First new U.S. nuclear reactors in decades approved

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-nuclear-20120210,0,3657441.story

by CWuestefeld • 14 years ago

114 120 14 years ago

ScotterC6• 14 years ago

Hopefully this will be a good start towards a new understanding of nuclear power. Also, we need to start building again in order to keep the knowledge of craftsmen that know how to build these. From pipe welders to concrete specialists, let alone the nuke engineers needed. N-Stamp skills could be forever lost in this country if we abandon this power source.

simonsarris• 14 years ago

As a state that's 49% nuclear power (New Hampshire) I really welcome this news. It almost seems too good to be true.

I hope we will someday be able to close down the single coal plant in my state (coal is 14% of NH power).

For all its faults I think Nuclear has gotten a bad reputation from an extremely small amount of catastrophes. Obviously those events are very salient in the public's mind, but it is worth remembering that coal plants are a catastrophe every single day.

There are lakes in New Hampshire with abnormally high mercury levels that have never been touched by humans save for testing the water. Coal from as far as Ohio give rise to uncomfortable asthma statistics. I know it won't be soon, but there's at least one technology I can't wait to shutter.

lukifer• 14 years ago

> it is worth remembering that coal plants are a catastrophe every single day.

In addition to CO2 levels, most people are unaware of how much radioactive material is released by burning coal, because it's spread out of over time rather than in a few big dramatic incidents.

beloch• 14 years ago

More people die mining coal each year than have died in Nuclear power plant accidents in the entire history of Nuclear power.

The Bhopal chemical plant disaster killed more people than all the nuclear power incidents in history combined. This plant manufactured pesticides.

Nuclear power is not completely risk free, but it's much safer than most people give it credit for. Anyone who would picket a nuclear power plant before a coal plant or a pesticide plant is an uninformed twit.

Nuclear power also promises to get much safer. China is currently testing thorium reactors based on Canada's CANDU design. Thorium reactors have several safety advantages over Uranium reactors, produce less waste with a shorter half-life, and do not produce weapons-grade fissionable materials as a byproduct. Thorium is far more abundant than Uranium to boot. If Iran went after Thorium based nuclear power Israel would be able to sleep more easily at night.

r00fus• 14 years ago

Have these new designs improved on water usage problems [1]?

Although I agree about the closure of coal plants, it seems nuclear still has water usage issues (cooling needs) and given the upcoming fresh-water crisis [2], wouldn't solar be a better bet?

[1] http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_technology...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12291371

tptacek3• 14 years ago

Is solar feasible at the scale we're talking about? What's the $/kwh?

Kadin3• 14 years ago

While there may be a fresh-water crisis on a global scale, that doesn't mean there is a shortage everywhere. There are lots of places where there are ample water supplies, and use of the water there doesn't really effect water availability in places where it's in short supply.

Also, you can cool a nuclear reactor with ocean water. Seabrook Station in NH is cooled this way, as are other reactors located on ocean coasts, presumably.

_delirium• 14 years ago

Generally good news I think, although as the article hints, the economics still seem to be tough, at least without any sort of more stringent regulation or taxation of their ultra-cheap competitors, goal and natural gas. It seems like either price will have to come down, or these quite generous federal subsidies will have to be extended to a number of additional new plants, in order to make the (very large) construction expense have a sufficient ROI for a private-sector company to undertake.

zeteo6• 14 years ago

"two new atomic energy reactors at an estimated cost of $14 billion [...] known as AP1000s, built by Westinghouse Electric Co."

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000:

"China has officially adopted the AP1000 as a standard for inland nuclear projects.", "In the spring of 2007 China National Nuclear Corp. selected the Westinghouse/Shaw consortium to build four nuclear reactors for an estimated US$8 billion."

So the same model is built in the US for 7 billion each, and in China for 2?

ImprovedSilence• 14 years ago

Regulation is a bitch.

That being said, I could see passing certain demanding regulatory tests and designs in the US could add a significant amount, perhaps even a billion, but I would guess raw supplies and labour are cheaper to source in china as well?

ScotterC6• 14 years ago

Going rate at the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is 250+ $/hour to just review documents which are several hundred thousand pages long.

'One of my key concerns was the effect on the schedules for new license applications – not only do applicants have to pay $273 for every regulator hour, but they have to pay the staff and contractors that they use to apply for permission and answer regulator questions. Longer licensing processes cost more in salaries and other overhead and they push potential revenue out into the future.'

http://atomicinsights.com/2011/12/audit-the-nrc.html

mikeash3• 14 years ago

I imagine that construction costs, like pretty much all labor costs, are vastly cheaper in China.

Additionally, the units may not be identical. For example, Wikipedia says that the first four Chinese units are being constructed with a weaker containment structure, and there may well be other cost-cutting measures in the Chinese models, given the difference in safety environments in the two countries.

zeteo6• 14 years ago

I don't think labor costs account for much of the difference. You can pay the salaries of 10,000 US construction workers for 7 years with a single billion. (I seriously doubt they need to hire that many people for one reactor.) And, due to cheap shipping these days, the cost of materials is pretty much the same everywhere.

ScotterC6• 14 years ago

Like what @mikeash is referring to. China is planning on building tens of these things in the next few decades. They are creating factories to pump out AP1000s on a standardized system.

Vogtle is a brown field site (their are already reactors there) and like most American plants, they are all built custom made. Every one of the U.S's 104 plants are different. It made engineering maintenance hellish. This stems from many things, but the easiest explanation is location specific laws and protests. By the time you get clearance to build it, a lot of things will have changed. Hence, standardization goes out the window.

afterburner6• 14 years ago

Things can get built pretty shoddily in China. You sure you don't want to pay extra for some quality control?

electromagnetic2• 14 years ago

Finally a step in the right direction. We need dependable energy that can live with society.

Smog from coal power kills 24,000 American annually (and $53 billion in damages: IE from its relation to non life threatening diseases like pneumonia) . Nuclear has killed 31 workers in its entirety of operation. The WHO estimates Chernobyl may have caused 4,000 civilian deaths since the accident, the Union of Concerned Scientists says 25,000.

I don't get why a single coal plant is still open when even the worst nuclear disaster on record is just another normal day for fossil fuel usage.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

Probably has something to do with that whole town that's uninhabitable. People are funny that way.

yew• 14 years ago

They are, aren't they. A town all in one place versus a few dozen spread far enough apart and suddenly nobody notices the disparity. Ah well.

trafficlight• 14 years ago

Not quite the same level of destruction, but Centralia, PA has been almost entirely abandoned since 1962 due to an ongoing coal mine fire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania

zeteo6• 14 years ago

Haven't heard anyone arguing for the elimination of the chemical industry after the Bhopal accident.

lispm4• 14 years ago

The US could update their old coal power plants to the usual standards or replace them with newer ones.

Tuna-Fish3• 14 years ago

The US coal power plants are actually extremely modern and clean compared to almost every other mass user of coal. It's just that they still suck.

xpose2000• 14 years ago

Thorium anyone? http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/1

ChuckMcM3• 14 years ago

Would be awesome wouldn't it?

The weird thing is that we have to excise, as a species, this notion that nuclear power's risks are unmanageable. That takes time, and a lot of people dying. Not from nuclear accidents but just dying of old age and with old fashioned ideas and an inability to get past their emotions and back into reasoning about something.

For all its promise, investment in Thorium is a non-issue until we can prove that we can license and build new nuclear plants. Sure Larry or Sergei could fund it but the challenge is in the deployment.

The comment above about how they cost $2B for the Chinese and $7B for the US is indicative of that challenge. That and a liability cap which makes them insurable in the first place. If you're government gets to just say what is going to be true then you only pay the cost of building it, which is much much less.

afterburner6• 14 years ago

You're commenting on a article that states a nuclear reactor of current design was approved, so what's your complaining for? Your "side" seems to be winning, despite the current crop of designs not being the blessed thorium reactor...

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

Thorium looks interesting, as does Bill Gate's Terrapower traveling wave reactor.

http://gigaom.com/cleantech/terrapower-how-the-travelling-wa...

hristov2• 14 years ago

This is bad news. If you read the article to the end you will see that the whole thing is funded with taxpayer money. Also, the electricity bill payers will be expected to pay extra to make up for the additional costs of nuclear energy.

This is only happening because of subsidies, and if we are to subsidize something we should subsidize renewable energy which is rapidly growing and decreasing in cost as opposed to nuclear which keep increasing in cost as new dangers of nuclear plants get discovered.

And by the way there are problems with this new advanced design too. A structural engineer that worked on the project says that the shield building is not well tested and there is no reason to assume that it can withstand the earthquakes and hits it is supposed to withstand.

pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1033/ML103370648.pdf

zeteo6• 14 years ago

"What makes a difference in Georgia is that the state has ruled that customers are going to have to pay, he said."

Not taxpayers. Subsidies have actually been going to wind and solar for quite a few decades (see Solyndra) - not to nuclear.

hristov2• 14 years ago

"The project at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Ga., is being undertaken by Southern Co., which operates four electric utilities in the South, and three minority partners — all aided by a massive federal loan guarantee and other incentives."

So yes federal taxpayers are paying for this too. Loan guarantees are not free. By the way, the loan guarantee for just these two nuclear reactors will be 8.3 billion which dwarfs the half a billion dollar Solyndra loan guarantee everyone is complaining about.

Unfortunately, nuclear subsidies in the US dwarf the very few incentives we have for renewable power. Almost the entire budget of the Department of Energy is devoted to supporting nuclear in one way or another.

Edit:

This is the link showing the amount of the loan guarantee:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/energy-environmen...

afterburner6• 14 years ago

If people are steeling themselves for high electricity bills, then why not focus on renewables where the current technology is improving very quickly? When the amazing thorium reactors show up I'll reconsider, but until then... why be willing to pay big for nuclear?

ScotterC6• 14 years ago

"The API000 shield building safety functions include shielding plant structures from impact loads, such as tornado missiles, protecting plant equipment during seismic events, similar to containment and shield structures in other reactor designs."

I don't know of any tornado missile that can manage getting through 6 ft of concrete reinforced with layers of steel rebar. Also, even if an earthquake did happen in Georgia, the last 9.4 quake in Japan was against a shield building that was designed more then 40 years ago. I think we can have a bit of faith in some new designs that we're designed without a slide ruler.

nextparadigms• 14 years ago

If they are going to use taxpayer money, can't they focus on something that is more forward looking like Thorium reactors, or even subsidizing renewable energy?

LeafStorm• 14 years ago

They are already subsidizing a heck of a lot of renewable energy. And I don't doubt that there is NSF-funded research on thorium reactors going on somewhere in the United States.

DennisP5• 14 years ago

I'm on a mailing list with some prominent people involved with liquid thorium reactors, and they're not aware of any current government-funded research in the U.S. (There's plenty in China, though.)

moonchrome3• 14 years ago

What about micro nuclear reactors ? eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

I'm unfamiliar with the details but simply based on the concepts :

- It solves the large scale catastrophe potential, a small reactor should threaten a very limited area (correct me if I'm wrong)

- It can be installed incrementally because of small unit costs and could be distributed/mass produced dropping the costs.

- Power loss from transmission is cut down to a minimum because this sort of micro reactor would be installed close to the consumers.

So any drawbacks I'm missing ? Why not subsidize that (if we have to subsidize something, simply going on technical/economic merits, I would prefer they don't subsidize anything) ?

RobertKohr2• 14 years ago

Political drawbacks.

You are looking to get approval for multiple nuclear reactors instead of just one. Good luck.

moonchrome3• 14 years ago

But these aren't nuclear reactors, not in the classic sense. This is like a nuclear battery.

ConstantineXVI2• 14 years ago

As the article mentions; these reactors are legally just as dangerous as a full-size installation; it'll take a lot of political legwork to make them feasible. Said politics would be a tad more difficult than usual; since your average voter will think of the following:

a) you're literally putting nuke plants in people's backyards. folk will worry about getting green suntans.

b) assuming they're meant to be autonomous; there's the issue of potential sabotage. they're small nukes, but they're still nukes. (and if they're networked, could be even worse than a centralized plant)

PS: perhaps this design would be far more sensible as a cluster (housed like a normal nuke plant); theoretically the entire plant would be safer as the smaller reactors would be easier to control and contain if things went south.

moonchrome3• 14 years ago

I'm not a nuclear physicist but in what way is a nuclear reactor equivalent to a nuke ? AFAIK reactors can't actually reach the critical level that's required to create a nuclear explosion - it's a completely different design, different isotope concentration, so the biggest threat is exposure to radioactive materials and maybe heat/pressure explosion. And 4S has passive safety mechanisms so sabotage would have to be manual, chain sabotage would be impossible, especially if they were properly monitored.

The biggest safety concern I've heard is that you could use them to create small quantities of weapons grade plutonium, but I guess if you know how to do that you could get it in other ways.

greyfade2• 14 years ago

It's baffling to me that so many people seem unwilling to accept the idea that maybe, perhaps, we've learned a few lessons about building safe nuclear reactors over the last 50 years.

It's also baffling to me that the widespread ecological disaster that coal- and oil-fired plants directly cause (and I'm not even referring to climate change!) is somehow more acceptable than the limited, mostly controlled circumstances of a handful of nuclear reactor failures (which Chernobyl has proven is not a permanent state of affairs.)

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

As a rule humans are catastrophically bad at estimating and ranking risk.

People are afraid of strangers abducting their kids, of air travel, of nuclear power. They aren't generally afraid of cheeseburgers, raising kids who don't exercise, cars, and coal power, but they should be.

greyfade2• 14 years ago

How is it possible that the Human Race has survived until now, given those facts?

afterburner6• 14 years ago

They also aren't afraid of the small but catastrophic risk of global warming truly messing our climate up, but they should be.

The inability to properly estimate risks goes both ways, people are bad at cumulative every day stuff as well as tiny probability catastrophic events (especially involving things they never see).

mkr-hn• 14 years ago

I thought this was already approved months ago when I first heard about it. I'm glad it's moving forward.

blktiger• 14 years ago

About time.

jakeonthemove2• 14 years ago

Nuclear reactors are the best source of energy - they just need more research and improvement, and you can't do that without actually building and running some of them on a large scale.

The sun is one huge nuclear reactor, and recreating that wherever we need it is simply awesome. Thorium reactors look promising and if fusion becomes feasible within ~100 years, that would solve a lot of problems...

The so-called "catastrophes" are nothing compared to the lives lost on coal plants and the whole coal power chain. Let's not forget that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are bustling with life, Tokyo is doing just fine with that "deadly radiation" around them (all things considered, of course), and Chernobyl is actually very green (no pun intended - plants and trees are growing nicely, the only ugly stuff laying and rusting around is human-made)...

lispm4• 14 years ago

just harvest the sun.

jakeonthemove2• 14 years ago

Definitely, but where it's not possible, cut out the middleman and create your own sun :-)

pash4• 14 years ago

As a counterpoint to all the comments like this:

> It's baffling to me that so many people seem unwilling to accept the idea that maybe, perhaps, we've learned a few lessons about building safe nuclear reactors over the last 50 years.

I would suggest that the real problem with nuclear energy is that we don't know how dangerous it is. And we have no means of estimating the danger that isn't obviously inadequate. You see, nuclear disasters don't happen because engineers are incapable of designing failsafes and containment buildings. Nuclear disasters happen because it's impossible for engineers to envision all the possible failure modes. The confluence of events that causes a meltdown is inevitably something the engineers didn't design for.

In an enlightening article [0] written after the Fukushima disaster, a physicist and expert on nuclear safety argues that

- severe accidents at nuclear reactors have occurred much more frequently than what risk-assessment models predicted;

- the probabilistic risk assessment method does a poor job of anticipating accidents in which a single event, such as a tsunami, causes failures in multiple safety systems; and

- catastrophic nuclear accidents are inevitable, because designers and risk modelers cannot envision all possible ways in which complex systems can fail.

In other words, everything we "know" about nuclear safety is wrong.

0. http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/beyond-our-imagi...

jerf• 14 years ago

Your argument is too powerful. It proves engineering as a whole is impossible. It equally proves we should never build any sort of building, because it could fall down and kill people and we can never be 100% sure we've prevented it.

It's an irrational appeal to emotion dressed up in rational trappings.

pash4• 14 years ago

> Your argument is too powerful. It proves engineering as a whole is impossible.

No. It's an argument that we have no good way of estimating the damage caused by rare, spectacular failures in complex systems. But thanks for the down-vote.

> It's an irrational appeal to emotion dressed up in rational trappings.

No. It's pointing out an epistemic hole, one that is essentially the reverse of the sunrise problem [0], that has been discussed by countless philosophers of science, probability theorists, and scientists across dozens of fields. I suggest you read the article I linked and some of the papers it cites rather than make a spectacle of your downright hurr-durr ignorance of the subject.

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_problem

pash4• 14 years ago

This comment has now been both down-voted and up-voted multiple times. Would one of you down-voters care to explain why you feel this point is unworthy of discussion?

A blog post [0] that was up-voted near the top of Hacker News last week made the same point in terms that apparently are more palatable to some readers. If you haven't read it, I encourage you to do so. Two of the academic papers/book chapters [1, 2] that the blogger cites specifically discuss risk assessment of nuclear power stations in the context I described.

All of this stuff is well known. It's why web-sites' uptimes are never anywhere near the five nines advertised and why we have "flash crashes" in our financial markets.

The focus of my original comment is not only on identifying and assigning probabilities to causes of failures that are inherently difficult to discern, but also on the inadequacy of metrics like expected value in quantifying the effect of rare but spectacular outcomes. Is it really not even worth discussing these problems with our risk-assessment methodologies when the price of failure is as high as it is in case of an uncontrolled meltdown of a nuclear reactor?

0. http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/02/10/each-necessary-but-onl...

1. http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/woods/error/fund_surp.pdf

2. http://crpit.com/confpapers/CRPITV86Qureshi.pdf

Robin_Message• 14 years ago

Two problems — even if it's much unsafer than we think, it's still very safe, and comparisons to other power technologies and the effects of climate change must be made.

Suppose nuclear power is ten or a hundred times more dangerous than we think it is. Then from the figures that have already been quoted show it is ten to a hundred times safer than coal power (in terms of excess deaths from production of energy.)

On the price of failure, the price of failure to deal with climate change in the low-likelihood scenarios is billions dead. In my opinion, any discussion of nuclear power and low likelihood risks requires being put against those numbers, since nuclear is one of the only options to avoid climate change. In contrast to the billions that will die in large-scale climate change, a modern reactor can have an uncontrolled meltdown 2 miles from my house for all I care. It'll be an expensive and annoying mess, but it's not going to kill billions.

stream_fusion• 14 years ago

If engineers could pursue nuclear power free from influence and interference, then I would have full confidence in their ability to create safe systems. Unfortunately politics and other forces have a way of always intruding.

Feynman's analysis of the Challenger disaster, and of the engineer who stayed up in the middle of the night refusing to sign-off on the launch in the face of commerical and political pressure ought to give anyone pause. In fact he was able to cite the exact reason for failure that occured - gaseous breach of the O-rings, due to operation outside design paramters. The fact his career was also finished, is the icing on the cake.

Chernobyl(cumulative maintenance procedural failures) and Fukushima (concrete walls too low to withstand the Tsunami) also stand as evidence that science and engineering doens't exist in a vaccum and always gets co-opted.

DennisP5• 14 years ago

Chernobyl was a reactor that (1) caused the reaction rate to increase as the temperature increased, a property viewed as madness today, and (2) had no containment building whatsoever.

Fukushima was better, but was still a reactor from the 70s. There were reactors right next door, built in the 80s with better safety features, that withstood the same events just fine.

Modern designs are much better than those 1980s reactors.

ciparis• 14 years ago

It's all going to come down to two things: are the workers any good, and do they give a shit.

Just like everything else.

First new U.S. nuclear reactors in decades approved

Related Stories