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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?

#351

Post by ars »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #296
coredog64 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just in case you are not joking, the sewage is not exposed to radiation.

Water essentially can not become radioactive, and the sewage is used to cool water, not (directly) nuclear material. As you probably know all heat engines need a hot side (the uranium) and a cold side (the sewage) - the cold side is also those huge cooling towers you see while driving near a power plant.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#352

Post by [deleted] »

Retric wrote: post #95
jandrese wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything this seems to support the position that the only way to reduce costs is to increase volume. A classic economies of scale example. Instead the experts want to disregard the data for vague reasons.

South Korea, Japan, and India all have similar costs which suggests South Korea isn’t benefiting significantly from continuous construction. Economies of scale generally exist, but it’s not magic. A large fraction of construction costs for nuclear power plants is very similar to other structures. A high pressure steam pipe is a high pressure steam pipe and people are constantly building structures using them.

[deleted]

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#353

Post by a9h74j »

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.

> Solar and wind projects seem thus far relatively immune.

The relative priority/urgency assigned by governments is probably a factor here.

I have seen analysis suggesting the "learning curve" for wind has turned upward in places, rather than declining.

There might also be some political science term for there being a learning curve in corruption as well. Or as is ascribed to Eric Hoffer, every social initiative ends, in a third phase, as a racket.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#354

Post by XorNot »

cryptonector wrote: post #293
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 typ…

Reactors can provide peak power no problems, the incentive not to is you burn fuel at a higher rate then you need to since you can't ramp quickly. But in a small scale scenario you could easily oversize the reactor to service the local area, and sell any excess on the grid as though it were a renewable utility.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#355

Post by otter-rock »

jacquesm wrote: post #344
otter-rock wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your concerns, and I think you're probably just unaware that they're addressed better than you know, but in a different way than you'd expect. When they accept an expensive out-of-spec part, it's because they can safely redesign the less expensive parts. The only thing that hurts is their long-term profitability because it'll be less efficient than they hoped. Big, expensive parts are always treated as one-of-a…

I'm sorry, I don't believe in magic or appeals to authority, I believe in physics and once you start bending the rules for one part who is to tell where it will stop. Having one leg too short won't be fixed by making the other one a little longer. The materials science requirements on nuclear reactor vessels are such that if the safety margins are so narrow that the specs are going to be even possible to be violated…

Ok, you obviously have zero interest in an actual discussion, lest it confront your completely fabricated "facts". So for anyone else who's genuinely interested in more than just pontificating their own bs, the "special teams" this person mocked, rather than asked about, can be learned about here:

https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/risk-informed.html

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#356

Post by a9h74j »

jacquesm wrote: post #344
otter-rock wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your concerns, and I think you're probably just unaware that they're addressed better than you know, but in a different way than you'd expect. When they accept an expensive out-of-spec part, it's because they can safely redesign the less expensive parts. The only thing that hurts is their long-term profitability because it'll be less efficient than they hoped. Big, expensive parts are always treated as one-of-a…

I'm sorry, I don't believe in magic or appeals to authority, I believe in physics and once you start bending the rules for one part who is to tell where it will stop. Having one leg too short won't be fixed by making the other one a little longer. The materials science requirements on nuclear reactor vessels are such that if the safety margins are so narrow that the specs are going to be even possible to be violated…

> neither of which are part of any materials science course that I'm familiar with. The knock on effect of changing the vessel specs would essentially require a complete rework unless the reactor were de-rated in either safety, generation capacity or lifespan.

At one point I learned there were standard tombs describing (presumably often unexpected) Nuclear Plant Phenomenology.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#357

Post by trhway »

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?

>There are countries where no combination of renewables + storage is possible. Places with little sunlight and little wind.

which places are these? I'm not sure they exist.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#358

Post by ncmncm »

a9h74j wrote: post #353
ncmncm wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Solar and wind projects seem thus far relatively immune. The relative priority/urgency assigned by governments is probably a factor here. I have seen analysis suggesting the "learning curve" for wind has turned upward in places, rather than declining. There might also be some political science term for there being a learning curve in corruption as well. Or as is ascribed to Eric Hoffer, every social initiative ends…

Renewables have the structural advantage that costs are relatively transparent. N units x P per unit x fractional overhead k (<<2) is C, expected cost.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#359

Post by jacquesm »

jacquesm wrote: post #130
fallingknife wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to disbelieve the people who say it's unnecessary because there are many places where the cheapest power generation has come from renewables for quite some time, and yet all of those places still have base load on the grid.

Baseload has several major ingredients: the required continuous consumption, connectivity of areas that are remote from each other where the one has a surplus and the other a deficit, local overcapacity storage options and installed capacity from 'guaranteed' sources (and no source is 100% guaranteed, typically even the most stable sources are down 20 to 40% of the time for maintenance, refueling, repairs and so on).…

(incidentally: if this stuff interests you take a guess at how far those electrons really move during 1/100th or 1/120th of a second and then check the physics to see how far they really travel, the answer may surprise you).

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#360

Post by towaway15463 »

ncmncm wrote: post #327
towaway15463 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I’m talking about waste, not cost.
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