America's Nuclear Power Plants Are Money Pits

[kristopher]

America's Nuclear Power Plants Are Money Pits

By Ben Richmond

Just like a pet alligator that’s grown too big to flush, America’s maturing nuclear power plants are a lot more work and danger than we thought, according to Mark Cooper's piece in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Cooper says if we had known this from the beginning, we probably shouldn’t have bothered to build the damn things in the first place.

The senior research fellow for economic analysis at the Center for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, Cooper wrote that one-sixth of nuclear reactors that have been active in the United States have been retired early. The plants were built in the 1970s with the promise of providing steady, inexpensive power with minimal up-keep, a notion that Cooper says, has been exposed "as a myth."

Cooper points to plant closings in California and Florida as representatives of a pattern. Utility companies are ill-equipped both in knowledge and funding to deal with the problems that emerge from an aging power plant.

In Florida, Process Energy’s attempt to replace steam generators at the Crystal River nuclear facility resulted in a cracked concrete containment wall. In Southern California, radioactive steam revealed that the new tubes in the San Onofre nuclear plant were wearing down much faster that expected. In both locations, the cost of the problems overran everyone’s expectations and lead to the plant's closure.

Cooper says that utility companies looking to untested solutions to big problems just lead to plants becoming money pits that ultimately have to be closed....

Read more: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/americas-nuclear-power-plants-are-money-pits

[kristopher]

1. The full piece by Cooper available here

http://www.thebulletin.org/nuclear-aging-not-so-graceful

Nuclear aging: Not so graceful
Mark Cooper

The abandonment of aging nuclear reactors—most prominently reactors that need repairs, as is the case at San Onofre in California and Crystal River in Florida, but also at some plants that have simply become uneconomic to operate, like Kewaunee in Wisconsin—has huge implications for resource-acquisition decisions. As the US nuclear fleet ages and the “nuclear renaissance” ballyhooed over the last decade fades into history, having failed to deliver on its promises, these early retirements will be closely scrutinized in regard to decisions about both old and new reactors. The industry is likely to seize on these retirements as justification to get behind the next new nuclear technology, but the lesson they actually teach is quite the opposite. Aging reactors that are too expensive to fix and must be retired before reaching the end of their expected life spans may be not a relic of the past, but an indication of the future. At one time, the nuclear plants now being closed were seen as the future of the electricity-generating industry. They teach a lesson for how the economics of new designs should be evaluated.

Old reactors: Too big to fix. The idea that once nuclear reactors are built, they just hum along, putting out low-cost power with minimum maintenance, is a myth. The life cycle of a nuclear plant is quite complex. While there is a short period of stable, high performance during a reactor’s mature phase, it takes a long period of childhood and adolescent maturation to get to that level, and performance declines as old age sets in. And when they break, nuclear power plants create major problems—not only in the cost of repair, but also in the cost of short-term replacement power.

Because the reactors are so large, utilities lean toward repairing them if at all possible and look for quick fixes. Mid–life-cycle problems at a nuclear plant create an environment for decision making and project implementation that is not unlike the situation that typified the initial US nuclear construction boom in the 1970s.

Stepping back from the details of specific retirement decisions, a pattern can be seen. Parts break as reactors age and need to be repaired. Utilities grab solutions that have not been subjected to full testing and demonstration in the real world—solutions that have a tendency to go bad, as happened at both San Onofre and Crystal River, where efforts to fix an existing problem created even bigger problems. Design changes are made that are not tested in deployment, and significant difficulties result. Uncertainty and escalating costs, coupled with the deteriorating economics of operating inefficient, old reactors, lead to the retirement decision.

Variations on this basic scenario have led to the early retirement of about one-sixth of the nuclear reactors that have been operational in the United States.*

Affixing cost responsibility for broken reactors has become a contentious undertaking, creating arguments over whether ratepayers or shareholders should shoulder repair bills...

http://www.thebulletin.org/nuclear-aging-not-so-graceful

It is worth noting that the nuclear industry refuses to acknowledge the loss of production capacity represented by these early closures. They still claim unrealistically high lifetime capacity factors and unjustifiable low costs based on lifetimes that have not been realized in the aggregate.
Cooper covers these points and more in his article.