After 47 Years, US Power Company Abandons Still-Unfinished $6 Billion Nuclear Power Plant (yahoo.com) 206
America's federally-owned electric utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority, has spent billions of dollars with nothing to show for it, reports the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
"Nearly 47 years after construction began on the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in Northeast Alabama, the Tennessee Valley Authority is giving up its construction permit for America's biggest unfinished nuclear plant and abandoning any plans to complete the twin-reactor facility..." Giving up the construction permit at Bellefonte signals the end of any new nuclear plant construction at TVA with only seven of the 17 nuclear reactors the utility once planned to build ever completed.... Since the 1970s, a total of 95 nuclear reactors proposed to be built by U.S. utilities have been canceled due to rising construction costs, slowing power demand and cheapening power alternatives.
The NRC now regulates 93 remaining commercial nuclear reactors at 56 nuclear power plants, including TVA's Sequoyah and Watts Bar nuclear plants in East Tennessee and the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Athens, Alabama. Collectively, those nuclear plants provide more than 40% of TVA's power and over 20% of the nation's electricity supply... TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said in the past two decades, the growth in power demand in the Tennessee Valley has continued to slow as more energy efficiency measures have been adopted and the price of natural gas, solar power and additional hydroelectric generation has declined in competition with nuclear.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader The Real Dr John for sharing the story. And today the Chattanooga Times Free Press opinions editor offered this suggestion: TVA still owns the 1,600-acre site, as well as the plant that has never — and likely now will never — generate the first spark of nuclear-produced electricity. But that doesn't mean it can't make power some other way. A gas plant? Uggh. A wind field? Seems unlikely given the stillness of North Alabama. A solar plant? That could be more of a possibility. All of the transmission equipment and the electrical grid is at the ready...
By now — after siting, building, scrapping, building again, abandoning, putting up for sale, agreeing to sell for pennies on the dollar and finally going to court to defend not selling the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant — TVA ratepayers and taxpayers have lost somewhere between $6 billion (according to TVA) and $9 billion (according to a 2018 letter from five congressmen)... TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said Wednesday that TVA is making no decisions immediately. "But we're not taking anything off the table," he added...
Hopson said TVA's May 2021 "strategic intent and guiding principles" notes the utility has solar commitments to date of more than 2,300 megawatts of solar capacity expected to come online by the end of 2023. Including those projects, TVA expects to add 10,000 megawatts of solar power by 2035 — a 24-fold increase from today.
That 10,000 megawatts of solar power would be equal to more than eight would-be Bellefonte reactors.
"Nearly 47 years after construction began on the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in Northeast Alabama, the Tennessee Valley Authority is giving up its construction permit for America's biggest unfinished nuclear plant and abandoning any plans to complete the twin-reactor facility..." Giving up the construction permit at Bellefonte signals the end of any new nuclear plant construction at TVA with only seven of the 17 nuclear reactors the utility once planned to build ever completed.... Since the 1970s, a total of 95 nuclear reactors proposed to be built by U.S. utilities have been canceled due to rising construction costs, slowing power demand and cheapening power alternatives.
The NRC now regulates 93 remaining commercial nuclear reactors at 56 nuclear power plants, including TVA's Sequoyah and Watts Bar nuclear plants in East Tennessee and the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Athens, Alabama. Collectively, those nuclear plants provide more than 40% of TVA's power and over 20% of the nation's electricity supply... TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said in the past two decades, the growth in power demand in the Tennessee Valley has continued to slow as more energy efficiency measures have been adopted and the price of natural gas, solar power and additional hydroelectric generation has declined in competition with nuclear.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader The Real Dr John for sharing the story. And today the Chattanooga Times Free Press opinions editor offered this suggestion: TVA still owns the 1,600-acre site, as well as the plant that has never — and likely now will never — generate the first spark of nuclear-produced electricity. But that doesn't mean it can't make power some other way. A gas plant? Uggh. A wind field? Seems unlikely given the stillness of North Alabama. A solar plant? That could be more of a possibility. All of the transmission equipment and the electrical grid is at the ready...
By now — after siting, building, scrapping, building again, abandoning, putting up for sale, agreeing to sell for pennies on the dollar and finally going to court to defend not selling the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant — TVA ratepayers and taxpayers have lost somewhere between $6 billion (according to TVA) and $9 billion (according to a 2018 letter from five congressmen)... TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said Wednesday that TVA is making no decisions immediately. "But we're not taking anything off the table," he added...
Hopson said TVA's May 2021 "strategic intent and guiding principles" notes the utility has solar commitments to date of more than 2,300 megawatts of solar capacity expected to come online by the end of 2023. Including those projects, TVA expects to add 10,000 megawatts of solar power by 2035 — a 24-fold increase from today.
That 10,000 megawatts of solar power would be equal to more than eight would-be Bellefonte reactors.
Don't worry about them (Score:2, Insightful)
Your tax money will bail them out.
Re: (Score:2)
If it's like the completed but never used Shoreham [wikipedia.org] plant, the power company will go out of business and ratepayers will pay a 3% surcharge for 30+ years afterward.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
How do you know? Where is your proof, that it wouldn't have worked (much) better being private?
The United States has around the 28th to 40th [wikipedia.org] highest life expectancy in the world. And "of the 27 most developed countries, the U.S. has the highest Infant Mortality Rate [wikipedia.org], despite spending much more on health care per capita. ... IMR varies greatly by race in the US."
This suggests that other countries are somehow managing to achieve better health outcomes, despite the handicap of operating under socialistic universal government-supported health care systems.
Re: (Score:3)
"When the Supreme Court in 1944 ruled that insurance regulation was a federal responsibility, the insurance industry successfully pressured Congress to enact the McCarran-Ferguson Act. That legislation delegated federal regulatory pow
7700 MW (Score:4, Interesting)
If the 6 billion was spent on solar at todays prices it would generate 7700 MW. Or given the 25% federal subsidy 9700 MW. Or given the 9 billion estimate and subsidy 14600 MW. Granted that money was spent long ago when solar was much more expensive.
Sources
https://www.solarreviews.com/b... [solarreviews.com]
Re: (Score:2)
If 6 billions dollars had been used to try and generate 7700MW 47 years ago, the TVA would now be selling 70,000 aches of a still unfinished solar farm.
So even with subsidies (Score:2)
Nuclear power is still too expensive to build, to expensive to run, too expensive to bother with anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
The subsidies are setup wrong, until renewables hit the wall where they stop being able to further reduce fossil fuel use they just offer better risk reward for investment. Assuming we want to hit future emission targets renewables will hit a wall though. A wall very expensive to overcome, which would probably have been better dealt with starting with nuclear power at the beginning ... but by then we will be pot committed.
Given the subsidy structure what I think will happen (without some large scale economi
Re: (Score:2)
The subsidies are setup wrong, until renewables hit the wall where they stop being able to further reduce fossil fuel use they just offer better risk reward for investment.
That's a mighty [youtu.be] big wall [youtu.be] they have [youtu.be] there. [youtu.be]
Re: (Score:2)
The speed at which we are running at the wall says nothing about its size.
You can actually see the realization of the upcoming wall happening if you pay close attention. The anti-hydrogen voices are a constant drone, but the pro-hydrogen voices and government initiatives are actually increasing ... despite hydrogen having been an economic failure till now. If you believe the anti-hydrogen voices you'd think it irrational, if you look at it from the perspective that TWh scale storage will become a simple nec
Re: (Score:2)
> TWh scale storage will become a simple necessity regardless of cost it makes more sense
Hydrogen is horrible for storage at that scale, though. With all the energy storage methods at our disposal, hydrogen is among the worst. (Flywheels are the worst). The problem with hydrogen as a storage medium is you take at least 50% of your input energy and immediately piss it away. Even compressed air is better than hydrogen.
It's worth noting that the major proponents of hydrogen have been the oil and gas compani
Re: (Score:2)
Compressed air scales isn't TWh scale, it's a battery competitor. Hydrogen and pumped hydro are the only TWh scale storage solutions, pumped hydro has its own problem, most the low hanging fruit is gone. Here in Europe hydrogen build out is overtaking pumped hydro.
PV can go ridiculously low in cost, soon the mounting and ground prep will be the most expensive part of large scale solar ... and even for metal mounting frames there are alternatives. Pumped hydro is getting more expensive as the low hanging fru
Re: (Score:2)
> Compressed air scales isn't TWh scale
Neither does hydrogen. For all the equipment you need to store compressed air, you need at least three or four times as much for making, storing and using hydrogen.
> Here in Europe hydrogen build out is overtaking pumped hydro
Got a source for that? I'd genuinely like to know more about what's happening around the world...
It looks like even if current trends and targets are met, hydro in the EU will still be 7 times [greentechmedia.com] the capacity of hydrogen by 2030. That doesn't s
Slowing power demand?? (Score:3)
Re:Slowing power demand?? (Score:5, Informative)
It all depends on locality. Efficiency has moved industry forward leaps and bounds over the years. I can't see your link but a simple Google search shows that USA electricity consumption rose to 3.8 trillion kWh a year in 2005 and hasn't budged since, and that's despite the doomsayers talking about electric cars bringing death to us all through overuse of electricity, and despite the fact that the population has increased by 11% from 295million to 331million over the same time.
The reality is mature first world nations are seeing drops in energy consumption, in some cases it's per capita (like the USA), or in some cases it's absolute.
E.g.
Australia peak of 210 billion kWh in 2008. Drop by 9% to 2018. Population increased 17%, 21.3m to 25m over the same time.
United Kingdom peak of 357billion kWh in 2005. Drop by 15% to 2018. Population increased 15% 60m to 68.8m over the same time.
The EU on the whole seems to have followed the USA's trend of staying steady while the population has increased.
So sure, if you look globally to the entire population of the world, demand continues to exist, and will continue to do so while people live in abject poverty. But the trend in wealthy developed nations shows the opposite.
Re: (Score:3)
We can't. Nuclear power is a fantasy solution to a problem that it doesn't have time to solve. Nuclear absolutely needs to be part of the future energy mix, but by the time we get any of it off the ground we are well beyond any help that it may bring.
Additionally you get a bit [citation needed] for the cost of nuclear. And in your cost estimate make sure you use current data including the lifecycle cost of constructing nuclear plants. Just construction. Don't worry about decommissioning. Every nuclear proje
Re: (Score:2)
Sloppy quote— slowing *rate of increase* in demand. Old projections were for demand to increase so fast that the only practical solution was nuclear energy.
Anyway (Score:2)
As the decades move on, the TVA, one of the crowning achievements of big government big projects, becomes a liability. The same people who put it up now use it as a shooting gallery.
Every billion dollars is a $20 hole in your family's pocket. That's a lotta popcorn to watch this farce unfold.
Well, as long as lawyers made money suing and delaying, and cronies did, and politicians did, that's what matters.
So much for reducing emissions... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Let's not forget Fukushima or Chernobyl as well. Keep endlessly repeating "it's safer now" and also counter with tales of disasters caused by wind and solar and maybe I'll start to agree with you.
Renewable energy sources don't "require" backup natural gas generators. They do however require backup power when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. That's where
Re: (Score:2)
Keep endlessly repeating "it's safer now" and also counter with tales of disasters caused by wind and solar and maybe I'll start to agree with you.
Solar has killed more people than any other energy source. Sure they are construction and maintenance jobs, but we don't care about *those people* right?
Pointing to Fukushima or Chernobyl shows what an incredible success nuclear actually is. Compared to every other energy source it's not only killed less people, but even compared to fossil fuels and hydropower it has displaced less people during both operation and during actual disasters.
But sadly nuclear is dead, and the bigger issue is construction time r
Re: (Score:2)
But sadly nuclear is dead, and the bigger issue is construction time related to how quickly we need to do something to solve the problem we've created.
That's what people like to make you believe but in reality, even if we work at a ridiculous pace, it will take many decades to replace our energy production with solar and wind. Sure, one wind turbine is quick to build but the millions we need will take forever and will require such ridiculous amounts of resources and space that that'll be a major bottleneck. We'll be much too late to prevent runaway warming if we don't accept that we need nuclear and lots of it.
[citation needed] (Score:2)
Solar has killed more people than any other energy source.
[citation needed]
Or it's bull-excrement.
Re: (Score:2)
Solar has killed more people than any other energy source
Any sources for this line of bullshit? Yeah just yesterday I saw a wild solar panel jump out and eat someone.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:So much for reducing emissions... (Score:5, Informative)
> Nuclear power is greenhouse gas emission-free
It's low emission, not not zero emission. Similar to wind and solar, a lot of the emissions coming from the construction phase. Unlike wind and solar, nuclear has ongoing emissions from fuel mining, refining, processing and disposal. Over the whole life of a typical power plant, nuclear's emissions are about on par with wind.
> Unlike wind and solar that requires backup natural gas generators
Nuclear power plants do not operate year-round. At some point they go offline - planned or otherwise [eia.gov] - and that power needs to be made up somewhere. The only reason natural gas gets involved at all is because it's heavily subsidized and therefore very cheap.
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:2)
The only reason natural gas gets involved at all is because it's heavily subsidized and therefore very cheap.
Are you talking about the depletion allowance? If so that's just a tax reduction to make some of the cost of the lost asset value from consuming the reserves deductable in the year they're used, rather than showing up years or decades later in the amortization of the purchase/leases of rights or sales of depleted fields after the resource is gone.
Or did you have something else in mind? Betcha it wo
Re: (Score:2)
Normally I'd point out all the debunked talking points with citations from reputable sources and suchlike, but if you can't be bothered to even use whitespace to break up your meandering spiel of bullshit then I'm not sure I can be bothered to engage either.
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:2)
It's also a modern pipe dream. At this point you can lump nuclear in with fusion as effectively all new nuclear projects will be perpetually 25 years away. This is just another example in a long list of projects that haven't been commissioned, and has bankrupted not only their owners but also their technology licensors.
And until we can actually get from concept to spark in 5 years with nuclear it remains an option not at all on the table to solve climate change. We absolutely should build nuclear plants, bu
Re: (Score:3)
> At this point you can lump nuclear in with fusion as effectively all new nuclear projects will be perpetually 25 years away.
For very different reasons: fission works. Fission is also a mandatory requirement for fusion power: Even while recovering tritium from irradiated ithium in the cooling blacket for a fusion reactor is an appealing way to supply tritium, it cannot be 100% efficient, and tritium's only commercially scalable source now is fission reactors. This leads directly to the "if we have succe
Re: (Score:2)
Fission is also a mandatory requirement for fusion power
Not for p+B (unless you're counting the immediate C12* to He4 + Be8 and Be8 to 2He steps as "fission"). No tritium involved. Also "aneutronic", i.e. 1% of reactions produce a neutron (about 0.1% for a thermal p B plasma).
Tougher to get going that D+T, but still looks doable.
Re: (Score:2)
Make that "'aneutronic', i.e. LESS THAN 1% ..."
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately, the building and decommissioning of a nuclear power plant creates so much CO2 that it can take 35% of a plant's operating life to offset those emissions.
47 years? (Score:2)
I guess the federal government should ask for their money back, plus interest.
You could cut them a rebate for the transmission and grid work, I guess.
"Not taking anythong off the table" (Score:2)
That is bureaucratic code for "we're hiring more managers to review your project: the budget is going to pay us while we hold more meetings". There is unfortunately, so much regulatory and safety concern over nuclear power that it's very difficult to avoid. And there have been some profound mistakes in managing nuclear power and resources: some regulation is needed.
You can't compare Nuclear with Solar like that. (Score:2)
"That 10,000 megawatts of solar power would be equal to more than eight would-be Bellefonte reactors."
You can't directly compare the nameplate wattage of a nuke plant with that of a solar plant. The nuke plant will have much better uptime, and it will be able to operate at any time of day.
They should do what they're best at (Score:2)
They should start preparing the site for fusion power generation, it seems to be on the same timetable as their project management and construction capabilities.
There could be an opportunity here (Score:2)
All of the transmission equipment and the electrical grid is at the ready...
It totally sucks that they wasted so much money to get nowhere. That said, this might make a great trial site for testing peak-load storage technologies. If the geography permits, use off-peak power from the grid to pump water into a reservoir so it can power generators during high demand. Or use batteries and inverters to do the same thing. Or spin up huge flywheels in vacuum cans.
There are probably many more ways I haven't thought of for recovering something useful from this appalling waste of resources.
- \sum p_i log p_i (Score:3)
The level of original ideas and insights, expressed as information-theoretic entropy, of posts on Slashdot, appears to be trending downward.
Re: (Score:2)
I for one, can't wait for it to fade away into history.
Perhaps solar power accelerators to deal with the waste.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Nuclear power has by FAR the lowest deaths-per-kilowatt-hour of ANYTHING out there including solar. It's one of the single cleanest, safest, and most reliable forms of power generation we have and the waste is one of the easiest problems to deal with of anything. Compare the catastrophic global damage caused by the rare earth metals necessary for "green" power generation or the side effects of fossil fuels sometime.
The worst nuclear disaster in the modern era that wasn't because of a dystopian dictatorship
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Nuclear power has by FAR the lowest deaths-per-kilowatt-hour of ANYTHING out there including solar.
If you're going to make that claim, please give us a link to the methodology of the studies supporting it.
Does that count the excess deaths from radiation exposure induced illness resulting from the few but widespread releases of radioactive elements from a handful of power reactor disasters (Fukishima, Chernobyl, ...) and nuclear fuel production waste releases (Andreev Bay, Mailuu-Suu, ...)?
How about any exce
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it does. Every single nuclear accident in history AND the two deliberate atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki STILL have a lower death per kilowatt hour than anything else.
The problem here is that you're afraid of rAdIaTiOn but completely ignore all of the excess deaths caused by mining for rare earth metals and deadly/toxic manufacturing processes, as well as a long-term toxic waste problem that utter DWARFS nuclear reactors. You're engaging in double standards and special pleading, holding only
Re: (Score:3)
Does that count the excess deaths from radiation exposure induced illness resulting from the few but widespread releases of radioactive elements from a handful of power reactor disasters (Fukishima, Chernobyl, ...) and nuclear fuel production waste releases (Andreev Bay, Mailuu-Suu, ...)?
I think the thing that people always seem to forget in these discussions is that uranium is mined and processed before any enrichment, etc. I've never seen anyone properly account for the safety hazards from that mining.
Re: (Score:2)
Recent studies put nuclear at 0.07 deaths per TWh, wind at 0.04 and solar at 0.02 (Sovacool et al., 2016).
Re: (Score:3)
Boiling water by burning coal has been far more disasterous than nuclear ever was or will be.
Re: (Score:2)
... ever devised to boil water.
Expect the government to do it.
Re:The most expensive and dangerous way... (Score:5, Informative)
Umm...no.
A reactor designed to produce weapons-grade fissionables is totally unsuited to generate electricity. And a civilian power plant (like all the nuke plants not owned by the Federal government) is pretty much useless for generating weapons-grade fissionables.
Re:The most expensive and dangerous way... (Score:5, Interesting)
And a civilian power plant is pretty much useless for generating weapons-grade fissionables.
No, not precisely useless. It's harder, but not impossible. Civilian power plants do breed 239Pu. They also breed 240Pu, but you can tweak the cycle to maximize 239 and minimize 240. (You want to minimize 240, because its spontaneous fission rate means a bomb with too much 240 is likely to fizzle, making a "small" boom which makes a small crater and spreads radioactive junk around, instead of a big one that makes a large crater).
But the clearer danger is that the facilities that enrich uranium to make civilian reactor fuel are identical [thebulletin.org] to the ones used to enrich uranium to make bomb material.
Re: (Score:3)
No, not precisely useless. It's harder, but not impossible.
It is. Fuel is irradiated for a few weeks or so in weapon-grade plutonium breeders. Anything more and there's too much Pu-240 in the resulting material.
No civilian nuclear reactor design supports refueling every few weeks. Even Russian RBMK reactors that can be refueled on the fly require more than 6 months for a full fuel replacement cycle.
Re: (Score:3)
First you said it is impossible... then you explain how to do it.
I mean, you can also get to space by stacking enough $100 bills in a pile. There's nothing that fundamentally prohibits that.
You think you can make a reactor do things they're not designed to? Or it it "impossible"?
Yes, it's in practice impossible to use a civilian reactor to produce plutonium. Simply stopping, reloading fuel and restarting the reactor takes more than a month. So you're looking at maybe 15% duty cycle.
Moreover, the neutron spectrum inside water-moderated reactors is not favorable for Pu-239 production. It'll always be heavily contaminated with Pu-240. Weapons-grade breeders ar
Re: The most expensive and dangerous way... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You are funny, all that nuclear waste and nowhere to put it. The residents of Chernobyl might disagree with you too. What are they doing with all the nuclear waste water at Fukushima? Dumping into the ocean. Yes, it is the most expensive and dangerous way ever devised to boil water. In 20 years, when most electricity needs are met by renewables, people will be very, very happy to say goodbye to the nuclear power industry, but unfortunately will not be able to say the same to the untold hundreds of thousands
Re:Enough, already (Score:5, Insightful)
Even so, this "Renewable Rulz" fanboisism is getting seriously annoying.
A simple, uncomfortable, physically unavoidable truth is that any activity which is not sustainable and renewable simply cannot continue indefinitely. It frankly does not matter what it is.
having a large fraction of renewable capacity on the grid poses technical challenges. One would think that News for Nerds would have a greater appreciation for this
It has great appreciation for the fact that you need to build or build up storage when production is variable. This is true for any commodity, whether it's wheat, or microcontrollers, or electrical energy. And whether you're storing that in a warehouse, or in the case of electricity as chemical energy, or potential kinetic energy, or in a supercapacitor or whatever magic future tech is yet to be discovered, you fundamentally have to store excess for the lean times somehow.
However, because the reactors don't conveniently follow load, we have the same problem with nuclear. Instead of using the energy, we overproduce, or we use other sources to follow load while the nuclear plods along. In other words, we still need storage to make the whole thing efficient now. And indeed, there are often problems with grid reliability which would be solved or mitigated with distributed storage today, although many of them can and should be solved by burying lines. Despite the elevated costs for doing this in North America due to seismicity and terrain, the benefits are sufficiently manifold to be justifiable.
Re: (Score:2)
Even so, this "Renewable Rulz" fanboisism is getting seriously annoying.
A simple, uncomfortable, physically unavoidable truth is that any activity which is not sustainable and renewable simply cannot continue indefinitely. It frankly does not matter what it is.
That idea is to complex for the morons. They want their cake and eat it too, and when that fails, they do not learn and want it all over again. Eventually, a society with to many of these morons dies. Plenty of examples in history.
Re:Enough, already (Score:5, Interesting)
I spent many years working in the environmental field, and I always felt "sustainability" was a problematic framing. Non-sustainability per se is an inherently self-limiting problem. The real issue is that people need to stop doing non-sustainable things *before they are forced to*.
Why? Because it's always better to have choices than to let circumstances force change on you. Waiting until we have no choice but to address climate change is going to be fabulously expensive; come at the loss of things we will never in our lifetimes get back, and fall on the shoulders of people least responsible for the problem.
Re: (Score:3)
Even so, this "Renewable Rulz" fanboisism is getting seriously annoying.
A simple, uncomfortable, physically unavoidable truth is that any activity which is not sustainable and renewable simply cannot continue indefinitely. It frankly does not matter what it is.
That idea is to complex for the morons. They want their cake and eat it too, and when that fails, they do not learn and want it all over again. Eventually, a society with to many of these morons dies. Plenty of examples in history.
That's kind of a childish understanding of the situation with nuclear power. I could argue that solar and wind power are technically non renewable because the sun will at some point burn out. You'd call me a moron, and rightly so. With nuclear, the amount of nuclear material that can be concentrated and used as fuel, assuming both reprocessing of spent fuel and use of isotopes beyond just uranium, falls pretty squarely in the "practically limitless" category. Far more so than fossil fuels. And since th
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. Nuclear is not "proven". It is proven to be a problem instead. Far too expensive both to build and to run and even more expensive to decommission, far too unreliable, far too inflexible, not suitable for either base-load or regulation energy or reserve (too slow for the second and third, too unreliable for the first), and that does not include the extreme risk-cost and the cost for fuel storage. Any other tech with performance this bad gets dropped.
Nuclear power is in all regards the "idiot" option an
Re: Enough, already (Score:2)
Wonder how France works around all your purported problems, being largely powered by nuclear. Evidently the problems are all in your head or due to shitty regulation.
Re: (Score:2)
Wonder how France works around all your purported problems, being largely powered by nuclear. Evidently the problems are all in your head or due to shitty regulation.
Read up on all the severe problems France has as a result. There are many.
Re: Enough, already (Score:5, Insightful)
Wonder how France works around all your purported problems, being largely powered by nuclear.
France solved those with government spending. France nuclearized in response to the energy crisis of the 1970s, at a time when electricity was a state monopoly.
Doing it this way *did* have a number of advantages over waiting for a variety of private investors to organize a bunch of different reactor projects. The French program had economies of scale that private projects couldn't hope to match; in the first ten years it built 34 reactors of identical design, each delivering 900 MWe. They later built a tranche of 20 more reactors of a second design producing 1300 MWe and 4 of a 1450 MWe capacity. Whatever you think of the French government at that time, the rate at which they build successful nuclear projects was astonishing.
The EU later forced France to open its electricity market, and in 2004 France privatized Électricité de France. Since privatization EDF has not completed a single reactor in France, although it did finish two for China. There is a single reactor under construction, started in 2007, and now scheduled to come on line in 2022.
Nuclear worked in France because it wasn't supposed to make a return on investment, it was supposed to solve a national security problem. It's like building an aircraft carrier strike group; you don't expect to make money on it. Now the scale of the program allows them to operate those reactors profitably, although if you count the construction costs the plants technically aren't profitable. But that doesn't matter; those are sunk costs incurred in successfully achieving a national goal.
Conversely this same logic is why Texas quickly ended up with 20% of the wind power in the US: Texas has a hyper-privatized system, and a private investor prefers a bird in a nearby bush to two in a bush that's years down the road. You can break ground on a wind farm and be taking profits out in less than a year. Nuclear might be better for Texas, but what's good for Texas is none of the investor's concern.
Saying Nope clinches an argument (Score:2)
And people one disagrees with suffer from a high level of intellectual disability.
Re: (Score:2)
And people one disagrees with suffer from a high level of intellectual disability.
In this case, that is an accurate description. To be pro-nuclear requires ignoring a lot of facts at this time.
Re: (Score:2)
A simple, uncomfortable, physically unavoidable truth is that any activity which is not sustainable and renewable simply cannot continue indefinitely. It frankly does not matter what it is.
Replacing nuclear plants with a renewable that has the same energy density and capacity factor would require orogeny, and we don't have time to wait around for that. What they are actually being replaced by is natural gas. Enjoy your additional carbon and burning of a fuel that will run out long before uranium will.
Re:Enough, already (Score:5, Informative)
> Replacing nuclear plants with a renewable that has the same energy density and capacity factor
Why would we need to do that, though?
Some estimates suggest that we'd need about 21,000 square miles [freeingenergy.com] of solar panels to capture all of the energy the US needs for a year - plus storage because of course the sun doesn't shine at night blah blah... the area is based on watt-hours so that's already factored in.
The oil & gas industry in the US occupies roughly 41,000 square miles [blm.gov] (26,604,169 acres) so it's not like we don't have the space.
And with that 20,000 square miles of PV panels spread out across the country you'd probably never even notice it.
The argument from energy density just doesn't hold much water.
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:2)
The argument from energy density just doesn't hold much water.
But it holds even less sunlight. First, the fun part: just try filing statements of impact for taking any given 21,000 square miles out of the sacred Environment, includimng areas that already have oil and gas wells drilled below them. Then, the expensive part: the entirely new grid it's going to take to shuffle that much PV power around the country to where it can do anything at all useful. Several trillion, at least.
For less than that, you could build a whole new set of latest generation, standardized des
Re: (Score:3)
> just try filing statements of impact for taking any given 21,000 square miles out of the sacred Environment
Well, we can reclaim half of the 40,000 square miles already being ruined for oil & gas and use that, and still have 19,000 square miles of reclaimed wilderness. How's that?
According to NREL [nrel.gov] there's about 1900 square miles (4.9 billion square meters) of rooftops suitable for solar PV installations... on small buildings. There's another 1200 square miles in medium and large building, so that's
Re: (Score:2)
23 Billion [youtu.be] solar panels needed for the entire world.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
FYI: Overproducing is not "efficient" however it is cheaper than storage and that's why they went that route.
Re: (Score:2)
Overproducing is not "efficient" however it is cheaper than storage and that's why they went that route.
Right, but we're spending through natural capital at an unsustainable rate on multiple bases, and we can't afford to do it the cheap way any more.
Re:Enough, already (Score:4, Interesting)
Overproducing is not "efficient" however it is cheaper than storage and that's why they went that route.
Right, but we're spending through natural capital at an unsustainable rate on multiple bases, and we can't afford to do it the cheap way any more.
That's a decision for a society implemented thru laws and regulations. Unfortunately it is difficult to get society to support long-term sustainability. A lot of people are more concerned with the more pressing matters of their current finances or are simply selfish. The "Collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery" is one of unfortunately many examples of this.
Re: (Score:2)
Microgrids [youtu.be] for resiliency.
Re: (Score:3)
>> However, because the reactors don't conveniently follow load, we have the same problem with nuclear.
THIS.
Nuclear is as much unfriendly to the grid as solar.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not quite sure what to make of this. It's not a technical criticism.
Yes, and I think an important thing for the fans of nuclear to understand is that the US (and many other countries) don't have a centralized energy generation, which
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Stability isn't the only reason [wikipedia.org]. You'll see more for the same reason given in your post. It makes someone money. Stability is just a bonus.
Re: (Score:2)
Elon will sell lots of batteries there.
Re: (Score:2)
"That 10,000 megawatts of solar power would be equal to more than eight would-be Bellefonte reactors."
Alright, OK, 10 gW of solar capacity is a lot, but given that the solar capacity is only there in daylight when it is not too cloudy and the nuclear power industry in the US has a record of running those plants ever more constantly, this is an intellectually impaired comparison.
Yes, I "get" that at least in the US, nuclear plants tend to be run "flat out" without varying their output to meet demand variation. Even though I guess in France they have such a high nuclear fraction that they do load following, that is problematic with a reactor because of the need to control the level of fission-product isotopes not to get a power excursion like at Chernobyl, although the control problem with light-water reactors is not as extreme.
Even so, this "Renewable Rulz" fanboisism is getting seriously annoying. Yeah, yeah and again yeah, Retail Demand Management where the power company gets to either cut you off or throttle you back, but having a large fraction of renewable capacity on the grid poses technical challenges. One would think that News for Nerds would have a greater appreciation for this than some rando news source
The millstone around the neck of Nuclear power is its astronomical price-tag and the high LCOE not "Renewable Rulz" fanboisism because Renewable actually Rulz, ... on price.
Renewable Rulz on price (Score:2)
if there is no economic value to reliability.
(channeling Frau Farbissina's yelling)
"Bring on the privately owned diesel generators!"
Economically obsolete. (Score:2)
Nuclear power is economically obsolete.
10GW of solar (bringing more energy) costs much less than 2GW of nuclear
Re: (Score:2)
"technical challenges" is pretty disingenuous. That is like saying owning a house without walls or a roof causes heating challenges. A house without walls or a roof, simply is not a house and cannot be heated effectively. The proper way to heat the house will always be to build a roof and walls. Similarly, a electricity grid made up of renewables does not solve the basic issues a electricity grid is trying to solve, and the correct way to fix it (other than living next to a nation with loads of nuclear powe
Re: (Score:2)
Grid improvements, including battery storage, could solve a lot of problems both for nuclear and renewables.
The real problem with load following in a nuclear plant is financial: you don't save much money by cutting your plant's output in half, but your *revenue* goes down by half. However a nuclear plant with a large iron-air battery can time shift energy generated in off-peak hours to peak hours, making a nuclear plant more profitable to operate.
Batteries also address the "dunkelflaute" problem with renew
New battery tech had a crossover this year. (Score:2)
Alright, OK, 10 gW of solar capacity is a lot, but given that the solar capacity is only there in daylight when it is not too cloudy and the nuclear power industry in the US has a record of running those plants ever more constantly, this is an intellectually impaired comparison.
Not any more. New battery tech is improving at a furious pace and is becoming practical for utility-scale time-shifting of solar power right now.
Just for starters, this is the year that current production systems based on each of TW
Re: (Score:3)
Build solar thermal storage, works all night.
Just amazes me that people think we can make nuclear work, but for some reason storing energy for several hours and adjusting demand a bit is beyond us.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, but the problem is deeper than that. See, nuclear regulation in the US works more or less like this:
a) Any time a bureaucrat has a new insight (empirical or scientific evidence not required, the insight alone is sufficient) on how a plant could become more secure (whether it really would or not), that becomes the rule and must be applied to any power plant still under construction. This result in lots of power plants having had to tear down entire areas already built to redo them anew, multiple times,
Re:Um, ok (Score:5, Insightful)
As a result, novel, more secure, while also cheaper designs...
Please show us these cheaper reactor designs.
Nuclear power was always very expensive, mostly due to construction costs, but even running nuclear plants turned out to be more expensive than expected. To date, when factoring in the investment in R&D, an investment that produced negative returns, as well as spent fuel storage and security, nuclear power remains the most expensive method of generating power ever conceived and implemented. The fission boiling water reactors in use today were always the least expensive designs of the lot and remain so today.
If your argument is that bureaucratic insight, trashed scientific criteria, and regulations are what make nuclear power expensive, your argument is flawed. What makes nuclear power expensive is site preparation, engineering, manufacturing, construction, commissioning, fuel, spent fuel storage, security and financing, the last of which is the nail in the coffin. No nuclear power plant anywhere ever has been profitable. Think about that. Not even in China or Russia, with an absence of strict regulations, has nuclear power been profitable. An absence of profitability is what stops new plants from being built, not regulations. Make it profitable and you can have a nuclear power plant in every county in the US; if it could be made profitable, no one and nothing could stop nuclear power plants from being built with wide adoption. The investors are not interested. Blame them if you must, but please quit with the whiney bullshit.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Where did the money come from to keep France in power, when their power is 75% nuclear....for forty years? By your "nuclear is unprofitable" theory, the French utility has had 40 years of subsidies that were kept utterly secret by government after government, as left and right took over. Because there are no such subsidies in evidence, on the books.
I'll grant you, power in France is not cheap, but it's not cheaper in the surrounding non-nuclear nations, either. If enough money to run the reactors was
Re:Um, ok (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll grant you, power in France is not cheap, but it's not cheaper in the surrounding non-nuclear nations, either. If enough money to run the reactors wasn't coming from the utility bills, and no subsidies are showing on the books, where the hell did the extra money come from? The plants are also growing dope in the basement?
The nuclear power plants in France are mostly government-owned and run. The heavy use of nuclear power seems to mostly be about energy independence and security. They would rather pay more but be able to weather supply shortages, wars, etc. The actual costs for that nuclear power are a bit obscure. Of course, here we have an interesting puzzle. Either nuclear power in France is actually expensive, and the taxpayers are paying for it both through their electric bills and their taxes, or it's cheap and it turns out that socialist control over industry is a lot cheaper than capitalism. Neither of those scenarios are the sort of thing that most of the nuclear power enthusiasts I've run into on Slashdot would be happy to admit to.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
As a result, novel, more secure, while also cheaper designs...
Please show us these cheaper reactor designs.
Pebble bed reactors, eVinci... even the third-generation standard designs are cheaper than building a second generation plant, which is what they were doing. Even if you ignored the fact that large parts of the plant would have been past the end of their design life on day one, the NRC should never have authorized continuing construction of a generation II plant, IMO. They should have started over with a modern reactor design.
Nuclear power was always very expensive, mostly due to construction costs, but even running nuclear plants turned out to be more expensive than expected. To date, when factoring in the investment in R&D, an investment that produced negative returns, as well as spent fuel storage and security, nuclear power remains the most expensive method of generating power ever conceived and implemented. The fission boiling water reactors in use today were always the least expensive designs of the lot and remain so today.
Spent fuel storage is expensive only because of bulls**t politics. There's abso
Re: (Score:2)
Typical cost of nuclear power plant construction in the United States: $5,500 to $8,100 per kW (25 to 30 cents per kWh operating cost). Average cost of recent nuclear power plant construction in Japan: $3,343 per kW (7.7 cents per kWh operating cost).
I frequently see the claim that nuclear costs are grossly inflated in the US because of environmental opposition. And country to country comparisons could bolster that claim. But, I am always suspicious when people throw out numbers without citing their provenance. It suggests they aren't based on careful research.
Can you provide sources for your numbers? That would go a long ways towards supporting your argument.
Re: (Score:3)
> Pebble bed reactors
Ummm, every single one has been an economic disaster. They're going to still be paying for AVR in another 100 years. How can you possibly not know this?
> eVinci ... has never been built, and it comes from a company whose predictive powers are so accurate that they went bankrupt and nearly took down all of Toshiba with them. Their $6.25 reactor is now up to about $12. So, yeah... not going to give anyone the benefit of the doubt when it comes to Westinghouse.
> Spent fuel storage
Re: (Score:2)
As a result, novel, more secure, while also cheaper designs...
Please show us these cheaper reactor designs.
Simple - unshielded, no containment structure, and non-regulated. Cheap AF.
Re: (Score:3)
Weren't for all this nonsense and nuclear energy would be ten times cheaper than the cheapest alternative
That's an absurd claim offered without any evidence to back it up. It also is totally false [arstechnica.com]. People actually study these things, you see, and we have real data on what actually contributes to the high cost of nuclear. Without all the safety requirements, nuclear would indeed be a bit cheaper, but only a little. And also less safe.
Re: (Score:2)
The safety regulations aren't the problem. Similar safety regulations exist everywhere. What makes nuclear power so expensive in the U.S. are the years of lawsuits trying to keep it from starting up, followed by the years of lawsuits trying to shut it down, plus all the red tape. But you're right. It's not cheaper than other forms of power. It should be about one-quarter as expensive as it is per kW, but that puts it at the same level as solar, not cheaper.
With some of the newer designs, though, it wi
Re: (Score:2)
It should be about one-quarter as expensive as it is per kW
Do you have a source for that number?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but the problem is deeper than that. See, nuclear regulation in the US works more or less like this:
Am*nd that fact that every other country in the world is on 100 percent nuclear power is the proof of your thesis. It is 100 percent US regulation that is holding the world back.
If we could only allow elimination of all regulations, private enterprise will create a perfect nuclear powered world, with electricity too cheap to meter.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is "nuclear".
The "free market" private sector Vogtle plant also wasted billions of taxpayers and ratepayers money before collapsing.
Re: (Score:2)
Batteries make the grid stable for a time however they can't keep industry going.
Newer ones are coming that can.
Like JUST GOT THERE RIGHT NOW to production within the next three years.
We're entering that sweet-and-sour stage where we have good enough tech and the main holdup on deployment is that the improvements are coming so thick and fast that manufacturers risk being obsoleted before the new plant is paid off. That effect should taper off over the next few - like five - years.