The costs the US government are incurring are due to the choice of Yucca Mountain as the permanent waste repository. The poor methodology and record keeping used for data regarding the suitability of Yucca Mountain has just fed the legal challenges to the facility. Yucca Mountain is almost certainly safe for the purposes intended, but the poor management of the program means that the data to establish that cannot be easily produced.

The recent move to have Sandia National Laboratory take over the scientific effort related to Yucca Mountain and the move to probabilistic risk assessment will probably end the uncertainty about Yucca Mountain, but will feed legal challenges for another 5 to 10 years. Costs for interim storage of the spent nuclear fuel will probably rise to somewhere between the $11 and $35 billion numbers listed.

Prior to that happening there may well be a move to reprocess much of the spent nuclear fuel. The spent fuel represents a huge store of reactor fuel that we really don't want to bury in permanent storage. The actinides removed in reprocessing will need to be permanently disposed of, but that doesn't need to go to Yucca Mountain. A facility in a stable salt bed like the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant would be more appropriate.

Seems like nuclear power has otlived itself. It is not even competetive with wind turbine power. So...whats the point with it?

"So...whats the point with it?"

It provides dependable baseline power, something that wind and solar can't at present. It will be decades before wind and solar can make up a significant percentage of power production. There is no feasible method of storing the power produced by wind & solar. Until we can develop those resources and technologies we've got to have nuclear. Unless we want more coal fired power plants.

==There is no feasible method of storing the power produced by wind & solar.==

Says who?

http://greyfalcon.net/solarthermal
http://www.energybulletin.net/11252.html

otherdoug: "There is no feasible method of storing the power produced by wind & solar ..."

Not anymore ...
http://www.beaconpower.com/products/EnergyStorageSystems/index.htm

These systems have multiple applications, from renewables(storage of intermitent solar and wind power), to peak shaving, to maximizing use of existing non-peak baseload. Using this technology NO new power plants need to be built, all the while slowly phasing out coal as the [slow] process of adding renewable capacity continues to accelerate.

I agree that keeping existing nucs and reprocessing fuel is probably a "necessary evil" for at least the next 20 years or so.

Greenovator, I'm familiar with Beacon Power's system. It's good and would be very helpful for power quality issues and for short term storage. It's expensive, though, and I don't think it's demonstrated the ability to store large amounts of power for the lengths we'd need in order to eliminate baseline nuclear or coal.

This is one of the potential storage solutions that could help us make renewables work for baseline, but there are others that are probably more practical. Pumped reservoir hydroelectric and compressed air with turbines would be a couple other ideas that could be widely implemented. Both these methods have been demonstrated and are economically feasible. They're still centralized large scale solutions that are very dependent on favorable geography.

Who really cares about the cost of nuclear power? Do we want to eliminate carbon emissions from coal plants or not? Do we think there isn't a similar (or greater) cost to pumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere?

Priorities, people!

p.s. Those flywheels are cool and we definitely need them attached to every commercial plant we operate (especially renewables). But they're good for cleaning up instantaneous spikes and drops in power, not for long-term energy storage.

wind is not competitive with nuclear. wind has twice the startup and operating costs of nuclear, as well as a capacity factor that is one third that of nuclear. all this adds up to wind being significantly more expensive than nuclear.

@ Doug

At least 20% of the electricity can be provided by wind energy alone, without the need for extra back-up or storage.

Planning and building nuclear reactors also takes decades. Since uranium is a finite resource, it is at best an intermediate solution. I would say: skip this step and go to the good stuff right away.

Pumped reservoir hydroelectric systems are notoriously inefficient, and power companies that do so do it as a "least bad option" where the other option is run turbines and do nothing with the excess power produced.

There is a reason all off grid solar applications use batteries, and not a pumped reservoir system.

Food for thought, an off grid house can have enough battery capacity for non sunny/windy days, why can't the large scale grid system have a large battery system for each set of houses? (i.e., every 100 houses has a battery bank)

The molten salt thermal storage is cool, but can only be utilized in areas where solar thermal makes sense; we won't be seeing it here in Ontario or upstate New York.

Compressed air storage is a really good idea that I don't think has gotten enough play, but the economics of it might be the factor that is limiting its application, same as with the flywheel storage systems.

All the storage systems are currently not feasible economically, even if they're possible and sensible. This is mainly due to the use of coal as our primary baseline power source. If you tacked on a decent carbon tax, or did a cap and trade system coal might not be as competitive. If you started seriously internalizing a lot of the other costs of coal (radionuclide and heavy metal contamination, environmental devastation from open pit mining, etc.) then most of the storage options above would make a lot more economic sense. But they'd still be a lot more expensive than nuclear.

Pieter: Wind can make up a large portion of the power supply, but it is still intermittent and can't be made to match the demand curve. Power storage would still be required to turn it into a realistic baseline source.

Yes, uranium is a finite source, but you could reprocess the uranium to extend its life. You could use fast breeder reactors and make mixed oxide fuel to keep the fuel from being used in weapons development. You could use thorium, which is much more plentiful than uranium, in slow breeder reactors that would allow you centuries of power. There are many options available, so I don't think uranium scarcity is really an issue.

France has the cleanest air because it uses ~70% nuclear energy, but it does not have a waste storage problem. France reprocesses and recycles its waste to extract more energy and greatly reduce the waste. The US does not reprocess its waste because it does not want to look like it is making more nuclear weapons. America, you are not fooling anyone about who has the most nukes.

Anyway, France’s nuclear waste has been described as fitting in a basketball court not in a mountain. I say we recycle our nuclear waste like our bottles and cans.

Mr. Brody:

It pains me to point this out, but pigs will fly before the USA learns from France's success.

@ otherdoug "Wind can make up a large portion of the power supply, but it is still intermittent and can't be made to match the demand curve. Power storage would still be required to turn it into a realistic baseline source."

Nuclear and coal cannot be made to match the demand curve either, because they only have only two modes: off or full power. However the demand varies over the day, dependent on what time it is, weather conditions and the television program . Furthermore it happens very often that a power plant "trips" and 1000 MW is taken of the grid in an instant . Nevertheless the system works, because they are supplemented by oil, gas and hydro power plants that can react very quickly to changes in demand and outages of other power plants.

The amount of wind energy may not be steerable, but it is predictable, so it can be scheduled in in the day-ahead planning of the electricity production like any other power source. On days with a high wind supply the powerplants with the highest marginal cost are taken of the grid. In Germany and Denmark it has been shown that the cumulative price reduction due to wind energy is much higher than the subsidy on wind energy! Furthermore, days with a high wind supply can be used by other power plants to do maintenance.

There is another hidden cost to taxpayers. Nobody would build a nuclear plant if they had to pay the full insurance premium, and so the Price Anderson act limits the liability to the industry in the case of a nuclear accident to $10b. Guess who would cover the rest? We do; as taxpayers. If you think $10b is a really big number, imagine the cost if Indian Point - just north of Manhattan - had an accident.

This is a hidden subsidy to the nuclear industry with a cost much larger than the PTC for wind that many nuclear advocates denounce as unfair.

@Pieter

"Nuclear and coal cannot be made to match the demand curve either, because they only have only two modes: off or full power."

Stop making things up, that statement is downright false.

@MY-T
The PAAA makes perfect sense. No insurance carrier could truly cover or was willing to cover a nuclear disaster and I sure wouldn't put my trust in State-Farm to payout before going bankrupt. The PAAA is codified law, so it is a guarantee to the people surrounding a nuclear facility that they will be covered in the event of an extremely extremely unlikely incident where damages top out over 10 billion dollars. Existing safeguards all but assure that such an incident won't happen in the first place.

nuclear power of the 21st century will not be that of your parent's and grandparent's.

http://www.lanl.gov/p/rh_pp_park.shtml
http://emc2fusion.org/

this is clean fusion; as in recycling the waste back into the reactor. if there's anything that should get funding it should be research into new tech and not construction of your same wasteful plant of old. someone have a cool $200mil to donate to EMC2? =D

Pieter: In my haste to post I comingled points about baseline and peak power production. My apologies.

My main point is that wind alone is not enough to provide for dependable baseline or deployable peak power production. It can be a significant portion of overall production, but it can't be relied upon for baseline and without storage it can't be used for peak.

At present natural gas provides most of our peak power production capacity. It probably still will for a good time to come. With better, cheaper storage we can begin to replace it with power from other renewable sources.

Baseline power is produced from nuclear and coal. My main concern is with eliminating coal fired power production. Renewables aren't going to do that for a good long time, but nuclear can begin to do it within a decade. Deploy as much wind and solar as we possibly can, we still won't eliminate coal without some other form of baseline power production. I'd like to see coal fired production begin to drop within a decade and the only way I see we can do that is with nuclear.

MY-T: The insurance issue is really a non-issue. Other similar sorts of indirect subsidies are provided to many energy industries including renewables. If we want nuclear to go without subsidies then we have to insist that fossil, hydro and renewables do to.

The likelihood of an accident causing over US$10 billion in damages is extraordinarily unlikely, but that threshold is demanded by lawmakers and citizens who have been frightened by anti-nuclear claims. The insurance guarantee is something that will almost certainly never be required, so it's hard to see what sort of real impact it has.

Re. Indian Point: I used to live in NYC; I was much more concerned with the chemical/petroleum infrastructure in northern New Jersey than I ever was with Indian Point. The facility is designed to contain a full meltdown of a reactor core. You might get some radiation released as in TMI, but that will not cause fatalities or injuries. At worst you will have huge class action lawsuits due to the very small increase in cancer risk to the immediate neighbors of the plant.

The question of how nuclear waste is to be stored remains open.

The question of what should happen to decommissioning or decommissioned sites is also wide open.

Once a generation, a logical argument seems to be raised on the reasons to enter nuclear power generation.

But no-one ever seems to ever lay down a proper, rational exit plan.

Maybe this is simply the way of the military-industrial complex but in an age in which sustainability is supposed to drive policy, the question of decommissioning needs to be addressed head on.

What to do with the sites of former power stations?

I've posted on a project i ran in the U.K. on this many years ago at

http://tinyurl.com/yqfql2

might be of interest.

[i]wind is not competitive with nuclear. wind has twice the startup and operating costs of nuclear, as well as a capacity factor that is one third that of nuclear. all this adds up to wind being significantly more expensive than nuclear.[/i]

I'm not quite sure where you are getting these "facts" from, or if you are simply ignoring the associated tax payer costs with nuclear, which was kind of the entire point of the article. In addition nuclear plants cannot be built overnight and there are no private investors willing to put up all the cash, any future nuclear power plants would be heavily subsidized by the government just to get them built.

In the end the appeal of wind is a reasonable startup cost that many private investors are willing to fund 100%, a clear path to profitability with no strings attached, the ability to get very precise estimates on power generation, maintenance, and RoI, and no unknown factors such as waste management.