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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.
Oh well... maybe they can reuse the land for those totally environmentally friendly solar panels. Wait, what do we do with those when they reach end of life? http://www.science20.com/scien...
Decommissioning costs are still a lot less than it would cost to build the plant now. Letting the plant cool down for a few years makes the process simpler and safer, though the reactor vessel is going to be a challenge.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Edison CEO Ted Craver says there's already enough money to pay for it, because Ted can declare bankruptcy on Southern California Edison, making the property a superfund site for taxpayers to pay for. SC Edison would then emege through chapter 11, restructure itself, and continue service in Southern California under another name. its precisely what Hooker Chemical Corporation did after the love canal disaster.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Too cheap to meter
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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 $4.4B that somebody is going to get is a bug, not a feature. Some people will get extremely rich from this expenditure and that's a powerful motivator.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
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.
They're also stuck storing the fuel on site until the federal government comes up with a spent fuel storage solution.
Or until there is a 4th gen reactor available to consume the old waste as its fuel. The waste of a 4th gen is only dangerous for a few centuries rather than tens of thousands of years. In other words 4th gen converts a 10,000 year problem into a 300 year problem, while generating power from "fuel" that has already been mined, processed, and paid for.
There are no defective pipes as such. The defective components are the thousands of small diameter tubes inside the steam generators, which actually had already been replaced, a project many (actually most) of the older plants have done. Due to a design flaw in the components built for this plant, they were wearing out at an accelerated rate.
Growing up nearby (Dana Point) the plant was affectionately known as the Dolly Parton museum. I imagine kids today have a more modern and equally inappropriate name. I for one will be sorry to see such a beautiful landmark be torn down. It will certainly make future vacations to the Grand Tetons mountains more poignant. --El
The Danes got it right. Wind is free.
Wind and solar can't scale to the levels needed yet. Two or three more decades of R&D and engineering are needed. No matter how much you wish otherwise this will not change. Even Denmark with its enthusiasm and pretty good wind conditions expects another 10 years to go from 30% wind to 50% wind, and expect to be using of North Sea fossil fuels for another 40 years.
Your options for electricity in the near term will largely be nuclear or fossil fuels. The goods and services you consume will largely be produced using electricity from fossil fuels.
Don't be a science and economics denier. Solar and wind are not magic, science and engineering take time.
The spent fuel is going to just be sitting there. So, they won't really be finishing the job of decommissioning. The waste at Humboldt Bay is vulnerable to sea level rise so the story there is even less complete.
some fucking idiotic nerd will defend the abomination that is nuclear power as great for the environment or some shit.
Yeah, like the environmental science nerds at NASA "... researchers estimate nuclear power has prevented more than 1.8 million deaths due to air pollution between 1971 and 2009. Given our fears, the findings are counterintuitive. But they're persuasive ..."
http://motherboard.vice.com/bl...
BTW, you do realize you are every bit the science denier as climate change deniers. Nuclear deniers are no different. They merely form their opinion based on left wing **politics** rather than right wing politics. Neither the climate deniers nor the nuclear deniers are based in science.
4th generation is much more expensive than once through and nuclear power is in decline so the wait will be forever. http://www.vox.com/2014/8/1/59...
High levels of renewable energy integration are going on now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Owing to the high opportunity cost of nuclear power, it more likely interfered with preventing even more deaths. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-C...
Is there still a nude beach nearby?
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".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
San Onofre is being shut down due to intentionally obstructive Federal and California regulation. After the leaks were found in the new equipment, SCE was wrangling with the Japanese supplier (Mitsubishi) of the bad tubes and trying to put together the plan to replace them and bring the plant online, but CA anti-nuke activists, incluing the luddites at FOE lobbied Democrat Senator Boxer and the Obama administration to make it unworkable. SCE (who was paying large amounts of money every month for all their basic costs including the employees) could never get an answer from the federal regulators on WHEN their applications to re-start the plant would even be processed if they spent the money to replace the pipes (this was NOT normal). When you are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to operate a plant that is producing nothing, and government regulators keep delaying giving you a date when you will even be able to dream of using it IF you make it over the increasing number of hurdles politically-motivated people keep throwing up, at some point you "pull the plug" and cut your losses.
Nearly all the inflation in the costs of nuclear power has come from regulations and lawsuits. Had it not been for the Ralph Nader style of crusading legal actions designed to kill things (sue anybody making any technology they cannot prove is perfect... and let's not notice that nobody else, like lawyers, are being held to that standard) we would indeed have very cheap and plantiful electricity thanks, in large part, to nuclear power (which has been stuck with ancient tech for many decades because the regulatory/legal environment makes newer safer more-efficient designs uneconomical TO GET CERTIFIED)
You should travel to Arizona and visit the copper mines. Thorium is ling around in piles waiting to be used for something more than dirt. Haiti has plenty ready to use, too, I understand.
Really?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
In addition to being far more plentiful, 100% of thorium can be used as fuel. For uranium, it is about 0.7%.
They should put the funds to decommission a nuclear plant in escrow before it's even built and turned on.
...to put those big scary "$4.4 billion" numbers in there without context. It sounds like a lot of money (especially to people unfamiliar with the industry) but that number is the retail value of approximately 18 months of electrical generation for units 2 & 3 at San Onofre.
While the actual generation of nuclear power in the plant may not have emitted CO2 or other burn products, you can hardly call this emissions free. Don't forget that mining the uranium ore, transporting the uranium ore and some more steps in the production process is done with fossil fuels. Nuclear waste is also a form of emission. Even if it's not directly related to greenhouse effects, it will cause severe effects on humans and nature if not taken care of (in an expensive way). All things considered, nuclear may or may not be smarter to use than coal or even wind energy, it may emit a lot less greenhouse gasses, but I wouldn't want to claim it to be anywhere near emissions free.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Yes, because somehow spewing millions of tons of radioactive materials into the atmosphere is better for humanity than having nuclear reactors in place that do not pollute the atmosphere and cause cell mutation on a global level.
RTFA
For uranium, it is about 0.7%.
Uranium is also 100% via breeder reactors.
It still doesn't change the fact that the types of Uranium currently used in existing nuclear power plants is orders of magnitude rarer than Thorium. Plus there's the problems of enrichment and weaponization.
In a Thorium reactor, you don't enrich Thorium. And any uranium bred in the reactor is unsuitable for bomb making.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Thorium is also a byproduct of rare earth refining. We can get the thorium we need for free as the electronics business drives more mining of RE elements. Until now it has been considered a useless liability.
You can't build nuclear power in California until there is a place to put the waste.
TMI happened less than 2 weeks after the China Syndrome was released so it's easy to see why public opinion would have shifted against nuclear power.
Here's what Carter actually said about nuclear power in '77:
I am announcing today some of my decisions resulting from that review.
First, we will defer indefinitely the commercial reprocessing and recycling of the plutonium produced in the U.S. nuclear power programs. From our own experience, we have concluded that a viable and economic nuclear power program can be sustained without such reprocessing and recycling. The plant at Barnwell, South Carolina, will receive neither Federal encouragement nor funding for its completion as a reprocessing facility.
Second, we will restructure the U.S. breeder reactor program to give greater priority to alternative designs of the breeder and to defer the date when breeder reactors would be put into commercial use.
Third, we will redirect funding of U.S. nuclear research and development programs to accelerate our research into alternative nuclear fuel cycles which do not involve direct access to materials usable in nuclear weapons.
Fourth, we will increase U.S. production capacity for enriched uranium to provide adequate and timely supply of nuclear fuels for domestic and foreign needs.
Fifth, we will propose the necessary legislative steps to permit the U.S. to offer nuclear fuel supply contracts and guarantee delivery of such nuclear fuel to other countries.
Sixth, we will continue to embargo the export of equipment or technology that would permit uranium enrichment and chemical reprocessing.
Seventh, we will continue discussions with supplying and recipient countries alike, of a wide range of international approaches and frameworks that will permit all nations to achieve their energy objectives while reducing the spread of nuclear explosive capability. Among other things, we will explore the establishment of an international nuclear fuel cycle evaluation program aimed at developing alternative fuel cycles and a variety of international and U.S. measures to assure access to nuclear fuel supplies and spent fuel storage for nations sharing common nonproliferation objectives.
The Kemeny commission that Carter appointed to review TMI was made up of people chosen specifically for their neutral position on nuclear power.
This, of course, is highly subjective but I've yet to see anyone point out anti-nuke bias against Kemeny or a member of that committee.
One thing that came out of the review was that a crucial valve had not only failed in the open position on multiple occasions but had nearly caused an accident at Ohio's Davis-Besse facility 18 months prior and Babcock engineers had not notified customers of the problem.
What really resulted from Kemeny's review was that the industry as a whole failed itself and that can't be blamed on Jimmy Carter.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Anyone want to clarify what the problem with thorium is? There is obviously some amount of downside here. I've heard "it can generate weapons grade plutonium", but thats true whether or not you use it; just as we are choosing now not to use it, we could hypothetically use it and choose not to create weaponry from it.
Is the tech not there yet, or what?
Existing stakeholders have put a lot into Uranium and were willing to lobby the Clinton era government to get a Thorium research reactor shut down and hound the head of that project out of the nuclear industry. He dared to suggest that a Thorium reactor would be safer which implied that existing reactors were not safe enough. While that was years ago it seems to be the end of the matter as far as the USA goes.
India was starting mostly from a clean slate and Uranium exports to them were blocked for decades (while they were not blocked to Iraq in the 1980s - funny really), so they had some incentive to use Thorium (plus that's how they got material for their bomb in an unexpected way). Now a lot of places are trying to sell them cheap Uranium so it's uncertain whether they will continue to develop new Thorium based designs, some that look like they can also take expended Uranium fuel rods and use them without any need for reprocessing.
China seems to be ready to try anything they can get.
And this stuff should be more precious than gold, oz for oz. Unfortunately nobody likes working with molten liquid sodium, even the machoest of machoest chemical workers, they balk at the idea of a liquid sodium jet spraying them from a heat exchanger leak. Maintenance is a bitch. But if the best minds, the kinds that are pitted at coming up with the latest ipods and gagdgets, focused on this topic, they could probably come up with some good solution, and the profits to reap are tremendous, as soon as the price of gas hits $5/gal, while the whole thing did not even deserve attention at gas prices of $1/gal out of which most of it back then was taxes, and the crude price was $0.15-0.20/gal, and nowadays it's more like $2-2.50/gal. That's a 10x increase even today, and such 10x things make or break profitability. Helium cooling instead of sodium cooling is not a panacea either, because of lower heat transfer coefficient, and also moderation (so you could use Argon not to moderate, as all Th and U238 reactors require fast neutrons, unlike the U235 ones, the U238 enrichment waste from U235 enrichment is just as precious as the Th waste from mines, or even the U235.), so because of the lower heat transfer and heat carrying capacity you need lots of contact surface area, along the lines of a car radiator shape, and fast gas velocities, and any kind of pluggage in the uniform gas velocity distribution can create local overheating, and local nuclear meltdown, unlike with car radiators, and unlike with liquid sodium immersion where the high heat transfer ability of the liquid molten metal ensures that no voids are left, and no great velocity with highly uniform distribution is required. Molten lead/bismuth eutectic is a bit better than sodium in the getting sprayed all over the place goes, but it melts at higher temperature, and as the Russian submarine experiments prove it, it's a bitch to get flowing and unstuck with an external torch when it freezes. So sodium it is, it's very unsafe if it leaks, but it melts easier, and alloyed as NaK it competes with Hg for low melting point. Maybe the Japs will come up with the nuclear robots, as they are smart, and the most energy dependent on such a technology. Perhaps that's why they had a Fukushima accident, so that, unlike the Germans, which killed their nuclear program in face of a helium gas cooled stacked pyramid of nuclear fuel balls shifting unsafely, the Japanese are supposed to hold the other cheek instead, and bounce back by coming up with robots, that instead of being human companions that looks like anime teenie weenie characters with panties and huge tits and blow out of the water any human female's tongue and lips at the ability to give a sensual blow job, they could focus on something more important to the welfare of their people, and national security, such as designing remote control robots, that piss on being sprayed by liquid sodium, or taking a high total body radiation dose, in fact they get off on bathing in that shit, and keep score on how much total body irradiation their hafnium free zirconium limbs took that day.
Not to mention the thousands of tons of Thorium they buried in Nevada because they didn't have any use for it.
It's best to come in with at least the understanding that national electricity grids are large before coming into such a discussion and wasting so much time typing text based on a faulty premise.
Maybe I should explain what opportunity cost is here. Wind is less expensive than nuclear power. Because of atoms-for-peace, we pursued the more expensive energy source. But, that hit a train wreck as financing collapses in the 70's. Had we followed a more balanced course, we'd have greater carbon free generation from wind power than from nuclear power and health effects from coal would be reduced. So, we missed an opportunity by putting too much money into nuclear power. So, nuclear power has cost the lives that a more balanced approach could have saved.
Nader's sister, at least, opposes nuclear power because it is anti-Jeffersonian. It requires uninterrupted police powers to have a chance at remaining safe. Look how the failed state in Iraq has lost control of nuclear materials. Jefferson thought interruptions might be a requirement from time to time. Nader is better known for automobile safety, which has saved lives and money.
Well we all have our complaints. Everything I've seen shows wind unable to ever scale under current tech. The grid in America can't handle long distribution schemes total wind would require, even if that would work. But, either way, it takes more of a breakdown to battle through than I have time available right now.
We're seeing large wind contributions in parts of the country. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
how does thorium connect to the price of gas? will cars run on thorium instead of gas? mr fusion?
Molten salts, including cyanide salts are routinely used in precision heat treatment/surface chemistry of metals. Most large cities have at least one such facility.
Molten cyanide salt isn't capable of 'double killing' you, any more than molten metallic sodium can triple kill you.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Take a fluid flow course.
Seriously, it's interesting stuff.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They were resonating and were _worn out_ in about a year.
As I understand the history, an engineer decided the old design was unnecessarily complicated. He was wrong.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
And makes sense too. The cost in a reactor is mostly construction and decommissioning, with maintenance/operation being a somewhat distant third. There's not a lot of fuel costs. I mean heck, you look at new Navy reactors and they actually don't accept new fuel, the reactor lasts the life of the ship.
They cost a lot to build and a lot to tear down, but not a ton to operate. Of course those build and teardown costs have to be included in lifetime costs, like any fixed cost does in production.
If you were to break down power costs further, and separate out generation, transmission, and taxes, you'd probably find that construction and decommissioning were a decent bit of the generation costs, with operational costs and profit making up the rest.
As you pointed out: Just because those costs are a lot, doesn't mean it is an issue since the plant generates a lot of power. You see the same kind of thing with chip fabs. Intel's latest 14nm fabs cost them multiple billions to build. Well, that's fine, because they are going to use them to make and sell a lot of chips, so the per unit cost doesn't end up being that bad.
Okay, the tech has been demonstrated. It was initially used for a reactor that was part of an aircraft reactor experiment (which is why we know these things can be made compact).
The "downside" is that the tech hasn't been fully explored since politics played a role in choosing solid fuel reactors as the "winning" tech back in the late 60's and early 70's. So there's some R&D that needs to be done on building modern, full-scale reactors and the processes needed to mass produce them.
Unfortunately the NRC is largely ignorant of the technology and needs to be shepherded along.
Not to mention the ridiculous state of affairs in trying to do ANY work in the nuclear field in the US.
Okay, Thorium reactors also breed some highly radioactive byproducts. Now, the UPSIDE of this is, they're so "hot", that they decay down in a matter of days/weeks/months/years instead of "tens of thousands of years".
Yes, Thorium reactors also breed small amounts Plutonium. But it's Plutonium 238, which is a powerful alpha emitter, but it is NOT "weapons grade". And that's a GOOD THING.
P238 is what NASA uses for nuclear batteries on satellites and deep space probes. And we, currently, can't get any more and making it in current solid fuel reactors is out of the question as the current method of generation starts with Uranium 238 (which CAN be used for breeding weapons-grade plutonium).
NASA has basically said that if we aren't able to manufacture more P238, we're never getting beyond Mars.
The Thorium cycle DOES require a small amount of Uranium to kick-start the Thorium breeder cycle. After that, it produces it's own Uranium, but it's U232, which isn't suitable for weapons production. Basically U232 is a heavy gamma emitter. You COULD, conceivably build bombs out of it, but EVERYONE would know you're doing it WHILE you're doing it, inviting a missile strike or black ops bag team. Assuming they didn't let you just kill yourself from the gamma emissions and then clean up afterward.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Not to mention the thousands of tons of Thorium they buried in Nevada because they didn't have any use for it.
Bingo!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Thallium 238?
You have any supporting material for this? Seriously, not being a dick. Looking for this info to better educate myself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
It's possible you meant Thallium 208 (Historic Name: Thorium C, Half-Life: 3 minutes)?
There are two observationally stable byproducts at Tl203 and Tl205.
The most stable of the remaining isotopes has a half-life of just under 4 years. Most of the rest are measured in hours, seconds and in some cases, milliseconds.
So yes, it's very "hot". But it's extremely short-lived.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Also, hit SUBMIT before I added this portion.
Yes, we have to have a containment facility regardless.
Still, I'd rather have a containment facility for products that decay within the span of a human lifetime, rather than trying to deal with the logistics of designing a facility to "safely" house stuff for thousands of years.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Apparently the shut-down is due to a problem on Mitsubishi's vapor generators, replaced in 2009/2010. Two years later, a leakage of 100+ liters per hour. Very impressive to buy heavy equipment with a two years lifetime ...
A continent is big and if it is calm in one place that does not mean it is calm everywhere. It is also colder in Alaska than Mexico. Different temperatures in different places result in different air pressures and air flows from high pressure to low - wind!
Inconvenient to your premise, but I had to point it out even though I don't give a shit about wind energy and am aware of it's many drawbacks. Making up drawbacks from nowhere however is a different story - I'd rather not have this place seen as a gathering of idiots due to people quoting stuff like your post and assuming we are all like that.
Line losses would be very low from nearby countries such as Denmark and Poland so if it's not windy in the little patch of Germany that has windmills how does that prove your point? Somewhere that's electrically almost in the same place is going to have some wind. Germany already trades electricity with France so why isn't French wind power on your little cherry picked graph if you want to prove your point?
Th is 5x more prevalent. That is *not* orders of magnitude. Oh and that is only if you ignore ocean reserves of Uranium.
China has planned just one LFTR and IIRC it is not even started construction. Th in used is some of the standard reactor designs. ie *not* Liquid anything.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
No its not. U238 is as much a fuel as Th is (they are both fertile, not fuels). At is about 5x less prevalent on land. Not orders of magnitude. You clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Do you really think Germany was down 60GW of wind power at any one instant? Is there even that much wind capacity available at any time? That much of the German total generating capacity available of around 170GW is wind? I find it very difficult to believe so you'll need more than a postage stamp sized cherry picked graph to be convincing, especially after your "get wind from another continent" and similar bleatings of idiocy.
Just give up on this fantasy and use something real to push your point - it may not be as dramatic but you won't be making enemies of everyone that is not a full on nuclear zealot.
You may be more than 1/3 wind but that's the only thing here that is.
Obviously I meant the small coastal area where the windmills are sited. You cannot possibly be as stupid as you pretend so why try that tactic? Pretended stupidity may work in comedy but it's very annoying elsewhere.
Do you really think Germany was down 60GW of wind power at any one instant?
This is a graph of actual wind production figures in Germany at daily resolution for 2011. Even if you don't speak German, the three yellow lines in there represent: nameplate installed capacity (29.06 GW), average power (5.145 GW) and minimal power delivery at 99% confidence (0.918 GW), all at 1 day resolutions (the problems get much worse at finer resolutions). I'd call 1/30th of the install nameplate capacity pretty much zero. With larger installations on a country the scale of Germany (not a small country by any account) what will change is only the absolute values, but the relative proportions of them are going to stay mostly the same. Even if you take the average into account the average production as your goal, wind varies between days easily by 5x or more. Take for instance the troth in the middle of April (04) - that's nearly a week long drop to 1/5th the average output. Who's gonna jump in and pick up that effort? Also, look at the average power in relation to nameplate installed power, about a 4-5x relation. Germany requires 50-80 GW of constant production a day. So are they going to install 300 GW or more of nameplate wind capacity just to get the averages right? That'd be more than a doubling of their current installed capacity of 180 GW across all energy sources. Who's gonna pay for that? And who's gonna smooth the output and how much is that going to cost?(*)
So you see, I have done my homework and actually analyzed real data. Have you done yours?
(*) That same video shows a statistical calculation, taking real wind & solar production data from 2011, combining them and calculating the price of adding storage to the grid that would get around 4/7 of the average in reliable power. Results: ~100 billion Euros for 430 new pumped hydro plants (to replace 3-4 nuclear plants which would cost a fraction of that) or >250 billion Euros if battery storage were used. Keep in mind: these are based on actual combined wind & solar production curves, so you can't just dismiss them as being theoretical - this is based on actual data. You know, reality is that thing which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Indeed, it'll probably be $16.16b by the time they're finished.
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How is that sixty?
Clearly not.
WTF is it with you armchair "one true energy" zealots? You seem to have got a lot worse in the decade since I was working in the electricity generating industry. Why is any lie justified as long as it pushes "the message"? Get back to fucking marketing or whatever you get up to and leave the solution of not having all your energy eggs in one basket to the engineers who have to deal with reality instead of making shit up.
To put it simply, the cost of fuel for a nuclear reactor is miniscule in the overall scheme of things. Coal, while costing less per ton, requires a LOT more fuel to produce the same amount of power.
Well, why is thorium a hard bargain then if fuel isn't a big deal? Yield. Money is spent on nuclear reactors in the buildout phase plus the monitoring/safety and maintenance of the plant, not the fuel. Using thorium doesn't significantly reduce these costs, but significantly reduces the power yield. You can only make reactors so big, and making more reactors cost more than making a higher yield reactor.
These aren't just some random leaky pipes. We're talking about both steam generators, on both units. What happened was the old steam generators were at the end of their design life, so they were replaced with what was supposed to be like-for-like replacement. It turned out the new ones had a design flaw which caused the tubes resonate and vibrate, causing damage early on. The original cost of the steam generators was nearly $1 billion. While they could get new steam generators, it would probably take at least two years to have them made and installed. The lost generation during that time, combined with all sorts of regulatory costs, would be too much to make it worth it.
WTF?
I'm the one calling you out on your bullshit "there is no wind anywhere" rubbish and your "60GW of interconnect" lie. I've been too busy rubbing your face in your own filth and asking you to put up or stop lying to make any claims of my own.
You know a new nuclear energy source is serious when the anti nuclear people start going to the trouble of producing hatchet job materials.
1 - Thorium is about 3-4x more common than Uranium on the Earth's crust. But a lot of that Uranium is disolved on Sea Water, which means expensive to obtain. Thorium is available worldwide, both as monazite beach sands and rare earth mines (all fairly easy to mine). Thorium is kind of FREE actually, since it's already extracted in huge scales from the earth for rare earth mining and current has zero actual usage. Thorium is actually a problem for rare earth mining. There is enough Thorium already mined that could power the whole earth for a decade using LFTR reactors.
2 - 100% of the Thorium is Th-232, 0,7% of Uranium is U-235. Thorium reactors can be designed to use at least 90% of the Th-232, with designs that promise over 99% Th-232 utilization. Current, water cooled, solid fuel uranium reactors are limited to using less than 0,7% of mined uranium since they burn most of the U-235 and a little of the U-238 (99,3% of Uranium), with reprocessing like the French, that's doubled. Uranium/Plutonium IFR reactors are able to use 99%+ of mined uranium. Actually an IFR reactor can be started and operated solely on the waste from regular uranium reactors (startup with spent nuclear fuel, topped of with depleted uranium), existing spent nuclear fuel is enough to startup enough reactors to increase USA nuclear electricity share from 20% to 50%, and depleted uranium stockpiles enough to power those reactors for hundreds of years.
Okay, Thorium reactors also breed some highly radioactive byproducts. Now, the UPSIDE of this is, they're so "hot", that they decay down in a matter of days/weeks/months/years instead of "tens of thousands of years".
Some quick reading indicates that those hot byproducts decay into U-233 which has a halflife that IS in the hundreds of thousands of years. I wasnt able to find whether U-233 can be used in a reactor or if you have to store the stuff.
...not. Advocates of nuclear power point to the relatively-low (compared with other fuel types) operating cost of nuclear power plants but tend to disregard the construction and dismantling costs. In this case, the dismantling cost is estimated at $4.4 billion and that's before dismantling has even started. Worse, still, though was the little nugget in the article stating that the spent nuclear fuel would be indefinitely stored on the site in steel cannisters until the federal government comes up with a long term solution. Yeah, I know what you're thinking...'so what's the big deal about a little spent nuclear fuel in a few steel cannisters?' Well, those will require long-term expensive oversight and security and, even with all of that, will likely eventually begin releasing contamination into the environment as vigilence is relaxed due to future financial constraints, corrosion, etc. That spent nuclear fuel remains dangerous far after we, our descendants, their descendants, and their descendants are alive...and that amount of time is probably beyond the limit of any earthly vigilance anyway. Don't buy into the 'nuclear power is cheap and environmentally-friendly' arguments. It's not either one of those...and never will be (fission-based power anyway). Better to have coal-fired power plants. Even better to have wind and solar power. Better still to just use less.
"Every single one of those damnable windmills is slowing-down the air and making it more turbulent as a trade-off for spinning the generator..."
This is so dumb, it's actually funny. Those 'windmills' do not create or consume energy. They are an energy transfer device. The take an insignificant amount of energy (relative to the atmospheric total) out of the moving gases in the atmosphere and transfer it to another location. There, that energy is released as heat into the...(wait for it)...atmosphere where it contributes (in an insiginificant small way) to convective heating that drives more...wind.
It's possible you meant Thallium 208 (Historic Name: Thorium C, Half-Life: 3 minutes)?
There are two observationally stable byproducts at Tl203 and Tl205. The most stable of the remaining isotopes has a half-life of just under 4 years. Most of the rest are measured in hours, seconds and in some cases, milliseconds. So yes, it's very "hot". But it's extremely short-lived.
Thanks for pointing that out and also much appreciated about not being a dick about it.
I checked my notes at home and they were about Thallium 208. I agree, I want to learn more so I can have a reasoned and measured response. Unfortunately I see the nuclear mod trolls are out in force again.
I have nothing against this type of reactor technology, in principle however I'd like to know more about it's spent fuel byproducts and operational effluents. It is important to understand that if the halflife is three minutes and it's an energetic emmiter, how many daughter product iterations does it got through before it becomes stable an what is the rate of decay? That in itself may pose an even greater threat *because* if it is continually changing just how many micro-nutrient analogues does it present to biology? I'm not going to pretend I know the answer because I am still learning myself, however at least I know that's a question to ask. Another question about a Thorium fuel cycle to uncover is are we just making a new problem. Regardless of that, we still have problems with the Uranium based cycle and they all lead back to the same thing.
The bottom line is that because this whole debate is so polarized, no one talks sense about it anymore. The irony is that if you took a rational look at both sides of the debate you would see that what the anti- and pro- nuclear lobby need is exactly the same thing.
So let's get to the bottom of this whole pro- anti- nuclear bullshit right here.
Pro-Nuclears: want to have new reactor technology developed and deployed, old reactors desposed of responsibly. Is that a fair call?
Anti-nuclear: wants no Nuclear industry at all, but if it has to be there clean it up an make it safer. Is that a fair call?
Answer: What both parties need to have *both* of their goals satisfied is a Geologically Stable Fuel Containment Facility. The original DOE, defense in depth spec. In every country that has Nuclear reactors, in granite to deal with the ground water issues and avoid relying on containment technology.
You are right to want to learn more, doing so gets rid of the ignorance that makes these discussions so vehement and ad hominem. In following the same path I've been fortunate have access to people. The thing is you have to learn not just about the reactor technology, but enrichment, mining, reactor disposal, spent fuel containment, lots of radioisotopes - their energetic properties, toxicity, the micro-nutrients they analogue that causes bio-accumulation in the food chain and what cancers they cause in humans. Then there is the poltics, funding, legislative constructs like Price-Anderson, funding arrangements in the 2005 Energy Bill (for example), it's PR machine, reports into accidents (like Chernobyl, Fukushima), NRC and regulatory operating principles, understanding their reports and the consequences of the metric they report. The effect of the IAEA interdiction orders on WHO organization publications on radiological findings. And still there is more.
It is a mammoth and absolutley awe inspiring industry and technolgy that can either wipe us out as a species or free us as a race if we respect that the danger it poses is geological in effect, requires very long term vision in science to understand and, deep wisdom to control due to human frailty.
What I've learned is though the nuclear industry has some deep structural problems that need to be addressed, I also recognise it's irresponsible for our generation to hand down a radionuclide legacy to our grandchildren's grandchildren... so I find myself ultimately b
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
An advanced progressing society only needs sunshine, breezes, and dung for energy, and legalized marijuana to be comfortable in the cold dark tepee.
It's possible you meant Thallium 208 (Historic Name: Thorium C, Half-Life: 3 minutes)?
There are two observationally stable byproducts at Tl203 and Tl205.
The most stable of the remaining isotopes has a half-life of just under 4 years. Most of the rest are measured in hours, seconds and in some cases, milliseconds.
So yes, it's very "hot". But it's extremely short-lived.
Thanks for pointing that out and also much appreciated about not being a dick about it.
No problem. I know how it is with "stream of consciousness typing".
I checked my notes at home and they were about Thallium 208. I agree, I want to learn more so I can have a reasoned and measured response. Unfortunately I see the nuclear mod trolls are out in force again.
Screw 'em.
I have nothing against this type of reactor technology, in principle however I'd like to know more about it's spent fuel byproducts and operational effluents. It is important to understand that if the halflife is three minutes and it's an energetic emmiter, how many daughter product iterations does it got through before it becomes stable an what is the rate of decay? That in itself may pose an even greater threat *because* if it is continually changing just how many micro-nutrient analogues does it present to biology? I'm not going to pretend I know the answer because I am still learning myself, however at least I know that's a question to ask. Another question about a Thorium fuel cycle to uncover is are we just making a new problem. Regardless of that, we still have problems with the Uranium based cycle and they all lead back to the same thing.
At least for Thallium 208, it looks like it decays directly to Lead 208, also known, historically as Thorium D.
Up to this point, I've seen nothing really reported other "useful waste", like the aforementioned P238.
Other by products are: xenon, neodymium (high-strength magnets), medical molybdenum-99, radiostrontium, zirconium, rhodium, ruthenium, and palladium.
http://liquidfluoridethoriumre...
On the decay. I've seen it reported that around 83% of all radioactive by products from LFTR are stable within 10 years with the remaining 17% stable within 350 with no uranium or plutonium waste.
http://liquidfluoridethoriumre...
The bottom line is that because this whole debate is so polarized, no one talks sense about it anymore. The irony is that if you took a rational look at both sides of the debate you would see that what the anti- and pro- nuclear lobby need is exactly the same thing.
I wouldn't say NOBODY talks any sense. But the ones who are get drowned out by the two rabid poles.
So let's get to the bottom of this whole pro- anti- nuclear bullshit right here.
Pro-Nuclears: want to have new reactor technology developed and deployed, old reactors desposed of responsibly. Is that a fair call?
Anti-nuclear: wants no Nuclear industry at all, but if it has to be there clean it up an make it safer. Is that a fair call?
The problem is, this is an over-simplification. And, thus, ROUNDLY incorrect.
It's a giant sliding scale with a nebulous median point.
On the pro nuke side, you have all manners of partisans. Each looking to push their own horse in the race. And LFTR (and myself for that matter) are little different.
On the anti-nuke side, you have groups of people with varying oppositions to nuclear. Anywhere from those who simply want a cleaner solution than today's mess, to those who'd rather see us go back to shivering and starving in caves than allow nuclear for ANYTHING (basically the ones who equate nuclear wi
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yes. You can burn U233 in another reactor. You also use some of it in the fissile core of the LFTR.
While you COULD, technically, build a bomb out of U233, the product is the hard radiation coming off it. It makes working with the product difficult (and therefore *extremely* costly). Joe Schmuck The Terrorist would die of radiation poisoning before being able to actually build a bomb out of the stuff, were he able to get his hands on it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
For uranium, it is about 0.7%.
Uranium is also 100% via breeder reactors.
No, that is not how breeders work. Breeders 'breed' plutonium as additional elements used in the core are activated and converted to plutonium - so they actually produce plutonium (as they were designed to do). You are probably thinking of burners khallow, another fast neutron reactor, a burners rate is about 20% for them *if* the materials technology is there to support there construction - which it isn't, so it creates a bigger problem than what SONGS is facing now.
Additionally PWR burnup rate is roughly .3% percent of the mass of the fuel.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Thorium connects to the price of gas through liquid ammonia carried hydrogen hydrogen economy. And by the way, earlier on Slashdot I expressed ideas and opinions of how even the Sun was powered by fission, not fusion, as I look at a volcanic eruption on earth, and it's molten hot lava, then I look at an asteroid and know it's not big enough to have molten lava on the inside, and neither is the Moon, but Earth is big enough, and Jupiter is probably very hot underneath all that hydrogen gas, to the point of probably glowing, but nothing beats the Sun nearby, which is the most humongous object nearby, at 333,000 Earth's combined in mass, at 99% of the solar system weight, and given its size, even in the absence of hydrogen it would probably have surface lava making it glow like it does, and that was my expressed opinion, but the actual scientifically measured numbers say differently, by orders of magnitude, so the official stance is that there is actual fusion in the Sun. But fusion might be a hell of a lot more difficult to achieve than we think, especially if basic things like fusors by the inventor of television, Farnsworth, don't pay off energetically, and if anyone was a bright mind in that electric field shaping plasma/ions area, it should have been him, but of course anybody can be surpassed. One of the issues with fusion is the structural stability of the materials involved under the order of magnitude higher neutron bombardment, and also the conditions necessary to conduct it, very high temperatures, or laser blasts, compared to conventional fission that works in a pot filled with water, at moderate temperatures of steam boilers, or even the Thorium and depleted (of U235) U238 fast neutron liquid sodium reactors, which are still much simpler conditions than the millions of Centigrade degree temperatures required by all fusion experiments so far. We can piss around with fusion in a lab, but if you want to have a ready replacement to hold transportation costs low when carbon tax hits, and gas hits $5-8-10-20/gal due to free market scarcity, you gotta go for nuclear fission+ammonia hydrogen economy car fuel. And then the biggest issue is having too many idiots around the world, as you would not give a rocket grenade launcher to a chimp, and expect him not to shoot it at the other chimps, he's too big of an idiot, so you can't really give nuclear power plants to countries that have a lot of people that blow themselves up, so you have to give them the electricity, from the outside, for almost free. And then you have the issue of 9/11 suicidal plane hijackers. And there comes the idea of Archie Bunker on how to deal with these situations, a better idea than fighter jets shooting them out of the sky. Inspect the packages for bombs, or better, don't inspect anything, put them on a separate plane that flies tandem, or gets towed at a distance, or even design the airplane so that the baggage compartment can freely blow away and do it safely so, with the airplane maintaining integrity and flight, like a lizard shedding its tail. A baggage is only property, and if anyone can't live without what they had in their baggages, I feel really sorry for them. Separate the pilot compartment from the rest of the plane with a bulletproof shield, with no access to the passenger zone, like it's done by the Israeli civilian flights. Fly at a depressurization safe zone at lower altitude, even if more expensive, so that everyone can breathe fine if bullets fly about and pierce the walls.Then hand out pistols to all responsible nonviolent criminal record adults at the beginning of the trip, and collect the pistols back at the end. Then nobody with plastic knives can hijack the plane, due to superiority in air power, as even an 80 year old grandma with a pistol can subdue them. I don't understand what's so complicated about this, you don't need no x-rays, no violation of privacy, flipping through somebody's underwear, but you can still figure out a way to fly about safely anyway. After all this is the USA, and we all love guns, privacy, personal responsibility and respect, and freedoms.
+1, would repeat. agreed about arming grandmothers to keep flights safe.
By the way I would not take this as far as have everyone walk around with a pistol on their belt, like in western movies, in everyday life, out on the streets, as there would be too many idiots shooting randomly. An airplane situation is different. For one, you have to be able to come up with the ticket fee, and homeless alcoholic hallucinating lunatics usually don't get on an airplane, unlike the city streets. Plus the total loss of life is only how many people ride on a plane, at max, is limited, unlike in a city where it's unlimited. The chances of a crash or hostages dying are probably smaller when everyone is armed, and hijacking a plane has a much lower incentive if the hijackers know everyone has a pistol. I think the biggest failure of 9/11 was the naivety the passengers thought they'd be negotiated for and land safely, else they would have done like the Pennsylvania flight, headed for the Pentagon, where passengers must have found out about the WTC planes, and heroically rebelled against plastic knives. You can't really see where you're going from the passenger seats, so you'd still need fighterjets ready to escort and shoot planes out of the sky. 200 passengers dying is better than 3000 plus a very expensive building's collapse. Also, hijacking the controls is not possible if the pilot compartment is isolated with a bullet proof wall and a separate entrance and exit, like on Israeli planes. Like duh, how much more complicated could this aviation safety get. Only an idiot would let the passengers and stewardesses have access to the pilots, under the threats of terrorism. But I guess the ides is to have people get used to picking through their stuff, waiting in line for ages, picking at their personal things, personal histories, views, opinions, genetic makeup, and see if anyone speaks up, and then you can hand pick out these free-speech abusers, that start the one bad apple spoils the bunch kinds of trends, so the transition to the the oncoming age of slavery and oppression is smoother. If we could only get everyone to stop speaking and just text everything, then monitoring thoughts and social rebellion and uprising becomes very easy, and such a thing as the French revolution could never happen, even if tax rates are at 99%, charged by the nobility, clergy and general upper class to the lower class working poor and peasants. But in fact we no longer need working poor and peasants as robots and automated machines like vending machines can substitute them, so I feel really bad for anybody lower class like myself, as they are not really needed anymore in the future economy and social structure, and there will be welfare, for a while...but if it ever stops, it's gonna be nastay.. The only argument a lower class poor can use in the labor market is that look, I'm cheaper than a computer with a robot, because they are complicated to repair and replace, maintenance on them is expensive when you can't even figure out what's wrong, because it has a stupid chip inside.
And because of that I'm not a big fan of automation. I mean I love computers, and know automation can get precision and repeatability and profit at its extreme, and you can sit back and collect, but all that does is drop the price to market, and everything ultra efficiently produced becomes ultra cheap, to where you have to lower your own pay, and the basic living expenses. The housing market is still living in a world where union jobs at $25/hr with overtime paid $100,000/year to someone with a high school degree. Those days are gone, and housing refuses to correct to the new realities. As that's all you have to do, is adapt to the circumstances, that's what life does, it adapts. I'd love to pay $2000/mo rent on an apartment that overlooks a lake with a beautiful sundown, if somebody gives me a factory janitor job where I get to sleep on the job while being paid for it, to collect overtime money that totals up to $100,000/year. In 1997 I worked at a place where a union janitor did just that. Then you can ask for high prices in the stores, and high rent too. Live in your own little world, as a country, isolated from the rest of the world competition, block all foreign imports with huge tariffs, and maintain such income and housing levels. But all I see is dollar stores sprouting up everywhere, and every time I flip an object upside down, on the bottom it says "Made in China." If you could raise the cost of living in China to match the US, then you could keep high prices, high incomes and high housing and insurance and car price and taxes. But then all you end up doing is chasing corporations to other low cost areas, like Bangladesh and Pakistan and Afganistan, and Zimbabwe and Namibia and Liberia, Ecuador, Papua, Russia, etc... good luck with fixing up the whole world, where costs of living are high because everyone is paying them, and people are no longer willing to work for peanuts. The simplest thing to do is to adapt, and drop your living costs to where you can beat the Made in China stuff on what they do best, price, because you can make it cheaper, and better quality.
By the way a girl I once worked with, and harassed, told me "I have a 22." And I'm kinda happy about that, because in this age of feminism she can stand up for herself like that. Freedom, respect and responsibility only possible through owning a 22. I don't know where she keeps it, she probably did not bring it to work, and she may not even have it at all, but the possibility is a great thing. On an airplane terrorists with plastic knives are currently guaranteed that nobody has a pistol. That's bullshit.
A little more research points to the spent fuel component of this fuel cycle actually Thaillium 233. I'd still like to learn more, however I thank you for the links.
I wanted to write a more detailed response however I'm tied up with things - I really appreciate your civility!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.