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Just four new nuclear power plants for every existing plant is still a lot of plants. There are 93 active reactors in the USA today. That means we need to buil

Just four new nuclear power plants for every existing plant is still a lot of plants. There are 93 active reactors in the USA today. That means we need to build between 350 to 400 more reactors. There are currently only 2 new reactors under construction and 11 more planned (6 of these are NuScale modes with only 77 MW Capacity). The last reactor to open was at the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee in 2016, and before that 1996 in the same plant. Both of these reactors started construction in the 1970s. If we “just” need 350-400 more, it is gonna take us ages to get there.

Manuel_D 5y ago
Building nuclear plants at the same rate as we did in the 1970s would get us there in 3 decades. You write as though this is some Herculean task, but if the US didn't reduce the pace of nuclear construction in the 1980s we would have had a decarbonized grid by 2000. It's not just hypothetically possible, this pace of nuclear construction has historical precedent. By comparison, nobody has any realistic plans to decarbonize fully through renewables. The plan is to burn gas for ~40% of our electricity when intermittent sources aren't producing, and cross our fingers while we hope for a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage. Plans to decarbonize through renewables assumes that hydrogen storage, thermal batteries, or something else will provide effectively free energy storage.
- runarberg 5y ago
  It is not fair to extrapolate the building speed of the 1970s to today. Especially not with nuclear reactors. We don’t build things like in the 70s anymore. There are safety and environmental standards which weren’t being observed back then. And that’s a good thing. It is not a coincidence that things slowed down in the 80s. The 3 mile island partial meltdown happened in 1979 and it left a mark. If we would still be building and running our reactor like we did back then, but had 5 times more reactors to maintain, we can assume that the probability of a full meltdown and a major nuclear accident would be far higher. Chernobyl serves as a reminder of what can happen if safety standards are not adequate. The labor and logistics situation is also completely different from today then it was in the 70s. Today’s megaprojects tend to go way over budget and suffer significant delays. Land acquisition is more complicated (and again that is a good thing as many building project back then tended to displace a lot of minority residents) and a much smaller proportion of our labor pool are construction engineers. This leads to a longer and more expensive building process. As an example the only two reactors currently under construction have gone at least $10 billion over budget and are 6-7 years behind schedule. And these are reactors in the existing Plant Vogtle in Georgie. I imagine a whole new power plant would suffer even worse logistics problems. > Plans to decarbonize through renewables assumes that hydrogen storage, thermal batteries, or something else will provide effectively free energy storage. This is only partially true. Plans also include a significantly more efficient energy usage. People are pressuring governments to significantly increase investments in green infrastructure. This includes more robust energy grid, electrifying railways and ferry terminals, increased building standards for efficient power usage and retrofitting old buildings to similar standards. We don’t need to replace carbon power 1:1 if we patch up the inefficiencies of our current energy use. There are also hopes for better battery technology and carbon capture. A carbon capturing gas burning power plant is not an unrealistic advancement, nor is solid state and molten salt batteries (all of which exist today at varying levels of economic feasibility; none less feasible then new new nuclear). Meaning that we can bridge that ~40% without emitting more greenhouse gasses and without new nuclear.
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    Three mile island was due to a pressure valve failure, not a design flaw in the pressure vessel, secondary storage, or steam generators - the components of a reactor that form most of the cost of construction. And the reactor meltdown was contained. The safety standards held. I'm not sure how people try and spin this into evidence that the reactors were unsafe. You're correct that the 1970s construction isn't the same as modern construction though. During the 1970s, series of the same reactor designs were built. As opposed to most modern construction, which are typically the only reactors of a given kind built in a given country. Serial production is much cheaper than one-off production. Electrifying railways and other transportation is going to increase electricity usage, not decrease it. Only about a third of total energy consumption is electric, and most of the rest needs to be electrified as a prerequisite to decarbonization. So assuming that electricity consumption is going to decrease is a very dubious prospect.
    - runarberg 5y ago
      I didn’t bring up Three Mile Island to argue that enhanced safety standards back then would have prevented the partial meltdown. I brought it up to demonstrate that it caused a shift in policy which resulted in slow-down in reactor build-up. Three Mile Island happened despite the safety standards at the time. We don’t know the probability distribution of a nuclear meltdown but we can safely assume that it is a function of relevant safety standards and a total number of reactors. USA decided to mitigate the risk by both limiting the growth of new reactors and increasing the standard. This was a logical choice. If USA had done neither other accidents would be happening now with greater probability then it did in the 1970s.
      - Manuel_D 5y ago
        The point I'm making is that the increased cost of nuclear wasn't due to greater safety standards. It was due to lower rates of construction, losing the economics of scale of serial production.
        runarberg 5y ago

Manuel_D 5y ago

Building nuclear plants at the same rate as we did in the 1970s would get us there in 3 decades. You write as though this is some Herculean task, but if the US didn't reduce the pace of nuclear construction in the 1980s we would have had a decarbonized grid by 2000. It's not just hypothetically possible, this pace of nuclear construction has historical precedent. By comparison, nobody has any realistic plans to decarbonize fully through renewables. The plan is to burn gas for ~40% of our electricity when intermittent sources aren't producing, and cross our fingers while we hope for a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage. Plans to decarbonize through renewables assumes that hydrogen storage, thermal batteries, or something else will provide effectively free energy storage.

runarberg 5y ago
It is not fair to extrapolate the building speed of the 1970s to today. Especially not with nuclear reactors. We don’t build things like in the 70s anymore. There are safety and environmental standards which weren’t being observed back then. And that’s a good thing. It is not a coincidence that things slowed down in the 80s. The 3 mile island partial meltdown happened in 1979 and it left a mark. If we would still be building and running our reactor like we did back then, but had 5 times more reactors to maintain, we can assume that the probability of a full meltdown and a major nuclear accident would be far higher. Chernobyl serves as a reminder of what can happen if safety standards are not adequate. The labor and logistics situation is also completely different from today then it was in the 70s. Today’s megaprojects tend to go way over budget and suffer significant delays. Land acquisition is more complicated (and again that is a good thing as many building project back then tended to displace a lot of minority residents) and a much smaller proportion of our labor pool are construction engineers. This leads to a longer and more expensive building process. As an example the only two reactors currently under construction have gone at least $10 billion over budget and are 6-7 years behind schedule. And these are reactors in the existing Plant Vogtle in Georgie. I imagine a whole new power plant would suffer even worse logistics problems. > Plans to decarbonize through renewables assumes that hydrogen storage, thermal batteries, or something else will provide effectively free energy storage. This is only partially true. Plans also include a significantly more efficient energy usage. People are pressuring governments to significantly increase investments in green infrastructure. This includes more robust energy grid, electrifying railways and ferry terminals, increased building standards for efficient power usage and retrofitting old buildings to similar standards. We don’t need to replace carbon power 1:1 if we patch up the inefficiencies of our current energy use. There are also hopes for better battery technology and carbon capture. A carbon capturing gas burning power plant is not an unrealistic advancement, nor is solid state and molten salt batteries (all of which exist today at varying levels of economic feasibility; none less feasible then new new nuclear). Meaning that we can bridge that ~40% without emitting more greenhouse gasses and without new nuclear.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  Three mile island was due to a pressure valve failure, not a design flaw in the pressure vessel, secondary storage, or steam generators - the components of a reactor that form most of the cost of construction. And the reactor meltdown was contained. The safety standards held. I'm not sure how people try and spin this into evidence that the reactors were unsafe. You're correct that the 1970s construction isn't the same as modern construction though. During the 1970s, series of the same reactor designs were built. As opposed to most modern construction, which are typically the only reactors of a given kind built in a given country. Serial production is much cheaper than one-off production. Electrifying railways and other transportation is going to increase electricity usage, not decrease it. Only about a third of total energy consumption is electric, and most of the rest needs to be electrified as a prerequisite to decarbonization. So assuming that electricity consumption is going to decrease is a very dubious prospect.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    I didn’t bring up Three Mile Island to argue that enhanced safety standards back then would have prevented the partial meltdown. I brought it up to demonstrate that it caused a shift in policy which resulted in slow-down in reactor build-up. Three Mile Island happened despite the safety standards at the time. We don’t know the probability distribution of a nuclear meltdown but we can safely assume that it is a function of relevant safety standards and a total number of reactors. USA decided to mitigate the risk by both limiting the growth of new reactors and increasing the standard. This was a logical choice. If USA had done neither other accidents would be happening now with greater probability then it did in the 1970s.
    - Manuel_D 5y ago
      The point I'm making is that the increased cost of nuclear wasn't due to greater safety standards. It was due to lower rates of construction, losing the economics of scale of serial production.
      - runarberg 5y ago