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!)
