US Approves Two New Nuclear Reactors 596
JoeRobe writes "For the first time in 30 years, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved licenses to build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia. These are the first licenses to be issued since the Three Mile Island incident in 1979. The pair of facilities will cost $14 billion and produce 2.2 GW of power (able to power ~1 million homes). They will be Westinghouse AP1000 designs, which are the newest reactors approved by the NRC. These models passively cool their fuel rods using condensation and gravity, rather than electricity, preventing the possibility of another Fukushima Daiichi-type meltdown due to loss of power to cooling water pumps." Adds Unknown Lamer: "Expected to begin operation in 2016 or 2017, the pair of new AP1000 reactors will produce around 2GW of power for the southeast. This is the first of the new combined construction and operating licenses ever issued by the NRC; hopefully this bodes well for the many other pending applications."
Re:No More Nuclear Waste Siting Problem? (Score:5, Informative)
PRISM [wikipedia.org] / IFR designs [wikipedia.org] in general (and Molten salt breeders [wikipedia.org], in theory) turn that "waste" into enough fuel to supply the earth ... forever, assuming we build pyroprocessing [wikipedia.org] facilities (PUREX generates a lot of waste ... no good).
Re:Great news! (Score:2, Informative)
HA HA HA, this was going to be my comment. The new reactors would power 1,000,000 homes or 500,000 electric cars.
MOST people don't recognize the load that a mass switchover to electric cars would put on the power grid.
Re:Typical (Score:5, Informative)
up North where the states refuse to allow them
Err... [sandia.gov]
Re:No More Nuclear Waste Siting Problem? (Score:5, Informative)
All that said, as a native Nevadan I am not opposed to the Yucca Mountain project. It's gotta go somewhere and while there are better places, there are a whole lot worse. At some point you just need to make your decision and act on it. I am however opposed to the regulatory environment that has kept newer, more efficient nuclear designs from seeing the light of day in the US. Land of the Risk Averse!
Re:And three, two, one... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:About time (Score:1, Informative)
Seems that we didn't learn much (yet). [vimeo.com] AP1000 has its own set of flaws nobody in NRC cares about.
I'm not against nuclear power but we still have serious issues to be solved. Most serious one is corporate negligence (a.k.a. "cost cutting") and general corruption at NRC. In AP1000 case nobody addressed issues resulting from Fukushima fiasco.
No, no it won't. (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear operating costs are far lower than fossil fuel plants... but they are higher than solar photovoltaic, wind, and hydro in almost all cases.
As for the "nuclear is always on" claims, that's true for the most part. The thing is, not every hour of electricity is worth the same. The Southeast (and most of tUSA) has surplus capacity even after the GWs of coal retirement hit 2016-2018. What we need in order to keep the price low is inexpensive *peaking* capacity. Guess when load is highest? Yip. When the sun is shining; more precisely, summer months on clear days at around 3pm M-F non-holidays. Guess when the cost of generating electricity with fossil fuel is the highest? Yip, during peak hours [thanks to economic dispatch, a good thing].
As for me, I'm not opposed to nuclear power, and I do believe that carbon emissions are the most important challenge of our generation. Nuclear waste is a real problem /. tends to gloss over [by either ignoring it in absolute terms or ignoring the foreign policy and transportation implications of reprocessing]. I'm opposed to the cost. Nuclear is far more expensive than renewables, we don't need the nighttime capacity, and if the First Nuclear Age is any indication, cost per MW will go up over time, not down.
Re:No More Nuclear Waste Siting Problem? (Score:2, Informative)
I'm so glad the problems in safely disposing of nuclear waste have been solved!
As opposed to global mercury contamination, where now you can't even eat tuna without killing yourself? Or the smog clouds that literally kill 1,000,000-2,000,000 people each year?
Sorry, nuclear waste problem is a TINY issue. We are talking a few thousand tones of material that 95% reusable, if we wanted to reuse it. But then Uranium recycling is not even cost effective until uranium costs at least $120/lb.
In reality, humans over last 50 years have produced about a few hundred barrels of stuff that cannot be reused and should be stored properly for few thousand years. Rest can be recycled. There is no energy producing solution that has lower impact on the environment.
Of course, we can continue burning about 2 train loans of coal every minute (about 200 tons of coal per SECOND every second last year) so you can worry about little problems that are not a problem.
Re:because we learned nothing from Fukushima (Score:5, Informative)
Oh it's still an environmental problem, but most of it is conveniently out of plain sight:
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-12-07/opinion/cousteau.gulf.oil.spill_1_oil-spill-deepwater-horizon-ixtoc [cnn.com]
Re:No More Nuclear Waste Siting Problem? (Score:5, Informative)
If these fear mongers really want to protest against nuclear waste they should be picketing coal plants.
Re:$6.36 per Watt (Score:5, Informative)
At best (clear days all the time and solar panels that move to point at the Sun), you can get 50% of the power rating averaged over the day. For fixed direction installations, that drops to a third. So 100 watts of maneuverable solar panel corresponds to 50 watts of average power for perfect weather conditions and 100 watts of fixed direction solar panel under the same conditions corresponds to about 33 waters of average power over the day.
The remaining big negative factor for solar is land use. It requires a lot of land to set up an installation of 2.2 GW average power. For maneuverable panels, you'd need almost 9 square kilometers of light gathering area (at 500 W per square meter). For fixed panels, that's 13 square kilometers of light gathering area. There's a modest hidden inefficiency here since solar panels intercept some light for panels behind them when the Sun is near the horizon.
On the nuclear reactor side, the problem is the big liabilities. The reactor design mitigates some of those liabilities, but not by any means all of them. You still need to figure out what to do with the fuel rods, for example. And until the US figures something out, those rods will be stored on site.
A remaining potential advantage for this particular reactor design is that if they can build a number of these, then they can enjoy economies of scale in construction, regulatory and safety issues, and other matters in which more working reactors can generate experience to make that activity less costly. It appears that there are six such reactors under construction, two in the US and four in China (with another eight reactors planned in China according to Wikipedia).
Reading through the Wikipedia article (and links), it appears that the four Chinese reactors under construction are going to generate 4.4 GW of power and cost $8 billion dollars to build. That (if true) changes the economics decisively in favor of nuclear power (though perhaps at substantially higher risk of safety and other liability issues).
Re:$6.36 per Watt (Score:4, Informative)
Good question. This wikipedia entry on electricity cost by source [wikipedia.org] has the US DOE estimates for total cost.
The main reason is that nuclear plants average 90% of listed ("nameplate") capacity, while solar PV averages just 25%, giving nuclear a 3.6x multiplier on cost-effectiveness, more than making up for the 2.12x shortfall in cost-per-nameplate-watt shortfall.
Re:$6.36 per Watt (Score:4, Informative)
Well, your $3/watt and falling solar is useful on average 12 hours a day.
That's a common misconception--it's actually only about an average of 5 hours per day in an ideal location. Capacity factor for PV is rarely greater than about 0.2.
Re:Great news! (Score:2, Informative)
History disagrees with you [wikipedia.org]. "Jigga" was the official pronunciation according the to the US National Bureau of Standards. Also, the soft 'g' sound respects the Greek origin of the prefix. From the link (emphasis mine):
"In English, the initial g of giga can be pronounced // (a hard g as in giggle), or /d/ (a soft g as in giant, which shares its Greek root).
This latter pronunciation was formalized within the United States in the 1960s and 1980s with the issue by the US National Bureau of Standards of pronunciation guides for the metric prefixes. A prominent example is found in the pronunciation of gigawatts in the 1985 movie Back to the Future."
Nah, Georgia Power Scam! (Score:5, Informative)
Nah, it's all a scam by Southern Company (parent of Georgia Power) to boost profits. I've been a shareholder for 30+ years. I live in Marietta. What they have done is to effectively double the price of electricity across the state to fund building the reactors rather than taking out a loan to build them. It's bait-and-switch. Once they have the money to build the reactors, the prices will never go down. They will have X years to build the reactors and in the mean time will come up with a number of excuses as to why our electricity prices didn't go down. Inflation, cost to operate, environmental regulations, you name it, any "reason" that they can come up with to pad their salaries and options. I'm a little guilty myself; their dividends aren't bad...
I'm looking for a direct quote from last fall from a Georgia Power rep (Jeff Wilson?) talking about how they have all sorts of hydro power, but I can't find it after a half-hour of scouring the Internets. Link's probably dead anyway. That's what I get for not printing. An article came out where there was a report from Georgia Power or Southern Company, generated by them where the company found itself as a huge polluter. A spokesperson from Georgia Power/Southern Company totally downplayed the report and dismissed it going so far as to say that they have lots of renewable power deployed. There was a quote "from the horse's mouth" IIRC about how there was so much power generated (50MW? installed IIRC) at Lake Sinclair. If you lived around the area and ONLY if you lived around the area and actually paid very close attention talking to workers, you would know that the guy was lying through his teeth. They aren't generating ANY power there because there isn't enough water now to even be run through the turbines. Installed capacity != realized capacity. If anyone can find this article, please post it. It was probably from the AJC or Athens or Milledgeville press.
Here's one that I dug out of my email on Georgia Power's water usage [macon.com].
Another on coal ash pollution [macon.com].
We have two of the world's top ten dirtiest power plants in operation RIGHT HERE IN GEORGIA!!! One of these (Cartersville) powers Atlanta, so I can't complain too much. :)
Source [momtastic.com]
Go to Milledgeville and behold the brown afternoon/evening skies. Been like this for longer than I've been around. They may actually be closing that plant because they're too cheap to install scrubbers.
There is such thing as clean coal or at least "cleaner" coal. And I'm just as much for nuclear as the next guy, but that's not what this is about.
Just another move by Southern Company to increase profits. Nothing else.
(See post [slashdot.org])
Re:because we learned nothing from Fukushima (Score:4, Informative)
You're correct here - Many of the safety features in this plant (and even its predecessors) would have allowed Fukushima to have survived the tsunami without any core damage.
For example, in addition to the diesels, the ABWR design has a gas turbine in the (heavily reinforced) turbine building.
The ESBWR design (similar in safety features to this AP1000) could have survived the loss of both that gas turbine and all of the diesels thanks to the PCCS - Maintaining PCCS operation only requires you to bring a fire truck onsite within 72 hours.
Re:because we learned nothing from Fukushima (Score:5, Informative)
Per-kilowatt I'm amazed at how expensive this is. $7/W just in construction costs? Yeah, I know nuclear has a higher capacity factor than wind and solar, but still... ouch.
And the article summary repeats the whole "passively cooled" thing as if that equals "safe". :P First off, it's not even a true passive system. The "passive" system must successfully activate within 30 minutes, and only works for 72 hours. It's only passive in that it doesn't require electricity once started, and assuming that it works properly. Secondly, "passive" does not automatically equal 'safe' anyway. For example, a number of graphite-moderated reactors have been declared "safe" because of a negative void coefficient, so if you lose your working fluid and air gets in, the reaction still slows down. Great, except that hot graphite *burns* or otherwise erodes (burning graphite is what spread the Chernobyl radiation).
In general, "passive safety" is an excuse to cut down on containment structures, which have saved our collective behinds many times over. And the AP1000 is no exception, with its bargain-basement containment design. I'm amazed that the construction cost on these is still this high despite the corner-cutting.
Re:$6.36 per Watt (Score:2, Informative)
> your solar panel will degrade to uselessness in a couple of decades
Incorrect. The very first run of commercial assembly-line solar panels, built in the 1970s, are still working perfectly today. Several systems have operated continually since the 1980s.
There's a misconception that panels slowly degrade over time. They don't. They tend to work very close to their initial standard and then suddenly fail - normally due to physical problems like the back sheet coming off or water working its way in. The chance of any one of these errors occurring is about 0.2% per year.
The average lifetime of a modern panel is likely between 40 and 100 years. No one knows, because we haven't been building them that long.
On the contrary, nuclear plants are generally designed for 25 years, and really do require replacement/refurb at that point. Look up "Darlington power plant" some time.
Re:because we learned nothing from Fukushima (Score:3, Informative)
Antimatter? really? Please realize that science fiction is indeed science fiction. Antimatter can not be harvest as a natural resource, it is at best a really really expensive form of energy storage because we have to create antimatter before we can use it.
Fusion may be possible sometime this century, maybe.
As for solar? in the southeast we can get about 1kw per meter a day at 20% efficiency. With a 1 square mile array we could get a little over 2.2 gw.
20% is entirely doable with solar thermal, and it can even generate a base load at night with a large enough thermal reservoir.
As for wind, Not a fan of it myself. To unreliable and needs an energy storage system of either pumped or chemical storage. Neither is very efficient and pumped storage has issues with land destruction.
I am still very much pro nuclear with these newer safer reactor designs.
Re:because we learned nothing from Fukushima (Score:5, Informative)
Three Mile Island was a panic, but nothing actually happened. Chernobyl was an actual disaster and Fukushima was a very real problem. Fukushima is/was NOT as bad as some coal power related incidents, it just happened faster, and had the new N word in it, so it gets attention. Coal fires due to mining have actually created some rather large exclusion zones of their own here in the U.S.
Re:because we learned nothing from Fukushima (Score:4, Informative)
As to fusion, we need to stop shooting for the "ideal purist" approach of fusion-only energy, and look into subcritical fission reactors using fusion as a neutron source as a stepping stone. Pure fusion is the ideal final goal, but we'll never get there without a more short-term realizable intermediary step of some sort.
This is silly. There's been enormous progress on fusion over the decades. ITER [iter.org] may be the first time we actually achieve long term self-sustaining reactions.
But there's practically no cross-over between fusion neutron sources, and fusion energy sources. If you want a neutron source, build a Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor and save yourself a lot of time and trouble - but those things will never be self-sustaining (unless Polywell's work out, but it seems more like those were a badly monitored experiment then real progress).
Re:because we learned nothing from Fukushima (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with nuclear power is the worst case scenario: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima.
The problem is the willful ignorance of the media because the mysteriousness of nuclear power provides an almost unlimited source of material for media hyperbole. The differences between Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are so enormous - not just the outcome but the risks taken and events leading to the accident - it is ridiculous to include them in the same list.
I would encourage people to understand these accidents and, in particular, look at the culture of safety/corruption in the organisations/countries involved. Chernobyl became operational before a key safety requirement was met (and, ironically, attempts to address this led to the accident). We now know that there were safety concens over Fukushima but TEPCO wasn't going to shut a profitable power station. Where safety regulators have the final say and are not corrupt, nuclear power, like everything else, will be much safer. Most aspects of everyday life are not 100% safe, e.g. walking down stairs, driving, flying etc., but in the USA/Canada and many European countries, at least, nuclear power should be low down on our list of things to worry about. My worry is that investment in nuclear power may detract from investment into developing sources of renewable energy.
Re:Nah, Georgia Power Scam! (Score:5, Informative)
"clean coal" is about as expensive as nuclear power and it has a lot of problems because it sequesters CO2 by pumping it underground at high pressure. In the event of a fracture event the sudden release of CO2 can prove fatal for anyone living in low areas. A similar effect occurs naturally in certain areas of Africa where CO2 suddenly released from deep lakes occasionally wipes out entire villages. If that happens in a suburban or urban area, 10s or hundreds of thousands could die. The risks are just too great.
Re:About time (Score:3, Informative)
>
" has actually been increasing in volume faster than we've been using it." .....do you have a citation, or are you just remembering from that time where you read nothing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves [wikipedia.org]
Check out foot note 3 for a discussion of what I'm talking about. There may be *other* reasons for it, but if you look at the various tables in this article, you will notice that we have a lot more oil reserves claimed in 2009 than we had in 2000.