Next-Gen Nuclear Power Plant Breaks Ground In China 426
An anonymous reader writes "The construction of first next-generation Westinghouse nuclear power reactor breaks ground in Sanmen, China. The reactor, expected to generate 12.7 Megawatts by 2013, costs 40 billion Yuan (~US$6 billion; that's a lot of iPods.) According to Westinghouse, 'The AP1000 is the safest and most economical nuclear power plant available in the worldwide commercial marketplace, and is the only Generation III+ reactor to receive Design Certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.' However, Chinese netizens suspect China is being used as a white rat to test unproven nuclear technologies (comments in Chinese)." Update: 04/20 07:28 GMT by T : As several readers have pointed out, this plant will generate much more than 12.7 Megawatts -- more like 1100 MWe.
Re:12 megawatts? (Score:1, Informative)
I don't know where the submitter came up with his number.
Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:3, Informative)
Either way, people may want to consider getting on the nexr plane out of China...
Hope they've got all their paperwork in order; from what I understand, simply leaving can prove problematic for those folks.
Re:Units? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Power Output (Score:3, Informative)
Either way, people may want to consider getting on the nexr plane out of China...
In all seriousness, 12.7 MW seems rather small for a $6 billion price tag.
The AP1000 produces 1150 MWe (megawatts electric). The 12.7 MW figure is either wrong or has to do with the start-up phase.
Re:Units? (Score:2, Informative)
The astounding thing to me is just how expensive this is... 6 billion for 1100MW is almost $6/nameplate watt.
$6 billion will buy a lot of Honda generators..
Re:Units? (Score:5, Informative)
solar panels on my own roof ... For greener energy, I think the premium is worth it.
Except for all the lead, mercury and cadmium needed to produce PV cells.
Re:Does Steve Jobs know... (Score:3, Informative)
That's not actually as silly as it sounds, though I believe the Big Mac is more traditional. [wikipedia.org]
Really you need to price it in iPods-bought-in-China. This can then be converted back to whichever local currency used, to give some idea of the cost taking into account purchasing power parity (i.e. $1 in China still goes further than $1 in the US and $1 in the UK can barely buy a packet of crisps these days).
Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:5, Informative)
I doubt investors viewed a nuclear plant that's completely shut down for the better part of 6 years for cleanup as a sound investment.
You're correct. Nuke plants must be designed like modern chemical plants, which are more complex than nuke plants, handle boatloads of hazardous chemicals and have high availability.
Re:Ah cool (Score:3, Informative)
1) "pseudo"
2) you are -> you're
3) owned by it -> its (it is -> it's)
4) The quote you attribute to Thomas Jefferson was actually made by Gerald Ford [answerbag.com]. Nobody imagined "a government big enough to give you everything you want" in Jefferson's day.
Re:12.7 Megawatts? (Score:5, Informative)
It also states that this is a Pressurized Water Reactor, so it's probably more about generating by-products (esp. tritium) than it is about generating energy.
What are you talking about? If the control rods are Li then you get T. But if you want more interesting byproducts you leave the water out and go for a fast neutron spectrum *and* you get more tritium.
Its pretty clear that this is about generating electricity.
Wind power costs the same, with no nasty cleanup (Score:4, Informative)
Now let's look at a new wind farm. A 50 MW wind farm would cost around $96 million [google.com] (at $1923/kW [doe.gov]), which yields an annual capital repayment of $7.5 million [google.com] (assuming a lifetime of 25 years). If the plant runs at a 35% capacity factor [awea.org], it will produce 153 million kWh per year [google.com]. So the total cost will be $0.049/kWh [google.com].
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant that might go over budget, might leak radiation at some point during its life, whose waste will need to be carefully controlled and permanently stored somewhere that hasn't yet been identified; or a wind farm whose costs are much more certain and which comes without all those ancillary risks?
Yes, any individual wind farm will not provide a firm supply of power. But if a lot of wind farms are used, and they are combined with solar, geothermal and other renewable resources, they will provide a fairly stable power supply. There is also a lot of potential for reshaping electricity loads to match the supply of power (e.g., recharge electric vehicles when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining). And finally, if you must have a firm supply of power, you can convert a wind farm into a completely firm supply (at 35% of its nameplate rating) by spending about 10% extra and building rarely-used natural gas peaker plants ($634/kW [doe.gov] * 35% = $222kW).
Re:And if they sold the heat as well as electricit (Score:4, Informative)
If you don't get rid of the heat then you don't have such a big temperature difference so you can get a lot of energy in the first place. While you can get a bit from power plants as industrial heat you really need a really reliable heat sink such as evaporative cooling (those big towers) or sea/lake water.
The second point has been shown in practice by the French - reprocessing of highly radioactive material is very difficult and very expensive since for one thing everything has to be done remotely. Lead lined gloves aren't enough - the stuff might as well be on Mars because it has to be handled so it doesn't get near anybody. That was really the thing that killed Superphoenix (where the waste was far more radioactive again and even more difficult to handle) and the idea of a commercially viable fast breeder reactor. What that has meant is that even though it takes a lot to make the fuel in the first place it is far easier to do that than reprocess. Accelerated Thorium is a different story since it appears that far less handling of fuel materials is required and it can apparently use up discarded weapons materials and uranium fuel rods.
IMHO the answer is less money on PR and more on R&D. Having nuclear power pushed by brainwashed zombies into conspiracy theories that think it was all perfect in 1970 is counterproductive.
Re:Wind power costs the same, with no nasty cleanu (Score:5, Informative)
You've started with wrong numbers. The 40 billion Yuan cost is not for one reactor; it is for two of the same kind.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-04/19/content_11217433.htm
So in fact, under your assumptions, the levelized cost of these reactors is 1/2 the cost of wind.
Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:3, Informative)
The Price-Anderson Act was re-authorised to underwrite the Nuclear industry with $600 Billion of Taxpayer money (closer to a trillion if you factor the huge amount of land you are going to lose in the event of an actual accident). However this is for government loss only, insurance companies won't insure private property holders against Nuclear accidents.
US vs International Companies (Score:1, Informative)
You say that like its a really bad thing.
In reality, yes, Westinghouse is a child company of Toshiba. But in the US, most of the employees are US citizens, many parts are made in the US, and if an AP1000 was built in the US then US labor would build it. Westinghouse, while being owned by Toshiba, doesn't really have a lot to do with Toshiba. It's just a company we bought because we wanted the lucrative Nuclear business.
disclaimer- I'm an American citizen working for Toshiba in the US
Re:The numbers are all wrong.. (Score:4, Informative)
I don't have time to search for the exact reference or the numbers, but there was a European study of the total life cycle environmental costs, including CO2 and other pollutants, of various energy technologies. In terms of CO2, hydro was lowest. Nuclear, solar, and wind were roughly the same. (I believe nuclear was computed two ways, once with gaseous diffusion--still used, but being phased out--for enrichment and once with gas centrifuge. Gas centrifuge produced lower CO2 emissions, but neither figure was astoundingly high.) I believe nuclear (and wind and solar) come in at around 6% of coal. The concrete and steel use in a nuclear plant was taken into account in the study, as were emissions from mining. There is also a Swedish environmental report with similar conclusions.
As for what percentage CO2 reduction in US power plant emissions could be expected, that would depend on how much of the new capacity replaced gas, and how much replaced coal. Any (expensive) gas used for base load would be the first candidate for replacement. That would reduce the impact on CO2 because baseload gas fired plants, expecially the combined cycle plants most useful for base load generation produce less (half?) the CO2 per unit of electricity generated of coal plants, though still far more than nuclear plants. Once you cut into coal, which produces about 50% of US electric power, you see some serious CO2 savings.
Two other comments:
The statement was that there would be a 30% reduction in emissions from POWER plants. I think electric power plants only account for about half on US CO2 emissions, so you would only get a 15% or so reduction in overall CO2 emissions.
From your question, I suspect you are being misled by a discredited Dutch study which claims ridiculously high CO2 emissions for both nuclear plant construction and uranium mining.
Re:And if they sold the heat as well as electricit (Score:2, Informative)
What? Radiation isn't magical. Even though the biological implications of radiation exposure are not fully understood, radiation is easily measured and tracked.
Anyone working with or near radiation sources wears dosimetry, and has their lifetime exposure tracked. Currently a worker at a nuclear plant receives a dose that is lower than the level at which there is a statistically-significant difference. Interestingly, airline crews get more radiation exposure (higher altitude -> less atmosphere absorbing cosmic rays), typically around 500 mrem/year, that a typical nuclear worker (~170 mrem/year).
And all that is for the WORKERS. Radiation intensity falls off with the square of the distance. So for average people living within a mile of a reactor, the radiation from the plant is totally overwhelmed by the natural background signal.
In other words, we have a good handle on the correlation between nuclear plants and health effects in the population: there is absolutely no detectable correlation.
Re:Units? (Score:4, Informative)
If a nuclear weapon of Tsar bomba's size achieved that it would be a hell of a lot stronger than 50 megaton. The energy in a fusion based weapon comes from the very slight difference in mass between the reactants ( usually deuterium and lithium ) and the products ( usually helium isotopes and neutrons). If you somehow achived 97% energy to mass conversion you would up the energy released by a factor of 1000 or so and a weapon of Tsar bomba's size would then produce a staggering fifty gigatonnes, exceeding the collected potential energy of the world's collected nuclear arsenal. I say most likely you confused the numbers with the fact that Tsar bomba derived an unusually large proportion of its energy from fusion whereas most weapons get a great share of it from uranium fission.
This also illustrates the amount of energy that can be stored as antimatter. about 10kg of antimatter annihilated with the same amount of matter would produce a blast that exceeds the world's collected nuclear arsenals.
Re:And if they sold the heat as well as electricit (Score:5, Informative)
I did some reading on wikipedia about the various nuclear reactors recently. So being a lay-person, there's some existing common wisdom.
The placement of the nuclear reactor to the sea is a safety issue. You NEED guaranteed large cool water in the condenser stage or reactor goes boom. Wiki says thermal heat is regularly used as hot-water heaters - similar to geothermal heating in iceland. Whether anybody actually uses this is anybody's guess.. Obviously you'd need to pipe the hot water to end locations, so existing suburbia obviously isn't anywhere near able to handle this.
As for breeder reactors:
A) All fission reaction is of a breeding nature. The ratio of bred material is what the different processes produce. The bred ratio varies from 0.5 to 1.2. Where 1.01 is the accepted min ratio to be called a breeder reactor (producing more fissile fuel than originally introduced).
B) Any of the high breeder reactors utilize some aspect of fast-fission. Canada, India and Russia (and France?). Fast fission requires the ABSENCE of water, as water (either light or heavy(deutreonic)) captures energetic neutrons. Instead reaction-neutral coolants are used such as sodium, molten lead, etc. The problem here is related to safety. It is harder to produce intrinsic stability into non-water-based fission. Namely, in boiler-based reactors, when a greater ratio of steam is produced, the reaction naturally slows down, thus naturally regulating the system if electronic control mechanisms don't catch and compensate the control rods in time. With non steam based systems, you use complex chemical fission-poisons (in high-pressure based reactors as found in subs) or are fully reliant on control-rod actuators. (possible single point of failure). (note: I could be wrong about liquid metal based systems not having alternate backup mechanisms such as fission-poisons)
C) Chernobyl was a fast-fission reactor. And it's melt-down was related to the inability to shutdown quickly enough.. (specifically pressure-valve failures and insufficient monitoring which would have initiated the shutdown sooner) The environmental DAMAGE, however was due exclusively to the fact that it was a warhead manufacturing site, and the construction apparatus is too large to enclose with a hardened concrete barrier.
D) 70% of Thorium is in India. Thus, even though Thorium is (likely) a less efficient starting process for a breeder reactor, it's a better long-term strategy for India so as to provide energy independence. This isn't true of most countries.
E) Breeder reactors are the basis of nuclear warheads, thus it's an extremely hot-button issue. The US and Russia specifically discontinue their breeder reactors to comply with arms control. Russia now strip-mines their old warhead supply to fuel existing reactors both domestically and abroad. I suspect that China is not indifferent to this topic as well. The french reprocessing plant is actively/heavily monitored by the UN (IAEA).
F) The French rebreeding process is apparently NOT cost effective by any measure. The reason they do it is similar to the Indian Thorium objective - international energy independence.. China is not likely to be short-supplied of uranium mineral deposits - but I'm not aware of their status. I know Canda has massive Uranium supplies.
Currently boiler and pressure based reactors are 'cheap' to build and are cheap to operate (so long as raw Uranium ore is cheap). They both require 'pre-processing' of the ore to increase the concentration of U-235 to a sufficient level. So it's slightly more expensive in the long run as both ore prices will increase over time, and the added cost of pre-processing.
heavy-water and liquid-metal and inert-gas based reactors facilitate 'raw' Uranium, (e.g. U-238 and possibly thorium), and thus make the operating costs MUCH cheaper, but they don't have the longevity of trivial passive boiler-based plants, and thus the high capital costs are for shorter terms - and thus the average cost is higher.
Re:And if they sold the heat as well as electricit (Score:5, Informative)
Not true. India has constructed thermal breeder reactors that use thorium-uranium fuel and heavy water moderator / coolant.
Nope. You just need to ensure you don't moderate the neutron spectrum. Supercritical water coolant has a high enough heat capacity and low enough neutron absorption cross section to make this feasible. Google for the Fast SCWR if you doubt me.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Chernobyl was a thermal spectrum reactor that was heavily moderated with graphite and cooled by water. Wikipedia has a good article about the causes of the chernobyl disaster. In summary it was caused by a heavily over moderated design ( the opposite of a fast reactor ) in combination with flawed control rod design and the lack of a containment building.
U-233 in thorium fuel has a much better capture to fission ratio than U-235 and Pu-239 which means you don't need a fast reactor to set up a breeding cycle. The waste products are also less long lived since the thorium cycle only produces trace actinides.
Every single plutonium based nuclear weapons program in existence has used low-burnup thermal reactors and not fast reactors. Furthermore most designs of fast reactors are not practical to be run on a frequent refueling cycle, making them substantially less suitable to produce weapons grade plutonium than more traditional methods. The reprocessing methods needed to recover the minor actinides are also unsuitable for separating pure plutonium, making the entire fuel cycle significantly less prone to proliferation than the thermal + PUREX cycle.
Russia has commercial breeder reactors in operation and actively develops fast breeder technology, including their BREST project based on lead coolant and dry reprocessing.
Only if you compare it to coal or traditional nuclear. Compared to wind and other low-co2 energy sources it works out cheaper. In addition the French programs currently aim for research. Commercial reactors would likely use different designs to optimize economics rather than flexibility of the experiments that can be run. In addition they use the PUREX process for recycling the waste as opposed to newer dry-reprocessing methods. Because dry reprocessing uses salt rather than water ( a moderator ) criticality problems are heavily reduced allowing the plant to be smaller and cheaper. Furthermore while liquid sodium reactors are indeed more expensive than pressurized water reactors, it is fully possible to use other coolants such as Lead or Supercritical water. These would with high probability lead to a much cheaper plant ( by 30% or so ) since the lack of a phase change in the coolant allows the plant to be simpler and smaller. In addition the higher temperature increases the efficiency to about 45% as opposed to 33% for more traditional designs.
Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:3, Informative)
And killed the total of, what, 60 people? The worst accident in the history of nuclear power was about equivalent to a bad truck accident. That is the bogeyman we're all supposed to be terrified of?
And that exclusion zone is busily turning into a forest with flourishing widllife.
And it caused about as much death and destruction. On the other hand, mining coal kills more people every year.
Re:Fun with acronyms. (Score:3, Informative)
That's a bit of a misleading statistic. Although 59 people died directly from overexposure to radiation and thyroid cancer, many more, infact an estimated 4000 more will or have died as a result of the accident.
Source: http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Focus/Chernobyl/pdfs/pr.pdf [iaea.org]