Comments on: Turkey’s only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour

By: russ

russ — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:28:49 +0000

Hyperion? The company that plans to begin delivery in 2014? That company with so much experience and track record?

Might work out OK but let somebody else show that it really works first.

By: Joe

Joe — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 02:49:20 +0000

Too cheap to meter!

By: Edward Greisch

Edward Greisch — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 02:46:37 +0000

No, that can’t be right. It has to mean 5 to 6 cents per KwH.

By: Edward Greisch

Edward Greisch — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 02:44:57 +0000

I received email from the company that makes nuclear reactors in a factory. There is an ambiguity. I think they mean 5 to 6 cents per INSTALLED kilowatt. With no fuel to buy for 5 years, the electricity is practically free if I interpret it correctly.:

From: Jim Jones
To: Edward Greisch
Date: Saturday, January 31, 2009 11:15 AM
Subject: Re: $$$ per kilowatt hour from your reactors?

5-6 cents per kW….including the balance of plant electrical generation.
Jim

From: Edward Greisch
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:32:01 -0600
To: “HyperionPowerGeneration James Jones, VP BD”
Subject: $$$ per kilowatt hour from your reactors?

How much will electricity cost from your reactors?

By: Asteroid Miner

Asteroid Miner — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 06:47:01 +0000

I smell corruption in the Turkish deal. Are the coal companies paying somebody to make the nuclear bid as high as possible?

By: Asteroid Miner

Asteroid Miner — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 06:43:48 +0000

So what you are saying Joe Romm, is that if you hire a BAD ENOUGH construction company, with engineers and workers who really want to screw up, you can get the price as high as you want it to be. No surprise there.

Why would anybody hire a Russian company to build a reactor? The Soviet built reactors are all like Chernobyl: Generation 1 unstable kluges without proper containment buildings. The design is from 1944.

A sensible person would look first at American reactors because American reactors are the best.

Did they get a bid from http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com ?

By: Asteroid Miner

Asteroid Miner — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 06:33:35 +0000

There are two types of 21st century reactors that cannot melt down no matter how badly they are treated. Safety is guaranteed by laws of physics.
In the pebble bed reactors, stopping coolant flow removes the space between fuel pellets. The space between fuel pellets must be filled with moving water. The water is the moderator to slow down the neutrons so that the reaction can take place. No coolant flow, no reaction. These pebble bed reactors will never experience a meltdown. It just can’t happen because of laws of nature. The US has 2 pebble bed reactors.
In the recommended and newly invented helium cooled reactor, the core is made of high temperature [refractory] materials that simply will not melt if coolant flow ceases. The core is cooled from a higher temperature by heating the containment building, which also does not melt. The containment building heats its surroundings in the case of coolant flow loss. The helium cooled reactor uses helium as the working fluid to turn a turbine. Helium gas is the ideal fluid to turn a turbine because it can be made very pure so that the turbine blades will last a very long time.
Safety is assured in all US built reactors by the containment building, which is a pressure vessel and which, as in the case of the now obsolete 3 mile island reactor, can and did contain the overheated core. There were ZERO casualties.

American reactors are now too safe. Nuclear power is overpriced because of the excessive safety. 20,000 to 30,000 Americans die each year because of those poisons listed below that come out of coal fired power plants. It is C O A L fired power plants that kill 20,000 to 30,000 Americans each year. Nuclear power plants kill ZERO Americans each year. It is COAL burning that will make us go extinct in about 100 years if we keep doing it.

The problem is that we OVERSHOT on safety design because of people who protest nuclear power. American reactors are TOO safe. It is C O A L fired power plants that give you 100 times as much radiation. Coal is almost pure carbon, except for the URANIUM, ARSENIC, LEAD, MERCURY, Antimony, Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, Selenium, Barium, Fluorine, Silver, Beryllium, Iron, Sulfur, Boron, Titanium, Cadmium, Magnesium, Calcium, Manganese, Vanadium, Chlorine, Aluminum, Chromium, Molybdenum, Thorium, Zinc and all of the decay chain of uranium that are coal’s impurities. We could fuel our nuclear plants from the uranium and thorium in the smoke and cinders from coal fired power plants. Coal cinders are an economically viable ore for several of the listed impurities.

French reactors use American technology that is about 3 decades old. Nuclear power in France undercuts the cost of coal by 30% WITHOUT SUBSIDIES.

By: MikeB

MikeB — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:17:22 +0000

An interview with the head of EDF in today’s Guardian shows clearly the nuclear game, when he says that subsidies to solar and wind should be reviewed. Since nukes have been hugely subsidised (EDF is 80% state-owned), its clear that they don’t care about their own costs, only the relative costs of their rival technologies.

It could well be that there are other bidders in the market, but even if they do come up with a more realistic figure, there is little chance (based on past experience) that it will either turn out to be that amount, or that the taxpayers of Turkey (as well as the US, France or whoever else is involved) will not be subsidising it to a large extent.

By: Bob Wright

Bob Wright — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:47:47 +0000

Why only one bidder for Turkey’s nuke? France, Canada and American companies are looking for business. It sounds shady. Why did Finland design its own nuke? I thought it was a French GenIII design. If you want a passenger jet, you don’t build one yourself or buy a creaky Tupolev. You go with Boeing or Airbus.

Westinghouse-Shaw-Toshiba is becoming the Boeing of GenIII passive nukes. They are building standardized, modular parts in the US and China, and lining up suppliers all over the world. The order book is something like 4 reactors underway in China of an eventual total of 100, and 14 planned in the US so far. Once this snowball gets rolling, costs are going to drop.

http://nextbigfuture.com/ 2008/ 08/ westinghouse-ap1000-nuclear-power-plant.html

By: crf

crf — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:48:21 +0000

Competitive bidding on a cost basis is a poor way to pick a builder for a nuclear plant that takes so long to build, which usually require unique engineering challenges which cannot be cheaply ascertained prior to bidding, and whose costs have proven to be always difficult to pin down. For example, the cost of simply planning a large nuclear plant, necessary before one can clearly ascertain how much it will cost, itself will cost a large fraction, perhaps even 10%, of its total final cost. No company entering a competitive bid process will spend that much money just to prepare a proper bid with some cost certainty — if they lose, they have no way of getting the money back!

There is no magic in the competitive bid process itself that will lower costs significantly from the actual costs of comparable past projects. Every time a nuclear project is built, for example, in the aftermath people will find many costly mistakes that could have been corrected at the time, and would be in the future. But every project is unique, and so seems to carry unique risks which cannot be quantified. You can’t predict shortages of labour. You can’t predict material prices. You can’t predict weather, politics, and the internal fortunes of your own bidding company over the long lifetime of a nuclear power-plant contract. You can’t predict what engineering challenges will appear. You can’t predict how costly inevitable errors will be. There will always be large uncertainties which thwart cost estimates that have small degrees of uncertainty on the overrun side.

Every nuclear power company gets most of its expertise and engineering payed for by essentially a blank cheque from a sponsoring government — Canada, France, Japan, the US, Russia. Where those countries build plants outside their home markets, the projects may often be financed from loans from their home governments to the contracting government.