The Ever Escalating Costs of Nuclear Power

By BJ Bjornson

Before getting into the post proper, I do want to highlight a series of interviews being done by one of the Skepchicks with her father, who happens to be a nuclear engineer, now being done daily. For anyone looking for an informative and accessible account of the ongoing disaster in Japan with someone truly knowledgable about the industry, I highly recommend them. Link to the latest is here.

I�ve been following the news on the plant crisis rather closely, and trying to refresh my memory on the operation and implications of radiation, meltdowns, and so forth.  One of the things that has struck me during the ongoing drama is the allocation of resources that the Japanese officials and power company have used in their attempts to keep the fuel rods cooled.  For anyone following the situation, the basic timeline should be relatively familiar.  When the massive 9.0 earthquake struck, the reactor went into shutdown mode as planned, shutting down the main fission reactions in the operating plants and going to back-up diesel generation to keep the coolant systems running while the cores and fuel rods slowly cooled down.  About an hour after that, the tsunami hit and not only knocked out, but basically destroyed the back-up diesel generators and left the reactors with only their eight hour battery back-up for power.  At that point, the problem remained easily defined, bring in enough portable power and equipment to keep the reactor cores and spent rod pools from overheating and causing a potential meltdown.

Clearly, they have not been able to that, and one of the frustrations I�ve felt in watching the ongoing crisis, is trying to figure out why.  Watching the crisis unfold showed attention and resources being shifted from one reactor building to another to another and back again as things appear to be getting out of hand in one area while the workers are focused on containing another.  The most recent example being the issue with the storage pools where spent fuel rods are kept after being removed from the reactors.  (A good summary of what the pools are and what dangers they represent is provided here.)  This wasn�t an unknown risk by any means, but in the efforts to keep the reactor cores themselves from overheating, maintaining a safe level of water in those storage pools seems to have been forgotten, leading to the crisis at the #4 reactor building, which may as a result wind up being more dangerous than the reactors themselves have been to date.

Which brings me to the question of just why more resources and equipment weren�t moved to the site in time to avert some of these problems.  Of course, it�s a fair guess that part of the reason is that despite the fact that the ongoing crisis at the nuclear power plant has sucked up most of the news coverage, the Japanese are still dealing with the very relevant fact that the whole area has been devastated by the earthquake and tsunami, with a death toll in the thousands, many thousands more still missing, and roughly a half million people living in temporary shelters in sub-zero temperatures that therefore require some heat.  In context, the fact that resources are pretty thin on the ground makes a fair bit more sense, though whether or not that actually excuses their inability to get the required resources in place in a timely manner or not won�t be known until things have actually been brought under control and there is time to fully investigate the decisions made. 

In the meantime, one can only continue to watch and hope that enough resources can be brought to bear in time to avoid having the situation deteriorate any further.  If the plant can be reconnected to the main power grid shortly, and enough of the equipment has survived to allow for regular pumping to restart, even if in only one or two of the more stable reactor buildings, that should free up enough resources to help contain the situation and move things towards a proper cold shutdown.  

The other point this crisis is bringing up is the debate over the use of nuclear power overall.  I have some sympathy for those that say one shouldn�t discuss such issues in the middle of a crisis situation, or at least I would if so many of them weren�t willing to use other crisis situations; real, manufactured, and occasionally imagined, to push their own agendas, but we only seem to have such debates when some crisis or another jolts the public consciousness to the issue.

On the pro-nuke side, one of the oft-heard arguments, and likely to remain a major talking point, is how well things have gone given the unprecedented challenges faced by the reactor.  As Greg Laden put it, you really shouldn�t go off telling everybody how well the situation has been handled until it has been resolved sufficiently to the point you�re not made a liar within hours of making such a statement.  At this point, we really don�t know how bad an incident this will be.  Even if the situation does get contained without any further worsening of radiation levels, it will be some time before we know the just how much those working to contain the situation have been exposed to or what the level of danger in the immediate and intermediate vicinity of the plant might be.

On the other hand, I couldn�t help but wince when reading the following at McClatchy:

In a conference call with reporters, Ira Helfand, past president of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, said a meltdown of each reactor at Japanese plant would be the equivalent of "a thousand Hiroshimas."

Really?  A thousands Hiroshimas?  Chernobyl remains far and away the worst nuclear disaster involving a power plant, a threshold the Fukushima disaster needs to deteriorate massively in order to come close to matching, and the damage, deaths, and long-term health effects of that remains a tiny fraction of what happened at Hiroshima.  Say something like that, and I�m not inclined to pay much further attention to your arguments.

In the end, the best case I�ve read against the use of nuclear power is a simple economic one:

Each gigawatt reactor costs upwards of $14 billion these days. And climbing. As the increasingly useful Climopedia at Climate Central puts it: "the question on many peoples' minds today is not what the last nuclear power plant cost, but rather what the next nuclear plant will cost to build." And no one wants to put up a loan for a project with unknown costs. This is why utilities keep trying to get state regulators to let them hike electricity rates before they even get approval to build a new nuclear power plant; the usual sources of major infrastructure funding won't touch these things.

While the capital and operating costs of renewables, most notably solar PV and thermal plants, keep falling, nuclear's is on the opposite slope. In the medium and long-term, this is a fatal flaw. Yes, we could make nuclear power cheaper by loosening regulations, the environmental review process, and safety protocols, but does anyone really want to include such a plank in a re-election campaign?

Well, looser regulations, little or no environmental review, and no real oversight of safety protocols are already pretty much the Republican Party�s campaign platform, but on the bright side, the near paranoia surrounding nuclear power (see the recent selling-out of iodine pills on the West Coast of North America, thousands of miles away and in no actual danger) keeps the NRC an effective regulatory agency, which is a large part of the reason the costs for building and operating a nuclear power plant keep on an upward slope.  And no question that what is happening in Japan will cause those costs to go up further.

Hopefully, the situation at the Fukushima plant will be contained in the very near future, at which point a true post-mortem of the event can begin.  It should be an interesting conversation.