I am stunned by the "Navy has operated 5,000 years of reactors".
But, I come back to my basic thesis on nuclear power. It's the A+ game or bust
Yes the US fricking Navy can do it well, but the minute the Soviet's ran out of
cash they just let it all rust. If we lean on nuclear in the carbon energy transition then when we run out of money, can we afford to let them rust.
So why don’t we have the US fricking navy actually run and manage the reactors? It’s not as if they only exist at sea. And if the reactors are actually wholly military operated we might get the added benefit of being able to use the Navy’s 20ish year lead on civilian nuclear. Amazing what you can learn when you have a navy nuclear engineer a few beers in and trying to impress you.
Is our ultimate goal to get nuclear at any cost? Then sure.
But nuclear at any cost is not a reasonable goal. The only reason we want nuclear is for its carbon-free energy. At which point it must be evaluated on its merits, not as an end goal of its own
And how can we just ignore the waste problem? [1]
In many cases, containment pools are full to the brim with spent rods [2], which is both environmentally hazardous, & a target for terrorists (dirty bombs)
The waste problem is real, and if the nuclear shills can demonstrate that there can exist a nuclear reactor that can compete with solar+storage in winter at 45 degrees north economically then we can bother talking about it.
Until then we dismiss them along with every other technology that does not meaningfully exist.
That only solves part of the problem, the civilian reactors are still too expensive to build. Nuclear is great, I went through the Naval Nuclear Power Program several decades ago myself, but it's not financially viable.
Let me say that again to those engineers who weren't listening:
Nuclear (fission) power is not, and will never be, financially viable for civilian powerplants.
I'll eat a roll of toilet paper covered in hot sauce if someday nuclear fission is financially viable enough to produce power for civilians at a decent scale.
Even assuming that's the case, isn't the counterargument "Fine, then governments need to subsidize investment into nuclear power plants, just as we do with other green technologies."
Environmentalists have pretty much zero impact on the ability of nuclear plants to be started and demonstrate feasibility.
In the US, Georgia and South Carolina started building with nary a peep. France started building again without any environmental objections.
Yet these builds are all catastrophic failures, to the point that any other financial backer is scared away from even touching nuclear. The decision makers are those with the dollars to invest, not the environmentalists.
"environmentalists" in california have succesfully prevented at least 6GW from coming online, and were directly responsible for plans that shutter california's last operating reactor. They lobbied PG&E with a study they paid for that, under the insane assumption that california's energy use would _decrease_ in the future, concluded renewables would be cheaper. Meanwhile CAISO issued increasingly urgent press releases warning of the catastrophic consequences to grid stability were diablo canyon to close. A disaster which was narrowly avoided a few weeks ago by newsom.
don't underestimate the negative influence of "environmentalists"
> They lobbied PG&E with a study they paid for that, under the insane assumption that california's energy use would _decrease_ in the future, concluded renewables would be cheaper
Usage in California has gone down, and renewables are cheaper, just look at the blog series in the original article. Calling these well-known and irrefutable facts "insane" does not bode well for the plethora of other questionable assertions in your comment. For the usage:
energy austerity is incompatible with climate change mitigations. eg thermal industrial processes currently powered by fossil fuels need to be moved to grid power.
their proposal was to spend $2B to lose 2GW of carbon free baseline power
everything in my statement is true and based on documents in the public record
I have followed the documents carefully, doing a deep dive on Diablo Canyon around 2020, but I do not recognize your framing of the situation as anywhere close to accurate. I'm also not sure what you mean when you are referring to energy austerity in your comment, of what $2B you are talking about.
I think not really. It depends on why you think subsidizing is a good thing.
My personal take is that we should subsidize tech to take it from an early stage to a production stage as soon as possible. We need better power sources yesterday, not next century. So we can't sit around waiting for some sort of Elon Musk to get really passionate and dump heaps of cash into it.
But the assumption there is that once the tech is developed and mature, it'll be good enough to stand on its own. Because if it'll never not be expensive, we're just artifically choosing a power source that's permanently more expensive than the alternatives, and that's an unstable situation. Eventually people will get tired of dumping money into it, or there will be some other urgent matter to throw money at, and then we have a bunch of expensive tech that's falling out of use, and underdeveloped alternatives.
Subsidizing nuclear forever also doesn't make any sense economically. Money is fungible. There's no real difference between say, paying $200/month to your power company, or paying $100/month to your power company, and $100 in taxes that ends up going to the power company. The amount you have to spend at the end of the month is the same either way. Now paying $200/month for 5 years so that then your power bill drops to $50/month afterwards, that's a different proposition.
So, I support subsidizing solar, wind and storage because I believe that in their perfected, mass produced versions they're cheap and competitive. They just need a push now. I don't support subsidizing nuclear because I believe it'll always be expensive because it's a fundamentally complex technology that's not amenable to mass production and will always lose to brute force mass applications of simpler technologies.
The US government makes a steady stream of trillions of dollars appear in order to, among other things, build single use missiles for millions of dollars each and jets that have never seen real combat for billions each. The idea that any durable public work is somehow "too expensive" in the face of that is comically absurd.
Putting aside the wisdom of such massive defense spending, the question is what is the alternate good that could perform the job?
If we spend $12B on a 1GW reactor, we have far far better alternatives. A 1GW nuclear reactor has a 90% capacity factor of undispatchable, hard to throttle electricity. At today's prices, thay $12B could instead buy 6GW of solar at 20% capacity factor, and 24GWh of batteries. This combined solar plus storage is more flexible, more responsive, and delivers 30% more overall energy. And this is with a stupid design of splitting the cash to half storage half solar. A smarter design more tailored to the actual demand curve would remove some flexibility but become far cheaper.
There's zero reason to build nuclear unless you want to line Bechtel's pockets.
What does that amount of solar and storage look like in terms of material used for its construction as well as area occupied once it’s deployed?
What current examples do we have of projects at this scale?
What is the lifespan of the solar arrays and batteries?
What are the operating costs? How many personnel are required for maintenance and day to day operation?
What other infrastructure is necessary to support such a deployment? Transmission lines, buildings, monitoring facilities, security, roads, office space, etc.
What is the construction timeline for such a project?
I don't have exact numbers for any of these questions. However, we know that regardless of the inputs in materials or land, the ultimate dollar cost, all in, is cheaper than nuclear. Take the levelized cost of solar for the MWh coinciding with daylight hours, and the levelized cost of storage during the other hours, and nuclear is blown out of the water:
Also, the scale doesn't matter, we have built far more than 6GW of solar, deployed more than 24GWh of storage, but it doesn't have to be at one location for these resources. Solar and batteries scale far better than nuclear, because they can be deployed on smaller installations without nearly as much hassle as nuclear. Or they can be sited at one location.
Additionally, part of the bonus of solar+storage vs. large nuclear is that when you spread out your generation into smaller grid sections, then you can reduce the need for large transmission infrastructure that requires maintenance[1].
Distributed software is good, so why not distributed energy generation? Answer: distributed energy generation is great!
Even so, when people say that we’ll just spread out this energy generation infrastructure everywhere I still want to know the actual numbers. Are there enough rooftops and vacant lots in LA to provide all the necessary power? What about lower density areas? What about northern climates with lots of snow and rain? There is still maintenance involved, installation costs are likely increased by doing this piecemeal rather than at a single site. Are we assuming all of this will be undertaken by individual homeowners or is it a commercial operation? Leaving it up to individuals seems like it would drastically slow roll out due to a lot of people not being able to afford it or simply being unwilling to have panels. If commercial then the available locations become very limited. These things can’t just be hand waved away.
So, like, why don't you try to calculate this for yourself? As a pedagogical exercise, I think you'll get much more out of it if you compute the numbers for yourself and play through a bunch of "what if" scenarios.
Just to get you started with some ballpark numbers: The solar irradiance at ground level on a sunny day is greater than 1kW/m^2 for about 6 hours per day (google for "AM1.5"). Typical commercial panels have a conversion efficiency of 21-22%.
You seem very confident that solar is impossible, so why don't you make some reasonable assumptions and prove it to all of us?
I didn’t say that I think it’s impossible. I’m asking for the reasoning behind the belief that it would be the optimal solution. In this context a lot of details are being talked about to argue for or against the viability of nuclear but I don’t see the same critical process being applied to the assertions that we can run everything on solar and batteries. I’ve put forward many of the same questions that have been answered for nuclear, it is up to the solar proponents to answer them.
It's safe to assume that most nuclear propositions are based upon unrealistic best case scenarios that won't stand up to the scrutiny of reality, and that all solar propositions have been treated incredibly harshly and conservatively and the solar solution will be completely underestimated.
There is a massive bias in the field in favor of nuclear and against solar, and this shows in every single prediction made over the past 15-20 years. The EIA would uncritically put out numbers for "advanced nuclear" that were unbeliever rosy for a tech that had never been built. And at the same time, use out of date costs for solar, and the assumption that solar would stay at the old prices and never improve in price.
Or you will see peer reviewed papers in nuclear that assume ridiculous rosy solutions, that make it all the way through to publication without those rosy assumptions being challenged. For example, using nuclear in remote areas, but it using the actual capacity factor of that sort of system, 40-50%, and instead assuming that the price is coming from using every last bit of electricity at all time. In contrast all the modeling around solar always picks the most conservative estimates, because of the unrealistic hyper criticism of solar, which leads to even the most rosy of solar predictions being underestimated of solar.
Similarly, "concerns" about land or energy density are not realistic concerns, but mere political talk used to delay delay delay as long as possible the obvious solution that solar will be a cornerstone of our energy future, from 40%-70% of most countries' energy.
But if you actually are interested in the land usage, it's a question that has been studied to death. NREL is usually a good source, but one caution is to look at the date of any publication, and realize that if it's more than a year old, a lot of the data will be out of date. Here's a 2013 report on land use:
If small commercial solar operations are in fact cheap and have a high return then why am I not seeing startup solar power generation companies everywhere? Surely it would be a hot industry to get into if you can put it anywhere and make a profit?
I would suggest that those companies exist everywhere, you just don't see them. There's something like 1 TW of renewable projects that are being considered in US interconnection queues right now. Total US power draw is only 0.5TW. At and average of ~30% capacity factor, that's 60% of total US electricity demand replacement, with today's projects.
Now, only a fraction of these will get connected, because only the marginal best investment dollar gets the invested, but the scale is there.
Really the limit it current solar and wind production capacity, which is ever increasing at absolutely terrific speeds.
This is one of many reasons that I think a focus on nuclear is the wrong place. It's not going to be able to scale to catch up to these other technologies, even if after 60 years of development, nuclear finds a learning curve for the first time ever.
I’m aware of several heavily subsidized renewable projects in my local area alone that have failed to deliver usable power to a grid that sorely needs it. I’m aware of 0 independently funded ventures even though my area has some of the highest electricity prices in the country.
My question is given this market where you have high prices and high demand, why do I not see any entrepreneurs building small solar installations and cutting deals with municipalities to provide some of their grid power?
That tells me that the technology, cost, and/or regulation isn’t viable yet. Promises of future developments do nothing to address current needs. I have a feeling that 100% renewable generation is fast becoming a “20 years away” problem since I’ve been hearing the same promises for at least 20 years now and those older than me likely remember even older promises.
> That tells me that the technology, cost, and/or regulation isn’t viable yet.
I don't know where you live, but generalizing from one small locality with an out of wack market is leading you to the wrong conclusions.
In places where there's a free market for new generation, like Texas, there's more GW of storage being added than GW of natural gas. There's an order of magnitude of new wind and solar generation being added than natural gas, and this is the place with some of the cheapest natural gas in the entire world. Having trouble finding ERCOT, but for the entire US, 1.3TW of the 1.4TW on newly proposed projects are renewable or storage:
So your local utility, which is charging you high prices, probably has a process that disincentivizes renewables to a large degree. And if there are zero independent funded ventures, then your utility must be actively stopping renewables, and those investors are working in the far more fertile rest of the US.
In particular, small projects can be the hardest to get through. There's zero reason for a utility to cut a deal, they are a monopoly, they are raking in far checks by doing nothing. Utility executives are some of the people least likely to adopt any sort of new technology.
The biggest impediment to renewables sweeping through the grid and giving us cheaper electricity is politics, conservatives, and rentierism. In areas where there's a market set up to allow lower costs to win, fossil fuels are toast. But in most places, electricity is not a market.
Replacing existing operating power plants is tougher than outcompeting other options for new power plants. Demand for grid energy in the US has been flat for more than a decade.
> At today's prices, thay $12B could instead buy 6GW of solar at 20% capacity factor, and 24GWh of batteries.
I don't think that can actually be done. The world's largest battery installation is less than 1 GWh AFAICT. OTOH we're not doing great at nuclear either.
It doesn't have to all be one giant stack of batteries. Your argument is like saying that we can't add more than (say) 2 GW of nuclear, because that's the size of the largest nuclear power plant.
I don't think this black and white thinking is really useful. There are inhabited places in the world where solar and wind face real challenges to practicality as the sole source of energy. I would be shocked if we're capable of building an amount of storage that will get the city I live in through the winter, for example. Certainly not for cheaper than a natural gas plant, which is the real competition.
Frankly, whenever this comes up the handwaving about storage just seems hopelessly optimistic even for places where it is practical, let alone places where you're lucky to get 4 hours of sunlight a day for a bunch of the year.
Nothing is ever that simple. If carbon zero is an imperative, then there will sometimes be need for something other than solar and wind, and it will inevitably be "impractically expensive" compared to the carbon emitting sources we're moving away from.
It's certainly important to improve the economies of scale of renewables, but doing so is not the goal. Saving money is not the goal. The survival of the human species is the goal, and we aren't going to get there by nickel and diming our way to it.
Does your city burn natural gas in the winter? That natural gas is not coming directly from wells, typically; it is stored in underground caverns and pipelines. Hydrogen can be stored just the same way. Power-to-X (where X can be hydrogen or other e-fuels) allows renewables to scale to 100% of the energy needed by society at affordable costs.
I mean, nuclear might be expensive, time consuming to build, and difficult but at least we've been doing it for 70 years. It's not clear that projections of long term costs on things we haven't even done at scale are going to be realistic when we try them in the real world.
Even if it takes 20 years to build a nuke, that might still be sooner than "power to x" becomes a viable, affordable option for most of the world.
This is the weird thing about this argument: it so often rests simultaneously on an argument for practicality and/or cost effectiveness, but literally any criticism is met with a gish gallop of unproven technology. You can't have this both ways.
In the end, my central thesis here is just that if you think the be all and end all of this issue is cost effectiveness you are optimizing for the wrong goals and it leaves open a giant window for carbon emitting sources to justify their use when renewables don't work for various local reasons.
The thing to be black and white about is carbon emissions. "What energy mix works for place X right now if we try to eliminate carbon emissions asap" is not a decision that's gonna be made on an internet forum.
You're aware that current commercial nuclear power plants cannot power the world, right? They are thermal burner reactors. Supplying the entire world's current primary energy demand would require about 6000 1 GW(e) (which is 3 GW(th)) reactors. These would use up current uranium resource (not reserve) in about five years.
A nuke powered world will either require radically new sources of uranium (like sea water uranium extraction) or breeder reactors. Neither is available now, unlike cheap electrolyzers for making hydrogen (< $300/W in China).
This is all about moving off fossil fuels because of induced climate change. That requires changing what powers the world. If nuclear is not going to power the world, then it's basically irrelevant, and the issues raised against renewables will not block their widespread adoption.
No one thing is going to power the whole world. Even "renewables" isn't one thing, and it can't and won't be deployed the same way in every climate or environment. It, as a blanket set of things, should be deployed everywhere however it can be. But there is no reason to exclude nuclear a priori as a blanket thing. And especially not in favor of waiting for promised improvements in storage or synthetic fuels that have not yet been proven.
Again, this is not a duel to the death. The only thing that should be dismissed out of hand is carbon emitting fuels.
If you live in a place that only gets four hours of sun a day, sure, look more into nuclear.
But instead of being so "black and white" and insisting it must be nuclear that powers things, also evaluate options like thermal storage to gather summertime heat in reservoirs for use throughout the winter. It's super cheap, and makes a ton of sense in most areas, yet it's so low tech that it gets ignored.
I will be black and white that fission is not a feasible solution for the vast majority of the human population for at least the next 20 years, and probably forever. Despite more than half a century of experience, it has not improved as a technology. There would have to be some sort of drastic breakthrough for nuclear to be a realistic power source for most of the earth's surface.
> But instead of being so "black and white" and insisting it must be nuclear that powers things
It sure is a good thing I didn't say anything of the sort or wow I'd be a hypocrite.
I am definitely not the person trying to shoehorn the entire earth into one energy mix box in this conversation. I think the answer to this is likely to vary a lot all over the world.
Also a lot of the world's population is far enough north that winters produce relatively little solar or wind energy. And those places also tend to be massive energy consumers because it's also very cold.
Right now that doesn't show up in electricity stats because of how common in-home gas heating is. In order to decarbonize the northern parts of the world we will need to dramatically increase both electric energy consumption and production, during winter, because heat pumps will almost certainly be replacing gas furnaces.
I agree with your reasoning, but on this tiny rock we call Albion I'm not convinced that renewables will ever be viable for base load.
I'm concerned about the tonnage requirement of strategic minerals for battery storage. Supplies for EV batteries are currently choked; we need to scale far beyond that for grid storage.
Pumped hydro at the required scale will be a feat of engineering comparable to nuclear engineering. Millions of tonnes of Portland cement will be an input.
And renewables are land-extensive; that's an impedance mismatch for us.
There are many different battery technologies being pursued. Some use uncommon materials, but others are just using elements available in essentially unlimited amounts. There are also means of storing energy in other forms. For example, storage of electrical energy as heat energy in sand could have a round trip efficiency of 54% at a quite reasonable cost.
The amount of subsidy required for nuclear is at least an order of magnitude larger than renewables.
Switching to renewable energy with massive amounts of storage is a world of cheaper energy than today. There has been zero learning curve for oil, and coal, and nuclear. If anything nuclear gets more expensive rather than less.
In contrast, renewables and storage are technologies that behave like semiconductors, or hard disks. There's a fairly predictable improvement in costs over time, resulting in massive changes in capabilities over the course of decades.
So not only is switching to renewables and storage cheaper than our current every sources, the faster we perform the change, the more money we save, the more of our resources we can devote to improving the quality of human lives, instead of devoting all that effort to make-work of welding pipes and pouring concrete.
Aren't governments subsidizing nuclear power plants a whole lot more than anything else?
I heard without government subsidies, nuclear power plants would simply not be buildable. No insurance company would insure them. The cost in case of a nuclear fallout is just too high.
I mean, if the choice is expensive electricity and rolling blackouts because the entire country relied on unreliable sources of energy, I'd take the former. The best energy source is one that's robust and dependable, not one that's theoretically cheaper in some ideal circumstances.
Right, but non-monetary negative outcomes are swept under the rug.
It costs nothing for fossil plant operators to pump carbon and sulphur into the atmosphere; that's why it takes regulation to make them install scrubbers. Scrubbers help, but don't prevent the outcome.
The outcome can be measured in human deaths and loss of arable land. That cost is hidden.
The "free market" is a grim joke while these costs can be ignored.
EDF has recently been re-nationalized, and has always been under strong government influence. It's not a good example of a civilian/free market nuclear power plant operator.
Careful, the renationalization is due to a lot of factors, the main one is that the EU forced EDF to sell its nuclear eneegy at a loss to private energy providerd in order to "free the market". Look for ARENH if you would like to learn more (quick Google https://www.nusconsulting.com/energy-blog/arenh-reform-could...)
I didn't mean to imply that nationalization happened because nuclear power isn't commercially viable. The French situation was special even before full nationalization.
I really doubt ARENH is the problem because as far as I understand it, it only applies to EDF's existing nuclear power plants. At 42 EUR/MWh wholesale, those plants should still make a tidy profit. Apparently, too few of them were actually running last year, and the French government imposed further price restrictions that also affected resale of energy that EDF purchased elsewhere at market prices (not coming from EDF's own nuclear fleet or its other power plants).
>I'll eat a roll of toilet paper covered in hot sauce if someday nuclear fission is financially viable enough to produce power for civilians at a decent scale.
So all the world’s nuclear power plants operate at a loss? That’s a pretty strong proposition…
The problem is that people want to talk about fully-loaded life-cycle costs; and depending on who is doing the talking you get wildly different numbers.
More than a few old reactors here and there that are about to be decommissioned would be my idea of "at decent scale" here, so let's say that 10% of the new build power was nuclear (which would be equal to how much old, rotten nuclear fission infrastructure we have today, in the world).
I would almost bet less than 2% of the current planned and contracted energy capacity was in nuclear and that probably a good part of that will never materialize.
There's never been a single merchant nuclear plant built to sell into a competitive market, anywhere in the world. So, all the nuclear plants around were built with a captive audience of customers who were to be forced to pay for them. In the US, the remainder of nuclear interest was down in the southeast where this sort of thing still exists.
Can we better define what “financially viable” means?
I don’t know that I need a nuclear power plant to “turn a profit”. That would be great, I suppose, but my view on electricity is a little more nuanced than a dogmatic adherence to market forces.
That doesn't counter the point above. France's fleet was built in the 70s, at difference costs. And what were those costs? Were they viable at the time, or was it a government program that would spend at any cost? Are today's costs viable now?
Have you bothered to look at Flamanville or Olkiluoto? What happened when in the past when France built subsequent copies of a reactor design, and won't we expect similar costs rises with these already unviable reactors?
False, with heavy subsides ~70% of Frances electricity production for the power grid was nuclear but they exported a great deal of that nuclear power in non peak times such as nights and weekends to maintain even a 68% capacity factor. Further they imported a great deal of non nuclear power to cover their own peak demand. By comparison US reactors generally have over a 90% capacity factor which means generating ~30% more electricity from the same investment or in Frances case posting a ~30% premium on nuclear power.
It’s hard to work out exact figures but around 60% of the grid’s electricity used in France came from nuclear reactors. To illiterate the difficulty, recently most of France’s nuclear power plant where undergoing maintenance however due to low seasonal demand other power plants where able to make up the difference.
PS: To be really pedantic, total electricity production would include car alternators, home PV panels, diesel electric locomotive etc, but that’s yet another calculation.
there's a reference I can't find discussing the financials of hinkley point C, a wildly expensive reactor and concluding that even with the extreme cost overruns, the levelized cost would still be superior to renewables if not for aggressive interest rates by financiers.
It is more viable than any other form of energy. You need to count the externalized costs of fossil fuel power plants. The cost of climate change has already exceeded the cost of building many nuclear plants, and that cost will continue to compound at an accelerating rate. One nuc plant costs less than twitter, and twitter is useless. So as a society we have more than enough resources, just not the will. Let it burn.
This is old thinking that considers nuclear as the only option to replacing fossil fuels. But this is now a broken world view, and you need to stop making this bad argument.
I’m an ex navy nuke (I did the whole thing, school through startups, sea trials, refuel, operations, maintenance, was nuke mechanic). I think some of the main impediments to adoption of navy-style training, operations, and maintenance in the civilian world are that the work is challenging and high stress. The school is very mentally and spiritually challenging to most people. When you get to the fleet the work is very challenging both mentally and physically. You are taking weekly technical short answer tests, operating the thing in 100F degrees doing legit physical work, responding to emergency stuff at 2 am before a 6 am shift. It’s nuts. The navy selects smart people through asvab test requirements. Most students are still challenged by the coursework. When you stay in by reenlisting it gets a little easier because you have less physical work to do but you still have to maintain excellence and train the junior people to the required competency level. Combine this with the fact that the pay is shitty compared to other jobs in industry available and the incentives just aren’t there. Where do we find these highly motivated, fit, young, intelligent people to work like dogs? They don’t exist in sufficient quantity to do this. The navy doesn’t have superior technology; most of the ships are old and maintained. The secret sauce is the personnel and their desperation. You aren’t going to contract people in the civillian world to do this stuff. I really don’t think it’s feasible.
Thus killing the economics of nuclear power relative to competing sources. The Navy uses nuclear power on a few dozen carriers and submarines because that's the only practical way to accomplish the mission. But after building a handful of nuclear powered surface combatants they abandoned that approach, and returned to conventional engines largely for cost reasons. Civilian power plants have to find a way to operate at a profit.
Personnel are a key ingredient for success. In civilian world for construction the regulatory environment is wildly different. Calls for Navy to run civilian nukes would likely not work with the civilian regulator.
I can only speak for myself, although I would say I was pretty average as far as people who finished the school. My class had a fifty percent drop rate. Two people killed themselves that year. My good friend was the “petty officer of the watch” and found one of the people that jumped off of their second story common area balcony head first. The housing areas were named after ships so we made gallows humor jokes about them being in the xx diving squad. The school had zero cheating, a very fast pace, and very specific grading requirements. This led to a grade meritocracy that seemed gaussian in nature, distributed around a very specific skill set centered around quickly testing. Some people easily skated by. Others struggled. Some from both groups failed out. I think that seeing people be put into a meat grinder like that was more than I was prepared for. I believed in some kind of justice in the world, or at least in the man-made systems we created but didn’t encounter that. There is also the chance that everyone goes through experiences that change their outlook on life, but that was my lived experience. If you are interested there is a book that was passed around that tells it better: https://www.swm1.com/life%20in%20the%20nuclear%20navy.pdf I didn’t write it but it was pretty accurate and really funny IIRC.
Human nature is inherently a bit of a crapshoot and progress on that front is slippery, but "make a reactor robust to neglect and abuse" is an engineering problem and progress on that front is sticky.
We've gotten much better at this particular engineering problem. For instance, Fukushima was designed in 1967, but if it had been designed in 1972 it would not have had its fatal flaw.
Fukushima was neglect. As you said we had known those types of tsunamis were possible since 1972, but no additional safety measures were put into place over the decades.
> I am stunned by the "Navy has operated 5,000 years of reactors".
When they've been building them for 70 years and have over 200 nuclear powered vessels, it shouldn't be that surprising. For comparison, Ontario Power Generation has operated 787 years of nuclear reactors (343 combined at Pickering, 120 at Darlington, 324 at Bruce), each of which is at least 3.5 times larger than the biggest navy nuclear reactor. France has dramatically more than that.
To give context to who acidburn is, he's been a long time HN user, has a PhD in nuclear engineering, has worked in fission and fusion for over a decade, and has blogged about it for years. The take here is the take of an expert and not just a nuclear bro.
Yeah I made my HN username on a whim years ago after watching that movie and didn't realize it was a dumb choice. I wanted it to be 'hackery' and anon. Oops.
I don't know acidburn but I'd argue that having a PhD in nuclear engineering and having worked in the field is likely to increase your bias towards nuclear (being a "nuclear bro") rather than equalize it. PLT PhDs will tell you Haskell is the best programming language and environmental science PhDs will tell you solar is the best energy source.
This is an odd argument. You're basically saying that being more knowledgeable about something makes your opinion less useful. Everyone knows there's bias but if you're arguing that we shouldn't value someone's opinion because they're an expert then we're not going to progress very far in society. I'm not saying you have to take his word as divine truth but dismissing experts is extremely naive.
If you're knowledgeable in one field primarily, I think it's likely you have some bias towards that field. If you are doing a lot of research only in e.g. Solar, I think it'd be harder to provide an unbiased comparison between solar and nuclear than someone who studies power generation in general.
EDIT: At a first glance, the linked article seems reasonable if not a bit optimistic for future developments and very positive phrasing for NPP in general.
Sibling comment is basically what I meant and my general opinion about the linked website as well.
> You're basically saying that being more knowledgeable about something makes your opinion less useful.
In certain contexts I definitely think this. Imagine you're a CEO that has to decide how to distribute profits among departments. Obviously you'll listen to the head/experts of every department to weigh your options, but you can't really trust them to be unbiased (Obviously not the best analogy but I hope it helps get my point across (: ).
We need a new pejorative to mirror "nuclear bro" for people who take any mention or discussion of any downside of wind and solar and blanket categorize them as a Fox News viewer.
There are a lot of anti-100%-renewable nuclear proponents. There are fewer and fewer full-on anti-renewable nuclear proponents.
Most of us support everything that can make low-carbon energy.
Thoughts on LFTR? The presentation that made the rounds many years ago made it seem like it was a solved problem (1965!). That made me rethink the value of nuclear and I'm curious if it's legit.
Electricity demand will surely increase. Primary power demand on the other hand will most likely go down. An EV is about 80% efficient from solar panel to movement, an ICE is only about 30% efficient from gas to movement (and you have to invest a whole bunch of energy to get gas into tank starting from oil underground). Similarly, heating with a heat pump is about three times more energy efficient than heating with oil or gas.
Today we use about 600 exajoules of primary energy per year. The sun hits us with about 3.8 million exajoules per year. 1.03^1000 is a factor of 7e12. So under that assumption, the earth would be making 1 billion times more power than we receive from the sun.
I can pretty much guarantee that we won't be scaling at 3%/yr for the next 1000 years. And if we do, that's an argument for lots more nuclear fission, and a lot of fusion too. Because the solar-derived flows (wind, solar, hydro, biofuel, fossil fuel) won't be able to keep up even if we covered 100% of the earth with solar panels!
Thanks for the link, what are your thoughts on the position that France is in with a number of reactors out of action and requiring repairs? From an outsiders perspective, I am curious if it is really as simple as the French not keeping up with maintenance and it catching them at a bad time or are there issues with the reactor type or other influencing factors.
They're experiencing the flip side of the argument of picking one standard reactor and building lots of them identically. If an issue is identified, it can affect your whole fleet. In this case, they were doing an inspection and found unexpected corrosion in a safety system. They checked another similar reactor and found it too. The more they started checking the more they found. So they have to go down for extended outages and repairs, as necessary. This is very bad timing, considering the gas-driven energy crunch.
The repairs can be done, and the reactors will come back online, it just takes time. Very unfortunate, to say the least.
This is a well-written series (Parts 1 and 2 are linked in this article). This last part makes comparisons to the reactors designed and used by the US Navy.
If you read through all of this the message I got was that size is the enemy. In one part it notes that a 100MWe core meltdown could likely be contained by the vessel but a 1000MWe reactor meltdown likely wouldn't. This concern is part of why there are ever stricter requirements on civilian reactors.
So you have opposing forces: bigger reactors produce more power and scale better. Smaller reactors are safer and easier and cheaper to build. Smaller reactors probably means more of them, each requiring separate planning permission, design approval and so on. It also probably means people living closer to the reactor, which many would and do oppose.
This series makes a good case for regulation being a significant cost component but it doesn't really make the case (nor does it try to) that said regulation is overly onerous or otherwise unnecessary. A lot of regulation came about because of our experience with nuclear reactors, accidents and near-accidents and the bigger failur emodes of the larger reactors power supplies would likely want to build.
> Smaller reactors probably means more of them, each requiring separate planning permission, design approval and so on. It also probably means people living closer to the reactor, which many would and do oppose.
The major selling point for smaller reactors is that you can make a mass produced design that doesn't need separate planning, permission, and design approval every time. You can still have large power plants to get the benefits of scale, you just put more of these small units together at the same site. In fact you get some bonuses as you can shut down some reactors for maintenance while still producing power. Indeed most nuclear power plants already have multiple cores for exactly this reason, but typically its 2-6 rather than 20-60 and thus they are still pretty big.
I think the point is more that the past cost overrund are due to _changing_ regulation, not necessarily the regulation themselves.
It's like a software client changes requirements a year into a 2 year project and suddenly you need to rearchitect the whole thing, essentially starting again.
Following regulations is costly, but following changing regulations throughout a project lifecycle is _very expensive_.
Everyone assumes that anyone hesitant about Nuclear power is focussed on the environmental or safety concerns, but that is wrong. The costs (and cost overruns) of the construction and maintenance of Nuclear reactors have been enough reason on their own to be bearish on Nuclear.
I'm hopeful that new technologies, such as small nuclear reactions that can be built in a factory, will address this.
Our nations were far less wealthy when the existing stock of nuclear power plants were built, the technology available for building them have improved since then, and the raw resources needed as their inputs aren't a constraint, so why have costs risen so much relative to what we are willing to spend on it?
Environmental and safety regulations are supposed to be explanations for this rise in cost, not rival explanations to "cost is the issue" (since they take that as given).
I imagine moving all that mass and the energy intensive process to form and break concrete directly scale with rising oil prices. Plus price of labor going up.
They built them only for non economic reasons. Either because they wanted material for bombs, or as national vanity projects or because they convinced themselves it would be cheap.
If you want those reasons, go for it. Iran for instance is pursuing at least one of these goals when it works towards nuclear "power". Just don't expect affordable electricity at the end...
- Nuclear power plants are rare enough that each project is basically unique.
- Nuclear power plants are very complex. They are more "engineered" than "constructed", with hundreds of kilometers of tubes and wires. Pouring the concrete is the easy part.
- Nuclear power plants deal with an incredibly dangerous environment: high pressures, high temperatures, radioactivity, hazardous chemicals. Everything has to be tested, re-tested, and certified. Many parts will be near impossible to replace once it enters production, and the plant is supposed to be operational for decades.
- Nuclear power plants are safety-critical. Contrary to many other structures of similar complexity, things can get way worse than a big explosion. They have the potential to contaminate the site (or even the surrounding country) for decades or centuries. Failure is simply not acceptable.
- Safety regulations have been getting stricter over the years, because supposedly "100% safe" plants keep having accidents and the population is not very happy about that.
The existing stock of nuclear power plants is an offshoot of several military programs. The most common design is pretty much a submarine power plant on steroids, which turned out to be less than ideal. Things like "safety" and "profit" were almost seen as a suggestion more so than a requirement.
Newly-built power plants are required to incorporate over 50 years of innovation, but it turns out almost nobody has the skills to actually build them. They have simply gotten too complex to construct!
All of the above is true enough, but it is not the full story on why US nukes cost like they do.
The ones attempted recently in South Carolina and Georgia cost so much because people in a position to block building them want it that way. Once a nuke project starts, a torrent of money starts flowing. Everybody with a stake expects a share, and none want it ever to end. Finishing a plant would plug that flow. If it looks like the flow will dry up regardless, they might deliver something at the end.
We see the same process with urban tunnels and big military procurements. It is all perfectly legal.
It is probably not fixable.
Thus far, wind and solar projects have mostly avoided it, maybe in part because their legitimate costs are easy to estimate.
Existing nukes also cost more than renewables to operate, because they actually have operating costs. Big steam turbines, in particular, need regular overhauls. So, it is hard for anything with a steam turbine to compete with something that has none. Reactors need also operation, inspections, refueling, security, compliance monitoring... the list goes on.
Solar panels might need to be dusted off, or replaced. The worst that can happen to a wind turbine is to catch fire.
>We see the same process with urban tunnels and big military procurements. It is all perfectly legal. It is probably not fixable.
Not being a lawyer and all that, would some of this holding of the hands-out not qualify as some sort of grift or worse? Are there not laws already in place for this stuff? Is it a case of it being too hard to prove so no prosecutions are brought?
>Not being a lawyer and all that, would some of this holding of the hands-out not qualify as some sort of grift or worse? Are there not laws already in place for this stuff? Is it a case of it being too hard to prove so no prosecutions are brought?
Practically speaking sure, but all one needs to do is hide the grift behind a veneer of altruism and people[0] lap it up. Also half the time it is the lawmakers behind the grift. Do the phrases: “Think of the children“, “we need an environmental impact report“, or “This is a building of historical significance“ ring a bell? Behind each of them is an entity(ies) looking to advance their interest, which is often, but not always, profit from the increased diligence required or profit from the obstruction and the induced scarcity.
Francis Fukuyama uses the term "vetocracy" for our government. So many layers, so many checks and balances. Some of them were even a good idea at the time (eg in response to abusers like Robert Caro).
Every petty tyrant or crank has to be bought off, rolled over, or buried under. That takes time, resources, lawyers, political capital, stamina, tenacity.
I'm not even so sure vetocracy is a wholly bad thing, in principle. Of course people impacted by projects should be considered, heard, and hopefully accommodated. But, as others have already stated, vetocracy has been weaponized to thwart all progress, regardless of how much popular support is behind them.
For instance, we need expand our power grid, roughly 3x bigger. The challenge is our current patchwork of veto points (local, county, state, regional, national). So someone(s) will have to expend huge political capital to overhaul the regulatory and permitting system. Or we simply won't reach our goal for net zero carbon emissions.
When I mentioned "grift or worse", extortion is what I was thinking of but just unable to use my brain to get to extortion. So thanks for getting me there.
I think the technical term is "patronage". I am not very clear on the details. It is just, the bigger the budget, the more people you need on board pulling for it vs. every other project after the same money. Some people will support you because they agree with your priorities. Others need persuasion. You don't personally have the means for persuasion, but the project does, so it comes from that budget.
Of course, the more persuasion you need, the more it costs, and the more backing you need. So it is usually better to budget less and plan on overruns, instead. And, finishing on time would mean cutting off all those backers; thus, the schedule is overrun, too.
Thing is, most things somebody wants to spend $billions in public money on shouldn't proceed.
Jumbojets are hugely complex with hundreds of kilometers of pipes and wires and yet a thousand of them are in the air right this second. Complexity is a nothingburger.
A jumbo jet has countless failure modes that are completely fine where something analogous happening in a nuclear plant would wipe a city off the map.
Their core backup safety feature of being roughly bird shaped requires only a few moving parts, none of which are operating at extreme temperature or require cooling.
> A jumbo jet has countless failure modes that are completely fine where something analogous happening in a nuclear plant would wipe a city off the map.
No, the first post is correct - safety is not the issue. We build keep building dams, and dam failures have killed far, far more people than nuclear. Other comments about nimby are also off the mark. People whose properties are flooded hate dams, nimby's force delays measuring decades, yet we keep building dams.
The comment you are responding contains the answer to the riddle it posed:
> a thousand of them are in the air right this second.
If the one factory could build 1000 nuclear reactors, complexity would not be an issue there either. And I'm sure after building 1000 of them, the price would not so much as drop as plummet. Which is why small nuclear reactors built in factories are such a common meme.
But the first 100 of those small nuclear reactors will be hideously expensive based on the quotes we have from people who've actually tried to do it - far more than a couple of big plants generating the same output. And the big plants already being crushed by cost overruns.
Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them. That seems to be the only way it could happen, because after decades of refusals I think we can safely say the banks aren't interested in funding a technology that turns out energy 100% more expensive than current competitors.
Dam disasters don't render the entire region indefinitely uninhabitable. Nuclear accidents have only been so small and infrequent because of the constant vigilance against allowing them to gamble with millions of lives.
> Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them.
The thing is none of these people actually want nuclear power. They either want to redirect resources which would make fossil fuels irrelevant or feast forever off of the public teat whilst pretending to build a power plant.
The forces stopping nuclear power have very little to do with safety or greens or nimbys. It's a combination of their cost and of the power fossil fuels have. It just so happens that the fossil fuel interests are inadverently on the side of continuing to have human habitable land by virtue of leveraging the safety issue for their own greed.
Ironically they've probably hastened their own demise because if they hadn't forced the regulation we'd probably be too busy cleaning up nuclear disasters to think about weaning off of coal.
To be fair, complex is solvable compared to complicated. You just break each of the complex steps into components that are easier to solve individually. This is part and parcel for software peeps.
As stated does sound a bit pompous, but at the core, it's not inaccurate
I'm too busy working at an energy startup I think is the best path forward for energy security: something that takes a bit more effort than being an armchair quarterback.
Prompt supercriticality (as happened at Chernobyl) is worse. Having that happen in a fast reactor is even worse than that -- it could be a literal nuclear explosion.
Fast reactors may be necessary for a fully nuclear powered world, because the uranium runs out too quickly without breeding. And 233U or plutonium skate much closer to the edge of prompt supercriticality, since they produce about half the delayed neutrons of 235U.
* Technology makes machines cheaper, and makes human work more expensive in comparison. Nuclear projects involve a lot of highly qualified human work.
* Technology makes repetitive operations cheaper. You build a factory for hundred million dollars, make a billion gadgets on it, and every gadget costs you ten cents to make. Nuclear projects lack the economy of scale: even the Navy is going to order reactors by a dozen, and civil power plant reactors may see even fewer installations per model. Thus the huge costs of the R&D and the factory are amortized over but a few reactors, making each of them very expensive.
* Due to small production scale, various custom materials needed for nuclear reactors, like special steels, are much more expensive than more widely used materials.
Nuclear is now in a position similar to solar cells 15 years ago: a promising technology which is too expensive due to small scale and bespoke nature of their production. It took a decade of betting on them, pouring money into them, and giving various discounts to the customers to get where we are now, with solar panels which are efficient, affordable, and available. I suppose nuclear tech would need the same to become cost-efficient. France did / does something along these lines; the US does not.
Solar experience relentless experience effects, with cost dropping by about 20% for each doubling of cumulative production. Nuclear has not shown good experience effects.
> Nuclear is now in a position similar to solar cells 15 years ago: a promising technology which is too expensive due to small scale and bespoke nature of their production. It took a decade of betting on them, pouring money into them, and giving various discounts to the customers to get where we are now, with solar panels which are efficient, affordable, and available. I suppose nuclear tech would need the same to become cost-efficient. France did / does something along these lines; the US does not.
Unlike solar 15 years ago, nuclear has been around 60 years already and received huge amounts of subsidies (much more than solar, excluding all the extra military subsidies). So what is fundamentally different now that would change the essentially linear scaling to an exponential scaling and why should we not invest into the tech where we see ongoing exponential scaling of cost already with no indication of slowing (solar and wind)?
Nuclear involves large, monolithic plants, with many parts, with many of those parts shutting down the system if they fail. So the parts have to be highly reliable, which is costly.
Renewables involve larger numbers of decoupled systems, where failures of parts don't propagate to shut down the whole thing. If that PV module fails, or that wind turbine is struck by lightning and catches fires, the rest of the system goes on as before.
Yes and no. Renewables themselves don't suffer much at failure, but the grid itself has to pay a quite heavy cost if it can't balance demand and supply. The European grid has had several server incident where grid were close to break down from sudden imbalance between supply and demand, and if a crash had occurred the cost of such failure would be massive. As reported, those failures has increase in both frequencies and severity in correlation with increase dependency on renewables.
It all depend on how one want to perceive the system. A wind turbine struck by lightning might not propagate too much, but a poor weather prediction can have massive propagation for the system as a whole.
I was discussing the implications of reliability on the cost of components.
The grid is also a resilient system where individual parts can fail independently. Weather prediction is correlated, but has no effect on the cost of individual parts.
The grid need more resilience and complex systems as it becomes more vulnerable to sudden changes in demand and supply, which increase the costs of the components of the grid. We don't think of it as components of renewables, even through they are required in the grid in order to have renewables connected.
My best guess is what Freeman Dyson said in his autobiography Disturbing the Universe: he stopped working on nuclear reactors after TRIGA (01958) and Project Orion (01957 to 01961) because it stopped being fun. It became a question of bureaucracy and national security and empire-building and whatnot.
So people like Dyson, who learned calculus by spending his Christmas vacation working his way through a textbok for fun, were no longer available to design reactors. So progress on, for example, thorium reactors ended in the US in 01966 (thorium BWR is from 01960, thorium LWBR is from 01962, thorium MSR is from 01964, thorium HTGR is from 01966). In other countries it took a few more years. Teller, who worked on TRIGA with Dyson, seems to have stopped working on reactor design in 01960. The elves left Middle Earth. So hospitals still use TRIGA today for nuclear medicine.
I don't see the key issue here as being that Dyson and Teller were brilliant, though they were brilliant. Rather, it's that Dyson and Teller were curious and playful. I think curious and playful people exploring the possibilities of nuclear reactors will come up with many improvements, even if they are the ordinary kind of stupid people. It might take them five times as long as it would have taken people like Dyson, and there might be more accidental deaths along the way, but they will get there. But today the occasional curious and playful person who tries to investigate nuclear reactors is likely to get arrested, even if they pose less risk to their neighbors than Marie Curie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Handl (or assassinated by the Mossad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...) and so the Navy is still using reactors very similar to the ones they used 60 years ago.
I see questions like "the technology available has improved, so why have costs risen?" as symptomatic of the worldview that anything can be bought. Teller, Dyson, and Handl were not optimizing their life decisions to maximize their earning power; they were curious about the world and wanted to preserve liberal democracy. You can't buy that. If you announce that you are going to spend a lot of money on nuclear reactor development, it will attract people who optimize their life decisions to maximize their earning power, not people who are curious about the world.
You maximize your earning power by owning things, not by learning things or figuring things out. People who optimize their life decisions to maximize their earning power will be no good at ferreting out possible improvements that can be made to nuclear reactors, because you don't get paid any more for making breakthroughs than you do for just plodding along.
Less, in fact, because nine tenths of the time when you're doing the kind of things that lead to breakthroughs, the things you try don't work, so you aren't delivering anything of value to anybody.
The other issue is that "Why can't we build nuclear power plants?" is a subset of "Why can't we build?" and I think the answer to that is basically that people aren't free to build. But nuclear power plants are probably the kind of building that people are least free to build.
It’s, as I understand it, to draw attention to the briefness of our lives and contextualize the decisions we make that have effects long beyond “now”.
Personally, I think it’s kind of weird to base it upon the supposed birth year of a religious figure who may not have even lived, but standards are useful, I suppose.
I'm so glad that you brought up TRIGA. For those who don't know, the story of TRIGA is quite fascinating from our perspective. The pitch was rather simple, "Build a reactor that a teenager could play with" (without supervision). And they succeeded.
The reactor was designed in the span of a few months. They started in the summer of 01956. The first one was commissioned and built in May of 01958. And it ran until 1997, steadily producing 250 MW with occasional "pulses" up to 1,000 MW, the entire time.
Let's take a minute to appreciate that. They went from design to implementation in less than 2 years, that's lightning fast even in startup terms. And their design has never malfunctioned, ever. AFAICT, there are 66 of these reactors out there in the world that have operated for nearly 7 decades with 0 incidents. Some of them are even true to form and are operated by teenagers!
And I suspect that's the real reason why nuclear power is so expensive. While regulatory burdens, subsidies, and general corruption do indeed explain the exponential cost increases for nuclear power, the truth is that these are proximate causes. The distal cause is simple; the reactors suck. We've been designing them wrong for decades now, and we need to make rethink them from the ground up.
Luckily, I'm not the only person who thinks that. Far more smarter people have been bringing the fun back to nuclear engineering, and we are finally getting a series look at concepts like pebble bed reactors.
I hope that someday we'll have forever batteries and power sources that are small, self-contained, and can be carted for use anywhere, including space.
It could happen! But, right now, at most latitudes, building a PV farm is cheaper than building a coal power plant with the same average output, and a coal power plant is basically a conventional nuclear power plant without the reactor. I think that, to be cost-competitive with PV as a source of energy, nuclear reactors need either much cheaper heat engines than a Parsons turbine, or some way of converting nuclear power to useful forms that doesn't start with using it to heat something up.
The only group I know of trying to do this is https://hb11.energy/, whose plan is to laser-initiate an avalanche of boron-11/hydrogen "fusion" and throw the resulting alpha particles up a million-volt potential difference. Though it's not guaranteed, that might end up being cheaper than a steam turbine and generator.
Without such improvements, nuclear energy is only really appealing in environments where PV and wind aren't an option — like submarines, aircraft carriers, Antarctic research stations, deep-space probes, and Scotland — or as a hedge against unforeseen difficulties in scaling up grid-scale energy storage and the like.
But I might be wrong about where the costs in coal plants come from, and I'd be very grateful to find that out.
I really appreciated your "On Apple’s “Expanded Protections for Children”," by the way.
To be fair, to make the average output of a PV plant comparable to the average output of a nuclear plant you need to add some storage, which drives up the cost a bit. Probably not enough to account for the extra cost of nuclear though.
You do, although it's still unclear how much storage you'll need to add. On the other hand, while you can't turn PV plants on at night, you can't turn conventional nuclear plants off, and so to go all nuclear you need some form of load following: either gas peakers, or PV that carries a higher load during the day, or storage, or giant resistor banks.
Evidently naval reactors are a lot better at this, though.
As far as I know it's not terribly difficult to model how much storage you'll need. It has a couple of variables, like how well connected your grid is, or how well you can shape demand, but then it's just looking at past weather data and deciding how low you want the probability for blackouts to be. Here for example is a toy implementation: https://model.energy/
From what I've heard the amount of storage is not very large if you assume sufficiently large grids and the total system cost is expected to be lower than what we currently pay for electricity.
Demand response is the biggest unpredictable factor, I think, but demand is also unpredictable.
Power plants are commonly depreciated over 30 or even 40 years. Electricity consumption in the US doubled during the 01960s, and it doubled in PRC during the 02010s. If the transport sector in the US went all-electric, that would double electrical consumption again even without increasing energy use.
How can you predict what fraction of your users will be using electric vehicles 15 years from now, and whether they'll charge them in the daytime or at night? That depends on, among other things, whether they'll go back to working in offices, whether the offices will have chargers, and how much cheaper it will be for them to charge during the day than at night. And that, in turn, depends on what kind of time-of-use rate schedules you can get the public utility commission to approve. Will people insulate their houses more so they don't need to heat them at night? That depends not only on the rate schedule but their future expectations of the rate schedule, as well as what their house buyers' expectations of the rate schedule. How much will superinsulating your walls raise the house's sale price?
How about home TCES — if daytime electricity is sufficiently cheap, such forms of energy storage might become popular as a cheaper alternative to superinsulation, and maybe suppress the demand for nighttime electricity further in cold areas; but we don't have any mass-market experience with them right now. Will building codes, or insurance underwriters, impede the wide adoption of TCES after the first homeowner files a massive insurance claim to replace their hardwood floor ruined by a calcium-chloride spill? Will dirt-cheap rail-shipped carnallite drop the price of TCES further than calcium chloride possibly could? Will new carnallite deposits be found, closer to large cities?
How about the future of industry? Mass PV rollout will drop the price of energy dramatically, so industrial processes that are currently unprofitable because they use too much energy will become profitable. They might outcompete more energy-efficient incumbents.
The first example of this might be aluminum replacing steel in more and more uses; today it's so much more expensive than steel that it's only used in places where its lighter weight is a big advantage, but with lower energy costs (and shorter shipping distances) it might replace steel for many more purposes. Minimills recycling existing steel might be able to fulfill the entire steel demand for quite a while — steel mills that smelt iron from ore would shut down entirely, and the 30-year-depreciated power plants built to supply those mills might find themselves without the demand they were built for. And this might happen by 02039. This is maybe the most predictable outcome of much lower prices for electrical energy, but probably won't be the most dramatic one.
So shifts in electrical demand will depend on cultural change, diffusion of innovations, regulatory capture, consumer expectations, and cost-driven substitution in the radically changed economic landscape.
The last time the price of energy dropped so dramatically might have been Watt's steam-engine in 01776. The dislocations in society that resulted would have been very hard to predict.
Specifically, aluminum might replace steel because steel is being moved to an electrically reduced metal, with electricity separating oxygen from the oxide (indirectly perhaps, using electrolytic hydrogen). But aluminum is already electrically reduced. The cost advantage of using cheaper coke to make iron goes away.
Steel moving to being electrically reduced could happen for regulatory reasons, as you seem to be suggesting, or it could happen because the electricity becomes cheaper than the coke, at least during the daytime.
Agreed! To be more specific, the volume electrochemical equivalent of trivalent iron is 8.83 μm dm²/A/hour (and that's the form of iron in hematite), and for aluminum it's 12.4 μm dm²/A/hour, calculated in units(1) as 26.982 dalton / (2.70 g/cc) / 3 e. Usually metal prices are quoted per kg, not per liter, so it might be better to calculate these as 190 μg per coulomb for iron and 93 μg per coulomb for aluminum: iron would still be cheaper, costing 49% as much (assuming the Faradaic efficiencies are comparable and the other aspects of the processes are of insignificant cost, which are obviously wrong assumptions), but right now aluminum costs US$3.10/kg (USGS MCS 2022) and steel is more like US$1.30/kg (same source: US$110 billion ÷ 87 million tonnes raw steel).
This is a much smaller gap than I had expected, so maybe the switch to electrically reduced iron (directly, as in electrolytic iron, or indirectly) won't be as big a change as I thought.
Well you leave out the small inconvenient truth that TRIGA is not power generating.
The earlier series of the blog post we are discussing actually talks about that a significant fraction of the cost of a nuclear plant is the thermal power plant part, which is the same as for a coal plant for example.
Moreover, actually having to use a reactor for power generation significantly increases the complexity of the design, you suddenly need to heat water, which means two different water cycles which mustn't contaminate each other... And having water involved makes things more tricky anyway because of corrosion...
>The distal cause is simple; the reactors suck. We've been designing them wrong for decades now, and we need to make rethink them from the ground up.
Obviously, the vast majority of nuclear power plants are of the suck type. If you want a regulatory blank slate you are going to have to shut them all down and replace them with good power plants. The regulations are there to deal with the "suck" of the nuclear industry. Get rid of the suck and you will make the nuclear industry very unhappy, in other words the legacy nuclear power industry is exactly the problem that drives regulations and costs up.
That argument should apply to houses as well, but building houses has become more expensive in the last 50 years not less.
Generally construction does not significantly benifit from economies of scale, while fabrication does. Now we could build lots of small scale reactors, but while construction costs might come down (so far completely unproven) running costs most definitely would go up. You don't want to run even a small scale nuclear reactor without qualified staff, security etc..
As I said, the problem with nuclear power are all these ragtag powerplants that were hastily built at a time people didn't understand the potential for catastrophic failure. If you get rid of these ancient power plants, the risk of failure goes down dramatically and the need for further regulation disappears. Meanwhile everywhere you keep hearing how e.g. Germany should keep obsolete power plants even though this will ruin the long term reputation of nuclear further.
Nuclear is not fundamentally expensive[0], and most nuclear power plants currently in operation were cheap when they were built. The high costs of building new powerplants is a result of going decades without building any, leading to a loss of experience. Even still, nuclear remains competitive with other traditional power generation technologies like coal. Only with recent advancements in fracking did natural gas supplant coal as the go to fuel, and Wind and solar have become extremely inexpensive, but only in the past 10 years, in large part due to a concerted effort to scale up those industries. In other parts of the world where nuclear power did not have a decades long hiatus it remains extremely competitive with even these renewables, for example in South Korea where LCOE for nuclear is half that of solar.
Of course you may have only became bearish on nuclear when the costs got high, but there are a large number of people who were bearish before then, which is what made costs high.
Which is mind bendingly stupid.. why would you switch from nuclear to coal in the middle of an energy crisis. Germany is the epitome of failed, stupid and corrupt energy planning and are now pulling the whole of Europe down with them.
In fact France is pulling Europe down.
France was 80% nuclear energy, but half their power plants are down or failing so they have to import power from Germany (which is produced with natural gas).
France was a net exporter, now they need massively import power.
Germany could handle their power load, but not theirs + france.
Maybe for a short while, all reactors will be back online before winter and they are planning to build 10 new plants. France's only problem is that they also have a crazy "green" movement trying to ruin their nuclear program and has successfully hindered modernization until now. All i all France's nuclear program has been an overwhelming success, and they've managed to cover almost 40% of their total energy consumption with nuclear compare that to the <10% that renewables cover in Germany and it's easy to see that it was much much faster building nuclear for green energy.
TFA (if you include parts 1 and 2) addresses all of these points, though it's only answer for SK is:
> The fact that South Korea is the only country to exhibit this trend has led some experts to speculate that the cost data (which comes directly from the utility and hasn’t been independently audited) has been manipulated and we shouldn’t draw conclusions from it.
If you read the paper, South Korea is clearly not the only country to exhibit this trend. Pretty much every non-western developed nation has nuclear power which is competitive with other nations. It makes perfect sense that South Korea, being an extremely advanced economy which also waited to go nuclear and thus did so with technologies that incorporate many lessons learned, along with a very well structured program for implementation, saw some of the best results.
But the fact is that we did go years without building any, leading to nuclear power plants being more expensive. It is the path we chose (rightly or wrongly) and today solar and wind is cheaper in the western world. Even if continuing to invest in nuclear in the 1970s was the right choice, it may no longer be the case today that we have those. (see Path Dependence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence)
In my opinion, rather than spending the many years and billions of dollars on regaining the edge in nuclear, we should expand the capacity of the cheap and clean energy sources we have access to today.
That is fair! I do wonder where we would be had we never stopped investing in nuclear. Probably much better from a global warming perspective - alas, here we are.
Nuclear runs constantly. Solar and wind don't. This is a significant problem. Storage is hard and inefficient.
We don't currently have a viable complete renewable solution. Nuclear is much better for the planet than fossil fuels and is the only option to bridge the gap required to operate the current renewables.
Well the best strategy would be LFTR/MSRs that can breed and/or burn the waste to usable isotopes or as fuel. But it's always interesting how much pro-nuclear people are anti-MSR or anti-anything-but-huge-concrete-domes-and-solid-rods
Because the lobbies underlying nuclear power in solid fuel rod processing is a lucrative government boondoggle.
All the nuke proponents say "we are losing all the old guard!". I actually think this is a feature, nuclear needs to be reformulated and reassessed from the ground up without all the political and military biases, and once they have stable cost profiles in wind/solar to actually target.
If they can actually make a competitive reactor once wind/solar stabilizes, likely at 1/2 to 1/3 the current real dollar cost.
This is ridiculous. Never in my life have I read someone say "Build nuclear, but not MSR!!" My problem with MSR is that I do not have a productive one I can point to and say "There! It works!". But by all means, let's build some!
And then, you nicely suggest that all pro-nuclear people somehow _must be shills_ (as if, uhh, nuclear people just love destroying the world, I guess?) that really is ridiculous and not a too charitable reading of the opponents.
Have you read any of the history behind the ORNL MSR and the budgetary ax it got?
Do you know that Weinberg and the ORNL people advocated for increased safety in the nuclear industry (which their reactor design had fundamental advantages over all other designs)?
The organizational religion of nuclear power was that it was safe and had no chance of failure. You can choose to disagree on my characterization of the nuclear industry, but the political wars with "The Greens" has counter-radicalized nuclear proponents.
ORNL and Weinberg saying their nuclear reactor was superior on safety leads to the inevitable follow-up implication for anyone listening that other nuclear reactors... WERE NOT.
Thus the ORNL director for MSR was sent to forced retirement/fired (fired from a government job!), ORNL funding was totally axed. Kirk Sorensen claims that MSR research was forbidden in public universities at a policy level, so no one would touch it. Sorensen is a pretty rabid LFTR advocate, but the fact that only in 2022 after 60 years, finally SOMEONE is doing a research reactor that fits in a closet? The fact there has been ZERO research programs in MSR tells me that Sorensen is probably right about the prohibition.
I believe that the Military was also involved in this, because they needed their isotopes for weapons, or to maintain popular support for nuclear weapons. You can't have these people undermining public confidence in civilian nuclear power, what follows after that is the hated peacenik "Greens" then getting nuclear weapons banned.
Anyway, yes it does seem conspiratorial, but with nuclear tech which required so much governmental push/funding in the beginning, and now has SO MUCH regulatory apparatus above it that was an organizational outgrowth of the original nuclear research government agencies, YES, there is a historical and effective bias against the ORNL design.
Some of that is practical: the ORNL and LFTR designs are totally different that the entirety of the world's solid fuel designs. It would require AEC regulatory fasttracking, and a ton of budget. And if something doesn't have government funding in the nuclear world, it is DEAD.
Anyway, China has a prototype MSR reactor coming online. Oh look! MSR projects are coming out of the woodwork everywhere! What a coincidence. Los Alamos is doing materials research! Some Texas university got clearance to boot the first US research reactor in fifty years! Huh, funny how that works.
So yeah, sure it might be conspiratorial or uncharitable, but this was probably a trillion dollars in budgeting (inflation adjusted) over 20-30 years that was at stake.
I know it seems like I'm anti-nuclear. I think fission power is so effing cool. I think LFTR is the coolest design I've ever seen. I also see that nuclear is fundamentally not competitive with the current approaches, and I don't think that is NIMBYism or excessive regulatory at the core: I think the designs don't scale and issues with nuclear waste and safety are offloaded, avoided, corner-cut, etc.
And if nuclear has to compete with solar/wind, those "hidden costs" would be handled even more poorly. So a reactor design that uses 99% of fuel, is meltdown proof, scalable, and can even reprocess old spent rod waste, well, to me that or something that also lives up to that is the real path forward. Scalable (i.e. closet sized) seems to also be a fundamental requirement to competitive economics, although I read a good post on how big honking reactors are what are needed to make the economies of scale work, not small reactors, but I personally suspect that view is polluted with existing huge-effing-solid-fuel-dome reactor design bias.
I'm just a dumb fuck programmer that reads this stuff in his spare time. I would love a cogent response from a nuclear scientist that knows the ORNL design in depth to give me really good reasons why it isn't commercially viable. But again I think the entire nuclear industry and university ...
The Chinese nation is awesome. Amazing work ethic, rich history and a great people. The only problem is the government's tendency to drift into a totalitarian state where most people live okay lives but are not allowed to step outside of certain ideological standards. If they were able to get a better government I almost think the work could do okay having them as the number one super power.
Storage is not, in fact, hard. Its efficiency is not important beyond a few hours' worth, because it is rarely needed. For those few hours, battery efficiency is very good.
If it was rarely needed and only needed for a few hours we wouldn't need all the fossil fuel based generation to fill the gaps.
I'm not aware of any significant battery based storage system deployed at scale that solves this problem. There are some large battery banks but none even close to the scale required. It's a hard problem as it would require a huge increase in global manufacturing.
I'd like to be wrong here. I'd love it if it was possible to build an affordable grid based on 100% renewable generation. It will be possible one day. I look forward to that day.
It would be stupid to spend money building out storage before there is renewable generating capacity to charge it from. So, they spend on that, first.
Most of the storage, in the end, will not be batteries. Most existing storage is pumped hydro, because the dams were already there. There are lots of alternatives: underground or underwater compressed air, liquified air, underground hydrogen, tanked ammonia, buoyancy, mineshaft gravity.
Most places will keep a few days' ammonia that they can burn where they do NG today, and order more if it looks like they may need it, and can't book transmission line power. Other times, they will synthesize ammonia for sale.
Regional storage of underground hydrogen is already under construction. Hydrogen synthesis efficiency is now well over 90%, up from 60% very recently.
Until ammonia synthesis ramps up in the '30s, they will burn NG at need, without apology.
It's not relevant what source is used to charge the batteries. Right now there is a massive price difference between peak and off peak power (partly due to renewables daily cycle), so anyone able to build a battery can charge at the off-peak rate and sell at the peak rate every day. This means that batteries have a revenue source right now, and therefore, the only reason they don't exist is because the cost exceeds that revenue source.
Storage as a separate business is not viable beyond a few years, so investment is limited. Original producers of energy will have their own storage, and prices will level out. Excess generation capacity (e.g. noon) after recharging storage will be devoted to synthesizing liquid fuels and desalination, which serve unlimited demand.
By the time there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge storage, storage will be very, very cheap. Right now, it costs more, so money produces much better results building generation capacity and factories for storage. As the factories are completed, production ramps up, and costs fall.
Storage emits a lot more co2/kwh though, and that's a big problem. Even when you remove cost from the equation.
There's also no grid in the world that runs on wind/solar+storage, it's obvious from looking at California that it would take 20+ years to arrive there.
Storage needn't emit any CO2 at all. In a world that has transitioned entirely to non-fossil energy sources, where are you thinking this CO2 is coming from? Cement production? Batteries aren't made of cement.
Before you have built a thing, you have to build it. After you build it, you have it. Building will be a big job, but nowhere near as big as building nukes instead would have been.
The good news is that renewables start displacing CO2 emission almost immediately after ground is broken.
It would be stupid to build storage without renewable capacity to charge it from. You spend on that first.
And even where storage is hard, things are developing FAST.
EVs are still at, what, 1% of cars on the road, and only a small percentage of dozens of transport modes by air, land, sea, from single person motorcycles to busses or even container ships.
Grid storage still basically is an "EV batteries on land". This is going to change as well.
WHich is funny because the fundamental issue any nuclear plant has to deal with isn't the current price of alternative energy + grid storage. The REAL problem is that in ten years when the thing comes online, what will the price of alternatives be then given the cost improvement curves of the last decade?
I would hazard a guess that alt energy will be half of natural gas turbine by then (and natural gas turbine is already untouchably cheaper than nuclear), and probably 2/3 the cost with functional grid storage.
I believe home solar will be cheaper than grid natural gas turbine in 10 years too. And that's without carbon taxes.
Actually, nuclear plants need maintenance once in a while too and they do have outages as well. Take France for example, a lot of their reactors are offline for maintenance right now. Right in the middle of the biggest energy crisis on the continent since the oil crisis in the seventies.
A lot of countries are already pretty far down the path of going carbon neutral. Mostly without building or planning to build nuclear plants. They are a lot less necessary than some nuclear proponents would have people believe.
Energy storage is actually a fairly simple problem. There are at this point dozens of different ways that are being used commercially to store energy. Including of course a wide variety of battery types, pumped hydro and other gravity based systems, thermal storage, synthesizing hydrogen and other gases/liquids that can be burned later, etc. The main challenge is not storage but cheap storage. Or cheaper storage as combined generation and storage bids are fairly common these days and already way cheaper than nuclear already. Scaling the deployment of these solutions over the next few decades will drop cost further.
And of course energy can also be moved around via cables over long distances. The main challenge is not just generating enough power but getting it to where it is needed. Long distance cables even out local fluctuations in solar and wind performance.
How is wind and solar in any way close to achieve what nuclear has already has? Solar and wind is not a mature technology at all, you would know if you lived in a country that has invested heavily in it. Where i live people has to use an app to see when they can afford to wash their clothes, run the dishwasher, charge the car at any given time of the week and and hour. The government is praying to the weather gods for a warm and windy winter so that we might avoid rolling blackouts and insane energy prices. We as humans can simply not afford to rely on the current state of mother Nature. Who knows what might happen? Wind patterns could change over time or because of climate change, heck a super vulcano an asteroid or nuclear fallout could block out the sun for years. As long as we can't control the weather, plate tectonics or deflect asteroids let's invest in a technology that is very well understood and has stood the test of time, works in space, the most energy dense, the most efficient and there's enough of it on earth to keep us going for thousands of years.
If solar and wind are not mature, that just means there's even more room for them to improve. And they're already beating the pants off nuclear globally for new generating capacity.
If you extend the demonstrated empirical experience curve for solar assuming PV dominates world energy production, cost might decline to just $0.01/kWh.
Solar and wind is not being anything as long as we haven't got a solution for storage. As it is now wind and solar are backed up by dirty sources like gas, coal and biomass and that isn't about to change any time soon.
The difficulty of solving the storage problem is greatly overstated. The big issue with storage will be which of the many possible approaches comes out on top. It's an embarrassment of possibilities, not an unsolvable problem.
BTW, nuclear isn't going to power the world with current thermal reactors (there's not enough uranium), so hand wringing over storage should be matched by that for the more difficult problem of making breeder reactors safe and affordable. So far, they've been more expensive than current commercial reactors, and they suffer from safety issues due to Pu and 233U producing fewer delayed neutrons, so they operate closer to prompt criticality.
(Unlike breeders, storage is actually getting installed on grids around the world these days, and costs are coming down.)
Also could you point me to any meaningful and scalable storage implemented or being implemented anywhere in the world? Also what about materials used for solar and wind? Both requires insane amounts of material where a very significant part of that is rare earth.
As far as I've seen the best bet for wind so far is power to x . X because we haven't figured out of it should be hydrogen, ammonia or something else, both of which would be very impractical as we've got no infrastructure to support it and it's also very inefficient in reality you'd loose like 80% of the energy generated so you'd have to build so much more capacity.
That page lists uranium resources at 6,147,000 tonnes.
Operating a 3 GW(th) LWR requires about 200 tonnes/year of natural uranium.
6000 such reactors (needed to produce the 18 TW of primary energy currently used by the global economy) would therefore consume 1.2 million tonnes of U per year. The resource listed on that page would last five years.
So, either much larger uranium resource would be needed, or breeding would be needed, or both.
As for your other questions:
The first skates close to the position that no storage solution can ever be built unless it has already been built. This sort of reactionary attitude is just mindlessly obstructive, and does not reflect an attitude of constructive discussion. One can look at various storage technologies and see they scale very well.
As for materials in solar/wind systems: they are materials that are used in general society at much larger scale. The world makes 2 billion tonnes/year of steel, for example. If global industrial society can produce these materials, it can produce them for the renewable energy systems needed to power it. If it can't, then not even nuclear can save it.
Of course we need new types of reactors, we already have reactors that can use the waste from old reactors types like CANDU. Most reactors in use today are ancient and inefficient using only 4% or so of the potential in the fuel. Your back of a napkin calculation is disingenuous and misleading, for example it's estimated that sea water contains 4.5 billion tons tons of uranium. At the very least we have plenty of uranium to last until thorium reactors are ready.
We do not have breeder reactors in a commercialized form. Rejecting solar/wind because technologies are not yet in widespread use, but accepting breeders with nuclear, is hypocritical.
Recycling fuel from LWRs to make MOX is not the same thing. It would only extend that 5 years by a couple of additional years.
Seawater uranium extraction has been demonstrated at the gram scale. It would have to be scaled up by something close to a factor of a trillion to power the world. Also, powering a single 1 GW(e) reactor would require a collector field on 170 square kilometers of continental shelf, in an area with good ocean currents. The levelized power/area would be considerably worse than PV.
I will add that running a reactor on bred isotopes (233U, various Pu isotopes) presents an additional problem. All of these have considerably lower delayed neutron fraction than 235U. This means the reactors will be operating much closer to prompt criticality. One could resort to subcritical reactors, but that means adding a 100 MW (or so) 1 GeV linac to each to add the needed extra neutrons. And of course no such accelerator driven reactors have ever been built.
>> today solar and wind is cheaper in the western world.
I’m afraid this is only true for the US, let’s not forget almost all of Europe is as north as Canada or north US.
In order to compare the cost we cannot just compare the price to install a certain capacity.
You must also factor in how much extra capacity you need to build.
When we look at the Germany[1], on the best month, their solar produce half of the installed capacity and solar never goes higher than a third.
And that’s for the best month.
Germany has already invested 600 billions, does it need to go 5 five folds ? Maybe less as the costs are decreasing.
It seems like that money invested in nuclear would produced much more and prevent spending what’s starting to look like an entire gdp invested into renewables.
The extra capacity is taken into account with "levelized cost". Levelized cost of wind and solar are just a fraction of the levelized cost of energy from new nuclear power plants.
We can estimate the cost of storage to deal with intermittency and seasonality, and renewables will likely come in cheaper than nuclear by the time any nuclear plant whose construction was started today would come on line.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit
that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels.
From where do you geht the 600 billion figure? I only know the 500 billion figure from an INSM study from 2016 but that was an estimste for 2025 (doubtful that it still holds up) and also include things like transport infrastrukture etc.
Nuclear is by far the most expensive technology and keeps only getting more expensive. They are also not insurable and the waste problem is not solved. Appart from that they are also basically a big target.
> The high costs of building new powerplants is a result of going decades without building any, leading to a loss of experience
Cool, let's get the price ratio between the early PWR reactors in the west and the ones started in the early 90s (just after the peak of spending) then and multiply it by current costs to get a enstimate.
Cost is indeed the issue for commercial power generation. So let's look at costs. Especially, let's look at cost trends.
My sources are: Lazard's 2022 levelized cost of energy estimates; NREL's Spring 2022 Solar Industry Update: the Global Wind Energy Council's Global Wind Report 2022 highlights; and especially the 2022 report in Cell (Cell's "Joule" sub-publication) called "Empirically Grounded Energy Forecasts and the Energy Transition".
On the basis of the trends in costs shown there, I conclude that 1) coal, nuclear, and large-scale hydro are obsolete for power generation; 2) combined-cycle gas, peaker gas, and on-shore wind generation are obsolescent. (Biomass thermal, concentrated solar thermal, and geothermal are essentially lab experiments. A few hundred MW or maybe 2 GW total globally each. Oil is of course obsolete too.)
Once current project pipelines are emptied (2035 maybe?), there won't be much of any of these built for commercial power generation, because they won't be able to compete except in obscure niches. Onshore wind comes closest to being competitive, but its costs are not dropping fast enough. The costs of the others are rising.
(According to NREL and the GWEC respectively, cumulative global solar PV installed capacity is 939 GWdc, most of it installed in 2018-2021, and cumulative global wind capacity installed is 837 GW, most installed 2012-2019. Onshore wind, while it has not yet peaked in terms of yearly increment, has peaked as a share of total generation, while PV is bottlenecked by permitting queues alone.)
So what is supposed to replace all of these obsolete technologies that currently account for the vast majority of energy generation? Lithium batteries, solar power, and offshore wind power?
There are so many problems with this scheme, not least of which is that you have pretty much no base load and batteries can't be manufactured at anywhere near enough scale to successfully do this "transition" for at least the next 20 years.
In the US, we already have about ~25% of power coming from nuclear and Hydro. That's a huge chunk of our base load.
Add in ~7% offshore wind, ~4% for onshore, and ~4% storage for pumped hydro, and we would be just fine with the rest coming from solar & a hodge podge of other renewables.
And we'll have natural gas power plants in commission for another 30 years. Why shut them down? We can use them in the Winter. 30 years is more than enough time to transition to near 100% renewables.
If mini nuclear reactors pan out and can replace even a fraction of the coal plants out there - our base load will be covered.
At night, in the winter, we use about half as much electricity as during the day in the summer - when Solar works best.
Obsolete means we're unlikely to add a lot more energy generation from them - but not that we'll decommission what we have or stop maintaining them. This is especially true for Hydro.
I doubt we'll ever add much more nuclear if not mini nuclear reactors - that's why I'm really excited about the possibilities for them.
To add to that, I said nothing about storage. There is not much clarity about storage as yet. Pumped hydro, compressed air, thermal (hot rocks), hydrogen or ammonia: they could all be viable alongside batteries (for grid stabilization and short term storage). And more besides them, probably.
It's also not clear to me which battery chemistries will win for grid storage. Possibly several of them.
Grid scale batteries are in their infancy. There are over 100 different technologies in the oven now. The technology, mining, refinement, and manufacturing will mature. In 20 years nothing will come close to storing energy at the price and scale of grid batteries.
I think the cost argument is disingenuous - solar camp likes to tout how it took a decade of subsides before economies of scale kicked in - no reason to believe nuclear wouldn't come down with same kind of subsides - on a longer scale due to longer iteration cycle.
> solar camp likes to tout how it took a decade of subsides before economies of scale kicked in - no reason to believe nuclear wouldn’t come down with same kind of subsides - on a longer scale due to longer iteration cycle.
There is: nuclear has been subsidized on a much longer scale than solar already.
Well, since nuclear plants cannot be insured these costs as well as the waste cost are mostly carried by the state. There are various calculations on these costs online. Not sure about other costs, but I'm sure there are more (e.g. security for transportation)
The costs are only seen as high relative to other investments. If you tax polluting industries for the damage the cause, for example, maybe those cost overruns for nuclear reactors would be just as easily stomached as the countless highway projects that also see cost and time overruns and are still paid for nonetheless, relative to having to pay massive taxes on dirty energy.
Nuclear is not just a little bit more expensive but more like an order of magnitude. And as cost for renewables continues to drop, that might turn into two orders of magnitude.
Small nuclear reactors might reduce the cost a little; but a little is not nearly enough. Cost needs to come down by at least an order of magnitude for it to at least somewhat keep up. Anything else is just not going to be cost competitive. And that's a problem when renewables are still dropping rapidly in price.
If cost is the issue why is Japan spending so much e.g. estimates of 600 billion USD on cleaning up Fukushima? Rebuilding the entire nuclear power plant fleet of Japan would have been cheaper than a single meltdown.
Oh right, cost is an issue because obsolete nuclear power plants keep giving nuclear a bad name and end up increasing regulatory requirements on modern designs even if they don't have failure modes from 50 years ago. In other words, the nuclear power industry really likes shooting themselves in the foot.
I have not read it, but I've read an article [1] which cites it. Apparently a lot of the current regulation is created based on a faulty model (LNT, ALARA) of how harmful radiation is. This model predicts that the harm is linear in dose, with no time component. Ie.: that receiving a dose of 1/n for n days is as bad as a single high dose of n for one day.
According to the article and book, this is model has been proven wrong (a long time ago).
Recently on a podcast John Carmack said somebody should look into building small fission fragment direct energy conversion reactors, since despite their lower efficiency, they’re apparently much cheaper to build. Since Carmack is a software guy (albeit a very good one) I’m somewhat skeptical, since it seems like if it’s not that complicated a design somebody would have tried it already and found good reasons why it doesn’t work. The only resources I could find on such a thing was a DoE paper about some prototypes Sandia and General Atomics built. Does anyone know more about the merits of this idea?
Good question. I think historical designs supported the fuel elements on material structures that ended up absorbing a large fraction of the fragments, leading to inefficiency & overheating the fuel. Here's an outside-of-the-box idea, using a dusty plasma cloud. [0] In this case, I'd be concerned about a criticality accident if the fuel dust containment failed & all the dust landed in a pile.
Until fail-safe fission technology is ready (unlike fail deadly technology which all current and planned systems currently are) nuclear power seems to me a sophisticated example of cutting off your nose to spite your face
If by fail safe you mean that powering off the reactor makes it cool down then the Navy uses fail safe reactors. Water is used as the moderator to absorb radiation. When water is heated its density decreases (edit), thereby making it a less good moderator of radiation. This effect lowers reactor reactivity and heat output. This effect is combined with various devices to produce what is called an inherently safe design. Losing power will not make the reactor have a fuel element failure or melt down.
Fail safe means that in a catastrophic failure of the reactor’s regulatory systems it stops functioning rather than overloads. Entropy trends it to not working rather than working too much - for example a gas furnace will stop burning if the systems running the furnace stop working and are unable to provide more gas to the burn chamber.
Chernobyl used a neutron moderator with a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity (liquid sodium), while U.S. Navy reactors use water, which has a negative coefficient of reactivity. The more energy you put into the water surrounding the reactor, the less reactive it allows the reactor to be. This has a stabilizing effect on the system. U.S. Navy reactors are inherently stable and inherently safe. To answer your question directly, yes entropy will trend toward making the reactor produce less heat with no intervention.
Or, to snark on the other half of that post: Instead of building power plants that are deadly when they fail, we'll just build power plants which are deadly all the time.
The bio makes me think that it is, in fact, written by a machine:
> Perhaps you'll think my comments are unthinkable. My only response to that is that they were legibly written, not by a machine, but by a writer with a soul.
I’ve seen quite a few machine like comments as of lately. They should nail auto complete and support chatbots first then try to fool people around here.
I don't think this was a machine. The Simpsons observations, the Zola reference, the epiphoric sentence rhythms... doesn't feel like it. He just seems to ignore Grice's third conversational maxim.
Here's my response from 10 days ago to this same story.
0 points by BMc2020 10 days ago | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? ...
I opened all three of these, but did not read any of them
I did a Ctrl-F for "subsid" (to find subsidy or subsidies) 0 hits I did a Ctrl-F for "decomm" (to find decommission or decommissioning) 0 hits
Having read many of these types of articles before, I've learned some shortcuts on how not to waste time.
You can in theory decommission naval nuclear reactors by letting them sink to the bottom of the ocean in a terrible, sad accident from which fortunately all the sailors were safely rescued. I don't know that anybody has done this; often the sailors all died.
But it seems that even without taking decommissioning into account, naval nuclear reactors are not cost-competitive with other power sources. Looking for "subsidies" when we're talking about a military project doesn't make sense; the project is 100% taxpayer-funded unless some supplier is selling parts to the government at a loss. Far more likely, lamentably, is the opposite, the proverbial thousand-dollar toilet seats.
Maybe it's relevant to the cost question that the Navy can buy diesel engines from half a dozen naval diesel engine vendors but has to commission custom nuclear power plants.
You didn't read parts 1 and 2? You've had many chances since this propoganda is re-posted so frequently:
Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy (constructionphysics.substack.com)
104 points by gmays 5 hours ago | flag | past | 100 comments
Why did we wait so long for wind power? Part I (constructionphysics.substack.com)
26 points by jseliger 9 days ago | flag | past | 4 comments
Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy (constructionphysics.substack.com)
4 points by bilsbie 10 days ago | flag | past | 1 comment
Why did we wait so long for wind power? (constructionphysics.substack.com)
2 points by gok 10 days ago | flag | past | discuss
Why aren't there economies of scale in building size? (constructionphysics.substack.com)
2 points by rwmj 21 days ago | past
Where do economies of scale come from? Part II (constructionphysics.substack.com)
66 points by jseliger 23 days ago | past | 4 comments
Where Economies of Scale Come From (constructionphysics.substack.com)
10 points by vwoolf 28 days ago | past
How the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Works (constructionphysics.substack.com)
44 points by jseliger 34 days ago | past | 15 comments
Why are there so few economies of scale in construction? Part I (constructionphysics.substack.com)
95 points by danboarder 34 days ago | past | 84 comments
Why are there so few economies of scale in construction? (constructionphysics.substack.com)
5 points by h2odragon 35 days ago | past | 2 comments
How NEPA Works (constructionphysics.substack.com)
3 points by burlesona 41 days ago | past | 1 comment
How the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Works (constructionphysics.substack.com)
2 points by jseliger 42 days ago | past
The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home – Part I (constructionphysics.substack.com)
158 points by samclemens 76 days ago | past | 174 comments
The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home – Part I (constructionphysics.substack.com)
3 points by jseliger 77 days ago | past
Nuclear reactor costs – US Navy Edition (constructionphysics.substack.com)
4 points by uncertainrhymes 88 days ago | past
Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy (constructionphysics.substack.com)
3 points by jseliger 3 months ago | past
Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part II (constructionphysics.substack.com)
34 points by jseliger 3 months ago | past | 14 comments
Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part II (constructionphysics.substack.com)
3 points by jseliger 3 months ago | past | 1 comment
You might want to leave a blank line between your paragraphs for less of a TIME CUBE vibe. You're still in the editing window, it isn't too late.
No, I haven't read parts I and II yet. They look interesting, maybe I will. That still puts me ahead of you since evidently you haven't read any of the three!
>Following the Three Mile Island accident, Naval Reactors was asked to prepare a statement on what civilian reactors could learn from the navy’s long history of safe reactor operation. Of the 111 pages prepared, 88 were devoted to training.
Whenever we talk about nuclear power on HN, people are split in two groups: those who'd love to see nuclear power succeeding, and those who are against it and who support solar and wind.
I am pro both nuclear and renewables.
Solar and wind have been on an absolute tear lately. At least in the US (where I live) new solar and wind construction has been growing at a breathtaking pace during the last decade.
Take a look at the latest data from the EIA [1]. For the last month available, July 2022, solar and wind generated together 45 Terawatts hour of electricity. Coal generated 86 TWh. But 3 months prior, solar/wind produced 60 TWh, while coal only 55.
To get an appreciation for how much solar and wind have grown over the last 2 decades, here's their July production every 5 years since 2002 (in TWh):
2002: 1
2007: 2
2012: 7
2017: 22
2022: 45
Somewhere up there Moore is smiling.
Guys who are pro-solar and pro-wind: rejoice, you have won. Solar and wind have achieved escape velocity. If they keep it like that, we won't have any problems fully decarbonizing by 2050. We'll actually get there sooner. Without any help from nuclear. We won't even need batteries or hydrogen.
Few people know, but we could keep all the current natural gas plant and still achieve net zero (actually net negative). How is that possible, you ask?
Right now the forests absorb about 13% of the total emissions in the US [2]. Electricity generation contributes by 25% to the total emissions, and natural gas generates less than half of those. So overall, land and forestry absorb more greenhouse gases than those produced by the natural gas power plants.
If we increase solar and power, at some point we will need natural gas to only cover the intermittency. That means, even if we keep all the current natural gas plants, their usage will go down, and their emissions. If we cut all other sources of greenhouse gases (apart from aviation, which depends on energy dense fuels, and contributes quite little to the total emission), we will have no problems to achieve net zero by 2050, and very likely much sooner.
On the nuclear side, things are looking quite good too. Just head to the DoE infographic [3] and see how many cool ideas are in the works. My favorite ones are the fast reactors. But they are just vaporware, you say. In that case, head to the NRC webpage [4], and click on some links over there, and see that all of those ventures (and some more) have already started the licensing process.
Of course, none is as advanced as NuScale. But my point is that NuScale is not our only hope. Lots of other startups are hot on their tails.
My prediction is that 15 years from now, more than 1 of all these startups will have delivered reactors that will be selling electricity at a profit, without subsidies.
There has never been a nuke plant operated without subsidies, anywhere in the world, and probably never will be. In the US, taxpayers pick up the tab for disaster insurance because no private insurer is big enough. No reactor would be left enough to operate, paying the premiums on that policy.
By 2040, all the existing nukes will have been shut down, unable to deliver enough power at the spot price to continue operating. The less each sells, the more each kWh it delivers has cost. When shut down early, the cost of every kWh it ever delivered jumps up as construction cost is amortized over less lifetime output.
So, no, the only way to figure commercially competitive nuke power is by cooking the books.
I mean the odds of somebody coming up with a nuke that can be operated purely on non-compulsory commercial power rates are slim to none. No one has ever even tried. Everyone promoting SMR relies heavily on continued massive subsidy to make it seem viable.
What are the subsidies of nuclear compared to wind, solar, fossil fuels, etc. Do those subsidies include the cost of externalities like nuclear waste disposal/storage vs. pollution from fossil fuels or disposal of things like batteries for renewables? And costs for things like mining, building, etc. raw materials to get the various systems up and running, maintenance, etc. Honest questions. I haven't seen anyone run those numbers.
I'm pro whatever is cheapest and fastest. Which just isn't nuclear. For every GW of nuclear coming online, there are hundreds of wind and solar GW coming online. An order of magnitude more power in an order of magnitude less time. And things are getting cheaper and faster still. Fifteen years from now that will be a lot cheaper and faster. Any plan that does not take that into account is not a great plan. And my problem with many of these nuclear startups is that they don't seem to do that. They are reluctant to talk about cost because it's a weakness and a problem for which they have no solution.
We're in a weird transition phase where gas/coal generation still exists and matters but have obvious financial challenges that are getting worse very quickly. Courtesy of the Russians, everybody is well aware of that now and can look forward to some really steep energy bills in the next year. But investors have been voting with their feet long before that happened as this has been quite obvious for a while now. Coal plants have been shutting down in many countries mainly for cost reasons and with a few exceptions (China, India), very few countries are building new ones. And now that cheap Russian gas is not an option, gas plants just got a lot more expensive to operate and they were already too expensive before that. Basically, that's an industry that is experiencing a rapidly accelerating collapse. It won't take until 2050 for that to be completed.
The only remaining debate is how soon we'll turn the remaining plants off. That's mostly a function of production capacity for solar and wind generation and energy storage solutions. More investment is flowing into that industry every year and we're seeing massive sustained growth there for decades in term of new capacity coming online every year. It's a super profitable industry to be in and a lot of those profits are getting reinvested in more and even better stuff. Lots of countries have been revising their already ambitious plans to become carbon neutral to be even more ambitious as they find themselves beating their own expectations of just a few years ago on this front. Ten years from now, a lot of countries will get the vast majority of their power from renewables and the remaining ones will be busy figuring out how to get in on the action.
Nuclear is getting lots of attention and investment obviously. But planned new capacity does not add up to mattering much at all over the next fifteen years. A few GW here and there vs. hundreds of GW in the next few years alone. And it takes that long to plan more nuclear plants and there are very little signs of countries warming up to that notion. A lot of those nuclear startups you mentioned won't hit volume production (if they survive long enough) before most countries have shut down all their remaining coal and gas plants. Which in Germany would be around 2035 according tot he latest plans. And those plans don't seem to involve any nuclear. Of course, that timeline might be accelerated due to recent events..
My state is building 2 new reactors and they will be the first to be built in the US in 30 years. Despite Westinghouse going bankrupt and a utility company in South Carolina deciding they don’t want to be a part of it, construction continues. Unit 3 will hopefully be fueled this year and start making power next year. Unit 4 will be a few years.
You can’t produce power at night with solar and the wind is not always blowing. Nuclear is what will get us off coal and gas if we combine it with renewable energy.
Vogtle 3/4 are coming in very expensive. Much more CO2 emission would have been avoided by spending that money to build PV and wind.
Vogtle 3/4 also were greenlighted back in an environment when it wasn't clear PV would get so cheap so quickly. When it became clear how cheap renewables would become, it was obvious that initial decision was bad. The other nuclear build in the US, V. C. Summer, reached the point where they had spent the initial estimate but found the cost had doubled. At that point, it was as if they were asked to make the initial decision again, but now against much cheaper wind and solar. The reluctant conclusion was that continuing made no economic sense. It made no economic sense at Vogtle either, but politicians forced it to continue (the execs in SC were revenge prosecuted for stopping the gravy train.)
There is no path to clean energy without nuclear. If you don’t have nuclear you are going to burn coal and gas. Germany invested heavily on renewables and is having similar issues. The costs overruns are being eaten by the huge Co-Op Georgia Power, they pay for overruns but the other stakeholders will lose their share.
If you stop building reactors for 30 years it’s going to be an extremely massive undertaking only a government can handle. It will be up to the governments to subsides the costs.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels.
Concentrated/thermal solar seems to be flying under the radar. Plenty of room for efficiency and cost improvement. Most of the work is concurrently beneficial to electric production and industrial use. SETO targets $0.05/kWh including 12+ hours of storage by 2030. Plus a pretty safe supply chain.
Just remember that a huge part of the current excess cost is in part:
(a) because nuclear power is the only energy technology for which the full lifecycle costs have to be fully accounted for upfront. No one is accounting for the disposal costs of solar panels in their initial capital expenditure, for example.
(b) The build costs in terms of energy of wind and solar are comparably high. They are raw material and energy hungry and have a much lower energy return on investment and require a much larger geographic footprint. Plus their use without adequate baseload generation will necessitate a large additional requirement for raw materials to create energy storage. Much if not all of wind and solar’s cost advantages will likely evaporate in an environment where they are no longer subsidized by very cheap fossil fuels.
we need to account for the danger of disposal/long term storage of the dead batteries for solar as well. But I'm not sure what the calculation for that is vs. nuclear waste.
They can be recycled but it doesn’t appear we’ve had to deal with this much on an industrial scale - yet. Electric car batteries may be better off being “reused” for less demanding tasks after they’ve hit their usable limit for vehicle use. Of course they’ll need to be recycled eventually. This isn’t my domain so I’m very open to new information.
In regards to recycling lead acid batteries the work seems horrendous, for more information check out the lead poisoning cases from Florida workers at Gopher Resource in Tampa.
Obviously you'd want to reduce, reuse, recycle in that order. But it's not surprising that we don't have a large lithium battery recycling industry yet, since we don't have all that many big lithium batteries on the market yet.
The difference is that you usually store garbage to protect people from it. With nuclear waste, however, you also have to protect the waste from people like ISIS & Co.
It's cheaper to store something in such a way that you can't just trip over it.
But it's something else to store it in a way that you can't reach it even if you know where it is.
My impression of solar in the western US, at least, is most solar arrays do not charge batteries. They are linked up to the power grid instead and solar owners are payed back a percentage of what they’ve contributed.
Im personally an advocate of battery banks (And have them in a boat and rv) but it seems if every single family home had a battery bank there’d be a large surplus of energy created but not always used (aka it doesn’t scale well). If anyone has information otherwise I’m all ears this isn’t my domain
That would be nice arguments if they would actually be true.
a) typically nuclear plants don't have to include all life cycle cost into their calculations. Insurance is essentially not included (no insurance is willing to cover nuclear disaster), storage costs are not included to the full extend (partly because we actually don't know the cost, storage for these amounts of time is unprecedented)
b) is also falso both wind and solar have significantly lower ROI on energy than nuclear. A wind turbine has a break even (when you have produced more energy than it took to build it) after 18-24 month or so
No energy plant need to include insurance that cover disaster. People living downstream of a hydro electric dam have to pay their own insurance, and in the end it will still be the government that pick up the bill when people and homes are lost to catastrophic flooding.
Mining raw material also produce a lot of waste, including radioactive waste, much which will never be safe for humans. Those are generally stored for an indefinite time in pools or just in piles near the mines, with a sign warning people of the toxic material. There will be no one to pay the bill for waste storage except governments when the mining company close down. This is why drinking water near old (or new) mines is a exceptional bad idea.
That's not true, the operator of a windfarm definitely needs to have insurance (or be liable otherwise) for a possible accident that can happen (i.e. A rotor falling off and hitting a car), the thing about nuclear power plants (and hydro) is that generally the risks are so high that nobody wants to insure it.
You seem to argue that because others are doing bad things it's OK for nuclear? I don't think that is a very good argument.
Offshore windfarms have zero insurance against environmental damages caused by changes in the water environment, nor does windfarms or PV farms has insurance against forest fires.
If we want to be technical correct, nuclear plants and hydropower plants do have some insurance, for example if employees are harmed during work.
What all power plants share is the inability to insure against risk that is direct to society at large. It not that the risk is high (which it isn't), but rather that in case of accident there isn't anything other than governments that could step in and take the cost.
> You seem to argue that because others are doing bad things it's OK for nuclear?
No, that is a bad faith interpretation. If we want power plants to pay insurance against risk that is place on society, then such requirement should be technology neutral. If we have historical evidence of harm to either society or the environment, directly connected to a method of producing energy, then producers using that method should pay a tax to government that represent the risk. Be that hydro, nuclear, fossil fuels, wind farms, PV, a battery farm or what have you. Quantify the risk and let researcher, experts and historians argue how much each specific plant should pay.
In the end, no one is arguing that nuclear power in the West is not expensive.
As the first part of this article series notes, South Korea does not seem to have such extensive costs. Instead of looking into why South Korea can build nuclear power plants at reasonable costs, it hand waves it away implying that the South Koreans are faking the numbers.
South Korean companies also built the Barakah nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates, which is hugely successful.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadBut, I come back to my basic thesis on nuclear power. It's the A+ game or bust Yes the US fricking Navy can do it well, but the minute the Soviet's ran out of cash they just let it all rust. If we lean on nuclear in the carbon energy transition then when we run out of money, can we afford to let them rust.
But nuclear at any cost is not a reasonable goal. The only reason we want nuclear is for its carbon-free energy. At which point it must be evaluated on its merits, not as an end goal of its own
1: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-waste
2: https://ips-dc.org/spent_nuclear_fuel_pools_in_the_us_reduci...
Until then we dismiss them along with every other technology that does not meaningfully exist.
Let me say that again to those engineers who weren't listening:
Nuclear (fission) power is not, and will never be, financially viable for civilian powerplants.
I'll eat a roll of toilet paper covered in hot sauce if someday nuclear fission is financially viable enough to produce power for civilians at a decent scale.
In the US, Georgia and South Carolina started building with nary a peep. France started building again without any environmental objections.
Yet these builds are all catastrophic failures, to the point that any other financial backer is scared away from even touching nuclear. The decision makers are those with the dollars to invest, not the environmentalists.
don't underestimate the negative influence of "environmentalists"
Usage in California has gone down, and renewables are cheaper, just look at the blog series in the original article. Calling these well-known and irrefutable facts "insane" does not bode well for the plethora of other questionable assertions in your comment. For the usage:
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
their proposal was to spend $2B to lose 2GW of carbon free baseline power
everything in my statement is true and based on documents in the public record
My personal take is that we should subsidize tech to take it from an early stage to a production stage as soon as possible. We need better power sources yesterday, not next century. So we can't sit around waiting for some sort of Elon Musk to get really passionate and dump heaps of cash into it.
But the assumption there is that once the tech is developed and mature, it'll be good enough to stand on its own. Because if it'll never not be expensive, we're just artifically choosing a power source that's permanently more expensive than the alternatives, and that's an unstable situation. Eventually people will get tired of dumping money into it, or there will be some other urgent matter to throw money at, and then we have a bunch of expensive tech that's falling out of use, and underdeveloped alternatives.
Subsidizing nuclear forever also doesn't make any sense economically. Money is fungible. There's no real difference between say, paying $200/month to your power company, or paying $100/month to your power company, and $100 in taxes that ends up going to the power company. The amount you have to spend at the end of the month is the same either way. Now paying $200/month for 5 years so that then your power bill drops to $50/month afterwards, that's a different proposition.
So, I support subsidizing solar, wind and storage because I believe that in their perfected, mass produced versions they're cheap and competitive. They just need a push now. I don't support subsidizing nuclear because I believe it'll always be expensive because it's a fundamentally complex technology that's not amenable to mass production and will always lose to brute force mass applications of simpler technologies.
If we spend $12B on a 1GW reactor, we have far far better alternatives. A 1GW nuclear reactor has a 90% capacity factor of undispatchable, hard to throttle electricity. At today's prices, thay $12B could instead buy 6GW of solar at 20% capacity factor, and 24GWh of batteries. This combined solar plus storage is more flexible, more responsive, and delivers 30% more overall energy. And this is with a stupid design of splitting the cash to half storage half solar. A smarter design more tailored to the actual demand curve would remove some flexibility but become far cheaper.
There's zero reason to build nuclear unless you want to line Bechtel's pockets.
What does that amount of solar and storage look like in terms of material used for its construction as well as area occupied once it’s deployed?
What current examples do we have of projects at this scale?
What is the lifespan of the solar arrays and batteries?
What are the operating costs? How many personnel are required for maintenance and day to day operation?
What other infrastructure is necessary to support such a deployment? Transmission lines, buildings, monitoring facilities, security, roads, office space, etc.
What is the construction timeline for such a project?
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Also, the scale doesn't matter, we have built far more than 6GW of solar, deployed more than 24GWh of storage, but it doesn't have to be at one location for these resources. Solar and batteries scale far better than nuclear, because they can be deployed on smaller installations without nearly as much hassle as nuclear. Or they can be sited at one location.
Distributed software is good, so why not distributed energy generation? Answer: distributed energy generation is great!
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/05/california-finds-pge-equipme...
Just to get you started with some ballpark numbers: The solar irradiance at ground level on a sunny day is greater than 1kW/m^2 for about 6 hours per day (google for "AM1.5"). Typical commercial panels have a conversion efficiency of 21-22%.
You seem very confident that solar is impossible, so why don't you make some reasonable assumptions and prove it to all of us?
There is a massive bias in the field in favor of nuclear and against solar, and this shows in every single prediction made over the past 15-20 years. The EIA would uncritically put out numbers for "advanced nuclear" that were unbeliever rosy for a tech that had never been built. And at the same time, use out of date costs for solar, and the assumption that solar would stay at the old prices and never improve in price.
Or you will see peer reviewed papers in nuclear that assume ridiculous rosy solutions, that make it all the way through to publication without those rosy assumptions being challenged. For example, using nuclear in remote areas, but it using the actual capacity factor of that sort of system, 40-50%, and instead assuming that the price is coming from using every last bit of electricity at all time. In contrast all the modeling around solar always picks the most conservative estimates, because of the unrealistic hyper criticism of solar, which leads to even the most rosy of solar predictions being underestimated of solar.
Similarly, "concerns" about land or energy density are not realistic concerns, but mere political talk used to delay delay delay as long as possible the obvious solution that solar will be a cornerstone of our energy future, from 40%-70% of most countries' energy.
But if you actually are interested in the land usage, it's a question that has been studied to death. NREL is usually a good source, but one caution is to look at the date of any publication, and realize that if it's more than a year old, a lot of the data will be out of date. Here's a 2013 report on land use:
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56290.pdf
Both coexist synergetically with reservoirs, canal, pasture, even crop land. So, zero acres of land needed.
Now, only a fraction of these will get connected, because only the marginal best investment dollar gets the invested, but the scale is there.
Really the limit it current solar and wind production capacity, which is ever increasing at absolutely terrific speeds.
This is one of many reasons that I think a focus on nuclear is the wrong place. It's not going to be able to scale to catch up to these other technologies, even if after 60 years of development, nuclear finds a learning curve for the first time ever.
My question is given this market where you have high prices and high demand, why do I not see any entrepreneurs building small solar installations and cutting deals with municipalities to provide some of their grid power?
That tells me that the technology, cost, and/or regulation isn’t viable yet. Promises of future developments do nothing to address current needs. I have a feeling that 100% renewable generation is fast becoming a “20 years away” problem since I’ve been hearing the same promises for at least 20 years now and those older than me likely remember even older promises.
I don't know where you live, but generalizing from one small locality with an out of wack market is leading you to the wrong conclusions.
In places where there's a free market for new generation, like Texas, there's more GW of storage being added than GW of natural gas. There's an order of magnitude of new wind and solar generation being added than natural gas, and this is the place with some of the cheapest natural gas in the entire world. Having trouble finding ERCOT, but for the entire US, 1.3TW of the 1.4TW on newly proposed projects are renewable or storage:
https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-do...
So your local utility, which is charging you high prices, probably has a process that disincentivizes renewables to a large degree. And if there are zero independent funded ventures, then your utility must be actively stopping renewables, and those investors are working in the far more fertile rest of the US.
In particular, small projects can be the hardest to get through. There's zero reason for a utility to cut a deal, they are a monopoly, they are raking in far checks by doing nothing. Utility executives are some of the people least likely to adopt any sort of new technology.
The biggest impediment to renewables sweeping through the grid and giving us cheaper electricity is politics, conservatives, and rentierism. In areas where there's a market set up to allow lower costs to win, fossil fuels are toast. But in most places, electricity is not a market.
I don't think that can actually be done. The world's largest battery installation is less than 1 GWh AFAICT. OTOH we're not doing great at nuclear either.
Similarly if we can build a 1GWh battery we can build also a 24 GWh battery.
Yet we can't and aren't.
Frankly, whenever this comes up the handwaving about storage just seems hopelessly optimistic even for places where it is practical, let alone places where you're lucky to get 4 hours of sunlight a day for a bunch of the year.
Nothing is ever that simple. If carbon zero is an imperative, then there will sometimes be need for something other than solar and wind, and it will inevitably be "impractically expensive" compared to the carbon emitting sources we're moving away from.
It's certainly important to improve the economies of scale of renewables, but doing so is not the goal. Saving money is not the goal. The survival of the human species is the goal, and we aren't going to get there by nickel and diming our way to it.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
Even if it takes 20 years to build a nuke, that might still be sooner than "power to x" becomes a viable, affordable option for most of the world.
This is the weird thing about this argument: it so often rests simultaneously on an argument for practicality and/or cost effectiveness, but literally any criticism is met with a gish gallop of unproven technology. You can't have this both ways.
In the end, my central thesis here is just that if you think the be all and end all of this issue is cost effectiveness you are optimizing for the wrong goals and it leaves open a giant window for carbon emitting sources to justify their use when renewables don't work for various local reasons.
The thing to be black and white about is carbon emissions. "What energy mix works for place X right now if we try to eliminate carbon emissions asap" is not a decision that's gonna be made on an internet forum.
A nuke powered world will either require radically new sources of uranium (like sea water uranium extraction) or breeder reactors. Neither is available now, unlike cheap electrolyzers for making hydrogen (< $300/W in China).
Again, this is not a duel to the death. The only thing that should be dismissed out of hand is carbon emitting fuels.
But instead of being so "black and white" and insisting it must be nuclear that powers things, also evaluate options like thermal storage to gather summertime heat in reservoirs for use throughout the winter. It's super cheap, and makes a ton of sense in most areas, yet it's so low tech that it gets ignored.
I will be black and white that fission is not a feasible solution for the vast majority of the human population for at least the next 20 years, and probably forever. Despite more than half a century of experience, it has not improved as a technology. There would have to be some sort of drastic breakthrough for nuclear to be a realistic power source for most of the earth's surface.
It sure is a good thing I didn't say anything of the sort or wow I'd be a hypocrite.
I am definitely not the person trying to shoehorn the entire earth into one energy mix box in this conversation. I think the answer to this is likely to vary a lot all over the world.
Also a lot of the world's population is far enough north that winters produce relatively little solar or wind energy. And those places also tend to be massive energy consumers because it's also very cold.
Right now that doesn't show up in electricity stats because of how common in-home gas heating is. In order to decarbonize the northern parts of the world we will need to dramatically increase both electric energy consumption and production, during winter, because heat pumps will almost certainly be replacing gas furnaces.
I'm concerned about the tonnage requirement of strategic minerals for battery storage. Supplies for EV batteries are currently choked; we need to scale far beyond that for grid storage.
Pumped hydro at the required scale will be a feat of engineering comparable to nuclear engineering. Millions of tonnes of Portland cement will be an input.
And renewables are land-extensive; that's an impedance mismatch for us.
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20D... (now being commercialized by Babcock & Wilcox.)
The big question of storage is not if it's possible, but which of the many options will come out on top.
Switching to renewable energy with massive amounts of storage is a world of cheaper energy than today. There has been zero learning curve for oil, and coal, and nuclear. If anything nuclear gets more expensive rather than less.
In contrast, renewables and storage are technologies that behave like semiconductors, or hard disks. There's a fairly predictable improvement in costs over time, resulting in massive changes in capabilities over the course of decades.
So not only is switching to renewables and storage cheaper than our current every sources, the faster we perform the change, the more money we save, the more of our resources we can devote to improving the quality of human lives, instead of devoting all that effort to make-work of welding pipes and pouring concrete.
I heard without government subsidies, nuclear power plants would simply not be buildable. No insurance company would insure them. The cost in case of a nuclear fallout is just too high.
But yes, nukes all rely heavily on subsidies, always have.
It costs nothing for fossil plant operators to pump carbon and sulphur into the atmosphere; that's why it takes regulation to make them install scrubbers. Scrubbers help, but don't prevent the outcome.
The outcome can be measured in human deaths and loss of arable land. That cost is hidden.
The "free market" is a grim joke while these costs can be ignored.
I really doubt ARENH is the problem because as far as I understand it, it only applies to EDF's existing nuclear power plants. At 42 EUR/MWh wholesale, those plants should still make a tidy profit. Apparently, too few of them were actually running last year, and the French government imposed further price restrictions that also affected resale of energy that EDF purchased elsewhere at market prices (not coming from EDF's own nuclear fleet or its other power plants).
So all the world’s nuclear power plants operate at a loss? That’s a pretty strong proposition…
More than a few old reactors here and there that are about to be decommissioned would be my idea of "at decent scale" here, so let's say that 10% of the new build power was nuclear (which would be equal to how much old, rotten nuclear fission infrastructure we have today, in the world).
I would almost bet less than 2% of the current planned and contracted energy capacity was in nuclear and that probably a good part of that will never materialize.
I don’t know that I need a nuclear power plant to “turn a profit”. That would be great, I suppose, but my view on electricity is a little more nuanced than a dogmatic adherence to market forces.
Have you bothered to look at Flamanville or Olkiluoto? What happened when in the past when France built subsequent copies of a reactor design, and won't we expect similar costs rises with these already unviable reactors?
It’s hard to work out exact figures but around 60% of the grid’s electricity used in France came from nuclear reactors. To illiterate the difficulty, recently most of France’s nuclear power plant where undergoing maintenance however due to low seasonal demand other power plants where able to make up the difference.
PS: To be really pedantic, total electricity production would include car alternators, home PV panels, diesel electric locomotive etc, but that’s yet another calculation.
> Where do we find these highly motivated, fit, young, intelligent people to work like dogs?
We increase the pay. It's that simple.
We've gotten much better at this particular engineering problem. For instance, Fukushima was designed in 1967, but if it had been designed in 1972 it would not have had its fatal flaw.
There were multiple studies and suggestions ignored a decade before the incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#200...
It wasn't that there was a fundamental flaw with the design, just the sea walls needed to be higher.
When they've been building them for 70 years and have over 200 nuclear powered vessels, it shouldn't be that surprising. For comparison, Ontario Power Generation has operated 787 years of nuclear reactors (343 combined at Pickering, 120 at Darlington, 324 at Bruce), each of which is at least 3.5 times larger than the biggest navy nuclear reactor. France has dramatically more than that.
EDIT: At a first glance, the linked article seems reasonable if not a bit optimistic for future developments and very positive phrasing for NPP in general.
'It is ever the domain of specialists to overstate their domain.'
> You're basically saying that being more knowledgeable about something makes your opinion less useful.
In certain contexts I definitely think this. Imagine you're a CEO that has to decide how to distribute profits among departments. Obviously you'll listen to the head/experts of every department to weigh your options, but you can't really trust them to be unbiased (Obviously not the best analogy but I hope it helps get my point across (: ).
His take on nuclear's competitors and hence its relative competitiveness as an electricity source is substantially more nuclear bro / Fox News viewer.
There are a lot of anti-100%-renewable nuclear proponents. There are fewer and fewer full-on anti-renewable nuclear proponents.
Most of us support everything that can make low-carbon energy.
https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html
https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html
https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html
See details I wrote in links from the other comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33041985
Calculating "years of energy" based off of current usage seems silly to me given that global energy usage has been rising exponentially for centuries.
For example, if you assume a 3% per-year increase in global energy usage, 12 billion years becomes a bit less than 1000 years.
I can pretty much guarantee that we won't be scaling at 3%/yr for the next 1000 years. And if we do, that's an argument for lots more nuclear fission, and a lot of fusion too. Because the solar-derived flows (wind, solar, hydro, biofuel, fossil fuel) won't be able to keep up even if we covered 100% of the earth with solar panels!
We will need to dismantle gas giants' moons for construction materials.
The repairs can be done, and the reactors will come back online, it just takes time. Very unfortunate, to say the least.
If you read through all of this the message I got was that size is the enemy. In one part it notes that a 100MWe core meltdown could likely be contained by the vessel but a 1000MWe reactor meltdown likely wouldn't. This concern is part of why there are ever stricter requirements on civilian reactors.
So you have opposing forces: bigger reactors produce more power and scale better. Smaller reactors are safer and easier and cheaper to build. Smaller reactors probably means more of them, each requiring separate planning permission, design approval and so on. It also probably means people living closer to the reactor, which many would and do oppose.
This series makes a good case for regulation being a significant cost component but it doesn't really make the case (nor does it try to) that said regulation is overly onerous or otherwise unnecessary. A lot of regulation came about because of our experience with nuclear reactors, accidents and near-accidents and the bigger failur emodes of the larger reactors power supplies would likely want to build.
The major selling point for smaller reactors is that you can make a mass produced design that doesn't need separate planning, permission, and design approval every time. You can still have large power plants to get the benefits of scale, you just put more of these small units together at the same site. In fact you get some bonuses as you can shut down some reactors for maintenance while still producing power. Indeed most nuclear power plants already have multiple cores for exactly this reason, but typically its 2-6 rather than 20-60 and thus they are still pretty big.
It's like a software client changes requirements a year into a 2 year project and suddenly you need to rearchitect the whole thing, essentially starting again.
Following regulations is costly, but following changing regulations throughout a project lifecycle is _very expensive_.
Everyone assumes that anyone hesitant about Nuclear power is focussed on the environmental or safety concerns, but that is wrong. The costs (and cost overruns) of the construction and maintenance of Nuclear reactors have been enough reason on their own to be bearish on Nuclear.
I'm hopeful that new technologies, such as small nuclear reactions that can be built in a factory, will address this.
Environmental and safety regulations are supposed to be explanations for this rise in cost, not rival explanations to "cost is the issue" (since they take that as given).
Broadly, construction is the singular industry where productivity hasn't improved with modern technology.
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/sketch-of-a-theor...
If you want those reasons, go for it. Iran for instance is pursuing at least one of these goals when it works towards nuclear "power". Just don't expect affordable electricity at the end...
- Nuclear power plants are very complex. They are more "engineered" than "constructed", with hundreds of kilometers of tubes and wires. Pouring the concrete is the easy part.
- Nuclear power plants deal with an incredibly dangerous environment: high pressures, high temperatures, radioactivity, hazardous chemicals. Everything has to be tested, re-tested, and certified. Many parts will be near impossible to replace once it enters production, and the plant is supposed to be operational for decades.
- Nuclear power plants are safety-critical. Contrary to many other structures of similar complexity, things can get way worse than a big explosion. They have the potential to contaminate the site (or even the surrounding country) for decades or centuries. Failure is simply not acceptable.
- Safety regulations have been getting stricter over the years, because supposedly "100% safe" plants keep having accidents and the population is not very happy about that.
The existing stock of nuclear power plants is an offshoot of several military programs. The most common design is pretty much a submarine power plant on steroids, which turned out to be less than ideal. Things like "safety" and "profit" were almost seen as a suggestion more so than a requirement.
Newly-built power plants are required to incorporate over 50 years of innovation, but it turns out almost nobody has the skills to actually build them. They have simply gotten too complex to construct!
The ones attempted recently in South Carolina and Georgia cost so much because people in a position to block building them want it that way. Once a nuke project starts, a torrent of money starts flowing. Everybody with a stake expects a share, and none want it ever to end. Finishing a plant would plug that flow. If it looks like the flow will dry up regardless, they might deliver something at the end.
We see the same process with urban tunnels and big military procurements. It is all perfectly legal. It is probably not fixable.
Thus far, wind and solar projects have mostly avoided it, maybe in part because their legitimate costs are easy to estimate.
Existing nukes also cost more than renewables to operate, because they actually have operating costs. Big steam turbines, in particular, need regular overhauls. So, it is hard for anything with a steam turbine to compete with something that has none. Reactors need also operation, inspections, refueling, security, compliance monitoring... the list goes on.
Solar panels might need to be dusted off, or replaced. The worst that can happen to a wind turbine is to catch fire.
Not being a lawyer and all that, would some of this holding of the hands-out not qualify as some sort of grift or worse? Are there not laws already in place for this stuff? Is it a case of it being too hard to prove so no prosecutions are brought?
Practically speaking sure, but all one needs to do is hide the grift behind a veneer of altruism and people[0] lap it up. Also half the time it is the lawmakers behind the grift. Do the phrases: “Think of the children“, “we need an environmental impact report“, or “This is a building of historical significance“ ring a bell? Behind each of them is an entity(ies) looking to advance their interest, which is often, but not always, profit from the increased diligence required or profit from the obstruction and the induced scarcity.
[0]The voting electorate, anyway.
Francis Fukuyama uses the term "vetocracy" for our government. So many layers, so many checks and balances. Some of them were even a good idea at the time (eg in response to abusers like Robert Caro).
Every petty tyrant or crank has to be bought off, rolled over, or buried under. That takes time, resources, lawyers, political capital, stamina, tenacity.
I'm not even so sure vetocracy is a wholly bad thing, in principle. Of course people impacted by projects should be considered, heard, and hopefully accommodated. But, as others have already stated, vetocracy has been weaponized to thwart all progress, regardless of how much popular support is behind them.
For instance, we need expand our power grid, roughly 3x bigger. The challenge is our current patchwork of veto points (local, county, state, regional, national). So someone(s) will have to expend huge political capital to overhaul the regulatory and permitting system. Or we simply won't reach our goal for net zero carbon emissions.
When I mentioned "grift or worse", extortion is what I was thinking of but just unable to use my brain to get to extortion. So thanks for getting me there.
Of course, the more persuasion you need, the more it costs, and the more backing you need. So it is usually better to budget less and plan on overruns, instead. And, finishing on time would mean cutting off all those backers; thus, the schedule is overrun, too.
Thing is, most things somebody wants to spend $billions in public money on shouldn't proceed.
Their core backup safety feature of being roughly bird shaped requires only a few moving parts, none of which are operating at extreme temperature or require cooling.
No, the first post is correct - safety is not the issue. We build keep building dams, and dam failures have killed far, far more people than nuclear. Other comments about nimby are also off the mark. People whose properties are flooded hate dams, nimby's force delays measuring decades, yet we keep building dams.
The comment you are responding contains the answer to the riddle it posed:
> a thousand of them are in the air right this second.
If the one factory could build 1000 nuclear reactors, complexity would not be an issue there either. And I'm sure after building 1000 of them, the price would not so much as drop as plummet. Which is why small nuclear reactors built in factories are such a common meme.
But the first 100 of those small nuclear reactors will be hideously expensive based on the quotes we have from people who've actually tried to do it - far more than a couple of big plants generating the same output. And the big plants already being crushed by cost overruns.
Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them. That seems to be the only way it could happen, because after decades of refusals I think we can safely say the banks aren't interested in funding a technology that turns out energy 100% more expensive than current competitors.
> Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them.
The thing is none of these people actually want nuclear power. They either want to redirect resources which would make fossil fuels irrelevant or feast forever off of the public teat whilst pretending to build a power plant.
The forces stopping nuclear power have very little to do with safety or greens or nimbys. It's a combination of their cost and of the power fossil fuels have. It just so happens that the fossil fuel interests are inadverently on the side of continuing to have human habitable land by virtue of leveraging the safety issue for their own greed.
Ironically they've probably hastened their own demise because if they hadn't forced the regulation we'd probably be too busy cleaning up nuclear disasters to think about weaning off of coal.
As stated does sound a bit pompous, but at the core, it's not inaccurate
Total meltdown to a China Syndrome with the slag melting its way to the water table is pretty much the worst I can imagine.
Fast reactors may be necessary for a fully nuclear powered world, because the uranium runs out too quickly without breeding. And 233U or plutonium skate much closer to the edge of prompt supercriticality, since they produce about half the delayed neutrons of 235U.
* Technology makes repetitive operations cheaper. You build a factory for hundred million dollars, make a billion gadgets on it, and every gadget costs you ten cents to make. Nuclear projects lack the economy of scale: even the Navy is going to order reactors by a dozen, and civil power plant reactors may see even fewer installations per model. Thus the huge costs of the R&D and the factory are amortized over but a few reactors, making each of them very expensive.
* Due to small production scale, various custom materials needed for nuclear reactors, like special steels, are much more expensive than more widely used materials.
Nuclear is now in a position similar to solar cells 15 years ago: a promising technology which is too expensive due to small scale and bespoke nature of their production. It took a decade of betting on them, pouring money into them, and giving various discounts to the customers to get where we are now, with solar panels which are efficient, affordable, and available. I suppose nuclear tech would need the same to become cost-efficient. France did / does something along these lines; the US does not.
...In the opposite direction, but about the same magnitude.
Unlike solar 15 years ago, nuclear has been around 60 years already and received huge amounts of subsidies (much more than solar, excluding all the extra military subsidies). So what is fundamentally different now that would change the essentially linear scaling to an exponential scaling and why should we not invest into the tech where we see ongoing exponential scaling of cost already with no indication of slowing (solar and wind)?
Renewables involve larger numbers of decoupled systems, where failures of parts don't propagate to shut down the whole thing. If that PV module fails, or that wind turbine is struck by lightning and catches fires, the rest of the system goes on as before.
It all depend on how one want to perceive the system. A wind turbine struck by lightning might not propagate too much, but a poor weather prediction can have massive propagation for the system as a whole.
The grid is also a resilient system where individual parts can fail independently. Weather prediction is correlated, but has no effect on the cost of individual parts.
So people like Dyson, who learned calculus by spending his Christmas vacation working his way through a textbok for fun, were no longer available to design reactors. So progress on, for example, thorium reactors ended in the US in 01966 (thorium BWR is from 01960, thorium LWBR is from 01962, thorium MSR is from 01964, thorium HTGR is from 01966). In other countries it took a few more years. Teller, who worked on TRIGA with Dyson, seems to have stopped working on reactor design in 01960. The elves left Middle Earth. So hospitals still use TRIGA today for nuclear medicine.
I don't see the key issue here as being that Dyson and Teller were brilliant, though they were brilliant. Rather, it's that Dyson and Teller were curious and playful. I think curious and playful people exploring the possibilities of nuclear reactors will come up with many improvements, even if they are the ordinary kind of stupid people. It might take them five times as long as it would have taken people like Dyson, and there might be more accidental deaths along the way, but they will get there. But today the occasional curious and playful person who tries to investigate nuclear reactors is likely to get arrested, even if they pose less risk to their neighbors than Marie Curie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Handl (or assassinated by the Mossad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...) and so the Navy is still using reactors very similar to the ones they used 60 years ago.
I see questions like "the technology available has improved, so why have costs risen?" as symptomatic of the worldview that anything can be bought. Teller, Dyson, and Handl were not optimizing their life decisions to maximize their earning power; they were curious about the world and wanted to preserve liberal democracy. You can't buy that. If you announce that you are going to spend a lot of money on nuclear reactor development, it will attract people who optimize their life decisions to maximize their earning power, not people who are curious about the world.
You maximize your earning power by owning things, not by learning things or figuring things out. People who optimize their life decisions to maximize their earning power will be no good at ferreting out possible improvements that can be made to nuclear reactors, because you don't get paid any more for making breakthroughs than you do for just plodding along.
Less, in fact, because nine tenths of the time when you're doing the kind of things that lead to breakthroughs, the things you try don't work, so you aren't delivering anything of value to anybody.
The other issue is that "Why can't we build nuclear power plants?" is a subset of "Why can't we build?" and I think the answer to that is basically that people aren't free to build. But nuclear power plants are probably the kind of building that people are least free to build.
https://longnow.org/
It’s, as I understand it, to draw attention to the briefness of our lives and contextualize the decisions we make that have effects long beyond “now”.
Personally, I think it’s kind of weird to base it upon the supposed birth year of a religious figure who may not have even lived, but standards are useful, I suppose.
The reactor was designed in the span of a few months. They started in the summer of 01956. The first one was commissioned and built in May of 01958. And it ran until 1997, steadily producing 250 MW with occasional "pulses" up to 1,000 MW, the entire time.
Let's take a minute to appreciate that. They went from design to implementation in less than 2 years, that's lightning fast even in startup terms. And their design has never malfunctioned, ever. AFAICT, there are 66 of these reactors out there in the world that have operated for nearly 7 decades with 0 incidents. Some of them are even true to form and are operated by teenagers!
And I suspect that's the real reason why nuclear power is so expensive. While regulatory burdens, subsidies, and general corruption do indeed explain the exponential cost increases for nuclear power, the truth is that these are proximate causes. The distal cause is simple; the reactors suck. We've been designing them wrong for decades now, and we need to make rethink them from the ground up.
Luckily, I'm not the only person who thinks that. Far more smarter people have been bringing the fun back to nuclear engineering, and we are finally getting a series look at concepts like pebble bed reactors.
I hope that someday we'll have forever batteries and power sources that are small, self-contained, and can be carted for use anywhere, including space.
Achieving this goal requires everything from the kinds of modular designs NuScale https://www.nuscalepower.com/ and Terrapower https://www.terrapower.com/ are working on to Zeno Power's radioisotope systems, https://www.zenopower.com/
I am excited for the future again.
The only group I know of trying to do this is https://hb11.energy/, whose plan is to laser-initiate an avalanche of boron-11/hydrogen "fusion" and throw the resulting alpha particles up a million-volt potential difference. Though it's not guaranteed, that might end up being cheaper than a steam turbine and generator.
Without such improvements, nuclear energy is only really appealing in environments where PV and wind aren't an option — like submarines, aircraft carriers, Antarctic research stations, deep-space probes, and Scotland — or as a hedge against unforeseen difficulties in scaling up grid-scale energy storage and the like.
But I might be wrong about where the costs in coal plants come from, and I'd be very grateful to find that out.
I really appreciated your "On Apple’s “Expanded Protections for Children”," by the way.
Evidently naval reactors are a lot better at this, though.
From what I've heard the amount of storage is not very large if you assume sufficiently large grids and the total system cost is expected to be lower than what we currently pay for electricity.
Power plants are commonly depreciated over 30 or even 40 years. Electricity consumption in the US doubled during the 01960s, and it doubled in PRC during the 02010s. If the transport sector in the US went all-electric, that would double electrical consumption again even without increasing energy use.
How can you predict what fraction of your users will be using electric vehicles 15 years from now, and whether they'll charge them in the daytime or at night? That depends on, among other things, whether they'll go back to working in offices, whether the offices will have chargers, and how much cheaper it will be for them to charge during the day than at night. And that, in turn, depends on what kind of time-of-use rate schedules you can get the public utility commission to approve. Will people insulate their houses more so they don't need to heat them at night? That depends not only on the rate schedule but their future expectations of the rate schedule, as well as what their house buyers' expectations of the rate schedule. How much will superinsulating your walls raise the house's sale price?
How about home TCES — if daytime electricity is sufficiently cheap, such forms of energy storage might become popular as a cheaper alternative to superinsulation, and maybe suppress the demand for nighttime electricity further in cold areas; but we don't have any mass-market experience with them right now. Will building codes, or insurance underwriters, impede the wide adoption of TCES after the first homeowner files a massive insurance claim to replace their hardwood floor ruined by a calcium-chloride spill? Will dirt-cheap rail-shipped carnallite drop the price of TCES further than calcium chloride possibly could? Will new carnallite deposits be found, closer to large cities?
How about the future of industry? Mass PV rollout will drop the price of energy dramatically, so industrial processes that are currently unprofitable because they use too much energy will become profitable. They might outcompete more energy-efficient incumbents.
The first example of this might be aluminum replacing steel in more and more uses; today it's so much more expensive than steel that it's only used in places where its lighter weight is a big advantage, but with lower energy costs (and shorter shipping distances) it might replace steel for many more purposes. Minimills recycling existing steel might be able to fulfill the entire steel demand for quite a while — steel mills that smelt iron from ore would shut down entirely, and the 30-year-depreciated power plants built to supply those mills might find themselves without the demand they were built for. And this might happen by 02039. This is maybe the most predictable outcome of much lower prices for electrical energy, but probably won't be the most dramatic one.
So shifts in electrical demand will depend on cultural change, diffusion of innovations, regulatory capture, consumer expectations, and cost-driven substitution in the radically changed economic landscape.
The last time the price of energy dropped so dramatically might have been Watt's steam-engine in 01776. The dislocations in society that resulted would have been very hard to predict.
This is a much smaller gap than I had expected, so maybe the switch to electrically reduced iron (directly, as in electrolytic iron, or indirectly) won't be as big a change as I thought.
The earlier series of the blog post we are discussing actually talks about that a significant fraction of the cost of a nuclear plant is the thermal power plant part, which is the same as for a coal plant for example.
Moreover, actually having to use a reactor for power generation significantly increases the complexity of the design, you suddenly need to heat water, which means two different water cycles which mustn't contaminate each other... And having water involved makes things more tricky anyway because of corrosion...
Obviously, the vast majority of nuclear power plants are of the suck type. If you want a regulatory blank slate you are going to have to shut them all down and replace them with good power plants. The regulations are there to deal with the "suck" of the nuclear industry. Get rid of the suck and you will make the nuclear industry very unhappy, in other words the legacy nuclear power industry is exactly the problem that drives regulations and costs up.
Generally construction does not significantly benifit from economies of scale, while fabrication does. Now we could build lots of small scale reactors, but while construction costs might come down (so far completely unproven) running costs most definitely would go up. You don't want to run even a small scale nuclear reactor without qualified staff, security etc..
Of course you may have only became bearish on nuclear when the costs got high, but there are a large number of people who were bearish before then, which is what made costs high.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Look at Germany. They are the first to really destruct the first power plant and it will take 20 to 25 years. Everything has to be checked.
Germany could handle their power load, but not theirs + france.
> The fact that South Korea is the only country to exhibit this trend has led some experts to speculate that the cost data (which comes directly from the utility and hasn’t been independently audited) has been manipulated and we shouldn’t draw conclusions from it.
In my opinion, rather than spending the many years and billions of dollars on regaining the edge in nuclear, we should expand the capacity of the cheap and clean energy sources we have access to today.
We don't currently have a viable complete renewable solution. Nuclear is much better for the planet than fossil fuels and is the only option to bridge the gap required to operate the current renewables.
That's a strong declaration without any solution in sight for nuclear power-generated waste: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-waste
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
Because the lobbies underlying nuclear power in solid fuel rod processing is a lucrative government boondoggle.
All the nuke proponents say "we are losing all the old guard!". I actually think this is a feature, nuclear needs to be reformulated and reassessed from the ground up without all the political and military biases, and once they have stable cost profiles in wind/solar to actually target.
If they can actually make a competitive reactor once wind/solar stabilizes, likely at 1/2 to 1/3 the current real dollar cost.
And then, you nicely suggest that all pro-nuclear people somehow _must be shills_ (as if, uhh, nuclear people just love destroying the world, I guess?) that really is ridiculous and not a too charitable reading of the opponents.
Do you know that Weinberg and the ORNL people advocated for increased safety in the nuclear industry (which their reactor design had fundamental advantages over all other designs)?
The organizational religion of nuclear power was that it was safe and had no chance of failure. You can choose to disagree on my characterization of the nuclear industry, but the political wars with "The Greens" has counter-radicalized nuclear proponents.
ORNL and Weinberg saying their nuclear reactor was superior on safety leads to the inevitable follow-up implication for anyone listening that other nuclear reactors... WERE NOT.
Thus the ORNL director for MSR was sent to forced retirement/fired (fired from a government job!), ORNL funding was totally axed. Kirk Sorensen claims that MSR research was forbidden in public universities at a policy level, so no one would touch it. Sorensen is a pretty rabid LFTR advocate, but the fact that only in 2022 after 60 years, finally SOMEONE is doing a research reactor that fits in a closet? The fact there has been ZERO research programs in MSR tells me that Sorensen is probably right about the prohibition.
I believe that the Military was also involved in this, because they needed their isotopes for weapons, or to maintain popular support for nuclear weapons. You can't have these people undermining public confidence in civilian nuclear power, what follows after that is the hated peacenik "Greens" then getting nuclear weapons banned.
Anyway, yes it does seem conspiratorial, but with nuclear tech which required so much governmental push/funding in the beginning, and now has SO MUCH regulatory apparatus above it that was an organizational outgrowth of the original nuclear research government agencies, YES, there is a historical and effective bias against the ORNL design.
Some of that is practical: the ORNL and LFTR designs are totally different that the entirety of the world's solid fuel designs. It would require AEC regulatory fasttracking, and a ton of budget. And if something doesn't have government funding in the nuclear world, it is DEAD.
Anyway, China has a prototype MSR reactor coming online. Oh look! MSR projects are coming out of the woodwork everywhere! What a coincidence. Los Alamos is doing materials research! Some Texas university got clearance to boot the first US research reactor in fifty years! Huh, funny how that works.
So yeah, sure it might be conspiratorial or uncharitable, but this was probably a trillion dollars in budgeting (inflation adjusted) over 20-30 years that was at stake.
I know it seems like I'm anti-nuclear. I think fission power is so effing cool. I think LFTR is the coolest design I've ever seen. I also see that nuclear is fundamentally not competitive with the current approaches, and I don't think that is NIMBYism or excessive regulatory at the core: I think the designs don't scale and issues with nuclear waste and safety are offloaded, avoided, corner-cut, etc.
And if nuclear has to compete with solar/wind, those "hidden costs" would be handled even more poorly. So a reactor design that uses 99% of fuel, is meltdown proof, scalable, and can even reprocess old spent rod waste, well, to me that or something that also lives up to that is the real path forward. Scalable (i.e. closet sized) seems to also be a fundamental requirement to competitive economics, although I read a good post on how big honking reactors are what are needed to make the economies of scale work, not small reactors, but I personally suspect that view is polluted with existing huge-effing-solid-fuel-dome reactor design bias.
I'm just a dumb fuck programmer that reads this stuff in his spare time. I would love a cogent response from a nuclear scientist that knows the ORNL design in depth to give me really good reasons why it isn't commercially viable. But again I think the entire nuclear industry and university ...
I'm not aware of any significant battery based storage system deployed at scale that solves this problem. There are some large battery banks but none even close to the scale required. It's a hard problem as it would require a huge increase in global manufacturing.
I'd like to be wrong here. I'd love it if it was possible to build an affordable grid based on 100% renewable generation. It will be possible one day. I look forward to that day.
Most of the storage, in the end, will not be batteries. Most existing storage is pumped hydro, because the dams were already there. There are lots of alternatives: underground or underwater compressed air, liquified air, underground hydrogen, tanked ammonia, buoyancy, mineshaft gravity.
Most places will keep a few days' ammonia that they can burn where they do NG today, and order more if it looks like they may need it, and can't book transmission line power. Other times, they will synthesize ammonia for sale.
Regional storage of underground hydrogen is already under construction. Hydrogen synthesis efficiency is now well over 90%, up from 60% very recently.
Until ammonia synthesis ramps up in the '30s, they will burn NG at need, without apology.
From what source? Hydrocarbons?
Anyway that efficiency will not be important.
Storage as a separate business is not viable beyond a few years, so investment is limited. Original producers of energy will have their own storage, and prices will level out. Excess generation capacity (e.g. noon) after recharging storage will be devoted to synthesizing liquid fuels and desalination, which serve unlimited demand.
By the time there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge storage, storage will be very, very cheap. Right now, it costs more, so money produces much better results building generation capacity and factories for storage. As the factories are completed, production ramps up, and costs fall.
There's also no grid in the world that runs on wind/solar+storage, it's obvious from looking at California that it would take 20+ years to arrive there.
Before you have built a thing, you have to build it. After you build it, you have it. Building will be a big job, but nowhere near as big as building nukes instead would have been.
The good news is that renewables start displacing CO2 emission almost immediately after ground is broken.
It would be stupid to build storage without renewable capacity to charge it from. You spend on that first.
EVs are still at, what, 1% of cars on the road, and only a small percentage of dozens of transport modes by air, land, sea, from single person motorcycles to busses or even container ships.
Grid storage still basically is an "EV batteries on land". This is going to change as well.
WHich is funny because the fundamental issue any nuclear plant has to deal with isn't the current price of alternative energy + grid storage. The REAL problem is that in ten years when the thing comes online, what will the price of alternatives be then given the cost improvement curves of the last decade?
I would hazard a guess that alt energy will be half of natural gas turbine by then (and natural gas turbine is already untouchably cheaper than nuclear), and probably 2/3 the cost with functional grid storage.
I believe home solar will be cheaper than grid natural gas turbine in 10 years too. And that's without carbon taxes.
A lot of countries are already pretty far down the path of going carbon neutral. Mostly without building or planning to build nuclear plants. They are a lot less necessary than some nuclear proponents would have people believe.
Energy storage is actually a fairly simple problem. There are at this point dozens of different ways that are being used commercially to store energy. Including of course a wide variety of battery types, pumped hydro and other gravity based systems, thermal storage, synthesizing hydrogen and other gases/liquids that can be burned later, etc. The main challenge is not storage but cheap storage. Or cheaper storage as combined generation and storage bids are fairly common these days and already way cheaper than nuclear already. Scaling the deployment of these solutions over the next few decades will drop cost further.
And of course energy can also be moved around via cables over long distances. The main challenge is not just generating enough power but getting it to where it is needed. Long distance cables even out local fluctuations in solar and wind performance.
If you extend the demonstrated empirical experience curve for solar assuming PV dominates world energy production, cost might decline to just $0.01/kWh.
BTW, nuclear isn't going to power the world with current thermal reactors (there's not enough uranium), so hand wringing over storage should be matched by that for the more difficult problem of making breeder reactors safe and affordable. So far, they've been more expensive than current commercial reactors, and they suffer from safety issues due to Pu and 233U producing fewer delayed neutrons, so they operate closer to prompt criticality.
(Unlike breeders, storage is actually getting installed on grids around the world these days, and costs are coming down.)
Also could you point me to any meaningful and scalable storage implemented or being implemented anywhere in the world? Also what about materials used for solar and wind? Both requires insane amounts of material where a very significant part of that is rare earth.
As far as I've seen the best bet for wind so far is power to x . X because we haven't figured out of it should be hydrogen, ammonia or something else, both of which would be very impractical as we've got no infrastructure to support it and it's also very inefficient in reality you'd loose like 80% of the energy generated so you'd have to build so much more capacity.
Operating a 3 GW(th) LWR requires about 200 tonnes/year of natural uranium.
6000 such reactors (needed to produce the 18 TW of primary energy currently used by the global economy) would therefore consume 1.2 million tonnes of U per year. The resource listed on that page would last five years.
So, either much larger uranium resource would be needed, or breeding would be needed, or both.
As for your other questions:
The first skates close to the position that no storage solution can ever be built unless it has already been built. This sort of reactionary attitude is just mindlessly obstructive, and does not reflect an attitude of constructive discussion. One can look at various storage technologies and see they scale very well.
As for materials in solar/wind systems: they are materials that are used in general society at much larger scale. The world makes 2 billion tonnes/year of steel, for example. If global industrial society can produce these materials, it can produce them for the renewable energy systems needed to power it. If it can't, then not even nuclear can save it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium
Recycling fuel from LWRs to make MOX is not the same thing. It would only extend that 5 years by a couple of additional years.
Seawater uranium extraction has been demonstrated at the gram scale. It would have to be scaled up by something close to a factor of a trillion to power the world. Also, powering a single 1 GW(e) reactor would require a collector field on 170 square kilometers of continental shelf, in an area with good ocean currents. The levelized power/area would be considerably worse than PV.
I will add that running a reactor on bred isotopes (233U, various Pu isotopes) presents an additional problem. All of these have considerably lower delayed neutron fraction than 235U. This means the reactors will be operating much closer to prompt criticality. One could resort to subcritical reactors, but that means adding a 100 MW (or so) 1 GeV linac to each to add the needed extra neutrons. And of course no such accelerator driven reactors have ever been built.
I’m afraid this is only true for the US, let’s not forget almost all of Europe is as north as Canada or north US.
In order to compare the cost we cannot just compare the price to install a certain capacity. You must also factor in how much extra capacity you need to build.
When we look at the Germany[1], on the best month, their solar produce half of the installed capacity and solar never goes higher than a third. And that’s for the best month.
Germany has already invested 600 billions, does it need to go 5 five folds ? Maybe less as the costs are decreasing.
It seems like that money invested in nuclear would produced much more and prevent spending what’s starting to look like an entire gdp invested into renewables.
1: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
We can estimate the cost of storage to deal with intermittency and seasonality, and renewables will likely come in cheaper than nuclear by the time any nuclear plant whose construction was started today would come on line.
https://model.energy/
As modeling gets better, renewables look better, as there are more and more ways found to work around the seasonality and intermittency problems.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=983...
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels.
current economic model assigns $0 to skilled and experienced workforce. In reality it is worth billions.
This productive asset is degrading or beind destroyed through union busting, precarious working conditions, wage fixing, etc.
Cool, let's get the price ratio between the early PWR reactors in the west and the ones started in the early 90s (just after the peak of spending) then and multiply it by current costs to get a enstimate.
That comes to what, $20000/kWe?
My sources are: Lazard's 2022 levelized cost of energy estimates; NREL's Spring 2022 Solar Industry Update: the Global Wind Energy Council's Global Wind Report 2022 highlights; and especially the 2022 report in Cell (Cell's "Joule" sub-publication) called "Empirically Grounded Energy Forecasts and the Energy Transition".
On the basis of the trends in costs shown there, I conclude that 1) coal, nuclear, and large-scale hydro are obsolete for power generation; 2) combined-cycle gas, peaker gas, and on-shore wind generation are obsolescent. (Biomass thermal, concentrated solar thermal, and geothermal are essentially lab experiments. A few hundred MW or maybe 2 GW total globally each. Oil is of course obsolete too.)
Once current project pipelines are emptied (2035 maybe?), there won't be much of any of these built for commercial power generation, because they won't be able to compete except in obscure niches. Onshore wind comes closest to being competitive, but its costs are not dropping fast enough. The costs of the others are rising.
(According to NREL and the GWEC respectively, cumulative global solar PV installed capacity is 939 GWdc, most of it installed in 2018-2021, and cumulative global wind capacity installed is 837 GW, most installed 2012-2019. Onshore wind, while it has not yet peaked in terms of yearly increment, has peaked as a share of total generation, while PV is bottlenecked by permitting queues alone.)
There are so many problems with this scheme, not least of which is that you have pretty much no base load and batteries can't be manufactured at anywhere near enough scale to successfully do this "transition" for at least the next 20 years.
Add in ~7% offshore wind, ~4% for onshore, and ~4% storage for pumped hydro, and we would be just fine with the rest coming from solar & a hodge podge of other renewables.
And we'll have natural gas power plants in commission for another 30 years. Why shut them down? We can use them in the Winter. 30 years is more than enough time to transition to near 100% renewables.
If mini nuclear reactors pan out and can replace even a fraction of the coal plants out there - our base load will be covered.
At night, in the winter, we use about half as much electricity as during the day in the summer - when Solar works best.
I doubt we'll ever add much more nuclear if not mini nuclear reactors - that's why I'm really excited about the possibilities for them.
To add to that, I said nothing about storage. There is not much clarity about storage as yet. Pumped hydro, compressed air, thermal (hot rocks), hydrogen or ammonia: they could all be viable alongside batteries (for grid stabilization and short term storage). And more besides them, probably.
It's also not clear to me which battery chemistries will win for grid storage. Possibly several of them.
Storage is where the R&D action is.
Right now the overwhelming majority of storage is pumped hydro, almost as dispatchable as batteries. There are plenty of alternatives.
There is: nuclear has been subsidized on a much longer scale than solar already.
Small nuclear reactors might reduce the cost a little; but a little is not nearly enough. Cost needs to come down by at least an order of magnitude for it to at least somewhat keep up. Anything else is just not going to be cost competitive. And that's a problem when renewables are still dropping rapidly in price.
Oh right, cost is an issue because obsolete nuclear power plants keep giving nuclear a bad name and end up increasing regulatory requirements on modern designs even if they don't have failure modes from 50 years ago. In other words, the nuclear power industry really likes shooting themselves in the foot.
I have not read it, but I've read an article [1] which cites it. Apparently a lot of the current regulation is created based on a faulty model (LNT, ALARA) of how harmful radiation is. This model predicts that the harm is linear in dose, with no time component. Ie.: that receiving a dose of 1/n for n days is as bad as a single high dose of n for one day.
According to the article and book, this is model has been proven wrong (a long time ago).
[1] (in Norwegian) https://www.minervanett.no/energi-kjernekraft-klima/hvordan-...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/us-regulators-will-c...
[0] www.rbsp.info/rbs/PDF/aiaa05.pdf
Is that how Navy reactors work?
The bio makes me think that it is, in fact, written by a machine:
> Perhaps you'll think my comments are unthinkable. My only response to that is that they were legibly written, not by a machine, but by a writer with a soul.
0 points by BMc2020 10 days ago | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? ...
I opened all three of these, but did not read any of them I did a Ctrl-F for "subsid" (to find subsidy or subsidies) 0 hits I did a Ctrl-F for "decomm" (to find decommission or decommissioning) 0 hits
Having read many of these types of articles before, I've learned some shortcuts on how not to waste time.
But it seems that even without taking decommissioning into account, naval nuclear reactors are not cost-competitive with other power sources. Looking for "subsidies" when we're talking about a military project doesn't make sense; the project is 100% taxpayer-funded unless some supplier is selling parts to the government at a loss. Far more likely, lamentably, is the opposite, the proverbial thousand-dollar toilet seats.
Maybe it's relevant to the cost question that the Navy can buy diesel engines from half a dozen naval diesel engine vendors but has to commission custom nuclear power plants.
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No, I haven't read parts I and II yet. They look interesting, maybe I will. That still puts me ahead of you since evidently you haven't read any of the three!
The international Standard for "properly" appears to mean in deeper water.
I am pro both nuclear and renewables.
Solar and wind have been on an absolute tear lately. At least in the US (where I live) new solar and wind construction has been growing at a breathtaking pace during the last decade.
Take a look at the latest data from the EIA [1]. For the last month available, July 2022, solar and wind generated together 45 Terawatts hour of electricity. Coal generated 86 TWh. But 3 months prior, solar/wind produced 60 TWh, while coal only 55.
To get an appreciation for how much solar and wind have grown over the last 2 decades, here's their July production every 5 years since 2002 (in TWh):
Somewhere up there Moore is smiling.Guys who are pro-solar and pro-wind: rejoice, you have won. Solar and wind have achieved escape velocity. If they keep it like that, we won't have any problems fully decarbonizing by 2050. We'll actually get there sooner. Without any help from nuclear. We won't even need batteries or hydrogen.
Few people know, but we could keep all the current natural gas plant and still achieve net zero (actually net negative). How is that possible, you ask?
Right now the forests absorb about 13% of the total emissions in the US [2]. Electricity generation contributes by 25% to the total emissions, and natural gas generates less than half of those. So overall, land and forestry absorb more greenhouse gases than those produced by the natural gas power plants.
If we increase solar and power, at some point we will need natural gas to only cover the intermittency. That means, even if we keep all the current natural gas plants, their usage will go down, and their emissions. If we cut all other sources of greenhouse gases (apart from aviation, which depends on energy dense fuels, and contributes quite little to the total emission), we will have no problems to achieve net zero by 2050, and very likely much sooner.
On the nuclear side, things are looking quite good too. Just head to the DoE infographic [3] and see how many cool ideas are in the works. My favorite ones are the fast reactors. But they are just vaporware, you say. In that case, head to the NRC webpage [4], and click on some links over there, and see that all of those ventures (and some more) have already started the licensing process.
Of course, none is as advanced as NuScale. But my point is that NuScale is not our only hope. Lots of other startups are hot on their tails.
My prediction is that 15 years from now, more than 1 of all these startups will have delivered reactors that will be selling electricity at a profit, without subsidies.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/
[2] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
[3] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-advanced-reac...
[4] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/licensing...
By 2040, all the existing nukes will have been shut down, unable to deliver enough power at the spot price to continue operating. The less each sells, the more each kWh it delivers has cost. When shut down early, the cost of every kWh it ever delivered jumps up as construction cost is amortized over less lifetime output.
So, no, the only way to figure commercially competitive nuke power is by cooking the books.
I don't get it. If there will be one, are you going to be unhappy? Because you surely sound like you'd be unhappy.
We're in a weird transition phase where gas/coal generation still exists and matters but have obvious financial challenges that are getting worse very quickly. Courtesy of the Russians, everybody is well aware of that now and can look forward to some really steep energy bills in the next year. But investors have been voting with their feet long before that happened as this has been quite obvious for a while now. Coal plants have been shutting down in many countries mainly for cost reasons and with a few exceptions (China, India), very few countries are building new ones. And now that cheap Russian gas is not an option, gas plants just got a lot more expensive to operate and they were already too expensive before that. Basically, that's an industry that is experiencing a rapidly accelerating collapse. It won't take until 2050 for that to be completed.
The only remaining debate is how soon we'll turn the remaining plants off. That's mostly a function of production capacity for solar and wind generation and energy storage solutions. More investment is flowing into that industry every year and we're seeing massive sustained growth there for decades in term of new capacity coming online every year. It's a super profitable industry to be in and a lot of those profits are getting reinvested in more and even better stuff. Lots of countries have been revising their already ambitious plans to become carbon neutral to be even more ambitious as they find themselves beating their own expectations of just a few years ago on this front. Ten years from now, a lot of countries will get the vast majority of their power from renewables and the remaining ones will be busy figuring out how to get in on the action.
Nuclear is getting lots of attention and investment obviously. But planned new capacity does not add up to mattering much at all over the next fifteen years. A few GW here and there vs. hundreds of GW in the next few years alone. And it takes that long to plan more nuclear plants and there are very little signs of countries warming up to that notion. A lot of those nuclear startups you mentioned won't hit volume production (if they survive long enough) before most countries have shut down all their remaining coal and gas plants. Which in Germany would be around 2035 according tot he latest plans. And those plans don't seem to involve any nuclear. Of course, that timeline might be accelerated due to recent events..
You can’t produce power at night with solar and the wind is not always blowing. Nuclear is what will get us off coal and gas if we combine it with renewable energy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_P...
Vogtle 3/4 also were greenlighted back in an environment when it wasn't clear PV would get so cheap so quickly. When it became clear how cheap renewables would become, it was obvious that initial decision was bad. The other nuclear build in the US, V. C. Summer, reached the point where they had spent the initial estimate but found the cost had doubled. At that point, it was as if they were asked to make the initial decision again, but now against much cheaper wind and solar. The reluctant conclusion was that continuing made no economic sense. It made no economic sense at Vogtle either, but politicians forced it to continue (the execs in SC were revenge prosecuted for stopping the gravy train.)
If you stop building reactors for 30 years it’s going to be an extremely massive undertaking only a government can handle. It will be up to the governments to subsides the costs.
Stop this lying, please. There's clear paths to clean energy without nuclear.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels.
This article is a good summary: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/30/us-energy-dept-still-ho...
(a) because nuclear power is the only energy technology for which the full lifecycle costs have to be fully accounted for upfront. No one is accounting for the disposal costs of solar panels in their initial capital expenditure, for example.
(b) The build costs in terms of energy of wind and solar are comparably high. They are raw material and energy hungry and have a much lower energy return on investment and require a much larger geographic footprint. Plus their use without adequate baseload generation will necessitate a large additional requirement for raw materials to create energy storage. Much if not all of wind and solar’s cost advantages will likely evaporate in an environment where they are no longer subsidized by very cheap fossil fuels.
In regards to recycling lead acid batteries the work seems horrendous, for more information check out the lead poisoning cases from Florida workers at Gopher Resource in Tampa.
It's cheaper to store something in such a way that you can't just trip over it. But it's something else to store it in a way that you can't reach it even if you know where it is.
Im personally an advocate of battery banks (And have them in a boat and rv) but it seems if every single family home had a battery bank there’d be a large surplus of energy created but not always used (aka it doesn’t scale well). If anyone has information otherwise I’m all ears this isn’t my domain
a) typically nuclear plants don't have to include all life cycle cost into their calculations. Insurance is essentially not included (no insurance is willing to cover nuclear disaster), storage costs are not included to the full extend (partly because we actually don't know the cost, storage for these amounts of time is unprecedented)
b) is also falso both wind and solar have significantly lower ROI on energy than nuclear. A wind turbine has a break even (when you have produced more energy than it took to build it) after 18-24 month or so
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222703134_Meta-Anal....
Mining raw material also produce a lot of waste, including radioactive waste, much which will never be safe for humans. Those are generally stored for an indefinite time in pools or just in piles near the mines, with a sign warning people of the toxic material. There will be no one to pay the bill for waste storage except governments when the mining company close down. This is why drinking water near old (or new) mines is a exceptional bad idea.
You seem to argue that because others are doing bad things it's OK for nuclear? I don't think that is a very good argument.
If we want to be technical correct, nuclear plants and hydropower plants do have some insurance, for example if employees are harmed during work.
What all power plants share is the inability to insure against risk that is direct to society at large. It not that the risk is high (which it isn't), but rather that in case of accident there isn't anything other than governments that could step in and take the cost.
> You seem to argue that because others are doing bad things it's OK for nuclear?
No, that is a bad faith interpretation. If we want power plants to pay insurance against risk that is place on society, then such requirement should be technology neutral. If we have historical evidence of harm to either society or the environment, directly connected to a method of producing energy, then producers using that method should pay a tax to government that represent the risk. Be that hydro, nuclear, fossil fuels, wind farms, PV, a battery farm or what have you. Quantify the risk and let researcher, experts and historians argue how much each specific plant should pay.
As the first part of this article series notes, South Korea does not seem to have such extensive costs. Instead of looking into why South Korea can build nuclear power plants at reasonable costs, it hand waves it away implying that the South Koreans are faking the numbers.
South Korean companies also built the Barakah nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates, which is hugely successful.
https://www.enec.gov.ae/news/latest-news/start-up-of-unit-3-...