10 ms·

Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable. However, when evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, SMRs

by sp332 2y ago

Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable. However, when evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, SMRs will actually be more expensive than large reactors. That's not what affordable means. People are building smaller reactors because it's more likely that a project will be completed, not because of unit costs.

readyman 2y ago
This needs to be recognized as an indictment of our society. An inability to accomplish anything in a collective and intentional manner is only one of the many disasterous outcomes of the wretched individualism promoted by the neoliberal agenda. And make no mistake; this is not a result of a so-called "free market". It is the result of top-down privatization. The US government, for example, has a much larger budget than ever before, accounting for inflation and so on. It's just being delivered to private firms for profit instead of on building big things or maintaining the big things we used to build. This lack of cooperation across society is also the primary source of cultural breakdown and the sense of "division" felt by all of us, both rich and poor.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  When the market is telling you something over and over, it's best to listen.
  - readyman 2y ago
    The so-called "market" isn't telling anybody anything here. The financiers are the only ones speaking and all they're saying is they can't turn as much profit in their own individual lifetimes. It is a total disregard for society as a whole, which is why we're in this mess.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      > “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies. https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/71/12/26/904707/US-nuclear-industry-fights-for-survivalA-glut-of https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/71/12/26/904707/US...
      - readyman 2y ago
        What is your point? Cost is not a problem when near-term profit is high, and nuclear energy has an unbeatable track record with long-term ROI. Saying "it's expensive" is meaningless nonsense. There is absolutely no excuse besides the time to ROI.
        pfdietz 2y ago
        Every one of your statements there is obviously false.
        readyman 2y ago
        Source? France's investments in nuclear energy are very well known as being incomparably successful, both in terms of return on capital investment and emissions. There is literally nothing to compare it to because nothing comes close. The only downside is literally upfront cost. Even the US has had great ROI in long term nuclear investments, especially if you discount the losses of all the prematurely decommissioned plants.
  - neglesaks 2y ago
    There is no market in the regular sense when it comes to large-scale enterprises, especially one that is so government-entangled as the energy and infrastructure sectors.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      There are plenty of markets in the electrical power sector. In addition to the market for energy sources, selling generating assets to utilities, there are markets in the power itself in many places, for example ERCOT in Texas. No one has ever built a nuclear plant to sell into a competitive power market. One can trace the downfall of nuclear in the US to the time when markets were opened to competition, with PURPA.
      - readyman 2y ago
        Nonsense. PURPA was just more regulation, regardless of how it was sold. It had nothing to do with "markets being opened to competition". One can trace the downfall of nuclear in the US to the end of the New Deal coalition and the divestment of public infrastructure, which meant short-term planning only. It has nothing to do with "markets". Markets in energy don't exist now and did not exist then.
        pfdietz 2y ago
        https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0096340213485949 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/009634021348594... > The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA) triggered a restructuring of the previously monolithic utility sector, stipulating in particular that electricity produced by independent power producers must be purchased by utilities at "avoided cost." The new power from independent producers, combined with lack of demand for electricity, further eroded utilities' need for new nuclear plants. In large part owing to the provisions of PURPA, nonutility generation rose steadily from 71 billion kilowatt-hours per year in 1979 to almost 400 billion kilowatt-hours per year by 1995 -- this new, nonutility generation was the equivalent of adding more than 50 typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear plants (Energy Information Administration, 1996). As Peter Bradford (2011), a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, argued in the Wall Street Journal: > "Nuclear-plant construction in this country came to a halt because a law passed in 1978 [PURPA] created competitive markets for power. These markets required investors rather than utility customers to assume the risk of cost overruns, plant cancellations, and poor operation. Today, private investors still shun the risks of building new reactors in all nations that employ power markets."
- justahuman74 2y ago
  Collective intention requires some amount of collective agreement. Many people are unfortunately scared of nuclear power and politicians know this.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    The idea that nuclear is struggling because people are "scared" is a form of denial from nuclear advocates. Nuclear is struggling because it's much too expensive, not because people are "scared".
    - chii 2y ago
      It's expensive because people are scared, and to alleviate that fear, regulation is put in place. Some of those fears are founded, but some are not. But overall, the regulation required is what drives the cost up.
      - cycomanic 2y ago
        That is simply not true and repeating it all the time does not make it more true. There have been several analysis posted here on HN which showed that compliance with regulations is not a major cost factor for nuclear power. In fact nuclear power operators have often lobbied to be exempt from regulations that apply to other power generation schemes. Solar and wind often have significantly higher compliance costs as percentage of their budget than nuclear.
        neglesaks 2y ago
        Could you post a link to one or two of the sumissions where these analyses have been presented please?
    - rayiner 2y ago
      It’s expensive because environmentalists put in too many barriers to building nuclear power plants because they’re scared (in addition to being innumerate). If we had started building out nuclear power in the 1960s the same as the French, we would have much more runway today to address climate change.
mc32 2y ago
Would this not relegate this option to niche areas? Elsewhere it needs to compete on price against other viable options.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Yes. Also, there really aren't any such niche areas save some military naval applications. Even there, most ships in the US navy are not nuclear, because burning liquid hydrocarbons is cheaper.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
Also, not every application of nuclear energy requires 1GW...
- justahuman74 2y ago
  I'm thinking of all the new datacenters we need to build, imagine if you could just slot a small reactor down on-site
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    NuScale's SMR is ~77MW - which is a medium sized data center. AFAIK, that's typical consumption for data centers being built today.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      A site that contained a single NuScale reactor would have unacceptable fixed costs per MW. The UAMPS/NuScale CFPP was planned to have six reactors to amortize those fixed costs (like personnel) over more output. Note also that the cost figures NuScale gave for that was the cost after 40-50 reactors had been built (and with federal subsidy), not FOAK costs.
      - justahuman74 2y ago
        If you can build N reactors, the datacenters will suddenly appear nearby if they're allowed to. Power is the current bottleneck in the US
mikeyouse 2y ago
There’s clearly some value to consistent power sources producing clean energy but if SMRs are in the $0.15/kwh wholesale range, they’re DOA. Solar+battery gets you there today, is getting cheaper every day, and there’s almost zero project risk. If the install is small enough, you could likely beat the realistic costs for SMRs with solar + battery + diesel generators if you need a guarantee of 100% uptime.
- throw0101c 2y ago
  > Solar+battery gets you there today, is getting cheaper every day, and there’s almost zero project risk. Debatable. In Ontario nuclear costs 10¢/kWh while wind costs 15¢ and solar 50¢ (Table 2): * https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20221021.pdf https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2022... And when wind goes to zero at night, then (natural/methane) gas generators are often spun up (generating carbon emissions). Meanwhile the refurbishments of Ontario's nuclear plants are on-budget, and often ahead of schedule: * https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/infrastructure/2023/07/unit-3-at-darlington-nuclear-completed-ahead-of-schedule https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/infrastructure/...
  - chickenbig 2y ago
    Ontario gives hope to the nuclear dreams. Being able to deliver projects on-budget gives decision-makers cause to believe project plans. Lets hope that another 4-pack of CANDU reactors will be built, to further the soverign industry.
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    Existing nuclear, in Canada, is basically the best case scenario for nuclear Vs the worst case scenario for solar and batteries. It's not globally representative though.
    - mikeyouse 2y ago
      And this very article is about how SMRs by their nature are going to be more expensive than traditional nuclear so seems pretty silly to make any comparison to the costs of production for reactors that were built 40 years ago. A better comparison would be how much are we expecting wholesale costs for Hinkley’s new reactor to be? Don’t want to ruin the surprise but people will be shocked if they look up what they’re charging in a sub-$0.10/kwh world.
bjourne 2y ago
What do you mean? The lower unit costs is exactly the point of SMRs.
- rafaelmn 2y ago
  Unit cost of reactor not unit cost of power ?
  - chickenbig 2y ago
    Indeed, the selling point is probably that a single entity can build an SMR without risk of going bankrupt. Perhaps this speaks to the problem of building consortia of like-minded companies. Currently EDF are being stung for a large chunk of money now that CGN are refusing to put any more cash into Hinkley Point C construction.
DennisP 2y ago
And because if you build a lot of reactors, then you get a learning curve where they get cheaper over time, just like any other mass-produced item. Some of the SMR designs can even be built in factories. The article ignores this, and in fact complains about the cost of the first six reactors proposed by NuScale (which, fwiw, is just a smaller LWR, not one of the more innovative designs). Before anyone talks about the negative learning curve of large reactors in the US, bear in mind that we mostly build those as one-offs, so no learning curve exists. We don't build many, regulations change pretty frequently, and sometimes the NRC requires design changes after construction starts.
- cycomanic 2y ago
  Economies of scale don't work for infrastructure. I mean if it would work for nuclear plants why have people not done it for coal plants? There have been many of them build, and a nuclear power plant is 70% the same as a coal power plant (which incidentally also explains much of the cost for nuclear power generation, it's essentially a thermal plant with added complexity, so can't really be significantly cheaper than a coal plant).
  - DennisP 2y ago
    The fact that something hasn't been done is not necessarily evidence that it won't work. A few years ago you could have asked why everybody was still using disposable rockets, if reusables would be so great. And coal is not exactly fertile ground for innovation, given that we'd like to stop burning coal entirely. Matching the price of coal, with clean dispatchable power, is not such a bad outcome. There's a bit of wiggle room for extra complexity since coal pays 2 cents/kWh for fuel, and has to handle large amounts of incoming fuel and outgoing ash. For a reliable zero-carbon grid of only wind/solar/battery, we need about 2X overproduction and 4 days of battery storage[1]. Maybe that still ends up the cheapest option, but it's not so obvious that a backup plan isn't worth considering. [1] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/grid-storage-batteries-will-win/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/grid-storage-b...
    - 2y ago
ooterness 2y ago
In terms of cost per ton moved, trains and semi-trucks outperform taxis. And yet taxis still exist. Turns out cost per vehicle (or per reactor) is important in some situations.

by sp332 2y ago

readyman 2y ago

This needs to be recognized as an indictment of our society. An inability to accomplish anything in a collective and intentional manner is only one of the many disasterous outcomes of the wretched individualism promoted by the neoliberal agenda. And make no mistake; this is not a result of a so-called "free market". It is the result of top-down privatization. The US government, for example, has a much larger budget than ever before, accounting for inflation and so on. It's just being delivered to private firms for profit instead of on building big things or maintaining the big things we used to build. This lack of cooperation across society is also the primary source of cultural breakdown and the sense of "division" felt by all of us, both rich and poor.

pfdietz 2y ago
When the market is telling you something over and over, it's best to listen.
- readyman 2y ago
  The so-called "market" isn't telling anybody anything here. The financiers are the only ones speaking and all they're saying is they can't turn as much profit in their own individual lifetimes. It is a total disregard for society as a whole, which is why we're in this mess.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    > “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies. https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/71/12/26/904707/US-nuclear-industry-fights-for-survivalA-glut-of https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/71/12/26/904707/US...
    - readyman 2y ago
      What is your point? Cost is not a problem when near-term profit is high, and nuclear energy has an unbeatable track record with long-term ROI. Saying "it's expensive" is meaningless nonsense. There is absolutely no excuse besides the time to ROI.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        Every one of your statements there is obviously false.
        readyman 2y ago
        Source? France's investments in nuclear energy are very well known as being incomparably successful, both in terms of return on capital investment and emissions. There is literally nothing to compare it to because nothing comes close. The only downside is literally upfront cost. Even the US has had great ROI in long term nuclear investments, especially if you discount the losses of all the prematurely decommissioned plants.
- neglesaks 2y ago
  There is no market in the regular sense when it comes to large-scale enterprises, especially one that is so government-entangled as the energy and infrastructure sectors.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    There are plenty of markets in the electrical power sector. In addition to the market for energy sources, selling generating assets to utilities, there are markets in the power itself in many places, for example ERCOT in Texas. No one has ever built a nuclear plant to sell into a competitive power market. One can trace the downfall of nuclear in the US to the time when markets were opened to competition, with PURPA.
    - readyman 2y ago
      Nonsense. PURPA was just more regulation, regardless of how it was sold. It had nothing to do with "markets being opened to competition". One can trace the downfall of nuclear in the US to the end of the New Deal coalition and the divestment of public infrastructure, which meant short-term planning only. It has nothing to do with "markets". Markets in energy don't exist now and did not exist then.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0096340213485949 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/009634021348594... > The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA) triggered a restructuring of the previously monolithic utility sector, stipulating in particular that electricity produced by independent power producers must be purchased by utilities at "avoided cost." The new power from independent producers, combined with lack of demand for electricity, further eroded utilities' need for new nuclear plants. In large part owing to the provisions of PURPA, nonutility generation rose steadily from 71 billion kilowatt-hours per year in 1979 to almost 400 billion kilowatt-hours per year by 1995 -- this new, nonutility generation was the equivalent of adding more than 50 typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear plants (Energy Information Administration, 1996). As Peter Bradford (2011), a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, argued in the Wall Street Journal: > "Nuclear-plant construction in this country came to a halt because a law passed in 1978 [PURPA] created competitive markets for power. These markets required investors rather than utility customers to assume the risk of cost overruns, plant cancellations, and poor operation. Today, private investors still shun the risks of building new reactors in all nations that employ power markets."
justahuman74 2y ago
Collective intention requires some amount of collective agreement. Many people are unfortunately scared of nuclear power and politicians know this.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  The idea that nuclear is struggling because people are "scared" is a form of denial from nuclear advocates. Nuclear is struggling because it's much too expensive, not because people are "scared".
  - chii 2y ago
    It's expensive because people are scared, and to alleviate that fear, regulation is put in place. Some of those fears are founded, but some are not. But overall, the regulation required is what drives the cost up.
    - cycomanic 2y ago
      That is simply not true and repeating it all the time does not make it more true. There have been several analysis posted here on HN which showed that compliance with regulations is not a major cost factor for nuclear power. In fact nuclear power operators have often lobbied to be exempt from regulations that apply to other power generation schemes. Solar and wind often have significantly higher compliance costs as percentage of their budget than nuclear.
      - neglesaks 2y ago
        Could you post a link to one or two of the sumissions where these analyses have been presented please?
  - rayiner 2y ago
    It’s expensive because environmentalists put in too many barriers to building nuclear power plants because they’re scared (in addition to being innumerate). If we had started building out nuclear power in the 1960s the same as the French, we would have much more runway today to address climate change.

mc32 2y ago

Would this not relegate this option to niche areas? Elsewhere it needs to compete on price against other viable options.

pfdietz 2y ago
Yes. Also, there really aren't any such niche areas save some military naval applications. Even there, most ships in the US navy are not nuclear, because burning liquid hydrocarbons is cheaper.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

Also, not every application of nuclear energy requires 1GW...

justahuman74 2y ago
I'm thinking of all the new datacenters we need to build, imagine if you could just slot a small reactor down on-site
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  NuScale's SMR is ~77MW - which is a medium sized data center. AFAIK, that's typical consumption for data centers being built today.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    A site that contained a single NuScale reactor would have unacceptable fixed costs per MW. The UAMPS/NuScale CFPP was planned to have six reactors to amortize those fixed costs (like personnel) over more output. Note also that the cost figures NuScale gave for that was the cost after 40-50 reactors had been built (and with federal subsidy), not FOAK costs.
    - justahuman74 2y ago
      If you can build N reactors, the datacenters will suddenly appear nearby if they're allowed to. Power is the current bottleneck in the US

mikeyouse 2y ago

There’s clearly some value to consistent power sources producing clean energy but if SMRs are in the $0.15/kwh wholesale range, they’re DOA. Solar+battery gets you there today, is getting cheaper every day, and there’s almost zero project risk. If the install is small enough, you could likely beat the realistic costs for SMRs with solar + battery + diesel generators if you need a guarantee of 100% uptime.

throw0101c 2y ago
> Solar+battery gets you there today, is getting cheaper every day, and there’s almost zero project risk. Debatable. In Ontario nuclear costs 10¢/kWh while wind costs 15¢ and solar 50¢ (Table 2): * https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20221021.pdf https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2022... And when wind goes to zero at night, then (natural/methane) gas generators are often spun up (generating carbon emissions). Meanwhile the refurbishments of Ontario's nuclear plants are on-budget, and often ahead of schedule: * https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/infrastructure/2023/07/unit-3-at-darlington-nuclear-completed-ahead-of-schedule https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/infrastructure/...
- chickenbig 2y ago
  Ontario gives hope to the nuclear dreams. Being able to deliver projects on-budget gives decision-makers cause to believe project plans. Lets hope that another 4-pack of CANDU reactors will be built, to further the soverign industry.
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  Existing nuclear, in Canada, is basically the best case scenario for nuclear Vs the worst case scenario for solar and batteries. It's not globally representative though.
  - mikeyouse 2y ago
    And this very article is about how SMRs by their nature are going to be more expensive than traditional nuclear so seems pretty silly to make any comparison to the costs of production for reactors that were built 40 years ago. A better comparison would be how much are we expecting wholesale costs for Hinkley’s new reactor to be? Don’t want to ruin the surprise but people will be shocked if they look up what they’re charging in a sub-$0.10/kwh world.

bjourne 2y ago

What do you mean? The lower unit costs is exactly the point of SMRs.

rafaelmn 2y ago
Unit cost of reactor not unit cost of power ?
- chickenbig 2y ago
  Indeed, the selling point is probably that a single entity can build an SMR without risk of going bankrupt. Perhaps this speaks to the problem of building consortia of like-minded companies. Currently EDF are being stung for a large chunk of money now that CGN are refusing to put any more cash into Hinkley Point C construction.

DennisP 2y ago

And because if you build a lot of reactors, then you get a learning curve where they get cheaper over time, just like any other mass-produced item. Some of the SMR designs can even be built in factories. The article ignores this, and in fact complains about the cost of the first six reactors proposed by NuScale (which, fwiw, is just a smaller LWR, not one of the more innovative designs). Before anyone talks about the negative learning curve of large reactors in the US, bear in mind that we mostly build those as one-offs, so no learning curve exists. We don't build many, regulations change pretty frequently, and sometimes the NRC requires design changes after construction starts.

cycomanic 2y ago
Economies of scale don't work for infrastructure. I mean if it would work for nuclear plants why have people not done it for coal plants? There have been many of them build, and a nuclear power plant is 70% the same as a coal power plant (which incidentally also explains much of the cost for nuclear power generation, it's essentially a thermal plant with added complexity, so can't really be significantly cheaper than a coal plant).
- DennisP 2y ago
  The fact that something hasn't been done is not necessarily evidence that it won't work. A few years ago you could have asked why everybody was still using disposable rockets, if reusables would be so great. And coal is not exactly fertile ground for innovation, given that we'd like to stop burning coal entirely. Matching the price of coal, with clean dispatchable power, is not such a bad outcome. There's a bit of wiggle room for extra complexity since coal pays 2 cents/kWh for fuel, and has to handle large amounts of incoming fuel and outgoing ash. For a reliable zero-carbon grid of only wind/solar/battery, we need about 2X overproduction and 4 days of battery storage[1]. Maybe that still ends up the cheapest option, but it's not so obvious that a backup plan isn't worth considering. [1] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/grid-storage-batteries-will-win/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/grid-storage-b...
  - 2y ago

ooterness 2y ago

In terms of cost per ton moved, trains and semi-trucks outperform taxis. And yet taxis still exist. Turns out cost per vehicle (or per reactor) is important in some situations.