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Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

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Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#181

Post by epistasis »

polski-g wrote: post #70
SemanticStrengh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear power plants take too long to plan, build and bring online. IIRC it's at least 11 years It's crazy what people come to believe. To generalize the pathetic bureaucratic failures like the EPR to all model couldn't be farther from reality. Russian commercialized VVER 1200 models take 57 month to build. Their successor, the VVER-TOI take 40 month, so 3.5 year to build. It output 1300MWe Besides the russian comp…

Yeah these things don't take 11 years to build. Government makes them take that long.

That's absolutely false, check out what has happened in Georgia and South Carolina and you will not be able to find any government interference or regulation slowing things down.

It's just rank incompetence, bad management, and three-party contracts where each party is preparing for failure and a gigantic lawsuit in the end.

Meanwhile, the latest excuse for the recent US failure in building was that they commenced building before design was complete, and if we just try again now that designs are complete, everything will proceed smoothly. Meanwhile others in this thread are complaining that the NRC requires complete plans before building.

Those who complain about imaginary regulations can neither state the regulations that slow things down, nor describe suitable regulations, nor apparently even agree on what the current regulations are.

I've been asking "which regulations" for years, nobody has ever, literally ever pointed me to which. They just have supreme confident that it's the answer, despite not knowing specifics.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#182

Post by [deleted] »

bbu wrote: post #180

Has anyone built a facility to store the waste for 1 million years yet? I think Finland is the only country in earth who started for real. It is mind boggling to me that people even consider building more waste before having the slightest idea what to do with nuclear waste. And the talking about how clean it is. Lol.

[deleted]

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#183

Post by stkdump »

systemvoltage wrote: post #170
Maursault wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has nothing to do with economics Nuclear power is not profitable. It has nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with economics. If nuclear power were profitable, you could not stop it. If nuclear power were profitable, the regulations would change with a quickness, because motivated investors remove any and all roadblocks to their money. If it wasn't for the absurdly bad economics, bad track record p…

You're mixing up the matters and has gotten it backwards. The industry has been regulated to teeth after scare mongering by environmentalists post Chernobyl/3-mile-island. It has wiped out any hopes for private industry to build and hope to bring down costs by economies of scale. Too much regulation leads to death of economies of scale. If software was regulated like nuclear power, say because of hypothetical AI risk…

TFA says that the reactor part of a plant only makes up ~25% of the construction costs. The rest is the same that coal plants also have to deal with.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#184

Post by epistasis »

nrp wrote: post #84
polski-g wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah these things don't take 11 years to build. Government makes them take that long.

I would be interested in understanding what drives this. Even in Korea, where large scale infrastructure projects like new subway lines get built very quickly, new nuclear reactors seem to take >10 years (both the ones installed domestically in Korea and the export ones in places like UAE).

Nuclear technology requires ridiculous complexity, with miles upon miles of piping that need precision, accurate welds to last 40 years. It requires high performance concrete. It requires huge logistics to get all the concrete pours and rebar and everything in place.

These things are massive projects, utterly massive. There's no reason to think they should be cheap.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#185

Post by neilwilson »

uranium wrote: post #66

"Recently, places as diverse as Texas, California, Oklahoma/Iowa/Kansas/Nebraska (SPP), the UK, and Germany have rapidly decarbonized without nuclear." Uh...Germany's actually recarbonized by shutting down their nuclear [increasing coal and imported electricity to pick up the slack]. "The nuclear electricity production lost in Germany's phase-out was primarily replaced with coal electricity production and electricity…

"Uh...Germany's actually recarbonized by shutting down their nuclear"

Germany outsourced their nuclear to France.

Remember that Germany and France are no longer countries, but states in the Eurozone within the wider European Union.

It's the same effect as, say, New Mexico exporting nuclear power to California and California then calling itself 'nuclear free'.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#186

Post by stkdump »

uranium wrote: post #66

"Recently, places as diverse as Texas, California, Oklahoma/Iowa/Kansas/Nebraska (SPP), the UK, and Germany have rapidly decarbonized without nuclear." Uh...Germany's actually recarbonized by shutting down their nuclear [increasing coal and imported electricity to pick up the slack]. "The nuclear electricity production lost in Germany's phase-out was primarily replaced with coal electricity production and electricity…

So, by how much did Germany increase its carbon output during the nuclear shutdown? Hint: it didn't. It went from 14.8 to 7.7 tons/capita. You can always argue that it could have decreased faster by keeping nuclear plants online. But please don't believe the headlines of opinion makers without looking at the actual data.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#187

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #178
Maursault wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, it was never the regulations. A nuclear power plant costs between $6B - $9B to build, before it generates any electricity, that is just the construction cost these days for a 1100MW plant Regulatory costs for a nuclear power plant will range between $7M - $15M annually. Do the math: it is definitely not the regulations. Any time someone complains about regulations, you know there is a Republican agenda. We ne…

> A nuclear power plant costs between $6B - $9B to build Why? Why not $20M or at the absolute worse $200M? > Regulatory costs for a nuclear power plant will range between $7M - $15M annually. This is disenginous number. Every single supplier, compliance, proposal, EVERYTHING about nuclear is regulated. Behind this $7M-$15M on paper costs, lies the true cost of regulations: $6B-$9B. > The money is what is important. Y…

So you're saying that if we removed the regulation and built cheap reactors each reactor might cost -1 billion dollars to construct? Sign me up!

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#188

Post by iamcurious »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #148
pmoriarty wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that nuclear power plants are uninsurable without government subsidies. Why is that?

Imagine if fossil and biofuel combustion plants had to insure themselves against the air pollution deaths they are known to directly cause. 4.2 million dead per year, year after year, according to the WHO [1]. And then there's climate change. It's wild that nuclear has to insure against things that may happen while 80% of our primary energy sources don't have to pay at all for the deaths and climate change they cause…

>Imagine if fossil and biofuel combustion plants had to insure themselves against the air pollution deaths they are known to directly cause.

Such a good dream

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#189

Post by gcanyon »

bbu wrote: post #180

Has anyone built a facility to store the waste for 1 million years yet? I think Finland is the only country in earth who started for real. It is mind boggling to me that people even consider building more waste before having the slightest idea what to do with nuclear waste. And the talking about how clean it is. Lol.

Non-nuclear power kills far more people each year than nuclear has killed during its entire existence. "...before having the slightest idea what to do with nuclear waste." implies that there is some way to do so that will result in a hundred thousand deaths annually. I don't know of a way to botch the job that badly?

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#190

Post by replygirl »

epistasis wrote: post #175
replygirl wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10 billion for a gigawatt of the cleanest, safest, most energy-dense, most thermally efficient, and most reliable power you can find vs $4 billion for a gigawatt wind farm that takes up 100-1000x the land, always has a few % of its installed capacity down for maintenance, and doesn't provide predictable output unless you mine about half a million pounds of lithium

These points are either inaccurate or irrelevant We can not build nuclear at $10/GW, that's a fantasy. The use of the land is quite different too. When a wind farm "uses" 100x-1000x the land (and I am not accepting those numbers, just quoting you), that land is still available for other uses. The fraction of "used" land is so neglible as to not matter at all. So to discuss it in the same terms as a reactor doesn't ma…

my point is that the advantages of nuclear both outweigh its cost by a mile, and address most of the issues we're dealing with in transitioning to renewables and conservation. i'd throw hydro, desal, and terraforming projects like nawapa in that category too.

even with mixed use i'd still say renewables have a footprint problem, but the bigger problem i see is that the output is unstable and too low relative to input, and we're already seeing blackouts in part because of just that. we can't move down the energy ladder if we want to keep improving everyone's standard of living, and we have a moral imperative to do that

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