Kenya Identifies Site For It's First Nuclear Power Plant.

[NNadir]

The government of Kenya has identified construction sites for a nuclear power plant, potentially the first in Africa outside South Africa.

A senior engineer for the Kenyan government, Rolex Kirui, recently said one site has been identified near the coastal region and construction will begin as soon as an ongoing environmental study is completed.

Kirui added that a second potential site has been identified in western Kenya, next to Lake Victoria.

Plans for the nuclear plant’s construction were first announced by Kenya’s energy minister, Kiraitu Murungi, in October last year.

Murungi recently told SciDev.Net that there is a shortage of 3,000 megawatts of electricity for the country. Kenya produces only 1,100 megawatts of electricity annually and is ranked 22nd in Africa.

“With nuclear energy there is potential to generate four times that amount or even more,” he said...

South Africa is the only county in Africa to have a fully operational nuclear power plant. Nigeria and Egypt are in the process of planning their own plants. Kenya is, however, the first to both identify a site and undergo an environmental study.

http://www.constructionkenya.com/archives/kenya-identifies-sites-for-nuclear-power-plant

[joshcryer]

1. $1 billion?

Hard to believe.

[NNadir]

2. Actually, in third world countries, many reactors are built cheaply. India has built reactors...

under budget and ahead of schedule.

Off the top of my head, I recall that Tarapur 3 & 4 and Kaiga 3 all qualified on this score.

These are, of course, relatively small reactors by Western standards.

Nevertheless, India's nuclear energy program is world class, and I admire it a lot. Some of the most exciting papers I read on nuclear chemistry - particularly thorium but also plutonium - come out of India. Their HWR program should be the envy of the world.

What it accomplishes is better than any thing that might have been obtained through charity and concern for "those poor Indians."

In 20 years, between 1960 and 1980, the United States built more than 100 reactors, most of them still operate, and those that have been shut have been in most cases been shut by public stupidity.

The anti-nuke position is that what has already happened is impossible.

Anti-nukes are like arsonists who love to complain about fires. An additional cost in every nuclear enterprise is the cost of fighting stupidity, and it is real. The destruction of the infrastructure that built those 100 plants will now require that all new nuclear plants have a FOAKE (First of a Kind Engineering) cost that could have been avoided in a more rational world.

Basically most nuclear reactor companies buy local materials and use local labor. This is, of course, a good thing, since it provides jobs, intellectually rewarding skilled jobs.

It is good for the Kenyan nation to have these kind of jobs and this kind of infrastructure.

Mostly we are oblivious about the third world, offering a mixture of condescension and pity. However the best way to save Africa will be to fight its poverty by provided safe, efficient, indigenously built infrastructure, as much as it may erode the Western Rock Festival Industry.

[joshcryer]

3. Well if they can build it for that much, safely, good for them.

I back all CO2 free energy sources.

[kristopher]

4. Riiiiight...

Cooper bandwagon


Cooper collected comparisons


Cooper cost graph

[NNadir]

6. Did you have a point? If so, um, well never mind. Wait...this should be fun...

Um, did you mean something by this? I've seen lemons do more analysis, and I don't think oflemons as particularly bright.

They are brighter, however, than the average anti-nuke.

I'm sure that the President of Kenya is laying in bed all night to see if some ligthtweight blogger has cut and pasted some incoherent junk from the anti-nuke circle jerk of a group in which each participant is even dumber than the one he or she "cites."

Um, by the way, the electricity price observed in France that is observed right now is less than half the electricity price in Denmark, as I never tire of pointing out.

http://www.energy.eu/#gas-electricity

Thus pasting a picture that claims otherwise is like posting a picture of the Virgin Mary to "prove" that Pope Urban was right and Galileo was wrong.

The price of both forms of energy are not a "theory." On the contrary they are observable, sort of like the moons of Jupiter.

Have a nice faith based Pope Urbanist evening.

[phusion]

9. What about waste?

I applaud your perspective and information on nuclear energy...But, this is an honest question, what happens to the waste when these nuclear materials are spent? Is there an answer for that now?

[Statistical]

10. What is the half life of coal fly ash?

Answer: infinite.

The amount of waste produced from nuclear power plants is very small compared to the massive amount of energy they produce. There is lots of toxic stuff on the planet. Lead, mercury, arsenic, etc. We must carefully storage waste and spent fuel is no different.

If you received 100% of your electricity for your entire life from nuclear power the amount of spent fuel would be about the size of a coke can.

Reprocessing can substantially reduce the amount of spent fuel. Spent fuel can be used to fuel a whole new generation of reactor for the next generation. There is a tremendous amount of potential energy in spent fuel it simply can't be used in existing powerplants. Calling it waste is kinda silly.

[Statistical]

5. Cheap labor.

Reactors are very labor intensive.

In the US it takes about 3000 construction workers working 5 years to produce a reactor. That is hourly 30 million manhours. That is just the onsite "assembly" of the reactor. Parts fabrication adds even more labor. Also "semi-raw" materials like copper piping, steel banding, concrete components, and rebarb add even more offsite labor.

Also it likely isn't a GenIII reactor.
Smaller output, less efficient (lower burnup), simpler design.

China National Nuclear Corporation is building 4 AP1000 (1150MW GenIII+) for $8 billion that works out to $2 billion a piece so half that in a country with cheap labor and (likely) a older, smaller, less efficient design is possible.

[kristopher]

7. That might be the perspective of the nuclear salesforce but...

"...Even if Finland and France each builds a reactor or two, China goes for an additional 20 plants and Japan, Korea or Eastern Europe add a few units, the overall worldwide trend will most likely be downwards over the next two decades. With extremely long lead times of 10 years and more, it will be practically impossible to maintain, let alone increase the number of operating nuclear power plants over the next 20 years. The one exception to this outcome would be if operating lifetimes could be substantially increased beyond 40 years on average; there is currently no basis for such an assumption.

For practically all of the potential nuclear newcomers, it remains unlikely that fission power programs can be implemented any time soon within the required technical, political, economic framework. None of the potential new nuclear countries has proper nuclear regulations, an independent regulator, domestic maintenance capacity, and the skilled workforce in place to run a nuclear plant. It might take at least 15 years to build up the necessary regulatory framework in countries that are starting from scratch.

Furthermore, few countries have sufficient grid capacity to absorb the output of a large nuclear plant, an often-overlooked constraint. This means that the economic challenge to financing a nuclear plant would be exacerbated by the very large ancillary investments required in the distribution network.

Countries with a grid size and quality that could apparently cope with a large nuclear plant in the short and medium term encounter an array of other significant barriers. These include a hostile or passive government (Australia, Norway, Malaysia, Thailand); generally hostile public opinion (Italy, Turkey); international non-proliferation concerns (Egypt, Israel); major economic concerns (Poland); a hostile environment due to earthquake and volcanic risks (Indonesia); and a lack of all necessary infrastructure (Venezuela). Many countries face several of these barriers at the same time. p.6

Lack of a trained workforce and massive loss of competence are probably the most difficult challenges for proponents of nuclear expansion to overcome. Even France, the country with perhaps the strongest base of civilian nuclear competence, is threatened by a severe shortage of skilled workers. Demographics are a big cause: a large number of "baby-boomers" are approaching retirement — about 40% of the nuclear staff of the world’s largest nuclear utility EDF by 2015. Currently, a maximum of 300 nuclear graduates are available for some 1,200 to 1,500 open positions. An additional difficulty stems from the fact that the number of nuclear graduates does not correspond at all to the availability of new recruits for the nuclear industry. In the USA for example only about one quarter of the 2008 nuclear graduates planned to actually work in the industry or a nuclear utility. Many prefer either to continue their studies or to join the military or other government and business sectors.



The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2009 With Particular Emphasis on Economic Issues
By
Mycle Schneider
Independent Consultant, Mycle Schneider Consulting, Paris (France)
Project Coordinator
Steve Thomas
Professor for Energy Policy, Greenwich University (UK)
Antony Froggatt
Independent Consultant, London (UK)
Doug Koplow
Director of Earth Track, Cambridge (USA)

Paris, August 2009

Commissioned by
German Federal Ministry of Environment, Nature Conservation and Reactor Safety

http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/nuclear-power-an-obstacle-to.pdf

[Statistical]

8. One that is utter shit and two WTF does it have to do with what I wrote?

I was simply pointing out that cost of a reactor is heavily dependent on local cost of labor.