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Nothing has changed since the early days. A helluva complicated and expensive way to boil water. "At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and

Nothing has changed since the early days. A helluva complicated and expensive way to boil water. "At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy … This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe." — C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951. ( Ref: Power from the Atom - An Appraisal, Nucleonics, Feb. 1951 ) https://www.ieer.org/pubs/atomicmyths.html https://www.ieer.org/pubs/atomicmyths.html Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: https://ieer.org/projects/carbon-free-nuclear-free/ https://ieer.org/projects/carbon-free-nuclear-free/

apatheticonion 3y ago
Turkey is set to get 10% of its grid electricity from the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant [1] The build cost has been 22B (excluding loans) and it will have a capacity of 4456MW meaning it's $4.9/W. On average the cost per Watt for solar is 27 cents (excluding loans and costs for storage) [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices EDIT: incorrect calculation
- Retric 3y ago
  That project isn’t finished they are targeting 2026 and hope it’s only ~10% over budget. Your solar numbers are wildly inflated because that’s per watt not per watt hour. Over 2/3 of nuclear power plants costs occur after you build the things. It would be comparable if 22B was the total cost and if nuclear didn’t need ~1,000 full time employees, fuel, decommissioning etc. Those costs delay how quickly you can pay back loans which then drives up how much interest nuclear pays over the plants lifetime. Companies have signed solar power purchase contracts at 2c/kWh. Adding solar redundancy and batteries for 24/7 power is actually more flexible and cheaper than nuclear because you can cheaply follow the demand curve. Meanwhile nuclear power plants need to go offline for multiple weeks every ~2 years and really want to sit at 100% the rest of the time. PS: Even just looking at construction costs is misleading because solar starts producing power so much sooner. You’re paying interest from day 1 of construction not day 1 of operations. So if you take 6 years to build that’s 5 years of interest on the first years construction costs without any revenue. Meanwhile solar’s been producing power for ~5 years and paying down debt.
  - kragen 3y ago
    1.5 cents per kilowatt hour even https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas-in-the-southwest-means-carbon-capture-is-not-going-to-save-coal-plants/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas... note that the coal plant mentioned in that article has since been decommissioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan_Generating_Station
- kragen 3y ago
  these are great numbers, thanks keep in mind that almost all the cost of pv plants is construction (capex), while most of the cost of nuclear is during operation and decommissioning (opex) so 20 cents per watt capex is close to 60 cents per watt total, twice the price of pv as emmaengineer pointed out, though, you did the division backwards: it's 0.20 watts per dollar, not 0.20 dollars per watt. the correct quotient is 490¢ per watt, or maybe closer to 15 dollars per watt including opex
- EmmaEngineer 3y ago
  $22B / 4.456B = $4.9/W, about 20x more expensive than your number for PV.
  - kragen 3y ago
    thank you for posting this correction; i had missed that obvious error
  - apatheticonion 3y ago
    Oh you're right! Did it backwards. Correcting my post
- kragen 3y ago
  i just noticed that you're linking a page about panel prices two problems one, pv modules are typically about a third of the cost of a utility-scale solar farm; things like installation labor and power electronics are also part of the cost. so roughly we should expect solar projects to cost about 80 cents per peak watt based on that number two, that page ends in 02021, but pv module prices have fallen by about a third to half since the beginning of this year https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preisindex/ https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... in particular solarserver's 'mainstream' category was about 25 euro-cents throughout 02021 and is now at 19, 24% lower, and the lowest it's ever been it seems like the price-fixing cartel announced at the beginning of 02019 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl-idUSKCN1PI2OQ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl-i... has finally collapsed solarserver's 'low-cost' category is at the staggeringly low price of 11 euro-cents per peak watt; if the other costs didn't change, that would lower the solar plant cost from 80 cents to 65 cents or so per peak watt, though in fact they tend to increase somewhat because of the larger area of solar cells required to reach the same wattage (that's why the mainstream pv modules are more expensive) a third problem is the capacity factor, tho; nuke plants typically run at about 90% capacity, while solar farms run at closer to 20%, because of problems such as night. in very polar countries like germany it's 10%. so 70 cents per nameplate watt works out to more like 3.5 dollars per delivered watt which is still cheaper than 4.9 (or 5.4 dollars per delivered watt assuming that 90% capacity factor) but not implausibly cheaper anymore if solar farm builders can find ways to reduce the costs of solar farms proportionately to the vertiginous drop in module prices, which sounds implausible but has always been done successfully before, we should expect the price to drop to half that
  - Retric 3y ago
    German solar policies are insane. Nation wide capacity factor was 11.6% in 2018. The numbers are so low because they keep building solar in the northern parts of the country which are absolutely terrible for solar. Brandenburg has a stupidly large amount of solar compared to a terrible amount of sunlight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#/media/File:Germany_GHI_Solar-resource-map_GlobalSolarAtlas_World-Bank-Esmap-Solargis.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#/media/... Meanwhile the best location in Germany the south southern tip of Baden-Württemberg only has a relatively small fraction of their total installed solar. I haven’t worked out the exact numbers but they are something like 20+% less efficient than they could be. Granted they would need to build more power transmission lines but it’s a small county so such projects would be fairly cheap compared to the efficiency gain. PS: May solar power plants on the US are over 30% capacity factor and the average is ~25%. We’re a long way from the equator. In a perfect location solar tracking PV should get around 40% capacity factor. You beat 1/pi because over the day an angled panel casts a wider shadow than the width of the panel.
vlovich123 3y ago
It’s important to remember that research and commercial funding for nuclear reactors has basically frozen for the better part of 60 years, which means that fission tech hasn’t been following Wright’s law and we’re still stuck with designs from 60 years ago. Things have heated up a bit more recently but this stuff has a long lead time (+ think of all the people who didn’t go into nuclear because of the lack of funding). There’s actually lines of research to do direct conversion of energy instead of boiling water which gets efficiency up to ~90% instead of 40%. But the challenge with fission isn’t fuel conversion efficiency but manufacturing and maintenance costs. I wonder if getting rid of the water requirements for fission reactors would meaningfully alter the costs involved. Would be neat if it would. But ultimately fission is still price competitive with renewables and that’s when you ignore the need for batteries and the fact that it’s taken a lot of investment in renewables paired with underinvestment in fission.
- kagakuninja 3y ago
  All the major world powers dumped tons of money into researching light water fission, precisely because it is dual use technology for making weapons. What has not had billions of government dollars in finding were renewables.
  - p_l 3y ago
    Lots was dumped into known low-effectiveness light water fission precisely because it is not a viable path for making weapons. There are many more efficient ways of running nuclear power, especially ones that do not involve either needing enrichement of fuel nor throwing away majority of still usable fuel - but despite NPT, they are blocked politically by nuclear-haves.
    - p_l 3y ago
      Can't edit anymore, but for reference for those who probably downvote out of misunderstanding. Light water moderated reactors aren't a pathway to making nuclear weapons, because they require that you have the ability to enrich uranium separately just to start. I.e. a light-water moderated reactor is dependant either on capability to enrich fuel and/or use unenriched fuel (for enrichment or plutonium production) - which are core capabilities for making fission weapons. This is why they have been favoured on non-proliferation (and often "control") grounds - they are dependant on fuel from groups that do have fission weapon production pipeline or at least parts of it. To work from natural uranium, without artificial enrichment, you need to use either heavy-water moderation or graphite moderation, or more exotic designs - but then you can both use unenriched uranium to produce power as well as produce plutonium or other useful things, and a distillation pipeline provides for both light-water reactor fuel and weapon fissile material. Details of how subsidies went are way more complex, and both renewables and nuclear and fossil fuels had areas heavily subsidized.
deleted 3y ago
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stonogo 3y ago
In 1951 the Hanford reactors were making plutonium, not power. Only one of the Hanford reactors sold electricity, and not until the middle of the 1960s. That one went over budget to construct but operating costs were well under predictions. I'm not sure Mr. Suits had enough information in 1951 to make his claim authoritative seventy years later.
philipkglass 3y ago
The Internet Archive has many old issues of Nucleonics available. Here's the full article you reference: "Power from the Atom - An Appraisal" https://archive.org/details/sim_nucleonics_1951-02_8_2/page/2/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/sim_nucleonics_1951-02_8_2/page/...

apatheticonion 3y ago

Turkey is set to get 10% of its grid electricity from the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant [1] The build cost has been 22B (excluding loans) and it will have a capacity of 4456MW meaning it's $4.9/W. On average the cost per Watt for solar is 27 cents (excluding loans and costs for storage) [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices EDIT: incorrect calculation

Retric 3y ago
That project isn’t finished they are targeting 2026 and hope it’s only ~10% over budget. Your solar numbers are wildly inflated because that’s per watt not per watt hour. Over 2/3 of nuclear power plants costs occur after you build the things. It would be comparable if 22B was the total cost and if nuclear didn’t need ~1,000 full time employees, fuel, decommissioning etc. Those costs delay how quickly you can pay back loans which then drives up how much interest nuclear pays over the plants lifetime. Companies have signed solar power purchase contracts at 2c/kWh. Adding solar redundancy and batteries for 24/7 power is actually more flexible and cheaper than nuclear because you can cheaply follow the demand curve. Meanwhile nuclear power plants need to go offline for multiple weeks every ~2 years and really want to sit at 100% the rest of the time. PS: Even just looking at construction costs is misleading because solar starts producing power so much sooner. You’re paying interest from day 1 of construction not day 1 of operations. So if you take 6 years to build that’s 5 years of interest on the first years construction costs without any revenue. Meanwhile solar’s been producing power for ~5 years and paying down debt.
- kragen 3y ago
  1.5 cents per kilowatt hour even https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas-in-the-southwest-means-carbon-capture-is-not-going-to-save-coal-plants/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas... note that the coal plant mentioned in that article has since been decommissioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan_Generating_Station
kragen 3y ago
these are great numbers, thanks keep in mind that almost all the cost of pv plants is construction (capex), while most of the cost of nuclear is during operation and decommissioning (opex) so 20 cents per watt capex is close to 60 cents per watt total, twice the price of pv as emmaengineer pointed out, though, you did the division backwards: it's 0.20 watts per dollar, not 0.20 dollars per watt. the correct quotient is 490¢ per watt, or maybe closer to 15 dollars per watt including opex
EmmaEngineer 3y ago
$22B / 4.456B = $4.9/W, about 20x more expensive than your number for PV.
- kragen 3y ago
  thank you for posting this correction; i had missed that obvious error
- apatheticonion 3y ago
  Oh you're right! Did it backwards. Correcting my post
kragen 3y ago
i just noticed that you're linking a page about panel prices two problems one, pv modules are typically about a third of the cost of a utility-scale solar farm; things like installation labor and power electronics are also part of the cost. so roughly we should expect solar projects to cost about 80 cents per peak watt based on that number two, that page ends in 02021, but pv module prices have fallen by about a third to half since the beginning of this year https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preisindex/ https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... in particular solarserver's 'mainstream' category was about 25 euro-cents throughout 02021 and is now at 19, 24% lower, and the lowest it's ever been it seems like the price-fixing cartel announced at the beginning of 02019 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl-idUSKCN1PI2OQ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl-i... has finally collapsed solarserver's 'low-cost' category is at the staggeringly low price of 11 euro-cents per peak watt; if the other costs didn't change, that would lower the solar plant cost from 80 cents to 65 cents or so per peak watt, though in fact they tend to increase somewhat because of the larger area of solar cells required to reach the same wattage (that's why the mainstream pv modules are more expensive) a third problem is the capacity factor, tho; nuke plants typically run at about 90% capacity, while solar farms run at closer to 20%, because of problems such as night. in very polar countries like germany it's 10%. so 70 cents per nameplate watt works out to more like 3.5 dollars per delivered watt which is still cheaper than 4.9 (or 5.4 dollars per delivered watt assuming that 90% capacity factor) but not implausibly cheaper anymore if solar farm builders can find ways to reduce the costs of solar farms proportionately to the vertiginous drop in module prices, which sounds implausible but has always been done successfully before, we should expect the price to drop to half that
- Retric 3y ago
  German solar policies are insane. Nation wide capacity factor was 11.6% in 2018. The numbers are so low because they keep building solar in the northern parts of the country which are absolutely terrible for solar. Brandenburg has a stupidly large amount of solar compared to a terrible amount of sunlight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#/media/File:Germany_GHI_Solar-resource-map_GlobalSolarAtlas_World-Bank-Esmap-Solargis.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#/media/... Meanwhile the best location in Germany the south southern tip of Baden-Württemberg only has a relatively small fraction of their total installed solar. I haven’t worked out the exact numbers but they are something like 20+% less efficient than they could be. Granted they would need to build more power transmission lines but it’s a small county so such projects would be fairly cheap compared to the efficiency gain. PS: May solar power plants on the US are over 30% capacity factor and the average is ~25%. We’re a long way from the equator. In a perfect location solar tracking PV should get around 40% capacity factor. You beat 1/pi because over the day an angled panel casts a wider shadow than the width of the panel.

vlovich123 3y ago

It’s important to remember that research and commercial funding for nuclear reactors has basically frozen for the better part of 60 years, which means that fission tech hasn’t been following Wright’s law and we’re still stuck with designs from 60 years ago. Things have heated up a bit more recently but this stuff has a long lead time (+ think of all the people who didn’t go into nuclear because of the lack of funding). There’s actually lines of research to do direct conversion of energy instead of boiling water which gets efficiency up to ~90% instead of 40%. But the challenge with fission isn’t fuel conversion efficiency but manufacturing and maintenance costs. I wonder if getting rid of the water requirements for fission reactors would meaningfully alter the costs involved. Would be neat if it would. But ultimately fission is still price competitive with renewables and that’s when you ignore the need for batteries and the fact that it’s taken a lot of investment in renewables paired with underinvestment in fission.

kagakuninja 3y ago
All the major world powers dumped tons of money into researching light water fission, precisely because it is dual use technology for making weapons. What has not had billions of government dollars in finding were renewables.
- p_l 3y ago
  Lots was dumped into known low-effectiveness light water fission precisely because it is not a viable path for making weapons. There are many more efficient ways of running nuclear power, especially ones that do not involve either needing enrichement of fuel nor throwing away majority of still usable fuel - but despite NPT, they are blocked politically by nuclear-haves.
  - p_l 3y ago
    Can't edit anymore, but for reference for those who probably downvote out of misunderstanding. Light water moderated reactors aren't a pathway to making nuclear weapons, because they require that you have the ability to enrich uranium separately just to start. I.e. a light-water moderated reactor is dependant either on capability to enrich fuel and/or use unenriched fuel (for enrichment or plutonium production) - which are core capabilities for making fission weapons. This is why they have been favoured on non-proliferation (and often "control") grounds - they are dependant on fuel from groups that do have fission weapon production pipeline or at least parts of it. To work from natural uranium, without artificial enrichment, you need to use either heavy-water moderation or graphite moderation, or more exotic designs - but then you can both use unenriched uranium to produce power as well as produce plutonium or other useful things, and a distillation pipeline provides for both light-water reactor fuel and weapon fissile material. Details of how subsidies went are way more complex, and both renewables and nuclear and fossil fuels had areas heavily subsidized.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

stonogo 3y ago

In 1951 the Hanford reactors were making plutonium, not power. Only one of the Hanford reactors sold electricity, and not until the middle of the 1960s. That one went over budget to construct but operating costs were well under predictions. I'm not sure Mr. Suits had enough information in 1951 to make his claim authoritative seventy years later.

philipkglass 3y ago

The Internet Archive has many old issues of Nucleonics available. Here's the full article you reference: "Power from the Atom - An Appraisal" https://archive.org/details/sim_nucleonics_1951-02_8_2/page/2/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/sim_nucleonics_1951-02_8_2/page/...