16 ms·

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appe

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But, consider that in the same time period, 10 of this wind projects could be completed. On top of that, solar projects are also much faster. Look at the Solar Star solar installation which provides .5 gigawatts of power, started in 2013 and completed in 2015. So 10 of these could have been completed in the same time as the Finnish system. No, I'm not suggesting that Solar is a good option in Finland. And yes, it would be important to work on massive battery storage systems, to make these work. This just points out just how uneconomical nuclear power is. On top of that, with nuclear facilities coming under fire in Ukraine and Russia making (probably bluffing) threats against Finland, it really makes nuclear an unappealing option. Can someone point out why these projects are so attractive to so many people when it would appear that a combination of renewables appear to both be faster to bring on line and overall safer? Edit: forgot the links, Arkwright Summit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkwright_Summit_Wind_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkwright_Summit_Wind_Farm Solar Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star

mcronce 5y ago
Without significantly more information, it doesn't really point out nuclear being uneconomical. It points out artificial roadblocks, regulatory and otherwise, imposed on nuclear generation that aren't imposed on other forms of generation. Other forms of generation that require GHG-emitting backup generation.
jturpin 5y ago
Agreed, though solar tech has gotten a lot better and cheaper in the last 20 years, so it's not completely fair to compare. Power storage is still an issue, but this is getting better and better each year with the prices of lithium iron phosphate batteries coming way down.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Lithium batteries will not be used for utility-scale storage, beyond load-leveling. Overwhelmingly cheaper alternatives will be used instead.
standardUser 5y ago
It's a lack of imagination. People look at established systems that took generations to implement and take for granted all of the developments and revelations that emerged from that generations-long effort to make that system work the way it does today. Then they look at an emerging system, like renewable energy, and see only the flaws and shortcomings, completely forgetting that a historically-massive investment of time and money is the only way to make any new system feasible on that scale.
liketochill 5y ago
Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of the opex is in maintenance, staffing, safety and reliability, and that cost is low per MWH.
- bluejekyll 5y ago
  > All of the opex is in maintenance, staffing, safety and reliability Does this include the higher security needs around nuclear facilities? I left out the construction costs, the Arkwright Summit farm, $125 million. The Solar Star project was $2 billion. This Finnish Nuclear site appears to have cost $12 billion. That makes wind look really good, and solar at least on the same order (and still safer).
  - winkeltripel 5y ago
    There are a couple of things to consider. The solar and wind need to be overprovisioned, to feed the grid scale batteries to provide baseload. Those batteries are currently not cost effective, which is why there are very few such batteries in use. If you add in the price of battery, wind and solar look rather pricey. Without the batteries, they are helping us reduce the use of fossil fuel plants, but not helping shut them down. The other thing is the land. Solar and wind each need a substantial % of landmass to have 100% of our power come from those sources. The ongoing costs of running nuclear are also way higher than solar or wind, which matters.
    - markvdb 5y ago
      Look at Latvia. >45% hydro, plenty of space for wind, both on shore and off shore, and hardly any of that potential realised with only 2.2% active wind energy production. Significant public investment in wind energy announced to start construction in... 2026. That is a glacial pace in the face of an ecological and geopolitical crisis situation.
stefan_ 5y ago
While 23 years to build the thing are already bad, it now needs to operate continuously for at least some 30 years selling electricity at a price that is even today not competitive with renewables to make financial sense. Essentially, building a nuclear power plant in 2022 means you are betting we won't have workable storage for renewables by 2052.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Renewables are only competitive because you are not pricing in either storage or the cost of building and running fossil fuel plants as backups. Add that in and the equation looks substantially different.
  - Gwypaas 5y ago
    You can run power to gas and then burn the hydrogen and still come out ahead of nuclear plants today. They are completely irrelevant.
    - natmaka 5y ago
      Germany's new gas (methane...) powerplants are retrofitable in order to burn hydrogen. https://global.kawasaki.com/news_211209-2e.pdf https://global.kawasaki.com/news_211209-2e.pdf
- RF_Savage 5y ago
  Today, what are the alternatives? If you add in batteries with todays technology the nuclear plants are competituve with solar or wind. So the alternative is coal or natural gas plants. Which then have their own drawbacks. Solutions that are built today need to use technology available today. Nuclear is fine, especially when you are not buying the first reactor of its kind from a vendor who has never fully built a plant on its own. Areva got a tad too greedy and cut out the middleman in the form of doing 100% of the work themselves instead of the usual 30% and contracting out the rest. They ware not helped by the fameously strict Finnish regulatory authority (STUK).
fny 5y ago
In a word, reliability. Nuclear is /by far/ the most reliable energy source. Nuclear power plants produce maximum power 92.5% of the time. Compare that to other energy sources: - Geothermal: 74.3% - Nat gas: 56.6% - Hydropower: 41.5% - Coal: 40.2% - Wind: 35.4% - Solar: 24.9% Batteries are a joke. Consider the 409MW / 900MWh battery at Florida Power & Light: this is only enough to power 329,000 homes just over two hours. What happens after the juice runs out? In a day the RE Ginna Nuclear Plant in New York operates at 582 MW--in 24 hours thats 13,968MWh guaranteed! [3] That's powering over 329,000 or more homes without fear of outages. Battery systems in conjunction with renewables brings the capital cost per kwh of nuclear vs renewable to closer to 2:1 (6k $/kW vs 3k $/kW) too. So you're essentially getting 3x the reliability for 2x the cost when using nuclear and outages that exceed a few hours are a non issue. [4] [1]: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliab... [2]: https://www.energy-storage.news/worlds-biggest-solar-charged-battery-storage-system-unveiled-in-florida/ https://www.energy-storage.news/worlds-biggest-solar-charged... [3]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3 [4]: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capital_cost_AEO2020.pdf https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... page 28
- wbl 5y ago
  The other sources produce less because they can. Since nuclear has a high capital cost and low variable cost it bids low.
  - clusterfish 5y ago
    Coal and gas sure, but renewables are obviously dependent on weather. Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can". When there is significant oversupply of energy from solar, it gets sold for pennies on the dollar to neighbouring regions, and when the sun doesn't shine, you're sol.
    - chmod775 5y ago
      >Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can" Energy prices can be negative when there's not enough load but too much supply. Not every power source can be just switched off.
sigg3 5y ago
I've read that the startup process of building new or subsequent nuclear plants will be considerably shorter due to the groundwork for the Finnish reactor paving the way. Which seems to topple most of your argument. As for wind turbines on land, they require a lot more space for the same yield, space which is stolen or irreversibly destroyed for the local fauna. Here in Norway, wind turbines near settlements are also forced to run on diminished capacity at night because of the health problems people associate with the 24/7 humming and whoosh noises (not kidding).
thematrixturtle 5y ago
Olkiluoto 3 was the first-ever EPR to start construction back in 2005. It was supposed to go live in 2009, but basically everything that could have gone wrong did, which is why it was so massively delayed. Funnily enough, the 2nd and 3rd EPRs in China both opened before this one, taking "only" 9 years from start to production. They're also the world's largest reactors now.
- natmaka 5y ago
  Those reactors in China (at the Taishan powerplant) were completed at a (officially) 60% overcosts, and were 5 years late. One of them is shut down since mid-2021 after an incident (leak).
ilyich 5y ago
Area. To produce 1 gigawatt of power you need 1000 square kilometers of wind turbines or 300 sq km of solar elements or 3 sq km of nuclear power plants. How much land do you have in your country that you are ready to deforestate in order to build renewables? Predictability. Renewables depend on weather. They only work when the wind blows or the sun shines. Are you ready to be able to heat your house only when the weather forecast is good?
- bluejekyll 5y ago
  The wind farm linked above is installed in a forested area. The turbines are above the tree line, and didn't require a significant amount of deforestation. In addition to that, in CA at least, and I'm sure elsewhere, wind farms can still have farm land underneath, definitely grazing land. On top of that, some solar installations are actually compatible with some foods, here's one article on that: https://www.dw.com/en/farmers-reap-double-benefits-with-solar-power-in-fields/a-58284134 https://www.dw.com/en/farmers-reap-double-benefits-with-sola... Point being, land use doesn't need to be single purpose in your example. In terms of the weather, this is why it important to have balanced installations and associated battery storage.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Solar installation is compatible with many, even most food crops, most trivially pasture, and increases yield while cutting water need. There is absolutely no need for single-use solar or wind area, anywhere.
- natmaka 5y ago
  Area: offshore wind is by far the most promising renewable (excellent aggregated power and load factor). Predictability: spreading out production units, using a mix (wind, solar...) and storage are key. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...
Gatsky 5y ago
Renewables are fair-weather energy sources, both literally and geopolitically. Hopefully it never comes to that, but off-shore wind is a trivially easy target in a war. Solar too is not very defendable. Power plants are a bit better (in a sub-apocalypse war at least).
- natmaka 5y ago
  Renewables are more sparsely deployed (no real way to take them all in a quick sweep), and don't create risk whenever exposed to battles/missiles/... https://www.npr.org/2022/03/11/1085427380/ukraine-nuclear-power-plant-zaporizhzhia https://www.npr.org/2022/03/11/1085427380/ukraine-nuclear-po...
aqsalose 5y ago
Olkiluoto 3 suffered significant delays and cost overruns. My impressions, based on recollection I got reading the newspapers during these two decades, are: 1. Bad management of construction project, almost near corruption level stupidity. Many constructions tasks outsourced to contractors who outsourced them to contractors who outsourced them to contractors, making it easy to take "cost-saving" shortcuts and difficult to supervise. 2. Failure of corruption to speed things up: Finnish nuclear safety authorities are not easily bribed, so when issues with bad quality of welds, concrete, boiler valves and safety electronics were identified (all this from memory, these were separate incidents), the issues could not be smoothed over and ignored with well-placed thick envelopes. The authorities would demand the construction crew to tear stuff apart and do again, properly. And if it didn't pass, then again. And again. Most of the issues I have read about do not sound like "nuclear technology" failures, more about failures in building a big pressurized boiler power plant. The nuclear part comes in by authorities requiring high quality. They couldn't make good enough concrete bed on a first try, that isn't some super novel space technology. It mostly reminds me of similar kind of mismanagement that plagues many big construction projects run by big corps managed by suits. During same time frame city of Helsinki wasted amazing amount of money in a "automated metro car" subway upgrade project they bought from Siemens, which ultimately didn't work and had to be scrapped. (edit. City of Helsinki decided to "automate" city subway metro system in 2006, contract signed with Siemens in 2008, originally planned to be completed in 2011. Project was postponed several times and effectively scrapped in 2016. Tried googling most recent news, the lower district court had given judgement in 2021, parties likely to appeal.)
ck2 5y ago
What's their waste disposal plan? Apparently the way the USA does it is a nightmare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository#Opposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
- Maakuth 5y ago
  This is the company doing the disposal, they start the disposal operations in a few years: https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html The method is Swedish, they seem to have good pictures of it here: https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repository/our-methodology/ https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repositor...

mcronce 5y ago

Without significantly more information, it doesn't really point out nuclear being uneconomical. It points out artificial roadblocks, regulatory and otherwise, imposed on nuclear generation that aren't imposed on other forms of generation. Other forms of generation that require GHG-emitting backup generation.

jturpin 5y ago

Agreed, though solar tech has gotten a lot better and cheaper in the last 20 years, so it's not completely fair to compare. Power storage is still an issue, but this is getting better and better each year with the prices of lithium iron phosphate batteries coming way down.

ncmncm 5y ago
Lithium batteries will not be used for utility-scale storage, beyond load-leveling. Overwhelmingly cheaper alternatives will be used instead.

standardUser 5y ago

It's a lack of imagination. People look at established systems that took generations to implement and take for granted all of the developments and revelations that emerged from that generations-long effort to make that system work the way it does today. Then they look at an emerging system, like renewable energy, and see only the flaws and shortcomings, completely forgetting that a historically-massive investment of time and money is the only way to make any new system feasible on that scale.

liketochill 5y ago

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of the opex is in maintenance, staffing, safety and reliability, and that cost is low per MWH.

bluejekyll 5y ago
> All of the opex is in maintenance, staffing, safety and reliability Does this include the higher security needs around nuclear facilities? I left out the construction costs, the Arkwright Summit farm, $125 million. The Solar Star project was $2 billion. This Finnish Nuclear site appears to have cost $12 billion. That makes wind look really good, and solar at least on the same order (and still safer).
- winkeltripel 5y ago
  There are a couple of things to consider. The solar and wind need to be overprovisioned, to feed the grid scale batteries to provide baseload. Those batteries are currently not cost effective, which is why there are very few such batteries in use. If you add in the price of battery, wind and solar look rather pricey. Without the batteries, they are helping us reduce the use of fossil fuel plants, but not helping shut them down. The other thing is the land. Solar and wind each need a substantial % of landmass to have 100% of our power come from those sources. The ongoing costs of running nuclear are also way higher than solar or wind, which matters.
  - markvdb 5y ago
    Look at Latvia. >45% hydro, plenty of space for wind, both on shore and off shore, and hardly any of that potential realised with only 2.2% active wind energy production. Significant public investment in wind energy announced to start construction in... 2026. That is a glacial pace in the face of an ecological and geopolitical crisis situation.

stefan_ 5y ago

While 23 years to build the thing are already bad, it now needs to operate continuously for at least some 30 years selling electricity at a price that is even today not competitive with renewables to make financial sense. Essentially, building a nuclear power plant in 2022 means you are betting we won't have workable storage for renewables by 2052.

zdragnar 5y ago
Renewables are only competitive because you are not pricing in either storage or the cost of building and running fossil fuel plants as backups. Add that in and the equation looks substantially different.
- Gwypaas 5y ago
  You can run power to gas and then burn the hydrogen and still come out ahead of nuclear plants today. They are completely irrelevant.
  - natmaka 5y ago
    Germany's new gas (methane...) powerplants are retrofitable in order to burn hydrogen. https://global.kawasaki.com/news_211209-2e.pdf https://global.kawasaki.com/news_211209-2e.pdf
RF_Savage 5y ago
Today, what are the alternatives? If you add in batteries with todays technology the nuclear plants are competituve with solar or wind. So the alternative is coal or natural gas plants. Which then have their own drawbacks. Solutions that are built today need to use technology available today. Nuclear is fine, especially when you are not buying the first reactor of its kind from a vendor who has never fully built a plant on its own. Areva got a tad too greedy and cut out the middleman in the form of doing 100% of the work themselves instead of the usual 30% and contracting out the rest. They ware not helped by the fameously strict Finnish regulatory authority (STUK).

fny 5y ago

In a word, reliability. Nuclear is /by far/ the most reliable energy source. Nuclear power plants produce maximum power 92.5% of the time. Compare that to other energy sources: - Geothermal: 74.3% - Nat gas: 56.6% - Hydropower: 41.5% - Coal: 40.2% - Wind: 35.4% - Solar: 24.9% Batteries are a joke. Consider the 409MW / 900MWh battery at Florida Power & Light: this is only enough to power 329,000 homes just over two hours. What happens after the juice runs out? In a day the RE Ginna Nuclear Plant in New York operates at 582 MW--in 24 hours thats 13,968MWh guaranteed! [3] That's powering over 329,000 or more homes without fear of outages. Battery systems in conjunction with renewables brings the capital cost per kwh of nuclear vs renewable to closer to 2:1 (6k $/kW vs 3k $/kW) too. So you're essentially getting 3x the reliability for 2x the cost when using nuclear and outages that exceed a few hours are a non issue. [4] [1]: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliab... [2]: https://www.energy-storage.news/worlds-biggest-solar-charged-battery-storage-system-unveiled-in-florida/ https://www.energy-storage.news/worlds-biggest-solar-charged... [3]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3 [4]: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capital_cost_AEO2020.pdf https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... page 28

wbl 5y ago
The other sources produce less because they can. Since nuclear has a high capital cost and low variable cost it bids low.
- clusterfish 5y ago
  Coal and gas sure, but renewables are obviously dependent on weather. Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can". When there is significant oversupply of energy from solar, it gets sold for pennies on the dollar to neighbouring regions, and when the sun doesn't shine, you're sol.
  - chmod775 5y ago
    >Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can" Energy prices can be negative when there's not enough load but too much supply. Not every power source can be just switched off.

sigg3 5y ago

I've read that the startup process of building new or subsequent nuclear plants will be considerably shorter due to the groundwork for the Finnish reactor paving the way. Which seems to topple most of your argument. As for wind turbines on land, they require a lot more space for the same yield, space which is stolen or irreversibly destroyed for the local fauna. Here in Norway, wind turbines near settlements are also forced to run on diminished capacity at night because of the health problems people associate with the 24/7 humming and whoosh noises (not kidding).

thematrixturtle 5y ago

Olkiluoto 3 was the first-ever EPR to start construction back in 2005. It was supposed to go live in 2009, but basically everything that could have gone wrong did, which is why it was so massively delayed. Funnily enough, the 2nd and 3rd EPRs in China both opened before this one, taking "only" 9 years from start to production. They're also the world's largest reactors now.

natmaka 5y ago
Those reactors in China (at the Taishan powerplant) were completed at a (officially) 60% overcosts, and were 5 years late. One of them is shut down since mid-2021 after an incident (leak).

ilyich 5y ago

Area. To produce 1 gigawatt of power you need 1000 square kilometers of wind turbines or 300 sq km of solar elements or 3 sq km of nuclear power plants. How much land do you have in your country that you are ready to deforestate in order to build renewables? Predictability. Renewables depend on weather. They only work when the wind blows or the sun shines. Are you ready to be able to heat your house only when the weather forecast is good?

bluejekyll 5y ago
The wind farm linked above is installed in a forested area. The turbines are above the tree line, and didn't require a significant amount of deforestation. In addition to that, in CA at least, and I'm sure elsewhere, wind farms can still have farm land underneath, definitely grazing land. On top of that, some solar installations are actually compatible with some foods, here's one article on that: https://www.dw.com/en/farmers-reap-double-benefits-with-solar-power-in-fields/a-58284134 https://www.dw.com/en/farmers-reap-double-benefits-with-sola... Point being, land use doesn't need to be single purpose in your example. In terms of the weather, this is why it important to have balanced installations and associated battery storage.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Solar installation is compatible with many, even most food crops, most trivially pasture, and increases yield while cutting water need. There is absolutely no need for single-use solar or wind area, anywhere.
natmaka 5y ago
Area: offshore wind is by far the most promising renewable (excellent aggregated power and load factor). Predictability: spreading out production units, using a mix (wind, solar...) and storage are key. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

Gatsky 5y ago

Renewables are fair-weather energy sources, both literally and geopolitically. Hopefully it never comes to that, but off-shore wind is a trivially easy target in a war. Solar too is not very defendable. Power plants are a bit better (in a sub-apocalypse war at least).

natmaka 5y ago
Renewables are more sparsely deployed (no real way to take them all in a quick sweep), and don't create risk whenever exposed to battles/missiles/... https://www.npr.org/2022/03/11/1085427380/ukraine-nuclear-power-plant-zaporizhzhia https://www.npr.org/2022/03/11/1085427380/ukraine-nuclear-po...

aqsalose 5y ago

Olkiluoto 3 suffered significant delays and cost overruns. My impressions, based on recollection I got reading the newspapers during these two decades, are: 1. Bad management of construction project, almost near corruption level stupidity. Many constructions tasks outsourced to contractors who outsourced them to contractors who outsourced them to contractors, making it easy to take "cost-saving" shortcuts and difficult to supervise. 2. Failure of corruption to speed things up: Finnish nuclear safety authorities are not easily bribed, so when issues with bad quality of welds, concrete, boiler valves and safety electronics were identified (all this from memory, these were separate incidents), the issues could not be smoothed over and ignored with well-placed thick envelopes. The authorities would demand the construction crew to tear stuff apart and do again, properly. And if it didn't pass, then again. And again. Most of the issues I have read about do not sound like "nuclear technology" failures, more about failures in building a big pressurized boiler power plant. The nuclear part comes in by authorities requiring high quality. They couldn't make good enough concrete bed on a first try, that isn't some super novel space technology. It mostly reminds me of similar kind of mismanagement that plagues many big construction projects run by big corps managed by suits. During same time frame city of Helsinki wasted amazing amount of money in a "automated metro car" subway upgrade project they bought from Siemens, which ultimately didn't work and had to be scrapped. (edit. City of Helsinki decided to "automate" city subway metro system in 2006, contract signed with Siemens in 2008, originally planned to be completed in 2011. Project was postponed several times and effectively scrapped in 2016. Tried googling most recent news, the lower district court had given judgement in 2021, parties likely to appeal.)

ck2 5y ago

What's their waste disposal plan? Apparently the way the USA does it is a nightmare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository#Opposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

Maakuth 5y ago
This is the company doing the disposal, they start the disposal operations in a few years: https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html The method is Swedish, they seem to have good pictures of it here: https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repository/our-methodology/ https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repositor...