Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Hard To Keep Up

Another week of breathing smoke, and I'm reading about the administration's attempt to rollback the clean air standards for power plants (especially coal-fired plants) which in the long run would dramatically affect the quality of the air we, and future generations, will breathe. The energy industry continues to do everything they can to discourage renewables with their blatant expensive PR campaign.

Nuclear power is basically dead because it simply is too expensive and not cost effective in our energy mix even without massive subsidies. It is not a solution to our climate change challenges. In fact, when it is really hot, and the demand for electricity is great, many reactors have to shit down because of cooling water problems. The "renaissance" from 12 years ago is dead! The half-built Sumner plant in South Carolina has been scrapped, and all the powers that be are trying to sort out who has/will pay the $9 billion already spent. Of course, the ratepayers will ultimately be on the hook for about $6,500 each, and the utilities and giants like Westinghouse walk away or go bankrupt. The Vogle plant in Georgia, still under construction, is faring no better, and will probably be canceled within the next year. Twelve years and some $20 billion later...no affordable, clean electricity! The same is true in other parts of the "free world." Bechtel just pulled out of the Hitachi deal to build a nuke in Britain. France is struggling with it's two new generation plants under construction. Japan can't afford to even upgrade and reopen its 50 idle plants because it is struggling with the massive costs of trying to figure out what to do with Fukushima, which continues to be a massive mess.

With this economic failure on the construction side, a few utilities are now having to deal with the back-end of the technology. The shutdown and decommissioning of plants around the US and elsewhere is creating incredible economic issues. Vermont Yankee, San Onofre, Diablo Canyon, Oyster Creek, and the dozen more in the block will cost ratepayers tens of billions of dollars today, and hundreds of billions over the next 100 years or so. The strategy here is to defer decommissioning for 40-60 years (for worker safety reasons!) And, there are still another 80+ plants that are rapidly approaching the end of their useful life.

And then again, there is the issue of spent fuel management and storage. Yucca Mountain will never open, so the industry's push is to send the dry casks to a central "temporary" facility run by a couple of corporations. The Holtec plan for New Mexico is great for Holtec (a privately held company) since they also are one of the largest builders of dry casks. Billions and billions of our dollars here! The only other option is to leave the 10+ million dollar casks on site, and continue to spend millions of dollars per year monitoring and safeguarding them for eternity. The big issue right now at San Onofre on the California south coast is that those 250+ casks will sit on a pad 100 yards from the Pacific Ocean. Sea rise, earthquakes, tsunami, all those immigrant terrorists...not to worry, the powers that be will take care of it! The hyped-up promise of cheaper small modular reactors is still tied to all the other issues of fuel storage, the balance of system, grid interties, etc., and realistically and technologically will not be cost effective.

Nuclear fusion is again making some waves with the promise of clean, cheap, unlimited energy will soon be there for us. Another giant hoax and myth that is sucking up our research dollars. We probably will achieve a sustained fusion reaction, but all the issues affecting the fission industry today will apply to fusion reactors. True, there will not be any high-level wastes (long-lived transuranics) produced; but we're still dealing with neutrons and the activation problems they create. Interesting enough, the USS Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, which has been in mothballs for many years now with its spent fuel removed from its 10 small (10MW) reactors. The current estimate to "decommission" the ship is over $1 billion, due to the neutron activation making it difficult to disassemble, and the metal un-recyclable. The other challenging issues with fusion involve how to contain the hot plasma (hundreds of millions of degrees) and extract the heat necessary to boil water into steam to spin the turbine which spins the generator which creates a flow of electricity. We're not going to have one in every garage...The "costs" of large central power sources make them uneconomical and eventually unnecessary in our future electricity systems. The other interesting sidelight of fusion fuel...unlimited deuterium in seawater, must be extracted. Deuterium has a natural abundance in Earth's oceans of about one atom in 6420 of hydrogen. Great...I've always been a proponent of the hydrogen economy, where H2 will be the storage medium to be used in fuel cells or combusted back to water. Right now hydrogen production is too expensive.????? What about the tritium? Construction costs, O&M costs, decommissioning costs?

The good news is that gains in hydrogen as an energy carrier and storage medium other than for use in vehicles is making some gains in Australia, Germany, Canada, and Japan. Again, the US lags behind. The solar industry continues to grow, in spite of the tariffs, penalties, and the push for coal and nuclear power. The cost continues to come down as the technology matures, efficiency increases, and individuals and business realize the cost-effectiveness and savings they can have. More on this later.

Just a few references (there are so many now each day!)







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