[HN Gopher] First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters comme...
___________________________________________________________________
First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation
in Georgia
Author : CharlesW
Score : 203 points
Date : 2023-07-31 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| Retric wrote:
| "seven years late and $17 billion over budget. At its full output
| of 1,100 megawatts of electricity"
|
| Ignoring interest for those 7 years and all other costs just the
| overage is insane. 17 billion / ( 1,100,000 kW * 90% capacity
| factor * 24 hour * 365 days * 50 years) = 4 cents per kWh. Add
| interest etc and someone lost an incredible amount of money on
| this project.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| >"seven years late and $17 billion over budget. At its full
| output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity"
|
| It's all projects. This just happens to be a big one.
|
| Everyone likes to point to over-runs, over-budget, late
| projects.
|
| Nobody goes back and asks "who did the original estimate that
| we eventually went over?".
|
| Many projects start with /s 'everyone knowing it will go over
| budget, but if we give a real estimate it wont get off the
| ground'/s.
|
| Then later someone has to get blamed. If everyone is
| (quietly)honest they kind of spread around the blame and the
| success. If it is a contentious project, everyone is playing
| tag at the end.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Every other kind of power project is built using fixed price
| bids. If a company bids $3B for a natural gas plant or solar
| plant and the project costs more than $3B to build the
| company is on the hook, not the ratepayer.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I didn't dig into details on specific of this project.
|
| But any large fixed price project I've been on, it all
| hinged on verbose specifications. And then any change
| resulted in change orders. And it becomes a pissing match
| of who will pay. It is rarely cut and dry.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| They are power contracts, not construction contracts. The
| power company isn't buying a power plant, they're buying
| power. That's what makes the contract so much simpler.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > someone lost an incredible amount of money on this project.
|
| All roads lead to Ratepayers (electrical customers).
|
| > Georgia Power's residential customers are projected to pay
| more than $926 apiece as part of an ongoing finance charge and
| elected public service commissioners have approved a rate
| increase. Residential customers will pay $4 more per month as
| soon as the third unit begins generating power. That could hit
| bills in August, two months after residential customers saw a
| $16-a-month increase to pay for higher fuel costs.
|
| > The high construction costs have wiped out any future benefit
| from low nuclear fuel costs in the future, experts have
| repeatedly testified before commissioners.
|
| > "The cost increases and schedule delays have completely
| eliminated any benefit on a life-cycle cost basis," Tom
| Newsome, director of utility finance for the commission,
| testified Thursday in a Georgia Public Service Commission
| hearing examining spending.
|
| > The utility will face a fight from longtime opponents of the
| plant, many of whom note that power generated from solar and
| wind would be cheaper. They say letting Georgia Power make
| ratepayers pay for mistakes will unfairly bolster the utility's
| profits.
|
| > "While capital-intensive and expensive projects may benefit
| Georgia Power's shareholders who have enjoyed record profits
| throughout Vogtle's beleaguered construction, they are not the
| least-cost option for Georgians who are feeling the sting of
| repeated bill increases," Southern Environmental Law Center
| staff attorney Bob Sherrier said in a statement.
|
| This will likely be the last commercial nuclear generator ever
| reaching criticality for the first time on US soil. Consider
| the current interest rate environment and the appetite for
| backstopping a multi decade construction project.
|
| https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...
| [pdf, start at page 4]
| laiewjrliawej wrote:
| And that's why I left the nuclear industry. Nuclear power is
| the safest form of power production we've ever produced (more
| people are killed per MWh installing and repairing wind
| turbines than in the nuclear industry) but it has never been
| anywhere near cost effective and no nuclear project has ever
| been completed anywhere near on-schedule. Every time I hear
| someone talk about how the world needs tons of new nuclear
| plants and solar and wind can't possibly meet the demand
| quickly enough, that person seems to imagine that none of the
| next wave of nuclear plants magically will not have any of
| the problems that every previous nuclear plant had. Meanwhile
| solar and wind are beating estimates year after year. I still
| love nuclear physics (and I am excited about several up-and-
| coming fusion projects) but I just don't believe in the
| nuclear (fission) power industry anymore.
| coldpie wrote:
| Interesting to hear an inside perspective! While they
| definitely aren't cheap, do you feel they're not worth the
| price, given the urgency and rapidly rising costs of
| climate change? It seems like they'd be competitive with,
| or even cheaper than, fossil fuel plants if we priced in
| their externalities, and nuclear can shore up the areas
| where renewables have difficult to solve gaps. Any
| thoughts?
| Retric wrote:
| It's hard to see projects that take ~14 years to produce
| the first kWh urgent solutions to anything.
|
| Spend the same money starting in the same year and the
| first solar project makes enough money to fund a second
| which then also comes online before your nuclear power
| plant is ready.
|
| Which doesn't make nuclear useless, but it's really
| disappointing if you're in the industry.
| coldpie wrote:
| I feel like the root of the pro/against nuclear debate
| comes down to your outlook on storage :) I'm skeptical
| that storage can meet our needs (would love to be wrong!
| haven't seen a convincing analysis, yet), so I think we
| need a reliable form of continuous power. The only option
| currently on the table for that is nuclear, so, I boost
| nuclear. I dislike the nuclear nay-saying, because it
| further delays an already slow process. When (IMO) the
| optimistic plan for storage doesn't pan out, we're really
| going to regret not having started building those nukes
| ~14 years ago... so why not hedge our bets and get 'em
| started right now? In the grand scheme of climate change
| costs, they are absolutely dirt cheap.
| flaburgan wrote:
| It's because of the urgency that nuclear is not the
| solution. You need more than a dozen of years to build
| one. By that time it will be too late for the climate.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| >>Nuclear power is the safest form of power production
| we've ever produced.
|
| This is a common claim but it abuses statistics. By looking
| only at the one metric (deaths) it ignores the enormous
| enterprise required to keep nuclear as safe as it has been.
| No other power source needs anything like it.
| mywittyname wrote:
| The sad part is, this is a solvable problem. If the nation
| _really_ wanted to build a large number of safe, effective
| nuclear power plant, we could, and probably in a time frame
| of months, not years. But entrenched interest from natural
| gas and coal producers combined with anti-nuclear sentiment
| practically guarantee that will never happen.
|
| Nuclear power is held to too high of a standard to really
| be a viable source of power, especially in a democracy.
| breckenedge wrote:
| > Nuclear power is held to too high of a standard to
| really be a viable source of power, especially in a
| democracy
|
| Don't tell that to France.
| pfdietz wrote:
| France can't do it these days either. Look at the fiasco
| of the EPR; it drove their nuclear corporation to
| insolvency.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Doubtful.
|
| Nuclear is very specific tech. I don't think there's a
| whole bunch of companies out there sitting on their hands
| just waiting for a bunch of contracts to show up.
| lamontcg wrote:
| None of that is the root problem. Nuclear plants are too
| big, and we can't build big things cheaply in this
| country.
|
| The idle corruption of middle managers is what kills
| these kinds of projects.
| blibble wrote:
| > If the nation really wanted to build a large number of
| safe, effective nuclear power plant, we could, and
| probably in a time frame of months, not years. But
| entrenched interest from natural gas and coal producers
| combined with anti-nuclear sentiment practically
| guarantee that will never happen.
|
| meanwhile the Chinese have 22 power stations under
| construction and 70 planned
| mlsu wrote:
| I would argue that ratepayers would lose significantly more,
| in the form of
|
| iq decreases, cancer, early death from air pollution, and
| ongoing, worsening weather damage from climate change
|
| were this plant not constructed and the grid powered from
| natgas or coal instead.
|
| I hate these discussions about power, because in every case
| the quoted price of alternatives does not factor in the huge
| and obvious externalities.
| llsf wrote:
| I would add to the list of externalities if we do not build
| more nuclear power plants: CHAOS
|
| chaos that will ensue when we will reach peak oil/gas/coal,
| as we extract and consume faster than earth produce them.
| When the price to extract oil/gas/coal would be too high,
| chaos will result of our economies addiction to fossil
| fuel.
|
| The sooner we use alternatives the better.
|
| Housing: So, yes, it is annoying to have new house built
| with only electricity (i.e. without a gas line) but unless
| energy becomes super abundant and cheap so we can create
| gas (out of CO2 and water), electricity is the best bet
| long run.
|
| Transportation: Same, the sooner we can electrify
| transportation the better starting with trucks and trains.
| Boats and planes might get the last drop of oil.
|
| Industry: Should get incentives to move to electricity.
|
| And all electricity should be eventually non-fossil
| (nuclear + solar + wind + hydro).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-
| release/2023/01/2024-... (By 2024, one-fourth of U.S.
| electricity will come from renewables: EIA)
|
| https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/us-power-regulator-
| we... (US moves to link more wind and solar projects to
| electric grid) ("Today there is more than 2,000 gigawatts
| of renewable power waiting to be connected to the grid --
| nearly double the amount of current U.S. generation
| capacity, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Acting
| (FERC) Chairman Willie Phillips said at a press conference
| following the unanimous vote.")
|
| https://www.energy-storage.news/us-utility-scale-battery-
| sto... (US utility-scale battery storage industry deployed
| 4GW/12GWh in record-breaking 2022)
|
| https://cleantechnica.com/2023/03/31/turning-america-
| into-a-... (Turning America Into A Solar Manufacturing
| Powerhouse)
|
| Low carbon power from Vogtle is welcome, because it's here
| and what is done is done, but there is no point in throwing
| good money after bad on commercial fission.
| runako wrote:
| It's nice to have a captive customer base. Georgia Power
| serves more than a million additional people now than it did
| when this thing broke ground. And somehow all the pre-
| existing customers, plus the million+ new residents, all have
| to pay $4 extra for the power generated here. This, in
| addition to the fees they pay for electricity.
|
| Vogtle isn't going to be a good sales pitch for expanding
| nuclear.
|
| It's no wonder Georgia Power doesn't provide a calculator to
| let people know how Vogtle coming online affects the per-unit
| cost to consumers.
| aputsiak wrote:
| On the news page, there is a link til an article on India
| purchasing 1,200 MW facility from China for 3,5 billions. Edit:
| https://apnews.com/article/pakistan-china-nuclear-power-plan...
| _hypx wrote:
| Your own math points out that this is a cost effective
| technology. 4 cents per kWh is quite cheap electricity.
| syspec wrote:
| That's an additional flat charge, _in addition to_ the cost
| it was last month.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Those are non-intermittent kilowatt hours, though (and the
| maintenance that does need to happen is known in advance). One
| energy demand at peak production is saturated, intermittent
| sources become a lot more expensive since storage needs to be
| provisioned. Some markets are fast approaching this scenario:
| https://reneweconomy.com.au/california-duck-curve-now-a-cany...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Wouldn't solar, as an intermittent source, be well correlated
| with demand in Georgia?
|
| Sun's out = heavy AC load?
|
| Doing any grid 100% solar needs a lot of storage, but there's
| gotta be a perfect point that mostly shaves peaks really
| nicely.
|
| (Yeah yeah, it can be cloudy _and_ hot+humid, but still)
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Demand typically peaks in the evening, around 9pm. This is
| right as the sun sets, where solar is tapering off. It's
| not "shaving peaks" about half your electricity consumption
| (including peak consumption) is going to happen during
| periods of non-production.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| And yet their on-peak times in the summer ends at 7pm:
|
| > Shift some of your summer energy usage away from the
| on-peak time periods (2-7 p.m., Monday-Friday, June-
| September, excluding holidays).
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Demand shifting is just a long winded way of saying, "we
| can't generate enough electricity, you just need to stop
| using power at certain times of day." And it's easier
| said than done. Residential demand shifting, and some
| forms of industry (e.g. arc furnaces) can shift demand.
| But others cannot: the pumps powering your sewage system
| needs to work all day around. Same with data centers, and
| plenty of other industries.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| A Tesla megapack holds 3MWh and is warranted for 15years. If
| you use the entire capacity daily for duck curve shifting and
| it dies the day after its warranty runs out, (3MWh * 365 *
| 15), that's 16 TWh. A megapack costs $1.8M, for a cost of 11
| cents per kWh. That's cheaper than the fully loaded cost of
| Vogtle.
|
| But of course you don't have store every kWh used. Peak
| demand in the summer is caused by A/C and corresponds closely
| with peak solar generation and can be used directly. New
| solar farms have a cost of about 0.5cents per kWh, but we'll
| use 1cent per kWh to be generous. So if you use 3/4 of your
| power directly and shift 1/4 you end up with an average cost
| of 0.75 _1c + 0.25_ (11+1) = 2.75 cents.
|
| And those costs aren't theoretical. For a concrete example,
| the 8minute energy Eland project proves 24h battery+solar
| energy for under 4 cents per kWh.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| 3 MWh is a trivial amount of storage. That's less than 10
| seconds of this plant's output. To put this in perspective,
| the USA uses 11.5 TWh of electricity each day. That's just
| under 500 GWh per hour. You'd need a _lot_ of megapacks to
| provision 8 hours of storage. The Eland project you mention
| has 4 hours of storage, it 's not a 24 hour production
| system.
|
| The reality is that renewables are currently only viable to
| supplement a grid primary backed by a dispatchable source
| of energy. If you have loads of hydroelectricity, that's
| fine, but the regions that don't have hydroelectric
| potential are going to be stuck burning fossil fuels until
| a massive storage breakthrough is found.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| It's a trivial amount of storage for a trivial amount of
| money. Do the math, don't hand wave.
|
| The Eland project provides 24 hour power with only 4hr of
| storage. That's the demand curve in action.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > It's a trivial amount of storage for a trivial amount
| of money. Do the math, don't hand wave.
|
| Sure thing! Right now we have an annual battery
| production rate of 500 GWh _globally_ [1]. If we 're
| going to use global battery production figures, we need
| to use global electricity consumption, which is about 70
| TWh per day [2]. How much storage we'll need varies,
| depending on the mix of solar and wind. Estimates I can
| find say 12 hours on the low end, 3 weeks on the high end
| [3].
|
| So even with the optimistic estimates of 12 hours, that
| means we'd need 35,000 GWh of storage. This is 70 years
| of global production at our current rate, for the
| _optimistic_ storage estimates. And of course we can 't
| dedicate _all_ battery production to grid storage - we
| need them for electric vehicles, and electrical devices
|
| Production of batteries may grow in the future, but then
| again so will electricity demand as countries develop and
| transportation becomes more electrified. Furthermore,
| we're not counting the fact that batteries have limited
| lifetimes. It depends on depth of discharge, but we're
| usually looking at 1,500 to 3,000 cycles before they're
| substantially degraded.
|
| As your can see, the scale of battery production and the
| scale of energy storage required to make intermittent
| sources variable are totally mismatched. The reality is
| there is no amount of money that will provision the
| battery storage required, because if countries across the
| world start trying to buy terawatt hours of batteries
| when only 500GWh of batteries are produced then the cost
| of batteries will skyrocket. Cathode material already
|
| > The Eland project provides 24 hour power with only 4hr
| of storage. That's the demand curve in action.
|
| The "demand curve" means Eland _doesn 't_ provide 24
| hours of power at its rated output. It provides a
| fraction of its rated power at night and tells customers
| not to use as much electricity. This may work for some
| consumers, but not others. The pumps powering your sewage
| system can't demand shift if you want to flush your
| toilet at night. The reality is that peak energy demand
| happens at night [4], when storage isn't producing
| electricity. Eland can do this demand shift because other
| producers are picking up the slack.
|
| When you read about storage projects you need to be on
| the lookout for weasel-words like this. Demand curve
| means they produce a fraction of the rated power output
| during periods of non-production. If I have a plant that
| produces 1,000 MW during the date and 100=MW at night,
| that's _technically_ 24 hours of production. But clearly
| this is not the same thing as a nuclear plant that
| produces 1n000 MW at all hours.
|
| 1. https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-
| analysis/growt...
|
| 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/280704/world-
| power-consu...
|
| 3. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-
| energy-stora...
|
| 4. https://reneweconomy.com.au/california-duck-curve-now-
| a-cany...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Your link 3 also contains this line: "The solar heavy
| network wouldn't need energy storage with an HVDC
| network."
|
| IOW, the US could build a 100% solar+wind+hydro grid
| WITHOUT ANY STORAGE. The wind is always blowing somewhere
| in the US.
|
| Of course that much HVDC and overbuild would be
| ridiculously expensive, but some HVDC and some batteries
| are a lot cheaper than only HVDC or only batteries.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The US alone has 800GWh of battery plants in the
| pipeline, to come online before 2026.[1] China has
| multiple TWh's worth. We can build 35TWh or even 350TWh
| of batteries a lot faster and than we can build the
| multiple TW of nuclear plants that would be necessary to
| decarbonize electricity without storage.
|
| 1:
| https://publications.anl.gov/anlpubs/2022/11/178584.pdf
|
| > The reality is that peak energy demand happens at night
|
| Peak _net_ energy demand happens at night. Peak _gross_
| demand is during the day.
|
| > Eland can do this demand shift because other producers
| are picking up the slack.
|
| Eland is producing at a rate identical to the California
| demand curve, it's in their contract. It's the solar
| producers who don't have solar along with consumer
| rooftop solar that's causing the duck curve daytime
| demand drop.
|
| > If I have a plant that produces 1,000 MW during the
| date and 100=MW at night, that's technically 24 hours of
| production. But clearly this is not the same thing as a
| nuclear plant that produces 1000 MW at all hours.
|
| But the former costs 1/10th of the latter, so you build
| 10 of them to get 1000MW at night and 10000MW during the
| day.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The "pipeline" you're referring to is a measure of
| battery manufacturing capacity. This is not nearly the
| same thing as actual production figures. Capacity
| utilization in 2022 was under 35%. In other words, 100
| GWh of capacity only translated into 35 GWh of battery
| production. This is because the majority of cost of
| lithium ion batteries is in raw materials, namely cathode
| material [1]. A huge amount of capacity is useless if you
| don't have the input materials to feed your factories.
|
| You can't store energy in a battery factory, you store
| energy in batteries. Cite the _actual production_
| figures, not the stated capacity figures (spoiler alert:
| it was just under 500 GWh last year.).
|
| And to reiterate, the vast majority of this production is
| not going to grid storage, it's going to EVs and
| electronics. Even if battery production matches the
| predicted growth, it's still vastly insufficient to
| provision grid storage without heavily crippling EV
| rollout.
|
| > Eland is producing at a rate identical to the
| California demand curve, it's in their contract. It's the
| solar producers who don't have solar along with consumer
| rooftop solar that's causing the duck curve daytime
| demand drop
|
| Again, electricity demand at night is still high:
| https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
|
| Demand remains high well into midnight. I'm not sure why
| you think matching the demand curve is somehow going to
| mean you're going to get away with less storage. Unless
| Eland is going to be producing much less than its
| nameplate capacity at all times of day, 4 hours of
| storage is nowhere near enough for it to match the demand
| curve.
|
| > If I have a plant that produces 1,000 MW during the
| date and 100=MW at night, that's technically 24 hours of
| production. But clearly this is not the same thing as a
| nuclear plant that produces 1000 MW at all hours. But the
| former costs 1/10th of the latter, so you build 10 of
| them to get 1000MW at night and 10000MW during the day.
|
| The former doesn't have a price tag, because no amount of
| money in the world will buy you that much lithium ion
| batteries. Again, the world uses 70,000 GWh of electricty
| per day, _most_ of that being consumed when solar is not
| producing electricity. No amount of money can fulfill
| that amount of storage.
|
| 1. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-
| cost-of-a...
| coldpie wrote:
| Excellent comment.
|
| > If we're going to use global battery production
| figures, we need to use global electricity consumption,
| which is about 70 TWh per day
|
| Don't forget about all the energy usage that isn't
| currently electricity, but will need to be! Especially
| heating & transportation.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The problem isn't intractable. It just requires time,
| effort, and capital.
|
| https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-
| Part-3.pdf
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The paper also assumes we'll make have feasible CO2
| energy capture and hydrogen electrolysis and storage. It
| required time, effort, capital, and _and multiple
| engineering breakthroughs_. If your plan is contingent on
| technologies that aren 't available... it's just a long
| winded way of saying you don't have a plan.
|
| Actually, we just need improvements in fusion power and
| then we don't need solar, wind, or battery storage!
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The paper assumes CO2 energy capture at $200/ton. That's
| "scale up existing technologies" pricing, not
| "engineering breakthrough" pricing.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| It also assumes a vast hydrogen electric grid storage
| network - this is only theoretical, nobody has actually
| deployed a facility that converts electricity to
| hydrogen, and back to electricity. At best this is,
| "scale up heretofore unproven technologies", not
| "existing technologies".
| pfdietz wrote:
| Once cheap intermittent sources have in the moment saturated
| the market, nuclear cannot charge what it needs to pay off
| the very large capital cost. Nuclear is then dependent on
| making that money during brief spikes, but storage and demand
| dispatch will be flattening those spikes. Nuclear will have
| nowhere to hide.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Many smaller intermittent sources with non-correlated outages
| is better for availability than a single dominant source even
| with preplanned maintenance intermittency. What is the
| emergency and disaster planning impact if the nuclear plant
| goes down in the middle of a summer heatwave?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Smaller intermittent sources don't really help since
| they're still subject to the same weather patterns and
| earth rotation. Distributing generation across continents
| would involve massive costs in energy transmission. People
| like to tout that intermittent sources are more distributed
| and less centralized. But that's negative facet of
| renewables, since demand _is_ centralized in population
| centers, and distributed production means more transmission
| costs.
|
| The same criticism can be applied to any electricity
| source: What happens wind stops during a heatwave? Or when
| the sun goes down? You might say nuclear is less reliable,
| but the reality is nuclear power has the highest capacity
| factor of all generation sources:
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-
| capacity#....
| dv_dt wrote:
| Instead of proposing cross-continent distribution lines,
| just build more small regional renewable sources...
| unlike nuclear, their costs keep going down. Smaller
| renewable solar and wind sources with battery storage are
| perfectly fine, and the correlation in heat with sun
| works to reduce the need for storage capacity.
|
| Capacity factor does not address reliability or emergency
| planning...
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Smaller renewable solar and wind sources with battery
| storage are perfectly fine, and the correlation in heat
| with sun works to reduce the need for storage capacity.
|
| Again, peak electricity demand does _not_ happen at noon.
| It happens at around 9pm, when the sun either has set or
| is about to set. Unfortunately, solar 's production does
| not match demand patterns.
|
| > Instead of proposing cross-continent distribution
| lines, just build more small regional renewable
| sources...
|
| Again, all the renewable sources in the same region are
| subject to the same weather patterns and and day/night
| cycles. Sure multiple solar farms gives you redundancy
| against some sort of mechanical failure that causes one
| specific solar farm to go down. But the most common
| failure mode in intermittent sources is cloud cover or
| lower-than-expected wind speeds. A backup solar plant a
| mile away isn't going to give you redundancy against
| weather patterns. This is why a lot of plans for
| renewable grids are contingent on thousands of miles of
| HVDC lines to move energy across continents.
|
| > Capacity factor does not address reliability or
| emergency planning...
|
| Capacity factor describes the uptime of a power plant.
| Nuclear power has the highest uptime. The point is it's
| less likely to go down than all alternatives.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Cloud cover doesn't stop all production, it just reduces
| it. Just build more solar and more storage and it will
| still be a fraction of the cost of nuclear. I could
| answer point by point but all of your "failures" are
| artificially constrained.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Cloud cover reduces solar production by 10-25%. If you
| need 10x overproduction, _plus_ storage it 's not cheaper
| than nuclear. That's not even counting factors like axial
| tilt (during winter the Earth is rotated away form the
| sun, reducing incoming light per M^2 of land), and the
| transmission infrastructure required to accommodate the
| decentralized nature of solar and wind [1] (which nuclear
| conveniently avoids since it's much more energy dense).
|
| These aren't artificially constrained issues. These are
| real practical barriers. Why haven't countries the world
| over completely to renewables if it's cheaper? Because
| corporations want to screw up the environment because...
| they're moustache-twirling evil people or something? But
| the reality is that intermittent sources still have
| significant barriers to implementation that won't go away
| without massive, orders-of-magnitude improvements in
| storage performance. Renewables are good to deploy in an
| opportunistic fashion, supplementing dispatchable sources
| during periods of production and then turning the gas
| back on when they're not producing. But actually
| producing a primarily renewable grid becomes vastly more
| challenging due to the intermittency.
|
| 1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-
| clean-ene...
| dv_dt wrote:
| Fossil fuel companies are those mustache-twirling profit
| optimization villains, and there is demonstrated evidence
| that they have run a decades long campaign against any
| form of energy that is not fossil fuel...
|
| 10-25% short fall doesn't require 10x over capacity, it
| requires a mix of overcapacity + storage + energy
| conservation measures.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The energy storage at relevant scale is nowhere near
| feasible as other comment chains explain. "Energy
| conservation" is just an admission that these sources
| can't generate enough energy.
| Retric wrote:
| Non-interment kilowatt hours are actually _less_ valuable.
| Demand dips at night, the weekend, spring and fall etc. So
| when negotiating power purchase agreements grid operators are
| pricing most of that production when it's least valuable.
|
| Battery backed solar is becoming really popular with grid
| operators because you get the upsides of load following
| without the overhead of mostly idle production. The economics
| get interesting as more solar comes online, but things are
| only getting much worse for nuclear and coal. Which is why
| there is basically nothing in the pipeline for either one.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Incorrect, demand peaks right as night starts and the sun
| goes down. See that peak [1] at 9pm? Battery backed solar
| is not even remotely feasible. To put this in perspective,
| the USA alone uses ~11.5 TWh of electricty each day. A
| battery to last through the night is over 5,000 GWh.
|
| 1. https://b698061.smushcdn.com/698061/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/...
| Retric wrote:
| There are several battery backed solar power plants in
| the US already built.
|
| Collocated Solar with batteries increases efficiency as
| DC from solar is used to directly charge batteries
| without the cost or losses associated with DC>AC>DC you
| would see if these where separate. LCOE is already below
| 60$/MWh because you only need batteries for a fraction of
| total production.
|
| https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2022/utility-scale_pv-
| plus-...
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Sure, but those battery backed solar plants usually only
| have 2-4 hours worth of storage. They're not actually
| producing full output throughout the night.
|
| The cost of batteries would skyrocket if countries
| actually tried to provision 12 hours of battery storage.
| Because the US _alone_ uses 500 GWh of electricity each
| hour. This is greater than the _global_ battery
| production figures in 2022 [1].
|
| 1. https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-
| analysis/growt...
| Retric wrote:
| You're calculating that storage number as if the solar
| power plant would have produced power for 24 hours.
|
| To simplify if you have 8 hours of power and you store
| 1/2 of it you need 4h of storage. So our hypothetical 4GW
| solar power plant produces 2GW for 8 hours and 1 GW for
| 16. That already batter fits the demand curve than steady
| state output.
|
| However things get better if you instead consider real
| world demand and the actual production of solar panels
| being spread across the entire day a 4 hour of storage is
| close to perfect. Except, the real world isn't a
| hypothetical 100% solar grid so 2h ends up working fine
| in most areas.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Again, the demand curve is the opposite of what you
| claim: peak production happens during the night, at
| around 9 pm, not during the day. You'd need to supply
| more energy during periods of non-production, not less.
| You can't get away with 50% output at night, unless you
| have some other energy source picking up the slack. And
| remember, during the winter you're getting less than 12
| hours of sunlight, maybe even less than that if you
| consider that cloud cover eliminates 75-90% of solar
| power output.
|
| These factors do depend on geography. Hotter climates do
| see more energy use during the day to power A/C. But on
| the flip side, colder climates see even more energy
| demand during the night to heat homes. And unfortunately
| this also coincides when solar is producing the least
| amount of energy due to fewer sunlight hours, axial tilt,
| and more cloud cover.
|
| There are niches solar can carve out: Las Vegas and
| Australia have loads of empty space, clear weather, and
| hydroelectricity that can fill in periods of non-
| production. But nuclear power is a much more flexible
| solution. All you really need is water to cool the
| reactor, and 80% of the population lives within a hundred
| miles of the coastline (you just need water, not fresh
| water).
| XorNot wrote:
| This is the Australia energy market price and demand
| dashboard[1].
|
| Note the two peaks: 1 happens at 7am. There's very little
| solar at 7am even though the sun is up, but _demand_ is
| at a maximum. The other happens at around 6pm - when
| people get home. There 's also very little solar at 6pm
| (sun sets at 5pm in Winter, during the day it's longer).
|
| Also note the demand fall off in the evening: that's a
| very lopsided peak, because people stay at home (whereas
| in the morning they turn on the kettle, then leave). But
| also note the absolute magnitudes: at the minimum, which
| is about 4am, demand last night bottomed at about
| 6,800MW. The peak was 9,800MW. So even the "low demand"
| was 2/3rds of peak demand, and it took 8 hours to get
| there. Most of the night, consumption was a lot higher.
|
| But it gets worse: _before_ you 're going to recover any
| real capacity from your solar, the _largest_ demand of
| the day is about to happen in 3 hours, with the sun just
| barely over the horizon.
|
| [1] https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-
| systems/electricity/national-e...
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| That's for March 31st, presumably in the northern
| hemisphere. I _assume_ the curve looks dramatically
| different for July 31st.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The curve also looks dramatically different in January
| 31st. March is about the middle between summer and
| winter.
| merpnderp wrote:
| The good news is that after it is paid for, it will cost about
| $20-$25/MWh. The bad news is that at least for the few decades
| it will cost $75, which is about the same as solar+battery LCOE
| today.
| Retric wrote:
| Those numbers are wildly optimistic, these overruns mean the
| plant is going to be repaying construction costs over it's
| full lifespan.
|
| I don't know where you messed up but if you're running the
| numbers include the full cost not just the overrun, interest
| rates, increasing operating costs during loan repayment,
| _capacity factor,_ and decommissioning costs. Opening costs
| late in life is a real killer as older power plants mean ever
| more equipment needs to be replaced which then lowers
| capacity factors etc.
|
| Also, LCOE battery backed solar is also under 60$/MWh
| https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2022/utility-scale_pv-
| plus-... Numbers may be slightly higher in Georgia, but still
| well below your estimate.
| krasin wrote:
| > 4 cents per kWh.
|
| For comparison: I live in SF Bay Area and pay 42 cents per kWh.
| vel0city wrote:
| For comparison: I pay 6.269C/ per kWh for energy costs.
| charrondev wrote:
| For comparison I pay 6 cents per kWh in Quebec (and that's
| Canadian money).
| gweinberg wrote:
| We are getting ripped off.
| SilasX wrote:
| Just to make sure no one misunderstands (not saying you did,
| just that this is easy to misread):
|
| The 4 cent/kWh figure is the _additional_ cost it would have
| to charge, over the life of the plant, to make up for the
| budget overage, and would go on top of whatever ratepayers
| would have to pay for its "regular" energy output.
|
| Further pedantry: you'd have to factor in time value, so that
| kind of understates it, as the entity that built it would
| have had to borrow that much more to finish, and pay back
| with interest.
| krasin wrote:
| Thanks. I can now see how my comment could be
| misunderstood.
|
| My point is that while 4 cents per kWh for 50 years is a
| very big number in terms of cost overruns and the taxpayers
| in Georgia will have to eat it, I as a California resident,
| somehow pay through the nose despite abundant and cheap
| solar energy, especially during the daytime.
| dv_dt wrote:
| We have our own nuclear albatrosses that we are
| overpaying for in California.
| llsf wrote:
| Nuclear power plants now run more than 50 years. We are
| pushing some to 80 years already.
|
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-
| nuclear-re...
| yodelshady wrote:
| If you ever doubt that the US has a simply fucking _insane_
| advantage in primary resource extraction and consumption,
| consider your comment. You think $40 per MWh is _expensive_.
|
| _Wholesale_ rates in Europe hit SIX HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE
| EUROS PER MWh last year because of gas supply issues _and
| unfavorable weather_. Spot prices have gone higher still, over
| one order of magnitude higher actually, those were futures
| contracts for a useful period of time. Because THAT 'S WHAT
| PEOPLE WILL PAY WHEN THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE.
|
| Consumer rates of 30 cents per kWh are perfectly normal. 100
| not unheard of.
|
| Oh, fun fact; the largest producer of nuclear power in Europe
| is suing its government because it was forbidden from selling
| at that market rate. It _had_ to sell at 40 cents per kWh. Not
| to consumers of course, to the _fucking glorious private
| sector_ , aka resellers, who _did_ sell it to consumers at
| market rate. The ones who hadn 't gone bankrupt and fucked off
| earlier when market conditions were against them, that is.
| Although they did spend a _lot_ arguing, successfully, they
| didn 't need to pay producers then, either. Because _the
| glorious efficient private sector can 't have competition_.
|
| Yes, I'm bitter. Going to an industry conference and seeing no
| one able to run plants properly because of unreliable power,
| whilst neighouring Germany sets a new coal-burning record, in
| unnatural heat, does that.
| Retric wrote:
| Texas spot prices recently peaked at 9,000$/MWh briefly
| that's in no way what I am talking about.
|
| 4c/KWh is the minimum additional cost across 50 years
| ignoring interest not the total cost of this power. In other
| words if inflation adjusted electricity would have been
| X$/kWh in 2070 it's now at least X + 4c / kWh whatever the
| baseline would have been. Europes average electricity prices
| for the year aren't that far above average, across 50 years
| it's a tiny blip by comparison.
| Raphaellll wrote:
| Tell me more about that coal burning record in Germany.
| blibble wrote:
| > Oh, fun fact; the largest producer of nuclear power in
| Europe is suing its government because it was forbidden from
| selling at that market rate. It had to sell at 40 cents per
| kWh. Not to consumers of course, to the fucking glorious
| private sector, aka resellers, who did sell it to consumers
| at market rate.
|
| don't you all love the European Union's Single Electricity
| Market?
| arh68 wrote:
| 2 units, both 1,100 MW each. So 2 cents / kWh.
| [deleted]
| chroma wrote:
| The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975. Since
| then, no plant license that was initially submitted to the NRC
| has started operations.
|
| Plant Vogtle was approved by the Atomic Energy Commission (the
| predecessor to the NRC). Their license was grandfathered in.
| Building this reactor required a new reactor license (not plant
| license). Shortly after the reactor design was approved and
| construction started, the federal government added new rules
| about containment vessels being resilient to passenger aircraft
| impact. The NRC applied these rules retroactively, causing the
| containment vessel to be redesigned and construction to be
| halted.[1] The companies working with the NRC are reluctant to
| criticize regulators, as they fear retaliation from the NRC. The
| NRC supervises and approves each step of nuclear reactor
| construction, making it very difficult to schedule work with
| contractors and suppliers. Honestly, it's amazing this plant was
| built at all.
|
| 1. https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-
| vogtle-a...
| pfdietz wrote:
| The NRC was established just about when the first nuclear
| buildout collapsed under the weight of its own foolishness.
| Massive cost overruns did nuclear no favors whatsoever, clearly
| inadequate safety (especially on those first generation BWRs;
| hello Fukushima), and (most devastatingly) the deregulation of
| the US electricity grid, with PURPA (in 1978) and later steps
| opening grids to non-utility providers. Nuclear projects that
| would make sense for a monopoly utility (hey, let's boost the
| capital spending to increase our regulated earnings) no longer
| made any sense in a competitive market.
| chroma wrote:
| Fukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are
| incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated
| design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with
| the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with
| a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it _explodes_... and what
| were the casualties? One worker and maybe 50 early deaths due
| to cancers. A typical coal power plant kills more people
| every year from the air pollution it spews out. And don 't
| forget that the cause of the meltdown was an earthquake and
| tsunami that killed 20,000 people!
|
| If we judged other forms of power generation the way we judge
| nuclear, we simply wouldn't have electricity.
| chickenchicken wrote:
| It shows that the people who considered the location and
| plant to be safe enough to be wrong.
| wskinner wrote:
| If your standard for "safe enough" is that no one will
| directly die or be injured, ever, then the only feasible
| solution is no electricity at all.
| d_sem wrote:
| People often fail to compare the opportunity cost of
| alternative methods to nuclear power. At that time the
| alternative to nuclear was coal power plants. Radioactive
| carbon isotopes have harmed many times more people than
| Nuclear.
| ImaCake wrote:
| Coal dust, sans radioactive stuff, and coal burning
| emissions also exact a terrible toll on respiratory
| health. A lot of people have died, or had much worse
| lives, thanks to the widespread use of coal.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Coal contains no significant radioactive carbon. All the
| radioisotopes of carbon have half life many orders of
| magnitude smaller than the age of coal deposits.
|
| Coal contains other radioactive elements, though.
| However, the quantity of these is still usually less than
| the quantity that needs to be mined to power a light
| water reactor.
| ImaCake wrote:
| Absolutely agree with this take. Coal power plants are a
| public health disaster on the scale of leaded petrol and no
| one talks about it. Even wind turbines have a terrible
| impact on birdlife. The arguments against nuclear are
| irrational; future generations will wonder what was wrong
| with people in the late 20th century.
| cauch wrote:
| The number of nuclear plants is so small that any example
| is statistically anecdotical.
|
| Yes, Fukushima did not kill much. Is it because the nuclear
| is in itself super safe, or is it because we were lucky? We
| would need ~100 Fukushima before even having a rough
| estimation.
|
| I think risk cannot be counted as "number of deaths", but
| as "capacity of losing control". Cars and cows kill a lot
| of humans. Yet, their risks are controllable: it is not
| true that if just few things change or if the circumstances
| are slightly unlucky, suddenly, they will do 1'000 times
| more deaths. With this way of thinking, we can understand
| better why scientists are worried about pandemic rather
| than common cold, even if before the last pandemic (and
| maybe during, whatever) common colds was killing more.
|
| And it works with coal too: unpredicted effects of global
| warming are a way of losing control, and it is why
| scientists are so adamant about stopping using coal.
|
| I don't think it is true that we have judged the other
| forms of power generation differently than the way we judge
| nuclear. We judge the same way: based on our current
| understanding of how easy it is to keep or lose control.
|
| Sure, coal is dangerous and has unpredicted effects. But
| the reason it was treated differently is because the
| capacity of losing control with coal were not at all
| obvious from the start, while they were written in black
| and white from the start for nuclear.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Human deaths aren't the only measure of safety.
|
| Pollution into the ocean from Fukushima was huge,
| unfortunately.
|
| Just because it's not as bad as Chernobyl (which was as
| worst-case as it gets) doesn't mean it's safe.
| fluxem wrote:
| It's brings a lot confidence that a nuclear power was built
| through a legal loophole.
| epistasis wrote:
| This project is what killed nuclear in the US. Not regulations,
| not the NRC, just plain old incompetence, bad planning, bad EPC,
| bad design.
|
| The AP1000 was supposed to be a "modular" design, where most of
| the difficult welding could be done off site and delivered
| complete, with paperwork. And failure in this modularity is what
| caused the project to be such a flop, and essentially kill all
| new large nuclear in the US (people are trying "small" modular,
| but their target costs are still far too high to be economically
| feasible).
|
| See, for example, this 2017 report on just one aspect of what
| went wrong:
|
| https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of...
|
| > To build the first new nuclear reactors in the U.S. in three
| decades--South Carolina's V.C. Summer Units 2 and 3 and Georgia's
| Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4--the design and construction team
| would face a steep learning curve. However, says Hartz, learning
| wasn't much of a priority in the rush to start work at Lake
| Charles. "They were clueless" about the complex geometry of
| nuclear welds, the nuclear supply chain and the need for a
| nuclear safety culture, he notes, adding, "I wasn't a whistle-
| blower. I was just a senior procurement manager who was
| concerned."
|
| > Westinghouse would issue drawings to Shaw Nuclear in Charlotte.
| When Shaw reviewed the drawings and asked Westinghouse to correct
| a detail, problems ensued. The work processes were unnecessarily
| complicated by the separation of the team members. Giving an
| example of how the process got out of hand, Hartz says that, if a
| design called for a 3/8-in.-wide, 12-in.-long fillet weld, the
| welder might make it 14 in. long. "Instead of having Westinghouse
| right there saying, 'That's no problem,' " recalls Hartz, "we had
| to write a nonconformance report that was processed and reviewed
| by Shaw and then sent to Westinghouse for disposition. It was
| insane. From Lake Charles to Pittsburgh to Charlotte then back to
| Shaw Modular before the red nonconformance tag could be taken
| off, saying it's OK now." He adds, "Each change went through the
| same tortuous path, taking months and months."
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| In regards to the story about the weld length, that is the
| process working as intended. As a constructor you don't just
| decide that something can be a different dimension. And as a
| engineer you don't just stand "right there" saying "That's no
| problem". That is how people get killed.
| epistasis wrote:
| I 100% agree that such changes need to be checked, but that's
| not the point of the anecdote. The point is that this process
| took months rather than being streamlined.
|
| It is a management failure to make common necessary things,
| like signing off on small changes, a month long process.
|
| This sort of bad management is endemic throughout the entire
| build.
|
| Which is to say, the problem isn't the regulation requiring
| that things are build as designed, the problem is the
| management structure that makes such changes so uneconomical,
| combined with the frequency of such changes due to
| miscommunication between designers and builders.
| ryan93 wrote:
| So to power every home in the USA would roughly cost 3 trillion
| at these prices. if they reused the same teams and designs maybe
| they could get it somewhat cheaper. plus we have increasing
| renewable plus existing hydro and nuclear. for the price of a
| year or two of national debt we could go full renewable in this
| country.
| topspin wrote:
| > 3 trillion
|
| The US federal budget deficit was 2.8 trillion in 2021. One
| year. I can't remember any US leader of any party even
| mentioning it.
| justrealist wrote:
| So we could decarbonize the entire US power grid for what we
| spent on COVID relief/stimulus?
|
| That seems like a good deal, even without economies of scale...
| coldpie wrote:
| Yup. The Georgia plant seems expensive until you remember it
| cost half of what Twitter did.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| $30B is more than half of $44B.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Not just decarbonize, but become a major fossil fuel exporter
| and be all smug about like a certain Nordic country...
| JohnFen wrote:
| > become a major fossil fuel exporter
|
| Wouldn't doing that undo a lot of the gains from this? If
| we export fossil fuels instead of burning them, we aren't
| really decarbonizing. We're just having the carbonization
| take place somewhere else.
| justrealist wrote:
| It offsets significant carbon production elsewhere
| (especially if we only export natgas), and defunds from
| some of the worst governments on earth.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > It offsets significant carbon production elsewhere
|
| Does it? Or does it simply increase the amount of fossil
| fuels being used elsewhere?
|
| > defunds from some of the worst governments on earth.
|
| That has nothing to do with decarbonization, though.
| slt2021 wrote:
| you are right, oil extraction is literally producing
| carbon (which is then processed and burned at later stage
| somewhere else)
|
| so we need to separate: carbon production and carbon
| emissions.
|
| a lot of so called decarbonized industries are
| decarbonized simply because they outsourced carbon
| intensive parts to third world, but carbon is still being
| produced and emitted.
|
| I think this is why some people are supporting De-Growth
| movement, that just by reducing consumption of
| nonessential stuff, we would decrease carbon production
| and emissions globally
| aschearer wrote:
| What if climage change is a big hoax and we create a better
| world for nothing?[1]
|
| [1]: 2009 -
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1e/What_if_it%27...
| epistasis wrote:
| The alternative isn't carbon emission, the alternative is far
| cheaper wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, battery storage (both
| lithium and many others)
|
| The only question is if nuclear can offer something
| compelling to keep it in the mix. We have roughly 100 1GW of
| nuclear reactors in the US that are reaching end of life, and
| 90% of those communities would like to see replacements to
| keep the jobs in town. However, nobody will ever invest in a
| project that looks like Vogtle, due to the cost.
| Unfortunately, recent projects in France, Finland, and the UK
| all look quite similar in cost of dollars and time.
|
| Which is to say, that nuclear will not be able to provide a
| climate solution at all. It's too late, we can not even build
| 100 rectors in the next 15 years to replace what needs to be
| retired!
|
| If nuclear advocates want more nuclear, they need to focus on
| the details and the engineering and the management, not
| merely rah-rah for the tech. The devil is in the details, and
| projects like Vogtle have virtually guaranteed that nuclear
| will not be built in the US in quantity for at least a
| generation.
| coldpie wrote:
| Awesome! Nuclear is a fantastic and needed addition to the grid.
| The cost was high, but still quite cheap relative to the cost of
| continuing to build & run fossil fuel plants. It's a real shame
| we let 30+ years slip by, letting our ability to build projects
| like this wither. I hope there's lessons learned from this
| experience that will help get costs down for future plants. This
| should spur discussions on streamlining the regulatory side of
| things, and there's a lot of exciting stuff going on in modular
| reactors.
|
| (In case it needs saying, which it shouldn't: yes, we should be
| building out wind & solar, too! We need all hands on deck, wind,
| solar, and nuclear, right now, to kill coal. We already blew our
| chance to do it cheaply, so now we have to pay the price.)
| tracker1 wrote:
| Mostly agree... though I think Solar tech still needs to
| improve a bit. Nuclear power is definitely needed for the grid,
| though preferably more inland in places less likely to be
| affected by natural disaster. I get why the NY plant was
| closed.
|
| I also hope that the build and cost timelines can be shortened.
| I think the push for electric cars is a bit of a miss in this,
| only because the grid needs to improve dramatically before such
| efforts can be effective and are barely keeping pace with
| current demands.
| epistasis wrote:
| I think you have that reversed, solar is great, and nuclear
| needs to improve.
|
| Nuclear is rather old tech, and the more we learn about it
| the more expensive it gets. It's not a good fit for modern
| economies, because construction is so labor intensive and
| difficult to automate. Plus, the industry itself is a
| managerial failure and can't plan or execute on those plans
| effectively.
|
| Storage is a great complement to the grid, because it lessens
| the need for transmission. And our original "storage" on the
| grid, hydro, was put there to deal with the shortcomings of
| nuclear, if you listen to Jigar Shah (though he is far far
| more bullish than me on the ability of the nuclear industry
| to deliver in the future).
| Retric wrote:
| EV's have a fairly trivial impact on the grid. Cars last 25+
| years so even if everyone all new cars where EV's we are
| talking less than 1% increase in total electricity demand per
| year. The grid has expanded dramatically faster at several
| points.
|
| Even more importantly we can shift most of that demand to
| cheaper times of the day or even day of the week.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > Cars last 25+ years
|
| This is not a truth universally acknowledged.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The average age of cars on the road in the US is 12
| years. There aren't many 100 year old cars skewing the
| average, so that implies that most cars last over 24
| years.
| colatkinson wrote:
| Ehh Indian Point (the NY plant) wasn't really a concern with
| regards to natural disasters. We get some occasional (very
| minor) earthquakes and a hurricane once in a decade or so,
| but I doubt the latter would do much vs many tons of
| reinforced concrete.
|
| The plant definitely had issues -- some due to age
| (construction started in 1956!), some due to mismanagement,
| and some due to dumb regulations [0]. My chem class went
| there on a field trip in high school, and the guy giving the
| tour definitely gave off "engineer who has been overruled by
| management in very dumb ways" vibes while explaining that
| their waste silos were almost full because they weren't
| allowed to transport the spent rods across state lines so
| that they could be recycled back into fissile materials.
|
| As an aside, the control rooms had a real "retro-futurism"
| look. Lots of manual dials and brightly-colored plastics [1].
| Gene Roddenberry eat your heart out, etc.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center
| #Saf...
|
| [1]: https://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/2016/02/12/indian-
| point-...
| pfdietz wrote:
| Nuclear is not a needed addition to the grid, unless you have a
| compulsion to waste money.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| mikece wrote:
| > ...seven years late and $17 billion over budget...
|
| And how much of that was a result of red tape from the NRC, DOE,
| and EPA?
| epistasis wrote:
| It's easy to find detailed retrospectives of the multitude of
| failures here.
|
| I haven't found a single one that said excess regulation was a
| problem, but I have found a huge number that showed project
| management, bad design, bad communication between engineers and
| EPC, etc. were all to blame.
|
| Here's one I was reading recently from 2017, about the welding
| issues. Every other aspect, such as concrete, exhibited similar
| failures.
|
| https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of...
|
| But if you have an idea of which regulations to change, or how
| to fix project management, you can pick up a half-completed
| pair of reactors in South Carolina on the cheap. That
| boondoggle often gets forgotten when examining Vogtle.
| pavlov wrote:
| I don't know, but new nuclear projects in the West tend to be
| extremely late and over budget even with friendly regulators.
|
| Olkiluoto 3 in Finland is a Gen 3 reactor that just came online
| earlier this year. Its original target date was 2010. The
| original budget was 3 billion euros, but the final cost was
| over 11 billion.
|
| The project was of great national importance because this
| single unit provides around 14% of power to the country, and
| the Finnish nuclear power regulator was extremely motivated to
| make it happen. So the delays and cost overruns were not due to
| red tape.
| glimshe wrote:
| One project in 30 years doesn't benefit from economies of scale.
| Nuclear is the only hope we have to make up for the gaps in
| generation for solar and wind. Solar and Wind should be used
| whenever possible, but they are not 100% of our solution mix,
| even if they are the majority.
|
| If we want to mitigate the impact of climate change, we need to
| invest in decreasing Nuclear costs and building _many_ more
| plants in the US.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Counterpoint just because someone has to go against the pro-
| nuclear orthodoxy here: economy of scale won't fix nuclear
| power. You will never get the cost (or risk) down far enough
| with existing technology, and none of the advanced technologies
| have panned out so far. And large scale renewables + battery
| storage are good enough.
| glimshe wrote:
| The problem is that you are comparing a hypothetical with a
| proven system. Nuclear works, and works in large scale in a
| lot of places - heavy users include France, Lithuania, Sweden
| and Belgium.
|
| One can argue about costs, but costs are at least low enough
| to be viable, otherwise these countries couldn't exist as
| they do. You can say that the costs are being externalized to
| taxes or some other place, but _these societies are being
| able to absorb these costs_ in aggregate. Nuclear might not
| be cheaper than gas and oil, but it 's possible to build a
| modern industrial society with nuclear.
|
| Now contrast with green hydrogen generation and battery
| storage, for instance. These approaches aren't working in
| country-level scales _anywhere_. We compare hypotheticals
| with systems that, despite problems, costs and limitations,
| _are known to work_.
| legulere wrote:
| France has massive problems with their reactors and leads
| the world with only 62.6% from nuclear. A comparable number
| to Denmark that has almost no hydro power. There are
| several countries with higher percentage of renewables up
| to 100%.
|
| Costs aren't the only problem, new nuclear reactors simply
| cannot be build fast enough to counteract the climate
| crisis.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| > France has massive problems with their reactors and
| leads the world with only 62.6% from nuclear.
|
| Yet, France consistently produces half of Germany's CO2
| per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.C
| O2E.PC?location...
|
| I would consider that a giant success of nuclear energy.
|
| > A comparable number to Denmark that has almost no hydro
| power.
|
| Denmark is not relevant - they import giant majority of
| their energy. Right now they barely produce at all:
| https://i.imgur.com/69SI5J9.png
|
| > Costs aren't the only problem, new nuclear reactors
| simply cannot be build fast enough to counteract the
| climate crisis.
|
| They could be build fast enough if we did it _seriously_,
| and not as vanity projects.
|
| https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-
| korea-s... Is the suggestion to just import the energy?
| belorn wrote:
| Are you talking about consumption or production?
|
| In term of production a country can easily go above 100%
| renewable by selling a lot of it during periods of
| optimal conditions. Naturally, a country can not above
| 100% in terms of consumption. Denmark for example is a
| massive exporter in terms of production, but also a
| massive importer in terms of consumption and has a very
| large dependency on imports. They are not self sufficient
| despite producing more energy that they themselves
| consume.
| coldpie wrote:
| > And large scale renewables + battery storage are good
| enough.
|
| I wish this were true, but I haven't seen convincing evidence
| that it is. Up here in Minnesota, we heat our homes with
| natural gas. Once that's converted to electric, that's a
| _lot_ of energy to generate and store, and it has to be
| absolutely reliable for six straight months or you're talking
| mass death. Nuclear seems like a perfect fit for this
| scenario. I think it's a poor choice to take it off the
| table.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Generating green hydrogen with renewables and then burning
| it in combined cycle plants would be cheaper than Vogtle-
| level nuclear.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| jtc331 wrote:
| Nuclear and renewables/batteries actually have the same
| biggest problem: the vast majority of the cost of future
| energy is up front capital costs. That's what makes natural
| gas so attractive: the vast majority of costs are fuel
| amortized over the lifetime of power generation.
|
| That's the thing we need to fix regardless of the power
| source.
| zamalek wrote:
| > or risk
|
| That really casts doubt on your assertions. Nuclear carries
| significantly fewer risks than coal (which operates in the
| nuclear failure state all the time).
| kibwen wrote:
| Nobody's arguing in favor of building more coal plants. The
| fact that nuclear is better than coal is irrelevant to the
| discussion of what new plants to build.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Large infrastructure projects (and nuclear is certainly one)
| don't benefit from economies of scale. Half of a nuclear power
| plant is essentially the same as a coal plant and they have not
| gone down in price either.
|
| The reality is even assuming that we can not overcome shortages
| in solar and wind by overprovisioning and storage (and studies
| say otherwise), it does not make any sense to build nuclear
| instead of solar/wind as long as we are still running coal. We
| get much bigger CO2 reduction bang for our buck with solar and
| wind. Building nuclear would therefore effectively increase our
| CO2 over alternatives. This is especially true as nuclear
| plants have a relatively long ROI (in terms of CO2.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Nuclear is the only hope we have to do to make up for the
| gaps in generation for solar and wind.
|
| Nuclear would be entirely unsuited for this task. Nuclear
| provides baseload, it doesn't fill in gaps. If you try to run
| the reactor intermittently to counterbalance an intermittent
| source the cost of its output increases massively.
| belorn wrote:
| That is true when the market price is fairly static and
| doesn't change much. This is how it used to be when fossil
| fueled power dominated the grid, since the biggest cost is
| the fuel and that could scale based on demand.
|
| For EU this is no longer the case. The difference in market
| price between low and high can be above 100x. In theory a
| power plant could earn as much in 4 days as an other plant
| earn in a year worth of power generation. This is why all
| those nations started to bailout the power bills of
| businesses and citizens last winter. A single month for some
| people costed more than a years worth of power. For companies
| with contract obligations, paying what ever the market
| demanded was the lesser evil.
|
| The US is not in the same situation, but the energy grid
| there is still a market based one. There is also other
| technologies that could in theory compete in such volatile
| market.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Those high points are better addressed by such things as
| hydrogen-burning turbines. Hydrogen produced from excess
| renewables during the price troughs, stored underground,
| then burned at the peaks. Because the capacity factor of
| these turbines would be low the cost of fuel would be
| acceptable, and their capital cost would be an order of
| magnitude below what a nuclear plant would cost, per unit
| of power output.
|
| Europe has enough salt formations to store many petawatt
| hours of hydrogen, far far more than would be needed.
| belorn wrote:
| People are naturally allowed to invest in what ever
| technology they think will fit the role best, such as
| green hydrogen. No one is investing in that, there exist
| no hydrogen-burning turbines that burn green hydrogen,
| but someone could become the first and do that.
|
| Producers of green hydrogen are currently more interested
| in delivering green steel, which pays much better than
| hydrogen-burning turbines. The general idea is that this
| will in the future reduce prices down to energy grid
| levels, and a researcher here in Sweden working on such
| project estimated prices to drop to those levels around
| ~2060-2080.
|
| This could happen much earlier if prices continue to
| increase as they do, but who knows. It would make for a
| good A/B testing to produce both and see which one was
| the cheaper option, and if the green hydrogen power plant
| fail they can always just produce more hydrogen for steel
| production.
| XorNot wrote:
| This is such an incredible misrepresentation. The only thing
| nuclear can't do is respond to sudden demand surges. But
| that's what batteries _can_ do (it 's also the only thing
| they can do well).
|
| This[1] is the Australian energy market operator dashboard.
| Note the demand curve. It is _not_ sudden in anyway - it is
| highly, highly predictable. Nuclear reactors can handle that
| sort of curve just fine - you roll the control rods in when
| it 's low, pull them out when it's high.
|
| The "inability" of nuclear reactors to handle variable loads
| is to do with the thermal mass of the reactor pile which
| can't be changed rapidly, but electrical load generally
| _doesn 't_ change rapidly - it changes very, very predictably
| at large scale.
|
| Nuclear reactors can handle normal electrical demand flows
| just fine.
|
| [1] https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-
| systems/electricity/national-e...
| blibble wrote:
| you can nuclear in load following mode (France does)
|
| but it hurts the economic efficiency massively, as costs
| for nuclear are almost entirely fixed at construction time
| pfdietz wrote:
| Your counterargument there betrays a complete
| misunderstanding of the point I was making.
|
| I wasn't claiming that nuclear power plants couldn't
| technically ramp up and down. I will happily stipulate that
| they could. I was arguing it was economically ludicrous to
| do so. That's because most of the costs of nuclear are
| fixed: capital cost, financing costs, fixed manpower costs.
| If you operate the power plant at low capacity factor, the
| cost per unit of energy produced increases inversely, just
| because these fixed costs are being spread over less
| output.
|
| Nuclear either makes sense for baseload or it doesn't make
| sense at all. Trying to retreat to an application for which
| it isn't suited, like covering for intermittent renewables,
| is a losing game. There are any number of alternatives that
| would be much cheaper.
| jakewins wrote:
| Nuclear is dope and we should build tons of it, but it ain't
| our only hope; plenty of other alternatives to build at the
| same time.
|
| Eg hydro, overprovisioning solar or wind, transmission to
| remove local weather variations, coupling wind and solar,
| demand flexibility.
|
| Fervo just started its first full-scale new-gen geothermal
| plant, for instance; 24/7 firm power. You might like David
| Roberts interview with Tim Latimer about it:
| https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally...
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Hydro isn't clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down
| stream); and if we dammed every river it's a drop in the
| bucket of what we need.
|
| I don't know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks
| more than most people realize.
| switchbak wrote:
| Canada's energy mix is roughly 60% hydro, and some
| provinces are well past 90%. You ought to check your
| numbers.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| No offense, but Canada isn't relevant on the global
| scale.
|
| Hydro use is growing, especially in developing countries.
| However it's a shrinking percentage of total energy
| generation. There is an absolute cap on theoretical hydro
| energy production, and it isn't enough.
|
| Hydro is low carbon and renewable. But it isn't green,
| and it's not enough.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Canada is second-largest country by area, occupying
| around 6.5% of Earth's land surface. It's only 37th by
| population, with 0.5% of world's population. It's very
| non-representative example.
| thatswrong0 wrote:
| My assumption is that rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere
| pose a much greater existential threat to humanity than
| localized ecosystem damage resulting from river blockages.
| But maybe I'm wrong.
|
| Speaking of hydro, I do think pumped hydro-storage ought to
| be looked at a lot more for energy storage (esp. versus
| giant lithium-ion battery banks), especially as we
| transition to inconsistent renewable sources like solar and
| wind. I'd assume that creating new, isolated bodies of
| water wouldn't incur as much ecological damage as blocking
| off existing rivers or greatly increasing our mining of
| rare earth minerals)
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| But it isn't "localized ecosystem damage". Building dams
| absolutely fucking destroys the ecosystems upstream and
| downstream. It's the civil engineering of burning the
| crops when you retreat. The "new" ecosystem has nothing
| in common with the prior ecosystems.
| jakewins wrote:
| True but PV+wind make our existing dams go much further -
| recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they
| refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense
| that energy over the dry season.
|
| Adding PV means hydro can save much more of its water, just
| dispensing to "fill in the gaps". This is already how the
| hydro in Norway and Sweden operates, you can see it daily
| if you look at the hourly power breakdowns by generation
| type.
|
| But I agree, I hope we will get to a point where we can
| decommission the big dams..
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries,
| they refill in the rainy season once per year, then
| dispense that energy over the dry season
|
| That's not quite how it works.
|
| Consider the biggest hydro project in US, the Columbia
| river, with its 14 dams.
|
| The system does fill up in the rainy season, but the
| crucial thing is that it's not the dams that do fill up,
| but rather the whole watershed, meaning things like
| snowfall and ground water. This means that we have very
| limited amount of control over when we let the water
| through. We can't just dam the river for an extended
| period: if we don't use it for generating power, we must
| spill (waste) it. This means in practice that the dams
| are _not_ batteries: to a large degree, it's use-it-or-
| lose-it.
|
| To make these into batteries, we'd need to somehow
| refurbish the dams to tremendously increase the power
| generating capacity on each dam, so that instead of
| assumption of continuous flow (either through turbines or
| spillways), we make the flow more intermittent, so that
| we can make up for closed times by pushing more water
| through during open times.
|
| This is tremendously difficult in practice: dams are
| simply not designed to allow for refurbishing with many
| more turbines or much more flow through them than they
| were originally designed for, the upstream reservoirs are
| not designed for quickly varying water levels, etc.
|
| Point is, we can't just "save the water".
| Arrath wrote:
| > That's not quite how it works.
|
| Yeah in reality there are two forms of hydropower: the
| classic reservoir dam, and 'run of the river'
| powerplants. You're absolutely right, even reservoir dams
| don't really fulfill the 'annual battery' idea, since
| they must maintain some minimum outflow for downstream
| consumers and can't shut it off entirely if it better
| suits the power generation goal.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > But hydro sucks more than most people realize.
|
| There's a reason Russia blew up the Kakhovka hydro dam. The
| down-stream impacts of the flooding were more devastating
| than what they could reasonably accomplish with
| conventional weapons.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| No.
|
| It killed <75 people.
|
| They blew up the dam because it was also a bridge and
| removing it allowed them to redeploy troops to the east.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| I'm as far from russia apologist as can be - but they
| blew the bridge part few months earlier, in November.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxHLImMbnAw
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Looking this up.
|
| https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html
|
| > Hoover Dam generates, on average, about 4 billion
| kilowatt-hours. And the lake covers an area of 1,495,806
| acres
|
| Rough estimate, 2GW worth of solar produces that much in a
| year. And requires I think 12000 acres of land. (Open to
| have phat fingered the calcs)
|
| My take away is it's not even economic anymore and requires
| flooding 100 times more land then a solar plant.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Dams still get built for non-power reasons, to manage
| water supplies, so adding turbines (and floating solar
| PV) to them might make sense, but yes I think we're now
| at the point where new hydro purely for energy production
| is going to struggle to make a case for itself against
| just deploying renewables and batteries and
| interconnects.
|
| edit: to add some context re the Hoover dam:
|
| > Upon becoming Secretary of Commerce in 1921, Hoover
| proposed the construction of a dam on the Colorado River.
| In addition to flood control and irrigation, it would
| provide a dependable supply of water for Los Angeles and
| Southern California.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| It's not exactly relevant how much solar produces per
| year - it's very important _when_ the energy can be
| produced and how much you can control that.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Hydro is only source of renewable power that generates >50%
| of any country's electricity grid: https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable...
|
| Wind caps out at 42% with Denmark, solar at 15% in
| Australia. Many countries have nearly 100% of their
| electricity coming from hydroelectricity. Besides nuclear
| power, hydroelectricity is one of the few non-intermittent
| sources of renewable energy - sure, rainfall does
| technically make hydro intermittent in a sense, but it's
| not going to change output on a dime when the sun goes down
| or the wind stops blowing.
|
| Well, you also have geothermal power, but that's even more
| geographically constrained than hydro.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| Absolute nonsense. Your attitude is actively harmful to
| decarbonization.
|
| Ecosystem change =/= ecosystem destruction. The lake
| produced by a dam is a far more beneficial ecosystem to a
| much broader range of life than the river that preceded it
| nicpottier wrote:
| Source?
|
| I like hydro but this is not at all what people I know
| working in this field believe to be true.
| chris222 wrote:
| I'm not so sure with overprovisioning, batteries and
| controllable load. Also pumped hydro and other gravity
| batteries. We barely have any storage on the grid right now.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| All the coal and gas storage currently exists. We need to
| stop using that for non-storage uses, replacing with solar
| and wind, before we need to replace its storage function once
| we get down to the last 15% or so of grid electricity being
| fossil based.
| weaksauce wrote:
| > Also pumped hydro and other gravity batteries
|
| pumped hydro is not a winner. the locations that could be
| used are few and far between and require massive amounts of
| water and wreak ecological nightmare on a wide area.
| elihu wrote:
| Pumped hydro can work anywhere that has hills. It's just a
| lot cheaper in some locations than others, due to favorable
| geography.
|
| Water use just has to keep up with evaporation on average.
|
| I'm not sure why building a reservoir needs to be an
| "ecological nightnmare" except in the sense that it's a
| sudden change to an environment.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The locations where pumped hydro could be used are
| extremely abundant. Remember, it doesn't have to be on a
| river. It can be out in a desert! Here's an example of a
| project being built in Nevada. Basin and Range geography,
| more vertical relief than you can shake a stick at. Look
| how small this thing is for the capacity!
|
| https://www.cityofelynv.gov/pdf/CityCouncil2021/cc1-28-21/W
| h...
|
| https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/
|
| (the whole thing could be sped up; that's a general problem
| in the US)
| XorNot wrote:
| The problem with pumped-hydro is - and all storage based
| solutions is - how low can you let the storage get before
| it's an emergency?
|
| Electricity is a vital service: completely vital. Without
| it, modern civilization halts. It might be annoying being
| unable to make a cup of coffee, but municipal water and
| sewage need electricity to work. You go without power for
| a week, and the entire wastewater infrastructure will
| start shutting down. Refrigeration and food storage
| fails. Even backup fuel storage becomes a liability
| because you need electricity to pump it around.
|
| So the question is, how low can you let the reservoir
| get? Because it's not about how long you could run going
| from 100% to 0% - it's how much of it can you use. And we
| have a model for this, in the form of another service:
| city townwater supplies.
|
| In Australia, water restrictions go into effect when we
| hit <50% water capacity in the dams. That's the level at
| which usage cuts are applied to try and ensure we don't
| run out. At <40% we increase the severity. But this sort
| of resource exhaustion is also _slow_ - we lose storage
| capacity over the course of months, not days.
|
| And this is a resource which is dependent on electricity
| to supply (we also have a desalination plant, so we have
| _some_ guaranteed capacity).
|
| So within that context then - i.e. imagine you're
| planning a nation-state electricity supply, what are your
| risks? - how good does pumped hydro - or any storage-
| based solution - look, when your requirement is "the
| power cannot go off - ever". Put on your systems
| engineering hat, treat it like a software deployment -
| what level of redundancy and overbuild would you want
| when you're told "this is a mission critical, safety-
| critical system consuming an intermittently available
| resource". How much capacity and overbuild would you
| believe is necessary to have confidence, or even
| decision-making capability, when pressured?
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Until we're willing to let Iran, Pakistan, the Talibani
| Afghanistan build nuclear power plants, nuclear is no hope of
| anything other than an energy apartheid.
|
| And that's the optimistic scenario where it actually works
| well, scales, can be built out rapidly, and is not extremely
| expensive.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| How can costs be reduced? You can't skimp on over-engineering
| nuclear reactors because they have to be designed and built to
| deal with rare 'black swan' events, such as jetliners crashing
| into the reactor core. E.g.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/us/18nuke.html
|
| > "The rule, approved by the commission in a 4-to-0 vote,
| requires that new reactors be designed so their containment
| structure would remain intact after a plane crash, cooling
| systems would continue to operate and spent fuel pools would be
| protected."
|
| You can't risk a failure in the primary cooling system, and
| since reactors need active cooling in the event of a regional
| grid power failure just to avoid core meltdown, you need
| onsight power generation capable of running the cooling loop
| 24-7 (failure in this system led to the Fukushima explosions).
| These systems (from cooling loops to steam generators) are
| under constant stress and have relatively high maintenance
| costs (a major factor in the closure of California's San Onofre
| reactor).
|
| Then you have to add in the cost of the uranium fuel rods,
| which is a complex supply chain issue in many countries (the
| recent coup in Niger has shut down 1/3 of France's uranium ore
| supply chain for their reactors, say news reports). Uranium
| supplies are limited and historically uranium prices get
| volatile when it seems a reactor boom is coming (look at right
| before Fukushima). Then you have the long-term costs of spent
| fuel treatment and secure storage, and eventual reactor
| decommissioning.
|
| I really don't see anyway to reduce these costs such that
| nuclear will be anywhere near cost-competitive with today's
| solar/wind/storage complexes, that are entirely capable of
| producing reliable 24/7 grid power at costs well below that of
| a comparable nuclear power plant in most locations.
| zamalek wrote:
| We've effectively forgotten how to build (specifically
| engineer) nuclear reactors. This is very similar to problems
| faced by the space program somewhat recently. During the 3
| decade pause people retired and memories faded, there were no
| apprentices to carry the wisdom forward.
|
| > How can costs be reduced?
|
| Build more reactors, and re-learn how to build them. Note
| that this doesn't touch on economies of scale, which will
| likely never really apply to nuclear power. Nuclear is likely
| to always have immense up-front costs, but it shouldn't cost
| this much.
| dyno12345 wrote:
| The US Navy seems to be able to do it
| kibwen wrote:
| The navy uses nuclear reactors for tactical reasons, not
| economic reasons. Nuclear-powered ships are significantly
| more expensive.
| arghandugh wrote:
| What this article is missing is that if you don't consider
| refueling, defouling, valve refitting, coolant issues, cooling
| tower furloughs, transmission plant failures, early retirement,
| funding issues, staffing issues, or pressure vessel refurbishment
| the uptime is 100%! Beat that, renewables.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Good. More, please.
| 10g1k wrote:
| My 2c:
|
| Why nuclear power is a dumb idea.
|
| Countries with nuclear reactors: 32.
|
| Countries which have had nuclear leaks or meltdowns: 15.
|
| Number of nuclear leaks and meltdowns since 1952 (only those
| which resulted in loss of human life or >US$50K property damage):
| ~100.
|
| About 60% of those have been in the USA, allegedly the most
| advanced country in the world with the bestest regulation of such
| things.
|
| Note that the USA requirements for nuclear reactor waste (yes,
| they produce toxic waste; they are not clean), last time I
| checked, required the canisters to be able to survive for 300
| years. The waste lasts longer than 300 years. So all you can do
| with the waste, at best, is leave it for someone else to handle
| later.
|
| Two years ago the USA had a leak which spilled ~400,000 gallons
| of radioactive water into a major river system, and it was
| covered up for two years. You can not trust governments or
| nuclear power companies about this stuff.
|
| The entire ecosystem is getting poisoned by all that waste water
| Japan is dumping. Almost 50% of countries with nuclear reactors
| have had significant leaks and meltdowns, and it only takes one
| significant event to screw up the entire natural environment.
|
| Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right
| beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone
| else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of
| nuclear power.
| gottorf wrote:
| About time!
|
| > "This hadn't been done in this country from start to finish in
| some 30-plus years," Chris Womack, CEO of Atlanta-based Southern
| Co. said Monday in a telephone interview.
|
| IIRC, scientists are working on Gen 4 reactors, and there are a
| number of Gen 3 reactors operating in commercial capacities
| around the world; but the US is still stuck on Gen 2 due to
| regulation.
| gh02t wrote:
| That's a major oversimplification. The reason the US is mostly
| (entirely) running Gen 2 reactors is because we simply lost
| interest in building new reactors for a _long_ time. There were
| regulatory hurdles that caused this, but there were tons and
| tons of other factors that were (IMO) more important.
| Especially economic factors related to the cost and
| mismanagement of large nuclear projects, public opinions
| shifting over nuclear power, and alternatives like natural gas
| being super cheap.
|
| The NRC has been approving Gen 3 designs for a while now but
| nobody wanted to follow through on building them.
| tmn wrote:
| Are costs and mismanagement directly related to regulations?
| Genuine question. This is impression I get from nuclear
| advocates like Mark Nelson and doomberg.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > seven years late and $17 billion over budget.
|
| When does this become a national security issue? Zoinks!
| llsf wrote:
| That reactor could last until 2100.
|
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-31 23:01 UTC)