First new U.S. nuclear reactors in decades approved | Hacker News Reader

First new U.S. nuclear reactors in decades approved

latimes.com

114 pointsCWuestefeld120 comments

As a state that's 49% nuclear power (New Hampshire) I really welcome this news. It almost seems too good to be true.

I hope we will someday be able to close down the single coal plant in my state (coal is 14% of NH power).

For all its faults I think Nuclear has gotten a bad reputation from an extremely small amount of catastrophes. Obviously those events are very salient in the public's mind, but it is worth remembering that coal plants are a catastrophe every single day.

There are lakes in New Hampshire with abnormally high mercury levels that have never been touched by humans save for testing the water. Coal from as far as Ohio give rise to uncomfortable asthma statistics. I know it won't be soon, but there's at least one technology I can't wait to shutter.

> it is worth remembering that coal plants are a catastrophe every single day.

In addition to CO2 levels, most people are unaware of how much radioactive material is released by burning coal, because it's spread out of over time rather than in a few big dramatic incidents.

More people die mining coal each year than have died in Nuclear power plant accidents in the entire history of Nuclear power.

The Bhopal chemical plant disaster killed more people than all the nuclear power incidents in history combined. This plant manufactured pesticides.

Nuclear power is not completely risk free, but it's much safer than most people give it credit for. Anyone who would picket a nuclear power plant before a coal plant or a pesticide plant is an uninformed twit.

Nuclear power also promises to get much safer. China is currently testing thorium reactors based on Canada's CANDU design. Thorium reactors have several safety advantages over Uranium reactors, produce less waste with a shorter half-life, and do not produce weapons-grade fissionable materials as a byproduct. Thorium is far more abundant than Uranium to boot. If Iran went after Thorium based nuclear power Israel would be able to sleep more easily at night.

More people die mining coal each year than have died in Nuclear power plant accidents in the entire history of Nuclear power. Just noting that to fairly compare apples to apples, you should compare stats of coal mining deaths and accidents to uranium mining deaths and accidents.

That statistic would be even more violently pro-nuclear -- you need to dig up roughly 20 000 times more coal than uranium to produce the similar amounts of energy, assuming a steam thermal coal plant and a light-water nuclear reactor. If you swap that light-water plant to an advanced heavy water plant like CANDU, that multiplier goes up to about 2 000 000 times. A fun fact: the extractable amount of energy in the trace radioactive elements (notably thorium) that is dug up with coal (and mostly distributed into the environment) is several times higher than the extractable energy content of the coal.

> More people die mining coal each year than have died in Nuclear power plant accidents in the entire history of Nuclear power.

And the miner deaths are completely insignificant part of the total death toll of coal. Most of the death toll comes from NOx and SO2 poisoning, and manifests in cancer and respiratory diseases. The total death toll is hard to tally, but it is typically estimated to be between 100k and 1M a year.

Have these new designs improved on water usage problems [1]?

Although I agree about the closure of coal plants, it seems nuclear still has water usage issues (cooling needs) and given the upcoming fresh-water crisis [2], wouldn't solar be a better bet?

[1] http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_technology...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12291371

While there may be a fresh-water crisis on a global scale, that doesn't mean there is a shortage everywhere. There are lots of places where there are ample water supplies, and use of the water there doesn't really effect water availability in places where it's in short supply.

Also, you can cool a nuclear reactor with ocean water. Seabrook Station in NH is cooled this way, as are other reactors located on ocean coasts, presumably.

You can also use the waste heat from a nuclear generation facility to desalinate water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination

"In a December 26, 2007, opinion column in the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Nolan Hertel, a professor of nuclear and radiological engineering at Georgia Tech, wrote, "... nuclear reactors can be used ... to produce large amounts of potable water. The process is already in use in a number of places around the world, from India to Japan and Russia. Eight nuclear reactors coupled to desalination plants are operating in Japan alone ... nuclear desalination plants could be a source of large amounts of potable water transported by pipelines hundreds of miles inland..."[12]

A typical aircraft carrier in the U.S. military uses nuclear power to desalinate 400,000 US gallons (1,500,000 l; 330,000 imp gal) of water per day.[14]

Also, you can cool a nuclear reactor with ocean water. Seabrook Station in NH is cooled this way, as are other reactors located on ocean coasts, presumably.

Progress Energy's Brunswick Nuclear Plant[1] in Southport, NC takes brackish water from near the mouth of the Cape Fear River as it's source of cooling water, then discharges it through a canal back into the Atlantic Ocean.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_Nuclear_Generating_St...

Is solar feasible at the scale we're talking about? What's the $/kwh?

I have some experience with solar energy at the small scale (1-2 kwh arrays) and I can say that at the consumer level, the cost for a solar array is now dropping to roughly $0.50/watt. It's still nowhere near the scale/cost of nuclear/coal but it's definitely more feasible than it was ten years ago.

Using the figure of $0.50/watt, to construct a 50MW plant would cost $25 million for the panels alone; bring in the infrastructure, mounting, and remember that the panels lose roughly 10% of their capacity every ten years. Plus account for cloudy days (not as much of an issue in, say, Arizona) and you start to realize that solar isn't a very viable option.

It works really well at the consumer/personal/business level but fails horribly at large, centralized setups. For those about to mention the `good sunlight' requirement, I will provide some refutation for that: my panels are located such that there is a good 30-degree angle to the east the sun has to peak before the light reaches them. The only time that power becomes an issue is the three weeks either side of the winter solstice; at which point I have to start watching my power consumption and regulating computer use etc.

I've assembled the array (roughly 1.5KWh) over the past ten years or so; the cost has been small considering what the equivalent would have been to purchase electricity from the power grid.

I have rambled on for quite a while here, for which I apologize. I guess the TL;DR version is: I don't think solar is feasible at large scale, but it seems to be at a small scale in my own experience.

Is that price per watt of peak power production, or per watt of average power? Solar tends to have a fairly low capacity factor, which is important to include in economics calculations.

That is per watt of peak power production.

I'm not well informed, but according to John Quiggin[1], yes:

(PV is photovoltaics)

    the cost of PV has already fallen well below that of nuclear and
    is set to fall further. The average retail price of solar cells as
    monitored by the Solarbuzz group fell from $3.50/watt to $2.43/watt
    over the course of the year, and a decline to prices below $2.00/watt
    seems inevitable. For large-scale installations, prices below
    $1.00/watt are now common. In some locations, PV has reached
    grid parity, the cost at which it is competitive with coal or gas-fired
    generation. More generally, it is now evident that, given a carbon
    price of $50/ton, which would raise the price of coal-fired power by
    5c/kWh, solar PV will be cost-competitive in most locations.

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-end-the-nuclear-r...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quiggin

Those are valid numbers as long as solar is backed up by fossil fuels or nuclear, but if you want use solar for most of your electric power, you have to take energy storage into account. That's a lot more expensive.

No.

Finally a step in the right direction. We need dependable energy that can live with society.

Smog from coal power kills 24,000 American annually (and $53 billion in damages: IE from its relation to non life threatening diseases like pneumonia) . Nuclear has killed 31 workers in its entirety of operation. The WHO estimates Chernobyl may have caused 4,000 civilian deaths since the accident, the Union of Concerned Scientists says 25,000.

I don't get why a single coal plant is still open when even the worst nuclear disaster on record is just another normal day for fossil fuel usage.

Probably has something to do with that whole town that's uninhabitable. People are funny that way.

Not quite the same level of destruction, but Centralia, PA has been almost entirely abandoned since 1962 due to an ongoing coal mine fire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania

A full 50 year fire. Sounds a tad worse then any nuclear failure I know of. Even Nagasaki / Hiroshima were livable within a year.

This is why I love HN. A purely rational discussion with citations. Not even Reddit achieves this level of discourse.

I live in New Zealand where many are extremely anti-nuclear, almost to the point of ridiculousness. This causes massive problems: soured relations with United States (and other nuclear capable countries), high prices for electricity, and an arrogant perception on our environment.

The last point is very important: dairy farms and coal mining are destroying the environment but kiwis still perceive themselves as 'clean and green'. 50% of our waterways are toxic. 28 Miners lost their lives digging for coal in one accident, yet there was no massive backlash against coal in New Zealand. If one person died in a nuclear power plant, there would be questions over the entire feasibility of nuclear power in multiple countries, which is ridiculous.

Totally agree with your point. "Nuclear" has become a taboo, even in wording. When you go for a MRI, you know it stands for "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" (MRI), but the actual full name of the diagnostic tool is "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (NMRI)". Because the full name has the "N word" in it, it scares the hell out of people who have no understanding of Science whatsoever. Completely irrational.

Well, considering the dangers presented by earthquakes (cf. Fukushima), maybe there are reasons for New Zealanders to be anti-nuclear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquakes_in_New_Zealand

I know, a lot of different factors contributed to the outcome in Fukushima (e.g. power generators installed in the basement, which is flooded after a Tsunami. See http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/24-hours-at-fukushim... for a good analysis). Still, one might argue that there are areas that are not quite suitable for building nuclear power plants.

Actually not even within a year. People kept living there after the explosion. They had nowhere to go anyway. I remember that in Nagasaki (or Hiroshima, not sure anymore which one) they had the tramway back on track just one week after the nuclear bomb. Of course there were a higher number of leukemia and other health issues, but it recovered fast, very fast.

  > not even within a year

It was less than "less than or equal to a year?"

"He held his breath for a long time, but within a year he was forced to start again." "I believe it was actually about 5 minutes." "Is that not within a year?"

There's a huge difference between people remaining in a city through a nuclear bomb blast and people coming back to that city less than a year later. That's what the parent was trying to get across.

Yes, thanks for clarifying, my first sentence was not very clear.

Thanks for the correction

Centralia isn't even a town any more. Its buildings have all been reclaimed and condemned and the zip code has been revoked. The government is likely concerned that the fire is going to cause the entire area to subsist through loss of mass underground.

Haven't heard anyone arguing for the elimination of the chemical industry after the Bhopal accident.

Note to dead responder mark_up (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mark_up): your account (and every comment you have posted) is, for whatever reason, flagged. Was your first comment massively downvoted and/or flagged, then deleted?

They are, aren't they. A town all in one place versus a few dozen spread far enough apart and suddenly nobody notices the disparity. Ah well.

The US could update their old coal power plants to the usual standards or replace them with newer ones.

The US coal power plants are actually extremely modern and clean compared to almost every other mass user of coal. It's just that they still suck.

wrong, the US has many extremely old, dirty and inefficient coal power plants.

It's baffling to me that so many people seem unwilling to accept the idea that maybe, perhaps, we've learned a few lessons about building safe nuclear reactors over the last 50 years.

It's also baffling to me that the widespread ecological disaster that coal- and oil-fired plants directly cause (and I'm not even referring to climate change!) is somehow more acceptable than the limited, mostly controlled circumstances of a handful of nuclear reactor failures (which Chernobyl has proven is not a permanent state of affairs.)

As a rule humans are catastrophically bad at estimating and ranking risk.

People are afraid of strangers abducting their kids, of air travel, of nuclear power. They aren't generally afraid of cheeseburgers, raising kids who don't exercise, cars, and coal power, but they should be.

They also aren't afraid of the small but catastrophic risk of global warming truly messing our climate up, but they should be.

The inability to properly estimate risks goes both ways, people are bad at cumulative every day stuff as well as tiny probability catastrophic events (especially involving things they never see).

How is it possible that the Human Race has survived until now, given those facts?

The relative dangers of plane travel, automobile travel, or even leading a sedentary lifestyle and eating unhealthy foods are not high enough to actually cause an existential risk for the continuation of human civilization.

People are bad about judging relative risk on lower risk activities, such as whether a 1 in 10,000 chance of death is safer or less safe than a 1 in a million chance of death. But when it comes to simple go/no-go decisions on much riskier activities humans are a bit better at making a sound judgment. Is it a good idea to start a fight with a bear? To engage in a gun fight? To set your house on fire and stay inside it? These sorts of risks people understand and can handle.

Generally speaking, if everyone decided tomorrow that drunk driving, smoking, and obesity were awesome humanity would still endure. Though people wouldn't live quite as long.

It isn't hard.

Inhale, exhale Consume food *Reproduce occasionally.

most of the stuff kills you after reproductive age, so is pretty much irrelevant to the survival of the species.

The majority of us haven't.

Our risk estimation brains are based on the ancestral environment. Technology multiplies impacts.

Okay, so some part of our risk estimation ability comes from risk-evaluation-specific heuristics that have developed in ancestral environment. But how much impact does this have on the result of any serious evaluation? How easily do the ancestral parts get overridden by rational correction or outright calculation?

"two new atomic energy reactors at an estimated cost of $14 billion [...] known as AP1000s, built by Westinghouse Electric Co."

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000:

"China has officially adopted the AP1000 as a standard for inland nuclear projects.", "In the spring of 2007 China National Nuclear Corp. selected the Westinghouse/Shaw consortium to build four nuclear reactors for an estimated US$8 billion."

So the same model is built in the US for 7 billion each, and in China for 2?

Like what @mikeash is referring to. China is planning on building tens of these things in the next few decades. They are creating factories to pump out AP1000s on a standardized system.

Vogtle is a brown field site (their are already reactors there) and like most American plants, they are all built custom made. Every one of the U.S's 104 plants are different. It made engineering maintenance hellish. This stems from many things, but the easiest explanation is location specific laws and protests. By the time you get clearance to build it, a lot of things will have changed. Hence, standardization goes out the window.

Regulation is a bitch.

That being said, I could see passing certain demanding regulatory tests and designs in the US could add a significant amount, perhaps even a billion, but I would guess raw supplies and labour are cheaper to source in china as well?

Going rate at the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is 250+ $/hour to just review documents which are several hundred thousand pages long.

'One of my key concerns was the effect on the schedules for new license applications – not only do applicants have to pay $273 for every regulator hour, but they have to pay the staff and contractors that they use to apply for permission and answer regulator questions. Longer licensing processes cost more in salaries and other overhead and they push potential revenue out into the future.'

http://atomicinsights.com/2011/12/audit-the-nrc.html

Loan interest also accumulates over time. It's a major part of the cost of US nuclear construction, because the process takes so long.

I imagine that construction costs, like pretty much all labor costs, are vastly cheaper in China.

Additionally, the units may not be identical. For example, Wikipedia says that the first four Chinese units are being constructed with a weaker containment structure, and there may well be other cost-cutting measures in the Chinese models, given the difference in safety environments in the two countries.

I don't think labor costs account for much of the difference. You can pay the salaries of 10,000 US construction workers for 7 years with a single billion. (I seriously doubt they need to hire that many people for one reactor.) And, due to cheap shipping these days, the cost of materials is pretty much the same everywhere.

How about the costs to manufacture the various components? I imagine that even with a standardized design, many components get sourced locally (like pipe and such) and that labor cost factors into the overall price too.

Also, did I mess up my math, or are you saying that hiring an American construction worker costs only $100,000 for 7 years? That's (barely) below minimum wage, and I don't imagine that construction workers earn minimum wage either.

The estimate for the two reactors involves 3500 on-site construction workers [1] with a completion date of 2016 or 2017 [2]. This means 1750 construction workers employed for 4-5 years at each reactor. The average annual wage for a construction laborer is 34,040 [3]. So we're looking at labor costs of about 0.3 billion / reactor. Even if the US workers get paid double the average, and the Chinese close to nothing, labor costs only explain about 10% of the price difference.

Regarding components, anything that's not built on the spot (including pipe) can and will be shipped internationally from the cheapest supplier (particularly if it's expensive). Again, we're looking at price differentials of around 10% rather than 2500%.

[1]http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/obama-administrat...

[2]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/09/federal-regulators-...

[3]http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag23.htm#earnings

The wage of construction workers is $34,000, but what is the cost of employing a construction worker? I'm surprised if it does not double the total cost per worker. That said, your point is still taken that it does not explain the full price difference.

According to this, nuclear construction workers can make $75,000/year:

http://money.usnews.com/money/careers/articles/2008/03/13/a-...

Presumably nuclear reactor construction requires more skill than building houses or whatever. And this is for people with absolutely zero prior experience, so not counting experienced people, not counting management, not counting various overhead (payroll taxes, HR, etc., which is often significant).

I would not be surprised if components had a similar story to the workers: nuclear means extremely specialized, and that means the normal rules for commodity resources may not apply. For such a political project, it also would not surprise me if certain things were required to be purchased from US suppliers even if they aren't the lowest bidders.

I don't know exactly where all of the difference comes from, but the situation seems more complicated than simply hiring standard construction workers at average salary and buying commodity components from international suppliers.

Also, you probably want to double the salary figure to get an idea of the total compensation cost to the company doing the hiring. A $70k worker can easily have a compensation package that costs $140k to the company doing the hiring, depending on the exact benefits and what sort of discounts the employer can wring from insurance companies, if most employees have families, if there's relocation assistance, etc. Since there aren't a lot of qualified people to work in the nuclear industry I'd expect the packages to be pretty decent.

You're radically off the mark.

It's $100k per year per construction worker to build a nuclear power plant. Their pay will be $50k just for the base for an average worker.

The security issues (for various stages it requires a lot of background checks), the liability issues (requiring massive insurance outlays), the actual pay, the engineering requirements that the workers must qualify for (just finding the right engineers), any union tangles you run into, and so on. There is an extraordinarily long list of costs per employee to build a nuke plant.

You're looking at upwards of $1 billion per year with 10,000 employees. It's very easy to see where it ends up costing $7 billion to deploy a new plant (it's going to cost 50% more with cost overruns). Even if you were to amazingly slice the worker cost to $50k per year flat fee, with zero added costs per employee, you're still talking $500m per year with 10k workers, and over the build term that's going to be $3.5 billion to $5 billion (7 to 10 years).

Upon closer inspection, they only use 1750 construction workers for 4 years per reactor. By your figures, that's 0.7 billion total. Let's assume the Chinese pay absolutely nothing for nuclear-reactor-qualified workers. Where do the other 4.3 billion per reactor go?

The 14 billion number includes cost of capital.

The actual construction cost I recall being cited for this project is closer to $9.5 billion. The remaining $4.5 billion are the interest you have to pay on a somewhat-high-risk $9 billion loan. Oh, and you have to start paying interest when you borrow the money, but don't start having revenues until 4+ years later.

Cost of capital is very different in China, depending on who's funding the project and how. It's hard to compare exactly what the construction cost component of the Chinese numbers is, or whether they're even including the cost of capital at all. I strongly suspect it's not, since the article quoted is talking about the revenue Westinghouse/Shaw will receive, not the expenditures of the purchaser.

So we're really comparing about $4.75 billion in the US to $2 billion in China. If the actual structures are somewhat different, land in the US somewhat more expensive, a lot less in the way of earthmoving needs to be done in one of the locations (say because people aren't worried about environmental impacts), then I can see a 2x difference in the price tag...

Navigating red tape?

Things can get built pretty shoddily in China. You sure you don't want to pay extra for some quality control?

Nuclear reactors are the best source of energy - they just need more research and improvement, and you can't do that without actually building and running some of them on a large scale.

The sun is one huge nuclear reactor, and recreating that wherever we need it is simply awesome. Thorium reactors look promising and if fusion becomes feasible within ~100 years, that would solve a lot of problems...

The so-called "catastrophes" are nothing compared to the lives lost on coal plants and the whole coal power chain. Let's not forget that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are bustling with life, Tokyo is doing just fine with that "deadly radiation" around them (all things considered, of course), and Chernobyl is actually very green (no pun intended - plants and trees are growing nicely, the only ugly stuff laying and rusting around is human-made)...

just harvest the sun.

Definitely, but where it's not possible, cut out the middleman and create your own sun :-)

France is on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

we have just started to explore the possibilities

Hopefully this will be a good start towards a new understanding of nuclear power. Also, we need to start building again in order to keep the knowledge of craftsmen that know how to build these. From pipe welders to concrete specialists, let alone the nuke engineers needed. N-Stamp skills could be forever lost in this country if we abandon this power source.

Thorium anyone? http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/1

Would be awesome wouldn't it?

The weird thing is that we have to excise, as a species, this notion that nuclear power's risks are unmanageable. That takes time, and a lot of people dying. Not from nuclear accidents but just dying of old age and with old fashioned ideas and an inability to get past their emotions and back into reasoning about something.

For all its promise, investment in Thorium is a non-issue until we can prove that we can license and build new nuclear plants. Sure Larry or Sergei could fund it but the challenge is in the deployment.

The comment above about how they cost $2B for the Chinese and $7B for the US is indicative of that challenge. That and a liability cap which makes them insurable in the first place. If you're government gets to just say what is going to be true then you only pay the cost of building it, which is much much less.

You're commenting on a article that states a nuclear reactor of current design was approved, so what's your complaining for? Your "side" seems to be winning, despite the current crop of designs not being the blessed thorium reactor...

I'm only observing. The AP1000 design was originally proposed by Westinghouse in early 2004, based on entirely understood physics and components. Here we are 8 years later seeing the approval. I attribute much of that delay to a requirement that Westinghouse prove it would never fail. Meeting such a standard has been, for many years, effectively impossible, even for designs with a known history.

Thorium reactors don't have any of the 'known' history to rely on and so they have to prove something which cannot be proven without building one. In order to get past that cognitive stall, one has to 'take the risk' of actually building one with the promise that should the risk pan out as being Ok, the reactor will be allowed to continue to exist. It has been politically impossible to do that with a new nuclear technology in the US for some time.

Some cynics have suggested that the only reason the NRC licensed it in the US is because China is going to build them and the US wanted a local copy so that they could use as a model should they want to take the Chinese reactors offline "the hard way." I don't subscribe to that level of cynicism.

So ultimately I believe that Thorium reactors are worth pursuing, however any work beyond theoretical requires a different political climate than the one we've existed in to this point. Fortunately that is changing. I would love to find ways to help people with their emotional response to nuclear power, that will be a necessary part of putting us back on to a path of a sustainable future.

Fortunately for the cynics, China is making a big investment in liquid thorium reactors as well.

I've actually had a lot of success advocating liquid thorium to people who are otherwise strongly anti-nuclear. Having a completely different fuel, with small amounts of short-lived waste and easily-understood safety features, goes a long way.

Me too, however I have thoroughly unsuccessful in getting anyone in the legislature past the word 'nuclear.' Once, during a moment of lucid depression about the energy picture, someone pointed out that the Indiana legislature once tried to change the value of Pi to 3.2 to make it "easier to deal with." [1] It was suggested that if we could get a liquid thorium process redefined as a 'fossil fuel' then perhaps we could get permits to build 'new' fossil fuel power plants.

The UK has an interesting thorium program as well and that may yet yield the needed 'proof of concept' that we don't have in the US (nor can we get funding to build).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

Thorium looks interesting, as does Bill Gate's Terrapower traveling wave reactor.

http://gigaom.com/cleantech/terrapower-how-the-travelling-wa...

What about micro nuclear reactors ? eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

I'm unfamiliar with the details but simply based on the concepts :

- It solves the large scale catastrophe potential, a small reactor should threaten a very limited area (correct me if I'm wrong)

- It can be installed incrementally because of small unit costs and could be distributed/mass produced dropping the costs.

- Power loss from transmission is cut down to a minimum because this sort of micro reactor would be installed close to the consumers.

So any drawbacks I'm missing ? Why not subsidize that (if we have to subsidize something, simply going on technical/economic merits, I would prefer they don't subsidize anything) ?

As the article mentions; these reactors are legally just as dangerous as a full-size installation; it'll take a lot of political legwork to make them feasible. Said politics would be a tad more difficult than usual; since your average voter will think of the following:

a) you're literally putting nuke plants in people's backyards. folk will worry about getting green suntans.

b) assuming they're meant to be autonomous; there's the issue of potential sabotage. they're small nukes, but they're still nukes. (and if they're networked, could be even worse than a centralized plant)

PS: perhaps this design would be far more sensible as a cluster (housed like a normal nuke plant); theoretically the entire plant would be safer as the smaller reactors would be easier to control and contain if things went south.

I'm not a nuclear physicist but in what way is a nuclear reactor equivalent to a nuke ? AFAIK reactors can't actually reach the critical level that's required to create a nuclear explosion - it's a completely different design, different isotope concentration, so the biggest threat is exposure to radioactive materials and maybe heat/pressure explosion. And 4S has passive safety mechanisms so sabotage would have to be manual, chain sabotage would be impossible, especially if they were properly monitored.

The biggest safety concern I've heard is that you could use them to create small quantities of weapons grade plutonium, but I guess if you know how to do that you could get it in other ways.

They aren't; that's what people will think of them as though. It's taken us this long to actually build a new plant period; it'll be a while longer before people are convinced it's safe to live across the street from one.

This contradicts what you said in your first post: "they're small nukes, but they're still nukes. (and if they're networked, could be even worse than a centralized plant)"

What is the issue? That they are dangerous or that people perceive them to be?

"Nuke", in this case, was being used as a shorter way to say "nuclear reactor". Nuclear reactors are, of course, completely different from nuclear bombs.

Political drawbacks.

You are looking to get approval for multiple nuclear reactors instead of just one. Good luck.

But these aren't nuclear reactors, not in the classic sense. This is like a nuclear battery.

If engineers could pursue nuclear power free from influence and interference, then I would have full confidence in their ability to create safe systems. Unfortunately politics and other forces have a way of always intruding.

Feynman's analysis of the Challenger disaster, and of the engineer who stayed up in the middle of the night refusing to sign-off on the launch in the face of commerical and political pressure ought to give anyone pause. In fact he was able to cite the exact reason for failure that occured - gaseous breach of the O-rings, due to operation outside design paramters. The fact his career was also finished, is the icing on the cake.

Chernobyl(cumulative maintenance procedural failures) and Fukushima (concrete walls too low to withstand the Tsunami) also stand as evidence that science and engineering doens't exist in a vaccum and always gets co-opted.

Chernobyl was a reactor that (1) caused the reaction rate to increase as the temperature increased, a property viewed as madness today, and (2) had no containment building whatsoever.

Fukushima was better, but was still a reactor from the 70s. There were reactors right next door, built in the 80s with better safety features, that withstood the same events just fine.

Modern designs are much better than those 1980s reactors.

This is bad news. If you read the article to the end you will see that the whole thing is funded with taxpayer money. Also, the electricity bill payers will be expected to pay extra to make up for the additional costs of nuclear energy.

This is only happening because of subsidies, and if we are to subsidize something we should subsidize renewable energy which is rapidly growing and decreasing in cost as opposed to nuclear which keep increasing in cost as new dangers of nuclear plants get discovered.

And by the way there are problems with this new advanced design too. A structural engineer that worked on the project says that the shield building is not well tested and there is no reason to assume that it can withstand the earthquakes and hits it is supposed to withstand.

pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1033/ML103370648.pdf

"The API000 shield building safety functions include shielding plant structures from impact loads, such as tornado missiles, protecting plant equipment during seismic events, similar to containment and shield structures in other reactor designs."

I don't know of any tornado missile that can manage getting through 6 ft of concrete reinforced with layers of steel rebar. Also, even if an earthquake did happen in Georgia, the last 9.4 quake in Japan was against a shield building that was designed more then 40 years ago. I think we can have a bit of faith in some new designs that we're designed without a slide ruler.

"What makes a difference in Georgia is that the state has ruled that customers are going to have to pay, he said."

Not taxpayers. Subsidies have actually been going to wind and solar for quite a few decades (see Solyndra) - not to nuclear.

"The project at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Ga., is being undertaken by Southern Co., which operates four electric utilities in the South, and three minority partners — all aided by a massive federal loan guarantee and other incentives."

So yes federal taxpayers are paying for this too. Loan guarantees are not free. By the way, the loan guarantee for just these two nuclear reactors will be 8.3 billion which dwarfs the half a billion dollar Solyndra loan guarantee everyone is complaining about.

Unfortunately, nuclear subsidies in the US dwarf the very few incentives we have for renewable power. Almost the entire budget of the Department of Energy is devoted to supporting nuclear in one way or another.

Edit:

This is the link showing the amount of the loan guarantee:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/energy-environmen...

I would think a loan guarantee would only have a cost if the utility defaulted on the loan. The taxpayers are in effect co-signing.

Unfortunately the history of nuclear generating station construction is one of massive cost overruns and defaults. I wish I felt more confident that things would be different this time.

Regardless, I think this is welcome news, demand for electricity is only going to grow especially as electric vehicles start to become viable.

> loan guarantee would only have a cost if the utility defaulted

But loan guarantee does have a cost -- it is risk the taken on by the tax payer. The value of that risk is how much the loan guarantee would cost if purchased on the free market.

The loan guarantee is actually against government induced project delays not default. The goal is to make the government a stakeholder. The last two built at that same site had > 10x cost overruns for that reason.

I have good credit, would you co-sign a car loan for me for free?

No?

How much would I have to pay you to make it worth co-signing?

That's the value of the loan guarantee to you.

The value to me is how much I save on interest due to your guarantee. Or, if I can't buy a car without your signature, the value to me is the difference between the value of owning a car vs. not owning one.

If people are steeling themselves for high electricity bills, then why not focus on renewables where the current technology is improving very quickly? When the amazing thorium reactors show up I'll reconsider, but until then... why be willing to pay big for nuclear?

The fact that renewable energy technology is improving is kind of irrelevant — you don't retroactively get all that progress if you purchase now, just like your nuclear reactor won't suddenly be thorium-based once that technology is worked out. You have to choose based on what's actually available. As things stand, AFAIK no renewable power source is more economical than nuclear. Hopefully they will be in the future, but building the current, inferior implementation because one day there will be a better version doesn't make sense. That's like putting a 2-year-old on the Olympic weightlifting team because he seems likely to be very strong one day.

You think nuclear is cheaper than renewables?

Not sure what you're getting at with the "retroactively" bit. What I mean is renewables are feasible now, and next year they will be appreciably better, and the year after that even more so... this is not a pace of improvement I see in nuclear power, and yet I am supposed to be amazed by its price (cough) and potential (irrelevant since reactors are built to last 50 years; renewable stuff can be upgraded far more easily, in pieces)

What renewable energy source are you thinking of as "feasible now" at a scale of 1000 MW?

Coat the countryside with wind turbines--it's what they've done near the SF area, although you'll note that as far as I can tell no turbines are visible from any point within what is generally considered "the Bay Area"... San Franciscans just NIMBY their power into the back yards of the "less enlightened".

As I understand it, current wind technology requires a lot more land (like, an order of magnitude) and intensive maintenance if you want to get even in the same ballpark of energy output, and that's assuming a location that's good for wind power. You can hardly just drop wind turbines into an existing plant to multiply the energy output like they're planning to do here with nuclear reactors.

Aren't the largest wind farms lucky to get 30% of 1000 MW, and that only where and when it's windy?

To clarify, I am not a big fan of wind power :)

Germany's installed wind power production is 27000 MW. Their solar capacity is 24800 MW.

Nuclear seems to be our only option for the time being; most renewables require TONS of space to be comparable (not to mention problems with electricity production vs. demand management in the grid - solar and wind energy kind of depends on weather). There's a good book on the topic that has all the relevant calculations: http://www.withouthotair.com/

Increasing the rates paid for electricity actually helps renewables, by making them more competitive. Just like any increase to the gas tax helps electric vehicles compete, any increase to the average price-per-kWh makes alternative energy sources that much closer to economic viability.

I would assume (though I'm not fully up to date) that the so-called "safer" reactor designs such as high-temperature gas cooled, pebble-bed, or thorium reactors are still pretty much research projects. They are likely at least a decade or more away from commercial scale feasibility.

One exception is the Integral Fast Reactor, which was near production-ready when Clinton cancelled the program in 1994. GE-Hitachi has a similar design called the PRISM which has been approved by the NRC for a full-scale demo reactor. GE is trying to sell it to the UK to burn up their plutonium stockpiles.

In the IFR tests at Argonne, researchers cut off the cooling system entirely, and the reactor just quietly shut down, with no damage.

A great new book on the IFR is Plentiful Energy by Till and Chang, two senior scientists at the Argonne project.

You're mostly right, with a couple of exceptions:

1. China is working on a mass-producible pebble bed reactor, the 100 MWe HTR-PM. The first pair of them are under construction, and are scheduled to start commercial operation in 2015.

2. It's possible to run existing pressurized light water reactors on a fuel mix consisting mostly of thorium. This has nothing to do with the capital costs of construction, but if uranium ever gets a lot more expensive, it could be a very useful option.

If they are going to use taxpayer money, can't they focus on something that is more forward looking like Thorium reactors, or even subsidizing renewable energy?

They are already subsidizing a heck of a lot of renewable energy. And I don't doubt that there is NSF-funded research on thorium reactors going on somewhere in the United States.

I'm on a mailing list with some prominent people involved with liquid thorium reactors, and they're not aware of any current government-funded research in the U.S. (There's plenty in China, though.)

Generally good news I think, although as the article hints, the economics still seem to be tough, at least without any sort of more stringent regulation or taxation of their ultra-cheap competitors, goal and natural gas. It seems like either price will have to come down, or these quite generous federal subsidies will have to be extended to a number of additional new plants, in order to make the (very large) construction expense have a sufficient ROI for a private-sector company to undertake.

It's all going to come down to two things: are the workers any good, and do they give a shit.

Just like everything else.

About time.

I thought this was already approved months ago when I first heard about it. I'm glad it's moving forward.

As a counterpoint to all the comments like this:

> It's baffling to me that so many people seem unwilling to accept the idea that maybe, perhaps, we've learned a few lessons about building safe nuclear reactors over the last 50 years.

I would suggest that the real problem with nuclear energy is that we don't know how dangerous it is. And we have no means of estimating the danger that isn't obviously inadequate. You see, nuclear disasters don't happen because engineers are incapable of designing failsafes and containment buildings. Nuclear disasters happen because it's impossible for engineers to envision all the possible failure modes. The confluence of events that causes a meltdown is inevitably something the engineers didn't design for.

In an enlightening article [0] written after the Fukushima disaster, a physicist and expert on nuclear safety argues that

- severe accidents at nuclear reactors have occurred much more frequently than what risk-assessment models predicted;

- the probabilistic risk assessment method does a poor job of anticipating accidents in which a single event, such as a tsunami, causes failures in multiple safety systems; and

- catastrophic nuclear accidents are inevitable, because designers and risk modelers cannot envision all possible ways in which complex systems can fail.

In other words, everything we "know" about nuclear safety is wrong.

0. http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/beyond-our-imagi...

Your argument is too powerful. It proves engineering as a whole is impossible. It equally proves we should never build any sort of building, because it could fall down and kill people and we can never be 100% sure we've prevented it.

It's an irrational appeal to emotion dressed up in rational trappings.

> Your argument is too powerful. It proves engineering as a whole is impossible.

No. It's an argument that we have no good way of estimating the damage caused by rare, spectacular failures in complex systems. But thanks for the down-vote.

> It's an irrational appeal to emotion dressed up in rational trappings.

No. It's pointing out an epistemic hole, one that is essentially the reverse of the sunrise problem [0], that has been discussed by countless philosophers of science, probability theorists, and scientists across dozens of fields. I suggest you read the article I linked and some of the papers it cites rather than make a spectacle of your downright hurr-durr ignorance of the subject.

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_problem

This comment has now been both down-voted and up-voted multiple times. Would one of you down-voters care to explain why you feel this point is unworthy of discussion?

A blog post [0] that was up-voted near the top of Hacker News last week made the same point in terms that apparently are more palatable to some readers. If you haven't read it, I encourage you to do so. Two of the academic papers/book chapters [1, 2] that the blogger cites specifically discuss risk assessment of nuclear power stations in the context I described.

All of this stuff is well known. It's why web-sites' uptimes are never anywhere near the five nines advertised and why we have "flash crashes" in our financial markets.

The focus of my original comment is not only on identifying and assigning probabilities to causes of failures that are inherently difficult to discern, but also on the inadequacy of metrics like expected value in quantifying the effect of rare but spectacular outcomes. Is it really not even worth discussing these problems with our risk-assessment methodologies when the price of failure is as high as it is in case of an uncontrolled meltdown of a nuclear reactor?

0. http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/02/10/each-necessary-but-onl...

1. http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/woods/error/fund_surp.pdf

2. http://crpit.com/confpapers/CRPITV86Qureshi.pdf

Two problems — even if it's much unsafer than we think, it's still very safe, and comparisons to other power technologies and the effects of climate change must be made.

Suppose nuclear power is ten or a hundred times more dangerous than we think it is. Then from the figures that have already been quoted show it is ten to a hundred times safer than coal power (in terms of excess deaths from production of energy.)

On the price of failure, the price of failure to deal with climate change in the low-likelihood scenarios is billions dead. In my opinion, any discussion of nuclear power and low likelihood risks requires being put against those numbers, since nuclear is one of the only options to avoid climate change. In contrast to the billions that will die in large-scale climate change, a modern reactor can have an uncontrolled meltdown 2 miles from my house for all I care. It'll be an expensive and annoying mess, but it's not going to kill billions.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

My argument is not that nuclear energy is much less safe than other energy technologies. I am merely observing that (a) our understanding of the safety of nuclear power generation has been shown to be severely lacking and that (b) nuclear power generation has a very different distribution of adverse outcomes than do technologies without the potential for catastrophic failure. Together, those facts suggest that comparisons of the safety of nuclear power to that of other technologies are not very meaningful.

But since it seems most readers are actively disinterested in the details, I'll give up the argument.

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