28 ms·

“The French were able to hold their build times below 6 years up to about 1985” You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced. 8500 g

“The French were able to hold their build times below 6 years up to about 1985” You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced. 8500 global coal power plants produce 20% of emissions. Retiring coal power plants was a no-brainer decades ago. Instead we’ve been building more.

technicalbard 4y ago
The very first nuclear reactor went from idea to operating in 2 years. In the middle of WW2. The only reason nuclear projects take longer than other industrial projects is regulatory capture.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  During WW2 the US could build a ship in 39 days. Now it takes 10 years.
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    I know this point is made a lot but I’m not sure it’s that meaningful. WW2 boats were not the enormously complex network and sensor systems that today’s are. While, yeah, 10 years is extreme, but I don’t think 39 days is physically possible.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      The 39 day boats built in WW2 were probably more similar in complexity to a modern boat than a WW2 reactor is to a modern reactor.
      - eternityforest 4y ago
        I would be surprised if some of the systems were actually harder to work on back then. Old battleships always seemed to have insane amounts of wiring and cabling, because they used the nightmarish one signal per wire protocol in the pre digital age.
        remarkEon 4y ago
        > because they used the nightmarish one signal per wire protocol in the pre digital age. Can you say more about this? I find that kind of thing fascinating.
        eternityforest 4y ago
        https://softsolder.com/2017/11/05/battleship-wiring/ https://softsolder.com/2017/11/05/battleship-wiring/ They presumably used to have to run an individual wire for every. single. signal, or at most, they'd have extremely simple multiplexing. I have no idea what these cables do, but I'm glad I'm not the one repairing it. Not only is there physically a lot of wire, 90% of it looks to be going directly to something mechanical. I don't know how modern ships do it, but with civilian digital logic , you'd probably run a few redundant ethernet(Or fiber, or CAN) links to some kind of fan out box right near the switches or motors. Cars these days are very extreme about it, sometimes even running the entertainment system commands over the fairly critical CAN bus for some reason. If one of those cables went bad, spanning tree protocol would save you till you fix it, and probably tell you which cable broke and maybe even where. Mix them up, no problem, firmware knows what to do. Plus, everything goes through a computer, so you've got logging and all kinds of stuff to help spot issues, rather than the classic "Oh well, noise and intermittent connections, we live with it till it gets bad enough to be all the time". The only rats nest is right from the mechanical switch to your PLCish thing, but that's short enough to trace by eye. You might have zero concern about interference in cables, because they might be fiber. You won't have complicated color code schemes or wiring diagrams, or cut off wires that nobody knows where they go to anymore, you can just test it, because you don't have 50 thousand things to sift through. People argue about whether digital or analog is more reliable, but digital is definitely easier from a hardware perspective, the hard stuff is done in factories by robots. I'm sure the technicians had special training and it was a lot better than average civilian industrial uses of the pile o wires system, but I would think it would still be time consuming and not paralellizable, only so many people can fit around one of those giant bundles at once. I could also be vastly misinterpreting how modern ships are wired, I know some industrial setups today insist on home run wiring instead of condensing to digital.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        It was Liberty ships—slow, high-capacity, not especially durable cargo ships built as fast as possible, assembly-line style. The median construction time only got that low after the assembly line really got going and they were able to work out some kinks. It was over 200 days early on. Warships—none of the capitals ships, certainly—weren't built that fast. Not even the cheap-as-hell escort carriers we built tons and tons of, I don't think. Destroyers and little corvettes and other smalls screen and utility ships, maybe some of those weren't too far from 39-day construction times.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    And you think the safety record of those ships was the same as today?
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      A hell of a lot safer than a WW2 reactor!
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  Or because covering half of Europe to the level that in some places you, even to this day, have to measure the radiation levels of mushroom and wild game is irrelevant? https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-radiation-in-Europe-in-May-1986-as-a-result-of-the-Chernobyl-disaster_fig1_7080615 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-radiatio...
- pixl97 4y ago
  Well, and that the nuclear reactors back then commonly had terrible accidents and after Chernobyl (and TMI in a lessor manner) we realized that you can really screw up the planet with a nuclear oopsie whoopsie.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    The planet? No, you can’t.
- philipkglass 4y ago
  The wartime Hanford reactors did not produce any electricity. They had no safety containment systems. And they released cooling water containing radioactive contamination directly into the Columbia River: https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Processes/PlutoniumProduction/hanford-hazard.html https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Proce... Aside from "possible catastrophes" involving control rod failures, enemy bombing, or sabotage, DuPont's greatest concerns about reactor operations involved pumping Columbia River water through the reactors for cooling purposes. Using a "once-through" system, water was taken from the river and chemically treated before passing through the core of the reactor at the rate of 75,000 gallons per minute and being released back into the river. The reactor used canned fuel slugs, which prevented radioactive fuel from getting into the coolant as long as the cans did not accidentally rupture. Even if no fuel escaped, however, there was induced radioactivity of the impurities and treatment chemicals within the water. Radioactivity thus inevitably entered the Columbia. To alleviate possible dangers, DuPont engineers diverted the heated and "somewhat radioactive" exit water, containing mostly, but not exclusively, short-lived radionuclides, as well as certain chemical contaminants, to a 12,000,000 gallon retention basin. Each basin was divided in two, with the two sides operating in parallel. Monitoring for radioactivity occurred at the inlet to the basin, at an intermediate point, and at the exit. After six hours, radioactivity diminished by a factor of about twenty. With radioactivity below the then tolerance dose for complete immersion, the water was further diluted with wastewater free from radioactivity and returned via underground pipes for release in mid-river.
kristopolous 4y ago
If that's the framing, solar and wind are the clear economic winners right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Global_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... There's been rapid progress with those two in particular that's made it shockingly cheap. Solar cost is down about 95% in 10 years. If that trend keeps up in the 2020s, anything else will have a real hard time catching up. I'm still pretty excited about the idea of fusion space travel though. Trips to Mars could be done, depending on what thrust system can be built, in about 1-3 months (compared to about 9 now) and because the fuel is denser, longer high speed trips become feasibly possible, like to Jupiter in 4 months. For a comparison, it took Galileo 74 months to get there when it launched in 1989. The idea of humans, say, landing on Europa in the 2030s might now be on the table.
- jules 4y ago
  Measuring cost by installed capacity is highly misleading because solar and wind need storage to be reliable sources. The cost of storage dwarfs the other costs, and battery prices have stagnated.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    The reason battery prices are down 97% since 1990 is because of better battery chemistries coming along. Currently there's a few more in the pipeline (including silicon) that lead market forecasters to predict the long-term (think 2030) trend will continue. The downhill road of pricing has had some bumps but it's very assuredly, extremely downhill
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      So Wright's Law applies to batteries but not to nuclear power?
      - kristopolous 4y ago
        Yes, that's what the historical data from the last 50 years supports. There's giant periods without any movement. Batteries have been around for centuries for instance. These model can be a bit imaginative at times and nuclear may start its journey on it any day but so far it doesn't look like it has. I'd love something absurdly cheap like a working Ponz-Fleischman bubble fusion to come around but if I was advising say a $100 million fund I'd say "solar + wind + chemical batteries" is the foreseeable future. It's just the reality.
cm2187 4y ago
It's not magic, when you build series like France did in the 70s and 80s (I think they were building 8 or 9 reactors a year), the time and cost reduce. When every project is a unique design, they cost a lot and have lots of delays. Wind and solar would be much more expensive without economies of scales (and if the cost of dealing with their volatility would be factored in).
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Many solar & wind plants do have the cost of dealing with their volatility built in. For example, 8minuteenergy is developing several solar+battery projects and selling that energy for 4cents per KWh.
- masklinn 4y ago
  Exactly. Also should be noted that even at the height of France’s building the bigger and more complex reactors took longer and never got down to the build times of the smaller ones: the CP (900MWe) series got down to about 5 years, the P4 (1300) all needed 7+ iirc.
pydry 4y ago
>You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced. That seems to be what Japan did until Fukushima went boom. >Instead we’ve been building more coal plants. That seems to be what Japan did after Fukushima went boom. To be fair, coal has quite widely replaced all around the world in the last 8 years by a mix of wind, solar and gas. It's now almost as unattractive to investors as nuclear power is.
wpietri 4y ago
> You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced. Possibly not! We have gotten worse at building large things. One interesting explanation comes via Poppendieck's "Tyrrany of the Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of-the-plan/ https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of... Her prime example here is the Empire State Building, which was built on time and on budget even though they had not finished designing it when they started building. The basic notion is that contrary to the current paradigm, more planning does not necessarily make things better. On my own account I'd add that the rise of The Plan corresponds to a rise in a managerial caste (driven in part by the invention and rise of MBAs) that took power from people with domain-specific expertise. Much of that managerial work relates to developing, maintaining, and enforcing The Plan. But this is so much the dominant paradigm that it's hard for many to even imagine alternatives. A good book here is Spender & Locke's "Confronting Managerialism": https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Economic-Controversies-ebook/dp/B09LQSSM77/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=confronting+managerialism&qid=1671207692&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec... So it may be that even if the future depended on it, build times could not be reduced because it's paradigmatically impossible. For basically the same reason that a lot of large software projects are clusterfucks: the POSIWID-type purpose of many organizations is not the work they're supposed to be doing, but protecting and benefiting the people supervising the work.
- peteradio 4y ago
  I think largely I agree but I'm personally sensitive to too much disparagement of having a plan at all. I doubt the empire footers were dug and poured prior to a plan. The important part is knowing when phase 1 can be executed and then phase 2 until the last phase so that all the layers are in the correct order. If you have incompetent planners or perhaps even people with disincentive to complete then you wind up digging out the electrical after the walls are finished.
- notahacker 4y ago
  I suspect that having up to 3000 people per day working for a pittance in the middle of a global financial crisis was a larger factor in getting the Empire State Building built on time and budget than lack of planning or middle management... Either way, I'm not sure Depression-era construction approaches are really what we want for nuclear plants.
dv_dt 4y ago
If you follow French next gen design builds, this has not been the case. Not as bad a US builds, but not exactly on time as the earlier builds.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Thus far only a couple of the French next gen builds have been built in France. During the Messmer plan, dozens of the same design were built. The fact that the former is more expensive than the latter isn't contradicting the claim that serial production is cheaper than one-off production.
LastTrain 4y ago
It would really have helped the argument if coal had not been turned into a culture war. Are we all ready to admit that coal sucks now?
- mindslight 4y ago
  My grandpa didn't die of black lung just so you can go around spreading baseless lies that coal might be harmful. (/s)
mindslight 4y ago
At this point, there are multiple well-developed western economies with regulatory regimes that are generally trusted to adequately keep the perverse incentives of business in check. It would be an interesting regulatory experiment to charter a project that would be subject to a different regulatory environment than the country in which it was physically built. For example, a nuclear plant in the US that was exempt from all US regulations, but had to meet all of the French ones - built by French companies, inspected by French inspectors, etc. Just a wholesale transplant of the entire business/regulatory culture, as a point of competition. (Obviously there are a thousand ways for this to go wrong, but entertain the idea anyway)

technicalbard 4y ago

The very first nuclear reactor went from idea to operating in 2 years. In the middle of WW2. The only reason nuclear projects take longer than other industrial projects is regulatory capture.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
During WW2 the US could build a ship in 39 days. Now it takes 10 years.
- remarkEon 4y ago
  I know this point is made a lot but I’m not sure it’s that meaningful. WW2 boats were not the enormously complex network and sensor systems that today’s are. While, yeah, 10 years is extreme, but I don’t think 39 days is physically possible.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    The 39 day boats built in WW2 were probably more similar in complexity to a modern boat than a WW2 reactor is to a modern reactor.
    - eternityforest 4y ago
      I would be surprised if some of the systems were actually harder to work on back then. Old battleships always seemed to have insane amounts of wiring and cabling, because they used the nightmarish one signal per wire protocol in the pre digital age.
      - remarkEon 4y ago
        > because they used the nightmarish one signal per wire protocol in the pre digital age. Can you say more about this? I find that kind of thing fascinating.
        eternityforest 4y ago
        https://softsolder.com/2017/11/05/battleship-wiring/ https://softsolder.com/2017/11/05/battleship-wiring/ They presumably used to have to run an individual wire for every. single. signal, or at most, they'd have extremely simple multiplexing. I have no idea what these cables do, but I'm glad I'm not the one repairing it. Not only is there physically a lot of wire, 90% of it looks to be going directly to something mechanical. I don't know how modern ships do it, but with civilian digital logic , you'd probably run a few redundant ethernet(Or fiber, or CAN) links to some kind of fan out box right near the switches or motors. Cars these days are very extreme about it, sometimes even running the entertainment system commands over the fairly critical CAN bus for some reason. If one of those cables went bad, spanning tree protocol would save you till you fix it, and probably tell you which cable broke and maybe even where. Mix them up, no problem, firmware knows what to do. Plus, everything goes through a computer, so you've got logging and all kinds of stuff to help spot issues, rather than the classic "Oh well, noise and intermittent connections, we live with it till it gets bad enough to be all the time". The only rats nest is right from the mechanical switch to your PLCish thing, but that's short enough to trace by eye. You might have zero concern about interference in cables, because they might be fiber. You won't have complicated color code schemes or wiring diagrams, or cut off wires that nobody knows where they go to anymore, you can just test it, because you don't have 50 thousand things to sift through. People argue about whether digital or analog is more reliable, but digital is definitely easier from a hardware perspective, the hard stuff is done in factories by robots. I'm sure the technicians had special training and it was a lot better than average civilian industrial uses of the pile o wires system, but I would think it would still be time consuming and not paralellizable, only so many people can fit around one of those giant bundles at once. I could also be vastly misinterpreting how modern ships are wired, I know some industrial setups today insist on home run wiring instead of condensing to digital.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      It was Liberty ships—slow, high-capacity, not especially durable cargo ships built as fast as possible, assembly-line style. The median construction time only got that low after the assembly line really got going and they were able to work out some kinks. It was over 200 days early on. Warships—none of the capitals ships, certainly—weren't built that fast. Not even the cheap-as-hell escort carriers we built tons and tons of, I don't think. Destroyers and little corvettes and other smalls screen and utility ships, maybe some of those weren't too far from 39-day construction times.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  And you think the safety record of those ships was the same as today?
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    A hell of a lot safer than a WW2 reactor!
Gwypaas 4y ago
Or because covering half of Europe to the level that in some places you, even to this day, have to measure the radiation levels of mushroom and wild game is irrelevant? https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-radiation-in-Europe-in-May-1986-as-a-result-of-the-Chernobyl-disaster_fig1_7080615 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-radiatio...
pixl97 4y ago
Well, and that the nuclear reactors back then commonly had terrible accidents and after Chernobyl (and TMI in a lessor manner) we realized that you can really screw up the planet with a nuclear oopsie whoopsie.
- kaba0 4y ago
  The planet? No, you can’t.
philipkglass 4y ago
The wartime Hanford reactors did not produce any electricity. They had no safety containment systems. And they released cooling water containing radioactive contamination directly into the Columbia River: https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Processes/PlutoniumProduction/hanford-hazard.html https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Proce... Aside from "possible catastrophes" involving control rod failures, enemy bombing, or sabotage, DuPont's greatest concerns about reactor operations involved pumping Columbia River water through the reactors for cooling purposes. Using a "once-through" system, water was taken from the river and chemically treated before passing through the core of the reactor at the rate of 75,000 gallons per minute and being released back into the river. The reactor used canned fuel slugs, which prevented radioactive fuel from getting into the coolant as long as the cans did not accidentally rupture. Even if no fuel escaped, however, there was induced radioactivity of the impurities and treatment chemicals within the water. Radioactivity thus inevitably entered the Columbia. To alleviate possible dangers, DuPont engineers diverted the heated and "somewhat radioactive" exit water, containing mostly, but not exclusively, short-lived radionuclides, as well as certain chemical contaminants, to a 12,000,000 gallon retention basin. Each basin was divided in two, with the two sides operating in parallel. Monitoring for radioactivity occurred at the inlet to the basin, at an intermediate point, and at the exit. After six hours, radioactivity diminished by a factor of about twenty. With radioactivity below the then tolerance dose for complete immersion, the water was further diluted with wastewater free from radioactivity and returned via underground pipes for release in mid-river.

kristopolous 4y ago

If that's the framing, solar and wind are the clear economic winners right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Global_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... There's been rapid progress with those two in particular that's made it shockingly cheap. Solar cost is down about 95% in 10 years. If that trend keeps up in the 2020s, anything else will have a real hard time catching up. I'm still pretty excited about the idea of fusion space travel though. Trips to Mars could be done, depending on what thrust system can be built, in about 1-3 months (compared to about 9 now) and because the fuel is denser, longer high speed trips become feasibly possible, like to Jupiter in 4 months. For a comparison, it took Galileo 74 months to get there when it launched in 1989. The idea of humans, say, landing on Europa in the 2030s might now be on the table.

jules 4y ago
Measuring cost by installed capacity is highly misleading because solar and wind need storage to be reliable sources. The cost of storage dwarfs the other costs, and battery prices have stagnated.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  The reason battery prices are down 97% since 1990 is because of better battery chemistries coming along. Currently there's a few more in the pipeline (including silicon) that lead market forecasters to predict the long-term (think 2030) trend will continue. The downhill road of pricing has had some bumps but it's very assuredly, extremely downhill
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    So Wright's Law applies to batteries but not to nuclear power?
    - kristopolous 4y ago
      Yes, that's what the historical data from the last 50 years supports. There's giant periods without any movement. Batteries have been around for centuries for instance. These model can be a bit imaginative at times and nuclear may start its journey on it any day but so far it doesn't look like it has. I'd love something absurdly cheap like a working Ponz-Fleischman bubble fusion to come around but if I was advising say a $100 million fund I'd say "solar + wind + chemical batteries" is the foreseeable future. It's just the reality.

cm2187 4y ago

It's not magic, when you build series like France did in the 70s and 80s (I think they were building 8 or 9 reactors a year), the time and cost reduce. When every project is a unique design, they cost a lot and have lots of delays. Wind and solar would be much more expensive without economies of scales (and if the cost of dealing with their volatility would be factored in).

bryanlarsen 4y ago
Many solar & wind plants do have the cost of dealing with their volatility built in. For example, 8minuteenergy is developing several solar+battery projects and selling that energy for 4cents per KWh.
masklinn 4y ago
Exactly. Also should be noted that even at the height of France’s building the bigger and more complex reactors took longer and never got down to the build times of the smaller ones: the CP (900MWe) series got down to about 5 years, the P4 (1300) all needed 7+ iirc.

pydry 4y ago

>You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced. That seems to be what Japan did until Fukushima went boom. >Instead we’ve been building more coal plants. That seems to be what Japan did after Fukushima went boom. To be fair, coal has quite widely replaced all around the world in the last 8 years by a mix of wind, solar and gas. It's now almost as unattractive to investors as nuclear power is.

wpietri 4y ago

> You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced. Possibly not! We have gotten worse at building large things. One interesting explanation comes via Poppendieck's "Tyrrany of the Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of-the-plan/ https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of... Her prime example here is the Empire State Building, which was built on time and on budget even though they had not finished designing it when they started building. The basic notion is that contrary to the current paradigm, more planning does not necessarily make things better. On my own account I'd add that the rise of The Plan corresponds to a rise in a managerial caste (driven in part by the invention and rise of MBAs) that took power from people with domain-specific expertise. Much of that managerial work relates to developing, maintaining, and enforcing The Plan. But this is so much the dominant paradigm that it's hard for many to even imagine alternatives. A good book here is Spender & Locke's "Confronting Managerialism": https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Economic-Controversies-ebook/dp/B09LQSSM77/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=confronting+managerialism&qid=1671207692&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec... So it may be that even if the future depended on it, build times could not be reduced because it's paradigmatically impossible. For basically the same reason that a lot of large software projects are clusterfucks: the POSIWID-type purpose of many organizations is not the work they're supposed to be doing, but protecting and benefiting the people supervising the work.

peteradio 4y ago
I think largely I agree but I'm personally sensitive to too much disparagement of having a plan at all. I doubt the empire footers were dug and poured prior to a plan. The important part is knowing when phase 1 can be executed and then phase 2 until the last phase so that all the layers are in the correct order. If you have incompetent planners or perhaps even people with disincentive to complete then you wind up digging out the electrical after the walls are finished.
notahacker 4y ago
I suspect that having up to 3000 people per day working for a pittance in the middle of a global financial crisis was a larger factor in getting the Empire State Building built on time and budget than lack of planning or middle management... Either way, I'm not sure Depression-era construction approaches are really what we want for nuclear plants.

dv_dt 4y ago

If you follow French next gen design builds, this has not been the case. Not as bad a US builds, but not exactly on time as the earlier builds.

Manuel_D 4y ago
Thus far only a couple of the French next gen builds have been built in France. During the Messmer plan, dozens of the same design were built. The fact that the former is more expensive than the latter isn't contradicting the claim that serial production is cheaper than one-off production.

LastTrain 4y ago

It would really have helped the argument if coal had not been turned into a culture war. Are we all ready to admit that coal sucks now?

mindslight 4y ago
My grandpa didn't die of black lung just so you can go around spreading baseless lies that coal might be harmful. (/s)

mindslight 4y ago

At this point, there are multiple well-developed western economies with regulatory regimes that are generally trusted to adequately keep the perverse incentives of business in check. It would be an interesting regulatory experiment to charter a project that would be subject to a different regulatory environment than the country in which it was physically built. For example, a nuclear plant in the US that was exempt from all US regulations, but had to meet all of the French ones - built by French companies, inspected by French inspectors, etc. Just a wholesale transplant of the entire business/regulatory culture, as a point of competition. (Obviously there are a thousand ways for this to go wrong, but entertain the idea anyway)