A big part of the problem in the USA is legal. The owners can’t even use co-generation technology to generate electricity from the waste heat from these plants. the reason? If they modify these plants, then they will come under new environmental laws which will make the plants illegal to operate. Stupid laws, made by stupid people. So the owners opeate these rickety old, inefficient, polluting plants-because they are PENALIZED for making them more efficient! As long as Bozos like Ted Kennedy are allowed to maintain their grip on power plant construction (and that includes wind turbines), this nonsense will continue.
Ted Kennedy is presently making a film about his accomplishments-46 years in the senate-screwing the taxpayers of America-walk proud, Sen. Kennedy!
There are a lot of variables here - how much power we make from nukes, whether we reprocess spent fuel, and what that does to the price of Uranium (therefore stimulating the mining of more of it).
A couple of important things to note about nuclear fuel. First, it’s not a big component of the cost of nuclear power. Unlike fossil fuel power, where a large fraction of the overall cost is the cost of the fuel itself, nuclear power’s costs are almost entirely in the infrastructure and the handling of waste. The fuel itself accounts for only a few percentage points of the overall cost.
What this means is that wild price swings in the price of uranium will have only a modest effect on the price of nuclear power.
Which brings up the next point - Uranium is everywhere. Unlike oil, which was created through mostly plant decay and only exists in large amounts in isolated geological pockets where conditions were just right for it to pool, Uranium is scattered throughout the crust of the earth, and can even be found in usable quantities in seawater. Granted, the more exotic sources of uranium could a lot more expensive, but again that would not affect the price of power by that much.
According to this paper:
At those kinds of prices, you can mine uranium from phosphates and seawater, and if you do that, there is over 10,000 years of the stuff available at current energy consumption rates.
But we can also use Thorium as a nuclear fuel, and there’s a lot of that kicking around as well. And we can reprocess nuclear waste and gain another order of magnitude. Reprocessed waste also has the benefit of only being dangerously radioactive for around 700-900 years, which is a manageable timeframe for storage.
In short, you can consider cheap nuclear power to have enough fuel for at least a couple of hundred years, and more if we reprocess More expensive, but still usable, nuclear power is virtually inexhaustible.
The issue with uranium isn’t how much there is, but how much high grade uranium is left vs low grade and what the consequences are in direct cost, carbon production, and other environmental effects, once you need to start relying on low grade uranium as a source.
I hope that no objects too badly to my using this Wikipedia article for some numbers.
Very High grade ore is 20% Uranium. Low grade ore is 0.1% Uranium. Mining low grade is barely economical. And only if one does not account for the cost of the carbon produced by mining it. If you have the interest, an academic review of the issue is available but is summarized by the BBC as follows
The ex-, who was in public utility regulation, told me that the Europeans have it on us. Here in the US, electric companies saw it something like a bragging deal. “We can build it better than those guys.” In Europe, they took what tech was out there and improved on it. I.e. they improved the wheel…we (individual companies) tried to reinvent it each time.
Do their assumptions assume that there will be no fast breeder reactors and no reprocessing of spent fuel? If you reprocess fuel, the energy available in a gram of uranium is huge. If you don’t, you’re only using a tiny fraction of the energy available.
Anyway, there’s nothing that says mining uranium has to be particularly energy intensive. Certainly some types of uranium mining are, but others aren’t.
For example, there has been success in harvesting Uranium from seawater using a totally passive method: Aquaculture of Uranium in Seawater by a Fabric-Adsorbent Submerged System
The abstract:
Fishing for uranium. Drop your block of cloth in the ocean like a lobster cage. Come back and get it a year later, and pull out a kilogram of uranium. The only energy in the process is the power for the vessel used to fetch it and the energy cost of making the cloth.
Here’s a more in-depth article about the process, which includes a description of improvements that have already yielded big improvements, including using braided material instead of sheets in a rack separated by nets, which increased the yield to 1.5kg of Uranium after 30 days.
Synthesis of Uranium Adsorbent by Radiation-induced Graft Polymerization
Keep in mind that 1kg of uranium yellow cake will only have a few grams of U235 in it, but with reprocessing, a few grams of U235 represents a hell of a lot of energy. However, you’d need so much of this material currently that it would be extremely expensive - at least 100 times as expensive as other uranium sources today, so it will be a long time before we’d need to go to such exotic lengths. But it can be done. And remember, a 100-fold increase in the price of uranium fuel would only increase the overall cost of nuclear energy by a fraction of that amount.
And bear in mind that this research is still new, and not a lot of money has been spent on it. We don’t know what other improvements could be made. The materials are reusable, by the way - the uranium is removed by washing the cloth in an alkaline bath, and the cloth can go right back into the ocean. You could power the winches for raising and lowering the cloths with wind turbines, since you can put these things in any warm offshore water, and wind turbines work best offshore. That’s a pretty compelling harvesting method - wind powered uranium ‘fishing’, which actually cleans the water of heavy metals. But the need to use anything like this is decades or centuries away.
Any estimate of the amount of uranium available inexpensively has to take into account the increase in exploration and research into better extraction methods that come with time. For example, proven oil reserves have always been said to be only a few decades away from running out, but our ability to improve exploration and extraction of petroleum has increased faster than our consumption. I expect the same would be true of uranium.
BTW, there is enough uranium and other fissile material, including unprocessed nuclear waste, to provide our needs for a couple of hundreds years without any additional mining at all, so long as we’re willing to do reprocessing of the fuel.
Yes Sam, there are technologies that may someday be possible. Breeder technology may work out. New technologies like the one you link to may be scalable and feasible. May be. And maybe even funding that research with government money is wise.
But the reactors that are proposed to be built now are not breeder reactors, few countries right now are desirous of widespread fuel reprocessing, and those technologies for harvesting uranium from sources like sea water are right now still only interesting possibilities.
Nuclear meanwhile will need to compete as it is. And its life cycle carbon cost does have to include the likely carbon cost of harvesting lower grade uranium using the technology we know exists today.
Define local. The first indication of something wrong in Chernobly was the radioactive sensors screaming in Sweden. It is true a mere 15 to 30 thou died. Also a mere 6 million live in contaminated areas.
http://www.thelocal.se/7200/20070504/ Heres an article saying Swedes are still dieing and showing the radioactive effects.
How many deaths outside of the local area above the background baselines? AFAIK, very few to none. So…local. As opposed to global, which is what CO2 emissions effect if you believe the AGW/GCC folks anyway. Contaminated area is roughly where, oh, a mere 6 BILLION people live.
-XT
I did a couple back of the envelope calculations once…
One was that every SINGLE Person on the planet would have to have their OWN Three Mile Island Incident add up to one Chernobyl.
The second was, ALL the deaths attributed in the area to Chernobyl were on roughly the same level, if not significantly LOWER, as the child mortality rate for the region. Or in other words more children died from the choice of parents deciding to have and raise a child than folks died from Chernobyl. So, if nuclear power is big, bad, and scary, so is child birth/rearing.
Chernobly was genius in its level of stupidity. You couldnt have made it worse if you tried. And if the Russians had done ANYTHING other than the absolute WORST things you could have done RIGHT after the accident, the death toll would have been a tiny fraction of what it was.
Even the UN did a study where they came to the conclusion that stressing everyone out and destroying families and economies by evacuating “victims” and labeling them as such did MORE damage than the event itself.
IIRC, besides the poor workers on site, the only MEASURABLE increase in radiation related illnesses was an extremely RARE form of thryroid cancer in young children. So rather than a few cases a year for the region, for a period of time you had now had a couple hundred. And this cancer was both highly detectable before it got bad, and had about as high a CURE rate without any significant long lasting effects as any cancer does.
And even with that, if the retarded Soviets had just given everyone iodine tablets, even THOSE cancers probably would not have occured.
The world could probably have a Chernobly EVERY year… and in every measurable way be better off than using coal, oil, and gas…and thats NOT EVEN INCLUDING the scary doom and gloom global warming effects we will supposedly get.
Blll
Agreed Bill.
BTW, just managed to look at gonzo’s cite and I am underwhelmed.
So…in a 10 year period they are claiming (no cite) that there were 1000 cancer deaths (with a population of 1 million). I would love to see how many people died of, say, falling off their house or swallowing a tooth pick (or, say, LUNG cancer) for that same population grouping. 1000 over 10 YEARS? Nuclear power is even safer than I thought if that’s the case…since this was THE worst disaster in nuclear power history (and as Bill pointed out it was a series of fuckups of monumental…hell BIBLICAL…proportions).
Obviously gonzo is not the only one who fails to have even a tenuous grasp of probability statistics though, based on the article he linked to.
So…out of 22,000 cases 849 were ‘directly related to radiation’. By my calculation that’s not even 1% (though I will say that if their cancer rate is only 22k over a 10 year period they are significantly higher than what I understand our own is…maybe less cigarette smoking?).
Anyway, that article is really a load of horseshit…apologies to our Swedish brethren and sisteren if this represents a major news source of their’s (I’m doubtful). It’s much ado about nuffing…which is unsurprising considering who posted the link.
If you were trying to prove how scary nuclear power is gonzo I think you just blew your case out of the water…at least for anyone who can read between the lines and has an open mind about the subject.
-XT
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Do these cost projections for nuclear power reflect the rising price of oil? The main cost for nuclear power plants comes from their construction, which requires a massive amount of fossil fuel. This should be factored into all discussions to do with their costs.
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Nuclear power plants also require a reliable supply of cold water in order to run. As I understand it France had to switch off plants last summer because the temperature got too hot.
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Someone mentioned Canada upthread. We do have lots of nukes but we don’t necessarily do it well. The reason we have so many nukes (in Ontario at least, I can’t speak for the rest of the country) is because of heavy taxpayer subsidies.
As one example, here in Ontario we are still paying the debt retirement charge from the last power plant we built (the aforementioned Pickering A), which ended up costing orders of magnitude more than was originally projected.
Another example is the federal Nuclear Liability Act, which limits the operator to a liability of $75 million in case of an incident; the taxpayer picks up the rest. In the case of a nuclear incident, $75 million is chump change. So the taxpayer subsidizes the risk.
- Finally: I remain unconvinced that we (in Ontario, but I can’t see that things are different in the rest of North America) are in such desperate need of new nuclear power facilities. Most discussions on the subject focus on supply and very little on demand management. We could make changes which would have massive positive effects on our energy efficiency (such as reforming building and zoning/development policies) and nobody would even notice a change in their lifestyle. In order to justify its nuclear expansion, Ontario has used models which assume a growth in the rate of growth of electricity use. This is quite disingenuous in the total absence of discussion of meaningful conservation measures.
In Heat, George Monbiot made a convincing case that we could cut 90% of our emissions (and therefore a corresponding percentage of our energy use) without any change to our lifestyle, and without relying on nuclear. I’m not prepared to accept his truth as gospel, but it certainly does indicate an enormous unexplored potential for energy savings, and it seems irresponsible to commit to spending hundreds of billions of dollars without at least investigating the available alternatives.
This seems like elementary conservative logic to me. If the problem is that you’re spending more money than you can make, you have two options worth considering: spend less money, or make more. For some reason, tho, the “spending less” option doesn’t enter into this discourse.
When push comes to shove ENERGY is ENERGY…
IFFFFFFFFFFF…get the point?..IFFFFFFFF to produce nuclear energy required massive amounts of oil/coal/natural gas to produce it…the cost of nuclear energy would be SOOOOO high as to not even be in the same ballpark as carbon based/carbon emitting sources…or in other words something like DOUBLE carbon based stuff.
Nuclear as it now stands IS higher…maybe…but thats mostly due to a handful of things…
takes more/more skilled/edgeumacated/trained workers to design build and operate than carbon based energy sources…
The permiting/building process is UNGODLY when compared to carbon based sources…not to mention lawsuits that would bankrupt bill gates…
The whole “waste problem” is another cost anti-nukes LOVE to tack onto the cost of nuclear…and greatly exagerate…when they sure as hell don’t do the same to carbon based engergy sources…
Did you know many of the “clean/green” alternate energy sources are soooooo bad that it is a DEBATBLE issue as to whether they produce more energy than they consume? (and the energy they consume IS coal based)…now given current technolgy, they probably are on the positive side of the question…but the fact that it is even a relevant concern should tell you something…
I’ve never seen ANYTHING remotely like that for nuclear…lots of “possible problems”…sure/maybe…but that it consumes nearly as much energy (carbon based) as it consumes? …get outa here…total bull malarky…
Bllll
I’ve been following this thread with interest.
Is this not actually a sensible solution? How could any organisation other than a national government underwrite such a huge potential cost?
That’s not even close to being true. 31 people died in the immediate aftermath of the accident - 28 from radiation poisoning and 3 from other causes. An additional 125 were diagnosed with acute radiation sickness, but only 14 of them have died. There have also been 800 cases of thyroid cancer in children, but only 3 died from it.
The World Health Organization estimated that a total of 3500 deaths will have the Chernobyl accident as a cause, but most of these will come in the form of a higher incidence of cancer among the aged as the population grows older. But in fact, a lot of the dire predictions about the after-effects of Chernobyl did not come to pass, and even the WHO estimate now looks to be significantly high. There has been no measurable increase in Leukemia, which was originally thought to be a big problem in the future.
I don’t want to under-state the magnitude of the disaster, but a lot of people tend to wildly over-state it.
In comparison, the 1975 Banquo Dam collapse in China killed 171,000 people. In 2006, according to the State Work Safety Supervision Administration, 4,749 Chinese coal miners were killed in thousands of blasts, floods, and other accidents.
There is no form of energy that is absolutely safe. If you put solar panels on every roof in the U.S., deaths from accidental falls would skyrocket due to the added roof maintenance and cleaning requirements (accidental falls kill 15,000-20,000 people a year in the U.S. Guess what it would be if everyone was climbing on their roofs to clean their solar panels). Windmills are big, heavy structures that can kill people while being assembled. The largest windmills have landing decks for helicopters and can be quite dangerous to maintain. Of course, electricity can kill you, and kills hundreds of people a year.
Nuclear has always been held to an impossibly high standard that we don’t hold for any other source of energy. People panic over nuclear waste transportation, but no one has EVER died or even been contaminated by a nuclear transportation spill. And yet here in Alberta alone, over 100 people a year are killed on the oil sands projects. Can you imagine the outcry if 100 people were dying of radiation poisoning somewhere? Thousands of workers die each year from black lung, emphysema from workplace particulates, cancers from workplace risks, and other energy-related deaths.
Nuclear power is by far the safest form of baseload power we’ve ever devised. Even with Chernobyl added to the mix, the number of people killed as a result of nuclear power is a very tiny fraction of the number killed by other power sources.
Also, there’s no feasible way to hold various CO2 emitting sources liable for their damage, so by forcing nuclear power to absorb liability for hundreds of years into the future you put it at a serious disadvantage. If you want an efficient energy market, you can make the argument that a carbon tax on CO2 sources would level the playing field. But absent that, the next best thing to do would be to indemnify nuclear power from long-term liability to level the playing field.