8 ms·
Once you factor in the costs to decommission a nuclear facility, nuclear becomes one of the most expensive options.
by samcheng 9y ago
Once you factor in the costs to decommission a nuclear facility, nuclear becomes one of the most expensive options.
- virmundi 9y agoWhen you say that, does it take into account nuclear where we reuse fuel?
- pjc50 9y agoFuel sourcing and disposal is a small part of the cost. Edit: a projected cost breakdown for Hinkley Point C! https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Point-C.pdf https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po... (figure 2) So fuel is not inconsiderable; 6.2bn "fuel costs", 1.8 "fuel management", 2.6 "fuel disposal". From a total of £54.8 bn. Add 10-50% to actual construction and decommissioning costs for overruns.
- worldsayshi 9y agoAnd yet still there are so many people that believe that nuclear is the only pragmatic path to a green energy future.
- RivieraKid 9y agoTrue, but nuclear energy has two important benefits. It has a stable output (so you don't have to invest in energy storage) and it takes up much less space (so it doesn't visually disrupt the landscape as much).
- olau 9y agoDemand is not stable so you still need energy storage or something else to fill the peaks. The only alternative is not running the plant at full capacity, which will make it even more expensive. Less space: that's true. But you still need a fair bit of space to the nearest city. :)
- RivieraKid 9y agoYeah, but with nuclear you only have to deal with demand variability, not supply variability.
- Caveman_Coder 9y agoThat is not "the only alternative" in practice. If you're in a market (which most companies owning nuclear generation are) you'd sell your excess energy, you wouldn't lower the output of your nuclear generation resources.
- pjc50 9y agoUnless the 1/1000 failure event happens and all the land for miles around is rendered uninhabitable and unfarmable.
- eru 9y agoWe could have many, many more Chernobyl and Fukushima style disasters, and nuclear would still be safer than real-world coal. (But that's an easy target to beat.)
- RivieraKid 9y agoIn modern nuclear reactors, safety is not an issue.
- chefkoch 9y ago"In modern nuclear reactors, safety is not an issue." Russian nuclear engineer, 1985
- eropple 9y agoGiven that the Chernobyl disaster can be traced to intentional disabling of safety systems to see what would happen, this is lousy, disingenuous snark. (For those not so afflicted, "Normal Accidents" has an awesome treatment of the Chernobyl disaster.)
- chefkoch 9y agoSo intentional circumventing of safety measures and (cost) cutting corners is not possible sich the new tech? Almost in every industry i can think of there are countless examples of how profit is traded for safety. Why should this be any different?
- guscost 9y agoSafety measures which cannot be intentionally circumvented (except by planting a bomb, I suppose) predate Chernobyl by many years. The RBMK was a horrible design which threw away passive safety[0] for convenience and cost savings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
- olau 9y agoWhile decommissioning is indeed expensive and as far as I'm aware still mostly based on estimates since there's little experience with the full process, I don't think this statement is correct. What's really, really expensive is building the plant in such a manner that it is both secure and maintainable. The problem with securing it is that a critical event is so damn expensive (cf. Fukushima) that you need to secure it against all imaginable problems - and as you can imagine, that list is growing over time. And still, you can't buy insurance for a plant. So the government carries the bulk of the risk.
- DiThi 9y ago> you need to secure it against all imaginable problems It's not that hard if you avoid greedy power plant owners. TEPCO was repeatedly warned many years ago that they had to build a barrier against tsunamis, and all other plants of the area followed the advice.