ML24322A001
| ML24322A001 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Diablo Canyon  |
| Issue date: | 11/14/2024 |
| From: | Public Commenter Public Commenter |
| To: | NRC/NMSS/DREFS |
| NRC/NMSS/DREFS | |
| References | |
| 89FR87433 | |
| Download: ML24322A001 (4) | |
Text
From:
Van Snyder <van.snyder@sbcglobal.net>
Sent:
Thursday, November 14, 2024 6:17 PM To:
DiabloCanyonEnvironmental.Resource
Subject:
[External_Sender] Thanks for 14 Nov DEIS meeting Thanks for the 14 November DEIS public comment meeting.
My initial concern was that consideration of the environmental impact of alternatives to Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station appears to be inadequate. Other callers to the meeting addressed those concerns.
Several callers remarked about the environmental effect of uranium mining. I pointed out that spent nuclear fuel, a substance we mistakenly call nuclear waste, is actually valuable 5% used fuel.
Unfortunately, the energy immanent in the 95% fuel in "nuclear waste," twenty times the energy extracted from it before it was removed from the reactor, can only be accessed by reprocessing. The Nuclear Waste Fund now stands at $43 billion, but the Nuclear Waste Act explicitly forbids those funds from being used for reprocessing. If spent fuel were reprocessed, uranium mining would be entirely unnecessary for at least 500 years.; environmental concerns about uranium mining would become irrelevant. One caller remarked about 220,000 year storage. The isotopes that cause that storage requirement are fuel, which can be converted to electricity and fission products. Only two elements among fission products, caesium and strontium (9.26% of fission products or 0.46% of spent fuel), require 300 year custody. Half the remainder are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive. Caesium and strontium are produced at the rate of less than 92 kilograms per GWe-year, so an additional forty years of operation at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Generating Station would produce less than 3.7 tonnes (1000 kg/T) of caesium and strontium. Their density is about two tonnes per cubic meter, so the volume would be less than 1.9 cubic meters about two cubic yards, or about 500 gallons.
The yearly average capacity factor at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station during the last decade has been 90%, so average output has been 2.0 GWe. Solar power in California has an average capacity factor of 27%. If Diablo Canyon Nuclear Generating Station were to be replaced by solar power, 2.0/0.27 = 7.33 GWe label capacity would be needed. The average land area for industrial scale solar power in California is five acres, so about 36,000 acres about 57 square miles would be necessary. While the entire Diablo Canyon Nuclear Generating station area is about 1,000 acres, the power station proper occupies twelve acres. The current price for industrial-scale solar power, according to EIA, is $2.31 per watt, so the capital cost, not counting interest, would be
$16.94 billion. Assuming 5% interest and ten year amortization brings the cost to $33 billion, or $1.1 billion per year, about one half cent per average delivered watt.
Some asset would be required to provide the remaining 73% capacity not provided by a solar replacement. This amounts to 0.73
- 0.90
- 2.2
- 24 = 35 GWe-hours average per day, that is, about 17.5 watt-hours of storage per watt of average demand. If that backup were provided by gas, the effect of closing Diablo Canyon Nuclear Generating Station would be to increase carbon dioxide emissions. Long-term calculations described at http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Worse.html, using thirteen years of data from the California Independent System Operator, show that consideration of diurnal variation is not sufficient. When annual variation is considered, the amount of storage required is seen to be over 1,000 watt-hours of storage per watt of average demand. The current price for utility-scale battery storage, according to EIA, is $0.56/Wh. Assuming only 35 GWe-hr of storage, 100% charge-discharge efficiency and storage levels, the cost would be $19.4 billion. Taking into consideration 90% charge-discharge
efficiency, and the need to maintain energy in storage between 20% and 80% of total capacity to avoid damaging batteries, and ten year lifetime, brings the cost to $19.4 billion / 0.54 = $36 billion. With interest at 5% and ten year amortization the cost becomes $41.6 billion, or $4.16 billion per year.
Increasing the capacity to 1,000 Wh/W brings the total cost to $1.2 trillion, or the yearly cost to $120 billion.
Including 35 GWe-hours of storage brings the total annual cost for a solar replacement to $5.26 billion, or about 2.6 cents per average watt. Providing adequate storage is clearly not financially possible.
One caller remarked that 14 GW of battery storage capacity (actually 13.391), seven times Diablo Canyon's average capacity, have been installed in California. The power capacity of storage to compensate for renewable sources' inherent unreliability is not the relevant quantity. The question is the energy capacity in megawatt-hours, not the available power during discharge in megawatts. The total energy storage capacity as shown at https://www.caiso.com/documents/2023-special-report-on-battery-storage-jul-16-2024.pdf is 35,400 MWh, or approximately enough to provide average daily buffering for a solar replacement for Diablo Canyon Nuclear Generating Station.
The construction cost of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Generating Station was about $16.5 billion in 2024 dollars.
Assuming 5% interest, thirty year life, and thirty year amortization brings the total cost to $33 billion, or about $1.1 billion per year, or about 0.5 cents per watt of average output. The total cost over thirty years is about the same as the total cost over ten years for a solar replacement, not counting storage.
One caller remarked that an energy system supplied entirely by renewable generators is possible.
Professor Simon Michaux has obtained the list of "technology units" that the IEA claims would be necessary to power the Earth using solar, wind, hydro, and minor contributors such as geothermal and biofuels, with battery storage. Constructing these would require more copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, graphite, and vanadium than are known to be recoverable using existing technology. His report is available at https://tupa.gtk.fi/julkaisu/bulletin/bt_416.pdf. Professor Michaux's estimate of required storage capacity was very optimistic.
Callers compared the hazard at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Generating Station to Chernobyl. I remarked that Chernobyl was irrelevant because the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station is not an incompetently built and operated unlicensed reactor, with a positive temperature coefficient and inherent instability at low power, constructed in a country having neither safety culture nor licensing criteria. Furthermore, it is not a graphite-moderated reactor, so a fire such as dispersed the nuclear materials at Chernobyl is impossible. One caller remarked about Three Mile Island. It must be remembered that the 1979 accident caused no injuries, illnesses, or deaths, but the immediately previous release of the fictional movie "The China Syndrome" caused widespread irrational panic. In the entire civilized world, nuclear power remains safer than Teddy Kennedy's Oldsmobile.
I remarked that there does not appear to be a significant tsunami danger at Diablo Canyon. That question needs more study.
The Fukushima Daiichi ("number one") power plant was not damaged by the Sendai earthquake. Its auxiliary cooling system diesel generators, batteries, switchgear, and electric pumps were in the basement, and their fuel was at a low elevation. The basement was not waterproof so the pumps, batteries, switchgear, and generators were flooded and the fuel was swept away by the tsunami. Although the reactors had shut down automatically in response to the earthquake, without auxiliary cooling, the three operating reactors were damaged by heat from residual radioactive decay. TEPCO had been warned of these hazards eight years earlier but took no action. At the nearby Fukushima Daini ("number two") power plant, although the generators, batteries, and switchgear were in
the basements, the basements were waterproof, and fuel was at a high elevation. Fukushima Daini reactors were not damaged, but water intakes suffered minor damage; the power station was back in operation in a few days.
The Fukushima Daiichi power station was built on a bluff with an original height of 35 meters, but this was excavated down to ten meters (about 33 feet) to place the plant on bedrock to reduce vulnerability to earthquakes. The seawall was only twenty meters tall. It was 80 miles from the epicenter of the Sendai earthquake. The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Generating Station is at an elevation of 85 feet. Unlike at Fukushima Daiichi, the reactors are more than 1,000 feet from the shoreline. The site is 500 miles from Cape Mendocino, the southern end of the nearest megathrust fault. Tsunami energy in the open ocean decreases linearly with distance, so the maximum credible tsunami at Diablo Canyon is about one sixth the 35 meter seashore maximum height near an undersea megathrust fault earthquake. Whether PG&E has learned anything from the inadequacies at Fukushima Daiichi, and the entirely adequate protections at Fukushima Daini, needs to be described. NRC should ascertain whether the backup generators, batteries, pumps,switchgear, and fuel would be vulnerable to the maximum credible tsunami at Diablo Canyon.
The accident at Fukushima Daiichi caused no injuries, illnesses, or deaths, but the panic-stricken, incompetent, and entirely unnecessary evacuation caused about 1,100 deaths. The correct advice would have been to shelter in place and not consume locally-sourced food and water until further advised. The dirt in areas surrounding the grounds of the power station is half as radioactive as dirt in Denver, but 15,000 Japanese who could safely return to the area of their homes are still living as refugees in their own country.
Fear of arbitrarily small doses and dose rates of ionizing radiation is irrational. It was fabricated for economic and political reasons by a century of scientific misconduct, largely funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, as explained by a documentary interview with Prof. Edward Calabrese (Toxicology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst), which is available at https://hps.org/hpspublications/historylnt/episodeguide.html.
Thanks again for conducting this public comment meeting.
Van Snyder La Crescenta, CA
Federal Register Notice:
89FR87433 Comment Number:
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