17 ms·

It's because we only build them one at a time, and after 40 years of hiatus. At which point nearly all of the expertise for building them has retired. The prob

by _hypx 3y ago

It's because we only build them one at a time, and after 40 years of hiatus. At which point nearly all of the expertise for building them has retired. The problem is that environmentalists are fundamentally unserious about climate change. They pander to wishful thinking as hard as those who reject the existence of climate change. If we were really serious about it, we'd build 500 nuclear reactors all at once and demand they get built as fast as possible. And it isn't even that expensive once you get down to it! How many nuclear reactors could we build for the price of the F-35 program? We could easily afford thousands of them if we really needed to. So no, the problem is lack of willpower and seriousness, not cost.

Simulacra 3y ago
It's not just environmentalists, but environmental regulation that is used by anti-nuclear opponents to stall, slow down, and halt all nuclear development.
- dboreham 3y ago
  Also the whole blowing up and contaminating square miles of planet surface, every so often thing.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The nuclear industry isn't very good at making reactors, but nuclear fans are really good at making excuses. It's always someone else's fault.
mikeyouse 3y ago
Blaming environmentalists for the complete and utter failure of nuclear power plant EPCMs to actually build nuclear power plants seems pretty misguided. Edit; Environmentalists didn't bankrupt multiple international conglomerates and blow their construction schedule and budget by >100%. What part of this did Greenpeace influence; 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...
- brutusborn 3y ago
  Then why is the US one of the few nuclear countries that hasn’t build in years? I saw a calculation that suggested that anti-nuclear campaigning has resulted in 1/3 of current emissions because it resulted in increased coal and gas use. That wouldn’t have happened if the environmental movement wasn’t so anti-nuclear.
  - Retric 3y ago
    That comes down to capacity factor + minimal increase in electricity demand. The US can operate nuclear at 90+% capacity factors because it’s such a small fraction the overall grid. Seasonal, daily, and weekend dips in demand mean you just don’t want that much base load power. France could export power to other countries and still only hit 70% capacity factor which means your paying the exact same capital, and nearly identical operating costs driving up cost per kWh by about 30% on average except that cost isn’t spread evenly the marginal costs go up much faster. To simplify if you hypothetically built 50GW and you’re paying 8c/kWh, the next 10GW is at 9c/kWh, the next 10GW at 10c/kWh, and it just keeps getting worse. Sure on average that’s 70GW for 8.42c/kWh but each new project just keeps looking like a worse deal.
    - robocat 3y ago
      > Seasonal, daily, and weekend dips in demand mean you just don’t want that much [nuclear] base load power One problem is that the US regulatory agency doesn’t like load-following - apparently only one nuclear reactor in the states does it. It is common in France to do load following i.e. using Nuclear not only for base load but varying load too: This means that RTE can depend on flexible load following from the nuclear fleet to contribute to regulation in these three respects: * Primary power regulation for system stability (when frequency varies, power must be automatically adjusted by the turbine). * Secondary power regulation related to trading contracts. * Adjusting power in response to demand (decrease from 100% during the day, down to 50% or less during the night, and respond to changes in renewable inputs to the grid, etc.). PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety). So at the very end of the cycle, they are run at steady power output and do not regulate or load-follow until the next refueling outage. From https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... and click on “Load-following with PWR nuclear plants” in the right-hand menu. NuScale is supposed to be able to vary output too “plant incorporates unique features that enhance its ability to load follow” https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-NuScale-module-load-following-to-compensate-for-generation-from-the-Horse_fig4_295114246 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-NuScale-modul... and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295114246_Integrating_nuclear_and_renewables https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295114246_Integrati...
Retric 3y ago
The major issue with nuclear power is and always has been costs are just too damn high. What nobody talks about is increasing the efficiency of coal power plants significantly reduced their operating costs. The same was true of everything including hydro except nuclear which just kept getting more expensive compared to alternatives over time. Coupling long plant lifespans with minimal growth in electricity demand for decades meant there was no incentives to build nuclear after it reached ~30% of total demand. It couldn’t pass that ~30% threshold because costs enter an exponential spiral of decreasing capacity factor meaning higher fees when it’s in operation. PS: I say ~30% because the actual economics get really complicated that’s just what most countries seem to roughly settle on. Forecasting today out a full plants lifespan and I don’t think even 30% is still viable without massive subsidies.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  It was actually natural gas fired plants that put the nails in the coffin for the "Nuclear Renaissance". The important fact: a combined cycle natural gas power plant has a capital cost of about $1/watt, with a thermal efficiency of about 60% (LHV). Vogtle 3/4 are something like $15/W. And natural gas on the Henry Hub is $2.28/million BTU right now (at 60% efficiency, that's a fuel cost of $.013/kWh).
photochemsyn 3y ago
Costs for nuclear don't really benefit that much from economies of scale, each installation has to be heavily reinforced and the required equipment is very expensive (you really don't want primary coolent pumps to ever fail, so they're over-engineered to essentially eliminate accidental failure - although exceptional situations e.g. Fukushima are still always a possibility). Also, the global uranium fuel pipeline is limited (US imports most of its uranium fuel doesn't it?). Building 500 1 gigawatt solar/storage plants would be much cheaper - by at least a factor of ten - and could be done much faster.
- _hypx 3y ago
  If you take into account load factor, you will need closer to 2,000 such solar plants. And you need far more land too. Also, you’ll end up being most of them in deserts, far away from any human habitations. So you will then build a vast network of power distribution. Now, to be fair, we could do that. It will just need trillions of dollars, and will have its own set of huge complications. It’s mostly just a fantasy that this will be all that much more cheaper.
  - bottlepalm 3y ago
    It is cheaper, and more and more solar, wind, batteries, and hvdc lines are built everyday.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    I'm not quite sure what your 2000 could be referring to. If it's land use, that's off by orders of magnitude. Nuclear at this site: 3100 acres [1], 1/3 of which is a nature preserve, so 2000 acres. It will be 4.5GW at 90% capacity factor, so roughly 500 acres/GW. NREL puts the least land efficient solar PV at 6.1 acres/MW [2], which with a 0.2 capacity factor corresponds to 30500 acres/GW. This is a factor of 61 for land use, which is nowhere near the 2000, but I'm not sure if that's what you were talking about. But land use is not a concern for powering the US by solar. It doesn't take that much land, and even the land it does use is easy to use simultaneously for pretty much anything else. You talk about "trillions of dollars" as if we should be scared of big numbers, but for some reason forget that it would be far more trillions of dollars just to continue with our current system! That's a very biased way to look at things. And if we were to use nuclear instead of fossil fuels like we do now, it would be far more trillions. Seriously, this is just one GW at a cost of $15B. Average US load is ~500GW, but will be much higher in the future after the energy transition. A nuclear grid is easily a $15T prospect! And that's without the absolutely massive amount of storage that nuclear needs in order to deal with load following. [1] https://www.bechtel.com/projects/plant-vogtle-units-3-4/ https://www.bechtel.com/projects/plant-vogtle-units-3-4/ [2] https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech-size.html https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech-size.html
VintageCool 3y ago
If we were really serious about climate change, we'd build a ton of wind and solar and batteries, plus a ton of new transmission to get electricity from the windy and sunny places to our cities. That's currently the fastest way to cut our greenhouse gas emissions.
- prox 3y ago
  Renewable energy in the future is predicted that by 2024, solar capacity in the world will grow by 600 gigawatts (GW), almost double the installed total electricity capacity of Japan. Overall, renewable electricity is predicted to grow by 1 200 GW by 2024, the equivalent of the total electricity capacity of the US. From a study on earth.org. Solar will also become 35% cheaper is expected by 2024.
  - yread 3y ago
    Soon we will have too much solar. Which is a nice problem to have but still. In 2021 Dutch solar and wind produced >100% of the demand 0.4% of the time. In 2023 it's already 5%. It's not a disaster but the producers have to switch the plants off (due to negative el. prices). Which makes the business case worse - you are not making money at night, when it's cloudy or when it's too sunny. And they will add another ~7.5GW peak solar+wind this year (60% of demand)! Hopefully, someone can figure out what to do with all the extra energy (hydrogen? synthetic fuels?)
    - natmaka 3y ago
      All this may become consistent: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...
- _hypx 3y ago
  If we were serious about doing it with renewables, we'd skip the batteries and build as much green hydrogen capacity as possible, plus hydrogen pipelines to move it around. People who bring up batteries have failed to realize that winter exists, and in winter you will need far more energy storage than you can possibly achieve with batteries.
kuhewa 3y ago
That's a pretty facile analysis.
dotnet00 3y ago
See also, setting up other critical infrastructure like new rocket launch sites. So called environmentalists have taken every chance to file lawsuits against the FAA and SpaceX regarding activity at Boca Chica, filing complaints about animals that were seen once in the area 40 years ago and complaining about pollution on the beach even though it was completely uncared for before the facility got going. On the other hand, when the abnormally cold front hit the area, none of those groups were anywhere to be seen trying to help the turtles while SpaceX employees were out helping and had helped setup generators etc at nearby NGOs (where the turtles were kept) who actually do care about the environment. Also, regarding the F35, it's also a nice example of how valuable mass production and continuous refinement can be. Despite its original obscene cost, the program by now has produced so many planes that per unit it's actually not that expensive relative to other modern jets, despite being much better than essentially all of them.
- Pigalowda 3y ago
  Aren’t those kind of environmental complaints usually by hostile competitors? For instance - Blue Origin hires a person/lawyer to set up an environmental impact complaint against SpaceX just to tie up resources? I thought these kinds of things were generally all corporate shenanigans and bullshit? Maybe i have too much tin foil on.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    You're not too far off, IIRC some of the complaints do seem to have an indirect link to competitors (eg donations to the organization) but I feel that the point against environmental organizations still stands for them to be hurting support for their own cause just to be a front for others to hinder competition.

by _hypx 3y ago

Simulacra 3y ago

It's not just environmentalists, but environmental regulation that is used by anti-nuclear opponents to stall, slow down, and halt all nuclear development.

dboreham 3y ago
Also the whole blowing up and contaminating square miles of planet surface, every so often thing.
pfdietz 3y ago
The nuclear industry isn't very good at making reactors, but nuclear fans are really good at making excuses. It's always someone else's fault.

mikeyouse 3y ago

Blaming environmentalists for the complete and utter failure of nuclear power plant EPCMs to actually build nuclear power plants seems pretty misguided. Edit; Environmentalists didn't bankrupt multiple international conglomerates and blow their construction schedule and budget by >100%. What part of this did Greenpeace influence; 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...

brutusborn 3y ago
Then why is the US one of the few nuclear countries that hasn’t build in years? I saw a calculation that suggested that anti-nuclear campaigning has resulted in 1/3 of current emissions because it resulted in increased coal and gas use. That wouldn’t have happened if the environmental movement wasn’t so anti-nuclear.
- Retric 3y ago
  That comes down to capacity factor + minimal increase in electricity demand. The US can operate nuclear at 90+% capacity factors because it’s such a small fraction the overall grid. Seasonal, daily, and weekend dips in demand mean you just don’t want that much base load power. France could export power to other countries and still only hit 70% capacity factor which means your paying the exact same capital, and nearly identical operating costs driving up cost per kWh by about 30% on average except that cost isn’t spread evenly the marginal costs go up much faster. To simplify if you hypothetically built 50GW and you’re paying 8c/kWh, the next 10GW is at 9c/kWh, the next 10GW at 10c/kWh, and it just keeps getting worse. Sure on average that’s 70GW for 8.42c/kWh but each new project just keeps looking like a worse deal.
  - robocat 3y ago
    > Seasonal, daily, and weekend dips in demand mean you just don’t want that much [nuclear] base load power One problem is that the US regulatory agency doesn’t like load-following - apparently only one nuclear reactor in the states does it. It is common in France to do load following i.e. using Nuclear not only for base load but varying load too: This means that RTE can depend on flexible load following from the nuclear fleet to contribute to regulation in these three respects: * Primary power regulation for system stability (when frequency varies, power must be automatically adjusted by the turbine). * Secondary power regulation related to trading contracts. * Adjusting power in response to demand (decrease from 100% during the day, down to 50% or less during the night, and respond to changes in renewable inputs to the grid, etc.). PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety). So at the very end of the cycle, they are run at steady power output and do not regulate or load-follow until the next refueling outage. From https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr... and click on “Load-following with PWR nuclear plants” in the right-hand menu. NuScale is supposed to be able to vary output too “plant incorporates unique features that enhance its ability to load follow” https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-NuScale-module-load-following-to-compensate-for-generation-from-the-Horse_fig4_295114246 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-of-NuScale-modul... and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295114246_Integrating_nuclear_and_renewables https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295114246_Integrati...

Retric 3y ago

The major issue with nuclear power is and always has been costs are just too damn high. What nobody talks about is increasing the efficiency of coal power plants significantly reduced their operating costs. The same was true of everything including hydro except nuclear which just kept getting more expensive compared to alternatives over time. Coupling long plant lifespans with minimal growth in electricity demand for decades meant there was no incentives to build nuclear after it reached ~30% of total demand. It couldn’t pass that ~30% threshold because costs enter an exponential spiral of decreasing capacity factor meaning higher fees when it’s in operation. PS: I say ~30% because the actual economics get really complicated that’s just what most countries seem to roughly settle on. Forecasting today out a full plants lifespan and I don’t think even 30% is still viable without massive subsidies.

pfdietz 3y ago
It was actually natural gas fired plants that put the nails in the coffin for the "Nuclear Renaissance". The important fact: a combined cycle natural gas power plant has a capital cost of about $1/watt, with a thermal efficiency of about 60% (LHV). Vogtle 3/4 are something like $15/W. And natural gas on the Henry Hub is $2.28/million BTU right now (at 60% efficiency, that's a fuel cost of $.013/kWh).

photochemsyn 3y ago

Costs for nuclear don't really benefit that much from economies of scale, each installation has to be heavily reinforced and the required equipment is very expensive (you really don't want primary coolent pumps to ever fail, so they're over-engineered to essentially eliminate accidental failure - although exceptional situations e.g. Fukushima are still always a possibility). Also, the global uranium fuel pipeline is limited (US imports most of its uranium fuel doesn't it?). Building 500 1 gigawatt solar/storage plants would be much cheaper - by at least a factor of ten - and could be done much faster.

_hypx 3y ago
If you take into account load factor, you will need closer to 2,000 such solar plants. And you need far more land too. Also, you’ll end up being most of them in deserts, far away from any human habitations. So you will then build a vast network of power distribution. Now, to be fair, we could do that. It will just need trillions of dollars, and will have its own set of huge complications. It’s mostly just a fantasy that this will be all that much more cheaper.
- bottlepalm 3y ago
  It is cheaper, and more and more solar, wind, batteries, and hvdc lines are built everyday.
- epistasis 3y ago
  I'm not quite sure what your 2000 could be referring to. If it's land use, that's off by orders of magnitude. Nuclear at this site: 3100 acres [1], 1/3 of which is a nature preserve, so 2000 acres. It will be 4.5GW at 90% capacity factor, so roughly 500 acres/GW. NREL puts the least land efficient solar PV at 6.1 acres/MW [2], which with a 0.2 capacity factor corresponds to 30500 acres/GW. This is a factor of 61 for land use, which is nowhere near the 2000, but I'm not sure if that's what you were talking about. But land use is not a concern for powering the US by solar. It doesn't take that much land, and even the land it does use is easy to use simultaneously for pretty much anything else. You talk about "trillions of dollars" as if we should be scared of big numbers, but for some reason forget that it would be far more trillions of dollars just to continue with our current system! That's a very biased way to look at things. And if we were to use nuclear instead of fossil fuels like we do now, it would be far more trillions. Seriously, this is just one GW at a cost of $15B. Average US load is ~500GW, but will be much higher in the future after the energy transition. A nuclear grid is easily a $15T prospect! And that's without the absolutely massive amount of storage that nuclear needs in order to deal with load following. [1] https://www.bechtel.com/projects/plant-vogtle-units-3-4/ https://www.bechtel.com/projects/plant-vogtle-units-3-4/ [2] https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech-size.html https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech-size.html

VintageCool 3y ago

If we were really serious about climate change, we'd build a ton of wind and solar and batteries, plus a ton of new transmission to get electricity from the windy and sunny places to our cities. That's currently the fastest way to cut our greenhouse gas emissions.

prox 3y ago
Renewable energy in the future is predicted that by 2024, solar capacity in the world will grow by 600 gigawatts (GW), almost double the installed total electricity capacity of Japan. Overall, renewable electricity is predicted to grow by 1 200 GW by 2024, the equivalent of the total electricity capacity of the US. From a study on earth.org. Solar will also become 35% cheaper is expected by 2024.
- yread 3y ago
  Soon we will have too much solar. Which is a nice problem to have but still. In 2021 Dutch solar and wind produced >100% of the demand 0.4% of the time. In 2023 it's already 5%. It's not a disaster but the producers have to switch the plants off (due to negative el. prices). Which makes the business case worse - you are not making money at night, when it's cloudy or when it's too sunny. And they will add another ~7.5GW peak solar+wind this year (60% of demand)! Hopefully, someone can figure out what to do with all the extra energy (hydrogen? synthetic fuels?)
  - natmaka 3y ago
    All this may become consistent: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...
_hypx 3y ago
If we were serious about doing it with renewables, we'd skip the batteries and build as much green hydrogen capacity as possible, plus hydrogen pipelines to move it around. People who bring up batteries have failed to realize that winter exists, and in winter you will need far more energy storage than you can possibly achieve with batteries.

kuhewa 3y ago

That's a pretty facile analysis.

dotnet00 3y ago

See also, setting up other critical infrastructure like new rocket launch sites. So called environmentalists have taken every chance to file lawsuits against the FAA and SpaceX regarding activity at Boca Chica, filing complaints about animals that were seen once in the area 40 years ago and complaining about pollution on the beach even though it was completely uncared for before the facility got going. On the other hand, when the abnormally cold front hit the area, none of those groups were anywhere to be seen trying to help the turtles while SpaceX employees were out helping and had helped setup generators etc at nearby NGOs (where the turtles were kept) who actually do care about the environment. Also, regarding the F35, it's also a nice example of how valuable mass production and continuous refinement can be. Despite its original obscene cost, the program by now has produced so many planes that per unit it's actually not that expensive relative to other modern jets, despite being much better than essentially all of them.

Pigalowda 3y ago
Aren’t those kind of environmental complaints usually by hostile competitors? For instance - Blue Origin hires a person/lawyer to set up an environmental impact complaint against SpaceX just to tie up resources? I thought these kinds of things were generally all corporate shenanigans and bullshit? Maybe i have too much tin foil on.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  You're not too far off, IIRC some of the complaints do seem to have an indirect link to competitors (eg donations to the organization) but I feel that the point against environmental organizations still stands for them to be hurting support for their own cause just to be a front for others to hinder competition.