4 ms·

The mechanisms used to drive up nuke construction cost are well studied, but those don't touch on the motivation: corruption and graft. Once construction is in

by ncmncm 4y ago

The mechanisms used to drive up nuke construction cost are well studied, but those don't touch on the motivation: corruption and graft. Once construction is in full swing, a firehose of money begins to pour in. Completing the project on time and budget would cut off that influx. Nobody actually involved wants that ever to happen. (Anyway, not until the kids graduate college.) So, ways are found to extend the project and drive up cost. Many of these are baked in at the start: any huge public-works project needs buy-in from numerous gatekeepers, each of whom demands something in exchange, a piece of the action. So, even the originally estimated cost has been inflated on their behalf. We see the same for urban tunnels and, often, bridges, and always in military procurement and, lately, manned spaceflight. Solar and wind farm projects have been relatively free of such activity, so far. Partly this is because expected cost is easy to estimate: $X per unit, times Y units; and people involved might be more altruistic. But no doubt ways will be found, in time, to get hooks into those, maybe as installations get more complicated, e.g. stirring in storage and transmission. The main thing enabling all this is that the corruption channels have been made wholly legal. There is no one to indict. When the nuke project is finally cancelled after $billions in overruns, nobody ever gets any of the money back.

f0e4c2f7 4y ago
I find this topic to be interesting and important. Any reccomended reading further detailing it, suggestions on fixing it, or stories about countries that have done better or worse with this problem? The book The Power Broker by Robert Caro talks about this subject a little in an indirect way.
- TheDudeMan 4y ago
  It's very easy to fix: Produce tiny reactors on an assembly line.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    That is part of why there will be no market for them. The main reason, though, is that their operating cost is way too high to compete in a fair market. All existing reactors have relied on having the fix in: heavily subsidized or ratepayers compelled to pay above market rates, most usually both.
credit_guy 4y ago
Nice conspiracy theory there. But take any large corporation, and it will always prefer a long string of successful contracts to a single unsuccessful but bloated one. If NuScale sells thousands of their Small Modular Reactors, they become the Tesla of nuclear energy - a trillion dollar company. If they start playing the game of milking a perpetually delayed project, they'll be lucky if they milk half a billion dollars. And by the way, they have already spent half a billion dollars to get their reactor approved by the NRC [1]. [1] https://www.nuscalepower.com/newsletter/nucleus-fall-2020/program-development-update https://www.nuscalepower.com/newsletter/nucleus-fall-2020/pr...
- ncmncm 4y ago
  You miss that it cannot be a conspiracy if it is wholly legal. Any public works projects will not be driven by NS, but by whoever is pulling together the budget for the project. There is no doubt that NS wants to make a lot of reactors, fast. On any reactor, or any public works, project, there are always people who want to deliver. But they are not commonly in the driver seat. Anyway, even if an NS project did deliver on time and on budget, its power would find no buyers at an honest price it could offer. So, the only way it could succeed is in a captive market. Even neglecting their absurd capex, nuke opex cannot compete against renewables' near zero opex. Nukes' steam turbine maintenance cost alone exceeds renewables' opex. Nukes' indemnity insurance, always 100% subsidized by government, alone exceeds renewables' opex. Nukes' fuel handling expense (mining, refining, packing, storing, disposing) alone exceeds renewables' opex. And, nukes' decommissioning cost alone exceeds renewables' whole capex. Thus, nukes can never compete in a non-captive market. Every nuke ever fielded, anywhere in the world, has relied on subsidy and coercion. Renewables are radically cheaper than anything else nukes have ever faced, and nukes were not honestly competitive even with the old stuff.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
With 20/20 hindsight you could alternatively look at the situation from the point of view that non-nuclear plants have their own special financial advantage and delay-avoidance mechanism under construction. Remember TAEdison was involved with the earliest power plants, his type was no longer in control by the time nuclear came along. Electrification grew from a small business to a less-efficient but still money-making bureaucracy, nuclear augmentation started out as intricate bureaucracy to begin with. And "grew" from there, somewhat in response to "economies of scale". But the bigger the bureaucracy, the less efficient and that is supposed to be made up for by overcompensating advantages in other areas. This is hard to do and the delicate balance can be easily lost and then you get the overcompensating disadvantage of a money pit at scale where you can only slow or stop the deepening from there. Then there's the "big-ticket item" effect. The most persuasive salespeople sell the biggest-ticket items. Items. Since it's supposed to be good enough that you only need to sell one (if you can), and you rake in the bucks. This sets the scenario and the most persuasive suppliers and participants are simply all attracted to the huge pile of money that you don't normally get a shot at every year. Most of the players are the ones who have specialized as bureaucracies selling to other bureaucracies, usually government/miltary organizations funded by taxpayers who routinely are called upon to fund overruns. A lot of them are like middlemen that can not actually make money or go forward without the overruns for decades now, and when it's a shareholder project instead of a government project the shareholders may not really be ready for this. Anyway one time I bought some surplus stainless pressure tubing left over from a nuclear project. Every tube was hand engraved with a few tracking numbers which I expect were traceable to reference paperwork issued somewhere which probably did weigh as much as the tube itself. This was laboratory size tubing which exceeds the burst rating far in excess compared to larger diameters of the same material. However if pressures were ever to approach this extreme, the engraving itself would lead to premature failure and less predictable too. But if it blew up at least you'd know whose fault it was.

by ncmncm 4y ago

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

I find this topic to be interesting and important. Any reccomended reading further detailing it, suggestions on fixing it, or stories about countries that have done better or worse with this problem? The book The Power Broker by Robert Caro talks about this subject a little in an indirect way.

TheDudeMan 4y ago
It's very easy to fix: Produce tiny reactors on an assembly line.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  That is part of why there will be no market for them. The main reason, though, is that their operating cost is way too high to compete in a fair market. All existing reactors have relied on having the fix in: heavily subsidized or ratepayers compelled to pay above market rates, most usually both.

credit_guy 4y ago

Nice conspiracy theory there. But take any large corporation, and it will always prefer a long string of successful contracts to a single unsuccessful but bloated one. If NuScale sells thousands of their Small Modular Reactors, they become the Tesla of nuclear energy - a trillion dollar company. If they start playing the game of milking a perpetually delayed project, they'll be lucky if they milk half a billion dollars. And by the way, they have already spent half a billion dollars to get their reactor approved by the NRC [1]. [1] https://www.nuscalepower.com/newsletter/nucleus-fall-2020/program-development-update https://www.nuscalepower.com/newsletter/nucleus-fall-2020/pr...

ncmncm 4y ago
You miss that it cannot be a conspiracy if it is wholly legal. Any public works projects will not be driven by NS, but by whoever is pulling together the budget for the project. There is no doubt that NS wants to make a lot of reactors, fast. On any reactor, or any public works, project, there are always people who want to deliver. But they are not commonly in the driver seat. Anyway, even if an NS project did deliver on time and on budget, its power would find no buyers at an honest price it could offer. So, the only way it could succeed is in a captive market. Even neglecting their absurd capex, nuke opex cannot compete against renewables' near zero opex. Nukes' steam turbine maintenance cost alone exceeds renewables' opex. Nukes' indemnity insurance, always 100% subsidized by government, alone exceeds renewables' opex. Nukes' fuel handling expense (mining, refining, packing, storing, disposing) alone exceeds renewables' opex. And, nukes' decommissioning cost alone exceeds renewables' whole capex. Thus, nukes can never compete in a non-captive market. Every nuke ever fielded, anywhere in the world, has relied on subsidy and coercion. Renewables are radically cheaper than anything else nukes have ever faced, and nukes were not honestly competitive even with the old stuff.

fuzzfactor 4y ago

With 20/20 hindsight you could alternatively look at the situation from the point of view that non-nuclear plants have their own special financial advantage and delay-avoidance mechanism under construction. Remember TAEdison was involved with the earliest power plants, his type was no longer in control by the time nuclear came along. Electrification grew from a small business to a less-efficient but still money-making bureaucracy, nuclear augmentation started out as intricate bureaucracy to begin with. And "grew" from there, somewhat in response to "economies of scale". But the bigger the bureaucracy, the less efficient and that is supposed to be made up for by overcompensating advantages in other areas. This is hard to do and the delicate balance can be easily lost and then you get the overcompensating disadvantage of a money pit at scale where you can only slow or stop the deepening from there. Then there's the "big-ticket item" effect. The most persuasive salespeople sell the biggest-ticket items. Items. Since it's supposed to be good enough that you only need to sell one (if you can), and you rake in the bucks. This sets the scenario and the most persuasive suppliers and participants are simply all attracted to the huge pile of money that you don't normally get a shot at every year. Most of the players are the ones who have specialized as bureaucracies selling to other bureaucracies, usually government/miltary organizations funded by taxpayers who routinely are called upon to fund overruns. A lot of them are like middlemen that can not actually make money or go forward without the overruns for decades now, and when it's a shareholder project instead of a government project the shareholders may not really be ready for this. Anyway one time I bought some surplus stainless pressure tubing left over from a nuclear project. Every tube was hand engraved with a few tracking numbers which I expect were traceable to reference paperwork issued somewhere which probably did weigh as much as the tube itself. This was laboratory size tubing which exceeds the burst rating far in excess compared to larger diameters of the same material. However if pressures were ever to approach this extreme, the engraving itself would lead to premature failure and less predictable too. But if it blew up at least you'd know whose fault it was.