What I find shockingly absent in this article is any commentary on budget and cost overruns. I'm definitely not anti-nuclear but it stands to reason that a comparison vs other forms of energy would've been wise to consider.
Something like this. The project started in 2000, construction began in 2005 and should have been completed in 2010. Original cost was 3 billion euro but landed on over 10 billion euro.
It is the first nuclear reactor in Europe for 15 years so not much working experience or available sub contractors.
Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that.
If nuclear energy should be considered, much more must be built more continuously.
I think this is vastly misunderstood in the (artificial) renewables vs nuclear conversation. We keep building effectively one-off complex machines, and then flushing all that knowledge down the drain by saying it cost too much and took too long. Like yes, the first one always takes longer and costs more...
There's no reason to assume that building the same nuclear reactor design multiple time will maintain the same cost or decrease. Even with the supposedly successful French nuclear program, costs increased over time, there was negative learning:
There's huge huge risk in choosing a particular design and building even one of it, because we don't know if it will be constructible the first time, and we don't know if future builds of the first design will be more or less expensive.
When each build is a $10B roll of the dice with variance of 2-3x of initial estimates, it's a bit difficult to find rational financial backers. Especially when there's not that much profit to be had from even a successful build. The risk reward is completely out of whack compared to the other options for carbon neutral energy.
Of course there is, it's happened exactly the way I said in South Korea, Japan, and American naval reactors. These projects take a long time to complete and there have been relatively few of them. It therefore stands to reason that the cycle of learning from them and making their construction more predictable would take longer than for e.g. cars.
Far too many people are generalizing from the French and American nuclear programs, both of which built lots of reactors in a comparatively short time and then were fear-mongered into a standstill by the fossil fuel lobby.
"""In the third era of nuclear power construction in Japan, from 1980 to 2007, costs remain between ¥250,000/kW and ¥400,000/kW, representing an annual change of −1% to 1%. This period experienced relatively stable costs over 27 years."""
The negative learning rate is a strong signal of interference by the regulators. More than anything else it shows how excessive safety regulations are strangled the industry.
1970s nuclear safety standards, despite it all, were still better than the energy strategy the world adopted from 1970-2020. Killing off nuclear in search of a perfect power system was a stupid strategy, and failed. The only unfortunate point of karmic justice is that Europe ended up reliant on Russian gas and in an energy crisis as a reward for their stubbornness against making the technically obvious choice.
Well done Finland for even managing to get a reactor built in the face of all that.
What did France change about their regulations that increases cost?
Maybe you have some actual knowledge, but I have never found somebody who says that regulations are the problem but has any concrete suggestions for changing regulations. It's just a vague gut feeling. And in the case of France I doubt it applies at all.
Construction is not like manufacturing, it does not see continual productivity improvements like manufacturing does:
As an energy source whose costs are primarily construction related, we would not expect to see it falling in cost over time. We would expect that energy sources whose costs are dominated by manufacturing to outcompete nuclear as time passes.
Ironically, the evidence to date is that'd probably get more people killed due to energy security issues. The last group who tried to apply that logic in defiance of market forces - the Germans - are currently staring at each other wondering what to do about their reliance on Russian gas.
If they'd acted rationally, acknowledged Fukushima and moved on with trying to make their nuclear power cheaper instead letting ideology determine that part of their energy policy then they wouldn't be in the mess they are in. Instead they pushed ahead with renewables, ignored technical problems like reliability and have ended up looking like fools while literally paying a high price for the privilege. France continues to quietly plod away as a reliable European energy success story.
In France the 'nuclear success story' led to a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") stating that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewable sources must replace it.
In France nuke-power is backed by gas (which produced 7.5% of the gridpower in 2020).
The sole reactor currently planned (Flamanville-3) is a complete disaster, more than 12 years behind schedule, it will cost at least 19.4 billion € (initial budget: 3.7 billion €).
The other options for carbon neutral energy that does not rely on using fossil fuel as part of the energy strategy are few and far between. The few suggested solutions tend to rely on battery solutions for wind power (at least for countries this far up north).
It would be great to see an attempt to such battery solution that would cover the same amount of capacity as this plant, that can operate for at least several months without recharging, in Finish winter, and cost less than this plant and be built faster. That would check all the boxes, and if such technology already exist, people here should really put their investment money into it.
It's not only the first one. It's at least the first ones plural. The same one, being built in France in Flamanville by the same company was scheduled to be finished in 2012, and is currently planned for 2023 (11 years delay), and with crazy over cost like the Finish one.
I don't think there is any reason to think it will be different for future ones if any. We'll see what happens for the British one (Hinkley Point C), but they already know there will be large delays and cost overrun.
It’s not too big, just too politicized. Bill Gates wanted to do it for a long time, but he can’t get the political buy in.
For me even seeing the Tesla Berlin factory delays makes me sad: in China already the second factory is being built while Germany is coming up with new arguments without looking at the cost/benefit ratio for EU of those delays.
Using someone who's been comfortably in the top 5 wealthiest people for the past two decades, with a 12-digit estimated net worth is perhaps not a good way to illustrate "not too big."
The main reason I was writing it is that there _is_ willingness from the top tech billionaires to invest in modern nuclear plants. They don’t do it because the politicians don’t let them do it, and it’s not only about regulations, they want to keep full control.
So far every attempt at small modular reactors built assembly line style has failed. Currently there's two projects with some momentum: NuScale's pilot plant in Idaho, and the recently announced Rolls Royce project.
Sadly NuScale seems to be struggling to meet timeline and cost targets, and there were some headlines last year about the sponsoring utility pulling out of the project. I'm rooting for them but it doesn't look good.
The RR project is still just on paper really, and is closer to a medium sized reactor than SMR. Maybe they've cracked the code? Maybe not, we'll see.
Every nuclear thread here people chime in with a reflexive "just build nuclear smarter" answer without actually addressing why every prior attempt at this has failed. A lot of people don't want to develop an understanding of the challenges more sophisticated than smugly blaming environmental activists, over regulation, etc.
Look at these projects from the prospective of potential private investment. Anyone doing basic due diligence is going to realize that the odds are stacked against a project hitting it's time and cost goals. Then you look at the trend lines for levelized cost of renewables + storage, and you realize that even in the best case scenario, within 2 decades you may be squeezed out of the market even if the efficiencies of scale and learning kick in.
> ...and then flushing all that knowledge down the drain by saying it cost too much and took too long. Like yes, the first one always takes longer and costs more...
Yup, exactly: And then there is a huge stink about this and no more are built for a good while, so the next one is a first one again. Over and over and over. Lather, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat...
> Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that.
When did Japan last build a nuclear reactor? I don't think any time recently.
South Korea used to be touted as a success at construction without massive overruns, but it turns out that it was largely a result or corruption and skimping on safety inspections:
As for China and Russia, we don't really have much insight to what they are doing as far as safety. China is seems to be successful at large scale construction projects in a way that we can not replicate in the west, so perhaps their numbers are reasonable for construction costs.
> If nuclear energy should be considered, much more must be built more continuously.
We would need entirely new designs unlike what has been built in the past. Both France and the US have negative learning rates when building the same reactor design multiple times, and that was 50 years ago when construction was a much more effective part of our economies.
I do not believe that nuclear is a smart energy source to pursue given our modern production capabilities. There's a bevy of nuclear startups trying smaller reactors that might be able to constrain construction costs. But in the past these designs have been rejected because of the loss of economy of scale, as being too expensive per watt.
Of the potential carbon neutral energy sources of the future, nuclear is one of the e least practical. It may supply a tiny fraction of our future power, maybe 10%, but without a major revolution soon on construction, our aging reactors will be shut down at end of life without any way to build more of them.
Last one was connected in 2009 which isn't that recent but there are also not that many projects of this size. China and Russia might not be the most thrustworthy and I would rather see more more western examples but then we have to go back a couple of decades, most of which were excellent.
I agree that a gigantic shift is required and put my hopes into mass produced SMRs. It's gonna take time and money, yes, just like the shift to EVs and renewables.
Fossil fuels is still above 80% of global primary energy, nuclear 5% and renewables excluding hydro 2%.
I really don't think putting all eggs in the solar/wind basket is good. They should of course also get heavy investments but that doesn't have to exclude nuclear. We're gonna need everything we have to end the fossil era.
Even in the first nuclear build out in the US, large cost overruns were very common. Forbes magazine was famously critical of this in a 1985 cover article.
There's a reason the US stopped building NPPs back then and it wasn't green mind control.
> China is seems to be successful at large scale construction projects in a way that we can not replicate in the west
Are they? Considering that their population is higher than the whole of North America + EU + Russia combined, wouldn't it be fair to compare it that way? Sure, it's one country as opposed to several, but still, the population plays a huge role in this "amazing construction at scale".
can you flesh this out, why exactly does a larger population mean more efficient construction projects? i don't follow
seems to me other factors like economics and government structure are more important, don't think a 4x larger US would be building faster and more cheaply
I guess what I'm saying is you can't compare what "China" is doing to most western countries, which have a fraction of the population, so of course there will be fewer reactors, fewer roads, less housing, less production.
I'd say it's more fair to compare it to a region of equal population. People actually do stuff, and the more of them (especially educated ones) there are, the more stuff will get done.
People are the biggest resource these days, which western countries realized a long time ago (or maybe it's the other way around, western countries created this system?). Hence, immigration heavily in favour of the best from other parts of the world.
And higher concentrations of people are more productive and effective. Think cities vs rural areas.
After accounting for that and comparing, if your region (clump of people) is still losing, then you might have a real problem and should take notes from the other group.
EDF (France) keeps building nuclear reactors around the world. Not sure whether they are the only EU company active in that market, but I doubt it. Either way, some expertise definitely exists in Europe.
Germany had spectacular delays and overruns for a new airport for Berlin
That too doesn't mean Europe forgot how to build airports.
This reactor was designed/partially built by Framatome/Areva/EDF/whatever the ownership structure is now after the various Areva scandals. Siemens erected the building. Same design as the Flamanville plant that's still not finished. Two reactors vessels shipped to China also from the same design. Time delays (took over 7 years to construct; original plan was 4), structural issues in the reactor containment vessel during manufacturing due to shoddy work by Areva and substandard alloy quality delivered by the Areva subsidiary.
This is also the nuclear plant (Taishan) that was in the news last year regarding damaged fuel rods.
That's the output from the experts in France so far.
Areva was basically shuttered and written off as a loss during all this. A part of the company only still exists as part of this Finland deal.
They didn't lose their nuclear capability because they kept maintaining and building reactors instead of decommissioning them. US and to a degree most of Europe did not.
China in particular plans to build ~250 new reactors over the next few years, most like new HTG reactors based on the pebble bed technology Germany sold to them when they abandoned their next-gen nuclear plans.
Russia has reactor building capabilities that are still current but their domestic needs are stagnating so said capability could decay as they don't actually need to build modern reactors at this time.
Japan has a similar problem to Russia in that post-Fukishima there isn't domestic demand for nuclear reactors. However they are building reactors for other countries, in particular I think they are planning to build ~20 good sized reactors in India.
This "250" number for China keeps being trotted out, but nobody knows how many of those will actually ever be built or operated. There is
anyway not fuel for that many, at present.
It would be more honest to cite the much smaller number that have actually broken ground. Nobody knows how many of those will be completed, or how many of those completed will be fueled or operated continuously, or where operated actually mainly generate power, as opposed to generating plutonium and tritium for weapons.
The pebble bed reactors are pretty much useless for making weapons grade material.
The design was built with non-proliferation in mind.
If they wanted to do that they would have just built more of their LWR design.
What do you mean there isn't enough fuel? Not enough pellets/pebbles? Well ofcourse.. there is only 2 operational reactors right now... not enough uranium? Yeah no. There is way more than enough uranium to fuel their projected fleet and it's not like they are building it tomorrow, it's probably going to take until around 2050 to complete.
China has a track record of saying they will do something and then actually doing it, I'm inclined to believe they will make good on that number.
I get that people don't like China but lets be serious, no-one else is actually as serious about nuclear power as them right now.
Xi is old. Will the next dictator share Xi's enthusiasm for high-cost power when the rest of the world is on low-cost power?
Any organization as big as the Chinese gov't makes lots of plans, and changes them as conditions change. It is one thing to be prepared to build a lot of nukes, entirely another to start building them, and entirely a third to finish them. The last will depend on conditions in the world, and of political alliances at the time.
> when the rest of the world is on low-cost power?
And regret about it?
The French are in much better position compared to the German with that low-cost power enthusiasm yet still heavily dependent on burning fossil.
I think you overestimate how expensive these reactors will be. Also they are part of a mix naturally. China has such vast energy needs they are still building coal, LNG, solar and nuclear all alongside each other.
My current feeling is that if they stick to their plan and build these smaller 600MW reactors that can mostly be built in factories and assembled on-site it's going to be a vastly different economic proposition than existing "big nuclear" that has been attempted in the West.
Of course there is no way to know exactly how it plays out but the inputs look good.
> This "250" number for China keeps being trotted out
The source is a Bloomberg article ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... ) which states that the boss of Chine General Power corp. announced his plans 200GW for 2035, nothing more. Admitting that it is an official governmental announcement (it doesn't seem so(?)) and given that China already has 50GW, that's maybe 100GW new (way less than 150 standard reactors).
Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), and 1200GW planned for 2030. In 2020 China added 71,6GW windturbine power. Even considering the load factors the picture is pretty clear.
Probably large fixed costs (engineers, builders learning how to do the thing) amortized over building a large number of plants.
China has been constructing a lot of new nuclear power plants over the last 15 years -- estimated at ~12 GW in 2013, but now closer to 50 GW as of 2021. Wikipedia says 50 plants as of 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China.
Anecdotally I've heard that temporary pollution control measures during the 2008 olympics gave the populace and decision makers a taste of reduced air pollution, and gave increased political willpower to invest in solar, wind, and nuclear power generation.
To a large extent, because they're building established designs. An EPR plant (that is, the same design as this one) was completed in China in about half the time of the Finnish one, but that would have been informed by the problems in building the Finnish EPR, which was the first in the world. Another EPR, being built by EDF (a French company) in the UK is broadly on-track, and should have a much shorter time to switch-on than the Finnish one.
This isn't new; historically, the first couple of examples of any given nuclear power plant design have typically seen major overruns.
> > Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that.
> Any insight into the why?
At least as for China, one gets the feeling (from recent news about COVID-19 hospitals being built in a week, the world's largest dam in a few years, etc) that with a population of over a billion, they do it Pharaonic Egypt pyramid-building style: Throw a few thousand engineers and a few hundred thousand construction workers at anything, and you will get something built.
Or at either end. Or, nowhere near either number. When you are making up numbers to announce, you pick according to the audience, not any physical constraint.
This is why nuclear does not compete with renewables during optimal weather conditions. Nuclear compete with fossil fuels when demand exceeds that of what renewables can produces, usually during periods of non-optimal weather conditions. Right now the price on the energy market is determined by fossil fuel and Russia is using this fact in order to fund their military invasion. Any period where renewable productions dips below demand is an opportunity to extract money from EU into that invasion.
We have completely screwed up market price discovery for energy with big govt involvement and subsidies. The numbers I see everywhere are cherry picked to present a winner and loser.
e.g. Depending on whose point of view you read, solar/wind prices either includes or not: subsidies, storage, land, weather, green label costs passed on to customers, interest rates, etc. Coal prices either includes or not: labor, imports, duties, mining, environmental costs, health costs, etc.
Lately I've come to a conclusion that we can make any of these methods appear equal, higher or lower by shifting the books.
Atleast I'm happy that this article is focusing only on the benefits and outcome, rather than invent winners and losers.
I’m hoping all these comments on HN I see that follow the pattern "I was wrong about something important, but rather than admit that, I'm going to believe that the truth is unknowable" are just the first step on someone's journey to accept an unpleasant shock to their ego.
It's depressing to think there's a growing army of geeks who have given up on science, rationality and objective reality just because they got sucked in by some propaganda and tied their identity a bit too firmly to it to ever escape.
I think the issue is not the geeks grasp of science and objectivity, but the cultures democratization of the talking space to include vast numbers on un-rational and subjective thinkers on equal status with educated and more objective thinkers.
Politics and the funding of state actions seems to be enacted highly subjectively according to power plays and vested interests, with minimal impact from rational geeks.
This is the defining issue of our times in my opinion, the reason climate change is the barely mitigated disaster it's turning into.
We only get a small fraction of the possible benefits of science as a race, because so much of our potential is wasted or actively worked against.
I don't see why it shouldn't be a reason for being hopeful? Admitting ignorance is generally a step in the right direction. No reason to be depressed about it.
Admitting ignorance is no indication that the number is closer to what you wish it were. Increasing uncertainty increases uncertainty. Increased uncertainty undermines investment, which depends mainly on confidence.
But literally every reactor ever built depended more on government extraction and concentration of capital (i.e., politics) than on market forces, making it all even less predictable.
I'm not sure what identity or propaganda or bias I'm part of, so I humbly accept there may be things I don't know I don't know.
But maybe if remotely applicable, an optimistic view can be: that some of those geeks, some of the times care about seeing progress happen, rather than the means.
You appeared to have given up on being able to answer the question "Is coal/peat/oil a better option than nuclear/solar/wind". Some of those questions are tricky, once you get to the level of which of these should be combined in what locations to absolutely maximize the system and what the trade-offs are, but some are easy. For example, peat is a bad fuel for all sorts of reasons. Yes assuming different interests rates or counting the effects of illness differently will affect different models in different ways, but peat is still a stupid thing to be burning for electricity in 2022. This is something we know.
Throwing your hands up and declaring the whole thing unknowable just because (I assume) the expert consensus is coming up with a different answer than you were confidently told and believed about renewables for decades by talking heads in your media bubble seems a weak cop out.
Either prove to everyone that it's a big conspiracy and you were right all along, or convince yourself that what you were told previously was a big conspiracy. One of these options is true.
I think you should read the thread and context of the reply again.
Just to make the misunderstanding clear: Any *green energy* that takes us out of coal/peat/oil is progress. You don't have to repeat as if there is a conspiracy. I was replying to a comment asking for comparison with other sources, saying that *progress to green energy is way more important* than comparisons against brown energy, no matter even if said comparisons paint coal/peat/oil in favourable or unfavorable terms. It's exactly the same you said, burning peat doesn't make sense today no matter the cost, and that's exactly the same I'm saying.
If we leave energy decisions to an under-regulated "free market", we guarantee that market forces will select for the most short-termist, externality-spewing choices possible.
What do power execs care if they leave behind ruins decades down the road? They will have already made their money and enjoyed it.
It was shipped with 12 years delay, and has caused billion in loss to the builder Areva/Orano. They are building a similar one in France which will have at least 11 years delay, and also billions of costs overrun.
Areva/Orano being a french state owned (mostly) company, this is probably largely paid for by the French tax payer.
When you do the 2-3x (minimum) for wind and solar + keep the coal plant around and ready to go at a moments notice, including stockpile fuel and maintain it, it starts getting really expensive really fast.
Gas plant. Coal is much more expensive than gas, by every measure, and is much less adjustable to immediate requirement. The only reason any coal is still being used is installed base and market and political inertia.
You start to understand the issue of comparing the raw cost of kWh of renewables to stable energy like nuclear, if you have to build N times the capacity, the cost per kWh is just N times more expensive.
Doesn't matter if you can't build a grid with only those and still need gas or nuclear aside. The real cost of renewable in a functioning grid is probably 5 times higher of what's advertised when including externalities.
Sure. And if the Moon were made of green cheese and we had regular transport from a mining operation there we could all eat as much green cheese as we want.
Kazakhstan (under Russia's sphere of influence) is the largest producer at 36% of the global supply (5% from Russia itself.) It can be purchased from countries like Canada (15%) or Australia (12%). The next two are Namibia and Niger, each producing 8% of the global supply.
still cleaning up mess at ranger (which has impacted on a dual-listed world heritage national park) and rum jungle (there's a class action of the few surviving workers + their families whose cohort have suffered cancers)
notably still operating is olympic dam, where the huge volumes of radioactive tailings literally spill out on the surrounding land, representing an entirely unmanaged environmental hazard.
A single shipment from wherever can last a looooong time. It's not like gas or oil where you need continuous supply. And there're deposits in civilised world.
Yep. I think the only chance for embracing more nuclear would be to have smaller modular reactors that can be built on an assembly line. And while we're dreaming, moving to Thorium as the fuel.
Anyway not for longer than hoped. And, if approved, not built anytime soon, as the cost will still be much more than for renewable + storage, at that time. Those latter costs are falling faster than ever.
Very distinct things. China is actively deploying modular reactors while thorium salt reactors have many unsolved problems, mostly with durability that will need substantial advancements in material sciences to become viable.
