CogentHedgehog

Nah, the nuclear industry got a TON of R&D funding too, and continues to. Plus I don't think you realize just how much governments subsidize and assist nuclear power. $8-10 billion per reactor is more money than companies can easily plunk down for an investment that takes decades to pay off. They rely on government loans, subsidies, and loan guarantees to raise capital and help fund the projects.

Loan guarantees are a particularly common example -- for example, last year the US govt provided $3.7 BILLION in loan guarantees for the troubled Vogtle reactor builds in Georgia. The way loan guarantees work is that the government agrees to pay the debt owed if the company goes bankrupt or cannot complete the project; this is surprisingly common actually, since the same project had already driven Westignhouse to file bankruptcy.

Solar and wind aren't likely to make a handful of people extremely rich -- the profit margins on the components are pretty low due to the high degree of competition pushing them down. Building solar and wind farms to sell their power does produce a solid and reliable financial return on investment, but it's still less than 10% (even though the energy return on investment is good).

> When you look at this table [energy density]

For power generation, energy density is largely irrelevant.

Also these energy densities are apples-to-oranges comparisons. You can't burn uranium without a fairly large, heavy reactor. There are no "nuclear cars." Similarly diesel requires an engine although it's smaller. Batteries aren't a power source on their own, they're storage, and you're not "burning" them up.

So you're saying the 1% of people driving electric cars should pay for the climate change caused by the 99% that are not?

> Do people readily go to school to study nuclear engineering?

Yes, people do study nuclear engineering. I was considering that path myself in university, but ended up going more towards science and doing several years of research in nuclear physics labs instead.

I'm very glad I didn't end up doing nuclear engineering. The nuclear industry stagnated and failed to address cost problems and bad project delivery (cost overruns, delays, etc).

And then between 2010 and 2020 renewable energy scaled up and became incredibly cheap, in fact the cheapest source of energy in most countries: https://about.bnef.com/blog/scale-up-of-solar-and-wind-puts-...

Between 2010 to 2019 wind energy become 70% cheaper and solar became 89% cheaper: https://www.lazard.com/media/451082/lcoe-8.png

Battery costs have dropped 75% over the last 6 years: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-levelize...

> I think there's a perception problem.

Somewhat, but the nuclear industry did a massive PR campaign to address that.

Blaming perception or "green activists" or "fear of scawy radiashun!" is an easy straw-man for them, but the real obstacles are more practical and harder to address: the economics of nuclear are not good. This is compounded by a problematic history of delivery problems.

Small reactors were part of the original 1st gen nuclear reactors. The world went to bigger reactors in the 60s-70s because it ended up being much cheaper than building lots of small ones. Reactor fabrication is complex, and it's easier to just build them bigger.

From the 90s to the mid-2000s there was probably a window for development in this area. But the nuclear sector stagnated as a whole, and then fracking made natural gas cheap enough that people wouldn't consider it.

The jury is out on SMRs still. They're promising a lot, and the tech and engineering has improved. But plunging costs of renewables mean the window of opportunity for nuclear tech is probably mostly closed in the West. This article from a highly respected energy sector analysis group is worth a read: https://about.bnef.com/blog/scale-up-of-solar-and-wind-puts-...

India and China are the big markets for nuclear right now -- their energy demands continue to grow, and they're building reactors as part of an all-of-the-above model. France MIGHT be a potential buyer of SMRs (their reactor fleet is getting close to end-of-life), but their nuclear companies have put a lot of push behind the EPR design.

> Citation needed.

I already provided a citation for this - https://www.reuters.com/article/france-electricity-solarpowe...)

Quote

>> France aims to rapidly develop renewable wind, solar and biomass capacity to curb its dependence on atomic power, reducing its share in its power mix to 50 percent by 2035, from 75 percent today.

A quick google will turn up dozens of other sources discussing that if you like.

> reducing dependence on nuclear has a lot of advantages unrelated to "nuclear is bad" or "nuclear is not clean" or etc

When did I even say that? Please have the decency NOT to convert my educated and reasoned points into a straw-man argument. I spent years working in nuclear physics. I'm not making some idiotic "nuclear reactors will turn us into glowing mutants" argument here.

The real issues with nuclear are -- and always have been -- simple, practical problems of cost, time to construct, and the usual problems of cost overruns and delays that you see with constructing a very complicated system. The Flamanville EPR has been a fiasco, with costs triple its original estimate and a timeline that ballooned to 15 years.

In comparison, the competition from renewable energy has heated up rapidly. Economies of scale are rapidly driving down the costs renewables and batteries (and the underlying technology is improving rapidly). Between 2010 to 2019 wind energy become 70% cheaper and solar became 89% cheaper: https://www.lazard.com/media/451082/lcoe-8.png

Battery costs have dropped 75% over the last 6 years: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-levelize...

Nuclear energy in 2020 is often quite expensive compared to renewable energy, and the comparison is only getting worse over time.

> France has no plans on eliminating nuclear in the foreseeable future.

In 2020, Energy Minister Élisabeth Borne announced the government would not decide on the construction of any new reactors until Flamanville 3 starts operation after 2022. Citation: https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsfrance-to-decide-on-new...

"France has undertaken to cut the nuclear share in its electricity mix from around 75% to 50% by 2035 while increasing the share of renewable solar, wind and biomass."

“Whether we are looking at 100% renewables or a percentage of new nuclear, we want to consider all the elements, including technical, economic,” she noted. “On such important subjects, we must make rational, reasoned decisions, and that is the objective of the various studies that have been launched.”

To put that all together: France is cutting their use of nuclear, and waiting to decide whether or not to replace reactors that are fast approaching end-of-life. They're going to look and see how the energy market shakes out.

China's nuclear industry and the way the government interacts with it is just... very different from pretty much any other country. This is true of some of their other sectors. Yes, they can do some things incredibly quickly by more or less ramming them through at top speed using a combination of government and state-affiliated corporations. But the ways they achieve those results at speed are not necessarily transferable to other countries.

I also get a bit nervous about how fast they've scaled their nuclear sector and pumped out plants. It reminds me a bit of the big historical push the USSR did into nuclear tech -- which culminated in the Chernobyl incident because they overlooked issues they should not have in order to keep things moving fast.

A lot of technology and engineering lessons have been learned since those days... and so far I haven't heard anything specifically concerning about China's nuclear reactor fleet. But there's always going to be a little doubt in the back of my mind.

Yeah, and there's not enough viable vendors in the nuclear sector to be able to just switch if someone does not play by the rules.

You are correct that wind has a lot more flexibility in this area than nuclear. It is also much easier to scale a project up by just adding more turbines. In the case of older, smaller turbines they can be replaced with more modern turbines that yield more power (called re-powering).

In general wind power and solar have much better economies of scale too -- the more you build, the cheaper it gets. Nuclear doesn't tend to follow that pattern -- although there are attempts to create it via small modular reactors (SMRS). The jury is out if that will succeed or not (early signs are not great though).

Passive safety is what you describe. That's a requirement for reactors to be classified as Gen III, so all of the models listed above have some variant of that.

> eliminating the need for ever increasing safety tech and complexity of it for conventional reactors would be a cost savings

Passive safety features are useful, but they don't end up replacing active features (you still need to control the reactor during normal use). At best they might allow for reducing the redundancy level on a critical system -- which might save a bit bit of money, although not much.

Better safety is always a great feature in general, but it's not close to making breeders cost competitive on its own.

> Not to mention the clean up costs when you compare to a conventional reactor that could melt down, even if it's rare.

Actual meltdowns are exceedingly rare (and catastrophically expensive + devastating), so you don't really factor them into the cost equation for a normal reactor.

> Especially in the US, a driving reason that new designs aren't used is that there have been few built I'm recent decades - partially due to lower cost alternatives and also due to public opinion

Mostly cost tbh -- nuclear energy has been historically somewhat unpopular (especially after major accidents) but there's a lot of industrial projects that continue anyway despite being unpopular (oil pipelines etc). The financials for nuclear reactors are not great (it's a big, financially high-risk investment that takes decades to really pay off), so there's less incentive.

> which is not what France is doing.

They literally are, and have formally said so. They're not shutting down all their reactors right away or anything. But for a country that took pride in betting big on nuclear, officially planning to go from 70% nuclear to 50% is a pretty huge drop. They've already shut down the first two reactors at Fessenheim as part of this.

Yes, they're kicking the can down the road slightly at last news. That's not surprising since many of the reactors may be possible to life-extend to 50 years, and renewable energy costs are dropping quickly. Delaying a few years saves some money. But that does not change the fact that many of the reactors will not be replaced when they hit end-of-life.

You're trying to argue that the solar market in 2020 looks the same as it did in the 1970s? Seriously? When the cost of solar PV has dropped 70% just in the last decade alone...?

https://www.lazard.com/media/451447/grphx_lcoe-09-09.jpg

I can't even find LCOE figures that far back, but the cost of solar modules in 1975 was just over $100 a watt. Today, a solar panel can cost as little as $0.50/W

Citation: https://news.energysage.com/the-history-and-invention-of-sol...

That's literally a TWO HUNDREDFOLD decrease in price, and modern panels last longer. This is like arguing that computers are useless in 2020 because in the 70s they were not very powerful.

> If batteries actually get cheap then we can do 2x wind+battery, but that isn't here today

Battery storage costs have already dropped 75% over the last 6 years, and we're pretty close to making that possible: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-levelize...

In the field, people bidding on energy projects are doing mixed solar+storage and wind+storage at prices comparable to nuclear or lower. Today. With 2020 tech and 2020 pricing, not 2025, not 2030. Granted, these aren't including a lot of storage right now (1-4 hours generally) but as battery prices continue to drop that will increase.

Given how costs are dropping as the technologies scale up, in 2025 people won't even think twice before choosing renewables+storage over nuclear, because it'll be a no-brainer.

> What we have today are nuke plants, just like we did 40 years ago.

Yes, that's the problem. Nuke plants plants have advanced technologically in the last 40 years, but in terms of cost they're actually more expensive because we found more failure modes (and need to prevent them).

And this is disappointing because I worked in nuclear physics for a few years and really wanted to believe that nuclear energy was going to save us... and it catastrophically failed to deliver.

Click the link and look at the graph in my parent comment. Gas started rising in 2002, when wind and solar had an invisibly small presence in the US market.

It sure sounds like you were arguing that renewable energy had a time-travel effect causing the construction of gas before the renewables were added?

People are downvoting because what you're saying makes no sense.

You realize that the natural gas plants sit mostly idle when renewables are producing enough power, right? And the more renewable capacity we build, the more often that happens?

> Worse, at the current rates, we won't get there for decades.

So, about the same timespan it took to execute the Messmer plan in France, and at a fraction of the cost? (The Messmer plan was France's big nuclear buildout from the 70s through the 90s.)

On a side note, even if we started building reactors today they probably wouldn't be operational for a decade or more (including planning time).

Today I learned that Wikipedia and OurWorldInData are "press releases"...

Yes, we get it that you have a wholly irrational dislike of renewable energy and are willing to grasp at straws to argue against it.

> because all those intermittent sources are 30%+ backed by NG generators which can be spun up/down on demand and over the past 15 are super cheap to install

I'm trying to follow what you're arguing here and it makes no sense. You're arguing that the Northwest is simultaneously using almost all renewables and using tons of fossil fuels...? It can't be both.

We'll ignore the fact that according to your link, wind+solar is less than 10% of the electricity generation there, and there's no real evidence of a big investment in either, just the pre-existing hydro power.

Gas plants are replacing coal plants: https://www.power-eng.com/2019/04/11/eia-gas-fired-combined-...

They're generally cheaper to run and better at load-following.

Coal has been on the way out for a decade or so, long before renewable energy started to be a big player in the US.

It's not looking so hot for SMRs right now though. NuScale, one of the most promising SMR companies, is losing backers for its first big reactor build. This is a result of cost under-estimates and delays:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/several-us-utilities...

> announced that completion of the project would be delayed by 3 years to 2030. It also estimates the cost would climb from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion.

Unfortunately it has become a pattern now for the nuclear industry to promise that the next tech will suddenly make nuclear energy cheap and fast to build. They consistently have failed to deliver on their promises -- the fiasco of the AP1000 reactor build at Vogtle in Georgia is a recent example.

It seems like the problem of the nuclear industry is the industry, not the technology itself. They're too used to relying on fat taxpayer subsidies, and are not well equipped to compete against other energy sources on the free market.

There's a reason countries don't build breeder reactors. Fuel costs are a tiny fraction of the costs for a nuclear powerplant: less than 10%. Breeders save a bit of money on fuel in exchange for a higher capital cost (cost of construction). For reactors, capital costs are a huge factor because reactors are extremely expensive already ($8-10Bn per reactor in the US/Europe). Increasing that further more than balances the savings on fuel.

Thus, breeders generally end up being more expensive than a conventional BWR or PWR.

Here I should mention that I spent some time in nuclear physics research. There's a lot of misinformation floating around about nuclear energy. Most of the "miracle solutions" don't live up to their promises (especially thorium tech and breeders). If they did, we'd already be using them -- nuclear engineers are not fools, and most of these reactor concepts have been kicked around for literally decades.

One other point: the physics behind breeders and conventional slow-neutron reactors isn't fundamentally different. Both neutron capture ("breeding") and fission ("burning") reactions happen in both, the ratios in a breeder are just optimized to favor the first process more. In fact in conventional light water reactors, around a third of the energy released comes from fissile isotope bred from fertile isotopes such as U-238.

> But if its truly cheaper than all the worlds CO2 production problems are solved!!

I mean, the International Panel on Climate Change certainly thinks renewable energy is a core part of solving carbon emissions. Their special Report on 1.5C AKA SR15 (https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/) says:

> In 1.5°C pathways with no or limited overshoot, renewables are projected to supply 70–85% (interquartile range) of electricity in 2050 (high confidence).

For the 3 scenarios where we achieve needed emissions reductions, renewables are 48-60% of electricity generation in 2030, and 63-77% in 2050.

> Energy is sufficiently deregulated in enough of the US that they will sell to the areas that aren't

In the US in 2020 the majority of new generating capacity being added is from solar or wind: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42495# -- and if you do the math for capacity factors (around 40% for wind, 25%ish for solar, 60% is for natural gas) then you'll find that solar and wind capacity generates more electricity than the gas.

If the US grid operators and utilities are building all this renewable energy capacity, perhaps they know something...??

> in places like TX the power costs frequently go to zero when the wind is blowing and spike at other times.

Isn't that what a free market is supposed to do -- respond to supply and demand? Last I checked, we don't say that the stock market is broken because it goes up and down.

> that does little but create an oversupply problem

Are you saying free excess power is a BAD thing? I can think of a TON of ways to take advantage of a temporary oversupply; capturing it in storage is only one of them.

> If big battery plants are economically workable then we would also see a lot of companies arbitraging the free wind energy into $ when the price spikes but we don't see that either

Hold your horses -- they're literally starting to do this in Australia. Batteries were pretty expensive up until a couple years ago: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/us-grid-battery-cost...

Now we're seeing a race to install batteries. Energy arbitrage is only one of the possible income streams -- grid services such as frequency regulation are an even bigger source of funds. The "Big Battery" in Australia has already paid for itself after just a couple year and they've already increased capacity by 50% and are installing a second one in Victoria.

> balancing with gas

In the US, gas capacity is mostly replacing dirtier, more expensive coal powerplants. I don't see a problem with using spare gas capacity to help balance the grid while storage gets ramped up -- the renewable generation is directly replacing fossil fuels except when they need an extra boost.

Wind is a pretty solid source of baseload actually, as long as you build enough. The supplementary materials from Caldeira's Geophysical Constraints paper (usually used to argue AGAINST renewable energy) show that with 50/50 wind/solar mixes (figure S4) you can achieve:

* 1x capacity, 0 storage: 74% of electricity demand

* 1.5x capacity, 0 storage: 86% of electricity demand

* 1x capacity, 12h storage: 90% of electricity demand

* 1.5x capacity, 12h storage: 99.6% of electricity demand

Citation: http://www.rsc.org/suppdata/c7/ee/c7ee03029k/c7ee03029k1.pdf

> ElectricityMap

Nobody who follows the energy sector closely thinks ElectricityMap has any credibility for country-to-country comparisons. The datasets are extremely fragmentary and have huge yawning gaps with no data available, which should be the first red flag for anybody citing it. It might be useful for trends within a given country, but not the way you're citing it.

Also: accounts popping up out of the woodwork to argue passionately for an out-of-favor technology reeks of a dying industry trying to revive itself with public relations. 3/4 of those accounts seem to cite ElectricityMap, oddly enough...

The reactors being built today are Gen III/Gen III+ designs: AP-1000, the EPR, VVER-1200/ AES-2006, APR1400, etc. These include all the design and engineering refinements we've been able to cram in. They're a far cry from 30-60 year old tech.

Unfortunately most of the new reactors built in the US and Europe have run massively over time and over budget, despite new technology. Vogtle 3&4 in Georgia drove Westinghouse bankrupt. These were modern AP-1000 models. Flamanville 3 in France (an EPR) is running nearly triple its cost estimate and the delivery time ballooned to 15 years. Olkiluoto in Finland (the first EPR) went massively over time and budget as well. These reactors were specifically designed to be more cost-effective and promised much lower prices, but failed to deliver.

The problem in the nuclear industry isn't the technology itself, but the fact that they consistently fail to deliver projects within their allotted time and budget. Unfortunately this shows no signs of changing, and renewable energy industry looks poised to completely out-compete them in the energy market.

I say this all as someone that used to have high hopes for nuclear tech, after working in nuclear physics research all throughout university.

Nothing in there actually refutes my point that France wants to REDUCE its dependence on nuclear energy overall. France is the poster-child for a nuclear-focused powergrid. If they want to move away from nuclear, that suggests it is not working out as well as people claim.

Legislation gets written and rewritten as timelines get tweaked. That's a reality. The core goal is unchanged.

This is... really off base for 2020. Solar and wind in the US are incredibly cheap sources of energy. Literally the cheapest options: https://www.lazard.com/media/451445/grphx_lcoe-02-02.jpg

Residential solar is expensive because you don't have the same economy of scale you see in utility-scale deployments. Also something like 1/3 of the cost is "soft costs" such as marketing and the crazy red tape associated with permitting.

The latest academic modelling shows that we can meet 70-80% of energy demand from renewable energy alone, even without storage. All it requires is building a modest excess of capacity and a 50/50 wind/solar mix. When it comes time to add storage, battery storage costs have been plummeting and already dropped 75% over the last 6 years: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-levelize...

Worth noting that Unit 3 at Olkiluoto in Finland was started before Flamanville and it hit massive cost overruns and delays as well. It was another EPR -- it's not like Flamanville was the very first build of this design, they had another to learn with.

Yes, nuclear power projects bid below what they know it will cost and then pull a shocked-pikachu face when the final bill ends up several times the original "cost estimate".

Look at Flamanville in France: budget triple the "estimate", 15 years to construct. France has more nuclear energy per-capita than any other country on Earth, so it's not like they don't know how to "do" nuclear.

Counter-example: the Boeing 737 MAX

You realize that World Nuclear News is not an unbiased source, right?

The UK is doing fine with a renewables-heavy powergrid, as are Spain and Portugal. 40% of their electricity comes from this, and the share is rising steadily.

NuScale just lost a bunch of their backers for their project after announcing several years of delays and cost overruns.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/several-us-utilities...

> announced that completion of the project would be delayed by 3 years to 2030. It also estimates the cost would climb from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion.

Unfortunately this is a very old story with the nuclear industry: they consistently over-promise and under-deliver. The closer projects get to completion, the more costs grow and the further the completion date gets pushed out. This has been true of most of the recent builds in the US and Europe.

The tech is fine, but there seems to be something wrong with the industry.

Exactly. Watts Barr in Tennessee just got a big fine from the NRC for safety violations, after trying to lie about an incident to the NRC and firing a whistleblower who reported safety issues.

https://news.yahoo.com/federal-utility-fined-900k-nuclear-21...

> In a notice dated Nov. 6, regulators noted a “substantial safety culture issue” at Watts Bar at the time of the incident. They also found that “TVA senior management and staff failed to communicate with candor, clarity, and integrity during several interactions with the NRC during the course of the inspection and investigation.”

> The incident wasn't recorded in the plant's logbook and managers later misled NRC investigators about what had happened. The shift manager told investigators he wasn't truthful with them at first because he feared that whatever he said would be relayed back to management.

> last year, TVA was ordered to rehire and pay thousands of dollars in back pay and compensation to a whistleblower who raised concerns about nuclear safety.

And then there was the nuclear corruption scandal in South Korea: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...

And let's not forget when a nuclear company literally bribed Ohio politicians with $60M to get a $1Bn+ bailout:

https://www.cleveland.com/open/2020/07/fbi-agents-deployed-t...

Unit 3 at Olkiluoto in Finland was started before Flamanville and it hit massive cost overruns and delays as well. It was another EPR -- it's not like Flamanville was the very first build of this design, they had another to learn with.

Exactly, and when a reactor takes 10 years to build it's almost guaranteed you'll discover some issues after construction begins.

The Messmer plan (France's big reactor build) was enacted 40-50 years ago. The energy market looked vastly different then. It would not work in 2020. In fact, France is looking to REDUCE their dependence on nuclear energy now. Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/france-electricity-solarpowe...

> France aims to rapidly develop renewable wind, solar and biomass capacity to curb its dependence on atomic power, reducing its share in its power mix to 50 percent by 2035, from 75 percent today.

Even if they can reduce costs a bit, the economics are still not in favor of nuclear energy, and renewable energy has become incredibly cheap. Between 2010 to 2019 wind energy become 70% cheaper and solar became 89% cheaper[1] -- and they're still getting cheaper. We are now in a situation where we can build 3x as much renewables for the same price as nuclear[2] - nuclear has a serious cost problem. I'm very skeptical of any claimed nuclear energy cost reductions because time and again the industry has promised lower costs and failed to deliver; for example the new AP1000 and EPR reactors in the US and Europe have all vastly overrun their budgets and run years behind schedule.

1. https://www.lazard.com/media/451082/lcoe-8.png 2. https://www.lazard.com/media/451081/lcoe-2.png