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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.
Where do they get these people? The guy running the show may know business but if he thinks that's steam he knows fuckall about nuclear or power generation at all. He should ask a high schooler to tell him about cooling towers.
Obama incentivized atomic power as one facet of his energy policy. As a once dogwhistle for the R party 4 decades ago, this could become the anti-wedge for the two major parties and defuse climate modeling uncertainty debates. Bonus: defunding petro oligarchs of all creeds.
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 cares? It's only our childrens children that will have to deal with the radioactive waste out parents parents left us.
Is not design but project management. Plant Vogtle has problems with things like concrete not built to design specs requiring expensive rework and delays. The whole idea with the next gen plants was standardized design an a combined construction operating license, which would keep costs down, IF you built it to the licensed design. Unfortunately that is proving not to be the case. Watts Bar is an old design that was mothballed with plans to restart construction and not a "new" plant.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Uranium "breeder" reactor technology is a throwback to the days of nuclear arms proliferation because if you can continually use the fissile material it generates then it will eventually create weapon's grade Plutonium. What we really need is to invest in the research needed to make a fourth generation reactor that transmutes Thorium a few times before finally making it into a Uranium isotope that is "burned" for power, destroying the fissile material instead of stockpiling it. This makes the possibility of a meltdown physically impossible making it safe enough fully automate without the need for human oversight. If made into small unmanaged units (one buried every X miles) it would be a poor attack target (minimal impact). Basically, you stream in some water, start the reaction and it will churn out electricity and warm water for the century, given a small pile of Thorium.
The idea has been around a long time and in the 80s, congress even refused to fund the research to build a reactor because it couldn't be used to make weapons.
It's past time to start using nuclear physics to cleanly and safely power the globe.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
great news for once. I was getting tired of all this green shit for power crap. this is the real power industry.
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.
Disclaimer: Until recently, I was in the business of building nuclear plants.
When I say that over-regulation, discord between the NRC and ASME, NIMBY trolls, and congressional oversight cause cost and lead time issues, I don't mean that energy companies are trying to bypass safety regulations to accelerate building - there are literally too many people who don't know enough about nuclear plants in decision-making positions.
Here's a true story.
WEC is the prime contractor constructing Summer and Vogtle. After farming out subs to various entities, with defined scopes of work, timelines required to design / install / test / etc - the entire gamut of a multi-billion dollar project...work began. In 2012, during one of the ASME conferences, the ASME committee changed the definition of SA316 forged steel. I won't bore you with the details, but the change they implemented into ASME standards changed the dimensions that SA 316 bar stock could be forged into (for fear that too large of a bar would create structural weakness in the center) - whereas the primary use of 316SS within the context of ASME Section 7 is for creating safety valve bonnets - in this case, for the valves in containment. A bonnet is cored out - hollowed out - leaving no internal metal in the 4" center radius ASME flagged.
However, ASME is responsible to no one. Their decision was decried and appealed by the entire nuclear industry, but ASME answers to no one, and the NRC has no input into ASME standards. Since Summer and Vogtle required congressional approval to build, including design approval - ASME changing the definition of 316SS required a design change in the plans for the nuclear plants, which in turn required congressional approval.
1. Tens of millions in material got scrapped.
2. Tens of hundreds of millions in labor hours between prime and sub-suppliers were wasted - design, engineering, procurement, project management...
And this is ONE tiny decision made by ONE body with regulatory oversight amidst dozens of stakeholders making decisions and changing scopes - not least of which are political bodies. I have dozens of stories just like it.
When it melts down "thanks" to hackers from Canada?
Two words: Three Mile Island
In this area we had 5 reactors being built, one day they just called a halt to them. I had a friend who was studying to be a reactor operator who was told to go home, you haven't a job anymore, just one of the thousands told the same thing.
In January 1982, the WPPSS board stopped construction on Plants 4 and 5 when total cost for all the plants was projected to exceed $24 billion. Because these plants generated no power and brought in no money, the system was forced to default on $2.25 billion in bonds. This meant that the member utilities, and ultimately the rate payers, were obligated to pay back the borrowed money. In some small towns where unemployment due to the recession was already high, this amounted to more than $12,000 per customer. http://www.historylink.org/Fil...
At the time the largest default in the U.S.
$4.7B for a nuclear plant. Is it worth it? Will the company get $4.7B worth of use from this asset? If they put it on the market today, what price would they get?
Does this price reflect the cost of building a new nuclear plant today, or is it horribly inflated by the troubled construction history?
The new planed UK Hinkley Point station has (Wikipedia) "estimated construction cost of £18 billion, or £24.5 billion including financing costs." This is two units with combined 3200MW output. Watts Bar II is 1200MW - so the UK is planing on spending more per MW than this plant cost.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Someone check my math.
6.8 B in cost avg over 40 years of operation (which will be extended to 80 but lets just assume 40)
means we have to sell the power at
$.0159/kWhr ? 1.5 cents per kWhr vs the national avg of 12cents (based on 1218 MW output)
granted that just initial cost but that seems really low for such a huge price tag. (or is that just showing ignorance in terms of how much the profit the utility sector actually robs from us)
All of it does. It's water, not steam. :)
You were aiming to correct me but you mist
The idiot there is the guy (not you obviously) that didn't put a date on the end of the specified standard to be used in the designs/legislation/whatever. With respect that's a newbie mistake. Standards change. If you don't refer to the one you actually mean and leave things open to referring to one that has not been written yet it's pretty obvious that things are going to go wrong someday. This fuckup looks like what happens when you get office workers with English Lit. degrees to do an engineers job.
As a former member of ASTM (I stopped paying the fees about 15 years ago) I'm a bit curious as to why the ASME standard was used instead of ASTM which has the advantage of being more recognized internationally so would vastly increase the pool of potential suppliers.
Is all hope to be thusly consolidated?
now it is 489 stinking smoking noxious deadly terraforming piles of metal that will for ever⦠At least the next 5 billion years be like superheated galactic temperature pimples heating up our atmosphere way more than global warming.
Nuclear power is awesome!
So, this beloved nuclear power is anything BUT cheap.
And "clean" is also relative when you consider the mining, refining, enriching and disposal of the radioactive fuel and waste products...
If you listen closely you can hear mdsolar screaming.
Can you translate if please? Hard to do with the political nonsense interfering with the message.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
"after billions of dollars in budget overruns" - How is this cheap? Doesn't even consider the still unsolved problem of long term nuclear waste storage. These billions would have been better spent on battery research so that we have effective means to store the power generated by wind, water, and solar.
It's an awful lot of complexity just to make water really hot.
There's got to be a better. Maybe this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The problem with small reactors is the LUDDITES in congress. They pass laws meant to make Terawatt generators safe, and keep them from being built. They make those same laws apply to small reactors. Ex: You have to have evacuation plans for all towns within X miles of the reactor. In New England a small town, on the edge of that range, refused to make a plan. That stopped the reactor from being built. The builders could have provided a slush fund to that town, then they might have approved it. Paying off all the locals and making plans for rare events, and the plans have to be approved by people who graduated from school 50 years ago.
I would hope that designs created in this Century would be safer. Build some reactors based on designs for Submarines and Aircraft Carriers. They could cover a small town. Build a 1000 of those and watch the price of oil go down. Watch the price of oil go down and see the problems coming out of the middle east evaporate.
More Nukes - Less Kooks.
Too much regulation that could be STREAMLINED.
That's helpful, but you've failed to include fixed operations and maintenance (O&M), fuel, variable O&M, and, most important perhaps for nuclear, ongoing capital expenditures (capex) necessary to keep the thing running. We're seeing nuclear units retiring in America right now because the $30/MWh they make on the energy market isn't enough to cover their per-unit-energy ongoing costs. When you include the ongoing costs to keep them running, it's far less obvious that new nuclear power plants will be money makers. Even less obvious is that they will make more money than a combined cycle gas plant, a wind farm, or a solar farm.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
When you make enough Lithium to have CITY SIZE storage, that is a LOT of Lithium.
Then you go 5-10 years out, you have a LOT of Lithium waste to store.
That stuff is NIMBY.
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.
The amount of revenue it generates is not the important consideration in determining if a project is economically worthwhile. It has to generate enough PROFIT to repay the investment. If the annual cost of generating your $947M worth of power is $947M then the project will never repay the cost of building the plant. The cost of generation plus the amortized cost of building and maintaining the plant has to be less than the amount of revenue brought in. Presumably the amount charged for a unit of electricity is high enough to pay for the plant during it's lifetime but you cannot just assume that to be true. In the case of a plant that cost $4.7B to build and is expected to last for 40 years you would need to bring in $117.5M in revenue each year in excess of the operating costs just to break even. And that is ignoring inflation, financing costs, etc. So by your example that electricity had better not cost more than $829.5M per year (actually less than that in the real world) or the plant will not break even.
promised to generate enough power to light up 1.3 million homes.
So how many megawatts is that? (And no, given the name of the plant, searching for "watts" doesn't help.)
And are we talking trailer park homes or mansions? Does "light up" include heating/cooling, running the electronics, etc, etc.
Who comes up with these freaking units, anyway?
(Grouchy because /me hasn't finished first cup of coffee yet.)
-- Alastair
That's a difficult deciduous to make. Best to leaf it alone, rather than root around, pining for questions that don't really need to be axed. I suggest you branch out into something else.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This has been a problem for decades to which no nation really wants to address. Putting aside even power generation for a second, there are experimental reactors out there that are used to produce certain isotopes for various reasons.
Chalk River is a perfect example in Canada. A number of years ago, due to budget cuts and mismanagement there was a problem a the station causing it to be shut done for an extended period of time. It basically produced isotopes used in medical procedures. However it, even though being built back in the 60's, is one of only 3 in the entire world, which caused an immediate shortage of the availability of said isotopes and rationing had to occur for a period of time until it could be brought back online.
However it was an experimental reactor built by a nation, with really no commercial value so no company is going to do it. With all the issues associated with creating new reactors what nation wants to get into that business either, and how does a politician sell that to its people. The need is still there regardless.
Don't worry. China is paving the way.
There, I have now doubled the number of times "France" appears in the discussion. (It was twice when I posted).
That's normal. You see these giant arguments go on and on about whether it is economically feasible or safe or whatever, and not only do detractors fail to address the nation that's been getting most power from it for 40 years without accidents, contamination, public protests of note, and affordably enough....the weird thing is the promoters hardly mention it, either.
France. Triple.
FFS - just look up the wikipedia article for cooling towers instead of revealing that you are commenting on a topic you have zero clue about.
The water in those things is not very hot, it's typically starting at 40C or so and the stuff that comes out is fog.
As for your nuclear engineering comment - irrelevant - the guy that made the "steam" comment - footballer, historian and lawyer with a career mostly in banks.
He doesn't know any better.
You should.