Nuclear power , not that cheap or safe it appears

http://timeforchange.org/nuclear-energy

http://www.eaem.co.uk/news/lights-will-stay-nuclear-timetable-slips

“…….electricity is only 17.5% of the UK’s total final consumption by fuel.”

“At the end of 2010, the UK as a whole had a total of 90.2 GW of electricity generating capacity of various kinds. This breaks down to:

Coal: 26% Oil: 4% Other Conventional Steam: 11% Gas: 38% Nuclear: 12% Hydro Natural Flow: 2% Hydro Pumped Storage: 3% Wind: 3% Other Renewables: 2%”

What is 12% of 17%?

Is it more or less than the total energy useage to decommission the UK nuclear industry?

TJ wrote: “Do you want to share this nuclear tech with the rest of the world? Iran? Korea? Sudan?”

This is something of a red herring. Globally, 71% of CO2 emission comes from the top-five entities, all of which are already nuclear powers or have reactor technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions

Increasing the percentage of their power from nuclear doesn’t present much of a proliferation risk.

TJ: “1) nuclear is a very small % of the worlds electricity generation so I would expect less deaths”

(a) 14% globally isn’t small compared to the fraction actually generated (not nameplate “capacity”) by wind and solar, and (b) the ExternE study normalized risk per unit electricity generated.

Macavity: “…….electricity is only 17.5% of the UK’s total final consumption by fuel.”

A very interesting observation. Much of the energy consumed goes into heating.

Small modular reactors are quite amenable to cogeneration (combined heat and power). Their thermal efficiency is poor compared to gas, because the temperature differential is relatively low. That means the overall efficiency improvement available from cogeneration is substantial.

The main problem with nuclear district heating is transportation of large amounts of heat over longish distances from big plants (tens of kilometers). Finland was considering such an arrangement:

http://www.cospp.com/articles/print/volume-11/issue-3/features/carbon-free-nuclear.html

Most readers here will leap for joy with the editor’s note saying the project was denied. But you might also want to read the last paragraph, citing a study calling it “…clearly the most economical and environmentally sound alternative for the future heat generation in the Helsinki metropolitan area.”

clearly the most economical and environmentally sound alternative for the future heat generation in the Helsinki metropolitan area

If (as you do) you ignore the costs of decommissioning and of waste disposal. Also calling it carbon free is an outright lie – massive amounts of carbon release from all that concrete and from mining and refining the fuel plus all the penalty of decommissioning

despite your evangelical love of nuclear you like all other nuclear evangelists will not answer some simple questions

1) How will you fund decommissioning and how much will it cost.
2) What will you do with the waste
3) where will you get the fuel from to fuel the massive expansion of reactors

“Do you want to share this nuclear tech with the rest of the world? Iran? Korea? Sudan?”

This is not a red herring – its absolutely pertinent. Third world countries are going to increase their energy consumption over the coming years. If nuclei is the answer to global warming as you assert then you have to share the tech widely.

Of course if you do this then we run into fuel supply problems as the supply is a few decades only at current consumption rates

If nuclear is an imperative for the UK to prevent the lights going out and to prevent global warming then it has to be introduced globally on a massive scale

TJ: 1) How will you fund decommissioning and how much will it cost.
2) What will you do with the waste
3) where will you get the fuel from to fuel the massive expansion of reactors

To question (1), just like the cost to build it in the first place, the cost of decommissioning is some fraction of the price charged for electricity. The US NRC estimates the order of $300 million, which is roughly 5% of the original cost. http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/decommissioning.html

Question 2: Pretty much the same thing as France has been doing for the last 30 years. Reprocess the fuel to get more energy from it and reduce its volume by three orders of magnitude; bury what’s left over. A vitrification process developed in the US makes the waste resistant to dispersal by leaching.

Question 3: To a first approximation, there is roughly an 80-year known fuel supply: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html

But there is never more than about 50-80 years of known reserves of more or less any mineral resource. Nobody bothers looking harder if the demand doesn’t warrant it.

We are presently using our nuclear fuel supplies incredibly inefficiently, particularly the once-through fuel cycle in the US. Reprocessing to reduce waste volume and increase fuel supply should be obvious, and going to combined heat and power makes use of the thermal energy which is currently wasted. Thorium is also potential reactor fuel and is three times as abundant as uranium.

You cite carbon emissions from the concrete used to construct a nuclear plant.

Constructing a modern GenIII+ nuclear plant takes about 400,000 cubic yards of concrete per GWe:

http://www.ne.doe.gov/np2010/reports/mpr2776Rev0102105.pdf

A 1.5 MW wind tower (68 m rotor diameter) takes an average of 300 cubic yards of concrete foundation on land (more in water). However, the best siting only yields about 30% capacity factor, so you only get 0.5 MW output. So you need about 2000 of them for the same GWe output, ignoring the issue of intermittence and whatever pilings are needed for the resulting network of transmission towers. That’s 600,000 cubic yards, or 50% more.

You think wind is pollution-free in all other respects?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html

I don’t regard nuclear power as the complete answer to CO2. It’s just one of many answers, and we’ll need them all. Read the 2004 Science article by Pecala and Socolow, or google “carbon” “wedges model”. But I do claim most environmentalists radically overestimate the risk of nuclear, and underestimate the risk of technologies they think of as “green”.

So then the usual lack of answers to the questions posed

Decommisionning is is many billions per plant
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4140636.stm there is no chance this can be c#recouped from selling electricity without massive price rises which is why no private company will accept this risk – its an open ended and unknown cost in many billins per plant

Reprocessing waste creates more waste not less -it concentrates the most dangerous types. while creating vast amounts of medium and low level waste

You cannot bury it in the ground it is too hot in both senses- we have tonnes of the high level stuff awaiting disposal with no way of disposing of it

waste resistant to dispersal by leaching

Not nearly good enough -wh have to keep this stuff safe for millennia.

Thorium reactors are not viable at the moment and may well never be – pie in the sky

WE do not have enough fuel to fuel the massive expansion of reactors we need if they are gong to make any significant contribution to global warming- more pie in the sky hoping we will find some more.

Nuclear is not a part of teh solution – can not ever be apart of teh slution adn is far too dangerous, unrelaible adn expensive. Putting money into nukes takes away money from practicala dn realistic alternatives.

Nuclear apologists just pretend that the issues do not exist in there fetish for this dead end useless high tech approach

concetration on nucelar makes it less likely we will find solutions as it takes money and effort away from realistic and practical solutions.

I have no idea what’s been said previously, but nuclear is part of the solution, just not the reactors that the govt wants to build, PWRs are old tech, and I wouldn’t live anywhere near one (any reactor where the moderator and cooling system are the same is not a good idea). I would rather spend on research into thorium/wind/wave power and invest heavily in coal CC&S systems (since we have lots of coal in the UK) to tide us over until the research bears fruit.

Sobriety — we have lots of coal in the US too, but CC&S is not a good idea.

You’re talking about taking gigatons of material that wants to be a gas at room temperature, and somehow storing it not for a hundred years, or a thousand, but forever.

Engineering “forever” is really, really difficult. Just ask Ozymandias.

I live near a nuclear plant, of course. New Jersey gets half its electricity from nuclear. Now if only I weren’t breathing the emissions from all those danged coal plants upwind in Ohio…

Makes for nice sunsets, though.

You’re talking about taking gigatons of material that wants to be a gas at room temperature

And placing it under conditions where it doesn’t want to be a gas, in areas that previously held a gas for millions of years.

Nuclear still sounds techy & powerful & futuristic

George Monbiot in the Guardian today. He knows a thing or two…..

Anti-nuclear campaigners have generated as much mumbo jumbo as creationists, anti-vaccine scaremongers, homeopaths and climate change deniers. In all cases, the scientific process has been thrown into reverse: people have begun with their conclusions, then frantically sought evidence to support them.

The temptation, when a great mistake has been made, is to seek ever more desperate excuses to sustain the mistake, rather than admit the terrible consequences of what you have done. But now, in the UK at least, we have an opportunity to make amends.

cont…

So we environmentalists have a choice. We can’t wish the waste away. Either it is stored and then buried. Or it is turned into mox fuels. Or it is used to power IFRs. The decision is being made at the moment, and we should determine where we stand. I suggest we take the radical step of using science, not superstition, as our guide.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/05/sellafield-nuclear-energy-solution

I said: “You’re talking about taking gigatons of material that wants to be a gas at room temperature…”

Sobriety said: “…And placing it under conditions where it doesn’t want to be a gas, in areas that previously held a gas for millions of years…”

… before some nitwit went and poked a hole in the rock formation that confined it to let the gas out. Then you’re dealing with a human-engineered cork, and sometimes they pop out with unfortuate consequences. Just ask a Louisiana (former) oysterman.

Plus, the sheer scale of CC&S is a bit daunting. A coal plant needs 80 railroad cars a day of fuel. Adding two oxygen atoms to each carbon atom more than triples the mass, so conceptually you are talking about removing nearly 300 railroad cars worth of material daily.

It seems easier to deal with nuclear waste simply because there is a million times less of it.

diogenesisnj: I wouldn’t bother, you’ll still be wrong, TJ says so…

It seems easier to deal with nuclear waste simply because there is a million times less of it.

shame its a million times more toxic and remaions so fo millenia,

Nice safe stuff this nuclear.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/05/fukushima-leak-radioactive-water?INTCMP=SRCH

The Anti Nuclear lobby frequently drag out all sort of spurious comments about how much decommissioning costs….

The costs of the legacy plant’s is so high because they were not designed for decommissioning…..

using this data to predict the cost of decommissioning new plants is flawed….

it’s no more valid that predicting the O & M costs for a new car using the data from a Morris Oxford

So how much will decommissioning cost? Why will no private sector company build a nuclear plant unless the decommissioning costs are to be met by governments?

TandemJeremy – Member

Why will no private sector company build a nuclear plant unless the decommissioning costs are to be met by governments?

Where did you get that from? I thought that the energy act was put in place so that any future nuclear power station operators had to show that they had secure funding in place to cover the cost of decommissioning and their portion of the waste disposal costs before they would be allowed to build a station?

Thats the theory. Anyone signed up to it yet? Massive subsidy on offer as well

Good grief, is this debate still going?

(I’m just off to the shed to fire up my home-made fusion reactor as I fancy some toast…)

Nice safe stuff this nuclear.

Hmmm, just like CO2 then…

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But you can’t see that, so it must be OK, eh?

Why will no private sector company build a nuclear plant unless the decommissioning costs are to be met by governments?

Because, currently, they don’t have to pay for their fossil-based pollution. Throw in a carbon tax with regulation to ensure the cost isn’t mostly passed on to the consumer, and I bet nuclear will stack up a damned sight more.