I was reading an article in the ASME “mechanical engineering” magazine called “Nuclear’s Model T”, which talked about building small nuclear power plants in a factory and shipping them to their operational sites. This issue was Vol.131/No.7 July 2009. The article was published a few years before the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.
First off, I will state flatly that I have nothing against nuclear power. However there are some points that the average person should understand before making any intelligent decision pro or con.
At this time, Feb 2013, nuclear power seems to be dying in the U.S.. The Japanese have shut down almost all of their 54 nuclear power plants and since they require the citizenry to give permission to restart the plants and there is so much bad sentiment after Fukushima, it looks like they may never restart them.
After Fukushima, the Germans have now decided to shut down all of their nuclear power plants in the next several years. They believe that renewable power should replace nuclear power.
There is a single nuclear power plant being built in the U.S. but it is the only one in decades that has gone through the planning and building stages. Others have been cancelled.
After Fukushima, it is unlikely that any IOU (investor owned utility) will build a new nuclear power plant. I think a number of factors will prevent it. One is that the investors will not want to invest the large sums of money needed to build one. And then there is getting an insurer to insure one. Most likely the insurance premiums will be exhorbitant.
I think the biggest obstacle will be the public. NIMBY or not in my back yard! No one will want to live near one and will not allow one to be built, especially after the Fukushima disaster (the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant is just one example).
The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, one unit has been shut down recently due to cracks in the pipes. This was just rebuilt and they seem to have been unable to get it right. Now how much faith in nuclear power do you have when the rebuilders can’t even rebuild the power plant?
It’s always nice to know that we have shot ourselves in the foot when it comes to nuclear power. There is plenty of solar, wind, tidal and geothermal energy out there waiting to be harvested, so why don’t we get with the program, like Germany has, and build a lot more solar photovoltaic plants? We can do it. We have the best locations for PVs in our southwestern deserts. Someday these nuclear power plants are going to have to be shut down, so why not be ready for the future? I think there is too much procrastination with renewable energy. More solar and wind power should be built, until there is enough to supply most of the power. In order to get the solar and wind power to be better prepared for variability in the sun and wind, we need to expand the national electrical transmission grid. Then some bad weather in one part of the country will not have such a bad effect.
Ok I am struggling with this post on nuclear power. The choice is presented as an either or binary decision. Let’s assume the US is the pre-eminent technological country in the world for the moment. I think the optimum solution for most countries, including the US, will be a mix of both technologies as fossil fuels run out or are increasingly deprecated. Therefore it is a duty on the US to develop safe and efficient civil nuclear power AND the business models to make it feasible to both build, run and decommission. This is, all the more so since we all live under threat of a US nuclear military arsenal of such awesome and apocalyptic power. This in no way detracts from a duty of the US to develop varied distributed renewable solutions using the stimulus of your great natural resources. The better your renewable solutions, the fewer nuclear power plants you will need. Of course you do not shoulder those burdens to find solutions alone, but you can’t shirk them either. We are all addicted to energy and growth in a way that the National Grid can’t solve in isolation. That’s my penny worth. Paul
PAUL. I agree with you on nuclear power. The NRC (Nuclear regulatory Commission) has to make sure a design meets all the requirements for safety, etc., before it approves the design. As for the development, I assume that the NRC doesn’t do development, only the commercial industry such as General Electric, Westinghouse and a few others do the development. Some of these companies are international, such as Toshiba and Hitachi. The business model in the U.S. is mostly IOUs, investor owned utilities such as Southern California Edison. Typically, building one is riddled with cost overruns, so as in the case of Shoreham, it ends up costing ten times as much. Running one means that the ratepayers have to shoulder the costs of construction over a period of decades. Decommision is a whole ‘nother story. I’m not sure what the military arsenal of the U.S., and all the other powerful countries for that matter, have to do with the nuclear power industry.
I’ve been reading about the wind power in the U.K., and they say it’s not up to the capacity that the industry claimed when it sold the public on wind power. They claimed something like 25 percent capacity, and it hasn’t made over 20 percent. So investors are not happy with the outcome.
I think one day the Icelanders will develop more geothermal power than they can use, and end up exporting hydrogen to the other countries, if they can only find a safe place to put plant; everywhere there seems to be an active volcano.
Disposing of spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. is a problem. There’s a disposal site in Nevada that remains unused. Every nuclear reactor has the spent fuel stored next to it on site. More fuel, more danger, just like at Fukushima. But the biggest danger is the unknown. Like Fukushima, the designers, builders and operators of nuclear power plants have to make a decision between prudent safety and costs, and there is always the case of the unknown Tsunami (well, in the case of Fukushima it was not unknown) that comes along and causes a major nuclear disaster. I think the only way to avoid another Chernobyl, TMI or Fukushima is to decommission all existing nuclear power plants and wait for the building of Generation 4 plants, which are inherently much safer. Or else wait another few decades for the development of nuclear fusion. In the meantime, keep on increasing the percentage of renewable energy. Convincing the public to go nuclear is much more difficult after Fukushima.
One other thing. The cost of nuclear fuel isn’t cheap. I read the Shoreham article on Wikipedia, and it mentioned the cost of the nuclear fuel as 45 million dollars US. Well, it lasts for more than a year, and I suppose that that is equivalent to a mountain of coal or the equivalent in oil or gas. But nuclear fuel gets used up, and the spent fuel has a lot of unused uranium, if the spent fuel could only be moved safely to a reprocessing plant and safely reprocessed. But that doesn’t seem to be happening in the U.S. The spent fuel is highly radioactive and dangerous, and needs to be specially handled. In every direction there seems to be opposition to dealing with the spent fuel. In my blog I mentioned the magazine article supporting mass produced reactors, and that may be a way to seal up the spent fuel and dispose of it for a few centuries. All in all, there are no easy and simple answers to the problems with nuclear power.