Meh, old reactor tech with new "engineered" safety features. I would have liked to see stuff more like FAST or slow wave reactors with inherent physics based safety features.
Even if heat were free you'd have a hard time making the steam turbine powerset competitive in 2023.
Nuclear might be able to compete if we can get rid of the water. In Japan they are talking about producing hydrogen directly with thermochemistry, no powerset at all. There is also talk about coupling fast reactors or molten salt reactors to this kind of powerset
https://www.powermag.com/what-are-supercritical-co2-power-cy...
The claimed price of a NuScale reactor isn't going to beat a large LWR but it might possibly be able to build at the quote that NuScale quotes, whereas the large LWR struggles.
If you want "the power to save the Earth" you have to get costs down and reactors that can do that are still a decade + out.
I thought they have small scale modupar FAST reactors. I would hope they would be similar on price, or at least quote accuracy.
There is a table here that estimates that only 28% of the cost is the "nuclear island"
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
the steam turbine and other systems that are bloated by low temperature overhead comprise much of the rest. Also some of the "nuclear island" such as the steam generators is also bloated by low temperature overhead.
It is no accident that we stopped building coal-burning power plants at the same time we stopped building LWRs and that is because gas turbine power plants with much lower capital cost became available.
You don't really need armed security, but a couple guys with guns in America are a dime a dozen.
Decomissioning is $300-400M after a 30-50Y lifecycle and operators are generally allowed to collect that money over the plant life. [1] That's compared to the $17B in construction costs for Vogtle.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/d...
Refueling is expensive because of many separate costs. Even simply being forced to take a power plant offline for a long period is inherently expensive. Similarly building a cooling pond and equipment to move extremely high level nuclear waste is costly. Add up all those individual costs and fuel represents a significant faction of the total lifetime costs for a nuclear reactor.
Nukes' fuel cost seems low only in comparison to their other very high costs.
Of course we do, we've decommissioned plants before. About 200 commercial and 500 research reactors. That's a sufficient sample size. [1]
> Nukes' fuel cost seems low only in comparison to their other very high costs.
$0.0015/kWh is objectively cheap on an absolute scale. I don't know if you noticed, but California pays about $0.19/kWh, so this would be 0.78% of the delivered cost.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
That’s ~7% of the total cost for solar per kWh and doesn’t even get you to fuel rods.
> That’s ~7% of the total cost for solar per kWh and doesn’t even get you to fuel rods.
Which again doesn't matter because it's still objectively and on an absolute scale very cheap. About 0.8% of the cost you pay for electricity.
Solar is great, nobody, certainly not me, is trying to tell you not to build solar.
The reality is the future of the grid is going to be a mix of generation sources. That's going to include solar. It should, in my opinion, also include nuclear due to their different generation characteristics.
> The only thing that matters in economics is the relative scale. Nuclear being more expensive compared to the alternatives is a deal killer even if it’s not that expensive per kWh in absolute terms.
I disagree because it has different supply characteristics. One supplies a constant amount over a long period of time and is difficult to adjust. The other varies massively over the course of a day and zeroes out at night. Solar alone isn't going to meet needs, you need either or both of base load plus storage in addition.
It's disingenuous to compare the price of a kWh of solar by itself to nuclear when one works at night. If you want power at night, which I think many of us do, then you need to price into the $/kWh rate the cost of storage. You need to compare like for like.
[edit] In 2021, utility scale solar-plus-storage with a capacity of 50 MW/200 MWh is estimated to reach $0.085-$0.158/kWh. Nuclear is $0.131-$0.204/kWh. [1] They're actually quite comparable, and we have line of sight to making nuclear cheaper. Again, nobody is advocating for a 100% nuclear grid, it's not possible, because it's only suited to providing base load. A 100% solar grid is impossible because of the night time.
[edit2] Are you not reading what I'm saying? Nobody is advocating for a 100% nuclear grid. I am advocating for a mixed grid of renewables and nuclear where each operates according to its optimal utility function.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/05/utility-scale-solar-r...
Again if 7% represented a total fuel costs that might be helpful benchmark, but Nuclear’s actual fuel costs are higher than Solar’s total costs.
Yes, that’s right even if the only costs where fuel rods nuclear would already be more expensive than Solar per kWh.
Edit: In response to your edit unsubsidized Nuclear is currently more expensive than unsubsidized solar + batteries which can not only provide 24/7/365 power but actually respond to changing grid demand. Base load power isn’t a benefit it’s a major limitation to adoption because demand isn’t constant.
A true apples to apples comparison shows a 100% Nuclear grid would required vast price increase, while a 100% solar grid is roughly the same price as what we pay today.
Edit2: “Nuclear is $0.131-$0.204/kWh” that’s only for base load nuclear costs skyrocket if you want to respond to changing grid demand on a 100% nuclear grid. Rough estimates are close to 50c/kWh for a pure nuclear grid which is why nobody did so and even France was forced to import and export a large fraction of their generation and useage.
What you need in backup generation is cheap construction. Storage cost is falling even faster than solar and wind.
We already have the combined-cycle gas turbines. Their opex falls with duty cycle. Duty cycle falls with renewable generation buildout and, eventually, storage buildout.
The point was illustrative. We already have nuclear, the only point of advocating nuclear is if you want to increase it. Unfortunately, a 35% nuclear grid costs more per kWh than a 30% nuclear grid, and I don’t think most nuclear advocates understand why.
Your 50 MW/200 MWh numbers are basically what it costs for a 100% solar grid. So it’s not even clear if any nuclear would be cost effective in most areas. Alaska and Russia clearly can benefit from nuclear power, it’s not obvious if California, Texas etc will.
Solar has got so cheap that idling them half the year is no big deal.
Rare earths: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
Copper: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/09/copper-minin...
Mining both have a devastating impact on their local environments.
Copper is used heavily in all electric power systems, so does not count against any. Likewise, all industrial energy infrastructures depend heavily on mining, less-electric ones most of all. So, please do not throw up this irrelevant canard again.
While you are actually underestimating the cost of Indian Point decommissioning (the scale of which was a surprise to me too - but likely attributable to there being 3 reactors), it has a $2.4B fund that's already been collected and held in trust for its clean-up. But of course Indian Point is in New York, home of the most expensive subway track on earth - $3.9B per mile for the Q line extension. So decommissioning a 67 year old 3-reactor NPP costs the same as 0.58 miles of Q line extension.
Since commissioning, it generated 777TWh based on a 73% lifetime capacity factor (src: Wikipedia). About 1/4 of NYC's entire energy needs for 60 years. Decommissioning cost $0.0029/kWh generated. Why are we still pretending this is expensive?
On the other hand you know who isn't responsible for collecting the cost of recycling during operation? Solar and wind operators.
I don't know why people saying that nuclear has a waste problem when even cursory research will show you it simply doesn't due to the sheer energy density of the fuel. Further, fast neutron reactors produce two orders of magnitude less waste, and with incredibly short half lives.
The reality is we've been okay with the quantity of waste in large part because the input uranium is just so cheap it hasn't been economically effective to reprocess and reuse it, and nuclear has been such a whipping boy of the so-called environmentalist movement that we just haven't meaningfully invested in developing the technology in decades. The outcome of this so-called environmentalism in the 60s though was 60 years of coal and oil plants.
We've had a renewable, effectively-unlimited source of clean zero-carbon energy for decades now. We've simply elected not to pursue it.
We know the biggest cost of nuclear is the up-front expenditure and there was a really good interview recently with the head of the DOE loan program, Jigar Shah.* He talked about how a ton of the cost was simply that each NPP is a one-off snowflake, and that there were huge savings to be realized by standardizing designs and copy-pasting them onto favorable spots. There are tons of low hanging fruit that we can actually invest in addressing that would dramatically reduce the cost. We just lack the motivation. Stop mistaking the current state with the potential.
* I believe this was on Odd Lots.
This is even true in cases where the situation is unprecedented and people are having to develop new techniques.
Aka if we only needed to pay for fuel rods and waste management then nuclear would be wildly profitable. Similarly if the only cost was a large workforce and expensive maintenance then again it would be wildly profitable. Being forced to act as base load generation with long periods offline for refueling isn’t a deal killer. If it was just the long construction times and NIMBY issues that would be fine. Etc.
Unfortunately because there is such a diverse range of costs there isn’t a single silver bullet that’s going to solve all problems with nuclear power. At best by addressing individual issues we might increase the percentage of electricity generated by nuclear power. That’s very realistic and IMO a worthwhile goal.
If your intuition was correct, I think we'd see a trend towards much smaller steam turbines with fewer stages. It's a deliberate choice to engineer them at the size scale they are: the marginal efficiency gains from largest [0], lowest-pressure stages has to justify their cost.
[0] https://power.mhi.com/products/steamturbines/lineup/thermal-... (diagram showing relative sizes of HP / IP / LP turbine stages)
If you can test Tsar Bomba somewhere - why can't you build a nuclear reactor there that might melt down?
While it is definitely full of NIMBYism, there is a bit more complexity to the Yucca Mountain decision.
At best the LWR gets 2% of the energy out of natural uranium. A fuel cycle that removes the small fraction of fission products and feeds plutonium and uranium can extract vast amounts of energy from today's "nuclear waste". It is the plutonium that is radioactive for tens of thousands of years, if you use it as fuel the remaining fission products decay quickly and are less radioactive than the original ore in less than 1000 years.
So Yucca Mountain makes no sense from the viewpoint of the nuclear industry (it isn't going to fight for it) so if some people don't like it there is no point in pursuing it.
The Act established a Nuclear Waste Fund composed of fees levied against electric utilities to pay for the costs of constructing and operating a permanent repository, and set the fee at one mill per kilowatt-hour of nuclear electricity generated. Utilities were charged a one-time fee for storage of spent fuel created before enactment of the law. … The Nuclear Waste Fund previously received $750 million in fee revenues each year and had an unspent balance of $44.5 billion as of the end of FY2017. … In late 2013, a federal court ruled that the Department of Energy must stop collecting fees for nuclear waste disposal until provisions are made to collect nuclear waste.[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act
Anyway, LWR can extract more than 2% of the energy in the fuel it mostly comes down to how enriched the uranium you feed them is because the ratio of U235:U238 in reactor grade fuel is different than the ratio LWR are burning. They can extract far more energy from weapons grade uranium, but using it would be a bad idea.
Similarly, you need a design that’s likely to last long enough to pay back construction costs.
Finally there’s logistic issues in locating power plants in the middle of nowhere. You need massive quantities of water and large massive workforce plus dedicated power transmission to someone in need of power etc.
It turns out the lead time to build long power lines is long and it is a politically difficult proposition because you have to get permits for a whole line from Point A to Point B.
One of the ways where the sticker price of renewables is higher than what is quoted is the cost of transporting it and one advantage of nuclear is it could be sited closer to demand in some cases.
Leading to the somewhat perverse situation where it's now necessary to build new or bigger lines from Scotland all the way down to the south of England where most of that generated energy is needed.
Think about Chernobyl vs Hiroshima. Chernobyl is uninhabitable and will remain so for a very long time. Hiroshima was rebuilt in the exact same spot that was destroyed and is a healthy, thriving city, by all accounts.
Even in some far out place, nuclear fallout in some far out place will eventually make its way into the air and water of the world, count on it.
Meltdowns aren’t controlled reactions the waste includes perfectly useful fuel, short and long lived waste products, plus a mix of things such as control rods and the walls of the reactor etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corium_(nuclear_reactor)
There’s a few other effects such as mushroom clouds moving material away from the blast location, and reactors containing more nuclear fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Transmutatio...
I don’t understand all the details but apparently this is why some types of H-Bombs can be relatively “clean.”
The book mentions 3-miles island, where a problem in a secondary system (an added safety system) spread and caused the system as a whole to fail. This is a tongue-in-cheek way of illustrating a serious issue when designing systems, though I wonder if the interpretation of what happened at 3-miles island is a bit of a stretch? (And I may misremember the book.)
"The accident to unit 2 happened at 4 am on 28 March 1979 when the reactor was operating at 97% power. It involved a relatively minor malfunction in the secondary cooling circuit which caused the temperature in the primary coolant to rise..."[1]
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-Large/d... [1]: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
"Secondary" in nuclear parlance for a PWR refers to the loop of water that cycles through the steam generators and turbines, while the "primary" loop cycles through the reactor and steam generators.
Not to detract from your point, which is a good one, and the pressurizer relief valve that stuck open and through which the cooling water escaped was indeed an added safety system.
[2] is the legwork the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is doing to prepare for the approval process on non light water reactor designs.
As for the slow wave reactors, it looks like that idea was put on a back burner. Fast reactors are much more exciting anyway.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2020/05/f74/Advan...
At best the worst case downside is limited, but so to is the amount of power generated.
(I don't know enough about this to know if nuclear will have a large impact, in the grand scheme).
If the reward is high enough the risk might be justified. Personally I doubt it (mostly because economically solar + wind + power storage seems like a better bet), but that's a whole other discussion.
"Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, also known as SL-1 or the Argonne Low Power Reactor (ALPR), was a United States Army experimental nuclear reactor in the western United States at the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS), later the Idaho National Laboratory, west of Idaho Falls, Idaho. It experienced a steam explosion on the night of January 3, 1961, killing all three of its young military operators, and pinning one of them to the ceiling of the facility with a reactor vessel plug. The event is the only reactor accident in U.S. history that resulted in immediate fatalities.