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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.
An off the cuff estimate of a complicated event with virtually no precedents. Made by an entity responsible for the disaster.
I think everyone who thought about it for more than a couple of minutes was figuring to multiply the 'estimate' by a factor between 2 and 10.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If Tepco's profit are not enough to fill the bill, then there is a good case to go after Tepco's capital. Japan's state could seize the company.
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.
You see, the thing is, nuclear *is* a great idea.
However, putting 40 year old designs next to the ocean on an island chain on the Ring of Fire tectonic plate zone with a hundreds-year old history of tsunamis along that coastline *isn't* a great idea.
Pebble bed designs, CANDU reactors, SMR (Small Modular Reactors) and reprocessors are available today. Soon, Molten Salt reactors and Thorium reactors will be available. To top that off, on the other side of nuclear, ITER is coming along nicely with the promise of commercial level over-unity fusion.
Yes, Nuclear is a great idea, but one has to be smart about *where* it's built, not *whether* it's built.
Sorry mdsolar, we can't take that risk. And fusion is only 50 years away 50 years ago.
The supposed "critics" are fucking idiots. Thins as big and as costly as a nuclear power plant is not built on the whim of a corporation. Rate payers, government at all levels from the first responders that are funded to serve it to the indifferent elected officials the public put in office and who appointed the deficient regulators; everyone was at the table and everyone got the benefits for forty years. Japan used the power of those nukes to build its prosperity from the 70's to 2011 and there is a whole generation of geriatric Japanese living off the pensions built by that engine of wealth. The public is just as obligated to pay for the consequences as Tepco or anyone else involved in Fukushima.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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.
Taxpayers and customers are footing the bill. They might grumble a bit, but they'll still pay.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Does this mean that every nuclear power plant is "too big to fail," with each installation possibly representing a trillion+ dollar liability?
Yes, Nuclear is a great idea, but one has to be smart about *where* it's built, not *whether* it's built.
there is a little problem, and you just nailed it. Where it is built. And smart. Sorry, but there are humans involved, and perhaps a nuc plant gets built in a certain place because the person who sold the land gave great head, or a fine ass contribution to one of his employees, also known as an elected politician. Added to the mix is the CEO of the project who demands the schedule is met, and the CFO who even thought they don'nt know a thing about niuclear power, knows exactly where to save money by cutting corners.
It's a mighty big damn genie in that bottle, and it wants out really bad. And while corporations are darn good at turning a profit, they aren't so good with genies. Samsung has problems with tiny little genies in their phones. So while they might be great at making sneakers or selling Pizza, corporate culture doesn't like engineers and scientists very much, and doesn't consider their input necessary on the "important matters"
Until that damn genie gets out of the bottle.
In hindsight of course, the Fukushima Power plant was simply going to fail. The walls were 100 percent certain to breach, the water was 100 percent going to settle where the emergency generators were. The design itself however, would still be working today if not for the terrible decisions made on siting and building the place.
Can a safe reliable nuclear based pwer generating plant be built? I'm pretty certain the answer is yes.
Will they be built? Having a pretty good grasp of human nature, my money is on only by accident.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Well since even TFS suggested that compensation was the lion's share of that amount, a quick Googling brings me to this article: which suggests, as of last year, that there was "still" 250,000 people displaced (the phrasing of which suggests that there was previously even more.)
So that's quite a bit larger than the 10k people you were suggesting. $200B/250k people works out to $800k per person. Which is still quite a lot, but not nearly as insane as it sounds if you'd been assuming only 10,000 people.
And of course that's not counting people who hadn't been displaced but may be getting compensated for some reason or other anyway.
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.
... because they skip right over human fallibility.
Look at Katrina.
Books were written about how New Orleans was a bowl below sea level, years and years ago.
The Army Corps of Engineers, their brothers, nieces, and adoptive children knew the score.
Look at the Mississippi floods. We know it does that and yet people live there.
Look at earthquake-prone California.
In the final analysis, we find that shit happens.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
But it's simply not. Tout all the vaporware you can buzzword - breeder reactors, thorium reactors, etc etc - it's still going to be more expensive than wind and solar. Build nukes as safe as you want, they're still going to be more of a risk, and still be more expensive to decomission.
You anti fusion luddites are unbelievable with your snideness and negativity. The budget for nuclear fusion was cut by 90% in the 1970s. Have some patience, maybe it's just delayed by 50 years or 100years. So what, it hasn't been shown to be impossible and they are credible paths to acheiving it. Thank goodness you weren't around 125 years ago to ridicule the aviation pioneers like the wright brothers for their failures.
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."
I'd like to see a citation for the death rates. A citation that includes the uranium minors who died of cancer (uranium mining was quite unsafe back in the 50's, mostly out of ignorance), along with the Navajo who died of cancer when retaining ponds let lose. The citations I've seen don't even seem to admit that there were construction accidents during the construction of all the reactors in the world while counting the construction accidents involved with wind and solar. Perhaps there honestly was never a construction accident while building reactors, which would be pretty amazing.
Wind and solar, if good practices such as safety harnesses and ropes, are followed, should be as safe or safer then building a large reactor. Hydro as well as long as the locations are well thought out, much like nuclear. All four need to be built correctly and safely yet corners get cut, damns fail and eventually a nuclear plant will fail worse then the ones being discussed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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
Just wondering how large is 200B, then I search http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp
The 2016 Japanese GDP is about 4000B.
Anyone able to run the numbers properly? From my v rough back of the envelope, it looks like $200bn would buy you about 0.7TW of solar capacity in today's money, assuming no economies of scale (!!) Fukushima was about 5TW, I think.
Just curious to know what magnitude of solar capacity could be created if governments put the scale of investment into it that goes into nuclear.
French nuclear plants are primarily owned and run by the government.
You are welcome on my lawn.