Thorium reactor discussion thread!

[sgt_flyer]

Well, here's some decommissionning costs - so even with that added, the total cost for a nuclear power plant is far less than the rest.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Nuclear-Wastes/Decommissioning-Nuclear-Facilities/

Example : Crystal river 3 (single 860MW reactor) - decommission date 2013 with a slow deconstruction method, for 1.13Billion US$ (They provisionned the funds and will let interests run on it during the time frame - if they wanted more immediate deconstruction, it would have cost roughly an additional 195M$) - the seabrook plant is also a single reactor, but more powerful - so costs will likely be a slightly higher, but not that much.

Another example is for the Zion power plant (2x1000MW reactors) - with a 10 year planned deconstruction - the costs were estimated to reach 1 billion US$.

German reactors as you stated (even for the 40B€ for 16 reactors) would give a cost of 2.5B€ / reactor.

[SomeGuy12]

Ok, if I read this, it seems to indicate I'm right, natural gas is cheaper. Nuclear does do pretty well on this chart, but I have read many articles indicating it often goes much higher for actual installations.

Yes, Wind has a 30% capacity factor. I meant that you build ~3x as many wind turbines, of course, such that the rated maximum watts is 3 times the average load of a geographic area, such that on an average day, most of your power comes from wind.

Well, ok, if you do that, there will be large periods of time where you are making too much wind power and the extra capacity is wasted. So the math to figure out how many wind turbines and solar panels you actually need is quite a bit more complex and depends on empirical data. But the point is, you never assume the wind will go to zero everywhere - that won't happen - so you don't need enough natural gas backup generators to run the entire load at peak conditions on a black swan day where there is zero wind across a thousand mile geographic area. That can happen, but is unlikely, you spec for probable situations. The utility regulators in a particular power market don't expect zero blackouts, that is unrealistic - even a market where you use all nuclear reactors, they could all scram at the same time due to random chance conspiring against each one. They just want the statistical number of hours per year when there are some areas of the grid offline to be low.

[peadar1987]

Ok, if I read this, it seems to indicate I'm right, natural gas is cheaper. Nuclear does do pretty well on this chart, but I have read many articles indicating it often goes much higher for actual installations.

Yes, Wind has a 30% capacity factor. I meant that you build ~3x as many wind turbines, of course, such that the rated maximum watts is 3 times the average load of a geographic area, such that on an average day, most of your power comes from wind.

Well, ok, if you do that, there will be large periods of time where you are making too much wind power and the extra capacity is wasted. So the math to figure out how many wind turbines and solar panels you actually need is quite a bit more complex and depends on empirical data. But the point is, you never assume the wind will go to zero everywhere - that won't happen - so you don't need enough natural gas backup generators to run the entire load at peak conditions on a black swan day where there is zero wind across a thousand mile geographic area. That can happen, but is unlikely, you spec for probable situations. The utility regulators in a particular power market don't expect zero blackouts, that is unrealistic - even a market where you use all nuclear reactors, they could all scram at the same time due to random chance conspiring against each one. They just want the statistical number of hours per year when there are some areas of the grid offline to be low.

Electricity grids don't really work like that. You have to balance real and reactive power, and avoid overloading transmission lines.

When you have distributed and dispatchable power generation, controlling things isn't too much of a problem.

If you have no real way of predicting in advance when and where in your system power is going to be generated, you're going to have to build the grid to cope with massive power transmission, and put capacitors and inductors everywhere to balance the complex loads. All of which pushes the cost of your energy sky-high.

Edit: You say zero wind across a 1000 mile geographical area is a "black swan day". Fair enough. But light or too-heavy wind across large areas can and does happen on an extremely regular basis. If a big storm hits Scotland, and all the wind turbines are taken offline, the UK has to power itself solely on wind from other locations, meaning that the south of England is going to have to have a massive excess installed capacity. Which again pushes the cost up.

I've said it a hundred times on this forum. Non-dispatchable power sources are only cheap at low grid penetrations.

Edited October 14, 2015 by peadar1987

[Elthy]

You have similar problems with the grid when using nuclear powerplants, since it takes a realy long time to change the power output of a reactor, you cant react to changing demand with that...

[NuclearNut]

You have similar problems with the grid when using nuclear powerplants, since it takes a realy long time to change the power output of a reactor, you cant react to changing demand with that...

Actually it gets quite interesting with nuclear. On one hand, you are right, reactors take hours to increase in power output to capacity, on the other hand the O&M+fuel costs tend to be a few cents per KWh, likewise some reactors, such as france's PWRs and all BWRs can change power output for peaking (but still pretty slowly). However, all increases etc. are planned, unlike in wind and solar, making it easier to deal with.

[peadar1987]

You have similar problems with the grid when using nuclear powerplants, since it takes a realy long time to change the power output of a reactor, you cant react to changing demand with that...

Yes, you have nuclear plants for base load, and faster-acting sources for load-following, like CCGTs, or hydro, if you have it available. Nuclear is dispatchable enough to cope with the broad trends, from day to night, for example.

[Elthy]

Then the difference is quite small when it come to other things required on the grid. For renewables you need a larger peak capacity of the other energy sources, for the very unlikely event of peak demand and minimum sun/wind. Maybe thats more than the very high costs of nuclear (building/deconstructing/radioactive waste), its propably impossible to tell without a very large scale research project..

Edited October 14, 2015 by Elthy

[SomeGuy12]

No. You just add. How much does a cheap natural gas turbine cost, one without the steam portion for combined cycle. How much does a solar panel cost in 2015? How much does wind cost? How much solar + wind are you going to get for the geographic area, on each day of the year? What is the probability distribution for that solar + wind?

Then, taking probably the worst case - the bottom 5% chance of combined solar + wind, you know how much natural gas turbine capacity you need. You would have some of the turbines be the co-generation or combined cycle style, since you would expect those to run most of the time, except when there is exceptional solar + wind output, and the rest be the cheaper straight turbine style.

I don't have the data in front of me, but you could probably get a study like this done in a few months with a single grad student. Really, all we have to do is show that nuclear, including all costs such as end of life disposal and liability insurance, including the government's portion, and the interest rate on all the money when you wait 10 years to build the plant, is much more expensive.

Assuming this is true, and nuclear is hugely more expensive, then the final step to dismiss Thorium from consideration at all is to show that none of the cost savings with Thorium are significant enough, especially compared to the extra costs of all that reprocessing equipment.

[Elthy]

You make it a bit easy:

How much solar + wind are you going to get for the geographic area, on each day of the year?

Sun is propably easy but wind is hard to measure since its very dependant on the local surruondings, e.g. hills or forests. When 5 large wind turbines were build here they build a high temporary iron truss tower before which stood for one year. They had instruments on different heights, with that they could calculate if the powerplant would be viable.