Georgia nuclear plant's cost now forecast to top $30 billion
Source: AP
By JEFF AMY
ATLANTA (AP) — A nuclear power plant being built in Georgia is now projected to cost its owners more than $30 billion.
A financial report from one of the owners on Friday clearly pushed the cost of Plant Vogtle near Augusta past that milestone, bringing its total cost to $30.34 billion
That amount doesn’t count the $3.68 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the owners after going bankrupt, which would bring total spending to more than $34 billion.
Vogtle is the only nuclear plant under construction in the United States, and its costs could deter other utilities from building such plants, even though they generate electricity without releasing climate-changing carbon emissions.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry speaks during a press event at the construction site of Vogtle Units 3 and 4 at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, Friday, March 22, 2019 in Waynesboro, Ga. Georgia Power Co.’s parent company announced more cost overruns and schedule delays to the project on Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022. (Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/business-environment-united-states-georgia-atlanta-7555f8d73c46f0e5513c15d391409aa3
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The steel in them would require millions of tons of coal and the trucks to put them in place, and then to haul them away 20 years from now would add millions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
They will be trash, a liability, when today's toddlers will be just graduating from college.
A nuclear power plant will be saving human lives, by contrast, when today's toddlers are grandchildren.
The wind industry is not sustainable; it is not green; and it is a crime against all future generations; so called "renewable energy" is a reactionary scheme because there is a reason that humanity abandoned so called "renewable energy" in the 19th century, most people even more than today, lived short lives of dire poverty.
The great energy thinker Vaclav Smil put it best:
Vaclav Smil: What I See When I See A Wind Turbine.
For the record, humanity spent over 3.233 trillion dollars between 2004 and 2 on wind and solar energy for no result other than carbon dioxide concentrations of 420 ppm:
Recently I updated the expenditure on so called "renewable energy" as we happily run along trashing huge stretches of wilderness, rendering them into industrial parks to serve the clearly failed rhetoric of anti-nukes.
Source: UNEP/Bloomberg: Global Trends in Renewable Energy.
I manually entered the figures in the bar graph in figure 8 to see how much money we've thrown at this destructive affectation since 2004 (up to 2019): It works out to 3.2633 trillion dollars, more than President Biden has wisely recommended for the improvement of all infrastructure in the entire United States.
The United States once built over 100 nuclear reactors in 20 to 25 years while providing the lowest energy prices in the world. China built 56 of them in this century.
If we can't do this now, maybe we should look in the mirror and ask ourselves why we have allowed our contempt for engineering and science fall so low that we now cannot do what other countries do easily and what engineers working with slide rules were able to build reactors that modern Americans with advanced computers cannot do.
Nuclear power saves lives: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
The wind and solar industry, by contrast, have saved the dangerous fossil fuel industry.
If, on the other hand, one waves one's hand, makes a specious lazy calculation and doesn't consider that the wind industry is a worthless fantasy that produces, "count 'em" after half a century of cheering, 5.7 Exajoules:
Source: IEA World Energy Outlook, 2021, page 294, Table A1A
The question, glib handwaving aside is how much energy would 10,000 wind turbines produce, even if one ignores the concrete, the copper, the lanthanides isolated, and - all the back up for this crap, etc., etc. when the wind doesn't blow, ignored 100% of time, and the cost of hauling the wind junk away when it becomes landfill in 20 years.
Maybe I can help anyone who can't understand exactly how useless 10,000 wind turbines and how many would be required if wind power were scaled to obscene levels, industrializing vast stretches of benthic and terrestrial ecosystems.
You see, I have analyzed, in depth how much energy all the wind turbines in that offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole Denmark produces from wind energy after having built 9,740 Wind Turbines over a period beginning in 1978, which is just shy of half a century ago: The data links can be found in my post here: The Growth Rate of the Danish Wind Industry As Compared to the New Finnish EPR Nuclear Reactor.
9,740 is happily very close to 10,000 wind turbines. Of the 9,740 wind turbines, 3,440 of them have been decommissioned, the decommissioned turbines having had an average lifetime of 17 years and 316 days. This suggests that all of the wind turbines in Denmark will need to be replaced regularly, which has an implication on their mass intensity that cannot be addressed with a lazy (unreferenced) comparison to the weight steel of cars to the mass of steel in 10,000 wind turbines, since to match a nuclear plant that will operate for 60 years, 30,000, not 10,000 wind turbines would be required, spread over vast sand or sea areas serviced by huge diesel trucks or huge diesel barges. (Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!)
An excerpt from that post:
The spreadsheet has two tabs, one of which is for existing reactors (the Danish word seems to be a sort of double negative, ikke-afmeldte, "non-decommissioned" ) and the other for decommissioned wind turbines (afmeldte). The spreadsheet is labeled in both English and Danish. There is probably a reason for the use of the double negative term "ikke-afmeldte," as opposed for the Danish word for existent, eksisterende. (No, I am never going to try to read Kierkegaard in the original Danish.) As of January 2022, the last data entry for the performance of existent wind turbines in Denmark, 134 of the 6,296 ikke-afmeldte ("non-decommissioned" ) wind turbines in Denmark produced zero electricity. Perhaps there is some hope of repairing some of these: For example, the ikke-afmeldte 11 kW wind turbine connected to the grid in November 1979 produced zero electricity in 2006 and 2007, and 1 kWh in 2008, and nothing since. I assume it's not been decommissioned because it's being allowed to rot in place; it is now 42 years old. It is the second oldest ikke-afmeldte wind turbine in Denmark. The oldest, a 400 kW turbine located at Madum by, Madum is operating, but it's a decrepit old thing. It's capacity utilization in the very windy month of January 2022 was a mere 4.33%. It is almost to the point of rotting in place as much as those producing zero electricity are also rotting in place.
It is well known that wind turbine performance degrades with age; the reason is aerodynamic. The tangential velocity of a rotating wind turbine blade, particularly a large blade, is rather high, on the order of hundreds of meters per second - translating into hundreds of miles per hour - and at these speeds, the polymer coatings on wind turbine blades can be shattered by the momentum of - believe it or not - rain drops, spewing microplastics into the air...
As noted in the post, after the construction of 9,740 wind turbines constructed over 44 years, 3,444 of which are landfill or rotting in place, Denmark produced 57.96 PetaJoules of energy, 0.058 exajoules. Thus to scale to the 29.4 Exajoules that nuclear energy produced in 2020 in an atmosphere of contempt by wind advocates, one would need to build - if they perform as Denmark's have - roughly 29.4/0.058 * 9740 = 4,940,400 wind turbines, roughly, replacing all of them every 20 years.
And the issue isn't just steel, lazy calculations aside.
Like I said, I don't wave my hands, I read the scientific literature, whether or not someone is inclined to insult me by comparing me to a hyperbolic antinuke.
Here in the literature, from the anti-nuke Benjamin Sovacool, who I consider to be an asshole, writing in Science: Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future
I'm very proud of little Bennie. He seems to have discovered, in spite of himself, that the batteries that he and his fellow asses want to bet the planetary atmosphere involves human slavery.
Many of the minerals and metals needed for low-carbon technologies are considered “critical raw materials” or “technologically critical elements,” terms meant to capture the fact that they are not only of strategic or economic importance but also at higher risk of supply shortage or price volatility (8). But their mining can produce grave social risks. A majority of the world's cobalt, used in the most common battery chemistries for EVs and stationary electricity storage, is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (see the map), a country struggling to recover from years of armed conflict. There, women and sometimes children often work in or around mines for less pay or status than their male and adult counterparts, without basic safety equipment (see the photo). Owing to a lack of preventative strategies and measures such as drilling with water and proper exhaust ventilation, many cobalt miners have extremely high levels of toxic metals in their body and are at risk of developing respiratory illness, heart disease, or cancer...
Don't worry, be happy though. Little Bennie has a solution, the "forty acres and a mule" solution, wherein the cobalt warlords free the slaves and make them into "artisanal miners."
Traditional labor-intensive mechanisms of mining that are possible to undertake with less mechanization and without major capital investments are called artisanal and smallscale mining (ASM). Although ASM is not immune from poor governance or environmental harm, it provides livelihood potential for at least 40 million people worldwide, with an additional three to five times more people indirectly supported by the sector (10).
Why, he's even discovered that he cares about (gasp) pollution as we move to the renewable nirvana that is no problem however, which he graciously considers will apply to the "forty acres and a mule" slaves he expects to liberate to build electric cars and big utility scale mountains of batteries so we can all feel "green."
Earlier in this abysmally oblivious piece little Benny writes:
(He also writes about (gasp) dysprosium for control rods for nuclear reactors, which of course, indicates that he knows next to nothing about nuclear engineering, hardly a surprise.)
Bennie is willing to "go green" by tearing into the ocean floor:
I'm sure he knows just how to get the energy to mine the ocean floor too, wind powered clipper ships perhaps?
Now, I note the effort to insult me by comparing me to hyperbolic an anti-nuke, and appreciate it that, while apparently not bothering to think on any profound level about what one is saying, it is acknowledged that anti-nukes are hyperbolic.
People are dying in India and Pakistan today from extreme heat, but "FUKUSHIMA!"
I couldn't care less, however.
Turn around is fair play:
Building 10,000 wind turbines, which Denmark has almost done is a useless exercise, worthless, and it won't do anything to address climate change. The question isn't how much junk 10,000 wind turbines represent, nor even how much former wilderness has to be industrialized and laced with asphalt access roads to site them, the question is whether they are worth anything.
There are people - I call them "environmentalists," - who think that maybe, just maybe, cars have been bad for the environment. The idea that wind turbines, that are useless, are OK, because cars are also OK is frankly - and I'm only speaking for myself here - rather obscene given the state of the planet.
Whether or not I'm being "hyperbolic" I consider a comparison cars and wind turbines rather glib, disingenuous to the point of ethical indifference.
Like I said, I access the scientific literature regularly and even if I bought into the unrreferenced claim that a wind turbine has "only" 160-250 tons of steel, there are thousands of publications on critical materials and their energy cost. Here's just one, not even behind a firewall:
Vidal, O., Goffé, B. & Arndt, N. Metals for a low-carbon society. Nature Geosci 6, 894–896 (2013)
I quote:
I note that if it were easy to close material cycles, we'd be doing it now. We aren't. We pretend we're going to do it someday but meanwhile, the world is falling apart.
One can, of course, be as glib and as intellectually lazy as one wishes and say that wind turbines are green, because cars are green, but I reserve the right to regard such commentary as oblivious.
If it now takes the US, 30 billion dollars to build a single nuclear reactor when engineers with slide rules in the same country built 100 of them in 25 years 40 years ago while providing the lowest priced electricity in the industrialized world, this using technology developed in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and when China has built reactors at a pace of about 3 per year in this century with the rate accelerating, this is a problem with the US intellectual and industrial infrastructure, not the technology itself.
Have a nice evening.
Wind farms on average, put out MW's that are a fraction of their 'capacity'. Obviously what the fraction is depends on a huge number of factors but I guess the operators are pretty pleased with 25% of 'capacity' being output on average.
However, an NPP can spin up and down (roughly) on demand, as opposed to a wind farm where you're at the mercy of ... well, nature. And there's obviously no guarantee that 'when the public needs more power' significantly correlates to 'when the wind farm is producing more power'. And 'making power on demand' is highly important to the overall equation at play.
There's also land-use requirements. 10,000 functional windmills require VASTLY more land than an NPP. How much does it cost to buy that much land? How many trees must be chopped down? How much work needs to be done across that HUGE tract of land to make it suitable for a wind farm? And consider that ALL 10,000 windmills ... need a road that goes to them so they can be serviced. And how much petroleum will you burn in order to do that servicing?
And there's the question of whether there's any locale that's remotely near the population being serviced ... that's also suitable for a GIANT wind farm site. The further away the energy source is away from the consumer, the more energy you lose due to entropy during its transport. You might be able to build an NPP 5 miles out of town, but the nearest suitable site for a 10,000 windmill site might be 30, 50, 100 miles from where the power is needed.
And lastly, there's the question of how long windmills last compared to NPP's. The answer to which is ... significantly shorter.
IOW, no offense, yours appears to be a rudimentary-at-best comparison, to the point that it's actually kinda useless. 
Look at Fukushima (from a safe distance, of course):
Take a look at this coal plant accident:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill
You can't even blame this coal accident on a tsunami.
That doesn't include all the toxic shit and greenhouse gasses spewed by fossil fuel plants in normal operation.
Nuclear fission’s object, er, at least the unclassified one, is to heat water to a boil in order to spin a turbine and generate a current. That is the only good the reason for all the uranium, plutonium, etc., that we can’t properly dispose of and makes people ill for hundreds of thousands of years, along with the myriad resources, byproducts, and associated costs. The other reasons for all that, the bad reasons, are to make a buck and to build bigger guns.
Fukushima, Plutonium, CIA, and the BFEE: Deep Doo-Doo Four Ways to Doomsday
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1002794278