17 ms·

Study identifies reasons for soaring nuclear plant cost overruns in the U.S.

240 points by consumer451 6y ago

themusicgod1 6y ago
31$USD for a fucking pdf?
Supermancho 6y ago
> building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant. > if more components of the plant, or even the entire plant, could be built offsite under controlled factory conditions, such extra costs could be substantially cut. Wait what? France builds with relative similarity and it's cheaper. The problem is with US regulation, politics and CYA hand-wringing, imo.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  The French industry isn’t doing too well either; all the EPRs are also late and over budget and they took over Areva to bail it out.
  - Iwan-Zotow 6y ago
    not true Taishan units are up and running
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      Open doesn't mean it was on time or on budget. https://archive.is/MT9fA#selection-2255.0-2337.266 https://archive.is/MT9fA#selection-2255.0-2337.266 > CGN Power, the listed unit of state-owned China General Nuclear Power, China’s largest nuclear power projects developer, has announced a 17 per cent capital increase at its Taishan nuclear project, raising concern cost overruns and commissioning delays will continue. > The company will inject 2.94 billion yuan into its 51 per cent-held unit Taishan Nuclear Power Joint Venture, which will see the unit’s total registered capital to 28.6 billion yuan from 24.4 billion yuan, the company said in a filing to Hong Kong’s bourse late on Tuesday. Provincial government-controlled Guangdong Yudean, the province’s largest power producer, owns 19 per cent stake, and CGN’s French technology partner EDF holds 30 per cent stake. > CGN said the capital injection serves “to enhance its financing ability so as to meet its fund requirements for engineering construction.” > The project, which CGN said on track to become the world’s first third-generation nuclear reactor built on the European pressurised reactors (EPR) design to achieve commercial operation, was originally expected to have its first generating unit come online in December 2013 followed by the second in October 2014. > The timetable of the two units subsequently slipped to the first and second half of this year, and further to the first and second half of next year after “comprehensive evaluation on subsequent engineering construction plan and relevant risks,” said CGN a year ago.
      - Iwan-Zotow 6y ago
        Sure but we're talking about 20% overrun, which I could call a good upfront guess
- Gwypaas 6y ago
  Flamanville, France: The project was planned to involve around €3.3 billion of capital expenditure from EDF, but latest cost estimates (from 2019) are at €12.4 billion. Pierre Moscovici, president of the Court of Audit, gave a statement on 9 July 2020 concerning the release of the report on the delay costs of the Flamanville 3. The report of the Court of Audit reveals that the cost of Flamanville 3 could reach €19.1 billion when taking in account the additional charges due to the delay in construction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanville_3_(France) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...
  - realusername 6y ago
    This one is a bit different though, it's the first of a kind of a new design (so count a lot of R&D there) and the original schedule was very unrealistic, not sure why anybody agreed on a timescale so short for a new design in the first place.
    - dv_dt 6y ago
      France hasn't built any reactors of the old design in what decades?
    - CogentHedgehog 6y ago
      Worth noting that Unit 3 at Olkiluoto in Finland was started before Flamanville and it hit massive cost overruns and delays as well. It was another EPR -- it's not like Flamanville was the very first build of this design, they had another to learn with.
      - cbmuser 6y ago
        You should also add that China started to build two EPRs after France and Finnland and they are both already operating commercially.
        bobthepanda 6y ago
        They were both also late and over budget though. Less so than the two European units, but still. https://archive.is/MT9fA#selection-2255.0-2337.266 https://archive.is/MT9fA#selection-2255.0-2337.266 > CGN Power, the listed unit of state-owned China General Nuclear Power, China’s largest nuclear power projects developer, has announced a 17 per cent capital increase at its Taishan nuclear project, raising concern cost overruns and commissioning delays will continue. > The company will inject 2.94 billion yuan into its 51 per cent-held unit Taishan Nuclear Power Joint Venture, which will see the unit’s total registered capital to 28.6 billion yuan from 24.4 billion yuan, the company said in a filing to Hong Kong’s bourse late on Tuesday. Provincial government-controlled Guangdong Yudean, the province’s largest power producer, owns 19 per cent stake, and CGN’s French technology partner EDF holds 30 per cent stake. > CGN said the capital injection serves “to enhance its financing ability so as to meet its fund requirements for engineering construction.” > The project, which CGN said on track to become the world’s first third-generation nuclear reactor built on the European pressurised reactors (EPR) design to achieve commercial operation, was originally expected to have its first generating unit come online in December 2013 followed by the second in October 2014. > The timetable of the two units subsequently slipped to the first and second half of this year, and further to the first and second half of next year after “comprehensive evaluation on subsequent engineering construction plan and relevant risks,” said CGN a year ago.
- fnord77 6y ago
  don't forget the NIMBYs
  - mikeyouse 6y ago
    I don’t know how anyone can look at the state of corporate America and not be a NIMBY when it comes to a new nuclear plant... which company exists right now that you would trust to run something correctly for the next 50 years and resist the pressure to cut costs as close to the bone as possible..
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - orthecreedence 6y ago
      Why is this downvoted? I wouldn't trust a nuclear power plant run by a private company.
    - loeg 6y ago
      The Navy. Semi-serious; they’ve been operating nuclear reactors safely for decades.
      - fnord77 6y ago
        I was skeptical, but it's true https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2008/jun/09/john-mccain/navys-record-unblemished/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2008/jun/09/john-mccai...
    - oconnor663 6y ago
      I trust airlines with my life without even thinking about it. Sometimes we even make fun of people who are afraid of flying. Incentives make a big difference here. Ignoring everything else, airlines don't want to lose their hundred million dollar machine in an accident. And the person most directly responsible for the safety of the flight -- the pilot -- is sitting right there in the machine with the rest of us. It's a good arrangement with a long track record. I could imagine corporate-run nuclear plants that have the same incentives as airlines. I could also imagine bad ones, run by Homer Simpson. It probably makes more sense to judge case by case.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  "The problem is with US regulation, politics and CYA hand-wringing" The article specifically addresses your cynicism about "regulation and politics", only they call it "safety regulations". They found it not to be the deciding factor. Lack of construction outside the US would seem to support that conclusion or, alternatively, to accept those factors as unchanging, sort-of like the laws of nature, and to blaming democracy for all ills of society.
jjk166 6y ago
I'm surprised by these findings but they do make sense. Seems to me like it's basically the giant construction project version of design for manufacturing.
oropolo 6y ago
> building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant. Unless building a nuke plant is a common thing where the crew that built a plant in Georgia can then go build one just like it in Alabama then one in Tennessee, then in Ohio, etc, then I don't see how building two plants with identical layouts can leverage economies of scale. For example: Wolf Creek NGS in Kansas and Calloway NGS in Missouri were apparently the first two plants in the US to be built using the same blueprints. If two more plants were built today with those same blueprints but by different construction crews who don't have any of the tribal knowledge from the construction of Wolf Creek and Calloway then what you have are four essentially bespoke plants that just happen to use the same blueprints.
- giarc 6y ago
  But if subsequent plants are built with same drawings, you don't have a design engineering firm having to create that work from scratch. Should that alone not save money?
  - giantg2 6y ago
    Not when those original plans and designs are 30-60 years old. We have newer reactor designs, materials, and engineering knowledge today that could significantly reduce cost just in material savings or construction time.using something like FAST reactor, is significantly different that the older tech and could save 90% on fuel and waste.
    - CogentHedgehog 6y ago
      The reactors being built today are Gen III/Gen III+ designs: AP-1000, the EPR, VVER-1200/ AES-2006, APR1400, etc. These include all the design and engineering refinements we've been able to cram in. They're a far cry from 30-60 year old tech. Unfortunately most of the new reactors built in the US and Europe have run massively over time and over budget, despite new technology. Vogtle 3&4 in Georgia drove Westinghouse bankrupt. These were modern AP-1000 models. Flamanville 3 in France (an EPR) is running nearly triple its cost estimate and the delivery time ballooned to 15 years. Olkiluoto in Finland (the first EPR) went massively over time and budget as well. These reactors were specifically designed to be more cost-effective and promised much lower prices, but failed to deliver. The problem in the nuclear industry isn't the technology itself, but the fact that they consistently fail to deliver projects within their allotted time and budget. Unfortunately this shows no signs of changing, and renewable energy industry looks poised to completely out-compete them in the energy market. I say this all as someone that used to have high hopes for nuclear tech, after working in nuclear physics research all throughout university.
hristov 6y ago
The biggest reason for cost overruns in the US is that the companies that are doing the work make more money from cost overruns. The way nuclear plant financing works in the US is that taxpayers and ratepayers ultimately pay for the cost no matter what the cost is and how much the overruns are. The cost of the plant with all the overruns usually shows up on the electric bills of the consumers, so the more overruns the more one can charge the consumers. This overcharging may not happen fully intentionally, it may be happening as kind of a long bureaucratic slide into convenience but it is happening. Now you may think there is an easy solution for this. Funding for these plants should be changed, so that private parties pay for them and they get their money by selling the electricity produced by the plants. I.e., they should be funded the way any private business is supposed to be funded in a capitalist economy. Sounds like a good idea at first, but there is a catch. If that is the rule, nobody in their right mind will ever build a nuclear plant ever again. Gas, wind and solar are all so much cheaper now. And yes, even considering back ups for when the wind is not blowing, wind is much much cheaper than nuclear. So the obvious solution is just not to build nuclear. Even if you do not consider the real risk to human life, it is a an incredibly expensive extravagance. If you do consider the risk to human life it is absolute madness.
- giantg2 6y ago
  You are right about wind and solar being able to bid the lowest rate to the grid. Newer reactor designs such as FAST reactors do not pose a threat to human safety.
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  > Gas, wind and solar are all so much cheaper now. But cannot power our collective needs (especially industrial), unlike nuclear, which can (at least temporarily). > an incredibly expensive extravagance So is entire cities disappearing under growing oceans because nuclear makes us feel bad. And if we want nuclear to be cheaper, then we should collectively raise the cost of fossil fuels until gas is $20/gallon. Then we'll see how expensive nuclear is.
iwwr 6y ago
The article is fairly sparse in details and could be summarized by: >so if more components of the plant, or even the entire plant, could be built offsite under controlled factory conditions, such extra costs could be substantially cut From the paper (locked behind paywall) there is also a mention of rising labor costs. I wonder if this has more to do with the size of reactors, which went up from 600-800MWhe up to the 1500MWhe range, i.e. if containment buildings (safety systems etc) at those power levels are just a massive dis-economy of scale.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Before the HN crowd, which sometimes seems to forever live in the future of 1960s sci-fi, gets their hopes uppish: - "building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant" This invalidates a major argument often made for large-scale roll-out of nuclear power. - "safety regulations could account for some of the excess costs, that was only one of numerous factors contributing to the overages." Safety regulations are often cited as onerous, politically-motivated reasons for lack of economic viability. This finding makes it unnecessary to even argue the point. - "we need to be rethinking our approach to engineering design [...] new methods and theories of technological innovation and change" ...is their suggestion. If that sounds vague and unrealistic, that's because it is. But, specifically, we get: " if more components of the plant, or even the entire plant, could be built offsite [...]" I have no idea if this is possible. But I'm reasonably certain that the idea isn't entirely new. Since it wasn't done, it's likely to not actually be worth it. Indeed, the next suggestion is to: "substitut[e] some new kinds of concrete in the massive structures" Gee, thanks! Now we know a yet-to-be-invented miracle material might be useful. And if the sheer amount of concrete is a major factor in construction costs, we now also have a better idea wrt feasibility of off-site construction and subsequent transport. Meanwhile, in the alternative SF universe that is reality, photovoltaics and batteries have come done in costs per unit of energy (-storage) by an order of magnitude every three or four years.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  You do a lot of hand-waving. Current methodologies mean scaling out for cost benefits doesn't work correctly, so give up forever. Oh wait, says the article, we need to rethink our design approach. You say "never going to happen, chump". But listen, says the article, improvements in materials would help a lot. "Fat chance, we've invented the best concrete we'll ever have", you say. The chip on your shoulder regarding nuclear could feed a small state.
- nipponese 6y ago
  "-storage" is no trivial caveat.
  - 6y ago
StillBored 6y ago
I guess I have to read the full paper, because reading the link does nothing to clear up what is going on. From reading the link I get, change orders cost money (duh!) and that there are a lot of change orders, particularly to older designs due to "changing regulation". Cause presumably before starting construction the older design has been mitigated to deal with newer regulations. Which from my own biases, seems to mean that courts/etc are stepping in and modifying the regulations during construction and that costs a sh*tload. Otherwise the builders are negligent, or simply that it took 30 years to get approval for the plans, but now its a catch 22 because they are outdated.
- jt2190 6y ago
  All large systems are, in a sense, obsolete as soon as construction begins. The longer construction takes, the more out-of-date the finished product. And then there are the decades of operation. Consider, for example, that one year into construction of a new power plant a completely unrelated investigation into fires concludes with the finding that a certain kind of electrical wire, when installed incorrectly, can short and cause a fire. The power plant has already installed miles of the exact same wire. The wire manufacturer has a new product that prevents incorrect installation, but the plant designs call for the old wire. What to do? * Pause construction while they adjust the plant designs with the new wiring? * Continue construction, but inspect the existing wiring, and reinstall if necessary? * Leave the wiring in place, but install a fire-remediation solution for the already-installed wiring? All large systems have to deal with these kinds of changes. (It’s interesting to look at the changes in a “class” of ships over them as they build each one, for example.)
  - selestify 6y ago
    Is there a field of study/practice that deals with such changes to large scale system? It does sound like a very useful thing to systematically study, if possible.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    But those problems exist for large coal/etc plants as well, so some of that is baked into the equation and doesn't do much to explain why nuke plants end up paying 10x as much for a plant that is only slightly more complex.
_trampeltier 6y ago
How can you build today something, with any kind of electronic parts, and excpect a life from 50 years?
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Overbuild it to be capable of taking many times what it is expected to encounter just like for something mechanical. It being electronic isn't the cause in itself and can make things significantly better from fewer moving parts.
- edogg 6y ago
  You have drawings that show how it works and a supply of spare parts. When it stops working people can figure out why using the drawings and then fix or replace the broken or worn out components.
  - _trampeltier 6y ago
    No I guess thats not so easy. Every new part in a design for a nuclear power station has to be certified. So just use another almost same chip is not so easy, because you have to make o lot of tests, so the new part is allowed. Thats why a lot of things for nuclear power station are so extreme expensive.
    - edogg 6y ago
      The components we are installing have chips in them, but we don’t worry about what chip because the manufacturer of the product keeps it working the same way. The modicon quantum Plc uses the pentium 166 chip and was released in 1994 and I can still buy it today from Schneider although they encourage new installations to use a newer product. I am sure I will still be encountering old quantum Plc in the field when I retire, the platform will have a 50 year lifespan. Even when a line of controllers is end of life the manufacturers provide an upgrade path to their newer product line.
hokkos 6y ago
Sadly sci hub fails on the mentioned study : https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X
LinuxBender 6y ago
Where is the Elon Musk of Nuclear Reactors? Where are the robotic assembly lines that crank out highly modular, efficient, miniature "assemble-yourself" nuclear power plants that any construction team could snap together and seat into a preformed foundation in 48 hours? Why doesn't this exist yet? I'm talking on the scale of 1 reactor to 1 neighborhood or 1 large business. Perhaps geothermal cooling.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  NIMBYism, safety, and non-proliferation concerns.
  - echelon 6y ago
    > non-proliferation concerns We're already entering into runaway proliferation. Pakistan and India are our allies, but I don't see them keeping a stranglehold on the tech. Iran will have them. The Saudis will probably have them soon. If a dysfunctional nation like North Korea can have nukes, what's stopping the rest of the world? We're not even preventing ICBM capability from spreading! What gives? This is way more of a nightmare scenario than climate change and nobody is batting an eye.
    - baq 6y ago
      > This is way more of a nightmare scenario than climate change and nobody is batting an eye. there is a probability that an irrational leader orders a nuclear attack and somebody executes it instead of deserting. climate change is a certainty at this point and the only question is how bad will it be. for people living by the sea and in the parts of the tropics displacement in a single lifetime is next to certain.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      The tech is 75 years old. One suspects a sufficiently-funded team of recent PhDs could build the entire infrastructure from scratch in less than a decade. The methods we've attempted to stem proliferation haven't worked. Trying them again, except harder this time, won't work either. We all know this, but few of us have the imagination to consider other options.
bobbybabylon 6y ago
Please. We have known why this is the case (in the West) for decades. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
- pydry 6y ago
  This was certainly true in 1990 when it was published.
  - bobbybabylon 6y ago
    Sadly, the facts don't seem to have changed that much.
    - pydry 6y ago
      It switched from coal in 1990 to natgas and now renewables taking market share. Nuclear is still not cost competitive without lavish subsidy injections though, no. Never was, probably never will be.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TheRealPomax 6y ago
"Analysis points to ways engineering strategies could be reimagined to minimize delays and other unanticipated expenses." Ah, okay, reimagined. Phew.
- Agathos 6y ago
  Let me guess. They need to be more Agile.
ultra_nick 6y ago
NuScale's small modular reactor (SMR) seems like a good solution to this problem. https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small-modular-nuclear-reactors https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small...
omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
I feel like large multi-year construction costs have a tendency to increase significantly (outside of the normal increases in year-of-expenditure costs), and I wonder if this is because construction firms know something needs to be built and will behave accordingly. This is in contrast to smaller projects, especially during recessions, where construction firms may be more likely to need the work (lower bids) and also don't have the expectation that the project will have to be completed (they can wait it out to extract more money from a contract).
- iguy 6y ago
  Not quite this scale, but talking to people on large projects, I have been told that to bid what it's actually going to cost simply guarantees someone else gets the job. To stay in business, knowing how much to underbid is a crucial piece of unwritten knowledge. I'm sure it's hard to shift these norms. As the buyer, it's hard to credibly threaten a hard limit. Everyone knows that, in 10 years time with an 80% done plant, and a construction company in bankruptcy proceedings, of course more money will be found.
  - CogentHedgehog 6y ago
    Yes, nuclear power projects bid below what they know it will cost and then pull a shocked-pikachu face when the final bill ends up several times the original "cost estimate". Look at Flamanville in France: budget triple the "estimate", 15 years to construct. France has more nuclear energy per-capita than any other country on Earth, so it's not like they don't know how to "do" nuclear.
    - iguy 6y ago
      Right, but it's hopeless to pose this as a moral question, and hope that businessmen & politicians will suddenly start behaving with boy-scout honor. Those who decline to play by the rules we have ended up with, don't get the contract & go out of business, or don't get elected. It seems like an incentive problem. And a possibly unsolvable one, for huge mega-projects like this -- constructed over decades, dangerous & high-tech, and completely useless until 100% completed. Wind energy seems much more healthy in this regard. You buy off-the-shelf units, from a factory. If you don't like the first 10 they install, you don't buy the other 90, and still get 10% the power. It's much closer to buying cars, or pencils, which our society is pretty good at optimizing. Every year we improve the process, and these steps add up.
NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
Has this study included corruption as one of the key points of raising costs?
supernova87a 6y ago
I think a pervasive theme in US infrastructure (and why it's expensive) is that we've gotten out of practice of building. I think it's the deeper "why" to this issue. We no longer have a broad reservoir/cadre/pool of practitioners of engineers, construction crews, experts, designers (except for a very concentrated few) who do this week in, week out. Every job now seems custom. Only Parsons or whoever has the ability to do it, and even they have to scrounge around for the project manager. Other countries are in their building phase and have thousands of engineers who are practiced in standardizing designs and squeezing out inefficiencies. They have graduating classes full of highway engineers. For gods sake, they even have graduating classes full of engineers specializing in the tooling for highway / railroad engineering machinery. Our building phase was post-war construction-crazy economic expansion era. Now we're in the maintenance phase, where big new projects are the exception. Not to denigrate the great importance of doing great maintenance, but in practice you can't keep (or attract) a large pool of well paid expert engineers going on that level of activity. They go where the projects go. And as a result, as the report points out, when everything is "for the first time again" and custom because you do it once per decade, the particular factors of a given site are allowed to dictate what the system design should be. (Maybe also not insignificant: the environmental considerations allowed to creep in, just to point that out, as grateful as I am for the protection that we give these matters). Rather than (for better or worse, probably a bit worse) in other countries, they're stamping out highways, railroad, power plants by the week, and the environment is made to fit the construction. It's choices we made, over time, that caused us to atrophy our capabilities here. It could be brought back with investment.
- mymythisisthis 6y ago
  The gov should just pay people $15 an hour to study welding. It's the best way of; i)getting people trained, ii)having a kind-of minimum wage accessible to many people.
  - sunshinerag 6y ago
    Why would the gov. need to pay people? if there is a demand for welding people in the market, their pays would signal people to study for it isn't it?
terrisdotcom 6y ago
Can they please be less ugly
AlleyTrotter 6y ago
Jane Fonda
CogentHedgehog 6y ago
Even if they can reduce costs a bit, the economics are still not in favor of nuclear energy, and renewable energy has become incredibly cheap. Between 2010 to 2019 wind energy become 70% cheaper and solar became 89% cheaper[1] -- and they're still getting cheaper. We are now in a situation where we can build 3x as much renewables for the same price as nuclear[2] - nuclear has a serious cost problem. I'm very skeptical of any claimed nuclear energy cost reductions because time and again the industry has promised lower costs and failed to deliver; for example the new AP1000 and EPR reactors in the US and Europe have all vastly overrun their budgets and run years behind schedule. 1. https://www.lazard.com/media/451082/lcoe-8.png https://www.lazard.com/media/451082/lcoe-8.png 2. https://www.lazard.com/media/451081/lcoe-2.png https://www.lazard.com/media/451081/lcoe-2.png
- ninja3925 6y ago
  I am very hopeful about renewable but I am also aware of their intrinsic weakness: They can't be provide base power (unless we build battery farms able to cover our needs). Renewables are exciting. Jumping too fast into it like Germany did (and is now polluting as much as 8X France with 450g CO2 / kWh) is much less exciting. I wish there was a bit more expert involvement in the way we choose our energy policies (and much less tribalism and populism). source: https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
  - CogentHedgehog 6y ago
    Wind is a pretty solid source of baseload actually, as long as you build enough. The supplementary materials from Caldeira's Geophysical Constraints paper (usually used to argue AGAINST renewable energy) show that with 50/50 wind/solar mixes (figure S4) you can achieve: * 1x capacity, 0 storage: 74% of electricity demand * 1.5x capacity, 0 storage: 86% of electricity demand * 1x capacity, 12h storage: 90% of electricity demand * 1.5x capacity, 12h storage: 99.6% of electricity demand Citation: http://www.rsc.org/suppdata/c7/ee/c7ee03029k/c7ee03029k1.pdf http://www.rsc.org/suppdata/c7/ee/c7ee03029k/c7ee03029k1.pdf > ElectricityMap Nobody who follows the energy sector closely thinks ElectricityMap has any credibility for country-to-country comparisons. The datasets are extremely fragmentary and have huge yawning gaps with no data available, which should be the first red flag for anybody citing it. It might be useful for trends within a given country, but not the way you're citing it. Also: accounts popping up out of the woodwork to argue passionately for an out-of-favor technology reeks of a dying industry trying to revive itself with public relations. 3/4 of those accounts seem to cite ElectricityMap, oddly enough...
deleted 6y ago
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renewiltord 6y ago
Does anyone have a PDF for https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S254243512030458X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424...? Sci-hub has the wrong paper for this DOI.
alricb 6y ago
The principal author, Philip Eash-Gates, presented his master's thesis last year: Modeling barriers to cost change in solar and nuclear energy technologies [1] [1]: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/122160 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/122160
bitminer 6y ago
>Is there a field of study/practice that deals with such changes to large scale system? It does sound like a very useful thing to systematically study, if possible. "Analysis points to ways engineering strategies could be reimagined to minimize delays and other unanticipated expenses." (from comments below). The two quoted authors in the press release are a prof in energy studies and a nuclear engineer. What I notice is that MIT does not have a Systems Engineering undergraduate department, but numerous specialties. In a large design/build project such as a nuclear power plant, the systems engineering group (there must be exactly one) keeps track of the performance and function of each of the subsystems (civil works like containment, basements, buildings; electrical; controls; HVAC; the nuclear bits; and so on). In addition, it is the system engineering group that responds (or directs responses) to a change order request, and the overall impact on expense, on functionality/reliability/safety, and schedule. It seems these are responsibilities that are not identified here with a known role; instead the authors reinvent system engineering for themselves. There is a lot of SE work done in numerous industries (Elon Musk is what I would call a systems engineer, based on how he identifies things to do and how he gets them done. His degree is not in SE though). A short list of US universities offer SE or related disciplines; in California/New York/Illinois. MIT is not one: it has a research group not a degree-granting program. References: https://www.incose.org/ https://www.incose.org/ The International Council of System Engineering. Has published a handbook in numerous editions over the years. https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/nasa-systems-engineering-handbook https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/nasa-systems-engineering... First published 1995, based on other reports published in the 1960s. MILSTD 499, 1970s, very dated by today's standards
ChuckMcM 6y ago
I appreciate that someone has "done the math" on the soft costs for nuclear plants. One of the arguments against nuclear has always been "but it's so expensive" and yet the engineering of the plant itself is not particularly expensive relative to similar capacity coal or gas plants[1]. When we were discussing the "Ultra Safe Nuclear" (www.usnc.com) [2] I commented [3] that expense was more soft costs than engineering from my own experience of looking into the cost of nuclear. This paper just does the math and makes it more explicit. [1] Yes, that is multiple plants to create the equivalent amount of capacity. [2] Ultra Safe Nuclear -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505727 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24511751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24511751
aussiegreenie 6y ago
What about the possibility that their is no bad consequences for cost over runs? If fact, from a corporate view it is highly beneficial. Show me the reward structure and I will show you the outcome.
wavegeek 6y ago
I can't see any other reference to this but there is a whole field of study on this. See e.g. https://www.amazon.com.au/Cost-Disease-Computers-Cheaper-Health/dp/0300198159 https://www.amazon.com.au/Cost-Disease-Computers-Cheaper-Hea... or google "cost disease". One thing I have noticed is the incredible increase in the cost of regulatory compliance over the years. It can take years to get the dozens to hundreds of approvals needed. Vast armies of people are needed to document and monitor compliance. At a large bank where I worked, I analyzed the previous $600 million in IT projects. $350 million of that $600m was on compliance projects.
- dctoedt 6y ago
  > At a large bank where I worked, I analyzed the previous $600 million in IT projects. $350 million of that $600m was on compliance projects. We live in a complex world. "Traffic laws," to keep people from inadvertently interfering with — or harming — each other, are necessarily more complex than they were, say, 200 years ago.
- pas 6y ago
  http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-236-alex-tabarrok-on-why-are-the-prices-so-dmn-high.html http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-236-alex-tabarr... the current state of the argument, pretty interesting.
blackrock 6y ago
Nuclear power plants are insanely complex. It’s just a massive water boiler. The problem is that all that steam and water is radioactive. So you have to design in all these reinforcements to ensure that the steam and liquids do not leak out. It’s easy to say that your design is airtight, but the reality is far different, with the laws of entropy taking over after decades of operation. This is when your parts starts to fail. Seals starts to leak. Things just wear out and fall apart. This is why the thing is so complex. Then, you have to deal with the radioactive waste byproduct which lasts for 10,000+ years. How do you even deal with this, when no government in human history has lasted longer than a few hundred years. As much as nuclear is a necessary evil to maintain baseload, since solar and wind doesn’t always function, I think we need a new energy paradigm. I’m thinking we need to go with solar space power generation, and beam the energy down via microwave or laser. Maybe laser is a good candidate. Beam the laser down, and collect it with photovoltaics. And the laser can run 24/7, even at night. Asking a friend: Maybe someone can run the efficiency numbers on this. But even if it’s less efficient than nuclear, this is probably far safer than nuclear ever will be.
- pas 6y ago
  Does water itself become activated? Or the problem is that something leaks into the water even during normal operating? Plus everything is designed to maintain containment, which makes the coolant loops a lot more complicated, right? Putting a giant laser in space doesn't seems _that_ safe. The proposed space based energy things are very low efficiency. After all, you can collect enough solar power on Earth already, the problem is efficient distribution. (And if you put a big laser/maser in space that still would not be able to provide baseload if it's not always in line of sight.) And launch costs are prohibitively expensive right now. First we'd need to bootstrap a cislunar economy (eg mine and manufacture stuff in space, so we don't need to pay the launch costs from deep within Earth's gravity well): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOr-Gd58zu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOr-Gd58zu8
ncmncm 6y ago
Costs go up because they get paid. Once enough money is sunk, no amount more can kill the project. (Rare exception, Californian "hi-speed" rail! But that was politics.) Thing is, none of the money is wasted, as such: somebody gets every single dollar. The higher the costs, the more they get. So long as that somebody spreads enough of it around, everybody actually involved (the paying public not among them) benefits. That model applies to any big-enough multi-year construction project, whether it's a nuke plant, a subway line, or a fleet of bombers. So, it's nothing to do with nukes, as such, except that for nukes there are always enough pigeons convinced that the next one will be cheap, for sure! And around we go.

240 points by consumer451 6y ago

31$USD for a fucking pdf?

> building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant. > if more components of the plant, or even the entire plant, could be built offsite under controlled factory conditions, such extra costs could be substantially cut. Wait what? France builds with relative similarity and it's cheaper. The problem is with US regulation, politics and CYA hand-wringing, imo.

bobthepanda 6y ago
The French industry isn’t doing too well either; all the EPRs are also late and over budget and they took over Areva to bail it out.
- Iwan-Zotow 6y ago
  not true Taishan units are up and running
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Open doesn't mean it was on time or on budget. https://archive.is/MT9fA#selection-2255.0-2337.266 https://archive.is/MT9fA#selection-2255.0-2337.266 > CGN Power, the listed unit of state-owned China General Nuclear Power, China’s largest nuclear power projects developer, has announced a 17 per cent capital increase at its Taishan nuclear project, raising concern cost overruns and commissioning delays will continue. > The company will inject 2.94 billion yuan into its 51 per cent-held unit Taishan Nuclear Power Joint Venture, which will see the unit’s total registered capital to 28.6 billion yuan from 24.4 billion yuan, the company said in a filing to Hong Kong’s bourse late on Tuesday. Provincial government-controlled Guangdong Yudean, the province’s largest power producer, owns 19 per cent stake, and CGN’s French technology partner EDF holds 30 per cent stake. > CGN said the capital injection serves “to enhance its financing ability so as to meet its fund requirements for engineering construction.” > The project, which CGN said on track to become the world’s first third-generation nuclear reactor built on the European pressurised reactors (EPR) design to achieve commercial operation, was originally expected to have its first generating unit come online in December 2013 followed by the second in October 2014. > The timetable of the two units subsequently slipped to the first and second half of this year, and further to the first and second half of next year after “comprehensive evaluation on subsequent engineering construction plan and relevant risks,” said CGN a year ago.
    - Iwan-Zotow 6y ago
      Sure but we're talking about 20% overrun, which I could call a good upfront guess
Gwypaas 6y ago
Flamanville, France: The project was planned to involve around €3.3 billion of capital expenditure from EDF, but latest cost estimates (from 2019) are at €12.4 billion. Pierre Moscovici, president of the Court of Audit, gave a statement on 9 July 2020 concerning the release of the report on the delay costs of the Flamanville 3. The report of the Court of Audit reveals that the cost of Flamanville 3 could reach €19.1 billion when taking in account the additional charges due to the delay in construction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanville_3_(France) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...
- realusername 6y ago
  This one is a bit different though, it's the first of a kind of a new design (so count a lot of R&D there) and the original schedule was very unrealistic, not sure why anybody agreed on a timescale so short for a new design in the first place.
  - dv_dt 6y ago
    France hasn't built any reactors of the old design in what decades?
  - CogentHedgehog 6y ago
    Worth noting that Unit 3 at Olkiluoto in Finland was started before Flamanville and it hit massive cost overruns and delays as well. It was another EPR -- it's not like Flamanville was the very first build of this design, they had another to learn with.
    - cbmuser 6y ago
      You should also add that China started to build two EPRs after France and Finnland and they are both already operating commercially.
      - bobthepanda 6y ago
        They were both also late and over budget though. Less so than the two European units, but still. https://archive.is/MT9fA#selection-2255.0-2337.266 https://archive.is/MT9fA#selection-2255.0-2337.266 > CGN Power, the listed unit of state-owned China General Nuclear Power, China’s largest nuclear power projects developer, has announced a 17 per cent capital increase at its Taishan nuclear project, raising concern cost overruns and commissioning delays will continue. > The company will inject 2.94 billion yuan into its 51 per cent-held unit Taishan Nuclear Power Joint Venture, which will see the unit’s total registered capital to 28.6 billion yuan from 24.4 billion yuan, the company said in a filing to Hong Kong’s bourse late on Tuesday. Provincial government-controlled Guangdong Yudean, the province’s largest power producer, owns 19 per cent stake, and CGN’s French technology partner EDF holds 30 per cent stake. > CGN said the capital injection serves “to enhance its financing ability so as to meet its fund requirements for engineering construction.” > The project, which CGN said on track to become the world’s first third-generation nuclear reactor built on the European pressurised reactors (EPR) design to achieve commercial operation, was originally expected to have its first generating unit come online in December 2013 followed by the second in October 2014. > The timetable of the two units subsequently slipped to the first and second half of this year, and further to the first and second half of next year after “comprehensive evaluation on subsequent engineering construction plan and relevant risks,” said CGN a year ago.
fnord77 6y ago
don't forget the NIMBYs
- mikeyouse 6y ago
  I don’t know how anyone can look at the state of corporate America and not be a NIMBY when it comes to a new nuclear plant... which company exists right now that you would trust to run something correctly for the next 50 years and resist the pressure to cut costs as close to the bone as possible..
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - orthecreedence 6y ago
    Why is this downvoted? I wouldn't trust a nuclear power plant run by a private company.
  - loeg 6y ago
    The Navy. Semi-serious; they’ve been operating nuclear reactors safely for decades.
    - fnord77 6y ago
      I was skeptical, but it's true https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2008/jun/09/john-mccain/navys-record-unblemished/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2008/jun/09/john-mccai...
  - oconnor663 6y ago
    I trust airlines with my life without even thinking about it. Sometimes we even make fun of people who are afraid of flying. Incentives make a big difference here. Ignoring everything else, airlines don't want to lose their hundred million dollar machine in an accident. And the person most directly responsible for the safety of the flight -- the pilot -- is sitting right there in the machine with the rest of us. It's a good arrangement with a long track record. I could imagine corporate-run nuclear plants that have the same incentives as airlines. I could also imagine bad ones, run by Homer Simpson. It probably makes more sense to judge case by case.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
"The problem is with US regulation, politics and CYA hand-wringing" The article specifically addresses your cynicism about "regulation and politics", only they call it "safety regulations". They found it not to be the deciding factor. Lack of construction outside the US would seem to support that conclusion or, alternatively, to accept those factors as unchanging, sort-of like the laws of nature, and to blaming democracy for all ills of society.

jjk166 6y ago

I'm surprised by these findings but they do make sense. Seems to me like it's basically the giant construction project version of design for manufacturing.

oropolo 6y ago

> building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant. Unless building a nuke plant is a common thing where the crew that built a plant in Georgia can then go build one just like it in Alabama then one in Tennessee, then in Ohio, etc, then I don't see how building two plants with identical layouts can leverage economies of scale. For example: Wolf Creek NGS in Kansas and Calloway NGS in Missouri were apparently the first two plants in the US to be built using the same blueprints. If two more plants were built today with those same blueprints but by different construction crews who don't have any of the tribal knowledge from the construction of Wolf Creek and Calloway then what you have are four essentially bespoke plants that just happen to use the same blueprints.

giarc 6y ago
But if subsequent plants are built with same drawings, you don't have a design engineering firm having to create that work from scratch. Should that alone not save money?
- giantg2 6y ago
  Not when those original plans and designs are 30-60 years old. We have newer reactor designs, materials, and engineering knowledge today that could significantly reduce cost just in material savings or construction time.using something like FAST reactor, is significantly different that the older tech and could save 90% on fuel and waste.
  - CogentHedgehog 6y ago
    The reactors being built today are Gen III/Gen III+ designs: AP-1000, the EPR, VVER-1200/ AES-2006, APR1400, etc. These include all the design and engineering refinements we've been able to cram in. They're a far cry from 30-60 year old tech. Unfortunately most of the new reactors built in the US and Europe have run massively over time and over budget, despite new technology. Vogtle 3&4 in Georgia drove Westinghouse bankrupt. These were modern AP-1000 models. Flamanville 3 in France (an EPR) is running nearly triple its cost estimate and the delivery time ballooned to 15 years. Olkiluoto in Finland (the first EPR) went massively over time and budget as well. These reactors were specifically designed to be more cost-effective and promised much lower prices, but failed to deliver. The problem in the nuclear industry isn't the technology itself, but the fact that they consistently fail to deliver projects within their allotted time and budget. Unfortunately this shows no signs of changing, and renewable energy industry looks poised to completely out-compete them in the energy market. I say this all as someone that used to have high hopes for nuclear tech, after working in nuclear physics research all throughout university.

hristov 6y ago

The biggest reason for cost overruns in the US is that the companies that are doing the work make more money from cost overruns. The way nuclear plant financing works in the US is that taxpayers and ratepayers ultimately pay for the cost no matter what the cost is and how much the overruns are. The cost of the plant with all the overruns usually shows up on the electric bills of the consumers, so the more overruns the more one can charge the consumers. This overcharging may not happen fully intentionally, it may be happening as kind of a long bureaucratic slide into convenience but it is happening. Now you may think there is an easy solution for this. Funding for these plants should be changed, so that private parties pay for them and they get their money by selling the electricity produced by the plants. I.e., they should be funded the way any private business is supposed to be funded in a capitalist economy. Sounds like a good idea at first, but there is a catch. If that is the rule, nobody in their right mind will ever build a nuclear plant ever again. Gas, wind and solar are all so much cheaper now. And yes, even considering back ups for when the wind is not blowing, wind is much much cheaper than nuclear. So the obvious solution is just not to build nuclear. Even if you do not consider the real risk to human life, it is a an incredibly expensive extravagance. If you do consider the risk to human life it is absolute madness.

giantg2 6y ago
You are right about wind and solar being able to bid the lowest rate to the grid. Newer reactor designs such as FAST reactors do not pose a threat to human safety.
orthecreedence 6y ago
> Gas, wind and solar are all so much cheaper now. But cannot power our collective needs (especially industrial), unlike nuclear, which can (at least temporarily). > an incredibly expensive extravagance So is entire cities disappearing under growing oceans because nuclear makes us feel bad. And if we want nuclear to be cheaper, then we should collectively raise the cost of fossil fuels until gas is $20/gallon. Then we'll see how expensive nuclear is.

iwwr 6y ago

The article is fairly sparse in details and could be summarized by: >so if more components of the plant, or even the entire plant, could be built offsite under controlled factory conditions, such extra costs could be substantially cut From the paper (locked behind paywall) there is also a mention of rising labor costs. I wonder if this has more to do with the size of reactors, which went up from 600-800MWhe up to the 1500MWhe range, i.e. if containment buildings (safety systems etc) at those power levels are just a massive dis-economy of scale.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

Before the HN crowd, which sometimes seems to forever live in the future of 1960s sci-fi, gets their hopes uppish: - "building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant" This invalidates a major argument often made for large-scale roll-out of nuclear power. - "safety regulations could account for some of the excess costs, that was only one of numerous factors contributing to the overages." Safety regulations are often cited as onerous, politically-motivated reasons for lack of economic viability. This finding makes it unnecessary to even argue the point. - "we need to be rethinking our approach to engineering design [...] new methods and theories of technological innovation and change" ...is their suggestion. If that sounds vague and unrealistic, that's because it is. But, specifically, we get: " if more components of the plant, or even the entire plant, could be built offsite [...]" I have no idea if this is possible. But I'm reasonably certain that the idea isn't entirely new. Since it wasn't done, it's likely to not actually be worth it. Indeed, the next suggestion is to: "substitut[e] some new kinds of concrete in the massive structures" Gee, thanks! Now we know a yet-to-be-invented miracle material might be useful. And if the sheer amount of concrete is a major factor in construction costs, we now also have a better idea wrt feasibility of off-site construction and subsequent transport. Meanwhile, in the alternative SF universe that is reality, photovoltaics and batteries have come done in costs per unit of energy (-storage) by an order of magnitude every three or four years.

unethical_ban 6y ago
You do a lot of hand-waving. Current methodologies mean scaling out for cost benefits doesn't work correctly, so give up forever. Oh wait, says the article, we need to rethink our design approach. You say "never going to happen, chump". But listen, says the article, improvements in materials would help a lot. "Fat chance, we've invented the best concrete we'll ever have", you say. The chip on your shoulder regarding nuclear could feed a small state.
nipponese 6y ago
"-storage" is no trivial caveat.
- 6y ago

StillBored 6y ago

I guess I have to read the full paper, because reading the link does nothing to clear up what is going on. From reading the link I get, change orders cost money (duh!) and that there are a lot of change orders, particularly to older designs due to "changing regulation". Cause presumably before starting construction the older design has been mitigated to deal with newer regulations. Which from my own biases, seems to mean that courts/etc are stepping in and modifying the regulations during construction and that costs a sh*tload. Otherwise the builders are negligent, or simply that it took 30 years to get approval for the plans, but now its a catch 22 because they are outdated.

jt2190 6y ago
All large systems are, in a sense, obsolete as soon as construction begins. The longer construction takes, the more out-of-date the finished product. And then there are the decades of operation. Consider, for example, that one year into construction of a new power plant a completely unrelated investigation into fires concludes with the finding that a certain kind of electrical wire, when installed incorrectly, can short and cause a fire. The power plant has already installed miles of the exact same wire. The wire manufacturer has a new product that prevents incorrect installation, but the plant designs call for the old wire. What to do? * Pause construction while they adjust the plant designs with the new wiring? * Continue construction, but inspect the existing wiring, and reinstall if necessary? * Leave the wiring in place, but install a fire-remediation solution for the already-installed wiring? All large systems have to deal with these kinds of changes. (It’s interesting to look at the changes in a “class” of ships over them as they build each one, for example.)
- selestify 6y ago
  Is there a field of study/practice that deals with such changes to large scale system? It does sound like a very useful thing to systematically study, if possible.
- StillBored 6y ago
  But those problems exist for large coal/etc plants as well, so some of that is baked into the equation and doesn't do much to explain why nuke plants end up paying 10x as much for a plant that is only slightly more complex.

_trampeltier 6y ago

How can you build today something, with any kind of electronic parts, and excpect a life from 50 years?

Nasrudith 6y ago
Overbuild it to be capable of taking many times what it is expected to encounter just like for something mechanical. It being electronic isn't the cause in itself and can make things significantly better from fewer moving parts.
edogg 6y ago
You have drawings that show how it works and a supply of spare parts. When it stops working people can figure out why using the drawings and then fix or replace the broken or worn out components.
- _trampeltier 6y ago
  No I guess thats not so easy. Every new part in a design for a nuclear power station has to be certified. So just use another almost same chip is not so easy, because you have to make o lot of tests, so the new part is allowed. Thats why a lot of things for nuclear power station are so extreme expensive.
  - edogg 6y ago
    The components we are installing have chips in them, but we don’t worry about what chip because the manufacturer of the product keeps it working the same way. The modicon quantum Plc uses the pentium 166 chip and was released in 1994 and I can still buy it today from Schneider although they encourage new installations to use a newer product. I am sure I will still be encountering old quantum Plc in the field when I retire, the platform will have a 50 year lifespan. Even when a line of controllers is end of life the manufacturers provide an upgrade path to their newer product line.

hokkos 6y ago

Sadly sci hub fails on the mentioned study : https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X

LinuxBender 6y ago

Where is the Elon Musk of Nuclear Reactors? Where are the robotic assembly lines that crank out highly modular, efficient, miniature "assemble-yourself" nuclear power plants that any construction team could snap together and seat into a preformed foundation in 48 hours? Why doesn't this exist yet? I'm talking on the scale of 1 reactor to 1 neighborhood or 1 large business. Perhaps geothermal cooling.

whimsicalism 6y ago
NIMBYism, safety, and non-proliferation concerns.
- echelon 6y ago
  > non-proliferation concerns We're already entering into runaway proliferation. Pakistan and India are our allies, but I don't see them keeping a stranglehold on the tech. Iran will have them. The Saudis will probably have them soon. If a dysfunctional nation like North Korea can have nukes, what's stopping the rest of the world? We're not even preventing ICBM capability from spreading! What gives? This is way more of a nightmare scenario than climate change and nobody is batting an eye.
  - baq 6y ago
    > This is way more of a nightmare scenario than climate change and nobody is batting an eye. there is a probability that an irrational leader orders a nuclear attack and somebody executes it instead of deserting. climate change is a certainty at this point and the only question is how bad will it be. for people living by the sea and in the parts of the tropics displacement in a single lifetime is next to certain.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    The tech is 75 years old. One suspects a sufficiently-funded team of recent PhDs could build the entire infrastructure from scratch in less than a decade. The methods we've attempted to stem proliferation haven't worked. Trying them again, except harder this time, won't work either. We all know this, but few of us have the imagination to consider other options.

bobbybabylon 6y ago

Please. We have known why this is the case (in the West) for decades. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html

pydry 6y ago
This was certainly true in 1990 when it was published.
- bobbybabylon 6y ago
  Sadly, the facts don't seem to have changed that much.
  - pydry 6y ago
    It switched from coal in 1990 to natgas and now renewables taking market share. Nuclear is still not cost competitive without lavish subsidy injections though, no. Never was, probably never will be.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

TheRealPomax 6y ago

"Analysis points to ways engineering strategies could be reimagined to minimize delays and other unanticipated expenses." Ah, okay, reimagined. Phew.

Agathos 6y ago
Let me guess. They need to be more Agile.

ultra_nick 6y ago

NuScale's small modular reactor (SMR) seems like a good solution to this problem. https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small-modular-nuclear-reactors https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small...

omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago

I feel like large multi-year construction costs have a tendency to increase significantly (outside of the normal increases in year-of-expenditure costs), and I wonder if this is because construction firms know something needs to be built and will behave accordingly. This is in contrast to smaller projects, especially during recessions, where construction firms may be more likely to need the work (lower bids) and also don't have the expectation that the project will have to be completed (they can wait it out to extract more money from a contract).

iguy 6y ago
Not quite this scale, but talking to people on large projects, I have been told that to bid what it's actually going to cost simply guarantees someone else gets the job. To stay in business, knowing how much to underbid is a crucial piece of unwritten knowledge. I'm sure it's hard to shift these norms. As the buyer, it's hard to credibly threaten a hard limit. Everyone knows that, in 10 years time with an 80% done plant, and a construction company in bankruptcy proceedings, of course more money will be found.
- CogentHedgehog 6y ago
  Yes, nuclear power projects bid below what they know it will cost and then pull a shocked-pikachu face when the final bill ends up several times the original "cost estimate". Look at Flamanville in France: budget triple the "estimate", 15 years to construct. France has more nuclear energy per-capita than any other country on Earth, so it's not like they don't know how to "do" nuclear.
  - iguy 6y ago
    Right, but it's hopeless to pose this as a moral question, and hope that businessmen & politicians will suddenly start behaving with boy-scout honor. Those who decline to play by the rules we have ended up with, don't get the contract & go out of business, or don't get elected. It seems like an incentive problem. And a possibly unsolvable one, for huge mega-projects like this -- constructed over decades, dangerous & high-tech, and completely useless until 100% completed. Wind energy seems much more healthy in this regard. You buy off-the-shelf units, from a factory. If you don't like the first 10 they install, you don't buy the other 90, and still get 10% the power. It's much closer to buying cars, or pencils, which our society is pretty good at optimizing. Every year we improve the process, and these steps add up.

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago

Has this study included corruption as one of the key points of raising costs?

supernova87a 6y ago

I think a pervasive theme in US infrastructure (and why it's expensive) is that we've gotten out of practice of building. I think it's the deeper "why" to this issue. We no longer have a broad reservoir/cadre/pool of practitioners of engineers, construction crews, experts, designers (except for a very concentrated few) who do this week in, week out. Every job now seems custom. Only Parsons or whoever has the ability to do it, and even they have to scrounge around for the project manager. Other countries are in their building phase and have thousands of engineers who are practiced in standardizing designs and squeezing out inefficiencies. They have graduating classes full of highway engineers. For gods sake, they even have graduating classes full of engineers specializing in the tooling for highway / railroad engineering machinery. Our building phase was post-war construction-crazy economic expansion era. Now we're in the maintenance phase, where big new projects are the exception. Not to denigrate the great importance of doing great maintenance, but in practice you can't keep (or attract) a large pool of well paid expert engineers going on that level of activity. They go where the projects go. And as a result, as the report points out, when everything is "for the first time again" and custom because you do it once per decade, the particular factors of a given site are allowed to dictate what the system design should be. (Maybe also not insignificant: the environmental considerations allowed to creep in, just to point that out, as grateful as I am for the protection that we give these matters). Rather than (for better or worse, probably a bit worse) in other countries, they're stamping out highways, railroad, power plants by the week, and the environment is made to fit the construction. It's choices we made, over time, that caused us to atrophy our capabilities here. It could be brought back with investment.

mymythisisthis 6y ago
The gov should just pay people $15 an hour to study welding. It's the best way of; i)getting people trained, ii)having a kind-of minimum wage accessible to many people.
- sunshinerag 6y ago
  Why would the gov. need to pay people? if there is a demand for welding people in the market, their pays would signal people to study for it isn't it?

terrisdotcom 6y ago

Can they please be less ugly

AlleyTrotter 6y ago

Jane Fonda

CogentHedgehog 6y ago

Even if they can reduce costs a bit, the economics are still not in favor of nuclear energy, and renewable energy has become incredibly cheap. Between 2010 to 2019 wind energy become 70% cheaper and solar became 89% cheaper[1] -- and they're still getting cheaper. We are now in a situation where we can build 3x as much renewables for the same price as nuclear[2] - nuclear has a serious cost problem. I'm very skeptical of any claimed nuclear energy cost reductions because time and again the industry has promised lower costs and failed to deliver; for example the new AP1000 and EPR reactors in the US and Europe have all vastly overrun their budgets and run years behind schedule. 1. https://www.lazard.com/media/451082/lcoe-8.png https://www.lazard.com/media/451082/lcoe-8.png 2. https://www.lazard.com/media/451081/lcoe-2.png https://www.lazard.com/media/451081/lcoe-2.png

ninja3925 6y ago
I am very hopeful about renewable but I am also aware of their intrinsic weakness: They can't be provide base power (unless we build battery farms able to cover our needs). Renewables are exciting. Jumping too fast into it like Germany did (and is now polluting as much as 8X France with 450g CO2 / kWh) is much less exciting. I wish there was a bit more expert involvement in the way we choose our energy policies (and much less tribalism and populism). source: https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
- CogentHedgehog 6y ago
  Wind is a pretty solid source of baseload actually, as long as you build enough. The supplementary materials from Caldeira's Geophysical Constraints paper (usually used to argue AGAINST renewable energy) show that with 50/50 wind/solar mixes (figure S4) you can achieve: * 1x capacity, 0 storage: 74% of electricity demand * 1.5x capacity, 0 storage: 86% of electricity demand * 1x capacity, 12h storage: 90% of electricity demand * 1.5x capacity, 12h storage: 99.6% of electricity demand Citation: http://www.rsc.org/suppdata/c7/ee/c7ee03029k/c7ee03029k1.pdf http://www.rsc.org/suppdata/c7/ee/c7ee03029k/c7ee03029k1.pdf > ElectricityMap Nobody who follows the energy sector closely thinks ElectricityMap has any credibility for country-to-country comparisons. The datasets are extremely fragmentary and have huge yawning gaps with no data available, which should be the first red flag for anybody citing it. It might be useful for trends within a given country, but not the way you're citing it. Also: accounts popping up out of the woodwork to argue passionately for an out-of-favor technology reeks of a dying industry trying to revive itself with public relations. 3/4 of those accounts seem to cite ElectricityMap, oddly enough...

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renewiltord 6y ago

Does anyone have a PDF for https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S254243512030458X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424...? Sci-hub has the wrong paper for this DOI.

alricb 6y ago

The principal author, Philip Eash-Gates, presented his master's thesis last year: Modeling barriers to cost change in solar and nuclear energy technologies [1] [1]: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/122160 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/122160

bitminer 6y ago

>Is there a field of study/practice that deals with such changes to large scale system? It does sound like a very useful thing to systematically study, if possible. "Analysis points to ways engineering strategies could be reimagined to minimize delays and other unanticipated expenses." (from comments below). The two quoted authors in the press release are a prof in energy studies and a nuclear engineer. What I notice is that MIT does not have a Systems Engineering undergraduate department, but numerous specialties. In a large design/build project such as a nuclear power plant, the systems engineering group (there must be exactly one) keeps track of the performance and function of each of the subsystems (civil works like containment, basements, buildings; electrical; controls; HVAC; the nuclear bits; and so on). In addition, it is the system engineering group that responds (or directs responses) to a change order request, and the overall impact on expense, on functionality/reliability/safety, and schedule. It seems these are responsibilities that are not identified here with a known role; instead the authors reinvent system engineering for themselves. There is a lot of SE work done in numerous industries (Elon Musk is what I would call a systems engineer, based on how he identifies things to do and how he gets them done. His degree is not in SE though). A short list of US universities offer SE or related disciplines; in California/New York/Illinois. MIT is not one: it has a research group not a degree-granting program. References: https://www.incose.org/ https://www.incose.org/ The International Council of System Engineering. Has published a handbook in numerous editions over the years. https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/nasa-systems-engineering-handbook https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/nasa-systems-engineering... First published 1995, based on other reports published in the 1960s. MILSTD 499, 1970s, very dated by today's standards

ChuckMcM 6y ago

I appreciate that someone has "done the math" on the soft costs for nuclear plants. One of the arguments against nuclear has always been "but it's so expensive" and yet the engineering of the plant itself is not particularly expensive relative to similar capacity coal or gas plants[1]. When we were discussing the "Ultra Safe Nuclear" (www.usnc.com) [2] I commented [3] that expense was more soft costs than engineering from my own experience of looking into the cost of nuclear. This paper just does the math and makes it more explicit. [1] Yes, that is multiple plants to create the equivalent amount of capacity. [2] Ultra Safe Nuclear -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505727 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24511751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24511751

aussiegreenie 6y ago

What about the possibility that their is no bad consequences for cost over runs? If fact, from a corporate view it is highly beneficial. Show me the reward structure and I will show you the outcome.

wavegeek 6y ago

I can't see any other reference to this but there is a whole field of study on this. See e.g. https://www.amazon.com.au/Cost-Disease-Computers-Cheaper-Health/dp/0300198159 https://www.amazon.com.au/Cost-Disease-Computers-Cheaper-Hea... or google "cost disease". One thing I have noticed is the incredible increase in the cost of regulatory compliance over the years. It can take years to get the dozens to hundreds of approvals needed. Vast armies of people are needed to document and monitor compliance. At a large bank where I worked, I analyzed the previous $600 million in IT projects. $350 million of that $600m was on compliance projects.

dctoedt 6y ago
> At a large bank where I worked, I analyzed the previous $600 million in IT projects. $350 million of that $600m was on compliance projects. We live in a complex world. "Traffic laws," to keep people from inadvertently interfering with — or harming — each other, are necessarily more complex than they were, say, 200 years ago.
pas 6y ago
http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-236-alex-tabarrok-on-why-are-the-prices-so-dmn-high.html http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-236-alex-tabarr... the current state of the argument, pretty interesting.

blackrock 6y ago

Nuclear power plants are insanely complex. It’s just a massive water boiler. The problem is that all that steam and water is radioactive. So you have to design in all these reinforcements to ensure that the steam and liquids do not leak out. It’s easy to say that your design is airtight, but the reality is far different, with the laws of entropy taking over after decades of operation. This is when your parts starts to fail. Seals starts to leak. Things just wear out and fall apart. This is why the thing is so complex. Then, you have to deal with the radioactive waste byproduct which lasts for 10,000+ years. How do you even deal with this, when no government in human history has lasted longer than a few hundred years. As much as nuclear is a necessary evil to maintain baseload, since solar and wind doesn’t always function, I think we need a new energy paradigm. I’m thinking we need to go with solar space power generation, and beam the energy down via microwave or laser. Maybe laser is a good candidate. Beam the laser down, and collect it with photovoltaics. And the laser can run 24/7, even at night. Asking a friend: Maybe someone can run the efficiency numbers on this. But even if it’s less efficient than nuclear, this is probably far safer than nuclear ever will be.

pas 6y ago
Does water itself become activated? Or the problem is that something leaks into the water even during normal operating? Plus everything is designed to maintain containment, which makes the coolant loops a lot more complicated, right? Putting a giant laser in space doesn't seems _that_ safe. The proposed space based energy things are very low efficiency. After all, you can collect enough solar power on Earth already, the problem is efficient distribution. (And if you put a big laser/maser in space that still would not be able to provide baseload if it's not always in line of sight.) And launch costs are prohibitively expensive right now. First we'd need to bootstrap a cislunar economy (eg mine and manufacture stuff in space, so we don't need to pay the launch costs from deep within Earth's gravity well): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOr-Gd58zu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOr-Gd58zu8

ncmncm 6y ago

Costs go up because they get paid. Once enough money is sunk, no amount more can kill the project. (Rare exception, Californian "hi-speed" rail! But that was politics.) Thing is, none of the money is wasted, as such: somebody gets every single dollar. The higher the costs, the more they get. So long as that somebody spreads enough of it around, everybody actually involved (the paying public not among them) benefits. That model applies to any big-enough multi-year construction project, whether it's a nuke plant, a subway line, or a fleet of bombers. So, it's nothing to do with nukes, as such, except that for nukes there are always enough pigeons convinced that the next one will be cheap, for sure! And around we go.