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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

> And how many nuclear reactors does one worker build in their lifetime? 2? 4? That's not a lot of opportunity for process improvement.

France built 58 over 20 years, that's how you make it economical. India says they want to do one a year IIRC, which is probably good enough too.

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French nuclear power is still not particularly economical and they didn’t build as many plants as originally planned because of it, nor do they plan to build a sufficient number of new plants to sustain current capacity over the next decades. France justifies the expense with their nuclear bomb program that benefits from a strong civilian nuclear industry.

French nuclear power has a levelized cost of about $70/MWh - which is about the same cost as the levelized cost of solar or wind in France, without most the headaches of intermittency. (Remember the average French person lives further north than the average Canadian...)

Exactly, and don't forget that nuclear costs in France are being driven high by wind (and solar, but less so), because it cannot run at its optimal power because it has to reduce produced power when there's wind.

Downvote all you want, when you artificially decrease capacity factor from the average 90% to 65% because you have to accommodate for wind, in an industry when fixed costs are the vast majority of costs, you mathematically raise the cost per MWh…

> “Remember the average French person lives further north than the average Canadian...”

That doesn’t mean much. Regardless of latitude, the French climate is much milder than most of Canada.

In fact there’s plenty of places in North America that get much, much colder than equivalent latitudes in Europe.

Heck, Chicago is the same latitude as Barcelona(!!), but there can be 20°C or more difference in temperature during winter.

What are you saying? That Earth's rotation axis is, what, tilted? Outragious! Herasy!

Wait, Chicago is colder than Barcelona because of the Earth's tilt?!

I don't know!!!?!!!? You think I just had a streak of genius?

No. Since the earth spins they both get the same solar energy.

The way ocean currents work help Barcelona more than Chicago. Chicago is warmer than its western suburbs because the suburbs are farther from the lake. (there are many other confounding factors so we cannot measure this)

That's true, because of the gulf stream, but the only thing that matters from a solar panel point of view is the angle to the sun. In fact you might get slightly more out of a Canadian solar panel than a French one at the same latitude because the Canadian one will be colder!

Indeed. But in either case, solar doesn't help too much on cold winter days at higher latitudes. Especially if we want to decarbonise heating, leading to increased grid demand on the coldest days.

> "French nuclear power has a levelized cost of about $70/MWh"

That may be true for the existing nuclear fleet, but the cost of new-build nuclear is significantly higher. Flamanville 3, which is expected to finally come online in mid-2024 after 17 years of construction, was estimated at €125/MWh in 2022.

This is in large part because they are not building a bit over 2 reactors per year anymore.

France did not experience a significant fall in construction costs when they were building lots of reactors in the 1970s. There's not much hope of getting that €125/MWh below €100/MWh, and honestly that €125/MWh is likely a sever underestimate to start with.

Don't know about France but TVO in Finland is way under that. Their earlier reactors were built in the 70s.

They have been hitting 15 to 20€/MWh for decades now. Or at least this is the price they have been selling to their owners without going bankrupt for decades now. Target with OL3 in the mix is 40€/MWh so OL3 alone is probably in the 50€/MWh to 60€/MWh range. (and they got a really good deal with OL3)

https://www.tvo.fi/material/sites/tvo/pdft/rm89bf734/TVO_-_C...

Paid off reactors can get by on O&M only costs. The trouble is getting through that initial period of paying off the loan and interest. Also, older reactors were far simpler and reliable to construct. (Though "simpler" does not mean simple, they are still extremely complex beasts of machines.)

Finland was smart enough, and France dumb enough, to sign a fixed-cost contract for OL3. This ended up in complete disaster for the French companies doing the building, with the French government buying up the failed builder.

So you can thank French taxpayers for a €70-€100/MWh subsidy for the new clean energy in Finland.

What you're saying is just true of EPR, but not revelant at all in comparison to what happened when the nuclear plants where mass produced. As the parent said, nuclear has been very cheap for 3 decades.

One big difference in the costs is that now days, new reactors are required to fund their own eventual decommissioning and long-term waste handling costs from operating income.

That wasn’t always the case! In the UK, taxpayers have been left with enormous liabilities for managing and cleaning up old nuclear sites:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...

Finland deserves credit for actually building a long-term waste storage repository, which helps solve one of the biggest ongoing issues/costs with nuclear decommissioning.

The operators have been paying into a fund since the 80s which is meant for decommissioning and spent fuel storage.

Basically it is a legal requirement (some small fraction of a cent for every kWh produiced)

This is really the only sane way to do it.

Also we got lucky with the ground under Olkiluoto being good spot for nuclear waste storage so not much NIMBY stuff for that as it is already the site for the biggest nuclear power plant in the country. It is also small town so a huge % of the population there work at the plant or its sub contractors.

> which is about the same cost as the levelized cost of solar or wind in France

As of 2024. Remember that solar and wind are still on a downward price trajectory and the reduced investment in Nuclear has meant that the prices to up.

So if you have a figure for example of $70/MWh for PV and wind in mind from a couple of years ago, then this figure might be slightly outdated now and more slightly outdated tomorrow. PV might go under $20/MWh at the end of the decade for instance. Nobody will be able to compete with that.

> Nobody will be able to compete with that

It depends on what it will cost to level out times of no sun.

>Nobody will be able to compete with that.

Coal does. According to this IEA table, India and China achieved under $10/MWH

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/levelised...

The coal numbers food those countries are $70-100/MWh. Its only the capital cost that get to $10/MWh.

> PV might go under $20/MWh at the end of the decade

It's never clear to me when these numbers are cited, clearly you must be talking about PV + battery right? Otherwise it would not be a fair comparison.

> PV might go under $20/MWh at the end of the decade for instance. Nobody will be able to compete with that.

Except places where the sun doesn't shine much long periods of time (far north/south).

> Remember the average French person lives further north than the average Canadian

The opposite is true, I think.

Did you try to find data? Or just reporting on your intuition about this thing that someone else thought might be surprising and turned out to be surprising?

It seems like half of Canada's populations lives south of 45.5°N. [1]

Someone else calculated the mean population latitude of France to be just over 47°N [2]

Mean and median aren't the same, but in this case, the measures are far enough apart that it does seem like the average (however reasonably defined) French resident lives north of the average (same defined) Canadian resident.

[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/50122/do-50-of-...

[2] https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/1125

I wonder how economical it is if you factor externalities.

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-trillions-hidden-energy-extern...

What's interesting is that they mentioned the externalities for geothermal are very very low.

Wikipedia writes: "As of early September 2022, 32 of France's 56 nuclear reactors were shut down due to maintenance or technical problems" and "In 2022, Europe's driest summer in 500 years had serious consequences for power plant cooling systems, as the drought reduced the amount of river water available for cooling."

What has this to do with building? Summer gets you cheap PV battery electric energy anyhow. Lack of cooling towers etc. gives you trouble....

French reactors suffered a lack of suffciently cool water, what little water they had was too hot. Cooling towers numbers actually are sufficient.

There is still plenty of water, the problem is that you have to limit heating the river. With a cooling tower can cool with or without evaporating water depending on the design but always without heating the river. But it is cheaper to directly dump the heat into the water.

And you cannot empty the river neither, especially during a drought, can you?

My hunch is evaporative cooling uses not very much water. You could also fill a small dam when the water flow is higher. All means higher cost, of course.

It generally helps to no use hunches when it comes to hard technical questions.

Ok, the hard technical answer is that a phase change from liquid to gas eats a lot more energy than just heating the liquid however many degrees. :-)

My back of the envelope calculations say it's about 10 times less water to evaporate.

There are detailed diagrams and formulas to calculate that. Engineering, not back of the envelope highschool physics.

But guess what, people designing an building power plants know this. And whatever is built is the best compromise possible at the time. Backnof envelope calculus in 2023 or not.

Dry cooling tower exists but they are more expensive. Natural cooling with the evaporation eventually runs into the problem due to built-up of salts which forces you to replace non-evaporated cooling water with fresh river water and lets you dump the heated water into the river (which is limiting factor due to environmental concerns). The less water is flowing and the higher the temperature of the river are the sooner this point is reached

Related and interesting thing - China appears to be building a trial reactor in the Gobi desert [0] because they think they have air cooling sorted out.

Or at least close enough. I haven't checked if it is technically in the desert.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1

Even after the summer heat the reactor availability in France had trouble inching above 2/3 for a number of reasons. One of them being age of the installations and related unplanned outages.

> "As of early September 2022, 32 of France's 56 nuclear reactors were shut down"

This is cherry picking. Look at the 10 years, or even lifetime, average availability. It's 90 or 95%. The reason for this bad number is because of delayed maintenance due to COVID.

> "serious consequences for power plant cooling systems, as the drought reduced the amount of river water available for cooling."

The reduction of power output of French nuclear was something like 0.30%. You read that right. So I would call "serious consequences" a blatant lie.

> "Look at the 10 years, or even lifetime, average availability. It's 90 or 95%."

Average load factor for nuclear reactors globally hovers around 80% according to IAEA data [1]. In France the average is actually lower than this due to load following: by design, many French reactors don't always operate at full capacity because there isn't enough demand at off-peak times.

Few, if any, reactors reach 95%: planned outages for refuelling and maintenance takes up more than 5% of their time.

[1] https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/WorldTrendinAvera...

What proportion of wind turbines were off-line for maintenance over a similar period?

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