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This 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

This 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 ago
Most 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 ago
  Heads should roll for such poor decisions. If that happens, no new nuclear project will ever be started in USA again.
  - 6d6b73 9y ago
    And why is that bad?
    - bpodgursky 9y ago
      Because some of us care about the environment more than we like populist posturing.
      - epistasis 9y ago
        While it may be important to correct the record on the safety of nuclear, if one really cares about the environment, one shouldn't be attached to just one solution like nuclear. In a political environment where approximately half of the country has been tricked by propaganda to disbelieve the basics of climate science, we can't get attached to expensive solutions like nuclear that require lots of public financial and political support. We need the carbon-free electricity to be the cheapest option, as dollars are probably the only thing that can overcome the anti-climate-change political ideology. Market solutions are the best option now, and though well-sited solar and wind are the cheapest source of power at the moment, they need to be distributed properly both in time and in geography. Storage and HVDC are the solutions that make this possible. Storage is getting super cheap, and is on the cusp of becoming a universal install with all new renewables. HVDC is getting somewhat cheaper, and other countries are building tons of it. Getting HVDC built does require some political support, because it means getting different grids to interact with each other. We need to be realistic about nuclear. Refusing to hold people accountable for bad decisions on nuclear isn't fighting against populist posturing, it's just protecting poor decision makers and preventing better ones from taking their place. These utilities have had poor decision makers that have been unfairly biased against renewable energy over the past decade, and are only ever so slowly awakening to the financial realities out there. South Carolina needs utility execs that are forward thinking, understand technology and how its changing, and are not stuck in the 80s or 90s. Only then will they be proper stewards of South Carolin's finances and environment. Imagine if South Carolina had been building off shore wind, at $9B. They amount of industry that would have been gained off that would have been immense. South Carolina companies would have had the knowledge to build off-shore wind all over the East Coast. And it would be local corporations, not foreign contractors like Dong energy. We need to get out of the past, and look to the future of technology. Nuclear had its day, and may again in the future, but for the coming decades it is not a terribly great option, at more than say 1%-5% of our energy supply.
      - 9y ago
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      It's the best news I've heard so far this week.
    - adventured 9y ago
      As well as for the other obvious reasons mentioned, it's highly desirable to maintain a mix of energy supply. For both security reasons, technological know-how reasons, and who-knows reasons. Security: distribution of energy sources, multiple options, no single majority dependency. Who knows: how long will the natural gas supply last? We can speculate, that's all. Know how: having a technological mastery of all the best sources of energy, is critical. What's the limit of nuclear power in terms of what we can accomplish with it and how safe we can make it? We don't yet know. That's very valuable technology ground that shouldn't be given up.
      - 6d6b73 9y ago
        We can maintain all of the above without building any new power plants. We just need to maintain all of the ones that we currently have, and have few research reactors.
  - epistasis 9y ago
    That's just fearmongering. If nothing else, foreign contractors could be used to build nuclear in the US. Not holding people accountable because it may look bad is one of the reasons that incompetence festers, and leads to failures like this one. Westinghouse, by going bankrupt, has been held somewhat accountable, so perhaps my request was somewhat satisfied. I imagine that's little comfort to the utilities rate payers though.
    - gozur88 9y ago
      >Not holding people accountable because it may look bad is one of the reasons that incompetence festers, and leads to failures like this one. By the same token, finding a scapegoat to punish when something doesn't go right leads to a culture of extreme risk aversion in which no decisions are made and nothing actually gets done.
- wongarsu 9y ago
  >Heads should roll for such poor decisions. If it was an unreasonable risk (from their information) or incompetence, there's an argument for firing the person. But if they did everything right and the chances of financial disaster where reasonably low it would set very bad incentives to fire people over it.
  - devrandomguy 9y ago
    If they did everything right, then surely their prototype would have cost less than a billion dollars?
marze 9y ago
The central challenge for new nuclear in the USA can be called the "chump search". You need to find some chumps to put up the billions. The chumps footing the bill tend to be poor utility rate payers who are ignorant of the economics.
- epistasis 9y ago
  Well, the key feature is not that they are ignorant of the economics, it's that they have no control over the process, or what decisions are made on their behalf! When two, incomplete, reactors account for 18% of rates while delivering 0% of the power, the bad decisions were made back when it was thought that gambling even 6% of the electric rate on one resource. $9B on 2.2GW of generation capacity could have bought 36GWh of energy storage at current lithium ion prices. Match that with solar and HVDC to import wind on regionally cloudy days, and then even if the project "fails" they have some grid capabilities to show. Here, there is nothing.
lamontcg 9y ago
The cost overruns for these plants were also increased by untested regulations -- that were designed to simplify and accelerate their development. Like all complex systems regulations need to get debugged and they threw a beta release at an advanced reactor design that was already a beta release itself. The regulations wound up needing to be patched which meant that the reactor designs had to change mid-project.

epistasis 9y ago

Most 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 ago
Heads should roll for such poor decisions. If that happens, no new nuclear project will ever be started in USA again.
- 6d6b73 9y ago
  And why is that bad?
  - bpodgursky 9y ago
    Because some of us care about the environment more than we like populist posturing.
    - epistasis 9y ago
      While it may be important to correct the record on the safety of nuclear, if one really cares about the environment, one shouldn't be attached to just one solution like nuclear. In a political environment where approximately half of the country has been tricked by propaganda to disbelieve the basics of climate science, we can't get attached to expensive solutions like nuclear that require lots of public financial and political support. We need the carbon-free electricity to be the cheapest option, as dollars are probably the only thing that can overcome the anti-climate-change political ideology. Market solutions are the best option now, and though well-sited solar and wind are the cheapest source of power at the moment, they need to be distributed properly both in time and in geography. Storage and HVDC are the solutions that make this possible. Storage is getting super cheap, and is on the cusp of becoming a universal install with all new renewables. HVDC is getting somewhat cheaper, and other countries are building tons of it. Getting HVDC built does require some political support, because it means getting different grids to interact with each other. We need to be realistic about nuclear. Refusing to hold people accountable for bad decisions on nuclear isn't fighting against populist posturing, it's just protecting poor decision makers and preventing better ones from taking their place. These utilities have had poor decision makers that have been unfairly biased against renewable energy over the past decade, and are only ever so slowly awakening to the financial realities out there. South Carolina needs utility execs that are forward thinking, understand technology and how its changing, and are not stuck in the 80s or 90s. Only then will they be proper stewards of South Carolin's finances and environment. Imagine if South Carolina had been building off shore wind, at $9B. They amount of industry that would have been gained off that would have been immense. South Carolina companies would have had the knowledge to build off-shore wind all over the East Coast. And it would be local corporations, not foreign contractors like Dong energy. We need to get out of the past, and look to the future of technology. Nuclear had its day, and may again in the future, but for the coming decades it is not a terribly great option, at more than say 1%-5% of our energy supply.
    - 9y ago
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    It's the best news I've heard so far this week.
  - adventured 9y ago
    As well as for the other obvious reasons mentioned, it's highly desirable to maintain a mix of energy supply. For both security reasons, technological know-how reasons, and who-knows reasons. Security: distribution of energy sources, multiple options, no single majority dependency. Who knows: how long will the natural gas supply last? We can speculate, that's all. Know how: having a technological mastery of all the best sources of energy, is critical. What's the limit of nuclear power in terms of what we can accomplish with it and how safe we can make it? We don't yet know. That's very valuable technology ground that shouldn't be given up.
    - 6d6b73 9y ago
      We can maintain all of the above without building any new power plants. We just need to maintain all of the ones that we currently have, and have few research reactors.
- epistasis 9y ago
  That's just fearmongering. If nothing else, foreign contractors could be used to build nuclear in the US. Not holding people accountable because it may look bad is one of the reasons that incompetence festers, and leads to failures like this one. Westinghouse, by going bankrupt, has been held somewhat accountable, so perhaps my request was somewhat satisfied. I imagine that's little comfort to the utilities rate payers though.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    >Not holding people accountable because it may look bad is one of the reasons that incompetence festers, and leads to failures like this one. By the same token, finding a scapegoat to punish when something doesn't go right leads to a culture of extreme risk aversion in which no decisions are made and nothing actually gets done.
wongarsu 9y ago
>Heads should roll for such poor decisions. If it was an unreasonable risk (from their information) or incompetence, there's an argument for firing the person. But if they did everything right and the chances of financial disaster where reasonably low it would set very bad incentives to fire people over it.
- devrandomguy 9y ago
  If they did everything right, then surely their prototype would have cost less than a billion dollars?

marze 9y ago

The central challenge for new nuclear in the USA can be called the "chump search". You need to find some chumps to put up the billions. The chumps footing the bill tend to be poor utility rate payers who are ignorant of the economics.

epistasis 9y ago
Well, the key feature is not that they are ignorant of the economics, it's that they have no control over the process, or what decisions are made on their behalf! When two, incomplete, reactors account for 18% of rates while delivering 0% of the power, the bad decisions were made back when it was thought that gambling even 6% of the electric rate on one resource. $9B on 2.2GW of generation capacity could have bought 36GWh of energy storage at current lithium ion prices. Match that with solar and HVDC to import wind on regionally cloudy days, and then even if the project "fails" they have some grid capabilities to show. Here, there is nothing.

lamontcg 9y ago

The cost overruns for these plants were also increased by untested regulations -- that were designed to simplify and accelerate their development. Like all complex systems regulations need to get debugged and they threw a beta release at an advanced reactor design that was already a beta release itself. The regulations wound up needing to be patched which meant that the reactor designs had to change mid-project.