6 ms·

What about decomissioning and caring for the nuclear waste? That seems to bei very expensive as the decomissioning of the Greifswald plant in former east German

What about decomissioning and caring for the nuclear waste? That seems to bei very expensive as the decomissioning of the Greifswald plant in former east Germany is going to cost more than 6 billion €.

godelski 6y ago
This is an extremely complicated matter, to be honest. It isn't difficult to store waste on site. There are also much cheaper technologies out there that we've invented over the last 50 years but one of the major reasons we don't have them in practice is because they are "unproven", as in physically untested at large scale (though they have been through simulations and small scale testings at DoE labs). Long term storage isn't too bad of an issue either, but there's two camps. One is to do smaller sites where we can just bury local material in the ground. The other is having a large mass site (think Yucca Mountain), which means higher scrutiny because there's more chances of something going wrong (standard failure analysis) and you're packing more material together which increases total radiation levels. Either one will work, but both are bureaucratic nightmares. The result of which has been constantly changing plans, which drives up costs very quickly as you change gears (e.g. spend tons to survey the US for good sites, more to verify Yucca Mountain is good, start digging, cancel because NIMBY, start again, cancel, survey other areas, repeat). But one factor I want to mention is that by the nature of the physical processes materials can't be both extremely dangerous and long living. The danger literally comes from mass being expelled from the atoms. High level radioactive materials have and always will be stored on site, as this is the safest place for them (where they can be monitored). There are still technical challenges, don't get me wrong, but the whole process is also a bureaucratic nightmare on top of that and we know what that does to costs. For some better facts I'll refer you to an article written by a HN user that is a reactor scientist: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
sir_bearington 6y ago
There's actually extremely small amounts of nuclear waste. The entirety of the waste produced by USA's nuclear electricity generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and less than 10 yards high [1]. The cost of storing waste is minuscule in comparison to the amount of electricity generated. Europe's waste repository in Finland costs ~800 million Euros [2]. Which is an order of magnitude less than a nuclear plant. And the repository can accommodate the fuel produced by several plants. In short, waste disposal accounts for a single-digit percentage of nuclear power operating costs. 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
  There is far far more to nuclear decommissioning cost than just spent fuel storage. The costs are truly staggering and cannot be breezed past so simply.
  - sir_bearington 6y ago
    Average decommissioning costs are $460-$730 million dollars per GW of capacity [1]. This is about 10% of the construction cost for most power plants in the GW range. Decommissioning adds $0.80 per MWh of electricity generated, assuming a capacity factor of 90% and a lifetime of 80 years. By comparison, the cost of natural gas power is $40 to $80 per MWh. You and I seem to have very different ideas of what is a "staggering" cost. 1.https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/decommissioning-nuclear-facilities.aspx#:~:text=For%20US%20reactors%20the%20expected,to%20%241.22%20million%20per%20MWe https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu....
    - natmaka 6y ago
      As far as I know building a long-term repository for the spent nuclear fuel is so simple... not a single nation solved it. The most advanced project (Onkalo, in Finland) may open in 2023. Decommission costs are low... when planned. When a project at scale starts, however, things are usually less fun. Take a look at the UK. The 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... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/uks-nuclear-sites-costing-taxpayers-astronomical-sums-say-mps https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/uks-nucl... Decommissioning small and old reactors costs more, and entombing may, at least apparently (short-term), reduce the cost. In theory. Let's check a real and ongoing case: Oyster Creek. According to the EIA its construction costs were $488 million (2007 USD) ( https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/state/archive/2010/newjersey/ https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/state/archive/2010/newjersey/ ). As soon as the decommission project started the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it will cost "about $1.4 billion to shut down the plant". Not for an immediate and complete decommission, because the plant will stay in a “safe store” condition until 2075, with dismantling ((...)) set for a period between 2075 and 2078 ( https://www.powermag.com/oldest-u-s-nuclear-plant-shuts-down/ https://www.powermag.com/oldest-u-s-nuclear-plant-shuts-down... ). Then new problems (costs!) may arise. Let's bet that, as usual, the taxpayer will pay and the real cost will be hidden. US: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup-underfunded-by-up-to-70-billion/ https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup... Moreover if there is a serious glitch during decommission or at a waste repository site, are bets are off. You can obtain an insurance policy for anything, AFAIK even for a space trip, but no-one covers major nuke risk (reimbursements have a hard limit).

godelski 6y ago

This is an extremely complicated matter, to be honest. It isn't difficult to store waste on site. There are also much cheaper technologies out there that we've invented over the last 50 years but one of the major reasons we don't have them in practice is because they are "unproven", as in physically untested at large scale (though they have been through simulations and small scale testings at DoE labs). Long term storage isn't too bad of an issue either, but there's two camps. One is to do smaller sites where we can just bury local material in the ground. The other is having a large mass site (think Yucca Mountain), which means higher scrutiny because there's more chances of something going wrong (standard failure analysis) and you're packing more material together which increases total radiation levels. Either one will work, but both are bureaucratic nightmares. The result of which has been constantly changing plans, which drives up costs very quickly as you change gears (e.g. spend tons to survey the US for good sites, more to verify Yucca Mountain is good, start digging, cancel because NIMBY, start again, cancel, survey other areas, repeat). But one factor I want to mention is that by the nature of the physical processes materials can't be both extremely dangerous and long living. The danger literally comes from mass being expelled from the atoms. High level radioactive materials have and always will be stored on site, as this is the safest place for them (where they can be monitored). There are still technical challenges, don't get me wrong, but the whole process is also a bureaucratic nightmare on top of that and we know what that does to costs. For some better facts I'll refer you to an article written by a HN user that is a reactor scientist: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

sir_bearington 6y ago

There's actually extremely small amounts of nuclear waste. The entirety of the waste produced by USA's nuclear electricity generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and less than 10 yards high [1]. The cost of storing waste is minuscule in comparison to the amount of electricity generated. Europe's waste repository in Finland costs ~800 million Euros [2]. Which is an order of magnitude less than a nuclear plant. And the repository can accommodate the fuel produced by several plants. In short, waste disposal accounts for a single-digit percentage of nuclear power operating costs. 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
There is far far more to nuclear decommissioning cost than just spent fuel storage. The costs are truly staggering and cannot be breezed past so simply.
- sir_bearington 6y ago
  Average decommissioning costs are $460-$730 million dollars per GW of capacity [1]. This is about 10% of the construction cost for most power plants in the GW range. Decommissioning adds $0.80 per MWh of electricity generated, assuming a capacity factor of 90% and a lifetime of 80 years. By comparison, the cost of natural gas power is $40 to $80 per MWh. You and I seem to have very different ideas of what is a "staggering" cost. 1.https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/decommissioning-nuclear-facilities.aspx#:~:text=For%20US%20reactors%20the%20expected,to%20%241.22%20million%20per%20MWe https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu....
  - natmaka 6y ago
    As far as I know building a long-term repository for the spent nuclear fuel is so simple... not a single nation solved it. The most advanced project (Onkalo, in Finland) may open in 2023. Decommission costs are low... when planned. When a project at scale starts, however, things are usually less fun. Take a look at the UK. The 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... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/uks-nuclear-sites-costing-taxpayers-astronomical-sums-say-mps https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/uks-nucl... Decommissioning small and old reactors costs more, and entombing may, at least apparently (short-term), reduce the cost. In theory. Let's check a real and ongoing case: Oyster Creek. According to the EIA its construction costs were $488 million (2007 USD) ( https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/state/archive/2010/newjersey/ https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/state/archive/2010/newjersey/ ). As soon as the decommission project started the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it will cost "about $1.4 billion to shut down the plant". Not for an immediate and complete decommission, because the plant will stay in a “safe store” condition until 2075, with dismantling ((...)) set for a period between 2075 and 2078 ( https://www.powermag.com/oldest-u-s-nuclear-plant-shuts-down/ https://www.powermag.com/oldest-u-s-nuclear-plant-shuts-down... ). Then new problems (costs!) may arise. Let's bet that, as usual, the taxpayer will pay and the real cost will be hidden. US: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup-underfunded-by-up-to-70-billion/ https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup... Moreover if there is a serious glitch during decommission or at a waste repository site, are bets are off. You can obtain an insurance policy for anything, AFAIK even for a space trip, but no-one covers major nuke risk (reimbursements have a hard limit).