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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.'"
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.
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....
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.
"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.
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...
One, you have serious reading comprehension issues. OP claims coal produces more nuclear waste than nuclear power.
Two, that SA article has been debunked so many times, it isn't even funny. The 'research' it is based on is from 1977 and it discusses coal plants that aren't built anymore. Here, for your reading pleasure: http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
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.