12 ms·

People who decide to build new plants make their decision not from concerns about climate change, but economics. Building a new nuclear plant would be like buil

People who decide to build new plants make their decision not from concerns about climate change, but economics. Building a new nuclear plant would be like building a new coal plant, but worse because by the time it's complete the economics will be even poorer in comparison. Nuclear just doesn't make economic sense on any measure: cost per GW, time to complete, up front cost, regulatory difficulty, etc. So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it's just not going to happen. For the same reason you don't shop around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the type of plant it came from.

nimish 6y ago
Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries. Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it'll have to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous economies of scale. RIP, only France did nuclear right :(
- scotty79 6y ago
  You can overbuild and burn excess energy mining crypto. I think crypto will be what dictates future energy prices and investments.
- sir_bearington 6y ago
  > Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries. Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal batteries, something else. But who knows if any of those will actually pan out. California has already hit saturation with solar power. Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions. As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more valuable than raw generation figures present because this power is generated 24/7. > RIP, only France did nuclear right :( And Belgium. And Slovakia. And China.
  - willis936 6y ago
    Pumped hydro is pretty interesting, but highly dependent on natural elevation changes to be considered remotely economical.
  - jashephe 6y ago
    Isn't pumped storage hydro kind of that "silver bullet"? At least in places with the right geography?
    - sir_bearington 6y ago
      Pumped hydroelectric has good capacity, but doesn't scale well. The right geography is the main limiting factor, accessibility is a second. The places with good hydroelectric potential tend to be very remote, in the mountains. It's extremely hard to do large earthmoving and concrete construction in remote places. The places that have simultaneously the right topology and relatively easy accessibility are limited.
      - AstralStorm 6y ago
        The alternative is essentially big water towers, and that has serious construction challenges not solved yet.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Pumped thermal storage has no geographic limits. The idea is: compress argon, transfer the heat to thermal store, expand the argon back to the starting pressure to recover some work, then transfer the "cold" to another thermal store. For long term storage, use very cheap materials, like rocks, for the thermal stores. To discharge, reverse the flow, so argon is cooled, then compressed, then heated, then expanded. All this can be done with existing technologies and with a round trip efficiency of perhaps 60%.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    > Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. What physical limit prevents this? It would be expensive, but cheaper than building nuclear power plants, especially the breeder reactors that would be needed for a fully nuclear world economy.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  Economies of scale and a heavy reliance on forced labor. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-solar-companies-forced-labor-xinjiang.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-so...
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Forced labor reminds me of Nazi labor programs. However, I'm surprised that it's not done to expand the military. It's really weird that someone is being forced to work for the sake of the entire planet when every other nation is trying to wiggle itself out of its responsibility.
- gameman144 6y ago
  One of the advantages of nuclear, though, is land-area required. Nuclear takes about a third as much land as solar, and a fifth as much as wind, meaning that it can more easily scale up if energy needs outstrip available land for energy production without reverting to the equally land-efficient methods of coal and gas. That said, improvements in the transmission grid might be able to remedy that issue, honestly not sure.
  - abruzzi 6y ago
    This is very interesting to me. On of my (perhaps irrational) fears with solar and wind is how much land it potentially could take to supply power. I live in a very sparsely populated state because my greatest joy in life is being as far as possible from "civilization." I spend a lot of my free time traveling through craggy jeep trails to visit obscure locations (and photograph them.) If nuclear takes, hypothetically, 200 acres to build a power plant, containment, and all the supporting services necessary to generate enough power to feed a city, and solar takes 600 acres to generate an equal amount (and be much safer as well) I'm ok with that compromise, but I would have expected that the ratio would be much higher. Can you tell me where the ratios you have quoted come from?
    - gameman144 6y ago
      Sure, it's at https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf. I'm on the same page in terms of pro-solar, but I also think having nuclear ready to go is a nice fallback (e.g. if rare earth metals for solar and batteries become prohibitively expensive or embargoed).
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        Solar does not use rare earth metals. Please stop propagating this canard.
        gameman144 6y ago
        Ah, honest mistake, lithium (not rare earths) is the metal that the US doesn't have a sufficient stockpile of. The rest of the point should still stand though, essentially having an energy grid that can react to supply shocks.
- ourlordcaffeine 6y ago
  France did it right-ish. They have to import peak power as their reactors cannot ramp quickly enough.
throwaw4ybio 6y ago
If you want nuclear to happen: 1) Disrupt the nuclear construction contracting process. Until fleet contractors like Bechtel et al are stopped from parasitizing the industry, it's going nowhete due to spiralling costs. 2) Lower the cost of reinforced concrete. 3) Close the fuel cycle. 3 is technically feasible, 2 isn't very sexy, but possible. 1 seems insurmountable.
- jlnthws 6y ago
  What about Terrapower and Nuscale? They are building new type of reactors, much smaller and allegedly safer/cleaner.
  - thinkcontext 6y ago
    Nuscale is targeting the end of the decade for its first project to come online. Terrapower does not have a licensed design yet, so it will be longer.
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
    Good developments, but we cannot wait for them. Even the coal grids are falling apart now, and building gas to replace them is not sane. On the other hand, once they're available, switching to them is perfectly fine, and the 50+ lifetime of LWRs exists for a reason. Maybe we will even have workable fusion by then.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
    It appears the NuScale pilot project is floundering. They announced cost raising about 50% and about a 3 year delay. Several of the utility customers have backed out of the project as a result, putting it on iffy grounds.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  The only way it works is if the power consumer owns the entire lifecycle (construction, ongoing O&M, etc) (the US Navy, for example). There is absolutely no way any commercial power purchase agreement buyer is going to spec nuclear when they can get renewables backed by storage for pennies per kwh [1], both of which have install lead times measured in months (versus a decade for nuclear). Tesla committed to having the Hornsdale Power Reserve built in 100 days or it was free [2]. That is what nuclear is up against. Please don't argue base load; there is no need for base load, only diverse firm dispatchable generation assets [3], robust transmission, and demand response for non-essential industrial loads. [1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-plus-storage-poised-to-become-more-financially-attractive-but-season/589857/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-plus-storage-poised-t... [2] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/28/16709036/elon-musk-biggest-battery-100-days https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/28/167090... [3] https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothing-renewables-cant-better/ https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...
gcheong 6y ago
Fine then provide the subsidies. We spend trillions on boondoggle military projects without concrete return to society. I think the livability of the planet is basic to having an economic system to point to as an excuse.
- killjoywashere 6y ago
  It may be worth noting that the companies that control the military nuclear stuff also control the civilian nuclear stuff.
  - gcheong 6y ago
    Fair enough and we can have that discussion but at least I know what I'm getting (at least in part) when we build a nuclear plant.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- thinkcontext 6y ago
  The best solution would be to provide a broad carbon price. That way subsidy would be applied to renewables, nuclear, insulating your house or things that haven't been invented yet.
- Krasnol 6y ago
  If the livability of the planet is important to you, you should give the subsidies to renewables: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b809990c#!divAbstract https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099...
  - gcheong 6y ago
    I'm just not convinced that renewables are going to live up to their promise as a total solution sans nuclear. I think having some investment in nuclear is inevitable and I would rather build out excess capacity and be wrong and not need it than be right and have to play catch up.
cbmuser 6y ago
Hey, another comment that doesn’t understand the difference between system cost and levelized costs of electricity. Solar and wind are ONLY cheap if you ignore the costs for backup power plants and extra landlines. We have the highest electricity prices in Germany worldwide. I really wished people stopped claiming renewables are cheap, they are not. > https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
- imtringued 6y ago
  The spot market prices in Germany are ridiculously low. It's a problem with the compensation/tax structure.
belorn 6y ago
Currently the most subsidized energy is fossil fuels. My own government is a very vocal about climate change, but they still pay millions in order for fossil fuel plants to stand ready in case demand exceeds that of the production from wind. I understand people dislike when nuclear get subsidies, but its nowhere as bad as the amount of subsidies we pay right now to fossil fuels. We need to stop throwing money at fossil fuels. I rather have my tax money go to batteries or nuclear than fossil fuels disguised as "reserve energy".
dcolkitt 6y ago
The prohibitive cost of nuclear plants is driven by policy- not economics. Obviously the world built a plethora of economically feasible nuclear power plants in the 1960s. It's not like we collectively lost that technology. Instead what happened is that anti-nuclear activists put up arbitrary regulatory barriers to construction. Three-Mile Island provided the political catalyst for a massive regulatory burden on new construction. Most of these burdens have an at best minor impact on safety, but at the cost of astronomical impact on cost. Now maybe you can debate about whether loosening nuclear regulations to decrease cost is acceptable or not. But at the very least that's at least a debate we should be having. It's certainly the case that a lot of people will die from unmitigated climate change. Not to mention the enormous economic and environmental toll. Against that, I would gladly trade off a Three-Mile Island incident every decade or so.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  > The prohibitive cost of nuclear plants is driven by policy- not economics. So, what was the policy that caused Vogtle 3/4 and the Summer plants to go so wildly over budget? Was there a policy for Westinghouse to screw up badly? And similarly for Flamanville 3, and the new plants they're trying to build in the UK. The argument for "less regulation" is really the argument "who needs expensive containment and emergency systems, because radiation is no big deal".

nimish 6y ago

Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries. Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it'll have to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous economies of scale. RIP, only France did nuclear right :(

scotty79 6y ago
You can overbuild and burn excess energy mining crypto. I think crypto will be what dictates future energy prices and investments.
sir_bearington 6y ago
> Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries. Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal batteries, something else. But who knows if any of those will actually pan out. California has already hit saturation with solar power. Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions. As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more valuable than raw generation figures present because this power is generated 24/7. > RIP, only France did nuclear right :( And Belgium. And Slovakia. And China.
- willis936 6y ago
  Pumped hydro is pretty interesting, but highly dependent on natural elevation changes to be considered remotely economical.
- jashephe 6y ago
  Isn't pumped storage hydro kind of that "silver bullet"? At least in places with the right geography?
  - sir_bearington 6y ago
    Pumped hydroelectric has good capacity, but doesn't scale well. The right geography is the main limiting factor, accessibility is a second. The places with good hydroelectric potential tend to be very remote, in the mountains. It's extremely hard to do large earthmoving and concrete construction in remote places. The places that have simultaneously the right topology and relatively easy accessibility are limited.
    - AstralStorm 6y ago
      The alternative is essentially big water towers, and that has serious construction challenges not solved yet.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Pumped thermal storage has no geographic limits. The idea is: compress argon, transfer the heat to thermal store, expand the argon back to the starting pressure to recover some work, then transfer the "cold" to another thermal store. For long term storage, use very cheap materials, like rocks, for the thermal stores. To discharge, reverse the flow, so argon is cooled, then compressed, then heated, then expanded. All this can be done with existing technologies and with a round trip efficiency of perhaps 60%.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  > Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. What physical limit prevents this? It would be expensive, but cheaper than building nuclear power plants, especially the breeder reactors that would be needed for a fully nuclear world economy.
andromeduck 6y ago
Economies of scale and a heavy reliance on forced labor. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-solar-companies-forced-labor-xinjiang.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-so...
- imtringued 6y ago
  Forced labor reminds me of Nazi labor programs. However, I'm surprised that it's not done to expand the military. It's really weird that someone is being forced to work for the sake of the entire planet when every other nation is trying to wiggle itself out of its responsibility.
gameman144 6y ago
One of the advantages of nuclear, though, is land-area required. Nuclear takes about a third as much land as solar, and a fifth as much as wind, meaning that it can more easily scale up if energy needs outstrip available land for energy production without reverting to the equally land-efficient methods of coal and gas. That said, improvements in the transmission grid might be able to remedy that issue, honestly not sure.
- abruzzi 6y ago
  This is very interesting to me. On of my (perhaps irrational) fears with solar and wind is how much land it potentially could take to supply power. I live in a very sparsely populated state because my greatest joy in life is being as far as possible from "civilization." I spend a lot of my free time traveling through craggy jeep trails to visit obscure locations (and photograph them.) If nuclear takes, hypothetically, 200 acres to build a power plant, containment, and all the supporting services necessary to generate enough power to feed a city, and solar takes 600 acres to generate an equal amount (and be much safer as well) I'm ok with that compromise, but I would have expected that the ratio would be much higher. Can you tell me where the ratios you have quoted come from?
  - gameman144 6y ago
    Sure, it's at https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf. I'm on the same page in terms of pro-solar, but I also think having nuclear ready to go is a nice fallback (e.g. if rare earth metals for solar and batteries become prohibitively expensive or embargoed).
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Solar does not use rare earth metals. Please stop propagating this canard.
      - gameman144 6y ago
        Ah, honest mistake, lithium (not rare earths) is the metal that the US doesn't have a sufficient stockpile of. The rest of the point should still stand though, essentially having an energy grid that can react to supply shocks.
ourlordcaffeine 6y ago
France did it right-ish. They have to import peak power as their reactors cannot ramp quickly enough.

throwaw4ybio 6y ago

If you want nuclear to happen: 1) Disrupt the nuclear construction contracting process. Until fleet contractors like Bechtel et al are stopped from parasitizing the industry, it's going nowhete due to spiralling costs. 2) Lower the cost of reinforced concrete. 3) Close the fuel cycle. 3 is technically feasible, 2 isn't very sexy, but possible. 1 seems insurmountable.

jlnthws 6y ago
What about Terrapower and Nuscale? They are building new type of reactors, much smaller and allegedly safer/cleaner.
- thinkcontext 6y ago
  Nuscale is targeting the end of the decade for its first project to come online. Terrapower does not have a licensed design yet, so it will be longer.
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  Good developments, but we cannot wait for them. Even the coal grids are falling apart now, and building gas to replace them is not sane. On the other hand, once they're available, switching to them is perfectly fine, and the 50+ lifetime of LWRs exists for a reason. Maybe we will even have workable fusion by then.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
  It appears the NuScale pilot project is floundering. They announced cost raising about 50% and about a 3 year delay. Several of the utility customers have backed out of the project as a result, putting it on iffy grounds.
toomuchtodo 6y ago
The only way it works is if the power consumer owns the entire lifecycle (construction, ongoing O&M, etc) (the US Navy, for example). There is absolutely no way any commercial power purchase agreement buyer is going to spec nuclear when they can get renewables backed by storage for pennies per kwh [1], both of which have install lead times measured in months (versus a decade for nuclear). Tesla committed to having the Hornsdale Power Reserve built in 100 days or it was free [2]. That is what nuclear is up against. Please don't argue base load; there is no need for base load, only diverse firm dispatchable generation assets [3], robust transmission, and demand response for non-essential industrial loads. [1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-plus-storage-poised-to-become-more-financially-attractive-but-season/589857/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-plus-storage-poised-t... [2] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/28/16709036/elon-musk-biggest-battery-100-days https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/28/167090... [3] https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothing-renewables-cant-better/ https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...

gcheong 6y ago

Fine then provide the subsidies. We spend trillions on boondoggle military projects without concrete return to society. I think the livability of the planet is basic to having an economic system to point to as an excuse.

killjoywashere 6y ago
It may be worth noting that the companies that control the military nuclear stuff also control the civilian nuclear stuff.
- gcheong 6y ago
  Fair enough and we can have that discussion but at least I know what I'm getting (at least in part) when we build a nuclear plant.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thinkcontext 6y ago
The best solution would be to provide a broad carbon price. That way subsidy would be applied to renewables, nuclear, insulating your house or things that haven't been invented yet.
Krasnol 6y ago
If the livability of the planet is important to you, you should give the subsidies to renewables: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b809990c#!divAbstract https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099...
- gcheong 6y ago
  I'm just not convinced that renewables are going to live up to their promise as a total solution sans nuclear. I think having some investment in nuclear is inevitable and I would rather build out excess capacity and be wrong and not need it than be right and have to play catch up.

cbmuser 6y ago

Hey, another comment that doesn’t understand the difference between system cost and levelized costs of electricity. Solar and wind are ONLY cheap if you ignore the costs for backup power plants and extra landlines. We have the highest electricity prices in Germany worldwide. I really wished people stopped claiming renewables are cheap, they are not. > https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/

imtringued 6y ago
The spot market prices in Germany are ridiculously low. It's a problem with the compensation/tax structure.

belorn 6y ago

Currently the most subsidized energy is fossil fuels. My own government is a very vocal about climate change, but they still pay millions in order for fossil fuel plants to stand ready in case demand exceeds that of the production from wind. I understand people dislike when nuclear get subsidies, but its nowhere as bad as the amount of subsidies we pay right now to fossil fuels. We need to stop throwing money at fossil fuels. I rather have my tax money go to batteries or nuclear than fossil fuels disguised as "reserve energy".

dcolkitt 6y ago

The prohibitive cost of nuclear plants is driven by policy- not economics. Obviously the world built a plethora of economically feasible nuclear power plants in the 1960s. It's not like we collectively lost that technology. Instead what happened is that anti-nuclear activists put up arbitrary regulatory barriers to construction. Three-Mile Island provided the political catalyst for a massive regulatory burden on new construction. Most of these burdens have an at best minor impact on safety, but at the cost of astronomical impact on cost. Now maybe you can debate about whether loosening nuclear regulations to decrease cost is acceptable or not. But at the very least that's at least a debate we should be having. It's certainly the case that a lot of people will die from unmitigated climate change. Not to mention the enormous economic and environmental toll. Against that, I would gladly trade off a Three-Mile Island incident every decade or so.

pfdietz 6y ago
> The prohibitive cost of nuclear plants is driven by policy- not economics. So, what was the policy that caused Vogtle 3/4 and the Summer plants to go so wildly over budget? Was there a policy for Westinghouse to screw up badly? And similarly for Flamanville 3, and the new plants they're trying to build in the UK. The argument for "less regulation" is really the argument "who needs expensive containment and emergency systems, because radiation is no big deal".