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Delays For SC Nuclear Plant Put Pressure On the Industry
mdsolar sends this news from the Associated Press:
Expensive delays are piling up for the companies building new nuclear power plants, raising fresh questions about whether they can control the construction costs that crippled the industry years ago. The latest announcement came this week from executives at SCANA Corp., which has been warned by its builders the startup of the first of two new reactors in South Carolina could be delayed two years or more. ... That announcement may well foreshadow more delays for a sister project in eastern Georgia, and they have caught the attention of regulators and Wall Street. 'Delays generally cause cost increases, and the question becomes who's going to bear the costs?' said C. Dukes Scott, executive director of the South Carolina Office of Regulatory Staff, a watchdog agency that monitors SCANA Corp.'s spending.
None of this is helpful for the nuclear power industry, which had hoped its newest generation of plants in Georgia and South Carolina would prove it could build without the delays and cost overruns so endemic years ago. When construction slows down, it costs more money to employ the thousands of workers needed to build a nuclear plant. Meanwhile, interest charges add up on the money borrowed to finance construction. A single day of delay in Georgia could cost $2 million, according to an analysis by utility regulators.
None of this is helpful for the nuclear power industry, which had hoped its newest generation of plants in Georgia and South Carolina would prove it could build without the delays and cost overruns so endemic years ago. When construction slows down, it costs more money to employ the thousands of workers needed to build a nuclear plant. Meanwhile, interest charges add up on the money borrowed to finance construction. A single day of delay in Georgia could cost $2 million, according to an analysis by utility regulators.
First of all, nuclear power plants are far more complex than coal plants. Sure, the steam to electric part is identical, but controlling a nuclear reaction requires far different parts than crushing and burning coal.
Secondly, coal fired power plants are not "popping up everywhere" in America. No new coal plants will be built anytime soon, because 111(b) prevents new sources of electric generation that emit more than ~1200 lbs CO2 per MWh (coal is ~2000 lbs). A few plants have opened in the past five years; we won't see any more.
Thirdly, it isn't "red tape" that caused this latest delay -- it's the inability for suppliers of key components of the power plant to deliver the materials on time. The parts are specialized, the vendors capable of building (some of) those parts few and far between, and the list of parts that must be assembled in order rather long. Any delay ripples through the project, and the loan (plus interest) needs to get paid back, even if the plant isn't operating yet.
The big risk in nuclear construction is a financial risk. It isn't until much later that the nuclear reaction itself becomes a challenge.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Here is an October 2013 article about a protest against the tax: Georgia Power Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery Tariff Excites Local Protest
And here's an organization that is protesting the tax: STOPCWIP.COM, which is short for STOP Construction Work In Progress
They point out that the Nuke owners are guaranteed a 11.5% return no matter how late the plant is:
In 2009, the Georgia General Assembly passed “Georgia Nuclear Energy Financing Act,” making it legal for Georgia electric utilities to charge customers in advance to construct the nuclear reactors. The Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) subsequently approved Georgia Power and other owners of Plant Vogtle to charge the CWIP tax which will be collected during the whole construction period, no matter how long it will take, and allow Georgia Power and the other Vogtle owners a guaranteed profit with a protected return on investment of 11.15%.
The AP-1000 is a brand new design and apparently they are having troubles building many of the components, as well as with the in place fabrication techniques. In theory, once they fix those problems follow on plants should be able to be built faster because the teething problems would be solved. the reality is it will be hard to convince people to build them because of the delays.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
It always amazes me to hear about cost overruns and delays with new nuclear plants considering that in essence they're little more complex than coal plants, which keep popping up everywhere without any apparent issues.
So, is it just the red tape causing delays, or is it something else which make a nuclear plants so much more complex than a coal or gas plant?
One reason is that they have a lot of quality control. If you have a stuck valve inside a reactor, you can't just go to Home Depot and get a replacement.
Reactors are even more critical than aircraft. If a commercial airliner goes down, 300 people die. If a reactor blows up, you've got Chernobyl.
The tight specifications are required not only for individual components, but also for the fault trees for the system as a whole. It's hard to eliminate the possibility of some unexpected failure along a pathway in the appendices of the safety documents that was assigned an insignificant probability. Like a tsunami overwhelming the system.
The nuclear industry will tell you that the slow regulatory approval, with lots of opportunities for nuclear opponents to slow things down, are another reason.
I don't have a conclusion about nuclear power myself. OTOH, 200 tons of uranium can cause a really bad day. OTOH, we've been running a couple of hundred nuclear power plants worldwide for, what, 40 years, and we've had only one major accident and a couple of minor ones. The health effects of coal power plant emissions are so horrible (50,000 deaths a year in the U.S., more in China) that coal makes nuclear look attractive. I've been waiting for affordable solar and wind power for a long time.
Part of the problem is that the infrastructure and supply paths for constructing nuclear plants has to be re-constituted as no plants have been built for quite some time. In the case of the Westinghouse plants, their 'modular' assembly facilities had to be built as well and put into production. Nuclear plants require large metal components on a scale that isn't commonly needed. It also requires meticulous tracking of materials and manufacturing activities for quality assurance. Once the supply lines are re-established, it all gets a lot easier and more predictable. Its not a technology issue, its an infrastructure one. We just need to start building more.
Even with higher than predicted costs, its still quite economic. Like any large capital project, getting it going is the hard part.
The links provided in the story are the usual, information free sort one expects from mdsolar as he plies his anti-nook trade around Slashdot. There are better news stories written about this and the bottom line is a subcontractor is falling behind making "submodules." This story from yesterday points the finger at Chicago Bridge & Iron in Louisiana, and this story actually provides a little detail about the submodules that CB&I are trying to make. The builders are moving some of this work to other facilities and contractors because of CB&I failures. Another story a year ago also names CB&I as the culprit for delays.
So it's a manufacturing problem and not a regulator hold up. Manufacturing problems are solvable (we've built stuff like this many times) and not as appealing to mdsolar as a nasty regulatory tangle, so he deliberately avoided stories with specifics.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
As you surely know, coal plants are huge polluters and pollution causes health issues, which in turn add up to early deaths, even if we ignore damage done to environment.
But then again, opposing nuclear power is not really about protecting humans or nature, now is it? It has long since turned into politics, where opposition is based more on identity than rational calculation of risks and rewards of various options. And who knows, perhaps being hit by the double-whammy of full-power climate change and energy crisis simultaneously will finally teach humanity to not treat important decisions as tribal identifiers. It's something we must learn before we venture beyond this planet, since the cost of irrational stupidity will continue getting higher. But I fear the lesson will be exremely painful, even by the scale of these things.
Thousandfold decrease in mining causes a thousandfold decrease in mining-related deaths, even before factoring in such details as coal being highly flammable and uranium being not. Also, unlike coal, uranium can be extracted from seawater, so with it we could theoretically eliminate mining altogether.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You never have 50,000 death per year in the US to coal.
Perhaps 5 to 10 in the long time average due to mining accidents. I really doubt the total number of workers mining coal is close to that number.
And: fix your damn mining safety issues instead of blaming it to 'coal', mining of uranium is only marginally more safe.
You can never calculate exactly how many people die from coal emissions, so I used an estimate that would be in the neighborhood. There are lots of people dying of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and bronchitis. They're going to die eventually, when their lung function goes down below a certain threshold, and coal emissions brings their lung function down a little sooner. Another vulnerable group is people with heart failure.
Here's an estimate of 24,000 lives a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... In the 1980s I used to work on the same floor as a bunch of energy industry magazines, and they had reports floating around from different organizations, which I would pick up occasionally. I remember reading some surprising number like 50,000. I don't have those reports around any more so I can't easily check. It might have been 50,000 in the 1980s, because that was around the time coal plants were installing pollution control equipment. The pollution control equipment was fairly expensive, particularly because it cut the power output by about 10%. You can make coal emissions as clean as you want, if you can spend a sufficient amount of money. There were debates during the Reagan era about things like, "How much should society spend to save the life of a 4-year-old girl with asthma?" (The economists said $220,000.)
The best-documented and highest estimates of the number of deaths from coal power that I saw came from the nuclear power industry. The worse coal looks, the better nuclear looks. They were fond of saying that coal plants had higher emissions of uranium and radium than nuclear plants did (barring catastrophe). Those guys are pretty good engineers. I hope they know what they're doing. The American Lung Association also had some similar figures.
Coal mining used to be one of the most dangerous occupations in America, but it's gotten safer because (1) open pit mining is safer (2) even underground mining can be safe if they follow safety rules with the same diligence that the nuclear or airline industry does. There are a few companies that have a, shall we say, investor-centered approach to safety, and they have most of the accidents. The Wall Street Journal used to love to run stories about mine accidents on the front page, and look up the mine owner's records of safety violations, injuries and deaths with MSHA. In the last big US mine accident, there was strong evidence that the supervisors were deliberately violating safety rules about ventilation etc. In some countries, that would be a crime and they would go to jail.
Uranium mining has some problems with the radioactive dust and gas in the air. I don't know if they can filter it out. You can filter anything, but you might not be able to breathe for more than 10 minutes with a filter that traps the very smallest particles, and you couldn't do any heavy work. But at least uranium mines don't have coal damp.
"setbacks stem from a delay in fabrication and delivery of modules from Chicago Bridge & Iron out of Lake Charles, La., SCE&G officials said. They said 100 out of 146 project milestones have been completed, but many of them are being delayed because of a large structural module called a CAO1 that has not been delivered by CB&I.
SCE&G officials said as many as half of the construction milestones could fall outside the 18-month construction window allowed by state regulators under the existing Summer guidelines.
The delay revealed last year was estimated by SCE&G to cost about $278 million. In April, the S.C. Energy Users Committee and the Sierra Club took SCE&G to the Supreme Court asking that those cost delays be borne by SCE&G, not ratepayers, after the PSC ruled the charges could be passed off to the public."
Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2014/0...
Having your military supply chain depend on countries that you might be fighting against is a terrible plan. It's also in the national interest for the US to retain engineering and manufacturing capabilities. And, of course there's the possibility that they embed controls into the devices that they sell us, the way the NSA pre-hacked hardware being sold by US companies only in the other direction.
So really, it kinda does matter.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!