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Construction of nuclear stations in the United States instead of getting cheaper as more were built got more expensive but what is surprising is a good amount o

Construction of nuclear stations in the United States instead of getting cheaper as more were built got more expensive but what is surprising is a good amount of the costs were because of poor project management. [0] Basically last minute design changes. Having people sitting around doing nothing because their skills were not needed at the current time. You would have over crowded work areas and either insufficient or lack of tools needed to do the work. Standardization, the same methods by which the price of solar panels plummeted could benefit nuclear as well. there is no reason as a nation a standardized design could not be created and installed with good speed and low costs. Think of it as a modern day Liberty ship except we are freeing ourselves from fossil fuels [0]https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

kragen 6y ago
> there is no reason as a nation a standardized design could not be created and installed with good speed and low costs. There is, actually, if by "low costs" we mean lower than solar. If you take a nuclear plant and remove the nuclear reactor from it, what you have left is a steam-driven generator and a firebox where the reactor used to be. That's what a coal power plant is. Coal power plants cost about twice as much per watt to build as current solar power plants, and solar power keeps getting cheaper. So it's unlikely that nuclear power plants will start costing less—to build—per watt than coal plants. (They could of course cost less to operate per watt, since they don't have to buy fuel by the trainload or dispose of fly ash. But just the cost to build a coal plant makes it uncompetitive with solar in most of the world, unless you make very pessimistic assumptions about intermittency and the cost of utility-scale energy storage, which is, however, still an unknown.) So, it's even more unlikely that nuclear power will get cheaper than solar power. Unless you're in, like, Svalbard or something. Or there's a revolutionary new way to build supercritical steam turbines that makes them much cheaper per watt and isn't also applicable to making solar panels. Steam turbines were invented 137 years ago and have been a big business central to the economy of every developed country for decades, so I'm not holding my breath.
ncmncm 6y ago
Nuke plants got more expensive because that was the whole point of starting the projects in the first place: reliable long-term pipelines of corruption, graft, fraud, and kickbacks lasting a good decade, sometimes longer, providing many $billions, with no strings attached, to well-connected beneficiaries. It is the reason small, standardized reactors never got traction: there was so little scope for corruption, they offered nothing of value for the people who could have backed them. The same applies to any big public project in the US, of late: California's bullet train, New York's 2nd Avenue subway, Boston's Big Dig, the F-35, NASA's SLS. It has taken a long time, but the US now ranks among the most corrupt nations. Corruption is wholesale, from the top, not retail, at the bottom.

kragen 6y ago

> there is no reason as a nation a standardized design could not be created and installed with good speed and low costs. There is, actually, if by "low costs" we mean lower than solar. If you take a nuclear plant and remove the nuclear reactor from it, what you have left is a steam-driven generator and a firebox where the reactor used to be. That's what a coal power plant is. Coal power plants cost about twice as much per watt to build as current solar power plants, and solar power keeps getting cheaper. So it's unlikely that nuclear power plants will start costing less—to build—per watt than coal plants. (They could of course cost less to operate per watt, since they don't have to buy fuel by the trainload or dispose of fly ash. But just the cost to build a coal plant makes it uncompetitive with solar in most of the world, unless you make very pessimistic assumptions about intermittency and the cost of utility-scale energy storage, which is, however, still an unknown.) So, it's even more unlikely that nuclear power will get cheaper than solar power. Unless you're in, like, Svalbard or something. Or there's a revolutionary new way to build supercritical steam turbines that makes them much cheaper per watt and isn't also applicable to making solar panels. Steam turbines were invented 137 years ago and have been a big business central to the economy of every developed country for decades, so I'm not holding my breath.

ncmncm 6y ago

Nuke plants got more expensive because that was the whole point of starting the projects in the first place: reliable long-term pipelines of corruption, graft, fraud, and kickbacks lasting a good decade, sometimes longer, providing many $billions, with no strings attached, to well-connected beneficiaries. It is the reason small, standardized reactors never got traction: there was so little scope for corruption, they offered nothing of value for the people who could have backed them. The same applies to any big public project in the US, of late: California's bullet train, New York's 2nd Avenue subway, Boston's Big Dig, the F-35, NASA's SLS. It has taken a long time, but the US now ranks among the most corrupt nations. Corruption is wholesale, from the top, not retail, at the bottom.