First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

That said, the companies aren't going to just stop, they'll just charge higher prices. To stop producing in the third shift, they'll need to:

    - add more daytime production lines, which means buying more floor space, possibly in a different location with new logistics to work out

    - new capex for the new lines

    - higher overhead because your newly expanded production lines are idle 30% of the time

    - higher overhead from daily startup and shutdown times

Even places like hospitals don't exactly get to choose to just turn off all the life support and lights at night.

Both.

Intermittent generation methods are more problematic the more of the grid you try to replace with them. You have solar generation during the day, you run your natural gas plants less during the day but still run them at night, great. Keep building solar until you can stop running them during the day at all. Installing that much capacity could take 20 years.

At that point you'd have to contend with what to do at night. But hey, by then the nuclear plants you started building today are online. You might also look into ways of speeding up the process, because it shouldn't take 20 years to do that.

We need to stop building new natural gas power plants and existing ones need to have a planned obsolescence so that investors know when their investment will no longer be worth anything.

Storage in particular could be MUCH cheaper. (And still be centralized to conserve public-utility oversight and dangers from all those saboteurs out there somewhere.)

Battery storage is VERY expensive and hard on the environment. I continue to see little attention being paid to merely simple gravity storage.

Yes, traditional large-scale pumped hydro exists (usually using expensive turbines to pump water uphill, like the plants used in the UK for decades to get past tea-time. There are many more in the U.S.) They're usually expensive (good for getting tax-payer dollars into constructor pockets) ... time-consuming as well ... and need a hill for a reservoir and a water-source. (Of course we have -all the time in the world- right?)

But on a large scale, electricity can also be stored much more simply and economically by moving VERY heavy weights uphill ... or lifting VERY heavy weights out of a hole. Already existing and proven steel cables can lift 'barrels' containing hundreds or thousands of tons of (very cheap) rocks. Construction times and $/MW cost savings over high-tech 'solutions'? might be 10-1000 times lower.

No, when picking fruit its best to pick it in the order it ripens, and as it does so, irrespective of position on the tree.

It is generally easier and requires less special equipment to pick fruit from the lower branches, hence the metaphorical description of simple tasks as low-hanging fruit. The metaphor (while it may also indicate optimal ordering for some other tasks) is not about optimal ordering for picking fruit from a tree.

> risk factors of a meltdown (however small) to tackle which are always working against you. Technology development in the Nuclear area is SLOW.

True, then again these really aren't a big deal. Burning coal is about the same as having a Chernobyl size disaster every few year (even when we 100% ignore climate change) and most people don't seem to mind that much.

Also why do we pretend that we can just magically clone 3x of the Bhadla plant from pakistan to the US for identical costs? Why do we assume we have infinite rare earth metals for panel/battery production?

Im down to have a discussion, but youre leaving so much out that its hard to take the argument seriously.

It's a shame that Vogtle NPP is now made to be a poster child of "nuclear is inviably expensive organizational mess" argument whereas none of its problems are the technology's fault.

If we truly want to decarbonize, nuclear power is absolutely a part of the solution, together with renewables. Given the climate emergency that we are facing, ignoring nuclear’s massive benefits and not removing unnecessary obstacles from its way is almost criminal at this point.

Edit: Just realized the link is broken for some reason... This one should work:

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....

The first nuclear reactor was built in 1942. We have more than 50 YEARS of technological advancement in nuclear design gained after any one of those reactors.

Modern reactors have made radical improvements. Imagine comparing the safety of a car from the 1960-70s to the safety of a modern car. They are NOT equivalent.

People will bring storage online when it’s needed, but we don’t need it thus we don’t build it. So keep building Solar/Wind and soon enough storage will come online.

Like a car crash where the seat belts and airbags lead to no injuries.

And then all driving was banned.

After the cooling water began to drain out of the broken pressure valve on the morning of March 28, 1979, emergency cooling pumps automatically went into operation. Left alone, these safety devices would have prevented the development of a larger crisis. However, human operators in the control room misread confusing and contradictory readings and shut off the emergency water system. The reactor was also shut down, but residual heat from the fission process was still being released. By early morning, the core had heated to over 4,000 degrees, just 1,000 degrees short of meltdown. In the meltdown scenario, the core melts, and deadly radiation drifts across the countryside, fatally sickening a potentially great number of people.

As the plant operators struggled to understand what had happened, the contaminated water was releasing radioactive gases throughout the plant. The radiation levels, though not immediately life-threatening, were dangerous, and the core cooked further as the contaminated water was contained and precautions were taken to protect the operators. Shortly after 8 a.m., word of the accident leaked to the outside world. The plant’s parent company, Metropolitan Edison, downplayed the crisis and claimed that no radiation had been detected off plant grounds, but the same day inspectors detected slightly increased levels of radiation nearby as a result of the contaminated water leak. Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh considered calling an evacuation.

Finally, at about 8 p.m., plant operators realized they needed to get water moving through the core again and restarted the pumps. The temperature began to drop, and pressure in the reactor was reduced. The reactor had come within less than an hour of a complete meltdown. More than half the core was destroyed or molten, but it had not broken its protective shell, and no radiation was escaping. The crisis was apparently over.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nuclear-accident...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia

People are calling for small, modular and repeatable nuclear reactors that could theoretically get cheaper with scale.

You know what is is actually small, modular and repeatable and getting cheaper with scale? Solar panels and wind turbines.

A) Idealistic voters with little interest in detail or execution.

B) Hard working state employees executing in an ineffective way because they are working on over constrained problems with conflicting and sometime impossible goals.

C) A number of opportunists that take advantage of poor rulemaking and bureaucratic disorganization.

For what it is worth, I dont think corruption is a major driver of problems, but bad policy detached from the practical considerations.

One simple example is SF parks maintenance:

The city wants to keep invasive species out, so it has staff to remove them. The city also believes in livable wages, so the workers make >100K. Residents dont like pesticides, so the workers must hand weed. Hand weeding doesnt work, so the City periodically also pays outside consultants to come in and take care of the invasives (with pesticides and low paid workers).

California has a referendum system. That so few referendums focus on cutting costs says something about its voters’ priorities.

I believe engines are from Rolls Royce which is European.

It's just true.

Pharmaceuticals, medical and gems are off topic.

I'm sure there's other small niches the US dominates in. But overall what I said is the objective truth no matter how much you desire it to be not true.

If Asia doesn't dominate a niche yet they are aggressively on track to dominate in the near future.

Nuclear plants have only ever been built where the customers can be forced to buy the power. No merchant nuclear plant, selling into a competitive market, has ever been built anywhere.

Couldn't that be paraphrased to "last minute changes"?

Guess that's where they took it from.

Skimming the paper it seems a large part of the issue is that it's difficult to mass produce something which needs to be integrated into a variable environment, and attempting to do so is detrimental compared to custom solutions.

This seems to mirror what I've found in the software world, where a custom integration is often much cheaper and easier to maintain than trying to manhandle some generic library/software to do what's needed.

Rince repeat.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088

“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.

Solar and wind costs have only ever decreased. For reasons.

There were supposed to be advantages to building four at once, in that there would be some economy of scale. The AP1000 were also supppsed to be somewhat "modular" to avoid on site custom builds. None of this worked out as planned.

If we wanted nuclear to be a part of the energy transition, we didn't need two new reactors every decade or even four, we needed something like 5-20 per year. However, the experience of building the AP1000 has soured the market.

If we are going to build more nuclear, now is the time because we have the most knowledable workforce right now, but the benefit of building nuclear looks so small in comparison to the cost and the risks that it seems unlikely.

Major major support from the government is needed (and it's there from DoE's Loan Programs Office, run by a huge nuclear fan), but you also need utilities who want to place orders. And that second part is hard to create.

I think you're betraying your bias here with the added term "needlessly". There is some (maybe even most) bureaucracy that is inefficiently applied, for sure. But it is meant to address some risk. Maybe it's a risk that you (personally) don't care about, or aren't even cognizant of, and that's when it becomes easy to declare it "needless." We should be looking to streamline our risk mitigation and align it with risks that the public cares about, not throw it out altogether.

In 2013, CA generated 17 out of 200 GW from nuclear. GA generated 32/120 GW. NY generated 44/136GW. So at least in the case of New York, it generated more power from nuclear as a percentage than GA, and had higher electricity prices, so there doesn't seem to be a correlation. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/state/

It probably has more to do with the fact that electricity is deregulated in CA and NY, where implementations were infamously botched: https://truenergy.com/deregulated-energy-states/

[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=GA

As for how much greening benefits offset costs, I was mildly frustrated by the downvoting :) and went researching on the economic effects in particular. The only study I can find on CO₂ fertilization is recent and stunning:

"we apply the CO₂ fertilization effect... backwards to 1940, and, assuming no other limiting factors, find that CO₂ was the dominant driver of [American agriculture] yield growth"

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29320/w293...

As they note, the extrapolation is from a study period of 2014-2020, but it's expected they have underestimated the prior role of CO₂ fertilization, as CO₂ response becomes saturated as levels rise and that's not represented in their model.

This is 2021 research funded by DOE & USDA, run by NBER, with PIs from Harvard and Columbia who are well cited within their field of environmental economics. Given the pedigree and that conclusion, this should be front-page news in science mags at least. I couldn't find any reporting on it except for Epoch Times (https://www.theepochtimes.com/science/nasa-satellite-data-su...), which gets an eye-roll from me, but guess they got this one :)

I read the full thing. It's great. Crosses high-resolution satellite CO₂ anomaly observations (NASA OCO-2) with crop yield records, wind modeling, sensitivity testing on non-ag land and the result is broadly repeated: +1ppm CO₂ -> +~0.5-1% yield. CO₂ levels went from ~310-410ppm in that period.

If true, it seems at odds with the normal account that gave nitrogen fertilization the lead role for increasing crop yields this past century and lifting most of the world's population out of regular food insecurity, and the growth of our population into billions. Seems more likely both were necessary.

It also makes sense, as C3 plants (e.g. soy, wheat and most plants besides hot/dry grasses) respond positively to CO₂ partial-pressures up to 800-1000ppm. C4 low-CO₂ adapted corn also fertilizes, just to a lesser extent. The authors also note the negative effects of heat stress, but this wouldn't have been as significant in the extrapolation period.

From Epoch Times: “The paper’s first author, Taylor, said: 'We reiterate that climate change will have a large negative impact on agriculture in aggregate, especially in places exposed to extreme heat. And higher CO2 may even lower food nutrition. But the countervailing fertilization effect should also be taken into account.'”

Energy density isn't, alone, determinant here.

The most determinant question is: after taking into account all measures aiming at reducing renewables' production 'intermittency' ('variability' is more adequate), which are: spreading a mix (wind, solar, geothermic...) of renewable sources on a continent, enhancing grid interconnections among nations for them so support each other (objective already very actively and more and more pursued in Europe), storing at continental-level renewables' over-productions (thanks to hydro, hydrogen...) and using it on a clean 'backup' compensating for renewables' 'intermittency', demand response... ... then how much energy do we need to store in order to compensate for any remaining 'intermittency'?

Given that the average electric car battery can power the average home for quite a while (days), and that other EV batteries will be online...

Moreover each year 7% to 10% of gridpower is in France (fully nuclearized) produced thanks to fossil fuel, and its electricity is low-emitting, giving a quite comfy last-resort.

> And how much mining is required obtain those materials

Those materials are recyclable and have substitutes.

Uranium isn't (in practice) recyclable and doesn't have any substitute: this is eternal mining of an ever-rarefied source.

> shipping them around the world in diesel powered boats?

This is a valid point, enforcing the need for each continent hosting cooperating nations to produce its own production units.

On the other hand uranium reserves at current conditions can provide for at best 200 years (more probably 130 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium ), therefore the conditions (price and emissions, as the raise as the ore grade lowers may quickly worsen if some 'nuclear renaissance' stems reactors building projects. Who will take the risk and invest?

Is it the kind of wildlife you want as a pet?

Is it the kind of wildlife you want to eat?

No, this is not actually a good thing.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption

For the same reason gas power plants and hydroelectric power plants are quoted in MW units, and not on the size of their fuel tanks or reservoir volume (converted to MWh as appropriate): it's the most important number for balancing the grid. If you have 90 GW of power demand on the grid at a given moment, you need 90 GW of power generation on the grid at that same moment (simplifying a bit, since transmission constraints mean you also need some of that power generation to be at specific places).

Various agencies are constantly missing FOIA deadlines, and often the only way to get them to actually do the jobs they are legally required to do is to sue them in court, asking for both the information and to have court costs covered.

NYC has large power plants in Manhattan (East River 1, 2, 6, and 7), Queens (650MW Astoria Energy II power station), and Brooklyn (Narrows 1–1 to 2-8) plus a few more.

It’s almost all cars, trucks, and electric power, so those are the things it makes the most sense to worry about as opposed to things that are much harder to decarbonize and account for less emissions.

- costs for a single ship reactor (shipping is extremely price and cost sensitive)

- time, and lost revenue (a ship not carrying cargo is only costing money, see above) for refuelling

- piracy and terrorism (I am not really convinced risking having some pirate group somewhere capture nuclear reactor is a good idea)

The environmental Greens had a lot to do with the smear. Even recently, they were the ones who pushed for the shutdown of German nuclear power which ended up increasing German CO2 output.

It's funny-and-sad to see the old behemoth of nuclear power begging for government support as they last chance to be alive.

Edit: also, the economics are such that you rarely want to drop load from a nuclear plant unless it's offline or for system reasons. The fuel cost is negligible so you'd rather turn off your gas plant or lower the coal plant and save on those fuels.

Thermally it is difficult to dial a reactor up and down. Generally the way nuclear power is modified is by not-sending the steam to generators through a by-pass and quenching their heat in some fashion.

So thermal generation stays at 100% (or whatever), but electrical generation output can be dropped.

It just doesn't make any sense to use reliable nuclear as the "backup" to unreliable renewables.

Because this "backup" is already CO2 free. It is also reliable. And cheap to run. So just run it all the time (nuclear tends to have >90% capacity factor).

You then simply don't need the "primary".

Nuclear reactors absolutely can vary their output to match demand, this is what France has been doing for 50+ years (and what Germany was doing before switching back to coal). It's not as reactive as coal/gas, but you can still vary within 30-100% of output power at a speed of 5% change per minute. Way more than enough to react to 1-day-ahead forecasted supply/demand, and way more than enough to react minute-by-minute if you've got a tiny bit of storage to stabilize the grid's frequency (e.g. pumped hydro).

But that's averaged over the month, what about a run of December days with heavy cloud cover, misty foggy atmosphere, still air, maybe some Icelandic volcano soot in the atmosphere, what's the worst we'd have to plan for, and how much overprovisioning would that take?

[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/solar-update/

[1] https://www.archdaily.com/976069/when-5-percent-of-the-unite...

Surface wind is not reliable. I've seen proposals to put turbines on large kites or gliders tethered to the ground. There's pretty much always strong winds over most of the United States somewhere between the surface and 10000 feet.

This is a linked graph of solar growth compared to International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook predictions: https://rameznaam.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IEA-Solar-G...

In each of 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, the IEA predicted deployment of solar would stop accelerating (line going up) and steady off into consistant growth (flatline on that graph). Every year they have been very quickly wrong, and the 2019 predition of flatline is so wrong that by 2021 actual production of 190GW was WAYYYY off the top of that chart. At this rate we may not need to figure out storage nearly as much as we think.

> "What people have missed is that reaching cost parity on fuel synthesis will unlock huge new demand centers [and trigger an acceleration in demand/investment/research/cost decline of solar created synthetic fuels]."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32197012 (article rather than comments)

> Hydrostor, which is based in Toronto, is one of several startups working on fixing those problems. The company says it’s figured out a way to capture and reuse the heat generated when air is compressed, eliminating the need to burn gas. It’s also figured out a way to make the mechanics work in areas where caverns must be dug out of hard rock, rather than salt. <

https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2023-01-12/th...

This first thing we need to do is align the costs and incentives. What I mean by that is simply allow the market, or government, to dictate the real cost of providing electricity at night. If there are no solar panels (nighttime), and whatever grid-scale batteries are available cost 1$/kwh then so be it, charge that amount to the consumer. People will learn to forego "bathing" in electricity at night endlessly. For decades we've been spoiled with ridiculous "energy on a tap" that just gives us oodles at the flick of a switch, and we just need to take that away.

As a side-effect of this whole "switching off the endless tap", micro-grids are the future. Small communities with mini-grid-scale batteries and sharing of electricity will take over this stupid "national synchronized grid" idea that has gimped our ability to be agile wrt local energy generation.

I think what you mean is that wind alone is not baseload, not that it is unreliable. It is quite reliable in that its availability is predictable such that it can be coordinated with storage to create virtual baseload. Therefore its failure modes are relatively mild in impact.

In contrast, large centralized plants (whether combustion or nuclear) have far more consequential failure modes - for example, losing 1GW of power with little notice, as can happen with these plants, is usually a grid emergency event.