8 ms·

> But I doubt anybody will get the costs down enough to make them viable [citation needed] This was discussed recently and I really down understand the immens

> But I doubt anybody will get the costs down enough to make them viable [citation needed] This was discussed recently and I really down understand the immense skepticism exhibited on HN (and in general) towards nuclear energy. Sure it's expensive now, but it's been misregulated into a pulp and all extant nuclear reactors are using decades old designs. AND you need to compare the cost of nuclear to renewables PLUS storage. Don't kick a gift horse in the mouse. We had a great shot at getting off oil in the form of fission 60 years ago. Probably time to stop kicking it in the mouth and stop spreading misinformation.

Clem_fandango 7y ago
I agree with your points, but I just want to be a pedant and say that the expression is 'Don't look a gift horse in the mouth'
- andbberger 7y ago
  Oops. Well you probably don't want to kick it either.
Retric 7y ago
Nuclear currently has a huge range of issues that’s outside of reactor design. Even assuming a 50% cost reduction seems viable, it’s still expensive. Permit’s and regulation are real and significant costs. In an ideal world they would be lower, but realistically you need to consider them Next, load following is critical as renewable energy regulatory reduces the spot price of electricity near zero. Breakeven right now is an average around 12c/kWh 24/7 if you’re capacity factor is cut in half then you need to be selling near 24c/kWh for that half. This is more or less still true even if you get to run 24/7 as the value of energy produced still drops. A ~50% price drop clearly helps, but the core issue remains. As to the design, it’s inherently more complex than a gas turbine due to the need for shielding etc. Next, the fuel assembly is surprisingly expensive $1390 per kg up front which provides about 40kw for a year or 0.4c/kWh. And then you need to deal with 1kg of high level Nuclear Waste. Eventually you need to decommission things and that’s even more inherent costs. Sure, some costs can come down like the current 500 to 1,000 workers per GW of capacity. But, Nuclear is already reviving subsidies in the west so it needs to be vastly less expensive to become viable. PS: Yes compared to coal fuel is cheap, but compared to 2c/kWh solar that’s eating up significant budget for something considered cheap in the Nuclear world.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Gas turbines are indeed simple. And fracked gas is amazingly cheap and plentiful. The problem there is that it's exceedingly high carbon. If you factor in methane leakage at the wells and in the pipes it approaches and even exceeds coal carbon emissions. We must stop locking in fracked gas turbines if we are to avoid climate change issues. Nuclear companies are trying to deal with load following by coupling to energy storage systems like thermal storage (molten salts), pumped hydro, and batteries. In an increasingly variable-renewable world, more energy storage is required. The nukes can be used to charge batteries in the daytime while the solar PV runs the grid, and then for the evening peak while solar ramps down, the nukes and batteries carry the evening, and then the nukes do the baseload at night. The one thing that nuclear reactors can do that no other energy source can do is provide hugely-deployable 24/7 low-carbon energy for over a year (e.g. through the seasons). Hydro can do it in some places but it's mostly maxed out in the proper geography. Finally, EROI on wind/solar with massive battery systems gets dangerously low.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Wind and solar charge batteries/pumped hydro at vastly lower prices. If you take 2c/kWh solar add 50% oversupply to cover seasonal issues you’re at 3c/kWh. Thus it’s really storage that Nuclear needs to compete with not generation. Further, as nuclear takes years to build it’s competing with future battery prices 5-55 years from now. Using conservative total system costs of say 200$ per kWh of storage every day for 10 years (200/10/365) ~= 5.5c/kWh. So, Nuclear needs to compete with load following at (3+5.5) = 8.5c/kWh for part of the day or mass generation at 3c/kWh. Assuming it’s ~50/50 of each your 24/7 Nuclear is facing 6c/kWh average electricity prices. Also, EROI can’t actually get low when you’re talking electricity at those prices. PS: My comparison to turbines was simply a minimal calculation of capital costs. It’s an argument that any design will have higher capital costs and thus you can safely use that as your theoretical perfect design’s capital cost. Then add other costs on top of that to try and find Nuclear’s minimum theoretical cost.
    - acidburnNSA 7y ago
      As wind/solar scales, it's likely to get more regulation. There will be fires in battery facilities. People in San Bernardino county will put a moratorium on large solar installations in the desert due to dust storms, etc. This kind of thing always happens, and with wind/solar it will be because they take up so much land and raw materials. Nuclear was once a wonder energy source (in 1958), but as it scaled it ran into troubles. There is some probability that this will happen to wind/solar too. This will slow them down (due to permitting) and increase costs. Intermittency is their boogeyman. When you have enough solar to power everything at noon in the summer, each additional panel becomes a little more expensive than the last. EROI is just energy system output/manufacturing energy in. How is that a function of price?
awalton 7y ago
> [citation needed] You don't need a citation for a personal doubt, wtf. Maybe someone will do it. Maybe they won't. But a person is reasonably able to doubt something when there's no evidence one way or another. Nobody's done this before. Adding emphasis to the "no evidence" part, because apparently that's not evident enough.
- andbberger 7y ago
  If I personally doubt something objective I can suddenly claim whatever I want about it?? You personally may have no idea what these things might cost but the people designing them certainly do. Moreover such baseless skepticism is extremely harmful to the 'public dialogue' when we are in the midst of a climate emergency. What does it bring to the conversation to say something baseless like that?
- lazyguy2 7y ago
  It's ok to say that you don't really know for a fact and that you are just making assumptions. It doesn't mean you are wrong. It just means that you don't have anything backing your opinion.
  - strainer 7y ago
    The claims that nuclear has been "misregulated into a pulp" and that new designs can be economically developed which are much better than 20 and 30 year old designs, are also evidence free opinions.
natmaka 7y ago
Many nuclear power-plant projects, conducted by experts, are way late and over-budget. See Olkiluoto, Flamanville. Many potential units are purely and simply cancelled because they are too financially risky (notwithstanding other risks) given the falling costs of solar and wind. The hot nuclear waste disposal challenge is not solved, wherever you check (France and the US, experts both are "in the process of solving it"... for the last 50 years!). Check the Yucca Mountain waste repo, a non-solution since 1978. Decommissioning costs are everywhere very probably largely underestimated because they explode as soon as a project begins. Check the UK case: UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-nuclear-atomic-clean-up-decommissioning https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-... Then £161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u... Then £234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision... Until now the taxpayer covers it, but our impoverished nations just cannot cope anymore. Moreover a small-scale reactor is difficult to protect (theft, terrorism, nuke (especially dirty weapons) proliferation...) Fukushima politically put the last nail in this coffin.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  The waste disposal problem has been solved at the Onkalo Nuclear Waste Repository in Finland. It's a deep geologic repository without the political fights associated with Yucca. Deep geologic repositories are basically a consensus solution now. Finns chose to solve the nuclear waste issue and did it. Fukushima killed up to 1 person from radiation. Meanwhile fossil is killing 4.3 million people per year via air pollution. If fossil had to pay for that health externality (not to mention climate change), then nuclear economics would look exceedingly more fantastic. Though it's true that nuclear builds need to get their act together to maintain relevance. Small reactors have less radioactive source in them and are proportionally less radiologically impactful than larger higher power reactors in the event of military/terrorist attack. Wind and solar are doing amazing. There is some serious worry that the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) will go below the level needed to sustain industrialized civilization once variable renewables are deployed at significant enough scale to require massive energy investment in "non-productive" equipment like batteries. For example, see this Nov 2019 paper on the topic [1]. EROI on solar PV is like 3-8. With massive storage it can dip below 3. Nuclear is like 50. I think a low-carbon future will have a whole lot of wind/solar and a whole lot of nuclear. Both industries can scale by 10x happily and we still will struggle with our climate issues. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X19300926 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1...
cycomanic 7y ago
People responded to the request for citation already, but Google ROI will get you a lot of sources. Wind is in fact one of (often the) cheapest options, so the OP was wrong. To add to your point of "we just need more research to make nuclear viable", nuclear has been the most subsidised (also in research funding) energy source, it has not gotten us there over the last 60 years. And regarding adding the cost of battery, this is the baseload myth, actually nuclear power plans are much worse than wind power. Having power plants that don't easily adjust to load is worse for a network than ones that change. There is actually research that shows if your network is large and modern enough (the wind always blows somewhere) you could work with only wind or solar. You could not if you only have nuclear power plants. You then need adjustable loads (Belgium does illuminate all there highways for this reason) .
marcosdumay 7y ago
You are really asking for a citation of my opinion? Besides, did you get to the next phrase? Nuclear won't beat the research investment on renewables on the next decades, because our society is starting to organize around the later. Your handful of institutions will not be able to produce more than literally everybody else. As much as small reactors can improve, renewables will improve faster, and the floor for solar costs is very, very low.

Clem_fandango 7y ago

I agree with your points, but I just want to be a pedant and say that the expression is 'Don't look a gift horse in the mouth'

andbberger 7y ago
Oops. Well you probably don't want to kick it either.

Retric 7y ago

Nuclear currently has a huge range of issues that’s outside of reactor design. Even assuming a 50% cost reduction seems viable, it’s still expensive. Permit’s and regulation are real and significant costs. In an ideal world they would be lower, but realistically you need to consider them Next, load following is critical as renewable energy regulatory reduces the spot price of electricity near zero. Breakeven right now is an average around 12c/kWh 24/7 if you’re capacity factor is cut in half then you need to be selling near 24c/kWh for that half. This is more or less still true even if you get to run 24/7 as the value of energy produced still drops. A ~50% price drop clearly helps, but the core issue remains. As to the design, it’s inherently more complex than a gas turbine due to the need for shielding etc. Next, the fuel assembly is surprisingly expensive $1390 per kg up front which provides about 40kw for a year or 0.4c/kWh. And then you need to deal with 1kg of high level Nuclear Waste. Eventually you need to decommission things and that’s even more inherent costs. Sure, some costs can come down like the current 500 to 1,000 workers per GW of capacity. But, Nuclear is already reviving subsidies in the west so it needs to be vastly less expensive to become viable. PS: Yes compared to coal fuel is cheap, but compared to 2c/kWh solar that’s eating up significant budget for something considered cheap in the Nuclear world.

acidburnNSA 7y ago
Gas turbines are indeed simple. And fracked gas is amazingly cheap and plentiful. The problem there is that it's exceedingly high carbon. If you factor in methane leakage at the wells and in the pipes it approaches and even exceeds coal carbon emissions. We must stop locking in fracked gas turbines if we are to avoid climate change issues. Nuclear companies are trying to deal with load following by coupling to energy storage systems like thermal storage (molten salts), pumped hydro, and batteries. In an increasingly variable-renewable world, more energy storage is required. The nukes can be used to charge batteries in the daytime while the solar PV runs the grid, and then for the evening peak while solar ramps down, the nukes and batteries carry the evening, and then the nukes do the baseload at night. The one thing that nuclear reactors can do that no other energy source can do is provide hugely-deployable 24/7 low-carbon energy for over a year (e.g. through the seasons). Hydro can do it in some places but it's mostly maxed out in the proper geography. Finally, EROI on wind/solar with massive battery systems gets dangerously low.
- Retric 7y ago
  Wind and solar charge batteries/pumped hydro at vastly lower prices. If you take 2c/kWh solar add 50% oversupply to cover seasonal issues you’re at 3c/kWh. Thus it’s really storage that Nuclear needs to compete with not generation. Further, as nuclear takes years to build it’s competing with future battery prices 5-55 years from now. Using conservative total system costs of say 200$ per kWh of storage every day for 10 years (200/10/365) ~= 5.5c/kWh. So, Nuclear needs to compete with load following at (3+5.5) = 8.5c/kWh for part of the day or mass generation at 3c/kWh. Assuming it’s ~50/50 of each your 24/7 Nuclear is facing 6c/kWh average electricity prices. Also, EROI can’t actually get low when you’re talking electricity at those prices. PS: My comparison to turbines was simply a minimal calculation of capital costs. It’s an argument that any design will have higher capital costs and thus you can safely use that as your theoretical perfect design’s capital cost. Then add other costs on top of that to try and find Nuclear’s minimum theoretical cost.
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    As wind/solar scales, it's likely to get more regulation. There will be fires in battery facilities. People in San Bernardino county will put a moratorium on large solar installations in the desert due to dust storms, etc. This kind of thing always happens, and with wind/solar it will be because they take up so much land and raw materials. Nuclear was once a wonder energy source (in 1958), but as it scaled it ran into troubles. There is some probability that this will happen to wind/solar too. This will slow them down (due to permitting) and increase costs. Intermittency is their boogeyman. When you have enough solar to power everything at noon in the summer, each additional panel becomes a little more expensive than the last. EROI is just energy system output/manufacturing energy in. How is that a function of price?

awalton 7y ago

> [citation needed] You don't need a citation for a personal doubt, wtf. Maybe someone will do it. Maybe they won't. But a person is reasonably able to doubt something when there's no evidence one way or another. Nobody's done this before. Adding emphasis to the "no evidence" part, because apparently that's not evident enough.

andbberger 7y ago
If I personally doubt something objective I can suddenly claim whatever I want about it?? You personally may have no idea what these things might cost but the people designing them certainly do. Moreover such baseless skepticism is extremely harmful to the 'public dialogue' when we are in the midst of a climate emergency. What does it bring to the conversation to say something baseless like that?
lazyguy2 7y ago
It's ok to say that you don't really know for a fact and that you are just making assumptions. It doesn't mean you are wrong. It just means that you don't have anything backing your opinion.
- strainer 7y ago
  The claims that nuclear has been "misregulated into a pulp" and that new designs can be economically developed which are much better than 20 and 30 year old designs, are also evidence free opinions.

natmaka 7y ago

Many nuclear power-plant projects, conducted by experts, are way late and over-budget. See Olkiluoto, Flamanville. Many potential units are purely and simply cancelled because they are too financially risky (notwithstanding other risks) given the falling costs of solar and wind. The hot nuclear waste disposal challenge is not solved, wherever you check (France and the US, experts both are "in the process of solving it"... for the last 50 years!). Check the Yucca Mountain waste repo, a non-solution since 1978. Decommissioning costs are everywhere very probably largely underestimated because they explode as soon as a project begins. Check the UK case: UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-nuclear-atomic-clean-up-decommissioning https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-... Then £161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u... Then £234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision... Until now the taxpayer covers it, but our impoverished nations just cannot cope anymore. Moreover a small-scale reactor is difficult to protect (theft, terrorism, nuke (especially dirty weapons) proliferation...) Fukushima politically put the last nail in this coffin.

acidburnNSA 7y ago
The waste disposal problem has been solved at the Onkalo Nuclear Waste Repository in Finland. It's a deep geologic repository without the political fights associated with Yucca. Deep geologic repositories are basically a consensus solution now. Finns chose to solve the nuclear waste issue and did it. Fukushima killed up to 1 person from radiation. Meanwhile fossil is killing 4.3 million people per year via air pollution. If fossil had to pay for that health externality (not to mention climate change), then nuclear economics would look exceedingly more fantastic. Though it's true that nuclear builds need to get their act together to maintain relevance. Small reactors have less radioactive source in them and are proportionally less radiologically impactful than larger higher power reactors in the event of military/terrorist attack. Wind and solar are doing amazing. There is some serious worry that the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) will go below the level needed to sustain industrialized civilization once variable renewables are deployed at significant enough scale to require massive energy investment in "non-productive" equipment like batteries. For example, see this Nov 2019 paper on the topic [1]. EROI on solar PV is like 3-8. With massive storage it can dip below 3. Nuclear is like 50. I think a low-carbon future will have a whole lot of wind/solar and a whole lot of nuclear. Both industries can scale by 10x happily and we still will struggle with our climate issues. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X19300926 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1...

cycomanic 7y ago

People responded to the request for citation already, but Google ROI will get you a lot of sources. Wind is in fact one of (often the) cheapest options, so the OP was wrong. To add to your point of "we just need more research to make nuclear viable", nuclear has been the most subsidised (also in research funding) energy source, it has not gotten us there over the last 60 years. And regarding adding the cost of battery, this is the baseload myth, actually nuclear power plans are much worse than wind power. Having power plants that don't easily adjust to load is worse for a network than ones that change. There is actually research that shows if your network is large and modern enough (the wind always blows somewhere) you could work with only wind or solar. You could not if you only have nuclear power plants. You then need adjustable loads (Belgium does illuminate all there highways for this reason) .

marcosdumay 7y ago

You are really asking for a citation of my opinion? Besides, did you get to the next phrase? Nuclear won't beat the research investment on renewables on the next decades, because our society is starting to organize around the later. Your handful of institutions will not be able to produce more than literally everybody else. As much as small reactors can improve, renewables will improve faster, and the floor for solar costs is very, very low.