> The main cost of a nuclear plant is the initial construction
the main cost is storing the waste for 10k+ years with zero defect rate
the main cost is storing the waste for 10k+ years with zero defect rate
Even equipment used to decommission a nuclear reactor becomes contaminated. It’s not that dangerous for very long, but safe disposal is still expensive.
From a pro nuclear website: 97% of the waste produced is classified as low- or intermediate-level waste (LLW or ILW). Such waste has been widely disposed of in near-surface repositories for many years. In France, where fuel is reprocessed, just 0.2% of all radioactive waste by volume is classified as high-level waste (HLW) http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
For example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste...
So if you don't like the nuclear waste we already have, build newer reactors to get rid of it.
(Technically an exception is the bn-800 but it was modified rebuild from an 80s aborted reactor construction project, to get rid of weapons grade plutonium, before the the us/russia treaty fell apart... Good story at http://euanmearns.com/the-bn-800-fast-reactor-a-milestone-on... )
Not really, what happened is there were "good enough" designs, there was a China Syndrome inspired move away from nuclear, and the government had little to no interest in reactor designs that made it hard to recover weapon materials.
Bill Gates is championing both molten salt and traveling wave reactors that "burn" nuclear waste.
There are other very interesting designs, including the Xscale helium-cooled pebble bed design. It, and many of the molten salt designs, don't require water cooling. Not needing a source of nearby water vastly expands siting options.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/x-energy-developing-pebbl...
Another interesting design is ThorCon's molten salt reactor, which it recommends siting 100 feet underground, eliminating almost all security issues including plane strike.
The subsidies have been in the form of the MOX program, PRISM, and other gov funded fuel recycling programs in many countries. The problems remain: weapons grade Pu profileration risk, unviable cost, dearth of demonstrated working large plants due to technical difficulties inherent in the designs, difficulties scaling up to commercial sizes competitive w traditional designs.
Yes, there are many interesting designs on the drawing table, same as it has been for decades...
We are now getting China and France to build our new nuclear, having successfully driven our own industry into the ground by lying to our customers.
edit - what worries me about nuclear power is the attitude and practices of the industry, not the technology per-se. The only group I have ever heard of that comes up to scratch for how you would want nuclear plants to be run is the US Navy, though that might be because they live on them.
"In December 2016 the government estimated decontamination, compensation, decommissioning, and radioactive waste storage costs at 21.5 trillion yen ($187 billion), nearly double the 2013 estimate." [1]
For comparison purposes, Diablo Canyon cost $13.8B to construct in 2018 dollars. [2] That same page states graceful decommissioning of the plant is estimated to cost $4B (!) dollars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
That is poetic justice, given that the Japanese government could have made sure the backup generators were stored securely. They were, as it turned out, fairly important. ;-)
Don't forget that a couple of working diesel generators providing power to keep the cooling working would have entirely avoided the disaster. Some were actually flown there in time, but the connectors were wrong and time ran out.
> This money could have been spent on 50GW of wind capacity instead.
Sure, and when the wind doesn't blow, and the storage runs out, and it's a nighttime cold event - people freeze to death. That's aside from the economic effects on industry from unreliable energy sources.
Wind costs generally aren't being calculated correctly, as reliable backup power is required for any wind that dips into the "minimum baseline" power supply, which is the essential power required for basic needs and industry.
Nuclear is overall one of the safest ways of producing energy, and is the ONLY scalable, reliable power source that doesn't emit CO2. With mass-produced, modular, reactors, it can also be the cheapest power source overall. Cheaper than wind, solar or coal.
The world desperately needs mass nuclear power from a couple of perspectives. If Global Warming is in fact a major threat, there is no choice in the matter. That is my touchstone as to whether or not the "Green" movement has gotten serious about it.
This is an example of pro-nuclear ignorance. Renewables scale just fine, and are sufficiently reliable with a properly designed energy system. Their huge levelized cost advantage over nuclear means one can afford to mitigate their intermittency with overcapacity, transmission, storage (short and long term) and demand dispatch.
An average 3 MW wind turbine will generate about 6 GWh of energy per year. It's estimated that wind farms can produce around 4 MW per square kilometer, so let's go with around 8 GWh per sqkm.
In 2014 the UK used about 302 TWh of electricity (out of a total energy usage of 2249 TWh). To match the 302 TWh of electricity with these wind turbines you'd need wind farms covering 37,750 square kilometers. To cover the UK's total energy usage, you'd need an area greater than the surface area of the UK to be covered in wind farms.
These are back of the envelope calculations, but they do point out the problem rather well.
Europe in general will have trouble in a solar-powered future, though. Energy intensive industry will migrate to the cheap energy closer to the equator.
* that would mean 17.5MW/sq km. So yes, better than GP figure. No, still not usable (improvement of only factor 4.5).
EDIT: Quick calculation based on numbers here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#/medi... gives me solar utilization factor of 9.5 for Germany in 2016.
Also lots of wind parks are off shore where there’s less vegetation and hills to slow down wind.
And 2249 TWh / 8 GWh = 281,125
>Also lots of wind parks are off shore where there’s less vegetation and hills to slow down wind.
They're more expensive to construct and tear down after. They do generate more power, on average, but in these calculations with average it would only give you a ~20% advantage.
At this point, I will believe a new generation of reactors is cheap and wonderful only after N of them have been built, costs have not exploded, and the maker isn't in bankruptcy.
The implication that stupid people are the ones lobbying against nuclear is deplorable. I'd argue the shoe is on the other foot. Nuclear's cost disease renders continued pursuit of the technology very difficult to justify.
Most often it's ignorance and not stupidity.
> I'd argue the shoe is on the other foot. Nuclear's cost disease renders continued pursuit of the technology very difficult to justify.
Nuclear's "cost disease" is a function of an industry that, for one thing, functions a lot like the dinosaur space launch companies (ULA). Somehow SpaceX came along and completely disrupted things.
The small, agile companies pursuing small modular nuclear reactors are a lot like SpaceX. Probably the most disruptive idea is that of building the reactors at factories, and then transporting and installing them with little additional work. That avoids the entire red tape and risk of one-off construction, and affords economies of scale.
Since there's a very effective and strident anti-nuclear lobby here in the US, these companies will get started elsewhere. Keep an eye on ThorCon, X-Energy, Terrapower, and NuScale.
> According to IAEA, there are 50 designs or concepts in various development or planning stages around the world, with four in advanced construction in Argentina, Russia, and China.
https://www.scottmadden.com/reports/V17_I2/EIU_V17_I2_2017_D...
SpaceX operates by testing a lot and blowing things up. You're not getting that with nuclear. The SMR makers have not delivered much; the closest to delivery, NuScale, is not giving cost improvements that will be sufficient to turn nuclear's ebbing tide.
And what "facts" would those be, exactly...?
Let's start with the incentive to mess with nuclear at all, beginning with the cost of fuel.
>> A modern American light-water reactor has a fuel burnup in the neighborhood of 45 GWd / MTU (45 billion watt-days per metric ton uranium).
So, a metric ton of uranium produces 4.5 billion Watt-days, or 108 GWH.
By contrast, a metric ton of natural gas produces 15.2 million Watt-hours, or 0.0152 GWH.
That means a ton of uranium produces 7,105 times the energy of a ton of natural gas. A ton of uranium costs about $1,400. A ton of natural gas costs about $150. That means the natural gas equivalent of a ton of uranium would cost $150 x 7,105, or about $1,070,000.
That looks like a pretty big incentive. The other is the zero CO2 issue, with nuclear being the only, sole, solitary, single, scalable, existing reliable source of zero CO2 energy. I hope I don't need to explain why that's relevant.
> SpaceX operates by testing a lot and blowing things up.
SpaceX has an exemplerary safety record. More misinformation...
> You're not getting that with nuclear. The SMR makers have not delivered much; the closest to delivery, NuScale, is not giving cost improvements that will be sufficient to turn nuclear's ebbing tide.
ThorCon is estimating to-the-plug electricty costs of three to five cents per KWH. That's vastly cheaper than any "green" electricity source, and better than any alternative in most locations.
Nuclear done sanely is at least competitive with fossil fuels, and is the only scalable, reliable source of zero-CO2 electricity. Having enough grid storage to (usually) make it through low output periods for wind and solar is nothing beyond wildest fantasy at this point.
Nuclear power is a necessity if a very low CO2 trajectory is required.
2) The energy density of uranium is admittedly spectacular. If you compare only uranium prices and fossil fuel prices, uranium wins every time. The problem is that all the equipment and personnel to turn uranium into electricity end up making American uranium-fueled electricity more expensive than gas-fueled electricity. That's why cheap gas has pushed so many operating American nuclear plants into the red, and why those plants need support beyond market prices to keep producing their steady low-emissions electricity. Quoting uranium price alone for nuclear power is like quoting silicon price alone for solar power -- it has very little bearing on the final delivered price of electricity.
3) Practically every power reactor design claims to supply affordable electricity before anyone actually builds one. The EPR did. The AP1000 did. Like pfdietz I'll trust ThorCon's claims after they have operating reactors to prove it, not before. New reactor designs claiming big improvements are no more special than big claims about spectacular new batteries or solar cells. Wait for commercial delivery, then measure. Most of these exciting early claims go nowhere.
The levelized cost of solar and wind are well below that of new nuclear. If you did not know this, well, you were ignorant.
> That looks like a pretty big incentive.
Funny you should compare natural gas and nuclear. Exelon, which operates 23 nuclear reactors in the US, did the same thing. The conclusion Exelon came to was that new nuclear construction is hopelessly uncompetitive with natural gas fired combined cycle in the US at current natural gas prices. An effective CO2 tax of $300-400/ton would be needed for new nuclear to compete.
Yes, nuclear saves on fuel costs, but it's a penny wise, pound foolish saving.
> SpaceX has an exemplerary safety record. More misinformation...
SpaceX blows up plenty of stuff IN DEVELOPMENT. They just blew up their manned capsule during ground tests, for example. Applying the same development methodology to nuclear would be a nonstarter. In nuclear you need to avoid accidents everywhere. Paralysis by analysis follows.
> ThorCon is estimating to-the-plug electricty costs of three to five cents per KWH.
Uh huh. That estimate, and $5, will get you a cup of caffeinated brown water at Starbucks.
So the catch 22 then. Don't build newer reactors until you prove something that requires building them to prove.
> Nuclear's cost disease renders continued pursuit of the technology very difficult to justify.
Why isn't the solution analyzing where the money is going so that the wasteful expenses can be eliminated then?
(Note that one of the major ones is regulatory requirements changing during construction, which is an entirely politically-driven cost.)
> Why isn't the solution analyzing where the money is going so that the wasteful expenses can be eliminated then?
Why do you think that hasn't been tried?
You seem to have the preconception that there must be some way for nuclear to live up to your expectations for it, despite all the evidence that it can't and won't.
There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic that the Earth's natural nuclear fuel resources can find a way to be effectively used by humanity. We've done an OK job at it so far. It's relatively safe. It's very low-carbon, and it has been making ~60% of the USA's carbon free energy for a few decades. Not a bad track record.
But it's a bit too expensive. So we just have to figure out ways to make it cheaper.
This certainly doesn't seem insurmountable. I don't think a "can't and won't" curse is at all warranted.
I think nuclear energy optimism is largely based on wishful thinking.
Meanwhile nuclear plants go on saving millions of lives by displacing air pollution deaths. China is building high-power district heater reactors to reduce coal deaths in Winter [1].
You're absolutely right that rapid improvement requires high volume. That's probably the fundamental challenge of nuclear right now. MIT is working on shipyard constructed nuclear stuff that has these characteristics for this precise reason [2]. UltraSafe nuclear's microreactors are attempting the same dynamic [3].
Human progress depends wholly on people taking bets like this.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-nuclear-heating/chi...
[2] http://news.mit.edu/2015/new-look-floating-nuclear-power-062...
None of these are Gen IV reactors, thought the last two are labelled as gen III+, which looks like the kind of labelling a hopeful chipmaker might slap on a processor when they add some bells and whistles to an existing design. Do you know where any gen IV reactors are being built currently? I hear a lot about them, but they seem mostly to be vapourware.
Also, Hinkley C, which is currently under construction, has a strike price so high it will probably be mothballed as soon as it is finished, with an analysis by London stockbrokers Liberum Capital describing it as 'the most expensive conventional power station in the world' and 'economically insane'.
This is the new nuclear actually being built. If there is better, safer, cheaper available in gen IV reactors, why is that not under construction instead? If they are available, the UK government will presumably also know about these reactors, yet it is apparently not interested in building them.
https://blogs.platts.com/2016/03/29/nuclear-safety-upgrades-...
"Power companies in Japan are willing to spend billions of dollars on reactor upgrades because they expect the investments will help them reduce substantial costs spent on replacement fossil fuels. Restarting the two Takahama reactors, for example, could save about Yen 10 billion/month for Kansai Electric Power Co., a company spokesman said March 22."