4 ms·

If we're aspiring to 1970s standards then sure. Nuclear power isn't about achieving the lofty heights of the 1970s. I'm just going to wave the famous article by

by roenxi 2y ago

If we're aspiring to 1970s standards then sure. Nuclear power isn't about achieving the lofty heights of the 1970s. I'm just going to wave the famous article by Crawford on the economics of nuclear around: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop [0] What you can see there is a very impressive learning curve that was well on the way to very cheap electricity. Then it suddenly and sharply inverts in a shape that defies common sense. Then no-one else really builds any. "Supporting nuclear" isn't supposed to mean splitting the atom at any cost. The point is if we would just stop regulating the industry into oblivion and let costs drop then it'd be a perfectly competitive form of power. We have this lobby that goes in, wrecks the economics of nuclear then uses the wreck they created as justification for why we can't build any more. And in some senses that is fair because if they had the power to destroy past nuclear projects they can do it again. But lets not pretend that these costs are fundamental to nuclear. Keeping a weather eye on China, if they do their usual trick and start learning how to build nuclear cheaply they could leapfrog everyone else on energy tech in another industry. On the one hand that'd be fantastic to the point where I'd love it. On the other it is so frustrating to be relying on nominal communists to push the state of the art forward on energy technology after listening to my western compatriots whinge about exactly that topic for decades while blocking the obvious solutions. We could have built the future in the west, we never had to have a do-it-in-China policy. [0] If you read the article, he's paraphrasing some book by someone called Devanney. I'm going to gamble on nobody reading the article so I can get that wrong without being corrected.

kragen 2y ago
it would be a perfectly competitive form of power by 01970s standards, but naval nuclear reactors, chinese nuclear reactors, and russian nuclear reactors are not regulated into oblivion and have not had their economics wrecked by lobbying. nevertheless, they remain more expensive and less economical than even fossil-fuel plants in both warships and china. conceivably capitalism could solve that problem (us defense contractors and chinese power plant builders are pretty tightly state-linked rather than free-market actors) but we don't have strong reasons for believing so crawford here talks optimistically about building nuclear plants for 250¢ per (nameplate) watt. europe and india are already building solar farms for 60¢ per (peak, nameplate) watt, a cost that is dropping dramatically year by year. he does plot some plants being built that cheaply in the 01960s in the us, in inflation-adjusted 02010 dollars, but for some reason he doesn't comment on that, and he doesn't find anyone able to do anything like that in recent years; the 'building cheaply' he cites in south korea and india is 190¢–250¢ per watt. this suggests that perhaps either the inflation adjustment or the original cost figures are incorrect solar does of course have a lower capacity factor than nuclear, but there are numerous countries where it's 30% or better, so 60¢ per peak watt is still less than 200¢ per long-term average watt. also 60¢ today is 41¢ in the 02010 dollars crawford is using: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60&year1=202405&year2=201005 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60&year1=20240... i sympathize with crawford's leanings but even the most generous reading of his claims doesn't support the contention that nuclear can be built cheaply enough to compete with solar
- XorNot 2y ago
  None of those watts are dispatchable though. A solar plant can't look ahead a month and bid a block of kWh on any given day with any confidence. Solar and Wind in "price per watt" are meaningless when storage is not accounted for. In fact a huge chunk of their actual cost of power has to be buying contracts for the backup plants to provide the kWh they want to promise but may not be able to deliver (hence the true cost of a kWh from a solar plant is basically whatever it would cost a gas plant to produce it).
  - kragen 2y ago
    you'd think it would turn out to be a huge chunk, but it turns out to be relatively marginal. also power producers bid on day-ahead markets generally, not month-ahead markets
  - roenxi 2y ago
    The quality isn't the same, but price is its own reward. We'll learn how to shift a lot of industrial production around if the price goes low enough. Watt-for-watt dispatchable is superior, but for half price there are probably a lot of uses that will turn out to be quite flexible. The energy markets don't appear to have quite gotten to the point where they handle that flexibility (prices keep dipping negative, which is unfortunate if you understand what that implies), but it is reasonable to expect that it is coming.
    - kragen 2y ago
      yeah, negative lmps with solar is 100% perverse bureaucratic incentives. solar panels aren't like coal plants (or conventional nuclear) where they overheat if you stop drawing power from them, and take hours to heat back up if you ramp down their burn rate; they're perfectly happy to be left in the sun either open-circuited or (more safely) short-circuited, and can return to supplying grid power in literally nanoseconds
    - dev_tty01 2y ago
      >We'll learn how to shift a lot of industrial production around if the price goes low enough. Are you going to send everyone home on overcast days? What if production needs to run 24/7? Solar is a whole solution if and only if storage is solved on a massive scale. Even with adequate storage, it still isn't going to work in some parts of the world or during certain seasons. In the end, I think we need a mix of energy sources and working to make nuclear cost effective is part of a practical low carbon energy future. I just don't understand the confrontational nature of the solar vs. nuclear argument. Solar is absolutely going to be a huge part of our energy future. Supplementation by cost-effective nuclear would be a great complement to solar. Nuclear costs might not ever get low enough, but we'll never know if we don't put serious effort behind the goal.
Retric 2y ago
Just a FYI that article you linked is written by someone that doesn’t actually understand what’s going on they even say: “I‘m a little fuzzy on the economic model, but” And then say things that aren’t true. The baseline cost of fuel rods alone ends up being ~0.9c/kWh. That already significantly eats into the margins before you consider the ~500 person workforce required to maintain such a complex system 24/7 365. The physical degradation of equipment like pumps, turbines, and lightbulbs costs yet more money. Decommissioning again yet more costs. People focus on the upfront construction costs because they are extreme, but even if construction costs were the same as a coal power plant nuclear electricity would still be quite expensive. Further, many things like the initial fuel supply get lumped under ‘construction costs’ but are better thought of as something else like operating expenses.
- roenxi 2y ago
  It is an argument based mainly on learning rates. He doesn't need to know any details about the economic model of nuclear; the observations are based on the economic model changing over time. > The baseline cost of fuel rods alone ends up being ~0.9c/kWh. I saw a quote from the 4th generation reactor wiki page (it came up while people were talking about China getting started on the build out of next gen of nuclear tech) that mentioned "100–300x energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel" as a potential advantage. People will figure out how to make fuel rods cheaper. We haven't really pushed the limits of this stuff. Besides, even in the current climate 1c/kWh is still a great lower bound to aspire for. Possibly even that would be worth pushing through the political blowback for.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Gen IV doesn’t mean anything specifically. No individual gen IV designs has every single advantage you see in any of those designs. You need to look at a specific designs in isolation as well as what trade offs are involved in that design. “100-300x energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel” That’s one of those things that sounds good in isolation, but ends up being more expensive. It’s just like CANDU reactors don’t need enrichment and can operate on natural uranium, but it turns out fuel costs drop by 20% when they started enriching the fuel. Similarly LWR/HWR could make better use of their fuel if they could operate at higher temperatures, but that causes a world of other problems. Unfortunately nuclear engineers aren’t dumb, they’re doing things for surprisingly solid reasons even if counter intuitive reasons.
defrost 2y ago
> Keeping a weather eye on China, if they do their usual trick and start learning how to build nuclear cheaply Well, that ship has apparently sailed already: How innovative is China in nuclear power? (1 day ago | 173 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40703088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40703088
- kragen 2y ago
  this is a great find, thank you, but keep in mind that 81% of the prc's new electrical generation capacity last year was wind and solar; 16% was fossil fuels, 2% was hydroelectric, and ½% nuclear. so while they're certainly going to do their best with nuclear, for the foreseeable future they're moving rapidly to solar https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/MONTHLY-CHINA-ENERGY-UPDATE-_-2023-China-Electricity-Mix-Yearly-Review-1-1.pdf https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/...
  - roenxi 2y ago
    Who cares? If solar is cheap people can build solar. That isn't a particularly controversial idea. When coal was cheaper coal plants got built, when gas was cheaper people built gas plants. When solar is cheap we can build solar farms. The issue is that nuclear has the potential to to shift society's energy costs 2+ orders of magnitude cheaper and we're explicitly retarding its progress by policy. Apparently only because of irrational beliefs.
    - kragen 2y ago
      hmm, so, if i get a 360-watt solar module for 30 dollars and set it up someplace with a 30% capacity factor (like in the north of argentina where it's sunny) it will produce an average of 110 watts, which is 950 kilowatt hours per year. if i demand a 10% return on my investment, i'm getting 950 kilowatt hours for 3 dollars, which is 0.3¢ per kilowatt hour this is already better than wholesale electrical prices, which average about 4¢ per kilowatt hour, but of course that involves all kinds of auxiliary equipment and batteries and whatnot. so let's assume generously that you're saying that nuclear energy has the potential to produce electricity for a wholesale price of 0.004¢ per kilowatt hour, which would be 2 orders of magnitude cheaper why would you think that it has that potential? you cited crawford and devanney, but they don't say anything that even suggests that they think that. at the extreme they think that you can get those same 360 watts from nuclear power for 360 dollars. what are you basing your estimate on?
Krasnol 2y ago
> Supporting nuclear" isn't supposed to mean splitting the atom at any cost. The point is if we would just stop regulating the industry into oblivion Sounds to me like just that. If deregulation is the only way you could make nuclear work in the 21st century, then it rightfully is on the way out. > Keeping a weather eye on China, if they do their usual trick and start learning how to build nuclear cheaply they could leapfrog everyone else on energy tech in another industry. Oh, China learned to do all kinds of things cheaply. They are famous for their tofu dreg and the catastrophes connected with this meme, which is a result of regulative negligence and corruption. I would question the theory that this model should become an example for the rest of the world and especially in technologies which are as dangerous as nuclear power generation. But there are actually fantastic news coming from there with much lower risks where we could learn from: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-trend-upward-while-nuclear-trends-flat/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...

by roenxi 2y ago

kragen 2y ago

it would be a perfectly competitive form of power by 01970s standards, but naval nuclear reactors, chinese nuclear reactors, and russian nuclear reactors are not regulated into oblivion and have not had their economics wrecked by lobbying. nevertheless, they remain more expensive and less economical than even fossil-fuel plants in both warships and china. conceivably capitalism could solve that problem (us defense contractors and chinese power plant builders are pretty tightly state-linked rather than free-market actors) but we don't have strong reasons for believing so crawford here talks optimistically about building nuclear plants for 250¢ per (nameplate) watt. europe and india are already building solar farms for 60¢ per (peak, nameplate) watt, a cost that is dropping dramatically year by year. he does plot some plants being built that cheaply in the 01960s in the us, in inflation-adjusted 02010 dollars, but for some reason he doesn't comment on that, and he doesn't find anyone able to do anything like that in recent years; the 'building cheaply' he cites in south korea and india is 190¢–250¢ per watt. this suggests that perhaps either the inflation adjustment or the original cost figures are incorrect solar does of course have a lower capacity factor than nuclear, but there are numerous countries where it's 30% or better, so 60¢ per peak watt is still less than 200¢ per long-term average watt. also 60¢ today is 41¢ in the 02010 dollars crawford is using: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60&year1=202405&year2=201005 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60&year1=20240... i sympathize with crawford's leanings but even the most generous reading of his claims doesn't support the contention that nuclear can be built cheaply enough to compete with solar

XorNot 2y ago
None of those watts are dispatchable though. A solar plant can't look ahead a month and bid a block of kWh on any given day with any confidence. Solar and Wind in "price per watt" are meaningless when storage is not accounted for. In fact a huge chunk of their actual cost of power has to be buying contracts for the backup plants to provide the kWh they want to promise but may not be able to deliver (hence the true cost of a kWh from a solar plant is basically whatever it would cost a gas plant to produce it).
- kragen 2y ago
  you'd think it would turn out to be a huge chunk, but it turns out to be relatively marginal. also power producers bid on day-ahead markets generally, not month-ahead markets
- roenxi 2y ago
  The quality isn't the same, but price is its own reward. We'll learn how to shift a lot of industrial production around if the price goes low enough. Watt-for-watt dispatchable is superior, but for half price there are probably a lot of uses that will turn out to be quite flexible. The energy markets don't appear to have quite gotten to the point where they handle that flexibility (prices keep dipping negative, which is unfortunate if you understand what that implies), but it is reasonable to expect that it is coming.
  - kragen 2y ago
    yeah, negative lmps with solar is 100% perverse bureaucratic incentives. solar panels aren't like coal plants (or conventional nuclear) where they overheat if you stop drawing power from them, and take hours to heat back up if you ramp down their burn rate; they're perfectly happy to be left in the sun either open-circuited or (more safely) short-circuited, and can return to supplying grid power in literally nanoseconds
  - dev_tty01 2y ago
    >We'll learn how to shift a lot of industrial production around if the price goes low enough. Are you going to send everyone home on overcast days? What if production needs to run 24/7? Solar is a whole solution if and only if storage is solved on a massive scale. Even with adequate storage, it still isn't going to work in some parts of the world or during certain seasons. In the end, I think we need a mix of energy sources and working to make nuclear cost effective is part of a practical low carbon energy future. I just don't understand the confrontational nature of the solar vs. nuclear argument. Solar is absolutely going to be a huge part of our energy future. Supplementation by cost-effective nuclear would be a great complement to solar. Nuclear costs might not ever get low enough, but we'll never know if we don't put serious effort behind the goal.

Retric 2y ago

Just a FYI that article you linked is written by someone that doesn’t actually understand what’s going on they even say: “I‘m a little fuzzy on the economic model, but” And then say things that aren’t true. The baseline cost of fuel rods alone ends up being ~0.9c/kWh. That already significantly eats into the margins before you consider the ~500 person workforce required to maintain such a complex system 24/7 365. The physical degradation of equipment like pumps, turbines, and lightbulbs costs yet more money. Decommissioning again yet more costs. People focus on the upfront construction costs because they are extreme, but even if construction costs were the same as a coal power plant nuclear electricity would still be quite expensive. Further, many things like the initial fuel supply get lumped under ‘construction costs’ but are better thought of as something else like operating expenses.

roenxi 2y ago
It is an argument based mainly on learning rates. He doesn't need to know any details about the economic model of nuclear; the observations are based on the economic model changing over time. > The baseline cost of fuel rods alone ends up being ~0.9c/kWh. I saw a quote from the 4th generation reactor wiki page (it came up while people were talking about China getting started on the build out of next gen of nuclear tech) that mentioned "100–300x energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel" as a potential advantage. People will figure out how to make fuel rods cheaper. We haven't really pushed the limits of this stuff. Besides, even in the current climate 1c/kWh is still a great lower bound to aspire for. Possibly even that would be worth pushing through the political blowback for.
- Retric 2y ago
  Gen IV doesn’t mean anything specifically. No individual gen IV designs has every single advantage you see in any of those designs. You need to look at a specific designs in isolation as well as what trade offs are involved in that design. “100-300x energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel” That’s one of those things that sounds good in isolation, but ends up being more expensive. It’s just like CANDU reactors don’t need enrichment and can operate on natural uranium, but it turns out fuel costs drop by 20% when they started enriching the fuel. Similarly LWR/HWR could make better use of their fuel if they could operate at higher temperatures, but that causes a world of other problems. Unfortunately nuclear engineers aren’t dumb, they’re doing things for surprisingly solid reasons even if counter intuitive reasons.

defrost 2y ago

> Keeping a weather eye on China, if they do their usual trick and start learning how to build nuclear cheaply Well, that ship has apparently sailed already: How innovative is China in nuclear power? (1 day ago | 173 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40703088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40703088

kragen 2y ago
this is a great find, thank you, but keep in mind that 81% of the prc's new electrical generation capacity last year was wind and solar; 16% was fossil fuels, 2% was hydroelectric, and ½% nuclear. so while they're certainly going to do their best with nuclear, for the foreseeable future they're moving rapidly to solar https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/MONTHLY-CHINA-ENERGY-UPDATE-_-2023-China-Electricity-Mix-Yearly-Review-1-1.pdf https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/...
- roenxi 2y ago
  Who cares? If solar is cheap people can build solar. That isn't a particularly controversial idea. When coal was cheaper coal plants got built, when gas was cheaper people built gas plants. When solar is cheap we can build solar farms. The issue is that nuclear has the potential to to shift society's energy costs 2+ orders of magnitude cheaper and we're explicitly retarding its progress by policy. Apparently only because of irrational beliefs.
  - kragen 2y ago
    hmm, so, if i get a 360-watt solar module for 30 dollars and set it up someplace with a 30% capacity factor (like in the north of argentina where it's sunny) it will produce an average of 110 watts, which is 950 kilowatt hours per year. if i demand a 10% return on my investment, i'm getting 950 kilowatt hours for 3 dollars, which is 0.3¢ per kilowatt hour this is already better than wholesale electrical prices, which average about 4¢ per kilowatt hour, but of course that involves all kinds of auxiliary equipment and batteries and whatnot. so let's assume generously that you're saying that nuclear energy has the potential to produce electricity for a wholesale price of 0.004¢ per kilowatt hour, which would be 2 orders of magnitude cheaper why would you think that it has that potential? you cited crawford and devanney, but they don't say anything that even suggests that they think that. at the extreme they think that you can get those same 360 watts from nuclear power for 360 dollars. what are you basing your estimate on?

Krasnol 2y ago

> Supporting nuclear" isn't supposed to mean splitting the atom at any cost. The point is if we would just stop regulating the industry into oblivion Sounds to me like just that. If deregulation is the only way you could make nuclear work in the 21st century, then it rightfully is on the way out. > Keeping a weather eye on China, if they do their usual trick and start learning how to build nuclear cheaply they could leapfrog everyone else on energy tech in another industry. Oh, China learned to do all kinds of things cheaply. They are famous for their tofu dreg and the catastrophes connected with this meme, which is a result of regulative negligence and corruption. I would question the theory that this model should become an example for the rest of the world and especially in technologies which are as dangerous as nuclear power generation. But there are actually fantastic news coming from there with much lower risks where we could learn from: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-trend-upward-while-nuclear-trends-flat/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...