8 ms·

Rising steel prices, interest rates could push NuScale Utah project to $100/MWh

ars 4y ago
With solar and wind being so competitive on price (both per MW and MWh) I don't understand why there's not more of it. Wouldn't investors build massive amount and undercut other plants? Is it simply because the capital costs are already sunk, and the running costs are still competitive? $100 for this is really bad, other energy sources are 1/3 of this. To me this spells the end of this project.
- BuffaloBagel 4y ago
  Dispatchable energy sir.
  - kragen 4y ago
    conventional nuclear isn't dispatchable ramp times are measured not in hours but in days
    - wyaeld 4y ago
      Completely false Modern LWR reactors ramp at around 5% per minute. France & Germany use them for Load following https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuclear_power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc... Conventional nuclear is vastly more dispatchable than other fuel types
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        When capex costs more than other technologies plus storage, and it reduces your neutron economy and thus the life of your fuel it's just curtailment with extra steps.
      - pydry 4y ago
        Physically they can ramp down to 50% but generation is pretty much a sunk cost at that point so it makes the bad economics even worse. That would mean that you are paying of the order of $240/MWh instead of $120/MWh. For comparison solar/wind are about $30-40. Levelizing with pumped storage pushes that up to $60-$70. IIRC France and Germany almost exclusively use gas for load following. Even at current prices it's vastly cheaper than using a NPP to do it.
    - robocat 4y ago
      Incorrect. NuScale appears to be designed to be dispatchable - for example here is a simulated load-following curve during a day: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-NuScale-module-load-following-to-compensate-for-generation-from-the-Horse_fig4_295114246 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-NuScale-modul... From: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295114246_Integrating_nuclear_and_renewables https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295114246_Integrati... The NuScale plant incorporates unique features that enhance its ability to load follow, either due to changes in electricity demand or variable generation by renewable sources on the grid. This is accomplished through a combination of the small unit capacity of a NuScale module (50 MWe gross) and a multi-module approach to the plant design. This design strategy provides a uniquely scalable plant and gives the plant owner considerable flexibility in both the build-out of the plant and also its operation, including for load-following. The key power management options of the NuScale plant for load-following operations, designated NuFollow™, include the following: • Taking one or more modules offline for extended periods of low grid demand or sustained wind output, • Maneuvering reactor power for one or more modules during intermediate periods to compensate for hourly changes in demand or wind generation, or • Bypassing the module’s steam turbine directly to the condenser for rapid responses to load or wind generation variations. One problem is that the US regulatory agency doesn’t like load-following - apparently only one nuclear reactor in the states does it. It is common in European countries to do some load-following on time periods of hours to 2 days (although like all generation technologies, there are limitations and constraints). A section about France on the topic: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx#ECSArticleLink5 https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
      - kragen 4y ago
        thank you for the update, this does seem to be a real difference between nuscale and conventional nuclear
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        If you're paying $80/MWh for captial and fixed O&M and $20/MWh for fuel and variable O&M, then you're still payiny 80% for the energy you don't produce. At that point it's effectively just curtailment.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Not sure if nuscale is wanting to do it in the short term, but many of the SMR concepts include a thermal storage component. This helps build industry experience with molten salts and would allow it to be actually dispatchable (rather than paying for energy in the form of capex and fixed O&M and then just not producing it)
  - epistasis 4y ago
    There are very few locations where renewables have high enough penetration for dispatchability to be the slightest concern for new additions. In locations with lots of renewables already, new projects are including storage, cost-effectively, which turns non-disparchable power into dispatchable. I think it's pretty clear that $58/MWh was never going to be achieved, and as with most nuclear projects, reality is 1.5x-3x of what the boosters promise. But even $58/MWh is not cheap enough to match the bids seen for dispatchable renewables+storage.
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      And, consider that the new projects won't be online for 5-10 years, during which time year-on-year improvements to cost of solar and wind will likely continue to decline 5-15% per year. Nuclear projects are turtles chasing rabbits at this point, and the rabbit has head start.
      - midasuni 4y ago
        Nuclear was a great solution back in the 90s and early 00s. Not effective now - the cost in both time and money means it’s not worthwhile.
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        Except where the part where the rabbit start saturating markets during peak production. Then further progress starts to crawl as less and less of the actual generation capacity is usable. At least not until a breakthrough makes energy storage feasible. The only countries that have successfully moved all or nearly-all of their electricity to decarbonized sources have done so primarily with dispatchable sources: hydroelectricity (E.g. Norway, Brazil, Albania, Uruguay) and with a mix of nuclear power filling in where hydro isn't enough (France, Sweden, Switzerland). All of those countries generate a single digit percentage of their electricity from fossil fuels. Nobody has decarbonized primarily through a source of decarboinzed energy source besides hydroelectricity or nuclear power.* Unless there's a storage breakthrough on the horizon, we'll still need to derive a significant chunk of our electricity generation from dispatchable sources. * One minor counterexample is geothermal power, but like hydro it's geographically dependent.
- beefield 4y ago
  > With solar and wind being so competitive on price (both per MW and MWh) I don't understand why there's not more of it. You need to be a bit more patient. solar / wind have been growing double digit percentages (from the top of my head something like 20-30%) p.a. now for some time. Just to compare, iPhone had never two consecutive full production years that would have had triple digit growth. And arguably increasing production capacity for energy infrastructure is more difficult than for a phone. So the 20-30% p.a. growth is likely the best we can have, and I'd argue even that is explosive. Given current growth rates, majority of electricity production should be solar/wind within the next decade or so.
  - Gibbon1 4y ago
    California appears to building the solar equivalent of a 1GW nuke per year with no end in sight. Total electricity currently from solar is 26%. Likely to increase to 40% in five years. Lest one think that's just California being hippy dippy, Texas is on a similar trajectory.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    If we stopped buying all those phones, we might need less of those solar panels. It’s amazing to think how much power usage must be controlled by Apple. Any power saving they achieve on iOS has a hundreds of millions of units in the wild.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      ...there's a decent amount of embodied carbon, but a phone uses about the same amount of energy you get from a 30cm solar panel, or about two kg of fossil fuel over a very very optimistic lifetime. Nothing it does when it's on will really alter its total lifetime emissions in any meaningful way.
      - lostlogin 4y ago
        My point wasn’t that an individual phone will do make much of a difference, it’s that a saving made by Apple and pushed out to phones has a multiplier that approaches a billion.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Renewables are limited in some areas by hostile legislation and in other areas by reaching saturation for non-dispatchable energy. There's also a paradoxical cost risk created by such rapid improvements because faster deployment and plummeting prices can mean projects started after yours could finish sooner and cheaper. In spite of this, PV is selling out as fast as it can be made, wind is being built as fast as it can be permitted, and demand is so high that prices decreases have slowed in spite of manufactuing continuing to get more efficient. Batteries are a bit of a bottleneck (flow batteries are lagging a bit, but getting there), but sodium ion is here next year and lithium capacity is increasing at record pace. Policy is kinda lacking in most areas for building out the necessary non-battery storage, but off river and blue field pumped hydro is picking up, and china is advancing the state of the art on concentrating solar (which is dispatchable over ~12-36 hours) and compressed air storage. Europe is also starting to build out thermal storage (which is dirt cheap in the most literal sense because it's made out of the sand that is worthless for other purposes).
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    That 150 wh/kg sodium ion going into mass production is going to be a revolution.
morninglight 4y ago
Maybe try decommissioning some of the old reactors that are beyond their safe lifetime and use the steel from them. Much of that steel cannot be used for conventional projects because it poses a radiation hazard. That should devalue it. https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-material-scrap-metal https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-material-scrap-metal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_scrap_metal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_scrap_metal
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Interesting concept. It reduces decomissioning costs and building costs. Would the extra handling precautions cost more than you saved though?
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  "That should devalue it." Only if the other party wants to sell.
  - morninglight 4y ago
    Reactors from nuclear subs might be a good place to start. Now we bury them for a period of at least 600 years. And there is plenty more from conventional nuclear power stations. https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/disposal-site-for-nuclear-submarine-reactors/ https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/disposal-site-for-nucle...
- ragebol 4y ago
  Interesting idea. Though I doubt working with(slightly?) radioactive steel during construction makes things cheaper. It cannot be used conventionally for a reason, it needs special handling I suppose.
  - myself248 4y ago
    There's a sliding scale of special handling, and of how unsuitable it is for other things, though. It's interesting to ponder whether there might be a sweet spot of "too radioactive to be reused as warehouse beams" but "foundry workers making a new reactor vessel out of it would only need minimal protection for the few days they'd be around it".
locallost 4y ago
And even that price is subsidized. > Hughes explained to the Hurricane City Power Board that the new cost projections take into account approximately 30% in savings through the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes billions in tax credits to support clean energy projects. Otherwise, the project cost could be $120/MWh, he said. And they don't say it explicitly, but I think it gets worse than that. It wouldn't be unusual for new technology, especially nuclear technology, to offer things at a below market price. It's basically a demo. > The Department of Energy in 2020 approved a multi-year cost share award of about $1.4 billion to help demonstrate NuScale reactors at Idaho National Laboratory.
Teknoman117 4y ago
Dumb question, but wouldn't rising steel prices and interest rates affect any large construction project? How are the prices of new construction of other energy sources affected by this?
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  At a guess, new wind would be affected about the same because it uses about the same amount of steel as a traditional large reactor (although you can and some projects do use other materials like concrete). Chromium prices would only effect the nuclear plants. PV has a completely different supply chain. Steel quantities for a racking system like PEG https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/11/14/peg-racking-system-survives-near-direct-120-mph-hurricane-hit-in-cuba/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/11/14/peg-racking-system-su... are minimal. The limitation is polysilicon (which it is riding fairly hard right now, but production is being increased rapidly). Silver is the only critical resource, but metallization improvements are keeping the inputs required flat in spite of mid 20s percent growth.
- jlarocco 4y ago
  Yeah, probably: > Webb said prices are rising for all energy projects. At their October meeting, Hurricane City Power Board members discussed other project price increases and whether $100/MWh would still be a good price for energy from the CFPP. Board Chair Mac Hall said he would be willing to pay the increased cost because of the guaranteed dispatchable power it would provide.
lolc 4y ago
The interest rates I can understand. But how are rising steel prices going to change estimates? I'd expect the cost of the steel to be less than one percent of the budget. Is this way off? Or are they just looking for excuses?
- dymk 4y ago
  What’s your prior for the cost of steel being only one percent of a major commercial construction project like this?
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Steel usage is on the order of 100,000t for a GW of nuclear reactor and a decent chunk is rebar rather than low alloy stainless. If we take it on the high end, that's about $200 million. Double it for finance costs and you're around half a billion. Stainless and heavy fabrication costs more, but that's not 'steel costs' per se. Over its lifetime a NPP including fuel and upkeep is on the order of 20 billion/GW. Might call it 5-10% at a stretch. Certainly not enough to double it. And if nuscale reactors are claiming to be much cheaper and less resource intensive then they're either lying about the steel costs being the cause, lying about hidden subsidies, or lying about using an order of magnitude more steel. Either way you probably don't want scam artists in charge of enriched uranium.
    - snapplebobapple 4y ago
      This is why we need to move away from pressurized water based reactors. Most of this material is in the shielding needed because the system is designed around keeping water at several hundred atmospheres pressure. Operating at atmospheric should dramatically reduce materials costs going forward (but still needs substantial research investment to get going and regulators that aren't so stuck in their ways)
renewiltord 4y ago
Why do construction projects not buy steel futures?
- varjag 4y ago
  Can't build structures out of paper derivatives.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    You have to transport the steel from the contract delivery point but the steel is real, not paper.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    No cardboard derivatives. No paper, no string. No sellotape. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
- jpgvm 4y ago
  Probably hubris. If you are forecasting such a big expense then yeah, you should probably hedge the upside risk with futures contracts.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    Perhaps there's no mechanism for a government project to do this without being exposed to becoming a speculative endeavour.
    - qeternity 4y ago
      It's called a forward (which is basically any vanilla contract for delivery). They shouldn't be trading financial instruments, but they should contract with a supplier for the tonnage needed, and that supplier then turns around and manages their risk, possibly with futures. This is all smoke though. The project would be way over budget, and input costs are being blamed.
benj111 4y ago
I don't get this. If the price per mwh has basically doubled. The price of steel must have taken a huge jump. Except if I try and get a price https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/steel https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/steel There seems to be a recent doubling, but the price is back down. So I guess these are just general cost overuns?
- epistasis 4y ago
  The entire point of moving towards the more expensive form factor of SMRs was to avoid cost overruns, and maybe even get some cost decreases in the future. I maintain hope that some of the other SMR attempts will not have the same ballooning costs problem of every single nuclear project that inspired them, but it's a hold based on the need for the tech, not a hope that could be backed with a rational reasoning. I fear that the entire nuclear industry is filled with charlatans, and nobody who isn't a charlatan would ever get funding to start working on a new reactor.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Luckily there has been an ever growing torrent of successful demos, new technologies and projects coming in on time and on budget (or before and below) from the renewable sector. There are still some missing pieces, and more policy support is needed; but more and more it's looking like completing the puzzle is possible without the charlatans, and it may even happen before 2 degrees.

ars 4y ago

With solar and wind being so competitive on price (both per MW and MWh) I don't understand why there's not more of it. Wouldn't investors build massive amount and undercut other plants? Is it simply because the capital costs are already sunk, and the running costs are still competitive? $100 for this is really bad, other energy sources are 1/3 of this. To me this spells the end of this project.

BuffaloBagel 4y ago
Dispatchable energy sir.
- kragen 4y ago
  conventional nuclear isn't dispatchable ramp times are measured not in hours but in days
  - wyaeld 4y ago
    Completely false Modern LWR reactors ramp at around 5% per minute. France & Germany use them for Load following https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuclear_power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc... Conventional nuclear is vastly more dispatchable than other fuel types
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      When capex costs more than other technologies plus storage, and it reduces your neutron economy and thus the life of your fuel it's just curtailment with extra steps.
    - pydry 4y ago
      Physically they can ramp down to 50% but generation is pretty much a sunk cost at that point so it makes the bad economics even worse. That would mean that you are paying of the order of $240/MWh instead of $120/MWh. For comparison solar/wind are about $30-40. Levelizing with pumped storage pushes that up to $60-$70. IIRC France and Germany almost exclusively use gas for load following. Even at current prices it's vastly cheaper than using a NPP to do it.
  - robocat 4y ago
    Incorrect. NuScale appears to be designed to be dispatchable - for example here is a simulated load-following curve during a day: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-NuScale-module-load-following-to-compensate-for-generation-from-the-Horse_fig4_295114246 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-NuScale-modul... From: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295114246_Integrating_nuclear_and_renewables https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295114246_Integrati... The NuScale plant incorporates unique features that enhance its ability to load follow, either due to changes in electricity demand or variable generation by renewable sources on the grid. This is accomplished through a combination of the small unit capacity of a NuScale module (50 MWe gross) and a multi-module approach to the plant design. This design strategy provides a uniquely scalable plant and gives the plant owner considerable flexibility in both the build-out of the plant and also its operation, including for load-following. The key power management options of the NuScale plant for load-following operations, designated NuFollow™, include the following: • Taking one or more modules offline for extended periods of low grid demand or sustained wind output, • Maneuvering reactor power for one or more modules during intermediate periods to compensate for hourly changes in demand or wind generation, or • Bypassing the module’s steam turbine directly to the condenser for rapid responses to load or wind generation variations. One problem is that the US regulatory agency doesn’t like load-following - apparently only one nuclear reactor in the states does it. It is common in European countries to do some load-following on time periods of hours to 2 days (although like all generation technologies, there are limitations and constraints). A section about France on the topic: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx#ECSArticleLink5 https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
    - kragen 4y ago
      thank you for the update, this does seem to be a real difference between nuscale and conventional nuclear
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      If you're paying $80/MWh for captial and fixed O&M and $20/MWh for fuel and variable O&M, then you're still payiny 80% for the energy you don't produce. At that point it's effectively just curtailment.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Not sure if nuscale is wanting to do it in the short term, but many of the SMR concepts include a thermal storage component. This helps build industry experience with molten salts and would allow it to be actually dispatchable (rather than paying for energy in the form of capex and fixed O&M and then just not producing it)
- epistasis 4y ago
  There are very few locations where renewables have high enough penetration for dispatchability to be the slightest concern for new additions. In locations with lots of renewables already, new projects are including storage, cost-effectively, which turns non-disparchable power into dispatchable. I think it's pretty clear that $58/MWh was never going to be achieved, and as with most nuclear projects, reality is 1.5x-3x of what the boosters promise. But even $58/MWh is not cheap enough to match the bids seen for dispatchable renewables+storage.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    And, consider that the new projects won't be online for 5-10 years, during which time year-on-year improvements to cost of solar and wind will likely continue to decline 5-15% per year. Nuclear projects are turtles chasing rabbits at this point, and the rabbit has head start.
    - midasuni 4y ago
      Nuclear was a great solution back in the 90s and early 00s. Not effective now - the cost in both time and money means it’s not worthwhile.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Except where the part where the rabbit start saturating markets during peak production. Then further progress starts to crawl as less and less of the actual generation capacity is usable. At least not until a breakthrough makes energy storage feasible. The only countries that have successfully moved all or nearly-all of their electricity to decarbonized sources have done so primarily with dispatchable sources: hydroelectricity (E.g. Norway, Brazil, Albania, Uruguay) and with a mix of nuclear power filling in where hydro isn't enough (France, Sweden, Switzerland). All of those countries generate a single digit percentage of their electricity from fossil fuels. Nobody has decarbonized primarily through a source of decarboinzed energy source besides hydroelectricity or nuclear power.* Unless there's a storage breakthrough on the horizon, we'll still need to derive a significant chunk of our electricity generation from dispatchable sources. * One minor counterexample is geothermal power, but like hydro it's geographically dependent.
beefield 4y ago
> With solar and wind being so competitive on price (both per MW and MWh) I don't understand why there's not more of it. You need to be a bit more patient. solar / wind have been growing double digit percentages (from the top of my head something like 20-30%) p.a. now for some time. Just to compare, iPhone had never two consecutive full production years that would have had triple digit growth. And arguably increasing production capacity for energy infrastructure is more difficult than for a phone. So the 20-30% p.a. growth is likely the best we can have, and I'd argue even that is explosive. Given current growth rates, majority of electricity production should be solar/wind within the next decade or so.
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  California appears to building the solar equivalent of a 1GW nuke per year with no end in sight. Total electricity currently from solar is 26%. Likely to increase to 40% in five years. Lest one think that's just California being hippy dippy, Texas is on a similar trajectory.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  If we stopped buying all those phones, we might need less of those solar panels. It’s amazing to think how much power usage must be controlled by Apple. Any power saving they achieve on iOS has a hundreds of millions of units in the wild.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    ...there's a decent amount of embodied carbon, but a phone uses about the same amount of energy you get from a 30cm solar panel, or about two kg of fossil fuel over a very very optimistic lifetime. Nothing it does when it's on will really alter its total lifetime emissions in any meaningful way.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      My point wasn’t that an individual phone will do make much of a difference, it’s that a saving made by Apple and pushed out to phones has a multiplier that approaches a billion.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Renewables are limited in some areas by hostile legislation and in other areas by reaching saturation for non-dispatchable energy. There's also a paradoxical cost risk created by such rapid improvements because faster deployment and plummeting prices can mean projects started after yours could finish sooner and cheaper. In spite of this, PV is selling out as fast as it can be made, wind is being built as fast as it can be permitted, and demand is so high that prices decreases have slowed in spite of manufactuing continuing to get more efficient. Batteries are a bit of a bottleneck (flow batteries are lagging a bit, but getting there), but sodium ion is here next year and lithium capacity is increasing at record pace. Policy is kinda lacking in most areas for building out the necessary non-battery storage, but off river and blue field pumped hydro is picking up, and china is advancing the state of the art on concentrating solar (which is dispatchable over ~12-36 hours) and compressed air storage. Europe is also starting to build out thermal storage (which is dirt cheap in the most literal sense because it's made out of the sand that is worthless for other purposes).
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  That 150 wh/kg sodium ion going into mass production is going to be a revolution.

morninglight 4y ago

Maybe try decommissioning some of the old reactors that are beyond their safe lifetime and use the steel from them. Much of that steel cannot be used for conventional projects because it poses a radiation hazard. That should devalue it. https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-material-scrap-metal https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-material-scrap-metal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_scrap_metal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_scrap_metal

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Interesting concept. It reduces decomissioning costs and building costs. Would the extra handling precautions cost more than you saved though?
KingOfCoders 4y ago
"That should devalue it." Only if the other party wants to sell.
- morninglight 4y ago
  Reactors from nuclear subs might be a good place to start. Now we bury them for a period of at least 600 years. And there is plenty more from conventional nuclear power stations. https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/disposal-site-for-nuclear-submarine-reactors/ https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/disposal-site-for-nucle...
ragebol 4y ago
Interesting idea. Though I doubt working with(slightly?) radioactive steel during construction makes things cheaper. It cannot be used conventionally for a reason, it needs special handling I suppose.
- myself248 4y ago
  There's a sliding scale of special handling, and of how unsuitable it is for other things, though. It's interesting to ponder whether there might be a sweet spot of "too radioactive to be reused as warehouse beams" but "foundry workers making a new reactor vessel out of it would only need minimal protection for the few days they'd be around it".

locallost 4y ago

And even that price is subsidized. > Hughes explained to the Hurricane City Power Board that the new cost projections take into account approximately 30% in savings through the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes billions in tax credits to support clean energy projects. Otherwise, the project cost could be $120/MWh, he said. And they don't say it explicitly, but I think it gets worse than that. It wouldn't be unusual for new technology, especially nuclear technology, to offer things at a below market price. It's basically a demo. > The Department of Energy in 2020 approved a multi-year cost share award of about $1.4 billion to help demonstrate NuScale reactors at Idaho National Laboratory.

Teknoman117 4y ago

Dumb question, but wouldn't rising steel prices and interest rates affect any large construction project? How are the prices of new construction of other energy sources affected by this?

Schroedingersat 4y ago
At a guess, new wind would be affected about the same because it uses about the same amount of steel as a traditional large reactor (although you can and some projects do use other materials like concrete). Chromium prices would only effect the nuclear plants. PV has a completely different supply chain. Steel quantities for a racking system like PEG https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/11/14/peg-racking-system-survives-near-direct-120-mph-hurricane-hit-in-cuba/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/11/14/peg-racking-system-su... are minimal. The limitation is polysilicon (which it is riding fairly hard right now, but production is being increased rapidly). Silver is the only critical resource, but metallization improvements are keeping the inputs required flat in spite of mid 20s percent growth.
jlarocco 4y ago
Yeah, probably: > Webb said prices are rising for all energy projects. At their October meeting, Hurricane City Power Board members discussed other project price increases and whether $100/MWh would still be a good price for energy from the CFPP. Board Chair Mac Hall said he would be willing to pay the increased cost because of the guaranteed dispatchable power it would provide.

lolc 4y ago

The interest rates I can understand. But how are rising steel prices going to change estimates? I'd expect the cost of the steel to be less than one percent of the budget. Is this way off? Or are they just looking for excuses?

dymk 4y ago
What’s your prior for the cost of steel being only one percent of a major commercial construction project like this?
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Steel usage is on the order of 100,000t for a GW of nuclear reactor and a decent chunk is rebar rather than low alloy stainless. If we take it on the high end, that's about $200 million. Double it for finance costs and you're around half a billion. Stainless and heavy fabrication costs more, but that's not 'steel costs' per se. Over its lifetime a NPP including fuel and upkeep is on the order of 20 billion/GW. Might call it 5-10% at a stretch. Certainly not enough to double it. And if nuscale reactors are claiming to be much cheaper and less resource intensive then they're either lying about the steel costs being the cause, lying about hidden subsidies, or lying about using an order of magnitude more steel. Either way you probably don't want scam artists in charge of enriched uranium.
  - snapplebobapple 4y ago
    This is why we need to move away from pressurized water based reactors. Most of this material is in the shielding needed because the system is designed around keeping water at several hundred atmospheres pressure. Operating at atmospheric should dramatically reduce materials costs going forward (but still needs substantial research investment to get going and regulators that aren't so stuck in their ways)

renewiltord 4y ago

Why do construction projects not buy steel futures?

varjag 4y ago
Can't build structures out of paper derivatives.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  You have to transport the steel from the contract delivery point but the steel is real, not paper.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  No cardboard derivatives. No paper, no string. No sellotape. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
jpgvm 4y ago
Probably hubris. If you are forecasting such a big expense then yeah, you should probably hedge the upside risk with futures contracts.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Perhaps there's no mechanism for a government project to do this without being exposed to becoming a speculative endeavour.
  - qeternity 4y ago
    It's called a forward (which is basically any vanilla contract for delivery). They shouldn't be trading financial instruments, but they should contract with a supplier for the tonnage needed, and that supplier then turns around and manages their risk, possibly with futures. This is all smoke though. The project would be way over budget, and input costs are being blamed.

benj111 4y ago

I don't get this. If the price per mwh has basically doubled. The price of steel must have taken a huge jump. Except if I try and get a price https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/steel https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/steel There seems to be a recent doubling, but the price is back down. So I guess these are just general cost overuns?

epistasis 4y ago
The entire point of moving towards the more expensive form factor of SMRs was to avoid cost overruns, and maybe even get some cost decreases in the future. I maintain hope that some of the other SMR attempts will not have the same ballooning costs problem of every single nuclear project that inspired them, but it's a hold based on the need for the tech, not a hope that could be backed with a rational reasoning. I fear that the entire nuclear industry is filled with charlatans, and nobody who isn't a charlatan would ever get funding to start working on a new reactor.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Luckily there has been an ever growing torrent of successful demos, new technologies and projects coming in on time and on budget (or before and below) from the renewable sector. There are still some missing pieces, and more policy support is needed; but more and more it's looking like completing the puzzle is possible without the charlatans, and it may even happen before 2 degrees.