Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

constructionphysics.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 298 posts

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

#231

Post by imtringued »

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,…

>The distal cause is simple; the reactors suck. We've been designing them wrong for decades now, and we need to make rethink them from the ground up.

Obviously, the vast majority of nuclear power plants are of the suck type. If you want a regulatory blank slate you are going to have to shut them all down and replace them with good power plants. The regulations are there to deal with the "suck" of the nuclear industry. Get rid of the suck and you will make the nuclear industry very unhappy, in other words the legacy nuclear power industry is exactly the problem that drives regulations and costs up.

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

#232

Post by olejorgenb »

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.

Here is a free book on this topic: http://www.xylenepower.com/gordian_w8.pdf

I have not read it, but I've read an article [1] which cites it. Apparently a lot of the current regulation is created based on a faulty model (LNT, ALARA) of how harmful radiation is. This model predicts that the harm is linear in dose, with no time component. Ie.: that receiving a dose of 1/n for n days is as bad as a single high dose of n for one day.

According to the article and book, this is model has been proven wrong (a long time ago).

[1] (in Norwegian) https://www.minervanett.no/energi-kjernekraft-klima/hvordan-...

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

#233

Post by Nimitz14 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #150
moonchrome wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. There is: nuclear has been subsidized on a much longer scale than solar already.

Please share more information. What subsidies existed for nuclear?

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

#234

Post by cycomanic »

belorn wrote: post #224
cycomanic wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be nice arguments if they would actually be true. a) typically nuclear plants don't have to include all life cycle cost into their calculations. Insurance is essentially not included (no insurance is willing to cover nuclear disaster), storage costs are not included to the full extend (partly because we actually don't know the cost, storage for these amounts of time is unprecedented) b) is also falso both…

No energy plant need to include insurance that cover disaster. People living downstream of a hydro electric dam have to pay their own insurance, and in the end it will still be the government that pick up the bill when people and homes are lost to catastrophic flooding. Mining raw material also produce a lot of waste, including radioactive waste, much which will never be safe for humans. Those are generally stored fo…

That's not true, the operator of a windfarm definitely needs to have insurance (or be liable otherwise) for a possible accident that can happen (i.e. A rotor falling off and hitting a car), the thing about nuclear power plants (and hydro) is that generally the risks are so high that nobody wants to insure it.

You seem to argue that because others are doing bad things it's OK for nuclear? I don't think that is a very good argument.

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

#235

Post by z7 »

yrgulation wrote: post #117
fffobar wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this neural-network generated? The bio makes me think that it is, in fact, written by a machine: > Perhaps you'll think my comments are unthinkable. My only response to that is that they were legibly written, not by a machine, but by a writer with a soul.

I’ve seen quite a few machine like comments as of lately. They should nail auto complete and support chatbots first then try to fool people around here.

I don't think this was a machine. The Simpsons observations, the Zola reference, the epiphoric sentence rhythms... doesn't feel like it. He just seems to ignore Grice's third conversational maxim.

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

#236

Post by willis936 »

tomcam wrote: post #179
willis936 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jumbojets are hugely complex with hundreds of kilometers of pipes and wires and yet a thousand of them are in the air right this second. Complexity is a nothingburger.

Sounds like you have it under control. I suggest you take your business plan to YCombinator and make some serious money.

I'm too busy working at an energy startup I think is the best path forward for energy security: something that takes a bit more effort than being an armchair quarterback.

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

#237

Post by pfdietz »

ncmncm wrote: post #105
crote wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Nuclear power plants are rare enough that each project is basically unique. - Nuclear power plants are very complex. They are more "engineered" than "constructed", with hundreds of kilometers of tubes and wires. Pouring the concrete is the easy part. - Nuclear power plants deal with an incredibly dangerous environment: high pressures, high temperatures, radioactivity, hazardous chemicals. Everything has to be teste…

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…

One reason renewables avoid it is the projects can be built in stages, with an off ramp if the contractor turns out to have lied.

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

#238

Post by wil421 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #223
credit_guy wrote: post #137

Whenever we talk about nuclear power on HN, people are split in two groups: those who'd love to see nuclear power succeeding, and those who are against it and who support solar and wind. I am pro both nuclear and renewables. Solar and wind have been on an absolute tear lately. At least in the US (where I live) new solar and wind construction has been growing at a breathtaking pace during the last decade. Take a look…

I'm pro whatever is cheapest and fastest. Which just isn't nuclear. For every GW of nuclear coming online, there are hundreds of wind and solar GW coming online. An order of magnitude more power in an order of magnitude less time. And things are getting cheaper and faster still. Fifteen years from now that will be a lot cheaper and faster. Any plan that does not take that into account is not a great plan. And my prob…

My state is building 2 new reactors and they will be the first to be built in the US in 30 years. Despite Westinghouse going bankrupt and a utility company in South Carolina deciding they don’t want to be a part of it, construction continues. Unit 3 will hopefully be fueled this year and start making power next year. Unit 4 will be a few years.

You can’t produce power at night with solar and the wind is not always blowing. Nuclear is what will get us off coal and gas if we combine it with renewable energy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_P...

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

#239

Post by pfdietz »

dylan604 wrote: post #163
crote wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Nuclear power plants are rare enough that each project is basically unique. - Nuclear power plants are very complex. They are more "engineered" than "constructed", with hundreds of kilometers of tubes and wires. Pouring the concrete is the easy part. - Nuclear power plants deal with an incredibly dangerous environment: high pressures, high temperatures, radioactivity, hazardous chemicals. Everything has to be teste…

>things can get way worse than a big explosion. Total meltdown to a China Syndrome with the slag melting its way to the water table is pretty much the worst I can imagine.

Prompt supercriticality (as happened at Chernobyl) is worse. Having that happen in a fast reactor is even worse than that -- it could be a literal nuclear explosion.

Fast reactors may be necessary for a fully nuclear powered world, because the uranium runs out too quickly without breeding. And 233U or plutonium skate much closer to the edge of prompt supercriticality, since they produce about half the delayed neutrons of 235U.

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

#240

Post by pfdietz »

nine_k wrote: post #78
virissimo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our nations were far less wealthy when the existing stock of nuclear power plants were built, the technology available for building them have improved since then, and the raw resources needed as their inputs aren't a constraint, so why have costs risen so much relative to what we are willing to spend on it? Environmental and safety regulations are supposed to be explanations for this rise in cost, not rival explanati…

* Technology makes machines cheaper, and makes human work more expensive in comparison. Nuclear projects involve a lot of highly qualified human work. * Technology makes repetitive operations cheaper. You build a factory for hundred million dollars, make a billion gadgets on it, and every gadget costs you ten cents to make. Nuclear projects lack the economy of scale: even the Navy is going to order reactors by a doze…

Nuclear involves large, monolithic plants, with many parts, with many of those parts shutting down the system if they fail. So the parts have to be highly reliable, which is costly.

Renewables involve larger numbers of decoupled systems, where failures of parts don't propagate to shut down the whole thing. If that PV module fails, or that wind turbine is struck by lightning and catches fires, the rest of the system goes on as before.

Post reply on HN