps down after station blackout. No coolant flow. Workers tried to access it, run water, valves did not function. Systems likely broken by earthquake. 3 levels of earthquake resistant gear, descending in toughness as one moved away from the reactor. The stuff thought to not be that important is what gave up. (NHK Documentary) Water boiled off, exposing the spent fuel rods. Hydrogen went boom, as in the others, in less than an instant, Zoom. Black mushroom cloud of volatilized spent fuel.
Check it out. If it is BS, it should be easy to debunk. So far, noone has. Instead, they call him names, say, oh well, he is a denier sort of thing. Really. Arnie's Vid http://vimeo.com/22865967
The Fukushima criticality in the fuel pool is another piece of FUD.
The class monitor of the course I pointed you stated outright there is zero evidence of that.
Who am I going to believe in, somebody with a Nuclear Engineering Masters or an anti nuclear activist ?
I'm not going to take the liberty of copying his statement. But its compelling. It's data based instead of conspiracy theory based.
His name is Cory Stansbury.
Many choose to ignore anything that contradicts preconceived ideas, "accepted thinking, "settled science". TEPCO was certain a tsunami was no threat. They were told about it repeatedly. Arrogance and hubris from men that are accustomed to being the smartest man in the room. This is the fatal flaw. Not the technology. The people.
Transuranics were spread far and wide. How? A very serious question. I do not take it lightly, nor listen to fool's rant. Measures of Xenon gas isotopes would decisively prove/disprove this theory due to a half life measured in hours. That information has not been released. Why?
Arnie Gundersen is no ranting, stoned hippy. He was a gung-ho Nuke industry pro, a true believer. B.A. Nuclear Engineering Cum laud from the serious and respected Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1971) . Master's degree in nuclear engineering thanks to a prestigious Atomic Energy Commission Fellowship (1972). 40 plus years nuclear power engineering experience, holds nuclear safety patent, licensed reactor operator, former nuclear industry senior vice president, managed and coordinated projects at 70-nuclear power plants in the US.
There is nothing of a lightweight in the man.
Arnie found radioactivity in an office safe.(IIRC) Well, how could that happen, he properly asked, and insisted on an answer. He was fired. Became a whistleblower, they tried to destroy him. He ended up broke, but not broken, and now "out of the priesthood". He dedicated his life to increased safety. His approach is cool, calm, fact based, science. After Fukushima he decided there are no safe Nukes. Because, People.40 good years, and one very bad day. The risks are not manageable over the long term. Odds are, something is going to break. The proof is in the results.
Here, many links about finding fuel bits http://www.zerohedge.com/contr...
google of prompt criticality Fukushima https://www.google.com/#q=prom....
The google search does not yield a scientific rebuttal of his argument. Nor have you attempted to rebut the argument. Nor evidently even bothered to watch the vid? Here is the link, again http://vimeo.com/22865967
Fukushima is permanently abandoned. You say the risks are over stated. Was the evacuation an error? Inside the buildings, levels are so high that machines cannot function. Men must enter this dangerous place, risk their lives for other's mistakes, for the next 40 years. Is this an acceptable risk?
The entire industry is threatened, Germany is shutting down. 5 closed last year in the US, another 8 plans canceled. Why? They have themselves to blame. The men in the industry did not listen, called it FUD, scaremongering. They did not act, repeatedly ignored warnings, repeatedly dodged safety issues. Now Japan has 50 reactors turned off. Very expensive rusting junk.
Now here in the US, a move to lower safety standards?
To the question? Fukushima is permanently abandoned. You say the risks are over stated. Was the evacuation an error?
Marcelo, I did not manage to find links to Mr Stansbury? If he has written about this, I am interested. Thanks. And Thanks for the good discussion. These are serious issues, of great consequence.
And feed 'em to a molten salt reactor. :)
That'd cut high level waste by "SomeUngodlyNumber"
Again, go fight Coal plants. They kill people EVERY DAY, by the dozens. You are very close to looking like what I call a PAID anti nuclear activist.
TEPCO upper management are a bunch of idiots, that doesn't make every other nuclear operator in the world idiots too ! You are passing judgement over the entire nuclear industry based on an isolated incident of stupidity.
If there is one thing I agree with you is that 1970s and 80s corporations showed a lot of deeply evil behavior. It was before the internet, before a whistleblower could make his case to tens of millions over the course of a month. But it's the past. The reality today is deeply different. Today the public is able to put mass pressure over any minor appearance of reckless behavior.
Have you seen a coal ash pile ? Do you understand how many tons of mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and other poisonous metals are accumulated in those piles over a decade ? Over the course of a decade a large coal power plant site burns dozens of millions of tons of coal, producing close to a million tons of coal ash, that stuff is deadly. And it's so much they can't afford to secure it like spent nuclear fuel. Go fight the real fight !
Mr. Stansbury posted to the course discussions. A week ago it was still possible to cram the course (doing the tests). The tests deadlines are past due, so I'm not sure it's possible to enroll the course. He had access to pictures of the spent fuel pools in question, should a criticality even in the fuel pool took place there would be evidence (things would melt big time), there was no indications.
Asking the nuke industry to address its longstanding issues is not a pro coal argument. Coal's issues are not an answer to nuke problems.
So the argument is a dodge, a distraction from another reality. Threat level? Different time zones, orders of magnitude difference, an utterly laughable comparison. Playing with nuclear gadgets has resulted in the world abandoning areas the size of Delaware and three or four Rhode Islands combined, now no-go zones. Nuclear toys have created a waste more deadly than anything in nature, capable of killing all biota for hundreds of thousands of years. No comparison at all is possible.
Oh but look at all the dead people who have died. We may work that out. Why do we die? It is the way. I point to this, drinking killed the man. He was run over by a beer truck.
To answer the presented impressive numbers graphs and Power Point Presentations there is also this and that serious, statistical and scientifically based analysis that Chernobyl killed a million. Nuke fans insist that is FUD. Coal fans do the same, because the problem? Neither is provable. Both are probable. Probably. Beware of beer trucks.
Coal mining vs Uranium mining? An unattractive couple, no photos at that wedding please. Which one threatens unborn children, 26,587 years from now? We have a winner.
Open question one. Should EPA change standards on safe levels of radioactivity? Begin by accepting science that says there is no no safe level. Proceed to the calculation of acceptable rates of excess deaths. How many will we kill?
EPA uses Maximum Contaminant Levels, 70 years of consumption, one in a million die.
FDAs single dose Derived Intervention Level standard accepts two extra cancer fatalities in 10,000.
How many folks are aware FDA numbers are orders of magnitude beyond EPA? Let's have a discussion on that, shall we? Good idea. Done!
Environmental Standards for Uranium Fuel Cycle Facilities: Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) http://www.epa.gov/radiation/l...
Comments are due June 4, 2014.
It is an open question what happened at Fuku 3. Perhaps someone or something can get in there by 2025 or so and have a look around. In the meantime, radioactivity flows to the sea. How much? Trace amounts already on the US West coast, but neither FDA nor EPA are bothering to measure.
The effort to radioactivitate (sick) the Pacific Ocean is a work in progress. I would have voted to not do that. (Nukes require on the order of a million gallons per minute to cool).
Three of the current problems gifted to us by the the Safe, Reliable and Green Nuclear Industry to our largest body of water are Bioaccumulation, Hot Particles, and clumping. Big fish eat little fish, collect the stuff. Hot particles are bits of the fuel that somehow became shot all about, and clumping is the tendency of this nuke waste to gather together. It is not evenly distributed in the water, as cream in coffee.
We are all players in the World Championship Nuclear Lottery. You probably will not consume that many hot particles. Probably, long odds on that. But they get better, the chance of Winning over time increases as radiation continues to flow to the sea.
The Master Strategists, or World Class Assholes (my view) at TEPCO have recently said, err, we don't think we can stop this, any of you folks have any ideas? That only took them three years to figure out.
Marcelo, you should fight these idiots, that is your necessary, good fight. They are to blame for this. The nuke industry should be screaming, lining up to lynch them, to get them the heck out of there, yesterday. Instead they cower together, ignore the problem, lie, and point the finger at others. NIMBYS and BANANAS and COAL and GLOBAL WARMING. Business as usual. I am not impressed.
Chernobyl was arguably the worst design of anything in the history of t
You have made up your mind, no point in arguing with you. G'bye.