Nuclear VS. Renewables, EVs, and Jobs - Truth in the House!

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LFTR - Google it.

The problem is not nuclear specifically, it's the unsafe design we have been using for all this time. A thorium reactor cannot meltdown - by design it is much safer, as the reaction automatically fizzles off in the event of such a problem. The waste from a thorium reactor cannot be used for weapons, in fact it can use recycled weapon material as fuel! A thorium reactor burns its fuel much more thoroughly and the small amount of waste is also much less radioactive - a conventional reactor's waste has a half-life of many thousands of years, but with thorium it's only 300 years. A thorium reactor core is not pressurized, so there is no risk of hydrogen explosions. So, why do we use dangerous nuclear technology when safe nuclear technology exists? One, the industry has become used to it. Two, a major factor in the decision was the "benefit" of getting nuclear weapons material as a byproduct.
 
It's not about pro/anti nuke - it's that this program was pushed through by pro-industry groups and was adjusted by the nuke lobby to put the taxpayer on the hook first in the event a project went south.

This is the same program that is under fire today - by the same folks that created it - simply because now it's also used for alternatives as well as nuke generation and transmission infrastructure.
 
Sorry to resurrect such an old thread, but I wasn't sure this needed a new one. Closing nuclear plant:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/b...on-to-close-wisconsin-nuclear-plant.html?_r=0
The owner of a small nuclear reactor in Wisconsin said Monday that it would close the Kewaunee Power Station early next year because it was unable to find a buyer and the plant was no longer economically viable. ....snip....In some regions, the average selling price of a megawatt-hour today is less than $50 at times. But a survey of the industry by the Electric Utility Cost Group, an industry consortium, found that one quarter of nuclear plants with the highest costs were spending an average of $51.42 to produce a megawatt-hour from 2008 through 2010. And costs have gone up since then.
Too cheap to meter :? Is this evidence that natural gas and renewables are driving down the price of electricity so much so that even existing nuclear plants will be shut down? How can a new plant hope to get $5-10B in financial backing in this case? Now, I understand that this is a 40 yr old plant, but still, they just got an NRC extension so the maintenance must be up-to-date. I had hoped that old coal would be shut down first, but then again maybe this has already happened:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/06/12/us-coal-use-falling-fast-utilities-switch-to-gas/
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/20...ng-coal-with-36-percent-share-of-electricity/
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_01

Thoughts?

Reddy
 
TomT said:
Personally, I strongly feel that there is a place for Nuclear and that it is a very worthwhile technology...

Considering the cost of a nuclear produced kwh is now twice as expensive as a kwh produced by wind and
On a par with the kw cost of solar thermal, there is o place for this form of production. Particularly when one considers the massive expeduratures our government spends on waste managment. Additionally because of the congressional policies that Limit nuclear power facility liability the true cost of production is never realized, as without those protections no insurance company would insure this dangerous and dirty means of power production.
 
One of the nukes in Florida is shutting down. Because it would be too costly to fix it.

Guess who pays to decommission the plant. Right, the rate payers. Welcome to the "free market".

If the company had to pay to decommission as well, I guess they would have fixed it instead.
 
TomT said:
Personally, I strongly feel that there is a place for Nuclear and that it is a very worthwhile technology...

what do you do with the waste?
it is currently sitting in pools at each plant.
no one wants it and the plant sites becoming toxic dumps themselves.
 
All good discussion. I found it interesting that costs have been driven so low as to close a plant that the industry says is essentially "paid for" and "printing money" with every KWH produced. Remember, the industry capacity factor is around 0.9, so these things run all the time, except refueling or scrams.

Here in WA, the Columbia Generating Station has been running essentially flat out since the last refueling. It will be interesting to see what happens in May/June when we get the spring run-off and increased winds. Free fuel vs the low cost, high capacity factor nuclear. In previous years, there's been a conflict as to who gets to produce. One year the BPA requested that the nuclear plant start their planned shutdown early and extend it an extra month or so. Too much water & wind.

Come on guys, get your EVs out and charge/drive as much as possible in June! Take all those vacations and long drives. Let's use up some of that extra power!
 
One can find the ~89% nuclear capacity factor number often quoted, but is it real? According to docs like this:
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/61776/2010-016.pdf?sequence=1 it may not be.

One of the critical risks facing an investor in a nuclear power plant is uncertainty
about the plant’s realized capacity factor. Realized capacity factors show great variation.
Although the typical investor’s cash flow model of a proposed plant shows a projected
capacity factor of 85% or more, many reactors have problems achieving this target.
Oftentimes the shortfall is quite large. According to the Power Reactor Information
System (PRIS) database maintained by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),
the realized capacity factor is less than 50% in more than 10% of all reactor years in their
database.
While the numbers we have are based on yesterday, today's climate on Eaarth might stress these numbers more - like the plants shut down in earlier flooding, or the Mass plant shut down by blizzard 'Nemo':
http://www.wunderground.com/news/mass-nuclear-nemo-20130209

I don't know - do any of you?


As for new nukes, we have the Georgia project - with loan guarantees 5 times larger than Solyndra...
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/02/12/georgia-nuke-becoming-boondoggle-poster-child/
So, you have all the ingredients that made the nuclear industry what it became in the 80s. Cost plus contracts – check. Sloppy foundation work – check. Steady drip of limited hang-outs about cost overruns and newly discovered screw-ups – check. The project is now a year behind and “hundreds of millions” over budget. You can be sure that will increase ten fold before this is over.

This appears to be too similar to the problems we had down here when negotiating a two reactor expansion of the existing South Texas Project power plant.

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/deta...a=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ==#db=bth&AN=48097041
But the new reactor initiative at the South Texas Project (STP) has hit exceptionally stormy seas as a nasty legal battle has developed between partners that previously had been working together to build two new reactors at the Bay City, Texas, plant. CPS Energy owns 45 percent of the project, with the balance owned by a partnership of Princeton-based NRG and Toshiba called Nuclear Innovation North America LLC (NINA). Even before the current tussle, the partners had been seeking to shed about 45 percent of the project.

Ironically, STP is one of the four projects selected by DOE for final loan guarantee talks, and the project had until recently been seen as one of the best-structured and most likely to succeed among more than a dozen planned U.S nuclear projects.

On our new Eaarth, though, even the existing two reactors - responsible for 1/3 of San Antonio's power (7th largest city in the US) - are in danger of flooding.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/article/Report-South-Texas-Project-faces-flood-risk-3965431.php
 
Andy, although I don't follow it much, I did locate historical capacity factor here:
http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstat...csandcharts/usnuclearindustrycapacityfactors/
This is a nuclear industry website, but high profile so I doubt it would be faked. While highly touted now, I doubt the industry can keep up the 90% number given the average age of the reactors. Notice that the value seems to have peaked, and maybe even decreasing a bit. Also, if you "shut down" or "take out of service", is that capacity instantaneously removed from the calcs? Probably. In this case, the industry just keeps removing the poorly performing plants, and the average is kept up but the number of MWH produced decreases. Certainly there are some reactors that have lower capacity factors and some that have higher.

As for bizarre weather/disaster shutdowns, they will certainly happen. I only hope not too often. I've lived around nuclear for most of my life and it's always chugged along "way out there on the site," 20-30 miles away. I was amazed when I saw my first reactor right next to the highway in a high population area. It just didn't seem right given my previous experiences. We're a bit sheltered around here, very little population nearby, huge amount of hydro/nuclear/wind/coal power being produced and sent to California/Seattle/Portland/Spokane, no real climate change effects (except maybe some additional rain which is welcomed here in the desert), etc. The last big disaster here was: http://www.iceagefloodsinstitute.org/floods.html where we were under about 300 ft of water. I hope we don't see that one again soon.
 
Just found this article on a planned off-shore wind farm near Fukushima:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23082-japan-to-build-worlds-largest-offshore-wind-farm.html
Not a huge number of GW, only slowly implemented, and certainly not enough to replace Japan's nuclear power. No argument here. However, I did find it interesting that this would be a "deep water" installation, so more challenging than current off-shore turbines mounted on a shallow sea floor.

We had similar discussions about this topic here:
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=11515&p=267565#p267505

Reddy
 
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/03/01...-wind-surpasses-nuclear-in-energy-production/

highlights35_windnuclear.PNG


Did you ever notice that, when nuclear advocates give out examples of countries that are “ahead of us”, or, ”moving ahead”, or “successful examples” of nuclear energy, they always cite countries with tightly controlled socialist planned economies, like Russia, China, France and Japan?

Well, not so much Russia, since Chernobyl anyway – but China, Japan, France commonly come up. Well, not so much Japan since Fukushima. And with France, well, you got yer Freedom Fries and all that. And not so much Iran and North Korea.

Well, ok. China.

But you know what I mean.

Now, news out of China shines a light on progress in that country’s all-out assault on the renewable energy revolution. Wind has surpassed nuclear in power generation.
 
Reddy said:
Just found this article on a planned off-shore wind farm near Fukushima:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23082-japan-to-build-worlds-largest-offshore-wind-farm.html
Not a huge number of GW, only slowly implemented, and certainly not enough to replace Japan's nuclear power. No argument here. However, I did find it interesting that this would be a "deep water" installation, so more challenging than current off-shore turbines mounted on a shallow sea floor.

We had similar discussions about this topic here:
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=11515&p=267565#p267505

Reddy

there is a test platform off the OR/WA coast that will introduce a new concept of a floating platform which is what I think Japan is doing. this greatly reduces the cost (no sea bottom anchors) and risk (during really bad weather, they can be cut loose and retrieved later)

this really opens up off shore wind power if the concept is successful. now there is no "Kennedy sight" issues to deal with or congestion near the coastline
 
Reddy said:
All good discussion. I found it interesting that costs have been driven so low as to close a plant that the industry says is essentially "paid for" and "printing money" with every KWH produced. Remember, the industry capacity factor is around 0.9, so these things run all the time, except refueling or scrams.

Here in WA, the Columbia Generating Station has been running essentially flat out since the last refueling. It will be interesting to see what happens in May/June when we get the spring run-off and increased winds. Free fuel vs the low cost, high capacity factor nuclear. In previous years, there's been a conflict as to who gets to produce. One year the BPA requested that the nuclear plant start their planned shutdown early and extend it an extra month or so. Too much water & wind.

Come on guys, get your EVs out and charge/drive as much as possible in June! Take all those vacations and long drives. Let's use up some of that extra power!

i try to do my part! interesting on the graph of power output to the grid from various sources to see where our usage overall has been flat since 2007. not sure if that is the recession, more home solar or what?

i had previously thought our power needs had continuously risen. am i think think all those CFLs and LEDs have finally started to pay off?
 
evnow said:
One of the nukes in Florida is shutting down. Because it would be too costly to fix it.

Guess who pays to decommission the plant. Right, the rate payers. Welcome to the "free market".

If the company had to pay to decommission as well, I guess they would have fixed it instead.
Here's an interesting op-ed analysis: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100825242
Edison invested $2.1 billion in the plant and related assets and has allocated $2.7 billion for decommissioning. All in all, SONGS will cost California ratepayers over $5 billion plus the cost of fuel.
 
"Some of the world's top climate scientists say wind and solar energy won't be enough to head off extreme global warming, and they're asking environmentalists to support the development of safer nuclear power as one way to cut fossil fuel pollution."

"Four scientists who have played a key role in alerting the public to the dangers of climate change sent letters Sunday to leading environmental groups and politicians around the world. The letter, an advance copy of which was given to The Associated Press, urges a crucial discussion on the role of nuclear power in fighting climate change."

http://news.yahoo.com/experts-nuclear-power-needed-slow-warming-103134312.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
 
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