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

Coal fuel cycle

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's The Coal Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator that includes all the hidden costs?

Insurance?

[Errol backfiring]

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.

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.

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[dbIII]

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

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...

[AmiMoJo]

The tool also fails to include the cost of insurance, both to the operator and the government. The government's costs are practically impossible to calculate, as it has almost unlimited liability.

The cost of equipment failure is ignored as well. Around 1.3% of all civilian reactors have failed catastrophically, but vastly more equipment has failed safely and either been abandoned or needed expensive repairs. Storage and reprocessing systems are included. Maintenance costs tend to be rather high because the equipment gets contaminated and can't safely be worked on by human beings.

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...

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

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.

Thorium

[JudeanPeople'sFront]

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.

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[Viol8]

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.

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[Rei]

The waste issue (as well as inherent safety) is part of the reason that there's so much research on ADSRs right now (note: the article says that an ADSR "would use thorium as a fuel", but it's not actually limited to thorium, it can use any subcritical fissile core). Spallation can rip apart the long-lived actinides that don't have a sufficient (n, gamma) cross section to prevent their accumulation in nuclear waste. And of course, since the core is inherently subcritical by design, simply not enough neutronicity under any condition to sustain a chain reaction on its own, when you shut the beam off, fission ceases instantly (though you still have decay heat like with any other nuclear power plant). Spallation source provides no more than about 10% or so of the neutronicity, but it's the amount needed to push the core over the edge.

I have my own very radical variant on the concept of an accelerator driven fission that I'm working on simulating now in Geant4 (although that was probably a poor choice of software, apparently their thermal scattering codes are really immature... as far as CERN is concerned, once particles get down below the MeV range they're usually not particularly interesting). But anyway the concept is to have a core with literally zero neutronicty - a lithium-burning reactor. The basic concept is as such:

1. A planar proton beam is delivered by one or more high power linac beamlines. Commercial-scale linac costs - without any improvements in technology - are expected to cost $5-20 per watt. The particular design would call for very high voltage (~16MV) klystrons to drive it - and not simply to reduce size (more in this shortly)

2. The proton beam bombards a fragment emitting target inside an axial magnetic field in a vacuum. The estimation of deceleration efficiency is estimated at over 90% in fragment reactors due to the lack of Carnot losses (according to the published research on the subject). The resultant HVDC will be direct converted to the klystron voltage in producing the electron beam that drives the linac. About 60% of the energy of spallation goes into fragment production. Fragments will be drawn away from the fragment target en route to the collector via a slightly expanding axial magnetic field. Fragment collection allows for automatic isotope separation.

3. The maximum power output of a fragment reactor is limited by its surface area and its ability to radiate heat. Fragment-emitting targets can be either electrostatically suspended dust or rapidly rotating with thin fibers or planes of target material, in order to radiatively cool without melting. Spallation targets, for efficiency, need to be high-Z materials, such as lead, tungsten, mercury, etc. Tungsten is particularly attractive due to its high melting point of 3695K. High-Z metal-rich ceramics are also possible targets, with very high melting points. The temperature of the chamber's beryllium walls being radiated to will be around 1050K. This means heat exchange between a ~3000K emitter (4.6e7W/m) and a 1050K receiver (6.8e4W/m), or about 4.5MW per square meter. In short, this allows for a surprisingly compact core, limited more by the length necessary to ensure a sufficient proton spallation cross section.

4. Neutrons emitted by spallation (at a cost of 30-40 MeV per neutron) are heavily biased by

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Yes. What about them?

[nojayuk]

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.

Waste?

[MrL0G1C]

How France is [not yet] disposing of its nuclear waste - BBC News

Despite advanced schemes in Finland, not a single country worldwide has an operational underground repository.

50+ years of nuclear and still no waste storage.