[HN Gopher] First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US ...
___________________________________________________________________
First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been
canceled
Author : deverton
Score : 139 points
Date : 2023-11-09 00:02 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| scythe wrote:
| >With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however,
| the project's economics have worsened, and backers started
| pulling out of the project.
|
| I would expect this to continue limiting investment in nuclear,
| since the outlook for renewables just keeps getting better, and
| the stumbling blocks are increasingly jejune, like we can't build
| powerlines fast enough.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I am still very confused how power will be generated cleanly on
| cloudy, no-wind days with solar and wind. I am hopeful that
| hydrogen can be generated in the desert and moved by hydrogen-
| truck. Or grid-scale batteries actually exist someday. But if
| we write off nuclear, a lot of coal and natural gas will be
| burned.
| bradbot wrote:
| Is it possible to transport wind / solar energy across the
| country via high powered transmission lines?
| monero-xmr wrote:
| No, because of physics you lose more power the longer
| distance it travels. It is also very expensive and
| difficult to build a network that can move power great
| distances to where it's needed given how dense the areas
| that need it are (major cities).
| bobthepanda wrote:
| You can certainly get it to places closer, then shift
| those areas' power to farther away places, etc.
|
| China has a large network of HVDC lines. Unfortunately,
| due to how the Chinese power market works, they're mostly
| underutilized, even in times of high power stress.
| threeseed wrote:
| Sun Cable, formerly known as PowerLink, is an ambitious
| idea that involves sending solar power via an undersea
| cable 4,200 kilometers (2,610 miles) from Darwin,
| Australia, to Singapore.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
| cesarb wrote:
| Yes, and it's already done today; for instance, in Brazil
| these high power transmission lines transport wind power
| from the northeast region (which has lots of wind due to
| favorable geography) to the southeast region (where most of
| the electricity consumption is). The total distance is on
| the order of 2000 km.
|
| (A fun fact: many of these high power transmission lines
| were originally to send power from the hydroelectric power
| plants in the southeast region to the water-starved
| northeast region. With the rapid expansion of wind power in
| the northeast region, the usual direction of the flow has
| reversed, and it's not uncommon for that wind power to
| provide over a quarter of the power for the whole country.)
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Genuinely curious - why is wind power being cancelled in
| the North East because it isn't cost competitive, if it's
| so easy to do?
|
| https://apnews.com/article/offshore-wind-orsted-
| cancellation...
| kragen wrote:
| you're confusing the northeast of brazil, which is what
| cesar was talking about, with the northeast of the usa
|
| these are not just in different countries but in vastly
| different climates in different hemispheres
|
| the exact page you linked in your comment literally
| answers your question: 'due to problems with supply
| chains, higher interest rates and a failure to obtain the
| amount of tax credits the company wanted. ... High
| inflation, supply chain disruptions and the rising cost
| of capital and building materials are making projects
| more expensive while developers are trying to get the
| first large U.S. offshore wind farms opened.'
|
| maybe you should have read it
|
| please don't post random bullshit without respect to
| whether it's true or not
| monero-xmr wrote:
| It's strange because wind is supposedly overwhelmingly
| cheaper and better, yet even with tons of government
| subsidies and political will behind it, it still can't be
| built. Wouldn't something truly more cost effective be
| easy to build because it's cheaper? Clearly something
| doesn't add up.
| cesarb wrote:
| > It's strange because wind is supposedly overwhelmingly
| cheaper and better
|
| There's two kinds of wind power: onshore and offshore.
| Their costs are different, with onshore being cheaper.
| The ones in Brazil are all onshore, while the one in the
| article you linked to is offshore. In the USA, offshore
| is even more complicated because of the Jones Act (it
| needs specialized ships to transport and erect the
| structures, while onshore needs only common cranes).
| kragen wrote:
| obviously enough, numerous projects that are profitable
| when you can finance them at 1% become unprofitable when
| you have to finance them at 6%, particularly when you're
| competing with incumbent assets financed at 1%
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
|
| feb 02022, 0.08% interest. since august, 5.33%
|
| nothing is easy to build in the usa; it's halfway to
| being zimbabwe
| nimeni wrote:
| Because the Jones Act of 1920 prevents use of the
| existing European installation ships so they have to
| start from scratch in uncompetitive American shipyards.
|
| https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/charlotte/news/2023/04/0
| 3/t...
|
| https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/rust-buckets-how-
| jones-...
| kragen wrote:
| this is just one of many factors, and one that was
| understood by oersted when they originally started the
| project; the article mentions others that are more
| relevant
|
| in particular, you should expect to see many, many
| cancelled projects across the entire economy with the
| interest rate hikes the usa put in place
|
| obviously none of this is relevant to brazil
| mrguyorama wrote:
| There are mild externalities assumed and feared about
| offshore wind, despite it being pretty good in a
| multitude of ways. States are playing a dumb game,
| because we would be better off if there was lots of
| offshore wind, but each state individually is better off
| having offshore wind SOMEWHERE ELSE.
|
| For example, here in maine, our premier engineering
| school has spent two decades now being a premier wind
| energy investment and research institution, and we have
| minted hundreds and hundreds of trained people into the
| field, yet our Democrat governor still decided to sign a
| bill that bans offshore wind, something that Orono has
| explicitly invested into for years.
|
| Our state desperately needs new generation to bring power
| costs down, but there's no real incentive for anyone to
| do so (why build new supply to bring down your own
| revenue?) and apparently the state government has zero
| interest to help itself there.
| iamthemonster wrote:
| Ignore the sibling comment, it is definitely possible,
| typically via HVDC transmission. With 3% losses per 1000km,
| HVDC transmission of variable renewable energy is
| absolutely part of our future energy systems.
|
| Wind is especially well suited to this - to a certain
| extent it's always windy SOMEWHERE whereas with solar you
| ain't generating any at night, no matter what.
| cesarb wrote:
| > whereas with solar you ain't generating any at night,
| no matter what.
|
| Nitpicking: that's only the case for photovoltaics. Solar
| thermal can store the heat for a while, and keep
| generating even after the sun goes down.
| kragen wrote:
| solar thermal is dead tho
|
| just like other thermal power plants, it's too expensive
| to compete with pv and wind
| NikkiA wrote:
| It's never 'not windy' everywhere, plus gravity batteries can
| store power for days/weeks.
|
| Geothermal is also an 'always on' renewable.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| If it was this easy, gravity batteries and geothermal would
| be everywhere and widely used, but they remain niche.
| voisin wrote:
| Because there are currently cheaper options. Those are
| last mile, high hanging fruit solutions.
| kragen wrote:
| gravity batteries and geothermal are too expensive to be
| competitive, except in the niches of pumped hydro,
| district heating, very polar regions, and stranded assets
| from before pv and wind got so cheap
| angiosperm wrote:
| Incidentally, the only viable gravity batteries known today
| are pumped hydro reservoirs. On the up side, they only need
| a hill. On the down side, they need a hill.
|
| (Gravity Vault, BTW, is 100% scam.)
|
| Suspending weights from ocean platforms (e.g. scrapped
| supertankers), for flat places with deep sea nearby, should
| be a viable alternative, but it has not been done yet. Deep
| cave systems are another, either draining water into them
| or (for those below the water table) pumping air in. There
| are a _lot_ of deep caves.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Deserts don't tend to have much water, so where do you expect
| to get the hydrogen from? Getting water to the desert takes a
| pile of energy as it is, and typically once it gets there
| people want to turn it into plants.
| kragen wrote:
| you can use the hydrogen an arbitrarily large number of
| times once you get it there, and the amount of water needed
| is so small that this is not a major part of the cost of a
| grid-scale storage system system even if you have to truck
| it in, which you don't because even deserts have
| groundwater
|
| please do the math instead of posting random bullshit
| without respect to whether it's true or not
|
| specifically hydrogen is 142 MJ/kg
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density and is 1/9
| of water by mass, so each kg of water you drill, truck in,
| or collect from cisterns can store 15.8 MJ as hydrogen. a
| square meter of 21% efficient pv panel produces 210 watts
| nameplate, or 52 watts derating for the 25% capacity factor
| typical for deserts. that is 4.5 MJ per day. the water
| needed to store the panel's daily production weighs much
| less than the panel itself and is therefore much cheaper to
| truck in
|
| obviously it would be stupid to truck it back out again
| unless you decided to do your grid-scale storage somewhere
| else
| angiosperm wrote:
| Deserts all have way more humidity than you could ever need
| for your hydrogen production. Extracting hydrogen from
| atmospheric water vapor is a win because it is cleaner than
| ground water, and has already been vaporized.
| cesarb wrote:
| > I am still very confused how power will be generated
| cleanly on cloudy, no-wind days with solar and wind.
|
| You are making it harder by adding that "cleanly"
| requirement, because the simple answer is going to be
| "natural gas". Unlike coal or nuclear, natural gas power
| plants are fast to start and stop (hydroelectric is even
| faster, but depends on favorable geography), so they can be
| left powered down (using no fuel) until they're necessary;
| and both overbuilding wind and solar, and spreading them over
| a wider area, can reduce the amount of time where that
| natural gas (or hydroelectric) backup is necessary.
|
| By requiring a perfect solution (100% clean), you are
| excluding the 90% solution which is already possible, and
| which can be incrementally enhanced to get closer and closer
| to that 100% goal (by adding more wind and solar, by
| strengthening the interconnections so the generation is
| spread over a wider area, by sprinkling a bit of storage like
| batteries or reversible hydroelectric, and even by
| dynamically reducing consumption when there's a generation
| shortage).
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Reversible hydro is actually pretty possible in much of the
| world, particularly the US, because all you need is
| something bowl-shaped at a high elevation. Pumped hydro for
| the most part needs storage measured in hours or days, and
| something like the size of Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam is
| overkill.
|
| It's also more advantageous than regular hydro, because it
| does not need to be in the path of flowing water, so you
| avoid issues with silting up, lack of suitable locations,
| it's much less environmentally destructive, etc.
| StillBored wrote:
| funded by backdoor taxes if texas is any indication. Prop 7
| passed, which is basically just shifting the cost of grid
| reliability from the energy companies to the tax payers. So
| now you get to pay top dollar for the energy which is 50%+
| carbon sources, while also paying to keep the plants
| operating from the general budget.
|
| Its like a wet dream for those energy traders.
|
| https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_Proposition_7,_Creation_of_St
| a...
| camel_gopher wrote:
| The problem with this 90% solution is that the more
| renewables are added, the more natural gas capacity is
| required to cover the capacity. Good problem for the
| natural gas industry.
|
| Going clean with nuclear isn't cheap right now, and it
| shouldn't be. It wasn't at the start of renewables when
| solar was expensive.
|
| Cheap, reliable, clean; pick two.
| cesarb wrote:
| > The problem with this 90% solution is that the more
| renewables are added, the more natural gas capacity is
| required to cover the capacity.
|
| That can be the case only if the demand also increases.
| If the demand stays the same, adding more wind and solar
| can only decrease how much the natural gas power plants
| are used, and the required capacity (that is, how much
| they can produce at full power) either stays the same or
| decreases (if the newly added wind and solar are non-
| correlated enough to reduce the chance of all of them
| "going dark" at the same time).
| kragen wrote:
| or if existing plants shut down, for example coal and
| nuclear plants
|
| they are in fact shutting down in many cases because they
| can't compete with renewables, and the result is that
| more grid-scale storage or peaker capacity (or demand
| response!) is needed
|
| but this is a good kind of problem to have, if you
| replace 900 megawatts (produced) of coal with 400
| megawatts (produced, not nameplate) of solar and 500
| megawatts of gas, you've still cut carbon emissions by
| two thirds, and lowered electricity prices at the same
| time
| pasttense01 wrote:
| There already is a massive amount of natural gas
| generating capacity. But if this capacity is used one
| tenth as much as it is currently used it will only use
| one tenth as much natural gas and will last much longer.
| atoav wrote:
| The thing about cloudy no wind days is:
|
| 1. These are conditions that don't coincidence as often as
| one would think
|
| 2. If they do happen at the same time they are limited to
| certain places
|
| Now the only thing you need to have your solar and wind
| installations not in one place and make sure it is unlikely
| enough to have all of them inoperational at once.
|
| If you have the proper energy storage and a big enough grid
| that can balance itself this is totally doable.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| It's possible to build mostly renewable grids today with
| existing technology without nuclear. For example Marin Clean
| Energy generates over 90% of its energy from carbon free
| sources [1].
|
| Storage and batteries are the key. Although lithium ion has
| limitations in the use case of long term discharge and
| storage, new chemistries are becoming commercially available
| that are appropriate for grid scale power. Iron Air batteries
| are made out of cheap, common materials, can discharge for up
| to 100 hours and can store power for long periods of time.
| Form Energy is building a plant in West Virginia that will
| produce these batteries and will open in 2024 [2].
|
| Renewables are getting increasingly cheaper. Storage is
| increasingly more available. The writing is on the wall.
| Renewables are going to win out and it's going to happen much
| sooner than conventional wisdom says.
|
| [1] https://www.mcecleanenergy.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/11/20...
|
| [2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/form-energy-
| build-lo...
| gravitronic wrote:
| A harder stumbling block compared to nuclear is land mass
| requirements per Mwh:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
| threeseed wrote:
| There are many parts of the world that are uninhabitable
| because it is too hot.
|
| The perfect location for solar installations.
| fao_ wrote:
| And the world production of food far exceeds the world's
| population, yes.
|
| The difficulty, as always, is logistics and economics.
| downvotetruth wrote:
| You used the word inhabitable. I do not think it means what
| you think it means.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I think they confused "hot" with "wet"
| threeseed wrote:
| I have edited to mean uninhabitable.
|
| e.g. places like outback Australia where it reaches 50C
| and is a long distance from water.
| atoav wrote:
| So the solar panels will have dust and extremely harsh
| temperature cycles. I don't have any source on that, but
| I don't think the gained efficiency from the hot sun is
| going to outweigh the pain (and efficiency loss) from
| maintaining that efficiency in such an environment.
| kragen wrote:
| typically desert solar farms have higher capacity
| factors, like 25% to 29%, than non-desert solar farms,
| which are typically more like 20%, or 10% in very polar
| countries like the uk, germany, or the netherlands;
| possibly faster degradation will eventually reverse the
| relationship
|
| but, for the time being, the gained efficiency from the
| hot sun does seem to outweigh the efficiency loss
|
| as an ai language model, i cannot feel pain, so i do not
| know what outweighs it
| atoav wrote:
| As an electrical engineer I have to sadly inform you that
| electricity transport is not free. Transporting electricity
| from those places to the places with populations is overall
| inefficient.
|
| So the best place for a solar panel is right next to were
| the energy is needed (provided there is at least some sun).
|
| Solar installations in deserts could still be a thing if
| you are willing to think it differently (e.g. use the
| energy for desalination and to split water into hydrogen
| and oxygen, transport that hydrogen via container ship
| etc).
| kragen wrote:
| no because even though pv uses orders of magnitude more land
| per megawatt (not per megawatt hour; please get your units
| straight) it still uses two orders of magnitude less land
| than is available
|
| please do the math instead of posting random bullshit without
| any regard to whether or not it is true
|
| i did
|
| https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html
| jcranmer wrote:
| If this is the math you did:
|
| > A crude calculation (earthradius_equatorial^2 * pi *
| (1000 W/m^2) * 1 year in units(1) --- gosh, Unix is great!)
| suggests that the total solar energy falling on the earth
| is about 40000 * 10^20 joules per year.
|
| ... that's not a good approximation. There's someone who
| actually has done less crude math for maximum possible
| solar energy, at least for the UK:
| https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml (though the
| HTML version is somewhat annoying because it's still
| paginated as if it were a book). Spoiler alert: it's
| roughly enough energy to cover total transportation energy
| demand, nowhere near total energy demand in the UK.
| atoav wrote:
| I mean UK isn't quite known for its sunny weather, right?
| I would guess in Norway during the dark part of the year
| it is even going to be worse.
|
| The farther north you go the more relevant technologies
| like wind energy and geothermal will become.
| kragen wrote:
| and maybe nuclear or synfuel. also, the farther south;
| there used to be a nuclear reactor in mcmurdo
|
| norway in particular gets almost all their _electricity_
| from hydroelectric plants
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1025497/distribution-
| of-... but of course its transportation sector is still
| mostly fossil-powered
| kragen wrote:
| you would look much less foolish if you read more than
| just the introduction to my notes; i did a great deal
| more math than that
|
| while i appreciate mackay's calculations a great deal,
| his estimates for very polar countries such as the uk are
| not generally applicable, and even for the uk are
| probably conditioned on overly pessimistic assumptions;
| he would undoubtedly agree if he were alive today
|
| in particular, he assumed (reasonably) that 10%-efficient
| solar panels would be much cheaper than 20%-efficient
| ones, which would remain impractically expensive. but in
| fact most solar farms are being built with 21%-efficient
| panels because they're nearly as cheap as the
| 16%-efficient kind, and the 10%-efficient kind has been
| competed out of the market. so mackay's excellent
| calculations are all too low by more than a factor of 2,
| because one of his reasonable assumptions turned out to
| be wrong
|
| but i do think it's plausible that without wind the uk
| would have to continue importing energy from abroad, as
| it has done since the 19th century, unless it goes
| nuclear. because mackay was _aware_ his estimates for
| very polar countries such as the uk were not generally
| applicable, importing solar energy from abroad was in
| fact what he recommended in the chapter you linked but
| evidently didn 't bother to read
| jcranmer wrote:
| > you would look much less foolish if you read more than
| just the introduction to my notes; i did a great deal
| more math than that
|
| Perhaps, but I see nothing in your post that actually
| corrects for effective solar irradiation on Earth, or for
| the fact that half the Earth's surface is by definition
| not receiving any sunlight at any given time, or for the
| fact that most of the Earth is water and not land
| (although I suppose you dropping the 4 from the
| multiplier for the surface area is meant to account for
| that). In other words, at no point did I see anything
| that took into account the error I pointed out.
| kragen wrote:
| you didn't point out any errors; maybe you noticed one
| and forgot to mention it. please let me know if so
|
| if you're interested in taking the capacity factor into
| account, which accounts for things like night, clouds,
| and oblique illumination, a number of my other notes in
| https://dercuano.github.io/topics/solar.html (linked from
| the bottom of my above-linked note) do that; for example
| in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/japan-energy-
| autarky.html i calculated that energy autarky for japan,
| if purely solar, would require 5% of its land area and
| about 1.7 trillion euros of solar modules, taking into
| account all of those factors as well as panel efficiency.
| since then, the price has dropped by more than a factor
| of 2, but the land area required remains about the same,
| or slightly increased
|
| (floating that 5% of their land area on solar barges off
| the coast, instead of occupying precious land area, is
| also clearly feasible; it just isn't economically
| competitive, much like nuclear power)
|
| of course, the real-life solution also involves wind and
| grid-scale storage
|
| perhaps it goes without saying that very few places are
| as densely populated or as heavily industrialized as
| japan, so much smaller fractions of their land area would
| suffice
| D_Alex wrote:
| >pv uses orders of magnitude more land per megawatt (not
| per megawatt hour; please get your units straight)
|
| "Per MWhr" is a better measure when comparing intermittent-
| power generation such as wind and solar.
|
| >posting random bullshit
|
| ^^
| kragen wrote:
| you can and should use 'per megawatt produced' rather
| than 'per megawatt nameplate capacity' when comparing
| things like solar to things like nuclear
|
| but intermittency is irrelevant to basic
| incommensurability of units; neither nuclear nor solar
| uses more and more land over time to produce a constant
| amount of power, which is what 'land per megawatt hour'
| implies
| gravitronic wrote:
| > pv uses orders of magnitude more land per megawatt
|
| Glad we agree
|
| If anyone's reading this and wants a decent resource I
| suggest Bill Gates's book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
| kragen wrote:
| i suggest learning the basics of the field, so you can do
| a modicum of critical thinking, instead of parroting
| talking points from thought leaders, without any idea of
| what it would mean for them to be true or false
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I would call that a minor hurdle. There's actually no
| shortage of unused land. Or roofs. And agrivoltaics
| (combining solar with farming) is a thing. And wind turbines
| and farms are a common combination as well. And we have off
| shore wind, and floating offshore wind. Which you can combine
| with solar. Floating solar to limit evaporation in hydro
| basins is also a thing.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Their data source suggests that rooftop solar, onshore and
| offshore wind and nuclear are basically tied on that metric
| so not sure what problem you're seeing?
|
| Is it the ground mounted grid solar? I'm sure some countries
| will happily trade extra land use for much cheaper energy.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The problem is those prices are wrong; they are pricing the
| hard thing.
|
| Renewable sells when it wants to, for dirt cheap. And they
| don't sell when they don't want to. At that point, today,
| typically natural gas picks up the ball. Other storage is as
| much in its infancy as SMRs, as is "demand response".
|
| The pricing people compare so favorably isn't pure renewables,
| it's that renewables + fall back fossil mix.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| This is true. And it also highlights what the part I don't
| understand about these nuclear investments.
|
| Absent massive government subsidies, any nuclear-based
| solution has to compete against the renewable + fossil mix,
| which is dramatically cheaper than any nuclear solution. That
| means any nuclear investments will have to operate in a
| pretty unfavorable market until renewables reach a saturation
| point (maybe 50% of energy generation or more.) That point is
| still somewhere in the future.
|
| It's not clear when that saturation point will arrives (or if
| it will), but when that happens today's nuclear investors
| will also have to "bet" that storage costs won't have dropped
| to the point where storage eats a big chunk of the market for
| nuclear generation. And finally: in the course of taking this
| risky long term bet, nuclear manufacturers will have to build
| out huge amounts of manufacturing capacity so they can
| actually meet market demand.
|
| Anyway, the whole thing seems like a pretty risky bet. Maybe
| not such a risky bet if the technology was mature, but very
| risky given the fact that storage _is_ relatively mature and
| basically needs a lot of manufacturing and process tweaks to
| wipe out the benefits of nuclear.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Renewables have a lumpy profile of energy provided. Nuclear
| has a flat profile.
|
| But demand is also lumpy, so the issues of matching supply to
| load are basically identical.
|
| What do you think France uses all the gas on its grid for?
| Why do they have excess electricity in the middle of the
| night that they need to tempt people to use domestically or
| export to other countries?
| pfdietz wrote:
| This was entirely foreseeable.
|
| Notes from the Feb. 2023 meeting of the Idaho Falls Power Board
| (one of the utilities in UAMPS, and the place where the reactors
| would have been built.)
| https://www.idahofallsidaho.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Minute...
|
| NuScale still needed to get costs down by $700 M to reach the
| promised $89/MWh. Without that, it would be $105/MWh. This is
| also after federal subsidies.
|
| "GM Prairie said that the CFPP would need to come down by 55% to
| be competitive with the market."
|
| "CFPP is not inflation protected because cost increases above
| projections are borne by the developer which is UAMPS and its
| members in the project."
|
| "GM Prairie commented that he has been to many meetings recently,
| including CFPP sales meetings and notices that utilities are
| still not subscribing, but instead wishing the project well. He
| said it was his opinion that even if the project gets to $89 LCOE
| and 80% subscribed by November, that it still is not an
| attractive deal for Idaho Falls [...]."
|
| "GM Prairie [...] pointed out that all the big utilities have
| left the project but the smaller utilities stay in because they
| are trusting UAMPS."
|
| "GM Prairie said [...] that the $89 LCOE is based on 40-50
| modules being sold."
|
| "GM Prairie said the UAMPS' resolution states that the project
| has to come in/or under $89 LCOE and be subscribed at least by
| 80% and if UAMPS fails to do that, then just one member of the
| PMC can vote to terminate the project."
| kragen wrote:
| note that 89 dollars per megawatt hour is three to five times
| what solar energy usually costs
|
| as i have said before, if small modular reactors were cheaper
| energy sources than diesel engines, they would power every ship
| in the navies of the usa, france, the uk, russia, and china,
| instead of just the aircraft carriers, some of the submarines,
| and a few other russian ships
|
| (and note that diesel engines are too expensive to compete with
| solar and wind)
|
| one day nuclear energy will be cheaper than solar and wind, but
| for now the humans' manufacturing is too primitive
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Exactly. All these numbers are based on the current/past market
| and a very broken assumption that LCOE of competing technology
| (renewables + storage) won't continue to drop further. Which of
| course they are projected to do; and not just a little. And of
| course that already actually happened and was widely predicted
| to happen years ago.
|
| Also the numbers of these plants would need to be massively
| higher to be significant. 40-50 plants is tiny a feasibility
| study. That study has now been cancelled for cost reasons.
|
| You'd need many thousands to make these start contributing
| significant percentages of market share to overall energy
| production. Tens of thousands really. Which of course at a high
| LCOE is never going to be competitive. Basically the "value"
| proposition to investors is to be selling these things at a
| massive loss using government subsidies to make that tolerable
| for whomever is buying. This has to be sustained until the
| learning effects drive the LCOE low enough that making them
| actually stands a chance of turning a profit. And of course
| there are no guarantees that the LCOE will actually ever catch
| up with renewables. Small chance of success & high chance of
| failure that requires decades of sustained massive investments
| and massive subsidies. All with a high degree of uncertainty.
|
| That's not a great investor pitch of course. Which is why they
| are bailing. There seem to be a few other projects still going.
| But they'll have to face the same realities eventually.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Nothing has changed since the early days. A helluva complicated
| and expensive way to boil water.
|
| "At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and
| inconvenient means of obtaining energy ... This is expensive
| power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe." --
| C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was
| operating the Hanford reactors, 1951. ( Ref: Power from the Atom
| - An Appraisal, Nucleonics, Feb. 1951 )
|
| https://www.ieer.org/pubs/atomicmyths.html
|
| Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: https://ieer.org/projects/carbon-
| free-nuclear-free/
| apatheticonion wrote:
| Turkey is set to get 10% of its grid electricity from the
| Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant [1]
|
| The build cost has been 22B (excluding loans) and it will have
| a capacity of 4456MW meaning it's $4.9/W.
|
| On average the cost per Watt for solar is 27 cents (excluding
| loans and costs for storage) [2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant
|
| [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
|
| EDIT: incorrect calculation
| Retric wrote:
| That project isn't finished they are targeting 2026 and hope
| it's only ~10% over budget.
|
| Your solar numbers are wildly inflated because that's per
| watt not per watt hour. Over 2/3 of nuclear power plants
| costs occur _after_ you build the things. It would be
| comparable if 22B was the total cost _and_ if nuclear didn't
| need ~1,000 full time employees, fuel, decommissioning etc.
| Those costs delay how quickly you can pay back loans which
| then drives up how much interest nuclear pays over the plants
| lifetime.
|
| Companies have signed solar power purchase contracts at
| 2c/kWh. Adding solar redundancy and batteries for 24/7 power
| is actually more flexible and cheaper than nuclear because
| you can cheaply follow the demand curve. Meanwhile nuclear
| power plants need to go offline for multiple weeks every ~2
| years and really want to sit at 100% the rest of the time.
|
| PS: Even just looking at construction costs is misleading
| because solar starts producing power so much sooner. You're
| paying interest from day 1 of construction not day 1 of
| operations. So if you take 6 years to build that's 5 years of
| interest on the first years construction costs without any
| revenue. Meanwhile solar's been producing power for ~5 years
| and paying down debt.
| kragen wrote:
| 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour even
|
| https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-
| ppas...
|
| note that the coal plant mentioned in that article has
| since been decommissioned
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan_Generating_Station
| kragen wrote:
| these are great numbers, thanks
|
| keep in mind that almost all the cost of pv plants is
| construction (capex), while most of the cost of nuclear is
| during operation and decommissioning (opex)
|
| so 20 cents per watt capex is close to 60 cents per watt
| total, twice the price of pv
|
| as emmaengineer pointed out, though, you did the division
| backwards: it's 0.20 watts per dollar, not 0.20 dollars per
| watt. the correct quotient is 490C/ per watt, or maybe closer
| to 15 dollars per watt including opex
| EmmaEngineer wrote:
| $22B / 4.456B = $4.9/W, about 20x more expensive than your
| number for PV.
| kragen wrote:
| thank you for posting this correction; i had missed that
| obvious error
| apatheticonion wrote:
| Oh you're right! Did it backwards. Correcting my post
| kragen wrote:
| i just noticed that you're linking a page about _panel_
| prices
|
| two problems
|
| one, pv modules are typically about a third of the cost of a
| utility-scale solar farm; things like installation labor and
| power electronics are also part of the cost. so roughly we
| should expect solar projects to cost about 80 cents per peak
| watt based on that number
|
| two, that page ends in 02021, but pv module prices have
| fallen by about a third to half since the beginning of this
| year https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-
| preis...
|
| in particular solarserver's 'mainstream' category was about
| 25 euro-cents throughout 02021 and is now at 19, 24% lower,
| and the lowest it's ever been
|
| it seems like the price-fixing cartel announced at the
| beginning of 02019 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-
| meeting-solar-gcl-i... has finally collapsed
|
| solarserver's 'low-cost' category is at the staggeringly low
| price of 11 euro-cents per peak watt; if the other costs
| didn't change, that would lower the solar plant cost from 80
| cents to 65 cents or so per peak watt, though in fact they
| tend to increase somewhat because of the larger area of solar
| cells required to reach the same wattage (that's why the
| mainstream pv modules are more expensive)
|
| a third problem is the capacity factor, tho; nuke plants
| typically run at about 90% capacity, while solar farms run at
| closer to 20%, because of problems such as night. in very
| polar countries like germany it's 10%. so 70 cents per
| nameplate watt works out to more like 3.5 dollars per
| delivered watt
|
| which is still cheaper than 4.9 (or 5.4 dollars per delivered
| watt assuming that 90% capacity factor) but not implausibly
| cheaper anymore
|
| if solar farm builders can find ways to reduce the costs of
| solar farms proportionately to the vertiginous drop in module
| prices, which sounds implausible but has always been done
| successfully before, we should expect the price to drop to
| half that
| Retric wrote:
| German solar policies are insane. Nation wide capacity
| factor was 11.6% in 2018. The numbers are so low because
| they keep building solar in the northern parts of the
| country which are absolutely terrible for solar.
|
| Brandenburg has a stupidly large amount of solar compared
| to a terrible amount of sunlight. https://en.wikipedia.org/
| wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#/media/...
|
| Meanwhile the best location in Germany the south southern
| tip of Baden-Wurttemberg only has a relatively small
| fraction of their total installed solar. I haven't worked
| out the exact numbers but they are something like 20+% less
| efficient than they could be. Granted they would need to
| build more power transmission lines but it's a small county
| so such projects would be fairly cheap compared to the
| efficiency gain.
|
| PS: May solar power plants on the US are over 30% capacity
| factor and the average is ~25%. We're a long way from the
| equator. In a perfect location solar tracking PV should get
| around 40% capacity factor. You beat 1/pi because over the
| day an angled panel casts a wider shadow than the width of
| the panel.
| kragen wrote:
| i've often wondered why germany's pv capacity factor is
| so terrible, thanks
|
| prc's pv capacity factor is also around 10% last i
| checked, which is also absurdly low and suggests that
| they maybe aren't as capitalist as they seem in important
| respects (i'd be interested in updates)
|
| by 'may' do you mean 'many'
|
| it was easier to justify solar tracking (and
| concentrating solar, and nuclear) fifteen years ago when
| solar panels are expensive. but now you have to trade off
| twenty dollars in mechanical parts for tracking against
| 180 more peak watts of solar panels. with maintenance
| costs it's easy for the balance to come out in favor of a
| simpler system without tracking
| Retric wrote:
| Grid scale tracking systems keep getting cheaper but
| neither always wins.
|
| Solar tracking makes more sense when you look at
| wholesale rates over a day. Peak demand prices start
| right as static solar production falls off so you would
| need batteries not just more solar panels to sell at
| those rates. On top of this costs like land, inverters,
| and wiring gets amaorterised across more hours of
| production.
|
| Wholesale prices get influenced by the deployed solar
| power including rooftop solar. Which adds yet another
| dimension to these models.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| It's important to remember that research and commercial funding
| for nuclear reactors has basically frozen for the better part
| of 60 years, which means that fission tech hasn't been
| following Wright's law and we're still stuck with designs from
| 60 years ago. Things have heated up a bit more recently but
| this stuff has a long lead time (+ think of all the people who
| didn't go into nuclear because of the lack of funding).
|
| There's actually lines of research to do direct conversion of
| energy instead of boiling water which gets efficiency up to
| ~90% instead of 40%. But the challenge with fission isn't fuel
| conversion efficiency but manufacturing and maintenance costs.
| I wonder if getting rid of the water requirements for fission
| reactors would meaningfully alter the costs involved. Would be
| neat if it would.
|
| But ultimately fission is _still_ price competitive with
| renewables and that's when you ignore the need for batteries
| and the fact that it's taken a lot of investment in renewables
| paired with underinvestment in fission.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| All the major world powers dumped tons of money into
| researching light water fission, precisely because it is dual
| use technology for making weapons.
|
| What has not had billions of government dollars in finding
| were renewables.
| p_l wrote:
| Lots was dumped into known low-effectiveness light water
| fission precisely because _it is not a viable path for
| making weapons_.
|
| There are many more efficient ways of running nuclear
| power, especially ones that do not involve either needing
| enrichement of fuel nor throwing away majority of still
| usable fuel - but despite NPT, they are blocked politically
| by nuclear-haves.
| p_l wrote:
| Can't edit anymore, but for reference for those who
| probably downvote out of misunderstanding.
|
| Light water moderated reactors aren't a pathway to making
| nuclear weapons, because _they require that you have the
| ability to enrich uranium separately just to start_.
|
| I.e. a light-water moderated reactor is dependant either
| on capability to enrich fuel and/or use unenriched fuel
| (for enrichment or plutonium production) - which are core
| capabilities for making fission weapons.
|
| This is why they have been favoured on non-proliferation
| (and often "control") grounds - they are dependant on
| fuel from groups that do have fission weapon production
| pipeline or at least parts of it.
|
| To work from natural uranium, without artificial
| enrichment, you need to use either heavy-water moderation
| or graphite moderation, or more exotic designs - but then
| you can both use unenriched uranium to produce power as
| well as produce plutonium or other useful things, and a
| distillation pipeline provides for both light-water
| reactor fuel and weapon fissile material.
|
| Details of how subsidies went are way more complex, and
| both renewables and nuclear _and_ fossil fuels had areas
| heavily subsidized.
| peyton wrote:
| Forced labor in solar-grade polysilicon production is
| effectively in the billions of dollars of government
| subsidies club. Let's not kid ourselves.
| kragen wrote:
| hmm, i hadn't heard of this before
|
| https://www.csis.org/analysis/addressing-forced-labor-
| concer...
|
| > _(...) there is mounting evidence that the polysilicon
| produced in Xinjiang, the first step in the supply chain
| for solar photovoltaics, possibly uses forced labor.
| (...)_
|
| > _Another major problem is that there is limited
| visibility into the actual conditions under which
| polysilicon is produced. In part, this is because
| Xinjiang is inaccessible, so it is hard to get verifiable
| facts on the working conditions inside factories. Much of
| the incredible research that has brought this topic to
| the surface has involved inference and triangulation._
|
| this was two years ago; is there more reliable
| information since then?
| stonogo wrote:
| In 1951 the Hanford reactors were making plutonium, not power.
| Only one of the Hanford reactors sold electricity, and not
| until the middle of the 1960s. That one went over budget to
| construct but operating costs were well under predictions. I'm
| not sure Mr. Suits had enough information in 1951 to make his
| claim authoritative seventy years later.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The Internet Archive has many old issues of Nucleonics
| available. Here's the full article you reference:
|
| "Power from the Atom - An Appraisal"
|
| https://archive.org/details/sim_nucleonics_1951-02_8_2/page/...
| sciencesama wrote:
| Used to work in utah, warren buffet is damn close with the mayor
| and team and threatened to use his full power if state starts
| using more renewable energy, he has huge coal mining shares fyi
| !!
| kragen wrote:
| it's news to me that utah's head of state is a mayor
|
| i would be surprised if your information about warren's
| position on renewable energy turns out to be more accurate than
| your information about how he spells his name
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-19/buffett-s...
| Retric wrote:
| The US has actually tried small nuclear reactors before... "All
| components limited to packages measuring 7.5 by 9 by 20 feet (2.3
| m x 2.7 m x 6.1 m) and weighing 20,000 pounds (9,100 kg)"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
| jmclnx wrote:
| >The final straw came on Wednesday, when NuScale and the primary
| utility partner, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems,
| announced that the Carbon Free Power Project no longer had enough
| additional utility partners
|
| I cannot help but to think the Fossil Fuel Industry had their
| hands in this.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| No, it turns out that SMRs are not yet economically viable,
| just as us skeptics have been claiming. SMRs are continually
| hyped by the pro-nuclear crowd online. They aren't cost
| efficient vs renewables.
| donny2018 wrote:
| Nuclear tech hasn't had a luxury of having renewables-like
| subsidies though.
|
| Who knows what the prices could have been had nuclear got the
| same level of subsidies.
|
| Nuclear energy (especially fast neutron tech that can use the
| abundant U-238 and nuclear waste from existing NPPs) isn't
| getting attention it deserves. Only Russia, China and India
| are investing in it, but it's neglected in the West because
| there is no immediate profit to gain from this.
| kragen wrote:
| nuclear tech had the biggeet subsidies program in human
| history in the 01940s and 50s, continuing to a significant
| extent into the 80s, which is how the humans got it in the
| first place
|
| some historians argue that subsidizing nuclear tech too
| heavily was a major factor in the collapse of the ussr
| donny2018 wrote:
| And after those subsidies stopped, the progress of
| nuclear power also stopped, naturally. If the subsidies
| continued, we could have had scalable, sustainable and
| affordable nuclear.
|
| I believe that Renewables should be subsidized, and
| current progress is great, but total decarbonization is
| easier to realistically achieve together with nuclear
| energy.
|
| If you support renewables, you don't have to be anti-
| nuclear at all.
| kragen wrote:
| agreed about being anti-nuclear. probably it is not in
| the interest of life forms made of atoms to be anti-
| nuclear
|
| it's plausible that further subsidies could have made
| nuclear power cheap. the long pole in the tent seems to
| be the cost of the steam turbine generator, though, which
| isn't cost-competitive with pv even if the heat to make
| the steam is free. this is after a century of
| improvements, and the steam turbine is the main electric
| power source of every rich economy in the world and most
| of the poor ones. so i'm not sure a few trillion dollars
| more in subsidies would change that
| donny2018 wrote:
| >the long pole in the tent seems to be the cost of the
| steam turbine generator
|
| And yet some "renewables-only" people want to rely on gas
| turbines for the times of unfavorable weather conditions.
|
| And, the turbines are still more efficient (46%
| efficiency with modern Siemens turbines), and the heat
| that isn't going into the turbine steam can still be used
| elsewhere, like for district heating or for industrial
| purposes, which makes the overall system very high yield.
|
| In comparison, photovoltaics is currently at 20%
| efficiency. Wind is at 60% but it's quite intermittent
| and unpredictable.
| kragen wrote:
| agreed
|
| a couple of quibbles, tho
|
| the efficiency of photovoltaics and wind is only relevant
| here if you're powering them from stored energy, such as
| white-hot graphite blocks, rather than from the sun. or
| in the far future when human energy consumption has grown
| by two orders of magnitude
|
| gas turbines are only 'renewables-only' if you make the
| gas from renewable energy
| donny2018 wrote:
| >gas turbines are only 'renewables-only' if you make the
| gas from renewable energy
|
| There are ways to make hydrocarbons from atmospheric
| carbon (using any energy, including renewable) but that
| is nightmarishly inefficient. Anti-nuclear people's plan
| though is to use good ol' fossil gas for the times when
| the weather is unsuitable for renewables.
|
| >the efficiency of photovoltaics and wind is only
| relevant here if
|
| Agreed, you can disregard its efficiency if the source
| energy is free.
|
| Fission energy is so high yield that it's also basically
| free, just like the Sun or wind, with the difference of
| being able to increase/decrease production on demand.
| It's the infrastructure to extract that energy that costs
| money, and those costs could be improved with proper R&D,
| investments, subsidies and economies of scale, just like
| with renewables.
|
| I do believe nuclear is the part of the Solution together
| with renewables. At least we will need nuclear before
| solar extraction and storage are so advanced that they
| can power the grid all the time by themselves. Yes, that
| future is certainly is not very far away, but we can't
| afford much time to start decarbonizing.
| kragen wrote:
| fischer-tropsch is about 60% efficient https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces... but that's
| being fed from energy that's already in the form of
| carbon
|
| water electrolysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrol
| ysis_of_water#Efficien... is about 80% efficient, except
| that there's an experimental capillary-fed process that
| is supposedly 98% efficient
|
| i wouldn't call that 'nightmarishly inefficient',
| particularly if you can do it at hours when electricity
| prices would otherwise be zero or negative because of
| abundant solar or wind power
|
| but i don't know how efficient carbon dioxide reduction
| is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_utili
| zation
|
| nuclear power plants are not normally highly
| dispatchable, though obviously the naval ones are
| donny2018 wrote:
| >water electrolysis ... 80% efficient
|
| It's only to get hydrogen, also there is cost to make it
| liquid, to store it (it's neither trivial nor cheap) and
| to extract energy from it in fuel cells.
|
| >i don't know how efficient carbon dioxide reduction is
|
| If we want to capture carbon from atmosphere and turn it
| back into hydrocarbon fuel like gas or diesel, thus
| achieving net zero emissions, that process is still
| "nightmarishly inefficient". There is a startup that I'm
| watching (Prometheus Fuels) that promises to do that
| cheaply, but there haven't been any positive news from
| them recently
| kragen wrote:
| i'm surprised to see you still haven't posted any numbers
| or cited any sources
| donny2018 wrote:
| " We can expect 48% of the energy from renewable
| electricity to be lost in conversion to liquid fuels,
| using the average value for drop-in diesel technologies
| from our previous economic modeling work. To compound the
| problem, according to various studies 70% of the energy
| in those fuels will be lost when they are combusted in
| internal combustion engines, for a total efficiency of
| 16% for the e-fuels pathway. Therefore, the vast majority
| of the energy from the sun or wind is lost. In contrast,
| the majority of energy used by electric vehicles actually
| goes to powering the wheels, losing only 10% in charging
| and 20% by the motor and for a total efficiency of 72%."
|
| https://theicct.org/e-fuels-wont-save-the-internal-
| combustio...
|
| There is lots of (paywalled) proper economic analysis of
| current methods of Electrofuel generation from
| atmospheric carbon, the summary is that the current
| processes cost multiple times more than similar fossil
| fuels, with the main cost factor being the cost of
| electrolyzed hydrogen per kg, and captured atmospheric
| carbon cost per kg, and all of that comes down to the
| cost of the energy consumed during the process.
|
| https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2021/11/18/how-
| much-wi...
|
| Edit: other than any research, the main indicator (for
| me) is that nobody hasn't yet offered renewables based
| liquid hydrogen or atmospheric carbon Electrofuel at
| nearly viable prices for today's world. If the technology
| was energy efficient, these fuels would be flooding the
| market already even at 2x the price, but the cost of
| producing these is currently 5x or higher. That's why the
| first target for such fuels is commercial aviation and
| sea transportation where the cost of fuel can be absorbed
| less painfully.
| kragen wrote:
| 52% efficiency sounds fantastic; the other 70% loss is
| equally present when you're burning fossil fuels in the
| same engines. of course it is very relevant to the
| electric vehicle comparison, but not to replacing fossil
| fuels in peaker plants or airplanes, which is the topic
| at hand
|
| and it's fantastic news that the main cost factor is the
| cost of the energy input, rather than, for example,
| defouling or catalyst replacement. because once the
| electric grid is mostly renewable and intermittent, so
| that energy is free in the daytime, synthetic fuels will
| be immensely cheaper than they are now. perhaps by even
| more than 5x :)
|
| initially the carbon dioxide won't come from atmospheric
| capture; carbon capture at the source is immensely
| cheaper. perhaps as the number of fossil-fuel and biomass
| point sources dwindles, atmospheric carbon capture will
| become competitive, but i suspect that it may
|
| 16% cycle efficiency might rule out liquid synfuels for
| grid-scale energy storage, but hydrogen should be closer
| to 50% (60% combined-cycle turbine times 80%
| electrolysis), or perhaps higher with fuel cells, and
| though that's much lower than batteries, it's still a
| viable alternative to nuclear if batteries don't work out
| due to shortages or whatever
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Nonsense; it's getting plenty of attention. And there's a
| lot of lobbying happening to ensure that.
|
| The nuclear industry actually has been running on
| subsidies. Also in China and Russia. It would not survive
| long without them. And of course this whole industry was
| bootstrapped via massive defense spending. Trillions in
| today's money.
|
| There's no such thing as an unsubsidized profitable nuclear
| plant. That's why investors are pulling the plug on this
| thing. Because even with the (massive) subsidies, it just
| does not add up to anything remotely financially feasible.
| Unsubsidized LCOE is off by about an order of magnitude
| where it should be now. Never mind in a few decades.
|
| And of course the cost of securing them, dealing with the
| waste, or decommissioning them is typically also
| subsidized. To the point where that's commonly not even
| factored into the projected cost for nuclear because that
| is depressing enough without that. Somebody (i.e. tax
| payers) should take care of all that. Not their problem.
| Most current nuclear waste is stored in temporary locations
| while people figure out how to actually pay for all that.
| That was the plan seventy years ago and there still is no
| solution. Those sites need security. Which of course costs
| money. And eventually "somebody" might do something about
| it. At great cost.
|
| All of it subsidized. By past, current, and future
| generations.
| throw0101b wrote:
| Ontario announced one GE Hitachi BWRX-300 in December 2022, and
| three more in July 2023:
|
| * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-darlington-nu...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BWRX-300
|
| This is in addition to a new large-scale plant:
|
| * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/ontario-new-nuclear-bu...
| ksec wrote:
| Also much more interested in BWRX300 as well. Old and proven
| working technology fine tuned. And will continue to get cheaper
| as they are much more standardised.
| preisschild wrote:
| But why build them in Darlington, when there's a big grid that
| could make use of new CANDU reactors, for which most of the
| supply chain is from Canada and its higher energy output makes
| it more competitive?
|
| BWRX-300 makes more sense in smaller communities.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| One of the perks of building them in Darlington is that the
| regulatory approval process is simpler since there's already
| nuclear facilities on site. Saskatchewan is currently going
| through the site selection and approval process and will be
| doing that for a while while the BWRX-300 units are going up
| in Darlington. The build in Darlington and lessons learned
| will be applied directly to the SK BWRX-300 builds.
| BasilPH wrote:
| David Roberts from Volts talked about why he thinks SRMs are
| overhyped last week. Here's the transcript[^0], but his main
| points are _(I fed the whole transcript the new GPT-4 128k token
| model for this)_:
|
| - SMRs are not yet delivering on their promised benefits and cost
| savings due to challenges in scaling and production.
|
| - The SMR concept is yet to prove itself with efficient and cost-
| effective factory-made parts and repeatable construction
| practices.
|
| - Concern exists that the enthusiasm around SMRs could lead to
| more unfocused subsidies for the nuclear industry without
| addressing the industry's deeper issues of inefficiency and
| historical missteps.
|
| - SMRs are seen as one option among many for balancing renewable
| energy, and they should not be considered the only solution.
|
| - Their capabilities are mostly theoretical at this stage, and
| there's uncertainty if they can bridge the gap between their
| promise and reality in terms of cost and deployment hurdles.
|
| - SMRs might receive undue favor over other equally promising
| technologies for providing firm power.
|
| In conclusion, David believes SMRs are getting more attention and
| investment than warranted by their current capabilities and
| progress, potentially detracting from other solutions that may
| offer better returns or efficiency for transitioning to a
| renewable energy grid.
|
| [^0]: https://transcripts.volts.wtf/the-volts-catalyst-pod-
| crossov... (starts at around 26:13)
| throw0101b wrote:
| Bloomberg's _Odd Lots_ podcast had an episode on nuclear October
| 23:
|
| > _The US is taking a fresh look at nuclear power. After a dearth
| of construction, and de-commissioning of working nuclear plants,
| people are talking, yet again, about it as a source of steady,
| affordable, carbon-free electricity. But of course, nuclear has
| its drawbacks, particularly on the financial side, as new plants
| have been plagued by cost over-runs, contributing to utility
| bankruptcies. So what would need to happen to get the economics
| working again? On this episode we speak with Mark Nelson, the
| founder of Radiant Energy Group, to discuss the state of the
| industry, the state of the technology, and what it would take to
| bring nuclear back into the mix._
|
| * https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/whats-really-standing-in-the-...
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d084PIspUwk
|
| * https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whats-really-standing-...
| Laaas wrote:
| > The decision to cancel the project followed an update from
| NuScale this year regarding the cost of building the reactors,
| which had soared to $9.3 billion from $5.3 billion because of
| rising interest rates and inflation.
|
| Even $5.3B seems very expensive. For reference, (the new Finnish)
| Olkiluoto-3 was EUR11 billion, for 1600 MW. The article says 6 *
| 77 MW = 539 MW!
|
| How is it that we've become so bad at building?
| Pat_Murph wrote:
| We've gotten better at billing than building.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| One I can automate the other not so much
| hotpotamus wrote:
| > How is it that we've become so bad at building?
|
| What industry would you prefer your children to go into?
| Construction or just about anything else?
| theultdev wrote:
| So you prefer other people's children to do your
| construction, got it.
|
| That's fine.. I guess, but the world needs construction
| workers, including in America.
|
| If my son wanted to build nuclear reactors I'd be A-Okay with
| that.
| vinay427 wrote:
| Not the parent commenter, but I read their comment perhaps
| more charitably as describing a general societal attitude
| rather than their personal beliefs that they would instill
| on their children.
|
| No idea if I'm correct, but it's maybe worth offering them
| the benefit of the doubt here.
| theultdev wrote:
| The general societal attitude is what influences their
| personal belief, and vice versa at scale.
|
| But their point remains the same, "let someone else do
| it" (the quiet part: "it's below us").
|
| It's a very negative and elitist attitude that's
| prevalent in bubbles where people don't have to work
| normal jobs.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I don't have and have never wanted children, so you are
| correct that it is not my personal belief. Yes, it's a
| question of the social status afforded to certain
| professions. The ones that actually build and maintain a
| functioning society seem low on that hierarchy. I'm
| willing to bet that the lawyers litigating whether or not
| a nuclear power plant will be built have have a higher
| income than the people who build it.
|
| This is my perception as someone from the working class
| who doesn't get one of those big FAANG salaries; they
| don't check that when you sign up here.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Oh I'd prefer a lot of things that are never going to
| happen. It's more a question of social status - what pays
| more, construction worker, or lawyer who argues for/against
| construction?
| theultdev wrote:
| What was your point in asking this "question of social
| status"?
|
| Nothing in this thread points to lack of workers, but to
| over regulation.
|
| On a personal note, I'd prefer many less lawyers,
| especially the ones who argue against the one energy
| source that works.
|
| I'd prefer many more trade workers, much less in
| academics.
|
| I'd prefer people to not view jobs as a social status and
| appreciate the contributions people give to society.
|
| A plumber can make quite a bit of money, work up to their
| own business, not have to deal with huge amounts of debt,
| and actually provides needed services for society.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Plumber-Salary-per-
| Mon...
|
| A basketball player can make quite a bit of money playing
| basketball if they're exceptional. Looks like the
| national average for a plumber is about $60K/year. Most
| people on this forum would scoff at that if someone
| offered them that. It's actually about as much as my
| uncle, a heavy diesel mechanic, made before his untimely
| death. It's about what my father made when he retired.
|
| Why don't we build? Why don't we do anything; because
| it's more profitable not to I'm sure.
| theultdev wrote:
| 60k/yr can support a family in a lot of areas. Most
| people in my area make around that.
|
| SWE is a bubble and can't really be applied to the rest
| of the workforce. A SWE would scoff at any other job
| because of this.
|
| We do have builders, there is overregulation that stops
| us from building.
|
| It's not the lack of workers.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| My brother was a contractor too and could barely make it
| on that with no kids. He fairly recently became an
| engineer (not the software kind) and was stunned to learn
| that he could take days off and still get paid. He was
| also quite happy to have health insurance. There may not
| be a lack of workers, but there's one less who will ever
| go back because of the nature of the job.
| imtringued wrote:
| >Nothing in this thread points to lack of workers, but to
| over regulation.
|
| The thread points at inflation and interest rates and
| general cost overruns. I don't see the overregulation. As
| others have said, you can run your non nuclear
| powerplants until they fall apart. That isn't possible
| with nuclear power.
| delfinom wrote:
| Depending on the area, construction can pay really well and
| be a stable form of long term employment. Usually the trades
| part of construction is best rather than being a general
| laborer.
|
| In my area of NY suburbs, there's such a shortfall of
| tradesmen now due to boomer retirement en-masse, you see alot
| of younger guys showing up as plumbers, electricians, hvac
| and more that you would never ever have seen just 5 years
| ago.
|
| I wouldn't care if my own kids did it. As long as they figure
| out their life plan in advance, who cares.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I worked with one of the major HVAC companies in that area.
| There was not one dude under 50 in that building. 'we can
| not even get people to apply and we are throwing money at
| them'. That was 10 years ago. That may have changed by now.
| But probably not much.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| How much money were they throwing? Enough to make you
| consider HVAC work?
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Me personally no. I have 20+ years doing what I do. I am
| paid decently for that. But fresh out of high school and
| willing to do the apprentice/mentor thing I probably
| would have considered it very compelling. It was 2-3x
| what I made starting what I do now.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| It's not a job I'd do either for a few reasons,
| principally marginal physical disability; something many
| tradesmen acquire and learn to live with, but to which I
| was essentially born.
|
| That said, if the job is so attractive to young people
| (I'm guessing primarily men), then why do you think that
| not much has changed in the intervening decade?
| Nickersf wrote:
| It depends on what needs to be built. If the regulators 'like'
| what needs to be built it'll pop up fast, look at the wind
| turbine expansion in Europe and parts of the USA. In terms of
| material input that dwarves what building one nuclear power
| plant or blast furnace requires.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Olkiluoto-3's budget also overran a lot to reach 11b. It's also
| an extra reactor at an existing nuclear plant so perhaps that
| somehow reduces costs, and it's built by a very established
| company.
|
| Now, on the other hand, as far as I know NuScale never built a
| commercial reactor before... so we'll see how many of their
| current projects actually come to life.
| chris222 wrote:
| For that price you can build almost any combination of
| wind/solar plus storage. It will probably use less land when
| you factor in exclusion zones and require fewer operators and
| resources. It will also have no major calamity risk and an easy
| clean up and decommissioning.
|
| The Tesla megapack price is about 300 million dollars per 1GWh
| of storage these days.
| audunw wrote:
| Solar will certainly use more land unless you build on
| rooftops or do agrovoltaics. But that's not the norm for
| large scale production yet.
|
| Wind depends on how you calculate area used. The zone that
| excludes other wind turbines and residential buildings will
| be much larger. But the area used by just the base is
| obviously quite small. When placed between farm plots the
| area usage is very effective.
|
| The risk of accidents in the US is probably extremely small.
| I wouldn't personally be worried about. Especially with
| NuScKe which should be passively safe. Though I would have
| said the same about Japan before Fukushima so you never know
| (yes, I know the death toll was negligible, but the effect it
| had on nearby residents is still catastrophic)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Nuclear and solar also can dual-use most of their
| footprint. For nuclear, the keep-out zone becomes a de
| facto nature preserve. And a pretty good one at that, since
| the keep out is enforced well.
|
| Solar installations can be grazed. Alternatively, bifacial
| panels can be installed vertically east-west and the strips
| between can be farmed. Or the panels can be placed on
| rooftops. Or used to shade parking lots. Et cetera.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| This is a bit unfair.
|
| You're comparing untried and untested SMR design to slapping up
| an EPR next to two BWRs if I'm remembering the Finnish project
| correctly. While EPR is newer, we as mankind have a good
| understanding of how to build and operate one.
|
| Now of course Vogtie cost us 30 or 40 whatever billion for a
| couple of trifling PWRs, so your larger point still stands. I
| just think it was dumb of NuScale from the outset to go out
| marketing over-promises on the idea of SMR. If you took an
| educated look at the stats and numbers proponents of SMRs were
| out touting, it's doubtful that even China could have delivered
| on that. How they thought they could do it in the real world of
| Idaho is beyond me? They must have had an ace up their sleeves?
| Or perhaps they expected the government to play a much larger
| role? Not sure.
| nickpp wrote:
| > How is it that we've become so bad at building?
|
| Regulation. No matter how you find it (a drag, useful or even
| life-saving), one thing is certain: it significantly increases
| costs and time to build.
|
| Do you know how Golden Gate or the Empire State Building were
| built on budget and fast? With risks and lost lives.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Finland is hardly a low-regulation country, especially
| compared to Idaho.
| theultdev wrote:
| It is when it comes to nuclear regulation.
|
| The NRC effectively makes nuclear impossible in the US.
| epups wrote:
| Finland has modern regulation for nuclear energy, and is
| constantly improving it
| (https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsfinland-to-reform-
| nucle...). They see it as a strategic option. I'm not sure
| this is the same for Idaho.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" Even $5.3B seems very expensive. For reference, (the new
| Finnish) Olkiluoto-3 was EUR11 billion, for 1600 MW. The
| article says 6 _ 77 MW = 539 MW!"*
|
| Olkiluoto-3's materials and labour costs were locked in well
| before the current inflationary cycle. If they started out
| today the cost would likely be much higher.
|
| Also, NuScale is a novel new design. SMRs haven't been
| commercially deployed anywhere yet, so there's a lot of extra
| risk and cost associated with building and certifying the very
| first ones. After all, it cost Boeing an awful lot more to
| produce the first 777 aircraft than it did to knock out the
| 1000th.
| danbruc wrote:
| And why six? Why not build one and then see?
| petre wrote:
| You still need to build the building with the water pools and
| eveything else. If you bother bying the land, contracting
| construction workers, leasing heavy machinery you could as
| well build 6x as big and spread the fixed costs over that.
| NuScale was designed to work with up to 12 modules.
|
| It's too bad it dodn't work out commercially. Their other
| projects will probably get cancelled as well if they face the
| same price increases.
| fulafel wrote:
| For additional data, a just announced start in Poland [1] is
| planned for $40B for 6 AP1000 reactors (6000 GW? maybe more),
| which sclaed down by 10x would make $4B for 600+ MW.
|
| [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/poland-ap-polish-
| mateusz-...
| lamontcg wrote:
| > How is it that we've become so bad at building?
|
| MBAs. Same ones infecting the company that you most likely work
| for.
|
| Something smaller like stamping out PV panels or windmills for
| farms of them is much more manageable. Anything big and complex
| invites too much graft.
|
| And while you can complain about expensive regulations, that's
| just another graft called regulatory capture. And they let you
| blame it on the hippies, while they rake in the dollars.
| Tanoc wrote:
| Investment has become a fast guaranteed returns at all costs
| kind of thing. That means that while it would cost nine years
| to build a nuclear reactor and twenty five to break even, the
| reactor could operate for a century because they're required to
| maintain it due to how dangerous it is. Meanwhile a gas plant
| can be built in two, break even in five, and operates for
| twenty years before falling apart from neglect because a gas
| explosion doesn't create nuclear fallout. This is also why coal
| fired plants are still running despite external pressures to
| render them extinct; the owners know the ROI and like the short
| term projections.
| BasilPH wrote:
| David Roberts from Volts talked about why he thinks SRMs are
| overhyped last week. Here's the transcript[^0], but his main
| points are _(I fed the whole transcript to GPT-4-turbo model for
| this)_:
|
| - SMRs are not yet delivering on their promised benefits and cost
| savings due to challenges in scaling and production.
|
| - The SMR concept is yet to prove itself with efficient and cost-
| effective factory-made parts and repeatable construction
| practices.
|
| - Concern exists that the enthusiasm around SMRs could lead to
| more unfocused subsidies for the nuclear industry without
| addressing the industry's deeper issues of inefficiency and
| historical missteps.
|
| - SMRs are seen as one option among many for balancing renewable
| energy, and they should not be considered the only solution.
|
| - Their capabilities are mostly theoretical at this stage, and
| there's uncertainty if they can bridge the gap between their
| promise and reality in terms of cost and deployment hurdles.
|
| - SMRs might receive undue favor over other equally promising
| technologies for providing firm power.
|
| In conclusion, David believes SMRs are getting more attention and
| investment than warranted by their current capabilities and
| progress, potentially detracting from other solutions that may
| offer better returns or efficiency for transitioning to a
| renewable energy grid.
|
| [^0]: https://transcripts.volts.wtf/the-volts-catalyst-pod-
| crossov... (starts at around 26:13)
| krupan wrote:
| It feels like most of those bullet points, if not all, could be
| applied to any fledgling new energy source, or actually any new
| technology in general. I hope there's more to this analysis
| than just these bullet points
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| That link is just a 404 to me
| kalleboo wrote:
| It seems like it's been truncated from
| https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-voltscatalyst-pod-crossover-you
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Similar points were raised on the Decouple podcast by James
| Krellenstein .
| https://www.decouplemedia.org/podcast/episode/3195740d/small...
| javier_e06 wrote:
| The article:
|
| By Ivan Penn and Brad Plumer Published Nov. 8, 2023Updated Nov.
| 9, 2023, 3:42 a.m. ET
|
| A developer of small nuclear reactors announced on Wednesday that
| it was canceling a project that had been widely expected to usher
| in a new wave of power plants.
|
| NuScale Power, a company in Portland, Ore., said it lacked enough
| subscribers to advance the Carbon-Free Power Project, which had
| been expected to deliver six of the company's 77-megawatt
| reactors. Although more than two dozen utilities had signed up to
| buy electricity from the reactors, which would be in Idaho, that
| number fell short of what NuScale said it needed to move forward.
|
| The Carbon-Free Power Project was the result of an agreement
| between NuScale and Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems,
| which supplies electricity to public power providers in seven
| Western states, including California. The project was first
| proposed in 2014.
|
| "This decision is very disappointing given the years of
| pioneering hard work," said Mason Baker, chief executive of Utah
| Associated Municipal Power Systems. "We are working closely with
| NuScale and the U.S. Department of Energy on next steps to wind
| the project down."
|
| The decision to cancel the project followed an update from
| NuScale this year regarding the cost of building the reactors,
| which had soared to $9.3 billion from $5.3 billion because of
| rising interest rates and inflation.
|
| NuScale had needed to triple the number of customers for the
| Carbon-Free Power Project by February. The company, which also
| has an agreement to deliver its technology to Romania, told
| investors that it would repurpose materials developed for the
| Carbon-Free Power Project for other customers.
|
| NuScale's stock price fell more than 20 percent, to $2.37, in
| after-hours trading. Its value has declined more than 70 percent
| in the past 12 months.
| bitter_old_man_ wrote:
| I'm so glad I left the nuclear industry thirteen years ago!
|
| I worked in nuclear power for about eight years. I felt like I
| was taking crazy pills. There's a strong vein of cognitive
| dissonance running through the industry relating to its economic
| viability. Nuclear power has always been the most expensive
| available energy production method. So every time I hear talking
| heads say "nuclear power is the only power production method that
| can be built fast enough to address climate change" my blood
| starts to boil. Every nuclear power plant in history has been
| pitched as "sure it's stupid expensive up front, but the power it
| produces will be too cheap to meter". And then they cost 5x as
| much and take 5x as long as predicted to be built and also cost
| more than predicted to operate. But the next generation won't
| have any of the problems that all previous generations had? It's
| like listening to silicon valley people rave about AI or humanoid
| robots or driverless cars. "Sure, the past six generations didn't
| deliver what they promised, don't worry about that, don't think
| about that, the next one is going to be amazing!"
|
| Goodbye nuclear.
| codersfocus wrote:
| Why do areas with nuclear power around the world have cheaper
| than average electricity costs, then?
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Because they were built using subsidies. Nuclear has a
| competitive OPEX cost when the plant has been paid off.
|
| We are 50 years from that point for any potential new builds.
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| "It's like listening to silicon valley people rave about AI or
| humanoid robots or driverless cars."
|
| That's a very interesting statement to make, given what's
| happening right now with AI, humanoid robots and driverless
| cars.
| pradn wrote:
| It looks like the biggest problem with nuclear is not the safety
| or whatnot, it's just that as a civilization, we just can't build
| them without cost overruns and massive delays. And this is a
| loss, because we need non-variable energy sources to augment
| wind/solar/tidal.
|
| Perhaps the other way to solve the energy transition is to lean
| heavily into mass storage of variable energy sources. If you have
| enough energy storage, you don't need so much of the base energy
| suppliers like gas/coal/nuclear.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Wonder if it's worth digging into why that's the case. It seems
| like it's a lot more than just the cost of materials + labour
| that's the problem.
| panick21_ wrote:
| There is lots of research on that for transport
| infrastructure at least.
|
| https://transitcosts.com/
|
| https://pedestrianobservations.com/
| tomatocracy wrote:
| There's been some work done on this in the US context (eg
| [0]) but not really enough. It seems like general large
| project issues (need to adapt to site specific conditions as
| they are discovered, difficulty ensuring work stays properly
| scheduled so that construction workers don't sit idle for
| large amounts of time, etc.) are a big part, and these are
| made worse because of the knock on impact when these interact
| with safety regulations/processes.
|
| There's some hope that making designs smaller and more
| modular might enable less chance of big overspend at a
| slightly higher expected cost but that's speculation until we
| actually do it.
|
| 0. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435
| 12...
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| This problem isn't confined to nuclear energy either. Just
| about the only thing our society is still able to build quickly
| and cheaply are roads.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| Just a point of clarity, we need demand resources, which means
| variable at our command vs not variable or variable based on
| wind/solar input out of our control.
|
| The economically viable mass storage options (i.e pumped
| storage) are basically all deployed. Batteries are getting
| there but they still need some shenanigans in the ancillary
| market where they get paid for not running for complex reasons
| to make the economics in most instances. As the shenanigans
| price out nat gas in those markets it will be interesting to
| see how offer strategies of nat gas change to recoup the lost
| economic viability and if that makes batteries less profitable.
| Retric wrote:
| Batteries are _already_ viable paired with solar. You see
| solar power purchase agreements in the 1.5 to 2c / kWh range
| and you can directly use that energy around 1/2 the time.
| Recharging and discharging batteries isn't 100% efficient but
| it's close.
|
| Current numbers are lower, but in 2022 you could use LFP for
| ~5,000 discharge cycles and pay ~480$/kWh of capacity or ~9.6
| c/kWh. Inverters etc last longer than the batteries
| themselves so you can amortize those costs across multiple
| generations of batteries, therefore it's not quite upfront
| costs / number of discharge cycles, but it's also not that
| far off of it. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf
|
| Still roughly 2c/kWh * 105% + 9.6 c/kWh * 50% ~= 6.9c/kWh
| averaged over a day.
|
| Currently batteries are discharged at peak demand, but the
| underlying economics scales just fine even if you double the
| number of solar panels for redundancy and aren't being paid a
| premium. Further at scale demand that shifted to cheaper
| nighttime rates will instead shift to cheaper daytime rates.
| tomatocracy wrote:
| I assume that's for already built solar PV, though it still
| seems extremely low to me so I'm curious where you are
| seeing this.
|
| For reference on new build, at the UK government's most
| recently completed CfD auction (which happened in
| September), the solar PV bids accepted were at PS47/MWh,
| CPI indexed and specified in 2012 prices:
| https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contracts-for-
| dif...
| Retric wrote:
| Not bad considering the UK is a dark rainy hellhole for
| solar.
|
| NYC is 40.7' North, Toronto Canada is North 43.7', London
| is 51.5' North and that's the southern part of the UK.
|
| Edit: To be clear I don't think battery backed solar is a
| good fit for the UK today, I'm just surprised how close
| it is.
| tomatocracy wrote:
| Yes, though the fact that it's 2012 prices and indexed to
| CPI does a lot - that's roughly PS65/MWh in current
| prices. And despite all that it's still cheaper than
| offshore wind.
|
| You can also look at Spain - the CfDs aren't really
| comparable since the way CfDs are used there is different
| but LCOE is probably in the 40s-50s EUR/MWh for new build
| solar PV. But there are now meaningful curtailment issues
| in some places due to grid capacity there so developers
| will probably be working to higher numbers.
| konschubert wrote:
| I think your math is realistic.
|
| We have to keep in mind that 6.9 isn't yet the end user
| rate after grid fees, but still.
|
| There is also a ton of potential in demand shaping by
| offering hourly prices to customers.
|
| The place where batteries fail is long-term, seasonal
| storage. The price per charge is still low, but an asset
| that takes 5000 years to amortise (one charge cycle per
| year) is not a competitive investment.
|
| So we will need other approaches here, where the substance
| that stores the energy is cheap and the cost is shifted
| onto the energy transforming device (this is e-fuels/
| ammonia/ hydrogen)
| Retric wrote:
| I'm not convinced we want significant seasonal storage as
| a separate system because depth of discharge impacts
| battery lifespan.
|
| So rather than having a singe battery doing nothing for
| 364 days a year and getting used one day you have a
| battery bank which gets discharged slightly more 1 day a
| year and recovers that deficit over some time period.
|
| For redundancy reasons you want excess generation
| capacity should something happen which would most of the
| time allow for a full charge soon afterwards.
|
| PS: individual wind locations also tend to get more power
| on specific time of the year which can offset seasonal
| issues.
| angiosperm wrote:
| There will be no need for "long-term, seasonal storage".
| We only need enough storage to last until a shipment of
| synthetic anhydrous ammonia, ordered from a nearby wind
| farm or from a solar farm in the tropics, can be
| delivered, to be burned in an existing combined-cycle
| turbine. That storage is some mix of batteries and tanked
| ammonia.
|
| Well-provisioned solar farms can synthesize and tank
| their own ammonia during periods of excess production,
| and sell excess (over what local tankage holds) on the
| open market.
| konschubert wrote:
| I mention ammonia in my comment. I think we agree.
| 6510 wrote:
| We've used wind for 5000 years when it was available. It just
| takes a bit more time to wear out the machines if they sit
| there waiting most of the time.
|
| Someone in Iran told me these are about 3500 years old
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H48TV-Wb9NQ
| cma wrote:
| Wrong link?
| 6510 wrote:
| thats so weird, the link is from the previous video in
| the same tab. spa's are a terrible idea :P
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ugw7-BwsmI
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| A bit more clarity: right now, and for the rest of this
| decade just rolling out a lot more renewables will be the
| cheapest way to replace carbon generating sources which are
| right now burning and spewing carbon into the atmosphere to
| generate electricity around the globe.
|
| So, there is a long term need, in order to reach a goal of
| 100% carbon free electricity (generally set for about 2035)
| for more on-demand resources (including responsive demand),
| but it is not the most pressing concern right now. And even
| when it is, it'll account for a small fraction of the total,
| like 10% or so.
|
| (Luckily, batteries are gettting rolled out already because
| they have positive economic value in various niches, like in
| cars, frequency response, avoiding congestion and network
| upgrades so the ramp up is looking good)
| lm28469 wrote:
| > we just can't build them without cost overruns and massive
| delays.
|
| Which isn't a problem, nor even a concern, for big rockets or
| weapons tho
| all2 wrote:
| You can't shoot the bad guys with a nuclear power plant, so
| no selling it using fear.
| xenon7 wrote:
| Would it be wrong to assume that we're dealing with an Apollo-
| style issue here (we "no longer have the technology to do it
| efficiently")? I'm certainly not an expert on nuclear power,
| but it is a little odd how the average nuclear reactor in the
| US is 42 years old [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/us-nuclear-
| indus...
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| It's just the U.S. China, France, and Japan have all
| successfully built nuclear at scale. I won't be surprised if
| developing nations in Africa start lapping the U.S. on
| nuclear power in the next few decades. They certainly have
| enough Uranium to do so.
| briffle wrote:
| These are to be mass produced, and shipped to the site. So
| really, the first few will have cost overruns and delays, but
| then they should be able to re-use all the tooling, processes,
| transportation equipment, etc, to get the rest going.
| petre wrote:
| Only the reactor vessel which is probably one of the most
| expensive parts of the entire project (21%), along with the
| turbine (18%). Construction, engineering services, structures
| are probably where the bulk of cost overruns are happening.
|
| https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| > And this is a loss, because we need non-variable energy
| sources to augment wind/solar/tidal.
|
| We need dispatchable energy to complement renewables. Nuclear
| is on the complete opposite side of the dispatchability
| equation with high CAPEX and low OPEX.
|
| Like the cancellation exemplifies, even running at 100% nuclear
| is wholly uncompetitive. Being dispatchable means vastly
| lowering the utilization rate.
| anvil-on-my-toe wrote:
| I wonder why the Navy or Core of Engineers can't make civilian
| nuclear systems. It arguably would have made us safer as a
| country to have energy independence by investing dollars in
| reactors for domestic use instead of for warheads and nuclear
| submarines.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Because their customer, the US navy, is the world's least
| price sensitive customer. That does not translate into
| competitive products on cutthroat markets.
| treypitt wrote:
| that's just America, and its not just nuclear, it's civil
| engineering & construction projects of all kind that have
| ballooned in complexity and cost due to myriad political and
| regulatory causes. France can build reactors cheaply and easily
| due to standardized reactor designs; I'm not sure the US has
| ever replicated a reactor build (ie, every reactor is built in
| a different & unique way)
| avar wrote:
| > France can build reactors cheaply and easily[...]
|
| It can? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Pow
| er_Plan...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > France can build reactors cheaply and easily due to
| standardized reactor designs
|
| Your information on french reactor building prowes is several
| decades out of date.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| As a civilization we have been capable of that multiple times
| in multiple places. Those technologies are not lost. In fact
| there are now new reactor projects that are simplified from
| older ones that could be built potentially fast.
|
| People generalize a lot! There are a large variety of nuclear
| reactors. Even construction projects of the same design vary
| somewhat.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Potentially being the key word here. They don't seem to
| succeed when going from theory to reality so far.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| That's not true, there have been successes.
| jes5199 wrote:
| I think it's time to give up on nuclear. Solar+Wind+Batteries
| continue to get cheaper. Nuclear doesn't seem to have a
| detectible learning curve at all
| chrischattin wrote:
| No one has done more to harm the environment than
| environmentalists that advocate against nuclear power.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > No one has done more to harm the environment than
| environmentalists that advocate against nuclear power.
|
| I mean we all learn from our mistakes, I surely was against
| nuclear power when I was young but I think for ok reasons.
| Now the world is in a worse spot than it was so I changed my
| mind a little. Still, it's silly to pretend that that caused
| more "harm to the environment".
| jes5199 wrote:
| that may be historically true, but today you can build much
| more KW of solar+batteries than KW of nuclear for the same
| price. Continuing to advocate for nuclear is throwing away
| money that could be spent on the green transition.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Solar+Wind+Tides+Hydro+Geothermal+... it's also beautifully
| decentralized and low risk if done on a local, small, scale.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| The learning curve has been negative all throughout nuclear
| powers 70 year lifespan.
| IceHegel wrote:
| This should not be allowed to happen.
| proee wrote:
| Musk claims we can run the entire US off a 100 square mile solar
| arry + battery storage.
|
| Does it make economic sense to just start working on this as a
| country, or is this still too cost prohibitive?
|
| Seems like a system that you could upgrade over time as the tech
| gets better.
|
| What are the downsides of such a concept?
| angiosperm wrote:
| The right place to stop reading is right after "Musk claims".
|
| Somebody told him a 100-mile-square array, i.e. 10,000 square
| miles, would suffice. Of course you build much smaller farms
| close to where the power is needed, instead.
|
| And, of course, solar farms are being built today. We should
| build them faster.
| lacrosse_tannin wrote:
| what do you guys thing about cleaning up the defunct ones? Like
| the one in San Diego is just going to be there for the next 10000
| years?
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