Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power (2017)
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Nucleae's problems are not the politics, the problem is that basic competency in design and construction logistics have been lost. Plans get delivered to construction that are "unconstructable," but construction soldiers on and wings it. Then it al has to go through design review again. And maybe redone. Delays delays delays. Incompetence abounds.
All the partners are planning from the beginning for a massive lawsuit at the end, and work harder to limit their liability (or create liability for others?) than to make the project work.
Executives lie about the progress, there are guilty pleas to fraud:
https://www.postandcourier.com/business/former-scana-executi...
20 years ago, I though nuclear was essential to fighting climate change. Today, I don't see how nuclear can ever help. We can't build it before it's too late, and by the time we build anything other technology has completely leapfrogged it.
We started these two AP-1000 reactors in 2008! A dozen years later we have nothing to show for it except for bankruptcy, plea deals, billions of dollars that would have been more effectively spent on solar and storage.
At some point the results have to speak for themselves, and solar/wind plus battery storage is actually working and being built. That seems a more realistic path forward than nuclear power, which is demonstrably failing over and over.
It reminds me of TSMC leapfrogging Intel because of mobile volume or PCs vs custom Unix workstations.
If we do make nuclear fission work it will be with modular reactors and standardized fuel form factors, etc.
Fusion won't fly even if we get over unity fusion unless we adopt a similar approach. Fusion reactors like to be big, but I can see them being composed of mass producible smaller modules and parts. Settling on a standard design that can be mass produced could make it work.
Thing is: as the nuclear people work to try to make anything above a reality, we are experiencing iterative rapid development in solar, wind, and batteries, with all of these getting geometrically cheaper until they approach the naked cost of the materials and the energy required to refine them... and the latter cost (energy) will drop as we get better at making these things.
In the long term I would not be surprised if Earth is almost 100% solar/wind/hydro/geothermal powered. You might see nuclear used in niche markets that combine high population density with low insolation and insufficient other resources and where geopolitical concerns make reliance on long distance power transport problematic. Earth is pretty close to a giant free fusion reactor that we don't need to worry about maintaining for at least two billion years. Nuclear power will be for space settlements further from the sun and deep space travel.
I could see Mars eventually relying on fusion in the far future. Mars is further from the sun, and most people who talk about settling there drastically underestimate the massive amounts of energy that will be needed to refine and purify literally every single material all the way down to the air and the water. The total energy footprint of your average Martian will be at least 10-20X your average Texan with a giant raised pickup and a 4000 square foot house.
The erosion of technical capability in nuclear power is likely unsolvable. There is no brains trust outside the USA from which to borrow the knowledge of metallurgy, concrete, site preparation, building design, or even design for manufacture. This is rebooting the entire industry from scratch to produce an unprofitable product.
Now the problem is getting operators to actually buy such equipment, and then operators getting the slots and ability to run these at a usable frequency, speed, and reliability.
We are now in a climate crisis, and solar/wind is still a fraction of the energy portfolio.
We als can't build nuclear anymore, because we have lost decades of experience.
I really hope you are correct this time.
I bought my current system for $45k four years ago. I only did it because the investment math worked in my case. (Yes, yes yes. It was for sure subsidized and the investment math _didn't_ work without the subsidies.) Now, however, that same system would cost me ~$20k. I checked when my coworker was looking into solar and wanted to run the numbers. The economics of solar are approaching beat-the-[idealized]-stock market investment. 4 years is a rule-of-thumb number for many businesses for investing in capital. That is, if a capital investment breaks even in 4 years, you pull the trigger. Once the economics hits 4 years for break even, you'll see a lot of CFO's start pulling the trigger, not to mention the encouragement from the marketing department for the optics.
Anyways, I think it is coming and for many of us, it is already here.
Nuclear as a power source is fantastic. One of the biggest operators is the US Navy which has been running reactors in military vessels for decades without incident. The problem is politics, ignorance and lack of will to actually see it through, not fundamental science or tech.
AFAICT, none publicly acknowledged since a bunch in the 1970s, but that may mean less than it seems since the US government has a history of covering up nuclear incidents for decades (like a whole slew at the Hanford site from the 1940s-1980s that weren't acknowledged until the 1980s.)
Modern reactors are in an entirely different league with an incredible safety record. [1] Considering how easy it is to detect nuclear failures and the consequences in a tightly-enclosed ship, it's unlikely that there are any serious incidents. It's clear that they're experience and technology is continuing to get better every year though.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/12/23/americas-...
I'm not saying that Hanford has the same risk profile as Naval reactors, I’m saying that it demonstrates that the US government has a propensity for covering up nuclear incidents that it can get away with covering up (note that it also acknowledged other incidents at Hanford in the decades it was concealing many of them), so the fact that it hasn't acknowledged any related to naval power generation since a bunch in the 1970s is absence of evidence of such incidents, but not reliable evidence of absence of such incidents.
The only likelihood of nuclear power succeeding would be to containerize the reactors to ensure build quality, keep costs down, and to address scaling.
A quick search hit this company that appears to be promoting this very thing: http://www.holosgen.com/
Today, I don't think we can consider nuclear a good or modern energy system when compared to something like solar or wind. Nuclear is used as a heat source to boil water and power a turbine, and throws away half of its thermal energy as waste. disposing of that waste heat is becoming so difficult that reactors in France power down in hot days. This is not some sort of super futuristic power source!!
While small modular reactors are the only near term hope for nuclear, I think that fission is not a good fit for terrestrial power. And fusion is no better until we have direct conversion or some other massive tech leap.
> I think that fission is not a good fit for terrestrial power.
Heh, it's even worse off-planet. If you think dumping the waste heat is hard when you have access to an atmosphere/large bodies of water, wait until you try it when you don't!! ;)
Around 2008-2010, ORNL published a paper describing how the cheap electricity and waste heat from a nuclear plant could be used to capture carbon from the air and create carbon neutral fuels for transportation. So again, if we were looking at a holistic picture, we could definitely improve the overall climate situation with nuclear.
> The efficiency of the Rankine cycle is limited on the cold side by the lower practical temperature of the working fluid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle
> The efficiency of even the best heat engines is low; usually below 50% and often far below. So the energy lost to the environment by heat engines is a major waste of energy resources. Since a large fraction of the fuels produced worldwide go to powering heat engines, perhaps up to half of the useful energy produced worldwide is wasted in engine inefficiency, although modern cogeneration, combined cycle and energy recycling schemes are beginning to use this heat for other purposes.
The heat is waste. For the same power generation, you want to minimize the amount of waste heat as much as possible.
So until Nuclear plants can provide dispatchable power, they're competing against the much cheaper solar/wind power, not against natural gas or batteries where the cost disadvantage isn't as bad. Nuclear theoretically could be dispatchable, but current designs aren't.
We can't do nuclear properly because society tells all the smart engineers and financiers that they should be doing other things.
A lot of "boring things" suffer from this problem.
It's all bad management, bad execution, and bad promises. And since few of any around the world have been able to keep construction promises recently, it may just be part of the natural variability of the construction process. And 2-3x variability is not a desirable trait for $10B projects, where most of the lifetime cost is in the upfront construction.
There is a great book on the history of the US nuclear power industry that goes into this called Beyond Engineering: How Technology Shapes Society. The technical issues were only a small part of why nuclear power is not more widely used. Countries like France that standardized on reactor design and had enough projects that construction crews could gain experience with the different processes and requirements involved were much more successful in deploying nuclear power.
I don't think this is just a nuclear problem. This is a civil engineering problem more broadly. IMO, the exact same forces which make nuclear impractical now are also responsible for the horrific budget explosions and overruns in big projects all over the US.
My guess is that by the time we have regained any such capacity, renewable and storage will be cheaper than the thermodynamic process of harvesting heat and turning it into electricity; a process that has been hyper optimized for a century without much progress, and which has hit the wall of thermodynamics in efficiency. The only way to improve its cost would be far cheaper materials, a revolution which might happen with 3D printing, but which is super speculative today.
Efficient homes, renewables, ubiquitous internet connectivity, and electric vehicles are going to be your targets as people spend more time at their homes and the trips they make can be electrified.
(the above comment is predicated on developing countries aging rapidly causing workers to leave the workforce, the quick uptake of remote work due to the pandemic forcing employers to learn how to support it, and data showing people fleeing cities for the suburbs and lower density living arrangements in general)
Logistics isn't easy. Dirt isn't simple stuff, neither is waterway management, nor concrete. Hauling a giant steel pressure vessel from its point of manufacture to point of installation isn't easy, nor is its installation. Just because it looks simple to a layman doesn't make it simple.
Why can't we use an affordable safe/competent reactor design from 30-40 years ago, and stamp that out at scale, rather than building a "new" model that results in failure?
However, they're also the main type of reactor that actually got built and works.
You can't examine the differences in project management and execution while the project is still on paper. You have to commit years and billions of dollars to determine if a project is going to adhere to the original plan or blow out on time and/or money.
Right now South Korea has the best track record of rapidly, affordably building reactors. Some American nuclear proponents think that we should just have South Koreans build Korean reactor designs here, to bypass the apparently irremediable problems in the domestic nuclear industry.
But even the smooth progress of South Korean reactor builders is not assured when they are building outside of Korea.
The Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, built by Koreans with Korean reactors, just powered up its first reactor days ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
The timeline from construction start to operation was originally 5 years. It has actually taken 8 years. It's 60% over the time originally scheduled, even though it is using a standard reactor design built by the most competent reactor builders currently available.
(In addition to what pjc50 said.)
edit: Never mind. The system inherits elements from a design used in the Palo Verde NPP near Phoenix, AZ
Probably know how to handle the heat...
I have noticed that there is something like "regulatory capture" in the construction industry now, but not by the same methods as most other industries. With giant, multi-national corps handling most large construction projects now, the QA/QC engineers are either incorporated directly into the company and thus never stop terrible practices, or they are there as a sub-contractor to the prime contractor and thus will be replaced for 'other reasons' if they give push back. It's now a push to the bottom for quality and the industry is going to hell quickly as the Engineers who value quality and ethics are slowly pushed out or forced to submit. If a small engineering company tries to stand up to one of these behemoth construction corps, the smaller company will either be blackballed behind the scenes (if they're lucky enough to be temporarily successful in their challenge) or the behemoth will lean on the nearest municipal gov't and say something along the lines of "We would love to finish this critical project, but we're being held up by this silly requirement and this silly engineer. (implied: Since we're on a Cost Plus contract) It's costing you X,XXX,XXX per day while we're held up. You should probably give us a way to get past this issue."
It would be funny if it weren't so sad. Civil Engineers are getting crapped on by both sides for increasing costs. They are blamed for holding things up with quality checks and at the same time for not doing enough to stop the terrible practices that result in long-term failures which end up increasing costs further. Payouts are going down for QA/QC companies and the pressure is constantly increasing to let things slide. The differences between a well-regulated project and an 'unregulated' (for all intents and purposes) project are shocking - you can feel (and see) an attitude of IDGAF from everyone on projects where it is known that the regulations don't REALLY apply.
Are people not able to do an internet search for this stuff? All this data is right out there in the open.
France is going to retire end of life nuclear reactors and replace them with renewables, while their new generation reactors have had all the same cost and schedule overruns as elsewhere. Including BTW, China, which did all the construction expertise management for nuclear that the experts recommend - e.g. using the same crews the build multiple reactors, moving them from project to project. China too stopped building new reactors in favor of more renewables.
Reactor, singular. They've only tried to build one new reactor this century, Flamanville #3. Civaux reactors were finished in 1997. As in the U.S., it's clear the cost issue is primarily related to public sentiment, not fundamentals. France's existing nuclear energy infrastructure was built at a time when France was very pro-nuclear, and nuclear was a matter of national pride, thus the gall to sink the Rainbow Warrior. Times have changed, for better (less investment in nuclear weapons, appetite for murdering civilians) and worse (less support for nuclear energy).
> China too stopped building new reactors in favor of more renewables.
"China will build six to eight nuclear reactors a year between 2020 and 2025 and raise total capacity to 70 gigawatts (GW), up 43.5% compared to the end of May, the official China Daily said on Thursday, citing the country’s nuclear association." https://in.reuters.com/article/china-nuclearpower/china-to-b...
Since 2011, over 30 reactors have come online, 3 of which began construction after Fukushima: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#China
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/12/138271/chinas-lo...
We will see if those announcements actually go forward.
FWIW, here'a a May 2020 video purporting to show a construction milestone, placement of the second steel containment ring, for the first Zhangzhou reactor: https://www.facebook.com/ChinaNationalNuclear/videos/2547931...
Basically this means there will be expanding workloads where it makes no financial sense to use natural gas at all, let alone nuclear. It's a matter of when, and we should be accelerating financial threshold to fight the climate crisis.
Edit: You have to be able to handle the worst case. Which means you've maxed what you can get from non-renewables and you have a period where renewables are generating less than normal (e.g. low-wind and or cloudy for a few days). Right now, renewables work because you just fire up your peaker plants when you have no sun or wind, so you also don't need much storage. What happens when you need more storage? You have to build batteries (or pumped-water or whatever).
I would be willing to bet a dollar that for 95% of the earth, a wind/solar/storage/hydro grid will be cheaper, use fewer toxic resources, and produce more excess energy than one that includes nuclear. Because once you don't plan for that baseload, you start overbuilding cheap solar and wind to give excess capacity. A renewables-based grid is one with excess unused capacity nearly all the time, and one that is right at capacity for ~week per year.
Edit: I think solar/wind prices are artificially low because they exist in a system with peaker plants. When you remove the peaker plants the solar/wind utilities have to internalize the cost of storage, which is currently being externalized on natural gas peaker plants.
Very old article about using HVDC to drop prices (still assumes coal is viable, because it uses old tech prices) https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/making-a-single-us-e...
The more publicized papers are those from Clack and Jacobson in PNAS arguing about whether nuclear/storage would be needed or not; both situations assumed that renewables would be far above 50%. There was a really silly lawsuit even, which is pretty awful:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/100-percent-ren...
So even in the case of bad modeling for 100% renewables, the critics are mostly people who think that 80% renewables is quite achievable with our current tech curves, and with building more nuclear.
Apologies again for not being more specific, but hopefully the papers in these press articles will help follow the citation chain to even better modeling. Both spatial and temporal modeling are important for both weather and electricity demand, so it's not an easy thing to get right. And I suspect that the market will find minimums that are quite different than anything these programs will find, due to political and other social factors nor modeled. But the models do show that a different future is possible, at least.
As I understand it, the only really hard part is that one week of really bad combination of weather for wind and solar in the winter. Because of that, we need to keep around a ton of backup fuel-based generation (which includes nuclear).
Edit: On reflection though, you may be right. I might have gone too low. The problem I'm trying to point out occurs when you don't have access to peaker plants. As long as there is enough peaker plant capacity you do not need much storage.
Don't forget the Canada examples too! They were able to build effectively.
I don't think corporate culture in the US is capable of it. Ironically the one thing that may have saved Westinghouse is if there had been more regulation, and the NRC has to not only evaluate safety of the designs, but also "can we even build this thing." Something that an exec with long term thinking would ensure! But current executive culture is about cost cutting in the moment, and it has pervaded even those companies that need to be thinking on decade long builds of projects that need to last half a century or more.
https://allongeorgia.com/georgia-business/georgia-power-anno...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Licensing_Corpora...
The cost of nuclear energy has been flat for decades, but the cost of sources like solar has been plummeting. Nuclear doesn't have much of change without some technological break through.
Nuclear provides steady source of electricity 24/7.
If you want same from renewable, you must add the cost of energy storage and the cost of overcapacity.
Mid-day is off-peak for solar in many markets, and they curtail their output so that they don't oversupply. As there is more solar built, more and more will be curtailed.
Both nuclear and solar would need a hydrolysis system that was economical even if not run 24x7 in order to utilize their supply-demand mismatches. This is the biggest road block to hydrogen production with the GWh of "free" electricity that we could currently be generating in the spring in California, but currently just don't use.
"Nuclear and renewables are not 1:1 match or comparison.
Different energy sources for different requirements. You want a good mix, not bad mix. Things like periodical negative electricity prices (in Europe) increase the net cost of energy. Excessively high night-time electricity is also harmful (industries, and many other uses require 24/7 energy).
This is completely wrong. There is a certain level of electrical production that is needed 24/7:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
As the data for the province of Ontario (Canada) shows, nuclear plants are very good at this (click on "Supply"):
* http://www.ieso.ca/power-data
* http://www.ieso.ca/Power-Data/Supply-Overview/Transmission-C...
As I mentioned in another comment, Ontario could stand to build another 2500-3000MW with of nuclear to deal with the base load, and the variable demand could then largely be dealt with using hydro-electric.
Ontario has quite a few turbine farms itself, spread over a reasonable wide area, and even then variability is high:
* http://www.ieso.ca/localContent/map/default.htm
And given that weather systems travel west-to-east, any neighbours are going to have lulls at roughly the same time as Ontario.
Perhaps in other jurisdictions things can work out, but I see it as a non-starter here.
Does the cost of solar et al take into account the capacity factor?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
Solar is barely able to be used 30% of the time, and wind maybe touches 40% reliability. Meanwhile nuclear hardly ever drops below 80%, and is usually above 90%.
I live in Ontario, Canada, and we have quite a few nuclear plants, and they deliver very reliable power (click on the "Supply" tab):
* http://www.ieso.ca/power-data
We're 61% nuclear, and 25% hydro(-electric):
* http://www.ieso.ca/en/Power-Data/Supply-Overview/Transmissio...
IMHO, if we build another ~2500MW of nuclear, then that would completely take care of our base load, and the daily fluctuations could be handled by hydro.
As other people mentioned here, it looks like the problem now is that the experience of building nuclear reactors was lost, so we are in a Catch-22 situation right now: if you want to build experience you need to just build reactors, but they are not economically viable without experienced builders.
The problem is that all current reactors are of the 1 GW size. For the last few decades the world has been building about 1 or 2 per year outside of China.
The solution is small nuclear reactors. For very large machines there is a dis-economy of scales. It was more expensive to build a Saturn V rocket than to build 20 rockets that are 20 times smaller each. In fact it was 3 times more expensive (about $180MM/ launch for Saturn V vs $3MM for Titan II)
Similarly, it's quite likely that it will be much cheaper to build 20 reactors of 50 MW each than it is to build a 1 GW reactor. And this is exactly what small nuclear reactors hope to achieve. For example NuScale estimates it will cost them $3 BN to build a 600 MW power plant [1] using small modular reactors.
What's needed is simplification - there are a wide range of inherently / passively-safe Generation 4 designs - of which my particular interest is in the molten salt designs (e.g. Terrestrial Energy's Integral MSR) which could be made MUCH smaller, simpler and cheaper than traditional reactors. These might never clear the various financial, regulatory and technical hurdles, but one can hope...