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The cost of nuclear energy seems seriously understated. Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still don’t have a long-term storage plan. We’ll

by mch82 4y ago

The cost of nuclear energy seems seriously understated. Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still don’t have a long-term storage plan. We’ll incur this cost for hundreds or thousands of years. https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us#gs.37rjl0 https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us... There’s also a cost to secure the nuclear infrastructure. https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/nuclear-generation-has-huge-and-hidden-security-costs-e0a11264bbac https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/nuclear-generation... Can anyone find a cost per Megawatt Hour calculation for nuclear that includes security and long-term waste storage? The calculations I’ve found for the $96/MWh figure seem like they include construction and operation costs, but exclude decommissioning and waste management.

com2kid 4y ago
> Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still don’t have a long-term storage plan. We’ll incur this cost for hundreds or thousands of years. New plants produce a lot less waste. And the reason nuclear waste seems so expensive is because we have externalized the cost of most other forms of power generation. Coal and gas, well we just let people get sick or die. Natural gas, fracking has huge negative impacts on communities, lots of illness, but again, we don't count that as part of the "financial cost" of natural gas. Solar, we have the panels made in some other country, we have the raw materials mined in some other country, we import the final product, now it is clean energy. (I support solar, but there is an environmental cost to solar panels!) Nuclear makes us confront the waste up front, so now we are all freaked out about it. As has been pointed out repeatedly, you could take a football field, dig down a few stories, and put all the nuclear waste needed for energy generation in there, and then have enough left over to keep storing spent fuel from new high efficiency reactors until sometime until well after everyone reading HN is dead and gone. It is a crap shoot if the cost of paying the lawyers to deal with all the lawsuits over where to build the storage site will end up costing more or less than the storage itself.
- jka 4y ago
  > As has been pointed out repeatedly, you could take a football field, dig down a few stories, and put all the nuclear waste needed for energy generation in there Here are mentions of this talking point on Hacker News: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=nuclear%20waste%20size%20of%20a%20football%20field&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Guvante 4y ago
It is complicated: $6B is supposedly related to nuclear waste from the weapons program which is likely hard to compare to power production sites for a huge number of reasons. Technically there is a $40B fund paid for from taxes on nuclear production to deal with the long term storage problem by NIMBY has prevented that from going from a concept into a reality. As with many things "we need X but not here" makes getting things done hard. So from a planning standpoint the long term problem is solved but in reality it isn't. How you boil that down into a cost I couldn't begin to solve.
adastra22 4y ago
Nuclear waste is only a problem if you don’t allow breeder reactors. Otherwise it is a fuel resource and an asset, not a liability.
- devoutsalsa 4y ago
  Nuclear waste isn't a problem if you drill a hole that's deep enough, encase the waste in a "dry cask", and drop it in the hole. Kyle Hill did a great video on this... "We solved nuclear waste decades ago" => https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Or just drop it in the ocean, as US, Brits and Russians have preferred in the past. But this has nothing to do with construction cost.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
      Speaking of offer dumping. One good use for stainless steel nuclear waste dry casks would be to build an encasement for the 25,000 odd drums of DDT dumped off the coast of California. Fortunately, those decaying drums are only a problem every so often when the news media gets around to reminding us.
- natmaka 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31689996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31689996
  - adastra22 4y ago
    From your linked post: > after decades of often huge projects in many nations there is not a single industrial fast breeder reactor working satisfactorily The key word is "industrial." I assume you mean this as a synonym for "commercial." Let me emphasize the part of my original post, which you are replying to: > Nuclear waste is only a problem *if you don’t allow breeder reactors* There have been, as you link to, dozens of research fast breeder reactor in almost all the nuclear-signatory countries. Many of these "research" reactors operated continuously for decades providing consistent power, and were only shut down when the plant reached end-of-life. They were/are operated by government-run research organizations because only these organizations have the authority to run new / unapproved nuclear reactor designs. And they remain unapproved for commercial use due to political reasons ranging from general fear of nuclear power, lobbying from energy companies (for whom traditional designs are more profitable, externalities be damned), and fear over nuclear proliferation since the uranium-based reactors technically produce some weapons-grade material in their fuel cycle. The last point is a major one, but manageable if there was political will to do so. We know how to build fast breeder reactors economically. We're just not allowed to.
ncmncm 4y ago
Waste management is by far the smallest of all the problems with nukes. Overwhelmingly the biggest problem is wholly legal corruption, as cost and schedule are allowed to balloon without limit. For everyone involved, the gravy train stops when a plant is delivered, which no one actually involved wants ever to happen. (If it must end anyway, there is some incentive to actually deliver, as happened at Olkiluoto, but not at Vogtle.) No one has offered any plausible suggestion for how to contain corruption costs for nuke construction, at least in the US, never mind who should apply such containment. No such dynamic is apparent in solar and wind projects, where expected cost is easy to estimate as a multiple of generating units -- panels and turbines. We may expect that SMRs will not find traction specifically because they do not seem to offer the conduit for graft that bespoke nuke construction guarantees. After corruption costs, we have numerous operating costs, some noted above, plus steam turbine maintenance, which each individually exceed the sum of operating costs of renewables. So capex is radically more and opex is radically more than for current cost of renewables, with no reasonable prospect for any reductions, never mind matching exponential decline of renewables costs. There is also decommissioning cost, always omitted from reported capex. And, disaster insurance, always 100% subsidized by taxpayers, so omitted from reported opex. As renewable generating capacity approaches and exceeds fossil generation, we will need to begin building out storage to provide base load. Cost for storage, in numerous forms, is falling even faster than for renewable generation. By the time we need any -- after we have enough renewable capacity to charge it -- storage will be very cheap indeed. Only a tiny fraction of it will be batteries, mostly for load smoothing (as now), as batteries will remain more expensive than alternatives. Cheap storage will cost per W added or extracted, not per Wh stored, like batteries. Synthetic fuel -- ammonia and hydrogen, while costlier than others, have the advantage that surplus may be exported for direct revenue.
- pyrale 4y ago
  > No one has offered any plausible suggestion for how to contain corruption costs for nuke construction Honestly, I had assumed this was how the US worked in any industry. The tech industry (most recently crypto) has certainly spent lavishly on politics in recent years, either to escape accountability or to get special status.
SECProto 4y ago
> The cost of nuclear energy seems seriously understated. Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still don’t have a long-term storage plan. We’ll incur this cost for hundreds or thousands of years. Wait til you hear about the costs of fossil fuel waste storage!
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Fortunately, that is not the alternative: fossil fuel use is already uncompetitive, so on its way down. But not fast enough, as societal inertia props it up against what cost favors.
  - SECProto 4y ago
    > Fortunately, that is not the alternative: fossil fuel use is already uncompetitive Maybe where you live the grid operators are being progressive with renewables as an alternative. Where I am, a couple nuclear reactors are reaching EOL and we're going to have a huge increase in carbon emissions, as electricity from zero carbon nuclear gets replaced with natural gas (with little probability of this changing, with the ruling party having cancelled all the renewable projects a few years ago and just having won re-election). https://www.thestar.com/business/2022/05/09/ontario-energy-grid-emissions-set-to-skyrocket-400-as-ford-government-forced-to-crank-up-the-gas.html https://www.thestar.com/business/2022/05/09/ontario-energy-g...
  - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
    You're right, fossil fuel waste storage costs aren't the alternative to nuclear waste storage costs. We've chosen to have to deal with both fairly indefinitely, for any time scale we're likely to want to talk about.

by mch82 4y ago

com2kid 4y ago

> Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still don’t have a long-term storage plan. We’ll incur this cost for hundreds or thousands of years. New plants produce a lot less waste. And the reason nuclear waste seems so expensive is because we have externalized the cost of most other forms of power generation. Coal and gas, well we just let people get sick or die. Natural gas, fracking has huge negative impacts on communities, lots of illness, but again, we don't count that as part of the "financial cost" of natural gas. Solar, we have the panels made in some other country, we have the raw materials mined in some other country, we import the final product, now it is clean energy. (I support solar, but there is an environmental cost to solar panels!) Nuclear makes us confront the waste up front, so now we are all freaked out about it. As has been pointed out repeatedly, you could take a football field, dig down a few stories, and put all the nuclear waste needed for energy generation in there, and then have enough left over to keep storing spent fuel from new high efficiency reactors until sometime until well after everyone reading HN is dead and gone. It is a crap shoot if the cost of paying the lawyers to deal with all the lawsuits over where to build the storage site will end up costing more or less than the storage itself.

jka 4y ago
> As has been pointed out repeatedly, you could take a football field, dig down a few stories, and put all the nuclear waste needed for energy generation in there Here are mentions of this talking point on Hacker News: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=nuclear%20waste%20size%20of%20a%20football%20field&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Guvante 4y ago

It is complicated: $6B is supposedly related to nuclear waste from the weapons program which is likely hard to compare to power production sites for a huge number of reasons. Technically there is a $40B fund paid for from taxes on nuclear production to deal with the long term storage problem by NIMBY has prevented that from going from a concept into a reality. As with many things "we need X but not here" makes getting things done hard. So from a planning standpoint the long term problem is solved but in reality it isn't. How you boil that down into a cost I couldn't begin to solve.

adastra22 4y ago

Nuclear waste is only a problem if you don’t allow breeder reactors. Otherwise it is a fuel resource and an asset, not a liability.

devoutsalsa 4y ago
Nuclear waste isn't a problem if you drill a hole that's deep enough, encase the waste in a "dry cask", and drop it in the hole. Kyle Hill did a great video on this... "We solved nuclear waste decades ago" => https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Or just drop it in the ocean, as US, Brits and Russians have preferred in the past. But this has nothing to do with construction cost.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
    Speaking of offer dumping. One good use for stainless steel nuclear waste dry casks would be to build an encasement for the 25,000 odd drums of DDT dumped off the coast of California. Fortunately, those decaying drums are only a problem every so often when the news media gets around to reminding us.
natmaka 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31689996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31689996
- adastra22 4y ago
  From your linked post: > after decades of often huge projects in many nations there is not a single industrial fast breeder reactor working satisfactorily The key word is "industrial." I assume you mean this as a synonym for "commercial." Let me emphasize the part of my original post, which you are replying to: > Nuclear waste is only a problem *if you don’t allow breeder reactors* There have been, as you link to, dozens of research fast breeder reactor in almost all the nuclear-signatory countries. Many of these "research" reactors operated continuously for decades providing consistent power, and were only shut down when the plant reached end-of-life. They were/are operated by government-run research organizations because only these organizations have the authority to run new / unapproved nuclear reactor designs. And they remain unapproved for commercial use due to political reasons ranging from general fear of nuclear power, lobbying from energy companies (for whom traditional designs are more profitable, externalities be damned), and fear over nuclear proliferation since the uranium-based reactors technically produce some weapons-grade material in their fuel cycle. The last point is a major one, but manageable if there was political will to do so. We know how to build fast breeder reactors economically. We're just not allowed to.

ncmncm 4y ago

Waste management is by far the smallest of all the problems with nukes. Overwhelmingly the biggest problem is wholly legal corruption, as cost and schedule are allowed to balloon without limit. For everyone involved, the gravy train stops when a plant is delivered, which no one actually involved wants ever to happen. (If it must end anyway, there is some incentive to actually deliver, as happened at Olkiluoto, but not at Vogtle.) No one has offered any plausible suggestion for how to contain corruption costs for nuke construction, at least in the US, never mind who should apply such containment. No such dynamic is apparent in solar and wind projects, where expected cost is easy to estimate as a multiple of generating units -- panels and turbines. We may expect that SMRs will not find traction specifically because they do not seem to offer the conduit for graft that bespoke nuke construction guarantees. After corruption costs, we have numerous operating costs, some noted above, plus steam turbine maintenance, which each individually exceed the sum of operating costs of renewables. So capex is radically more and opex is radically more than for current cost of renewables, with no reasonable prospect for any reductions, never mind matching exponential decline of renewables costs. There is also decommissioning cost, always omitted from reported capex. And, disaster insurance, always 100% subsidized by taxpayers, so omitted from reported opex. As renewable generating capacity approaches and exceeds fossil generation, we will need to begin building out storage to provide base load. Cost for storage, in numerous forms, is falling even faster than for renewable generation. By the time we need any -- after we have enough renewable capacity to charge it -- storage will be very cheap indeed. Only a tiny fraction of it will be batteries, mostly for load smoothing (as now), as batteries will remain more expensive than alternatives. Cheap storage will cost per W added or extracted, not per Wh stored, like batteries. Synthetic fuel -- ammonia and hydrogen, while costlier than others, have the advantage that surplus may be exported for direct revenue.

pyrale 4y ago
> No one has offered any plausible suggestion for how to contain corruption costs for nuke construction Honestly, I had assumed this was how the US worked in any industry. The tech industry (most recently crypto) has certainly spent lavishly on politics in recent years, either to escape accountability or to get special status.

SECProto 4y ago

> The cost of nuclear energy seems seriously understated. Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still don’t have a long-term storage plan. We’ll incur this cost for hundreds or thousands of years. Wait til you hear about the costs of fossil fuel waste storage!

ncmncm 4y ago
Fortunately, that is not the alternative: fossil fuel use is already uncompetitive, so on its way down. But not fast enough, as societal inertia props it up against what cost favors.
- SECProto 4y ago
  > Fortunately, that is not the alternative: fossil fuel use is already uncompetitive Maybe where you live the grid operators are being progressive with renewables as an alternative. Where I am, a couple nuclear reactors are reaching EOL and we're going to have a huge increase in carbon emissions, as electricity from zero carbon nuclear gets replaced with natural gas (with little probability of this changing, with the ruling party having cancelled all the renewable projects a few years ago and just having won re-election). https://www.thestar.com/business/2022/05/09/ontario-energy-grid-emissions-set-to-skyrocket-400-as-ford-government-forced-to-crank-up-the-gas.html https://www.thestar.com/business/2022/05/09/ontario-energy-g...
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  You're right, fossil fuel waste storage costs aren't the alternative to nuclear waste storage costs. We've chosen to have to deal with both fairly indefinitely, for any time scale we're likely to want to talk about.