New Studies Support New Nukes

[phantom power]

A new study released by the University of Chicago combined with demonstration projects approved by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) make it more likely that new nuclear power plants will be brought on-line in the near- to mid-term. A new study from the University of Chicago finds the future cost of nuclear power production to be comparable to gas and coal-based energy generation.

The principal findings of the Chicago study demonstrate that future nuclear power plants in the United States can be competitive with natural gas and coal, a conclusion likely to encourage prospective plant developers. The University of Chicago researchers determined the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for coal to be $33 to $41 per megawatt-hour (MWh), $35 to $45 per MWh for gas-fired production, and $31 to $46 per MWh for new nuclear plants, once early plant costs are absorbed. The LCOE is the amount invested to cover operating costs plus annualized capital costs of operating a nuclear generating facility.

The study notes that the principal economic barrier to nuclear power will be the ability to address the elevated costs associated with building and operating the first few nuclear plants. Early plant costs, which can include "first-of-a-kind" engineering costs and the elevated construction and financing expenses expected for the first U.S. nuclear plants initiated since the 1970s, disappear by the time a third or fourth plant comes online.

Licensing issues and regulatory concerns have also impeded development of new nuclear plants for decades. The projects announced by the DOE are intended to demonstrate the untested combined Construction and Operating License (COL) regulatory process and will enable the power generation companies to make firm business decisions on ordering and building new nuclear power plants.
http://www.energyusernews.com/CDA/ArticleInformation/coverstory/BNPCoverStoryItem/0,2582,138425,00.html

[Massacure]

1. Fair enough. I would love it if the utilities would replace our nukes

They are old, and creep me compared to the new ones which are many times safer.

If only the U.S. would reprocesses its waste to cut down on the amount of the longetivity of radiation from nuclear waste.

[phantom power]

2. They seemed to be referring to "generation-III+" reactors

Maybe these have better fuel-cycle properties, too. Maybe NNadir will drop by and offer his expertise...

[NNadir]

3. These are state of the art reactors, definitely very modern and safe.

Heavy water CANDU's are tremendous reactors. Heavy water moderated, they can achieve very high burn-ups with proliferation resistant Thorium based fuels. They can function like near breeders. High burn-ups mean excellent fuel economy and lower reprocessing costs and impact.

Pressurized water reactors (PWR) like the AP-1000 are a proven design and have a very low failure rate. In fact, the only case of a failure of a PWR, Three Mile Island, did not result in a single loss of life, because the ultimate safety system, the containment building worked.

The API-1000 seems like a design where all of the thousands of reactor years of experience with this class of reactors, have been appreciated and evaluated. I went over the web site for the AP-1000, a design I'm with which I have only limited familiarity (because my nuclear hobby focuses on more exotic high temperature designs like Molten Salt Reactors and High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactors).

The Web Site is here: http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/

Also there is this graphic description from an academic institution:

http://www.eng.tulane.edu/FORUM_2003/Matzie%20Presentation.pdf

From what I can see from a cursory look is that this API-1000 is an excellent design. It has added passive safety features not seen the in the first generation reactors, particularly in a LOCA (Loss of Cooling Accident). Although early generation PWR and BWR's had the most important safety feature of all: A negative void coefficient - meaning that the fission reaction shuts down if the coolant/moderator is lost, they were lacking in passive cooling, meaning they still risked meltdown from fission product heat. (This is what happened at Three Mile Island.) This reactor is designed to address these concerns.

The main risk of building these plants is not at all technical. Probably the main restriction is financial and has nothing to do with nuclear power per se, but every thing to do with infrastructure in general. The problem has to do with the fact that we actually have nothing left with which to invest in the future.

The concern of which I am speaking is, of course, that the American currency is probably going to collapse because of the enormous stupidity of a slight (alleged) majority of the American electorate, leading to run away interest and capital costs. Although this reactor is designed to be built cheaply, it still is a capital intensive project, and the ultimate cost of operation is tied to the interest rates at the time of construction. Given that we are now likely to experience an Argentine type run on our currency, given that we have just voted to become a neo-Stalinist banana republic, I am not optimistic that these fine plants will actually be built.

[phantom power]

5. Thank you for giving me hope and then reminding me that

actually we are doomed.

[NNadir]

7. I didn't mean to be such a downer.

I'm feeling very depressed about the future. I hope we can shake it off. I hope I can be proved wrong about the last part.

[phantom power]

8. I'm in the same funk. I believe that we have the resources to

make it thru the next century, and come out strong. But we're squandering everything we have. Economic, environmental, military, human resources. We're letting it all spiral out of control.

It's painful, because we really have so much potential. Like watching a promising adolescent self-destruct after joining a religeous cult, or from a drug addiction.

Actually, it's even worse, cuz we're all along for the ride.

[NNadir]

9. Well, that's a good analogy about the kid.

Maybe though, we just have to accept what's happening, let the "kid" get smacked around in some Tijuana jail as a consequence of his bender, maybe even do some time, and when he gets back, we'll be there to try to help him get his dopey ass straightened out, and help him get back on the right track.

It could happen. I've seen that sort of thing.

Maybe in a few weeks, we'll get our chins back up, and fight back to save whatever can be saved.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Does this include decommissioning costs?

Are the decommissioning costs sufficiently well known yet, for modern reactors, or are they still estimates?

[NNadir]

6. Two reactors have been decommissioned, Yankee Rowe and Shippingport.

I don't believe that in either case, the costs added that significantly to the per watt costs of running the reactor.

The expectation is now that modern reactors of the Gen III class will have lifetimes approaching a century. The brilliant nuclear scientist Alvin Weinberg, inventor of the molten salt reactor has written that nuclear reactors may be considered "eternal" in the future. I don't know if I believe that, because of certain known effects of neutrons on metals.

(I will say that I am concerned about some current licensing extentions into the unknown, but then again, I am hardly as knowledgable as Alvin Weinberg.)

From my perspective, a major cost of production of nuclear plants is the preparation of Hafnium free Zirconium. If nothing else, this metal should be recycled.

[struggle4progress]

10. If the new generation nukes will be so safe, then why did the NRC ...

... revise its rules to eliminate almost any possibility of citizen challenge to the licensing of this new generation?

[NNadir]

11. Possibly because morons "challenge" nuclear reactors on specious

grounds. If anyone challenged coal plants on what actually occurs, and not merely on they might imagine, not one would have been built anywhere in the United States.

When you can actually show someone killed anywhere in the United States by the nuclear portion of a nuclear reactor, maybe you will have a case, but until then you are relying solely on fear and fantasy in opposing nuclear energy.

When you oppose nuclear energy you are costing lives, actually millions of lives. There is something called "air pollution" about which you are totally indifferent. There is something called, "acid rain," which has no meaning to you. There is something called "the Greenhouse effect" which is far beneath your consideration." There is something called toxic run-off, that you completely don't care about. It's clear and it's simple. Nuclear energy is safer on these grounds than any of its alternatives on all these scores.

But don't worry, as I stated earlier in the thread, fear, ignorance and fantasy have won in the United States. We are doomed. You can enjoy you self enormously in the coming dark ages, engaging in Bushian doublespeak, naming whatever Ludditism so satisfies you as a struggle for "progress."

[struggle4progress]

12. Frivolous cases get thrown out. If the new generation of nukes ...

... will be so safe, I would expect them to withstand challenge; but the nuclear industry has instead worked long and successfully to eliminate any real possibility of court challenges.

[NNadir]

13. Nonsense. Every argument you have presented has been frivilous.

You will challenge this plants because you have not even a primitive understanding of risk analysis. You will be allowed to kill people with legalistic balderdash and now insist on the legal right to enforce your ignorance on the grounds you are extremely proud of your ability to display it with indifference to the actual case.

When we were defeating the Shoreham plant on Long Island we used just such an absurd strategy. Among other things, we argued that the Long Island Lighting Company could not prevent traffic build-ups on the the Long Island Expressway during any nuclear accident we could dream up. We got this incredible stupidity in the newspapers and we riled up the same ignorant masses of the sort who voted for George Bush.

As a result our efforts tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of persons on Long Island and the surrounding areas, have died from air pollution since our dubious "victory" in the early 1980's. Not one of the objections we rose at that time had any practical merit when viewed as a likely event, because no pressurized water reactor any where on the planet earth has failed in such a way as to have irradiated people so as to have killed them. Not one, not on a traffic filled day, not on a lonely snowy night, not one in dead of summer, not one, EVER, ANYWHERE.

We were wrong. We behaved abysmally. But at least we were operating in an environment in which there was far less data than you have now, if in fact, data mattered to you, which clearly it doesn't.

Not a single person on the planet has died from the controlled storage of what you pathetically fret about when you imagine that there is such a thing as "nuclear waste." In so doing you demonstrate your complete lack of even the barest concept of the most important issue in environmentalism: Recycling.

I have not seen one idea from you on this website that addresses any reality. Even now you are appealing to specious legalistic arguments and not to technical issues. You want to have the right to sue in order to demand that people who actually know what they're talking about can convince moral fools of something they are basically too stupid and ignorant to understand. You assert this as some kind of "right" even though you cannot demonstrate a SINGLE PERSON EVER KILLED BY OVER TWO THOUSAND REACTOR YEARS of operation in the United States.

Now I can PROVE by appeal to scientific journal articles that millions of people on the planet are likely to have died in the last year alone from air pollution. As mysterious as it might seem, millions minus zero is millions, and that number is the number of people who have been killed because all coal and oil plants have not been replaced by nuclear plants.

Now, every soldier who has died in Iraq, every person killed by heavy metal poisoning from coal plants, every person killed in coal mine explosions, collapses, every person drowned or poisoned in as containment dam failures, every person who has died from air pollution has done so because people like you have failed to do the moral thing and think.

Since you kill, there needs to be regulations against your nonsense, just as we have laws against other killers. We don't need laws to protect your alleged "right" to "raise" challenges. The "challenges" you will raise will simply be specious, ill informed and gratuitous. The actual challenge in this matter has been proven by nearly 5 decades of EXPERIENCE with nuclear operations. Nuclear energy saves lives. Now, a mental midget might confuse this statement with a claim that "nuclear energy will be completely risk free for all time," but that is NOT the statement I am making. The statement that I am making is different: There is no form of energy on the planet as safe as nuclear energy with the exception of wind power.

I bumped my ExternE study thread , collating the work of thousands of EU scientists, to prove my assertion, but I guess you were unable to understand what the study cited therein said or couldn't be bothered to actually read it, since it might conflict with your preconceptions and your religion. I certainly don't want people who demonstrate such laziness as this sort of moral indifference represents to make decisions about the health of my children.

Go back to your coal clouds, bub. As I said to you elsewhere, if you want to kill children, kill your own children, not mine.

Man you piss me off, because I so hate ignorance...

http://www.caromont.org/14872.cfm

http://www.cleanairstandards.org/article/archive/47/20

http://www.un.org/earthwatch/health/airpollution.html

http://vanderbiltowc.wellsource.com/dh/content.asp?ID=614

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0100-879X2004000500019&script=sci_arttext

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996685

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/329/24/1807

http://www.awma.org/journal/ShowAbstract.asp?Year=2003&PaperID=1000

http://www.becnet.org/Bylines/airpolution.html

http://www.co2science.org/edit/v4_edit/v4n45edit.htm

http://www.healthlink.org/deaths27.html

and so on...

[struggle4progress]

14. Yawn! Your now-familiar slather of insults and name-calling:

... "you have not even a primitive understanding of risk analysis" ... "if in fact, data mattered to you, which clearly it doesn't" ... "you pathetically fret" ... "you demonstrate your complete lack of even the barest concept of the most important issue in environmentalism" ... "The 'challenges' you will raise will simply be specious, ill informed and gratuitous" ... "you were unable to understand what the study cited therein said" ...

I don't know whether in your usual circles such invective counts as rational argumentation, but to find comparable rhetoric in any respectable scientific discussion we should need to return to the early nineteenth century.

I might, of course, be inclined to regard as charming your preface to your complaint by denouncing my view as "frivilous" -- if I were less inclined to take seriously your assertion that "Since you kill, there needs to be regulations against your nonsense, just as we have laws against other killers." But, in fact, THAT encapsulates nicely, in a nutshell, a legal concern about nuclear power, which, as shown clearly by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, has been promoted by the Federal Government primarily as a means for maintaining national nuclear weapons expertise, a relation repeatedly demonstrated by recurrent federal threats to seize one or more commercial plants for tritium production to preserve our thermonuclear capacity; the atomic industry is thus linked from birth to its twin, the national security state, and it has inherited from that kinship its continuing tendency to assume that "outsiders" are fools, lacking the wisdom and technical skill to understand the issues, and are potentially traitorous to boot. Viewed in this historical context, I find entirely predictable your view that my disagreement with you qualifies me as a killer whose contrary views should be silenced by regulation.

As you have no real basis whatsoever for pretending to judge either my technical competence or the degree of my concern about the various problems facing the world, let me simply reiterate something I have said to you before, namely: I should be inclined to take you more seriously, if you were less inclined to portray those who did not share your admiration of nuclear power as hysterical nitwits.

[Buzz Clik]

15. Alternatively,

you could address his arguments and ignore his comments that you found offensive.

[struggle4progress]

16. The topic of the thread is the alleged safety of the glorious new ...

... generation of nukes.

In my view, anything, that was as wonderfully safe as these nukes are alleged to be, should be able to withstand hostile adjudication, allowing opponents traditional rights to examine evidence and to call and cross-examine witnesses. The nuclear industy, while cheering loudly about safety, has donated to enough campaigns and applied enough political pressure, to gut these rights. Meaningful access to courts is an essential right of free peoples and not something only morons want. If the industry were really safe, they wouldn't have worked so hard to limit their opponents' rights-to-challenge, because the industry would be confident of winning on the merits.

Despite continual noise from the nuclear industry, alleging the safety of its plants, the industry strongly dislikes scrutiny. Recently, it has managed almost entirely to eliminate public access to NRC documents. If they were really safe, they wouldn't mind folks peeking over their shoulder.

The insurance industry is, of course, the real center of commercial expertise on risk assessment and risk management. For decades, the insurance industry has been unwilling to provide affordable catastrophic coverage to the nuclear industry. So, instead, the nuclear industry has a gift from Congress, the Price-Anderson liability caps: in the case of real nuclear catastrophe, local folks would be on their own. If the new generation of nukes were really safe, the industry wouldn't object to repealing Price-Anderson.

If what they were doing was really safe, they'd support changing the AEA of 1954 to make "public health and safety" the top priority. They won't do that, of course, because the AEA bolsters power industry claims that it is vital to security: as the traditional "atoms for peace" happy-face of the bomb industry, the nuclear power cabal continually gets whatever secrecy and subsidies it seeks, simply by shrieking "national security."