[... continued]

Dr. Kadak and his colleagues argue for an increased role for nuclear power, but gloss over problems that can and must be addressed to make the industry adequately safe and secure. Proponents of increasing nuclear power should be pushing the industry to meet higher safety and security standards, and for the NRC to require the plants to meet the regulations it is supposed to enforce.


About the author: David Wright is a physicist and the co-director of the Global Security Program. He is a nationally known expert on the technical aspects of missile defense systems, missile proliferation, and space weapons. See David's full bio.

BatteriesNotIncluded wrote on Feb 3^rd, 2014 at 3:22pm:
I fear you're probably right. The Conservative mindset simply cannot act until forced. By the time they feel forced, it will be far too late. Nuclear is the obvious option, but it comes with its own set of (arguably worse) problems. We will build in haste. We will build poorly.

To quote from the foreword of the book We Almost Lost Detroit:
Quote:
Building in haste practically ensures errors.

It depends upon what you put in the nose of the missile.

The energy released is nuclear. Albeit an uncontrolled release.

The United States or United Kingdom wouldn't be able to get anywhere near their climate emissions targets without the low emission nuclear power plants.

Nuclear is a safe, sustained step forward.

I grew up not far from Oldbury, Berkeley and Hinkley Point.
Perfectly safe.

[... continued]

So why bother? There is already a better alternative to fossil fuels: the efficient use of renewable energy.

* This article is an edited extract from Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change, published in Australia and New Zealand by UNSW Press in December 2013 and due to be published overseas by Earthscan in April 2014. References are included in the book.

--> http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1202098727/0

Oh, lookie, I even have a sock("PlayersPlay") making an entrance at the end there... gawd, was I really getting the raw end of the prawn back then toooooooooo?!?!?

  lol at the Memories., lol 

Here --> http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1200023554 you can witness some of the same old characters wasting everyones time,... including those of the children we all know they can't stop impulsively loving to hate!

i.e. witness the long road of psychopathy still hanging around societies/the childrens childrens childrens neck today !!

[... continued]

Flamanville looks like becoming the cost benchmark for EPRs, or at least for any early EPRs. This is confirmed by EdF’s 2013 contract to build two 1,600 Mw EPR reactors at Hinkley Point in the UK, for £7bn each (at 2012 prices).[2] Again, these EPRs will be the first of their kind in the UK, indeed the first reactors of any kind to be built in the UK for a quarter of a century. The cost is very high considering what the UK government has agreed to in order to give EdF financial certainty. While EdF and its partners will take the construction risk of sticking to budget and schedule, the UK Treasury is to underwrite the debt they incur for the project of up to 65 per cent of total costs prior to operation. Moreover, EdF will get a guaranteed price of £92.5 per Mwh, almost double the UK wholesale price, under a 35-year contract that will begin from the date of commissioning, expected to be 2023. An important caveat is that this UK state aid requires approval from the European Commission if the deal is to go ahead.

Such overt state aid is apparently what is needed for new nuclear build in a market such as the UK that is considerably more liberalised than the French market. As EdF becomes more exposed to competition, however, at least from foreign if not domestic competition, the UK contract may be an indication of the future extra state support that the French utility will need to build more reactors in France.

Cost inflation in new nuclear build is not confined to France or to French-built reactors, but has been evident for some decades in other industrialised countries such as the US and Germany. According to a UK study,[3] as early as the 1960s construction costs began to increase as regulators ordered design changes which added cost and prolonged construction times. These lengthened further as the result of new safety measures. On average, US nuclear plants took 5 years to build before the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, and 12 years after it.

The degree to which France was part of this cost inflation was surprising. Indeed as François Lévêque, an expert on nuclear economics at the École des Mines, has pointed out, there was every reason to expect French reactor construction costs to fall: ‘The French nuclear programme offered the best possible conditions for powerful learning effects. The power stations were built by a single operator, EdF, which was able to appropriate all the experience accumulated with each new project. The plants were built in a steady stream over a short period of time. In the space of just 13 years, from late 1971 to the end of 1984, work started on construction of the first 55 reactors.’[4]

Yet, as Lévêque points out, there were other factors. France made step changes in capacity – from 900 Mw to 1,300 Mw to 1,450 Mw – which did involve changes in technology. It went to some expense to ‘frenchify’ the basic American design of Westinghouse, and further expense to source components and machinery in France. The move to larger units means fewer units, and therefore shorter production runs in order to ‘learn by doing’. The first reactors of the third generation – the EPRs – were probably bound to have teething problems.

France’s nuclear bill has recently been calculated by the government auditor, the Cour des Comptes.[5] The construction cost of reactors between 1969 and 2004 was, at 2010 prices, €72.9 bn or €83.2 bn with engineering and labour costs added in. Costs have continued to rise, per unit of capacity. While the construction cost per Mw installed was €1.37m (including engineering costs) for Civaux commissioned as late as 2002, the comparable cost for Flamanville will be above €4m per Mw. Another historic cost has been the €55bn (at 2010 prices) spent on research between 1967 and 2010.

EdF has estimated the cost of keeping the existing fleet going for the period of 2011 to 2025 at €55bn. This includes the cost of upgrading safety after Fukushima, as well as that of replacing large components such as steam generators, upgrading fire safety equipment, enlarging fuel storage pools and measures to deal with any recurrence of the extreme heat conditions experienced in the 2003 heatwave, such as the replacement of chiller units. This adds up to €3.6bn in annual maintenance costs, more than double the average annual cost of €1.5bn in the 2008–2010 period which was itself considerably higher than in the early 2000s.

End-of-life cost estimates have also risen. By the end of 2012 EdF had set aside €20.9bn for decommissioning in a fund that is paid for out of current electricity sales. In common with virtually every country except Finland, France has not yet embarked on burying its residual nuclear waste. But the cost of deep geological storage in France was estimated by ANDRA, the agency responsible for dealing with such waste, at €20bn in 2005, and at €35bn in 2010.

[continued ...]

[... continued]

An extensive study by the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that today’s nuclear power plants will suffer less than gas or coal plants by integrating them with renewables.[7] This is because existing nuclear plants, especially those which have fully amortised their capital costs, will find it easier to cover their relatively low variable costs (chiefly fuel) despite lower revenue from electricity sales.

However, justifying the huge initial outlay of capital involved in the building of new reactors is a very different matter. As the study points out, ‘in the long run, high-fixed cost technologies will be affected disproportionately  by the increased difficulties in financing further investments in volatile low-price environments’.

France is Europe’s top electricity exporter, with net exports of 44 Twh of power in 2012 or 15 per cent of its national consumption. It runs a steady electricity trade surplus with all its neighbours, except for Germany which in 2012 was the source of half of France’s total imports of electricity. But France has a problem, born out of its success in electrifying its heating system more than any other country in Europe except for Norway. The result is that one degree drop in temperature creates an extra 2.3 Gw load on the French system. This sensitivity to temperature change is such that France accounts for nearly half of the entire temperature sensitivity of power demand in the whole of the EU, amounting to 5 Gw extra load across the EU for every one degree drop in temperature.

The normal load in France is around 80 Gw, but the record was 102 Gw in the very cold spell of February 2012. For about 10 days in that month, France had to draw on imports from virtually all its neighbours – the UK, Belgium and Spain, as well as Germany. ‘These peaks seem to keep increasing’, according to Yannick Jacquemart of the Réseau de Transport Electrique (RTE), the French grid operator.[8] Annual peaks in load have increased by 33 per cent over the decade up to 2012, while total consumption has only risen by 15 per cent. After 2015, EU legislation will force the closure of heavy fuel and coal plants, and as a result, in 2016–17, the reserve margins of supply over demand will be very low. Furthermore, any further electrification of the economy, in heating or transport, will tend to augment peak demand.

For the moment, France is relying on a combination of imports, expensive combustion turbines and demand-side measures to cover the peaks during cold winter evenings for an average of about 200 hours a year. In 2014, however, it plans to set up a capacity market, operating on both the supply and demand side, which would take effect in 2016. The essence of the system is to place the responsibility on each and every supplier to balance supply and demand. It is, therefore, according to Fabien Roques of Compass Lexecon, a specialist on capacity markets,[9] ‘a decentralised approach which puts the cost of balancing precisely on those causing imbalances’.

He contrasts this with the UK plan for a more centralised capacity market which ‘will tend to socialise the cost of security across all market participants’. He concedes that ‘the decentralised approach may provide the authorities with less overall visibility of the capacity market, but making each supplier responsible for balancing is more compatible with current trading arrangements’. This French capacity plan has been welcomed by the country’s trading partners, Germany in particular, and by the European Commission.

Prices, competitiveness and efficiency

Any premature closure of reactors or refusal to prolong their life cycle to 50–60 years would almost certainly lead to an increase in electricity prices, much to the concern of French industry. Thanks to nuclear power, France has relatively low electricity prices. These have made it hard for competitors to enter the French market, and they have also acted as a brake on further improvements to energy efficiency. By virtue of owning all nuclear reactors in France, EdF has been able to dominate the French electricity market long after EU liberalisation policies swept aside its legal monopoly.

The true cost of French nuclear power is not easy to calculate, because it depends on assumptions about discount rates and about the amortisation schedule of the capital costs of the country’s 58 reactors. But EU action has shed some light on nuclear power costs. As a result of pressure from the European Commission to enable some competition in the French market, France passed a law in 2010 establishing the ARENH system. This requires EdF to sell 100 Twh of electricity, or around a quarter of its nuclear output, each year to rival suppliers at a price reflecting the historic investment and current operating cost of its 58 reactors, plus a ‘normal margin’. The price of this ARENH power is currently Euros 42 per Mwh, which for example is below the average spot price in France of Euros 47 per Mwh in 2012. (If the ARENH price were to also reflect the costs of a future generation of reactors, which it is not allowed to do, it would be considerably higher).

[continued ...]

This is what I've been saying all along, but in Australia it's just not going to happen.

BatteriesNotIncluded wrote on Feb 3^rd, 2014 at 3:22pm:


Probably quite right.

Quote:


You're talking about intergenerational equity. You don't hear much about ecologically sustainable development these days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecologically_sustainable_development
Quote:

lee wrote on Feb 11^th, 2014 at 8:45pm:

And fossil fuel companies CAN compete without any subsidies, but they get them anyways.

The significance of which is .... ?