Worry about 2 Ontario reactors cost overruns (already expected to cost $26B Canadian)

Last year...



Now...

I gave it a rec and it still has <0 recs.
So there were at least two unrecs.

This appears to be one of them.

so it got at least another unrec.
There seems to be a group of people who are trying to hide this information.
What could possibly be motivating them?

Mission Accomplished!

From the "On The Fence" section of the "Top Tens" page:


How many recs and unrecs were there?
A simple problem of two equations with two unknowns.

1) recs - unrecs = 4
2) recs = .61 (recs + unrecs)

recs - unrecs = 4
so unrecs = recs - 4

Substituting into equation 2:

recs = .61 (recs + unrecs)
so recs = .61 (recs + (recs-4))

recs = .61 (2 recs - 4)
recs = 1.22 recs - 2.44
.22 recs = 2.44
recs = 2.44 / .22 = 11

unrecs = recs - 4 = 11-4 = 7

so 11 people rec'ed this, and 7 people unrec'ed it.

It's no longer on the "On the Fence" page, so can't tell absolute numbers.
But it got at least 2 votes to go from +4 to +6, so there are at least 13 people who rec'ed this, and at least 7 trolls who unrec'ed it.

;-)

Or about the overruns on cost, or how the poison they product is uncontrollable.

...like they do and keep repeating mantras like this.

'Cause without huge government subsidies (in both overt and
covert ways), *NOBODY* would ever consider building an
enriched-uranium fission power plant nowadays.

And that's just considering the economics of the white elephant.
No civilization with a conscience would ever create a legacy of
nuclear waste such as is produced by fuel mining, enrichment,
and disposal.

Tesha

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Ontario Hydro has lost so much money, they're charging EVERYONE for the cost overruns for these nuke plants.

As you can imagine, nuke plants aren't popular even with the people who AGREE with nuclear power.

I lived in a suburb called Nepean. They had their own hydro company called (not surprisingly) Nepean Hydro. The company was debt free and a not for profit organization. We paid for the electricity we used at market rates and for the local infrastructure. The Mike Harris government forced the amalgamation of all local hydro authorities into a conglomerate called Hydro One (is it back to being called Ontario Hydro now?) and we started getting surcharges on our bills to retire the debt. Overnight, our hydro went from debt free to $36 Billion in the hole, and somehow it was our fault and we had to pay for it.

The fact that Ontorio would reject cheaper foreign designs in favor of the CANDU design with its massive history or low uptime, failures, complex repairs, and higher costs is very telling.

Natioanlistic pride getting ahead of science.

CANDU was a good experiment often times science requires research into multiple different angles. In this case CANDU was a good experiment that never lived up to its paper potential.

There isn't a single CANDU reactor anywhere that today is safer cheaper, safer, or have higher uptime (capacity factor) than the best "conventional" PWR or BWR. In 1950s when nuclear reactors has capacity factor of 50% the CANDU uptime of 88% was amazing. Today when cheaper, simpler PWR are pushing 92% the larger, more complex CANDU design stuck at 88% uptime is a failure. Throw in the cost of millions of gallons of heavy water and it simply doesn't make sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor#Economics

Canada seems unwilling to accept this though. So they will keep building them despite nobody in the world willing to buy them anymore.

And when one considers the costs of the entire nuclear fuel
cycle, that's still a significant benefit.

This is especially true when you consider that essentially the
same enrichment chain that produces enriched reactor fuel
can produce Highly-Enriched Uranium for nuclear weapons.

If you're not doing *ANY* enrichment, you aren't doing clandestine
production of HEU.

I still have a lot of respect for the CANDU effort.

Tesha

While enriching "can" leads to HEU. Uranium reactors (including CANDU) produce plutonium as a fission product. Plutonium is a far more effective weapons material than HEU.

The CANDU design made sense in 1960s. The nuclear industry was plauged by downtime and long, slow expensive refeulings. Refueling that should take 2-3 months were taking 6-9 months. The entire time a PWR or BWR is refueling it is producing 0 kwh of energy.

However technology didn't stand still. Refueling times decreased with experience down to about 2 months. Burnup (length of time fuel can be fissioned before refueling) increased dramatically. The combination as well as improved uptime raised capacity factor for US reactors to about 92%.

CANDU reactors in Canada have capacity factor of 88% and around the world it is far lower.

CANDU mades sense in 1960s but it failed to live up to the promise.

With the nuclear industry every problem is an example of a "failed promise" and something that demonstrates "what we shouldn't be doing"; while they insinuate ("they rejected cheaper bids for nationalism") that there IS an acceptable solution.

However when you sit down and list all of "failed promises" and their solutions, they end up canceling each other out and you are left with nothing but the HUGE bill from yet another political boondoogle that was justified with doubletalk.

nope

....that will keep costing and costing and costing for centuries.

yup

except it does.

So CANDU reactor no longer makes economical sense.

You can be anti-nukker and still get that point.

Despite your position on nuclear energy you can look at two reactor designs logically and say Reactor A is worse than Reactor B (even if you dislike both A & B).

That was the cost of Yucca Mountain - and that does not include the cost of disposing the 750,000 metric tonnes of highly toxic and highly corrosive uranium hexafluoride currently housed in thousands of corroding steel casks produced by US uranium enrichment plants to make all the nucular fuel.

nucular sucks all the way

yup

0.1cents per kWh for last 30 years. The govt has collected $30 billion in disposal fees and not disposed of the waste. If number of reactors remains around 100 that would generate another $80 billion by the time they reach end of life.

Also about half of high level waste is the result of weapons programs, and naval reactor spent fuel neither of which are the responsibility of the utilities.

So you have to consider the cost of any long term storage needs to be seperated out into cold war waste and nuclear energy waste.

The truth is the govt collected billions from the utilities to dispose of the waste and then never did anything with it.

reactors.

Yucca Mountain would have cost >$100 billion - taxpayers would have to pick up the rest.

To make matters worse - dozens of reactor operators are suing taxpayers for >$56 billion to recover the costs of dry cask and spent-fuel-pool storage.

Oh yeah - thanks to Ronald Reagan, taxpayers OWN all spent fuel created by commercial US power reactors.

yup

Things you won't hear on teh FAUX News

in order to see your error.

They paid "x" dollars to the government for storage (shorthand)... then they have paid "y" for their on-site storage (that under the plan was not their responsibility - and assuming that the number is accurate).

Take x+y and you're quite close to that $100 billion. Add in "z" (future fees and storage costs" and you're talking about a number far larger than a "mere" 100B

I expect there are quite a few "off the books" costs that are not
being fully accounted for, many of which are buried in the Federal
Budget.

Tesha

Anybody, even you or I, could build a "gun type" bomb using
Highly-Enriched Uranium. But Plutonium requires an implosion-
type bomb, and it takes much more technical expertise to get that
one right.

As a proof point, note that the gun-type device we dropped on
Japan ("Little Boy") was completely untested, but the design of
the implosion-type device ("Fat Man") had been full-scale tested
at Trinity (Alamagordo).

Tesha

I understand your point, but I'm not sure that mitigates the danger from plutonium waste very much.

Toxicity and nuclear proliferation by nation-states are at least as significant as casual bomb builders, I'd imagine...

Do you see this design as acceptable for that purpose?

But in its day, CANDU was a design that addressed
some of the challenges facing its contemporary peers.

Tesha

whereas our high-consumption lifestyles are non-negotiable, of course.

> Oh well, its only money
> whereas our high-consumption lifestyles are non-negotiable, of course.

Brief yet accurate.
:hi: