Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#121

Post by epistasis » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 5:57 PM UTC

stefanfisk wrote: post #68

epistasis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'd love to read more about this! do you have any tip on where to start?

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:

https://www.postandcourier.com/business/vc_summer_nuclear_pr...

Search for "Georgia recorder vogtle" to get some of the reports from the Georgia construction delays.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#122

Post by petre » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 5:57 PM UTC

yvdriess wrote: post #65

kaiju0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each build is unique and requires way too much overhead. The new generation of preapproved factory assembled SMR's are the future.

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.

Alvin Weinberg begs to differ, at least concerning PWRs and BWRs. The bigger plants are more efficient but less safe.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iW8yuyk3Ugw

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.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#123

Post by babypuncher » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

Krasnol wrote: post #20

xroche wrote: post #10

> 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-…

Why should states invest it's taxpayer money into overpriced and slow technology when there are cheaper and fast improving alternatives?

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.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#124

Post by goodpoint » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

fatcat500 wrote: post #90

DisjointedHunt wrote: post #52

Way to bury the lede and avoiding the main point: 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 comp…

> 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…

> they are being used a pawns to shift over the control of energy to the government

...by pushing for domestic solar panels? And improved isolation, heat pumps, passive houses?

Sounds like the very opposite of centralizing energy production.

So maybe we need a bit more evidence for your conspiracy theory.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#125

Post by samstave » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 5:59 PM UTC

ratsmack wrote: post #91

samstave wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My grandfather was Kenneth Victor Stave. If that name means anything to your family.

Also, I dont know if your uncle was part of that suit against GE - but it may be something you want to look up.

I don't have any further info to provide on the subject, my grandfather passed in 1996. My grandmother last year. So I cant ask anyone...

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#126

Post by fallingknife » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

logifail wrote: post #116

ak217 wrote: post #93

> 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 o…

> base load generation capacity 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 b…

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.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#127

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 6:01 PM UTC

fatcat500 wrote: post #90

DisjointedHunt wrote: post #52

Way to bury the lede and avoiding the main point: 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 comp…

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#128

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 6:07 PM UTC

ak217 wrote: post #93

> 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 o…

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.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#129

Post by epistasis » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 6:09 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #98

this_user wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 via…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#130

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 6:10 PM UTC

fallingknife wrote: post #126

logifail wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> base load generation capacity 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 b…

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.