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

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#461

Post by ClumsyPilot » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 1:12 PM UTC

logifail wrote: post #453

Dylan16807 wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think whether it's cheaper is begging the question. And I couldn't tell you what's safer. But there's definite risk in outsourcing the majority of your power production, risk that doesn't exist if you're outsourcing long-term storage. If something goes wrong with the storage ecosystem, you can keep it on-site for a few extra months.

> there's definite risk in outsourcing the majority of your power production, risk that doesn't exist if you're outsourcing long-term storage. If something goes wrong with the storage ecosystem, you can keep it on-site for a few extra months I think trusting another country to look after your radioactive waste for a few thousand years might involve a fair amount of risk. It's hard enough trying to look after it yours…

This comes across silly. Have you ever seen how nuclear waste is stored?

It is not like oil stored in a tanker that might spill out because rust has made a hole.

It is a solid substance, vitriefied in a giant block of gas, sealed inside a copper container that never rusts. Then this container is placed hundreds of meters underground, into bedrock, and the tunnel is filled in. Noone walks around to check how it's doing today.

If something goes terribly wrong, these containers can be stored in an ordinary warehouse for years and nothing happens.

Then lets address the misattribution of incentives.

In all your scenarios the coutry housing nuclear waste is the one that's interested in making sure its stored properly. You can't use it for extortion, any kind of returning of nuclear waste by force would likely amount to an act of war.

On the other hand, if another nation is supplying you power, they can extort you by cutting power supply, and that is what Russia is doing to europe today. Europe is very fortunate that Russian leadership is completely retarded when it comes to running the economy, and Russia simply can't afford to cut the supply completely. However it does mean that Europe is sponsoring putin's war in Ukraine.

The primary concerns with nuclear power are those of economic viability, lead times, practicality.

The waste is not killing anyone, we can build containers thay last hundreds, even thousands of years and we have time to figure out this problem.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#462

Post by ClumsyPilot » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 1:18 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #294

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Synthe…

fuel synthesis is one of the few trully plausible solutions to the storage problem, but i am not sure it will be cheaper - hydrogen is so much more difficult to handle than petrolium.

I am not up to date with ammonia based processed.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#463

Post by dTal » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

logifail wrote: post #421

dTal wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite the non-sequitor. An exploration of how broken "the market" is would be an entirely separate discussion. If you wanted to have that discussion, we could start by analyzing the massive subsidies enjoyed by fossil fuels, not to mention the complete lack of accounting for its toxic byproducts which are dumped into the atmosphere (while nuclear power is legally required to track and safely store every molecu…

> That's quite the non-sequitor Is it? If nuclear is indeed able to throttle output up and down to match demand - or perhaps we should say, to match spot pricing(!) - why on Earth would we need to fix a minimum price for decades in advance in order to attract investment to build new ones? "Given its commitment to building Hinkley Point C, the [UK] government had no choice but to make EDF an offer that was too good to…

> If nuclear is indeed able to throttle output up and down to match demand - or perhaps we should say, to match spot pricing(!) - why on Earth would we need to fix a minimum price for decades in advance in order to attract investment to build new ones

Lots of reasons, one of which my sibling comment by user akvadrako has touched on. The question of whether it's currently economically viable to do so is a separate discussion. You persist on making this odd logical syllogism - if nuclear could throttle, the market would look like X, the market looks like Y, therefore nuclear can't throttle - and keep ignoring the technical fact of the matter that nuclear plants can in point of fact throttle. I have already linked to robust corroboration of this fact so I don't think there's any more for me to say here.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#464

Post by ncmncm » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #459

ncmncm wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyway only the tiniest fraction of utility storage will ever be batteries.

Your comment conveys cynicism, but I'm not sure what you're saying. So you're proposing 100s to 1000s of TWh of utility storage in what form, exactly? Or are you saying that there will be almost not utility storage? Are you counting EV batteries as part of utility storage? How about if the batteries take part in vehicle to grid transmission? People have been skeptical of batteries for decades, claiming that they are…

Batteries just cost more than alternatives. They are excellent for load smoothing, because they can vary power intake and output very quickly, at any wattage out, but they are an expensive place to keep energy. For home use, batteries are the only practical storage we have, which is why off-grid power is much costlier than utility scale need be.

Battery cost is per Wh of total capacity, with typically a very high limit of W in or out. Alternatives mostly cost, instead, per W of power in or out, with an increase of total Wh stored costing relatively little, mainly limited by convenience.

For example, pumped hydro. The expensive part is the turbine. (You often don't even need a dam.) Want more watts, you need another turbine; but you can usually pump up way more water than you will need.

Likewise, synthetic ammonia or hydrogen, or liquified nitrogen or compressed air. Tankage is super-cheap, but electrolysers, cryo units, and compressors cost, as do turbines. More watts out means more turbines, again.

For buoyancy storage, the floats, sea-floor pulleys, cable reels, and clutches are cheap, the size or number of winch motor / generators determines how many watts you can put in or get out. Similarly for mineshaft gravity storage: The 10,000 ton weight is cheap, and the mineshaft has plenty of depth. Wattage is in the winch.

Producing enough lithium batteries for both cars and utilities would put a serious strain on world capacity to mine lithium. It is better reserved mainly for cars, where its light weight matters. Where you do want batteries, other chemistries are likely better for utilities than fought-over lithium. I expect molten metal batteries to be competitive soon.

It is strange that most people who talk about storage seem to have no conception of what makes a thing more, or even prohibitively, expensive. Thus, Energy Vault has a $2B market cap for a system that is very obviously totally useless. People propose putting expensive electromechanical equipment on the sea floor. The storage that will be used will be the storage that is cheap to buy and cheap to use.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#465

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 1:54 PM UTC

goodpoint wrote: post #451

JetAlone wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the possibilities of solar energy. I like the possibilities of decentralized energy. I am a conspiracy theory type of guy. Here's what I really think about all the state and corporate SDG campaign sloganing I see on the streets every damn day: The reasonably accessible domestic solar panels that do come out will most likely be IoT devices. It will be energy as a service. They will gather information in a way y…

This was the most deranged and illogical conspiracy theory that I heard in a while.

[deleted]

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#466

Post by ncmncm » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 1:55 PM UTC

trashtester wrote: post #439

ncmncm wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally , we could have started building out solar in 1989, and would have had today's PV prices by the '90s, and would be well along to mitigating the climate catastrophe now. But we chose otherwise. Starting nuke construction now would just be kicking the can down the road again.

How much of the development in PV tech is linked to developments in other technologies, and how much is due to dedicated R&D on PV's? My personal understanding is that basic science is the main long-term driver, while directed R&D into a specific field is important for short-term gains in efficiency, but will tend to reach diminishing returns if it goes beyond what is enabled by basic science. Economies of scale is m…

Solar panels have barely improved since the 80s. What drove down cost, and continues driving down cost, is purely manufacturing volume.

New PV tech, like perovskites, might carry prices down further once the learning curve for Si levels off, but we are not there yet.

There is no "storage bottleneck". We just don't have anywhere near enough renewable generating capacity to justify diverting capital from expanding it to building storage. Diverting capital to boutique nukes, and to coal while we wait a decade or two for the nukes, would be far, far worse than that.

When we do start building out storage, vanishingly little of it will be batteries.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#467

Post by ncmncm » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 1:58 PM UTC

otter-rock wrote: post #460

ncmncm wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly were not good enough at Fukushima, in a half-dozen particulars. The next pile of reactors down the coast did not melt down, solely on the strength of a single engineer who succeeded, with enormous difficulty, in upholding standards management objected to, but that he knew were essential. Without him, there would now be two major uninhabitable areas there. He must have known Fukushima would melt down, a…

> They certainly were not good enough at Fukushima Then why would remaking the part be any better than redesigning the system?

Either course would produce uncompetitive power. The best would be stop pouring money into the rathole.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#468

Post by ncmncm » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 1:59 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #431

ncmncm wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waste management is by far the smallest of all the problems with nukes. Overwhelmingly the biggest problem is wholly legal corruption, as cost and schedule are allowed to balloon without limit. For everyone involved, the gravy train stops when a plant is delivered, which no one actually involved wants ever to happen. (If it must end anyway, there is some incentive to actually deliver, as happened at Olkiluoto, but no…

> No one has offered any plausible suggestion for how to contain corruption costs for nuke construction, ... standardization. transparency. enough market participants to have meaningful competition. (even if not for the top level project, but for parts) order 100+ plants, get economies of scale. sure, political feasibility is ludicrously close to zero, hence the US is stuck with short term workarounds and incremental…

It is anyway far too late for that.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#469

Post by ncmncm » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #462

ncmncm wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Synthe…

fuel synthesis is one of the few trully plausible solutions to the storage problem, but i am not sure it will be cheaper - hydrogen is so much more difficult to handle than petrolium. I am not up to date with ammonia based processed.

There are many obviously practical storage methods.

Ammonia and hydrogen are attractive because you can sell extra production after your local tankage is full, keeping your synthesis equipment busy whenever you are not drawing down your storage.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#470

Post by tacocataco » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

mandevil wrote: post #239

krylon wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> European construction seems a lot better Unless the situation in the US is really, really REALLY horrible, I doubt that. I don't remember where, but one country is in the process of building a nuclear power plant, that is AFAIK unfinished, but already took way more time and money than originally planned. Doesn't even have to be nuclear - ask the Internet about Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie or Stuttgart's train station.…

An excellent (English language) podcast about Berlin's fiasco of an airport, BER: https://www.radiospaetkauf.com/ber/ (29 years from planning to completion, 14 years from construction start to opening, 9 years late, budget from 1 billion Euro to almost 6). One of the points they made in the podcast was similar to TFA's: changes in construction are really expensive and blow things out in costs. A new mayor came in and…

I don't think being the best at planning means much when you change those plans mid project.