Cost of Decommissioning Nuclear Plants
Nuclear proponents like to talk about how affordable the power is from nuclear plants. But we all know that someday, we will need to safely decommission the plants, and that is going to cost a lot. After all, it is tricky business dealing with highly toxic materials. You can’t just use a wrecking ball. And it is has never been done before with Candu reactors used in Ontario. We will have to invent a way to safely do it. The Vancouver Sun has published an article that estimates the cost to decommission the Gentilly reactor in Quebec at $1.6 billion.
So lets do a little math. Ontario has 20 nuclear reactors. Today, 15 are operating. Two of the Pickering units are “laid up”, a euphemism for “awaiting decommissioning”. One of the Pickering reactors is out for repair. Two of the Bruce units are nearing the end of a multi year refurbishment, and were supposed to be operating on Mar 31, and June 30 respectively, although they are not yet operating.
The cost to decommission 20 reactors, if the cost is the same as Quebec, would be $32 billion. And that is using the nuclear industry estimates, which have never before been accurate. Perhaps we are talking about $60 billion? And we haven’t even talked about the cost of storing the nuclear waste for thousands of years.
$32 billion is a huge number, rivaling the debt incurred to build the nuclear plants in the first place.
It looks like the hated Debt Recovery Charge on our bills will be with us for a long time to come. Our liabilities with nuclear go on long after the financial liability has been paid.
July 11th, 2012 at 3:00 pm
Glen,
What then, do you believe should be Ontario’s power makeup?
I am personally a Bullfrog Power user, but I’ve also been a Nuclear proponent – in large part because (as far as I understand it) HydroElectric cannot produce enough base load generation to guarantee our power needs 24/7 for instances where the wind isn’t blowing, and Nuclear is certainly better for the environment than coal, despite the increased cost.
Obviously, as a Bullfrog Power customer, I’ve made the decision that increased cost is justified for clean energy. To that end, I would rather have safely maintained CANDU-based Nuclear power (which has an exemplary record) compared to, for example, the BWR-3 type reactors used at Fukushima Daiichi), versus the toxins (and, ironically, radiation) produced by coal.
But perhaps I’m wrong. What would an ideal power mix BE for Ontario, in your opinion?
July 11th, 2012 at 6:19 pm
Excellent post, Glen. This is something no one has ever talked about and the nuclear industry would love to keep quiet about.
July 13th, 2012 at 1:53 pm
The question of an ideal mix is a question with many answers.
The first answer is conservation. We need to look to best practices around the world. Conservation includes regulations, such as phasing out inefficient refrigerators, pumps, motors, lighting, TV’s, cable boxes etc. It includes getting the price of electricity right to encourage the myriad of economic decisions made by businesses and individuals. It includes programs to encourage peak shaving and to assist conservation in certain sectors such as social housing, First Nations, and adoption of certain technologies. Ontario’s electricity consumption has dropped by 10% since 2005. We should be able to arrest growth (we already have), and get 1% reductions for a long time, just though conservation, even with a growing economy. By comparison, the average Danish home, with a similar climate to ours, uses 50% of the electricity we do. A 25% reduction in demand in 15 years is not unrealistic. Improved building codes to mandate designs for passive solar heat, insulation/windows/sealing standards and solar hot water collectors etc. can cut space and water heating and cooling. Conservation alone lets us phase out a nuclear plant or more, while continuing with our coal phase out.
We should NOT build a new nuclear plant. The idea is daffy. The cost is completely out of line with any other alternative. The risks, both financial and environmental are staggering. We should phase out nuclear plants at the end of their lives. The Darlington refurb looks like it going ahead, so we let it finish, but we let Pickering die in 2020 when it is scheduled to be either closed or refurbished.
We aggressively build renewables, including solar, landfill gas, sewage gas, on farm biodigestion, wind, solar, and new hydroelectric. These sources are not as limited as you may think. I heard an OPG employee say there was 5-700 MW of landfill gas available in the province, mostly untapped. There are hundreds of MW’s of hydroelectric available with 367 new MW already contracted. Germany gets 3% of their power from on farm biogas. Wind and solar are unlimited in the amount they can provide.
Increasing renewables substantially is already underway. Contracts already awarded will increase the installed capacity for wind, solar and biogas by 3 times, raising their contribution to supply to over 10%, from the current 3%. And of course we can look elsewhere like Germany, Denmark, Spain, or even PEI to see what can be done with renewables.
And we aggressively pursue load shifting, and storage, through better reservoir management, plug in cars, use of heat storage in hot water tanks or elsewhere. Tyler Hamilton’s blog cleanbreak.ca has a good entry on smart grid initiatives. Baseload demand can be met from a variety of sources, each contributing at different times.
We reinforce our links with Quebec, and perhaps Manitoba, to utilize their already built reservoirs to store energy when we have surplus, and to use that energy when we need it.
As we gain experience, and improve the use of the smart grid, storage, load shifting etc., there is no doubt that this will liberate us to allow another nuclear plant to be phased out at the end of its life. This could be 20-25 years from now, but that gives us a lot of time to get ready.
We are limited only by our own ingenuity.
July 18th, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Best question…and best answer yet on this blog. Well said Glen!