4 ms·

> 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 proba

> 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).
  - jdjdjjsjs 7y ago
    Wind and solar projects are not coming in at 3-4x their costs anywhere. So the fact that they are simply simpler projects which rarely (never?) have massive overruns due to "bad project management" is a huge financial point in their favor that is rarely factored in.
    - natmaka 7y ago
      Indeed. A huge and complicated project is a much wonderful playground for involved people (from the planners to the decommissioners). They benefit from it (on all accounts, including intellectual, financial, reputation, tolerance for error...) much more than they would with simple and transparent ways.
- 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).

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).
- jdjdjjsjs 7y ago
  Wind and solar projects are not coming in at 3-4x their costs anywhere. So the fact that they are simply simpler projects which rarely (never?) have massive overruns due to "bad project management" is a huge financial point in their favor that is rarely factored in.
  - natmaka 7y ago
    Indeed. A huge and complicated project is a much wonderful playground for involved people (from the planners to the decommissioners). They benefit from it (on all accounts, including intellectual, financial, reputation, tolerance for error...) much more than they would with simple and transparent ways.
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).