The first permit for the new units was applied for in August 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
A mere sixteen years from NRC application to coming online.
A mere sixteen years from NRC application to coming online.
We sorely need a safe, cost-effective and reproducible blueprint for manufacturing nuclear infrastructure at scale.
But given two options, one twice (or more) the cost of the other, and with the more expensive option being slower and less scalable, why choose the hard and expensive route versus the cheap and easy route?
Most utilities use five-year resource plans, and even then they tend to use out of date publications for cost guidance, which themselves took several years to be written and get through peer review.
So traditional utility deployment is done on 10-year old info. In more open markets, like Texas, storage is a huuuuge amount of the capital that's being deployed on the grid. And in places with more active residents that force the utility commissions to force the utilities to use realistic numbers, like California, storage is already deployed in GW range. For example, existing storage on the grid today was a bigger player than nuclear during California's recent and massive heat waves.
And one dirty secret that they don't tell you about nuclear: it's also going to need storage. Nuclear is not dispatchable, it can't be turned down on demand, and can't be ramped up. But real power demand varies a huge amount throughout the day.
The only reason France was able to get up to 70% nuclear energy on their grid was by using the continental grid to trade energy with other countries. France has a small number of super expensive nuclear "peakers" but they can only deal with very small fluctuations in demand.
So if nuclear were ever going to be a really major power source, or the only power source, it would require lots of storage to balance load.
I advize doing the maths on this. Look at graphs of how much solar and win vary, check total elecricity consumption, look up latest price of li ion batteries and then do a bit of maths to see how much you need so that you get no blackouts in a 10 year period. Then realize you should use compressed air storage instead...
Last I checked, if we use the cheapest form of storage (compressed air) and assume there are enough suitable caves for the huge amount we want, we'd triple electricity costs by switching to renewables+storage.
> And one dirty secret that they don't tell you about nuclear: it's also going to need storage.
Not really, you just need to be able to burn excess power. Which is a very easy thing to do (you can spend as much as you want on turning atmospheric CO2 and water into methane).
As for CAES, if it can scale and be cheap, great. But there isn't nearly as much evidence of that for CAES as there is for batteries, which are being deployed by the GWh on the grid now, and which have massive plans for expansion in areas where the grid is market based and profit driven, instead of a regulated monopoly that can rest on its laurels.
I occasionally hear about liquid air too, and though everybody I have encountered that works on it is a bit nuts, I am more optimistic about liquid air than CAES for massive scale, as liquid air can be deployed many many places.
No technological breakthroughs are needed for arbitrarily scalable power storage with good efficiency.
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054
"Insofar as the numbers I have presented in this paper are correct, they demonstrate that energy storage is a problem of 19th century science. No future laboratory breakthroughs or discoveries are required for solving it. All that is needed is fine engineering and assiduous attention to detail. Said poetically, this is 21st century rocket science.
Moreover, it is clear from Fig. 11 that the storage capacity of months becomes feasible once the engine (including the heat exchangers) exists as a product one can purchase at a known cost, particularly if the heat is further transferred into cheaper media for longer-term storage, such as rocks underground. Thus, pumped thermal storage with heat exchange is not a niche solution to the energy storage problem but a global one. This is the reason I think it will prevail."
I'm not impressed with the costing methodology used, but it's probably at least in the ballpark.
And what about fusion, we spend a lot on R&D but it's pretty clear it will be even more expensive than fission, if you were in charge would you cancel that effort entirely and shift funds elsewhere?
If fusion can compete once it happens, bring it on. But it should be targeting a cost of $1-5/MWh instead of $50/MWh.
Helion's approach might make engineering sense, but it's still a longshot. But that's ok for research.
Well, that was part of Areva's branding circa 2009: nuclear's nespresso and selling combustible and reactor in the same package. Full vertical integration: uranium mining, enrichment, reactor building, recycling.
Areva used to be top in their field (mine prospecting, geological stuff) and then discredited. Ended up being bought back by EDF (which is to say, bought back by the French state).
The company (Uramin) that Areva bought (to get the uranium deposit fields) seem to have lie about their deposits' potential. It was before Fukushima sent the price of Uranium down, so they were expecting a lot of return on investments from this move.
The whole affair is riddled with corruption, insider knowledge, betrayal and incompetence at some key high level ranks at Areva. Too much easy money if you ask me, then someone (Uramin + insider ?) wanted a bigger part of the pie and the whole cake turned bad.
edit: also too much money (~10billions) invested in different fields ultimately led up Areva to bankruptcy.
Maybe. Or maybe nuclear is actually just too expensive, and we need to stop pretending it's a commercially-viable technology.
Each of the two reactors mentioned in the article produces 1250 MWe.
OTOH maybe a row of smaller reactors could offer a better economy of scale for production, even if they require more parts and more maintenance overall.
Their core life relies on highly enriched uranium. Production and delivery at commercial power scale is a weapons proliferation risk in addition to being more expensive.
Refueling a naval reactor is a multi-year operation that happens only a tiny handful of times in the life of the ship. Current-gen submarines don't get refueled at all. They can get away with this in large part because they aren't running at 100% power. They are shut down in port, and even at sea they only operate at low power most of the time.
To reduce LCOE, commercial power reactors run at full power all the time. Refueling a commercial power reactor takes a month or so and happens every 1.5 years.
In the west, nuclear plants were more affordable when built at scale. It's not just reactors that are costly, specialty parts like steam generators and turbines are cheaper to produce in runs of 40 instead of 4. It's not so much the blueprint that makes a plant cheap. It's building two dozen of the same blueprint.
We'll just multiply that same ratio by the price of Vogtle and get.. what? $30k/kW?
"The reactor achieved its design output power 30 September 2022."
Regular production will mean all tests have been completed. They are currently ongoing and yes we can notice it in the electricity price when they test shutdowns and 1600 MW (15% nation-wide) disappears from the supply.
This is VERY concerning as prices where very high as the plant was operating then?
Here you can see the current and past national totals for nuclear/hydro/wind/solar etc. production. Choose 12 October to see what it looks like when they tested turning the whole 1600 MW off at once: https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/
Many things have affected the prices recently including imports (or lack of) from Sweden and Norway, exports to Estonia, wind and rainfall situation, as well as other nuclear reactors being offline for maintenance.
Ask yourself if those things are possible in your life and whether that means perfect should be the enemy of good when bringing in a responsible solution demands responsible care. Your needs for immediate satisfaction do not supersede the longterm welfare of your progeny.
From the outside looking in, valuing current demand over the lives of our children is what got us in this mess.
Yes, people should consume less oil (but big corporations don't).
Yes, people should use less power (but big corporations just count power as a cost of doing business).
Yes, people should make less people (but big corporations need manpower).
> Ask yourself if those things are possible in your life and whether that means perfect should be the enemy of good when bringing in a responsible solution demands responsible care. Your needs for immediate satisfaction do not supersede the longterm welfare of your progeny.
I have no intention of creating progeny in this fucked up world. Moreover, nuclear power is far safer, per watt produced, than coal or oil.
> From the outside looking in, valuing current demand over the lives of our children is what got us in this mess.
It's not individual people who've got us in this mess. Or rather, it is... individual people working for individual corporations who don't consider individual people anything other than feedstock for corporation profits.
My partner and I just need to figure out who can support us when we’re old… (e.g. help us steer our finances in case we can’t ourselves)
There's nothing inherent about society that requires more people than the current workforce to run things in 20+ years, though admittedly, generations are not of equal size (booms and busts in the birth rate over time) and there are often demographic issues as particular generations age out of the workforce.
I too support people's desire and right to make choices about reproduction, but at some point it just becomes irresponsibly selfish for a couple to have more than some replacement-level N number of kids. Not just for the planet, but at a smaller level, too, when considering a family's financial resources, etc. I wish more would-be parents would take this sort of thing into account before choosing (or unintentionally not-actually-choosing) to have a(nother) kid.
Most of the rich world is already doing this [1]. The change was enforced by rising living standards and costs of living. Not proselytising.
Game theory (and several economic theories) suggest that relying on voluntary collective sacrifice is never going to work. People simply will not do it, at least not in numbers large enough to be effective.
I do try to consume less, but I'm sure I'm still above average consumption-wise, and I'm not sure what other cuts I could make while still maintaining the lifestyle I like. At the very least, I have decided I won't reproduce, so I guess that's something.
Political solutions can force people to do things they wouldn't otherwise voluntarily do, but politicians who make their constituents miserable tend to be replaced with politicians who will... not do that.
I think the only feasible solution is the one we are already pursuing: continue consumption growth, but find and build cleaner, renewable ways to fuel that consumption. It's not happening nearly fast enough, though, is hindered by special-interest groups who have an incentive to fight change, and it's unclear if we'll be able to dig ourselves out of the hole we've made for our species' future generations.
It doesn't necessarily involve sacrifice though. Will your life be worse if you have 2 children rather than 3. Or even none instead of 2. For some people it will, but for many it won't. Will it be worse if your house is insulated and requires less energy to heat/cool? Will it be worse if we replace highways with public transit in cities? No, it'll likely actually better (even if you still need to drive, because they'll be less traffic).
It also doesn't need to be voluntary. We could mandate these changes, or strongly incentivise them through tax structures. Many countries have already started doing this in some limited cases.
We should certainly try to find cleaner ways to fuel consumption, because we're of course still going to need to consume a lot. But much like the easiest way (and often the only way) to make software faster is to make it do less work (while still achieving an equivalent or close enough to equivalent result), the easiest way to meet our energy needs in a clean way is to reduce our energy needs.
Authoritarianism on the march again.
> Your needs for immediate satisfaction do not supersede the longterm welfare of your progeny.
not really sure why you are beeing downvoted apart from 'less' always beeing a tough sale.
There's nothing magically "right" or calculated about 16 years, it's just the time it took the gears of apathetic bureaucracy to turn. It's a fallacy to use this as a guidepost for a "responsible" amount of time.
I suspect a lot of it is red tape without a real benefit...
Former commercial nuclear fuel vendor employee here. I did my time with the NRC being part of my life.
"a paper [..] provides some empirical evidence that safety changes have contributed to the cost of building new nuclear reactors. But the study also makes clear that they're only one of a number of factors, accounting for only a third of the soaring costs. The study also finds that, contrary to what those in the industry seem to expect, focusing on standardized designs doesn't really help matters, as costs continued to grow as more of a given reactor design was built."
https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-does-permitting-for-c...
Decades ago the United States didn’t get to 20% electricity from nuclear power by being so inefficient.
The job market is also a lot more diverse now then in the 70s. There used to be a lot of highly skilled construction workers back then. Generally large infrastructure projects take longer and cost more, regardless of the project type.
Imagine writing bug-free code put in continuous, mass population-critical use for the better part of a century.
Can't possibly go tits up. These new reactors are surely infallible, right?
A few plant and supply chain workers have been killed, but again, fewer than with any other source (mining coal and climbing on roofs and towers to install wind and solar is dangerous, yo).
Since I've been muzzled again:
> Climbing on the roof of a two story house to install solar panels is considerably less dangerous than building a nuclear power plant. Yo.
In terms of workers killed per watt-hour generated?
No, it isn't. It's not even close. Yo.
> climbing on roofs and towers to install wind and solar is dangerous, yo
Climbing on the roof of a two story house to install solar panels is considerably less dangerous than building a nuclear power plant. Yo.
> without a single fatality to a member of the general public.
No immediate fatality is the only accurate claim you can make. Over 150,000 people were evacuated from the Three-Mile Island disaster. Due to the stress, there were some increases in consumption of alcohol, cigarettes, and tranquilizers immediately following the accident. The eventual long term effects of those behaviors surely resulted in shorter life spans for at least some of the people.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/003801...
> for over 70 years
That's a short time. Unless you can show the US is somehow exceptional in its quality controls compared to Japan, then a huge disaster like Fukushima is inevitable, and life will be lost.
No one complains about the dangers of the neighbors who use solar energy. No one wants a reactor in their backyard. And it has fair reasoning behind it. You'll never have to evacuate 150,000 people due to your neighbors' solar panels failing.
> No, it isn't. It's not even close. Yo.
This source says you are wrong. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
What source were you using when making your claim?
1) Ground level installations have a greatly diminished risk of dangerous falls during construction/maintenance and have come to account for more wattage than rooftop systems.
2) Installing a solar panel in a large farm instead of on a roof yields more energy output per year, since it usually has mechanical sun tracking [2] and will be oriented for optimum output even if installed with a fixed tilt.
3) Newer panels generate more annual energy output per panel, per kilogram, and per square meter. That means that the same number of full time solar installation workers now produce more energy over the system's lifetime than in the past.
The information from OurWorldInData that you linked is more up to date and therefore shows low deaths-per-TWh for solar. Probably Turing_Machine was remembering an older report like this one from 10 years ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
[1] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81325.pdf page 9
[2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2017/09/20/trackers-dominate-u-s...
No, I was talking about the United States. Not Chernobyl.
The Soviet Union (and now Russia) is notorious for having crap technology.
Adding Chernobyl into the mix is like adding the (outrageously high) air crash rates from the Soviet Union into the mix and claiming that it's "evidence" that flying is dangerous.
> You're simultaneously claiming that the US can somehow safely build the tall and complex structures for a nuclear plant
Yes. We can. 70 years, no accidents.
> but cannot safely install solar panels on a 2 story building
I'm saying that the fatality rate is HIGHER for solar panels. Which it is.
I think we're done here.
And Japan too? They had a major and recent disaster. How do you explain that? Crap Japanese technology?
> Yes. We can. 70 years, no accidents.
That's absolutely false.
1961. Steam explosion and meltdown results in three fatalities at National Reactor Testing Station's SL-1 Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One
1986. Feedwater line-burst at Surry Nuclear Power Plant kills 4
2013. One worker was killed and two others injured when part of a generator fell as it was being moved at the Arkansas Nuclear One.
> I'm saying that the fatality rate is HIGHER for solar panels. Which it is.
It's not. You're confusing correlation with causation. There is nothing particular about solar installations that would result in a higher fatality rate compared to building tall nuclear cooling towers. You'd need to point to some sort of causation to be believable.
The real difference is probably something like big construction sites versus small construction sites. Which says nothing at all about the safety of nuclear vs. solar.
In fact it would be a safe bet that large scale solar installations are far safer to build and maintain than nuclear installations.
I explain that with 1) outdated plant, 2) magnitude 9.0 (!) earthquake 3) devastating tsunami, 4) massive fire, 5) total loss of power to all control systems.
Followed by:
6) still didn't kill anybody due to radiation leaks.
So what? Solar isn't killing anyone due to radiation leaks either. The subject is death rate, not death due to radiation leaks.
This is yet another example of you trying to get away with cherry picking data. And failing at it.
Besides the fact that the radiation deaths from Fukushima will come.
At least six workers have exceeded lifetime legal limits for radiation and more than 175 (0.7%) have received significant radiation doses
That will never happen with a solar power plant. Never.
And you avoided the question. Does Japan have crap technology? Is that your explanation for the Fukushima disaster? That was your excuse for Russia. What's your excuse for the Fukushima disaster?
There have been nuclear power disasters requiring evacuation at the minimum in Russia, the US, and Japan. Can you name a solar power disaster?
Several comments ago you said "I think we're done here". And in another comment "Again, I think we're done here". You called that wrong, didn't you? Twice.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Even giving you the benefit of the doubt there, it's clear that nuclear is extremely safe. Plus it has the added benefit of, actually, you know, working (and by "working" I mean "producing energy in quantities sufficient to run a modern industrial society", not "works in someone's pipe dream").
It's clear that solar is extremely safe. And doesn't have a history in the US of evacuating over 150,000 people. Which nuclear does.
> Plus it has the added benefit of, actually, you know, working (and by "working" I mean "producing energy in quantities sufficient to run a modern industrial society", not "works in someone's pipe dream"
Modern solar works and continues to be installed at a rapid rate all over the world. Even France is phasing out nuclear. Westinghouse Electric went bankrupt over the Vogtle nuclear plant in discussion. The U.S. government has given $8.3 billion of loan guarantees to help finance construction of the Vogtle reactor. It's not viable anymore compared to very quick and simple to maintain solar plants. The future is sunny. Which is after all just nuclear energy at a safe distance.
Sorry, you don't get to count media hysteria as a "risk" of nuclear energy.
It wasn't media hysteria. The evacuation was to protect people. On the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale, it is rated Level 5. It was a partial meltdown, and there was a risk of explosion, releasing radiation into the general area. Not evacuating would have been grossly irresponsible.
It is a matter of historical record that Met Ed had not informed state officials before conducting a steam venting from the plant. Convinced that the company was downplaying the severity of the accident, state officials turned to the NRC.
Twenty-eight hours after the accident began, William Scranton III, the lieutenant governor, appeared at a news briefing to say that Metropolitan Edison, the plant's owner, had assured the state that "everything is under control".
Later that day, Scranton changed his statement, saying that the situation was "more complex than the company first led us to believe". There were conflicting statements about radioactivity releases. Schools were closed and residents were urged to stay indoors. Farmers were told to keep their animals under cover and on stored feed.
Governor Dick Thornburgh, on the advice of NRC chairman Joseph Hendrie, advised the evacuation "of pregnant women and pre-school age children...within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility". The evacuation zone was extended to a 20-mile radius on Friday, March 30.
Where do you see the press taking action in any of the above except to repeat what state and NRC officials had decided?
Can you name a US evacuation over a solar power accident?
It absolutely was media hysteria. Add "stupid and cowardly politicians" if you like. I'd be okay with that.
> Add "stupid and cowardly politicians" if you like.
Do you expect the average politician to be highly educated about when a nuclear meltdown in progress becomes dangerous enough to evacuate?
Do you think politicians should be brave about the lives of others when faced with a nuclear meltdown? You can be brave with your own life -- that's your choice for sure -- but asking political leaders to risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of people just in order to make sure nuclear has a good name, seems quite off. Asking people to not be "cowardly" when faced with an actual nuclear meltdown in progress sounds more like a sociopath than of a leader tasked with the responsibility to protect people.
Has any political leader ever had to be brave about a solar power plant disaster? Can you even name a solar power plant disaster?
I have been following closely, and never once have I heard of a delay because of regulation changes. Not once! It's all construction.
And with the costs of delays, blaming this on an external party like the NRC would be an essential thing to do to explain it to the backers.
If you have any knowledge of regulations that caused the big delays, I would love to know, and would be very surprised.
Although to fair on the NRC, there was a case where, due to lack of experience, the contractor cast an enormous slab using the wrong rating of concrete, which then had to be removed at great expense and delay.
And that's what it comes down to, EPC and design not understanding each other and mucking it up. Regulations and rules have not gotten in the way or caused ballooning budgets or massive delays.
IN fact, if the NRC had more regulations and required the design to specify how to construct and other parts, then perhaps these projects would not be in so much trouble. But instead all three sides of the deal seem intent on mucking up the construction and then suing each other at the end when everything falls apart.
And that's the problem with the entire nuclear construction industry: no accountability or reliability, and tooooons of corruption. Some of the execs involved with the Summer project are going to jail, and if executives in the US are going to jail for something other than medical regulations (the only regulations with real teeth for executives), then they are hopelessly corrupt.
I've seen 16 year old bugs get fixed though. Usually just need to get them retriaged as a security bug, and then all things are fixable.
I thought they meant American Permanent Resident (aka green card), which has a notoriously long waiting period.