Alternative Technology Assn Forums

1. 

   dlvb19
   Member

   I recently read an interesting post which pointed out that the build time and embodied energy of nuclear power plants means that they will not begin to reduce net GHG emissions for 15-20 years after construction starts, around the year 2030.

   This raised for me another interesting question:

   "What is the levelised cost of nuclear energy when you factor in nuclear disasters?"

   How many billions of dollars/yen has Japan spent cleaning up its mess? Russia? America? Possibly there are some other less famous incidents which have added to this total in a significant way. Sure they have been operating since the fifties but there have not been that many of them built.

   If anybody has done research into this area I would be interested to hear.
   

   Posted Friday 9 Aug 2013 @ 2:55:42 am from IP #
2. 

   Lance
   Key Master

   The Japanese mess is not over by a long shot, seems the reactor is leaking lots more radioactive water and the storage tanks being used to store the radiactive water that is being pumped out of the reactor are almost full. Not sure what they are going to do when that happens, but the choice currently seems to be keep feeding in water and let it leak, or stop feeding it and let it melt down. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23578859

   Posted Friday 9 Aug 2013 @ 3:12:31 am from IP #
3. 

   dbindoff
   Member

   dlvb19, almost 2 decades ago I thought we were looking at viable solutions with fast breeder reactor designs, they have enormous (50+ times) better energy extraction, even greater improvement in waste lifetimes and toxicity and vastly reduced capacity for weapons development. They can also effectively consume a large amount of the current accumulated wastes.
   So the 'nuclear' you are referring to I think is the solid fuel Uranium 'conventional' nuclear with pressurised concrete vessel containment, which is very different. I think you are right about CO2 payback times for that technology and also permitting and social acceptance is going to be very long term, longer than we can possibly afford.

   Fast breeder technologies were abandoned by the Clinton administration.
   So I have noticed with interest recently that fast breeder with Thorium and passive safety (totally failsafe apparently?) has started to be talked about again. For now I don't think it will get up soon enough to alleviate my GHG concerns but a little down the track it may well get up enough to get us out of the hole we are digging if we don't intensify our efforts with renewables dramatically. (to power active GHG sequestration and ocean alkalinising - the horse may have bolted though)

   I could look up some references if you are interested. (search for LIFTR and Thorium reactors initially)

   (Levelised cost of fast breeders should be .3c/kwh since wide scale intrinsic disaster cannot happen)

   Posted Friday 9 Aug 2013 @ 4:47:45 am from IP #
4. 

   sun2steam
   Member

   Former fast breeder reactors were not based on thorium but on uranium and were producing plutonium. So much about 'improved toxicity' (thorium is probably the most toxic substance ever created).

   Nuclear energy is a pipe dream and by far too expensive especially if you factor in insurances which are largely covered by the tax payer.

   Posted Friday 9 Aug 2013 @ 6:09:27 am from IP #
5. 

   dbindoff
   Member

   Did you mean Plutonium is the most toxic... S2S?
   I'd need to do more research to get my facts straight, I thought there were relatively benign designs far better than current ones (including uranium fast breeders). We could have a discussion about it. Its decades since I studied it.

   Posted Friday 9 Aug 2013 @ 6:31:54 am from IP #
6. 

   johnmath
   Member

   dlvb19 said:
   "What is the levelised cost of nuclear energy when you factor in nuclear disasters?"

   “The industry likes to say once you build them, they just hum along and they’re cash cows, producing low cost electricity, and then the industry takes that claim and uses that as a pillar [on which] they try to build the case for new nuclear reactors,” Cooper told IPS.

   The nuclear industry maintains that once construction is complete, plants are inexpensive to operate and “last forever”, according to Cooper.

   “The reality of old reactors does not support those claims,” he argued, and “the construction costs for new nuclear reactors go through the roof.”

   He said one-fifth of reactors built before 2013 that received commercial licenses have retired early and called the 60-year life span of reactors “inconsistent with reality”.

   “When [reactors] age, they have the tendency of being more and more costly to keep online,” he added. “When they break, they are too expensive to fix,” he said, citing over two dozen reactors that have closed down for those reasons.

   http://nuclear-news.net/2013/06/28/nuclear-power-its-just-not-cost-effective/

   "In fact, the economic and safety problems associated with nuclear energy are not unrelated. Trying to avoid flukes like Fukushima Daiichi is remarkably costly. And trying to avoid those costs can lead to flukes.

   It may sound unrealistic to require plants to withstand a vicious earthquake and a 25-ft. tsunami, but nobody's forcing utilities to generate power with uranium. One lesson of the past decade, in finance as well as nature, is that perfect storms do happen. When nukes are involved, the fallout can be literal, not just political."

   Time Magazine: The Real Cost of U.S. Nuclear Power
   http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2059603,00.html#ixzz2bS60eH2d

   Posted Friday 9 Aug 2013 @ 6:52:44 am from IP #
7. 

   dbindoff
   Member

   I want to be clear that I think it would be insane to pursue new builds of conventional nuclear. I simply think that we need to carefully differentiate between the various designs.
   It's a very difficult thing to convey and it may be difficult to supervise in practice but if molten salt Thorium reactors with passive failsafe and the ability to burn otherwise intractable accumulated wastes and produce very low cost energy, then they deserve rational consideration.
   As I understand it the embodied energy and CO2 is likely to be quite small since they don't require an enormous pressure vessel for containment.

   Posted Friday 9 Aug 2013 @ 7:10:32 am from IP #
8. 

   sun2steam
   Member

   dbindoff, do you want to revive the Thorium discussion? It has bee chewed trough in the ATA forum several times. I have still not seen any of these 'simple' molten salt thorium reactors producing commercial electricity. However wind turbines are spinning, PV farms are getting bigger and bigger, solar thermal in several varieties with storage is on the grid and pumped hydro for energy storage has been on the market for decades.

   So even if there was not the issue about radioactivity and storage for nuclear energy, why waste money and other resources on development of a new nuclear technology that is not required and will come too late anyway to save us from climate change?

   Posted Friday 9 Aug 2013 @ 11:24:21 am from IP #
9. 

   pulpo
   Member

   I always wonder what sort of insurance is taken out on Nuclear power.

   There would be a very limited liability on any policy, the Government would have to under write them.

   Nuclear is just not an option.

   Pulpo

   Posted Friday 9 Aug 2013 @ 12:09:54 pm from IP #
10. 

    dbindoff
    Member

    sun2steam said:
    dbindoff, do you want to revive the Thorium discussion? It has bee chewed trough in the ATA forum several times.

    Sorry, I have not read through previous threads, I'm fairly sure I have not discussed it here. I only raised it to delineate some sort of relevant discrimination within this thread.

    sun2steam said:
    I have still not seen any of these 'simple' molten salt thorium reactors producing commercial electricity.

    Not sure whether there have been or are any commercial reactors of the LIFTR type. That is not to say it is not worthwhile having the imagination to 'envision' them as a potential solution.

    sun2steam said:
    However wind turbines are spinning, PV farms are getting bigger and bigger, solar thermal in several varieties with storage is on the grid and pumped hydro for energy storage has been on the market for decades.

    Agree entirely that is the range of technologies which has outperformed technically and commercially and it is a clear path to clean energy, requiring at this point no great vision (historically it did require a lot) but still requiring massive ramp up to sufficient scale.

    sun2steam said:
    So even if there was not the issue about radioactivity and storage for nuclear energy, why waste money and other resources on development of a new nuclear technology that is not required and will come too late anyway to save us from climate change?

    I think the hope is that LIFTR technology can genuinely alleviate some of the storage headaches?? I agree entirely, focussing resources on ramping up what we have is the priority. On the other hand, time is clearly marching us headlong into this planetary emergency and yet we are dilly dallying with no real commitment in most parts of the world and last year we had significant spare capacity worldwide in PV and wind manufacturing.
    LIFTR can't really make much difference to conventional commercial and residential energy costs since most of the time we are selling our Hydro power for 4.5c/kwh into the wholesale market, so clearly the big costs are in distribution and retail. Having said that, LIFTR would be very handy (with all the visionary provisos etc.) if we needed vast amounts of continuous energy to take 'direct action' (to use a politically repugnant term) against ocean acidification etc. I am only considering such thoughts as a very last resort...

    In short, no it's not me wanting to revive the 'Thorium discussion' but neither am I disinterested.

    Posted Friday 9 Aug 2013 @ 12:52:51 pm from IP #
11. 

    Morbo
    Member

    The good news: at this rate mankind is done for in 100 years or so, so why not? It may accelerate future evolution of different species.
    I suppose renewable energy plants are fairly cheap to run as well, so initial investment has to be made either way. The stupid thing is, one can mine and sell uranium and coal, but not sunlight and wind.

    Posted Saturday 10 Aug 2013 @ 3:39:38 am from IP #
12. 

    johnmath
    Member

    Morbo said:
    The stupid thing is, one can mine and sell uranium and coal, but not sunlight and wind.

    THWACK! (the sound of a hammer hitting a nail on the head)

    Posted Saturday 10 Aug 2013 @ 7:03:48 am from IP #
13. 

    sun2steam
    Member

    But one can harvest energy from sun and wind. Harvesting in contrast to mining is a sustainable process.

    And the fruits of the harvest can be exported. http://grenatec.com/

    Or we could just stop exporting bauxite and only ship aluminium produced in renewable energy powered aluminium smelters. As Aluminium contains heaps of embedded energy this would be a clever move.

    Posted Saturday 10 Aug 2013 @ 8:59:43 am from IP #
14. 

    Morbo
    Member

    the Al thing is done in Island. They are not happy, too many dams now.

    Posted Saturday 10 Aug 2013 @ 2:33:15 pm from IP #
15. 

    dlvb19
    Member

    I stumbled upon the answer to what was the crux of my question:

    " If you consider the full range of incidents and accidents reported on the International Nuclear Event Scale, there have been hundreds of events over the past few decades. One peer-reviewed study identified 105 nuclear accidents totalling U$176.9 billion in damages and 4,231 fatalities worldwide from 1952 to 2011. The International Atomic Energy Agency also reports no less than 2,400 separate incidents since the organisation began collecting data in the 1950s. "

    http://theconversation.com/is-fukushima-the-new-normal-for-nuclear-reactors-17391

    So given there have been about 450 nuclear plants constructed in the last few decades you would have to add about 400 million dollars and 9 deaths to the cost of each nuclear plant.
    Add that to the levelised cost and re-evaluate.

    Posted Tuesday 27 Aug 2013 @ 5:29:11 am from IP #
16. 

    Greg C
    Member

    There is no point trying to work out the levelised cost of nuclear. The only thing you need to know is that it is too expensive. No plant has ever been built purely as a money making exercise. All have had government funding or very generous subsidies.

    The only appeal is that it is likened to building a big machine in a box, with a label saying how much electricity will come out and an on off switch. When you turn on the switch the machine runs and the advertised electricity flows out 24/7.

    However this ignores the costs of building, decommissioning, waste storage which makes them the most expensive way to generate electricity. Everyone built has gone over budget. Solar thermal is much cheaper, and while it is a bit harder to visualise that we will get all the power we need, if you look carefully you find you can.

    Posted Wednesday 28 Aug 2013 @ 10:42:10 am from IP #
17. 

    yabbietol
    Member

    Light water nuclear reactors are old technology and very dangerous and expensive to build, expensive to decommission ( no one really know how much a safe full decommissioning will cost as it is yet to occur). Reactors are very dangerous to use and if something goes wrong with the very complex technology the consequences of mistakes are around for about 250, 000 years plus. Heavy water reactors are also old technology, but are no longer built as they are more expensive than light water reactors, though they are safer, they still have the similar high costs issues in building, decommissioning and waste disposal.

    Nuclear reactors are a key part of the process to make nuclear weapons, without reactors to make fissile material we would have no nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are of course a greater environmental threat that almost any other technology.
    Also nuclear reactors in the US are impossible to insure, the only way they exist in the US is that by US law the liability of the owner operator is limited to $10B. The risk over this $10B is covered by the US Government.They are not economic to produce electricity in any rational sense. They only make economic sense if you want nuclear weapons and then they need large tax payer subsidies.

    Fast breeder reactors are very complex and yet to prove their value and are the most expensive reactors to build. They often use coolants like liquid sodium, they could be interesting if they develop a fault. However, they are excellent for making nuclear weapons.

    Medical isotopes are better and more cheaply produced by particle accelerators. There is no rational reason for Australia to have a poor quality Argentinian reactor that cost in excess of $300m (diverted form other more rational scientific research) to build and was two years late in becoming operational and is still very unreliable. It produces little and costs a lot of money to run which could be better spent on renewable energy.

    Posted Thursday 29 Aug 2013 @ 7:02:06 am from IP #

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