Why is Nuclear Energy So Expensive?

In pressurized water reactors control rods are needed mainly for shutdowns. The day to day power control is by chemistry, i.e. administering neutron absorbent chemicals into the reactor water. In addition light water moderated reactors have also a negative temperature coefficient, so as long there are not much load changes it is quite self regulating.

The reason for Fukushima event occurred after the control rods had been pushed in i immediately after the earthquake but before the tsunami but the removal of latent heat failed due to lost diesel generators.

Granite moderated reactors do not have such negative temperature coefficient and the Chernobyl RBMK went wild due reckless operation.

There are frequent earthquakes in Japan and even grade 9.0 did not cause a nuclear accident.

The problem in Fukushima was that they relied on a single technology (multiple diesel generator) for emergency cooling after emergency shutdown. The assumption was that if there are an _independent_ failure in one generator, the rest could handle the emergency load. Unfortunately, the tsunani took out all the emergency generators simultaneously, so this was not a single generator failure. Things went wrong because the emergency cooling relied on a single technology installed in a single place.

After Fukushima, various different methods have been added to existing sites to avoid those single point of failure issues.

At one site, in which they already have diesel generators, dedicated HV lines to a local hydro plant, they now installed small air cooling towers on the roof to handle the 7 % latent heat after emergency shutdown, if the main cooling circuit to the sea fails.

On an other site, in addition to diesels and dedicated feed lines, they also have two big gas turbines and if everything else fails, they have a wind turbine on site :-). Actually the wind turbine is just for PR, it is too small to run all emergency systems, even if the wind happened to blow during emergency shutdown.

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tions were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interest ed in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

ed civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of caves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fa ir bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

rmation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denialis t propaganda of a particularly silly sort.

you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US industry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't even the largest of the different sources of risk.

I'm sure others would love to see the "numbers" you ran to come to that absurd conclusion. To start with, probably 1 in 10 reactors in the US are not even in an area where a significant earthquake is likely during the lifetime of the plant. And that's before we get to any failures.

Next!

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 3:53:09 AM UTC-4, snipped-for-privacy@downunder.com wro te:

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ations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interes ted in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

ved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of cave s long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and f air bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping u s out of the caves in future.

ormation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent deniali st propaganda of a particularly silly sort.

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e you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk o f core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US industr y over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't even the largest of the different sources of risk.

Yes, because the earthquakes caused an amount of vibration the plants were designed to withstand. But there is no guarantee that this will always be the case. Earthquakes are hard to predict in location, timing and Anna was a perfect example. They designed the plant to withstand any highly improb able East Coast earthquake. Over the 40 years the plant had been operating we finally had one and it was within 10 miles of the plant! The resulting shaking was twice what the plant was designed for. Fortunately there was enough reserve strength that there were no major system failures. There we re numerous failures including one that lost power to the seismic recorders so know exactly how strong the shocks were. Dry casks were moved by the s haking and numerous other impacts that caused the facility to be offline fo r months. In other words, we dodged a bullet.

My point about the probability is that they give numbers for the chances of an accident separately due to a single cause, at a single reactor for a si ngle year. Those numbers appears to be very conservative being 1 in some t ens of thousands. But when you combine even just the number of reactors an d number of years the results drop to 1 in 10!!! Hardly a conservative num ber. Then combine that with the many various ways an accident can occur an d you get some very disturbing results indeed.

Isn't that what they all do? I've never heard of any that use multiple coo ling technologies.

You are the one who opened the Fukushima can of worms.

The point is that things DID go wrong. The designers of nukes would have y ou believe there was virtually no chance this could have happened, that it was unforeseeable, yet it did happen. We look back with 20/20 hindsight an d say it was inevitable.

At North Anna they had a generator fail. When they looked into the cause i t was found that the procedure for installing the head gaskets was faulty. That procedure was a single point of failure for every generator and was n ot discovered until the plant was 40 years old during an emergency. What i f every generator had failed because of a bad head gasket installation?

I always thought it was odd that during the earthquake the facility disconn ected from the grid. Clearly they think that is the safest thing to do. T oo bad there is no hydro anywhere near here.

Which reactor are you talking about? Which one site?

Which system is this one? I'd like to read about these.

That only leave around 96 US reactors to deal with. The odds are still pre tty bad.

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lations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were intere sted in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

oved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of cav es long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

formation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denial ist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.

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ke you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US indust ry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't eve n the largest of the different sources of risk.

They publish numbers for the various reactors being damaged in an earthquak e. I started with the number for North Anna which is one of the least like ly, around 1 in 70,000. Factor in the useful life of the reactor which pre sently stands at 70 years and now it's 1 in 1,000. There are 100 such reac tors in the US, most of which have a worse risk factor and you get 1 in 10 approximately. Not high math.

While I was looking for the starting numbers a reference indicated the prob ability of something going wrong with the reactor itself was an even more l ikely event. So the ultimate odds are at best 1 in 5. You wouldn't even d rive your car if the odds of a serious accident were 1 in 5.

This is one of the reasons why nuclear reactors are so expensive to design and build. To be safe they have to be designed so much better and to accou nt for so many more problems than most anything we make.

Yes, too cheap to meter indeed. Tell that to Dominion who seems to be very happy billing their customers for half a billion dollars obtaining a facil ity approval that will likely never be built.

Depends on how you define the lifetime and define "likely"; over the span of 50 years from today say, the likelihood of an earthquake causing significant damage in the Boston/Providence area is perhaps about 1 in

1. The plates are locked together tighter on the East Coast and damaging shocks can propagate farther, a 6.0 with an epicenter within 150 miles of either of those cities and you're looking at several hundred deaths, thousands of injuries and maybe 15 billion worth of damage not a problem at all, unfortunately. Loma Prieta times five, at least with the structures that are there currently. It will surely happen at night during a snowstorm, too.

There are few places in America that don't have a statistically significant risk of a large earthquake over 50-100 year period. Remember it's currently expected that some amount of waste will have to be stored on site for longer than the plant's operational lifetime.

He's underestimating the risk of large earthquakes on places like the East Coast. Just cuz it hasn't happened in living memory or recent history doesn't mean the risk is infinitesimally low, it may just mean it's overdue

There have been several large quakes on the East Coast in the past 50 years with magnitude 6.0 and above, they just happened to occur in say the Adirondacks or in relatively unpopulated area of Quebec or etc. They can happen anywhere though, and the geology of quake production on the East Coast is much less well-understood than e.g. California. Dodging bullets.

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ulations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were inter ested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

moved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of ca ves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

nformation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denia list propaganda of a particularly silly sort.

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ike you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US indus try over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't ev en the largest of the different sources of risk.

e designed to withstand. But there is no guarantee that this will always b e the case. Earthquakes are hard to predict in location, timing and Anna w as a perfect example. They designed the plant to withstand any highly impr obable East Coast earthquake. Over the 40 years the plant had been operati ng we finally had one and it was within 10 miles of the plant! The resulti ng shaking was twice what the plant was designed for. Fortunately there wa s enough reserve strength that there were no major system failures. There were numerous failures including one that lost power to the seismic recorde rs so know exactly how strong the shocks were. Dry casks were moved by the shaking and numerous other impacts that caused the facility to be offline for months. In other words, we dodged a bullet.

of an accident separately due to a single cause, at a single reactor for a single year. Those numbers appears to be very conservative being 1 in some tens of thousands. But when you combine even just the number of reactors and number of years the results drop to 1 in 10!!!

Obviously you failed probability and statistics, if you ever took it. If the probability of a failure is one some tens of thousands,, then having N of them, the probability increases by a factor of N. There aren't several thousand nukes operating in the US, which is what even your numbers would require.

Hardly a conservative number. Then combine that with the many various way s an accident can occur and you get some very disturbing results indeed.

That's wrong too. The predicted accident number would already include that, you don't then add it on.

ooling technologies.

you believe there was virtually no chance this could have happened, that i t was unforeseeable, yet it did happen. We look back with 20/20 hindsight and say it was inevitable.

it was found that the procedure for installing the head gaskets was faulty . That procedure was a single point of failure for every generator and was not discovered until the plant was 40 years old during an emergency. What if every generator had failed because of a bad head gasket installation?

Seems to me if you believe the global warming folks, most of whom are the same ones that are opposed to nuclear power, we're headed for a total global catastrophe. In which case, the risks from nuclear power look very acceptable by any reasonable standards. Or is all that global warming stuff BS?

I was referring to the electricity needed to run the circulation pumps after emergency shutdown, this should have multiple different electric sources.. There are other methods if some of the main pipes burst inside the containment building.

The problem was that this Fukushima plant was still 1970's technology. It was soon going to be retired anyway, so the power company had not made much upgrades recently.

In power plants in which the operation license is to be extended by 20 or 30 years, a power company has a great motivation in doing significant rolling upgrades during annual service breaks. After 60 or

It had a single point of failure. When working with redundant systems, you should always be on alert to avoid single point of failures.

Exactly for that reason you should not rely on a single technology from a single manufacturer.

This is Loviisa site in Finland with two reactors.

That is Olkiluoto site in Finland with two running reactors and one (still) under construction.

Regarding emergency feeds from an external hydro power plant, make sure that you have at least two voltage transformer so that all three phases can be monitored. In Sweden they had a hydro feed with a single voltage transformer between two phases indicating a healthy voltage, but the third phase which was not monitored and it had been down for a long time. Always make sure that all phases are present !

Having no nuclear weapons didn't stop the Japanese from building them.

Of course. You're too blind to see.

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gulations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were inte rested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

moved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of c aves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - an d fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keepin g us out of the caves in future.

information back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent deni alist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.

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like you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the ris k of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US indu stry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't e ven the largest of the different sources of risk.

ake. I started with the number for North Anna which is one of the least li kely, around 1 in 70,000. Factor in the useful life of the reactor which p resently stands at 70 years and now it's 1 in 1,000. There are 100 such re actors in the US, most of which have a worse risk factor and you get 1 in 1

Like I said, when you have a cite to the actual numbers, let us know. We don;t know what numbers you used or what you did with them, nor what quantifies as a radiation release. If it's popcorn fart, who cares?

obability of something going wrong with the reactor itself was an even more likely event. So the ultimate odds are at best 1 in 5. You wouldn't even drive your car if the odds of a serious accident were 1 in 5.

n and build. To be safe they have to be designed so much better and to acc ount for so many more problems than most anything we make.

ry happy billing their customers for half a billion dollars obtaining a fac ility approval that will likely never be built.

Make much money with that Tesla spamming yet?

facilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and risks are untenab le

ed?

monstration HTGR is about US$5,000/kW ? about twice the initial cos t estimates."

rce is available cheaper.

on top of the many other ...

Lots of 'estimate' costs turn out wrong, the magnitude matters; that magnit ude isn't a show stopper, IS the point.

d when the projects were started.

But you expect overruns now and in the future? Why is that, I'm not seein g any known cause that ought to persist/grow/shrink according to a timescale.

sts because of a massively overrun project in South Carolina? There is no longer a Westinghouse nuclear reactor company.

Yeah, but solar cell company Solyndra also no longer exists. Is there a k nown cause that we should expect to repeat?

Understanding is deep stuff, not touched by casual rhetorical spin.

Well, not directly, but when the earth moves, so do the waters. The unlikely magnitude 9 event created an unlikely fault tree (and modern designs have already been modified so that fault scenario can be treated by employing firefighting pump trucks).

I'd call the quake the proximal cause, though that is, of course, a judgement call and not an observation.

The difference, is that one might be a problem by unlikely accident, the other implements a deliberate injury

'Catastrophe' usually means sudden event, which is NOT the sole global warming evil to be expected.

WECGWWGW

Raising Solyandra as a counter-example to failed nuclear power companies isn't exactly an exhibition of deep undertstanding - it looks much more like an example of rhetorical spin.

Solyandra failed because it's idiosyncratic technology was less good that that exploited by the numerous solar cell companies that are making money.

The nuclear energy businesses that have failed seem to share much the same tecnology as those that are still hanging on.

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lations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were intere sted in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

oved civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of cav es long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out of the caves in future.

formation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denial ist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.

ower

like you to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the ris k of core damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US indu stry over the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't e ven the largest of the different sources of risk.

quake. I started with the number for North Anna which is one of the least likely, around 1 in 70,000. Factor in the useful life of the reactor which presently stands at 70 years and now it's 1 in 1,000. There are 100 such reactors in the US, most of which have a worse risk factor and you get 1 in 10 approximately. Not high math.

The problem with that is they design the reactors to match the chance and s everity of anticipated earthquakes to get the probability down to the nomin al value of 1 in 70,000... most of the time. So smaller earthquake likely, less earthquake resistance, similar odds, unless they aren't.

probability of something going wrong with the reactor itself was an even mo re likely event. So the ultimate odds are at best 1 in 5. You wouldn't ev en drive your car if the odds of a serious accident were 1 in 5.

ign and build. To be safe they have to be designed so much better and to a ccount for so many more problems than most anything we make.

very happy billing their customers for half a billion dollars obtaining a f acility approval that will likely never be built.

I've mentioned this before but the NRC says, "Indian Point 3 is calculated to be 1-in-10,000 each year" which is the worst earthquake rating in the US even though this is considered acceptable. NYC is just 25 miles downwind and in 2001, "During the September 11 attacks, American Airlines Flight 11 flew near the Indian Point Energy Center en route to the World Trade Center . Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers/plotters, had considered nuclear facilities for targeting in a terrorist attack." Imagine how much worse th e results would have been if this has been the target of one of the planes.

Before anyone talks about how the containment vessel would likely withstand the impact of an airplane, consider they don't need to attack the vessel i tself, only the cooling system which is outside the containment vessel. Kn ock that out with not even too large an airplane and the reactor will melt down. Given enough damage to the cooling system and the containment vessel will leak radiation through the cooling channels or even other means as is presently happening at Fukushima. The difference is that at Fukushima the y are dumping radioactive water into the Pacific ocean. At Indian Point th ey would be dumping it into the Hudson river that runs right through NYC.

When all this was factored in it seems the decision was made to end the app roval of these two reactors and shut them down by 2021. The plans to repla ce this energy include the 650 MW gas generator at Wawayanda, New York and transmission lines from other areas. Environmentalists are calling for eff orts to replace this capacity "by renewable energy, combined with conservat ion measures and improvements to the efficiency of the electrical grid."

I know that many don't want to discuss the facts. They prefer to put their own spin on everything in a way that makes them feel good. For me the mor e I look at nuclear power, the more issues I find and the more I don't like it. These are real issues that everyone should be aware of. But many peo ple don't want to learn from the mistakes that others have made. So we wil l repeat the same mistakes. Complacency is a big one. Hubris is another. They both can lead to nemesis.