Slashdot Mirror
Japan Fukushima Nuclear Plant 'Clean-Up Costs Double,' Approaching $200 Billion (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Japan's government estimates the cost of cleaning up radioactive contamination and compensating victims of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has more than doubled, reports say. The latest estimate from the trade ministry put the expected cost at some 20 trillion yen ($180 billion). The original estimate was for $50 billion, which was increased to $100 billion three years later. The majority of the money will go towards compensation, with decontamination taking the next biggest slice. Storing the contaminated soil and decommissioning are the two next greatest costs. The compensation pot has been increased by about 50% and decontamination estimates have been almost doubled. The BBC's Japan correspondent, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, says it is still unclear who is going to pay for the clean up. Japan's government has long promised that Tokyo Electric Power, the company that owns the plant, will eventually pay the money back. But on Monday it admitted that electricity consumers would be forced to pay a portion of the clean up costs through higher electricity bills. Critics say this is effectively a tax on the public to pay the debt of a private electricity utility.
What about the lost productivity of the land that's now quarantined? Or the tourism money that would've went to Japan if it wasn't for Fukushima?
I'd like to see an honest calculation of how much nuclear power costs, because all the numbers I've seen never takes those into account.
When dealing with Utilities, there is no way for the company to pay back without taking the money from the rate payers. The only real way to do it is for the government ot require the company to issue stock representing a percentage of the company value that would go to the government. Therefore the owners of the company ie stock holders pay for the damage they caused by placing idiots in charge and the government can then sell the stock to pay for the cleanup or hold it in trust to ensure this does not happen again.
Damn it, point being consumers would have had to pay more for the electricity either way...
Yeah. Of course if they had an off grid solar installation, they wouldn't have to worry so much about post-kaboom subsidization.
Watching this conversation, it looks like the pro nuc zealots are now saying "Well sure, the plants blow up and you have to pay for all the damage - that's just how nuclear works. 200 billion? Of course you have to pay that!" Seems like paying it backwards. P I'm trying to imagine that might be a rather hard sell to a world that is steadily adapting to solar and wind.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yes the cost is big. But everything about nuclear is big, including the amount of power generated. Fukushima Daiichi consisted of 6 reactors:
#1 generated 460 MWe from March 1971 to April 2012, or 41.1 years
#2 generated 784 MWe from July 1974 to April 2012, or 37.7 years
#3 generated 784 MWe from March 1976 to April 2012, or 36.1 years
#4 generated 784 MWe from October 1978 to April 2012, or 33.6 years
#5 generated 784 MWe from April 1978 to Jan 2014, or 35.7 years
#6 generated 1100 MWe from October 1979 to Jan 2014, or 34.2 years
Multiply the generating capacity by the time in service and you get 165.7 TWh for reactor #1, 259.1 TWh for #2, 248.1 TWh for #3, 230.9 TWh for #4, 245.3 TWh for #5, and 329.8 TWh for #6. For a total of 1478.9 TWh.
Nuclear's capacity factor in Japan (ratio of actual electricity generated vs peak capacity) started around 46% in the mid-1970s, and had reached 79% by 2001. Assume a linear increase followed by it remaining stable from 2001-2014, and overall capacity factor over this timeframe (which conveniently breaks down into 26 and 13 years) is (26*(.46+.79)/2 + 13*.79) / 39 = 0.68.
So actual electricity generated by the plant would be about 1478.9 TWh * 0.68 = 1005.7 TWh. Round it down and call it an even 1000 TWh.
The average price of electricity in Japan is 26 cents/kWh. Yes the price was lower in the past, but we want the inflation-adjusted total value of electricity generated, so using today's price is valid.
1000 TWh * $0.26/kWh = $260 billion worth of electricity produced over the lifetime of the plant. Even with the second-worst and most expensive nuclear accident in history, the Fukushima Daiichi plant still produced more value in electricity than the cleanup cost.
Now consider that the world generated 2731 TWh with nuclear in 2008. If you go with 20 cents/kWh as a global average electricity price, that's $546 billion worth of electricity generated by nuclear power each year. Add up the cost to clean up Fukushima ($200 billion), Chernobyl ($200 billion), and Three Mile Island ($1 billion). Amortized over the 37 years since the first of those accidents, the cost of cleaning up these nuclear accidents only works out to ($401 billion / 37 years) / (546 billion / 1 year) = 1.98% of the cost of electricity produced.
Basically, the cost of cleaning up nuclear accidents is just 0.4 cents/kWh.
There were numerous teams around the world actively working toward powered flight at the time. As for the apparent quality of their design, you're applying modern standards of what a prototype should look and feel like to a vastly more adventurous era. It's one of the reasons we made massive strides during the first half of the 20th and now typically make far more incremental advances: we're terrified of failure, particularly if there's any risk to any human life. It's the reason a design like the YF-12 would never be allowed to fly these days. On paper, the design decisions made to allow it to fly as high and as fast as it does are laughably insane. But it flew, and its 1950s design set records we still haven't broken.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Pebble bed designs >> Nope. Germany still struggles to find what to do with the decomissionned experimental reactor. it's the radioactives thing on earth, contminated with dust that has potential to kill anything breathing on earth if released.
CANDU reactors >> Nope. Bad design, does not scale. Also, no proper waste reprocessing.
SMR >> Yeah, let's put a bomb in each backyard, great idea. Seriously, this thing is more of a financing for small military reactors (for submarines)
Molten Salt reactors >> Nope. There is no containment material that can hold the molten core at scale. Also, it implies a chemical processing plant with gigantic contamined waste integrated with each reactor. Tritiated Fluorhydric acid, anyone ? Nice cocktail, but no thanks.
Thorium reactors will be available >> breeders with sodium ? Yeah, no danger sir. We can wipe a continent if a bigger fire brakes out. We cannot put out this fire with water, or else booom :)
ITER ... the promise of commercial level over-unity fusion. >> what an empty promise. ITER is an experimental, not a commercial plant. And it's a failed one, at this. It will not sustain overunity for longer than a minute. Which every scam artist on youtube can also do for a lot less money by storing some energy in a flywheel.
aaaaaaa