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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Yes, which is why they're supposed to be stupidly overdesigned and are given shutdown dates and whatnot.
Trouble is, we haven't been shutting them down. Strong political resentment makes it hard to build replacement plants (and those things produce a lot of power that has to be replaced in some manner.)
And if you get past that you get the beancounters looking at the multi-billion dollar price tags of a new reactor and they start wondering if the existing ones can't hold on just a few more years.
And when you get past that, you get the NIMBYs doing their best to make sure that the only place you can build the new plant is on the moon.. and someone would still likely complain about it.
Unfortunately the world has turned away from the idea of long-term investments in things like infrastructure. Anything that looks bad in the next quarterly report is highly questioned and anything the government gets involved in has to be able to show positive results by the next election season.
A project that won't show a profit for 10 or 20 years (or worse doesn't show a profit at all and is only being done because we don't want bloody nuclear explosions all over the place) is simply not given any political or economic weight these days.
Throw in the uphill battle I mention above and its hardly surprising that we keep trying to retrofit and upgrade existing ancient plants. Its nearly impossible to do anything else. But unfortunately there will be the odd occasion when "good enough" just isn't good enough anymore. And unfortunately when that occasion happens to hit a nuclear power plant, things get very ugly very fast.
Nuclear is still our cleanest, safest form of large-scale power. But only if its properly maintained, spent fuel properly reprocessed and properly disposed of when it can no longer be reprocessed, replacement schedules are followed and so forth. Unfortunately we've got an absolutely horrific track record on basically all of those points. Frankly its kind of amazing that we haven't had more disasters.
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."
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,
And this is just for the cleanup cost. The total lifetime cost will be vastly higher. And let's not forget that Tepco has literally lied about Fukushima at every turn. (I defy any reader to find any moment at which Tepco told the whole truth, even as they understood it.) The total cleanup cost will likely be much, much higher.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"