4 ms·

Exelon was going to shut down the plants (instead of refueling them) if they didn't get subsidies from Illinois. They got subsidies from Ohio and New Jersey. Th

Exelon was going to shut down the plants (instead of refueling them) if they didn't get subsidies from Illinois. They got subsidies from Ohio and New Jersey. They didn't get subsidies from Pennsylvania and shut down TMI 1. If existing, fully paid off nuclear power plants are uneconomic to run without subsidies, that really undercuts the narrative the narrative that "construction is expensive and operation is cheap". And given that construction is so expensive, it ruins the economic case for building new nuclear plants (imho).

Gwypaas 5y ago
Operation is cheaper, but it is not cheap. The steam based thermodynamic cycle is very expensive compared to CCGT and even worse compared to gearbox into generator for wind power and solid state for solar. In this graph you have the marginal cost of traditional generation compared to total cost of new built renewables. https://www.lazard.com/media/451885/grphx_lcoe-07.png https://www.lazard.com/media/451885/grphx_lcoe-07.png From Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy 2021. https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
- hardolaf 5y ago
  Lazard does not include the cost of storage to provide baseload power from renewables so it's largely a lie.
  - Gwypaas 5y ago
    > While historically large power grids used unvarying power plants to meet the base load, there is no specific technical requirement for this to be so. The base load can equally well be met by the appropriate quantity of intermittent power sources and dispatchable generation.[3][4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load#Description It is a straight LCOE shoot out. Storage may help at the limits but is a pure loss from a system perspective.
  - rstuart4133 5y ago
    Nor does it include the cost of storage for nuclear. It's no accident Japan has the most pumped storage per unit of generation on the planet - it's because it has the most nuclear. Nuclear can't vary it's generation fast enough to match the daily variation in load. Admittedly you need much less storage (until a tsunami comes along). But pumped storage only costs around $1/watt. (The unit of $/watt rather than $/kWh because the dam is only a minor fraction of the cost of pumped storage, and it drops quadratically with size.) Storage + renewable generation still costs less than 1/2 of nuclear.
- VintageCool 5y ago
  I had believed that "nuclear construction is expensive, nuclear operation is cheap" got decades, and I spent a few months of pandemic downtime trying to figure out why that isn't true. I didn't find all that much to go on. Aside from a French Court of Audit report in 2012, this information seems to be mostly non-public? Anyway, it looks like the answer is staffing and maintenance. It seems to be common for nuclear power plants to employ 500 to 1000 people. Fessenheim in France employed 700 people at the time of its closure, plus an additional 600 to 2000 during maintenance (per Wikipedia). Meanwhile, nuclear seems to be very technically complicated with a bunch of weird Advanced Physics-y shit that can go wrong. Like, water pipes exploding because the nuclear radiation caused water molecules to split up by radiolysis and a design flaw allowed the hydrogen to collect somewhere. Or borated water eating through steel. And now that I type this, it occurs to me that you can't just turn off the plant for safe maintenance work -- inside the dome is always going to be irradiated and probably require hazmat suits. And, as you alluded to, nuclear plants use the steam based thermodynamic cycle but run cold because they have to maintain water in a liquid state while absorbing heat from the reactor. The power achievable from the Carnot cycle depends on the magnitude of the temperature difference: nuclear plants run at 300° C, coal plants about 570° C, and CCGT at 1000° C up to 1500° C. https://cbe.anu.edu.au/researchpapers/CEPR/DP687.pdf https://cbe.anu.edu.au/researchpapers/CEPR/DP687.pdf
  - VintageCool 5y ago
    s/got/for/
  - Gwypaas 5y ago
    Another publication to add to the list is this: "Study of Equipment Prices in the Power Sector" https://esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/TR122-09_GBL_Study_of_Equipment_Prices_in_the_Power_Sector.pdf https://esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/TR122-09_G... From table ES3 we can see that steam based plants are expensive in pure equipment costs. Which makes sense comparing a tiny gas turbine giving direct mechanical force. Then you can use the waste heat for steam generation if that makes sense in your location. Comparing this to coal and nuclear plants huge boiler and turbine setup with about the same output. Nuclear adding even more complexity of different loops and safety requirements. Haven't dug deeper into that report than the executive summary though.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

Gwypaas 5y ago

Operation is cheaper, but it is not cheap. The steam based thermodynamic cycle is very expensive compared to CCGT and even worse compared to gearbox into generator for wind power and solid state for solar. In this graph you have the marginal cost of traditional generation compared to total cost of new built renewables. https://www.lazard.com/media/451885/grphx_lcoe-07.png https://www.lazard.com/media/451885/grphx_lcoe-07.png From Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy 2021. https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

hardolaf 5y ago
Lazard does not include the cost of storage to provide baseload power from renewables so it's largely a lie.
- Gwypaas 5y ago
  > While historically large power grids used unvarying power plants to meet the base load, there is no specific technical requirement for this to be so. The base load can equally well be met by the appropriate quantity of intermittent power sources and dispatchable generation.[3][4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load#Description It is a straight LCOE shoot out. Storage may help at the limits but is a pure loss from a system perspective.
- rstuart4133 5y ago
  Nor does it include the cost of storage for nuclear. It's no accident Japan has the most pumped storage per unit of generation on the planet - it's because it has the most nuclear. Nuclear can't vary it's generation fast enough to match the daily variation in load. Admittedly you need much less storage (until a tsunami comes along). But pumped storage only costs around $1/watt. (The unit of $/watt rather than $/kWh because the dam is only a minor fraction of the cost of pumped storage, and it drops quadratically with size.) Storage + renewable generation still costs less than 1/2 of nuclear.
VintageCool 5y ago
I had believed that "nuclear construction is expensive, nuclear operation is cheap" got decades, and I spent a few months of pandemic downtime trying to figure out why that isn't true. I didn't find all that much to go on. Aside from a French Court of Audit report in 2012, this information seems to be mostly non-public? Anyway, it looks like the answer is staffing and maintenance. It seems to be common for nuclear power plants to employ 500 to 1000 people. Fessenheim in France employed 700 people at the time of its closure, plus an additional 600 to 2000 during maintenance (per Wikipedia). Meanwhile, nuclear seems to be very technically complicated with a bunch of weird Advanced Physics-y shit that can go wrong. Like, water pipes exploding because the nuclear radiation caused water molecules to split up by radiolysis and a design flaw allowed the hydrogen to collect somewhere. Or borated water eating through steel. And now that I type this, it occurs to me that you can't just turn off the plant for safe maintenance work -- inside the dome is always going to be irradiated and probably require hazmat suits. And, as you alluded to, nuclear plants use the steam based thermodynamic cycle but run cold because they have to maintain water in a liquid state while absorbing heat from the reactor. The power achievable from the Carnot cycle depends on the magnitude of the temperature difference: nuclear plants run at 300° C, coal plants about 570° C, and CCGT at 1000° C up to 1500° C. https://cbe.anu.edu.au/researchpapers/CEPR/DP687.pdf https://cbe.anu.edu.au/researchpapers/CEPR/DP687.pdf
- VintageCool 5y ago
  s/got/for/
- Gwypaas 5y ago
  Another publication to add to the list is this: "Study of Equipment Prices in the Power Sector" https://esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/TR122-09_GBL_Study_of_Equipment_Prices_in_the_Power_Sector.pdf https://esmap.org/sites/default/files/esmap-files/TR122-09_G... From table ES3 we can see that steam based plants are expensive in pure equipment costs. Which makes sense comparing a tiny gas turbine giving direct mechanical force. Then you can use the waste heat for steam generation if that makes sense in your location. Comparing this to coal and nuclear plants huge boiler and turbine setup with about the same output. Nuclear adding even more complexity of different loops and safety requirements. Haven't dug deeper into that report than the executive summary though.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]