Next time you complain that waiting for a code review approval till next week is excruciatingly long, think about these turnaround times.
Also this is why we can't quickly build many reactors to ramp up electric generation for millions of new electric cars, etc.
But on the good side, we _didn't_ have a hydrogen explosion due to some late-night troubleshooting, great work Carl!
But we learned a lot, our alerts were confusing, and our metrics didn't surface coolant level or the relief valve that was stuck open.
So next sprint, let's focus on monitoring and cross-team knowledge transfer! 3 points, right?
"We" here means any country on the planet. Nuclear plants are simply inherently more complicated and more risky to build that the alternatives. Even China, who often rightly, gets criticized for pushing through individual rights on such projects can't build them quickly.
Look at the shape of these curves [1], nuclear is flatlining while renewables are accelerating at incredible speed.
[1]:https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...
No. The reason is that they have not been price competitive with renewables.
And so there isn't the volume of approvals that gives regulators experience which in turn reduces approval times.
Commercial solar takes months to approve by comparison.
I agree on regulatory experience but that comes more from panic over nuclear proliferation rather than any economic reason. Whether or not you view that as a legitimate concern is open to debate.
The primary cost of running solar plants is no longer the panels themselves (ie if they drop to 0 the $/KW wouldn’t change a whole lot).
Maybe people should read something from the actual domain experts instead? The latest CSIRO report specifically responded to the claims made about extending the time period.
> CSIRO said accounting for a 60-year life reduced the costs of nuclear by about 9% compared with calculating over 30 years, but found other technologies such as solar and wind saw similar cost reductions of about 7% under the same approach.
You yourself seem a bit confused about facts after using these sources.
1. Nuclear is not anywhere near the same price as solar. (I'm hoping you typo'd and were really trying to make the much saner but still wrong claim that renewables plus storage has costs comparable to nuclear which this document tries to claim)
2. It's not just the panel costs that have dropped, the delivered cost of solar energy has been falling. It dropped 12% in 2023 alone. This has lots of causes, like the safe and predictable success of solar allowing for lower interest rates and cheaper panels allowing for other assumptions to be rethought (e.g. ditch trackers that used to maximise output per panel and use the money and space saved to buy more panels).
You didn't check, you decided to cook the presentation of the facts.
Indeed, solar is not available 24/7. But it's not individual installations which need 24/7 availability, it's the grid as a whole; plus, energy use during the day and night differs, so even the grid as a whole doesn't need the same generation capacity 24/7. And - the grid has many different energy sources (i.e. not just solar and nuclear), some renewable and some non-renewable, which aren't daylight-only.
Which is to say there is plenty of room for solar installations irrespective of energy storage solutions. And indeed, those installations are taking place, and they are rather cheap.
The peak to trough is ~30% reduction if I recall correctly. It’s different but not massively so. And long distance energy transport is insanely expensive. It’s being done but mainly to stabilize the grid rather than arbitrage. And your entire solar capacity in the US goes offline for ~12+ hours. That’s a lot of energy you’re going to have to supplant in other ways regardless of long distance.
> And indeed, those installations are taking place, and they are rather cheap.
Because the cost of storage and the destabilization of the grid it causes the provider are treated as externalities.
When your basic assumption is that an entire industry is doing something dumb, it’s probably wrong. If nuclear was actually that cheap electric companies would constantly be proposing new projects, but it’s not.
> 24/7 peak availability
The industry abandoned nuclear because electricity demand stopped increasing decades ago. It simply isn’t cost competitive when facing both significant curtailment and the need for backup generation for the multiple weeks to months downtime nuclear power plants have semi annually.
That’s the core issue nuclear needs both 24/7 demand, and the grid to also be perfectly fine when it goes away for months. That only possible when it makes up ~30% of supply which is roughly where it’s been for decades.
Now having not built nuclear for decades once off projects are constantly wildly over budget and behind schedule. Solar + batteries is currently beating even optimistic estimates for nuclear just about anywhere, let alone current boondoggle pricing.
The industry is doing the right thing but the reason it’s not choosing nuclear is because regulatory burdens make project success and prices highly variable and uncertain, not to mention a shift in political winds kills your project. The reason isn’t purely a price thing.
> The industry abandoned nuclear because electricity demand stopped increasing decades ago
There’s no way this is true considering that crypto and AI have started to push significant power demands.
> Now having not built nuclear for decades once off projects are constantly wildly over budget and behind schedule. Solar + batteries is currently beating even optimistic estimates for nuclear just about anywhere, let alone current boondoggle pricing.
That’s a choice we get to make. China is building their nuclear muscle because they realize it’s required for baseload for solar, way cheaper than batteries, and the only way you’re going to be able to charge all these EVs.
I was describing what happened when we stopped building nuclear power plants, not what’s happening now or in the near future.
From 1.7TWh in 1975 to 3.1TWh in 1995 is an 82% increase in demand in just 20 years, but the next 20 years only takes us to 3.9TWh in 2015 a 26% increase. That had massive knock on effects in terms of power plant construction, move forward to 2023 demand is only at 4TWh less than a 3% increase. https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co...
The point of that was simply context.
> The reason isn’t purely a price thing.
All that risk ultimately just equates to a cost, if nuclear was wildly profitable to operate nobody would care about those risks but it’s at best barely breaking even when nothing goes wrong.
Also, costs rose not because of regulations in a vacuum. 3 mile island happened because of a lack of maintenance, you don’t solve that problem without spending more money on maintenance. And so it goes for a huge range of issues like foreign material in cooling ponds. Suddenly there’s all this effort when working around cooling ponds to avoid a multi million dollar issue and that’s not free, but there’s no free lunch where you can avoid the expense and not also be cautious.
Thus nuclear power was always expensive, the costs where initially just hidden as risk and escalating maintenance costs.
Right. My point though is that that cost is because of political decisions we make, not inherent in the technology. We could also choose to make solar projects equally risky in such ways; force solar projects to require to be baseline generators, not risk grid stability, and stop subsidizing home panel installations and see what happens to the solar industry. I’m not saying we should do that because solar is an important partner in the energy mix, but nuclear is more important to decarbonize as we still fail to see a drop in green house emissions on any grid that’s invested purely in renewables with only nuclear showing that it can offload carbon inputs; renewables have only generally shown the ability to level off growth of carbon inputs at the grid level (unless you look relatively small grids not in the richest nations, but the richest nations are the biggest polluters).
> Also, costs rose not because of regulations in a vacuum. 3 mile island happened because of a lack of maintenance, you don’t solve that problem without spending more money on maintenance
Just not true on several fronts. First the consequences of 3 mile island were wildly overblown and generated unnecessary fear. The cleanup cost was $1B which is negligible. In fact the plant is being restarted on the other reactor by 2028. Secondly, reactor design is hugely important. Fukushima and 3 mile island are Gen II reactors while Chernobyl was a Gen I reactor and we can see the drastically smaller issues we’ve had from such reactors. Gen III reactors are much safer and are cheaper while Gen IV reactors are generally completely fail-safe (i.e. doesn’t matter the quality of maintenance on the safety of the reactor). So pretending like nuclear has a constant maintenance cost that’s ever increasing ignores our ability to solve problems like this at the design stage. The problem is that regulations that remain stuck responding to Gen I designs being constantly applied to newer generations.
“1 billion dollars” is not negligible when your company is paying it either directly or through insurance. They also lost a nuclear reactor (~$2.5 billion in 2018 dollars to build - depreciation) and lost revenue, so they were out far more than just 1B.
Worse this isn’t a one off event, every single nuclear reactor was facing the same issue.
Just from a pure economic perspective if someone says you need to spend say 20-30 m/year to avoid losing your nuclear power plant and paying 1B on top of this your going to do some internal calculations and figure out how much maintenance is worth 1B dollars and frankly it’s a lot of maintenance. But now every single nuclear reactor is now paying more every year on maintenance forever. The industry just got more expensive seemingly from thin air thus 3 mile island cost the nuclear industry a lot more than just what was spent on the island.
Worse the same thing happens after basically every expensive incident. Almost never does the industry look at an expensive accident and say well that’s just the cost of doing business we don’t need to change anything. Which then means every year it just keeps getting more expensive.
Checked where? Lazard says it is one fifth of the price.
>There’s a huge difference in capability though because nuclear is 24/7 peak availability which solar can’t do
Not 24/7. They have to be turned off for maintenance and when that happens e.g. France burns an awful lot of gas.
Pair solar with wind and storage and it's still cheaper than raw, nuclear power and would be even if matching storage were 4x the cost.
The rountrip efficiency of this is shit (~40% compared to 90% for pumped storage or batteries) but the important thing is it's cheap to store a lot of it for a long time and straightforward to use a lot of it all at once during those rare dark, windless spells. For natgas we even already have the infrastructure.
What's really startling is the cost of producing a kwh from stored syngas/hydrogen generated from solar and wind is similar to the cost of getting a kwh from a nuclear power plant.
So, worst case storage + solar + wind ~= average case nuclear power.
Pretty sure >90% of France’s energy consumption is completely green. Renewable grids wish they could boast these kinds of numbers.
Well, nuclear is 24/7 base load. Nuclear can't peak that well. Also, when nuclear goes offline it does so for days.
But even if nukes were somehow very cheap to build, the review process due to high safety requirements and a lack of a standardized reusable reactor design would make the process slow. To become cost-competitive, nuclear reactors need to be mass-produced, using a proven design that needs little review. The French sort of achieved that, with two mass-produced types of reactors.
Renewables as baseload are still problematic though. Solar cells and even wind turbines are not expensive, but the batteries are very expensive, and are a huge fire hazard. It would be interesting to estimate how much would a kWh cost from a nuclear power station, and from an equal-power LiFePO4 battery installation with the capacity of, say, 3 days worth of the rated max power. Batteries can be replaced gradually, but would need to be replaced much sooner.
[Update:]
If we take a modest nuclear generation unit producing 300 MW of electric power, I'd like to compare it with a battery that can store 300 MW * 3 days of energy from renewable sources. It's 21.6 GWh. With LiFePO4 typical bulk price of $100 per kWh, the upfront cost in batteries alone would be $2.16 billion. It's still lower than nuclear reactor equipment, but very much in the same ballpark.
You need to factor in waste disposal and decommissioning costs for nuclear.
And if you are concerned with the fire risks of batteries you may want to think about the impact of serious events with a nuclear reactor. In almost all cases they end up being quite expensive.
Have you seen how the fire risk petroleum presents? It's crazy.
This requires very special approaches to the architecture of a battery installation, and likely rather special insurance premiums.
And right now renewables continue to get better and cheaper so it will be hard for nuclear to get much traction.
Says who? This is an opinion, not a fact.
All of the newer SMR companies are pitching their design as costly at start, but then cheaper because of mass production. Well the entire gaggle of companies won't all be able to mass produce their SMRs in the numbers required to get the scale down since there isn't the appetite for it.
> there isn't the appetite for it.
A distinct without a difference.
You take so much for granted.
If these markets produce their version of 2008, building renewables and no storage, and then we have blackouts - will you stand by those words if the power grid collapses and people freeze to death?
With the ‘markets’ not ask for government intervention and bailouts at my expense?
We have identified a few key areas where pricing energy is not enough and therefore price available of physical properties.
Not sure what point you think you are making.
Following their troubles they strengthened ancillary services and created new regulations to ensure stability.
All this made them quite easily manage the last winter storm in January 2024.
https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insight...