Nuclear Poised for Comeback: GE, Hitachi Win Design Approval for Passive Reactor 22 comments
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by Michael Kanellos
General Electric (GE) and Hitachi (HIT) passed one of the key milestones on the long road to deploying a new type of what will arguably be a cheaper and safer nuclear reactor on Wednesday: design approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. With design approval secured (the process takes years), a utility that wants to build a plant based on the reactor can then seek approval for a site and, potentially, start to build a nuclear plant with the reactor.
The Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) effectively exploits passive cooling techniques more than older reactors, which means 25 percent fewer pumps and values. Fewer valves means more rapid construction – an entire power plant can be built in 42 months – and at the same time reduces the potential for something to go wrong.
Nuclear appears poised to make a comeback in the U.S. No commercial nuclear plants have been built in the U.S. since the '70s. However, the 104 existing commercial reactors provide 21 percent of the electrical power in the states. Nuclear plants do not emit carbon emissions when operating, but there is that waste problem. Nuclear has also risen in public opinion polls.
A whole host of companies, meanwhile, are developing small modular reactors, fusion reactors and even ones that burn spent nuclear waste (see our guide to new nuclear here). NuScale Power and other new companies are exploiting passive cooling too.
Still, the high costs of reactors, the potential for community opposition, and the long history of delays and cost overruns make both banks and utilities skittish about committing to new nuclear plants.
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I reproduce it here as the thread is now old.
the latest cost estimates in China run at $1565/kwh:
nextbigfuture.com/2008...
Although this is an estimate it should be noted that both Westinghouse and CANDU have built on time and to cost in many areas of the world.
The same reference gives US costs:
'Another indication of financing costs is given by Georgia Power, which said in mid 2008 that twin 1100 MWe AP1000 reactors would cost $9.6 billion if they could be financed progressively by ratepayers, or $14 billion if not. This gives $4363 or $6360 per kilowatt including all other owners costs.'
Some of the extra costs are due to higher labour costs etc and are inevitable, but many are due to truly batty and ineffective regulation, the lack of a series build, the fact that this would be the first of a kind for a long time so that expertise has to be accumulated and so on.
It is also necessary to use crazy accounting to make nuclear look like a bad deal - the recent bids in Ontario are a good example:
bravenewclimate.com/20...
Note that after all the fun and games, that still works out to a levelised cost of $0.05/kwh - cheaper than anything but natural gas and coal, which if it had to pay for the pollutants and control them to the same standard as the nuclear industry would be hopelessly uneconomic.
For more information on nuclear costs and comparisons with wind, which is by far the cheapest renewable, are here:
theoildrum.com/nod...
This allows for capacity, which the figures you quote do not, but does not allow for the costs of linking to the grid, which are very large due to the dispersed nature of wind.
It also does not allow for back up, which in practise is gas fired generation, as in Europe wind can be still for a week in midwinter, and winds are low in Texas in the summer when cooling needs are high.
Without writing a dissertation on it, the problems of solar power relate to annual variation, so you have low solar incidence in mid-winter for months at a time, even as far south as the Mohave, whose latitude is similar to Cairo, incidence figures at 1.6 here:
powerfromthesun.ne...
I don't really study renewables in the US, as I have determined as far as I am concerned that whatever may be the case elsewhere, renewables are wholly impractical in the UK:
withouthotair.com/
In the US land based wind resources are much better, and can certainly supplement existing powers sources, but check out people like EON, who actually have to run the German grid, for the practical problems and costs of using a high proportion of renewables.
Solar in the South-west of the US can also usefully provide peak power, and in some isolated communities may be a pretty cheap option, mainly because the US regulatory authorities charge a flat rate of about $50million for authorising nuclear plants, so making small, cheap designs uneconomic.
As a general power source though, assuming that America is now incapable of organising itself to allow the build of nuclear power at reasonable cost, by far the cheapest way of getting power would be to buy off-the-shelf reactors from Russia or China, at a cost of, say, $2,000/kwh installed, as both are now designing and setting up the production lines for mass produced power.
I hope this is helpful. At minimum perhaps when considering costs you would compare costs allowing for capacity factors, as without them the figures are deeply misleading.
Rgds,
And:
Evidence of on time and to-budget construction here:
pepei.pennnet.com/disp...
I have now spent some time providing documentation for the arguments I have made.
Perhaps you would similarly support your own statements.
You say:
'China's costs are not viable as they are subsidized in many ways'
Evidence, sources, amounts?
And:
'Again I'm talking US, European free market . If you want to use Russian, Chinese nukes feel free but not me.'
that nuclear power can be built so cheaply there indicates that costs in the US are inflated, and the technology is not inherently expensive.
And also, if we can buy a source of carbon low power more cheaply than we can make it, and reduce the costs of everything else we make in this way, why not?
Please provide sources for all your cost figures for renewables, including where they can be bought for that cost and what assumptions you are making and any Government subsidies.
Since you were originally just quoting figures for installed capacity as though it were output then considerable verification is needed.
Here it is again:
pepei.pennnet.com/disp.../
Westinghouse have also built reactors on time and to budget, and googling will show this.
I feel that I have provided sufficient proof of nuclear costs to not need to track this down for yet more proof.
Incidentally, many of the cost projections for nuclear build are on safe grounds for the new designs, as simplification by not needing so many valves inherently make them cheaper etc.
Pre-approval of everything in the design rather messing around during construction also obviously reduces cost.
It actually took for the site I reference 54 months from first concrete to power.
Flaws in American construction management hardly reflect on the technology, they just show that many of the procedures in operation there are not constructive.
bravenewclimate.com/20.../
This shows that in spite of heroically daft accounting and regulation inflating build costs, the levelised cost of nuclear power is still only estimated as being 5cents/kwh for the Ontario build.
Apologies for the multiple posts.
You make some excellent points in justifying the ability of the nuclear industry to deliver a new reactor on time and on Budget. However, I think that to do justice to this topic, we also need to consider the considerable maintenance costs of operating these reactors over their life cycles, including times when they are put out of commission for rebuilds etc.
The present retubing of many existing PWR and PHWR reactors costs upwards of $2+ billion and can take up to 2 years to complete, during which the reactor is non-operational. Most of these reactor rebuilds have had to take place in advance of their design envelope as dependability issues have plagued the industry. For example, CANDU engineers are today still wrestling with reactor void reactivity problems that create instability and lead to accelerated deterioration of components, decades after this problem first surfaced.
I remain a supporter of nuclear energy as a fundamental source for the world's energy needs. But speaking as a former nuclear engineer, we should be very cognizant that the industry does not follow the path of the N. American auto manufacturers, where uninspired engineering and lazy management conspire to destroy a major sector of our economy.
I agree that we can build still better reactors.
My favourite is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor, which cannot conceivably explode as the material just freezes when exposed to the air, and is low pressure so there is nothing to make it explode in the first place.
This means that you simply don't need most of the elaborate safety engineering of current reactors.
www.energyfromthorium.com/
Even present reactors are still vastly better than anything else we have though, and have successfully provided France with some of the cheapest electricity in Europe for donkey's years.
I fully agree that maintenance is a non-trivial part of the cost, but so it is for renewables, for instance Vespa stopped making turbines for off-shore wind due to high maintenance costs, and Siemens is currently the only manufacturer.
The Government have also levied a not-inconsiderable $25bn from the industry for waste disposal in Yucca mountain, which is not going to happen.
Hopefully, nuclear waste will be recognised for what it is, America's greatest resource, and designs such as the IFR and liquid fluoride thorium reactor will compete to use it as fuel.
Thinking of the LFTR, please have a browse on our forum:
www.energyfromthorium....
Where your contribution will be greatly valued - you can chat to the other nuclear engineers and chemists - I understand about one word in ten, on a good day.
Fusion is just a scam that the physicists have got going to get taxpayer money and live a good life jetting off to conferences, at least in the form of the Tokamak.
There is no way it will ever produce economic power.
We don't need it though, nor do we need any technical breakthroughs at all.
If burnt in a efficient reactor, there is enough thorium for billions of years, as the efficiency of burn is so high that even normal granite could have the thorium extracted, or it could be got from seawater.
For many hundreds or thousands of years though, the very rich ores in Idaho and Montana can be used:
'The U.S.G.S.` latest estimate of 915,000 tons of thorium ore reserves within the
claims held by Thorium Energy, Inc., in Idaho and Montana compares to the
previously published U.S.G.S. estimate of 160,000 tons for the entire United
States as stated in the U.S.G.S. Mineral Commodity Summaries 2008.'www.reuters.com/articl...
That's enough to provide all the electric in the US for over 1800 years.
The reactors were developed in the US in the 60's, but put aside as they are no good for producing weapons grade materials.
All they need is some engineering work, and can be built with present-day materials straight out of the engineering handbook.
I hope there are other simplified passive designs in the pipeline as these seem to be the next generation of the technology which has been on hold for 40 years. So what is the status of this design?
Nobody wants one in their back yard. When the price of a kWh doubles and brownouts start rolling through, I would hope attitudes would change. There are only a limited number of suitable locations anyway, and most aren't near population centers (unlike France). If these "simplified" designs were smaller, they could be built closer to cities without as much outcry (think aircraft carrier and submarine power plants) and without the long T&D right of way.
With all regard to the NRE, my rule is never buy anything with a low serial number. I hope this thing gets the engineering attention it needs.
One slip and the technology goes down for another 40 years. In the meantime, they can be working on simplified "breeders" to handle the spent rod issue, since all the pools are full.
What would the NRE have to say about off the shelf reactors from Russia or China? Personally, I would take a pass on those and count on the cost curve to lower the price as more are built.
Also, who's working on fusion reactors? Hope you don't mean cold fusion.
All the new reactors use passive safety to one degree or another.The Hitachi design is probably the most advanced in some ways, but there are passive features and reduced complexity in the new Areva and CANDU designs as well.
Beyond that, here is a brief overview of the next stage, Gen IV reactors:
world-nuclear.org/info...
There are a whole raft of small reactor designs:
nextbigfuture.com/2007...
The NRE makes them almost impossible to get approval or build.
It charges $240/hour for it's staff to study new designs, a vast cost even for well-financed firms.
It then charges a flat rate for individual site authorisations, around $50 million I believe.
This guarantees that all nuclear reactors have to be big, although smaller modular designs make a lot of sense.
It says a lot for the basic viability that the nuclear industry survives in a regulatory environment that would kill any other industry.
If coal, for instance, had anything like the safety requirements and had to deal with it's waste, it would not exist.
There are actually quite a lot of sites for nuclear power.
For a start you could build reactors in most of the present 100sites as the old ones go off-line.
The new reactors would be bigger, so you could massively increase power in that way.
If, on average, you could build two new Areva 1600MW reactors on each site, you would get around 320GW of power, about 3 times the current output and more than half of all the electricity the US uses.
The flexibility in location is actually a great deal more than for solar thermal, for instance, as you don't need to build them in sunny areas and can optimise for water resources for cooling, whereas solar thermal tends by it's nature to go to water-stressed areas.
Places with access to sea water are ideal.
You can also reasonably air-cool nuclear plants, albeit with a small loss of efficiency, something which is very difficult indeed for solar thermal, as in the very hot areas it needs like the Mohave day-time temperatures are so high that air cooling is very inefficient indeed, as it relies on temperature differential.
Solar PV of course has no such water resource issues, but is still very, very expensive.
The likeliest designs for export are modular reactors, pebble bed in the case of China, and lead in the case of Russia.
The PBR is here:
nextbigfuture.com/2009...
As outlined above, any new reactor design is given almost prohibitive hurdles to jump.
However, just like in the UK, the US may get itself into such a fix that suddenly they become a lot less fussy, and decide that their job is to expedite the build of safe reactors, and not to obstruct in every conceivable, and some nearly inconceivable, ways.
On fusion reactors, the big money goes to the Tokamak design, which keeps physicists amused at the cost of a few billion, and will never lead to a practical commercial design, as one of it's founders, Bussard, admitted - it was just an idea to extract money from the government for interesting fundamental research.
Bussard later moved on to the Bussard fusion reactor, which may actually produce reasonably priced power, if, and it is a big if, it can be made to work:
nextbigfuture.com/2008...
Some funding from the Navy
Another Hail Mary idea is the Focus Fusion reactor:
www.focusfusion.org/in...
Some funding, and research work in Chile.
Then there is laser fusion:
technology.newscientis...
And field reversed configuration:
www.helionenergy.com/
And some even want to use pistons:
nextbigfuture.com/2009...
As I have said in this thread before, all of this requires a great deal more work than in one of the options for the generation IV reactors I listed above, the molten salt reactor.
Davewmart Here in Fla the costs is $8.5k/kw on recently priced nukes by Progress Energy and FPL. That what we have to pay.
To compared nukes built in China costs to US is just not fair as China has both far lower labor costs, little regulation and other costs.
I never said nukes couldn't be built at lower costs, just these are what they cost in the western world including ones presently being built in Europe, here .
But anyone with a reasonable RE site, either wind and/or solar which is about 50% of US homes, businesses can for $5-10k for wind now and once in mass production for CSP have all the energy needed for a home, transport for 50 yrs. This is still far lower that your Chinese cost of nukes.
Also you cherry pick examples and don't include high running, maintaining, land, disposal, decommissioning and other costs. Nor do you mention the increasing cost of nuke fuel as the present source from Russian supplies has dried up doubling the cost.
Next what about the as you think many more nuke plants that will drive fuel cost higher? I agree there is plenty of nuke fuel at higher costs such as the phosphate mines here in Fla which now the fuel prices has risen, will probably start separating it out.
I hope good, cost effective nukes will be built in inherently safe designs. They are not necessary though as there is no shortage of energy, just a shortage of equipment to make, catch it.
And homeowners don't have to pay land, transmission lines, overhead or stockholder costs. If you include all costs, home RE in most cases is by far the low cost energy source of the future.
This is not a technical problem, but a political problem.
It may come to this.
On Sep 10 09:43 PM iggyDalrymple wrote:
> All IMBY (In my back yard) customers should have lower rates subsidized
> by a stiff NIMBY tax. This system should be applied to electric,
> natural gas , and petroleum. Let the tree huggers eat tree bark....it's
> a staple in the North Korean diet.
Tnx for all the links.
Since the US generates half its power from coal, it would seem alternatives would be desirable. However, the coal is there and it seems likely that barring any legislation, it will continue to be used, making the prospects for both nuclear and RE difficult.
It's a shame that the US govt impedes tech progress thru regulation as I have long considered the small modular nukes the way to go, with one or two large fast breeders to deal with the spent fuel.
As a desert dweller, I look forward to covering my roof with PV to sell power back to the utility and provide shade for the house. As the price of PV comes down, I expect this to be very a very popular option in this area just a solar hot water was in 1980. Since refrigeration is the main summer load, and PV output generally increases with refrigeration demand, it seems a good match.
Davavewmart. You can't compare plant prices in China and US, Europe. Here they as in Finland cost $8.5k/kw and $7.6k/kw for recent units. Deal with it.
We are US centric because we are US based investors so it's you who need to adapt, not us.
I'm all for better, lower cost nukes but again here, they are not. How much did a CANDU cost in Canada? How much subsidies did it get? How much did it get in China? How much will nuke fuel cost in the future? How much to de-commission? How much to store wastes? You quotes are only a part of the real costs. And yes financing is a cost. How much does $5-10B cost?
Nor will nuke companies be that good an investment because so few will be built and not profitably, especially at the prices you quote.
I agree in the future pebble bed, Hyperion, others might be worthwhile but there is a lot of if's.
You need to stop using those Ga numbers as they have little to do with reality. In Fla in 2008 they gave similar numbers but when they had to put down real ones they jumped 30%.
RE is inexpensive, we just need to get it in real mass production in home sizes where for under $10k you can get enough for energy for 50 yrs. Even your $1500k/kw nuke costs, though isn't true in real life as it's only a part of the cost, can't beat that.