A question on the cost of nuclear power

Nuclear power is appealing to a certain mind-set in the same way that the invasion of Iraq was to those of an idealistic political mind-set. Both ideas suffer from hubris, one with respect to what is possible politically, the other with respect to the reliability of human engineering.

Most professional engineers have an understanding of the limits of human designed and maintained systems. Murphy’s law is a constant presence. Less technical people, and less honest engineers, believe that systems can be designed to eliminate risk. The problem with nuclear power is that, given the fallibility of human engineering and management, inevitably the worst case scenario will occur, safety systems will fail in surprising ways, and the damage will be enormous.

So the question is not “can we engineer a safe nuclear power plant”, but rather “is the cost of an inevitable catastrophic failure of a nuclear power plant worth the savings versus other power sources.”

Policy makers are aware of the potential damage the failure of a nuclear plant would cause, and so they impose huge and expensive regulatory burdens in an attempt to reduce the risk. Those burdens, ineffective at preventing disaster but justifiable given the magnitude of the risk, make nuclear power economically inefficient.

Has anyone here ever heard that there is a problem of disposal of nuclear waste? It’s a true dilemma — not something made up by wild-eyed greens — and a problem with at this point NO solution. It’s the reason why nuclear power is simply NOT practical.

We’ll need to store the wastes ten thousand years.

In three thousand years we’ve had Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Attila the Hun, and Hitler – among others, of course.

I’d prefer to take my chances with global warming, thank you.

Sorry, on mature reflection, the choice of my examples makes it sound like I’m worried about bad people using the wastes. Of course bad people will have plenty of other options.

The point I was trying (!) to make is that, if you think of human history, ten thousand years is a long, long time. We don’t know who we’re saddling with this problem.

It is forbidden, absolutely and most thoroughly forbidden to question the holiness of the demand for electrical power. The uses to which it is put are never to be examined as to their necessity, or their lack of necessity.
Use heroin, as an analog for argumentive purposes I mean.
Everyone’s arguing about synthetic opiates or morphine or demerol. No one’s talking about kicking the addiction.
Demand is so sacred it’s taboo to mention except as a constant need that has to be met.
Most electricity in America is being used to hypnotize people whose lives get significance the same way modern poultry do.

tib – if “the worst case” scenario occurs at a modern (designed in the last twenty years) nuclear plant, the resulting radiation danger will be about that of the granite used for monuments in Washington. A Chernobyl (designed inadequately even for its time) is simply not possible, and even a terrorist attack with anything short of nukes will just necessitate building a wall around the site – at worst. Are you thinking Three Mile Island? I used to live about ten miles from it – there was hotter stuff in the press than at the Island.

David Sucher – disposal of nuclear “waste” is a poliical problem. The waste is about as radioactive as raw ore. But it sounds scary, mostly because the radioactivity will “last for thousands of years.” Hint: the longer the half-life, the less dangerous. Too, a lot could be recycled – except politically there would be screams because in the past recycling was largely concerned with recovery of weapons-grade isotopes, and if we do recovery for fuel others may do recovery for other purposes. That is partly why Iran has refused offers to build a “light water” reactor, insisting on an older “heavy water” design – more recoverable weapons materiel.

I can’t believe what I am reading above.
What do you people all think the end-game in twenty years is going to be? That, as oil prices go bezerk citizens around the world are simply going to accept this and switch to a simpler life-style?
OF COURSE nuclear power in a big way is coming. A sane society (not much evidence yet that the US qualifies) will augment it with more efficiency, more aggressive use of wind power and so on, but when push comes to shove, nuclear is the only game in town for real heavy lifting. The only question is whether things will ramp up gradually and carefully, or whether construction will occur in a massive panic, too fast and not carefully enough.
Anyone who denies the freaking obvious is part of the solution, not part of the problem. The world didn’t convert to hippies growing their own food on communes in 1970, and it ain’t gonna do so in 2020; so claiming that’s the only acceptable solution makes you morally culpable for any disaster that might occur as a result of rushed panic-driven construction.

Maynard,

In 20 years, as “oil prices go bezerk,” there are lots of non-nuclear options:

–Getting more oil out of existing wells (since a “dry” well isn’t dry, it’s just too expensive to get the oil that remains)

–Exploitation of oil wells and fields which are at present too expensive to bother (I’m thinking Canadian shale oil here, of which there is a LOT)

–Greater use of coal. Many countries have enough domestic coal to cover all of their energy needs for centuries to come. Certainly the US does.

–Greater use of hydroelectric, and the restoration of dams on minor rivers that have been breached in recent years.

There are doubtless others. But I don’t see nuclear as inevitable in the least. Most of our electricity doesn’t come from oil as it is anyway.

Also, Ian says that nuclear plants may be net consumers of energy. I’ve also heard that claim for solar panels–that they consume more power to make than they can produce themselves over their service life. I haven’t been able to confirm this because, oddly enough, I can’t find statistics on “power required to make one solar panel.” Anyone got reliable numbers?

Finally, I’d like to see a link to the New Scientist article. Uranium isn’t the only possible fuel (think thorium in breeder reactors), and surely they didn’t make the basic error of assuming that “proven reserves” equals “world supply”?

Finally, Ixlnxs, if you aren’t drawing blueprints, it’s because they can’t be drawn. Your suggestions would work for powering a single household (with huge surrounding acreage for solar panels) but cannot possible be scaled up to the gigawatt needs of a mondern industrial nation.

I have found these two articles in teh NS archive, but I don’t think they are what I am looking for. Until I can get at my paper copies I can’t do any more. I am relying on memory so I may have got it wrong.

http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=7&id=mg17924080.900
http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=1&id=mg17924071.000

Beside the waste and safety arguments, I think the most important argument, which is rarely discussed, is that nuclear power is simply not cheap whithout vast public subsidies.

I read once (and I was incidentally trying to locate this the other day) that in the UK, the money recently given by the Government to keep BNFL afloat was more than was allocated to the developpement of alternative energy in 30 years. If my recollection is correct, this puts in perspective claims that renewables are “costly and inefficient”.

We’re hearing a lot about Reagan. He was a genial and friendly man. His obvious heir is Arnold Schwarzenegger, not either Bush. His philosophy of “be happy and let the free market work its magic” looked good in the 1980s, when there was no imminent energy problem. The Soviet Union was built on quicksand and could not prevail, any more than the Confederacy could prevail against the industrial and more populous North. The US had a short-term winning hand. Today the Asian countries have a winning hand, in spite of their lack of petroleum, and problems in China.

President Bush would distract us with a mission to Mars- the same amount of money in the same amount of time could get us off petroleum (conservation and Bio-diesel are good but not remotely enough, ethanol fuel is a crooked fraud, and hydrogen fuel cells unwise because hydrogen filling stations are a nice target for a one or two man terrorist team). Lacking its Afghan headquarters, Al-Qaeda can’t mount organized operations like the 9/11 attacks. Free-lance terrorists can mount small truck bomb attacks in almost any country- do we want concrete walls and military guards surrounding every hydrogen filling station? Other types of fuel cells seem much more desirable and would avoid the energy cost of the electrolysis of water. The energy cost of separating and packaging hydrogen is substantial.

We need better education, a living wage for all willing to work, and a 20-year energy plan. We must prepare now for the collapse of the House of Saud- Islamic fundamentalists can’t run a complex country, but I believe that they have a 50% chance of bringing down the House of Saud in the next 6 years. The dumbest thing we could do is land US troops in the kingdom when that happens. We can’t solve our energy problems in isolation from other issues. The American West faces years of severe droughts. Growth of our desert cities should be slowed. Decentralized energy production by fuel cells has much to offer. Nuclear power is top-down power. It requires subsidies, protection from terrorists, and disposal of dangerous wastes.

We can learn something from Reagan. Everybody wants to hear that their country is special. The US has a tremendous good side- the many immigrants from other countries and the American spontaneity and energy are wonderful. We can’t close our eyes to the bad side of US culture or expect the market to control that. The market and the corporations control Congress. Enron-type swindles lurk in the shadows. Anti-science is a powerful theme of American culture; it will cost us dearly- Asia lacks this hobble. Racism and blaming the poor for their fate are deeply embedded in the American culture and were part of Reagan’s bad side. Let’s stop saying, “are you for or against America?” and face up to the need for major and long-term reforms, and the good and bad sides of all politicians. Every political candidate has a bad side- who has demonstrated the executive ability to lead in long term projects?

Another thing anyone who is going to seriously talk about this subject has to consider, is something called “hormesis”; The “linear” hypothesis, that the damaging effects of radiation continue right down to zero doses, has been known to be flat out wrong for some time now. The truth of the matter, though it’s a truth so incendiary that it’s politically impossible to base public policy on it, is that low doses of radiation are actually BENEFICIAL.

There is an optimal level of radiation exposure, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20 rem per year, and practically nobody is getting that much.

Radiation leaks from nuclear power plants save lives.

Let me repeat that: Radiation leaks SAVE LIVES.

You can’t make good policy, if you’re determined to ignore facts that you don’t like.

I watched an upper-middle class woman with a prosperous husband and a nice big house in a nice small town, and a very unhappy 18 month old child, burn through every single rationalization possible to avoid confronting the very obvious fact that her addiction to cocaine was destrying all the good things in her life.
She was beautiful, smart, funny, and skeletal.
They had a parrot in a cage, who went without water and food, and then was deluged and showered with it, his newspapers went unchanged, he was plucking his feathers out…
The one thing that needed to change wasn’t, everything else was changing for the worse.
It isn’t the drugs, it’s the selfishness and submission to the demands of the self.
We don’t need SUV’s. The people who sell them want us to think we do.
It’s no co-incidence that Enron was an “energy” company.

We don’t need SUV’s. The people who sell them want us to think we do.

Evidently you’ve never been on a poorly-maintained dirt road in a Ford Escort. Or tried to stuff a big Ikea box into a Ford Escort. Or tried to to tow anything with a Ford Escort.

Maybe you don’t need an SUV, but if I want one for the above purposes (and I do), you can just butt out of my business.

The right are attracted to nuclear rather than alternative (you would think individual empowerment might be attractive) because the complexities of “big power” vs “small power” affords them better opportunities to steal.

Also, of course, there’s the fact that “big power,” whether nuclear, coal, hydro, or whatever, is more efficient and generages fewer externalities of all kinds than “small power.” There’s no law against running your house purely from a diesel generator, but that’s both more expensive and way more polluting than buying it off the grid.

Ok, you nuke-lovers.

Please offer a plausible explanation as to why there is a perceived problem with nuclear power…something which has some hook to it. (An explanation such as “Environmentalists are just plain stupid” is not acceptable.)

Having a degree from a Nuclear Physics lab I guess my opinion is likely to be considered suspect. But anyway.

First off, if Nuclear is to get anywhere they have to start off by appologising for a fifty year history of lies and deception. Without exception nuclear programs have been considerably more expensive and less safe than non-nuclear alternatives. You will not find reliable figures on the French nuclear program for the same reason that reliable figures only became available on the British program during privatization. Governments lie when core ideological commitments turn out to be duds.

The big problem has been that the ‘fail safe’ nuclear power plants are not. Light water power station designs are all derrived from the Fermi graphite pile design which was originally built to make plutonium. Despite repeated claims to the contrary all the original UK power stations were built with the primary purpose of making plutonium for bombs. The problem was that the later designs were all based on the earlier bomb making designs which are definitely not failsafe.

I support research into true failsafe designs, but not because I think it is time to give the nuclear industry a second chance. I think we should research these designs because we need an alternative to the existing nuclear industry that is not as complacent and deceptive. If we are not careful we will end up being suckered into allowing a new generation of Chernobyl/Three Mile island designs to be built.

Don’t believe the claims that Three Mile Island was not a major accident, or that Chernobyl could not have happened in the West. Both claims are utter lies told for the same reason Bush told fantasy tales about WMD and Iraqi links to Al Qaeda. The Chernobyl meltdown was due to a design defect of a type that could not be predicted using computer simulation at the time it was built. The computation power required were beyond western computers as well as Soviet ones. Three Mile Island really did come very close to killing tens of thousands. Placing a nuclear plant in such a place was pure negligence.

It is probably quite possible to run a nuclear plant safely. The problem is not technical, it is political. Unfortunately we have a crystal clear demonstration in Iraq that the political process in the US and the UK cannot be trusted. Recent news in the US Enron story shows us that there is a severe problem with energy regulation.

In this situation it is not unreasonable for people to object to new nuclear power stations. They are neither stupid nor ill-informed to do so. If the US nuclear lobby wants to get anywhere they need to abandon the GOP tactics of agenda denial, smearing their critics with false charges of irrational superstition. There may be a case for new nuclear stations but only after the nuclear industry starts to confess its past misdeeds.

My information is not expert, and quite out of date, but this is a blog… :)
My father was an expert in corrosion science, and had at least one contact who was an expert in the nuclear industry ( in the 70s). I remember this man telling me that the problems of finding the proper plating (cladding?) for materials inside the reactor that would last a reasonable lenghth of time was not solved.

Robert, unless hauling Ikea boxes around is something you do on a daily basis, your claims of “need” sound pretty fishy to me. Sure, it’s more convenient when you actually do need to move big boxes or tow something, but it’s an obvious fact that the vast majority of SUVs in the US are being used for single occupant transportation, a job Ford Escorts do just as well, and at the same time with less pollution and more safely.

TPS12: I didn’t say “need,” I said “want,” along with some explanations of why I want an SUV (Right now I have only an Escort).

In principle, I don’t need anything other than bread, protein shakes, multivitamins, water, and air. But I’ll kick like hell if you try to limit me to that.

Liberty has some value, you know.

One gauge of the safety of any technology is the willingness of private insurers to cover the liability of the technology. The US nuclear industry externalizes their liability by having a federal subsidy(welfare?) via a cap on liablity for nuclear accidents. This is the only way that they can operate in the US.
A viable business model would welcome and include the costs of doing business including paying for their own insurance rather than externalizing it to each taxpayer.

A longtime friend actually builds nuclear reactors around the world as a boilermaker by trade. He recounted finding plans for the cooling system on a CANDU reactor in Argentina that were backwards. The engineers kept telling him that he was mistaken. He refused to follow the plans until the head engineer returned to the site from Canada. The head man agreed with my friend that the plans if followed would have drained the reactor of coolant causing a meltdown. So much for failsafe ddesign and implementation. People remain the problem and weak link in this questionable chain.

The costs post-decommissioning are a major kicker (as well as the insurance as mentioned already). Sure, it’s not a vast quantity of money, but even at an optimistic discount rate the present value of a stream of payments that lasts 10,000 years is … large.