Slashdot Mirror
US Nuclear Comeback Stalls As Two Reactors Are Abandoned (theaustralian.com.au)
Brad Plumer reports via The New York Times (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source): In a major blow to the future of nuclear power in the United States, two South Carolina utilities said on Monday that they would abandon two unfinished nuclear reactors in the state, putting an end to a project that was once expected to showcase advanced nuclear technology but has since been plagued by delays and cost overruns. The two reactors, which have cost the utilities roughly $9 billion, remain less than 40 percent built. The cancellation means there are just two new nuclear units being built in the country -- both in Georgia -- while more than a dozen older nuclear plants are being retired in the face of low natural gas prices. Originally scheduled to come online by 2018, the V.C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina had been plagued by disputes with regulators and numerous construction problems. This year, utility officials estimated that the reactors would not begin generating electricity before 2021 and could cost as much as $25 billion -- more than twice the initial $11.5 billion estimate. The utilities also struggled with an energy landscape that had changed dramatically since the large reactors were proposed in 2007. Demand for electricity has plateaued nationwide as a result of major improvements in energy efficiency, weakening the case for massive new power plants. And a glut of cheap natural gas from the hydraulic fracturing boom has given states a low-cost energy alternative. Facing those pressures, the two owners of the project, South Carolina Electric & Gas and Santee Cooper, announced they would halt construction rather than saddle customers with additional costs.
"At the beginning of the 1980s, only one of the five WPPSS plants was nearing completion. By this time, nuclear power had been reexamined and was found to not be as clean as was originally thought. Some cities boycotted nuclear power from the plants before the facilities were even up and running. The cost overruns reached the point where more than $24 billion would be required to complete the work, but recouping funds would be a tricky matter because of less-than-promising sales. Construction halted on all but the near-completed second plant; the first plant was once again being redesigned. WPPSS was forced to default on $2.25 billion worth of municipal bonds."
http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/0...
Nuclear energy is really only good for one thing.
Then they could have been generating power 8 years ago!
Or they could have bought 9 billion dollars worth of LED bulbs for their customers and reduced power usage by some extensive amounts.
Or they could have bought a few billion in meats, set up a big-ass pit, got some sauce, and had the hugest BBQ evah! BYOB though.
In much of the country nuclear cannot survive because of all the tax subsidized $0 Market wind energy. As a result carbon heavy resources must ride the wind demand up and down. Our base load infrastructure has been gutted by the wind fad. There has been nothing worse for the environment than the influx of wind power. Literally only idiots support wind power. If you hear anyone talking about wind in a positive light, punch them in the face and tell them to take physics 101.
come on, olkiluoto 3 is neeeaaarly ready. maybe. possibly.
start of construction was 2005. fixed price contract with areva was 3 billion. estimated actual cost somewhere between 8.5 and 9 billion, with it open who pays the bill(Areva doesn't want to pay it and got smacked into pieces already anyways. Siemens was part of the original contract too).
the lesson there is that don't buy construction from the french since their pricing assumes government handouts in both quality control and purely financial manners.
and well.. supposedly they had not even started to make the automation system before the original delivery date - which should just fucking put the whole fucking bill on the areva remaining assets.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
We used to be able to make nuclear plants, now we can't. Either we forgot how, or something else happened. Place your bets.
If South Carolina had invested this money in wind and solar, they would have a great position on the road to meaningful jobs and energy security.
So who profited from this. It's not like S.C. doesn't have their share of hogs feeding at the public trough. You don't suppose any politicians benefited from this fiasco?
The NRC needs an overhaul. Modern designs are very safe and emit less radioactivity than burning coal. People are needlessly scared. People perceive threat wrong. They fear terrorist attacks and nuclear meltdowns but don't even know that smoking, heart disease and driving are considerably more likely to kill them.
Are these some of the reactors that was bankrupting Toshiba/Westinghouse?
The prime factor in this decision, the bankruptcy of Westinghouse, isn't mentioned in the article until you get halfway through. I guess factors such as these don't really fit the narrative of "nuclear bad".
This is by design. The left has seized this approach above all others to kill nuclear power plants.
They have networks of friendly lawyers who file bogus suits before amenable judges. They have friendly regulators that change the rules midstream. The effect is delay, delay, delay. And that means cost, cost, cost. While tthe construction site sits idle, the utility often has to pay a squadron of union electricians and/or plumbers to sit around while it is resolved in court or while engineering updates the plans to take into account the newest retarded rule change.
A few years delay can double the cost.
See also: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl... (old, but good)
See that "Preview" button?
Something like $10B in loses.
Please read the following report
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/china-nuclear-power.aspx
Thank you!
I find it ironic that nuclear power supporters here get condescending and accuse everyone else of being anti-scientific and of living in a fantasy world, all while pointing at worldwide conspiracies in order to explain why no one invests in nuclear energy anymore, without accepting the more simple and realistic explanation that the energy source they believe to be cheap, safe and clean is neither cheap, nor safe, nor clean. It's always only a couple years away from becoming such, but its's not just there yet. And it has been so since the 80s.
Far Cry 1 Download
Meanwhile, Russia is building 7 reactors right now: https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/Worl... , and is collaborating with China. Russian nuclear export agency is also building reactors in Bangladesh and Thailand.
Oh, but it's not all. Russia has the world's only power-generating fast-neutron reactor (BN-800) and is preparing to build the second generation (BN-1200) of this reactor type. All the while pursuing the revolutionary project of lead-cooled reactor (i.e. reactor cooled with molten lead as coolant) that will allow to achieve almost 100% closed loop within the territory of a power plant, including fuel reprocessing.
Yep, US is way behind in nuclear technology, and it's entirely self-inflicted.
Where is Blindseer when you need him to debunk that article?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The prime factor in this decision, the bankruptcy of Westinghouse, isn't mentioned in the article until you get halfway through. I guess factors such as these don't really fit the narrative of "nuclear bad".
No, but it does fit the narrative of 'nuclear unprofitable and uneconomic, even with government backed insurance and no paying for cleanup at end of life'.
Actually, no.
What happened is the NIMBYs and 'Green' movement (intentional use of quotes since they are usually clueless knee-jerkers who know sweet F.A about the actual environment) made the whole thing a political football resulting in 300-400% cost increases pushing it to the borderline of economic.
'We' could quite happily produce them for a sensible price - and the Chinese are. All that needs to be done is not intentionally pushing the costs through the roof for no actual gain in safety, efficiency, or production.
Actually, that is a tiny bit unfair, it is also caused by certain corporations who exist on government style cost-plus contracts using regulatory capture, and who cream billions of dollars by making things cost as much as possible.
However, it is clear that exactly ZERO of the problem is the ability to actually produce cheap effective safe nuclear power. In fact what we are doing now is forcing the burning of more fossil fuels, and the lifespan extension of older and less efficient/safe reactors. Congratulations Greenpeace et.al.
Yes, just like it's not too difficult to convert a motorbike into a steam locomotive.
Come on guys - at least THINK before posting.
That BBQ idea sounds good. Now who's got few billion to spare? Hands up!
> glut of cheap natural gas from the hydraulic fracturing boom has given states a low-cost energy alternative
Natural gas -> burn -> CO2 -> atmosphere -> furthers man-made global climate change
Nuclear -> fission -> radioactive waste -> underground burial -> no problem for 100K years
> It should not be too difficult to convert these unfinished plants to use coal instead of nuclear.
The russian navy actually has a battle-cruiser named Tsar Peter the Great, which is powered by combined nuclear and oil (so called CONAS scheme). Essentially the nuclear reactor provides the baseline amount of power needed for leisurely travel and crew / weapon systems needs, but if there is a need for dash speed, crude oil fired boilers can be stoked up and used to further super-heat the steam flow which comes out of the nuclear reactor, so that the steam-turbines spin the screws faster. This way the amount of concrete and metal used for reactor shielding could be reduced and the ship can maintain limp paced emergency mobility, even if the reactor malfunctions.
Now that's a bit of a strange thing to write. Not even the salesfolk trying to get governments and power utilities to build these things make claims that wild.
There's nothing wrong with something with an expected life of three decades or more taking quite a few years to show a return so there is no need for such wild claims.
All you are achieving by making such a claim is the impression that either you are holding all the readers here in utter contempt or that you are writing without having the merest shred of a clue about the topic - not a good look either way is it?
Meltdowns are almost always a combination of bad reactor design + human error. Both of these can be mitigated.
People seem to conveniently forget that france has generated > 50% of its grid electricity from nuclear for over 50 years without a single major incident.
Talk about rich envy!!!
You only have "not baseload" if your supply drops to less than 50%, since "baseload" is 50% of peak demand. It doesn't matter if it's supplied by 20 different types of "unreliable" power, because all that means is you have peak production above 100% when they all vary together to more energy and less than 100% when you them all varying together to less energy.
It doesn't matter if it's variable, as long as there's enough to make "baseload". And then you have "baseload power"
You moron.
but who's in control when you're selling a physically addicting substance. You'll note that the overwhelming majority of smokers in America are young and low income. There is such a thing as taking advantage of people who are in a bad situation you know?
I worry about my own mistakes. Lots of folks do. But lots of folks have so much on their plate it's all they can do to make it through another day.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Watch Pandora's Promise to see just how crazy these fanbois are. The best part is at the end where the crazy nuclear tycoon is talking about nuclear waste saying "who are these human beings 10,000 years in the future?". These nuclear crazies do not care about humanity at all.
Yes watch PP to see just how nutty these nuts are.
Hippie environmentalists fought them tooth and nail, I assume because they prefer dumping carbon into the atmosphere. Then got older and joined the regulatory agencies.
There is a hidden cost in solar and wind power. Power grids are real-time, the electricity you consume is generated the instant you use it (transmission speed is effectively the speed of light). For the grid to work you have to have a guaranteed minimum power delivery. Geo-thermal and hydro power are the only clean energy sources that allow for that and neither are currently cheap to build (and dams are have other environmental impacts to be considered). Solar is useless at night and wind and wave power are inconsistent. Sharing power among regions is not viable right now because the grid doesn't support it and technology doesn't allow for efficient transmission over distance anyway (we'd need super-conducting cables for that to be workable). The only option is massive battery banks which are neither cheap nor environmentally friendly. Cost is coming down but batteries have nasty chemicals and a set number of recharge cycles. That's not going to change for sometime (granted, safe disposal is at least an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear disposal).
Until something in the equation changes we have to have a consistent source of power to make sure the grid is capable of supporting the demand. That's either hydro-electric (which is not even an option in some regions), coal/gas or nuclear.
You can check the number of deaths from energy accidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Below are some entries, in deaths per PWh:
Coal (China): 170,000
Coal (US): 10,000
Oil: 36,000
Natural Gas: 4,000
Solar: 440
Wind: 150
Hydro (non-US): 1,400
Hydro (US): 5
Nuclear(non-US): 90
Nuclear(US): 0.01
Yup - and Westinghouse went bust because they built shit reactors.
It should not be too difficult to convert these unfinished plants to use coal instead of nuclear.
If there is turbo-machinery at the site, it will most likely be converted to natural gas.
Oil and coal (and other natural resources) are about the only thing keeping Russia solvent right now. They don't export anything else that comes even close to putting a dent in their trade balance. If you have a way to use less of a resource that's vital to your economy, that's what you do.
Beyond that, millions of solar panels is not an option in most of Russia. Many of the most populous cities are at extremely high latitudes and solar output in the winter (when it would be most needed) is greatly reduced. Wind turbines are also a problem because mechanical equipment doesn't work well in areas where engine blocks freeze solid if you leave them outside at night.
So no, it's not just bragging rights (but that's certainly a part of it).
had been plagued by disputes with regulators
A project is on its death march at the stage where there are disputes with the regulators. Somebody has royally fucked up with the regulator relations, design, implementation, or all of them.
The US is a fearful country where the people have more power than the government (relative to China & Russia). Nobody wants it in their backyard. Even if construction costs were cut in half, it would still be an enormous uphill battle. I support safe nuclear energy production but realistically it's just very unlikely to ever happen here in light of the current state of affairs.
The first reactors were always going to be more expensive and take longer to build. The supply chain needs to be primed.
It's a new design. Even if a lot of the design risk was retired with the AP600 prototype that prototype wasn't full scale.
The cost to start up a new natural gas power plant and run it on cheap natural gas is killing everything else. Even Three Mile Island is going under, not due to safety issues but because they can't find a buyer for the electricity produced. They can't produce it cheap enough to compete. Wind and solar are great, but you just can't put a wind or solar farm anywhere, you need a lot of land. A gas powered plant is fairly small, and can be built near the customers. So, instead of building high tension lines from the mid west to the east coast to provide wind generated power, they are building gas pipelines from Pennsylvania and West Virginia to supply fracking gas to small power plants. They can build and operate these cheaper than established plants obtaining power in traditional ways.
You can't just say it's expensive without digging into the why. You can't point to "cost overruns" without digging into the why. And a huge part of the why is the regulatory environment. Mandatory changes, redesigns, more changes. Someone here on slashdot familiar with the system once explained how one of the many regulatory organizations mandated a materiel change which then forced a valve redesign and the redesign had to be approved by so many organizations that it literally took years. That is why it's so expensive, and that's what drives the cost overruns. I'm sure there are ordinary run of the mill cost overruns as well, but they pale in comparison.
when run as a non-profit. The trouble is Americans can't stand for anything that isn't profitable and those profits have to be maxed. So the Gov't builds the plant, hands it over to a well connected private citizen for pennies on the dollar and after a few decades of inflation when it's no longer profitable enough they start cutting corners and you get a meltdown. It happened to the Japanese over in Fukushima. They knew damn well the reactor wasn't safe given the current weather patterns and they ignored it. Last I heard nobody was punished. A few committees formed but nothing came of it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
For years, Georgia residents using Georgia Power have been paying the "Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery" fee to Georgia power. The fee title pretty much sums up the purpose of the fee. The fee is present on every itemized bill from Georgia Power. Many Georgia residents do not have a choice of power companies, and ,as of now, are assured that they will never see a return from the money that they have been forced to pay to Georgia Power over the last decade. Construction was halted on these projects much earlier than this announcement, but the fee "is still being assessed." The burden of the poor project management and ill spent dollars has been shifted from a private company with a market lock to the customer. This is essentially a "power tax" added by Georgia Power, and residents have no choice but to continue to pay the tax for as long as Georgia Power decides to continue the assessment. This could go on for decades under current conditions. Additionally, Georgia Power management has little reason to put effort into insuring that costly mistakes like this one do not occur because they company will not see a profit or revenue decrease from the poor investment as the debt was shifted to consumers who were not given a choice.
Toshiba bought out Westinghouse a few years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Corporation#Timeline_of_company_evolution) as part of a plan to increase investment in nuclear power (they'd already bought most of the nuclear division around a decade before that).
My wife's brother worked on the SC plants. According to him, Westinghouse was tasked with making new designs with inexperienced teams. One of their bright ideas was to prefab the plant (to save engineer time and money I'd guess) instead of making a design tailored to the specific location. As anyone could foresee, they've spent billions of dollars ever since tailoring it bit by bit. That leads to huge wastes (15M/week -- on the site alone -- as everyone sits around waiting for corporate and government bureaucracy to reach an agreement).
I always wanted to see what a nuclear power plant turned crackhouse looks like.
Back in the day (60's maybe?) there was a battle between two nuclear reactor technologies, uranium based and liquid salt reactors which used thorium as fuel. Think beta vs VHS. At the time, due to politics etc the uranium based nuclear reactor technology became the "standard". A liquid salt reactor using thorium as fuel is far superior in terms of safety and nuclear waste. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Actually, the prime factor was Westinghouse's liability limit was $2.2B, which would not make a dent in the cost to complete. Westinghouse could have walked away years ago, and would still only be on the hook for the $2.2B.
Cheap, Safe, Clean: Pick two.
(I would have switched Clean for Fast personally though. The time element is a big part of the problem.)
By the way, I just thought I'd mention that I think Brad Plummer has been doing a super-cool job of doing intelligent, technically astute coverage of issues related to energy and the environment. Hiring Brad Plummer is one of the best moves the New York Times has made of late. It almost makes up for hiring Bret Stephens. Almost.
In general the New York Times has been doing a good job of reporting on these issues, for example about a month ago there was an excellent take-down of Mark Z. Jacobson based on a new National Academy of Sciences report: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
(My prediction: once Mark Z. Jacobson is discredited it will not change the public stance of the anti-nuke/pro-rennies crowd one iota-- they'll just quietly stop quoting him, and move on to some other cherry-picked "expert".)
Natural gas is so cheap because there's a glut, and there's a glut because of fracking.
It's still a fossil fuel, thus ultimately limited. It releases less CO2, because much of the energy comes from burning the hydrogen in the largely methane gas, but methane is quite a bit more greenhouse-y than CO2.
And The Usual Suspects are all hot and bothered about fracking, too, trying to get it banned. As they will reliably campaign to ban any technology whatsoever that actually risks producing enough energy to keep industrial civilization going. (See the editorials Paul Ehrlich wrote when it looked like Pons and Fleishmann were actually on to something.)
"Enough energy to keep industrial civilization powered" is the real unforgivable sin of nuclear power, not any of the excuses trotted out.
"A project that was once expected to showcase advanced nuclear technology but has since been plagued by delays and cost overruns." - so it did showcase advanced nuclear technology as being plagued by delays and cost overruns.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Indeed the economical landscape made the project unprofitable. Still, it is unusual that project leaders manage to write off a multi billion expense before completion and move to something else. Forecast failure is usually rather ignored until the loss cannot be hidden anymore.
Considering the turbine hall hasn't even been built yet let alone a turbine delivered it's going to be kind of tricky to convert.
Wrongly[sic] for your purposes, but correctly for what baseload means. Baseload is the minimium power needs. If your "baseload infrastructure" delivers that much then it meets baseload and is baseload supply. If it varies a lot that merely means that you are supplying frequently much more than baseload from your baseload infrastructure. This does not make it not supply the baseload supply.
Variability does not mean it can't supply baseload.
It just means it is variable.
There are other means than batteries for storing energy from renewable energy supplies such as solar and wind power.
Gravity can be used to store excess energy from intermittent renewable sources to pump water from lower storage facilities (which can also be used as a water supply) into elevated reservoirs, such as the water tanks used to supply the fire sprinkler systems in hi-rise buildings, or to and from a pair of multi-use recreational reservoirs. Micro-hydro generators would be used to produce power, while excess renewable energy would be used to pump water to the elevated reservoirs.
Any elevated natural or man-made mountain lake can be used for storing the potential kinetic energy of the water, which makes such a system a matter of engineering the necessary pipelines and micro-hydro power generators that make up the connections to similarly sized reservoirs at lower elevations.
If the reservoirs are properly sized, a community would be able to have several multi-use lakes, which could also be used to collect excess rainfall which would normally run off the streets into storm drains.
In emergency drought or fire conditions, the extra water storage could come in handy, while such a system might be also designed to mitigate the problems caused by agricultural runoff into natural streams and rivers. It depends on the needs of the communities and the geographical constraints of the population served and specific locations involved.
Unlike Li-ion or molten salt batteries, the infrastructure used for water storage and power generation is non-toxic, and has the potential for being long lasting and multifunctional, ie: more bang for the bucks. All it requires is a bit of vision.
PlaynBass
The problem with labels like "free range eggs" is that you can't trust the grocery store labeling to mean what you think it should mean. The free-range part is difficult to find (if not impossible) in large commercial egg operations, and may not actually produce the increases in nutritional quality that one can get from raising their own laying hens and allowing them to feed on the local bugs and plants that they find when allowed the free-run of a small barnyard, complete with piles of cowpies and other sources of grubs, maggots, and protein rich chicken food that produce the best eggs.
More often than not, those marketing terms may only indicate a larger caged area for fewer chickens per square foot and the same commercial chicken feed that is used when chickens are more closely confined, which may or may not actually produce a better egg.
PlaynBass