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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.
This user mdsolar submits a lot of stories. All of them are negative about nuclear power.
Isn't that an interesting pattern?
"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.
And something positive about radiation is ... ?
Spiderman, the Hulk and microwave ovens all come to mind... ;)
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?
I'd love it if a nuke plant was built in my town. Would source a ton of decent paying jobs as well as bring some infrastructure improvements. But alas, Lane County (OR) is a designated "nuclear free zone". =/
It's almost as if Chris Dudley is a reseller for the Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative and has a vested interest in scaring people away from nuclear power to buy his solar panels as if there's no way the two can co-exist.
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
The rational response to this situation is that when the cost of keeping some old X running gets too high, you replace it with a new and improved X. But in this one case, no.
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.
Sorry. Wrong.
Nuclear has by far the lowest deathprint.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
An alpha particle?
Actually, I was thinking about the radioactive iodine isotope the doctors used to successfully treat my wife's thyroid cancer. That's something very positive about radiation.
John
> 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.