7 ms·

Several US utilities back out of deal to build novel nuclear power plant (2020)

52 points by zeristor 6y ago

eunos 6y ago
Should just paint the development and construction of new nuclear plant as a vital part of "Great Power Competition". Congress will pour money and resources in no time.
- roenxi 6y ago
  There is something to that frame. Based on one unreliable Wikipeida article [0] it looks like nuclear power is becoming something of an Asian technology. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations#Under_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations...
  - est31 6y ago
    Asia has 4.6 billion people, of 8 billion in total. If technology is distributed equally among all humans, most technology will be predominantly used by Asians.
    - fakedang 6y ago
      Exactly. It's laughable to think that only ~900m people have the right to access new technology.
pjc50 6y ago
> It also estimates the cost would climb from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion. The history of every new nuclear project includes promises of cost reduction followed by massive 50% overruns, sometimes multiple times. > The deal protects UAMPS customers by specifying a maximum cost for electricity from the plant of $55 per MWh This is good, though. Cheaper than Hinkley Point C. > Bradford questions how reliable that reassurance can be. He notes that in the 1980s, Washington Public Power Supply System agreed to build several nuclear reactors in Washington that ran far overbudget and were never completed, leading to the biggest default on municipal bonds in U.S. history. Possibly the only nuclear reactor to have caused a city-wrecking disaster without even being built.
- silvestrov 6y ago
  From linked-linked article [1]: "For now, NuScale's reactors exist mostly as computer models [...] the company has built a full-size mock-up of the upper portion of a reactor" I'd place the bet: never going to happend. Reductions in price for wind and solar power is going to kill any black bottom line for this project. 1: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/smaller-safer-cheaper-one-company-aims-reinvent-nuclear-reactor-and-save-warming-planet https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/smaller-safer-cheape...
  - wmiel 6y ago
    Wind and solar do not work on demand. It's a huge difference. It's not always sunny nor windy. Only coal, natural gas or hydro in some cases can be a viable baseline energy sources.
    - eloff 6y ago
      I believe we have reached the point where solar/wind plus storage is cheaper than nuclear, and without the massive capital outlay, political problems, or risk. Even solar or wind plus a gas turbine is cheaper. That's a pity because nuclear could be competitive if economies of scale and innovation occur in that space. Edit: I'm getting down voted, maybe because I didn't provide a source. But neither do the people who disagree. I stand by it.
      - olyjohn 6y ago
        I honestly don't care if it's cheaper. I just don't want to keep running gas and coal plants, and continuing to let the planet warm up. The cost when we've burned this planet up will be much higher. We have a solution to end coal, oil and gas fired power plants, and end a tremendous amount of pollution. But it's somewhat more expensive to run a nuke plant... Is money the only thing we are looking at here? We keep fiddling around with solar and wind, and while it's great, we're still running goddamn fossil-fuel based plants for a huge percentage of our power. If solar and wind are cheaper, and price is what dictates this market, then we should have much more transitioned away by now. Solar and wind will get better and better, but we need to dump all this carbon-based power right now. We should be building nukes right now to replace the fossil-fuel based plants and then phase them out once wind and solar, and other, better tech gets developed. We have a huge problem solved right now. It's nothing but politics and bullshit getting in the way.
virmundi 6y ago
Why do they need to put these containers together? Why not create a 30 MW box and drop it in suburbia?
- p_l 6y ago
  That's kinda the design behind russian SVBR-150 (from mid 1990s, still waiting on money for finishing). Self-contained "cells" that can be delivered by railcar ready to use as power/heating/cogeneration plant. You literally need to attach normal COTS steam turbine or heat exchanger for municipal heating, and that's it as far as pure generation is involved. For refueling you disconnect the pipes and cables, place it on the railcar, and send it to manufacturer. Initial design for such cell was 150MW(e) each, thus the name.
- 7952 6y ago
  Firstly it might be easier. One site, one grid connection, one access road for heavy loads, one civil engineering operation, one security fence. One construction compound, fewer land owners and nimby neighbors. All the same reasons you might build larger factories or distribution centers. But more so. Pursuading local residents in suburbia is not a fight worth having. Also, a project designed to export 1GW can connect to a regional or national grid. Then it can sell power far more widely. Connected to a local grid you have the same capacity issues as solar. Why bother?
pfdietz 6y ago
Utah has excellent energy storage possibilities. In addition to lots of topographical relief for pumped hydro, there is a salt formation near Delta that could store enough hydrogen (in solution mined caverns) to power the entire US grid for 30 hours. It would make more sense for them to go with rapidly cheapening renewables + storage than to try one more time to make nuclear work.
- sesuximo 6y ago
  Right now, nuclear power plants generate approximately the same amount of power as all renewables combined (in the US). Don’t see why we wouldn’t invest in all proven and environmentally-viable energy solutions. Not to mention the reasons in the article.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    We wouldn't invest in it because it's now massively more expensive than the renewable alternatives, and also much more risky. The people handling the billions of dollars know their stuff, and they don't like nuclear for this reason. That there are existing nuclear plants still running does not imply building new ones would make any sense.
    - sesuximo 6y ago
      > The people handling the billions of dollars know their stuff, and they don't like nuclear for this reason. What do you mean by this? I’d be curious to read about that. As far as I knew, nuclear is one of the main investments of the current us government (pages like https://www.energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-sources/nuclear https://www.energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-sources/nuc... confirm)
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        Governments (and quasi-governmental entities) invest in things for reasons other than direct return on investment. Essentially all nuclear construction is of this kind. Private investors spurn nuclear. That's because the cold financial details don't work for it. The first wave of nuclear investment in the US came to a crashing halt in 1978 not because of TMI, but because of the passage of PURPA which opened up the grid to merchant power producers (ostensibly cogeneration, but many were cogen in name only.) If nuclear were really a good deal, we'd be seeing merchant nuclear plants, financed and built privately. But that money went to fossil fuels, and now increasingly to renewables.
burlesona 6y ago
Is the cost overrun due to engineering - we haven’t built these (NuScale) yet so we don’t really know how hard it is - or due to politics? Regarding Nuclear power in general, it’s amazing to me that we seem to have lost the engineering ability to actually build technology that’s about 70 years old at this point.
- quonn 6y ago
  But all the safety measures are not 70 years old. Of course we could technically replicate an old plant.
- m0llusk 6y ago
  We have the engineering. In a real sense that is the problem. For any particular complication we can come up with designs and systems that handle and control that. But each and every one such complication whether it is a coating or a backup cooling system or whatever adds up. Ideally nuclear power could be cheap, and it is conceivable that with enough design effort invested we could get there. Unfortunately even the modern simplified designs are not cost competitive with solar, wind, and hydro.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    Not to mention zoning laws, neighborhood petitions against it, and the myriad of laws and regulations that make it impossible to even want to attempt it.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      The places it was attempted recently in the US (GA, SC) had great local and state support. That didn't stop the efforts from becoming expensive fiascos.
- kragen 6y ago
  I explained why in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925722. The cost increase was due to redesigning the project to be larger.
kragen 6y ago
The planned cost was US$4.2 billion or US$4.3 billion; https://www.powermag.com/shakeup-for-720-mw-nuclear-smr-project-as-more-cities-withdraw-participation/ https://www.powermag.com/shakeup-for-720-mw-nuclear-smr-proj... says it was originally 600 megawatts, electric. That's US$7.17 per peak watt. That is not a good price, and the planned expansion to 720 MW and US$6.1 billion doesn't rescue it (US$8.47/W, somehow resulting in a lower LCOE estimate). Optimistically, if you finance the original US$7.17 per peak watt at 3% per year, that capital is costing you 21.5¢ per year per peak watt. If you can run the reactor at an optimistic 95% capacity factor, that's 22.6¢ per average watt. There are 8765 hours in a year, so that's 2.6¢ per kilowatt hour or US$26 per megawatt hour. That's just the cost of building the plant; operating costs are added on top of that. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas-in-the-southwest-means-carbon-capture-is-not-going-to-save-coal-plants/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas... describes a recent photovoltaic PPA in Texas (not in Utah, but not far away) that's selling solar energy for US$15 per megawatt hour, and a battery-storage PPA that's selling at US$30/MWh, and notes that prices that year at the Palo Verde energy trading hub (in Arizona, a bit nearer to Utah) averaged US$26.58/MWh. With new generation capacity coming online and selling at $15 in the daytime and $30 at night, it's going to be hard to sell nuclear energy in the Southwest at $26/MWh plus opex and transmission costs. (The LCOE estimate in the POWER article, based on the original US$4.3 billion estimate for 600 MW capacity, was US$65/MWh). You can't turn your nuclear plant off in the daytime just because PV is driving LMPs negative. (And turning it off wouldn't reduce your capex even if you could, just your opex—maybe.) Part of the problem is the quote from the former chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/smaller-safer-cheaper-one-company-aims-reinvent-nuclear-reactor-and-save-warming-planet https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/smaller-safer-cheape...: "Nuclear does not do anything quickly." And that makes it expensive. As I said three weeks ago, nuclear energy is the Amiga of energy sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26674832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26674832 If this is what "Smaller, safer, cheaper" looks like, it's a definition of "cheaper" I'm not familiar with. How did this project get off the ground in the first place? Under what analysis did it look like a good deal?
wolverine876 6y ago
A much more informative link: https://www.powermag.com/shakeup-for-720-mw-nuclear-smr-project-as-more-cities-withdraw-participation/ https://www.powermag.com/shakeup-for-720-mw-nuclear-smr-proj...
marchidesyt 6y ago
Let us recall that France is 100% nuclear. If we have 20 years to save ourselves from climate change it's hard to understand why environmentalists didn't embrace this proven solution decades ago.

52 points by zeristor 6y ago

Should just paint the development and construction of new nuclear plant as a vital part of "Great Power Competition". Congress will pour money and resources in no time.

roenxi 6y ago
There is something to that frame. Based on one unreliable Wikipeida article [0] it looks like nuclear power is becoming something of an Asian technology. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations#Under_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations...
- est31 6y ago
  Asia has 4.6 billion people, of 8 billion in total. If technology is distributed equally among all humans, most technology will be predominantly used by Asians.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    Exactly. It's laughable to think that only ~900m people have the right to access new technology.

pjc50 6y ago

> It also estimates the cost would climb from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion. The history of every new nuclear project includes promises of cost reduction followed by massive 50% overruns, sometimes multiple times. > The deal protects UAMPS customers by specifying a maximum cost for electricity from the plant of $55 per MWh This is good, though. Cheaper than Hinkley Point C. > Bradford questions how reliable that reassurance can be. He notes that in the 1980s, Washington Public Power Supply System agreed to build several nuclear reactors in Washington that ran far overbudget and were never completed, leading to the biggest default on municipal bonds in U.S. history. Possibly the only nuclear reactor to have caused a city-wrecking disaster without even being built.

silvestrov 6y ago
From linked-linked article [1]: "For now, NuScale's reactors exist mostly as computer models [...] the company has built a full-size mock-up of the upper portion of a reactor" I'd place the bet: never going to happend. Reductions in price for wind and solar power is going to kill any black bottom line for this project. 1: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/smaller-safer-cheaper-one-company-aims-reinvent-nuclear-reactor-and-save-warming-planet https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/smaller-safer-cheape...
- wmiel 6y ago
  Wind and solar do not work on demand. It's a huge difference. It's not always sunny nor windy. Only coal, natural gas or hydro in some cases can be a viable baseline energy sources.
  - eloff 6y ago
    I believe we have reached the point where solar/wind plus storage is cheaper than nuclear, and without the massive capital outlay, political problems, or risk. Even solar or wind plus a gas turbine is cheaper. That's a pity because nuclear could be competitive if economies of scale and innovation occur in that space. Edit: I'm getting down voted, maybe because I didn't provide a source. But neither do the people who disagree. I stand by it.
    - olyjohn 6y ago
      I honestly don't care if it's cheaper. I just don't want to keep running gas and coal plants, and continuing to let the planet warm up. The cost when we've burned this planet up will be much higher. We have a solution to end coal, oil and gas fired power plants, and end a tremendous amount of pollution. But it's somewhat more expensive to run a nuke plant... Is money the only thing we are looking at here? We keep fiddling around with solar and wind, and while it's great, we're still running goddamn fossil-fuel based plants for a huge percentage of our power. If solar and wind are cheaper, and price is what dictates this market, then we should have much more transitioned away by now. Solar and wind will get better and better, but we need to dump all this carbon-based power right now. We should be building nukes right now to replace the fossil-fuel based plants and then phase them out once wind and solar, and other, better tech gets developed. We have a huge problem solved right now. It's nothing but politics and bullshit getting in the way.

virmundi 6y ago

Why do they need to put these containers together? Why not create a 30 MW box and drop it in suburbia?

p_l 6y ago
That's kinda the design behind russian SVBR-150 (from mid 1990s, still waiting on money for finishing). Self-contained "cells" that can be delivered by railcar ready to use as power/heating/cogeneration plant. You literally need to attach normal COTS steam turbine or heat exchanger for municipal heating, and that's it as far as pure generation is involved. For refueling you disconnect the pipes and cables, place it on the railcar, and send it to manufacturer. Initial design for such cell was 150MW(e) each, thus the name.
7952 6y ago
Firstly it might be easier. One site, one grid connection, one access road for heavy loads, one civil engineering operation, one security fence. One construction compound, fewer land owners and nimby neighbors. All the same reasons you might build larger factories or distribution centers. But more so. Pursuading local residents in suburbia is not a fight worth having. Also, a project designed to export 1GW can connect to a regional or national grid. Then it can sell power far more widely. Connected to a local grid you have the same capacity issues as solar. Why bother?

pfdietz 6y ago

Utah has excellent energy storage possibilities. In addition to lots of topographical relief for pumped hydro, there is a salt formation near Delta that could store enough hydrogen (in solution mined caverns) to power the entire US grid for 30 hours. It would make more sense for them to go with rapidly cheapening renewables + storage than to try one more time to make nuclear work.

sesuximo 6y ago
Right now, nuclear power plants generate approximately the same amount of power as all renewables combined (in the US). Don’t see why we wouldn’t invest in all proven and environmentally-viable energy solutions. Not to mention the reasons in the article.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  We wouldn't invest in it because it's now massively more expensive than the renewable alternatives, and also much more risky. The people handling the billions of dollars know their stuff, and they don't like nuclear for this reason. That there are existing nuclear plants still running does not imply building new ones would make any sense.
  - sesuximo 6y ago
    > The people handling the billions of dollars know their stuff, and they don't like nuclear for this reason. What do you mean by this? I’d be curious to read about that. As far as I knew, nuclear is one of the main investments of the current us government (pages like https://www.energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-sources/nuclear https://www.energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-sources/nuc... confirm)
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Governments (and quasi-governmental entities) invest in things for reasons other than direct return on investment. Essentially all nuclear construction is of this kind. Private investors spurn nuclear. That's because the cold financial details don't work for it. The first wave of nuclear investment in the US came to a crashing halt in 1978 not because of TMI, but because of the passage of PURPA which opened up the grid to merchant power producers (ostensibly cogeneration, but many were cogen in name only.) If nuclear were really a good deal, we'd be seeing merchant nuclear plants, financed and built privately. But that money went to fossil fuels, and now increasingly to renewables.

burlesona 6y ago

Is the cost overrun due to engineering - we haven’t built these (NuScale) yet so we don’t really know how hard it is - or due to politics? Regarding Nuclear power in general, it’s amazing to me that we seem to have lost the engineering ability to actually build technology that’s about 70 years old at this point.

quonn 6y ago
But all the safety measures are not 70 years old. Of course we could technically replicate an old plant.
m0llusk 6y ago
We have the engineering. In a real sense that is the problem. For any particular complication we can come up with designs and systems that handle and control that. But each and every one such complication whether it is a coating or a backup cooling system or whatever adds up. Ideally nuclear power could be cheap, and it is conceivable that with enough design effort invested we could get there. Unfortunately even the modern simplified designs are not cost competitive with solar, wind, and hydro.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  Not to mention zoning laws, neighborhood petitions against it, and the myriad of laws and regulations that make it impossible to even want to attempt it.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    The places it was attempted recently in the US (GA, SC) had great local and state support. That didn't stop the efforts from becoming expensive fiascos.
kragen 6y ago
I explained why in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925722. The cost increase was due to redesigning the project to be larger.

kragen 6y ago

The planned cost was US$4.2 billion or US$4.3 billion; https://www.powermag.com/shakeup-for-720-mw-nuclear-smr-project-as-more-cities-withdraw-participation/ https://www.powermag.com/shakeup-for-720-mw-nuclear-smr-proj... says it was originally 600 megawatts, electric. That's US$7.17 per peak watt. That is not a good price, and the planned expansion to 720 MW and US$6.1 billion doesn't rescue it (US$8.47/W, somehow resulting in a lower LCOE estimate). Optimistically, if you finance the original US$7.17 per peak watt at 3% per year, that capital is costing you 21.5¢ per year per peak watt. If you can run the reactor at an optimistic 95% capacity factor, that's 22.6¢ per average watt. There are 8765 hours in a year, so that's 2.6¢ per kilowatt hour or US$26 per megawatt hour. That's just the cost of building the plant; operating costs are added on top of that. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas-in-the-southwest-means-carbon-capture-is-not-going-to-save-coal-plants/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas... describes a recent photovoltaic PPA in Texas (not in Utah, but not far away) that's selling solar energy for US$15 per megawatt hour, and a battery-storage PPA that's selling at US$30/MWh, and notes that prices that year at the Palo Verde energy trading hub (in Arizona, a bit nearer to Utah) averaged US$26.58/MWh. With new generation capacity coming online and selling at $15 in the daytime and $30 at night, it's going to be hard to sell nuclear energy in the Southwest at $26/MWh plus opex and transmission costs. (The LCOE estimate in the POWER article, based on the original US$4.3 billion estimate for 600 MW capacity, was US$65/MWh). You can't turn your nuclear plant off in the daytime just because PV is driving LMPs negative. (And turning it off wouldn't reduce your capex even if you could, just your opex—maybe.) Part of the problem is the quote from the former chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/smaller-safer-cheaper-one-company-aims-reinvent-nuclear-reactor-and-save-warming-planet https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/smaller-safer-cheape...: "Nuclear does not do anything quickly." And that makes it expensive. As I said three weeks ago, nuclear energy is the Amiga of energy sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26674832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26674832 If this is what "Smaller, safer, cheaper" looks like, it's a definition of "cheaper" I'm not familiar with. How did this project get off the ground in the first place? Under what analysis did it look like a good deal?

wolverine876 6y ago

A much more informative link: https://www.powermag.com/shakeup-for-720-mw-nuclear-smr-project-as-more-cities-withdraw-participation/ https://www.powermag.com/shakeup-for-720-mw-nuclear-smr-proj...

marchidesyt 6y ago

Let us recall that France is 100% nuclear. If we have 20 years to save ourselves from climate change it's hard to understand why environmentalists didn't embrace this proven solution decades ago.