Posted on 03/06/2016 2:51:44 AM PST by iowamark
There's a compelling argument that the world ought to be building many more nuclear power plants. We'll need vast amounts of carbon-free energy to stave off global warming. It's not at all clear that renewables can do the job alone. And nuclear is a proven technology, already providing 11 percent of electricity globally.
So what's the catch? Cost. More than safety or waste issues, cost is nuclear's Achilles' heel. Modern-day reactors have become jarringly expensive to build, going for $5 billion to $10 billion a pop. Worse, the price tag seems to be rising in many places. Back in the 1960s, new reactors in the US were one of the cheaper energy sources around. Two decades later, after a series of missteps, costs had increased sixfold — a big reason we stopped building plants.
Ever since, experts have been debating whether or not nuclear's cost problems are an intrinsic flaw that will doom the technology. Nuclear skeptics, such as Joe Romm, argue that soaring costs are inevitable if you try to build massive reactors that need layers of safeguards.
But there's also an optimistic story for nuclear — one that I think is worth hearing out. A recent paper in the journal Energy Policy by Jessica Lovering, Arthur Yip, and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute looked at construction costs for hundreds of reactors built in the US, France, Canada, Japan, German, India, and South Korea between 1960 and 2010. Their data tells a more nuanced story.
Nuclear construction costs in the US did spiral out of control, especially after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. But this wasn't universal. Countries like France, Japan, and Canada kept costs fairly stable during this period. And South Korea actually drove nuclear costs down, at a rate similar to what you see for solar. Studying these countries can offer lessons for how to make nuclear cheaper — so that it can become a useful clean energy resource around the world...
Here's a look at where America's nuclear industry went awry — and how France and South Korea avoided those mishaps.
I’m old now and some days out in the pasture, but once in a while I still actually work.
Now days for what might seem ordinary work, the nuclear rules have become the norm with traceability, quality and inspection. It is not my place to say if that is good or bad, but it just is. American engineering methods forged in the nuclear process are the norm, or seem to be, on international work of non American engineers.
If there was a nuclear resurrection today, what was extreme is now the norm, and the costs for the nuclear work might not be extraordinary. I”ll never know
Thorium was the first word that crossed my mind when I read the post, and it’s good to see that’s the case with others here, too. Forget this about the left at your peril: they do not want an inexpensive kind of ANY energy. The leftist vision of paradise has us shivering in the dark, and playing with our own waste (aka compost). The reason I’ve most often seen for thorium’s obscurity is that you can’t use it to produce weapons-grade uranium. Has even 1 presidential candidate mentioned thorium?
TMI experienced the worst-case scenario multiple failures for a reactor of that design. And how many people died?
ZERO.
Chernobyl was mismanagement of a reactor design that already was 20 years obsolete when it was built (huzzah for communism!).
Fukashima was the result of 20 years of insufficient maintenance and government-condoned neglect. In the aftermath, there should have been a rash of sepuku, but there wasn’t.
OTOH, the US Navy has 400 portable nuclear reactors sailing around the world. The US has more experience than anyone with producing safe nuclear energy than anyone, possibly excepting the French whose 59 fission reactors produce about 70% or their nation’s electricity.
“It’s not at all clear that renewables can do the job alone.”
To the contrary, it is patently clear that “renewables” CANNOT do the job. Not nearly.
First of all, there’s the matter of variability. The wind doesn’t always blow, and when it does blow, it’s rarely steady. And the sun, ...well, there’s clouds, and there’s also something called “night.” Wind and solar are inherently too variable to support a stable power grid. What the Euros have found (particularly the Germans and the Brits) is that the total output of wind and solar must be backed up by at least 85% of that same capacity in conventional power production facilities running in a condition known as “spinning reserve.” The problem is, owing to the efficiency of conventional modern power plants, running at spinning reserve does not save significant amounts of fuel (and the most ‘modern’ coal-fired plants aren’t capable of spinning reserve). So in order to save the environment by converting to wind and solar, you still have pay for the building, operation and maintaining of 85% of the same capacity in the old non-renewable energy sources. What the Germans have found is that, in the end, renewable energy costs about three times (3x) per kWh what conventional does.
Also significant to note that nowhere in Europe has even a single conventional power plant been decommissioned because it had been obsoleted by renrewables.
Second, there’s the question of availability. You can build conventional powerplants right where the people are. You have to collect renewables wherever nature provides them. So how much solar power can you count on in a place like Seattle, with ~50 days of sunshine a year?
And you can’t build wind turbines near human settlements because the low-frequency ‘thrum’ they introduce into the ground drives people off the edge.
So what you get is wind and solar farms built in isolated locations which results in large losses in efficiency because of the distance the electricity has to travel from the source to the consumer.
Wind turbines also are as susceptible to icing as are airplane wings, and have de-icing equipment built in to them, powered by the same electricity they generate (which, of course, compromises their efficiency). And if they shed collected ice unevenly, it causes an imbalance that can cause the fan to sling itself apart. So they have the capacity to auto-shot down as an act of self preservation. In worst conditions, de-icing energy demands can run so high they actually consume more than they produce, which means they’re actually drawing current from the grid.
Which means that in a place like Montana, or Buffalo NY, wind power will be a very dodgy proposition when you need it most, in the dead of winter. Not a lot of sunshine in a snowstorm either. The UK’s hideously expensive North Sea offshore wind farms famously spend a goodly portion of the coldest days of every winter in auto-shutdown.
Using the standard wind turbine deployment scheme, enough windmills to provide 100% of the US’s electricity needs (presuming adequate wind) would require a land mass slightly greater than the state of Nevada. All of which would be rendered uninhabitable to humans in the doing.
OTOH, enough nuclear power plants to run the entire country would fit inside of Dallas County.
Nuclear power also has the added benefit of being a cheap source of hydrogen gas. And the hydrogen fuel cell is the only power source that can equal the power output and the range of a fossil fuel-powered automobile that emits no pollution of its own and can be refueled (from flat empty) in just minutes. Why the auto industry hasn’t already invested in HFC refueling infrastructure is God’s own mystery (Hindenberg hangover, maybe?), but HFC-powered cars are our best opportinity to tell the Saudis to kiss our red, white and blue tooches without materially changing our driving habits.
Good point... Digital control systems were very expensive back in the day...but now they are very common, widely understood and cheaply manufactured...
You can buy a pretty decent computer for $300 bucks now days...
In Washington state in the 70s we had a governor Dixie Lee Ray who was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Although she was a Democrat she scoffed at the Climate Change greenies and supported allowing super tankers to dock in Puget Sound.
Unfortunately our WPPS nuclear reactors at Hanford and out by the coast were shoddily built, had leaks and were ultimately shut down.
On another topic, Washington state has enormous hydroelectric potential but hydro has not been rated as a “green” energy source, so instead we have added a bunch of windmills that seldom turn and generate expensive power as well as foolhardy solar schemes when for about two thirds of the year it is raining or, if not actual rain, the skies are gray.
Yucca Mountain?
Climate does change, whether we humans drive that or not.
So far, none of the proposed permanent repository methods is without a serious flaw, which is why 'spent' fuel rods continue to sit in ponds all over.
Reprocessing that material would cut down on the problem, but IIRC, that was done away with by treaty during the Carter years.
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