US Nuclear Power Industry Poised For a Comeback 853
ThousandStars sends us to The Wall Street Journal for a report that momentum for nuclear energy is waxing in the US. "For the first time in decades, popular opinion is on the industry's side. A majority of Americans thinks nuclear power, which emits virtually no carbon dioxide, is a safe and effective way to battle climate change, according to recent polls. At the same time, legislators are showing renewed interest in nuclear as they hunt for ways to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. The industry is seizing this chance to move out of the shadow of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and show that it has solved the three big problems that have long dogged it: cost, safety and waste."
FP (Score:1, Interesting)
"...The industry is seizing this chance to...show that it has solved the three big problems that have long dogged it: cost, safety and waste."
Yeah, I never liked petroleum either. Paying 6 bucks a gallon to a multinational cartel, causing two fruitless wars in the Middle East, and then my kids' college funds and my 401K being given to the CIA and State Department's $300,000/person/yr Blackwater mercenaries while we eat Ramen for dinner.
Huh, what? Oh. Nevermind.
Ethanol-fueled
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the public won't understand something as complicated as nuclear reactors. Science is over their heads.
Me: "I work on stem cells in adult mice"
"Average" citizen: "Stem cells? You're going to hell, euthanizing senior citizens is wrong!"
Me: "Wow... I don't... uh, I'm going to..."
With Yucca Mountain closed? (Score:2, Interesting)
How will the closing of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository affect the development of more power plants? I would think a lack of waste storage could slow down the construction of new plants.
Environment?? (Score:2, Interesting)
"peak uranium"? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've heard from a physicist, that we have only so much easily refinable uranium/plutonium to last until 2050 or so. Wikipedia says 100 years which, while not a reason to stop doing it, seems pretty low to me. After that we'd have to go to lower-yield thorium fuel cycle (breeder) reactors which would last a while.
Of course he's not a nuclear physicist/engineer. Anyone have the scoop? Would these current power plant designs be adaptable?
Do the math (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a reason nobody is investing in this great deal.
The interest on a $8B loan at 8% is about 1.8M per day.
The amount of power made is about that much, at the wholesale rate of .10/KWH
And that's not counting the cost of uranium, labor, maintenance, decomissioning, or insurance .....
Not to mention that it takes many years to build one, with the 1.8M accruing each day.
Re:Shameless sig whoring (Score:5, Interesting)
See this on a ./er's sig so I can't take credit for it, but it sums up the situation nicely: Nuclear power. Global warming. Agrarian society. Pick one.
The enviro-nazi's would seem to prefer the Agrarian society option. We can't use nuclear, we can't use coal, we can't use natural gas, we can't build more hydro -- so what exactly is going to replace the base load part of the power grid? Solar and wind will never scale that well and aren't appropriate for base load anyways. We never should have stopped building nuclear power plants. The environmentalist movement really shot themselves in the foot with that one. How much CO2 has been released into the atmosphere by the coal/gas power plants brought online to replace the nuclear ones that we never built?
We should also extend a nice fat middle finger at Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford for unilaterally abandoning reprocessing technology. How does the United States not reprocessing our spent nuclear fuel prevent nuclear proliferation anyway? Was there some third world dictator who thought to himself "Gee, I'd like to have a nuclear bomb but the US abandoned reprocessing technology so why should I even bother to try?"
Re:Hooray! (Score:3, Interesting)
Just visit antique stores, perhaps you'll find one with an extra vial of radium paint in the back of the clock.
http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html [dangerousl...tories.org]
Progress for nuclear power (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a supporter of widespread nuclear power. However, the industry hasn't solved two major issues:
-Hazards of mining the fuel
-Political viability of fast breeder reactors
If we could get robots to mine the fuel, great. Right now, mining heavy, radioactive material is a hazardous occupation with long-term health effects.
Fast breeder reactors are the way to minimize nuclear waste to easily manageable levels. It is also an efficient generator of weapons-grade fissile material. The international community has proliferation concerns associated with this.
I hope to see these issues addressed in the future for ushering in widespread nuclear power along with solar, wind, and geothermal energy.
Re:Do the math (Score:3, Interesting)
Then perhaps it should be built as a power-coop?
You know a nice non-profit, perhaps even given a government loan?
Re:Shameless sig whoring (Score:3, Interesting)
what exactly is going to replace the base load part of the power grid?
Wind and Solar with proper energy retention mechanisms for times when they cannot provide the power needed. Take the money you would invest in ramping up nuclear and invest in basic battery research in the meantime use concepts like molten salt and compressed air to provide energy during night and low wind occurrences. Invest in basic science to provide long range power transmission so areas rich in said power can supply far off urban centers.
Re:Shameless sig whoring (Score:3, Interesting)
Solar thermal is a fairly good option for base load and massive scaling. Using a thermal reservoir allows continued energy production at night and cloudy days. It requires no exotic materials or manufacture processes like photovoltaic, it can use the same turbines, generators and boilers used in conventional plants. Its drawbacks are the space it takes up (not relevant in the desert) and being fragile to adverse weather (hail, tornadoes, thunderstorms, etc).
Re:Good. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's funny that the article talks about how much things have changed in the last 20 years. I had a buddy that was a nuke in the navy and when he got out he turned down a nice job offer because he didn't think civilian operations were done well or safely. That was in the mid 90's.
Re:Put the waste in your backyard (Score:3, Interesting)
That's ridiculous. Overwhelmingly so.
Do you refuse to drive a car at night because it isn't safe to drive without headlights? No -- you drive a car with headlights, and you turn them on at night.
You're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We can have nuclear power, and mitigate the waste danger by storing the waste far away from population centers. This is basic common sense, and your objection to it is silly.
What I could see, is a state like NJ (very densely populated with almost no places for safe storage away from a population center) could pay a state like Nevada or Pennsylvania to store the waste. As long the the NJians bear a fair cost for the outsourced risk, then it works just fine.
The other thing I believe, tangentially related, is that electricity rates should be inversely proportional to potential fallout location given typical wind patterns. Then the NIMBYs will need to pay for their NIMBYism.
Follow the money (Score:5, Interesting)
Who cares about polls? The laws of physics don't care about public opinion. Neither do the laws of economics.
And the later is clearly a problem. We just went through this here in Ontario, with a new set of reactors planned to go in about 50 k east of Toronto at Darlington. Darlington A, the original set, was enormously over-budget, and if I'm doing the math right, will never pay itself back in inflation-adjusted dollars. All of us Ontarians have a little line item on our bills called the "debt retirement charge" as a result. In order to prevent this occuring again, Ontario Power Generation (via Infrastructure Ontario) demanded that the quotes include overrun insurance. That drove the price up over $26 billion.
I'm a failed physicist and I'm very much aware of the realities of nuclear power. It IS safe, and the waste is NOT that big a problem. But $26 billion is a REALLY BIG PROBLEM. I'm not the only one believing that; after the bill was presented, they cancelled the project.
Here's something to think about. Darlington A and B together would have produced about 7 GW peak. The site occupies 1200 acres, or just under 5 million square meters. 5 million square meters of 8% average solar panel will produce about 3.8 GW peak. Yeah, it's not baseload. Yeah, it's only during the day. Now here's the kicker... ready? Solar costs a dollar a watt wholesale, so the price of that plant is about, oh lets round up some, $10 billion.
It gets worse. We already get about 60% of our power from hydro. In fact, there's more _spare_capacity_ in the generator plants in northern Quebec than there would have been in Darlington. All we'd need is a cable to get it. How much? Mmmm, 500 million, tops. Newfoundland and Manitoba also have oodles of spare capacity that they would love to sell us. Arco say's there's another, ready for it? 25 GW continuous in northern Canada lying undeveloped. That's more than all the power the province uses. But they can't get a red cent to develop it, because OPG want's it all in house.
*sigh*
Re:Yeah, sure (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Progress for nuclear power (Score:1, Interesting)
In fact we do have robots doing the most dangerous mining now. In Canada, Cigar Lake has such a high uranium content in some veins that there are areas that people can't go to even with radiological protection and short exposure times.
For those who are wondering I'm the son of a geologist :D.
Re:Shameless sig whoring (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Do the math, a real example (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll expand your idea to my local utility, Progress Energy in Florida. Progress Energy estimates that a two reactor plant is going to cost $17 billion (http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/993686.html)
At an 8% cost of capital ... our cost estimate of $2 billion dollars per year, that works out to 11.04 cents per kilowatt hour.
This reasonable cost analysis illustrates the TRUE fundamental reason why nuclear power construction has been dead since the 1970s: the high capital cost. Coal power currently costs around 4 cents per kilowatt hour. Under current regulatory conditions coal power plants are always cheaper to build which means not only do they produce electricity more cheaply, but the risk to the utility is lower since the payoff on the investment is faster. And utilities are generally under a legal requirement that their investment decisions pass the muster of regulators who represent the rate-payer -- if the decisions are not found to be reasonable from the rate-payers view point the utility CANNOT recover the investment! In effect this regulatory regime prohibits the construction of nuclear power plants for practical purposes.
Reforming this situation requires at least one of the following:
Currently item 2 has been the only technique put into practice, and only spottily.
BTW, there is no inherent reason to suppose that huge cost overruns are an inevitable part of nuclear power plant construction. The common occurrence in the 1970s was an artifact of several conditions of the time: high inflation and thus punishing interest rates, the immature regulatory environment (safety changes were needed at the time, but this has been stable now for over 25 years), and immature (one might say poor) plant design. The first few plants might still be prone to overruns, but it is reasonable to expect this to disappear with practical construction experience.
Re:"peak uranium"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"peak uranium"? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Those are reserves, not resources. (Look up the difference sometime).
2. Breeder reactors extend this 20-fold.
3. Thorium extends this further 5 times so that now we're looking at 5000 years of *reserves* (e.g. the amount that can be economically mined at present day price)
4. There are billions of tons of uranium in seawater.
5. Finally, advances in nuclear fission based power generation technology are a prerequisite for nuclear fusion.
Some more information:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html [stanford.edu]
Re:Progress for nuclear power (Score:5, Interesting)
1. You overestimate the radioactivity of uranium ore. There are entire towns built on uranium deposits and they don't experience any measurable ill effects.
2. Some designs of breeder reactors like IFR (also called ALMR) cannot create usable weapons-grade fissile materials. The risk of someone stealing fissile materials from a breeder reactor is lower than that of someone capturing an ICBM site, or stealing a complete warhead.
Re:Progress for nuclear power (Score:3, Interesting)
Fast breeder reactors are the way to minimize nuclear waste to easily manageable levels. It is also an efficient generator of weapons-grade fissile material.
The solution to this problem is non-breeding fast reactors. You get a breeder by surrounding the core with natural uranium, which will slowly transform into fissile material like Plutonium under the intense neutron bombardment in the reactor. A fast reactor is a reactor using unmoderated (fast) neutrons. Breeders have usually been fast reactors, but there is nothing that requires a fast reactor to be a breeder. And it is the fast neutrons that can be used to minimize nuclear waste. Breeding more fuel is not connected to the reduction in waste.
Re:Progress for nuclear power (Score:3, Interesting)
The anonyposter is correct. Here in Canada we do, do some mining by remote rig now. But that's not the real funny thing, underground not so much of an issue. It can be the toxic gas releases in the high arctic that will kill you. So you get an operator sitting in a remote box a good ways away and do it. There's a company near me who does underground coal mining all by wired remotes.
Mining by robot is not a concern.
Re:Do the math (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is the nuclear decommissioning costs aren't clearly understood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning [wikipedia.org]
This I've heard is the real problem with Nuclear power - not the waste issue. The plants can only operate so long before they have to be decomissioned and the costs of decommissioning so far have been tremendously low. France has spent 500 million EU just trying to decomission a single plant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennilis_Nuclear_Power_Plant [wikipedia.org]
If they can solve the decommissioning problem, then I'd be in favor of more nuclear power. But building more plants that might cost billions to decommission doesn't sound too good to me.
Re:Progress for nuclear power (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Interesting)
Couldn't it be dropped into a undersea subduction zone, where the tectonic plates meet?
Circulation of very heavy metals at the deeper locations is going to be almost zero and there's no (?) biological activity that could bring it into contact with our biosphere...
Re:With Yucca Mountain closed? (Score:1, Interesting)
Hmm. Couldn't we still use that to pre-heat the water going into the main powerplant?
Re:Grrr... (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Burn coal? Nope. 2. Burn petroleum. Nope. 3. Nuclear power. Nope. NIMBY 4. Hydro power. Nope, think of the salmon! 5. Wind power. Nope. NIMBY 6. Solar power. NIMBY
etc...
They won't be happy until we're back in the days of using whale blubber lanterns to read at night...oh wait....
You aren't representing this very fairly. You're representing it like a snide interlocutor with a vested interest in nuclear power. Interest is high in nuclear power because coal and petroleum prices are high. Not because Luddites demand alternative energy but then say it will harm the environment. You make it read as if nuclear power is comparable to wind or solar - it isn't.
The world of the future also has to deal with future risks we leave them. It's true that hydro-electric power affects salmon populations, as you point out, but the reason it's a concern is because fishing is a huge business that makes a lot of money. So it raises the price of hydro power to compensate in the market, it doesn't invalidate the power source.
Two additional, greater risks that nuclear and hydro power present to the environment is the risk of terrorism. One can theorize that wind and solar power could have harmful effects on their local environments, but it would be on the order of roads or power lines. It would not be on the order of Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. Or that scene we see of the Hoover Dam crumbling in every freakin' movie that comes close to the Hoover Dam, ever.
In the grand scheme, coal and petroleum processing are still preferable to nuclear power from a social planning perspective, especially when it comes to decommissioning. Sinking the money for nuclear infrastructure plans into alternative research, including tide pools and geothermal to introduce even more competitive players will reduce the cost of power and solve the so-called 'Energy Crisis'.
Consumption and waste is not a crisis that can be solved by scientists. As long as we're producing it on Earth and there are practical limits, there is no free energy, so we would do well to think of it that way instead of pretending nuclear power will solve problems. Putting more power in the hands of nuclear providers simply tilts the scales of global power towards instability. Especially if nations that don't have nuclear power are prevented from having it in the future.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Interesting)
Chernobyl blew up because the operators tested the emergency cooling facilities at 200Mw instead of at 750Mw like the test scenarios proscribed AND after they Xenon poisoned the reaction. By the time the were able to restart the reaction there was a shift change from the more experienced crew (who were dead tired by this stage) to a less experienced crew.
Stubbornly the manager persisted with the test, we know this can only be the case because of the shift change, they didn't recognise the danger of the ratio of control rod extraction to low thermal power output was because they were creating steam voids in the reactor core. No water, no reaction moderation. When they tried to scram the reactor the graphite tipped control rods displaced the little the steam was doing to moderate the reaction, thermal power spiked to 30Gw and ***BOOM***.
From memory 750Mw was proscribed because of the time it took to spin down the cooling system for the reactor down was matched to the start-up time of the diesel pumps that would take over. Operator error introduced a new failure-mode into the system and as all these reactors age, those failure modes will change up to and beyond the time for decommissioning.
In other words, the engineers specify sequences for a reasons based on the characteristics of the machine. This is of course just from memory the Chernobyl wiki [wikipedia.org] probably does a better job remembering than I do.
Re:Do the math, a real example (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Grrr... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh I'm sorry, that's an incredibly stupid thing to say.
It seems to me, being relatively uninformed about nuclear power, that there are significant differences between computers, a technology which has gotten cheaper, and nuclear power, which you say will get cheaper. How exactly WILL a free market ever do anything on power when we're still talking about huge power plants and inevitable government bureaucracy basically granting a monopoly? Are we going to see two competing nuclear power plants per town? Why aren't we seeing that with coal?
These aren't hypothetical questions, I honestly don't know. What I do know is that the answers aren't obvious, so you have no leg to stand on acting as if his concerns are stupid. You pro-nukers always seem so angry whenever anyone questions nuclear power, it makes me wonder why you're so sure that nuclear power is beyond question. What's your real motivation? Are you trying to make nuclear power look less interesting? Because I have very little motivation to become educated on the pros of nuclear power when you guys act like it should be obvious already and anyone who isn't wearing a "I love nuclear power" button is an idiot.
Re:Still dangerous (Score:3, Interesting)
My friend, radioactive waste will always be dangerous.
Yes, but with current technology, we have the halflife down to 10 years. I think we can handle the waste for 10 years until it becomes safe.
Solar and wind are still underexploited resources in this country. Combine them with better use of the energy we currently make and we will be energy independent and cleaner.
Maybe... but its not like they don't have problems of their own. Also, where we put solar and wind matters... and for some places it really isn't practical. Remember, power is a fairly local thing, since we don't have great ways to store it. You also ignore population growth, with will continually push up demand for energy. I doubt conservation will be enough to counteract population growth.
Installation of residential solar generation is ideal. It places the generation at the place of its consumption. And the use of geothermal heat-exchange heating and cooling should be mandatory.
No, its not really ideal.. especially here in VT, where our winter will be starting in about two weeks and lasting until April. Not to mention the summer we just had, where for three months we had rain every day except for a total of 10 days. Not until the last few weeks have we had consistent days of sun and warm weather... and at night its almost getting cold enough to turn on the heat again. Yes, this may be a fluke year... but what would solar do for anyone in these conditions?
Also, I live in the city, with 0.1 aches. Where exactly would you like me to install geothermal heating and cooling? What about the people in NYC... where exactly would they build that?
The fact is, nuclear is the best option we're going to have for a LONG time, and its only gotten better and safer since the 60s.
Re:Do the math (Score:1, Interesting)
On top of that, pebble chemistry is unfavourable in the manufacturing and disposal phases, not least because widely available SEU is insufficient for higher temperature cores, and LT-PBRs have much lower power densities than PWRs and much higher running costs than even the leakiest CANDUs.
Adding to your list of problems with helium is that it's an expensive gas and unlike heavy water does not pool up in a drip pan if leaks develop. Substituting highly reactive water for helium is fine until you end up suffering interesting metal hot-spot and concrete chemistry problems when running the gas at the desired high temperatures.
PWRs are really expensive in part because the high pressure part is hard to build and maintain against corrosion and other mechanical problems; BWRs are really expensive because of void formation or implosive voids (when other fluids leak into the pressurized part) which exacerbates some problems in the pressurized part, in the containment part, and in operational modes; HTRs have both these problems. CANDUs are low temperature, the pressurized parts are very small, the dangerous failure modes centre around breaks or ejections of the pressure cylinders, and so cleanups are generally a lot more straightforward. The main problem is that the power density per core is unattractive to power generators who plan on a GWe availability basis (i.e., most of them), and construction of multiple units always looks expensive up front.
The proliferation argument against CANDU cannot be taken seriously any more. Moreover, PBRs effectively have adjustable core geometries and can be run on several breeding cycles without enormous difficulty, and should face the same arguments.
Re:Still dangerous (Score:3, Interesting)
The trouble is that it is waste, not fuel. The waste includes things like highly contaminated coolant (water) and control rods from the reactor core.
These don't have enough radioactivity within themselves to generate heat sufficient to turn water to steam which would power turbines, (which is how we use the radioactive material in a nuclear power station, lest we forget), but the materials are still too highly radioactive to be considered 'safe' to be kept around human populations.
As of yet we have no way to dispose of this waste material and likely never will have. It tends to end up being dumped in holes in the ground and covered in concrete or dumped illegally in barrels in the sea. Either way the waste has a tendency to leak and can/does end up in the foodchain or drinking/irrigation water supplies. The half life of this hazardous waste is over a hundred thousand years!!! It's not sensible to use radioactive power generation with this single fact facing us.
The other major problem with nuclear power is it's massive carbon footprint. An average nuclear plant will have about 75%-80% the footprint of a gas/coal powered station. This is due in no small part to the 'carbon cost' of extracting the nuclear ore from the ground, shipping, enriching, shipping, turning into fuel rods, shipping - oh, and then there's building the plant and all associated infrastructure, storing/disposing of fuel etc etc etc. And not to forget the decommissioning process which again adds massively to the 'footprint' over decades.
Nuclear is a dead technology for use on-planet. In space it would be great, but not on earth. Solar thermal is a much more efficient system of 'nuclear power' and it is very very very clean, with the nuclear reactor being 93 million miles away. :)