No nuclear power plant works like that. Nuclear power plants have an internal circuit that touches the reactor, which passes its heat to water from a nearby lake or river in a heat exchanger. Radioactive material exiting the reactor in cooling water is physically impossible.

You're talking about a military reactor designed in 1944.

How is a terrorist organization going to sabotage a nuclear power plant? Sure, there would be problems if they were able to. But they can't.

--Stewart Peterson

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/03/17/MN21841.DTL

Read it and weep Stewart. 68 of these lightly guarded used nuclear fuel rod storage pools exost all over the US.

Merely removing the cooling water will create a nuclear fire that will release 8 to 17 times the radiation released from the chernobuyl disater. That's from EACH pool!!

Even one event would render a whole region of the uS ininhabitable for centuries.

Is nuclear power worth that? Especially when wind power is nearing 2 cents per kwh.

Nuclear power, including waste disposal and entombment, hidden costs, is somewhere over 50 cents per kwh? Who knows. Thanks to the nuclear "priesthood" everything about it is secret.

used nuclear fuel rod storage pools... Merely removing the cooling water will create a nuclear fire.

It won't. These are spent fuel rods exactly because they are no longer capable of sustaining the "nuclear fire" in the reactor.

It's underground. Any ways you propose to make water flow up would get you a Nobel prize.
It's in a containment--a weaker containment, but still a containment, and still strong enough to be impenetrable.
It's impossible to fly an airplane into, and if you did, the effect would be zero.
How are they lightly guarded? Do you want SAM batteries onsite? Do you want an entire army stationed there?
Removing the cooling water (somehow) would result in the fire department pouring water on the new fuel assemblies until the pool could be refilled.
Even at Chernobyl, only 5% of the core was released. Chernobyl was a worst-case scenario accident at the worst reactor in the world.
"Region" is a bit disingenuous. If hell froze over and this physically impossible accident happened the exclusion zone would be about the size of Chernobyl's. Is it a "region?" A region of a state, and a fairly small region at that.
Is nuclear power worth enduring vicious attacks by people who don't know physics? Is it worthwhile to have had one harebrained stunt killing 4,400 people, while coal kills 30,000 every year?
Wind is nowhere near 2 cents/kWh. It might operate 30% of the time if you're lucky, and we need something that can provide baseload electricity. The fundamental debate is not between wind and nuclear but between nuclear and coal.
Likewise, IIRC nuclear is 1.82 cents/kWh. That includes a tax paid for a nuclear waste disposal fund which Congress appropriated to pet projects, storage of fuel for upwards of 40 years, and financially supporting regulators at upwards of $200/man-hour. Nuclear energy internalizes its costs and is punished by the market for doing so. What are these "hidden costs" you speak of?
--Stewart Peterson

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2005/5/19/872925.html

Hidden waste costs. Protected by secrecy agreements signed by the scientists working on projects like Yucca Mountain.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2005/7/22/1063384.html

Chernobyl shows the magnitude of damage probable if even one of these uncoverd storage pools suffers a catastrophic loss of water.

http://www.sprol.com/?s=diablo+canyon

Do those nuclear fuel rod storage pools look covered to you? They aren't, not even the protection that a typical swimming pool has, a pool cover.

Why should we the people trust the government or the nuclear infdustry ever again after the criminal negliegance that has characterized their operation of nuclear sites?

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2005/6/28/982514.html

Read it and weep. Nuclear power will never compete with wind...coupled with the national storage battery comprised of 100s of millions of electric cars..

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2005/12/19/1455214.html

Give up Stewart. Face reality and get on the side of green power.

Nukes 1.87 cents per kwh? With the huge cleanup and disposal costs facing it...and nuclear fuel expected to skyrocket in price of and when nuke plant building resumes?

The first link you gave simply throws numbers around. Where did these numbers come from?
And don't think pro-nuclear people are all in love with Yucca Mountain. Most of us hate it. We would much rather use waste-eating reactors--the CANDU class, currently operating commercially in Canada, could use light-water nuclear waste if export bans were lifted or it were licensed in the US. The experimental IFR, developed at Argonne in the late 80s to early 90s, ran for several years on waste from a nuclear power plant. Fission products are useful for nuclear batteries, measuring equipment, and medicine--where they're already used today.
Waste costs are hidden just about everywhere else but nuclear reactors. All the fuel over the entire life of a plant is stored onsite. Do you think that's free?

Chernobyl shows the magnitude of damage probable if you run an unauthorized test that you know could result in a loss of coolant on the worst-constructed of the worst reactor class in the world. Nothing more.

You persistently refer to these "uncovered pools"--which are belowground most of the time, accessible all of the time, and contrary to what you say, covered and contained. The link you refer to is laughable--the shallow pools that they zoom in on aren't the spent fuel pool. The spent fuel pool is the white building between the two domes.
You also cannot answer my objection that your figure of several hours for a fire to start would allow the fire department to start dumping water on it.

Do not "trust" the industry. Listen to what it has to say, listen to what disinterested observers have to say, and listen to what its opponents have to say, and form a conclusion. Use critical thinking skills.

As for wind's costs, you point to a wind industry projection. So we should trust the wind industry and not the nuclear industry? You simply can't point to any real performance data.
Besides, no matter how much wind capacity you install or how cheap it is, it's still only on 30% of the time under the best possible conditions. It doesn't matter how much you're willing to pay for electricity if it doesn't exist.

With plug-in hybrids, you still have to get that electricity from somewhere. One of the best ways I can think of to strangle electric cars would be to have an inconsistent source of electricity.

Decommissioning is going to get much easier to do once we get to the operational plants, meaning not Shippingport and Yankee Rowe, but plants that were designed with the life cycle in mind. Fuel costs are a miniscule amount of a nuclear power plant's operating costs--if it were only fuel, it would already be literally too cheap to meter, on the order of a dollar per home per year. Fuel isn't being used efficiently either--from 90%-97% of the energy of a fresh fuel rod is still inside at the end of today's once-through cycle. The reality is that you can't come up with any real numbers on this either--simply using words like "huge" and "skyrocket" to cover a vacuous argument.
--Stewart Peterson

Waste eating reactors? Where will they be built. Not in my back yard. Who will pay for them?

That extra money collected with customer's power bills to pay for waste storage was used up 10 times over for those fuel rod storage pools. Yucca Mountain's 50 (who know's it may be 200 billion, it's all secret) billion dollar cost is over and above that.

As with oil, where 1 dollar per gallon of fuel is currently being borrowed from future generations to pay for oil wars, nuclear cost fantasies like that 1.72 cents per kwh are pure propaganda.

Your solution to the huge problems with current nuclear plants is to build a next generation of "safer" plants that recycle nuclear waste?

Since you object to nuclear regulators getting "$200 per hour" (consulting nuclear engineers charge how much, maybe $500 per hour?), do I assume correctly that you embrace the infamous neocorporate talking point of industry "self-regulation"?

With the revolving door between nuclear industry managment and government nuclear regulators, how could we the people expect any better results from this new generation of "safer" reactors, than was obtained from ongoing disasters like Hanford, rocky Flats, Oak Ridge, Chernobyl....and on and on.

Of course consumers and taxpayers will pick up the tab for this whole new round of nuclear industry mega spending, as usual.

The current cost estimates for wind are taken from wind farms in operation. Energy storage combined with a broad national grid of renewable power will take care of the internmittent supply problems of green enerrgy.

Your estimate for the cost of nukes is pure industry propaganda calculated neglecting all the extra costs hidden for national security reasons, which is pure propaganda also.

It is the nuclear industry protecting it's own ass..sets.

When it comes to trusting the proclamations of the nuclear "priesthood" (a group cloisterd in national security, hehey) the famous Bush mistatement comes to mind.. "fool me once...ahh... fool me..we won't get fooled again".

Where will waste-eating reactors be built? Many nuclear power plants were designed to house more reactors than were actually built. They could definitely be built onsite--especially given that towns that made it to the short list for a new reactor are fighting to get it. Who will pay? Utilities will pay for the cheapest power plant they can find. Currently, there is national-level political opposition to nuclear, so they go to gas and coal.

I have no clue where you get your numbers for the cost of spent fuel pools. Cite something. And no, the money from the spent fuel surcharge didn't go to spent fuel pools--that money went to the government, and the government doesn't pay for spent fuel pools.
Surprisingly, at the start of a project, engineers and managers do not always know what the final cost will be, especially if the project is first-of-a-kind. The number isn't secret, it just doesn't exist. Current worst-case estimates are $56 billion. Like I said earlier, we don't like it, either. Don't blame DoE's cost overruns on the concept of nuclear energy.

What does the cost of oil have to do with the cost of nuclear-derived electricity? What's your point? Do you have any numbers that you didn't pull out of your ear?

My solution (and most other pro-nuclear people's solution) to the waste problem is to recycle it instead of burying this useful material in the ground. What other "huge problems" are there? You singled out the waste problem, and I responded to it.

As for "self-regulation," you assume incorrectly. I would give the NRC a budget and stop requiring it to assess fees to recover 82% of its operating costs. I would set up a system modeled on the FAA. And yes, NRC bureaucrats are paid over $200 per man-hour by the utilities. When I first heard that, I didn't believe it, either. So you know what I did? I went to the Code of Federal Regulations and looked it up. Guess what? It was true, and there were even more fees and they were even more exorbitant than I thought. Look it up (especially 10 CFR 171 and 10 CFR 52). Consultant engineers are lucky to get $50.

Want to talk about a revolving door? How about the anti-nuclear activists that Bill Clinton appointed? And who would you rather put in there--someone without experience in the industry? There is a major difference between Ralph Nader's experience suing people and those people's technical experience. Would you appoint a dentist principal of a school?

Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Oak Ridge are weapons labs. Chernobyl was a crazy stunt on a defective model of the worst reactor class in the world. You simply can't point to a light-water reactor, CANDU, or IFR that has killed or injured someone in operation.

Will taxpayers pay for this? If you count the government paying for its own costs incurred instead of leaning on the industry for financial support, then yes. Will consumers pay for this? CWIP surcharge bans have helped make nuclear power plants the only item which businesses are legally not allowed to raise prices to buy. Things cost money, and even if the government bought 320-odd reactors to eliminate use of coal in this country the public health benefit would be worth the cost. Of course, this isn't what happens; utilities pay for the reactors and most of the government's costs out of liquid assets. Lump-sum money throwing doesn't help the core problem. Pro-nuclear people would gladly forfeit every cent of funding for nuclear energy from this year's energy bill to have the regulations restructured in a way that makes sense.

The cost estimates you linked to were industry projections. Find the cost of wind in operation.
Here's a question I have for you. Who's going to pay for these wind turbines to run 15-30% of the time? We have a national grid. Wind just doesn't work. I wish it did, but it doesn't work.

1.82 cents per kilowatt-hour is not my estimate, it is taken from actual costs using actual math, instead of number-assisted speculation. The only real number you've used so far is the number of nuclear power plants in the US. You have not yet even detailed these "extra costs" of which you speak--you simply look at the math and say that there are secret concealed numbers, then walk away.
List your extra hidden costs.

As I have said, I do not trust anyone's statements. I have my own brain and refuse to let anyone do my thinking for me.

Sorry, I forgot to put my end tag.

--Stewart Peterson

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=12525&hed=More+Cash+for+Clean+Energy§or=QAndA&subsector=PolicyMakersAndPundits


Wind power supplied 2 percent of the United States’ renewable energy consumption in 2003, according to the Energy Information Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Energy. As a whole, renewable energy made up 6 percent of the nation’s energy use.



Wind energy is one of the cheapest, most widespread, and fastest-growing forms of renewable energy. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory projects wind energy costs an average of $0.02 per kilowatt hour this year.



Here is the link to the 2 cent per kwh reference. I will find the info on the allocation of the funds witheld from consumer's electric bills to pay for nuclear waste disposal.

http://www.ncseonline.org/NLE/CRSreports/waste/waste-2.cfm


In the first set of rulings on breach-of-contract suits filed by several utilities, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims decreed on October 29, 1998, that DOE must pay fuel storage costs for three closed commercial reactors. Those costs are to be determined by future trials; the three utilities are claiming damages of $2.4 billion. Damage claims were denied to Northern States Power by another Court of Federal Claims judge on April 6, 1999, but that ruling was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on August 31, 2000. The Appeals court decision cleared the way for nuclear power companies to proceed with lawsuits in the Court of Federal Claims against DOE. Industry officials contend that total damages for missing the 1998 disposal deadline could eventually reach tens of billions of dollars, assuming that no disposal ever takes place.

DOE has been negotiating with various reactor owners since 1999 on the missed nuclear waste deadline and reached its first settlement agreement with a nuclear utility, PECO Energy Co., on July 19, 2000. The agreement allows PECO to keep up to $80 million in nuclear waste fee revenues during the next 10 years and may result in DOE's taking title to waste and storage facilities at PECO's Peach Bottom plant in Pennsylvania. In return, PECO agreed not to sue DOE over the missed disposal deadline. Several utilities expressed opposition to the agreement, but DOE said others are considering similar settlements.

The money in the fund is dissappearing to pay for temporary storage as utilities sue. And Yucca is already full. That means the rest of the funds will fall far short of pasying for processing, transport, and eventual permanent storage.

I realize that your marvelous, new and improved reactors snuggled into the same sites that reactors are now located will majically use all the waste to make more power, and produce no waste doing it!

Nuclear science is majical!! Hehey.

What's 2% of 6%? 0.12%. What a large-scale success.
The keyword in your first post is still "projects." You can't find any actual, real, operating costs--just projections.

As for the second post, I'll try to say this slowly.

The spent fuel surcharge is a fee paid to the government.
The utility pays for fuel storage on top of this fee. The two have nothing to do with each other.
The utility and the government had a contract--the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982--that the government would use this money to take ownership and possession of the waste by 1998.
Take a deep breath.
The utility is paying for current onsite storage and is paying into a fund for future permanent storage.
Thus, when the government takes the utility's money and runs off into the hills, it is in breach of contract and financially liable.
This is not a subsidy or bailout. This is the government misusing the industry's money and missing a deadline, with financial consequences to the industry.

The money in the fund is being used to develop Yucca Mountain--which is the wrong answer, as I've said about six times. I don't know why you keep referring to it.
How is Yucca Mountain already full? It hasn't been used yet. Nobody knows what the final volume of waste will be.

No "snuggling" is involved in my proposal. Sites which were originally designed for four reactors and currently have two or were designed for two and currently have one have gaping holes where reactors should be. The new reactors would simply be placed where they should have gone 20 or 30 years ago. And these are not new, untried concepts: the CANDU has been running commercially across Canada at multiple locations for decades, and the IFR, although experimental, ran for years on nuclear waste. They are waste-eating reactors, meaning that they reduce the volume of waste. So yes, they do lower the amount of total waste. What waste they do produce would have been there anyway but in greater amounts.
--Stewart Peterson

Stewart since I was dilligent enough to provide actual links to independent sites to verify my contentions, would it be too much to ask of you to provide a link explaining each of your contentions that counter mine?

Provide a link supporting that 1.82 cents per kwh figure please?

And a link that verifies your statement that the electric power consumers funding of nuclear waste disposal is sufficient to store that waste safely.

It would be a good place to start, then I will provide further links to other arguments I have made. Such as the government analysis of nuclear site safety that claimed reactors are insufficiently guarded. Thanks.

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:HSExclnpXj4J:www.nti.org/e_research/official_docs/other_us/crs020405.pdf+homeland+security+nuclear+power+plants&hl=en

The 109th congress was supposed to enact legislation to solve the nuclear plant security problems outlined here, was that ever acomplished?

It points out that nuclear fuel rods are stored outside the containment structure. My characterization of these areas as "lightly guarded" is based on this sort of investigation by congress.

http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm

Fuel costs for nuclear plants are a minor proportion of total generating costs and often about one-third those for coal-fired plants.

A third of the cost of coal? It sounds good, but wall street weasel investment touts are predicting that nuclear fuel proces will triple in the near term as more power plants come online. That leaves nuclear with no fuel cost advantage..and the huge disadvantage of costing a lot more to build than coal, or of course wind power.

And how much will these new waste processing nuclear plants cost? With inflation running along since the last plants were built years ago, NIMBY lawsuits over plant location, and the added complexity of the waste processing nukes...what? Maybe 10 times the cost of the initial round of nuclear power plants?

And BTW, weren't the pebble bed reactors supposed to be the great new nuclear hope? Safer, more efficient, inexpensive construction? How would one redesign the pebble bed reactors to reprocess waste? Would it take a whole new round of engineering and testing taking decades to complete?

http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm

The European Commission launched the project in 1991 in collaboration with the US Department of Energy, and it was the first research project of its kind "to put plausible financial figures against damage resulting from different forms of electricity production for the entire EU". The methodology considers emissions, dispersion and ultimate impact. With nuclear energy the risk of accidents is factored in along with high estimates of radiological impacts from mine tailings (waste management and decommissioning being already within the cost to the consumer). Nuclear energy averages 0.4 euro cents/kWh, much the same as hydro, coal is over 4.0 cents (4.1-7.3), gas ranges 1.3-2.3 cents and only wind shows up better than nuclear, at 0.1-0.2 cents/kWh average.

Yep that's what this 2001 study shows. That's before signifigant cost reductions in wind over the last few years too.

The back-end of the fuel cycle, including spent fuel storage or disposal in a waste repository, contributes up to another 10% to the overall costs per kWh, - less if there is direct disposal of spent fuel rather than reprocessing. The $18 billion US spent fuel program is funded by a 0.1 cent/kWh levy.

This same source claims 18 billion is in the waste fund from the tax on consumers, but you have conceded that Yucca moiuntain cost projections are 56 billion? and Yucca's space is already spoken for, without even taking into account those spent fuel rod storage pools.

This is a pro-nuclear source of information too.

Once the facts come out from under the murky disinformation of the nuclear "priesthood", the future of nuclear power looks very dark indeed!

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/science/27nuke.html?8br

There's a link to the times article on nuclear waste, it's a good one!

The byproduct of nuclear electrical generation is plutonium. PLUTONIUM IS THE MOST POISONOUS, THEREFOR THE MOST IMMORAL THING ON THIS PLANET. NO MORE PLUTONIUM! NO MORE NUKES!

PLUTONIUM IS THE MOST POISONOUS

No, it isn't. LD50 for Pu is estimated(!) at 1mg, but nobody knows for sure because nobody has yet died of plutonium poisoning. Compare that to the LD50 of say botox, an entirely natural substance, which is around 1µg.

Also, Pu kills by causing cancer. After ingesting Pu you face 40 years of healthy life before contracting cancer and maybe being cured. Compare to botox, where you simply die right on the spot.

And lastly, in the early 40s some twenty people in a military context ingested amounts of Pu which are considered lethal today. All but four of them were still alive in the 90s, which is quite astonishing if you consider that they ate THE MOST POISONOUS.

On, and don't forget that plutonium is no byproduct, but an intermediate substance that a sane civilization would recycle into fuel.

I will include citations to numbers when necessary. I do not have to cite everything I say; I have a brain, too. For cost per kWh it turns out I was using a number from 2003; the most recent data (2004) are lower--you won't like it, since it's from NEI, but notice that the numbers they use are from the Electric Utility Cost Group--which is most certainly neutral.

As for the cost of spent fuel management, there are many different options. Detailed cost analyses have not been performed on each. Yucca Mountain could have cost less than the $24 billion paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund; however, anti-nuclear activists have filed lawsuit after lawsuit and blamed the cost on Yucca Mountain. Placing spent fuel in vitrified form in the uranium mine that it came from would certainly cost less, since you don't have to determine the suitability of the site.

What security problems are there? I dealt with aircraft collisions before, and there's not much more a terrorist could do to a nuclear power plant than what happened at TMI, even with access to the control room.

People promoting investment in uranium futures have a vested interest in making it look more expensive than it actually is (Remember when they were saying that the cost of uranium would skyrocket in 1985 so BUY BUY BUY?). Even at that, the number you give covers the cost of fuel pellet production, not the cost of raw materials, which is what they're talking about. Using the fuel efficiently would decrease this cost by a factor of 30 at least (97/3=32 1/3).

Wind and nuclear cost about the same to construct. This does not include the cost of standby capacity (i.e., nuclear runs 90% of the time and wind 15%-30%, so you need three to six times more wind capacity to produce the same amount--assuming a normal distribution of outages, which doesn't actually happen, etc., etc.).

As for the cost of the IFR, I quote:
"For a new power source to be viable, the cost of power must be competitive with today's power systems. The proof of costs in any project only comes when full- sized systems are built and operated. Although no full-sized IFR plant has been built, several facts suggest that the IFR will be very economic. Costs of today's nuclear plants are just slightly above that of coal as a national average. Several nuclear plants have operated with costs significantly below that of coal however. A new IFR should cost less than either a new nuclear (typical of today's technology) or coal plant based on the following. The IFR does not require some of the complex systems that today's reactors require. Examples include the low level radwaste cleanup station, the emergency core cooling system, and fewer control rod drives and control rods for comparable power. Because of the low pressure in the sodium systems, less steel is required for the plant piping and reactor vessel. There are studies that suggest that the reactor containment will be less massive. Other cost savings will be made because the IFR does not require the services of the Isotopic Separation Plants for fuel enrichment. Additional costs to the IFR include the integral fuel reprocessing capability, and a secondary sodium system (but the IFR fuel process costs are somewhat offset by the extremely low cost for raw fuel and the improved waste product). Some studies have been done which indicate that an IFR would be very economical and competitive to build, own, and operate, but the final proof of economics can only come in the construction and operation of a commercial sized plant."
In all likelihood, it wouldn't be any more expensive than the first round of light-water plants, the second round of IFRs wouldn't be any more expensive than the second round of light-water plants, etc. Technology does develop and has in the past.

At least in the first few new plants, the lawsuits will come from the national level or heavily-funded and -assisted astroturf local groups. Communities that have nuclear power plants already generally like them and want another. Bellafonte and Calvert Cliffs have been in the news recently in this regard.

Inflation isn't as much a factor as you think. The last two nuclear power plants in the US--Seabrook and Watts Bar--were ordered in 1973 but only came online in 1991 and 1996, respectively. Inflation was a huge factor in that 20-year period, but since the costs are accounted for in 1991 and 1996 dollars, the lack of significant inflation from 1991 to the present means that the costs won't go up significantly.

PBMRs are supposed to be the great Third World hope. It would indeed be difficult to reprocess fuel from a PBMR; however, PBMRs are only in their initial stages of development and PBMR-based breeders may eventually be developed.

The European Commission study shows what costs should be added to correct for social impacts, not actual monetary costs of production. It concludes that only wind is more socially responsible than nuclear--and I conclude that's because it doesn't produce enough energy to have much of an impact.

Pro-nuclear people do not as a whole like Yucca Mountain. It's interesting that you are discovering this.

Here's a link to my discussion of the New York Times article on reprocessing.

Anonymous: the byproduct of an IFR cycle is 1700 pounds of fission products per 1000 megawatt reactor per year. Plutonium is a fuel, not a byproduct; if it indeed is extremely poisonous (and it isn't--it's up there with caffeine), let's use it in reactors and get rid of it.

What do you mean? Please tell me more.

Here's a wild discussion on the topic.

http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2006/02/are_lefties_ree.shtml#comments