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San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant Dismantling Will Cost $4.4 Billion, Take 20 Years
mdsolar writes with news about the closing of the San Onofre nuclear plant. Dismantling the San Onofre nuclear power plant in Southern California will take two decades and cost $4.4 billion. Southern California Edison on Friday released a road map that calls for decommissioning the twin-reactor plant and restoring the property over two decades, beginning in 2016. U-T San Diego says it could be the most expensive decommissioning in the 70-year history of the nuclear power industry. But Edison CEO Ted Craver says there's already enough money to pay for it. Edison shut down the plant in 2012 after extensive damage was found to tubes carrying radioactive water. It was closed for good last year.
For 2 units, plus a third already shut down one on the site, this is not too bad a cost. Considering the overall lifetime cost of the plant, including D&D, and even though it shut down early, on a cost per kwh basis, it is a good deal for emission free generation.
Unfortunately, many will look at the cost and not have a good perspective / basis for comparison.
The first question that comes to my mind is how much would it cost to just fix the damn pipes?
Make sure you're not assuming that the $4.4B that somebody is going to get is a bug, not a feature. Some people will get extremely rich from this expenditure and that's a powerful motivator.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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The first question that comes to my mind is how much would it cost to just fix the damn pipes?
They would have to replace the entire steam generator. That's been done at a lot of plants, in fact the ones at San O were replaced but defective. A few hundred million. But San O is nearing end of life, shale gas is depressing market prices, and politically California is a hostile environment which has its own costs.
Some of the lost opportunity cost will be borne by the manufacturer of the flawed Steam Generators. But that plant has served well for decades even with an early shutdown.
"too cheap to meter" certainly was an over enthusiastic optimism with nuclear as it was first being deployed. We all know that, but it doesn't make it a bad deal. I never understood the simpleton argument that this was somehow a failure. I guess its just easy to repeat without making an actual point.
It's a sort of logical fallacy.
They believe that because not all objectives were met, the whole thing was a complete failure.
A quote from the article you linked to:
"We live in a culture where we think every janitor should get a $50 an hour benefit package and university students get sex change operations included in their health care plans, whose $50,000 costs are then paid for by federal student loans and federal taxpayer grants and, soon, federal health care underwriting."
PROTIP: Right-wing rant sites typically don't provide good scientific reporting. Do you imagine they would say "solar PV is wonderful, despite those subsidies and Chinese imports we hate so much"?
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The falling cost of renewable energy seems to be an impediment for nuclear having a future.
It's actually so expensive that the UK couldn't find anyone to build new plants, and the only people who were eventually willing demanded special rates well above the normal unit cost of electricity to be guaranteed for the lifetime of the plant. That's on top of all the other subsidies already on offer.
Gas is cheap let's build that. There'll never be aaaaaaaany problem getting gas from the Russians. No sireee. Never mind that local fracking won't supply enough gas.
Nuclear is only the most expensive option when you stubbornly ignore the externalities.
The options are:
1. Renewables (not enough to supply the entire country even using rather optimistic estimates).
2. Coal which is cheap and astonishingly filthy.
3. Gas from Russia.
4. Nuclear.
The thing is the prices are set by the free market. The free market ignores externalities such as pollution and is purely reactive so it never makes a strategically wise choice. Gas is the cheapest option right now, but is not the wisest choice.
This is why we have governments. Left to itself, the free market does not make the best decisions.
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