Dealing With Our Nuclear Spent Fuel

Over the last couple of months, there has been a lot of talk about finally doing something with the spent fuel inventory that is steadily increasing on site at our nuclear reactors.  The problem is, there is no solution to permanently dispose of this waste, and there is no realistic technology available to even render it less dangerous.  It simply must be isolated from the environment.

Spent fuel is the “used up” fuel from a nuclear reactor.  A fresh fuel rod contains 97% Uranium 238, and 3% U235 (the fissionable form of Uranium.)  After about 2 years of use in a reactor, it is “spent,” and now has a composition of about 96% Uranium 238, 1% U235, 1% Plutonium 239 (which is created by neutron capture of U238), and 2-3% fission products (formed when U235 fissions.)  The fuel rods are typically removed and stored in a pool to keep them cool, and provide shielding from the high levels of radioactivity that they emit.  Hence, it is called high-level waste.  After about five years, the fuel has somewhat stabilized with many of the fission products having decayed; but the remaining ones, as well as the Plutonium, remain highly radioactive for many thousands of years.  This material needs to be contained and shielded, and continues to give off heat as a byproduct of its radioactive decay. 

There is about 70,000 tons of spent fuel stored at reactor sites in the U.S., and utilities are running out of room in their fuel pools as they keep adding to the volume.  Many are opting to place these fuel bundles into dry-cask storage…large heavily shielded canisters that typically sit on a pad outside, and are air-cooled.  At Humboldt Bay, there are 6 casks, and it cost close to $70 million to put the fuel into dry storage.  It costs about $12 million/year for security, monitoring, and maintenance.  It is estimated that we would need some 6000+ casks to contain our current spent fuel inventory.  $80 billion + ??? in today’s dollars.

Nuclear fuel is owned by the government’s Department of Energy, and it is “rented” out to nuclear utilities.  The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act mandated that by 1998, the government would have a deep geologic repository ready, and would take possession of the spent fuel.  This has not happened…not even close.  Many years, and $15 billion have been spent on Yucca Mountain, a possible repository site north of Las Vegas.  Aside from all the politics, the bottom line is that the DOE could not meet the EPA criteria and standards for containment of radioactivity at this site.  This isolation from the environment needs to be for a minimum of 10,000 years, even though radioactivity will remain there for 100,000 years or more.  The sealed central storage of so much radioactivity would produce high amounts of heat that would unpredictably create changes in the geology of the mountain, and threaten the integrity of the casks themselves.  Cask failure could lead to the release and mixing of fuel that could trigger fission processes, explosions, contamination of ground water, and a host of other unknown reactions during the thousands of years this material is active.  Allison MacFarlane (the new chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a noted geologist) concludes the obvious in her excellent book “Uncertainty Underground.”   We do not know enough to be able to model and predict what will happen so many years into the future.

The recent push by the nuclear industry, wanting to rid themselves of the responsibility of spent fuel, is pushing for a new “independent” review of Yucca Mountain.  President Obama’s Blue Ribbon Committee of a few years ago came to the conclusion that there is no solution to this waste problem.  Congress will now form another committee to “come up with a solution.”  This is not a political problem.  It is the scientific reality that radioactivity is an atomic-level process, and not a molecular one that can be manipulated and neutralized.  We cannot make it go away.  The early nuclear pioneers understood this, but in the glory days of nuclear bombs and “electricity too cheap to meter,” they rushed ahead hoping that someday, someone would figure it out.  70 years down the road, we don’t even have a clue.  Oh, what to do?

There are several possible courses of action, which will be looked at and proposed over the next couple of years.  The first is to continue characterizing Yucca Mountain or finding some other geologic site somewhere…Texas, New Mexico, Mississippi ???   We are not alone, since other countries are also beginning to look at solutions for their wastes.  Sweden, with its relatively small amount of spent fuel, is currently storing it in copper casks in a geologic cave, with the idea that it can be retrieved when a better solution is found.  Problems have already begun to surface.  Germany has recently reopened their  investigations, going back to the drawing board.  Japan doesn’t have a clue with what they are going to do…right now they’re “underwater.”

A second option is an idea that has been around for a while and involves creating a central Monitored Retrievable Site.  Take all the casks, and ship them to one location.  The leading contender is Skull Mountain in Utah, where the 35 members of the Goshute Indian Rancheria were offered $50 million to use a portion of their land for this purpose.  Too bad it is directly in the flight path of an Air Force practice bombing range!  Placing all this material in one place is very risky, especially with current terrorist and climate change possibilities.  Transporting 6000+ casks and storing them in the open air…???!!!  And then transporting them again if/when a repository is built, or maintaining/re-casking the spent fuel 50-60 years down the road?  Security?  Very expensive and dangerous.

A third option, which the nuclear industry wants, is probably more insane than the initial creation of the entire nuclear power business.  Reprocessing, or recycling as they call it, involves taking the fuel rods, grinding them up and dissolving them in acids, and then separating out the U238, the unused U235, and the Plutonium, which would then be put into new fuel.  This is what was done in Hanford to acquire the Plutonium for our nuclear bombs. The remaining liquids, containing the highly radioactive fission products, would then be concentrated, and “vitrified”…converted into a glass/ceramic log that will have to be disposed of in a geologic repository for thousands of years.  Sounds great?  Ed Lyman, a prominent scientist with the Union of Concerned  Scientists says “reprocessing actually increases, not decreases, the total volume of long-lived nuclear waste that must be stored and eventually buried in a geologic repository  It only slightly reduces the volume of high-level nuclear waste that must be disposed of in a repository.”  Can we really do this?  At what cost?  The “new” vitrification plant under construction at Hanford is half completed, 12 years behind schedule, and 13X over budget at a current $13 billion. How many of these plants would we have to build, and where?  How would we be transporting all this dangerous material around?  We’d have to build new power plants to burn the “new” mixed-oxide fuel and Plutonium fuel?  How much would it cost to build this whole new infrastructure?  We tried this in West Valley, New York back in the 70’s and it turned into an economic and environmental disaster.  

Reprocessing produces more problems that it can solve.  It hasn’t worked for England, Germany, and Japan.  The French are reprocessing for the Japanese, and are nowhere near dealing with their own spent fuel.  We don’t know much about the Russian program, but are very concerned with the possibility of Iran and North Korea developing the process to build nuclear weapons. The bottom line is that reprocessing would be a very, very expensive proposition that the taxpayer would wind up funding.  Hundreds of billions of dollars.

There are other options out there…putting it in rockets and shooting it into the sun, dumping it in the deep sea trenches, drilling a deep hole into the earth’s crust and dropping the canisters down.  The most recent moronic idea comes from the chairman of the Oregon Republican Party…”sprinkle nuclear waste over the oceans from airplanes…”

The best strategy seems to be to place spent fuel in dry-cask storage, and keep that material on site until a better solution comes up…which may be never, meaning that the 30+ nuclear sites would become defacto waste dumps.  At least the casks can be monitored, maintained, and repaired if need be.  There are several sites, such as California’s Humboldt Bay, Diablo Canyon, and San Onofre, where special safety issues  such as earthquake, tsunami, and flooding, might require moving these casks to a more secure location. 

Whatever we decide to do, it will be very EXPENSIVE for a very long time.

Some source material:

http://allthingsnuclear.org/fact-fiction-and-faith-the-endless-debate-over/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/30/utilities-nuclear-yuccamountain-idUSL2N0GV2AC20130830

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/Aug/22/nuclear-fuel-pools-scrutinized/2/?#article-copy

http://www.ocregister.com/taxdollars/waste-520410-nuclear-storage.html

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/08/oregon-gop-art-robinson-nuclear-waste-airplanes

And then, there is Low-Level Radioactive Wastes…a whole other story:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-04/nuclear-trashmen-gain-from-record-u-s-reactor-shutdowns.html

Fukushima Update, August 2013

Water, water everywhere, and not a drop…

 

Two and a half years after the nuclear accidents at Fukushima, things are in worse shape than when the earthquake and tsunami hit.  Although it is difficult to really know what is going on there, we know the containment and cleanup is going rather poorly.

The six reactors there each suffered different kinds of accidents.  The two most serious ones were the damage to the core of the reactor in Unit 1, and the damage to the spent-fuel pool of Units 2&3.  In both cases, the immediate need has been, and continues to be cooling the fuel to keep it from melting.  Hence, large amounts of water continues to be pumped into these two facilities, resulting in the outflow of large amounts of radioactive contaminated water.  Under ideal conditions, this water would be captured, filtered, and then released.  A few glitches have come into play.

First of all, the buildings and structures are severely damaged, and the contaminated water is flooding the below-grade basements, and leaking into the groundwater below the plants.  Second, the earthquake altered some of the groundwater flows, so that it is now leaking in to some of the substructures of the plants, increasing the amount of water that has to be dealt with.  Third, the volume of radioactive water to be treated is far greater than the technical capacity available.  They have built over a thousand tanks to store the water for future treatment; and they will continue to add more tanks  for more water.  The problem is that some of the early tanks are already starting to leak.  “Tokyo Electric Power Co. says about 300 tons (300,000 liters, 80,000 gallons) of contaminated water leaked from one of the tanks, possibly through a seam (1),” and that highly radioactive water is getting into the groundwater, which will eventually reach the ocean.  The site of one of the leaks has soil contamination at such a high concentration, that a worker dealing with that leak would receive in one hour his maximum exposure dose allowable in five years.  “Masked workers found puddles with radiation readings of 100 millisieverts an hour near makeshift tanks that store contaminated water – enough to induce radiation sickness in less than 12 hours (2).” 

What to do?  Tepco has suggested building an ice dam all around the entire plant…they would put pipes down several hundred feet, and 24 inches apart, pump a refrigerant through it, and freeze the soil, blocking the flow of water.  Another option is to put a mechanical barrier down to divert the flow of water to somewhere…!  They are obviously going to have to repair the leaky tanks…maybe they should call on the folks who built the tanks at Hanford. 

The problem boils down to the fact that whatever is going to be done, it will be done in a dangerous, highly radioactive environment that will be technically challenging, very expensive, and putting thousands of workers at risk of the potential biological damages from radiation.  The Japanese government is willing to step in and take its budget surplus of several billion of dollars to help out.  However, this accident will run for decades, and will cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars…far more than the worth of the entire Japanese nuclear program.  Add to that the decommissioning cost of the 50 other idle reactors just in that country alone, and …well nuclear is cheap!

But, it’s only money.  Of greater concern is the potential long-term radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean, and the concentration of radioactivity in biological systems and fisheries that the world population is so highly dependent on.

(1)   http://news.yahoo.com/water-leaks-may-become-japan-132004111.html

(2)   http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/nuclear-crisis-fukushima-threat-level-raised-to-serious-as-plant-leaks-300-tonnes-of-radioactive-water-from-storage-tank-8775962.html

Update on Renewables

As we enter the second half of 2013, we find that renewable energy is alive, well, cost-competitive, and significantly gaining in the addition of new electricity generation here in the US, as well as the rest of the world.  The war has been won, although major battles continue to be launched and fought.  The current issue now is the fight which the Conservative, Big Fossil Fuel Industry, Republican, Anti-Environmental, Big Money…the Koch Brothers, Exxon, etc, all the players which I will now call the FFs…are launching against solar, wind, and energy efficiency.  Lots of money being spent by ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, and the like; but they seem to be losing their battles. 

Many states have imposed mandatory renewable quotas for their utilities, which created rate increases and general political upheaval over the years.  Subsidized energy!  Well, all that is changing.  In a landmark decision, Michigan (that wonderful sunny state) is now saying solar and wind are cost-competitive, and is reducing the ratepayer fees which helped bring these resources online.

            http://www.sfgate.com/business/energy/article/Green-energy-fees-disappearing-from-utility-bills-4739883.php

FF attacks on state renewable mandates are not having much success.

            http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/08/state-renewable-energy-laws-turn-out-to-be-really-hard-to-repeal/

            http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/08/2399121/corporations-clean-energy-standards/

The big FEAR the FFs have is the loss of money, and control and power over their customers who rely on aged utilities to supply them with electricity.  More and more individuals, as well as businesses, are installing their own solar systems, and selling power back to the utilities.  Obviously, this creates a huge new technical, economic, regulatory, and monopoly-busting nightmare for the electricity generating industry.  What to do, what to do?  Fight the change…or join the club.  We’re seeing major utilities, even in Georgia, getting into renewable generation.

            http://www.forbes.com/sites/uciliawang/2013/08/05/why-edison-wants-a-piece-of-the-rooftop-solar-business/?ss=business:energy

            http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-22/dominion-resources-buys-three-indiana-solar-projects.html

This is just business common sense.  If a utility is in business to supply electricity to its customer, then it can do so in a variety of ways…build a large central power plant, whether it is gas fired or solar, or wind…but it can also offer that generation potential in small packages on individual rooftops, commercial complexes, basically any appropriate site.  That is what many small solar businesses are already doing in California and many other states.  In other words, instead of fearing the “new age,” they should see opportunity to profit from it.  A good example is ATT and the telephone land-line.  More and more people are abandoning their old land-lines and going cellular.  The cost of maintaining land-line service is being paid for by a smaller and smaller share of customers.  We may eventually do away with those “telephone poles and wires,” but for now, ATT is very much into cell phones; making that positive transition to the “future.”  The same will be true for the electric utilities…at least those that survive.

            http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/08/us-utilities-threat-idUSBRE92709E20130308

Renewables are surging.  We need to keep in mind that the transition will take a certain amount of time.  We can go from 2% renewable electricity to 20-30% in the next 10 years if WE want to. It is an incredible opportunity to create jobs, allow for incredible technical innovation in the industry for production, storage, and cost reduction, be environmentally sustainable, and lead us into the future just as the computer chip has brought us to where we are today.

            http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/15/1231375/-Chart-2-3rds-of-global-solar-PV-has-been-installed-in-the-last-2-5-years#

            http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-08/solar-shipments-surge-in-second-quarter-as-demand-in-asia-swells.html

The battles will continue with the FFs pushing the lies and mis-statements that solar and renewables are too expensive; they are intermittent and thus cannot be trusted; the new small modular nuclear reactors are the wave of the future; global climate change is a hoax…all those clichés that are slowly getting worn out. 

As my friend says, ”follow the money!”

Cracks in the Economics of Renewables Myth

This has been an amazing week with a significant shift in the perceived ECONOMICS of renewables.  The myth (lie) that solar and wind are too expensive is starting to fall apart.  The blockbuster decision this week by Georgia’s Public Service Commission to force Georgia Power to add 525 megawatts of solar by 2016 is a major step (an economic step) forward, and will lead to the revelations that renewables are/will be truly affordable, cost effective, and environmentally sustainable.

The powers that be, namely the Koch brothers, Exxon, Fox News, etc. have for years pushed the lies and misstatements.  In Georgia last week, Americans For Prosperity-GA, the nation’s premiere grassroots organization for promoting “economic freedom,” launched a project asking activists to urge PSC members to “Keep The Lights On In Georgia” by opposing renewable energy mandates that have been shown to raise the cost of electricity.
http://americansforprosperity.org/georgia/newsroom/immediate-release-afp-ga-launches-keep-the-lights-on-in-ga-project/#ixzz2Z2RQ93Mk

After the Commission voted 3-2 in favor of renewables, “Georgia Power, in a surprising about-face, backed off that argument on Thursday after months of making that case. Instead, its attorney said for the first time that the added solar likely wouldn’t affect power bills.”  Yowie Zowie!

In another surprise move, “Xcel’s Southwestern Public Service unit is asking regulators for permission to buy almost 700 megawatts of power from wind farms in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico.  The deal will save customers $590 million in fuel expenses over 20 years and the wind farms will generate power at costs lower than most of Xcel’s natural gas plants, according to Riley Hill, president and chief executive officer of Southwestern Public Service. “We are making these acquisitions purely on economics and the savings we can deliver to our customers,” Hill said in the statement.” WOW!  Saving money for its customers with renewables?  What a concept!

The “conservatives” fight against renewables has been going on for the last 30 years and more.  They fear the loss of profits by the status quo because the fuel is FREE!  No money to be made in exploration, extraction, transportation, processing, more transportation, and finally in some retail sales.  Less cost to the consumer…less profit.

In another arena this week, Republicans in the House blocked a bill to increase light bulb efficiency.  Again, the efficient use of energy, saving energy, means less profit for the fossil energy giants.  It’s all about money, and as my friend says “follow the money!”

So, today, we’ve taken another small step in the right direction…seems like we’re taking more and more larger steps…but we still  have a long way to go.

Some interesting insights:

1. Another of the Koch brother’s organizations: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218301/-ALEC-Strikes-again-by-Resolving-to-Free-Electrity
2. Fear for the traditional electricity producers: http://grist.org/climate-energy/solar-panels-could-destroy-u-s-utilities-according-to-u-s-utilities/
3. A nice summary of the anti-renewables campaigns: http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201303/grapple-renewable-energy-electricity-freedom-act.aspx
4. More on the Koch brothers: http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201303/grapple-renewable-energy-electricity-freedom-act.aspx
5. Our democracy in full action: http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201303/grapple-renewable-energy-electricity-freedom-act.aspx
6. Energy efficiency?  One of the basic problem sets I had my students do was a cost analysis between a 100 watt incandescent light bulb and a 23 watt compact florescent.  Basic math!  Things have even gotten better. http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/310167-house-again-blocks-enforcement-of-light-bulb-standards

The Sun is Shining

I had a wonderful 4^th of July reflecting and discussing how fortunate we are to live in this great nation of America, in spite of all its ongoing problems, and its more recent polarization.  This past week has been a major turning pointing for solar energy in California, and is likely to set precedent for the rest of the country.

The Southwest suffered through an incredible heat wave, which now appears to be subsiding.  Energy pundits were predicting disaster in the state; the two reactors at San Onofre were gone, one unit at Diablo Canyon developed a weld crack and was shut down, and low precipitation in the winter diminished available hydropower.  The loss of some 4000MW of electricity would plunge the state into blackouts, brownouts…industry, people would suffer.  It didn’t happen!  The availability, pricing, and dispatch of electricity is a very complex process, but here are a few things to consider.

The Cal ISO is responsible for keeping the electrons flowing in the wires.  The System Status page on their website is crucial to understanding what is going on.  http://www.caiso.com/SystemStatus.html

shows electricity use for the entire day.  At night, use is low, hitting a low of 24,000MW around 4am.  The peak usually occurs around 4-5pm, and is normally around 34,000MW.  When it is really hot, for the few weeks out of the year, the peak can reach 44,000MW, mainly due to air conditioning, as it did earlier in the week. This demand has to be met, but here are a few key points in this equation.  There was a 20% buffer…available electricity, which can be called upon when needed.  In the case last Tuesday, the amount of electricity available at peak was 55,000MW, 11,000 more than what was needed or used.  These small generators are called “peakers” and are usually small jet turbines that can be turned on/off in a matter of minutes.  They are expensive to run because they only operate for a short period of time when fuel costs are at their highest.  http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/jun/29/peaking-units/#axzz2XiYZW5H3

The main point is that we have a lot of generating capacity that is unused during most of a 24 hour period and during most of the year…all there to meet the peak demand when it is hot because the sun is shinning.

Scroll down the page, and look at the renewables contribution to the demand.  The state has about 2000MW from utility grade solar, and an estimated 1500MW from small-scale rooftop systems.  This made up for the loss of nuclear electricity, and because the fuel is free, was actually cheaper than running the natural gas peakers.

Solar is too expensive!  How often have we heard that?  How do we quantify the economics of solar…nuclear…any kind of energy.  That is a great mystery, but the basic economic principles account for Capital investment (design and construction costs), O & M (cost of fuel, operation, and maintenance), End costs (dismantlement, waste disposal, etc), and Profit (utilities are guaranteed a profit after they have paid taxes, insurance, depreciation, public programs, advertising, etc, etc.).  Solar has very low O&M costs (the fuel is free), minimal End costs, but has had high Capital costs.  All that is rapidly changing.  The recent rash of bankruptcies in the solar manufacturing industry worldwide has been due to dramatic reduction in the cost of the final product…the PV cell.  Major blame can be placed on China for “subsidizing” their solar industry, and now dominating the global solar market.

Here are some quotes from recent reading:

“The EIA has historically overestimated the cost of renewables, and underestimated the cost of conventional fuels. The new 50-MW Macho Springs solar plant under construction by First Solar in New Mexico will deliver power for $50.79/MWh (that’s 5 cents/kwh) under its Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), and other US solar projects have come in this year in the range of $70 to $90/MWh.”

“The price of power in the Mid-Columbia was $18.85 per megawatt hour last year (mainly due to cheap hydro), but Energy Northwest’s nuclear power cost was about $47.30 per megawatt hour, said Robert McCullough, of McCullough Research.”

“EIA suggests a minimum cost for advanced nuclear of $104.40, an average of $108.40, and a maximum of $115.30/MWh.”  PG&E’s Diablo Canyon nuclear electricity was 14 cents/kwh back in 2000 during deregulation…that ultimately resulted in their bankruptcy.
 “Three or four years ago, the solar industry was targeting one dollar per watt costs in 2013; today we are at 50 cents per watt.”
“The cost of photovoltaic solar panels is expected to drop to 36 cents per watt by 2017”
Today, solar is almost cost-competitive with grid-tied electricity, not only here in the US, but in Germany, Spain, and Italy, and soon in most parts of the world.  The key to its deployment is POLITICS and not economics. 

Again, California leads the way.  “This week, Los Angeles started the biggest urban rooftop solar program in the country, with the goal of powering 30,000 homes. [LA Times]”   “The California Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee overwhelmingly approved SB 43, a groundbreaking new program that would give millions of Californians who currently don’t have access to renewable energy the opportunity to use 100% clean energy for the first time.”  These are major steps to empowering the up-coming solar revolution.

Up to now, there have two kinds of solar deployment.  Large-scale utility grid projects have been constructed out in the deserts feeding solar electrons into our wires.  True, these have been expensive, and have required a new learning curve for their integration into the system.  The other type of solar system has been on the roof of the individual homeowner…some providing stand alone power, and many being grid-tied, feeding electricity back into their local grid.  Most of these are/were expensive, required subsidies to make them affordable, and were limited to appropriate rooftops and clientele.

A new third type of solar system will be somewhere in the middle…accessible to the majority of residents wanting to use solar energy, but more importantly, now being able to do so with the fuss and mess of having to do it yourself; or if you are a renter; or if your don’t have the right kind of south facing rooftop.  Suppose you have $10,000 and you want to invest that money in a social and environmentally responsible instrument.  You could put that money into a company that is installing a large solar system on the roof of a local warehouse.  You either get electricity credit for what is produced, or get a payout from the sale of that electricity on the grid.  Most small systems today have a 7-8 year payback (that’s a 10% return on your money).  Larger systems are cheaper, and with the costs coming down, your investment will generate more interest than what is available in most saving accounts or CD’s.  You’re investing in a product that is necessary, and has value; and you will hopefully be bypassing the big-business big-money energy mentality that has worked so hard to strangle renewables for decades.  Their fight is now becoming more desperate, but their economic argument is slowly fading towards extinction.

The potential for smaller, local solar deployment is enormous.  Manufacturing jobs, installation jobs, sales and financing jobs, less costs and more efficiency for maintaining the huge grid system, less CO2 and other environmental problems…on and on. 

Besides the political blockade, there is a major issue/obstacle with solar…the sun doesn’t always shine.  We do have solutions for storing renewable energy, which is crucial for our future…more on that later.  But for now, we need to value the solar electricity that we can easily harness…a value that soon, even the fiscal conservatives will see as a money-making opportunity.

Apple (one of the world’s biggest companies) is heavily investing in solar, primarily as a means of reducing peak demand for the massive air conditioners they are running at their server sites in Nevada and North Carolina.  This will save them money, reduce the strain on the grid, and more importantly, provide a huge push for solar from the “big-money” players. 

Power to the people!  The best is yet to come.

Some interesting reads if you wish to follow up on this discussion.

1.      Apple’s solar projects  http://lasvegas.cbslocal.com/2013/07/02/apple-to-build-massive-solar-plant-to-power-data-centers/

2.      Heat wave in California   http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2013/0701/Heat-wave-tests-California-power-grid.-Why-no-blackouts-so-far

3.      Excellent energy article in Time magazine  http://business.time.com/2013/06/27/grid-politics/

4.      The “hard energy boys” strike out   http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218301/-ALEC-Strikes-again-by-Resolving-to-Free-Electrity

5.      Even Jim Cramer is beginning to see the light…just wait..  http://www.thestreet.com/story/11911544/1/solar-scores-a-big-win-over-nuclear.html?cm_ven=RSSFeed

6.      It’s the economy…jobs…  http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-green-jobs-20130319,0,2962980.story

7.      Cost of solar   http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/deutsche-bank--sustainable-solar-market-expected-in-2014_100010338/#axzz2LyRXuVHd

Economics Catching Up With the Nuclear Industry

2013 has so far been a very bad year for the nuclear power industry, culminating last month with the permanent closure of the San Onofre reactors in southern California.  The aging national nuclear fleet is now down to 100 plants, with the recent closure of Crystal River and Kewaunee.  None of these reactors have run through their 40-year license because major repairs and upgrades have been technologically unfeasible and/or economically unaffordable.  This opens a whole new set of questions and concerns regarding RELICENSING, which was deemed to be a given just a few years ago.

Construction costs for a large number of nuclear plants built 30-40 years ago were generally under $1 billion each, and they were issued a 40-year operating license by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  In most industrial environments, mechanical components have a 30-year life, after which repairs and replacement of components becomes almost mandatory.  In a lot of cases, a new state of the art facility is built.  Being that reactors have to be shut down for months at a time for refueling and other maintenance, this 40-year regulatory statute was well founded.  Several years ago, the industry, realizing that new construction was astronomically unfeasible, the concept of extending the operating license by 20 years was justified by plans to just repair, replace, and retrofit the existing plants.  The utilities would save spending money and continue to profit from the “cheap” old reactors.  Sort of like repairing that “83 Buick with 280,000 miles, and wanting to take it on a cross-country trip and back.  The problem is a nuclear power plant is very complex and radioactive, which makes any kind of maintenance difficult.

Crystal River in Florida shut down for refueling and repairs in 2009.  Its normal license would expire in 2016, but with relicensing, Florida Power was optimistic that it could run the plant until 2036.  Just this year, the plant was permanently closed due to an estimated repair price tag of $3.5 billion.  The Kewaunee reactor in Wisconsin was shuttered in early May after it was deemed uneconomical to try and run the plant until 2033.  The big blow came later last month, when Southern Cal Edison retired the two San Onofre reactors.  The difference here was that they had already spent close to $800 million replacing steam turbines that proved to be defective, and fixing that problem would lead to billions more. Lots of money wasted.

This all raises several major issues…what will happen to relicensing?  Will Prairie Island (proposing to spend $280m), Monticello ($600m), Vermont Yankee, Oyster Creek and the long list of other plants be willing to gamble that they can technologically and economically keep plants running beyond their legal time frame, when experience shows that the majority of retired reactors have failed to even run to their 40-year expiration.  One must remember that this is not really their money, but that of the ratepayers who automatically get stuck with the bill.

A second major concern deals with the construction of new nuclear plants.  The dream of a nuclear “renaissance” has faded with only five reactors currently under construction…two in Georgia, two in South Carolina, and a fifth being the completion of Watts Bar in Tennessee, where construction began in 1973 and was stopped in 1988 because of cost issues.  Just this year, two proposed plants in Texas and two in North Carolina were cancelled.  The fate of those under construction is certainly up in the air, since they could not be built without huge subsidies from the Federal Government, and are already way behind schedule, and way over budget.  Some economic analysts propose that it would be cheaper to ratepayers (and tax payers) if construction was abandoned and the costs written off…similar to what the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS…oops) did back in the early ‘80s when they abandoned two partially built reactors and defaulted on $2.25 billion in bonds. Other analysts claim that if completed, the electricity produced would be so expensive that nobody would buy it without additional government subsidy.  The outrageous cost of all this is starting to come to light, and has even caught the eye of the Tea Party in South Carolina who is suing the utility for not considering cheaper renewable alternatives.

The third major issue concerns the future of the current nuclear industry.  While it is obvious that we will not be constructing new reactors to replace ones being retired, the industry will not just disappear.  We are beginning to comprehend the huge decommissioning costs facing us over the next 60-100 years.  Kewaunee says it will take 60 years to decommission; San Onofre claims it will cost them $2.8 billion, a price tag that is way under-estimated.  When the tiny Humboldt Bay reactor was shut down in 1976, the decommissioning cost was estimated at $95 million.  Today, with full decommissioning about half complete, the estimated cost is $1.082 billion!  We, and our children and grand-children, will cough up hundreds of billions of dollars bill to dismantle and deal with these radioactive facilities.  We will not benefit from these expenditures, since the electricity (cheap electricity) would have been long gone through our electric wires.  In addition, we will continue to pay to safeguard the tens of thousands of tons of high-level spent fuel, for which we have no feasible storage plan or cost estimate.

The nuclear power generating industry is once again teetering on its unsustainable fulcrum.  It is not safety issues, or weapons proliferation issues, or moral issues, but pure economics that will finally tilt it towards oblivion.  New modular reactors or new technologies will not save this dinosaur. It cannot/will not compete with the decreasing true costs and other advantages of renewables and, for now, natural gas.

Let the sun shine and the wind blow!  It’s free!  My next blog will examine the current economics of solar, and how this resource will displace/is displacing the incredibly true high cost of nuclear electricity.

Some good references for follow up reading:

1. A nice overview by Terry Tamminen, ex-Secretary of Resources for State of California

    http://www.cnbc.com/id/100825242?__source=yahoonews&par=yahoonews

2. A  piece by Mark Cooper in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

    http://www.thebulletin.org/nuclear-aging-not-so-graceful

3. San Onofre

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-10/san-onofre-seen-as-latest-setback-for-u-s-nuclear-power.html

4.  Matthew Wald on the aging of the nuclear fleet

     http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/business/energy-environment/aging-nuclear-plants-are-closing-but-for-economic-reasons.html?_r=1&

5.      A peek at the complex economics

http://qz.com/94817/the-real-reason-to-fight-nuclear-power-has-nothing-to-do-with-health-risks/

6.      New construction problems

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-05/scana-reactors-face-new-delays-and-200-million-additional-costs.html

7.      End of the renaissance

      http://blog.cleanenergy.org/2013/06/17/nuclear-renaissance-in-florida-crumbles-meets-economic-reality/

     

High Level Waste Disposal

As the global nuclear industry continues to struggle with technical issues in its aging fleet, and the cost overruns and delays in new construction, a renewed focus has turned to decommissioning and more importantly the disposal of high-level wastes.  Germany just appointed a new commission to examine their waste disposal solutions, something the US did a few years ago, and they will probably come up with the same conclusions:  There is no real solution to the spent fuel problem!  But we have to do something…so what do we do?

There are several courses of action we (and this is true of all the nuclear nations) can take.  The consensus is to eventually bury the canisters in a deep geologic repository.  Easier said than done.  We have spent 30 years and close to $15 billion culminating with Yucca Mountain, which we have scientifically deemed unsuitable for a variety of technical problems, which of course the politicos have reduced to just “plain politics.”  The truth is that the waste is highly radioactive, which means it releases heat…we cannot predict what the impact of that heat and radiation will have on the geology and hydrology of the site, and on the actual casks containing the waste.  This material must be isolated from the environment for a minimum of 10,000 years.  Lots of uncertainty.  So what do we do?

Most of the spent fuel rods are currently stored on site in pools at the power plants.  They are slowly being encased in huge dry casks, and placed on guarded pad facilities.  This is costly and spreads the waste over 40-50 sites in the US.  But it may be the best option until a central underground repository is built (if it ever is.) 

Another possibility is to move all these casks (they are about 20 ft tall, 8 ft wide, and can weigh up to 150 tons each) to a central retrievable location, where they will sit until a repository is open.  One such site is Skull Mountain on Native American reservation land in Utah.  Although this would relieve the utilities from responsibility of maintaining the casks, it would concentrate an enormous amount of highly radioactive material in one vulnerable place.  Current estimates of the wastes we would produce if we were to build no new reactors would fill some 6000 casks.  Handling and shipping this number of casks, storing them in one concentrated location, and maintaining them from weathering, corrosion, and most importantly from possible terrorist attack would not be easy or cheap.  The current casks are designed for a life 50-100 years, so they would have to be re-casked and moved again to a repository if it is built.  Lots of uncertainty!

Another option is the recycle/reprocessing route.  Although this sounds idealistic, it really not a solution, and would create an even bigger mess than we have now.  Best described by Edwin Lyman: “Reprocessing is the worst possible alternative to deep geological disposal because it greatly increases the cost, as well as the dangers, of waste management. Reprocessing increases the total volume of nuclear waste sevenfold over direct disposal; those multiple new waste streams present additional challenges for storage, transport and disposal. Even worse, reprocessing produces copious quantities of concentrated nuclear-weapon-usable materials, primarily plutonium. One large reprocessing plant can produce about 1,000 bombs' worth of plutonium each year. 

Adding insult to injury, this technological disaster costs a lot of money.”  Reprocessing has been a nightmare for England, France, and Russia, and even Ronald Reagan recognized this when he cancelled reprocessing in the US.

So, as the Nuclear Waste “Blue Ribbon Commission” reported a few years ago, “No currently available or reasonably foreseeable reactor and fuel cycle technology developments - including advances in reprocess and recycle technologies - have the potential to fundamentally alter the waste management challenge this nation confronts over at least the next several decades, if not longer."  We all just wind up kicking the can down the road.

A few references to the above:

Three “experts” opinions

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324789504578382722051659686.html

http://www.dw.de/nuclear-waste-to-find-a-new-home/a-16733434

I’m just about finished going through “Uncertainty Underground” edited by Allison MacFarland, the new head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  Everything and more that you want to know about nuclear waste, geology, hydrology, thermohydrology, volcanism, colloidal transport…whew!  Articles written by the very well qualified scientists who studied Yucca Mountain, and come up with the conclusion: UNCERTAINTY!

Cheap nuclear electricity!

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