Posted on 04/04/2007 6:39:40 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
After painstakingly analyzing the costs of U.S. nuclear power plants built decades ago, energy experts caution that a resurrection of nuclear power could bring along some financial risk and surprisingly high electricity costs.
Researchers reporting in the most recent edition of the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that construction costs varied by as much as 500 percent before the last U.S. nuclear power station was built almost 30 years ago.
"There is no other (energy) technology we're looking at where the range in cost is a factor of five," said Dan Kammen, professor of energy and resources and of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. "It means that if the nuclear industry doesn't manage itself much better than in the past, we are likely to still get this large range of costs."
The clean, carbon-free energy from splitting atoms has drawn backing among influential lawmakers and environmentalists as a way to ease consumption of fossil fuels and global warming.
But the industry and its financial backers could be vulnerable to the same cost volatility, scientists warned, especially if utilities begin trying half a dozen new kinds of reactors cooled by metals or gases rather than water.
In recent weeks, federal regulators have given the nod to new reactor sites in Illinois and Mississippi, and firms are readying applications for construction and operation of up to 33 new U.S. reactors, mostly in the Southeast and Midwest.
Industry officials say soaring plant costs in the 1980s are all but irrelevant to this renaissance.
"I don't think it's a good prologue," said Peter Saba, a former Energy Department official and financial adviser at the law firm Paul, Hastings, Janovsky & Walker for several utilities eyeing new nuclear plants. "Past experience is not going to be a good gauge, because people are building them differently and you've got a different licensing process as well."
Ordinarily, an industry learns by producing and with learning, technology gets less expensive. But researchers at UC Berkeley, Georgetown University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that "the case of nuclear power has been seen largely as an exception that reflects the idiosyncrasies of the regulatory environment as public opposition grew, regulations were tightened and construction times increased."
Particularly after the loss of reactor coolant at Three Mile Island in 1979, tougher new safety requirements came into play, and utilities had to upgrade their construction plans, increasing construction costs at a time when interest rates were high. By the end of the decade, costs inflated so rapidly that the industry no longer could afford to build plants.
Saba, whose father was a nuclear engineer, said part of the problem was that utilities wanted every nuclear power station to be unique.
"They were designing them as they were building them," he said.
Starting in 1992, Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also have reworked the rules for licensing new plants, allowing nuclear firms to get the latest three basic Generation III+ reactor designs approved in advance. Saba said the advanced Generation IV reactors that concern the energy scientists at Berkeley and Georgetown are at least a decade away.
The rules also permit utilities to seek early site approvals, mostly for sites adjoining existing reactors. Utilities then can apply for a joint construction and operating license, rather than work through two costly and combative licensing proceedings. To these changes, Congress has added billions of dollars in federal liability protections and loan guarantees.
"I don't have any doubt that companies are going to do some pretty hard number-crunching before they proceed," said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the industry's trade association, the Nuclear Energy Institute.
"It never hurts to look at what the history was in that period. I'm not sure what that tells you because the rules have changed."
Stop this lunacy and get on with what has to be done
Disposal? Put it back in the ground, where it camefrom.
Not switching is making us vulnerable to foreign games. Pay now or pay later.
Experts also said:
“The earth is flat”
“The moon is made of cheese”
“The sun rotates around the earth”
“The earth will freeze”
“No sane person will ever need or want an auto”
“Mars has canals an life on it”
well... you get my point..
I'm for regulation, don't get me wrong.
Exactly. Cost is not the only variable to consider.
To deliberately drive costs up, yup they did.
Once you are done with a seismic design and have started to install piping and seismic dampers and all, some professor “finds” a new fault near the plant- stop work, re-do the 3D finite element seismic models, validate them, redesign the piping. Then there’s an endangered moss near where the cooling tower goes, and on and on.
Jimmy Carter was part of the problem, and people misusing IEEE-323 and -650.
Hold on! Look where the story originated. Oakland, Kalifornia. That state is anti-everything so it should not surprise anyone that nuclear power or coal or natural gas or wind farms or rubbing two sticks together would be too expensive and harm the environment.
So? Switching to ethanol and all these global-warming fixes are expensive too and I don’t hear any leftists complaining.
I hate to say it, but the French are ahead of us on the Nuclear energy side.
Just follow the money and see where the trail leads when it comes to who will benefit most when it comes to the ‘greenpush’, it will help explain why some are so hot to declare global warming all man caused ,,
It helps their efforts to be the latest version of “political elite” robber barons maximizing their own personal fortunes at the expense of a gullible electorate.
Not saying alternative energies should not be pursued but what we are witnessing is equivalent to tossing the baby and the bathwater out and trying to substitute a ‘sacrifice is necessary to save the planet’ mantra in its place.
Let the french design em, the chinese manufacture em and use mexican labor. That ‘ll be cheap. Now all we need is insurance.
I know a Nigerian Prince who can get you some.
Dan Kammen, professor... University of California, Berkeley.
B.S. - I rest my case....
He said they used to spend two weeks installing some piping, then the regulations would change and they would spend the next week tearing out the piping they had just installed.
They then spent the next two weeks installing piping to the new regulations. Guess what? The regulations would change again, so they would spend a week tearing out THAT piping... only to install new piping to the original design.
He worked on a plant in northern Virginia for five years... he finally left the business as it was driving him crazy!
Here in Michigan they had the Midland plant something like 98% done - just needed to be fueled - when they stopped work. They eventually converted it to some other source of energy, but we still get stuck in our electric bills with the costs for that plant.
This ‘could’ be why the price of the plants varied so widely... /s
I probably visited that plant in Virginny, Surry. Shoreham on Long Island also got cuaght amidst regulation snafus by the wheel barrel full. It’s nuts.
We need cookie cutter designed plants, standardization of technologies and streamlining of permitting processes..
China will be building new plants, why aren’t we?
France does it.
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