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U.S. Nuclear Comeback Stalls as Two Reactors Are Abandoned
- wodencafe 9y agoFrom TFA: The cancellation means there are just two new nuclear units being built in the country — both in Georgia — while more than a dozen older nuclear plants are being retired in the face of low natural gas prices. So what is going to happen when gas prices skyrocket?
- stephen_g 9y agoIf it's anything like Australia, the high gas prices will cause electricity prices to skyrocket and then conservative politicians will blame it on renewable energy.
- freehunter 9y agoThen they'll attempt to put more nuclear plants in, then gas will plummet again and they'll abandon those plans and then gas will skyrocket and they'll make new plans and then gas will drop and
- addicted 9y agoWhich, once again, shows why nuclear is an economic disaster. The extremely high capital costs, and the long times from conception to completion means that it's very difficult for it to profitably (after adjusting for financial risk) compete with fossil fuels, which can be ramped up or down based on their costs, or renewables, which while also predominantly capital driven, can be brought from idea to pumping electricity in a fraction of the time.
- 15charlimit 9y ago"Nuclear" is not an economic disaster. "Nuclear politics" is, and has been since the technology first appeared. We have the technological capability to build perfectly safe, high-performance reactors that spit out low-risk waste products (or no waste products) for far less than the cost of any current/planned project. What we don't have is politicians with the balls to push through the political minefield that come with it.
- merpnderp 9y agoAt current technology levels and known reserves, there's about 85 years of natgas. And it just keeps getting cheaper to produce and known reserves keep expanding far faster than it is consumed. The only way gas prices could skyrocket are political caps on production or a cheap way to export natgas across the oceans explodes demand.
- tvchurch 9y agoWhile the full article is gated at WSJ, John Cochrane and David Henderson write about the lack of quantifying economic costs when it comes to addressing climate change. Their last paragraph: Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis, and mushy thinking undermines their case. If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. It follows that the costs of genetically modified foods and modern pesticides, which can feed us with less land and lower carbon emissions, might be bearable. It follows that if the future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering should not be unmentionable. And it follows that symbolic, ineffective, political grab-bag policies should be intolerable. Here's Cochrane's write up about the op-ed: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2017/07/on-climate-change.html?spref=tw http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2017/07/on-climate-change....
- mathattack 9y agoCochrane is an awesome thinker
- QAPereo 9y agoClimate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis, and mushy thinking undermines their case. If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. I agree, but I'd also consider myself to be a "Climate policy advocate" with an "apocalyptic vision" so maybe he's conflating different groups for the purpose of argument?
- mcguire 9y agoI mostly agree with his paragraph above. But from your link, "No. Healthy societies do not fall apart over slow, widely predicted, relatively small economic adjustments of the sort painted by climate analysis. Societies do fall apart from war, disease or chaos. Climate policy must compete with other long-term threats for always-scarce resources." "Small economic adjustments?" How many large scale resources does preventing war or pandemics require? Is chaos a real threat? Most of what he lists are effects, not causes. Here's an economic question for him: what happens when the area between the Mississippi and the Rockies returns to being an unusable semidesert? (That's not an if. It is all irrigated.) And I'll just leave this comment here: "As I favor a uniform VAT in place of the idiotically complex income and corporate tax system."
- drallison 9y agoNuclear energy has a small carbon footprint when compared to fracked natural gas. It is insane to cancel and abandon two reactors because natural gas prices are low. Doesn't anyone think long term anymore? How much CO2 will be dumped into the atmosphere due to this cancellation? What will be the collateral damage due to the inadvertent release of methane in fracking. Nuclear power is clean and safe relative to fossil fuel power generation.
- Zigurd 9y ago"It is insane to cancel and abandon two reactors because natural gas prices are low." Not if, for whatever reasons, it's impossible to build them on time and within budget. It's regrettable for a whole range of reasons, not least that it keeps older, less-safe nukes running when maybe they shouldn't. Maybe recovering the cost of carbon fuel externalities would change the relative profitability of nuclear. But maybe the way we use nuclear power - the fuel, the safety issues, etc. - is wrong enough that it can't be fixed without a fundamental re-think.
- skybrian 9y agoIf you're looking decades out, you need to think about all the potential competitors in the energy market. I'm not sure the case building these plants gets any better. Costs for solar, wind, and energy storage are coming down rapidly, and they can be built relatively quickly.
- sehugg 9y agoOur long-term thinking is somewhat affected by politics. From the article: President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, finalized in 2015, would have given South Carolina and Georgia credit against their state climate goals for finishing the new reactors, which may have persuaded local regulators to stick with the project. But the Trump administration is dismantling that plan. The pro-fossil fuel take: http://www.heritage.org/coal-oil-natural-gas/commentary/trumps-sweeping-executive-order-climate-policy-has-been-sorely http://www.heritage.org/coal-oil-natural-gas/commentary/trum... And the pro-environment take: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2017/04/19/430591/hidden-costs-president-trumps-campaign-erase-social-cost-carbon/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2017/0...
- pavement 9y agoOh, come on. Just because old technology is too complicated to repair or upgrade doesn't mean the entire industry has stalled. This is pretty much the definition of "cruft." An accumulation of old defunct artifacts in the face of technological advances. [0] [0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/C/cruft.html
- Shivetya 9y agowell my take away was, don't start a project unless the design is understood. I am all for nuclear power but a utility company should not be the breaking ground for new designs that are untested and not fully understood. If so, they the federal government should guarantee backing of a pilot plant/upgrade so that we don't end up with these fiascos
- ethbro 9y agoFor better or worse, the regulatory environment ensures that "old technology" is the only thing getting built on a production scale. So yeah, it is a problem. Since every plant is essentially a one-off * , the economics are doomed to be terrible. Honestly, the UN should just annoint a multinational nuclear conglomerate composed of any volunteering existing nuclear companies. Standardize designs, share R&D costs across all, then use UN-approval for non-proliferation or assistance with waste disposal as the market carrot. It's a bit crazy that for things like space and nuclear technology we're burning so many resources (physical and human) reinventing the wheel in 5 different places, and telling smaller countries they just can't be trusted with wheels. * EDIT: Did some background reading and apparently this is one of the features of the AP1000 and its NRC certification. It's now certified to be built again as long as the design is not modified. Not sure if this was standard NRC practice, but the phrasing and context make this sound like a somewhat new approach.
- merpnderp 9y agoYou're seriously making the claim that NASA is more productive than the commercial entities blowing its doors off with launch technology, with tiny fractions of NASA's budget? I can't even imagine how you got there.
- ricw 9y agoI see a lot of technocratie on this site bemoaning the dying of nuclear. We've tried for 70+ years and have as yet not succeeded to use nuclear as a financially feasible energy source. Anyone trying to argue against this please answer this: Why has a nuclear facility never been able to be fully privately insured without government backing?! The answer is simple: nuclear is too risky as a technology such that even some of the largest companies in the world are unwilling to take the risk. Nuclear is dying for a reason. Ps: thanks for the downvotes on stating facts
- tptacek 9y agoNuclear is failing in the US currently because we have historic low natural gas prices. They spent 9 billion dollars on these plants. They didn't give up because of insurance. They gave up because they can't outcompete fossil fuels.
- ricw 9y agoGas has actually been this cheap before, and for a long time so. 20 years ago oil cost less than a third than it is now, and yet then fossil fuel prices weren't an issue. The real reason is deeper than that. Nuclear is simply put very very expensive and has a high risk attached to it.
- jessaustin 9y agoBack then lots of politicians were willing to steal from taxpayers and ratepayers because of some nebulous idea that we needed more nuclear weapons and nuclear power was somehow related to that. Now, that's less true.
- endorphone 9y agoNuclear has been "failing" for decades. The TVA plant that recently came online was started 43 years ago. Nuclear has a long, storied history of costing multiples of estimates at every stage -- building, operation, decommissioning, etc. And as the GP mentioned, black swan events ("it couldn't possibly happen...oh it happened well that's not a true Scotsman") are so enormous that it needs government to take the liability.
- rsync 9y agoWhat kind of nuclear reactors were these ? Were the new molten salt reactors that require no cooling source ? Or were they the same old westinghouse models that require external cooling (and external power) and have the capability of melting down ?
- honestoHeminway 9y agoYou know how much humanity loves retro- only the old reactors get that glow in your heart..
- ethbro 9y agoFrom the article: Westinghouse Gen3+ AP1000s with greater passive safety.
- rsync 9y ago"with greater passive safety" Predictable. Old, meltdown-capable reactor designs that are incredibly capital intensive and overly complex to run.
- ethbro 9y agoCitation? Or are you a nuclear or mechanical engineer? I like to have a little humility that maybe folks splitting atoms and designing incredibly complex and redundant machines to control borderline critical reactions for massive power production aren't all lazy / idiots / shortsighted / unimaginative. And under that assumption, maybe they're doing the best they can under the current regulatory scheme and economic organization and we should cut them some slack and give them respect for the effort they put into what they do.
- ApolloFortyNine 9y agoThe AP1000's can go 3 days without human intervention. https://www.iaea.org/NuclearPower/Downloads/Technology/meetings/2011-Jul-4-8-ANRT-WS/2_USA_UK_AP1000_Westinghouse_Pfister.pdf https://www.iaea.org/NuclearPower/Downloads/Technology/meeti...
- madengr 9y agoIt's right here: "We’ve let our nuclear industry atrophy for 30 years, and we’ve lost the robust supply chains and expertise needed” in building reactors." This can be said for lots of things. You put it on hold for a generation of engineers, and pretty much need to start from zero again. Imagine all the knowledge lost, as tradecraft is not recorded.
- willvarfar 9y agoAre there any technical solutions solving the nuclear waste storage problem yet? Before following the HN crowd and becoming pro-nuclear-power, I'd like to understand what problems it is leaving to our children and their children and so on.
- mikeash 9y agoYes, put it in sturdy canisters and store it somewhere with a nice fence and some guards.
- beat 9y agoAnd who will be paying for the guards in the year 8017? How will the fence be doing? Will anyone still be speaking English to read the signs?
- mikeash 9y agoThere's lots of highly dangerous non-nuclear waste which stays dangerous forever, and we don't worry about this. The best answer to those questions is to do our best to ensure that civilization doesn't collapse in the first place.
- beat 9y agoI don't wear a seat belt, because I do my best not to get into accidents.
- mikeash 9y agoWhat's the plan for warning future civilizations away from mercury, arsenic, and other long-lived toxic waste? The current approach for those things is to dump it in a suitable landfill or similar, and let it be. Nobody seems worried about what happens when some future civilization discovers it thousands of years hence.
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- someone443 9y agoI live in the service area for this power company and toured the construction site last year. During the tour they told us that the reactors were "twins" of reactors under construction in China. In fact, they took regular trips to China to learn from the team there because they were further along in the construction process. I wonder how the Chinese project is coming along. A lot of people were laid off yesterday and that's a tragedy. But even more tragic is that these reactors were supposed to be the solution for meeting the regions rising energy demands. Now what? There was no plan B. note - this is a burner account for privacy reasons
- skywhopper 9y agoThis brings to light a risk of nuclear power that's rarely mentioned: that the scale of practical projects is so great that the likely cost overruns and delays make the systems politically or financially difficult to fund. Not to mention the additional risk that when/if a nuclear power station goes offline (whether for maintenance, accident, or some other kind of failure), the gap in energy production is massive. Compare that to solar and wind energy projects, which are typically smaller scale (and can be much, much smaller), built with diverse technologies in multiple locations, in small units. The risks of disruption, project failure, cost overruns, and financial failure are all much smaller. When we are seeking solutions to growing energy demand and climate change, the likelihood and ease of fulfilling the demand has to be included in the calculations.
- epistasis 9y agoMost certainly, and this is what really stuck out for me: >The nuclear project now accounts for 18 percent of the electric bills of South Carolina Electric & Gas’s residential customers. Santee Cooper, a state-owned utility, has increased rates five times to pay for the reactors. The costs of mistakes like this are massive! A failed $100 million storage experiment has little impact. This $9B experiment is a financial disaster. Heads should roll for such poor decisions.
- jessaustin 9y agoHeads should roll for such poor decisions. If that happens, no new nuclear project will ever be started in USA again.
- 6d6b73 9y agoAnd why is that bad?
- bpodgursky 9y agoBecause some of us care about the environment more than we like populist posturing.
- nprecup 9y agoInterestingly, South Carolina produces most of its energy using nuclear already... It is too bad the broad public perceives nuclear as a 'risky' energy source. It is in fact the safest energy source we have ever developed, in terms of deaths per kilowatt hour. Its just that when something goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. That makes more of an emotional reaction in the general public than the scattered and sporadic deaths in other industries, in which there are sadly many, many more. So, it seems it is hard to get support to invest in newer, safer technologies in the industry. I do understand the short term economic incentives. Nuclear is expensive to build. However it is very cheap to operate, and relatively environmentally friendly. It takes long term planning on timescales of many years, and looking at safety data rather than focusing on the disasters on their own. Neither of which humans are any good at. The one thing that turns me off nuclear power is how to store nuclear waste. The collapsed storage tunnel at the Hanford site this year is an example of how poorly this can be done. The waste will remain dangerous for thousands of years. How do you build a storage facility that keeps it contained for that long?
- marze 9y agoThe "cheap to operate" myth has long been debunked by all of the 100% depreciated nuclear plants closing, because, they are not cheap to operate.
- bluedino 9y agoAlthough at the current time, low natural gas prices make natural gas plants very attractive, most nuclear plants are closed because of public outcry. A lot of these plants are nearing 50 years old as well.
- beat 9y agoPer the article, old nuclear plants are being closed because they are not cost-competitive with natural gas. If you're saying they're actually being closed due to public opposition, you should cite a source. Preferably one as non-partisan as the NYT.
- SoMisanthrope 9y agoAs a project management professional, I have to wonder why these project so-often fail to meet their objectives of cost, scope, and schedule? It makes you think that there have been so few of these projects, in the past 40 years, that any "lessons learned" from former projects are unavailable. Plus, the duration of such projects probably causes loss of knowledge via retirement of the smart people. If you want to make these projects work, I would recommend spending much more time on planning and give project control to the project managers. My guess is, that since this was a "state owned project", they took a typical "state run" mindset, which always displaces the liability of incompetence and failure onto the endless bank account of the taxpayer.
- m0llusk 9y agoIn my opinion this article is completely wrong. There were problems with many early reactors. Now there is much exciting design work on fission reactors especially using Thorium and fusion options are showing promise. If you look at energy source development over the long term then nuclear power is looking exceptionally strong now. If anything keeping older iterations operating beyond their lifetimes would be a sign of stagnation.
- pm90 9y agoHow is this article "completely wrong"? It is basically reporting the actual fact that new nuclear reactors are being abandoned because they are too expensive.
- m0llusk 9y agoHow is a nuclear comeback more closely related to old reactor shutdowns than new reactor designs? For a real example of energy generation being abandoned look at dams which have no new generation of potential replacements causing discussion.
- exabrial 9y agoVery sad to see. I see nuclear as the future * Despite this however, I also recognize Nuclear is failing because of the Central Planning fallacy :( Instead of small, modular, flexible modules, we have one giant plant. I think we need to scale down, not scale up. * = as in, if we're every visited by aliens their ships won't be powered by windmills :)
- dmritard96 9y agoFrom an environmental perspective - I have always felt the failure to adopt nuclear power was a result of environmentalists that undervalued global pollution relative to localized pollution. Of course the safety concerns whether or not they are actually warranted may be just as big or more so the real culprit in the lack of nuclear dominance, but given the costs of switching the grid to solar and wind (the costs are as much the slow roll out as the actual dollars), nuclear seems reasonably priced. Cleaning up our atmosphere is going to be one hell of an endeavor.
- jartelt 9y agoI have to give the two utilities credit for pulling these projects. Sure they wasted $9 billion, but it would have been easy for them to keep building given the large amount of money and time already spent on the project. By cancelling the project, they avoided passing another $15 billion in costs onto rate payers. With this $15 billion saved, they can buy a hell of a lot of wind, solar, and batteries.
- thephyber 9y ago> If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. This assumes that the costs are paid by the same group of people. The people who live within range of a meltdown might consider the threat of a meltdown a much larger threat to their future than the threat of a much more evenly distributed disaster. Alaskans didn't feel personally threatened by the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, but there certainly were New Yorkers who felt affected. Also, "pose a threat" on the time scales of (Nuclear Power plant lifetimes and climate change) is as much about perception and values as it is objective fact. Different people and societies are likely to perceive different levels of threat from different sources. For example, rural Americans who fear ISIS and terrorism are least likely to be directly affected by it or to have actually seen it in person (excluding those individuals who sign up to be shipped to the place where those are actually existential threats), yet they overwhelmingly value policies which prioritize defense against terrorism over defense against climate change. Discussions of nuclear power accidents and climate change generally should (but don't) include {probability, impact, and duration}. A nuclear power incident is likely to be low probability, high impact (within a state-sized region), and quick. Climate change is likely to be a high probability (of unknown effects), wide ranging impacts, and affecting many different regions of the world over a long timescale (perhaps longer than a lifetime).
- mattbierner 9y agoUnfinished nuclear power plants are not uncommon and for anyone in Washington State, the Satsop plant near Olympia is worth a visit. The massive unfinished concrete containment buildings and cooling towers are awe inspiring, and on a quiet morning the place feels almost like some ancient monument. But then again, I'm a romantic. Some photos from Satsop a few years ago: - https://photography.mattbierner.com/Satsop-Nuclear-Power-Plant-Eve https://photography.mattbierner.com/Satsop-Nuclear-Power-Pla... - https://photography.mattbierner.com/Satsop-Nuclear-Plant-Morning https://photography.mattbierner.com/Satsop-Nuclear-Plant-Mor...
- wantoncl 9y agoJames Cameron Presents... The Abyss Part 2 Coming Summer 2029
- kalleboo 9y ago> Demand for electricity has plateaued nationwide as a result of major improvements in energy efficiency How quickly can wide-spread adoption of EVs change this part of the equation?
- intrasight 9y agoNuclear just can't succeed as long as every reactor is a custom job with unknown costs. Companies like NuScale are trying to fix this by creating modular plants with predictable costs. It is unfortunate (especially for my hometown of Pittsburgh) that Westinghouse didn't pursue a modular design for it's latest AP1000 reactors.