ITER Costs Double

[MSimon]

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http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show ... oject.html

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Rostock, Germany - Cost over-runs may double the cost of a world project to build a new kind of nuclear reactor that leaves behind practically no nuclear waste, according to the deputy chief scientist Monday. The 5.5-billion-euro (7.7-billion-dollar) ITER project, run by the European Union, the United States, Russia, China, Japan, India and South Korea, is building a fusion reactor to generate electricity in Cadarache in southern France.

Norbert Holtkamp, deputy director of the project, told a conference in Rostock, Germany that the final cost would exceed the budget by at least 10 per cent and perhaps 100 per cent.

He told the fusion technology conference that reasons for the over-run included the higher costs of raw materials and energy as well as sophisticated new technologies that scientists want to include.

I think one doubling is not enough.

[olivier]

I suddenly realized that MSimon's motto had a double meaning :

Engineering is the art of making

• What you want - A big science toy
  From what you can get - Twice as budgeted
  At a profit - No reason you couldn't raise some, out of 5 or 10 billion €

Well, well... I should be ashamed of myself for this witticism and apologize to all those who devote their time to ITER. Frankly speaking, I am a much happier taxpayer when my money goes to education and research, than to the rescue of shady financial institutions and rogue traders.
IMHO if there is a problem with ITER,

• - It is not the objective, nor the technology. The energy issue is major. I want my grandchildren to have electricity. If there were only one chance in ten, it would still be worth trying the tokamak option. Somebody is going to say there is not even one chance in a hundred, ok, ok.
  - It is not the cost over-runs per se. No large project I ever heard of actually sticked to its budget, everyone knows that costs are deliberately underestimated in early phases, so as to, say, facilitate the decision-making process.
  - It may be the inefficiency of the international cooperative framework. I would like to know how much of ITER scientists' energy and time is dissolved in bureaucracy and diplomatic arrangements.
  - It is the absence of funding for other options (the law of large numbers says there should be many of them). I do not like complaining that ITER is siphoning off research funding because, yes, I am ready to pay more for credible research.

[tombo]

Hmmmm...
When was the last doubling?

[Roger]

The size and cost of a potential Tokamak generating electricity seems to run into a problem if a fission nuke is cheaper and smaller.

Changing out weakened parts every 2 yrs is very problematic. I think we need to look for some alternative fusion program that eliminates the huge cost issue, and can generate 1200MW in something less than the size of a large sports stadium.

Umm, any suggestions?

[MSimon]

Olivier,

You need to read what Dr. Nebel says on the matter. The chances of ITER delivering electricity at the current estimated price is very near zero.

In addition we don't yet know how to distribute electricity from a 20 GW source.

Utilities would prefer 25 to 100 MW chunks. Fission nukes come in 1,000 MW chunks and are viable for base load.

ITER costs are already at the limit of $$/KWh. A 2X or 4X increase means we will be burning coal for a long time to come. There is plenty of it.

[alancj]

Utilities would prefer 25 to 100 MW chunks. Fission nukes come in 1,000 MW chunks and are viable for base load.

Fission plants can come in any size you care to design them. Most people "back in the day" seemed to think bigger was better, for economies of scale, so what we have now off-the-shelf is extra large. But people are finally realizing that small plants that can roll off the factory floor make far more sense. The Hyperion and PBMR (which can load follow) projects are some near term projects. I'm also a big fan of the Molten Fluoride Thorium Reactor http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/. All these guys advocate the economies of series production and (relatively) distributed generation. I can't wait for the Polywell, but if it doesn't work out, I think it should be "full steam ahead" with small next gen fission.

[TallDave]

It is not the objective, nor the technology. The energy issue is major. I want my grandchildren to have electricity

They will, and odds are overwhelming that it won't come from the ITER tokoamak path. Fission fuels will last at least 1,000 years, perhaps more than 100,000 and renewables will, of course, last forever. Both are likely to be far cheaper than ITER/DEMO plants.

Fission plants can come in any size you care to design them.

Yes, but there are sizes which are more efficient than others.

[alancj]

But my point was that extra large nukes are not necessarily more efficient or economical. Something that gets installed quickly and starts producing revenue in a year from order date is going to be a lot more economical than ten years of interest on a massive loan with no income. The only thing that needs to change is with NRC licensing fees, which are sized as if all plants are the same with no regard to output.

[TallDave]

But my point was that extra large nukes are not necessarily more efficient or economical.

I think they generally are. Maybe M Simon can speak to this point, but I remember reading the most economical size for a plant is around 1.1 GW.

Something that gets installed quickly and starts producing revenue in a year from order date is going to be a lot more economical than ten years of interest on a massive loan with no income.

All else being equal, yes. But if the former doesn't produce electricity at an operating profit, it's worthless no matter how quickly it can be put in.

The only thing that needs to change is with NRC licensing fees, which are sized as if all plants are the same with no regard to output.

I can't disagree that the NRC regs need to change. But that begs the question: does it really cost that much less to regulate a smaller plant? You're probably still going to have to do all the same monitoring.

[MSimon]

Dave,

Yep. 1 GW or so.

The monitoring is about the same no matter the plant size.

What got it into such bad shape is that industry has had 50+ years of efforts to cut corners and hide problems. Every time it happened regs got tougher. And the enviros go crazier.

[Chuck Connors]

MSimon- All this and more. During the 70's in Washington State, what is now Energy Northwest began construction on 5 reactors, 3 in Eastern Wa., and 2 in Western Wa.

Out of the 5, only one was completed and is still operating near Richland, WA...a 1.19 GW reactor called the Columbia Generating Station (formerly WNP-2). This began construction in early 70's and started operations in 1984.

The other 4 were cancelled in varying states of construction for several reasons...the biggest was that they just spent too much money; cost overruns, financing issues (high interest rates), power surplus in the state (hydro), tougher regs, and a growing anti-nuke movement. Literally Billions of public money up in smoke.

http://www.efsec.wa.gov/nuclearproj.shtml

This remains an execellent lesson for the future.

[classicpenny]

Not just public money up in smoke - quite a few private investors lost money as well: my dad made the mistake of buying bonds for that fiasco. The acronym was WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply System) – most people just called it "Whoops" - not funny. The almost-completed corpse of the Satsop reactor is quite visible from the highway, driving from Olympia to Hoquiam. I've got to admit that I'm not entirely sure just exactly what that lesson was.

[rnebel]

Classicpenny:

Back in the 1970s “nuclear optimists” predicted that nuclear power would comprise 20% of the US electrical market by 2000. Guess what. That happened. How can that be even if a lot of plants were cancelled and no new plants have been ordered since the 70s?
The answer is that the projected demand never materialized. For the previous several decades prior to 1980 electrical power had grown exponentially. This had been maintained because electrical demand had been periodically adding large new components (i.e. rural electrification, air conditioning, etc.) However in the early 80s we had a combination of recession, inflation and rising electrical costs, along with no new large electrical demand items. Demand never materialized, and a lot of these projects that had counted on the demand projections were cancelled.
What is the lesson to take from this? My conclusion is that the financial risk of 1000 MWe units is just too large. It takes too long to build them (i.e. you have to project demand 5-10 years down the road) and you tie up too much investment in a single product. This is why you see the government underwriting the loans for the nuclear renaissance. Recent electrical generating capacity has largely been natural gas. They can build units in the 100-200 Mwe range in a couple of years. Also, the cost for these units is small compensating for the higher cost of natural gas.

[jmc]

I think the problem with the nuclear industry is that it has always been surrounded by critics. Its hard to find any other industry in the world whose critics will be quite as enthusiastic in basking in its every failure, no matter how small. Greenpeace are against nuclear power because its "dirty and expensive", I don't think they are willing to change that view. No matter what happens in the nuclear industry, the greens will find a slant to take to reinforce that line.

http://www.greenpeace.org/international ... ustainable

France went from 0% nuclear power to 80% nuclear power in 2 decades. I don't see why other countries (at least technologically advanced) could not do the same. One thing that disgusts me is that the same environmental groups which complain that nuclear power could never be installed quickly enough to me our Kyoto targets. Are the ones who lobby against and delay the construction of nuclear power plants at every opportunity they get.

Regarding being economic, nuclear power can be mass-produced rapidly with an aggressive government backed programme and our power grids are already equipped to accomodate them with relatively minor modifications, (Which cannot be said for 100% wind power). Maybe other power plants are cheaper (in that sense nuclear energy perhaps is not economically competitive) , but that doesn't change the fact that nuclear energy is affordable. In a world with nuclear power we could still use electricity as much as we do today while only paying marginally more.

If you throw in concerns of future fuel uncertainty both in terms of resources aswell as reliance on other, less than friendly nations in addition to climate change and SO2 emmissions. The nuclear energy looks, not only affordable, but also more desirable, then most other forms of electricity generation, even if it is slightly more costly.

[rnebel]

Jmc:
I should have clarified this, but my comments apply to the US market and structure. I am in favor of nuclear fission power and back in the 70s I used to do a fair amount of nuclear advocacy. Although most of what the anti-nuclear people said was fear mongering, the local group we had was actually fairly knowledgable about the utility industry. The way they attacked was to go after the utilities' pocketbooks. Back then utilities were heavily regulated monopolies. When they had cost overruns, they generally tried to get these overruns incorporated into their current rate base. What this did was charge today’s customers for power that would be delivered in the future. The anti-nuclear people claimed this was unfair and that the utilities were effectively forcing their customers to capitalize the utilities. This forced the utilities to borrow more money to cover the overruns as well as to pay back their investors. This is kind of an inverse pyramid scheme and you can see how it can quickly lead to financial difficulties.
The situation is even worse today. Utilities are increasingly becoming electrical distribution companies rather than generating companies. They then buy their power on the open market. The generating companies don’t have the monopoly protection that the old utilities used to have. They can’t raise capital from their customers since they have to compete on the open market. Consequently, financing is a big issue. I think that nuclear fission can probably compete if one only looks at the cost of electricity. But the financing is risky.