Economy Puts US Nuclear Reactors Back In Doubt 392
eldavojohn writes "Remember those 30 new nuclear reactors the US was slated to build? Those plans have been halted. A few years ago, it seemed like a really good idea to build a bunch of nuclear reactors. The environmental impacts of other energy production methods were becoming well known and the economy was tanking. Well, natural gas is now much cheaper, and as a result it looks like building a single nuclear reactor in Maryland is such a risky venture that Constellation can't reach an agreement with the federal government for the loans it needs to build that reactor. The government wants Constellation to sign an agreement with a local energy provider to ensure they'll recoup at least some of the money on the loan, but Constellation doesn't like the terms. So, the first of those thirty reactors has officially stalled, with no resolution in sight. It looks like it'd take an economic meltdown to trigger nuclear reactor production in the US."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Cost Is Always A Factor (Score:3, Insightful)
Sustainable energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm...
Wasn't sustainable energy supposed to be the really expensive one? Wasn't nuclear supposed to save us while the real sustainable energy is being developed?
It's funny how the costs of nuclear energy are structurally underestimated, while sustainable energy (wind/solar) continuously has to fight the image of being expensive.
It says enough that all 28 business plans for nuclear reactors are halted, partially because a regulatory system for greenhouse gases (the "cap and trade" system) was not put into effect.
So... public perception in summary:
- sustainable energy: requires too much subsidies, too expensive
- nuclear energy: financially more interesting, needs no subsidies
Reality:
- sustainable energy: growing market, although expensive
- nuclear energy: market stagnation, too expensive
Costs or Fees? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Loan from government? (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone else manages to take a loan and roll it over. Sure there's a risk interest rates go up, but if you think that's the case then those bank rates aren't "crippling" they are just factoring that in.
If you need a government guarantee on your loan in order to afford it then whatever you are doing isn't viable. Whether it's building a nuclear reactor, buying a house, or going to college.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cost Is Always A Factor (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't forget that even nuclear power do produce a large amount of emissions and waste. If you include the whole process from mining, transport, enrichment and then the waste produced by the process you will end up in a situation where you find that you have a relatively dirty process.
And building a reactor takes a huge amount of material, advanced alloys and extra thick concrete to keep radiation on the inside. The control equipment is also very expensive due to all failsafes. The designs also have to be enhanced in a newly built reactor compared to what was in previous generations of reactors in order to contain any spills if they do occur. This will both affect the construction cost - making the construction more expensive, but also the operational cost making it more expensive to run the reactor.
Some of us actually remembers Harrisburg [wikipedia.org] and Chernobyl [wikipedia.org], both are indications of things that can go wrong. There are other examples too that can be found in A Review of [orau.org]
Criticality Accidents.
Most of the accidents are caused by neglect and ignorance but a nuclear failure is causing trouble for a long time since it contaminates the area affected for so long. It's a question of decades and the contaminants are often invisible. Oil spills are visible to the naked eye and are of course not good either but the time that they are really causing any dangers is short compared to nuclear spills.
Re:Sustainable energy? (Score:3, Insightful)
If a carbon price is introduced here the natgas will likely be put to good use again. When the coal-seam gasification projects go live gas prices will likely get a kick in the supply and demand curve yet again. The price of oil should give you a good indication of how screwed up the energy market in general is. So yes while nuclear energy right now is too expensive it wasn't a few years ago when the plans were announced, and it may not be again in a few years down the road.
Re:old designs? (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt it. Any project can be made arbitrarily expensive by political maneuvering, and selling a township or even a state on "Hey, we've got a brand new type of nuclear fission reactor we'd like to try out in your area" suffers from serious NIMBY effects, and thus politicians will try to be seen opposing it.
Re:old designs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes of course, unproven reactor designs will certainly be cheaper!
Re:Sustainable energy? (Score:2, Insightful)
Part of the reason nuclear plants are so expensive is that any time the word "nuclear" is mentioned, a bunch of people go "ZOMG NUCLEAR!!! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE LIKE THREE CHERNOBYL ISLAND!!1!!ONE!" And then they demand study after study after study after study after study, supposedly to make sure the native grasshopper population isn't inconvenienced or trying to prove that the reactor won't be damaged if a rock the size of Bobby Dodd stadium falls on it, but really just intended to ramp the legal costs up and delay the build so long that it doesn't happen. It's kind of like running a filibuster in Congress, or filing a bunch of groundless patent suits against a competitor--the goal is to stall long enough that the other guy gives up.
Well, that and the way we custom-design every single plant instead of standardizing on one reactor and layout (economy of scale and all that).
You see this stuff happen with "green" energy plants, too; there are protests and studies because solar plants crowd out the native desert life and disrup the ecosystem, wind turbines kill birds and bats, hydroelectric and tidal kill fish, and so on, according to them. It's not as bad with these projects because the only people filing the objections to these tend to be super eco-nuts who basically oppose any kind of energy use or technology and would rather have everyone go back to being hunter-gatherers^W^W vegetarian farmers living in harmony with nature in mud-cake thatch huts.
Re:Sustainable energy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Reality:
- sustainable energy: growing market, although expensive
- nuclear energy: market stagnation, too expensive
First of all the article is about competition with natural gas, the cheapest form of electricity generation currently available. The reason nuclear has issues compeeting is the same that renewables don't cut it, the fossil fuels are getting a free pass emitting pollutants and greenhosue gases which would be very expensive to sequester and dealt with properly.
Secondly when it comes to replacing fossil fuels it's not a question of nuclear OR renewables, we will need both. Even MITs somewhat optimistic forecast of nuclear growth will not displace the fossil fuels within several decades, and the situation is similar for energy conservation and the renewables. It is however quite possible to get rid of teh fossil fuels if you are willing to use ALL of these techniques in combination.
So in summary, if we are to have any realistic hope of getting rid of the fossil fuels within any foreseeable future we will need a strong combination of nuclear , renewables and energy conserving technology. There's no silver bullets for this problem, and it sure as hell won't be solved by people like you trying to sound smug by deliberately misinterpreting the problem.
Not westinghouse (Score:2, Insightful)
I seriously doubt that westinghouse has anything to do with Thorium based reactors not being on the short list despite their many benefits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Key_benefits [wikipedia.org]).
I would say it has far more to do with the lack of ability to produce weapons with their byproducts. The US would prefer to get a little something extra out of the deal.
Re:It looks like it'd take an economic meltdown to (Score:4, Insightful)
Not going to happen in the US. Licensing costs are too expensive to justify anything but the 1600 MWe behemoths using standard fuel cycles with proven technology.
I don't know how many lobbyists Westinghouse has, but I do have an idea of how many engineers they have working to satisfy the NRC's licensing requirements for their own designs. Likewise with Mitsubishi and General Electric.
Re:Loan from government? (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone else manages to take a loan and roll it over.
Not reactor operators. Their income is controlled 100% by the govt. Not remotely a free market. Probably appropriate for that kind of technology.
If you need a government guarantee on your loan in order to afford it then whatever you are doing isn't viable. Whether it's building a nuclear reactor, buying a house, or going to college.
Ah but only a nuke has its revenue controlled 100% by the govt, both by regulation, enviroloonie protest suits, and monopoly public utilities commission defining what they charge.
A bit unfair to make the bank liable for the NRC's and PUC's decisions.
Re:Solar Roofing (Score:3, Insightful)
They have had that in Victoria, Australia for about a year now [vic.gov.au]. I haven't checked the other states.
In Victoria, the scheme is useless. While the power companies must offer a standard feed-in tariff for excess power, they are entitled to have different packages or terms and conditions than their usual accounts. In practice, that means that they charge more for the power consumed to offset what they pay back to the household. You don't go solar to save money in this country.
You can see why there is a trend towards voting for the Greens.
Re:Funny in summary (Score:5, Insightful)
The problems with your theory:
#1 - Nuclear reactor production is put under more government scrutiny than any other energy production method. Not that it isn't justifiable in large degree, just that it increases the costs of running the reactor.
#2 - The US has no fuel recycling program. If we DID have a responsible fuel recycling program, we wouldn't have to worry about the whiny idiots going "but it produces nuclear waste", nor would we be having to dig up ore for fuel - reprocessed, recycled fuel can be extracted from "spent waste" over and over again, which would take care of 95% or greater of our current "nuclear waste" in storage.
#3 - Energy still isn't deregulated on the east coast. The government controls the pricing, therefore it makes sense that the people sticking their money out to build the reactor would want to have some guarantee in writing that the government isn't going to try to force them to operate at a loss.
The larger problem is that the idiot fringe currently in control of the Democrat Party - as evidenced by the current administration's reaction to basically everything energy-related - are a bunch of total morons who are so kooky that even the co-founder of Greenpeace [wired.com] recognized them for the wack-jobs that they are.
Of course, there are a number of other things that "could" be done on the energy conservation front. The US could outlaw residential air-conditioning/heating systems that don't incorporate a closed-loop ground heat pump, and require any legacy systems to be switched over at time of replacement. They could pass a national law protecting the right of all homeowners to implement "greywater" systems, rain cisterns, and solar collectors. They could focus in on outdated, inefficient "freeway flyer" bus routes and replace them all with electric train systems.
But then again, we live in a time when municipalities claim they are working for "safety" and put up red-light cameras and then shorten the yellow timing to get more tickets, despite every study out there showing that if you want to reduce accidents, lengthening the yellow time does much, much more than putting up a fucking camera. So I doubt the people would have any trust in their government that any of the other things I suggested earlier were done with the right motives...
Re:This is what the bailout should have gone to (Score:1, Insightful)
But that'd be socialism, and that's bad! Glen Beck told me!
It's not like Glen Beck supported the bailouts either. The point is that if we were going to create a huge bill for our grandchildren to pay off, we should at least have spent them money on something of value.
Re:This is what the bailout should have gone to (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's really the problem with central planning.
It's not that it's impossible for government to do the right thing - it's that when you give that much money and power to a bunch of politicians they make decisions based on politics rather than objective technical criteria.
Everyone thinks they could do a job of it if only they had absolute power but in reality the process you need to go through to get that kind of power forces you to become a politician.
How quickly we forget (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole point of LEADERSHIP is not to invest in alternative energy when other energy sources are prohibitively expensive (how quickly we forget $150/bbl oil), but to shape the future so that when energy costs increase again the infrastructure is already in place.
I am disappointed that the US government believes that spending trillions of dollars to create inefficient, artificial jobs is more worthwhile than investing in the future of the country in terms of solid infrastructure. Those nuclear plants will not be cheaper to design and build in 20 years.
In the 1930's FDR went about building the interstate system, completing the Hoover Dam (which provided energy to California, Arizona and Nevada), the Tennessee Valley Authority which provided power to the South-East. This cheap power, as well as the roadways which permitted goods to be moved across the country cheaply, heralded new economic growth.
Today's government instead would have scrapped these types of projects in favor of repainting federal buildings in Washington, hiring analysts to make sure that homes didn't get foreclosed, while at the same time forking over more money to the banks.
While nuclear power may be expensive, peak oil is coming and there's no way to stop it. China continues to grow, and India will soon start demanding its share as well. There are not enough straws in the oil milk-shake, and putting more straws in only means that the shake will be finished a lot faster. When oil prices begin to rise again it will only be a matter of a few short months before we hit $150/bbl. In the meantime other "alternative energy" types (wind/solar) continue to be far, far less efficient than nuclear power.
But hey, we were warned.
Re:Sustainable energy? (Score:1, Insightful)
Meanwhile, it's used as you say that.
Naturally it's not an all-or-nothing approach to sustainable energy sources. It's just including them into a portfolio of different sustainable energy sources.
You state an energy buffer like it's some horrid thing. It's how things work when you have good, clean energy that is given to you sporadically. You pool hydro-electric, geo-thermal, solar, air-turbine into a single source via that method.
We're not worried about how "hard" it is, we're thinking about ourselves and our future, here. Nuclear is a viable option, but it's not sustainable.
Re:Not westinghouse (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? Did they buy Oak Ridge [wikipedia.org] or something?
Re:Funny in summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because some politicians and monopolists spin something as "deregulation" doesn't mean that they actually did any such thing.
True deregulation means that there is no artificial barriers to entry. Without that "deregulation" is simply a bailout of a protected monopoly.
Re:Cost Is Always A Factor (Score:5, Insightful)
The subject is coal, because coal is the only usable, reasonably constant and reliable expandable baseload source of power other than nuclear. Natgas is too expensive to consider, hydro is unexpandable (tapped out).
Just a distractor to the real argument... Nuke waste is "bad for a long time". So freaking what. Every other industrial era waste is also bad, and its bad FOREVER not just a couple half lives. I'd feel much better about dumping nukewaste that we know will be harmless in a couple years, than dumping, say, heavy metals that we know will never, ever be harmless.
Basically nuke is coal except the waste is easily contained, concentrated, and becomes harmless in a long time.
Or, Coal is nuke except the waste is inherently uncontainable, spread all over the place (you're breathing it now) and its harmful forever.
Re:Nuclear would do fine too ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Price-Anderson to date has cost US taxpayers $0.00.
The US has never had a containment structure breech. In fact it has never had any reactor pressure vessel burst thus that is 2 barriers which would both have to be defeated to have a release like Chernobyl.
There are numerous factors that make an accident on the scope and scale of Chernobyl impossible in the US. This isn't to say some future US reactor couldn't have a core event but it would be more limited in scope.
Western reactors are all negative void coefficient designs. As the reactor heats up and water turns into steam this lowers the moderating effect of the water and slows down fission rate. Chernobyl was positive void design. As water flashed into steam the graphite in reactor continued to moderate the reactor. The fission rate (and thus heat) continued to increase creating a virtuous cycle.
Western reactors don't use graphite in the core (graphite burns when exposed to oxygen at reactor temperatures) this created an effective dispersal mechanism at Chernobyl for radioactive material.
Western reactors have containment dome. Once the core was breeched at chernobyl there was no barrier to radioactive dispersal.
Western reactors have redundant passive safety features. Chernobyl had safety systems but over the years many had been bypassed and jury rigged.
You'll see that an accident every 40 years comes to about $0.08/kWh.You'll see that an accident every 40 years comes to about $0.08/kWh.
Correction a Chernobyl sized accident every 40 years would cost $0.08 (I'll trust your math) however in the western world depsite hundreds of operating reactors (with combined operate life in millions of hours) that has never happened.
A smaller more contained accident (like say 3 mile island) every 50-100 years would be a rounding error on the cost of energy.
Nothing like the utterly staggering and completely unsustainable 1.25 cents per kWh given to sustainable energy.
Re:Aren't fusion plants around the corner? (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm not being facetious, I've watched a few documentaries where the scientists guessed we'd have viable fusion technology in 10 years or so.
I remember when scientists said fission would produce power to cheap to meter. The moral is that scientists are human and not infallible.
Seriously, look at the size and complexity of any experimental fusion reactors and they haven't even reached breakeven yet, nevermind produced a net power output. Compare that with commercial fission power plants which many people believe are too expensive to build now.
For a fun comparison, compare any experimental fusion reactor with the first artifical nuclear fission reactor [wikipedia.org].
Having said all that, I have my fingers crossed for Dr. Bussard's Polywell [wikipedia.org] reactor project.
Re:Always Bad Economics (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't forget all the negative subsidies that greatly add to the cost of getting one of these plants built.
Because nuclear reactor technology stopped advancing in 1950 and there's no reason we'd want to use anything more advanced that's been invented since then.
FTFY
FTFY, again
Re:Funny in summary (Score:3, Insightful)
One very small scale device that wasn't connected to any generation equipment and ran for only 5 years? That counts as "almost completely unproven" to me.
If that's your only criterion, the sodium fast breeder and RBMK reactors would have been declared complete successes decades ago.
Really.... (Score:1, Insightful)
"natural gas is now much cheaper" cheap does not mean better!! http://gaslandthemovie.com/
imminent meltdown? (Score:3, Insightful)
It looks like it'd take an economic meltdown to trigger nuclear reactor production in the US.
From where I sit (somewhere *outside the US of A*) that does not seem entirely unlikely in the reasonably forseeable future.
Seriously folks - how long, hard, and deeply to you need to fuxor your economy before *even the retarded aussie dollar* is starting to look good? (clue: you've done enough, you can stop now)
Or are you claiming that any economy that outdoes Zimbabwe is "in good shape".
Re:Funny in summary (Score:3, Insightful)
But then again, we live in a time when municipalities claim they are working for "safety" and put up red-light cameras and then shorten the yellow timing to get more tickets
Sometimes I wonder how the people making these decisions can sleep at night. How can someone justify reducing the yellow light time, thereby increasing the likelyhood of an accident, all in the name of more revenue? It boggles the mind.
Re:Cost Is Always A Factor (Score:3, Insightful)
Either way we need to develop a technology for injecting waste into subduction zones. This is the Earth's ultimate recycling system. The mantle is full of radioactives anyway, so it's a perfect place to dispose of radioactive waste. In a jillion years when it comes out of a volcano someplace it will have been processed.
Or, Coal is nuke except the waste is inherently uncontainable, spread all over the place (you're breathing it now) and its harmful forever.
Indeed, more fissionable nuclear material is released into the atmosphere from the burning of coal than is actually used up in nuclear reactors... and the fissionable materials are a minuscule fraction of what is actually released, which is mostly many many tons of Thorium.