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Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

constructionphysics.substack.com

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Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#171
post #97
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/coal-... If we treated such waste with the care and security it deserved, the cost equation may balance out…

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!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_McCrory#Duke_Energy

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#172

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…

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.

[1] https://publications.csiro.au/publications/publication/PIcsi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#173
post #97
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/coal-... If we treated such waste with the care and security it deserved, the cost equation may balance out…

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.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#174
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…

[deleted]

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> micro and modular reactors Umm, are these the ones that - relatively speaking - produce significantly more radioactive waste than traditional designs? "The next generation of small nuclear reactors will be big on producing radioactive waste"[0] "Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants"[1] Sorry for the scepticism, but the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to m…

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…

> 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.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> micro and modular reactors Umm, are these the ones that - relatively speaking - produce significantly more radioactive waste than traditional designs? "The next generation of small nuclear reactors will be big on producing radioactive waste"[0] "Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants"[1] Sorry for the scepticism, but the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to m…

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…

The whole problem with the whole argument is: It isn't a binary choice.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#177
post #15

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 replace…

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.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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..

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#179
post #151
post #15

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 replace…

yes, well said. 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.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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).

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