Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by towaway15463 » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #104

towaway15463 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If small commercial solar operations are in fact cheap and have a high return then why am I not seeing startup solar power generation companies everywhere? Surely it would be a hot industry to get into if you can put it anywhere and make a profit?

I would suggest that those companies exist everywhere, you just don't see them. There's something like 1 TW of renewable projects that are being considered in US interconnection queues right now. Total US power draw is only 0.5TW. At and average of ~30% capacity factor, that's 60% of total US electricity demand replacement, with today's projects. Now, only a fraction of these will get connected, because only the marg…

I’m aware of several heavily subsidized renewable projects in my local area alone that have failed to deliver usable power to a grid that sorely needs it. I’m aware of 0 independently funded ventures even though my area has some of the highest electricity prices in the country.

My question is given this market where you have high prices and high demand, why do I not see any entrepreneurs building small solar installations and cutting deals with municipalities to provide some of their grid power?

That tells me that the technology, cost, and/or regulation isn’t viable yet. Promises of future developments do nothing to address current needs. I have a feeling that 100% renewable generation is fast becoming a “20 years away” problem since I’ve been hearing the same promises for at least 20 years now and those older than me likely remember even older promises.

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

#262

Post by belorn » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #240

nine_k wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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 g…

Yes and no. Renewables themselves don't suffer much at failure, but the grid itself has to pay a quite heavy cost if it can't balance demand and supply. The European grid has had several server incident where grid were close to break down from sudden imbalance between supply and demand, and if a crash had occurred the cost of such failure would be massive. As reported, those failures has increase in both frequencies and severity in correlation with increase dependency on renewables.

It all depend on how one want to perceive the system. A wind turbine struck by lightning might not propagate too much, but a poor weather prediction can have massive propagation for the system as a whole.

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

#263

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #262

pfdietz wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Yes and no. Renewables themselves don't suffer much at failure, but the grid itself has to pay a quite heavy cost if it can't balance demand and supply. The European grid has had several server incident where grid were close to break down from sudden imbalance between supply and demand, and if a crash had occurred the cost of such failure would be massive. As reported, those failures has increase in both frequencies…

I was discussing the implications of reliability on the cost of components.

The grid is also a resilient system where individual parts can fail independently. Weather prediction is correlated, but has no effect on the cost of individual parts.

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

#264

Post by epistasis » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 3:43 PM UTC

towaway15463 wrote: post #261

epistasis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suggest that those companies exist everywhere, you just don't see them. There's something like 1 TW of renewable projects that are being considered in US interconnection queues right now. Total US power draw is only 0.5TW. At and average of ~30% capacity factor, that's 60% of total US electricity demand replacement, with today's projects. Now, only a fraction of these will get connected, because only the marg…

I’m aware of several heavily subsidized renewable projects in my local area alone that have failed to deliver usable power to a grid that sorely needs it. I’m aware of 0 independently funded ventures even though my area has some of the highest electricity prices in the country. My question is given this market where you have high prices and high demand, why do I not see any entrepreneurs building small solar installa…

> That tells me that the technology, cost, and/or regulation isn’t viable yet.

I don't know where you live, but generalizing from one small locality with an out of wack market is leading you to the wrong conclusions.

In places where there's a free market for new generation, like Texas, there's more GW of storage being added than GW of natural gas. There's an order of magnitude of new wind and solar generation being added than natural gas, and this is the place with some of the cheapest natural gas in the entire world. Having trouble finding ERCOT, but for the entire US, 1.3TW of the 1.4TW on newly proposed projects are renewable or storage:

https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-do...

So your local utility, which is charging you high prices, probably has a process that disincentivizes renewables to a large degree. And if there are zero independent funded ventures, then your utility must be actively stopping renewables, and those investors are working in the far more fertile rest of the US.

In particular, small projects can be the hardest to get through. There's zero reason for a utility to cut a deal, they are a monopoly, they are raking in far checks by doing nothing. Utility executives are some of the people least likely to adopt any sort of new technology.

The biggest impediment to renewables sweeping through the grid and giving us cheaper electricity is politics, conservatives, and rentierism. In areas where there's a market set up to allow lower costs to win, fossil fuels are toast. But in most places, electricity is not a market.

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

#265

Post by Galaxeblaffer » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 3:44 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #147

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is wind and solar in any way close to achieve what nuclear has already has? Solar and wind is not a mature technology at all, you would know if you lived in a country that has invested heavily in it. Where i live people has to use an app to see when they can afford to wash their clothes, run the dishwasher, charge the car at any given time of the week and and hour. The government is praying to the weather gods fo…

If solar and wind are not mature, that just means there's even more room for them to improve. And they're already beating the pants off nuclear globally for new generating capacity. If you extend the demonstrated empirical experience curve for solar assuming PV dominates world energy production, cost might decline to just $0.01/kWh.

Solar and wind is not being anything as long as we haven't got a solution for storage. As it is now wind and solar are backed up by dirty sources like gas, coal and biomass and that isn't about to change any time soon.

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

#266

Post by adrianN » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 3:45 PM UTC

dieselgate wrote: post #221

adrianN wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They can be recycled but it doesn’t appear we’ve had to deal with this much on an industrial scale - yet. Electric car batteries may be better off being “reused” for less demanding tasks after they’ve hit their usable limit for vehicle use. Of course they’ll need to be recycled eventually. This isn’t my domain so I’m very open to new information. In regards to recycling lead acid batteries the work seems horrendous,…

Obviously you'd want to reduce, reuse, recycle in that order. But it's not surprising that we don't have a large lithium battery recycling industry yet, since we don't have all that many big lithium batteries on the market yet.

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

#267

Post by epistasis » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 3:57 PM UTC

stormbrew wrote: post #189

epistasis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting aside the wisdom of such massive defense spending, the question is what is the alternate good that could perform the job? If we spend $12B on a 1GW reactor, we have far far better alternatives. A 1GW nuclear reactor has a 90% capacity factor of undispatchable, hard to throttle electricity. At today's prices, thay $12B could instead buy 6GW of solar at 20% capacity factor, and 24GWh of batteries. This combined…

I don't think this black and white thinking is really useful. There are inhabited places in the world where solar and wind face real challenges to practicality as the sole source of energy . I would be shocked if we're capable of building an amount of storage that will get the city I live in through the winter, for example. Certainly not for cheaper than a natural gas plant, which is the real competition. Frankly, wh…

If you live in a place that only gets four hours of sun a day, sure, look more into nuclear.

But instead of being so "black and white" and insisting it must be nuclear that powers things, also evaluate options like thermal storage to gather summertime heat in reservoirs for use throughout the winter. It's super cheap, and makes a ton of sense in most areas, yet it's so low tech that it gets ignored.

I will be black and white that fission is not a feasible solution for the vast majority of the human population for at least the next 20 years, and probably forever. Despite more than half a century of experience, it has not improved as a technology. There would have to be some sort of drastic breakthrough for nuclear to be a realistic power source for most of the earth's surface.

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

#268

Post by belorn » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 5:39 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #263

belorn wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. Renewables themselves don't suffer much at failure, but the grid itself has to pay a quite heavy cost if it can't balance demand and supply. The European grid has had several server incident where grid were close to break down from sudden imbalance between supply and demand, and if a crash had occurred the cost of such failure would be massive. As reported, those failures has increase in both frequencies…

I was discussing the implications of reliability on the cost of components. The grid is also a resilient system where individual parts can fail independently. Weather prediction is correlated, but has no effect on the cost of individual parts.

The grid need more resilience and complex systems as it becomes more vulnerable to sudden changes in demand and supply, which increase the costs of the components of the grid. We don't think of it as components of renewables, even through they are required in the grid in order to have renewables connected.

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

#269

Post by belorn » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 5:59 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #234

belorn wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Offshore windfarms have zero insurance against environmental damages caused by changes in the water environment, nor does windfarms or PV farms has insurance against forest fires.

If we want to be technical correct, nuclear plants and hydropower plants do have some insurance, for example if employees are harmed during work.

What all power plants share is the inability to insure against risk that is direct to society at large. It not that the risk is high (which it isn't), but rather that in case of accident there isn't anything other than governments that could step in and take the cost.

> You seem to argue that because others are doing bad things it's OK for nuclear?

No, that is a bad faith interpretation. If we want power plants to pay insurance against risk that is place on society, then such requirement should be technology neutral. If we have historical evidence of harm to either society or the environment, directly connected to a method of producing energy, then producers using that method should pay a tax to government that represent the risk. Be that hydro, nuclear, fossil fuels, wind farms, PV, a battery farm or what have you. Quantify the risk and let researcher, experts and historians argue how much each specific plant should pay.

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

#270

Post by kragen » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 6:16 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #241

kragen wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demand response is the biggest unpredictable factor, I think, but demand is also unpredictable. Power plants are commonly depreciated over 30 or even 40 years. Electricity consumption in the US doubled during the 01960s, and it doubled in PRC during the 02010s. If the transport sector in the US went all-electric, that would double electrical consumption again even without increasing energy use. How can you predict wh…

Specifically, aluminum might replace steel because steel is being moved to an electrically reduced metal, with electricity separating oxygen from the oxide (indirectly perhaps, using electrolytic hydrogen). But aluminum is already electrically reduced. The cost advantage of using cheaper coke to make iron goes away.

Steel moving to being electrically reduced could happen for regulatory reasons, as you seem to be suggesting, or it could happen because the electricity becomes cheaper than the coke, at least during the daytime.