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.

Comments

Re:From the article

[guruevi]

And what else do you think is coming out of those cooling towers... hint: evaporated water.

6.8 Billion

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Rei]

Nuclear power has always been a lot more popular on K Street than on Wall Street. At least these sort of overruns pale in comparison to some of the ones in Europe - one in the UK has now become the second most expensive thing ever made by man (after the International Space Station). Lots of nuclear plants on that list, too. One in Finland is now a decade overdue and commercial operation still isn't expected until 2018 - assuming there's not even more delays.

One of nuclear's biggest problems is, it doesn't work very well small. There are some "smallish" modular reactor designs, but as a general rule, nuclear plants are very large structures. Which means, you're not making a lot of them. Which means you don't retire the risk (both financial and safety) very quickly. Nuclear inherently contains a lot of both of those. It can take decades to learn what problems are. And when we redesign systems to start over with a new "generation" of nuclear power plants, that "ironing out the financial and safety kinks" process starts over.

It's unfortunate, but the very nature of fission means going through every element on the periodic table except the extremely short-lived/superheavy ones. Which automatically means facing very significant corrosion and containment challenges. The very nature of a high neutron flux means degradation on its own. The very nature of having exceedingly toxic materials means that you can't allow even tiny amounts to escape, and have to go to extreme levels to prevent serious problems like fires - and not only is your fuel source challenging from a chemical and materials standpoint, but it also can't be shut down quickly. Criticality can be, but the daughter product decays keep the core hot for a considerable length of time.

Nuclear is eminently doable from a technological standpoint. But like rocketry, a lot of things conspire to make it very difficult to do affordably and safely.

Re: 6.8 Billion

[ddtmm]

Ya, because nuclear power plants are so beautiful to look at.

Re: 6.8 Billion

[arglebargle_xiv]

Only in some circumstances. That blue beam of Cherenkov radiation shooting up into the sky with the core uncovered does look pretty though, you'd never get that with coal.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear actually is very scale-able small and is in fact better small and has more options small a simple google search would reveal that. WHen nuclear first started in this country a businessman bribed congress to only approve one reactor in the USA. That's why there big and the USA can do them VERY efficient small we have them on subs and there very safe as well.

It was WW2 that created the first reactors, this areas claim to fame is we fueled the second A-bomb :|

I thought I operated the largest reactor at 4000Mw, bigger is better for Plutonium production. But it only ranks third, one is twice as large. http://www.power-technology.com/features/feature-largest-nuclear-power-plants-world/ while those may still be operating, we shut down in the late 80's (our moderator was carbon as was Chernobyl's and the deciding factor).

Now TRIGA reactors are not only small but inherently safe, to WOW the visitors the center rod is spring loaded and ejected out of the pile, you see that beautiful blue glow, then the reactor shuts down due to the heat generated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA To certify I had to shutdown and start-up a reactor 10 times ( or watch), we did that on a TRIGA reactor :)

Re: 6.8 Billion

[Gavagai80]

All power plants are beautiful in their own way.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Rei]

From a physics standpoint, this is not true. Larger reactors help you have higher total neutron cross sections, both for elastic scattering / moderation and fission. A "small" nuclear reactor is defined by the IAEA as one that's less than 300MWe, although even reactors as big as 500MWe are sometimes referred to as "small". Per-reactor, not per-plant. Don't get me wrong, you can make reactors at any size - some companies are looking at modules as small as 25MW (per reactor). But it makes your already problematic economics even worse.

That said, I still do have more hope for small reactors than large ones, just simply from the standpoint of getting some degree of mass production and refinement through use. Still, the "nothing may go wrong" situation one faces with nuclear reactors and the "need to start from scratch if some flaw is developed in the basic design that prevents you from 'nothing may go wrong'" still bites.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Trailer Trash]

Nuclear is eminently doable from a technological standpoint. But like rocketry, a lot of things conspire to make it very difficult to do affordably and safely.

True, but the main competitors up until recently - hydro and coal - have their own problems that aren't as bad a nuclear per generator, but in aggregate are bad. Acid rain and global warming come to mind. With hydro, we lose huge amounts of land (although we at least get a lake out of the deal) but imagine if we could have covered that land with solar cells instead of a lake.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Mr D from 63]

I wonder how many wind and solar plants could be built for a mere 6.8 Billion?

A lot, but their collective energy output would be much much less than the nuclear plant of the next 60 years. In fact, the windmills would need to be replaced 2 or 4 times, the solar panels 2 or 3 times.

Re:6.8 Billion

[hvdh]

Likely, the $370M was in 1973's dollars, which would be around $2B in 2016 dollars.

Re:6.8 Billion

[mrchaotica]

One of nuclear's biggest problems is, it doesn't work very well small.

US or Russian naval officers would disagree with you. Or do you think the reactor on a submarine counts as "big?"

Re:6.8 Billion

[Daemonik]

We've pretty much already dammed every river that's capable of generating reasonable amounts of hydro power, and coal produces more radioactive waste than nuclear reactors: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/.

...imagine if we could have covered that land with solar cells instead of a lake

Yeah, imagine a huge swath of land with no purpose other than being covered with solar cells that have to be kept clean and maintained. A chunk of land nobody can be allowed to enter, no trees or animals can be allowed to inhabit.. just imagine it all.

The reservoir is the key side benefit of hydro, in that it creates recreation areas, fish habitat and flood control. None of which solar would provide.

Re:6.8 Billion

[necro81]

With hydro, we lose huge amounts of land (although we at least get a lake out of the deal) but imagine if we could have covered that land with solar cells instead of a lake

considering that the lake used to be a deep river valley, I'd say it would be a terrible idea. But, now that we do have a lake there, and the river valley is filled in, I suppose we could deploy floating rafts of solar panels.

Re:6.8 Billion

[necro81]

A chunk of land nobody can be allowed to enter, no trees or animals can be allowed to inhabit.. just imagine it all.

There are a variety of prime places in the American southwest that come to mind. The former nuclear test site in Nevada would be a decent start: it's not going to be turned into casinos and golf courses anytime soon.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Rei]

The GP is correct. Solar farms are a pretty dense energy source - comparable (when the reservoir is included) to all but the highest head dams, and an order of magnitude or two more than a typical dam. And some designs can get even more dense, such as linear fresnel reflectors (which cover a higher percentage of the ground because of less issues with self-shading as the sun moves). Plus, solar can be paired with wind. Wind is a low energy density source with respect to total acreage, but very high with respect to actual surface area required on the ground.

Beyond this, a few notes. Much solar doesn't have to take up any new land at all, as one notes from rooftop solar (ideally industrual/commercial), parking shelters/covered walkways, etc. And places where solar plants are made are most typically desert areas. And there's a curious reversal in the desert when it comes to life: while shading terrain hinders life in moist areas, it encourages life in desert areas. In the desert, places that provide shade (ironwood trees, saguaro cacti, large rocks, etc) tend to turn into oases of life - not simply by providing relief from the blazing sun, but slowing down the rate of water loss from the soil. Now, this doesn't usually happen with solar plants because at this stage, most are kept cleared. But that does not have to be the case.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Rei]

US or Russian naval officers would disagree with you.

See what I wrote above. You can make a reactor of any size. But you lose efficiency - both neutron efficiency and cost efficiency - the more you scale down. Nuclear sub reactors' scaledowns are aided by the use of highly enriched uranium as fuel, something you don't want to do with civilian nuclear plants. And note that even nuclear subs' reactors aren't "small". A Los Angeles class, for example, uses a 165MW reactor. And nuclear power plants, unlike subs, generally need to have multiple reactors so that they can be taken down for maintenance / fueling.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Rei]

See above re: submarines, etc.

No spacecraft today are powered by nuclear reactors. There were some extremely inefficient reactors used on spacecraft in the past, mainly by the Soviet Union.

Re: 6.8 Billion

[Chas]

Yeah, but it's only ONE nuclear plant. One that can be strategically located (like right next to the other nuclear plant on the existing facility). So it's not like they just broke ground in some scenic place and spoiled everything.

Additionally, the land use of a reactor facility and cooling tower is a fraction of the amount of land used in a solar or wind farm.

Re: 6.8 Billion

[Maritz]

Hundreds of windmills and flocks of dead birds? In your backyard? Have you considered writing for The Sun?

Re:6.8 Billion

[mrchaotica]

Why even bother screwing up the desert when we have millions of perfectly-good unused rooftops to fill up with panels first?

Re:6.8 Billion

[LynnwoodRooster]

About 3 Ivanpah power stations ($2.2 billion), which produces about 1/10th the amount of power of this new plant. So this new nuclear plant represents about a 3X increase in output-per-dollar spent on construction - and the power costs about 1/10th as much as well, meaning over a 40 year lifespan, the nuclear plant will produce it's power for $78 billion less than Ivanpah.

Re:6.8 Billion

[TroyHaskin]

Well, smaller reactors will have a lower non-leakage percentage due to the decreased number of mean free paths the volume covers which will affect the effective multiplication factor, but the total macroscopic cross section can be increased by fabricating with a higher fissile number density in an attempt to overcome this or even having a specially-designed reflector. As for economics, the idea behind Small Modular Reactors is that the n-th of a kind product, assuming a factory exists to pump them out, will ultimately be far more cost effective than the monolithic reactors we have today and, in some scenarios, even treated as commodities on the international market. But there is still a lot of research to due to overcome the current industrial-scale inertia, and if countries like the U.S. continue to experience the 2%-ish annual energy growth, large monolithic reactors may still have their place on the grid in a low carbon energy future.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Mr D from 63]

Likely, the $370M was in 1973's dollars, which would be around $2B in 2016 dollars.

It certainly was. Of course trying to convey that fact was never the intent of the author.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Mr D from 63]

All it takes is building Nth of a kind and they can be built at a lower cost and quite quickly. Korean has proven this, China is as well. Pointing to a couple of first builds where there is no supply chain or infrastructure in place is misleading as to what can be accomplished. Plenty of proof out there;

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/ww...

As for all that "toxic materials" talk. There are some extremely nasty toxic chemicals produced for PV manufacture or other industrial productions, and there is a much higher chance of human exposure due to the ways they are used. Where are the worries about that? Meanwhile, used nuclear fuel is relatively inert, particularly compared to many of the industrial wastes we produce. Add that fact that the real volume of nuclear waste is so small from a global perspective, that the problem is really quite manageable. It is easily confined and tracked. We have the technology to easily monitor, clean up, etc nuclear fuel if that were a problem. It is not like the cold war nuclear waste that so many confuse it with. No, there is not an excessive corrosion challenge.

Re:6.8 Billion

[operagost]

Solar thermal, and offshore wind cost more that nuclear, while PV solar and onshore wind power cost a little less. You can pay about half the cost of nuclear for onshore wind, but I think you're going to need way more real estate (yes, even considering the nuclear exclusion zone) to meet the same KW generation. And you still won't have base load; you're going to need to use batteries, flywheels, water pumps, or some other method of storage if you don't want to waste excess generation.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Loki_1929]

Someone on Reddit already ran these numbers. For the money spent on this nuclear plant after it was stopped/restarted/held up by red tape/hit by NIMBY BS/etc, you could build enough solar to power 274,000 homes; a fraction of what the nuclear option provided. You also have to consider how much area that much solar or wind would cover and the impacts to the local environment and wildlife. Finally, there's the death toll. Both solar and wind power - per kWH generated - cause more human deaths than nuclear power. And I don't believe any of this considers actual power generation vs nameplate generation. That solar plant is going to generate roughly 30% of what it's slated peak output suggests due to weather, night time, etc. In the US, we run our nuclear power plants at about ~93% with the remaining time lost to maintenance, refueling, etc.

In other words, your "renewables" cost several times as much even with all the red tape thrown in nuclear's path, they generate far less power, they kill more humans, have a much greater environmental impact, and basically just fucking suck in every comparison. When we're talking about solar, the panel construction requires all kinds of horrifically toxic stuff to be put together. Both wind and solar require huge amounts of batteries; also a toxic mess. Reprocessing nuclear fuel cuts the waste down to almost nothing. A family of four that has their entire lives powered from birth to death by nuclear will be responsible for nuclear waste that fits in a Coke can. And once you're reusing the high-energy waste products, almost everything that's left is so low-energy it poses no significant risk.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Mr D from 63]

Define "energy density". If you are talking simply KW/area, who cares? Now, if you include actual production of energy for a given footprint, as MWH/Area/Year, that would be useful comparison. Of course hyrdo is unique in that the reservoir will take up a large area, but those reservoir have multiple uses beyond power generation.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Mr D from 63]

Larger windmills are generally more efficient than smaller ones as well.

Re:6.8 Billion

[DarthVain]

I don't think it is so much the technical specifications that influence the size so much as the regulatory burden placed on projects that makes developing anything at a smaller scale not really feasible.

It is the same with a number of different industries with similar regulatory burdens, only that with the case of nuclear it is exacerbated to an extreme degree.

If some of the smaller designs were treated differently likely the R&D to go into making more of those designs more feasible. As it is, why would companies pour billions into developing technology that realistically in the current regulatory environment have little chance of being implemented due to inflated per project cost.

There are plenty of examples where people wonder why certain things are done at such a large scale, and usually the reason is that it is the only way to make it fiscally feasible due to all the additional costs associated with it. Refineries probably fall into that, as do a lot of mining operations for example.

Re:6.8 Billion

[SvnLyrBrto]

> Yeah, imagine a huge swath of land with no purpose
> other than being covered with solar cells that have to
> be kept clean and maintained. A chunk of land
> nobody can be allowed to enter, no trees or animals
> can be allowed to inhabit.. just imagine it all.

Not do be anti-nuclear or a solar fanboy... I'm actually a fan of both. But we do have quite a lot of uninhabited desert that would do perfectly fine for solar farms. Plus there are rooftops, which are otherwise essentially unused.

Re:6.8 Billion

[dj245]

From a physics standpoint, this is not true. Larger reactors help you have higher total neutron cross sections, both for elastic scattering / moderation and fission. A "small" nuclear reactor is defined by the IAEA as one that's less than 300MWe, although even reactors as big as 500MWe are sometimes referred to as "small". Per-reactor, not per-plant. Don't get me wrong, you can make reactors at any size - some companies are looking at modules as small as 25MW (per reactor). But it makes your already problematic economics even worse.

That said, I still do have more hope for small reactors than large ones, just simply from the standpoint of getting some degree of mass production and refinement through use. Still, the "nothing may go wrong" situation one faces with nuclear reactors and the "need to start from scratch if some flaw is developed in the basic design that prevents you from 'nothing may go wrong'" still bites.

Not to mention the effects of scaling on the steam turbine. In general, the larger the turbine, the more efficient it is, both thermodynamically and from a total cost of ownership standpoint. The choice of technology / vendors in any power plant today is generally picked by accountants running Net Present Value-type calculations.

Re:6.8 Billion

[MachineShedFred]

$370M in 1975 is $1.66B in 2016 from inflation alone. Add in the increased price of construction materials over what steel, concrete, etc cost then, as well as increased cost for labor and you might be getting close. Then, all the legal wrangling...

Re:6.8 Billion

[MachineShedFred]

Now only if there was a power hungry city somewhere close to the Nevada Test Site that could use the power generated for big shiny lights and air conditioning. Or maybe a large pre-existing hydroelectric project that already has transmission lines running to it.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Rei]

Energy density (with respect to time) - J/m^2-s or equivalent.

As for "Who cares?" The GP for one. Me for two. Most people on Earth as well. The more land that is used up, the less you have for other purposes, be that for humans (agriculture, forestry, mining, grazing, etc) or natural habitat. It hits doubly that reservoirs target land defined most notably by the following characteristics:

1) Large river
2) Deep ravine/basin
3) Significant altitude change

In short, they often tend to be the areas most important to wildlife, often locally-unique habitats, as well as the most scenic areas within a given location - areas responsible as well for significant mobilization of sediment and oxygenation of water.

Solar, by contrast benefits most from environments full of endless identical flat wastelands. The more mundane and barren, the better.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Rei]

Higher fissile number density = higher enrichment = nonstarter. Fine for submarines, not for civilian power. Re, reflector, you still have to deal with free path issues when determining overall reactor size. The more you're spending on inert mass relative to how much power you're getting, the worse your economics. Plus your reflector is contributing to (n, gamma) and other neutron consuming reactions (although it's possible to use a moderator that you need anyway (say graphite) as a reflector... although there are issues with that as well to deal with)

You'll note that I mentioned and agreed with the mass production argument - if fission power is going to have an actually sustainable renaissance, I would expect modular reactors to be the means. But I nonetheless questioned whether that could be enough to overcome the basic issues on top of the additional challenges that a small modular reactor imposes.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Rei]

Actually, I think the would would be greatly served by a reliable grid of HVDC lines.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Rei]

No, a RTG is distinctly different from a nuclear reactor in almost every single way. They do not involve chain reactions. They do not involve neutrons to any significant degree. Moderation, cross section calculations, etc don't even come into play. It's just a ball of material that stays hot due to capturing its own alphas. RTGs are not considered nuclear reactors. There is no wiggle room on this; they're an entirely different class of spacecraft power systems.

RTGs scale down quite well. They're also, however, about as far on the opposite side of the affordability spectrum as you could possibly get.

There have been actual nuclear reactors used on spacecraft in the past, as I wrote, primarily by the Soviets. But they're anything what you'd consider a cost effective design for civilian power generation.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Rei]

Scroll up.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Mr D from 63]

But were YOUR comparisons based on J/m^2-s? Meaning, did you consider capacity factors? Its not clear with your generalizations, and if you didn't then 'who cares' because the numbers are useless.

Re:6.8 Billion

[mspohr]

Large scale solar installation cost has dropped to about $1 - 2/watt so you could install about 3 - 6 Gigawatts of solar power. Of course, as many pendants are fond of saying, the sun doesn't shine at night. You can expect about 5 good hours of sun a day so this is roughly equivalent to a 1 Gigawatt nuclear plant which is the size of Watts Bar 2.
Wind is about half the cost of solar.

Re:6.8 Billion

[bigpat]

Not supporting nuclear power to a greater extent than we have today is going to ensure that we exceed Global Climate change targets which are meant to keep climate change largely within acceptable limits.

Maybe Global Climate change is unavoidable at this point, but just trudging forward with solar and wind without seeing their real limits doesn't do anyone any favors, except dragging things out for the fossil fuel industry until they hit their production limits. The future is at least 60% nuclear or else it is going to get a lot warmer for our kids and grand kids than civilization can really withstand.

With that kind of environmental damage we can expect some serious regional or world wars with food production and water resources as underlying causes and the mass migrations we see because of that. Already we can view the war in Syria as not just a factional struggle, but as a result of too many people struggling to control too few resources and then dividing along sectarian and ethnic lines when resources become too scarce.

Re:6.8 Billion

[thegarbz]

some companies are looking at modules as small as 25MW (per reactor)

Smaller reactors than that have existed for many years. Not all reactors put out whopping big amounts of power. Some are just for research, neutron bombardment, medical isotopes etc.

Re:6.8 Billion

[HornWumpus]

Most university research reactors run on weapons grade or near weapons grade. Most are subcritical, so you'd need to the fuel from two to make a bomb.

Re:6.8 Billion

[TroyHaskin]

You can increase the number density with a constant enrichment by using a denser fuel matrix. But that just goes back to the research part of the problem.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Rei]

Denser fuel matrix means comparably less moderator. Less moderator per unit distance traveled means greater mean free path.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Rei]

Yes. I've run numbers before. No, I'm not going to be bothered to do them again for a Slashdot chat on a thread that's rapidly becoming out of date. Feel free to do your own if you doubt me. Take a sampling of solar plants with a realistic capacity factor and a sampling of hydro plants with a realistic capacity factor, and compare. You'll need a broader sampling on hydro because solar thermal plants are "fairly" consistent (with the exception of compact linear fresnel plants, of which last I checked there was only one), while hydro reservoir sizes vary wildly for a given output.

Re: 6.8 Billion

[dlingman]

That's called "Plankton".

Re:6.8 Billion

[Mr D from 63]

Again, you are picking out hydro just because it has a huge footprint. Hyrdo is the outlier, and if you want to compare against energy sources in general it really is of no help to point out its less than hydro. That's true for just about everything.

Growth for hydro is severely restricted due to its footprint.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Maury Markowitz]

> I wonder how many wind and solar plants could be built for a mere 6.8 Billion?

No need to guess, google has that answer:
https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf

Actually these numbers are already out of date, solar in the US is under $1/Watt:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2016/07/22/and-were-down-under-1/

So you could buy about 6.8 GWp of PV for that, as opposed to the 1.2 GW of nuclear they did get. Nuclear has a CF around 90% and solar about 32%, so that means PV is only half the price of nuclear, as opposed to six times.

Which is precisely why this is the first nuclear plant in so long, while 8.5GW of wind went into the US in the last year alone.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Maury Markowitz]

> We've pretty much already dammed every river that's capable of generating reasonable amounts of hydro power

This is patently false.

In pretty much any area you look with some hydro development now, there's about 50% untapped. That includes here in Canada, where only about 55% of the conventional resources are used, and if they expended to all the large ones only, it would provide enough electricity to power everything we already have an all our cars. With some left over to sell to the US as well.

Here, for instance, is a recent-ish report for my area. Ontario currently has 8 GW of installed capacity. The study found about 6 GW of untapped easy capacity, 1 GW of which required internal changes only (new turbines and distribution systems). Another 14 GW exists but is not currently economic. If fully developed, it would be more than enough power to run the entire province.

This ignores the emerging fields like hydrodynamics. It's not entirely clear how large this is, but estimates I've seen place it at about the same as existing sources. Unlike conventional systems, these take up no space and have basically no effect on the river.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Gussington]

$370M in 1975 is $1.66B in 2016 from inflation alone. Add in the increased price of construction materials over what steel, concrete, etc cost then, as well as increased cost for labor and you might be getting close. .

Er that is covered by inflation. That is exactly what inflation is, the increased cost of things over time.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Gussington]

Finally, there's the death toll. Both solar and wind power - per kWH generated - cause more human deaths than nuclear power.

I like Nuclear as an option, but am not sure how people die from solar panels or wind farms?

Re:6.8 Billion

[Maury Markowitz]

> Wind is about half the cost of solar.

Not for about a year. PV in the US is about $1, and wind is between $1.25 and $1.50. See the post below this for links.

Additionally, new installs of both have CF's on the order of 30 to 35%. This is up about 5% over the last five years.

So they are very, very comparable.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Maury Markowitz]

> Someone on Reddit already ran these numbers

Can you provide a link for this? I'd like to respond, because its so obviously wrong.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Loki_1929]

With vastly more decentralized installations, you have far greater risks around electrocutions, falls (primarily for wind and rooftop solar, e.g. falling off the roof), and let's not forget those poor bastards trapped atop a partially assembled wind turbine that caught fire. One of them jumped to his death and the other burned alive. It isn't a huge number of deaths, but nuclear just produces so much power and has so few deaths associated with it throughout its history that the comparison is hugely favorable.

Re:6.8 Billion

[Loki_1929]

Thread with a little earlier context is here.

Re:6.8 Billion

[MachineShedFred]

Inflation covers some of it - all goods do not change prices at the same rate. For example, in 1975 there was a significant amount of steel that would have been locally produced and cheap. Between then and now, the steel prices have changed dramatically, and by far more than inflation. New laws and new standards have been put in place that affect pricing outside of the standard inflationary index.

Re:From the article

[ScentCone]

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.

Re:From the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubbish. Steam engines produce steam.

We're talking about a nuclear power plant here so those are nuclears coming out of that tower.

Re:Can't make steel with windmills

[Pascoea]

Can I have a hit of whateverthefuck you are on? Read that post 4 times, still have no clue what you are talking about.

Re:From the article

[0100010001010011]

(If you can see it, it's not steam)

You're thinking about 'wet steam'. He's talking about normal steam.

The problem with the new plants

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

Re:The problem with the new plants

[dbIII]

The whole idea with the next gen plants was standardized design an a combined construction operating license, which would keep costs down

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?

Re:The problem with the new plants

[Type44Q]

I'd rather buy North Korean: those guys've had to go it on their own with no help from the rest of us; I bet their shit rocks.

Re:The problem with the new plants

[Mr D from 63]

Is not design but project management.

You are right, it is not design. It is partially project management, it is also supply chain and experience. These are first of a kind builds, even the suppliers are being 'created' to support it. Korea shows what you can do after you get going;

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/ww...

Build a few, get the experience and work out the kinks in the process and supply chain, apply experienced workers, and things improve dramatically.

Re:The problem with the new plants

[Gussington]

The whole idea with the next gen plants was standardized design an a combined construction operating license, which would keep costs down,.

Just like the F35 JSF?

Nuclear research needed!

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[ArmoredDragon]

If that's the case, then why couldn't they use it to create depleted uranium ammunition? I think the military would prefer that over thermonuclear bombs.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[Cyberax]

Thorium is WORSE for proliferation. Thorium breeding produces Np-237 as a by-product. And it can be extracted rather easily - it's a chemical process.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[dbIII]

If made into small

Nuclear, like all thermal power, is only really useful when you scale up. Double the size of a solar panel and you get twice the power, but double the size of a thermal power unit and you get more than twice the power for a lot of reasons (such as a lower percentage of losses - getting turbines moving with a LOT of low pressure steam instead of them staying still with only a little bit of steam from the same pressure). If you want nukes it only makes sense to have them at huge scales unless you are driving a ship or something.
However that doesn't mean you can't have little pebble bed or whatever reactors, it just means that you have enough of them close to a turbine to provide it with vast amounts of steam.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[angel'o'sphere]

A melt down has nothing to do with what fissionable material you fission.

It's past time to start using nuclear physics to cleanly and safely power the globe.
Can be done with wind and solar and biomass and water as well ... much simpler and on lots of small scale installations instead of a few big bang ones.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[AmiMoJo]

There are a few governments toying with this technology, but no commercial providers will touch it because it's still too experimental. One of the Japanese experimental rectors is being abandoned because it barely works, and the Chinese ones are having difficulties. Japan is looking at 2040 for a fully operational prototype.

So given that kind of timeframe, a commercial operator would have to be looking at 2050 at the very earliest for a commercial, profitable plant, and that's assuming the prototype one they have to pour tens of billions into doesn't have any serious problems.

Meanwhile other forms of clean energy will be getting much, much cheaper along with utility scale energy storage systems.

The only groups that can justify the cost are governments who want the reactors for reasons other than profit, and even they are going to have to wait decades.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[nojayuk]

Thorium (Th-232) isn't fissile, it needs to be bred up into U-233 to produce energy. U-233 works quite well in a nuclear weapon core (the US fired off at least two test devices back in the day). The U-233 in a proposed thorium reactor is pure, it has no contaminants that make it difficult to weaponise by an unscrupupous operator.

There are very few commercial breeder reactors still around or in operation since mined uranium is cheap and plentiful and breeders generally have a poor operational record, something that does not bode well for any thorium reactor that might be built since they share a lot of the same engineering technology (very hot compact core, solid moderator, very high neutron flux, low neutron surplus etc.).

The Russians have a couple of fast sodium-cooled reactors, the BN-600 and BN-800 which produce power, breed new fuel and burn waste but they are still very much beta-level designs. They might be useful in another fifty or sixty years when mined uranium becomes more expensive.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[KonoWatakushi]

Your "easily" is still considerably more difficult than producing weapons grade materials the old fashioned way, so how does it matter? The fuel salt in a molten salt reactor is the safest place for any materials that pose a proliferation threat. It is both thermally and radiologically very hot, and confined to a chemical processing hot cell or the reactor itself, which makes it rather difficult to walk off with. Little of the thorium ends up as Np-237 in the first place, and it doesn't stop there--the reactor will turn it into Pu-238 and so on.

The standard LFTR design does not have the facilities to separate the Np-237 which comes out of the fuel salt with along with UF6, and goes right back into the core. A thermal breeder using the thorium fuel cycle has a very small margin for neutron loss, and if the fissile is diverted, the reactor will stop. Extra care will need to be taken with machines configured to produce Pu-238, but even that poses a significant challenge for diversion, and similarly will not go unnoticed.

Furthermore, this is the machine which is capable of making every nation on earth energy independent, and ending essentially all resource conflict. Once a nation has that, there is little motivation to produce bombs and risk losing it. There is also the fact that reactors provide the only means of destroying weapons grade materials, and provide abundant energy as a byproduct. Obstructing nuclear energy prevents that from ever happening, and will pose a substantially greater risk.

Re: Nuclear research needed!

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh what?

Wikipedia:
"While neptunium itself has no commercial uses at present, it is widely used as a precursor for the formation of plutonium-238, used in radioisotope thermal generators to provide electricity for spacecraft. Neptunium has also been used in detectors of high-energy neutrons."

So I would say that's a good byproduct...

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[Chas]

I'd LOVE to see a bunch of would-be nuclear-fuel thieves try taking a jackhammer to high-strength, reinforced structural concrete...

And just digging the entire reactor vessel up?

Yeah, I SERIOUSLY doubt they're going to do that unnoticed.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[Friggo]

You are right that U-233 can be used in a nuclear weapon.
However you are wrong that thorium reactors breed pure U-233. It actually breeds U-233 contaminated with U-232, which is almost impossible to separate from U-233 and which further decays to hard gamma emitters, which are both easy to detect, and hard to work with. A fact which they actually saw when they did the test with U-233 bombs you mentioned.
It is much easier, and more efficient, to either enrich uranium ore to get U-235, or breed U-238 into plutonium-239.
From Wikipedia there has been only 3 tests with nuclear bombs which used U-233, of which only 1 was actually a U-233 bomb, the other 2 used a mix of U-233 and U-235 or plutonium.
In fact, to enrich U-235 you don't even need a nuclear reactor, just ore and some centrifuges.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[MachineShedFred]

Because that's not how it works. "Depleted" Uranium is simply the U238 that is left over after enriching natural Uranium into reactor grade / HEU / weapons grade. It's not "depleted" by being used in a reactor - actually, U238 that is in a reactor (the majority of the fuel assembly) captures neutrons and turns into Plutonium, which then fissions and gives off more neutrons.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[angel'o'sphere]

Sorry, basically everything you write is wrong:
Wind farms are now mainly build at sea. They don't have land issues anway as the farmers happily farm on the fields where the wind farms are.
Solar, if it is photovoltaic, is best build in cities anywa, where you again have no land issues. Thermic solar is another thing, though.
Solar panels don't need rare earthes.
Wind generators use them, but would work also without them.
The environmental arguments are moot. Rare earthes are extracted right out of rock or sand and usually mined in deserts. There are no real concerns. Your claim China is worth than USA, is wrong. China is building up strong regulations, since years. However they suffer from the lack of those during the recent years.
A rare earth mine in the USA would look exactly like one in China. A big pit in a huge rock or desert.
Burning Biomass is not problematic because of green house gas issues, You are an idiot. If it is rotting it produces CO2 and CH4, a far stronger green house gas than CO2. Bottom line it is climat neutral if you burn it, as it wiuld rott otherwise anyway. Or more prcisely, because of avoiding the release of CH4 into the atmosphere it is even an advantage.
The amount of energy we produce with biomass is big enough that it is a majour player in the balancing power market.
Biomass: the shit of pigs and cows ... perhaps you had a different idea what biomass is ... it is actually not burned but converted into natural gas and then burned.
Even if you don't believe it: 70% of europes land mass is neither used for housing, roads nor farming. There is plenty of space to build what ever plant you want.
And in the USA, it is even more land available.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[Chas]

Sorry, basically everything you write is wrong:

Oh this ought to be good.

Wind farms are now mainly build at sea. They don't have land issues anway as the farmers happily farm on the fields where the wind farms are.

Even if your assertion that wind farms are now mainly built at sea was correct, this poses a problem. How much seacoast is there, and how much transmission loss is there getting it to places with no seacoast?

Also, not every land-bound wind farm is being built on farmland. And when clearing land for wind farm use, they're clearing roughly 5000 sq/m per turbine.

Solar, if it is photovoltaic, is best build in cities anywa, where you again have no land issues. Thermic solar is another thing, though.

Actually PV is best built in areas with maximum days of sun and away from obstructions that might interfere with solar coverage.
That basically means that while it CAN work in cities, cities are sub-optimal. At least for carrier-grade solar installs.

Solar panels don't need rare earthes.

Correction, the bulk of solar panels, which use silicon bases, don't contain rare earths. However, multi-junction cells and some of the highest efficiency cells are built on substrates of rare earths.

Wind generators use them, but would work also without them.

At far lower efficiency or with much greater bulk...

The environmental arguments are moot. Rare earthes are extracted right out of rock or sand and usually mined in deserts. There are no real concerns.

Bullshit. There's a reason rare earth mining in this country is virtually nonexistent. The tailings from such mines tend to be chock full of things like thorium, and uranium. Which are classified as nuclear waste and are regulated far differently (and more expensively) in the US. You can't just leave the stuff lying around in a pile.

Your claim China is worth than USA, is wrong. China is building up strong regulations, since years. However they suffer from the lack of those during the recent years.

You apparently missed the entire last couple decades. China basically crashed the rare earths market by severely undercutting EVERYONE, simply by having no (or next to no) environmental regulation. They were basically open strip-mining and doing dig-and-dump.

A rare earth mine in the USA would look exactly like one in China. A big pit in a huge rock or desert.

Except the waste from the mine would be controlled differently.

Burning Biomass is not problematic because of green house gas issues, You are an idiot. If it is rotting it produces CO2 and CH4, a far stronger green house gas than CO2. Bottom line it is climat neutral if you burn it, as it wiuld rott otherwise anyway. Or more prcisely, because of avoiding the release of CH4 into the atmosphere it is even an advantage.

Ah. So we get into name calling.

Burning Biomass for power is less of a problem than just open-burning the waste. But it's still being put back up into the atmosphere at a greater rate than allowing it to decay normally. Remember, sequestration isn't about permanent removal of these substances from the environment, it's about how long it's kept out as well.

The amount of energy we produce with biomass is big enough that it is a majour player in the balancing power market.

It's roughly 43% of the energy delivered by renewable sources.

Renewable energy accounts for roughly 7% of total power generation in this country.

So, biomass (both wood and fuels) accounts for a whopping 3% of total energy produced.
Hydro power, which is past its peak in the US, generates twice that.
Nuclear generates 7x what biomass does. With 100 individual reactors spread across 30 states in 60 individual pla

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[angel'o'sphere]

Well it is pretty pointless to argue with one who has made up his mind and does not listen to facts or arguments.

How much seacoast is there, and how much transmission loss is there getting it to places with no seacoast?
The losses are the same as any long distance power transfer, so why do you care? (Hint: you can google how much it is, and the value is astonishing low)

However, multi-junction cells and some of the highest efficiency cells are built on substrates of rare earths. That is wrong. Because they are made from Silicon, too; or Gallium Arsenid. Rare Earths would actually destroy them, facepalm.

Only thin film solar cells use rare earth elements. So does any laptop battery ... go figure. "Rare earth" is just a name those elements got 100 years ago, they are not rare.

Actually PV is best built in areas with maximum days of sun and away from obstructions that might interfere with solar coverage.
Like parking lots, roofs of buildings etc ... aka in cities. So I see we agree. Finally.

Except the waste from the mine would be controlled differently. What waste does a mine have that only mines stones and grinds them to sand to be refined into metals? (*facepalm*)

The amount of energy we produce with biomass is big enough that it is a majour player in the balancing power market.
[...]
So your idea of a "major player" and mine are somewhat different.

No they are not. You are simply bad in reading or lack some understanding: do you know what "balancing power" is?
As said before and made it now bold again: balancing power (or reserve power). In germany biomass is a majour player in balancing power. No idea what biomass plants you have, burning wood is imho not a good idea but waste.
Please stop mixing up your retarded energy market with the rest of the worlds.

Will locals or government ALLOW you to build there?
The same problem you have with nukes ...

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[Agripa]

Thorium (Th-232) isn't fissile, it needs to be bred up into U-233 to produce energy. U-233 works quite well in a nuclear weapon core (the US fired off at least two test devices back in the day). The U-233 in a proposed thorium reactor is pure, it has no contaminants that make it difficult to weaponise by an unscrupupous operator.

U-232 is a significant and dangerous contaminant in U-233 produced from Th-232.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[MrKaos]

Because that's not how it works. "Depleted" Uranium is simply the U238 that is left over after enriching natural Uranium into reactor grade / HEU / weapons grade. It's not "depleted" by being used in a reactor - actually, U238 that is in a reactor (the majority of the fuel assembly) captures neutrons and turns into Plutonium, which then fissions and gives off more neutrons.

You've missed the point.

DU doesn't need to be weapons grade to be used as a weapon. It's used because it's mass gives the warhead a larger range.

The other property is that it is pyrophoric, which means it bursts into flames and lances through the target's armour. It's ash is ceramic and an inhalant, from memory it is also spontaneously critical, so it will have bursts of 10-15 times as much alpha emissions (iirc).

I think the confusion you are having is that DU is used as a sub critical ordinance. Nasty stuff when used as a weapon.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[MrKaos]

I think you will find that thorium reactors also create Thallium 233 as a waste by-product, which is pretty nasty stuff. Consumption of weapons grade plutonium was prototyped in an experimental fast 'burner' reactor called IFR, Integral Fast Reactor. Very interesting technology.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[MachineShedFred]

I never said that DU is "weapons grade" but rather what is left over after enriching other bits of uranium to be "weapons grade" - as in a large percentage U235.

Re:Nuclear research needed!

[MrKaos]

I never said that DU is "weapons grade" but rather what is left over after enriching other bits of uranium to be "weapons grade" - as in a large percentage U235.

Indeed, perhaps armoureddragon mistakes where DU comes from. You are right about what DU *is*, we agree on that. What I am saying is DU is used as a projectile due to its mass and pyrophoric properties.

Good!

[GerryGilmore]

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.

Re:Good!

[GerryGilmore]

Actually, I already live in the affected area (SE USA), so take your snide-ass stupid comments elsewhere. Oh - sorry - you twit! (Much more appropriate than "twat", which here is a euphemism for vagina, whereas "twit" is a euphemism for "dumb-ass", but thanks for playing!)

Re:Good!

[SuperKendall]

We'll be happy to ship you somewhere powered only be "renewable" energy. Without a generator though, good luck...

Re:Good!

[DNS-and-BIND]

As a tree-hugger you certainly know that Fukushima permanently ruined the name of nuclear power. Nuclear power is a non-starter. How do you not know this?

Re:Good!

[dbIII]

It makes sense so long as you have military uses so that you can share the vast cost of the nuclear infrastructure.

Re:Good!

[angel'o'sphere]

I would start to learn what base load and base line is ... (*facepalm*)
It does not mean what you think it means.

Re:Good!

[rickyslashdot]

One major issue with nuclear usage is the long-lived residue of the current Uranium-based reactors. The storage of the radioactive 'trash' got scuppered by a 'tree-hugger' substituting an organic filler (cat litter) for the inorganic (again cat litter - but just dry clay pellets). This led to the bursting of a drum of material that has - so far - completely closed operations at the waste storage facility in New Mexico. - - http://www.theverge.com/2014/5... - - - from the article - one of the radioactive shipments was mixed with organic instead of inorganic material. "‘Green’ cat litter," he writes, is "made with materials like wheat or corn. These organic litters do not have the silicate properties needed to chemically stabilize nitrate the correct way." The result: "solutions can ignite when they dry out." You gotta' love the system that allows substitutions of critical materials like this.

Re:Good!

[serviscope_minor]

As a tree-hugger you certainly know that Fukushima permanently ruined the name of nuclear power. Nuclear power is a non-starter. How do you not know this?

Maybe he's not so suseptible to populsim? Also maybe he's not pro-death and would rather that electricity is generated with the lowest human cost rather than assuaging his fears with the deaths of others.

No matter what name nuclear power has, it ahs the record as the safest form of generation measured in deaths/TWh. Now imagine if it hadn't been completely stagnated and we were running designs with 40 years more development rather than designs from the 1970s.

Re: Good!

[bazorg]

I don't think he meant *that* type of tree hugging...

Re:Good!

[serviscope_minor]

You seem to be arguing at crossed purposes. To those who can actually understand the evidence, nuclear is not so dead. For the rest, they'd generally prefer that more people die so they can feel happier.

That's not a tradeoff I'm prepared to make.

Re:Good!

[jeff4747]

One major issue with coal usage is the log-lived residue of coal combustion. Primarily higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere that threaten the entire planet instead of a relatively small area threatened by nuclear waste.

Re:Good!

[Chas]

1: Actually, politics have almost EVERYTHING to do with it. The entire regulatory environment for nuclear power has been poisoned for most of the last 30-40 years. And the countless lawsuits by the anti-nuke crowd don't do anything to drive costs and timelines down.

The reason why the power industry lobbies for extensions on existing plants is because:

A - Trying to get a truly NEW reactor site developed is like convincing someone to have all their teeth pulled, without painkillers or being knocked out, THROUGH THEIR RECTUM. Getting NRC time simply to look at or discuss plans is prohibitively expensive. AND THAT'S THEIR FUCKING JOB! Getting local, state and federal approval is a tortuously long and painful process, with nuisance lawsuits breeding faster than rabbits.

B - Because of A, most of these power generation companies would have to replace the aging nuclear reactors with things like coal or oil-fired facilities which have their OWN regulatory nightmares.

C - Most can't implement wind farms or solar farms simply because they don't have access to the land assets necessary, and these power assets still cannot be used as base load. Geothermal is out of the picture for most parts of the country as well.

2: This is why you assign accountants to monitor regulators' finances.

Additionally, look at the history of nuclear safety in the US. Total number of people killed by nuclear power generation. ZERO.

3: Yucca Mountain was forced on Nevada by the Feds. On top of that, the flames of NIMBY-ism were fanned by the state officials talking about rolling nuclear waste down the streets of Las Vegas, when anything BUT was going to happen.

While I, personally, don't know if our engineering is up to building a facility capable of holding things safely for 100K+ years, the site is one of the most heavily researched pieces of land on the planet.

And the OP keeps talking about "we", as if there's some sort of unified front for nuclear power. That usually signifies that they're one of the anti-nuke crowd. Meaning THEY don't think humanity should use it, because they don't want to deal with the waste in any meaningful way.

Re:Good!

[Chas]

Fukushima was a case of TEPCO not listening to their engineers. Had the sea wall been of the proper height, nothing would have happened.

Chernobyl was the result of shitty maintenance, old, faulty design and the idiots in charge of the facility playing games with the reactor and not communicating it to the next shift.

TMI was the result of poor maintenance. And it still killed NOBODY.

Re:Good!

[DevsVult]

As nuclear plants can only be constructed and operated by large bureaucratic organizations overseen by multiple other large bureaucracies, cost overruns and occasionally catastrophic errors are inevitable.

Re:Good!

[Loki_1929]

Founders of Greenpeace are pro-nuclear. Why? They have functioning brain cells that communicate effectively. The movement they started became anti-science and pro-good-vibes, so they broke away from it to preach common sense.

Re:Good!

[slack_justyb]

You should seriously watch the three part video Kurzgesast did on nuclear. You need a slightly more balanced view on the issue.

Re:Good!

[Chas]

No. Not really. Current generations of reactor designs are passively safe.

Take a look at Gen IV reactors. Look for the words "passively safe".

Look at Gen III and earlier. The majority of the equipment you see in the actual reactor facility doesn't have anything to do with the reactor itself.
It's the huge, Rube-Goldberg safety systems designed to follow through on every imaginable problem with tons of "if-then" layers. The main problem becomes "what if something happens which you didn't foresee"?

Gen IV, anything happens, you stop feeding power to the reactor facility as a whole and the reaction will still taper off.

Re:Good!

[Gussington]

As a proud, card-carrying TreeHugger(TM) I am happy to see nuclear power remaining a viable component of our national electrical baseline capacity..

I always find it absurd that the hippies are the people most responsible for the continued use of coal burning. Had there been no hippies in the 60's and 70's, we'd actually have a lot cleaner energy today. We'd probably be up to Gen6 reactors today that were extremely safe and efficient and electricity would still be cheap.
Fucking hippies...

Budget and Timelines

[Notabadguy]

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.

Re:Budget and Timelines

[Notabadguy]

I also forgot to mention that none of this got approved to change until the next congressional session had the time to meet about it, which is where the lead time losses come into play.

Re:Budget and Timelines

[jezwel]

Thanks. I was wondering why leadtimes and budgets were so blown out in what I assumed would be a now experienced / matured class of construction. This type of intentional disruption exactly meets what I was thinking.

Re:Budget and Timelines

[dgatwood]

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.

True, but on the other hand, I'd argue that Watts Bar 2 is an example of ignoring modern safety standards to accelerate building.

If I took a house that was 80% built in the early 1980s and tried to finish building it today, they'd literally make me tear it down, because it would be essentially impossible to retrofit all of the additional braces inside the walls that are required for earthquake safety, not to mention that the plumbing wouldn't be of a material that's legally allowed to be used now, the electrical wiring probably wouldn't be up to code, and even the foundation might have to be dug out and replaced. Yet they've allowed a forty-year-old nuclear reactor design to be brought online that doesn't come close to meeting modern design standards for things like passive safety.

To be fair, TVA has patched the design to mitigate some of the more serious risks based on lessons learned in Fukushima, but even still, it seems completely insane to me that they were allowed to continue building this reactor instead of being told to tear down everything but the outer shell and start over. IMO, this should have been at least a third-generation reactor, if not a III+, not an ancient second-generation design. At some point, they should stop allowing new reactors to be built using old designs, and for second-generation designs, that cutoff date should have been a couple of decades ago, give or take....

Re:Budget and Timelines

[dbIII]

With respect (fuck I have to use that a LOT here these days - check out the UK series "Yes Minister" for an explanation why) since the US nuclear industry has been in close to a state of statis since the late 1970s there will be very little to change. Major players (Westinghouse et al) lobbied hard AGAINST the Clinton era Thorium research and hounded the guy who was running it out of the industry. The nuclear lobby ate it's own children. Far more money has been spent on PR than R&D, a total waste since people do not trust the spin about the older technology and that money could have been spent on developing something worth cheering for instead.
The only reason we have any advances at all is because Westinghouse bought a Japanese company that was doing R&D until they were bought out.
It's so slow moving that pretty well anything designed after the wake-up call of Three Mile Island is going to be good enough today.

Re:Budget and Timelines

[AmiMoJo]

Can you tell us what practical means this sort of issue could be solved by?

On the one hand you need strong regulation. We have seen time and time again that when regulation is lax, so is safety and accidents happen. On the other hand you seem to want less strict regulation when an engineering case can be made against it. I'm not an expert but it seems that you have ASME engineers and scientists saying the steel needed to be changed, and the nuclear industry with profit as its primary motivator saying it is unnecessary.

Clearly we don't want to just take the industry's word for me. How would you propose balancing these things? Get a third body of independent experts perhaps? Fire the people you disagree with at ASME until they give you the right answer?

Re:Budget and Timelines

[Anonymous Coward]

How many labor hours were wasted on writing things like "tens of hundreds of millions" instead of "billions"?

Re:Budget and Timelines

[Mr D from 63]

True, but on the other hand, I'd argue that Watts Bar 2 is an example of ignoring modern safety standards to accelerate building.

Can you name one single modern safety standard that was ignored? Or are you just making an uninformed assumption?

Re:Budget and Timelines

[mrchaotica]

Would it have been possible for the Congressionally-approved design to have specified "steel meeting the ASME SA316 standard as it existed on X date" to head off the problem at the beginning? Also, did the ASME committee really care about the structural weakness or did some anti-nuclear member(s) of the committee realize it would screw over the reactor construction and do it on purpose?

Re: Budget and Timelines

[drinkypoo]

Fukushima would have actually been fairly safe if the all the safety features would have been implemented instead of being scaled down because of cost....

I don't think you can call a reactor design safe if it depends on external maintenance. Only a reactor which is self-scrambling in a runaway can possibly be called "safe". Then, perhaps even quite reasonably so, until we have to talk about decommissioning. I still think we should just shove the whole reactor into a subduction zone ;)

Re: Budget and Timelines

[Loki_1929]

Any reactor with a negative void coefficient is safe, barring a major compromise from the outside (such as an earthquake and tsunami). And Fukushima's problem wasn't that the reactor was old or unsafe, it's that a known design flaw published by the manufacturer decades ago wasn't corrected at that particular plant per manufacturer guidelines. They simply decided it wasn't worth the cost and their regulatory agency allowed them to run with it.

And even with all that - a decades old design with a decades old known flaw left uncorrected, an earthquake, a tsunami, incompetence bordering on negligence on the part of the operator and the regulator - how many deaths as a result? There's a reason why nuclear ranks far better in safety for human life than all other types of electrical power generation (yes, including wind and solar).

Re:Budget and Timelines

[bigpat]

To be fair, TVA has patched the design to mitigate some of the more serious risks based on lessons learned in Fukushima

If a tsunami hits Tennessee then a nuclear accident is the least of our concerns.

Re:Budget and Timelines

[thegarbz]

I believe it. I was talking to some safety system engineers in for one of the local nuclear reactors. They proudly proclaimed they just finished upgrading their safety logic solvers to a new model. ... One that we in the chemical industry were just decommissioning because it was obsolete. Firstly there were years of delays getting a Nuclear 1E certification, then the project (which we typically execute in 3 months) ran for over 4 years, then they had a late stage but very minor design change which set them back 2 years (for us the equivalent would have cost about 3 days), and after all that, the startup was delayed because some commissioning paperwork had changed between the time they planned the commissioning phase and when they executed so they had to redo all of that.

Nuclear is not expensive. People put serious effort into making it expensive.

Re:Budget and Timelines

[HornWumpus]

Fuzzy little foreigners are confused about billion vs. trillion. Thousand million is the unambiguous standard.

Re:Budget and Timelines

[dgatwood]

Sure. Generation III and later reactors are designed to ensure passive safety—that is, the plant should be able to lose all external power and, without any further supply of fuel, etc., should be able to keep from melting down entirely on its own. Second-generation reactors don't meet those modern standards.

Re:Budget and Timelines

[dgatwood]

Tsunamis, no, but the Tennessee River can and does flood.

Re:Budget and Timelines

[dgatwood]

That's not really the point. The point is that over time, those plants will get taken offline and replaced by newer designs, and we'll be safer when that happens. If you're going to bring a new plant online, ideally, you'd like it to be based on the newest, safest designs, rather than something that met NRC regulations before Chernobyl.

Re:Budget and Timelines

[Mr D from 63]

That's not a standard, that is just an advancement. A standard is a set basis. There is no standard that requires plants to be passive. Passive in and of itself does not even make a plant safer than active.

Re:Budget and Timelines

[dgatwood]

First, no reactors built in the past twenty years (except in China, IIRC) lack those safety features. Passive safety might not be an official standard from a regulatory agency, but is still effectively a standard.

Second, yes, passive safety most certainly does make a plant significantly safer than active safety, particularly when you have two plants right next to one another. Imagine a scenario where a containment accident occurs at one reactor, along with a fire that damages the external power feed to the second reactor. At that point, it is unsafe for people to bring diesel fuel in to keep the emergency generators running to keep the pumps running to cool the second reactor while it shuts down, and suddenly you've gone from one meltdown event to two.

Re:Budget and Timelines

[Mr D from 63]

Active plants have safety features that passive plant lack. Passive is not a standard, not by any means.

And your subsequent description of passive plants need for Diesel Generators shows you really don't understand. The whole point of passive is you don't need emergency power to keep the reactor cool. In fact, the AP1000 doesn't even have safety related emergency diesels.

Re:From the article

[ShanghaiBill]

(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.

Good for them, we had to bit the bullet

[Trax3001BBS]

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.

Re:Good for them, we had to bit the bullet

[Mr D from 63]

Yes, they overbuilt 40 years ago and had to halt construction. That has nothing to do with today.

Economics?

[Michael Woodhams]

$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.

Re:Economics?

[dbIII]

"Greenfields" sites often cost a lot more than adding units to an existing facility.

Re:Economics?

[Solandri]

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.

Re:Economics?

[angel'o'sphere]

The CF of a plant depends on hwo the plant is run. Not on its fuel.

For a new nuclear plant to have 90% CF the surrounding coal plants (or what ever) have to cut their CF.

E.g. in France where 75% of the power comes from nuclear plants, with a base load factor of about 60%, all nuclear plants have either to adapt load over the day from 60% to 95% (or something) ... hence their CF is only ~70% or a few of them run at > 90% and the rest significantly below 60%.

You can only feed as much power into the grid as the grid is consuming. If 100% of your power would be from nuclear plants ... all plants had a CF of perhaps 55% or 60% ... due to changing demand over the course of a day.

at the UK average rate of US$0.22/kWh, the expected power generated over 40 years would be worth $222 billion.
That rate is dropping rapidly as renewables are replacing nuclear plants ... in ten years no one in europe will be able to run a nuclear plant profitable.

Re:Economics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your definition of return is "income from production, minus construction costs, and ignoring all costs for fuel and operations"?

Re:Economics?

[reboot246]

The "company" you speak of is the TVA, a government owned company. So, profit or not, they don't care. Cost is no object to the Feds.

Re:Economics?

[jez9999]

If anything, a bunch of people requiring electricity overnight for charging their car means nuclear power is needed MORE, not less.

Re:Economics?

[Mr D from 63]

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.

Re:Economics?

[necro81]

A few quibbles with your math:

At a U.S. average rate of 12 cents/kWh = $120/MWh

That may be the average retail rate paid by you and me. But as for what the generator can sell the electricity at, you need to look at the wholesale rates. Squinting at this graphic from the EIA, you can see the wholesale rates tend to hover at around $50/MWh, or a bit less than half the figure you were using. Because nuclear tends to supply baseload, rather than peaking, power, it may even be less than that. So you should figure only about $400 million of power generated per year.

Secondly, you have neglected operating costs: those nuclear engineers don't come cheap, and neither does enriched uranium. This table from the EIA tabulates the operating cost of various power plants, priced in $/1000 ("mils") per kWh generated, which is the same as $/MWh. Operation and maintenance for a nuke plant in 2014 ran about $18/MWh, and from the table seems to be increasing pretty quickly. For the 1 GW plant you hypothesize, the operating costs end up at about $140 million / yr.

So the net revenue for the plant may only be about $250 million/year, not $947 million/year. Over the lifetime of the plant, that gets you maybe $10 billion of net revenue. That's perhaps 2x the initial investment and doesn't take into consideration things like Net Present Value, etc. All in all, it doesn't look so rosy from an investment standpoint.

There's also the cost of decommissioning, which is a number that's hard to pin down, since very few plants have been fully decommissioned. Some poking around gave me figures anywhere from 10%-100% of the initial cost. Nuke plants are supposed to be setting aside that decommissioning cost during the life of the plant, so it may be baked into the operating cost numbers already. On the other hand, those decommissioning funds, like public pensions, are generally believed to be vastly underfunded. Leaving aside the externality of sticking the cost to the public, one should assume that, in year 40 (or 60), you'll need to cough up another $500 million to $5,000 million.

Re:Economics?

[Solandri]

0.9 is the historical capacity factor for nuclear in the U.S. Yeah, nuclear is really best for base load. It's slow to ramp up or down, so is not very good for peaking power load (the hourly and instantaneous spikes and dips in power consumption for the grid overall). Peaking load is usually handled by hydro and gas plants, sometimes coal.

The difference is that nuclear power proponents do not advocate making 100% of power generation nuclear. They are ok with using hydro, gas, wind, solar to handle peaking load. Renewable power proponents OTOH advocate 100% of our power come from hydro, wind, and solar, even though none of them are suitable for base load. Geothermal was really the only viable renewable for base load, but it has become collateral damage in environmentalists' war against fracking. (The energy of earthquakes triggered by fracking was already in the earth. If that energy hadn't been released by the fracking, it would've been released in a natural earthquake some time in the future. But in their zeal to shut down fracking for oil by incorrectly blaming fracking for all the energy released in an earthquake, they've poisoned public perception so that geothermal would also be blamed for earthquakes.)

As for rates for different power sources, wind is getting close to nuclear, but solar is still nowhere near. And as mentioned above, neither are suitable for base load. Most of the articles I've read proclaiming renewables will overtake nuclear and fossil fuels in cost mistakenly omit capacity factor in their comparison. They wind up comparing peak generating capacity, which has very little to do with rates. Theoretically you could use renewables for base load if you had sufficient storage capacity. But the most efficient storage system (pumped storage) only has about 75% efficiency, so that automatically makes it at least 1.33x more expensive than its source.

Re:Economics?

[drinkypoo]

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.

That's not safe, though, because you can't perform a complete metallurgical inspection of the interior of the reactor, and it tends to be damaged over time. Also, many of our older reactors are based on unsafe designs; that they haven't had an incident is laudable, but that they won't have a serious one in the future is still not assurable. And a number of them are proven insecure designs, literally based on the same design as used at Fukushima Daiichi and also storing spent fuel on site.

I am not wholly against nuclear power, but I am wholly against extending the lifespan of old reactors which frankly weren't safe when they were built. That human ingenuity has kept them going is not a counterargument. It is pucker-inducing.

Re:Economics?

[avandesande]

2/3 of the cost of your bill is distribution, so yeah, the calculation is off by a bit

Re:Economics?

[MrKaos]

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.

But *NOT* taking into account:

• The cost of spent fuel storage
• The cost of infrastructure to move spent fuel to it
• The cost of DU storage
• The cost of demolishing the reactor
• The variability of ore grades and the extraction costs
• The cost of cleaning up mine tailings from mine sites
• The ongoing costs for accident clean-ups from Fukushima and Chernobyl

How can CF factor these things into it, especially when a lot of these costs occur decades *after* the end of the service life of the reactor?

Isn't it *exactly* the same as the coal industry getting benefit by externalizing the cost of the carbon, only the nuclear industry does it with radionuclides and pushes the cost and consequences far far into the future. Do you include the cost of carbon remediation into a coal plants capacity factor?

It seems to me capacity factor is a measure designed to obscure the socialization of those costs at the expense of methods of generation that don't have those costs.

Re:Economics?

[DarthVain]

You're missing the mandatory decommissioning costs which can be a lot particularly when by the time all those years go by it would be even more expensive (just due to inflation etc), but yes still profitable. Presumably they would be taking a percentage of the profits and putting it into a fund over time to lessen the impact due to time (provided they don't cheat or raid the fund).

However even if it was at cost it would still be worthwhile due to the pubic good and the energy infrastructure of the nation.

Re:Economics?

[JesseMcDonald]

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.

Billions of dollars are changing hands, but it would be incorrect to say that this brings billions of dollars' worth of benefit to the economy. There is an economic gain from voluntary trade, but it's a small fraction of what either party pays or receives in absolute terms. The gain comes from the differences between the values each party assigns to the items being exchanged (e.g. productivity vs. salary for the employer, or salary vs. time, effort, and "human capital" such as training for the worker). This difference will, of course, be considerably less than the values of the goods being exchanged. Since the trade is voluntary the exchange can be presumed to benefit both parties, but the size of this benefit is difficult to estimate. As a thought-experiment one could consider the range of prices that would be acceptable to both parties (which is, of course, unknowable in any particular instance); the net benefit to the buyer is the highest amount the buyer would have been willing to pay for the same good minus the amount actually paid; or for the seller, the amount actually received minus the least the seller would have been willing to settle for. The net economic benefit of the transaction to society as a whole is the sum of the benefits to the buyer and the seller.

The state and local taxes, on the other hand, are a straightforward involuntary transfer of existing property from one party to another and should not be counted as an economic benefit at all. If anything, the taxed party can reasonably be expected to lose more value than the government gains, for a net economic loss.

Re:Economics?

[Mr D from 63]

You said whole lot of nothing. Just describing transactions. No, there is clearly a benefit to having a significant portion of the money flow into the community and support economic activity. The economy is not a zero sum game, it grows and to participate in that growth people need to get paid. If we consider a solar farm, for example, the largest portion of the cost is capital, much of which goes to Asia for supply.

People having jobs is of major importance to an economy.

Tax revenue depends on the economy too, and jobs, and production of saleable goods. It is also not a zero sum game.

Re:Economics?

[angel'o'sphere]

Every power plant is suitable for 'base load'.
You are mixing up the terms 'base load' and 'dispatchable' power plant.
Far over 50% of germanies water plants are flow river plants, always running at 100%, obviously they are 'bae load' plants.
The remaining ones are pumped storage: they are not even counted in 'energy production' because they only release energy that was produced otherwise.

Pumped storage has an efficiency of roughly 81% not 75 .... Over 90% efficiency in pumping uphill, and depending on turbine type 90% - 95% efficiency in converting the water comming downhill into electricity.

Sorry, you should read bit more instead of spreading myths.

The rest of the post is bollocks as you keep using the term 'base load' wrong ...

Re:Economics?

[HornWumpus]

To be suitable for 'base load' a plant must have a low marginal cost. So no, not all plants are suitable for 'base load'.

Re:Economics?

[MrKaos]

The cost of spent fuel storage

The cost of infrastructure to move spent fuel to it

Its about $1.5 million to store and move 1/4 of a PWR core.

Seems awfully cheap, how did you arrive at that cost?

Re:Economics?

[Gussington]

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.

Where I live it's closer to 40c/kWh, so yeah, a no brainer. But the hippies don't like them so we continue to burn coal instead

Re:Economics?

[angel'o'sphere]

Wrong ... get a dictionary or lexicon and read what base load is ... can't be so hard.

The word "base" actually implies all of it.

Re:Economics?

[HornWumpus]

We both know what it is.

You're just using a contrived simplified definition of 'suitable' that ignores economics.

Re:Economics?

[angel'o'sphere]

Nope, I don't ignore economics.

Classical base load plants are no longer economical. At least not in Europe and not in the emerging asian areas. No idea about USA, though.

electricity cost

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:electricity cost

[fnj]

Take an economics course and study up on "time value of money".

Paying off an investment of $6.8 billion over 40 years, even at only 3% per annum interest is a total expenditure of over $11.6 billion. So that takes your 1.5 cents to 2.6 cents, and then you have to add staggering amounts for very highly trained operating personnel, security, insurance, decommissioning at EOL, waste disposal, etc. And the fuel does cost SOMETHING. Before you know it, your costs are up to at least the going rate for wholesale electricity.

Re:From the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubbish. Steam factories produce steam. Which may or may not later be fashioned into steam engines.

So rain clouds are all steam now?

[dbIII]

All of it does. It's water, not steam.
You were aiming to correct me but you mist :)

Re:Can't make steel with windmills

[ArylAkamov]

I understood it just fine.

"Obama incentivized atomic power as part of his energy policy. I used to be a republican 4 decades ago, this could bring the two major parties together and defuse climate change debates. Bonus: defunding big oil"

Bad regulation is bad, but some rules are OK

[dbIII]

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.

Re:Bad regulation is bad, but some rules are OK

[Chas]

Standards change.

No. They DON'T. Or at least they SHOULDN'T.

They can be appended or superceded. But they shouldn't CHANGE.

Changing them basically defeats the purpose of a STANDARD.

Re:Bad regulation is bad, but some rules are OK

[AJWM]

This.

Never had the joy(?) of doing a hardware design spec, but I once spent about a year of my life on the software design and spec for a major contract.

Even (especially!) standards as complex as the definitions of programming languages come with dates or version numbers. Fortran 66 is not Fortran 77 is not Fortran90 is not Fortran 95 is not Fortran2003 is not Fortran2008. Close, and there's probably a common subset in there somewhere, but they aren't the same.

Ditto for any other programming language with an ISO standard -- the year is part of the standard number. (Although curiously, C89 and C90 are the same language, because the 1989 ANSI C standard (X3.159-1989) was adopted as the ISO standard (ISO/IEC 9899:1990) in 1990.)

So yeah, if you're spec'ing something as part of a billion-dollar project, hardware or software, get the details nailed down. At the very least, stick in verbiage to the effect that "all standards named here-in, unless otherwise specified, shall refer to those current as of the date of this specification."

Re:Bad regulation is bad, but some rules are OK

[dbIII]

They do change if you stupidly just specify the standard number and not the date (version number). If it is done properly it is as you say.

Re:Bad regulation is bad, but some rules are OK

[dbIII]

It's many years between the revision of standards so the year the standard is released is enough. Typically it's in big letters on the front cover and the spine or the first page of a PDF immediately following the standard number.

Re:From the article

[dbIII]

Steam? Do you burn yourself on misty mornings?
It's really fog and nothing like steam at all. It's all just warm (~40C) droplets of water coming off the condensate that has come out of the condensors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station#Steam_condensing) before going into the cooling towers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower).

Re:From the article

[dbIII]

The guy is a Lawyer, and it shows.

Re:From the article

[Joce640k]

No, he's right.

But only in the most nitpicking, anal-retentive, orange-fingered, never-been-out-into-the-sunshine definition of 'right'.

Not in the generally accepted use of the word 'steam' sort of right.

Re:From the article

[angel'o'sphere]

However the steam coming out of the cooling towers should never have been in contact with radioactive material. And: plenty of coal plants have cooling towers, too.

Uh oh

[whodunit]

If you listen closely you can hear mdsolar screaming.

Re:Can't make steel with windmills

[EzInKy]

I thought steel was made before windmills? Somebody fact check me on this.

Great!!

[EzInKy]

Can you translate if please? Hard to do with the political nonsense interfering with the message.

Re:From the article

[dbIII]

In the "beige box is not the hard drive and the LCD screen is not the computer" sense of right.
Haven't you kids heard of fog? If you are not kids - shame on you. The idiot in the article is a Lawyer with a network of old buddies of the family from birth and a $44 million dollar golden parachute but you guys are supposed to get exposed to some sort of STEM if you want to eat.

Cheap?

[MoarSauce123]

"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.

Re:Cheap?

[washort]

"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.

Re:Cheap?

[dunkelfalke]

If it is that easy, why don't you build a reprocessing facility?

Re:Cheap?

[Xyrus]

The "billions of dollars in budget overruns" are self-inflicted by the ridiculous mess of bureaucracy that's in place. Material and labor costs for a nuclear plant really aren't that much different than any other power plant. Construction time (again, taking out the bureaucracy) takes about a year or two more. Actually getting one approved however requires billions of dollars up front before so much a s a shovel touches the ground, and something just short of an act of god.

The problems with nuclear power are caused by people.

Re:Cheap?

[oh_my_080980980]

LMOL umm no. Getting a nuclear power plant approved is not the obstacle. Getting funding is. Because, yes Virginia, a nuclear power plant is expensive to build. It has to have more safety/security features that other power plants.

Re:Cheap?

[Loki_1929]

Government policy. Seriously, that's the reason. In fact, we've built one (EBR-II in Idaho) and it worked great for 30 years. Then we shut it down.

France reprocesses its high-level waste without any issue. As a result, they have vastly less waste to store and what's left to store is mostly low-energy garbage that doesn't present a significant threat.

Re:Cheap?

[cheesybagel]

Actually most of the building cost is concrete. Similar to a hydro dam.

Re:Can't make steel with windmills

[Trailer Trash]

I understood it just fine.

Actually, you didn't.

"Obama incentivized atomic power as part of his energy policy. I used to be a republican 4 decades ago, this could bring the two major parties together and defuse climate change debates. Bonus: defunding big oil"

He never claimed to be a Republican 4 decades ago. He said that nuclear power was a Republican dogwhistle 4 decades ago. You can go look up what a dogwhistle is in politics if you're unaware. Oddly, I'm not sure the GGP understood that, either.

Re:From the article

[Trax3001BBS]

However the steam coming out of the cooling towers should never have been in contact with radioactive material. And: plenty of coal plants have cooling towers, too.

It never was just a lot of people with a misconception.

That steam is from the secondary loop and should never come in contact with the primary water which is contaminated, there are safeguards in place.

Re:From the article

[Trax3001BBS]

We have a reactor who's steam can be seen for many miles being emitted from the cooling towers that caused a lot of concern over the contamination it was spreading from many people, for the first few years.

So much ignorance. smh.

Care to explain how cooling tower emission would be contaminated?

It would be the primary mixing with the secondary loop which is where the emissions come from, but there are safe guards in place, there is no contamination just worried people.

Re:From the article

[Nidi62]

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.

What nobody ever really says about nuclear

[tkrotchko]

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/...

Re:What nobody ever really says about nuclear

[oh_my_080980980]

Finally! It just makes freakin' steam to turn a turbine. Big freakin' deal. Why people get such a stiffy over such a limp dick approach is beyond me. Now if somehow we harnessed the power directly, THAT would be amazing. If somehow heat could generate current, like light does in a photovoltaic device, we'd have something.

Re:What nobody ever really says about nuclear

[AJWM]

Why mess around with heat at all? Just sandwich some beta-emitting isotope with a semiconductor and use the emitted electrons directly.

Betavoltaics for the win, baby!

Hey, imagine one of those batteries in a Galaxy Note 7! ;)

ITS ABOUT TIME

[p51d007]

Too much regulation that could be STREAMLINED.

Re:ITS ABOUT TIME

[oh_my_080980980]

Nothing to do with regulation. It's all about the funding. Banks don't want to fund nuclear power plants.

Cost to operate

[stomv]

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.

Re:Cost to operate

[cheesybagel]

So you seriously think a nuclear power plant will have more running costs per unit of energy generated than wind power? Seriously?

You need to read some more.

Re:Can't make steel with windmills

[Anonymous Coward]

"dogwhistle" is a word used by assholes to avoid talking issues

Re:From the article

[Chas]

Just the sheer amount of deaths per terawatt caused by nuclear power should make people rethink it. Nothing even comes close.

You mean that whopping number of ZERO?

You're right. Pretty much everything out there has a higher death count than nuclear, even when taken individually. So you're right. Nothing even comes close.

Re:From the article

[fnj]

Rubbish. Steam engines produce steam.

And gasoline engines produce gasoline. And fire engines produce fire.

Re:From the article

[omnichad]

sheer amount of deaths per terawatt

Compared to coal mining?

Re: Fight the future make sure its screwed

[Maritz]

lol. Sure you are. Atheists are people who can do good altruistic things without the promise of a reward from Big Sky Daddy. You on the other hand, would presumably rape and pillage everything in sight if it wasn't for the ramblings of bronze-age goat herders being codified for you with the usual threats and promises.

Re:From the article

[jbengt]

It's steam, even if it's below the boiling point of water. Saying that you're not seeing steam just because you're seeing the droplets of re-condensed water vapor rather than the gaseous water molecules is awfully pedantic. And you are not seeing "droplets of water coming off the condensate that has come out of the condensors [sic]". The cooling towers are not condensers - they don't condense water, they evaporate a portion of the water to cool the bulk of it - and the condensate from the condensers never comes in direct contact with the cooling tower water. The condensers are heat exchangers that separate the open cooling tower and the closed steam system.

Re:From the article

[0100010001010011]

Place on the phase diagram of water where the cooling towers operate.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Re:From the article

[0100010001010011]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:From the article

[Stuarticus]

"Stick it in a hole, it'll be fine"

Profit not revenue

[sjbe]

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.

Re:From the article

[Mr D from 63]

Actually, it would also then require then passing to the cooling loop, then passing through to the cooling pipes to the raw water.

There are detectors in place that detect even the slightest amount of leakage from primary to secondary. The plant is shut down if that happens, and that rarely occurs due to steam generator PM and inspections.

The only reason anybody is worried is the FUD mongers and ignorance.

Re:From the article

[Wulf2k]

Yes, that was exactly how I read his post.

But I suppose Poe's Law is a thing for a reason....

What's that in Libraries of Congress?

[AJWM]

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.)

Re:From the article

[fyngyrz]

Can you please tell me what the atomic number for asbestos is?

1-900-OMG-DUST

Re:"after billions of dollars in budget overruns"

[AJWM]

And "clean" is also relative

It is when you consider the amount of mining, separation, transportation and disposal of the energy-equivalent amount of coal and ash -- 1 cubic centimetre of uranium is about the equivalent of a mile-long train load of coal.

(Or the amount of mining, refining, etc, etc, to manufacture and install the equivalent in solar panels or wind turbines.)

Most people have no comprehension of the energy density of nuclear vs chemical fuels. This might help.

(Fun fact -- the trace thorium in coal has more potential nuclear energy than the chemical energy of burning the coal.)

I have tree things to say:

[fyngyrz]

because he would have no idea personally if they are fir for the job or not.

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.

Re: I have tree things to say:

[fyngyrz]

Trust me, that was a tremendous guess. I know from that guess that you are the very best people, believe me. I thank you big league for your comment.

Re:From the article

[dlingman]

Just get SpaceX to ship it to the far side of the moon. What could go wrong?

Experimental Reactors

[DarthVain]

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.

Re:From the article

[ArtemaOne]

Yeah, compared to coal mining the difference is staggering.

Re:From the article

[bigpat]

> or Eeeevil Radioactive Fog.

Did someone say Radioactive Frogs? Get the pitch forks towns folk! We need to prevent these evil radioactive frogs from destroying our civilization with their electrifications!

Re:From the article

[balbeir]

Rubbish. Steam engines produce steam.

And gasoline engines produce gasoline. And fire engines produce fire.

Don't forget electric engines producing electricity !

Re:From the article

[magarity]

Nuclear power has more than 0 casualties in actual fact during its 60 year history. It's not comparable to coal or oil obviously, but lying is not required.

In the spirit of the first post that pointed out the mist from the cooling tower wasn't "steam", I'd like to point out that nuclear power has never caused a single death because all deaths are caused by lack of oxygen flowing to the brain.

Re:From the article

[budgenator]

If it's condensed, it's water.

Re:From the article

[budgenator]

Here's how it work,

1. the reactor heats pressurized water in the primary loop
2. the hot pressurized water in the primary loop heats the very pure treated water in the secondary loop and boils it,
3. the cooler primary loop water returns to the reactor for reheating
4. the high pressure steam in the secondary loop propels the turbine to make the alternator turn,
5. the turbine exhaust consisting of steam is piped into the condensers inside the cooling tower,
6. external water is sprayed on the hot condenser pipe creating steam, which is lighter than air,
7. the rising steam creates a slight vacuum inside the cooling tower that draws in large amounts of air to further cool the condensers.
8. the secondary loop water is returned to be reheated

So anything you can see has 3 degrees of separation from the reactor

Re:From the article

[poofmeisterp]

And what else do you think is coming out of those cooling towers... hint: evaporated water.

If high schoolers start coming out of cooling towers, there is a serious problem involving mutation most likely occurring.

Re:From the article

[poofmeisterp]

Place on the phase diagram of water where the cooling towers operate.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

In the green!!!!!!

Dude, I'm so sorry. I couldn't control my fingers. These things just happen.

France France

[rbrander]

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.

Re:From the article

[dbIII]

It's steam, even if it's below the boiling point of water

No.
Look at a phase diagram of water and stop your science teacher from crying.

The cooling towers are not condensers

Cooling towers cool the water that has come out of the condensors - follow the link and you will learn!

Re:From the article

[dbIII]

No - even one more step removed. The water in the cooling loop never goes near the turbines or they corrode quickly.
It's not steam, it's water, not even a lot hotter than a bath at that. The water in the cooling loop never becomes steam - the steam is on the other side of tubes in the condensor.

Re:From the article

[dbIII]

Care to explain how cooling tower emission would be contaminated?

Blowing the roof off the reactor will do it, but short of that not much. There's a heating loop, a turbine loop and then the loop that cools that turbine water - for anything to get through all three the failure would have to be massive.

Re:From the article

[dbIII]

One more loop. You don't run lake water through your turbines, the turbines would not last very long. You exchange heat between lake water and the loop that runs through the turbines.

Re:From the article

[wjcofkc]

What, pray tell, do you think is coming out of those towers? It's 100% pure dihydrogen monoxide in the form of steam in order to turn turbines which then generate electricity. Although I really am curious, what do you actually think is coming out of those towers? Gluten? I honestly want to know how you think a nuclear reactor generates electricity. Where do they get these people? Probably the likes of Harvard Business School, University of Michigan—Ann Arbor, MIT, Texas A&M is also a great school for advanced study in Nuclear Engineering. I really truly want to know what was or wasn't going through your head with such bold and self-assured statement. Also: Some light reading on the subject

But seriously, what is it that you though you understood?

Fog hod sake People

[dbIII]

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.

Re:Fog hod sake People

[wjcofkc]

Honestly I merely saw an opportunity to say "pure dihydrogen monoxide" - Gas, condensed. It's still the same molecule just in a different state. Yes, steam is invisible. Thermal Brownian motion and so on and so forth. If I were an actual nucluer ---G Bush Joke engineer, then perhaps I would be so pedantic. My dad would, but his been an R&D Chemist since forever.

Re:Fog hod sake People

[dbIII]

While I've done a lot of work as an engineer in power stations I'm no nuclear engineer (and the ones I worked with were Russian!), but the cooling towers work the same way in coal fired power stations.
It's not steam anywhere in the cooling towers FFS - it's not even very hot. Same molecule - so - it's not the "steam" molecule so how does that make it correct?

My comment above was mostly exasperation at the almost content free article and their interview with the manager who knows as little about his plant as you do. It's a little depressing that so many here thought actual hot steam was coming out of those things.

Re:Fog hod sake People

[wjcofkc]

Huh? There is no "steam" molecule so I am not sure what you are getting at. I was simply stating that water is water without thinking so hard over a trollish slashdot post while then calling your reply out as being pedantic.Ya dig?

Re:Fog hod sake People

[wjcofkc]

Concerning my more recent reply, it would be like you replying "but there is a steam molecule and it is water!"

Re:Fog hod sake People

[dbIII]

I'm sorry but that makes zero sense. Steam is a well defined phase of water. Please try again.

thinking so hard over a trollish slashdot post

Feel free to once again add a patronizing link, suggestions about my education and how wonderful your father, but not you, is if you are unable to think of something sensible to write.

It's out of depth power station management such as Johnson that resulted in TEPCO's fuckup at Fukishima in Japan by cutting corners that non-technical management has no clue that they should not have been cut. It's people like that the cost us the manned space program by ignoring their engineers warnings about not launching when it was too cold. When they know so little about what they are responsible for that they start talking about steam coming out of cooling towers they are a danger. A simple half hour briefing on how the entire place works would have cured that mistake, but such types don't even take that time.

Re:From the article

[lnovak]

That's not the only thing coming out of those plants.

I'm sure you're aware of the waste that's sitting in rusting barrels, here in Michigan, just yards from 20% of the worlds fresh water.

You're probably also aware of all the raw materials and their sources that go into building the plant and creating the fuel.

Re:From the article

[Trax3001BBS]

Here's how it work,

1. the reactor heats pressurized water in the primary loop
2. the hot pressurized water in the primary loop heats the very pure treated water in the secondary loop and boils it,
3. the cooler primary loop water returns to the reactor for reheating
4. the high pressure steam in the secondary loop propels the turbine to make the alternator turn,
5. the turbine exhaust consisting of steam is piped into the condensers inside the cooling tower,
6. external water is sprayed on the hot condenser pipe creating steam, which is lighter than air,
7. the rising steam creates a slight vacuum inside the cooling tower that draws in large amounts of air to further cool the condensers.
8. the secondary loop water is returned to be reheated

So anything you can see has 3 degrees of separation from the reactor

Sigh I guess it came across wrong, I was getting at how worried people are over radiation.

I'm well aware of how it works, I operated a 4000Mw reactor for many years, we didn't use cooling towers, our mission was to produce Plutonium our steam went to dump conditioners (imagine large radiators who's coils carried cold water) when the steam hit those they condensed into water, and back through the cycle to cool down the primary loop.

Just now I was out playing with the dog when I noticed the only clouds in the sky were from those freaking cooling towers. Some ~15 miles away.

Re:From the article

[Trax3001BBS]

No - even one more step removed. The water in the cooling loop never goes near the turbines or they corrode quickly.
It's not steam, it's water, not even a lot hotter than a bath at that. The water in the cooling loop never becomes steam - the steam is on the other side of tubes in the condensor.

I would think just having one loop for the primary and power production would contaminate the entire area.

Steam some of the driest you'll come across is what drives the turbines, after that a method is required to recapture the water to send it back to cool the primary loop.

It's a different age, we didn't use the Columbia river for our secondary system like they did with the older reactors.

Re:From the article

[Trax3001BBS]

The only reason anybody is worried is the FUD mongers and ignorance.

Exactly! Thank you.

Re:From the article

[dbIII]

It's a tertiary system. Wikipedia will help.

Re:From the article

[dbIII]

Columbia river for our secondary system

Never happened. People have know to keep their boiler water clean for at least one and a half centuries. On the other side of the condensors it can even be sea water but that boiler water is kept clean.
Nukes have the extra loop that exchanges heat with the boiler water - thus cooling water that goes through the cooling towers is the third loop. If anything from the first loop has made it into the third it's either a string of failures or a huge catastrophic event obvious to anyone within miles.

Re:From the article

[Trax3001BBS]

Columbia river for our secondary system

Never happened. People have know to keep their boiler water clean for at least one and a half centuries. On the other side of the condensors it can even be sea water but that boiler water is kept clean.
Nukes have the extra loop that exchanges heat with the boiler water - thus cooling water that goes through the cooling towers is the third loop. If anything from the first loop has made it into the third it's either a string of failures or a huge catastrophic event obvious to anyone within miles.

First reactors out here used Columbia river for the primary, then let it sit in big cooling pools before releasing it back to the river, there were two cooling pools.
They have buried it all now, even the reactor I operated. http://www.hanford.gov/page.cf...