Nuclear power plant after removal of nuclear fuel and decontamination is inert as abandoned fossil plant. Such cleaning at end of life has to be done also for many kinds of chemical plants, chemical storage tanks, otherwise you get a catastrophe like in Bhopal, India.
If you are looking for long term storage of spend nuclear fuel, it's mostly a political issue, not technical issue. In U.S. there is WIPP, in New Mexico, a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years. But this is only licensed to store military nuclear waste, not civilian nuclear waste.
There is also hazardeus chemical waste which is stored in underground. The Herfa-Neurode underground landfill ( UTD Herfa-Neurode ) is the world's largest underground landfill for hazardous waste, includes 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury , 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide , and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.
>Nuclear power plant after removal of nuclear fuel and decontamination is inert as abandoned fossil plant.
The site itself sure, but the "removal" just moves the remaining cost somewhere else, it doesn't /re/move it.
The remaining costs for "decommissioned" power plants usually end up with the military. Sellafield in the UK, INL in the US for example.
The problem with the idea of a multi-century stable solution is that we make mistakes. The WIPP facility in the US had a similar cousin in Germany, the Asse II mine. Also planned to be permanent storage until they had to empty it because water found a way in. Several new billions of euros will now be drawn from taxpayers to pay for "decommissioned" plants.
It can be argued that so far, there has been no fully decommissioned, as in "stopped costing any money" nuclear plants, anywhere.
Fossil plants however can be fully decommissioned with 0 remaining costs. Thank god, because that's what we should do of course!
Civil nuclear power plants accumulate funds for decommissioning and disposal of nuclear waste. It's part of the electricity costs. Sellafield in the UK, INL in the US are military/research facilities.
"Asse II: A lesson that is making modern deep repositories safer"
There were reports in 2008 about brine contaminated with radioactive caesium-137, plutonium and strontium. I would be interested about the amounts of these isotopes in the brine, as we can detect extremely small quantities of radioactive isotopes.
For example for caesium-137 we can measure amounts as low as 5 Bq/kg, the decay of 5 atoms of caesium-137 per second in 1 kg of sample.
An adult person usually has activity of 3,000–6,000 becquerels (Bq) of potassium-40. 3,000–6,000 potassium-40 atoms decay and emit a beta particle in adult person every second.
We have developed cheap glass that can be mass produced and sucks electricity from sunshine, can be placed on already occupied surfaces to produce 100x more electricity than we are currently consuming. It requires basically no maintenance or operating costs for decades and is xheap enough for an average home-owner to meet at least half of their electricity needs.
We have also discovered cheap containers that can be built using the fourth most common element in the earths crust to store that electricity for when it's needed.
All of this can be built cheaply, massively, quickly, and be deployed anywhere with no conceivable risks of either massive disasters or proliferation of destructive weapons.
The end result is electricity creation distributed everywhere, so cheap that it's realistic to have small communities provide all the electricity they need. Resilient to failure, sabotage or natural disasters.
Why argue for massive amounts of money, manpower and time being spent to create central power plants that take a decade to build, end up controlled by a few masters who can milk the customers at will forever, when we can have so much better?
Cheap solar, yes you can now buy PV quite cheap. How much of this costs (research, developmemt, building large factories in China) was payed by German EEG money and different subsidies? Also subsidies in form of cheap Chinese coal electricity, polysilicon production is very energy intensive.
Costs estimates for Energiewende are in hudreds of bilions of euros.
>How much of this costs (research, developmemt, building large factories in China) was payed by German EEG money and different subsidies?
This doesn't matter whatever the answer is. Cheap solar is what matters, not how humanity made the breakthrough or who paid for the research or build-out.
Personally, I think China deserves credit here. They made a political decision to develop batteries, solar and EV's as part of their long-term planning several years ago and have been wildly successful with all 3.
That Germany (and most other western nations) failed to do this themselves is unfortunate, but having a sour grapes attitude about it is not constructive. Cheap solar and cheap batteries are here now. All countries should make the most of it as quickly as possible. Particularly Germany, and I'm happy to see Munich getting one of the first Sodium BESS storage facilities from CATL.
China still produced only 11% of electricity from solar, Germany 18%, so in this metric Germany is better, but import all of it PV panels. And electricity only a part of primary energy consumption in both in China and Germany.
I'm interested how China could decarbonize, as they still building a lot of coal power plants. They are slowly decreasing coal electricity production, but ramping up syntetic fuel from coal production.
So if Germany wants to follow Chinas path, they should build a lot of solar, wind, coal, some nuclear and hydro power plants, stop building gas power plants. You don't want it, as coal burning still has significant health impacts in Germany.
Medium-term thinking in Germany is to import a lot oil, natural gas, PV. Long-term thinking in Germany to import a lot of hydrogen, PV. Nobody talks about Germany becomming energy independent.
Best place for batteries for decarbonization is in EVs, not grid stabilization. Even better for decarbonization are electric trains, electric trams, trolleybus, they run directly from electric grid.
>China still produced only 11% of electricity from solar, Germany 18%, so in this metric Germany is better
I think it's more interesting to compare actual production in this case. Here is a truly mindblowing statistic:
China's solar panels already produce more than twice the total amount of electricity consumed by Germany per year.
China's solar growth is equivalent to "one Germany" every 2 years.
Batteries follow a similar curve to solar panels, and I disagree strongly that they should not be used for grid stabilization. In fact, nothing stabilizes the grid better than batteries. They should of course also replace fossil fuels in transportation as well, and that's been happening for years now.
I recall many similar arguments for EV's as we now see for grid storage. "It's too expensive", "We can't make enough batteries". Turns out it wasn't, and we could.
I'm sure we can again, and China is basically proving it repeatedly. All that our politicians in the west need to do is get out of the way, and I'm sure it will solve itself without any further involvement from them.
We will see how the battery costs change over years, currently they are still very expensive for quantities necessary for large grid stabilization in Europe.
But they start to make economic sense in regions with lot of sun and high electricity costs.
In China politicians give the way and whoever is in the way, is removed. It an error of Europe to make itself depend from China. The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
>currently they are still very expensive for quantities necessary for large grid stabilization in Europe.
They are at about 100 euros per KWh now, which is small potatoes for the hyperscalers building AI-centers for 10s of billions of euros. How about we demand that any data center being built in Europe needs to provide at least 8 hours of battery backup for max power draw? Most of the time that battery backup will not be needed, and can then benefit the grid.
Google is building multiple 1GW data centers in europe, 8 GWh of battery backup at each of those would stabilize the grid nicely!
>The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
Here I agree 100%. We are fortunate that Xi seems relatively benign for a despot but we should not count on that fortune lasting indefinitely. It's imperative that we in the west start making our own solar panels and batteries as quickly as possible.
>With Capex of $125/kWh for BESS, 8 GWh of battery backup would cost about a bilion USD. [..] At this scale there just few projects in the pipeline
Worth noting there is that Google (alone, and they are one of several) are spending around 200 billion on datacenters this year, and that the 125/kWh figure is a year old and calculated from BESS-projects that need to pay for a lot of things the datacenter already pays for.
A datacenter already needs infrastructure to handle a 1GW load, which means it can also deliver 1GW back to the grid. Trucks, cranes, housing, roads and everything else that a BESS-project has to finance separately are already paid for by the datacenter itself. So the "extra cost" would likely be close to the raw cost of the actual battery capacity.
It's therefore reasonable to assume that Google & co would pay a lot less than a billion for 8 hours of runtime on batteries. And they are already spending so much that even the billion is no problem.
For the communities who will give up 10-15% of the nations electricity production per center, it seems like a sensible demand. Google will still grab their cheap electricity but a 8GWh battery would go a very long way to remove the biggest problems with solar and wind, which can then be built out much more aggressively.
You are right about about nuclear weapons, every large nuclear civilian reactor produces multiple bombs worth of plutonium every year, spread within the spend nuclear nuclear fuel. This reactor-grade plutonium has miserable properties for bomb making, but in theory could be used to make a bomb (U.S. experimented with concept and created few bombs from reactor-grade plutonium).
This also the reason why every civilian nuclear reactor in non-nuclear weapon states is under constant monitoring of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and all spend nuclear fuel is under constant monitoring. Every gram of special nuclear material is accounted. Any irregularities detected by IAEA are then handled by United Nations Security Council, with possible diplomatic sanctions or military actions.
Outside of few experiments, civilian power reactors are not used for plutonium production for use in weapons, because to get high quality weapon grade plutonium you have to frequently put nuclear fuel into reactor and out of reactor (every few weeks). This increases down-time and makes electric production more expensive. Also civilian nuclear reactor use high temperature and high pressure steam, this makes change of nuclear fuel under power a risky business.
Plutonium for weapons is produced in smaller, cheaper production reactors. They run at much lower thermal power and are optimized for frequent cycling of nuclear fuel and easy handling of spend nuclear fuel.
Because any spend nuclear fuel could be in theory be used to make a nuclear bomb, U.S. in general doesn't allow countries to develop spend nuclear fuel reprocessing capabilities, or strongly tries to persuaded them not to develop such capabilities. This was a corner stone of U.S. foreign policy for many decades and also the reason why U.S. stopped development of fast-neutron breeder reactors under Carter (they didn't want other countries to pursue this technology).
The long-term U.S. policy for decades was to prevent any kind civilian nuclear power production in developing countries, as written in Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978.
"The United States shall endeavor to cooperate with other nations, international institutions, and private organizations in establishing programs to assist in the development of non-nuclear energy resources, to cooperate with both developing and industrialized nations in protecting the international environment from contamination arising from both nuclear and non-nuclear energy activities, and shall seek to cooperate with and aid developing countries in meeting their energy needs through the development of such resources and the application of non-nuclear technologies consistent with the economic factors, the material resources of those countries, and environmental protection."
Developing countries have been prevented from exploring nuclear power generation but they were free to explore coal power generation.
As a side-note:
The are many countries that developed nuclear weapons before building nuclear power plants, there are countries (Israel, North Korea) which have nuclear weapons today and didn't deliver a single Joule of electricity from nuclear reactor to the electric grid.
> Fossil plants however can be fully decommissioned with 0 remaining costs
You say that, but someone still has to pay those costs which are rarely factored in and are significant.
To the north of my state we are faced with the costs of decommissioning and removal of 35 platforms, 6076 km of pipelines and static umbilicals; 483 subsea lifts; 11 floating facilities, 120 risers and 548 wells to be plugged - in addition to kilotons of offshore steel and concrete.
eg: One project is the Northern Endeavour is a 274-metre floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) facility. The Australian Government took responsibility for the decommissioning of the Northern Endeavour after the liquidation of its owner.
These are non trivial undertakings with costs running into the billions.
You're absolutely correct that oil and gas extraction activities need to be properly decommissioned, and that is expensive.
But that's a separate activity from shutting down electric power plants. Oil rigs will continue to operate even if all gas and oil power plants were shut down tomorrow, since only about 25% of all oil and gas is used for electricity generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
If you are looking for long term storage of spend nuclear fuel, it's mostly a political issue, not technical issue. In U.S. there is WIPP, in New Mexico, a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years. But this is only licensed to store military nuclear waste, not civilian nuclear waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
Finland is building Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
There is also hazardeus chemical waste which is stored in underground. The Herfa-Neurode underground landfill ( UTD Herfa-Neurode ) is the world's largest underground landfill for hazardous waste, includes 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury , 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide , and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode