7 ms·

The Murky Future of Nuclear Power in the United States

40 points by greglindahl 10y ago

velodrome 10y ago
Too bad this article mentions nothing about the future of LFTR reactors (Thorium).
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Researching thorium all the way to production will cost a lot of money. For the same money, we could do a lot of research into new storage ideas and solar thermal, which thus far has been disappointing in production, but does make storage easier.
- Animats 10y ago
  Thorium reactors have too much going on inside the reactor, and a radioactive chemical plant outside it. The history of nuclear reactors indicates that plants with anything complex going on inside run into problems. Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Helium reactors leak. Pebble bed reactors jam. Boring old water reactors are about all that can be made to work for decades. Running a radioactive chemical plant usually results in a toxic waste site. All three US reprocessing plants are now major toxic waste sites.
  - DrScump 10y ago
    Boring old water reactors are about all that can be made to work for decades. A sodium-cooled breeder reactor worked continuously for 30 years and survived a (planned) hard power-down of all external cooling apparatus in 1986[0] to demonstrate its design safety. After being shut down by the Clinton administration in 1994 (as was its follow-on IFR program), disassembly showed no meaningful wear or damage to its hardware. "In controlled testing in 1986, with the EBR-II reactor running at full power and the emergency shutdown systems disabled, the reactor's supply of electricity was intentionally turned off, causing the coolant pumps to stop. This is a worse scenario than what happened in the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. (At Fukushima, which began operation in 1971, the emergency shutdown system turned off the reactor as soon as it detected the earthquake. However the tsunami destroyed the electric generators powering the coolant pumps, which needed to continue running after the reactor shutdown. Subsequently, the core overheated and meltdown occurred.) EBR-II, in contrast, handled the event without creating a dangerous situation. EBR-II had a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity that shut down the reactor when the temperature increased due to loss of the coolant pumps; the time required to heat the large pool of sodium surrounding the reactor provided a sufficient time buffer for the passive decay heat removal system to prevent the EBR-II reactor from melting down. The safe shutdown of the EBR-II relied only on the laws of physics and did not require operator or control system intervention." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...
    - cocoablazing 10y ago
      This reactor was 1/50th the scale of a typical power reactor. The radiation, thermal-hydraulic, and chemical environment of a full-scale reactor is different. Different stress corrosion interactions, severe oscillating stresses due to thermal-hydraulic fluctuations at assembly outlets... The operational record of such reactors hardly supports them as foolproof or economical versus the best modern water reactors.
exabrial 10y ago
Nuclear is still the future, just maybe not the immediate future... Unless we have a massive breakthrough in transmission and storage. I see it as gap between solar and wind to meet emergencies and peak loads.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Given how expensive nuclear is, running it for emergencies and peak loads is not a good economic plan. Given that concrete generates a lot of carbon, you're better off using natural gas peaker plants.
  - DrScump 10y ago
    ... except for that pesky CO2 emission problem.
    - greglindahl 10y ago
      ... all that concrete in the nuclear reactor emits a lot of CO2 when the reactor is built. If you don't use the nuclear reactor for anything but peaking, you're not going to amortize that CO2 emission over a large number of kWH. You'd never use the nuke as a peaker because it'd cost too much money, but, it's not a good idea in this other way, too.
- marze 10y ago
  It is the future in a parallel universe where solar panels don't cost $0.40 per watt and aren't falling at 30% per year.
  - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
    That suggests they will be $0.20/watt in two years. That will make them too cheap to ignore for almost everything.
- DrScump 10y ago
  It's far better used for primary generation than as a "peaker" plant. The optimal energy infrastructure, IMHO, is to use nuclear for baseline needs, then in times of low electrical demand use it for splitting out hydrogen for fuel cell vehicle use and industry.
asitdhal 10y ago
Nuclear energy is clean and to some extent cheap. But, if a war breaks out and someone bombs a nuclear reactor, it will be messy to clean up the mess.
- marze 10y ago
  Do you mean cheap (to some extent) to build, or cheap to operate?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - asitdhal 10y ago
    Cheap in the sense, build and operate(and not phase out). Coal may be cheaper than nuclear, but the damages to environment and health are too high.
    - marze 10y ago
      Coal is dead, no point to compare. Solar is cheaper to deploy. And cheaper to operate.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- _delirium 10y ago
  Running it is cheap, but the large costs of construction and decommissioning that bookend a plant's lifespan mean you need a really, really long and mostly trouble-free operating life for the overall amortized costs to look good. At least with conventional large-scale plants. There are alternatives [e.g., 1] that might change that aspect of the economics, if they turn out to be feasible (politically and otherwise). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
  - pasbesoin 10y ago
philipkglass 10y ago
I like to assess energy sources by the numbers, and by the numbers nuclear power is safe enough (far safer than continuing to burn fossils). By the numbers, new reactor builds are also slow and expensive, with the one notable exception of South Korea's KEPCO. (China and Russia sometimes also get cited as examples of countries that can still do nuclear power "right," but neither is particularly transparent with domestic projects nor particularly inexpensive/quick with projects they offer to build abroad.) Ten years ago Japan and France looked like they did nuclear right also. Then Fukushima tanked the Japanese nuclear industry and the ongoing disaster of EPR construction took France off the list. France's fame as a country that did nuclear right is also a bit tainted by recent revelations of problems with component quality and forged quality control reports: http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-plants-down-due-to-quality-concerns/ http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pla... I should probably also mention falsified nuclear documentation in South Korea that surfaced a few years ago, in fairness to France: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Indictments_for_South_Korea_forgery_scandal-1010137.html http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Indictments_for_South_K... Maybe small modular reactors will make nuclear power attractive again. Or maybe even big, expensive, slow reactors will seem relatively attractive some decades from now after national grids are already saturated with as much renewable electricity as they can reasonably use. (Though even that is subject to receding horizons if bulk electricity storage gets cheaper over time.) It's really hard to see anything that will make nuclear power more competitive over the next 10 years in Japan, the Americas, Oceania, or Europe. (South Korea, China, and the Middle East and North Africa -- I expect to see continued if not particularly fast nuclear growth in these regions.) I had thought that the AP1000 looked like a pretty incrmental, conservative, easy-to-build choice for new reactors. Builds are well behind schedule in both the US and China, and the costs are escalating too. My personal guess is that the 4 reactors now under construction in the US will not make the 2020 deadline to qualify for the new-reactor tax credits that have been available since 2005. My guess is also that all the institutions that got burned building these 4 will dissuade new US orders, so any lessons painfully learned on this first wave will not ease the construction of another wave of reactors; the lesson learned will just be "don't try to build reactors." China's leadership can plan for the long term because there are no electoral politics nor elections. The same goes for Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt where I also expect to see nuclear growth. In the heyday of France's nuclear build-out, there was something similar offering stability: EDF was a state owned electricity monopoly for all of France, and didn't have to worry about competition or the short term. Since the monopoly ended in 1999 France has only started building one new reactor, the disastrously late and over-budget Flamanville-3. With a monopoly I could imagine this being a painful lesson that nonetheless eases construction of more EPRs. Without a monopoly I think that this expensive education will be wasted, like the skills relearned from the current AP1000 projects will be wasted in the US. Just add these nuclear industry woes to the very long list of reasons that the world is not on track to stabilize the climate with emissions cuts alone, and will need active carbon dioxide removal measures later this century or sometime in the 22nd, assuming that industrial civilization remains intact.
intrasight 10y ago
I'll bet that no new nuclear plants will be built in my lifetime nor in my children's lifetimes.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  So strange you're downvoted when you're correct. Why spend billions on a nuclear plant that'll take a decade to build when you can deploy solar, wind, and battery storage at a lower cost and a tenth the time? The economics simply do not work for nuclear, and I'd expect all nuclear generators in the US decommissioned by 2030.
  - Cowicide 10y ago
    It's not strange to see downvotes, IMO. Industry spends a tremendous amount of money and resources attacking our more sustainable energy future with rampant FUD. They want to milk their current infrastructure for as long as it's profitable for them. Sowing Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about alternative, more sustainable energy sources (and storage) has gone on for decades and has had a very pervasive, toxic effect on general discourse of the matters.
nikdaheratik 10y ago
I'm not against nuclear power, but the U.S. was a pioneer in this tech and it still required massive support from the weapons industry to even get as much implementation as it has. I don't believe this is solely on either the tech or the anti-nuke power movement, but rather has to do with how large and distributed the U.S. is geographically, which makes each plant being a custom build job in many places with not enough nearby consumers to give any savings from scale. Add to that, the fact that you have so many levels of government approval before you can break ground, and the high initial cost to build a plant, and you're basically left with a system that can only gain traction with some organisation like the military pushing it through.
teslaberry 10y ago
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-19/fukushima-aborts-latest-robot-mission-inside-reactor-radiation-unimaginable-levels http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-19/fukushima-aborts-la...

40 points by greglindahl 10y ago

velodrome 10y ago

Too bad this article mentions nothing about the future of LFTR reactors (Thorium).

greglindahl 10y ago
Researching thorium all the way to production will cost a lot of money. For the same money, we could do a lot of research into new storage ideas and solar thermal, which thus far has been disappointing in production, but does make storage easier.
Animats 10y ago
Thorium reactors have too much going on inside the reactor, and a radioactive chemical plant outside it. The history of nuclear reactors indicates that plants with anything complex going on inside run into problems. Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Helium reactors leak. Pebble bed reactors jam. Boring old water reactors are about all that can be made to work for decades. Running a radioactive chemical plant usually results in a toxic waste site. All three US reprocessing plants are now major toxic waste sites.
- DrScump 10y ago
  Boring old water reactors are about all that can be made to work for decades. A sodium-cooled breeder reactor worked continuously for 30 years and survived a (planned) hard power-down of all external cooling apparatus in 1986[0] to demonstrate its design safety. After being shut down by the Clinton administration in 1994 (as was its follow-on IFR program), disassembly showed no meaningful wear or damage to its hardware. "In controlled testing in 1986, with the EBR-II reactor running at full power and the emergency shutdown systems disabled, the reactor's supply of electricity was intentionally turned off, causing the coolant pumps to stop. This is a worse scenario than what happened in the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. (At Fukushima, which began operation in 1971, the emergency shutdown system turned off the reactor as soon as it detected the earthquake. However the tsunami destroyed the electric generators powering the coolant pumps, which needed to continue running after the reactor shutdown. Subsequently, the core overheated and meltdown occurred.) EBR-II, in contrast, handled the event without creating a dangerous situation. EBR-II had a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity that shut down the reactor when the temperature increased due to loss of the coolant pumps; the time required to heat the large pool of sodium surrounding the reactor provided a sufficient time buffer for the passive decay heat removal system to prevent the EBR-II reactor from melting down. The safe shutdown of the EBR-II relied only on the laws of physics and did not require operator or control system intervention." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...
  - cocoablazing 10y ago
    This reactor was 1/50th the scale of a typical power reactor. The radiation, thermal-hydraulic, and chemical environment of a full-scale reactor is different. Different stress corrosion interactions, severe oscillating stresses due to thermal-hydraulic fluctuations at assembly outlets... The operational record of such reactors hardly supports them as foolproof or economical versus the best modern water reactors.

exabrial 10y ago

Nuclear is still the future, just maybe not the immediate future... Unless we have a massive breakthrough in transmission and storage. I see it as gap between solar and wind to meet emergencies and peak loads.

greglindahl 10y ago
Given how expensive nuclear is, running it for emergencies and peak loads is not a good economic plan. Given that concrete generates a lot of carbon, you're better off using natural gas peaker plants.
- DrScump 10y ago
  ... except for that pesky CO2 emission problem.
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    ... all that concrete in the nuclear reactor emits a lot of CO2 when the reactor is built. If you don't use the nuclear reactor for anything but peaking, you're not going to amortize that CO2 emission over a large number of kWH. You'd never use the nuke as a peaker because it'd cost too much money, but, it's not a good idea in this other way, too.
marze 10y ago
It is the future in a parallel universe where solar panels don't cost $0.40 per watt and aren't falling at 30% per year.
- CapitalistCartr 10y ago
  That suggests they will be $0.20/watt in two years. That will make them too cheap to ignore for almost everything.
DrScump 10y ago
It's far better used for primary generation than as a "peaker" plant. The optimal energy infrastructure, IMHO, is to use nuclear for baseline needs, then in times of low electrical demand use it for splitting out hydrogen for fuel cell vehicle use and industry.

asitdhal 10y ago

Nuclear energy is clean and to some extent cheap. But, if a war breaks out and someone bombs a nuclear reactor, it will be messy to clean up the mess.

marze 10y ago
Do you mean cheap (to some extent) to build, or cheap to operate?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- asitdhal 10y ago
  Cheap in the sense, build and operate(and not phase out). Coal may be cheaper than nuclear, but the damages to environment and health are too high.
  - marze 10y ago
    Coal is dead, no point to compare. Solar is cheaper to deploy. And cheaper to operate.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
_delirium 10y ago
Running it is cheap, but the large costs of construction and decommissioning that bookend a plant's lifespan mean you need a really, really long and mostly trouble-free operating life for the overall amortized costs to look good. At least with conventional large-scale plants. There are alternatives [e.g., 1] that might change that aspect of the economics, if they turn out to be feasible (politically and otherwise). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
- pasbesoin 10y ago

philipkglass 10y ago

I like to assess energy sources by the numbers, and by the numbers nuclear power is safe enough (far safer than continuing to burn fossils). By the numbers, new reactor builds are also slow and expensive, with the one notable exception of South Korea's KEPCO. (China and Russia sometimes also get cited as examples of countries that can still do nuclear power "right," but neither is particularly transparent with domestic projects nor particularly inexpensive/quick with projects they offer to build abroad.) Ten years ago Japan and France looked like they did nuclear right also. Then Fukushima tanked the Japanese nuclear industry and the ongoing disaster of EPR construction took France off the list. France's fame as a country that did nuclear right is also a bit tainted by recent revelations of problems with component quality and forged quality control reports: http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-plants-down-due-to-quality-concerns/ http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pla... I should probably also mention falsified nuclear documentation in South Korea that surfaced a few years ago, in fairness to France: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Indictments_for_South_Korea_forgery_scandal-1010137.html http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Indictments_for_South_K... Maybe small modular reactors will make nuclear power attractive again. Or maybe even big, expensive, slow reactors will seem relatively attractive some decades from now after national grids are already saturated with as much renewable electricity as they can reasonably use. (Though even that is subject to receding horizons if bulk electricity storage gets cheaper over time.) It's really hard to see anything that will make nuclear power more competitive over the next 10 years in Japan, the Americas, Oceania, or Europe. (South Korea, China, and the Middle East and North Africa -- I expect to see continued if not particularly fast nuclear growth in these regions.) I had thought that the AP1000 looked like a pretty incrmental, conservative, easy-to-build choice for new reactors. Builds are well behind schedule in both the US and China, and the costs are escalating too. My personal guess is that the 4 reactors now under construction in the US will not make the 2020 deadline to qualify for the new-reactor tax credits that have been available since 2005. My guess is also that all the institutions that got burned building these 4 will dissuade new US orders, so any lessons painfully learned on this first wave will not ease the construction of another wave of reactors; the lesson learned will just be "don't try to build reactors." China's leadership can plan for the long term because there are no electoral politics nor elections. The same goes for Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt where I also expect to see nuclear growth. In the heyday of France's nuclear build-out, there was something similar offering stability: EDF was a state owned electricity monopoly for all of France, and didn't have to worry about competition or the short term. Since the monopoly ended in 1999 France has only started building one new reactor, the disastrously late and over-budget Flamanville-3. With a monopoly I could imagine this being a painful lesson that nonetheless eases construction of more EPRs. Without a monopoly I think that this expensive education will be wasted, like the skills relearned from the current AP1000 projects will be wasted in the US. Just add these nuclear industry woes to the very long list of reasons that the world is not on track to stabilize the climate with emissions cuts alone, and will need active carbon dioxide removal measures later this century or sometime in the 22nd, assuming that industrial civilization remains intact.

intrasight 10y ago

I'll bet that no new nuclear plants will be built in my lifetime nor in my children's lifetimes.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
So strange you're downvoted when you're correct. Why spend billions on a nuclear plant that'll take a decade to build when you can deploy solar, wind, and battery storage at a lower cost and a tenth the time? The economics simply do not work for nuclear, and I'd expect all nuclear generators in the US decommissioned by 2030.
- Cowicide 10y ago
  It's not strange to see downvotes, IMO. Industry spends a tremendous amount of money and resources attacking our more sustainable energy future with rampant FUD. They want to milk their current infrastructure for as long as it's profitable for them. Sowing Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about alternative, more sustainable energy sources (and storage) has gone on for decades and has had a very pervasive, toxic effect on general discourse of the matters.

nikdaheratik 10y ago

I'm not against nuclear power, but the U.S. was a pioneer in this tech and it still required massive support from the weapons industry to even get as much implementation as it has. I don't believe this is solely on either the tech or the anti-nuke power movement, but rather has to do with how large and distributed the U.S. is geographically, which makes each plant being a custom build job in many places with not enough nearby consumers to give any savings from scale. Add to that, the fact that you have so many levels of government approval before you can break ground, and the high initial cost to build a plant, and you're basically left with a system that can only gain traction with some organisation like the military pushing it through.

teslaberry 10y ago

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-19/fukushima-aborts-latest-robot-mission-inside-reactor-radiation-unimaginable-levels http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-19/fukushima-aborts-la...