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First New US Nuclear Reactor In 20 Years Goes Live (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Tennessee Valley Authority is celebrating an event 43 years in the making: the completion of the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant. In 1973, the TVA, one of the nation's largest public power providers, began building two reactors that combined promised to generate enough power to light up 1.3 million homes. The first reactor, delayed by design flaws, eventually went live in 1996. Now, after billions of dollars in budget overruns, the second reactor has finally started sending power to homes and businesses. Standing in front of both reactors Wednesday, TVA President Bill Johnson said Watts Bar 2, the first U.S. reactor to enter commercial operation in 20 years, would offer clean, cheap and reliable energy to residents of several southern states for at least another generation. Before Watts Bar 2, the last time an American reactor had fired up was in 1996. It was Watts Bar 1 -- and according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it cost $6.8 billion, far greater than the original price tag at $370 million. In the 2000s, some American power companies, faced with growing environmental regulations, eyed nuclear power again as a top alternative to fossil fuels such as coal and oil. A handful of companies, taking advantage of federal loan guarantees from the Bush administration, revived nuclear reactor proposals in a period now known as the so-called "nuclear renaissance." Eventually, nuclear regulators started to green light new reactors, including ones in Georgia and South Carolina. In 2007, the TVA resumed construction on Watts Bar 2, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The TVA originally said it would take five years to complete. The TVA, which today serves seven different southern states, relies on nuclear power to light up approximately 4.5 million homes. Watts Bar 2, the company's seventh operating reactor, reaffirms its commitment to nukes for at least four more decades, Johnson said Wednesday. In the end, TVA required more than five years to build the project. The final cost, far exceeding its initial budget, stood at $4.7 billion.
I wonder how many wind and solar plants could be built for a mere 6.8 Billion? And that's without the 10,000 year radioactive waste from a nuke.
Who do you think he was communicating to? People who really needed, just that moment, to process the distinction between steam and condensed water droplets making visible emissions? No. He was making sure that low information twits understood that wasn't smoke or Eeeevil Radioactive Fog.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
As a proud, card-carrying TreeHugger(TM) I am happy to see nuclear power remaining a viable component of our national electrical baseline capacity. Let's be real: when coal (especially) is the main alternative for providing the huge baseload requirements of a solid electrical infrastructure, it's a no-brainer to have nuclear be a portion of the multi-legged stool we need.
(If you can see it, it's not steam)
Some of it condenses, but much of it does not. It is steam.
If you want to really get pedantic, you never actually see anything other than photons striking your retina.
That's what the economists think but they've missed out a very important step the engineers know. You need R&D and pilot plants so that you can design a GOOD standardized design before you build a lot of them. Otherwise your standardized design costs a fortune in the long run from retrofitting a lot of units each time you find a problem.
Instead of that the R&D money got blown on PR (probably literally on hookers and blow for Senators) and we have nothing to build on apart from reactors from the 1970s and imported Japanese technology (Westinghouse made up for their lack of R&D spending by taking advantage of the Japanese taxpayer instead).
Maybe we will be like the UK and just give up and buy Chinese?
Nuclear power has a capacity factor of about 0.9. So a 1 GW plant will generate on average 900 MW throughout the year after taking into account downtime for maintenance and refueling.
8766 hours in a year (taking into account leap years), so that's 7889 GWh per year.
At a U.S. average rate of 12 cents/kWh = $120/MWh = $0.12 million/GWh, that's $947 million worth of power generated per year.
Nuclear plants are licensed to operate for 40 years. So that's $37.9 billion worth of power generated over 40 years.
Most of the older plants have had their license extended to 60 years. Some are requesting an extension to 80 years because everything is working just fine. So the actual power generated over the lifetime of the plant will likely be 1.5x to 2x higher.
So yeah, the $4.7 billion construction cost is tiny compared to the return you'll get. For your example of a 3.2 GW output plant that costs £24.5 billion ($30 billion) including financing, at the UK average rate of US$0.22/kWh, the expected power generated over 40 years would be worth $222 billion.
Nuclear power has a capacity factor of about 0.9. So a 1 GW plant will generate on average 900 MW throughout the year after taking into account downtime for maintenance and refueling. 8766 hours in a year (taking into account leap years), so that's 7889 GWh per year. At a U.S. average rate of 12 cents/kWh = $120/MWh = $0.12 million/GWh, that's $947 million worth of power generated per year. Nuclear plants are licensed to operate for 40 years. So that's $37.9 billion worth of power generated over 40 years. Most of the older plants have had their license extended to 60 years. Some are requesting an extension to 80 years because everything is working just fine. So the actual power generated over the lifetime of the plant will likely be 1.5x to 2x higher. So yeah, the $4.7 billion construction cost is tiny compared to the return you'll get. For your example of a 3.2 GW output plant that costs £24.5 billion ($30 billion) including financing, at the UK average rate of US$0.22/kWh, the expected power generated over 40 years would be worth $222 billion.
Not only that, but nuclear plants employ a large number of well paid, skilled, and educated people for that entire duration. They also pay huge amounts in local and state taxes. The contributions back to the tax base and the economy from that is worth billions more.
Frrom the article:
TVA President Bill Johnson said Watts Bar 2, the first U.S. reactor to enter commercial operation in 20 years, would offer clean, cheap and reliable energy to residents of several southern states for at least another generation.
Clean - as long as you don't count the radioactive waste that has to be stored somewhere for the next thousand years.
Stored for the next thousand years, but ideally (if it weren't for NIMBYs) stored in secured and protected underground caverns where the radioactivity is isolated and contained. As opposed to coal, which spreads radioactivity all over the place or fossil fuels which release massive amounts of greenhouse gasses. Isn't it better to make a very small, unused area really dirty compared to making large swathes of used and inhabited lands only kind of dirty? And in those thousand years that we are storing the nuclear waste we may come up with technology that can reuse that waste for some other purpose.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"Nuclear waste" is mostly unspent fuel that can be reprocessed and used again. The US just decided not to invest in the facilities to do so. The remainder of the reactor output is short-lived radiologicals useful for medicine and some other isotopes that can be used as fuel in a molten-salt reactor. Nuclear "waste" isn't a fundamentally difficult problem.
sheer amount of deaths per terawatt
Compared to coal mining?