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.

Comments

Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[geogob]

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.

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[StanBerka]

Your approach is self deluding. Not much different than burrying a dead mouse or a dead cat in your garden. And then the next owner of the property has a nice surprise. Only the surprise is many orders of magnitude larger. Unless you shoot the waste into a star (and do it safely), there is no safe place for it. OK, you could say I exaggerate. Well, not really. How do you know a place safe today, is still safe in 50 years? And if someone decides to build a space terminal like X-Space build one recently in a desolate area, someone not knowing that 100 years earlier some cosmic jerks burried highly radioactive wastes there?

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[foreverdisillusioned]

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.

Please. Just use the bin Laden solution. Once you have too much to store on-site just drop it in the Marianas trench. Problem fucking solved. Virtually impossible to locate (assuming coordinates are kept secret) and virtually impossible to retrieve even if you do know where it is. If any of it does ultimately dissolve in the seawater somehow, it would be utterly negligible compared to what coal power is doing to the ocean right now. Also, I'm curious about what isotopes we're producing in enough quantity that it would still be dangerous enough to worry about after 100k years. (And if there is such an isotope, why can't just we transmute it to something a little less stable first?)

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.

The problem is the costs are done from some kind of utopian or hyper-paranoid point of view, instead of an opportunity cost vs. other forms of power generation. If we used a "cost of human life" approach where we look at the actual lives lost in actuarial terms, nuclear is far and away the cheapest. It's only when we look at the costs associated with senselessly pandering to anti-nuclear fears that it becomes pricey.

I will concede that reactors obviously need to have updated failsafes, as Fukushima painfully illustrated. However, I have yet to hear a newscaster or 'expert' mention Deepwater Horizon (or all of that mercury messing up our delicious tuna) in the same sentence as the Fukushima disaster.

And what about going in the other direction and figuring out how to harness the crazy excess power that nuclear offers? Thermal electrolysis of hydrogen in breeder reactors on a megaproject scale (with an embrittlement-proof pipeline) would completely revolutionize the economy whilst at the same time putting a huge dent in global warming.

I've no doubt the authors here have an agenda to push, but I've also no doubt that the truth lies much closer to their propaganda than it does to the hysteria that dominates all mainstream discussions on nuclear power.

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[Andy Dodd]

Gas is not the best option. It may burn clean, but the process of extracting it is NOT clean.

The problem is that the contamination is much more diffuse/widespread, so you can't say "OMG LOOK THREE MILE ISLAND! BAD!" - even though TMI led to less negative health effects for the environment than gas drilling in just a single town (Dimock, PA).

Solar and wind won't be able to meet our needs for another few decades as we don't have sufficient energy storage technology to make them viable yet (Tesla's making great strides here, but one has to wonder - what might the hidden environmental costs here be? For example, the permanent magnet motors used in nearly all electric and hybrid vehicles use rare earth magnets - http://www.bbc.com/future/stor...

We need one more generation of nuclear to bridge the gap, using modernized reactors with improved safety. (Ideally, research into improved reactors/fuel cycles like the IFR wouldn't have been killed 2 decades ago and they'd be ready for construction now... If I recall one calculation, the IFR could've met our energy needs for 100 years using only the stockpiles of LWR waste we had in the mid-late 1990s.)

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[drinkypoo]

As long as there are no waterways, rocks can stay stable for thousands or even millions of years. There are fossils to prove it.

Waterways change. There are fossils to prove it.

Direct exposure from these sites would be negligible compared to natural background radiation. Water contamination would be more problematic (not catastrophic though), that's why it is important to chose the site wisely

Yes. It is called a subduction zone. The mantle is full of radioactives. It is the only reasonable place to send radioactive waste which is still on this planet, but people like you are pretending that we can just bury it like it's a turd.

Yes. What about them?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[AmiMoJo]

Greenpeace published a plan to move all energy production to renewable sources. I'm sure you have read it, but if not it is published on their web site. It has been peer reviewed and contains vast amounts of evidence, shows how numbers were arrived at and is fully costed. They are assuming that we intend to maintain our current or better standard of living.

So, can you explain why their plan won't work, giving specifics? It might be a long term plan and fairly expensive (although they claim otherwise), but you seem to be suggesting that it can't work at all.

You have done a careful study of this topic, right? Can you post some of your notes?

Re:Insurance?

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Given that nuclear energy producers are not required to have an insurance against nuclear disasters (at least on this side of the Pond)

Neither does hydro dams. Most dams are "insured by the government", i.e. there is no insurance, just like for nuclear. And that doesn't seem to stop anyone from extolling the virtues of hydro electricity even in the face of a very long list of dam failures. You know, a billion here and a billion there, it adds up....

Re:Insurance?

[Rei]

First off, who's extolling the virtues of hydroelectric dams? Dams usually fall on environmentalists' hate lists at around the same place as coal, give or take a few slots.

Extolling the virtues of wind or solar, yeah. But you better believe a wind farm operator will be sued if a turbine falls on someone's house, or a solar thermal plant if their mirrors misalign and blind a pilot. And for that matter, you better believe that a hydroelectric dam operator will be sued if their dam breaks (at least in the first world). And most companies willingly insure their large projects as a hedge against risk.

The aspect of Price-Anderson that people complain about is that the US government foots the bill for the vast majority of costs in the event of a catastrophic accident. The power plant operators only need to insure enough to foot the bill to insure against minor accidents, something most operators would want to do anyway to protect themselves. Many people find the capped liability to be a highly distorting influence on the market, socializing the risks while keeping the profits private.