Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

constructionphysics.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 512 posts

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#221

Post by dqpb »

photochemsyn wrote: post #117
jason-phillips wrote: post #19

Last year I did a fair amount of consulting work for the GAIN initiative at Idaho National Lab [0]. They're doing so much good work with micro and modular reactors that can basically be "dropped in" decommissioned coal-burning sites because the infrastructure to tie into the electric grid already exists. It was expressed to me that selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an uphill battle and uptak…

Construction costs are only part of the picture and utility operators are well aware that they need to look at lifecycle costs. This includes everything from costs of fuel rods (look at the historically volatile uranium market), availability of large volumes of cooling water (see more frequent droughts), maintenance costs (maintenance being a major factor in the retirement of California's nuclear power plants), secur…

> the cost of storing fuel rods onsite for decades

This environmental remediation cost is generally missing in comparisons with all other energy sources.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#222

Post by logifail »

a_shovel wrote: post #144
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…

There was a discussion about this a few days ago, and this comment thread [0] featured some criticism from experts on these claims. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642424

and yet one of the comments from that thread stated:

> The correct answer is that there is no way to make fission cost-competitive with the near-term price of renewables + storage, or even with imported synthetic fuel produced with renewables, waste or no waste. Thus, the whole issue is moot. No such SMRs will be built except where coerced funding carefully excludes true cost from the process (as indeed happened on behalf of every single utility reactor in operation

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#223

Post by ryan93 »

stewbrew wrote: post #48
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-…

The state better invests the money in cheaper technologies. Why should it waste the money on nuclear plants? Edit: To the downvoters: Seriously, why should the state waste money on a technology that doesn't work and never has? More than half of France's nuclear power plants are currently offline and in maintainence mode. Maybe also because they could not produce electricity at market prices.

They get 80% of their electricity from nuclear. And even export some.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#224

Post by stingraycharles »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #152
stingraycharles wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this statement makes me think that OP had very little actual knowledge about energy pricing. If there’s ever a complicated market of supply and demand it’s energy. Having a huge chunk of the supply be stable and controllable is absolutely desired, will help simplify operations a lot, make supply more predictable, and as a result deliver more stable prices. It’s not as if the population is suddenly getting cheape…

"all else equal" is in there. He was trying to make a point - that flexibility is valuable. And it is valuable. All else equal you'd take more flexibility than less, especially since demand moves around a good amount.

But it isn’t flexibility we can control. It’s either fluctuations in supply which we need to absorb somehow, or it’s scaling down supply. The big differentiator is the flexibility to scale up supply when you need it, and it’s precisely this flexibility that’s missing.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#225

Post by 01100011 »

nickelpro wrote: post #66
01100011 wrote: post #3

Totally unrelated question but does anyone know if nuclear powered US Navy vessels are able to feed power to the grid while in port? I know it's technically possible, just not sure if anyone has ever implemented such a thing.

Navy nuclear vessels have (relative to the grid) little real power generation capability and cannot handle grid reactive loading at all. The grid appears as an infinite reactive load to shipboard electrical switching equipment.

Sure, relative to the total grid capacity it's not much but during peak loads every bit helps.

I suppose you'd want to transition from ship to shore via a DC path and convert it back to synchronized AC which should avoid issues with reactive loads.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#226

Post by ClumsyPilot »

zackees wrote: post #170
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…

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.

"It’s becoming clear that the climate alarmism isn't about solutions or even a tax, but forcing us to purchase “carbon credits”

Every half educated climate activist knows thay carbon credits are a fraud perpetuates by wallstreet types to pretend they are doing something when they are not.

This post is breathtakingly uninformed. I suggest calling it climate illiteracy

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#227

Post by spoonjim »

photochemsyn wrote: post #117
jason-phillips wrote: post #19

Last year I did a fair amount of consulting work for the GAIN initiative at Idaho National Lab [0]. They're doing so much good work with micro and modular reactors that can basically be "dropped in" decommissioned coal-burning sites because the infrastructure to tie into the electric grid already exists. It was expressed to me that selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an uphill battle and uptak…

Construction costs are only part of the picture and utility operators are well aware that they need to look at lifecycle costs. This includes everything from costs of fuel rods (look at the historically volatile uranium market), availability of large volumes of cooling water (see more frequent droughts), maintenance costs (maintenance being a major factor in the retirement of California's nuclear power plants), secur…

Can’t you just dump radioactive uranium into the bottom of the ocean? Can’t imagine it would do much damage with all of the water around it.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#228

Post by ClumsyPilot »

logifail wrote: post #222
a_shovel wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a discussion about this a few days ago, and this comment thread [0] featured some criticism from experts on these claims. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642424

and yet one of the comments from that thread stated: > The correct answer is that there is no way to make fission cost-competitive with the near-term price of renewables + storage, or even with imported synthetic fuel produced with renewables, waste or no waste. Thus, the whole issue is moot. No such SMRs will be built except where coerced funding carefully excludes true cost from the process (as indeed happened on b…

There are countries where no combination of renewables + storage is possible. Places with little sunlight and little wind. What do they do?

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#229

Post by logifail »

mschuster91 wrote: post #187
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…

> More broadly: what's the actual use case for 'base load generation capacity' over the coming decades? The use case is that there should be enough capacity under governmental control to ensure that even in a case of crisis (such as, say, an oil price hike, a war or import blockades) the base load of the citizenry is still accounted for - big industries might be temporarily restricted, but no citizen should freeze in…

> there should be enough capacity under governmental control [..]

Q: You really want to nationalize power generation?

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#230

Post by belorn »

pfdietz wrote: post #196
belorn wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

There is a massive war and shortage of natural gas in Europe so if there exist cheap electrolyzers + wind power combinations that can solve that issue today then people should rush to invest before next winter where prices are predicted to sky rock. I recall that the study did say that existing natural gas power plants could cheaply and easily be converted to run on hydrogen. Hydrogen prices has also gone up a lot since the war.

And it was 10-20 times a few years ago. Prices has gone down a significant bit. If you get the prices to around $1 per/kg (about 3-10x reduction from this year prices), and we don't account for transportation, infrastructure and physical storage, the price would start to look really competitive to nuclear.

If you search online you will find plenty of predictions that prices might reach that magical $1 per/kg in say 2030 or so, in which case that will be a great choice. As a bonus it will make medical oxygen dirt cheap. At that point all discussions about nuclear power will mostly be made moot since hydrogen will be the factual best choice.

Post reply on HN