Expert Supports Plan For Nuclear Plant

[george]

Expert supports plan for nuke plant

BANGKOK: -- Thailand needs nuclear power plants as a long-term solution to cope with increasing energy consumption and staggeringly high fuel prices, a Ministry of Energy seminar was told yesterday.

Chawalit Phichalai said natural gas reserves in the Gulf of Thailand would run out in the next 30 years and the world community's call to lower carbon dioxide emissions from fuel-fired plants would only get louder as a result of global warming.

Chawalit, an Energy Policy and Planning Office deputy director, was speaking in support of a National Energy Policies Commission (NEPC) decision to build a 2,000-mega-watt nuclear plant in Thailand by 2021. He said current high oil prices highlighted the importance of nuclear plants that could produce cheaper power - around Bt2.08 per unit compared to the Bt4 per unit created by bunker oil-ignited plants.

Producing oil from recyclable fuel could not be done cheaply enough in Thailand and no independent power producers had shown interest in investing because they were being offered no incentives, he said.

Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand chief mechanical engineer Kamol Takkabutr said there were now 442 nuclear power plants in 33 countries, and another 29 plants were being built.

Decharat Sukkamnerd, of Kasetsart University, said he was opposed to nuclear power production, arguing that the Bt2.08 figure did not include basic costs which would probably make each unit of electricity cost at least Bt4.04 - more expensive than the power currently produced from bunker oil-ignited plants. He said nuclear power production had been limited in many countries and there were no nuclear plants in many developed countries, including Den-mark and Norway.

Energy Minister Piyasvasti Amranand said it was inevitable that Thailand would be forced to rely on nuclear or coal-fired power plants in the future. He cited France's success in building nuclear plants after gaining the trust of local communities, suggesting that Thailand do the same.

The NEPC will today sign an initial deal with Laos to produce 1,000 megawatts from its hydropower plants.

-- The Nation 2007-11-16

[John K]

Producing oil from recyclable fuel could not be done cheaply enough in Thailand and no independent power producers had shown interest in investing because they were being offered no incentives, he said.

I guess the same with getting quality teachers.

[Martin]

Loose talk from an Energy Minister.

There is nothing 'inevitable' about it.

I can construct umpteen feasible scenarios in which Thailand never goes down the civil nuclear power geneation route.

[Martin]

The concept of 'recyclable' fuel has me bemused, too.

What on earth is he on about? Or was it all in Thai, and we are just getting a ham-fisted translation?

It would be interesting to see just what assumptions were built into the calculation that produced that 2.08 baht per unit figure.

Most of the cost of nuclear power generation comes in the capital cost of the station.

I remember once doing the cost figures of the one that I worked on (for a group of student apprentices, when I was standing in for the Training Officer).

At an assumed 6% interest rate on what had been borrowed to build the station, it took our output for 26 days of the month to service the 'bank loan', 1 day's output to pay for the fuel and two day's output to pay the month's wages bill.

Allowing for outages (and, oh boy, did we ever have some in those early days) we could only have been profitable compared to coal if the 'bank' had been satisfied with 3%.

But then the miners got a couple of pay rises, and we would have been 'in the money' at 4%.

For meetings like the one reported above, all sorts of figures are served up to speakers by PR departments and then spouted from platforms. Caveat emptor. Never believe what you hear from those who have a vested interest in selling to you.

Edited November 16, 2007 by Martin

[Flatouthruthefog]

Loose talk from an Energy Minister.

There is nothing 'inevitable' about it.

I can construct umpteen feasible scenarios in which Thailand never goes down the civil nuclear power geneation route.

Yes! Please go ahead and construct and try to give us some re-assurance.

There has been a steady flow of good readers' letters in 'The Nation' on this lately. Seen 'em? The very best was from an engineer based in California who said that, given Thailand's long history of lax attitudes to safety and maintenance - of anything - that in his view Thailand was utterly unsuited to handling nuclear power.

What gave the writer and his letter such great cred? He is a THAI!!

If this insanity is allowed to go ahead, will its VIP supporters and their families please live within 2kms of the first nuclear power facility?

I will see pigs flying in formation first.

[Martin]

“The very best was from an engineer based in California who said that, given Thailand's long history of lax attitudes to safety and maintenance - of anything - that in his view Thailand was utterly unsuited to handling nuclear power.

What gave the writer and his letter such great cred? He is a THAI!!”

I haven’t seen those letters, but I note that you say that this engineer is in the USA. That means that he has been in a country that has a long tradition of developing professional engineers.

The professional engineer is a person who works cautiously within her or his limitations to ensure that the benefits of her/his knowledge and experience are used to create something of benefit to mankind and to avoid the dis-benefits that may occur if her/his technology is misapplied.

Professional engineers, like health professionals, keep in mind the warning: “Do no harm”.

From the quotation above, it appears to me that this Thai has come to see the danger that the rapid introduction of industrial technologies and the rapid build-up of advanced education has brought to Thailand.

Sending people abroad for a little superficial exposure to a technology by an attachment to a Western university does not make a professional technologist of them, even if they do come back with Dr. in front of their name and PhD behind it.

It isn’t that they are thick, but that they haven’t had sufficient ‘hands on’ experience to go with the ‘being told about’ element of the development of the professional engineer.

We used to always say ‘the education and training of the professional engineer’; though Sir Monty Finniston in “Engineering: Our Future” recommended that, at least in the UK, an effort to get the point across should be made by adopting new terminology: “the formation of the professional engineer”.

We don’t have to be as pessimistic as George Bernard Shaw (“Professions are conspiracies against the laity”) to accept that a dark and sinister side to a profession does lurk in the background and must be kept at bay. That only comes with experience, though. Unfortunately it doesn’t get into the textbooks, probably because the textbooks are written by academics who have only studied (‘been told about’) the subject by other academics and have no real experience of it.

Does anybody happen to have the curriculum vitae of this ‘expert’ in the OP, I wonder?

I’ll bet that it doesn’t contain much study of the way that things can go wrong, or of the harm that can be done to societies, by the introduction of technology that is inappropriate in scale or nature to their circumstances.

And I’ll bet that it doesn’t contain much ‘shudder down the back’ experience of taking responsibility for making plant safe so that the workers who put their lives in your hands go home alive at the end of the shift.

Did he even intern in a nuclear power station?

I could go on at length about the daftness and dangers of saddling my Thai greatgrandchildren with the burdens of operating and paying for a nuclear power station, but that’ll have to do for now. I'll do a scenario for you later.

[OlRedEyes]

“The very best was from an engineer based in California who said that, given Thailand's long history of lax attitudes to safety and maintenance - of anything - that in his view Thailand was utterly unsuited to handling nuclear power.

What gave the writer and his letter such great cred? He is a THAI!!”

I haven’t seen those letters, but I note that you say that this engineer is in the USA. That means that he has been in a country that has a long tradition of developing professional engineers.

The professional engineer is a person who works cautiously within her or his limitations to ensure that the benefits of her/his knowledge and experience are used to create something of benefit to mankind and to avoid the dis-benefits that may occur if her/his technology is misapplied.

Professional engineers, like health professionals, keep in mind the warning: “Do no harm”.

From the quotation above, it appears to me that this Thai has come to see the danger that the rapid introduction of industrial technologies and the rapid build-up of advanced education has brought to Thailand.

Sending people abroad for a little superficial exposure to a technology by an attachment to a Western university does not make a professional technologist of them, even if they do come back with Dr. in front of their name and PhD behind it.

It isn’t that they are thick, but that they haven’t had sufficient ‘hands on’ experience to go with the ‘being told about’ element of the development of the professional engineer.

We used to always say ‘the education and training of the professional engineer’; though Sir Monty Finniston in “Engineering: Our Future” recommended that, at least in the UK, an effort to get the point across should be made by adopting new terminology: “the formation of the professional engineer”.

We don’t have to be as pessimistic as George Bernard Shaw (“Professions are conspiracies against the laity”) to accept that a dark and sinister side to a profession does lurk in the background and must be kept at bay. That only comes with experience, though. Unfortunately it doesn’t get into the textbooks, probably because the textbooks are written by academics who have only studied (‘been told about’) the subject by other academics and have no real experience of it.

Does anybody happen to have the curriculum vitae of this ‘expert’ in the OP, I wonder?

I’ll bet that it doesn’t contain much study of the way that things can go wrong, or of the harm that can be done to societies, by the introduction of technology that is inappropriate in scale or nature to their circumstances.

And I’ll bet that it doesn’t contain much ‘shudder down the back’ experience of taking responsibility for making plant safe so that the workers who put their lives in your hands go home alive at the end of the shift.

Did he even intern in a nuclear power station?

I could go on at length about the daftness and dangers of saddling my Thai greatgrandchildren with the burdens of operating and paying for a nuclear power station, but that’ll have to do for now. I'll do a scenario for you later.

Excellent post.

[Scott]

I think the use of nuclear power is almost inevitable, given the rising oil prices and the unlikelyness that they will drop. I am, however, opposed to one in Thailand for the reasons already posted. The country just has such a lack of safety and poor foresight.

Over the years, we've seen this with numerous buildings that have collapsed and culminating with the fiasco known as Suvanapumi.

A nuclear power plant can't be built on the cheap, you can't cut corners and you can't give contract to your wife's brother because he can't find a decent job.

Because you have a Ph.D (and probably little or no experience), you can't be the boss and conversely because you are older and richer doesn't make you the best boss either.

The list of reasons for not having one keeps getting longer and longer.