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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...
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.
Powering the lights for you to read at least one book in your life? If you knew anything about nuclear power, you would know that your comment is nonsense. I would suggest that you read that one book sometime. Sooner than later.
We used to be able to make nuclear plants, now we can't. Either we forgot how, or something else happened. Place your bets.
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.
You seem to have forgotten that batteries exist.
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".
People are more than willing to pay more for energy sources that don't produce CO2. Where have you been for the last decade?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
You mean the rich progressive hypocrites who pretend to care about the little guy? I'm all for weaning off fossil fuels but the economics have to work too.
RBMK != current reactor technology
Just because building nukes on a faultline is a bad idea doesn't mean nukes are a bad idea.
New QB and only second year coach... they will need it.
None the less... Go Big Red!
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
And since fluctuating wind cannot be a baseload power source,
Any power source can be a baseload power source, provided you pair it with enough storage capacity to smooth out the fluctuations.
(Whether supplying sufficient storage capacity is practical using today's technology is a separate argument, but there's nothing fundamental preventing it, only the usual engineering problems, which are in the process of being solved)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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?
RBMK != current reactor technology
Just because building nukes on a faultline is a bad idea doesn't mean nukes are a bad idea.
Fukashima isn't RBMK, it is current technology, and it wasn't built on a fault line.
Wow, three out of three wrong, you really suck at this.
Sure, let's add to the list of hopeful assumptions: ...
2. Magic batteries will be developed, holding utility-scale amounts of power. This might involve Trump annexing Bolivia, but if it benefits wind, Greenpeace will be okay with that.
3. We will never run out of natural gas.
Something like $10B in loses.
People are more than willing to pay more for energy sources that don't produce CO2.
1. Many people are NOT willing to pay more, hence the election of our current president.
2. The people that are willing to pay more don't have to, since wind is already cost-competitive with FF and solar will be soon.
"Standardized" nukes like the AP1000 were supposed to lower construction costs and reduce maintenance. But so far they have NOT lowered costs, and appear to be worse in every way. There is no path forward for nukes in America, but to go with a complete redesign, and no one wants to pay the NRE for that.
My prediction: Hinkley Point will also be cancelled before it goes live.
Here is an alternative link since TFA is paywalled (at least for me).
I'm so glad that we abandoned air travel after early deadly crashes showed how unsafe the technology was (really? people flying in heavier than air vehicles - absurd and obviously stupid).
I'm sure some people who continued to dream of air transport claimed that the technology would only get better and safer. Perhaps some even made absurd claims such as "In less than one hundred years, we may see more than a five year span where no one died in a crash of a United States-certificated scheduled airline operating anywhere in the world" which, of course, would have been an absurd prediction. Fortunately, we largely ignored such idiots.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I'm not a progressive at all (I'm mostly far right), I don't hesitate to claim that I don't care about the little guy, but the same way I buy "free range" eggs, even if those eggs cost between 150% and 200% more than regular eggs for the exact same product, I would pay more for electricity coming from energy sources that produce less pollution.
I've been following the AP1000 project for quite a long time. The delays are due to several reasons. The projects started later than planned. Also the design was done before Fukushima. In China, where the first units are being constructed, there was a moratorium and construction stopped for like one year and a half to reevaluate the design taking into account what happened at Fukushima and changes were made to the design in the middle of construction which caused further delays. In the USA what also happened is that the manufacturing infrastructure has decayed, due to no new construction since the 1980s, so setting up the supply chain has taken even longer than in China. China has recent experience with reactor construction. If you factor out these delays, it seems to be taking the average construction time for reactor builds since the 1980s, which is like 5 years construction time. If they build it in modules like was originally planned for a small series production I think they could do it in 4 years.
Of course if construction is delayed and you still need to pay salaries to the construction crews then the cost goes up. But once the reactors enter operation they'll pay for themselves in just a couple of years.
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.
I'll give you one example of issues that happened in the US. Some of the metal alloys in the original specification weren't being manufactured anymore. So newer alloys had to be qualified, tested, and certified, this impact the schedule by months.
It's a new construction so of course there are delays.
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'.
I'll give you one example of issues that happened in the US.
Why was none of this foreseeable? Why wasn't it in the original quoted price? With nuclear you get massive overruns to double or triple the original cost, you get decades of delay, but you also get lots of GREAT excuses that somehow make it all okay, and won't happen next time ....
But once the reactors enter operation they'll pay for themselves in just a couple of years.
This is the most ridiculous sentence I have read so far today. Do you have the foggiest notion of how much these reactors cost and the value of their annual production? "A couple of years"???
You can shove economics up your ass
"Mrs. Clinton, what you do in your private life for sexual satisfaction, be it a Russian Urine Romp with eastern European prostitutes of dubious age . . .
. . . oh, wait . . . that was the other guy . . .
OK, so Bernie Sanders walks into a bar, and Donald Trump is working there, and asks Sanders,
What would you like to drink? What can I do for you . . ."
. . . and then Sanders says . . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Baseload, that is fixed amount of power, never varying, e.g. 50% of peak.
That can be provided with any power plant, it does not matter if it is varying, or not.
Because you have load following plants to balance any variation out, regardless if demand or supply.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
To follow the analogy, today we have the added issue of many people preferring cheap sustainable clean safe beautiful air balloons.
And some people questioning this saying, but how will you move 2 million passengers a year in air balloons?
And other people saying, we'll make efficiency savings, so it isn't a problem.
For one thing, if projects take years and years, specialty alloys that were once available from manufacturer A may have been discontinued because the market was too small to justify keeping certain production processes running.
And by the time the project actually goes ahead, years and years after the original quote was requested, you find out that instead of buying alloy A off the shelf for the quoted price, you now need to pay a manufacturer to a) design an alterative alloy b) implement the production process c) perform all the testing, qualification and certification.
This is probably common in nuclear projects because from the political go-ahead to the actual ordering it can take many years.
And that's what's unfair. One lot are happy to invoke magic in the service of their favourite technology, but not allow it for other technologies.
So nuclear is always the real world nitty gritty pessimistic accident prone can never work nor be safe, whilst alternative energies are assessed by the optimistic future looking wizards and magicians who can deliver the utopia vision.
And meanwhile people have to get up in the morning and go to work, so they are going to be burning something, which will be natural gas.
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.
as more and more homes/business get their own solar/wind and battery storage and microgrids emerge there will be less reliance on single point of failure of "utility scale amounts of power" and those utilities will soon also get with the program and get more and more battery storage.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
> 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
Playing devils advocate here - the first one has only just gone live in China (or is about to) despite them being a 1970s style design so those reduced costs are not expected for a while until the rough edges of the design are sorted out. It was only the utterly clueless nuke fanboys (of which there are a few on this site) who claimed that cost savings would be showing up already.
Whatever people think about nukes I don't see private enterprise touching it for a while. Socialist intervention or no nukes, tough choice for those pushing nukes due to their political bent instead of practicality. At least if it's pushed by government without any pretence at being a business proposition we may see incremental development instead of a step back into the 1970s driven by a failed attempt at economic viability.
Nuclear energy is really only good for one thing.
I think the Russkies once had a plan to power turbines with hydrogen bombs or something like that.
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?
Well, when an aircraft crashed, you never had to evacuate and cordon off 2,000 square miles around the crash site for the next 50 years.
whoever was paid the money so far in wages and the construction companies that skimmed that money prior to having paid said wages.
also whoever was providing the cement etc.
if the workforce wasn't imported then local whoevers got the money, really.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
If you're waiting for these people touting nuclear as solution to everything admitting they were wrong both on environmental, monetary and energy concerns, you'll probably have to wait longer than half life of Cesium.
You came from the soil, is there anything wrong with putting you back?
Local concentrations often matter.
Yes, but 2,000 square miles is a tiny percentage of the planet Earth.
And, that is the hard lesson learned by the Japanese and the world -- own up immediately so the world (the US and western Europe to lessor degree) can deploy resources (generators, cables, helicopters, et al) can within an hour initiate deployment of resources. rather than being too proud to ask for help.
If asked immediately, the world could have helped, and possibly prevented meltdown, but the Japanese for cultural reason et al waited too long. THAT needs to be fixed. When you are at any risk of losing a core of an old-school reactor, open the kimono and beg for help. Simple.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Some of the metal alloys in the original specification weren't being manufactured anymore. So newer alloys had to be qualified, tested, and certified,
So, why not just make the specified alloy again instead of coming up with a whole new one?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
A thin slice of your spinal column is but a tiny percentage of your body - by your logic it'd be fine to remove it.
Still citing a fake story created by 4Chan and carried by CNN? Try to catch up please.
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.
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"Standardized" nukes like the AP1000 were supposed to lower construction costs and reduce maintenance. But so far they have NOT lowered costs,
Even with standardized plants, the first few are never cheaper, in fact they are often more expensive because they are not tailored to the specific customer, they are tailored to the greater market. Costs only come down after building several. Unfortunately we don't seem to have the will to get that done.
Considering how many lives were saved having nuclear power over the alternatives at the time (oil, coal), it could be a very reasonable tradeoff.
We can live with a tiny portion of the planet cordoned off. Also, no one is proposing removing it to another planet or to outer space.
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.
Yeah it's bad, but it's not worse than gold mining.
I can't remember anything like that. But there were proposals to use hydrogen bombs to do large excavations for hydro power plants and the like. I think those ended up being done with conventional explosives instead. For the US equivalent read on Operation Plowshare, and Project PACER.
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
Man.. the excuses.. nuclear is always coulda shoulda woulda..
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.
Yep. Westinghouse took over the construction company which was hiding massive losses. Then Toshiba took over Westinghouse.
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.
I've actually worked in the nuclear fuel industry. So I know a little bit about dealing with that sector. Thanks to many factors, nuclear is a politically very sensitive topic. Even fairly innocent projects can take years of political maneuvering before anything gets actually off the ground. So what typically happens is that an initial study is done to figure out what the project will cost.
These numbers are then put into a budget request and made part of a political agenda. At that point you get the usual cow trading, political posturing and dealing with environmental action committees. Keep in mind that at this point, there are still no vendor contracts because nothing is set in stone and the future of the project is still unclear. For the building of a nuclear reactor which noone wants in their beack yard, this stage can take many years. Eventually the deal is struck and X billion dollars are allocated in the overall budget.
And that is when the actual work starts and actual contracts are to be signed. And that is when the project team discovers things like alloys no longer being manufactured.
I have been lucky enough to work on software to perform data logging for the compression of nuclear fuel powder into MOX tablets. I say lucky, because I've always been interested in nuclear physics. And I can tell you that for projects that do not have to be part of a political agenda (such as mine), things can be pretty efficient and well controlled in terms of cost. Because the project is usually decided by the site board of leadership. Even pretty expensive projects can be done efficiently if the budget falls within the overal site budget.
Pollution underground in thick concrete will not affect me. Pollution in the air will affect me.
There was also the proposal to build the Suez Canal with nuclear detonations. Crazy times for even crazier people.
But in 1867 they didn't know where to get enough pitchblende.
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.
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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.
Well, when an aircraft crashed, you never had to evacuate and cordon off 2,000 square miles around the crash site for the next 50 years.
And we don't need to cordon off nearly that much land for nearly that long for a nuclear event for modern plants with containment. There is one energy technology that has rendered huge swaths of land unihabitable , displaced many thousands of people, and killed all native life that remained. That would be hydro of course. Many times more land taken than all nuclear events combined.
And if it weren't for the US government subsidized liability limits for nuclear, nuclear would die on its' own.
. A lot of the crew were irradiated. Some have legal proceedings against TEPCO.
Just BS lawsuits. Exposure levels at the ship were extremely low. You are being "irradiated" right now.
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).
Then why not invest in MSR setups?
They're smaller, denser and far less complicated to set up than solid fuel reactors. Therefore, cheaper in the long run.
They don't require vast quantities of water because they don't use water to cool the reactor or run the turbine.
They can burn existing nuclear waste and they can burn existing mine tailings that had to be stored because they're high in thorium.
They can even be built in such a way that an entire reactor, dump tank and turbine header can be built as a single unit the size of a tractor trailer. Then plugged into a concrete pit like a battery.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Actually no. Most of it is stored in open air casks.
And most of it is only very mildly radioactive. Hell, you could hold it in a rubber-gloved hand. The issue is that it's like this for millions of years.
The main problem is the way the US government "picked a winner" with solid fuel reactors and solid fuels that are "done" after only giving up a tiny percentage of energy in "fast" reactors.
It makes far more sense to go with MSR reactors where the fuel is kept in until it and most of the byproducts cook down.
And while we're still producing waste at the end, it's only a tiny fraction of what's produced today (and we can cook off the stuff we have today too). And while most of it is MUCH more radioactive, the majority of it breaks down in months and years, with a tiny remainder that'll require something in the neighborhood of a human lifetime to break down.
Even so, nuclear produces less waste. It produces more CONCENTRATED waste. Rather than blowing it up a stack and into the atmosphere where it becomes somebody else's problem.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Sure! Let's simply consume the world's yearly supply of new batteries every 7 years for the rest of forever!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The problem with nuclear right now is that the US "picked a winner" in nuclear by going with solid fuel fast reactors.
While the reactors themselves aren't terribly huge, the bulk of a plant are the water cooling towers and all the plumbing for the safety systems.
And, contrary to popular belief, REACTORS do NOT "blow up". What you're seeing in these cases are STEAM explosions from the cooling systems.
In an MSR style reactor, most of that crap is done away with. Because you don't need it and aren't using water to cool the reactor.
If you need to shut the reactor down, you simply pop the plug to the reactor's dump tank and the reactor shuts down.
As for pricing of power. Not going to speak to that.
I'll simply point to power density.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You're defining it wrongly, baseload is the minimum demand in any given period, it's not half the peak. But it can be met with any combination of power supply at all.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"No. A variable power source (wind/solar/etc) CANNOT be baseload.
Because baseload is the minimum required 24x7x365.
Wind is not 24x7x365.
Solar is not 24x7x365.
Maybe tacking in battery. But then you have to factor in replacing batteries every 7-10 years.
Or you're talking about a plant that's solar-PLUS-something else (natural gas, oil, etc) or wind-PLUS-something else.
And that's a completely different animal.
Coal is a baseload power source (hence the term "brown power").
Oil is a baseload power source.
Natural gas can be a baseload power source.
Nuclear is a baseload power source.
Hydro is a baseload power source.
Geothermal is a baseload power source.
Then, to meet demand, you have peaking plants. Which can also be coal, oil, NG or even hydro. They aren't meant to be up and running 24x7. So they come up for a few hours during the day and shut down in the evening.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
And, contrary to popular belief, REACTORS do NOT "blow up".
TEPCO, is that you?!?!?1/!?!?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fukushima is absolutely not current technology, it was old when it was built.
The fact it's on top of a fault line is relatively irrelevant, though. The fact that it was built below a generations-old high water mark is much more significant.
The site was chosen by GE. GE, we put good things to death.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There were multiple problems with Fukushima, and not all of them were cultural. The Japanese government didn't even want to put the reactor there, but that's where GE wanted to put it, and they got their way. Any reactor which needs external power to scram is inherently unsafe, and their design for providing external power was inherently unsafe as well. All that was wrong and unsafe before the incident even occurred.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not envy. There's nothing wrong with being rich. It's laughable when rich progressives, who claim to care about the little guy, claim what's good for him is ever increasing taxation and needlessly more expensive necessities.
The post I responded to made a generalization that 'most' people are willing to pay more. I disagree. Some few may. Most would not because they can't afford it.
Because all of the Molten Salt reactors so far have been disappointments. Yes, its a promising technology but,like holographic storage and fusion, it seems to be just around the corner.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So why don't they do it? I'm not against nukes. I think they're mandatory if we want that all electric transport of the future. I just said that the economics have to work.
Some of the metal alloys in the original specification weren't being manufactured anymore. So newer alloys had to be qualified, tested, and certified,
So, why not just make the specified alloy again instead of coming up with a whole new one?
Pessimistic guess, patents. Optimistic guess, with the advances in metallurgy the cost increase of finalizing a new alloy and starting up production is worth any price increase as the expense of re-starting up production of the old alloy would cost about as much without benefits of the new alloys.
The "waste" from nuclear reactors can be recycled, there is still waste from recycling but instead of decaying in 1,000s of years it's 100's of years. The amount of nuclear waste to generate electricity for a year for the average American is 40 grams. Burning fossil fuels produce between 350 and 1000 grams per kWH they produce multiple orders of magnitude more waste then nuclear power does.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
No. Reactors are not bombs. And they lack the capability of detonating.
What happened with all three reactor failures in history were first failures of the pressurized water cooling safety systems.
This is kind why it'd be a good idea to move away from water cooled reactors.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The problem right now is that the nuclear regulation environment is a byzantine money pit.
Note: I'm not saying nuclear doesn't need regulation. It does. It needs oversight to make sure that bad decisions aren't being made simply because they save money.
But the entire process to even just TALK to NREC has become this ridiculously expensive game of cat and mouse.
And that's even before the pointless NIMBY lawsuits and protests and the like.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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...
Because baseload is the minimum required 24x7x365.
No it is not. You don't know what base load means. Reread my previous post, I explained it there.
The rest of your post is nonsense as it is based on your incorrect idea what base load is.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No. Reactors are not bombs. And they lack the capability of detonating.
Except there was a gas explosion in one of the reactors.
What happened with all three reactor failures in history were first failures of the pressurized water cooling safety systems.
This is kind why it'd be a good idea to move away from water cooled reactors.
To what, sodium cooled reactors? Which are an even bigger problem if they go wrong?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And so it would. ...with grave dirt.
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.)
No. Sorry, but YOU are the one who doesn't understand what base load is.
Wind and solar, BY THEIR NATURE, are NOT continuous supplies.
Thanks for playing.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
And yet, I live in a country that doesn't have nearly as convoluted power-utilities/government environment as the US, the price of electricity is twice as high, and yet the state dismissed the prospect of building two new reactors as too costly and economically unjustifiable. With US prices of electricity, I'd be very surprised if regulation was your biggest problem.
Ezekiel 23:20
Still citing a fake story created by 4Chan and carried by CNN? Try to catch up please.
One that Trump keeps mentioning?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It was not discontinued. Inconel-600 is known for its resistance to chemical corrosion and still used in high-temperature environments. Unfortunately it lost certification for use in nuclear reactors because it became known in early 2000s (see publication MRP-111 Materials Reliability Program Resistance to Primary Water Stress Corrosion Cracking of Alloys 690, 52, and 152 in Pressurized Water Reactors) that it have caused leaks of radioactive fluids there because of radiation induced corrosion. The fact that Westinghouse used it in its early specifications for these reactors is entirely their fault. Germans, Russians switched to Incoloy-800 long ago and Americans waited when it gets approved in US. Unfortunately this switch caused delays, re-design, and partial re-build. Then there were problems with quality control, problems with foundation, problems with transportation of delicate components, etc.
Stalling of this project was not caused by Westinghouse bankruptcy, rather Westinghouse bankruptcy was caused by its inability to build reactors without cost overruns.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
We have 20-25 year batteries today, although I agree that base load is a power SOURCE and not a storage mechanism.
You are mixing up a "base load power plant" with "base load".
Try again.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"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.
The average nuclear plant takes in about $1MM in revenue per day.
Let's assume that is 100% profit (which it certainly is not). That would be $365M per year. According to TFA the projected construction cost is $25B. So the rate of return is less than 1.5%. Even the US Treasury can't borrow that cheaply. So this plant, even assuming it has zero operating expenses, can't even pay the interest on the capital investment.
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.
That's fine of you define a "business" as a boutique software house in New Zealand consisting of two guys and a MacBook Pro. If the wind isn't blowing today, you can just knock off and go to the beach.
But if your country has heavy industries and large cities, you need large-scale, 24/7 sources of power. This is why China is moving from coal to nuclear.
Hey, i'm a troll, not a whore. My bridge is a WPA original, dating back to the time when the Democrats built infrastructure, rather than being the party that prevents infrastructure from being built.
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.
The current person in the White House is President of the Electoral College.
He did not win the popular vote.
I know I'm an AC, but I've been an AC since 1999, and I miss the days when I came here to read technical discussions, half of which I didn't understand, and before slashdot became filled with alt-right trolls.
You've been coming here for that long, and still don't believe in reality. That's sad.
The Electoral College system is how the US president is chosen, and it is not based on popular vote of every adult citizen. Without the electoral college, the Constitution would not have been approved, and the Articles of Confederation would still be in effect, if the United States of America even still existed.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
> solid fuel fast reactors.
We picked solid fuel _thermal_ neutron reactors, not fast neutron reactors. We also picked ceramic fuel, which complicates heat transfer and is subject to cracking.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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