[GASMON]

Out of interest I never thought I would see this day

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39675418

Britain went a full day without using coal to generate electricity for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the National Grid says.
The energy provider said Friday's lack of coal usage was a "watershed" moment.
Britain's longest continuous energy period without coal until now was 19 hours - first achieved last May, and again on Thursday.
The government plans to phase out Britain's last plants by 2025 in order to cut carbon emissions.
Friday is thought to be the first time the nation has not used coal to generate electricity since the world's first centralised public coal-fired generator opened in 1882, at Holborn Viaduct in London.

Gas

[Zarquon]

According to what I've read about EDF (the French nuke company, basically state-owned), the reason why they can sell electricity for 14 cents is that EDF sucked up huge losses for decades. Today they don't even have enough money to dismantle the aging reactors which will have to go offline in the next decade, let alone build replacements. EDF is a financial black hole. So, if I understand it correctly, cutting down nuclear power in France is not so much a courageous policy decision as simply acknowledging the facts.

[dissident]

@vox_mundi

The usual western media anti-Russian drivel. "Secretive" that the whole world knew about these plants long before actual construction started. Last time I checked public tours aren't common of nuclear power plant construction sites. So, no shit Sherlock, they are "secretive".

As for the photograph. As usual no context. Yet more masturbatory, chauvinist BS designed to propagate stereotypes for brain dead biggots. Clearly the fuse has been unscrewed from this shell (there are no hollow point shells) and they are trying to detach the threaded fuse housing which is probably seized. This procedure is 100% safe since without the detonator the explosive does not explode even if you put a match to it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detonator). This is an ordinance disposal activity being used by retards to produce internet forum cheese.

[Subjectivist]

Out of interest I never thought I would see this day

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39675418

Britain went a full day without using coal to generate electricity for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the National Grid says.
The energy provider said Friday's lack of coal usage was a "watershed" moment.
Britain's longest continuous energy period without coal until now was 19 hours - first achieved last May, and again on Thursday.
The government plans to phase out Britain's last plants by 2025 in order to cut carbon emissions.
Friday is thought to be the first time the nation has not used coal to generate electricity since the world's first centralised public coal-fired generator opened in 1882, at Holborn Viaduct in London.

Gas

Too bad they achieved this marvel by burning a nassive quantity of wood pellets imported from Canada instead of the coal they were designed for.

[yellowcanoe]

Ontario Hydro's debt was downloaded on the consumers of the province via an additional fee on their bills. Half of this 30 billion Canadian dollar debt was due to one nuclear power plant, Darlington. Nuclear plant construction is clearly a racket since the costs are beyond any sane level and clearly in the corruption category. Supposedly the calandria developed cracks after it was built, so it had to be replaced. Somehow a hunk of metal doubled the cost to 14 billion dollars. BTW, the wikipedia page does not even mention to calandria so it is not to be trusted, I clearly recall the excuses given during the 1980s.

Now they want to sink 13 billion dollars into refurbishment. This amount of money should buy them a whole new plant with four reactors.

The cost over run in building the four reactor Darlington facility was largely due to the refusal of Ontario Hydro to pay any of the construction costs up front. The entire construction cost over the long period of construction was financed entirely with borrowed money at a time when interest rates were in the double digits. Thus a good portion of the final bill was interest costs, not construction costs.

I've never heard about a cracked calandria in one of the Darlington reactors. My impression is that the Darlington reactors have performed flawlessly since they were brought into service. Earlier CANDU reactors experienced premature cracking in the pressure tubes, something that had not been seen in the smaller development reactors. CANDU reactors require a refurbishment after 30 years and the Darlington reactors are approaching that point. $13 billion to refurbish Darlington is cheaper than building four new reactors. The project to refurbish Darlington was started several years ago. OPG constructed a full size replica of one of the reactors so all steps in the process could be tested before work is done on any of the real reactors. All existing reactor components have been studied to determine if they can be used "as is" for another 30 years, can be refurbished or require complete replacement. The level of planning and preparation that has been put into the refurbishment project greatly increases the chances that it will be completed on time and on budget.

My understanding is that OPG and Bruce Nuclear are receiving 6.5 cents per Kwh. That's a lot less than the regulated price for power and less than half what wind power producers receive. 60% of Ontario's electricity comes from our nuclear plants.

[Tanada]

According to what I've read about EDF (the French nuke company, basically state-owned), the reason why they can sell electricity for 14 cents is that EDF sucked up huge losses for decades. Today they don't even have enough money to dismantle the aging reactors which will have to go offline in the next decade, let alone build replacements. EDF is a financial black hole. So, if I understand it correctly, cutting down nuclear power in France is not so much a courageous policy decision as simply acknowledging the facts.

180 degrees backwards like most anti-nuclear claims. Like most state owned enterprises all the considerable money generated by EDF has gone into the national budget as if it were pure tax and then been spent by the irresponsible politicians. EDF has only 'lost money' in the same sense that the Mexican and Venezuelan oil companies have 'lost money', in each case the politicians spent it as fast as the money came in.

[dissident]

Ontario Hydro's debt was downloaded on the consumers of the province via an additional fee on their bills. Half of this 30 billion Canadian dollar debt was due to one nuclear power plant, Darlington. Nuclear plant construction is clearly a racket since the costs are beyond any sane level and clearly in the corruption category. Supposedly the calandria developed cracks after it was built, so it had to be replaced. Somehow a hunk of metal doubled the cost to 14 billion dollars. BTW, the wikipedia page does not even mention to calandria so it is not to be trusted, I clearly recall the excuses given during the 1980s.

Now they want to sink 13 billion dollars into refurbishment. This amount of money should buy them a whole new plant with four reactors.

The cost over run in building the four reactor Darlington facility was largely due to the refusal of Ontario Hydro to pay any of the construction costs up front. The entire construction cost over the long period of construction was financed entirely with borrowed money at a time when interest rates were in the double digits. Thus a good portion of the final bill was interest costs, not construction costs.

I've never heard about a cracked calandria in one of the Darlington reactors. My impression is that the Darlington reactors have performed flawlessly since they were brought into service. Earlier CANDU reactors experienced premature cracking in the pressure tubes, something that had not been seen in the smaller development reactors. CANDU reactors require a refurbishment after 30 years and the Darlington reactors are approaching that point. $13 billion to refurbish Darlington is cheaper than building four new reactors. The project to refurbish Darlington was started several years ago. OPG constructed a full size replica of one of the reactors so all steps in the process could be tested before work is done on any of the real reactors. All existing reactor components have been studied to determine if they can be used "as is" for another 30 years, can be refurbished or require complete replacement. The level of planning and preparation that has been put into the refurbishment project greatly increases the chances that it will be completed on time and on budget.

My understanding is that OPG and Bruce Nuclear are receiving 6.5 cents per Kwh. That's a lot less than the regulated price for power and less than half what wind power producers receive. 60% of Ontario's electricity comes from our nuclear plants.

Thanks for the information about the absurd financing model. But I am quite sure about the calandria cracking excuses since I personally heard them. The financing model was never used as an excuse. But I doubt it accounts for all the costs since the refurbishment is being tagged initially as 14 billion dollars. This means the final bill will be much higher and even accounting for inflation vs. 1980 this figure is insane.

If the workers were making $100,000 per year then you would need 14,000 of them working for 10 years to cost this much. There will not be even 1,000 of them and they will not work for 10 years. They must be using platinum and palladium by the ton.

[Zarquon]

Sorry, maybe I misunderstood these:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/edf- ... -z3dgd6tb0

"The French state group building Britain’s new nuclear plant does not have enough cash to dismantle its domestic reactors, according to an official study. A French parliamentary committee said that EDF would need a public bailout to meet the cost of closing ageing power stations. The warning was issued after unions expressed fury about an announcement that EDF plans to cut 3,900 jobs in France over the next three years. Jean-Marc Sylvestre, an economics commentator, said that the group was on the “edge of a precipice” and faced a choice between privatisation and bankruptcy. He described EDF’s situation as a “catastrophe foretold”. EDF’ s critics say that the company, which has debts of more than 37 billion euros lacks the financial resources to meet its commitments in France, let alone embark upon the Hinkley Point scheme. Their concerns were fuelled with the publication of a report by the committee for sustainable development, which accused EDF of failing to plan for the dismantling of its plants. EDF has set aside has 36 billion euros to pay to clean up reactors at the end of their working lives."

https://nuclear-news.net/category/2-wor ... orld-area/

"A French Parliamentary report from the National Assembly’s Commission for Sustainable Development and Regional Development says the clean-up of French reactors will take longer, be more challenging and cost much more than French nuclear operator EDF anticipates. Whereas Germany has set aside €38 billion to decommission 17 nuclear reactors, and the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estimates that clean-up of UK’s 17 nuclear sites will cost between €109?250 billion over the next 120 years, France has set aside only €23 billion to decommissioning its 58 reactors. In other words France estimates it will cost €300 million per gigawatt (GW) of generating capacity to decommission a nuclear reactor, Germany estimates €1.4 billion per GW and the UK estimates €2.7 billion per GW.

EDF says it wants to set aside a €23 billion fund to cover decommissioning and waste storage for an estimated €54 billion final bill - and the difference between these two figures will be closed through the appreciating value of its equities, bonds and investments - in other words, ‘discounting’. Unfortunately, recent experience has taught us that markets can go up and down over time - especially the very long-time periods involved in radioactive waste management. But for a company that has huge borrowings and an enormous debt of €37 billion, €23 billion is a large sum of money to find. Any significant change in the cost of decommissioning would have an immediate and disastrous impact on EDFs credit rating - something that the debt-ridden corporation can simply not afford. EDF is already in financial trouble. Along with bailing out collapsing AREVA, EDF also has to bear the huge financial burden of the failing reactor newbuild at Flamanville. It will also have to pay for extending the life of France’s existing nuclear power stations (to 2025), at a cost of €55 billion.

On top of all this the French authority tasked with disposal of all the countries vast and increasing waste burden (Andra) has recently ramped up the estimated cost for the planned national nuclear waste repository at Cigéo, to €25 billion - and EDF must pay for most of Cigéo’s construction. Although €5 billion more than EDF anticipated, it still seems a gross underestimation, and the costs are likely to rise considerably."

This one puts the mess in a larger perspective:

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_a ... epens.html

"Nuclear giant EDF could be heading towards bankruptcy, writes Paul Brown, as it faces a perfect storm of under-estimated costs for decommissioning, waste disposal and Hinkley C. Meanwhile income from power sales is lagging behind costs, and 17 of its reactors are off-line for safety tests. Yet French and UK governments are turning a blind eye to the looming financial crisis.
..."

[Tanada]

Thanks for the information about the absurd financing model. But I am quite sure about the calandria cracking excuses since I personally heard them. The financing model was never used as an excuse. But I doubt it accounts for all the costs since the refurbishment is being tagged initially as 14 billion dollars. This means the final bill will be much higher and even accounting for inflation vs. 1980 this figure is insane.

If the workers were making $100,000 per year then you would need 14,000 of them working for 10 years to cost this much. There will not be even 1,000 of them and they will not work for 10 years. They must be using platinum and palladium by the ton.

What an odd way of looking at things, as if all the money will be spent on labor and none on the specialized highly tested and certified materials used in the refurbishing.

[Tanada]

Nope, you understood the propaganda message of the anti-nukes and bought into the narrative picture they drew you hook line and sinker. Things like the long term cost of waste storage are directly influenced by political opportunists who delay projects for no reason other than political expediency. Propagandists also love to stretch out timelines to make things appear either much cheaper or much more expensive than they are. If you claim nuclear waste has to be guarded forever then even at a cost a 1 euro a day forever adds up to a LOT of money.

Here is an example for you. What does 'clean up of a nuclear site' mean? In reality it means the spent nuclear fuel and easily portable waste are hauled off to facilities intended for those things. Then uncontaminated materials, steel scrap and machinery for the most part, is hauled away. Once all that is done which only requires a few months you have the reactor vessel and its containment structure plus the portions of the power production equipment that was 'contaminated'.

The next step is to put a padlock on the building and ignore it for 10-25 years depending on your planning and budget. Why? The remaining structures that are 'contaminated' are not going anywhere. It requires some pretty heavy duty work to do so and people notice when other people show up with heavy machinery and start tearing structures apart. By ignoring the 'contaminated' structures the residual radiation caused by neutron activation has time to decay away to nothing, and the longer you wait the less remaining radioactivity it has.

Finally 10-25 years after the 'contamination' has had time to decay away heavy machinery is brought in, the remaining structures are demolished and the very slightly radioactive steel and concrete is hauled away for permanent disposal. In 99 percent of cases you could move into the containment building a few months after they had hauled away all the portable materials and you would get a lower dose living inside their the rest of your natural lifespan than you would laying on the beach in Brazil for an hour a week during that same lifespan.

So what it costs to 'decontaminate' a nuclear site in the western way of doing things is a huge charge that is completely unnecessary for any location where normal practices were followed for the 60 year or less period the plant operated. Civilian radiation standards are insanely tight. For example a Nuclear worker is permitted to receive hundreds of times the civilian permitted dosage during a 40 year working career. With rare exception few workers ever receive those permitted levels of exposure. Yet the cancer rate for nuclear workers is much LESS than that of the general public who receive fractions of a percent of the permissible worker dose.

Politicians and anti-nuclear propagandists make all sorts of claims that are disproven by science constantly, and yet the anti-science left takes those claims at face value in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Then after accepting those disproven claims as truth the politicians use the propaganda to justify passing regulations and laws that reflect unfounded fear that place an enormous technological and financial burden on nuclear power suppliers. Meanwhile in countries where science is used instead of fear mongering the expense of nuclear power is much lower.

Take everyone's favorite anti-nuclear example of Chernobyl. A huge territory was marked off on maps by political fiat and declared unsuitable for human habitation 31 years ago. Since that time the governments of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus have changed significantly. In Russia and Belarus actual scientists have tested the marked off territory and much of it has been found to be suitable for human habitation and put back into productive use. In the Ukraine on the other hand the political leadership from several different parties over that 31 years has used Chernobyl as a scapegoat. They use it to cry on the world stage about how poor they are and how badly they were treated under the former USSR regime and make tons of excuses about why they can't accomplish much of anything useful. Real world testing has shown that not only does a good slice of the 'exclusions zone' now meet reasonable exposure limits for human habitation, many locations that were never part of the zone have equal or stronger background dose rates. This is true for a few 'hot spots' inside the Ukraine but is especially true of places where tens of thousands of people live perfectly normal lives around the world. Iran, India and Brazil all have significant and populated areas with higher background radiation levels than most of the 'exclusion zone'. Propaganda says the 'exclusion zone' is unfit for human habitation forever, or at least a thousand years. Reality says most of it is as safe as anywhere else TODAY. What are you going to believe, the Propaganda, or the scientific reality?

[onlooker]

Can I ask the nuclear advocates here, does the time and resources still exist for a wide scale transition to Nuclear especially the Fast breeder reactors? I ask because I have reluctantly concluded that nuclear seems now a necessary avenue to pursue to both power civilization and be more climate friendly in the process

[dissident]

Thanks for the information about the absurd financing model. But I am quite sure about the calandria cracking excuses since I personally heard them. The financing model was never used as an excuse. But I doubt it accounts for all the costs since the refurbishment is being tagged initially as 14 billion dollars. This means the final bill will be much higher and even accounting for inflation vs. 1980 this figure is insane.

If the workers were making $100,000 per year then you would need 14,000 of them working for 10 years to cost this much. There will not be even 1,000 of them and they will not work for 10 years. They must be using platinum and palladium by the ton.

What an odd way of looking at things, as if all the money will be spent on labor and none on the specialized highly tested and certified materials used in the refurbishing.

Labour costs are always invoked as the main portion of the expense. So it is your way of looking at it that is odd. How can labour costs be less than 1/14th of the total expense? Certified materials like gold and plantinum? Enriched uranium does not cost that much. The refurbishment would consist of fuel assembly replacement and control systems upgrades. Unless they want to replace the freaking calandria again. Neither the control systems nor the fuel assemblies could possibly cost almost $14 billion without any labour costs.

[dissident]

Can I ask the nuclear advocates here, does the time and resources still exist for a wide scale transition to Nuclear especially the Fast breeder reactors? I ask because I have reluctantly concluded that nuclear seems now a necessary avenue to pursue to both power civilization and be more climate friendly in the process

Only if the Russian and possibly Chinese model is followed. That means realistic project prices and not racketeering as is clearly involved in all the major nuclear power construction projects in NATO. I know there is a lot of cognitive dissonance in seeing corruption in NATO since it is drilled into NATO citizens' heads from birth that no corruption exists in NATO. If a rinky dink refurbishment costs $14 billion then any reasonable collection of reactor plants would cost tens of trillions of dollars. In spite of the nominal GDP of NATO, there is not enough money to pay for such an absurdly expensive program. NATO would have to transition to WWII command economics to build up nuclear infrastructure.

[dissident]

BTW, Canada's public sector spending is clearly corrupt. The gun registry computer expenses were $2 billion. Stop and think about this figure. No freaking registry requires TOP10 supercomputer capacity. You can register every potential gun owner in Canada (15 million) including coarse digitized black and white photos of their faces on a simple PC with a multi-terabyte SATA RAID system. The only possible way to explain the $2 billion is through extortion level fees for contractors and consultants to write software and give advice. The cost was not even for workers who would process registration documentation.

[Subjectivist]

Can I ask the nuclear advocates here, does the time and resources still exist for a wide scale transition to Nuclear especially the Fast breeder reactors? I ask because I have reluctantly concluded that nuclear seems now a necessary avenue to pursue to both power civilization and be more climate friendly in the process

That all depends on exactly what model reactor is picked and how much the NIMBY crowd are allowed to interfere.

If you are building modular units in a fatory mass production set up, and you then delivery those unit sets to locations where nuclear plants are already located and considered acceptible you could in theory replace all the coal power stations within a few years.

To do this you would need full federal and state government support, not to mention the court system bouncing all the frivelous lawsuits from anti-nuclear nutcases who hate science. The biggest cost in nuclear projects today bare delays, many of which are caused by people who fight every step of every project in court and in news reports slanted anti-nuclear.

On a pound for pound basis fissionable material gives off about 2,500,000 times the energy you get from burning the same weight of fossil fuel. On a death per kWe energy produced coal kills thousands of people, natural gas and petroleum kill hundreds, hydroelectric and solar kill dozens. The safest are Nuclear and Wind, and if you take away the massive wind subsidies the government passed nuclear is about half the cost of wind.

[onlooker]

On a pound for pound basis fissionable material gives off about 2,500,000 times the energy you get from burning the same weight of fossil fuel. On a death per kWe energy produced coal kills thousands of people, natural gas and petroleum kill hundreds, hydroelectric and solar kill dozens. The safest are Nuclear and Wind, and if you take away the massive wind subsidies the government passed nuclear is about half the cost of wind.--- I have slowly but surely come to this view, in part from comments and links on this site . I have had a visceral discomfort with nuclear propelled by scary reinforcement by society. But we don't have the luxury of many options anymore. So reluctantly, I am pro Nuclear

[pstarr]

onlooker, it seems our paths cross again I was pretty much anti-nuke, until the wolves of Chernobyl. Now I am an agnostic, leaning pro-nuke.

--Still have doubts as per world-uranium ore supply. An issue? Or is breeder technology real? Really proven? Can it size up?

--Still concerned re cost and security. Is this really an outmoded issue, or a consequence of hysterical fears by the hard greens and pandering Dems.

Sub and diss, we may have our disagreements elsewhere but here I appreciated your facts and opinions. Are there still valid anti-nuke folks around this forum anymore? Or are they all knee-jerks?

[Tanada]

Thanks for the information about the absurd financing model. But I am quite sure about the calandria cracking excuses since I personally heard them. The financing model was never used as an excuse. But I doubt it accounts for all the costs since the refurbishment is being tagged initially as 14 billion dollars. This means the final bill will be much higher and even accounting for inflation vs. 1980 this figure is insane.

If the workers were making $100,000 per year then you would need 14,000 of them working for 10 years to cost this much. There will not be even 1,000 of them and they will not work for 10 years. They must be using platinum and palladium by the ton.

What an odd way of looking at things, as if all the money will be spent on labor and none on the specialized highly tested and certified materials used in the refurbishing.

Labour costs are always invoked as the main portion of the expense. So it is your way of looking at it that is odd. How can labour costs be less than 1/14th of the total expense? Certified materials like gold and plantinum? Enriched uranium does not cost that much. The refurbishment would consist of fuel assembly replacement and control systems upgrades. Unless they want to replace the freaking calandria again. Neither the control systems nor the fuel assemblies could possibly cost almost $14 billion without any labour costs.

Where did I say labor costs would only be 1/14th of the cost of the upgrades/repairs in question?

Nuclear certified equipment is routinely marked up 4 or 5 times the price of the identical equipment for other applications, and specialized equipment just for nuclear power applications is comparably priced though there is no equivalent non-nuclear application to compare costs too.

[sparky]

.
A large engineering project has a lot of design work done by people who are far from the site .
CAD studies and design are quite costly ,
some inspections are done at the manufacturer location ,prior to shipping the gizmos
for every on site worker there is probably another in the background working is some head office
if the gear is one off , made to comply to complex and demanding specifications, the cost can get quite astronomical
I've worked with gear whose price per weight was not far from solid gold, much to the anguish of the bean counters

Some standard instrumentation was much more expensive if it had to be certified to a higher degree
the stuff was exactly the same but had to be re-tested in an authorized lab with proper certificates issued

[Subjectivist]

Sub and diss, we may have our disagreements elsewhere but here I appreciated your facts and opinions. Are there still valid anti-nuke folks around this forum anymore? Or are they all knee-jerks?

Seems how you ask there are some recent arguments on both the Nuclear thread and for some wierd reason on the Coal thread as well.