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.

Comments

Back of envelope calculation

[photonic]

I hope my math is correct: Taking numbers from wikipedia, considering only units 2 and 3: both were in operation for a bit more than 29 years and were producing about 1 GW at full power. Ignoring any production time lost for maintenance (my guess is they would run with a duty cycle of 80-90%), the total amount of produced kWh would be: 29 years * 365 days/year * 24 hours/day * 2 GW = 5e14 Wh = 5e11 kWh. The price for the decommissioning would thus come down to around 4.4e9 $ / 5e11 kWh = 0.0086 $/kWh, so let's round it up to 1 cent per kWh. Average price for electricity in the US seems to be around 0.10 $/kW, so the cost for the decommissioning seems acceptable, though not negligible.

Re:CLEAN, SAFE,

[AmiMoJo]

Fixating on that one point is an extremely simplistic argument that seeks to ignore the real issues. Nuclear is extremely expensive, and only appears cheap in the US because of massive subsidy.

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.

It's also worth pointing out that the $4.4bn and 20 year timescale is not the real cost of decommissioning. They are not returning the land to its original state where it could be redeveloped. They are merely encasing the reactors and leaving them to deal with later at additional cost. It also doesn't include the cost of storing material from the decommissioning process that is contaminated for an indefinite period of time. To give you an idea the UK is doing all that to some reactors that were shut down in the early 90s, costing tens of billions of pounds and estimated to take around 80 years for competition (plus indefinite storage of waste from the process, not including spent fuel).

Re:Fusion is your FUTURE corporate boondoggle

[Chas]

Seriously. Listen to the linked audio. Thorium or whatnot will be more difficult to obtain and maintain than Uranium - creating new classes of super-expensive "conflict minerals" - rapidly exhausting sources as expensive, horrible wars are fought.

Yeah. That's flat out bullshit.

Thorium is several orders of magnitude more prevalent in the earth than Uranium. There are a number of fairly large rare-earth mines in the US that are shut down because they're bringing up too much Thorium. This is why China has a lock on rare earths right now. They don't give a shit WHAT they bring up, or what it does. People are cheap and unmonitored dumping is even cheaper.

Additionally, this is why China's got such a hard-on for LFTR

Also, the Thorium yearly tailings brought up by just a few US rare earths mines could power the entire energy needs of the country at current consumption levels for several YEARS.

So there's exactly ZERO "conflict materials" involved. Whoever dreamed this up must pay exactly zero attention to a thing we like to refer to as "reality".