5 ms·

Cost is high because there is no mass production. Every new nuclear plant starts from scratch. France built almost all their nuclear power plants in one decade

by vimy 5y ago

Cost is high because there is no mass production. Every new nuclear plant starts from scratch. France built almost all their nuclear power plants in one decade with tech from the seventies. They have 56 reactors. There’s no reason we couldn’t do it again.

baybal2 5y ago
> Cost is high because there is no mass production. Aside from reactor, everything else is shared with all other thermal powerplants. And think, "other thermal powerplants" also cost a ton to build, run, maintain, and decomission. Reactors themselves are the most expensive single part in the nuclear powerplant, but they are far from being the deciding factor. You cannot do much about the cost of reactors, with mass production, or without: - Without mass production, you have to forge one giant pressure vessel to extremely high standard - With mass production, you have to forge few dozen giant pressure vessels to extremely high standard The capital cost of the reactor is considerable, but take just any reactor technology, it will not make much difference to the fact of reactors being giant, expensive pressure vessels. Union's RBMK reactor design (one which blew up in Czernobil) tried to work around that by turning the pressure vessel into a huge pipe network, without much success: - Such piping network still needed to be fabricated to an extremely high standard - Such piping network still was gigantic - Such piping network still had to use super expensive superalloys - This giant pipe network was requiring even more inspection, and maintenance than one big boiler - This giant pipe network obviously leaked way more than one big boiler - Fixing the above leaks was taking enormous amounts of time, money, and manpower, and opportunity cost in lost generation hours
- Tarrosion 5y ago
  > Reactors themselves are the most expensive single part in the nuclear powerplant Do you have a recommended source for this? My impression was the vast majority of cost was outside the "nuclear island" of the plant.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    Yes, you are right, most of the cost is still outside of nuclear island. But the single costliest part would still be a reactor, despite it itself being a small part of the plant cost. Turbines may've been more expensive than reactors for gigawatt scale plants decades ago, but large steam turbines went down in price considerably exactly because of mass manufacturing.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Have you been able to find reliable pricing information for large steam turbines? I've been looking for quite a while and haven't managed to find a good source, especially for historical data.
      - baybal2 5y ago
        Unfortunately not except of "tens of megabucks" range
        kragen 5y ago
        Have you been able to find reliable pricing information about the turbines in the tens of megabucks range? Those are the ones that matter for the cost of grid power, I think.
- vimy 5y ago
  Mass production means experienced teams so no costly delays because of inexperience. It also means the flaws in the design have been corrected after a couple iterations. An EU wide team working to build 100 nuclear plants in Europe in 10 years will be a lot faster and cost a lot less than each country going at it alone with different designs. The problem isn’t technological or cost, it’s political. There is no political willingness to even try.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    > Mass production means experienced teams so no costly delays because of inexperience. How can experience change anything about the costs of forging a 10 meter tall piece of superalloy?
    - jsnell 5y ago
      Experience curves / Wright's law have been observed in a lot (most?) of manufacturing industries. Why would this be different?
      - baybal2 5y ago
        1. It will not do anything about material costs — reactor superalloy use will still be dwarfed by superalloy use by the rest of power generation industry, and marine 2. It will not do anything to the extremely expensive tooling needed to forge reactor vessels. If you want 10x production, you basically need 10x of these huge forging plants. 3. It will not do much about capital cost, as anything of this scale is never done for cash. 4. The extreme high quality standard needed can't be worked around. If you got a single cavity in the whole 10 meter piece, you scrap that whole 10 meter piece. This is unavoidable as the underlying physics. 5. The extreme level of defectoscopy, and manpower needed. It may be cheapened, and automated, but it wouldn't be much of a reduction of already small part of cost. 6. Logistic costs of the whole reactor vessel delivery can't go down by much either. Road closures are expensive. 7. Insurance cost for the reactor in transit... may go down, but it also is not much.
- tdeck 5y ago
  Isn't there a new generation of reactor designs that operate under low pressure?
  - baybal2 5y ago
    Lower pressure == bigger turbines
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
thinkcontext 5y ago
EPR was supposed to be the way forward for the EU and instead has been a costly disaster. There's no way dozens of those are getting built.
akamaka 5y ago
If you believe economies of scale are truly the key to success, then certainly wind, solar and battery power will be the long term winners. We can scale up to put solar panels on every roof in the world, and batteries in every car. Do you envisage a realistic scenario of having billions of tiny nuclear reactors in every home and car, to achieve similar economies of scale?

by vimy 5y ago

baybal2 5y ago

> Cost is high because there is no mass production. Aside from reactor, everything else is shared with all other thermal powerplants. And think, "other thermal powerplants" also cost a ton to build, run, maintain, and decomission. Reactors themselves are the most expensive single part in the nuclear powerplant, but they are far from being the deciding factor. You cannot do much about the cost of reactors, with mass production, or without: - Without mass production, you have to forge one giant pressure vessel to extremely high standard - With mass production, you have to forge few dozen giant pressure vessels to extremely high standard The capital cost of the reactor is considerable, but take just any reactor technology, it will not make much difference to the fact of reactors being giant, expensive pressure vessels. Union's RBMK reactor design (one which blew up in Czernobil) tried to work around that by turning the pressure vessel into a huge pipe network, without much success: - Such piping network still needed to be fabricated to an extremely high standard - Such piping network still was gigantic - Such piping network still had to use super expensive superalloys - This giant pipe network was requiring even more inspection, and maintenance than one big boiler - This giant pipe network obviously leaked way more than one big boiler - Fixing the above leaks was taking enormous amounts of time, money, and manpower, and opportunity cost in lost generation hours

Tarrosion 5y ago
> Reactors themselves are the most expensive single part in the nuclear powerplant Do you have a recommended source for this? My impression was the vast majority of cost was outside the "nuclear island" of the plant.
- baybal2 5y ago
  Yes, you are right, most of the cost is still outside of nuclear island. But the single costliest part would still be a reactor, despite it itself being a small part of the plant cost. Turbines may've been more expensive than reactors for gigawatt scale plants decades ago, but large steam turbines went down in price considerably exactly because of mass manufacturing.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Have you been able to find reliable pricing information for large steam turbines? I've been looking for quite a while and haven't managed to find a good source, especially for historical data.
    - baybal2 5y ago
      Unfortunately not except of "tens of megabucks" range
      - kragen 5y ago
        Have you been able to find reliable pricing information about the turbines in the tens of megabucks range? Those are the ones that matter for the cost of grid power, I think.
vimy 5y ago
Mass production means experienced teams so no costly delays because of inexperience. It also means the flaws in the design have been corrected after a couple iterations. An EU wide team working to build 100 nuclear plants in Europe in 10 years will be a lot faster and cost a lot less than each country going at it alone with different designs. The problem isn’t technological or cost, it’s political. There is no political willingness to even try.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > Mass production means experienced teams so no costly delays because of inexperience. How can experience change anything about the costs of forging a 10 meter tall piece of superalloy?
  - jsnell 5y ago
    Experience curves / Wright's law have been observed in a lot (most?) of manufacturing industries. Why would this be different?
    - baybal2 5y ago
      1. It will not do anything about material costs — reactor superalloy use will still be dwarfed by superalloy use by the rest of power generation industry, and marine 2. It will not do anything to the extremely expensive tooling needed to forge reactor vessels. If you want 10x production, you basically need 10x of these huge forging plants. 3. It will not do much about capital cost, as anything of this scale is never done for cash. 4. The extreme high quality standard needed can't be worked around. If you got a single cavity in the whole 10 meter piece, you scrap that whole 10 meter piece. This is unavoidable as the underlying physics. 5. The extreme level of defectoscopy, and manpower needed. It may be cheapened, and automated, but it wouldn't be much of a reduction of already small part of cost. 6. Logistic costs of the whole reactor vessel delivery can't go down by much either. Road closures are expensive. 7. Insurance cost for the reactor in transit... may go down, but it also is not much.
tdeck 5y ago
Isn't there a new generation of reactor designs that operate under low pressure?
- baybal2 5y ago
  Lower pressure == bigger turbines

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

thinkcontext 5y ago

EPR was supposed to be the way forward for the EU and instead has been a costly disaster. There's no way dozens of those are getting built.

akamaka 5y ago

If you believe economies of scale are truly the key to success, then certainly wind, solar and battery power will be the long term winners. We can scale up to put solar panels on every roof in the world, and batteries in every car. Do you envisage a realistic scenario of having billions of tiny nuclear reactors in every home and car, to achieve similar economies of scale?