Ontario power generation: Cost analysis

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OVERKILL

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I ran the math to determine the cost per KWh of the various generators in Ontario that would be required to cover the capital necessary to procure them. I also delve into the operating costs later in the piece, as these are also significant. This is Ontario-specific, so please don't assume that these apply to your province/state/country. However it does give one an interesting view into the energy industry in the province and definitely was a bit of an eye opener for me.

Quote:

The per Megawatt cost of three major generators is as follows:
A 2.5MW wind turbine costs us $1,200,000/MW
The Lilly Lake solar farm cost us $4,500,000.00/MW
A 2,400MW Nuclear install (2 reactors) is $5,000,000/MW

However, to determine how quickly these devices will cover their capital costs we need to know how many KWh a year each is capable of producing. For this, I defer to the data provided on the IESO website, which gives us the following:
Nuclear: 7,112,035.75KWh/MW of installed capacity
Wind: 2,294,162.63KWh/MW of installed capacity
Solar: 892,857.14KWh/MW of installed capacity

Now we need to determine the "lifetime" of the product:
- A CANDU reactor has a lifespan of 30 years before refurb
- A Wind turbine has a marketed lifespan of 20 years
- A solar panel is also listed as having a 20 year lifespan

So, over their lifetime our generators produce the following:
Nuclear: 213,361,072.5KWh/MW
Wind: 45,883,252.6KWh/MW
Solar: 17,857,142.8KWh/MW

This results in the following per KWh rates to cover our capital:
Nuclear: $0.023
Wind: $0.026
Solar: $0.252

Which brings us to the electricity situation in Ontario and some rather alarming realities:
Ontario has 12,978MW of installed Nuclear capacity. This generates 92,299,999,963.5KWh of electricity per year. Nuclear facilities are paid market rate for baseload, which is around $0.045/KWh, this results in an annual income of $4,153,499,998.36. Based on a 30 year refurb cycle, this means that there is $124,604,999,950.73 generated between refurbs to cover operating costs and to be collected to cover the refurbishment costs, which are roughly $3 billion per reactor. The province has 18 operating reactors, though the 6 oldest have been deemed non-viable for refurb and will be shuttered. Factoring in the present 12 billion set aside for the Darlington refurb and the refurb at Bruce, we've spent 24 billion on refurbishment, leaving us with $100 billion to cover operating costs for the three facilities, or $3.3 billion per year, which works out to $1.1 billion per facility per year to cover operating costs. A healthy situation.

Ontario has 3,923MW of installed Wind capacity. This generates 8,999,999,997.5KWh of electricity per year. Wind facilities are massively subsidized thanks to the contracts given to the independent companies that own and operate them and they are paid on average, more than $0.20/KWh. Using that number alone, this generates an annual income of $1,799,999,999.5. Based on the 20 year contracts held by these companies, total revenue will be $36 billion dollars. Capital investment would be roughly $4.7 billion, leaving these companies with a profit of $31.3 billion.

Ontario has 280MW of installed Solar capacity. This generates 249,999,999.2KWh of electricity per year. Solar is massively subsidized, the Lilly Lake facility is paid $0.42/KWh, using that across the board, that results in an annual income of $104,999,999.67. Based on the 20 year contracts held by these companies, total revenue will be $2.1 billion. Capital investment would be roughly $1.26 billion, leaving these companies with a profit of $840 million dollars.


My conclusions, edited to remove political commentary are:

Quote:

- Solar is simply non-viable in Ontario. With a break-even per KWh rate of 25 cents, this is simply outrageous.

- We have been screwed HARD on wind. These facilities could be paid fair market baseload rate and still make a healthy profit. This is money that comes DIRECTLY out the pockets of Ontarians, and over the 20 years that these contracts run, we will be paying more than 30 BILLION DOLLARS in profit to these companies thanks to the rate subsidies.

- Nuclear power is cheap. These facilities more than cover their operational and refurbishment costs due to their extremely high outputs. This simply reinforces my support of them for baseload duty.

This also means that if the rate subsidy contracts were cancelled, wind farm operators would continue to be profitable, which was a concern I had when considering the repercussions of such an approach. Solar farms would likely fold. At fair market rate, they would never make back their capital costs before the panels died.
 
Most of the overall cost of nuclear is transporting and storing the spent radioactive waste materials safely for a few half-lives, which means thousands (or millions) of years. Otherwise, future generations of Canadians suffer. And THAT is what is so expensive about nuclear.

http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/radwastegermany.htm
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/en...-waste-disposal

"Generally 10-20 half lives is called the hazardous life of the waste. Example: Plutonium-239, which is in irradiated fuel, has a half-life of 24,400 years. It is dangerous for a quarter million years, or 12,000 human generations. As it decays, uranium-235 is generated; half-life: 710,000 years."
HIGH-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE - NIRS - Nuclear Information...
www.nirs.org/factsheets/hlwfcst.htm
 
Thanks for that research Overkill. Very interesting, especially "shovel ready" solar energy jobs.

Not a lot of choices between dirty coal plants or leftover fuel from nuclear plants. There's no other large source of electrical power waiting to go. 46% of my state's elec power comes from a single nuclear plant.
 
You're failing to include maintenance, labor and other overhead costs in your calculations. The long term storage of spent nuclear fuel, the overhead in transport of nuclear fuel also aren't included in your analysis. Your analysis is strictly one dimensional, and overall relatively worthless.

I can't speak for Canada, but here locally wind turbines are also a financial benefit to the land owner and the county in which they're built, another factor that your analysis doesn't include. Here locally we have over 6,200 MW as of early this year (additional capacity has come on line since). It's successful enough that we're soon going to be a net energy exporter, even after satisfying our own power generation needs.

It's also brought a number of high profile companies to the region-our wind energy was a primary reason Facebook built (and is still building) several huge datacenters right in the middle of the state, bringing good paying jobs as well as construction jobs to the region. Microsoft and Google have built datacenters in Iowa, in part because of wind power. I haven't heard of any companies that left the area because they didn't like wind power (and the low costs associated with them).
 
I don't stress over electricity bill, I just pay it.
Lots of maintenance costs associated with any type of utility / power generation.

Who makes windmills in the USA ?
 
Originally Posted By: Mr Nice
Who makes windmills in the USA ?

TPI composites
Clipper
General Electric
Northern Power Systems
Urban Green
Westinghouse

Just to name a few.
 
Originally Posted By: WillsYoda
Most of the overall cost of nuclear is transporting and storing the spent radioactive waste materials safely for a few half-lives, which means thousands (or millions) of years. Otherwise, future generations of Canadians suffer. And THAT is what is so expensive about nuclear.

http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/radwastegermany.htm
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/en...-waste-disposal

"Generally 10-20 half lives is called the hazardous life of the waste. Example: Plutonium-239, which is in irradiated fuel, has a half-life of 24,400 years. It is dangerous for a quarter million years, or 12,000 human generations. As it decays, uranium-235 is generated; half-life: 710,000 years."
HIGH-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE - NIRS - Nuclear Information...
www.nirs.org/factsheets/hlwfcst.htm


The most recent crop of CANDU reactors can burn spent fuel. Also, we burn unenriched Uranium, which is different from what the US plants use. Waste is stored on-site at the Bruce Nuclear facility, significantly reducing costs associated with that activity.
 
Originally Posted By: Pop_Rivit
You're failing to include maintenance, labor and other overhead costs in your calculations. The long term storage of spent nuclear fuel, the overhead in transport of nuclear fuel also aren't included in your analysis. Your analysis is strictly one dimensional, and overall relatively worthless.


If you actually took the time to read my post in its entirety you'd have realized that this was covered in the 1.1 billion per facility per year for maintenance and operating costs. I made that quite clear. Or is your own bias getting in way of your reading comprehension?

What is quite worthless is your going off half-cocked opinion. If that is all you've got to contribute then I will politely request not participating in the discussion.

Originally Posted By: Pop_Rivit
I can't speak for Canada, but here locally wind turbines are also a financial benefit to the land owner and the county in which they're built, another factor that your analysis doesn't include. Here locally we have over 6,200 MW as of early this year (additional capacity has come on line since). It's successful enough that we're soon going to be a net energy exporter, even after satisfying our own power generation needs.


You are correct, you can't speak for Canada. Generally wind turbines reduce land value here. If I had meant to include it, I would have. I thought I made it quite clear that this was simply about the rate required to recoup the procurement costs with the 2nd component being an evaluation of the situation in Ontario with respect to energy prices, something you are also not impacted by.

Originally Posted By: Pop_Rivit
It's also brought a number of high profile companies to the region-our wind energy was a primary reason Facebook built (and is still building) several huge datacenters right in the middle of the state, bringing good paying jobs as well as construction jobs to the region. Microsoft and Google have built datacenters in Iowa, in part because of wind power. I haven't heard of any companies that left the area because they didn't like wind power (and the low costs associated with them).


You are missing the point by a country mile. Wind is cheap. I covered that. Once installed, the operating costs are extremely low. In Ontario, it is massively subsidized due to poor decisions made by the government, which results in the installs being a cost rather than profit centre.
 
It probably really depends on location.

Phoenix is the sunniest city in the U.S. with over 300 days a year of pure sunshine. We have quite a bit of solar here and hopefully they keep up with installing more, they've been expanding west out into the desert. But we also have the largest nuclear power plant just west of the city (Palo Verde).
 
Originally Posted By: Nick1994
It probably really depends on location.

Phoenix is the sunniest city in the U.S. with over 300 days a year of pure sunshine. We have quite a bit of solar here and hopefully they keep up with installing more, they've been expanding west out into the desert. But we also have the largest nuclear power plant just west of the city (Palo Verde).


Yes, I would imagine Phoenix would be far better suited for solar than anywhere in Ontario.

If you have the time and are able to access:
- The construction costs of a solar facility and its nameplate capacity
- The total installed capacity of solar in the area
- The total output of the above installed capacity that can be converted to KWh

Then you would be able to determine the cost per KWh necessary to recoup the construction costs of the facility. Since there are no real long-term operating costs, anything above and beyond that can generally be regarded as profit.

Would be interesting to see how your numbers compare to ours.

As it stands, wind has the potential to be a huge profit centre if properly implemented. For export purposes, if we could get 3 cents a KWh and hadn't subsidized its rates out the wazoo, we'd be making money on it right now.
 
Yeah but do you really wanna have one of those stupid things in your yard spinning?Some will see the money and go for it.I live in tornado alley and dont need one of them falling or being tossed on my house.
 
Originally Posted By: WillsYoda
Most of the overall cost of nuclear is transporting and storing the spent radioactive waste materials safely for a few half-lives, which means thousands (or millions) of years. Otherwise, future generations of Canadians suffer. And THAT is what is so expensive about nuclear.

http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/radwastegermany.htm
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/en...-waste-disposal

"Generally 10-20 half lives is called the hazardous life of the waste. Example: Plutonium-239, which is in irradiated fuel, has a half-life of 24,400 years. It is dangerous for a quarter million years, or 12,000 human generations. As it decays, uranium-235 is generated; half-life: 710,000 years."
HIGH-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE - NIRS - Nuclear Information...
www.nirs.org/factsheets/hlwfcst.htm


If you've got the time for a good read, you might enjoy this paper:

Nuclear fuel reprocessing, partitioning and transmutation.

While one cannot completely eliminate nuclear waste, there are a variety of ways to significantly reduce it as well as reusing the waste we currently have stored. Our facilities store all their high-level waste directly on-site and subsequently this is factored into the operating costs of each plant. Low level waste is kept until it can be disposed of (for example, incinerated) and there is a deep underground storage facility being constructed at Bruce for long-term storage of the spent fuel and intermediate waste.

That is all immediate stuff. The paper explores our options using more modern reactor designs like the Advanced Fuel CANDU, which can use various waste products as fuel, as well as a Thorium fuel cycle as another option.

Originally, the long term plans seemed to revolve entirely around simply coming up with ways of storing used fuel. Most places in Europe reprocess their fuel, and as such, have significantly less of it to deal with. More modern ideas involve integrating waste into feeder fuel in existing, modified or new reactor types to simultaneously reduce fuel demand whilst reducing existing waste. This only makes sense if Nuclear power is to have a future, as trying store hundreds of thousands of tons of used fuel with no real end game isn't going to sell well to a population that has become far more conscious about the future of their planet.

Another thing the paper touches on is the use of stored nuclear weapons as reactor fuel, which I found quite interesting.
 
Originally Posted By: Marco620
Yeah but do you really wanna have one of those stupid things in your yard spinning?Some will see the money and go for it.I live in tornado alley and dont need one of them falling or being tossed on my house.


No, I definitely don't want one in my yard, but I live in the city, so the odds of that happening are pretty slim
wink.gif
On the other hand, our city has five run of the river hydro electric dams that provide a significant portion of our local power. Most of these facilities are close to 100 years old.

I'm a huge fan of hydro electric, as I believe it is the best compromise. The smallest environmental impact with no waste product while still being able to act as a baseload provider, something neither wind or solar are capable of. While generally not as efficient as a thermal, this is more than made up for by the significantly smaller environmental footprint and no long-term fueling to deal with.
 
Generally, western-design Nuclear Power Generation facilities in North America store the spent fuel onsite, in a concrete pool covered in water (which is an excellent barrier to radiation). That particular storage method is proven and safe, but because it is considered temporary storage, despite the fact that it has been the only storage method ever widely used and could be used forever, the question is considered unsolved.

Uranium Ore, known as Yellowcake, is more than 99% U-238 and less than 1% U-235. It is the U-235 that is extracted to create the fuel rods for Nuclear Power Plant fuel (20% U-235); the U-238 is low radioactivity and not usable as fuel. Yellowcake itself is barely radioactive ... you can hold it in your hand and the dead skin cells on your palm will stop all radiation from entering your body further.

There is no reason why the spent fuel rods, which are currently stored, could not be mixed with U-238 to create fuel rods suitable to be used in the types of reactors we use in the West. This is exactly what we were doing with de-commissioned Russian Soviet-era Weapons-Grade nuclear bombs for about the last 20 years due to the Russians and the US mutually reducing their weapons assets after the end of the Cold War.
 
Originally Posted By: Johnny2Bad
Generally, western-design Nuclear Power Generation facilities store the spent fuel onsite, in a concrete pool covered in water (which is an excellent barrier to radiation). That particular storage method is proven and safe, but because it is considered temporary storage, despite the fact that it has been the only storage method ever widely used and could be used forever, the question is considered unsolved.


The CANDU plants generally store it in water for 10 years, then it is moved to dry storage in big cement containers designed for 50+. This would technically count as "temporary" as well, as from there it is supposed to end up in the deep storage facility. However, my hope is that we start utilizing the Advanced Fuel CANDU's to use this waste as fuel to make more power and reduce the creation of more waste while potentially creating less hazardous products to be stored. That's the direction the industry as a whole seems to be heading if one follows the texts from the various atomic power bodies and I think it really only makes sense. If you have the option of using existing waste as new fuel and subsequently creating less waste going forward, that only makes sense. Less mining, less storage....etc.

EDIT to reflect your edit and presentation of additional information:

I agree with your assessment and this is well covered in the paper I linked a few posts up
thumbsup2.gif
 
Regarding your original post. Thanks for posting the facts. Very straight forward and an eye opener for most of us.
 
Last edited:
Anyways, this thread really isn't about nuclear waste storage, so while it has gone in that direction, I'd like to abandon that discussion at this juncture. The purpose was more to discuss the presented per KWh costs, particularly with respect to the renewables and the huge difference between wind and solar in this province. I had not expected the costs for wind to be so low, nor for solar to be so high.

I could do the costs for hydro electric if there was interest in more numbers to add the list. I'd like to do gas turbines, but I lack sufficient cost, installed capacity and output figures to make the calculations.

Also, if others are able to do the math on the situation in their place of residence for comparative purposes, that would also be appreciated, as it would be nice to contrast Ontario costs with elsewhere.
 
CANDU reactors are unique in that the spent fuel is more radioactive, high in plutonium content, versus the spent fuel from typical designs (G-E, Westinghouse, etc). They present unique storage issues. None the less, storage under water is viable.

The reason CANDU spent fuel is treated differently is because it is a form of spent fuel that can be easily converted to Nuclear Weapons-Grade fuel (creating Weapons-Grade fuel from ordinary Power Plant spent fuel requires specialized equipment and techniques). In fact it was spent fuel from CANDU reactors that India used to develop it's Nuclear Weapons program.
 
Originally Posted By: Johnny2Bad
CANDU reactors are unique in that the spent fuel is more radioactive, high in plutonium content, versus the spent fuel from typical designs (G-E, Westinghouse, etc). They present unique storage issues. None the less, storage under water is viable.


It isn't stored under water though. It is only in water for 6-10 years and then moved into concrete dry storage.

Originally Posted By: Johnny2Bad
The reason CANDU spent fuel is treated differently is because it is a form of spent fuel that can be easily converted to Nuclear Weapons-Grade fuel (creating Weapons-Grade fuel from ordinary Power Plant spent fuel requires specialized equipment and techniques). In fact it was spent fuel from CANDU reactors that India used to develop it's Nuclear Weapons program.


The information from AECL and other sources seems to contradict this. The reactors do no create weapons-grade plutonium through normal operation. They actually refer to the "India Myth" here:

Canadian Nuclear FAQ - Nuclear proliferation

Regarding the radioactivity of the spent fuel:

CANDU spent fuel bundle:
Uranium-235 - 0.23 %
Uranium-238 - 98.70 %
Plutonium-239 - 0.27 %
Fission Products - 0.80 %

LWR spent fuel:
Uranium-235 - 0.81 %
Uranium-236 - 0.51 %
Uranium-238 - 94.3 %
Plutonium-239 - 0.52 %
Plutonium-240,241,242 - 0.36 %
Fission Products - 3.5 %

accompanied with the following quote:
Quote:
Comparing Table 5 with Table 1, the general observation is that there is more of everything present in LWR fuel compared to CANDU fuel. The initial enrichment in uranium-235 means more fission reactions have occurred with more fission products and actinides produced. Significant quantities of uranium-236 and the higher isotopes of plutonium are present because the fuel has been burned to a higher energy level and that increases the time for neutron absorption leading to more actinides. The fissionable components for recycling total 1.34% compared to 0.5% in CANDU fuel and thus, the incentive to recycle is increased two to three fold in terms of deriving the most energy from a given quantity of uranium.

Note that the burn up for this particular LWR example is about 2,800 GJ/kg U compared to 685 GJ/kg U (7,900 MWd/ton U) in typical CANDU fuel. This factor of four difference means that four times as much spent fuel is produced by CANDU reactors compared to LWRs for the same amount of energy. Much of this difference, all uranium-238, is accounted for by the substantial amounts of depleted uranium (uranium-238 containing about 0.2-0.3% uranium-235) left at the enrichment plants. However, it is much easier to deal with depleted uranium than having the “extra” uranium-238 incorporated in spent fuel with fission products and actinides, as is the case for CANDU.


Again, this is from the article I linked a few posts up. You'd probably enjoy it, it was published by the NWMO.
 
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