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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...
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.
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.
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 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.
The same left that hasn't gotten a single policy past since Medicare/Medicaid since the 60's? Tthat couldn't get a Public Option through congress much less single payer? You're a complete idiot if you think the left has any power.
This is under the same government that DGAF about mass poisonings in leaded drinking water or DuPond runoff, that exports fracking to the world, and lets BP go on incompetently drilling of the coast after trying their best to run the Gulf of Mexico?
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.
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"???
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.
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.
Actually, no.
You can tell that this narrative about the Left ruining everything is nonsense by how it only ever applies to things that failed. If they were really that powerful we wouldn't be burning oil in our cars or scrapping Obamacare. And if it really worked the right wing NIMBYs would have blocked every wind farm from ever being built.
The Chinese cancelled most of their new reactors, just finishing the ones they have already started, shortly after Fukushima. Not entirely due to safety concerns either, but because they realized that the market for nuclear power was failing and renewable energy was the smart investment. Look at China now, leading the world in wind, in electric vehicles, even giving the Tesla/Panasonic gigafactory a run for battery production.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Meltdowns are almost always a combination of bad reactor design + human error. Both of these can be mitigated.
In theory yes, but in practice there are budgets and profitability to think about. Part of the reason why nuclear is now so expensive is because we realized that those "bordering on impossible" scenarios are actually not that unlikely and need to be addressed.
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.
Yes, it was a great welfare programme for the energy companies. The French electorate has got fed up giving them money though, which is why they are struggling to raise the funds to build plants in other countries like Hinkley C, and having to rely on Chinese investment.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
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.