"New Nuclear Reactor every 2 days is not feasible"

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

I have to take issue with this blanket statement. In the hypothetical future world of 2050 described, education and industrialization has spread world-wide, and there is now a market of 9 billion consumers, many of whom hold useful skills, who demand Poland-level amounts of energy per-capita.

This is a straight economics question. Right now, fully loaded nuclear reactors have a drawback - they are expensive. It depends on how you spin the numbers, but a fully licensed plant with all costs accounted for might run 13.7 cents/kilowatt hour, using the most pessimistic numbers displayed on this site here : http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Economic-Aspects/Economics-of-Nuclear-Power/#.UnV1wPmql8E

Apparently, the per capita income of Poland is $13,000. That means the total global economy in this world is 117 trillion annually. A nice nuclear plant might run you 10 billion at the high end, so this hypothetical future world is spending 1.8 trillion building nuclear reactors annually. That’s only 1.5% of the global economy.

Other posters will be quick to point out that if 150 nuclear reactors were being constructed annually, there would be considerable economy of scale, and the cost per plant would be a lot less. Yet OTHER posters are going to say that building this many nuclear reactors will require incredible quantities of material, and some of those materials (rare earths, zirconium etc) might be rare. This would work in the other direction and drive costs up.

Neverthless, at current prices, it’s only 1.5% of the global economy, so the world could afford to spend quite a bit more money. In fact, if you think about it, if we had a world with 9 billion people, a good chunk of them educated as STEM workers, I think we could probably devise a way to give everyone a lifestyle closer to that of a high end first world country.

Now, the final argument I expect to see in this thread is that this future world is pure fantasy. We aren’t going to end up with a world of 9 billion educated and productive people (even to the standards of Poland) by 2050 for a lot of reasons. However, that isn’t the point : I’m saying that Cecil’s argument is complete malarky. For the nations of the world that have the technical skill, we could in fact run everything using nuclear power. It would probably be more expensive than the methods we use now, and there’s the nasty fact that with this many power reactors (we are talking about thousands, eventually tens of thousands of them) meltdowns will be a common occurence, but basic reasoning says it could be done this way.

Responding to :

and

2

I thought the big problem was lack of usable Uranium. There isn’t that much around and what is used is mostly wasted due to reactor processes producing huge amounts of unusable waste mixed with unusable Uranium.

3

Even cheaper if you used 3-D printers.

4

This does have solutions, however. You can use the neutrons produced by a reactor to convert U-238 to U-235 (the classic “breeder” reactor) or, apparently, you can do something similar to Thorium.

Either method, fuel is basically infinite - tens of thousands of years at a minimum.

5

And if fusion ever becomes available, the first plants won’t be pure fusion but fusion-boosted fission: using the fast neutrons from fusion to induce fission directly in U-238, and to burn up nuclear waste. In the mid term this is probably the most viable form of nuclear energy, even if the fusion reaction itself isn’t break even.

6

Won’t that make the whole reactor go boom.?:dubious:

7

You’re doing this reaction under controlled conditions, a little bit of material at a time, and there’s a big mountain of neutron absorbers and dampeners and control rods and so on.

But yeah, this is one of the drawbacks. It’s been pointed out that the actual, empirical severe accident rate for civilian pressurized water reactors is somewhere on the order of 1% over the reactor’s lifetime. Even if you used next generation designs, and you assume those designs are “10 times safer”, if you are building tens of thousands of these things over a period of decades, you better get used to cleaning up the accidents.

This could be dealt with. I thought of having reactor complexes surrounded by uninhibited land, and the workers would commute to work by train every day.

8

No, because the neutrons released from fissioning U-238 aren’t energetic enough to induce further fission. Only the very high energy neutrons generated by the deuterium-tritium reaction can do that. That’s one advantage of hybrid fusion-fission reactors: you can hit the off switch and it stops immediately.

9

I don’t offhand believe a reactor can convert U-238 to U-235. The classic “breeder” reaction is U-238 + n => U-239 => Np-239 + e[sup]-[/sup] => Pu-239 + e[sup]-[/sup], which is more or less as fissionable as U-235.

10

I think Cecil or Nocera made a slight error. From the article:
He thinks we could produce 8 terawatts by constructing 8,000 nuclear power plants, which would mean one new plant every two days for the next 40 years.

There is a big difference between a nuclear plant and a nuclear reactor. A single reactor produces about a gigawatt, so we want about 8000 reactors. But most plants have multiple reactors; as many as 7. This might well go higher if we were trying to place large numbers of new reactors.

11

I dispute the OP’s entire argument.

First, the title, “New Nuclear Reactor every 2 days is not feasible”, is disingenuous. Cecil never uses the word feasible anywhere in the article. Second, his argument is not at all about nuclear power. He’s looking at several sources of power in that first article, of which nuclear is just one. And it’s certainly the most feasible of the four, since the other three are ridiculous in their extremity.

You can certainly argue whether Nocera’s numbers are correct. But you can’t argue Cecil’s point, which is merely that alternative power, barring a miracle breakthrough, is insufficient. And you absolutely can’t claim that Cecil says anything at all negative about nuclear. He doesn’t, in either column. He just states, correctly, that building 180*40 nuclear power plants is not going to happen. It doesn’t matter whether it technically is possible. It’s not going to happen. Does anybody doubt this?

The entire OP is built on a false premise and goes off into a fantasy world. What exactly was the point?

12

Exact quote :
But in Nocera’s analysis, just to keep up with expected demand over the next 40 years we’d have to open an additional nuclear power plant every two days.
5. Not going to happen, obviously.

I suggest you read the linked articles, and read posts in their entirety before making uninformed comments. I specifically also mention that this is a fantasy world, as established in Cecil’s premise. Cecil is assuming we need as much energy per capita as Poland. Given that assumption, the world must be making the GDP of Poland, and sufficient nuclear reactors to generate enough power is affordable. (but probably not the optimal solution)

13

This site (updated just a couple of days ago) contains a lot of detailed information about the current and projected (through 2020) state of nuclear power in the United States. It is a pro-nuclear-power site and appears to be, if anything, optimistic about the proliferation of nuclear energy.

…and even this site states only that “four to six new units may come online by 2020”. That’s less than one new nuclear plant per year.

14

The problem of creating the reactors is not a practical one but a political one. Nobody understands that better than people who are pro-nuclear and thinking that we could get approval of one new reactor a year is fairly optimistic.

15

As I will continue to say as long as necessary, not feasible and not going to happen are two entirely different things and you can’t arbitrarily conflate them.

16

That doesn’t say we can’t do it, it just says we won’t. There is a reason for this, and I quoted in the OP. Nuclear is expensive per KwH, and is very, very, very expensive upfront.

17

Given the context, if you don’t assume Cecil meant “not feasible”, his article does not make any sense.

18

So are other infrastructure projects. The real reason is that people are scared of the words “radioactive” and “nuclear,” and will keep plans to build such plants entangled in legal proceedings indefinitely.

19

Full of broken promises may be a better reason. There are a people who the very term radioactive strikes fear in their heart, but that’s not the vast majority of people.

The problem is that nuclear energy never provided what it was suppose to: Energy that was too cheap to meter. Energy that’s 100% safe. Energy that has no downside!

Instead, we find out that building a nuclear power plant is complex and fraught with perils. In Fukushima, the plant survived the earth quake, shut down as it was suppose to, but then blew up anyway because with it shutdown, it couldn’t generate the required energy to keep the pumps going in order to keep the plant cool while it was shutting down? What? During the design, they sort of forgot about that issue? How could they have even started the plant knowing that it would take two weeks to shutdown and that power would be needed to keep the plant cool during this time, but had no idea how this would be accomplished.

Then, there’s the issue of what happens when nuclear plants are decommissioned. Tearing down a nuclear power plant can take decades, is expensive, and we still have no idea where to store the radioactive wastes.

Then we find the type of sloppiness that’s really inexcusable. Disaster plans that are pretty much made out of whole cloth. The Indian Point nuclear reactor assumed in their disaster recovery plan that they could evacuate 20 million people (including parts of Manhattan) in a few hours. Anyone who’s commuted to and from Manhattan, or drives on the Long Island Expressway could have pointed out this was a pure pipe dream.

And, then there’s the real world examples of what happens when things don’t quite go right with nuclear power plants. When a regular power plant blows up, the damage is quite localized, and rebuilding can take place almost immediately. When a nuclear power plant goes, the damage is widespread and long lasting. In Ukraine, the exclusion zone covers over 1000 square miles, and may be in effect for 180 to 350 years. And, don’t forget the continent wide economic damage to Europe as the cloud of radioactive particles rained down upon the soil in Finland and Scandinavia.

The nuclear power industry had the backing of the American public. They lost it bit-by-bit as the nuclear dream turned into reality and later into disaster.

20

No. The plant overheated because the backup diesel generators were swamped by the 13 m tsunami that came over the 10 m sea wall. Otherwise there would not have been an issue at all.

Before construction can be granted to nuclear power plants, all decommissioning plans and costs must be in place approved by the nuclear regulator.

The nuclear industry is one of the safest and most regulated of all industries. Yes, there have been disasters, and yes the industry learns from these, just as the airline industry learned from their disasters over the years.