As the summer went by, not much really happened
in the nuclear world that would aspire confidence in a resurgence of nuclear
power as the industry is continuing to tout.
In spite of Japan restarting one or its 48 reactors idled for the past
four year, numerous plants are being cancelled, closed, and/or at least under strong
economic scrutiny.
Here in the US, construction on four new
reactors continues, although all are now seriously behind schedule and way over
budget. Current discussions about the
two Vogle plants in Georgia are centered around the cost savings to rate-payers
and taxpayers from abandoning the projects entirely versus the exorbitant
projected lifecycle cost of $65 billion, excluding decommissioning and waste
disposal; and a projected $0.15/KWH wholesale cost for the electricity it would
produce. It will be another four or
five years before any of these actually come o line. A fifth reactor, begun in the ‘70s in Tennessee, may come online
sometime soon; but the concern there is that this is 40 year old
technology…sort of taking that ’72 Buick, finding an old V-8 engine and
transmission, and hoping it will make the run cross country a couple of hundred
times.
The industry is all a flutter in the wishful
thinking that the new generation of small modular reactors will hit the market
in the next ten or so years, and that they will be so cheap and cost effective
that the utilities will order them by the hundreds. I really don’t think so; this overall scenario has been widely
argued and dismissed as realistic. I
will discuss small modulars in the future.
I do hope all the money that is going into this research can lead to a
small reactor that can be used under very appropriate conditions; but their
large scale development will never compete with the low costs, safety,
pollution-free, and non- terrorist potentials that renewables have to offer.
The other new direction some are hoping for is a
thorium-based reactor, will also prove to be uneconomical if it can be made to
work by the huge investment in its supportive infrastructure.
We’ve yet to build a working model of a thorium
reactor! The same hold true for the
pipe dream of fusion power.
The other big publicity push by the industry
involves the management of nuclear wastes.
Again, there are two major components to this problem. The first is decommission of the 100
reactors we have in this country, most of which will reach the end of their
designed useful life within the next 20-30 years. The industry wants to extend their operating licenses by
rebuilding and upgrading these old power plants. It cheaper for the utilities to run these into the ground, rather
than build new ones. Just the other
day 5 old reactors failed to sell their electricity at auction in the east
because their electricity is too expensive.
These same utilities are asking Public Utilities Commissions for
subsidies and rate increases to upgrade and keep their nukes running. We will soon see more reactors retired. Again, safety issues comes into play with
the biggest battle soon to be openly fought
involving the twin reactors at Diablo Canyon. Will these reactors be allowed to run in today’s knowledgeable
environment of earthquake risks and old design; and the fact the PG&E
deliberately colluded with the California Public Utilities Commission over the
years with faulty design information.
The closed reactors at San Onofre, Vermont,
Wisconsin, and Florida are all limbo as the utilities argue over what/when
deconstruction will begin, and more importantly, how/who will pay the huge
undetermined cost. Most utilities do not have enough money in their supposed
decommissioning trust funds as required by law, and closing reactors before the
end of their supposed life has serious consequences on how, when, and who will
pay the bill. We’ll see how many
plants close in the next few years, and how they will impact the discussion.
The whole quagmire of spent nuclear fuel
continues to stew with false promises and technical challenges. I still contend that there is no real
solution to this issue other than the long-term storage in containers that can
be monitored and repaired/replaced when needed. Dry casks were originally designed with a lifespan of 50 years,
although today the industry hopes for 100 years.
Humboldt Bay has 6 casks, 5 of them holding 12
tons of fuel each. The 6th
cask has very high-level reactor internals.
These cost about $1m each, and about $9m each to load, seal, and place
in the storage facility (ISFISI.) The
US has about 80,000 tons of spent fuel which it needs to deal with. This will be a very expensive issue for the
future, since we will probably have to secure some 7000+ casks in the future,
at a cost of $70 billion+? There is a lot of talk about reviving Yucca Mountain
once Senator Harry Reid retires, but again, this is a technical and
environmental issue, and less a political one.
(Interesting how politicians trust certain scientists and not others!)
The leaks at the WIPP facility in new Mexico, where materials containing hugely
significant lower amounts of heat generating radiation have been placed
underground, have been blamed on human error…doing the wrong thing! Not much confidence in storing more
dangerous stuff for a minimum of 10,000 years.
The latest scheme comes from Texas, where the
owners of Low Level Waste site now want to begin accepting dry casks from
around the nation to one centralized
location. Industry is pushing
Congress to privatize waste storage, so that the huge amounts of money could go
directly to firms like Holtec, Westinghouse, and Bechtel, and bypass authority
that all Administrations and Congresses since the ‘50s have ceded to the
Federal Government.
Centralized storage has been brought up
before. In the ‘90’s, DOE tried to
bribe a small of Goshute Native Americans in Utah with millions of dollars to
give up a portion of their reservation land for a monitored retrieval
site. That didn’t happen because of
concerns of safety from having a large amount of spent fuel in one location,
that the proposed site would most likely become a de-facto High Level Waste
dump, that the costs and problems with transporting all this material from
across the nation, and the fact that the land was in the direct path of a major
Air Force testing range. This, too, was
before 911, and the new founded concerns of terrorism must enter into the new
scenario. Storing thousands of casks
above ground in one place is not really a great idea,
unless you were to make a lot of money doing so!
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