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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.
Energy prices in Europe have been declining for a while now: http://www.platts.com/pressrel...
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.
Citation please?
There are a number of nuclear plants which are not being kept in operation due to the advent of cheap, clean, natural gas. Fracking has increased the production of old wells and opened up new areas to energy production. So much that wholesale electricity prices have been falling (along with retail prices). This has hammered the nuclear industry (along with solar and wind power) who are facing rising costs (due to inflation, as well as plant age), not to mention other fuel sources such as coal are suffering too. This low natural gas price is not expected to rise for at least the next decade.
So, electric power has NOT been an industry to rack in billions of ill-gotten profits. They make profits, but many are facing the cold hard fact that their current set of generation capacity fueled by nuclear or coal is not going to be financially viable in short order. They are currently on a natural gas fired plant building binge, while shuttering their existing plants. I don't see this trend changing anytime soon.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Although I largely agree with your skepticism (and am intrigued by the sentence "Look up the French Revolution for an example of pretending that politics > math",would you care to expound on that?), I think your view lacks the perspective of the vast improvements that can be achieved with efficiency/ economy/ frugality.
http://www.energyrealities.org/chapter/meeting-our-needs/item/per-capita-energy-consumption/erp327B7C729A3B31D2B
A relatively simple ten percent reduction in the top ten energy using countries would alleviate a massive amount of necessary production.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
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.
Energy prices in Europe have been declining for a while now: http://www.platts.com/pressrel...
Electricity rates have been rising in America. Perversely, this is because of falling demand. Electricity consumption peaked in 2007, and has been falling since then. Falling demand should mean lower prices, but most generators are protected monopolies that are guaranteed a profit. So falling demand means that fixed costs must be spread over fewer kwHrs.
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
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
“German power prices for March 16 delivery turned negative as wind power output rose above 24-GW combined with stronger solar production,” Franke said.
Translation: we've overproduced by such an amount that we're paying for people take our crap.
If the legislative environment weren't such that grid operators were forced to take unneeded generation, wind & solar would have to be curtailed and you'd see the owners of those facilities cry bloody murder, because that's lost revenue and a big hit to ROI. What's funnier is that this situation isn't going to get less frequent with more wind & solar buildout, it's going to get more frequent. Much, much more. The politicians have essentially made grid operators pay for the unreliability of wind & solar, instead of the people who actually own the thing and earn money from it. It's like making a public transport company pay for the lost wages of people who continuously oversleep and show up late for work, despite the public transport running on time.
Contrary to many wind & solar advocates' claims, negative energy prices are not good - it means something's seriously messed up in the grid.
At continental Europe’s most liquid natural gas trading hub, the Dutch TTF, the average price of day-ahead natural gas was €22.76/MWh in March, down 4% on February and down 29% year-over-year.
“The decline has accelerated in recent days,” Richardson said. “TTF prompt delivery gas has dropped below €20/MWh in early April trade, the first time we’ve seen it this low since December 2011. Norwegian gas flows have been healthy and demand for heat and storage have been low.”
So a significant part of the cheap power price is also natural gas, which is most decidedly not renewable and not zero-CO2.
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 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 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
> Translation: we've overproduced by such an amount that we're paying for people take our crap.
Another translation: due to decreased economic activity as industry moves to China, along with improved efficiency in household consumption and in the market in general, the existing generation assets we have are no longer needed as overall demand lowers.
Example: Ontario has been decommissioning nukes and coal plants for 10 years now and still has negative pricing at night. Exact same reasons.
> 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.
So a significant part of the cheap power price is also natural gas, which is most decidedly not renewable and not zero-CO2.
Things are a lot worse than you think. The fact is the electric power prices went down in Germany because coal prices are down. Why are they down? The US has a natural gas glut and has been exporting the excess coal, which is not required anymore, to countries like Germany.
Germany has been trying to get off natural gas because the major supplier to Central Europe is Russia and you know how they are. *cough* Ukraine *cough*.
The Wind and Solar are window dressing. Coal is used to generate 45.8% of the electricity used in Germany while Wind and Solar combined are 17.1%. As Germany is winding down its Nuclear power plants they are building new Coal power plants to replace them.
If the trend continues the US will actually reduce its CO2 emissions in the next decade while countries in Europe like Germany will increase CO2 emissions. If you care about that.
German steel producers have already said they will move elsewhere if the electric power prices don't come back down again. It is uncompetitive to manufacture steel in Germany at current prices.
The German people have decided to make their grid serve them, not profit making companies. It's a very socialist thing to do so I can understand why it seems so strange to Americans.
As well as solar people are buying grid infrastructure. Towns are buying or building a grid that suits them, not the energy companies. The end result will be that electricity production is basically a non-profit endeavour, mostly run by nationalised companies and local government.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC