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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?

#251

Post by SiempreViernes »

avianlyric wrote: post #183
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.

> Then why are you making so many arguments about how we must find ways to make it cheaper? They don’t appear to be making those arguments at all. Just stating that Nuclear regulations sets safety standards substantially higher than safety stands for other power sources. It quite reasonable to include a question about “how safe is safe enough” when talking about trade offs. It’s easy to change safety standards, and t…

> Nuclear regulations sets safety standards substantially higher than safety stands for other power sources.

Ok, but this surely only is an argument that other sources should be regulated harsher (and fossil fuels absolutely should), not that we must make nuclear less safe.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#252

Post by trashtester »

sfe22 wrote: post #23
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-…

Zero percent or negative just means people involuntary pay by inflation. There is not free lunch (someone had to work to make it)

It is a tax on deposits. You only have to pay if you have deposits. Basically, it means the saver has to pay to store value as currency. On the other hand, they also have to pay if they want to store other valueables, such as gold or the most ancient store of value of all, grain.

I don't think a negative real interest rate is inherantly unfair, any more than it was unfair to have 10% of grain go to waste 3000 years ago when storing for a bad year.

If you had 7 good years, and expect 7 bad years, the utility of the stored grain may be way higher in the bad years than the good years, even when accounting for the waste. The same goes for cash.

The same can be true with cash.

To demand that cash maintains its purchasing power, is the same as ancient farmers demanding to purchase grain from their neighbour (who did save) in a bad year as they themselves got paid for their grain during the good years.

In periods of growth, we may start to think that positive time preference is natural. But the fact is that throughout most of human history, we would switch to negative time preference in good times, since we expected bad times to come back. During good times, humans would store grain, dry meat, fish and fruit, build housing, tools or boats, all of which were investments into goods that were likely to gradually perish over time.

Even after people started to use coins, this was true. If you produced a surplus during one year, you could trade it for cold coin instead of storing it. But not only was there a risk that the coins would be stolen or otherwise vanish, it was also highly likely that at the time where you needed to spend that goal, prices would be higher.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#253

Post by mch82 »

The cost of nuclear energy seems seriously understated.

Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still don’t have a long-term storage plan. We’ll incur this cost for hundreds or thousands of years. https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us...

There’s also a cost to secure the nuclear infrastructure. https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/nuclear-generation...

Can anyone find a cost per Megawatt Hour calculation for nuclear that includes security and long-term waste storage? The calculations I’ve found for the $96/MWh figure seem like they include construction and operation costs, but exclude decommissioning and waste management.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#255

Post by freemint »

bipson wrote: post #176
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…

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

The number of plants you build is an integer valued choice though. This has profound implications.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#256

Post by trashtester »

7952 wrote: post #166
babypuncher wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hedging your bets. We know nuclear works. Grid-scale energy storage for renewables still feels far fetched. Maybe it's not. Either way, we should not put all our eggs in one basket.

We shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. But I don't think rapid growth of the battery industry is far fetched at all. It has already experienced massive growth and is ridiculously mass producable. And we will need batteries anyway for electric cars.

The battery capacity needed to replace all cars with electric ones is about two orders of magnitude lower than the battery capacity needed to replace all fossil fuels with wind and solar, at least in temperate regions, where you need heating during the winter.

According to this MIT study, the cost (LCOE) of doing this today, would be $3000/MWH:

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

Even if the cost of batteries continue to come down by x4 in price every decade from now on, it will take 30-40 years for prices to come below current energy prices.

If we hit an S-curve before then, it could take much longer.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#257

Post by spc476 »

mandevil wrote: post #160
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.

Unfortunately, when it comes to nuclear Europe's (excluding Russia) basically in the same boat as the US. Consulting the current list of nuclear power plants under construction around the world by a pro-nuclear power group here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu... I see the following as the only ones still under construction in all of Europe (not counting Belarus and Russia): 1) Mochovce 3…

I also recall reading (somewhere) that France basically ended up with two nuclear power plan designs used repeatedly, unlike in the US where nearly every nuclear power plant is unique. That might account for the lower costs shown in the article.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#258

Post by pfdietz »

trashtester wrote: post #243
pfdietz wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

That's grossly excessive. This website lets you look at optimization vs. actual historical weather data and reaches a much lower cost. BTW, you use both batteries AND storage; their combination can be cheaper than either alone. You also store the hydrogen underground rather than above ground.

https://model.energy/

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#259

Post by imtringued »

sfe22 wrote: post #23
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-…

Zero percent or negative just means people involuntary pay by inflation. There is not free lunch (someone had to work to make it)

If there is a negative interest rate of 4% on cash, then the easiest way to avoid it would be to lend out your money at 0%. Since there is no growth dependence and excessive savings do not grow automatically anymore there is no need for inflation and the central bank can do price level targeting instead.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#260

Post by stormbrew »

iancmceachern wrote: post #238
spoonjim wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No https://theecologist.org/2009/mar/01/somalia-used-toxic-dump...

I'm not saying I think dumping nuclear waste in the ocean is a good idea (though I am also curious if there's been specific impact studies done on it, if we're talking about very very deep ocean) but I'm pretty sure somalia isn't in the ocean.
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