Question by Dana1981: What are your thoughts on this nuclear power article?
Nuclear power is often touted as the key to solving global warming. Personally I don’t have any major opposition to nuclear power, as long as it can be produced economically.
However, as this article notes, no one has broken ground on a new reactor in the US for thirty years. Nuclear power projects require government-backed loans to fund their construction. According to a 2003 CBO study, these loans would have a default rate of “well above 50 percent.” If one loan were to default, it would cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
Of the 26 applications for new reactors submitted to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission for approval in the past three years, nine have been canceled and 10 have been significantly delayed. Several have attempted to raise electric rates before the plant is even built in order to fund their construction.
Even French nuclear company Areva’s project to build a new nuclear plant in Finland hit a wall last year after the anticipated price tag leapt by more 50 percent. Areva now refuses to even give an estimate of when the plant will be completed.
This information doesn’t give me much confidence that we can build new nuclear power plants safely from an economic standpoint. I mean geez, the French are nuclear power experts, and even they can’t seem to finish a new nuclear plant on time and on budget.
I’m hopeful that nuclear power will play a role in reducing our energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, but this article is troubling. What are your thoughts?
Best answer:
Answer by bestonnet_00
Given that non-hydro renewable energy has basically failed to do anything to the market share of fossil fuels and there isn’t enough hydro capacity you’d better hope that article is a load of nonsense.
It does however look like the thing that determines whether a nuclear reactor is on time and budget or late and overbudget is the regulatory environment where it is built and how many design changes are needed during construction (one of the main tactics the anti-nuclear movement used during the ’70s was to get the regulations to constantly change thereby requiring those building reactors to keep going back and changing something on the reactor).
The loan guarantees give the advantage of forcing the government to not do something to prevent that power plant being built (since if they set the regulatory environment such that it is possible to operate the plant profitably they don’t need to pay it).
AECL has a record of being on time and on budget when they build reactors outside of Canada which can be seen at http://www.aecl.ca/CANDU-Country/Record.htm
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I think you need to go to nei.org and do some research. While what you say is true, you are only getting part of the picture.
Most of the cost for nuclear plants come from regulation, which came from politics and environmental concerns. Nuclear plants (at least in the US) are built on the concept of safety first. They have multiple redundant systems, inspections, and oversight that most other commercial systems do not have.
As far as the loans go, the government backing only means that the government insures the loan – not that taxpayers are loaning or giving the utility money – it is insurance. The whole idea is to reduce the ultimate cost to the rate payer. The only reason this is necessary is because of all the frivolous lawsuits in the past, delaying production and increasing cost. Only the lawyers came out ahead on that – but the blame went to the nuclear industry.
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I don’t have any big problem with any energy, as long as it can be produced economically including solar, bio, hydro, etc. and if it is cleaner, so much the better. We can find ways to produce it cheaper. Some will be through technological advance. Some may have to be from reducing the political red tape. We should have had more nuclear power already IMO but it isn’t going to replace fossil fuels anytime soon. It takes decades. We squadered many decades already.
A couple thoughts come to mind.
1. France gets 80% of it’s electricity from nuclear power. I haven’t heard of a problem there. What do they know that we here in the US don’t know?
2. Mother Jones is quite environmentally slanted. That’s not bad. It’s good that there are such. However, when you read something there, you need to keep their likely bias in the back of your mind.
3. The largest part of the problem the US has with nuclear waste is self imposed. We do not allow reprocessing of spent fuel rods, which would provide 2-3-4 times more energy from the original uranium, and would also reduce the half-life of the fully spent fuel from hundreds of thousands of years to tens of thousands of years. The purported problem is that reprocessed fuel rods could be used in nuclear weapons. That’s true. However, i submit that reprocessing is being done elsewhere, and if we cannot control what’s done in the US, we have no hope at all of containing the problem elsewhere in the world.
4. As you say, it’s the regulations that are the largest part of the expense. In truth, i’m not about to move downstream of a nuclear power plant. I have enough money that i can afford to live somewhere else, even if i honestly don’t think that there will ever be a problem. Thus it is a bit disingenuous of me to say that nuclear power is fine, and should be used.
All that said, it is clear that we need to get away from using fossil fuel. Solar and wind are nice, but are not able to handle the load, as far as i know. Nuclear is reliable, and long lasting. It is going to be part of the mix that will get the US out of the coal/oil era of power generation.
The U.S. government heavily subsidizes nuclear power in the form of insurance guarantees. Private industry only covers up to 10 Billion in damages Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act. That may sound like a lot of money but if private industry was liable for the full risks of a nuclear disaster, there would be no investment at all.
The point is often claimed that government regulation drives up the cost of nuclear power. Regulation is a goverments tool to address risks. But private enterprise’ method to reduce risk is usually to avoid risky enterprise altogether. If private busines were allowed the full freedom and the full cost of the associated risks, no nuclear plants would ever have been built.
One truth that the gulf oil spill illustrated is that things sometimes do go wrong even when the stakes are so high and the risk so great that we cannot imagine those responsible would ever let something go wrong. Spit happens. I am skeptical that nuclear power will ever be a larger portion of the solution — the risks are too great, to costs to mitigate the risks are too great, the cost to insure against those risks are too great, and no parent would want a plant built within 200 miles. (Chernobyl caused radiation polution in the water as far south as Italy, thousands of miles away.)
Nuclear energy is okay, but the only problem it has is the nuclear waste.
Solar and wind power can just as easily be over regulated, making it prohibitively expensive.
Fifty years ago the advent of nuclear power promised efficient, cheap and safe electricity, unfortunately it hasn’t lived up to those promises.
The world’s first nuclear power station was Calder Hall in Cumbria, England. It began providing electricity in 1956 and continued up until a few years ago when the site was closed down. At the time of commissioning, the people of the UK were promised electricity that was “too cheap to meterâ€. In retrospect that hasn’t quite been the case, and in fact, nuclear energy has proved to be the most expensive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield
Currently seven sites are being decommissioned in the UK with twelve more to follow. The average cost is a little over £10 / $15.5 billion per site. Over the next 25 years the cost to dismantle the redundant nuclear plants will be £9,500 / $14,700 for every household in the country (given that the costs have risen every year since 2002 when the plans were first announced, it’s probable that the final costs will be considerably more).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Kingdom
The UK isn’t alone in facing these enormous bills and as a consequence there are several countries that have abandonned plans for new nuclear power stations on economic grounds alone.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/792209.stm
There’s also the safety factors to be taken into account. With a couple of exceptions, the operation of nuclear sites has a fairly good record, there have however been several ‘near misses’ that could have been catastrophic.
I think an issue of greater concern is the amount of nuclear material which has been lost. There are hundreds of kilos of plutonium missing from sites in the US, Japan, UK, Iran, Germany and other countries. Nobody seems to be able to account for this and there has been growing speculation that at least some of this has made it’s way to North Korea. It’s not unfeasible that extremists could obtain nuclear material with which they could construct their own nuclear bomb.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/consumerawareness/a/missingpluto.htm
http://www.haaretz.com/news/analysis-u-s-to-ask-n-korea-where-s-the-missing-plutonium-1.244381
Additionally there’s the millions of tons of contaminated and radioactive waste that nobody has really figured out what to do with, as a result it’s stockpiled at strategic sites around the world waiting for a solution. Progress is being made in this area and options to bury the waste deep beneath the ground are likely to be implemented soon. The drawbacks being that the amount of stockpiled waste is enormous and therefore burial would be very expensive, and that the half-life of some of the waste is as much as a million years meaning that any solution has to be very, very long term.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_management_of_waste
There’s various other problems as well such as land contamination, food chain disruption, washed-up nuclear particles, illegal dumping, leaching from old burial sites and health issues.
Given the costs involved and the other factors I’m not particularly in favour of building new nuclear power plants. Not yet anyway.
If we can get to grips with nuclear fusion then we have the potential to produce vast amounts of electricity without any of the problems associated with radiation and contamination. There would be no potential terrorism threat, no need for long-term storage, no expensive decommissioning programmes etc.
The main stumbling block at present is one of containment – how to control the huge amount of energy that is released when the atoms fuse together. Once this has been resolved then we should be on track to enter a second age of nuclear power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion
Is there a place for nuclear power in providing the energy we need? Absolutely there is, but I would caution against fission and advocate fusion instead.
Startup costs aside, uranium is also a finite resource, as used in fission reactors. Fusion has yet to be proved feasible.
If we went all-out with the current type of nuclear plant, uranium would show its limits much sooner than people realize. Look up “peak uranium” if you think this is pessimistic.
However, I’d prefer “safe” nuclear power over desecrating enormous tracts of land with wind turbines and solar plants.
There may be no total energy solution, and that’s the point that people aren’t willing to accept yet.
There’s a general attitude that humans “must not be denied” prosperity and comfort, no matter what the cost to nature. Who has the authority to make such a claim? With such a high population, headed toward 9 billion+, the easy life is far from assured with all those people trapped on finite land acreage with a relatively thin atmosphere. People need to get over the idea that the planet can and “must” absorb endless needs. It’s anthropocentric bunk.
The most important information is the effect on total cost of electricity and stability of the grid. The article doesn’t look at that properly so only useful as an introduction to some arguments.
Olkiluoto is new tech. It’s not unreasonable to expect prices to fall if they’re mass produced. It’s currently 3 billion euros for 860 MWe, and nuclear tends to have a high capacity factor i.e. it’s ‘worth’ 2-3 times the same nameplate amount of wind.
The Thanet offshore wind farm cost £780m for 300 MW. Also a new tech and newer farms are expected to be cheaper, but that’s still 2-3 times as expensive as Olkiluoto per average kWh output. You also can’t control the output, need more backup/storage and reactors last decades longer. This makes me think that the peer reviewed estimates for nuclear power (putting it at no more expensive than renewables) are close.
‘No nuclear power station has been built without subsidy’ isn’t a surprise, it doesn’t receive the huge indirect subsidies of fossil fuels and how much wind power has been built without subsidy or policy? Just look what happened to American wind installations on years the tax credit expired…
France is mostly nuclear, has cheaper electricity rates than many other European nations and its reactors save about 360 million tons of CO2 a year compared with the CO2 intensity of the US grid. At £30/ton that’s nearly £11 bn a year in carbon savings or over £180 million per power station… that’s the sort of subsidy that should be considered worthwhile IMO – for all low carbon power sources.
cant be done without subsidy; our lot said no subsidy but industry free to build, but they will be giving a ‘low carbon’ feed in tarriff which will act as a subsidy
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/05a43498-daeb-11df-a5bb-00144feabdc0.html#axzz19X6LXeFD
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/718de1ea-0958-11e0-ada6-00144feabdc0.html#axzz19X82JhrK
costs of decommissioning are supposed to be built in so the tax payer doesnt end up paying as for the current plant;
http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/pn10_124/pn10_124.aspx
First, MotherJones is not a neutral source of information. Second, the reason that the US hasn’t had another nuclear power plant since the late 1970’s was because of Three Mile Island and what happened there. Finally, the biggest reason for the increase in cost is because of lawsuits against power plants in general and nuclear plants specifically. Without the Government stopping the lawsuits and backing production of nuclear power it will not happen.
Nuclear power is the best choice for making electricity.
This is a dichotomy of Energy and our quest to produce it carbon free and safely. The dream of Nuclear Energy was founded in the mid forties. It was thought the electricity would be “too cheap to meterâ€. The reality is the high cost of construction coupled with the high cost of maintenance has made this unrealistic. To further complicate matters the fear of Nuclear Energy is so strong that here has been a strong public resistance augmented by environmental activists.
Many will point to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl as proof as to why we should resist these plants from ever being considered.
Chernobyl was a legitimate disaster of epic proportions. Chernobyl does and should stand as fair warning that without proper design and vigilant maintenance these plants could reap disaster in an instant and for years to come.
Three Mile Island was an almost disaster and should not be mentioned in the same breath. No radiation of any significant amount was released. No deaths have been reported to this day that can be attributed to the almost meltdown.
With our sparsely built plants here in the US we produce one fifth of our energy from Nuclear. This is rather amazing considering that last plants were built were started in the 1970’s. The knee jerk reaction to cancel the 120 plants that were in the pipeline before Three Mile Island was devastating to the Nuclear Industry in The United States.
One must wonder how much we could have learned about the construction and completion of these facilities. How many of our best and brightest minds could have engineered and improved processes to the safe construction and operation of Nuclear Power.
How many megatons of carbon would not be in the atmosphere? How many coal plants would be offline today?
Although we cannot go back we can move forward.
If we are looking to produce large scale low carbon emission energy what other real options besides Nuclear Power are out there? The renewable sector of clean energy can help to relieve grid strain. But with current technology it will not replace watts currently needed.
I think there is a strong argument that Nuclear Power needs to be a part of our long term plans. It is a proven technology that has been employed worldwide. Its cost has never been cheap. However if we agree as resources become more scarce and or carbon taxing becomes a reality what else is really out there that will produce the watts that we use?
linlyons nailed it. we have 11 reactors in northern illinois. this means less coal burning. i,d live next to a nuc plant any day. not so for coal plants. we will see many nuc plants built in the coming years. they are just too energy efficient to not be allowed to be built.
uh i don’t really know