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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?

#321

Post by trashtester »

pfdietz wrote: post #313
trashtester wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that a combination of batteries and hydrogen would be a bit cheaper, but generally I would trust the MIT study over the model above, that states directly that it is a toy model. It's fun to play with, though, so definitely upvoted. Do you have an alternative peer reviewed study to support the conclusions?

(Edited to actually look at the link) Looking at that first link, it appears to cost/kWh is the cost for just the seasonal power that is being produced from hydrogen. It is not the average cost/kWh over all the energy being consumed off the grid. Comparing this to nuclear is to compare apples and oranges. Nuclear supplies baseload, not additional seasonal power. If you tried to use nuclear to supply seasonal power th…

I alredy provided the link that led to the original paper, here is the original paper, though:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062...

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#322

Post by Dylan16807 »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #179
rob_c wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, well said. It's a shame the idiotic "green" movement after chernobyl is rather annoying that it has set energy production in developed nations back ~50 years and caused so much climate damage in the mean time... but hey 'radioactive waste is corporate greed maaannnn'.....

But the green movement was ultimately correct. They didn't know why and had nonsense arguments, but the fact is that "old nuclear" was developed with insufficient long-term safety. Fukushima showed that. What also seems true is that you can't trust a company to run them properly, no matter the regulations and audits. TEPCO showed that. From people I know who've dealt with the nuclear industry, there is a strong conte…

> the fact is that "old nuclear" was developed with insufficient long-term safety. Fukushima showed that.

How many people died again?

We can do a lot better, but I think we'd be worse off if we hadn't built any of those plants at all.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#323

Post by theptip »

krupan wrote: post #314
ncmncm wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries are the most expensive storage. They cost per kWh stored, while others cost mainly only per W inserted or extracted. Only a minuscule fraction of utility scale storage will ever be batteries, so even mentioning batteries only details discussion.

What will it be then? Flywheels?

I like gravity storage. Pumping water up a hill, or pumping air into an underwater tank to displace water. Seems that you can get quite good efficiency with these approaches.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#324

Post by [deleted] »

ncmncm wrote: post #317
pyrale wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one has offered any plausible suggestion for how to contain corruption costs for nuke construction Honestly, I had assumed this was how the US worked in any industry. The tech industry (most recently crypto) has certainly spent lavishly on politics in recent years, either to escape accountability or to get special status.

It is particularly a problem in high capex projects with opaque cost accounting, particularly nukes, urban tunnels, weapons procurement, and crewed spaceflight. Solar and wind projects seem thus far relatively immune.

[deleted]

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#325

Post by Paradigma11 »

baud147258 wrote: post #319
Paradigma11 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use Case: You pay more to get a reliable service for the same price regardless of weather conditions.

well, nuclear power plants can be impacted by weather conditions: specifically those which use rivers to provide the water for their cooling need, rivers whose discharge can be impacted by high heat, bringing it to a level below what's required for the nuclear plant. I don't think it's not a common occurrence, but it can happen

Is this really a fundamental problem or were those plants just not designed with a warming climate in mind?

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#326

Post by ncmncm »

theptip wrote: post #318
SiempreViernes wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Holding the technology constant, you can change the safety requirements.

There is absolutely no appetite for reducing safety standards for nukes, especially considering that renewables pose exactly zero threat, and also cost much less than even the most ... aspirational ... guesses for nukes even with relaxed standards.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#327

Post by ncmncm »

towaway15463 wrote: post #191
throw827474737 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posts like this make me just despair... we couldn't even scale up this to the world wide needs, but if we could the waste would be huge. Only thing that could get us out there and would only make sense is going renewables everywhere in Manhatten-like projects, but that won't happen because people argueing like this got us into this situation where there is allegedly only a binary choice between failed and failed..

> the waste would be huge Isn’t the opposite true? Nuclear fuel has the highest energy density of any fuel source by a gigantic margin. The entire US stockpile of waste since the 50s is only 83,000 metric tonnes and could fit on a single football field stacked less than 10 yards deep. If we could all stop clutching our pearls about scary radiation and just agree to store the spent fuel deep underground there’d be abs…

Energy density has proven so totally meaningless as a proxy for cost that even mentioning it as a plus is disingenuous at best.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#328

Post by trashtester »

pfdietz wrote: post #313
trashtester wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that a combination of batteries and hydrogen would be a bit cheaper, but generally I would trust the MIT study over the model above, that states directly that it is a toy model. It's fun to play with, though, so definitely upvoted. Do you have an alternative peer reviewed study to support the conclusions?

(Edited to actually look at the link) Looking at that first link, it appears to cost/kWh is the cost for just the seasonal power that is being produced from hydrogen. It is not the average cost/kWh over all the energy being consumed off the grid. Comparing this to nuclear is to compare apples and oranges. Nuclear supplies baseload, not additional seasonal power. If you tried to use nuclear to supply seasonal power th…

About using nuclear to cover seasonal variation, its not ideal, but at worst you increase the cost by 50-100%.

Day/night cycles can make that even slightly worse, but even small amounts of storage can even that out.

This Korean study claims that a at 3% dicount rate, the price the LCOE of their APR1400 reactors go from 36Won/kWh (a bit under 3cents) at 90% average utilization to 52Won/kWh (a bit over 4 cents) at 60% average utilization.

In both cases, the costs are very reasonable.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#329

Post by tkdubs »

The "west" has forgotten how to produce Nuclear.

The two largest countries, USA & France, have built 1 plant each, both for 2-4x the original cost, and are 10-15 years late.

France has cancelled the only other plant, and the USA has done the same, spending $4.6bn to cancel the plant at the 60% mark

Their fleets are now verging on >90% 30 years old, and they are opting to extend the lives rather than build new ones.

On the other hand... China is crushing out plants. It is the only country to be accelerating. China will be a nuclear power IP exporter and potentially the only country that has the knowhow and capability to build these plants.

Speak about it at length here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvOvKno0N3o&t=2160s&ab_chann...

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#330

Post by ncmncm »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #242
logifail wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That is not the alternative.
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