Playing a Global Game of Risk
There are obvious and less-obvious reasons for the lack of progress in building new nuclear power plants on American soil.
First, there’s the status of combined construction and operating license applications in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission queue. Anghaie said he expects delays there.
Then there’s the enormous lag time—during which expertise was lost—between any new projects and the last ones that were built. New plant construction costs, of which more than a third are for labor, he said, also represent a daunting hurdle, especially when you factor in six years to build an EPR.
But one of the thorniest challenges may be the cost of risk-management.
Given high construction costs, and utilities’ bad experiences with cost overruns in the 1970s and ’80s, utilities, Anghaie said, now want “zero risk.” They’re wanting cost guarantees from the reactor vendors, not from their engineering, procurement, and construction contractors. Zero risk, he noted, carries a high price tag: increased costs—which is where this circle started.
There’s no way to completely eliminate risk, so it just gets moved around. Without naming names, Anghaie said that there are vendors engaging in “highly risky risk-taking” because of the cost and schedule guarantees they’re giving.
Given this cost/risk dynamic, cost and schedule predictability favor more mature technologies, he noted, just as design simplicity favors passive safety systems and large baseload power needs favor large-capacity plants.
If you make all the “right” technology choices, can you be guaranteed that the reactor design you choose is 100% ready for prime time? Maybe not.
A Role for the National Labs
According to Anghaie, the reactor industry needs immediate help with research and development (R&D), and that’s where national labs like LANL could help. His vision is that LANL develop a pool of scientific and technical expertise to start R&D partnerships with industry to meet such needs as:
- Modeling and simulation.
- Large-scale testing facilities.
- The development of new fuel cycle and proliferation-resistant technologies.
- Support for the economic and institutional aspects of nuclear power.
Even if Anghaie has overstated the case for nuclear power, and even if constructing 900 reactors turns out to be unrealistic (for any number of reasons), his argument for using all R&D resources at our disposal to expedite development of the next generation of reactors, and to ensure the safe construction and operation of them, is sound. It remains to be seen if the national labs, and the politicians who fund them, will get the message.
—Gail Reitenbach, PhD is managing editor of
POWER.
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Comments (3)
1) that the current fleet of 104 reactors won't be relicensed. The NRC has already relicensed every plant that has sought to extend its initial 40-year license and there's no evidence that nuclear plant life ends at 60. Maybe 80? Maybe 100? Who knows. It turns out that these are pretty robust plants, and replacing and repairing is a heck of a lot cheaper than building new units.
2) that old coal will die. Coal plants, like old soldiers, never seem to die. But unlike old soldiers, they don't fade away. They just get rebuilt, a piece at a time. One of the assumptions of the original Clean Air Act, and all subsequent amendments, was that new coal technology would render the older plants uneconomic. That led to the "grandfather" clause in the act. But Grandpa is still alive and ticking, and retrofits and re-engineering keep the old guy spry.
Notable that FERC Commissioner Wellinghoff today asked whether need to (or can affored to) build any more new coal of nuclear plants ever again in this country in his remarks at a U.S. Energy Association forum.
Reality will probably end up somewhere between the two prognostications, but most people who care about the environment would tend to hope that Commissioner Wellinghoff is closely to what actually happens than what Dr. Anghaie envisions.
Jeff Anthony, American Wind Energy Association