This option leaves you with a few ugly buildings in the middle of nowhere, but the cost unbeatable (even way less than decommissioning thousands of wind turbines).
Aren't you forgetting something? Buildings slowly deteriorate, even if not used. So now you have to maintain the disused reactor, for ... how long exactly?
(Amendment: wind, rain, sunlight, rodents, ... idiots with power tools ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident )
And here comes radioactive decays to the rescue! Half-life of Co60 is a little bit more than 5 years, for instance. The important thing to consider is that dangerous radioactive materials are also the ones with the shortest half-life (because the same number of atoms emits more radiation per second), so as long as you took out the fuel[1] you don't have anything really dangerous for too long. It could still be a problem when decommissioning (because you spill everything out in a short time and you have workers just nearby) but if you let the building just decay slowly, you don't have issues.
[1]: the fuel is a bit special, because it has long half-life but it's still dangerous for two reasons. 1) it's alpha emitters, the worst kind of radioactive substance. 2) the concentration is enormous.
Krypton-85 Beta/Gamma 10 years
Strontium-90 Beta 28 years
Iodine-131 Beta/Gamma 8 days
Cesium-137 Beta/Gamma 30 years
Carbon-14 Beta 5770 years
Zinc-65 Beta/Gamma 245 days
Cobalt-60 Beta/Gamma 5 years
Iron-59 Beta/Gamma 45 days
Tritium Beta 12 years
I'm also not sure where you got the idea that alpha emitters are the worst kind of radioactive substance; alpha radiation is easily shielded.
On the other hand, sure, just leaving the reactor there for 50 years may be part of a cost effective solution. https://www.dndkm.org/DOEKMDocuments/BestPractices/26-EFCOG%... (linked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning) claims a 71% reduction in decomissioning costs. However, this includes neither fuel waste disposal costs nor future costs for full dismantling at some point.
In fact, according to the weighting system that converts joules of energy absorbed (Grays) to severity of radiation dose (Seiverts), a joule of alpha radiation is 20 times worse than a joule of X-rays, beta radiation, or gamma rays.
And it's ingestion or inhalation that we're worried about from environmental contamination; not that the environment itself would become so radioactive, Fallout-style, that you'd take rads just from standing around - but that radioactive dust from demolition might get into the air, or that contaminants might leak into the groundwater.
Nor will they weaken the structure.
So as long as people don't enter the reactor without proper precautions, there's really no reason to worry about radiation inside it. And this problem can be solved pretty well with a fence and warning signs.
The buildings being designed as a bunker also helps. Just add a single guardian and his dog just to be sure nobody is actively trying to break through the concrete walls and you're good to go.
Ahah! I considered making an appendix especially for this one because I expected some people to make this mistake, so here we are. Notice that if you're French, the mistake isn't yours but it's the official physics course for French high-schoolers which is to blame.
First of all, alpha rays are helium nucleus, they are really heavy compared to electrons (beta rays) and thus, much more energetic (energy of an order of magnitude of a few MeV vs hundreds of keV), and gamma rays in the case of radioactivity are even lower (40 keV in case of iodine for instance).
If you stand in front of a radioactive source, the radiations comes from in front of you, you can really easily shield against alpha rays (because they are big!), but you can't really shield against gamma rays (because they are just photons), then gamma rays are the most dangerous in that specific context.
But most people aren't physicists or nuclear workers, and you don't usually end up being irradiated by a radio source (the incident you talked about earlier is a good counter example though). The major risk faced by a population is not direct irradiation, it's contamination: that means, you eat food or drink water which contains some radioactive element. And now you get the radioactive source right in your body (let say the thyroid, if we're talking about radioactive iodine). Here, there is no possible shielding, so the total energy is what matters. And regarding the different kinds of rays and their ability to pass through matter, gamma rays have some chance to exit your body without ionizing a single cell, beta have less chance, and alpha have zero chance to go out.
So yes, in terms of radio protection of populations, you fear alpha rays way more than others. And if you operated a plant you are actually allowed to release a little (and subject to regulations of course) amount of beta-emitters (tritium is released in low quantities quite often for instance) but you aren't allowed to release any single atom of alpha emitters.
Also, the list you quote contains fission products (from krypton to C14) as well as activation products. Under normal conditions (I mean, no critical accident like TMI, Chernobyl or Fukushima), most fission products stays in the fuel rod, and then they won't remain in the decommissioned plant.
Zn65 and Fe59 decay quickly, Tritium will be slowly released in the water nearby (yes, that's the normal procedure and it's happening during all the plant's life) and then you have Co60.
Do those isotopes also get absorbed, and if so, at what rate? Since I don't know the physic I don't know if all isotopes can get absorbed at the same rate, but my intuition is that the answer is no. I would also guess that nuclear plants get exposed to different amount of each type of isotope, so the above table would need to include both in order to compare the radiation risk after X years.
Fortunately, it's a fission product so it's only released when you melt your reactor or when your reactor is in fact a bomb… (Mandatory reference to the Silly Asses short story from Isaac Asimov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_Asses).
Fission products are directly created when splitting an uranium nucleus in half. They stay in the fuel rod unless it's damaged in a catastrophe. With a bomb you don't have rods, so everything is just released in the air.
Alpha decays are still problematic for any material that can by aspirated or ingested. Demolition means flying dust. A leaky building means groundwater contamination. A lot of these substances are also heavy metals, so even without the alpha decay problem they are highly toxic.
Can you keep a building full of alpha sources water tight for five or six half lives?
But it's very likely that 10% is irrelevant.
Radioactivity is not a all or nothing thing. It exists all around you right now.
Camping out at a old abandoned nuclear power plant 20 years after it's decommissioned probably gives you less radiation exposure then you would get from a flight from California to Hong Kong.
Also dispose the vitrified spent fuel in a repository after reprocessing it.
That's kinda missing the point, the fact is that France's nuclear fleet is heavily underfunded by at least 50 billion Euro [0].
These are exactly the kind of costs regularly externalized or completely omitted when calculating the profitability of nuclear vs renewables [1].
[0] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-nuclear/eu-short-of...
[1] https://energypost.eu/how-profitable-is-an-investment-in-nuc...
"This is the €25bn deep geological storage facility for France’s high and medium-level radioactive waste... [France] produces enough toxic radioactive waste every year to fill 120 double-decker buses (about 13,000 cubic metres worth, or 2kg a year for every French person)." [0]
[0] 2016: "Nuclear waste: keep out for 100,000 years" https://www.ft.com/content/db87c16c-4947-11e6-b387-64ab0a670...
Going from first principles, France has 133 GWe of nuclear capacity, and each Gw reactor produces 27t of unprocessed waste a year. France reprocesses used fuel, of which > 95% is un-burnt uranium - this goes back into reactors. Conservative estimate suggest that they produce <200t of waste a year. That's 3g per person! Of that, only 1/5 is real long-lived waste.
There is no industrial process that produces less waste. These volumes are easily manageable.
Check out diagram for what nuclear waste is made up of: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_VyTCyizqrHs/TCWrO7OFt4I/AAAAAAAAIF...
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-...
End of life PV panels are one of a million waste products that end up in landfills.
Ewaste is a problem for sure, but it doesn’t present the same complexity as nuclear waste products.
Almost all of the pro-nuclear arguments depend on an ideal state that never will and never did exist today. We have the reactors that we have because the military was in the midst of a massive buildup of atomic weapons during that timeframe.
As it stands, those plants are often not viable — my state directly subsidizes nuclear plants because the operational expenses and capital costs make the electricity produced more expensive than the open market will pay. And that’s after the taxpayer implicitly taking on the long term expenses associated with decommissioning and dealing with the plants for decades after retirement, at taxpayer expense.
It isn't complex because it is unsolvable. When large amount of solar panels reach their end of life we are guaranteed to get large quantities of carcinogens in landfill that eventually leaks into the water table. Many sets of landfill are guaranteed to be poorly managed, and even those that are well managed are not scrutinised to the same extent as a nuclear related activity and will be of lower quality.
With nuclear, if we successfully traverse a complicated path then there will be no carcinogens in the water supply in the next 100 years. If we do it wrong there will be small quantities of carcinogens in the water supply.
> Almost all of the pro-nuclear arguments depend on an ideal state that never will and never did exist today.
What we are doing with nuclear today is working better than what we were doing with solar today. There is less waste and the harm it does is less than the harm of solar waste.
Anti-nuclear arguments just don't seem grapple with these questions of scale. Carcinogens sourced from e-waste are at least as bad as carcinogens from radioactive materials. As far as I can tell, large quantities of lead are worse.
> my state directly subsidizes nuclear plants because the operational expenses and capital costs make the electricity produced more expensive than the open market will pay.
This didn't stop Germanny bringing in solar. I've heard a rumour that German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nuclear, last half as long.
Anyway, uranium extraction and refining creates its share of byproducts too.
Per TWh of generated electricity you end up with an order of magnitude more deaths from solar power. It’s always a balance.
If a 7 gram uranium fuel pellet releases as much thermal energy over its lifetime as a tonne of coal [4], that's 8141 kWh. Assuming a thermal efficiency of 33% for conversion to electricity [5], that's 2687 kWh of electricity from one 7 gram fuel pellet.
A breeder reactor could extract many times as much energy from one fuel pellet's worth of uranium, but the world currently operates hundreds of power reactors and only one breeder power reactor, the Russian BN-800.
[1] Table 1 in https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Timothy_Gessert/publica...
[2] http://www.firstsolar.com/-/media/First-Solar/Technical-Docu...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
[4] https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/nuclear-fission-can-help-...
[5] http://holbert.faculty.asu.edu/eee463/NuclearPowerPlants.pdf
AFAIK photovoltaic cells with the electricity producing junction made of pure silicon do not exist. Don't know how much of non-silicon is there, but arsenic from GaAs cells is not something you want in your soil either.
As for WEEE, I hope most of the cells are returned and recycled or somehow properly disposed of, but not all will be collected, and there will be breakage, maybe even leakage of acid-rain digested cells. Also, even now, the collected e-waste is not really processed in a environmentally friendly way.
GaAs cells are far too expensive for terrestrial use.
If they were held to the same safety standards as nuclear waste it would require containment; the risk of harm is greater (especially after accounting for volume). PV waste isn't held to that silly standard because then it would be impossible to produce solar panels.
If nuclear waste were contained using the same standard of acceptable harm as solar panels the cost would be a rounding error.
"In an effort to reduce costs, the Energy Department developed a plan to ship nearly 75 percent of the fissile materials in Building 3019, as is, to a landfill at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site by the end of 2014. Because such disposal would violate the agency’s formal safeguards and radioactive waste disposal requirements, the Energy Department changed those rules, which it can do without public notification or comment. Never before has the agency or its predecessors taken steps to deliberately dump a large amount of highly concentrated fissile material in a landfill, an action that violates international standards and norms."
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
Anti-nuclear activists are right when they say that nuclear energy is politically impossible but only because they're the ones making it politically impossible.
Rust and corrosion will attack the strongest container – all they need are the right conditions and enough time to work. Not only that, but metals behave differently (and chemical reactions proceed more quickly) at higher temperatures – such as those produced by the decay of fission products. So the thermal effects also have to be factored in when designing the things.
So here’s the bad news about long-term disposal of spent reactor fuel – and the containers meant to hold it. Nobody knows how a container is going to hold up over even 100,000 years, let alone a million years (the time span required by EPA).
This.
The sad thing is that the article is probably right about nuclear being preferrable over fossil fuels due to relative priorities of global warming vs. nuclear accidents and garbage disposal.
But this cost comparison against renewables is just comically miscalculated.
UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-...
£161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u...
£234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision...
Long-term waste management is another ticking bomb.
Moreover if there is a serious glitch (Chernobyl, Fukushima...), are bets are off. You can obtain an insurance policy for anything, AFAIK even for a space trip, but no insurance company covers such nuke risk.
Those cases don't prove that trains and plains are uneconomical.
Rail, tube and tram lines will still be there and graded 100 years later - after track replacements, roads are not dissimilar, reservoirs and storage caverns far longer with a turbine replacement or two. Nuclear on the other hand has a much more limited life in which to absorb those overruns.
They are still within their financial budget for this project, will maybe overshoot it by a bit in the end. But that's OK, since such a dismantling had no precedence whatsoever, and it was just an estimate and everybody knew that. They will exceed their time budget by a lot, which is also OK, since again such a dismantling had no precedence whatsoever, it doesn't really matter if this thing takes a decade longer to dismantle, and the reason they take longer than initially estimated is that they had to overcome a ton of problems nobody could have known about before and went about their work carefully and systematically. There were a lot of lessons learned from this, which should help with being faster when dismantling other nuclear plants, but and a bit cheaper (maybe at 2/3rds the cost in the future).
With BER on the other hand the date of completion did matter, both politically and economically, and the exploding time and financial budgets were a result of gross incompetence in particular from the politicians that personally kept meddling in the project (it was "prestige" project), complete failure in contractor oversight (which resulted in a ton of defects and also some corruption and embezzlement) and a completely useless project leadership (of mostly political appointments, aside from the politicians themselves, that e.g. resulted in them building that thing without working fire safety).
So the fact that they are simply simpler projects which rarely (never?) have massive overruns due to "bad project management" is a huge financial point in their favor that is rarely factored in.
Tally: Germany 1, France 28
There are many causes, one being that during hot seasons many French atomic plants cannot run at full speed (thermal pollution).
About $650 million budget.
In 2016, They say it is on schedule and under budget. https://www.energysolutions.com/zion-nuclear-power-plant-dec...
They are doing less sorting. They just get a bigger cave and put the entire facility into it. There is room in the large cave for all US nuclear plants.
But it's not just our cost estimate that improves. Gen III reactors were designed with more data on how Gen I reactors were decommissioned than was available when Gen II reactors were being designed, and so on.
Finding a new decommissioning snag affects how you design the next reactor you build, but it doesn't really affect its predicted decommissioning cost because by that point you're aware of the issue and take steps to prevent it from occurring for the generation now being constructed.
"French power utility EDF estimates it would cost at least 46 billion euros ($51 billion) to build six of its latest generation EPR nuclear reactors if the government decides to build them"
"the Flamanville EPR reactor under construction in northern France has been plagued by cost overruns and a series of technical problems resulting in years of delays. EDF, in which the state has an 84% stake, said in October the project which began in 2006 would cost 1.5 billion euros more than previously expected, raising the total cost to 12.4 billion euros."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-e...
And because that was expensive, there isn't enough money for decommissioning left, which needs equally massive subsidies [1].
[0] https://www.france24.com/en/20170710-france-hulot-could-clos...
[1] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-nuclear/eu-short-of...
The UK's National Audit Office puts the price of one EDF reactor around that once you include the excess price paid on every MWh over the 50 year projected life, and the decommissioning (which is supposedly built into that MWh price). It remains to be seen if it will be correct. From Wikipedia:
The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion, which "will continue to vary as the outlook for wholesale market prices shifts"
That's $64bn on top of £20bn ($25bn) latest build estimate. A build with such poor worker conditions that it has gained a reputation for suicides.
$89bn would build a ton of pumped storage to underpin offshore wind at a quarter the MWh price.
All of it is down to the creative accounting of the conservative government to demonstrate that they eliminated the deficit.
Instead of financing the construction directly and purchasing the plant as "turn-key" asset, they forced EDF to take a multi-decade loan and agreed a price of electricity decades in the future that would enable EDF to pay back that loan. This doubled or triples the cost.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35741772
What's 'a ton' of pumped storage? Thats doesn't mean much. Can it can back up at least 16GWh, the equivalent of a single nuclear reactor's output over night. I have never heard of a project of this magnitude that wasn't just on the drawing board.
Considering Dinorwig cost £425m in the 1980s to get around 10GWh, even allowing for inflation and construction costs rising much in excess, there should be easily enough for multiple times 16GWh from $89bn even with major overruns. Hence "a ton". Probably enough to derive most generation from wind with more than adequate storage underlying it.
Clearly that needs suitable geography for several sites, but considering there were two backup sites within 10mi of Dinorwig should the main site prove unsuitable, and given the geography of the UK those should not be lacking. I know where I would spend my money given the outlook for renewable costs - absolutely not on nuclear. I was once quite keen in my naive twenties.
It doesn't always have to be a populated valley that gets dammed. There's a decent selection of disused quarries, maybe some of the Highland lochs that have potential to create something like Dinorwig at minimal disruption to environment once complete. What I don't know is how those constructions compare in today's money to alternatives. Still, £70bn brings an awful lot of choices, especially when lifespan is indefinite, just periodic turbine replacements.
If the geography isn't available there's the Netherlands project that's pumped storage on entirely flat land. Involves building an artificial lake, with a cavern and turbines below it. Suitable rock for the cavern is quite a long way down, which adds to the cost, but also adds to the head so it should end up with significant capacity. As far as I know it is the first such scheme, so costs are projection only at this stage, but it looks pretty interesting if it turns out to be viable economically: https://o-pac.nl
Or the UK company that has a plan involving winching weights (thousands of tonnes) up and down disused mine shafts. The open question of course is how many of the world's thousands of disused mine shafts are going to be viable. If viable the advantage seems to be very low surface profile.
Also, I am no expert on the subject, but digging out underground reservoir sounds expensive.
With devolved government now in Wales and Scotland and new Pumped storage will face more push back
In the case of Scotland it's been the Scottish government looking at using lochs. No idea what the case is in Wales.
Everyone know that the provisioned costs don't make sense. It was pointed by the national court of auditors in 2012 and 2014 [1] and again in a report from the national assembly in 2017 [2]. We are not even taking about puny mistakes. Even the actualisation ratio used is garbage.
[1] https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/201405...
[2] http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/documents/notice/14/rap-i...