The Aging of Our Nuclear Power Plants Is Not So Graceful 436
Lasrick writes "This is a very thoughtful article on nuclear power plant aging: how operators use early retirement of plants to extract concessions from rate-payers and a discussion on how California's 'forward-looking planning process' has probably mitigated disruption from the closing of San Onofre."
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Informative)
The failure to build new reactors is primarily driven by economics. Nuclear reactors require huge capital investment and take a long time to build. They also take a long time to turn on and off, so make an inflexible source of supply that integrates poorly with more variable sources, such as wind and solar. Natural gas, on the other hand, has a comparatively much lower capital investment and time to build for the same generation capacity. The low price of natural gas also makes it extremely competitive with other power sources. Natural gas turbines can also come to full power from a dead stop in 20 minutes and partial power sooner than that, allowing it it integrate gracefully in a world with variable power demand and supply.
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Informative)
Not to mention there's legislation that prevents spent rods being reprocessed. Leaving a lot of nasty radioactive waste about when it could be reprocessed into more fuel, and reused and further being a source for fast breeders.
Besides Pebble Bed reactors are the way to go.
Re:NIMBY (Score:2, Informative)
Need is an interesting word. Our use and need for electric power as two quite different things. Even if we decide nobody should have to go without their favorite gadgets there is no reason to think that we would need to produce more power to meet demand. This is principally because newer devices are often better than old one. A 15 year old fridge is a monster and junking it for a shiny new one will save the owner money. Other new technologies such as more efficient lighting are saving huge amounts of power. Today's computers are more efficient than the one they replace.
US energy consumption per capita has declined since its peak in 1974 (http://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumption-since-1820-in-charts/) Per capita electricity consumption has been flat since 2000 in the US. The reason for this is not a sudden distaste for new things or a turn to socialism. It is simply that the new things are better than the old ones.
I have no idea where your 1.2 GW per person figure comes from, but for your family's safely I hope it is hyperbole, since it would take about 1,000,000 toaster overs to generate that kind of power, though far be it from me to judge how dark you like your toast.
-- same AC as above
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear reactors require huge capital investment and take a long time to build.
It's true that the capital costs of nuclear power are high, but in all fairness a substantial part of those costs and the time required to build are caused by anti-nuclear pressure groups and other NIMBYs who drag the process out for decades in courts and through environmental review boards as a delaying tactic to discourage development by artificially running up the cost. Meanwhile the world continues to burn ever more and dirtier fossil fuels to make up for lost nuclear generation capacity in national electric grids.
They also take a long time to turn on and off, so make an inflexible source of supply that integrates poorly with more variable sources
Which is why you don't turn them off and why the electric grid should never be entirely nuclear. Nuclear is for the portion of the demand that needs constant and consistent base load supply. Because the national energy grids never have zero energy demand at any time of day there will always be demand for some amount of base load power and nuclear fits that profile perfectly. The variable power sources, like wind and solar, can contribute as they're able with the remainder of variable demand being handled by natural gas turbines that can be turned on when necessary to fill in supply gaps and shutdown quickly and easily when not needed.
Natural gas, on the other hand, has a comparatively much lower capital investment and time to build for the same generation capacity.
Natural gas is also a valuable transportation, heating and cooking fuel. It's not just power plants that demand natural gas, so it would be unwise in the long run to replace base load nuclear with natural gas. We have many centuries of proven nuclear fuel, but natural gas supplies have waxed and waned over the years along with demand, depletion and development of new supplies. The lifespan of a power plant is measured in decades but nobody can tell you what the price will be for natural gas decades in the future.
The low price of natural gas also makes it extremely competitive with other power sources.
For now, but much of the newly drilled glut of natural gas comes from horizontally drilled and fracked wells in tight shale formations where the long term depletion rates are still poorly understood. We might have centuries of gas left in these formations or they might be depleted in a matter of decades; nobody's sure yet because we don't have enough data on depletion rates and demand is also uncertain. For example, increased use of natural gas in commercial transportation may eventually put upward pressure on natural gas prices as an alternative to diesel in those applications.
Natural gas turbines can also come to full power from a dead stop in 20 minutes and partial power sooner than that, allowing it it integrate gracefully in a world with variable power demand and supply.
Which is why there will always be a role for natural gas in electricity generation. My point was that we shouldn't lean too heavily on any one technology, but rather seek to optimize the grid by tapping into the different strengths of different generation technologies. We need nuclear, solar, wind, natural gas and even niche sources, like geothermal or tidal, where available. The best solution utilizes a mix of all of these technologies, but as long as there are ignorant, biased and uneducated people we will continue to "debate" whether eliminating one or more of these technologies from the mix is a "good idea", as in the case of the "no nukes" crowd.
GREAT SCOTT! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This subject is shill ridden (Score:4, Informative)
nuclear wasn't being subsidized in the way most people think. They are subsidized loans
Which are subsidies, plain and simple. Interest on construction loans is a standard cost that has to be dealt with.
Re:NIMBY (Score:2, Informative)
A somewhat-common solution to the inflexible nature of nuclear power is to pair it with hydroelectric power in artificial lakes. During the night, or other low-demand periods, the excess electricity can be used to pump water upstream, filling the reservoir. When peak times hit, that water can be let back down to generate additional power.
This has certain additional advantages as well. Nuclear plants need cooling water, so building them next to a lake is already fairly common. And as yet another added bonus, the dam provides some level of safety in event of a leak - it can be closed off completely, for a time, and it provides a chokepoint where filters could be installed in a leak scenario.
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Informative)
What killed Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Miles Island isn't that they were particularly unsafe.
Chernobyl blew up mainly due to a whole bunch of human errors while preparing the reactor for a safety test - preparations were supposed to start nearly a day ahead of time and the chief engineer decided to rush it after preparation got delayed by a government request to run the reactor a few hours longer to accommodate peak hours. In their rush to bring down reactor output to test level, they accidentally radon-poisoned the core, power wouldn't come back up so they started removing control rods beyond GE's safe minimum and then got caught with their pants down in their attempts to restart it when the radon poisoning cleared up and reactor output surged out of control. This highlighted many design issues that could have helped the staff figure out what was happening a little sooner but the fundamental failure was human errors.
Three Mile Island's core issue was a flawed control/indicator pair for a discharge valve where the indicator tracked the control switch's state rather than the valve's actual state which caused the reactor to bleed dry without staff knowing it was happening. This got further complicated by lack of first-degree measurement of water level in the reactor core. How such a fundamental and trivial design flaw ever made it in an actual reactor design is beyond me. Without this vital bit of information, plant engineers had no way to know exactly what was going wrong when nearly every alarm, many of which contradictory, started going off at once.
For Fukushima, the single dumbest mistake and the root cause of most complications there was putting backup generators in floodable areas, causing the loss of nearly all backup power within hours. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the reactors themselves. Most nuclear plants house their backup generators in the turbine building precisely to shelter them from elements but Fukushima had theirs outdoors near sea-level. I'm still scratching my head about how the people who managed the site had the foresight to install wave-breakers off-shore but neglected to protect generators from potential flooding in some way.
Pebble and molten salt reactors still benefit from everything that was learned from past mistakes. If you had a pebble or MSR reactor with Chernobyl-era knowledge and experience, Chernobyl would likely still have happened: still stuck with a massive power surge once radon poisoning clears up. Same for TMI and Fukushima. Pebbles and molten salt may be more convenient and safer to handle and process but there is very little they can do to prevent operator, design and construction errors.
Following the procedures and operating manual would have saved Chernobyl by never allowing it to reach the highly volatile state it was forced into in the first place. A simple direct-observation water level gauge would have saved TMI by providing engineers the single most critical information they needed to know exactly what was happening. Putting generators indoors in a safe location would have saved Fukushima by keeping them safe from the salt-water ingestion that fouled them. Being "obsolete" played little to no part in any of those incidents; all the measures that would have prevented those incidents are very low-tech even for their original construction dates and could have been fixed at little to no cost if someone had simply thought of these being liabilities back then.
If you are going to defend nuclear as a safe energy source, I strongly suggest researching WHY those historic failures occurred before blindly tagging all "obsolete" reactors as intrinsically unsafe; otherwise you are simply contributing to the FUD about it. Old reactors are just about as safe as newer ones once retrofitted to address potential safety hazard as they are identified - and this applies to newer reactors regardless of type as well.
Newer reactors simply have the benefit of decades worth of safety enhancements being built-in from day-1.
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Informative)
And this makes me wonder why we still build refrigerators, and the place they sit in within homes, the way we do.
In some parts of the country, there are several months of the year when we try to remove heat from our homes. But the refrig goes to all the trouble (i.e., energy use) to "separate" heat from already air conditioned air. Then, what does it do with the heat? It dumps the "heat" back in to the conditioned air in the house to repeat the cycle!!! Stupid...
Why not put an exhaust vent (and maybe fan) to the exterior and an outside air intake, perhaps with remote actuated dampers, by the refrig in new homes (and kitchen remodels). Hook that to a new class of "integrated climate control" refrig that takes its condenser cooling input air from either the room or the outside source and exhausts it either to the room or outside -- all depending on input from the thermostat controlling that zone of the house. Obviously input/exhaust dampers would be closed except when the refrig was running (in case of failure, it would default to taking house air in and exhaust the hot air back into the house).
Seems more efficient - a bit of up front cost (and, unfortunately, a need for some simple standardization between architects, the HVAC industry, and appliance manufacturers) but over the years it seems like it would pay for itself in areas with much hot weather.
(Sorry for my likely abuse of the word "heat" et al)
Do you really want to install and maintain all of that duct work and automatic louvers for "several months of the year" when it would make a difference? Don't forget to take into account the energy use for the fan that you'll need to run to vent the heat outside, and to account for the fact that while you're saving a bit of energy by making your air conditioner work less hard, your refrigerator compressor will be doing more work when the evaporator coils are cooled by 95 degree outside air instead of 70 degree air conditioned air.
I'm not sure that the energy cost savings would be worth it - a modern energy efficient refrigerator uses around $60 of electricity/year (500KWh * 12 cents/KWh). Even if you saved 100% of that energy, it might take you around 10 years to recoup the cost of $500 worth of duct work, electronic louvers, vent fan, and associated control circuitry. If you run the air conditioning 4 months out of the year, then it's a 30 year payback time.
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Informative)
But when the AC comes back on, it has to work harder because now the room is warmer. Sure, you saved that 15 minutes of AC usage but instead of the AC cycling on and off every few minutes as it would normally do to maintain a room at a given temperature it will come on and stay on until it's made up the difference.
No energy has been saved in the long run, all thats happened is a tall thin peak of energy consumption has been flattened and made wider.
Smart meters help with peak power on a grid which can't handle the demand but don't save energy. It's a cheap way of dealing with a failure to invest in essential infrastructure.