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Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

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Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#191

Post by thereisnospork »

dylan604 wrote: post #182
ncmncm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the above is true enough, but it is not the full story on why US nukes cost like they do. The ones attempted recently in South Carolina and Georgia cost so much because people in a position to block building them want it that way. Once a nuke project starts, a torrent of money starts flowing. Everybody with a stake expects a share, and none want it ever to end. Finishing a plant would plug that flow. If it loo…

>We see the same process with urban tunnels and big military procurements. It is all perfectly legal. It is probably not fixable. Not being a lawyer and all that, would some of this holding of the hands-out not qualify as some sort of grift or worse? Are there not laws already in place for this stuff? Is it a case of it being too hard to prove so no prosecutions are brought?

>Not being a lawyer and all that, would some of this holding of the hands-out not qualify as some sort of grift or worse? Are there not laws already in place for this stuff? Is it a case of it being too hard to prove so no prosecutions are brought?

Practically speaking sure, but all one needs to do is hide the grift behind a veneer of altruism and people[0] lap it up. Also half the time it is the lawmakers behind the grift. Do the phrases: “Think of the children“, “we need an environmental impact report“, or “This is a building of historical significance“ ring a bell? Behind each of them is an entity(ies) looking to advance their interest, which is often, but not always, profit from the increased diligence required or profit from the obstruction and the induced scarcity.

[0]The voting electorate, anyway.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#192

Post by kragen »

areoform wrote: post #186
kragen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My best guess is what Freeman Dyson said in his autobiography Disturbing the Universe : he stopped working on nuclear reactors after TRIGA (01958) and Project Orion (01957 to 01961) because it stopped being fun. It became a question of bureaucracy and national security and empire-building and whatnot. So people like Dyson, who learned calculus by spending his Christmas vacation working his way through a textbok for f…

I'm so glad that you brought up TRIGA. For those who don't know, the story of TRIGA is quite fascinating from our perspective. The pitch was rather simple, "Build a reactor that a teenager could play with" (without supervision). And they succeeded. The reactor was designed in the span of a few months. They started in the summer of 01956. The first one was commissioned and built in May of 01958. And it ran until 1997,…

It could happen! But, right now, at most latitudes, building a PV farm is cheaper than building a coal power plant with the same average output, and a coal power plant is basically a conventional nuclear power plant without the reactor. I think that, to be cost-competitive with PV as a source of energy, nuclear reactors need either much cheaper heat engines than a Parsons turbine, or some way of converting nuclear power to useful forms that doesn't start with using it to heat something up.

The only group I know of trying to do this is https://hb11.energy/, whose plan is to laser-initiate an avalanche of boron-11/hydrogen "fusion" and throw the resulting alpha particles up a million-volt potential difference. Though it's not guaranteed, that might end up being cheaper than a steam turbine and generator.

Without such improvements, nuclear energy is only really appealing in environments where PV and wind aren't an option — like submarines, aircraft carriers, Antarctic research stations, deep-space probes, and Scotland — or as a hedge against unforeseen difficulties in scaling up grid-scale energy storage and the like.

But I might be wrong about where the costs in coal plants come from, and I'd be very grateful to find that out.

I really appreciated your "On Apple’s “Expanded Protections for Children”," by the way.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#193

Post by croes »

grej wrote: post #181

Just remember that a huge part of the current excess cost is in part: (a) because nuclear power is the only energy technology for which the full lifecycle costs have to be fully accounted for upfront. No one is accounting for the disposal costs of solar panels in their initial capital expenditure, for example. (b) The build costs in terms of energy of wind and solar are comparably high. They are raw material and ener…

Maybe (a) is because solar panels are less dangerous than nuclear waste.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#194

Post by ryoshu »

croes wrote: post #193
grej wrote: post #181

Just remember that a huge part of the current excess cost is in part: (a) because nuclear power is the only energy technology for which the full lifecycle costs have to be fully accounted for upfront. No one is accounting for the disposal costs of solar panels in their initial capital expenditure, for example. (b) The build costs in terms of energy of wind and solar are comparably high. They are raw material and ener…

Maybe (a) is because solar panels are less dangerous than nuclear waste.

we need to account for the danger of disposal/long term storage of the dead batteries for solar as well. But I'm not sure what the calculation for that is vs. nuclear waste.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#195

Post by brutusborn »

jmyeet wrote: post #33

This is a well-written series (Parts 1 and 2 are linked in this article). This last part makes comparisons to the reactors designed and used by the US Navy. If you read through all of this the message I got was that size is the enemy. In one part it notes that a 100MWe core meltdown could likely be contained by the vessel but a 1000MWe reactor meltdown likely wouldn't. This concern is part of why there are ever stric…

I think the point is more that the past cost overrund are due to _changing_ regulation, not necessarily the regulation themselves.

It's like a software client changes requirements a year into a 2 year project and suddenly you need to rearchitect the whole thing, essentially starting again.

Following regulations is costly, but following changing regulations throughout a project lifecycle is _very expensive_.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#196

Post by adrianN »

ryoshu wrote: post #194
croes wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe (a) is because solar panels are less dangerous than nuclear waste.

we need to account for the danger of disposal/long term storage of the dead batteries for solar as well. But I'm not sure what the calculation for that is vs. nuclear waste.

Batteries can be recycled. They contain expensive metals in high concentrations, recycling makes financial sense.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#197

Post by adrianN »

kragen wrote: post #192
areoform wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so glad that you brought up TRIGA. For those who don't know, the story of TRIGA is quite fascinating from our perspective. The pitch was rather simple, "Build a reactor that a teenager could play with" (without supervision). And they succeeded. The reactor was designed in the span of a few months. They started in the summer of 01956. The first one was commissioned and built in May of 01958. And it ran until 1997,…

It could happen! But, right now, at most latitudes, building a PV farm is cheaper than building a coal power plant with the same average output, and a coal power plant is basically a conventional nuclear power plant without the reactor. I think that, to be cost-competitive with PV as a source of energy, nuclear reactors need either much cheaper heat engines than a Parsons turbine, or some way of converting nuclear po…

To be fair, to make the average output of a PV plant comparable to the average output of a nuclear plant you need to add some storage, which drives up the cost a bit. Probably not enough to account for the extra cost of nuclear though.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#198

Post by adrianN »

jiggawatts wrote: post #188
kragen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My best guess is what Freeman Dyson said in his autobiography Disturbing the Universe : he stopped working on nuclear reactors after TRIGA (01958) and Project Orion (01957 to 01961) because it stopped being fun. It became a question of bureaucracy and national security and empire-building and whatnot. So people like Dyson, who learned calculus by spending his Christmas vacation working his way through a textbok for f…

Silly question: why do you use 5-digit years with a leading zero? I have never seen this format anywhere else...

The Long Now Foundation does it that way "to foster long term thinking".

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#199

Post by adrianN »

ncmncm wrote: post #133
xupybd wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was rarely needed and only needed for a few hours we wouldn't need all the fossil fuel based generation to fill the gaps. I'm not aware of any significant battery based storage system deployed at scale that solves this problem. There are some large battery banks but none even close to the scale required. It's a hard problem as it would require a huge increase in global manufacturing. I'd like to be wrong here.…

It would be stupid to spend money building out storage before there is renewable generating capacity to charge it from. So, they spend on that, first. Most of the storage, in the end, will not be batteries. Most existing storage is pumped hydro, because the dams were already there. There are lots of alternatives: underground or underwater compressed air, liquified air, underground hydrogen, tanked ammonia, buoyancy,…

As far as I know the best we can do is PEM electrolysis with about 80% efficiency, but as you say, efficiency is not very important.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#200

Post by adrianN »

moonchrome wrote: post #113
tomComb wrote: post #34

Yes, cost is the issue. Everyone assumes that anyone hesitant about Nuclear power is focussed on the environmental or safety concerns, but that is wrong. The costs (and cost overruns) of the construction and maintenance of Nuclear reactors have been enough reason on their own to be bearish on Nuclear. I'm hopeful that new technologies, such as small nuclear reactions that can be built in a factory, will address this.

I think the cost argument is disingenuous - solar camp likes to tout how it took a decade of subsides before economies of scale kicked in - no reason to believe nuclear wouldn't come down with same kind of subsides - on a longer scale due to longer iteration cycle.

The problem is that we don't have another forty years to wait for nuclear costs to come down if we want to prevent catastrophic warming.
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