Up until about a week ago, nuclear energy had been broadly embraced as our great radioactive hope for a clean energy future. In the face of a scary and uncertain situation in Japan, the president and some Congressional Republicans have urged us to stay the course on nuclear energy despite renewed safety concerns. The truth is that even without the safety concerns we should forgo new nuclear reactors because they are fundamentally uneconomic. Nuclear reactors are a bad deal for the private sector and they are a bad deal for American taxpayers.
Nuclear construction has been stagnant since the 1970s. According to conventional wisdom this construction freeze was the result of public fears about nuclear safety following the crises in Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. This is only part of the story. What really happened is that the private sector was unwilling to finance nuclear reactors because they were too expensive and too risky. New nuclear plants cost $10 billion at a minimum and have a history of chronic cost overruns. Without a carbon tax or carbon cap and trade system in place, nuclear energy prices are at least 8.4 cents per kilowatt hour and cannot possibly compete with coal at 6.2 cents or natural gas at 6.5 cents. In addition, advances in solar technology are constantly improving the efficiency of solar panels that will very likely be competitive with other forms of power generation when considered over the future lifetime of a nuclear plant. Wind energy, even the relatively more expensive offshore type, has also been shown to be cheaper than nuclear.
In fact, despite France's often reported reliance on nuclear energy, Europe has also found nuclear energy to be costly compared to other renewable and is investing in wind and solar instead. Of all available technologies, nuclear is the least likely to survive in a market that priced risk and costs properly, which is why the market will not finance new plants. Politicians are attempting to artificially change these dynamics now by offering federal loan guarantees, a program that started under the Bush Administration and has continued under the Obama Administration. These loan guarantees mean that taxpayers shoulder the burden of loan defaults and cost overruns. Taxpayers underwrite the risks that investment firms are unwilling to gamble on.
So once we have taxpayers absorb the construction risks of these plants, we should be ready to break ground on new reactors, right? Not quite. The other problem with nuclear power is that the private insurance market which regularly insures against everything from flood damage to Tom Jones' chest hair, was not willing to insure nuclear reactors against catastrophe in even close to sufficient amounts.
Enter the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, which originally passed in 1957 as a temporary measure to get nuclear energy off the ground. The idea was that the taxpayer could underwrite the risks associated with a potential nuclear crisis just until nuclear energy had a proven track record of safety and private insurers were willing to step up to the table. The problem is that it's more than half a century later and there are STILL no private insurers willing to take on the risk of a nuclear crisis. In fact, Price-Anderson was just extended another 20 years in 2005. Currently the entire nuclear industry would pay just $12.6 billion in a crisis. I've been unable to find a reliable estimate of the cost to cleanup Japan's nuclear crisis but the cost to clean up the Gulf Oil Spill was initially estimated at $40 billion which appears to have been a gross underestimation. Even with Federal Loan Guarantees and Price-Anderson Indemnity, only two new nuclear reactors are actually moving forward with construction.
Add to these issues the very real safety concerns and a complete lack of a solution regarding nuclear waste disposal and I think we should be quite content to let market forces kill the nuclear industry. The real way to move towards a clean energy future is to stop the nuclear subsidies and institute a market-based system which recognizes all the costs to society of the energy we use which includes the costs of pollution and potentially also risks to our national security. Under a solution that properly priced these factors, bio-fuels, solar and wind would become increasingly attractive and fossil fuel solutions would be less attractive. If nuclear energy were to win out in such a marketplace that would be fine with me although judging from the costs and risks it seems unlikely. Unfortunately, Republicans would rather rely on taxpayer-funded nuclear welfare than a market-based cap and trade system. I just hate when these left-wing socialists have government bureaucrats pick winners and losers rather than leaving it up to the invisible hand of competition.
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It pretty much goes on forever that way. I think what we really need to do is build a solid balanced energy plan using nuclear, solar, bio fuels, fossil fuels, hydroelectric, wind turbines and 200 other sources that just won't fit in one comment section. Or we can play Chicken Little.
As an example Exelon, the operator of 17 nuclear power plants posted a profit of $2.56 billion dollars in 2010. This was just one example.
Another example of privatizing profit while socializing both costs and risk.
There is no neutralizing agent capable of stopping radiation cold in its tracks, therefore humanity cannot completely control it, therefore we have no business messing with it. Maybe in the future we'll solve that riddle but as of today it is not the answer
But America is not alone in the world. No nation with a nuclear industry has a RELIABLE concept to store nuclear waste for the long haul. We are talking at least 5 000 (fife thousand) years here.
Good luck and not so good good riddance.
Weinberg was Director of ORNL and held patents on the Light Water Reactor (LWR), such as Pressurised Water Reactors and Boiling Water Reactors. He was against the civil use of LWRs with their safety fallabilities. His promotion of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) for civil use was politically/militarily blocked.
In his autobiography Weinberg confessed:
“I became obsessed with the idea that humankind’s whole future depended on the breeder. For Society generally to achieve and maintain a standard of living of today’s developed countries depends on the availability of relatively cheap, inexhaustible sources of energy.”
By ‘breeder’, he means transmutation of thorium232 to fissile Uranium233 by LFTRs.
LFTRs are hot-salt chemical plants, a fraction of the cost of PWRs. Operating at atmospheric pressure, using chemically stable fluoride salts, there is no 'driver' to expel radioactivity. If the reactor vessel leaks, liquid salt will dribble down and solidify; if the vessel is breached, the contents drain into an air-cooled, passively-reactive drain tank.
LFTRs will ultimately provide all the electrical/heat power for everyone on the planet forever. In the 'West', we could do it sooner rather than later. If we don't, the Chinese will be exporting these to us by the container-ship full, within a decade or two.
I blog on LFTRs in the UK. Google: “LFTRs to Power the Planet”
The Plant was originally proposed in 2006 - in March 2008 there was this report:
Price triples for Progress Energy's proposed nuclear plant in Levy = Progress Energy's planned plant costs $17-billion
http://www.sptimes.com/2008/03/11/Business/Price_triples_for_Pro.shtml
Then in May 2010 another cost increase and construction delay was announced:
Levy nuclear plant pushed back - The Progress Energy plant won't be online until at least 2021 now.
http://www.gainesville.com/article/20100506/ARTICLES/5061056?tc=ar
and what about costs?
"Company spokeswoman Cherie Jacobs said the company predicts the project, once slated to be online by 2016 and cost about $17 billion, will now be operational no sooner than 2021 at a cost ranging between $17.2 billion to $22.5 billion."
These costs are already being borne by ratepayers, via payments through their bills (called Construction Work in Progress or CWIP), prompting lawsuits against the company.
In 2002, this was more energy in one hour than the world used in one year.
There is no "energy" crisis. We just aren't very smart about how we harness it.
Coal, oil, gas, are only cheaper because we fail to take into consideration the health care costs associated with pollution. A recent study concluded that 40% of the worlds morbidity/mortality rates were directly associated with pollution. Now there is the additional question of global warming.
Like most of our decisions, this one is based on profits, not on logic. Our loss.
As it is, even with heavy subsidies and liability caps, there is almost no interest in building them.
If you and 12 billion of your friends each pitch in a dollar, that will get you to the first of many years worth of cost overruns, by the time you've each invested 5 dollars, you may be ready to generate electricity, or you may be ready to abandon the project, as so many are abandoned.
And I'd bet not one of your 12 billion friends is ready to have the waste product stored in their back yard, keep saving those dollars, you'll need them.
Energy Turf Wars between Nuclear, Coal, Oil and Gas, all trying to prevent meaningful
progress towards viable clean energy.
a cell phone and the ability to communicate world without hard phone wires.
The Nuclear and Fossil Fuel Industries have clearly taken a protectionist role, digging deep
into their pockets to BRIBE lawmakers to keep us in the technological dark ages.
Any Clean technology that threatens these technological dinosaurs, is swiftly bought up
and swept under the rug, along with 10's of thousands of other alternative energy patents.
The Department of Energy is swarming with insider shills who's only purpose is to report &
derail viable competition from clean energy.
I doubt China will allow any monkey business to prevent their quest for viable clean alternatives.
The money being spent right now attempting to SELL old tech, is sinful.
All that money should be going towards research to finally free us from all the risks
of cheap and dirty energy.
(1) There are three nukes currently on the drawing boards or under construction. They all depend on federal construction loan guarantees. If the utility goes bust, we have to pay the contractors. No guarantee, the first shovel of earth does not get turned over. I think she understates the case here. What would a private loan guarantee cost?
(2) She is exactly right about Anderson-Price. The legislation caps the utility's liability at $10 billion per incident. I doubt there is enough capacity in the insurance industry to pay for liability insurance for all our nukes. Even if there were, knowing the price of that insurance would assure that utilities paid the full cost of the protection they get for free now.
(3) If the free market were willing to provide storage for all the spent waste, why all the brouhaha about Yucca Mountain. Face it. No amount of money is going to persuade a community to accept and care for that waste for centuries. Again, it would be instructive to put a free market price on that subsidy so we could see how big the subsidy was.
If we added together all three subsidies, we would see that nuclear energy was the most expensive on Earth.
If you want to respond, no snark, please. Just coherent arguments.