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

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#291

Post by ncmncm » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 10:23 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #278

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 a perfect solution for like 1/3 of the world for like 1/3 of the day. Batteries though, current batteries are a horrible solution. It's funny that this threads main objection to nuclear is waste/mining/etc but the solar battery revolution generates some far worse environmental effects getting all those rare earth minerals. Compared to the tiny amounts of fuel needed for reactors, the sheer amount of metal ne…

Mentioning batteries can only distract from sensible discussion, because only the tiniest fraction of utility-scale storage will ever be batteries.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#292

Post by trashtester » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 10:25 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #285

trashtester wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a sales pitch from someone who makes a living from selling grid capacity.

But is it true or not?

I'm not sure he's lying on purpose. But it's pretty common that people just stop thinking further when someone tells him what they want to hear.

The article certainly dismisses the need for storage way too easily, imo. It claims that consumption can be adjusted to match supply. There are not that many uses of electricity where you can simply lower your consumption when the supply is low.

There are some cases, like car batteries that can, sort of, be seen as consumption, but unless your car has some extreme storage capacity, you typically want to be able to recharge it when YOU need to have that range, instead of when the power company has additional supply.

And if you don't want to use fossil fuels for heating, the power saved by not charging your car is NOT enough to keep your house warm for a few cold days with no winds (unless you live in a place with no real winter).

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#293

Post by cryptonector » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 10:25 PM UTC

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…

Here's an idea: offer one of these micro/modular reactors for free to a developer of a new residential division, and indemnify them by offering to remove it after at least N years in operation and up to M years after that.

I would consider living in a division that has extra low-cost electricity. It couldn't be zero cost because nuclear could only provide base load power, unless one of these micro/modular reactor types is so innovative that it can provide base and peak load power, in which case such a division could have truly zero-cost power for a bunch of years.

I.e., promote the darned things, loss-lead if need be.

If the manufacturer won't take such risks, then might never break through.

I bet that after a few years you could get such good press out of it that other developers might sign on.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#294

Post by ncmncm » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #228

logifail wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They today import fuel and burn it. They are equipped to continue doing so.

They can add transmission lines, for cheaper importation.

As fuel synthesis -- ammonia and hydrogen -- comes online and undercuts NG, they can import that instead, at times when their transmission line power capacity or availability is exceeded.

Fuel synthesis from solar in the tropics undercutting NG extraction will be a big business. Synthesis using reliable wind, in other places, likewise.

In the meantime, as minority participants, their contribution to the ongoing climate catastrophe is relatively small.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#295

Post by otter-rock » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 10:34 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #231

otter-rock wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out-of-spec doesn't mean it can't work. It just means you have to redo the design using what's effectively a different part than you originally planned on.

Yes, but the idea here was to construct a nuclear power plant, not to build a large pot for boiling soup in. You can't take a critical component like that, spec it and then suddenly pretend the spec never mattered in the first place, then you have to admit that you're just winging it. Changing the spec of the reactor vessel essentially translates into a complete redesign of the reactor itself unless you are willing t…

It's a requirements change. Those happen all the time in everything. Why would that be completely forbidden or impossible here? Like you said, it might really suck. But the NRC does not allow trading off safety the way you suggest.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#296

Post by cultofmetatron » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 10:35 PM UTC

coredog64 wrote: post #241

photochemsyn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

oh thats cool. I imagine all the pathogens are effectively killed for free

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#297

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 10:39 PM UTC

otter-rock wrote: post #295

jacquesm wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the idea here was to construct a nuclear power plant, not to build a large pot for boiling soup in. You can't take a critical component like that, spec it and then suddenly pretend the spec never mattered in the first place, then you have to admit that you're just winging it. Changing the spec of the reactor vessel essentially translates into a complete redesign of the reactor itself unless you are willing t…

It's a requirements change. Those happen all the time in everything. Why would that be completely forbidden or impossible here? Like you said, it might really suck. But the NRC does not allow trading off safety the way you suggest.

Requirements changes are not driven by one-off material defects in critical pieces of hardware.

That's simply a bending of the rules for economic reasons. And it is one of the main reasons for me to oppose nuclear: the fact that people will be people and that at the root of every one of those disaster and near disasters there was someone who thought they could get away with something. We are ill equipped to deal with this kind of responsibility, especially across a timeframe measures in decades.

At the same time I would love to see us solve the climate change problem, and I recognize that we will likely have a nuclear component in there. But it will have to be done by the book or we'll end up regretting it - again.

If we're going to start out with the normalization of deviance on the #1 critical component of a reactor then I think we are on the wrong path:

https://becht.com/becht-blog/entry/normalization-of-deviance...

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#298

Post by jka » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #266

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…

> 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

Here are mentions of this talking point on Hacker News:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#299

Post by iancmceachern » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

stormbrew wrote: post #260

iancmceachern wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They were dumping waste off the coast of Somalia, in the ocean

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#300

Post by trashtester » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

freemint wrote: post #265

trashtester wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Heating is super awesome with renewables. As you can store heat in an well isolated home.

Sounds like you're not speaking from experience. Actually, houses are pretty lousy batteries. Most people have a range of only a few degrees that they find comfortable indoors. They will tend to set the thermostat to about the middle of that range. If they turn off the head, the temperature will go the lower end of that range after a few hours. Very few hours if it's really cold outside, and that's when it matters most.

Admittedly, my house is old and not super-well isolated, but during the coldest days of winter (around -20C), it can easily require 10kw, constantly, to keep it warm enough to prevent my wife from becoming agressive.

If we turn off the power for 2 hours, it's already pretty cold.

Heat pumps would reduce overall energy consumption, but not the need for constant use, and more isloation would reduce both, but it would still likely take several kw constantly on days like that.