https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
* to be anti-nuclear is to be anti-climate, and pro-coal.
Finland is also a country that just spent almost 20 years building one new nuclear reactor, and its still not in commercial operation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_build...
If you’re ever in New York, check out the Tweed courthouse, which was built in the 1880s. The total cost was $10.5B 2020 dollars.
It’s worth reading the line items from that construction. Carpenters getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars - multiple millions now - for a couple days of work. Enough carpeting ordered to cover whole parks several times.
Where did you get that number? Wikipedia has the costs around 11-13 million, also consistent with this https://www1.nyc.gov/site/designcommission/public-programs/t..., or $304 million in 2019 dollars.
They tried to cut corners in concrete casting, then they had to do it again. Then they tried to get away with bad welds and had to redo them, and inspection. Endless use of as cheap labor as possible.
Should have thought of that when bidding.
All three projects are over-budget and have been dogged by delays.
I'm not against nuclear, but the cost of new (large) nuclear plants always spiral out of control. For example, Hinkley Point C in the UK is due for completion in 2026. Estimated total cost: £23 billion - making it one of the most expensive nuclear power plants in the world.
This BBC report on Hinkley Point C has some interesting facts:
Hinkley nuclear power station on track for 2026 opening: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-58724732
From the article:
> When Hinkley was approved in 2016, EDF estimated the cost at £18bn. Today, the company puts the bill at nearer £23bn.
The deal to build Hinkley Point C includes a fixed-price or ceiling cost for electricity known as the Strike Price:
> ...in 2016, the British government fixed that price at £92.50 per megawatt hour (MWh). The price rises with inflation and has now reached £106/MWh.
> Back then, the equivalent price for electricity from offshore windfarms was well over £120/MWh. But wind costs have fallen fast. Today new wind projects are fixed at about £50/MWh, well under half the price of Hinkley power.
> So, the big question for Hinkley watchers is this. By 2026, will the electricity it produces look very expensive?
Regardless, I'm all for maintaining at least our current level of nuclear contribution to the grid until the renewable storage story is complete at GW scale. It's much harder to commission new nuclear plants if we allow all of ours to fall into disuse.
But of course with a guaranteed and indexed linked strike price, it will be running at full pelt for its entire lifespan, regardless of how much cheaper solar and wind is available at any given time.
S&P Global Platts assessed UK day-ahead baseload prices at GBP540.15/MWh ($747.56/MWh) for delivery Sept. 14, up from GBP171.15/MWh Sept. 10. Sept. 9 as several plants priced themselves at GBP4,000/MWh amid low wind, outages and reduced interconnector availability*.
The UK energy situation is basically a total mess - they need more of everything (or to just stop shutting down everything). About the only thing being done is building more interconnects to import electricity from other countries.
Regardless, it's possible to negotiate this as some sort of trade agreement, sure. Your country could also build their own if they didn't have one already...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#/media/File:...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/05/31/new-map-...
> Your country could also build their own if they didn't have one already
It's like you didn't read at all what I wrote! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28842914)
Look at the map from the US, many sites of varying level are extremely close to major metropolitan areas. They are often deep underground.
> Look at the map from the US, many sites of varying level are extremely close to major metropolitan areas. They are often deep underground.
Wikipedia tells me that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, NM is currently the only deep underground waste storage site in the US.
> Wikipedia tells me that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, NM is currently the only deep underground waste storage site in the US.
The US storage sites are old (the Carlsbad facility design is from the 70's for example), and the US has vast amounts of land. European sites are often much deeper, and new sites are deeper and deeper, up to 800 meters below the surface.
The Yucca Mountain site is 50 meters underground, which is about 164 feet. That's deep enough to not disturb things on the surface if in a geologically stable area.
You can see Yucca in on the shallow-side of things for many countries[1].
Perhaps I overspoke when I alleged many are deep in the US. The US is very spread out, and it seems going 200+ meters below the surface wasn't warranted except for the highest classifications of waste.
However, in a more densely populated nation, there is no hurdle to building deep repositories, except politics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
France does have at least some of necessary technologies to do so too. USA/Finland doesn't.
See https://habr.com/ru/post/473028/ (in Russian) and links from it
Everything nasty from all of them put together is something like one large modern soccer stadium.
Here's a good paper on the costs https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/9/12/2437/pdf
It has being done for 20+ years now.
Additionally, even with no nuclear reactors whatsoever, we'll still have to deal with nuclear waste as it is used in various other areas like medicine. The Goiânia accident incident in Brazil killed many people _immediately_ (unlike Fukushima) and originated from a defunct hospital, not a nuclear power plant. We need to find ways to deal with this stuff regardless if you use nuclear power or not.
These repositories are meant specifically for the separated waste from the recycling/reusing process. So the process you're suggesting is the one that creates this "artificial problem".
The experience of that has been a bit mixed in the real world at Windscale/Sellafield "Europe's largest nuclear site" in the UK.
The incidents section on Wikipedia goes on for pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
and "The site is due to be fully decommissioned by 2120 at a cost of £121bn."
which doesn't sound ideal for future reprocessing.
>Erityisesti nuoret ja naiset uskoivat ydinvoiman tuottavan hiilidioksidipäästöjä. 18–29-vuotiaista vastaajista 18 prosenttia piti ydinvoimaa pahimpana ilmaston lämmittäjänä. Naisista näin uskoi 13 prosenttia.
The rest of the article doesn't talk about nuclear power at all. Based on that I'm not sure how did you end up with the conclusion that "Most of youth in finland think nuclear energy produces lots of waste and are against it", 18 percent doesn't seem majority to me?
>Erityisesti nuoret ja naiset uskoivat ydinvoiman tuottavan hiilidioksidipäästöjä. 18–29-vuotiaista vastaajista 18 prosenttia piti ydinvoimaa pahimpana ilmaston lämmittäjänä. Naisista näin uskoi 13 prosenttia.
While this was true even 10 years ago, not so much now. While nuclear is still cheaper than the batteries which would otherwise be the main[0] worldwide alternative to backing up PV/wind, it is close, and probable future development curves for renewables and batteries make it not completely insane to reject nuclear.
Personally I would still support new reactors, firstly because I don’t want to keep all my eggs in one basket if my expectations for future battery factories are falsified, and secondly because I think diverse solutions are likely to be cheaper and faster overall than monoculture solutions.
[0] Scandinavia in general might be amazing for hydro, which is much cheaper than batteries, but IIRC most places aren’t so fortunate.
I don't know. Here in Scandinavia the price of electricity is forecasted to sky rocket, due to lower output of hydro power.[0] If macro weather pattern are to undergo rapid change hydro power might not be the most reliable.
[0]
A very remarkable thing is the decline in the cost of renewables just in the last 10 years.
The cost number have completely flipped in that time, not even counting the cost risk from delays, underestimated decommissioning costs for nuclear, the uninsurability of decommissioning costs, and the uninsurability of of nuclear accident risk. Solar and wind are cheapest now, by a multiple.
But even more importantly, the need for storage arises at much higher renewable penetration levels than you observe in the current world. It will take multiple decades to get to the point where you need large amounts of storage in the first place.
No one is saying it must come from a single source? Combining electricity from multiple reliable sources is fine, but there will be times when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing so you need to be able to meet energy demands in those cases. The only clean solution is nuclear (and hydro where available).
That claim is highly debatable. Lots of people claim that the storage necessary to overcome these generation troughs make it infeasible but they seem to completely ignore holistic cost minimization approaches using overgeneration and then conclude that the amount of storage required makes it impossible. Meanwhile it's been calculated that modest overgeneration squashes storage amounts (and costs) in massive ways. People have actually studied these things, you know...
See for example the 2018 article On the economics of electrical storage for variable renewable energy sources by Zerrahn et al.
In practice, though, I expect that you won't even get energy waste from overgeneration if flexible energy consumers like BEVs or flexible hydrogen electrolyzers are connected to the grid. These will account for a major portion of electricity consumption and it will be possible to move their consumption around very considerably.
You’ll still have some windless nights, but enough overproduction means that you don’t have to worry about mere cloudy days or low-wind periods — One suggestion in another comment was needing weeks of storage, and overproduction can reduce that to a day of storage, perhaps even less.
10% of everyones car and home battery will be annexed by the grid when needed.
Nuclear doesn't give you 100% for Y above - there are times when your nuclear reactor will also be unavailable - the average is about 32 days per year in the US. So nuclear has a similar problem - as has all generation types - albeit with different statistical properties.
This is true for a sufficiently large number of uncorrelated sources, but all solar plants in a region are correlated and all wind plants in a region are correlated so effectively you have only two renewable sources in a region that are decoupled, which is wholly inadequate considering the relatively low reliability of either source. Maybe over-provisioning would help, but I don't know how much you would have to over-provision to get power on a still night, and anyway the whole point is accounting for costs so if it's not storage then you have to account for the over-provisioning costs.
> Nuclear doesn't give you 100% for Y above - there are times when your nuclear reactor will also be unavailable - the average is about 32 days per year in the US. So nuclear has a similar problem - as has all generation types - albeit with different statistical properties.
These aren't similar problems. With wind and solar power, bad weather shuts down all "plants" in a region. With nuclear, you have maintenance windows on individual plants which can be coordinated with other plants in the region such that base load is maintained.
> different statistical properties
Technically true, but doing a lot of rhetorical labor.
Wind and solar are largely anti-correlated in most regions. Depending on the geography, differences in wind output can vary significantly over distances in as little 100km and offshore and on-shore capacity factors also tend to show divergence. At distances above 1,500km wind is uncorrelated in Europe.
The stochastic failures of nuclear reactors are largely independent but not always - a natural catastrophe like Fukushima can take out a bunch of reactors. Or extreme weather (heat), like last summer's drought took out a bunch of reactors in a few northern European countries.
It's not rhetorical labor to point out that it's simplistic to present nuclear as completely reliable (it's not) and that unreliable sources can contribute to a reliable grid. It's pointing out that the problem is more subtle.
Unlike 10 years ago, we have now concrete examples of grids which operate with very high shares of wind and solar without any decrease in reliability and have developed practical techniques for incorporating such sources into grids.
Absolutely! I’m only suggesting nuclear as a backup for low wind nighttime demand. It’s completely pointless to use nuclear as the main power source precisely because of the cost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
But to deal with the low-wind nighttime demand, you have the option of storage (hydro and batteries aren’t the only options); you can do demand management (it helps people use less when they sleep); you can do intercontinental HVDC (in principle, but think in terms of a square metre of cross section for 100% of EU demand, so it will take a while to build); and you can do other power types — nuclear (expensive), geothermal (geographically specific in ways I don’t understand), tidal (surprisingly expensive), natural gas (sill better than coal).
I’m in favour of all of the above except natural gas. I’m expecting near 100% wind & PV supported by existing nuclear plants and existing and new storage (and a few 10s of GW intercontinental HVDC) by early 2030s… but my expectations are based on hoping grid storage battery prices get a lot cheaper with less evidence than I’d like to be comfortable, which means I want to support all the solutions rather than just my favourite.
The cost of nuclear is artificially high because special interests have lobbied hard against nuclear, draining western countries of the experience to build nuclear facilities rapidly and also taking away any opportunities for efficiencies of scale.
Moreover, I don't think you can look at the cost of batteries as-is. If we seriously invest in batteries as a solution for grid-scale power storage, the demand will go through the roof and I doubt supply will be able to keep up (at least not on the 10-50 year timeframes that the climate challenge requires) while we're also trying to electrify transport and other industries.
> Personally I would still support new reactors, firstly because I don’t want to keep all my eggs in one basket if my expectations for future battery factories are falsified, and secondly because I think diverse solutions are likely to be cheaper and faster overall than monoculture solutions.
I strongly agree with this. If climate change is an existential threat, then it's supremely foolish to give up on our only proven clean base load supply in favor of unsubstantiated hope for a miracle breakthrough in renewable storage. We should absolutely pursue both, vigorously.
Hinkley Point C is build in cooperation by China and France, the at the moment most active countries in building and maintaining nuclear power plants. It doesn't get more "economy of scale"-ly than this.
*I say strange, because renewables have only just now started to get to make sense at scale, despite the reliance on fossil fuels to provide a base load, when we could have had a clean grid by now without them had we tried.
Fuel is similarly expensive and no in practice reprocessing doesn’t really help. Shutting down for refueling is again expensive when you consider it happens 30 times over the lifetime of a nuclear power plant. Decommissioning is extremely expensive even if it can but off. Even highly subsidized insurance is yet again expensive. Overall construction costs aren’t limited to the reactor you still need radiation shielding, cooling towers or the equivalent, cooling ponds for waste, roads, offices etc.
Don’t get me wrong if someone had come up with a great modular reactor 20 years ago Nuclear might be much better off today, but we’re simply past the point where more R&D is going to help. The only possibly for change is if nighttime electricity costs ended up much higher than current daytime costs. However a lot of demand is being shifted to nighttime because costs are currently cheaper, change that equation and nighttime demand will fall dramatically.
It’s the same reason that puts me off houseboats: “thieves stole my house”/“my nuclear reactor has gone missing” should be Onion headlines and Pratchett storylines respectively, not things that actually happen.
There's a reason why logistics for certain materials include security services, and it's much harder to abscond with multiple-tens-of-tons container that can have tracking beacon than a single fuel assembly.
Any tech that exists today can be made in almost-limitless quantities given a few years and customers willing to pay.
Eg. Say you want to make 100x the worlds current production of nuts and bolts. You just count up how many nut and bolt factories there are, how many steel works, how many mines, etc, and you multiply that by 99 and build them. Provided you have financing (which you will have if enough people are happy to buy nut and bolt futures ahead of time), they're all parallel projects so can be done independently, almost eliminating schedule risk.
The only time it doesn't hold true is when the need for a product is short term, unpredictable, unexpected, or where someone desires to pay less than market price.
Li-Ions are frankly a terrible solution for grid storage, pumped hydro is the only thing that makes sense on these scales.
PV being as cheap as it is, it isn’t totally crazy to suggest so much overproduction that 24h of storage is enough. I expect not optimal, but not wildly so.
That reduces the 2778000 GWh to 7610 GWh, which only needs replacing at most every 3 years.
I’m supporting nuclear (and brought up hydro in the first place) because something might get in the way of scaling up battery production or prevent batteries from getting much cheaper (last I checked there’re more expensive per lifetime unit stored than nuclear is per unit generated), but it definitely isn’t crazy to think it will scale up to the required level and come down in price.
Even worse, scaling anything isn’t linear. It’s likely a lot easier to scale from 1GWh/year to 10GWh/year than it is to scale from 10 to 100. For example, in the first 10x scale, you might be able to pull a certain kind of skilled labor or raw material from other industries, but for the next 10x you now need to increase the global supply of said skilled labor or raw material.
It would probably help to show the working here:
600 GWh/year times 3700 years is 2220 TWh, but if you really do need them to last a week, 1000 cycles at one per week means they last about 20 years. As 1000 is an underestimate, this seems broadly correct to me given current battery construction.
However:
First, we will occasionally want them to last a week; most of the time you’d only want a day. This gives us longer to build out whatever solutions, more battery factories or reactors or whatever.
Second, it is very plausible the non-linearity of scaling will reduce costs rather than increase them. After all, that is what has happened so far, and as for workforce there will be a lot of coal miners available to switch to copper etc.
I’m not saying this is certain to happen, just that it’s at least plausible.
Third, my personal favourite combo with batteries is intercontinental HVDC — shift time zones or hemispheres and you don’t need to care about night or winter, but even much shorter links will connect you with a desert with a completely different climate and weather. Every 1 GW of capacity is 1 GW * (your desired storage duration in hours) of storage you no longer need (same for every 1 GW of nuclear, obviously). If we need a week of storage as you suggest, a single 1 GW line would save on 168 GWh of batteries.
I’m only expecting us to do HVDC in the order of length of e.g. EU to Sahara and therefore only limiting our storage requirement to about a day of storage, perhaps even as good as just overnight storage, but the longer the storage period we need the better relative value a planetary scale grid looks like.
(Downside: an antipodal ring big enough for world power use about a decade of worldwide aluminium production, or alternatively five decades of copper[0]. Again, this is why I prefer mixed approaches).
[0] One of my older comments did the maths for just Europe and just to the Sahara, so multiply the “3 months” and “about a year” in the linked comment by 10 for antipodal and another 5 for global electrical demand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201
Fair enough, I was on mobile. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum..., the world consumed 9,717 Mtoe or 112,717.2 TWh of energy in 2020. Dividing that number by 52 weeks/year gives us 2,167 TWh--the amount of energy we need for a week's worth of storage. 2,167 is about 3612 times the amount of capacity that Europe is slated to produce annually (previously I rounded various figures before doing the math, so my number rounded up to 3700 rather than down to 3600).
But as previously mentioned, this doesn't account for growing energy demands or wear on battery stock or many other pertinent factors.
> First, we will occasionally want them to last a week; most of the time you’d only want a day. This gives us longer to build out whatever solutions, more battery factories or reactors or whatever.
My "week" figure is based on the assumption that we need to be able to manage with near-zero wind/sun for a week. While most of the time you won't need a week, we're not concerned about "most of the time", we're concerned about the worst cases. By the way, I have no idea if a week is accurate. I've just heard "weeks" slung around, so I assume that "one week" is the low end. I would be surprised if we could get this down to a day on average. Mind you, this doesn't mean we need 1 week of storage, but it means we need 1 week of something besides solar/wind.
> Second, it is very plausible the non-linearity of scaling will reduce costs rather than increase them
I agree. The specific dynamics depend on the market and the supply chain, but I'm pessimistic, especially after seeing the havoc covid continues to wreak on supply chains the world over.
> Third, my personal favourite combo with batteries is intercontinental HVDC
This is really interesting. I always been a bit surprised that electricity isn't more fungible from region to region, and wondered why this was never really talked about as a serious mitigation against regional weather patterns. I've been thinking about clean energy as Europe's key to energy independence, but it would be cruelly ironic if Europe came to depend on simply a different region for its energy (and also for Africa, if its sunshine had the effect that oil tends to have on poorer countries).
This is also why we are building HUGE reactors.
The bureaucracy for building a nuclear plant is pretty much the same whether you build a 1 watt plant or a 1 terawatt plant.
Thus, it's more cost-effective to build the biggest m-f:n plant you possibly can.
All the possible rivers are already used, and the plants have killed the fish from the rivers. The effect on wildlife is not that nice.
And here lies the problem, if we see everything through the lens of economics and affordability we'll never get out of it
And then what would be the driving force of progress which results in all that wondereful green technology?
Technology as a human concept is about solving problems, and throughout history, it's sometimes been about solving problems caused by previous technology. Unless we suddenly get struck by a movement to get back to an agrarian civilisation and stick there in perpetuity like an ultra strict Amish-like society, there's simply no way to escape the race with ourselves where we need more and more technology to fix the problems caused by the previous technologies.
Yes, eventually we'll fail. Or escape to the stars and sacrifice other planets to our selfish genes. But that's ok, eventually the universe itself will fail, you can only slow down entropy for a tiny bit.