On of the more polite Agelbert exchanges with a nuke puke (claimed to be a materials engineer with over 30 years experience in nuclear power plant siting, building, operating and maintenance costs) during March of 2011. DROLL TROLL BILL ---><---AGELBERT
Atomsk's comments are spot on!
Droll Troll had the brass to claim everything was "all good" at Fukushima. I claimed from the start that the reactor vessels had been
**** by the earthquake even BEFORE the tsunami. History has proven me right and Droll Troll a bald faced liar.
Also, Vermont Yankee will, thankfully, CLOSE by the end of 2014. Droll Troll Bill had been claiming that it was "cost effective" to keep Vermont Yankee running.
He also expresssed dismay abut my "adversarial" dialogue.
Agelbert snark added today along with emoticonsBill (Droll Troll) One of the questions you asked me the other day piqued my curiosity and I have done some pencil pushing. The following is based on the current GE ABWR, not the Mark 1 used at Fukushima-1. The new reactor is much bigger and more powerful but the per rod data should be pretty close to the reactors with the accident:
Total number of fuel rods: 54,064
Total uranium dioxide in reactor: 379,221 lbs
Uranium dioxide in each rod: 7 lbs
Uranium in each rod: 6.2 lbs
Natural uranium necessary for one rod (uranium going into enrichment): 48 lbs
Uranium cost (48 lbs): $4446
( costs not included) Chemical conversion: $ 283
( costs not included)Enrichment service: $2114
( costs not included ) Rod fabrication: $1500
( costs not included) Cost per rod: $8143 Reactor electrical output (gross) 1,356 MW
Electrical output per rod: 25 kw
(excluding all the energy required to mine, refine and maufacture it, of course!) Electricity generated over 4.5 years: 591,300 kwh per rod
Wholesale value of electricity: $35,478 per rod
Federal fee for disposal: $ 591 per rod
The reactor design data is from NRC filings. SWU calculation (how much enrichment is necessary) from wise-uranium.org. Uranium, chemical conversion, and enrichment service prices from uxc.com. Rod fabrication is my guess. I assumed a 90% capacity factor. Wholesale price of electricity is contract price from Vermont Yankee to instate utilities.
Good question
Bill
Posted by agelbert Mar 30 2011 - 10:32pm
Bill,
Thanks for the info. It's a lot to chew on. That 591 bucks fee floored me though. It sounds like one of those externalized costs that we the people get stuck with.
For many decades scientists were flumuxed by the paradox of the required energy for a dolphin to swim and the actual energy it uses. There was no paradox. The problem was the math in fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics. But it is a testament to the sheer bull headedness of the scientific community to cling to their world view in the face of a reality that conflicts with the math they so love.
I bring this to your attention because my baseline for logical premises is reality, not necessarily scientific status quo. No, I don't question the law of gravity but I question a lot of stuff that many scientists do, like putting mice under hard radiation to see effects on a "mammalian biological model" similar to humans. I think it's wrong to torture animals for the "good" of humanity. But that's another subject.
I will continue to balance the costs of anything that generates energy against anything else by adding up the whole enchilada.
If I buy a car that will become toxic waste after 4.5 years
, I would consider it prudent to find out what it was going to cost me to detoxify this car, not just offload the toxic waste at the cheapest possible price. I don't subscribe to Wall Street's greater fool theory although that seems to be the MO of corporate executives everywhere.
So thanks again for the info. I'll get back to you with a summary comparison of nuclear energy with, among other things, pumping with wave action water with thousands of hydraulic rams several thousand feet up a mountain and using it in a pipe back to the ocean to generate electrical energy. That and other crude and simple energy production methods work but there aren't a lot of corporate profits to be had beyond initial fabrication. Inland alternatives exist as well.
Finally, as a materials engineer, you probably know a lot better than I do how much more expensive the pipes, valves, fittings, insulation, etc. are in a nuclear power plant as opposed to those in a dam or a wind generator. All these things need to be looked at afresh IF humanity recovers from the current level of insanity.
Posted by Atomsk Mar 30 2011 - 10:47am
Budgeting for crimes is common practice in business, and if businesses are allowed to do that, the state certainly has that right too :-/
Afaics, responsibility and risk gets concentrated at the bottom, power and payoff at the top.
I think that responsibility is how society handles feedback from reality, and if you decouple that from power, you get a positive feedback loop, which will lead to cancerous structures.
I know this sounds really vague and mystical and pseudo-scientific and stupid, but I don't have better words for this.
Source: Agelbert's files. I'm sure you can find this at the Common Dreams web site archive for March, 2011. Note: This was before they adopted Disqus so the handles are in-house.
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