10 ms·

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 mak

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.
  - corethree 3y ago
    One airplane isn't a full story. The US and Europe still lead the way here. I believe engines are from Rolls Royce which is European.
- bumby 3y ago
  "Machinery" (not including airplanes) is still one of the largest exports of the US. The list [1] of exports by size is: Mineral fuels including oil: US$378.6 billion Machinery including computers: $229.6 billion Electrical machinery, equipment: $197.7 billion Vehicles: $134.9 billion Aircraft, spacecraft: $102.8 billion Optical, technical, medical apparatus: $99.1 billion Gems, precious metals: $92.5 billion Pharmaceuticals: $83.5 billion So the top 3 "non-aircraft" machinery categories are still exported at 5x the amount of aerospace. It seems like people [2] are still interested in the stuff the US manufactures. [1] https://www.worldstopexports.com/united-states-top-10-exports/ https://www.worldstopexports.com/united-states-top-10-export... [2] https://www.usitc.gov/research_and_analysis/tradeshifts/2020/machinery.htm#_ftn1 https://www.usitc.gov/research_and_analysis/tradeshifts/2020...
  - corethree 3y ago
    Yes but Asia dominates the "building" category overall by a massive margin. It's just true. Pharmaceuticals, medical and gems are off topic. I'm sure there's other small niches the US dominates in. But overall what I said is the objective truth no matter how much you desire it to be not true. If Asia doesn't dominate a niche yet they are aggressively on track to dominate in the near future.
    - bumby 3y ago
      Can you elaborate on what you mean by "building"? It's a nebulous term. If you mean building infrastructure, that's true, but also partly because the US invested heavily in the same type of infrastructure a generation or two prior. I would disagree with the pharmaceuticals because that is a manufacturing-intensive industry. Throwing out gems (because that probably isn't a good case, like you said), it still amounts to over $1.2 trillion in exports. I'm sure other countries would love that kind of "niche" business.
      - corethree 3y ago
        Gems isn't good also because it's mostly aesthetic. No intrinsic utility other then being rare and pretty. You won't actually "improve" society with gems. It's hard to distill this in technical terms but I hope you're able to understand without the need to get pedantic. Gemstones therefore are more of a reflection of countries with the ability to purchase the gemstones as an import and less of a reflection of the country actually exporting the gemstones. Right? If a country exports a huge amount of gemstones it means a lot of external countries have an abundance of economic output such that they can purchase frivolous goods that ultimately don't contribute much to the economy. North Korea doesn't purchase gemstones but maybe a rich country would. And the place where diamonds are mined are mostly from some poor countries in Africa. >Can you elaborate on what you mean by "building"? It's a nebulous term. Manufacturing and infrastructure I believe are the two words that cover it best off the top of my head but it's unnecessary to specify this to the level of pedantic detail you're going for here. I think those two terms are clear enough. I think we both know, in general the direction China/Asia is going and where they're completely dominating the US. It's at a general tipping point now. Where one can say they're better than the US overall in the general area of infrastructure/manufacturing. Manufacturing is pretty broad and general and that's the right word to use because broadly and generally Asia is just ahead of the US in this matter. The problem with these things is that even though it's obvious people still like to debate pedantic details in some vain attempt to use the pedantic details to obscure the obvious truth or even shift the advantage in the favor of the US. Why else would you bring up gemstones and pharmaceuticals? I don't think I need to elaborate as you requested. You know what I'm talking about and deep down you most likely agree. The trouble here is less about getting at the most accurate truth and more about the inability to accept the truth.
RandallBrown 3y ago
I sometimes imagine how cool it would be if some of the worlds biggest billionaires got together and just did some crazy mega project and didn't care about profits. This nuclear plant cost ~$34 billion USD. What if Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and a few others just got together and built 10 or so nuclear power plants? I wonder if that could actually bring down the price to build them.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Money, at that scale at least, is pretty good at calculating business cases. And the money is on renewables, especially solar. And the solar Wp cost for modules is, with some special cause exceptions, following Moores law. Nuclear not so much, all those plants have is delays and cost over-runs.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    The Money can see where renewables and storage are likely to be when any nuclear plant that could start to be built today would become available. Nuclear plants have only ever been built where the customers can be forced to buy the power. No merchant nuclear plant, selling into a competitive market, has ever been built anywhere.
erngkejr 3y ago
[flagged]
- jdewerd 3y ago
  Studying history. The cost of nuclear was low until we stopped building 50 years ago. https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us-france-korea https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-u... It's a pity -- if we had kept up the pace, we'd already have completely decarbonized our grid, but instead we are barely starting. Ah well. At least solar and wind finally became economical. Any path forward is a good path, even if it's 50 years late.
  - hedora 3y ago
    At the moment, coal and probably gas is more expensive than solar, purely due to the turbines and generators. Nuclear relies on the same subsystems, and it’s unlikely they’ll get significantly cheaper any time soon. Having said that, I think nuclear could be made cost-competitive with coal and natural gas, at least in theory. Also, it’s unclear that we’ll be able to build a reliable, net carbon negative power grid without a large number of nuclear plants.
    - XorNot 3y ago
      Solar cannot provide reliable power. It's cheaper because it doesn't solve a massive part of the problem. Do the actual math on what it takes to get a reliable solar kWh onto the grid and suddenly it's a lot more expensive.
- hedora 3y ago
  Perhaps they were in France, where the plants are neither bespoke nor expensive. They reuse blueprints, and make use of interchangeable parts, unlike the US nuclear. As a bonus, they can train people once, then transfer them between identical nuclear plants. Also, if there is a near miss at one plant, they apply the safety upgrades to the whole fleet.
  - 3y ago
mk89 3y ago
I heard or read somewhere that in China they had the same issue - like in every mega project, there are deadlines and ... well it doesn't really fare well. So the issue is real.
Joeri 3y ago
MIT found that reusing a design made plants more expensive to build, not less, because of costly on-site last minute design changes. Taking your point more charitably, it is indeed the lack of a sustainable nuclear energy industry that routinely builds plants that causes costs to skyrocket. There is a chicken and egg situation: nuclear projects don’t get funded because they’re too expensive, so there is no chance to develop expertise in how to build them cheaply, which causes the few that get greenlit to be built by rookie teams that make rookie mistakes that cause costs to skyrocket. The MIT study into the causes of cost overruns: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  > costly on-site last minute design changes I clicked through to the actual study ( https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS254243512030458X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_r... ) and I couldn't find a single sentence mentioning on-site last-minute design changes. I searched for "change" and tabbed through all of the results. The closest thing was mention of Westinghouse changing construction standards halfway through an ongoing project, which required many changes to the project design. But, that's one project. So my question is: Is it possible that the MIT News Office can't understand MIT journal articles?
  - bpfrh 3y ago
    "Our results point to a gap between expected and realized costs stemming from low resilience to time- and site-dependent construction conditions." Couldn't that be paraphrased to "last minute changes"?
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    From the article's own summary: Our results point to a gap between expected and realized costs stemming from low resilience to time- and site-dependent construction conditions. Guess that's where they took it from. Skimming the paper it seems a large part of the issue is that it's difficult to mass produce something which needs to be integrated into a variable environment, and attempting to do so is detrimental compared to custom solutions. This seems to mirror what I've found in the software world, where a custom integration is often much cheaper and easier to maintain than trying to manhandle some generic library/software to do what's needed.
wolverine876 3y ago
> Problem is that we don't build the damn things anymore, so each one is bespoke and expensive. When we built them more often, weren't they bespoke and expensive?
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  No, they were much cheaper in the 70s and 80s!
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    That's not what I understand, but I don't have numbers. Do you happen to know where we can find some?
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      From another thread: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-Cost-of-US-Nuclear-Power-Reactors-by-Construction-Start-Date_fig8_292964046 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-C...
      - natmaka 3y ago
        "The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing" (2010, A. Grubler): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
  - angiosperm 3y ago
    Right, nuke costs have only ever increased. For reasons. Solar and wind costs have only ever decreased. For reasons.
    - juped 3y ago
      You're not saying what you think you're saying with those facts.
Krasnol 3y ago
The French never stopped building them all over the world and they still are over budget and overdue.

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.
- corethree 3y ago
  One airplane isn't a full story. The US and Europe still lead the way here. I believe engines are from Rolls Royce which is European.
bumby 3y ago
"Machinery" (not including airplanes) is still one of the largest exports of the US. The list [1] of exports by size is: Mineral fuels including oil: US$378.6 billion Machinery including computers: $229.6 billion Electrical machinery, equipment: $197.7 billion Vehicles: $134.9 billion Aircraft, spacecraft: $102.8 billion Optical, technical, medical apparatus: $99.1 billion Gems, precious metals: $92.5 billion Pharmaceuticals: $83.5 billion So the top 3 "non-aircraft" machinery categories are still exported at 5x the amount of aerospace. It seems like people [2] are still interested in the stuff the US manufactures. [1] https://www.worldstopexports.com/united-states-top-10-exports/ https://www.worldstopexports.com/united-states-top-10-export... [2] https://www.usitc.gov/research_and_analysis/tradeshifts/2020/machinery.htm#_ftn1 https://www.usitc.gov/research_and_analysis/tradeshifts/2020...
- corethree 3y ago
  Yes but Asia dominates the "building" category overall by a massive margin. It's just true. Pharmaceuticals, medical and gems are off topic. I'm sure there's other small niches the US dominates in. But overall what I said is the objective truth no matter how much you desire it to be not true. If Asia doesn't dominate a niche yet they are aggressively on track to dominate in the near future.
  - bumby 3y ago
    Can you elaborate on what you mean by "building"? It's a nebulous term. If you mean building infrastructure, that's true, but also partly because the US invested heavily in the same type of infrastructure a generation or two prior. I would disagree with the pharmaceuticals because that is a manufacturing-intensive industry. Throwing out gems (because that probably isn't a good case, like you said), it still amounts to over $1.2 trillion in exports. I'm sure other countries would love that kind of "niche" business.
    - corethree 3y ago
      Gems isn't good also because it's mostly aesthetic. No intrinsic utility other then being rare and pretty. You won't actually "improve" society with gems. It's hard to distill this in technical terms but I hope you're able to understand without the need to get pedantic. Gemstones therefore are more of a reflection of countries with the ability to purchase the gemstones as an import and less of a reflection of the country actually exporting the gemstones. Right? If a country exports a huge amount of gemstones it means a lot of external countries have an abundance of economic output such that they can purchase frivolous goods that ultimately don't contribute much to the economy. North Korea doesn't purchase gemstones but maybe a rich country would. And the place where diamonds are mined are mostly from some poor countries in Africa. >Can you elaborate on what you mean by "building"? It's a nebulous term. Manufacturing and infrastructure I believe are the two words that cover it best off the top of my head but it's unnecessary to specify this to the level of pedantic detail you're going for here. I think those two terms are clear enough. I think we both know, in general the direction China/Asia is going and where they're completely dominating the US. It's at a general tipping point now. Where one can say they're better than the US overall in the general area of infrastructure/manufacturing. Manufacturing is pretty broad and general and that's the right word to use because broadly and generally Asia is just ahead of the US in this matter. The problem with these things is that even though it's obvious people still like to debate pedantic details in some vain attempt to use the pedantic details to obscure the obvious truth or even shift the advantage in the favor of the US. Why else would you bring up gemstones and pharmaceuticals? I don't think I need to elaborate as you requested. You know what I'm talking about and deep down you most likely agree. The trouble here is less about getting at the most accurate truth and more about the inability to accept the truth.

RandallBrown 3y ago

I sometimes imagine how cool it would be if some of the worlds biggest billionaires got together and just did some crazy mega project and didn't care about profits. This nuclear plant cost ~$34 billion USD. What if Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and a few others just got together and built 10 or so nuclear power plants? I wonder if that could actually bring down the price to build them.

hef19898 3y ago
Money, at that scale at least, is pretty good at calculating business cases. And the money is on renewables, especially solar. And the solar Wp cost for modules is, with some special cause exceptions, following Moores law. Nuclear not so much, all those plants have is delays and cost over-runs.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The Money can see where renewables and storage are likely to be when any nuclear plant that could start to be built today would become available. Nuclear plants have only ever been built where the customers can be forced to buy the power. No merchant nuclear plant, selling into a competitive market, has ever been built anywhere.

erngkejr 3y ago

[flagged]

jdewerd 3y ago
Studying history. The cost of nuclear was low until we stopped building 50 years ago. https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us-france-korea https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-u... It's a pity -- if we had kept up the pace, we'd already have completely decarbonized our grid, but instead we are barely starting. Ah well. At least solar and wind finally became economical. Any path forward is a good path, even if it's 50 years late.
- hedora 3y ago
  At the moment, coal and probably gas is more expensive than solar, purely due to the turbines and generators. Nuclear relies on the same subsystems, and it’s unlikely they’ll get significantly cheaper any time soon. Having said that, I think nuclear could be made cost-competitive with coal and natural gas, at least in theory. Also, it’s unclear that we’ll be able to build a reliable, net carbon negative power grid without a large number of nuclear plants.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    Solar cannot provide reliable power. It's cheaper because it doesn't solve a massive part of the problem. Do the actual math on what it takes to get a reliable solar kWh onto the grid and suddenly it's a lot more expensive.
hedora 3y ago
Perhaps they were in France, where the plants are neither bespoke nor expensive. They reuse blueprints, and make use of interchangeable parts, unlike the US nuclear. As a bonus, they can train people once, then transfer them between identical nuclear plants. Also, if there is a near miss at one plant, they apply the safety upgrades to the whole fleet.
- 3y ago

mk89 3y ago

I heard or read somewhere that in China they had the same issue - like in every mega project, there are deadlines and ... well it doesn't really fare well. So the issue is real.

Joeri 3y ago

MIT found that reusing a design made plants more expensive to build, not less, because of costly on-site last minute design changes. Taking your point more charitably, it is indeed the lack of a sustainable nuclear energy industry that routinely builds plants that causes costs to skyrocket. There is a chicken and egg situation: nuclear projects don’t get funded because they’re too expensive, so there is no chance to develop expertise in how to build them cheaply, which causes the few that get greenlit to be built by rookie teams that make rookie mistakes that cause costs to skyrocket. The MIT study into the causes of cost overruns: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

phendrenad2 3y ago
> costly on-site last minute design changes I clicked through to the actual study ( https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS254243512030458X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_r... ) and I couldn't find a single sentence mentioning on-site last-minute design changes. I searched for "change" and tabbed through all of the results. The closest thing was mention of Westinghouse changing construction standards halfway through an ongoing project, which required many changes to the project design. But, that's one project. So my question is: Is it possible that the MIT News Office can't understand MIT journal articles?
- bpfrh 3y ago
  "Our results point to a gap between expected and realized costs stemming from low resilience to time- and site-dependent construction conditions." Couldn't that be paraphrased to "last minute changes"?
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  From the article's own summary: Our results point to a gap between expected and realized costs stemming from low resilience to time- and site-dependent construction conditions. Guess that's where they took it from. Skimming the paper it seems a large part of the issue is that it's difficult to mass produce something which needs to be integrated into a variable environment, and attempting to do so is detrimental compared to custom solutions. This seems to mirror what I've found in the software world, where a custom integration is often much cheaper and easier to maintain than trying to manhandle some generic library/software to do what's needed.

wolverine876 3y ago

> Problem is that we don't build the damn things anymore, so each one is bespoke and expensive. When we built them more often, weren't they bespoke and expensive?

Georgelemental 3y ago
No, they were much cheaper in the 70s and 80s!
- wolverine876 3y ago
  That's not what I understand, but I don't have numbers. Do you happen to know where we can find some?
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    From another thread: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-Cost-of-US-Nuclear-Power-Reactors-by-Construction-Start-Date_fig8_292964046 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-C...
    - natmaka 3y ago
      "The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing" (2010, A. Grubler): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
- angiosperm 3y ago
  Right, nuke costs have only ever increased. For reasons. Solar and wind costs have only ever decreased. For reasons.
  - juped 3y ago
    You're not saying what you think you're saying with those facts.

Krasnol 3y ago

The French never stopped building them all over the world and they still are over budget and overdue.