12 ms·

No one knows the actual cost of French Nuclear. France has yet to dismantle one of its end of life reactor. Everyone know that the provisioned costs don't make

• eqvinox 7y ago
  > No one knows the actual cost of French Nuclear. France has yet to dismantle one of its end of life reactor. This. The sad thing is that the article is probably right about nuclear being preferrable over fossil fuels due to relative priorities of global warming vs. nuclear accidents and garbage disposal. But this cost comparison against renewables is just comically miscalculated.
  • rndgermandude 7y ago
    In 1995 Germany estimated 3 - 5 billion Euro to dismantle one of the old DDR nuclear plants that was decommissioned in 1990 by 2012. The work has not finished yet. About 1000 people work on this project. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald
    • ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      Bad project management does not equate bad technology. German government also messed up Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport, it's 7 years late and massively over budget. In UK it takes us 30 years to build a train line. Those cases don't prove that trains and plains are uneconomical.
      • lispm 7y ago
        That some other projects were late does not mean much for dismantling a nuclear power plant, which is a very different/ unique problem with different actors.
      • adrianN 7y ago
        But they should increase your bayesian estimate of typical project costs for these types of projects. If we had a way of reliably preventing bad project management such things wouldn't happen.
      • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        There's a common feature of massive complex projects the world over - they pretty much always come late and massively over budget. Then as infrastructure mostly end up sticking around for a century or more, sometimes limiting future choices. Rail, tube and tram lines will still be there and graded 100 years later - after track replacements, roads are not dissimilar, reservoirs and storage caverns far longer with a turbine replacement or two. Nuclear on the other hand has a much more limited life in which to absorb those overruns.
      • rndgermandude 7y ago
        What has this to do with bad project management? I do not see anything particularly bad happening in this project, while the BER is indeed a clusterfuck that keeps giving. They are still within their financial budget for this project, will maybe overshoot it by a bit in the end. But that's OK, since such a dismantling had no precedence whatsoever, and it was just an estimate and everybody knew that. They will exceed their time budget by a lot, which is also OK, since again such a dismantling had no precedence whatsoever, it doesn't really matter if this thing takes a decade longer to dismantle, and the reason they take longer than initially estimated is that they had to overcome a ton of problems nobody could have known about before and went about their work carefully and systematically. There were a lot of lessons learned from this, which should help with being faster when dismantling other nuclear plants, but and a bit cheaper (maybe at 2/3rds the cost in the future). With BER on the other hand the date of completion did matter, both politically and economically, and the exploding time and financial budgets were a result of gross incompetence in particular from the politicians that personally kept meddling in the project (it was "prestige" project), complete failure in contractor oversight (which resulted in a ton of defects and also some corruption and embezzlement) and a completely useless project leadership (of mostly political appointments, aside from the politicians themselves, that e.g. resulted in them building that thing without working fire safety).
    • natmaka 7y ago
      Decommissioning costs, often neglected, are a ticking bomb. UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-nuclear-atomic-clean-up-decommissioning https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-... £161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u... £234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision... Long-term waste management is another ticking bomb. Moreover if there is a serious glitch (Chernobyl, Fukushima...), are bets are off. You can obtain an insurance policy for anything, AFAIK even for a space trip, but no insurance company covers such nuke risk.
  • mattrp 7y ago
    Agreed - the lifespan argument is really not portrayed in an accurate way. Besides, France is basically screwed - it hasn’t been able to expand its energy supply beyond population demands (ie it doesn’t and couldn’t support a data center economy). More than likely they will be buying energy rather than generating it in the future — unless of course someone can get the salt reactor commercialized.
    • namdnay 7y ago
      Huh? France exports energy, and it has a massive nuclear and hydroelectric industry. Why on earth would it be more screwed than anywhere else in Europe?
      • mattrp 7y ago
        Today they produce a lot of subsidized power that when everything operating correctly produces an excess of power. However we are not talking about today, we are talking about the future. The average plant age is 30 years. Some plants are so old that frances neighbors accuse it of risking another Fukushima incident.. Germany closed its plants for precisely that reason. It will like cost close to 100b if not more to decommission and untold amounts to replace whatever they take offline. My point is that just for France to unwind it’s aging nuclear it’s going to have to build and spend a lot and that is just to get back to even... much less expand to cover new sources of electricity like electrification of the car fleet. Germany in contrast has been building new transmission lines and production for a decade and still has a decade to go. Norway actually has a true surplus which is expected to be a multiple of france’s entire output, etc etc. My point was that the author was saying nuclear has an expected age of 40-80 years... I call bs on that lifespan and point to France as an example: there’s just no way we see them continue their existing plants for 80 years when their existing plants are already showing signs they may be at risk or not be able to operate much past 35-40...
      • natmaka 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_exports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici... Tally: Germany 1, France 28 There are many causes, one being that during hot seasons many French atomic plants cannot run at full speed (thermal pollution).
• adventured 7y ago
  I'm a very big fan of nuclear and I believe it should be subsidized at high cost as necessary. However, it is clear that even France has extreme inbound cost problems related to its nuclear industry - "French power utility EDF estimates it would cost at least 46 billion euros ($51 billion) to build six of its latest generation EPR nuclear reactors if the government decides to build them" "the Flamanville EPR reactor under construction in northern France has been plagued by cost overruns and a series of technical problems resulting in years of delays. EDF, in which the state has an 84% stake, said in October the project which began in 2006 would cost 1.5 billion euros more than previously expected, raising the total cost to 12.4 billion euros." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-edf-expects-six-new-nuclear-reactors-to-cost-46-billion-euros-le-monde-idUSKBN1XJ074 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-e...
  • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    What EDF estimates is meaningless without a strike price and decommissioning cost. The UK's National Audit Office puts the price of one EDF reactor around that once you include the excess price paid on every MWh over the 50 year projected life, and the decommissioning (which is supposedly built into that MWh price). It remains to be seen if it will be correct. From Wikipedia: The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion, which "will continue to vary as the outlook for wholesale market prices shifts" That's $64bn on top of £20bn ($25bn) latest build estimate. A build with such poor worker conditions that it has gained a reputation for suicides. $89bn would build a ton of pumped storage to underpin offshore wind at a quarter the MWh price.
    • walshemj 7y ago
      That is assuming you have the suitable terrain and don't have a problem with forcibly moving the inhabitants - its not the 50/60's the locals might not just pack up and move.
      • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
• agumonkey 7y ago
  Jean Marc Jancovici quoted 10-15% of the total cost in an interview last week.
  • toomuchtodo 7y ago
    A quote is of no value. Actual costs and time spent must be determined by dismantling a reactor successfully.
    • dmix 7y ago
      Quotes don't matter when it doesn't help the argument I'm making on the internet.* Meanwhile projections are used extensively in major engineering projects. The fact error rates exist in probabilities doesn't make them useless.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • angry_octet 7y ago
        The parents point is sound in that estimates only have validity if they are about well understood or frequently undertaken activities. There is no basis for certainty about decommissioning of nuclear; older plants especially have unique problems. There have been enormous cost overruns for any plant that has had an incident, and many plants will have problems only discovered upon disassembly.
        • AnthonyMouse 7y ago
          Problems unique to older plants have no relevance to the estimates for newer plants. They're not even relevant to the choice whether to keep existing plants in operation, except insofar as pushing the decommissioning date further into the future lowers its net present cost due to the time value of money.
          • angry_octet 7y ago
• littlestymaar 7y ago
  This is true but people tend to forget one thing: decommissioning doesn't necessarily means dismantling. Dismantling is a tough challenge (mainly because of the civil engineering part btw, which becomes difficult to manage when you add the constraints from nuclear: “What do you mean when you say we can't use dynamite? oO”) but it's only a legal obligation not an absolute one. With government support to change the law, EDF could just unload the fuel (price is well known, they do it all the time), and pickle the primary circuit in place (the price is also known, they did it a few times already) and now you have a place where all contamination (which comes from neutronic activation) is trapped inside the structure (Co60 in the rebar of the structure mostly) and the biggest risk is asbestos… (like your nearest decommissionined building in your neighborhood, even houses). This option leaves you with a few ugly buildings in the middle of nowhere, but the cost unbeatable (even way less than decommissioning thousands of wind turbines).
  • DuskStar 7y ago
    Why isn't this just the default choice?
    • littlestymaar 7y ago
      Good question. The dismantling narrative probably comes from a mix between wishful thinking from politicians and bad habits of lying all the time from the nuclear industry… I mean, the nuclear story is even brighter if we can promise we'll clean up after us right?
  • eqvinox 7y ago
    > This option leaves you with a few ugly buildings in the middle of nowhere, but the cost unbeatable (even way less than decommissioning thousands of wind turbines). Aren't you forgetting something? Buildings slowly deteriorate, even if not used. So now you have to maintain the disused reactor, for ... how long exactly? (Amendment: wind, rain, sunlight, rodents, ... idiots with power tools ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident )
• briwang2050 7y ago
  the Decommissioning of the Zion reactors. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1909/ML19092A270.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1909/ML19092A270.pdf About $650 million budget. In 2016, They say it is on schedule and under budget. https://www.energysolutions.com/zion-nuclear-power-plant-decommissioning-project-on-budget-and-ahead-of-schedule-six-years-after-the-project-started/ https://www.energysolutions.com/zion-nuclear-power-plant-dec... They are doing less sorting. They just get a bigger cave and put the entire facility into it. There is room in the large cave for all US nuclear plants.
• 8bitsrule 7y ago
  And waste is far from a solved problem. "This is the €25bn deep geological storage facility for France’s high and medium-level radioactive waste... [France] produces enough toxic radioactive waste every year to fill 120 double-decker buses (about 13,000 cubic metres worth, or 2kg a year for every French person)." [0] [0] 2016: "Nuclear waste: keep out for 100,000 years" https://www.ft.com/content/db87c16c-4947-11e6-b387-64ab0a67014c https://www.ft.com/content/db87c16c-4947-11e6-b387-64ab0a670...
  • roenxi 7y ago
    Which is much less waste than solar produces. We barely even try to keep the waste from solar panels segregated from the environment because it is impossible with volumes that high. It is impossible to try to keep it to the same standards as nuclear but the damage is probably about the same. https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-...
    • Spooky23 7y ago
      I missed the part about solar panels and radioactive waste that require containment. End of life PV panels are one of a million waste products that end up in landfills.
      • roenxi 7y ago
        The EOL PV products are just as dangerous as radiation; lead and cadmium poisoning are nasty businesses. If they were held to the same safety standards as nuclear waste it would require containment; the risk of harm is greater (especially after accounting for volume). PV waste isn't held to that silly standard because then it would be impossible to produce solar panels. If nuclear waste were contained using the same standard of acceptable harm as solar panels the cost would be a rounding error.
      • arcticbull 7y ago
        They've got large quantities of Cadmium Telluride and Cadmium Sulfide, the Cadmium portion of which is quite toxic. Not to mention that burning coal releases a ton of radiation into the air also. This isn't whataboutism, far from it, in an ideal world there'd be no waste. But in the real world we have to reduce harm and balance options against each other. Nuclear waste can be quite effectively dropped into long-term geological storage facilities.
• Iv 7y ago
  Plants have been dismantled in the past, not in France though. I think closing Fessenheim is a bad decision, but at least it could shut down this bad argument by showing that costs of decommisioning a nuclear power plants are not 3 years of GDP.
• afterburner 7y ago
  Exactly. The real costs of France's national nuclear program can be hidden inside of the accounting of the entire nation, and fudged beyond belief. It's a point of national pride at this point, they would definitely lie and take to the grave anything that might suggest it's not an overwhelming success. And given how fudged financing can be easy to do and compound into massive errors, it could take a massive team of financial forensic analysts to uncover it.
• tinus_hn 7y ago
  Not to mention the cost of permanently evacuating an area when the impossible event of a meltdown manages to happen anyway. There's a reason why countries like to put their reactors near the border, that way part of that area is someone else's problem.