The BWRX-300 footprint is so large they might as well just build large nuclear power units again and get 3-4x the power
This particular reactor is already estimated at over 5 billion $ I think. That's a lot of money for just 300MW and it probably could end up being a wildly optimistic estimate as well. I think effectively much of the construction is still on site and not in a factory. Hence the need for a construction permit. So, you get all of the downsides of complex on site construction such as including high cost, permitting overhead, lots of bureaucracy, associated delays & uncertainty, etc. without the upside of actually delivering a lot of power like you would with a larger reaction. Calling it "modular" might be overstating things a bit.
Probably cheaper, faster, and easier to just plonk down 5GW of solar, wind, or battery (or combinations of those). Especially if you calculate in the 200-300% time and dollar budget that many nuclear projects seem to end up having. Maybe this one will be different. A lot of people have a lot riding on Nuclear projects breaking this trend. But then that has been the case for decades.
I only bring that up because footprint was a point further up the thread.
There's still a fair amount of site work that has to happen here in the small modular concept, but I think when parts of it happen continuously in a factory you're largely immune from a lot of the jobsite nonsense that happened from contractors milking the job for every dollar they could get, plus economies of scale that you do get in a factory setting (citation: industrial revolution).
You don't get much useful notice for unplanned nuclear outages either, whereas both wind and solar output can be forecast with reasonable accuracy 24h in advance.
And many parts of large (+1GWe) reactors have also been manufactured at off-site factories and then shipped on-site by barges in the past.
This suggests one should move to reactor concepts that don't need such large structures. The containment building size is dictated by the need to contain a certain volume of pressurized steam in an accident (and the requirement to contain the pressure of that steam dictates the mass of the building's structure). This is perhaps the strongest motivation for reactors cooled with molten salt.
Alternately, allow steam to escape in an accident, after filtering. Most of the radioactivity could be captured. But this violates current rules that require no release of radioactivity for 24 hours in an accident.
Part of the point of these projects in particular is to get the machine spinning. Once it's running you start getting some of the economies of scale
Also not said is the fact that going into more standardized designs you lower the operational cost because operations can be standardized. Today every single facility has different training from the next. Even at the same facility, if it's got new + old reactors, operators can't move between them without training on both
This line of thinking seems to start with that we must have new nuclear, for some reason, and then try to rationalize it.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321765366_How_expen...
In term of decarbonization of electricity production and independence of imported fuel for electricity production, it got less then France for comparable amount of money.
But this is quite clear as the first and foremost goal of German Energiewende was denuclearization of German electricity production, not decarbonization of electricity production.
> In China you get the economy of scale for building nuclear power plants precisely because they are standardized.
Related: UAE had zero nuclear power plants before the Barakah nuclear power plant[1] opened starting in 2020. They built 4x Korean APR-1400s for only 32B USD. That seems incredibly cheap. How did they do it? I assume (near) slave labour prices for construction workers, like most other stuff built in that country.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
Higher lending rates can easily double the final cost and they multiply with any time delays.
That particular build had government finance from both the host and the building government.
> How you raise finance is incredibly important for nuclear costs.
No, I'm answering your question as to why their build costs are surprisingly low. They didn't finance at the rate that other builds did and finance related costs can be 2/3rds of the total cost of a nuclear plant.
One could bring in modules and link them together. But then they tried that on the AP1000 to famously disastrous effect, at least at first.
Yes it is. So far, we've flushed enough money down the Iran war toilet to pay for ten of these, and there's no end in sight.
The rat, having been caught by the rat catcher, complains there are other, bigger rats. But he's still a rat.
The uneconomical project, having been called out, complains there are other, even more expensive activities. But that doesn't change that the project is too expensive.
But, the $5 billion here isn't purely an investment in 300 MW of capacity, it's an investment in starting up the nuclear reactor factory that can start churning these things out at $1-2 billion or whatever their goal may be
Also, have to take into consideration the overall operating costs. Nuclear costs significantly more up front but over time costs much less to operate (and is much more predictable) because you don't have to buy and burn natural gas forever
The only cheap nuclear watts come from facilities built a long time ago in a completely different cost environment, and had construction and insurance subsidized by the state.
A standardized reactor design that doesn't need a bespoke training control room at every single site means fewer training staff. It means the same maintenance workers and compliance workers and everyone else can be utilized more because they can cover more facilities instead of just the single site they are certified on and work at
The underlying mechanic here is that cost projections are being used to sell a technology. As such, there is very strong incentive to underestimate the costs. This applies to FOAK plants and to projected experience rates.
This is an historical artifact. When that generating capacity was built, nuclear was the alternative to fossil fuels. It isn't today; renewables are now cheaper and faster to install.
Your argument can be seen as a way to ignore the cost decline of renewables without at first glance doing so.
(As you say, there are hydro-dominated grids with no nuclear, for example Costa Rica, which gets 98% of its electrical energy from renewables.)
Comparing to renewables is a different story - it can be done but it's much more complex (not dispatchable, seasonally variable) but certainly renewables makes sense in some or many places, (and in all places for a portion of the supply). I'm all in favour as long as it is actually done with the intent of getting to zero CO2, and doesn't just stall when it gets to the more difficult part of the transition. So many places get to 50% annual generation as renewable and throw up their hands about the remainder and leave it on coal/oil/natural gas
It's comparing nuclear to alternatives, one of which is natural gas. Others are renewables. One cannot make or justify a decision on nuclear without considering all the alternatives.
From point of view of an electrical grid operator only wind/solar+fossil are alternative to nuclear, if you want to maintain stable electric grid without blackout or rolling blackouts.
This is a common misconception. The reality is that coupled with storage in a cost-optimized way renewables are no more expensive than nuclear for providing 365/24/7 power and likely considerably cheaper.
That guy wanted a particular US president elected; in this regard, the investment has likely already paid off.
With a nuclear power plant, the stakes are way lower, and the payoff is much, much more distant.
For those unaware, the submarine is Virginia-class[1] and is powered by a 210MW nuclear reactor called the "S9G"[2]. And yes, as of 2019 prices, each boat cost 2.8B USD. There are 28 of these subs active in the US Navy. This isn't some new, experimental reactor design. The US is pumping these out of their shipyards. Sheesh. 5B+ USD for a measly 300MW reactor... (without the nuclear sub!) looks way too expensive. What am I missing?
Naval reactors and civil reactors look roughly the same at first glance, but as the folks at Three Mile Island found out the hard way, there are some rather crucial differences.
$2.8B for 70 MW is insanely expensive.
What are the civil works costs for a small(er) reactor versus a large(r) reactor?
The "modular" part is the idea that you then produce more of them lowering unit cost and install many more than is typical at a site.
This also potentially allows you to have more control of plant energy output and respond faster to grid needs.
Recall that the fukushima meltdown was caused after the cooling failed. The reactor building survived the tsunami and the reactors were shutdown. The problem is the diesel backup generators used to run the coolant pumps were flooded.
There's other factors to consider.
For example: in some areas there were small/medium coal-fired plants built right by the coal mines, and so have some grid infrastructure already present. You could replace the coal-fired component with an SMR and have a good portion of the rest of the infrastructure as-is (not have to spend effort / political capital on more grid pylons, which many folks oppose).
Or, for a smaller regional area, having more smaller units allows for more HA since each individual unit can be serviced independently. E.g., in Canadian Maritimes there is a big CANDU, which serves just fine when online, but when it goes offline it needs to be backstopped. Their demands need (say) 'only' 600 MW, and instead of 1x600MW, having 2x3GW allows for more HA. So if one units goes offline for maintenance/inspection the backstop that is needed is much less.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Lepreau_Nuclear_Generati...
There's a chance that it might work out reasonably well, depending on how long they take to build and bring into service in practice. If it can be done quickly enough (RR claim 4 years) then it'd be a useful fillip while the renewable buildout is ongoing and the system is still grid-constrained.
In the medium term, it's unclear whether it can be competitive with the alternative of just turning those sites over to batteries, but it's probably worth a try as a hedge against some sort of unforeseen problem with scaling out storage.
Japan managed to begin a new (BWR/PWR) nuclear reactor build and have it in commercial operation in ~5 years:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
They did this every year beginning in 1980 up to 2004. Economies of scale and production efficiencies are applicable to nuclear reactors as much as widgets.
And after some digging, the core alone is 4.2m INNER diameter and over 27m tall. That is smaller than average but this is a far cry from the sales pitch of reactor modules being mass produced in a factory to be delivered to site by truck.
https://www.gevernova.com/content/dam/gevernova-nuclear/glob...
The BWRX-300 is at the upper end of that range and I don't think claims of factory-production of the whole unit were ever made for this reactor.
That said, even the much larger AP-1000 had fairly large modules made in a factory. In fact as far as I understand that was one of the problems with the Vogtle builds, because doing that only really makes sense for a larger number of units, not for just two unites.
Maybe not.
For example, Aalo Atomics has split the construction process in such a way that the on-site pour that happens after the reactor is delivered from the factory is (a) very simple (b) standardized, and (c) non-nuclear. In addition, the site work that is required is very repetitive, so you get a positive learning curve, again without the slowness of nuclear construction.
Copenhagen Atomics has heavy thorium salt shielding inside the nuclear core and a "Cocoon" that is delivered in 12 prefab parts installed on a regular concrete pad. So on-site construction is making the non-nuclear concrete pad, installing the pre-fab cocoon on pad and then placing the reactor core inside the Cocoon.
Westinghouse apparently ships the entire eVinci microreactor pre-assembled with shielding.
X-energy puts the reactor in a hole underground.
etc.
https://www.icetransport.com/blog/what-are-the-maximum-overs...
("Oversize/Overweight Permit Limits by State (Standard Freight Loads") that should be deliverable by truck with a permit.
Pictures don't do them justice, they're amazing to see in person. I think a typical SMR is on the small end of what's possible to move by road.