[HN Gopher] Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
___________________________________________________________________
Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
Author : spenrose
Score : 286 points
Date : 2022-06-09 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (constructionphysics.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (constructionphysics.substack.com)
| teslaberri wrote:
| corruption is why, it has become a legal part of doing business.
| that simple.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| TL;DR rising labor costs and regulation
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Note that the regulatory costs are only responsible for much of
| the increases of the 60s and 70s. They're the boogey man, but
| the increases of the last forty years can't be blamed on them.
|
| It's a general problem: HSR and subway stations have seen
| similar increases.
| NaNDude wrote:
| may be the increases of the last forty years have'nt been
| studied as thoses of the 60s to 70s, but regulatory costs are
| still a reality, the french EPR for exemple got a 20billion
| increase in cost during the construction for changes in
| security standards.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| That's also due to regulatory costs. Regulations now require
| "citizen voice" for large projects, whether infrastructure or
| just an apartment building. So NIMBYism is able to slow
| construction (which translates directly to increased costs),
| require additional measures or features. And NIMBY lawsuits
| after regulatory approval is given can further increase costs
| and schedule, even if the court rules in favor of the
| project. And then because of all these regulatory costs, the
| experience isn't gained, so learning doesn't occur, and if it
| does, it occurs only for a few firms. Additionally, large
| state sponsored projects often are treated as jobs programs,
| etc.
|
| Another issue is that the difficulty of complying with the
| regulations is intentional. The paperwork is difficult as an
| intentional sort of time-tax on building anything new. We
| could actually automate and streamline everything to be
| approved immediately (while following the letter) without
| large paperwork costs, but that's not actually what those who
| push for the regulations actually want. They WANT it to be
| hard.
|
| It's not just a boogeyman. It's the real reason. Regulations
| are responsible for most of the cost of nuclear power.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I don't think it's useful to conflate construction code
| style regulation and NIMBYism.
|
| There can be excess of the former, but ultimately rules-
| based regulation isn't the worst. NIMBYism and other
| discretionary review adds more much delays and uncertainty
| and _that_ is the Achilles heel.
|
| Ultimately we need build out the literal and metaphorical
| supply chains, i.e. do the same thing over and over and
| over again. Economies of scale are real, and so are
| diseconomies of discale, and the latter is the NIMBY's
| greatest weapon for collective action.
|
| Are Stadtbahns the SMRs of transit?
| philipkglass wrote:
| _It's not just a boogeyman. It's the real reason.
| Regulations are responsible for most of the cost of nuclear
| power._
|
| In a counterfactual world with fewer regulations, I can
| believe that construction would be cheaper. But regulations
| don't explain why new projects have drastic cost and
| schedule overruns. The United States started building new
| AP1000 reactors in Georgia and South Carolina in 2013 [1]
| [2]. There were no regulatory changes/increases after 2013.
| But the projects went drastically over the budget and
| schedule numbers that they had in 2013.
|
| The South Carolina project was ultimately canceled and the
| SCANA CEO ended up in federal prison:
| https://www.powermag.com/former-scana-ceo-will-land-in-
| priso...
|
| _Following the project 's demise, an "exhaustive and
| multi-year joint investigation" was conducted by the U.S.
| Attorney's Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the
| U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the South Carolina
| Attorney General's Office, and the South Carolina Law
| Enforcement Division. Marsh's sentencing is the result of
| that investigation.
|
| "Kevin Marsh deceived regulators and customers to
| financially benefit SCANA," Susan Ferensic, special agent
| in charge of the FBI Columbia Field Office, said in a
| statement. "Unfortunately, Marsh's and other executive's
| actions resulted in South Carolinians bearing the financial
| brunt of the failed Summer Nuclear Station."
|
| "Due to this fraud, an $11 billion nuclear ghost town, paid
| for by SCANA investors and customers, now sits vacant in
| Jenkinsville, S.C.," DeHart said._
|
| The Georgia project is still in progress.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/business-environment-united-
| state...
|
| "Georgia nuclear plant's cost now forecast to top $30
| billion"
|
| _A nuclear power plant being built in Georgia is now
| projected to cost its owners more than $30 billion.
|
| A financial report from one of the owners on Friday clearly
| pushed the cost of Plant Vogtle near Augusta past that
| milestone, bringing its total cost to $30.34 billion._
|
| ...
|
| _When approved in 2012, the third and fourth reactors were
| estimated to cost $14 billion, with the first electricity
| being generated in 2016. Now the third reactor is set to
| begin operation in March 2023, and the fourth reactor is
| set to begin operation in December 2023._
|
| It's reasonable to say that a pacemaker costs more to
| develop than an MP3 player because medical devices are
| heavily regulated by the FDA. But it's not reasonable to
| say that a project to develop a new pacemaker is 100% over
| budget and 7 years late because of FDA regulations if the
| FDA regulations didn't change in the mean while. In this
| case, the regulations didn't change. So earlier estimates
| were due to fraud or incompetence (either execution-
| incompetence or planning-incompetence). I tend to blame
| incompetence -- after all, _many_ megaprojects end up
| horribly late and over budget, not just nuclear ones -- but
| in the case of South Carolina 's VC Summer there was
| outright fraud too.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generatin
| g_Pla...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_
| Gener...
| jandrese wrote:
| Is this due to "citizen voice" or is it just that all of
| the land is now someone's back yard? A century ago most of
| the land around cities was forest, plains, or sometimes
| farm. Building out rail, transmission lines, or pipelines
| was relatively easy because barely anybody lived near where
| you were building.
|
| Today there are people scattered all around and they will
| absolutely complain when you start building something near
| the property they bought specifically to be away from other
| people.
| bumby wrote:
| You're not wrong, but I'm not sure what's a better
| alternative.
|
| Think of it in a different scope: government contracts are
| also expensive because the have to be open to competition.
| A lot of the red tape could be reduced with no-bid
| contracts, but people understand the corruption risk
| tradeoff is generally not worth it.
|
| In your example, it seems like the NIMBYism is the root
| cause, not the process by which NIMBYism is wielded.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Since 50s we've got so many improvements in construction tech
| that I would expect costs to plummet, instead they are higher
| than ever. Countries use immigrant labor (sometimes illegal)
| and have all tech available and the price only goes up. I
| wonder why.
| kaiju0 wrote:
| Each build is unique and requires way too much overhead. The
| new generation of preapproved factory assembled SMR's are the
| future.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I have high hopes for prefab modular systems. The same design
| approval covers 1000+ units, most designs fit on a flat-bed
| for transport, and instillations can scale up as needed.
| yvdriess wrote:
| Having talked to a nuclear engineer about this: SMRs are
| being politically pushed because of their political and
| financing convenience, more than engineering reasons. Power
| output scales really well with reactor size, so it makes much
| more sense to build the one big expensive power plant than a
| multitude of smaller ones. SMRs do make sense for off-grid or
| on-site power, but not for grid electricity.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The ideal case is that SMRs are not the end goal, but a way
| to rebuild the supply chain. As soon as we have SMRs in
| prod, rather than building more of them, we should attempt
| to increase the size of deployments with minimal falling
| back on in-situ construction.
|
| SMRs take the supply chain metaphor a bit too literally: we
| do need practice but assembling prefabbed parts at a larger
| scale is fine too. There is a spectrum of options and we
| just need to avoid "special snowflake boondoggles".
|
| Given the US's fucked NIMBY culture, it well may be that
| SMRs are the best route despite these inefficiencies. Just
| don't expect the "solar model" where we just shit out lots
| of lousy product and that's it.
| zbrozek wrote:
| From a thermal physics and material science perspective,
| yes, bigger is definitely better. But there's a lot to be
| said of the value of being able to mass-produce a product
| in a factory and ship it in nearly ready-to-use state to
| its destination.
|
| There would also be a lot of value in turning off the
| ability of folks to NIMBY everything from new power plants
| to housing.
| petre wrote:
| Alvin Weinberg begs to differ, at least concerning PWRs and
| BWRs. The bigger plants are more efficient but less safe.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iW8yuyk3Ugw
|
| One can scale the size by using several reactors, which is
| exactly what NuScale and others aim to do. One also doesn't
| have an unavailability problem having to shut down a large
| reactor in order to refuel it.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Totally unrelated question but does anyone know if nuclear
| powered US Navy vessels are able to feed power to the grid while
| in port? I know it's technically possible, just not sure if
| anyone has ever implemented such a thing.
| pydry wrote:
| Russia did it https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic-
| industry-and-energy...
| loeg wrote:
| I think they do while in port in Hawaii. Hawaiian electricity
| is largely diesel (other than nuclear coming from Navy ships).
| jandrese wrote:
| Isn't Hawaii also transitioning a significant fraction of its
| generation to solar? Diesel can be ramped up and down easily
| to account for varying production from solar.
| db65edfc7996 wrote:
| The Hawaii government page [0] list a goal of getting to
| 100% renewables by 2045. If I am reading the report
| correctly, the 2020 number was already at 36% renewables.
|
| [0]: https://energy.hawaii.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/01/HSEO_20... ( pdf warning )
| loeg wrote:
| Yes, but I'm not sure what the current percentage is or how
| fast that change is happening.
| jandrese wrote:
| Solar and Wind have really been exploding in the past few
| years. I fully expect this hand wringing over nuclear
| will end up being overtaken by events in the next 30
| years or so. The real limitation at the moment is battery
| technology, there is a lot riding on finding cheap and
| efficient energy storage.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| My understanding is that they shut down the reactors in port
| and run off the grid.
| ortusdux wrote:
| This is my understanding as well. I believe that they may
| even shut down at sea and run in on batteries/generators,
| which doubles as a way to test those systems. Refueling is
| quite the ordeal, so there is an incentive to minimize fuel
| depletion.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Reactors may sometimes be shut down at sea to test backup
| generators and run reactor restarting drills, but it would
| not be done otherwise. Aircraft carrier propulsion comes
| from steam from the reactors - if the reactors are offline
| the ship cannot move. Moreover, the backup generators burn
| jet fuel, which is convenient because aircraft carriers
| already have a store of jet fuel for the planes and so
| don't have to carry extra fuel for the backup generators,
| but it's very expensive, and not something that would be
| done outside of an emergency or testing emergency
| preparedness.
| nickelpro wrote:
| Nuclear powered vessels do not spend any significant amount
| of time shutdown at sea, and there is no reason to.
| Electrical power is a very small fraction of their total
| MWh production, with almost all power going to propulsion.
|
| When fuel lifetime becomes an issue for a nuclear naval
| vessel they will have propulsion limits in place that limit
| transit speeds to those which are most efficient for the
| propulsion turbines.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Sometimes, in relief missions like after big earthquakes.
|
| More often they use the onboard desalination plants (also
| nuclear powered) to make lots of fresh water.
|
| e.g. https://www.militarynews.com/norfolk-navy-
| flagship/oceana/ne...
| colechristensen wrote:
| The largest nuclear vessel produces up to 160 MW, the smallest
| single nuclear reactor power plant about 500 MW (sites often
| have multiples), the largest nuclear reactor in the US is about
| 4 GW. An average wind turbine produces 2-3 MW.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| CVN-78s reactor according to Wikipedia:
|
| > It is estimated that the total thermal power output of the
| A1B will be around 700 MW
|
| CVN-78 has two of them.
| comrh wrote:
| I think the discrepancy is not all the thermal output is
| converted to electricity:
|
| > A1B reactors likely produce enough steam to generate 125
| megawatts (168,000 hp) of electricity, plus 350,000 shaft
| horsepower (260 MW) to power the four propeller shafts.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Ah, yes. Most steam is not converted to electricity.
| Should have mentioned that.
| jeffbee wrote:
| A naval reactor produces most of its power in direct steam
| propulsion and relatively little (~1/3rd) converted to
| electricity. I think the largest vessels can generate just
| 125MW which isn't much at all. The only beneficial use of a
| navy vessel as mobile infrastructure that I can recall is when
| the USS Carl Vinson was used to produce drinking water for
| Haiti after their earthquake.
| nickelpro wrote:
| Navy nuclear vessels have (relative to the grid) little real
| power generation capability and cannot handle grid reactive
| loading at all. The grid appears as an infinite reactive load
| to shipboard electrical switching equipment.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Sure, relative to the total grid capacity it's not much but
| during peak loads every bit helps.
|
| I suppose you'd want to transition from ship to shore via a
| DC path and convert it back to synchronized AC which should
| avoid issues with reactive loads.
| hansel_der wrote:
| quick google suggests it has been done in emergencies.
| cvccvroomvroom wrote:
| Insurance, licensure, and NIMBY pressure.
|
| Previously in nuclear industry.
| justinsb wrote:
| The only nuclear plant under construction in the US is at Plant
| Vogtle, in Georgia. Regulators set up a system (CWIP) whereby the
| companies building the plant earn a 10% return on their costs,
| until the plants come online. I think it's not surprising
| therefore that costs keep increasing and the delays keep coming.
| I don't think we can infer that nuclear power plants cannot be
| built at reasonable cost, rather that we need to consider
| "regulatory capture" as a significant construction risk.
|
| (Some admittedly one-sided background on CWIP:
| https://stopcwip.com/ )
| ak217 wrote:
| > Nuclear is sometimes praised for having lower fuel costs, but
| all else being equal (ie: assuming total production cost stays
| constant), it's better to have a larger fraction of your
| electricity costs be variable, so that if demand drops then
| production cost drops as well.
|
| This is not obviously true. I could make an argument that base
| load generation capacity (nuclear and hydro in particular) should
| be state-owned or largely state-sponsored, both to avoid economic
| price shocks/volatility and because it's good for national
| security (check out what Europe is going through right now).
| jacquesm wrote:
| What Europe is going through right now is _mostly_ caused by
| those large, state sponsored conglomerates. It 's the smaller
| private operators that are doing just fine.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Yeah this statement makes me think that OP had very little
| actual knowledge about energy pricing.
|
| If there's ever a complicated market of supply and demand it's
| energy. Having a huge chunk of the supply be stable and
| controllable is absolutely desired, will help simplify
| operations a lot, make supply more predictable, and as a result
| deliver more stable prices.
|
| It's not as if the population is suddenly getting cheaper
| windmills if there's too much supply; if the energy supplier is
| losing money due to oversupply, they will need to get their
| money back another way, so it's always the consumer that pays
| anyway.
| logifail wrote:
| > Having a huge chunk of the supply be stable and
| controllable
|
| Nuclear might be stable, but "controllable"?
|
| On the days when it's windy and sunny in your part of the
| planet, try telling your local nuclear plants they're not
| required.
|
| There's simply no reason to guarantee nuclear generators a
| fixed electricity price decades in advance, like the UK did
| with Hinkley Point.[0]
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-
| point-c...
| dTal wrote:
| I don't know why you say you can't throttle nuclear up and
| down. All thermal plants have inertia, but nuclear is if
| anything easier to throttle than fossil fuels.
|
| There's a lot of numbers, and comments from nuclear plant
| operators, in this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/
| NuclearPower/comments/m0rwso/how_fa...
| logifail wrote:
| > I don't know why you say you can't throttle nuclear up
| and down. All thermal plants have inertia, but nuclear is
| if anything easier to throttle than fossil fuels.
|
| In that case why don't we let the market build nuclear
| plants without any state guarantees or insurance and they
| can simply "throttle up" when they're required. No need
| to fix a strike price for decades before investors are
| interested.
|
| I'm sure it makes financial sense. Honest. /s
| dTal wrote:
| That's quite the non-sequitor. An exploration of how
| broken "the market" is would be an entirely separate
| discussion. If you wanted to have that discussion, we
| could start by analyzing the massive subsidies enjoyed by
| fossil fuels, not to mention the complete lack of
| accounting for its toxic byproducts which are dumped into
| the atmosphere (while nuclear power is legally required
| to track and safely store every molecule).
|
| Or we could just keep building gas peaker plants and
| ignore the mass die-offs, because "the market" can't
| possibly be wrong, right? /s
| akvadrako wrote:
| Nuclear has very low fuel costs, under 1%. So it really
| doesnt make sense to throttle them unless the price goes
| negative.
|
| Having an upfront guaranteed price is just a way to
| spread the construction cost over more time.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| "all else equal" is in there.
|
| He was trying to make a point - that flexibility is valuable.
| And it is valuable. _All else equal_ you 'd take more
| flexibility than less, especially since demand moves around a
| good amount.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| But it isn't flexibility we can control. It's either
| fluctuations in supply which we need to absorb somehow, or
| it's scaling down supply. The big differentiator is the
| flexibility to scale _up_ supply when you need it, and it's
| precisely this flexibility that's missing.
| logifail wrote:
| > base load generation capacity
|
| What's the consensus on the meaning of 'base load generation
| capacity'?
|
| There are those who'd say it's an archaic term often used to
| defend power sources that can't ramp up and down to meet
| demand, and nuclear would be top of that list. If - for
| instance - there are times when it's windy _and_ sunny, why
| should consumers have to pay more than the market rate to
| nuclear generators, just because nuclear is inflexible?
|
| More broadly: what's the actual use case for 'base load
| generation capacity' over the coming decades?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > More broadly: what's the actual use case for 'base load
| generation capacity' over the coming decades?
|
| The use case is that there should be enough capacity under
| governmental control to ensure that even in a case of crisis
| (such as, say, an oil price hike, a war or import blockades)
| the base load of the citizenry is still accounted for - big
| industries might be temporarily restricted, but no citizen
| should freeze in winter because the forces of the market deem
| it more profitable to have some large company buy their way
| out.
| logifail wrote:
| > there should be enough capacity under governmental
| control [..]
|
| Q: You really want to nationalize power generation?
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| Use Case: You pay more to get a reliable service for the same
| price regardless of weather conditions.
| [deleted]
| orangeoxidation wrote:
| Yup, that seems a strange argument. Power usage varies during
| the day, but it doesn't really go below some "base load".
|
| Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or
| off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So
| nuclear power is only good for base load.
|
| We need peaker plants to get the rest. Gas plants are the
| popular (cheap) choice for this. Carbon free alternatives are
| pumped hydro or batteries.
|
| With renewables the production capacity is variable as well.
|
| To fill possible "holes" in it we don't need more base load.
| What renewables need are ... peaker plants. A role nuclear
| reactors are exceptionally unsuited to fill.
| logifail wrote:
| > you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to
| hourly changes in demand
|
| Surely you'd want actually want suppliers to react to
| changes in spot price, not just demand? If it's windy and
| sunny, it might not matter if demand is high! If it's calm
| and cloudy, you have a problem.
|
| If the spot electricity price is high, you want providers
| to jump in and supply electricity. If it's low, or indeed
| goes negative[0], you want them to shut down.
|
| Nuclear just doesn't fit this model, since investors appear
| to want the strike price guaranteed for several decades
| before they'll even start pouring concrete for their plant.
|
| [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666
| 79242...
| masklinn wrote:
| > Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on
| or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in
| demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load.
|
| That's not exactly true, you can build nuclear plants for
| load following which provides some amount of flexibility,
| at the cost of some efficiency (about 1% I think).
|
| IIRC French plants can operate between 30 and 100% rated
| power, and ramp rates can reach 5% per minute (though
| normal rates are 1 to 3). French nukes regularly have to
| ramp up and down quickly to compensate for wind variation
| and monday pickup (electricity consumptions goes way down
| over the weekend, especially nice spring weekends, then
| back way up on week start).
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react
| to hourly changes in demand
|
| To be precise, it cannot _stop consuming fuel_ quick enough
| that there 's any important savings, and so nuclear power
| plants always want to run at full capacity because
| otherwise they are wasting fuel.
|
| But more than that, fuel consumption is simply not a very
| big part of the running cost of a nuclear power plant, most
| is fixed cost so that even if they could change the fuel
| consumption quickly there's just not enough savings to
| really bother with it.
| logifail wrote:
| > To be precise, it cannot stop consuming fuel quick
| enough that there's any important savings, and so nuclear
| power plants always want to run at full capacity because
| otherwise they are wasting fuel. But more than that, fuel
| consumption is simply not a very big part of the running
| cost of a nuclear power plant, most is fixed cost so that
| even if they could change the fuel consumption quickly
| there's just not enough savings to really bother with it
|
| (Sorry) but that sounds like a slightly long-winded way
| of saying that nuclear just isn't economically viable.
|
| "the costs of renewables continue to fall due to
| incremental manufacturing and installation improvements
| while nuclear, despite over half a century of industrial
| experience, continues to see costs rising"[0]
|
| [0] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/09/24/nuclear-power-
| is-now-...
| necheffa wrote:
| The technology to do load follow at a nuclear plant exists.
|
| If you think about it, "base load" has nothing to do with the
| power source. Given some period of time, say a day, you are
| always going to have a certain minimum demand for power
| generation in a geographic location. Congratulations, you
| have identified base load.
|
| As the grid becomes more distributed and therefore less
| centralized, you are going to see base load hitting lower
| peaks because individual power generation stations will have
| less aggregate demand. But until society reaches a point
| where at least part of the day there is zero demand on the
| grid (fat chance) you will always have base load in some
| shape or form.
| logifail wrote:
| > you are always going to have a certain minimum demand for
| power generation in a geographic location. Congratulations,
| you have identified base load.
|
| If it's - say - sunny and windy, your renewables are always
| going to undercut _all_ other generators. So when they
| undercut nuclear, basic market forces should mean nuclear
| doesn 't get to supply a single MW, and if that means
| investors lose out, well, tough.
|
| Base load should _always_ be supplied by the cheapest
| supplier. Not the least flexible and /or the ones with the
| highest fixed costs.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I tend to disbelieve the people who say it's unnecessary
| because there are many places where the cheapest power
| generation has come from renewables for quite some time, and
| yet all of those places still have base load on the grid.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Baseload has several major ingredients: the required
| continuous consumption, connectivity of areas that are
| remote from each other where the one has a surplus and the
| other a deficit, local overcapacity storage options and
| installed capacity from 'guaranteed' sources (and no source
| is 100% guaranteed, typically even the most stable sources
| are down 20 to 40% of the time for maintenance, refueling,
| repairs and so on).
|
| The required baseload is then further influenced by load
| variability, and rate-of-change. Not all generation
| equipment can spin up / down equally fast, and sometimes
| the effect of for instance a shut-down is that it will take
| a long time to go back online.
|
| Baseload is a function of a whole interconnected grid
| rather than of some locality, and this is a big difference
| between how laypeople see this and how people in the power
| business see it. It's not as if the electrons that are
| pushed into a wire in say Southern France need to get all
| the way to Poland to light a bulb there, all that the
| various generators do is maintain their local grid by
| making available enough power locally that lightbulbs in
| France are served by their local power stations and
| lightbulbs in Poland are served by theirs. This minimizes
| transmission losses.
|
| If you have a surplus and the distance is large then with
| conventional (AC) transmission lines there is an upper
| limit to how big an area you can serve before the losses
| make that no longer economical. HVDC has nicer properties
| for long distance transmission which has some very
| interesting consequences for baseload: suddenly wind and
| solar thousands of KM (multiple timezones) away can be used
| to provide power to some locality, reducing the need for
| local generation capacity if the price is right.
|
| This revolution is happening right now, the HVDC grid
| interconnects are shaping up rapidly with more and more of
| these coming on-line. Especially the longer East-West runs
| have the possibility to materially affect the amount of
| fossil/nuclear required for when solar and wind are
| insufficient, as well as the North-South ones from areas
| where there is a lot of hydro generation capacity.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| The statement is obviously true.
|
| The part which makes it so is "all else being equal". He is
| just saying "flexibility is more valuable than it might seem on
| the surface, because demand moves around".
| mbostleman wrote:
| Doubling the cost consequence of regulations, regulations
| changing causing in-progress projects to go back and remove and
| re-do work, negative learning - all of these things are a result
| of our society not gathering around the mission. If we wanted it,
| we would fix all these things. But it just doesn't have support.
| It seems like an incredible tragedy that is at least proportional
| to that of climate change since from most reasonable projections,
| nuclear - assuming the technological challenges can be solved -
| is the quickest way to reduce our impact on climate change. The
| fact that we insist on suppressing the courage to solve the
| problems makes me question the integrity of those who run the
| narratives on climate change policy.
| lelag wrote:
| The article misses another important aspect: loss of nuclear
| competency.
|
| Between the 60s and 80s, there were many nuclear reactors
| projects which allowed an industry to develop and get better at
| it.
|
| But since the 80s, there was comparatively very few new reactors
| built for over 20-30 years. The workforce that had the skills and
| knowledge related to actually building nuclear plants had mostly
| retired and their replacement had only theoretical knowledge and
| no actual experience. This makes building new reactor much harder
| than it should be.
|
| The embattled EPR project at Flammanville is an exemple of that:
| the specialised company that was hired to forge the nuclear
| vessel were simply unable to build to spec and a defective
| critical piece was delivered, creating delays and cost increases.
| In the end, they even had to use it anyway as it was not
| economically feasible to simply have another one made.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| This is undoubtedly true, but south korea has now been building
| nuclear plants for decades, and their costs haven't really
| dropped at all.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| According to the article they have
| alex_young wrote:
| From the article: > The only country where
| the costs of nuclear plant construction seem to have
| steadily decreased is South Korea: > The fact
| that South Korea is the only country to exhibit this trend
| has led some experts to speculate that the cost data (which
| comes directly from the utility and hasn't been
| independently audited) has been manipulated and we
| shouldn't draw conclusions from it.
| bhc wrote:
| The government that was in power from 2017 to 2022 put a
| moratorium on new reactor construction there and promised
| a full phase-out, and although the newly-elected
| government promised to reverse this, it likely has done
| some damage to S. Korea's civilian nuclear capabilities.
| DennisP wrote:
| In absolute terms, Japan and India have costs similar to
| South Korea's.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142
| 151...
|
| See figure 12 for a quick overview. And from the
| introduction: "In contrast to the rapid cost escalation
| that characterized nuclear construction in the United
| States, we find evidence of much milder cost escalation
| in many countries, including absolute cost declines in
| some countries and specific eras. Our new findings
| suggest that there is no inherent cost escalation trend
| associated with nuclear technology."
| danans wrote:
| > In absolute terms, Japan and India have costs similar
| to South Korea
|
| That countries like Japan and Korea have similar absolute
| costs as India which has a 4-5x lower PPP adjusted GDP
| per capita suggests that the price for labor for nuclear
| power plant construction is globally set (relatively few
| qualified engineers who can demand a high price), or
| India uses a lot more labor, or a combination of both.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| India probably uses a lot of foreign expertise. It's
| either the French or the Russians that supply the
| reactor. That would change in the future I suppose and
| cost would drop. Also, corruption.
| mandevil wrote:
| Japan ceased all construction of nuclear reactors in
| response to Fukushima daiichi, and since that was a
| decade ago I'm betting that all the competence they built
| up has disappeared.
|
| In other words, very similar to what happened in the US
| in response to Three Mile Island: after a scary nuclear
| incident there was a lengthy pause in nuclear
| construction which meant that all of the skills and
| learning-by-doing that had accumulated up to that point
| went away, and starting again would be significantly more
| expensive and subject to massive schedule and cost
| overruns.
| jandrese wrote:
| If anything this seems to support the position that the
| only way to reduce costs is to increase volume. A classic
| economies of scale example. Instead the experts want to
| disregard the data for vague reasons.
| Retric wrote:
| South Korea, Japan, and India all have similar costs
| which suggests South Korea isn't benefiting significantly
| from continuous construction.
|
| Economies of scale generally exist, but it's not magic. A
| large fraction of construction costs for nuclear power
| plants is very similar to other structures. A high
| pressure steam pipe is a high pressure steam pipe and
| people are constantly building structures using them.
| clairity wrote:
| also, quantity is the (primary) independent variable in
| economies of scale, and at quantities of dozens for
| nuclear plants, you can't get much economies, as opposed
| to when quantities are in the many thousands/millions.
| trashtester wrote:
| The cost of flying has come down by 50% since 1980, and
| while an airplane is a simpler machine than a nuclear
| plant, the two industries also have a lot in common (such
| as the perception of risk not being in their favour).
|
| By doing international standardization and coordination
| in ways similar to the aircraft industry, the same should
| be possible for the nuclear power industry.
|
| It should be possible to consolidate most of global
| production down to a handful of companies (like Boing and
| Airbus), with a forest of subcontractors in the same way
| that was done for airliners, and achieve similar
| economies of scale.
|
| Successful designs could be re-used over a period of 20
| years or more, with only minor modernizations of things
| like electronics, like the Airbus A320 or Boing 747.
|
| Ideally, we should have done this in 1980, but even if we
| start today, nuclear can provide a lot of energy at very
| competitive prices in the next 60-100 years. By then, we
| should have fusion or the ability to build energy storage
| cheeply enough to make renewables (probably solar)
| competitive.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| By the way, this blog (Construction Physics) is about why
| construction in general (not nuclear power construction
| in particular) is expensive. One big part is that
| construction is done on site, and site-to-site variation
| hurts standardization and economies of scale.
|
| Finished airplanes can transport itself by flying. This
| advantage is particular to aircraft industry and probably
| can't be copied by other industries. Finished buildings
| can't transport itself.
| treme wrote:
| Koreans excel in cost-efficient construction projects.
| Korean companies are often considered for best bang-for-
| buck value when developing countries are interested in
| big infrastructure projects nowadays.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1915_%C3%87anakkale_Bridge
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan%E2%80%93Cavite_Inter
| lin...
| [deleted]
| pfdietz wrote:
| They've built four NPPs in the UAE that may end up producing
| at $0.08/kWh.
|
| Unfortunately, UAE is also building PV that will be producing
| at $0.013/kWh. And since they're still burning gas for most
| of their power, every kWh from solar goes straight to
| reducing the overall cost and CO2 emission, five times
| cheaper than the NPPs will.
| samstave wrote:
| My grandfather was a Nuclear Engineer for General Electric his
| whole life (worked like 60 years at GE - he was one of the
| designers of Hanford.
|
| He died of cancer, thyroid cancer of exenguination (bleeding
| out of your mouth)
|
| My grandmother received a fairly large settlement from the
| class action lawsuit against GE for exposing engineers to
| radiation for decades without proper safety...
| ratsmack wrote:
| My uncle worked at Hanford his entire life but his last few
| years of life were not good. He he retired with numerous
| health issues and was essentially a mental vegetable the last
| few years of his life. He was at Hanford from it's inception
| up to around the seventies when he retired.
| cco wrote:
| Son of a Hanford man here. I believe my father started work
| at Hanford _after_ the bulk of their issues were wrapped up
| but I'm sure there was some increased exposure relative to
| background.
|
| Sorry to hear about your uncle's experience, a lot of pain
| came out of that facility.
| samstave wrote:
| My grandfather was Kenneth Victor Stave. If that name means
| anything to your family.
|
| Also, I dont know if your uncle was part of that suit
| against GE - but it may be something you want to look up.
|
| I don't have any further info to provide on the subject, my
| grandfather passed in 1996. My grandmother last year. So I
| cant ask anyone...
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I think this is actually a good thing.
|
| The old designs are dangerous, expensive, and wasteful. The
| regulatory, economic, and political environment that resulted
| in their design ultimately resulted in reactors run without
| proper controls, supervision, or long term safety. The
| resulting waste was not properly considered from a life cycle
| perspective.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm not a nuclear expert, but man I loved those
| LFTR presentations. What really appeals to me about LFTR is the
| inherent safety, the near-full use of fuel, and the
| scalability. I understand there are challenges for the
| materials and containment, but I believe the smaller size of
| the reactor can lend itself to replacement and manufacturing.
|
| So a "clean slate" with new people, regulations, standards,
| expectations, computer simulation, and lifecycle planning would
| do nuclear a huge bonus.
|
| But ultimately it doesn't matter. It won't be price competitive
| with wind/solar and can't even target a 10-year price point
| with the wind/solar improvement curves. Same issue the fusion
| story on the front page faces.
|
| Let's continue active research, but commercialization is a
| waste of time and money right now. When wind/solar stabilize
| their cost curves, then nuclear (or fusion) will have something
| to target commercially. IF they can get there.
| nomel wrote:
| > The article misses another important aspect
|
| I don't think that's a fair claim, considering "Part I" is in
| the title.
| sky-kedge0749 wrote:
| I'm just riffing here but this doesn't seem like an
| insurmountable problem if you're willing to spend. Open up a
| training school, put the old guard in as instructors, get some
| good students, pay everyone big money. Build a lab reactor for
| hands-on practice, and pay to put students as glorified interns
| into under-construction and operating plants across the world.
| A few years later, you've got your people.
|
| I don't mean to say it would be trivial but it seems like you
| could do the whole thing for a couple billion USD a year.
| masklinn wrote:
| TBF Flamanville 3 was a shitshow from top to bottom, starting
| from anyone actually taking Areva's completely unrealistic
| timeframes seriously: the claim was something like 3 years for
| the build, EDF assumed production within 4.5 years.
|
| For a novel build of a barely finished design.
|
| 4.5 years is probably the shortest time it took to build a CP
| (900MW) reactor at the height of France's reactor-building
| frenzy (St-Laurent-B-1 construction started in May 1976 and
| ended in January 1981, 4 years and 8 months).
|
| The next generation (P4) I don't think any took less than 6
| years to build, and the embattled N4 generation immediately
| preceding the EPR the first reactor (Chooz 1, of only 4) had a
| build time of _12 years_ (and 7 months), the last (and
| fastest), Civaux 2, being completed in a "mere" 8 ( and 8
| months).
|
| And the N4 had and still has significant teething issues: soon
| after they were put into production they suffered from leaks in
| cooling pipes leading to all 4 being stopped for 10 months, and
| at the 10 years revision in 2021 extensive stress corrosion
| cracking of the primary circuit was discovered, all the N4s
| have been stopped and the last news are they won't be restarted
| until 2023.
| epistasis wrote:
| The recent US nuclear construction projects have been plagued
| with similar incompetence, such as trying to build plans that
| were unconstructable, and then having to get regulatory
| approval for the changes.
|
| I would like to see comparisons to other large construction
| projects too. The US is really really bad at large construction
| projects, but European construction seems a lot better.
| mandevil wrote:
| Unfortunately, when it comes to nuclear Europe's (excluding
| Russia) basically in the same boat as the US.
|
| Consulting the current list of nuclear power plants under
| construction around the world by a pro-nuclear power group
| here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-
| and-fu...
|
| I see the following as the only ones still under construction
| in all of Europe (not counting Belarus and Russia): 1)
| Mochovce 3 in Slovakia. Construction started November 2008,
| originally scheduled to complete in 2012, now hopefully
| complete later this year, so 15 years total, 10 years late.
| 2) Flamenville 3 in France. Construction started in 2007,
| originally scheduled to complete in 2012. Hopefully complete
| in 2023, so 16 years later, 11 years late. 3) Mochovce 4 in
| Slovakia. Construction started November 2008, original
| scheduled to complete in 2013, now hopefully complete in
| 2023, so 16 years total, 10 years late. 4,5) Hinkley Point C1
| and C2 in the UK. Construction started in roughly 2008,
| originally expected to be online 2022 or so ("early 2020s" is
| the best I can find with Google now, and that's for both C1
| and C2 to be online). Now C1 is expected to be complete in
| 2027, and C2 in 2028. So 19-20 years total, 6 years late.
|
| (The US has two reactors on the list, Vogtle 3 and 4, started
| in 2009, originally expected to finish in 2016 and 2017, now
| expected to finish in 2023.)
|
| I suspect that Europe's success in building rapid transit,
| compared to America, is due to the fact that they were
| continuously building such systems, whereas the US largely
| hasn't, so there is no cohort of engineers and workers who
| learned-by-doing and get better over time. But in nuclear,
| those workers seem to have gone in Europe as well- you can
| see from this 2020 chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucle
| ar_power_in_France#/media...) that France built almost all of
| their reactors in a giant lump between 1970 and 1983, built a
| few reactors later in the 1980s (presumably late career work
| from the people who had built so many earlier), and has found
| building a new reactor to be really hard, e.g. Flamenville 3
| is just as big a disaster as Vogtle.
| thow-58d4e8b wrote:
| To add one more data point - Olkiluoto 3, started 2005, was
| expected to finish in 2009. Completed late 2021, 12 years
| late
|
| Cherry on top - after producing electricity for about a
| week, it had to shut down for another 3 months. Then, after
| ramping up to about 30% of the capacity, it encountered
| another problem, delaying it for another 5 months. Here we
| are in June 2022, 17 years later, Olkiluoto 3 provides
| exactly 0 MW to the Finnish grid
| spc476 wrote:
| I also recall reading (somewhere) that France basically
| ended up with two nuclear power plan designs used
| repeatedly, unlike in the US where nearly every nuclear
| power plant is unique. That might account for the lower
| costs shown in the article.
| mandevil wrote:
| That is true for the 1970's and 1980's boom of production
| in France, but is not true at present: the EPR they are
| building at Flamenville 3 and Hinkley Point C1+C2 are the
| sum total of those reactors currently under construction,
| and none are currently operational, so those three are
| likely to be the total number ever built.
|
| It is true that the 34 CPY reactors, and the 20 P4
| reactors, were produced in large enough numbers to create
| a skilled class of workers and engineers who were deeply
| experienced with building these reactors, but right now
| all of those workers are retired.
|
| And honestly, from observation, it appears that
| rebuilding competence like this is a lot harder than
| building it in the first place: when you are building the
| first time everyone- the general public, the regulators,
| the workers themselves- are more forgiving. When you've
| lost that capacity and are trying to rebuild it you have
| expectations set for a mature industry, but the skills
| aren't there to deliver it.
| krylon wrote:
| > European construction seems a lot better
|
| Unless the situation in the US is really, really _REALLY_
| horrible, I doubt that. I don 't remember where, but one
| country is in the process of building a nuclear power plant,
| that is AFAIK unfinished, but already took way more time and
| money than originally planned.
|
| Doesn't even have to be nuclear - ask the Internet about
| Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie or Stuttgart's train station.
| Having public construction projects overrun their schedules
| and budgets is a well-honored tradition, at least in Germany,
| but I suspect our neighbors have similar customs.
| mandevil wrote:
| An excellent (English language) podcast about Berlin's
| fiasco of an airport, BER:
| https://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/ (29 years from planning
| to completion, 14 years from construction start to opening,
| 9 years late, budget from 1 billion Euro to almost 6).
|
| One of the points they made in the podcast was similar to
| TFA's: changes in construction are really expensive and
| blow things out in costs. A new mayor came in and demanded
| major changes once construction was underway in Berlin. And
| then, when people said "this will cause problems" his
| response was basically "we're Germany, we are the best at
| planning, building and constructing, of course we can
| handle this with no problems"...
| ajmurmann wrote:
| US is absolutely terrible at large infrastructure projects.
| This article has some good details and statistics:
| https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/03/le...
|
| In general, Alon Levy's blog has great articles on this
| topic and he lives in Berlin
| https://pedestrianobservations.com/
| stefanfisk wrote:
| I'd love to read more about this! do you have any tip on
| where to start?
| epistasis wrote:
| Or if you were taking specifically about the nuclear
| construction incompetence, the loca newspapers in South
| Carolina and Georgia have been providing the best
| reporting. Here's South Carolina's archive:
|
| https://www.postandcourier.com/business/vc_summer_nuclear_p
| r...
|
| Search for "Georgia recorder vogtle" to get some of the
| reports from the Georgia construction delays.
| epistasis wrote:
| The Pedestrian Observations blog is great for construction
| cost analysis:
|
| https://pedestrianobservations.com/
| intrasight wrote:
| My first job was doing software in the nuclear industry. Was
| the late 80s. Probably the best job I ever had in terms of
| working with extremely competent engineers. But they were all
| in their 50s and 60s. After TMI, a generation of engineers said
| "no" to nuclear careers. We can only imagine the alternate
| history where that accident hadn't occurred.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I find it disconcerting that a defective critical piece ended
| up being used anyway, regardless of the economies involved.
| That might mean you have no reactor, but you can't just go an
| substitute broken or out of spec parts for good ones.
| otter-rock wrote:
| Out-of-spec doesn't mean it can't work. It just means you
| have to redo the design using what's effectively a different
| part than you originally planned on.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, but the idea here was to construct a nuclear power
| plant, not to build a large pot for boiling soup in. You
| can't take a critical component like that, spec it and then
| suddenly pretend the spec never mattered in the first
| place, then you have to admit that you're just winging it.
| Changing the spec of the reactor vessel essentially
| translates into a complete redesign of the reactor itself
| unless you are willing to compromise on other aspects, such
| as safety, longevity and so on.
|
| We're not talking about a bracket here. Or an O-ring. When
| was the last time something as stupid as an O-ring decided
| the fate of... oh, never mind.
| otter-rock wrote:
| It's a requirements change. Those happen all the time in
| everything. Why would that be completely forbidden or
| impossible here? Like you said, it might really suck. But
| the NRC does not allow trading off safety the way you
| suggest.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Requirements changes are not driven by one-off material
| defects in critical pieces of hardware.
|
| That's simply a bending of the rules for economic
| reasons. And it is one of the main reasons for me to
| oppose nuclear: the fact that people will be people and
| that at the root of every one of those disaster and near
| disasters there was someone who thought they could get
| away with something. We are ill equipped to deal with
| this kind of responsibility, especially across a
| timeframe measures in decades.
|
| At the same time I would love to see us solve the climate
| change problem, and I recognize that we will likely have
| a nuclear component in there. But it will have to be done
| by the book or we'll end up regretting it - again.
|
| If we're going to start out with the normalization of
| deviance on the #1 critical component of a reactor then I
| think we are on the wrong path:
|
| https://becht.com/becht-blog/entry/normalization-of-
| deviance...
| curiousllama wrote:
| I mean depends how it's broken, right? Broken could just mean
| anything from "will blow up momentarily" to "more inefficient
| than spec, but totally safe"
| sveme wrote:
| But with that position any spec is useless.
| immmmmm wrote:
| Carbon migration problems during forging if i recall
| correctly. So steel is out of specs. How badly will
| certainly remain secret, like most things in this industry.
| rob_c wrote:
| yes, well said.
|
| It's a shame the idiotic "green" movement after chernobyl is
| rather annoying that it has set energy production in developed
| nations back ~50 years and caused so much climate damage in the
| mean time... but hey 'radioactive waste is corporate greed
| maaannnn'.....
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| But the green movement was ultimately correct. They didn't
| know why and had nonsense arguments, but the fact is that
| "old nuclear" was developed with insufficient long-term
| safety. Fukushima showed that.
|
| What also seems true is that you can't trust a company to run
| them properly, no matter the regulations and audits. TEPCO
| showed that. From people I know who've dealt with the nuclear
| industry, there is a strong contempt of regulation in
| sentiment/culture, likely due to the annoyances and perceived
| costs.
|
| This contempt however breeds a long term apathy towards
| safety and maintenance. It's human nature.
|
| There are reactor designs that are inherently meltdown proof
| (LFTR) and use almost all their nuclear fuel (LFTR) and can,
| I believe, breed old nuclear waste into usable fuel (LFTR).
| They scale down to small closet sizes (LFTR) and so can be
| more economically flexible. I believe pebble bed and others
| can do similar things. LFTR allegedly can be designed to be
| proliferation resistant, although I've seen opposing views
| from much better educated people.
|
| But the LFTR goals should be the standard of the nuclear
| industry for next-gen. Not these massive solid rod huge dome
| boondoggle-prone eyesores.
| bsedlm wrote:
| I think there's a larger point around the general notion of
| "spread of competency".
|
| the competency is not allowed to spread. there's a thick shroud
| of secrecy around how all this sophisticated technology comes
| about.
|
| This is also why semiconductors are so difficult.
|
| Back in the early 20th century the nuclear stuff was secret so
| the nazis and then the russians would not get it.
|
| Now semiconductors are also closely related to national
| security stuff (china and taiwan). I find it quite suggestive
| that most of the tech used to make the semiconductors is owned
| european companies.
|
| Finally, I have a sensation that in the 18-19th century it was
| the chemical sciences that were similarly shrouded in secrecy
| of this sort.
|
| There was a topic here on HN the other day about how there's so
| little popularization of chemistry... IMO, this is why, the
| legacy of secrecy so to guarantee competitive industrial
| advantages still casts its shadow.
| djtango wrote:
| At least in the UK, I found that salaries for Chemists were
| depressingly low - PhD grads would earn around 30k GBP which
| made it hard for me to justify studying for so long.
|
| I really liked Chemistry but ended up moving into software
| instead.
| bsder wrote:
| > the competency is not allowed to spread. there's a thick
| shroud of secrecy around how all this sophisticated
| technology comes about. > > This is also why semiconductors
| are so difficult.
|
| The dirty secret is that _all_ factories are hard to build
| because nobody knows all the details to make them work.
|
| It's that simple.
|
| People bring operative knowledge to bear in the running of a
| factory. Over time, that knowledge becomes baked into the
| procedures, equipment, maintenance and people.
|
| This is, in my opinion, something that everybody overlooks
| about nuclear. Power plants and factories _need_ to evolve
| and optimize over time to be successful.
|
| Nuclear plants get encased in amber and can't do that. I
| understand why people don't want to allow that. However, I
| really think that this inability to evolve will doom _any_
| large scale nuclear reactor design. Probably the only way
| that nuclear becomes successful is very small, semi-sealed
| power plants as the whole plant evolves at the manufacturing
| facility rather than at the site.
|
| > I find it quite suggestive that most of the tech used to
| make the semiconductors is owned european companies.
|
| This is hardly surprising. They're spinouts of the big
| conglomerates from the 1980s (ASML is from Philips, no?).
| These conglomerates _didn 't exist_ in Japan (maybe--MITI was
| funding the hell out of things in Japan in the early 1980s so
| my memory may be off), China, etc. back when this stuff was
| getting started and spun out.
|
| _TSMC_ is actually the anomaly. It took a _very_ determined
| effort with a lot of money being shoveled around by the
| government combined with a disgruntled TI executive of
| Chinese background and all of his knowledge and contacts to
| put it all together.
| bumby wrote:
| > _I have a sensation that in the 18-19th century it was the
| chemical sciences that were similarly shrouded in secrecy._
|
| I'm not sure this is the case. Chemistry and geology were
| both popular with hobbyists (albeit, it seemed to often be
| aristocratic hobbyists) during that period.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Link to the topic?
| bsedlm wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31648981
| brandmeyer wrote:
| This is one of the reasons for continuing to incrementally
| design and build new submarine and aircraft carrier reactors.
| If the expertise is to re-emerge in the US commercial sector,
| it may require another cross-pollination effort from the
| military.
|
| The difficulty is that both military reactors and commercial
| power reactors have evolved considerably since their initial
| branch point. Commercial power reactors provide base load (run
| at full power) for a year or two and then get refueled.
| Military reactors now last the life of the ship without
| refueling at all, but are optimized for propulsion's variable
| demands.
| nixonpjoshua1 wrote:
| Perhaps military style reactors designed for propulsion loads
| would be a good match for balancing renewables on the grid as
| an alternative to natural gas peaker plants
| rndmind wrote:
| Consider how new the industry is, this comment is an hilarious
| load of logical fallacies
| Oarch wrote:
| I'm enjoy HN's ongoing obsession with this substack.
|
| Seeing it regularly appear here lets me forget for a moment that
| my industry (construction) is still in the technological Dark
| Ages.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
|
| Because there isn't enough will to make them cost less.
|
| China is building lots of nuclear power plants.
| w0mbat wrote:
| If you think the construction costs are high, think about the
| demolition cost when the facility reaches end of life, and is now
| radioactive.
| locallost wrote:
| On top of that the cost of waste disposal is astronomic and in
| most of the world without a permanent solution. And it is
| usually not included in the actual calculation -- power plants
| usually need to put some money on the side and into an index
| fund, with the hope the fund eventually grows to be large
| enough to cover the cost. But nobody really knows if it will
| suffice, so it's likely the public will be on the hook. On top
| of all the subsidies received during construction and
| operation. Basically I view it as a type of graft.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| Way to bury the lede and avoiding the main point:
|
| If you plan to build a Nuclear plant *TODAY*, there are financial
| requirements and regulatory uncertainties that mean you're
| sitting on high interest(and risky) loans/credit lines/asset
| pledges etc that increase over time.
|
| Very few banks or financial institutions are remotely interested
| in setting up financing an endeavor that has an almost 0 chance
| of success to completion since the 90s.
|
| Environmental review has become a tool of environmental extremist
| militants to derail and progress in energy. These organizations
| are SO short sighted that they have been weaponizing the judicial
| system against simple projects such as high voltage transmission
| lines for the silliest of reasons which assures America that her
| infrastructure will forever be stuck in the past.
|
| The cost of operating a plant come after all this is considered.
| All plants running today are roughly HALF A FUCKING CENTURY old.
| What the US needs is easy access to cheap credit for people
| willing to set up Nuclear plants.
|
| We need incentive to invest in audacious increases in energy
| output in exchange for meeting thresholds of performance. Right
| now, you can kill yourself by filling out thousands of pages of
| ridiculous review, hire some of the most expensive attorneys to
| represent you in court to be granted to privilege of even having
| basic clearance to START building while sitting on a fast
| bleeding pool of credit, it makes NO sense.
| fatcat500 wrote:
| > Environmental review has become a tool of environmental
| extremist militants to derail and progress in energy.
|
| Hmm... I wonder why they are so bent on blocking the only
| viable solution to climate change?
|
| Almost as if they are being used a pawns to shift over the
| control of energy to the government... after all, if I wanted
| to nationalize every industry, I would start with the industry
| upon which all other industries depend on: energy.
| [deleted]
| goodpoint wrote:
| > they are being used a pawns to shift over the control of
| energy to the government
|
| ...by pushing for domestic solar panels? And improved
| isolation, heat pumps, passive houses?
|
| Sounds like the very opposite of centralizing energy
| production.
|
| So maybe we need a bit more evidence for your conspiracy
| theory.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| Last year I did a fair amount of consulting work for the GAIN
| initiative at Idaho National Lab [0].
|
| They're doing so much good work with micro and modular reactors
| that can basically be "dropped in" decommissioned coal-burning
| sites because the infrastructure to tie into the electric grid
| already exists.
|
| It was expressed to me that selling this idea to the private-
| sector energy industry was an uphill battle and uptake was very
| slow to nonexistent.
|
| [0] https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an
| uphill battle"
|
| Could you elaborate on the why? I would asume, because of risk.
| A solar plant, you can more or less just put anywhere, but a
| nuclear power plant, even a small one, needs state permission,
| has to meet extensive regulation, etc.
|
| It would need some convincing for me, too, that a nuclear
| reactor can be just a drop in replacement for coal. I would
| think unknown risks, hidden costs due to regulations,
| neverending building, etc.
|
| And are we talking about a battle tested design, or is it new
| technology? That sounds extra risky.
| bozhark wrote:
| Sounds like a good time to get into the energy sector.
|
| Time for an HN Wind, water, solar, and nuclear company start-
| up.
|
| Who's in?
| samstave wrote:
| There was a nuclear startup that came through YC a few
| years back... what happened to them?
| pnw wrote:
| Oklo is still around, recent news article wasn't great
| though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937836
| _1tan wrote:
| Here, email is avg@duck.com
| cupofpython wrote:
| I have government contracting experience in construction
| management QAQC
| 7952 wrote:
| Not the parent but have some experience with this on the UK.
| Typically energy companies will start with the technology
| they want to develop and then find a site that will suit it.
| Starting with the plot of land is the wrong way around. And
| existing decomissioned sites are just an asset like any
| other. They may be sold for a distribution centre or a data
| centre. And the grid connection may be used by a new power
| station built on a neighboring plot or to connect an offshore
| wind farm.
| samstave wrote:
| That sounds like a brilliant idea. However, the tooling and
| staffing requirements of a Coal Plant arent going to suffice
| for a nuke.
|
| How do they propose training for existing employees of a coal
| plant.
|
| We think of Coal folks as "dirty stupid miners from kentucky"
| and we think of people that work at nuke sites as "white lab
| coat wearing scientists"
|
| The only dirty stupid person from Kentucky is Mitch.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > However, the tooling and staffing requirements of a Coal
| Plant arent going to suffice for a nuke.
|
| I am not sure what you mean by Tooling but I am sure these
| retrofit reactors aren't going to be dropped off by UPS and
| someone on site has to figure out how to plug it in.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I think there is a good amount of overlap.
|
| Operating the reactor is of course specialized. But once you
| have the steam, the rest of the power plant is conventional.
| Steam turbines, generators, and all the grid tie-in would be
| mostly the same as a coal plant.
| bozhark wrote:
| We could always start _new_ companies...
| cryptonector wrote:
| Here's an idea: offer one of these micro/modular reactors for
| _free_ to a developer of a new residential division, and
| indemnify them by offering to remove it after at least N years
| in operation and up to M years after that.
|
| I would consider living in a division that has extra low-cost
| electricity. It couldn't be zero cost because nuclear could
| only provide base load power, unless one of these micro/modular
| reactor types is so innovative that it can provide base _and_
| peak load power, in which case such a division could have truly
| zero-cost power for a bunch of years.
|
| I.e., _promote_ the darned things, loss-lead if need be.
|
| If the manufacturer won't take such risks, then might never
| break through.
|
| I bet that after a few years you could get such good press out
| of it that other developers might sign on.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _Here 's an idea: offer one of these micro/modular reactors
| for free to a developer of a new residential division..._
|
| One word: Epcot
|
| It's something Disney and Florida could probably agree on,
| would be a wholesome PR story about investing in Walt's
| futurism dreams, and would be easier to negotiate than with a
| less-planned development.
|
| And finally, what better showcase than "If it's safe enough
| for Disney"?
|
| _Our Friend the Atom_ , indeed
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QRzl1wHc43I
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Construction costs are only part of the picture and utility
| operators are well aware that they need to look at lifecycle
| costs. This includes everything from costs of fuel rods (look
| at the historically volatile uranium market), availability of
| large volumes of cooling water (see more frequent droughts),
| maintenance costs (maintenance being a major factor in the
| retirement of California's nuclear power plants), security
| costs, the cost of storing fuel rods onsite for decades, and
| finally, decommissioning costs (as reactors themselves become
| contaminated with in-situ activation products, i.e. radioactive
| cobalt/iron/carbon/nickel isotopes).
|
| It's basically a huge long-term liability that just doesn't
| exist with solar/wind/storage, hydropower, or geothermal.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Can't you just dump radioactive uranium into the bottom of
| the ocean? Can't imagine it would do much damage with all of
| the water around it.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| No
|
| https://theecologist.org/2009/mar/01/somalia-used-toxic-
| dump...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That doesn't really show anything because it's such a
| huge mixture and the vast majority is random toxic
| chemicals, not plain old spent fuel.
| stormbrew wrote:
| I'm not saying I think dumping nuclear waste in the ocean
| is a good idea (though I am also curious if there's been
| specific impact studies done on it, if we're talking
| about very very deep ocean) but I'm pretty sure somalia
| isn't _in_ the ocean.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| They were dumping waste off the coast of Somalia, in the
| ocean
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "Bottom of the ocean" here doesn't mean on the
| continental shelf.
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| There's life down there.
| [deleted]
| coredog64 wrote:
| The largest nuclear plant in the United States (Palo Verde)
| is in the middle of the Sonoran Desert and uses treated
| sewage output for cooling. People probably won't stop
| urinating during a drought.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| oh thats cool. I imagine all the pathogens are effectively
| killed for free
| dqpb wrote:
| > the cost of storing fuel rods onsite for decades
|
| This environmental remediation cost is generally missing in
| comparisons with all other energy sources.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| And mining too
| anamexis wrote:
| It's generally missing from the other energy sources as
| well.
| nradov wrote:
| Private industry uptake is slow because the required changes to
| staffing, security, and waste disposal are so expensive. Until
| there are higher costs for CO2 emissions, it will be cheaper
| for power companies to convert those facilities to natural gas,
| or just shut them down.
| Arrath wrote:
| > ...waste disposal are so expensive. Until there are higher
| costs for CO2 emissions...
|
| Perhaps we should also examine the requirements and costs
| associated with storing waste from coal-fired power plants.
| Oft overlooked in favor of the fuel rod boogeyman.
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/coal-.
| ..
|
| If we treated such waste with the care and security it
| deserved, the cost equation may balance out differently.
| krallja wrote:
| One of the victims of coal was Pat McCrory in the 2016 NC
| governors race. Signing "H.B. 2," the stupid transgender-
| bathroom law, is often cited as the main reason for his
| loss, but I believe the coal-ash spill[1] and subsequent
| coverup scandal were decisive in his losing support in
| rural areas.
|
| I certainly agree: the true costs of coal should be better
| believed!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_McCrory#Duke_Energy
| paulmd wrote:
| Yes. The problem with nuclear is basically twofold:
|
| first, the approval and regulatory process is deliberately
| cumbersome and in obvious need of reform. Treating every
| plant as a one-off design rather than standardizing has
| enormously inflated costs. And generally much higher
| scrutiny requirements for new designs have strangled the
| ability to roll out better/safer designs. It's very similar
| to what happens in the FAA with aircraft/engine designs, we
| can design much better engines/reactors than we could in
| 1960, but the new ones require an onerous approval process
| while the old ones got grandfathered approval. So we only
| build the old/worse ones!
|
| If you don't want any more nuclear constructed, set policy
| to that effect, don't use the approval process to
| artificially inject costs to make it unfavorable. And the
| disposal situation just needs to happen, period. The waste
| has to go somewhere, we can't just have it sitting around
| forever. Even if we never ran another nuclear plant ever,
| the _existing_ waste still has to go somewhere, and that
| process was dragged to a halt for political reasons too.
| The Yucca Mountain repository needs to be moved forward
| again.
|
| Second, we need to stop letting coal externalize its costs.
| Tax carbon emissions heavily, require secure disposal of
| radioactive coal ash rather than letting it sit around in
| storage ponds that eventually spill and destroy miles and
| miles of land, etc.
|
| Unfortunately, in both cases, the fossil fuel industry has
| its finger on the pulse of washington and isn't going to
| allow a trillion-dollar industry to be torn down without a
| massive fight. Existing stakeholders are just too
| entrenched for it to ever be successful and construction
| costs/disposal/externalities are just the place where that
| iceberg breaks the surface.
|
| The "once you build the expertise, costs come down for the
| Nth plant" is also probably true, but there's also other
| things going on here with the process as a whole.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Doesn't seem to have helped any at Vogtle.
| logifail wrote:
| > micro and modular reactors
|
| Umm, are these the ones that - relatively speaking - produce
| significantly more radioactive waste than traditional designs?
|
| "The next generation of small nuclear reactors will be big on
| producing radioactive waste"[0]
|
| "Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big
| plants"[1]
|
| Sorry for the scepticism, but the nuclear lobby were the ones
| that brought us the phrase "too cheap to meter"[2], and we're
| still waiting...
|
| [0] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-next-generation-
| of-n... [1]
| https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/nuclear_reactors_wast...
| [2] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf
| a_shovel wrote:
| There was a discussion about this a few days ago, and this
| comment thread [0] featured some criticism from experts on
| these claims.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642424
| logifail wrote:
| and yet one of the comments from that thread stated:
|
| > The correct answer is that there is no way to make
| fission cost-competitive with the near-term price of
| renewables + storage, or even with imported synthetic fuel
| produced with renewables, waste or no waste. Thus, the
| whole issue is moot. No such SMRs will be built except
| where coerced funding carefully excludes true cost from the
| process (as indeed happened on behalf of every single
| utility reactor in operation
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| There are countries where no combination of renewables +
| storage is possible. Places with little sunlight and
| little wind. What do they do?
| logifail wrote:
| Q: Do those countries already have long term nuclear
| waste storage facilities?
|
| There are countries that have been spectacularly failing
| to provide their own such facilities for decades.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Suppose they don't - so what is you proposed solution -
| they live in the dark ages?
| ncmncm wrote:
| They today import fuel and burn it. They are equipped to
| continue doing so.
|
| They can add transmission lines, for cheaper importation.
|
| As fuel synthesis -- ammonia and hydrogen -- comes online
| and undercuts NG, they can import that instead, at times
| when their transmission line power capacity or
| availability is exceeded.
|
| Fuel synthesis from solar in the tropics undercutting NG
| extraction will be a big business. Synthesis using
| reliable wind, in other places, likewise.
| theptip wrote:
| 35x of a small problem is not necessarily a big problem. You
| need to quantify that objection. Nuclear waste can be
| reprocessed (see Fast Breeder reactors); the concern raised
| here is usually proliferation risk.
|
| Given a binary choice, I'd rather have to deal with some
| nuclear waste than climate change, and I don't even think
| that climate change is an existential risk for humanity (just
| likely to cause large and uneven/unjust levels of harm). I
| think it's misleading to throw out individual objections like
| this without considering the systemic trade-offs that we need
| to make.
|
| > the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase
| "too cheap to meter"
|
| I think this kind of blame-throwing is unhelpful. I couldn't
| care less what marketing claims were made in the past. Does
| this technology make a good cost/benefit trade-off now, or
| not? Specifically, compared to the other options we actually
| have available to us now. That is the conversation I think we
| should be having.
|
| To address your object-level claim, as the OP describes in
| detail, one reason nuclear is more expensive now is the ever-
| increasing regulatory framework that has changed under the
| feet of in-progress projects. Maybe those regulations have
| resulted in a good ROI, but it's hard for me to buy that
| claim. Nuclear is now 10-100x safer than most other
| traditional/fossil forms of power generation[1], and it's
| excruciatingly expensive to buy that safety margin. These are
| tiny death rates caused by power generation.
|
| The problem here is that it's political suicide to say "I
| think we should reduce safety regulations to make nuclear
| power 10x more dangerous, because that will avert far more
| deaths from climate change". In practice perhaps a major push
| for solar/wind/geothermal would be a higher-ROI solution to
| our problems, but that's politically much harder to get
| consensus on.
|
| [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
| zackees wrote:
| Post like this make me hopeful that rational minds will
| prevail and we get clean abundant nuclear energy.
|
| It's becoming clear that the climate alarmism isn't about
| solutions or even a tax, but forcing us to purchase "carbon
| credits" from Saudi Arabia and other sovereign wealth funds
| ranked high in the ESG index.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "It's becoming clear that the climate alarmism isn't
| about solutions or even a tax, but forcing us to purchase
| "carbon credits"
|
| Every half educated climate activist knows thay carbon
| credits are a fraud perpetuates by wallstreet types to
| pretend they are doing something when they are not.
|
| This post is breathtakingly uninformed. I suggest calling
| it climate illiteracy
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Posts like this make me just despair... we couldn't even
| scale up this to the world wide needs, but if we could
| the waste would be huge.
|
| Only thing that could get us out there and would only
| make sense is going renewables everywhere in Manhatten-
| like projects, but that won't happen because people
| argueing like this got us into this situation where there
| is allegedly only a binary choice between failed and
| failed..
| towaway15463 wrote:
| > the waste would be huge
|
| Isn't the opposite true? Nuclear fuel has the highest
| energy density of any fuel source by a gigantic margin.
| The entire US stockpile of waste since the 50s is only
| 83,000 metric tonnes and could fit on a single football
| field stacked less than 10 yards deep. If we could all
| stop clutching our pearls about scary radiation and just
| agree to store the spent fuel deep underground there'd be
| absolutely no danger from it. Add to that the fact you
| can recycle the fuel and get even more energy out of it.
| logifail wrote:
| > ESG
|
| Is that the same ESG that Exxon is part of but Tesla
| isn't?
| throwaway23234 wrote:
| > In practice perhaps a major push for
| solar/wind/geothermal would be a higher-ROI solution to our
| problems, but that's politically much harder to get
| consensus on.
|
| The most awesome thing you get from Solar is that it's
| going to move forward no matter what. It's just something
| you can do to lower your bill, or even disconnect from the
| grid altogether. Personally I am off grid with no propane.
| Almost unheard of in CA. Solar is now THAT cheap if you are
| willing to put the up-front investment instead of paying
| PGE $600 a month. And if you don't have the space - buy a
| solar panel on a business from that other company they are
| starting - it was on here a week or so ago.
| theptip wrote:
| I agree with the trend here. It's inevitable that solar
| will displace fossil fuels eventually (especially when
| you consider that fossil fuels will gradually increase in
| price as the cost to extract goes up).
|
| The problem is that moving to solar solely by riding out
| the market-led transition won't happen fast enough. We
| would need to subsidize a lot more to avert the worst
| outcomes of climate change.
| criley2 wrote:
| Solar is a perfect solution for like 1/3 of the world for
| like 1/3 of the day.
|
| Batteries though, current batteries are a horrible
| solution.
|
| It's funny that this threads main objection to nuclear is
| waste/mining/etc but the solar battery revolution
| generates some far worse environmental effects getting
| all those rare earth minerals. Compared to the tiny
| amounts of fuel needed for reactors, the sheer amount of
| metal needed for worldwide grid solar batteries is
| astronomical.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Mentioning batteries can only distract from sensible
| discussion, because only the tiniest fraction of utility-
| scale storage will ever be batteries.
| solardev wrote:
| Solar is great at small scale, but at utility/grid scale,
| that means needing to ramp up storage too. The grid
| doesn't currently have much storage capacity (batteries,
| pumped hydro, phase shifting materials, etc.) to support
| current needs, much less future needs if we want to phase
| out fossil fuels.
|
| Getting the lithium and cobalt infrastructure up to scale
| takes time and has a lot of geopolitical considerations.
| It's not impossible but also far from trivial. It's not
| just a matter of throwing up more panels and turbines and
| calling it a day.
|
| Unless we can solve storage at scale, generation at night
| will continue to be an issue, and nuclear is the least
| climatically damaging way to do that in the interim.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Isn't this the crux of the argument for investing more
| money into solar/wind/storage vs nuclear. The solar and
| wind stuff is already cheap enough, so its storage vs
| nuclear. Will nuclear get cheaper faster than grid-scale
| batteries? There is only so much capital that can be
| invested, and potential advancements in batteries are
| looking a lot more promising than advancements in
| nuclear. I think the lion's share of money should be
| going to renewables and batteries.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Batteries are the _most expensive_ storage. They cost per
| kWh stored, while others cost mainly only per W inserted
| or extracted. Only a minuscule fraction of utility scale
| storage will ever be batteries, so even mentioning
| batteries only details discussion.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > Does this technology make a good cost/benefit trade-off
| now, or not? Specifically, compared to the other options we
| actually have available to us now. That is the conversation
| I think we should be having.
|
| Then why are you making so many arguments about how we must
| find ways to make it cheaper? That doesn't seem very
| committed to the idea of discussing the _current_ cost
| benefit trade-off.
| theptip wrote:
| The technology might make a good cost/benefit trade-off,
| if we fixed the regulatory framework but not otherwise.
| Or it might already make a good trade-off in the current
| regulatory environment. I don't see the technology and
| the regulatory framework as being tightly-coupled here,
| though they do obviously affect each other. My point is
| that we need to look at both of these factors, rather
| than considering the regulatory framework as a given that
| is set in stone, definitely correct, and something we
| can't change.
|
| In this case it may be easier to change the regulatory
| environment than to come up with new dramatically-cheaper
| nuclear technology that complies with the restrictions of
| the current regulations (though that is happening too
| with modular reactors).
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > I don't see the technology and the regulatory framework
| as being tightly-coupled here
|
| You're saying the safety standards regulation is not
| couple to the technology being used? Then what is it
| regulating if it's not the technology?
| avianlyric wrote:
| > Then why are you making so many arguments about how we
| must find ways to make it cheaper?
|
| They don't appear to be making those arguments at all.
| Just stating that Nuclear regulations sets safety
| standards substantially higher than safety stands for
| other power sources.
|
| It quite reasonable to include a question about "how safe
| is safe enough" when talking about trade offs. It's easy
| to change safety standards, and they're constantly
| evolving in all industries, so it's hardly disingenuous
| to consider as part of the current cost benefit trade-
| off.
|
| However to insist that Nuclear energy can only be
| evaluated in strict unchanging state, or to suggest that
| GP was suggesting such an evaluation, is somewhat
| disingenuous, and substantially undermines the
| authenticity of your argument.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > Nuclear regulations sets safety standards substantially
| higher than safety stands for other power sources.
|
| Ok, but this surely only is an argument that _other_
| sources should be regulated harsher (and fossil fuels
| absolutely should), not that we must make nuclear less
| safe.
| logifail wrote:
| > Just stating that Nuclear regulations sets safety
| standards substantially higher than safety stands for
| other power sources.
|
| Errm, than renewables?
| bipson wrote:
| The whole problem with the whole argument is: It _isn 't_ a
| binary choice.
| theptip wrote:
| I was using that phrasing to illustrate my ranking of
| preference between those two options, I wasn't claiming
| that we have a binary choice.
|
| To be clear, I am explicitly advocating for a proper
| cost/benefit analysis that keeps all options on the
| table, rather than getting caught up on single factors
| ("we can't do micro-nuclear because it produces more
| nuclear waste"). As I mentioned later in the post, a
| major push to renewables is another option (I also don't
| see these as mutually exclusive).
|
| I know that the most popular plan here is "push hard for
| renewables". I like that plan; I think a Green New Deal
| is an excellent idea. But empirically, how is that plan
| going? If that's your plan A, do you think it's going
| well enough to reject a plan B that you deem to be worse,
| but still dramatically better than climate change? I
| think the stakes are high enough that we should be
| hedging our bets.
| freemint wrote:
| The number of plants you build is an integer valued
| choice though. This has profound implications.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > Nuclear waste can be reprocessed
|
| Arguing that we should adopt smr reactors because their
| proportionally larger amount of waste can be burned by a
| much larger/more expensive reactor that we'd _also_ have to
| fund/build? One that would likely cost >10b and take 20
| years to construct? That doesn't seem like a good response
| to the waste issues with SMRs.
| logifail wrote:
| > Does this technology make a good cost/benefit trade-off
| now, or not?
|
| Given the progress (or lack of it) with the EPRs[0], I
| don't think "now" is something nuclear can claim to deliver
| on.
|
| If we'd started planning dozens of reactors a decade ago,
| perhaps - but we didn't.
|
| Nuclear simply isn't any kind of "quick fix", by a long
| stretch.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This article is _very_ light on the basics of nuclear fission and
| could use some help there. Here 's a good source on background:
|
| https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
|
| To summarize, light water reactors rely on the production of
| uranium fuel rods, which hold uranium enriched to about 3% U-235
| relative to 97% U-238. Naturally occuring uranium ores are about
| 0.7% U-235 and there is a large variation in the percentage of
| uranium in a given ore by total rock mass, with a few deposits
| being as much as 18% uranium ranging down to about 0.1%, which
| most sources describe as the economically recoverable limit. This
| will affect the cost of refueling a LWR (which has to be done
| every ~3 three years).
|
| Fission in LWRs is due to slow thermal neutrons, which can only
| fission U-235 and Pu-239 (odd-numbered isotopes. Fast neutrons
| are a different story, see above source for that.) These slow
| neutron/U-235 events generate fission fragments (atomic masses in
| the range ~80-110 and ~130-150 with peaks at 95 and 135), gamma
| rays, and free neutrons. The initial energy distribution for
| heating the circulating fluid (water) is about 85% fission
| fragment kinetic energy, and about 15% gamma ray and neutron
| kinetic energy.
|
| Some of the neutrons are captured by U-239, forming plutonium-239
| (and other transuranics) - which is also subject to fission, and
| over the lifetime of the fuel, about 66% of this formed Pu-239 is
| itself fissioned, adding to the total energy output.
|
| However, the actual heat produced by the reactor is also due to
| long-term decay of the fission fragments inside the fuel rods
| (about 6% of the total). This latter 6% is important because even
| if you halt the initial fission process, the reactor won't just
| go to zero, it still has to be cooled to prevent overheating and
| meltdown, as do the 'spent' fuel rods. It takes about ten years
| for used fuel rods to go from 10 kW decay heat/ton to 1 kW decay
| heat/ton. Storage of used fuel rods adds significantly to the
| operational costs of the reactor over time.
|
| Long-term storage of used fuel is necessary almost entirely
| because of the transuranics, which are alpha-radiation emitters
| with half-lives of thousands of years. Most of the fission
| fragments appear to decay via faster beta/gamma processes.
|
| Finally, there are the activation products to consider. Tritium
| is formed in the primary circulating water coolant loop, and is
| highly radioactive which is why this loop has to be isolated and
| its heat transferred to the secondary coolant loop which drives
| the steam turbines. Note here that reactors have to use a lot of
| water, at least as much as a coal-fired power plant, and these
| systems need to be highy engineered to prevent breakdowns, which
| would lead to meltdowns (Fukushima failure mode). The other
| activation products form in the reactor itself - carbon-14,
| cobalt-60, iron-55, nickel-63. This significantly adds to the
| cost of nuclear reactor decommissioning as the entire reactor
| body has to be treated as high-level waste.
|
| These factors explain why nuclear reactors have to be
| overengineered relative to traditional fossil fuel power plants,
| oil refineries, etc. which regularly suffer major accidents and
| fires - but those accidents don't lead to 100-year+ exclusion
| zones around the accident sites, so it's deemed acceptable. Not
| to belabor the point, but wind/solar/storage also has much lower
| costs for these reasons. Security vis-a-vis terrorism,
| cyberattack, military conflict, etc. is also a major related
| cost.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| Because reactors are much too large, causing far too slow of a
| design iteration cycle and inability to leverage economies of
| scale and mass production.
| jokoon wrote:
| I'm not an expert but I'm a bit skeptical about small nuclear
| reactor designs.
|
| I want to believe they would be cost effective, but... It doesn't
| seem there is a prototype that is cheap?
| larsrc wrote:
| Prototypes are never cheap. Prototypes are where all the
| research and design costs go. Once you have a design that works
| and doesn't have to be customised for each instance, you can
| get economics of scale because now you're just producing the
| same items over and over.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Masochism in part, and secondly the Simpsons blackballing the
| entire industry. Nobody wanted to become a nuclear engineer after
| that shitty show. The creators of the Simpsons are nuclear war
| surrender monkeys.
|
| Context, in the show, the groundskeeper which is a discriminatory
| stereotype of Scots, says the French are "cheese-eating surrender
| monkeys", another discriminatory stereotype, but it's fine
| according to the bitchvictim media's rules because since they're
| both white it counts as "poking fun" and not "bigotry". Tucker
| Max said "cheese-eating surrender monkey!" to a French girl at a
| bar, game over right there even for a guy with crazy game like
| him, because it's fucking insulting. Literally calling them
| monkeys AND submissive cowards? Well if the Simpsons can do it to
| others, I can do it to the Simpsons. One of my surnames is
| French, I'm part French, my great-grandfather spoke French and
| was a Francophile following the Blitzkreig with a map hoping the
| French could turn the invasion around, he was rooting for them.
| It's just not fucking funny. The Simpsons is a bigoted show,
| don't think you can repeat any of those jokes. So this is what I
| get to reply to the Simpsons, and all those losers: The Simpsons
| are nuclear armageddon surrender monkeys. Whole bitchvictim media
| with them.
|
| Going back to the topic of nuclear engineers, with 22 minutes of
| slander on television on every day specifically against them
| that's the hottest show on television decade after decade, like
| only a son of a nuke would become a nuke.
|
| So that's also sabotage, then the public is like a thousand times
| as sensitive to a nuclear accident than to a coal plant shitting
| into the air we breathe.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31598892
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| dqpb wrote:
| I would like to see a comparison of energy sources that includes
| environmental remediation costs.
| memco wrote:
| There are efforts in our area to expand solar and they are
| offering programs to the public to subsidize some of the
| construction with shares of the panels. Customers are advised
| that they will not make money but they'll get back some
| percentage of their shares each month. Additionally the power
| company offers a renewable power option for which they charge
| extra over the standard rate. Given this: will we see a nuclear
| option to help subsidize the cost? I would love the cost to come
| down but I feel like they're never going to come down if we don't
| build it anywhere. Would love to help get it going although I
| have nowhere near enough money to make an offer other than to be
| a willing paying customer to whoever can get service to me.
| dest wrote:
| On this topic, see the excellent website
| https://whatisnuclear.com/ and its webpage about economics
| https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
| xroche wrote:
| > Because nuclear plants are expensive, and they take a long time
| to build, financing their construction can also be a significant
| fraction of their cost, typically around 15-20% of the cost of
| the plant. For plants that have severe construction delays and/or
| have high financing costs (such as the Vogtle 3 and 4 plants in
| Georgia), this can be 50% of the cost or more.
|
| This is why nuclear power plants should be state-sponsored
| projects. States typically have loans at 0% rate, or even
| negative interests.
| stewbrew wrote:
| The state better invests the money in cheaper technologies. Why
| should it waste the money on nuclear plants?
|
| Edit: To the downvoters: Seriously, why should the state waste
| money on a technology that doesn't work and never has? More
| than half of France's nuclear power plants are currently
| offline and in maintainence mode. Maybe also because they could
| not produce electricity at market prices.
| ryan93 wrote:
| They get 80% of their electricity from nuclear. And even
| export some.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Yes, probably. This can bring its own problems, though. In
| Britain, for example, the Treasury is extremely reluctant to
| approve new public capital projects, even at negative real
| interest rates. Investment is effectively rationed by requiring
| a benefit/cost ratio of above 2 (at net present value, after
| making heavy optimism bias adjustments) before it will approve
| funding. New nuclear won't get close to that on any
| conventional appraisal, which is one reason why _our_ current
| nuclear new build is happening on an eye-wateringly expensive
| private finance arrangement.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| This is because of "not corruption"
| pmyteh wrote:
| It's mostly because the ability of the economy to produce
| positive economic (but not direct financial) returns on
| very cheap credit is basically infinite, and borrowing
| money to invest in all of these things would need a huge
| amount of extra tax revenue to pay off the loans, which is
| hard. (Even in principle it's not straightforward for
| government to capture the consumer surplus of
| infrastructure investment. And in practice tax increases
| are politically problematic). So it's rationed, instead.
| strainer wrote:
| A project should garner favorable financing arrangements for
| its merits, not for its risks.
| danans wrote:
| Merit must be determined in a way that includes known risks.
| Anything otherwise would be fraudulent.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Why should states invest it's taxpayer money into overpriced
| and slow technology when there are cheaper and fast improving
| alternatives?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Note that solar and wind power are NOT alternatives to the
| predictable base load of nuclear, hydro, or fuel burning
| power generation.
| Krasnol wrote:
| "Steve Holliday, CEO National Grid: "The idea of large
| power stations for baseload is outdated""
|
| https://energypost.eu/interview-steve-holliday-ceo-
| national-...
| trashtester wrote:
| This is a sales pitch from someone who makes a living
| from selling grid capacity.
| jacquesm wrote:
| But is it true or not?
| trashtester wrote:
| I'm not sure he's lying on purpose. But it's pretty
| common that people just stop thinking further when
| someone tells him what they want to hear.
|
| The article certainly dismisses the need for storage way
| too easily, imo. It claims that consumption can be
| adjusted to match supply. There are not that many uses of
| electricity where you can simply lower your consumption
| when the supply is low.
|
| There are some cases, like car batteries that can, sort
| of, be seen as consumption, but unless your car has some
| extreme storage capacity, you typically want to be able
| to recharge it when YOU need to have that range, instead
| of when the power company has additional supply.
|
| And if you don't want to use fossil fuels for heating,
| the power saved by not charging your car is NOT enough to
| keep your house warm for a few cold days with no winds
| (unless you live in a place with no real winter).
| xienze wrote:
| Because transitioning over to green technology is a decades-
| long project, it's not something you can just snap your
| fingers and make happen, as many countries are discovering.
| You still need non-renewable energy sources to fill in the
| gaps that renewables currently have.
| Krasnol wrote:
| You don't have to transition completely in decades. You can
| start today. Meanwhile building a single nuclear reactor is
| a "decade-long" project, you can't start today and in the
| end you're still left with an old and expensive tech while
| the green tech moved ahead rapidly during the same time.
|
| Germany managed to replace almost half of their generation
| in 2 decades:
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-renewable-
| powe...
|
| When they started out the technology was terrible and
| managed to do all that despite a just recently retired
| government which did everything to stop further expansion.
| trashtester wrote:
| > Germany managed to replace almost half of their
| generation in 2 decades:
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-renewable-
| powe...
|
| Still, only 16% of Germany's total energy consumption
| comes from renewables:
|
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/style
| s/g...
|
| If Germany wants to replace all uses of fossil fuels for
| heating, transportation, industrial use, etc, with
| renewables, HUGE investments remain.
|
| In particular, giving up the ability to smooth out
| variations in production without the use of fossil fuels
| will be extremely costly, unless the cost comes down by
| at least a factor or 50.
| xienze wrote:
| > You don't have to transition completely in decades. You
| can start today.
|
| Yes, I agree. If you start today, you'll be done in
| decades. The boneheaded move is to start a green energy
| transition and immediately start decommissioning existing
| nuclear power plants and stonewall creating new ones by
| throwing up your hands and saying "well it'll take
| forever to build them." By the way, have you ever
| considered why it takes so long to build nuclear power
| plants? It's a political and environmental special
| interest problem, not a technical one.
|
| At the end of the day, when the wind isn't blowing or the
| sun isn't shining, you still have to generate power
| somehow. Until the day that problem is solved (that's the
| "decades" part), you want something like nuclear power to
| fall back on.
| Krasnol wrote:
| I don't know why you're ignoring my reality example.
| Germany is part of a EU wide market and it just works.
| Also it's not like you put all your wind on one spot.
| There is always wind somewhere for example.
|
| The idea that it's an "political, environmental and
| special interest" problem while we're watching several
| nuclear plants being FAR over budget and over due being
| constructed in pro-nuclear countries proves that your
| argument is false.
|
| So basically: everything you wrote there is wrong...why
| are you doing this?
| trashtester wrote:
| > There is always wind somewhere for example.
|
| There is always wind somewhere. But grid capacity is not
| free, in fact it is quite expensive. Let's say, on a
| given day, the only place in Europe with reasonable winds
| would be west of Cadiz, transporting all that power
| through Spain, Portugal and France to cover the needs of
| all of Europe, would require immensive grid capacity
| expansion. And even with super-high-voltage, the losses
| before the power reaches Estonia would be huge.
|
| Also, if this load causes a brownout in Spain, due to
| improper maintaince, for instance, all of Europe could go
| dark, cold and stop moving (in a time after fossil
| fuels).
|
| (I can imagine seeing this from space during some cold
| winter night around 2045, all the lights in Western and
| Central Europe disappear at once. Only Norway and parts
| of Sweden can be seen, since they have their hydro
| power.)
|
| In other words, while a better grid can mitigate _some_
| of the variability of renewable supply, you still need
| massive expansion of storage capacity when you stop using
| natural gas, especially when you switch heating and
| transportation to use electricity too.
|
| Seen from the outside, it surely looks like the German
| population has been seriously misled.
| petre wrote:
| Yeah, we've seen how it (hasn't) worked out for Germany.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| There are no cheaper and fast improving alternatives to
| provide plentiful electricity at 9pm every single day.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| Here are a few:
|
| https://www.energy-storage.news/department-of-energy-
| confirm...
|
| https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-at-worlds-
| largest-...
|
| https://www.energy-storage.news/energy-dome-launches-4mwh-
| de...
| xyzzyz wrote:
| That's not cheaper. Run the numbers and you'll see. Solar
| by itself is indeed pretty cheap per kWh if you don't
| care about matching supply with demand, but storage very
| much is not. If it was, you'd see investors build
| standalone storage, to buy cheap electricity, store it,
| and resell when demand goes up. This is not what's
| happening: instead, existing projects are based either on
| heavy government subsidies, or on vanity buyers, who want
| to pay above market prices to signal eco awareness, like
| Starbucks in one of your links.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| The problem with running the numbers is that the actual
| numbers for nuclear are basically unknowable and most
| governments have given a taxpayer insurance that covers
| this unknown number "in blanco".
|
| This means that most of the costs that will be caused by
| operating a nuclear power plant are not included in the
| costs of operations, and therefore not in the "price per
| MWh" or similar numbers. We don't know what this number
| is but we do know it's a very large number, and by
| removing it from the resposibility of the plant operators
| it represents a very large hidden subsidy for nuclear
| power.
|
| Chernobyl and Fukushima are the familiar elephants in
| this particular room of course with he most recent
| estimate for Chernobyl passing 600bn usd in 2016 (and
| counting still of course and for the forseeable future)
| but I like to use the Asse II salt mine in Germany as a
| more digestable example.
|
| This mine was used to store nuclear waste in the 70s
| which turned out to be a very bad mistake that has to be
| fixed in the coming few decades. The cost of this
| project, (estimated to be at least several bn euros) is
| not added to the cost of nuclear, it's just charged to
| the current taxpayers. The power plants that generated
| the waste stored in this mine are closed long ago but
| they keep costing money decades later.
|
| Nuclear seems cheap because we're paying for it with
| credit cards issued to our grandchildren.
| sofixa wrote:
| Because you can start a project with the existing, proven and
| expensive tech _today_. Grid-scale storage is purely
| theoretical today (bar pumped-up hydro, which is infeasible
| in most locations). There 's lots of hope, and money should
| be invested in the various alternatives, absolutely. But
| nobody can say when and if that tech would be ready.
| jeffbee wrote:
| This is really not correct at all. Half of the utility-
| scale generating projects waiting for interconnect approval
| are combined solar and battery installation. Grid-scale
| storage is a solved problem, technically and economically.
| There were over 400GW of grid storage project proposed in
| the U.S. at the end of 2021.
| renewiltord wrote:
| According to this commenter, we can't build with the proven
| and expensive tech today because we don't have it any more
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31682876
| sofixa wrote:
| Depends who.
|
| For EPR, we're almost over the hump, with the latest
| projects in Finland and France coming online and becoming
| fully operational in the near future.
|
| Rosatom has continued pumping out reactors at a decent
| rate.
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| Looks like they should do it and we shouldn't in America
| unless we can somehow allow them to build ours (I think a
| fear of competition will make this infeasible but if
| we're lucky we'll get the stuff).
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Storage is not not purely theoretical!! In fact there are
| <lists five completely theoretical storage methods that
| rely on stable climate or perfect geography>.
| epistasis wrote:
| This is inaccurate, GW scale batteries could be deployed
| today, but because storage is so scalable it's often a
| better idea to build multiple smaller batteries that help
| alleviate grid congestion.
| belorn wrote:
| A month or so back someone posted a report by a financial
| investing advisor for the energy sector, and they were
| pretty clear what is and what isn't economical viable
| right now.
|
| Solar + storage of 1-6 hrs can be made economical viable
| as long as the storage can have 365 discharge cycles each
| year, assuming prices get high enough each such cycle.
| Each unit of storage get a return on investment each day,
| and each are used fully at the point in time when the
| market price is at peak.
|
| Under those precise circumstances the economics of
| storage is cheaper than nuclear. The only other cheaper
| alternative to nuclear is to use renewables when the
| weather is optimal and fossil fuel when the weather is
| not optimal, or just use fossil fuels (through that is
| just a waste of money and the climate).
|
| Naturally this advisor firm could be wrong and someone
| here could start the world first economical viable
| operation that uses wind for renewables and then charge a
| reverse hydro operation. It would make for a nice news
| item.
| epistasis wrote:
| Making such broad statements about economical versus not
| economical is difficult, because batteries serve so many
| purposes and have so many revenue streams that deployment
| is highly locational, depending on the specifics of the
| grid and where and when demand causes congestion.
|
| There's also little incentive to install storage when
| solar and wind penetration is low, but as higher
| percentages of the grid is powered by renewables, then
| storage quickly becomes far more attractive.
|
| Currently, there are 14.5GW of batteries in development
| across the US, and this is just a tiny nascent industry.
| Even as a small industry, this is many times the power
| capacity of nuclear currently in development.
|
| This biggest challenge with batteries right now is low
| supply, and competing with demand from EV production,
| which provides higher margins:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-
| business/how-ba...
| belorn wrote:
| If we are talking about the US and not like places like
| northern Europe, then they have a lot of existing
| capacity for fossil fuel production. The cheapest way to
| produce energy would be to just add more renewables and
| use that fossil fuel whenever that weather isn't optimal.
| Batteries might be competitive to fossil fuel in places
| such situation as highlighted by the financial advisor,
| ie when they can discharge fully each day of the year at
| the maximum price point.
| epistasis wrote:
| The batteries can often be cheaper than fossil fuels,
| especially when colocated with existing solar. Most solar
| designs currently under size the inverters compared to
| maximum solar power output, to get the cost optimal
| balance. Batteries on-site allow storage of that extra DC
| energy, and then reuse of the same inverters outside
| normal solar generation hours to discharge the batteries.
|
| This means that hitting the cost peak is really easy for
| batteries.
|
| As this cheapest form of energy begins to dominate, and
| the "baseload" generators like coal or combined cycle gas
| become more expensive than solar, then it becomes less
| economical to run the "baseload generators because they
| don't have sufficient price support during the peak solar
| output times. This will raise the night time prices of
| energy, as the daytime prices decrease, and eventually
| storage plus solar becomes cheaper than new "baseload"
| facilities, and then cheaper than continuing to run
| existing "baseload" facilities.
|
| I put "baseload" in quotes because on the past baseload
| meant cheapest energy, in addition to slow and expensive
| dispatchability. That is all changing.
| belorn wrote:
| > and then reuse of the same inverters outside normal
| solar generation hours to discharge the batteries.
|
| Yes, if we are talking about hours of capacity then
| batteries can be very cost competitive to fossil fuels.
| That is exactly what the financial advisor stated in
| their report.
|
| In areas where solar + batteries can reliable handle all
| year round demands for energy, those technologies should
| just replace fossil fuels. There will likely be some
| natural gas plants that get subsidies to exist as reserve
| in case there is a sudden weather change, but nuclear
| wouldn't be a great option in such places.
| jacquesm wrote:
| A big variable too is the price development of batteries,
| which is trending in the right direction due to more and
| more production capacity coming on-line but once grid
| storage and EVs start to compete for those batteries the
| price could well be going up.
| pydry wrote:
| >Grid-scale storage is purely theoretical today bar pumped-
| up hydro, which is infeasible in most locations
|
| Viable locations arent in short supply at all:
|
| https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-
| spot-530-000-potenti...
| sofixa wrote:
| They aren't in short supply, but aren't present
| everywhere - e.g. in Europe there's nothing north of
| Slovakia. If Denmark wants storage, they have to work
| with other countries and rely on transit. It's even worse
| for the Baltics.
| arethuza wrote:
| Norway, UK and Ireland aren't in Europe?
|
| Edit: I was a bit puzzled as there are already pumped-
| storage plants in Wales and Scotland with more planned.
| raphaelj wrote:
| Well, that also applies if Denmark wants uranium, oil or
| gas.
| freemint wrote:
| You know that you can just pump all the water Denmark
| has. Build underground caverns full with air, let water
| in for energy and pump it out later.
| Krasnol wrote:
| You make it sound like it's some burden while the EU grid
| is actually a single market with a significant expansion
| last year: https://www.tennet.eu/our-grid/international-
| connections/nor...
| Krasnol wrote:
| You make it sound like it's some SciFi tech where in
| reality Germany has replaced half of it's whole production
| with true green energy in the last two decades. Replacing
| nuclear years ago.
| larsrc wrote:
| That's inaccurate. Germany has replaced half of its
| _electricity_ production with renewables (modulo
| dispatchability), but electricity only accounts for a
| quarter of the energy usage. We frequently have to import
| electricity from France now, where it's largely made by
| nuclear, and electricity in France is a lot cheaper than
| here. Closing the German nuclear plants was grand scale
| stupid.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Hedging your bets. We know nuclear works. Grid-scale energy
| storage for renewables still feels far fetched. Maybe it's
| not. Either way, we should not put all our eggs in one
| basket.
| 7952 wrote:
| We shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. But I don't
| think rapid growth of the battery industry is far fetched
| at all. It has already experienced massive growth and is
| ridiculously mass producable. And we will need batteries
| anyway for electric cars.
| trashtester wrote:
| The battery capacity needed to replace all cars with
| electric ones is about two orders of magnitude lower than
| the battery capacity needed to replace all fossil fuels
| with wind and solar, at least in temperate regions, where
| you need heating during the winter.
|
| According to this MIT study, the cost (LCOE) of doing
| this today, would be $3000/MWH:
|
| https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021/08/20210829-mitei.h
| tml
|
| Even if the cost of batteries continue to come down by x4
| in price every decade from now on, it will take 30-40
| years for prices to come below current energy prices.
|
| If we hit an S-curve before then, it could take much
| longer.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, it also works:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2018/04/austr...
|
| We just need a lot more of it, but it _definitely_ works.
| fulafel wrote:
| States tend to have self imposed debt limiting policies, so
| opportunity costs are still there for investments.
| Tenoke wrote:
| If you think 50% cost overruns and overheads are uncommon for
| state sponsored projects.. you will be right but only because
| often the actual numbers are much higher.
| sfe22 wrote:
| Zero percent or negative just means people involuntary pay by
| inflation. There is not free lunch (someone had to work to make
| it)
| imtringued wrote:
| If there is a negative interest rate of 4% on cash, then the
| easiest way to avoid it would be to lend out your money at
| 0%. Since there is no growth dependence and excessive savings
| do not grow automatically anymore there is no need for
| inflation and the central bank can do price level targeting
| instead.
| kube-system wrote:
| No, interest rates are quoted nominally -- i.e. they are
| independent of inflation.
|
| If you purchase a negative interest rate instrument and
| experience inflation, you will lose real value to both.
| trashtester wrote:
| It is a tax on deposits. You only have to pay if you have
| deposits. Basically, it means the saver has to pay to store
| value as currency. On the other hand, they also have to pay
| if they want to store other valueables, such as gold or the
| most ancient store of value of all, grain.
|
| I don't think a negative real interest rate is inherantly
| unfair, any more than it was unfair to have 10% of grain go
| to waste 3000 years ago when storing for a bad year.
|
| If you had 7 good years, and expect 7 bad years, the utility
| of the stored grain may be way higher in the bad years than
| the good years, even when accounting for the waste. The same
| goes for cash.
|
| The same can be true with cash.
|
| To demand that cash maintains its purchasing power, is the
| same as ancient farmers demanding to purchase grain from
| their neighbour (who did save) in a bad year as they
| themselves got paid for their grain during the good years.
|
| In periods of growth, we may start to think that positive
| time preference is natural. But the fact is that throughout
| most of human history, we would switch to negative time
| preference in good times, since we expected bad times to come
| back. During good times, humans would store grain, dry meat,
| fish and fruit, build housing, tools or boats, all of which
| were investments into goods that were likely to gradually
| perish over time.
|
| Even after people started to use coins, this was true. If you
| produced a surplus during one year, you could trade it for
| cold coin instead of storing it. But not only was there a
| risk that the coins would be stolen or otherwise vanish, it
| was also highly likely that at the time where you needed to
| spend that goal, prices would be higher.
| imtringued wrote:
| One has to consider that the storage capacity of the
| economy isn't infinite. Charging money for storing
| something is a very straightforward business model. When
| your economy is growing the storage capacity appears
| endless as no storage is actually needed, you can just
| produce the good in the future with your expanded
| production capacity. Once the economy stops growing for
| even a single year, then you will effectively hit the
| storage capacity of the economy and must pay to store
| additional goods that are intended to be consumed in the
| future.
| danuker wrote:
| Negative interest rates mean more than your units of currency
| going down in purchasing power.
|
| It also means them going down in number (a bank CHARGES you
| for the costs incurred holding your money).
| this_user wrote:
| > This is why nuclear power plants should be state-sponsored
| projects. States typically have loans at 0% rate, or even
| negative interests.
|
| Not anymore with inflation at around 8% in many western
| countries. And even so, construction and operation still remain
| expensive. France's EDL is basically bankrupt if it were not
| for the state backstopping them. However you want to slice it,
| nuclear power is not economically viable, and looks even worse
| compared to the rapidly decreasing costs of renewable sources
| of energy.
|
| So why waste more money on an obsolete technology rather than
| use it for solving the remaining issues with renewables like
| energy storage? Invest that money in battery technology and
| everything that comes with that. That approach will do a lot
| more good in the long run than trying to keep the nuclear
| industry on life support even though it has failed for half a
| century to deliver on its promises.
| samstave wrote:
| Inflation is WAY fn higher than 8%.
|
| Try more like 30%
|
| Go to costco's meat section, walmarts juice section, any fn
| gas station.
|
| Fleecing is whats happening.
|
| EDIT:
|
| Cool, clearly you arent tracking prices like I do.
|
| Costco's meat section is up ~22%$
|
| Walmarts Juices are up ~30%
|
| We all know what gas prices are. $7 a gallon in Napa.
| outworlder wrote:
| > So why waste more money on an obsolete technology
|
| It is not obsolete. At all. You can argue that some reactor
| designs should not be used and I would agree. But fission is
| the only answer we currently have for baseline power that
| doesn't involve burning things. It will become obsolete if we
| can ever make fusion work.
|
| We should be deploying more reactors. There are small
| reactors (shipping container-sized) that could be used to
| power small towns and are pretty safe. Good luck getting one
| approved and installed in your neighborhood. It's not the
| tech that's being held back, it's people.
|
| Look, I love batteries, I drive EVs since 2015. But if we
| want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to
| provide cheap and reliable baseline power 24/7. There's not
| enough time to do so with batteries alone.
| derriz wrote:
| The electricity from small modular reactors is far more
| expensive than that from large reactors - about twice as
| expensive by some estimates[1]. They also produce more
| waste per MWh generated.
|
| The industry has been pushing in the opposite direction
| with larger reactors like the EPR[2] to reduce costs.
|
| When measured by LCOE, a MWh from a new conventionally
| sized nuclear plant is 4 to 7 times as expensive as a MWh
| from solar PV, then SMR are simply out of the question from
| a cost point of view.
|
| [1] https://publications.csiro.au/publications/publication/
| PIcsi... [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
| trashtester wrote:
| Solar is great in deserts, where the sun always shines
| and were the main use of electricity is air conditioning
| during the hottest parts of the day.
|
| Solar is near-useless in colder areas, where you want to
| use the power for heating in the winter.
|
| If you include the storage + grid expansion needed to
| compensate for the intermittent nature of most renewables
| (especially if you don't want to rely on fossil fuels
| when the wind is not blowing), the LCOE of many of them
| will be many times higher than just the production cost.
|
| Meanwhile, Korea claims to be able to construct Nuclear
| capacity at prices down to $0.03/kwh with their APR1400
| reactors:
|
| https://www.kns.org/files/pre_paper/34/15A-435%EC%9D%B4%E
| A%B...
|
| That's at least an order of magnitude lower than the cost
| of renewables when constant output is required.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Awesome then that on-shore wind is even cheaper than
| solar, and exists at night. Then for some more, still
| less than 1/3 to 1/4 of nuclear you get off-shore wind
| with higher capacity factors.
| trashtester wrote:
| When the wind is not blowing, the cost of wind per kwh is
| infinite.
| freemint wrote:
| > Solar is near-useless in colder areas, where you want
| to use the power for heating in the winter.
|
| Heating is super awesome with renewables. As you can
| store heat in an well isolated home. Yes you need
| capacity for that but heat pumps well a lot with that.
| trashtester wrote:
| > Heating is super awesome with renewables. As you can
| store heat in an well isolated home.
|
| Sounds like you're not speaking from experience.
| Actually, houses are pretty lousy batteries. Most people
| have a range of only a few degrees that they find
| comfortable indoors. They will tend to set the thermostat
| to about the middle of that range. If they turn off the
| head, the temperature will go the lower end of that range
| after a few hours. Very few hours if it's really cold
| outside, and that's when it matters most.
|
| Admittedly, my house is old and not super-well isolated,
| but during the coldest days of winter (around -20C), it
| can easily require 10kw, constantly, to keep it warm
| enough to prevent my wife from becoming agressive.
|
| If we turn off the power for 2 hours, it's already pretty
| cold.
|
| Heat pumps would reduce overall energy consumption, but
| not the need for constant use, and more isloation would
| reduce both, but it would still likely take several kw
| constantly on days like that.
| bozhark wrote:
| Had to delete my one line response because you embodied
| everything I meant. Cheers
| epistasis wrote:
| > There's not enough time to do so with batteries alone.
|
| I suggest you run the numbers on this, because I think you
| have them exactly reversed.
|
| We are increasing battery production capacity 10x every
| five years. This could be accelerated if there was
| government investment as is done for every single nuclear
| reactor. At current rates we expect to produce
| 20-30TWh/year of lithium ion batteries, not including other
| chemistries that could be used for stationary storage but
| not mobile applications.
|
| Currently in the US we are only building 2GW of reactors,
| but we have ~100GW of reactors quickly reaching retirement
| age. Even if we scale our current nuclear construction
| capacity 10x every five years like we do for batteries, and
| add in the 10 year construction time, we are going to see a
| big decrease in nuclear before we see an increase.
| epistasis wrote:
| Argh, there's a typo there, we expect 20-30TWh/year in
| 2031.
| samstave wrote:
| I have long thought there should be a global nuclear
| consortium and have that organization build and run and
| manage and secure all the nuclear power plants in the
| world.
|
| Earth/Humanity needs electricity FOREVER. Its bizarre that
| we cant come together over this expressly universal need.
| This and water.
| freemint wrote:
| > But fission is the only answer we currently have for
| baseline power that doesn't involve burning things.
|
| Patently false. The sun shines 24/7. This (besides power
| satellites) offers other possibilities like a world wide
| connected grid. Even if you are a proponent of nuclear you
| will also need that, as i assume you do not want to put
| reactors in every country.
| [deleted]
| belorn wrote:
| > So why waste more money on an obsolete technology rather
| than use it for solving the remaining issues with renewables
| like energy storage? Invest that money in battery technology
| and everything that comes with that.
|
| A few years ago Sweden did a study on green hydrogen, the
| energy storage that Germany and many other countries seem to
| view as the best bet as a storage for places where solar +
| daily discharging batteries won't work. The cost was then
| around 10-20 times more expensive than nuclear. Those costs
| has gone down a bit since then, but it is still several times
| more expensive than nuclear.
|
| Sweden and Germany are still very much in favor of green
| hydrogen, and there are on-going experiment to use it for
| industries that need hydrogen itself (rather than burning it
| for energy), but they are no investments for a grid storage.
| If nuclear is not economically viable, a technology that is
| several time more expensive is not something they are just
| going to throw money at. Those money are currently going
| towards fossil fuels, since that is cheaper than nuclear.
|
| If however we would ban fossil fuel, especially cheap fossil
| fuel from Russia, the economics might change. There is also
| always the hope that politicians investment into fossil fuels
| today will give green hydrogen enough time to become
| economical viable for the energy sector.
| pfdietz wrote:
| China is selling electrolyzers for < $300/kw. Given that
| renewable electricity's LCOE is a fraction of nuclear, I
| don't see how hydrogen could be 10-20 times the cost of
| nuclear. Were they doing something ridiculous like assuming
| it's stored as liquid hydrogen?
|
| Also, remember the big use of hydrogen on the grid would be
| as a dispatchable backstop to cheap renewable sources, not
| as something that's used 24/7. So most of the energy flow
| would not be through hydrogen, it would be from the
| renewables directly (or through batteries for short term
| smoothing.)
| belorn wrote:
| There is a massive war and shortage of natural gas in
| Europe so if there exist cheap electrolyzers + wind power
| combinations that can solve that issue today then people
| should rush to invest before next winter where prices are
| predicted to sky rock. I recall that the study did say
| that existing natural gas power plants could cheaply and
| easily be converted to run on hydrogen. Hydrogen prices
| has also gone up a lot since the war.
|
| And it was 10-20 times a few years ago. Prices has gone
| down a significant bit. If you get the prices to around
| $1 per/kg (about 3-10x reduction from this year prices),
| and we don't account for transportation, infrastructure
| and physical storage, the price would start to look
| really competitive to nuclear.
|
| If you search online you will find plenty of predictions
| that prices _might_ reach that magical $1 per /kg in say
| 2030 or so, in which case that will be a great choice. As
| a bonus it will make medical oxygen dirt cheap. At that
| point all discussions about nuclear power will mostly be
| made moot since hydrogen will be the factual best choice.
| freemint wrote:
| Hydrogen needs an complete overhaul to the pipeline
| system. Burning natural gas for energy is a fraction of
| it's use. More important are heating (where it can't be
| transported too), steel making and chemistry (CoViD
| vaccine ingredients are made using natural gas by BASF).
| trashtester wrote:
| This study from MIT found that the LCOE of fully
| renewable energy production, backed by LI batteries would
| be $3000/MWh vs $2400/MWh for hydrogen instead of
| batteries for storage:
|
| https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021/08/20210829-mitei.h
| tml
|
| Either alternative is about 15x to 50x more expensive
| than Nuclear, though....
| freemint wrote:
| I thought the article we are replying to said
| >>$4000+/MWh for nuclear not including financing.
| trashtester wrote:
| No, it is saying that it is currently about $6000000/MW
| construction cost. Then you devide by number of hours of
| operations to get the cost per MW/h. (Not adjusted for
| interest rate.)
|
| The LCOE of new nuclear plants have estimates ranging
| from less than $30/MWh to around $150/MWh, while
| estimates for the cost of plants built a few decades ago
| end up at around $40-60/MWh, from the numbers I've seen.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's grossly excessive. This website lets you look at
| optimization vs. actual historical weather data and
| reaches a much lower cost. BTW, you use both batteries
| AND storage; their combination can be cheaper than either
| alone. You also store the hydrogen underground rather
| than above ground.
|
| https://model.energy/
| trashtester wrote:
| I agree that a combination of batteries and hydrogen
| would be a bit cheaper, but generally I would trust the
| MIT study over the model above, that states directly that
| it is a toy model.
|
| It's fun to play with, though, so definitely upvoted.
|
| Do you have an alternative peer reviewed study to support
| the conclusions?
| mellavora wrote:
| Huh. I'd argue that they should be state-sponsored because that
| is what the state is for-- investing in long-term
| infrastructure where the value is widely diffused and thus hard
| to capture via market mechanisms, i.e. investments which are
| foundational to the more focused investments which business is
| so well suited to maximize.
|
| similar to things like interstate highways or internets or
| public schooling. I'd add "healthcare" to the list, but some
| countries haven't realized this yet.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Indeed, US large-construction has reached a point of
| fundamental/terminal corruption through the process of
| private contracting and especially through the bid-based
| system.
|
| You can see this with the disastrous failure of public
| transit construction and planning in the country and if
| nuclear became an option, it seems very likely that the same
| corrupt mouths that eat up transit spend would also eat
| nuclear spending. Something for nuclear proponents to
| consider.
| belorn wrote:
| One of the largest problem is the concept of cost-plus
| contracts, where the construction doesn't have a fixed cost
| from the beginning. Government could in theory avoid this
| problem by doing the design first and then have companies
| bid on the construction without a cost-plus contract. This
| assumes that the regulations remain constant from start to
| finish, as well as the contractual obligations.
| balaji1 wrote:
| Might be nitpicking here: Referring to the pie charts under this
| section[1], I can't help but think images like this are
| intentionally meant to mislead:
| [1]https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-
| nuclear-p...
|
| I understand author picked it from some other source, Dawson 2017
| or whatever.
|
| These pie charts are not like for like, when it includes the
| renewables -- maybe the coal/gas/nuclear fine. So why put them
| next to one another. I can't tell if the costs of renewables are
| for entire "farms" (solar or wind farms). What about lifetime of
| plants/farms, total value derived, etc.
| zbrozek wrote:
| What is your objection? The charts are all various fractional
| contributions to LCOE, which already captures and normalizes
| for things like plant life. You could argue that the size of
| the pie should be scaled for the total LCOE, but that doesn't
| really help with the comparison being made (e.g., the
| relatively small fractional cost of fuel vs capital for nuclear
| plants).
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| > but all else being equal (ie: assuming total production cost
| stays constant), it's better to have a larger fraction of your
| electricity costs be variable, so that if demand drops then
| production cost drops as well.
|
| This is how capitalism gives us scarcity when there is no reason
| for scarcity. Infrastructure like trains and nuclear that
| absolutely _swamps_ current demand, and whose costs cannot be
| adjusted very much (even if one can run fewer trains, remove some
| fuel rods) is _good_. But woe unto anyone that floods the market
| utopia-style under capitalism --- you will just get paid nothing
| and your investors will not repeat such a project again.
| bgilroy26 wrote:
| Cow's milk in the United States seems to be an exception to
| this
| skybrian wrote:
| Another way to interpret that sentence is "it's better not to
| spend too much on construction, and it can be better to spend
| on fuel if it means spending less on construction."
|
| Building things you don't need is waste of labor and resources,
| regardless of the economic system you use or who paid for it.
| This should be accounted for somehow.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| What is needed changes over time.
|
| It is better to spend more on capital than operational costs
| if one actually wants the world to change not just ideal
| along.
|
| The best cost control is in large part doing lots of cookie-
| cutter work, hence the focus on small modular reactors. It is
| better to do those, and then ramp up the "small" part over
| time.
|
| Likewise, we should construct lots of rail simultaneously
| with ramp up to improve those supply chains too.
|
| But at no point do you _want_ to spend more on fuel in any
| global optimal sense. That is just wasteful. It 's not like
| we are _actually_ uncertain that we won 't need way more
| electricity production on a societal scale.
| skybrian wrote:
| I agree that we are going to need more power generation as
| electricity replaces other forms of energy.
|
| But for any given level of electricity generation, doing it
| in a cheaper way is still better than doing it in a more
| expensive way. For one thing, it allows capacity to be
| increased for the same cost.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| If your costs are all fixed, and demand falls, you have to put
| prices up to stay alive. That's the issue with Nuclear: If it
| costs $1bn a year for the plant, it costs that whether you
| generate 1bn kWh (at $1 each) or 1 kWh (at $1Bn each).
|
| What you call artificial shortage, others call "not making
| something no one wants and then forcing them to pay for it"...
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| There is no non-depressing future where demand for
| electricity doesn't go _way_ up as fossil fuel is phased out.
| An uncertainty is a shit situation we should work to prevent,
| not have a contingency plan for.
|
| This is where the Keynesian "socialization of investment"
| stuff comes in. Private markets get skiddish over change even
| when our economies are fully capable of dealing with the
| issues. Don't be held hostage to private capital playing
| "nose goes" when the solution is obvious.
|
| Abundance really does mean everything is too cheap to meter
| on margin. There is no other definition. To get there we have
| to make people more risk tolerant, and the only way to do
| that is guaranteeing consumption.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| It's not so much that your points are wrong, as that they
| fail to see a bigger picture.
|
| When you say there is no no depressing future without
| increased electrical demand, that's true. But who
| guaranteed you a non depressing future?
|
| And the same was true in 1990, but we've made almost no
| progress to removing fossil fuels. So if you'd started
| nuclear projects then, you'd be just coming online. And
| have no new customers. And in the mean time the price of
| gas and solar and wind would have collapsed in comparison.
| And you couldn't afford to shut down when the price crashed
| like they can. You're fixed costs would rapidly drive you
| bankrupt.
|
| That's the problem here.
|
| The future isn't nice. And it's not predictable. Even over
| relatively short periods.
|
| So it's much better to plan 6m ahead and then do it again
| 40 times, than to try and plan 20 years ahead in one go.
| That makes it much much better to run small incremental
| short-term projects like gas plants and renewables.
|
| And if you do have to make some sort of medium term plan
| then it needs to be very flexible. Like a gas plant that
| can shut down for a year and avoid 90% of its costs.
|
| Nuclear is long term, fixed cost. And that's terrible.
|
| But go ahead, by some shares in a nuclear operator (or
| someone else in the supply chain etc). Make your fortune
| being right in 2045. Just don't sign up the rest of us via
| the public finances please!
|
| This has always been one of the issues with control
| economies: people vastly over estimate their ability to
| predict the future, they don't appreciate flexibility and
| they don't manage risk. That's how the USSR ended up
| producing enormous amounts of steel and no washing
| machines: no one asked what people wanted, they just said
| 20% more of the same compared to last year! China are doing
| the same thing right now with electricity targets and no
| financial services...
| thraway11 wrote:
| "For instance, in the 1980s several nuclear power plants in
| Washington were canceled after the estimated construction costs
| increased from $4.1 billion to over $24 billion."
|
| That's not even 10x. I would say hitting the correct order of
| magnitude is "on budget" for civil engineering projects.
|
| Here is what out of budget looks like:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-13/how-the-c...
| [deleted]
| mch82 wrote:
| The cost of nuclear energy seems seriously understated.
|
| Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still
| don't have a long-term storage plan. We'll incur this cost for
| hundreds or thousands of years.
| https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us...
|
| There's also a cost to secure the nuclear infrastructure.
| https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/nuclear-generation...
|
| Can anyone find a cost per Megawatt Hour calculation for nuclear
| that includes security and long-term waste storage? The
| calculations I've found for the $96/MWh figure seem like they
| include construction and operation costs, but exclude
| decommissioning and waste management.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Waste management is by far the smallest of all the problems
| with nukes.
|
| Overwhelmingly the biggest problem is wholly legal corruption,
| as cost and schedule are allowed to balloon without limit. For
| everyone involved, the gravy train stops when a plant is
| delivered, which no one actually involved wants ever to happen.
| No one has offered any plausible suggestion for how to contain
| corruption costs for nuke construction, at least in the US,
| never mind who should apply such containment.
|
| No such dynamic is apparent in solar and wind projects, where
| expected cost is easy to estimate as a multiple of generating
| units -- panels and turbines.
|
| We may expect that SMRs will not find traction specifically
| because they do not seem to offer the conduit for graft that
| bespoke nuke construction guarantees.
| Guvante wrote:
| It is complicated: $6B is supposedly related to nuclear waste
| from the weapons program which is likely hard to compare to
| power production sites for a huge number of reasons.
|
| Technically there is a $40B fund paid for from taxes on nuclear
| production to deal with the long term storage problem by NIMBY
| has prevented that from going from a concept into a reality. As
| with many things "we need X but not here" makes getting things
| done hard.
|
| So from a planning standpoint the long term problem is solved
| but in reality it isn't. How you boil that down into a cost I
| couldn't begin to solve.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Nuclear waste is only a problem if you don't allow breeder
| reactors. Otherwise it is a fuel resource and an asset, not a
| liability.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Nuclear waste isn't a problem if you drill a hole that's deep
| enough, encase the waste in a "dry cask", and drop it in the
| hole. Kyle Hill did a great video on this...
|
| "We solved nuclear waste decades ago" =>
| https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k
| ncmncm wrote:
| Or just drop it in the ocean, as US, Brits and Russians
| have preferred in the past.
|
| But this has nothing to do with construction cost.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still
| don't have a long-term storage plan. We'll incur this cost for
| hundreds or thousands of years.
|
| New plants produce a lot less waste.
|
| And the reason nuclear waste seems so expensive is because we
| have externalized the cost of most other forms of power
| generation. Coal and gas, well we just let people get sick or
| die.
|
| Natural gas, fracking has huge negative impacts on communities,
| lots of illness, but again, we don't count that as part of the
| "financial cost" of natural gas.
|
| Solar, we have the panels made in some other country, we have
| the raw materials mined in some other country, we import the
| final product, now it is clean energy.
|
| (I support solar, but there _is_ an environmental cost to solar
| panels!)
|
| Nuclear makes us confront the waste up front, so now we are all
| freaked out about it.
|
| As has been pointed out repeatedly, you could take a football
| field, dig down a few stories, and put all the nuclear waste
| needed for energy generation in there, and then have enough
| left over to keep storing spent fuel from new high efficiency
| reactors until sometime until well after everyone reading HN is
| dead and gone.
|
| It is a crap shoot if the cost of paying the lawyers to deal
| with all the lawsuits over where to build the storage site will
| end up costing more or less than the storage itself.
| jka wrote:
| > As has been pointed out repeatedly, you could take a
| football field, dig down a few stories, and put all the
| nuclear waste needed for energy generation in there
|
| Here are mentions of this talking point on Hacker News:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
| belorn wrote:
| It is interesting that personal costs was such huge part of the
| increase in construction. Construction seems like a field that
| automation has yet to really start to create waves, but I recall
| seeing news about small step forward like scaled up 3d printing
| with cement. Modular construction is an other concept I have not
| heard much for in the context of nuclear plants.
| freemint wrote:
| You can never 3d print pre stressed cement.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-06-09 23:00 UTC)