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Why does nuclear power plant construction cost so much?

• wkat4242 3y ago
  It would cost even more if they'd take the decommissioning into account too. Which they really will have to, going forward.
  • koheripbal 3y ago
    No, this is a dishonest argument used by anti nuclear advocates. Decommissioning is not actually needed. Plants can be run indefinitely with the correct maintenance. Where is the decommissioning fund for the Hover Dam? Or the highway system? Or literally any other factory or power plant? It is a cost no other industry faces.
• adhambadr 3y ago
  "72% of the cost increase was due to indirect costs, indicating a large increase in expensive professionals such as engineers and managers" one of the first very tangible direct "Macro" effects of the rise of non-contributing b.s jobs (Consulting, Life Coaches, Influencers, Day Trading and everything else under the 4 hour week mantra). I've always wondered what are the big picture scale effects if everyone is trying to retire early and live off real-estate income and here it is: we as a species regress in the single most indicator of progress: energy autonomy cause we can't afford it because our cultural narrative doesn't motivate enough people to specialize in it depriving us from clean energy production and literally destroying the earth we inhibit.
  • fartsucker69 3y ago
    Nothing is really necessarily being deprived here. Society could just decide to pay for those expensive engineers and then some, take the purely economic loss, and enjoy relatively clean energy. have fun with that though
• RadixDLT 3y ago
  the price is actually going down with the creation a nuScale mini reactor. https://tiempoheadlines.com/nuscale-power-plants-in-central-europe-and-eastern-europe-signed-contract-between-nuclearelectrica-nuscale-power-e-infra-nova-power-gas-fluor-enterprises-and-samsung/ https://tiempoheadlines.com/nuscale-power-plants-in-central-...
  • pfdietz 3y ago
    Um, no. https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-released-nuscale-small-modular-reactor https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-r...
• xjlin0 3y ago
  Another question: Why does nuclear power plant demolition also cost so much and so long?
• elialbert 3y ago
  if the navy is so good at building reactors, can't we just have them build some on land for us? start with military use first and expand outward from there? could be a much better use for enlisted forces, train more people to be engineers, etc.
• Georgelemental 3y ago
  TLDR: regulation
  • givemeethekeys 3y ago
    Yup. The cost of failure is too damn high. Nuclear plants, despite our best efforts so far, don't have a reputation for graceful degradation.
    • treeman79 3y ago
      Okay. But no complaints about burning huge amounts of coal then.
      • dale_glass 3y ago
        Plenty complain, and coal is being rapidly paced out.
      • dataflow 3y ago
        The logic doesn't follow.
      • bcrosby95 3y ago
        There are plenty of complaints about burning coal. I don't think I've seen an article arguing for that, and if I did I would imagine people would be very against the idea.
        • MostlyStable 3y ago
          The high cost of nuclear _is the reason_ we still burn coal. If we hadn't over-regulated it 50 years ago there wouldn't be a coal power plant left in the country, and tens of millions of human-years would have been saved over the past several decades. And it's because we completely ignored the safety risks of coal while hyper-focusing on nuclear. There is no mythical "zero risk" power generation. Everything is context dependent. It is potentially true that at this point, cheap energy storage is close enough to make 100% renewable a reality and therefore that it's too late to make the switch to nuclear (although I'm not entirely convinced), but failing to switch fifty years ago is one of the greatest civilizational mistakes humanity has made.
• slicktux 3y ago
  Licensing, regulation, inspections and certifications ; all good things…but also accidents, technology changing before construction is over.
  • ignite 3y ago
    insurance
    • dpe82 3y ago
      Insurance is just putting a dollar value on risk.
      • Gwypaas 3y ago
        Hugely subsidized by the federal government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... Compare the $15 billion funded by the industry with Fukushima looking to cost at least $150 billion to clean up.
    • przemo_li 3y ago
      Nobody insures nuclear power plants. Government is always spillover guarantee. It also does not come into play after start of operations. Financing would be different matter. Those percentages trump up heavily and can kill any large project with long delays.
      • Manuel_D 3y ago
        In the US, the government charges $375 million dollars per reactor for that guarantee. This huge overhead cost incentivizes larger reactors.
      • doikor 3y ago
        Except they do but just like pretty much every other insurance it does not cover everything and the payout has a maximum. For example here in Finland the nuclear plants are required by law to get an insurance that covers up to 732 million euros (~1.2 billion euros in Sweden) of "third party damages" (they can buy additional insurances that covers damages to the plant itself). If that is not enough then government will take care of the next 500 million after that. If that is still not enough then the company is liable for the rest which effectively means they will go bankrupt as usually the only assets they have is the nuclear power plants. This does mean that at the very end government will have to pay for it if the accident is big enough but gets to keep all the left over assets of the company. They buy the insurance from this company https://atompool.org/en https://atompool.org/en that is a consortium of multiple insurance companies that operate in the nordics. And there is multiple of these nuclear insurance pools around the world and they all reinsure each other. Another question related to this is why don't big dams etc need similar insurances (at least here in Finland they don't). When things go wrong the damages can be just as big if not bigger.
• r2vcap 3y ago
  Although this article is about nuclear power, in fact it may be an issue that applies to all US infrastructure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29489616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29489616 Also, I wonder if the US has accumulated know-how to lower the cost of nuclear power plant construction. Korea has continued to build nuclear power plants, and it is clear that it has the know-how to cut costs.
  • Gwypaas 3y ago
    Or just falsified certificates and used opaque accounting methods, all while the regulator sat on double chairs. > In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea during the winter.[25] Reuters reported this as South Korea's worst nuclear crisis, highlighting a lack of transparency on nuclear safety and the dual roles of South Korea's nuclear regulators on supervision and promotion.[26] This incident followed the prosecution of five senior engineers for the coverup of a serious loss of power and cooling incident at Kori Nuclear Power Plant, which was subsequently graded at INES level 2.[25][27] > In 2013, there was a scandal involving the use of counterfeit parts in nuclear plants and faked quality assurance certificates. In June 2013 Kori 2 and Shin Wolsong 1 were shut down, and Kori 1 and Shin Wolsong 2 ordered to remain offline, until safety-related control cabling with forged safety certificates is replaced.[28] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[29] In October 2013 about 100 people were indicted for falsifying safety documents, including a former chief executive of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and a vice-president of Korea Electric Power Corporation.[30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#H...
    • makomk 3y ago
      Same thing happened to a certain extent with French nuclear. This article talks vaguely about new requirements whilst large components were manufactured, but one of the big problems with Flamanville 3 was that one of the largest and most critical components - the main pressure vessel that formed the primary containment for radioactive materials - didn't meet the existing material specifications and was at increased risk of failing, and the manufacturer had basically faked the testing and certification on it. After discovering this, the regulators went back and looked at the reactor pressure vessels built by the same supplier during the golden era of French nuclear, and a bunch of them turned out to be defective in the same way.
• quijoteuniv 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • aaronbrethorst 3y ago
    What prompt did you give ChatGPT to generate this?
    • jtriangle 3y ago
      You can very much just ask it to "summarize this article into 10 main points $copypastedarticletext" and it'll do a pretty good job.
• aaronbrethorst 3y ago
  Learning curves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects#:~:text=The%20learning%20curve%20model%20posits,curve%20or%20experience%20curve%20effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects#:~:te.... More on the subject: https://climateer.substack.com/p/learning-curves https://climateer.substack.com/p/learning-curves https://www.volts.wtf/p/learning-curves-will-lead-to-extremely#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/learning-curves-will-lead-to-extreme... https://www.volts.wtf/p/which-technologies-get-cheaper-over#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/which-technologies-get-cheaper-over#...
• arcticbull 3y ago
  Listening to Jigar Shah, head of the DOE loans program, indicated part of the reason it's so expensive to build NPPs is that each nuclear power plant is a bespoke operation and requires a ton of custom work, planning and certification, etc. The suggestion he made was to create a basic design that you can just copy-paste where suitable, allowing you to leverage economics of scale. This would seem at least at first glance to align with the recommendations in the article. [1] https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/jigar-shah-on-the-does-role-in-accelerating-the/id1056200096?i=1000568239668 https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/jigar-shah-on-the-does...
  • atyppo 3y ago
    I have no problem with this personally. But I fear that nuclear fearmongers would capitalize on this as a possible "worst-case scenario" if we tried to deploy such a plan. Is this thought misguided?
  • AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    You mean maybe like a shipping container sized reactor that is simply stacked (and replaced / defueled for maintenance)? Like one that can have its liquid fuel removed by just piping? That's very development was done using a closet-sized reactor that could be easily powered up and powered down so it CAN scale with demand? Whose design is inherently meltdown-proof? Which uses almost all its fuel so there's no nuclear waste to transport? That can breed its fuel from Thorium? The time to invest in this was 20 years ago. Certainly the viability of nuclear missed the boat 10 years ago. Nuclear will have to wait for solar/wind/battery and other grid levelling alternatives (home solar + storage, EVs-as-grid-batteries) to mature and develop before they have a stable economic target. Then nuclear needs to figure out how to make that target. I think it is a LFTR, but who knows. I don't think solid fuel rods are the way. Too much waste, too much danger inherent to the fuel packaging. And seriously, "the institute for progress"? The nuclear industry is so out of touch their marketing and lobbying is 30 years out of date.
  • pfdietz 3y ago
    The way to build standardized nuclear plants is for the reactor maker to build merchant plants, operate them, and sell the output into competitive power markets. It's like SpaceX building and operating their own vehicles, and how many renewable and natural gas power plants work. It's just that no such merchant nuclear plant has ever been built anywhere. There's a serious lack of dog food here.
• chasil 3y ago
  Materials science is a great expense. - Monocrystaline turbine blades have become required due to their ability to operate at higher temperatures than the melting points of the metals that compose their alloys. The requirement is their efficiency in power production. These are also used in aerospace, but are complex and difficult to produce. - Common water reactors must contain insanely high pressures, enough to force water to remain liquid at 300°C or higher. This is not inexpensive. - Molten salt reactors, where deployed, must be composed of alloys resistant to molten (negative) chloride ions and (positive) sodium ions, assuming the fluid chemically disassociates. Alloys that can withstand these conditions are also not inexpensive.
  • pfdietz 3y ago
    Monocrystalline turbine blades reduce creep, they don't allow the blade to remain solid if its above the melting point.
    • chasil 3y ago
      But... isn't the melting point of the alloy far above the melting point of the constituent pure metals? I'd ask my metalurgist friend, but I don't want to look like an idiot.
      • pfdietz 3y ago
        In a common example, the alloy of iron and carbon known as cast iron melts at a lower temperature than pure iron or pure carbon (or low-carbon steel). But there are other cases where an alloy has higher melting point. Ti(88)Al(12), for example.
      • metal_am 3y ago
        Film cooling and coatings are what allow operating temperatures above the melting temperature. That doesn’t mean the metal is above its melting temperature.
  • metal_am 3y ago
    It’s definitely an expense. But this doesn’t fully explain why nuclear is expensive. -Current nuclear reactors aren’t nearly hot enough to need single crystal turbine blisks. We’re talking on the order of 300°C. -Coal power plant routinely hit much higher temperatures in supercritical and ultra-supercritical (yes, that’s a real term) steam generators. We don’t have quite as bad a problem building coal power plants. -We’re not currently building molten salt reactors for power generation. You didn’t say anything that was wrong. I’m just don’t think this is the reason building reactors is so expensive.
• 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  Regulations are just one of many different aspects of the cost and complexity of nuclear. To understand what's involved here, look at the parent company that is building and running the nuclear plant. You will probably find an archaic, bloated, inefficient, yet profitable company, that has enormous market advantage and basically no incentive to reduce cost, complexity, or time, but does have incentive to cut costs and hide risks in order to maximize the share price. The article talks about complexity, about delays. But it doesn't talk about how insanely inefficient the design, construction, etc is. How a lot of that complexity and waste could be eliminated if somebody in leadership actually gave a shit. But they know you're going to pay for it anyway, and they're going to get their bonus, and they certainly aren't motivated by lowering the cost to the consumer. It's the typical capitalist story: become big enough that you have virtually no competition, so you can charge what you want, and nobody has any choice but to put up with your shit.
  • nonethewiser 3y ago
    > But they know you're going to pay for it anyway Do they? New construction on reactors stopped for a long time in the US. And cost is one of the primary downsides to building.
    • 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
      Renewables are not enough to replace coal and gas, so you just need nuclear. Even if the big energy conglomerates didn't get the construction contract (which would be crazy), they'd get you on distribution instead of generation. Or they'll get hand-outs from the government if they start to fail, because they're too big. One way or another they'll get your money.
• jtriangle 3y ago
  It sounds like we could fix basically all of this by having new plant approvals be "sticky", ie, once a project is approved, you can build and operate it with no additional regulatory-imposed changes. This whole system of retroactively requiring changes made is absurdly costly and it's why we're stuck in terms of building out new capacity. This is not de-regulation, just changing how we regulate this from something that is actively antagonistic to something that is not.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Gwypaas 3y ago
    When we find a systemic risk across the industry, like the requirement for independent core cooling after Fukushima, we should just roll with it and accept it? Tsunamis do not happen everywhere, but the regulators found the risk to be systemic. As an example: 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...
    • concordDance 3y ago
      > we should just roll with it and accept it? When your "safety" regulation is costing a billion dollars per QALY then by imposing it you are killing thousands of people, because that money could have instead been spend on other things like cancer screening that would let you save a thousand times as many lives per dollar.
      • Gwypaas 3y ago
        The other side is, how many QALYs do you get from the at least $150 billion we are spending to clean up Fukushima?
        • concordDance 3y ago
• WalterBright 3y ago
  Lawsuits.
• abhibeckert 3y ago
  Last year a tiny radioactive capsule the size of a fingernail went missing in Australia, when a "safe" storage container the size of a small car failed and allowed it to fall out. The search to find the capsule cost four million dollars and there were global news stories warning people to avoid the highway the (very, very long) highway the truck had driven down. In other countries (e.g. Soviet ones) where precautions like that haven't been taken, those capsules have been found after dozens of people caught cancer due to regular exposure to a capsule that just happened to end up near them. Presumably there are more that haven't been found, and those countries just accept a higher rate of cancer than the rest of the world. Avoiding those scenarios is what costs so much.
  • canadianfella 3y ago
    [dead]
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • renewiltord 3y ago
    That doesn’t check out, though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident Was horrific and teletherapy machines are quite cheap. You would expect that if risk of radiation source loss underlies cost then they would be much more expensive.
  • jimworm 3y ago
    The accidents you described didn't come from nuclear power plants. The Western Australian incident was mining equipment. The Goiânia accident happened in Brazil and was medical equipment. The Kramatorsk radiological accident was also mining equipment.
    • itishappy 3y ago
      I was imaginging insane nuclear laser drills, but... > The capsule, part of a gauge used to measure the density of iron ore... https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/31/australian-nuclear-agency-joins-hunt-for-lost-radioactive-capsule https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/31/australian-nuclear-... More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Australian_radioactive_capsule_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Australian_radioactive... Terrifying Wikipedia rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  I'm not contradicting anything about this, but I would be interested to see a comparison between nuclear power plants and OTHER very large projects (the California Bullet Train, anyone? How about the Sydney Opera House?) It seems like they are mostly all getting worse, not better. It doesn't have to be this way. Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish professor, has a book on this: https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done-ebook/dp/B0B3HS4C98/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done-ebook/dp/B0B3... It might well be that nuclear plants are even worse than other types of projects, but I'd like to see the proof.
  • AlbertCory 3y ago
    After I wrote that, I wondered if Flyvbjerg had already written on nuclear plants. He has the world's biggest database of large projects, so he must have. It turns out he has, and they're in the quadrant of "dumb scale-up." https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.11104.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.11104.pdf
  • peterfirefly 3y ago
    I lost all faith in Flyvbjerg in the 90's when he published his doctoral thesis. It was published as two volumes, one of them being a philosophical background. That volume was 1) mostly cribbed from the Dreyfus brothers (Hubert and Stuart) and 2) contained many very dodgy quotes from Aristotle. He had used '[...]' more liberally than any other author I've ever come across. The quotes ended up being like the Homer Simpson's interview from S06E09: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqDP8SnPVA0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqDP8SnPVA0
    • AlbertCory 3y ago
      Hmm. The book doesn't have that, I don't think. It's pretty readable. On the other hand, he does have some association with Oxford, which is selling a "course" on how to apply his methods of project estimation. I wouldn't waste my money on the course, but I think the method of "look at similar projects, and take the average" is a much better algorithm than the bottom-up Gantt chart that everyone does. Shit happens, no one thinks it'll happen to them but it does, and the historical data includes all the Black Swan events that no one saw coming.
• User23 3y ago
  Because of how much time and money is spent on deciding the color of the bike shed of course![1] [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1448236.Parkinson_s_Law https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1448236.Parkinson_s_Law
• credit_guy 3y ago
  Those who oppose nuclear power fall in two camps: people who honestly believe there is something insurmountable about nuclear technology, and antihumanists, who think humanity as a whole is bad, and the planet would be much better if we were fewer, the fewer the better (see for example Club of Rome [1]). In the past few years we've had so many discussions about nuclear here on Hacker News. Mostly unproductive. I think it would be more productive if people explicitly stated their position in one camp or the other at the time they bring their arguments. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome
  • Schroedingersat 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • pyrale 3y ago
      > There's also the camp that noticed that everything the pro-nuclear propagandists say about the supposed upsides is either paltering or an outright lie At this point, both camps are blatantly lying. That's the very nature of a polarized discussion that has lasted for decades with very few new elements. I guess you can't blame GP for being sour about discussions he's had on that topic. But at the same time, it's kind of odd he didn't notice people from his own side peddling blatant lies.
      • credit_guy 3y ago
        So the fact that India is building nuclear reactors that are cheaper than solar is a lie? https://twitter.com/BrianGitt/status/1653386880627646464 https://twitter.com/BrianGitt/status/1653386880627646464
        • Schroedingersat 3y ago
          Yes. The capacity factor is a blatant lie given that units 1 & 2 are about 60%, and the costs are an old estimate of overnight cost without escalation or inflation. Comparing overnight costs to final all-in prices is one way nukebros love to lie. You're also pretending operating costs don't exist. You're also pretending that costs for a solar project in 2015-2019 are costs today. This is another blatant lie. Longevity is another lie. The median and mean ages of the plants that actually get completed is around 30 years, not 60. The average for nuclear plants that are paid for is even lower because so many do not open at all. Thankyou for demonstrating.
• cj 3y ago
  My mother worked for a company that made small cooling fans used in fighter jets and space craft. She would bring one of the fans home and say “Look! I just sold 10 of these for $1,000,000” The fans themselves were cheap to manufacture. But they were SO incredibly important that they could NOT fail under any circumstance. (They were mostly fans meant to cool electronic systems, and if they failed, would cause the plane or space craft to explode, literally) The fans were so expensive because they had to go through so many quality checks to ensure they would sustain every environment imaginable, compounded with the fact that there’s no scale in demand (no one other than Boeing, NASA, etc is going to buy a tiny $100k fan) Tiny production volume + huge quality requirements/standards = very expensive product. I assume a similar dynamic applies to many components in a nuclear power plant. Volume is very low and the quality/reliability requirements are very high.
  • rvba 3y ago
    Could you use it to cool a Pentium 4 processor?
  • ftxbro 3y ago
    not sure if you care but they track comments like this on https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
  • actionfromafar 3y ago
    There has to be a way to build a safe system from several not as safe parts. At least for a system which doesn't need to fly.
    • ekaryotic 3y ago
      You make me think about how nuclear weapons tests are currently done. they are detonated underground, the soil above the device collapses on top, containing the majority of the fallout. it's a reliable and simple system and poses the question, could a nuclear power station be built in that way, because it wouldn't require the development of new technology.
• oatmeal1 3y ago
  People project their opinions of regulation in general onto this issue. If you like regulation, it got more expensive because we made them safer. If you don't like regulation, the regulations have become excessive. Personally I'm in the camp that the regulations are excessive. Regulators are probably incentivized to keep creating new rules, without considering costs for those rules. No one notices if an extra nuclear power plant online, allowing millions to get cheap, clean electricity. But oh boy is it noticed if something goes wrong.
• Lramseyer 3y ago
  I have a tinfoil hat theory that all of this environmental and safety regulation was amplified heavily by lobbying and/or propaganda efforts from the coal companies. On one hand, you can make the argument that nuclear fuel was the new silent invisible killer on the block (as opposed to coal mining and emissions which were known, but accepted since it had been around for decades) But when I read stuff like this, it seems as if regulation was heavily disproportionately applied to nuclear energy even despite it being a new and unfamiliar danger. Or maybe the coal industry simply was more successful at curbing regulation. After all, it was was a more mature industry financially and politically. My theory might be speculative and totally off the mark. But when you compare deaths per TWh of energy produced, coal is responsible for almost 3 orders of magnitude more deaths than nuclear. So maybe the real question is "how has coal power stayed so cheap?" or "if we tried to make coal power as safe as nuclear, what would it cost?"
  • koheripbal 3y ago
    Russian influence operations as well. It is well documented
  • baybal2 3y ago
    [dead]
  • wolfram74 3y ago
    I mean, with the history[0] of petro companies funding anti nuclear groups, it's not a very out there conspiracy theory. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement/?sh=3bb394a57453 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
    • fsflover 3y ago
      A couple more links: https://www.ans.org/news/article-1392/robert-anderson-antinuclear-financier https://www.ans.org/news/article-1392/robert-anderson-antinu... https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-nuclear-movement https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-n...
• apatheticonion 3y ago
  Doing back of napkin math (using the numbers I can find) it doesn't seem like nuclear power is expensive to construct - at least compared to solar and wind. Nothing is cost competitive with natural gas and coal - but that's the problem we are trying to solve. Solar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm The Topaz Solar Farm in the US has a capacity of 550MW and a construction cost of $2.5b US billion. That puts it at a cost of $4.5 million per MW capacity (550MW / 2.5b) (adjusted for inflation that's $3.2b USD or $5.8m per MW). It is used at 26% of its capacity which I assume is due to the non dispatchable nature of solar (would likely change if batteries were added - increasing cost). Assuming a 10 year loan at 3% adds $500m bringing it to $6.7m per MW capacity Nuclear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_... The Palo Verde nuclear plant has a capacity of 3937MW and a construction cost of $12.6b USD adjusted for inflation. That puts it at a cost of $3.2m per MW capacity and it was used at 82% of its capacity over its lifetime. Interest at 3% over 10 years adds 2b to the figure making it $3.7m per MW capacity Limitations: This doesn't consider running costs, maintenance or factor how usage capacity affects cost. Maybe I am missing something, perhaps the running costs of nuclear eclipse the total cost of solar + batteries over 50 years? Maybe the loans granted for nuclear are at a much higher interest rate than those granted for other power projects? Is insurance a factor?
  • philipkglass 3y ago
    The Topaz Solar Farm began construction in 2011. Solar costs dropped a lot in the following decade: https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/how-does-utility-scale-solar-work https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/how-does-utility-scale-sol... See figure 9 in particular: https://www.solarreviews.com/content/images/blog/SMI-2021-Q2-ES-Fig9.png https://www.solarreviews.com/content/images/blog/SMI-2021-Q2... Utility scale fixed tilt PV installations like Topaz were down to $0.77 per watt ($0.77 million per megawatt) by 2021.
    • apatheticonion 3y ago
      Does $0.77m per MW describe plant capacity or realized output? Is that a national average or is that for a particular geography? Looking at some more modern projects and it is actually looking pretty good. I don't know how to account for unused capacity as it seems most PV util setups use about 30% of their capacity (do you just multiply the cost by 1.7?) Case 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karap%C4%B1nar_solar_power_plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karap%C4%B1nar_solar_power_pla... 2023 Turkey - 1300MW capacity and a construction cost of 1.3b USD puts it at ~ $1m/MW capacity which is incredible. Case 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar 2018 USA - construction cost of $1.1b (maybe) and a capacity of 615MW so ~1.8m per MW Case 3 (China nuclear) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangjiashan_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangjiashan_Nuclear_Power_Plan... is ~ 1.8m USD per MW capacity if we can trust their numbers. Assuming a utilization of 80% (like other nuclear plants) this seems at worst cost competitive?
• rogers18445 3y ago
  Ultimately it boils down to lack of competition + enormous overheads due to regulation, legal & political risk and uncertainty. The accidents were spectacular, even though they resulted in so very few deaths. For most people nuclear is effectively witchcraft, and selling fear is effective. The HBO series were so absurd yet so loved.
• RagnarD 3y ago
  Because U.S. environmentalists were, and are, happy with the NRC making it virtually impossible to build them with a sea of totally unnecessary red tape.
  • adrianN 3y ago
    Opinions differ on which part of the red tape is "totally unnecessary".
• bradley13 3y ago
  According to the article, "rising labor costs are the bulk of increased construction costs". Yet we are talking about cost increasing by hundreds of percent. The question the article does not really pose is: how much of that labor is actually necessary? I am reminded of my summer internship installing a computer system in a sewage plant. One of my jobs was testing the connection of the computer system to sensors. I needed a guide to show me where the sensors were located, and then I needed to attach a multimeter to the wires while someone on the computer end sent a signal. So two people needed. However, there were six of us: The guide. The guy who could open the sensor cover. The guy who could attach the clips to the wires. The guy who read the meter. The guy who made sure each person only did his part of the job. And me. 300% of the required labor, so 300% of the costs.
  • lnsru 3y ago
    When I think about big projects I immediately think about the system of contractors. There is a dozen layer distance between buyer and the guy who delivers. And every layer wants the share. So having one screw installed costs a salary for one guy and profit for dozen other involved companies creating price explosion.
    • Maxion 3y ago
      This is normal in any slightly larger project, the company that wins the bid rarely has hundreds of people twiddling their thumbs waiting for the next contract to be won. Instead the contracting company goes out to find sub contractors who do have free labor. This creates a chain where the main contractor goes out to find labor, they find someone who promises fifty engineers for a good price. This company doesn’t either have fifty engineers sitting idle. Maybe they have ten. So they go out to find forty engineers. Rinse and repeat until the price that’s offered is too low for anyone to accept, or they’ve found their allocation of engineers. The only way to prevent this is for the original contracting company to hire all of the necessary staff themselves onto their staff, but this is slow and only works if the project is long enough so that you can entice people to switch jobs. All experienced engineers are already employed somewhere else.
    • 3y ago
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  Engineering for Black Swan events is always going to be expensive. Someone tried to tell me that airplanes crash fairly frequently, so why should we be concerned so much about nuclear reactor accidents? Well, if every time an airplane crashed at an airport, we had to turn that airport into a Chernobyl/Fukushima exclusion zone for the next 100 years, would air travel even be a thing?
  • pfdietz 3y ago
    > Someone tried to tell me that airplanes crash fairly frequently Usually at most once.
• vinay_ys 3y ago
  The real problem seems to be lack of standards in manufacturing industry to raise the quality bar across the supply chain to the nuclear levels. If all regular factories of cooling systems and valves and pipes and concretes were operating to meet interoperability and quality standards set by regulatory bodies then the cost of meeting such high quality bar would be amortized over large number of things. Also, the "indirect" costs can be significantly optimized with today's tech – especially with more AI-infused software systems. I think this pattern of the problem is seen in many industries – of lack of regulations for enforcing interoperability requirements and setting quality bar high enough to meet a large number of critical use-cases. We don't build as many big and amazing things anymore, not as much as we used to.
  • dexwiz 3y ago
    What’s stops the nuclear industry from then requiring even higher quality? Can you get another magnitude of safety? There will always be a window for quality, and nuclear will always be at the top along with other high budget projects.
    • nine_k 3y ago
      Nuclear power generation is already ridiculously safe. The amount of radiation allowed to leak from a power plant in a year is about as much as you receive by having a dozen trans-Atlantic flights. Number of people dying per GWh generated is lower than e.g. wind generation. Coal produces much more radiatoin-induced diseases than nuclear, because the ashes concentrate heavy metals, including some radioactive isotopes. I don't think it's the industry what pushes for even higher standards. OTOH some cost-cutting in very mundane things can end up in a disaster. The whole Fukishima catastrophe won't happen if the height of the tsunami-protection wall was not reduced. So when a once-in-a-century earthquake with a once-in-a-century tsunami hit, it proved to be inadequate. But building a concrete wall does no require any special nuclear-reactor-grade materials or skills, it's civil engineering 101.
      • YetAnotherNick 3y ago
        Stop gaslighting please. I have heard this so many times yet it is not the truth[1]. Most of the time people are basing this on political belief. > Coal produces much more radiatoin-induced diseases You can't compare nominal operation of coal with nuclear. Nuclear is very safe when operating nominally but once in a while there is a leak or something, which sometimes even go unnoticed. And it could affect the surrounding for years. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
• rgmerk 3y ago
  Predictions: 1) in 2050, the world will get its energy almost exclusively from renewable sources, with a combination of batteries, hydrogen, biogas, hydropower (conventional and pumped), and demand management used to cope with variability. 2) Energy, even taking into account transmission and firming costs, will be cheaper than it ever was. 3) Message boards will still be full of arguments over nuclear energy.
  • spacebanana7 3y ago
    I’ll unilaterally bet $50 that oil + natural gas + coal will still make up >50% of the global energy mix by 2050. In 2019, fossil fuels still generated 79% of our power worldwide with a projection to very slowly lose market share [1] [1] https://earth.org/data_visualization/eo-indexes-global-energy-mix/ https://earth.org/data_visualization/eo-indexes-global-energ...
    • rgmerk 3y ago
      I'll take that bet. Here's hoping both of us are around to settle it!
    • Gwypaas 3y ago
      Separate primary energy from useful energy. An ICE car is 20-25% thermally efficient while BEVs are 90%.
      • Turing_Machine 3y ago
        > while BEVs are 90% Only if you ignore the cost and conversion efficiency of generating the electricity. There aren't any electricity wells out there where it comes out of the ground for the cost of pumping it.
        • Gwypaas 3y ago
          Well, wind turbines have some trouble catching all the wind and solar PV is not 100% efficient either, but it is not like it is going to waste. That is the alternative, not burning fossil fuels somewhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law
• pcurve 3y ago
  Here's shorter article. https://ieefa.org/articles/european-pressurized-reactors-nuclear-powers-latest-costly-and-delayed-disappointments#:~:text=Originally%20projected%20to%20cost%20%E2%82%AC,commissioning%20to%20later%20in%202023 https://ieefa.org/articles/european-pressurized-reactors-nuc.... The cost overrun is a global problem. The five European Pressurized Reactors (EPRs) designed by French utility EDF have all suffered unanticipated issues that have led to costly delays and soaring price Findings of a 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis that found successive iterations of a new nuclear design generally cost more than the original project Although a pair of Chinese EPRs have been completed and are generating power, one unit was shut down for more than a year because of faulty fuel rods. Costs and delays have also plagued EPRs in France, the United Kingdom, and Finland, where the completion of the Olkiluoto 3 reactor has been delayed 17 years
  • pyrale 3y ago
    I found it a bit ridiculous that the author of the article interviews himself in the third person, depicting himself as: > [...] the energy transition,” said Frank Bass, an IEEFA editor and author of the study. “Unfortunately, [...] The site also seems to be a content farm, with the article rehashing the MIT study already posted here.
  • aubanel 3y ago
    For more context: EPRs are all developed by EDF and Framatome. So this could be another factor explaining that they all have issues, rather than their sheer complexity.
    • Xixi 3y ago
      You are missing half of it: Siemens. The EPR design is French-German, as an "evolutionary descendant of the Framatome N4 and Siemens Power Generation Division Konvoi reactors". [1] This largely explain the complexity of the design: it would probably have been easier to make either an evolution of the Framatome N4 reactor, or the latest Siemens reactor. Combining both and trying to please all industrial partners (industrial work-share...) added a lot of complexity. Hence the simpler EPR 2 design that is being worked on, presumably without Siemens Konvoi involvement in the design (although probably still as a subcontractor). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) EDIT: clarity
• locallost 3y ago
  One thing I never understand about the "higher safety standards increase costs" argument is that those higher safety standards are also used as a strong argument on how safe nuclear is. But then it's criticized at the same time for driving the costs up. So either we have extremely safe plants that can be built and operated safely in the thousands worldwide, or we have cheap plants that can be built quickly, but at the expense of safety. Thus far we could not have both.
  • remus 3y ago
    This seems like a basic pros/cons kinda thing? More safety margin means less chance of your reactor blowing up (pro), but it costs more and takes longer to build (con), so you've got to weigh those up and find a sweet spot.
• fuzzfactor 3y ago
  For one thing since recent history shows the actual cost was going to be about $25 Billion for the kind of plant people expect to go forward with, construction never would have been approved unless the estimate could have been artificially reduced to some more palatable number to begin with. Plus the bigger the ticket item, the more profit for suppliers and better commission for salespeople all up and down the line of such a huge project. The fundamental purpose is to be a gravy train not to bring affordable power to the masses unless some kind of bonanza has fully taken place beforehand. Contractors and everyone involved know this and are prepared to take whatever bonanza they can get as long as it lasts, and it can be more lucrative than other sizable projects without even going to completion. It's the sale of a lifetime and more people than ever expect to be set for life with bonuses before construction even starts. Plus the true need for increased safety is an issue and all industries have spiraling costs here since insurance companies are involved, even if more so during construction than operation. Not only is more safety layered on than was once acceptable, but shareholders of insurance companies wanted to experience unbroken growth in returns to beat inflation since the 1970's and 1980's too. They are traded on the same stock market as value-added companies.
• jillesvangurp 3y ago
  The article does a great job of calling out all the things that go wrong in nuclear project that lead to cost overruns and negative learning effects. Michael Liebreich recently interviewed a researcher that made some interesting points about the phenomenon of big public projects overrunning cost: https://www.cleaningup.live/ep128-prof-bent-flyvbjerg-how-big-things-should-get-done/ https://www.cleaningup.live/ep128-prof-bent-flyvbjerg-how-bi... This person studied many thousands of large scale engineering projects and the pattern of these projects overrunning time and costs budgets is universal according to him. It's not a local problem specific to the US either. It happens everywhere. A few of his observations were that renewable projects are among the best performing large scale energy projects currently and nuclear projects among the worst. The big differences between the two are: - on site vs factory based manufacturing. - complexity Nuclear plants are built from scratch in the field. This has lots of risks, requires lots of ad hoc problem solving, and any emerging problems lead to costly delays. That also means that a lot of learning effects are lost because there are a lot of contractors involved that have to solve a lot of site specific issues and in between projects years/decades can pass so the next project has to re-learn a lot of things. And as each site is slightly different there are also site specific risks and uncertainty. The learning effects are negative because each project inherits the mitigations from the previous projects and then has to add completely new solutions based on any new problems. With renewables, most of the difficult stuff happens in a factory. That factory produces lots of cheap modular units that are than shipped and assembled on site. Each unit is relatively cheap. Assembly is relatively uncomplicated. With a wind tower for example, the components are large (tower, turbine, blades, foundation) but mostly pre-assembled. So, on site assembly is relatively straightforward and does not require a lot of problem solving. With solar it's even better because the parts are more plentiful, smaller, and assembly does not require a lot of heavy equipment or site preparation. Doing this at scale means there is a large positive learning effect. So, estimating a wind or solar project is possible with a high degree of accuracy. These projects can be scaled up or down as needed. With Nuclear it so far is the opposite. As for modular nuclear reactors, which the article barely talks about, this is a promising but as of yet unproven way to produce reactors in factories. It's promising because it duplicates some of the advantages of renewables. It's unproven because we won't know it works until lots of these have been assembled and deployed. Which is a thing that seems to be blocked on a lot of mundane things like regulations, approvals, investor enthusiasm, etc. And there's also the notion that the nature of nuclear reactors is that so far bigger seems better in terms of efficiency and overall cost. Which goes against producing lots of small reactors that are two orders of magnitudes smaller than their traditional multi GW counterparts. Likely at least for the first few ones, cost and time budget estimates are probably not that accurate.
• ianpurton 3y ago
  So Rolls Royce want to build small modular reactors https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx#/ https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor... It will be interesting to see if the smaller scale can avoid some of the issues mentioned in the article.
• fhennig 3y ago
  > We can roughly break the costs of operating any power plant into three categories: fuel costs, operation and maintenance costs, and capital costs The article forgets to mention another cost: The cost of disposing/storing used up fuel. This is often forgotten, but a major cost too, if the spent fuel is to be stored safely and securely. And it needs to be stored like that for hundreds of thousands of years! Switzerland is currently in the process of building a national waste storing facility, a quick Google search showed that the US currently does not have one.
  • concordDance 3y ago
    It's only a major cost due to the need to manage media headlines, NIMBYism and an uninformed public. You actually could just dump it into the ocean to join the billion tons of Uranium already there...
    • fhennig 3y ago
      Your comment comes of as a bit dismissive, but I'm trying to take your word here. A quick google search shows that the there have been policies [0] to prevent ocean dumping of nuclear waste due to adverse effects on the environment. It doesn't seem like something we should do. Also it seems like you are implying that spent fuel and raw, unenriched uranium are somehow the same, which is also not true. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste#Policies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
      • concordDance 3y ago
        > A quick google search shows that the there have been policies [0] to prevent ocean dumping of nuclear waste due to adverse effects on the environment. Check the citations. The wikipedia article is conflating general oceanic waste dumping with nuclear waste dumping. Things like oil float(!), come in huge quantities and react both physically (coating) and chemically with wildlife. As best I can tell dumping solid dense nuclear waste onto the abyssal plane has no known or theoretical environmental effects. > Also it seems like you are implying that spent fuel and raw, unenriched uranium are somehow the same, which is also not true. You're correct here. However the moderating effects of water mean that if you did glass solid nuclear waste and dump it in the abyss you'd get no detectable increase in ocean radioactivity.
• piokoch 3y ago
  1. Cooling. You need a lake or a see nearby. 2. A lot of custom stuff that has to be created from scratch, as nukes were "bad" (see point 4.) for many years so there was no chance to rise industry that would provide standard parts, etc. Imagine the cost of building every block of flat starting from the ground zero. It would be huge as well. 3. Red tape. Huge certification for everything, every piece of equipment, materials. 4. Lack of innovation for many, many years. If you wanted to work in the University on nuclear energy reactors 15 years ago you were treated by your fellow academia friends as a Holocaust denier or at least global warming denier. Green movement was very successful in making nukes look bad and now we have what we have. Germany could have been 100% CO2 neutral today if they have invested into nukes instead of renewables...