Feds find "substantial'' safety issue at SC nuclear plant
thestate.com
thestate.com
These plants need on-site diesel generators to provide site-power in case of loss of off-site power (grid failure). Here the operator had leaks in fuel lines that fed both the A and B generators. These are the only generators of on-site emergency power.
An operating reactor needs approximately 2-5 days to cool due to build-up of radioactive decay products in the core, which continue to generate heat even after the reactor has been fully shutdown (in the case of an emergency, a sudden shutdown of the reactor is called a SCRAM).
On-site power serves the primary purpose of driving core-recirculating coolant loops to control the core temperature. Chief metrics in reactor safety generally relate back to core-damage-frequency (CDF), because when one damages the fuel-casing or core, this is the most-likely precursor to releasing radioactivity. CDF determinations are almost directly linked to loss-of-coolant-accidents (LOCAs) which imply that one can no longer cool the nuclear fuel core or elements.
Total station blackout, which is a result of loss of off-site and on-site power, combined with a SCRAM is essentially the scenarios that led to Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters. The NRC will not treat this lightly.
The AP1000 design is a generation III+ reactor which is safer than 99% of the existing plants in the U.S.
After the Atomic Energy Commission was disbanded the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was formed. The NRC has had an ultra-conservative policy against new technologies, creating a chicken-and-egg-problem for new tech: a tech must be proven in a relevant nuclear environment before it can be approved by the NRC, but it cannot be proven without installing it in a relevant environment unless it is already in a grandfathered reactor design.
Additionally while there are a lot of interesting ideas, simulations and paper-reactors, "approved" real reactors face large capital costs (~$5bn / 1 GWe) as well as long build times (~10-20years). The real crux of this problem is that the utility cannot get guarantees that when it builds a reactor that it will be allowed to operate it. At the end of a build, there is a licensure process that must pass a community comment period. The political landscape 10-20years in a community's future can change dramatically, leaving a utility with a huge gamble that can result in brand-new nuclear-reactors, which are blessed by the NRC, to be shuttered.
The first Google snippet had me think you can build a nuclear powerplant in six years, but you are right [1,2].
Why does it take so long, say, 15 years? Is it simply the difficulty? Supply chain issues? Regulation? Changes in the political climate?Something else?
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1333678/nuclear-plants-c...
2. https://www.world-nuclear.org/gallery/world-nuclear-performa...
Vogtle-3 and 4 are the first nuclear reactors to come into commercial market in like 20-30 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla..., permits started in 2008 and finally operation will happen this year.
Westinghouse, the designer, went bankrupt in 2017 and the utility was given at least $12bn in _federal_ loan guarantees to help the reactors be completed.
These two units cost $15bn each.
A lot of operators blame construction timelines on community comment periods, though I suspect that like every other large capital investment in the US, the timelines are extended by mistakes, regulatory oversight / indecisiveness and some misaligned incentives of the government, construction companies and utilities.
Wait, aren't there cooling pools for spent rods that take years to cool down? What do you mean by "cool"?
Fukushima made it rather clear that reactors don't cool down in 2-5 days.
Looks to me the copium is still high in the field.
Significance: P (pending)
Jun 30, 2023
Identified By: SR
Item Type: AV Apparent Violation (AV)
Failure to Identify and Correct a Condition Adverse to Quality Associated with the EDG Fuel Oil System
A self-revealed finding with significance to be determined (Pending) and associated AV of Title of the Code of Federal Regulations (10 CFR) Part 50, Appendix B, Criterion XVI, "Corrective Action," was identified when the licensee failed to identify and correct a condition adverse to quality for the EDG fuel oil system that left the system vulnerable to premature piping cracks and eventually resulted in the failure of the ‘A’ EDG during testing on November 2, 2022. Specifically, inspectors determined that, based on the failure history of the EDGs and the licensee’s documented conclusions that attributed pipe cracks to prior maintenance events, the licensee had sufficient information to identify the existence of a condition adverse to quality related to the design of the EDG fuel oil system. This condition caused threaded fuel oil piping connections to be vulnerable to maintenance activities that over torqued, strained, or impacted the piping. Despite the challenge to maintain leak-tight connections and repeat occurrences of cracked piping, no significant changes were made to maintenance practices, procedures or system design, and the licensee continued to reactively monitor for leakage even after vulnerabilities were identified.
Previous report:
Significance: W (white)
Mar 31, 2022
Identified By: NRCI
Item Type: NOV Notice of Violation (NOV)
Failure to Correct Condition Adverse to Quality Resulting in Inoperable Emergency Diesel Generator
An NRC-identified apparent violation of 10 CFR 50, Appendix B, Criterion XVI, was identified for the licensee failing to correct a condition adverse to quality resulting in the inoperability of the 'B' emergency diesel generator (EDG). Specifically, there were indications of erratic governor performance following the January 2022 maintenance package that were identified during testing January 16, 2022. The governor performance was also erratic during the February 9, 2022, surveillance test, after which the licensee declared the EDG inoperable. As a result of this condition, the ‘B’ EDG was inoperable for a time in excess of its technical specification (TS) allowed outage time.
The scale is Green, White, Yellow, Red. Normal is green. This problem reached White in March 2022, and the June 2023 problem shows as Pending, which means the NRC had not assigned a color level yet. Now they have escalated that to Yellow, according to the press coverage. Which is a good move, considering that troubles have been observed in both the A and B emergency generator systems. Anyone know if they have more than two emergency generators? Two is kind of low.
One lesson for me is that excellence is a symptom of a healthy organization, not the other way around.
[1] https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/failed-v-c-summer-...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-carolina-utility-agrees-t...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2019/02/06/south-caroline-green-new...
This is the right abundance of caution for the NRC to use (after all, that kind of reactor can melt down if power completely fails and cannot be maintained to sink heat), but it should be an easy fix. If anything, the yellow card was given for how long Dominion's been letting itself sit on an easy fix.
(On the other hand, the justifiably-paranoid might ask what else is wrong if they've let a maintenance issue this relatively unimportant slide...)
They were famous for having a clause in the preparation checklist, that they had to have a bowl of M&Ms in the lounge, but no green ones.
Eddie Van Halen was asked about this, and his explanation was that their stage set was very complex, and required rigorous preparation. Failure could actually be dangerous (think the “pod” scene from Spinal Tap).
He said that if they found green M&Ms, then that meant the instructions were not read correctly.
[EDIT] I was wrong. It was brown M&Ms
"The rider's "Munchies" section was where the group made its candy-with-a-caveat request: "M&M's (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)." *
*https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/van-halens-leg...
You are correct, which is why I am not setting up metal stages.
But the correct way costs way more money than M&Ms.
That being said... you would be surprised to learn how often "cute" tactics like these are utilized by governments to leverage human behavior.
As you say, the M&Ms are just a proxy indicator. They indicate the instructions were read, but they have no direct role in the stage set.
The backup diesel generators, at this nuclear power plant, could be considered a proxy indicator that attention has been paid to more fundamental pieces of the reactor, as your metaphor implies, sure. But the backup diesel generators themselves play a direct and critical role in the preventing a power outage from turning into a nuclear meltdown.
Imagine if the M&Ms actually did act as a fire suppression system that would stop a pyrotechnics mishap from burning down the concert arena. That's more like the kind of M&Ms that were supposed to be in the bowl at this power plant.
Exactly. It seems like the kind of negligence that should get a license revoked and have the plant seized and handed over to a more competent manager (Duke seems reasonable).
I wonder if there's precedence for such a move when it comes to utilities in the US?
Edit: It doesn't seem quite as negligent after a second reading, but ... still makes me wonder what else has been done quickly and without really addressing the root issue...
The sounds acceptable. We're not able to run any piece of gear without the occasional failure - the argument with nuclear is a failure scenario appears to be about as damaging as the business-as-usual so all y'all be mad for putting so much effort into preventing it that nuclear became uneconomic.
Uneconomic because finding and fixing a crack in a pipe in the backup system is 4-on-a-5-tier system of regulatory response and has people talking about delicensing the operator.
[0] Oh wait I know this regulator. The dude who is in charge has a B. Arts in Religious Studies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_T._Hanson - which isn't a problem in itself but I felt it was apart of a pattern when it came to heads of the regulator. Their backgrounds didn't inspire my confidence.
Seems like they could easily pressurize the pipes when idle to detect leaks
The odds of that happening are crazy low. And the downside of that risk coming to fruition is a 0-death to near-0-death crisis (which is much better than whatever this precise external shock will cause). Deal with the risk. Living is risky. The environmental disaster you posit is more dangerous than the nuclear scenario you envision as a result! The efforts to eliminate this risk have done far more damage so far even your hypothetical would cause.
Take the severe Forsmark incident in 2006 in Sweden. Many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades. Thus loss of cooling became almost a certainty. That is why you test and do not accept half fixes to placate the operators profit margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...
> And the downside of that risk coming to fruition is a 0-death to near-0-death crisis (which is much better than whatever this precise external shock will cause).
And a at least $200B bill to cleanup the mess in Fukushimas case. Lets remove the Price Anderson Act so they have to pay the true cost for their risk?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
Yeah. The costs and benefits should be born by the capital owner. The issue is that if you want to force them to pay for a cost externality that should be balanced out by considering the benefit eternalities. For nuclear power? if the world was fair they'd get a much bigger net subsidy. The risks of nuclear power going critical are far smaller than the benefits from not having to use coal for example.
I forget what a life saved is worth in engineering terms. Something like 1 or 10 million per capita I think. $200 billion in cleanup only needs to save ~200-2,000 lives to be justified.
> Many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.
Things like pipes being cracked, for example? That is the issue here to me, this is part of a system of defences where it is anticipated that some of them won't be working. No one defence being broken should be a crisis.
I'm cool with the idea that they should fix their pipe. I'm not cool with it being treated like a big deal without pretty solid evidence that the deal is big.
That is a strawman argument. Coal has generally been uneconomical since the advent of combined cycle gas turbines where gas infrastructure exists. Today renewables are vastly undercutting both.
Trying to frame it as a choice between nuclear and coal is only made because nuclear does not stack up against the real competition in 2023.
> I forget what a life saved is worth in engineering terms. Something like 1 or 10 million per capita I think. $200 billion in cleanup only needs to save ~200-2,000 lives to be justified.
Or we just build power generation without those third party risks. I do not understand why you are trying to frame a $200 billion cleanup bill as "nothing to see, move along sheeple!".
> I'm cool with the idea that they should fix their pipe. I'm not cool with it being treated like a big deal without pretty solid evidence that the deal is big.
Almost all nuclear accidents final hole in the Swiss cheese is some sort of loss of cooling. When the backup power fails due to negligent maintenance that is a big deal.
Fukushima led to us building stockpiles of backup generators together with the necessary electric connections allowing us us to fly them in with helicopters and connect them if the primary ones fail. Saying that failure in the primary ones is "fine, nothing to see" is sticking your head in the sand.
If you want to talk about the future, then guessing at $200 billion cleanup bills seems unlikely. The design state of the art has come a long way since the dawn of the nuclear industry. We don't know what a serious failure of a post-Chernobyl design looks like because such a thing has never happened.
> Or we just build power generation without those third party risks. I do not understand why you are trying to frame a $200 billion cleanup bill as "nothing to see, move along sheeple!".
You are, at present, living with a >$200 billion cleanup bill because we didn't commit to Nuclear early enough. Given past performance, the odds of losing more than $200 billion from not enabling Nuclear now are quite high. Net benefits outweighing costs isn't that complicated a stance and I expect you'll understand it if you think about it.
And take note on the way through that the renewables proponents have serially overstated their case for years - Germany appears to be on the path to de-industrialising itself rather than admitting that its renewable program was actually quite expensive. I'd much rather have $200B as a one-off cost rather than the ongoing fiscal disaster of their Energiewende. The cost of renewables has improved a lot since then, but it seems unlikely that the situation on the ground is as lopsided as the raw costs suggest - being able to schedule the generation of power counts for something.
Also, what is with this "sheeple" business? I never said that. And I'm addressing the issue of cleanup cost directly.
> Almost all nuclear accidents final hole in the Swiss cheese is some sort of loss of cooling.
Yeah. If the cooling doesn't fail then it is pretty hard to see how accidents could happen. But the argument isn't that accidents won't happen - accidents do happen. We can only control probabilities and sooner or later everything fails.
The issue is that the situation is a lot like the UK in the 1750s refusing to use coal because of the risk of air pollution. They'd technically be right about the costs, but the upside of cheap power is much, much more important than the downside of things going wrong. Nuclear has a smaller cost than coal and a bigger upside. Pulling the plug on the nuclear industry was and remains foolish policy.
> Fukushima led to us building stockpiles of backup generators together with the necessary electric connections allowing us us to fly them in with helicopters and connect them if the primary ones fail. Saying that failure in the primary ones is "fine, nothing to see" is sticking your head in the sand.
I'm not sticking my head in the sand, I'm saying that a hypothetical failure of one component (which didn't happen and was caught by the inspection program) is acceptable. You just provided a new argument for why. These things have a lot of redundant layers of protection.
Some things leave no room for error.
But what is fairly clear is that the USs anti-nuclear strategy has caused thousands of deaths, untold pollution and a lot of poverty because it pushed energy prices up. It squelched the safest and cleanest form of power we've ever discovered from taking root. People should calm down about calling for license revocations because something turned out to be imperfect. Especially since we don't know how much redundancy is built in to this system. The standard applied to nuclear power safety is excessive.
For us to read an article before making dismissive comments isn't merely polite--it's essential for us to be able to communicate effectively with each other.
The article explains that this plant has two backup diesel generators, both of which have been having problems. (It also links to older articles detailing the plant's long history of negligence in fixing problems after they were discovered--this wasn't the first time.)
> People should calm down about calling for license revocations because something turned out to be imperfect. The standard applied to nuclear power safety is excessive.
Imagine for a moment that you live in a rented home, and for twenty years, the plumbing has been repeatedly cracking and leaking, and each time you tell the landlord, they wait weeks or months before calling a plumber, who only puts temporary patches on the leaks. Would you be satisfied each time the plumber eventually comes? Or would you like to hold your landlord and plumber to a higher standard than nuclear safety?
You're trying to assess the safety of a highly redundant engineered system design (likely paranoidly designed) based on the opinions and research of Sammy Fretwell, journalist. That isn't actually a good way to try and engage with the problem - journalists are typically not engineers and frequently aren't in the room when decisions are made.
The plant engineers believe the situation is safe enough. The regulator disagrees. The regulator could be reasonable in their disagreement but this particular regulator is famously unreasonable and excessive in their safety demands. Likely by design.
And by and large that is what we can glean without doing a lot of research going through primary sources and engineering reports. It is a good article, but it is the regulators opinions are not the end of the story on this one - the problem here is that the regulator's opinions and enforcements are damaging society as a whole.
> Imagine for a moment...
I like that metaphor because it illustrates how the fluid system continues to work perfectly adequately despite cracks in the piping.
They also generate tritium for hydrogen bombs.
And do things like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
It's not about hiring infallible operators. It's about operating with enough redundancy that humans can be fallible without causing a disaster.
I understand that nuclear facilities are not like regular buildings and require more logistics for repairs but there's no way it would require 20 years.
From: https://www.thestate.com/news/local/environment/article28022...
> The NRC, which rarely issues yellow findings, said nuclear plant operators did not resolve cracking problems from 2003 to 2022 in V.C. Summer’s diesel generator system, one of the most important backup safety systems at an atomic power plant.
which links to: https://www.thestate.com/news/local/environment/article27928...
> Federal nuclear safety officials made a discovery that was perhaps more unsettling than the problem from 2022. They identified a pattern of cracks and leaks in the plant’s emergency generator system going back 20 years. On five different occasions since 2003, the power company has been forced to repair cracks in the emergency diesel generator system, according to an agency inspection report released in August. Diesel oil leaks have focused attention on why VC Summer plant operators did not resolve the cracking problems — and how that might have affected the company’s ability to prevent a radiation leak if an emergency occurred. Officials with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission say they are concerned because the problems keep recurring. Few other nuclear plants in the Southeast have had the same number of cracking problems in diesel generator systems, say officials in the agency’s Atlanta office.
Without a true timeline of events, its hard to say for sure.
So they found cracks first in 2003, and fixed them. They found more cracks over the years and fixed them... what they have failed to do is to stop the cracking from occurring in the first place. That failure led to an even bigger crack happening during a test run of the system. According to Dominion, they plan to build a new pipe, which should fix this. The NRC seems to think they should have done this sooner, and the NRC is likely right, but I am no expert in these things.
It probably should also result in a much more throughout inspection of the plant to ensure that there are no other issues. Again, I have no expertise here.
tldr; regulatory processes prevent improvements.
I work in a highly regulated industry though not nuclear. There are obvious things to change which were approved in the site plans decades ago. Those nonsensical systems must be maintained because if they stop working for a small number of hours, everything must be stopped and there will be fines. It won't be changed because doing so requires asking regulator for approval and then everybody and their uncle gets to make a comment and even sue to stop it. Regulatory process hinders obvious good changes and improvements.
BTW, this is similar to how Los Angeles squeezed out good paying manufacturing jobs three decades ago - make it near-impossible to get electrical permit to change anything.
They have an engineered lifespan and things start falling apart and becoming dangerous when you exceed that. Many should never have been extended. They've had to change safety tests and infrastructure tests so the order plans would pass inspection.
This has always been my concern with nuclear. Yes we can make it safe, but the human greed factor is always the weak point. Regulations weakened, automated systems bypassed, skimping on design decisions, etc.
This first link makes me absolutely furious. There's too much to quote from here, but here's just one excerpt. The post has numerous examples of very concerning issues.
> 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.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859
> The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses. Many plant operators have sought licenses to extend the operating life of their plants past the original deadlines, even as experts have warned that aging plants come with heightened concerns about safety.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe...
> The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The NRC “is listening” to this advice, the Associated Press reported last month. “Annie Caputo, a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four board members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she was ‘open to self-assessments’ by nuclear plant operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of some NRC inspections.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-tru...
And this stance would be perfectly fine if the alternatives were better. If we are firing up coal plants to make up for not building nuclear plants, we are much worse than even a _leaking_ nuclear power plant. Coal plants, depending on where their coal comes from, can't even be built near nuclear as they would set off radiation alarms.
Coal emissions are particularly harmful and cause lots of deaths worldwide. Natural gas are much less so, but still not great.
We need to remove the older nuclear power plants and replace them, for baseline power, with newer designs. They are far safer and will not meltdown no matter what fails. Newer reactor designs are usually not self-sustaining and require active management to keep them going (as opposed to intervening to stop them).
The answer seems to be renewables everywhere, and newer reactors to keep up with baseline demand.
> The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses.
That is indeed the main problem. We have solved a lot of issues in half a century.
I believe we passed the point where solar with storage is better. It's certainly faster and easier to deploy, but now it's apparently also cheaper per produced Wh than nuclear even accounting for a mere 30% efficiency from the storage "detour".
Solar has kept falling in price this year as well, while nuclear is always revealed to be more expensive every time a new study is made.
The cost of storage isn't just the conversion losses. You also need the storage hardware, and for it to have enough capacity for an extended period of low generation.
Once you convert heating systems to electric to stop burning fossil fuels, what do you do during winter when it's cold, the days are short and it's cloudy and calm for a week?
No one seems to be able to answer this, and the closest I've seen is something like "keep all of the existing natural gas plants operational and use them to burn hydrogen instead, but only when renewable generation is low." Which is just preposterously expensive -- you'd have to maintain an entire redundant set of generating plants that you hardly ever use and that themselves cost almost as much as nuclear power plants do.
But that is still less expensive than trying to build a week's worth of storage capacity using something like lithium batteries. And both of them have the problem that you have to choose in advance how much storage capacity to build, but if you build too much you've doubled your costs and if you build too little then people freeze to death.
That is also included in the estimates of course and solar+storage is still cheaper.
Solar is so cheap that individuals are themselves paying to get it on the roofs of their homes and get returns from the investments inside a quarter of the life expectancy of the panels despite being taxed on everything involved, sometimes even the production of electricity.
Small communities have made off-grid hydrogen fuel stations, including electrolyzers and storage. It's so cheap that basically anyone can do it. Certainly any corporation that is making money can do it, and will do it, as soon as they realize it's cheaper than grid-electricity.
>"keep all of the existing natural gas plants operational and use them to burn hydrogen instead, but only when renewable generation is low." Which is just preposterously expensive
Any gas plant still being operational would be running all the time and be part of the base supply just like it is today. You would mix hydrogen in with the natural gas gradually as production capacity is increased, so for the first 100s of TWh you wouldn't even need to invest in anything but hydrogen production.
Compared to replacing the same amount of energy with nuclear it will be very cheap, maybe orders of magnitude cheaper.
Ironically that's also the main problem I see with it - there are many large power plant investments already made that will become unprofitable if solar+storage starts dictating the price of electricity, not just nuclear. There are many laws in many countries that only exist to make it hard for private actors to produce their own electricity.
I don't believe that it is.
> Solar is so cheap that individuals are themselves paying to get it on the roofs of their homes and get returns from the investments inside a quarter of the life expectancy of the panels despite being taxed on everything involved, sometimes even the production of electricity.
Because they have free land (existing empty roof) and are using grid power from nuclear and fossil fuels whenever the sun isn't shining. Everybody knows solar is cheaper during the day, the question is how do you heat your house at night.
> Small communities have made off-grid hydrogen fuel stations, including electrolyzers and storage. It's so cheap that basically anyone can do it.
It's cheap in the sense that you can build one at small scale. How much is it to build 500GW worth of capacity and then store enough hydrogen to run it for ten days straight?
> Any gas plant still being operational would be running all the time and be part of the base supply just like it is today.
Not if its purpose is to supply power during periods of low generation.
Suppose you have a bunch of wind turbines that on average generate 500 GW of power. Sometimes it's 950 GW, sometimes it's 50 GW. Then you have 500 GW of average demand.
When they generate in excess of demand you want to use the excess to produce hydrogen. Okay, fine, but that's about half the time, so already your combustion-based power plants are operating at most at half duty cycle.
But the renewable output is more of a bell curve. The midpoint is 500GW but 450GW or 550GW are way more common than 950GW or 50GW. The problem is you still need enough generating capacity for when it's 50GW. You have to maintain 450GW of alternate capacity even though you don't need the majority of it except for on rare occasions.
> You would mix hydrogen in with the natural gas gradually as production capacity is increased, so for the first 100s of TWh you wouldn't even need to invest in anything but hydrogen production.
Constructing the existing plants is a sunk cost but that doesn't mean it wasn't a cost. You still have to maintain them and build new ones as they age out, you can't recover the cost of the land by selling it. And you could get a similar efficiency by converting the existing sites to nuclear, reusing the land and steam-to-power generating equipment and grid connection. But then you get power ~100% of the time because the fuel cost is negligible.
> Ironically that's also the main problem I see with it - there are many large power plant investments already made that will become unprofitable if solar+storage starts dictating the price of electricity, not just nuclear. There are many laws in many countries that only exist to make it hard for private actors to produce their own electricity.
The real problem here is that if you did a straight free market design, the result would be that power is very cheap 95% of the time and then costs multiple dollars per kWh during extended periods of low generation. That would allow long-term storage technologies and reliable generation methods to recover their costs from the times they're most needed, and use pricing to suppress demand when supply is low.
But then instead of having a $100/month electric bill, people would pay $20/month eleven months out of the year and then the month when there isn't enough capacity it would be $1000, unless they can severely limit their use during that time, which generally means something like turning down their thermostat in the winter. Which, of course, people hate.
The alternative is to have the power company smooth it out, so you always pay $100/month and they take the extra $80 most months to build nuclear reactors that can supply reliable power. In the end it comes out about the same but then people don't get a huge surprise bill once in a while.
>Not if its purpose is to supply power during periods of low generation.
The purpose is to convert intermittent energy to stable energy. Whenever there is a surplus, it is balanced by producing gas. Whenever there is a shortage, you burn the gas.
The idea is to reach a balance, where we produce the same amount of gas that we need during a year. The storage only needs to cover a worst-case scenario of cloudy days with no wind, which is far less than many countries are already storing today.
>The real problem here is that if you did a straight free market design, the result would be that power is very cheap 95% of the time and then costs multiple dollars per kWh during extended periods of low generation.
No, since the energy in this scenario is stable 24/7 and for as many days as we are able to store gas, the price will be stable as well. And it is this kind of solution (including the cost of building the storage) that has recently been estimated to be cheaper than any other source of stable energy, even fossil fuels. Certainly Nuclear, which is estimated to be more expensive than any previous estimates have indicated.
The important thing to keep in mind is that once this storage infrastructure has been built, it will be a gift for future generations comparable to hydropower. the cost of the dam was paid by our ancestors and we've enjoyed cheap energy for most of our lives from some of them. Gas production and storage has the same property. It is an investment that will pay dividends for centuries.
Nuclear has the opposite property - we are today paying for plants that are no longer producing any energy, and we still have no end in sight for that cost. I can't see that as anything but a very poor gift to our children and a very bad investment at this point in time.
Keep some amount of fossil backup for emergencies, and interconnect (eg, with HVDC). The US for instance is huge, and the chances of wind not blowing anywhere in it are essentially zero.
If say, Washington is suddenly devoid of sun and wind, there's a lot of places around it could buy power from. And be the seller when the reverse happens.
This is the "keep maintaining the existing natural gas plants even though they're hardly ever used" which is unreasonably expensive.
> interconnect (eg, with HVDC). The US for instance is huge, and the chances of wind not blowing anywhere in it are essentially zero.
Weather is regional. You could very easily have calm air in an entire region of the country for an extended period of time. Even if you had long-distance transmission, where do you get the capacity? The generators in another party of the country still have to satisfy the same load they normally do.
And the generators in another part of the country would be a different kind -- you would use a higher proportion of solar in the US southwest and a higher proportion of wind in the midwest. If it's calm in winter in the midwest, you need power for heating at night and solar generators in the Mojave with short winter days aren't going to do it. And the reverse when there isn't enough generation for the air conditioning load in the south in the summer.
To actually do this you would have to massively overbuild generating capacity of the type opposite what that region is suited for, specifically to satisfy the demand in another part of the country on rare occasions, and build and maintain thousands of miles of HVDC lines that are hardly ever used. With enough redundancy that you don't shut off power to half the country if a truck veers off the highway and crashes into one.
This is supposed to be the cheapest option?
You use the gas or battery storage that you have created locally close to where you are. Since it's cheap even at small scale. People with solar panels and some modern EV's with V2G can already go 24/7 (for a day or so anyway).
I think you underestimate the power in small scale in large numbers. Solar power in Germany increased by the equivalent of one nuclear reactor in just one year. By comparison, the latest nuclear reactor built in Europe took 14 years.
It seems overwhelmingly likely that local battery storage will develop similarly, meaning that nations will get several TWh of storage from companies and individuals adding batteries to their homes and businesses. Modern EV's can power a home for at least 24 hours already.
>To actually do this you would have to massively overbuild generating capacity of the type opposite what that region is suited for,
Certainly not - every region has their own storage and can overprovision whatever makes the most sense where they are.
edit: typo
Not all of them. A small fraction.
> Weather is regional. You could very easily have calm air in an entire region of the country for an extended period of time. Even if you had long-distance transmission, where do you get the capacity?
From other regions with different weather patterns.
> And the generators in another part of the country would be a different kind -- you would use a higher proportion of solar in the US southwest and a higher proportion of wind in the midwest.
Exactly, you build in each place what it's best suited for.
> If it's calm in winter in the midwest, you need power for heating at night and solar generators in the Mojave with short winter days aren't going to do it.
So you pull from the rest of the country as well. That's what a national grid is for.
Every place ends up with some capacity to overproduce, so when a given region has 50% of what it needs, it pulls 10% from 5 places each.
> To actually do this you would have to massively overbuild generating capacity of the type opposite what that region is suited for
Why opposite?
> This is supposed to be the cheapest option?
Sure. Renewables are cheaper than nuclear. So overbuilding solar and wind is still cost competitive. At this point solar is less than half the price of nuclear. Which means if you thought nuclear is a good idea, then overbuilding solar still saves you money.
As for baseload (which I assume is what you are referring to here), that seems to be an elusive concept that is just never expressed in twh. Because as soon as you do that, you can start imagining all sorts of alternative and much cheaper, practical, less hand wavy, and faster ways of getting that capacity in place than building actual nuclear plants at scale.
I mean, how many nuclear plants do we actually need? 2, 5, 200? At least put a number on it. Do we need any plants at all? Nobody seems to know this or want to talk about this in any level of detail that you could use to actually start planning some budgets for this. It's just presumed lazily that we need unspecified (typically to the extent of committing nontrivial percentages of the world's GDP to this) amounts of it to ensure our anxiety levels stay within acceptable range. It's completely irrational at this point.
Meanwhile, the amount of wind and solar coming online keeps beating expectations and battery production is ramping up from gwh scale to twh scale per year. It's the only practical alternative that exists to nuclear right now. And it's being done at a ridiculous scale because it's an order of magnitude or two cheaper (and dropping further). To make a dent into that, you need a lot of nuclear plants at this point for it to even matter and at a much lower cost than most nuclear proponents seem willing to entertain. I don't see that happening really. Doubling or quadrupling the amount of renewables + battery seems much easier, doable, and cheaper at this point. Especially if it needs to be done in a timely fashion.
Others types of power plants slowly hurt people or the environment even if mistakes don't happen.
One can get a handle on the magnitude of this issue by looking at the cost per person killed. Typically, policy decisions on this are based on the statistical value of a human life, which is somewhere around $9M/life.
If you use that value, then the extra "life value cost" from renewables is orders of magnitude below their direct cost. So it makes no sense to use a more expensive energy source than renewables just because you've been convinced renewables are too unsafe.
I agree. But it does make sense to use nuclear for other practical reasons. It works well for fulfilling base load. Renewables are great but transmission and storage is a bitch for those which are not dispatchable.
Where nuclear shines is in replacing other base loads, like coal.
At this point, pro-nuclear thinking is increasingly magical in nature. New reactor types will solve everything, never mind they can't be on the market for a very long time.
Update: it was $12.5M in 2022.
Also, let’s not forget about Hanford site, which was part of the US nuclear program
I'm not really concerned with the events of the Soviet/Russian navy, as they are not the ones regulating anything that concerns me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_(nerve_agent)#Worldwide_sto...