16 ms·

See also: "Georgia nuclear rebirth arrives 7 years late, $17B over cost" https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3

• apengwin 3y ago
  A good start!
• briandear 3y ago
  If we’re worried about cost overruns, then perhaps cancel the California high speed rail boondoggle. That project could buy several nuclear reactors.
  • api 3y ago
    I have a very strong impression that the perpetual money pits of California (rail, the amount spent on homelessness without progress, etc.) aren’t bugs but features… for someone. That money is going into someone’s pocket.
    • icelancer 3y ago
      As usual it's some from Column A and B. Hard to tell sometimes what is graft and what is incompetence.
      • s1artibartfast 3y ago
        A little of A, B, and C. A) Idealistic voters with little interest in detail or execution. B) Hard working state employees executing in an ineffective way because they are working on over constrained problems with conflicting and sometime impossible goals. C) A number of opportunists that take advantage of poor rulemaking and bureaucratic disorganization. For what it is worth, I dont think corruption is a major driver of problems, but bad policy detached from the practical considerations. One simple example is SF parks maintenance: The city wants to keep invasive species out, so it has staff to remove them. The city also believes in livable wages, so the workers make >100K. Residents dont like pesticides, so the workers must hand weed. Hand weeding doesnt work, so the City periodically also pays outside consultants to come in and take care of the invasives (with pesticides and low paid workers).
        • mlrtime 3y ago
          >The city wants to keep invasive species out... These small examples are extremely frustrating as a tax payer. What is the solution to these examples, or does one just try to ignore it as a price of living in that society?
          • s1artibartfast 3y ago
            Frustrating indeed. I don't think there is a quick fix to create a political culture among voters and representatives that cares about fiscal responsibility. One consideration is having a broader tax base so that voters have more skin in the game. For example, taxes in Houston are less progressive than SF, but SF city budget per resident is more than 500% that of Huston.
            • zbrozek 3y ago
              How do we get to a more decisive government that doesn't try to make everything a priority (especially things that are at odds with each other)? Is it to reduce direct participation and rely on representation (remove public hearings)? The $1.7M public toilet was a painful example showing how far off the rails we are. Should auditors and controllers have some teeth? What would they be?
    • zbrozek 3y ago
      Our electeds simply don't care what anything costs, and as a result we have (probably) the worst cost disease on the planet.
      • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > electeds simply don't care what anything costs California has a referendum system. That so few referendums focus on cutting costs says something about its voters’ priorities.
        • zbrozek 3y ago
          Sure does! That's why I used "electeds" rather than "representatives", to make really clear the connection. On the other hand, the state is losing population on an absolute basis (and relatively even more so against a backdrop of national growth). So some folks are voting with their feet. I'm eagerly awaiting the day when I'm free enough to do the same.
          • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
            > why I used "electeds" rather than "representatives", to make really clear the connection I’m arguing the opposite. The voters have the tools to oppose the state government’s size. That they don’t use them signals support in broad terms.
            • aspenmayer 3y ago
              I’d agree with you with the caveat that such public support is mediated by regulatory capture on all sides and from all quarters: outside the government by industry and lobbyists, within the government by elected officials, and adjacent to/despite the government by a public apathetic to such issues and/or voting against its own shared/collective interests in favor of individual interests. Participation in local and state politics even in California is not common beyond voting, which is a low bar to clear. Much of media messaging in the area of referendums is focused on niche issues and special interests, and serves to highlight and promote those issues to convert NIMBYs to YIMBYs or vice-versa on those specific narrow issues. Agreement in broad terms like you mention is hard to achieve due to the difficulty in drafting referendum legislation texts such that they will withstand a challenge by the state attorney general as well as state Supreme Court, as well as having the resulting referendum achieve enough signatures to make it on the ballot and have enough recognition and support by voters to actually pass and become law. One key difference that I do like about the CA referendum process is that laws passed by referendum in California are equal to the state constitution and require 2/3 supermajority in state congress to modify or change, just like the state constitution itself. This avoids many attempts by legislature to foil or spoil the will of the voters’ referendums, in contrast to other state referendum processes which are only considered a law passed by other means and are usually able to be modified by simple majority.
  • solarpunk 3y ago
    Probably best to diversify infrastructure investment across... multiple projects.
  • danans 3y ago
    The difference is that there are many cheaper viable alternatives to the firm power that nuclear provides, including renewables+batteries ($60/MWh and dropping) and enhanced geothermal ($80/MWh and dropping). Heck, even natural gas combined-cycle + carbon capture/storage is cheaper on an LCOE basis (~$60/MWh) than nuclear ($180/MWh and rising) [1]. It would be great if nuclear could be cost competitive for equivalently firm power, but its costs are increasing, not decreasing. In contrast, the only real alternative to air travel for high speed transportation between Northern and Southern CA is high speed rail. The "Hyperloop" has been exposed (charitably) as a failure, and personal vehicle travel (even electrified) is not an equivalent to HSR in a state as big as CA. None of that is to say that the CA HSR project has been well planned/executed or that the costs have been well estimated. But that doesn't obviate the need for high speed ground transport in the state. 1. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... (pages 2 and 31)
    • mpweiher 3y ago
      Oh good grief, not that Lazard "study" again. They took the cost to build Vogtle, which is one of the most or even the most expensive outlier in terms of time/cost overruns of all time, and decided to make that the baseline for "the cost of nuclear power". When the average time to build a nuclear reactor in the world has consistently been around 7.5 years. For the last 50 years, and also for the ones that came online in 2022, lest you think these were just the bygone good old days. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-construction-time https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
      • adrianN 3y ago
        Which new nuclear would you suggest instead? Hinkley C will cost about $160/MWh, right in the range given by Lazard.
        • mpweiher 3y ago
          I would suggest we look at overall stats instead of isolated examples. Time to construct a nuclear plant takes on average 7.5 years, a number that hasn't really budged in the last 50 years. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-construction-time https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi... And since financing (i.e. interest) is the primary cost of nuclear (~50%), time is money. Hinkley and Flamanville are examples of the EPR, a brand new reactor type that is both at the start of its learning curve, always problematic, and also apparently a design that is particularly difficult to build. And both Europe and the US haven't really built any nuclear plants for quite a long time, so the know-how to build them is just not there. Oh, and the regulators sometimes change regulations after parts of the plants have been built so they have to tear down what they have built and start again. These are obviously all solvable problems, and mostly solvable by just building more. The problem is that we didn't build enough. Just build more.
• rjbwork 3y ago
  Problem is that we don't build the damn things anymore, so each one is bespoke and expensive. Ideally we'd keep building them and develop the expertise and make it a more repeatable scalable process. I worry instead that the lesson taken from this will be "nuclear is too expensive and ineffective".
  • bordercases 3y ago
    Both Ukraine and the Red Sea collapsing has produced ads for uranium mining in Saskatchewan, Canada. These kinds of ads don't run without government support; since public opinion is often extremely uninformed, I expect the pivot to nuclear to happen with or without pundits vocalizing their views.
  • corethree 3y ago
    We don't really build anything anymore. The "expertise" has transferred to Asia. Anything we build we'll build worse, slower and more expensive. Except for airplanes that's one of the few things we still do better. My overall point is I highly doubt nuclear powerplants will be built here in any major way. Will it happen in Asia? Far more likely.
    • bordercases 3y ago
      According to my sources, Hong Kong has an engineer shortage. They still want the je ne-sais quoi quality of North American trained engineers.
      • corethree 3y ago
        I would say Hong Kong doesn't illustrate the overall story.
    • mayama 3y ago
      To be specific it's airplane engines, 5th gen turbofan engines. China started building COMAC airplanes too, probably with questionable maintenance and serviceability story, that they can push with govt airlines. They are still having trouble with modern turbofan engines though.
• EduardoBautista 3y ago
  Maybe if they can continue the momentum and learn from this project, the next reactors will be cheaper?
  • sanxiyn 3y ago
    Yes it will, but experience from South Korea says it won't be cheap enough to matter. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30380897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30380897.
• perihelions 3y ago
  And also: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sc/pr/top-westinghouse-nuclear-executive-charged-conspiracy-fraud-16-count-federal-indictment https://www.justice.gov/usao-sc/pr/top-westinghouse-nuclear-... ("Top Westinghouse Nuclear Executive Charged with Conspiracy, Fraud in 16-Count Federal Indictment") That's the failed project OP blithely elided over as: - "Two other Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were planned for a nuclear power plant in South Carolina, but construction was halted in 2017." I'm really, really strongly in favor of nuclear fission power; but the American attempts this decade, and this company in particular, have been a grotesque failure. We really seem to have forgotten how to build things.
  • applied_heat 3y ago
    Elon to the rescue ?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • dexwiz 3y ago
      Sure, let his companies blow up a few to learn how to build them. /s Rockets and cars are one thing. But that risk equation doesn’t work for nuclear.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • applied_heat 3y ago
        He has shook up and revitalized two industries and proven his ability to execute and get people motivated to do significant work with physics and manufacturing and project management that are complex. It doesn’t seem that far fetched to me and aligns with his sustainable energy focus but downvoters seem to disagree!
        • grecy 3y ago
          Based on everything he has said to date, he would just cover a few square km with solar. In that one talk he said building enough solar to power the entire world is similar in effort to all the cars that have ever been built. So we can certainly do it.
• lawn 3y ago
  This is always the case when you build large one-off projects. If you continue to build reactors non-stop you'll learn how to make the process more efficient and be able to make better estimates. Surely we software developers should appreciate how hard making accurate estimates is? And this isn't a 2 week sprint we're talking about, but a gigantic engineering project.
  • matthewdgreen 3y ago
    But are we going to build reactors non-stop? Is there either private-sector funding for this, or government subsidies to make it happen?
    • FredPret 3y ago
      Yes, of course. Power demand increases. Technology improves. Installed capacity ages out. There will always be a need to build new plants, might as well lean into it and be proactive.
      • afterburner 3y ago
        Unless the technology becomes obsolete. There are other ways to generate power.
        • FredPret 3y ago
          > Technology improves
      • matthewdgreen 3y ago
        I found this list which shows "under construction", "planned" and "proposed". It does not look like the US is planning to build a lot of reactors. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
        • 3y ago
• Exoristos 3y ago
  Surely much of the crippling cost is due to hostile lawfare and regulation.
  • BoiledCabbage 3y ago
    Damn, if only we didn't have to build them safely we could make them so cheaply.
    • sonotathrowaway 3y ago
      We build planes safely, but those same parts are 3x the cost. Safety isn’t the reason why it’s more expensive.
    • willis936 3y ago
      Safety and bureaucracy are orthogonal. Bureaucracy is a slowing force, which is sold as being correlated with safety. The more layers of abstraction needlessly added, the more likely there will be systems engineering failures.
      • bumby 3y ago
        >more layers of abstraction needlessly added I think you're betraying your bias here with the added term "needlessly". There is some (maybe even most) bureaucracy that is inefficiently applied, for sure. But it is meant to address some risk. Maybe it's a risk that you (personally) don't care about, or aren't even cognizant of, and that's when it becomes easy to declare it "needless." We should be looking to streamline our risk mitigation and align it with risks that the public cares about, not throw it out altogether.
        • willis936 3y ago
          You're betraying your bias by insinuating I suggested throwing out risk mitigation. I advocated for streamlined risk mitigation by highlighting the risk of unnecessary complexity.
• credit_guy 3y ago
  Somehow all the articles criticizing Vogtle keep mentioning the cost overruns, the additional cost to consumers, but don't mention that in Georgia people pay less than the national average price per kWh (11 cents vs 12.7) while sunny California, for example pays about twice the average (24.3 cents per kWh). In my state, NY, where 2 reactors were decommissioned in 2020 and 2021, the average price is 22 cents per kWh. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
  • bobthepanda 3y ago
    This cost premium has always existed. https://ballotpedia.org/Historical_state_electricity_prices https://ballotpedia.org/Historical_state_electricity_prices
    • credit_guy 3y ago
      Good point. Could it be that Georgia already generates a lot of power from its existing nuclear reactors, and has been doing that for a few decades?
      • bobthepanda 3y ago
        I mean, all that data is also from when California and New York both had operational reactors. In 2013, CA generated 17 out of 200 GW from nuclear. GA generated 32/120 GW. NY generated 44/136GW. So at least in the case of New York, it generated more power from nuclear as a percentage than GA, and had higher electricity prices, so there doesn't seem to be a correlation. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/state/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/state/ It probably has more to do with the fact that electricity is deregulated in CA and NY, where implementations were infamously botched: https://truenergy.com/deregulated-energy-states/ https://truenergy.com/deregulated-energy-states/
        • WillPostForFood 3y ago
          This is how your link describes deregulation in California: "very limited and is conducted by a lottery system called DirectAcccess" There was a semi-deregulation in 1996, but it was largely rolled back in 2001. So any price data post data 2001 should be bucketed in regulated.
• DrBazza 3y ago
  It seems like up-front monetary 'cost' is continually used to bash nuclear. And 100% from the perspective of human beings. To put it into context, nuclear * total human deaths due to nuclear since its inception is in the low thousands at worst, for the entire industry. * total animal deaths due to nuclear since its inception is minimal, in fact, for example, wildlife around Chernobyl has flourished * damage to the environment is minimal * waste is tiny by volume, zero CO2, and can be buried deeply where no human will ever get to it. Versus fossil fuels: * has killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of humans * has killed millions if not hundreds of millions of animals through climate change, oil spillage, fires and so on * has destroyed thousands of square miles of land for open cast mining, oil slicks, and so on * waste dumps thousands of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day plus other byproducts So, what's the actual monetary cost of the usage of fossil fuels? How much money needs to be spent to mitigate climate change? Or figuring out how to de-extinct species? Or restoring habitats after cleaning up oil slicks? Or attempting to the put the land 'right' after open cast mining? How much money are we going to spend on figuring out 'energy storage' for green power, when nuclear power is already stored in the uranium, in a tiny volume? In fact how much money could we have saved by going long on nuclear in the 60s and 70s, had it not been for ill-educated, and ill-informed campaigns by CND and Greenpeace, for example? And how much better would the environment be right now?
  • pmayrgundter 3y ago
    The actuarial account for fossil fuels is important, but I've come across this set of summary items many times and it ignores the positive effects of CO2, which have been substantial. This is a great benefit for many ecosystems and also improves crop yields, to your monetary cost point. The overall phenomenon is well documented, so I'll give just one highly credible account: "The greening [over the last 35 years] represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States… Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect" - NASA Apr 2016, https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2436/co2-is-making-earth-greenerfor-now/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2436/co2-is-making-earth-green... I'm not wanting to rehash the climate debate, nor am I implying how much it offsets negatives and would grant all of your points otherwise. I do think it's wise to do whatever we can to move towards cleaner carbon burning to remove toxic and particulate emissions, and limiting CO2 emissions as well, but also within fair economic tradeoffs. I also support developing nuclear, fission and fusion.