Even $5.3B seems very expensive. For reference, (the new Finnish) Olkiluoto-3 was €11 billion, for 1600 MW. The article says 6 * 77 MW = 539 MW!
How is it that we've become so bad at building?
Now imagine that we don’t have any practice building one of these things because people have been scared of building them for approximately 40 years, so the last person to make one is 70-90.
Now imagine that the failure case for this thing is a disaster that causes an expensive cleanup in the surrounding area, so no one will insure the project against that unless you pay an astronomical amount. Now add in that you’re using a “new” design that’s never been tested, and you have to follow a bunch of government regulations that didn’t even exist when the last comparable reactor was built.
Stack up all these things and you get a lot of uncertainty about project scope, uncertainty about financing, and uncertainty about whether it will work.
This means that to ballpark what it was cost, it will necessarily be expensive because of the risk everyone is taking in producing it.
The real difference between then and now, is willingness to take on risk. Developed countries of today are essentially victims of the innovators dilemma. We're fat and happy and complacent, and that's why we will never have anything new or better. People in developed countries don't even want the inconvenience of having children anymore. Why take risk to make things better for the next generation when we're not even willing to create them?
Which means we’d spend any amount of money on them and they’re a strategic asset.
Many safer designs are (basically) useless for enrichment, (pebble bed, molten salt thorium, w/e), which means the military might use one on an aircraft carrier or remote outpost, if they had any reason to (which they don’t as there’s no NIMBYism far out at sea). But safer designs are likely cheaper to run long term as the failure modes are significantly less catastrophic. (Not that the current gen ones are particularly dangerous).
the cleanest energy the world has ever seen
Now, on the other hand, as far as I know NuScale never built a commercial reactor before... so we'll see how many of their current projects actually come to life.
Similar reactors built after this will not have these growing pains.
MBAs. Same ones infecting the company that you most likely work for.
Something smaller like stamping out PV panels or windmills for farms of them is much more manageable. Anything big and complex invites too much graft.
And while you can complain about expensive regulations, that's just another graft called regulatory capture. And they let you blame it on the hippies, while they rake in the dollars.
People are bad as estimating the cost of technical work when unknown-unknowns are involved, and the problem becomes worse when there's a massive incentive to underestimate to win the contract when you know the government will pay for all of your overruns.
Olkiluoto-3's materials and labour costs were locked in well before the current inflationary cycle. If they started out today the cost would likely be much higher.
Also, NuScale is a novel new design. SMRs haven't been commercially deployed anywhere yet, so there's a lot of extra risk and cost associated with building and certifying the very first ones. After all, it cost Boeing an awful lot more to produce the first 777 aircraft than it did to knock out the 1000th.
You're comparing untried and untested SMR design to slapping up an EPR next to two BWRs if I'm remembering the Finnish project correctly. While EPR is newer, we as mankind have a good understanding of how to build and operate one.
Now of course Vogtie cost us 30 or 40 whatever billion for a couple of trifling PWRs, so your larger point still stands. I just think it was dumb of NuScale from the outset to go out marketing over-promises on the idea of SMR. If you took an educated look at the stats and numbers proponents of SMRs were out touting, it's doubtful that even China could have delivered on that. How they thought they could do it in the real world of Idaho is beyond me? They must have had an ace up their sleeves? Or perhaps they expected the government to play a much larger role? Not sure.
The Tesla megapack price is about 300 million dollars per 1GWh of storage these days.
Wind depends on how you calculate area used. The zone that excludes other wind turbines and residential buildings will be much larger. But the area used by just the base is obviously quite small. When placed between farm plots the area usage is very effective.
The risk of accidents in the US is probably extremely small. I wouldn’t personally be worried about. Especially with NuScKe which should be passively safe. Though I would have said the same about Japan before Fukushima so you never know (yes, I know the death toll was negligible, but the effect it had on nearby residents is still catastrophic)
Solar installations can be grazed. Alternatively, bifacial panels can be installed vertically east-west and the strips between can be farmed. Or the panels can be placed on rooftops. Or used to shade parking lots. Et cetera.
All that needs to be done is that it needs to make financial sense to install. If we can find a way to make it so compelling financially, you’d be crazy not to fill your parking lot with solar.
Also 1 level parking lots tend to be black, and therefore tend to accumulate heat much more than the field it is replacing.
So transforming some energy it gets into electricity even sounds like a nice side effect.
You missed "nuclear keep-out zone". You missed "becomes". And you missed 'de facto".
Please read comments properly before going on a rant.
I didn’t miss those things and I’m really agreeing with you but leaning more heavily into the solar since it’s not nearly as controversial as nuclear and the “land issue” is, in fact, very often cited as the reason that solar won’t scale but it’s a actually a thinly veiled argument for NIMBYism.
Not so weird IMO; I interpreted it the exact same way. So how do you mean it should have been interpreted? GP pointed out that exclusion zones around nukes in effect become nature preserves, and that solar panels could be placed in agricultural zones -- two very different things. In response, you start ranting about "displace wildlife and thus rile up the nature conservationists" with, apparently, solar installations. (You didn't explicitly say so, but then you hadn't indicated any change of subject from your previous sentece, which was explicitly about solar.) Which nobody was talking about.
So yes, weird indeed, but you do you.
That said, I’m not against nuclear but there are significant environmental drawbacks to it for anyone who lives near a plant. I can’t think of any significant environmental drawbacks to installing solar in existing parking lots.
(and it's probably more expensive than installing solar on hillsides or in fields, and yields less than installing them in deserts, though those may turn out not to matter)
consider the usa, one of the most parking-lot-intensive countries in the world, with 278 million cars, almost one per person https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-s...
0.47% of the contiguous usa is covered in solar panels, 13778 square miles, or in modern units, 35680 square km https://time.com/6239651/solar-parking-lots-france-us/ (that's what the article says, anyway; i suspect the number is smaller, because https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648... only found 2.2 parking spaces per registered vehicle in a more-urban-than-average county; 5 m times 2.3 m times 2.2 times 278 million gives only 7000 square km of parking spaces, perhaps doubling if the parking lot covers twice as much area as the parking spaces in it)
with 21% efficient panels, the 35680 km² figure would yield 7.5 terawatts peak; at a high 30% capacity factor it would average 2.2 terawatts, though the time article linked above only estimates 0.422 terawatts peak. possibly the discrepancy is due to oblique illumination: you can't get the full 1000 watts per square meter of insolation on a horizontal surface like a parking lot except in the tropics, where the us isn't. i suspect some of the discrepancy is so large due to an allowance for spacing the panels apart so they never shade each other. also the time article has an arithmetic error where it says half of 13778 is 4822
if we use, say, 14000 km² and a more plausible 18% capacity factor, without trying to take into account angling the panels and spacing them out, we get 2.9 terawatts nameplate capacity, 0.53 terawatts average
the us uses 100 quads per year https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56980 which is 3.3 terawatts. 0.27 terawatts of this is nuclear
so conceivably you could replace nuclear with parking-lot solar, but you'll need a lot more solar than that to power the rest of the economy
Politicians probably don't like it because the construction riles up their constituents while it's happening.
There’s really very little excuse
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/poland-ap-polish-mateusz-...
The most dangerous and expensive accident happening to a wind turbine is way (way!!!) less daunting and way more easy to avoid and tackle than a major nuclear accident.
> In terms of material input
Given that most material needed for renewables can be recycled, has substitutes and that there is no need for a combustible there is quite a debate there.
Even the underlying part (is there enough of this or that?) isn't fully cooked, lithium being an example: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-v...
My opinion doesn't matter anyway, the reality is that even in France that was a leader and highly successful in nuclear technology; new reactors do not get built or/and take forever.
It has nothing to do with skill, it is pretty much a systemic and political problem. Remove the political opinions, remove the feminist bullshit and things will get done. In the meantime, I suggest enjoying the fall, because nothing will happen until it gets so bad there will be no choice.
Price(size) = fixed + K*size^b
Where b is almost always less than 1, can go as low as 0.6.
So building 6 small reactors will be more expensive than building a single reactor 6 times the size.
This is the difference between vertically scaling (bigger thing) vs horizontal scaling (multiple smaller things).
Horizontal scaling will almost always cost you more.
It makes sense when the monolith is very complex to certify, so having discrete parts that are individually certified is more expensive only in theory when you dont factor in the exponential certification complexity. which i guess is high for nuclear related parts.
Historically each nation nuclear certification authority developed its own set of requirements.
There are links, and a push to federate efforts, however it remains true.
Case in point: the Olkiluoto-3 EPR reactor isn't exactly the same as Flamanville-3, the one being built in France, because the Finns wanted/needed various different thingies. Any of such requirement may have a significant impact on the design, and therefore impede the SMR approach.
We build so few gigawatt-size reactors. In the US only 4 came online since 1990. For most of the construction crew of such a reactor, that job is the first of that type in their career, and the last. They get trained on the job, and that (ultra-expensive) training is then never used again.
Contrast that with the building of naval reactors, which are essentially SMRs. The US builds about 1 or 2 per year. In factories. The workers there participate in the building of numerous reactors during their careers. For each reactor, the majority of the crew has already done the job at least once before, and they know they will continue using their skills for many years to come.
The cost of naval reactors is classified, but one could infer from this congressional report ([1], page 6) that an A1B reactor cost about $400 MM in 2011 money. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $560 MM today.
A single A1B reactor is equivalent to about 3 NuScale modules, so 2 A1Bs would be equivalent to the 6-module package that was canceled here, because its cost ballooned to more than 9 billion. The US Navy is able to procure them for less than $1.2 BN.
So, no, the economics don't fundamentally doom SMRs. It's just that you can expect the numbers to start working out only after you enter serial production. The first-of-its-kind costs are always high.
[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/112th-congress-2011-...
I am not disagreeing with the idea of Wright's law. The US Navy very likely benefits from it, but NuScale does not, and possibly never will.
However, a) this does include other prices such site licenses and environmental assessment.
b) Wrights law models a decrease with every doubling in units produced. At 1-2 a year, we're looking at a very long time to get several doublings in. NuScale meanwhile has 0 doublings under their belt. And NuScale is not alone in this field, there are dozens of companies, each one promising the same thing (SMNRs). The Navy has a single source for their reactors, NuScale has lots of competition and has to share the market, leading each of company to get even fewer reactors built per year.
c) Someone has to pay those early costs. For the Navy, there are not many alternatives; there are no PV or Wind aircraft carriers. It's nuclear or oil. The same is not true about power generation.
d) As you say, each navy reactor is about 3 NuScale modules. Why does the Navy not build 3 smaller modules and get even better scaling? Why not 30? I argue they don't because of the costs associated with horizontal scaling. NuScale meanwhile doesn't have a power budget they need to hit, they are trying to produce baseload power, and the bigger they make them the more economies of scale the nuclear reactor benefits from.
That's a good point.
Actually the Navy does build such smaller modules. The Navy uses 2 types of naval reactors, one for Virginia-class submarines, the S9G, which is very close to one NuScale module, and one for Ford-class carriers, the A1B, about 3 times larger.
Each Ford-class carrier uses 2 A1B reactors. Why not 6 S9G? I don't know. But then why not a single reactor twice as large as an A1B? I don't know either. It looks like there are some tradeoffs.
In any case, the fact that the Navy can build economically SMR-sized reactors is encouraging. Of course, the Navy can use technologies that are not available on the civilian market, for example their reactors use weapon-grade uranium. So it's not completely an apples-and-apples comparison.
Still, NuScale has produced more than one million pages of documentation to get their SMR design approved by the NRC. One can imagine they also put a lot of thinking in the economic viability of the project. One way or another they convinced a large engineering, procurement and construction company (Fluor Corp) to buy them.
Just because the pile of sh*t is massive doesn’t mean there’s a pony somewhere underneath it.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col/auro...
The NRC denied them, without prejudice might I add, a license based on an evaluation of the technical merits and safety of the reactor, not on its economics.
But, imagine that whenever you want a new car, the car company sent a crew to your house and builds the car in your backyard. All the parts needed will be shipped to your address, and workbenches, tools, machinery, too. They put the car together, paint it, dry it, and voila, the car is yours. Would it surprise you if it was 10 times more expensive than if it came from an assembly line?
Not much to do about a), so if this technology were to succeed, the government would have to play kingmaker and pick only one company such that they actually go through enough units to drop down the price curve. This might work domestically, but I foresee political difficulties when trying to convince other countries to abandon their homegrown tech in favour of yours.
My other points still stand, especially the one about competition.
But, NuScale has no experience building anything. It's just a startup. It's a miracle they got their reactor design approved.
BWXT however is the company that builds the Navy's naval nuclear reactors. They are cooperating with GE and Hitachi [1] to build a 300 MWe SMR. All 3 of these companies have plenty of experience delivering on numerous types of projects, including nuclear ones. I do think they have a chance.
[1] https://www.bwxt.com/news/2023/03/21/BWXT-Awarded-Engineerin...
The real total cost of exploitation of a marine (think: cooling) military (think: many hands available, and a quite specific way to manage dangerous equipment) reactor is also very difficult to establish.
Even the cost of civilian research (from the 50's to 2012) is very difficult to assess («les données recueillies ne sont pas toutes homogènes et leur fiabilité n’est pas totale.»).
Ballpark figures (page 270): 288 billions euros (value: 2010) invested, 118 of them being directly production-related investments (maintenance is not accounted for), with severe methodological restrictions («Il est difficile aujourd’hui de 'reconstruire' l'histoire du financement»), tackled by using conventions inherited from the nuclear industry.
But I guess there's no permitting process on Mars.
They're not super efficient either, and ones on the last two american rovers use plutonium that still has to be made in a reactor.
Still, I'd love an RTG for powering or heating my home. Even if I needed batteries to even out the demand on the couple thousand watts one can make.
What industry would you prefer your children to go into? Construction or just about anything else?
That's fine.. I guess, but the world needs construction workers, including in America.
If my son wanted to build nuclear reactors I'd be A-Okay with that.
No idea if I’m correct, but it’s maybe worth offering them the benefit of the doubt here.
But their point remains the same, "let someone else do it" (the quiet part: "it's below us").
It's a very negative and elitist attitude that's prevalent in bubbles where people don't have to work normal jobs.
This is my perception as someone from the working class who doesn't get one of those big FAANG salaries; they don't check that when you sign up here.
Nothing in this thread points to lack of workers, but to over regulation.
On a personal note, I'd prefer many less lawyers, especially the ones who argue against the one energy source that works.
I'd prefer many more trade workers, much less in academics.
I'd prefer people to not view jobs as a social status and appreciate the contributions people give to society.
A plumber can make quite a bit of money, work up to their own business, not have to deal with huge amounts of debt, and actually provides needed services for society.
A basketball player can make quite a bit of money playing basketball if they're exceptional. Looks like the national average for a plumber is about $60K/year. Most people on this forum would scoff at that if someone offered them that. It's actually about as much as my uncle, a heavy diesel mechanic, made before his untimely death. It's about what my father made when he retired.
Why don't we build? Why don't we do anything; because it's more profitable not to I'm sure.
SWE is a bubble and can't really be applied to the rest of the workforce. A SWE would scoff at any other job because of this.
We do have builders, there is overregulation that stops us from building.
It's not the lack of workers.
The thread points at inflation and interest rates and general cost overruns. I don't see the overregulation. As others have said, you can run your non nuclear powerplants until they fall apart. That isn't possible with nuclear power.
No no no no, we are talking about hard labor. I think OP is merely saying that there are jobs that no one wants to do, but they need to be done. So while everyone wish someone becomes the janitor, no one wants their own kid to become one (or whatever job you deem is less "respected").
This is not to say that I don't respect janitors, it is that I WISH i feel respect for them, but for whatever reason (nurture or nature) I simply don't feel respect for them and I constantly fight against this intuition.
In my area of NY suburbs, there's such a shortfall of tradesmen now due to boomer retirement en-masse, you see alot of younger guys showing up as plumbers, electricians, hvac and more that you would never ever have seen just 5 years ago.
I wouldn't care if my own kids did it. As long as they figure out their life plan in advance, who cares.
That said, if the job is so attractive to young people (I'm guessing primarily men), then why do you think that not much has changed in the intervening decade?
Not all trade work is swinging a hammer or lugging huge things around (what we have been sold). Most of it is fit and trim work. Fiddly work where you are making sure that wire is lined up just right to fit in this wall or knowing where to put the pressure hose. Yeah swinging the hammer work and lugging stuff around is how you get started. You 'put in your dues'. It is a form of hazing. Sort of how we give interns the 'build this weird form that no one will ever use' work.
I know the trades guys are doing decent. The ones I see are driving around in brand new f150s (go look at the prices on them). As scarcity for their work is driving up prices. I can put up a job opening for a programmer and have 200+ applicants. Do you think the trades are getting lots of people asking to do this work? No it is seen as 'low class work'.
I'm quite aware of how much a new F-150 costs, perhaps you should look up the length of the average vehicle loan these days.
I bet I do know what would help the trades to be seen as higher class work; paying more lol.
It's too bad it didn't work out commercially. Their other projects will probably get cancelled as well if they face the same price increases.
Regulation. No matter how you find it (a drag, useful or even life-saving), one thing is certain: it significantly increases costs and time to build.
Do you know how Golden Gate or the Empire State Building were built on budget and fast? With risks and lost lives.
The NRC effectively makes nuclear impossible in the US.
Nuclear energy can be done safely as long as it is run by competent nuclear energy physicists/technicians with real authority, so they can and will shut down stupid ideas such as operating outside parameters because economy/boss said so. This seems to rule out commercial organizations. NRC is more benevolent than that, maybe they should actually be even tougher.
We should allow only competent states to build and operate nuclear plants, so science and rules take precedence to money and boss boot-licking.
This may push nuclear energy into unprofitable territory, depending on the market conditions, infrastructure, water and people resources. Which is fine by me - nuclear energy in some areas is so important for grid stability we should have it even if it is unprofitable.
Pointing to extreme events with outdated designs has nothing to do with this.
Nuclear energy has a minuscule list of total casualties throughout history. Casualties per megawatt produced? It's practically zero. At the same time burning hydrocarbons kills every single day through pollution. It kills millions yearly. Burning coal even spews radioactive ash into the air!
And above all, climate change is looming as a civilization-ending danger, closer and closer.
So which one should we regulate more?!
A nuclear accident creates a big and costly disaster suddenly. People don't like sudden big problems but can live with continuously growing ones.
Burning hydrocarbons is much more acceptable in that regard. CO2/dust pollution is accepted by society, because it is continuous and dilutes well. Killing millions is socially acceptable when it happens randomly all over the planet. Radioactive pollution due to coal burning is/should be negligible, most is(should be) filtered out in the smokestack scrubbers.
I don't like fossil power plants, but they are much easier to build and more acceptable to people than nuclear ones. That's why regulation and security have to be high with nuclear, to make it acceptable to most of society.
> civilization-ending danger
I don't think climate change is a civilization-ending danger in the coming decades. It already creates political problems, migration. If we keep pumping CO2 then maybe in hundred years.
We had 2 huge ones. They resulted in a few thousand deaths and some uninhabitable land. Nothing compared to pollution damage.
> accepted by society [...] socially acceptable
I'd rather decide based on reason. And I doubt many people find millions of deaths due to pollution every year acceptable. They just don't know they had a choice. Choice stolen from them by rabid anti-nuclear fear mongering.
> I don't think climate change is a civilization-ending danger
Yet you think a few black swan nuclear disasters are? Can I borrow your crystal ball? You are pretty sure about the future but most experts I read disagree: nuclear experts consider it extremely safe while climate experts warn of dire futures.
Nuclear experts consider it safe because of existing regulations and because it is hard for sketchy company to launch a new plant.
That may be, but you're coming off as mongering the same irrational fear.
By the same logic, maximum security prisons have the safest interns. ;-)
I think we over regulate nuclear plants/nuclear plant construction/design in the United States. We should absolutely have robust regulatory controls and review in place, but those controls need to serve a purpose and reduce a specific risk(s). Controls for controls sake just add to cost and possibly sub-optimal operations.
Case in point, across the US many coal fire power stations are being decommissioned, on the face these would be great candidates to convert to Nuclear power stations. They already have a lot of the expensive infrastructure in place on site (i.e. massive transmission lines, electric substation, probably a reliable water source, etc). Great opportunity to reduce cost and accelerate a project.
But because of the way the nuclear regulations are structured, and the fact that coal ash is radioactive it's unlikely a site like this would be to become compliant.
We should have tough regulations on the nuclear industry, but they should be smart regulations.