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‘Mythology distracts us everywhere. For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie: deliberate, contrived and dishonest. But the myth: persistent, persuasive, unrealistic.’ - John F. Kennedy
There is now a solid recognition by most politicians in the world, and increasingly even by those in once staunchly anti-nuclear regimes in such places as Germany, Sweden, Austria and a few other Politically Correct holdouts (Italy), that nuclear power is becoming unavoidable. Furthermore, it is also shown to be the cleanest, safest, and often the cheapest way of generating reliable electricity in any advancing society.
However, even in this recognition, and mostly because of it, there is a growing howl of shrill desperation in the ever-shrinking, and increasingly irrelevant anti-nuclear constituency that is horrified by this rational and inevitable outcome. And it is inevitable, if we wish to survive.
The general public listens to the propaganda of these various critics only so long as there are easy and affordable energy alternatives. As soon as there is a threat of shortages and prices escalate dramatically as they have over the last few years, the public becomes more questioning and less inclined to believe the usual dogma. For this reason, the anti-nuclear brigade must continually harp upon whatever emotional issue they can resurrect and keep alive for long enough – they hope – to stall the nuclear option, while the world digs itself deeper into energy deficiencies and uncertainties, as it plows ahead with building more super-expensive and unworkable cuisinarts of the bird and bat world – windmills!
About here, one is also advised to reflect upon the revealing admission by one editor, that ‘it is not the responsibility of the media to report the truth about anything, but only to report liars, accurately.’
The broad-based anti-nuclear constituency, despite temporary victories in the 1970s and 80s in the U.S. and elsewhere (Sweden, Germany, Austria, Finland etc.), has recently seen its legs cut out from under it on most energy issues, as the accumulating facts about safety, environmental impact, health impact, long term fuel availability, and cradle to grave costs, from the last 50 years of growing commercial nuclear electricity have shown that:
1. Nuclear power is vibrant and affordable, as France, Sweden, Switzerland, and even Germany and others so clearly demonstrate. The same is true in the U.S., where utilities now are consolidating their highly profitable nuclear fleets and are applying for license extensions (generally granted). They are also considering building the next generation of nuclear, once the usually paralyzing influence of frivolous interveners can be blocked, and the regulatory and licensing maze is straightened and made clear. Europe would freeze in the dark were it not for France’s nuclear success as, despite another hysterical fear; that of Global Warming, they seem to be heading in the other direction, with spring a month later than normal, and thousands having frozen to death last winter.
2. Nuclear power is far safer than any other comparable alternative source of large-scale energy. It is even safer than the dilute and unreliable and intermittent small-scale renewables like wind and solar.
3. Nuclear fuel is defined for at least thousands of years, through the gradual adoption of advanced nuclear cycles and reprocessing.
4. Nuclear electricity is mostly cheaper than coal, oil, or gas fired electricity, as data from the Utility Data Institute (U.S.) have shown for the last few years, and as France, Japan, Finland, Ukraine, and others already know. No coal, no oil, no gas, no choice.
5. The average Capacity Factors of U.S. nuclear power plants has increased from about 60%, to more than 90% over the last 20 years and their lifetimes can be safely extended to something more than 40 years and more.
6. Decommissioning and waste disposal costs are collected from the already low nuclear electrical price paid by consumers.
7. Nuclear power is the most environmentally friendly and least environmentally harmful of any electrical generation process. If fossil fuels were to similarly pay for their detrimental environmental and health impact upon society (which they do not do at this time; see externe site: http://www.externe.info/), the costs of fossil fuel would rise considerably, and they would become even less competitive.
8. There are no significant emissions of greenhouse gases from the entire nuclear cycle, despite selective allegations to the contrary, by the much-discredited Storm van Leeuwen and Smith efforts and others. Had they conducted the same analysis of ALL energy facilities they would have been more relevant and honest, but this would have resulted in a ringing endorsement of nuclear energy, which was not their intent.
9. All nuclear wastes are 100% managed. Try saying that for coal, oil or gas, which blow most to all of their waste products into the atmosphere. If fossil fuels were required to sequester even a small fraction of their billions of tonnes of gaseous wastes, the energy diverted to do so, would similarly cripple their present economic rationale.
10. Alternatives to nuclear power and fossil fuels and hydro, can’t provide the energy that any industrial or advanced society needs reliably, consistently, affordably, or with the minimal environmental impact of nuclear. And now, many fossil fuels are starting to become too expensive, and are clearly seen to be major environmental polluters.
The Nuclear Waste ‘Issue’
The one remaining trumped-up nuclear issue, is to do with the mythology surrounding nuclear wastes and waste disposal and long term health concerns. There are even a few who believe that the nuclear waste issue is so unsolved, that we should not build any new nuclear plants until we solve this problem – as though the problem actually exists in reality rather than just politically.
Most of what we hear in the media about nuclear wastes is wrong, with minor glimmers of truth. It is intended to be frightening. Even the Yucca site is merely a political sideshow for Nevada politicians and others, to posture and grandstand.
The issue, as it is dealt with by the media and Special Interest Factions, is totally devoid of perspective and the necessary epidemiological data to place it in any ranking of comparable social risks. Such data exist, even on this site, but are studiously and strenuously ignored by these critics.
We continually hear other such emotionally loaded statements that spent fuel, the most highly radioactive ‘nuclear waste’ and its disposal is:
1 An unsolved problem
2. Dangerously radioactive for millions of years
3. A threat to the health of future generations
4. A proliferation threat
5. A terrorist target
That none of these statements is true, though one of them does have a grain of truth, seems immaterial. But let’s get one misconception out of the way first. Spent fuel is NOT nuclear waste. (See my article in EnergyPulse on “Nuclear Cycles and Nuclear Resources”).
The factual and honest responses to these perceptions go something like this:
1. Disposal of any nuclear waste is NOT an unsolved problem. The containment and emplacement-engineering is very well understood. Rather, politicians (in general) refuse to make a (temporarily vote-costing) decision to get on with what is known to be an acceptable method of disposal.
2. It is NOT dangerously radioactive for millions of years. It is slightly radioactive for millions of years only because it consists mostly (about 95%) of natural uranium which is weakly radioactive for hundreds of millions (U-235), to billions (U-238) of years. The truly dangerous component in the short term – about 4% fission wastes – is mostly decayed in less than a few days out of the reactor, as the tabulated data show.
About 16% of the fission nuclides are stable (non-radioactive); about 91% are either stable or have a half life of less than 24 hours; about 97% are either stable or have a half-life of less than 1 year; and about 98.1% are either stable or have a half life of less than 10 years. Only about 1.9% of fission nuclides have a half-life greater than 10 years. The two of most concern are strontium-90 and cesium-137 with half-lives of about 30 years.
About 1% of spent fuel consists of transuranic nuclides (plutonium isotopes, etc.). These fairly long half-life nuclides (some, thousands of years), along with the 95+% of remaining uranium, constitute ongoing reactor fuel in a closed reactor cycle, which seems about to be revived in the US after decades of being blindly proscribed in the Ford-Carter years. (See my article on EnergyPulse on “Nuclear Power and Politics”).
Spent fuel should be reprocessed, as it is in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. And it will be. It is just a matter of time, economics, and political evolution.
Reprocessing removes 96% of the spent fuel back into the reactor cycle, and leaves relatively low volumes of easily managed fission wastes. These are required to be managed for a few tens of years (unless strontium-90 and cesium-137 have been removed for medical use), and perhaps further monitored for about a hundred years or so.
3. It is NOT a significant threat to the health of future generations. It is contained, and it is 100% managed. It represent far less of a threat than any other social or energy wastes produced in society. To the degree with which nuclear power replaces fossil fuel power, it would represent a net prevention (saving) of more than about 1 million lives from pollution, mining accidents, transportation accidents, etc., each year, at this time. I consider this to be a major health benefit. However, the EPA - by extrapolating calculated effects out to tens of thousands of years, and by using the flawed LNT hypothesis in calculating radiation injuries from doses that are a fraction of natural background everywhere in the world - believes (making some extreme assumptions) that it can perceive some few radiation-related deaths – perhaps much less than 100 in total - over the next ten thousand years from a repository like Yucca. If the EPA used the same notions of extrapolated risk for other sources of energy, the nuclear option would obviously prove to be thousands of times LESS hazardous to future generations. That particular piece of perspective is lost by not being revealed by EPA.
4. Nuclear wastes do NOT represent a significant proliferation threat. It is far easier to make a nuclear weapon by enrichment of uranium-235 (Iran) - which does not require a reactor - than to make a weapon from spent fuel from a commercial reactor. Military reactors, dedicated to weapons production, and easily detected, and useless for producing electricity, can produce weapon-useable fuel. Today, this has practically nothing to do with commercial nuclear power.
5. Terrorists, in their right minds, are NOT interested in spent fuel at this time. It is too difficult to deal with:
http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/dirty_bombs.Sutherland.htm.
There are numerous easier, and more vulnerable and ‘safe’ targets for them to go after. If we could, however, persuade them to try to steal this stuff, we could get rid of them most decisively.
The facts about even high-level nuclear wastes of any kind are very simple, and easily understood:
1. Nuclear waste has neither injured nor killed anyone in the last 60 years of nuclear energy use. No one. It is 100% safely managed and cannot cause any exposure to the general public.
Compare that envious safety record with the alleged hundreds of thousands of pollution deaths each year from the almost entirely unmanaged wastes associated with our use of fossil fuels and burning dung.
The average number of deaths from coal mining accidents throughout the world each week, and regularly reported on the inner pages in most newspapers, exceeds the total numbers of nuclear power related deaths in the entire 60 year history of the nuclear power industry; nuclear accidents included. From that empirical (observed) point of view alone, this makes nuclear power at least 3,000 times safer than coal.
In addition, the annual numbers of pollution related deaths worldwide (3 million per year WHO), from burning fossil fuels (50,000 per year in the U.S. if an MIT study is to be believed), make fossil fuels millions of times more dangerous than nuclear power operation and waste disposal. These facts alone bring the so-called waste safety issue into stark perspective, and reveal it as a truly minuscule issue about which there is a lot of noise, and a great deal of emotional misinformation, but little substance.
2. Nuclear waste from nuclear power facilities is very low volume; less than the size of a golf ball per person, per year, from all facilities. It is also easily managed and safely moved into storage. I have monitored and supervised it being done on several occasions. We’ve also been doing that safely for the last 60 years too, and it can continue indefinitely and safely.
There are approximately 40,000 tonnes of solid and managed nuclear ‘wastes’ produced each year from ALL of the world’s nuclear facilities.
Now compare that number, with the approximately 25 billion tonnes of ‘radioactive’ wastes from fossil fuel use, or about 4 tonnes per person each year. And YES, they are also radioactive, though at a very low level. These are mostly thrown into the atmosphere to affect us all. They are also partially blamed for what is regarded in some hand-wringing circles as the greatest threat to humanity; Global Warming, even if the other health effects from fossil fuel use didn’t exist.
The radiation dose to residents living around an operating coal burning facility is up to 20 times higher than that of residents who live around an operating nuclear power facility. Fortunately, they are both still minor compared with other radiation doses from nature and medicine. Coal burning plants produce much more nuclear waste per megawatt, than does a nuclear power plant, but we neither manage it well, nor consider it as nuclear waste. We've just got used to it without being terrified of it. However, it will constitute an extremely valuable nuclear fuel source over the next few hundreds of years.
3. The nuclear waste issue is entirely political at this time, and is milked to an extreme degree by many environmental activists, as opposed to active environmentalists, of which I am one. There is nothing unsolved about its disposal or management other than how to get politicians to let the engineers get on doing what they do best, and how to counter the various zealots spreading emotional misinformation about it.
The politicians of some countries have made their decision. And even the wrong one – not to reprocess, and to choose deep disposal (out of sight, out of mind) – can be reversed, as it eventually will be. Disposed spent fuel becomes a pure high-grade uranium/plutonium ore-body from the moment it is emplaced, and it will eventually be exploited and reprocessed. If this is a good example of a serious unsolved problem, we need many more of them to be as insubstantial and as harmless as this one is.
4. Spent nuclear fuel is NOT waste, though it is often misleadingly labeled as such. It can, and will, be reprocessed in future nuclear cycles. It should therefore NOT be disposed of at all, but that simple reality gets lost in all the political noise.
Only from 1 to 5% of the fuel resource is actually used in the first pass through the reactor. In North America, we are temporarily 'throwing away' – for the moment – the 95+% of fuel that is unused, and that can be readily recovered and used. Such ‘waste’ in any other endeavor would inflame and arouse even the most ignorant environmentalist, but not, it seems if it is associated with Nuclear Power. Such reprocessing is already carried out in Europe and Japan and Russia, and will shortly be revived in the U.S. along with the logical revival of the fast breeder reactor. In truth, there is no shortage of energy in the world; there is just a shortage of politicians with guts, at least outside of France and a few other countries.
Public radiation exposures today come about 75% from nature; about 24% from medical procedures; and about 1% from all of industry. Nuclear power plant operation contributes about 0.01%; nuclear ‘waste’ and ‘waste’ storage contribute less than about 0.001% at worst.
It is only the smallest three sources of radiation on the diagram that the public is usually stirred up about. Why?
Now, several Native groups in North America, including the Mescalero Apaches of the south-west U.S., have closely examined the nuclear waste disposal issues, consulted their people and decided to take advantage of this window of opportunity before others recognize the outrageously generous rewards for little work and practically no risk. They are considering offering reservation land as an interim repository to at least 30 utilities with whom they are negotiating. They see the jobs in engineering and health physics, and financial rewards and economic prosperity that far outweigh the small risks of managing such wastes with the available technology. The risks of being poor, without jobs or future prospects (stress, alcoholism, general ill-health, tuberculosis, substance abuse, violence, suicide), are thousands of times more detrimental to them than any risk from nuclear waste disposal, and all could be countered by increased prosperity and education that comes with wealth.
Additionally, the Meadow Lake Tribal Council in Saskatchewan representing 8,000 natives have also examined the issue, the costs, the benefits and the minuscule risks, and decided that there are up to billions of dollars to be made, over hundreds of years, just for offering a permanent repository and looking after something that poses little more than a public relations problem. Of course, various so-called environmental groups are climbing all over them to try and stir up tribal fears in order to sink the negotiations in the only way they know how – Distort the facts, and terrify them as much as possible!
A majority (about 72%!) of the residents of the nuclear community of Blind River, Ontario, voted recently to become the first Canadian municipality to offer to take radioactive waste. They know that the benefits far outweigh any risks, and have sufficient education and knowledge of the industry to be able to evaluate the risks.
Other communities may miss an opportunity to be part of this process and regret it for the next few decades.
For information on purchasing reprints of this article, contact Tim Tobeck ttobeck@energycentral.com. Copyright 2010 CyberTech, Inc.
"by many environmental activists, as opposed to active environmentalists,"
Probably brilliant.
Ferdinand E. Banks 4.21.06
Great article, but don't make the mistake of not spreading it around. And don't put it in one of those unread economics journals that take a year before publishing.
John K. Sutherland 4.22.06
'This link seems to work better than the one in the text.
Brilliant! What better way to fight a myth than with another myth.
Steve Sturgill 4.23.06
Before you follow Banks' advice, you should drop the slaps at wind and, especially, global warming. They severely detract from your message.
A good portion of your audience will stop reading at the point where you call global warming a hysterical fear, as I would have did I not already consider you credible on the nuclear front.
You should stick to nuclear issues and leave climate to climatologists, among whom there is little controversy over the reality of global warming.
Ferdinand E. Banks 4.23.06
Steve Sturgill, I get a newsletter from a well known climate skeptic every week. If it were not for his attitude toward the Kyoto travesty I would ignore it. As for John Sutherland's work, we need it because we need more nuclear, and we need it now. His position on wind and global warming are irrelevant to me, although in truth I have some problem understanding it.
Steve Sturgill 4.23.06
Yes.
I probably should have started out my comment with, "I agree with Banks, but first, drop the slaps..."
mauk mcamuk 4.24.06
Another excellent effort, Mr. Sutherland! :)
Yes, you should seek a wider audience, definately. Maybe, you should drop the wind and climate references, as noted, you arguments are more than strong enough to stand on their own merits.
No, you should not moderate your stance in the slightest. :) The concerted effort to smear commercial nuclear power over the last 30 years should be seen as one of the largest crimes against humanity yet committed, once rational eyes evaluate the events in the perspective of history.
Curt Sommer 4.25.06
Everyone who would like to have a nuclear waste dump in their back yard, raise your hand.
Everyone who would like to subsidize that waste dump raise your other hand.
Now stand up and cheer for nuclear energy!!!
Len Gould 4.25.06
Curt: Do I get to own the nuclear waste for resale as I wish? And a 50 billion dollar fee? I'll take it. Sign me up.
Malcolm Rawlingson 4.25.06
Curt,
Everyone who enjoyed breathing in the sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide from the coal burning plant you used to power the computer to type your response ---- raise one leg
Everyone who likes to subsidize photovoltaic panels and windmills that use coal- produced electricity in their manufacture - please raise the other leg.
Now cheer for nuclear energy - the alternatives have no legs to stand on.
I really hope you are not connected to any power grid Curt. Please tell me you are not.
And Len - I'll take the nuclear "waste" and put it in my back yard for just a couple of billion. Risk to me are nil. We should drop the term waste - it is a misnomer.
Malcolm Rawlingson.
Malcolm Rawlingson 4.25.06
In response to Steve Sturgills comments about Mr. Sutherland dropping references to hysteria surrounding global warming and use of wind. I think it is at the root of this debate. Nuclear is considered technological wizardry by those that don't (or don't want to) understand it. Anything technological is not natural (like the wind) and therefore must be bad.
Why should Mr Sutherland drop those references to wind or global warming? What he says is the truth. So he should stop telling the truth to people on this planet because some might get upset when they realise it IS the truth and all the other b-s put out by so called environmentalists is garbage.
Most of what I have read on the subject of global warming in particular including many papers written by those who should know better are exactly hysteria and hype based on very few supportable facts and irrational flawed logic.
The shaky logic of the arguments so far presented on mans imopact on global warming does not impress me or make me believe that the world is going to end any time soon. In fact a warmer world may be a very much better place to live and deliver significant benefits to the human race. Who says its all doom and gloom. I don't.
The Earth has been going through temperature cycles long before man ever had a presence on the planet and will do so long after we have gone. The last Ice Age was not man made neither were the many others before it. Nature did that all on its own. Species of all plants and animals have come and gone without ANY intervention by humans. But somehow humans are entirely to blame for THIS particular change in temperature - why this one and not all the others that have gone before it. That is irrational flawed logic that begs explanation.
In many respects the human race should consider extinctions of some mammals a very good thing. Who would not really want to be around with the all-natural non man madeTyrannosaurus Rex wandering about in their back yard. Thank goodness they did become extinct. I am sure T-Rex was very environmentally friendly. The other species that were ripped to shreds by them I am sure got recycled back into the swamp....perfectly naturally of course.
Volcanic eruptions belch out millions of tons of sulphur dioxide and other noxious gases - far greater than anything human power plant is capable of. When Krakatoa exploded in the late 19th century hundreds of millions of tons of rock, volcanic dust and gases were thrown high into the atmosphere. It changed the world climate for several years - nothing man made about that particular event. It was all-natural.
The premise often espoused by so called environmentalists is that nature is our friend and anything we do to protect ourselves and ensure our survival on this planet is therefore unnatural and should be stopped - including the development of nuclear power. That of course is irrational nonsense. The real conclusion that must be reached is that human beings have fought a constant and never ending battle with "nature" to stay alive on this planet for millions of years and will continue to fight it every step of the way. We are very successful at this survival game and the key tool we use to survive is our technology. If nature had its way we would all be dead at 40 or less and survival would be the survival of the fittest. If nature had its way many parts of the world could not be inhabited due to cold. Humans can live anywhere on this planet with technology.
Where would you rather live - the middle of the all-natural Sahara Desert or in your nice comfortable air conditioned house.
Thefact is that in the scheme of things the human influence on this planet may appear to be great but in fact is miniscule and we are arrogant if we think our effect is much greater than that.
Also I question the notion that all things natural equates to all things good. It is complete crap. Those that think otherwise should go and try the life without the technology they have come to expect - they will soon become extinct at natures hands.
Ruth Sponsler 4.25.06
Sutherland seems to be speaking out of both sides of his mouth on the fossil fuels/global warming issue. In a couple places in the article, he cites pollution and consequent deaths from fossil fuel emissions. However, in Argument 1, he cites the 'hysterical fear' of global warming.
Much stronger would be a logically consistent argument for the capacity factor of nuclear to displace fossil fuel generation with its consequent particulate and sulfur dioxide emissions.
I happen to believe that global warming is indeed occurring, and that nuclear energy is probably the best way to displace coal-fired generation. I find it hard to understand why a nuclear proponent would deny the existence of global warming, when it is one of the strongest arguments in favor of nuclear power.
If Sutherland does not believe that global warming is occurring, he can still make a very strong argument for nuclear power and against fossil fuels _without even mentioning global warming_, on the basis of particulate emissions and coal mining accidents. Just the same as I could make that argument without also mentioning the (irrelevant) fact that I love my kittycat.
John K. Sutherland 4.25.06
Sponsler is confusing two issues here.
Fossil fuel combustion causes pollution that we can measure and attribute directly to that combustion. Epidemiology even convincingly demonstrates a linkage between fossil fuel pollution and numerous premature deaths. On these points there is little to argue about. One can accurately measure emissions, and through epidemiology one can reasonably infer related deaths.
There is no such scientific evidence to demonstrate a comparable linkage between fossil fuel combustion and global warming (anthropogenic global warming, AGW), and its supposed, invariably negative, effects. Cold scares me much greater than warmth. Global Climate Change is normal, both ways, and has occured in cycles throughout all of geological time. Twenty years ago, many of the same scientists speaking of GW today were equally convinced, and vocally outspoken about Global Cooling then.
The biggest driver of climate change is solar activity. The dominant greenhouse gas is not carbon dioxide, but water vapor. We often also confuse local weather, with climate, and we have not been taking enough, or adequate quality baseline measurements for long enough over enough of the globe. The present Computer Modelling does not work even with the historical data that we know. Why anyone would think it can yet be reliably extrapolated to defining future climate, defies rationality.
It is a fact - not my opinion - that there is a demonstrable hysteria associated with illogical fear of Global Warming; one just needs to read the newspaper, listen to certain politicians (Gore), or buy into much of the environmentalist cant. Many climatologists believe AGW is real, but almost as many (perhaps even more - but some are wisely cautious, and are not willing to stick their necks out just yet), don't. There is no overwhelming consensus on this issue, as is widely and misleadingly reported. Science is not defined by consensus.
With billions in grants at stake it is only human for climatologists to say that 'we should investigate this problem much more, give me the money', rather than say 'this is a waste of money based upon what we could better do with that wealth.'
When Sponsler says ... 'I find it hard to understand why a nuclear proponent would deny the existence of global warming, when it is one of the strongest arguments in favor of nuclear power.' I accept that Sponsler finds it hard to understand. That is her problem, having bought into the belief that Global warming is anthropogenic. I do not.
I see no reason to try to use the poor science of the supposed anthropogenic global warming to promote nuclear power. Nuclear power can be promoted strongly enough on its own merits and benefits without resorting to weak or even outright bad, but politically correct, 'science' of AGW, to give it dubious merit.
Clearly this forum needs someone to provide to people like me, the ten or twenty definitive points that have convinced THEM that AGW is something that is defensible in science. I would be happy to respond with my ten or twenty points as to why such points are more politics than science, and are based upon junk speculative science and political manipulation to this point in time.
For those who believe that we are causing our problem by increasing from about 280 ppm of carbon dioxide to about 350 ppm, I will challenge you to tell me what is the optimum carbon dioxide level you think we should aim for in the global atmosphere. Should it be 280? 500? Perhaps 200? Perhaps 100 or less? If you do not know the answer to this, or even if it is part of the right question, then you are part of the problem and not of the solution. Get off the pot.
Persuade me with verifiable science, not speculation based upon unworkable computer models that do not even know how many variable there are or what some of the most significant factors actually are. We only recently discovered the relationship between el Nino, and la Nina, and our climate. When the scientific data change and are more robust, I will change my opinion if the facts require it. What will you do?
Curt Sommer 4.25.06
Mr Rawlingson as long as the couple billion isn't coming from the taxpayers you can swim in it for all I care. Don't want to call it 'waste'...how about compost!! Don't refer to it as 'clean and safe' either, that's an oxymoron.
As far as the grid is concerned Mr. Rawlingson, I'm not counting on it staying up for more than another 5 to 10 years, at least not as we think of it now.
And I understand nuclear very well thank you just the same. Here are some of it's attributes:
non-renewable mining the ore is environmentally destructive by-product, or whatever the *$%@ you want to call it must stored away for many, many years makes for an excellent terrorist target
Nuclear is nothing more than an extension of the military and the corporate power pirates looking to suck on the government teat.
Oh yes, technology will save us.....yours' the bunch of crap. Unsubstantiated drivel of the lowest kind.
Graham Cowan 4.25.06
I think global warming is real and climate models that project it have successfully predicted its evolution years in advance. Nuclear is the sensible solution. It's clean and abundant for many centuries or millennia in ordinary reactors of the sort that are being built today. If it weren't the sensible solution, it wouldn't be so threatening to the oil money we've been hearing from.
If you can build that nuclear 'waste' facility without a single-dime of taxpayer money, ensure that it will never, ever, ever, ever leak, and the waste will never pose a threat to society, or be the object of a terrorist target, then yes by all means go ahead.
Of course the answer to all these stipulations is 'no'.
Have we all forgotten Chernobyl? Oh but of course, the Russians don't know what they're doing.
There is so much dishonesty going on here it's palpable.
Rinaldo Sorgenti 4.26.06
Dear Mr. Sutherland,
Truly an excellent article and valuable arguments. Please go ahead and try to increase the audience to your words. I would equally suggest you drop the slaps related to other energy sources (like coal, wind or even "global warming"), just following your own words and thoughts: ".... I see no reason to try to use the poor science of the supposed anthropogenic global warming to promote nuclear power. Nuclear power can be promoted strongly enough on its own merits and benefits without resorting to weak or even outright bad, but politically correct, 'science' of AGW, to give it dubious merit." About Chernobyl, it will be very helpful and important to focalize attention and detail the true reasons of the accident occurred there in 1986, speaking about the related technology, otherwise the "ambientalists" will continue to speculate and let people associate what happened there to Nuclear Energy in general (including the militar aspect), just to raise hysterical fear. I am from Italy (where the "greens" and so called "environmentalists" have plaied an important role in demonizing nuclear power after Chernobyl) and here the energy dispute and speculations is even stronger than it is in the US, where imported Natural Gas (methane) has taken the place of your Coal with a much higher bill for both consumers and industry. Quite the same happen in the Western Europe and we need strong arguments like yours to help raise the debate to a more consistent and scientific points than it has speculatively been driven in the last 20-30 years now. I will try to send you copy of a Study we have made here in Italy, named: "The Life Cycle of the CO2 from fossil fuels - coal versus natural gas". If you could kindly provide me an email address I could sent it stright away and will be much interested to get your opinion and view thereto. This is a very important topic to raise and discuss about, because it clarifies most part of the tricks behind the "Kyoto Protocol" and the immense waste of wealth related to it and the Emission Trading Scheme, now implemented in Europe ! Just because of the attention given to the Kyoto Protocol and associated aurguments, I am in strong favour of what has been done by the USA with 5 Asian countries (the: "Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development") which is much more reasonable way to approach the subject, worldwide. I will try to disseminate your article here in Italy if you agree. Please inform.
Rinaldo Sorgenti (email: r.sorgenti@tiscali.it)
John K. Sutherland 4.26.06
Rinaldo, Please disseminate the direction for my article as widely as you wish. Also, why not consider publishing your own article in the Environmental section of this forum. I am sure it would be received with the interest that just about all articles receive. Directions for submission are at the top. The editors would be pleased to hear from you.
Tam Hunt 4.26.06
Mr. Sutherland, there are a lot of points in your piece that could be disputed, but I'll highlight just one:
Do you believe uranium supplies will last more than a couple of decades? The US Army Corps of Engineers release a report last year looking at fuel supplies for the US Army and stated that not only are we at or near a peak in global oil production, but that uranium supplies will also be depleted within 20 years, at present consumption rates. The implication is that as nuclear power becomes more popular, in its latest renaissance, those supplies will be used up even faster.
You will argue of course that there is abundant nuclear fuel in our oceans, rocks, etc. But let's get to the bottom of this debate right away: at what point does the energy balance become negative with low concentration refining of nuclear fuel? Van Leeuwen has famously (infamously?) stated that that point is reached rather quickly and he has stated world supplies may run out in even less than the 20 years predicted by the Army Corps of Engineers.
Your thoughts? Anyone else?
Malcolm Rawlingson 4.26.06
Dear Mr Somer, An interesting reply largely what I would expect. Not much in the way of facts and a great deal in the way of rhetoric.
Clearly you do not understand nuclear energy as well as you say you do. I have worked with nuclear materials for 40 years. I respect them but have no irrational fear of them - unlike some. if I did the dentists X-Ray machine at the dentist would fill me with fear - it never has nor will it. The industry has a safety record better than any other industry in the world. It is a fact that you cannot dispute. If you do dispute it show me your numbers and the source of your data.
Yes uranium mining does do damage to the environment. No one disputes it - least of all me. So does coal mining...or would you prefer the flooding of vast areas of land for hydroelectricity. Or huge forrests of windmills that only work 25% of the time. The solar panels you may desire to put on your roof require large amounts of energy to make - as far as I know solar panels don't grow on trees - they are made by humans using energy - lots of it.
As with most others in the nuclear business I have a completely open mind with respect to alternatives. If there was one or even several viable alternatives that was better than nuclear you can be sure I would be supporting it totally. If the faxcts were there then to be sure I would be out in the front championing it. The facts are not there. I am an engineer and a scientist and I work with facts - hype just does not cut it with me and all the political spin in the world does not change the fact that unless you want the world to live in abject poverty then large scale cheap and abundant energy is essential. As I see it only nuclear power can deliver that. You have the opportunity to convince me otherwise.
You could of course reduce the worlds population. But you would need to go and talk to the Governments of China and India who are struggling to improve the standard of living of their burgeoning populations. Those people see nuclear power as the only way they can improvfe their standard of living and free their populations of drudgery....or would you want those people to live in the poverty they have been accustomed to for the last few centuries.
It may surprise you that I also have a program to remove my home from the grid. But I can assure you it is not cost effective. I am doing it just to show that it can be done and I am documenting how much it costs to do it.
So I would hope that you have as much of an open mind to nuclear power as I have an open mind to any other proposals to produce energy cheaply and abundantly.
As far as it being an extension of the miltary - so was dynamite, jet propulsion, rocket propelled vehicles, TNT, radar, integrated circuits, satellite communication to name a few. Perhaps when you next fly to anywhere you should consider that the jet engine pushing you along was a miltary development....sad but true.
Malcolm
Malcolm Rawlingson 4.26.06
Dear Mr Hunt,
Interesting comment. I would like to know the derivation of the information you have from the US military. It seems to me they are quite cagey on that sort of information.
I have seen numbers for uranium supplies that show the mineral availability in mineable quantities anywhere from 30 to 300 years.
There is major exploration going on in the Thelon and Athabaska basins in Northern Canada where significant quantities of very high grade ore are expected to be found. The McArthur mine is part of the Athabaska area and is already in production. The area surrounding this deposit may well produce several other mines of similar capacity. You are right though - as the number of reactors increases (to the dismay of some but it is inevitable) there will be increased demand and it may outstrip supply if no more exploration is done. Perhaps this shortage of supply (a short term problem in my opinion) will prompt the recycling of used fuel. We seem to regard used fuel as waste and is in fact nothing of the sort having about 98% of fissionable material still in it.
Nuclear fuel cycles have been studied extensively and there is general agreement amongst the experts in this field (geologists - not nuclear engineers like me) that there is enough uranium with the current reactor designs for about 300 years with zero recycling of fissionable materials already mined and used in a reactor. With recycling this figure increases substanially. My estimate is that with recycling we have somwhere between 1000 to 2000 years of fuel left. Hopefully we will have figured out something better by then.
This assumes that there is only one fuel cycle using U235. There is a fuel cycle based on Thorium which works something like a thermal "breeder reactor". Not sure if that works in all reactors - maybe there is someone out there who can provide some accurate data on that.
I have seen estimates that using the Thorium cyle the amount of fuel available is of the order of tens of thousands of years.
I would appreciate any thoughts on this. Tam Hunt has raised some good points. If we double or triple our nuclear electricity production how long does our current fuel a supply last? I don't think it will but certainly worth discussion.
Malcolm Rawlingson
Graham Cowan 4.26.06
I'm pretty sure I've addressed that very point in these pages. Country rock is a net-energy-yielding uranium ore if the uranium is used in conventional burner reactors.
I believe past Dutch governments have expressed much distrust of nuclear safety and sustainability as they pocketed their natural gas revenues, and I guess they have long employed van Leeuwen as a tame "nuclear scientist" to back them up in these matters. If that's so, he has of course been paid from those same revenues. (Currently natural gas costs 40 times more per BTU than uranium; this relation has stayed fairly constant as both prices have risen and fallen, although for sure gas is more volatile, in a number of ways.)
Mr. Cowan, can you summarize your arguments re the energy balance of country rock uranium extraction?
John K. Sutherland 4.26.06
Malcolm Rawlingson (very good comments by the way) and Tam Hunt, I will first direct your attention to other of my papers on this site that at least open up the picture considerably, especially with regard to fuel resource outlook and to the closed nuclear cycle and the use of thorium:
http://www.energycentral.com/centers/knowledge/whitepapers/by_publisher.cfm?pid=23371 and here
One of the important points to be aware of is that natural uranium in the once-through cycle (CANDU), typically generates only about 50,000 kWh/kg of prepared fuel, compared with about 250,000 kWh/kg for enriched fuel and potentially of about 3,000,000 kWh/kg with the closed reactor cycle. In terms of electricity value at say 10 cents/kWh, this makes its least intrinsic value, about $5,000 per kilogram ($5 million/tonne). For coal it is about 30 cents per kg, or about $300/tonne. Refined uranium sells at about this time for about $90/kg (electricity/price differential of 55 in the CANDU), and coal for about $100/tonne CIF (for a differential value of only about 3). Obviously there is a lot of leeway for price fluctuation in uranium relative to coal. It also means that even dilute uranium sources may be exploitable with profit, as Graham Cowan notes.
Mining economics and resource exploitability require that all costs of mining should be less per tonne than the ore is worth in order that the producer makes a profit. When oil was $15/barrel, the Canadian oil sands were a worthless chunk of cold real estate; at a sustained price over $20 they became of interest; at $70, they are a goldmine worth trillions of dollars. At more than this, even the trillions of tonnes of oil shales (e.g. Green River) become lucrative if they are not, already.
Ore-bodies can appear and disappear overnight! There is no sleight of hand, it is all a case of ore value, economics and profit. There was little incentive to prospect for other than high value ore-bodies when uranium was less than $10 per pound. Now there is considerable incentive, and uranium is more abundant than silver, mercury or antimony.
I see no reason to decry dilute sources of uranium. The bottom line is that the price gained from sale of the ore should maximally exceed its cost of production. At some price of electricity coupled with cost of extraction, even seawater with only 3.2 ppb, is an orebody for uranium.
You wonder what is the break-even cost of energy derived from uranium relative to energy put into it to exploit it (energy balance negative). Wrong question. The market determines whether or not a resource is exploitable. It’s all a question of dollar profits, and energy costs are built into that question.
I believe the energy break-even question is too difficult and complicated, with too many variables; and it is meaningless unless you ask it of all ore-bodies, coal seams, oil fields, gas fields, and all fuels equally. Each ore-body has its own unique economics which is why some are exploited and others not. Uranium is also a ‘free’ by-product of other industries – phosphate, gold, silver, etc. and even some coal burning. There are also economics of scale and extraction costs; in situ leaching of uranium goes after ore – passively - where other mining methods would not be economical. Costs of exploitation of any commodity are also severely impacted by environmental regulations (especially coal), concerning mine site reclamation, and air pollution costs hanging over everything to do with fossil fuels.
This is a poor answer. If anyone can answer this differently and better, I would love to see that response.
John K. Sutherland 4.26.06
Malcom, thank you for your insightful and much appreciated comments on booster rods and Magnox, in my other documents. Where did you go to School? Send me a message please.so that I can respond.
Malcolm Rawlingson 4.26.06
The numbers John Sutherland uses above are very interesting and really undersore the near independence of a nuclear plant from its fuel source as far as fuel cost goes.
What it also says is that we can afford to mine even very low grade ores if the price paid for it warrants the cost of finding and extracting it. There are lots of low grade ore deposits that are not economic now but will be as the price goes up. Unlike oil, coal or gas the cost of uranium will have only a marginal effect on the price of nuclear electricity. And of course the only other use for a chunk of Uranium ore is a door stop.
Also on another earlier topic, nuclear generated electricity does not need global warming to justify its expansion and use. It makes sense on every level. China is not persuing nuclear power as an option because it is a signatory on the Kyoto document (it is not by the way - neither is the USA which is why the whole thing is a complete joke). The reason China is building nuclear plants is mostly because it is short of large scale cheap electricity and to some extent because its cities are becoming choked with smog from coal plants.
The Chinese flooded huge tracts of land building the five sisters dam and it did not even make a dent in their required electrical capacity.
Sadly those that oppose the deployment of nuclear power do not have to answer to the millions of people in the world who have nothing. No water and no food and no shelter. Those that cannot grow crops because they have no electricity to pump water to their fields and whose families starve to death because of it. It is clearly apparent that such folks have become so comfortable in their western life style that they appear to have lost sight of the fact that there is a world outside North America and Europe that strives for even a glimpse of what we have.
They are selfish in the exteme.
Whether the west likes it or not the developing world IS going to develop nuclear power on a massive scale - it is inevitable and all the verbal jumping up and down on this site is not going to change it. Those that think this is wrong - well please go and knock on the door of the Governemnt of China in Bejiing and see what they have to say to you. When you have done there go to New Delhi and convince the Government of India to abandon its nuclear power plans. And if the answer is not clear to you go to South Africa and see how they view nuclear power as a means to rid that continent of abject poverty which we in the west are so very happy to ignore
As John Sutherland says nuclear power is inevitable just as we expect the inevitable verbal diatribe from those that know very little except how to manipulate politicians.
Even Patrick Moore the co-founder of Greenpeace recognizes that nuclear power has a great deal to offer an impoverished world. I hope that there are others who are honest enough to admit they are wrong. Many of the goals of GreenPeace and other organisations are supported by people who conside nuclear power as the best solution for the worlds energy supply. Some seem to think these views are mutually exclusive. They are not.
Are there risks involved - well of course there are just as there are in crossing the road and driving down the highway (applies only to those that can afford to buy and operate cars - most of the world cannot).
Is nuclear power the perfect solution - of course it is not. There is no perfect solution.
Does nuclear anergy affect the environment - yes of course it does. Everything humans do on earth affects the environment. Every breath you take affects it but I don't advocate not breathing as it is rather dangerous to ones health.
But these are the wrong questions. The real question that we must answer is whether nuclear power is the best option amongst all options available. In most cases the answer is a very clear yes. As I stated before I have been in this business for 40 years and there is no safer industry I could have chosen to work in.
Unlike John Sutherland I place nuclear power well before hydroelectric plants. The environmental damage done by flooding vast tracts of land, drowning communities (China), submerging millions of trees (Quebec & British Colombia, Canada), and denying the world acces to sites of huge historical significance (Aswan Dam - Egypt) are pure tragedies and clearly not without major enviromental effects.
The effects of producing nuclear power pale into insignificance by comparison. Even Chernobyl had less environmental impact than some of the above projects.
The shoddy science and shaky logic behind climate predictions and the possible effects of Carbon Dioxide on the atmosphere are not required to ensure the development of nuclear power around the world.
Global warming or not nuclear power is essential to support the worlds population.
Malcolm
mauk mcamuk 4.26.06
I had in interesting thought, concerning shale bodies as ore.
As the excellent Mr. Sutherland notes, at around 70+ dollars per barrel, the Green River Shale in the US becomes an attractive resource for oil. However, the Green River Shale is not the only shale deposit of note.
The Chattanooga Shale is not as large as the Green River Shale, but it is a Devonian Black Shale, meaning that it also contains far more uranium than country rock. On average, let's say it holds 50 parts per million U.
Burned in an IFR-style closed fuel cycle, that U is the energy equivalent of about 6000 barrels of oil per pound. Thus, every ton of the Chattanooga Shale has about as much energy in it as 600 barrels of oil!
This same logic applies to the coal that we already mine. If we extracted the uranium from the clinker and ash and burned it efficiently, we could easily triple the energy we get from every ton of coal we mine.
It is sobering to consider the potential of nuclear fission, once we stop being foolish about it.
Tam Hunt 4.26.06
John and others, thanks for your comments re the uranium supply issue. I'm not however, convinced. In particular, John, your discussion of the economics of low grade ore refinement skirts (as you acknowledge) the energy balance issue. Certainly in the short term, if there is a market for low grade refining, it will be economical. But will it be good policy? In a world of declining energy fuels (excepting of course renewables, which I view as being the real solution to our needs), it will be necessary to take a hard look at the energy balance of all technologies we use.
The same debate is taking place re Alberta's tar sands, which may require more energy than they produce. If stranded natural gas (natural gas that wouldn't otherwise be used) is utilized for this process, the argument is less clear, but obviously in a world of declining primary energy fuels, demand for the remaining fuels will rise higher and higher, requiring that policymakers look at energy balance for the long run, even if the markets in the short-run ignore such considerations.
Your thoughts?
mauk mcamuk 4.26.06
Well, Tam, I'm not John, but I'll address your concerns if I may. :)
As I understand it, you are taking the position advocated by the execreble Storm van Leeuwen series of papers, in that "lean ores" are SO lean that you get no appreciable energy from them. This seems persuasive, but upon analysis, it is foolish.
Allow me to explain.
Let's ignore all sources of "lean" uranium save one: Coal. I choose coal because we will doubtless mine and use this resource, no matter what. We simply have too much coal infrastructure in place to stop.
Now, how much Uranium is this? Note the link below:
Those felows conclude that from 1937 to 2040, we will mine and burn about 637 billion tons of coal worldwide, and in the ash left over there is 828,000 tons of Uranium and 2,000,000 tons of thorium. For the purposes of an IFR-style closed fuel cycle, those two materials are essentially identical. (Fast reactors can be engineered to treat essentially all actinides the same.)
Thus, from a source that we are going to mine anyway, we have access to 2.8 million tons of reactor fuel. That is 5.6 billion pounds of Uranium and Thorium, and each pound is equal to 6000 barrels of oil, for a total energy equivalence of a whopping 33.6 TRILLION barrels of oil.
Note that we don't have to mine a thing to get this Uranium and thorium: it comes to the surface in coal we're already mining. Note that this is not "hard rock" mining either, coal is a very soft rock. Indeed, the process of extracting this valuable resource would enable us to clean up the vast quantities of coal ash which is left in huge dams all over the world, killing hundreds of people and poisoning the environment forever.
Further note that this is only a tiny fraction of the uranium we could get. The numbers for uranium from phospahte rock(which we also mine anyway, for fertilizer) are if anything even larger than these.
Does this clarify anything for you? Properly utilized, nuclear power is vastly abundant indeed. Really and truly. :)
Rodney Adams 4.26.06
Malcolm:
I just wanted to add my appreciation to that already expressed. Your arguments are cogent and your numbers hard to dispute (unless, of course, you have a "belief" that cannot be overcome with facts.)
Rod Adams
Graham Cowan 4.26.06
Markets cannot and do not ignore low net energy fraction. Let him who thinks the Alberta tar sands operation could be going at its present rate of a million-plus barrels a day, if he really believes this is being done at an energy loss, explain exactly how that energy loss is being made to look like a money profit.
Well written & comprehensive. My major nagging concern is what happpens if we have a failure of the magnitude of Cherynobl. A secondary concern is the handling of spent fuel and crossing state lines.
Malcolm Rawlingson 4.27.06
Mauk,
Very interesting and thoughtful observations about shale deposits. Certainly a new area to me but further reinforces that fact that there really is plenty of Uranium on this planet. More than enough to keep us going without fossil fuels until we figure out a better way.
The argument about Uranium supply is directed at the financial and political community for the purpose of undermining their confidence in the technology. Do we really want to invest money in a plant if there may not be enough fuel to run it for its lifetime? It is the only reason the "opposed to all things nuclear" fraternity are interested in it. Otherwise they don't care.
But, being the recycling nut that I am, I cannot help but observe that we have a vast resource of energy aleady mined right under our nose. It is called Used Fuel.
Deploying the technology to utilise that ought to be one of the industrial worlds top priorities. Then the nuclear industry has no "waste".
I enjoy your responses here. Most thought provoking and interesting.
Malcolm
Malcolm Rawlingson 4.27.06
Gerard.
There is no doubt that Chernobyl was a terrible and avoidable disaster. Had I been on the Chernobyl Unit 4 controls that night it would not have happened - I'd probably be in prison but at leat that mess would not have occurred.
As I said earlier the RBMK reactor physics design was flawed from the start. The west knew it but had little control over what the Soviet Union did. I should also say that a primary cause was political interference with operational decisions. I hope all in the industry have learned from it.
Despite these tragic events there is no reason not to continue with nuclear power as a source of cheap energy. We do not stop flying in planes because of a plane crash or stop riding in trains because of a train wreck While the public has every right to be concerned about such events the focus should be preventing such occurrences in the future not banning the technology.
It seems odd to me that we do not commemorate the events at Bhopal in the same way that we do the events at Chernobyl. Several thousand people were killed in that event and many thousands more suffer permanent health effects. The only difference I can see is that Bhopal was a chemical exposure and Chernobyl was a radiation exposure. We have not stopped building chemical plants.
But having said that the nuclear industry wordwide must never allow this to occur again. All of us work for the good of people not to harm them.
I am sure this lesson has been learned very well. New reactor designs such as the pebble bed reactor cannot generate steam explosions (no water cooling). The reactor physics are inherently safe and this is the thinking we need to build into all plants. They core should be immune from human intervention.
Chernobyl was the first and will be the last such incident if we work together and apply the lessons learned.
John K. Sutherland 4.27.06
Gerard, Malcolm answered part of your question about Chernobyl.
We had our worst case accident at TMI n 1979. No one died. There was a small release of gaseous radioactivity. All subsequent class action suits were recently dismissed in the courts as not demonstrating significant radiation exposure or injury to anyone.
In terms of relative safety of our energy options – which is a far more important facet of this subject – please re-read a few of the statements in the paper above. Also take a look at my other paper on this site: ‘Nuclear power comparisons and perspectives’, which quotes relative safety data over several decades from the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland. They show that nuclear power is far safer than any large scale alternative source of energy for the same power output. There have been almost 90,000 coal miners killed in the US alone since 1900, and in the world there are at least 6,000 dead (that we know about) every year in the same way. These are actual deaths (bodies), and not the hypothetical calculated deaths that Greenpeace is now throwing around based upon exceedingly bad science 20 years after Chernobyl, in their desperation to terrify the public in their usual way.
I responded to some of the Greenpeace supported Chernobyl rubbish here, as have others: http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=11474 I do not understand your hang up on the storage or movement of spent fuel. Spent fuel has been stored and even moved (when we reprocessed it) for the last 60 years without significant injury to anyone (that is unless an idiot protester lies down on the track, as happened recently in Germany I believe). The greater danger to the public is demonstrably from the tens of thousands of rail cars loaded with coal that cross the country all of the time. There are many more accidents and many more injuries, because coal is such a damnably dilute fuel, as well as polluting the air and possibly affecting the climate if you believe that.
A little additional perspective may be in order here. There are about 18 million shipments of radioactivity in the world each year - Canada is one of the world's major suppliers. Most of these are going - each and every week - to major hospitals, and many of them are far more radioactive gram for gram than spent fuel, as they are usually extremely short half life medical nuclides like iodine-131 (8 day half life) and Molybdenum-99 (66 hours – but with a technetium-99 daughter of 6 hours half life), and many others. Also, by far the largest and most radioactive materials moving around (more rarely) are hospital large radiotherapy devices based upon cobalt-60 (5 year half life), and thousands of radiography sources used throughout all heavy industry and using iridium-192 (74 day half life). The cobalt-60 devices are in the many kilocurie range and can give a fatal dose in seconds to a cancer - and anyone else who should not be there.
I wrote a very lengthy and somewhat technical outline of radiation, radioactive waste, and its defined health effects here. It may be tough reading unless you are really interested in this stuff, as I am.
The radiation block diagram and table in the paper above say it all. YOU are potentially more at risk by about a million times from medical devices (if you visit hospitals for life-giving treatments) than from the 100% managed spent fuel in your region. However, do not do what some foolish people do and avoid hospitals out of fear of radiation. Medical radiation and nuclear medicine have added many years of life expectancy on average to us all, just as adequate and assured energy, and nuclear power have.
Tam Hunt 4.27.06
Mauk,
The report you link to is 13 years old. With uranium prices tripling over the last few years, are any companies looking into the possibility of capturing uranium from coal emissions?
Has anyone followed up on the ORNL report to determine the economic feasibility - and energy balance of a process that would take coal emissions and extract the useable uranium?
Last, as I understand it, haven't breeder reactors been studied for about 50 years now, with no one still being able to produce a workable model for commercial use?
mauk mcamuk 4.27.06
Malcolm,
Aw, shucks, yer gonna make me blush! :D I have been following this tiopic avidly for about 20 years now, I guess I have picked a few things up along the way.
As for your comments on the Spent Fuel as a usable resource, you are correct! As I recall, there is roughly 200,000 tons of Spent Fuel worldwide right now, and that resource is ready to be used right away.
Even more importantly, if we design our IFR-style closed fuel cycle to use efficient breeder reactors, an even larger fuel resource becomes available, namely, the giant stocks of Depleted Uranium the USA has laying around gathering dust.
The US DOE has 470,000 metric TONS of U238. That's roughly a billion pounds of Uranium, or, at roughly 6000 barrels of oil per pound energy equivalent, six trillion barrels of oil worth.
This is U that is already mined and purified! If we ever stop strangling ourselves over mindless spite, we will have more energy than we know what to do with. :)
Now, the depleted uranium will need efficient breeders and possibly an external neutron source in order to utilize it, but the Energy Amplifier that Carlos Rubbia developed, and the various Accelerator Driven designs that are under development, take care of that issue right away. It's also possible that by using the plutonium resource in the "Spent Fuel" that we'd be able to avoid the need for an external neutron source.
So, as can be seen, the USA has incredibly vast energy resources available to us, if we'd just stop being cowards about it.
mauk mcamuk 4.27.06
Tam, I will seek to further address your concerns. :)
Yes, the report is 13 years old. I do not know if any companies are looking into recovering U from coal ash, because to be frank, there is so much U in the world in regular deposits, we have no need to look at coal ash yet.
There is a LOT of Uranium in the world. This fact should make you both re-assured and fearful. Reassured, because there is no "energy starved future" that you have been told about. Fearful, because nuclear bombs can be made directly from Uranium, and the stuff is EVERYWHERE.
The USA has a wonderfully farsighted program to address these concerns called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, GNEP, which is sadly bungling along right now when it should be our most highly prized and funded program.
http://www.gnep.energy.gov/
I can't understand why the President is pushing the idiocy of ethanol when this much, much better program is in the wings. At MOST, ethanol is slated to provide 500,000 barrels a day for the US. Compare that trickle to the energy available from Uranium.
Not to mention, growing the corn for that ethanol is trashing our soil something fierce....
But anyway. Nobody is looking at coal for U because there's so much of it in much easier to get at deposits.
As for your question about breeder reactors, yes, breeders have been looked at for 50+ years. Nobody has bothered to develop one for market yet because, as I pointed out, we have a LOT of uranium.
What nobody in the past has wanted to admit is that breeders are more useful because they destroy their own actnide "waste". Non-actinide nuclear waste is much shorter lived than actinide waste.
Probably the best, most farsighted, and most promising breeder program in the world was killed in the USA in 1994, when the IFR project was killed for no good reason whatsoever.
Anti-nuclear propaganda is what has stalled breeders, not any inherent difficulty.
As a matter of fact, did you know that EVERY commercial nuclear power plant running today is a breeder? They just have a low breeding ratio, or BR. The nuclear industry has been sneaking the BR higher and higher in recent years, disguised as "high burnup." More enriched high burnup fuel also raises the breeding ratio of a thermal reactor. At a burnup of 40,000 Gwdays per ton heavy metal, 40 percent of the electricity produced in a commercial powerplant comes from bred plutonium.
Indeed, that's where all the plutonium used to make MOX comes from, as well! :)
A Generation 3+ design, like the AP-1000 or the EPR uses neutron reflectors and other tricks to raise the BR even higher. As I understand it, those designs have a BR of about .6 to .7.
A "Fast Breeder" has a BR well over 1, up to about 1.3. Several of the designs in the Gen4 program are so-called "Slow Breeders" with a BR of almost exactly 1.
Once such design that's very promising is the SCFR, the Super Critical Fast Reactor, which uses plain old water and a novel core design to get a breeding ratio of about 1. You fuel it once with conventional fuel, and forever after, it burns recycled spent fuel and depleted or natural uranium.
Trust me, there is amazing stuff waiting in the wings, if we can only get the government to get out of the way of the nuclear industry.
John K. Sutherland 4.27.06
Mauk, thanks for all your very good comments. the shippingport reactor in its final 5 years of operation was used as a light water breeder. It continued to produce electricity over this time, and finished with about 1.3% more fissile fuel than it started with. The table at the end of my 'idiots guide...' in a second location on this site, briefly describes this.
Tam, about uranium in coal ash. Yes, it was once economically recovered from Dakota coal in which it was about 1,000 ppm in the ash, but this was dropped when world supplies made a better source more readily available. It was also once recovered from Swedish alum shale, as it is from phosphates and other metal deposits. And for your information, the Japanese have already extracted uranium from seawater (it's even described on the internet), and it does not seem to be outrageously expensive to do. When land-based sources get sufficiently high priced, and we cannot get it from coal, phosphates, oil shales, alum shales, or the Reading Prong formation in the US NE, then we can go after granite and seawater. Of course we will by then - like India - be building breeder reactors and also using thorium which they (and Brazil and most of the rest of us) have in abundance.
Ferdinand E. Banks 4.27.06
Mauk, "..get the government to get out of the way of the nuclear industry." You haven't been reading Ronald Reagan's speeches have you, or did you mean to say 'get the government to get out of the way of the designer clothes industry?
Outside of that, a great comment. In fact a lot of great comments.
Tam Hunt 4.28.06
Mauk, thanks for the info. I was almost convinced until you talked about having the government get out of the way of the nuclear power industry. The industry's proponents apparently very much want the opposite: massive government subsidies. The 2005 EPAct provided billions in subsidies in the form of government-backed insurance and a production tax credit, among other things.
Why on earth should a 60 year old massive industry need such support?
mauk mcamuk 4.28.06
Tam and Ferdinand: Glad I could be of use! :)
I note with interest that you both view with scepticism my assertion that goverment regulation is stifling innovation in the commercial nuclear power industry.
Why do you feel this way?
Do you realize how long the government-mandated process to design a new reactor is? If the automobile industry had the same degree of red tape to deal with that the nuclear power industry does, we would still be driving Edsels. :)
More topically, if the Internet was under the same rules as the nuclear power industry, we'd still all be using Tandy's. :D
The nuclear power industry NEEDS strong regulations, make no doubt. Nuclear power is driven by the strongest force in the universe, and should be approached with all due caution. But there is a difference between strong regulations well-enforced and a strait jacket.
We have gone well into strait jacket territory in the USA.
If you need proof of this fact, look at the current situation in regards the licensing process for a nuclear power plant in the USA. There are 13 new reactors currently underway in the United States. To the best of my knowledge, every one of them is to be sited on the same patch of ground as an existing nuclear power plant. There is no new site even under consideration.
Every one of those existing nuclear power plants has been open and operating safely and profitably for many years, without exception. All this is is a simple capacity expansion, using reactor designs that are up to a hundred times SAFER than the existing plant on the same patch of ground.
Yet it is STILL estimated to take up to eight YEARS to get permission to start building.
Given the current tightness in energy supplies, this is the height of stupidity.
As for Tam's question as to why a 60 year old industry needs support? Well, that's a complicated issue, but it can best be addressed by an analogy.
Under normal curcumstances, a vivacious woman would need little help and support, either. Unless of course, the woman's husband routinely beats her.
Similarly, the commercial nuclear power industry is the battered victim of the government's abuse.
A classic example is the whole "nuclear waste" issue, which has been created, in its entirety, by the government's abusive meddling in the nuclear power industry, most notably, President Carter's woebegone decision to ban reprocessing.
Nuclear "waste" is a resource, not a problem. The nuclear industry as conceived in the 50's was ALWAYS predicated upon a closed nuclear fuel cycle. The current wasteful open fuel cycle is an artifact of government meddling, both the US government and many others.
In that sort of an instance, then, yes, the government should work to repair the damage it has done to the nuclear power industry (which is considerable). If you choose to call that a subsidy, well, your opinion is your own. :D
Ferdinand E. Banks 4.28.06
Since when did I become an enemy of the friendly atom? I guess that I'll just have to have a talk with myself. And if the licensing process in the U.S. is what you say Mr M., it is close to the maximum height of stupidity. But only close. For what it's worth, I've ALWAYS been in favor of nuclear power, but it's not worth much since it's virtually certain that there is going to be a lot of nuclear power in all our futures - even Tam might eventually sign up on the nuclear team, because like you he's going to realize that we can't afford to reject the energy in uranium.
But that's about as far as I can go, although apparently it's not far enough for you. For instance, I'm not going to say that nuclear facilities that will be licensed in five years should be licensed tomorrow, just because YOU'VE drawn that conclusion. As for the government's "abusive meddling" and "stifling innvation", well everything is relative in this old world of our's, isn't it? In Sweden it's against the law to do nuclear research. How would you like to dance to that music?
John K. Sutherland 4.29.06
Most who are following this thread are now probably aware that Tam Hunt and his colleague have just posted an anti-nuclear type of paper. It certainly broadens the picture and opens up the opposing factions to direct scrutiny for their entrenched positions. I recommend that those with an open mind and are intelligent - no matter which camp they are in - will find such a direct opposition of views and massaging and twisting of 'facts', to be interesting and informative.
Dan Grunbrg 4.30.06
The resounding argument is that you are pushing the emotional issues and light on the facts. Certainly, you make some interesting points about waste management, but the facts you bolster your arguments with, are not much more than spin.
Focusing on the economic viability of nuclear vs. wind power first. Unsubsidized bids for BOO wind power facilities are coming in at $0.03 per kWh. And wind power generators are becoming even more efficient as new materials and design strategies develop, allowing even larger size generators to be built. I challenge anyone to show me a credible unsubsidized costing for nuclear power that can beat those prices.
Of course, nuclear can play a different role in the energy supply mix, but if you use economics in your argument, please back it up.
As for nuclear fuel reprocessing, can you show me a reprocessing plant that is functioning and independently solvent today? I have spent my last 20 years in Japan, one of the examples you cite, but it is common knowledge here that the Monju reprocessing plant was a technological failure (disaster?) and was reborn as an R&D facility to save face (?) of the sponsors of the project.
When Britain decided to privatize its nuclear power industry, the accounting had to become transparent. When one arbitrarily shifts your generating asset depreciation cost from 25 years to 150 years just to show a profit, you should be looking for a job from Enron, not trying to evangelize nuclear power.
In fact, these accounting "tricks" can be pulled because precisely there is no data on the cost of decommissioning a plant and long-term storage of waste. If you can give me a complete accounting proving that nuclear is more competitive to wind power, I will become a strong supporter of nuclear power.
Ferdinand E. Banks 5.1.06
Nice try, Dan, but I don't think that you'll make it.
The combination of hydro and nuclear, each about 45%, provided Sweden with the lowest or next to the lowest cost power in the world.
What about those terrible subsidies that everyone talks about. Those subsidies - if there were any - resulted in the input (electricity) that in this energy intensive economy led to a rapid increase in production that in terms of jobs, welfare, and the quality-of-life put Sweden pretty close to the top where this old world is concerned. The people who provided the subsidies, taxpayers, as a group got their money back with plenty of interest, and it looked like smooth sailing.
Of course jobs, welfare, and the quality of life weren't good enough for the environmentalists. They preferred seeing these items in stone-age countries, and so it won't be smooth sailing after all. In fact, together with Swedish membership in the EU, I get the feeling that a light curse has been placed on this Kingdom.
This thing with Japan is also interesting. I certainly haven't had your contact with the decision makers in that country, but on the basis of what little I have had I get the feeling that they don't believe too much in the present generation of nuclear equipment. What they want is the breeder, and eventually they will get it. I don't know what that will mean, and I'm not certain that I want to know.
Malcolm Rawlingson 5.1.06
A note for Dan Grunbrg and other wind supporters.
I applaud wind generators that can produce power for 3c/kW hour .....provided that they are not using coal, oil, natural gas or nuclear generated electricity as their back up when they are not working due to reduced or no wind. Something has to replace their capacity when they do not produce. That "something" is coal, oil, nuclear or natural gas. In other words you have to build twice the MW installed capacity for every MW of installed wind capacity. Unfortunately wind generated electricity as part of a grid system does not and can not stand alone. When those costs are included I doubt if the real number is 3c or anywhere even close to it.
I suspect the economics of 3c/kW hour electricity is just a little bit distorted don't you think.
The ONLY way wind generators are cost effective (and by that I mean NOT relying on the already existing power plant infrastructure to operate) is if there is storage capacity available. I doubt very much Dan whether your 3c includes the costs of storage or spinning reserve or MVAR controls that must be in place for wind power to work at all. How do you control power factor in a system heavily reliant on wind power?
This is very skewed economics and only looks at a small part of the picture. Here are some realities as reported in Power Week News (today)
Alberta Canada is right now running into serious reliability problems with the amount of wind power that is now on line and planned. The AESO (Alberta Electricity System Operator) has set a limit of 900MW as the maximum it can absorb without destabilizing the grid there. The reasons cited are wind unpredicatbility and wind variability. Unfortunately there is well above 900MW of existing and planned capacity and the Alberta grid cannot handle it. Who is going to pay for the cost of the grid repeatedly blacking out Alberta if they allow more than 900MW? It will not be the generators for sure. You won't see them for Alberta dust. AESO don't mention that sometimes (even in Alberta) the wind does not blow at all leaving one to wonder how and where the electricity is going to come from on days when that happens. Don't you have to have ANOTHER power station ready to operate when the wind fails to blow and didn't you just double or triple the cost when you have to build not one but TWO power plants for the same installed nameplate wind capacity.
So all is NOT sweetness and light in the wind businessas as you would have us believe.The FACTS are that wind is variable, it is unreliable and the capacity factors of plants at even the very best wind sites is only 25%. That means the ONLY way they can possibly work is if the existing infrastructure is maintained so that it can handle the wind experiment. Wind generating companies (of course) don't pay for that.
This standard of economics is likely to bankrupt us all when the lights finally go out over North America as a result of it.
Without some method of reliable and efficient storage of wind generated electricity the fundamentals of the technology to produce electricity on a large scale are fundamentally and dangerously flawed.
Storage technology may eventually solve the dilemma but as yet such technology does not exist. If it did and was viable the grid systems of the world would be clamouring to build it because they would only have to run plants at base load and store the excess for peaks. The grid always has to meet the peaks which is why some plants like nat gas sit idle for most of the year. How do you meet the peaks with wind...ask the wind to blow a little harder when necessary?? I think you have to still build those plants aswell.
Grid operators have limited methods to meet the peaks because there is no way of storing electricity on large scale. Pumped storage works but such sites are rare in the world. Compressed air also works but is an incredibly ineffiicient way of storing electricity.
As far as wind being only 3c.....Sure and I have a piece of swamp in Florida Icould sell you!!!
Malcolm
Todd McKissick 5.1.06
Malcolm,
Can you repeat that last comment with solar thermal electric replacing wind as the contender? Oh, and please us the plants that do have 99% capacity and thermal storage at 98-99% efficiency with natural gas as their worst case backup heat generator. After all, they're the ones that will be built in the future if such a technology was to garner public awareness. I'd appreciate getting a nuclear advocate's actual opinion since they always run when confronted with the (lack of) problems or societal concerns of S.T.E.
Dan Grunbrg 5.2.06
Malcolm,
I would say that it is you that is mixing emotions into your arguments and confounding issues. I have no idea what you're credentials are, but if you don't believe that wind power bids are going for 3 cents per kWh unsubsidized, then a simple Google search for "wind power costs unsubsidized bidding" will bring up a slew of reports that prove my point.
Availability of wind power is unpredictable when you are talking about one generator. IPPs and generating companies deal with this by linking geographically independent locations and generators on the grid. I wish you would call GE and tell then of the problems you purport to be occurring in Canada, because they are ramping up production of their new 1.5 mW turbines and they might be sued!
Most power options require initial capital cost, fueling cost, waste treatment, and decommissioning costs. Wind power's capital costs are about $1000/kW and decreasing rapidly. That is 1/3 less than a new combined cycle thermal plant. The availability of a well designed wind farm is now approaching 98%. Any mention of 30% is just poor design. GE has also been leading the pack in producing smart electronics for coupling to the grid with high reliability.
So, I have provided you with facts, why don't you debate me on the facts. This thread is about nuclear power and I contend that despite all the potential benefits of nuclear power, it just doesn't pass the basic test of economics. Wind power does. Keep your emotions controlled and do a little research.
Please somebody give us the capital cost of a new generation nuclear plant, its fueling cost, depreciation period that is reasonable given the existing data and decommissioning and spent fuel storage costs. We shall compare apples to apples.
Please don't get me wrong. There may be a place in the supply matrix for nuclear, but if you are going to make economic arguments, let's see the accounting!
I suspect a bit of an agenda on your side if you can't argue the facts. I repeat. I have never seen an unsubsidized costing for nuclear power that can beat wind's price.
Let's see the figures...
Roger Arnold 5.2.06
Dan,
This is the accuracy police. I have to cite you for a couple of violations.
You've confused "availability" with capacity factor. Availability is the percentage of time that a unit is not down for maintenance--when it could be producing power if the wind were blowing. 98% is actually not that great. I think the experience in Denmark has availability upwards of 99%. Not sure about that, however. The AWEA wind site only claims 98% as typical.
Capacity factor, OTOH, is the ratio of energy actually delivered annually to what would be delivered if the unit operated at its full nameplate capacity 24/7/365. 33% would be an unusually high capacity factor for a wind turbine; real experience is more like 25% in a moderately good location.
Note that CF is not the percentage time that the wind turbine is producing power. A lot of the time, the wind velocity will be below that needed to achieve full output from the turbine, and it will be producing half or less of its rated capacity. In a good location, there should be some degree of generation about 2/3 of the time on average.
Because of the CF, wind turbine capacity at $1000 / kW is equivalent, in capital cost per kWh, to conventional baseload power at $3000 - $4000 / kW.
As to $.03 / kWh, yes, contracts are being closed to deliver wind energy at that price. It indicates a very impressive degree of progress in wind power, but it doesn't mean quite as much as it might sound. In fact, it's below the wholesale market for energy trading, and it indicates how much wind power pays for being intermittent.
Consider an aluminum smelter: that's one of the most energy-intensive industries that there is. The cost of energy represents something like a third of the cost of their product. You'd think that they'd find 3 cents / kWh irresistable. But not if it isn't reliably available 24/7. Since much of the 2/3 of their operating cost that isn't electricity is the cost of capital for their plant facilities, they need to run full up 24/7--or as close as they can get--to maximize production. If the choice is between $.06 / kWh with a guaranteed 100% CF and $.03 / kWh with an unpredictable 30% CF, they'll take $.06 / kWh.
Of course, they could try to secure the best of both worlds by buying wind power when it's available, and buy from conventional sources when it's not. But they'd likely have to pay a stiff premium for the unscheduled backup capacity.
The bottom line is that for renewables to compete on a level playing field with other sources, the cost of energy storage, or whatever it takes to provide the equivalent of baseload power, really does need to be factored in. Now, if there were a carbon tax stiff enough to reflect the externalized costs of fossil fuels, renewables would look very good. But until that happens, or the cost of storage gets a lot lower, renewables will have a hard time competing on a strictly economic basis.
Don Giegler 5.3.06
Dan,
I see where Western Wind will tap into SCE's Sagebrush transmission line. From the "forward-looking statements" in the announcement, my calculator tells me that WW will sell power from a $1600/kW facility at $0.0285/ kW-hr. That's quite an improvement over WW projects from the last 2 years where similar calculator estimastes indicate $5643/kW facilities sold power at $0.32/kW-hr. If the former is true, you'll soon catch up with what your cohort Tam Hunt calls those "paid-off" CA nukes. If the latter is true ... well, perhaps my calculator misbehaved. On the other hand, FERC had to order the partners of the Sagebrush line to interconnect and provide at least 50 MW and up to 120 MW of transmission to WW. That seems curious. Why wouldn't the partners be salivating over power at $0.0285/kW-hr? Maybe WW needs more geographic links or additional smart GE electronics.
Dan Grunbrg 5.3.06
I can't believe all of your nitpicking and nobody has stepped up to the plate to give me the figures I requested for Nuclear. YES, there are issues with baseload vs. intermittent sources of power, but these issues are way overblown because you are looking at WP under a microscope. One must consider WP in the context of the entire supply matrix. WInd happens to blow most of the time during the day when peak loads are highest. Many peak load generators sit idle just like wind mills do at night. Nobody with half a brain would consider directly attaching a windmill to an aluminum smelter! The proper use of wind power is to attach it to a grid with diverse generating assets and shut down your coal fired plants when the wind is blowing. Nobody discusses down time for peak load generators if they are powered by natural gas. Why are you all so paranoid of the facts?
Despite the author of this article making economic arguments in favor of nuclear power, I have seen NOT ONE POST outlining the construction, fueling, operation, decommissioning and spent fuel storage costs of nuclear power. In the UK, the nuclear generating assets failed to privatize because the prospectus could not account for the decommissioning and fuel storage costs. Fast Breeder projects both in France and Japan met the same fate and were relegated to R&D labs. They are economic disasters.
I only mentioned wind as a comparison for the economics of nulcear and all you pro-nuke hound-dogs make emotional, non-fact based attacks on wind. The arguments about wind are really silly. Despite you're greatest fears, wind now has 22GW installed world wide and has provided 30% of new power development in the last 10 years, so I guess in a free market the choice has been made.
I argue against nuclear as I fear that, as history has proven, when the plants are built by private companies, they will finally cry to the government for billions of dollars to decommission their plants and store their fuel as has happened wherever nukes tried to privatize.
Not to mention that efficiency improvements can achieve on average 30% reductions in loads at ROIs of 25-35% (see Clean Companies by Dr. Joe Romm, former Assistant Secretary of Energy). There are a lot more economic options available before we have re-open the nuclear genie bottle again.
Again, address me on the issues of the economics of nuclear and then I can show you how to use a calculator. But, I must warn you, you need lots of digits on yours when you are doing nuclear accounting...
John K. Sutherland 5.3.06
Those, like Mr Grundbrg, who believe that wind power is a key to any rational social energy strategy in the twenty first century in Canada or elsewhere in the world, should take a close look at recent publicity concerning several recent projects slated for Canada, as well as historical data from Denmark, Germany, California and elsewhere. But first, Canada. Developer information on a planned wind development in the Tantramar marshes of SE Canada, noted that 19 wind turbines will be erected in the Amherst Wind Energy Project. There is a planned total of 31 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity, and the total cost is estimated by the developer to be about CAN$60 million. It was described as likely to produce about 100 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity each year – or enough to supply about 10,000 homes, but omitted to say that this might happen only when the wind actually blows. We should examine the fine details of this and other comparable wind projects so that there is no misunderstanding of what is really being accomplished, and at what cost. The installed cost works out to about $3.1 million, for each 1.6 megawatt windmill. If each windmill were to operate at full power for the entire year, then each would produce 14 million kWh (14,000 MWh or 14 GWh), and all of them would produce about 266 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity. Thus, the operators are obviously assuming that these windmills will spin for an average of about 37% of the year at full capacity to produce the estimated 100 GWh (or 5.3 GWh per windmill).
The Tantramar marshes – close to sea level - are a windy place, but even the 5,000 plus windmills in the Altamont pass, high in the hills of California, can only manage to operate at about 20% of their capacity on average, so the assumption of 37% may be over-optimistic. Operating data from Denmark, Germany and Spain suggest that less than 20% (about 15%) is more likely. Germany had long believed that 39% coud be expected.
However, let us assume for now that the 37% is correct, until actual operating experience provides better data. If one scales up this power output to match that of New Brunswick’s operating 680 MW nuclear reactor at Point Lepreau, which has operated at a lifetime factor of about 83% for the last 23 years (and allowing for only 630 MW of net capacity, as 50 MW of the 680 MW station, supplies the in-station needs), then Point Lepreau generates an average of 4,580 GWh each year. The equivalent output from the Amherst Project windmills operating 37% of the time, would require 864 of them, costing close to $2.7 billion of capital cost, or about twice the projected cost of Lepreau re-furbishment of about $1.4 billion! If, as is more likely, the average operating time of these windmills is about 20%, then the equivalent windmill cost (1600 of them) becomes about $5 billion, or almost four times the cost of Lepreau refurbishment for the same power production. Unfortunately when the wind is not blowing in this region, the 1600 windmills are ALL landscape decoration, and the $5 billion is dead money that needs to be backed up with $1.4 billion of reliable nuclear or coal, or hydro.
Significantly, the Tantramar coastal marshes are on the migrating routes for many protected species of waterfowl. Another large Canadian project, The Melancthon-GH project, to be constructed by Canadian Hydro Developers, will cost $126 million in Capital Cost to erect 45 windmills each of 1.5 MW, for a total of 67.5 MW capacity. The maximum theoretical output (100% operation) from these windmills, and which cannot be achieved anywhere in the world, is 591,300 MWh. With a more likely operation of about 20% of capacity in the year, the output will be about 118,000 MWh (118 GWh, costing $120 million) – the company assumes 190GWh.
Similar projects with similar very high costs relative to nuclear power are planned and under construction in Manitoba (Schneider Power), and at Grey Highlands in Ontario, as well as at Tabor in Southern Alberta.
Gigawatt for gigawatt, the existing wind farm projects demonstrate that wind project electricity, typically costs at least three times more than nuclear electricity. The proposed projects will only confirm this. The over-riding problem with wind power is that it occurs on an intermittent, unreliable, uncontrollable, and unpredictable basis that requires dedicated standby operation of a reliable and controlled source of power (nuclear, coal, or imports) that must be constantly available within seconds. This logically requires that the assumed costs of wind should also include the costs of the needed standby generation. As one must build and have, the necessary reliable replacement power on hand – along with all of its costs - for those times when the wind does not blow, the obvious question should be asked: why bother with wind power at all? It is a surplus and un-needed environmentalist dream that causes capi
John K. Sutherland 5.3.06
Continued:
It is a surplus and un-needed environmentalist dream that causes capital costs of electrical energy derived from it, to be a factor of three to five and more, higher than the cost of electricity from the reliable ‘standby’ assets; coal, hydro, or Nuclear Power. If it is from coal or other fossil fuels, then having such stand-by power ticking over at a low level, as in Germany, Denmark, and Spain, also contributes much more to air pollution; pollution that should also to be chalked up against wind energy operation, but rarely is. Not surprisingly, nuclear power relicensing, refurbishment, and new-build, look like great investments, and wind power doesn’t. Nuclear begins to look even better when one looks at the other environmental impact of windmills. Not for nothing are they called the cuisinarts – blenders - of the bird and bat world.
The Los Angeles Times tells us that the ‘biggest wind farm’ in the world, at Altamont Pass in California, consisting of more than 5,400 windmills, generated 820 million kWh of electricity (2004?), operating at about 20% of rated capacity. Each windmill thus produced about 17 kilowatts each hour throughout the year!
Clearly, few people could figure out that 820 million kWh, is the amount of electricity that a single, small 100 megawatt (electrical) fossil fuel or nuclear plant could also generate in 1 year, if it operated at about 94% capacity. With windmills costing at least $0.5 million each and more to buy, install and connect, this means that Californian tax payers paid in excess of US $2.5 billion for the equivalent of a single small 100 MW reliable facility, while the canny private owners pocketed hundreds of millions in tax write offs and other massive benefits. Now the owners are also facing up to shutting many of these windmills down on bird migration routes, for two months of the year during bird migration episodes, because of the major kills of endangered bird species. I bet they will be generously compensated for not producing power at government request!
You may not have heard of the ‘Save the Flint Hills Kansas’ where there are more than 200 anti-wind environmental groups.
The General Accounting Office of the US Congress just finished a study of bat kills at windmills, and regards them as disturbing, as bats are slow to reproduce and are major consumers of pestiferous insects like mosquitoes and moths. The raptor bird kills in California are now associated with a significant explosion in the rat population.
Invariably, all wind power projects clearly demonstrate that they are not only unjustified and unnecessary, but that they are too expensive, grossly unreliable, and environmentally damaging to an unacceptable degree. The British recently estimated the costs of their various options. Onshore wind costs are 5.4 pence/kWh (about 12 cents Canadian/kWh). Offshore wind costs are 7.2 p/kWh (these also include the fractional costs of the essential standby backup energy sources for when the wind does NOT blow and the reliable alternatives must be brought on line), and nuclear power, whose costs are 2.3 p/kWh. Without an assured and guaranteed electricity supply there is no water supply; no sewage pumps to dispose of sewage; no elevators to serve tall buildings; no industry; few jobs; no frozen and unspoiled food in supermarkets; no quality to life. Welcome back to the age of wind.
As one astute contributor to Energy Pulse recently noted; with regard to Wind energy: ‘sometimes even ‘free’, can be too expensive’
Most rational and qualified environmentalist have known all along that the greenest and most reliable energy of all is nuclear power.
mauk mcamuk 5.3.06
Hello, Dan Grunbrg! :)
Please allow me to address a few of your points.
First, I am an advocate of wind power. I like windmills, and feel that in combination with hydropwer and nuclear, they are the best way we have to get away from fossil fuels. Sue me. :D
But, I acknowledge the fact that for windpower to be a viable power source in the future, MASSIVE power grid upgrades have to happen. I think that we have the basic technology to make this happen, but it is very much non-trivial.
(I refer to an HVDC backbone, probably superconducting.)
It is obvious that we need to rebuild our power system. We just need to get on with it. :) The results of the ExternE study make it very obvious what our source choices should be. We just need to implement at this point, except that the raving ecowackies want to have nothing to do with it.
Oh, well.
Don Giegler 5.3.06
Dan,
Don't see much but emotional innuendo backed by unsubstantiated statements in your response. All of a sudden emotion became overblown nitpicking and recognition that availability is not capacity factor became paranoia! You must be following a different forum than this one if you believe nuclear economics, including your hoped-for talking points, has not been thoroughly aired here in articles and comments. By the way, our monthly SDG&E bill includes an electric charge (in dollars and cents, not coulombs) for nuclear decommissioning. It would be refreshing to see something comparable for other less reliable, more expensive power sources. My calculator would appreciate that!
Len Gould 5.3.06
mauk: Superconducting HVDC transmission for long distances is never likely to make sense even if HighTemp SC materials were free. Just cant compete with aluminum hung on poles, more losses to cooling than to I^2R losses in the aluminum. HTSC - DC can make sense where you are forced to bury the cables, and it's likely to be many years before it ever moves out of that niche.
James Hopf 5.4.06
So, according to Dan, we have a huge wind resource that is available at a total unsubsidized cost of only 3 cents/kW-hr, and the intermittantcy problem can be solved fairly simply, at little additional cost.
First of all, this is at odds with my understanding on all points. I thought that wind costs ~3 cents with the tax credits, ~5 cents w/o it, at the very best sites. If what Dan was saying were true, wind power would only cost ~1 cent/kW-hr after the PTC!! In all but the most pessimistic estimates, new nuclear plants will have a total cost of less than 5 cents (closer to 4). I also have not heard many experts say that the intermittantcy issue could be easily addressed. Most experts believe it is a fundamental limitation, which will limit wind's overall generation percentage to ~10-20%, barring development of economical, large-scale energy storage. If the concept of shipping power from windy parts of the country to power all the unwindy parts is feasible at all (unlikely), it would require a massive transmission grid, something whose costs are surely not counted in the reported wind power costs.
Without an answer to the intermittantcy problem, windfarms basically do not count as capacity, and only act as fuel cost savers at the times when the wind is blowing. As long as there is enough gas generation in the system, wind output displaces gas generation, and saves the gas fuel cost. Wind may indeed be cheaper than the gas fuel cost (only). If wind ever has to compete with a coal or uranium fuel cost (~1.5 cents or less), however, it seems doomed.
More to the point, Dan's assertions raise many questions (from any critical thinker), and can be shown to be false practically from deduction alone.
For starters, if wind only costs ~3 cents, which beats all other sources, even w/o the PTC, then why does all wind development stop when the PTC goes away? Secondly, if wind cost no more than any other option, had unlimited potential (i.e., could provide for all new power demands), and intermittantcy is not really an issue/limitation, then why, oh why, would utilities even consider building anything else? Wind is fully domestic. There is no forward fuel price uncertainty or volatility. It can be built quickly. It emits no CO2 or other pollution (and is thus not vulnerable to future pollution restrictions). It is also relatively popular (right)? Why are we seeing ~50 GW of coal plants being built, despite the threat of increased restrictions on pollution, as well as restrictions on CO2 emissions, when wind can provide all our power, reliably at a lower cost (apparently)?
If Dan's assertions are true, why are we all still here arguing. We wouldn't be. All our energy problems would be solved. Let me guess, it's all a conspiracy. (After all, wheras utilities make money off coal/nuclear plants, they can't also make money off wind plants, for some reason).
If Dan's assertions were true, concerning cost, etc..., why is he here trying to convince us. After all, neither we or he makes the decision on what types of new power plants to build, the utilities do. If Dan were correct, the utilities would be smart enough to figure that out, believe me. And we wouldn't be here discussing all this policy. Utilities would have long since made it clear that they have no interest at all in coal, nuclear, or any other type of power plant other than wind. If these things were true, we "nuclear advocates" would be wasting our time, because nothing that we could ever do would change the situation (such that utilities would consider nuclear over wind). Why would you consider it if there were a cheaper source that could get the entire job done, that is relatively hassle free?
To that end, my question to Dan would be, if he really believes his assertions, what is he afraid of? What is he after in trying to convince us (and others) of wind's "obvious" advantages. Surely, he's not trying to get approval for policies that demand wind be used, give wind large subsidies, or which intentionally block nuclear development (so that it's not allowed to compete). After all, none of those things would be necessary, if what he says were true.
The reason why we're having all there involved discussions is that no, Virginia, our energy and environmental problems are not that simple, and every energy option has its benefits and its drawbacks. There is no simple solution, or silver bullet. Any claim, or "data" that seems to suggest otherwise should be viewed with skepticism. People (including Dan) need to work on developing a "giggle" or "smell" test, which recognizes when things just don't make sense. Nobody was selling wind power for ~1 cent/kW-hr, believe me. And yes, there is a reason why utilities are building plants other than wind for the great majority of new generation.
Todd McKissick 5.4.06
Here's an Out of the Box thought that might support the mismatch of generated power (be it from either demand swing or intermittant generation)... If we're headed for a hydrogen economy anyway, why not select the best electricity>H2 generation technology and place these systems all over the place now instead of waiting for the Big 3 to create a demand? I think the market will keep pace with the ramp-up of production. It should be easy to manage grid load by kicking in extra load (making H2) anytime load is below max capacity. Surely the efficiency loss of even the worst technology (electrolisys) economically outweighs the loss of curtailment on either side. Most people arguably believe an H2 infrastructure is inevitable (right or wrong) so why not shift transportation demands to the grid as soon as possible if it will have so many benefits to all parties?
Tam Hunt 5.4.06
James, et al, re wind intermittency, a just released official report from the UK's Energy Research Center found that if the UK were to obtain up to 20% of its total electricity demand from wind, it would add only 1% to customer bills total, including balancing generation (which would obviously be minimal, as you can tell from the small additional cost). Google the report and read for yourself.
Also, Denmark's grid operator stated last year that that country could get to 50% wind power with limited problems regarding intermittency and grid stability: http://www.windpower.org/en/news051105.htm.
Wind is not the only choice being considered right now by utiltiies b/c there are many entrenched opponents, most particularly the nuclear power industry, the coal power industry, and the natural gas industry. Policymakers are often confused by the array of views on things like wind power - and don't always receive the best views on this admittedly complex topic.
Graham Cowan 5.4.06
Perhaps the cost of balancing generation would be 1 percent, or perhaps the UK Energy Research Centre is an idiots' consultative working group, or perhaps they are funded from HM Government's natural gas tax revenues, and are lying in defense of those revenues. (Wind power opposed by the natgas industry!?! One stands in awe.)
Why is McKissick setting up a hydrogen-economy strawman? If "most people arguably believe an H2 infrastructure is inevitable", and their belief does not pertain to the existing hydrogen infrastructure of tube trailers and cryogenic tanker trucks that service a large base of customers who, as F. David Doty occasionally points out, find hydrogen worth having at ~US$100 per gasoline-gallon-equivalent, per kg, then most people are fools. I would venture to guess that most people are not fools, and have as strong a belief in the inevitability of a new, true H2 infrastructure as they do in the evils of bimetallism.
No-one can dispute -- but I won't be surprised if someone tries -- that no electricity storage system based on a water electrolyser and a hydrogen fuel cell has ever demonstrated round-trip efficiency as much as 20 percent. Is that what McKissick was talking about? Lead-acid batteries are hugely better, but no megawatt-scale wind turbine has a 10-MWh bank of those, either, unless somebody put one in without informing me. (Hey. Why not a 40-metre spherical water tank on top of the tower!)
(... er ... better make that two 30-metre spherical tanks on a sturdy cantilever, far enough upwind and downwind of the blades not to be hit.)
My arguments have been twisted and spun beyond recognition. After all this debate, we still haven't seen one, not ONE post on the economics of nuclear power. I only gave the wind solution as an example of one economical solution to the need for energy, there are more. I regret that I brought up the wind issue in the first place.
Can some of you pro-nuke people please tell me how much it costs to build a new nuclear power plant, fuel and operate it, store the spent fuel and decommission the plant? The entire premise of this article was that nuclear is an economically viable option. Economist magazine for one no longer supports nuclear power on the basis of economics.
Somebody please give me the latest figures. Then we can nail down the cost range for nuclear power (Please note, especially those of you in Sweden, that there is a difference between COST and PRICE). Once we can all agree on the real costs of nuclear power, we can revisit whether there are better alternatives.
Let me also say that I am not pro-wind as much asa I am anti-nuclear. Purely for economic reasons. SO, let's see the figures and debate the economics of nuclear power. Of course there are advantages to nuclear compared to fossil fuels, I will give you that. But, before we continue this debate, can somebody please give me the latest figures?
Graham Cowan 5.5.06
When was The Economist ever pro-nuclear? When oil hit a deep price minimum a few years ago, they prophesied on their cover that it would go twice lower still. And here they are on October 7, 1995:
Only in Asia are governments continuing to invest enthusiastically in nuclear power. They are making an expensive mistake.
Be careful what you say. Those bimetalites have spies everywhere. ;)
What I was suggesting was more the principle of allowing nuclear to back up wind without the requirement or associated capital waste of throttling back the generators. Watching how the wind blows, politically, I would assume we're not close to being done putting in wind turbines. I do accept this and think the grid stability issue needs to be prior planned. The unfortunate part is that there's no yield sign on wind installations to wait for the other. I see public opinion as accepting H2 at a rapid pace. I'm not commenting on whether it's good or bad, but that it's happening and will likely continue. So, the last question becomes, what's the avoided cost of the energy not generated when a nuke backs off to allow wind to produce? Take that price against your favorite H2 generator and get something out of your extra nuke capacity that otherwise wouldn't have been used. I'm pretty sure the fuel costs involved wouldn't break this deal.
As to electrolysis, are there better technologies? Absolutely. In this scenerio, I'd vote for nuke based thermal disociation, but that isn't going to happen for a few years. Electrolizers are commercially available today. Googling them found a number either above 60% or hoping to reach 65% soon, and even some home scale wallmount models (without efficiency numbers). I don't see a downside unless you're willing to wait 10 years for the perfect technology to be released and let that decade waste a bunch in the meantime.
Being critical of those who would pay $100eq for H2 is sort of counter to your argument, isn't it? We're talking about the production of the gas, so $100-per is a good thing from a profit standpoint, right? How much is the O2 worth?
As far as the infrastructure goes, I don't care if you fly party balloons to the masses. It's most likely going to follow the current distribution network and may warrant some pipline experiments or whatnot.
I see this as a way to build an alliance between nuclear and wind... two forces of nature politically equal and opposite. How's that for diatribe? :)
Todd
John K. Sutherland 5.5.06
Mr Grunbrg, what is the cost of running your car?
Until it actually dies and you scrap it, you do not know for sure. The only thing you know with any certainty is what the capital cost was to you, along with all of the interest penalties and dealer prep costs as you drive it off the lot. You hope it will operate well for you, but you cannot be sure. If it dies after one kilometer and the dealer thumbs his nose at you, and you don’t know any lawyers, and insurance will not cover your loss, then I suggest to you that the cost per kilometer would be many tens of thousands of dollars.
If, after operating the car for hundreds of thousands of kilometers, it dies, then your costs per kilometer would look pretty good, but you would never know what they were as you initially drove off the lot, as you could not know fuel costs, insurance costs, scrap value costs, environmental disposal costs, intervenor costs to stop you driving your SUV, road taxes, repair costs, etc.
The best of all circumstances is when you have operating data over tens of years on all vehicles sold and driven, and then you get a reasonably true cost of operation picture. Your disastrous data on the car that died, or the windmill that blew over, or the nuclear plant that was never operated (Shoreham), or the coal plant that blew up (it happened), is then part of a much better ‘population’ statistic.
The same is true of electrical facilities of all kinds. You only know after many of them have operated for some time, what their relative costs are. This is why, the current fleet of 100 plus nuclear facilities even in the highly disadvantageous climate of the US are now looking so very good, even before their end of initial operating life, and even with included spent fuel disposal and decommissioning costs being collected from the price charged for their electricity. Fossil Fuel costs going astronomical, are making the others look spectacularly poor investments as candidates of new-build. When pollution penalties, and other external costs which are not yet collected, begin to bite them, they will look particularly bad.
This is why, if you had bothered to read any of the earlier referenced documents that I took pains to point out as a source of much corroborating data (Nuclear Power Comparisons and Perspectives – which I wrote and published on this site)
you would be able to see the Utility Data Institute figures comparing the various long-term costs of nuclear, coal, oil, and gas with time. They tell you all you need to know in the larger picture, without grinding away at ‘nitpicking’ (your word) issues.
Many respondents to these articles assume that somehow, wind and nuclear power are in competition with each other. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nuclear and coal are competing options for baseload electricity, with heavy oil in others, and hydro in some favored regions, though various jurisdictions favored gas-fired electrical generation until the price climbed too high.
As a result, some of the various misconceptions about wind power and its economics needed to be examined, which was what I did, to your obvious discomfort, and probably disbelief, though I used the wind developer figures. I noticed also, that many of those who are wind promoters and are anti-nuclear, tend to stop reading when the facts they do not like, are presented, otherwise they would recognize that their questions and objections have generally been answered, often in several different ways.
Wind is great for pumping water and not much else. I oppose its use for grid electricity only. As its rarely-disclosed capital costs are from two to five times more than even the local nuclear example that I have access to, and because of its intermittency and other fatal issues, it should be a non-starter as a feeder to the grid. It is strange how many so-called environmentalists object to nuclear power solely on its capital costs, yet when the situation is turned around to bite them, they manage to sound offended and unfairly treated.
Electricity prices vary from country to country, region to region, and state to state. Even if they have the same kind of operating units. The reason is that the operational rules vary from one jurisdiction to another; interest rates have been very volatile in the past; and only nuclear units tend to operate close to 90% of the time, with coal, oil and gas (more expensive fuel costs) operated only as required (from maybe 20% to 70%) to meet base-load demand. The example below applies only to my local utility. Others have their own figures and operating experiences, all of which are continuously looking better all of the time, as those for fossil fuel are looking less healthy. However, coal will be an easy sell for quite some time in the U.S. with its major coal resource and well-established industry, and vested politic
John K. Sutherland 5.5.06
Continued:
However, coal will be an easy sell for quite some time in the U.S. with its major coal resource and well-established industry, and vested political interests; as will oil and gas.
From my own experience, my local utility operated nuclear facility which is now 24 years old is expected to earn about 9 billion dollars of electricity by its twenty sixth year, which is close to its anticipated planned refurbishment.
Uranium fuel (natural uranium) to operate it in that time will have cost about 210 million dollars over those 26 years. And those dollars mostly stay in Canada. Had coal or oil been the fuel, then those fuel costs (which have now at least doubled) would have been about $2.6 billion and $3.6 billion respectively – all of which would have left the country. This is a difference to the local jurisdiction of about $2.4 billion between coal and uranium costs, and a difference of about $3.4 billion between oil and uranium. And those differences are getting much bigger as the costs of oil, coal and gas continue to rise. Those differences cover a lot of the anticipated and unanticipated expense of building, and running the nuclear facility, but those dollars all stay in Canada. In addition, more than $1 billion was brought into this province by electricity exports to the US in the first decade of the nuclear facility operation.
As with all jurisdictions, a rate of about 0.1 cent per kilowatt hour is levied against nuclear electricity to cover waste disposal and decommissioning costs. It adds up to one pile of money when one considers that reprocessing is being put back in the picture, rather than disposal; and that existing sites are not likely to be decommissioned as anticipated back to green field, but will continue to be used for needed generation.
This is why nuclear, with its now defined relatively low operating costs and long term operating advantages, looks so spectacularly good, even in the U.S. as well as the rest of the world.
Roger Arnold 5.6.06
Todd's suggestion re. electrolysis may be "out of the box" (his words), but it's not "off the wall". It's also my own favorite approach for load matching. There are good markets for electrolytic hydrogen and oxygen in:
* refining heavy crude; * gasification of coal, petcoke, or biomass; * production of nitrogen fertilizers; * production of synthetic fuels and chemical feedstocks from CO2.
In gasification, electrolytic oxygen replaces the need for an air liquefaction and distillation plant, and makes smaller operations economically feasible. Adding hydrogen to the gasification reaction roughly doubles the yield of synthesis gas.
There are a couple of caveats, of course. First, electrolysis units still have moderately high capital cost and non-trivial maintenance needs. I'm not sure how long their membranes last, but I think it's only a few years. That adds substantially to the cost of the hydrogen and oxygen produced. Presumably, if there were a large assured market, both capital and operating costs of water electrolysis capacity would shrink rapidly.
Another caveat concerns the manner in which the electrolysis plant interfaces to the grid. You want it to simulate the parallel combination of a constant load and a dispatchable power generator. In grid control terminology, this virtual generator would operate "under regulation". That means that the system operator's SCADA software can command real-time adjustments in power output, with a response time measured in seconds. System operators contract for regulated generation capacity, usually with hydroelectric facilities, if they're available in the area. They use it to stabilize the grid. It's the most valuable type of generating capacity, and commands a premium.
It is certainly feasible to design the grid interface for an electrolysis plant to simulate a regulated generator in parallel with a constant load, but the designer has to know what she's doing. Electrically, the interface must "look" like a spinning generator, complete with rotational inertia. There are various ways to achieve that, but it's not what you'd get from the straightforward AC - DC rectifier that an electolysis plant would normally use.
Dan Grunbrg 5.8.06
Look John, we cannot have a debate on whether X is greater than, or less than Y if you don't know the value of X and Y. I don't buy your arguments (excuses) about prices being different according to location. You can provide a portfolio of average costs and we can debate the assumptions used to make them.
The US has 103 operating reactors producing an average of 1091 megawatts each, which operate on average 80% of the time, giving a yearly average power of 873 megawatts per plant. How much are the initial capital costs of a 1000 megawatt nuke? Fueling costs are only a part of the operating costs. Nukes must employ expensive nuclear engineers, so we need the total operating budget.
If your plant stated above is an average plant, then the 0.1 cents per kWh is nowhere even near the latest estimates for fuel storage and decommissioning cost. The latest figures made public in UK's parliament during their privatization process reached 23 billion pounds for fuel storage and decommissioning, or about 100 times your current estimate.
So, I don't argue about the viability of fissionable material resources, but just the economics.
Hypothetically, if despite nuclear's deplorable record for underestimating real costs, a private utility fails to provide for fuel storage and decommissioning costs in its cost structure, and 60 years later when the day of reckoning comes and the company has no funds, the public must foot the bill for this negligence, so there is plenty of room for public debate. In the case of the UK, the test of analysis by independent accountants failed miserably, ultimately resulting in the abandoning of their nuclear generating asset privatization scheme.
Additional facts that tip the scale away from nuclear power are the resulting increase in bomb making material, namely plutonium. Plutonium is not found in nature and is 100% man-made. Obviously in the future, the market for this material will grow as terrorists grow more sophisticated and better financed in the coming millennium.
In addition, those of you that claim that fuel reprocessing is a solution to the storage problem, obviously have no idea how that process works. Actually there is a net increase in mass of radioactive material during the process, so while it may be able to produce more reactor fuel, the storage problem is exacerbated.
I have many more options for you that address the baseload issue of wind power, but I wish to stick to the economics of nuke power argument for the time being.
Just give me one example of a nuke plant business plan. If every businessman used your logic of a car purchase analogy, we would be flooded with bankruptcies (I can't estimate the cost of operating my car in the future, so I will just buy a Lambo and drive it until it dies and then let somebody else take care of the expenses...). The reason we are not is that most consumers can estimate, quite accurately what the costs are for owning a new car by making educated guess and assumptions about unclear factors. Once you make a model you are free to plug in various costs for labor, fueling costs, etc. This algorithm can also be applied to nuke power.
Challenge me with figures.
mauk mcamuk 5.9.06
Hello Dan! :)
I read your last comment with a disappointed grimace. Please, allow me to dispell some of the mythology you're spewing.
First, the US commercial reactor fleet has demonstrated capacity factors near or above 90 percent for the last five years, not 80 percent. As new designs start getting built, that number is likely to creep up a bit. The AP-1000 and EPR are both designed to hit 93 percent capacity factor, and after a few years to work out any kinks are likely to do so easily.
Second, you point at British decommisioning costs as indicative of US costs. This is wrong. The British built a TOTALLY different kind of reactor than we did. The MAGNOX used carbon dioxide gas as coolant with metallic uranium fuel clad in a magnesium alloy sheath, with a concrete reactor vessel. It was a totally different reactor. Unfortunately for the British, while it worked great on paper, in practice it turned into a nightmare. The British MAGNOX's, because they used natural uranium, produced HUGE amounts of waste compared to US light water reactors. Even worse, the waste deteriorated badly in water due to the magnesium cladding.
THAT is why the British have issues with nuclear: They made a series of poor choices, and now have to foot the tab.
But the British mistakes have nothing whatever to do with US water-cooled reactors. Please educate yourself a little better on this topic if you're going to blather on about it.
Third, you claim to argue economics: Okay, here's a doozy of a question for ya. Over a 60 year lifespan, how much money does an AP-1000 earn? 1140 megawatts, 93 percent capacity factor, 8760 hours a year, plug in whatever electicity rate you think people will pay. Don't forget 60 years worth of inflation! :)
Your decommisioning worries are baseless.
Fourth, you bring up the old plutonium malarkey. Plutonium is not only manmade. Plutonium is made in supernova events just like every other element, it just decays away so quickly it is all gone on a planet as old as Earth. But there is STILL natural plutonium present on Earth, such as in the natural reactors at Oklo.
Hey, look at that. There is nothing magical, evil, or mysterious about plutonium. It is not the most lethal substance on earth, and a pound of it cannot poison a million people.
Fifth, you claim we folks don't know how reprocessing works. LOL!
Okay sport, you asked for it. Which reprocessing system do you wanna discuss, smart guy? PUREX, pyroprocessing, or UREX-1a? PUREX is the old-style pure plutonium system, UREX-1a adds a reagent which keeps the plutonium and actnides commingled, and pyroprocessing uses hot salt and electrodeposition to do the same trick, only better.
I can get into practically any level of detail you care to mention on any of those three processes. Want to discuss fission products? What about Americium? Why is Neptunium both valuable and dangerous? What is the critical mass for all the transuranics? Why do we care? Why does adding water to a reproccessing system make it more finicky? Why are fast reactors better than thermal reactors for reprocessing scenarios? I can talk about this stuff all DAY. :)
Sixth, you claim that the mass of radiocative material increases in reprocessing. I find it laughable that people are STILL trotting that old propaganda out. Here's the question you must answer: What intensity is it? A billion tons of granite is pretty darn radioactive, after all, but I don't see anybody worrying about it.
Seventh, I want to see your information about wind as baseload, so put up the citations.
Eighth, you demand figures for nuclear power. Okay.
I touched on this above, but here's a nice layman-accessible paper:
http://www.uic.com.au/neweconomics.pdf
Feeling challenged yet? Note the current price of natural gas and coal, and plug those costs into the MIT and Chicago models laid out in that paper, then sit there at your desk and feel that cold, hard, fact sinking in.
Nuclear has a crushing competitive advantage as long as fossil fuels stay expensive.
Sorry.
Tam Hunt 5.9.06
Mauk and John,
Re nuclear power costs, the standard calculation when comparing different technologies is the levelized cost of electricity analysis (LCOE). This compares apples to apples by taking a 20 or 30 year lifespan for each technology and including all costs. Here's one report finding a not very favorable LCOE for nuclear (Kammen and Paca, 2004): http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.28.050302.105630. This is the abstract only, if you'd like the full report let me know and I can send you a pdf.
I'll agree that extending the life of any given power plant will change the LCOE in that plant's favor, but from today's perspective, we have no idea which plants may be extended past their 30 year lifetime, so it's far more accurate to include a 30 year lifetime than any longer period, in my view.
Tam Hunt 5.9.06
Mauk and John again,
I'm curious what you think of UxC's presentation on past and future uranium supplies, and the effect on the industry of declining supplies? Here's the presentation: http://www.uxc.com/cover-stories/UxC%20Toronto%202005-10.pps.
Rodney Adams 5.9.06
Tam:
I would be interested in seeing the full report that you cite (Kammen and Paca, 2004). Based on what I know about how such reports are put together and the references that they use, I would not be surprised to find out that the oil, gas and coal prices and the associated inflation rates for those fuels assumed in the LCOE computations are a bit lower than would be assumed for a report produced with today's data.
If the report is anything like the MIT "Future of Nuclear Power" report from one year earlier (2003) that is widely cited as "proving" that nuclear power is not competitive, I would imagine that the energy price data is circa 2001 or 2002. In that study, the "high gas price case" assumed a levelized 40 year power plant natural gas cost of $6.76 per thousand cubic feet.
NO ONE would assert today that natural gas will be available for the next 40 years at anything close to that price even when adjusted for inflation.
You also cited a 30 years plant life, indicating that you may be a little misinformed about nuclear power plants licensing in the United States. Under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (as amended numerous times) nuclear power plants are licensed for 40 years initially with the ability to apply for license extensions in 20 year increments.
I am pretty sure that every one of the plants that has applied has either been awarded an extension or their application is still under review. That is not because the NRC is soft; it is because the plant owners have no desire to waste a considerable sum of money and a lot of time applying for a license extension for a plant that should be retired because of maintenance issues.
John K. Sutherland 5.10.06
Tam, If you will not read, and do not try to understand, the article I wrote on nuclear resources and the future:
and numerous others in the open literature that are not written by those as seemingly blinkered about energy as yourself, then I guess you will continue to say that you are not persuaded by the arguments and the extensive data provided, and will (are determined to) remain unconvinced.
You appear to be fixated on uranium resources in the same way that those who bleated about oil resource availability in 1900 and almost every decade since, opined that oil would run out in the next ten years as they could not see the future resource and seemed unaware of how market forces work. Now we are more than 100 years later.
Keep watching the nuclear development taking place, even as you wonder where the U resource (and thorium) will be coming from. The rest of the world obviously knows something you do not yet know.
Dan, I tried to keep the example of costs simple, but like Tam your usual fallback position when you encounter data that is inconvenient is that you are not persuaded and remain unconvinced.
You may not be panicking in the usual way, but you and Tam are definitely in deep denial and in my opinion THAT is close to a panic attack.
James Hopf 5.10.06
Adding to what mauk said…..
All waste management and plant decommissioning costs are fully included in the price of nuclear electricity. Nuclear plants are required to pay a 0.1 cent/kW-hr fee to the federal govt.’s nuclear waste fund, and this will be more than sufficient to pay the full cost of the $60 billion Yucca Mtn. repository. In fact, the govt. has been siphoning off a significant fraction of these funds to pay for other govt. expenditures. Delays in Yucca Mtn. will actually make these contributions even more overly sufficient, due to interest accrual, and the fact that letting the fuel cool off more would allow the repository’s capacity to increase.
In addition to this, the nuclear utilities are required, by law, to continuously set aside money (amounting to a fraction of a cent/kW-hr) into a plant decommissioning fund. These funds, and the level of contributions, are routinely monitored and audited by NRC and other govt. agencies, to ensure that they will be sufficient to pay the full cost of decommissioning at the end of plant life. These financial analyses (and resulting required annual contribution levels) are, if anything, quite conservative, as they are based on a 40-year plant life (I believe). The fact that virtually all plants in operation today will be operated for at least 60 years (if not more) will greatly reduce the per/kW-hr fee that would really need to be charged to cover the cost, due to the profound effect of long-term compounding interest.
We’ve already decommission several (older) plants, and we have a very good idea what it costs. Several hundred million dollars (i.e., a significant fraction of the initial construction cost) sounds like a lot of money, and this would lead many people who do not sufficiently appreciate the effect of long-term compounding interest to conclude that it would have a significant effect on the total cost of nuclear electricity. Dan’s confident (and wrong) assertions that these small per/kW-hr fees are “clearly not enough” demonstrate his inability to appreciate this effect.
Not only did the Brits pick the wrong reactor technology, as mauk points out, but they apparently did not make any such contributions over the long time period when the plants were in operation. Instead, they waited for the (huge) bill to come due at the end. A lot of ignorant people will ignore the interest effect, and simply divide this large sum by the total number of kW-hrs the plants generated, to come up with a vastly inflated per/kW-hr costs of waste and decommissioning.
One final thing, the Brits chose to conduct a lot of their nuclear operations on the same sites that their weapons establishment did their work. In the US, the military and commercial side were separate, with the military conducting all its nuclear operations on specific sites not involved at all with the power industry. In both Britain and the US, these military nuclear operations, conducted in the late 40s through the early 60s (before commercial nuclear plants even existed) were performed sloppily, with little or no concern for the environment. The resulting mess was indeed expensive to clean up, costing hundreds of billions in the US and ~100 billion in Britain. In the US, however, we understand that this has nothing to do with nuclear power, as all these cleanup operations are on these old defense sites. There basically are no “messes” at our commercial power plant sites, because nuclear plants (LWRs, anyway) are a clean operation that does not make a “mess”. In Britain, the situation is much more blurred, due to the co-location of operations, and the public does not understand that these massive costs they’re reading about have nothing to do with commercial power plants; LWR plants anyway, and that the new reactors being proposed would not result in such costs.
mauk mcamuk 5.10.06
Hello Tam! :)
The abstract you posted doesn't give any useful info so I can't speculate, although I wouldn't mind a link to a full version. I find this kind of boring crap fascinating.
Weird, huh! :)
As a note, in my previous reply I posted a link to a very good layman-oriented analysis paper on nuclear economics: I highly recommend this:
http://www.uic.com.au/neweconomics.pdf
In a nutshell, this paper shows that nuclear has cheap fuel and expensive capital requirements versus fossil fuels. Rises in fossil prices make nuclear more competitive, and nuclear is very sensitive to capital expense, IE, interest rates.
The anti-nuclear wackos out there know this very well, and so they do everything in their power to make nuclear projects uncertain, thus raising their interest costs. This effect is a major reason why the MIT study shows nuclear so unfavorably: The MIT analysts charged nuclear power a higher rate of interest. This is a HUGE effect.
Now, you claim to be an advocate of wind. So am I.
So, let me point out something: Wind is in exactly the same boat nuclear power is when this calculus is being performed. Wind has very low fuel costs (free!) and very high capital costs(much higher than nuclear even).
Indeed, as that paper shows, wind is even MORE extremely dependant upon cheap money than nuclear, if it is to have even a ghost of a chance at being competitive.
So, the kinds of nasty tricks the anti-nukes use to sabotage nuclear projects work even more effectively against wind projects. Frivolous lawsuits against wind projects will kill that nascent industry much more dead than it did to nuclear.
Windpower NEEDS a baseload partner. Period.
The reasons are many, intermittancy and reactive loads being the most proximal thereof. (It is POSSIBLE to make windpower internally self-supporting, but it takes a massive grid upgrade that would be technically feasible but very expensive. A baseload partner is far more prudent.)
Nuclear power, due to it's similarity ( dependence upon capital costs and fossil fuel prices for comptetive advantage) is in the exact same boat as wind, and is logically the best and perhaps only partner for wind in the long term.
This is a fact. There is no arguing this point.
For the nuclear industry to chasten wind, and especially for the wind industry to chasten nuclear, is appallingly stupid in both cases.
The other potential advantage that wind has is the imposition of carbon sequestration fees, namely internalizing that cost of fossil fuels. But that ALSO helps nuclear power.
Wind, nuclear, and hydro, working together, is the best mix of power sources available to us. Your stance of opposing nuclear is foolish in the extreme, for many reasons, and a rational fellow would change his stance.
Now, as for the UXC paper, my first impression is that those guys are commodity traders and they're trying to make a lot of money. :D
The fact of the matter, and this is well explained in the economics paper I posted above, is that nuclear power is very insensitive to changes in fuel prices compared to fossil fuels, and moving to a closed fuel cycle, while more expensive initially, renders nuclear practically immune to changes in fuel costs compared to fossil fuels.
The cost of the uranium has little to no bearing. This means that we can afford to pay practically any price for uranium and nuclear still has a competitive advantage.
The reason for this, as Mr. Sutherland posted about back in 2003, is that uranium is incredibly energy dense. In a closed fuel cycle, a single pound of uranium has the same energy as 6000 barrels or oil. At todays prices, this means that we can pay up to 360,000 dollars per pound for uranium and still be ahead of fossil fuels.
Instead, uranium costs about 40 bucks a pound, last time I looked. It's CHEAP. It's so cheap we can afford to thow away 99 percent of it in the idiotic "open" fuel cycle we're using for the time being.
This incredible cheapness is why nuclear (and wind) is so dominated by the cost of money.
Does that clarify anything for you? :)
James Hopf 5.10.06
Tam,
Using a 30-year life is absurd. Virtually every plant operating today will be operated for 60 years, if not more. Thus, 60 years is actually probably a conservative (low) value. At worst you would assume something lightly less than 60 (55?), to account for the possiblity that a few reactors will not get a license extension.
Concerning the article you referred to, it never once discussed long-term uranium supplies, or the nature of the actual uranium resource (in the ground). It simply spoke about the fact that, due to the uranium coming from weapons decommissioning, the price of uranium fell to very low levels, and production fell to far below power plant demand (it simply had to, as the weapons uranium was covering ~half of demand). This resulted in drastic reduction in exploration and discovery, as well as many mine closures.
The issue being discussed in the paper is the fact that the weapons-uranium supply will end, abruptly, around 2010. This will create a sudden need for new mine production capacity. Given the long time periods required to get mines in operation, this may result in a short term supply problem (and escalation in uranium price). As mauk points out, even a large increase will not matter, however, as uranium ore costs are only ~2% of the cost of nuclear electricity (~0.1 cents/kW-hr). The theme of the talk was that the mining industry needs to get its butt in gear in terms of lining up post-2010 supply. That is, opening new mines, as well as exploring for more ore.
Nowhere did the paper suggest a limited (or declining) supply of uranium resources in the ground. As many of us have been explaining, the ultimate resource is going to be darn near effectively infinite, certainly nothing to worry about.
Len Gould 5.11.06
Tam: "the standard calculation when comparing different technologies is the levelized cost of electricity analysis (LCOE). This compares apples to apples by taking a 20 or 30 year lifespan for each technology "
This tactic of applying the same lifetime to a nuclear plant as to eg. a gas turbine plant is simply designed to make nuclear look bad. A gas turbine plant will be essentially scrap long before 30 years operation (most designed for 20 yrs), whereas LWR/PHWR nuclear, with regular maintenance to turbine, pumps and steam gens and perhaps a few other bits depending on design, should last indefinitely.
Logically at minimum, an even "Levelized Cost" comparison should triple the capital cost (in future value discounted funds) of a CCGT (or wind) installation when comparing with long-lived competitors such as nuclear or hydro.
Len Gould 5.11.06
Also fascinating is how Tam et al can go so nuts on nuclear but ignore data such as
Quote: "The Cinergy coal-fired electric generating units at issue in this litigation emit 300,000 tons (305,000 tonnes) of air pollutants into the shared airshed of the Great Lakes Basin," it says. "These pollutants have been linked to increased incidence of asthma, especially in children, and to premature deaths and debilitating respiratory conditions."
It estimates air pollution costs the province $10 billion each year, $6.6 billion of that in health-care costs.
More than half of that pollution comes from the U.S., Broten said, putting the cost of American-sourced dirty air at more than 2,700 premature deaths and 14,000 emergency room visits each year. /end Quote
Toronto Star, 5-11-06
John K. Sutherland 5.24.06
Up until now, there has been a well-critiqued, brief, and factless panic-attack article - as anticipated above - by Tam Hunt at this location.
