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Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

reuters.com

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Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#331

Post by mjevans »

tuukkah wrote: post #303
tenuousemphasis wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if we throw capital at the problem and fast track regulatory approval, I don't see why that's not possible. Do you think it's not?

You don't want to "fast track" nuclear security and this is not something you can iterate by building unsafe plants first. Even as it is, people don't want a nuclear plant in their backyard and it's a long process to find and secure a suitable location. You'd need huge amounts of capital with big risks and little profits foreseen. The track record from the latest western projects is horrible so I don't see how it wou…

"fast track approval" -- spare no expense in manpower to review with as little delay as possible. Many workers in parallel, all required regulations observed.

Your implication is "cut corners" which is a misunderstanding.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#332

Post by danhor »

p_l wrote: post #195
ljf wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as private industry is funding and running nuclear power including the decommissioning costs, plus selling their energy at market rates (in the UK we have guaranteed the new nuclear plants rates that are higher than the next most expensive generators costs) then I'll believe that. The only way these are remotely economical is when they are funded by the tax payer before the are built, while they run, and afte…

The problem is that markets are supremely bad at building a stable electricity grid. So on one hand wind and solar are getting cheaper per MW, but it doesn't include the effect they have on destabilising both the grid and electricity markets - in fact, solar getting cheaper is probably going to cause a stop on buildout in some places, because the price of solar MW is going to be too low to deal with all the time you'…

The issue is, that in a traditional electrical system, you need both base load and dispatchable power plants. And while nuclear power plants work as base load, they're really bad for dispatchable power, both economically and in how they work.

So if you want to base an electrical grid solely on nuclear power without additional fossil fuel plants, you need either a lot of often unused (and thus very, very expensive) nuclear capacity or some kind of .. storage. It's similar to renewables in that regard, although much more predictable and reliable (with exceptions, such as france this winter).

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#333

Post by shagie »

liketochill wrote: post #328
bluejekyll wrote: post #321

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of…

> Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind

There's also the aspect of "how much sun is there?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy_in_Finland

There are a number of issues with photovoltaic solar cells that close to the Arctic Circle.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#334

Post by alvarlagerlof »

ncmncm wrote: post #253
alvarlagerlof wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm betting they don't get approved.

Anyway not for longer than hoped. And, if approved, not built anytime soon, as the cost will still be much more than for renewable + storage, at that time. Those latter costs are falling faster than ever.

Exactly. I heard these modular ones are meant to be cheaper, but they also produce 10x less. Can easily be replaced by a wind farm.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#335

Post by bluejekyll »

liketochill wrote: post #328
bluejekyll wrote: post #321

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of…

> All of the opex is in maintenance, staffing, safety and reliability

Does this include the higher security needs around nuclear facilities?

I left out the construction costs, the Arkwright Summit farm, $125 million.

The Solar Star project was $2 billion.

This Finnish Nuclear site appears to have cost $12 billion.

That makes wind look really good, and solar at least on the same order (and still safer).

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#336

Post by stefan_ »

bluejekyll wrote: post #321

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

While 23 years to build the thing are already bad, it now needs to operate continuously for at least some 30 years selling electricity at a price that is even today not competitive with renewables to make financial sense.

Essentially, building a nuclear power plant in 2022 means you are betting we won't have workable storage for renewables by 2052.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#337

Post by DasIch »

liketochill wrote: post #328
bluejekyll wrote: post #321

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of…

You cannot depend on nuclear 24x7x365 as we’ve been able to see in France and Germany the last few years. Hot temperatures in summer cause the temperature of the rivers to increase so much that the water cannot be used for cooling and so these plants have to be shut down. That’s only going to become worse.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#338

Post by mkoubaa »

cipher_system wrote: post #29
loufe wrote: post #4

What I find shockingly absent in this article is any commentary on budget and cost overruns. I'm definitely not anti-nuclear but it stands to reason that a comparison vs other forms of energy would've been wise to consider.

Something like this. The project started in 2000, construction began in 2005 and should have been completed in 2010. Original cost was 3 billion euro but landed on over 10 billion euro. It is the first nuclear reactor in Europe for 15 years so not much working experience or available sub contractors. Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. If nuclear energy…

Economies of scale is a factor even when going from 1 to 12

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#339

Post by winkeltripel »

bluejekyll wrote: post #335
liketochill wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of…

> All of the opex is in maintenance, staffing, safety and reliability Does this include the higher security needs around nuclear facilities? I left out the construction costs, the Arkwright Summit farm, $125 million. The Solar Star project was $2 billion. This Finnish Nuclear site appears to have cost $12 billion. That makes wind look really good, and solar at least on the same order (and still safer).

There are a couple of things to consider. The solar and wind need to be overprovisioned, to feed the grid scale batteries to provide baseload. Those batteries are currently not cost effective, which is why there are very few such batteries in use. If you add in the price of battery, wind and solar look rather pricey. Without the batteries, they are helping us reduce the use of fossil fuel plants, but not helping shut them down.

The other thing is the land. Solar and wind each need a substantial % of landmass to have 100% of our power come from those sources.

The ongoing costs of running nuclear are also way higher than solar or wind, which matters.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#340

Post by andresp »

rdsubhas wrote: post #27

What I find incredible is: Once this fully ramps up, this one power plant is expected to satisfy 14% of the entire country's electricity needs. 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7.

Nuclear is really the only solution at the moment. It is a shame it took a war for people to start realising this. At least we can all learn with Germany's mistakes now.
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