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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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: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.

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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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 ...

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!

[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!

[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!

[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.

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

[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

[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: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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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: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?

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: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

[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.

Uh oh

[whodunit]

If you listen closely you can hear mdsolar screaming.

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: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

[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.

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?

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.

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.