Is the Era of Nuclear Power Coming to an End in the US?

[kristopher]

Is the Era of Nuclear Power Coming to an End in the US?
A battle raging in Vermont over an aging plant may be an important indicator of whether nuclear has had its day.
February 27, 2012 |


Nearly one year after the Fukushima disaster, 23 nuclear power plants of the same model are still operating in the United States, many of them pushing 40 years old -- and despite the risks they pose, a recent federal court decision will make it harder for states to close them down.

On January 19, federal District Court Judge Garvan Murtha ruled that the Vermont legislature had exceeded its power when it voted in 2010 not to let the Vermont Yankee nuclear-power plant operate after its 40-year operating license expires on March 21 this year. Under federal law, the judge wrote, only the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the power to rule on issues related to radiation safety.

Vermont Yankee is a telling example of the dangers that nuclear power in the US could pose and of the regulatory red tape (bolstered by political might) that communities face when they try to take on the industry.

<snip>

What We Can Learn from Vermont

Vermont's Public Service Board, a three-member panel, still has to decide whether to approve letting Vermont Yankee keep running. Though the court decision barred it from considering safety issues, it can still consider the economic effects on Vermont and the environmental issues surrounding decommissioning the plant and cleaning up the site, says Sarah Hoffman...

Read more at http://www.alternet.org/water/154260/is_the_era_of_nuclear_power_coming_to_an_end_in_the_us_?page=entire

[Vincardog]

1. The States have the right and power to regulate corporations that operate in their boundaries.

Isn't it it convienent the way States rights are only important when they impede the Federal Government from helping people?
They are however of no importance when they conflict with the Federal attempt to subjugate and imprison people (War on MM).

[PamW]

4. US Constitution Supremacy Clause

It's real simple if you read the US Constitution. Article VI Section 2 of the US Constitution is called the "Supremacy Clause". It states that when the Federal Government is given a power by the Constitution, and Congress uses that power; then States can not interfere. Legitimate Federal Laws preempt State and Local Laws. The term "States Rights" applies to powers that were NOT given to the Federal Government by the US Constitution, and therefore belong to the States as per Amendment X.

In the case of nuclear power, the Courts have held that this is clearly an area of Federal responsibility. Therefore, when Congress wrote the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and subsequent acts like the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 ( created NRC ); it was acting well within its Constitutional power, and no State can make a law that contravenes these Federal Laws.

The NRC is the SOLE authority for determining whether a nuclear power plant is safe and can continue to operate due to safety concerns. The State of Vermont attempted to usurp the legal power of the NRC. The NRC voted to extended Vermont Yankees license. A State can not usurp that decision based on safety concerns.

Judge Murtha prevented an illegal usurping of the US Government by Vermont. The State board is prohibited from considering safety and must make its decision upon the aspects it was chartered to regulate. The state board has to decide if Vermont Yankee is an economic benefit to Vermont. Given that Vermont Yankee sells power to other states ( it's a merchant plant ) it brings money into Vermont and is a clear economic benefit. The judge precluded the board from saying that safety concerns overwhelm that economic benefit, since safety concerns are the SOLELY regulated by NRC.

Although Vermont plans an appeal, they are just wasting money. The US Supreme Court, and its subordinate Appeals Courts, have held that the NRC is the regulatory agency for nuclear safety, and it's not up to Courts and legislatures to "second guess" the agency that Congress has charged with regulation of nuclear safety.

Vermont Yankee will begin operation on its extended license THIS MONTH.

PamW

[PamW]

5. Really????

The State has the power to regulate any corporation that operates within it?????

Let's defuse this by considering automobile companies. Automobile companies operate in LOTS of States. So who gets to decide the fuel mileage standards and safety standards of cars?

Chrysler operates an assembly plant in St Louis. So does Missouri set the safety standards for Chrysler cars?

Chrysler operates many assembly plants in Michigan. So perhaps it's Michigan that sets safety standards for cars since Chrysler operates there.

Can you not see how that could lead to a multitude of conflicting laws?

So the Federal Government sets safety standards. They also set fuel mileage standards. That way the industry has a clear regulator.

NO - it is not true that just because a company operates within a state, that that state can regulate the operations / products of the company.

PamW

[Vincardog]

11. So a car in NY or CA has to have the same safety and emission standards a one in GA?

[PamW]

12. YEP!!!

The car sold in NY or CA meets the exact same safety and emission standards as one in GA.

The saftety standards are mandated at the federal level; and they are the same for all states.

Now some states like California have lower emission standards ( they have to get federal permission for that ).

However, the car companies make all their cars to the same standards. I'm in California, but both my cars were originally sold in Michigan. My father is an engineer for Chrysler and he can purchase cars at the employee's discount. So he buys the cars for me; and we ship them to California. The cars have to go through California's SMOG-II testing; and they PASS with FLYING COLORS!!

The car companies charge California buyers a charge to certify that the car meets California emissions; but the California buyer doesn't get a cleaner car. The cars in all 50 states are just as clean as California cars.

PamW

[JDPriestly]

2. I think that Americans will have to see the devastation

of a nuclear accident on our soil before we will respond adequately to limit or end nuclear energy. We are just too addicted to lots and lots of energy.

[madokie]

3. I really think it is

three near misses has shown us that there is consequences and risk to the use of splitting atoms to boil water to make steam to drive turbines that drive generators that produce electricity that we really should move away from it as one of our primary power sources. Too dangerous when things do go wrong.
Could you imagine what could be if we had 1000 nuclear plants around the world rather than the 400 or so there is today. I don't even want to think about that many in the usa alone.
imho

[PamW]

6. TMI was hardly a "near miss"

three near misses has shown us that there is consequences and risk
===============

The only accident to happen in the USA was hardly a "near miss".

At Three Mile Island the containment system worked 100%. The only releases were intentional venting in order to allow personnel to access contaminated areas with lower exposure.

Although the reactor was destroyed, the public was protected and no harm came to the public.

When residents around TMI attempted to sue; they didn't even get to a jury trial.

Chief Judge Slyvia Rambo granted a summary judgment in favor of Metropolitan Edison and DISMISSED the case:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/tmi.html

the discrepancies between Defendants, proffer of evidence and that put forth by Plaintiffs in both volume and complexity are vast. The paucity of proof alleged in support of Plaintiffs, case is manifest. The court has searched the record for any and all evidence which construed in a light most favorable to Plaintiffs creates a genuine issue of material fact warranting submission of their claims to a jury. This effort has been in vain.

PamW

[modrepub]

7. What do you get with a more up to date N-power plant?

If a new plant is more efficient, uses (sterilizes) less water and produces less waste then we shouldn't allow a 40-year old plants continue to operate. If the industry wants new plants then the storage question absolutely has to be answered.

[PamW]

8. The storage problem is answered.

The USA could do what other nations that have nuclear power are doing; reprocess and recycle. Spent fuel is 96% U-238. That U-238 is no more radioactive than the day it was dug out of the ground. Therefore, if we separate it from the rest of the waste, then we could put it right back into the ground where we got it from - no harm, no foul. That reduces the amount of "waste" by a factor of 25.

The problem, of course, is the long-lived actinides like Plutonium. However, the actinides are burnable fuel for a reactor. What would you do with unburned wood when you cleaned out your fireplace? You'd put it right back into the fireplace to be burned on the next cycle. If you kept doing that, you would only have ashes to dispose of.

That's exactly what other nations do. Read how this works in the following interview for PBS's Frontline with nuclear physicist Dr. Charles Till, at the time, Associate Director of Argonne National Laboratory:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Q: And you repeat the process.

A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.

It's the actinides like Plutonium that have the muti-thousand year lifetimes that make nuclear waste so difficult to dispose of. However, if you burn the actinides like Plutonium as Dr. Till suggests (analogous to recycling unburned wood in your fireplace), then you don't have long-lived isotopes in your waste stream. You only have short-lived isotopes as Dr. Till details.

We only have to do what the scientists originally intended, as other countries do. You don't see France digging out a mountain in the Alps for its waste, do you? Their now shorter lived waste is stored at the La Hague facility until it is no longer dangerous.

PamW

[kristopher]

10. That's a pie in the sky opium dream...

G. Reprocessing and spent fuel stocks from existing U.S. reactors

As we have seen, statements that 90 or 95 percent of the material in spent fuel can be used are completely invalid without breeder reactors. In this section we will examine some of the implications of a policy that seeks to deal with existing spent fuel by trying to convert the mass of the material into fuel and using it for energy, assuming that breeder reactors will work and can be deployed on a large scale.

We start with a heuristic calculation. A 1,000-megawatt nuclear power reactor fissions about one metric ton of heavy metal per year in the course of energy generation. At present, there are over 60,000 metric tons of spent fuel in the United States. With reactor re-licensing, the total amount of spent fuel could amount to well over 100,000 metric tons by the time the reactors are retired; 95-plus percent of the content of this spent fuel is uranium or transuranic elements (mainly plutonium). We will use a round number of 100,000 metric tons92 of uranium and plutonium content in spent fuel that would be converted into fuel. This corresponds approximately to statements that 90 or 95 percent of existing spent fuel has “energy value” and hence should not be regarded as waste. For instance, such a scheme would appear to be the one that Dr. Miller had in mind and that NRC Commissioner Bill Magwood made explicit in his discussions of spent fuel management.93

Setting aside for the moment a variety of difficult issues, including those associated with the rate of conversion of uranium-238 into plutonium, it is easy to see that it would take 100,000 reactor years (assuming 1,000 megawatt reactors) to convert the heavy metal content of spent fuel from the existing fleet of U.S. power reactors into fission products in a manner that extracts essentially all the physically possible energy value in it.

Assume a reactor operating life of 50 years, accumulating 100,000 reactor years would mean building 2,000 reactors to extract the energy in the total spent fuel from the existing fleet of reactors. This is about 20 times the size of the existing U.S. nuclear power system. It is four times the total electricity generation of the United States and seven or eight times the baseload requirements under the present centralized electricity dispatch system. If the material is consumed in a smaller number of reactors, the time to consume it would be proportionally increased. For instance, it would take 200 years to consume the material in 500 reactors.

The matter gets more complex when the time required to breed plutonium out of uranium-238 is taken into account...

THE MYTHOLOGY AND MESSY REALITY OF NUCLEAR FUEL REPROCESSING, Page 37
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. April 8, 2010
On the Web at http://www.ieer.org/reports/reprocessing2010.pdf

[PamW]

13. Again you have to read..

That's a pie in the sky opium dream...
======================

It's not a "pie in the sky dream" Read the interview with Dr. Till. Argonne actually demonstrated the fuel cycle that Dr. Till speaks of.

Notice also the "weasel wording" of Arjun's paper. Arjun makes the point that it will take a long, long, time to consume that uranium.

Do you know what that means? It means that we will have a fuel, a needed energy source; for a long, long, time.

We could use nuclear power for hundreds of years. ( Arjun had just dispoved all those that say that we will run out of uranium in a few years)

Arjun couches that as a disadvantage; but I call it an advantage. I think it is an advantage to have a fuel source that will last hundreds of years.

PamW

[kristopher]

14. Of course you think of it as an advantage

You are wrong. Nuclear power has 4 primary problems - cost, safety, proliferation and waste.

As his paper makes clear reprocessing helps in some areas but makes things worse in other areas. Your claims are typical of the run-around favored by those promoting nuclear power. You can't solve all the problems in one design but you jump from one to another acting if they were all the same thing instead of separate choices each with its own set of trade offs.

THE MYTHOLOGY AND MESSY REALITY OF NUCLEAR FUEL REPROCESSING,
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. April 8, 2010
On the Web at http://www.ieer.org/reports/reprocessing2010.pdf

[PamW]

15. Sure..

You are wrong. Nuclear power has 4 primary problems - cost, safety, proliferation and waste.
=========================

Look at the Science, and numbers - cost - nuclear is about 2 cents per kwh hour which is comparable to coal.
Wind is 5 cents - over twice what nuclear is, and solar is about 20 cents per kwh. Nuclear is "dispatchable" available 24/7 while wind and solar are not.

In terms of safety; nuclear power is WAY safer than airline travel which we accept; and WAY, WAY, WAY safer than automobiles.
In the USA, nuclear has NEVER killed anyone, nor harmed anyone; - we have the TMI Court case to prove that.
Airliners have killed thousands over the past 50 years that we have had nuclear; and cars have killed over 2 million.

Proliferation is a red herring. Besides, why are you worried about the USA proliferating? The USA has nuclear weapons.
Whether or not the USA uses nuclear power isn't going to change the US nuclear weapons one way or the other.

We are discussing the waste. Reprocessing / recycling changes long-lived waste into short-lived waste that decays to harmless species in a reasonable amount of time.

Problems Solved!!!

PamW

[kristopher]

16. Nucler is 2 cents/kwh??? ROFLMAO

If you ignore all capital costs or eradicate them via bankruptcy I suppose it might be.

All in costs for new nuclear are on the order of 30 cents per kwh.

http://energyeconomyonline.com/Nuclear_Costs.html

Full paper here:
http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nuclear-costs-2009.pdf

[FBaggins]

18. So you think that capital costs for the new generation of plants will exceed $150 Billion per unit?

That's what your post adds up to.

[kristopher]

19. No, all in capital costs are likely to be about 22 cents/kwh

The total breakdown is
“MOST LIKELY” SCENARIO
Projected Total Generation Cost/kWh of New Nuclear Power
(In Nominal Dollars in Projected 2018 First Year of Full Operation)
COST COMPONENT $/KWH
CAPITAL COST ...... ....... ........ ........$0.22
OPERATION & MAINTENANCE W/O FUEL $0.01
PROPERTY TAXES . ...... ....... .......... ..$0.02
DECOMMISSIONING & WASTE COSTS .. $0.02
RESERVE FUEL CYCLE COSTS ........ .... $0.03
TOTAL DOLLARS/KWH..... ...... .......... $0.30

Severance pg 28

Discussion of capital costs in earlier in the paper and is summarized on page 18:
“All-In” Cost Estimate for New Nuclear Power Cost to Build (“Most Likely” Case)
As noted previously, an “Overnight” cost estimate is not intended to be an indication of total costs to build a nuclear plant. Since construction takes place over a long period, annual cost escalations and the Cost of Capital each become major components of the total capital costs:
“Overnight” Cost Estimate (in 2007 Dollars): $ 4,070/KW
Construction Cost Escalations $ 3,370/KW
Cost of Capital Used During Construction: $ 3,114/KW
Total Estimated “All In” Capital Costs: $10,553/KW

http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nuclear-costs-2009.pdf

[FBaggins]

20. So what does that work out to?

$0.22 * 24 hrs/day * 365 days/yr * 60 yrs * .9 capacity factor * 1,000 (kW-MW conversion) * 1,154 (Vogtle's per-unit capacity) = ???

So what's your prediction for the Vogtle per-unit capital cost? We should know in just a few years how close you come.

[PamW]

9. ACTUALLY...

If a new plant is more efficient, uses (sterilizes) less water and produces less waste then we shouldn't allow a 40-year old plants continue to operate.
======================================

Actually the reactor internals are completely replaceable and can be updated, and ARE; as new technology is available.

It's like engines for airliners. As more efficient engines become available, the airlines can drop the old engines off their airliners and replace with newer, more efficient turbofans. That's one of the reasons we see plenty of 40 year old airliners flying our skies.

You do the same with nuclear power plants. As new fuels and fuel technology become available, the reactor core itself is replaced with newer technology. So you can keep a 40 year old reactor running the same way an airline keeps a 40 year old airliner running with new technology.

Back in the '70s, our nuclear power plant fleet was burning fuel to a burnup of 45,000 Mw-Days/tonne. Today, the same plants burn to 55,000 to 60,000 Mw-D/tonne; which makes the spent fuel even more unusable as bomb fuel.

PamW

[FBaggins]

17. No.

Though it's awfully entertaining watching the flailing of those who wish it would.

I think the author may have spent too much time "researching" is prefered topic of conversation.

[Terry in Austin]

21. No. There will always be a nuclear plant somewhere in the US

Certainly, for as long as there is a US.

But "the era of nuclear power" will continue pretty much as it has all along -- as a "boutique" source of energy.

Even when you set aside all the issues of safety and fuel supply, the fact remains: nuclear costs too much and does too little.

Too many factors work against its becoming anything more. Nuclear just doesn't scale well, and certainly not well enough to remedy climate change and fossil-energy decline, as its proponents would have us believe.

[diane in sf]

22. Yes.