Last year I did a fair amount of consulting work for the GAIN initiative at Idaho National Lab [0].
They're doing so much good work with micro and modular reactors that can basically be "dropped in" decommissioned coal-burning sites because the infrastructure to tie into the electric grid already exists.
It was expressed to me that selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an uphill battle and uptake was very slow to nonexistent.
Construction costs are only part of the picture and utility operators are well aware that they need to look at lifecycle costs. This includes everything from costs of fuel rods (look at the historically volatile uranium market), availability of large volumes of cooling water (see more frequent droughts), maintenance costs (maintenance being a major factor in the retirement of California's nuclear power plants), security costs, the cost of storing fuel rods onsite for decades, and finally, decommissioning costs (as reactors themselves become contaminated with in-situ activation products, i.e. radioactive cobalt/iron/carbon/nickel isotopes).
It's basically a huge long-term liability that just doesn't exist with solar/wind/storage, hydropower, or geothermal.
The largest nuclear plant in the United States (Palo Verde) is in the middle of the Sonoran Desert and uses treated sewage output for cooling. People probably won’t stop urinating during a drought.
Just in case you are not joking, the sewage is not exposed to radiation.
Water essentially can not become radioactive, and the sewage is used to cool water, not (directly) nuclear material. As you probably know all heat engines need a hot side (the uranium) and a cold side (the sewage) - the cold side is also those huge cooling towers you see while driving near a power plant.
I said the same just now, before I saw yours. I know it is going to get down voted, because I didn't append the '\s' tag, and it was a little to obscure. Cheers!
That's a good point. Carbon is dumped in the air - for free! That's because there is no cost resulting from it. (Edit: Yes, the last sentence is sarcastic.)
There are massive mining/smelting/manufacturing costs in metal for solar and wind. Solar panels in particular generate massive waste due to the rare earth metals through mine waste, concentrator tailings, leftover leach solution, solution-extraction-electrowinning waste, slag, transportation fuel, etc. Let's not forget the massive fuel costs involved.
Solar panels may be tiny but they generate dozens of tons of waste material per panel.
Even if that was always the case (I'm confident it won't be), compare it to, say, coal fly ash. In my country, coal ash is 1/5th of all waste generated (by weight, I think) over a year. 12 million metric tonnes per year [1]. And that's before even thinking about CO2 and other air pollutants.
Wind turbine waste is almost nothing compared to that. Still worth fixing, but perspective is important.
Oh, I don't think this is a significant problem - and agree that the volume of this fairly inert waste product is trivial in comparison to the huge volumes of nasties that come out of fossil fuel power stations.
I'm sure these turbine blades will likely continue to be iteratively re-designed to be increasingly recyclable or at least re-purposable as times goes on.
I was just answering the question about remediation costs for wind turbines, as this feature of the current popular implementations is often a surprise.
There are 100% recyclable blades (including production byproducts) currently being tested. They are using Elium as the composite material which can be chemically broken down back into glass fibre and resin for reuse.
Hydro power has some high drawbacks, including being affected by droughts. They're flooding large swaths of land, destroying ecosystems, are extremely energy intensive while being built, cannot be built anywhere you'd need one, and result in large destruction when they fail.
If you vitrified it first honestly it'd probably be totally fine. An arguably better plan is just get serious about reprocessing and work towards cleaner processes than PUREX. Not even necessarily a completely new process, just better controls around handling waste and making sure there's no massive liquid tanks just waiting to leak into the ground like the Hanford site. Most spent fuel is depleted uranium and not exceptionally dangerous to be around. If you can separate out the fission products and transuranics then you could drastically reduce the amount of waste needed to be stored, store it for less time, and potentially recycle some and get some actual use out of what is currently considered waste.
Just dumping fuel pellets into the deep ocean would be a pretty terrible idea though. All the fission products and impurities that build up as the fuel is burned lead to the pellets starting to crack apart. Any cesium or iodine would leach into the water quickly, it would not be a good day for Shamu.
Er, but it's still vitrified and stable as a glassy material that's less prone to leaching fission products into any water right? As far as I understand it, the whole point of vitrifying it is to trap anything and everything aside from Xenon and Tritium into the vitrified end product.
I'm not saying I think dumping nuclear waste in the ocean is a good idea (though I am also curious if there's been specific impact studies done on it, if we're talking about very very deep ocean) but I'm pretty sure somalia isn't in the ocean.
The historic problem of just 'drop it in the ocean' is that (so far) it almost always comes back to bite you. Hence the thousands of rusting barrels of DDT off the coast of California.
Minimal measured effects (few studies), the key here is the precautionary principle, applied here by the "London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Convention_on_the_Preve...
"selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an uphill battle"
Could you elaborate on the why? I would asume, because of risk. A solar plant, you can more or less just put anywhere, but a nuclear power plant, even a small one, needs state permission, has to meet extensive regulation, etc.
It would need some convincing for me, too, that a nuclear reactor can be just a drop in replacement for coal. I would think unknown risks, hidden costs due to regulations, neverending building, etc.
And are we talking about a battle tested design, or is it new technology? That sounds extra risky.
Not the parent but have some experience with this on the UK. Typically energy companies will start with the technology they want to develop and then find a site that will suit it. Starting with the plot of land is the wrong way around. And existing decomissioned sites are just an asset like any other. They may be sold for a distribution centre or a data centre. And the grid connection may be used by a new power station built on a neighboring plot or to connect an offshore wind farm.
Looking at the energy landscape the most significant area for innovation is with government relations.
There exist green energy companies, and their biggest barrier to growth is government policy. For example, when Green Mountain energy wanted to sell to customers in AZ in 2021, SRP, one of the states largest utilities, pushed the state to repeal the competition laws it had on the books for 24 years. HB2101 was introduced in January to do this and it was signed by governor Doug Ducey in April. This gutted the states policy to have a competitive energy market and stopped the expansion of Green Mountain into the state.
You need friendly environments to operate in. Existing players like their monopolies, and they have the political connections to use the force of law to shut down your energy startup. You may have to plan to spend most of your investors money on Lobbyists and Lawyers.
Here's an idea: offer one of these micro/modular reactors for free to a developer of a new residential division, and indemnify them by offering to remove it after at least N years in operation and up to M years after that.
I would consider living in a division that has extra low-cost electricity. It couldn't be zero cost because nuclear could only provide base load power, unless one of these micro/modular reactor types is so innovative that it can provide base and peak load power, in which case such a division could have truly zero-cost power for a bunch of years.
I.e., promote the darned things, loss-lead if need be.
If the manufacturer won't take such risks, then might never break through.
I bet that after a few years you could get such good press out of it that other developers might sign on.
> Here's an idea: offer one of these micro/modular reactors for free to a developer of a new residential division...
One word: Epcot
It's something Disney and Florida could probably agree on, would be a wholesome PR story about investing in Walt's futurism dreams, and would be easier to negotiate than with a less-planned development.
And finally, what better showcase than "If it's safe enough for Disney"?
Yeah... chose not to highlight that, as it seemed a clickbaity way of saying "Disney has historically had substantial independence in zoning" (which is a more accurate but less exciting way to phrase it).
Reactors can provide peak power no problems, the incentive not to is you burn fuel at a higher rate then you need to since you can't ramp quickly. But in a small scale scenario you could easily oversize the reactor to service the local area, and sell any excess on the grid as though it were a renewable utility.
Private industry uptake is slow because the required changes to staffing, security, and waste disposal are so expensive. Until there are higher costs for CO2 emissions, it will be cheaper for power companies to convert those facilities to natural gas, or just shut them down.
> ...waste disposal are so expensive. Until there are higher costs for CO2 emissions...
Perhaps we should also examine the requirements and costs associated with storing waste from coal-fired power plants. Oft overlooked in favor of the fuel rod boogeyman.
Yes. The problem with nuclear is basically twofold:
first, the approval and regulatory process is deliberately cumbersome and in obvious need of reform. Treating every plant as a one-off design rather than standardizing has enormously inflated costs. And generally much higher scrutiny requirements for new designs have strangled the ability to roll out better/safer designs. It's very similar to what happens in the FAA with aircraft/engine designs, we can design much better engines/reactors than we could in 1960, but the new ones require an onerous approval process while the old ones got grandfathered approval. So we only build the old/worse ones!
If you don't want any more nuclear constructed, set policy to that effect, don't use the approval process to artificially inject costs to make it unfavorable. And the disposal situation just needs to happen, period. The waste has to go somewhere, we can't just have it sitting around forever. Even if we never ran another nuclear plant ever, the existing waste still has to go somewhere, and that process was dragged to a halt for political reasons too. The Yucca Mountain repository needs to be moved forward again.
Second, we need to stop letting coal externalize its costs. Tax carbon emissions heavily, require secure disposal of radioactive coal ash rather than letting it sit around in storage ponds that eventually spill and destroy miles and miles of land, etc.
Unfortunately, in both cases, the fossil fuel industry has its finger on the pulse of washington and isn't going to allow a trillion-dollar industry to be torn down without a massive fight. Existing stakeholders are just too entrenched for it to ever be successful and construction costs/disposal/externalities are just the place where that iceberg breaks the surface.
The "once you build the expertise, costs come down for the Nth plant" is also probably true, but there's also other things going on here with the process as a whole.
The article hints at the core driver of costs: time
Decrease time-to-completion, and you decrease a whole host of costs. And the regulations driving that time explosion are within Congress's ability to modify.
(1) Grandfather any currently builing plan into regulations as of the year of project initiation, regardless of how they change after the fact
(2) Waive environmental impact studies for nuclear (or other no-carbon) plants. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good
The real problem is that nuclear has no constituency. Environmentalists hate it because they can't do math and aren't pragmatic (let's be honest); wealthy folks hate it because they don't care how much power costs and NIMBY.
So who exists to fight for it?
The only political hope I see in the US would be a single-issue group comprised of practical environmentalists + industrialists. The former should like it because it saves the planet. The latter should like it because it allows decarbonization without inflating energy costs.
You nailed it about aerospace: the manufacturer I work for makes aircraft that were certified in the 1950's. The visitor entrance to the production facility has the type certificates framed near the entrance. We routinely design "new" aircraft that are basically lipstick on the old grandfathered in designs from decades ago. Whatever it takes to not have to recertify.
One of the victims of coal was Pat McCrory in the 2016 NC governors race. Signing “H.B. 2,” the stupid transgender-bathroom law, is often cited as the main reason for his loss, but I believe the coal-ash spill[1] and subsequent coverup scandal were decisive in his losing support in rural areas.
I certainly agree: the true costs of coal should be better believed!
Operating the reactor is of course specialized. But once you have the steam, the rest of the power plant is conventional. Steam turbines, generators, and all the grid tie-in would be mostly the same as a coal plant.
> However, the tooling and staffing requirements of a Coal Plant arent going to suffice for a nuke.
I am not sure what you mean by Tooling but I am sure these retrofit reactors aren't going to be dropped off by UPS and someone on site has to figure out how to plug it in.
35x of a small problem is not necessarily a big problem. You need to quantify that objection. Nuclear waste can be reprocessed (see Fast Breeder reactors); the concern raised here is usually proliferation risk.
Given a binary choice, I'd rather have to deal with some nuclear waste than climate change, and I don't even think that climate change is an existential risk for humanity (just likely to cause large and uneven/unjust levels of harm). I think it's misleading to throw out individual objections like this without considering the systemic trade-offs that we need to make.
> the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to meter"
I think this kind of blame-throwing is unhelpful. I couldn't care less what marketing claims were made in the past. Does this technology make a good cost/benefit trade-off now, or not? Specifically, compared to the other options we actually have available to us now. That is the conversation I think we should be having.
To address your object-level claim, as the OP describes in detail, one reason nuclear is more expensive now is the ever-increasing regulatory framework that has changed under the feet of in-progress projects. Maybe those regulations have resulted in a good ROI, but it's hard for me to buy that claim. Nuclear is now 10-100x safer than most other traditional/fossil forms of power generation[1], and it's excruciatingly expensive to buy that safety margin. These are tiny death rates caused by power generation.
The problem here is that it's political suicide to say "I think we should reduce safety regulations to make nuclear power 10x more dangerous, because that will avert far more deaths from climate change". In practice perhaps a major push for solar/wind/geothermal would be a higher-ROI solution to our problems, but that's politically much harder to get consensus on.
> In practice perhaps a major push for solar/wind/geothermal would be a higher-ROI solution to our problems, but that's politically much harder to get consensus on.
The most awesome thing you get from Solar is that it's going to move forward no matter what. It's just something you can do to lower your bill, or even disconnect from the grid altogether. Personally I am off grid with no propane. Almost unheard of in CA. Solar is now THAT cheap if you are willing to put the up-front investment instead of paying PGE $600 a month. And if you don't have the space - buy a solar panel on a business from that other company they are starting - it was on here a week or so ago.
I agree with the trend here. It's inevitable that solar will displace fossil fuels eventually (especially when you consider that fossil fuels will gradually increase in price as the cost to extract goes up).
The problem is that moving to solar solely by riding out the market-led transition won't happen fast enough. We would need to subsidize a lot more to avert the worst outcomes of climate change.
Solar is a perfect solution for like 1/3 of the world for like 1/3 of the day.
Batteries though, current batteries are a horrible solution.
It's funny that this threads main objection to nuclear is waste/mining/etc but the solar battery revolution generates some far worse environmental effects getting all those rare earth minerals. Compared to the tiny amounts of fuel needed for reactors, the sheer amount of metal needed for worldwide grid solar batteries is astronomical.
> It's funny that this threads main objection to nuclear is waste/mining/etc
Is it?
I got the impression the discussion has moved to recognising that nuclear is too expensive, not flexible, and looking at the slow-motion-train-wreck that is the EPR project, new reactor projects are likely going to be very late[0][1][2] and hugely over budget.
Solar is great at small scale, but at utility/grid scale, that means needing to ramp up storage too. The grid doesn't currently have much storage capacity (batteries, pumped hydro, phase shifting materials, etc.) to support current needs, much less future needs if we want to phase out fossil fuels.
Getting the lithium and cobalt infrastructure up to scale takes time and has a lot of geopolitical considerations. It's not impossible but also far from trivial. It's not just a matter of throwing up more panels and turbines and calling it a day.
Unless we can solve storage at scale, generation at night will continue to be an issue, and nuclear is the least climatically damaging way to do that in the interim.
Isn't this the crux of the argument for investing more money into solar/wind/storage vs nuclear. The solar and wind stuff is already cheap enough, so its storage vs nuclear. Will nuclear get cheaper faster than grid-scale batteries? There is only so much capital that can be invested, and potential advancements in batteries are looking a lot more promising than advancements in nuclear. I think the lion's share of money should be going to renewables and batteries.
Batteries are the most expensive storage. They cost per kWh stored, while others cost mainly only per W inserted or extracted. Only a minuscule fraction of utility scale storage will ever be batteries, so even mentioning batteries only details discussion.
It will likely have to be a combination of many different types of storage, plus decentralization/distributed storage (electric cars, home & office battery backup), plus smart grids and appliances (time-shiftable smart electric water heaters/HVACs/car chargers), renewable biofuels for peaking, etc., riding on top of a base load of hydro and geothermal. (My vote's for nuclear, but it's wildly unpopular).
They are counting on lithium-ion batteries becoming dramatically cheaper at scale due to increasing demand for electric cars.
Nobody is counting on lithium-ion batteries becoming dramatically ("even") cheaper. Batteries will remain one of the most expensive storage methods. They will be used mainly for load leveling, and in very small-scale systems.
Nukes are not just unpopular, they are also way, way, way more expensive than favored methods.
I like gravity storage. Pumping water up a hill, or pumping air into an underwater tank to displace water. Seems that you can get quite good efficiency with these approaches.
AFAIK though only pumped water and batteries have been done at anything approaching utility scale. Anything else and you're probably looking at several decades to reach maturity, and then another several decades to roll it out.
All but chemical methods rely only on trivial physics used industrially billions of times worldwide every day. The only open question is which will have become cheapest, in each place, at the time that conditions become favorable to build it.
That time will arrive after we have brought enough renewable generating capacity online that storage would not need to be charged by burning fossil fuel.
There are many storage alternatives, each more attractive for certain circumstances. Undersea methods are particularly cheap, but synthetic fuels -- ammonia and hydrogen -- have advantages that offset higher cost.
What we can be certain of is that Energy Vault (ERGV) investors who get out last will lose badly.
There isn't enough time. The world is already way behind on climate change. Nuclear is a mature and safe technology, on a incidents/pollution/deaths per kWh produced basis. Storage is in its infancy. Yes, more investment in that field would be great, but that's a timescale of decades that we don't have -- especially the rest of the world. Realistically we need something much bigger than the Manhattan Project to even have a chance in hell of making an impact at a utility, much less national or global, scale. There's nothing like that even on the horizon, simply no political will.
Small to medium investors and companies are trying to tackle it at the locality level (Tesla, small utility experiments, etc.), but there are no national or international movements to solve this issue wholesale. And until it is solved, adding more renewable production without storage to an already-capped grid doesn't really help the issue; in fact it worsens it by creating huge peaks and valleys in power production that are then compensated for by fossil fuel peaker plants (because nuclear can't ramp up and down that quickly). California is the example of this.
At the end of the day renewables vs nuclear is a false dilemma. The actual issue is future livability vs present-day profit, and the latter always wins in our political economy. We need vision and political will to get us there, way more investment in both renewables and nuclear, on the timescale of years, not decades, with nuclear providing a band-aid while R&D on storage increases several orders of magnitude.
It's the sort of problem that the private sector cannot easily solve; it would take mass national and international collaboration, or perhaps an arms race.
Arguing that we should adopt smr reactors because their proportionally larger amount of waste can be burned by a much larger/more expensive reactor that we'd _also_ have to fund/build? One that would likely cost >10b and take 20 years to construct? That doesn't seem like a good response to the waste issues with SMRs.
As they say, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. Just because it takes a while to bring it online doesn't mean it isn't a worthwhile investment.
Actually that's exactly what it means. Investments are measured in Rate of Return on Investment - the time to break even. Because the sooner you get your money back, the sooner you can re-invest it.
> Nuclear waste can be reprocessed (see Fast Breeder reactors);
Doubt so, as after decades of often huge projects in many nations there is not a single industrial fast breeder reactor working satisfactorily. Can you name one?
> Does this technology make a good cost/benefit trade-off now, or not? Specifically, compared to the other options we actually have available to us now. That is the conversation I think we should be having.
Then why are you making so many arguments about how we must find ways to make it cheaper? That doesn't seem very committed to the idea of discussing the current cost benefit trade-off.
> Then why are you making so many arguments about how we must find ways to make it cheaper?
They don’t appear to be making those arguments at all. Just stating that Nuclear regulations sets safety standards substantially higher than safety stands for other power sources.
It quite reasonable to include a question about “how safe is safe enough” when talking about trade offs. It’s easy to change safety standards, and they’re constantly evolving in all industries, so it’s hardly disingenuous to consider as part of the current cost benefit trade-off.
However to insist that Nuclear energy can only be evaluated in strict unchanging state, or to suggest that GP was suggesting such an evaluation, is somewhat disingenuous, and substantially undermines the authenticity of your argument.
> Nuclear regulations sets safety standards substantially higher than safety stands for other power sources.
Ok, but this surely only is an argument that other sources should be regulated harsher (and fossil fuels absolutely should), not that we must make nuclear less safe.
With fossil fuels I'd say we need to worry about taxing emissions more than we worry about safety. But sure, let's make them safer.
Why do you think nuclear isn't too safe? Don't say it's impossible to be too safe. It's very possible. Imagine if speed limits were 15mph everywhere for an easy example.
We can build plants that are much safer than any previous ones; why is that not good enough? The regulations shouldn't be "make the whole thing out of the black box material, okay good luck".
Because the opposite is a nonsensical way to reason about risk: the fact that going for a drive is riskier than staying at home is not a good argument for removing the front door.
> Why do you think nuclear isn't too safe?
It's up to you to give me reasons to think that, because the default position is that a the regulation doesn't seek to require more than is necessary. This is explicitly listed in the legislation creating the NRC: it is tasked with running "A program to encourage widespread participation in the development and utilization of atomic energy for peaceful purposes to the maximum extent consistent with the common defense and security and with the health and safety of the public", meaning the current regulations are written to be just on the right sight of "safe enough" (my emphasis).
> Because the opposite is a nonsensical way to reason about risk
Yes, the opposite of that strawman is also a strawman. Neither one is correct.
By my view you're advocating for a strawman of near-infinite safety.
> meaning the current regulations are written to be just on the right sight of "safe enough"
As far as I'm aware, the way the regulation is handled in practice is that you have to be on the bleeding edge of safety innovations at all times. You can't just be much safer than your predecessors and adopt new methods as they become practical, you have to max out safety at tremendous cost.
Probably because there's decades and decades of pushing for safety, and it sounds really bad to say "no, the plant should not be safer than this, that's too expensive" even when it's true.
The technology might make a good cost/benefit trade-off, if we fixed the regulatory framework but not otherwise. Or it might already make a good trade-off in the current regulatory environment. I don't see the technology and the regulatory framework as being tightly-coupled here, though they do obviously affect each other. My point is that we need to look at both of these factors, rather than considering the regulatory framework as a given that is set in stone, definitely correct, and something we can't change.
In this case it may be easier to change the regulatory environment than to come up with new dramatically-cheaper nuclear technology that complies with the restrictions of the current regulations (though that is happening too with modular reactors).
There is absolutely no appetite for reducing safety standards for nukes, especially considering that renewables pose exactly zero threat, and also cost much less than even the most ... aspirational ... guesses for nukes even with relaxed standards.
I was using that phrasing to illustrate my ranking of preference between those two options, I wasn't claiming that we have a binary choice.
To be clear, I am explicitly advocating for a proper cost/benefit analysis that keeps all options on the table, rather than getting caught up on single factors ("we can't do micro-nuclear because it produces more nuclear waste"). As I mentioned later in the post, a major push to renewables is another option (I also don't see these as mutually exclusive).
I know that the most popular plan here is "push hard for renewables". I like that plan; I think a Green New Deal is an excellent idea. But empirically, how is that plan going? If that's your plan A, do you think it's going well enough to reject a plan B that you deem to be worse, but still dramatically better than climate change? I think the stakes are high enough that we should be hedging our bets.
Post like this make me hopeful that rational minds will prevail and we get clean abundant nuclear energy.
It’s becoming clear that the climate alarmism isn't about solutions or even a tax, but forcing us to purchase “carbon credits” from Saudi Arabia and other sovereign wealth funds ranked high in the ESG index.
Posts like this make me just despair... we couldn't even scale up this to the world wide needs, but if we could the waste would be huge.
Only thing that could get us out there and would only make sense is going renewables everywhere in Manhatten-like projects, but that won't happen because people argueing like this got us into this situation where there is allegedly only a binary choice between failed and failed..
Isn’t the opposite true? Nuclear fuel has the highest energy density of any fuel source by a gigantic margin. The entire US stockpile of waste since the 50s is only 83,000 metric tonnes and could fit on a single football field stacked less than 10 yards deep. If we could all stop clutching our pearls about scary radiation and just agree to store the spent fuel deep underground there’d be absolutely no danger from it. Add to that the fact you can recycle the fuel and get even more energy out of it.
"It’s becoming clear that the climate alarmism isn't about solutions or even a tax, but forcing us to purchase “carbon credits”
Every half educated climate activist knows thay carbon credits are a fraud perpetuates by wallstreet types to pretend they are doing something when they are not.
This post is breathtakingly uninformed. I suggest calling it climate illiteracy
> Every half educated climate activist knows thay carbon credits are a fraud perpetuates by wallstreet types to pretend they are doing something when they are not.
The problem with this statement is that the carbon credits ARE being rolled out AS the solution.
and yet one of the comments from that thread stated:
> The correct answer is that there is no way to make fission cost-competitive with the near-term price of renewables + storage, or even with imported synthetic fuel produced with renewables, waste or no waste. Thus, the whole issue is moot. No such SMRs will be built except where coerced funding carefully excludes true cost from the process (as indeed happened on behalf of every single utility reactor in operation
They today import fuel and burn it. They are equipped to continue doing so.
They can add transmission lines, for cheaper importation.
As fuel synthesis -- ammonia and hydrogen -- comes online and undercuts NG, they can import that instead, at times when their transmission line power capacity or availability is exceeded.
Fuel synthesis from solar in the tropics undercutting NG extraction will be a big business. Synthesis using reliable wind, in other places, likewise.
In the meantime, as minority participants, their contribution to the ongoing climate catastrophe is relatively small.
fuel synthesis is one of the few trully plausible solutions to the storage problem, but i am not sure it will be cheaper - hydrogen is so much more difficult to handle than petrolium.
There are many obviously practical storage methods.
Ammonia and hydrogen are attractive because you can sell extra production after your local tankage is full, keeping your synthesis equipment busy whenever you are not drawing down your storage.
If we propose to allow countries to outsource their nuclear waste disposal, wouldn't it be simpler, cheaper and safer to just skip nuclear entirely and outsource the power generation?
All those countries with apparently not enough access to sunlight or wind will save an awful lot of time and money messing about with nuclear and just buy in their renewable power.
If it works, could the Xlinks Morocco-UK power project could be a template for this kind of solution?[0]:
"A 10.5 gigawatt (GW) solar and wind farm will be built in Morocco’s Guelmim-Oued Noun region, and it will supply the UK with clean energy via subsea cables. The twin 1.8 GW high voltage direct current (HVDC) subsea cables will be the world’s longest."
I think whether it's cheaper is begging the question. And I couldn't tell you what's safer.
But there's definite risk in outsourcing the majority of your power production, risk that doesn't exist if you're outsourcing long-term storage. If something goes wrong with the storage ecosystem, you can keep it on-site for a few extra months.
> there's definite risk in outsourcing the majority of your power production, risk that doesn't exist if you're outsourcing long-term storage. If something goes wrong with the storage ecosystem, you can keep it on-site for a few extra months
I think trusting another country to look after your radioactive waste for a few thousand years might involve a fair amount of risk. It's hard enough trying to look after it yourself.
At the simplest level, what if the storage facility has a design fault or some geological event happens and suddenly loads more work and/or money is required?
Or, in the spirit of bad movie plots:
What happens if the other country changes its mind, perhaps after a major change of government or referendum? "We instruct you to take all your nuclear waste back. Right Now!"
What happens if the other country doesn't maintain the storage properly / fails to keep it safe? Who's to blame for any leak / accident / incident / attack?
This comes across silly. Have you ever seen how nuclear waste is stored?
It is not like oil stored in a tanker that might spill out because rust has made a hole.
It is a solid substance, vitriefied in a giant block of gas, sealed inside a copper container that never rusts. Then this container is placed hundreds of meters underground, into bedrock, and the tunnel is filled in. Noone walks around to check how it's doing today.
If something goes terribly wrong, these containers can be stored in an ordinary warehouse for years and nothing happens.
Then lets address the misattribution of incentives.
In all your scenarios the coutry housing nuclear waste is the one that's interested in making sure its stored properly. You can't use it for extortion, any kind of returning of nuclear waste by force would likely amount to an act of war.
On the other hand, if another nation is supplying you power, they can extort you by cutting power supply, and that is what Russia is doing to europe today. Europe is very fortunate that Russian leadership is completely retarded when it comes to running the economy, and Russia simply can't afford to cut the supply completely. However it does mean that Europe is sponsoring putin's war in Ukraine.
The primary concerns with nuclear power are those of economic viability, lead times, practicality.
The waste is not killing anyone, we can build containers thay last hundreds, even thousands of years and we have time to figure out this problem.
Nuclear produces very little waste. One or two sites world wide should be enough for the current or 100 times the amount. Since we already need these sites and they cost practically the same regardless how much waste is buried, any additional nuclear waste is stored for free.
Can anyone find a cost per Megawatt Hour calculation for nuclear that includes security and long-term waste storage? The calculations I’ve found for the $96/MWh figure seem like they include construction and operation costs, but exclude decommissioning and waste management.
> Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still don’t have a long-term storage plan. We’ll incur this cost for hundreds or thousands of years.
New plants produce a lot less waste.
And the reason nuclear waste seems so expensive is because we have externalized the cost of most other forms of power generation. Coal and gas, well we just let people get sick or die.
Natural gas, fracking has huge negative impacts on communities, lots of illness, but again, we don't count that as part of the "financial cost" of natural gas.
Solar, we have the panels made in some other country, we have the raw materials mined in some other country, we import the final product, now it is clean energy.
(I support solar, but there is an environmental cost to solar panels!)
Nuclear makes us confront the waste up front, so now we are all freaked out about it.
As has been pointed out repeatedly, you could take a football field, dig down a few stories, and put all the nuclear waste needed for energy generation in there, and then have enough left over to keep storing spent fuel from new high efficiency reactors until sometime until well after everyone reading HN is dead and gone.
It is a crap shoot if the cost of paying the lawyers to deal with all the lawsuits over where to build the storage site will end up costing more or less than the storage itself.
> As has been pointed out repeatedly, you could take a football field, dig down a few stories, and put all the nuclear waste needed for energy generation in there
Here are mentions of this talking point on Hacker News:
Waste management is by far the smallest of all the problems with nukes.
Overwhelmingly the biggest problem is wholly legal corruption, as cost and schedule are allowed to balloon without limit. For everyone involved, the gravy train stops when a plant is delivered, which no one actually involved wants ever to happen. (If it must end anyway, there is some incentive to actually deliver, as happened at Olkiluoto, but not at Vogtle.) No one has offered any plausible suggestion for how to contain corruption costs for nuke construction, at least in the US, never mind who should apply such containment.
No such dynamic is apparent in solar and wind projects, where expected cost is easy to estimate as a multiple of generating units -- panels and turbines.
We may expect that SMRs will not find traction specifically because they do not seem to offer the conduit for graft that bespoke nuke construction guarantees.
After corruption costs, we have numerous operating costs, some noted above, plus steam turbine maintenance, which each individually exceed the sum of operating costs of renewables. So capex is radically more and opex is radically more than for current cost of renewables, with no reasonable prospect for any reductions, never mind matching exponential decline of renewables costs.
There is also decommissioning cost, always omitted from reported capex. And, disaster insurance, always 100% subsidized by taxpayers, so omitted from reported opex.
As renewable generating capacity approaches and exceeds fossil generation, we will need to begin building out storage to provide base load. Cost for storage, in numerous forms, is falling even faster than for renewable generation. By the time we need any -- after we have enough renewable capacity to charge it -- storage will be very cheap indeed. Only a tiny fraction of it will be batteries, mostly for load smoothing (as now), as batteries will remain more expensive than alternatives.
Cheap storage will cost per W added or extracted, not per Wh stored, like batteries. Synthetic fuel -- ammonia and hydrogen, while costlier than others, have the advantage that surplus may be exported for direct revenue.
> No one has offered any plausible suggestion for how to contain corruption costs for nuke construction
Honestly, I had assumed this was how the US worked in any industry. The tech industry (most recently crypto) has certainly spent lavishly on politics in recent years, either to escape accountability or to get special status.
It is particularly a problem in high capex projects with opaque cost accounting, particularly nukes, urban tunnels, weapons procurement, and crewed spaceflight.
Solar and wind projects seem thus far relatively immune.
> Solar and wind projects seem thus far relatively immune.
The relative priority/urgency assigned by governments is probably a factor here.
I have seen analysis suggesting the "learning curve" for wind has turned upward in places, rather than declining.
There might also be some political science term for there being a learning curve in corruption as well. Or as is ascribed to Eric Hoffer, every social initiative ends, in a third phase, as a racket.
Renewables have the structural advantage that costs are relatively transparent. N units x P per unit x fractional overhead k (<<2) is C, expected cost.
> No one has offered any plausible suggestion for how to contain corruption costs for nuke construction, ...
standardization. transparency. enough market participants to have meaningful competition. (even if not for the top level project, but for parts)
order 100+ plants, get economies of scale.
sure, political feasibility is ludicrously close to zero, hence the US is stuck with short term workarounds and incremental changes based on fanatics/startups/lobbying or other regional perturbations.
It is complicated: $6B is supposedly related to nuclear waste from the weapons program which is likely hard to compare to power production sites for a huge number of reasons.
Technically there is a $40B fund paid for from taxes on nuclear production to deal with the long term storage problem by NIMBY has prevented that from going from a concept into a reality. As with many things "we need X but not here" makes getting things done hard.
So from a planning standpoint the long term problem is solved but in reality it isn't. How you boil that down into a cost I couldn't begin to solve.
> The cost of nuclear energy seems seriously understated. Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still don’t have a long-term storage plan. We’ll incur this cost for hundreds or thousands of years.
Wait til you hear about the costs of fossil fuel waste storage!
Fortunately, that is not the alternative: fossil fuel use is already uncompetitive, so on its way down. But not fast enough, as societal inertia props it up against what cost favors.
> Fortunately, that is not the alternative: fossil fuel use is already uncompetitive
Maybe where you live the grid operators are being progressive with renewables as an alternative. Where I am, a couple nuclear reactors are reaching EOL and we're going to have a huge increase in carbon emissions, as electricity from zero carbon nuclear gets replaced with natural gas (with little probability of this changing, with the ruling party having cancelled all the renewable projects a few years ago and just having won re-election). https://www.thestar.com/business/2022/05/09/ontario-energy-g...
Nuclear waste isn't a problem if you drill a hole that's deep enough, encase the waste in a "dry cask", and drop it in the hole. Kyle Hill did a great video on this...
One good use for stainless steel nuclear waste dry casks would be to build an encasement for the 25,000 odd drums of DDT dumped off the coast of California.
Fortunately, those decaying drums are only a problem every so often when the news media gets around to reminding us.
> after decades of often huge projects in many nations there is not a single industrial fast breeder reactor working satisfactorily
The key word is "industrial." I assume you mean this as a synonym for "commercial." Let me emphasize the part of my original post, which you are replying to:
> Nuclear waste is only a problem *if you don’t allow breeder reactors*
There have been, as you link to, dozens of research fast breeder reactor in almost all the nuclear-signatory countries. Many of these "research" reactors operated continuously for decades providing consistent power, and were only shut down when the plant reached end-of-life. They were/are operated by government-run research organizations because only these organizations have the authority to run new / unapproved nuclear reactor designs. And they remain unapproved for commercial use due to political reasons ranging from general fear of nuclear power, lobbying from energy companies (for whom traditional designs are more profitable, externalities be damned), and fear over nuclear proliferation since the uranium-based reactors technically produce some weapons-grade material in their fuel cycle. The last point is a major one, but manageable if there was political will to do so.
We know how to build fast breeder reactors economically. We're just not allowed to.
> were only shut down when the plant reached end-of-life
Which one can be described this way? As far as I know all were and are plagued with problems (mainly liquid sodium leaks, which is not fun at all).
> fear of nuclear power, lobbying from energy companies (for whom traditional designs are more profitable, externalities be damned), and fear over nuclear proliferation
In most nations research were conducted for decades, this is difficult to explain if such hostility was real. Fear of nuclear power is weak here, as breeders reduce the amount of dangerous waste.
The most mature and advanced breeders are in Russia, and all those reason simply don't apply there as governments always were pro-nuclear, without any serious opposition, controlling energy companies, and not really afraid of proliferation because they always export according to their own strategic views.
The only nuclear plant under construction in the US is at Plant Vogtle, in Georgia. Regulators set up a system (CWIP) whereby the companies building the plant earn a 10% return on their costs, until the plants come online. I think it's not surprising therefore that costs keep increasing and the delays keep coming. I don't think we can infer that nuclear power plants cannot be built at reasonable cost, rather that we need to consider "regulatory capture" as a significant construction risk.
Can anyone compare this to new EPR nuclear plant being built in France, that project also ballooned to almost twice the estimated price and a decade late. Do they use cost+profit accounting too?
The article misses another important aspect: loss of nuclear competency.
Between the 60s and 80s, there were many nuclear reactors projects which allowed an industry to develop and get better at it.
But since the 80s, there was comparatively very few new reactors built for over 20-30 years. The workforce that had the skills and knowledge related to actually building nuclear plants had mostly retired and their replacement had only theoretical knowledge and no actual experience. This makes building new reactor much harder than it should be.
The embattled EPR project at Flammanville is an exemple of that: the specialised company that was hired to forge the nuclear vessel were simply unable to build to spec and a defective critical piece was delivered, creating delays and cost increases. In the end, they even had to use it anyway as it was not economically feasible to simply have another one made.
TBF Flamanville 3 was a shitshow from top to bottom, starting from anyone actually taking Areva's completely unrealistic timeframes seriously: the claim was something like 3 years for the build, EDF assumed production within 4.5 years.
For a novel build of a barely finished design.
4.5 years is probably the shortest time it took to build a CP (900MW) reactor at the height of France's reactor-building frenzy (St-Laurent-B-1 construction started in May 1976 and ended in January 1981, 4 years and 8 months).
The next generation (P4) I don't think any took less than 6 years to build, and the embattled N4 generation immediately preceding the EPR the first reactor (Chooz 1, of only 4) had a build time of 12 years (and 7 months), the last (and fastest), Civaux 2, being completed in a "mere" 8 ( and 8 months).
And the N4 had and still has significant teething issues: soon after they were put into production they suffered from leaks in cooling pipes leading to all 4 being stopped for 10 months, and at the 10 years revision in 2021 extensive stress corrosion cracking of the primary circuit was discovered, all the N4s have been stopped and the last news are they won't be restarted until 2023.
This is one of the reasons for continuing to incrementally design and build new submarine and aircraft carrier reactors. If the expertise is to re-emerge in the US commercial sector, it may require another cross-pollination effort from the military.
The difficulty is that both military reactors and commercial power reactors have evolved considerably since their initial branch point. Commercial power reactors provide base load (run at full power) for a year or two and then get refueled. Military reactors now last the life of the ship without refueling at all, but are optimized for propulsion's variable demands.
Perhaps military style reactors designed for propulsion loads would be a good match for balancing renewables on the grid as an alternative to natural gas peaker plants
Military style reactors use highly enriched fuel, often near weapons grade. That's an acceptable thing for a carrier or submarine that's also full of things that have to be continuously secured, like nuclear weapons, but is a big challenge for a small modular reactor scheme. Most of the stuff proposed in recent years for small non military reactors has focused on a middle ground of partial enrichment that's more approachable.
The recent US nuclear construction projects have been plagued with similar incompetence, such as trying to build plans that were unconstructable, and then having to get regulatory approval for the changes.
I would like to see comparisons to other large construction projects too. The US is really really bad at large construction projects, but European construction seems a lot better.
I see the following as the only ones still under construction in all of Europe (not counting Belarus and Russia): 1) Mochovce 3 in Slovakia. Construction started November 2008, originally scheduled to complete in 2012, now hopefully complete later this year, so 15 years total, 10 years late. 2) Flamenville 3 in France. Construction started in 2007, originally scheduled to complete in 2012. Hopefully complete in 2023, so 16 years later, 11 years late. 3) Mochovce 4 in Slovakia. Construction started November 2008, original scheduled to complete in 2013, now hopefully complete in 2023, so 16 years total, 10 years late. 4,5) Hinkley Point C1 and C2 in the UK. Construction started in roughly 2008, originally expected to be online 2022 or so ("early 2020s" is the best I can find with Google now, and that's for both C1 and C2 to be online). Now C1 is expected to be complete in 2027, and C2 in 2028. So 19-20 years total, 6 years late.
(The US has two reactors on the list, Vogtle 3 and 4, started in 2009, originally expected to finish in 2016 and 2017, now expected to finish in 2023.)
I suspect that Europe's success in building rapid transit, compared to America, is due to the fact that they were continuously building such systems, whereas the US largely hasn't, so there is no cohort of engineers and workers who learned-by-doing and get better over time. But in nuclear, those workers seem to have gone in Europe as well- you can see from this 2020 chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#/media...) that France built almost all of their reactors in a giant lump between 1970 and 1983, built a few reactors later in the 1980s (presumably late career work from the people who had built so many earlier), and has found building a new reactor to be really hard, e.g. Flamenville 3 is just as big a disaster as Vogtle.
To add one more data point - Olkiluoto 3, started 2005, was expected to finish in 2009. Completed late 2021, 12 years late
Cherry on top - after producing electricity for about a week, it had to shut down for another 3 months. Then, after ramping up to about 30% of the capacity, it encountered another problem, delaying it for another 5 months. Here we are in June 2022, 17 years later, Olkiluoto 3 provides exactly 0 MW to the Finnish grid
I also recall reading (somewhere) that France basically ended up with two nuclear power plan designs used repeatedly, unlike in the US where nearly every nuclear power plant is unique. That might account for the lower costs shown in the article.
That is true for the 1970's and 1980's boom of production in France, but is not true at present: the EPR they are building at Flamenville 3 and Hinkley Point C1+C2 are the sum total of those reactors currently under construction, and none are currently operational, so those three are likely to be the total number ever built.
It is true that the 34 CPY reactors, and the 20 P4 reactors, were produced in large enough numbers to create a skilled class of workers and engineers who were deeply experienced with building these reactors, but right now all of those workers are retired.
And honestly, from observation, it appears that rebuilding competence like this is a lot harder than building it in the first place: when you are building the first time everyone- the general public, the regulators, the workers themselves- are more forgiving. When you've lost that capacity and are trying to rebuild it you have expectations set for a mature industry, but the skills aren't there to deliver it.
The Hinkley Point story is very complicated, indeed. But I believe you will find that initial work to clear space and create parking for the future construction site started in 2008, then the EDF acquisition shenanigans and British government shenanigans came along and massively delayed the project.
Unless the situation in the US is really, really REALLY horrible, I doubt that. I don't remember where, but one country is in the process of building a nuclear power plant, that is AFAIK unfinished, but already took way more time and money than originally planned.
Doesn't even have to be nuclear - ask the Internet about Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie or Stuttgart's train station. Having public construction projects overrun their schedules and budgets is a well-honored tradition, at least in Germany, but I suspect our neighbors have similar customs.
An excellent (English language) podcast about Berlin's fiasco of an airport, BER: https://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/ (29 years from planning to completion, 14 years from construction start to opening, 9 years late, budget from 1 billion Euro to almost 6).
One of the points they made in the podcast was similar to TFA's: changes in construction are really expensive and blow things out in costs. A new mayor came in and demanded major changes once construction was underway in Berlin. And then, when people said "this will cause problems" his response was basically "we're Germany, we are the best at planning, building and constructing, of course we can handle this with no problems"...
The story of BER's troubled birth confirms your view.
German satire website Der Postillion (roughly equivalent to The Onion) ran a headline once that Berlin would get a new airport by moving the entire city to some place with an existing airport.
Or if you were taking specifically about the nuclear construction incompetence, the loca newspapers in South Carolina and Georgia have been providing the best reporting. Here's South Carolina's archive:
I think there's a larger point around the general notion of "spread of competency".
the competency is not allowed to spread. there's a thick shroud of secrecy around how all this sophisticated technology comes about.
This is also why semiconductors are so difficult.
Back in the early 20th century the nuclear stuff was secret so the nazis and then the russians would not get it.
Now semiconductors are also closely related to national security stuff (china and taiwan). I find it quite suggestive that most of the tech used to make the semiconductors is owned european companies.
Finally, I have a sensation that in the 18-19th century it was the chemical sciences that were similarly shrouded in secrecy of this sort.
There was a topic here on HN the other day about how there's so little popularization of chemistry... IMO, this is why, the legacy of secrecy so to guarantee competitive industrial advantages still casts its shadow.
At least in the UK, I found that salaries for Chemists were depressingly low - PhD grads would earn around 30k GBP which made it hard for me to justify studying for so long.
I really liked Chemistry but ended up moving into software instead.
> the competency is not allowed to spread. there's a thick shroud of secrecy around how all this sophisticated technology comes about.
>
> This is also why semiconductors are so difficult.
The dirty secret is that all factories are hard to build because nobody knows all the details to make them work.
It's that simple.
People bring operative knowledge to bear in the running of a factory. Over time, that knowledge becomes baked into the procedures, equipment, maintenance and people.
This is, in my opinion, something that everybody overlooks about nuclear. Power plants and factories need to evolve and optimize over time to be successful.
Nuclear plants get encased in amber and can't do that. I understand why people don't want to allow that. However, I really think that this inability to evolve will doom any large scale nuclear reactor design. Probably the only way that nuclear becomes successful is very small, semi-sealed power plants as the whole plant evolves at the manufacturing facility rather than at the site.
> I find it quite suggestive that most of the tech used to make the semiconductors is owned european companies.
This is hardly surprising. They're spinouts of the big conglomerates from the 1980s (ASML is from Philips, no?). These conglomerates didn't exist in Japan (maybe--MITI was funding the hell out of things in Japan in the early 1980s so my memory may be off), China, etc. back when this stuff was getting started and spun out.
TSMC is actually the anomaly. It took a very determined effort with a lot of money being shoveled around by the government combined with a disgruntled TI executive of Chinese background and all of his knowledge and contacts to put it all together.
>I have a sensation that in the 18-19th century it was the chemical sciences that were similarly shrouded in secrecy.
I'm not sure this is the case. Chemistry and geology were both popular with hobbyists (albeit, it seemed to often be aristocratic hobbyists) during that period.
My grandfather was a Nuclear Engineer for General Electric his whole life (worked like 60 years at GE - he was one of the designers of Hanford.
He died of cancer, thyroid cancer of exenguination (bleeding out of your mouth)
My grandmother received a fairly large settlement from the class action lawsuit against GE for exposing engineers to radiation for decades without proper safety...
My uncle worked at Hanford his entire life but his last few years of life were not good. He he retired with numerous health issues and was essentially a mental vegetable the last few years of his life. He was at Hanford from it's inception up to around the seventies when he retired.
Son of a Hanford man here. I believe my father started work at Hanford _after_ the bulk of their issues were wrapped up but I'm sure there was some increased exposure relative to background.
Sorry to hear about your uncle's experience, a lot of pain came out of that facility.
I find it disconcerting that a defective critical piece ended up being used anyway, regardless of the economies involved. That might mean you have no reactor, but you can't just go an substitute broken or out of spec parts for good ones.
Out-of-spec doesn't mean it can't work. It just means you have to redo the design using what's effectively a different part than you originally planned on.
Yes, but the idea here was to construct a nuclear power plant, not to build a large pot for boiling soup in. You can't take a critical component like that, spec it and then suddenly pretend the spec never mattered in the first place, then you have to admit that you're just winging it. Changing the spec of the reactor vessel essentially translates into a complete redesign of the reactor itself unless you are willing to compromise on other aspects, such as safety, longevity and so on.
We're not talking about a bracket here. Or an O-ring. When was the last time something as stupid as an O-ring decided the fate of... oh, never mind.
It's a requirements change. Those happen all the time in everything. Why would that be completely forbidden or impossible here? Like you said, it might really suck. But the NRC does not allow trading off safety the way you suggest.
Requirements changes are not driven by one-off material defects in critical pieces of hardware.
That's simply a bending of the rules for economic reasons. And it is one of the main reasons for me to oppose nuclear: the fact that people will be people and that at the root of every one of those disaster and near disasters there was someone who thought they could get away with something. We are ill equipped to deal with this kind of responsibility, especially across a timeframe measures in decades.
At the same time I would love to see us solve the climate change problem, and I recognize that we will likely have a nuclear component in there. But it will have to be done by the book or we'll end up regretting it - again.
If we're going to start out with the normalization of deviance on the #1 critical component of a reactor then I think we are on the wrong path:
I see your concerns, and I think you're probably just unaware that they're addressed better than you know, but in a different way than you'd expect.
When they accept an expensive out-of-spec part, it's because they can safely redesign the less expensive parts. The only thing that hurts is their long-term profitability because it'll be less efficient than they hoped.
Big, expensive parts are always treated as one-of-a-kind articles with unique requirements. It's how bridges and roads get built, for example.
With nuclear, they have special teams that do nothing but manage every type of risk you could ever think of for every piece of nuclear material in the country. It's very advanced, and many industries are trying to use those techniques themselves now.
Nobody is normalizing or bending anything. Every potential problem is thoroughly addressed on an individual basis. There is no deviance from the safety requirements. Nuclear is decades ahead of every other field in terms of risk management.
I'm sorry, I don't believe in magic or appeals to authority, I believe in physics and once you start bending the rules for one part who is to tell where it will stop. Having one leg too short won't be fixed by making the other one a little longer. The materials science requirements on nuclear reactor vessels are such that if the safety margins are so narrow that the specs are going to be even possible to be violated by a manufacturing defect that you have a problem anyway, either in the selection of your manufacturing partners, your design process, your risk assessment, your QA or all of the above. For me that breaks trust at a level that I'm not going to buy the 'we'll fix it by using better parts somewhere else' argument.
The stated defect has effects that can only be properly ascertained by destructive testing and since the whole point was that there was only one of these that leaves a large part of the end result in the realm of 'hope' and 'belief', neither of which are part of any materials science course that I'm familiar with. The knock on effect of changing the vessel specs would essentially require a complete rework unless the reactor were de-rated in either safety, generation capacity or lifespan. And because 'safety' is the only one that doesn't show up in the books that's where my worry would be.
'special teams' don't amount to much, we've had special teams all along and a long series of fuck ups. This is exactly the problem.
> neither of which are part of any materials science course that I'm familiar with. The knock on effect of changing the vessel specs would essentially require a complete rework unless the reactor were de-rated in either safety, generation capacity or lifespan.
At one point I learned there were standard tombs describing (presumably often unexpected) Nuclear Plant Phenomenology.
Ok, you obviously have zero interest in an actual discussion, lest it confront your completely fabricated "facts". So for anyone else who's genuinely interested in more than just pontificating their own bs, the "special teams" this person mocked, rather than asked about, can be learned about here:
No, that's not how it works. See the FAA and many other institutions where commerce, one upmanship and all kinds of other considerations besides the actual work ended up trumping what should have been done in the first place. I don't think the nuclear power industry is immune to that sort of thing.
This kind of thinking is what brought down the spaceshuttle. Three Mile Island (US), Windscale (UK), Chernobyl (Then USSR, now Ukraine) and Fukushima (Japan) all had the very best teams assigned to their design, construction and operations and yet each of those had a major accident.
There isn't anything fabricated about these facts so you can extend your appeal to authority but I'm just not buying it: people will always be people and the day that you start bending the rules on the design requirements is the day that I bow out. Obviously that isn't going to move the needle but it is exactly why I don't trust the nuclear industry: way too much did not go according to plan even if it always was with the best of intentions. And that's before we get into non-proliferation, waste and other considerations.
Trust has to be earned.
Also, you should probably lay off the personal attacks.
You said that engineers don't engineer things, you called the techniques I mentioned an appeal to authority because I also said who's practicing those techniques, and you keep repeating yourself about everything instead of interacting with what I've written. And now you're whining about a personal attack I didn't make. You took it personally because you're presenting your own opinions as facts.
All I see is a whole pile of unsupported assertions, let's take them one by one:
> When they accept an expensive out-of-spec part, it's because they can safely redesign the less expensive parts.
'They' presumably being the engineers, and because they are engineers it is automatically assumed that the less expensive parts can always be redesigned. But in the case of a reactor vessel it isn't clear at all how and if that is even possible without compromising on something that apparently originally wasn't to be compromised on. And because the nuclear industry isn't exactly known for their transparency when it comes to such defects it is hard to have visibility on whether what is now no longer the original design really is as safe as what went before.
I think we can agree on at least this simple fact: if the original spec was presumed to be optimal and the new change is still a costly one that there is some pressure to allow a solution to pass that maximizes the economic equation, in this case to redesign the rest of the parts that closely interact with the part that is out of spec. But because the interaction with the reactor vessel is one that is closely based on the operating parameters of the complex as a whole and funds are limited there will be pressure on to compromise. In your world such a compromise would never happen. In mine there is ample evidence that it is and I highly doubt that the nuclear industry is exempt from such pressure to compromise.
The very fact that they did not simply demand a vessel made to spec spells out exactly such a compromise.
> The only thing that hurts is their long-term profitability because it'll be less efficient than they hoped.
That is exactly where the pressure comes from any further compromise will limit that efficiency and hence the profitability (including subsidies) of the plant. So there is pressure to minimize the costs of such a redesign to ensure that the economic damage is limited. The question whether or not that is possible within the original safety margins is an open one, and for at least one reactor I'm aware that safety margins were exceeded on more than one occasion and yet the plant remained open, simply because of a continuous redefinition of what was deemed to still be acceptable. Something that in your world, again, likely is an impossibility:
Just one example, there are many more (sorry, this one is in Dutch, it is about the plants that I know most about). So there is clear evidence (at least, clear enough to me) of this 'normalization of deviation' that you claim does not exist in this context.
> Big, expensive parts are always treated as one-of-a-kind articles with unique requirements. It's how bridges and roads get built, for example.
Indeed. And bridges never collapse and roads never have problems... In terms of our knowledge about bridges we are still learning new things. Not that long ago that a completely safe and well designed bridge ended up with a whole slew of patches to deal with various resonances in the steel cabling that held up the bridge when the wind was strumming those cables causing massive deflection of the bridge deck, far in excess of what the design originally allowed.
Engineering complex, one-off installations is hard. Reliability and reproduction go hand in hand, only by iteration over a design across many cycles and learning from various defects and errors does engineering progress. It's not just a matter of plugging numbers into formulas, there is a significant amount of feedback from the field about how the assumptions hold up that drives engineering forward and in the case of a one off design that loop doesn't exist. If there is only one reactor vessel and it does not end up being to spec the real effects of that change won't be known until the reactor is decommissioned. Until then we're on ice that we hope is thick enough but that we can not be 100% sure of, see that article linked above. There too engineers ended up being quite surprised at their findings when analyzing the reactor after it had been in service for a while.
> With nuclear, they have special teams that do nothing but manage every type of risk you could ever think of for every piece of nuclear material in the country.
> It's very advanced, and many industries are trying to use those techniques themselves now.
This is again a claim that essentially creates an elevated class of engineers who are above making mistakes and who lead the way in ways that I can only assume is through magic. Because in my world engineers do make mistakes, they miss elements in their risk assessment and they make mistakes in their assumptions and sometimes even in the design itself.
But for a one off reactor vessel with a material defect there is no 'plan B', the job could not be called off, so instead of scrapping this vessel and getting one that was built to spec we now work on a cascade of changes. And your claim essentially is that because all these people are so good at what they are doing that they can make this all work without further consequence other than some financial adjustments. My claim is that this isn't a bolt or some other simple part of the reactor and that the safety implications of such a change will not be known until either one of two things happen: the reactor serves out its lifespan, is decommissioned and after analysis of the vessel it is proven that there was no material difference between this one and the one that they originally wanted to have. Or we do find such a difference and in that case we conclude that we were lucky. The third alternative we'll leave unspoken.
> Nobody is normalizing or bending anything.
I don't think you realize that you've essentially made the case for doing just that far more eloquently than I ever could: you are normalizing the deviation by making the claim that it can always be done safely. But how do you know this? In the long, long chain from the QA inspector that faulted the vessel, to the recommendations, to the engineers that redesigned the other parts to the management surely there is pressure from above to solve this, just like there was pressure on NASA administrators to launch and that pressure worked its way downward. And I fail to see the difference between rocket scientists and nuclear power plant engineers. Both are very capable people with very extensive backgrounds in the fields that they are operating in. And if it was just the scientists I'm pretty sure they would have ordered a new vessel and left it at that.
But because there is a political element to this (and politics driven by financial considerations at that) you end up with the exact environment that can lead to this thing called 'normalization of deviation' and that way accidents can and do happen. There is a mountain of evidence for this and I'm not going to close my eyes to that on your say-so. And what goes for the USA may not hold for other countries with less capital and possibly even higher pressures on the management to deliver.
> Every potential problem is thoroughly addressed on an individual basis.
I'm sure it is. Just like in aviation, right? And of course the regulators are not in bed with the likes of GE.
> There is no deviance from the safety requirements.
Blanket unsourced statement. How can you make this claim with such certainty?
My claim is that safety requirements are violated routinely, by people who believe that they are in control of the situation and who have the best of intentions. They're people, after all. And I do have some evidence for my claim:
> Nuclear is decades ahead of every other field in terms of risk management.
That is not a reason to be super happy about nuclear, but it is a source of worry for all these other fields. And this is probably one of the few things where we agree: that risk management is a field that is still very much under appreciated. And I see that reflected in my practice almost every week.
I appreciate you engaging in a two way discussion.
As a general comment, you still jump to many exaggerated conclusions apparently without seeking to understand. For example, your conclusion about an elevated class of engineers that use magic, which you explicitly said is an assumption.
Having worked with these processes and techniques myself for many years in other industries, I know from daily firsthand experience that this is not at all a fair characterization. What they do is one piece of one layer of defense. One aspect of their job is to say no until they cannot say no anymore. The new techniques are for finding more things to say no about.
However, you erroneously concluded that they must be concocting new ways to justify increasingly risky behavior. If you still feel this to be true, the burden of proof has firmly shifted back to you, for the purpose of this discussion. To be clear, I don't expect you to trust me for the purpose of changing your own opinion.
I don't have time to address everything you've written. Maybe the next thing to reflect on is what out-of-spec truly means and implies. On one hand, you're afraid of cost pressure. But on the other hand, you want to create larger cost pressure through a rigid system of rules that you alone adhere to. Something to consider revisiting yourself.
As for general concerns about nuclear, I think the public messaging needs to improve before a real discussion can happen about accepting new developments. Old technologies and risks still dominate the psyche, and new technologies are varied with different concerns from each other.
I think my main point is that engineers operate in a field that is always going to be subject to pressure, both commercial, political, prestige and so on and that even though the engineering profession in general can be relied upon to do their level best to produce high quality and reliable solutions the various pressures have the ability to push that which is commercially still viable into the realm of danger. The shuttle debacle is an excellent example of how even though everybody worked with the best of intentions this can eventually lead to a disastrous outcome and it is exactly the use of out-of-spec parts for critical applications that you find as the root cause. Once you start doing that the pressure is on to keep doing it right up to the moment that mother nature gives you the kind of wake up call that you really don't want to have. The big trick is simply not to make that first move down the slope.
Nuclear engineers, while possible made of different stuff than your average bridge-and-road engineers are not exempt from such pressures, and examples that prove this abound.
What you are talking about here is called "normalizing deviance". We have had very bad experience with how that process plays out. It is particularly pernicious around safety.
Imagine you write software for rabbit-mq. But then you get a requirements change to use zero-mq for whatever reason. Is that deviance? Have you normalized it? No, and no.
Deviance is when you're dropping messages in production when you shouldn't. Normalizing is when you ignore it because "it's usually fine".
You're probably thinking that my analogy doesn't work because changing software libraries is different than accepting an out of spec part. But why? If it's out of spec, it's a different part. You can make a spec around that part and design to it all the same. Just because it wasn't your first choice doesn't mean it's dangerous.
Point is that it is arbitrarily hard to tell whether a response is adaptive. Maladaptive responses are much cheaper than (unmentioned) alternatives, so are systematically more attractive to management.
They certainly were not good enough at Fukushima, in a half-dozen particulars.
The next pile of reactors down the coast did not melt down, solely on the strength of a single engineer who succeeded, with enormous difficulty, in upholding standards management objected to, but that he knew were essential. Without him, there would now be two major uninhabitable areas there. He must have known Fukushima would melt down, and must have wanted it held to the same standard as his, but lacked authority to extend his standard so far.
I mean depends how it's broken, right? Broken could just mean anything from "will blow up momentarily" to "more inefficient than spec, but totally safe"
Carbon migration problems during forging if i recall correctly. So steel is out of specs. How badly will certainly remain secret, like most things in this industry.
They've built four NPPs in the UAE that may end up producing at $0.08/kWh.
Unfortunately, UAE is also building PV that will be producing at $0.013/kWh. And since they're still burning gas for most of their power, every kWh from solar goes straight to reducing the overall cost and CO2 emission, five times cheaper than the NPPs will.
> The only country where the costs of nuclear plant construction seem to have steadily decreased is South Korea:
> The fact that South Korea is the only country to exhibit this trend has led some experts to speculate that the cost data (which comes directly from the utility and hasn’t been independently audited) has been manipulated and we shouldn’t draw conclusions from it.
Koreans excel in cost-efficient construction projects. Korean companies are often considered for best bang-for-buck value when developing countries are interested in big infrastructure projects nowadays.
See figure 12 for a quick overview. And from the introduction: "In contrast to the rapid cost escalation that characterized nuclear construction in the United States, we find evidence of much milder cost escalation in many countries, including absolute cost declines in some countries and specific eras. Our new findings suggest that there is no inherent cost escalation trend associated with nuclear technology."
> In absolute terms, Japan and India have costs similar to South Korea
That countries like Japan and Korea have similar absolute costs as India which has a 4-5x lower PPP adjusted GDP per capita suggests that the price for labor for nuclear power plant construction is globally set (relatively few qualified engineers who can demand a high price), or India uses a lot more labor, or a combination of both.
India probably uses a lot of foreign expertise. It’s either the French or the Russians that supply the reactor. That would change in the future I suppose and cost would drop. Also, corruption.
India was under nuclear sanctions until recently and had to build and design everything from scratch. Every component is made in India for PHWR which adds a lot of cost, due to r&d and economies of scale. Also, India is still not a member of NSG, due to repeatedly being blocked by China.
Japan ceased all construction of nuclear reactors in response to Fukushima daiichi, and since that was a decade ago I'm betting that all the competence they built up has disappeared.
In other words, very similar to what happened in the US in response to Three Mile Island: after a scary nuclear incident there was a lengthy pause in nuclear construction which meant that all of the skills and learning-by-doing that had accumulated up to that point went away, and starting again would be significantly more expensive and subject to massive schedule and cost overruns.
The government that was in power from 2017 to 2022 put a moratorium on new reactor construction there and promised a full phase-out, and although the newly-elected government promised to reverse this, it likely has done some damage to S. Korea's civilian nuclear capabilities.
If anything this seems to support the position that the only way to reduce costs is to increase volume. A classic economies of scale example. Instead the experts want to disregard the data for vague reasons.
South Korea, Japan, and India all have similar costs which suggests South Korea isn’t benefiting significantly from continuous construction.
Economies of scale generally exist, but it’s not magic. A large fraction of construction costs for nuclear power plants is very similar to other structures. A high pressure steam pipe is a high pressure steam pipe and people are constantly building structures using them.
also, quantity is the (primary) independent variable in economies of scale, and at quantities of dozens for nuclear plants, you can't get much economies, as opposed to when quantities are in the many thousands/millions.
The cost of flying has come down by 50% since 1980, and while an airplane is a simpler machine than a nuclear plant, the two industries also have a lot in common (such as the perception of risk not being in their favour).
By doing international standardization and coordination in ways similar to the aircraft industry, the same should be possible for the nuclear power industry.
It should be possible to consolidate most of global production down to a handful of companies (like Boing and Airbus), with a forest of subcontractors in the same way that was done for airliners, and achieve similar economies of scale.
Successful designs could be re-used over a period of 20 years or more, with only minor modernizations of things like electronics, like the Airbus A320 or Boing 747.
Ideally, we should have done this in 1980, but even if we start today, nuclear can provide a lot of energy at very competitive prices in the next 60-100 years. By then, we should have fusion or the ability to build energy storage cheeply enough to make renewables (probably solar) competitive.
By the way, this blog (Construction Physics) is about why construction in general (not nuclear power construction in particular) is expensive. One big part is that construction is done on site, and site-to-site variation hurts standardization and economies of scale.
Finished airplanes can transport itself by flying. This advantage is particular to aircraft industry and probably can't be copied by other industries. Finished buildings can't transport itself.
According to the original article, only 16.5% of the costs of a nuclear plant is from the buildings, though.
Most are things like reactor equipment, turbine equipment and electrical equipment. I'd bet most of that could be built in a central factory, and then shipped to the site.
In fact, when comparing to air travel costs, the reactor buildings can be compared to the airports.
Ideally, we could have started building out solar in 1989, and would have had today's PV prices by the '90s, and would be well along to mitigating the climate catastrophe now. But we chose otherwise.
Starting nuke construction now would just be kicking the can down the road again.
How much of the development in PV tech is linked to developments in other technologies, and how much is due to dedicated R&D on PV's? My personal understanding is that basic science is the main long-term driver, while directed R&D into a specific field is important for short-term gains in efficiency, but will tend to reach diminishing returns if it goes beyond what is enabled by basic science.
Economies of scale is more of a fixed saving on top. This may have helped take the cost per kwh of solar from $10 to $3, but the scientific development was what made it possible to go to $0.1.
In any case, PV prices are already very low. We are reaching a point where installation and maintaince are becoming limiting factors, and where storage is becoming the primary bottleneck.
Development in storage (batteries and hydrogen) already has so much momentum that building out some nuclear power would not threaten it.
Solar panels have barely improved since the 80s. What drove down cost, and continues driving down cost, is purely manufacturing volume.
New PV tech, like perovskites, might carry prices down further once the learning curve for Si levels off, but we are not there yet.
There is no "storage bottleneck". We just don't have anywhere near enough renewable generating capacity to justify diverting capital from expanding it to building storage. Diverting capital to boutique nukes, and to coal while we wait a decade or two for the nukes, would be far, far worse than that.
When we do start building out storage, vanishingly little of it will be batteries.
Imagine if there were 200 companies producing airliners instead of a handful? How would the airports know which were safe enough to land?
Imagine if there were 200 operating systems for phones, instead of 2? How would corporations know which were safe enough to install 2-factor auth on?
Imagine if there were 200 suppliers of x86 cpu's, all with small differences in features? How would we build safe software for those?
Consolidation to a few vendors (but more than 1) is a huge benefit for both costs and safety.
And there is absolutely no reason these companies need to be "Western", unless you include Korea, Japan, Taiwan and India in the "Western World".
China would probably have one such company, but would perhaps only be trusted by their allies, just like US companies would probably not be allowed such infra in China or Russia.
The old designs are dangerous, expensive, and wasteful. The regulatory, economic, and political environment that resulted in their design ultimately resulted in reactors run without proper controls, supervision, or long term safety. The resulting waste was not properly considered from a life cycle perspective.
Disclaimer: I'm not a nuclear expert, but man I loved those LFTR presentations. What really appeals to me about LFTR is the inherent safety, the near-full use of fuel, and the scalability. I understand there are challenges for the materials and containment, but I believe the smaller size of the reactor can lend itself to replacement and manufacturing.
So a "clean slate" with new people, regulations, standards, expectations, computer simulation, and lifecycle planning would do nuclear a huge bonus.
But ultimately it doesn't matter. It won't be price competitive with wind/solar and can't even target a 10-year price point with the wind/solar improvement curves. Same issue the fusion story on the front page faces.
Let's continue active research, but commercialization is a waste of time and money right now. When wind/solar stabilize their cost curves, then nuclear (or fusion) will have something to target commercially. IF they can get there.
I'm just riffing here but this doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem if you're willing to spend. Open up a training school, put the old guard in as instructors, get some good students, pay everyone big money. Build a lab reactor for hands-on practice, and pay to put students as glorified interns into under-construction and operating plants across the world. A few years later, you've got your people.
I don't mean to say it would be trivial but it seems like you could do the whole thing for a couple billion USD a year.
My first job was doing software in the nuclear industry. Was the late 80s. Probably the best job I ever had in terms of working with extremely competent engineers. But they were all in their 50s and 60s. After TMI, a generation of engineers said "no" to nuclear careers. We can only imagine the alternate history where that accident hadn't occurred.
It's a shame the idiotic "green" movement after chernobyl is rather annoying that it has set energy production in developed nations back ~50 years and caused so much climate damage in the mean time... but hey 'radioactive waste is corporate greed maaannnn'.....
But the green movement was ultimately correct. They didn't know why and had nonsense arguments, but the fact is that "old nuclear" was developed with insufficient long-term safety. Fukushima showed that.
What also seems true is that you can't trust a company to run them properly, no matter the regulations and audits. TEPCO showed that. From people I know who've dealt with the nuclear industry, there is a strong contempt of regulation in sentiment/culture, likely due to the annoyances and perceived costs.
This contempt however breeds a long term apathy towards safety and maintenance. It's human nature.
There are reactor designs that are inherently meltdown proof (LFTR) and use almost all their nuclear fuel (LFTR) and can, I believe, breed old nuclear waste into usable fuel (LFTR). They scale down to small closet sizes (LFTR) and so can be more economically flexible. I believe pebble bed and others can do similar things. LFTR allegedly can be designed to be proliferation resistant, although I've seen opposing views from much better educated people.
But the LFTR goals should be the standard of the nuclear industry for next-gen. Not these massive solid rod huge dome boondoggle-prone eyesores.
Which mostly means the evacuation was far too aggressive, but even if we pretend they were unavoidable that's basically all the nuclear deaths for multiple decades, which is vastly less harm than fossil fuels.
It is very hard to do tracebacks of cancer to nuclear events. It's very hard to do cancer death tracebacks to industrial spills and pollution. Genetic damage that may span a generation.
Nuclear proponents (I'm a nuclear proponent) that handwave away such dangers are exactly who I'm talking about from the "old guard", and the people that the greens were correct about: the people who need to die off/retire/disappear (by attrition), whose lax view of nuclear safety and who politically killed the LFTR in preference for the solid fuel design that could ALSO produce nuclear weapons. Good riddance.
LFTR has given the blueprint for a next-gen reactor: use all the fuel, inherent meltdown protection via the plug, proliferation reduction. Solid fuel reactors are not safe
Well I'm not handwaving danger. I'm saying we should compare it to other kinds of power plant before we call it "insufficient". Maybe I define insufficient differently than you.
> It is very hard to do tracebacks of cancer to nuclear events.
Tracebacks are hard but we can do estimates. When I look those up I see numbers like "130".
I think it stands to reason that nuclear power plant design and construction efficiency would have progressed far more quickly with continued construction of nuclear plants.
And the amount of fossil fuel usage that greater energy production from nuclear sources would have curbed would have saved thousands of lives via reduced air pollution, particularly from coal usage, without coming at the expense of high energy prices, that increase mortality among the poorest segments of the population, that simply capping energy usage would have brought about.
So I disagree the mainstream environmental movement, that opposed the nuclear industry, got it right. I think they got it totally wrong, as any populist movement, that is heavy on simple narratives and ideology, and light on science, is bound to be, when it weighs in on extremely complex large-scale issues.
Denial is always strong. Meltdowns prove the same thing as non-meltdowns.
What we do know is that if solar PV had got the subsidies in the '80s it finally got from China the '00s, PV prices in the '90s would have been where they are now, and we would today be well along toward a fully renewable and radically cheaper energy infrastructure today without looming imminent climate catastrophe. Nobody would be hyping dodgy super-expensive nukes. We probably would have avoided the whole Iraq fiasco besides.
> Because nuclear plants are expensive, and they take a long time to build, financing their construction can also be a significant fraction of their cost, typically around 15-20% of the cost of the plant. For plants that have severe construction delays and/or have high financing costs (such as the Vogtle 3 and 4 plants in Georgia), this can be 50% of the cost or more.
This is why nuclear power plants should be state-sponsored projects. States typically have loans at 0% rate, or even negative interests.
Huh. I'd argue that they should be state-sponsored because that is what the state is for-- investing in long-term infrastructure where the value is widely diffused and thus hard to capture via market mechanisms, i.e. investments which are foundational to the more focused investments which business is so well suited to maximize.
similar to things like interstate highways or internets or public schooling. I'd add "healthcare" to the list, but some countries haven't realized this yet.
Indeed, US large-construction has reached a point of fundamental/terminal corruption through the process of private contracting and especially through the bid-based system.
You can see this with the disastrous failure of public transit construction and planning in the country and if nuclear became an option, it seems very likely that the same corrupt mouths that eat up transit spend would also eat nuclear spending. Something for nuclear proponents to consider.
One of the largest problem is the concept of cost-plus contracts, where the construction doesn't have a fixed cost from the beginning. Government could in theory avoid this problem by doing the design first and then have companies bid on the construction without a cost-plus contract. This assumes that the regulations remain constant from start to finish, as well as the contractual obligations.
> This is why nuclear power plants should be state-sponsored projects. States typically have loans at 0% rate, or even negative interests.
Not anymore with inflation at around 8% in many western countries. And even so, construction and operation still remain expensive. France's EDL is basically bankrupt if it were not for the state backstopping them. However you want to slice it, nuclear power is not economically viable, and looks even worse compared to the rapidly decreasing costs of renewable sources of energy.
So why waste more money on an obsolete technology rather than use it for solving the remaining issues with renewables like energy storage? Invest that money in battery technology and everything that comes with that. That approach will do a lot more good in the long run than trying to keep the nuclear industry on life support even though it has failed for half a century to deliver on its promises.
> So why waste more money on an obsolete technology
It is not obsolete. At all. You can argue that some reactor designs should not be used and I would agree. But fission is the only answer we currently have for baseline power that doesn't involve burning things. It will become obsolete if we can ever make fusion work.
We should be deploying more reactors. There are small reactors (shipping container-sized) that could be used to power small towns and are pretty safe. Good luck getting one approved and installed in your neighborhood. It's not the tech that's being held back, it's people.
Look, I love batteries, I drive EVs since 2015. But if we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to provide cheap and reliable baseline power 24/7. There's not enough time to do so with batteries alone.
The electricity from small modular reactors is far more expensive than that from large reactors - about twice as expensive by some estimates[1]. They also produce more waste per MWh generated.
The industry has been pushing in the opposite direction with larger reactors like the EPR[2] to reduce costs.
When measured by LCOE, a MWh from a new conventionally sized nuclear plant is 4 to 7 times as expensive as a MWh from solar PV, then SMR are simply out of the question from a cost point of view.
Solar is great in deserts, where the sun always shines and were the main use of electricity is air conditioning during the hottest parts of the day.
Solar is near-useless in colder areas, where you want to use the power for heating in the winter.
If you include the storage + grid expansion needed to compensate for the intermittent nature of most renewables (especially if you don't want to rely on fossil fuels when the wind is not blowing), the LCOE of many of them will be many times higher than just the production cost.
Meanwhile, Korea claims to be able to construct Nuclear capacity at prices down to $0.03/kwh with their APR1400 reactors:
Awesome then that on-shore wind is even cheaper than solar, and exists at night. Then for some more, still less than 1/3 to 1/4 of nuclear you get off-shore wind with higher capacity factors.
> Solar is near-useless in colder areas, where you want to use the power for heating in the winter.
Heating is super awesome with renewables. As you can store heat in an well isolated home. Yes you need capacity for that but heat pumps well a lot with that.
> Heating is super awesome with renewables. As you can store heat in an well isolated home.
Sounds like you're not speaking from experience. Actually, houses are pretty lousy batteries. Most people have a range of only a few degrees that they find comfortable indoors. They will tend to set the thermostat to about the middle of that range. If they turn off the head, the temperature will go the lower end of that range after a few hours. Very few hours if it's really cold outside, and that's when it matters most.
Admittedly, my house is old and not super-well isolated, but during the coldest days of winter (around -20C), it can easily require 10kw, constantly, to keep it warm enough to prevent my wife from becoming agressive.
If we turn off the power for 2 hours, it's already pretty cold.
Heat pumps would reduce overall energy consumption, but not the need for constant use, and more isloation would reduce both, but it would still likely take several kw constantly on days like that.
The house is 70 years old. 1 wall was renovated, and got modern insulation, but the other 3 have not received that treatment yet. If it's -20C outside, the temperature drops perhaps 2 degrees per hour, if all power is shut off. That means 20C goes to 16C in 2 hours.
> There's not enough time to do so with batteries alone.
I suggest you run the numbers on this, because I think you have them exactly reversed.
We are increasing battery production capacity 10x every five years. This could be accelerated if there was government investment as is done for every single nuclear reactor. At current rates we expect to produce 20-30TWh/year of lithium ion batteries, not including other chemistries that could be used for stationary storage but not mobile applications.
Currently in the US we are only building 2GW of reactors, but we have ~100GW of reactors quickly reaching retirement age. Even if we scale our current nuclear construction capacity 10x every five years like we do for batteries, and add in the 10 year construction time, we are going to see a big decrease in nuclear before we see an increase.
Your comment conveys cynicism, but I'm not sure what you're saying.
So you're proposing 100s to 1000s of TWh of utility storage in what form, exactly?
Or are you saying that there will be almost not utility storage?
Are you counting EV batteries as part of utility storage? How about if the batteries take part in vehicle to grid transmission?
People have been skeptical of batteries for decades, claiming that they are never going to be ready for EVs. Then they were ready. You can still find absolutely ridiculous videos on YouTube only a few years old of people going through all sorts of numerical arguments about volume and size to say that EVs will never work on lithium ion batteries. Millions of Tesla owners are proving them wrong on their bad "physics" every single day.
I have a feeling that utility battery storage skepticism is even less rational. Batteries are being deployed extremely effective on the grid right now, disproving the faith.
Batteries just cost more than alternatives. They are excellent for load smoothing, because they can vary power intake and output very quickly, at any wattage out, but they are an expensive place to keep energy. For home use, batteries are the only practical storage we have, which is why off-grid power is much costlier than utility scale need be.
Battery cost is per Wh of total capacity, with typically a very high limit of W in or out. Alternatives mostly cost, instead, per W of power in or out, with an increase of total Wh stored costing relatively little, mainly limited by convenience.
For example, pumped hydro. The expensive part is the turbine. (You often don't even need a dam.) Want more watts, you need another turbine; but you can usually pump up way more water than you will need.
Likewise, synthetic ammonia or hydrogen, or liquified nitrogen or compressed air. Tankage is super-cheap, but electrolysers, cryo units, and compressors cost, as do turbines. More watts out means more turbines, again.
For buoyancy storage, the floats, sea-floor pulleys, cable reels, and clutches are cheap, the size or number of winch motor / generators determines how many watts you can put in or get out. Similarly for mineshaft gravity storage: The 10,000 ton weight is cheap, and the mineshaft has plenty of depth. Wattage is in the winch.
Producing enough lithium batteries for both cars and utilities would put a serious strain on world capacity to mine lithium. It is better reserved mainly for cars, where its light weight matters. Where you do want batteries, other chemistries are likely better for utilities than fought-over lithium. I expect molten metal batteries to be competitive soon.
It is strange that most people who talk about storage seem to have no conception of what makes a thing more, or even prohibitively, expensive. Thus, Energy Vault has a $2B market cap for a system that is very obviously totally useless. People propose putting expensive electromechanical equipment on the sea floor. The storage that will be used will be the storage that is cheap to buy and cheap to use.
Batteries are getting cheaper all the time as we get better at manufacturing them, and we haven't hit the inflection point on cost decreases yet, and we haven't scaled lithium production yet. And we haven't fully developed other chemistries such as iron-air that promise to be even cheaper than lithium ion and have far higher capacity/power ratios.
Chemical storage of energy is highly inefficient, which is fine when we have super super cheap energy, but the capital costs of conversion and storage will probably require nearly continuous usage of the, say, electrolyzers in order to make the storage project feasible.
Perhaps you are right, and I really appreciate you laying out your reasoning, but I would bet otherwise about grid storage! None of the players for doing alternatives are anywhere near market ready, and batteries are being deployed today. As they get cheaper they will be deployed even more.
Batteries are also chemical storage, but I guess you mean synthetic fuels. Their cheap tankage, easy transportability, and ready sale value forgive a great deal of inefficiency. If not drawn down every night, efficiency hardly matters. Overnight storage wants efficiency and unlimited cycles. But transmission lines will probably end up preferred where available.
Buoyancy storage, where deep water is ready to hand, and mineshaft storage, where you have one, will be very, very cheap and efficient. Transmission lines mean such conveniences need not be especially nearby. But Europe is absolutely perforated with mineshafts.
Besides smoothing, there is very little use for storage yet, because we haven't got enough to charge it from. Charging storage from NG turbines would be worse than silly. So, we build out generating capacity first, then storage.
I have long thought there should be a global nuclear consortium and have that organization build and run and manage and secure all the nuclear power plants in the world.
Earth/Humanity needs electricity FOREVER. Its bizarre that we cant come together over this expressly universal need. This and water.
A global nuclear consortium would have as its first goal its own continuance and its continued hegemony over energy policy. It would be catastrophic. Fortunately there is no such possibility.
> But fission is the only answer we currently have for baseline power that doesn't involve burning things.
Patently false. The sun shines 24/7. This (besides power satellites) offers other possibilities like a world wide connected grid. Even if you are a proponent of nuclear you will also need that, as i assume you do not want to put reactors in every country.
> So why waste more money on an obsolete technology rather than use it for solving the remaining issues with renewables like energy storage? Invest that money in battery technology and everything that comes with that.
A few years ago Sweden did a study on green hydrogen, the energy storage that Germany and many other countries seem to view as the best bet as a storage for places where solar + daily discharging batteries won't work. The cost was then around 10-20 times more expensive than nuclear. Those costs has gone down a bit since then, but it is still several times more expensive than nuclear.
Sweden and Germany are still very much in favor of green hydrogen, and there are on-going experiment to use it for industries that need hydrogen itself (rather than burning it for energy), but they are no investments for a grid storage. If nuclear is not economically viable, a technology that is several time more expensive is not something they are just going to throw money at. Those money are currently going towards fossil fuels, since that is cheaper than nuclear.
If however we would ban fossil fuel, especially cheap fossil fuel from Russia, the economics might change. There is also always the hope that politicians investment into fossil fuels today will give green hydrogen enough time to become economical viable for the energy sector.
China is selling electrolyzers for < $300/kw. Given that renewable electricity's LCOE is a fraction of nuclear, I don't see how hydrogen could be 10-20 times the cost of nuclear. Were they doing something ridiculous like assuming it's stored as liquid hydrogen?
Also, remember the big use of hydrogen on the grid would be as a dispatchable backstop to cheap renewable sources, not as something that's used 24/7. So most of the energy flow would not be through hydrogen, it would be from the renewables directly (or through batteries for short term smoothing.)
There is a massive war and shortage of natural gas in Europe so if there exist cheap electrolyzers + wind power combinations that can solve that issue today then people should rush to invest before next winter where prices are predicted to sky rock. I recall that the study did say that existing natural gas power plants could cheaply and easily be converted to run on hydrogen. Hydrogen prices has also gone up a lot since the war.
And it was 10-20 times a few years ago. Prices has gone down a significant bit. If you get the prices to around $1 per/kg (about 3-10x reduction from this year prices), and we don't account for transportation, infrastructure and physical storage, the price would start to look really competitive to nuclear.
If you search online you will find plenty of predictions that prices might reach that magical $1 per/kg in say 2030 or so, in which case that will be a great choice. As a bonus it will make medical oxygen dirt cheap. At that point all discussions about nuclear power will mostly be made moot since hydrogen will be the factual best choice.
Hydrogen needs an complete overhaul to the pipeline system. Burning natural gas for energy is a fraction of it's use. More important are heating (where it can't be transported too), steel making and chemistry (CoViD vaccine ingredients are made using natural gas by BASF).
Have you heard of "lamp gas"? It used to be delivered via cast-iron pipes to every house, factory, and street light. It was a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. There was no problem with embrittlement, because the pressure was low. Natural gas is today carried (in the same pipes, some places) at quite low pressure. Germany could start admixing H2 anytime, although feeding it to NG turbines would be a better immediate use.
Anyway aluminum is quite resistant to hydrogen embrittlement.
This study from MIT found that the LCOE of fully renewable energy production, backed by LI batteries would be $3000/MWh vs $2400/MWh for hydrogen instead of batteries for storage:
That's grossly excessive. This website lets you look at optimization vs. actual historical weather data and reaches a much lower cost. BTW, you use both batteries AND storage; their combination can be cheaper than either alone. You also store the hydrogen underground rather than above ground.
I agree that a combination of batteries and hydrogen would be a bit cheaper, but generally I would trust the MIT study over the model above, that states directly that it is a toy model.
It's fun to play with, though, so definitely upvoted.
Do you have an alternative peer reviewed study to support the conclusions?
Looking at that first link, it appears to cost/kWh is the cost for just the seasonal power that is being produced from hydrogen. It is not the average cost/kWh over all the energy being consumed off the grid.
Comparing this to nuclear is to compare apples and oranges. Nuclear supplies baseload, not additional seasonal power. If you tried to use nuclear to supply seasonal power the cost would be extreme. If you use nuclear to supply baseload, it is competing not just with hydrogen but also with much lower cost energy sent directly from renewables to the grid, and from batteries to the grid.
Of course the fraction of the output from the hydrogen fueled turbines will be expensive. But what we get from that toy model is the average cost of power, of which seasonally stored power is just a small part. In that toy model, nuclear is "Dispatchable 2", which you can enable, and which comes out to about 10 euro/kWh (EPR assumptions, perhaps optimistic considering Flamanville 3.)
About using nuclear to cover seasonal variation, its not ideal, but at worst you increase the cost by 50-100%.
Day/night cycles can make that even slightly worse, but even small amounts of storage can even that out.
This Korean study claims that a at 3% dicount rate, the price the LCOE of their APR1400 reactors go from 36Won/kWh (a bit under 3cents) at 90% average utilization to 52Won/kWh (a bit over 4 cents) at 60% average utilization.
> Looking at that first link, it appears to cost/kWh is the cost for just the seasonal power that is being produced from hydrogen.
I interpreted those numbers as average LCOE for the electricy supply, but I could be wrong.
Let's assume that you're right, and this only applies to maybe 25% of total energy needs. The averge price would still be increased by $1000/MWh, on top of the renewable costs themselves, grid costs, etc.
If you go to https://model.energy/ and solve for California, 2011 weather data, 2030 cost assumptions, hydrogen is contributing just 5.9 euro/MWh to the average cost of electricity (less than 10% of the total cost of 68.1 euro/MWh). This is for supplying "synthetic baseload", the best case for nuclear (for varying demand, renewables could only do better, since one could always just swap out the nuclear source with this synthetic source, providing an upper bound on the cost.)
Nuclear will do best in more northerly places that are away from coasts. Poland, for example. For extremely northerly places, like Alaska, the total demand is so small that nuclear is not a good fit.
I'm afraid I don't trust those numbers, or rather, the calculations. For instance, if I select only Wind + Battery, and keep raising the storage cost for battery, the battery cost of the calculations go down, and are replaced by 100% wind plant costs. (Battery capacity is only enough for 1 hour of storage in such a scenario.)
On the other hand, if I drop the cost of battery to almost zero, the battery fraction of production goes to about 30-40%, and storage capacity is about 20 days.
In other words, it seems that the model is optimizing for an extreme overprovisioning of windmills when storage capacity is expensive, compared to when storage is cheap. (Basically, it "constructs" 10x or more windmills than what is needed from a pure energy production perspective.) I suspect that there are some issues with doing that is not taken into account by the model, such as available space at that level of density, risk calculations for completely dead winds, etc.
> Nuclear will do best in more northerly places that are away from coasts. Poland, for example.
Solar in dry, sunny places will likely be able to fully replace fossil fuels way before wind will be, since you do get some sunlight every day, while the wind may be gone for a week at a time. (And you have to plan for the worst case, in terms of available storage.)
No, because if wind is predicted to die down for a week, you order liquified ammonia shipped in from solar farms in the tropics. You might even keep a tank of a week or two's worth, banked against the occasion.
You may object that this seems fragile, but it is in fact how we live now. People are importing fuel from dodgy countries all the damn time.
I think much of the anti-renewable mindset is white high latitude racism. It's a difficult pill to swallow for some that these mid to high latitude areas are going to become the world's energy ghettos.
There may be individuals that fit your stereotype, but frankly your statement comes off as every bit as racist as you blame that stereotype of.
Personally, I think it would be great if Africa, India and Mexico could become energy powerhouses. Much better to have energy that can be produced anywhere with a desert or tropical climate than a few monopolist countries, such as OPEC+Russia.
And before you blame that last sentence on racism, keep in mind that Russia is VERY white and also very high latitude. It's not about the race, latitude or skin coloar, but the fact that many OPEC countries are dictatorships that use the profits to wage war on their neighbours, both in the Middle East and Russia/Ukraine.
My impression is of post-apocalyptic survivalism. If you are installing renewables, it is because you will not be able to rely on anyone else in the world, for anything, forever; or anyway must never be obliged to.
Dependence upon imported oil, cars, aircraft, microchips, shop tools, home appliances, clothing, and ... everything, really ... has scarred them deeply, and they cannot consider entering into any new such arrangement.
One could ask, but I would expect only sputtering.
No, it is saying that it is currently about $6000000/MW construction cost. Then you devide by number of hours of operations to get the cost per MW/h. (Not adjusted for interest rate.)
The LCOE of new nuclear plants have estimates ranging from less than $30/MWh to around $150/MWh, while estimates for the cost of plants built a few decades ago end up at around $40-60/MWh, from the numbers I've seen.
Yes, probably. This can bring its own problems, though. In Britain, for example, the Treasury is extremely reluctant to approve new public capital projects, even at negative real interest rates. Investment is effectively rationed by requiring a benefit/cost ratio of above 2 (at net present value, after making heavy optimism bias adjustments) before it will approve funding. New nuclear won't get close to that on any conventional appraisal, which is one reason why our current nuclear new build is happening on an eye-wateringly expensive private finance arrangement.
It's mostly because the ability of the economy to produce positive economic (but not direct financial) returns on very cheap credit is basically infinite, and borrowing money to invest in all of these things would need a huge amount of extra tax revenue to pay off the loans, which is hard. (Even in principle it's not straightforward for government to capture the consumer surplus of infrastructure investment. And in practice tax increases are politically problematic). So it's rationed, instead.
It is a tax on deposits. You only have to pay if you have deposits. Basically, it means the saver has to pay to store value as currency. On the other hand, they also have to pay if they want to store other valueables, such as gold or the most ancient store of value of all, grain.
I don't think a negative real interest rate is inherantly unfair, any more than it was unfair to have 10% of grain go to waste 3000 years ago when storing for a bad year.
If you had 7 good years, and expect 7 bad years, the utility of the stored grain may be way higher in the bad years than the good years, even when accounting for the waste. The same goes for cash.
The same can be true with cash.
To demand that cash maintains its purchasing power, is the same as ancient farmers demanding to purchase grain from their neighbour (who did save) in a bad year as they themselves got paid for their grain during the good years.
In periods of growth, we may start to think that positive time preference is natural. But the fact is that throughout most of human history, we would switch to negative time preference in good times, since we expected bad times to come back. During good times, humans would store grain, dry meat, fish and fruit, build housing, tools or boats, all of which were investments into goods that were likely to gradually perish over time.
Even after people started to use coins, this was true. If you produced a surplus during one year, you could trade it for cold coin instead of storing it. But not only was there a risk that the coins would be stolen or otherwise vanish, it was also highly likely that at the time where you needed to spend that goal, prices would be higher.
One has to consider that the storage capacity of the economy isn't infinite. Charging money for storing something is a very straightforward business model. When your economy is growing the storage capacity appears endless as no storage is actually needed, you can just produce the good in the future with your expanded production capacity. Once the economy stops growing for even a single year, then you will effectively hit the storage capacity of the economy and must pay to store additional goods that are intended to be consumed in the future.
If there is a negative interest rate of 4% on cash, then the easiest way to avoid it would be to lend out your money at 0%. Since there is no growth dependence and excessive savings do not grow automatically anymore there is no need for inflation and the central bank can do price level targeting instead.
If you think 50% cost overruns and overheads are uncommon for state sponsored projects.. you will be right but only because often the actual numbers are much higher.
Because you can start a project with the existing, proven and expensive tech today. Grid-scale storage is purely theoretical today (bar pumped-up hydro, which is infeasible in most locations). There's lots of hope, and money should be invested in the various alternatives, absolutely. But nobody can say when and if that tech would be ready.
You make it sound like it's some SciFi tech where in reality Germany has replaced half of it's whole production with true green energy in the last two decades. Replacing nuclear years ago.
That's inaccurate. Germany has replaced half of its _electricity_ production with renewables (modulo dispatchability), but electricity only accounts for a quarter of the energy usage. We frequently have to import electricity from France now, where it's largely made by nuclear, and electricity in France is a lot cheaper than here. Closing the German nuclear plants was grand scale stupid.
We buy sometimes electricity from France on the EEX because it's cheap. Not because we lac electricity. We actually sell more than we buy and that never changed.
France has to sell cheap because they can't shut down their rotting fleet. They HAVE to produce and they HAVE to sell. Even when the price is low. This is just another reason why the company running this hilarious "business" is bankrupt.
Germany has long ago replaced what nuclear has produced.
The only thing we HAVE to buy is gas because we need it for heating. Something nuclear can't replace since we don't even have 5% electrical heating in this country.
This is really not correct at all. Half of the utility-scale generating projects waiting for interconnect approval are combined solar and battery installation. Grid-scale storage is a solved problem, technically and economically. There were over 400GW of grid storage project proposed in the U.S. at the end of 2021.
Looks like they should do it and we shouldn't in America unless we can somehow allow them to build ours (I think a fear of competition will make this infeasible but if we're lucky we'll get the stuff).
This is inaccurate, GW scale batteries could be deployed today, but because storage is so scalable it's often a better idea to build multiple smaller batteries that help alleviate grid congestion.
A month or so back someone posted a report by a financial investing advisor for the energy sector, and they were pretty clear what is and what isn't economical viable right now.
Solar + storage of 1-6 hrs can be made economical viable as long as the storage can have 365 discharge cycles each year, assuming prices get high enough each such cycle. Each unit of storage get a return on investment each day, and each are used fully at the point in time when the market price is at peak.
Under those precise circumstances the economics of storage is cheaper than nuclear. The only other cheaper alternative to nuclear is to use renewables when the weather is optimal and fossil fuel when the weather is not optimal, or just use fossil fuels (through that is just a waste of money and the climate).
Naturally this advisor firm could be wrong and someone here could start the world first economical viable operation that uses wind for renewables and then charge a reverse hydro operation. It would make for a nice news item.
Making such broad statements about economical versus not economical is difficult, because batteries serve so many purposes and have so many revenue streams that deployment is highly locational, depending on the specifics of the grid and where and when demand causes congestion.
There's also little incentive to install storage when solar and wind penetration is low, but as higher percentages of the grid is powered by renewables, then storage quickly becomes far more attractive.
Currently, there are 14.5GW of batteries in development across the US, and this is just a tiny nascent industry. Even as a small industry, this is many times the power capacity of nuclear currently in development.
This biggest challenge with batteries right now is low supply, and competing with demand from EV production, which provides higher margins:
If we are talking about the US and not like places like northern Europe, then they have a lot of existing capacity for fossil fuel production. The cheapest way to produce energy would be to just add more renewables and use that fossil fuel whenever that weather isn't optimal. Batteries might be competitive to fossil fuel in places such situation as highlighted by the financial advisor, ie when they can discharge fully each day of the year at the maximum price point.
The batteries can often be cheaper than fossil fuels, especially when colocated with existing solar. Most solar designs currently under size the inverters compared to maximum solar power output, to get the cost optimal balance. Batteries on-site allow storage of that extra DC energy, and then reuse of the same inverters outside normal solar generation hours to discharge the batteries.
This means that hitting the cost peak is really easy for batteries.
As this cheapest form of energy begins to dominate, and the "baseload" generators like coal or combined cycle gas become more expensive than solar, then it becomes less economical to run the "baseload generators because they don't have sufficient price support during the peak solar output times. This will raise the night time prices of energy, as the daytime prices decrease, and eventually storage plus solar becomes cheaper than new "baseload" facilities, and then cheaper than continuing to run existing "baseload" facilities.
I put "baseload" in quotes because on the past baseload meant cheapest energy, in addition to slow and expensive dispatchability. That is all changing.
> and then reuse of the same inverters outside normal solar generation hours to discharge the batteries.
Yes, if we are talking about hours of capacity then batteries can be very cost competitive to fossil fuels. That is exactly what the financial advisor stated in their report.
In areas where solar + batteries can reliable handle all year round demands for energy, those technologies should just replace fossil fuels. There will likely be some natural gas plants that get subsidies to exist as reserve in case there is a sudden weather change, but nuclear wouldn't be a great option in such places.
A big variable too is the price development of batteries, which is trending in the right direction due to more and more production capacity coming on-line but once grid storage and EVs start to compete for those batteries the price could well be going up.
Storage is not not purely theoretical!! In fact there are <lists five completely theoretical storage methods that rely on stable climate or perfect geography>.
They aren't in short supply, but aren't present everywhere - e.g. in Europe there's nothing north of Slovakia. If Denmark wants storage, they have to work with other countries and rely on transit. It's even worse for the Baltics.
Hedging your bets. We know nuclear works. Grid-scale energy storage for renewables still feels far fetched. Maybe it's not. Either way, we should not put all our eggs in one basket.
We shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. But I don't think rapid growth of the battery industry is far fetched at all. It has already experienced massive growth and is ridiculously mass producable. And we will need batteries anyway for electric cars.
The battery capacity needed to replace all cars with electric ones is about two orders of magnitude lower than the battery capacity needed to replace all fossil fuels with wind and solar, at least in temperate regions, where you need heating during the winter.
According to this MIT study, the cost (LCOE) of doing this today, would be $3000/MWH:
Even if the cost of batteries continue to come down by x4 in price every decade from now on, it will take 30-40 years for prices to come below current energy prices.
If we hit an S-curve before then, it could take much longer.
I was arguing that we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket and the scale of the challenge really confirms that. But yes, I do think that the battery industry has the best chance of scaling up and achieving order of magnitude improvements. But we don't actually need that for that industry to play a part in defeating climate change. And failure to meet some hypothetical objective does not invalidate that. Again, we don't need to put all our eggs in once basket and that certainly means not relying 100% on battery storage.
That link is summarizing a nonpublic paper from a research group making the case for hydrogen as grid storage for California, not a very strong cite for this.
Generally keeping houses warm with low evergy is solved, well insulated passive houses need little heating energy even in places with long cold winters.
> Generally keeping houses warm with low evergy is solved, well insulated passive houses need little heating energy even in places with long cold winters.
What is your definition of "places with long cold winters" and how much energy do you think it takes (kwh) to heat a house in such climates during winter?
Have a look in eg p.43-46, 75, 117, 143 in https://portal.research.lu.se/en/publications/passive-houses... for one case of building standards back in 2009. There isn't really a energy efficiency limit there being approached, just a matter of what had been picked as a cost
efficient target, so there are no absolutes. I'm betting current designs are more efficient, as that has been a constant trend, but don't have newer references on hand.
In practice it seems going much lower than half as much as hot water uses may be wasteful investment as long as water is not heated with local renewables.
The savings depend on what you benchmark against. But energy savings between 50-75% for a new house compared to an old one, seems realistic. And maybe older houses could be modernized in ways that would save 25%-50% in many cases.
Tearing down all old houses and building new ones is obviously not an alternative, so a transition to new standards is likely to take 50 years or more, even though some of the benefit can be realized by modernizing existing housing.
But even $30000-€50000 euros to lower energy consumption is also a big investment for many families, and even WITH that investment, heating prices in Norway and Sweden will be 2-3x historic prices if prices stabilize at current levels, especially if the governments stop subsidies.
I think every country will have trouble bringing their population to accept having to use electricity at prices about €0.1/kwh, even if over a very long term, it is possible to build houses (at extra costs) that bring the consumption down a bit. At such prices, people in Germany, Denmark, Poland, Hungary etc will simply continue burning natural gas indefinitely.
Because transitioning over to green technology is a decades-long project, it's not something you can just snap your fingers and make happen, as many countries are discovering. You still need non-renewable energy sources to fill in the gaps that renewables currently have.
You don't have to transition completely in decades. You can start today. Meanwhile building a single nuclear reactor is a "decade-long" project, you can't start today and in the end you're still left with an old and expensive tech while the green tech moved ahead rapidly during the same time.
When they started out the technology was terrible and managed to do all that despite a just recently retired government which did everything to stop further expansion.
> You don't have to transition completely in decades. You can start today.
Yes, I agree. If you start today, you’ll be done in decades. The boneheaded move is to start a green energy transition and immediately start decommissioning existing nuclear power plants and stonewall creating new ones by throwing up your hands and saying “well it’ll take forever to build them.” By the way, have you ever considered why it takes so long to build nuclear power plants? It’s a political and environmental special interest problem, not a technical one.
At the end of the day, when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, you still have to generate power somehow. Until the day that problem is solved (that’s the “decades” part), you want something like nuclear power to fall back on.
I don't know why you're ignoring my reality example. Germany is part of a EU wide market and it just works. Also it's not like you put all your wind on one spot. There is always wind somewhere for example.
The idea that it's an "political, environmental and special interest" problem while we're watching several nuclear plants being FAR over budget and over due being constructed in pro-nuclear countries proves that your argument is false.
So basically: everything you wrote there is wrong...why are you doing this?
There is always wind somewhere. But grid capacity is not free, in fact it is quite expensive. Let's say, on a given day, the only place in Europe with reasonable winds would be west of Cadiz, transporting all that power through Spain, Portugal and France to cover the needs of all of Europe, would require immensive grid capacity expansion. And even with super-high-voltage, the losses before the power reaches Estonia would be huge.
Also, if this load causes a brownout in Spain, due to improper maintaince, for instance, all of Europe could go dark, cold and stop moving (in a time after fossil fuels).
(I can imagine seeing this from space during some cold winter night around 2045, all the lights in Western and Central Europe disappear at once. Only Norway and parts of Sweden can be seen, since they have their hydro power.)
In other words, while a better grid can mitigate _some_ of the variability of renewable supply, you still need massive expansion of storage capacity when you stop using natural gas, especially when you switch heating and transportation to use electricity too.
Seen from the outside, it surely looks like the German population has been seriously misled.
> There is always wind somewhere. But grid capacity is not free, in fact it is quite expensive.
No it's not...as I said several times over: IT'S ALREADY WORKING and has been for years...
> Also, if this load causes a brownout in Spain, due to improper maintaince, for instance,
This is not the US here. We have the most stable grid on the whole planet. Countries do maintain their networks here.
> In other words, while a better grid can mitigate _some_ of the variability of renewable supply, you still need massive expansion of storage capacity when you stop using natural gas, especially when you switch heating and transportation to use electricity too.
Sure more storage is nice. Especially if you want to profit locally but it's not something which would make true green energy possible NOW. Because: as I said several times over: IT'S ALREADY WORKING. We have been "pumping" massively energy into storage in the alps. Now with NordLink we do the same in the other direction too. It's all there.
> Seen from the outside, it surely looks like the German population has been seriously misled.
This must seem so if you're completely uninformed or even misinformed as you have shown here. In fact though as g8oz says: you should be thankful for us showing the world that true green future technology can be made to work and power a high tech and densely populated country. We'll keep on showing you and those countries which WASTE taxpayer money on nuclear just that.
I live in Europe. The grid in Europe is not designed to transport 100% of electricity needs from one edge of the continenent to the other. Most energy produced in Europe is still renewable or nuclear, and it is produced relatively close to where it is consumed, for the most part.
> We have been "pumping" massively energy into storage in the alps.
The storage capacity of electricity in the alps is tiny compared to total electricity consumption.
> Now with NordLink we do the same in the other direction too.
Nordlink has is getting seriously unpopular in Norway, even if it is only 1400MW out of a total installed capacity in Norway of 37GW.
What is working in Europe is fossil fuel plants and nuclear plants, oil for transportation and, in most plases, fossil fuels for heating. Wind and solar is still a tiny percentage (around 10%) of total energy consumption in Europe. Maybe in 20 years it will be 25%.
So what's the scare? You live in a working grid already. It's the most stable one on this planet already and it's improving constantly. Those improvements are also cheaper than nuclear reactors and make the grid more flexible than a constantly running nuclear reactor. What's your argument?
> The storage capacity of electricity in the alps is tiny compared to total electricity consumption.
That's why we don't rely just on it. Just like we don't rely only on PV or only on wind. That's the great thing about it.
> Nordlink has is getting seriously unpopular in Norway
Do you know what's really unpopular in Norway? Nuclear energy. Just as in Germany.
I also don't know how this is supposed to be a valid argument now.
> Wind and solar is still a tiny percentage (around 10%) of total energy consumption in Europe.
Just because certain parts of Europe are ignorant to new technology doesn't mean that it's not working. It's working in Germany pretty well and has been for years while France is embarrassing themselves with their rotting nuclear one-way.
With the load given to it today, it is stable where I live. But the capacity is limited to serve just the current usage + a safety margin. There is not even enough capacity within the country to even out prices from North to South. (Prices in the South is now >15x higher than in the North because of exports.)
> What's your argument?
My argument is that LCOE of renewables, when including the necessary storage/and or grid expansion to make it profitable, still is much higher than nuclear (even at European prices of nuclear).
> Do you know what's really unpopular in Norway? Nuclear energy. Just as in Germany.
I know what's unpopular in Norway, because I live here. Nuclear is pretty irrelevant here, as we still have more hydro than needed to meet our supply. But because we consumpe a LOT more electricity than most countries (do to prices historically having been very low), the population is also very sensitive to price fluctuations.
One aspect of that, is that many Norwegians actually hare highly critical of Germany shutting down their last nuclear plants this year. There is a growing sentiment that Norway needs to limit net exports of electricy to make sure prices return to historic levels. I don't think the government will survive if they don't manage that by next winter.
> It's working in Germany pretty well and has been for years while France is embarrassing themselves with their rotting nuclear one-way.
To me, as an outsider who's neither French nor German, it seems like it is Germany embarrassing themselves. I suppose opinions may vary.
If Germany wants to replace all uses of fossil fuels for heating, transportation, industrial use, etc, with renewables, HUGE investments remain.
In particular, giving up the ability to smooth out variations in production without the use of fossil fuels will be extremely costly, unless the cost comes down by at least a factor or 50.
> Still, only 16% of Germany's total energy consumption comes from renewables:
Sure but this has nothing to do with nuclear.
Germany heats with gas and oil. We don't even have 5% electrical heating here.
> In particular, giving up the ability to smooth out variations in production without the use of fossil fuels will be extremely costly,
It's not even close to how costly nuclear is and will continue to be for GENERATIONS.
Germany is connected to the most stable continental grid on this planet. Something other "developed" countries like the US can only dream of. Germany has been expanding their national grid and will continue to do so. Also we have build up renewable energy for the whole world. Paying for it. So don't worry. We'll manage. It's the rest of the world you have to worry about since they're stuck in the past. Especially France with their single source which is a rotting fleet run by a bankrupt state company eating up taxpayer money with no end in sight.
Germany, for all it's renewables, let out significantly more greenhouse gases per capita than surrounding countries, such as France.
> It's not even close to how costly nuclear is and will continue to be for GENERATIONS.
Modern nuclear plants are designed to last for a minimum of 60 years, and can be renewed to last another 40.
Modern wind turbines as well as most solar panels have an expected lifetime of around 25 years.
> Also we have build up renewable energy for the whole world. Paying for it.
Germany even pays Denmark to shut down their wind power on days when production is high, to make the statistics of German renewable production look prettier.
Germany is still using fossil fuels for most of their energy.
> Also we have build up renewable energy for the whole world.
Norway has been on 100% renewable electricity since forever, and unlike Germany, Norway actually uses electricity for heating. Fossil fuel heating was banned in Norway i 2020. So Norway uses electricity for everything, meaning the population is not willing to pay German prices for much longer. Most likely, the Norwegian government will have to strangle exports through Nordlink and similar cables in the coming winter, if prices remain high.
Norway did NOT need German help for that.
On the other hand, Norway also provides Germany with a large percentage of Germany's fossil fuel needs, both natural gas and oil (most of the imports not coming from Russia comes from Norway).
> Modern nuclear plants are designed to last for a minimum of 60 years, and can be renewed to last another 40. Modern wind turbines as well as most solar panels have an expected lifetime of around 25 years.
What does that have to do with the sentence you've quoted? They don't leave us with radioactive waste, we have no space to put away. "Modern" is also relative in this case since before you have one of those "new" reactors running, renewable tech made several technological jumps and most of "new" is still in development and/or of questionable use/improvement like SMRs: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2111833119
> Germany even pays Denmark to shut down their wind power
Why do you even bother quoting me when you're not answering to this?
> Norway has been on 100% renewable electricity since forever, and unlike Germany, Norway actually uses electricity for heating.
Good for Norway. What do you suppose? Give an electric heater to 95% of all German households? I mean seriously...what is this?
Btw: while Norway runs green, they dig for oil and gas and sell it to others making all the good on the environment bad again.
> Norway did NOT need German help for that.
Nobody said they need it. It's one of the batteries for the rest of the grid. This is how the grid works.
>> Germany, for all it's renewables, let out significantly more greenhouse gases per capita than surrounding countries, such as France.
> This has also nothing to do with nuclear.
When comparing to France, it has EVERYTHING to do with France using Nuclear, where Germany still uses a lot of gas and coal.
> They don't leave us with radioactive waste, we have no space to put away.
Don't believe the propaganda about nuclear waste. The volume of high grade waste is tiny, and it remains super-dangerous for much less time than people realize. And low-grade waste is mostly less dangerous than car-exhaust.
> "Modern" is also relative in this case
Gen3 reactors are safe enough, if not already over-engineered for safety in many cases.
>> Germany even pays Denmark to shut down their wind power
> Why do you even bother quoting me when you're not answering to this?
You were bragging of Germany paying, I confirmed that Germany was paying.
> What do you suppose? Give an electric heater to 95% of all German households?
If Germany is serious about getting rid of fossil fuel based heating/cooking etc, they could do like Norway, gradually ramp up taxes of natural gas for heating to a level just above the price of electricity. After 10 years at that level, switching becomes easy. Norway started this 20 years ago, and when fossil fuels were banned in 2020, most had already transitioned.
> Btw: while Norway runs green, they dig for oil and gas and sell it to others making all the good on the environment bad again.
That's one way to see it. If the environmentalist movement in Norway gets their way, Norway will shut down the oil and gas production asap. Realists would say that as long as Europe depends on fossil fuels, it's better that they get it from Norway, than being even more dependent on dictatorships in OPEC+Russia.
Anyway, Germany is in a similar situation with its car industry. Is Germany responsible for the polution generated by German-produced cars? Or do you put all the blame on the oil-producer?
> Nobody said they need it. It's one of the batteries for the rest of the grid. This is how the grid works.
Actually, Norway has very little capacity for pumped storage. If Europe can sell us power on windy days, we can temporarily shut down our hydro plants on those days, and export a similar amount when there is less wind in the North Sea.
But with Europe currently being so low on production capacity, this balance has turned into significant net exports for Norway. The effect of that to the average Norwegian is similar to what it would be if Germany simply banned natural gas heating overnight. Electrical ovens cost almost nothing compared to the electricity itself.
As long as the price differenc between Germany and Norway remains as high as it is, there is no way Norwegian consumers will be willing to pay German prices. Switching back to fossil fuels for heating is not an option here, so consumers are stuck with consumption that is 2-4x higher than most countries.
So be careful about depending on Norway to be part of the grid for much longer. It's simply not in the best interests of the Norwegian population anymore.
That’s not cheaper. Run the numbers and you’ll see. Solar by itself is indeed pretty cheap per kWh if you don’t care about matching supply with demand, but storage very much is not. If it was, you’d see investors build standalone storage, to buy cheap electricity, store it, and resell when demand goes up. This is not what’s happening: instead, existing projects are based either on heavy government subsidies, or on vanity buyers, who want to pay above market prices to signal eco awareness, like Starbucks in one of your links.
The problem with running the numbers is that the actual numbers for nuclear are basically unknowable and most governments have given a taxpayer insurance that covers this unknown number "in blanco".
This means that most of the costs that will be caused by operating a nuclear power plant are not included in the costs of operations, and therefore not in the "price per MWh" or similar numbers. We don't know what this number is but we do know it's a very large number, and by removing it from the resposibility of the plant operators it represents a very large hidden subsidy for nuclear power.
Chernobyl and Fukushima are the familiar elephants in this particular room of course with he most recent estimate for Chernobyl passing 600bn usd in 2016 (and counting still of course and for the forseeable future) but I like to use the Asse II salt mine in Germany as a more digestable example.
This mine was used to store nuclear waste in the 70s which turned out to be a very bad mistake that has to be fixed in the coming few decades. The cost of this project, (estimated to be at least several bn euros) is not added to the cost of nuclear, it's just charged to the current taxpayers. The power plants that generated the waste stored in this mine are closed long ago but they keep costing money decades later.
Nuclear seems cheap because we're paying for it with credit cards issued to our grandchildren.
How much of that is just sensitivity to the cost of battery cells? If most of the world can buy lithium iron phosphate cells at $100 a kw/h, would battery storage be cost effective in ways it isn't at $300 a kw/h?
(I'm not sure what the actually LFP cell wholesale costs are these days; I get the impression that historically they've been a lot cheaper in China due to patents, but the last of the major patents expired about a month ago so maybe low cost cells will show up everywhere if production can keep up with demand. As a retail customer though in the U.S. it's really hard to find anything under about $300 a kw/h -- if utilities are paying a similar price, I can understand them not wanting to go all-in on battery storage. There's no reason for them to continue to be that expensive.)
I'm not sure he's lying on purpose. But it's pretty common that people just stop thinking further when someone tells him what they want to hear.
The article certainly dismisses the need for storage way too easily, imo. It claims that consumption can be adjusted to match supply. There are not that many uses of electricity where you can simply lower your consumption when the supply is low.
There are some cases, like car batteries that can, sort of, be seen as consumption, but unless your car has some extreme storage capacity, you typically want to be able to recharge it when YOU need to have that range, instead of when the power company has additional supply.
And if you don't want to use fossil fuels for heating, the power saved by not charging your car is NOT enough to keep your house warm for a few cold days with no winds (unless you live in a place with no real winter).
The state better invests the money in cheaper technologies. Why should it waste the money on nuclear plants?
Edit: To the downvoters: Seriously, why should the state waste money on a technology that doesn't work and never has? More than half of France's nuclear power plants are currently offline and in maintainence mode. Maybe also because they could not produce electricity at market prices.
Doubling the cost consequence of regulations, regulations changing causing in-progress projects to go back and remove and re-do work, negative learning - all of these things are a result of our society not gathering around the mission. If we wanted it, we would fix all these things. But it just doesn't have support. It seems like an incredible tragedy that is at least proportional to that of climate change since from most reasonable projections, nuclear - assuming the technological challenges can be solved - is the quickest way to reduce our impact on climate change. The fact that we insist on suppressing the courage to solve the problems makes me question the integrity of those who run the narratives on climate change policy.
> Nuclear is sometimes praised for having lower fuel costs, but all else being equal (ie: assuming total production cost stays constant), it’s better to have a larger fraction of your electricity costs be variable, so that if demand drops then production cost drops as well.
This is not obviously true. I could make an argument that base load generation capacity (nuclear and hydro in particular) should be state-owned or largely state-sponsored, both to avoid economic price shocks/volatility and because it's good for national security (check out what Europe is going through right now).
What's the consensus on the meaning of 'base load generation capacity'?
There are those who'd say it's an archaic term often used to defend power sources that can't ramp up and down to meet demand, and nuclear would be top of that list. If - for instance - there are times when it's windy and sunny, why should consumers have to pay more than the market rate to nuclear generators, just because nuclear is inflexible?
More broadly: what's the actual use case for 'base load generation capacity' over the coming decades?
Yup, that seems a strange argument. Power usage varies during the day, but it doesn't really go below some "base load".
Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load.
We need peaker plants to get the rest. Gas plants are the popular (cheap) choice for this. Carbon free alternatives are pumped hydro or batteries.
With renewables the production capacity is variable as well.
To fill possible "holes" in it we don't need more base load. What renewables need are ... peaker plants. A role nuclear reactors are exceptionally unsuited to fill.
> Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load.
That's not exactly true, you can build nuclear plants for load following which provides some amount of flexibility, at the cost of some efficiency (about 1% I think).
IIRC French plants can operate between 30 and 100% rated power, and ramp rates can reach 5% per minute (though normal rates are 1 to 3). French nukes regularly have to ramp up and down quickly to compensate for wind variation and monday pickup (electricity consumptions goes way down over the weekend, especially nice spring weekends, then back way up on week start).
> but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand
To be precise, it cannot stop consuming fuel quick enough that there's any important savings, and so nuclear power plants always want to run at full capacity because otherwise they are wasting fuel.
But more than that, fuel consumption is simply not a very big part of the running cost of a nuclear power plant, most is fixed cost so that even if they could change the fuel consumption quickly there's just not enough savings to really bother with it.
> To be precise, it cannot stop consuming fuel quick enough that there's any important savings, and so nuclear power plants always want to run at full capacity because otherwise they are wasting fuel. But more than that, fuel consumption is simply not a very big part of the running cost of a nuclear power plant, most is fixed cost so that even if they could change the fuel consumption quickly there's just not enough savings to really bother with it
(Sorry) but that sounds like a slightly long-winded way of saying that nuclear just isn't economically viable.
"the costs of renewables continue to fall due to incremental manufacturing and installation improvements while nuclear, despite over half a century of industrial experience, continues to see costs rising"[0]
Correct. We know nukes are not economically viable. They get less so with every passing day. Starting any new ones under the present circumstances would be extremely stupid, as no one would pay for power from it at a price it could offer.
> you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand
Surely you'd want actually want suppliers to react to changes in spot price, not just demand? If it's windy and sunny, it might not matter if demand is high! If it's calm and cloudy, you have a problem.
If the spot electricity price is high, you want providers to jump in and supply electricity. If it's low, or indeed goes negative[0], you want them to shut down.
Nuclear just doesn't fit this model, since investors appear to want the strike price guaranteed for several decades before they'll even start pouring concrete for their plant.
I tend to disbelieve the people who say it's unnecessary because there are many places where the cheapest power generation has come from renewables for quite some time, and yet all of those places still have base load on the grid.
Baseload has several major ingredients: the required continuous consumption, connectivity of areas that are remote from each other where the one has a surplus and the other a deficit, local overcapacity storage options and installed capacity from 'guaranteed' sources (and no source is 100% guaranteed, typically even the most stable sources are down 20 to 40% of the time for maintenance, refueling, repairs and so on).
The required baseload is then further influenced by load variability, and rate-of-change. Not all generation equipment can spin up / down equally fast, and sometimes the effect of for instance a shut-down is that it will take a long time to go back online.
Baseload is a function of a whole interconnected grid rather than of some locality, and this is a big difference between how laypeople see this and how people in the power business see it. It's not as if the electrons that are pushed into a wire in say Southern France need to get all the way to Poland to light a bulb there, all that the various generators do is maintain their local grid by making available enough power locally that lightbulbs in France are served by their local power stations and lightbulbs in Poland are served by theirs. This minimizes transmission losses.
If you have a surplus and the distance is large then with conventional (AC) transmission lines there is an upper limit to how big an area you can serve before the losses make that no longer economical. HVDC has nicer properties for long distance transmission which has some very interesting consequences for baseload: suddenly wind and solar thousands of KM (multiple timezones) away can be used to provide power to some locality, reducing the need for local generation capacity if the price is right.
This revolution is happening right now, the HVDC grid interconnects are shaping up rapidly with more and more of these coming on-line. Especially the longer East-West runs have the possibility to materially affect the amount of fossil/nuclear required for when solar and wind are insufficient, as well as the North-South ones from areas where there is a lot of hydro generation capacity.
(incidentally: if this stuff interests you take a guess at how far those electrons really move during 1/100th or 1/120th of a second and then check the physics to see how far they really travel, the answer may surprise you).
> More broadly: what's the actual use case for 'base load generation capacity' over the coming decades?
The use case is that there should be enough capacity under governmental control to ensure that even in a case of crisis (such as, say, an oil price hike, a war or import blockades) the base load of the citizenry is still accounted for - big industries might be temporarily restricted, but no citizen should freeze in winter because the forces of the market deem it more profitable to have some large company buy their way out.
well, nuclear power plants can be impacted by weather conditions: specifically those which use rivers to provide the water for their cooling need, rivers whose discharge can be impacted by high heat, bringing it to a level below what's required for the nuclear plant. I don't think it's not a common occurrence, but it can happen
The technology to do load follow at a nuclear plant exists.
If you think about it, "base load" has nothing to do with the power source. Given some period of time, say a day, you are always going to have a certain minimum demand for power generation in a geographic location. Congratulations, you have identified base load.
As the grid becomes more distributed and therefore less centralized, you are going to see base load hitting lower peaks because individual power generation stations will have less aggregate demand. But until society reaches a point where at least part of the day there is zero demand on the grid (fat chance) you will always have base load in some shape or form.
> you are always going to have a certain minimum demand for power generation in a geographic location. Congratulations, you have identified base load.
If it's - say - sunny and windy, your renewables are always going to undercut all other generators. So when they undercut nuclear, basic market forces should mean nuclear doesn't get to supply a single MW, and if that means investors lose out, well, tough.
Base load should always be supplied by the cheapest supplier. Not the least flexible and/or the ones with the highest fixed costs.
Yeah this statement makes me think that OP had very little actual knowledge about energy pricing.
If there’s ever a complicated market of supply and demand it’s energy. Having a huge chunk of the supply be stable and controllable is absolutely desired, will help simplify operations a lot, make supply more predictable, and as a result deliver more stable prices.
It’s not as if the population is suddenly getting cheaper windmills if there’s too much supply; if the energy supplier is losing money due to oversupply, they will need to get their money back another way, so it’s always the consumer that pays anyway.
I don't know why you say you can't throttle nuclear up and down. All thermal plants have inertia, but nuclear is if anything easier to throttle than fossil fuels.
> I don't know why you say you can't throttle nuclear up and down. All thermal plants have inertia, but nuclear is if anything easier to throttle than fossil fuels.
In that case why don't we let the market build nuclear plants without any state guarantees or insurance and they can simply "throttle up" when they're required. No need to fix a strike price for decades before investors are interested.
That's quite the non-sequitor. An exploration of how broken "the market" is would be an entirely separate discussion. If you wanted to have that discussion, we could start by analyzing the massive subsidies enjoyed by fossil fuels, not to mention the complete lack of accounting for its toxic byproducts which are dumped into the atmosphere (while nuclear power is legally required to track and safely store every molecule).
Or we could just keep building gas peaker plants and ignore the mass die-offs, because "the market" can't possibly be wrong, right? /s
Is it? If nuclear is indeed able to throttle output up and down to match demand - or perhaps we should say, to match spot pricing(!) - why on Earth would we need to fix a minimum price for decades in advance in order to attract investment to build new ones?
"Given its commitment to building Hinkley Point C, the [UK] government had no choice but to make EDF an offer that was too good to resist. It offered to guarantee EDF a fixed price for each unit of energy produced at Hinkley for its first 35 years of operation. In 2012, the guaranteed price – known as the 'strike price' – was set at £92.50 per megawatt hour (MWh), which would then rise with inflation. (One MWh is roughly equivalent to the electricity used by around 330 homes in one hour.) This means that if the wholesale price of electricity across the country falls below £92.50, EDF will receive an extra payment from the consumer as a 'top-up' to fill the gap. This will be added to electricity bills around the country – even if you aren’t receiving electricity from Hinkley Point C, you will still be making a payment to EDF."[0]
> If nuclear is indeed able to throttle output up and down to match demand - or perhaps we should say, to match spot pricing(!) - why on Earth would we need to fix a minimum price for decades in advance in order to attract investment to build new ones
Lots of reasons, one of which my sibling comment by user akvadrako has touched on. The question of whether it's currently economically viable to do so is a separate discussion. You persist on making this odd logical syllogism - if nuclear could throttle, the market would look like X, the market looks like Y, therefore nuclear can't throttle - and keep ignoring the technical fact of the matter that nuclear plants can in point of fact throttle. I have already linked to robust corroboration of this fact so I don't think there's any more for me to say here.
You're forgetting that the energy market requires an absolute balance between supply and demand; if you're supplying energy without anyone using it, you're going to have a very bad time.
He was trying to make a point - that flexibility is valuable. And it is valuable. All else equal you'd take more flexibility than less, especially since demand moves around a good amount.
But it isn’t flexibility we can control. It’s either fluctuations in supply which we need to absorb somehow, or it’s scaling down supply. The big differentiator is the flexibility to scale up supply when you need it, and it’s precisely this flexibility that’s missing.
It definitely can be controllable. Peakers exist, and are controlled. You say "scale down", someone who runs a peaker thinks "scale up", and they can do it pretty fast (minutes). And the lower the capex the better, it gets closer and closer to a free option.
Having a real option on producing electricity (or, almost anything where demand varies) is valuable to society.
The part which makes it so is "all else being equal". He is just saying "flexibility is more valuable than it might seem on the surface, because demand moves around".
What Europe is going through right now is mostly caused by those large, state sponsored conglomerates. It's the smaller private operators that are doing just fine.
Totally unrelated question but does anyone know if nuclear powered US Navy vessels are able to feed power to the grid while in port? I know it's technically possible, just not sure if anyone has ever implemented such a thing.
Navy nuclear vessels have (relative to the grid) little real power generation capability and cannot handle grid reactive loading at all. The grid appears as an infinite reactive load to shipboard electrical switching equipment.
Sure, relative to the total grid capacity it's not much but during peak loads every bit helps.
I suppose you'd want to transition from ship to shore via a DC path and convert it back to synchronized AC which should avoid issues with reactive loads.
There's no mechanism for this specifically because shipboard MWe is so measly.
If the ship did have significant MWe capability you would have no way to get it shoreside, the shore power cables would burn. In availabilities where significant shore power is required (>800 Amps), sets of cables have to be welded directly to busbars because the sockets can't handle it.
So you've got 360kW (800A * 450V) that the average plant can deliver. The typical estimation is 10kW per home, so 36 homes from one naval plant.
A naval reactor produces most of its power in direct steam propulsion and relatively little (~1/3rd) converted to electricity. I think the largest vessels can generate just 125MW which isn't much at all. The only beneficial use of a navy vessel as mobile infrastructure that I can recall is when the USS Carl Vinson was used to produce drinking water for Haiti after their earthquake.
The largest nuclear vessel produces up to 160 MW, the smallest single nuclear reactor power plant about 500 MW (sites often have multiples), the largest nuclear reactor in the US is about 4 GW. An average wind turbine produces 2-3 MW.
I think the discrepancy is not all the thermal output is converted to electricity:
> A1B reactors likely produce enough steam to generate 125 megawatts (168,000 hp) of electricity, plus 350,000 shaft horsepower (260 MW) to power the four propeller shafts.
This is my understanding as well. I believe that they may even shut down at sea and run in on batteries/generators, which doubles as a way to test those systems. Refueling is quite the ordeal, so there is an incentive to minimize fuel depletion.
Reactors may sometimes be shut down at sea to test backup generators and run reactor restarting drills, but it would not be done otherwise. Aircraft carrier propulsion comes from steam from the reactors - if the reactors are offline the ship cannot move. Moreover, the backup generators burn jet fuel, which is convenient because aircraft carriers already have a store of jet fuel for the planes and so don’t have to carry extra fuel for the backup generators, but it’s very expensive, and not something that would be done outside of an emergency or testing emergency preparedness.
Nuclear powered vessels do not spend any significant amount of time shutdown at sea, and there is no reason to. Electrical power is a very small fraction of their total MWh production, with almost all power going to propulsion.
When fuel lifetime becomes an issue for a nuclear naval vessel they will have propulsion limits in place that limit transit speeds to those which are most efficient for the propulsion turbines.
Isn't Hawaii also transitioning a significant fraction of its generation to solar? Diesel can be ramped up and down easily to account for varying production from solar.
The Hawaii government page [0] list a goal of getting to 100% renewables by 2045. If I am reading the report correctly, the 2020 number was already at 36% renewables.
Solar and Wind have really been exploding in the past few years. I fully expect this hand wringing over nuclear will end up being overtaken by events in the next 30 years or so. The real limitation at the moment is battery technology, there is a lot riding on finding cheap and efficient energy storage.
There is no need to "find" cheap energy storage. Many different methods are already known to store energy.
But building storage before you have enough renewables to charge it from would be stupid. So, the money goes to generating capacity, in the meantime. When storage is needed, it will be much cheaper than today, as cost is falling even faster than generating capacity.
If you plan to build a Nuclear plant *TODAY*, there are financial requirements and regulatory uncertainties that mean you're sitting on high interest(and risky) loans/credit lines/asset pledges etc that increase over time.
Very few banks or financial institutions are remotely interested in setting up financing an endeavor that has an almost 0 chance of success to completion since the 90s.
Environmental review has become a tool of environmental extremist militants to derail and progress in energy. These organizations are SO short sighted that they have been weaponizing the judicial system against simple projects such as high voltage transmission lines for the silliest of reasons which assures America that her infrastructure will forever be stuck in the past.
The cost of operating a plant come after all this is considered. All plants running today are roughly HALF A FUCKING CENTURY old. What the US needs is easy access to cheap credit for people willing to set up Nuclear plants.
We need incentive to invest in audacious increases in energy output in exchange for meeting thresholds of performance. Right now, you can kill yourself by filling out thousands of pages of ridiculous review, hire some of the most expensive attorneys to represent you in court to be granted to privilege of even having basic clearance to START building while sitting on a fast bleeding pool of credit, it makes NO sense.
> Environmental review has become a tool of environmental extremist militants to derail and progress in energy.
Hmm... I wonder why they are so bent on blocking the only viable solution to climate change?
Almost as if they are being used a pawns to shift over the control of energy to the government... after all, if I wanted to nationalize every industry, I would start with the industry upon which all other industries depend on: energy.
I like the possibilities of solar energy. I like the possibilities of decentralized energy. I am a conspiracy theory type of guy. Here's what I really think about all the state and corporate SDG campaign sloganing I see on the streets every damn day:
The reasonably accessible domestic solar panels that do come out will most likely be IoT devices. It will be energy as a service. They will gather information in a way you might not be happy about, and have an off-switch listening for a signal from a remote, centralized hub. The solar panel's use will be governed by a TOS about what you use the electricity for. An automated system will sometimes cause random power outages for any kind of citizen, but it will also get disproportionately used against political enemies, as requested (perhaps sometimes with plausible deniability) by admins that we will never get to see, and never get to reach. It will be a corporate system, ergo the noble platitude of "electricity as a human right" will be sidestepped or shouted down, along with other things. To "manage carbon", alternative generators will be kept out of the hands of the people. Victims will either need to steal electricity or covertly depend on jury-rigged, borderline medieval sources of power to get by.
It will be an exacerbation of the status quo where service access is hydraulic state/corporate despotism.
As far as I can tell, the despots hate us because they know we desperately want this system to not get further created and we speak as able against the segments of it that exist. These people as a political unit behave sort of like Roko's Basilisk that way - a hyper powerful technological system that punishes you for trying to prevent its creation.
To gain the trust of people like us and help work together on this energy crisis, I recommend you and others campaign as hard as you can against a political system that allows this kind of abuse in energy policy management - and indeed in any place you can agree it is wrong. An alternative is to decide we are so stupid, paranoid and useless that a system like this should be created and should lock us out, because we are a doomed strain of ideological mutants holding the human team back, and our co-operation on energy would be a net detriment anyways. The final, safest, most comfortable alternative is to flatly deny such a system will exist, when stuff like it already happens in other parts of our lives and the means and motive are clearly present. The alternatives will keep dragging humanity into a sterile, upside-down world that feels less and less worth living in, no matter how many gigawatts of whatever kind of power we seem to benefit from.
I got angry at your mean dismissal, but I'm trying to move past it. I can live with being reviled, or seen as crazy. Even if you think my ideas are absolutely ridiculous, just promise me you'll do what you can to keep exploitative energy tech like what I described from being created, deployed, adopted if you ever do see it happening. It's enough for me if you do not go on one day to make or believe arguments that try to justify having such a TOS on services that provide ordinary people with their basic needs.
On top of that the cost of waste disposal is astronomic and in most of the world without a permanent solution. And it is usually not included in the actual calculation -- power plants usually need to put some money on the side and into an index fund, with the hope the fund eventually grows to be large enough to cover the cost. But nobody really knows if it will suffice, so it's likely the public will be on the hook. On top of all the subsidies received during construction and operation. Basically I view it as a type of graft.
It is interesting that personal costs was such huge part of the increase in construction. Construction seems like a field that automation has yet to really start to create waves, but I recall seeing news about small step forward like scaled up 3d printing with cement. Modular construction is an other concept I have not heard much for in the context of nuclear plants.
Prototypes are never cheap. Prototypes are where all the research and design costs go. Once you have a design that works and doesn't have to be customised for each instance, you can get economics of scale because now you're just producing the same items over and over.
Sure, but would the economics of scale really apply here?
Would a small reactor be simpler to build and maintain than a big one, for an equivalent energy output?
I'm no nuclear engineer or scientist, but I'm not sure that a smaller reactor can output more energy per dollar. I don't think that smaller reactor equals more safety, and most of the cost involved with nuclear energy has something to do with safety.
The two largest countries, USA & France, have built 1 plant each, both for 2-4x the original cost, and are 10-15 years late.
France has cancelled the only other plant, and the USA has done the same, spending $4.6bn to cancel the plant at the 60% mark
Their fleets are now verging on >90% 30 years old, and they are opting to extend the lives rather than build new ones.
On the other hand... China is crushing out plants. It is the only country to be accelerating. China will be a nuclear power IP exporter and potentially the only country that has the knowhow and capability to build these plants.
I understand author picked it from some other source, Dawson 2017 or whatever.
These pie charts are not like for like, when it includes the renewables -- maybe the coal/gas/nuclear fine. So why put them next to one another. I can't tell if the costs of renewables are for entire "farms" (solar or wind farms). What about lifetime of plants/farms, total value derived, etc.
What is your objection? The charts are all various fractional contributions to LCOE, which already captures and normalizes for things like plant life. You could argue that the size of the pie should be scaled for the total LCOE, but that doesn't really help with the comparison being made (e.g., the relatively small fractional cost of fuel vs capital for nuclear plants).
There are efforts in our area to expand solar and they are offering programs to the public to subsidize some of the construction with shares of the panels. Customers are advised that they will not make money but they’ll get back some percentage of their shares each month. Additionally the power company offers a renewable power option for which they charge extra over the standard rate. Given this: will we see a nuclear option to help subsidize the cost? I would love the cost to come down but I feel like they’re never going to come down if we don’t build it anywhere. Would love to help get it going although I have nowhere near enough money to make an offer other than to be a willing paying customer to whoever can get service to me.
This analysis is incredibly thorough and detailed, but I don’t think it answers the question it poses itself.
From my civil engineering and energy economics coursework, the one of the largest economic deterrents to nuclear power adoption was insurance: nobody would insure the construction of a plant, because a failure would bankrupt the insurance company.
To give the article credit, they do allude to catastrophic incidents and waste storage costs in near perpetuity, but don’t really mention insurance.
Because reactors are much too large, causing far too slow of a design iteration cycle and inability to leverage economies of scale and mass production.
"For instance, in the 1980s several nuclear power plants in Washington were canceled after the estimated construction costs increased from $4.1 billion to over $24 billion."
That's not even 10x. I would say hitting the correct order of magnitude is "on budget" for civil engineering projects.
To summarize, light water reactors rely on the production of uranium fuel rods, which hold uranium enriched to about 3% U-235 relative to 97% U-238. Naturally occuring uranium ores are about 0.7% U-235 and there is a large variation in the percentage of uranium in a given ore by total rock mass, with a few deposits being as much as 18% uranium ranging down to about 0.1%, which most sources describe as the economically recoverable limit. This will affect the cost of refueling a LWR (which has to be done every ~3 three years).
Fission in LWRs is due to slow thermal neutrons, which can only fission U-235 and Pu-239 (odd-numbered isotopes. Fast neutrons are a different story, see above source for that.) These slow neutron/U-235 events generate fission fragments (atomic masses in the range ~80-110 and ~130-150 with peaks at 95 and 135), gamma rays, and free neutrons. The initial energy distribution for heating the circulating fluid (water) is about 85% fission fragment kinetic energy, and about 15% gamma ray and neutron kinetic energy.
Some of the neutrons are captured by U-239, forming plutonium-239 (and other transuranics) - which is also subject to fission, and over the lifetime of the fuel, about 66% of this formed Pu-239 is itself fissioned, adding to the total energy output.
However, the actual heat produced by the reactor is also due to long-term decay of the fission fragments inside the fuel rods (about 6% of the total). This latter 6% is important because even if you halt the initial fission process, the reactor won't just go to zero, it still has to be cooled to prevent overheating and meltdown, as do the 'spent' fuel rods. It takes about ten years for used fuel rods to go from 10 kW decay heat/ton to 1 kW decay heat/ton. Storage of used fuel rods adds significantly to the operational costs of the reactor over time.
Long-term storage of used fuel is necessary almost entirely because of the transuranics, which are alpha-radiation emitters with half-lives of thousands of years. Most of the fission fragments appear to decay via faster beta/gamma processes.
Finally, there are the activation products to consider. Tritium is formed in the primary circulating water coolant loop, and is highly radioactive which is why this loop has to be isolated and its heat transferred to the secondary coolant loop which drives the steam turbines. Note here that reactors have to use a lot of water, at least as much as a coal-fired power plant, and these systems need to be highy engineered to prevent breakdowns, which would lead to meltdowns (Fukushima failure mode). The other activation products form in the reactor itself - carbon-14, cobalt-60, iron-55, nickel-63. This significantly adds to the cost of nuclear reactor decommissioning as the entire reactor body has to be treated as high-level waste.
These factors explain why nuclear reactors have to be overengineered relative to traditional fossil fuel power plants, oil refineries, etc. which regularly suffer major accidents and fires - but those accidents don't lead to 100-year+ exclusion zones around the accident sites, so it's deemed acceptable. Not to belabor the point, but wind/solar/storage also has much lower costs for these reasons. Security vis-a-vis terrorism, cyberattack, military conflict, etc. is also a major related cost.
Note that the regulatory costs are only responsible for much of the increases of the 60s and 70s. They're the boogey man, but the increases of the last forty years can't be blamed on them.
It's a general problem: HSR and subway stations have seen similar increases.
That’s also due to regulatory costs. Regulations now require “citizen voice” for large projects, whether infrastructure or just an apartment building. So NIMBYism is able to slow construction (which translates directly to increased costs), require additional measures or features. And NIMBY lawsuits after regulatory approval is given can further increase costs and schedule, even if the court rules in favor of the project. And then because of all these regulatory costs, the experience isn’t gained, so learning doesn’t occur, and if it does, it occurs only for a few firms. Additionally, large state sponsored projects often are treated as jobs programs, etc.
Another issue is that the difficulty of complying with the regulations is intentional. The paperwork is difficult as an intentional sort of time-tax on building anything new. We could actually automate and streamline everything to be approved immediately (while following the letter) without large paperwork costs, but that’s not actually what those who push for the regulations actually want. They WANT it to be hard.
It’s not just a boogeyman. It’s the real reason. Regulations are responsible for most of the cost of nuclear power.
I don't think it's useful to conflate construction code style regulation and NIMBYism.
There can be excess of the former, but ultimately rules-based regulation isn't the worst. NIMBYism and other discretionary review adds more much delays and uncertainty and that is the Achilles heel.
Ultimately we need build out the literal and metaphorical supply chains, i.e. do the same thing over and over and over again. Economies of scale are real, and so are diseconomies of discale, and the latter is the NIMBY's greatest weapon for collective action.
You're not wrong, but I'm not sure what's a better alternative.
Think of it in a different scope: government contracts are also expensive because the have to be open to competition. A lot of the red tape could be reduced with no-bid contracts, but people understand the corruption risk tradeoff is generally not worth it.
In your example, it seems like the NIMBYism is the root cause, not the process by which NIMBYism is wielded.
Is this due to "citizen voice" or is it just that all of the land is now someone's back yard? A century ago most of the land around cities was forest, plains, or sometimes farm. Building out rail, transmission lines, or pipelines was relatively easy because barely anybody lived near where you were building.
Today there are people scattered all around and they will absolutely complain when you start building something near the property they bought specifically to be away from other people.
It’s not just a boogeyman. It’s the real reason. Regulations are responsible for most of the cost of nuclear power.
In a counterfactual world with fewer regulations, I can believe that construction would be cheaper. But regulations don't explain why new projects have drastic cost and schedule overruns. The United States started building new AP1000 reactors in Georgia and South Carolina in 2013 [1] [2]. There were no regulatory changes/increases after 2013. But the projects went drastically over the budget and schedule numbers that they had in 2013.
Following the project's demise, an “exhaustive and multi-year joint investigation” was conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office, and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. Marsh’s sentencing is the result of that investigation.
“Kevin Marsh deceived regulators and customers to financially benefit SCANA,” Susan Ferensic, special agent in charge of the FBI Columbia Field Office, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Marsh’s and other executive’s actions resulted in South Carolinians bearing the financial brunt of the failed Summer Nuclear Station.”
“Due to this fraud, an $11 billion nuclear ghost town, paid for by SCANA investors and customers, now sits vacant in Jenkinsville, S.C.,” DeHart said.
"Georgia nuclear plant’s cost now forecast to top $30 billion"
A nuclear power plant being built in Georgia is now projected to cost its owners more than $30 billion.
A financial report from one of the owners on Friday clearly pushed the cost of Plant Vogtle near Augusta past that milestone, bringing its total cost to $30.34 billion.
...
When approved in 2012, the third and fourth reactors were estimated to cost $14 billion, with the first electricity being generated in 2016. Now the third reactor is set to begin operation in March 2023, and the fourth reactor is set to begin operation in December 2023.
It's reasonable to say that a pacemaker costs more to develop than an MP3 player because medical devices are heavily regulated by the FDA. But it's not reasonable to say that a project to develop a new pacemaker is 100% over budget and 7 years late because of FDA regulations if the FDA regulations didn't change in the mean while. In this case, the regulations didn't change. So earlier estimates were due to fraud or incompetence (either execution-incompetence or planning-incompetence). I tend to blame incompetence -- after all, many megaprojects end up horribly late and over budget, not just nuclear ones -- but in the case of South Carolina's VC Summer there was outright fraud too.
may be the increases of the last forty years have'nt been studied as thoses of the 60s to 70s, but regulatory costs are still a reality, the french EPR for exemple got a 20billion increase in cost during the construction for changes in security standards.
Since 50s we've got so many improvements in construction tech that I would expect costs to plummet, instead they are higher than ever. Countries use immigrant labor (sometimes illegal) and have all tech available and the price only goes up. I wonder why.
Having talked to a nuclear engineer about this: SMRs are being politically pushed because of their political and financing convenience, more than engineering reasons. Power output scales really well with reactor size, so it makes much more sense to build the one big expensive power plant than a multitude of smaller ones. SMRs do make sense for off-grid or on-site power, but not for grid electricity.
The ideal case is that SMRs are not the end goal, but a way to rebuild the supply chain. As soon as we have SMRs in prod, rather than building more of them, we should attempt to increase the size of deployments with minimal falling back on in-situ construction.
SMRs take the supply chain metaphor a bit too literally: we do need practice but assembling prefabbed parts at a larger scale is fine too. There is a spectrum of options and we just need to avoid "special snowflake boondoggles".
Given the US's fucked NIMBY culture, it well may be that SMRs are the best route despite these inefficiencies. Just don't expect the "solar model" where we just shit out lots of lousy product and that's it.
From a thermal physics and material science perspective, yes, bigger is definitely better. But there's a lot to be said of the value of being able to mass-produce a product in a factory and ship it in nearly ready-to-use state to its destination.
There would also be a lot of value in turning off the ability of folks to NIMBY everything from new power plants to housing.
One can scale the size by using several reactors, which is exactly what NuScale and others aim to do. One also doesn't have an unavailability problem having to shut down a large reactor in order to refuel it.
I have high hopes for prefab modular systems. The same design approval covers 1000+ units, most designs fit on a flat-bed for transport, and instillations can scale up as needed.
> but all else being equal (ie: assuming total production cost stays constant), it’s better to have a larger fraction of your electricity costs be variable, so that if demand drops then production cost drops as well.
This is how capitalism gives us scarcity when there is no reason for scarcity. Infrastructure like trains and nuclear that absolutely swamps current demand, and whose costs cannot be adjusted very much (even if one can run fewer trains, remove some fuel rods) is good. But woe unto anyone that floods the market utopia-style under capitalism --- you will just get paid nothing and your investors will not repeat such a project again.
Another way to interpret that sentence is “it’s better not to spend too much on construction, and it can be better to spend on fuel if it means spending less on construction.”
Building things you don’t need is waste of labor and resources, regardless of the economic system you use or who paid for it. This should be accounted for somehow.
It is better to spend more on capital than operational costs if one actually wants the world to change not just ideal along.
The best cost control is in large part doing lots of cookie-cutter work, hence the focus on small modular reactors. It is better to do those, and then ramp up the "small" part over time.
Likewise, we should construct lots of rail simultaneously with ramp up to improve those supply chains too.
But at no point do you want to spend more on fuel in any global optimal sense. That is just wasteful. It's not like we are actually uncertain that we won't need way more electricity production on a societal scale.
I agree that we are going to need more power generation as electricity replaces other forms of energy.
But for any given level of electricity generation, doing it in a cheaper way is still better than doing it in a more expensive way. For one thing, it allows capacity to be increased for the same cost.
The pricing is non-linear, both in terms of total output (due to economies of scale if done right) and especially in terms of share (are their fossil fuel PPs to cheaply fill in gaps).
If your costs are all fixed, and demand falls, you have to put prices up to stay alive. That's the issue with Nuclear: If it costs $1bn a year for the plant, it costs that whether you generate 1bn kWh (at $1 each) or 1 kWh (at $1Bn each).
What you call artificial shortage, others call "not making something no one wants and then forcing them to pay for it"...
There is no non-depressing future where demand for electricity doesn't go way up as fossil fuel is phased out. An uncertainty is a shit situation we should work to prevent, not have a contingency plan for.
This is where the Keynesian "socialization of investment" stuff comes in. Private markets get skiddish over change even when our economies are fully capable of dealing with the issues. Don't be held hostage to private capital playing "nose goes" when the solution is obvious.
Abundance really does mean everything is too cheap to meter on margin. There is no other definition. To get there we have to make people more risk tolerant, and the only way to do that is guaranteeing consumption.
It's not so much that your points are wrong, as that they fail to see a bigger picture.
When you say there is no no depressing future without increased electrical demand, that's true. But who guaranteed you a non depressing future?
And the same was true in 1990, but we've made almost no progress to removing fossil fuels. So if you'd started nuclear projects then, you'd be just coming online. And have no new customers. And in the mean time the price of gas and solar and wind would have collapsed in comparison. And you couldn't afford to shut down when the price crashed like they can. You're fixed costs would rapidly drive you bankrupt.
That's the problem here.
The future isn't nice. And it's not predictable. Even over relatively short periods.
So it's much better to plan 6m ahead and then do it again 40 times, than to try and plan 20 years ahead in one go. That makes it much much better to run small incremental short-term projects like gas plants and renewables.
And if you do have to make some sort of medium term plan then it needs to be very flexible. Like a gas plant that can shut down for a year and avoid 90% of its costs.
Nuclear is long term, fixed cost. And that's terrible.
But go ahead, by some shares in a nuclear operator (or someone else in the supply chain etc). Make your fortune being right in 2045. Just don't sign up the rest of us via the public finances please!
This has always been one of the issues with control economies: people vastly over estimate their ability to predict the future, they don't appreciate flexibility and they don't manage risk. That's how the USSR ended up producing enormous amounts of steel and no washing machines: no one asked what people wanted, they just said 20% more of the same compared to last year! China are doing the same thing right now with electricity targets and no financial services...
Your USSR analogy is apt but I think it makes my case. The USSR was planning the steel production and its uses. Electricity is the single most useful good with the most diverse downstream uses. I am not saying we should command all the uses of the electricity! But command-economying the electricity production itself is the a no-brainer.
One 6m and then 7m and then 8m all the way up to 20m. that is building increasingly bigger reactors with an efficient supply chain.
You're over-using markets and doing so in a circular way with your argument. You are confusing actual uncertainty around the world with the uncertainty that comes from the decentralized, loosely coordinate market-governance mechanism itself!
Some things are uncertain, and market are really great for small-scale experiments or "annealing" society. But or the brain-dead obvious things like "we need tons more electricity, rail, and dense housing ASAP!" there is no reason to rely on markets.
A good society has a socialist foundation and capitalist superstructure: guarantee the basics, but have fun with the rest. That is already how rich people enjoy capitalism (wealthy family entrepreneurs are not so leveraged), let's just scale that out to everyone. We can't all be top X% wealth, but we can all live with less uncertainty.
Masochism in part, and secondly the Simpsons blackballing the entire industry. Nobody wanted to become a nuclear engineer after that shitty show. The creators of the Simpsons are nuclear war surrender monkeys.
Context, in the show, the groundskeeper which is a discriminatory stereotype of Scots, says the French are "cheese-eating surrender monkeys", another discriminatory stereotype, but it's fine according to the bitchvictim media's rules because since they're both white it counts as "poking fun" and not "bigotry". Tucker Max said "cheese-eating surrender monkey!" to a French girl at a bar, game over right there even for a guy with crazy game like him, because it's fucking insulting. Literally calling them monkeys AND submissive cowards? Well if the Simpsons can do it to others, I can do it to the Simpsons. One of my surnames is French, I'm part French, my great-grandfather spoke French and was a Francophile following the Blitzkreig with a map hoping the French could turn the invasion around, he was rooting for them. It's just not fucking funny. The Simpsons is a bigoted show, don't think you can repeat any of those jokes. So this is what I get to reply to the Simpsons, and all those losers: The Simpsons are nuclear armageddon surrender monkeys. Whole bitchvictim media with them.
Going back to the topic of nuclear engineers, with 22 minutes of slander on television on every day specifically against them that's the hottest show on television decade after decade, like only a son of a nuke would become a nuke.
So that's also sabotage, then the public is like a thousand times as sensitive to a nuclear accident than to a coal plant shitting into the air we breathe.
They're doing so much good work with micro and modular reactors that can basically be "dropped in" decommissioned coal-burning sites because the infrastructure to tie into the electric grid already exists.
It was expressed to me that selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an uphill battle and uptake was very slow to nonexistent.
[0] https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx