Power Company Kills Nuclear Plant, Plans $6 Billion In Solar, Battery Investment (arstechnica.com) 390
Socguy writes: After being unable to complete the Levy County Nuclear Plant a few years ago, Duke energy abandoned it, leaving rate payers on the hook. Duke is now in the process of settling legal action as a result. As part of the settlement Duke will construct or acquire 700MW of solar capacity over four years in the western Florida area, construct 50MW of battery storage, undertake grid modernizations and install 530 electric car charging stations. "The Levy nuclear plant was proposed in 2008 and ran into hurdles early on," reports Ars Technica. "With cheap natural gas in 2013, Duke Energy Florida became nervous that it might not recuperate costs spent on the nuclear plant, especially with regulatory delays. The company cancelled its engineering and construction agreements in 2013 but said that it was holding open the possibility of returning to Levy someday. Over nine years, about $800 million had been spent on preparatory work for the plant. With Tuesday's announcement, those costs are sunk costs now. But overall, the changes will save residential customers future nuclear-related rate increases. Those customers will see a cost reduction of $2.50 per megawatt-hour (MWh) 'through the removal of unrecovered Levy Nuclear Project costs,' the utility said. The 700MW of solar won't exactly cover the nameplate capacity of the Levy plant, which was supposed to deliver 2.2 gigawatts to the region. But the Tampa Bay Times wrote that Duke 'is effectively giving up its long-held belief that nuclear power is a key component to its Florida future and, instead, making a dramatic shift toward more solar power.'"
Seems a good site (Score:2)
Re:Seems a good site (Score:4)
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Yea!!!
Humanity is incapable of designing for wind and we should immediately abandon any attempt.
Re:Seems a good site (Score:5, Insightful)
I like how you try to make it sound saner to have stuck with the original plan to build another nuclear power plant in the middle of hurricane territory instead.
Re:Seems a good site (Score:5, Interesting)
Until a hurricane rolls over it and sends the solar panels out to sea in many small chunks, maybe....
The irony that this is the reason that Duke cites Levy being cancelled. Westinghouse couldn't make an AP1000 that can pass NRC hurricane regulations, here is a transcript of the radio program. [nukefree.org]
Not really (Score:3, Insightful)
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Fukishama was a result of 2 things; a management that cut corners by doing the least possible, AND a major slowdown in building new reactors that are much safer.
The excuses keep coming. Where there are humans involved there will be short cuts. Where there are short cuts there will be accidents. Your travelling wave reactor may be perfectly safe in theory, however when someone cuts out the safety
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Sorry. But bullshit.
There ARE ways to design reactors that are safe by default. Power cuts out, the reactor shuts down and dumps fuel into a dump tank. And it's pretty much IMPOSSIBLE to cut out the safety feature.
Also, since the reactor design isn't being cooled by high pressure boiling water, no steam explosions.
Chernobyl was the result of unauthorized modifications to the an aged reactor's operations that weren't communicated to the next shift.
TMI is an obsolete reactor that had several flaws in the c
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If we learned so much about handling stuff that needs constant cooling, why did that chemical factory explode in Houston?
I constantly read two things from nuclear proponents:
1) The nuclear industry is vastly ahead of other industries in safety thinking
2) The ridiculous cost of nuclear is due to extreme overregulation and safety requirements
Now, personally the nuclear power accidents don't bother me so much. If you add up the cost of having a Fukushima once a decade and spread it out over the total electrici
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"Of course, we'd do it properly."
Given that humans rarely do anything perfectly, and accidents happen whether through negligence or not, nuclear will always be riskier and more dangerous than other forms of power generation.
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Fukishama was a result of 2 things; a management that cut corners by doing the least possible, AND a major slowdown in building new reactors that are much safer.
There were many factors involved in the Fukushima problem. The first was location.
Its kind of funny though, Are you saying that the Designers of Fukushima knew their reactor design was unsafe? You don't have to answer, because that's a trap.
We can postulate all day about how this won't ever happen again because modern reactors are safe. But people tend to remember that they were told how safe those old reactors were. So when we tell them how safe the new ones are, you'll have to forgive them if they are
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Actually the quake wasn't a factor. AT ALL.
The reactors went into shutdown properly after the quake. As they were supposed to.
And, had the sea wall been built to the height that the engineers had recommended, there would have been NO damage to Fukushima whatsoever.
Billions wasted, and an area contaminated. All because some jackass couldn't be bothered to pay for a couple thousand bucks in concrete and rebar.
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Right. Because a sea wall totally costs a couple thousand bucks.
Citation needed on the "engineers wanted a higher seawall" claim, too. And more than just one or two random people - show that there was any sort of serious belief among the engineering team responsible for the plant that the seawall wasn't high enough.
Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Fukushima... [lmgtfy.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)
Not exactly; the Guardian is messing up the sourcing a bit. First we have "a warning in 2008 by its own engineers". When you follow the link, it's simply "an internal report" - the source cited to Kyodo. Kyodo [kyodonews.net] however says the report wasn't from Tepco - it was from a Tepco subsidiary (and thus Tepco's engineers weren't involved in drafting it - they would have, however, been involved in evaluating it).
It's also worth noting that the report talked about stopping waves 10,2m high coming in from the south side by reinforcing the south side sea wall. What actually happened was waves 14-15 meters high came in from the east side. So even if they had followed up on the report's suggestion, it would have done nothing to prevent the disaster.
Lastly: your notion that building a sea wall to stop 15 meter waves costs "a couple thousand bucks" is remains absurd.
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
"Run away effect".
*sigh*
You've been watching too much Jane Fonda again.
What you're talking about is actually "failure of cooling systems".
This is a problem only for boiling water reactors. This is why BWRs are such huge, hyper-redundant, Rube-Goldbergian facilities. Because the actual reactors themselves are relatively small. The bulk of the physical plant is to accommodate the cooling systems.
If it were REALLY as much of a problem as you seem to think, we'd have it more often. But we have exactly 4 single-reactor failures of of hundreds and hundreds of reactor facilities.
Chernobyl was the Russians fucking around with an old, badly maintained reactor.
TMI was a design flaw in the cooling system.
Windscale was a military reactor that wasn't really designed for power production and operators who were mistaken about what was actually going on in the core.
Fukushima was engineering cost cutting compromising safety systems.
We KNOW "don't fuck with the reactor".
TMI simply can't happen anymore.
Windscale simply can't happen anymore.
Fukushima won't ever happen again. Because the next executive who tries to save a couple thousand in concrete and rebar for something like this would be reported and immediately ousted (then probably lynched).
Re:Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
Fukushima won't ever happen again.
When the next Fukushima happens because reactors are practically all sited where they can be flooded, and because there's plenty of the same kind of reactor out there, will you finally STFU about nuclear power?
Re:Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
It is because of ppl like you that we burn so much coal.
Trying to shame me with a false dichotomy isn't going to make your bullshit any more accurate.
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Just like tsunamis, apparently.
And actually, we've seen example after example after example of hurricanes breaching defenses that they weren't expected to be able to breach.
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Or you could do what's been done for decades.
Design the facility appropriately for the expected natural disaster du jour.
Implement a system to shut the reactor down before the storm comes ashore.
Then simply shield the fuel and go home.
Thus, by the time it hits, even if it damages the facility SEVERLY, it won't be any more dangerous hitting any other storm-hardened structure.
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Florida seems like a good site for a solar plant with battery storage. This might actually make sense.
Did you notice that category 5 storm swirling around Florida's tip right now? Last I heard they were expecting it to go right down to the balls. Florida is not a suitable place to build anything more permanent than a tent.
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Actually there are certain types of tents that are designed to be covered in shot-crete.
So they can actually hold up pretty well.
Re:Seems a good site (Score:5, Informative)
You would think. But...
We would likely have a solar adoption rate higher than all but a few other states if it wasn't for whacked laws put in place to defend the utilities. A homeowner here can't sell energy back to the utility. Only those who can produce 24 hours a day on-demand can do so. Because of this, our solar penetration is lower than many northeastern states.
Until we either get a change in the law or the cost of battery storage drops enough to make solar + battery much less than utility provided electric, Florida will lag the developed world in solar (and some of the third world).
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A homeowner here can't sell energy back to the utility.
Given that the utility doesn't want their power grid being messed up by random feedback from consumer panels, is it really a bad thing for them to not be paying for something that they don't want?
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Alternatively, all you have to do is install batteries at home and go off grid.
Accepting electricity from consumer panels is a cost for the utilities. Making them do so is essentially subsidizing consumer panels, which may be a good thing. No one is protecting the utilities, they are just not forced to lose money.
Re:Seems a good site (Score:4, Informative)
It works out fine until over a third of homes have panels. This is because power usage is also higher during the day.
Re:Seems a good site (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Seems a good site (Score:2)
Retail rate net metering is going away. It's no way to finance a grid when the lights have to stay on at night. And yes, I'm in a northeastern state.
The early adopters get a sweet deal for a few years on the backs of their neighbors (who pay for the early adopter's electricity at night), but that can't continue.
Re: Seems a good site (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, it's not like the peak demand is close the same time that solar panels produce peak output. Oh, wait, it is.
Most of the USA experiences peak demand mid-afternoon, when A/C units are cranking away.
Re: Only true for residential/commercial electrici (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the other way around: nuclear/coal power plants need base-load customers, not the other way around, because those power plants are cheap per kWh delivered, but cannot adapt to demand.
Power sources should really be categorized in one of three classes: 1. Flexible on-demand (natural gas, hydro, battery storage); 2. Base load (nuclear, coal); 3. Uncontrolled generation power (wind, solar).
If you add #3 to the net, you should add #1 to balance. Or do cross-continental balancing of #3 to make it behave like #2, but it requires expensive investments in long-distance transmission capacity.
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I can't be bothered to look up the last major study on the subject again, but while it's a lot more than "a percentage point" of the cost, nationwide HVDC links do indeed pay for themselves, whether compared to the cost of more fossil peaking, or when compared to the cost of more renewable generation to help compensate for fluctuating output. A geographically high-renewables + HVDC grid is actually more stable than a low-renewables local-only grid because of the stabilization effects of HVDC and the reducti
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A homeowner here can't sell energy back to the utility. Only those who can produce 24 hours a day on-demand can do so
Which is partly to do with the energy markets not currently being designed to scale. The spot price of electricity varies second by second and a lot of power plants adjust their outputs based on this. Some big storage facilities buy power when it's cheap, pump water uphill, and then run as a hydro-electric power plant when the spot price is high. Having a lot more sources varying their output but not being able to adjust output down or up based on the current price will cause a lot of problems for the ex
Re: Seems a good site (Score:3)
Well they could relocate in 50 years. A thing you cannot do with a nuclear plant.
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The fuck you can't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Seems a good site (Score:5, Informative)
Have you actually tried to read what you have posted?
"A prototype was scheduled for manufacture in 2015. However its development seems to have ended."
That's the problem with you atomic fanbois - you don't know much about the topic you wank on.
The Soviets have built a couple of these (TES-3 mobile nuclear power plant), but even they have recognised that the idea is not as great as it appears to be.
Solar Power in Florida? (Score:2, Funny)
That's the most impractical idea I've heard since I last read a tweet from Donald Trump.
They don't call it the Sunshine State, not even on the license plates. And they wouldn't need so many oranges if they weren't vitamin deficient from too little sun. And let's face it, they should just use the same generator powered by the soul of a Forsaken child as is used to keep Disneyworld operational.
regulatory delays (Score:2, Insightful)
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that is all.
Maybe the bankruptcy of Westinghouse has something to do with it.
Re:regulatory delays (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFS: "With cheap natural gas in 2013, Duke Energy Florida became nervous that it might not recuperate costs spent on the nuclear plant"
Cheap gas, the expectation that renewables and batteries will keep getting cheaper... It doesn't make economic sense to build, operate and decomission a nuclear plant now.
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Indeed, and it hardly did even before. The "nuclear renaissance"'s promise of much cheaper nuclear power failed to deliver; cost overruns was the name of the game with them. And more frequently than not, due to technical / construction reasons rather than regulatory. See Olkiluoto 3 [wikipedia.org] for one of the worst examples. Nearly a decade past schedule and still years from opening.
Building nuclear plants is just plain hard. The corrosion environment is terrible (irradiation-induced embrittlement, decay products, tra
Re: regulatory delays (Score:2, Informative)
Uthats a regulatory delay. The solution has been well understood and planned for decades, but shot down by judges and politicians.
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Doesn't change the fact that they've 1) ignored it 2) pushed immediate costs onto taxpayers 3) left future generations holding the nuclear waste bag.
Why spend ten years and ten billion dollars building a new nucl
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Why not simply build a better reactor that can actually burn most of this long-lived waste down to stuff that isn't (relatively) so long lived?
The big problem right now is that most of the waste is mildly radioactive, but it'll be mildly radioactive for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
The problem with engineering is, do we REALLY think we can engineer a site that'll be good for 100+ millennia?
And worse, 75-85% of the fuel in that waste is still unspent. Because there's no reprocessing (the reason th
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Wastes from battery plants are not "Nuclear" waste.
And deaths from installing solar equipment are not "Nuclear" accidents.
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If we want to be specific, quality li-ion recycling (ignoring techniques that attempt to avoid having to rebuild the cathode material) generally involves crushing under controlled conditions, removal of the electrolyte with supercritical CO2 (followed by redistillation after precipitating out lithium salts), and reprocessing the remainder. With pyrometalluric processes, separator membranes and carbon from the anodes burn off (silicon anodes end up as slag), lithium ends up in the slag side and can be extra
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What "waste from the battery plants" are you thinking of?
Tesla's powerpacks (to pick one) are rated for 5000 cycles to 80% capacity. Not that you have to get rid of them at 80% capacity.
Solar panel maintenance costs are almost meaningless compared to the amortized capital costs.
Setback for clean energy (Score:5, Insightful)
75% of Duke's generation mix is coal or natural gas. So, rather than offset any of that base load with a 2.2 GW nuclear facility, they'll supplement demand growth and cover peaks with solar and keep burning the coal and gas. It's cheaper and they get to wave the green flag etc.
Re:Setback for clean energy (Score:5, Interesting)
So, rather than offset any of that base load with a 2.2 GW nuclear facility, they'll supplement demand growth and cover peaks with solar and keep burning the coal and gas. It's cheaper and they get to wave the green flag etc.
The saying for this is "perfect is the enemy of good enough."
Is nuclear perfect? No. But then, neither is solar, wind, or any other technology? Is nuclear better than coal/natural gas? You bet. So then, why do people cheer when a nuclear project gets killed? Because they ignore the very thing that you pointed out. They look at it in absolute terms instead of "fossil fuel < nuclear < wind/solar/etc."
Sort of like getting a cancer diagnosis and being told that while it might take some time to completely eradicate it because the treatment is new and not yet widely available, they can do something to slow its growth for now. You can be all principled and turn down the interim treatment while you wait for the perfect treatment. In the meantime you die waiting for the perfect treatment instead of opting to do something now that will buy time.
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Which always seems to be said in the context of defending the indefensible. Nuclear power isn't an exception here.
Because they don't want their taxpayer dollars to be pissed away on the ultimate form of corporate welfare? Because they don't want to saddle future generations with an enormous waste problem? Because they took fifth grade econ and have heard the term "cost effective"?
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Yep, it actually is. Their electric utility company (EDF) is state-owned and state-subsidised.
Their nuclear power plants are not completely paid for yet and right now no money is provisioned for decomission.
The 75% electrical capacity is also quite misleading, because French nuclear power plants also only have a 75% avail
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The frustration many of us feel is that if all the money invested into nuclear was instead invested into renewables it would see a reduction in fossil fuel use too.
Look at Germany. Closing coal plans, and the new ones being opened are burning less of it and with cleaner output. It's not perfect but the net result is that by the mid 2020s they will not only have cancelled all new nuclear but closed all the current ones, and reduced coal and gas consumption, and developed a world-leading and highly profitable
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If France was not there they would simply do things a bit differently. Their transition is not dependent on France, it's just sensible to make use of available resources. Maybe without it might take them an extra few years.
The German releases twice as much CO2 per capita as us Swedes, and that's with similar standard of living and similar industrial mix. And yet, they're the green example to emulate, while we're the "backward ones".
I wouldn't use that phrase. However, the point is that Germany is transitioning, it's making a huge effort. They should be applauded for that.
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But how much baseload is truly necessary? In other words, how much electrical demand is perfectly inelastic?
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Your conflation of coal and gas is wrong. They're very different fuels from an environmental footprint standpoint, and while gas is most definitely on the rise, coal is likewise most definitely on the decline.
The US power grid is overwhelmingly headed in the direction of being a mix of gas, wind and solar (the latter small but undergoing an exponential scaleup similar to wind in its early days). All three will be major players over the next few decades at least, while coal continues its death spiral. At pr
Lost expertise (Score:2)
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Westinghouse, AREVA (Olkilouto 3), and now Duke Energy... More and more players seem to have trouble when trying to to re-start building new nuclear plants...
Hmmm... love me some solar, and full disclosure, I'm not against government interference in the markets in the form of subsidies to develop it, wind, and other renewables.
But. Baseline generation is important to the delicate balance of the grid. How about some some friggin' government interference in the markets on behalf of next-generation nuclear power development?
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The grid doesn't need base load. That term was invented because coal power plants could not follow load, so if all your power plants are of the load following types, base load is moot.
Inigo says... (Score:2)
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Sunk costs [businessdictionary.com] are costs that are already spent. The $800 million was a sunk cost long before this announcement. What you mean is those costs are now a write off [businessdictionary.com] due to obsolescence [businessdictionary.com].
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Which word? "Now"? The costs were always sunk.
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While the use of now is technically correct, it is misleading.
The phrasing implies that the costs have only recently become sunk(as a result of the decision to abandon the plant), whereas they have been sunk for a long time.
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The definition you refer to says: "Money already spent and permanently lost".
The "and" is important. Yes the costs were already spent but that doesn't make them sunk costs. That only happens when they are permanently lost. And that only happened at the moment they decided that they were definitively abandoning the project.
So, for me the statement is a correct one. According the cited definition.
We should (Score:2)
... the Levy plant, which was supposed to deliver 2.2 gigawatts to the region ...
I don't know why they keep messing with nuclear power. They showed how to create 1.21 jigawatts of electricity way back in 1984... [youtube.com] Why that research was discontinued? Who really shot such emmetinent scientists? Libyan terrorists? Or merceneries of the Big Power companies? I wonder...
Duke is not giving up on nukes (Score:2)
In this thread /. experts will... (Score:4, Interesting)
All that on a story about how a multi billion dollar energy company couldn't get a nuclear power plant off the ground even after $800 million dollars. I'm sure all Duke needed to do was consult such expert
Re:In this thread /. experts will... (Score:5, Informative)
So this 700 MW of solar power represents just 5.7% the capacity of the scrapped nuclear plant. Guess where the other 94.3% of energy production is going to come from (hint: its initials are FF)?
To replace the nuclear plant entirely with solar, they'd have to build (1980 MW / 0.161) = 12,300 MW of panels. That's more than 8x larger than the largest existing solar plant in the world [wikipedia.org], more than 20x larger than the largest existing solar plant in the U.S. At the optimistic cost of $1/Watt, those solar panels (never mind the supporting infrastructure) would cost $12.3 billion. The nuclear plant was only going to cost $7.65 billion. They killed it because of regulatory delays.
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In this thread /. "nuclear experts" will decry just how costly all this solar stuff is and how great and awesome and cheap nuclear power is. All that on a story about how a multi billion dollar energy company couldn't get a nuclear power plant off the ground even after $800 million dollars.
You're confusing technology with regulatory cost and garbage overheads caused by politics and NIMBYs. Don't do that, it makes you look foolish.
Oh and maybe you want to run the costs of how much 2.2GW of solar with >90% capacity factors will actually cost. But you won't. You'll just see that a large nuclear plant got cancelled while a small piss-weak solar plant gets built in its place. Then in a few years everyone will wonder why we're still burning coal, suffering from rolling power outages, and where a
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Avoided pouring millions (probably closer to billions) of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere?
Or is global warming suddenly not a thing again?
Cost per KW (Score:5, Informative)
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When this plant was proposed in 2006 nuclear was the most cost effective energy out there.
Only if you ignore decommissioning and waste management, which you don't get to do unless you're one of the assholes actually building the plant.
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Or, you know, if Luddite chicken-littles would stop blocking the building of breeder-type reactors that reuse their own fuel until what's left is much easier & safer to handle and dispose of. There doesn't have to be highly-radioactive waste to dispose of to begin with.
Congratulations and thanks to your kind of pseudo-environmental ideological/political pop-science idiocy, we get all the worst of the negative conse
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Or, you know, if Luddite chicken-littles would stop blocking the building of breeder-type reactors
Nobody is even trying to build such a thing.
Re:Cost per KW (Score:5, Insightful)
First, the main concern with early fast breeder reactor designs was proliferation. Engineering can reduce the convenience of proliferation, but it won't ever eliminate it because generating Pu-239 is inherent to the process. That's not a luddite concern; it's real.
Second, fast breeders at least don't appear to be as economical as originally hoped. The assumption when the tech was proposed was that uranium supply wouldn't keep up with demand, but in fact uranium turns out to be reasonably plentiful. Even under a scenario of greatly increased nuclear adoption it would be many decades before we'd need to turn to breeders. On the cost side, the breeder reactors that have been built have proven to be much less reliable and more expensive to operate than hoped. Of course engineering advances could make breeders cheaper to build and run, but you could say that of conventional nuclear plants too.
Finally, breeders still have radioactive waste problems; different, and likely more tractable ones, but from an economic standpoint that's meaningless because we allow companies to build conventional plants as if the future waste problem will solve itself. The need to solve the problems from a plant you break ground on today is so far in the future it has no financial reality. So I suspect to get breeder technology off the ground, you'd ironically have to crack down on nuclear power in general.
It takes a lot more for a technology to be economically feasible than for it to be physically possible. A lot depends on the cost of the alternatives. As long as fossil fuel companies are allowed to externalize their costs on the scale that they do, and conventional nuclear power is allowed to ignore the future costs their plants will incur, advances in novel nuclear technologies are bound to occur at a snail's pace.
You can imagine a future society running on thorium fuel cycle nuclear plants, it isn't hard to do, and that future can look reasonably good. But imagining something being done is a lot different than knowing how to get it done. You've got to convince people to spend money on stuff that costs more in the short- to mid-term.
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No amount of vaporware is going to make nuclear power cost-effective. Stop trying to make the nuclear efficiency thing happen. It's not going to happen.
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So nuclear is no longer the best bag for your buck in the energy industry and it comes with the NIMBY stigma associated with radiation.
It always did. The difference is that post-Fukushima, building a nuclear power plant near a coast also comes with a boatload of new regulations and extra scrutiny. Plus, with Westinghouse's bankruptcy putting the entire future of the AP1000 in jeopardy, there was a good chance that they would get halfway through and have to scrap it anyway. Better to cut their losses relatively early.
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It is interesting to note that Florida has several other nuclear reactors on the coast. One of them, Crystal River, was just a few feet above a Category 5 storm surge. Its basically built on a little platform that just barely brings above projected storm surge level. It would be a little island admist 10 foot waves should the worst happen. Very comforting.That often would cause me to wonder. I think that wondering more would be a good idea given what happened with Fukashima. The levy plant was located furth
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The problem with that plan, IMO, is that the state of Florida is very nearly flat. The highest elevation in Florida is less than 350 feet above sea level. The record run-up height for a tsunami was 1,720 feet. Even the relatively modest Fukushima run-up (128 feet) would theoretically have covered the entire state of Florida, with the exception of the most inland parts of the panhandle and a small h
Regulatory delays (Score:3)
Here we see the effect of dismantling the Public Utility Companies Holding Act (PUCHA deregulation) in action. This 'New Deal' act to prevent a re-occurrence of the 1929 depression by Utility companies scamming taxpayers.
Duke received subsidies and tax incentives under provisions to build a nuclear reactor (that's the $2.50 per MWh they charged) and will now be able to activate cost recovery under "SEC. 638. STANDBY SUPPORT FOR CERTAIN NUCLEAR PLANT DELAYS" of the 2005 US energy policy act to the tune of half a billion dollars for these two 'proposed' nuclear reactors. Not a bad return on sunk costs of $65 million. Specifically SEC. 638, (d)(2)(A,B).
To those that cite NIMBYs, NIMBYs didn't make Westinghouse Nuclear go bankrupt and Duke is blaming the NRC for delays issuing the Combined License for the construction and operation of Levy, this is SEC. 638, (c)(1)(A). It would be interesting to know what Duke claims those delays were and US tax and ratepayers should be concerned that this isn't actually covered by SEC. 638, (c)(2)(C), i.e a normal business risk because Westinghouse can't build them a pair of AP1000s anymore and even if they could they can't pass the NRC regulations that make them safe in a hurricane.
Of interest is a 2011 Tampa Bay Times article [tampabay.com] which aired complaints that Duke have been scamming their customers $2.50 per Mwh since they proposed Levy probably under SEC. 638, (d)(4)(B). This clumsy episode shows exactly how the scam works. It's difficult to believe there was an intention to build a nuclear power plant and that the entire nuclear renaissance was a way for oil and coal companies to use the nuclear industry to plunder the taxpayer.
Watts of storage? (Score:2)
"50MW of battery storage". How can a watt be a unit of storage?
REPLACED BY NATURAL GAS (Score:3)
Solar? Battery "storage"? Can we do the math on this one?
The cancelled reactors would have produced an average of 47.5 GWh per day @ 90% cap factor.
If the 700 MW of added solar uses modest DC overbuild, it will achieve something like a 25% cap factor, as a seasonal average.
That's 4.2 GWh per day, replacing just 9% of the foregone nuclear gen.
Most grid battery "storage" systems run for less than a couple of hours @ rated power (50 MW in this case) per day; many only have 10 minutes of rated runtime, just enough to allow paralleled quick-dispatch gas turbines (burning natural gas) time to spin-up.
So that's less than 0.1 GWh per day. The reactors would do nearly 500x times that.
Duke is planning to replace up to 90% of the nuclear with NATURAL GAS, mostly burned in high-efficiency combined-cycle turbines plus some in quick-dispatch simple-cycle turbines. The rest of the story is window-dressing.
I hope the "environmentalists" don't mind the GHG impact of this decision.
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Re:6 billion? (Score:5, Informative)
Do not make the error of comparing nameplate capacities ignoring capacity factors (i.e. how much of the nominal power is actually produced). Capacity factor for nuclear tend to be around 90%, for solar it's location-dependent but in California it may go as high as 25%.
If you take that into consideration then the difference between 2200 MV nuclear and 700 MW solar is almost ten-fold.
Re:6 billion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless of course the solar has an energy storage system then combined capacity rates are near 60-70% and present a power prices that's 1/3rd nuclear's cost.
I like nuclear as much as you but the simple fact is it's been priced out of the market and that's not likely to change without massive tax payer subsidies. Solar costs have fallen 99.99% since 1970. You can now purchase solar panels at a price that's orders of magnitudes smaller than other sources and the only reason it's not taken over completely is the storage issue. Once the storage problem is solved Wind and Solar will be the only two power sources as wind will be cheaper than dirt cheap gas without subsidy by 2020 at current price trends. Solar is following the same track but is a little bit more expensive upfront but has lower maintenance costs long term.
Rule of thumb: 5 solar hours/day (21%) (Score:2)
Capacity factor for nuclear tend to be around 90%, for solar it's location-dependent but in California it may go as high as 25%.
It varies with climate, season, latitude, and topography. But a quick rule of thumb is that a good solar location in the continental US (little cloud cover, midlatitude, not too close to a mountain, etc.) averages about 5 solar hours per day - about 21% of nameplate power.
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Except that, while nuclear plant operational costs are predominantly capital costs, they still have relevant operational costs (a much larger share than maintenance share of solar costs). Capital costs make up only about 3/4ths of the cost of a nuclear plant, vs. nearly 90% for a solar PV plant. They also have significant decommissioning liabilities at end-of-life. And are heavily subsidized in that they don't have to pay for their own catastrophic liability coverage, only base liability coverage - a simple
Re:6 billion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and the average PV capacity factor in the US is 27,2% [eia.gov]. A 700MW PV plant at average capacity factor is equivalent to 206MW of nuclear. So yes, there is a 10x difference in total generation; however, it more closely follows the demand curve, meaning that you can wholesale the power for significantly more per MWh, and the price you get for your power is the figure that really matters, not the total generation. Nuclear plants spend half their time generating dirt-cheap nighttime power.
Also it's worth noting that Duke's pricing on this solar plant is abnormally expensive; new plants in the desert southwest are coming in as low as $1,50/W (half as much). Florida's insolation is worse, but I'm not sure that fully explains the difference.
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That is not a "paper"; it's not peer-reviewed, and is simply something created by a conservative think tank (Institute for Energy Research) and put on their website. The previous job of the guy who founded and runs it was as a policy analyst for Enron.
Re: 6 billion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only if it's a PV based solar farm. Thermal solar plants continue to produce power when the sun goes down.
No they do not. Molten salt is just a big battery. They can only produce what has been put into them (minus a little which is lost in the process). This doesn't change the maths behind the solar generation capacity of a plant in any way, it does however provide storage if you can generate enough so that you don't suffer as badly from the intermittent nature of Solar.
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What do you do with the waste?
Re: How did they kill it? (Score:5, Funny)
With a spreadsheet in the boardroom.
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They are not actually designed by people in the state. They were going to use the AP1000 reactor design from Westinghouse.
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It seems as though China is Westinghouse's main customer now for AP1000 reactor, with this Levy plant being scrapped.
Re:Solar environmentally friendly, hah (Score:5, Funny)
You can't imagine how much wildlife has been displaced by the solar panels on my roof. Christ I haven't seen a single deer walking around on my roof!! I tell you it's a travesty of wasted wildlife access.
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You know the big problem with the solar panels on your roof? Well nothing technically other than the fact that it has nothing to do with the discussion.
On the other hand the 260 sq km of area needed to generate the 2.2GW of power, capacity factors taken into account, will have quite a different effect on those walking deers.
Solar belongs on roofs, it shouldn't be blanketing vast areas of nature.