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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?

#241

Post by coredog64 »

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 largest nuclear plant in the United States (Palo Verde) is in the middle of the Sonoran Desert and uses treated sewage output for cooling. People probably won’t stop urinating during a drought.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#242

Post by ClumsyPilot »

logifail wrote: post #234
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Q: Do those countries already have long term nuclear waste storage facilities? There are countries that have been spectacularly failing to provide their own such facilities for decades.

Suppose they don't - so what is you proposed solution - they live in the dark ages?

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#243

Post by trashtester »

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.)

This study from MIT found that the LCOE of fully renewable energy production, backed by LI batteries would be $3000/MWh vs $2400/MWh for hydrogen instead of batteries for storage:

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021/08/20210829-mitei.html

Either alternative is about 15x to 50x more expensive than Nuclear, though....

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#244

Post by ajmurmann »

krylon wrote: post #181
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.

> European construction seems a lot better Unless the situation in the US is really, really REALLY horrible, I doubt that. I don't remember where, but one country is in the process of building a nuclear power plant, that is AFAIK unfinished, but already took way more time and money than originally planned. Doesn't even have to be nuclear - ask the Internet about Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie or Stuttgart's train station.…

US is absolutely terrible at large infrastructure projects. This article has some good details and statistics: https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/le...

In general, Alon Levy's blog has great articles on this topic and he lives in Berlin https://pedestrianobservations.com/

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#246

Post by justinsb »

The only nuclear plant under construction in the US is at Plant Vogtle, in Georgia. Regulators set up a system (CWIP) whereby the companies building the plant earn a 10% return on their costs, until the plants come online. I think it's not surprising therefore that costs keep increasing and the delays keep coming. I don't think we can infer that nuclear power plants cannot be built at reasonable cost, rather that we need to consider "regulatory capture" as a significant construction risk.

(Some admittedly one-sided background on CWIP: https://stopcwip.com/ )

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#247

Post by pnw »

samstave wrote: post #110
bozhark wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There was a nuclear startup that came through YC a few years back... what happened to them?

Oklo is still around, recent news article wasn’t great though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937836

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#248

Post by bsder »

bsedlm wrote: post #25
lelag wrote: 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…

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…

> 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.

The dirty secret is that all factories are hard to build because nobody knows all the details to make them work.

It's that simple.

People bring operative knowledge to bear in the running of a factory. Over time, that knowledge becomes baked into the procedures, equipment, maintenance and people.

This is, in my opinion, something that everybody overlooks about nuclear. Power plants and factories need to evolve and optimize over time to be successful.

Nuclear plants get encased in amber and can't do that. I understand why people don't want to allow that. However, I really think that this inability to evolve will doom any large scale nuclear reactor design. Probably the only way that nuclear becomes successful is very small, semi-sealed power plants as the whole plant evolves at the manufacturing facility rather than at the site.

> I find it quite suggestive that most of the tech used to make the semiconductors is owned european companies.

This is hardly surprising. They're spinouts of the big conglomerates from the 1980s (ASML is from Philips, no?). These conglomerates didn't exist in Japan (maybe--MITI was funding the hell out of things in Japan in the early 1980s so my memory may be off), China, etc. back when this stuff was getting started and spun out.

TSMC is actually the anomaly. It took a very determined effort with a lot of money being shoveled around by the government combined with a disgruntled TI executive of Chinese background and all of his knowledge and contacts to put it all together.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#249

Post by SiempreViernes »

theptip wrote: post #180
SiempreViernes wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 regulato…

> I don't see the technology and the regulatory framework as being tightly-coupled here

You're saying the safety standards regulation is not couple to the technology being used? Then what is it regulating if it's not the technology?

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#250

Post by megaman821 »

solardev wrote: post #199
throwaway23234 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Isn't this the crux of the argument for investing more money into solar/wind/storage vs nuclear. The solar and wind stuff is already cheap enough, so its storage vs nuclear. Will nuclear get cheaper faster than grid-scale batteries? There is only so much capital that can be invested, and potential advancements in batteries are looking a lot more promising than advancements in nuclear. I think the lion's share of money should be going to renewables and batteries.
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