7 ms·

back of napkin calculation: 1180 MWh; 4.5 billion dollar capex; 2.4ct/kWh opex[1]; 50$/MWh income yearly power production = 1180MWh * 24 * 365 = 10'336'800 MW

by ju-st 11y ago

back of napkin calculation: 1180 MWh; 4.5 billion dollar capex; 2.4ct/kWh opex[1]; 50$/MWh income yearly power production = 1180MWh * 24 * 365 = 10'336'800 MWh yearly revenue = power production * 50$/MWh = 516'840'000 USD yearly costs = power production * 1000 * 0,024$ = 248'083'200 USD capex / (revenue - costs) = 18 years Doesn't look like a very interesting investment choice!? 1: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power/ http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/economic-aspects/economics...

hga 11y ago
Any reactor build during the TMI singularity is going to have an outrageous capex, and a better calculation would be to ignore the sunk costs and look at the figures going forward. You also need to allow for refueling downtime, these aren't constantly refuelable designs like the outlawed in the US old generation CANDU and Soviet RBMK (outlawed due to their positive void coefficients, something the latest CANDU design addresses). From vague memory, assume no more than 90% yearly uptime. ADDED: And you get an upvote if for no other reason than that you're doing the math. I wish a lot more people would do that.
- jerven 11y ago
  90% is a best of fleet number. But for economic analysis you should really assume a lower number, unless you can guarantee that you are the cheapest producer at all times. As demand during the day can be near double of that in an area during the night, once your type of plant is over 50% of local supply your capacity factor is not a limit but demand side is. 4.5 billion capex is a really good number for nuclear in a competent regulatory environment. Still its double the estimated project cost when started. Funnily enough nuclear and renewables really compete hard because of this. Extra power production is nearly nothing for both compared to opex and capex, so if you can produce you shall until returns hit 0. Both love energy storage for that reason. Nuclear is more dependable i.e. less peakers on because of supply issues. But capex for wind and solar are trending too be lower, as is time to market. Leading to less risks, which affects project planning a lot. CSPs with inbuilt storage tend to go to lower generator capacity factors so that they can take a share of the peak shaving market, due to their relative good dispatch ability (send power to the market when wanted, instead of when you can). Wind and solar projects tend to be online and producing quickly in time measured from first concrete poured to power send to market, certainly relative to nuclear in practice. Projects also tend to be smaller scale and in independent phases. Nuclear is added a GW at a time to the market, solar and wind in smaller 50-100mw projects. i.e. wind&solar are project wise much more agile.
  - hga 11y ago
    4.5 billion capex is a really good number for nuclear in a competent regulatory environment. Is France one, and does anyone know what their's is?
    - jerven 11y ago
      Flamanville, at 10.5 billion euro for 1.6 GW is not nearly as good as watts bar 2. This has had serious delays due to quality issues detected by its regulator. As had the finish and Chinese units build to the same design. Sure these are supposed by GenIII, but are currently not competitive in any way with other power sources in economic terms. 10.5 billion buys you about the same in offshore wind e.g. 3 london array installations ( 2 billion per 600 MW * 50% capacity, compared to 10.5 billion per 1600mw * 90% capacity) = 10/(1.6*.9). Big difference is london arrays take 1 year to build instead of 10 for nuclear. That alone gives a mayor difference in real project costs.
      - hga 11y ago
        There's not much surprise if the first version of a new design runs over budget; I'm interested in the costs of routine, serial production once those unknowns have been worked through. What about the 59 reactors already in operation, including Flamanville 1 and 2?
        jerven 11y ago
        That is really hard to determine, mostly because project costs are part of the greater EdF numbers and not broken down in details for those years. So someone with better French and access should be able to answer you there. This is true not just for nuclear but all power generation before the late 90's in europe. i.e. same difficulty to getting numbers in the UK and Germany. Once these national power companies went to the stock exchanges they started to report in more detail how much projects cost. Anyway there are also number of existing reactors that are no longer running even if in the same generation as some other ones. The, unfortunate, reality is nuclear reactors are not build in serial production. Therefore learning costs do not decrease as much as you might expect. Main reasons are distance between sites, meaning many construction workers do not work on all sites. You see at most 10 units for one design. Time between forgings for mayor means parts are not made in large series so relatively little is learned. All 4 EPR sites seem to have suffered from the same issues with concrete pouring so even there learning might not have happened. Economically nuclear is in a real bind: for regulatory reasons you want big plants (1gw+), but for economic reasons you want many small ones (about 100mw). The current 1.6GW units are in many ways to big and smaller reactors would be much better project/knowledge wise. Yet the regulatory overhead for each new unit means that the firms went towards designing larger units. Bechtel marine nuclear powerplants could actually be produced in series as they are small enough to be build off site and could be made economically viable. Yet I don't expect that Bechtel ever will. But lest assume Arreva learns how to build EPRs for 5 billion and in 5 years. Which gives you EPR done right 5 billion / (1.6 GW * .7 historic capacity factor) = 4.4 to 5 billion / (1.6 GW * .9 best capacity factor) = 3.2 London array 2 billion / (.63 GW * .50 historic capacity factor) = 6/2 Even in this very optimistic scenario, offshore wind is between 100% and 60% more expensive on construction costs. Offshore wind however, still has lower opex and a much better learning curve. i.e. if ordering a london array today costs will be less than 2 billion. (big difference in reporting is that wind projects include interconnect costs which current nuclear projects do not due to sitting next to existing plants). Wind farms, also have positive decommissioning costs (those steel towers have real economic value at end of life). Both types of projects have issues with nimbys.
mseebach 11y ago
Compared to hitting the jackpot on a SV Unicorn, it sucks. But in the grander scheme of things, it's not bad. You have to remember that it's a very long-term investment -- considering that well run nuclear reactors have expected life spans of 50+ years, and the price of carbon-free electricity probably isn't going to go down anytime soon, it's starting to look pretty good. After the capex is paid off, you have a 250mm/year cash cow.
- Graham67 11y ago
  It's not carbon free.
  - illumen 11y ago
    You are correct. It is not carbon free. Nuclear power plants make about 90 - 140 g CO2 per kWh electricity. Uranium extraction, waste management, construction, and decommissioning being the biggest offenders in the whole process.
    - snowwindwaves 11y ago
      90-140g/kWh sounds like a lot when 'carbon free' is also being bandied about. Nei states c02 emissions are 4-50g for the entire lifecycle,including construction mining fuel and decommssioning. Only hydro electric is lower. http://www.nei.org/Issues-Policy/Protecting-the-Environment/Life-Cycle-Emissions-Analyses http://www.nei.org/Issues-Policy/Protecting-the-Environment/...
      - illumen 11y ago
        That link says 2 to 59 grams too. Apparently the range is very high depending on how the extraction works, and all sorts of factors. Cement and steel for example have very different behaviours for emitting co2. Maybe the steel was melted by wind farm electricity for example. But anyway, even at the high end of the estimates, that is still way lower than coal.
  - DennisP 11y ago
redwood 11y ago
you're missing the biggest cost of all. how do you price the cost of the waste fuel?
- hga 11y ago
  Grossly overstated. E.g. leave it alone for 600 years and it's no worse than the ore from which it was mined (which, I grant you, you don't want to be rolling around in). Or feed it to breeder reactors, all that's used up is the U-235, there's still plenty of tasty U-238 that you can do all sorts of stuff with, and they also help address the nasty actinides etc. Don't confuse the bat-shit crazy regulatory regime for this in the US with anything rational or useful. We're wealthy enough for now to indulge in it, we'll see when things get tighter.
  - Ntrails 11y ago
    I recall going round a nuclear power plant once and they had a display showing that fresh coffee beans were radioactive enough to be considered nuclear waste had they been produced by the plant (whilst obviously not being considered materially at risk outside). It's stuck with me (though I merely presume it to be true).
    - hga 11y ago
      This has been formalized with the banana equivalent dose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose Potassium-40 is pretty fierce stuff, enough to, in this context, get people to be call for the outlawing more than two people sleeping together. If, you know, they really cared about the level of one kind of safety they insist on, as opposed to shutting down US nuclear activities for their various reasons, and used ludicrous methods like the linear no-threshold model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model which due to common sense and radiation hormesishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis we can even say is unscientific.
  - redwood 11y ago
illumen 11y ago
I think it's an even worse investment than that. I don't believe them that the cost of decommissioning is built in. Especially since the financiers who pay during construction aim to sell their equity. Also in the UK, recently had to pay 4 billion worth of tax payer funds to decommission. That puts the whole thing at a loss. Also, wind, solar and other renewable are able to be produced with a much smaller capital cost, and are only getting cheaper. Many of the tech issues are being fixed. For example, critical steam is now possible with CSP and mass production is making the systems cheaper. The production risks for nuclear are really high, because of the high capital costs. As demonstrated by this project stalling for over a decade. Also, uranium costs are not fixed. Over the last 18 years have changed a number of times. The price difference has been 3x (not even adjusting for inflation). Finally, many nuclear power plants have been closed down early to fix up (14% have been closed for more than a year). Including of course Fukushima, but also other ones around the world and in the USA. There was a report of 14 plants in the USA which will likely close early. That is around 14% of plants (so far) closing earlier than planned. (There are 99 plants in the USA). If there is a problem because the high capital costs, it seems many of the plants get closed. 100 orders for plants in the USA were cancelled, bankrupting companies.
- hga 11y ago
  Also, wind, solar and other renewable are able to be produced with a much smaller capital cost, and are only getting cheaper. Are you including the energy storage systems they require to provide either baseline or peaking power? Outside of perhaps some very special locations (i.e. cover deserts with solar cells if you can get that past the BANANAs, and that still doesn't cover nighttime to, e.g., recharge electric cars) they don't, you know, actually produce the two types of electrical production the system actually needs....
  - illumen 11y ago
    You can build small renewable systems with all sorts of different capital costs, and all sorts of power generation abilities. Price ranges from $100 to $9billion. Nuclear projects do not happen for less than $Xbillions (and about half bankrupt before completion). Got data? Seems that most of the renewable energy is being used ok. Smarter energy management, and using salt/aluminium/steel aluminium molten lakes allows for storage/adjustment. In many places aluminium factories use up a LOT of power. They can be used as batteries of sorts. CSP solar can hold power for over 8 hours. Wind farms over provision to allow for baseload generation. Then there is storing energy in car batteries. Biomass solutions offer different power generation abilities too. All this is being done today, and systems are continually being enhanced. The point I was making though, is that you can have power generation (including batteries) at a much smaller cost for it to be useful. For example, even installing solar on a factory roof and installing batteries can be done for way under $100,000. Working nuclear plants have to close 38 days every 17 months for refuelling and maintenance. How good are they at generating baseload then?
gh02t 11y ago
Don't forget though that these plants are designed for a 50 year operating life, with some talk that they might be extended upwards to as much as 100 years, and with operating costs that are pretty low. Maintenance isn't that bad, fuel is hardly even a rounding error; waste disposal is the only significant cost long term. Definitely a long term investment, which is why only large utilities are really interested in them. I think the direction for power generation in the US is solar/wind/hydro, but supported by nuclear in areas where solar and wind are much less attractive (like the Southeast). That's discounting the possibility of clean fusion energy (or other novel tech), which is likely inevitable but still a long way off.
- ScotterC 11y ago
  I've worked analysis related to extending reactor lifetimes. With correct maintenance, 100 years is going to be easy. Most of the analysis to getting them to 80 years required almost no changes.
sdab 11y ago
The article refers to 1180 MW of _power_. MW is joules/s and the unit of power is the watt (j/s). Your math talks about MegaWatt-Hours. These are often confused in articles, do you happen to know if that was the case in this article? Did they mean 1180 MWH or 1180 MW as stated? Otherwise your yearly production calculation is very off. 1180 MW (j/s) would produce 10^7 MHW per hour.
- Monkeyget 11y ago
  It's megawatt hour.

by ju-st 11y ago

hga 11y ago

Any reactor build during the TMI singularity is going to have an outrageous capex, and a better calculation would be to ignore the sunk costs and look at the figures going forward. You also need to allow for refueling downtime, these aren't constantly refuelable designs like the outlawed in the US old generation CANDU and Soviet RBMK (outlawed due to their positive void coefficients, something the latest CANDU design addresses). From vague memory, assume no more than 90% yearly uptime. ADDED: And you get an upvote if for no other reason than that you're doing the math. I wish a lot more people would do that.

jerven 11y ago
90% is a best of fleet number. But for economic analysis you should really assume a lower number, unless you can guarantee that you are the cheapest producer at all times. As demand during the day can be near double of that in an area during the night, once your type of plant is over 50% of local supply your capacity factor is not a limit but demand side is. 4.5 billion capex is a really good number for nuclear in a competent regulatory environment. Still its double the estimated project cost when started. Funnily enough nuclear and renewables really compete hard because of this. Extra power production is nearly nothing for both compared to opex and capex, so if you can produce you shall until returns hit 0. Both love energy storage for that reason. Nuclear is more dependable i.e. less peakers on because of supply issues. But capex for wind and solar are trending too be lower, as is time to market. Leading to less risks, which affects project planning a lot. CSPs with inbuilt storage tend to go to lower generator capacity factors so that they can take a share of the peak shaving market, due to their relative good dispatch ability (send power to the market when wanted, instead of when you can). Wind and solar projects tend to be online and producing quickly in time measured from first concrete poured to power send to market, certainly relative to nuclear in practice. Projects also tend to be smaller scale and in independent phases. Nuclear is added a GW at a time to the market, solar and wind in smaller 50-100mw projects. i.e. wind&solar are project wise much more agile.
- hga 11y ago
  4.5 billion capex is a really good number for nuclear in a competent regulatory environment. Is France one, and does anyone know what their's is?
  - jerven 11y ago
    Flamanville, at 10.5 billion euro for 1.6 GW is not nearly as good as watts bar 2. This has had serious delays due to quality issues detected by its regulator. As had the finish and Chinese units build to the same design. Sure these are supposed by GenIII, but are currently not competitive in any way with other power sources in economic terms. 10.5 billion buys you about the same in offshore wind e.g. 3 london array installations ( 2 billion per 600 MW * 50% capacity, compared to 10.5 billion per 1600mw * 90% capacity) = 10/(1.6*.9). Big difference is london arrays take 1 year to build instead of 10 for nuclear. That alone gives a mayor difference in real project costs.
    - hga 11y ago
      There's not much surprise if the first version of a new design runs over budget; I'm interested in the costs of routine, serial production once those unknowns have been worked through. What about the 59 reactors already in operation, including Flamanville 1 and 2?
      - jerven 11y ago
        That is really hard to determine, mostly because project costs are part of the greater EdF numbers and not broken down in details for those years. So someone with better French and access should be able to answer you there. This is true not just for nuclear but all power generation before the late 90's in europe. i.e. same difficulty to getting numbers in the UK and Germany. Once these national power companies went to the stock exchanges they started to report in more detail how much projects cost. Anyway there are also number of existing reactors that are no longer running even if in the same generation as some other ones. The, unfortunate, reality is nuclear reactors are not build in serial production. Therefore learning costs do not decrease as much as you might expect. Main reasons are distance between sites, meaning many construction workers do not work on all sites. You see at most 10 units for one design. Time between forgings for mayor means parts are not made in large series so relatively little is learned. All 4 EPR sites seem to have suffered from the same issues with concrete pouring so even there learning might not have happened. Economically nuclear is in a real bind: for regulatory reasons you want big plants (1gw+), but for economic reasons you want many small ones (about 100mw). The current 1.6GW units are in many ways to big and smaller reactors would be much better project/knowledge wise. Yet the regulatory overhead for each new unit means that the firms went towards designing larger units. Bechtel marine nuclear powerplants could actually be produced in series as they are small enough to be build off site and could be made economically viable. Yet I don't expect that Bechtel ever will. But lest assume Arreva learns how to build EPRs for 5 billion and in 5 years. Which gives you EPR done right 5 billion / (1.6 GW * .7 historic capacity factor) = 4.4 to 5 billion / (1.6 GW * .9 best capacity factor) = 3.2 London array 2 billion / (.63 GW * .50 historic capacity factor) = 6/2 Even in this very optimistic scenario, offshore wind is between 100% and 60% more expensive on construction costs. Offshore wind however, still has lower opex and a much better learning curve. i.e. if ordering a london array today costs will be less than 2 billion. (big difference in reporting is that wind projects include interconnect costs which current nuclear projects do not due to sitting next to existing plants). Wind farms, also have positive decommissioning costs (those steel towers have real economic value at end of life). Both types of projects have issues with nimbys.

mseebach 11y ago

Compared to hitting the jackpot on a SV Unicorn, it sucks. But in the grander scheme of things, it's not bad. You have to remember that it's a very long-term investment -- considering that well run nuclear reactors have expected life spans of 50+ years, and the price of carbon-free electricity probably isn't going to go down anytime soon, it's starting to look pretty good. After the capex is paid off, you have a 250mm/year cash cow.

Graham67 11y ago
It's not carbon free.
- illumen 11y ago
  You are correct. It is not carbon free. Nuclear power plants make about 90 - 140 g CO2 per kWh electricity. Uranium extraction, waste management, construction, and decommissioning being the biggest offenders in the whole process.
  - snowwindwaves 11y ago
    90-140g/kWh sounds like a lot when 'carbon free' is also being bandied about. Nei states c02 emissions are 4-50g for the entire lifecycle,including construction mining fuel and decommssioning. Only hydro electric is lower. http://www.nei.org/Issues-Policy/Protecting-the-Environment/Life-Cycle-Emissions-Analyses http://www.nei.org/Issues-Policy/Protecting-the-Environment/...
    - illumen 11y ago
      That link says 2 to 59 grams too. Apparently the range is very high depending on how the extraction works, and all sorts of factors. Cement and steel for example have very different behaviours for emitting co2. Maybe the steel was melted by wind farm electricity for example. But anyway, even at the high end of the estimates, that is still way lower than coal.
- DennisP 11y ago

redwood 11y ago

you're missing the biggest cost of all. how do you price the cost of the waste fuel?

hga 11y ago
Grossly overstated. E.g. leave it alone for 600 years and it's no worse than the ore from which it was mined (which, I grant you, you don't want to be rolling around in). Or feed it to breeder reactors, all that's used up is the U-235, there's still plenty of tasty U-238 that you can do all sorts of stuff with, and they also help address the nasty actinides etc. Don't confuse the bat-shit crazy regulatory regime for this in the US with anything rational or useful. We're wealthy enough for now to indulge in it, we'll see when things get tighter.
- Ntrails 11y ago
  I recall going round a nuclear power plant once and they had a display showing that fresh coffee beans were radioactive enough to be considered nuclear waste had they been produced by the plant (whilst obviously not being considered materially at risk outside). It's stuck with me (though I merely presume it to be true).
  - hga 11y ago
    This has been formalized with the banana equivalent dose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose Potassium-40 is pretty fierce stuff, enough to, in this context, get people to be call for the outlawing more than two people sleeping together. If, you know, they really cared about the level of one kind of safety they insist on, as opposed to shutting down US nuclear activities for their various reasons, and used ludicrous methods like the linear no-threshold model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model which due to common sense and radiation hormesishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis we can even say is unscientific.
- redwood 11y ago

illumen 11y ago

I think it's an even worse investment than that. I don't believe them that the cost of decommissioning is built in. Especially since the financiers who pay during construction aim to sell their equity. Also in the UK, recently had to pay 4 billion worth of tax payer funds to decommission. That puts the whole thing at a loss. Also, wind, solar and other renewable are able to be produced with a much smaller capital cost, and are only getting cheaper. Many of the tech issues are being fixed. For example, critical steam is now possible with CSP and mass production is making the systems cheaper. The production risks for nuclear are really high, because of the high capital costs. As demonstrated by this project stalling for over a decade. Also, uranium costs are not fixed. Over the last 18 years have changed a number of times. The price difference has been 3x (not even adjusting for inflation). Finally, many nuclear power plants have been closed down early to fix up (14% have been closed for more than a year). Including of course Fukushima, but also other ones around the world and in the USA. There was a report of 14 plants in the USA which will likely close early. That is around 14% of plants (so far) closing earlier than planned. (There are 99 plants in the USA). If there is a problem because the high capital costs, it seems many of the plants get closed. 100 orders for plants in the USA were cancelled, bankrupting companies.

hga 11y ago
Also, wind, solar and other renewable are able to be produced with a much smaller capital cost, and are only getting cheaper. Are you including the energy storage systems they require to provide either baseline or peaking power? Outside of perhaps some very special locations (i.e. cover deserts with solar cells if you can get that past the BANANAs, and that still doesn't cover nighttime to, e.g., recharge electric cars) they don't, you know, actually produce the two types of electrical production the system actually needs....
- illumen 11y ago
  You can build small renewable systems with all sorts of different capital costs, and all sorts of power generation abilities. Price ranges from $100 to $9billion. Nuclear projects do not happen for less than $Xbillions (and about half bankrupt before completion). Got data? Seems that most of the renewable energy is being used ok. Smarter energy management, and using salt/aluminium/steel aluminium molten lakes allows for storage/adjustment. In many places aluminium factories use up a LOT of power. They can be used as batteries of sorts. CSP solar can hold power for over 8 hours. Wind farms over provision to allow for baseload generation. Then there is storing energy in car batteries. Biomass solutions offer different power generation abilities too. All this is being done today, and systems are continually being enhanced. The point I was making though, is that you can have power generation (including batteries) at a much smaller cost for it to be useful. For example, even installing solar on a factory roof and installing batteries can be done for way under $100,000. Working nuclear plants have to close 38 days every 17 months for refuelling and maintenance. How good are they at generating baseload then?

gh02t 11y ago

Don't forget though that these plants are designed for a 50 year operating life, with some talk that they might be extended upwards to as much as 100 years, and with operating costs that are pretty low. Maintenance isn't that bad, fuel is hardly even a rounding error; waste disposal is the only significant cost long term. Definitely a long term investment, which is why only large utilities are really interested in them. I think the direction for power generation in the US is solar/wind/hydro, but supported by nuclear in areas where solar and wind are much less attractive (like the Southeast). That's discounting the possibility of clean fusion energy (or other novel tech), which is likely inevitable but still a long way off.

ScotterC 11y ago
I've worked analysis related to extending reactor lifetimes. With correct maintenance, 100 years is going to be easy. Most of the analysis to getting them to 80 years required almost no changes.

sdab 11y ago

The article refers to 1180 MW of _power_. MW is joules/s and the unit of power is the watt (j/s). Your math talks about MegaWatt-Hours. These are often confused in articles, do you happen to know if that was the case in this article? Did they mean 1180 MWH or 1180 MW as stated? Otherwise your yearly production calculation is very off. 1180 MW (j/s) would produce 10^7 MHW per hour.

Monkeyget 11y ago
It's megawatt hour.