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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
Is there a shortage of concrete?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
No, Rowe was not a government plant.
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.
uh, slight correction... Yucca Mountain is empty because of the people screaming NIMBY. It was shut down before receiving the first shipment of waste.
Yucca Mountain is full
Ok. Whatever source of information has led you to that belief ...... never go back there. Just don't. They've messed you up and you must get away from them.
Seriously.
In fact there is no waste inside Yucca mountain. Zero.
The only thing we've stored in Yucca mountain is bullshit from Harry Reid and the libtard moonbeamers that run this pathetic romper room country. We keep it there because he is old and when he dies we'll need a continuing supply Harry Reid's bullshit to keep the system running. There is enough bullshit stored in Yucca mountain to keep the system operating for approximately 20 years, during which time we will have to develop a new source of bullshit and transition our system to this new bullshit supply.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
"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 subs are made of metal. Nuclear plants are made of metal and concrete. Radioactive metal is (relatively) easy to deal with. Radioactive concrete, not so much. I can't recall any anti-nuclear activist getting involved in regulating the de-commissioning of nuclear plants. I think you are just talking through your hat.
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...
Obviously you are opposed to state rights, extremely opposed to state rights, at a guess this would make you politically schizophrenic (you are aware it was the state that opposed the facility). If you are going to have a national nuclear waste facility obviously the state affected has to approve it and all states affected by transport of the extremely dangerous material will have to approve the transport of that material through their state. One person has very little outcome on the issue, failure to achieve consensus is a nation wide failure at state and federal level. It seems the bullshit is nation wide and chaotic and prevents any reasonable outcome with regards to pretty much anything. So it would seem you are also contributing.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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?
'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
> 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.
But that's not what the industry told us. They told us they could be returned to greenfield. So they built some of them on land that is, after 35 years, extremely valuable real estate. And now we're left holding the bag, again.
Google Maps Pickering Nuclear. That land is worth, literally, billions. If we're being told that we can never use that land, and that looks *highly* likely, then we would have never built it.
So let's pretend that didn't happen, and blame it on the "eco-friendly big city dwellers" in a wonderful example of everything that's wrong with public discourse.
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.
They can. It's called "eminent domain". It's the process any government uses to seize private property....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
> All the NIMBY types and loud anti-nuke folks have made sure it's too expensive
So they're the ones to blame for Brown's Ferry and TMI, which basically trebled the cost of nukes in the US due to faulty engineering and operations? I guess they were also the reason that the turbine shafts at Darlington kept failing, that the fuel pod got stuck in the AVR, that Superphénix developed leaks in the cooling system, that the Magnox's all had to be dramatically upgraded to get rid of "shine" and that Soviet reactors have nasty positive void coefficients.
Do you really think ridiculous statements like this help the cause?