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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!”
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.
Spent fuel is 96% fuel. Combined with the depleted uranium its 99% fuel. It just takes a more efficient reactor to burn it.
Nuclear energy is orders of magnitude environmentally cleaner even than natural gas.
The main issue is nuclear regulators decided to make it economically unfeasible to to nuclear power.
Learn about it and you will find out you are wrong.
https://class.coursera.org/nuc...
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!
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...
I just complete an introductory course to nuclear technology, they say burn fuel, burnup ratio all the time. Technically is wrong, but even nuclear engineers talk about burning nuclear fuel.
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
>"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.
For every person that died from radiation, 10000 died from coal and 100 died from hydro dam bursting.
Get your numbers straight.
Coal alone kills 200k / yr worldwide, 13k / yr in USA.
Hydro killed 170k in a single incident in China in the 70s. It kills hundreds yearly even disregarding that horrible event in China.
Nuclear is the safest energy source in the world. Look up the numbers.
Looking only at civilian nuclear accidents (including mining, transportation, processing, fuel preparation plus reactors), nuclear power have killed less than 1000 people ever, worldwide.
'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
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.
> 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?