14 ms·

> 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 comm

> 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.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      They may be gen3 and gen3+ and newer designs, but they are still just working on the old regular fission model. I'm talking about using breeder or FAST reactors, which are completely different in the underlying physics. So far I believe there haven't been any of those built commercially but have been in testing for 60 years without issue.
      - CogentHedgehog 6y ago
        There's a reason countries don't build breeder reactors. Fuel costs are a tiny fraction of the costs for a nuclear powerplant: less than 10%. Breeders save a bit of money on fuel in exchange for a higher capital cost (cost of construction). For reactors, capital costs are a huge factor because reactors are extremely expensive already ($8-10Bn per reactor in the US/Europe). Increasing that further more than balances the savings on fuel. Thus, breeders generally end up being more expensive than a conventional BWR or PWR. Here I should mention that I spent some time in nuclear physics research. There's a lot of misinformation floating around about nuclear energy. Most of the "miracle solutions" don't live up to their promises (especially thorium tech and breeders). If they did, we'd already be using them -- nuclear engineers are not fools, and most of these reactor concepts have been kicked around for literally decades. One other point: the physics behind breeders and conventional slow-neutron reactors isn't fundamentally different. Both neutron capture ("breeding") and fission ("burning") reactions happen in both, the ratios in a breeder are just optimized to favor the first process more. In fact in conventional light water reactors, around a third of the energy released comes from fissile isotope bred from fertile isotopes such as U-238.
        giantg2 6y ago
        With the newer breeders (FAST), the main difference is safety. You don't need the same control mechanisms because they automatically cool down due to the physics of them so that they don't melt down. I'd imagine that FAST reactors eliminating the need for ever increasing safety tech and complexity of it for conventional reactors would be a cost savings (or at least make it close). Not to mention the clean up costs when you compare to a conventional reactor that could melt down, even if it's rare. I'm not saying that the engineers are idiots. But there are some engineers (supported by government or corporate funds) still building new prototypes and testing new designs, such as FAST. Especially in the US, a driving reason that new designs aren't used is that there have been few built I'm recent decades - partially due to lower cost alternatives and also due to public opinion.
- mikeyouse 6y ago
  Depends so much on siting too.. a lot of assumptions on foundations and water handling are baked into plans and even if the reactor room is the same size, you’re going to need an engineering firm comfortable with signing off on a nuke plant run the math based on the new soil composition and 500-year storm rainfalls, etc.
- lumost 6y ago
  Like any engineering activity it'll depend on how much knowledge of the design the engineering team has. If it's not the same engineering and regulatory teams - then there will be a lot of risk in certifying the plant, little reward, and I'd expect every design decision to be expensively questioned. Not to mention the hundreds of small decisions related to "X part supplier went out of business. Y part is similar with a slightly different alloy and mechanical properties, is it a suitable replacement? how can we verify this?" The original design teams would have auxiliary artifacts that were vetted, and tribal knowledge to help quickly answer these questions. Subsequent design teams will not. The timescales between plant construction exceeds most engineer's memory at 5-10 years.
- cratermoon 6y ago
  Except that when a safety problem is found with a plant design, you can't just build more from the same blueprint, you have to both refit the older plants with the mitigation and redesign subsequent plants with the fix, so now you're building a new design.
DennisP 6y ago
That's the reason for small modular reactors, built in factories.
- CogentHedgehog 6y ago
  It's not looking so hot for SMRs right now though. NuScale, one of the most promising SMR companies, is losing backers for its first big reactor build. This is a result of cost under-estimates and delays: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/several-us-utilities-back-out-deal-build-novel-nuclear-power-plant https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/several-us-utilities... > announced that completion of the project would be delayed by 3 years to 2030. It also estimates the cost would climb from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion. Unfortunately it has become a pattern now for the nuclear industry to promise that the next tech will suddenly make nuclear energy cheap and fast to build. They consistently have failed to deliver on their promises -- the fiasco of the AP1000 reactor build at Vogtle in Georgia is a recent example. It seems like the problem of the nuclear industry is the industry, not the technology itself. They're too used to relying on fat taxpayer subsidies, and are not well equipped to compete against other energy sources on the free market.
brmgb 6y ago
The crew is only a small part of the price. The first plant has a lot of costs which shouldn't impact as much the next ones: r&d which gets amortized on more and more units, sourcing parts and certifying providers, eventual blueprint adjustments at building, certification and safety assessments.
Animats 6y ago
This is also true of aircraft carriers. The head of Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock once told Congress that if they'd order two at once, instead of one at a time, he'd throw in a third carrier for free.
- pram 6y ago
  Well, did they take him up on the offer? lol
  - Animats 6y ago
    No.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      Congress, collectively, is not often referred to as "smart". If I'm a senator and a guy sitting in front of me makes that offer, I take him up on it and hold his feet to the fire. How do you explain that to your constituents? I was offered free, and I said no. Re-elect Me!!! To be fair, the building of the actual carrier is just part of the price of a carrier. What's the cost to also fit that carrier out with all of the various aircraft required to make the carrier worth having? Didn't we see an example of this when the NSA donated Hubble equivalent satellites to NASA, but NASA had to politely say no since they had no budget to operate them?
      - smorephism 6y ago
        >What's the cost to also fit that carrier out with all of the various aircraft required to make the carrier worth having? Right idea! The answer is "hardly anything, relative to crewing it for its useful lifetime", but you're barking up the correct tree.
        kevinpet 6y ago
        DOD budget is about $350K per employee. A typical E5 (sergeant or PO2 in the navy) makes $3K/mo, or 1/10 of that.
_n_b_ 6y ago
I’ve been involved with large scale nuclear construction projects of different designs in multiple different countries and different regulatory schemes. I have a hard time squaring what I’ve seen on the ground with the summary of this study. To respond to your exact point, big parts of the nuclear-qualified workforce in most places really do move from large job to large job (assuming relatively static demand), so you do get that transfer of knowledge on sequential jobs. Also, don’t forget the design and manufacturing that happens off-site, which can be significant and often is a huge driver of risk and cost. (10 MW vertical motors! Big safety-related pumps! Mega-sized forged components! Specialized custom fabrications!) The back office engineers and subcontractors and factory floor people who make them remain pretty static as long as there is work to be done. By the Nth unit, there is know-how and known problems are worked out; some of this is translatable into drawing updates and schedule resequencing but really a lot of it is expertise that stays in peoples’ heads. Once everybody is demobed and scatters, that is all lost.
echelon 6y ago
I'm not familiar with electric power infrastructure. Could we build the plants in middle America and transmit the power long distance? I assume we'd lose power during the transformer steps, but would it preclude building the plants away from people and groundwater reservoirs?
- dylan604 6y ago
  Why do you assume "middle" America has no groundwater reservoirs to be concerned about? Also, sure, the population may be sparse in case of accident, but there goes your food supply. Also, "middle" America has another common name used to describe it: Tornado Alley. Weather plays a large part of site decisions.
- fulafel 6y ago
  To the first question: Yes. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects It's not as attractive for managing nuclear accident risk as you might think, as nuclear is already struggling with cost competitivenss even without HVDC lines, and risk reduction per buck of other safety design features are better. But it's brilliant for eg hydro (for obvious reasons), wind power (because 2000 km away it'll be windy when you have local lulls and vice versa) and solar (2 time zones worth of distance balance out production/consumption peaks nicely).
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  No you can't, there are too many losses in power lines over that kind of distances. Ideally they are in 0 to 100 miles of where the power is used.
bazooka_penguin 6y ago
Sounds like we just have to build even more plants
7952 6y ago
I have no experience in nuclear but have worked on infrastructure projects that have restarted. I think people have a new set of biases that are not present in the first project. They are optimistic which is a risky state of mind. Also... * Often the starting point is a poorly organized mess that needs to be unpicked and understood. * People conduct "reviews" of existing work that consumes budget and leads to new issues being found. * You are continuing an existing chain of communication, but with a loss of continuity. The people you need to ask can't remember, or are not available to ask. * Overly optimistic budgets lead to corner cutting and mistakes.
manfredo 6y ago
That's why you don't build two plants you build 20 or 30. France's nuclear project built 34 and 20 plants of 900 MWe and 1300 MWe classes of plants respectively which make up the bulk of its reactor fleet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Technical_overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Techni...
- CogentHedgehog 6y ago
  The Messmer plan (France's big reactor build) was enacted 40-50 years ago. The energy market looked vastly different then. It would not work in 2020. In fact, France is looking to REDUCE their dependence on nuclear energy now. Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/france-electricity-solarpower/sunny-spell-boosts-french-solar-generation-to-record-level-idUSL8N21U58M https://www.reuters.com/article/france-electricity-solarpowe... > France aims to rapidly develop renewable wind, solar and biomass capacity to curb its dependence on atomic power, reducing its share in its power mix to 50 percent by 2035, from 75 percent today.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    Plans they continue to delay, because there's no feasible alternative to geographically independent and dispatchable energy save for fossil fuels: https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/French-bill-delays-nuclear-reduction-by-ten-years https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/French-bill-delays-n...
    - CogentHedgehog 6y ago
      You realize that World Nuclear News is not an unbiased source, right? The UK is doing fine with a renewables-heavy powergrid, as are Spain and Portugal. 40% of their electricity comes from this, and the share is rising steadily.
      - sir_bearington 6y ago
        The above source is quoting a bill written by the French government: > However, the bill also calls for "realistic goals to transform our energy model by increasing the timeframe for reducing nuclear power to 50% by 2035 instead of 2025, which would have required the construction of new gas-fired plants, and would have involved an increase in our greenhouse gas emissions." I'm sure World Nuclear News is more favorable to nuclear power, but I don't see how that is relevant. Do you believe that this article fabricated the contents of the French bill? This comes off more as a cheap jab than a substantive claim of bias.
jessaustin 6y ago
The Callaway plant cost ratepayers so much that a state ballot proposition outlawing that accounting trick passed with 66% of the vote. The last time Ameren tried to remove that protection was 2015. Even they've noticed how cheap renewables are now.

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.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    They may be gen3 and gen3+ and newer designs, but they are still just working on the old regular fission model. I'm talking about using breeder or FAST reactors, which are completely different in the underlying physics. So far I believe there haven't been any of those built commercially but have been in testing for 60 years without issue.
    - CogentHedgehog 6y ago
      There's a reason countries don't build breeder reactors. Fuel costs are a tiny fraction of the costs for a nuclear powerplant: less than 10%. Breeders save a bit of money on fuel in exchange for a higher capital cost (cost of construction). For reactors, capital costs are a huge factor because reactors are extremely expensive already ($8-10Bn per reactor in the US/Europe). Increasing that further more than balances the savings on fuel. Thus, breeders generally end up being more expensive than a conventional BWR or PWR. Here I should mention that I spent some time in nuclear physics research. There's a lot of misinformation floating around about nuclear energy. Most of the "miracle solutions" don't live up to their promises (especially thorium tech and breeders). If they did, we'd already be using them -- nuclear engineers are not fools, and most of these reactor concepts have been kicked around for literally decades. One other point: the physics behind breeders and conventional slow-neutron reactors isn't fundamentally different. Both neutron capture ("breeding") and fission ("burning") reactions happen in both, the ratios in a breeder are just optimized to favor the first process more. In fact in conventional light water reactors, around a third of the energy released comes from fissile isotope bred from fertile isotopes such as U-238.
      - giantg2 6y ago
        With the newer breeders (FAST), the main difference is safety. You don't need the same control mechanisms because they automatically cool down due to the physics of them so that they don't melt down. I'd imagine that FAST reactors eliminating the need for ever increasing safety tech and complexity of it for conventional reactors would be a cost savings (or at least make it close). Not to mention the clean up costs when you compare to a conventional reactor that could melt down, even if it's rare. I'm not saying that the engineers are idiots. But there are some engineers (supported by government or corporate funds) still building new prototypes and testing new designs, such as FAST. Especially in the US, a driving reason that new designs aren't used is that there have been few built I'm recent decades - partially due to lower cost alternatives and also due to public opinion.
mikeyouse 6y ago
Depends so much on siting too.. a lot of assumptions on foundations and water handling are baked into plans and even if the reactor room is the same size, you’re going to need an engineering firm comfortable with signing off on a nuke plant run the math based on the new soil composition and 500-year storm rainfalls, etc.
lumost 6y ago
Like any engineering activity it'll depend on how much knowledge of the design the engineering team has. If it's not the same engineering and regulatory teams - then there will be a lot of risk in certifying the plant, little reward, and I'd expect every design decision to be expensively questioned. Not to mention the hundreds of small decisions related to "X part supplier went out of business. Y part is similar with a slightly different alloy and mechanical properties, is it a suitable replacement? how can we verify this?" The original design teams would have auxiliary artifacts that were vetted, and tribal knowledge to help quickly answer these questions. Subsequent design teams will not. The timescales between plant construction exceeds most engineer's memory at 5-10 years.
cratermoon 6y ago
Except that when a safety problem is found with a plant design, you can't just build more from the same blueprint, you have to both refit the older plants with the mitigation and redesign subsequent plants with the fix, so now you're building a new design.

DennisP 6y ago

That's the reason for small modular reactors, built in factories.

CogentHedgehog 6y ago
It's not looking so hot for SMRs right now though. NuScale, one of the most promising SMR companies, is losing backers for its first big reactor build. This is a result of cost under-estimates and delays: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/several-us-utilities-back-out-deal-build-novel-nuclear-power-plant https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/several-us-utilities... > announced that completion of the project would be delayed by 3 years to 2030. It also estimates the cost would climb from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion. Unfortunately it has become a pattern now for the nuclear industry to promise that the next tech will suddenly make nuclear energy cheap and fast to build. They consistently have failed to deliver on their promises -- the fiasco of the AP1000 reactor build at Vogtle in Georgia is a recent example. It seems like the problem of the nuclear industry is the industry, not the technology itself. They're too used to relying on fat taxpayer subsidies, and are not well equipped to compete against other energy sources on the free market.

brmgb 6y ago

The crew is only a small part of the price. The first plant has a lot of costs which shouldn't impact as much the next ones: r&d which gets amortized on more and more units, sourcing parts and certifying providers, eventual blueprint adjustments at building, certification and safety assessments.

Animats 6y ago

This is also true of aircraft carriers. The head of Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock once told Congress that if they'd order two at once, instead of one at a time, he'd throw in a third carrier for free.

pram 6y ago
Well, did they take him up on the offer? lol
- Animats 6y ago
  No.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    Congress, collectively, is not often referred to as "smart". If I'm a senator and a guy sitting in front of me makes that offer, I take him up on it and hold his feet to the fire. How do you explain that to your constituents? I was offered free, and I said no. Re-elect Me!!! To be fair, the building of the actual carrier is just part of the price of a carrier. What's the cost to also fit that carrier out with all of the various aircraft required to make the carrier worth having? Didn't we see an example of this when the NSA donated Hubble equivalent satellites to NASA, but NASA had to politely say no since they had no budget to operate them?
    - smorephism 6y ago
      >What's the cost to also fit that carrier out with all of the various aircraft required to make the carrier worth having? Right idea! The answer is "hardly anything, relative to crewing it for its useful lifetime", but you're barking up the correct tree.
      - kevinpet 6y ago
        DOD budget is about $350K per employee. A typical E5 (sergeant or PO2 in the navy) makes $3K/mo, or 1/10 of that.

_n_b_ 6y ago

I’ve been involved with large scale nuclear construction projects of different designs in multiple different countries and different regulatory schemes. I have a hard time squaring what I’ve seen on the ground with the summary of this study. To respond to your exact point, big parts of the nuclear-qualified workforce in most places really do move from large job to large job (assuming relatively static demand), so you do get that transfer of knowledge on sequential jobs. Also, don’t forget the design and manufacturing that happens off-site, which can be significant and often is a huge driver of risk and cost. (10 MW vertical motors! Big safety-related pumps! Mega-sized forged components! Specialized custom fabrications!) The back office engineers and subcontractors and factory floor people who make them remain pretty static as long as there is work to be done. By the Nth unit, there is know-how and known problems are worked out; some of this is translatable into drawing updates and schedule resequencing but really a lot of it is expertise that stays in peoples’ heads. Once everybody is demobed and scatters, that is all lost.

echelon 6y ago

I'm not familiar with electric power infrastructure. Could we build the plants in middle America and transmit the power long distance? I assume we'd lose power during the transformer steps, but would it preclude building the plants away from people and groundwater reservoirs?

dylan604 6y ago
Why do you assume "middle" America has no groundwater reservoirs to be concerned about? Also, sure, the population may be sparse in case of accident, but there goes your food supply. Also, "middle" America has another common name used to describe it: Tornado Alley. Weather plays a large part of site decisions.
fulafel 6y ago
To the first question: Yes. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects It's not as attractive for managing nuclear accident risk as you might think, as nuclear is already struggling with cost competitivenss even without HVDC lines, and risk reduction per buck of other safety design features are better. But it's brilliant for eg hydro (for obvious reasons), wind power (because 2000 km away it'll be windy when you have local lulls and vice versa) and solar (2 time zones worth of distance balance out production/consumption peaks nicely).
stjohnswarts 6y ago
No you can't, there are too many losses in power lines over that kind of distances. Ideally they are in 0 to 100 miles of where the power is used.

bazooka_penguin 6y ago

Sounds like we just have to build even more plants

7952 6y ago

I have no experience in nuclear but have worked on infrastructure projects that have restarted. I think people have a new set of biases that are not present in the first project. They are optimistic which is a risky state of mind. Also... * Often the starting point is a poorly organized mess that needs to be unpicked and understood. * People conduct "reviews" of existing work that consumes budget and leads to new issues being found. * You are continuing an existing chain of communication, but with a loss of continuity. The people you need to ask can't remember, or are not available to ask. * Overly optimistic budgets lead to corner cutting and mistakes.

manfredo 6y ago

That's why you don't build two plants you build 20 or 30. France's nuclear project built 34 and 20 plants of 900 MWe and 1300 MWe classes of plants respectively which make up the bulk of its reactor fleet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Technical_overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Techni...

CogentHedgehog 6y ago
The Messmer plan (France's big reactor build) was enacted 40-50 years ago. The energy market looked vastly different then. It would not work in 2020. In fact, France is looking to REDUCE their dependence on nuclear energy now. Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/france-electricity-solarpower/sunny-spell-boosts-french-solar-generation-to-record-level-idUSL8N21U58M https://www.reuters.com/article/france-electricity-solarpowe... > France aims to rapidly develop renewable wind, solar and biomass capacity to curb its dependence on atomic power, reducing its share in its power mix to 50 percent by 2035, from 75 percent today.
- manfredo 6y ago
  Plans they continue to delay, because there's no feasible alternative to geographically independent and dispatchable energy save for fossil fuels: https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/French-bill-delays-nuclear-reduction-by-ten-years https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/French-bill-delays-n...
  - CogentHedgehog 6y ago
    You realize that World Nuclear News is not an unbiased source, right? The UK is doing fine with a renewables-heavy powergrid, as are Spain and Portugal. 40% of their electricity comes from this, and the share is rising steadily.
    - sir_bearington 6y ago
      The above source is quoting a bill written by the French government: > However, the bill also calls for "realistic goals to transform our energy model by increasing the timeframe for reducing nuclear power to 50% by 2035 instead of 2025, which would have required the construction of new gas-fired plants, and would have involved an increase in our greenhouse gas emissions." I'm sure World Nuclear News is more favorable to nuclear power, but I don't see how that is relevant. Do you believe that this article fabricated the contents of the French bill? This comes off more as a cheap jab than a substantive claim of bias.

jessaustin 6y ago

The Callaway plant cost ratepayers so much that a state ballot proposition outlawing that accounting trick passed with 66% of the vote. The last time Ameren tried to remove that protection was 2015. Even they've noticed how cheap renewables are now.