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> why we can't quickly build many reactors No. The reason is that they have not been price competitive with renewables. And so there isn't the volume of appro

> why we can't quickly build many reactors No. The reason is that they have not been price competitive with renewables. And so there isn't the volume of approvals that gives regulators experience which in turn reduces approval times. Commercial solar takes months to approve by comparison.

vlovich123 2y ago
Last I checked solar without batteries is roughly the same price per Kw as nuclear. There’s a huge difference in capability though because nuclear is 24/7 peak availability which solar can’t do and if you start building batteries the price increases substantially. I agree on regulatory experience but that comes more from panic over nuclear proliferation rather than any economic reason. Whether or not you view that as a legitimate concern is open to debate.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  For anyone arguing about this, please first look at https://www.cis.org.au/commentary/opinion/nuclear-vs-renewables-which-is-cheaper/ https://www.cis.org.au/commentary/opinion/nuclear-vs-renewab... The primary cost of running solar plants is no longer the panels themselves (ie if they drop to 0 the $/KW wouldn’t change a whole lot).
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    That's a Liberal Party think-tank supporting a hypocritical and ill-thought-out Liberal policy. Maybe people should read something from the actual domain experts instead? The latest CSIRO report specifically responded to the claims made about extending the time period. > CSIRO said accounting for a 60-year life reduced the costs of nuclear by about 9% compared with calculating over 30 years, but found other technologies such as solar and wind saw similar cost reductions of about 7% under the same approach. You yourself seem a bit confused about facts after using these sources. 1. Nuclear is not anywhere near the same price as solar. (I'm hoping you typo'd and were really trying to make the much saner but still wrong claim that renewables plus storage has costs comparable to nuclear which this document tries to claim) 2. It's not just the panel costs that have dropped, the delivered cost of solar energy has been falling. It dropped 12% in 2023 alone. This has lots of causes, like the safe and predictable success of solar allowing for lower interest rates and cheaper panels allowing for other assumptions to be rethought (e.g. ditch trackers that used to maximise output per panel and use the money and space saved to buy more panels).
- einpoklum 2y ago
  > Last I checked solar without batteries is roughly the same price per Kw as nuclear. You didn't check, you decided to cook the presentation of the facts. Indeed, solar is not available 24/7. But it's not individual installations which need 24/7 availability, it's the grid as a whole; plus, energy use during the day and night differs, so even the grid as a whole doesn't need the same generation capacity 24/7. And - the grid has many different energy sources (i.e. not just solar and nuclear), some renewable and some non-renewable, which aren't daylight-only. Which is to say there is plenty of room for solar installations irrespective of energy storage solutions. And indeed, those installations are taking place, and they are rather cheap.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    > Indeed, solar is not available 24/7. But it's not individual installations which need 24/7 availability, it's the grid as a whole; plus, energy use during the day and night differs, so even the grid as a whole doesn't need the same generation capacity 24/7 The peak to trough is ~30% reduction if I recall correctly. It’s different but not massively so. And long distance energy transport is insanely expensive. It’s being done but mainly to stabilize the grid rather than arbitrage. And your entire solar capacity in the US goes offline for ~12+ hours. That’s a lot of energy you’re going to have to supplant in other ways regardless of long distance. > And indeed, those installations are taking place, and they are rather cheap. Because the cost of storage and the destabilization of the grid it causes the provider are treated as externalities.
- Retric 2y ago
  > Last I checked solar without batteries is roughly the same price per Kw as nuclear When your basic assumption is that an entire industry is doing something dumb, it’s probably wrong. If nuclear was actually that cheap electric companies would constantly be proposing new projects, but it’s not. > 24/7 peak availability The industry abandoned nuclear because electricity demand stopped increasing decades ago. It simply isn’t cost competitive when facing both significant curtailment and the need for backup generation for the multiple weeks to months downtime nuclear power plants have semi annually. That’s the core issue nuclear needs both 24/7 demand, and the grid to also be perfectly fine when it goes away for months. That only possible when it makes up ~30% of supply which is roughly where it’s been for decades. Now having not built nuclear for decades once off projects are constantly wildly over budget and behind schedule. Solar + batteries is currently beating even optimistic estimates for nuclear just about anywhere, let alone current boondoggle pricing.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    > When your basic assumption is that an entire industry is doing something dumb, it’s probably wrong. If nuclear was actually that cheap electric companies would constantly be proposing new projects, but it’s not. The industry is doing the right thing but the reason it’s not choosing nuclear is because regulatory burdens make project success and prices highly variable and uncertain, not to mention a shift in political winds kills your project. The reason isn’t purely a price thing. > The industry abandoned nuclear because electricity demand stopped increasing decades ago There’s no way this is true considering that crypto and AI have started to push significant power demands. > Now having not built nuclear for decades once off projects are constantly wildly over budget and behind schedule. Solar + batteries is currently beating even optimistic estimates for nuclear just about anywhere, let alone current boondoggle pricing. That’s a choice we get to make. China is building their nuclear muscle because they realize it’s required for baseload for solar, way cheaper than batteries, and the only way you’re going to be able to charge all these EVs.
    - Retric 2y ago
      > There’s no way this is true considering that crypto and AI have started to push significant power demands. I was describing what happened when we stopped building nuclear power plants, not what’s happening now or in the near future. From 1.7TWh in 1975 to 3.1TWh in 1995 is an 82% increase in demand in just 20 years, but the next 20 years only takes us to 3.9TWh in 2015 a 26% increase. That had massive knock on effects in terms of power plant construction, move forward to 2023 demand is only at 4TWh less than a 3% increase. https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-consumption-since-1975/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co... The point of that was simply context. > The reason isn’t purely a price thing. All that risk ultimately just equates to a cost, if nuclear was wildly profitable to operate nobody would care about those risks but it’s at best barely breaking even when nothing goes wrong. Also, costs rose not because of regulations in a vacuum. 3 mile island happened because of a lack of maintenance, you don’t solve that problem without spending more money on maintenance. And so it goes for a huge range of issues like foreign material in cooling ponds. Suddenly there’s all this effort when working around cooling ponds to avoid a multi million dollar issue and that’s not free, but there’s no free lunch where you can avoid the expense and not also be cautious. Thus nuclear power was always expensive, the costs where initially just hidden as risk and escalating maintenance costs.
- pydry 2y ago
  >Last I checked solar without batteries is roughly the same price per Kw as nuclear Checked where? Lazard says it is one fifth of the price. >There’s a huge difference in capability though because nuclear is 24/7 peak availability which solar can’t do Not 24/7. They have to be turned off for maintenance and when that happens e.g. France burns an awful lot of gas. Pair solar with wind and storage and it's still cheaper than raw, nuclear power and would be even if matching storage were 4x the cost.
  - UltraSane 2y ago
    A key metric that controls the cost is just how much storage do we want? 4 hours? 1 day? 1 week?
    - pydry 2y ago
      https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
      - UltraSane 2y ago
        Very interesting. But having no dispatchable power generation other than 5 hours of storage runs a real risk of local or national outages during rare prolonged wind and solar shortfalls.
        pydry 2y ago
        On the sunniest windiest days when wind and solar is massively overproducing we can synthesize natural gas or hydrogen. That can be used to fill in the gaps for the last 1-3% of energy. The rountrip efficiency of this is shit (~40% compared to 90% for pumped storage or batteries) but the important thing is it's cheap to store a lot of it for a long time and straightforward to use a lot of it all at once during those rare dark, windless spells. For natgas we even already have the infrastructure. What's really startling is the cost of producing a kwh from stored syngas/hydrogen generated from solar and wind is similar to the cost of getting a kwh from a nuclear power plant. So, worst case storage + solar + wind ~= average case nuclear power.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  > nuclear is 24/7 peak availability Well, nuclear is 24/7 base load. Nuclear can't peak that well. Also, when nuclear goes offline it does so for days.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    I meant more that nuclear is basically 100% nameplate capacity at all times. If by peak you meant it can vary its load based on peak demand, there are load following plants although historically they don't work well. Gen IV MSR might fare better, but peak capacity is better handled through renewables particularly since this matches with their own peak power supply.
nine_k 2y ago
Indeed so. Renewables had about 15 years of breakneck-pace progress and massive production with huge economies of scale, which I cannot say about nuclear reactors. But even if nukes were somehow very cheap to build, the review process due to high safety requirements and a lack of a standardized reusable reactor design would make the process slow. To become cost-competitive, nuclear reactors need to be mass-produced, using a proven design that needs little review. The French sort of achieved that, with two mass-produced types of reactors. Renewables as baseload are still problematic though. Solar cells and even wind turbines are not expensive, but the batteries are very expensive, and are a huge fire hazard. It would be interesting to estimate how much would a kWh cost from a nuclear power station, and from an equal-power LiFePO4 battery installation with the capacity of, say, 3 days worth of the rated max power. Batteries can be replaced gradually, but would need to be replaced much sooner. [Update:] If we take a modest nuclear generation unit producing 300 MW of electric power, I'd like to compare it with a battery that can store 300 MW * 3 days of energy from renewable sources. It's 21.6 GWh. With LiFePO4 typical bulk price of $100 per kWh, the upfront cost in batteries alone would be $2.16 billion. It's still lower than nuclear reactor equipment, but very much in the same ballpark.
- threeseed 2y ago
  > but very much in the same ballpark You need to factor in waste disposal and decommissioning costs for nuclear. And if you are concerned with the fire risks of batteries you may want to think about the impact of serious events with a nuclear reactor. In almost all cases they end up being quite expensive.
  - EdwardDiego 2y ago
    Not like there's a history of steam explosions or hydrogen formation in historical nuclear reactor incidents.
- EdwardDiego 2y ago
  > but the batteries are very expensive, and are a huge fire hazard Have you seen how the fire risk petroleum presents? It's crazy.
TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
Once they’ve approved this reactor, build more of the same.
- threeseed 2y ago
  That's a decision for the markets. And right now renewables continue to get better and cheaper so it will be hard for nuclear to get much traction.
  - _aavaa_ 2y ago
    > That's a decision for the markets. Says who? This is an opinion, not a fact. All of the newer SMR companies are pitching their design as costly at start, but then cheaper because of mass production. Well the entire gaggle of companies won't all be able to mass produce their SMRs in the numbers required to get the scale down since there isn't the appetite for it.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
      >> That's a decision for the markets. > there isn't the appetite for it. A distinct without a difference.
  - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
    > decision for the markets You take so much for granted. If these markets produce their version of 2008, building renewables and no storage, and then we have blackouts - will you stand by those words if the power grid collapses and people freeze to death? With the ‘markets’ not ask for government intervention and bailouts at my expense?
    - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
      Which is why we have ancillary and capacity markets? We have identified a few key areas where pricing energy is not enough and therefore price available of physical properties.
karaterobot 2y ago
The reason nuclear isn't price competitive with renewables—or anything, really—is because of the amount of safety regulation and lack of experience building plants. Both of these emerged, at least in part, from decades of protests from well-meaning people with a laughable misunderstanding of how radiation works. So, you get people saying "don't build nuclear, it's unsafe!" and then you demonstrate that it's as safe as any energy technology in existence, so those people say "okay fine... don't build nuclear, it's expensive!" when they are the reason it's expensive. Meanwhile, we managed to create an irreparable 1.3C rise in global temperatures while waiting for solar, wind, and battery to catch up to where we could have been 70 years ago.
- devonkim 2y ago
  There needs to be generalized a term for NIMBYs for resisting various solutions to a number of issues because this pattern in liberal democracies around the planet isn’t exactly helping anyone make progress on the more core issues these folks seem to also be interested in.

vlovich123 2y ago

Last I checked solar without batteries is roughly the same price per Kw as nuclear. There’s a huge difference in capability though because nuclear is 24/7 peak availability which solar can’t do and if you start building batteries the price increases substantially. I agree on regulatory experience but that comes more from panic over nuclear proliferation rather than any economic reason. Whether or not you view that as a legitimate concern is open to debate.

vlovich123 2y ago
For anyone arguing about this, please first look at https://www.cis.org.au/commentary/opinion/nuclear-vs-renewables-which-is-cheaper/ https://www.cis.org.au/commentary/opinion/nuclear-vs-renewab... The primary cost of running solar plants is no longer the panels themselves (ie if they drop to 0 the $/KW wouldn’t change a whole lot).
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  That's a Liberal Party think-tank supporting a hypocritical and ill-thought-out Liberal policy. Maybe people should read something from the actual domain experts instead? The latest CSIRO report specifically responded to the claims made about extending the time period. > CSIRO said accounting for a 60-year life reduced the costs of nuclear by about 9% compared with calculating over 30 years, but found other technologies such as solar and wind saw similar cost reductions of about 7% under the same approach. You yourself seem a bit confused about facts after using these sources. 1. Nuclear is not anywhere near the same price as solar. (I'm hoping you typo'd and were really trying to make the much saner but still wrong claim that renewables plus storage has costs comparable to nuclear which this document tries to claim) 2. It's not just the panel costs that have dropped, the delivered cost of solar energy has been falling. It dropped 12% in 2023 alone. This has lots of causes, like the safe and predictable success of solar allowing for lower interest rates and cheaper panels allowing for other assumptions to be rethought (e.g. ditch trackers that used to maximise output per panel and use the money and space saved to buy more panels).
einpoklum 2y ago
> Last I checked solar without batteries is roughly the same price per Kw as nuclear. You didn't check, you decided to cook the presentation of the facts. Indeed, solar is not available 24/7. But it's not individual installations which need 24/7 availability, it's the grid as a whole; plus, energy use during the day and night differs, so even the grid as a whole doesn't need the same generation capacity 24/7. And - the grid has many different energy sources (i.e. not just solar and nuclear), some renewable and some non-renewable, which aren't daylight-only. Which is to say there is plenty of room for solar installations irrespective of energy storage solutions. And indeed, those installations are taking place, and they are rather cheap.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  > Indeed, solar is not available 24/7. But it's not individual installations which need 24/7 availability, it's the grid as a whole; plus, energy use during the day and night differs, so even the grid as a whole doesn't need the same generation capacity 24/7 The peak to trough is ~30% reduction if I recall correctly. It’s different but not massively so. And long distance energy transport is insanely expensive. It’s being done but mainly to stabilize the grid rather than arbitrage. And your entire solar capacity in the US goes offline for ~12+ hours. That’s a lot of energy you’re going to have to supplant in other ways regardless of long distance. > And indeed, those installations are taking place, and they are rather cheap. Because the cost of storage and the destabilization of the grid it causes the provider are treated as externalities.
Retric 2y ago
> Last I checked solar without batteries is roughly the same price per Kw as nuclear When your basic assumption is that an entire industry is doing something dumb, it’s probably wrong. If nuclear was actually that cheap electric companies would constantly be proposing new projects, but it’s not. > 24/7 peak availability The industry abandoned nuclear because electricity demand stopped increasing decades ago. It simply isn’t cost competitive when facing both significant curtailment and the need for backup generation for the multiple weeks to months downtime nuclear power plants have semi annually. That’s the core issue nuclear needs both 24/7 demand, and the grid to also be perfectly fine when it goes away for months. That only possible when it makes up ~30% of supply which is roughly where it’s been for decades. Now having not built nuclear for decades once off projects are constantly wildly over budget and behind schedule. Solar + batteries is currently beating even optimistic estimates for nuclear just about anywhere, let alone current boondoggle pricing.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  > When your basic assumption is that an entire industry is doing something dumb, it’s probably wrong. If nuclear was actually that cheap electric companies would constantly be proposing new projects, but it’s not. The industry is doing the right thing but the reason it’s not choosing nuclear is because regulatory burdens make project success and prices highly variable and uncertain, not to mention a shift in political winds kills your project. The reason isn’t purely a price thing. > The industry abandoned nuclear because electricity demand stopped increasing decades ago There’s no way this is true considering that crypto and AI have started to push significant power demands. > Now having not built nuclear for decades once off projects are constantly wildly over budget and behind schedule. Solar + batteries is currently beating even optimistic estimates for nuclear just about anywhere, let alone current boondoggle pricing. That’s a choice we get to make. China is building their nuclear muscle because they realize it’s required for baseload for solar, way cheaper than batteries, and the only way you’re going to be able to charge all these EVs.
  - Retric 2y ago
    > There’s no way this is true considering that crypto and AI have started to push significant power demands. I was describing what happened when we stopped building nuclear power plants, not what’s happening now or in the near future. From 1.7TWh in 1975 to 3.1TWh in 1995 is an 82% increase in demand in just 20 years, but the next 20 years only takes us to 3.9TWh in 2015 a 26% increase. That had massive knock on effects in terms of power plant construction, move forward to 2023 demand is only at 4TWh less than a 3% increase. https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-consumption-since-1975/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co... The point of that was simply context. > The reason isn’t purely a price thing. All that risk ultimately just equates to a cost, if nuclear was wildly profitable to operate nobody would care about those risks but it’s at best barely breaking even when nothing goes wrong. Also, costs rose not because of regulations in a vacuum. 3 mile island happened because of a lack of maintenance, you don’t solve that problem without spending more money on maintenance. And so it goes for a huge range of issues like foreign material in cooling ponds. Suddenly there’s all this effort when working around cooling ponds to avoid a multi million dollar issue and that’s not free, but there’s no free lunch where you can avoid the expense and not also be cautious. Thus nuclear power was always expensive, the costs where initially just hidden as risk and escalating maintenance costs.
pydry 2y ago
>Last I checked solar without batteries is roughly the same price per Kw as nuclear Checked where? Lazard says it is one fifth of the price. >There’s a huge difference in capability though because nuclear is 24/7 peak availability which solar can’t do Not 24/7. They have to be turned off for maintenance and when that happens e.g. France burns an awful lot of gas. Pair solar with wind and storage and it's still cheaper than raw, nuclear power and would be even if matching storage were 4x the cost.
- UltraSane 2y ago
  A key metric that controls the cost is just how much storage do we want? 4 hours? 1 day? 1 week?
  - pydry 2y ago
    https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
    - UltraSane 2y ago
      Very interesting. But having no dispatchable power generation other than 5 hours of storage runs a real risk of local or national outages during rare prolonged wind and solar shortfalls.
      - pydry 2y ago
        On the sunniest windiest days when wind and solar is massively overproducing we can synthesize natural gas or hydrogen. That can be used to fill in the gaps for the last 1-3% of energy. The rountrip efficiency of this is shit (~40% compared to 90% for pumped storage or batteries) but the important thing is it's cheap to store a lot of it for a long time and straightforward to use a lot of it all at once during those rare dark, windless spells. For natgas we even already have the infrastructure. What's really startling is the cost of producing a kwh from stored syngas/hydrogen generated from solar and wind is similar to the cost of getting a kwh from a nuclear power plant. So, worst case storage + solar + wind ~= average case nuclear power.
cryptonector 2y ago
> nuclear is 24/7 peak availability Well, nuclear is 24/7 base load. Nuclear can't peak that well. Also, when nuclear goes offline it does so for days.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  I meant more that nuclear is basically 100% nameplate capacity at all times. If by peak you meant it can vary its load based on peak demand, there are load following plants although historically they don't work well. Gen IV MSR might fare better, but peak capacity is better handled through renewables particularly since this matches with their own peak power supply.

nine_k 2y ago

Indeed so. Renewables had about 15 years of breakneck-pace progress and massive production with huge economies of scale, which I cannot say about nuclear reactors. But even if nukes were somehow very cheap to build, the review process due to high safety requirements and a lack of a standardized reusable reactor design would make the process slow. To become cost-competitive, nuclear reactors need to be mass-produced, using a proven design that needs little review. The French sort of achieved that, with two mass-produced types of reactors. Renewables as baseload are still problematic though. Solar cells and even wind turbines are not expensive, but the batteries are very expensive, and are a huge fire hazard. It would be interesting to estimate how much would a kWh cost from a nuclear power station, and from an equal-power LiFePO4 battery installation with the capacity of, say, 3 days worth of the rated max power. Batteries can be replaced gradually, but would need to be replaced much sooner. [Update:] If we take a modest nuclear generation unit producing 300 MW of electric power, I'd like to compare it with a battery that can store 300 MW * 3 days of energy from renewable sources. It's 21.6 GWh. With LiFePO4 typical bulk price of $100 per kWh, the upfront cost in batteries alone would be $2.16 billion. It's still lower than nuclear reactor equipment, but very much in the same ballpark.

threeseed 2y ago
> but very much in the same ballpark You need to factor in waste disposal and decommissioning costs for nuclear. And if you are concerned with the fire risks of batteries you may want to think about the impact of serious events with a nuclear reactor. In almost all cases they end up being quite expensive.
- EdwardDiego 2y ago
  Not like there's a history of steam explosions or hydrogen formation in historical nuclear reactor incidents.
EdwardDiego 2y ago
> but the batteries are very expensive, and are a huge fire hazard Have you seen how the fire risk petroleum presents? It's crazy.

TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago

Once they’ve approved this reactor, build more of the same.

threeseed 2y ago
That's a decision for the markets. And right now renewables continue to get better and cheaper so it will be hard for nuclear to get much traction.
- _aavaa_ 2y ago
  > That's a decision for the markets. Says who? This is an opinion, not a fact. All of the newer SMR companies are pitching their design as costly at start, but then cheaper because of mass production. Well the entire gaggle of companies won't all be able to mass produce their SMRs in the numbers required to get the scale down since there isn't the appetite for it.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
    >> That's a decision for the markets. > there isn't the appetite for it. A distinct without a difference.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > decision for the markets You take so much for granted. If these markets produce their version of 2008, building renewables and no storage, and then we have blackouts - will you stand by those words if the power grid collapses and people freeze to death? With the ‘markets’ not ask for government intervention and bailouts at my expense?
  - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
    Which is why we have ancillary and capacity markets? We have identified a few key areas where pricing energy is not enough and therefore price available of physical properties.

karaterobot 2y ago

The reason nuclear isn't price competitive with renewables—or anything, really—is because of the amount of safety regulation and lack of experience building plants. Both of these emerged, at least in part, from decades of protests from well-meaning people with a laughable misunderstanding of how radiation works. So, you get people saying "don't build nuclear, it's unsafe!" and then you demonstrate that it's as safe as any energy technology in existence, so those people say "okay fine... don't build nuclear, it's expensive!" when they are the reason it's expensive. Meanwhile, we managed to create an irreparable 1.3C rise in global temperatures while waiting for solar, wind, and battery to catch up to where we could have been 70 years ago.

devonkim 2y ago
There needs to be generalized a term for NIMBYs for resisting various solutions to a number of issues because this pattern in liberal democracies around the planet isn’t exactly helping anyone make progress on the more core issues these folks seem to also be interested in.