Cool Tool: The Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator 169
Lasrick writes: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has launched a very cool new tool that will excite anyone interested in understanding the per kilowatt cost of nuclear energy. Developed over the last two years in a partnership between the Bulletin and the University of Chicago, the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator estimates the cost of electricity produced by three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle:
1. The once-through fuel cycle used in most US nuclear power plants, in which uranium fuel is used once and then stored for later disposal.
2. A limited-recycle mode in which a mix of uranium and plutonium (that is, mixed oxide, or MOX) is used to fuel a light water reactor.
3. A full-recycle system, which uses a fast neutron spectrum reactor that can be configured to 'breed' plutonium that can subsequently be used as either nuclear fuel or weapons material.
This online tool lets users test how sensitive the price of electricity is to a full range of components—more than 60 parameters that can be adjusted for the three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle considered. The results provide nuanced cost assessments for the reprocessing of nuclear fuel and can serve as the basis for discussions among government officials, industry leaders, and public interest groups.
1. The once-through fuel cycle used in most US nuclear power plants, in which uranium fuel is used once and then stored for later disposal.
2. A limited-recycle mode in which a mix of uranium and plutonium (that is, mixed oxide, or MOX) is used to fuel a light water reactor.
3. A full-recycle system, which uses a fast neutron spectrum reactor that can be configured to 'breed' plutonium that can subsequently be used as either nuclear fuel or weapons material.
This online tool lets users test how sensitive the price of electricity is to a full range of components—more than 60 parameters that can be adjusted for the three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle considered. The results provide nuanced cost assessments for the reprocessing of nuclear fuel and can serve as the basis for discussions among government officials, industry leaders, and public interest groups.
Coal fuel cycle (Score:4, Insightful)
Where's The Coal Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator that includes all the hidden costs?
What about the cost for enrichment waste? (Score:3)
What about the cost for taking care of the waste from the enrichment process?
Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste? (Score:4, Insightful)
However if you want an answer, for the very active waste there is Synroc - bit of a guess as to how much it can be scaled up to drop costs but at least it (finally) exists. The less active stuff is a lot easier to handle and store, which is just as well because it makes up the majority of the volume of nuclear waste
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Maybe they will learn something and be informed about the topic instead of thinking of it as magic perfected in 1970.
Does anyone actually think that? As far as I know pro-nuclear people lament that the excess of irrational fear led all development to stop completely in the 70s. Given that it was originally initially developed at the time as computers, that's the nuclear equivalent of using a PDP-11 today.
We could be a lot further on if people weren't so bad at judging risks.
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It's still not clear to me what "a lot further along" would be. Waste disposal is still, the last I heard, an unsolved problem. There are some reasonable paths that could be developed, but until there's been a least a pilot, say, fast breeder reactor that actually burns all its fuel to "nearly harmless" one can't show that it will really work. And long term storage looks both dangerous and expensive. And also like it would prevent recovery. Hot waste should at least be useable as a source of process he
Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste? (Score:5, Informative)
The waste issue (as well as inherent safety) is part of the reason that there's so much research on ADSRs [wikipedia.org] right now (note: the article says that an ADSR "would use thorium as a fuel", but it's not actually limited to thorium, it can use any subcritical fissile core). Spallation can rip apart the long-lived actinides that don't have a sufficient (n, gamma) cross section to prevent their accumulation in nuclear waste. And of course, since the core is inherently subcritical by design, simply not enough neutronicity under any condition to sustain a chain reaction on its own, when you shut the beam off, fission ceases instantly (though you still have decay heat like with any other nuclear power plant). Spallation source provides no more than about 10% or so of the neutronicity, but it's the amount needed to push the core over the edge.
I have my own very radical variant on the concept of an accelerator driven fission that I'm working on simulating now in Geant4 (although that was probably a poor choice of software, apparently their thermal scattering codes are really immature... as far as CERN is concerned, once particles get down below the MeV range they're usually not particularly interesting). But anyway the concept is to have a core with literally zero neutronicty - a lithium-burning reactor. The basic concept is as such:
1. A planar proton beam is delivered by one or more high power linac beamlines. Commercial-scale linac costs - without any improvements in technology - are expected to cost $5-20 per watt [oecd-nea.org]. The particular design would call for very high voltage (~16MV) klystrons to drive it - and not simply to reduce size (more in this shortly)
2. The proton beam bombards a fragment emitting target [wikipedia.org] inside an axial magnetic field in a vacuum. The estimation of deceleration efficiency is estimated at over 90% in fragment reactors due to the lack of Carnot losses (according to the published research on the subject). The resultant HVDC will be direct converted to the klystron voltage in producing the electron beam that drives the linac. About 60% of the energy of spallation goes into fragment production. Fragments will be drawn away from the fragment target en route to the collector via a slightly expanding axial magnetic field. Fragment collection allows for automatic isotope separation.
3. The maximum power output of a fragment reactor is limited by its surface area and its ability to radiate heat. Fragment-emitting targets can be either electrostatically suspended dust or rapidly rotating with thin fibers or planes of target material, in order to radiatively cool without melting. Spallation targets, for efficiency, need to be high-Z materials, such as lead, tungsten, mercury, etc. Tungsten is particularly attractive due to its high melting point of 3695K. High-Z metal-rich ceramics are also possible targets, with very high melting points. The temperature of the chamber's beryllium walls being radiated to will be around 1050K. This means heat exchange between a ~3000K emitter (4.6e7W/m) and a 1050K receiver (6.8e4W/m), or about 4.5MW per square meter. In short, this allows for a surprisingly compact core, limited more by the length necessary to ensure a sufficient proton spallation cross section.
4. Neutrons emitted by spallation (at a cost of 30-40 MeV per neutron) are heavily biased by [viglink.com]
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Actually, no. But I'll be able to in the future if needed. :)
Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about the cost (enviromental and financial due to climate impact) of the CO2 from fossil fuels? Oh wait, 21st century western society can simply be powered by windmills and solar cells, right? Suuure.
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Solar and Wind both have a part to play. Solar has some real problems with supply/demand that solar fans like to gloss over but Wind backed by natural gas peaking plants works rather well in many areas. Solar does not compete for base load and can not until a massive breakthrough in storage is made and is in production. Molten salt thermal storage, batteries including Teslas, and pumping water are just not good enough to solve the problem. Nuclear and Hydro are the two lowest carbon output base load methods
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Lockheed starting with not using a tokamak is probably the best idea. ITER has sucked up 16 billion Euros and still is far from completion. When done, it will create only 500MW (goal is for 1000 seconds).
One way I've heard suggested to store both clean and non-clean energy is Flywheel Kinetic storage [wikipedia.org] with magnetic bearings and in a vacuum to reduce friction. I don't remember a lot about it (saw an online video or a TED conference or something on it), but I recall a company buying off-peak hour electricity a
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I read an article on magnetic levitated flywheels in PopSci back in the 1970s.
Do the math on what it would take to store 9 GWh of power. That is 16 hours of output from a small base load nuclear power plant.
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Greenpeace published a plan to move all energy production to renewable sources. I'm sure you have read it, but if not it is published on their web site. It has been peer reviewed and contains vast amounts of evidence, shows how numbers were arrived at and is fully costed. They are assuming that we intend to maintain our current or better standard of living.
So, can you explain why their plan won't work, giving specifics? It might be a long term plan and fairly expensive (although they claim otherwise), but y
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I haven't read this plan, but I think the key to the future of power generation is maintaining the same standard of living while using less power. I have an old PC sitting in my basement that has a 95 watt CPU in it. Meanwhile, Intel is coming out with computers with 4.5 watt CPUs that have much better performance than my old computer. Add in the use of solid state drives instead of spinning platters like I have now, and I could probably run the entire computer on 20 watts, where as my old one probably use
Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bingo. It's actually cheaper to save energy than generate more in most cases. There are vast power savings possible that actually increase quality of life. Insulating a building better not only reduces heating and cooling costs, it makes the building more pleasant to be in, it reduces costs for the owner, it makes less pollution and thus does less damage to health... It's a huge win.
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An article that opened my eyes said that washing laundry with hot water is pointless, modern washing machines with modern washing powder can wash clothes without the need for hot water and many clothes will last longer/fade less when washed cold. (caveat - very dirty / stinky clothes might still need heat).
All the gov't need to do is put a leaflet through everyone's door, informing them of how they could easily cut their fuel bills. Simple solution, why don't they do it?
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Because Americans respond poorly to t
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That plans has a number of non starters, like cap and trade, sure lets go get the whole world to participate in it. There is no fair way to implement it. If you use current levels current bad actors like china are rewarded. If you use by population again china is rewarded, and the US would be massively penalized.
Prioritizing renewable on the grid means the least agile generators (who are also the cheapest) get the short end.
Government guarantee's for private investment is broken by design, if your going
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Look at how Europe introduced RoHS. While only Europe is bound by it, companies from other countries quickly adopted it so they could continue selling into the massive EU market. Okay, the EU is a bigger market than the US, but not by that much. If you mandate such things, China and all the rest will follow.
So what about carbon trading? It's easy, you just require imports to pay a tax based on their carbon footprint if they don't participate, and for US companies that outsource manufacturing to China to inc
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Your thinking that the 3rd world wont gain in their living standard (it has to happen) the system has to account for it. China has huge amounts of foreign debt and will not sit idly by and accept import taxes, if they refuse to roll that over that is a world wide economic crisis. This is pretty much the stick approach.
Current fission has issues related to proliferation, those are fixable issues. The key is making a cheap reliable and safe baseload electric generation that is agile.
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You say China won't play ball, but they did with the EU. RoHS and carbon taxes/trading are all in operation here, with China participating.
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You forget that RoHS was good for china it made no real change to their exports and it was potentially better for their labor force.
Considering that china agreed to is pretty week and heavily skewed in there favor, they will stop emissions growth by 2030. With the US pledging to go down 25% from it's 2005 numbers by 2025. That is not fair nor equitable, it's china getting to say they are doing something in 15 years.
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It doesn't work because it makes elecricity more expensive and hence makes people overall poorer since next to everything requires electricity to be produced.
In short you could do it, if you accept worse living standards for no good reason at all.
Solar cell production is quite dirty too but you won't hear that from Greenpeace.
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Solar and wind are not the only sources of renewable energy.
100% renewables is perfectly possible and would highly likely be a lot cheaper than nuclear.
The world can be powered by alternative energy in 20-40 years, Stanford researcher says [stanford.edu]
â- Powering the World With Wind, Water, and Sunlight: Mark Jacobson at TEDxPaloAltoHighSchool - YouTube [youtube.com]
Cost Of Solar PV Will Fall To 2 Cents/kWh In 2050, Says Fraunhofer Study [cleantechnica.com]
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Beached whale? Tell that to France thats been using it safely for the last 50 years for the majority of their electrical power.
Yes... but they're FRENCH. (Score:2)
Yes... but they're FRENCH. F R E N C H.
I'm all for nuclear power, but OMG! F R E N C H!
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Sorry, but it is the other way around. The French from both France and Canada have a huge disdain for all things American. The stereotypical arrogant French a-hole is unfortunately well-founded. I've encountered it all over the world, including my home state of NH where French-Canadians like to grace us with their presence by standing and the way and not talking to us.
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France can get away with this because disposal of spent fuel is, for the most part, someone else's problem.
France does recycle a lot; something like 15-20% of its fuel is from recycling. Most of it, however, is imported from places like Canada, Niger, and Australia. Under the non-proliferation treaty, it's the responsibility of the country of origin to dispose of the waste that came from its fuel.
So yeah, I'll bet France loves nuclear power. They don't have to deal with most of the long-term (i.e. 100,000+
Re:Yes. What about them? (Score:5, Insightful)
France imports yellowcake (refined U3O8 uranium oxide powder) and turns it into fuel (enriched UO2 uranium oxide pellets), burns it and reprocesses its spent fuel to make more fresh fuel. The small amount of resulting waste is vitrified and is currently stored above ground until the time there's enough of it to be worth putting in an underground repository which will be built in France, not Australia.
Where you get the weird idea that the countries selling uranium are required to accept and dispose of other people's spent fuel I don't know. In some cases spent fuel from other countries has been recycled by nations with the capacity to do so -- the UK, for example has processed spent Magnox fuel from Japan, turning it into fresh fuel rods which were shipped back to Japan. The deal involved the resulting vitrified waste also being returned to Japan in separate shipments. Japan's last Magnox reactor was decommissioned a few years back and the shipments of spent fuel, recycled fuel and vitrified waste have now come to an end.
Russia's Rosatom is offering some countries like Jordan and Vietnam a turnkey nuclear power capability where they supply fresh fuel and take away the spent fuel at each refuelling meaning the host country does not need to build its own waste disposal and processing facility.
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That's... odd. Australia doesn't have any nuclear power reactors. It burns coal for a lot of its power requirements and exports a shitload more to other countries who do the same. Of course it doesn't take back all the CO2 emitted by the foreign power stations when they burn that coal...
A quick Giggle shows that Australia has sent spent fuel from at least one of its research reactors, HIFAR to France for reprocessing. The waste from that reprocessing operation would normally be returned to Australia after b
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Oh get over yourself. The stuff came out of the ground so it can quite easily be buried back in the ground. Or did you think radioactivity appeared as if by magic from unicorns and fairy dust as soon as the uranium was put in the reactor?
And people like you go on about long term pollution, but I bet you don't think twice about the immediate pollution caused by mining to get the ore to build the latest smarttoy you've upgraded to do you? The way things are going they'll be hardly anyone around to care in 100
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But you really can't guarantee that it won't taint groundwater for 10,000 years. We sure can't post a sign that will last that long.
The fact is, the only thing that can be done with the existing waste is to burn it up in a reactor. Supposedly, it can be got down to around 300 years, which we could then deal with.
We have no choice, and the people who still debate whether or not we should build new reactors are just uninformed. Or I am.
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Isn't that included in the price of the fuel? I don't think that the EPA and it's equivalents in other countries are going to be letting them off. That's a bit like asking 'What about the waste from refining copper?' when it comes to wiring up your house.
I also believe that the amount of 'nuclear' waste that people are worried about is minimal.
That being said, some reactors like the CANDU don't need enriched fuel.
Insurance? (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that nuclear energy producers are not required to have an insurance against nuclear disasters (at least on this side of the Pond), is insurance included or is it as usual "delegated" to society? The calculator itself refuses to run without cross-site scripting attacks from Google, so I could not check.
If it serves as a "basis for discussion", you can bet it serves a political rather than a technical purpose.
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You can see the parameters, the cost of Price-Anderson covering them in the event of a catastrophic accident beyond the minimums is not covered.
Also, people should be careful not to confuse the prices on the calculator with the price of electricity that they pay. Power plant generation costs and consumer purchase rates are not the same thing. Industrial rates are at least closer to generation costs, but even they add a couple cents per kWh to the cost.
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You can see the parameters, the cost of Price-Anderson covering them in the event of a catastrophic accident beyond the minimums is not covered.
The availability of the reactor, the impact of increased energetic inputs to produce the fuel are limited to $600 and reactor disposal cost would be would be a good addition especially considering the 'reactor economic lifetime' is there.
I can think of two interesting modifications. The first would be to show the energetic costs as input vs output that factors the above but also allows for increasing the reactor lifetime beyond 100 years. That way you could explore things like 'what is the impact on cost
Re:Insurance? (Score:4, Interesting)
Given that nuclear energy producers are not required to have an insurance against nuclear disasters (at least on this side of the Pond)
Neither does hydro dams [damsafety.org]. Most dams are "insured by the government", i.e. there is no insurance, just like for nuclear. And that doesn't seem to stop anyone from extolling the virtues of hydro electricity even in the face of a very long list [wikipedia.org] of dam failures. You know, a billion [wikipedia.org] here and a billion there, it adds up....
Re:Insurance? (Score:4, Interesting)
First off, who's extolling the virtues of hydroelectric dams? Dams usually fall on environmentalists' hate lists at around the same place as coal, give or take a few slots.
Extolling the virtues of wind or solar, yeah. But you better believe a wind farm operator will be sued if a turbine falls on someone's house, or a solar thermal plant if their mirrors misalign and blind a pilot. And for that matter, you better believe that a hydroelectric dam operator will be sued if their dam breaks (at least in the first world). And most companies willingly insure their large projects as a hedge against risk.
The aspect of Price-Anderson that people complain about is that the US government foots the bill for the vast majority of costs in the event of a catastrophic accident. The power plant operators only need to insure enough to foot the bill to insure against minor accidents, something most operators would want to do anyway to protect themselves. Many people find the capped liability to be a highly distorting influence on the market, socializing the risks while keeping the profits private.
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First off, who's extolling the virtues of hydroelectric dams?
Quite a few of us how have them, yes and that includes "environmentalists". Sure, they're not without their problems, environmentally, but they have a quite a few upsides as well.
The aspect of Price-Anderson that people complain about is that the US government foots the bill for the vast majority of costs in the event of a catastrophic accident.
Sure, but what I was pointing out (in a roundabout way), is that the same is effectively true of any large scale infrastructure system, especially when it comes to power generation on a massive scale. Doesn't matter if the cost comes from a hydro electric dam that fails, or a coal ash slurry dam failure, or a major oil spill, or in
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What sort of environmentalists have you been hanging around with? Environmentalist opposition to dams is so well known that "blowing up dams" is one of the cliche stereotypes of "eco-terrorists".
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No. The logical solution is for the government to recompense those damaged by the event, and to then bill the companies for recompense, plus a "handling charge" for their work in recompensing the damaged. Probably the "handling charge" should be a fixed charge plus a low percentage, so the government doesn't have an incentive to minimize the compensation. (They will anyway due to corruption, AKA lobbying, but to minimize the incentive.)
Let me put my skepticism hat on... (Score:4, Interesting)
A "tool" to understand costs of nuclear energy production from the "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". Could this tool be any more biased? I doubt it looking at the selected metrics.
First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.
More importantly, the "tool" seems to cover only construction costs. Nowhere are decommissioning costs included, which are order of magnitude over the construction costs. Experience has shown both in the US and elsewhere, that these costs have been (willingly or not) underestimated by order of magnitude by the industry. The lack of transparency help a large boom of the industry 30 years ago, but the lack of long term sight is kicking back in full force. Sad of an industry, which should secure waste thousands if not millions of years.
Let me be clear on my sight. I am actually in favour of sensible use and development of nuclear energy. But this cannot be done without transparency, hiding the real costs. Worse, I believe its the hiding of the real costs (and risks) that made this industry stagnate and sent it towards its death (lets be honest, Atomic industry is really dying). This tools seems only to continue this long tradition.
It's a lung cancer patient dying with a cigarette in the hand.
Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on... (Score:5, Informative)
The tool also fails to include the cost of insurance, both to the operator and the government. The government's costs are practically impossible to calculate, as it has almost unlimited liability.
The cost of equipment failure is ignored as well. Around 1.3% of all civilian reactors have failed catastrophically, but vastly more equipment has failed safely and either been abandoned or needed expensive repairs. Storage and reprocessing systems are included. Maintenance costs tend to be rather high because the equipment gets contaminated and can't safely be worked on by human beings.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org]
If you simply add up the number of reactors that failed at Chernobyl and Fukushima, compared to total number ever built for civilian power production, you arrive at the 1.3% figure. If you include other serious events that resulted in the loss of the reactor or a significant release of radioactive material the number is much higher.
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What are your numbers then? Tjernobyl one reactor, Fukushima one reactor (or are you counting multiples there?), vs 443 power generating ones according to Google, that gives me 0.455% let's say 0.5%.
And that's even assuming that number of failed reactors / total, is even a good metric, something I'm not nearly convince of.
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Per reactor, not per plant. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima had multiple reactors go into meltdown and catastrophic failure, resulting in the release of significant amounts of contamination.
What other type of machine has a 1.3% catastrophic failure rate, resulting in billions of Euros of damage each time, and is still in widespread use? It's no wonder no reactor can get commercial insurance.
Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope. Tjernobyl had one count 'em, one reactor blow up (no 4). The other three reactors continued to operate for years after the catastrophic loss of no 4. Now, Fukushima had almost complete meltdown of one reactor, and partial meltdown of two more (but then again, TMI had a more severe meltdown than most of those, to no ill effect). However, these all happened from the same proximate cause, there was no chain reaction or anything of that nature, so counting reactors is a fools game anyway. If Fukushima had had fewer larger reactors, then it wouldn't have been as serious an accident according to you? Or if it had had ten with five melting (instead of three of six) it would have been a more serious accident? Patent nonsense.
What other type of machine has a 1.3% catastrophic failure rate, resulting in billions of Euros of damage each time
So this is why your analysis is basically flawed. If you want to compare then you need a unit of measurement that makes that comparison invariant of e.g. "how many reactors", and for example takes size into account. What you're doing is akin to counting the number of oil spills rather than the severity.
In power generation it's customary to compare given the amount of energy produced. Sure, a nuclear accident is bad, but we get tons of energy from it. It's like air travel safety, sure, one plane crash is bad, but you get to go a long way, quickly and cheaply, so compared to the options all of a sudden flying doesn't look that bad anymore. Now, answering your question, "What do we do in energy production that's as dangerous as nuclear". The answer is, perhaps surprisingly "everything else". Dams in particular are a large scale killer like no other... Many, many, many, more people have died en masse per kWh due to dam failure than anything else, but in total of course it's dwarfed by coal. Even wind and solar is more dangerous than nuclear, and that's a conservative estimate. Just google "death per kilowatthour", and you'll find no lack of sources to list the actual numbers. Coal is easily a factor of thousand more dangerous than nuclear, and guess what, they don't even pay for their damage, let alone insure against it.
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Every single machine that combusts fossil fuel. It's just that the catastrophic "failure" occurs over decades, not minutes.
The failures at both Chernobyl was not a machine failure. It was a series of incredibly stupid actions performed by unqualified people.
Fukushima was arguably not a machine failure. Would you consider it a "machine failure" if a car wa
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I see a difference between Chernobyl and Fukushima. Fukushima was preventable, but I have no confidence that humans will in general, do much better. Chernobyl was another matter: starting with a reactor design that would never be built today, there was a series of incredibly dumb decisions that led to the catastrophe, that I think would never be repeated. I'm comfortable calling it unrepeatable.
Fukushima was not, really, that bad. It was nowhere near as destructive as the natural disaster that cause
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First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.
Long term storage is not that big of a problem. It's only a matter of converting all that waste into rock (aka vitrification) and dumping it into a hole drilled into rock. As long as there are no waterways, rocks can stay stable for thousands or even millions of years. There are fossils to prove it.
Direct exposure from these sites would be negligible compared to natural background radiation. Water contamination would be more problematic (not catastrophic though), that's why it is important to chose the site
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Long-term disposal of waste (which you wouldn't want to do, because you would be throwing away usable energy): select any part of the country not in a volcanic plume or on a tectonic boundary. Drill through any sedimentary rock until you reach 'basement' strata, and then keep going for another few thousand feet. Dump your waste into the hole until the level approaches the bottom of the sedimentary layer. Plug with concrete to the top of the basement rock, then backfill the sedimentary. You will not see that
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You forgot the spread the waste out bit part. As generally you do not want all the waste to close together. Them neutrons seem to get everywhere. You do not really want a sub-fissile reactor in your storage bunker.
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Actually, you would want to keep the waste crammed together at the bottom of the hole and hope for some new fission inside the granite deep vault I describe. It wouldn't go anywhere and would dramatically reduce the time it takes for the whole thing to decay. It would also demonstrate the folly of throwing spent fuel away in the first place. Wouldn't we rather reuse the fuel to generate more power?
Interestingly, the Nevada Test Site is exactly where I have seen the kind of holes I have in mind. Our fossil f
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y... [wikipedia.org]
Nevada was just fine with it until some idiots thought that replacing clay based kitty litter with the newer paper based stuff was an ok substitution.
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Unless you shoot the waste into a star (and do it safely), there is no safe place for it.
Where do you think that radioactive material came from in the first place?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org]
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The safest place for nuclear "waste" is reprocessing it and throwing it back into a reactor. Anything that is hot enough to hurt you will be gone quickly enough to not matter in 50 years.
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Vitrification may be OK for the high-level short-lived (approx. 200 years to decay to safe levels) stuff that would have come out of the IFR's integrated fuel cycle, but I'm fairly certain it's not OK for long-lived transuranics...
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So let's build IFRs then. Wasn't their research cancelled by the Clinton administration to "send a signal"? An anti-science one, presumably.
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As long as there are no waterways, rocks can stay stable for thousands or even millions of years. There are fossils to prove it.
Waterways change. There are fossils to prove it.
Direct exposure from these sites would be negligible compared to natural background radiation. Water contamination would be more problematic (not catastrophic though), that's why it is important to chose the site wisely
Yes. It is called a subduction zone. The mantle is full of radioactives. It is the only reasonable place to send radioactive waste which is still on this planet, but people like you are pretending that we can just bury it like it's a turd.
Quality of thought from nuclear playboys (Score:2)
When someone points out a problem with your beloved scheme, mod down! Because you know that there is no rational response which you could make, you must behave irrationally. You are married to nuclear power, and it's an abusive relationship. You can leave any time you want, but you've convinced yourself you can't find anything better, so you stay for the beatings. The problem is, you're making sure everyone else gets beaten, too.
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When your argument comes down to your own ignorance of the issue, it isn't the other person's issue, it is your own.
The reason the US has a nuclear waste issue is that the government won't allow reprocessing. Once reprocessed, the left over stuff can be safely buried. People are ignorant and scream "omg nuclear!" instead, kind of like your comments.
If you are unwilling to learn about nuclear physics and understand the issues, don't comment and display your ignorance for all to see.
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A "tool" to understand costs of nuclear energy production from the "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". Could this tool be any more biased?
What you think it would be better that someone who has no understanding of the problem wrote the tool instead. Everyone has biases and that isn't a reason to not listen to what they are saying. Maybe what they say needs interpretation, but so what
First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated.
You do realise that the slides below the calculation allow you to tweak these costs. So what you are saying is that the "default" value is an underestimate.
BTW, the default value of 30 yea
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A "tool" to understand costs of nuclear energy production from the "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". Could this tool be any more biased?
What you think it would be better that someone who has no understanding of the problem wrote the tool instead.
That's such a classic false dichotomy, that even I can spot it without thinking too hard.
Actually... (Score:2)
Everyone has biases and that isn't a reason to not listen to what they are saying.
Actually... that's kind of the perfect reason to not listen to what they are saying.
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So we shouldn't listen to you because of your biases. Ok, we will now all ignore you as you are human and have your biases.
Also, what you blindly fail to realize is that the people making the tool are anti nuke, not pro nuke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
These are the people behind the doomsday clock.
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Biased? Maybe, I don't know enough about the economics of the situation- what I'm glad to see is that this is a tool that gives some insight to the true costs of nuclear power- as it is a model, it is incomplete (like all models), but it gives a place to start, to improve, and most importantly, to compare to other models.
For our society to survive, we need energy- lots of it. And it's going to cost us in lots of ways. But if we are going to get capital investment, we have to convince the holders of that cap
Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on... (Score:4, Interesting)
First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.
Please. Just use the bin Laden solution. Once you have too much to store on-site just drop it in the Marianas trench. Problem fucking solved. Virtually impossible to locate (assuming coordinates are kept secret) and virtually impossible to retrieve even if you do know where it is. If any of it does ultimately dissolve in the seawater somehow, it would be utterly negligible compared to what coal power is doing to the ocean right now. Also, I'm curious about what isotopes we're producing in enough quantity that it would still be dangerous enough to worry about after 100k years. (And if there is such an isotope, why can't just we transmute it to something a little less stable first?)
Let me be clear on my sight. I am actually in favour of sensible use and development of nuclear energy. But this cannot be done without transparency, hiding the real costs.
The problem is the costs are done from some kind of utopian or hyper-paranoid point of view, instead of an opportunity cost vs. other forms of power generation. If we used a "cost of human life" approach where we look at the actual lives lost in actuarial terms, nuclear is far and away the cheapest. It's only when we look at the costs associated with senselessly pandering to anti-nuclear fears that it becomes pricey.
I will concede that reactors obviously need to have updated failsafes, as Fukushima painfully illustrated. However, I have yet to hear a newscaster or 'expert' mention Deepwater Horizon (or all of that mercury messing up our delicious tuna) in the same sentence as the Fukushima disaster.
And what about going in the other direction and figuring out how to harness the crazy excess power that nuclear offers? Thermal electrolysis of hydrogen in breeder reactors on a megaproject scale (with an embrittlement-proof pipeline) would completely revolutionize the economy whilst at the same time putting a huge dent in global warming.
I've no doubt the authors here have an agenda to push, but I've also no doubt that the truth lies much closer to their propaganda than it does to the hysteria that dominates all mainstream discussions on nuclear power.
Even on slashdot (Score:2)
I could be wrong
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After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years?
Do we need to? The point of modern reactor designs and nuclear reprocessing is to not only minimise the waste but the resulting waste does not need to be secured for 100000 years, several orders of magnitude less.
More importantly, the "tool" seems to cover only construction costs. Nowhere are decommissioning costs included, which are order of magnitude over the construction costs. Experience has shown both in the US and elsewhere, that these costs have been (willingly or not) underestimated by order of magnitude by the industry.
The costs haven't been under-estimated. The required scope was. To which I again ask, do we need to? Providing the site is not required for reclaiming why not just build a cement dome over it and let it sit. Decommissioning costs are very small if you're not under the delusion (in my opinion) that
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A "tool" to understand costs of nuclear energy production from the "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". Could this tool be any more biased? I doubt it looking at the selected metrics.
Yes, it could be more biased. It could have been written by someone with no technical knowledge and a political agenda, like mdsolar.
First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.
Yes, it can and has been estimated, by the nuclear industry and the department of energy.
More importantly, the "tool" seems to cover only construction costs. Nowhere are decommissioning costs included, which are order of magnitude over the construction costs. Experience has shown both in the US and elsewhere, that these costs have been (willingly or not) underestimated by order of magnitude by the industry.
This is just flat out wrong. Decommissioning costs are in the hundreds of million dollars, construction costs are in the billions. And they are included, by law, in the construction costs.
The lack of transparency help a large boom of the industry 30 years ago, but the lack of long term sight is kicking back in full force. Sad of an industry, which should secure waste thousands if not millions of years.
Let me be clear on my sight. I am actually in favour of sensible use and development of nuclear energy. But this cannot be done without transparency, hiding the real costs. Worse, I believe its the hiding of the real costs (and risks) that made this industry stagnate and sent it towards its death (lets be honest, Atomic industry is really dying). This tools seems only to continue this long tradition.
It's a lung cancer patient dying with a cigarette in the hand.
Just because you are not aware of how all the costs are calculated and accounted for in practice in th
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Gas is not the best option. It may burn clean, but the process of extracting it is NOT clean.
The problem is that the contamination is much more diffuse/widespread, so you can't say "OMG LOOK THREE MILE ISLAND! BAD!" - even though TMI led to less negative health effects for the environment than gas drilling in just a single town (Dimock, PA).
Solar and wind won't be able to meet our needs for another few decades as we don't have sufficient energy storage technology to make them viable yet (Tesla's making gr
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"Securing spent fuel for 100,000 years" would be required only in the once-through scenario. Recycle it so you can 'burn' that 100,000 years' worth of energy, and that problem disappears.
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To expand on this point, 'nuclear waste' consists of a number of different elements and isotopes. Generally speaking, the only isotopes that have half lives long enough to still be producing radioactivity after 100k years are also useful as fuel.
So you reprocess/recycle the waste, extracting those elements for another pass through the reactor. The remaining isotopes tend to be 'hot' - IE highly radioactive with short half lives.
Short half lives mean it's 'cool' orders of magnitude sooner.
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First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Let me put my skepticism hat on... (Score:2)
At the time of posting my previous comment, I didn't realite the Source was actually critics of atom energy and of its uses.
This wasn't at first obvious to me considering the flaws of the tool, giving a much to positiv view of atomic energy.
Now I'm not sure what worse. Is it a voluntary omission? Or not? i wonder.
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(lets be honest, Atomic industry is really dying).
Except in France, because the cowardly Frenchies surrendered to nuclear power due to it's being the most environmentally friendly and safe (eg lower cancer rate than coal, low death rate compared to coal or hydro, low emissions of CO2, particulates, etc).
sigh (Score:2)
the per kilowatt-hour cost of nuclear energy
or
the per kilowatt cost of nuclear power
TL;DR (Score:2)
Too lazy, didn't run. What's the conclusion? Does this mean that nuclear power is awesome or awful?
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Thorium (Score:3, Informative)
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First of all it produces the *same* waste as any other properly managed reprocessing cycling with breading. Yep you get similar results with Uranium.
Second, your burning U233 and so you get the same decay heat, the same "turn it off" issues. Sure LFR address some of this. But that has *nothing* to do with Thorium. So no its not 100% can't possibly release radioactive materials.
Thirdly it is *not* proven
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Some uranium (U-233, U-235) and plutonium (Pu-239, Pu-241) isotopes are fissile. Thorium is not fissile and cannot sustain a fission reaction by itself. Th-232 can be bred up into U-233 which is fissile in theoretical LFTRs and the like but at that point the reactor is fissioning uranium to produce energy and neutrons for breeding more useless thorium into uranium.
U-233 produced in thorium breeder reactors can be extracted and used to make nuclear weapons with some work, the uranium and plutonium in convent
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Except in the 80s in the Soviet union, where many of their "civilian" reactors were designed to allow for use as weapons production plants.
Such as Chernobyl... So many things went wrong there, but one of the major contributing factors was a fundamentally unsafe reactor design.
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The RBMK-4 reactors were putatively dual-use in that they could be used to expose uranium to a neutron flux for short periods, a necessary step to produce high-purity Pu-239 without much Pu-240. The British Magnox reactors[1] could also be operated in this mode, as can the CANDU family. However by the time many of these reactors (and especially the second-generation RBMK-4s) had been brought online in the mid to late 70s the major nuclear powers such as the Soviet Union had already produced and stockpiled a
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The Soviets were hardly unique in terms of bad reactor design. Have you seen the design used for the British Windscale plant? It makes you want to hit your head against a wall when you read it. They literally just stuck canisters of fuel into holes in the wall, hit them in by hand with ram rods, and hoped that the old canisters would fall out the back into a narrow trench of water. The designers got mad and nearly derailed it when one physicist wanted to put a really trivial pollution scrubber on the stac
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Well, Windscale was never used for civilian power production. I think nearly all of the reactors designed for weapons production were far less safe than nearly any civilian design.
And yeah, the Magnox reactors weren't very safe either, although they're better IMO than the RBMK design.
CANDU are, to my knowledge, the only other civilian reactors in use to have a positive void coefficient, but at least in their case the moderator (heavy water) isn't flammable...
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Well, Windscale was never used for civilian power production. I think nearly all of the reactors designed for weapons production were far less safe than nearly any civilian design.
Not to mention polluting. When anti-nuclear power nuts start going off, they'll often start listing all sorts of nuclear waste disasters 'waiting to happen'. Thing is, 99% of the time they're not talking about nuclear power waste, but from the government's weapons programs. Which, as you say, were run horribly.
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Yeah, it seems thorium has become the nuclear-reactor-hype of the day, the ShinyNewTech replacing PBMRs. The pattern repeats. I wish these people would at least google "ShinyNewTech disavantages" before spouting off about how ShinyNewTech is the savior of the world.
Waste? (Score:4, Informative)
How France is [not yet] disposing of its nuclear waste - BBC News [bbc.com]
50+ years of nuclear and still no waste storage.
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How can they not be storing it? Are they shipping it continuously from point to point?
Or is it that they don't have a 'permanent' storage facility yet? Thing is, the density of high level nuclear waste is such that you don't need much storage space for it. Oh, and it gets easier to store as it ages.
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Why store "waste" when you can process it in a fast breeder reactor? It's totally the wrong strategy.
Experts? (Score:2)
Definitely Number Three (Score:2)
I mean, one can never have enough weapons grade plutonium, don't you know? And there's always a market for it!
Does it consider cleanup, storage, and accident? (Score:2)
Does it consider cleanup, storage, and accident, or just the raw price of the fuel.
DUPIC? (Score:2)
Did they look at Direct Use of Pressurized Water Reactor Spent Fuel in CANDU [nextbigfuture.com]? You can pretty much grind up the "spent" fuel from a LWR, pack it into new pellets, then burn it again with a heavy-water moderator. Those reactors can also burn un-enriched uranium or thorium.
Not exactly a reliable source (Score:2)
No one who knows anything about nuclear power is going to be "excited" by anything the BAS releases on the topic, because they are a purely political anti-nuclear organization with a radical anti-nuclear agenda.
Whatever they have released, the odds are so overwhelming that it's nothing but a propaganda tool in their war on nuclear energy--a war whose success has helped create our current climate crisis--that it isn't worth anyone's time to even look at.
Its the Plutonium thats the problem (Score:2)
To date that one little word disposal has been the biggest problem for the nuclear Industry they can not figure out a way to get rid of the Plutonium that is in the waste so why would you create more ?
http://e360.yale.edu/counterpo... [yale.edu]