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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!
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?
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?
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.
Beached whale? Tell that to France thats been using it safely for the last 50 years for the majority of their electrical power.
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!
France can get away with this because disposal of spent fuel is, for the most part, someone else's problem.
France does recycle a lot; something like 15-20% of its fuel is from recycling. Most of it, however, is imported from places like Canada, Niger, and Australia. Under the non-proliferation treaty, it's the responsibility of the country of origin to dispose of the waste that came from its fuel.
So yeah, I'll bet France loves nuclear power. They don't have to deal with most of the long-term (i.e. 100,000+ years) consequences.
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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.
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.
Oh get over yourself. The stuff came out of the ground so it can quite easily be buried back in the ground. Or did you think radioactivity appeared as if by magic from unicorns and fairy dust as soon as the uranium was put in the reactor?
And people like you go on about long term pollution, but I bet you don't think twice about the immediate pollution caused by mining to get the ore to build the latest smarttoy you've upgraded to do you? The way things are going they'll be hardly anyone around to care in 100K years time since manking will have nicely wrecked the enviroment anyway.
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!
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.
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...
But you really can't guarantee that it won't taint groundwater for 10,000 years. We sure can't post a sign that will last that long.
The fact is, the only thing that can be done with the existing waste is to burn it up in a reactor. Supposedly, it can be got down to around 300 years, which we could then deal with.
We have no choice, and the people who still debate whether or not we should build new reactors are just uninformed. Or I am.
Actually, I misread the article. Australia actually sent fuel waste to France for reprocessing, and the bit that can't be recycled has bounced backwards and forwards a few times since then. My bad.
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I did make a mistake in my comment. However...
It's different "stuff". And that's not taking into account the fact that an awful lot of the uranium came out of the ground via in-situ leaching. There isn't even a hole you can put it in.
I resent the implication that I'm some kind of habitual upgrader. But since you asked, yes, I do think about where ores come from, and the livelihoods of the locals around there, and the working conditions of people who make the (few) things that I buy.
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That's... odd. Australia doesn't have any nuclear power reactors. It burns coal for a lot of its power requirements and exports a shitload more to other countries who do the same. Of course it doesn't take back all the CO2 emitted by the foreign power stations when they burn that coal...
A quick Giggle shows that Australia has sent spent fuel from at least one of its research reactors, HIFAR to France for reprocessing. The waste from that reprocessing operation would normally be returned to Australia after being vtirified.
HIFAR (it's shut down and now being decommissioned) was small with only 7kg of fuel compared to the hundred tonnes plus of fuel oxide in a typical power reactor of today. The problem seems to have been that initially HIFAR was fuelled with highly-enriched uranium which was a proliferation danger hence the desire to reprocess the spent fuel. Most research reactors of this type around the world (such as HIFAR's replacement, OPAL) have been now reconfigured to use low-enriched uranium which poses less of a proliferation threat and in such cases long-term storage on site of spent fuel is probably more appropriate and cheaper.
So? If people still have a modern-ish civilization in 10000 years then they will be able to detect the contamination. If humankind devolves into barbarians riding with ISIS flags, then they will be endangered by lots of other industrial byproducts. Remember, plutonium decays but arsenic is for forever!
FYI, HIFAR did produce power as a side-effect of the research activity. OPAL does too. So it's technically correct to say that Australia has a power reactor.
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"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.