Toshiba's nuclear project - cheaper than Hinkley C?

[madokie]

Toshiba, the 60% owner of NuGen, has announced it will build 3 AP1000 reactors at Moorside, England - much faster and cheaper than Hinkley C. But the whole proposition, writes David Toke, is seriously implausible.

The equivalent cost of the AP1000 Vogtle project in Georgia is already more expensive than Hinkley C!

Evidence from the USA casts a lot of doubt on hopes that Westinghouse's experimental AP1000 design - promoted by Toshiba for the planned 3.4 GW development in Cumbria - will be cheaper than Hinkley C.

Toshiba, the majority owners of the NuGen franchise, and hopeful developers of the plant say they will ask for a lower price than the £92.50 given for Hinkley C.

Well, good luck to Toshiba in finding investors, even though, no doubt they will, like Hinkley C - but unlike renewable energy schemes - be offered a very valuable amount of loan guarantees from the UK Treasury. Not to mention extra-long premium price contracts lasting 35 years.

http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2240101/toshibas_nuclear_project_cheaper_than_hinkley_c.html

[kristopher]

1. Do you remember that old perfume ad?

Promise them anything but give them a big bill.

With apologies to Arpege.

[Chris Diesel]

2. Too Bad

they can't just give up on uranium and develop thorium.

They need to spend some quality time in Chernobyl or Fukushima

money, money, money, the root of all evil

[kristopher]

3. "Thorium" is a scam.

It's just the latest pea in the nuclear shell game of "if you give us just one more chance we'll get it right this time".

It has already been rejected because the current technologies are, in sum, better; and they aren't good enough.

[LouisvilleDem]

4. Do some research

Thorium wasn't rejected because current technologies were better, it was rejected because the thorium fuel cycle doesn't provide material useful for nuclear weapons.


Nothing summarizes the nuclear power debacle better than the old adage, “…as we begin, so shall we go.” For half a century, the electrical power industry has been trying to make success of failure, safety of danger, and efficiency of wastefulness because it chose the wrong nuclear fuel to produce electricity from reactors. Instead of using thorium, it used uranium, and the economic, political and environmental costs of this mistake have been incalculable.

But “mistake” is technically not the correct word. The decision to use uranium rather than thorium was more a tragic misjudgment, a foolish choice based on the worst of reasons. At the end of World War II, the United States was flush with political and military power — and the atom bomb.

Uranium was the element that released the explosive power of this bomb, and it was the element favoured by the military because it produced the fissile plutonium needed for escalating the nuclear arms race that came to be called the Cold War. Prototypes of thorium reactors had been operated successfully and their safe production of electricity had already been demonstrated. This was the reactor favoured for commercial use by physicists like Alvin Weinberg, a thorium proponent (Superfuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source of the Future, by Richard Martin). But a proliferation of thorium reactors was opposed by military minds such as Hyman Rickover, an admiral in the US navy, who wanted to preserve the dominance of uranium reactors because its byproducts could be easily weaponized — not one of thorium’s qualities. When the upper echelons of the military migrated to the corporations building nuclear reactors, they brought with them their preference for uranium, even though it was a far more unstable and dangerous fuel than thorium.


http://commonsensecanadian.ca/thorium-reactor-energy-option/

[madokie]

5. The main purpose of pushing the use of splitting atoms to boil water to make steam

to begin with was the MIC's need for more of those awesome, as they seen the Atom, later nuclear bombs. Maybe I should say Government's need instead of the MIC but to me they're pretty much replaceable one with the other on this issue.
We the people were sold a pig in a poke when they told us that nuclear energy was safe, cheap and clean. Its not safe as Chernobyl and more recently Fukushima shows, never was cheap as the government subsidies are proof of and its only clean in the sense of CO2 production during operation.
No matter how much lipstick you put on that pig she's still one ugly critter.

By putting so many of our eggs in the nuclear will save us basket we lost a lot of time in development in more benign ways of producing our electrical energy. We lost a good 50 years of discovery.

Now its time for the new Physicist, old Scientist to edumacate me I guess
I shall wait with bated breath and whispering humbleness for this old dog to be spat upon. May the dog and pony show begin.

[kristopher]

6. MIT's The Future of Nuclear Power is pretty well accepted as the definitive study

On the feasibility of the various technologies and "fuel cycles"; it was updated in 2010. I'm basically reporting their conclusions. There has been a group of hucksters trying to promote thorium on the internet and posting a lot stuff that is designed to explain away the very real shortcomings of the technology by appealing to antiauthoritarian sentiments.

Think about it. You have about 8 countries that are engaged in cutthroat competition to sell reactors around the world but for some reason that competitive environment hasn't driven them to develop and market the miraculous thorium fuel cycle (or the "long overlooked and forgotten IFR" as another example)?

Does that really pass the smell test for you? Or is it more plausible that there are very real drawbacks to the system that those hoping to profit off of it aren't telling you about?

[Altair_IV]

7. I guess it eluded you..

You have about 8 countries that are engaged in cutthroat competition to sell reactors around the world but for some reason that competitive environment hasn't driven them to develop and market the miraculous thorium fuel cycle (or the long overlooked IFR as another example)?

On the contrary, the partnership of General Electric and Hitachi *has* picked up the Integral Fast Reactor technology. I guess it eluded you because they changed the name to "PRISM":

http://gehitachiprism.com/what-is-prism/evolution-of-prism/

Altair_IV

[kristopher]

9. Right. How many of those are on order?

[madokie]

11. _IV

LOL

[madokie]

10. If at first you can't succeed

change the name and have another go at it.

Man o man you are shallow if you think you can come here and pull the wool over our eyes like this #_IV

What I want to know is if this is the IV iteration then who were the other three. We know who two was but I can't for the life of me figure out who that missing one was.

[madokie]

8. If thorium reactors was what they are purported to be

We'd have a shit pot full of them by now.
Its a dog and pony, smoke and mirrors type deal if ever there was one.
Hell even in my infinite wisdom I can see that

[LouisvilleDem]

12. The MIT study does not even mention LFTR

So I'm not sure what you think that study proves...

[kristopher]

13. But it does discuss the thorium fuel cycle.

[LouisvilleDem]

14. But not the most interesting one

LFTR completely changes the analysis, and yet they don;t even mention it.

[kristopher]

15. No, it doesn't "completely change the analysis"

But that is what the hucksters try to make people believe.