5 ms·

Expectation is that Indian Point will cost $1B, not counting finding a home for the on-site waste.

arcticbull 4y ago
First of all you're double-counting decommissioning costs because as I said operators are collecting decommissioning costs during operation. So that XXc/kWh includes the cost of decommissioning but you're talking about it like it's a surprise on top after the fact. It's not. While you are actually underestimating the cost of Indian Point decommissioning (the scale of which was a surprise to me too - but likely attributable to there being 3 reactors), it has a $2.4B fund that's already been collected and held in trust for its clean-up. But of course Indian Point is in New York, home of the most expensive subway track on earth - $3.9B per mile for the Q line extension. So decommissioning a 67 year old 3-reactor NPP costs the same as 0.58 miles of Q line extension. Since commissioning, it generated 777TWh based on a 73% lifetime capacity factor (src: Wikipedia). About 1/4 of NYC's entire energy needs for 60 years. Decommissioning cost $0.0029/kWh generated. Why are we still pretending this is expensive? On the other hand you know who isn't responsible for collecting the cost of recycling during operation? Solar and wind operators. I don't know why people saying that nuclear has a waste problem when even cursory research will show you it simply doesn't due to the sheer energy density of the fuel. Further, fast neutron reactors produce two orders of magnitude less waste, and with incredibly short half lives. The reality is we've been okay with the quantity of waste in large part because the input uranium is just so cheap it hasn't been economically effective to reprocess and reuse it, and nuclear has been such a whipping boy of the so-called environmentalist movement that we just haven't meaningfully invested in developing the technology in decades. The outcome of this so-called environmentalism in the 60s though was 60 years of coal and oil plants. We've had a renewable, effectively-unlimited source of clean zero-carbon energy for decades now. We've simply elected not to pursue it. We know the biggest cost of nuclear is the up-front expenditure and there was a really good interview recently with the head of the DOE loan program, Jigar Shah.* He talked about how a ton of the cost was simply that each NPP is a one-off snowflake, and that there were huge savings to be realized by standardizing designs and copy-pasting them onto favorable spots. There are tons of low hanging fruit that we can actually invest in addressing that would dramatically reduce the cost. We just lack the motivation. Stop mistaking the current state with the potential. * I believe this was on Odd Lots.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Yet, no one has been willing, in decades, to lend any of their own money to building a nuke. What are you missing? That is a rhetorical question; the topic is dead and buried. Good day.

First of all you're double-counting decommissioning costs because as I said operators are collecting decommissioning costs during operation. So that XXc/kWh includes the cost of decommissioning but you're talking about it like it's a surprise on top after the fact. It's not. While you are actually underestimating the cost of Indian Point decommissioning (the scale of which was a surprise to me too - but likely attributable to there being 3 reactors), it has a $2.4B fund that's already been collected and held in trust for its clean-up. But of course Indian Point is in New York, home of the most expensive subway track on earth - $3.9B per mile for the Q line extension. So decommissioning a 67 year old 3-reactor NPP costs the same as 0.58 miles of Q line extension. Since commissioning, it generated 777TWh based on a 73% lifetime capacity factor (src: Wikipedia). About 1/4 of NYC's entire energy needs for 60 years. Decommissioning cost $0.0029/kWh generated. Why are we still pretending this is expensive? On the other hand you know who isn't responsible for collecting the cost of recycling during operation? Solar and wind operators. I don't know why people saying that nuclear has a waste problem when even cursory research will show you it simply doesn't due to the sheer energy density of the fuel. Further, fast neutron reactors produce two orders of magnitude less waste, and with incredibly short half lives. The reality is we've been okay with the quantity of waste in large part because the input uranium is just so cheap it hasn't been economically effective to reprocess and reuse it, and nuclear has been such a whipping boy of the so-called environmentalist movement that we just haven't meaningfully invested in developing the technology in decades. The outcome of this so-called environmentalism in the 60s though was 60 years of coal and oil plants. We've had a renewable, effectively-unlimited source of clean zero-carbon energy for decades now. We've simply elected not to pursue it. We know the biggest cost of nuclear is the up-front expenditure and there was a really good interview recently with the head of the DOE loan program, Jigar Shah.* He talked about how a ton of the cost was simply that each NPP is a one-off snowflake, and that there were huge savings to be realized by standardizing designs and copy-pasting them onto favorable spots. There are tons of low hanging fruit that we can actually invest in addressing that would dramatically reduce the cost. We just lack the motivation. Stop mistaking the current state with the potential. * I believe this was on Odd Lots.

moloch-hai 4y ago
Yet, no one has been willing, in decades, to lend any of their own money to building a nuke. What are you missing? That is a rhetorical question; the topic is dead and buried. Good day.