We sorely need a safe, cost-effective and reproducible blueprint for manufacturing nuclear infrastructure at scale.
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?
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.
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Most utilities use five-year resource plans, and even then they tend to use out of date publications for cost guidance, which themselves took several years to be written and get through peer review.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.
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.
Maybe. Or maybe nuclear is actually just too expensive, and we need to stop pretending it's a commercially-viable technology.