If you're excited by that $1.5B Michigan nuke plant revival, bear in mind it's definitely a fixer-upper A shuttered Michigan nuclear power plant is going to need a lot of work to get back online, according to atomic watchdogs. But its operators say the project is still on track despite extensive steam tube damage. After reporting on a $1.5 billion loan from Uncle Sam to Holtec International to revive the Palisades nuclear power …
Sounds about right ... the U-tube (recirculating) or once-through robust pants heat exhangers made of Alloy 400-600-800 with hot and cold legs, downcomer, swirl vanes, and gas coming out the back, front, or top (steam) ... fashionable in the 70s but, like corduroy, I wouldn't be caught dead wearing one of those today!
The very same generator tubes who's deterioration led to finally to the abandonment of the San Onofre plant in California.
I just love the way that once something needs fixing up it suddenly becomes a public problem that needs a substantial investment from the taxpayer. Who'll never get to see the money paid back, much less a return on that 'investment'.
Honestly, "We, the People" are a bunch of suckers.
Wrong!
San Onofre was shut down because of a bone-headed procurement decision. They replacement steam generators from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (owned by Toshiba). Mitsubishi H I had never built steam generators that large before. Their design was clearly inadequate - they were not qualified to do the work. As an engineer in the nuclear industry, I never consider buying the First-of-a-Kind from a vendor. You Always buy from a proven vendor. Senior Management at San Onofre tried to save money and it cost them the plant. Note: Palisades does not have Mitsubishi steam generators.
Now you know the real story.
Steam generators, in nuclear power terminology, generate steam from the reactor coolant. They are the interface between the radioactive parts and the non-radioactive electrical power generator system.
Basically, they're nuclear powered kettles.
The parts that generate power are referred to as turbo-alternator sets as they comprise a multistage steam turbine coupled permanently to high output (500MW+) ac generator.
Hope that clarifies it for you.
It might be noted that borked steam generator tubes was the cause of the shutdown and current somewhat fraught decommissioning of the San Onfre Nuclear Generating Station aka SONGS (a bit off key if you ask me).
The geniuses at Southern California Edison decided during a refurbishment to "replace" the steam generators with a system that might best be described as "broken as designed." Vibration caused excessive wear in the tubes and eventually led to the decision to just throw in the towel and scrap the plant rather than fix it. Much finger pointing and "who me?" ensued.
Now we have tons of both thermally and radioactive waste sitting within a few meters of the Pacific Ocean doing nobody any good -- the storage casks, which have been shown to be prone to cracking and having no viable path to repair if they do, are good for another laugh if you're given to that sort of chuckle. And who, might you ask, designed the canisters? Holtec, of course1.
I'm not reflexively anti-nuclear but I am knee-jerk anti-idiot.
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1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station
See title.
However: The campaigners went as far as warning, "If the reactor were allowed to restart, it would put one of the oldest US nuclear power plants at risk of a meltdown." Probably not. Leakage of radioactive cooling water is the highest risk here, contaminating the soil, groundwater, and oh yeah the adjacent Lake Michigan. After so many prior examples of coolant loss becoming a problem for the reactor, I think it's a safe bet Holtec will be covering that thoroughly and a "meltdown" is (still) highly unlikely.
I think nuclear is a necessity if we want to get off coal for electric production, and maybe even oil and gas, and I like it when old tech can successfully last longer than planned (like El Reg's ongoing articles on Voyagers 1 & 2). And while this ongoing drama is entertaining, it's not in a good way.
"First and foremost, we must acknowledge that accidents will continue to happen. If more and more plants come online, more and more accidents are inevitable. The danger of new accidents emanates more from the economics of the industry and the broadly defined 'human factor' than from technology itself. As the pressure to cut costs increases, safety will suffer. The workforce will shrink, leaving fewer people available to identify problems. The maintenance of existing equipment will become more sporadic as activities are deferred to save money."
Gregory Jaczko, Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator (2019), as cited in Serhii Plokhy, Atoms and Ashes.
Bringing back a 55 year old nuclear plant isn't a good idea. I know it is hard to get approval to build them but new plants would be safer in the long run. Also sometimes the companies bringing back old technologies aren't the safest. They want things fixed up at a low cost and often cut corners. Also like the restart of Three Mile Island. Nuclear power is probably necessary to reduce carbon emissions. Restarting older plants that were closed because they were considered unsafe, uneconomical to run, or need a lot of repairs somehow scares me. If there was a nuclear accident, would the company that opened the plant take responsibility for it? Probably not.
...fourth quarter 2025
(...and $1.5B). I suspect they'll gouge the tax payer for around $3B until the point where the whole thing gets funding pulled, in - let's say, late 2026 to mid 2027, since there's so much more battery-backed solar and wind online, with prices continuing to plummet, that the idea of nuclear power as a solution is recognised as just another cynical pork-barrel play, even with the comparatively crude but very rapidly evolving alternative generation technologies we have in 2024.
It's nothing to do with NIMBY, nothing to do with safety, to say that: Nuclear fission is a fucking stupid idea. Spend the money on renewables and research. The industry has been the absolute epitome of "privatise the gains, socialise the losses". The primary reason for this? Construction costs for new reactors are gigantic and construction times are enormous. But more importantly, decommissioning costs are astronomical.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032124003472
..."so far, of the 204 already closed reactors, only eleven with more than 100 MW of electrical capacity have been fully decommissioned"
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-v3-lr.pdf
...(from a paragraph looking at AGRs with a UK context only - never mind worldwide) "The decommissioning cost estimates for the AGRs have continued to rise and according to the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, costs 'have almost doubled since March 2004, estimated at £23.5 billion [US$2021 32.7 billion] in March 2021, and there remains a significant risk that the costs could rise further'. Furthermore, despite having already provided £10.7 billion [US$2022 13 billion] (from a total value of the funds of £14.8 billion [US$2021 20.3 billion]), the Government was committed to 'top up the Fund with taxpayers’ money, providing an injection of capital of £5.1 billion [US$2020 6.9] in 2020–21 with a further £5.6 billion [US$2022 7 billion] expected in 2021–22'"
The lifetime, end to end cost of nuclear energy is extremely high, either as levelized or capital cost. Nobody would pay for it by choice, were the electricity actually priced to its true cost and consumers given the option to select other sources - not business customers, nor home customers. It is, in fact, depending on conditions one of the most, or actually the most expensive generation method known to mankind even without including decommissioning. I have to add the caveats because of course the world is complex and there are conditions (especially locations) for which nuclear can make sense, but it's really not a sensible choice most of the time.
Hydroelectric - Everything that is going to be built is built. Has the ability to store energy.
Coal & Natural gas - Plenty of that, but do we want to burn it?
Solar & Wind - Great while the sun is shining on a windy day. No ability to store energy.
Nuclear has been chugging along quietly & safely for decades. Chernobyl & Three Mile Island were caused by human screw ups several generations ago. Fukushima was caused by an earthquake, which is an unpredictable event that could impact ANY power plant. This is no different that the hydroelectric industry which saw frequent dam failures a century ago. They figured out how to do it right and the risks are minimized.
Bottom line... We are pushing EVs as a solution to evil gas burning vehicles. But the additional power has to come from somewhere. We need to decide which of these initiatives we are going to support, and live with the consequences of that decision. Increasing energy usage while decreasing energy production is not a solution.
The safest solution would be deep well geothermal at scale. At least until fusion comes online. It easily could be done with national or international funding. While we were at it, we could also legally mandate provision of energy and its infrastructure to the state itself. By doing so we could eliminate taxes entirely, and run the government on the profits from energy production. The economic reasons for the desirability of such an arrangement include the inability of large corporations to avoid taxation, because they would effectively be taxed at exactly their rates of resource usage; also there would be an increase in economic activity / velocity of money supply as the parasitic drag from income taxes is removed from small businesses and consumers. As an old dude, I really hope my children and my children's children can escape the grasp of contemporary oligarchs, who are rapidly cobbling together a new feudalism. Good luck my friends.
After doing 3 minutes of research into Holtec I found that they just got busted in Jan. 2024 for falsifying tax incentive documents to receive more than they were due. They paid a fairly large fine to save themselves from criminal prosecution and are barred from any more state money in their home state of New Jersey.
Yet just a few months later the US government thinks it's ok to give them a $1.5 BILLION? But that's not all - the Gov is also giving Wolverine Energy and Hoosier Energy BILLIONS in free money to purchase energy from them!
They're also decomming a plant ("Pilgrim") in Massachusetts (US), going way over budget and regularly having "unplanned releases" of radioactive water into Cape Cod Canal.
Certainly not the first name you want to see when reading about someone bringing a new plant online.
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