True price of UK's nuclear legacy: £160bn

[jpak]

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article355080.ece

The true cost of cleaning up Britain's nuclear legacy is more than twice the70bn figure given out by the radioactive clean-up body this week.

On Thursday, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the body set up to clean up the UK's nuclear sites, increased its estimate of how much it would need by 14bn to70bn.

However, this giant figure is only around half of what will be required. It excludes decommissioning British Energy's seven nuclear power stations, the first of which is due to close in 2011, dealing with the Ministry of Defence's nuclear sites and the long-term storage of the waste. Adding those all in would bring the total cost to around160bn.

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Its various options - from surface storage to a deep geological repository - have been priced by the committee at between 7bn and 30bn. Adding all those estimates together comes to a worst-case scenario of160bn to deal with all the outstanding nuclear issues.

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[Greeby]

1. May I be the first to say

We'll put up with it, as long as you do it, dammit! :grr:

[Taxloss]

2. Ah yes, "too cheap to meter".

Looks pretty freakin' pricey to me.

[phantom power]

3. Not really. The cost of the world's energy infrastructure is...

many trillions of dollars. That is also the cost to replace this infrastructure with anything new. A few hundred billion is a small portion of that.

[JohnWxy]

4. What infrastructure will need to be replaced as we go to Wind Power?

We will be hooking into existing power transmission lines for quite some time to come. If you are talking about Nuclear Power's infrastructure, that is the nuclear plants, they will have to be decommissioned at some time anyway (what's the average productive life of a nuclear power plant 25 yrs? - some have been shut down for safety reasons much sooner than that). So that's a cost we built in for ourselves when we built the nuclear power plants.

So what are we replacing? Adding to yes (you can't build Wind Turbines for nothing) but what is being replaced that wouldn't have had to be decommissioned (at enormous cost) anyway?

[phantom power]

5. By "replace" I mean "replace existing energy sources."

For example, decomission coal plants and replace them with {x}. My point is, whatever {x} is, it will cost trillions to build it.

[JohnWxy]

6. as it will cost trillions to build more nuclear reactors and decommission

them in the future, as well as monitor all the nuclear waste generated. The post to which you were reasponding was talking about the costs of nuclear. Nuclear plants will have to be decommissioned whether or not we continue on to Wind power. It's not appropriate to apply the cost of decommmissioning nuclear plants as an opportunity cost to investing in Wind power - or any other source of energy, for that matter.

[phantom power]

7. Yes, I agree that investing in nuclear will cost trillions.

I guess the original point I was trying to make is that when I hear a figure of 160-billion for one aspect of nuclear plant lifecycles, I don't get especially worked up over it, because it's such a small fraction of the total picture.

The migration away from fossil fuels is going to cost trillions, regardless of how it is accomplished. I can propose nuclear power, wind power, solar power, tidal power, geothermal power, biomass power, or any combination of the above, and the cost of implementing that proposal on a scale required to replace fossil fuels will have twelve zeros after it. If we're talking about the entire planet, it's probably thirteen zeros.

Now, different proposals will cost different numbers of trillions. I think that would be a useful discussion, although it's not an easy discussion to have, since that level of detail isn't easy to forsee.

I should stress the fact that implementing conservation measures, simplifying our lives, reducing our standard of living, etc, will inevitably reduce the total cost of making this transition, but maintaining a supply of energy necessary to provide a decent standard of living for all people is not going to turn this into a "100-billion" class of problem.

It's trillions any way you slice it. Unless we continue fooling around, in which case climate change will kill so many of us that providing energy to the survivors will either be much cheaper, or completely irrelevent because the required levels of technology for things like electricity won't survive the disaster.

[JohnWxy]

11. wind power cheapest alternative:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=48480&mesg_id=48480

Forn THE U.S. the estimates annual for keeping the nucleaar experiment giong are over $10 Billion per year. (various web sites (will provide later).

[NNadir]

8. Imagine that, just 3 billion pounds a year. That's incredibly cheap.

And this includes all of the war waste too!

Since nuclear power plants have been operating in the UK since 1954, this is an incredible bargain! There is no form of energy waste on the planet that could be cleaned up quite so cheaply, and no form of energy whatsoever that could be cleaned to the same risk standard that this system will probably (without much justification) be required to meet.

This is very, very, very promising.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. I reckon it works out at about 4 cents per kilowatt hour

Currently, the UK consumes 18 million tons of oil equivalent of nuclear power per year (that may include electricity sent from France, but we'll assume it doesn't), and, looking at the historical data from the BP Statistical Review of energy, you can say it was an average of 14 Mtoe for 40 years. So:

14 * 40 = 560 Mtoe = 560 * 10^6 * 42 * 10^9 = 2.35 * 10^19 J = 6.5 * 10^12 kWh
£160 * 10^9 / 6.5 * 10^12 = £0.024/kWh = 4.4 cents/kWh.

There's still some life left in some of the power stations, so say it's 4 cents per kWh. Given that's just the cleanup costs, (ignoring construction and running costs), it's not a complete bargain.

[NNadir]

10. Well given that no amount of money will ever clean up fossil fuel

waste, it is a bargain.

Just because it is impossible to clean up fossil fuel waste under any circumstances, just because we pretend costs don't exist, doesn't mean that what they cost is cheap. It would be impossible to undo the damage done by coal alone, never mind natural gas and oil, in the UK for 10 trillion pounds and 50 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Nuclear power is both an economic and an environmental bargain.

I note that the standards to which most nuclear clean-ups are held (the site must seem as if it never had any energy production on it whatsoever) is infinitely higher than the clean up required of a single strip mine, a single oil spill site and a single planetary atmosphere.

Although nuclear power has operated in the UK since the 1950's, since 1980, it has produced about 1.6 trillion kilowatt-hours of commercial electricity.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls

Thus, if we only counted the time since 1980, the cost would come in at about 10 pence per kilowatt-hour. However, such a calculation ignores completely - as is usually the case - that the clean up includes activities not connected at all with commercial power, specifically it also includes weapons activity in the UK.

I can tell you that it is going to be expensive to clean up all of the waste of war, not the least of which is human waste. That said, Hanford is not Palo Verde or Calvert Cliffs.

Neither does the calculation include any provision for improved nuclear technology - it's a fuzzy game that pretends that the entire cost represents a year's expenditure and that the money will all be spent later this week and the invoices have already been issued. Frankly it's more spin than reality. I note that it is very, very, very, very, very, very unlikely that humanity will really end up burying spent nuclear fuel. That is a fantasy from the waste mentality that prevailed from the 20th century. The new reality is upon us and rather recently people are recognizing that all that stuff is, in fact, quite valuable. This reality should change the calculation as the game proceeds.

[JohnWxy]

12. HOw much waste will need to be cleaned up from Wind Power?

The cost for decommissioning doesn't include the health costs incurred to treat victims of nuclear pollution (Cancer). Yes, there are other environmental carcinogens but certainly there those who have had to get treatment for cancer who would not have gotten it had they not been exposed to a nuclear waste disposal site or nuclear plant leak. I don't know what the figures for this is but it is a true cost. If you want to realistically look at the effects of using nuclear power - that is if you want to expand it's use into the future, while uranium lasts (two to three decades?). The figure for U.S. id $10 billion annual.

Another issue about these estimates either to decommission plants or to maintain waste sites, virtually in perpetuity, is that these estimates seem to always be increasing and increasing dramatically. All the estimates of these costs we've seen in the past have been eclipsed by much higher estimates. Will this continue into the future? my guess is yes.

Rather than continue with nulcear in the face of such uncertainties it would make much more sense to develop renewables (Wind Power is cheapest source of power and doesn't produce all this radioacitve waste to be dealt with for thousands of years.) Wind power is expanding very rapidly and will expand even faster in coming years and will be pass nuclear power in several years - maybe 10 or 15 yrs - depending on growth rate - nuclear isn't really going anywhere, that will make it easier for wind to catch and pass nuclear). As the production capacity of wind turbine manufacturers grows wind power will continue its rapid expansion. And the wind doesn't increase it's costs year after year.

[Coastie for Truth]

13. There are implicit environmental and human costs in clean coal

I grew up in the coal and steel "Monongahela Valley" - not far from infamous Donora Pennsylvania and just over the ridge line from the USS Clairton Coke Works. The largest shopping mall (DeBartolo Century II, West Mifflin PA) in the area and the international airport (PIT) are built coal mine spoils.

Sago Creek is just over the line in West Virginia, but we lost coal miners just down the road at Consol's "Piney Creek."

My Dad was a lawyer for the United Mine Workers of America.

Coal is not good for children or other living things.

[NNadir]

14. How are you?

Good to see you here.

We've missed hearing from you.

Thanks for the comments, by the way. As usual, you reveal a special knowledge.