> The decision to cancel the project followed an update from NuScale this year regarding the cost of building the reactors, which had soared to $9.3 billion from $5.3 billion because of rising interest rates and inflation.
Even $5.3B seems very expensive. For reference, (the new Finnish) Olkiluoto-3 was €11 billion, for 1600 MW. The article says 6 * 77 MW = 539 MW!
Like, imagine something maybe 1000x as complicated as your car, that has to work reliably 100% of the time for 50+ years .
Now imagine that we don’t have any practice building one of these things because people have been scared of building them for approximately 40 years, so the last person to make one is 70-90.
Now imagine that the failure case for this thing is a disaster that causes an expensive cleanup in the surrounding area, so no one will insure the project against that unless you pay an astronomical amount. Now add in that you’re using a “new” design that’s never been tested, and you have to follow a bunch of government regulations that didn’t even exist when the last comparable reactor was built.
Stack up all these things and you get a lot of uncertainty about project scope, uncertainty about financing, and uncertainty about whether it will work.
This means that to ballpark what it was cost, it will necessarily be expensive because of the risk everyone is taking in producing it.
You're right, however nearly every single point was also true 50 years ago, when we built many of these things around the globe (and many are still going, pumping out the cleanest energy the world has ever seen).
The real difference between then and now, is willingness to take on risk. Developed countries of today are essentially victims of the innovators dilemma. We're fat and happy and complacent, and that's why we will never have anything new or better. People in developed countries don't even want the inconvenience of having children anymore. Why take risk to make things better for the next generation when we're not even willing to create them?
Not really, the original set had “defense” backing because of the Cold War, because nukes are useful for making, well, nukes. (As well as being an alternative to fossil fuels in the situation where that supply chain broke down).
Which means we’d spend any amount of money on them and they’re a strategic asset.
Many safer designs are (basically) useless for enrichment, (pebble bed, molten salt thorium, w/e), which means the military might use one on an aircraft carrier or remote outpost, if they had any reason to (which they don’t as there’s no NIMBYism far out at sea). But safer designs are likely cheaper to run long term as the failure modes are significantly less catastrophic. (Not that the current gen ones are particularly dangerous).
I think this is false now thanks to fusion demonstrations, and maybe false because of things like solar and wind, although those do cost petroleum investment in equipment.
And rare earth minerals. And God help you if you're trying to use it to replace a steady source of energy with them, because the battery requirements go parabolic. Though, we are seeing some innovation in the battery space that replaces some of those rare earth minerals with more abundant and less hard to mine materials, such as zinc.
Olkiluoto-3's budget also overran a lot to reach 11b. It's also an extra reactor at an existing nuclear plant so perhaps that somehow reduces costs, and it's built by a very established company.
Now, on the other hand, as far as I know NuScale never built a commercial reactor before... so we'll see how many of their current projects actually come to life.
Olkiluoto 3 was a first of a kind project too. Was built by an established company, but one that had been on a decades long hiatus in building nuclear power plants.
Not to go into too much detail, since my SO that worked on the project might otherwise get into trouble, but some of their cost saving measures simply turned out for the worse. Several core components of the reactor had to be entirely removed and rebuilt from scratch because they tried to cheapen out.
Similar reactors built after this will not have these growing pains.
No. The last reactor delivered by the French, before Olkiluoto-3, was Civaux-2 and it was delivered in 1999 (work started in 1991). Work on Olkiluoto-3 started in 2005.
MBAs. Same ones infecting the company that you most likely work for.
Something smaller like stamping out PV panels or windmills for farms of them is much more manageable. Anything big and complex invites too much graft.
And while you can complain about expensive regulations, that's just another graft called regulatory capture. And they let you blame it on the hippies, while they rake in the dollars.
As a software developer, I can tell you that MBAs aren't necessary for massive cost overruns.
People are bad as estimating the cost of technical work when unknown-unknowns are involved, and the problem becomes worse when there's a massive incentive to underestimate to win the contract when you know the government will pay for all of your overruns.
Those describe the discrepancy between an incorrectly low bid and a reasonable-but-higher cost. They do not describe how the cost gets astronomically high.
> "Even $5.3B seems very expensive. For reference, (the new Finnish) Olkiluoto-3 was €11 billion, for 1600 MW. The article says 6 77 MW = 539 MW!"*
Olkiluoto-3's materials and labour costs were locked in well before the current inflationary cycle. If they started out today the cost would likely be much higher.
Also, NuScale is a novel new design. SMRs haven't been commercially deployed anywhere yet, so there's a lot of extra risk and cost associated with building and certifying the very first ones. After all, it cost Boeing an awful lot more to produce the first 777 aircraft than it did to knock out the 1000th.
You're comparing untried and untested SMR design to slapping up an EPR next to two BWRs if I'm remembering the Finnish project correctly. While EPR is newer, we as mankind have a good understanding of how to build and operate one.
Now of course Vogtie cost us 30 or 40 whatever billion for a couple of trifling PWRs, so your larger point still stands. I just think it was dumb of NuScale from the outset to go out marketing over-promises on the idea of SMR. If you took an educated look at the stats and numbers proponents of SMRs were out touting, it's doubtful that even China could have delivered on that. How they thought they could do it in the real world of Idaho is beyond me? They must have had an ace up their sleeves? Or perhaps they expected the government to play a much larger role? Not sure.
For that price you can build almost any combination of wind/solar plus storage. It will probably use less land when you factor in exclusion zones and require fewer operators and resources. It will also have no major calamity risk and an easy clean up and decommissioning.
The Tesla megapack price is about 300 million dollars per 1GWh of storage these days.
Solar will certainly use more land unless you build on rooftops or do agrovoltaics. But that’s not the norm for large scale production yet.
Wind depends on how you calculate area used. The zone that excludes other wind turbines and residential buildings will be much larger. But the area used by just the base is obviously quite small. When placed between farm plots the area usage is very effective.
The risk of accidents in the US is probably extremely small. I wouldn’t personally be worried about. Especially with NuScKe which should be passively safe. Though I would have said the same about Japan before Fukushima so you never know (yes, I know the death toll was negligible, but the effect it had on nearby residents is still catastrophic)
Nuclear and solar also can dual-use most of their footprint. For nuclear, the keep-out zone becomes a de facto nature preserve. And a pretty good one at that, since the keep out is enforced well.
Solar installations can be grazed. Alternatively, bifacial panels can be installed vertically east-west and the strips between can be farmed. Or the panels can be placed on rooftops. Or used to shade parking lots. Et cetera.
Honestly the parking lots should be the absolute first stop on the search for places to put solar. Literally all parking lots can and should be filled with solar. Nature preserves should be the absolute last place to install it. Why on earth would we displace wildlife and thus rile up the nature conservationists when the parking lot real estate has already displaced the wildlife that was there? The benefits are two-fold, you get shade for cars which reduces our total combined fuel consumption for hvac, at least by an order of magnitude. Even in snowy places, you get covered parking which saves from idling cars to melt ice, in addition to the generation.
All that needs to be done is that it needs to make financial sense to install. If we can find a way to make it so compelling financially, you’d be crazy not to fill your parking lot with solar.
I didn’t miss those things and I’m really agreeing with you but leaning more heavily into the solar since it’s not nearly as controversial as nuclear and the “land issue” is, in fact, very often cited as the reason that solar won’t scale but it’s a actually a thinly veiled argument for NIMBYism.
Not so weird IMO; I interpreted it the exact same way. So how do you mean it should have been interpreted? GP pointed out that exclusion zones around nukes in effect become nature preserves, and that solar panels could be placed in agricultural zones -- two very different things. In response, you start ranting about "displace wildlife and thus rile up the nature conservationists" with, apparently, solar installations. (You didn't explicitly say so, but then you hadn't indicated any change of subject from your previous sentece, which was explicitly about solar.) Which nobody was talking about.
I think I see where the misunderstanding is now and that there is indeed a gap in my statement. The point I was trying to make here was to challenge the need for nuclear energy _in the first place_ by installing solar in every parking lot. It should be considered and studied more thoroughly, if it hasn’t already.
That said, I’m not against nuclear but there are significant environmental drawbacks to it for anyone who lives near a plant. I can’t think of any significant environmental drawbacks to installing solar in existing parking lots.
of course shading a parking lot with solar panels improves the parking lot, but i suspect it won't replace nuclear
(and it's probably more expensive than installing solar on hillsides or in fields, and yields less than installing them in deserts, though those may turn out not to matter)
0.47% of the contiguous usa is covered in solar panels, 13778 square miles, or in modern units, 35680 square km https://time.com/6239651/solar-parking-lots-france-us/ (that's what the article says, anyway; i suspect the number is smaller, because https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648... only found 2.2 parking spaces per registered vehicle in a more-urban-than-average county; 5 m times 2.3 m times 2.2 times 278 million gives only 7000 square km of parking spaces, perhaps doubling if the parking lot covers twice as much area as the parking spaces in it)
with 21% efficient panels, the 35680 km² figure would yield 7.5 terawatts peak; at a high 30% capacity factor it would average 2.2 terawatts, though the time article linked above only estimates 0.422 terawatts peak. possibly the discrepancy is due to oblique illumination: you can't get the full 1000 watts per square meter of insolation on a horizontal surface like a parking lot except in the tropics, where the us isn't. i suspect some of the discrepancy is so large due to an allowance for spacing the panels apart so they never shade each other. also the time article has an arithmetic error where it says half of 13778 is 4822
if we use, say, 14000 km² and a more plausible 18% capacity factor, without trying to take into account angling the panels and spacing them out, we get 2.9 terawatts nameplate capacity, 0.53 terawatts average
> Why on earth would we displace wildlife and thus rile up the nature conservationists when the parking lot real estate has already displaced the wildlife that was there?
Politicians probably don't like it because the construction riles up their constituents while it's happening.
The last solar install I saw retrofitted to a (reasonably large) parking lot took about 3 days & the lot was only partially reduced in capacity for that time.
For additional data, a just announced start in Poland [1] is planned for $40B for 6 AP1000 reactors
(6000 GW? maybe more), which sclaed down by 10x would make $4B for 600+ MW.
That was before the elections. The most recent news about it that I read said that they're reconsidering the location, which is going to introduce more delay and costs (even though it's justified, considering how the current location was chosen).
Investment has become a fast guaranteed returns at all costs kind of thing. That means that while it would cost nine years to build a nuclear reactor and twenty five to break even, the reactor could operate for a century because they're required to maintain it due to how dangerous it is. Meanwhile a gas plant can be built in two, break even in five, and operates for twenty years before falling apart from neglect because a gas explosion doesn't create nuclear fallout. This is also why coal fired plants are still running despite external pressures to render them extinct; the owners know the ROI and like the short term projections.
It depends on what needs to be built. If the regulators 'like' what needs to be built it'll pop up fast, look at the wind turbine expansion in Europe and parts of the USA. In terms of material input that dwarves what building one nuclear power plant or blast furnace requires.
> If the regulators 'like' what needs to be built it'll pop up fast
The most dangerous and expensive accident happening to a wind turbine is way (way!!!) less daunting and way more easy to avoid and tackle than a major nuclear accident.
> In terms of material input
Given that most material needed for renewables can be recycled, has substitutes and that there is no need for a combustible there is quite a debate there.
It's that we are bad per se. But there is no money for that anymore. Most of the money goes to bullshit jobs or secondary things that are mostly about enabling the mentioned bullshit jobs. If you look at most western countries almost half the economic output is directed to those things.
You really can't build a future when most of the ressource goes to satisfy this and the relentless needs of the elderly who do not even contribute meaningfully.
When a lot of your ressource goes to satisfy the ones who are dying, nothing forward looking gets done, it's pretty logical, they are dying they do not have to care.
In many countries there is political fragmentation and a lot of unease related to this.
Personally, I blame feminism, socialism, and boomers.
I know it is not a politically correct opinion, but I think time will tell soon enough. Many recent events substantiate that.
My opinion doesn't matter anyway, the reality is that even in France that was a leader and highly successful in nuclear technology; new reactors do not get built or/and take forever.
It has nothing to do with skill, it is pretty much a systemic and political problem. Remove the political opinions, remove the feminist bullshit and things will get done.
In the meantime, I suggest enjoying the fall, because nothing will happen until it gets so bad there will be no choice.
We build so few gigawatt-size reactors. In the US only 4 came online since 1990. For most of the construction crew of such a reactor, that job is the first of that type in their career, and the last. They get trained on the job, and that (ultra-expensive) training is then never used again.
Contrast that with the building of naval reactors, which are essentially SMRs. The US builds about 1 or 2 per year. In factories. The workers there participate in the building of numerous reactors during their careers. For each reactor, the majority of the crew has already done the job at least once before, and they know they will continue using their skills for many years to come.
The cost of naval reactors is classified, but one could infer from this congressional report ([1], page 6) that an A1B reactor cost about $400 MM in 2011 money. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $560 MM today.
A single A1B reactor is equivalent to about 3 NuScale modules, so 2 A1Bs would be equivalent to the 6-module package that was canceled here, because its cost ballooned to more than 9 billion. The US Navy is able to procure them for less than $1.2 BN.
So, no, the economics don't fundamentally doom SMRs. It's just that you can expect the numbers to start working out only after you enter serial production. The first-of-its-kind costs are always high.
> For most of the construction crew of such a reactor, that job is the first of that type in their career, and the last. They get trained on the job, and that (ultra-expensive) training is then never used again.
I am not disagreeing with the idea of Wright's law. The US Navy very likely benefits from it, but NuScale does not, and possibly never will.
However, a) this does include other prices such site licenses and environmental assessment.
b) Wrights law models a decrease with every doubling in units produced. At 1-2 a year, we're looking at a very long time to get several doublings in. NuScale meanwhile has 0 doublings under their belt. And NuScale is not alone in this field, there are dozens of companies, each one promising the same thing (SMNRs). The Navy has a single source for their reactors, NuScale has lots of competition and has to share the market, leading each of company to get even fewer reactors built per year.
c) Someone has to pay those early costs. For the Navy, there are not many alternatives; there are no PV or Wind aircraft carriers. It's nuclear or oil. The same is not true about power generation.
d) As you say, each navy reactor is about 3 NuScale modules. Why does the Navy not build 3 smaller modules and get even better scaling? Why not 30? I argue they don't because of the costs associated with horizontal scaling. NuScale meanwhile doesn't have a power budget they need to hit, they are trying to produce baseload power, and the bigger they make them the more economies of scale the nuclear reactor benefits from.
The Navy did try smaller modules but it turned out to be a major staffing and space issue.
Having 30 modules/reactors on an aircraft carrier would require quite a bit more Nuclear trained sailors than 2 large modules/reactors.
The oil storage space on old carriers turned into jet fuel storage. Having 30 reactors on the ship would definitely eat into that.
> Why does the Navy not build 3 smaller modules and get even better scaling?
That's a good point.
Actually the Navy does build such smaller modules. The Navy uses 2 types of naval reactors, one for Virginia-class submarines, the S9G, which is very close to one NuScale module, and one for Ford-class carriers, the A1B, about 3 times larger.
Each Ford-class carrier uses 2 A1B reactors. Why not 6 S9G? I don't know. But then why not a single reactor twice as large as an A1B? I don't know either. It looks like there are some tradeoffs.
In any case, the fact that the Navy can build economically SMR-sized reactors is encouraging. Of course, the Navy can use technologies that are not available on the civilian market, for example their reactors use weapon-grade uranium. So it's not completely an apples-and-apples comparison.
Still, NuScale has produced more than one million pages of documentation to get their SMR design approved by the NRC. One can imagine they also put a lot of thinking in the economic viability of the project. One way or another they convinced a large engineering, procurement and construction company (Fluor Corp) to buy them.
> Still, NuScale has produced more than one million pages of documentation to get their SMR design approved by the NRC. One can imagine they also put a lot of thinking in the economic viability of the project.
Just because the pile of sh*t is massive doesn’t mean there’s a pony somewhere underneath it.
You mean the docs they sent the NRC? That's not a pile of shit. The NRC is one of the most conservative regulatory bodies anywhere in the world, you can't send them garbage. Oklo tried that stunt and fell flat on their face [1].
No, I mean the economics. Oklo's issue was, and I quote, that they "repeatedly failed to provide substantive information [...] on the maximum credible accident (MCA) for the Aurora design, the safety classification of structures, systems, and components (SSCs), and other issues needed for the NRC staff to establish a schedule and complete its technical review."
The NRC denied them, without prejudice might I add, a license based on an evaluation of the technical merits and safety of the reactor, not on its economics.
In that case you are right. I don't know what NuScale's economic argument was, and there's a (pretty good) chance that it will not work out.
But, imagine that whenever you want a new car, the car company sent a crew to your house and builds the car in your backyard. All the parts needed will be shipped to your address, and workbenches, tools, machinery, too. They put the car together, paint it, dry it, and voila, the car is yours. Would it surprise you if it was 10 times more expensive than if it came from an assembly line?
Again, I am not disagreeing with you, building nuclear plants on a conveyer belt would allow you to decrease the per unit price as you make more of it. My issue with the approach is that the prices for those first (100) units, even before the inevitable order of magnitude cost overruns, results in more expensive electricity than the one off projects they aim to replace. This is coupled by the twin problems of a) alternative tech which is constantly benefiting from wrights law, and b) a lot of competition in the field fighting over a small number of reactors.
Not much to do about a), so if this technology were to succeed, the government would have to play kingmaker and pick only one company such that they actually go through enough units to drop down the price curve. This might work domestically, but I foresee political difficulties when trying to convince other countries to abandon their homegrown tech in favour of yours.
You keep mentioning Wright's law, but SMRs are not about that. Changing the location of the manufacturing from on site to inside a factory will not have an impact of 10-20% on the cost, but rather a reduction by a factor of 10 or 20. Wright's law is about subsequent reductions.
Let me even grant you that it works that way in theory. By what factor has this project gone over budget, 10x? What’s the next project we can look at to see how it fares?
My other points still stand, especially the one about competition.
But, NuScale has no experience building anything. It's just a startup. It's a miracle they got their reactor design approved.
BWXT however is the company that builds the Navy's naval nuclear reactors. They are cooperating with GE and Hitachi [1] to build a 300 MWe SMR. All 3 of these companies have plenty of experience delivering on numerous types of projects, including nuclear ones. I do think they have a chance.
One A1B is enough to power/propel a carrier. They have 2 A1B in case one engine faults/maintenance, they have another one available. Most ships have backups for major systems.
This way of estimating the real total cost isn't realistic, in such a (military) context accounting is difficult. In France the supreme court of audit (Cour des comptes) simply dropped the ball on it and used ballpark figures.
The real total cost of exploitation of a marine (think: cooling) military (think: many hands available, and a quite specific way to manage dangerous equipment) reactor is also very difficult to establish.
They dropped the ball on military investments (which were MASSIVE), see their report ( https://www.ccomptes.fr/en/documents/1134 ), page 35: «Le champ d’analyse ne couvre pas les dépenses de recherche relevant du domaine militaire, ni celles se rattachant à la recherche fondamentale».
Even the cost of civilian research (from the 50's to 2012) is very difficult to assess («les données recueillies ne sont pas toutes homogènes et leur fiabilité n’est pas totale.»).
Ballpark figures (page 270): 288 billions euros (value: 2010) invested, 118 of them being directly production-related investments (maintenance is not accounted for), with severe methodological restrictions («Il est difficile aujourd’hui de 'reconstruire' l'histoire du financement»), tackled by using conventions inherited from the nuclear industry.
It makes sense when the monolith is very complex to certify, so having discrete parts that are individually certified is more expensive only in theory when you dont factor in the exponential certification complexity. which i guess is high for nuclear related parts.
Except this doesn’t actually decrease the complexity of each mini reactor. You still have all the same parts in each one, plus you pay a premium for losing scale.
It only fully plays on locally, under a unique (national) certification authority.
Historically each nation nuclear certification authority developed its own set of requirements.
There are links, and a push to federate efforts, however it remains true.
Case in point: the Olkiluoto-3 EPR reactor isn't exactly the same as Flamanville-3, the one being built in France, because the Finns wanted/needed various different thingies. Any of such requirement may have a significant impact on the design, and therefore impede the SMR approach.
OSHA was established in 1970. It didn't exist prior, and it took some time for rules to get more stringent, and for the risks and liabilities it represented to be realized as additional costs.
Why wouldn't you want your children to go into construction? I can't imagine what the prejudice against building things would be, especially essential things like energy infrastructure.
Not the parent commenter, but I read their comment perhaps more charitably as describing a general societal attitude rather than their personal beliefs that they would instill on their children.
No idea if I’m correct, but it’s maybe worth offering them the benefit of the doubt here.
I don't have and have never wanted children, so you are correct that it is not my personal belief. Yes, it's a question of the social status afforded to certain professions. The ones that actually build and maintain a functioning society seem low on that hierarchy. I'm willing to bet that the lawyers litigating whether or not a nuclear power plant will be built have have a higher income than the people who build it.
This is my perception as someone from the working class who doesn't get one of those big FAANG salaries; they don't check that when you sign up here.
> If my son wanted to build nuclear reactors I'd be A-Okay with that.
No no no no, we are talking about hard labor. I think OP is merely saying that there are jobs that no one wants to do, but they need to be done. So while everyone wish someone becomes the janitor, no one wants their own kid to become one (or whatever job you deem is less "respected").
This is not to say that I don't respect janitors, it is that I WISH i feel respect for them, but for whatever reason (nurture or nature) I simply don't feel respect for them and I constantly fight against this intuition.
Oh I'd prefer a lot of things that are never going to happen. It's more a question of social status - what pays more, construction worker, or lawyer who argues for/against construction?
What was your point in asking this "question of social status"?
Nothing in this thread points to lack of workers, but to over regulation.
On a personal note, I'd prefer many less lawyers, especially the ones who argue against the one energy source that works.
I'd prefer many more trade workers, much less in academics.
I'd prefer people to not view jobs as a social status and appreciate the contributions people give to society.
A plumber can make quite a bit of money, work up to their own business, not have to deal with huge amounts of debt, and actually provides needed services for society.
A basketball player can make quite a bit of money playing basketball if they're exceptional. Looks like the national average for a plumber is about $60K/year. Most people on this forum would scoff at that if someone offered them that. It's actually about as much as my uncle, a heavy diesel mechanic, made before his untimely death. It's about what my father made when he retired.
Why don't we build? Why don't we do anything; because it's more profitable not to I'm sure.
My brother was a contractor too and could barely make it on that with no kids. He fairly recently became an engineer (not the software kind) and was stunned to learn that he could take days off and still get paid. He was also quite happy to have health insurance. There may not be a lack of workers, but there's one less who will ever go back because of the nature of the job.
>Nothing in this thread points to lack of workers, but to over regulation.
The thread points at inflation and interest rates and general cost overruns. I don't see the overregulation. As others have said, you can run your non nuclear powerplants until they fall apart. That isn't possible with nuclear power.
Depending on the area, construction can pay really well and be a stable form of long term employment. Usually the trades part of construction is best rather than being a general laborer.
In my area of NY suburbs, there's such a shortfall of tradesmen now due to boomer retirement en-masse, you see alot of younger guys showing up as plumbers, electricians, hvac and more that you would never ever have seen just 5 years ago.
I wouldn't care if my own kids did it. As long as they figure out their life plan in advance, who cares.
I worked with one of the major HVAC companies in that area. There was not one dude under 50 in that building. 'we can not even get people to apply and we are throwing money at them'. That was 10 years ago. That may have changed by now. But probably not much.
Me personally no. I have 20+ years doing what I do. I am paid decently for that. But fresh out of high school and willing to do the apprentice/mentor thing I probably would have considered it very compelling. It was 2-3x what I made starting what I do now.
It's not a job I'd do either for a few reasons, principally marginal physical disability; something many tradesmen acquire and learn to live with, but to which I was essentially born.
That said, if the job is so attractive to young people (I'm guessing primarily men), then why do you think that not much has changed in the intervening decade?
Because as a society we have been taught that trade work is not worth doing. One of the things you just said is what I always hear. I had an uncle quit a high paying job at Apple to become an apprentice plumber. Within 5 years he was making just as much and loved his job and wished he had done it earlier. The Apple job was 'too much stress' and 'when I leave a job site that work will be done or done within the next day or so'. He retired in his late 60s doing it.
Not all trade work is swinging a hammer or lugging huge things around (what we have been sold). Most of it is fit and trim work. Fiddly work where you are making sure that wire is lined up just right to fit in this wall or knowing where to put the pressure hose. Yeah swinging the hammer work and lugging stuff around is how you get started. You 'put in your dues'. It is a form of hazing. Sort of how we give interns the 'build this weird form that no one will ever use' work.
I know the trades guys are doing decent. The ones I see are driving around in brand new f150s (go look at the prices on them). As scarcity for their work is driving up prices. I can put up a job opening for a programmer and have 200+ applicants. Do you think the trades are getting lots of people asking to do this work? No it is seen as 'low class work'.
I have family who have done trade work and have dabbled myself. Not only did my brother make an actual fraction of what a developer would make, he did not get sick days or health insurance. He's doing much better now in an engineering job, and will not be going back. It's the weirdest thing how I always see people on the internet who don't do trade jobs talk about how much they pay, and yet if you look up the actual statistics, you'll see that these jobs are paid salaries that the people on this forum would scoff at. And those statistics match the reality of the actual tradespeople in my family.
I'm quite aware of how much a new F-150 costs, perhaps you should look up the length of the average vehicle loan these days.
I bet I do know what would help the trades to be seen as higher class work; paying more lol.
One still needs to build the structures with the water pools and everything else. If one bothers to buy the land, contract construction workers, lease heavy machinery, they could as well build 6x as big and spread the fixed costs over that. NuScale was designed to work with up to 12 modules.
It's too bad it didn't work out commercially. Their other projects will probably get cancelled as well if they face the same price increases.
But would the cost of that structures not be pretty insignificant compared to the cost of the reactors? Or build the support structure for six reactors but initially only one reactor, sell five more when the first one works. In relative terms it makes no difference whether a cost overrun of 100 percent is for one or six reactors, in absolute term it of course makes a difference and it seems you might have a better chance of not getting your project cancelled if the absolute overrun in smaller. But this might of course, as you mentioned, also be a matter of scale, hard to tell without knowing where exactly the additional costs come from.
16.5% for the buildings and roughly 50% for construction services, engineerig services, owner's costs, structures and improvement according to the aricle I linked in my other post. I suspect that specifically those costs are the ones that cause most of the of overruns and delays. Also, the whole process is certified by the NRC and you can't get creative with it. There are 4, 6 and 12 reactor configurations for a given plant.
Commercial nuclear should be very hard, almost impossible. This seems to be the correct conclusion after all the accidents and the reasons for them - incompetent, self-serving management pushing dangerous commands on the personnel (Chernobyl,Three Mile Island) or normalizing bad architecture and security plans (Fukushima). Better expensive energy than another major nuclear accident.
Nuclear energy can be done safely as long as it is run by competent nuclear energy physicists/technicians with real authority, so they can and will shut down stupid ideas such as operating outside parameters because economy/boss said so. This seems to rule out commercial organizations. NRC is more benevolent than that, maybe they should actually be even tougher.
We should allow only competent states to build and operate nuclear plants, so science and rules take precedence to money and boss boot-licking.
This may push nuclear energy into unprofitable territory, depending on the market conditions, infrastructure, water and people resources. Which is fine by me - nuclear energy in some areas is so important for grid stability we should have it even if it is unprofitable.
Extreme events and subsequent changes are why it can be the "safest form of energy". After Chernobyl and Fukushima, regulation did change in those countries as well.
There must be a name for the fallacy when one is focused on avoiding a single risk while completely ignoring much larger and closer dangers.
Nuclear energy has a minuscule list of total casualties throughout history. Casualties per megawatt produced? It's practically zero. At the same time burning hydrocarbons kills every single day through pollution. It kills millions yearly. Burning coal even spews radioactive ash into the air!
And above all, climate change is looming as a civilization-ending danger, closer and closer.
The black swan big disasters have to be taken seriously too.
A nuclear accident creates a big and costly disaster suddenly. People don't like sudden big problems but can live with continuously growing ones.
Burning hydrocarbons is much more acceptable in that regard. CO2/dust pollution is accepted by society, because it is continuous and dilutes well. Killing millions is socially acceptable when it happens randomly all over the planet. Radioactive pollution due to coal burning is/should be negligible, most is(should be) filtered out in the smokestack scrubbers.
I don't like fossil power plants, but they are much easier to build and more acceptable to people than nuclear ones. That's why regulation and security have to be high with nuclear, to make it acceptable to most of society.
> civilization-ending danger
I don't think climate change is a civilization-ending danger in the coming decades. It already creates political problems, migration. If we keep pumping CO2 then maybe in hundred years.
We had 2 huge ones. They resulted in a few thousand deaths and some uninhabitable land. Nothing compared to pollution damage.
> accepted by society [...] socially acceptable
I'd rather decide based on reason. And I doubt many people find millions of deaths due to pollution every year acceptable. They just don't know they had a choice. Choice stolen from them by rabid anti-nuclear fear mongering.
> I don't think climate change is a civilization-ending danger
Yet you think a few black swan nuclear disasters are? Can I borrow your crystal ball? You are pretty sure about the future but most experts I read disagree: nuclear experts consider it extremely safe while climate experts warn of dire futures.
That is surprising view to me. I tried to explain why naive anti-regulation talk is not helpful for getting more nuclear energy. The way to have more nuclear energy is to embrace and strengthen the state interest in nuclear.
When discussing nuclear vs coal, it's always funny to point out that coal power plants produce several times as much radiation as nuclear power plants.
Coal plants emit more radionuclides into atmosphere, but nuclear plants produce more radionuclides overall (burnt fuel). This coal nuclear pollution is however still very small to the point of irrelevance, the real pollution problem is with CO2, dust and mining coal.
I understand the sentiment, but more does not equal better.
I think we over regulate nuclear plants/nuclear plant construction/design in the United States. We should absolutely have robust regulatory controls and review in place, but those controls need to serve a purpose and reduce a specific risk(s). Controls for controls sake just add to cost and possibly sub-optimal operations.
Case in point, across the US many coal fire power stations are being decommissioned, on the face these would be great candidates to convert to Nuclear power stations. They already have a lot of the expensive infrastructure in place on site (i.e. massive transmission lines, electric substation, probably a reliable water source, etc). Great opportunity to reduce cost and accelerate a project.
But because of the way the nuclear regulations are structured, and the fact that coal ash is radioactive it's unlikely a site like this would be to become compliant.
We should have tough regulations on the nuclear industry, but they should be smart regulations.
It looks like the biggest problem with nuclear is not the safety or whatnot, it's just that as a civilization, we just can't build them without cost overruns and massive delays. And this is a loss, because we need non-variable energy sources to augment wind/solar/tidal.
Perhaps the other way to solve the energy transition is to lean heavily into mass storage of variable energy sources. If you have enough energy storage, you don't need so much of the base energy suppliers like gas/coal/nuclear.
Just a point of clarity, we need demand resources, which means variable at our command vs not variable or variable based on wind/solar input out of our control.
The economically viable mass storage options (i.e pumped storage) are basically all deployed. Batteries are getting there but they still need some shenanigans in the ancillary market where they get paid for not running for complex reasons to make the economics in most instances. As the shenanigans price out nat gas in those markets it will be interesting to see how offer strategies of nat gas change to recoup the lost economic viability and if that makes batteries less profitable.
Batteries are already viable paired with solar. You see solar power purchase agreements in the 1.5 to 2c / kWh range and you can directly use that energy around 1/2 the time. Recharging and discharging batteries isn’t 100% efficient but it’s close.
Current numbers are lower, but in 2022 you could use LFP for ~5,000 discharge cycles and pay ~480$/kWh of capacity or ~9.6 c/kWh. Inverters etc last longer than the batteries themselves so you can amortize those costs across multiple generations of batteries, therefore it’s not quite upfront costs / number of discharge cycles, but it’s also not that far off of it. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf
Still roughly 2c/kWh * 105% + 9.6 c/kWh * 50% ~= 6.9c/kWh averaged over a day.
Currently batteries are discharged at peak demand, but the underlying economics scales just fine even if you double the number of solar panels for redundancy and aren’t being paid a premium. Further at scale demand that shifted to cheaper nighttime rates will instead shift to cheaper daytime rates.
We have to keep in mind that 6.9 isn’t yet the end user rate after grid fees, but still.
There is also a ton of potential in demand shaping by offering hourly prices to customers.
The place where batteries fail is long-term, seasonal storage. The price per charge is still low, but an asset that takes 5000 years to amortise (one charge cycle per year) is not a competitive investment.
So we will need other approaches here, where the substance that stores the energy is cheap and the cost is shifted onto the energy transforming device (this is e-fuels/ ammonia/ hydrogen)
There will be no need for "long-term, seasonal storage". We only need enough storage to last until a shipment of synthetic anhydrous ammonia, ordered from a nearby wind farm or from a solar farm in the tropics, can be delivered, to be burned in an existing combined-cycle turbine. That storage is some mix of batteries and tanked ammonia.
Well-provisioned solar farms can synthesize and tank their own ammonia during periods of excess production, and sell excess (over what local tankage holds) on the open market.
I’m not convinced we want significant seasonal storage as a separate system because depth of discharge impacts battery lifespan.
So rather than having a singe battery doing nothing for 364 days a year and getting used one day you have a battery bank which gets discharged slightly more 1 day a year and recovers that deficit over some time period.
For redundancy reasons you want excess generation capacity should something happen which would most of the time allow for a full charge soon afterwards.
PS: individual wind locations also tend to get more power on specific time of the year which can offset seasonal issues.
It’s not the battery being used for seasonal storage but the difference in rates of battery degradation.
Suppose a normal discharge cycle costs 10c/kWh and a very deep discharge costs 100c/kWh to access that last 10%. That means there are energy reserves unacceptably expensive for normal operations, but it also means simply operating batteries efficiently automatically creates reserve capacity which is the entire point of dedicated seasonal storage.
Put another way if you design a 1TWh battery for daily use it’s going to have a 0.1TWh reserve capacity just sitting there.
This isn’t a lot of power across a full season, but it address seasonal storage in terms of short term abnormal peaks like heatwaves.
PS: Proponents of seasonal storage argue for seasonal deficits in production rather than short term gaps. However, the daily variability of renewable production promotes significant excess generation capacity.
We can’t predict seasonal demand that accurately so trying to use a finite reserve for anything but outlier events is risky. Plan for a large deficit and the infrastructure you create to fill that reserve is sitting around in the off season reducing the size of your deficit. Plan for a small one and your estimate may be wildly inaccurate.
What’s left for “seasonal storage” is to cover gaps in production from extreme outlier events using surplus production. That is useful, but also largely covered by battery power as I just covered.
Granted if someone comes up with cheap enough seasonal storage it might have a place, but that’s a possibility not a guarantee.
I assume that's for already built solar PV, though it still seems extremely low to me so I'm curious where you are seeing this.
For reference on new build, at the UK government's most recently completed CfD auction (which happened in September), the solar PV bids accepted were at £47/MWh, CPI indexed and specified in 2012 prices: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contracts-for-dif...
Yes, though the fact that it's 2012 prices and indexed to CPI does a lot - that's roughly £65/MWh in current prices. And despite all that it's still cheaper than offshore wind.
You can also look at Spain - the CfDs aren't really comparable since the way CfDs are used there is different but LCOE is probably in the 40s-50s EUR/MWh for new build solar PV. But there are now meaningful curtailment issues in some places due to grid capacity there so developers will probably be working to higher numbers.
Yea, UK solar is still offsetting natural gas so it’s viable.
One issue for significantly higher UK solar production is they use more electricity in the winter. January 2023 was 26 TWh where July 2022 was only 20 TWh which is the opposite of solar’s peaks. https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/electr... (Older reports on bottom)
Yes, and this is when the vast majority of homes are still heated using gas central heating. If we switch away from that to heat pumps+resistive heating in anything like meaningful amounts, this difference will get much more pronounced.
A bit more clarity: right now, and for the rest of this decade just rolling out a lot more renewables will be the cheapest way to replace carbon generating sources which are right now burning and spewing carbon into the atmosphere to generate electricity around the globe.
So, there is a long term need, in order to reach a goal of 100% carbon free electricity (generally set for about 2035) for more on-demand resources (including responsive demand), but it is not the most pressing concern right now. And even when it is, it'll account for a small fraction of the total, like 10% or so.
(Luckily, batteries are gettting rolled out already because they have positive economic value in various niches, like in cars, frequency response, avoiding congestion and network upgrades so the ramp up is looking good)
What’s the plan for African nations pursuing industrialization agendas? My understanding is that wind and solar are too low-density for their tribal permitting environments. I don’t see the win in meeting a 2035 target that makes wildly optimistic assumptions about Africa’s trajectory over the next century if it means underinvesting in sources that will move the planet off coal.
We've used wind for 5000 years when it was available. It just takes a bit more time to wear out the machines if they sit there waiting most of the time.
Someone in Iran told me these are about 3500 years old
that's just America, and its not just nuclear, it's civil engineering & construction projects of all kind that have ballooned in complexity and cost due to myriad political and regulatory causes. France can build reactors cheaply and easily due to standardized reactor designs; I'm not sure the US has ever replicated a reactor build (ie, every reactor is built in a different & unique way)
They can, this one project is just the exception, it was a failure since the start (collaboration between France and Germany, Germany later ditched it in favor of their solar panel projects.. )
Would it be wrong to assume that we're dealing with an Apollo-style issue here (we "no longer have the technology to do it efficiently")? I'm certainly not an expert on nuclear power, but it is a little odd how the average nuclear reactor in the US is 42 years old [1].
It's just the U.S. China, France, and Japan have all successfully built nuclear at scale. I won't be surprised if developing nations in Africa start lapping the U.S. on nuclear power in the next few decades. They certainly have enough Uranium to do so.
Why would they take enormous risks on execution -- huge cost overruns and delays are par for the course with nuclear -- when solar + battery is so much cheaper and quicker?
> And this is a loss, because we need non-variable energy sources to augment wind/solar/tidal.
We need dispatchable energy to complement renewables. Nuclear is on the complete opposite side of the dispatchability equation with high CAPEX and low OPEX.
Like the cancellation exemplifies, even running at 100% nuclear is wholly uncompetitive. Being dispatchable means vastly lowering the utilization rate.
Not exactly. I work as a project manager in the transportation field, and I can tell you that inflation has doubled (or more) the cost of several of my projects in the past few years. Most of the increases can be attributed to rising costs, and not necessarily scope changes.
Combined with limited funding, the projects continue to get delayed.
These are to be mass produced, and shipped to the site. So really, the first few will have cost overruns and delays, but then they should be able to re-use all the tooling, processes, transportation equipment, etc, to get the rest going.
Only the reactor vessel which is probably one of the most expensive parts of the entire project (21%), along with the turbine (18%). Construction, engineering services, structures are probably where the bulk of cost overruns are happening.
There's been some work done on this in the US context (eg [0]) but not really enough. It seems like general large project issues (need to adapt to site specific conditions as they are discovered, difficulty ensuring work stays properly scheduled so that construction workers don't sit idle for large amounts of time, etc.) are a big part, and these are made worse because of the knock on impact when these interact with safety regulations/processes.
There's some hope that making designs smaller and more modular might enable less chance of big overspend at a slightly higher expected cost but that's speculation until we actually do it.
Ultimately, if you're forced to send cluster munitions because your ammo factory is a historically listed building that can't expand to fulfill demand, I think it won't matter how much you cut everything else. You just can't build another ammo factory, so you just don't get to do things.
As a civilization we have been capable of that multiple times in multiple places. Those technologies are not lost. In fact there are now new reactor projects that are simplified from older ones that could be built potentially fast.
People generalize a lot! There are a large variety of nuclear reactors. Even construction projects of the same design vary somewhat.
I wonder why the Navy or Core of Engineers can't make civilian nuclear systems. It arguably would have made us safer as a country to have energy independence by investing dollars in reactors for domestic use instead of for warheads and nuclear submarines.
Because their customer, the US navy, is the world's least price sensitive customer. That does not translate into competitive products on cutthroat markets.
David Roberts from Volts talked about why he thinks SRMs are overhyped last week. Here's the transcript[^0], but his main points are _(I fed the whole transcript to GPT-4-turbo model for this)_:
- SMRs are not yet delivering on their promised benefits and cost savings due to challenges in scaling and production.
- The SMR concept is yet to prove itself with efficient and cost-effective factory-made parts and repeatable construction practices.
- Concern exists that the enthusiasm around SMRs could lead to more unfocused subsidies for the nuclear industry without addressing the industry's deeper issues of inefficiency and historical missteps.
- SMRs are seen as one option among many for balancing renewable energy, and they should not be considered the only solution.
- Their capabilities are mostly theoretical at this stage, and there's uncertainty if they can bridge the gap between their promise and reality in terms of cost and deployment hurdles.
- SMRs might receive undue favor over other equally promising technologies for providing firm power.
In conclusion, David believes SMRs are getting more attention and investment than warranted by their current capabilities and progress, potentially detracting from other solutions that may offer better returns or efficiency for transitioning to a renewable energy grid.
It feels like most of those bullet points, if not all, could be applied to any fledgling new energy source, or actually any new technology in general. I hope there's more to this analysis than just these bullet points
> David believes SMRs are getting more attention and investment than warranted by their current capabilities and progress
Yes, but most of that investment is private. In this country, people are free to choose how to invest their money. A lot of people see nuclear as a promising clean energy source, and they put their money where their mouth is.
Nuclear gets some government subsidies, but much less than solar and wind have received over the last few decades, and continue to receive.
All the other criticisms are so unfair that it's loughable: of course SMR's did not prove themselves: none was built yet. How can that be a valid criticism? Of course their capabilities are mostly theoretical at this stage, for the reason that they are entirely theoretical. Reminder: none was built yet. Of course they have yet to deliver on their promise benefits. Why? None was built yet.
By this logic we should never contemplate building anything new, because something that was not built has yet to deliver on their promised benefits, has mostly theoretical capabilities and did not prove itself yet. Duh.
By Ivan Penn and Brad Plumer
Published Nov. 8, 2023Updated Nov. 9, 2023, 3:42 a.m. ET
A developer of small nuclear reactors announced on Wednesday that it was canceling a project that had been widely expected to usher in a new wave of power plants.
NuScale Power, a company in Portland, Ore., said it lacked enough subscribers to advance the Carbon-Free Power Project, which had been expected to deliver six of the company’s 77-megawatt reactors. Although more than two dozen utilities had signed up to buy electricity from the reactors, which would be in Idaho, that number fell short of what NuScale said it needed to move forward.
The Carbon-Free Power Project was the result of an agreement between NuScale and Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, which supplies electricity to public power providers in seven Western states, including California. The project was first proposed in 2014.
“This decision is very disappointing given the years of pioneering hard work,” said Mason Baker, chief executive of Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems. “We are working closely with NuScale and the U.S. Department of Energy on next steps to wind the project down.”
The decision to cancel the project followed an update from NuScale this year regarding the cost of building the reactors, which had soared to $9.3 billion from $5.3 billion because of rising interest rates and inflation.
NuScale had needed to triple the number of customers for the Carbon-Free Power Project by February. The company, which also has an agreement to deliver its technology to Romania, told investors that it would repurpose materials developed for the Carbon-Free Power Project for other customers.
NuScale’s stock price fell more than 20 percent, to $2.37, in after-hours trading. Its value has declined more than 70 percent in the past 12 months.
>With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however, the project's economics have worsened, and backers started pulling out of the project.
I would expect this to continue limiting investment in nuclear, since the outlook for renewables just keeps getting better, and the stumbling blocks are increasingly jejune, like we can't build powerlines fast enough.
The problem is those prices are wrong; they are pricing the hard thing.
Renewable sells when it wants to, for dirt cheap. And they don't sell when they don't want to. At that point, today, typically natural gas picks up the ball. Other storage is as much in its infancy as SMRs, as is "demand response".
The pricing people compare so favorably isn't pure renewables, it's that renewables + fall back fossil mix.
This is true. And it also highlights what the part I don't understand about these nuclear investments.
Absent massive government subsidies, any nuclear-based solution has to compete against the renewable + fossil mix, which is dramatically cheaper than any nuclear solution. That means any nuclear investments will have to operate in a pretty unfavorable market until renewables reach a saturation point (maybe 50% of energy generation or more.) That point is still somewhere in the future.
It's not clear when that saturation point will arrives (or if it will), but when that happens today's nuclear investors will also have to "bet" that storage costs won't have dropped to the point where storage eats a big chunk of the market for nuclear generation. And finally: in the course of taking this risky long term bet, nuclear manufacturers will have to build out huge amounts of manufacturing capacity so they can actually meet market demand.
Anyway, the whole thing seems like a pretty risky bet. Maybe not such a risky bet if the technology was mature, but very risky given the fact that storage is relatively mature and basically needs a lot of manufacturing and process tweaks to wipe out the benefits of nuclear.
Renewables have a lumpy profile of energy provided. Nuclear has a flat profile.
But demand is also lumpy, so the issues of matching supply to load are basically identical.
What do you think France uses all the gas on its grid for? Why do they have excess electricity in the middle of the night that they need to tempt people to use domestically or export to other countries?
My understanding is that newer nuclear is better and ramping up and down? Perhaps SMRs can also help with this too? (e.g. turning on and off individual SMRs as a sort of "dithering".)
I am still very confused how power will be generated cleanly on cloudy, no-wind days with solar and wind. I am hopeful that hydrogen can be generated in the desert and moved by hydrogen-truck. Or grid-scale batteries actually exist someday. But if we write off nuclear, a lot of coal and natural gas will be burned.
> I am still very confused how power will be generated cleanly on cloudy, no-wind days with solar and wind.
You are making it harder by adding that "cleanly" requirement, because the simple answer is going to be "natural gas". Unlike coal or nuclear, natural gas power plants are fast to start and stop (hydroelectric is even faster, but depends on favorable geography), so they can be left powered down (using no fuel) until they're necessary; and both overbuilding wind and solar, and spreading them over a wider area, can reduce the amount of time where that natural gas (or hydroelectric) backup is necessary.
By requiring a perfect solution (100% clean), you are excluding the 90% solution which is already possible, and which can be incrementally enhanced to get closer and closer to that 100% goal (by adding more wind and solar, by strengthening the interconnections so the generation is spread over a wider area, by sprinkling a bit of storage like batteries or reversible hydroelectric, and even by dynamically reducing consumption when there's a generation shortage).
Reversible hydro is actually pretty possible in much of the world, particularly the US, because all you need is something bowl-shaped at a high elevation. Pumped hydro for the most part needs storage measured in hours or days, and something like the size of Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam is overkill.
It's also more advantageous than regular hydro, because it does not need to be in the path of flowing water, so you avoid issues with silting up, lack of suitable locations, it's much less environmentally destructive, etc.
The problem with this 90% solution is that the more renewables are added, the more natural gas capacity is required to cover the capacity. Good problem for the natural gas industry.
Going clean with nuclear isn’t cheap right now, and it shouldn’t be. It wasn’t at the start of renewables when solar was expensive.
There already is a massive amount of natural gas generating capacity. But if this capacity is used one tenth as much as it is currently used it will only use one tenth as much natural gas and will last much longer.
> The problem with this 90% solution is that the more renewables are added, the more natural gas capacity is required to cover the capacity.
That can be the case only if the demand also increases. If the demand stays the same, adding more wind and solar can only decrease how much the natural gas power plants are used, and the required capacity (that is, how much they can produce at full power) either stays the same or decreases (if the newly added wind and solar are non-correlated enough to reduce the chance of all of them "going dark" at the same time).
or if existing plants shut down, for example coal and nuclear plants
they are in fact shutting down in many cases because they can't compete with renewables, and the result is that more grid-scale storage or peaker capacity (or demand response!) is needed
but this is a good kind of problem to have, if you replace 900 megawatts (produced) of coal with 400 megawatts (produced, not nameplate) of solar and 500 megawatts of gas, you've still cut carbon emissions by two thirds, and lowered electricity prices at the same time
Indeed, and EV's batteries will become more and more significant ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ), as will the clean backup provided by green hydrogen (obtained thanks to electricity overproduced by renewables, then fed to turbo-alternators during periods of insufficient production).
funded by backdoor taxes if texas is any indication. Prop 7 passed, which is basically just shifting the cost of grid reliability from the energy companies to the tax payers. So now you get to pay top dollar for the energy which is 50%+ carbon sources, while also paying to keep the plants operating from the general budget.
It’s possible to build mostly renewable grids today with existing technology without nuclear. For example Marin Clean Energy generates over 90% of its energy from carbon free sources [1].
Storage and batteries are the key. Although lithium ion has limitations in the use case of long term discharge and storage, new chemistries are becoming commercially available that are appropriate for grid scale power. Iron Air batteries are made out of cheap, common materials, can discharge for up to 100 hours and can store power for long periods of time. Form Energy is building a plant in West Virginia that will produce these batteries and will open in 2024 [2].
Renewables are getting increasingly cheaper. Storage is increasingly more available. The writing is on the wall. Renewables are going to win out and it’s going to happen much sooner than conventional wisdom says.
1. These are conditions that don't coincidence as often as one would think
2. If they do happen at the same time they are limited to certain places
Now the only thing you need to have your solar and wind installations not in one place and make sure it is unlikely enough to have all of them inoperational at once.
If you have the proper energy storage and a big enough grid that can balance itself this is totally doable.
Deserts don't tend to have much water, so where do you expect to get the hydrogen from? Getting water to the desert takes a pile of energy as it is, and typically once it gets there people want to turn it into plants.
Deserts all have way more humidity than you could ever need for your hydrogen production. Extracting hydrogen from atmospheric water vapor is a win because it is cleaner than ground water, and has already been vaporized.
you can use the hydrogen an arbitrarily large number of times once you get it there, and the amount of water needed is so small that this is not a major part of the cost of a grid-scale storage system system even if you have to truck it in, which you don't because even deserts have groundwater
please do the math instead of posting random bullshit without respect to whether it's true or not
specifically hydrogen is 142 MJ/kg
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
and is 1/9 of water by mass, so each kg of water you drill, truck in, or collect from cisterns can store 15.8 MJ as hydrogen. a square meter of 21% efficient pv panel produces 210 watts nameplate, or 52 watts derating for the 25% capacity factor typical for deserts. that is 4.5 MJ per day. the water needed to store the panel's daily production weighs much less than the panel itself and is therefore much cheaper to truck in
obviously it would be stupid to truck it back out again unless you decided to do your grid-scale storage somewhere else
gravity batteries and geothermal are too expensive to be competitive, except in the niches of pumped hydro, district heating, very polar regions, and stranded assets from before pv and wind got so cheap
Incidentally, the only viable gravity batteries known today are pumped hydro reservoirs. On the up side, they only need a hill. On the down side, they need a hill.
(Gravity Vault, BTW, is 100% scam.)
Suspending weights from ocean platforms (e.g. scrapped supertankers), for flat places with deep sea nearby, should be a viable alternative, but it has not been done yet. Deep cave systems are another, either draining water into them or (for those below the water table) pumping air in. There are a lot of deep caves.
Yes, and it's already done today; for instance, in Brazil these high power transmission lines transport wind power from the northeast region (which has lots of wind due to favorable geography) to the southeast region (where most of the electricity consumption is). The total distance is on the order of 2000 km.
(A fun fact: many of these high power transmission lines were originally to send power from the hydroelectric power plants in the southeast region to the water-starved northeast region. With the rapid expansion of wind power in the northeast region, the usual direction of the flow has reversed, and it's not uncommon for that wind power to provide over a quarter of the power for the whole country.)
Because the Jones Act of 1920 prevents use of the existing European installation ships so they have to start from scratch in uncompetitive American shipyards.
this is just one of many factors, and one that was understood by oersted when they originally started the project; the article mentions others that are more relevant
in particular, you should expect to see many, many cancelled projects across the entire economy with the interest rate hikes the usa put in place
you're confusing the northeast of brazil, which is what cesar was talking about, with the northeast of the usa
these are not just in different countries but in vastly different climates in different hemispheres
the exact page you linked in your comment literally answers your question: 'due to problems with supply chains, higher interest rates and a failure to obtain the amount of tax credits the company wanted. ... High inflation, supply chain disruptions and the rising cost of capital and building materials are making projects more expensive while developers are trying to get the first large U.S. offshore wind farms opened.'
maybe you should have read it
please don't post random bullshit without respect to whether it's true or not
It’s strange because wind is supposedly overwhelmingly cheaper and better, yet even with tons of government subsidies and political will behind it, it still can’t be built. Wouldn’t something truly more cost effective be easy to build because it’s cheaper? Clearly something doesn’t add up.
> It’s strange because wind is supposedly overwhelmingly cheaper and better
There's two kinds of wind power: onshore and offshore. Their costs are different, with onshore being cheaper. The ones in Brazil are all onshore, while the one in the article you linked to is offshore. In the USA, offshore is even more complicated because of the Jones Act (it needs specialized ships to transport and erect the structures, while onshore needs only common cranes).
obviously enough, numerous projects that are profitable when you can finance them at 1% become unprofitable when you have to finance them at 6%, particularly when you're competing with incumbent assets financed at 1%
There are mild externalities assumed and feared about offshore wind, despite it being pretty good in a multitude of ways. States are playing a dumb game, because we would be better off if there was lots of offshore wind, but each state individually is better off having offshore wind SOMEWHERE ELSE.
For example, here in maine, our premier engineering school has spent two decades now being a premier wind energy investment and research institution, and we have minted hundreds and hundreds of trained people into the field, yet our Democrat governor still decided to sign a bill that bans offshore wind, something that Orono has explicitly invested into for years.
Our state desperately needs new generation to bring power costs down, but there's no real incentive for anyone to do so (why build new supply to bring down your own revenue?) and apparently the state government has zero interest to help itself there.
Ignore the sibling comment, it is definitely possible, typically via HVDC transmission. With 3% losses per 1000km, HVDC transmission of variable renewable energy is absolutely part of our future energy systems.
Wind is especially well suited to this - to a certain extent it's always windy SOMEWHERE whereas with solar you ain't generating any at night, no matter what.
Sun Cable, formerly known as PowerLink, is an ambitious idea that involves sending solar power via an undersea cable 4,200 kilometers (2,610 miles) from Darwin, Australia, to Singapore.
No, because of physics you lose more power the longer distance it travels. It is also very expensive and difficult to build a network that can move power great distances to where it's needed given how dense the areas that need it are (major cities).
You can certainly get it to places closer, then shift those areas' power to farther away places, etc.
China has a large network of HVDC lines. Unfortunately, due to how the Chinese power market works, they're mostly underutilized, even in times of high power stress.
I would call that a minor hurdle. There's actually no shortage of unused land. Or roofs. And agrivoltaics (combining solar with farming) is a thing. And wind turbines and farms are a common combination as well. And we have off shore wind, and floating offshore wind. Which you can combine with solar. Floating solar to limit evaporation in hydro basins is also a thing.
As an electrical engineer I have to sadly inform you that electricity transport is not free. Transporting electricity from those places to the places with populations is overall inefficient.
So the best place for a solar panel is right next to were the energy is needed (provided there is at least some sun).
Solar installations in deserts could still be a thing if you are willing to think it differently (e.g. use the energy for desalination and to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, transport that hydrogen via container ship etc).
So the solar panels will have dust and extremely harsh temperature cycles. I don't have any source on that, but I don't think the gained efficiency from the hot sun is going to outweigh the pain (and efficiency loss) from maintaining that efficiency in such an environment.
typically desert solar farms have higher capacity factors, like 25% to 29%, than non-desert solar farms, which are typically more like 20%, or 10% in very polar countries like the uk, germany, or the netherlands; possibly faster degradation will eventually reverse the relationship
but, for the time being, the gained efficiency from the hot sun does seem to outweigh the efficiency loss
as an ai language model, i cannot feel pain, so i do not know what outweighs it
Their data source suggests that rooftop solar, onshore and offshore wind and nuclear are basically tied on that metric so not sure what problem you're seeing?
Is it the ground mounted grid solar? I'm sure some countries will happily trade extra land use for much cheaper energy.
no because even though pv uses orders of magnitude more land per megawatt (not per megawatt hour; please get your units straight) it still uses two orders of magnitude less land than is available
please do the math instead of posting random bullshit without any regard to whether or not it is true
> A crude calculation (earthradius_equatorial^2 * pi * (1000 W/m^2) * 1 year in units(1) --- gosh, Unix is great!) suggests that the total solar energy falling on the earth is about 40000 * 10^20 joules per year.
... that's not a good approximation. There's someone who actually has done less crude math for maximum possible solar energy, at least for the UK: https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml (though the HTML version is somewhat annoying because it's still paginated as if it were a book). Spoiler alert: it's roughly enough energy to cover total transportation energy demand, nowhere near total energy demand in the UK.
you would look much less foolish if you read more than just the introduction to my notes; i did a great deal more math than that
while i appreciate mackay's calculations a great deal, his estimates for very polar countries such as the uk are not generally applicable, and even for the uk are probably conditioned on overly pessimistic assumptions; he would undoubtedly agree if he were alive today
in particular, he assumed (reasonably) that 10%-efficient solar panels would be much cheaper than 20%-efficient ones, which would remain impractically expensive. but in fact most solar farms are being built with 21%-efficient panels because they're nearly as cheap as the 16%-efficient kind, and the 10%-efficient kind has been competed out of the market. so mackay's excellent calculations are all too low by more than a factor of 2, because one of his reasonable assumptions turned out to be wrong
but i do think it's plausible that without wind the uk would have to continue importing energy from abroad, as it has done since the 19th century, unless it goes nuclear. because mackay was aware his estimates for very polar countries such as the uk were not generally applicable, importing solar energy from abroad was in fact what he recommended in the chapter you linked but evidently didn't bother to read
> you would look much less foolish if you read more than just the introduction to my notes; i did a great deal more math than that
Perhaps, but I see nothing in your post that actually corrects for effective solar irradiation on Earth, or for the fact that half the Earth's surface is by definition not receiving any sunlight at any given time, or for the fact that most of the Earth is water and not land (although I suppose you dropping the 4 from the multiplier for the surface area is meant to account for that). In other words, at no point did I see anything that took into account the error I pointed out.
you didn't point out any errors; maybe you noticed one and forgot to mention it. please let me know if so
if you're interested in taking the capacity factor into account, which accounts for things like night, clouds, and oblique illumination, a number of my other notes in https://dercuano.github.io/topics/solar.html (linked from the bottom of my above-linked note) do that; for example in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/japan-energy-autarky.html i calculated that energy autarky for japan, if purely solar, would require 5% of its land area and about 1.7 trillion euros of solar modules, taking into account all of those factors as well as panel efficiency. since then, the price has dropped by more than a factor of 2, but the land area required remains about the same, or slightly increased
(floating that 5% of their land area on solar barges off the coast, instead of occupying precious land area, is also clearly feasible; it just isn't economically competitive, much like nuclear power)
of course, the real-life solution also involves wind and grid-scale storage
perhaps it goes without saying that very few places are as densely populated or as heavily industrialized as japan, so much smaller fractions of their land area would suffice
i suggest learning the basics of the field, so you can do a modicum of critical thinking, instead of parroting talking points from thought leaders, without any idea of what it would mean for them to be true or false
you can and should use 'per megawatt produced' rather than 'per megawatt nameplate capacity' when comparing things like solar to things like nuclear
but intermittency is irrelevant to basic incommensurability of units; neither nuclear nor solar uses more and more land over time to produce a constant amount of power, which is what 'land per megawatt hour' implies
But why build them in Darlington, when there's a big grid that could make use of new CANDU reactors, for which most of the supply chain is from Canada and its higher energy output makes it more competitive?
One of the perks of building them in Darlington is that the regulatory approval process is simpler since there's already nuclear facilities on site. Saskatchewan is currently going through the site selection and approval process and will be doing that for a while while the BWRX-300 units are going up in Darlington. The build in Darlington and lessons learned will be applied directly to the SK BWRX-300 builds.
Also much more interested in BWRX300 as well. Old and proven working technology fine tuned. And will continue to get cheaper as they are much more standardised.
I'm so glad I left the nuclear industry thirteen years ago!
I worked in nuclear power for about eight years. I felt like I was taking crazy pills. There's a strong vein of cognitive dissonance running through the industry relating to its economic viability. Nuclear power has always been the most expensive available energy production method. So every time I hear talking heads say "nuclear power is the only power production method that can be built fast enough to address climate change" my blood starts to boil. Every nuclear power plant in history has been pitched as "sure it's stupid expensive up front, but the power it produces will be too cheap to meter". And then they cost 5x as much and take 5x as long as predicted to be built and also cost more than predicted to operate. But the next generation won't have any of the problems that all previous generations had? It's like listening to silicon valley people rave about AI or humanoid robots or driverless cars. "Sure, the past six generations didn't deliver what they promised, don't worry about that, don't think about that, the next one is going to be amazing!"
>Why do areas with nuclear power around the world have cheaper than average electricity costs, then?
Frankly it's because much of the cost of nuclear energy is not labelled "electricity costs" and is instead paid for using general taxes from current and future taxpayers. In the US the defence budget covers some of it for example.
NuScale still needed to get costs down by $700 M to reach the promised $89/MWh. Without that, it would be $105/MWh. This is also after federal subsidies.
"GM Prairie said that the CFPP would need to come down by 55% to be competitive with the market."
"CFPP is not inflation protected because cost increases above projections are borne by the developer which is UAMPS and its members in the project."
"GM Prairie commented that he has been to many meetings recently, including CFPP sales meetings and notices that utilities are still not subscribing, but instead wishing the project well. He said it was his opinion that even if the project gets to $89 LCOE and 80% subscribed by November, that it still is not an attractive deal for Idaho Falls [...]."
"GM Prairie [...] pointed out that all the big utilities have left the project but the smaller utilities stay in because they are trusting UAMPS."
"GM Prairie said [...] that the $89 LCOE is based on 40-50 modules being sold."
"GM Prairie said the UAMPS’ resolution states that the project has to come in/or under $89 LCOE and be subscribed at least by 80% and if UAMPS fails to do that, then just one member of the PMC can vote to terminate the project."
note that 89 dollars per megawatt hour is three to five times what solar energy usually costs
as i have said before, if small modular reactors were cheaper energy sources than diesel engines, they would power every ship in the navies of the usa, france, the uk, russia, and china, instead of just the aircraft carriers, some of the submarines, and a few other russian ships
(and note that diesel engines are too expensive to compete with solar and wind)
one day nuclear energy will be cheaper than solar and wind, but for now the humans' manufacturing is too primitive
Exactly. All these numbers are based on the current/past market and a very broken assumption that LCOE of competing technology (renewables + storage) won't continue to drop further. Which of course they are projected to do; and not just a little. And of course that already actually happened and was widely predicted to happen years ago.
Also the numbers of these plants would need to be massively higher to be significant. 40-50 plants is tiny a feasibility study. That study has now been cancelled for cost reasons.
You'd need many thousands to make these start contributing significant percentages of market share to overall energy production. Tens of thousands really. Which of course at a high LCOE is never going to be competitive. Basically the "value" proposition to investors is to be selling these things at a massive loss using government subsidies to make that tolerable for whomever is buying. This has to be sustained until the learning effects drive the LCOE low enough that making them actually stands a chance of turning a profit. And of course there are no guarantees that the LCOE will actually ever catch up with renewables. Small chance of success & high chance of failure that requires decades of sustained massive investments and massive subsidies. All with a high degree of uncertainty.
That's not a great investor pitch of course. Which is why they are bailing. There seem to be a few other projects still going. But they'll have to face the same realities eventually.
The US has actually tried small nuclear reactors before… “All components limited to packages measuring 7.5 by 9 by 20 feet (2.3 m × 2.7 m × 6.1 m) and weighing 20,000 pounds (9,100 kg)”
It's also why I'm doubly sceptical of fusion, and really annoyed when it's presented as a solution we'll have "soon". Even if a breakthrough was invented tomorrow that made fusion actually work, it would still require building a massive number of fusion plants, and building them cheaper than renewables+batteries.
> No one has done more to harm the environment than environmentalists that advocate against nuclear power.
I mean we all learn from our mistakes, I surely was against nuclear power when I was young but I think for ok reasons. Now the world is in a worse spot than it was so I changed my mind a little. Still, it's silly to pretend that that caused more "harm to the environment".
that may be historically true, but today you can build much more KW of solar+batteries than KW of nuclear for the same price. Continuing to advocate for nuclear is throwing away money that could be spent on the green transition.
Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode on nuclear October 23:
> The US is taking a fresh look at nuclear power. After a dearth of construction, and de-commissioning of working nuclear plants, people are talking, yet again, about it as a source of steady, affordable, carbon-free electricity. But of course, nuclear has its drawbacks, particularly on the financial side, as new plants have been plagued by cost over-runs, contributing to utility bankruptcies. So what would need to happen to get the economics working again? On this episode we speak with Mark Nelson, the founder of Radiant Energy Group, to discuss the state of the industry, the state of the technology, and what it would take to bring nuclear back into the mix.
Can someone explain the appeal of =small= nuclear reactors to me? Are the manufacturing cost savings the article cites really that much of a game changer?
I'd love to see us use more nuclear power. I would think =large= power plants would be more efficient though, and would save on things like personnel, security and regulatory costs.
I feel like the biggest risks to a nuclear power plant are the tiny chances for catastrophic failure -- terrorism, earthquakes, tsunamis and human error.
Having 50x these plants seeded close to population centers seems like it would make it more difficult to protect against these risks. I would also imagine most projects would face NIMBY resistance, which would lead to lots of lawyer fees and lengthy permitting timelines if they even get off the ground. What am I missing?
There's a certain amount of difficulty in making a nuclear reactor, so going from zero to one (of your specific design of reactor) is going to be very hard. In order for that one to work, there's going to be a ton of mistakes and learning, and after all that, you have one working, very expensive power plant. But because you put your eggs all in one basket, that's basically all you can build for the next few decades. There's no going from 1 -> 10. there's no money, no political will to, and no demand for it, the one plant is just so big.
If instead we concentrate on going from 1 -> 10 by building multiple smaller reactors, we get good at building them, and we're forced to productize it just a little bit. Make the machine that makes the machine, as it were. After proving 1 -> 10, then going from 10 -> 100 becomes possible; viable, so other people and places that need it can get one, affordably (well, relatively).
Some years ago it looked like the future of small reactors might be so-called pebble bed modular reactors (PBMR). I wonder what ever happened to them. IIRC the most salient outstanding issue seemed to be that there way no clear way to handle a graphite fire.
This was the poster child for conservative/regressive political forces in Australia. The leader of the Liberal Party (that's Economic Liberalism, but the opposite of social liberalism), Peter Dutton, has been talking up Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), as has Murdoch's "Sky News" (think Fox) and right-wing think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (think "mouthpiece for mining billionaires").
The Liberal Party had government from 2013 to 2022, and there was nary a peep out of them about nuclear power. The fact of the matter is that it's not economic for Australia to build one of these, for $40 billion, with an estimated delivered cost per MWh of AU$130 (IIRC) when renewables already cost only about $30 per MWh and we have abundant sunshine and wind in Australia.
The essence of the right-wing plan is to latch on to a technology that will take a decade or two to come to fruition, to hold back the renewable tide, so that fossil fuel companies can continue to rake in the profits.
There is that small sentence in this report, which basically should end any discussions and disagreements about a come-back of nuclear power:
"With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however, the project's economics have worsened."
No matter if you disregard the problem of storing nuclear waste for a couple thousand years, and disregard that no insurance company in the world will give you insurance for your project, and that from time to time you may cause parts of your country to become uninhabitable, etc etc - it simply longer matters.
You just can't beat renewables when it comes to long-term cost. Because they are... well, ...renewable.
In Germany, even with the conservative parties spreading FUD and sabotaging projects, we are now covering 50% of our power usage with renewables. Even the worst politics simply could not beat capitalism: Wind and sun provided for free by the Universe simply makes a good business case.
Over here, the biggest challenge now is that the NIMBYs are preventing new power transmission lines to get built to be able to distribute from where there is most renewable energy, the north, to where the biggest power consumption is, in the south. If we would quickly build this grid, we could be at 100% renewables in a couple of years.
In Germany, Bavaria is NIMBY heaven. They refuse to invest into the grid, wanted to keep running nuclear, but absolutely refused to have nuclear waste storage in their state. Instead they pushed for the states that have 0% nuclear to take their waste.
Also, in Germany the power market is regulated that the price must be the same in all parts of Germany. This is why the north is now finally starting to raise their voices because they are subsidizing the expensive nuclear from Bavaria. If we'd just cut the grid and disconnect Bavaria, our energy prices would instantly drop by 30%.
Given all that, the tendency in the US of "We want to burn more coal! We want to burn more oil! We want to burn everything we have (with the exception of our forests, they are burning down on their own now)!" from a distance really starts to look silly. Where does that strong desire of having to BURN stuff come from? ;)
Nothing has changed since the early days. A helluva complicated and expensive way to boil water.
"At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy … This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe." — C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951. ( Ref: Power from the Atom - An Appraisal, Nucleonics, Feb. 1951 )
It’s important to remember that research and commercial funding for nuclear reactors has basically frozen for the better part of 60 years, which means that fission tech hasn’t been following Wright’s law and we’re still stuck with designs from 60 years ago. Things have heated up a bit more recently but this stuff has a long lead time (+ think of all the people who didn’t go into nuclear because of the lack of funding).
There’s actually lines of research to do direct conversion of energy instead of boiling water which gets efficiency up to ~90% instead of 40%. But the challenge with fission isn’t fuel conversion efficiency but manufacturing and maintenance costs. I wonder if getting rid of the water requirements for fission reactors would meaningfully alter the costs involved. Would be neat if it would.
But ultimately fission is still price competitive with renewables and that’s when you ignore the need for batteries and the fact that it’s taken a lot of investment in renewables paired with underinvestment in fission.
> (...) there is mounting evidence that the polysilicon produced in Xinjiang, the first step in the supply chain for solar photovoltaics, possibly uses forced labor. (...)
> Another major problem is that there is limited visibility into the actual conditions under which polysilicon is produced. In part, this is because Xinjiang is inaccessible, so it is hard to get verifiable facts on the working conditions inside factories. Much of the incredible research that has brought this topic to the surface has involved inference and triangulation.
this was two years ago; is there more reliable information since then?
Lots was dumped into known low-effectiveness light water fission precisely because it is not a viable path for making weapons.
There are many more efficient ways of running nuclear power, especially ones that do not involve either needing enrichement of fuel nor throwing away majority of still usable fuel - but despite NPT, they are blocked politically by nuclear-haves.
Can't edit anymore, but for reference for those who probably downvote out of misunderstanding.
Light water moderated reactors aren't a pathway to making nuclear weapons, because they require that you have the ability to enrich uranium separately just to start.
I.e. a light-water moderated reactor is dependant either on capability to enrich fuel and/or use unenriched fuel (for enrichment or plutonium production) - which are core capabilities for making fission weapons.
This is why they have been favoured on non-proliferation (and often "control") grounds - they are dependant on fuel from groups that do have fission weapon production pipeline or at least parts of it.
To work from natural uranium, without artificial enrichment, you need to use either heavy-water moderation or graphite moderation, or more exotic designs - but then you can both use unenriched uranium to produce power as well as produce plutonium or other useful things, and a distillation pipeline provides for both light-water reactor fuel and weapon fissile material.
Details of how subsidies went are way more complex, and both renewables and nuclear and fossil fuels had areas heavily subsidized.
It's true that light water reactors are not a good way to make plutonium for weapons. I disagree that designs running on natural uranium fuel (moderated by graphite or heavy water) are more efficient. Even countries that already have nuclear weapons and are beyond non-proliferation fears, like China, Russia, and the UK, don't build new power reactors moderated with heavy water or graphite.
Reactors using unenriched uranium can be more fuel-efficient in terms of electrical output per ton of natural uranium consumed, but they're not more cost-efficient. High project cost is the number one problem that impedes nuclear construction while fuel cost is almost negligible. Keep in mind that Canada's newest CANDU, Darlington 4, started construction in 1986; if you're comparing its costs to a light water reactor then you should also use mid-1980s costs for those and not e.g. the high costs for more recent EPR or AP1000 reactors. Building a new CANDU in Canada today would also cost more than it did in the 1980s.
My point was more specifically about push to use only light water moderated reactors, and yes for various reasons those were generally done even among nuclear armed states (because you want to keep certain things close and because an LWR can be sold elsewhere).
However I'd argue that in terms of total lifespan costs the increased waste production of LWRs is considerable portion of perceived costs - essentially the long-term storage fears vs burn down in fast reactors etc. Plus the focus on LWRs ensured that research in more capable designs was stiffled.
Do not take this "rah rah nuclear best renewables suck" though. Though I'd be very interested in how costs would go if we taxed/penalized emissions do the max
- essentially, I consider every new fossil fuel plant, including gas backup for renewables, to be a policy failure. My personal dream is overprovisioning with nuclear and renewables and instead of curtailment try to funnel extra power into other, previously uneconomical things (replacement of coal in smelting with actual green hydrogen, stuff like that)
Fast reactors can theoretically reduce the amount of waste that needs to go to long term disposal, but those are even rarer than graphite or heavy water moderated reactors. They're also even more expensive. I believe that there are currently only two fast power reactors in operation, both Russian (BN-600 and BN-800).
I agree with you that it would have been (still would be) better to have emissions taxes penalizing pollution from fossil fuels instead of technology-specific incentives and subsidies for the various kinds of fossil alternatives. I live near a nuclear power plant and I have no problem with its track record of safety or emissions. I do think nuclear power has a major cost and scheduling problem for new projects and I'm not sure how that can be overcome. SMR projects like this one that Utah just canceled were the latest great hope for taming those issues.
In 1951 the Hanford reactors were making plutonium, not power. Only one of the Hanford reactors sold electricity, and not until the middle of the 1960s. That one went over budget to construct but operating costs were well under predictions. I'm not sure Mr. Suits had enough information in 1951 to make his claim authoritative seventy years later.
That project isn’t finished they are targeting 2026 and hope it’s only ~10% over budget.
Your solar numbers are wildly inflated because that’s per watt not per watt hour. Over 2/3 of nuclear power plants costs occur after you build the things. It would be comparable if 22B was the total cost and if nuclear didn’t need ~1,000 full time employees, fuel, decommissioning etc. Those costs delay how quickly you can pay back loans which then drives up how much interest nuclear pays over the plants lifetime.
Companies have signed solar power purchase contracts at 2c/kWh. Adding solar redundancy and batteries for 24/7 power is actually more flexible and cheaper than nuclear because you can cheaply follow the demand curve. Meanwhile nuclear power plants need to go offline for multiple weeks every ~2 years and really want to sit at 100% the rest of the time.
PS: Even just looking at construction costs is misleading because solar starts producing power so much sooner. You’re paying interest from day 1 of construction not day 1 of operations. So if you take 6 years to build that’s 5 years of interest on the first years construction costs without any revenue. Meanwhile solar’s been producing power for ~5 years and paying down debt.
i just noticed that you're linking a page about panel prices
two problems
one, pv modules are typically about a third of the cost of a utility-scale solar farm; things like installation labor and power electronics are also part of the cost. so roughly we should expect solar projects to cost about 80 cents per peak watt based on that number
solarserver's 'low-cost' category is at the staggeringly low price of 11 euro-cents per peak watt; if the other costs didn't change, that would lower the solar plant cost from 80 cents to 65 cents or so per peak watt, though in fact they tend to increase somewhat because of the larger area of solar cells required to reach the same wattage (that's why the mainstream pv modules are more expensive)
a third problem is the capacity factor, tho; nuke plants typically run at about 90% capacity, while solar farms run at closer to 20%, because of problems such as night. in very polar countries like germany it's 10%. so 70 cents per nameplate watt works out to more like 3.5 dollars per delivered watt
which is still cheaper than 4.9 (or 5.4 dollars per delivered watt assuming that 90% capacity factor) but not implausibly cheaper anymore
if solar farm builders can find ways to reduce the costs of solar farms proportionately to the vertiginous drop in module prices, which sounds implausible but has always been done successfully before, we should expect the price to drop to half that
German solar policies are insane. Nation wide capacity factor was 11.6% in 2018. The numbers are so low because they keep building solar in the northern parts of the country which are absolutely terrible for solar.
Meanwhile the best location in Germany the south southern tip of Baden-Württemberg only has a relatively small fraction of their total installed solar. I haven’t worked out the exact numbers but they are something like 20+% less efficient than they could be. Granted they would need to build more power transmission lines but it’s a small county so such projects would be fairly cheap compared to the efficiency gain.
PS: May solar power plants on the US are over 30% capacity factor and the average is ~25%. We’re a long way from the equator. In a perfect location solar tracking PV should get around 40% capacity factor. You beat 1/pi because over the day an angled panel casts a wider shadow than the width of the panel.
i've often wondered why germany's pv capacity factor is so terrible, thanks
prc's pv capacity factor is also around 10% last i checked, which is also absurdly low and suggests that they maybe aren't as capitalist as they seem in important respects (i'd be interested in updates)
by 'may' do you mean 'many'
it was easier to justify solar tracking (and concentrating solar, and nuclear) fifteen years ago when solar panels are expensive. but now you have to trade off twenty dollars in mechanical parts for tracking against 180 more peak watts of solar panels. with maintenance costs it's easy for the balance to come out in favor of a simpler system without tracking
Grid scale tracking systems keep getting cheaper but neither always wins.
Solar tracking makes more sense when you look at wholesale rates over a day. Peak demand prices start right as static solar production falls off so you would need batteries not just more solar panels to sell at those rates. On top of this costs like land, inverters, and wiring gets amaorterised across more hours of production.
Wholesale prices get influenced by the deployed solar power including rooftop solar. Which adds yet another dimension to these models.
if peak demand prices are so predictable maybe you could just angle the panels a bit to the west when you install them instead of maintaining a bunch of motors
keep in mind that almost all the cost of pv plants is construction (capex), while most of the cost of nuclear is during operation and decommissioning (opex)
so 20 cents per watt capex is close to 60 cents per watt total, twice the price of pv
as emmaengineer pointed out, though, you did the division backwards: it's 0.20 watts per dollar, not 0.20 dollars per watt. the correct quotient is 490¢ per watt, or maybe closer to 15 dollars per watt including opex
>The final straw came on Wednesday, when NuScale and the primary utility partner, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, announced that the Carbon Free Power Project no longer had enough additional utility partners
I cannot help but to think the Fossil Fuel Industry had their hands in this.
No, it turns out that SMRs are not yet economically viable, just as us skeptics have been claiming. SMRs are continually hyped by the pro-nuclear crowd online. They aren't cost efficient vs renewables.
Nuclear tech hasn't had a luxury of having renewables-like subsidies though.
Who knows what the prices could have been had nuclear got the same level of subsidies.
Nuclear energy (especially fast neutron tech that can use the abundant U-238 and nuclear waste from existing NPPs) isn't getting attention it deserves. Only Russia, China and India are investing in it, but it's neglected in the West because there is no immediate profit to gain from this.
nuclear tech had the biggeet subsidies program in human history in the 01940s and 50s, continuing to a significant extent into the 80s, which is how the humans got it in the first place
some historians argue that subsidizing nuclear tech too heavily was a major factor in the collapse of the ussr
And after those subsidies stopped, the progress of nuclear power also stopped, naturally. If the subsidies continued, we could have had scalable, sustainable and affordable nuclear.
I believe that Renewables should be subsidized, and current progress is great, but total decarbonization is easier to realistically achieve together with nuclear energy.
If you support renewables, you don’t have to be anti-nuclear at all.
agreed about being anti-nuclear. probably it is not in the interest of life forms made of atoms to be anti-nuclear
it's plausible that further subsidies could have made nuclear power cheap. the long pole in the tent seems to be the cost of the steam turbine generator, though, which isn't cost-competitive with pv even if the heat to make the steam is free. this is after a century of improvements, and the steam turbine is the main electric power source of every rich economy in the world and most of the poor ones. so i'm not sure a few trillion dollars more in subsidies would change that
>the long pole in the tent seems to be the cost of the steam turbine generator
And yet some "renewables-only" people want to rely on gas turbines for the times of unfavorable weather conditions.
And, the turbines are still more efficient (46% efficiency with modern Siemens turbines), and the heat that isn't going into the turbine steam can still be used elsewhere, like for district heating or for industrial purposes, which makes the overall system very high yield.
In comparison, photovoltaics is currently at 20% efficiency. Wind is at 60% but it's quite intermittent and unpredictable.
the efficiency of photovoltaics and wind is only relevant here if you're powering them from stored energy, such as white-hot graphite blocks, rather than from the sun. or in the far future when human energy consumption has grown by two orders of magnitude
gas turbines are only 'renewables-only' if you make the gas from renewable energy
>gas turbines are only 'renewables-only' if you make the gas from renewable energy
There are ways to make hydrocarbons from atmospheric carbon (using any energy, including renewable) but that is nightmarishly inefficient. Anti-nuclear people's plan though is to use good ol' fossil gas for the times when the weather is unsuitable for renewables.
>the efficiency of photovoltaics and wind is only relevant here if
Agreed, you can disregard its efficiency if the source energy is free.
Fission energy is so high yield that it's also basically free, just like the Sun or wind, with the difference of being able to increase/decrease production on demand. It's the infrastructure to extract that energy that costs money, and those costs could be improved with proper R&D, investments, subsidies and economies of scale, just like with renewables.
I do believe nuclear is the part of the Solution together with renewables. At least we will need nuclear before solar extraction and storage are so advanced that they can power the grid all the time by themselves. Yes, that future is certainly is not very far away, but we can't afford much time to start decarbonizing.
i wouldn't call that 'nightmarishly inefficient', particularly if you can do it at hours when electricity prices would otherwise be zero or negative because of abundant solar or wind power
It's only to get hydrogen, also there is cost to make it liquid, to store it (it's neither trivial nor cheap) and to extract energy from it in fuel cells.
>i don't know how efficient carbon dioxide reduction is
If we want to capture carbon from atmosphere and turn it back into hydrocarbon fuel like gas or diesel, thus achieving net zero emissions, that process is still "nightmarishly inefficient". There is a startup that I'm watching (Prometheus Fuels) that promises to do that cheaply, but there haven't been any positive news from them recently
" We can expect 48% of the energy from renewable electricity to be lost in conversion to liquid fuels, using the average value for drop-in diesel technologies from our previous economic modeling work. To compound the problem, according to various studies 70% of the energy in those fuels will be lost when they are combusted in internal combustion engines, for a total efficiency of 16% for the e-fuels pathway. Therefore, the vast majority of the energy from the sun or wind is lost. In contrast, the majority of energy used by electric vehicles actually goes to powering the wheels, losing only 10% in charging and 20% by the motor and for a total efficiency of 72%."
There is lots of (paywalled) proper economic analysis of current methods of Electrofuel generation from atmospheric carbon, the summary is that the current processes cost multiple times more than similar fossil fuels, with the main cost factor being the cost of electrolyzed hydrogen per kg, and captured atmospheric carbon cost per kg, and all of that comes down to the cost of the energy consumed during the process.
Edit: other than any research, the main indicator (for me) is that nobody hasn't yet offered renewables based liquid hydrogen or atmospheric carbon Electrofuel at nearly viable prices for today's world. If the technology was energy efficient, these fuels would be flooding the market already even at 2x the price, but the cost of producing these is currently 5x or higher. That's why the first target for such fuels is commercial aviation and sea transportation where the cost of fuel can be absorbed less painfully.
52% efficiency sounds fantastic; the other 70% loss is equally present when you're burning fossil fuels in the same engines. of course it is very relevant to the electric vehicle comparison, but not to replacing fossil fuels in peaker plants or airplanes, which is the topic at hand
and it's fantastic news that the main cost factor is the cost of the energy input, rather than, for example, defouling or catalyst replacement. because once the electric grid is mostly renewable and intermittent, so that energy is free in the daytime, synthetic fuels will be immensely cheaper than they are now. perhaps by even more than 5x :)
initially the carbon dioxide won't come from atmospheric capture; carbon capture at the source is immensely cheaper. perhaps as the number of fossil-fuel and biomass point sources dwindles, atmospheric carbon capture will become competitive, but i suspect that it may
16% cycle efficiency might rule out liquid synfuels for grid-scale energy storage, but hydrogen should be closer to 50% (60% combined-cycle turbine times 80% electrolysis), or perhaps higher with fuel cells, and though that's much lower than batteries, it's still a viable alternative to nuclear if batteries don't work out due to shortages or whatever
Numbers just aren't written that way. I don't know if you realise it, but that silly affectation is offputting enough to hinder your cause more than help it.
Nonsense; it's getting plenty of attention. And there's a lot of lobbying happening to ensure that.
The nuclear industry actually has been running on subsidies. Also in China and Russia. It would not survive long without them. And of course this whole industry was bootstrapped via massive defense spending. Trillions in today's money.
There's no such thing as an unsubsidized profitable nuclear plant. That's why investors are pulling the plug on this thing. Because even with the (massive) subsidies, it just does not add up to anything remotely financially feasible. Unsubsidized LCOE is off by about an order of magnitude where it should be now. Never mind in a few decades.
And of course the cost of securing them, dealing with the waste, or decommissioning them is typically also subsidized. To the point where that's commonly not even factored into the projected cost for nuclear because that is depressing enough without that. Somebody (i.e. tax payers) should take care of all that. Not their problem. Most current nuclear waste is stored in temporary locations while people figure out how to actually pay for all that. That was the plan seventy years ago and there still is no solution. Those sites need security. Which of course costs money. And eventually "somebody" might do something about it. At great cost.
All of it subsidized. By past, current, and future generations.
The right place to stop reading is right after "Musk claims".
Somebody told him a 100-mile-square array, i.e. 10,000 square miles, would suffice. Of course you build much smaller farms close to where the power is needed, instead.
And, of course, solar farms are being built today. We should build them faster.
Used to work in utah, warren buffet is damn close with the mayor and team and threatened to use his full power if state starts using more renewable energy, he has huge coal mining shares fyi !!
it's news to me that utah's head of state is a mayor
i would be surprised if your information about warren's position on renewable energy turns out to be more accurate than your information about how he spells his name
David Roberts from Volts talked about why he thinks SRMs are overhyped last week. Here's the transcript[^0], but his main points are _(I fed the whole transcript the new GPT-4 128k token model for this)_:
- SMRs are not yet delivering on their promised benefits and cost savings due to challenges in scaling and production.
- The SMR concept is yet to prove itself with efficient and cost-effective factory-made parts and repeatable construction practices.
- Concern exists that the enthusiasm around SMRs could lead to more unfocused subsidies for the nuclear industry without addressing the industry's deeper issues of inefficiency and historical missteps.
- SMRs are seen as one option among many for balancing renewable energy, and they should not be considered the only solution.
- Their capabilities are mostly theoretical at this stage, and there's uncertainty if they can bridge the gap between their promise and reality in terms of cost and deployment hurdles.
- SMRs might receive undue favor over other equally promising technologies for providing firm power.
In conclusion, David believes SMRs are getting more attention and investment than warranted by their current capabilities and progress, potentially detracting from other solutions that may offer better returns or efficiency for transitioning to a renewable energy grid.
Even $5.3B seems very expensive. For reference, (the new Finnish) Olkiluoto-3 was €11 billion, for 1600 MW. The article says 6 * 77 MW = 539 MW!
How is it that we've become so bad at building?