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Cool Tool: The Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator
Lasrick writes: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has launched a very cool new tool that will excite anyone interested in understanding the per kilowatt cost of nuclear energy. Developed over the last two years in a partnership between the Bulletin and the University of Chicago, the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator estimates the cost of electricity produced by three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle:
1. The once-through fuel cycle used in most US nuclear power plants, in which uranium fuel is used once and then stored for later disposal.
2. A limited-recycle mode in which a mix of uranium and plutonium (that is, mixed oxide, or MOX) is used to fuel a light water reactor.
3. A full-recycle system, which uses a fast neutron spectrum reactor that can be configured to 'breed' plutonium that can subsequently be used as either nuclear fuel or weapons material.
This online tool lets users test how sensitive the price of electricity is to a full range of components—more than 60 parameters that can be adjusted for the three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle considered. The results provide nuanced cost assessments for the reprocessing of nuclear fuel and can serve as the basis for discussions among government officials, industry leaders, and public interest groups.
1. The once-through fuel cycle used in most US nuclear power plants, in which uranium fuel is used once and then stored for later disposal.
2. A limited-recycle mode in which a mix of uranium and plutonium (that is, mixed oxide, or MOX) is used to fuel a light water reactor.
3. A full-recycle system, which uses a fast neutron spectrum reactor that can be configured to 'breed' plutonium that can subsequently be used as either nuclear fuel or weapons material.
This online tool lets users test how sensitive the price of electricity is to a full range of components—more than 60 parameters that can be adjusted for the three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle considered. The results provide nuanced cost assessments for the reprocessing of nuclear fuel and can serve as the basis for discussions among government officials, industry leaders, and public interest groups.
Where's The Coal Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator that includes all the hidden costs?
What about the cost for taking care of the waste from the enrichment process?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Given that nuclear energy producers are not required to have an insurance against nuclear disasters (at least on this side of the Pond), is insurance included or is it as usual "delegated" to society? The calculator itself refuses to run without cross-site scripting attacks from Google, so I could not check.
If it serves as a "basis for discussion", you can bet it serves a political rather than a technical purpose.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
"public interest groups"
Public Interest Groups
P.I.G.
pigs
The results provide nuanced cost assessments for the reprocessing of nuclear fuel and can serve as the basis for discussions among government officials, industry leaders, and public interest groups.
Here's what the basis of discussion will be. Profits and fear.
In fact, the fear of a lack of profits will drive a lot of discussion, and the profits from exploiting fear will drive most of the rest.
A "tool" to understand costs of nuclear energy production from the "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". Could this tool be any more biased? I doubt it looking at the selected metrics.
First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.
More importantly, the "tool" seems to cover only construction costs. Nowhere are decommissioning costs included, which are order of magnitude over the construction costs. Experience has shown both in the US and elsewhere, that these costs have been (willingly or not) underestimated by order of magnitude by the industry. The lack of transparency help a large boom of the industry 30 years ago, but the lack of long term sight is kicking back in full force. Sad of an industry, which should secure waste thousands if not millions of years.
Let me be clear on my sight. I am actually in favour of sensible use and development of nuclear energy. But this cannot be done without transparency, hiding the real costs. Worse, I believe its the hiding of the real costs (and risks) that made this industry stagnate and sent it towards its death (lets be honest, Atomic industry is really dying). This tools seems only to continue this long tradition.
It's a lung cancer patient dying with a cigarette in the hand.
the per kilowatt-hour cost of nuclear energy
or
the per kilowatt cost of nuclear power
At the bottom of the
Too lazy, didn't run. What's the conclusion? Does this mean that nuclear power is awesome or awful?
Human civilization has been around for a tiny fraction of 100,000 years -- and it is debateable for how much longer. And if we do survive, I suspect all of these waste dumps will be mined long before that time. We call it waste because we don't know what to do with it -- more our limitation than anyone else's.
And as has been observed above, the costs we associate with it can be anything we imagine -- depending upon our agenda. Legal fees for endless government paperwork or insurance costs for the end of the world and beyond -- these numbers can be gamed to produce any result the proponent wishes.
Meanwhile, the track record of nuclear power as implemented continues to accrue -- and problems accumulate because the pHBs of the world don't want to spend a dime to fix known problems unless forced and regulators zealous to show how tough they can be by making it even more expensive. And strangling any real engineering along the way. I suspect if reactors were airplanes we would be using the train a lot.
FRIST!! Apparently nobody mentioned it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... The Thorium Reactor operates at almost 100% fuel consumption. And some of the waste materials are used for cancer treatment, space batteries, etc. Current technologies use about 1% of the nuclear fuel. Not only that, but LFTR can use the already accumulated spent nuclear fuel, mixed with the Thorium, to produce energy and reduce the accumulated nuclear waste.
What is the cost of extinction, in philosophical terms of nuclear endearment?
I take it that you'd be against fossil fuels. Since renewables don't have the problem of nuclear fallout or radioactive waste, you would be for that, yes?
Or was that a feeble attempt to scare people into buying the beached white whale of nuclear power?
Ah, the anti-nuclear hysterics are out already. Please, go ahead and mod me down some more. Don't worry your pretty little heads with complicated issues like subtracting the number of people who died from Three Mile Island (statistically speaking, they think it might be as much one person. Years later, from cancer.) from the people who died from Deepwater Horizon (eleven did immediately. No word yet on whether the oil and oil dispersants will raise cancer risks, nor does the media care.)
I could be wrong on some of my speculation here and it's even conceivable I'm even deserving of a downmod for it, but I'm a little disappointed no one ever even tries to respond sensibly to the opportunity cost argument.
Practically if your half life tend to go on such a long time period as you considering 100.000 of years of storage, its activity is probably relatively low. The main problem now is not stuff we store for 100.000 of years which has low activity, the problem is more what has an half life of 100 days to 1000 years which tend to very from very radioactive (100 days) to low but still dangerous (1000 years) above that it tend to tapper off. So it is not as simple as "100.000 years of radioactive horrors". Once you start to speak of such long lived element chance is that the radioactivity level is low.
Yes... but they're FRENCH. F R E N C H.
I'm all for nuclear power, but OMG! F R E N C H!
Everyone has biases and that isn't a reason to not listen to what they are saying.
Actually... that's kind of the perfect reason to not listen to what they are saying.
It's to bad that everyone misses that energy from thorium using one of several technologies (such as a Molten Salt Reactor) has the possibilitiy to make the cost of electrical power generation cheaper than using coal. .5% of current waste levels, and the waste that is produced has a level of radioactivity that is dangerous for only 300 years.
Waste reduced to
It is able to use up current nuclear waste and leftover weapons material. The fuel is plentiful and cheap with little pre-processing required. The reactor operates at atmospheric pressure, so no chance of explosion releasing dangerous radioactive materials. Reactors can be scaled down so that construction can be done in a factory environment, greatly reducing construction costs. Air cooling instead of using millions of gallons of water.
The list goes on.
How France is [not yet] disposing of its nuclear waste - BBC News
50+ years of nuclear and still no waste storage.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
I don't know, the University of Chicago doesn't have much experience with nuclear reactors.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I mean, one can never have enough weapons grade plutonium, don't you know? And there's always a market for it!
isn't this hyperboly geared to CNN or better yet FOX??
It escapes me how this related to news for nerds?
wow, i wonder what money changed hands to get this published??
When someone points out a problem with your beloved scheme, mod down! Because you know that there is no rational response which you could make, you must behave irrationally. You are married to nuclear power, and it's an abusive relationship. You can leave any time you want, but you've convinced yourself you can't find anything better, so you stay for the beatings. The problem is, you're making sure everyone else gets beaten, too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Does it consider cleanup, storage, and accident, or just the raw price of the fuel.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Did they look at Direct Use of Pressurized Water Reactor Spent Fuel in CANDU? You can pretty much grind up the "spent" fuel from a LWR, pack it into new pellets, then burn it again with a heavy-water moderator. Those reactors can also burn un-enriched uranium or thorium.
No one who knows anything about nuclear power is going to be "excited" by anything the BAS releases on the topic, because they are a purely political anti-nuclear organization with a radical anti-nuclear agenda.
Whatever they have released, the odds are so overwhelming that it's nothing but a propaganda tool in their war on nuclear energy--a war whose success has helped create our current climate crisis--that it isn't worth anyone's time to even look at.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
So, no Thorium fuel cycle? Even though we could do a pretty good job of estimating cost, and the Thorium fuel cycle is the CLEAR winner in every aspect going forward.
How shortsighted.
To date that one little word disposal has been the biggest problem for the nuclear Industry they can not figure out a way to get rid of the Plutonium that is in the waste so why would you create more ?
http://e360.yale.edu/counterpo...
"Environmentalist" is a pretty broad category these days.
Hydro makes more sense than just about every other power source available. It's big detriment is that it is only realistic in certain specific geographical areas.
Environmentalists have a harsh buzz on Wind Power as well... All the dead birdies and bats and such...
I've even seen them complain about Solar power installations potentially destroying bird habitat.
Everyone has an agenda.
Nukes have a bad reputation which is probably ill deserved. As a result just about all Nukes are "old" nukes, which should be no surprise are not the best Nukes, however building new, or even research into advancements is difficult with the reputation. To my mind these are the problem with Nukes that need to be addressed:
1) There is a disconnect between liability and profitability. In short, in my opinion Nukes should *not* be privatized. There is a fundamental gap that is insurmountable in my opinion.
2) TCO. Rarely or incorrectly accounted for. The fact is Nukes produce a fantastic amount of constant power for low cost. However, the capitol costs to actual build one are also astronomical, and construction is usually measured in decades.
The future is those experimental pocket nukes. They produce less power, however seem much more logical. For one, having your generation dispersed where you need it rather than centralized where the plant happens to exist is better for the distribution side of things. They would be cheaper and be able to be constructed in more reasonable time frames. They don't produce the same or quantity of waste. They don't have the same safety issues that the old guard have. Because they are safer, less waste, probably easier closure plans, that means a lot less liability, which might make it more suitable for private enterprise. It also adds a measure of redundancy to the system. If a reactor goes down at a huge producer, it's a pretty big deal. Should a pocket nuke need to be taken out of service, it's immediate neighbors could probably be able to pick up the slack.
One last thing on Hydro, for all the proponents of Wind and Solar, or transient generation, Hydro storage (i,e, dams, etc...) are really the *only* realistic method of energy storage at scale. As soon as they start taking about using batteries and the like, I know they are a loon and have no idea what they are talking about (never mind the environmental costs of lead batteries, or their more advanced brethren also diverted from some pretty toxic stuff).
Only if you backdate the anti-nuclear lobby by a few years and pretend it had far more influence than it ever has had.
The reality is once it became a commercial situation those governments that were not making money out of it (eg. the USA) dropped out of research and private industry failed to pick up the slack. Research continued in Japan (despite the very strong anti-nuclear lobby there which makes the US one look like nothing) until it all went private, and Westinghouse picked up the spoils but failed to continue the research. Research is ongoing in France, India, Russia and some commercial research in Germany.