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Georgia’s big new nuclear reactors could be the last built in the US
- ortusdux 4y ago*could be the last of its kind built in the US
- manfre 4y agoHard to tell if it's purely for the clickbait or leaning heavily on shortening the title.
- wesoff 4y agoHeadlines limited to ~70 characters.
- _hcuq 4y agoThanks. Saved me a click.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nosianu 4y agoThe article further explains why that may not work out. To quote: > the industry is betting on advanced nuclear reactors to save the day. > It’s a bad bet. The main points: > The advanced and small modular reactors (SMRs) under development face a raft of economic, regulatory, technological and temporal risks. and > The advanced reactor closest to market in the U.S. is being developed by NuScale, which has a nonbinding agreement to build a first-of-its-kind SMR project in Idaho. The company has already raised its projected power cost from $58 per megawatt-hour to $89, even though it’s still years away from even beginning construction. and > Advanced reactors such as TerraPower’s Natrium, which are significantly different in design from existing light-water reactors, face an even steeper regulatory climb. And they’ll have to contend with broken or nonexistent supply chains because the more highly concentrated uranium fuels used by most advanced reactors are currently unavailable in large quantities outside of Russia. Which leads to this summary at the end: > Regardless of rosy messaging from DOE and the industry, it’s almost certain that Vogtle 3 and 4 are going to be the last big nuclear reactors coming online in the U.S. for a long time.
- wkat4242 4y agoYeah here in Holland they have the same pipe dream. They want to start new reactors rise should come online by 2040, delays obviously not included. It's a big bullet point for the hard right party VVD that think this way they can continue business as usual. But it'll come way too late for that. All the hard choices will already have been made by that. I'm sure their buddy's corporations will have some nice pork from it though. Such prestige projects always tend to double their budget at least. And then we have the fuel, waste storage and the cleanup which are usually not even factored into the cost but absorbed by society.
- belorn 4y agoWe will see in 2040 if countries who made a different decision has lower carbon footprint. There is seemingly a lot of countries betting that green hydrogen will become energy storage solution in 20-30-50 years, and thus they can use natural gas/coal while waiting and continue with business as usual. Only time will tell which bets in the energy grid was good and which was bad for the environment. The last bet that many countries did on buying natural gas from Russia ended up being quite bad for Europe.
- wkat4242 4y agoHydrogen is just as much of a pipe dream IMO. Producing, compressing is all very inefficient and it leaks through its tanks quickly. Which is a real big problem not only because of the energy wasted but because it's a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 is! The bet on buying natural gas was a bad one for the environment for the start obviously, no matter whom we bought it from.
- pfdietz 4y agoThere's a lot of bad faith pearl clutching over hydrogen, but industry already makes and uses 700 cubic kilometers (if measured at STP) of the gas each year, so obviously the problem of manipulating it is solvable. I read that the cost of a hydrogen pipeline might be about 8% higher than the cost of a natural gas pipeline, per unit of energy transportation capacity.
- megaman821 4y agoIt could easily be the last of its generation and its size built in the US. Is there any non-SMR on the horizon?
- melling 4y agoYes, next comes Gen-4 reactors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
- Gwypaas 4y ago2040? 2050? Which problem are we solving?
- melling 4y agoFrom the SAME sentence: “suggested that some might enter commercial operation before 2030”
- Gwypaas 4y agoWhy did you skip half the sentance? > The first commercial plants are not expected before 2040–2050,[3] although the World Nuclear Association in 2015 suggested that some might enter commercial operation before 2030.[4] An optimistic 2030 from 8 years ago, with about zero progress to date.
- PaulHoule 4y agoThe US shouldn't have shut down the FFTF. Had we not shut down advanced reactor development we could be 15-20 years ahead of where we are. Talk about Gen 4 reactors started around 2000, test reactors and development projects for Gen 4 reactors are going into high gear. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-molten-salt-reactor-cleared-for-start-up https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-molten-s... It would be nice if these were coming online in the next 10 years but don't think our need for energy suddenly expires in 2030 or that we'll be completely happy with renewables by 2040.
- Andrex 4y agoWe'd be 15-20 years further down a dead-end, possibly.
- _hypx 4y agoI'm going to come out and say, not even the last of its kind. Support for nuclear power is directly proportional to real, intellectually motivated support for clean energy (this is not related to the people that make dumb protests). And as that continues, we will see more conventional nuclear reactors being built.
- joseph_grobbles 4y agoNuclear is catastrophically expensive. Nuclear stagnated not because of those "dumb protests", but because economically it turned out that they made very little sense. Projects always went massively over budget, and then had a lifespan cost multiples idealist notions. Are they expensive because of overbearing safety requirements? Partly, sure. On the flip side, Fukushima has now cost hundreds and hundreds of billions in direct costs. If nuclear power plants didn't have a civil exemption where governments bore the potential liability of damage (which is almost infinite), they would be unbuildable.
- _hypx 4y agoAnd yet still cheaper than doing nothing. Same is true of half-solutions or pretend solutions. In reality nuclear is more than cheap enough to do the job. If upfront costs is really an issue, then we should subsidize it. And even with all nuclear disasters included, it is still cheap enough to do the job. If it is uninsurable, then government should insure it. Again, still cheaper than anything else.
- Zigurd 4y agoi recently had a VC in a couple new gen reactor companies call me a Negative Nancy. I'm not. I follow the developments. There is one venture, TerraPower that isn't just making another run at fast or pebble bed reactors, generally at a smaller scale. Only TerraPower has the vast risk capital backing needed to try what they are doing, but even they might license a technology to get to market sooner than they can by developing their TWR. It seems like PBRs have the most readily fixable problems, but even those are probably decades away from putting power on the grid. I would bet a number of the venture funded reactors will die of a "liquidity mismatch" with their investors. Some appear to be leaning on developing technologies and patents in anticipation of encountering that problem.
- systemvoltage 4y agoI only hear about NuScale doing anything new in this space. Is there anyone else or the US is entirely dependent on one "startup" for it's energy future?
- topkai22 4y agoI don’t follow the industry that closely, but I know TerraPower (a Bill Gates vehicle) is actively doing things, including building out molten salt reactors.
- pkaye 4y agoTerraPower which is funded by Bill Gates.
- charlieflowers 4y agoHope it wasn't keeping its payroll money in SVB.
- loeg 4y agoThe FDIC announced 100 cents on the dollar for depositors fully 48+ hours ago.
- ed_balls 4y agonope. royce rolls SMR, Toshiba. Pretty much everybody invests in it. There are others in US, but NuScale is the closest to a product.
- credit_guy 4y agoThere are plenty of other startups and established players pursuing NRC approvals for other reactor types. Here's [1] a list put of reactors that the DoE is working on (together with private partners) [1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-advanced-reactor-development https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-advanced-reac...
- jimnotgym 4y agoWhat's this doing on hn? It doesn't even mention GPT-4 in this article? /s
- wesoff 4y agoFunny.
- throwayyy479087 4y agoWill be. Wind is the future of American energy. Every year it pulls farther ahead.
- gambiting 4y agoWhat's the American plan for baseline energy generation?
- beisner 4y agoparent would probably say, "grid-scale battery storage". or natural gas.
- HWR_14 4y agoTwo very large grids. The wind is always blowing somewhere
- Animats 4y agoIf only. You can look at graphs of wind output for the big grids, CAISO and PJM. Over large multi-state areas, wind output varies over a 4:1 range in the course of a day. Wind needs storage.
- Gwypaas 4y agoStorage, or dispatchable energy, in whatever form is given, but is it 1, 4, or 12 hours?
- eldaisfish 4y agoI advise caution when claiming that the wind is always blowing somewhere. One does not hear a lot of discussion from the wind energy industry about the wind drought of 2015 in the USA and Canada. The 2015 event caused some of the lowest average wind speeds in fifty years. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2078374-mystery-wind-drought-that-cut-us-wind-power-in-2015-is-back/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2078374-mystery-wind-dr... Climate change has proven time and again that these events will be more likely. What then?
- hospitalJail 4y agoMy nearest nuclear power plant closed. It lasted its full licensed length, plus a 20 year extension. (Due to a problem, they closed 11 days early) I can't pretend to know why they need to be extended, but it seems like some sort of contract by either the government, the power companies, or some labor problem. I know this plant is in the middle of nowhere + near a lake that is only nice 2 months of the year. I imagine labor was not cheap. Our governor asked for federal funding, but it doesnt seem like it will happen. I hope they turn it into a museum, but that is probably too much to ask. I love looking at it from the beach, and I liked seeing the steam coming out of it.
- hanniabu 4y agoThey have an engineered lifespan and things start falling apart and becoming dangerous when you exceed that. Many should never have been extended. They've had to change safety tests and infrastructure tests so the order plans would pass inspection. This has always been my concern with nuclear. Yes we can make it safe, but the human greed factor is always the weak point. Regulations weakened, automated systems bypassed, skimping on design decisions, etc.
- tekla 4y ago> Many should never have been extended. Which ones.
- wnevets 4y ago> This has always been my concern with nuclear. Yes we can make it safe, but the human greed factor is always the weak point. Regulations weakened, automated systems bypassed, skimping on design decisions, etc. This is exactly my concern. Fukushima was only a problem because the company didn't want to spend money putting in backup generators in the correct place despite repeated warnings to do so.
- Gwypaas 4y agoThere has been more near misses in the nuclear industry than tsunamis. After Fukushima about all plants in the west had to install independent core cooling because the regulators realized the risk was systemic, even though the cause was special. A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#July_2006_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoThat's fine, China can lead the world in nuclear power.
- jmyeet 4y agoThe article mentions SMRs and other advanced nuclear power reactor designs that are still ridiculously far from commercial reality: > The advanced reactor closest to market in the U.S. is being developed by NuScale, which has a nonbinding agreement to build a first-of-its-kind SMR project in Idaho. The company has already raised its projected power cost from $58 per megawatt-hour to $89, even though it’s still years away from even beginning construction. The first module at the plant is set to begin commercial operation in December 2029, NuScale says, but nuclear project timelines are inevitably Pollyannaish and wildly off-base. Compare the $/MWh costs to other power sources [1]. I am not yet convinced nuclear power will ever be economic but I'd like to be wrong. For fission power in particular, I will point to one fact that turns me against it. And that is the Price-Anderson Act [2]. This is a Congressional limit on absolute liability (per-plant and total). It's a complex system of industry insurance not too dissimilar to the FDIC insurance premiums. Ultimately though the government limits liability and would ultimately have to pay anything in excess of that anyway. And the more plants you have the more pressure and lobbying you'll get to further limit that liability and shift all potential accident costs to the taxpayer. Companies are just terrible at managing long-term low-probability risk. We see this time and time again. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [2]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821#:~:text=Total%20liability%20for%20reactors%20under,and%20c https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821#:~:te....).
- Zigurd 4y agoThe "I am not yet convinced nuclear power will ever be economic but I'd like to be wrong." is the elephant in the room. Renewables used to be exotic, expensive, and did not scale-up. Now they are the shortest distance from capital in to ROI out. They scale up and down. They are insurable. That last bit: insurability, deserves a lot more attention than it gets.
- p1mrx 4y agoThe best way to eliminate the Price-Anderson Act is to design reactors that are orders of magnitude safer, so the insurance never needs to pay out. Some of the proposed SMRs seem in line with this goal.
- fwlr 4y agoThere’s a statistic that floats around the internet claiming more radioactivity harm from coal power than from nuclear power, based on the principle that coal power is essentially aerosolizing tons of particles with ever-so-slightly-higher-than-background radioactivity and there’s a lot more coal than nuclear. One could probably derive a similar statistic for how much harm nuclear over-regulation has caused. Perhaps of the form “Chernobyl killed 60 people directly through acute radiation, killed 60,000 indirectly through elevated cancer rates due to spread of radioactive material, and killed 6,000,000* with its second-order effects of supporting nuclear over-regulation that caused increased use of coal and gas energy”. (* This number is completely made up) It seems to me that changing over-regulation is nearly impossible, as it requires making suicidally unpopular arguments: “we shouldn’t weigh the risks”, “we should care less about safety”, “don’t think of the children”, etc. The workable solution is to find or make a receptive regulatory environment (perhaps in a small country with large reserves of nuclear fuel and large unpopulated areas to isolate reactors in, like say Australia), use massive banks of nuclear power to power commensurately massive carbon capture plants that turn airborne CO2 back into synthetic coal and synthetic gasoline, and then export these “completely clean conventional fuels” to the rest of the world. Using synthetic coal to run a coal power plant is essentially a zero-capital plant retrofit achieving guaranteed zero emissions. Putting synthetic gasoline in a gas station is essentially an over-the-air upgrade to any conventional ICE vehicle making it guaranteed zero emissions. It’s sort of like carbon offset credits except it bakes the carbon offset directly into the product instead of relying on fragile and game-able links like “we planted a tree to offset this pound of coal”. A potent offering and one that’s hopefully hard to regulate against as well.
- pfdietz 4y agoNuclear liberates more uranium decay products into the environment than coal does per unit of electrical energy produced, if you include those liberated in uranium mining.
- defrost 4y agoI think you'll find that vast tracts of granite across the planet relese more uranium decay products into the environment by several orders of magnitude than uranium mining does. You can work this out for yourself by downloading and working through the raw 256 channel data of an entire continent aquired across 40 years and > 600 surveys. https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysics/radiometrics https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi... https://www.publish.csiro.au/EG/EG09025 https://www.publish.csiro.au/EG/EG09025
- Overtonwindow 4y agoRegulations have killed the nuclear industry, which I think is a direct results of environmentalists and carbon energy producers. We know we can make safer reactors but like high speed rail, more housing, and pretty much every major infrastructure project, red tape will stop it every time.
- bjourne 4y agoWhat regulations have killed the nuclear industry? Because every US administration since George W. Bush have supported and promised subsidies to the nuclear industry. For example, construction of Vogtle 3 and 4 only began after Obama promised federal loan guarantees.
- loeg 4y agoThe NRC's entire function is to kill the nuclear industry.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoYeah. Free unlimited insurance, government backed loans, and being allowed to charge ratepayers whatever you want for reactors no matter whether they are built are real industry killers.
- pfdietz 4y agoNuclear isn't succeeding, therefore by definition it's the government's fault. Because axiomatically nuclear is the best. It's conspiracy theoretic cognition, what you get when someone firmly believes a falsehood.
- mixdup 4y agoWhat was the last commercial power reactor that was built in the US that didn't result in a bankruptcy of some kind? I think Westinghouse and Toshiba have been through bankruptcy court enough times they have their own wing at the courthouse
- PaulHoule 4y agoWhat's funny about it is that a lot of delay was because it was one of the first AP1000 reactors and had to wait in line for the first AP1000 to get built in China and, thus, for a factory in China to figure out how to build a main coolant pump that was supposed to be easier to build. It's not so clear that more AP1000's would be delayed so long but China has definitely moved on to the Hualong One.
- rdevsrex 4y agoEverybody is talking about how expensive nuclear is, and how wind and solar is a much better option. But that assumes we can actually mine all the copper, nickel, etc that we need. And do so without destroying fragile ecosystems and polluting regions where the mining is being done. This was a great video about how dirty the copper mining in Chile is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNUbroQ2XZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNUbroQ2XZ4. All I'm saying is, I don't think there are any free lunches to be had. To get off fossil fuels is going to be expensive whatever our energy mix is.
- epistasis 4y agoThis is some extremely muddled thinking. If, at some point, we run out of a mineral to mine, it's not like all our existing turbines stop working. They keep on working! And as they age out, critical materials can be recycled, because they don't consume fuel. As for copper mining being dirty, you has best stop participating in any part of modern society if a dirty mine means a tech isn't acceptable, because guess what your entire life is built upon? Which is your choice, please check out and join a commune if you prefer to! But the damage there is not permanent destruction of species, it's a transformation of some finite amount of land, excluding native species, which is what communes and suburban homes and cities also do. There is no free lunch, but there are economics lunches and there are wasteful lunches, and we should at least think clearly about these things rather than trying to make up arguments against choosing a cheaper lunch.
- scythe 4y agoGrid energy storage doesn't require nickel at all. Lithium iron phosphate batteries produced at scale today do away with nickel, but they just aren't ideal for cars. There are technologies that do away with the lithium part too, but it seems like there's a new lithium discovery every few months now that we're looking, so the future is uncertain. Copper, sure. You need copper for practically everything, though. The world has run on copper since the dawn of power generation. We may see more aluminum in power transmission at some point, but barring a breakthrough in graphene composites [1], copper will be central to the electricity sector and widely extracted regardless of technology choice. 1: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/admi.201900468 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/admi.2019004...
- acidburnNSA 4y agoNot to be ad hominem or anything, but I think it's useful context to point out that the author of this is a long-time anti-nuclear campaigner.
- DennisP 4y agoIt shouldn't be surprising that the US can't build nuclear reactors in a reasonable time or budget. We can't do it for subways or high-speed rail either. Meanwhile, as of May 2022 there were 53 nuclear reactors under construction worldwide. https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-construction-nuclear-reactors-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-c...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor
- pfdietz 4y agoWe can build solar or wind fields just fine though. They typically come in with 10% of the projected cost.
- DennisP 4y agoYes, and we should do a lot of that, though bearing in mind that we're also terrible at building long-distance transmission. Some projects have languished for decades. For countries with worse wind/solar resources and better ability to build large infrastructure, nuclear is a decent option, which is why 53 reactors are under construction.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoEven if all of those reactors were on time and on budget (23 are behind schedule), that's still less net generating capacity each year than just the wind power of just the US (who are almost as bad at building wind as they are nuclear). It's not a US problem. It's just that nuclear reactors are not a good way of making electricity.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoTitle's lacking "because the US wants to go back to living in the 20th century, until the current generation of wealthy white men are all dead".
- patientplatypus 4y agoThis is frustrating. ChatGPT that everyone is so fond of is run with electricity. So are cryptocurrencies. So is <insert new toy>. Passively safe nuclear power plants! From a note I sent to another person I would like us to have free energy though. I think that perhaps the point of life is to make the necessities of life so cheap as to be free so we can all sit around thinking deep thoughts and staring at the clouds. If you have any pull with the NRC I might mention (https://www.nuscalepower.com/en https://www.nuscalepower.com/en), base grid load capacity (https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Baseload_power https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Baseload_power), this (https://archy.deberker.com/the-uk-is-wasting-a-lot-of-wind-power/ https://archy.deberker.com/the-uk-is-wasting-a-lot-of-wind-p...), and Djikstra's algorithm. In essence, each small scale passive power plant reactor, if optimally placed along the power grid, would produce much higher returns of energy to the grid than just their energy production rating. You can also make nuclear power plants shippable around the world by putting small charges around the core that would fragment the radioactive material and release a mixture of boron and concrete if the containment unit is opened. Which means that third world countries could have energy independence. The geometries and physics involved is a minor engineering problem, as opposed to fusion reactors that require theoretical physics. And people think that a search box that talks to you like the person sitting next to you on the subway (who you'd like to interact with as little as possible) does is important. Free energy is both possible and necessary and we're not building it.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoSecond law says no. Work out the waste heat budget. First law says no. Work out the U235 budget. Not having cancer says no. Work out the Kr-85 budget. The closest thing to free energy is solar, but even then this exponential growth nonsense needs to stop.