Fukushima inspection in 2015 photo IAEA
Failed EPR and AP1000 reactor projects have brought giant energy companies to their knees, and even pro-nuclear lobbyists now acknowledge that the industry is in crisis. Jim Green, editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter, takes stock of the crisis in the global nuclear sector and concludes that the industry’s likely response, a retreat from post-Fukushima efforts to strengthen safety standards, risks making a bad situation worse.
The crisis over Toshiba that is it hitting the headlines is part of a much deeper crisis in the global nuclear sector. The venerable Japanese company is far from the only nuclear player
in crisis. Take France. The French government is selling assets so it can prop up its heavily indebted nuclear utilities. Électricité de France (EDF) announced in 2015 that it would sell €10bn of assets by 2020 to rein in its debt, which now stands at €37.4bn. EDF is being pressured by the French government to purchase parts of its bankrupt sibling Areva, which has accumulated losses of over €10bn over the past five years.
French EPR reactors under construction in France and Finland are three times over budget ‒ the combined cost overruns amount to about €15bn. Bloomberg noted in April 2015 that Areva’s EPR export ambitions are “in tatters“, and now Areva itself is in tatters.
‘Nuclear dark ages’
These latest dramas occur against a backdrop of deep industry malaise, with the only hope of growth now resting squarely on the shoulders of China. A February 15 piece in the Financial Times said: “Hopes of a nuclear renaissance have largely disappeared. For many suppliers, not least Toshiba, simply avoiding a nuclear dark ages would be achievement enough.”
Toshiba and Westinghouse are in deep trouble because of massive cost overruns building four AP1000 reactors in the US ‒ the combined overruns are about €11.6bn and counting. The saga is detailed in Bloomberg pieces titled ‘Toshiba’s Nuclear Reactor Mess Winds Back to a Louisiana Swamp‘ and ‘Toshiba’s Record Fall Highlights U.S. Nuclear Cost Nightmare‘.
Toshiba said on February 14 that it expects to book a €5.9bn writedown on Westinghouse, on top of a €1.9bn writedown in April 2016. The losses exceed the €5.1bn Toshiba paid when it bought a majority stake in Westinghouse in 2006.
Many thousands of staff, skilled across a range of disciplines, need to be trained and employed if the nuclear power industry is to move ahead (or even survive)
The four AP1000 reactors are the only ones under construction in the US. “There’s billions and billions of dollars at stake here,” said Gregory Jaczko, former head of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “This could take down Toshiba and it certainly means the end of new nuclear construction in the US.”
Bankruptcy looms for Toshiba, with the banks circling and the risk heightened by the likelihood of further delays and cost overruns with the AP1000 reactors in the US, and unresolved litigation over those projects.
‘Too much of a mess’
Toshiba says it would likely sell Westinghouse if that was an option ‒ but there is no prospect of a buyer. The nuclear unit is, as Bloomberg noted, “too much of a mess” to sell. And since that isn’t an option, Toshiba must sell profitable businesses instead to stave off bankruptcy. The company plans to sell most ‒ perhaps all ‒ of its profitable microchip business to prop up the nuclear carcass and avoid bankruptcy.
The company might get €12.3‒16.1bn by selling its entire stake in its microchip business, said Joel Hruska from ExtremeTech. “That would pay off the company’s immediate debts,” Hruska said, “but would leave it holding the bag on an incredibly expensive, underwhelming nuclear business with no prospects for near-term improvement.”
Toshiba plans to exit the high-risk reactor construction business and focus its nuclear business on design, equipment supply and engineering services.
UK plans
One site where the nuclear problems come together is Moorside in the UK. A Toshiba / Engie consortium was planning to build three AP1000 reactors there, but Toshiba wants to sell its stake in the consortium NuGen in the wake of its massive losses from AP1000 construction projects in the US. Engie also reportedly wants to sell its stake in the consortium, and the French government has already sold part of its stake in Engie … to help prop up EDF and Areva! Deck-chairs are being shuffled.
Cumbrians will be glad to see the back of corruption-plagued Toshiba ‒ but corruption-plagued South Korean utility KEPCO might take its place.
Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE) commented: “KEPCO is itself still emerging from a major scandal that surfaced in 2012 involving bribery, corruption and faked safety tests for critical nuclear plant equipment which resulted in a prolonged shut-down of a number of nuclear power stations and the jailing of power engineers and parts suppliers.”
“Nuclear safety always undermines nuclear economics. Inherently, it’s a technology whose time never comes”
Plans for six AP1000 reactors in India may not survive the Toshiba/Westinghouse meltdown either. The project is now almost impossible according to Reuters’ sources. India is said to be one of the countries leading the ‘nuclear renaissance’ but hasn’t seen a single reactor construction start since 2011.
Toshiba’s demise would not greatly concern the nuclear industry if it was an isolated case, but it is symptomatic of industry-wide problems. Nick Butler from Kings College London wrote in a Financial Times online post: “Toshiba is just one company in the global nuclear industry, but its current problems are symptomatic of the difficulties facing all the private enterprises in the sector. Civil nuclear power involves huge up-front capital costs, very long pay-back periods and high risks that are compounded by a lack of experience, especially in managing nuclear construction projects after a long period with few new plants. For all those reasons, private investors avoid the sector and prefer to put their money where they see faster and safer returns.”
‘Rapidly accelerating crisis’
The nuclear industry and its supporters have responded in varying ways to the crises facing nuclear utilities and the industry’s broader malaise. Some opt for head-in-the-sand delusion and denial. Others are extremely pessimistic about the industry’s future. Others paint a picture of serious but surmountable problems.
Michael Shellenberger from the pro-nuclear Breakthrough Institute presents cataclysmic assessments of nuclear power’s “rapidly accelerating crisis“ and a “crisis that threatens the death of nuclear energy in the West“. He notes that: “Nations are unlikely to buy nuclear from nations like the US, France and Japan that are closing (or not opening) their nuclear power plants. (…) From now on, there are only three major players in the global nuclear power plant market: Korea, China and Russia. The US, the EU and Japan are just out of the game. France could get back in, but they are not competitive today.”
That’s good news for the nuclear industries in South Korea, China and Russia. But they might end up squabbling over scraps ‒ there were just three reactor construction starts last year around the world.
South Korean companies have failed to win a single contract since the contract to build four reactors in the UAE. Likewise, China has made no inroads into export markets other than projects in Pakistan and Argentina.
Russia’s Rosatom has countless non-binding agreements to supply reactors, mostly in developing countries. But Russia can’t afford the loan funding promised in these agreements, and most of the potential customer countries can’t afford to pay the capital costs for reactors. Former World Nuclear Association executive Steve Kidd says it is “highly unlikely that Russia will succeed in carrying out even half of the projects in which it claims to be closely involved”.
Pro-nuclear commentator Dan Yurman writes that a “sense of panic is emerging globally” as Toshiba exits the reactor construction industry.
Radical breaks from past designs sometimes work in industries that require little up-front capital, like Internet companies. It’s now clear that they are deadly when it comes to nuclear”
Yurman adds: “After nine years of writing about the global nuclear industry, these developments make for an unusually grim outlook. It’s a very big rock hitting the pond. Toshiba’s self-inflicted wounds will result in long lasting challenges to the future of the global nuclear energy industry. Worse, it comes on top of the French government having to restructure and recapitalize Areva …”
Yurman notes that Westinghouse may struggle to keep its nuclear workforce intact: “Layoffs and cost cutting could reduce the core competencies of the firm and its ability to meet the service needs of existing customers much less be a vendor of nuclear technologies for new projects.”
Likewise, Will Davis, a consultant and writer for the American Nuclear Society, explains the failure of the Japanese/US AP1000 projects and the French EPR projects with reference to the “loss of institutional knowledge, industrial capability and construction capability” over the past generation.
As recent history has repeatedly shown, that loss of capability leads to reactor project delays and cost overruns, and that in turn leads one after another country to abandon plans for new reactors.
Many thousands of staff, skilled across a range of disciplines, need to be trained and employed if the nuclear power industry is to move ahead (or even survive). But utilities and companies are firing thousands of staff and making a perilous situation much worse … possibly irretrievable. EDF, for example, plans to cut 5,200 to 7,000 staff by 2019 (including 2,000 sacked last year) ‒ about 10% of its total workforce.
Ironically, Westinghouse, the villain in Toshiba’s demise, may have made the best strategic decision of all the nuclear utilities. In 2014, Westinghouse announced plans to expand and hopefully triple its nuclear decommissioning business. The global reactor fleet is ageing and the International Energy Agency anticipates an “unprecedented rate of decommissioning” ‒ almost 200 reactor shut-downs between 2014 and 2040.
A future for nuclear power?
A fundamental difficulty for the nuclear industry is that the imperatives for greater safety and reduced costs push in opposite directions. Mark Cooper, from the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, recently told the New York Times: “Nuclear safety always undermines nuclear economics. Inherently, it’s a technology whose time never comes.”
Beyond platitudes ‒ the obvious need for high safety standards, somehow building up the skills base and so on ‒ it’s difficult to see a way out of the mess.
The industry ‒ or more to the point, nuclear enthusiasts outside the industry ‒ could drop the tiresome rhetoric about Generation IV technology coming to the rescue. Shellenberger may have reached that conclusion, writing recently that: “Radical breaks from past designs sometimes work in industries that require little up-front capital, like Internet companies. It’s now clear that they are deadly when it comes to nuclear.”
And Shellenberger’s comments only refer to APR1000 and EPR projects, which aren’t radical at all. The likelihood of genuinely radical Generation IV concepts coming to the rescue is minuscule in circumstances where the inability to build conventional reactors on-time and on-budget has brought industry giants like Toshiba, Westinghouse, EDF and Areva to their knees.
A retreat from post-Fukushima efforts to strengthen safety standards seems to be where the industry and its enthusiasts are heading
Retreating from post-Fukushima efforts to strengthen safety standards inevitably increases the risk of another Chernobyl- or Fukushima-scale catastrophe. Leaving aside the hotly-disputed health effects from those disasters, the economic costs associated with both disasters was in the ball-park of US$500 billion, and both had devastating impacts on public acceptance of nuclear power.
Yet a retreat from post-Fukushima efforts to strengthen safety standards seems to be where the industry and its enthusiasts are heading. Proposals include weakening safety regulations; abandoning Generation 3/3+ reactors in favour of Generation 2 reactor types (or redefining Generation 2 reactor types as Generation 3/3+); and overturning the established scientific orthodoxy that even the smallest doses of ionizing radiation can cause morbidity and mortality.
How to convince the public to accept reduced nuclear safety standards? In a word: spin. Shellenberger, for example, wants “higher social acceptance” but he also wants weakened safety regulations such as the repeal of a US Nuclear Regulatory Commission rule designed to strengthen reactors against aircraft strikes. He squares the circle with spin and sophistry, claiming (without evidence) that the NRC’s Aircraft Impact Rule “would not improve safety” and claiming (without evidence) that the NRC “caved in to demands” from anti-nuclear groups to establish the rule.
Editor’s Note
Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter, where a version of this article was originally published.
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Time to double down on renewables. It’s feasible and cost effective right now. What else are we waiting for? I’m not against nuclear “per se”, though. Perhaps molten salt reactors, which promise to do away with the safety issues (real ones as well as embryonic ones) that have brought the current civilian nuclear industry to its knees, might have a role to play in the long term. Or not.
Dr Green wants to kill off the nuclear industry , that is quite clear. Comments such as the ” hotly-disputed ” health effects from Chernobyl & Fukushima are disappointing in the light of UNSCEAR.
While the large reactor construction industry in the west is undoubtably struggling there is a new wave of smaller reactors about to come online
Plenty of anti-nuclear spin here which doesn’t hold much water.
EDF has strengthened its balance sheet to be able to finance Hinkley Point C in addition to life extending France’s existing reactors. The costs of Flamanville 3 reflect the way a state owned utility handles projects and is able to absorb the costs. The overall costs will be covered by EDF no question. It appears AREVA made a commercial mistake in Finland carrying the burden of a fixed price contract. The EPR reactor is a ‘Rolls Royce’ design that is not now being offered outside of Western Europe.
The problems Toshiba faces appear to be largely commercial in the US. The technology is sound and any technical issues will be overcome. In contrast KEPCO is reported to be making good progress on four reactors in the UAE. China and EDF have started work on design approval for a Hualong One reactor at Bradwell. Rebuilding the nuclear skills base after decades of little activity was never going to be easy but engineers are resourceful and will come up with solutions. Civil nuclear power was very new in the 1950s but engineers quickly developed large reactors which over their life were successful and safe in the west.
The lessons learnt at Fukushima mainly around electrical supplies and emergency plans have already been applied to nuclear stations around the world. Safety standards have not been watered down.
In 2014, Nigel West wrote: “Back in 2011, after the Fukushima disaster, it appeared as though Japan’s nuclear dream was in tatters. However, only three years later, the reverse appears to be the case.”
As of Feb 2017, 2 reactors are operating in Japan. Clearly West is one of the head-in-the-sand nuclear advocates opting for delusion and denial.
Fukushima lessons about emergency planning have not been implemented, that’s one of the main reasons for ongoing strong opposition to reactor restarts. Pretending that problems have been resolved is a poor substitute for actually resolving problems.
Yes the French state will absorb the massive cost overruns associated with Flamanville-3 and the EPR in Finland. It’s an open question whether French citizens will tolerate the 50-100 billion euro price-tag to maintain the fleet of French reactors.
‘Nigel West’ was not writing here or anywhere else in 2014!! Sorry if I shot holes in your biased article – if it hadn’t been me others would have.
Jim you know very well that the issues in Japan were caused by a Tsunami – it doesn’t follow that nuclear power is unsafe. The issues with checking and securing emergency power supplies for all reactors were dealt with across the world as a matter of urgency. UK doesn’t have the tsunami problem and it’s stations are designed to deal with a credible flood risk scenario. It was reviewed as a precautionary measure though. The ONR, ASN and RSK regulators ensure operator emergency plans are robust in the UK, France and Germany.
I would say though building nuclear reactors in Japan given the earth quake and tsunami problem may not have been wise in hindsight. However the stations are built to withstand earthquakes and have stood the test of time. The issue the designers did not anticipate at Fukushima was the crest of the sea wall falling due to an earthquake which allowed the tsunami to overtop the sea wall. At this point I believe only one person is reported to have died due to radiation exposure whereas over 12,000 died as a result of the tsunami – a bit of perspective is always good.
The refurbishment and life extension costs of EDF’s nuclear fleet are well understood, within EDF’s plans and easier to deal with than new build costs.
They calculated what the odds of a tzunami taking out the powerplant at Fukushima was after that big one in Indonesia. They decided against doing anything, I assume to save money. They had a big explosion which was IIRC hydrogen, also preventable.
Nuclear is usually mostly safe, but it’s not always safe, they don’t always take precautions when it costs money, and some failures are really ugly. If nuclear produced electricity from a new plant for 2 cents a kwh, it might be worth the risk, but for 20 cents a kwh it’s ridiculous.
The Fuskushima disaster happened because the reactor depended on active safety controls and these failed because the grid connection failed and the back-up power failed. Earthquakes and tsunamis do not happen everywhere. But grid failures and back-up power failures can have many causes. So yes the Fuskushima disaster can happen at every similar nuclear power station.
Not so. All nuclear stations have multiple standby diesels and fuel tankage to cover for loss of the grid connection. The EPR has six independent diesels. So just failure of the grid is not an issue as diesels would operate to secure essential services.
However, because the tsunami overtopped the flood defences essential power supplies were lost completely and that is why the accident happened.
So a similar accident cannot happen at every similar station. A worldwide programme to fix any flood risk issues was initiated too.
BTW Fukushima was an accident, not a disaster. The tsunami was a disaster that killed >20,000 people.
If the diesels can be killed by a common cause (here a flood wave) the redundancy in the system is gone. To avoit htis the engineering approach against unknown common causes would be, to install 6 different kinds of diesels at 6 completely different locations (e.g. one in the basement, one on the roof, and so on…), and with 6 completely different control systems, supplied from 6 different sources for Diesel and so on. It is possible to reduce the likelyhood of black swan events this way, but it rises costs again. Since nuclear is already too expensive to be competitive, there is a serious problem.
No need for that. The sea wall crest was too low. All large engineering projects use a risk based probability assessment, not ‘black swans’ which is an anti nuclear construct that has no engineering basis. Nuclear stations are engineered on the ALARP principle.
There is more risk to people through driving cars and flying in aeroplanes than nuclear power in the west. Only one death has been linked to the accident at Fukushima.
Well at areoplanes you include the possibility of black swans in the design, So the main control units use different software on different hardware to avoid common causes.
Tere are other areas of engineering with less hybris.
Helmut, nuclear power is only more expensive than hydro electric power generation and cheaper than wind, gas and solar here in the province of Ontario Canada. See the included link:
https://cna.ca/why-nuclear-energy/affordable/power-rates/
If you don’t believe this source, check for your own region.
Now that Japan has shut down its nuclear power stations, they have had to import their power and power rates have gone up.
Here’s a youtube video that explains the failures at the Fukushima plant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMaEjEWL6PU
Human error (cost cutting) was a big contributor to the disaster here. Before the disaster tsunami disaster, the OEM for this plant had recommended to TEPCO changes that would have protected the backup systems but the operator choose not to bother because they were within months of shutting the plant down for end of life. A similar power plant down the coast from this ill fainted plant had made the changes to their backup systems and they did not suffer the losses.
Chernbyl too was human error, watch this video:
http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/
Simple put, if you play with fire, you will get burned. You cut corners, it will catch up with you. Do it properly or don’t do it at all.
These were not accidents but poorly calculated risks that had dire consequences.
The count of petroleum based disasters and those cost are massive compared to those of the nuclear industry, how does that make you feel?
Sure, you may drive an electric car, but those vehicles are made from parts that are largely petroleum derivatives as are many of our synthetics and products in our homes.
Don’t be against something that is a benefit to society as a whole, but be for more stringent standards and hold those responsible to greater levels of accountability.
The biggest opponents of the nuclear industry are those in the petroleum industry who feed society many lies about the nuclear industry whilst diverting attention from their ships that run aground, their pipeline leaks and explosions and their oil rig disasters. But we accept that and keep driving cars and heating with gas etc…
Watch the movie, “Pandora’s Promise” by Robert Stone. It is an education. Here is a commentary regarding the movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLkBdD-sM8E
Helmut, take the time to learn about the technology, it is safe and it is inexpensive.
For my own region it is well kown: lignite 6-7ct/kWh, hard coal 7-9ct/kWh, gas 8-12ct/kWh, nuclear above 12ct/kWh for new systems, Wind gets 7ct/kWh in 2018, solar bids for utility scale solar are 6-6,5 ct/kWh at the moment, falling.
Helmut,
Your 7cnt/KWh for onshore wind implies that offshore wind is already cheaper than onshore wind. Last autumn the Dutch Borssele offshore wind farm was auctioned for 5.45cnt/KWh (similar 15yrs guarantees as in Germany)…
While the fast price decrease of offshore, thanks to bigger wind turbines and increased installation efficiencies, just started…
The article is clearly written in a style that is biased against the nuclear industry, which of course is not surprising given the author’s history of opposition and commitment to opposing nuclear energy via issuing newsletters. Thus there has been no attempt made at impartial analysis.
First of all that it is inappropriate to call the situation described ‘a crisis’. The development of nuclear technologies leads directly to global decarbonisation in the power sector, which should be the only option under consideration when looking at how to develop energy markets.
Within this context, the situation is just another development stage, hardly a ‘crisis’.
Second, many unsubstantiated facts were used together with outdated and rather far-fetched links. For example, when talking about India, the author intentionally forgets that in August 2016 a second power unit came online at the Kundakulam plant, and construction of a third and fourth began. So what 2011 is he talking about?
Or how about Steve Kidd’s statement, made two and a half years ago!? Concluding his remarks, the author contradicts himself, as the intervening years have proved Kidd wrong: in the past 2 years and 6 months, Rosatom has not lost any contracts through any fault of its own.
In total, it is astonishing that the man who wrote this is the editor of a newsletter claiming to be “well-researched with factual information from all corners of the globe”.
“First of all that it is inappropriate to call the situation described ‘a crisis’.”
Nuclear lobbyists are increasingly talking about a crisis, As a worldwide generalization, the word ‘crisis’ is too strong. To take the extreme example, China’s nuclear power program clearly isn’t in crisis.
The aging of the global reactor fleet isn’t yet a crisis for the industry, but it is heading that way. In many ‒ perhaps most ‒ of the countries with nuclear power, the prospects for new reactors are dim and rear-guard battles are being fought to extend the lifespans of aging reactors that are approaching or past their use-by dates.
Large parts of the worldwide nuclear industry are already in crisis. The US nuclear industry is in crisis, with no likelihood of new reactors for the foreseeable future (other than the four under construction) and a very old reactor fleet. Toshiba and Westinghouse are certainly in crisis and their attempt to establish a Japanese/US reactor construction and export industry is in tatters.
The French nuclear industry is in crisis … its “worst situation ever” according to former EDF director Gérard Magnin. The French nuclear industry faces countless serious problems domestically, and its EPR export ambitions are “in tatters” as Bloomberg noted in 2015. EDF and Areva would both be bankrupt if not for the largesse of the French state.
Combined, the crisis-ridden US and French nuclear industries account for more than one-third of the world’s reactors and they accounted for 50% of nuclear power generation in 2015.
“For example, when talking about India, the author intentionally forgets that in August 2016 a second power unit came online at the Kundakulam plant, and construction of a third and fourth began. So what 2011 is he talking about?”
As stated in the article, the last construction start in India was in 2011. You only needed to follow the link to find the source – the IAEA’s database:
https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=IN
Construction of Kundakulam 3 and 4 has not begun – see the above IAEA link and the WNA which says construction will begin in 2017.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/india.aspx
“in the past 2 years and 6 months, Rosatom has not lost any contracts through any fault of its own.”
Russia’s inability to provide promised loan funding to more than a fraction of its paper-projects hasn’t been tested because potential customer countries keep dropping out.
In the past two years, Russia’s plans to build reactors in Vietnam and South Africa, and probably other countries (e.g. Indonesia), have come unstuck.
Rosatom is marketing nuclear power to Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. Good luck to them ‒ absolutely no chance of any of those countries building nuclear power plants in the foreseeable future.
Rosatom plans to sign cooperation agreements with Kenya, Uganda and Zambia. Good luck to them ‒ absolutely no chance of any of those countries building nuclear power plants in the foreseeable future.
That pattern is being played out around the world.
Jim, I have looked at the links you provided. But to get what I meant in my previous comment you need to adress the relevant information: the second phase in the construction of Kudankulam nuclear power plant was launched on 15 October 2016 (http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Kudankulam-II-project-launched-17101601.html). Let’s not argue about the terminology of what should be considered the launch of construction. I simply wish to point out that the way you have formulated your ideas may actually be misleading for the audience. This also applies to the way you speak in regard to Russia: you represent your own opinion as an accomplished fact. Yet the facts show that in a period of two and a half years, not a single Rosatom contract has been disrupted due to any fault attributable to Rosatom. Thus you are building theories – interesting ones – but nevertheless, just theories.
The cost of the Fukushima Nuclear disaster is often confused with the cost caused by the earthquake and tsunami. The reconstruction and recovery costs directly associated with the earthquake and the tsunami will top $250 billion. Strangely, the costs that never materialised were those of radiation-induced cancer and death. Fukushima grown food has no detectable radiation from the accident. The fishing stocks off the Japanese coast are not contaminated.
The media continues to wrongly assert that experts still debate whether the Chernobyl deaths number in the hundreds or in the millions, but there is actually no such debate among the experts. The number is less than a hundred. However, as with Fukushima, the most significant health and economic problems came from the perceived severity of the accidents and the fear spread through misunderstanding of radiation effects and the sometimes unethical exploitation of the refugees. While this is horrible, it does not rise to the level of the millions of deaths that the public now believes resulted from those two accidents and that has so incorrectly coloured the world view on nuclear energy. This view has brought about much higher safety standards, increased the cost, and delayed construction. In the past France build most of it’s nuclear infrastructure within a decade. The nuclear power industry is still the safest industry in the world by any measure.
All of those comments are inaccurate.
On the costs of the Fukushima disaster – direct and indirect – see https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/836/economic-impacts-fukushima-disaster
On the Fukushima death toll, see http://www.ianfairlie.org/news/summing-the-health-effects-of-the-fukushima-nuclear-disaster/
See also the WHO report http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/fukushima_report_20130228/en/
On the Chernobyl death toll, see https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/821/pro-nuclear-environmentalists-and-chernobyl-death-toll
Inaccurate – there is a lot of misinformation published. What one has to take into account what would the cost have been Self-styled anti-nuclear environmentalists peddle misinformation. if the Nuclear Power Plant had not gone into melt down. What you don’t read is that the total cost caused by the earth quake and tsunami alone would have costed an estimated $250 billion). You never see an isolated estimate on the direct cost and consequential losses (costs) of the explosion and melt down. The WHO reports that no one has prematurely died from radiation. There will be more premature deaths from the airborne pollution they now have from burning coal & natural gas. It always amuses me when I read “the nuclear industry and some of its scientifically-illiterate supporters”. You never hear the anti-nuclear environmentalists take a position on the global annual 7,000 premature deaths caused by airborne pollution and the cost to the heath system on this. Read-up on some real scientific data, instead of linking estimates and assumptions on mostly old news. Also look up the environmental impact from radioactive tracers used in the hydraulic fracturing process, by the natural gas industry. Furthermore, fracking has serious air quality, ground water quality and methane emission issues. By energy deathprint, the number of people killed by one kind of energy or another per kWhr produced. coal is the worst and nuclear is the best.
“The safest industry in the world by any measure” is one hell of an assertion. You got any data to back that up? Let me make it easy. Compare it to wind and solar.
As a respected and credible professional engineer (now in semi retirement); I have built with my teams some of the biggest plants ($5 billion ~ 20 billion) this earth has seen. [censored] You can find the deathprint numbers per kWhr produced on nuclear, wind, solar and the rest. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#42d6f47a709b
Interesting article, but it would be nice to see it updated. The wind turbine maintenence might have gotten safer, and they didn’t mention how people got hurt with solar, cause they didn’t see it as significant. Solar in the us was 1.3+ percent, up from .9% the year before, and installations last year were double the year before so 2% is coming soon.
There’s one other metric that I would like to see and I think should be thrown into the the mix, Mw/hectare. Simply, wind, solar and hydro would not do well against such a measure and with a growing global population, does it make sense to cover 1000’s of hectares of farm land with solar and wind or a few hectares with a nuclear power plant?
Steve, I fully agree with you. New Generation IV Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s) can even be built underground. And supply 365/24 over a life cycle of 60 Years. China will have the worlds first meltdown-proof Gen IV SMR Nuclear Reactor (210 MWe) go critical by November 2017.
Stop making stuff up, Harry.
No country, company or utility has any intention of betting billions on building an SMR supply chain. The prevailing skepticism is evident in a February 2017 Lloyd’s Register report based on “insights and opinions of leaders across the sector” and the views of almost 600 professionals and experts from utilities, distributors, operators and equipment manufacturers. The Lloyd’s Register report states that the potential contribution of SMRs “is unclear at this stage, although its impact will most likely apply to smaller grids and isolated markets.” Respondents predicted that SMRs have a “low likelihood of eventual take-up, and will have a minimal impact when they do arrive”.
An analysis of SMRs in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sums up the problems:
“Without a clear-cut case for their advantages, it seems that small nuclear modular reactors are a solution looking for a problem. Of course in the world of digital innovation, this kind of upside-down relationship between solution and problem is pretty normal. Smart phones, Twitter, and high-definition television all began as solutions looking for problems. In the realm of nuclear technology, however, the enormous expense required to launch a new model as well as the built-in dangers of nuclear fission require a more straightforward relationship between problem and solution. Small modular nuclear reactors may be attractive, but they will not, in themselves, offer satisfactory solutions to the most pressing problems of nuclear energy: high cost, safety, and weapons proliferation.”
Jim Green, I know that you are an active anti-nuclear activist. And let me inform you that I don’t make up stuff. The anti-nuclear movement even managed to get one appointed as the Chairman of the USA DOE. You say that the February 2017 Lloyd’s Register report based on “insights and opinions of leaders across the sector”. Did they ask Bill Gates (Microsoft), he is the Chairman of TerraPower a company he has invested in and develops SMR Technology. China with the help of Germany will have a Generation IV Meltdown-Proof 200MWe Nuclear Reactor in operation by November 2017. Construction of the plant is complete, tests performed, loading the fuel is in progress and the reactors will go critical in November. This plant will be followed by a 600MWe plant in the Jiangxi province. Beyond that, China plans to sell these reactors internationally. This technology is going to be on the world market within the next five years. You made mention that SMR’s will most likely apply to smaller grids. If you happen to know anything about this technology you would know better. SMR’s allows nuclear plants of various sizes (311 MWe and any integer multiple. You also make mention of that no country, company or utility has any intention of betting billions on building an SMR supply chain. Let me tell you that the US DOE is supporting this effort, China, Russia and India are doing the same. SMR Nuclear Reactors will help us to generate clean electricity in the energy mix and make a start to creating a hydrogen economy, in the transition to the next (within reach of one generation) nuclear fusion, Fully supported by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Germans are just doing fine with the Wendelstein 7-X program.
Jim Green, on the SMR’s cost. The cost estimate for the world’s biggest solar plant is $679 million to build. And this plant will only supply efficient power (depending on it’s location) for say 8 hours/day. This solar plant generates 648 MWe when the sun shines and covers an area of about 10 sq km. As 85% of the 234GW of installed global PV capacity has been in the field for less than five years, it will be more than 20 years before actual field data can be gathered on a solar plants life cycle. The cost of a Generation IV SMR Nuclear Power Plant to supply the equivalent 684 MWe (supplying this power on a 365/24 basis) would be about $3.0 billion, with a life cycle of 60 years. So when you add the cost of baseload support (say gas-coal fired generation) for this solar plant, I know what would be the better investment option. Something else, on natural gas fracking – lookup “fracking uses hazardous radioactive material”.
“The cost of a Generation IV SMR Nuclear Power Plant to supply the equivalent 684 MWe (supplying this power on a 365/24 basis) would be about $3.0 billion”
Yeah, sure. Hinkley Point is US$9.3bn/GW but new Gen IV reactors will be less than half that cost. Stop making stuff up.
Jim Green, making stuff up; who do you think I am. I happen to be a well known and respected professional engineer. [PLEASE TO BOTH: AND I MEAN BOTH – STOP THE PERSONAL ACCUSATIONS – OR I WILL NOT PUBLISH YOUR COMMENTS ANYMORE, the editor] First of all, learn to read, I am not talking here about Hinkley Point C. I am talking about the cost of a Generation IV SMR technology build by the Chinese and not the French still to be constructed “Hinkley Point C” 3,2GWe (non modular) Generation III Nuclear Power Plant. Why don’t you join some real discussion on SMR’s, where industry experts are involved, and debate your arguments in view of a large group of energy industry experts. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6245470158094237696/
I’m a lot more interested in actual costs, than estimated costs, especially nuclear, which historically came in at 250% of estimates in the US. You know who has a SMR? The navy. Ford class aircraft carriers have 2. You could get an actual price.
Jim Green, use facts not just rhetoric. The Greens sabotaged the Nuclear Power Generation Industry and delayed its progress at a great cost. As an example, Dr. Gregory Jaczko during his tenure as US NRC chairman was regarded with deep suspicion by the nuclear industry. A report by NRC Inspector General Hubert Bell accused Jaczko of withholding information from his colleagues in an effort to keep plans for the the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository from advancing. Dr. Greg Jaczko spent at least a decade misusing his impressive brain power in destructive ways by focusing it on halting the beneficial use of nuclear energy. He personally threw a huge wrench into the process of renewing licenses for existing reactors and for awarding licenses for new reactors. He was the driving force behind the aircraft impact rule for new reactors; he pushed as hard as he could to add more requirements for design changes as a way to significantly delay the the four new Westinghouse AP1000 reactors that are still under construction. Every day of delay at the NRC in producing the final COLA approvals for Vogtle and VC Summer after the staff had completed its review added at least a million dollars to the cost of each approved unit. Ironically; Jackzo was an antinuclear campaigner while he was a student at the University of Wisconsin. As described in Mark Leibovich’s “This Town”, Senator Reid played an important role in President Obama’s early decision to run for office. He pushed a lot of support to Obama from his position as Senate majority leader. After he became president, Obama made a payment on his political debt by firing Dale Klein as the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and promoted Dr. Jaczko 2009 into the position. In October 2011, all the other four NRC commissioners, two Democrats and two Republicans, sent a letter to the White House expressing “grave concern” about Jaczko’s actions at the NRC. He resigned as chairman (2012) after months of conflict with his four colleagues on the NRC commission.
Sure, and we can compare that to the amount of hectares that can be contaminated by a nuke that melts down like Chernobyl. You ever talk about that whenever somebody bilt a road, a mall, or a farm? You are looking for some reason we must have nuclear so we would be willing to pay 10 times as much for it.
Actual farmers make way more money from the wind turbines on their land, than what they could grow in that space. Solar can be put on roofs.
Frank, it’s obvious that you know nothing about recent nuclear developments when it comes to power generation. Generation IV SMR reactors of the Breeder type can use the nuclear waste from the stock piles. Apart from that the Fins (they have a very clean country) have agreed to build the first geological nuclear waste storage facility. The are also busy constructing 2 Nuclear Power Plants, one of the will run on MOX a reprocessed nuclear fuel from the waste of Generation II Nuclear Power Plants. The Chinese with the help of Germany will go critical with their new 210 MWe Meltdown-Proof Nuclear Reactor by November this year. Intermittent generation like wind and solar still need baseload support. For your information I am well informed on Chernobyl and Fukushima, its factually not as bad as you possibly are misinformed on. I am also informed on the 7 million deaths per year from the burning of coal for power generation. Google for “deathprint per kWhr produced” Nuclear including Chernobyl and Fukushima comes out with the lowest number of deaths.
When you say “recent nuklear developments” I’m looking for reactors in production with a competitive actual price. Baseload is not a requirement. It is a description. Keeping generation and demand in balance is the requirement. There are several ways to do that, and nuclear advocates love to argue they will never work. I say, let’s find out. Tesla installed a large battery in California recently after that big gas leak for example.
Frank, Are you an Engineer with Power Plant,Reticulation and Large Grid Experience.!!! The US$3.3 billion Indian Kudankulam Nuclear Plant comprising of 2 reactors of the Russian design VVER-1000 with a total net capacity of 1.834 GWe. Unit 1 started in 2014 and the unit 2 will start this year.
What will be competitive is when the Chinese Gen IV SMR Melt Down Proof Pebble Bed Reactor comes on the market in 5 years from now.
I agree that keeping generation and demand in balance is the requirement, and yes there are several ways to do that. It’s at the moment my area of expertise using smart software. I also sit on the European Council of Power 2 Gas.
Baseload Plants and Peaking Plants play there role. Some Nuclear Plants can load-follow extremely well and would be the cleanest.
That Tesla installation in California is a joke, they are proposing such a system for South Australia.
Grid connected batteries are fine for Voltage & Frequency Stabilisation, the same as a Flywheel does. The City With the World’s Largest Lithium-Ion Battery. The city of Escondido grabbed the headlines in recent days.
120 MWh supplies enough electricity to power 20,000 customers for FOUR, YES (4) HOURS. Due to the unreliable nature of most renewable energy sources, the city with its roughly 144,000 inhabitants is now able to use the stored power from the world’s largest lithium-ion battery when the sun doesn’t shine. For four (4) hours of storage, at night when the sun doesn’t shine for say 12 hours. The article even makes mention of, “due to the unreliable nature of most renewable energy sources”.
When we look at South Australia, with the power hungry BHP Billiton Olympic Dam Mineral Processing plant and nearby power hungry Aluminium Smelters, and further in the south large Steal and Lead Smelters. My advice, when using intermittent renewable electricity generation like “Wind & Solar” is to include in the energy mix reliable baseload generation support.
Furthermore, Batteries are not a renewable energy, as a matter of fact they are not an energy at all, they store the electricity put in to them. The components like cobalt, lithium, graphite and aluminium have to be mined (a dirty business) and they are all finite resources. Then the batteries over the years will experience capacity loss, especially for those in warm climates. Their life cycle may only be 10 years, and expensive to replace.
Are you familiar with “confirmation bias”. You strongly believe nuclear is great, and renewables will never work.
Wikipedia says Kudankulam reactors 1 and 2 were said to be producing at 6.4 cents in 2015, but that reactors 3 and 4 are going to cost twice as much. That can’t come close to https://cleantechnica.com/2017/03/13/solarreserve-bids-24-hour-solar-6-3-cents-chile/
Nuclear load follow “really well”? You’re joking, right? You mean they can load follow down to about 50% of their rated capacity for a year after fuel is loaded but it doesn’t save any money on operations, but produces less electricity to sell making it even more expensive.
You are knocking Tesla’s powepack, but your argument indicates you don’t have a good grasp of solar producrion, and load in California. Google duck curve. PV generates during the day, which is great, cause load is high then too, but the load is still high for about 4 hours after the sun goes down, so this battery is very useful.
You say batteries will degrade, but how much do you know about Tesla’s BMS? Not your area of expertise I’m guessing. What do you know about flow batteries? Molten silicon? AC units that make ice when electricity is cheap?
No, batteries don’t produce electricity. It’s all about shifting it from when it’s cheap, to when it’s not. Wind is in the two’s, solar in the three’s. AP1000’s in the US around 19 cents and they got fabulously low fiinancing. That leaves a lot of money to spend on matching production and demand.
The metals for the batteries do indeed need to be mined the first time. The battery recycling is being built into the gigafactory. Graphite is not mined.
If the Chinese actually finish the SMR and come up with a price, I will be curious to how they did. Until then, neither of us has any idea how much it will cost. Nuclear experts have been terrible at predicting future costs, and how long things will take to build.
Solar and wind should only ever be used on a small, local scale for the pure econmoics of reliability and effeciencies. If you were a long haul truck driver operating a team driven rig 24/7, would you rely on a fueling station that was only operating on a whimsical schedule or one that’s always open? Nukes run 24/7, wind and solar don’t and while they are nice green energy sources, that’s all they are.
As for the contamination aspect of human error based accidents, with all the pipeline breaks and tanker run agrounds that the petroleum industry continues to have numberous times per year, do you still drive a car?
Yes, farmers can make more with ‘energy farmers’ but that does not feed people, it’s like corn for ethanol, seriously?
Glad you brought up trucks. Electric trucks are so cool. Imagine if they made them with replaceable batteries hanging where the fuel tank mounts. Now you can charge the batteries when the wind blows and the sun is shining, and electricity is really cheap, like a tenth of what a new nuclear power plant in the US can make it for. Hope they make better use of rail for the long haul. Only need about 1/3 the energy to move a ton of freight. I heard loading and unloading trains is a hangup. Sounds like a computer/RFID problem to me.
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/03/13/byd-delivers-1of27-electric-heavy-duty-trucks/
Not a fan of fossil fuels, and yes I drive a Prius. My dream is to drive an electric car, or get rides from an electric robotaxi, but I really need around 200 mile range , and would want to be able to drive cross country, and Tesla hasn’t started making the model 3 yet.
Corn based ethanol is maybe best for use in whiskey.
Wind and solar PV are natural competitors to baseload generation, because they compete on price. Wind and PV are also very reliable, and are quite predictable in the short term with good forecasting. High levels of renewables will need to be managed. The basic tools are robust grid connections, storage, overbuild, and demand management. The optimal mix will depend on price.
Our reliance on petroleum is far more than just to power vehicles, your electric vehicles are made up of plastics which are petroleum based.
Trucks and removable batteries are a great idea but we have a few years to go before that’s a reality, charging would have to be quick, otherwise the ‘re-batterying’ station would need to keep a huge store of batteries at the ready.
As for cheap, one of our 8 units nuclear plants here in Ontario sells power to the grid for about 7 to 8 cents / kW hour 24/7, I think solar and wind are far from being competitive. 15 years ago, wind turbine contracts were being signed to pay to the producer as much as 80 cents per kW hour. Much of that is still being subsidized by the tax payer. That plant I spoke of is operated by an independent and is making profit. Our high energy bills are also off setting the high cost of renewables.
Given price points and with all of the other competition for my hard earned income, I can’t afford to pay 3 times more for renewables than nuclear. Based on price, give the option to the consumer and see how long renewables would last.
Nuclear is far from being a panacea and right now, renewables are even further away and hopefully that changes in the next decade.
In germany new wind power gets 7ct/kWh in 2018, and new utility size sollar is well below 7 ct/kWh already. Ant the prices are falling further. So the plant you name would become under pressure, because of being too expensive. Outside peak load ther is no market anymore for power costing 7-8ct/kWh.
How is this a relevant metric?
The masts of windturbines have a very small footprint. The 99,..% of land between the turbines can be used for agriculture as usual.
PV can be put on roofs, above parking spaces, on brownfields etc.
Yes, the mast of a wind turbine is relatively small, but it is the forces that are applied to the mast via wind loading on the mast and the blades that can topple over a wind turbine. Please watch the youtube video about torque and at the one minute mark, see the nut as the base of the wind turbine and the wrench as the mast. Ideally, the system must be in balance or else the wind turbine topples over. As the mast gets taller, the forces the base increase. Longer mast, more force, longer blades, more force.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zrphnd_0VI
All your locations for PVs are great and should be utilized as much as possible.
I am not anti-solar or anti-wind, I am just anti-expensive power and cost per MW nuclear and coal are about the same, but coal is dirtier. Gas may be cheaper, it is half as dirty as coal but not as clean as nuclear. All nuclear waste is stored on site. Nuclear has proven dangerous due to human error. Wind and Solar create no waste during generation of electricity but a lot of carbon is generated in the use of concrete and steel while constructing the base. Yes, nuclear plants use concrete and steel, but at a rate of 1/10 per MW of generation capacity compared to wind turbine bases. The chemistry used in PV fabrication is very toxic and currently unregulated in many jurisdictions around the world but some of that chemistry is changing for the better.
Right now, the only true form of energy generation that is truly green is radiant solar energy that heats up a dark solid surface.
What you need is to increase the distance of the base to the center of the tower according to rising forces.
To do so the modern towers get wider at the base, with relatively thin concrete.. And accrdingly designed bases, where some m of earth are put again onto the base, which alows agricultural use again on one hand, and adds weight which keeps the tower stable without needing concrete.
That is a lot of words to say that foundation of a wind turbine covers a larger area than the mast. This is indeed true, but it still leaves 99,.. % of the land free for agricultural use.
Regarding cost you seem to base yourself on obsolete data. Wind and PV have become cheap and get cheaper by the day. New nuclear on the other hand is quite expensive.
Frank, I don’t know why you think that I have no consideration for alternative possibilities. I use my own full name and there is plenty on me in the public domain. I have nothing against renewable energies like Wind, Solar and Hydro. The three in combination are fine, however, on a large grids Wind & Solar will always need baseload support. Hydro also has proven to represent a risk as we have seen last year in Tasmania due to empty dams and California’s droughts and the recent crippled spillway. Having said so I am a firm supporter of an energy mix with renewables, including hydro when one is lucky to have it available and nuclear baseload support.
Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control. Some designs allow for rapid changes of power level around rated power, a capability that is usable for frequency regulation.
In France, nuclear power plants use load following. French PWRs use “grey” control rods made of boron steel, in order to replace chemical shim, without introducing a large perturbation of the power distribution. These plants have the capability to make power changes between 30% and 100% of rated power, with a slope of 5% of rated power per minute. Their licensing permits them to respond very quickly to the grid requirements.
South Australia with it’s high penetration of wind & solar plants is in the news with it’s statewide blackouts and its constant need for load shedding. The state’s generation capacity is 3000MW with some very large heavy industry connected to the grid. South Australia has over 1700 MW of wind installed and 700 MW of solar. To fix SA’s electricity woes in 100 days, Tesla is offering a 100MWh battery plant at the moment. I will agree that those battery plants help in voltage and frequency control, but as far as backup power for a grid the size of South Australia, as far as I am concerned it’s a no.
I am not knocking Tesla’s powepack, it will do fine in providing storage support for domestic (residential) solar systems. They will also do fine for voltage and frequency stabilisation on a grid. I am fully aware on California’s electricity generation. With its total 72GW installed capacity, total solar represents about 10GW. http://www.caiso.com/outlook/outlook.html
At present, not much is invested into recycling Li-ion batteries due to costs, complexities and low yield. The most expensive metal involved in the construction of the cell is cobalt. Recovering cobalt from lithium ion batteries has a projected operating cost of US$4.45/lb of contained cobalt. Recycling of large like (automotive lithium-ion size) batteries is more complicated and not yet established because few end-of-life batteries will need recycling for another decade. FYI – Graphite is extracted using both open pit and underground mining methods.
With the Kudankulam 3 & 4 reactors, the cost is quoted double because of the increased insurance cost. Lets see how this pans out over time. To compare its cost for units 1 & 2 at 6.4 cents per kWh with the much smaller 6.3 cents per kWh solar thermal plant in Chile is good on a similar cost but not a good example.
On the Chinese SMR Reactor, the Chinese work very different to the West. Why not join the discussion on https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6244669838741114880/ contributing are a Lead Engineer and Research Scientist both working on pebble bed and breeding blanket technologies for the European fusion DEMO reactor within the framework of EUROfusion at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Well Kudabkulam 1&2 have problems to reach their rated power, (And to stay online for a longer time) https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Veraltete-oder-gar-gefaelschte-Komponenten-im-indischen-Kernkraftwerk-Kudankulam-3649079.html
At the moment one of the blocks does not get above 510MW output, I do not know if and how this problem was solved inbetween.
With so many outages and power reductions the originaly calculated prices per kWh get completely out of reach.
Helmut Frik, I don’t see this article to be credible. Inspired by the ideals of German Greens and their leader Petra Kelly, it was a Green Party launched by Udayakumar in the early 2000’s had eventually embraced the cause of Kudankulam villagers and their movements against KKNP. Udayakumar, who has a doctorate in Peace Studies from a US university returned to India and settled near Idinthakarai, a village lies in the shadow of the giant KKNP. Besides the protests of anti-nuclear protesters, what had triggered the fears of public in southern Tamil Nadu and Kerala districts bordering the Kudankulam region was long delays in the execution of the project, alleged shady deals by activists and mysterious profiles of the Russian firms that supplied crucial components for the plant.
Reaching nameplate capacity, give it a break. International nuclear safety standards insists that the commissioning tests alone can ensure that a reactor will operate in accordance with design and is capable of responding to anticipated transients and postulated accidents. Studies and operational data shows that the Kudabkulam reactor was to work at full power for non-stop 335 days in a year as 30 days are earmarked for refuelling and maintenance. However, after working for about six months after the commercial commissioning, the reactor was shut down on Jun 24, 2015 for a seven month-long maintenance, which was longer than the earmarked duration, (such a period can be expected the first time after commissioning). After the maintenance and refuelling, the reactor was grid connected on January 31, 2016 and it attained 90% FP 73 days later on April 13, 2016.
Last August; Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin and Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa jointly dedicated the Unit 1 of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant to the nation. The unit’s load factor in the current financial year (2016-2017) has been close to 100%. Two further VVER-1000’s are planned for construction at Kudankulam. Excavation works for Kudankulam units 3 and 4 is in progress.
Construction of Kudankulam 2 was completed in July 2015, and it was loaded with its first fuel in May 2016. Following the completion of safety tests, NPCIL began the process of approaching criticality on 8 July by diluting neutron-absorbing boric acid in the primary coolant water. A controlled self-sustaining nuclear fission chain reaction, or criticality, was attained on 10 July 2016.
As it seems the 100% were not reached for Unit 1 during 2016-2017 fiscal year. A short look with google brings up the real facts:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Kudankulam-nuclear-power-plant-down-due-to-steam-leak/articleshow/50863477.cms
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/after-3-months-kudankulam-n-reactor-unit-1-starts-power-generation/articleshow/57197256.cms
“will always need baseload support” because you said so? Nonsense.
Let’s get one thing clear. You and I don’t see eye to eye, but if you bring good data and logical arguments, this might be interesting, but understand you will need to prove every assertion.
You did not address my biggest problem with nukes load following. What it does to the price. Avoiding? Doesn’t fit what you want to hear? You also didn’t address whether they can keep doing it more than a year after a fuel load. I am mildly interested in what percentage of the nuclear fleet can get to 30% Got a link?
Time for you to educate yourself about the blackout in SA. https://cleantechnica.com/2016/10/19/south-australian-blackout-still-not-fault-wind-energy-variability/
My bad on the graphite. I had hit some link talking about making it from pet coke, which synthetic graphite can be made from, but it is definitely mined.
Tesla is building battery recycling int gigafactory one. They consider it high grade ore. As you stated, not a lot of spent batteries out there yet, but when they show up in sufficient quantities, it should happen especially if it costs the $4.45 to recover cobalt worth $24 a pound. http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/cobalt/
I don’t know why the insurance. All I know, is I wouldn’t pay twice as much for the generation, and certainly would never risk money building it.
The fact that the solar thermal plant is smaller is an advantage, not a disadvantage. You don’t have to buy a whole gigawatt if you don’t need that much. Chile still has plenty of desert if you want to buy more.
The Chinese SMR sounds like it might be a special purpose design. http://www.powermag.com/china-starts-building-smr-based-floating-nuclear-plant/
Frank, all your counter arguments are flops. You mentioning it’s time for me to educate myself, if you can ever match my industrial and charitable accomplishments ask me again. First of all, you used a link to South Australia that is irrelevant. I am talking about extreme heatwave conditions that they experienced last year and this year. Tasmania with their hydro had empty dams, and had to purchase a great number of diesel generators. South Australia, Victoria and NSW experienced prolonged heat waves when there is no wind and electricity most needed. Due to South Australia being highly dependent on Wind generation and having retired their coal fired baseload generator, and a gas fired baseload generator shut down due to the high gas price, resulted in load shedding in several states for a 3 day period. Now the MP’s, from all across Australia including the Prime Minister, publicly confirmed their support for nuclear power to Fairfax Media on Wednesday, (15/03/2017) arguing Australia has the world’s largest deposits of uranium, is geologically stable, and that nuclear power is a reliable source of base-load power that offers low emissions too. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/put-nuclear-in-the-energy-mix-coalition-mps-tell-malcolm-turnbull-20170315-guylds.html
On China, did I give you a link to a floating nuclear plant. do some real investigative work. Follow the link I gave you or use this one. It’s a year old, so going critical will be November 2017. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600757/china-could-have-a-meltdown-proof-nuclear-reactor-next-year/
If you want to discuss this project, I will only entertain it on LinkedIn.
On Chile you are comparing apples with bananas.
On my remark, on baseload support. Followed by your comment; nonsense, let’s get one thing clear. You and I don’t see eye to eye, but if you bring good data and logical arguments, this might be interesting, but understand you will need to prove every assertion” Let me reply as follows. I don’t know what I have done to upset you so much, but nevertheless I am willing to entertain you. So since this is not a good platform for such a discussion, I can open a discussion on LinkedIn where energy industry experts can follow the arguments. This way you can bring your own data and logical arguments and it will be an even playing field.
You know what works great in heat waves? Solar. https://cleantechnica.com/2017/02/17/australian-rooftop-solar-saves-day-households-get-paid-pittance/
Followed your link on the Chinese SMR. No doubt it will produce power. We’ll see how much it costs.
I’m not on linked in. It is difficult being an expert at everything, and particularly things which are changing fast. I used to think the eia was completely wrong in their assertion, that if prices go high enough, they will find more oil, simply because you can’t pump what you can’t find, and they hadn’t been finding much conventional oil. I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t believe it. Guess what happened. Oil went to $120 and they started producing tar sands and shale oil. US oil production went from 5 million barells to almost 10.
It is amazing how creative and ingenious people are when there is enough money at stake. If new wind and solar are in the 2-5 cent range and new nuclear is 19+ cents, that is a lot of incentive, and let me remind you wind costs dropped by 66% in the last 7 years, and solar 85% so this “reason” to figure out how to accomodate gobs of renewables just materialized.
“You know what works great in heat waves? Solar.”
You know what doesn’t work well in and after a blizzard? Something not thought of much either is that solar becomes less effective as to move away from the equator such that the winter months which obviously see shorter, colder days, generate less power as the PV are less effective. Sure they can be tilted but the sun is far less intense as is evident by the colder winter climate.
Steve, and at night solar panels don’t work at all. lol
Yep – all they do is displace conventional generation when the sun is shining.
Absolutely true, which is why it is great to combine it with wind power which produces more in the winter. Also remember, the lowest PPA’s for wind and solar is in the 2’s. At those prices, it’s not impossible or unreasonable to overbuild and waste a little so you you aren’t short. I believe, that if prices go to zero often enough, somebody will find some use for it and be willing to pay a little. The trick is time of use pricing and a little time.
That’s why solar does not come alone, it comes hand in hand with wind power and large grids. Wind power works fine in stormy winter weather, and grids bring power from places where ther is actually a different weather.
‘Grids’ – come at huge cost. Like that needed to transmit wind power from northern Germany which Tennet says needs a 4GW 800km link to southern Germany at an ‘estimated’ cost of 16bn Euros! Add that to the offshore wind farm costs and it is way more expensive even than new nuclear!
Where is wind and solar in the ‘2s’. [censored – no ad hominem allowed]. If you mean a bit of cheap onshore wind and solar – then that is constrained and not scalable to meet national demand. Scaleable wind has to be offshore of Europe at about 65 Euros/MWhr excluding farm to shore connection. And excluding the onshore cost of transmitting power to load centres which clearly is proving hugely expensive – actually not economic. Generation is needed near load centres, not in remote places like Timbuktu! A system with renewables 1000s km distant from Europe’s load centres will be uneconomic.
Helmut, why do you keep going on about big grids? You have stated elsewhere that Germany has massive lines of reserves of conventional thermal power to back up renewables intermittancy so Germany does not need a ‘large grid’. Furthermore, there is clearly no point in Europe wasting vast sums of money on a ‘large grid’ when it is well understood that the risk of not having back-up conventional generation is too great. If people in Germany believe their nuclear stations are ‘black sheep’ and too big a risk then the risk to society of not having conventional back up for renewables is far far greater.
[censored – no ad hominem allowed].
These large solar and wind grids take up land. The worlds population is growing and food production is an issue. These remote regions are good for large solar and wind farms but more importantly, they were good for farming first. Sure we can put wind turbines on mountain tops but the solar grids are not that flexible. It also comes down to mW/hectare, if we have tracks of land that are useless, perhaps the deserts, line up the hectares but wasting valuable farm land is, well, a waste.
I was recently to a 700 mW nuclear plant and saw first hand the waste from that plant. The wet containment was the size of an olympic sized pool and the dry a few times bigger and that was for 20 years of production on a few hundred hectares of land. Hard to bet that.
Well, the footprint of Wind power generators are not bigger per TWh produced as far as farming is concerned than nuclear pwoer stations. Solar is placed on roofs, parking lots, and land not useable for farming.
And yes, Wind power is better located on lonly mountain tops, than within the fields in the valley, it produces much more power on the mountain top.
Since the mountain tops are infertile areas here, they are usually occupied with forrests, since today high towers are available, these are the usual places to build wind turbines here. No interference with food production.
The wastes from wind farms and solar farms produced during production, so spent fuel is small enough to fit in the pocket of my trouser, or in even smaller places. So very easy to beat a giant olympic swwiming pool.
And especially these wastes do not cause any hazards.
You need to visit Scotland to appreciate how their beautiful hilly countryside has been blighted and spoilt by 3000 wind turbines on hill tops!
Of all of the things that humans have built all over hells half acre, you are going to pick this one thing out to be upset about? Whatever.
Scotland is tiny compared to the US – about the size of South Carolina. Easy to dismiss wind turbine blight when your country has vast tracts of open land. [censored – no personals allowed].
Yes it might be worth to visit scotland, I like the elegance of wind turbines.
Research in touristic regions in north germany found that more people prefere the sight of wind turbines in their touristic region than dislike it, most simply don’t care.
Older and conservative people often do not liek them, younger people with children often prefere them as I remember.
Brits live on a small island. We value our countryside too much to see it ruined with excessive numbers of wind turbines.
Here in Ontario, we have about 10,000 mW of nuclear power generation plotted on about 15 square kms of land with self contained wet and dry fuel storage. That is pretty good for the mW/hectare measure.
Lets say that a wind turbine can put out 2 mW of power with a liberal 20% effectiveness, that still means that 5 wind turbines would be needed to generate 2 mW of power. In Ontario our 10,000 mW of nuclear power to be displaced by wind turbines would require ((10,000 mW / 2 mW) x 5) or about 25,000 units to achieve 100% effectiveness. Lets say each unit requires about a 500 m radius for operation. Those 25,000 units would require about 19,625 square kms (about the size of New Jersey) of otherwise unusable space, or about 1300 times more land than our three multi-unit plants putting out 10,000 mW. We can go on about remote locations and service infrastructure but I am sure that you can imagine the numbers that would have to be generated.
As for Solar, any large solar farm in Ontario that I have seen was on what used to be farm land.
My thoughts, solar panels should be installed on 9 to 5 business type operations with minimal storage where consumption would not outweigh capacity outside of some battery storage. (Battery technology is getting better and that is great news.) So if that means running lights, a few computers and small appliances, that’s fine. But to run a geographical area like a town, city or province/state, that’s foolish. Our power rates in Ontario have gone up so much that manufacturing is leaving the province and people have to choose between eating and paying for power. I have done the incandescent to LED conversion and the savings were reasonable but it did not bring our bills down to what they were before wind and solar.
So, what happens to the 7,000 wind turbines that are decommissioned to 15 to 20 years, green energy production, hopefully they are somehow recycled, but what of the tons of concrete plugs in the ground. Our power plants run for about 60 years and again on about 15 square kms.
Now, those very toxic chemicals that are used in solar panel production, there’s an industry without a regulator so who really can say what happens to that waste?
The emissions from a minute of a coal plant’s burn would shut down a nuclear plant pretty quickly. Coal as C12 once burn becomes C14 which by definition is radioactive and holy cow, the half life of C14 is 5,730 years! Read this from Scientific American regarding coal burning: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ I know were are not talking coal but the nuclear industry could not get away with this for any stretch of years (aside from human performance based errors) yet the coal plants are daily.
10GW of nuclear power would produce about 70 TWh of electricity per year.
A E 141, with americas good wind conditions, would produce about 16 GWh each and requiring about 1500m² of land more or less (to be exact less, since most of this area cen be used for agriculture later on) when being built with a tower crane. So on 15.000.000m² you tell are exclusively used for nuclear, 10.000 E141 could be placed, just the land would be spread over a larger area in small prtrions.
They would produce about 160 TWh per year.
The wind power towers are just knocked dowen if they have become too small to be suitable for modern wind turbine designs, as it happened with the first small nuclear power stations too. The kind of towers used for wind turbines are known to last 60 years and more in practice, with some maintanence after 2 or 3 decades of service.
Please name the “toxic chemicals” you think are used for solar panel productions and tell why such expensive raw material should not be recyceled endlessly.
Cited here in an IEEE Spectrum article from Nov 2014.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-always-as-green-as-you-think
The manufacturing processes are improving but their has been a lot of toxic waste by means of silicosis during the mining phase, silicon tetrachloride during processing, the creation of trichlorosilanes and silicon tetrachloride a lot of which was dumped into the environment until word got out. If you read the article, the list goes on.
Since the majority of solar panels are manufactured in China, a lot of this dumping has polluted the Chinese country side.
Fortunately, these processes as getting green and less toxic as time progresses and the public becomes more aware of the truth behind some of this green energy.
Answer two levels lower to be able to reply:
Please tell, where for example Wacker, the worlds biggest manufacturer of Polysilicon has dumped Trichlorsilan (a product being sold) or silicon tetrachloride
As this document tells, this once happened in a small chinese backyard shop at a time when polysilicon was extremely expensive, and profits when making it extremely high. Prices today are below 20% of the prices then, and nobody can afford to throw away expensive raw materials any more to get a production running fast.
Silicosis – well in theory this might happen, in practice sand is not mined uderground, there is plenty of sand available everywhere which can be get without risk of silicosis. Source of the silicon for Wacker is a usual quarry in bavaria for example, and the amounts needed are negible to the other products of the quarry. Polysilicon production wants pure quartz, but getting it is in principle no different than getting the many billion tons of sand and stones needed for concrete, gravel etc.
The rest are standard chemicals used in almost all products at some step of processing of one component. Fluporic acid e.g. is used to clean boiilers of nuclear power plants (And other thermal power plants as well) in significant amounts, my sister once worked in that business for a short time, helping her friend which suddenly owned the company providing this service when her father died unexpectedly.
So there are tocic chemicals as in most productions, but you need to get it inrelation with any other business to see if it is relevant or not.
The cost of wind power is decling over time. There is one in Norway estimated at 35-40 euro/mwh, vs 92 for hinkley point c, and that isn’t even fixed.http://www.norwea.no/nyhetsarkiv/visning-nyheter/europe’s-biggest-and-cheapest-onshore-wind-project.aspx?PID=1145&Action=1
I live in the US, and the entire great plains has great wind resources. But here is the thing. Turbine blades have been growing longer allowing them to be effective in lower speed winds, and the higher you go, generally the higher the wind speeds are. I saw a tower Vestas sells that is over 160m tall. I can’t seem to find a wind map for europe over 80. With 140m towers you can put turbines pretty much anywhere in the lower 50 states. Offshore wind prices have been falling dramatically.
My point is that none of the prices you are calculating with are fixed, but for renewables the trend is downward, and nuclear it’s upward, and nukes take a long time to build.
Frank, nuclear reactors supply electricity 365/24 for 60 years. Korean reactors can compete on price and take less than 5 years to build.
Yes they can compete so much in price in the UAE that the gouvernment there has decided to build only one nuclear power staion, (the one with 4 reactors) and build solar and wind further on.
5.6GW of nuclear at competitive prices relative to around 30GW of installed generation capacity. Much of the difference being gas fired generation.
All solar achieves is displacing gas generation during the day. At night solar goes off so replaces zero conventional generation capacity.
Solar reduces the amount of gas burnt, but not the need for gas fired capacity. That domestically produced gas can then be exported. Being able to export more gas and make more money is the only logical reason for solar on the ME.
Whereas 5.6GW of nuclear capacity only requires back-up capacity for one reactor every two years during a short refuelling outage.
That depends on the kind of solar they install, doesn’t it.
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/03/13/solarreserve-bids-24-hour-solar-6-3-cents-chile/
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/03/20/tesla-now-energy-provider-kauai-hawaii-powerpack-solar-installation/
Yes they are investing $163bn in renewables. Its the UAE planning to have by 2050 an energy mix of, 44% renewables, 38% from gas, 12% from cleaner fossil fuel and 6% from nuclear energy. Saudi Arabia will follow the UAE with the “most ambitious nuclear plan, involving sixteen nuclear reactors to be built by 2032.” The first reactor is expected to be operating in 2022.
So after having installed the super cheap 6% (future share) nuclear they decided that the are better of in the future with more renewables (44%). What will happen in Saudi Arabia in the end we will see. The first tenders for wind and solar will be on the market in some months, when a tender for nuclear will come is unknown as it seems.
Land prices are going up and unless you can put 10 GW of power on 15 square kms of land, wind can’t compete. Sure you can string power transmission lines from the American Mid-West to NYC but that is a lot of line loss, a lot of utility poles and a lot of transmission lines/conductor materials. Has that been calculated into the cost of wind farms. You could bury those lines to but think of the rights-of-way that would be required. Just looks at the pipelines that are trying to get through.
The Pickering and Darlington plants are within the Greater Toronto Area where over 6 million people line, those transmission line costs are significantly lower because of that distance.
Again, our 10 GW of nuclear power in Ontario would need an area the size of the state of New Jersey to equal that production. That is a large cost in land, transmission lines and transmission towers. For those of us in the American North East, remember was ice storms have done to our power grids in the past. Imagine what could happen to a New Jersey wind farm.
The whole wind picture has not been address because it is so new and governments are secretly trying to push through their green agendas. Nuclear, coal and gas have had their little secrets reviewed.
You can easily put 10 GW of wind on 10 Squarekilometers, since each turbine, e.g. a Enercon E 141 needs just 1500m² for exclusive use, during operation even less. All other space can be used for agriculture or growing forrests further on, and because of this the distance between wind turbine does not cost any money.
So 15 Square kilometers are enough to build 10.000 Wind turbines with nameplate a capacity of 41 GW.
Often wind power is errected at places where lad is very cheap, and use moe than the minimum neccesary space, that’s a question of costs only.
Helmut, I was surprised at your numbers, the rotor diameter on an E-141 turbine is 141 meters for a unit that puts out 4 MWs. Having worked in the nuclear industry for a number of years at several plants around the world, I can tell you that a typical 900 MW plant sits comfortably in a 100m by 100m footprint putting out 225 times more power in a smaller space.
In a 15 square kilometer area you simply can not put that many wind turbines in place to generate 10 GW of power, the power heads would have to be fixed so that they could not rotate thus avoiding contact of any sort with neighboring units.
Yeah, nuclear has had to suffer the misfortunes of human errors and both Chernobyl and and Fukushima can largely be attributed to human error. TEPCO (Japan) was advised by the reactor designer of many engineering changes that may have saved the plant from catastrophe and had they been adhered to, that plant may very well had survived like a similar plant did just down the coast. It is regrettable the the loss that was incurred as a result of cutting corners.
I know the OEM I work for continues to develop safety systems for our fleet and those design changes and improvements or put out to the operates frequently. Many come out after Fukushima, although none of our plants are built on fault line such as what the entire country of Japan is.
But lets look at the benefits of nuclear. It is very clear power and its waste is stored onsite. If every nuclear plant around the world was a coal plant, all of our skies would be as caustic as those through China. I have flown out of Beijing on a bad day where you COULD NOT see the end of the runway. Without the 54 nuclear power plants that Japan has, it would not have been the economic and manufacturing power house that it was and is since the 70’s.
Wind and solar power are what they are now because they are standing on the shoulders of coal and nuclear power. Fortunately, coal is phasing out. However, after Fukushima, Germany shut down their nuclear fleet and France suffered daily smog days because Germany reverted back to their coal plants.
Because of Chernobyl and Fukushima, we must all become much more demanding of standards and safety and that should be said of all industries. Carbon based fuels are no exception. 100’s of oil tankers, oil rigs and pipelines have all run aground or exploded and we still drive our cars. In fact, it would not be hard to argue that carbon based fuels have done more damage to the environment than nuclear has. Unfortunately for nuclear, big petroleum has its far reaching tentacles into all of the major media outlets which is why you hear so little of many petroleum accidents any more unless they just can’t be covered up.
Sure, you can drive your electric car charged by your wind turbine or solar panel, but the fact of the matter is that all of those three things contain so many oil derivatives, that without oil, none of them would exist.
So take off your green tinted glasses and become an advocate for higher standards in safety.
Without oil and nuclear we would be all living in a third world country because that is the difference between us and them, cheap, affordable and for the most part, save power. I will agree that it should be saver and cleaner.
Well, You still did not get it that a mobile phone operator does not need to buy the whole state to run a mobile phone network, but just the small pieces of land to put the transmitters on, and not all the land between them which is needed anyway as a distance to let the transmitters do some useful work.
Around your nuclear pwoer plants, you usually have a vast safety area, whichcan not be used for anything else. The 15km² number is also not from me, it was given as example how small spaces nuclear power needs.
Like todays wind and solar power you could say that nuclear is based on coal power, which again is based on hydro and wind power, whis is based on human and animal power.
Products made from Oil can also be made by power to liquid, as well as they have been made from coal in germany untill the 1960’s. (Different from the U.S. where only oil chemestry is known).
Since the base chemicals to start with from PtG / PtL and the base chemical for the synthesis chain starting from coal, german chemical plants would just have to go reading in their archives if they want to switch from oil to electric power (e.g. from wind or solar) as a base for the chemical industry.
7
Nuclears basic probleim is, that the power is too expensive, and that it has a inhereint moral-hazard-Problem. Along with a unavoidable Black Swan Problem, which you can try to reduce, but which is impossible to avoid. Knowledge of the limits of engineering were developed during the 1980’s and 1990’s mainly in the softwaere industry, where unavoidable errors are more obvious. I do not complain that engineers constructing nuclear power stations in earlier times have not been aware of this fact. But I complain when engineers today claim that this universal problem can not happen in nuclear power stations. This is just Hybris, nothing more.
Oil and nuclear are very different things. Living without nuclear – well if I travel to Austria or Norway I see rich countries, which come along perfectly fine without nuclear.
A recalculation of “Wirtschaftswoche”, a conservative, Por Nuclear economic magazin here in germany came to the result, that nuclear pwoer in germany after the shutdown will have resulted in a red or black zero at the baseline. So it did not contribute to the wealtch of the country in the end.
Steve, all very good stuff. But I fear you are wasting your time engaging with ardent anti-nuclear posters here.
For example, last week in response to one I posted the UK nuclear safety regulator’s document that describes how risk must be managed and controlled on nuclear sites – it was ignored. [ad hominem, censored ]
For engineers like you and I who have actually worked on the design and construction of new nuclear plants we know the issues in detail, and can be confident that in the west nuclear has a good safety record and the risks are declining.
Furthermore leading nations of the world like the USA, UK, Canada, France, Russia, China, India, Korea are all committed to continuing with nuclear.
So Germany prematurely closing their nuclear stations should be seen as nothing more than purely political as there is no substantive technical or objective risk basis for taking such a decision.
It wouldn’t be the first time Germany has made a serious politically inspired mistake either and tried to impose that on the rest of Europe!
Steve, in the UK and much of Europe, wind farms investors have only had to pick up the shallow cost of the required connections. Deep reinforcement costs, possibly requiring long distance transmission, is ‘socialised’ and spread across customer bills. This makes generation far from the demand centres look far cheaper than it really is.
Who paid for the mess in Fukushima? Chernobyl? What did that article say? 500 billion?
Who pays for nuclear storage after the power plants shut down?
In the UK all new nuclear plants have to pay into a fund during operation that will cover the costs of their decommissioning.
Helmut, these E-141 units only run 4 MW each. You simply cannot pack that many units into such a small area. Sure, on paper you can, but the wind dynamics behind a wind turbine would screw up the air currents for any other unit that is too within a few hundred meters.
Steve, naturally you can place one on each 1500m” piece, and use the rest of the land as befor. Your argument is a non argument. You could say as well that a mobile phone operator would have to buy the whole state to run his business, because he has to spread his transmitter stations all over the country and cannot place all of them in one place.
Or you could say that when ther eis a nuclear power station in City A, and another one in City B, all area between city A and B is occupied by nuclear pwer stations. No of this make the sligthest sense, and so your argument does not make any sens in the context of wind turbines, too.
Tjhe only relevant factor – far from your arguments, but relevant – is the fact that there is a limit of 1 MW continuous power can be drawn from 1km² of land area by wind power without influencing climate. but you could place wind trubines +-500km or so to do this.
So e.g. the U.S. should not try to get more than 10 TW of baseload from wind pwoer. Since noone needs 10 TW of baseload in the US, this limit is only of academic interest.
Nigel, I understand the sentiment and the position you and I are in. It is about educating those that have been educated otherwise, many a time by those in the petroleum industry trying desperately to deflect the attention away from their seemingly weekly oil catastrophes.
All kidding aside, our world is energy hungry and like it or not, nuclear energy production is a massive clean energy provider to the mix. We have had to take our blows but even wind with it’s high death per MW rate is not blemish free.
I wish I could continue this discussion, but I am leaving for China where we will be reconfiguring one of their units later this month for continued service.
Cheers, and great chatting with you and the others, maybe they learned something!
Steve
LoL – “U.S. should not try to get more than 10 TW of baseload from wind power”.
Actually the US would be lucky to get 1mW of reliable baseload output from wind power alone regardless of capacity installed.
Any generating technology in isolation that can’t achieve high availabilities >90% is not by definition able to provide baseload capacity.
I like that article on Thermal Solar energy and that is a very different beast than the complexities of PV panels, cheaper and greener by far and is a great solution especially around the equator. Its a simple and passive system and I think that this is truly where solar energy excels, radiant heat.
Themal aolar is way to complex to build compared to Photovoltaics. The complexity of Photovoltaics is locked up in the factory, where it can easily be handeled in well controlled standardised and fully automatic processes.
Once it’s otside the factory it’s so simple that unqualified workers kann install everything.
Iteresting for thermal solar power are the storage options, but so far grid expansions have been cheaper.
Helmut, if I install some black pipe on my garage roof to heat the water for my pool, I am using thermal solar energy. I could also extend that to use in my home, on a small residential scale. On a small scale this is simpler than a PV system? It’s simple and cheap enough that almost anybody with a little ingenuity can rig up a simple system for home use. I can see to supply a community that such as system is not as feasible as a PV system.
For the home body that wants to incorporate such a system into their own energy mix, this would be a great way to go.
Steve, yes that is reflected in the fact that ME countries want as much if not more thermal solar than solar PV. A problem with solar PV in a ME desert is it takes a hammering from 45C temperatures which lowers panel efficiency and reduces life time.
Which, due to geographical limitations, does not necessarily mean that many types of renewable energy generators are suited for any site.
Too much sun or to acute a solar angle. Too close to the equator or too far north.
Too windy or not windy enough, although it is promising that with development, wind turbines can generate at lower wind speeds.
They can also generate at high wind speed, if they happen often enough to make it worth to dimension the compionents to this conditions. That’s why there are differend wind speed classes for wind turbines.
As well as there are different climate classes for photovoltaic modules.
There are modules designed for wet dry climate (deserts) and for hot wet climate (tropics, desert coasts) , cold climates and so on.
You would also not come to the idea to build a nuclear power station designed for north Alaska 1:1 without adoption is UAE, or vice versa.
Helmut, it’s got nothing to do with the future or tenders, it’s to do with energy security and that’s not guaranteed with wind & solar. A good number of countries will have nuclear in their future clean energy mix.
[…]. There is nothing special about nuclear regarding energy securrity. The tenders are very relevant. The cheaper the source, the more reason you have to incorporate it, and the more money you have to spend on incorporating it.
The Generation IV SMR Nuclear Reactors can be build underground. Large Solar & Wind Farms are an easy target during military conflicts that often occur in the Middle East.
But they are distributed, which makes them a difficult taget. You can spend a much more expensive Weapon on a SMR-Reactor. And it’s difficult to get it operating again after it was hit, a simple repair will not do.
The hardest to take out would be a few million rooftop solar systems with battery backup.
The rapidly-evolving nuclear power crisis escalated dramatically yesterday (March 29) with the announcement that US nuclear giant Westinghouse, a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Toshiba, has filed for bankruptcy. The Chapter 11 filing took place in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York in New York City.
Toshiba and Westinghouse are in crisis because of massive cost overruns building four ‘AP1000’ nuclear power reactors in the southern US states of Georgia and South Carolina. The combined cost overruns for the four reactors amount to about US$11.2 billion (A$14.5 billion) and counting.
Whether the four reactors will be completed is now subject to an “assessment period” according to Westinghouse. No other reactors are under construction in the US and there is no likelihood of any new reactors in the foreseeable future. The US reactor fleet is one of the oldest in the world ‒ 44 out of 99 reactors have been operating for 40 years or more ‒ so nuclear decline is certain.
Toshiba says Westinghouse had debts totalling US$9.8 billion (A$12.8 billion). Plans for new Westinghouse reactors in India, the UK and China are in jeopardy and will likely be cancelled. Bloomberg noted yesterday: “Westinghouse Electric Co., once synonymous with America’s industrial might, wagered its future on nuclear power ‒ and lost.”
The same could be said about Toshiba, which is selling profitable businesses to stave off bankruptcy. Toshiba said yesterday it expects to book a net loss of US$9.1 billion (A$11.9 billion) for the current fiscal year, which ends on Friday ‒ a record loss for a Japanese manufacturer. That projected loss is well over double the estimate provided just last month. “Every time they put out an estimate, the loss gets bigger and bigger,” said Zuhair Khan, an analyst at Jefferies in Tokyo. “I don’t think this is the last cockroach we have seen coming out of Toshiba.”
The BBC noted that Toshiba’s share-price has been in freefall, losing more than 60% since the company first unveiled the problems in December 2016. Toshiba president Satoshi Tsunakawa said at a news conference yesterday: “We have all but completely pulled out of the nuclear business overseas.”
A similar crisis is unfolding in France, which has 58 power reactors but just one under construction. French ‘EPR’ reactors under construction in France (Flamanville) and Finland are three times over budget ‒ the combined cost overruns for the two reactors amount to about €12.7 billion (A$17.8 billion) and counting. The French government is selling assets so it can prop up its heavily indebted nuclear utilities Areva and EDF. The French nuclear industry is in its “worst situation ever” according to former EDF director Gérard Magnin.
Nuclear lobbyists are abandoning the tiresome rhetoric about a nuclear power renaissance. They are now acknowledging that the industry is in crisis. The crisis-ridden US, French and Japanese nuclear industries account for half of worldwide nuclear power generation. Countries with crisis-ridden nuclear programs or nuclear phase-out policies account for more than half of worldwide nuclear power generation. Nuclear industries in some other countries ‒ such as the UK ‒ are in deep trouble and are approaching a crisis situation.
Renewable energy generation doubled over the past decade and strong growth, driven by sharp cost decreases, will continue for the foreseeable future. Conversely, the Hinkley Point project in the UK typifies nuclear power’s staggering cost increases ‒ the estimated construction cost is A$40 billion for two reactors.
Westinghouse has obtained $800 million in debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing from a third-party lender to help fund and protect its core businesses during its reorganization. Westinghouse Announces Strategic Restructuring “Today, we have taken action to put Westinghouse on a path to resolve our AP1000 financial challenges while protecting our core businesses,” said Interim President & CEO José Emeterio Gutiérrez. “We are focused on developing a plan of reorganization to emerge from Chapter 11 as a stronger company while continuing to be a global nuclear technology leader.”
Jim Green, your interesting remark that Nuclear lobbyists are abandoning the tiresome rhetoric about a nuclear power renaissance. Some interesting information. Europe is working on the MSR, Samofar is made-up of some 11 large research institutions. The objective of SAMOFAR is to prove the innovative safety concepts of the MSFR. The Dutch Thorium MSR Foundation is independent to Samofar, however their scientific counsel has 2 members, Prof Leen Kloosterman & Prof Jilt Sietsma both from the Technical University of Delft (TU Delft) this University participates in SAMOFAR. We will move towards a nuclear future with Small Modular Reactors with the work carried out in Europe, Canada, the UK, China and India. http://www.tnw.tudelft.nl/en/current/latest-news/article/detail/samofar-op-weg-naar-de-ultiem-veilige-kernreactor-1/
That sounds like a research project. They are also talking about safety, which is great, but can they make it cost effective? My understanding is that it is straightforward to make this type of reactor safe, but difficult to make it work well. So you know, I wish them well, but I’m not expecting much.
All a shame but a result of bad management decisions and the goal of the 1000 MW reactor designs and the Fukashima tragedy. The behemoths are failing in their attempts at grand numbers but the SMRs seems to be excelling in their development.
It has a lot to do with future tenders. If there will be no contract to build nuclear pwoer stations there also will be no nuclear power stations, no matter was plans on some pieces of paper say.
And if the saudis tender piles of cheap wind and solar pwoer, thereis no remaining baselode which nuclear could supply siometimes in the future. Only temporary residual load, which is reduced by the international interconnectors which the saidis also plan to extend, for which nuclaear is not a really good fit.
So watching the tenders is interesting. With each GW size tender for wind and solar the likelyhood tor a nuclear tender gets smaller, because the economics for nuclear gets worse.
Some very simplistic viewing. There is a bit more behind making decisions when it comes to energy security. Egypt (with it’s plentiful sunshine) signed an agreement with Russia to establish a third-generation technology nuclear power plant in Dabaa with a capacity of 4,800 MW at a price of $30bn. Russia will provide a governmental loan to Egypt worth $25bn.
The Saudis are planning 16 reactors too over the next 20 years. Probably don’t want to be left behind as their Arab neighbours develop nuclear. Saudis use a lot of electricity per capita and most of their water is from energy intensive desalination. So makes sense to team up with China as their nuclear costs are competitive. Nuclear and renewables will displace burning of gas/oil for power generation which can then be exported. Interestingly SA consumes about 1/4 of its oil production to generate power. Reducing that frees up oil for export which will increase revenues.
They have signed a deal with China to develop High Temp. Gas Reactors. Why not PWRs or BWRs? Possibly because they are no good for producing weapons grade material, whereas gas reactors are capable.
The high-temperature, gas-cooled twin reactor under construction in Shandong will go critical by November this year. If it’s successful, Shandong plant would generate a total of 210 MWe and will be followed by a 600 MWe facility in Jiangxi province. Beyond that, China plans to sell these reactors internationally within the next five years. Pebble-bed reactors that use helium gas as the heat transfer medium and run at very high temperatures, up to 950 °C, have been in development for decades. The Chinese reactor is based on a design originally developed in Germany, and the German company SGL Group is supplying the billiard-ball-size graphite spheres that encase thousands of tiny “pebbles” of uranium fuel. Several other advanced-reactor projects are under way in China, including work on a molten-salt reactor fuelled by thorium rather than uranium (a collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the technology originated in the 1960s).
Weapons, and the neccesay knowledge about nuclear needed around them might be a good cause for the Saudis to start nuclear business. As far as I remember Kuwait has abandoned nuclear plans, and UAE will end their program with the 4 reactors under construction now.
Thorium fired reactors also do not produce weapons grade by-products.
Any commercial thorium reactors operating?
The Chinese and Candu Energy are developing a unit that could be online in the next decade. Testing has gone well to this point making further research and design a feasible venture.
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_fuel.htm
For China and India, thorium reactors are good for they have about 50% of the worlds Thorium within there borders.
Yes, we will see how this project goes on. They also built a huge amout of gas power sdelivered by Siemens, and are actually building a lot of wind and solar as it looks like.
Its not very clear for which electricity market the russian power stations should produce power, but that’s a economic problem the gouvernment in egypt has to solve.
I would not wonder if we see slow porgress there due to a oversupplied electricity market in egypt.
The successful completion of 4 reactors by KEPCO in the UAE to time and on budget, and according to reports at a low power price, will provide much confidence for nuclear projects elsewhere in the world. Indeed while Toshiba sorts out their commercial problems, KEPCO is likely to join Nugen on the UK’s Moorside project where up to 3.8GW is planned. That should drive down new nuclear prices and make a big contribution to the UK’s nuclear replacement programme. Also providing a showcase for KEPCO technology elsewhere in Europe.
We will see. Engie wants to leave Moorside, too. So KEPCO would have to run the whole project. And restart reactor design approvement.
By the way: maybe ther will also be no new nuclar in Korea, as it sounds here: http://www.platts.com/latest-news/coal/seoul/interview-s-korean-leading-presidential-candidate-26644139.
It would be less likely for the state controlled KEPCO do get involved into UK nuclear projects with such politics of the owner.
I wouldn’t advise antis to place too much hope on that. If media speculation is true and S. Korea decided to defer new nuclear capacity, most unlikely KEPCO would withdraw from international sales of nuclear steam supply systems. Because they are building an international export business and after the UAE are likely to export their technology elsewhere. When a reactor vendor’s home country defers development, often more effort is put into international sales . The UK is a very attractive destination and KEPCO has been talking with NUGEN for a few years.
Nuclear power is an international business. Leading export players now being KEPCO, Rosatom and the Chinese based on a Westinghouse design. They are building all over the world. Shame Siemens has not maintained their skills base for the future should the politics change in Germany too.
Reactor vendors invest in talent and KEPCO will have established a pool of engineering skills and nuclear qualified component suppliers that they will be keen not to lose. Together with the export orders for associated equipment, that is good for Korea’s economy.
One reason EDF ‘s board went ahead with Hinkley Point C is because it provides work in France and training and continuity for their nuclear engineering skills base. When EDF moves ahead with their EPR-NM design for commissioning in the late 2020’s, they will not be short of trained and experienced engineers through big gaps in work.
In the mean time, the UK is proving a magnet for new nuclear developers. The future for competitive nuclear plant offerings is good.
Nigel, I wish I could add to and inform upon some of your points here, but this forum is too open.
Cheers Nigel, it has been great chatting with you, but I must drop off this discussion as I am heading out to China for three weeks to work on one of their units.
Steve
That’s just political propaganda, they are not going to give up on KEPCO’s profitable business. China does not just have the Westinghouse AP1000 they have their own Generation III ACPR1000. China’s General Nuclear’s Yangjiang Unit 3 (CPR-1000 1080 MWe) took less than five years to complete. The two Yangjiang Units 5&6 Generation III ACPR1000 currently under construction are on their 5 year target for becoming operational in 2018. The total cost is expected to be US$11.5 billion. Furthermore, China has their first SMR 210 MWe Demonstration Reactor going critical mid this year and produce electricity by November. This will be followed by a SMR triple configuration 630 MWe commercial plant that can compete on price with Solar & Wind.
Your right, China is in big with nuclear working it seems with everybody. You forgot there AFCR that they are positioning to burn thorium and other units to position amongst as many as four other PWRs and BWRs to continue the fuel burn in a CANDU reactor.
Korea is also into the UAE building units there and well as all over their country. They are a manufacturing power house and need the cheap power. Funny, last I was in Korea, I did not see many wind turbines – just an observation. But, maybe they know that the electricity generated is too expensive?
If we did away with the heavy hitters in baseload power production, coal, gas and nuclear (the first two being dirty), we may as well live in the dark because there simply not enough land on this planet for people/cities, farms, solar panels and wind turbines. Green energy is just not efficient enough yet to claim that nuclear is not feasible. It is still just a dream, but then again, in 1961, getting to the moon was a dream too, some maybe one day it will come true. I hope it does but I don’t want to spend 15% of my income to pay for that power.
If wind and solar really cost only 7 cents a kilowatt, I’d be all in. But it does not and wind and solar at that price would be heavily subsidized. Nuclear at that price is not, Bruce power generate power at 6.6 cents per kWh as per this article below.
http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/generating-low-cost-power-for-today-and-tomorrow-615001284.html
“In 2016, as recorded by the OEB, the team at Bruce Power provided all of our electricity to the system at 6.6 cents per kWh compared to solar (48 cents), natural gas (17 cents), wind (14 cents) and hydro (about 6 cents). Simply put, Bruce Power generates 30 per cent of Ontario’s electricity at 30 per cent less than the average residential price. That’s a role we play today and will for many years to come.”
Steve, I know a few expat. Brits at Bruce Power as it was once owned by a UK firm. I understand much refurbishment work has been done recently to restore units to service. The plant produces low cost power and also helps reduce CO2 emissions considerably in line with Ontario’s low carbon plans.
I was on the refurb of units 1 and 2 and also the refurb of Wolsong 1 in South Korea which was completed in under 24 months with local S. Korean labours. Bruce is now embarking on completing the last 6 units, hopefully with the success we saw in Korea. All the old reactor components are being stored onsite in a control waste management facility, all-in-all, a great bit of engineering work.
A SGHWR reactor, similar to CANDU, was consented but not built at the UK’s Sizewell site in the early 1970s. But the UK decided instead to pursue the AGR design. UKAEA influenced the choice based on the UK’s investment and skills base in gas cooled reactor technology. Perhaps a mistake as the AGR’s promise of being able to refuel at full load to achieve high availability never materialised, unlike CANDU. Until AGR low load refuelling was developed, having to shut down often for refuelling hit AGR output considerably. One AGR station must still be fully shut down for refuelling.
When Margaret Thatcher came to power the CEGB lobbied Government to abandon the AGR in favour of the PWR. The CEGB arranged for her to see PWRs under development in France leading to her overruling the UKAEA who wanted to continue with gas cooled reactors. A programme of PWRs was then planned but only Sizewell B built.
I think your numbers are way off.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-100/ Go to the bottom, and look at the study.
The record prices for wind and solar PPA’s are in the 2’s. Obviously the record for solar would be in a sunny place like Chile, and wind in a windy place like the great plains in the US.
The cost numbers are not way off, they are real numbers reported to the markets and consumers. As for the ‘2s’, these are great numbers if you live in the American mid-west or Chile, so let’s all relocate. But that’s just not feasible and if it’s not feasible, up go the costs, and those numbers create false hopes. On the other hand, thousands of miles of transmission networks for electricity increase line loss and raise the costs to where the ‘2s’ are not that cheap anymore.
I will add something to this. According to an article out of South Africa about 6 years ago, the concrete and steel required for a 1 MW wind turbine base MW per MW was a factor of ten times that required for a 700 MW power plant. That is ten times the carbon foot print, but that can be offset with the use of fly ash from coal plants that make for stronger concrete. But what happens to that base in twenty years when the wind turbine is no longer operational? Walk away and bury it? That’s not responsible. Put another wind turbine on the base, now limited by the size of the base. The physics of a larger wind turbine tower and longer blades requires that the base become exponentially larger requiring more concrete and steel thus expanding the carbon foot print.
I am sure that you also read from the same article, “Even though alternative energy is increasingly cost-competitive and storage technology holds great promise, alternative energy systems alone will not be capable of meeting the baseload generation needs of a developed economy for the foreseeable future.” Myself, I expect lights to come on every time I turn on the switch and do not expect to see a brown out because it is not windy or sunny enough. Baseload has to be reliable and we should not accept anything less. Unless you are willing to accept that by paying solely for renewable energy and expect brown outs, you can not argue otherwise.
Many renewables are just too immature right now, but the nice thing about emerging technologies is that it will only get better.
The report may say one thing, but I know another, and that is that ever since ‘green’ renewable energy has come online in Ontario, my power bills have continued to go up by over 80% and even more. How does that jive with the claim that renewable energy is cheaper? Sure, we took all of our coal offline and introduced renewable energy, we chased manufacturing out of the province and now our consumption has drop for that reason so we are left with fewer good paying jobs and higher energy costs. How is this good for the economy?
In 20 year the tower of the wind torbine will have some more decades to go, because they last much longer than 20 years with a tiny bit of care.
And a cnventional power plant does not need that much less concrete than a modern wind turbine, especially a efficient one. MAybe your numbers fit to open cycle gas turbines, which cost a slight bit more per kW priduced than the power from the wind turbine….
Helmut, these are numbers that are real world, not made up. Research and reading will lead you to what I am telling you.
Simple physics makes these larger wind turbines even more needy of more concrete and steel.
Simply put, when you apply 100 lbs of force on a 12 inch bar, you are applying 100 lbs/ft of torque to the fulcrum. If that bar was 24 inches long, that same 100 lbs of force would now be 200 lbs/ft of force on the same fulcrum. To keep that fulcrum from moving, or torquing over with the increased force, it has to get bigger. Now, make the blades longer and that adds more force to the fulcrum and that requires more concrete and steel, almost exponentially.
Wind turbines need a lot of concrete and steel to prevent then from blowing over and yes, the amount of those materials exceeds the amount required in nuclear power plant by a factor of very close to 10 times. The larger the turbine in capacity and height, the larger the base.
As for longevity, after 12 years in the UK, the failures are mounting: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2254901/Wind-turbines-half-long-previously-thought-study-shows-signs-wearing-just-12-years.html
Physiks is not that simple, because the other dimension is also increasing, and the power output increases more than square to the plade length.
Another step is to make the blades elastic in some direction, so “escaping” high wind forces, which is relevant for all parts of the wind turbines.
And also factory production of concrete parts allows thiner parts of stronger concrete, and using tensioned steel instead of usual steel parts.
As far as I have the informations, e.g. the up to 160m Twers of Max Bögel use significant less material with a 4,2 MW turbine with higher load factor, than 10 years ago a 2 MW turbine on a 100m tower built with locally cast concrete.
The point I was making is in regards to the base. You are right, physics is not simple by any means but my explanation illustrates that by increasing the forces on the system the base must increase in size to counter the increase forces generated by the wind and the rotary forces there generated. That increase in steel and concrete increases the carbon foot print generated by the wind turbine’s base. Without a significant base, these turbine will topple over.
Helmut, I have enjoyed this discussion, but I must close it out as I am leaving for a three week job in China where a number of us will be reconfiguring one of there nuclear reactors.
Please don’t take this as an insult, but you need to read more regarding nuclear power. Yes it is not super safe, but it is very green with virtually no emissions and for the millions of MWs generated each year, it has a lower death rate than wind turbines where the incidence of falling off a wind turbine is high thus raising the death per MW count higher than other sources of energy.
Many of your arguments are valid, the technology in manufacturing is getting better and the efficiency is improving, but they are still a ways away from generating electricity for 6.5 cents per KW/h.
Cheers.
Steve
It is possible that a very old solar or wind plant has a long term agreement for that amount. Show me the highest price you can find for a wind or solar power plant built in 2016 in Canada. Bet it isn’t even close. Canadians are not that incompetent.
LOL. No Canadians aren’t that incompetent, but out politicians are. Some of the first contracts were first signed at 80 cents per KW/h for wind and solar.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-to-cut-rates-paid-for-wind-solar-power-1.1157717
Our nuclear plants (Ontario Power Generation) is paid 5.6 cent per KW/h
That is a five year old article that already mentioned that the tariffs are dropping.
The thing that you do not seem to [no personal accusations]] understand is that the cost of wind and solar power are dropping fast. If you want to compare the cost of nulcear and renewables you have to use up-to-date data.
If the numbers are right, they aren’t recent. It can cost 2 or 3 times as much for solar in Canada, as Chile, but not 20 times. Those numbers are not what you pay for adding renewables today. I tried finding a 2016 number, but struggled.