Quite a lot of repetition in the text.
Why wouldn't the learning curve apply to nuclear power? There the fuel cost is almost negligible. I think the large unit size hampers learning - less iterations per decade.
Why wouldn't the learning curve apply to nuclear power? There the fuel cost is almost negligible. I think the large unit size hampers learning - less iterations per decade.
You would think so.
Which is why nuclear's apparent negative learning curve in the west is such a surprise. https://archive.thinkprogress.org/does-nuclear-power-have-a-...
"Apparently negative learning curve" means from the raw data it is each plant is getting more expensive to build. Worse, when they analyse it, the main driver behind the cost increases doesn't appear to be government regulation or politics. It's all about construction and supply issues.
I can't help but think that in post industrial societies, maybe we are getting worse at building things.
My understanding is that the reason construction and supply costs is so high is because we go so long between building new ones that the process has to essentially be re-invented. That nuclear does not benefit from economies of scale. One could argue that this here is coupled with government and politics given that if the approval rate is low and people fight them, then it drives the cost up. And on the other side, that's why they were so much cheaper when we first built them and why they were cheap for France. There were lots of orders and so there was a benefit from scale.
And no one ever gives back any of the money.
I suspect it’s not so much reinventing rather repricing
High level nuclear waste is not something you can responsibly lock up in a vault and forget about for 200,000 years. What ever is done with it, where ever it is put, it will need some monitoring for 200,000 years.
What are those future generations going to think of us?
Will they characterise this as: "The Age of Greed"? Maybe the "Age of Stupid"?
Reprocessing only really helps if you can feed the Pu into fast reactors that can more effectively consume the actinides. And France has given up on its fast reactor program.
It is ONE barrel PER YEAR for an operating reactor. That is a non-issue.
So greedy, selfish, and irresponsible.
There is no place on the planet that we can be confidant nuclear waste can be stored for 200,000 years with no monitoring.
This article makes a similar argument: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-pow...
Nuclear will never be cost competitive unless they can use the same turbines gas and coal plants use. And that is of course what most GenIV reactors do.
What nuclear needs to do is go to something radical, like supercritical CO2 turbines. But that involves a large cost and delay to mature those, and it may be too late. Perhaps it can be combined with the CO2 turbine technology for the Allam cycle (oxyfuel combustion of gas in CO2 for zero marginal cost CO2 separation.)
It's a mystery to me why the CO2 turbines haven't gone forward? The talk has been there for 15 years.
And yeah, a CO2 based turbine will be better, but those are not commercially available.
Supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle seems to be a good candidate.