What I find shockingly absent in this article is any commentary on budget and cost overruns. I'm definitely not anti-nuclear but it stands to reason that a comparison vs other forms of energy would've been wise to consider.
It is the first nuclear reactor in Europe for 15 years so not much working experience or available sub contractors.
Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that.
If nuclear energy should be considered, much more must be built more continuously.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
There's huge huge risk in choosing a particular design and building even one of it, because we don't know if it will be constructible the first time, and we don't know if future builds of the first design will be more or less expensive.
When each build is a $10B roll of the dice with variance of 2-3x of initial estimates, it's a bit difficult to find rational financial backers. Especially when there's not that much profit to be had from even a successful build. The risk reward is completely out of whack compared to the other options for carbon neutral energy.
Far too many people are generalizing from the French and American nuclear programs, both of which built lots of reactors in a comparatively short time and then were fear-mongered into a standstill by the fossil fuel lobby.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
"""In the third era of nuclear power construction in Japan, from 1980 to 2007, costs remain between ¥250,000/kW and ¥400,000/kW, representing an annual change of −1% to 1%. This period experienced relatively stable costs over 27 years."""
1970s nuclear safety standards, despite it all, were still better than the energy strategy the world adopted from 1970-2020. Killing off nuclear in search of a perfect power system was a stupid strategy, and failed. The only unfortunate point of karmic justice is that Europe ended up reliant on Russian gas and in an energy crisis as a reward for their stubbornness against making the technically obvious choice.
Well done Finland for even managing to get a reactor built in the face of all that.
Maybe you have some actual knowledge, but I have never found somebody who says that regulations are the problem but has any concrete suggestions for changing regulations. It's just a vague gut feeling. And in the case of France I doubt it applies at all.
Construction is not like manufacturing, it does not see continual productivity improvements like manufacturing does:
https://www.nist.gov/publications/measuring-and-improving-us...
As an energy source whose costs are primarily construction related, we would not expect to see it falling in cost over time. We would expect that energy sources whose costs are dominated by manufacturing to outcompete nuclear as time passes.
If they'd acted rationally, acknowledged Fukushima and moved on with trying to make their nuclear power cheaper instead letting ideology determine that part of their energy policy then they wouldn't be in the mess they are in. Instead they pushed ahead with renewables, ignored technical problems like reliability and have ended up looking like fools while literally paying a high price for the privilege. France continues to quietly plod away as a reliable European energy success story.
In France nuke-power is backed by gas (which produced 7.5% of the gridpower in 2020).
The sole reactor currently planned (Flamanville-3) is a complete disaster, more than 12 years behind schedule, it will cost at least 19.4 billion € (initial budget: 3.7 billion €).
It would be great to see an attempt to such battery solution that would cover the same amount of capacity as this plant, that can operate for at least several months without recharging, in Finish winter, and cost less than this plant and be built faster. That would check all the boxes, and if such technology already exist, people here should really put their investment money into it.
I don't think there is any reason to think it will be different for future ones if any. We'll see what happens for the British one (Hinkley Point C), but they already know there will be large delays and cost overrun.
Nuclear is just too big for a privatized energy market’s participants.
For me even seeing the Tesla Berlin factory delays makes me sad: in China already the second factory is being built while Germany is coming up with new arguments without looking at the cost/benefit ratio for EU of those delays.
Sadly NuScale seems to be struggling to meet timeline and cost targets, and there were some headlines last year about the sponsoring utility pulling out of the project. I'm rooting for them but it doesn't look good.
The RR project is still just on paper really, and is closer to a medium sized reactor than SMR. Maybe they've cracked the code? Maybe not, we'll see.
Every nuclear thread here people chime in with a reflexive "just build nuclear smarter" answer without actually addressing why every prior attempt at this has failed. A lot of people don't want to develop an understanding of the challenges more sophisticated than smugly blaming environmental activists, over regulation, etc.
Look at these projects from the prospective of potential private investment. Anyone doing basic due diligence is going to realize that the odds are stacked against a project hitting it's time and cost goals. Then you look at the trend lines for levelized cost of renewables + storage, and you realize that even in the best case scenario, within 2 decades you may be squeezed out of the market even if the efficiencies of scale and learning kick in.
Yup, exactly: And then there is a huge stink about this and no more are built for a good while, so the next one is a first one again. Over and over and over. Lather, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat...
When did Japan last build a nuclear reactor? I don't think any time recently.
South Korea used to be touted as a success at construction without massive overruns, but it turns out that it was largely a result or corruption and skimping on safety inspections:
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/s-korea-jails-nuclear-work...
As for China and Russia, we don't really have much insight to what they are doing as far as safety. China is seems to be successful at large scale construction projects in a way that we can not replicate in the west, so perhaps their numbers are reasonable for construction costs.
> If nuclear energy should be considered, much more must be built more continuously.
We would need entirely new designs unlike what has been built in the past. Both France and the US have negative learning rates when building the same reactor design multiple times, and that was 50 years ago when construction was a much more effective part of our economies.
I do not believe that nuclear is a smart energy source to pursue given our modern production capabilities. There's a bevy of nuclear startups trying smaller reactors that might be able to constrain construction costs. But in the past these designs have been rejected because of the loss of economy of scale, as being too expensive per watt.
Of the potential carbon neutral energy sources of the future, nuclear is one of the e least practical. It may supply a tiny fraction of our future power, maybe 10%, but without a major revolution soon on construction, our aging reactors will be shut down at end of life without any way to build more of them.
I agree that a gigantic shift is required and put my hopes into mass produced SMRs. It's gonna take time and money, yes, just like the shift to EVs and renewables.
Fossil fuels is still above 80% of global primary energy, nuclear 5% and renewables excluding hydro 2%.
I really don't think putting all eggs in the solar/wind basket is good. They should of course also get heavy investments but that doesn't have to exclude nuclear. We're gonna need everything we have to end the fossil era.
Even in the first nuclear build out in the US, large cost overruns were very common. Forbes magazine was famously critical of this in a 1985 cover article.
There's a reason the US stopped building NPPs back then and it wasn't green mind control.
Are they? Considering that their population is higher than the whole of North America + EU + Russia combined, wouldn't it be fair to compare it that way? Sure, it's one country as opposed to several, but still, the population plays a huge role in this "amazing construction at scale".
seems to me other factors like economics and government structure are more important, don't think a 4x larger US would be building faster and more cheaply
I'd say it's more fair to compare it to a region of equal population. People actually do stuff, and the more of them (especially educated ones) there are, the more stuff will get done.
People are the biggest resource these days, which western countries realized a long time ago (or maybe it's the other way around, western countries created this system?). Hence, immigration heavily in favour of the best from other parts of the world.
And higher concentrations of people are more productive and effective. Think cities vs rural areas.
After accounting for that and comparing, if your region (clump of people) is still losing, then you might have a real problem and should take notes from the other group.
Germany had spectacular delays and overruns for a new airport for Berlin That too doesn't mean Europe forgot how to build airports.
This is also the nuclear plant (Taishan) that was in the news last year regarding damaged fuel rods.
That's the output from the experts in France so far.
Areva was basically shuttered and written off as a loss during all this. A part of the company only still exists as part of this Finland deal.
Rest was covered by Areva, since the cost overruns were of their own failure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
It took over 4 times as long to built as pitched, and over 3 times as expensive.
Everyone doing comparison calculations with renewables, remember that.
> Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that.
China in particular plans to build ~250 new reactors over the next few years, most like new HTG reactors based on the pebble bed technology Germany sold to them when they abandoned their next-gen nuclear plans.
Russia has reactor building capabilities that are still current but their domestic needs are stagnating so said capability could decay as they don't actually need to build modern reactors at this time.
Japan has a similar problem to Russia in that post-Fukishima there isn't domestic demand for nuclear reactors. However they are building reactors for other countries, in particular I think they are planning to build ~20 good sized reactors in India.
It would be more honest to cite the much smaller number that have actually broken ground. Nobody knows how many of those will be completed, or how many of those completed will be fueled or operated continuously, or where operated actually mainly generate power, as opposed to generating plutonium and tritium for weapons.
What do you mean there isn't enough fuel? Not enough pellets/pebbles? Well ofcourse.. there is only 2 operational reactors right now... not enough uranium? Yeah no. There is way more than enough uranium to fuel their projected fleet and it's not like they are building it tomorrow, it's probably going to take until around 2050 to complete.
China has a track record of saying they will do something and then actually doing it, I'm inclined to believe they will make good on that number.
I get that people don't like China but lets be serious, no-one else is actually as serious about nuclear power as them right now.
Any organization as big as the Chinese gov't makes lots of plans, and changes them as conditions change. It is one thing to be prepared to build a lot of nukes, entirely another to start building them, and entirely a third to finish them. The last will depend on conditions in the world, and of political alliances at the time.
And regret about it? The French are in much better position compared to the German with that low-cost power enthusiasm yet still heavily dependent on burning fossil.
My current feeling is that if they stick to their plan and build these smaller 600MW reactors that can mostly be built in factories and assembled on-site it's going to be a vastly different economic proposition than existing "big nuclear" that has been attempted in the West.
Of course there is no way to know exactly how it plays out but the inputs look good.
The source is a Bloomberg article ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... ) which states that the boss of Chine General Power corp. announced his plans 200GW for 2035, nothing more. Admitting that it is an official governmental announcement (it doesn't seem so(?)) and given that China already has 50GW, that's maybe 100GW new (way less than 150 standard reactors).
Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), and 1200GW planned for 2030. In 2020 China added 71,6GW windturbine power. Even considering the load factors the picture is pretty clear.
China has been constructing a lot of new nuclear power plants over the last 15 years -- estimated at ~12 GW in 2013, but now closer to 50 GW as of 2021. Wikipedia says 50 plants as of 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China.
Anecdotally I've heard that temporary pollution control measures during the 2008 olympics gave the populace and decision makers a taste of reduced air pollution, and gave increased political willpower to invest in solar, wind, and nuclear power generation.
This isn't new; historically, the first couple of examples of any given nuclear power plant design have typically seen major overruns.
* The overall design must be done before construction starts, also no room for regulatory changes. Waterfall is better than Agile for nuclear.
* Experienced project management, work force and supply chain.
* Build many reactors on the same site and don't use a new reactor design.
* Work force is overall cheaper and possibly also more productive in Asia.
More or less the same as for everything else, the more you do it the better and cheaper it gets but it requires a lot of upfront costs.
> Any insight into the why?
At least as for China, one gets the feeling (from recent news about COVID-19 hospitals being built in a week, the world's largest dam in a few years, etc) that with a population of over a billion, they do it Pharaonic Egypt pyramid-building style: Throw a few thousand engineers and a few hundred thousand construction workers at anything, and you will get something built.
and in every place connected by water to Fukushima.
That's the reason it has struggled for traction.
e.g. Depending on whose point of view you read, solar/wind prices either includes or not: subsidies, storage, land, weather, green label costs passed on to customers, interest rates, etc. Coal prices either includes or not: labor, imports, duties, mining, environmental costs, health costs, etc.
Lately I've come to a conclusion that we can make any of these methods appear equal, higher or lower by shifting the books.
Atleast I'm happy that this article is focusing only on the benefits and outcome, rather than invent winners and losers.
It's depressing to think there's a growing army of geeks who have given up on science, rationality and objective reality just because they got sucked in by some propaganda and tied their identity a bit too firmly to it to ever escape.
Politics and the funding of state actions seems to be enacted highly subjectively according to power plays and vested interests, with minimal impact from rational geeks.
This is the defining issue of our times in my opinion, the reason climate change is the barely mitigated disaster it's turning into.
We only get a small fraction of the possible benefits of science as a race, because so much of our potential is wasted or actively worked against.
But literally every reactor ever built depended more on government extraction and concentration of capital (i.e., politics) than on market forces, making it all even less predictable.
But maybe if remotely applicable, an optimistic view can be: that some of those geeks, some of the times care about seeing progress happen, rather than the means.
Throwing your hands up and declaring the whole thing unknowable just because (I assume) the expert consensus is coming up with a different answer than you were confidently told and believed about renewables for decades by talking heads in your media bubble seems a weak cop out.
Either prove to everyone that it's a big conspiracy and you were right all along, or convince yourself that what you were told previously was a big conspiracy. One of these options is true.
I think you should read the thread and context of the reply again.
Just to make the misunderstanding clear: Any *green energy* that takes us out of coal/peat/oil is progress. You don't have to repeat as if there is a conspiracy. I was replying to a comment asking for comparison with other sources, saying that *progress to green energy is way more important* than comparisons against brown energy, no matter even if said comparisons paint coal/peat/oil in favourable or unfavorable terms. It's exactly the same you said, burning peat doesn't make sense today no matter the cost, and that's exactly the same I'm saying.
What do power execs care if they leave behind ruins decades down the road? They will have already made their money and enjoyed it.
Areva/Orano being a french state owned (mostly) company, this is probably largely paid for by the French tax payer.
For wind, we're too small country - there are always days without any wind. There are even days without any wind in nearby countries included.
Not 24/7.
Political, because it should already be banned.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
still cleaning up mess at ranger (which has impacted on a dual-listed world heritage national park) and rum jungle (there's a class action of the few surviving workers + their families whose cohort have suffered cancers)
notably still operating is olympic dam, where the huge volumes of radioactive tailings literally spill out on the surrounding land, representing an entirely unmanaged environmental hazard.
uranium mining is unclean unsafe and unwanted
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/rolls-royce-submits-...