Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy
constructionphysics.substack.com
constructionphysics.substack.com
Everyone assumes that anyone hesitant about Nuclear power is focussed on the environmental or safety concerns, but that is wrong. The costs (and cost overruns) of the construction and maintenance of Nuclear reactors have been enough reason on their own to be bearish on Nuclear.
I'm hopeful that new technologies, such as small nuclear reactions that can be built in a factory, will address this.
Environmental and safety regulations are supposed to be explanations for this rise in cost, not rival explanations to "cost is the issue" (since they take that as given).
Broadly, construction is the singular industry where productivity hasn't improved with modern technology.
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/sketch-of-a-theor...
If you want those reasons, go for it. Iran for instance is pursuing at least one of these goals when it works towards nuclear "power". Just don't expect affordable electricity at the end...
- Nuclear power plants are very complex. They are more "engineered" than "constructed", with hundreds of kilometers of tubes and wires. Pouring the concrete is the easy part.
- Nuclear power plants deal with an incredibly dangerous environment: high pressures, high temperatures, radioactivity, hazardous chemicals. Everything has to be tested, re-tested, and certified. Many parts will be near impossible to replace once it enters production, and the plant is supposed to be operational for decades.
- Nuclear power plants are safety-critical. Contrary to many other structures of similar complexity, things can get way worse than a big explosion. They have the potential to contaminate the site (or even the surrounding country) for decades or centuries. Failure is simply not acceptable.
- Safety regulations have been getting stricter over the years, because supposedly "100% safe" plants keep having accidents and the population is not very happy about that.
The existing stock of nuclear power plants is an offshoot of several military programs. The most common design is pretty much a submarine power plant on steroids, which turned out to be less than ideal. Things like "safety" and "profit" were almost seen as a suggestion more so than a requirement.
Newly-built power plants are required to incorporate over 50 years of innovation, but it turns out almost nobody has the skills to actually build them. They have simply gotten too complex to construct!
The ones attempted recently in South Carolina and Georgia cost so much because people in a position to block building them want it that way. Once a nuke project starts, a torrent of money starts flowing. Everybody with a stake expects a share, and none want it ever to end. Finishing a plant would plug that flow. If it looks like the flow will dry up regardless, they might deliver something at the end.
We see the same process with urban tunnels and big military procurements. It is all perfectly legal. It is probably not fixable.
Thus far, wind and solar projects have mostly avoided it, maybe in part because their legitimate costs are easy to estimate.
Existing nukes also cost more than renewables to operate, because they actually have operating costs. Big steam turbines, in particular, need regular overhauls. So, it is hard for anything with a steam turbine to compete with something that has none. Reactors need also operation, inspections, refueling, security, compliance monitoring... the list goes on.
Solar panels might need to be dusted off, or replaced. The worst that can happen to a wind turbine is to catch fire.
Not being a lawyer and all that, would some of this holding of the hands-out not qualify as some sort of grift or worse? Are there not laws already in place for this stuff? Is it a case of it being too hard to prove so no prosecutions are brought?
Practically speaking sure, but all one needs to do is hide the grift behind a veneer of altruism and people[0] lap it up. Also half the time it is the lawmakers behind the grift. Do the phrases: “Think of the children“, “we need an environmental impact report“, or “This is a building of historical significance“ ring a bell? Behind each of them is an entity(ies) looking to advance their interest, which is often, but not always, profit from the increased diligence required or profit from the obstruction and the induced scarcity.
[0]The voting electorate, anyway.
Francis Fukuyama uses the term "vetocracy" for our government. So many layers, so many checks and balances. Some of them were even a good idea at the time (eg in response to abusers like Robert Caro).
Every petty tyrant or crank has to be bought off, rolled over, or buried under. That takes time, resources, lawyers, political capital, stamina, tenacity.
I'm not even so sure vetocracy is a wholly bad thing, in principle. Of course people impacted by projects should be considered, heard, and hopefully accommodated. But, as others have already stated, vetocracy has been weaponized to thwart all progress, regardless of how much popular support is behind them.
For instance, we need expand our power grid, roughly 3x bigger. The challenge is our current patchwork of veto points (local, county, state, regional, national). So someone(s) will have to expend huge political capital to overhaul the regulatory and permitting system. Or we simply won't reach our goal for net zero carbon emissions.
When I mentioned "grift or worse", extortion is what I was thinking of but just unable to use my brain to get to extortion. So thanks for getting me there.
Of course, the more persuasion you need, the more it costs, and the more backing you need. So it is usually better to budget less and plan on overruns, instead. And, finishing on time would mean cutting off all those backers; thus, the schedule is overrun, too.
Thing is, most things somebody wants to spend $billions in public money on shouldn't proceed.
Their core backup safety feature of being roughly bird shaped requires only a few moving parts, none of which are operating at extreme temperature or require cooling.
No, the first post is correct - safety is not the issue. We build keep building dams, and dam failures have killed far, far more people than nuclear. Other comments about nimby are also off the mark. People whose properties are flooded hate dams, nimby's force delays measuring decades, yet we keep building dams.
The comment you are responding contains the answer to the riddle it posed:
> a thousand of them are in the air right this second.
If the one factory could build 1000 nuclear reactors, complexity would not be an issue there either. And I'm sure after building 1000 of them, the price would not so much as drop as plummet. Which is why small nuclear reactors built in factories are such a common meme.
But the first 100 of those small nuclear reactors will be hideously expensive based on the quotes we have from people who've actually tried to do it - far more than a couple of big plants generating the same output. And the big plants already being crushed by cost overruns.
Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them. That seems to be the only way it could happen, because after decades of refusals I think we can safely say the banks aren't interested in funding a technology that turns out energy 100% more expensive than current competitors.
> Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them.
The thing is none of these people actually want nuclear power. They either want to redirect resources which would make fossil fuels irrelevant or feast forever off of the public teat whilst pretending to build a power plant.
The forces stopping nuclear power have very little to do with safety or greens or nimbys. It's a combination of their cost and of the power fossil fuels have. It just so happens that the fossil fuel interests are inadverently on the side of continuing to have human habitable land by virtue of leveraging the safety issue for their own greed.
Ironically they've probably hastened their own demise because if they hadn't forced the regulation we'd probably be too busy cleaning up nuclear disasters to think about weaning off of coal.
As stated does sound a bit pompous, but at the core, it's not inaccurate
Total meltdown to a China Syndrome with the slag melting its way to the water table is pretty much the worst I can imagine.
Fast reactors may be necessary for a fully nuclear powered world, because the uranium runs out too quickly without breeding. And 233U or plutonium skate much closer to the edge of prompt supercriticality, since they produce about half the delayed neutrons of 235U.
* Technology makes repetitive operations cheaper. You build a factory for hundred million dollars, make a billion gadgets on it, and every gadget costs you ten cents to make. Nuclear projects lack the economy of scale: even the Navy is going to order reactors by a dozen, and civil power plant reactors may see even fewer installations per model. Thus the huge costs of the R&D and the factory are amortized over but a few reactors, making each of them very expensive.
* Due to small production scale, various custom materials needed for nuclear reactors, like special steels, are much more expensive than more widely used materials.
Nuclear is now in a position similar to solar cells 15 years ago: a promising technology which is too expensive due to small scale and bespoke nature of their production. It took a decade of betting on them, pouring money into them, and giving various discounts to the customers to get where we are now, with solar panels which are efficient, affordable, and available. I suppose nuclear tech would need the same to become cost-efficient. France did / does something along these lines; the US does not.
...In the opposite direction, but about the same magnitude.
Unlike solar 15 years ago, nuclear has been around 60 years already and received huge amounts of subsidies (much more than solar, excluding all the extra military subsidies). So what is fundamentally different now that would change the essentially linear scaling to an exponential scaling and why should we not invest into the tech where we see ongoing exponential scaling of cost already with no indication of slowing (solar and wind)?
Renewables involve larger numbers of decoupled systems, where failures of parts don't propagate to shut down the whole thing. If that PV module fails, or that wind turbine is struck by lightning and catches fires, the rest of the system goes on as before.
It all depend on how one want to perceive the system. A wind turbine struck by lightning might not propagate too much, but a poor weather prediction can have massive propagation for the system as a whole.
The grid is also a resilient system where individual parts can fail independently. Weather prediction is correlated, but has no effect on the cost of individual parts.
So people like Dyson, who learned calculus by spending his Christmas vacation working his way through a textbok for fun, were no longer available to design reactors. So progress on, for example, thorium reactors ended in the US in 01966 (thorium BWR is from 01960, thorium LWBR is from 01962, thorium MSR is from 01964, thorium HTGR is from 01966). In other countries it took a few more years. Teller, who worked on TRIGA with Dyson, seems to have stopped working on reactor design in 01960. The elves left Middle Earth. So hospitals still use TRIGA today for nuclear medicine.
I don't see the key issue here as being that Dyson and Teller were brilliant, though they were brilliant. Rather, it's that Dyson and Teller were curious and playful. I think curious and playful people exploring the possibilities of nuclear reactors will come up with many improvements, even if they are the ordinary kind of stupid people. It might take them five times as long as it would have taken people like Dyson, and there might be more accidental deaths along the way, but they will get there. But today the occasional curious and playful person who tries to investigate nuclear reactors is likely to get arrested, even if they pose less risk to their neighbors than Marie Curie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Handl (or assassinated by the Mossad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...) and so the Navy is still using reactors very similar to the ones they used 60 years ago.
I see questions like "the technology available has improved, so why have costs risen?" as symptomatic of the worldview that anything can be bought. Teller, Dyson, and Handl were not optimizing their life decisions to maximize their earning power; they were curious about the world and wanted to preserve liberal democracy. You can't buy that. If you announce that you are going to spend a lot of money on nuclear reactor development, it will attract people who optimize their life decisions to maximize their earning power, not people who are curious about the world.
You maximize your earning power by owning things, not by learning things or figuring things out. People who optimize their life decisions to maximize their earning power will be no good at ferreting out possible improvements that can be made to nuclear reactors, because you don't get paid any more for making breakthroughs than you do for just plodding along.
Less, in fact, because nine tenths of the time when you're doing the kind of things that lead to breakthroughs, the things you try don't work, so you aren't delivering anything of value to anybody.
The other issue is that "Why can't we build nuclear power plants?" is a subset of "Why can't we build?" and I think the answer to that is basically that people aren't free to build. But nuclear power plants are probably the kind of building that people are least free to build.
It’s, as I understand it, to draw attention to the briefness of our lives and contextualize the decisions we make that have effects long beyond “now”.
Personally, I think it’s kind of weird to base it upon the supposed birth year of a religious figure who may not have even lived, but standards are useful, I suppose.
The reactor was designed in the span of a few months. They started in the summer of 01956. The first one was commissioned and built in May of 01958. And it ran until 1997, steadily producing 250 MW with occasional "pulses" up to 1,000 MW, the entire time.
Let's take a minute to appreciate that. They went from design to implementation in less than 2 years, that's lightning fast even in startup terms. And their design has never malfunctioned, ever. AFAICT, there are 66 of these reactors out there in the world that have operated for nearly 7 decades with 0 incidents. Some of them are even true to form and are operated by teenagers!
And I suspect that's the real reason why nuclear power is so expensive. While regulatory burdens, subsidies, and general corruption do indeed explain the exponential cost increases for nuclear power, the truth is that these are proximate causes. The distal cause is simple; the reactors suck. We've been designing them wrong for decades now, and we need to make rethink them from the ground up.
Luckily, I'm not the only person who thinks that. Far more smarter people have been bringing the fun back to nuclear engineering, and we are finally getting a series look at concepts like pebble bed reactors.
I hope that someday we'll have forever batteries and power sources that are small, self-contained, and can be carted for use anywhere, including space.
Achieving this goal requires everything from the kinds of modular designs NuScale https://www.nuscalepower.com/ and Terrapower https://www.terrapower.com/ are working on to Zeno Power's radioisotope systems, https://www.zenopower.com/
I am excited for the future again.
The only group I know of trying to do this is https://hb11.energy/, whose plan is to laser-initiate an avalanche of boron-11/hydrogen "fusion" and throw the resulting alpha particles up a million-volt potential difference. Though it's not guaranteed, that might end up being cheaper than a steam turbine and generator.
Without such improvements, nuclear energy is only really appealing in environments where PV and wind aren't an option — like submarines, aircraft carriers, Antarctic research stations, deep-space probes, and Scotland — or as a hedge against unforeseen difficulties in scaling up grid-scale energy storage and the like.
But I might be wrong about where the costs in coal plants come from, and I'd be very grateful to find that out.
I really appreciated your "On Apple’s “Expanded Protections for Children”," by the way.
Evidently naval reactors are a lot better at this, though.
From what I've heard the amount of storage is not very large if you assume sufficiently large grids and the total system cost is expected to be lower than what we currently pay for electricity.
Power plants are commonly depreciated over 30 or even 40 years. Electricity consumption in the US doubled during the 01960s, and it doubled in PRC during the 02010s. If the transport sector in the US went all-electric, that would double electrical consumption again even without increasing energy use.
How can you predict what fraction of your users will be using electric vehicles 15 years from now, and whether they'll charge them in the daytime or at night? That depends on, among other things, whether they'll go back to working in offices, whether the offices will have chargers, and how much cheaper it will be for them to charge during the day than at night. And that, in turn, depends on what kind of time-of-use rate schedules you can get the public utility commission to approve. Will people insulate their houses more so they don't need to heat them at night? That depends not only on the rate schedule but their future expectations of the rate schedule, as well as what their house buyers' expectations of the rate schedule. How much will superinsulating your walls raise the house's sale price?
How about home TCES — if daytime electricity is sufficiently cheap, such forms of energy storage might become popular as a cheaper alternative to superinsulation, and maybe suppress the demand for nighttime electricity further in cold areas; but we don't have any mass-market experience with them right now. Will building codes, or insurance underwriters, impede the wide adoption of TCES after the first homeowner files a massive insurance claim to replace their hardwood floor ruined by a calcium-chloride spill? Will dirt-cheap rail-shipped carnallite drop the price of TCES further than calcium chloride possibly could? Will new carnallite deposits be found, closer to large cities?
How about the future of industry? Mass PV rollout will drop the price of energy dramatically, so industrial processes that are currently unprofitable because they use too much energy will become profitable. They might outcompete more energy-efficient incumbents.
The first example of this might be aluminum replacing steel in more and more uses; today it's so much more expensive than steel that it's only used in places where its lighter weight is a big advantage, but with lower energy costs (and shorter shipping distances) it might replace steel for many more purposes. Minimills recycling existing steel might be able to fulfill the entire steel demand for quite a while — steel mills that smelt iron from ore would shut down entirely, and the 30-year-depreciated power plants built to supply those mills might find themselves without the demand they were built for. And this might happen by 02039. This is maybe the most predictable outcome of much lower prices for electrical energy, but probably won't be the most dramatic one.
So shifts in electrical demand will depend on cultural change, diffusion of innovations, regulatory capture, consumer expectations, and cost-driven substitution in the radically changed economic landscape.
The last time the price of energy dropped so dramatically might have been Watt's steam-engine in 01776. The dislocations in society that resulted would have been very hard to predict.
This is a much smaller gap than I had expected, so maybe the switch to electrically reduced iron (directly, as in electrolytic iron, or indirectly) won't be as big a change as I thought.
The earlier series of the blog post we are discussing actually talks about that a significant fraction of the cost of a nuclear plant is the thermal power plant part, which is the same as for a coal plant for example.
Moreover, actually having to use a reactor for power generation significantly increases the complexity of the design, you suddenly need to heat water, which means two different water cycles which mustn't contaminate each other... And having water involved makes things more tricky anyway because of corrosion...
Obviously, the vast majority of nuclear power plants are of the suck type. If you want a regulatory blank slate you are going to have to shut them all down and replace them with good power plants. The regulations are there to deal with the "suck" of the nuclear industry. Get rid of the suck and you will make the nuclear industry very unhappy, in other words the legacy nuclear power industry is exactly the problem that drives regulations and costs up.
Generally construction does not significantly benifit from economies of scale, while fabrication does. Now we could build lots of small scale reactors, but while construction costs might come down (so far completely unproven) running costs most definitely would go up. You don't want to run even a small scale nuclear reactor without qualified staff, security etc..
Of course you may have only became bearish on nuclear when the costs got high, but there are a large number of people who were bearish before then, which is what made costs high.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Look at Germany. They are the first to really destruct the first power plant and it will take 20 to 25 years. Everything has to be checked.
Germany could handle their power load, but not theirs + france.
> The fact that South Korea is the only country to exhibit this trend has led some experts to speculate that the cost data (which comes directly from the utility and hasn’t been independently audited) has been manipulated and we shouldn’t draw conclusions from it.
In my opinion, rather than spending the many years and billions of dollars on regaining the edge in nuclear, we should expand the capacity of the cheap and clean energy sources we have access to today.
We don't currently have a viable complete renewable solution. Nuclear is much better for the planet than fossil fuels and is the only option to bridge the gap required to operate the current renewables.
That's a strong declaration without any solution in sight for nuclear power-generated waste: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-waste
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
Because the lobbies underlying nuclear power in solid fuel rod processing is a lucrative government boondoggle.
All the nuke proponents say "we are losing all the old guard!". I actually think this is a feature, nuclear needs to be reformulated and reassessed from the ground up without all the political and military biases, and once they have stable cost profiles in wind/solar to actually target.
If they can actually make a competitive reactor once wind/solar stabilizes, likely at 1/2 to 1/3 the current real dollar cost.
And then, you nicely suggest that all pro-nuclear people somehow _must be shills_ (as if, uhh, nuclear people just love destroying the world, I guess?) that really is ridiculous and not a too charitable reading of the opponents.
Do you know that Weinberg and the ORNL people advocated for increased safety in the nuclear industry (which their reactor design had fundamental advantages over all other designs)?
The organizational religion of nuclear power was that it was safe and had no chance of failure. You can choose to disagree on my characterization of the nuclear industry, but the political wars with "The Greens" has counter-radicalized nuclear proponents.
ORNL and Weinberg saying their nuclear reactor was superior on safety leads to the inevitable follow-up implication for anyone listening that other nuclear reactors... WERE NOT.
Thus the ORNL director for MSR was sent to forced retirement/fired (fired from a government job!), ORNL funding was totally axed. Kirk Sorensen claims that MSR research was forbidden in public universities at a policy level, so no one would touch it. Sorensen is a pretty rabid LFTR advocate, but the fact that only in 2022 after 60 years, finally SOMEONE is doing a research reactor that fits in a closet? The fact there has been ZERO research programs in MSR tells me that Sorensen is probably right about the prohibition.
I believe that the Military was also involved in this, because they needed their isotopes for weapons, or to maintain popular support for nuclear weapons. You can't have these people undermining public confidence in civilian nuclear power, what follows after that is the hated peacenik "Greens" then getting nuclear weapons banned.
Anyway, yes it does seem conspiratorial, but with nuclear tech which required so much governmental push/funding in the beginning, and now has SO MUCH regulatory apparatus above it that was an organizational outgrowth of the original nuclear research government agencies, YES, there is a historical and effective bias against the ORNL design.
Some of that is practical: the ORNL and LFTR designs are totally different that the entirety of the world's solid fuel designs. It would require AEC regulatory fasttracking, and a ton of budget. And if something doesn't have government funding in the nuclear world, it is DEAD.
Anyway, China has a prototype MSR reactor coming online. Oh look! MSR projects are coming out of the woodwork everywhere! What a coincidence. Los Alamos is doing materials research! Some Texas university got clearance to boot the first US research reactor in fifty years! Huh, funny how that works.
So yeah, sure it might be conspiratorial or uncharitable, but this was probably a trillion dollars in budgeting (inflation adjusted) over 20-30 years that was at stake.
I know it seems like I'm anti-nuclear. I think fission power is so effing cool. I think LFTR is the coolest design I've ever seen. I also see that nuclear is fundamentally not competitive with the current approaches, and I don't think that is NIMBYism or excessive regulatory at the core: I think the designs don't scale and issues with nuclear waste and safety are offloaded, avoided, corner-cut, etc.
And if nuclear has to compete with solar/wind, those "hidden costs" would be handled even more poorly. So a reactor design that uses 99% of fuel, is meltdown proof, scalable, and can even reprocess old spent rod waste, well, to me that or something that also lives up to that is the real path forward. Scalable (i.e. closet sized) seems to also be a fundamental requirement to competitive economics, although I read a good post on how big honking reactors are what are needed to make the economies of scale work, not small reactors, but I personally suspect that view is polluted with existing huge-effing-solid-fuel-dome reactor design bias.
I'm just a dumb fuck programmer that reads this stuff in his spare time. I would love a cogent response from a nuclear scientist that knows the ORNL design in depth to give me really good reasons why it isn't commercially viable. But again I think the entire nuclear industry and university feeder system is all solid fuel rod, because it's the only practical/career/feasible thing to study. But ORNL had a working reactor. Was it commercializable? Would it stand up to industrial/production use? Are molten salts truly impossible to contain long term? Is neutron degradation of the liquid fuel's holding tank too problematic? Are the chemical separation processes too hard to do economically?
Anyway, MSRs would be an industrial paradigm shift. It's a total rebuild of the entire nuclear power industry. It's every incumbent nuclear power interest being shown the door, or having a time clock. It's overcoming whatever instiutional echo the Nixon Administration left when it assassinated the ORNL MSR in a massive budgetary knife fight. What could possibly cause a sea change?
Oh right, the Chinese are ahead of us in it.
It's so funny, the Chinese really are the new evil empire, but they are the fundamental economic and investment driver that produced competitive solar and the batteries that will power the mainstream EV revolution. And they are the ones that have a functional MSR coming online.
Well, whatever works.
I'm not aware of any significant battery based storage system deployed at scale that solves this problem. There are some large battery banks but none even close to the scale required. It's a hard problem as it would require a huge increase in global manufacturing.
I'd like to be wrong here. I'd love it if it was possible to build an affordable grid based on 100% renewable generation. It will be possible one day. I look forward to that day.
Most of the storage, in the end, will not be batteries. Most existing storage is pumped hydro, because the dams were already there. There are lots of alternatives: underground or underwater compressed air, liquified air, underground hydrogen, tanked ammonia, buoyancy, mineshaft gravity.
Most places will keep a few days' ammonia that they can burn where they do NG today, and order more if it looks like they may need it, and can't book transmission line power. Other times, they will synthesize ammonia for sale.
Regional storage of underground hydrogen is already under construction. Hydrogen synthesis efficiency is now well over 90%, up from 60% very recently.
Until ammonia synthesis ramps up in the '30s, they will burn NG at need, without apology.
From what source? Hydrocarbons?
Anyway that efficiency will not be important.
Storage as a separate business is not viable beyond a few years, so investment is limited. Original producers of energy will have their own storage, and prices will level out. Excess generation capacity (e.g. noon) after recharging storage will be devoted to synthesizing liquid fuels and desalination, which serve unlimited demand.
By the time there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge storage, storage will be very, very cheap. Right now, it costs more, so money produces much better results building generation capacity and factories for storage. As the factories are completed, production ramps up, and costs fall.
There's also no grid in the world that runs on wind/solar+storage, it's obvious from looking at California that it would take 20+ years to arrive there.
Before you have built a thing, you have to build it. After you build it, you have it. Building will be a big job, but nowhere near as big as building nukes instead would have been.
The good news is that renewables start displacing CO2 emission almost immediately after ground is broken.
It would be stupid to build storage without renewable capacity to charge it from. You spend on that first.
EVs are still at, what, 1% of cars on the road, and only a small percentage of dozens of transport modes by air, land, sea, from single person motorcycles to busses or even container ships.
Grid storage still basically is an "EV batteries on land". This is going to change as well.
WHich is funny because the fundamental issue any nuclear plant has to deal with isn't the current price of alternative energy + grid storage. The REAL problem is that in ten years when the thing comes online, what will the price of alternatives be then given the cost improvement curves of the last decade?
I would hazard a guess that alt energy will be half of natural gas turbine by then (and natural gas turbine is already untouchably cheaper than nuclear), and probably 2/3 the cost with functional grid storage.
I believe home solar will be cheaper than grid natural gas turbine in 10 years too. And that's without carbon taxes.
A lot of countries are already pretty far down the path of going carbon neutral. Mostly without building or planning to build nuclear plants. They are a lot less necessary than some nuclear proponents would have people believe.
Energy storage is actually a fairly simple problem. There are at this point dozens of different ways that are being used commercially to store energy. Including of course a wide variety of battery types, pumped hydro and other gravity based systems, thermal storage, synthesizing hydrogen and other gases/liquids that can be burned later, etc. The main challenge is not storage but cheap storage. Or cheaper storage as combined generation and storage bids are fairly common these days and already way cheaper than nuclear already. Scaling the deployment of these solutions over the next few decades will drop cost further.
And of course energy can also be moved around via cables over long distances. The main challenge is not just generating enough power but getting it to where it is needed. Long distance cables even out local fluctuations in solar and wind performance.
If you extend the demonstrated empirical experience curve for solar assuming PV dominates world energy production, cost might decline to just $0.01/kWh.
BTW, nuclear isn't going to power the world with current thermal reactors (there's not enough uranium), so hand wringing over storage should be matched by that for the more difficult problem of making breeder reactors safe and affordable. So far, they've been more expensive than current commercial reactors, and they suffer from safety issues due to Pu and 233U producing fewer delayed neutrons, so they operate closer to prompt criticality.
(Unlike breeders, storage is actually getting installed on grids around the world these days, and costs are coming down.)
Also could you point me to any meaningful and scalable storage implemented or being implemented anywhere in the world? Also what about materials used for solar and wind? Both requires insane amounts of material where a very significant part of that is rare earth.
As far as I've seen the best bet for wind so far is power to x . X because we haven't figured out of it should be hydrogen, ammonia or something else, both of which would be very impractical as we've got no infrastructure to support it and it's also very inefficient in reality you'd loose like 80% of the energy generated so you'd have to build so much more capacity.
Operating a 3 GW(th) LWR requires about 200 tonnes/year of natural uranium.
6000 such reactors (needed to produce the 18 TW of primary energy currently used by the global economy) would therefore consume 1.2 million tonnes of U per year. The resource listed on that page would last five years.
So, either much larger uranium resource would be needed, or breeding would be needed, or both.
As for your other questions:
The first skates close to the position that no storage solution can ever be built unless it has already been built. This sort of reactionary attitude is just mindlessly obstructive, and does not reflect an attitude of constructive discussion. One can look at various storage technologies and see they scale very well.
As for materials in solar/wind systems: they are materials that are used in general society at much larger scale. The world makes 2 billion tonnes/year of steel, for example. If global industrial society can produce these materials, it can produce them for the renewable energy systems needed to power it. If it can't, then not even nuclear can save it.
Recycling fuel from LWRs to make MOX is not the same thing. It would only extend that 5 years by a couple of additional years.
Seawater uranium extraction has been demonstrated at the gram scale. It would have to be scaled up by something close to a factor of a trillion to power the world. Also, powering a single 1 GW(e) reactor would require a collector field on 170 square kilometers of continental shelf, in an area with good ocean currents. The levelized power/area would be considerably worse than PV.
I will add that running a reactor on bred isotopes (233U, various Pu isotopes) presents an additional problem. All of these have considerably lower delayed neutron fraction than 235U. This means the reactors will be operating much closer to prompt criticality. One could resort to subcritical reactors, but that means adding a 100 MW (or so) 1 GeV linac to each to add the needed extra neutrons. And of course no such accelerator driven reactors have ever been built.
I’m afraid this is only true for the US, let’s not forget almost all of Europe is as north as Canada or north US.
In order to compare the cost we cannot just compare the price to install a certain capacity. You must also factor in how much extra capacity you need to build.
When we look at the Germany[1], on the best month, their solar produce half of the installed capacity and solar never goes higher than a third. And that’s for the best month.
Germany has already invested 600 billions, does it need to go 5 five folds ? Maybe less as the costs are decreasing.
It seems like that money invested in nuclear would produced much more and prevent spending what’s starting to look like an entire gdp invested into renewables.
We can estimate the cost of storage to deal with intermittency and seasonality, and renewables will likely come in cheaper than nuclear by the time any nuclear plant whose construction was started today would come on line.
As modeling gets better, renewables look better, as there are more and more ways found to work around the seasonality and intermittency problems.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=983...
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels.
current economic model assigns $0 to skilled and experienced workforce. In reality it is worth billions.
This productive asset is degrading or beind destroyed through union busting, precarious working conditions, wage fixing, etc.
Cool, let's get the price ratio between the early PWR reactors in the west and the ones started in the early 90s (just after the peak of spending) then and multiply it by current costs to get a enstimate.
That comes to what, $20000/kWe?
My sources are: Lazard's 2022 levelized cost of energy estimates; NREL's Spring 2022 Solar Industry Update: the Global Wind Energy Council's Global Wind Report 2022 highlights; and especially the 2022 report in Cell (Cell's "Joule" sub-publication) called "Empirically Grounded Energy Forecasts and the Energy Transition".
On the basis of the trends in costs shown there, I conclude that 1) coal, nuclear, and large-scale hydro are obsolete for power generation; 2) combined-cycle gas, peaker gas, and on-shore wind generation are obsolescent. (Biomass thermal, concentrated solar thermal, and geothermal are essentially lab experiments. A few hundred MW or maybe 2 GW total globally each. Oil is of course obsolete too.)
Once current project pipelines are emptied (2035 maybe?), there won't be much of any of these built for commercial power generation, because they won't be able to compete except in obscure niches. Onshore wind comes closest to being competitive, but its costs are not dropping fast enough. The costs of the others are rising.
(According to NREL and the GWEC respectively, cumulative global solar PV installed capacity is 939 GWdc, most of it installed in 2018-2021, and cumulative global wind capacity installed is 837 GW, most installed 2012-2019. Onshore wind, while it has not yet peaked in terms of yearly increment, has peaked as a share of total generation, while PV is bottlenecked by permitting queues alone.)
There are so many problems with this scheme, not least of which is that you have pretty much no base load and batteries can't be manufactured at anywhere near enough scale to successfully do this "transition" for at least the next 20 years.
Add in ~7% offshore wind, ~4% for onshore, and ~4% storage for pumped hydro, and we would be just fine with the rest coming from solar & a hodge podge of other renewables.
And we'll have natural gas power plants in commission for another 30 years. Why shut them down? We can use them in the Winter. 30 years is more than enough time to transition to near 100% renewables.
If mini nuclear reactors pan out and can replace even a fraction of the coal plants out there - our base load will be covered.
At night, in the winter, we use about half as much electricity as during the day in the summer - when Solar works best.
I doubt we'll ever add much more nuclear if not mini nuclear reactors - that's why I'm really excited about the possibilities for them.
To add to that, I said nothing about storage. There is not much clarity about storage as yet. Pumped hydro, compressed air, thermal (hot rocks), hydrogen or ammonia: they could all be viable alongside batteries (for grid stabilization and short term storage). And more besides them, probably.
It's also not clear to me which battery chemistries will win for grid storage. Possibly several of them.
Storage is where the R&D action is.
Right now the overwhelming majority of storage is pumped hydro, almost as dispatchable as batteries. There are plenty of alternatives.
There is: nuclear has been subsidized on a much longer scale than solar already.
Small nuclear reactors might reduce the cost a little; but a little is not nearly enough. Cost needs to come down by at least an order of magnitude for it to at least somewhat keep up. Anything else is just not going to be cost competitive. And that's a problem when renewables are still dropping rapidly in price.
Oh right, cost is an issue because obsolete nuclear power plants keep giving nuclear a bad name and end up increasing regulatory requirements on modern designs even if they don't have failure modes from 50 years ago. In other words, the nuclear power industry really likes shooting themselves in the foot.
I have not read it, but I've read an article [1] which cites it. Apparently a lot of the current regulation is created based on a faulty model (LNT, ALARA) of how harmful radiation is. This model predicts that the harm is linear in dose, with no time component. Ie.: that receiving a dose of 1/n for n days is as bad as a single high dose of n for one day.
According to the article and book, this is model has been proven wrong (a long time ago).
[1] (in Norwegian) https://www.minervanett.no/energi-kjernekraft-klima/hvordan-...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/us-regulators-will-c...
[0] www.rbsp.info/rbs/PDF/aiaa05.pdf
If you read through all of this the message I got was that size is the enemy. In one part it notes that a 100MWe core meltdown could likely be contained by the vessel but a 1000MWe reactor meltdown likely wouldn't. This concern is part of why there are ever stricter requirements on civilian reactors.
So you have opposing forces: bigger reactors produce more power and scale better. Smaller reactors are safer and easier and cheaper to build. Smaller reactors probably means more of them, each requiring separate planning permission, design approval and so on. It also probably means people living closer to the reactor, which many would and do oppose.
This series makes a good case for regulation being a significant cost component but it doesn't really make the case (nor does it try to) that said regulation is overly onerous or otherwise unnecessary. A lot of regulation came about because of our experience with nuclear reactors, accidents and near-accidents and the bigger failur emodes of the larger reactors power supplies would likely want to build.
The major selling point for smaller reactors is that you can make a mass produced design that doesn't need separate planning, permission, and design approval every time. You can still have large power plants to get the benefits of scale, you just put more of these small units together at the same site. In fact you get some bonuses as you can shut down some reactors for maintenance while still producing power. Indeed most nuclear power plants already have multiple cores for exactly this reason, but typically its 2-6 rather than 20-60 and thus they are still pretty big.
It's like a software client changes requirements a year into a 2 year project and suddenly you need to rearchitect the whole thing, essentially starting again.
Following regulations is costly, but following changing regulations throughout a project lifecycle is _very expensive_.
EDIT: At a first glance, the linked article seems reasonable if not a bit optimistic for future developments and very positive phrasing for NPP in general.
'It is ever the domain of specialists to overstate their domain.'
> You're basically saying that being more knowledgeable about something makes your opinion less useful.
In certain contexts I definitely think this. Imagine you're a CEO that has to decide how to distribute profits among departments. Obviously you'll listen to the head/experts of every department to weigh your options, but you can't really trust them to be unbiased (Obviously not the best analogy but I hope it helps get my point across (: ).
His take on nuclear's competitors and hence its relative competitiveness as an electricity source is substantially more nuclear bro / Fox News viewer.
There are a lot of anti-100%-renewable nuclear proponents. There are fewer and fewer full-on anti-renewable nuclear proponents.
Most of us support everything that can make low-carbon energy.
https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html
See details I wrote in links from the other comment.
Calculating "years of energy" based off of current usage seems silly to me given that global energy usage has been rising exponentially for centuries.
For example, if you assume a 3% per-year increase in global energy usage, 12 billion years becomes a bit less than 1000 years.
I can pretty much guarantee that we won't be scaling at 3%/yr for the next 1000 years. And if we do, that's an argument for lots more nuclear fission, and a lot of fusion too. Because the solar-derived flows (wind, solar, hydro, biofuel, fossil fuel) won't be able to keep up even if we covered 100% of the earth with solar panels!
We will need to dismantle gas giants' moons for construction materials.
The repairs can be done, and the reactors will come back online, it just takes time. Very unfortunate, to say the least.
(a) because nuclear power is the only energy technology for which the full lifecycle costs have to be fully accounted for upfront. No one is accounting for the disposal costs of solar panels in their initial capital expenditure, for example.
(b) The build costs in terms of energy of wind and solar are comparably high. They are raw material and energy hungry and have a much lower energy return on investment and require a much larger geographic footprint. Plus their use without adequate baseload generation will necessitate a large additional requirement for raw materials to create energy storage. Much if not all of wind and solar’s cost advantages will likely evaporate in an environment where they are no longer subsidized by very cheap fossil fuels.
In regards to recycling lead acid batteries the work seems horrendous, for more information check out the lead poisoning cases from Florida workers at Gopher Resource in Tampa.
It's cheaper to store something in such a way that you can't just trip over it. But it's something else to store it in a way that you can't reach it even if you know where it is.
Im personally an advocate of battery banks (And have them in a boat and rv) but it seems if every single family home had a battery bank there’d be a large surplus of energy created but not always used (aka it doesn’t scale well). If anyone has information otherwise I’m all ears this isn’t my domain
a) typically nuclear plants don't have to include all life cycle cost into their calculations. Insurance is essentially not included (no insurance is willing to cover nuclear disaster), storage costs are not included to the full extend (partly because we actually don't know the cost, storage for these amounts of time is unprecedented)
b) is also falso both wind and solar have significantly lower ROI on energy than nuclear. A wind turbine has a break even (when you have produced more energy than it took to build it) after 18-24 month or so
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222703134_Meta-Anal....
Mining raw material also produce a lot of waste, including radioactive waste, much which will never be safe for humans. Those are generally stored for an indefinite time in pools or just in piles near the mines, with a sign warning people of the toxic material. There will be no one to pay the bill for waste storage except governments when the mining company close down. This is why drinking water near old (or new) mines is a exceptional bad idea.
You seem to argue that because others are doing bad things it's OK for nuclear? I don't think that is a very good argument.
If we want to be technical correct, nuclear plants and hydropower plants do have some insurance, for example if employees are harmed during work.
What all power plants share is the inability to insure against risk that is direct to society at large. It not that the risk is high (which it isn't), but rather that in case of accident there isn't anything other than governments that could step in and take the cost.
> You seem to argue that because others are doing bad things it's OK for nuclear?
No, that is a bad faith interpretation. If we want power plants to pay insurance against risk that is place on society, then such requirement should be technology neutral. If we have historical evidence of harm to either society or the environment, directly connected to a method of producing energy, then producers using that method should pay a tax to government that represent the risk. Be that hydro, nuclear, fossil fuels, wind farms, PV, a battery farm or what have you. Quantify the risk and let researcher, experts and historians argue how much each specific plant should pay.
As the first part of this article series notes, South Korea does not seem to have such extensive costs. Instead of looking into why South Korea can build nuclear power plants at reasonable costs, it hand waves it away implying that the South Koreans are faking the numbers.
South Korean companies also built the Barakah nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates, which is hugely successful.
https://www.enec.gov.ae/news/latest-news/start-up-of-unit-3-...
0 points by BMc2020 10 days ago | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? ...
I opened all three of these, but did not read any of them I did a Ctrl-F for "subsid" (to find subsidy or subsidies) 0 hits I did a Ctrl-F for "decomm" (to find decommission or decommissioning) 0 hits
Having read many of these types of articles before, I've learned some shortcuts on how not to waste time.
But it seems that even without taking decommissioning into account, naval nuclear reactors are not cost-competitive with other power sources. Looking for "subsidies" when we're talking about a military project doesn't make sense; the project is 100% taxpayer-funded unless some supplier is selling parts to the government at a loss. Far more likely, lamentably, is the opposite, the proverbial thousand-dollar toilet seats.
Maybe it's relevant to the cost question that the Navy can buy diesel engines from half a dozen naval diesel engine vendors but has to commission custom nuclear power plants.
Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy (constructionphysics.substack.com) 104 points by gmays 5 hours ago | flag | past | 100 comments Why did we wait so long for wind power? Part I (constructionphysics.substack.com) 26 points by jseliger 9 days ago | flag | past | 4 comments Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy (constructionphysics.substack.com) 4 points by bilsbie 10 days ago | flag | past | 1 comment Why did we wait so long for wind power? (constructionphysics.substack.com) 2 points by gok 10 days ago | flag | past | discuss Why aren't there economies of scale in building size? (constructionphysics.substack.com) 2 points by rwmj 21 days ago | past Where do economies of scale come from? Part II (constructionphysics.substack.com) 66 points by jseliger 23 days ago | past | 4 comments Where Economies of Scale Come From (constructionphysics.substack.com) 10 points by vwoolf 28 days ago | past How the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Works (constructionphysics.substack.com) 44 points by jseliger 34 days ago | past | 15 comments Why are there so few economies of scale in construction? Part I (constructionphysics.substack.com) 95 points by danboarder 34 days ago | past | 84 comments Why are there so few economies of scale in construction? (constructionphysics.substack.com) 5 points by h2odragon 35 days ago | past | 2 comments How NEPA Works (constructionphysics.substack.com) 3 points by burlesona 41 days ago | past | 1 comment How the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Works (constructionphysics.substack.com) 2 points by jseliger 42 days ago | past The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home – Part I (constructionphysics.substack.com) 158 points by samclemens 76 days ago | past | 174 comments The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home – Part I (constructionphysics.substack.com) 3 points by jseliger 77 days ago | past Nuclear reactor costs – US Navy Edition (constructionphysics.substack.com) 4 points by uncertainrhymes 88 days ago | past Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy (constructionphysics.substack.com) 3 points by jseliger 3 months ago | past Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part II (constructionphysics.substack.com) 34 points by jseliger 3 months ago | past | 14 comments Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part II (constructionphysics.substack.com) 3 points by jseliger 3 months ago | past | 1 comment
No, I haven't read parts I and II yet. They look interesting, maybe I will. That still puts me ahead of you since evidently you haven't read any of the three!
The international Standard for "properly" appears to mean in deeper water.
I am pro both nuclear and renewables.
Solar and wind have been on an absolute tear lately. At least in the US (where I live) new solar and wind construction has been growing at a breathtaking pace during the last decade.
Take a look at the latest data from the EIA [1]. For the last month available, July 2022, solar and wind generated together 45 Terawatts hour of electricity. Coal generated 86 TWh. But 3 months prior, solar/wind produced 60 TWh, while coal only 55.
To get an appreciation for how much solar and wind have grown over the last 2 decades, here's their July production every 5 years since 2002 (in TWh):
2002: 1
2007: 2
2012: 7
2017: 22
2022: 45
Guys who are pro-solar and pro-wind: rejoice, you have won. Solar and wind have achieved escape velocity. If they keep it like that, we won't have any problems fully decarbonizing by 2050. We'll actually get there sooner. Without any help from nuclear. We won't even need batteries or hydrogen.
Few people know, but we could keep all the current natural gas plant and still achieve net zero (actually net negative). How is that possible, you ask?
Right now the forests absorb about 13% of the total emissions in the US [2]. Electricity generation contributes by 25% to the total emissions, and natural gas generates less than half of those. So overall, land and forestry absorb more greenhouse gases than those produced by the natural gas power plants.
If we increase solar and power, at some point we will need natural gas to only cover the intermittency. That means, even if we keep all the current natural gas plants, their usage will go down, and their emissions. If we cut all other sources of greenhouse gases (apart from aviation, which depends on energy dense fuels, and contributes quite little to the total emission), we will have no problems to achieve net zero by 2050, and very likely much sooner.
On the nuclear side, things are looking quite good too. Just head to the DoE infographic [3] and see how many cool ideas are in the works. My favorite ones are the fast reactors. But they are just vaporware, you say. In that case, head to the NRC webpage [4], and click on some links over there, and see that all of those ventures (and some more) have already started the licensing process.
Of course, none is as advanced as NuScale. But my point is that NuScale is not our only hope. Lots of other startups are hot on their tails.
My prediction is that 15 years from now, more than 1 of all these startups will have delivered reactors that will be selling electricity at a profit, without subsidies.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/
[2] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
[3] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-advanced-reac...
[4] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/licensing...
By 2040, all the existing nukes will have been shut down, unable to deliver enough power at the spot price to continue operating. The less each sells, the more each kWh it delivers has cost. When shut down early, the cost of every kWh it ever delivered jumps up as construction cost is amortized over less lifetime output.
So, no, the only way to figure commercially competitive nuke power is by cooking the books.
I don't get it. If there will be one, are you going to be unhappy? Because you surely sound like you'd be unhappy.
We're in a weird transition phase where gas/coal generation still exists and matters but have obvious financial challenges that are getting worse very quickly. Courtesy of the Russians, everybody is well aware of that now and can look forward to some really steep energy bills in the next year. But investors have been voting with their feet long before that happened as this has been quite obvious for a while now. Coal plants have been shutting down in many countries mainly for cost reasons and with a few exceptions (China, India), very few countries are building new ones. And now that cheap Russian gas is not an option, gas plants just got a lot more expensive to operate and they were already too expensive before that. Basically, that's an industry that is experiencing a rapidly accelerating collapse. It won't take until 2050 for that to be completed.
The only remaining debate is how soon we'll turn the remaining plants off. That's mostly a function of production capacity for solar and wind generation and energy storage solutions. More investment is flowing into that industry every year and we're seeing massive sustained growth there for decades in term of new capacity coming online every year. It's a super profitable industry to be in and a lot of those profits are getting reinvested in more and even better stuff. Lots of countries have been revising their already ambitious plans to become carbon neutral to be even more ambitious as they find themselves beating their own expectations of just a few years ago on this front. Ten years from now, a lot of countries will get the vast majority of their power from renewables and the remaining ones will be busy figuring out how to get in on the action.
Nuclear is getting lots of attention and investment obviously. But planned new capacity does not add up to mattering much at all over the next fifteen years. A few GW here and there vs. hundreds of GW in the next few years alone. And it takes that long to plan more nuclear plants and there are very little signs of countries warming up to that notion. A lot of those nuclear startups you mentioned won't hit volume production (if they survive long enough) before most countries have shut down all their remaining coal and gas plants. Which in Germany would be around 2035 according tot he latest plans. And those plans don't seem to involve any nuclear. Of course, that timeline might be accelerated due to recent events..
You can’t produce power at night with solar and the wind is not always blowing. Nuclear is what will get us off coal and gas if we combine it with renewable energy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_P...
Vogtle 3/4 also were greenlighted back in an environment when it wasn't clear PV would get so cheap so quickly. When it became clear how cheap renewables would become, it was obvious that initial decision was bad. The other nuclear build in the US, V. C. Summer, reached the point where they had spent the initial estimate but found the cost had doubled. At that point, it was as if they were asked to make the initial decision again, but now against much cheaper wind and solar. The reluctant conclusion was that continuing made no economic sense. It made no economic sense at Vogtle either, but politicians forced it to continue (the execs in SC were revenge prosecuted for stopping the gravy train.)
If you stop building reactors for 30 years it’s going to be an extremely massive undertaking only a government can handle. It will be up to the governments to subsides the costs.
Stop this lying, please. There's clear paths to clean energy without nuclear.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels.
This article is a good summary: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/30/us-energy-dept-still-ho...
Is that how Navy reactors work?
But, I come back to my basic thesis on nuclear power. It's the A+ game or bust Yes the US fricking Navy can do it well, but the minute the Soviet's ran out of cash they just let it all rust. If we lean on nuclear in the carbon energy transition then when we run out of money, can we afford to let them rust.
But nuclear at any cost is not a reasonable goal. The only reason we want nuclear is for its carbon-free energy. At which point it must be evaluated on its merits, not as an end goal of its own
1: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-waste
2: https://ips-dc.org/spent_nuclear_fuel_pools_in_the_us_reduci...
Until then we dismiss them along with every other technology that does not meaningfully exist.
Let me say that again to those engineers who weren't listening:
Nuclear (fission) power is not, and will never be, financially viable for civilian powerplants.
I'll eat a roll of toilet paper covered in hot sauce if someday nuclear fission is financially viable enough to produce power for civilians at a decent scale.
In the US, Georgia and South Carolina started building with nary a peep. France started building again without any environmental objections.
Yet these builds are all catastrophic failures, to the point that any other financial backer is scared away from even touching nuclear. The decision makers are those with the dollars to invest, not the environmentalists.
don't underestimate the negative influence of "environmentalists"
Usage in California has gone down, and renewables are cheaper, just look at the blog series in the original article. Calling these well-known and irrefutable facts "insane" does not bode well for the plethora of other questionable assertions in your comment. For the usage:
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
their proposal was to spend $2B to lose 2GW of carbon free baseline power
everything in my statement is true and based on documents in the public record
My personal take is that we should subsidize tech to take it from an early stage to a production stage as soon as possible. We need better power sources yesterday, not next century. So we can't sit around waiting for some sort of Elon Musk to get really passionate and dump heaps of cash into it.
But the assumption there is that once the tech is developed and mature, it'll be good enough to stand on its own. Because if it'll never not be expensive, we're just artifically choosing a power source that's permanently more expensive than the alternatives, and that's an unstable situation. Eventually people will get tired of dumping money into it, or there will be some other urgent matter to throw money at, and then we have a bunch of expensive tech that's falling out of use, and underdeveloped alternatives.
Subsidizing nuclear forever also doesn't make any sense economically. Money is fungible. There's no real difference between say, paying $200/month to your power company, or paying $100/month to your power company, and $100 in taxes that ends up going to the power company. The amount you have to spend at the end of the month is the same either way. Now paying $200/month for 5 years so that then your power bill drops to $50/month afterwards, that's a different proposition.
So, I support subsidizing solar, wind and storage because I believe that in their perfected, mass produced versions they're cheap and competitive. They just need a push now. I don't support subsidizing nuclear because I believe it'll always be expensive because it's a fundamentally complex technology that's not amenable to mass production and will always lose to brute force mass applications of simpler technologies.
If we spend $12B on a 1GW reactor, we have far far better alternatives. A 1GW nuclear reactor has a 90% capacity factor of undispatchable, hard to throttle electricity. At today's prices, thay $12B could instead buy 6GW of solar at 20% capacity factor, and 24GWh of batteries. This combined solar plus storage is more flexible, more responsive, and delivers 30% more overall energy. And this is with a stupid design of splitting the cash to half storage half solar. A smarter design more tailored to the actual demand curve would remove some flexibility but become far cheaper.
There's zero reason to build nuclear unless you want to line Bechtel's pockets.
What does that amount of solar and storage look like in terms of material used for its construction as well as area occupied once it’s deployed?
What current examples do we have of projects at this scale?
What is the lifespan of the solar arrays and batteries?
What are the operating costs? How many personnel are required for maintenance and day to day operation?
What other infrastructure is necessary to support such a deployment? Transmission lines, buildings, monitoring facilities, security, roads, office space, etc.
What is the construction timeline for such a project?
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Also, the scale doesn't matter, we have built far more than 6GW of solar, deployed more than 24GWh of storage, but it doesn't have to be at one location for these resources. Solar and batteries scale far better than nuclear, because they can be deployed on smaller installations without nearly as much hassle as nuclear. Or they can be sited at one location.
Distributed software is good, so why not distributed energy generation? Answer: distributed energy generation is great!
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/05/california-finds-pge-equipme...
Just to get you started with some ballpark numbers: The solar irradiance at ground level on a sunny day is greater than 1kW/m^2 for about 6 hours per day (google for "AM1.5"). Typical commercial panels have a conversion efficiency of 21-22%.
You seem very confident that solar is impossible, so why don't you make some reasonable assumptions and prove it to all of us?
There is a massive bias in the field in favor of nuclear and against solar, and this shows in every single prediction made over the past 15-20 years. The EIA would uncritically put out numbers for "advanced nuclear" that were unbeliever rosy for a tech that had never been built. And at the same time, use out of date costs for solar, and the assumption that solar would stay at the old prices and never improve in price.
Or you will see peer reviewed papers in nuclear that assume ridiculous rosy solutions, that make it all the way through to publication without those rosy assumptions being challenged. For example, using nuclear in remote areas, but it using the actual capacity factor of that sort of system, 40-50%, and instead assuming that the price is coming from using every last bit of electricity at all time. In contrast all the modeling around solar always picks the most conservative estimates, because of the unrealistic hyper criticism of solar, which leads to even the most rosy of solar predictions being underestimated of solar.
Similarly, "concerns" about land or energy density are not realistic concerns, but mere political talk used to delay delay delay as long as possible the obvious solution that solar will be a cornerstone of our energy future, from 40%-70% of most countries' energy.
But if you actually are interested in the land usage, it's a question that has been studied to death. NREL is usually a good source, but one caution is to look at the date of any publication, and realize that if it's more than a year old, a lot of the data will be out of date. Here's a 2013 report on land use:
Both coexist synergetically with reservoirs, canal, pasture, even crop land. So, zero acres of land needed.
Now, only a fraction of these will get connected, because only the marginal best investment dollar gets the invested, but the scale is there.
Really the limit it current solar and wind production capacity, which is ever increasing at absolutely terrific speeds.
This is one of many reasons that I think a focus on nuclear is the wrong place. It's not going to be able to scale to catch up to these other technologies, even if after 60 years of development, nuclear finds a learning curve for the first time ever.
My question is given this market where you have high prices and high demand, why do I not see any entrepreneurs building small solar installations and cutting deals with municipalities to provide some of their grid power?
That tells me that the technology, cost, and/or regulation isn’t viable yet. Promises of future developments do nothing to address current needs. I have a feeling that 100% renewable generation is fast becoming a “20 years away” problem since I’ve been hearing the same promises for at least 20 years now and those older than me likely remember even older promises.
I don't know where you live, but generalizing from one small locality with an out of wack market is leading you to the wrong conclusions.
In places where there's a free market for new generation, like Texas, there's more GW of storage being added than GW of natural gas. There's an order of magnitude of new wind and solar generation being added than natural gas, and this is the place with some of the cheapest natural gas in the entire world. Having trouble finding ERCOT, but for the entire US, 1.3TW of the 1.4TW on newly proposed projects are renewable or storage:
https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-do...
So your local utility, which is charging you high prices, probably has a process that disincentivizes renewables to a large degree. And if there are zero independent funded ventures, then your utility must be actively stopping renewables, and those investors are working in the far more fertile rest of the US.
In particular, small projects can be the hardest to get through. There's zero reason for a utility to cut a deal, they are a monopoly, they are raking in far checks by doing nothing. Utility executives are some of the people least likely to adopt any sort of new technology.
The biggest impediment to renewables sweeping through the grid and giving us cheaper electricity is politics, conservatives, and rentierism. In areas where there's a market set up to allow lower costs to win, fossil fuels are toast. But in most places, electricity is not a market.
I don't think that can actually be done. The world's largest battery installation is less than 1 GWh AFAICT. OTOH we're not doing great at nuclear either.
Similarly if we can build a 1GWh battery we can build also a 24 GWh battery.
Yet we can't and aren't.
Frankly, whenever this comes up the handwaving about storage just seems hopelessly optimistic even for places where it is practical, let alone places where you're lucky to get 4 hours of sunlight a day for a bunch of the year.
Nothing is ever that simple. If carbon zero is an imperative, then there will sometimes be need for something other than solar and wind, and it will inevitably be "impractically expensive" compared to the carbon emitting sources we're moving away from.
It's certainly important to improve the economies of scale of renewables, but doing so is not the goal. Saving money is not the goal. The survival of the human species is the goal, and we aren't going to get there by nickel and diming our way to it.
Even if it takes 20 years to build a nuke, that might still be sooner than "power to x" becomes a viable, affordable option for most of the world.
This is the weird thing about this argument: it so often rests simultaneously on an argument for practicality and/or cost effectiveness, but literally any criticism is met with a gish gallop of unproven technology. You can't have this both ways.
In the end, my central thesis here is just that if you think the be all and end all of this issue is cost effectiveness you are optimizing for the wrong goals and it leaves open a giant window for carbon emitting sources to justify their use when renewables don't work for various local reasons.
The thing to be black and white about is carbon emissions. "What energy mix works for place X right now if we try to eliminate carbon emissions asap" is not a decision that's gonna be made on an internet forum.
A nuke powered world will either require radically new sources of uranium (like sea water uranium extraction) or breeder reactors. Neither is available now, unlike cheap electrolyzers for making hydrogen (< $300/W in China).
Again, this is not a duel to the death. The only thing that should be dismissed out of hand is carbon emitting fuels.
But instead of being so "black and white" and insisting it must be nuclear that powers things, also evaluate options like thermal storage to gather summertime heat in reservoirs for use throughout the winter. It's super cheap, and makes a ton of sense in most areas, yet it's so low tech that it gets ignored.
I will be black and white that fission is not a feasible solution for the vast majority of the human population for at least the next 20 years, and probably forever. Despite more than half a century of experience, it has not improved as a technology. There would have to be some sort of drastic breakthrough for nuclear to be a realistic power source for most of the earth's surface.
It sure is a good thing I didn't say anything of the sort or wow I'd be a hypocrite.
I am definitely not the person trying to shoehorn the entire earth into one energy mix box in this conversation. I think the answer to this is likely to vary a lot all over the world.
Also a lot of the world's population is far enough north that winters produce relatively little solar or wind energy. And those places also tend to be massive energy consumers because it's also very cold.
Right now that doesn't show up in electricity stats because of how common in-home gas heating is. In order to decarbonize the northern parts of the world we will need to dramatically increase both electric energy consumption and production, during winter, because heat pumps will almost certainly be replacing gas furnaces.
I'm concerned about the tonnage requirement of strategic minerals for battery storage. Supplies for EV batteries are currently choked; we need to scale far beyond that for grid storage.
Pumped hydro at the required scale will be a feat of engineering comparable to nuclear engineering. Millions of tonnes of Portland cement will be an input.
And renewables are land-extensive; that's an impedance mismatch for us.
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20D... (now being commercialized by Babcock & Wilcox.)
The big question of storage is not if it's possible, but which of the many options will come out on top.
Switching to renewable energy with massive amounts of storage is a world of cheaper energy than today. There has been zero learning curve for oil, and coal, and nuclear. If anything nuclear gets more expensive rather than less.
In contrast, renewables and storage are technologies that behave like semiconductors, or hard disks. There's a fairly predictable improvement in costs over time, resulting in massive changes in capabilities over the course of decades.
So not only is switching to renewables and storage cheaper than our current every sources, the faster we perform the change, the more money we save, the more of our resources we can devote to improving the quality of human lives, instead of devoting all that effort to make-work of welding pipes and pouring concrete.
I heard without government subsidies, nuclear power plants would simply not be buildable. No insurance company would insure them. The cost in case of a nuclear fallout is just too high.
But yes, nukes all rely heavily on subsidies, always have.
It costs nothing for fossil plant operators to pump carbon and sulphur into the atmosphere; that's why it takes regulation to make them install scrubbers. Scrubbers help, but don't prevent the outcome.
The outcome can be measured in human deaths and loss of arable land. That cost is hidden.
The "free market" is a grim joke while these costs can be ignored.
I really doubt ARENH is the problem because as far as I understand it, it only applies to EDF's existing nuclear power plants. At 42 EUR/MWh wholesale, those plants should still make a tidy profit. Apparently, too few of them were actually running last year, and the French government imposed further price restrictions that also affected resale of energy that EDF purchased elsewhere at market prices (not coming from EDF's own nuclear fleet or its other power plants).
So all the world’s nuclear power plants operate at a loss? That’s a pretty strong proposition…
More than a few old reactors here and there that are about to be decommissioned would be my idea of "at decent scale" here, so let's say that 10% of the new build power was nuclear (which would be equal to how much old, rotten nuclear fission infrastructure we have today, in the world).
I would almost bet less than 2% of the current planned and contracted energy capacity was in nuclear and that probably a good part of that will never materialize.
I don’t know that I need a nuclear power plant to “turn a profit”. That would be great, I suppose, but my view on electricity is a little more nuanced than a dogmatic adherence to market forces.
Have you bothered to look at Flamanville or Olkiluoto? What happened when in the past when France built subsequent copies of a reactor design, and won't we expect similar costs rises with these already unviable reactors?
It’s hard to work out exact figures but around 60% of the grid’s electricity used in France came from nuclear reactors. To illiterate the difficulty, recently most of France’s nuclear power plant where undergoing maintenance however due to low seasonal demand other power plants where able to make up the difference.
PS: To be really pedantic, total electricity production would include car alternators, home PV panels, diesel electric locomotive etc, but that’s yet another calculation.
> Where do we find these highly motivated, fit, young, intelligent people to work like dogs?
We increase the pay. It's that simple.
We've gotten much better at this particular engineering problem. For instance, Fukushima was designed in 1967, but if it had been designed in 1972 it would not have had its fatal flaw.
There were multiple studies and suggestions ignored a decade before the incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#200...
It wasn't that there was a fundamental flaw with the design, just the sea walls needed to be higher.
When they've been building them for 70 years and have over 200 nuclear powered vessels, it shouldn't be that surprising. For comparison, Ontario Power Generation has operated 787 years of nuclear reactors (343 combined at Pickering, 120 at Darlington, 324 at Bruce), each of which is at least 3.5 times larger than the biggest navy nuclear reactor. France has dramatically more than that.