San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant Dismantling Will Cost $4.4 Billion, Take 20 Years 343
mdsolar writes with news about the closing of the San Onofre nuclear plant. Dismantling the San Onofre nuclear power plant in Southern California will take two decades and cost $4.4 billion. Southern California Edison on Friday released a road map that calls for decommissioning the twin-reactor plant and restoring the property over two decades, beginning in 2016. U-T San Diego says it could be the most expensive decommissioning in the 70-year history of the nuclear power industry. But Edison CEO Ted Craver says there's already enough money to pay for it. Edison shut down the plant in 2012 after extensive damage was found to tubes carrying radioactive water. It was closed for good last year.
Re:of course theres plenty of fucking money (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Baby with bathwater (Score:4, Informative)
4th gen reactor consumes old waste ... (Score:4, Informative)
They're also stuck storing the fuel on site until the federal government comes up with a spent fuel storage solution.
Or until there is a 4th gen reactor available to consume the old waste as its fuel. The waste of a 4th gen is only dangerous for a few centuries rather than tens of thousands of years. In other words 4th gen converts a 10,000 year problem into a 300 year problem, while generating power from "fuel" that has already been mined, processed, and paid for.
Fossil fuels dominate for decades more ... (Score:2, Informative)
The Danes got it right. Wind is free.
Wind and solar can't scale to the levels needed yet. Two or three more decades of R&D and engineering are needed. No matter how much you wish otherwise this will not change. Even Denmark with its enthusiasm and pretty good wind conditions expects another 10 years to go from 30% wind to 50% wind, and expect to be using of North Sea fossil fuels for another 40 years.
Your options for electricity in the near term will largely be nuclear or fossil fuels. The goods and services you consume will largely be produced using electricity from fossil fuels.
Don't be a science and economics denier. Solar and wind are not magic, science and engineering take time.
Nuclear power is in decline (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Baby with bathwater (Score:5, Informative)
France's overall price of electricity with tax is lower than Denmark's untaxed price, meanwhile emitting >30% less CO2 per capita [worldbank.org] with a very similar GDP per capita [wikipedia.org] (to within 5%). If we limit our consideration to electricity, France has ~75% lower emissions [co2benchmark.com] per MWh generated than Denmark; and over 80% lower than Germany, the renewable powerhouse of the continent. In fact, they have so much zero-CO2 electricity that they can afford to offset the CO2 emissions [templar.co.uk] from many of their neighbors via transmission. Also keep in mind that France has had this CO2 per kWh value for the better part of two decades because its power mix has always been ~70-80% nuclear and ~15% hydro (the rest being filled in with things like gas, hence why this CO2/kWh number isn't a flat zero).
The OECD average is so high mostly because of heavy polluters like the US [worldbank.org], being the about 1/4 of the population of the entire OECD [wolframalpha.com] (not just the high-income bracket), but twice the per capita CO2 emissions of, say, Germany.
To preemptively dispense with the "we can't build it fast enough" criticism of nuclear, I again present the example of ... France. They initially started construction in 1974 [wikipedia.org] and finished installing >50 reactors, hitting over 70% of generation capacity, within 15 years. So don't believe the renewable industry talking points of "it can't be done on time". It has been done before and it can be done again. If it had the political and popular will, Denmark could hit its CO2-reduction targets for electricity for 2050 some 20 years earlier.
Re:CLEAN, SAFE, (Score:4, Informative)
Funnily enough it is a French-Chinese partnership that is building our new reactors. No British company will touch them. We are handing our basic infrastructure over to companies that have little interest in what is best for the UK and no real stake in what happens to us because they have a guaranteed profit for the lifetime of the plant.
Subsidy isn't always bad in itself, if it leads us somewhere worth going. Nuclear is on the way out though, we should be looking elsewhere.
Re:Baby with bathwater (Score:5, Informative)
I do think that France's build-out of nuclear plants was impressive but your worship of them should be tempered by a couple facts.
First is that as many as 17 of their 58 plants have been knocked offline or scaled back in a single heatwave because of a shortage of water for cooling thereby needing to import from their neighbors to keep the lights on and costing up to $1300 per megawatt hour.
The normal peak power prices are usually below $100 per MW-hr.
A warming climate will lead to this happening more frequently.
Also, they've been caught dumping nuclear waste in Russia. The lie was that it was sent to be separated and re-enriched to be returned but the truth is that 90% never comes back.
Right now, it seems that no one who has a significant build-up of nuclear waste is doing a proper job of managing it. Who knows how much has been dumped in backwater nations or into the oceans. And that's with nuclear providing 12% of global electricity.
What will the waste problem look like if we try to get to 50% in a hurry? Those thorium trolls may be right but it's not likely we'll know for sure before 2030.
Nobody accounted for regulatory costs (Score:5, Informative)
San Onofre is being shut down due to intentionally obstructive Federal [ap.org] and California regulation. After the leaks were found in the new equipment, SCE was wrangling with the Japanese supplier (Mitsubishi) of the bad tubes and trying to put together the plan to replace them and bring the plant online, but CA anti-nuke activists, incluing the luddites at FOE [scpr.org] lobbied Democrat Senator Boxer [kcet.org] and the Obama administration to make it unworkable. SCE (who was paying large amounts of money every month for all their basic costs including the employees) could never get an answer from the federal regulators on WHEN their applications to re-start the plant would even be processed if they spent the money to replace the pipes (this was NOT normal). When you are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to operate a plant that is producing nothing, and government regulators keep delaying giving you a date when you will even be able to dream of using it IF you make it over the increasing number of hurdles politically-motivated people keep throwing up, at some point you "pull the plug" and cut your losses.
Nearly all the inflation in the costs of nuclear power has come from regulations and lawsuits. Had it not been for the Ralph Nader style of crusading legal actions designed to kill things (sue anybody making any technology they cannot prove is perfect... and let's not notice that nobody else, like lawyers, are being held to that standard) we would indeed have very cheap and plantiful electricity thanks, in large part, to nuclear power (which has been stuck with ancient tech for many decades because the regulatory/legal environment makes newer safer more-efficient designs uneconomical TO GET CERTIFIED)
Re:Why not escrow the funds to decommission? (Score:4, Informative)
... The funds to decommission the site are collected during its lifetime as a tax and held in escrow. The operator has to by bonds to ensure cleanup in the event of an accident or shortful due to early shutdown. The point here is that even though they shutdown after only half it's expected lifetime, they've collected enough funds already to handle it even without the bonds to back it up.
Inflation makes it impossible from a practical perspective to pay up front. 4.4 billion 30 years ago would never have happened, and would turn into ridiculously large amounts of money today, and as such, ridiculous over kill.
Re:Fusion is your FUTURE corporate boondoggle (Score:2, Informative)
For uranium, it is about 0.7%.
Uranium is also 100% via breeder reactors.