Nuclear power

[macpacheco]

Where do you see the future of nuclear? It's currently 20% of total US generation... where do you see it in 10 years? 20 years?

Beside not having answered a lot of important questions I made to you, you continue to come up with questions designed to try to confirm what you already wrongly concluded. Your questions are useless.
I just finished listening to a 90 minute roundtable with several new nuclear reactor guys, and I was amazed to find out the US NRC is even worse than I thought.

1 - It took westinghouse 26 years to design+certify the AP600, most of it due to it being the first passively safe reactor in the market. Literally they had to pay for the US NRC to understand how passive design worked, in the end the real certification (after preparing the NRC to take in the paperwork) took 10 years ! Today the NRC chargers their customers US$ 280/hr to do regulatory work. A new reactor costs about one billion dollars to certify, including moneys owed to the NRC and documentation costs on the customer side. And then you still need to do all site specific work.

2 - The NRC gets its money from its regulatory work (reactor operators and nuclear suppliers), still its budget is done as a tax funded govt agency, as in, the NRC can't go out and hire more people to accelerate work, even if Westinghouse or GE is willing to upfront the costs, since they have a fixed budget.

Those are just the two craziest problems, in this audio conference alone there were plenty others, with all participants not interested in making any attacks at the NRC, just recognizing well known NRC facts.
So when I say that the biggest problem about the nuclear industry today is the US NRC, it really is. Going from active safety to passive safety is small compared to going MSR reactors. It is estimated the NRC will take 20 years to certify the first MSR reactor.

So I'm not interested in questions that are designed to conclude that the nuclear industry is dead, but rather what we can do to change that. Repeating your mantra just shows how short sighted you are nwdiver.

Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive. It was made expensive due to NRC insanity. You can either help, or please go away.
Before TMI nuclear reactors were destroying the coal industry. Literally. Its interesting that TMI happens right then and results in exploding nuclear costs. There was zero interest by the NRC to do anything in a rational way. None.

 

[nwdiver]

Beside not having answered a lot of important questions I made to you

Please list ~3 questions I have evaded. More than happy to answer more but I don't want to write a novel.

I honestly want to have a productive debate. I work in the nuclear industry and it would be awesome to have more confidence in the future of my trade.

I simply don't see how the growth of solar PV will slow... indeed as prices continue falling I expect it to accelerate. Is Solar perfect? No, there are going to be A LOT of problems as solar becomes a larger and larger supplier of power. The Trillion dollar question is, how do utilities equitably charge for reliable power when many of their customers only use the grid as back-up?

The EEI predicts that the shift from centralized generation to distributed generation will follow a similar curve to the transition from land lines to cell phones. Nearly every technology shift in the last ~20 years has occurred far faster than most people estimated. ~66% of solar was installed in the last ~30 months.

My point is simple... utility consumers are going to continue installing solar PV regardless of what utilities want. Utilities might be able to restrict exports but it's going to be much harder to sell PUCs on restricting production. Money spent on new nuclear would be better spent upgrading the grid to minimize solar curtailment; Solar is going to get installed one way or the other... might as well make good use of it.

 

[macpacheco]

Please list ~3 questions I have evaded. More than happy to answer more but I don't want to write a novel.

I honestly want to have a productive debate. I work in the nuclear industry and it would be awesome to have more confidence in the future of my trade.

I simply don't see how the growth of solar PV will slow... indeed as prices continue falling I expect it to accelerate. Is Solar perfect? No, there are going to be A LOT of problems as solar becomes a larger and larger supplier of power. The Trillion dollar question is, how do utilities equitably charge for reliable power when many of their customers only use the grid as back-up?

The EEI predicts that the shift from centralized generation to distributed generation will follow a similar curve to the transition from land lines to cell phones. Nearly every technology shift in the last ~20 years has occurred far faster than most people estimated. ~66% of solar was installed in the last ~30 months.

My point is simple... utility consumers are going to continue installing solar PV regardless of what utilities want. Utilities might be able to restrict exports but it's going to be much harder to sell PUCs on restricting production. Money spent on new nuclear would be better spent upgrading the grid to minimize solar curtailment; Solar is going to get installed one way or the other... might as well make good use of it.

Look up Terrestrial Energy and ThorCon sites. Light reading. So far you haven't made one comment showing you actually understand how much simpler MSRs are compared to PWR/BWR.
Terrestrial Energy is commited to making it happen in Canada, due to CNSC performance based licensing instead of prescriptive based licensing, meaning CNSC doesn't need to create the MSR certification requirements, Terrestrial must convince CNSC they are safe.

What you need to answer me is why can China/South Korea build a reactor for less than US$ 5 billion that is costing over twice that in the USA.
If you actually dig enough to answer that, I think you'll find the answer why the problem isn't nuclear in general, but rather nuclear in the USA/Germany.
BTW, I have written down Areva EPR as an economical failure. Although we'll probably see 6-7 come online, it's just not an example of how to do Gen III+ nuclear within reasonable costs.

If you don't want to dig, you will never understand why the discrepancies.

A final assumption is an MSR will cost much less than half as much as a PWR.
Oak Ridge did the MSRE experiment at a tiny fraction of the plutonium breeder efforts happening in parallel, like 1-2% of funding. A real reactor that produced power. a 5MWt reactor though, but it ran for 20000 hours. The project was canceled cause MSR wasn't in anybody's mind outside Oak Ridge. They tried to destroy all papers produced by the project. Brave men kept copies of everything against orders from Washington. Risking their pensions. There are a few very good talks about this on you tube. Perhaps you can explain anything Kirk Sorensen missed. He wrote a PhD thesis on just analyzing the Manhattan project journals and why thorium was rejected (explaining that all reasons for rejections don't apply to today's reality). I read the thesis.

The one question I want you to answer is about your electricity bill, your argument that you sell power @ $0.03/kWh, but we both know that's an oversimplification of the data. Look up the questions made before.

I accept that my writing is always raising questions. I don't have all answers, I'm anything but a very curious, scientific person studying nuclear/solar/wind power informally. If you're going to act like were having an pro/anti nuke formal debate, there's no point, I'm not interested in hiding everything that isn't 100% pro nuclear, while you hide everything that isn't 100% anti nuclear. That's the formula for the useless debates we have on youtube.

Getting to the bottom of things require complex reasoning. It can't be stripped down to a paragraph.

 

[nwdiver]

while you hide everything that isn't 100% anti nuclear.

LOL.... then there must be another nwdiver on this forum...

Waste management has been somewhat overblown by the media; The REAL threat is the period that fuel rods spend in cooling ponds. That's what caused most of the problem at Fukushima. Dry Cask storage for spent fuel is effective.

So, in actuality only ~2% of that shoebox is 'nuclear waste'. There is 4.5 Billion tons of Uranium currently dissolved in the oceans. We could dump all the uranium ever mined since the beginning of time into the ocean and the Uranium concentration would only rise by 0.02%. Compare that to the 40% rise in CO2 in the last 100 years. The Japanese actually developed a method of 'mining' uranium from the ocean... so it could be possible to make it a closed cycle. Extract uranium from the ocean then put the depleted Uranium back where it came from. There are also 'Fast Reactors' that are capable of using U-238 as fuel.

If you read my previous posts I've done my best to make the case that nuclear power probably has no future... but nuclear waste concerns are not the reason.

If someone offers a contract to build a nuclear plant for ~$2/w then I say go for it. Yes, obviously that $0.03/kWh is only available for ~25% of the day... then wind will typically take another ~25%... which is why nuclear >$2/w makes very little sense.

I've worked in nuclear power for >10 years... I understand it very well.

 

[macpacheco]

Fukushima radiation killed zero people. Fukushima radiation so far hasn't created a measurable increase in cancer patterns.
Fukushima is down to 10km2 of slightly higher cancer risk area. Should be down to a few km2 in 2 years, zero in 3-5 years.
The same earthquake/tsunami put an oil refinery/natural gas facility burning for 10 days, spewing monster levels of pollution into the air, pollution that will travel very far. CNN showed footage of the refinery burning while talking about the reactor.

Again, answer me this: Is coal acceptable ? Is natural gas ok for decades to come ?
You and me know the natural gas is just like the Oil market. It's manipulated. It's a cartel. What do we do if gas prices shoot to US$ 10 ? Go back to coal ?
Do you think Saudi Arabia is dumping oil to the market to please us, or to bankrupt the competition ?
Like you accepted, there is no blueprint for 100% renewable world (without nuclear) 50 years from now.
And you seem to hate hydro too.

About nuclear cost you will have to prove me that MSRs will be just as expensive as LWRs. Or even half as expensive.
The question is, will the USA continue to make MSRs impossible in the USA ?
Will the NRC continue to be allowed to regulate the nuclear market to an insane cost ?
You are taking the easy path of saying nuclear is expensive, and there's nothing that I'm going to do about it.

You are doing the same as the US govt. Let's just quick the can down the road.
You are not an environmentalist. You don't have a plan to avoid climate change. None.
I have.

You don't have a solution. Just criticism in the form of superficial questions.

Don't ask me again about nuclear price until you answer me WHY THE HELL NUCLEAR IS SO EXPENSIVE IN THE USA AND SO CHEAP IN COUNTRIES WITHOUT ANTI NUCLEAR PARANOIA !

 

[Robert.Boston]

Whoa, whoa, whoa, let's turn down the volume.

@nwdiver isn't opposed to nuclear on principle; he's making the case that the growing penetration of intermittent renewables is undermining the economics of the U.S. nuclear industry. (I would add that the low cost of natural gas isn't helping any.) The truth of his argument is borne out by the premature retirement of existing nuclear plants in the U.S. and the complete lack of interest in building any new nuclear in the U.S. outside of the few remaining utility areas where the utility has cozy relationships with their regulators and are able to recover high costs and higher cost overruns from their ratepayers.

@macpechco, I believe your POV is that the cost of nuclear in the U.S. is unnecessarily high. First, the NRC review process for new reactor designs and particular plant design is grossly inefficient and imposes high barriers to entry for new reactor designs. Second, America's focus on big reactors that require big protection schemes ignores the lower costs available from small reactors. Third, the bespoke construction methods used to build nukes in the U.S. is intrinsically expensive and prone to cost overruns.

If I've summarized the argument accurately, I don't see that you are fundamentally disagreeing, but you are talking past each other. @macpechco, you're unfairly insisting that @nwdiver have a solution to the problems he's identified. If @nwdiver was the Secretary of Energy, then I'd agree. But this is an internet forum, and @nwdiver has shared his insights to identify important problems. It's not reasonable to suppose he also must solve them.

I have to note that in your native Brazil, @macpechco, there is a similar love of huge, bespoke nuclear plants using PWR. One route to opening the world's eyes to the merits of smaller MSRs would be for countries with less-entrenched nuclear regulators and substantial need for new power sources would become leaders in adopting MSRs. Once proven safe in Brazil, for example, the U.S. NRC would likely be much more open to adopting them here. So let me throw the question back to you: why has Brazil been so reluctant to adopt MSRs, but instead clings to >1400 MWe PWR reactors?

- - - Updated - - -

A related but independent thought: Part of the nuclear v. renewables crunch in the U.S. can be explained by the very slow growth in overall demand for electricity in the U.S. There isn't much demand for new power plants at all, and if it weren't for regulatory compliance costs related to air emissions and cooling waters, there would be approximately zero demand for new power plants in the country. Thus, the rise of renewables here in the U.S. is displacing generation at traditional sources.

In economies with rapidly growing electric demand, or (like Japan) a major gap between supply and demand caused by lack/destruction of generation, the rise of renewables doesn't present the same near-term threat to coal & nuclear.

 

[nwdiver]

Fukushima radiation killed zero people.

That remains to be seen... last years tobacco sales hasn't anyone either... yet; Either way... if you read that post I tried to make it clear that nuclear is still acceptable with those risks... BUT those risks need to be managed. Do you really think the public will welcome a nuclear facility into their back yard if they released fission products with the same regularity that the oil industry spills oil? 1g of Cs-137 may be more benign than 40B tons of CO2 but that doesn't mean it's harmless.

I think I see our fundamental disagreement here... your perspective is that nuclear power should be regulated no differently than coal power; I strongly disagree. Nuclear is expensive in the US because of engineering requirements. There are certain parts of the facility designated as IROFS (Items Relied on For Safety). These components have been identified as being critical to keeping the public safe from exposure to a release; they're required to be QL1 and all materials are meticulously tracked from ore to installation. When my plant was under construction we even had some dirt that was designated QL1. Unlike in China people in the US have a say in wether a new nuclear plant is built in their community. The probability of a significant release needs to be VERY VERY low. I believe the NRC guideline is 10k:1.

Far from destroying the nuclear industry the NRC probably saved it. Japans NRA was inept... they allowed Fukushima to install their backup generators in an area where they were vulnerable to flooding. How many nuclear reactors are on-line in Japan today? How many in the US?

Elon has a great engineering quote,"There could be a flaw that has 100:1 odds of being a problem, so unless you build 100 of something you don't see it". The nuclear industry cannot afford release odds >10K:1. They cannot afford an accident. Extensive engineering analysis needs to be done on new technology. We don't even have an operating test MSR anymore that I'm aware of. We'll probably need to operate that for ~10 years before the NRC would license a commercial facility.

Again, answer me this: Is coal acceptable ? Is natural gas ok for decades to come ?

No, it's not acceptable... which is the primary reason I'm wary about $7B nuclear plants. $7B spent on improving our infrastructure to accommodate more variable sources, storage and keeping our current nuclear fleer on-line will displace more fossil fuels than spending it on nuclear plant that will probably be relegated to back-up duty for half the year before its first license expires.

MSRs might work... they might only cost $1/w... we don't know. Solar PV does work, Solar equipment costs ~$1.2/w, Batteries work, Demand Response works, Wind works.... Sorry, eliminating fossil fuels is too important to bet on 'mights'. I'm a skeptic at heart... show me the $2/w MSR and I will support building more of them.

 

[nwdiver]

The myth that MASSIVE storage is required for mass renewable penetration...

 

[William13]

I am not convinced. Good graphics though.

 

[SmartElectric]

Inside the race for Canada’s nuclear waste: 11 towns vie to host deep burial site - The Globe and Mail

Article outlining the thorny issue of Nuclear waste in Ontario.
The cost to store it for 400,000 years hasn't been "saved" yet, only $20B more to go... WTF!!

 

[nwdiver]

Inside the race for Canada’s nuclear waste: 11 towns vie to host deep burial site - The Globe and Mail

Article outlining the thorny issue of Nuclear waste in Ontario.
The cost to store it for 400,000 years hasn't been "saved" yet, only $20B more to go... WTF!!

Very interesting link; I know that Canadians are fond of heavy water reactors... which produce more waste per kWh... I'm just not sure how much more...

 

[neroden]

A related but independent thought: Part of the nuclear v. renewables crunch in the U.S. can be explained by the very slow growth in overall demand for electricity in the U.S. There isn't much demand for new power plants at all, and if it weren't for regulatory compliance costs related to air emissions and cooling waters, there would be approximately zero demand for new power plants in the country. Thus, the rise of renewables here in the U.S. is displacing generation at traditional sources.

In economies with rapidly growing electric demand, or (like Japan) a major gap between supply and demand caused by lack/destruction of generation, the rise of renewables doesn't present the same near-term threat to coal & nuclear.

This is very true. I am predicting a lull in electric demand *worldwide* due to the phaseout of incandescents in favor of LEDs, though; this has a ridiculously huge effect. Also, a bunch of the countries with less-developed electrical grids, such as in Africa, are simply bypassing "grid electricity" entirely and going directly to small distributed solar, so although they have rapidly growing electric demand, solar (and small wind) is eating the market for anything else, because everything else requires transmission lines which the governments are not able to build and maintain.

 

[nwdiver]

My read of the encyclical's position on nuclear is that it's informed by social justice and nuclear proliferation concerns. The Pope wants to see the third world get fully electrified, and nuclear is not how that will happen.

Agreed;

There are more people without electricity today than when Edison cast the first shadow with an electric lamp. In <5 years you'll be able to ship 1GW of solar for ~$1B (enough for a million people in a developing country), it will be able to be assembled, maintained and operated safely by a low skill workforce and last for decades with no security, no over-site, no fuel, no water and no external infrastructure. Nuclear power ANYWHERE is the complete opposite.

Can you imagine if ISIS/ISIL were able to seize a nuclear power station? Nuclear Power in areas with political instability is a non-starter. You don't need to make a bomb... you just need to extract a fuel rod, stick it in a truck and drive it into a city... that would make Fukushima look like a day at the beach. Sure, anyone within 10' of the thing would die of radiation poisoning in a week.... think those guys care?

My position on a nuclear future is similar to how Elon feels about fuel cells....

-Success is not one of the possible outcomes :crying:


..... that said..... I STILL think EXISTING nuclear plants should stay on-line as long as possible.... subsidized if necessary; Just PLEASE stop burning money building more... there are easier ways to waste money. $7/w?!?! That's CRAZY!

 

[3mp_kwh]

One read I have on the Encyclical is the Pope is averse to carbon credits, as if they are some kind of "indulgence". Mass based programs, which even inspire trading, can have the effect of successfully reducing mass-based emissions. OTOH, rate-based programs, which define carbon intensity not by carbon dioxide but by what you chose to put in the watts denominator (ie. "clean power "), have more chance of advantaging your choices than they do reducing CO2. Just watch.

This is where the synergy between what those who are confident about solar, those who economically benefit from solar and those now employed by solar (almost more than those by coal), works with the policies put in place to further advantage these benefits. It happens at the neglect of an equitable view on carbon dioxide. So, if you aren't watching emissions, but instead grading yourself on a scale that fails to respect things like <1% solar generation in the U.S., rising U.S. electric sector emissions, or how "1GW" of solar assumes the panels are running around the globe dodging clouds, you stand an excellent chance of being with a cohort who finds itself saying "Gee, we're half way through 1,000 gigatons of marginal emissions, and its only 2035."

Nuclear vs. solar isn't rational in a fossil fuel filled world. We're still building gas & coal plants. Policy is the tunnel through which you have to see light, not theory, or even theism.

 

[nwdiver]

One read I have on the Encyclical is the Pope is averse to carbon credits, as if they are some kind of "indulgence". Mass based programs, which even inspire trading, can have the effect of successfully reducing mass-based emissions. OTOH, rate-based programs, which define carbon intensity not by carbon dioxide but by what you chose to put in the watts denominator (ie. "clean power "), have more chance of advantaging your choices than they do reducing CO2. Just watch.

George Marshall goes fairly in-depth into the failure of carbon credits in his book. They can often have a NEGATIVE effect... increasing emissions by giving a license to pollute. They're not just some kind of indulgence... they work EXACTLY like the indulgences the church used to sell. Unless I have a conceptual error a carbon tax IS NOT a carbon credit. With a carbon tax you're not simply giving license to release carbon.. you're fixing the market failure and allowing the market to work against emissions.

Nuclear vs. solar isn't rational in a fossil fuel filled world. We're still building gas & coal plants. Policy is the tunnel through which you have to see light, not theory, or even theism.

This isn't 'nuclear vs solar' this is 'We don't have an infinite pile of $$$'....
When I say solar is cheaper than nuclear I don't mean per W.... I mean per Wh. It's currently ~2:1... For every ~$1 invested in solar you displace twice as much CO2 as if you invested that dollar in nuclear power.

Although... upon further consideration... I take back what I said about not building more nuclear plants... Solar is more attractive the cheaper it is vs grid power and building new nuclear plants is a good way of making grid power more expensive; So perhaps building $7/w nuclear plants IS a good thing... Building Vogtle 3 & 4 increased rates ~8%.

I am curious though... at what cost disparity do you give up on nuclear power? 3:1? 4:1? Or do you keep chasing the river hoping that the cost curve somehow turns? Seriously... how much is too much? $8/w? $10/w?

 

[Robert.Boston]

To you point, @nwdiver, I agree that we should be looking at cost metrics carefully and spending our money wisely. It occurred to me that many of the cost calculations I've seen for solar aren't really on the same basis as the cost calculations for nuclear (or coal, or any other "central station") power. Central station generation is always financed, and the financing costs are explicitly included as part of the project's cost. The calculations I've seen for solar tend to ignore the cost of money, i.e. the alternative interest/dividends that could be earned with the capital invested in the solar project. This creates a big gap. Nearly half the rates charged for nuclear plants are to cover financing costs (just as, if you look at the dollars you spend on buying a house, you'll find that the accumulated dollars spent on mortgage interest are usually about equal to the purchase price of the property).

Nuclear is still expensive, but I think that if the lifetime cost of energy for solar and nuclear are calculated on the same basis, the gap is less than some of the numbers I've heard on this forum.

 

[electracity]

We don't know the life cycle cost of nuclear in the U.S.

 

[nwdiver]

Nuclear is still expensive, but I think that if the lifetime cost of energy for solar and nuclear are calculated on the same basis, the gap is less than some of the numbers I've heard on this forum.

I agree that ferreting out total 'actual' cost is as if not more perilous than well-2-wheel or cradle-2-grave energy.

A critical distinction between solar and nuclear is that if you're building a 1GW solar farm you can start generating power when it's 5% complete. Vogtle units 3&4 have been under construction for ~2 years now... if that was a solar farm they would have already exported a few TWhs to the grid. While a 5% complete solar farm can start generating power a 99% complete nuclear plant is still just a liability.

Financing costs account for <15% of the total. Georgia Power was able to secure loans from DOE for much of the cost and depending on credit the interest for those is as low as 0.0% Another component I've seen added to the final cost is the expense of purchasing power that WOULD have been generated by Vogtle if there had not been delays; I would argue that while it seems unfair to use this to compare the cost.... this is becoming standard for nuclear power. Delays and cost overruns aren't a fault.... they're a feature.

I would argue that in aggregate... moving forward TODAY with $X; Dollar per Dollar you would displace ~2x as much CO2 putting that $$$ into solar vs nuclear. When ALL factors are taken into account.

- Solar starts generating kWs in months not years
- Solar costs fall as the project proceeds while nuclear costs almost always rise
- Uncertainty in cooling sources
- Uncertainty in capacity factor (nuclear NEEDS ~90% for economic viability)
- Construction risks

 

[AB4EJ]

We don't know the life cycle cost of nuclear in the U.S.

It is possible to come up with a reasonable estimate? We would need to do that with solar as well (and be sure to account for energy storage for when the solar cells are not producing, and battery replacement costs).

I have heard of nuclear reactors being decommissioned, so maybe some information from that could help to determine a 50-year cost of ownership (groundbreaking through decommissioning complete) for a nuclear plant, and then compare the cost to build and maintain an equivalent amount of solar cells and storage so you have 24x7 power. Oh, rats, do solar cells wear out? Do you have enough space to deploy them? Not easy to make this comparison.

 

[electracity]

We have spent nuclear fuel sitting on site in cooling ponds because we have no storage solution. Like coal plants, the full cost of site cleanup is not included in the electricity price. Like coal plants, investors would like to just walk away from decommissioned plants.

I'm not entirely anti-nuclear. But we don't know what it costs. New nuclear it's not financeable in the U.S. today without huge government subsidies and guarantees.

I do think we should keep existing Nukes running as long as possible.