Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms | Hacker News Reader

Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

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I feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's current form of large central power plants[1].

By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nature of the tech means each individual unit isn't very important, and failure means no power and maybe an eyesore, no catastrophic pollution.

One further consideration is the decentralized nature of renewables. As the war in Ukraine is showing us, for any country dependent on a small number of central power plants, those become extremely vulnerable weak points if your country is invaded, whereas a decentralized network of renewables is hardier and can degrade rather than hard fail.

I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc., but I think in the messy world of reality micro generation is going to swamp everything else in the very long run.

1: Perhaps the small modular nuclear reactors idea can eventually be proven out.

Georgia Power customers have been paying extra for this plant for something like a decade. Rate payers absorbed much of the risk instead of investors in the company. This was pushed as a way to save on financing costs by getting the money from customers upfront but saving them more long term with lower rates. But it appears the customers, despite prepaying for the plant, aren't going to see those savings. The investors however were insulated from much of the cost overruns.

Utilities are generally paid for by the users regardless of their cost. Investors are typically insulated in so far as the project completes, which is completely normal. It’s not like there’s some sort of call provision on a bond that asks for more money from the bond holder if the project costs more. Typically you would simply issue more bonds. Instead of issuing bonds and paying interest on those out of utility bills, they decided to just pay up front (which was likely a bad deal given how low interest rates have been). But in the end the utility users pay everything in every situation. Where else would the money come from? The charity investors who give money to mega projects out of benevolence? There aren’t many of those. It generally comes out of a mixture of taxes and utility users. Even investors are just loaning capital and their primary risk is the project outright fails.

I feel like in reading these comments people feel like there’s some other third party that foots the bill

Depends on if you have a regulated or open electricity market. You describe a regulated market.

On the other hand, Europe by and large operates on a marginal pricing open market with utilities providing the transmission grid and stabilization services.

In that market the investors take the losses. Unless huge state subsidies are brought out like Hinkley Point C leading to the government guaranteeing a strike price of $150/MWh over 35 years.

Realistically consumer still pay for the utility as the marginal pricing must provide revenues sufficient and in excess of capital and operating costs, and a sufficient risk premium to investors. If consumers don’t like it, they won’t get the services. There’s an argument that a market model is more efficient, but there’s an equally plausible argument that utility models provide more stable pricing - and that end users of utility services prefer stability over efficiency. Thanks for the info though I wasn’t aware Europe was structured this way, but it does explain why costs have been so volatile.

> Depends on if you have a regulated or open electricity market. You describe a regulated market.

what's being described is a regulated natural monopoly, standard economics. No economist would recommend unregulated natural monopolies.

marginal pricing would not pay for a transmission grid, and utility investors would not agree to build or maintain a grid without it being paid for. Marginal pricing refers to the cost of electricity given the grid, where there is no extra amount covering the cost of extra grid capacity.

> The investors however were insulated from much of the cost overruns.

The American way.

Capitalizing rewards, socializing the risks. But socialism is bad folks, m'kay.

Worse things have happened than a $4 rate increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

Hmmmmm I don't see what famine has to do with nuclear power.

The famine killed more people than nuclear power ever did, yet green activists are all for killing off nuclear power and not socialism.

I still don't see anyone else talking about "green activists" or famines. Your comment reads like a non sequitur.

Did you check what you are saying?

I did that for you: [1] has the average electricity prices in different regions of the US as published by the EIA. As of December 22 (latest data available), the average price for residential use in the whole of the US was 14.96 cents/kWh. In Georgia it was 11.96 cents/kWh. The report also has December 21, and also other sectors (commercial, industrial, transportation, overall). As far as I can see the price in Georgia was systematically below the nationwide average.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

I’m only paying $0.08 cents in Georgia but I’m with another energy provider that has the lowest rates in the state (if their marketing material is correct).

Sawnee EMC charges 7.67 cents per kWh ($0.0767) [0].

Georgia Power (most of metro Atlanta) charges 5.8-10.6 cents per kWh depending on season and amount consumes [1].

Georgia is very lucky to have cheap electricity. I think it’s in part to having nuclear power plants.

[0] https://file.sawnee.com/web-docs/rates/Residential-Service-R... [1] https://www.georgiapower.com/residential/billing-and-rate-pl...

Thanks. I am going to email Cobb EMC and ask why Sawnee has lower rates yet they claim they have the lowest.

Actually Sawnee is tiered so you would only get that rate below 100 kWh and the warm weather rates go up during specifics months. Cobb EMC rates don’t change unless you do the Niteflex program.

Socialize the risks, privatize the profits. Who would have guessed?

Setting aside the relative investment risk issues, perhaps customers are happy that they are getting a reliable source of power that is carbon free? Is zero cost the right threshold when looking at the larger benefits, nuclear or solar? That being said, I personally think we are headed to a combination of some always on nuclear combined with a lot of solar. Look to Texas for recent lessons on lack of robustness in power generation capability.

> Look to Texas for recent lessons on lack of robustness in power generation capability.

When they had not winterized the grid and an abnormal amount of gas, coal and nuclear power went offline.

> fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity

Do you have some links?

All I could find was [1], where it says the rates will be raised by 2.6% in 2023 and 4.5% in the next two years, which is not unreasonable given the current inflation rate. The justification for the increase does not mention Vogtle at all, instead it mentions strengthening the grid, investments in renewables, improving costumer experience, enhancing operations.

[1] https://www.georgiapower.com/company/news-center/2022-articl...

It’s in the originally posted article.

“Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers are already paying part of the financing cost, and state regulators have approved a monthly rate increase of $3.78 a month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. The elected Georgia Public Service Commission will decide later who pays for the remainder of the costs.”

The article mentions

> Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers are already paying part of the financing cost, and state regulators have approved a monthly rate increase of $3.78 a month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. The elected Georgia Public Service Commission will decide later who pays for the remainder of the costs.

Three dollars and seventy eight cents?!?!?!

You can't get around the fact that you need baseload and/or storage. Both are hard problems. Some locations have regional baseload solutions like hydroelectricity, but many don't. Nuclear is a solution that works anywhere, but like you say, it's expensive. Storage is similar: there are some regional solutions (pumped hydro), or a difficult and expensive general solution (chemical batteries). There's no single answer that works everywhere. All options, including nuclear, need to be on the table and considered as part of the whole-system energy solution.

Gas peaker plants solve the problem, with no additional costs.

We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions.

At that point it would be much cheaper to look elsewhere for more improvements. There's no need to invent a reason for massive new energy infrastructure. The gas plants already exist; no exotic solutions are required to give 100% continuous power supply.

Europe can not continue to rely on natural gas and fossil fuels for the next 20-30 years, nor will the climate goals be reached if power consumption and thus gas consumption are increased.

Gas peaker plants are also not cheap. People think they are cheap when looking at the theoretical cost, but having energy plants in stand-by mode costs a lot of money. Generally those are paid by either taxes or as part of the grid connection cost because governments will pay a lot of money to have grid stability. In theory we could remove those subsidizes and let the market pay to have grid stability, but no governments in Europe do this.

Europe also do not have any easy access to natural gas. The only country would be Norway. Being energy self-sufficient is important from a geopolitical perspective and I doubt anyone is unaware about the strong connection between current wars and fossil fuels. Nuclear fuel can be both mined and constructed in EU, the fuel is much less sensitive to geopolitical events, and the diversity in the nuclear fuel production chain is fairly good. Countries can much easier store up decades worth of fuel.

So you propose having nuclear plants in standby? Then I have a bridge to sell you.

Of course not, but is that question even asked in good faith? Are you not aware that the European grid is made out of multiple different technologies each with a different benefits and drawbacks?

Right now the most important aspect of the grid is not price, it is the reduction of fossil fuel dependency. It is not sustainable to use fossil fuels in the short run and it is definitively not sustainable in the long run. Countries need to invest and start building replacement for existing fossil fuel power plants, and they also need at the same time increase capacity. On top of that we also need to start replace and remove part of the hydro energy production in order to prevent several extinctions.

It is also not morally or economically sensible to continue spend subsidizes on fossil fuel plants. A minimum requirement for government subsidizes should be zero green house emissions and geopolitical self-sufficient within the borders of EU.

The problem with nuclear is that every dollar spent on nuclear could have displaced more fossil energy if invested in renewables. Any investment in nuclear prolongs the climate crisis.

The next problem nuclear faces is that the CAPEX heavy economic model requires them to run at 100% all the time, they used to be able to do that but renewables undercut them wildly.

Now you start to lower the capacity factor of the nuclear plants, which has now gone from $0.15/kWh to ~$0.3/kWh when operating at 50% capacity factor.

Who even wants electricity for that price? It's beyond what we today call an "energy crisis". This is locked in until that nuclear plant has paid of its initial investment after 40 years.

> The problem with nuclear is that every dollar spent on nuclear could have displaced more fossil energy if invested in renewables. Any investment in nuclear prolongs the climate crisis.

Every dollar spent on nuclear, or every dollar spent on gratuitous nuclear regulation? Renewables kill many more people and render far more land uninhabitable per kWh generated; if we normalized our safety requirements then we'd turn off more coal more quickly by going to nuclear.

Germany switched their policy away from nuclear and the result is they've spent more money (just look at the cost of the required grid upgrades alone from their renewable programme) and generated more CO2 (with coal plants being kept open past planned shutdowns, and in some cases even restarted).

There's plenty of space for renewables in the mix, but opposing nuclear doesn't mean more money gets spent on renewables and certainly doesn't mean more emission reduction; quite the opposite.

> Every dollar spent on nuclear, or every dollar spent on gratuitous nuclear regulation? Renewables kill many more people and render far more land uninhabitable per kWh generated; if we normalized our safety requirements then we'd turn off more coal more quickly by going to nuclear.

Ehh what. None of this is true.

> Germany switched their policy away from nuclear and the result is they've spent more money (just look at the cost of the required grid upgrades alone from their renewable programme) and generated more CO2 (with coal plants being kept open past planned shutdowns, and in some cases even restarted).

The great thing is that we are in 2023 and not 15 years ago. Germany spearheaded the renewable transition with the subsidies and huge buildout they enabled. Today we can utilize the fruits of that.

We make choices based on the options today, not past results.

> There's plenty of space for renewables in the mix, but opposing nuclear doesn't mean more money gets spent on renewables and certainly doesn't mean more emission reduction; quite the opposite.

Then the money gets spent on other economic activity, rather than siphoning state subsidies to a pet nuclear project.

The market should deploy the cheapest grid possible that can produce emission free energy. We should be using those market forces.

The problem that we have is that governments steps in to subsidize grid stability. Industries and citizens in general do no accept a government that allows for black outs, and they also do not accept a government that allow the energy price to reach the natural market price when supply is very low and demand is high.

A second major problem is that if cheap renewables can produce 90% of supply and we need to 10% of expensive storage to meet demand, the cost that customers will have to bear is as if 100% of the produced energy came from the expensive storage. This make it very expensive to customers to have a combination of very cheap and very expensive energy production.

And finally, EU law dictate that if a country has surplus energy production then they must sell it to countries that has a deficit in energy production. This makes grid stability an EU wide issue, and even if a single country has an very stable production they will still share the high costs of energy unstable countries.

All of it create a market where the cost of $/kWh of energy created within a country is just loosely connected by the real price that customers pay. This winter demonstrated that multiple times, and all the governments subsidizes and price roofs illustrated how ready governments are to pay when the real cost of grid stability lands.

We are. Marginal cost + paying for CO2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emissions_Tradi...

You are missing the time factor. Supplying 90% means that a vast majority of time they fulfill 100% and the expensive storage is not required. All based on the marginal price market Europe employs.

The storage would still be needed, but it is not the marginal cost and maybe storage is not the right path? Maybe it is sector coupling? Maybe it is demand response from hydrogen production for industrial use? Maybe it is not charging most cars for a couple of days?

As with all capitalistic systems a holistic organic approach will emerge. If it is not good enough adjust the market conditions. Sweden is already putting most stabilization services on an open market, with the goal to trade all day-ahead like power.

Pulling out a five-year plan of having nuclear solve it in 20 years will only lead to pain.

If that were true then we wouldn't see large wind/solar regions where the average cost during this winter were at $0.3/kWh or above. Wind and solar did contribute a lot, but it was quite rare that they hit 100%. Instead it was gas prices that controlled what the energy prices was. It was this fact that resulted in many country implementing a roof of how much profits those renewables could earn, redirecting those profits in order to pay the bill for more fossil fuels.

Sweden is a prime example of a country that is paying the cost of stabilizing the grid for the rest of the continent. They could have had one of the cheapest energy grid in EU thanks the the large stable production from nuclear and hydro, but because of how the EU system is setup the opposite occurred. The result is the highest inflation rate in EU coupled with a significant hit to the economy. Germany in contrast is using the profits they historically gained by using cheap natural gas from Russia and injected billions to their industry in the form of energy subsidizes, sheltering their economy from the same fate. Who cares if the energy prices reaches well above $1/kWh if the government foot the bill?

Massive subsidizes and huge difference between marginal cost and actually price is not a free market. There is nothing free about it.

No, decarbonize the grid the way France did it. Don’t follow Germany’s example.

It’s that simple.

The French example is amazing. A bunch of negative learning by doing and then the total boondoggle of Flamanville 3. Lets emulate.

Have a look at this crudely drawn graph to see the nuclear French cost over time with Flamanville 3 added as a cherry on top:

https://imgur.com/6G2RBa0

On the other hand Germany has gone from about zero to 50% renewables while spearheading the renewable market. Sure, personally I would prefer if they had closed fossil generation before nuclear, but Fukushima threw a wrench in that plan.

To not utilize the fruits of Germany's efforts today would be insane. We are making decisions 2023, not 2005.

What fruits? German co2 emissions per capital are similar to coal heavy Poland. Energiewende is a massive failure and a great example of politics screwing people and environment over.

Which is amazing considering that Germany has 2.8x the GDP per capita of Poland. As I said, I do not agree with phasing out nuclear before renewables.

Short of that transforming the electricity sector of Germany from all fossil and some nuclear to 50% renewables in 15 years is nothing short of incredible.

Add the current exponential growth in renewables to that, now when the cost side does not require subsidies anymore, and we have an incredible future ahead of us.

Or as wiki puts it, they choose after Fukushima to not use nuclear as a bridging technology.

> The key policy document outlining the Energiewende was published by the German government in September 2010, some six months before the Fukushima nuclear accident.[1] Legislative support was passed in September 2010. On 6 June 2011, following Fukushima, the government removed the use of nuclear power as a bridging technology as part of their policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende#Status

Per capita per gdp it's 70% higher than France. Going 50% renewables was a huge undertaking but it's clear it wasn't the right thing to do considering this money could've been spent on building more nuclear. It's all about decarbonisation, not about increasing share of renewable energy. Climate doesn't care about your share of renewables. Another thing to consider is that this transistion was in large part built on gas imported from Russia which funded the current war in Ukraine. And I would argue that growth of renewables in Germany has largerly stalled, barely any new wind farms are added to the grid nowadays. More solar has been added in recent years but Germany is so far north that it doesn't make much sense to build solar there (esp. considering energy requirements for winter). Energiewende is a big failure and the faster Germans notice the better.

You are stuck in the mindset of a blank slate with Energiewende as one of the options ahead of you. That decision is done, you can not revert it. The cost is paid.

We are now in 2023. This is how the cost for solar PV and wind have transformed, since that decision.

https://www.lazard.com/media/451886/grphx_lcoe-09.png

We are at the end of that graph. The outlook is not 2009, it is 2023. In 2023 renewables are the only choice, economically. When we hit 70-90% penetration depending on country there will be new problems to solve, but we are extremely far from that.

The current large build-out is off-shore wind, since that has higher capacity factors. We will see to what percentage of penetration that brings us. Then some sprinkling of solar on top because it is essentially free.

Nuclear and renewables both compete for the slice of the energy market being the most inflexible cheapest power source. Renewables win that by a landslide. Now nuclear becomes load following, and that horrific investment became even worse.

LCOE doesn't account for storage, backup and grid costs, please don't use it as a go to indicator that renewables are cheap. How much offshore capacity was added in the last 3 years in Germany? Zero? Or am I mistaken?

Energy grids tend to converge to LCOE of the producers. Just look at the average prices before the current crisis haphazardly replacing Russian gas with alternatives. We are also talking about the 70-90% case here, for that case no storage is needed. That is the point.

A stupid solution, which is cheaper than nuclear, is simply burning hydrogen in turbines like todays peaker plants. We are not at the point where it is needed, so everyone is instead looking for smarter solution.

The European grid is interconnected. UK awarded contracts to add 7 GW @ 60% capacity factor = 4.2 GW average last summer.

Germany seems to have added ~500 MW in off-shore wind in the last three years, so with that generations capacity factor about 230 MW in average power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in...

It just doesn't make sense to only use LCOE for weather and season dependent sources of energy, of course you need storage if you don't want to burn gas/coal during Dunkelflaute. Just look at German grid and what's happening right now (614 gCO₂eq/kWh, mostly gas and coal). Meanwhile France is at 92g. Are you really proposing countries like Poland decarbonise like Germany instead of following France's example? Interconnected or not, you do need cheap and dependable energy and the only clean source of that is nuclear. Hydrogen is just a greenwashed natural gas. And 500MW in 3 years is quite far from being meaningful.

We do need to get carbon production to zero, and then negative. But first we need to lower carbon production. Gas peaker plants make a good intermediate step. We can work on renewable electricity. And then work on more renewables and storage to get rid of all carbon, and finally even more renewables and carbon capture.

I have heard that 3x normal load in renewables is enough for nearly all the time with storage for load-shifting during the day. That results in extra capacity most of the time which can be used for carbon capture, making hydrogen, and making legacy fuels.

>We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions.

Not just wrong but backwards, we in fact need to REMOVE gigatons of carbon to avoid dangerous, possibly catastrophic warming of the planet.

> Gas peaker plants solve the problem, with no additional costs.

> We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions.

And now instead of paying for the expense nuclear power plant, you have to pay:

- Pay for 3x the raw capacity of the plant in solar and wind because they never run at peak capacity

- Pay for the battery for storage

- Pay for the Gas power plant that will never be cost effective because running 10% of the time.

And you still emit more CO2 than a damn nuclear power plant.

Ah downvoted. In front of mathematical evidence, the anti-nuclear run away and downvote ? Or you are working for the gas industry maybe ?

I've been pleasantly surprised by the impressive recent results that multiple groups have gotten with potassium-based dual-ion batteries. The dual-ion battery stores both positive (in the anode) and negative (in the cathode) ions, which means that both electrodes can be made of carbon rather than metals. Storing negative ions in the cathode also eliminates the major hurdle with sodium-ion: the large Na+ ion doesn't like to be yanked out of the metal-oxide cathode's crystal lattice. I'm not sure why the best stability results I've seen have been with potassium, but anyway:

1500 cycles, 95% capacity retention: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/ee/c7ee0...

2000 cycles, "100%" capacity retention (degradation below measurement limits): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202001...

It's rare that I see a battery that meets the triple criterion of high stability (>>1000 cycles), cheap materials and high current efficiency (which in a large installation is also related to heat dissipation), but these seem to do it. The density is too low for vehicles, but fine for grids.

Renewables with batteries are cheaper than new nuclear or even new natural gas.

Does that price include enough storage to heat the entire Twin Cities area (~4M people) for six continuous weeks of average -20C weather with overcast skies, where power failure means widespread death and property damage (broken pipes)? It might do, I don't know, but I'm skeptical. That's a lot of power! My gut feeling is a baseload solution is better for that kind of situation, though what I'm really advocating for is for every option to be on the table for the real experts (not me!) to decide.

Nope. The only "cost-competitive" solar+storage installations I've seen lack sufficient storage to maintain their advertised overnight--even after a perfect, sunny day! For solar with sufficient storage to handle consecutive cloudy days (when panel production is <30% of max), the cost would be many times higher than natural gas. And solar that can't handle consecutive cloudy days requires redundant backup capacity... which, oddly, is never priced in!

In 20 years I think we'll look back on this idea that cheap solar could be the cornerstone of our electricity production as a goofy idea which was about as realistic as the ethanol fuel schemes of the early 2000s.

But at a grid scale we don't need a single installation to provide continuous power and it wouldn't necessarily make sense for it to do so. Load is not uniform across the day and other sources may be cheaper at any particular moment.

Weather patterns can be very large. So essentially all installations in one area will act same way. And we are not really doing any intercontinental grids with large enough capacities to move whole demand. Or overprovisioning in each area so that also other areas can be covered...

At a grid scale you don't have to do everything all at once. Overprovisioning takes time, as does interconnection and storage.

We need a New Deal-type mobilization to build https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Communit... everywhere across the country. Like building the Hoover Dam, it will generate massive amounts of carbon-free energy for a long time and with a relatively short ROI. It's embarrassing parallelizable. We could be off fossil fuels for heating in fifteen years across all homes, saving thousands of dollars a household per year.

52 entire dwellings on 250 acres? Thanks but no. You would literally need to pave America to make this happen.

50 dwellings on one acre is at the low end of the urban density scale.

First, that's literally not even close to true about paving.

But I meant retrofit all existing housing stock with solar collectors and heat storage, neither of which require much room.

It is though. This is a net 5 acres per dwelling, there are only ~300 million arable acres in the USA and there are 200 million households.

This is a tangent. Only the garage roofs have solar thermal collectors on them. Every existing suburban area in the USA regardless of density has enough building roof volume to fully supply a Drake Landing-type thermal system and eliminate heating inputs. Drake Landing shows it will work even in the exurbs. I would guess it could provide enough heating for low-rise apartments and row houses as they have reduced heat loss compared to SFH to make up for the lower available roof area. They cover the deep bore thermal system with dirt and make it a park. I would expect you could put a building over it too. It literally doesn't need to take up any additional land area, so the fact that Drake Landing is an exurb does not mean the system would only work there.

What I haven't read enough about is whether it's limited to a certain geology. I assume it wouldn't work in Florida, but it's not needed there.

Back to your tangent, Drake Landing isn't a giant paved area: the vast majority of the area is not paved or building. I also don't know why you're counting only arable acres as they're houses not farms. Since the system only needs a large-garage-roof-sized thermal collector and the average house roof is larger than that (and if the roof is even smaller so is the thermal load) it's completely irrelevant.

You might be surprised at the rigor applied in studies like the NREL Standard Scenarios, viewable here: https://scenarioviewer.nrel.gov/. I'm guessing the Twin Cities region doesn't actually see 42 days of overcast skies, but if it does, that can be captured in these studies. And transmission is important - load in the Twin Cities area does not have to be served by generation in that area.

Pump water uphill on sunny & windy days. One thing that MN doesn't lack is water.

Wtf does six weeks of peak power consumption for a city look like in volume of water? Probably bigger than a city

During the long winter season, that water is largely in solid form, making it less useful for hydro-battery use.

Hydro plants in cold regions usually have an "ice laying" period where they reduce the output to form a thick layer of ice at their desired level to enable the flow they need and prevent ice-slush from entering the turbines.

Seems like Minnesota is more lakes, but that same concept should apply, and it is not like they freeze to the bottom each winter.

You've also got a sizable river on the eastern border that extends up into northern Minnesota.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monticello_Nuclear_Generating_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Crosse_Boiling_Water_Reacto...

bit short on hills though

Batteries in their current form are incredibly harmful to the environment, and I think would need to be replaced more than nuclear fuel sources.

Exactly, and the reason why they're cheaper now is because it's easier to dump their externalities on developing countries with lax environmental policy, whereas nuclear has unreasonably strict safety requirements which drive up costs substantially, along with the lost expertise in the work force by pausing it for so long.

TANSTAAFL

Batteries, if recycled, have less environmental impact than the massive amounts of concrete used in a nuclear facility.

Absolutely not. You might want to look up where that cobalt for batteries comes from as well and how much recycling actually gets done.

LiFePO4 batteries need no cobalt. You do not need fancy batteries for stationary services. Grid-scale storage batteries can be as big, heavy, dumb, and cheap as you like. You don't even need lithium really.

Cool. Would you like to let us know where all the other materials are mined from and how environmentally friendly that is? I suggest you look up nickel mining.

LiFePO4 batteries don't use nickel either.

I see that now. Yes, they seem to be a better option than other batteries. However, you're still mining stuff from the earth and the idea that disposing of current vehicles (or other fossil fuel powered things) is better for the environment is just silly.

You also didn't address the recyclable part. From what I can see LiFePO4 batteries are supposedly easier to recycle but I'm going to take that with a grain of salt. Almost all the things they've told us are being recycled just get dumped in the ocean in China. I have my doubts that anyone is actually recycling these batteries effectively.

> Almost all the things they've told us are being recycled just get dumped in the ocean in China.

Post-consumer recycling is quite poor, but post-industrial recycling is much better because they don't have to sort out random junk. Many battery plants already recycle the batteries that fail validation.

Cars are recycled quite thoroughly. In the US: 99% of lead acid batteries are recycled. 95% of vehicles are recycled, and of those 95%, 80% of the materials in the vehicle are recycled. (mostly steel).

In 2023 stationary storage batteries don't use cobalt.

Stationary storage batteries are expected to last 25 years. Given that we've only been doing stationary storage batteries for about 5 years, it's not really surprising that they aren't being recycled.

What's your point here? You're only supporting my stance.

This lie is promulgated by the oil industry.

The oil industry uses slave labor to mine cobalt in the congo with zero environmental concerns on how they get it out of the ground?

Your lie is promulgated by the "green energy" industry.

There's just as much money and bs coming from the other side. You can't pretend there's not when you have massive donors and and entire elitist political party backing something like that.

You have fallen into a trap. You are informed enough to be concern-trolled by fossil fuel propaganda, but not well-enough informed to realize it. Many battery technologies need no fancy metals. Even lithium is optional. But lithium, even if we have to get it, has an environmental footprint far smaller than fossil fuels production. Other things that have dramatically larger environmental footprints than lithium include soap and table salt.

Oh stop with the strawman attacks and wake up. You're being fed bs by your side just as much as the oil industry feeds their "constituents" lies. Big Green energy is backed by massive amounts of money and political interests just like big oil and it's not even close to replacing fossil fuels as a main energy source. All you need to do is ask Europe how things are going now that they don't have natural gas coming in from Russia.

Here's the deal... right now, fossil fuels heat my home, get me to work, cook my food, create a massive amount of the household products I own. They've kept my family alive and well and several generations back as well. Green Energy CAN'T do this effectively at all right now.

If/When it does I'll switch. However, I'm not going to listen to some shill, bully and shame me into using something because they feel they're morally justified in doing so.

Green energy does not have to be able to do 100% of everything to be useful. It is not as simple as CAN Vs CANT. And it won't suddenly flip from CANT to CAN in an instant.

You're strawmanning again.

The issue here is everyone knows green energy can't provide enough energy on it's own and yet governments and sjw's every seem to think it's a good idea to pull the rug out of the average middle class person and force them onto green power by taxation, social pressure etc.

And your "everyone knows" is an "appeal to the people" falacy. The grid operator in the UK certainly thinks it is possible to have a 100% renewable grid.

Although I guess that the political situation in the USA precludes a rational policy. Every argument turns into a culture war sooner or later. The opposition is criticised for moral weakness (child slave battery) whilst your own side are blameless victims.

WOW you're going to use the UK as an example for renewable energy right now??? Have you been paying attention at all?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/05/uk-prepares...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uk-wind-solar-builde...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/01/uk-effor...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/21/energy-cris...

https://e360.yale.edu/features/africa-europe-solar-wind-powe...

I'm actually surprised you had the gall to even make this comment.

This ISN'T a political side argument. It's a reality argument and it's time for you to wake up. I'm choosing the side that keeps my family I alive during the winter. When/If renewables do that I'll embrace them, right now they aren't cutting it.

The hilarity here is you've chosen some cult type rational to convince yourself "renewables" are your Jesus and you'll never stop praying to your renewable "God" even when it strikes you down over and over again. Stop drinking the koolaid bud.

The issues ovet winter in the UK were caused by gas supply concerns and low availability of French nuclear power. I am not really sure why you think that is the fault of the renewable industry. But anyway I pointed to the UK because the grid operator has a plan to deliver 100% renewables. But it doesn't need to be reached immediately and may never be reached. It is not a binary thing. The brilliant thing about electricity is that it is fungible. It is the same regardless of which particular "god" you have faith in. I actually live in a country with full electric heating and much of the electricity comes from renewables. Have not had a power cut for years and am still alive and warm. It is not faith in fossil fuels or renewables that keeps me alive but high quality engineering. That can exist in fossil fuel or renewables.

You're right, it's not a binary thing. So, stop using legislation to remove fossil fuels from the people that can't afford your renewables, and then turning around and taxing the shit out of those same people to push renewables that can't stay on par with fossil fuels yet.

Yep... and the cobalt they need to in order to be produced it mined by child slave labor in the Congo.

People need to realize nothing about living in our modern culture comes without a cost.

Right, does it survive week with bad weather and max load ? Coz that's called "a winter"

I’d like to read about this - can you point me towards some reputable articles

Not an article, but I find the summary from Sabine Hossenfelder neutral and trustworthy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo

That video is missing demand response enabling sector coupling.

Take green steel using hydrogen as a chemical feedstock. Oversize the electrolyzers and add some storage and the plant is now able to utilize low prices and leave the firm 10% to more important consumers, while enabling more producers to exist.

This without paying the round-trip cost.

Almost all studies looking into 100% renewable systems finds them easily possible globally but a holistic approach is required. Simply shifting the current electricity sector to renewables won't cut it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy

That's a great video, and I think it's important to point out to the other jackass in this thread that the issue is relevant to Germany because most of that country is north of fucking Saskatoon while this article is about Georgia which is at the same latitude as Iraq.

> I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc.,

Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it.

If the US were serious about climate change, I have no doubt we would move mountains tomorrow, but we absolutely are not serious. Sacrifice/compromise/responsibility aren't even part of the conversation.

I mean yes? There are tons of big projects getting built in the US. Now, I'm not sure about the actual "ratios" compared to the 80s and earlier. So there might be less big infra projects nowadays (but I think that's also true for most of the west). Costs are also creeping up, and delays are maybe more common. Yet the fact remains that there are huge infra projects all around the US, they just don't really make headlines in the national news cycle because they are (sadly) just inherently boring for most of the population. Unless there is some drama around costs or delays, that is.

> Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it.

Stadiums, airports, and semiconductor fabs. But yeah, we are off our game.

I feel like pointing out that stadiums and airports are single buildings that in the grand scheme of things aren't nearly as common or large as a country's (or even a single state's) worth of power plants, highways/rail networks, or housing for the masses.

Airports can be complex, and of course chip fabs are an overwhelming case of quality over quantity, so in conclusion you're definitely right on the "hard" count still being accomplished, but I notice a particular gap missing here on "big".

My melange of big projects:

Space shuttle, reusable rockets, cell phone networks, Fibre deployment

They’re incremental (and out of order of importance), but these radically changed our lives in some way.

> Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

Nearly all of the cell phone/broadband network came up in the last generation. A lot of highway projects have completed. Many cities have had substantial light rail projects and extensions. We've done very well with certain kinds of infrastructure, it's just a question of whether we allocated the effort to the right stuff.

The main issue we have in our built environment comes down to massively prioritizing automobile tech and privatized sprawl development at every turn, when we've known for some time that it's a money pit and doesn't produce the equitable outcomes promised. That's only shifted recently with changes in demographics(Boomers, the biggest block of homeowners, fading, immigration from places with different standards), and new direction from the higher levels of government(e.g. Biden admin infrastructure packages and policy-setting, or California's move to address housing by pressuring cities to build denser).

There's a definite correlation going on between "housing cost increase" and "infrastructure cost increase", which I believe has the causation mostly on the end of housing, and the trend towards financialization that set in at the end of the 70's and consolidated the homeowner demographic into voting towards asset inflation. The 2nd Ave subway was expensive because New York's land is expensive, not because the tunnel itself was a uniquely nefarious technical problem. But New York's land is expensive in a speculative sense: the structure of the tax policy and valuation is such that a rational move is to leave a building vacant and try to sell it for more, rather than set rent at a lower price and record a valuation in line with what tenants can afford.

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Your examples are either Military projects or Buildings? FYI they're building Fighter Jets and Stadiums and Skyscrapers all over the world. Nothing majorly impressive about that.

Really complex things we completely fail at, Nuclear power plants take decades longer than intended. California's High Speed rail is billions of dollars over budget and many years behind schedule and may never finish.

Imagine mentioning climate change and then discussing building massive infrastructure that only ADDS to climate change. How in the world do you think that stuff gets built? (hint: massive amounts of fossil fuels)

Anyone "serious" about climate change realizes that it's a very slow moving thing that's not going to result in some sort of Hollywood Dante's Peak type scenario. Anyone "serious" about climate change also realizes it's neither fair nor realistic to expect up and coming continents like Africa to continue burning dung for heat while western nations get to reap the benefits of a century plus of fossil fuels turning them into superpowers.

Right now fossil fuels are still the best energy source you're going to get and still the best way of bringing nations to an industrialized point where they can actually consider "green energy".

Additionally, you seem to not understand that America has vast areas of emptiness and any federal plan for mass infra (especially transportation) is a massive waste of materials, taxes, and possibly incredibly destructive to certain eco-systems. Even my Dutch friends think it would be stupid to build mass transit on a European scale here. Our population is too spread out.

Lastly, stop thinking everything is a political issue. If you haven't figured it out by now... big government moves like a snail and will NEVER be the quickest or most efficient way to get anything done. If all this stuff is as good as you think it is, people will embrace it on their own without the need of any political battle.

> By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." > I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc., but I think in the messy world of reality micro generation is going to swamp everything else in the very long run.

Trying to get solar and wind to reliably provide baseload will likely be a big engineering project too (assuming it can be done). I also like the idea of smaller power generation sites. I think it would be really healthy if we had a mix of small nuclear, gas, and renewables, so we're not reliant on one thing. We need a bit more overlapping capacity in our grids.

A sub-$4 monthly fee seems like a decent choice to significantly increase the energy supply in your region. I'd like to see the numbers on the average monthly cost of electricity usage for homes in Georgia (separate from the various fees), along with an analysis of how many years will be necessary to recover the additional fees associated with these new reactors. Perhaps this was already done and posted online, but I don't have the confidence to go looking for it.

Here in California we seem to be shutting down nuclear plants while energy demand grows.

Georgia is subject to hurricanes, which nuclear plants can weather much better than solar panels or wind turbines. And aside from aforementioned hurricanes, wind is simply not plentiful or reliable across the southeastern United States. Just by virtue of geography, the options are more limited. Nuclear makes a lot more geographic sense in places where there are no reliable wind corridors to harvest.

https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325

Also, unlike many "Red Dawn" fantasies, the US isn't getting successfully invaded anytime in the near (or distant) future. Mexico, Canada, and the islands of the Caribbean are neither inclined nor capable of such an action, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans make one hell of a moat.

The unique advantage of nuclear is not its price, it’s that it produces a lot of energy in any environment without polluting the air or contributing to climate change

One further point to add on decentralization: a nuclear power plant necessarily requires a powerful state to protect the plant and supply chain and avoid proliferation risks. This powerful state has other side effects. From a libertarian perspective you cannot have a weak state and safe nuclear power (or rather, this is uncertain), while wind and solar present no such risk.

I looked at the numbers for this Georgia plant extension. It cost something like $22B and took over 15 years to build. If such a new plant was started today it would not go online until 2037. Meanwhile you can generate as much total power (accounting for only daytime exposure) with $11B in solar panels, and if you spend the other $11B on battery and grid tied EV storage, you can both make the public happy by giving them discounted stuff while also meeting all of your overnight and weather related storage needs. And best of all that decision can be made tomorrow and you can see customers starting to feed energy back to the grid next month, not in 15 years when climate change is significantly worse.

I’m not inherently opposed to nuclear, but it’s hard to see the benefits of a single centralized plant versus a distributed system that can begin build out and operation immediately.

avoid proliferation risks

Proliferation risks seem like something we pretend to care about much more than we actually do. India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea all developed nuclear weapons with little more than complaining from the US.

There is nothing cheap or simple about wind and solar. This is especially true if you attempt to do an apples to apples output comparison.

'By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better."'

If we look at a long enough timeline, there really shouldn't be much change. The replacement of coal and gas plants would be with much cheaper renewable but also with higher cost nuclear. The average should land near the old price. What we observe is that the renewables have a head start compared to nuclear adoption so it seems like prices are higher because our minds are only remembering the recent price drops compared to the true legacy prices.

Or the cost of renewables + energy storage + smarter flexible loads will just become lower than nuclear all-in-all.

Seems to me that, now that both transportation and grid management is pouring bucketloads of money into energy storage technology, they'll just continue to improve and come down.

I mean, just as some countries are hitting 50%+ of renewables, and the variability is becoming a significant challenge, we're also starting to see a lot of EVs entering the market. I've got a car charging in my garage right now that my electricity provider can start and stop charging based on electricity prices. I can easily delay charging for 2-3 days if need be.

Seems to me that everything is coming together for a fully renewable solution. And this is probably what smaller island nations and such will want to standardize on anyway. It'll be the default for most areas.

Not that I mind nuclear.. just not sure where it'll fit in in the future. Just used in some key industrial areas maybe?

"Or the cost of renewables + energy storage + smarter flexible loads will just become lower than nuclear all-in-all."

May even in a generation or two. I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime though.

The small modular reactors could be useful for isolated places where it is hard to run power cables and renewables are not feasible. Solar doesn't work close to the poles. Places that are now powered by importing diesel.

Reactors might also work for ships. A super reliable small reactor that doesn't require much support personnel might be option for powering cargo ships.

I wonder if population is ready for smarter flexible loads. At least if they start to actually affect them. Like grid telling your home to drop temperature or that hot water is not available at certain time. Or that AC is turned off, due to bad wind conditions...

> Not that I mind nuclear.. just not sure where it'll fit in in the future. Just used in some key industrial areas maybe?

Nuclear submarines, and that is about it.

Process heat for industrial use?

Desalinization?

Compared to heat pumps and renewables? I see it as very unlikely.

Heat pumps aren't great above 80°C more-or-less.

Just naïvely I would think that you used multi stage heat-pumps with different heat transfer fluids? Unless the process heat is thousands of degrees, but then we are already using inefficient methods like arc furnaces.

As much as I'd love more nuclear power on the grid, this project cost over double its initial bid and is actually raising rates for GA utility customers... I can't tell from the story whether "nuclear is hard" or if "contractors are idiots" here. Reactor was supposed to open in 2016 - it's very hard to cheer for a 7-year delay and a 140% cost overrun.

Basically, you can look at [the list of nuclear plants under construction](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...) and see that the Russians VVER series are still going up around the word (over 20), the Chinese are building a bunch (of many different international and domestic designs, I don't think they've built one for another country yet), the South Koreans have 4 under construction around the world, there are 4 AP1000 (two in China, two in Georgia) and 6 EPR (2 in China, 1 in France, 1 in Finland, 2 in UK). (Plus a couple of oddities like Argentina and India building a new domestic design each.)

I think an under-appreciated point is that if you do a pause on nuclear construction, say because of the Fukushima Dai Ichi or Three Mile Island or whatever, you lose the skills to deliver them on time and quickly very fast, and it actually seems to be harder to rebuild than it was to build the first time. My suspicion is that the first time your standards are lower, and so you don't design as aggressively and your workmen deliver okay workmanship. Then you pause for a while, all your experience scatters to the wind, but you need to deliver next generation performance, and you just don't have the industrial base to actually build it on time and under budget.

This doesn't seem to be a just-America problem: France alone built ~60 reactors in the 1970's and 1980's and Germany and the UK built more, but the EPR has been just as big as disaster as the AP1000, because they didn't build new reactors in the 1990's and that experience withered away, but are still trying to deliver that next generation performance.

The overall number of operating reactors doesn't go up much though: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263945/number-of-nuclear...

Supplied energy seems to have leveled out also: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...

Time to say goodbye and maybe think hard why those Russian and Chinese reactors come up so fast and cheap, and prepare for the fallout...

now do the list of plants slated for decommissioning

We lost much of our nuclear engineering capability in the US, so in many ways contractors are "idiots" here and made many costly mistakes during construction. Many articles on this and how it lead to the Westinghouse bankruptcy. Sadly, there's only a handful of western-friendly firms in the world that can build a reactor, so hoping the expertise and lessons learned will be worthwhile for future projects.

Nuclear isn't necessarily the cheapest option for rates, but it's the best for base generation AND greenhouse gas emission.

This "loss of nuclear engineering capability" doesn't hold up when you see reactors build by the French having the same problems: overdue and over budget.

The French never stopped building reactors all over the world.

"Base generation" is an outdated concept. It can be replaced by storage and grid size for example.

France built most of their reactors to one design in the 1980s. That worked out well, but those reactors are nearing end of life. More recently, reactor projects in France have been taking far too long and going far over budget.[1]

You have to make multiples of something to get production efficiencies, and you have to keep building on a regular basis to keep the production line alive. Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock was once so fed up with the Navy's intermittent aircraft carrier orders that they said that if Congress would order two at once, they'd throw in a third carrier for free.

[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a33499619/fr...

The French have the same problems of loss of engineering capability. They built many reactors of the same design during the Messmer plan, but haven't had to build new reactors in a long time. The fact that nuclear plants are so long-lived is a huge strength: they are among the cheapest forms of green energy if they are allowed to serve the entirety of their service life. But because they last so long, if you build a bunch of them there's no reason to build more for half a century.

Weird that the French somehow missed all those basic facts some random person can come up on the internet when they presented their designs in recent years and started building those massively over budget and overdue projects, eh?

> they are among the cheapest forms of green energy

The only interpretation of "cheap" which makes nuclear "cheapest" in something is the one where you ignore everything related to nuclear waste. From reprocessing over storage to decommissioning. Making it a lie, basically. Just like the "green" in this greenwashing.

What facts are the French missing? The point is that building 48 reactors of the same design (like in the Messmer plan) is cheaper on a per-unit basis than building 2 reactors of a new design. The learnings from the first few builds inform subsequent iterations, and these learnings decay over time as plants haven't been built in decades. I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

Nuclear waste disposal is not a huge portion of nuclear power's cost, it accounts for about 10% [1]. Nuclear plant builders have to finance the cost of disposal upfront. Decommissioning is even less - less than one percent if the plant serves its full service life.

1. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec....

They had reduced costs within each generation but the costs between generations increased wildly.

They never saw any kinds of economics of scale.

Have a look at Figure 25 here and add Flamanville 3 waaaay beyond the end of the scale at $12 000/kWe

https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-07...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...

You just described an economy of scale: costs within generations went down. The more plants in the same generation the lower the cost.

Flamanville is the first EPR France has built, and this it's not leveraging the intra-generational learnings.

Take the 20% cost reduction the last two generations lead to. That would change Flamanville 3 from exorbitantly expensive to exorbitantly expensive.

The French nuclear program as a whole has had a huge negative learning curve. The more they've built and learned the more expensive they have become. Sure you can brush of 20% with a lot of money down the drain, but that does not make it in any way economical.

At the end of the day, the cost of reactors built when there was large scale serial production was considerably cheaper than they are now: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

The "negative learning curve" both in France and in the USA happened as the pace of reactor construction slowed. The "negative learning curve" you're referring to is actually the loss of the economies of scale.

Your paper shows a very nearly monotonic increase in costs with no dip at any pont between the peak of construction and when the reactors started during that peak were all finished. It also shows that in the US at least, the negative learning rate was much steeper between the end of the turnkey error and both TMI and the construction peak. It's also not normalised for availability factor or upgrades/reliability retrofits.

You can't just post evidence of the opposite to your claim and then repeat it.

We had economies of scale in the 50s when it was the cheapest? Or was it because we had this attitude towards nuclear engineering?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core#Second_incident

It was in the 1960s and early 70s that it was cheapest. And the Demon Core incident was part of the nuclear weapons program, not nuclear electric power - this is a common pattern in misleading anti-nuclear rhetoric.

Do you have any examples of other energy plants that weren't nuclear, were consistently under budget and delivered before the due date?

It's entirely routine in the natural gas world;

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170518005288/en/Pan...

> After the installation of 1.4 million linear feet of electrical cable, 113,161 feet of pipe, 890 tons of steel and expending more than 1.6 million man hours, Panda Power Funds’ 778-megawatt “Stonewall” generating station has achieved commercial operations. The Loudoun County, Virginia power facility was finished ahead of schedule and under budget, and initial tests show the plant is exceeding performance guarantees for both power output and efficiency. The plant is capable of continuously supplying the power needs of up to 778,000 homes in the Northern Virginia/District of Columbia metropolitan area.

Lest you believe the PR page after the fact -- They fundraised in 2013/2014, started site prep in November 2014, broke ground in August 2015 with a target commercial launch date of June 1, 2017 and Bechtel finished commissioning in May 2017.

https://web.archive.org/web/20151015014525/http://www.power-...

https://www.power-technology.com/projects/stonewall-power-pr...

I thought "overdue and over budget" is natural state of any big project

No, it's not.

But this generalization comes always up if someone wants to sell a project which they knew will be overdue and over budget.

They did stop building them in France though, and they switched technology to EPR

French engineers were still allowed to travel abroad and work on other French projects which were overdue and over budget.

The contractors aren't idiots. They got an extra 7 years and a 140% bonus.

We're assuming cost-plus contract terms, then, I assume? :-)

And don’t forget, this was the “revolutionary” AP1 design that was supposed to fix all the bad things about the previous revolutionary designs.

I don't see how that's related.

I doubt that much - if any - of the cost overruns and delays are related to the nuclear portion of this public works project. Governments and their contractors at all levels are not known for their ability to accurately forecast these things, and they're generally not incentivized to care during the work order, as they're not held accountable.

Jacksonville, FL’a JEA (public utility company) lost a lot of money investing in this plant as well

Are there any infrastructure projects that don't have cost overrun or finish on time in this country?

A lot of it seems to come down to very, very agreesive regulation. Eg, plant designs got approved, work started, then the regulators came back and said "actually, you need to make some major changes to the design", so everything paused and some completed work was torn up, new designs were made, approved (slowly), and then work restarted from scratch. Then it happened again. And again.

The changes weren't bad per se; in one case the regulators decided that the plant needed to be resistant to aircraft impacts; in another that it needed to be more resistant to tornados. But when you have a fantastically complex and expensive engineering project, going back and requiring retroactive changes after approval and after bg has already started is going to blow the budget to hell. And it did.

From the Federal Register notice for the aircraft impact change:

> In making these additions, the NRC is making it clear that the requirements are not meant to apply to current or future operating license applications for which construction permits were issued before the effective date of this final rule. This is because existing construction permits are likely to involve designs which are essentially complete and may involve sites where construction has already taken place. Applying the final rule to operating license applications for which there are existing construction permits could result in an unwarranted financial burden to change a design for a plant that is partially constructed. Such a financial burden is not justifiable in light of the fact that the NRC considers the events to which the aircraft impact rule is directed to be beyond-design-basis events and compliance with the rule is not needed for adequate protection to public health and safety or common defense and security.

That sounds pretty reasonable. As the US government said, applying this rule where existing construction permists exist could result in "unwarranted financial burden" which is "not justifiable" and because the rule is "not needed for adequate protection". It's just a "hey, if you haven't started building yet, why not make it extra super duper safe?" rule. And why not!

But the Georgia plant, at this point, didn't technically have "construction permits", but it did have certified designs, and signed firm contracts for engineering, procurement, and construction, had already submitted its certified costs and schedules to state regulators, and begun manufacturing long lead time components. The cost impact was enormous, but they were still required to go through it.

This regulatory environment is excellent for ensuring that nothing dangerous gets built, because nothing will get built. Is that wise? I suspect not.

See:

https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westin...

https://atomicinsights.com/nrcs-imposition-of-aircraft-impac...

All of this was a great explanation of some of the delays so far...nine years ago.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a...

Really excellent context - thank you for sharing all this detail and citation!

This is great news. Although disappointing how long it took. Still hoping for a nuclear resurgence. Between this and all the EV factories coming online in GA, GA will have quite the impact on climate goals.

We will literally have a very minor impact even if the entire globe goes 100% renewable for everything from home heating, lighting, aircraft, cars, trucks, maritime transport and rail.

And in order to do a fraction of that (say only USA goes 100% electric) we would need to significantly scale up strip mining and dig deep into the earth.

All of that industrial activity takes more energy than wind and solar can provide. In fact, none of it is possible without natural gas, heavy fuel oil, and diesel.

How exactly is it a very minor impact if the globe goes 100% renewable? Significant reduction in air pollution + more stable energy prices.

How much solar could they have built for the same price? Just doing some very rough calculations, they could have built enough panels to output several times as much peak power as they can with the nuclear reactors. Even including storage costs, they still could have probably built a system with more productive capacity than the nuclear reactors. This project is almost certainly the last conventional fission reactor that will ever be built in the US.

I think that some small modular reactors will get built. Whether more SMRs get built after the initial test deployments will depend on their own achieved cost/schedule numbers.

The Georgia reactors can't compete on price with solar projects backed by 4-8 hours of battery storage at current prices. However, the project started developing in 2010:

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/02/vogtle-20100217.htm...

At then-current prices for solar and especially battery storage, Vogtle 3 & 4 were economically rational decarbonization projects. Or at least they would have been if they had actually met their initially announced schedule and cost numbers.

The unpredictability of scheduling/budgeting for nuclear power projects is IMO their most unattractive characteristic. In 2010 costs for solar farms were much higher, but they were at least predictable. If a project developer said that a solar farm would be generating by November 2010, it would be generating by November 2010. The predictability enabled projects to gradually increase in size and number with high confidence that none of them would snowball into a financial catastrophe like Vogtle did. Iterative development with predictable characteristics brought solar project costs down dramatically since 2010.

Did you factor in land costs, preparing the land, lawsuits, etc in your rough calculations? How many acres would your calculation of solar panels cover?

It likely wasn't viable when the decision to choose to start building the plant was made.

Enough to put a nice roof over lots of carparks and roads perhaps.

> Even including storage costs

How much storage is required for solar(+wind if you're not a masochist) to reliably supply a consistent 2234 MW for 50 years?

Nuclear Plants aren't about peak power, they're about baseline. If you want to replace Nuclear with solar, you have to replace the baseline.

I think the problem is incentives - it would be way more effective to cover the cost of decentralized solar panels, but then you don't have to charge for the power and there's no way to "recover" the investment. I think we're going to keep seeing these dissonances until we can get over the idea that everything has to generate money

For 50 years of operation your solar plant would have had all it's panels replaced at least once and your batteries would have probably been replaced 5 times, if using todays' technology.

Solar only appears cheaper if you removed every external cost from it.

Peak power is the key word. It's not a constant like Nuclear unless power storage improves many orders of magnitude from where its at right now.

Also given global tensions and solar's reliance on China in its supply chain i'm not sure its the better option.

> Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

Although he missed school, juounalist finds out about nuclear fission. I'm eager to see the title when he writes about nuclear fusion or public toilets. /s

Seven years late and $20 billion over budget. Slow clap.

That's only half of a Twitter. That sounds like a joke, but honestly, it's not. $20B is absolutely nothing compared to the costs of not taking immediate action on climate change.

I think people are quibbling with the "immediate" part of that plan. It's 10 years later and we don't have a single kwh being used in lieu of carbon-based power, the opportunity cost of that $20B overrun is massive.

That's basically my reservation. I'm not knee-jerk against nuclear, the new ideas in that field like molten salt reactors intrigue me, but at this point it's not such a new technology anymore, we have the better part of a century of historical data to evaluate it on, and it seems that its promise of abundant emissions-free energy on the cheap just hasn't panned out.

It’s not a new technology, but it’s a technology built so infrequently that none of the benefits of being an old technology have been able to develop. We don’t have people experienced in creating the plants, we don't have standard templates to base designs off of, and we don’t have economies of scale.

Mind, we’re not going to get any of those things in the world we live in due to combination of over-regulation and NIMBYism making it impossible to even start a nuclear power project in an efficient manner. So it’s kind of a moot point. But we most certainly don’t have a century of seeing what it would be like if we actually tried to make nuclear power work. We have a century of seeing what happens when we cripple nuclear power due to people’s lack of trust in it.

13 years is immediate?

Let’s please not have our future depend on building giant, fragile things that are obsolete technologically and financially before they are even completed.

Wind and PV have some challenges, but they get online fast. Plus they are both riding down a steep cost S-curve, so (for the foreseeable future) the more you build, the cheaper the next one gets.

No one could say that about Nuclear with a straight face…

>13 years is immediate?

Yes. Please tell me the alternative solar or wind solution which can provide us with a carbon free grid in 13 years. There is none. You have to hand wave and pretend that maybe the next 13 years of battery technology will be fundamentally different than the past 30 years since the invention of the Lithium ion battery. Even if we had the battery solution today we don't have the global manufacturing capacity.

Solar and wind go online fast and turn stable grids into pricy unstable ones as you increase their share of production. Meanwhile Nuclear is ready, today. And if you cut down on some of the regulatory burden it could be built sooner.

You are comparing apples to oranges. We don't have the global industrial capacity to deploy nuclear at scale either. And the intrinsic technology challenge is more difficult with nuclear.

> the more you build, the cheaper the next one gets

Same as for Nuclear, but not building any new ones for decades and then only 2 reactors will not help.

Do you work at the press office of the construction company? 20B is absolutely nothing? Holy crap

I think their point was not so much that 20B is nothing, but that somebody cough cough no names cough paid way too much for a used social media network.

No. My point is that $20B is nothing compared to the cost of climate change[1].

[1] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/about-deloitte/article...

You have to read the whole sentence, not just the first half.

If solar and wind are better then thats what we should do. I wish though that even 1 of the many many trillions in debt we racked up went to nuclear plants. we could have had dozens of plants. prices would probably have gone done if there was a large supply chain and workforce after the first few plants

France had negative learning when attempting to scale up their nuclear industry. Assuming strong learning effects is not given. Nuclear has had 70 years of intense subsidies, and are still far from competing on the open market.

> The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

My guess is that the invention of computers made design more expensive because it led to fewer constraints and more difficulty in asserting a single source of truth.

Oh, Georgia the U.S. state. I assumed that the country of Georgia had gotten a nuclear power plant.

wow that's at least 240% over budget

Why are regulators allowing fission reactors, especially in a time of global turmoil, aren’t these easy targets for adversaries?

Quite the contrary: nuclear reactors are essentially housed in bunkers. There was much fretting about the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant during war, but if anything it demonstrates the resiliency of nuclear facilities.

It sounds like there was not a direct attack on that reactor so there’s no definitive answer on how bad it would be https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/what-experts-say-an-attack-o...

Instead of asking sensationalist questions designed to create fear...why not look into it?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S173857331...

The studies have already been done, crashing a jet into a nuclear power plant wont do much.

I'm more familiar with Canada's designs and the walls are several M thick of reinforced concrete. Not exactly material known for being easy to break into.

This is from the power plant close by me :

https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.8122465,-79.0744714,3a,48.2y,...

warning that you may be shot for entering has a tendency of keeping people away

You may not be familiar with Socratic questioning. Your response also comes off as rude. The question was meant as a prompt for dialogue not because I didn’t already research this topic.

your post looks like it has been downvoted, so i guess no one was familiar with "Socratic questioning" and your post comes across as "anti-nuclear" without doing any research.

as a leanring oppertunity, this is what Socratic questioning looks like:

What is an example of Socratic questioning?

What do you mean when you say X? Could you explain that point further? Can you provide an example? Is there a different point of view?

you simply asked negative-framed questions : Why did the regulators approve fission reactors knowing our country has enemies..

Thanks for the “leanring oppertunity” … yeesh. I feel so much smarter now. Making vague generalizations like “no one is familiar” because one person saw my comment and downvoted is a fallacy my friend.

So glad we finally designated the permanent repository for nuclear waste in the United State. /s

Since the waste will almost certainly not be accepted by another state, I would like to know where it will be stored in Georgia. I have some guesses, based on the demographics of adjacent populations, but perhaps the many HN nuclear boosters have some specifics?

Waste is typically stored on site after it has been entombed in concrete. So it will be stored on-site not in a secondary spot. That is until if ever they are able to get Yucca mountain going again.

From what I’ve researched, there’s not that much waste from reactors anymore. The glowing sludge of doom usually comes from enriched isotopes for weapons.

I have access to the radioactivity diagrams for a 10 year old spent fuel bundle.

Needless to say it is rather radioactive...

But it is easily contained by the water in the pools, and then the dry storage casks it is moved to once it is no longer "thermally hot" and needs constant cooling.

This guy is just your typical anti-nuke posting the classic talking points about all the billions of tonnes of used fuel?

looks like we found "that guy".. the one who posts about the enormous amount of used fuel circling the globe looking for a home.

There is a nuclear power plant not far from me. it went "live" in 1973 and all the spent fuel to date is still stored on site.

Step 1 : sit in a pool for around 10 years

Step 2 : sit in a dry canister for a few more decades.

Eventually we need to find a better solution, but the fact remains there is not a whole lot of it.

Okay, cool. So as long as there's never a natural/man-made disaster that disturbs said pool, no problem. Good thing that would never happen in a place like Georgia.

And yeah, eventually we'll take care of it. Just like we've been saying for 50 years.

Burning fossil fuels produces more net harm than any amount of radioactive waste ever will. Radioactivity just manages to be scarier than air pollution and climate change because our psychology doesn't map well to reality because we evolved to be afraid of fast-moving problems, not slow-moving ones.

Step 1. Build a swimming pool somewhere in the US

Step...

There is no other steps. Don't overthink it. A couple of hot bricks every 5 years isn't something to freak out about.

The risk is the soup of strangely radioactive materials leaking into the water table.

Fission is not a clean chemical reaction, this is the spread of the atomic masses for different kinds of fission processes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#/media/File:Th...

We’re Perry good a building swimming pools at this point.

We’ll be fine.

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