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Power Company Kills Nuclear Plant, Plans $6 Billion In Solar, Battery Investment (arstechnica.com)
Socguy writes: After being unable to complete the Levy County Nuclear Plant a few years ago, Duke energy abandoned it, leaving rate payers on the hook. Duke is now in the process of settling legal action as a result. As part of the settlement Duke will construct or acquire 700MW of solar capacity over four years in the western Florida area, construct 50MW of battery storage, undertake grid modernizations and install 530 electric car charging stations. "The Levy nuclear plant was proposed in 2008 and ran into hurdles early on," reports Ars Technica. "With cheap natural gas in 2013, Duke Energy Florida became nervous that it might not recuperate costs spent on the nuclear plant, especially with regulatory delays. The company cancelled its engineering and construction agreements in 2013 but said that it was holding open the possibility of returning to Levy someday. Over nine years, about $800 million had been spent on preparatory work for the plant. With Tuesday's announcement, those costs are sunk costs now. But overall, the changes will save residential customers future nuclear-related rate increases. Those customers will see a cost reduction of $2.50 per megawatt-hour (MWh) 'through the removal of unrecovered Levy Nuclear Project costs,' the utility said. The 700MW of solar won't exactly cover the nameplate capacity of the Levy plant, which was supposed to deliver 2.2 gigawatts to the region. But the Tampa Bay Times wrote that Duke 'is effectively giving up its long-held belief that nuclear power is a key component to its Florida future and, instead, making a dramatic shift toward more solar power.'"
that is all.
75% of Duke's generation mix is coal or natural gas. So, rather than offset any of that base load with a 2.2 GW nuclear facility, they'll supplement demand growth and cover peaks with solar and keep burning the coal and gas. It's cheaper and they get to wave the green flag etc.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
How about some some friggin' government interference in the markets on behalf of next-generation nuclear power development?
We already gave them billions. Perhaps tens of billions. Net result? One plant from the 1980s, Watts Bar 2, is operational.
We'd have been better off paying Solyndra to run their factory just to make their solar panels and giving them away to people to use.
Fukishama was a result of 2 things; a management that cut corners by doing the least possible, AND a major slowdown in building new reactors that are much safer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Or, you know, if Luddite chicken-littles would stop blocking the building of breeder-type reactors that reuse their own fuel until what's left is much easier & safer to handle and dispose of. There doesn't have to be highly-radioactive waste to dispose of to begin with.
Congratulations and thanks to your kind of pseudo-environmental ideological/political pop-science idiocy, we get all the worst of the negative consequences of both nuclear and wind/solar without the full benefits of either.
"Government strangles a nuclear plant, plans to bribe the company with billions of tax money to build solar instead."
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
First, the main concern with early fast breeder reactor designs was proliferation. Engineering can reduce the convenience of proliferation, but it won't ever eliminate it because generating Pu-239 is inherent to the process. That's not a luddite concern; it's real.
Second, fast breeders at least don't appear to be as economical as originally hoped. The assumption when the tech was proposed was that uranium supply wouldn't keep up with demand, but in fact uranium turns out to be reasonably plentiful. Even under a scenario of greatly increased nuclear adoption it would be many decades before we'd need to turn to breeders. On the cost side, the breeder reactors that have been built have proven to be much less reliable and more expensive to operate than hoped. Of course engineering advances could make breeders cheaper to build and run, but you could say that of conventional nuclear plants too.
Finally, breeders still have radioactive waste problems; different, and likely more tractable ones, but from an economic standpoint that's meaningless because we allow companies to build conventional plants as if the future waste problem will solve itself. The need to solve the problems from a plant you break ground on today is so far in the future it has no financial reality. So I suspect to get breeder technology off the ground, you'd ironically have to crack down on nuclear power in general.
It takes a lot more for a technology to be economically feasible than for it to be physically possible. A lot depends on the cost of the alternatives. As long as fossil fuel companies are allowed to externalize their costs on the scale that they do, and conventional nuclear power is allowed to ignore the future costs their plants will incur, advances in novel nuclear technologies are bound to occur at a snail's pace.
You can imagine a future society running on thorium fuel cycle nuclear plants, it isn't hard to do, and that future can look reasonably good. But imagining something being done is a lot different than knowing how to get it done. You've got to convince people to spend money on stuff that costs more in the short- to mid-term.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Unless of course the solar has an energy storage system then combined capacity rates are near 60-70% and present a power prices that's 1/3rd nuclear's cost.
I like nuclear as much as you but the simple fact is it's been priced out of the market and that's not likely to change without massive tax payer subsidies. Solar costs have fallen 99.99% since 1970. You can now purchase solar panels at a price that's orders of magnitudes smaller than other sources and the only reason it's not taken over completely is the storage issue. Once the storage problem is solved Wind and Solar will be the only two power sources as wind will be cheaper than dirt cheap gas without subsidy by 2020 at current price trends. Solar is following the same track but is a little bit more expensive upfront but has lower maintenance costs long term.
I like how you try to make it sound saner to have stuck with the original plan to build another nuclear power plant in the middle of hurricane territory instead.
Only if it's a PV based solar farm. Thermal solar plants continue to produce power when the sun goes down.
No they do not. Molten salt is just a big battery. They can only produce what has been put into them (minus a little which is lost in the process). This doesn't change the maths behind the solar generation capacity of a plant in any way, it does however provide storage if you can generate enough so that you don't suffer as badly from the intermittent nature of Solar.
It's the other way around: nuclear/coal power plants need base-load customers, not the other way around, because those power plants are cheap per kWh delivered, but cannot adapt to demand.
Power sources should really be categorized in one of three classes: 1. Flexible on-demand (natural gas, hydro, battery storage); 2. Base load (nuclear, coal); 3. Uncontrolled generation power (wind, solar).
If you add #3 to the net, you should add #1 to balance. Or do cross-continental balancing of #3 to make it behave like #2, but it requires expensive investments in long-distance transmission capacity.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Oh, and the average PV capacity factor in the US is 27,2%. A 700MW PV plant at average capacity factor is equivalent to 206MW of nuclear. So yes, there is a 10x difference in total generation; however, it more closely follows the demand curve, meaning that you can wholesale the power for significantly more per MWh, and the price you get for your power is the figure that really matters, not the total generation. Nuclear plants spend half their time generating dirt-cheap nighttime power.
Also it's worth noting that Duke's pricing on this solar plant is abnormally expensive; new plants in the desert southwest are coming in as low as $1,50/W (half as much). Florida's insolation is worse, but I'm not sure that fully explains the difference.
He's just being nice so my real father won't freeze him in carbonite and sell him for spice.
And by "messed up", you mean "being provided energy near the places of consumption, avoiding load on the transmission infrastructure"? I doubt that utilities don't want that.
Ezekiel 23:20