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The Cost of Caring For Elderly Nuclear Plants Expected To Rise
mdsolar writes with this story about the rising costs of keeping Europe's nuclear power plants safe and operational. Europe's aging nuclear fleet will undergo more prolonged outages over the next few years, reducing the reliability of power supply and costing plant operators many millions of dollars. Nuclear power provides about a third of the European Union's electricity generation, but the 28-nation bloc's 131 reactors are well past their prime, with an average age of 30 years. And the energy companies, already feeling the pinch from falling energy prices and weak demand, want to extend the life of their plants into the 2020s, to put off the drain of funding new builds. Closing the older nuclear plants is not an option for many EU countries, which are facing an energy capacity crunch as other types of plant are being closed or mothballed because they can't cover their operating costs, or to meet stricter environmental regulation.
The cost of caring for elderly _____ is expected to rise;
...and the list goes on.
1) Nuclear Plants
2) Houses
3) Windmills
4) Cars
5) Solar Installations
6) People
7) Factories
8) Roads
9) Bridges
Another amazingly useful submission to slashdot.
Which imaginary world are you living in? Energy prices are high and evergy companies have been raking in massive profits for years.
And the energy companies, already feeling the pinch from falling energy prices and weak demand
Closing the older nuclear plants is not an option for many EU countries, which are facing an energy capacity crunch
Wait, which is it, is there too much electricity or not enough?
"Closing the older nuclear plants is not an option for many EU countries, which are facing an energy capacity crunch as other types of plant are being closed or mothballed because they can't cover their operating costs, or to meet stricter environmental regulation."
In short: While nuclear isn't perfect, it currently sucks less than any other alternative available.
(Renewables just aren't scalable enough yet.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I didn't know nuclear plants were powered by the elderly. They told me grandma passed, and was in a better place. No one said that was inside a reactor.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Let's keep this in perspective. It was submitted by mdsolar.
Either this is a "true believer" who worships and genuflects on PV panels, or a fossil fuel industry astroturfer. Did we really need another fact free FUD fest on this subject? In either case, his claims need to be taken very critically. I don't see any reasonable hope that mankind's energy needs can be met with only PV and other "renewable" sources. The numbers do not add up. Look up the French Revolution for an example of pretending that politics > math.
Bottom line: Until the last coal plant is shuttered, nuclear power needs to be a major, perhaps THE major, source of electricity if we care to preserve a global ecosystem even faintly resembling that of pre-industrial times.
For all of the laudable successes of the Environmental Movement in the late 20th Century (e.g. bans on DDT and chlorofluorocarbons, regulations to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions, habitat preservation), the anti-nuclear movement has to count as one of its great failures. These old plants are dangerous, and becoming increasingly so. Knee-jerk opposition to the construction of new nuclear facilities has made all of us less safe by encouraging obsolete plants (like Fukushima) to be patched together for another few decades because there is no alternative to meet power demand. Knee-jerk opposition to any waste respository has resulted in the highly dangerous on-site storage of spent fuel.
Environmental opposition to nuclear power has made nuclear power vastly more dangerous than it needs to be, which appears to be a deliberate strategy: if you are convinced beyond any reasoning that something is too dangerous to be used at all, then it becomes paradoxically sensible to work to make it as dangerous as possible so that other people will agree with your preconceived notions about the hazards. I'm not sure if this effect has a name yet. Proof by suicide?
These sites have land close to cities (efficient), cooling, transmission lines, generators, etc. Basically, the problem with the old reactors is that they are old and are second generation.
What should be happening is that we should put on-site NEW multiple small 3+ gen reactors, such as mPower, to handle the loads, providing power/money for the company, while they take down the OLD reactors.
At the same time, we need to do a 4th gen reactor that will burn up the 'nuclear waste', and leave only 5% of the volume as well leave it safe in under 200 years (as opposed to 20,000+ years).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Darn it. After I posted, I realized that I had moderation power. I would have modded you up.
I consider my an environmentalists, but a sane one. Hell, the primary reason why I became Libertarian was because both dems and pubs are responsible for so much destruction.
We desperately need an energy mix, not depending on just ONE TYPE of energy. Right now the greenies push wind/solar. Yet, BOTH depend on the sun, which means that if say yellowstone erupts, or China attacks and uses clouds over America first (China is working very hard on weather control and they DO consider it a form of military weaponary), then we would lose much of our power at the very moment that we need it the most.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I see nothing on there that makes it anti-nuke. I DO see him pointing out a REAL problem, which is that many of the old reactors are being extend past their lifetimes and NEED to be taken down. BUT, they really need to be replaced by new ones, not other forms of energy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How is this in any way suprising? Putting it in car terms:
The Cost of Caring For Elderly Model T Fords Expected To Rise.
The fact that new plants have been banned for many years, we don't have anything in the US to compare the costs to. New technology would probably be much less expensive to maintain, but they are not permitted such updates for fear of a nuclear explosion. No companies are doing much development for new plants that are not going to be built.
We could probably be waving bye to the Middle East if the anti-nuke idiots didn't have such clout. But, they prefer burning oil and coal (and global warming) to nuclear power.
It' does make a nice political platform to garner votes from the usefull idiots the Democrats favor.
Nope. Horribly misinformed you are. Not worth discussing with you until you are educated on what currently available technology can accomplish, let alone near-future tech requiring only a handful of years of dedicated research.
Because I usually have to spell this out - I do NOT want you to change your opinion. I only want you informed so you stop spouting entirely incorrect information. There can be no discussion without agreement upon the basic science being discussed.
Start with just these two examples (out of many) and then let's talk:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candu
No. Get past your fear, embrace salt reactors, and use that "Waste" as fuel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
That's the strategy, folks: prevent nuclear reprocessing plants from getting built, so you can complain about the long-term nature of the spent fuel that reprocessing would have consumed.
Nuclear power plants have greater value than first anticipated, so we're keeping them for longer than originally planned.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The true cost of nuclear power is practically infinite, because we have to insure that highly concentrated and deadly waste must not come into contact with people's bodies for somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 years into the future, depending upon the waste.
The true cost of coal power is practically infinite, because we have to insure that highly dispersed and deadly waste must not come into contact with people's bodies for somewhere between 10,000,000,000 and over 10^33 years into the future, depending upon the waste. (the latter is the lower limits on the half-life of mercury)
We have only had a writing system for 5,200 years (roughly speaking, the length of recorded history). How many people on Earth today could read a radiation warning written in cuneiform 5,200 years ago (or today)? Many civilizations on Earth have had periods of scientific and technological decline, and we've all read articles about knowledge from Ancient Rome or, more recently, the Renaissance being rediscovered today. How can we guarantee persistence of any scientific or technical knowledge?
How are we supposed to convey the message: "Don't touch any of this, or pass it around. You and anyone who touches this will die not instantly but within months of a painful death, perhaps after you have traveled a great distance" for 200x the length of recorded history?
How are we supposed to convey the message: Um, could you guys put all this mercury, uranium, and greenhouse gases from our coal power plants back into the ground for us? We were too lazy to do it ourselves, we were hoping you guys wouldn't mind. Also don't eat any fish from the ocean, they're full of poisonous mercury, sorry about that.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Reprocessing is just one step. In order to achieve a true closed cycle, we'll need fast neutron waste burners. We've built them. We've got designs ready to go. Some pilot commercial plants have already been built. And we've got refinements in the pipeline that will make them even better. Unfortunately, the modern environmental movement has turned into a religion and some of them are mistaking Slashdot for their soap box.
How are we supposed to convey the message: "Don't touch any of this, or pass it around. You and anyone who touches this will die not instantly but within months of a painful death, perhaps after you have traveled a great distance" for 200x the length of recorded history?
It's simple, you label it as being cursed. Worked so well for all the tombs we've found....
Agree completely with your comments, although the nuclear waste issue still strikes me as one that few people are taking seriously enough. The reaction is always the same, "Don't load that stuff on a train that travels through MY city!" "Don't bury that stuff anywhere near MY place!" So it winds up sitting right where it started, on-site at the plant, where it's, to say the least, not an ideal storage location.
We've seen a lot of technical innovation in the last 50 years or so, which makes me question why we can't seriously look into developing a new type of power generator that can use all of this "spent" radioactive waste as fuel? Even if the costs to construct it were prohibitive in the sense of it generating enough electricity to be profitable? It would seem to be a cheap solution as a place to put waste coming from the existing reactors.
As long as the nuclear waste contains so much energy, it's this dangerous to handle or store -- that means there's got to be untapped potential left in it.
How is there simultaneously a supply crunch and drop in prices? If there is a crunch, then prices will be raised until demand drops to an appropriate level, or more capacity will be built... unless major market distortions are in play which disrupt this relationship. I don't get it.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
The "Environmental Movement" is not one homogeneous group of people. There are tons of sensible, evidence-based people like myself that have always been pro-nuclear. Then there are the non-evidence based folks who are terrified of "radiation" and rub crystals of themselves to cleanse their chakra.
I would like to think that I'm in the mainstream and they're the fringe.
And what makes you think the solution to old, creaky, leaky, explodey reactors is to build more new reactors? Did you think the new reactors would 'replace' the old reactors? That's a bit naive. What these new reactors guarantee is that there'll be twice as many old, creaky, leaky, explodey reactors in 30 years time. We're fantastically bad at decommissioning old reactors that'll we'll be happy to extend our 50 year design to 100 years or 200 years and beyond.
Creating a bigger problem is not a solution.
The above two quotes contradict each other. The first says there's weak demand, but the second says there's a "capacity crunch" (a shortage) which means there's too much demand. So which is it, a surplus of energy or a shortage of energy? It can't be both.
Resolving this contradiction will lead to the real problem. Then we can think about ways to solve it.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
We have already done that. But the anti-nuke fear mongers are holding that technology back, by preventing funding for new power plants. You can read more about it here: http://transatomicpower.com/
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It is if the cost of the raw materials has doubled in the last couple of years.
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/WPU132?data_tool=XGtable
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/WPU1321?data_tool=XGtable
http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/copper/all/
> we really should have built new cheaper and safer reactors
Newer designs are not cheaper. In fact, in spite of herculean efforts on the part of the industry, they're generally more expensive.
There are basically three "newer" designs that are actually available on the market, the EPR, AP1000 and ABWR. Other designs like the APWR, ACR-1000 and similar are dead, while others like the VVER are unlikely to be sold outside Russian client states, who get them basically for free.
Here's a current report on all of the ones that are still standing:
EPR, four under construction, one approved for short-term:
Olkiluoto's EPR is currently billed at E8.5 billion, about three times the original estimate. Construction is halted.
Flamanville's EPR has gone even higher.
Taishan's EPR's are both at least two years behind schedule (they were supposed to be on the grid last year, now they're scheduled for next year). I don't know what that does on the cost side in China.
Hinkley Point C is, well, no one really knows what's going on any more
AP1000, four under construction in China, four in the US, several others approved:
Summer's two AP1000s are both delayed at least 18 months, leading to a credit rating drop for the companies involved.
Vogtle's two AP1000 reactors are already billions over budget, and have just announced another series of delays. Delays cost $2 million a day.
Sanmen and Haiyang are both at least a year behind schedule. Haiyang 1 was last updated to begin operation in May,
Levy County's two AP1000 last accounting put it over $11 a Watt, at which point Duke gave up and kept everyone's money.
That's not to say this is universal, nor the fault of the designs. Spiralling material costs account for much of this. But having your costs controlled by time of construction on one hand and materials costs on the other is a bad place to be, they often conflict. If you want to get the materials cheaper you have to wait, which drives up soft costs, if you try to get it quicker to help there you drive up materials costs. And when interest rates are at historical lows and materials costs are skyrocketing, these sorts of things are going to happen.
If you actually do the research, nuclear makes pollution too. Lots of it. Only coal is really significantly worse (and coal is way worse).
And although solar panels are pretty dirty to manufacture (because most of them are made in China using electricity from coal plants under a lax environmental regime) their long service life makes up for it - you'll note that the brownwash jobs that the anti-solar people push out every month always significantly misstate service life and always use China's data, ignoring the clean European producers. Don't buy that meme, either! The real problem with solar's the same as with nuclear, it's simply not economically viable. (Although it might be in the future, if we end up subsidizing solar R & D the way we've subsidized the oil industry over the last 100 years).
Take a look at the real data instead of the memes. Only socialist and totalitarian states can have terrestrial nuclear fission plants, for exactly the reason you gave - in essence, you have to force people to pay costs they don't want in order to provide fission plants they don't need.
Your point about externalizing costs is certainly valid, though. Everybody's misrepresenting the true costs of all forms of power production at this point!
Hmmm. While IFR would help, Candu will not. It is not a breeder.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
For all of the laudable successes of the Environmental Movement in the late 20th Century (e.g. bans on DDT and chlorofluorocarbons, regulations to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions, habitat preservation), the anti-nuclear movement has to count as one of its great failures. These old plants are dangerous,
Yes, the anti-nuclear movement told you that would happen, but you ignored them. That was a failure, but it was largely yours.
Environmental opposition to nuclear power has made nuclear power vastly more dangerous than it needs to be,
Riiiiiight. Blaming the victim, real nice. It's not the environmentalists' fault that these old plants are dangerous. That's your fault. You put yourself in the pro-nuclear camp; you want to be there, you can take your share of the responsibility for making this situation possible. Instead, of course, of blaming the people who warned you. Fuck you for that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You present a false choice. Nuclear or dirty fossil fuels.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The energy source you are looking for is "coal". There's little actual competition between nuclear power and oil or natural gas. There are very few petroleum power plants and they tend to be in areas that have a lot of petroleum. Natural gas as a prevalent near-base load power source (rather than peaking load generator) is a recent phenomenon.
And why would any of these industries support environmentalists? In the short term, environmentalist opposition doesn't shut down nuclear plant competitors. In the long term, they'll get burned for any support they provide. The people who oppose nuclear power also strongly and deeply oppose fossil fuels too.
I think a much better explanation is public hysteria surrounding the word, "nuclear". It's bad enough that technology names have been changed to sound less threatening (for example, "nuclear magnetic resonance imaging" getting renamed to "magnetic resonance imaging" in the medical industry).
I agree that there was a great failure in the US to build out newer nuclear plants in the latter years of the 20th century. Unfortunately it isn't as clear as you state. Energy produces were spreading mis-information if not lies about nuclear power while the Environmental people were crying about the waste. Nuclear power is NOT without its drawbacks. I remember vividly having a PG&E rep come into our class and go through her whole spiel which included numerous falsehoods. When I called her on it she was literally dumbfounded that anyone would know enough to question her falsehoods. It took me YEARS to realize that while PG&E wasn't being trustworthy about nuclear power the other options where worse (generally). So the energy companies themselves hold some of the responsibility for the failure to build new generation nuclear reactors. People do not like being lied to or mislead and often will assume your goals are suspect because of it.
The ban on DDT, which you quote as a success story, is the main reason that malaria still kills millions today. Despite your defense of nuclear power, you still managed with that comment to jump onto the environmentalist propaganda bandwagon.
I am an environmentalist. Leftie as all hell, thank you very much.
With respect to DDT, I cited that deliberately, despite the fact that malaria does indeed take a huge human toll which could (in principle) be mitigated by widespread used of DDT. The problem is the tradeoff: Wholesale collapse of ecosystems is too high a price to pay for even millions of human lives, because the long-term result will be even more lives lost, and more suffering inflicted. The bacteria are going to win, eventually. Burning down our own house to prevent that is both futile and self-destructive.
And the lightwaters, while requiring more enrichment initially, will leave less after the fact, than what came out of the ground. IOW, like Candu, they also burn up a SMALL PORTION of it.
OTOH, MSRs, and IFRs can take what Candu and others can NOT use, and burn up 95% of it. And all at a fraction of the price
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Erm, you are mixing up stuff.
The anti nuclear horde always pointed out that the current plants are not safe. (And on top of that they don't want new ones).
And now you try to use that as a stick against them? Hey, lets build new nuclear plants (which are 'safer' ... but does that imply 'sade'?) so we can replace the old unsafe nuclear plants? Wow, and why did no one from the 'establishment' agree with them the last 50 years that the plants we operate said 50 years are unsafe? Wow, now as it seems convenient, for what ever reason, people start to agree?
If you have now 10billion dollars and build nuclear plants from it, instead of solar or wind plants (especially in Europe, China, India, Indonesia) you are simply plain stupid.
There is no way you earn more money with a nuclear plant.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
TFA is factually wrong on many counts.
The main reason we don't get new reactors in most european countries are political, not economical. In fact, power companies are doing fine and nuclear power is highly subsidized, mostly indirectly. New plants are expensive only on paper.
But the political culture has moved many countries into a very strange corner. Because the public dislikes nuclear power and wants it gone, but politicians don't (bribery, lobbyism, desire for energy-independence or wisdom in planning the future carefully - make your pick), you cannot get permission to build a new plant in many countries, but you can keep your old one running and extend its lifetime.
The second reason is economic, but of a different kind: Since these plants were originally designed for 20-30 years, which are long past, their value in the financial statement is 1 Euro. Which gives them incredibly cute key figures - they look really good in financial analysis. Actually, in reality too, because due to stupid/bought laws, the government will pay for large parts of the waste disposal, and the amount companies need to pay into a fund to pay for deconstruction is, by many experts opinion, only a fraction of what is needed. But once they actually deconstruct most of the plants, the game is up. Like any good scam, you need to keep it going as long as possible.
So thanks to management-think in both politics and business, we have some of the oldest nuclear power plants in the world, right next to some very large cities.
And, btw., I like nuclear power. I wouldn't mind having the old plants replaced by modern ones. But I agree with the anti-nuclear-power people that right now, we have the worst possible solution.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If the original article used actual statistics, perhaps you would not have made this foolish comment. According to the latest (2014) statistics from the EU (http://ec.europa.eu/energy/publications/doc/2014_pocketbook.pdf): Nuclear accounts for 11.7 percent of World Electricity Generation and renewables account for 20 percent.
If we look at energy production (2011), nuclear accounts of 5.1 percent and renewables for 12.9 percent.
~_~ Not tonight, dear, I have a modem.
Erm, you are mixing up stuff.
The anti nuclear horde always pointed out that the current plants are not safe. (And on top of that they don't want new ones).
And now you try to use that as a stick against them?
The plants weren't unsafe when they were built. They are unsafe now because they are far beyond their design lifetime. We have better plant designs now. Why is this so hard to understand?
That page isn't a paper, it isn't peer reviewed, it's a blog and it's 6 years old (before Fukushima)
Totally informative, the mod you deserve, but I see the nuclear mod trolls are out in force suppressing information to push their fanboi barrow.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
> Wow! Facts!
Sort of, I cut off the entire bottom of the post somehow. Here's the status of the other Gen III and similar systems that are not currently on the market:
GE/Hitachi ABWR:
The first Gen III design to be built.
Two successful starts in Japan, another four delayed. Very *very* bad startup CF due to problems on the turbine side, but suspect that will improve somewhat. It had better, or these will be cash disasters on the Darlington A scale. All turned off following Fukishima, not helping their CF at all.
Taiwan reactor hopelessly delayed.
US reactors delayed and then cancelled.
Further sales appear extremely unlikely.
System 80+
Not really a Gen III design according to some, but on the list for completeness. Three S80's (not the 80+) built at Palo Verde. No further sales prospects. Team and design purchased by GE, Combustion Engineering left the industry.
Mitsubishi APWR:
Built to compete with ABWR in Japan and US. No sales, effort cancelled. Misubishi is likely out of the industry, but who knows now.
AECL EC-6 and ACR-1000:
Only real sales prospect was for a ACR-1000 at Darlington B. Rumors of a second plant for industrial steam for oil sand production turned out to be a mistake. Darlington cancelled in 2013 after price came in way higher than the government could afford ($26 billion was the low estimate).
AECL was immediately broken up and the reactor design department sold off to a Quebec engineering firm for a few million dollars, along with a massive tax write-down that was more than they paid for the company.
Siemens:
Out of the industry. Part of EPR, but managed to avoid that nightmare just in time.
B&W mPower:
B&W has essentially closed their reactor division.
All of UK:
Out of the industry. Considering purchase of EPR for Hinkley, but given their experiences with that design it's anyone's guess what will happen.
1) Anything we built that is several decades old will need increasing amounts of maintenance.
2) Environmental regulation has increased costs over the last several decades.
3) Inflation has increased over the last several decades.
All of this means that the cost of caring for these facilities will increase. Notice I didn't say nuclear once in any of that.
I was not aware Europe had a nuclear fleet. I thought all their ships except UK and some French submarines used other means of propulsion.
(Humor, no need to reply.)
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
The fact that they are beyond their designed lifetime makes them not 'more unsafe'.
After all they get routinely maintained.
They are exactly as safe as they where when they where designed and crafted. Likley even safer as they likely got improved due to improved materials and improved control etc.
Same question to you: Why is that so hard to understand?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I thought it was DDT resistant mosquitoes
t can be estimated that at current rates each kilo of insecticide added to the environment will generate 105 new cases of malaria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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