6 ms·

Nuclear is upfront expensive, but the incredible efficiency wins hugely long term, AFAIK?

bronson 6y ago
Nuclear operating cost is comparable to offshore wind, coal, and combined cycle gas, and around 4X more expensive to operate than onshore wind or solar. (Of course, coal and gas would be more expensive if they had to pay a fair price for their emissions) Nuclear is also eye-poppingly expensive to decommission. Finally, note that operating cost doesn't include the sort of re-engineering and upgrades that are routinely required, and have doomed plants like San Onofre.
- sir_bearington 6y ago
  Most levelized energy costs do include cost of decommissioning and maintenance. On the other hand, estimates of wind and solar do not include the cost of storage to actually make intermittent sources viable. Which is understandable, because there's really no plan to provision this much storage without a massive breakthrough in storage solutions. Almost all plans for a predominantly wind and solar grid assume that something like hydrogen, synthetic natural gas, or something else will provide massive amounts of cheap storage. Until then, it's fossil fuels to fulfill off-peak demand.
  - mjevans 6y ago
    Modern nuclear plants (with 50+ years of safety lessons) for baseload and a mix of other sources (wind, solar, etc) sounds ideal.
    - sir_bearington 6y ago
      Peak energy consumption happens in the evening, when solar isn't producing any energy. And nuclear costs just as much to run at partial capacity as it does to run a full capacity. So if you build enough nuclear plants to support the grid when solar and wind isn't producing, then there's no reason to build any solar and wind. Nuclear makes the intermittent sources redundant.
      - bob29 6y ago
        If nuclear isn't subsidized by military uses its energy negative when you factor in mining, enrichment, and operation.
chefkoch 6y ago
What about decomissioning and caring for the nuclear waste? That seems to bei very expensive as the decomissioning of the Greifswald plant in former east Germany is going to cost more than 6 billion €.
- godelski 6y ago
  This is an extremely complicated matter, to be honest. It isn't difficult to store waste on site. There are also much cheaper technologies out there that we've invented over the last 50 years but one of the major reasons we don't have them in practice is because they are "unproven", as in physically untested at large scale (though they have been through simulations and small scale testings at DoE labs). Long term storage isn't too bad of an issue either, but there's two camps. One is to do smaller sites where we can just bury local material in the ground. The other is having a large mass site (think Yucca Mountain), which means higher scrutiny because there's more chances of something going wrong (standard failure analysis) and you're packing more material together which increases total radiation levels. Either one will work, but both are bureaucratic nightmares. The result of which has been constantly changing plans, which drives up costs very quickly as you change gears (e.g. spend tons to survey the US for good sites, more to verify Yucca Mountain is good, start digging, cancel because NIMBY, start again, cancel, survey other areas, repeat). But one factor I want to mention is that by the nature of the physical processes materials can't be both extremely dangerous and long living. The danger literally comes from mass being expelled from the atoms. High level radioactive materials have and always will be stored on site, as this is the safest place for them (where they can be monitored). There are still technical challenges, don't get me wrong, but the whole process is also a bureaucratic nightmare on top of that and we know what that does to costs. For some better facts I'll refer you to an article written by a HN user that is a reactor scientist: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
- sir_bearington 6y ago
  There's actually extremely small amounts of nuclear waste. The entirety of the waste produced by USA's nuclear electricity generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and less than 10 yards high [1]. The cost of storing waste is minuscule in comparison to the amount of electricity generated. Europe's waste repository in Finland costs ~800 million Euros [2]. Which is an order of magnitude less than a nuclear plant. And the repository can accommodate the fuel produced by several plants. In short, waste disposal accounts for a single-digit percentage of nuclear power operating costs. 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
Nope. Investment has dried up in nuclear exactly because the ROI is garbage compared to the trend lines in renewables + storage + gas turbine plants. A lot of posters here have a sort of smugness about being fans of nuclear power, blaming it's decline purely on "irrational" fears. They blithely ignore that even in authoritarian states where there's no meaningful political opposition to nuclear projects, we see the same declining interest. It just takes too much capital too long vs alternatives now. Absent a global carbon tariff nuclear will likely never again be competitive with gas supplementing renewables.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  Gas is on the way out as well. Renewables undercut them routinely. Gas plants are expensive to operate and in a peaker plant role they have to compete with cheap battery which means they are not running most of the time and only when all else has failed. And as we saw in Texas, that's not a good plan either when gas supplies run tight. E.g. the Australians vastly reduced their need for gas plants just by installing a few hundred MW of battery and saved a lot of cash in the process. ROI on those batteries has been quite high very early on. Not having turn on their peaker plants is a big deal.
- tekkk 6y ago
  Really? China has been building plants quite steadfastly. Fukushima seemed to have put the breaks on that but still, there are plants being built. Yet Western companies, like Areva, seemed to have completely lost their game in making the plants and nobody's willing to buy them from China or Russia. And sure, there's a high capital cost but putting the solar panels or wind turbines to match the capacity of one modern nuclear plant isn't exactly cheap either.
  - jillesvangurp 6y ago
    Buying solar or wind gets you about 3x the capacity for the same price in about 6-12 months. It's a lot cheaper and a lot less risk. And that's excluding operational cost. If you want capacity on a budget in a hurry, wind is your best bet right now. Nuclear is for the opposite scenario where you have decades time and are not in a hurry to get capacity online and don't mind paying an order of magnitude more. The Chinese hedged their bets a few decades ago and wind + solar won there as well. China is breaking records in terms of growth of their renewable capacity and are a key technology supplier in that space and also a big part of why it got so cheap.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
Not just upfront. Nuclear plants need staffing, security (lots of it) throughout its operational life, waste handling and storage, constant audits (and related bureaucracy) for safety, security, etc. None of that stuff is free. Additionally, nuclear plants work with materials that actually decay when exposed to lots of neutrons which I imagine needs occasional maintenance as well You need trained staff as well and a few propeller heads that actually understand the physics. These people need educations and salaries. None of that stuff is free. That's why nuclear is currently considered the most expensive form of energy in the market. The problem with renewables (for nuclear) is that it reduces the potential revenue for a nuclear plant over its 6-7 decade lifespan to well below any level where it makes sense to build them. If you budget for 1960s era grid pricing it all looks beautiful. Then fast forward 6 decades and you have solar bids trending towards 0.01$/kwh when most nuclear plants in operation are basically closer to 0.15$/kwh. That's the whole problem. It's the most expensive option in the market by far. a 10X improvement would make it competitive with current solutions. Except that will take a few decades. So, realistically, you'd need a second order of magnitude improvement at that point. Yes, I believe renewables can do another 10x cost reduction over the next decades; possibly more. Ballpark 0.005$/kwh is probably worth investing in for a plant that comes online around 2045 or so. That's a modest 3x cheaper than the lowest solar/wind bids right now. 25 years is a long time. In any case, last time I checked, such plants are not being planned anywhere and most nuclear bids are 10x or more expensive than that. Out of the gate they are 2-3x more expensive than solutions in the market right now. That's for a plant that has not been built yet and will take decades to get built.

Nuclear operating cost is comparable to offshore wind, coal, and combined cycle gas, and around 4X more expensive to operate than onshore wind or solar. (Of course, coal and gas would be more expensive if they had to pay a fair price for their emissions) Nuclear is also eye-poppingly expensive to decommission. Finally, note that operating cost doesn't include the sort of re-engineering and upgrades that are routinely required, and have doomed plants like San Onofre.

sir_bearington 6y ago
Most levelized energy costs do include cost of decommissioning and maintenance. On the other hand, estimates of wind and solar do not include the cost of storage to actually make intermittent sources viable. Which is understandable, because there's really no plan to provision this much storage without a massive breakthrough in storage solutions. Almost all plans for a predominantly wind and solar grid assume that something like hydrogen, synthetic natural gas, or something else will provide massive amounts of cheap storage. Until then, it's fossil fuels to fulfill off-peak demand.
- mjevans 6y ago
  Modern nuclear plants (with 50+ years of safety lessons) for baseload and a mix of other sources (wind, solar, etc) sounds ideal.
  - sir_bearington 6y ago
    Peak energy consumption happens in the evening, when solar isn't producing any energy. And nuclear costs just as much to run at partial capacity as it does to run a full capacity. So if you build enough nuclear plants to support the grid when solar and wind isn't producing, then there's no reason to build any solar and wind. Nuclear makes the intermittent sources redundant.
    - bob29 6y ago
      If nuclear isn't subsidized by military uses its energy negative when you factor in mining, enrichment, and operation.

chefkoch 6y ago

What about decomissioning and caring for the nuclear waste? That seems to bei very expensive as the decomissioning of the Greifswald plant in former east Germany is going to cost more than 6 billion €.

godelski 6y ago
This is an extremely complicated matter, to be honest. It isn't difficult to store waste on site. There are also much cheaper technologies out there that we've invented over the last 50 years but one of the major reasons we don't have them in practice is because they are "unproven", as in physically untested at large scale (though they have been through simulations and small scale testings at DoE labs). Long term storage isn't too bad of an issue either, but there's two camps. One is to do smaller sites where we can just bury local material in the ground. The other is having a large mass site (think Yucca Mountain), which means higher scrutiny because there's more chances of something going wrong (standard failure analysis) and you're packing more material together which increases total radiation levels. Either one will work, but both are bureaucratic nightmares. The result of which has been constantly changing plans, which drives up costs very quickly as you change gears (e.g. spend tons to survey the US for good sites, more to verify Yucca Mountain is good, start digging, cancel because NIMBY, start again, cancel, survey other areas, repeat). But one factor I want to mention is that by the nature of the physical processes materials can't be both extremely dangerous and long living. The danger literally comes from mass being expelled from the atoms. High level radioactive materials have and always will be stored on site, as this is the safest place for them (where they can be monitored). There are still technical challenges, don't get me wrong, but the whole process is also a bureaucratic nightmare on top of that and we know what that does to costs. For some better facts I'll refer you to an article written by a HN user that is a reactor scientist: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
sir_bearington 6y ago
There's actually extremely small amounts of nuclear waste. The entirety of the waste produced by USA's nuclear electricity generation fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and less than 10 yards high [1]. The cost of storing waste is minuscule in comparison to the amount of electricity generated. Europe's waste repository in Finland costs ~800 million Euros [2]. Which is an order of magnitude less than a nuclear plant. And the repository can accommodate the fuel produced by several plants. In short, waste disposal accounts for a single-digit percentage of nuclear power operating costs. 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago

Nope. Investment has dried up in nuclear exactly because the ROI is garbage compared to the trend lines in renewables + storage + gas turbine plants. A lot of posters here have a sort of smugness about being fans of nuclear power, blaming it's decline purely on "irrational" fears. They blithely ignore that even in authoritarian states where there's no meaningful political opposition to nuclear projects, we see the same declining interest. It just takes too much capital too long vs alternatives now. Absent a global carbon tariff nuclear will likely never again be competitive with gas supplementing renewables.

jillesvangurp 6y ago
Gas is on the way out as well. Renewables undercut them routinely. Gas plants are expensive to operate and in a peaker plant role they have to compete with cheap battery which means they are not running most of the time and only when all else has failed. And as we saw in Texas, that's not a good plan either when gas supplies run tight. E.g. the Australians vastly reduced their need for gas plants just by installing a few hundred MW of battery and saved a lot of cash in the process. ROI on those batteries has been quite high very early on. Not having turn on their peaker plants is a big deal.
tekkk 6y ago
Really? China has been building plants quite steadfastly. Fukushima seemed to have put the breaks on that but still, there are plants being built. Yet Western companies, like Areva, seemed to have completely lost their game in making the plants and nobody's willing to buy them from China or Russia. And sure, there's a high capital cost but putting the solar panels or wind turbines to match the capacity of one modern nuclear plant isn't exactly cheap either.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  Buying solar or wind gets you about 3x the capacity for the same price in about 6-12 months. It's a lot cheaper and a lot less risk. And that's excluding operational cost. If you want capacity on a budget in a hurry, wind is your best bet right now. Nuclear is for the opposite scenario where you have decades time and are not in a hurry to get capacity online and don't mind paying an order of magnitude more. The Chinese hedged their bets a few decades ago and wind + solar won there as well. China is breaking records in terms of growth of their renewable capacity and are a key technology supplier in that space and also a big part of why it got so cheap.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

Not just upfront. Nuclear plants need staffing, security (lots of it) throughout its operational life, waste handling and storage, constant audits (and related bureaucracy) for safety, security, etc. None of that stuff is free. Additionally, nuclear plants work with materials that actually decay when exposed to lots of neutrons which I imagine needs occasional maintenance as well You need trained staff as well and a few propeller heads that actually understand the physics. These people need educations and salaries. None of that stuff is free. That's why nuclear is currently considered the most expensive form of energy in the market. The problem with renewables (for nuclear) is that it reduces the potential revenue for a nuclear plant over its 6-7 decade lifespan to well below any level where it makes sense to build them. If you budget for 1960s era grid pricing it all looks beautiful. Then fast forward 6 decades and you have solar bids trending towards 0.01$/kwh when most nuclear plants in operation are basically closer to 0.15$/kwh. That's the whole problem. It's the most expensive option in the market by far. a 10X improvement would make it competitive with current solutions. Except that will take a few decades. So, realistically, you'd need a second order of magnitude improvement at that point. Yes, I believe renewables can do another 10x cost reduction over the next decades; possibly more. Ballpark 0.005$/kwh is probably worth investing in for a plant that comes online around 2045 or so. That's a modest 3x cheaper than the lowest solar/wind bids right now. 25 years is a long time. In any case, last time I checked, such plants are not being planned anywhere and most nuclear bids are 10x or more expensive than that. Out of the gate they are 2-3x more expensive than solutions in the market right now. That's for a plant that has not been built yet and will take decades to get built.