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Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms
- seatac76 4y agoThis is great news. Although disappointing how long it took. Still hoping for a nuclear resurgence. Between this and all the EV factories coming online in GA, GA will have quite the impact on climate goals.
- PM_me_your_math 4y agoWe will literally have a very minor impact even if the entire globe goes 100% renewable for everything from home heating, lighting, aircraft, cars, trucks, maritime transport and rail. And in order to do a fraction of that (say only USA goes 100% electric) we would need to significantly scale up strip mining and dig deep into the earth. All of that industrial activity takes more energy than wind and solar can provide. In fact, none of it is possible without natural gas, heavy fuel oil, and diesel.
- sh4rks 4y agoHow exactly is it a very minor impact if the globe goes 100% renewable? Significant reduction in air pollution + more stable energy prices.
- OrwellianChild 4y agoAs much as I'd love more nuclear power on the grid, this project cost over double its initial bid and is actually raising rates for GA utility customers... I can't tell from the story whether "nuclear is hard" or if "contractors are idiots" here. Reactor was supposed to open in 2016 - it's very hard to cheer for a 7-year delay and a 140% cost overrun.
- jerry80 4y agoThe contractors aren't idiots. They got an extra 7 years and a 140% bonus.
- OrwellianChild 4y agoWe're assuming cost-plus contract terms, then, I assume? :-)
- juve1996 4y agoAre there any infrastructure projects that don't have cost overrun or finish on time in this country?
- Province1108 4y agoWe lost much of our nuclear engineering capability in the US, so in many ways contractors are "idiots" here and made many costly mistakes during construction. Many articles on this and how it lead to the Westinghouse bankruptcy. Sadly, there's only a handful of western-friendly firms in the world that can build a reactor, so hoping the expertise and lessons learned will be worthwhile for future projects. Nuclear isn't necessarily the cheapest option for rates, but it's the best for base generation AND greenhouse gas emission.
- Krasnol 4y agoThis "loss of nuclear engineering capability" doesn't hold up when you see reactors build by the French having the same problems: overdue and over budget. The French never stopped building reactors all over the world. "Base generation" is an outdated concept. It can be replaced by storage and grid size for example.
- ttoinou 4y agoThey did stop building them in France though, and they switched technology to EPR
- Krasnol 4y agoFrench engineers were still allowed to travel abroad and work on other French projects which were overdue and over budget.
- ilyt 4y agoI thought "overdue and over budget" is natural state of any big project
- Krasnol 4y agoNo, it's not. But this generalization comes always up if someone wants to sell a project which they knew will be overdue and over budget.
- 4y ago
- gymbeaux 4y agoJacksonville, FL’a JEA (public utility company) lost a lot of money investing in this plant as well
- mandevil 4y agoBasically, you can look at [the list of nuclear plants under construction](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...) and see that the Russians VVER series are still going up around the word (over 20), the Chinese are building a bunch (of many different international and domestic designs, I don't think they've built one for another country yet), the South Koreans have 4 under construction around the world, there are 4 AP1000 (two in China, two in Georgia) and 6 EPR (2 in China, 1 in France, 1 in Finland, 2 in UK). (Plus a couple of oddities like Argentina and India building a new domestic design each.) I think an under-appreciated point is that if you do a pause on nuclear construction, say because of the Fukushima Dai Ichi or Three Mile Island or whatever, you lose the skills to deliver them on time and quickly very fast, and it actually seems to be harder to rebuild than it was to build the first time. My suspicion is that the first time your standards are lower, and so you don't design as aggressively and your workmen deliver okay workmanship. Then you pause for a while, all your experience scatters to the wind, but you need to deliver next generation performance, and you just don't have the industrial base to actually build it on time and under budget. This doesn't seem to be a just-America problem: France alone built ~60 reactors in the 1970's and 1980's and Germany and the UK built more, but the EPR has been just as big as disaster as the AP1000, because they didn't build new reactors in the 1990's and that experience withered away, but are still trying to deliver that next generation performance.
- Krasnol 4y agoThe overall number of operating reactors doesn't go up much though: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263945/number-of-nuclear-power-plants-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263945/number-of-nuclear... Supplied energy seems to have leveled out also: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu... Time to say goodbye and maybe think hard why those Russian and Chinese reactors come up so fast and cheap, and prepare for the fallout...
- justatdotin 4y agonow do the list of plants slated for decommissioning
- hefferbub 4y agoAnd don’t forget, this was the “revolutionary” AP1 design that was supposed to fix all the bad things about the previous revolutionary designs.
- parineum 4y agoI don't see how that's related.
- icelancer 4y agoI doubt that much - if any - of the cost overruns and delays are related to the nuclear portion of this public works project. Governments and their contractors at all levels are not known for their ability to accurately forecast these things, and they're generally not incentivized to care during the work order, as they're not held accountable.
- Lazare 4y agoA lot of it seems to come down to very, very agreesive regulation. Eg, plant designs got approved, work started, then the regulators came back and said "actually, you need to make some major changes to the design", so everything paused and some completed work was torn up, new designs were made, approved (slowly), and then work restarted from scratch. Then it happened again. And again. The changes weren't bad per se; in one case the regulators decided that the plant needed to be resistant to aircraft impacts; in another that it needed to be more resistant to tornados. But when you have a fantastically complex and expensive engineering project, going back and requiring retroactive changes after approval and after bg has already started is going to blow the budget to hell. And it did. From the Federal Register notice for the aircraft impact change: > In making these additions, the NRC is making it clear that the requirements are not meant to apply to current or future operating license applications for which construction permits were issued before the effective date of this final rule. This is because existing construction permits are likely to involve designs which are essentially complete and may involve sites where construction has already taken place. Applying the final rule to operating license applications for which there are existing construction permits could result in an unwarranted financial burden to change a design for a plant that is partially constructed. Such a financial burden is not justifiable in light of the fact that the NRC considers the events to which the aircraft impact rule is directed to be beyond-design-basis events and compliance with the rule is not needed for adequate protection to public health and safety or common defense and security. That sounds pretty reasonable. As the US government said, applying this rule where existing construction permists exist could result in "unwarranted financial burden" which is "not justifiable" and because the rule is "not needed for adequate protection". It's just a "hey, if you haven't started building yet, why not make it extra super duper safe?" rule. And why not! But the Georgia plant, at this point, didn't technically have "construction permits", but it did have certified designs, and signed firm contracts for engineering, procurement, and construction, had already submitted its certified costs and schedules to state regulators, and begun manufacturing long lead time components. The cost impact was enormous, but they were still required to go through it. This regulatory environment is excellent for ensuring that nothing dangerous gets built, because nothing will get built. Is that wise? I suspect not. See: https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-and-vc-summer-delays/ https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westinghouse-nucle/how-two-cutting-edge-u-s-nuclear-projects-bankrupted-westinghouse-idUSKBN17Y0CQ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westin... https://atomicinsights.com/nrcs-imposition-of-aircraft-impact-rule-played-a-major-role-in-vogtle-project-delays-and-vc-summer-failure/ https://atomicinsights.com/nrcs-imposition-of-aircraft-impac...
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoSeven years late and $20 billion over budget. Slow clap.
- coldpie 4y agoThat's only half of a Twitter. That sounds like a joke, but honestly, it's not. $20B is absolutely nothing compared to the costs of not taking immediate action on climate change.
- mikeyouse 4y agoI think people are quibbling with the "immediate" part of that plan. It's 10 years later and we don't have a single kwh being used in lieu of carbon-based power, the opportunity cost of that $20B overrun is massive.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoThat's basically my reservation. I'm not knee-jerk against nuclear, the new ideas in that field like molten salt reactors intrigue me, but at this point it's not such a new technology anymore, we have the better part of a century of historical data to evaluate it on, and it seems that its promise of abundant emissions-free energy on the cheap just hasn't panned out.
- NineStarPoint 4y agoIt’s not a new technology, but it’s a technology built so infrequently that none of the benefits of being an old technology have been able to develop. We don’t have people experienced in creating the plants, we don't have standard templates to base designs off of, and we don’t have economies of scale. Mind, we’re not going to get any of those things in the world we live in due to combination of over-regulation and NIMBYism making it impossible to even start a nuclear power project in an efficient manner. So it’s kind of a moot point. But we most certainly don’t have a century of seeing what it would be like if we actually tried to make nuclear power work. We have a century of seeing what happens when we cripple nuclear power due to people’s lack of trust in it.
- burlesona 4y agoI feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's current form of large central power plants[1]. By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nature of the tech means each individual unit isn't very important, and failure means no power and maybe an eyesore, no catastrophic pollution. One further consideration is the decentralized nature of renewables. As the war in Ukraine is showing us, for any country dependent on a small number of central power plants, those become extremely vulnerable weak points if your country is invaded, whereas a decentralized network of renewables is hardier and can degrade rather than hard fail. I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc., but I think in the messy world of reality micro generation is going to swamp everything else in the very long run. 1: Perhaps the small modular nuclear reactors idea can eventually be proven out.
- coldpie 4y agoYou can't get around the fact that you need baseload and/or storage. Both are hard problems. Some locations have regional baseload solutions like hydroelectricity, but many don't. Nuclear is a solution that works anywhere, but like you say, it's expensive. Storage is similar: there are some regional solutions (pumped hydro), or a difficult and expensive general solution (chemical batteries). There's no single answer that works everywhere. All options, including nuclear, need to be on the table and considered as part of the whole-system energy solution.
- woeirua 4y agoHow much solar could they have built for the same price? Just doing some very rough calculations, they could have built enough panels to output several times as much peak power as they can with the nuclear reactors. Even including storage costs, they still could have probably built a system with more productive capacity than the nuclear reactors. This project is almost certainly the last conventional fission reactor that will ever be built in the US.
- philipkglass 4y agoI think that some small modular reactors will get built. Whether more SMRs get built after the initial test deployments will depend on their own achieved cost/schedule numbers. The Georgia reactors can't compete on price with solar projects backed by 4-8 hours of battery storage at current prices. However, the project started developing in 2010: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/02/vogtle-20100217.html https://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/02/vogtle-20100217.htm... At then-current prices for solar and especially battery storage, Vogtle 3 & 4 were economically rational decarbonization projects. Or at least they would have been if they had actually met their initially announced schedule and cost numbers. The unpredictability of scheduling/budgeting for nuclear power projects is IMO their most unattractive characteristic. In 2010 costs for solar farms were much higher, but they were at least predictable. If a project developer said that a solar farm would be generating by November 2010, it would be generating by November 2010. The predictability enabled projects to gradually increase in size and number with high confidence that none of them would snowball into a financial catastrophe like Vogtle did. Iterative development with predictable characteristics brought solar project costs down dramatically since 2010.
- vuln 4y agoDid you factor in land costs, preparing the land, lawsuits, etc in your rough calculations? How many acres would your calculation of solar panels cover?
- thomasjb 4y agoIt likely wasn't viable when the decision to choose to start building the plant was made. Enough to put a nice roof over lots of carparks and roads perhaps.
- miguelazo 4y agoSo glad we finally designated the permanent repository for nuclear waste in the United State. /s Since the waste will almost certainly not be accepted by another state, I would like to know where it will be stored in Georgia. I have some guesses, based on the demographics of adjacent populations, but perhaps the many HN nuclear boosters have some specifics?
- alexfromapex 4y agoFrom what I’ve researched, there’s not that much waste from reactors anymore. The glowing sludge of doom usually comes from enriched isotopes for weapons.
- kennend3 4y agoI have access to the radioactivity diagrams for a 10 year old spent fuel bundle. Needless to say it is rather radioactive... But it is easily contained by the water in the pools, and then the dry storage casks it is moved to once it is no longer "thermally hot" and needs constant cooling. This guy is just your typical anti-nuke posting the classic talking points about all the billions of tonnes of used fuel?
- seatac76 4y agoWaste is typically stored on site after it has been entombed in concrete. So it will be stored on-site not in a secondary spot. That is until if ever they are able to get Yucca mountain going again.
- exabrial 4y agoStep 1. Build a swimming pool somewhere in the US Step... There is no other steps. Don't overthink it. A couple of hot bricks every 5 years isn't something to freak out about.
- Gwypaas 4y agoThe risk is the soup of strangely radioactive materials leaking into the water table. Fission is not a clean chemical reaction, this is the spread of the atomic masses for different kinds of fission processes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#/media/File:ThermalFissionYield.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#/media/File:Th...
- teddyh 4y agoOh, Georgia the U.S. state. I assumed that the country of Georgia had gotten a nuclear power plant.
- al_be_back 4y agowow that's at least 240% over budget
- alexfromapex 4y agoWhy are regulators allowing fission reactors, especially in a time of global turmoil, aren’t these easy targets for adversaries?
- Manuel_D 4y agoQuite the contrary: nuclear reactors are essentially housed in bunkers. There was much fretting about the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant during war, but if anything it demonstrates the resiliency of nuclear facilities.
- alexfromapex 4y agoIt sounds like there was not a direct attack on that reactor so there’s no definitive answer on how bad it would be https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/what-experts-say-an-attack-on-a-ukrainian-nuclear-power-plant-could-do/ https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/what-experts-say-an-attack-o...
- kennend3 4y agoInstead of asking sensationalist questions designed to create fear...why not look into it? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1738573319304619 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S173857331... The studies have already been done, crashing a jet into a nuclear power plant wont do much. I'm more familiar with Canada's designs and the walls are several M thick of reinforced concrete. Not exactly material known for being easy to break into. This is from the power plant close by me : https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.8122465,-79.0744714,3a,48.2y,88.54h,96.61t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1smnwdsyHWMouKidkp2_j9zA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.8122465,-79.0744714,3a,48.2y,... warning that you may be shot for entering has a tendency of keeping people away
- alexfromapex 4y agoYou may not be familiar with Socratic questioning. Your response also comes off as rude. The question was meant as a prompt for dialogue not because I didn’t already research this topic.
- hulitu 4y ago> Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms Although he missed school, juounalist finds out about nuclear fission. I'm eager to see the title when he writes about nuclear fusion or public toilets. /s