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Comment by nocoiner | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand how they figure this is the first new reactor in the US in 40 years? The page that that assertion links to says that one of the reactors at Watts Bar came online in 2016, and the prior reactor there came online in 1996. And I know that there was at least one nuclear power plant that came online in the early 90s which is, urk, 30 years ago, but hey, still not 40.

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Those Watts Bar reactors were previously the newest ones in the US. Both began construction in 1973:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....

I think that the headline is a half-garbled way to indicate that this reactor is the first one completed that began construction after the 1970s in the US. That interesting fact is omitted by the body of the story, which doesn't lay out the dates at all. I only knew this background because of my prior interest in the nuclear industry.

Watts Bar got approved an eternity ago and just got finished 30ish years late.

Vogtle 3 & 4 got approved recently, though I’m not sure the 40 years number is an apples-to-apples comparison.

The elephant’s foot in the room (see what I did there?) is that nuclear is just not cheap the way it used to be. It takes a lot of steel and a lot of concrete.

The reason we haven’t been building nuclear plants is that other plants, gas, wind, and solar, deliver way more power in way less time, and with a lesser quantum of plant size.

The fossil fuel consumption of a nuclear plant, while certainly less than coal, is still higher than wind or solar.

Nuclear offers a steady cheaper than solar base line of power. While gas has many advantages climate change isn't one of them.

Than solar, ok.

Than solar plus batteries, the numbers don't back you up on that (or no longer do).

The only thing more expensive than a nuclear reactor is a battery bank of the same capacity.

Now that’s just silly. Lots of things are more expensive than a nuclear reactor.

Grid-tied batteries are now about $300/kWh. Capitalized over 25 years, that adds 3.3 cents to peak (11AM) solar prices, which themselves can go negative at times (duck curve in action), and overall are 3-4 cents per kWh.

Nuclear (new) portends to cost between 7 and 20 cents per kWh according to Wikipedia.

Downvote me if you must, but the numbers are right there. Nuclear may have been the best option for a time, but that time has passed and is not coming back.

In some locations on an industrial scale.

For everyone else: The average solar panel cost is $3–$5 per watt or $15000–$20000 for a typical 5 kW system

This just shows that residential solar is kind of dumb. It's more gaming quirks of rate structures than it is producing cheap energy. Fortunately, there's more than enough room for large scale solar, installed at about $1/W.

2008 called. It wants its prices back.

A visit to sunelec.com or santansolar.com yields a litany of panels for sale well under $1/W. Half the offerings on Amazon are below $1/W as well.

As such, nowadays you should be paying no more than $10k for a 5kW system.

10k+install+taxes=15k-20k

"But why don't we pay it off in Canadian dollars and save ourselves some money?"

"Just so you know, if that's a route you want to follow, it's 50,000 American, It would be 70,000, roughly, Canadian dollars."

"How are we going to come up with $120,000?!"

according to the wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St... while they came online then, they were started in 1973

OK, so shouldn’t we then be benchmarking to Vogtle’s start of construction in 2009?

Attention headline writers: Cherry picking the start dates and commissioning dates doesn’t prove anything and just leads to madness.

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