“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”
JUL 07, 2024
ChatGPT & DALL-E generated allegorical image representing the extreme costs and duration of cleaning up a nuclear generation facility when it’s closed.
LLAW’s NUCLEAR ISSUES & COMMENTS, Sunday, (07/07/2024)
The following is an article from 4 years ago when I was Posting under a slightly abbreviated Facebook name that I have saved for posterity to see what has been done about this issue today. The answer is, sadly, nothing; however the problem has only grown severely worse and yet we are irrationally thinking as a global community to make the issue far worse, far more expensive and, incredibly, far more dangerous to all life on planet Earth — of course including our own . . . llaw
ChatGPT & DALL-E generated allegorical image representing the extreme costs and duration of cleaning up a nuclear generation facility when it’s closed.
US Nuclear Site Cleanup Underfunded By Up To $70 Billion
4 years ago by Michael Barnard (See author’s short bio following the articele)
Headlines out of the UK are pointing out the horrible state of affairs for nuclear generation decommissioning after a committee of Members of Parliament that the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority really doesn’t have a handle on the 17 sites, their costs, or the vendors they selected for cleanup. They are currently projecting $177 billion and 120 years for the full decommissioning, over $1 billion per site. Some of this is due to botched procurement, with two different cleanup vendors stripped of their contracts.
Some US commenters were feeling chuffed, although that’s not a term they would use, that the US was handling things so much better. But the USA isn’t far behind the UK in problems, it just isn’t as public.
Per the World Nuclear Association:
In the USA, utilities are collecting 0.1 to 0.2 cents/kWh to fund decommissioning. They must then report regularly to the NRC on the status of their decommissioning funds. About two-thirds of the total estimated cost of decommissioning all US nuclear power reactors has already been collected, leaving a liability of about $9 billion to be covered over the remaining operating lives of about 100 reactors (on the basis of an average of $320 million per unit). NRC data for the end of 2018 indicated that there was a combined total of $64.7 billion held in the decommissioning trust funds covering the 119 operational and retired US nuclear power reactors.
An OECD Nuclear Energy Agency survey published in 2016 reported US dollar (2013) costs in response to a wide survey. For US reactors the expected total decommissioning costs range from $544 to $821 million; for units over 1100 MWe the costs ranged from $0.46 to $0.73 million per MWe, for units half that size, costs ranged from $1.07 to $1.22 million per MWe. For Finland’s Loviisa (2 x 502 MWe) the estimate was €326 million. For a Swiss 1000 MWe PWR the detailed estimate amounts to CHF 663 million (€617 million). In Slovakia, a detailed case study showed a total cost of €1.14 billion to decommission Bohunice V1 (2 x 440 MWe) and dismantle it by 2025.
[Brief aside: I love the World Nuclear Association, because they are actually honest and report details that contradict their mission. I cite them on Germany’s wholesale electricity prices, which they freely admit are among the lowest in Europe as that country ramps up renewables rapidly and dumps nuclear. They aren’t just a lobbying organization, although they are an industry-funded lobbying association. Unlike the equivalent oil and gas organizations, they seem compelled to be honest and complete, perhaps because being honest and complete usually isn’t so disgustingly horrific for them, just simply bad.]
Back to the thread. The US has collected a bunch of money from operating reactors into a cleanup fund that they acknowledge is underfunded to the tune of billions already. But the industry estimates show that they are collecting under half of what it will actually take to decommission the sites.
There are about 100 reactors in the United States. Assuming they collect the $320 million per reactor (they won’t, as reactors are closing prematurely), they would have a fund of $32 billion. But they need a fund of closer to $70 billion, and they are short regardless. So the US fleet cleanup is going to cost the taxpayer probably closer to an additional $40 billion, if it all goes according to the estimates.
Note that the UK and Slovakia examples show that it usually doesn’t, just as building new nuclear never seems to come in on time or budget. The reality is going to be closer to the European and Slovakian costs, so let’s assume a billion per reactor as a reasonable number.
The US will have maybe $30 billion. They’ll need $100 billion. Yeah, $70 billion is the more reasonable number.
“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
– US Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen
Of course, this is on top of the $1.6 billion annual tax breaks nuclear plants in the US get, the $10 billion liability insurance cap with the taxpayer holding the bill should a Fukushima-scale disaster occur and the state-level boondoggles like the $1.1 billion Ohio subsidy that came with a side helping of $60 million in bribes.
Nuclear power is going to be the gift that keeps on returning fiscal dividends for a century.
That’s why Brookfield bought the bankrupt Toshiba Westinghouse division, for the long-term, guaranteed decommissioning revenue. SNC Lavalin bought Canada’s CANDU for the same reason, although I’m sure they are at the trough on the Canadian SMR idiocy too.
As a note, the nuclear industry’s cleanup being thrown on the taxpayers’ back is a drop in the bucket compared to the cleanup for coal, oil, and gas extraction and refinement, the majority of which will be funded by taxpayers. In the past, I reported that Alberta’s oil and gas cleanup bill will be $200 billion more than the amount they have set aside. That’s one Canadian province, albeit the worst of the Canadian ones. Doubling that for the rest of the country suggests a $400 billion shortfall for the country around oil and gas. The standard guideline is multiply the Canadian number by 10 for the US, so there’s probably in the range of $4 trillion unfunded oil and gas cleanup in the US. Certainly the nuclear set-aside doesn’t give any comfort that the fossil fuel industry is doing any better. Being $70 billion short on the nuclear cleanup starts to look like chump change when you consider potentially $4 trillion for oil and gas.
This isn’t exactly a secret. Nuclear projects always go over budget and over schedule, and there is exactly zero reason to believe decommissioning estimates provided by the industry. So why have jurisdictions been building more nuclear plants, whether at the egregious but at least honest costs of Hinkley, or the massively underestimated but increasingly obvious costs of the Virgil C. Summer and Vogtle sites? Three reasons.
The first is the magic of net present value. That calculates the value of future dollars today given inflation. Just as a thousand bucks bought a lot more in 1990 than it does today, in 2050 it will buy a lot less than it does today. That means that liabilities that will be incurred decades in the future approach zero cost in today’s cost benefit analysis. Can you say generational inequity?
The second is ideology. When really blatantly obvious economic sense gets thrown out the window, you start looking around for irrationality or graft. A lot of conservatives really hate onshore wind because it spoils the views from their manses (UK) or ranches (US) or country estates (Oz). They also think of wind and solar as inadequate hippy shit. They think nuclear is the answer. These are opinions that they formed in the 1970s or perhaps the 1980s, but conservatives have a stronger tendency to not let empirical reality change their mind. So Hinkley, Vogtle, and Summer are a triumph of ideology over reality.
The third is graft. When we start talking about $10 billion or more to build a plant, billions in subsidies, and another billion to take the thing apart, a lot of people start rubbing their hands together and figuring out who they have to bribe now to get a big payoff later. The entire regulatory structure in the two states that had nuclear plants in construction until recently when one was finally put out of the state’s fiscal misery were both structured so that no matter how much the utility spent, it was guaranteed a set profit. If they built a $15 billion nuclear plant, they made a lot of profit off of the rate payers. If they built $2 billion worth of wind and solar instead, they made a lot less money off of the rate payers. It’s dumb as a box of hammers, but it’s part of the reason a lot of utilities love nuclear, and coal-generation carbon capture schemes to boot. They are licenses to print money.
Outside of China, where they have trained resources who can build nuclear plants who would be mediocre at building wind and solar (which they are building a lot more of) and nuclear plants will displace coal plants, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to build new nuclear. The looming decommissioning debacle is just the icing on the cake.
Wind and solar have proven themselves to be vastly cheaper, completely reliable on grids, and easy to integrate in very large amounts. Their decommissioning costs are trivial. That’s yet another reason why nuclear is dead, but pretending it’s not.
Michael Barnard
is a climate futurist, strategist and author. He spends his time projecting scenarios for decarbonization 40-80 years into the future. He assists multi-billion dollar investment funds and firms, executives, Boards and startups to pick wisely today. He is founder and Chief Strategist of TFIE Strategy Inc and a member of the Advisory Board of electric aviation startup FLIMAX. He hosts the Redefining Energy – Tech podcast (https://shorturl.at/tuEF5) , a part of the award-winning Redefining Energy team.
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TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS, Sunday, (07/07/2024)
All Things Nuclear
NEWS
Putin warns NATO: Don’t provide too much military support for Ukraine | Jefferson City News Tribune
Jefferson City News Tribune
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Ukraine vies for NATO membership ahead of the group’s meeting in Washington, D.C.
WVTF
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Ukraine vies for NATO membership ahead of the group’s meeting in Washington, D.C.
Nuclear Power
NEWS
‘Significant Risk Of Failure To Deliver’: Weber Raises Concern Over Micro Nuclear Reactor Projects
YouTube
During a House Science Committee hearing prior to the Congressional recess, Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX) questioned Dept. of Energy Deputy Secretary, …
Gulf Energy supports nuclear power, urges public education on – Nation Thailand
Nation Thailand
Energy giant Gulf says nuclear power safe and feasible for Thailand but govt must communicate effectively. Ratthaphol Cheunsomchit, deputy chief …
Public Vote on Nuclear Power Plant Sparks Debate in Kazakhstan | OilPrice.com
Oil Price
Kazakhstan is holding a referendum on whether to build a nuclear power plant, sparking debate over energy diversification, environmental risks, …
Nuclear Power Emergencies
NEWS
One dead, one still missing in Lake Erie near Perry Nuclear Power Plant – News-Herald
News-Herald
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Nuclear War
NEWS
Where Putin stands on using nuclear weapons to win Russia’s war in Ukraine | PBS News
PBS
As the war in Ukraine turned slowly in Moscow’s favor this summer, Putin declared he doesn’t need nuclear weapons to achieve his go
The Nuclear Taboo Is a Myth – Lawfare
Lawfare
Public opinion can support the use of nuclear weapons in conflicts. Governments need stronger checks against pushing the button.
Russian State TV Discusses Nuclear Attack on Ukraine – Newsweek
Newsweek
A Kremlin propagandist cited a poll that found a third of Russians do not oppose a nuclear strike on Ukraine amid the ongoing war.
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
Where Putin stands on using nuclear weapons to win Russia’s war in Ukraine | PBS News
PBS
“Russian leadership may be assuming it has more at stake in Ukraine than NATO, and nuclear threats are one means of signaling its commitment to …
The Nuclear Taboo Is a Myth – Lawfare
Lawfare
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has similarly warned that nuclear risks are the highest they have been in decades and that the threat is …
Nobel prize winning scientists raise alarm on nuclear war threat – The Australian
The Australian
Nobel prize winning scientists raise alarm on nuclear war threat. Thirty … Their declaration comes after repeated nuclear threats from …