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The US is getting its first new nuclear reactor in 40 years
- milar 3y agoPlease more. And next time without so much wasted time. We don’t have much time.
- waynecochran 3y agoIf folks really cared about climate change we would building lots of these. The fact that we aren't is evidence that folks don’t truly care about solving anything … just want to push their own narrative.
- hackernewds 3y agoThere are plausible environmental reasons not to proliferate nuclear energy
- bottlepalm 3y agoSolar/wind/battery/hvdc is more than capable to providing gigawatts of power, cheaper.
- waynecochran 3y agoNothing close to nuclear
- bottlepalm 3y agoYesterday in California nuclear produced 54 GWh of energy - that's pretty good except solar/wind produced 237 and batteries 11. And the growth of both is only accelerating. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#section-supply-trend https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#sectio... So you're kind of right that nuclear isn't close to renewables..
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoLittle ol Iowa has 12GW wind capacity! Around here thats > half our needs.
- the_doctah 3y agoCan't even keep the ones already built open, like the one in Zion, IL.
- donny2018 3y agoI mean, in 60-s and 70-s, France and US were stamping out nuclear reactors like hotdogs, building them literally by dozens. And they were moderately cheap. I don't know what happened afterwards, but now building a nuke plant has become a nightmare.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoMy dad was apart of that building boom (starting at Hanford). In 1986 or so, he went from making $200k/year as a contractor to…< $40k/year in Mississippi as an FTE for a newly built power station there (after being unemployed for 2 years). There was a strong push by the government to build, and when that evaporated, all activity just stopped over night.
- stephen_g 3y agoThere were huge evolutions in the designs for safety (because of some big accidents), which I think did make them a lot more expensive. I’ve also heard stricter requirements for things like cooling can contribute - i.e. needing cooling towers instead of just rejecting waste heat into bodies of water, which is quite bad environmentally.
- kuhewa 3y ago'Folks' can't just will the economics of a building a nuclear plant into favourability. maybe if the US had a much different (e.g. China) style of government where a half trillion could be invested into nationalisation of energy production and complete overhaul of the grid. Otherwise anyone with capital would have to be crazy to put $10 billion into a nuclear project that won't be online for a decade and already won't be able to compete per kWh with renewables, when you could instead spread the investment out across a bunch of wind and solar projects that will be online in a couple years. Maybe things will change once renewables have saturated demand and we've hit hard limits regarding storage.
- MattGaiser 3y ago> “They just want to have coal plants without coal,” he said. “We’ll never solve the climate problem that way.” Given that the coal specifically (as well as oil and gas) is the problem, why is that bad? Coal plants without emissions sounds great!
- andbberger 3y agothis is the same guy that compared small modular reactors to theranos
- EricE 3y agoYes, replacing coal boilers with nuclear boilers seems like a total no-brainer. Which is why it probably will never happen.
- mullingitover 3y agoIt’ll never happen because coal plants are actually littered with radioisotopes from the coal ash. You could hook up a reactor to a coal plant’s turbine for cheap, but they would immediately violate regulations because of the existing levels of radiation.
- credit_guy 3y agoWait, what? In your mind a coal power plant is knee deep in coal ash, and there's radioactivity everywhere, or something like that? Ever heard of the EPA [1]? [1] https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics
- burnte 3y agoAs an Atlanta resident, I LOVED when this was announced, and I'm thrilled to live in GA with this plant, and I hope to see more. Yeah, it's going to drive my bills up a few bucks for a while, but I get to know we're burning that much less coal and gas.
- hackernewds 3y agoWhy would it drive your bills up?
- thinkcontext 3y agoBecause the price more than doubled to $30B.
- epistasis 3y agoNuclear is one of the very most expensive forms of new electricity. There's basically zero chance that a new reactor of this style will be built, voluntarily. It took a massive amount of government backed insurance and loans to even make these possible, but no utility will be insane enough to try again without someone shouldering the construction cost risk.
- himinlomax 3y agoNuclear is only expensive compared to renewables if you ignore storage. Since storage is more expensive than nuclear (unless you have plenty of mountains and water to do pumped hydro), nuclear is actually cheaper than wind+solar in most places.
- epistasis 3y agoNuclear is expensive compared to solar even if you add storage to the nuclear. Even if you ignore the storage and/or curtailment that nuclear needs in order to match demand on the grid.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
- theoldlove 3y ago“ The Public Interest Advocacy staff of the Georgia Public Service Commission warned back in 2008 that the costs could skyrocket. They advocated for a risk-sharing mechanism to incentivize Georgia Power to keep the construction costs down and opposed plans to bill customers for the Vogtle construction while it was underway. Both proposals failed. Thanks to a 2009 state law, Georgia Power ratepayers are billed a monthly Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery fee. They will begin paying an additional monthly charge when each of the new Plant Vogtle units come online.” If I were a Georgia Power customer I’d be livid. Why on Earth should I be on the hook for cost overruns instead of the company building the thing?
- elif 3y agoGP customer here. They have a monopoly anyway, so they will recover costs one way or another anyway. Also, we pay some of the lowest energy rates in the country so there's not much to be mad about. Overnight I pay $0.01/kwh ($0.03 if you include fees). Lastly, why get mad when you can get solar.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoWow, I thought my $0.08/kWh in PNW was great.
- lftl 3y agoNote that elif said "overnight" rate. I'm pretty sure they're on the EV rate plan from GA Power[1]. You only get that rate at night, and you pay a pretty punitive $0.21/kwh for any peak usage. As they mentioned, that's a pretty solid number for the marginal rate you'll pay for an extra kwh, but there are a number of base fees tacked on to that. I'm not on the EV plan, but my average out the door winter final rate is about $0.13/kwh and my summer rate ends up being more like $0.17/kwh. [1] https://www.georgiapower.com/residential/billing-and-rate-plans/pricing-and-rate-plans/plug-in-ev.html https://www.georgiapower.com/residential/billing-and-rate-pl...
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- nocoiner 3y agoI don’t understand how they figure this is the first new reactor in the US in 40 years? The page that that assertion links to says that one of the reactors at Watts Bar came online in 2016, and the prior reactor there came online in 1996. And I know that there was at least one nuclear power plant that came online in the early 90s which is, urk, 30 years ago, but hey, still not 40.
- mchannon 3y agoWatts Bar got approved an eternity ago and just got finished 30ish years late. Vogtle 3 & 4 got approved recently, though I’m not sure the 40 years number is an apples-to-apples comparison. The elephant’s foot in the room (see what I did there?) is that nuclear is just not cheap the way it used to be. It takes a lot of steel and a lot of concrete. The reason we haven’t been building nuclear plants is that other plants, gas, wind, and solar, deliver way more power in way less time, and with a lesser quantum of plant size. The fossil fuel consumption of a nuclear plant, while certainly less than coal, is still higher than wind or solar.
- ipaddr 3y agoNuclear offers a steady cheaper than solar base line of power. While gas has many advantages climate change isn't one of them.
- rendaw 3y agoIn 40 years? So roughly 2060?
- moomoo3000 3y agoI think they mean it's been 40 years since a plant was built.
- sambull 3y agoWatts Bar #2 was the last one in the US to come online started construction in 1972 came online in 2016... These are the sorts of timelines that make these things hard sells to modern boardrooms and investment strategies.
- replygirl 3y agoStopped in 1985, resumed in 2007
- actuallyalys 3y agoOne of the opponents in the article says nuclear power is not a silver bullet. But that argument only makes sense if people are advocating nuclear power to the exclusion of other techniques to deal with renewable generation being unavailable. Are there many nuclear power advocates who oppose grid upgrades or moving energy use toward times of day when renewables are generating a surplus?
- elif 3y agoI concur that nuclear is not a silver bullet for only one reason: overproduction. If we had enough nuclear capacity to support the peak grid, we would have a huge surplus for the remaining 80% of the day. In order for nuclear power to be a viable path toward decarbonization, it requires a coupling with: insanely large scale battery storage, global scale grid power redirection, a lot of dams which can act as peaker plants, a load generation which can scale with an economic model that makes sense (like server farms, crypto mines, etc which can be turned up or down on schedule) and/or an uninvented carbon-free peaker plant technology. Personally, I think nukes and batteries are the most straightforward and developed combination, but any combination could also be viable just with more research and development, and without an obvious economic model for them to work.
- andbberger 3y agooverproduction is a feature. plenty of useful things to do at night. synth fuels, carbon capture, desal. mostly synth fuels though.
- elif 3y agoThose "neat things" are academic dreams not things which can roll off a 2023 assembly line with a clearly defined economic incentive. Battery coupling is as close as you can bring nukes to a silver bullet, but that is a huge project on its own.
- waynecochran 3y agoCharge electric cars
- claytongulick 3y agoOne of the things that I find fascinating about nuclear power is how it is insured (or was). In the early 2000's I actually wrote the software that enabled this*. There was a single insurance company, NEIL (Nuclear Electric Insurance Ltd) that wrote the policies for all of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. This company was wholly owned by the energy companies, so they self-insured through cost-based rate hikes. I got to see pictures of some of the claims that had been filed. Let's just say... it still keeps me up at night. Many things don't make it to the news. * As an aside, one of the applications I wrote for them to track fires in plants still stands out as the single worst web app I've ever written. Visual Interdev with server events that reloaded the page every click and an OCX control with an animated fire. Omg.
- thinkcontext 3y agoGiven how badly both AP1000 projects in the US have gone (the other project was cancelled after spending $9B on a hole in the ground) its extremely unlikely it or any other big reactors will ever be built here. All the previous AP1000 projects that were in the development pipeline were cancelled and no generator in their right mind would order one without the feds agreeing to take on construction risk. Looks like the only game in town are SMRs and none of those are supposed to come online until 2030. But everything about them is highly speculative, who knows which ones will work or be economic. The costs of the one furthest ahead, NuScale, are already exploding and the power will be way more expensive than planned, even with big new money from the feds.
- credit_guy 3y ago> The costs of the one furthest ahead, NuScale, are already exploding and the power will be way more expensive than planned. Not sure if you've heard - there was some inflation that hit the US back in 2022. Are you asking for NuScale to be immune to inflation? Even regular cars became more expensive.
- mikeyouse 3y agoIn mid 2021, NuScale was estimating $58/mwh.. it's now $89/mwh. I don't think you can blame 'inflation' for a +50% increase in estimated power costs over the last 18 months.
- thinkcontext 3y agoIts $89MWH with a $30MWH generation credit and a $1.4B subsidy (thanks Biden). This is all before construction has started, there will certainly be more cost inflation coming. https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-released-nuscale-small-modular-reactor https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-r...
- evilos 3y ago1.4B doesn't even offset the 2B they paid to the NRC to certify their technology. This is boring old PWR reactors too. It's ancient tech. Fast construction is basically the point of SMRs so we will see if that pans out. Not that I expect them to nail it on the first try.
- fdye 3y agoDid a tour on some business of Vogtle-3/4 several years back. You have no idea how big or complex these things are until you see it up close. It feels like watching the pyramids go up. Just the amount of rebar on the ground was impressive. So happy to see it going into operation even with all the delays! Really cool timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSEv_K9861E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSEv_K9861E
- learyjk 3y agoWhat about all the nuclear powered submarines and carriers? Don’t count?
- pfdietz 3y agoA nuclear powered ship is overall more expensive to build+operate than a fossil fuel powered ship. And this is even when burning fairly expensive liquid fossil fuels. This is why most of the ships in the US Navy are not nuclear powered.
- bcatanzaro 3y agoThe people who oppose nuclear power always point to the construction cost and long delays. BUT. The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! We could build these reactors so much more cheaply and quickly (and more safely!) if we decided to! This in an argument from unclean hands. Nuclear skeptics, like the ones given so much airtime in the linked article, have been very successful in driving up costs and adding delay. But these costs and delays are not intrinsic to the technology. It's not fair if I delay a thing for me to claim the thing has failed because it was late. No, it failed because I delayed it. I wish the nuclear skeptics would apply their delay tactics to coal power plants, which spew staggering amounts of radionuclides over huge swaths of the world, not to mention their carbon emissions.
- PaywallBuster 3y agoNuclear is a decade long planning Doesn't work if the government changes hands every 4 years and comes with radical different ideas and starts reversing stuff from the previous government. Totally different to China, with their 20 year plans, where they're committed to developing nuclear, are putting superior resources into it and are building at scale. Every country with nuclear had a period where they went ahead and build a bunch. Building one or two in isolation is just a gamble
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y agoAgain, this isn’t intrinsic to the technology, we could be nuclear reactors on time and on budget if we decided to.
- oneshtein 3y agoThen Russians will blow up a dam, so the reactor will run out of water for cooling and then run away into a Red Forest. OR climate change will make a water pond dry, so you cannot even start the reactor. OR terrorists will capture a reactor and mine it. OR massive change in water weight due to climate change will create a massive earthquake.
- viggity 3y agoA pox on the house of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Even if you're a climate skeptic, what they've done to the country is absolutely criminal.
- 0xGod 3y agoMore.
- bottlepalm 3y agoLess. It's a red flag when your power generation system needs more security than Fort Knox.
- jimt1234 3y ago3 great articles about nuclear energy: https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago> The lesson I think we should learn from this is: What works on the computer doesn’t work in the real world, This seems to dovetail with Rickover’s “Paper Reactor” memo, that was referenced here, recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36080015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36080015
- ttul 3y agoNuclear plants are complex, bespoke machines. This is the first new reactor complex in 40 years! It’s ludicrous to expect it would somehow be built on time and under budget. If we can somehow start building several plants per year, then a supply chain will develop, skilled labour will be trained, and reusable parts and know how will emerge. But when you only build one thing every few decades, there are no economies of scale.
- sharts 3y agoToo little, too late.