Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
Yes, the costs are high, higher than originally predicted, but when averaged out per KWH produced by the plant, its really not that much. These articles always lack the perspective of scale and production life of the plant. D&D costs could go even higher and it would still be a good deal.
By the time they decommission a reactor it is usually 30 or 40 years old. By that point everything is worn out. You could save some hardware and infrastructure; but, you would be replacing most of the equipment, including all the expensive bits. You'd basically end up tearing it all out and rebuilding it new. Car analogy: I'm restoring a 40 year old truck. Engine had to be torn down to raw casting and rebuilt with all new parts (only I didn't have to deal with neutron damage or metal embrittlement) The truck chassis and body: Well, I'm tearing everything off the frame and I'm starting from there. It will all get disassembled, cleaned, repaired and painted, then go back through a complete re-assembly process using factory manuals. When I'm done, it'll be a 30-40% new 40 year old truck. If you count my time at typical shop labor rates, it could end up costing almost as much as just going down to the dealer and stroking a check for a brand new one. The new one would probably be safer...
In addition to the lawyers you'd have to kill a significant percentage of environmentalists, plus all the NIMBYs. The real issue isn't decommissioning costs, the real issue is the inability to build new reactors. If it wasn't for the public/political aversion to nuclear reactors, you could decommission the place, build a modern one right beside it, and use the leftover waste to power the new reactor.
A lawyer can't make you do anything. I once had a business partner who froze like a deer in headlights whenever our lawyer opened his mouth. As I said to him, the lawyer's job is to advise you of the trouble you might get into; but there's always *something* to be concerned about; it's *your* job to make a decision and shoulder the consequences. Business people choose which risks to take, and lawyers help them figure out what those risks are, simple as that. If your plans go kaplooie, it's your fault; possibly for hiring the wrong lawyer, or possibly hiring the right lawyer but letting him run your business for you.
This "it's all the lawyer's fault" business is childish baloney. It's not lawyers that keep owners from continuing to use these old reactors, it's the fact that these reactors are old and obsolete. It's not lawyers that made decommissioning the plants more expensive than projected, it's that nobody had ever done such a thing when the costs were estimated, and everyone chose a best case scenario in their plans because they wanted to see the things built. That's a *business* mistake, and an engineering mistake, but unless the lawyer was telling them they'd be able to cart their waste off to the town dump it's not a *legal* mistake.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
>"the claimed benefits"
Wow, you call that a citation? I'm willing to believe that safe/efficient nuclear tech is possible, but Wikipedia is NOT an authoritative source. Got anything better? Maybe a quote from an unbiased nuclear engineer? Respected NGO? Anything?
The word "claimed" was an appeasement to the nuclear deniers, to avoid an edit war erupting on that page. Don't read too much into it.
...
The citation above was just the first thing googled and reflects a consensus among qualified scientists and engineers. I did some more googling for you
Click on the links for the various reactor types: https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms...
"First the EM2 core will be started using 12% enriched uranium and used fuel or depleted uranium (DU). After the initial U235 amount has been consumed in the “starter-part” of the core, enough fissionable material will have been created to switch over to a second part of the core where the nuclear reactions will continue and be fed nuclear waste.."
http://meteolcd.wordpress.com/...
"The scientific method requires that we keep an open mind and change our conclusions when new evidence indicates that we should. Climate change is the new evidence affecting the nuclear debate -- we need low-carbon energy. Current (2nd generation) nuclear reactors are not as fail-safe as possible and they burn less than one percent of the energy in uranium ore. Next (3rd) generation reactors are safer, shutting down automatically in case of anomalies, and are ready to go, but they still leave 99 percent of the energy in long-lived waste piles. 4th generation reactors, tested but not commercially available, can extract all of the energy in the nuclear fuel and burn nuclear waste. We urgently need R&D to make the combination of 3rd and 4th generation reactors available with comprehensive international controls.
James E. Hansen heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. He has held this position since 1981. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University."
http://www.thesciencecouncil.c...
Careful with your NGOs. Some are nuclear deniers that are as purely political and scientifically unfounded as the climate deniers. The climate deniers and nuclear deniers differ only in their political allegiance, they abuse of and rejection of science are quite similar.
Damn right. The main reason Nuclear isn't truly strong in USA, Germany or the UK is they have lots of coal and/or natural gas. The correlation is extremely strong.
But even then, there are dozens of countries producing over 1/3 of their electricity from nuclear. Many use reactors to both produce electricity and provide district heating.
'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