I'm not an expert but I'm a bit skeptical about small nuclear reactor designs.
I want to believe they would be cost effective, but... It doesn't seem there is a prototype that is cheap?
Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
131–140 of 512 posts
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
In absolute terms, Japan and India have costs similar to South Korea's. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... 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…
> 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.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 u…
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 r…
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.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Germany managed to replace almost half of their generation in 2 decades: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-renewab…
> 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.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article: > 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.
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.
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.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they do while in port in Hawaii. Hawaiian electricity is largely diesel (other than nuclear coming from Navy ships).
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.
Yes, but I'm not sure what the current percentage is or how fast that change is happening.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#137> 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…
Use Case: You pay more to get a reliable service for the same price regardless of weather conditions.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#138The 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 replace…
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 rela…
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.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to the article they have
From the article: > 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.
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.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 u…
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 r…
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.