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Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

"The only one currently under construction – the Vogtle plant in Georgia – is years behind schedule and roughly $14 billion over the original budget." How does this happen, it is incredible to me how government contracts are allowed to overrun like this, where is the punishment for the original bidder. Same question applies to things like the F-35, the whole contract bidding process to government entities appears to be a grift.

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The punishment is that one of the principals, Westinghouse Electric Company, has declared bankruptcy and 2 of the construction contractors, Chicago Bridge & Iron Company and Fluor, have been kicked out of the project.

Thats great news at least

Unfortunately, it's often the case that the executives who made the bad decisions of these companies escape with golden parachutes while the employees lose their jobs.

Yeah there is always some excuse when there is just another overdue and over budget nuclear power plant under construction...

You have the sibling Virgil C. Summer [1]. That led to the Nukegate scandal [2] and executives landing prison sentences instead of golden parachutes.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Gener...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal

If we just assume the over-budget of $14 billion that would give us 13 GW of solar, and nuclear fanboys still thinks nuclear is viable option? And the nuclear plant is only 2.3GW. Seriously nuclear has to die, it is ridiculously expensive even in the best case scenario, it's a no brainer.

"13 GW of solar" is going to have a way lower capacity factor, as well as a shorter life-span.

At the very least, you should compare life-cycle $/MWh, not $/GW.

The Energy Information Administration regularly produces forecasts for levelized cost of electricity ($/MWh). You can see the present forecast here, which makes projections for plants entering service in 2026 (see table 1b):

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....

Looking at the older report from 2018, we can see costs for plants entering service in 2022:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181227232223/https://www.eia.g...

In 2018 the LCOE for new nuclear built in 2022 was estimated at $92.60/MWh while that from solar PV was estimated at $63.20 (before tax credits) or $49.90 (after tax credits).

The newer report with projections for 2026 shows that both nuclear and solar PV get tax credits, and at that time the nuclear tax credit is actually larger. The after-tax LCOE is $30.43 for solar PV and $70.59 for nuclear.

The earliest report in this series was from 2016. The AP1000 reactors currently under construction in the US started building before 2016, back when solar was considerably more expensive. The decision to build new AP1000 reactors was economically rational given the then-current costs of solar and the then-projected costs of new reactors. The reactor projects went tremendously over budget and utility scale PV costs subsequently plummeted, so building new reactors in South Carolina today would be a much more dubious choice, but I don't fault the decisions made back then.

In 2020 in the United States, utility scale solar PV had a capacity factor of 24% while nuclear power had a 92% capacity factor:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Not to mention the amount of land required to generate that much power.

Generating solar or wind power does not take the land out of use.

Both are compatible with agriculture. Agricultural productivity under partial solar cover is higher than without, for less water input. Pasture is probably the easiest to make compatible, and there is a very great deal of pasture, although little of it is irrigated. The prospect of less irrigation need will drive solar onto more intensive cropland.

Maybe in an ideal world, but I think it would require way more coordination and upkeep than you are giving credit for in order to do that at the scale required. Way easier to maintain a couple dozen distributed nuke plants with wind and solar to handle daytime peaks and residential, personal use where appropriate.

What matters is cost, and the cost picture is crystal-clear: Nukes are very expensive, and not getting any less so. Solar/wind/storage cost is much lower and still plummeting.

It's a no brainer, right. Until you need to turn on the lights at night, that is.

Multiply every large project in the USA's budget by 3 and you won't get surprised anymore

$1 for construction, $2 for corruption. Enriching the corrupt pays long-term dividends -- in increased corruption. Rich, corrupt people buy politicians to seed more corrupt projects.

Solar and wind seem, thus far, relatively immune to corruption. Most storage methods should be, too. It seems to be because easy estimation of incremental cost leaves little scope for corruption.

> Solar and wind seem, thus far, relatively immune to corruption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra?oldformat=true

> Solyndra executives misled federal officials to obtain $535 million in government-backed loans, with the help of former President Barack Obama's White House.

I haven't heard of much large scale wind projects. Most smaller scale corruption happens at the local level and rarely makes the news.

"Relatively".

But the Wikipedia page does not in fact include any "misled federal officials" language, quoted above as if it were from there. It says, instead, "Ultimately, none of the investigations of Solyndra found any evidence of wrongdoing or undue political influence." Sometimes a business failure is just a business failure. I have not heard of any multi-billion dollar solar failures or cost overruns as are the norm for nukes.

Most wind projects are large scale, yet buy their turbines on the open market. Again, I have not heard of any big cost overruns or non-delivery.

Solar concentrator projects have not paid back investment because they have turned out to be uncompetitive, same as Solyndra, undercut by the staggering fall in cost of conventional photovoltaics. Their natural value would be for process heat, which I have not heard of being tried.

A lot of it is bad government specs. So the government lacks a good idea of what it needs in advance, but buys something anyway. Then any change costs extra money.

That's just regular anti-government FUD. In those specific cases, Westinghouse shat the bed so much it cost Toshiba, which acquired them, billions and almost bankruptcy ( Westinghouse did go bust).

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