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No Nuclear Nirvana on the Horizon
Nearly a year after the Fukushima disaster and more than three decades after the Three Mile Island accident, nuclear power remains expensive, dangerous, and too radioactive for Wall Street
Is the nuclear drought over?
When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently approved two new nuclear reactors near Augusta, Georgia, the first such decision in 32 years, there was plenty of hoopla.
(Ken Colwell / Flickr)
It marked a "clarion call to the world," declared Marvin S. Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute. "Nuclear energy is a critical part of President Obama's all-of-the-above energy strategy," declared Energy Secretary Chu, who traveled in February to the Vogtle site where Westinghouse plans to build two new reactors.
But it's too soon for nuclear boosters to pop their champagne corks. Japan's Fukushima disaster continues to unfold nearly a year after the deadly earthquake and tsunami unleashed what's shaping up to be the worst nuclear disaster ever. Meanwhile, a raft of worldwide reactor closures, cancellations, and postponements is still playing out. The global investment bank UBS estimates that some 30 reactors in several countries are at risk of closure, including at least two in highly pro-nuclear France.
And Siemens AG, one of the world's largest builders of nuclear power plants, has already dumped its nuclear business.
Recently, Standard and Poor's (S&P) credit rating agency announced that without blanket financing from consumers and taxpayers, the prospects of an American nuclear renaissance are "faint." It doesn't help that the nuclear price tag has nearly doubled in the past five years. Currently reactors are estimated to cost about $6 to $10 billion to build. The glut of cheap natural gas makes it even less attractive for us to nuke out.
How expensive is the bill that S&P thinks private lenders will shun?
Replacing the nation's existing fleet of 104 reactors, which are all slated for closure by 2056, could cost about $1.4 trillion. Oh, and add another $500 billion to boost the generating capacity by 50 percent to make a meaningful impact on reducing carbon emissions. (Nuclear power advocates are touting it as a means of slowing climate change.) We'd need to fire up at least one new reactor every month, or even more often, for the next several decades.
Dream on.
Meanwhile, Japan — which has the world's third-largest nuclear reactor fleet — has cancelled all new nuclear reactor projects. All but two of its 54 plants are shut down. Plus the risk of yet another highly destructive earthquake occurring even closer to the Fukushima reactors has increased, according to the European Geosciences Union.
This is particularly worrisome for Daiichi's structurally damaged spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4, which sits 100 feet above ground, exposed to the elements. Drainage of water from this pool resulting from another quake could trigger a catastrophic radiological fire involving about eight times more radioactive cesium than was released at Chernobyl.
Ironically, the NRC's decision to license those two reactors has thrown a lifeline to Japan's flagging nuclear power industry (along with an $8.3-billion U.S. taxpayer loan guarantee). Toshiba Corp. owns 87 percent of Westinghouse, which is slated to build the new reactors. Since U.S.-based nuclear power vendors disappeared years ago, all of the proposed reactors in this country are to be made by Japanese firms — Toshiba, Mitsubishi, and Hitachi — or Areva, which is mostly owned by the French government. According to the Energy Department, "major equipment would not be manufactured by U.S. facilities."
For Southern Co., which would operate the Vogtle reactors, the NRC's approval is just the beginning of a financial and political gauntlet it must run through. Over the strenuous objections of consumers and businesses, energy customers will shoulder the costs of financing and constructing this $17-billion project, even if the reactors are abandoned before completion. If things don't turn out, U.S. taxpayers will also be on the hook for an $8.3-billion loan guarantee that the Energy Department has approved.
The Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office estimate that nuclear loan guarantees have a 50/50 chance of default.
Nearly four decades after the Three Mile Island accident, nuclear power remains expensive, dangerous, and too radioactive for Wall Street. The industry won't grow unless the U.S. government props it up and the public bears the risks.
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18 Comments so far
Show AllWestinghouse is over 80 percent owned by Japanese firms? This would go a long ways to explaining why the Japanese Cabinet Minister Yukio Edano told bare-faced lies for months about the severity of the Quadruple Explosions, Triple Meltdowns and Melt-Throughs at Fukushima. His government apparently hid 167 radiation simulations that showed radiation hitting the 30 million people in the Tokyo area, if the info at enenews was correct. No minutes exist of any of the meetings during the crisis it was reported there also. I guess itʻs bad for the sharholders of Westinghouse if the nuke business is curtailed due to this small deadly problem of global nuclear fallout.
Well, it would seem they finally got even with us for Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The whole west coast of North America was nuked with radio isotopes.
the owners of amerika and the world suppress free energy - which is available to use - in favor of selling the oil and their nukes
so don't tell me that the nwo/rothschilds/rockefeller debt prison is not driven by a satanic death wish
these luciferians love death and disease, they are sick fucks
nuclear fission is a hell of a way to boil water
albert einstein
there are only two things that are infinite - the universe and human stupidity, and i'm not sure about the universe
albert einstein
"The Fukushima complex has a total of 1760 metric tons of fresh and used nuclear fuel on site. The amount of fuel lost in the core melt at Three Mile Island was about 30 tons; the Chernobyl reactors had about 180 tons when the accident occurred. [Source]
Fukushima, like Chernobyl, is currently rated the maximum level 7 on the nuclear crisis severity scale. [Source]
The combined radioactivity from various elements at Chernobyl was 5.3 million TBq; the average estimate for Fukushima is around 720,000 TBq. [Source]
Highly radioactive water has been flowing directly into the adjacent ocean at Fukushima, thousands of times higher than seen in the Black Sea after Chernobyl."
http://www.earthpulsedaily.net/epd-post/nuclear-power-is-a-hell-of-a-way-to-boil-water
japan is completely irradiated
they are now feeding toxic food to their kids and selling it around the world - in places where it has not yet been banned
soon it will be a large cancer ward
as surely as this whole world will soon be
oh yeah - one more thing, neither the japanese government or tepco the company that owns these plants have a clue about what to do to stop it
but on the positive side - in another 230,000 years things will be back to normal, just be patient...
source: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/03/how-much-fuel-is-at-risk-at-fukushima.html?rss=1
It is quite funny in a tragicomic manner to see corporate shills whom regularly opine about the 'magic of the marketplace' put themselves into rhetorical knots whenever their bosses / clients put them on the pro-nuclear account. Public subsidization of nukes is the ultimate expression of 'privatize the profits, socialize the losses.' It also has the added extra benefit of creating a poisoned legacy that would last for at least four stages of human evolution (if said evolution is not damaged by nuclear radiation). Of any of the government giveaways 'orchestrated' by corporate sociopaths, this is quite possibly the most toxic in all ways.
Whatever Wall Street does directly, they control the USG, which will pick up the insurance slack. It will continue to be so until the Wall Street starnglehold on the USG is broken -- certainly a long time in coming.
Mammon vs We the People
Direct democracy
"Replacing the nation's existing fleet of 104 reactors, which are all slated for closure by 2056, could cost about $1.4 trillion. Oh, and add another $500 billion to boost the generating capacity by 50 percent to make a meaningful impact on reducing carbon emissions. (Nuclear power advocates are touting it as a means of slowing climate change.) We'd need to fire up at least one new reactor every month, or even more often, for the next several decades.
Dream on."
This quote is the key to understanding the situation with nuclear power generation today.
Quibble with some of the numbers if you wish, but the general picture remains the same: nukes as rising -or even steady- % of our electrical generation capacity will require a massive effort, which would imply massive support, which would seem very unlikely to ever actually happen.
The only thing I would add is a reminder that these 104 nukes only provide 19.6% of our juice, so even Alvarez's 50% increase would leave us with 70% demand left (at steady demand rates) to fulfill:
http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/usnuclearpowerplants/
It doesnʻt matter what it costs to shut down dangerous nuclear power. The alternative is human extinction. And the cost to clean up future disasters is even higher. Chernobyl alone is in the hundreds of billions of dollars just to put a dome over the leaking sponge sarcaphagus.
Japan is finished. Their cars are radioactive and have been restricted from normal import in some countries. Their fishing industry is screwed which supplies most of their diet since the radiation figures earlier donʻt count the months of much higher seawater releases. Japan is finished because of using Mark I reactors and burning MOX bomb material for fuel. A few more such disasters and the whole world will be finished for human habitation. Radioactive scrap metal already found itʻs way into concrete rebar from nuke disasters in the past. It may soon show up in electronic products, Japanese tractors which are used all over Asia, and food sold to the third world.
Nuke experts in March last year predicted we were witnessing the greatest tradgedy to ever befall Man. Those experts were forced to resign and the biggest cover-up of all time commenced. It will not be successful. There is no way to hide the cancers that are coming after the jet steam delivered invisable fallout all over the world.
TJ (the real one)
My point was that Alvarez is correct, expansion of nuke power capacity to needed levels (at least in the U.S.) would be such a massive effort that it is highly unrealistic.
This fact is too often forgotten in the whole "Nukes good vs. Nukes bad" debate.
The cost profiles cited above are a deterrent to installing nuclear generators only because of the penchant of the Operators for very large plants: 500 MW and above. Smaller plants of 100,000 hp (80 MW) are "off the shelf" at $50 million each, built today in limited production in the US. That current production capacity is easy enough to scale up. Instead of one mega-reactor of 500 MW you would have a plant site containing 5 or 6 small reactors. Groupthink, including the permitting process, prevents the deployment of such plants, not cost. (Whether it is a good idea, that is another issue, on which people do disagree.)
Give a citation of a study showing that the permit process is the bottleneck. Then show that the reason that the permitting process is the bottleneck is group-think, rather than legitimate safety concerns.
Simple economics is a more probable reason. Off the shelf mini-nukes are in several respects like solar panels - they are thermodynamically inefficient, when viewed from a life-cycle perspective:
a. PVs have EROEI less than one generally, except for highly toxic CdTe cells, and are used generally in conditions that would tend to destroy batteries, i.e. in niche applications.
b. Mini-nukes have a much higher area to volume ratio than large nukes, and containment material spending is proportional to surface area, so for the same power output, much more energy is spent making containment for mini-nukes than for a mega-nuke plant.
In one important respect, though, mini-nukes are far worse. Nuclear power plants are notorious for not having manufacturing under statistical control (small imperfections can make the difference between thirty years of relatively trouble-free operation and being at risk of melt-down at startup). Now you are essentially asking for mass-production, a process which relies on cutting corners and caveat emptor to realise greater economic efficiency. Mass production is great for processes that can be placed under statistical control.
You are suggesting a plant site with 5 or 6 small reactors. In any such batch, especially under conditions of mass production, there is substantial risk of e.g. one melt-down per four batches in the first ten years - the lower capital expense implies less testing, unless the per unit cost increases dramatically so as to become cost uncompetitive with large units. When one unit melts down, the radiation hazards and chaos substantially increases the risk of cutting off cooling to the others, disruption of controls, and thus increased risk of group melt-downs.
And should such plants become widespread, each plant needs substantial security details in order to avert material loss (proliferation, pollution, etc) - the risk of substantial material loss is proportional to the number of reactors.
No (more) nukes!!.. 'nuff said.
Junior Bush wanted to give $600 million away for Solyndra, but he couldn't quite get the loan out the door in time. Obama got that loan done months later. Then the Chinese methodically crushed the U.S. solar panel industry without a peep out of the government. This is what happens to government loans to private corporations in the good times. This $8B nuclear loan is different. It's a bailout of a completely dead industry, a re-animated monster made of body parts from 30 years ago.
If the nuclear industry stays real lucky and rolls sevens, not only will the safety measures not cost much, but the thing won't ever kill 10% of the population of Georgia and all of the investors will make out. Otherwise, the industry's long-demonstrated willingness to cheat on safety will leave a big national sacrifice zone and a thyroid cancer in every home for some nearby towns.
Hello to the nuclear industry's low-paid boiler room bloggers.
Twenty five years ago, Washington State had plans to build 5 nuclear reactors. Construction was started on a couple, but amid rising public opposition and endless cost overruns, only one was finished; the rest were mothballed and eventually demolished. Good Lord, do they think we've forgotten all this already?
It makes sense to imagine that this is strictly pork barrel stuff. There is no way to get knowledgeable investors for these projects without massive government subsidy, and there never was. They're going to keep taking as much money as they can and see how far they get.
Knowing I'm anti-nuke, a pro nuke engineer friend suggests that instead of mothballing nuke subs and ships, they be used to power cities. Is he yanking my chain or is there the slightest merit in this idea?
Not even the slightest.
In the military, lower safety standards are accepted. By way of comparison, the safety factor of civilian aircraft is preciously close to one (bleeding edge design), e.g. 1.2-1.5. Expect similar safety factors for ship nukes. A former US navy ship nuke operator has informed me that upon leaving the service, he found copious abuses in civilian nukes that are not tolerated in military nukes, so it sounds to me like a recipe for melt-downs.