Place your bets now.
Time until first power generated, and actual final total cost.
I’ll go 15 years and $10 Billion.
Time until first power generated, and actual final total cost.
I’ll go 15 years and $10 Billion.
10:1?
100:1?
Background:
The BWRX predecessor, the ABWR, holds the record for the fastest construction time of a commercial nuclear power plant ever: just slightly over 3 years to first criticality, 4 years total to commercial operation.
Fun fact: it was the success of this first Gen III reactor that caused EDF to predict the EPRs would also only take 3 years to build. Which proved...optimistic. For the EPR. But proven for the ABWR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_boiling_water_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Pow...
https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-ti...
The BWRX is also passively safe: cooling occurs via natural circulation, no pumps needed.
So if it takes 15 years I give you $100, if it takes less you give me $10000?
Deal?
Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment) but eventually pulled out after 12 years with £2bn spent and nothing built.
Maybe the BWRX will have better luck - but I'd not want to stake any money on it myself.
Citation needed.
> Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK
That's not evidence of them being uneconomic or unreliable.
> (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment)
Excuse me? The regulatory environment that is responsible for the 7000 design changes at Hinkley Point C and thus most of the eye-watering delays and cost overruns? The regulatory environment that required the £ 700 million "fish disco" that will save a few salmon at a cost of around £ 280000 per fish?
A series of "radical, root-cause solutions" is required to simplify the UK's nuclear regulatory system in order to speed up the construction of new nuclear projects at a lower cost and on time, an independent taskforce has concluded.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/radical_reforms_...
The way it usually goes with anti-nuclear activists when they make pronouncements like this is as follows:
1. It will take at least 15 years and cost 100 gazillion dollars
2. Are you sure?
3. Yes, this is 100% what will happen. It is 100% certain, because nuclear does not and cannot work.
4. OK, then let's put some money where our mouths are. Your 100% certainty means you should be willing to give me infinite odds, because any money I put up is automatically yours. Completely risk free income for you. But I am happy to reduce those odds to just 100:1, so I put up $100 and you put up $10.000.
6. <crickets>
I don't know any evidence of that. My understanding is that it's a highly complex technology, many components unavoidably take a long time to construct, and it may be fundamentally uneconomic.
Has anyone, anywhere in the world profitably (subtracting subsidies) constructed one?
Do you have any evidence for your claim?
This meme that nuclear power plants are unprofitable and require subsidies has been spread wide and far by the anti-nuclear lobby, but is still false.
As an example, when the Greens started to come into government in Germany, they tried to force nuclear operators out of business by creating onerous safety rules just for the purpose of forcing them out of business.
It didn't work.
The plants were so profitable that they could afford even the most ridiculous additional safety requirements. So they had to make them illegal.
Furthermore, you can look at France. EDF has been immensely profitable, despite having to sell a large amount of electricity at discounted rates.
Here's an explainer.
That doesn't make it wrong!
> Do you have any evidence for your claim?
No; you agree it's a well-known claim. I've never heard what you say (that I recall). Including the GGP claim that most aren't subsidized.
I note that you have no actual information to counter it. Nor do you have, by your own admission, any information to back up your claims.
The "YouTube video" is by a professor for nuclear science from the University of Illinois.
Professor David Ruzic, head of that department, to be precise.
https://npre.illinois.edu/people/profile/druzic
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Hv__SVAAAAAJ&hl=en
And yes, misinformation about nuclear energy is widely disseminated and thus "well known". Are we really at the point that Trump's "people are saying" is the standard for evidence?
I think we can do better.
When isolating the existing, completed Advanced Boiling Water Reactors (ABWRs), they are highly profitable—provided they are actually allowed to operate.
More reactors = riding the cost curve more quickly.
If the former: it might never happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
Yes, the plants are big and expensive, but once built, they are cheap to run and last pretty much forever.
SMRs lower the up-front cost, the time to build, the risk, and the financing costs, which are the biggest component of the construction costs.
Initially at somewhat higher cost per kWh, but there is plenty of headroom there. And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
It also says: "The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem. Which is especially interesting since the fossil plants will get a heavy hit due to their CO2 footprint.
Because of how hazardous it is, every country treats that as a national issue thus offloading the cost to taxpayers. Besides, I'm only aware of a single country (Finland I believe) who is far along on an actual permanent storage location. The US for example still doesn't have one, until that exists the real cost simply isn't known.
> And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something. I'm sure SMRs will soon be reality and we can see how much of it is actually true. Until then, take everything you read with a grain of salt.
Please identify the cherry picking.
> The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
Absolutely! When you consider full system costs, nuclear gets much, much better.
With fossils, you have the minor externalities of climate change and other emissions, which are not taken into account.
With intermittent renewables, you have the costs of their intermittency. Those system costs tend to rise with penetration, and dwarf the LCOE.
For details in a model, see:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
And this also plays out in real life: electricity prices are highest in countries with high intermittent renewables penetration. The correlation is quite strong. And the inverse correlation, from high penetration to low electricity costs simply does not exist. There are no countries (or states) with high penetration of intermittent renewables and low electricity prices.
> So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem.
The opposite is true. Nuclear is actually the only power source that has to account for its waste already in the LCOE cost. And it also turns out that the waste is one of the benefits of nuclear, at least compared to other sources of electricity: there is very, very little of it, we know how to store it safely without problems, it actually goes away by itself and it is valuable fuel.
[Costs from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent]
> Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something.
Nope. Those numbers are usually the sorts of things they have to present investors to make their business case. People tend to vet those numbers pretty carefully before investing millions or billions of dollars. Also, if you lie in those numbers that turns out to be fraud and you can go to jail.
In other news: "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" -- Yogi Berra.
Totally agree that if you get a stable, reliable operating reactor it's very cheap. When people, politics, and the rest get in the way the actual costs drastically increase.
1 cent / kWh cost is fantasy land.
That number will decrease every month too.