How much for a nuclear power plant?

[ensabah6]

http://counterpunch.com/wasserman09142010.html

Why Atomic Energy Can't Compete
Is the Nuclear Renaissance Dead Yet?

By HARVEY WASSERMAN
Soaring costs at Vogtle, the US's one active new reactor project, have stuck Georgia ratepayers with $108 million in unplanned overcharges Currently calculated to cost a sure-to-soar $14.5 billion, the Vogtle project got $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees from Obama in February. Citizen/taxpayer groups have since sued to see the details, which the administration is keeping secret. Georgia Power, which is building Vogtle, has already asked for another $1 billion rate increase.​

Is this a factually accurate accounting of the cost of this new nuclear plant?

In the US, liability is capped at around $11 billion, even though the financial damage from a full-scale catastrophe could easily soar into the trillions. Minimum estimates from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which occurred in a remote, impoverished area, have exceeded $500 billion. By recent estimates the death toll is 985,000 and still counting.​

 

[CRGreathouse]

Is this a factually accurate accounting of the cost of this new nuclear plant?

I find slightly lower costs online, but it's basically accurate. Amortized over 30 years, that's 2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour (using a total production of 2.3 GWe). Adding in the cost of refined uranium at maybe 1.1 cents per kilowatt-hour, that still gives the project a lot of headroom for personnel, repairs, insurance, and profit, since current prices are perhaps 10-15 cents per kilowatt hour -- and prices are likely to rise, even after inflation.

So expensive, yes, but not unreasonable.

 

[Jack21222]

http://counterpunch.com/wasserman09142010.html

Why Atomic Energy Can't Compete
Is the Nuclear Renaissance Dead Yet?

By HARVEY WASSERMAN
Soaring costs at Vogtle, the US's one active new reactor project, have stuck Georgia ratepayers with $108 million in unplanned overcharges Currently calculated to cost a sure-to-soar $14.5 billion, the Vogtle project got $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees from Obama in February. Citizen/taxpayer groups have since sued to see the details, which the administration is keeping secret. Georgia Power, which is building Vogtle, has already asked for another $1 billion rate increase.​

Is this a factually accurate accounting of the cost of this new nuclear plant?

In the US, liability is capped at around $11 billion, even though the financial damage from a full-scale catastrophe could easily soar into the trillions. Minimum estimates from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which occurred in a remote, impoverished area, have exceeded $500 billion. By recent estimates the death toll is 985,000 and still counting.​

Does the author of your source realize that a "full-scale catastrophe" like Chernobyl is impossible in modern nuclear plants?

Additionally, a 0.1 billion cost overrun is peanuts to a 14.5 billion dollar budget. They were off by less than 1%.

 

[xxChrisxx]

Nuclear power plant cost?

Spoiler

Tree fiddy

More BS from someone who don't know what they are talking about. Chernobyl comes up so often becuase it's pretty much the only horrendous incident in the history of nuclear power.

Since the 60's and discounting Chernobyl (are we really going to base out view on a technology on a Soviet era constriction - let's face it they weren't exactly known for pushing safety), you can count the direct number of deaths caused in Nuclear reactor incidents on your fingers.

People like the author of that article wind me up, it's like pointing towards the de Havilland Coment in the 50's and declaring all plane travel unsafe. Disredarding the umpteen thousand incident free flight-years.

Also France has managed to pull off Nuclear power, with no problems at all.

 

[ensabah6]

Does the author of your source realize that a "full-scale catastrophe" like Chernobyl is impossible in modern nuclear plants?

Additionally, a 0.1 billion cost overrun is peanuts to a 14.5 billion dollar budget. They were off by less than 1%.

He's antinuke

"Will this finally kill the much hyped "renaissance" of a Dark Age technology defined by quadruple failures in human health, global ecology, sound finance and increasingly shaky performance?"

 

[loseyourname]

I wonder how many people have been killed in hydroelectric dam disasters.

 

[Office_Shredder]

I wonder how many people have been killed in hydroelectric dam disasters.

A bunch. For example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

2000ish dead

 

[FlexGunship]

Not to be overly utilitarian, but if you're discussing the dangers of power generation (which is not the purpose of the thread) shouldn't you count it in terms of watt-hours per death. Obviously, higher would be better! More power with fewer deaths.

Since I invented the unit, I'd like to call it the "toasty" (symbol is the Jesus fish, ichthys).-Wind is pretty bad at 6.66 teratoasties.
-Rooftop solar is horrible at 2.27 teratoasties.
-Hydro is okay if you ignore Banqiao (the Chernobyl of hydroelectric) at 10 teratoasties, but a crappy 0.71 teratoasties if you include it.
-Nuclear has the best ratio at 25 teratoasties if you INCLUDE Chernobyl. If you don't include Chernobyl then it has a rating of 1875 teratoasties. That's 1.875 petatoasties! (That number includes a single death that was attributed to radiological exposure of a plant worker. There is still debate over that.)

For comparison, coal is only 0.006 teratoasties, and oil is 0.028 teratoasties.

Banqiao was responsible for 26,000 deaths directly, and 150,000 from famine and disease after. Chernobyl was responsible for 56 deaths directly and 19 more later were attributed to it. I vote we stop talking about Chernobyl entirely, forever, in the context of nuclear safety. It essentially works out to a rounding error for coal or oil.

EDIT: source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

 

[Office_Shredder]

You say potato, I say petoastie

So we've determined that nuclear power is not as evil and not as expensive as the OP makes it out to sound. Is there anything left to talk about?

 

[CRGreathouse]

So we've determined that nuclear power is not as evil and not as expensive as the OP makes it out to sound. Is there anything left to talk about?

Well, there's the issue of liability. As a free-market enthusiast, I agree with the OP on this issue: let the nuclear plants cover their costs. We don't want another BP Gulf spill...

If private insurers won't cover them, in a pinch, the US government can sell a policy -- but I'd prefer that it be provided by private insurance companies (or even directly by reinsurers).

 

[Gokul43201]

So we've determined that nuclear power is not as evil and not as expensive as the OP makes it out to sound. Is there anything left to talk about?

There seem to be some variances that need resolving...

Chernobyl was responsible for 56 deaths directly and 19 more later were attributed to it.

Minimum estimates from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which occurred in a remote, impoverished area, have exceeded $500 billion. By recent estimates the death toll is 985,000 and still counting.

... like the difference between 56 (or 75) and 985,000. I have no idea where the larger number comes from, but that difference can take 25 teratoasties and shrink it down to a mere 2 gigatoasties.

 

[CRGreathouse]

There seem to be some variances that need resolving...


... like the difference between 56 (or 75) and 985,000. I have no idea where the larger number comes from, but that difference can take 25 teratoasties and shrink it down to a mere 2 gigatoasties.

FWIW, Wikipedia (citing [1]) claims as many as 4000 deaths once indirect cancer deaths are included, but doesn't even total as many as 75 direct deaths.

This would give a figure of 0.47 TT, putting it below the other renewables but still well above coal and oil. Of course the non-Chernobyl number makes more sense to me, considering that even at the time that style of reactor was considered unsafe and wasn't really used anywhere but the USSR; they're certainly not being proposed today.

[1] Elisabeth Rosenthal (International Herald Tribune) (6 September 2005). "Experts Find Reduced Effects of Chernobyl". New York Times. Retrieved 11 September 2010.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

What is the worst case scenario given the assumption that terrorists take control of a reactor, who have all of the equipment, training, and knowledge needed to cause the most destructive event possible, using the number of deaths as a metric?

When we talk about safety, we have to include the potential for damage if someone is out to defeat the system.

There is also talk about limiting the size of dams. The idea that the failure of any constructed system could cause the death of millions, is called into question wrt more than just nuclear power. Frankly, I tend to think the Chinese are taking a big chance with the Three-Gorges Dam.

 

[Jack21222]

What is the worst case scenario given the assumption that terrorists take control of a reactor, who have all of the equipment, training, and knowledge needed to cause the most destructive event possible, using the number of deaths as a metric?

When we talk about safety, we have to include the potential for damage if someone is out to defeat the system.

I'm no nuclear engineer, but I'm under the impression that modern reactor designs have built-in fail-safes that simply cannot be overridden by human operators.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety has a list of such fail-safes, but I admit I lack the nuclear engineering knowledge to understand much of it.

 

[CRGreathouse]

What is the worst case scenario given the assumption that terrorists take control of a reactor, who have all of the equipment, training, and knowledge needed to cause the most destructive event possible, using the number of deaths as a metric?

Surely "worst-case" is the wrong metric to use here. In that case, it could be tens of billions for just about any scenario: the Earth's population grows, then experiences total existence failure.

If we (reasonably) want to exclude the Banqiao Dam incident, caused by a '1 in 2000 year' flood, maybe we should consider events which have a 1/1000 chance of happening in a given year.

This doesn't detract from your suggestion -- even with the current number of nuclear power plants I could see 1 or 2 such events happening in a dozen centuries, and more as the world moves away from fossil fuels. But I thought it important to draw this distinction early in the discussion.

 

[CRGreathouse]

I'm no nuclear engineer, but I'm under the impression that modern reactor designs have built-in fail-safes that simply cannot be overridden by human operators.

That's essentially right. (I don't do nuclear power, but I *do* work in radiation safety... if that counts for anything.)

But that's more like 'resistance to meltdown' and less like 'resistance to terrorists'.

 

[Gokul43201]

Of course the non-Chernobyl number makes more sense to me, considering that even at the time that style of reactor was considered unsafe and wasn't really used anywhere but the USSR; they're certainly not being proposed today.

Does it make sense to not include Chernobyl fatality numbers but still count pre-Chernobyl cumulative TWH? Also, accidents tend to be stochastic. It can't be good science to simply exclude specific accidents (from an already small sample) on the grounds that those particular accidents can no longer occur in modern systems.

 

[russ_watters]

What is the worst case scenario given the assumption that terrorists take control of a reactor, who have all of the equipment, training, and knowledge needed to cause the most destructive event possible, using the number of deaths as a metric?

Based on that description, I'd say the "worst case" would be that they brought with them a 10 megaton nuclear bomb and detonated it at the nuclear plant. That's about the "most destructive event possible" by humans today.

Not sure if it is very realistic to consider such a possiblity, though.

Realistically, if they hijack the plant for a few days and have the expertise, I suppose the most immediate risk is of a major power failure if they do it in the summer. Long term, they could probably cause enough damage to necessitate closing the plant, which would cost several dozen people their jobs and badly hurt the shareholders of the company that owns the plant.

[edit] Backup for the above opinion:

Regulatory requirements today are that the effects of any core-melt accident must be confined to the plant itself, without the need to evacuate nearby residents.

The main safety concern has always been the possibility of an uncontrolled release of radioactive material, leading to contamination and consequent radiation exposure off-site. . Earlier assumptions were that this would be likely in the event of a major loss of cooling accident (LOCA) which resulted in a core melt. Experience has proved otherwise in any circumstances relevant to Western reactor designs. In the light of better understanding of the physics and chemistry of material in a reactor core under extreme conditions it became evident that even a severe core melt coupled with breach of containment could not in fact create a major radiological disaster from any Western reactor design. Studies of the post-accident situation at Three Mile Island (where there was no breach of containment) supported this.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06.html

In other words, barring a meterorite strike or terrorists trucking-in a rediculously large quantity of explosives (that may not be enough: you may actually need a nuclear bomb), TMI represents about the worst possible failure of a western nuclear reactor.

[edit] I suppose there is another possibility: they could steal the fuel and truck it into the nearest city along with a conventional bomb. That would require holding off the Marines for a few days, though, which is pretty unlikely.

 

[CRGreathouse]

Does it make sense to not include Chernobyl fatality numbers but still count pre-Chernobyl cumulative TWH?

Certainly I wouldn't want to count the production from any RBMK plant.

Also, accidents tend to be stochastic.

Agreed. When I wrote 1/1000 chance per year, I was specifically envisioning that as lambda = 0.001 in a Poisson distribution.

It can't be good science to simply exclude specific accidents (from an already small sample) on the grounds that those particular accidents can no longer occur in modern systems.

On one hand, I agree that naive extrapolation from a small sample is a bad idea; in particular, in this case, it inflates the "TT" rating.* But on the other hand, that Soviet design was known to be unsafe even at the time, and there's no expectation that more of that style will ever be built. So actually yes, I would say that good science allows -- even requires -- excluding that design.

* I have a good example in mind, where a group of extremely low-risk drivers (?) were insured [with very low premiums] under the terrible assumption that their lack of accidents were due to their skill, where actually chance played greater part. Unfortunately I can't think of the name of the group! Our example doesn't have the same selection bias, but it's still similar in concept.

 

[CRGreathouse]

Realistically, if they hijack the plant for a few days and have the expertise, I suppose the most immediate risk is of a major power failure if they do it in the summer.

This might cause thousands of deaths if there's a heat wave -- but of course this risk applies to all plants, not just nuke plants. (They're more vulnerable in that they tend to provide more power and thus service more people, but less vulnerable in that their security tends to be tighter. I'll call it a wash unless someone wants to crunch numbers here.)

Long term, they could probably cause enough damage to necessitate closing the plant, which would cost several dozen people their jobs and badly hurt the shareholders of the company that owns the plant.

Worst-case loss in that scenario: perhaps $10 to $20 billion. At $10 million each, that could cost up to 2000 lives, in the sense that the money (which will eventually come from somewhere) could have been used to save roughly that many lives.

I suppose there is another possibility: they could steal the fuel and truck it into the nearest city along with a conventional bomb. That would require holding off the Marines for a few days, though, which is pretty unlikely.

I think this is what Ivan was referring to.* It would be interesting to do some Fermi estimates on the chances and potential damage caused. I would tend to think of that as major property damage (semi-permanent evacuation of a whole city!) but unlikely to actually kill many people. But I freely admit that's entirely speculation. Thoughts?

* He may also have been referring to the possibility that they would create a nuclear weapon from the fuel. This isn't a risk today. I actually think this could become a major issue in the future, but not during my lifetime: the technology requires is too difficult and tightly-controlled. If a terrorist gets a nuclear weapon in the (not-even-that) near future it will be stolen (or bought), not created by the terrorist group.

 

[Gokul43201]

But on the other hand, that Soviet design was known to be unsafe even at the time, and there's no expectation that more of that style will ever be built.

Was that the only plant built (over the entirety of the sample set) with a design known to be unsafe? Do you assert that during this history there have been no other designs or practices that were used despite knowledge of potentially large (i.e., on the scale of Chernobyl) safety issues? After all, there are still a handful of RBMKs running in Russia - I'm not sure if these have been significantly modified since Chern.

Our example doesn't have the same selection bias, but it's still similar in concept.

I suspect it does, pending your answer to the question above.

 

[CRGreathouse]

Was that the only plant built (over the entirety of the sample set) with a design known to be unsafe? Do you assert that during this history there have been no other designs or practices that were used despite knowledge of potentially large (i.e., on the scale of Chernobyl) safety issues? After all, there are still a handful of RBMKs running in Russia - I'm not sure if these have been significantly modified since Chern.

I'm talking about the risk of a single new nuclear plant not of that style. If you want to expand that to include the worldwide risk, yes you would certainly need to take that into account. There have been modifications to the design since the Chernobyl incident, but even the modern version is radically unsafe compared to PWRs.

It may be that our only 'disagreement' is that we're looking at different problems!

I suspect it does, pending your answer to the question above.

Even with my answer, which makes it clear that (as I intend it) RBMKs are entirely irrelevant, there's some small measure of selection bias remaining. But it's tiny compared to the example I mentioned,and surely a source of less error than the nature of the distribution itself (few accidents with the potential for a major one that hasn't happened enough to be measured properly).

 

[Office_Shredder]

Then you should be excluding deaths from power plants of other types that are of older design

 

[JaredJames]

It isn't a case of older design though, what he is saying is that the reactors were run at the time with known safety issues. The design was known to be unsafe and pose a threat.

There is a difference between deaths due to knowingly operating a dangerous plant and deaths due to old designs.

 

[Office_Shredder]

But then you get things like the Banqiao dam incident, in which one of the designers was fired because he criticized the project for taking shortcuts. Are we going to exclude that from the hydroelectric dam deathtoll?

And then go through history striking every power plant which was run with a known potential flaw? That seems like a lot of work

 

[Jack21222]

Was that the only plant built (over the entirety of the sample set) with a design known to be unsafe? Do you assert that during this history there have been no other designs or practices that were used despite knowledge of potentially large (i.e., on the scale of Chernobyl) safety issues? After all, there are still a handful of RBMKs running in Russia - I'm not sure if these have been significantly modified since Chern.

I suspect it does, pending your answer to the question above.

The original post is about constructing a new plant. I don't think the statistics of old models should have any bearing on the construction of a modern plant.

 

[CRGreathouse]

It isn't a case of older design though, what he is saying is that the reactors were run at the time with known safety issues. The design was known to be unsafe and pose a threat.

There is a difference between deaths due to knowingly operating a dangerous plant and deaths due to old designs.

The original post is about constructing a new plant. I don't think the statistics of old models should have any bearing on the construction of a modern plant.

Precisely!

 

[CRGreathouse]

And then go through history striking every power plant which was run with a known potential flaw?

No. There's a quantitative difference between designs that have some kind of flaw and (essentially experimental) designs that were never reasonable in the first place. I'd be happy to exclude the second type from any of the other power plant death rates, but I can't think of any other examples.

If the lack of safety was apparent only in hindsight, my exclusion of RBMKs would be selection bias; since this has been known long before the Chernobyl accident, it's not, particularly.

But then you get things like the Banqiao dam incident, in which one of the designers was fired because he criticized the project for taking shortcuts. Are we going to exclude that from the hydroelectric dam deathtoll?

Actually I would tend to exclude it (as I mentioned in an earlier post), but for a different reason: that was an unlikely event which I feel would not likely scale. I would be happy, just as for Chernobyl, to use it for estimating the damage in the tail of the distribution, though.

I don't expect to see another Chernobyl accident again, ever, failing the (unlikely) event that one of the existing RBMKs blows up -- and the last of these should be shut down after another decade or two. I *do* expect to see other Banqiao-like accident, but if we've produced H units of electricity through hydro so far, I posit that the expected number of such accidents in the next H units of hydro power is far less than 1.

It would be fun to try to quantify the shapes of the distributions of different power plant-caused deaths and make this formal. Until then, back-of-the-envelope estimates and guesses regarding the probabilities of different scenarios must rule.

 

[CRGreathouse]

Then you should be excluding deaths from power plants of other types that are of older design

I would be fine including or excluding their deaths and power. It's a statistical tradeoff: if we're talking about building a PWR, including PHWRs worsens the data in some ways (it's obviously less relevant) while improving it in others (increasing sample size). In the extreme case we could exclude all but a small fraction of the data for a collection that is highly relevant but far too small about which to draw reasonable conclusions about the tail behavior.

Ideally, we'd be able to take measurements about the directly relevant type in ordinary cases (where few measurements are sufficient) and extrapolate tail behavior from a larger collection including other different-but-related types, as decided by appropriate experts. Realistically, for a message board discussion, I'll take what data I can get and estimate first-order differences when appropriate.

 

[JaredJames]

I have to say I like the 'toastie'. Even after just this thread I feel myself using it in the future, might have to bring up the subject of power station safety just to use it...

 

[russ_watters]

The original post is about constructing a new plant. I don't think the statistics of old models should have any bearing on the construction of a modern plant.

That logic also applies to western people/countries that want to phase-out their nuclear power (such as Germany and including the handful of people who want that in the US). The [un]safety of a design they don't use has no bearing on the safety of the plants they do have.

 

[FlexGunship]

[edit] I suppose there is another possibility: they could steal the fuel and truck it into the nearest city along with a conventional bomb. That would require holding off the Marines for a few days, though, which is pretty unlikely.

Contrary to popular belief, nuclear fuel isn't actually that dangerous in the short term; direct exposure for several hours is hardly a concern. Uranium pellets can easily be handled without special equipment (gloves recommended, of course, to avoid heavy metal poisoning if you have cuts on your hands). But if you've ever seen a fuel production facility, not everyone wears a radiation suit. Here's an NRC image of a guy just handling a piece of fuel with tweezers, note the background:

Even the waste is not overly dangerous in the short term. True, you would not want spent fuel rods and control rods in your neighborhood, but again, the risk is small. Plutonium is the largest concern in this area since, even after being spent, it retains a high level of radioactivity.

As far as releasing radioactive dust into the air, you have much much more to worry about from coal and oil. Between the two of the, they release more radioactive material into the atmosphere each year than all of the nuclear power plant "disasters" combined (including Three Mile Island assuming the maximum theoretical release).

EDIT: sorry, can't find a source for that last one. Probably should exclude it from the conversation for now.

DOUBLE EDIT: This isn't a perfect source for the information above, but it corroborates the basic point: (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n14_v146/ai_16387382/)

 

[FlexGunship]

There seem to be some variances that need resolving...

... like the difference between 56 (or 75) and 985,000. I have no idea where the larger number comes from, but that difference can take 25 teratoasties and shrink it down to a mere 2 gigatoasties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster (Casualties 56 direct deaths, see the right hand summary) Add in the 19 confirmed to have died from radiation exposure. The 4,000 so oft quoted was speculation.

 

[xxChrisxx]

In the US, liability is capped at around $11 billion, even though the financial damage from a full-scale catastrophe could easily soar into the trillions. Minimum estimates from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which occurred in a remote, impoverished area, have exceeded $500 billion. By recent estimates the death toll is 985,000 and still counting.

Is that directly lifted from the artcle? it looks familiar.

EDIT it's in the op.

Well done for pointlessly responding with no new (or even decent) information.

 

[FlexGunship]

In the US, liability is capped at around $11 billion, even though the financial damage from a full-scale catastrophe could easily soar into the trillions. Minimum estimates from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which occurred in a remote, impoverished area, have exceeded $500 billion. By recent estimates the death toll is 985,000 and still counting.

No it's not.

See how easy tautology is?