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The delays on this project have nothing at all to do with people opposing nuclear construction. The site welcomed more reactors. The results were approved unde

The delays on this project have nothing at all to do with people opposing nuclear construction. The site welcomed more reactors. The results were approved under a new proces that was explicitly requested by the industry in order to expedite everything. Nuclear is a big construction project, and suffers from the same big construction project cost disease that every other big construction project suffers from in the US. In addition, it suffers from needing absolutely massive amounts of custom, high precision welding, and high precision concrete pours unlike any other construction project. In addition to being some of the most complex projects ever designed, it requires a large amount of highly skilled labor really only gets used for this one purpose in our economy. I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem, the inherent labor and construction efficiencies that made nuclear a good fit for the mid-20th century, but a less good fit for the 21st century when labor is much more valuable, and perhaps we should put it to more valuable purposes when we have far cheaper alternatives. Building buildings for manufacturing results in much better utilization of labor. A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor.

ftth_finland 3y ago
More solar is better if it displaces fossil fuels, loads can be moved to coincide with sunshine, output can be cost effectively stored and/or the climate is co-operative. Not all of these assumptions hold everywhere or every time.
- epistasis 3y ago
  The same caveats are also true of nuclear, and happen far more frequently for nuclear. If we are serious about displacing fossil fuel use, and I am deadly serious about it, wind, solar, storage, demand response, new transmission, thermal storage, hydrogen for chemical process... all these things are deployable today at massive scale and should be quickly adopted. However, nuclear is further away and more expensive than we thought it was in 2008 when these reactors got started. Back in the mid-2000s I was a huge proponent of nuclear. In the mid-2010s I change my tune because we had a ton of new data about nuclear being far more expensive than promised, and other tech had advanced massively. Nuclear has never advanced as a tech, it does not have a learning curve. If we are going to reach a future with energy abundance, with clean tech, we need to invest in technologies with learning curves, that advance. Nuclear tech does not advance.
  - evandijk70 3y ago
    Is this inherent to the technology, or because so few nuclear reactors are being built? Is there anyone involved in the construction of the latest reactor that contributed to another one? You learn by doing, and there has been very little construction in the last decades.
    - epistasis 3y ago
      Learning by doing has been tried many times, and it's never resulted in a learning rate where one could expect more than a small decrease in costs, and it has conclusively proven that even a halving of costs is probably out of the question. Look at France in their first build out; subsequent reactors of the same design cost more than the first. And France was considered a success by most. The few buildouts that have seen cost decrease have never produced learning like you get in manufactured products. I wish I had access to my bibliography right now for the papers on this, sorry I'm making statements without the research to back them up. But those that have looked into which technologies develop learning curves find that the learning curve is found early, and it tends to be tech wheee lots of the same small thing is made, with minimal customization at install. Nuclear is inherently a big tech, with some customization for site install. Combined cycle gas turbines found some efficiency of scale by being small enough that they could have standardized plant designs that don't require design changes for the site (though it does limit which sites can install the designs). SMRs might change this for nuclear, but what people are calling "SMR" today is still is as big as 300MW, and it's hard to see how that could be standardized and manufactured. Nuclear does not scale down very well, which is why all these places are trying to pass off really big reactors as part of the SMR hype wave.
      - usrnm 3y ago
        > Nuclear is inherently a big tech, with some customization for site install Russia has successful small floating power stations, that can just dock and power a nearby town. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov There is nothing "inherently big" about nuclear
oceanplexian 3y ago
> I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem, the inherent labor and construction efficiencies that made nuclear a good fit for the mid-20th century Yeah, this argument might hold water if there was nothing to compare to, but there is. China stamps these things out of an assembly line. Every year they’re building multiple nuclear reactors, leaving us in the dust. You can’t make the argument that China’s reactors are unsafe, because they’ve had less accidents than us. To me it’s obvious that it’s not an insurmountable engineering problem.
- riffraff 3y ago
  21st century china has a lot in common with early 20th western countries, namely cheap labor and the ability to push through people protests and regulations. South Korea might be a closer comparison.
  - natmaka 3y ago
    In South Korea those 'abilities' couldn't hide a nuclear scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
- Tade0 3y ago
  They still haven't reached the same capacity as France, even after 20 years of rapid development. Also in the same country wind overtook nuclear in terms of GWh delivered around a decade ago, and the gap only widened with time. Of course there are bold plans to accelerate nuclear even further, but at this rate it's doubtful it'll ever be a significant part of the electricity mix.
- epistasis 3y ago
  Actually I think this is the perfect comparison to support my point, not refute it. China does not suffer from construction cost disease like advanced Western countries do. Their cost of labor is lower. And even France, which doesn't have construction cost disease as bad for the US for things like transit projects, does have this problem now as they try to build Flamanville and as was seen at Olkiluoto. My hypothesis could definitely be wrong, perhaps it's just logistics and even with our high cost of labor we could still build nuclear economically in the US. But having read everything I can get my hands on about how to improve nuclear costs in the US, I'm sticking to my hypothesis until I get data that refutes it. And it's not an engineering problem alone, though at Vogtle it's clear that part of the problem was engineering. EPC in general was a massive fail at Vogtle. But the partial design and bad design did not help either. This was the site where EPC thought the design was unconstructable, yet still powered thought to construct something else, and then had to get this new thing approved... Everybody working on it has been gearing up to sue each other at the end rather than trying to get it built.
himinlomax 3y ago
> A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor. Except that 1GW of nuclear capacity means up to 900MW of production in practice, while 1GW of solar means 100MW. Nuclear stops for maintenance, refuelling and repairs. A well maintained plant can operate for 60 years or more. Solar stops at night, slows down on cloudy days, and so on. Panels degrade and have to be replaced after 20 years or so. Non-hydro renewables only beat nuclear when you conveniently forget storage, which is insanely expensive, and when you look at nominal capacity, not actual production. Just go look at https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR : currently, wind is barely producing anything across Europe. Germany has 67GW of wind capacity, yet they're producing a laughable 7.4 GW. It's been that way for *WEEKS*. You can't possibly store weeks of production.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > Solar stops at night, slows down on cloudy days, and so on. All of which is already accounted for, so you're double-counting > Panels degrade and have to be replaced after 20 years or so. Most of the ones I've seen have 25 year guarantees; historically they've lasted longer, but I don't know how much the manufacturing etc. has changed so I'm not sure how strongly to predict extra years of life beyond such guarantees. > Non-hydro renewables only beat nuclear when you conveniently forget storage, which is insanely expensive, and when you look at nominal capacity, not actual production. 1) Hydro is a storage system as well as a source 2) Even with li-ion backing it's cost-comparable to nuclear, and li-ion is one of the more expensive PWh-scale options 3) The current pricing is for digging up rocks and applying enough chemistry to make them batteries; recycling is expected to be much cheaper once scaled up. (I'll grant that recycling is an "if and when", if you like; but the other points stand without needing any support)
nine_k 3y ago
This is reasonable. Nuclear is still valuable though. It still works after a week of bad weather that would badly affect wind or solar. Regarding renewables: are we held back by solar panel manufacturing? I thought the constantly falling prices are a sign that the panels are abundant. I think serious utility use of solar is held back more by the cost of storage. If we speak about best allocation of scarce labor, maybe battery manufacturing would have more impact. Thermal storage (mirrors hearing rocks or melting salts) is also pretty material- and labor-intensive, even though it likely would require slightly less demanding processes of laying concrete and welding steel than a nuclear installation.
- jandrese 3y ago
  Storage is definitely a factor currently, but a lot of battery factories are scheduled to come online in the next few years and I expect the situation to improve considerably.
  - Paradigma11 3y ago
    I watched a representation of an mining industry insider ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOEGKDVvsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOEGKDVvsg ) some months ago who makes the point that all these projections are completely unrealistic because of mining constraints. He says/shows that you need an order of magnitude (I think) more ore of many elements and this is impossible because: 1) The Mining industry is incredible mature and there are no easy disruptive technologies on the horizon. 2) Even if there was the will to do it, new capacities take at least ten years to go live and he does not even see any relevant increased investment in the sector, never mind concrete projects.
    - defrost 3y ago
      Mark P. Mills [1] may be a number of things but he is absolutely not by any means a "mining industry insider". He is a senior fellow for a think tank that claims as axiomatic that the popular conception of climate change as posing an existential threat to modern civilization is not supported by climate science or economics. It comes as no surprise that he repeatedly makes presentations aimed to undercut transition to green energy. Regardless of the truth of his position though he is clearly no expert on the mining industry. [1] https://manhattan.institute/person/mark-p-mills https://manhattan.institute/person/mark-p-mills
DrBazza 3y ago
I wish nuclear opponents would perform a like for like analysis of non-nuclear vs nuclear. - How much does it raise co2 parts per million when operational? - How much does it raise co2 parts per million when being built? - Full environmental cost of the entire supply including construction? - Deaths during construction. - Deaths in the general population from "emissions" or accidents. - Deaths during use and maintenance. - How much area does the site area? - How much area lost to 'contamination'? Oil spills, coal slag piles [1], but for nuclear, nature does quite well after humans leave the area. What are the byproducts of producing turbine blades and solar panels, including the construction of new factories and all the transport of materials to those factories, and the emissions of those factories? - Post-use recycling (solar panels after 20yrs, wind turbines when a blade breaks) Nuclear power hasn't been industrialized until recently and even then there's not a huge effort towards that. Imagine if every single modern plane built is a one-off ad-hoc design. I wonder how much they'd cost? Best example I can think of, but huge complexity, safety-critical, a similar lifespan, with on going maintenance. > A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor. How are they an "exponential" improvement? There's a vast amount of digging in some out-of-sight out-of-mind country to get materials out of the ground, with sketchy practices, shipped across the sea in a diesel power ship, to be refined, consuming more power, day-in-day out. And then there's the solar panel recycling story that we haven't even figured out yet. [2] And with wind turbines, we started off on the wrong foot there as well. [3] Apparently we're in a critical climate emergency, but nuclear is "too costly". And 'green' solutions are seen to be greener than they actually are. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster 2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65602519 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65602519 3. https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wind-turbine-blades-be-recycled https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wi...
- tpm 3y ago
  > - Full environmental cost of the entire supply including construction? And also including dismantling and spent fuel/ contaminated material storage and disposal for unknown time to come. Also not only environmental, but social cost of creating a spent fuel site that does have to be cared for hundreds of years while bringing no benefit at all, with huge costs. That BBC article is actually funny. There is no disaster, it's glass, aluminum and some metals, all of them eminently recyclable but since there was not a lot of PV panels until now it was not an issue. It will be an issue now and it will be solved, but it pales in comparison with other waste.
runsWphotons 3y ago
Where do you read about these challenges, particularly the kinds of skilled and precision labour you mention?
credit_guy 3y ago
SpaceX cut the manufacturing cost of rockets by a factor of 10. Before reusability. With that, it's probably a factor of 100. Or more. Challenges in technology can be overcome.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  SpaceX can develop things by building them and then seeing if they fail catastrophically too often. Nuclear developers can't do that.
ekianjo 3y ago
> when we have far cheaper alternatives. the far cheaper alternatives that actually provide no 24/7 power, consume massive amounts of lands, and also have a non-nill carbon footprint once you take everything in account
- pfdietz 3y ago
  These are all tendentious talking points that have been well debunked. They can provide 24/7 power when paired with storage (like pumped hydro at $300/kWh of capacity), the land use is no serious problem, and the carbon footprint of nuclear is much higher when you include all the CO2 emitted by fossil plants while waiting 10 years for the nuclear plant to come online.
  - natmaka 3y ago
    > the land use is no serious problem ... especially as offshore wind often is the biggest reserve. Even better: no large vessel can navigate in an offshore wind-turbines field, which becomes a near-sanctuary.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    > the land use is no serious problem, Gotta love the complete double standard at play. The ridiculously small amount of land that needs to host radioactive material post use is a problem for people who hate nuclear but they never have any issue with huge swaths of lands being used for windmills and solar farms.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      While I appreciate that the public debate about nuclear power is… mis-calibrated[0]… remember that the political issues are people having visions of everything being another Chernobyl, where the land made unavailable is ~52 GW of PV even after assuming both 20% efficient cells and 10% capacity factor. And then there's the large quantity of "free space" in the form of rooftops and car parks (and cars) for PV, and that wind farms don't preclude other uses for most of the land (or water) around them. 10 or so years ago I was very much in favour of more nuclear power; now, while I still think it's neat, I don't have the energy to promote it when there's more palatable alternatives that are also cheaper. [0] one particularly memorable bad take was someone asking which you'd rather have under your bed, a bucket of coal or a bucket of nuclear waste. Obviously the coal, but assuming a 5 gallon bucket packed with coal, 11.3 kg coal, the mass of uranium with the same available energy (about 330 MJ) is 4.2mg with a volume of 0.2 mm^3; and conversely, burning 11.3 kg of coal produces 44 kg CO2, which approximately enough to be a lethal dose in a room of 100 cubic meters.
phil21 3y ago
> I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem Nuclear proponents have been wailing at the top of their lungs about this since the time I could start reading newspapers. The largest problem is the pipeline of industry needed to build these things. That was completely destroyed by the anti-nuclear zealot crowd, knowingly so and with purpose. They absolutely knew (and I read articles on it) that if they froze most new construction for just a couple decades, the entire industry would vaporize due to lack of of talent pool and experience. Everyone was correct. That means if you want nuclear now, we better start on those giant 15 year construction projects or we'll never get better. It will take a generation - at least - to restart an industry from pretty much zero. Hundreds of thousands of current 2 year olds need to be trained before we can even hope to make a dent in this problem 20 years later.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The pipeline wasn't destroyed by anti-nuclear zealots. What caused the termination of nuclear builds in the US had several interacting causes. First, electrical energy demand suddenly stopped growing. It had been growing 6% or so per year, and extensions of that into the future called for enormous numbers of power plants. But that suddenly slowed/stopped, around the time of the energy crisis. It turns out trees don't grow to the sky. Second, a new competitor arose: cogeneration. PURPA was passed in 1978 opening grids to non-utility generators. It required utilities to buy power from these generators, setting up a kind of market where new utility builds would compete with these sources. And lo and behold, power from cogeneration was way cheaper than from a new nuclear plant (cogeneration produces power from a fuel at 100% marginal efficiency). Since basically every industrial plant that uses process heat was a potential site for cogeneration, this was a lot of power that could be added to the grid. Third, the initial wave of nuclear builds was coming in way over budget, in an earlier reverse echo of what's happened lately. Forbes in the 1980s famously had a cover story on it, calling it the worst management disaster in history. All of these together slammed the lid on new nuclear construction in the US.
danielrpa 3y ago
We don't have proven "far cheaper" alternatives. It is irresponsible to advocate for a fully solar/wind grid if we don't have a single working large scale example that is able to sustain, let's say, a city with 5M people 24/7, all-season (examples including hydro and geothermal don't count as many places can't depend on these). Don't get me wrong, I love solar and wind and I highly encourage continued investment and buildup so we need less of other forms of energy. However, ignoring nuclear is the same, in practice, as supporting a hybrid fossil/renewables future. If you are fine betting on technological developments such as megascale batteries or other energy storage approaches, you should also be fine betting on the less impressive, incremental improvements needed for reducing nuclear plant costs. The future will involve many different energy sources, and nuclear fission has to be one of them until we discover a new major energy source (hopefully fusion).
- Gwypaas 3y ago
  We do not have a working economic nuclear grid. So it is irresponsible to advocate a nuclear grid unless throwing hundreds of billions of taxpayer money at Bechtel and friends is your goal.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    It's worse than that. We don't have commercial reactors capable of powering the world. Thermal burner reactors like this one, if scaled up to provide the world's 18 TW of primary energy consumption, would exhaust economical uranium resources in less than a decade.
    - godelski 3y ago
      > would exhaust economical uranium resources in less than a decade. This doesn't seem right. Can you show your work? I'm assuming there's no recycling either? I feel like you're off by more than an order of magnitude. Besides, who suggests using a single method to produce all the electricity? That seems a bit naive, doesn't it? Better to have a portfolio.
godelski 3y ago
It's a bit more complicated because these things are coupled. I think people are trying to draw deep distinctions to have a clear and simple answer to why the cost of nuclear rose but it is quite a lot of things that contribute and feed one another over time. As an incomplete example: anti-nuclear sentiments can make a government reduce the number of reactors they order or even cancel projects, this can then increase the cost of other reactors as low order counts don't scale well, causing others to cancel or delay orders as prices were higher than expected, and so on. Do this over 40 years. There isn't any one thing that killed nuclear in the US, but rather a lot of little things. There's the anti-nuclear sentiment, there is big oil/gas disinformation campaigns (their climate campaigns were about making doubt of everything but them), it was a drop in price of crude oil during the Regan/Bush era, it was a change in regulation after Chernobyl after 3-Mile and after Fukushima, a rise in fossil fuel subsidies when nuclear had none (Regan/Bush/Carter), a decrease in DOE research funding of reactors, and it was many more things. The story and history matters. The complexity matters because it didn't die overnight. This is important to understand because it also means fixing a single thing won't change things. Political will and support does matter but only gets the ball rolling as it prioritizes it to let the experts fix things. But the complexity means it won't be resolved overnight were we to magically get 100% of people onboard and passionate. I wish nuclear proponents as well as opponents would recognize the inherent complexities of these problems. The truth is that stories like this aren't unique to nuclear and our oversimplification prevents us from solving many of our critical issues these days. The world is complex and messy. But I guess it is easier to garner support (an important factor) if we over simplify things. I just wish that would be the hook rather than the full story that we passionately defend.

ftth_finland 3y ago

More solar is better if it displaces fossil fuels, loads can be moved to coincide with sunshine, output can be cost effectively stored and/or the climate is co-operative. Not all of these assumptions hold everywhere or every time.

epistasis 3y ago
The same caveats are also true of nuclear, and happen far more frequently for nuclear. If we are serious about displacing fossil fuel use, and I am deadly serious about it, wind, solar, storage, demand response, new transmission, thermal storage, hydrogen for chemical process... all these things are deployable today at massive scale and should be quickly adopted. However, nuclear is further away and more expensive than we thought it was in 2008 when these reactors got started. Back in the mid-2000s I was a huge proponent of nuclear. In the mid-2010s I change my tune because we had a ton of new data about nuclear being far more expensive than promised, and other tech had advanced massively. Nuclear has never advanced as a tech, it does not have a learning curve. If we are going to reach a future with energy abundance, with clean tech, we need to invest in technologies with learning curves, that advance. Nuclear tech does not advance.
- evandijk70 3y ago
  Is this inherent to the technology, or because so few nuclear reactors are being built? Is there anyone involved in the construction of the latest reactor that contributed to another one? You learn by doing, and there has been very little construction in the last decades.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    Learning by doing has been tried many times, and it's never resulted in a learning rate where one could expect more than a small decrease in costs, and it has conclusively proven that even a halving of costs is probably out of the question. Look at France in their first build out; subsequent reactors of the same design cost more than the first. And France was considered a success by most. The few buildouts that have seen cost decrease have never produced learning like you get in manufactured products. I wish I had access to my bibliography right now for the papers on this, sorry I'm making statements without the research to back them up. But those that have looked into which technologies develop learning curves find that the learning curve is found early, and it tends to be tech wheee lots of the same small thing is made, with minimal customization at install. Nuclear is inherently a big tech, with some customization for site install. Combined cycle gas turbines found some efficiency of scale by being small enough that they could have standardized plant designs that don't require design changes for the site (though it does limit which sites can install the designs). SMRs might change this for nuclear, but what people are calling "SMR" today is still is as big as 300MW, and it's hard to see how that could be standardized and manufactured. Nuclear does not scale down very well, which is why all these places are trying to pass off really big reactors as part of the SMR hype wave.
    - usrnm 3y ago
      > Nuclear is inherently a big tech, with some customization for site install Russia has successful small floating power stations, that can just dock and power a nearby town. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov There is nothing "inherently big" about nuclear

oceanplexian 3y ago

> I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem, the inherent labor and construction efficiencies that made nuclear a good fit for the mid-20th century Yeah, this argument might hold water if there was nothing to compare to, but there is. China stamps these things out of an assembly line. Every year they’re building multiple nuclear reactors, leaving us in the dust. You can’t make the argument that China’s reactors are unsafe, because they’ve had less accidents than us. To me it’s obvious that it’s not an insurmountable engineering problem.

riffraff 3y ago
21st century china has a lot in common with early 20th western countries, namely cheap labor and the ability to push through people protests and regulations. South Korea might be a closer comparison.
- natmaka 3y ago
  In South Korea those 'abilities' couldn't hide a nuclear scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
Tade0 3y ago
They still haven't reached the same capacity as France, even after 20 years of rapid development. Also in the same country wind overtook nuclear in terms of GWh delivered around a decade ago, and the gap only widened with time. Of course there are bold plans to accelerate nuclear even further, but at this rate it's doubtful it'll ever be a significant part of the electricity mix.
epistasis 3y ago
Actually I think this is the perfect comparison to support my point, not refute it. China does not suffer from construction cost disease like advanced Western countries do. Their cost of labor is lower. And even France, which doesn't have construction cost disease as bad for the US for things like transit projects, does have this problem now as they try to build Flamanville and as was seen at Olkiluoto. My hypothesis could definitely be wrong, perhaps it's just logistics and even with our high cost of labor we could still build nuclear economically in the US. But having read everything I can get my hands on about how to improve nuclear costs in the US, I'm sticking to my hypothesis until I get data that refutes it. And it's not an engineering problem alone, though at Vogtle it's clear that part of the problem was engineering. EPC in general was a massive fail at Vogtle. But the partial design and bad design did not help either. This was the site where EPC thought the design was unconstructable, yet still powered thought to construct something else, and then had to get this new thing approved... Everybody working on it has been gearing up to sue each other at the end rather than trying to get it built.

himinlomax 3y ago

> A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor. Except that 1GW of nuclear capacity means up to 900MW of production in practice, while 1GW of solar means 100MW. Nuclear stops for maintenance, refuelling and repairs. A well maintained plant can operate for 60 years or more. Solar stops at night, slows down on cloudy days, and so on. Panels degrade and have to be replaced after 20 years or so. Non-hydro renewables only beat nuclear when you conveniently forget storage, which is insanely expensive, and when you look at nominal capacity, not actual production. Just go look at https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR : currently, wind is barely producing anything across Europe. Germany has 67GW of wind capacity, yet they're producing a laughable 7.4 GW. It's been that way for *WEEKS*. You can't possibly store weeks of production.

ben_w 3y ago
> Solar stops at night, slows down on cloudy days, and so on. All of which is already accounted for, so you're double-counting > Panels degrade and have to be replaced after 20 years or so. Most of the ones I've seen have 25 year guarantees; historically they've lasted longer, but I don't know how much the manufacturing etc. has changed so I'm not sure how strongly to predict extra years of life beyond such guarantees. > Non-hydro renewables only beat nuclear when you conveniently forget storage, which is insanely expensive, and when you look at nominal capacity, not actual production. 1) Hydro is a storage system as well as a source 2) Even with li-ion backing it's cost-comparable to nuclear, and li-ion is one of the more expensive PWh-scale options 3) The current pricing is for digging up rocks and applying enough chemistry to make them batteries; recycling is expected to be much cheaper once scaled up. (I'll grant that recycling is an "if and when", if you like; but the other points stand without needing any support)

nine_k 3y ago

This is reasonable. Nuclear is still valuable though. It still works after a week of bad weather that would badly affect wind or solar. Regarding renewables: are we held back by solar panel manufacturing? I thought the constantly falling prices are a sign that the panels are abundant. I think serious utility use of solar is held back more by the cost of storage. If we speak about best allocation of scarce labor, maybe battery manufacturing would have more impact. Thermal storage (mirrors hearing rocks or melting salts) is also pretty material- and labor-intensive, even though it likely would require slightly less demanding processes of laying concrete and welding steel than a nuclear installation.

jandrese 3y ago
Storage is definitely a factor currently, but a lot of battery factories are scheduled to come online in the next few years and I expect the situation to improve considerably.
- Paradigma11 3y ago
  I watched a representation of an mining industry insider ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOEGKDVvsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOEGKDVvsg ) some months ago who makes the point that all these projections are completely unrealistic because of mining constraints. He says/shows that you need an order of magnitude (I think) more ore of many elements and this is impossible because: 1) The Mining industry is incredible mature and there are no easy disruptive technologies on the horizon. 2) Even if there was the will to do it, new capacities take at least ten years to go live and he does not even see any relevant increased investment in the sector, never mind concrete projects.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Mark P. Mills [1] may be a number of things but he is absolutely not by any means a "mining industry insider". He is a senior fellow for a think tank that claims as axiomatic that the popular conception of climate change as posing an existential threat to modern civilization is not supported by climate science or economics. It comes as no surprise that he repeatedly makes presentations aimed to undercut transition to green energy. Regardless of the truth of his position though he is clearly no expert on the mining industry. [1] https://manhattan.institute/person/mark-p-mills https://manhattan.institute/person/mark-p-mills

DrBazza 3y ago

I wish nuclear opponents would perform a like for like analysis of non-nuclear vs nuclear. - How much does it raise co2 parts per million when operational? - How much does it raise co2 parts per million when being built? - Full environmental cost of the entire supply including construction? - Deaths during construction. - Deaths in the general population from "emissions" or accidents. - Deaths during use and maintenance. - How much area does the site area? - How much area lost to 'contamination'? Oil spills, coal slag piles [1], but for nuclear, nature does quite well after humans leave the area. What are the byproducts of producing turbine blades and solar panels, including the construction of new factories and all the transport of materials to those factories, and the emissions of those factories? - Post-use recycling (solar panels after 20yrs, wind turbines when a blade breaks) Nuclear power hasn't been industrialized until recently and even then there's not a huge effort towards that. Imagine if every single modern plane built is a one-off ad-hoc design. I wonder how much they'd cost? Best example I can think of, but huge complexity, safety-critical, a similar lifespan, with on going maintenance. > A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor. How are they an "exponential" improvement? There's a vast amount of digging in some out-of-sight out-of-mind country to get materials out of the ground, with sketchy practices, shipped across the sea in a diesel power ship, to be refined, consuming more power, day-in-day out. And then there's the solar panel recycling story that we haven't even figured out yet. [2] And with wind turbines, we started off on the wrong foot there as well. [3] Apparently we're in a critical climate emergency, but nuclear is "too costly". And 'green' solutions are seen to be greener than they actually are. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster 2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65602519 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65602519 3. https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wind-turbine-blades-be-recycled https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wi...

tpm 3y ago
> - Full environmental cost of the entire supply including construction? And also including dismantling and spent fuel/ contaminated material storage and disposal for unknown time to come. Also not only environmental, but social cost of creating a spent fuel site that does have to be cared for hundreds of years while bringing no benefit at all, with huge costs. That BBC article is actually funny. There is no disaster, it's glass, aluminum and some metals, all of them eminently recyclable but since there was not a lot of PV panels until now it was not an issue. It will be an issue now and it will be solved, but it pales in comparison with other waste.

runsWphotons 3y ago

Where do you read about these challenges, particularly the kinds of skilled and precision labour you mention?

credit_guy 3y ago

SpaceX cut the manufacturing cost of rockets by a factor of 10. Before reusability. With that, it's probably a factor of 100. Or more. Challenges in technology can be overcome.

pfdietz 3y ago
SpaceX can develop things by building them and then seeing if they fail catastrophically too often. Nuclear developers can't do that.

ekianjo 3y ago

> when we have far cheaper alternatives. the far cheaper alternatives that actually provide no 24/7 power, consume massive amounts of lands, and also have a non-nill carbon footprint once you take everything in account

pfdietz 3y ago
These are all tendentious talking points that have been well debunked. They can provide 24/7 power when paired with storage (like pumped hydro at $300/kWh of capacity), the land use is no serious problem, and the carbon footprint of nuclear is much higher when you include all the CO2 emitted by fossil plants while waiting 10 years for the nuclear plant to come online.
- natmaka 3y ago
  > the land use is no serious problem ... especially as offshore wind often is the biggest reserve. Even better: no large vessel can navigate in an offshore wind-turbines field, which becomes a near-sanctuary.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  > the land use is no serious problem, Gotta love the complete double standard at play. The ridiculously small amount of land that needs to host radioactive material post use is a problem for people who hate nuclear but they never have any issue with huge swaths of lands being used for windmills and solar farms.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    While I appreciate that the public debate about nuclear power is… mis-calibrated[0]… remember that the political issues are people having visions of everything being another Chernobyl, where the land made unavailable is ~52 GW of PV even after assuming both 20% efficient cells and 10% capacity factor. And then there's the large quantity of "free space" in the form of rooftops and car parks (and cars) for PV, and that wind farms don't preclude other uses for most of the land (or water) around them. 10 or so years ago I was very much in favour of more nuclear power; now, while I still think it's neat, I don't have the energy to promote it when there's more palatable alternatives that are also cheaper. [0] one particularly memorable bad take was someone asking which you'd rather have under your bed, a bucket of coal or a bucket of nuclear waste. Obviously the coal, but assuming a 5 gallon bucket packed with coal, 11.3 kg coal, the mass of uranium with the same available energy (about 330 MJ) is 4.2mg with a volume of 0.2 mm^3; and conversely, burning 11.3 kg of coal produces 44 kg CO2, which approximately enough to be a lethal dose in a room of 100 cubic meters.

phil21 3y ago

> I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem Nuclear proponents have been wailing at the top of their lungs about this since the time I could start reading newspapers. The largest problem is the pipeline of industry needed to build these things. That was completely destroyed by the anti-nuclear zealot crowd, knowingly so and with purpose. They absolutely knew (and I read articles on it) that if they froze most new construction for just a couple decades, the entire industry would vaporize due to lack of of talent pool and experience. Everyone was correct. That means if you want nuclear now, we better start on those giant 15 year construction projects or we'll never get better. It will take a generation - at least - to restart an industry from pretty much zero. Hundreds of thousands of current 2 year olds need to be trained before we can even hope to make a dent in this problem 20 years later.

pfdietz 3y ago
The pipeline wasn't destroyed by anti-nuclear zealots. What caused the termination of nuclear builds in the US had several interacting causes. First, electrical energy demand suddenly stopped growing. It had been growing 6% or so per year, and extensions of that into the future called for enormous numbers of power plants. But that suddenly slowed/stopped, around the time of the energy crisis. It turns out trees don't grow to the sky. Second, a new competitor arose: cogeneration. PURPA was passed in 1978 opening grids to non-utility generators. It required utilities to buy power from these generators, setting up a kind of market where new utility builds would compete with these sources. And lo and behold, power from cogeneration was way cheaper than from a new nuclear plant (cogeneration produces power from a fuel at 100% marginal efficiency). Since basically every industrial plant that uses process heat was a potential site for cogeneration, this was a lot of power that could be added to the grid. Third, the initial wave of nuclear builds was coming in way over budget, in an earlier reverse echo of what's happened lately. Forbes in the 1980s famously had a cover story on it, calling it the worst management disaster in history. All of these together slammed the lid on new nuclear construction in the US.

danielrpa 3y ago

We don't have proven "far cheaper" alternatives. It is irresponsible to advocate for a fully solar/wind grid if we don't have a single working large scale example that is able to sustain, let's say, a city with 5M people 24/7, all-season (examples including hydro and geothermal don't count as many places can't depend on these). Don't get me wrong, I love solar and wind and I highly encourage continued investment and buildup so we need less of other forms of energy. However, ignoring nuclear is the same, in practice, as supporting a hybrid fossil/renewables future. If you are fine betting on technological developments such as megascale batteries or other energy storage approaches, you should also be fine betting on the less impressive, incremental improvements needed for reducing nuclear plant costs. The future will involve many different energy sources, and nuclear fission has to be one of them until we discover a new major energy source (hopefully fusion).

Gwypaas 3y ago
We do not have a working economic nuclear grid. So it is irresponsible to advocate a nuclear grid unless throwing hundreds of billions of taxpayer money at Bechtel and friends is your goal.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  It's worse than that. We don't have commercial reactors capable of powering the world. Thermal burner reactors like this one, if scaled up to provide the world's 18 TW of primary energy consumption, would exhaust economical uranium resources in less than a decade.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > would exhaust economical uranium resources in less than a decade. This doesn't seem right. Can you show your work? I'm assuming there's no recycling either? I feel like you're off by more than an order of magnitude. Besides, who suggests using a single method to produce all the electricity? That seems a bit naive, doesn't it? Better to have a portfolio.

godelski 3y ago

It's a bit more complicated because these things are coupled. I think people are trying to draw deep distinctions to have a clear and simple answer to why the cost of nuclear rose but it is quite a lot of things that contribute and feed one another over time. As an incomplete example: anti-nuclear sentiments can make a government reduce the number of reactors they order or even cancel projects, this can then increase the cost of other reactors as low order counts don't scale well, causing others to cancel or delay orders as prices were higher than expected, and so on. Do this over 40 years. There isn't any one thing that killed nuclear in the US, but rather a lot of little things. There's the anti-nuclear sentiment, there is big oil/gas disinformation campaigns (their climate campaigns were about making doubt of everything but them), it was a drop in price of crude oil during the Regan/Bush era, it was a change in regulation after Chernobyl after 3-Mile and after Fukushima, a rise in fossil fuel subsidies when nuclear had none (Regan/Bush/Carter), a decrease in DOE research funding of reactors, and it was many more things. The story and history matters. The complexity matters because it didn't die overnight. This is important to understand because it also means fixing a single thing won't change things. Political will and support does matter but only gets the ball rolling as it prioritizes it to let the experts fix things. But the complexity means it won't be resolved overnight were we to magically get 100% of people onboard and passionate. I wish nuclear proponents as well as opponents would recognize the inherent complexities of these problems. The truth is that stories like this aren't unique to nuclear and our oversimplification prevents us from solving many of our critical issues these days. The world is complex and messy. But I guess it is easier to garner support (an important factor) if we over simplify things. I just wish that would be the hook rather than the full story that we passionately defend.