Progress Energy owns the Chrystal River nuclear plant which went offline in 2009 and is not expected to be back on until 2014. They keep discovering parts of the containment dome falling apart.

The repair bill is expected to total $2.5 billion. The utility wants customers to pay $670 million, or about a quarter of that amount. Again, Progress owns the reactor, not Florida consumers.

Additionally Progress is having to purchase more expensive power from other sources in order to meet their power commitments. They’re seeking authorization to push this extra cost off on consumers. If this goes through Florida consumers who thought they were getting electricity from reactors “too cheap to meter” are going to encounter some serious price shocks.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9R6F5TO1.htm

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Only 11 of Japan’s 55 reactors are on line. Most were shut following the tsunami. Reactors operators are encountering resistance to restarting the other reactors.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking for as many pricing sources as I could find. The very lowest price for new nuclear electricity was from someone inside the nuclear industry who claimed that we could bring a plant on line and produce electricity for $0.12/kWh. The problem, for me, is that he refused to present any details so that one could determine if he had included everything or had done some ‘creative accounting’.

But for the moment accept that 12 cents. Then add to it the approximate $0.06/kWh that taxpayers provide in subsidies and accepted liability. No new nuclear plant will get built in the US unless taxpayers guarantee the loan during construction. No new nuclear plant will get built in the US unless taxpayers assume liability for a large scale accident.

We’re now up to $0.18/kWh. Some which we would pay at the meter, some via our taxes.

OK, now let’s look at the real world data. During the last couple of years there have been three open bids for any company to build a new reactor on a “turnkey” basis. That is, the customer would invest no money until the job was finished. Far too often in the past reactors were started but never completed leaving taxpayers and rate payers to pay off billions of
construction loans.

San Antonio, Texas, Ontario, Canada and Turkey all asked for turnkey bids.
The cost each time would have meant a plant that produced $0.20/kWh or
higher electricity. Then add in the subsidies.

A major problem with reactors is that they take so many years to build.
The cost of financing the construction roughly doubles the cost of
construction. China and a few other governments can afford to build
reactors because they don’t have to be fiscally accountable. They can pay
and ignore the fact that they have billions of dollars ‘not
preforming’/earning for the years it takes to bring the reactor on line.

Then selling that power.

First, almost no utility needs 24/365 power. The big need most places is
for peak hour power – mostly hot summer afternoons. Most parts of the
country are well-built for off-peak hour generation. New nuclear would
have to run 24/365, you can’t shut it down when demand is low. And you
can’t shut off interest payments on the loan.

Nuclear would have to sell at a significant loss for much of the day. The
wind blows at night and makes electricity for a small fraction of what
nuclear costs. Nuclear would have to sell its power for zero or even
negative cents for part of some days in order to get under the price of
wind. That means that it would have to sell for even higher prices during
the peak hours to make up for the loss. And there is no market for really
expensive electricity.

If nothing else, natural gas has killed new nuclear. We can build gas
peaker plants and use them only when demand is high and do that cheaper
than nuclear with all its costs built into a limited number of hours per
year.

Then, as solar prices continue to fall and battery technology improves, we
will replace those gas peakers with solar, wind and storage. Natural gas
is not a great thing, it does create CO2 and there are extraction problems,
but it is what we are using right now. Solar is dropping very fast and we
have some extremely promising battery technology entering production so my
guess is that natural gas is a few year bridge from coal to renewables.

Anyway, that’s my take. If you want I can give you links to a couple of
studies which estimate the price of new nuclear to be much higher than the
‘insider twelve cents’ I reported earlier. My thinking is that if nuclear
can’t work with a perhaps unrealistic low-ball estimate it has absolutely
no chance at a higher, objective price.

Already up and running and safe nuclear should, IMO, be allowed to run for a while.

The big problem is that we don’t know which reactors are safe. I gave you one example. Add to that the CA reactor that went for a year with part of its automatic safety system switched off.

The reactor which was almost hit by a tornado this last summer. The containment dome would have most likely been fine but the grid connection would have been lost. And the backup generation system was in a non-protected building.

Or Davis-Besse that had leak which ate away the steel containment dome right down to the stainless steel liner.

How about the two Virginia reactors which were not designed to withstand the earthquake that knocked them offline a few months ago?

Indian Point probably needs to be closed. Even if it is safe there’s no way to evacuate New York City if the “unknown” makes itself known.

I think we need a top level review leading to the shutting down of some of
the reactors now.

Certainly build no more.

Nuclear energy makes no financial sense. It’s tossing money down a rat
hole. And nuclear brings with it issues of safety and hazardous waste that
renewables do not.

Nuclear is too expensive. Too dangerous. And too slow to bring on line.

That said, coal plants don’t melt down and spew radiation.

At that point it seems that the German people decided to first get the most immediate danger out of their lives.

I also want to see both coal and nuclear plants closed. I suspect it would be smarter to close the most risky nuclear plants as we get rid of coal. We may have a few nuclear plants which are safe enough to keep using for a while. The big problem is, who do you trust to determine the safety of those plants?

Over and over the operators of nuclear plants lie about safety issues. The most recent incident which I know about…

On July 26, according to the NRC report, “monitors indicated a high level of acoustic activity” in the containment building at Crystal River. Progress Energy workers found an area of broken concrete 3 to 4 feet wide and 12 feet long.

On Aug. 8, Progress gave an update on the situation at Crystal River to Florida’s Public Service Commission, which is reviewing how much, if any, of the charges related to the repair can be passed on to customers.

Progress made no mention of a possible third crack.

….

Staff of the Public Service Commission did not hear about the third crack until Oct. 18, when a Progress engineer, John Holliday, made passing reference to it in a deposition. He was asked about his role in the Crystal River repair after the first crack shut down the plant in 2009.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/energy/article1202505.ece

http://theconversation.edu.au/renewable-energy-can-provide-baseload-power-heres-how-2221

http://www.hydrogencarsnow.com/eu-hydrogen-highway.htm

http://cleantechnica.com/2011/06/16/wind-power-in-europe-more-reliable-than-nuclear-power-in-japan/

http://cleantechnica.com/2011/03/27/25-twh-of-wind-power-idled-in-2010-in-us-grid-storage-needed/

“Although the industry frequently points to its low operating costs as evidence of its market competitiveness, this economic structure is an artifact of large subsidies to capital, historical write-offs of capital, and ongoing subsidies to operating costs.”

http://www.globalsubsidies.org/en/subsidy-watch/commentary/gambling-nuclear-power-how-public-money-fuels-industry

I agree with Michael and would even take it a step further. Focus on less energy use by both making more efficient devices and vehicles AND by taking a good hard look at our lifestyles and dialing them back a few kilowatts.

I really was just discussing the reasoning behind government subsidies, and whether it applies to nuclear power.