Nuclear power is a divisive issue for many reasons and it is difficult to see where each side is coming from. Anybody can look up the heated debates I've had on Scientific American or other forums to see how committed some people are to a much larger involvement of nuclear power in some form or another in our energy mix. As such, I've gathered a ton of information that I feel can be handy when considering or participating in this debate. I have taken a side though, so I'm not entirely unbiased, but I hope most people will at least consider the points I bring up blow the orange squiggle.
After researching nuclear power's past history and the potential technologies that could be employed in the future, I have come to the conclusion that nuclear power has a limited role to play in the world's future energy mix. Although the Fukushima disaster may have crippled the global nuclear industry politically, it wouldn't have been such an easy beast to slay if it did not have other problems to begin with.
I know people bash Wikipedia as a source, but it's a good place to start investigating any issue:
Nuclear Power Wiki
The gist of it is that Nuclear Power was a spin-off of the Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear weapons and commercial reactors began to appear in the late 1950s. The U.S. Navy began to use nuclear reactors to power its subs and aircraft carriers as well, but these reactors aren't really germane to civilian nuclear power. Cost is of no concern when you're trying to save the Free World from the Russkies after all.
As the 60s and 70s dragged on, the cost to build nuclear power escalated dramatically until eventually, the reactors became uneconomic in the U.S. and construction came to a standstill. The implosion of new nuclear construction was so bad that 2/3 of ALL nuclear reactors ordered after 1970 were cancelled:
Cancelled Nukes
The best defense of this collapse on nuclear power's behalf is presented here:
Costs of Nuclear Power Plants - What Went Wrong?
To sum up Dr. Cohen, he cites "Regulatory Ratcheting" and "Regulatory Turbulence" as the primary factors that dramatically increased the cost to build nuclear reactors as the 1970s dragged on into the 1980s. This is quite correct and in the wake of the Three-Mile Island incident in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, there were many design changes that needed to be made to nuclear plants, either in the planning phase or during construction. Changing plant designs while they are being built can make costs skyrocket and destroy any hope of successfully predicting how long it will eventually take to construct a reactor. The high inflation and interest rates of the 70s and 80s made delays MUCH worse and this one story was sadly repeated many times across North America:
A Northwest Distaste for Nuclear Power
Quote:
"Like most nuclear projects, the Supply System's plants took far longer than expected to build while cost estimates ballooned. Meanwhile, the 1970s energy crisis slowed electrical demand growth. The agency's complicated financing added a troublesome twist to these nationwide nuclear woes. Its first three plants received financial backing from the Bonneville Power Administration. Projects 4 and 5, however, depended on contracts in which 88 participating public utilities around the region bought shares of the plants' "project capability." These contracts mandated the utilities to pay whether or not the plants produced electricity — "hell or high water" clauses, in financial vernacular.
The Supply System was approaching financial hell in the early 1980s. The disastrous brew of construction delays, cost overruns, public suspicion and declining demand put the agency in an untenable position. The plants, initially slated to cost about $4.5 billion, were estimated in 1981 at $23.9 billion. In 1982, bowing to the inevitable, the agency terminated Projects 4 and 5, the ones without Bonneville's financial backing.
"Yet if Energy Northwest is reformed, the Supply System's failures still hang over the region. Bonneville ratepayers get the energy from Columbia Generating Station but must pay bondholders for that reactor and two projects the Supply System terminated in 1994. Approximately 15 percent of a residential ratepayer's electric bill still goes for principal and interest on the three plants."
This was caused in part by the regulatory ratcheting and uncertainty to be sure, but many nuclear power supporters cite this as evidence that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is ardently anti-nuclear for some reason. I don't want to delve into the conspiracy theories too deeply, but most of them involve an Evil Cabal of "Big Oil" and the Obama Administration working together to stop the heroic struggles of a nuclear industry that's just trying to save the world. This is patently absurd for several reasons:
1. 88% of "Big Oil" campaign cash has been going to republicans recently and they've averaged 77% of the "Big Oil" pie since 1990:
Oil and Gas - Long-Term Contribution Trends
2. The NRC has made a habit of moving the safety and regulatory goalposts ever closer to keep the nations aging reactors running:
NRC Weakens Safety Rules
"Federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation's aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.
Time after time, officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril, according to records and interviews.
The result? Rising fears that these accommodations by the NRC are significantly undermining safety - and inching the reactors closer to an accident that could harm the public and jeopardize the future of nuclear power in the United States.
Examples abound. When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed - up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.
Failed cables. Busted seals. Broken nozzles, clogged screens, cracked concrete, dented containers, corroded metals and rusty underground pipes - all of these and thousands of other problems linked to aging were uncovered in the AP's yearlong investigation. And all of them could escalate dangers in the event of an accident."
3. The NRC recently streamlined their reactor permitting process by combining the construction and operation licenses into one permit.
NRC Combined License Application for New Reactors
4. New nuclear reactor construction had slowed to a halt a few years before Three-Mile Island anyway:
Nuclear Fizzle
There's NO WAY one can think the NRC is beholden to "Big Oil" and determined to destroy the industry based on this evidence. Anybody that still believes in this unfounded conspiracy theory has a willful disregard for the facts.
Regardless, nuclear construction costs escalated, causing the nuclear industry in the U.S. and France to experience a "negative learning curve" as a result:
Nuclear Power - Negative learning curve
In the end, it wasn't safety, proliferation, fuel availability or nuclear waste issues that killed the industry (although these have yet to be solved), it was cold, hard economics. In deregulated electricity markets (starting in 1978), investors became responsible for cost overruns instead of ratepayers, so new reactor construction came to a halt. Even with weakened safety regulations, designing and building these plants to survive 40 - 80 years of the worst things Mother Nature and mankind can throw at them, both imagined and unimaginable, became a very expensive proposition.
On top of the billions of government dollars spent to develop a lot of the technology used in the nuclear industry during the Manhattan Project, the industry enjoys many other large pieces of government pork. For example, it is impossible to obtain adequate liability insurance for a nuclear reactor on the private market at any price. No one insurance company could absorb a Chernobyl or Fukushima-style disaster and this was apparent even back at the dawn of the industry. As such, a company operating a nuclear reactor is only on the hook for the first $12.6B in damages (and only $375M per nuclear plant...wow...) while the federal government is on the hook for the rest. To put this into perspective, just cleaning up the Fukushima site itself is probably going to cost more than $100B, never mind the permanent evacuation and condemnation of thousands of square kilometers within the prefecture (the exclusion zone could have been MANY times larger if the wind had been blowing in ANY other direction than out to sea). These pitifully low liability levels became glaringly apparent during the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill disaster, but the Gulf Coast was lucky that the Federal Government stepped in and mandated that BP set aside $20B to compensate the victims over and above the maximum liability limit imposed by law. We should not count on being so lucky in the future, especially since the industry has averaged 1 major reactor meltdown every 10 years, globally. The government has never had to pay out damages yet (thankfully), but this liability insurance has an opportunity cost associated with it that hamstrings federal energy policy and artificially lowers the price of nuclear power to boot.
New nuclear plants enjoy access to a $58B loan guarantee program and the Energy Policy Act of 2005 was loaded with other goodies for the industry:
"... the government would cover cost overruns due to regulatory delays, up to $500 million each for the first two new nuclear reactors, and half of the overruns due to such delays (up to $250 million each) for the next four reactors."
Finally, "A production tax credit of 1.8 cents per kilowatt-hour for the first 6,000 megawatt-hours from new nuclear power plants for the first eight years of their operation, subject to a $125 million annual limit. The production tax credit places nuclear energy on equal footing with other sources of emission-free power, including wind and closed-loop biomass."
Nuclear Power Goodies
So, nuclear power supporters are also hypocritical when they bemoan the paltry subsidies that renewable energy enjoys.
I will just quickly mention the fact that producing fuel for these reactors is basically inseparable from producing weapons-grade nuclear material. All you have to do is run the same equipment many more times to get bomb-worthy material. Additionally, India, Pakistan and now Iran have used their civilian power program as a cover for their nuclear weapons program.
Regardless of all this, nuclear power does have an upside. Once the plants are built and the bad loans / bonds / or government pork is paid, these plants generate tremendous amounts of electricity with hardly any global warming emissions (mostly from the curing of the concrete during construction and florinated gases escaping from enrichment plants). These plants can produce electricity more than 90% of the time, and despite slow response times, the output of the plants is controllable to a certain degree.
A different fuel cycle using Thorium (instead of Uranium) promises to mostly eliminate the waste, proliferation, and fuel availability issues while going to great lengths to mitigate safety issues. However, the commercial viability and eventual cost of these still-experimental reactors is unclear. This is why I fully support taking the government money we are wasting on traditional, "Light Water Reactors" and use it to fund the development of Thorium reactors instead. As long as renewable energy and efficiency are funded adequately in-tandem, we are not putting our eggs in one basket and are much less likely to repeat the mistakes plaguing our current energy infrastructure. Too few energy sources producing at-scale keep us at the mercy of oil price shocks, environmentally destructive drilling / mining practices, and the slings / arrows of outrageous fortune during nuclear reactor construction.
What REALLY prompted me to write this diary was this article:
Exelon's 'Nuclear Guy': No New Nukes
"Nuclear power is no longer an economically viable source of new energy in the United States, the freshly-retired CEO of Exelon, America’s largest producer of nuclear power, said in Chicago Thursday.
And it won’t become economically viable, he said, for the forseeable future.
“Let me state unequivocably that I’ve never met a nuclear plant I didn’t like,” said John Rowe, who retired 17 days ago as chairman and CEO of Exelon Corporation, which operates 22 nuclear power plants, more than any other utility in the United States.
“Having said that, let me also state unequivocably that new ones don’t make any sense right now.”
Currently, there are 4 new reactors under construction in the U.S., two at Georgia's Vogtle plant and two at the VC Summer plant in South Carolina. It is fitting that these plants are being installed in the Southeast, since the area has the least renewable energy resources of any other region. These plants will have a place in the energy mix of the region for a long time and may still be competitive in 2050. They will go a long way in reducing damage to the climate and reducing "traditional" pollution levels in the area. However, they are being installed for about $5 to $7 per Watt of capacity, although the aforementioned "goodies" from the government and the utility's ability to bill their customers for billion$ to help finance the reactors years before they crank out even one electron go a long way towards reducing those figures.
Even ignoring the threats of tsunamis, earthquakes or sabatoge, the fact remains that these plants are expensive compared to efficiency measures, electricity demand management techniques (enabled by the "Smart Grid") and many renewable energy technologies. Renewable energy is also swiftly falling in cost while enabling increased democratization and participation in the energy marketplace that would make Adam Smith proud. Large, centralized, "base-load" plants are looking increasingly obsolete considering the plethora of energy technologies coming down the pipeline. Nuclear power might still be a piece of our future energy puzzle, but on that level playing field routinely praised by free market-types, it is likely to be a small and dwindling piece as the 21st Century progresses.