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Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

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Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#191

Post by towaway15463 »

throw827474737 wrote: post #178
zackees wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

> the waste would be huge

Isn’t the opposite true? Nuclear fuel has the highest energy density of any fuel source by a gigantic margin. The entire US stockpile of waste since the 50s is only 83,000 metric tonnes and could fit on a single football field stacked less than 10 yards deep. If we could all stop clutching our pearls about scary radiation and just agree to store the spent fuel deep underground there’d be absolutely no danger from it. Add to that the fact you can recycle the fuel and get even more energy out of it.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#192

Post by joe_the_user »

mellavora wrote: post #55
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-…

Huh. I'd argue that they should be state-sponsored because that is what the state is for-- investing in long-term infrastructure where the value is widely diffused and thus hard to capture via market mechanisms, i.e. investments which are foundational to the more focused investments which business is so well suited to maximize. similar to things like interstate highways or internets or public schooling. I'd add "heal…

Indeed, US large-construction has reached a point of fundamental/terminal corruption through the process of private contracting and especially through the bid-based system.

You can see this with the disastrous failure of public transit construction and planning in the country and if nuclear became an option, it seems very likely that the same corrupt mouths that eat up transit spend would also eat nuclear spending. Something for nuclear proponents to consider.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#193

Post by Octoth0rpe »

theptip wrote: post #147
logifail wrote: post #106

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…

> Nuclear waste can be reprocessed

Arguing that we should adopt smr reactors because their proportionally larger amount of waste can be burned by a much larger/more expensive reactor that we'd _also_ have to fund/build? One that would likely cost >10b and take 20 years to construct? That doesn't seem like a good response to the waste issues with SMRs.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#195

Post by xyzzyz »

Kon5ole wrote: post #56
xyzzyz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no cheaper and fast improving alternatives to provide plentiful electricity at 9pm every single day.

Here are a few: https://www.energy-storage.news/department-of-energy-confirm... https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-at-worlds-largest-... https://www.energy-storage.news/energy-dome-launches-4mwh-de...

That’s not cheaper. Run the numbers and you’ll see. Solar by itself is indeed pretty cheap per kWh if you don’t care about matching supply with demand, but storage very much is not. If it was, you’d see investors build standalone storage, to buy cheap electricity, store it, and resell when demand goes up. This is not what’s happening: instead, existing projects are based either on heavy government subsidies, or on vanity buyers, who want to pay above market prices to signal eco awareness, like Starbucks in one of your links.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#196

Post by pfdietz »

belorn wrote: post #100
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 rather than use it for solving the remaining issues with renewables like energy storage? Invest that money in battery technology and everything that comes with that. A few years ago Sweden did a study on green hydrogen, the energy storage that Germany and many other countries seem to view as the best bet as a storage for places where solar + daily discharging batter…

China is selling electrolyzers for Also, remember the big use of hydrogen on the grid would be as a dispatchable backstop to cheap renewable sources, not as something that's used 24/7. So most of the energy flow would not be through hydrogen, it would be from the renewables directly (or through batteries for short term smoothing.)

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#197

Post by locallost »

w0mbat wrote: post #163

If you think the construction costs are high, think about the demolition cost when the facility reaches end of life, and is now radioactive.

On top of that the cost of waste disposal is astronomic and in most of the world without a permanent solution. And it is usually not included in the actual calculation -- power plants usually need to put some money on the side and into an index fund, with the hope the fund eventually grows to be large enough to cover the cost. But nobody really knows if it will suffice, so it's likely the public will be on the hook. On top of all the subsidies received during construction and operation. Basically I view it as a type of graft.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#198

Post by logifail »

dTal wrote: post #145
logifail wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having a huge chunk of the supply be stable and controllable Nuclear might be stable, but "controllable"? On the days when it's windy and sunny in your part of the planet, try telling your local nuclear plants they're not required. There's simply no reason to guarantee nuclear generators a fixed electricity price decades in advance, like the UK did with Hinkley Point.[0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/de…

I don't know why you say you can't throttle nuclear up and down. All thermal plants have inertia, but nuclear is if anything easier to throttle than fossil fuels. There's a lot of numbers, and comments from nuclear plant operators, in this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/NuclearPower/comments/m0rwso/how_fa...

> I don't know why you say you can't throttle nuclear up and down. All thermal plants have inertia, but nuclear is if anything easier to throttle than fossil fuels.

In that case why don't we let the market build nuclear plants without any state guarantees or insurance and they can simply "throttle up" when they're required. No need to fix a strike price for decades before investors are interested.

I'm sure it makes financial sense. Honest. /s

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#199

Post by solardev »

throwaway23234 wrote: post #190
theptip wrote: post #147

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…

> In practice perhaps a major push for solar/wind/geothermal would be a higher-ROI solution to our problems, but that's politically much harder to get consensus on. The most awesome thing you get from Solar is that it's going to move forward no matter what. It's just something you can do to lower your bill, or even disconnect from the grid altogether. Personally I am off grid with no propane. Almost unheard of in CA.…

Solar is great at small scale, but at utility/grid scale, that means needing to ramp up storage too. The grid doesn't currently have much storage capacity (batteries, pumped hydro, phase shifting materials, etc.) to support current needs, much less future needs if we want to phase out fossil fuels.

Getting the lithium and cobalt infrastructure up to scale takes time and has a lot of geopolitical considerations. It's not impossible but also far from trivial. It's not just a matter of throwing up more panels and turbines and calling it a day.

Unless we can solve storage at scale, generation at night will continue to be an issue, and nuclear is the least climatically damaging way to do that in the interim.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#200

Post by cupofpython »

bozhark wrote: post #96
hutzlibu wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an uphill battle" Could you elaborate on the why? I would asume, because of risk. A solar plant, you can more or less just put anywhere, but a nuclear power plant, even a small one, needs state permission, has to meet extensive regulation, etc. It would need some convincing for me, too, that a nuclear reactor can be just a drop in replacement for coal. I wo…

Sounds like a good time to get into the energy sector. Time for an HN Wind, water, solar, and nuclear company start-up. Who’s in?

I have government contracting experience in construction management QAQC
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