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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?
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!
Ssh, the cargo-cult fanboys want to pretend there isn't any and that it can all be fuel, so instead of starting a fight let's humour them so they will at least start to consider costs for once instead of pretending it's all "too cheap to meter". Maybe they will learn something and be informed about the topic instead of thinking of it as magic perfected in 1970.
However if you want an answer, for the very active waste there is Synroc - bit of a guess as to how much it can be scaled up to drop costs but at least it (finally) exists. The less active stuff is a lot easier to handle and store, which is just as well because it makes up the majority of the volume of nuclear waste
A "tool" to understand costs of nuclear energy production from the "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". Could this tool be any more biased?
What you think it would be better that someone who has no understanding of the problem wrote the tool instead. Everyone has biases and that isn't a reason to not listen to what they are saying. Maybe what they say needs interpretation, but so what
First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated.
You do realise that the slides below the calculation allow you to tweak these costs. So what you are saying is that the "default" value is an underestimate.
BTW, the default value of 30 years of exploitation is clearly an underestimate as the reactor average lifetime is currently over 40 years, so the bias you are accusing the developpers of this tool of seems to swing both ways.
Now consider le storage projet in Bures FRANCE that is under construction for an estimated cost between 15 and 35 billion euros with 80,000 m3 of storage of which 10,000 m3 is for high-activity waste. Imputing the entire project cost to the storage of HA waste thats or 1.5 to 3.5 m€/m3. The calculation of the metric used in the calculator is then a simple calculation, I'll use the most conservative of all of the values in this calculation
Assumed Values
Burnup of uranium 33 GWd/t (Gigawatt days per tonne) or 792E6 kWe-hr per tonne
Density of Uranium 18.95 grammes/cm3 ou 1.895 tonnes per cubic meter
Cost of storing 1 cubic meter of HA 3.5 m€/m3
Calculated values
Burnup of uranium per cubic meter = 792E6 * 1.895 kWe-hr/m3 = 1.5E9 kWe-hr/m3
Geological storage cost = 3.5E6 / 1.5E9 = 0.002333 € / kWe-hr
So the storage costs are very minor relative to the price per kW/hr representing significantly less than 1% of the kW/hr price. So even major increasing in this price will not have a major impact in the cost of generating electricity. If you moved the slider for the geological costs in the simulator you would have seen that this is the case. So please before accusing other of bias. Do your calculations
D.
What about the cost (enviromental and financial due to climate impact) of the CO2 from fossil fuels? Oh wait, 21st century western society can simply be powered by windmills and solar cells, right? Suuure.
Bingo. It's actually cheaper to save energy than generate more in most cases. There are vast power savings possible that actually increase quality of life. Insulating a building better not only reduces heating and cooling costs, it makes the building more pleasant to be in, it reduces costs for the owner, it makes less pollution and thus does less damage to health... It's a huge win.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
France imports yellowcake (refined U3O8 uranium oxide powder) and turns it into fuel (enriched UO2 uranium oxide pellets), burns it and reprocesses its spent fuel to make more fresh fuel. The small amount of resulting waste is vitrified and is currently stored above ground until the time there's enough of it to be worth putting in an underground repository which will be built in France, not Australia.
Where you get the weird idea that the countries selling uranium are required to accept and dispose of other people's spent fuel I don't know. In some cases spent fuel from other countries has been recycled by nations with the capacity to do so -- the UK, for example has processed spent Magnox fuel from Japan, turning it into fresh fuel rods which were shipped back to Japan. The deal involved the resulting vitrified waste also being returned to Japan in separate shipments. Japan's last Magnox reactor was decommissioned a few years back and the shipments of spent fuel, recycled fuel and vitrified waste have now come to an end.
Russia's Rosatom is offering some countries like Jordan and Vietnam a turnkey nuclear power capability where they supply fresh fuel and take away the spent fuel at each refuelling meaning the host country does not need to build its own waste disposal and processing facility.
Nope. Tjernobyl had one count 'em, one reactor blow up (no 4). The other three reactors continued to operate for years after the catastrophic loss of no 4. Now, Fukushima had almost complete meltdown of one reactor, and partial meltdown of two more (but then again, TMI had a more severe meltdown than most of those, to no ill effect). However, these all happened from the same proximate cause, there was no chain reaction or anything of that nature, so counting reactors is a fools game anyway. If Fukushima had had fewer larger reactors, then it wouldn't have been as serious an accident according to you? Or if it had had ten with five melting (instead of three of six) it would have been a more serious accident? Patent nonsense.
What other type of machine has a 1.3% catastrophic failure rate, resulting in billions of Euros of damage each time
So this is why your analysis is basically flawed. If you want to compare then you need a unit of measurement that makes that comparison invariant of e.g. "how many reactors", and for example takes size into account. What you're doing is akin to counting the number of oil spills rather than the severity.
In power generation it's customary to compare given the amount of energy produced. Sure, a nuclear accident is bad, but we get tons of energy from it. It's like air travel safety, sure, one plane crash is bad, but you get to go a long way, quickly and cheaply, so compared to the options all of a sudden flying doesn't look that bad anymore. Now, answering your question, "What do we do in energy production that's as dangerous as nuclear". The answer is, perhaps surprisingly "everything else". Dams in particular are a large scale killer like no other... Many, many, many, more people have died en masse per kWh due to dam failure than anything else, but in total of course it's dwarfed by coal. Even wind and solar is more dangerous than nuclear, and that's a conservative estimate. Just google "death per kilowatthour", and you'll find no lack of sources to list the actual numbers. Coal is easily a factor of thousand more dangerous than nuclear, and guess what, they don't even pay for their damage, let alone insure against it.
Stefan Axelsson