Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#261

Post by epistasis » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #129

outworlder wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> There's not enough time to do so with batteries alone. I suggest you run the numbers on this, because I think you have them exactly reversed. We are increasing battery production capacity 10x every five years. This could be accelerated if there was government investment as is done for every single nuclear reactor. At current rates we expect to produce 20-30TWh/year of lithium ion batteries, not including other chem…

Argh, there's a typo there, we expect 20-30TWh/year in 2031.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#262

Post by trashtester » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 9:25 PM UTC

Krasnol wrote: post #81

xienze wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because transitioning over to green technology is a decades-long project, it's not something you can just snap your fingers and make happen, as many countries are discovering. You still need non-renewable energy sources to fill in the gaps that renewables currently have.

You don't have to transition completely in decades. You can start today. Meanwhile building a single nuclear reactor is a "decade-long" project, you can't start today and in the end you're still left with an old and expensive tech while the green tech moved ahead rapidly during the same time. Germany managed to replace almost half of their generation in 2 decades: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-renewab…

> Germany managed to replace almost half of their generation in 2 decades: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-renewable-powe...

Still, only 16% of Germany's total energy consumption comes from renewables:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

If Germany wants to replace all uses of fossil fuels for heating, transportation, industrial use, etc, with renewables, HUGE investments remain.

In particular, giving up the ability to smooth out variations in production without the use of fossil fuels will be extremely costly, unless the cost comes down by at least a factor or 50.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#263

Post by Kon5ole » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 9:25 PM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #195

Kon5ole wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 va…

The problem with running the numbers is that the actual numbers for nuclear are basically unknowable and most governments have given a taxpayer insurance that covers this unknown number "in blanco".

This means that most of the costs that will be caused by operating a nuclear power plant are not included in the costs of operations, and therefore not in the "price per MWh" or similar numbers. We don't know what this number is but we do know it's a very large number, and by removing it from the resposibility of the plant operators it represents a very large hidden subsidy for nuclear power.

Chernobyl and Fukushima are the familiar elephants in this particular room of course with he most recent estimate for Chernobyl passing 600bn usd in 2016 (and counting still of course and for the forseeable future) but I like to use the Asse II salt mine in Germany as a more digestable example.

This mine was used to store nuclear waste in the 70s which turned out to be a very bad mistake that has to be fixed in the coming few decades. The cost of this project, (estimated to be at least several bn euros) is not added to the cost of nuclear, it's just charged to the current taxpayers. The power plants that generated the waste stored in this mine are closed long ago but they keep costing money decades later.

Nuclear seems cheap because we're paying for it with credit cards issued to our grandchildren.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#264

Post by freemint » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #98

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 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…

> But fission is the only answer we currently have for baseline power that doesn't involve burning things.

Patently false. The sun shines 24/7. This (besides power satellites) offers other possibilities like a world wide connected grid. Even if you are a proponent of nuclear you will also need that, as i assume you do not want to put reactors in every country.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#265

Post by freemint » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 9:29 PM UTC

trashtester wrote: post #233

derriz wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is great in deserts, where the sun always shines and were the main use of electricity is air conditioning during the hottest parts of the day. Solar is near-useless in colder areas, where you want to use the power for heating in the winter. If you include the storage + grid expansion needed to compensate for the intermittent nature of most renewables (especially if you don't want to rely on fossil fuels when th…

> Solar is near-useless in colder areas, where you want to use the power for heating in the winter.

Heating is super awesome with renewables. As you can store heat in an well isolated home. Yes you need capacity for that but heat pumps well a lot with that.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#266

Post by com2kid » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 9:30 PM UTC

mch82 wrote: post #253

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…

> 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.

New plants produce a lot less waste.

And the reason nuclear waste seems so expensive is because we have externalized the cost of most other forms of power generation. Coal and gas, well we just let people get sick or die.

Natural gas, fracking has huge negative impacts on communities, lots of illness, but again, we don't count that as part of the "financial cost" of natural gas.

Solar, we have the panels made in some other country, we have the raw materials mined in some other country, we import the final product, now it is clean energy.

(I support solar, but there is an environmental cost to solar panels!)

Nuclear makes us confront the waste up front, so now we are all freaked out about it.

As has been pointed out repeatedly, you could take a football field, dig down a few stories, and put all the nuclear waste needed for energy generation in there, and then have enough left over to keep storing spent fuel from new high efficiency reactors until sometime until well after everyone reading HN is dead and gone.

It is a crap shoot if the cost of paying the lawyers to deal with all the lawsuits over where to build the storage site will end up costing more or less than the storage itself.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#267

Post by LatteLazy » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #67

LatteLazy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your costs are all fixed, and demand falls, you have to put prices up to stay alive. That's the issue with Nuclear: If it costs $1bn a year for the plant, it costs that whether you generate 1bn kWh (at $1 each) or 1 kWh (at $1Bn each). What you call artificial shortage, others call "not making something no one wants and then forcing them to pay for it"...

There is no non-depressing future where demand for electricity doesn't go way up as fossil fuel is phased out. An uncertainty is a shit situation we should work to prevent, not have a contingency plan for. This is where the Keynesian "socialization of investment" stuff comes in. Private markets get skiddish over change even when our economies are fully capable of dealing with the issues. Don't be held hostage to priv…

It's not so much that your points are wrong, as that they fail to see a bigger picture.

When you say there is no no depressing future without increased electrical demand, that's true. But who guaranteed you a non depressing future?

And the same was true in 1990, but we've made almost no progress to removing fossil fuels. So if you'd started nuclear projects then, you'd be just coming online. And have no new customers. And in the mean time the price of gas and solar and wind would have collapsed in comparison. And you couldn't afford to shut down when the price crashed like they can. You're fixed costs would rapidly drive you bankrupt.

That's the problem here.

The future isn't nice. And it's not predictable. Even over relatively short periods.

So it's much better to plan 6m ahead and then do it again 40 times, than to try and plan 20 years ahead in one go. That makes it much much better to run small incremental short-term projects like gas plants and renewables.

And if you do have to make some sort of medium term plan then it needs to be very flexible. Like a gas plant that can shut down for a year and avoid 90% of its costs.

Nuclear is long term, fixed cost. And that's terrible.

But go ahead, by some shares in a nuclear operator (or someone else in the supply chain etc). Make your fortune being right in 2045. Just don't sign up the rest of us via the public finances please!

This has always been one of the issues with control economies: people vastly over estimate their ability to predict the future, they don't appreciate flexibility and they don't manage risk. That's how the USSR ended up producing enormous amounts of steel and no washing machines: no one asked what people wanted, they just said 20% more of the same compared to last year! China are doing the same thing right now with electricity targets and no financial services...

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#268

Post by imtringued » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

trashtester wrote: post #252

sfe22 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

One has to consider that the storage capacity of the economy isn't infinite. Charging money for storing something is a very straightforward business model. When your economy is growing the storage capacity appears endless as no storage is actually needed, you can just produce the good in the future with your expanded production capacity. Once the economy stops growing for even a single year, then you will effectively hit the storage capacity of the economy and must pay to store additional goods that are intended to be consumed in the future.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#269

Post by freemint » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #230

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.)

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 si…

Hydrogen needs an complete overhaul to the pipeline system. Burning natural gas for energy is a fraction of it's use. More important are heating (where it can't be transported too), steel making and chemistry (CoViD vaccine ingredients are made using natural gas by BASF).

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#270

Post by freemint » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

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....

I thought the article we are replying to said >>$4000+/MWh for nuclear not including financing.