7 ms·

If the point is generalizable, we should build more nuclear power plants. They will become cheaper.

by lifty 2y ago

jrnvs 2y ago
They can’t be made in a factory and thus the learning effect is very small (if it even exists - nuclear reactors have increased in price).
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  > They can’t be made in a factory They can now, see Small Modular Reactors (SMR).
  - fifilura 2y ago
    Where can I see one?
    - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
      Just need to: 1. Build prototype 2. Iterate on prototype. 3. In conjunction start standardizing and automating processes. 4. Achieve large enough scale to amortize the factory and process optimization costs over enough units to actually gain anything. The “SMR hype industry” seems to be perpetually stuck at 1, not even being able to deliver a single prototype. All the while talking like the factory already exists and SMRs are solved. Somehow it doesn’t add up.
    - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
      https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_booklet_2022.pdf https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_booklet_2022.pdf linked from https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-reactors-smrs#:~:text=More%20than%2080,they%20are%20deployed https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-.... I don't know, I'm not a specialist. But this came up by doing a rudimentary search.
      - fifilura 2y ago
        Thank you! Seems like I have 4 choices (although i probably don't want to go to Russia, since they are at war). KLT-40S Russia HTR-PM China HTR-10 China HTTR Japan
      - fifilura 2y ago
        Yay! There is a company called Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation. It has a nice ring to it! "Super safe bank" "Really clean hamburger restaurant" "Most trustworth car salesman" "Very accurate surgeon"
        rad_gruchalski 2y ago
        This is pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7VDqUbaCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7VDqUbaCg.
        fch42 2y ago
        If they really work in this factory like shown in that video, handling radioactive material in the production process with little personal protection (especially against airborne dust), then at least I for one would not like to work for them, ever. The safety of "final" product notwithstanding (that's fine), the shaping, size sorting and sintering processes create dust and really, you don't want to get that into yourself.
- Moldoteck 2y ago
  Did these increase in price in China too?
- nomel 2y ago
  Please see the cost breakdown: https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/ https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/ Very very little is made/manufactured on site. You do not make turbines, computers, pipes, or much at all, on a construction site. You form, weld, pour, and assemble. The goal would be a standard design, to cut those giant engineering and custom fabrication costs to a small fraction. You don't need to deliver a completed factory on a pallet to save costs (although that's possible with distributed small module reactors, as Asia is ramping up for).
  - treyd 2y ago
    Which is why France has such strong nuclear supply, they decided going into it to hage standard designs.
    - Retric 2y ago
      France’s nuclear is fully owned by the government. The subsidies are so huge there’s basically zero market forces in play on the supply side.
      - mpweiher 2y ago
        It's not subsidized. In fact, cheap nuclear electricity is used to subsidize other industries. The entire nuclear industry (construction, operation, support) cost France € 228 billion and produce 11000 TWh (by 2012). That's 2,07 cents/kWh. Not too shabby.
        Retric 2y ago
        Your numbers are wildly off and not just from ignoring inflation when using poorly sourced numbers from 2012. Quick, how much did they spend on fuel over that timeframe? Well according to that estimate it was 0, so it’s hardly including the operating costs. To give some perspective: “In March 2023 France's Parliament formally approved the government's nuclear investment plan – by 402 votes in favor and 130 against – which considers the €52 billion construction of six new EPR-2 PWRs at three sites.” That’s not operations that’s just for construction of 6 reactors when they have 56 in operation and that’s interest free unlike US reactor where interest is included with construction costs. One year later that’s already been increased to 67.4 billion euros: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-lifts-cost-estimate-new-reactors-67-bln-euros-les-echos-2024-03-04/#:~:text=PARIS%2C%20March%204%20(Reuters),on%20Monday%2C%20citing%20unidentified%20sources https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-l.... France operated as a pay as you go system so they didn’t set money aside for the full cost of decommissioning their reactors etc. Last I checked there was some talk in 2017 of them setting aside 27 billion based on some ridiculously optimistic estimates but mostly the plan is just foist the costs onto future taxpayers.
- qball 2y ago
  >They can’t be made in a factory All nuclear power plants made since around 1980s or so have been made in factories. The US (and other nations) use them all the time for their submarines- defense concerns correctly override environmentalists (and the oil companies backing them financially). The problem is a solved one. We're rich enough to afford to tilt at windmills instead- for now, anyway.
chpatrick 2y ago
Doesn't make sense if there are alternatives that are at least as cheap without the hassle.
Arnt 2y ago
It's not infinitely generalizable, only to tech production issues and maybe not to all of those. Nuclear isn't expensive because of production. https://progress.institute/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/ https://progress.institute/nuclear-power-plant-construction-...
PaulKeeble 2y ago
Even if it wasn't the case that PV's could have replaced fossil fuels back then because they weren't advanced enough nuclear was more than capable of doing so and readily available. Indeed investing in various different types of reactors might very well have produced a similar curve of progress and finding ways to make them less dangerous and requiring less regulation all of which would have sped up deployment and reduced the cost. We will never know, we just know now that its cheaper to do solar and power storage than nuclear.
mpweiher 2y ago
It is. They do. And did. Both France and Germany figured out how to do this. And then stopped building. <facepalm> You build a standardized design, and you build a bunch of them, and you overlap the construction. Germany's Konvoi reactors were built for DM 4 billion a piece in the late 80s. At the same time, non-Konvoi reactors cost more than twice as much, DM 9.5 billion. Apply the 88% cumulative inflation between then and now and you'd be at DM 7,52 billion, or € 3.9 billion. Fortunately we are starting to build more again, so prices should begin to fall.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
I doubt it. Even if the ORNL MSR reactor got maximum funding, we averted the safety panic from three mile island, and were effectively making no nuclear waste the economics still probably can't compete with current wind/solar. The scary prospect for all forms of energy is that wind and solar likely have a lot of runway, as does grid storage. Combined wind/solar + grid storage will fall under combined cycle natural gas this year. Just to emphasize, combined cycle natural gas exceeds the carnot efficiency of a single stage combustion with additional heat cycles. That means it basically has maximized the physics of extracting energy from using natural gas. In the US natural gas is also basically as low as can practically be priced because it is a waste byproduct of the bakken shale in the Dakotas. Natural gas beats all other fossil fuels and nuclear by quite a lot. And it CANNOT compete with wind/solar. Solar still has numerous opportunities to drop between perovskites and some theoretical cheap multijunction manufacutring. Grid storage will see sodium-sulfur or some other cheap/dense battery tech in the next 10 years in addition to the steady improvement of sodium-ion and LFP chemistries already in mass production. I would really really like to see a scalable cheap nuke plant that is only twice as expensive as solar/wind. But that massive 10s of billions in research and investment would have needed to start in the 1990s. And IMO would have been shunted to the same failed solid fuel rod designs rather than MSR or some other "radical" reactor design. Nuclear will simply never be economically viable in the foreseeable 30 years. And neither will fusion.

If the point is generalizable, we should build more nuclear power plants. They will become cheaper.

by lifty 2y ago

If the point is generalizable, we should build more nuclear power plants. They will become cheaper.

They can’t be made in a factory and thus the learning effect is very small (if it even exists - nuclear reactors have increased in price).

candiddevmike 2y ago
> They can’t be made in a factory They can now, see Small Modular Reactors (SMR).
- fifilura 2y ago
  Where can I see one?
  - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
    Just need to: 1. Build prototype 2. Iterate on prototype. 3. In conjunction start standardizing and automating processes. 4. Achieve large enough scale to amortize the factory and process optimization costs over enough units to actually gain anything. The “SMR hype industry” seems to be perpetually stuck at 1, not even being able to deliver a single prototype. All the while talking like the factory already exists and SMRs are solved. Somehow it doesn’t add up.
  - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
    https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_booklet_2022.pdf https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_booklet_2022.pdf linked from https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-reactors-smrs#:~:text=More%20than%2080,they%20are%20deployed https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-.... I don't know, I'm not a specialist. But this came up by doing a rudimentary search.
    - fifilura 2y ago
      Thank you! Seems like I have 4 choices (although i probably don't want to go to Russia, since they are at war). KLT-40S Russia HTR-PM China HTR-10 China HTTR Japan
    - fifilura 2y ago
      Yay! There is a company called Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation. It has a nice ring to it! "Super safe bank" "Really clean hamburger restaurant" "Most trustworth car salesman" "Very accurate surgeon"
      - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
        This is pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7VDqUbaCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7VDqUbaCg.
        fch42 2y ago
        If they really work in this factory like shown in that video, handling radioactive material in the production process with little personal protection (especially against airborne dust), then at least I for one would not like to work for them, ever. The safety of "final" product notwithstanding (that's fine), the shaping, size sorting and sintering processes create dust and really, you don't want to get that into yourself.
Moldoteck 2y ago
Did these increase in price in China too?
nomel 2y ago
Please see the cost breakdown: https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/ https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/ Very very little is made/manufactured on site. You do not make turbines, computers, pipes, or much at all, on a construction site. You form, weld, pour, and assemble. The goal would be a standard design, to cut those giant engineering and custom fabrication costs to a small fraction. You don't need to deliver a completed factory on a pallet to save costs (although that's possible with distributed small module reactors, as Asia is ramping up for).
- treyd 2y ago
  Which is why France has such strong nuclear supply, they decided going into it to hage standard designs.
  - Retric 2y ago
    France’s nuclear is fully owned by the government. The subsidies are so huge there’s basically zero market forces in play on the supply side.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      It's not subsidized. In fact, cheap nuclear electricity is used to subsidize other industries. The entire nuclear industry (construction, operation, support) cost France € 228 billion and produce 11000 TWh (by 2012). That's 2,07 cents/kWh. Not too shabby.
      - Retric 2y ago
        Your numbers are wildly off and not just from ignoring inflation when using poorly sourced numbers from 2012. Quick, how much did they spend on fuel over that timeframe? Well according to that estimate it was 0, so it’s hardly including the operating costs. To give some perspective: “In March 2023 France's Parliament formally approved the government's nuclear investment plan – by 402 votes in favor and 130 against – which considers the €52 billion construction of six new EPR-2 PWRs at three sites.” That’s not operations that’s just for construction of 6 reactors when they have 56 in operation and that’s interest free unlike US reactor where interest is included with construction costs. One year later that’s already been increased to 67.4 billion euros: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-lifts-cost-estimate-new-reactors-67-bln-euros-les-echos-2024-03-04/#:~:text=PARIS%2C%20March%204%20(Reuters),on%20Monday%2C%20citing%20unidentified%20sources https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-l.... France operated as a pay as you go system so they didn’t set money aside for the full cost of decommissioning their reactors etc. Last I checked there was some talk in 2017 of them setting aside 27 billion based on some ridiculously optimistic estimates but mostly the plan is just foist the costs onto future taxpayers.
qball 2y ago
>They can’t be made in a factory All nuclear power plants made since around 1980s or so have been made in factories. The US (and other nations) use them all the time for their submarines- defense concerns correctly override environmentalists (and the oil companies backing them financially). The problem is a solved one. We're rich enough to afford to tilt at windmills instead- for now, anyway.

chpatrick 2y ago

Doesn't make sense if there are alternatives that are at least as cheap without the hassle.

Arnt 2y ago

It's not infinitely generalizable, only to tech production issues and maybe not to all of those. Nuclear isn't expensive because of production. https://progress.institute/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/ https://progress.institute/nuclear-power-plant-construction-...

PaulKeeble 2y ago

Even if it wasn't the case that PV's could have replaced fossil fuels back then because they weren't advanced enough nuclear was more than capable of doing so and readily available. Indeed investing in various different types of reactors might very well have produced a similar curve of progress and finding ways to make them less dangerous and requiring less regulation all of which would have sped up deployment and reduced the cost. We will never know, we just know now that its cheaper to do solar and power storage than nuclear.

mpweiher 2y ago

It is. They do. And did. Both France and Germany figured out how to do this. And then stopped building. <facepalm> You build a standardized design, and you build a bunch of them, and you overlap the construction. Germany's Konvoi reactors were built for DM 4 billion a piece in the late 80s. At the same time, non-Konvoi reactors cost more than twice as much, DM 9.5 billion. Apply the 88% cumulative inflation between then and now and you'd be at DM 7,52 billion, or € 3.9 billion. Fortunately we are starting to build more again, so prices should begin to fall.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

I doubt it. Even if the ORNL MSR reactor got maximum funding, we averted the safety panic from three mile island, and were effectively making no nuclear waste the economics still probably can't compete with current wind/solar. The scary prospect for all forms of energy is that wind and solar likely have a lot of runway, as does grid storage. Combined wind/solar + grid storage will fall under combined cycle natural gas this year. Just to emphasize, combined cycle natural gas exceeds the carnot efficiency of a single stage combustion with additional heat cycles. That means it basically has maximized the physics of extracting energy from using natural gas. In the US natural gas is also basically as low as can practically be priced because it is a waste byproduct of the bakken shale in the Dakotas. Natural gas beats all other fossil fuels and nuclear by quite a lot. And it CANNOT compete with wind/solar. Solar still has numerous opportunities to drop between perovskites and some theoretical cheap multijunction manufacutring. Grid storage will see sodium-sulfur or some other cheap/dense battery tech in the next 10 years in addition to the steady improvement of sodium-ion and LFP chemistries already in mass production. I would really really like to see a scalable cheap nuke plant that is only twice as expensive as solar/wind. But that massive 10s of billions in research and investment would have needed to start in the 1990s. And IMO would have been shunted to the same failed solid fuel rod designs rather than MSR or some other "radical" reactor design. Nuclear will simply never be economically viable in the foreseeable 30 years. And neither will fusion.