3 ms·
We paid the first-of-a-kind costs, we should reap the Nth-of-a-kind rewards. Replace all the coal capacity with AP1000s.
by evilos 3y ago
We paid the first-of-a-kind costs, we should reap the Nth-of-a-kind rewards. Replace all the coal capacity with AP1000s.
- philipkglass 3y agoThere's no Federal agency that can decree that sort of policy. Coal generator retirement happens on a state-by-state or even business-by-business basis. Some states are going to cling to coal power past its economically rational lifespan because important parts of state politics are linked to coal businesses. States where coal retires for economic reasons will go for least-cost replacement (a blend of solar, wind, and natural gas). States where environmental concerns trump cost concerns have little if any coal generating capacity left to replace at this point.
- evilos 3y agoThere is potential in the federally owned TVA which has around 35 GW in its portfolio. Also Georgia has a lot of coal and is the state with these new NPPs. Plus the federal government doesn't need to mandate it. It can simply incentivize these plants to be built like it did with Solar/Wind.
- jerry1979 3y agoI have head that molten salt is much safer but also more expensive. Would there be a reason not to go with molten salt?
- evilos 3y agoIt will likely take a minimum of ten years to get a non light water reactor certified by the NRC. And that is very optimistic. Then you have to build the first of a kind plant which is always more expensive and takes longer. Then you have to get good at operating these new kinds of plants. It's true that MSR and Breeder reactors have lots of potential benefits over traditional LWRs but the truth is, LWRs are more than good enough for right now and we literally can't build enough of them if even if we tried. You wouldn't want to power all of human society off of LWRs simply because they only access ~5% of the energy in the fuel. But we're so far away from that being a constraint. Build LWRs today and keep developing Breeder/MSR tech.
- jerry1979 3y agoFYI, an MSR got green lit recently: https://fortune.com/2023/12/13/nuclear-reactor-approval-molten-salt-cooling-tennessee/ https://fortune.com/2023/12/13/nuclear-reactor-approval-molt...
- api 3y agoMSRs look nice on paper but we don’t have any experience building them. It would take a gigantic up front investment to work out the real world issues and commercialize a technology that has a lot of novel aspects like handling radioactive molten salt. Meanwhile that same money would buy loads more power in solar/wind and batteries, which are proven technologies that are getting progressively cheaper. An alternate timeline where we do MSRs in the 1950s and phase out coal by 1990 would have been possible but we didn’t do that and there are better alternatives now.
- jerry1979 3y agoIt looks like people recently got permission in the United States to build an MSR: https://fortune.com/2023/12/13/nuclear-reactor-approval-molten-salt-cooling-tennessee/ https://fortune.com/2023/12/13/nuclear-reactor-approval-molt... I have not seen any evidence that solar+wind will provide a proper base load of electricity, and it looks like MSR and its variants will give people the electricity they need.
- api 3y agoSolar and wind require storage. Nuclear needs batteries too because nuclear reactors are very slow to throttle and not good at load following. Every non fossil source except hydro requires a large build out of grid scale storage.
- evilos 3y agoWhile nuclear plants do pair well with storage (many pumped hydro storage stations were built to pair with nuclear plants), the idea that they cannot load follow is a myth. It is simply more economical for them to run at full load since fuel cost is a very small portion of nuclear operating expenses. https://imgur.com/a/tB3x48U https://imgur.com/a/tB3x48U
- pfdietz 3y agoThe world only produces a few hundred tonnes of beryllium a year, so MSRs using FLiBe do not scale.
- sanxiyn 3y ago"In 1989, Korea began construction on their first domestically developed OPR-1000 design... Twelve reactors of this standard design began construction between 1989 and 2008, and their costs declined in a stable manner... representing a 13% cost decline (1% annualized)." (Lovering 2016) The problem is, even after reaping this cost decline, totaling 50%, nuclear power is still noncompetitive in South Korea. They were built for energy independence after oil shock, not for cheap electricity.
- evilos 3y agoSame source as you (Lovering 2016), the Koreans built several 1 GW plants for an overnight cost of 2 Billion USD per plant or less in many cases. A seriously impressive feat. The graph seems to show a far greater cost decline than 13%. https://i.imgur.com/J90HtWm.png https://i.imgur.com/J90HtWm.png The Koreans just recently ousted an administration that was overtly hostile to nuclear energy and had declared a phase out. Now they are planning on increasing the share of nuclear electricity to 35%. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/South-Korea-increases-expected-contribution-of-nuc https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/South-Korea-incr...