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Fusion we can believe in?
Alan Boyle, MSNBC
Working on a shoestring budget, researchers have found no reason why a low-cost approach to nuclear fusion won’t work.
President-elect Barack Obama’s pick for energy secretary has said he’s aware of the approach, known as inertial electrostatic confinement fusion or Polywell fusion – and although it’s probably not on his radar screen right now, it just might show up in the future.
For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out how to harness the power of the nuclear reaction that sets the sun ablaze. Fusion involves smashing the nuclei of lighter elements together to produce heavier elements, plus an excess burst of energy. The sun turns hydrogen into helium. Thermonuclear bombs do something similar with different isotopes of hydrogen.
The mainstream approaches to commercial fusion would involve heating up plasma inside a doughnut-shaped magnetic bottle known as a tokamak, or using lasers to blast tiny bits of deuterium and tritium. The former approach is being followed for the $13 billion international ITER project, and the latter would be used by multibillion-dollar experiments such as the National Ignition Facility in the U.S. or HiPER in Britain.
Then there’s the $1.8 million (yes, million) project that’s just been wrapped up at EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. in Santa Fe, N.M. The experiment, funded by the U.S. Navy, was aimed at verifying some interesting results that the late physicist Robert Bussard coaxed out of a high-voltage inertial electrostatic contraption known as WB-6. (The “WB” stands for Wiffle Ball, which describes the shape of the device and its magnetic field.)
An EMC2 team headed by Los Alamos researcher Richard Nebel (who’s on leave from his federal lab job) picked up the baton from Bussard and tried to duplicate the results. The team has turned in its final report, and it’s been double-checked by a peer-review panel, Nebel told me today. Although he couldn’t go into the details, he said the verdict was positive.
“There’s nothing in there that suggests this will not work,” Nebel said. “That’s a very different statement from saying that it will work.”
(16 December 2008)
The staggering cost of new nuclear power
Joseph Romm, Climate Progress
Exclusive analysis, Part 1:
A new study puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour — triple current U.S. electricity rates!
This staggering price is far higher than the cost of a variety of carbon-free renewable power sources available today — and ten times the cost of energy efficiency (see “Is 450 ppm possible? Part 5: Old coal’s out, can’t wait for new nukes, so what do we do NOW?“).
The new study, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power, is one of the most detailed cost analyses publically available on the current generation of nuclear power plants being considered in this country. It is by a leading expert in power plant costs, Craig A. Severance. A practicing CPA, Severance is co-author of The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power (Praeger 1976), and former Assistant to the Chairman and to Commerce Counsel, Iowa State Commerce Commission.
This important new analysis is being published by Climate Progress because it fills a critical gap in the current debate over nuclear power — transparency. Severance explains:
All assumptions, and methods of calculation are clearly stated. The piece is a deliberate effort to demystify the entire process, so that anyone reading it (including non-technical readers) can develop a clear understanding of how total generation costs per kWh come together.
As stunning as this new, detailed cost estimate is, it should not come as a total surprise. I detailed the escalating capital costs of nuclear power in my May 2008 report, “The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power.” And in a story last week on nuclear power’s supposed comeback, Time magazine notes that nuclear plants’ capital costs are “out of control,” concluding:
Most efficiency improvements have been priced at 1¢ to 3¢ per kilowatt-hour, while new nuclear energy is on track to cost 15¢ to 20¢ per kilowatt-hour. And no nuclear plant has ever been completed on budget.
Time buried that in the penultimate paragraph of the story!
Yet even Time’s rough estimate is too low, as Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power quantifies in detail. Here is the Executive Summary:
It has been an entire generation since nuclear power was seriously considered as an energy option in the U.S. It seems to have been forgotten that the reason U.S. utilities stopped ordering nuclear power plants was their conclusion that nuclear power’s business risks and costs proved excessive.
With global warming concerns now taking traditional coal plants off the table, U.S. utilities are risk averse to rely solely on natural gas for new generation. Many U.S. utilities are diversifying through a combination of aggressive load reduction incentives to customers, better grid management, and a mixture of renewable energy sources supplying zero-fuel-cost kWh’s, backed by the KW capacity of natural gas turbines where needed. Some U.S. utilities, primarily in the South, often have less aggressive load reduction programs, and view their region as deficient in renewable energy resources. These utilities are now exploring new nuclear power.
Estimates for new nuclear power place these facilities among the costliest private projects ever undertaken. Utilities promoting new nuclear power assert it is their least costly option. However, independent studies have concluded new nuclear power is not economically competitive.
Given this discrepancy, nuclear’s history of cost overruns, and the fact new generation designs have never been constructed any where, there is a major business risk nuclear power will be more costly than projected. Recent construction cost estimates imply capital costs/kWh (not counting operation or fuel costs) from 17-22 cents/kWh when the nuclear facilities come on-line. Another major business risk is nuclear’s history of construction delays. Delays would run costs higher, risking funding shortfalls. The strain on cash flow is expected to degrade credit ratings.
Generation costs/kWh for new nuclear (including fuel & O&M but not distribution to customers) are likely to be from 25 – 30 cents/kWh. This high cost may destroy the very demand the plant was built to serve. High electric rates may seriously impact utility customers and make nuclear utilities’ service areas noncompetitive with other regions of the U.S. which are developing lower-cost electricity.
I am not saying here that nuclear power will play no role in the fight to stay below 450 ppm of atmospheric CO2 concentrations and avoid catastrophic climate outcomes. Indeed, I have been including a full wedge of nuclear in my 12 to 14 wedges “solution” to global warming here. It may, however, be time to reconsider that, since it is increasingly clear achieving even one wedge of nuclear will be a very time-consuming and expensive proposition, probably costing $6 to $8 trillion and sharply driving up electricity prices.
Given the myriad low-carbon, much-lower-cost alternatives to nuclear power available today — such as efficiency, wind, solar thermal baseload, solar PV, geothermal, and recycled energy (see “An introduction to the core climate solutions“) — the burden is on the nuclear industry to provide its own detailed, public cost estimates that it is prepared to stand behind in public utility commission hearings.
(5 January 2009)
EDF calls on UK to declare nuclear need
Peggy Hollinger in Paris and Ed Crooks in London, Financial Times
The British government must declare a national need for new nuclear power stations by the end of this year if EDF is to launch its first new generation reactor by 2017, according to senior executives of the French energy group.
EDF on Monday finalised its £12.5bn takeover of British Energy, operator of 10 UK nuclear power plants. The group plans to build four of the French-designed 1,600MW EPR reactors on British Energy sites.
However, Pierre Gadonneix, EDF chief executive, said Britain still needed to develop a “fluent” regulatory environment for the new generation technology if it was to have the new nuclear capacity needed to address environmental and capacity concerns.
(6 January 2009)
