Re: [cdn-nucl-l] National Post, Solomon, Why spend billions to store used fuel that won't kill anyone?

[Bill Garland <garlandw@mcmaster.ca>]

Agreed we need better PM domestically.  But how come
the off shore CANDUs were done on time and within budget?  I think
it has a lot to do with national will (through all ranks) and the
relative lack of intervenors off shore for those projects.  And as
for Darlington, the cost overruns were primarily due to project delays
imposed by policy makers, intervenors, economic bad time, low electrical
growth rates, very high interest rates and the imposed policy of not
passing costs along to the consumer until the plant started up.  It
was like building a nuclear plant with a credit card and not being
allowed to pay anything down on the principle!

Bill

At 11:10 AM 13/09/2011, Andrew Daley wrote:

> Rod,
>
> This is very interesting stuff.
>
> The way I see it, costs associated with LNT can be broken into three
> broad categories:
>
> 1) Design costs- containment, high quality parts etc to prevent or
> mitigate radiation accidents.
>
> 2) Operational Costs- as you listed ALARA, PJBS, ETC. Also ongoing design
> changes and safety analysis
>
> 3) Decommissioning and fuel storage- lots of unknowns here.
>
> Now the "high initial cost" of Nuclear is well documented as
> compared to other sources. Despite this cost, it was deemed economic to
> build the plants.
>
> Operational costs are what balances this... so even if they could be
> lowered, they are already low.
>
> Finally, decommissioning and fuel costs are already included in
> electricity prices.
>
> My gut feel is that you'd get a better bang for the buck in terms of
> economic viability by focusing on other areas.
>
> Two which immediately come to mind are political certainty and project
> management.
>
> Taking Darlington as an example... original projection 7 billion, final
> cost 14 billion.
>
> Only a minority of this cost increase was equipment related or inherent
> to nuclear. And that extra 7 bill could have bought a heck of a lot of
> LNT!
>
> Moving forward, the whims of politics are likely to always be with
> us.
>
> That leaves strong Project Management as the key to financial
> success.
>
> Looking at recent industry project performance is a mixed bag at
> best.
>
> We should be focused on this area which can save us literally billions
> and where the regulatory and political implications are nothing but
> positive.
>
> The major challenge here is getting non project people ( read: normal
> line managers) to understand what PM is really all about. In my
> experience, we have created a good awareness of PM but this is only step
> 1.
>
> In other words, everyone is now tracking SPI and CPI... but most of the
> time this is useless because the underlying schedule and cost estimates
> were not prepared with any sort of fidelity (e.g. scheduling an activity
> for 1 week because it "fits" when the activity physically takes
> 2 weeks).
>
> That is exactly the same as the "garbage in, garbage out"
> paradigm in Computer Science and is one of the reasons why so many of our
> projects have gone to garbage.
>
> If we actually applied PM principles... all of them... and didn't fudge
> our scheds and budgets... we could achieve some really excellent project
> performance and cost savings to offset LNT!
> On 2011-09-13 2:44 AM, "Rod Adams"
> <atomicrod@aol.com>
> wrote: