It appears that Wired has stirred up the containment chamber with its glowing prospectus for a resurrection of the nuclear power industry,
Nuclear Now!
Here at dKos, Lipris diaried on the article with this Science Friday edition. At Liberal Street Fight joelmakower said No Nukes is Good Nukes
Welp, the posts and some follow-up comments brought out the Yankee Curmudgeon. I've been fighting these utility companies for nigh on 25 years now, and I had quite a bit to say on those threads, which I've put together to give just a few of the reasons the Yankee Curmudgeon says "No Nukes!" On the tother side.
In response to first reading at LSF:
Wow. Where do I start?
I've noticed the renewed push for nuclear power, it shows up regularly over at dKos as well.
I was active in the anti-nuclear power movement of the late 70s and early 80s, most directly with the Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance. In fact that was the one time in my years of activism I became hired staff (peanuts, but paid nonetheless.)
What bothers me, what leaves me suspicious, is that many of the so-called progressives pushing a renewed nuclear power program engage in many of the same misleading statements that were characteristic of industry propaganda more than a quarter century ago. Most notably, complaints about any subsidies for renewables, while conveniently ignoring the vast subsidies (usually hidden) that extend the length of the nuclear fuel cycle, and the lifetime of a plant--and beyond.
Let's start with the Price-Anderson Act:
The Act requires that nuclear reactor owners obtain $200 million in insurance liability coverage from a private insurer, referred to as primary financial protection. One company Connecticut-based American Nuclear Insurers provides 100 percent of this primary financial protection. In the event of an accident that exceeds $200 million in damages, all 103 nuclear reactor operators in America must pay up to $88 million per reactor to cover costs meaning the potential total insurance pool financed by private interests is $9.3 billion ($200 million primary financial protection + $88 million from each of the 103 reactor operators)...
In the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, the federally-funded Sandia National Laboratory prepared a report on behalf of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). This 1982 study estimated that damages from a severe nuclear accident could run as high as $314 billion or more than $560 billion in 2000 dollars. Since that study, the NRC has developed "more realistic" modeling improvements to the agency s probabilistic risk assessment. A review of their 1982 study "found that property damages would be twice as much as those calculated in 1982, solely on the basis of the modeling improvements made." In addition, the Chernobyl catastrophe has cost the nations of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus $358 billion. This Chernobyl total, however, is vastly understated, since it does not attempt to estimate the costs to other nations, which also experienced health costs from the far-reaching nuclear fallout.
Therefore, the $9.3 billion provided by private insurance and nuclear reactor operators represents less than two percent of the $560 billion in potential costs of a major nuclear accident. Since the nuclear reactor operators have their liability capped through Price Anderson, that means taxpayers would be responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars in costs from a foul-up by a private corporation or a terrorist attack.
That's right, hundreds of billions in contingent taxpayer liability. If nuclear power is such a "free-market" solution, why doesn't it require that plant operators bear the insurance costs associated with their operation? Oh right, because that one cost alone would reveal nuclear power to be hideously uncompetitive in any genuine free-market analysis.
Let's talk about the back-end of the fuel cycle and plant operation. There's no way to properly amortize the costs of permanent waste disposal and reactor decommissioning because no one has a clue what the real costs will be for any particular reactor--no two situations will be the same. The NRC estimates that decommissioning costs should be 10-15% of original construction costs, and this is the principle used by plant operators to budget their decommissioning "sinking funds." But, how does that stack up in the few cases where commercial sized plants have actually been decommissioned? Well, let's try the Maine Yankee plant at Wiscasset, ME, where decommissioning is fully under way:
In January 2002 Maine Yankee put the total decommissioning cost at $635 million. Low-level waste burial was $81.5 million of that amount; packaging and shipping accounted for another $26.8 million. Expenses at other plants should be in the same range. These are prodigious numbers compared with the $231 million that the plant cost to build in the 1960s and 1970s.
Some quick, back of the envelope (literally in this case) math suggests then that the cost of decommissioning Maine Yankee is then 275% of original construction cost, so this practical real-world example shows that the NRC formula "underestimated" the cost of decommissioning that reactor by a factor of 18 to 27 times the estimated amount. Someone will have to bear those costs, most likely the ratepayers of the utilities that formerly purchased power from Maine Yankee--hundreds of millions of dollars in rate hikes for a rather small commercial plant--that no longer is producing power for those ratepayers! Some free market.
And waste storage? The first thing I learned in my research about Vermont was that at that time, more than 20 years ago, the plant was already holding in its spent fuel pool more retired fuel rods than the pool had been designed to hold in the first place. The NRC routinely approves "reconfigurations" of the architecture of the spent fuel pools to allow ever-increasing amounts of high-level wastes to accumulate in the on-site spent fuel pools. Under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act--adopted under the "free market" Reagan administration--it is "government" (read: taxpayer) responsibility to provide for the final disposal of all radwastes, bearing all costs beyond a set assessment on nuclear utilities set forth in the 1982 act. The government disposal assessments have collected about $15 billion for the Nuclear Waste Fund, but there are two problems:
- Due to the extraordinary difficulties in finding and developing a permanent repository, nuclear utilities have filed billions of dollars of claims against the fund to pay for the costs of maintaining their on-site spent fuel pools beyond the original projected repository date of 1998.
- Almost since its outset, the money allegedly in the Nuclear Waste Fund has been treated as moneys in the Social Security Fund--they've been taken from the fund and applied against budget deficits, so as with Social Security there is no real money in the NWF, just a bunch of IOUs. Free marketers are usually quick to point out just this sort of sleight-of-hand in government accounting as a reason to avoid government economic intervention. Then why were the "free market" champions in such a hurry back in the early 80s to shift this responsibility to government? To me, it's self-explanatory, this is another cost that the nuclear industry wanted to avoid, as it would further emphasize the economic non-competitiveness of nuclear power.
I'm not even going to get into the environmental and social considerations of permanent waste disposal, except to note that a half-life of plutonium is approximately 24,000 years, and that it would be several half-lives before the plutonium disposed of today could be reduced sufficiently to allow escape into the environment. That means that the repository must be maintained and protected for tens of thousands of years, and I'm not sure that there are many human institutions with that kind of durability. The closest thing we have are religous orders, there will need to be some kind of nuclear "priesthood" that will be responsible for securing repositories for hundreds of generations to come.
OK, let's go over to the flip-side: so-called "non-competitive" renewable alternatives. In comparison to just the nuclear subsidies I have examined above (and there are several others), the tax break embodied in the Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit pales, according to the [Congressional Research Service (pdf) http://bennelson.senate.gov/Crs/RenewableEnergy.pdf] this credit of 1.8 cents per kWh has a ten-year total subsidy of about $3 billion, or $300 million a year.
The cost of alternatives, particularly wind power production, has declined precipitously, to the point where the small subsidy provided by the Renewable Energy Tax Credit is decisive. This is illustrated by the pattern shown in this graph
of newly-installed wind capacity in the US. As it shows, the government has repeatedly allowed the REPTC credit to expire, and the impact has been decisive. This pattern of repeatedly allowing the credit to expire is counter-productive to the entire idea of the subsidy, to create a stabilizing marketplace where economies of scale in the fabrication of wind turbines can develop, the final stage in bringing wind power to full parity, and thus, full free-market cometitiveness.
Maybe at some future date we can also discuss the usefulness of wind power as a second income stream for farmland owners in the great plains.
Fun index of US wind power projects
This drew a response from Markinsanfran
So the curmudgeon kept going:
The construction cost is not the proper metric for comparison
Well, I'm not the one that chose that metric, the NRC did; I simply tested their proposition as they had presented it. I leave it to you to draw your own inferences as to what I found, as you see the numbers are all sourced.
The time frame in which wind and solar now become fully competitive, if the industrial economies of scale can be developed with a stable REPTC is about as long as it would take just the siting process of a new generation of nuclear reactors. Back in 1980, they said that solar and wind were about 25 or 30 years off--turns out the experts were pretty much right. I hated that at the time, I had ridiculous visions of doing it by 1990. It seemed to never pick up momentum. But that changed in the late 90s. Finally we're pretty much there, the fact that a $.018/kWh credit is sufficient to drive gigawatt annual new installation right now means that by 2010 we're home. Getting those nukes? 2010 will find a whole lot of communities not wanting a nuke.
There are other huge advantages in having a decentralized, distributed power production grid. One reason your bill is so high is that power plants of all kinds have to go down for servicing on a regular schecdule, not to mention emergency shutdowns. When you have a big 1000MW reactor go down for servicing, you need 1000MW of additional capacity to come online, large backup capacity.
Now say you have a 200MW wind farm, consisting of 100 turbines. Yah, each of those turbines will need annual servicing as well. But you only have to be able to back up 2MW each time.
Additional benefit: the reindustrialization of America. Someone's going to fully grasp the potential money to be madde and jobs to be created as this industry begins to break out, and it's right there opn the cusp. America was the leader inn the wind industry certainly through the 80s, maybe even the early 90s. But just as the necessary materials science breakthroughs were being made, we took our eye off the ball. Fossil fuels became relatively cheap again so America stopped looking for a way off the petrojunk. And the Euros didn't hesitate, the German engineering firm ABB is undoubtedly the world's leading installer of wind turbines.
Making wind turbines, and also other technologies such as solar furnaces that double as water distillation systems will find ready export markets. Somebody will be making these things. These industries will be high value added manufacturing, the kind of jobs that pay well, provide benefits, yknow, the kind we don't get our working class anymore. We've come near to endangering our world position as manufacturer of anything. This should be our home run, we're the ones with the greatest potential internal market to build on, we were the leaders in this industry for many years and there are still strong US presences in the industry.
Further benefit. The breadbasket is also the windbasket. Minnesota, Iowa, The Dakotas, Texas have enormous numbers of higly desireable windpower production areas. Many farmers are finding that by leasing 25 1/2-acre peices scattered over their 1200 acres to a production utility for wind turbines, they can pull in an extra $30-50,000 a year. Others go the route of outright buying their own, which averaged out covers their own needs and sells a little bit back to the grid. Either way this creates a second income stream for farmers. It comes too late for all but the vestiges of the family farm, but the success stories with this repeat over and over. So this isn't the future, this is now. And for what's left of the family farm, right now matters.
I don't know how long you've been around this issue, or what your overall political perspectives are. I've been involved with or at least tracking these issues for a quarter century, and through that period of time I've always been what you might call a progressive populist. I need to point some things out that if you're young you may not be aware of, and not to condescend if you know this stuff, but I don't know. If you're a progressive, you're going to find yourself with some unusual allies in taking a pro-nuclear stand. First, let's look at the industry. Who manufactures nuclear plants anyway? Well, historically there were two main nukemakers, Westinghouse and GE. Westinghouse built the pressurized water reactor, GE the boiling water reactor. Now, I don't know if Westinghouse is even in a position to be a player on this anymore. GE most certainly is. As is the contractor GE traditionally used to build the plants, Bechtel.
Oh--let's take a trip down TV memory lane. In the late 50s and early 60s, GE engaged on a sustained national sales pitch for its reactors. Advertising, lobbying, PR events, the works. As the sponsor of the popular NBC series Death Valley Days, GE hired the host of the show to go on the rubber chicken circuit around the country selling nuclear reactors. It was something the fading star took to like a fish to water, and Ronald Reagan found his second act.
Now I mentioned that Bechtel was the GC to GE on the BWRs while Reagan was out flacking for them. Curiously enough, two executives of Bechtel were named George Schulz and Caspar Weinberger. Let's see, so the nuclear industry, GE, Bechtel, NBC, the entire Reagan Administration (it's amazing, even Philip Habib was at Bechtel, it was a breeding ground for Reaganauts.) Note any patterns here yet? Damn the only thing missing is Halliburton--although if I'm not mistaken, Halliburton gobbled up the GC that built the Westinghouse plants.
Unfortunately, those aren't the worst of your friends on the pro-nuke position. Sorry, Who is this man?
Hint: he has an organization that militantly supports nuclear power; he also believes the Queen of England is a drug dealer. Victim of persecution.
So, those are the advocates of nuclear power, the corporate oligarchy and the Larouchies. You have to understand there was a reason no more nukes got built after the 70s. The American people chose then that we weren't going further down that energy path, believe me, if the right-wing governments we've had since that time didn't know that, there's be a bright spanking new nuke in a Springfield near you.
Now, you might say, oh they're safer now. well, here is what I say to the nuclear industry. If they're so much safer, then you don't need the protection of the Price-Anderson Act anymore, right? Let's thnk about the logic of the Price-Anderson Act for a second. Or wait, let's not, because the only logic is a taxpayer subsidy of potentially enormous degree to an industry that toots its horn about how safe and how economically competitive it is. Show me the economic theory that would endorse an arrangement like that. Ludwig von Mises and Karl Marx would stnand shoulder-to-shoulder in spitting invective at that mutant. Show me the economic competitiveness, let them buy their own damn liability insurance like your family doctor does, OK? I can show you $0.018/kWh from competitiveness with the general market production rate. I want them to buy the $350 billion insurance policy. Then let's see how they compete with wind economically!
Well, I could go on, but it's getting very late. I believe my position is well-founded on a number of grounds. I thought we'd won this battle with corporate America 25 years ago, I guess we have to refight all the old battles. Fortunately this time all we have to do is hold the corporate nuclear family at bay for about another 5 years and we'll be home free. I'm ready for this fight if they want it.
The Yankee Curmudgeon says, "Don't tread on me! No Nukes!"