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from the watch-out-for-the-three-eyed-fish dept.
Late last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its first new operating license in nearly two decades. It was issued to the Tennessee Valley Authority, which has finally completed the Watts Bar 2 reactor over 40 years after work was started on the site. The plant may begin generating electricity before the year is out.
Construction on the site was put on hiatus in 1985, but efforts to complete it were restarted in 2007. After work had restarted, the Fukushima disaster led to significant revisions of the safety regulations in the US; Watts Bar 2 becomes the first plant to meet all these requirements. Its license is good for 40 years.
According to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the total cost for completion was $6 billion.
The NRC's announcement is here. [PDF]
(Score: 5, Informative) by iamjacksusername on Tuesday October 27 2015, @06:34AM
Oops misplaced character caused half my comment to go missing... should have previewed more closely.
To be clear, the $6B total represents the construction as well as time decommissioning cost of the plant, including waste disposal. This is mandated by the NRC - TVA had to set aside the money for the decommissioning of the plant during construction.
Every time something nuclear comes up, we here "if only we spent more money on solar." Everybody has been talking about solar as "the answer" for the past 30 years. Instead of dragging their feet, the environmental movement could have gotten behind nuclear and the US could have replaced its entire coal infrastructure by now. Instead, we spent the last 30 years saying"just a few more years and solar will be working".
We have a working solution today. We do not have to burn coal today. A nuclear plant takes about 5 years to build. According to the EPA's own figures, we could eliminate roughly 1600 million metric tons of CO2 equivalents (about 23% of the TOTAL CO2 equivalent output for the whole country) by replacing every coal plant in the country with a nuclear plant. This is technology that is available today. It works today. Instead of spending the next 20 years arguing about 1% improvements here and there, we can actually do something that will have a substantial and real effect today.
According to the EPA and EIA:
In 2013, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions totaled 6,673 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents.
31% of CO2 emissions was attributed to the electrical generation sector.
Coal plants account for 77% of emissions but only 39% of total electrical generation capacity. 19% of total electrical generation is nuclear.
76% of emissions in the electrical sector come from coal plants, 22% from natural gas, 1% from petroleum and less than 1% from other.
Although coal accounts for about 77% of CO2 emissions from the sector, it represents about 39% of the electricity generated in the United States. About 27% of electricity generated in 2013 was generated using natural gas, although this percentage decreased relative to 2012. Petroleum accounts for less than 1% of electricity generation. The remaining generation comes from nuclear (about 19%) and renewable sources (about 13%), which includes hydroelectricity, biomass, wind, and solar.[1] These other sources usually release fewer greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuel combustion, if any emissions at all.
It is very hard to find individual data on nuclear CO2 and greenhouse emissions from the EPA but I was able to find this report from the world nuclear (bias, etc but they do cite their sources very well). Nuclear and Wind are closest to each other in terms of emissions per GW/h (World Nuclear page 7 below).
Sources:
- EPA - http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources/electricity.html [epa.gov]
- US Energy Information Administration- http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=77&t=11 [eia.gov]
- World Nuclear http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedFiles/org/WNA/Publications/Working_Group_Reports/comparison_of_lifecycle.pdf [world-nuclear.org]