The thrill is gone, is gone away for good
Oh the thrill is gone, baby it’s gone away for good — BB King The Thrill is Gone The focus of this month’s column is that nuclear is just too expensive and the alternatives are not. We have to realize the allure is no longer there. First we were lured to nuclear power on the well heeded advice of a letter written by Albert Einstein just weeks before the invasion of Poland. It put us ahead in the race for the nuclear bomb. It did ultimately end the war with Japan. The second lure was cheap clean energy. After WWII the conscience of the world awoke to the power of the atom. There was a quick struggle to put the destructive power of the atom behind us. The AEC — Atomic Energy Commission — then a leisure service of governmental nuclear marketing, now the NRC, was diligent in promoting nuclear power as the advent of a new and safe energy. It worked! Nuclear power plants were being commissioned with regularity in the early 1960s. Nuclear power plants are now seeking state and federal money to stay the course. The cost of cheap nuclear energy is gone. The cost of maintaining nuclear power has gone through the roof. When things get expensive, it leads to maintenance cost cutting, which in turn leads to making mistakes, very expensive mistakes. For example in 1995 Millstone Nuclear power plant attempted to quick cool its reactor water during a scheduled maintenance shutdown. It was done against procedure. If not for the two engineers who blew the whistle the plant would have caused the highly radioactive fuel pool water to boil. The plant was trying to cut corners to reduce their shutdown costs. The potential for these risks is simply no longer worth it. What is nuclear power? In a nut shell nuclear power is all about the rapid release of a lot of energy with little fuel. What happens after that is “all about control,” with pardons to Janet Jackson, and that is where the problem lies. It’s all about control The control I am referring to is thermal nuclear control mixed with political control topped off with the runaway costs involved in their construction, maintenance, decommissioning and security. Add to that the cost of catastrophic repairs for these major hiccups, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. A cost that will exceed the construction costs of all the U.S. nuclear plants put together. All these accidents were caused by human error. Now the U.S. is faced with the future of 100 aging plants which begs the same question of those in a bad relationship” Why are we putting up with this? What do we do now? Sustaining nuclear power has many questions. Do we need to keep one step ahead of our adversaries? Do we want our enemies to produce dangerous isotopes for bombs and isotopes such as tritium to ignite them, using them as an omnipresent threat to the U.S. of nuclear blackmail? Then what about the waste? What do we do with it? Decommissioned plants take 60 years to return the property for public use. The associated radioactive byproducts are placed in high security landfills which will require vigilance for literally thousands of years. How can this vigilance be guaranteed? Currently there is only $53 billion in the decommissioning trust fund. The current costs of decommissioning the remaining plants will be $71 billion. Think of it like this: Let’s say you paid $30,000 for your car; you get 10 years out of it now you get to pay $5,000 extra to put it in the junk yard. This is the cost comparison for most nuclear plants, and it will only cost more in the future. This does not include the cost of security. The cost of decommissioning alone is enough to build 23 gigawatts of clean solar power at today’s prices. Solar will only get cheaper while nuclear will only get more expensive. Other issues One of the reasons nuclear is still viable is, outside of the standard use of producing electrical energy, it is also used to make tritium. Tritium is necessary for rapid ignition of a nuclear weapon. This may be the motivation perhaps for some countries in the building of an electrical generating nuclear plant when more economical fuel is readily available. It was Iran’s Ahmadinejad who said that Iran was only looking to “supplement” its electrical capabilities with nuclear power. This is a curious statement made by an engineer such Ahmadinejad and once president of one of the world’s largest oil producing nations. One may speculate with a high degree of certainty he was not a dues paying member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Iran, however, has toned down a bit after Suxnet. Then there’s North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, nuclear rocket jockey and once rated as Onion Magazine’s sexiest man alive. Not only does he have a bad choice of hair dressers, he also is like an American teenager with dad’s credit card and a new sports car. He’s dangerous to himself and others. The future For commerical energy purposes we need to consider mothballing the old plants like Europe plans to do. We need to look elsewhere for energy. The new technologies will provide jobs and a cleaner environment. It will usher in a new era of independence for everyone. As for our adversaries we need to convince them there are better ways to resolve issues than the constant threat of some radioactive derivative. Instill in them that the consequences of their acts are ultimately self destructive. Nuclear research should continue as it is the secret of the origin of the universe but only for that reason.
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AuthorJames Bobreski is a process control engineer who has been in the field of electric power production for 43 years. His “Alternate Energy” column runs monthly. Archives
June 2020
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