San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant Dismantling Will Cost $4.4 Billion, Take 20 Years

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.

Not a bad deal

[Mr D from 63]

For 2 units, plus a third already shut down one on the site, this is not too bad a cost. Considering the overall lifetime cost of the plant, including D&D, and even though it shut down early, on a cost per kwh basis, it is a good deal for emission free generation.

Unfortunately, many will look at the cost and not have a good perspective / basis for comparison.

Baby with bathwater

[ssufficool]

Oh well... maybe they can reuse the land for those totally environmentally friendly solar panels. Wait, what do we do with those when they reach end of life? http://www.science20.com/scien... [science20.com]

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Cost to dismantle vs fix

[bill_mcgonigle]

The first question that comes to my mind is how much would it cost to just fix the damn pipes?

Make sure you're not assuming that the $4.4B that somebody is going to get is a bug, not a feature. Some people will get extremely rich from this expenditure and that's a powerful motivator.

Re:Cost to dismantle vs fix

[Mr D from 63]

The first question that comes to my mind is how much would it cost to just fix the damn pipes?

They would have to replace the entire steam generator. That's been done at a lot of plants, in fact the ones at San O were replaced but defective. A few hundred million. But San O is nearing end of life, shale gas is depressing market prices, and politically California is a hostile environment which has its own costs.

Some of the lost opportunity cost will be borne by the manufacturer of the flawed Steam Generators. But that plant has served well for decades even with an early shutdown.

Re:CLEAN, SAFE,

[Mr D from 63]

"too cheap to meter" certainly was an over enthusiastic optimism with nuclear as it was first being deployed. We all know that, but it doesn't make it a bad deal. I never understood the simpleton argument that this was somehow a failure. I guess its just easy to repeat without making an actual point.

Re:CLEAN, SAFE,

[ericloewe]

It's a sort of logical fallacy.

They believe that because not all objectives were met, the whole thing was a complete failure.

NASA: Nuclear power prevented 1.8 million deaths

[Anonymous Coward]

some fucking idiotic nerd will defend the abomination that is nuclear power as great for the environment or some shit.

Yeah, like the environmental science nerds at NASA "... researchers estimate nuclear power has prevented more than 1.8 million deaths due to air pollution between 1971 and 2009. Given our fears, the findings are counterintuitive. But they're persuasive ..."
http://motherboard.vice.com/bl... [vice.com]

BTW, you do realize you are every bit the science denier as climate change deniers. Nuclear deniers are no different. They merely form their opinion based on left wing **politics** rather than right wing politics. Neither the climate deniers nor the nuclear deniers are based in science.

Re:Baby with bathwater

[AmiMoJo]

A quote from the article you linked to:

"We live in a culture where we think every janitor should get a $50 an hour benefit package and university students get sex change operations included in their health care plans, whose $50,000 costs are then paid for by federal student loans and federal taxpayer grants and, soon, federal health care underwriting."

PROTIP: Right-wing rant sites typically don't provide good scientific reporting. Do you imagine they would say "solar PV is wonderful, despite those subsidies and Chinese imports we hate so much"?

Re:Nuclear power is in decline

[mdsolar]

The falling cost of renewable energy seems to be an impediment for nuclear having a future.

Re:Not a bad deal

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't even write English properly yet you're commenting on the intelligence of engineers? Fuck off.

The problems are political, not scientific or engineering related. The costs are driven up by a climate of constantly changing government regulation which is incredibly strict compared to coal. Your coal plants put more radioactive waste into the atmosphere every day than a nuclear plant does over its entire lifetime. You're the short-sighted one, fucking over the world you've borrowed from your children.

Re:CLEAN, SAFE,

[serviscope_minor]

It's actually so expensive that the UK couldn't find anyone to build new plants, and the only people who were eventually willing demanded special rates well above the normal unit cost of electricity to be guaranteed for the lifetime of the plant. That's on top of all the other subsidies already on offer.

Gas is cheap let's build that. There'll never be aaaaaaaany problem getting gas from the Russians. No sireee. Never mind that local fracking won't supply enough gas.

Nuclear is only the most expensive option when you stubbornly ignore the externalities.

The options are:
1. Renewables (not enough to supply the entire country even using rather optimistic estimates).
2. Coal which is cheap and astonishingly filthy.
3. Gas from Russia.
4. Nuclear.

The thing is the prices are set by the free market. The free market ignores externalities such as pollution and is purely reactive so it never makes a strategically wise choice. Gas is the cheapest option right now, but is not the wisest choice.

This is why we have governments. Left to itself, the free market does not make the best decisions.

Re:Baby with bathwater

[brambus]

Wow, this is grasping if I've ever seen some.

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.

This would be true of almost any heat engine-based power plant, regardless of the source of the heating, save for a few very high-temperature systems which can live with air cooling. Also, a 30% reduction in production from an 70-80% resource implies an overall shortfall of ~20% - we know how to bridge those temporary loss gaps with hydro, fossil and other dispatchable short-term backup technology. Wind, meanwhile, experiences periodic 1-2 week long shortfalls of 90% or more, whereas solar famously loses 100% of its output every day and varies by as much as 70-80% in output over the course of the year. Good luck smoothing those curves out.

In short, there are engineering solutions to this problem that are known and understood today.

Also, they've been caught dumping nuclear waste in Russia.

So I looked into this and I can't find any authoritative sources for the claims that this was actual spent fuel instead of just pure uranium. I read there's going to be an investigation. Can you find the results of it? All I can find is Greenpeace bragging about "uncovering" it [greenpeace.org], but they never said it's spent nuclear fuel. In fact, they explicitly said it's UF6 (uranium hexafluoride), which is a common enrichment feedstock. After enrichment 90% of that is going to be depleted uranium tailings, which cannot be used in thermal reactors (which is why it doesn't make any sense to ship it back to France), but it's still usable as fuel for fast neutron reactors (which is why Russia might want to hold on to it - free fuel, w00t!). It's NOT spent nuclear fuel and certainly not fission products.