TVA gives up construction permit for Bellefonte nuclear plant after 47 years | Hacker News Reader

TVA gives up construction permit for Bellefonte nuclear plant after 47 years

timesfreepress.com

13 pointsguerby6 comments

Also on slashdot:

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/09/26/0130228/after-4...

Opinion piece:

https://www.yahoo.com/now/opinion-tva-look-sun-bellefontes-2...

The site in question has about 80-160MW of solar potential, and already has the transmission infra in place, just need the solar (and maybe some batteries) installed. 6-12 months tops from groundbreaking to permission to operate.

Not sure if this is a joke or not, but that estimated capacity it seems like it would be 20x less MW than if all the reactors destined for that site were finished. I didn’t do the calculations but I wouldn’t be surprised if the lifetime of the solar wouldn’t even offset the carbon cost of all the unfinished reactors.

The power generated by those unfinished nuclear reactors will definitely not offset the carbon cost.

Not a joke. Why would you have to equal the power of reactors that couldn't be built in 50 years? More than enough land in TVA's service area to meet needs with solar, battery storage, existing nuclear (~8GW), and hydro (from the opinion piece guerby posted in a comment above):

> Hopson said TVA's May 2021 "strategic intent and guiding principles" [1] notes the utility has solar commitments to date of more than 2,300 megawatts of solar capacity expected to come online by the end of 2023. Including those projects, TVA expects to add 10,000 megawatts of solar power by 2035 — a 24-fold increase from today.

> That 10,000 megawatts of solar power would be equal to more than eight would-be Bellefonte reactors.

> So, folks, we ask again: How about Bellefonte? Be bold. Look to the sun.

10 years is about how long, historically and ignoring outliers, it takes to build a nuclear generating station with a handful of generator units. As time has shown, these reactors can't get built, but solar (and batteries) can, very easily. This is without discussing interconnects between the PJM, MISO, Southern Company, and AEI (Missouri) grid systems that are possible but not currently implemented for importing or balancing power between those systems.

I don't think folks grasp just how cheap wind and solar have gotten (1-3 cents/kwh at utility scale), and how rapidly battery storage is coming down in cost. The US total installed battery storage capacity reached 1,650MW by the end of 2020, but by 2024 will have almost 12GW online [2]. Nuclear, gas peaking, and most of coal are already dead economically.

[1] https://tva-azr-eastus-cdn-ep-tvawcm-prd.azureedge.net/cdn-t... (Page 6) ("We are adding significant renewable energy to our system. TVA has solar commitments to date of over 2,300 megawatts of solar capacity expected to come online by the end of 2023. Including these projects, we expect to add 10,000 megawatts of solar by 2035, which is primarily based on customer demand and represents a 24-fold increase from today. Additionally, TVA is also supporting our many long-term local power company partners in the deployment of up to 2,000 megawatts of distributed solar to provide increasingly clean, local, renewable energy generation as a fully integrated part of the larger power system. These projects have the potential to add as much as 12,000 additional megawatts of solar in TVA’s future.")

[2] https://www.energy-storage.news/eia-us-battery-storage-insta...

Lazard’s annual Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis seems solid: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020

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