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

#281

Post by stormbrew » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #280

stormbrew wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, nuclear might be expensive, time consuming to build, and difficult but at least we've been doing it for 70 years. It's not clear that projections of long term costs on things we haven't even done at scale are going to be realistic when we try them in the real world. Even if it takes 20 years to build a nuke, that might still be sooner than "power to x" becomes a viable, affordable option for most of the world…

You're aware that current commercial nuclear power plants cannot power the world, right? They are thermal burner reactors. Supplying the entire world's current primary energy demand would require about 6000 1 GW(e) (which is 3 GW(th)) reactors. These would use up current uranium resource (not reserve) in about five years. A nuke powered world will either require radically new sources of uranium (like sea water uraniu…

Please point to me saying anything about "powering the world" with nukes. What a ridiculous strawman. This isn't Mortal Kombat: Energy Edition.

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

#282

Post by md2020 » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 9:45 PM UTC

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.

Recently on a podcast John Carmack said somebody should look into building small fission fragment direct energy conversion reactors, since despite their lower efficiency, they’re apparently much cheaper to build. Since Carmack is a software guy (albeit a very good one) I’m somewhat skeptical, since it seems like if it’s not that complicated a design somebody would have tried it already and found good reasons why it doesn’t work. The only resources I could find on such a thing was a DoE paper about some prototypes Sandia and General Atomics built. Does anyone know more about the merits of this idea?

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

#283

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 10:57 PM UTC

stormbrew wrote: post #281

pfdietz wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're aware that current commercial nuclear power plants cannot power the world, right? They are thermal burner reactors. Supplying the entire world's current primary energy demand would require about 6000 1 GW(e) (which is 3 GW(th)) reactors. These would use up current uranium resource (not reserve) in about five years. A nuke powered world will either require radically new sources of uranium (like sea water uraniu…

Please point to me saying anything about "powering the world" with nukes. What a ridiculous strawman. This isn't Mortal Kombat: Energy Edition.

This is all about moving off fossil fuels because of induced climate change. That requires changing what powers the world. If nuclear is not going to power the world, then it's basically irrelevant, and the issues raised against renewables will not block their widespread adoption.

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

#284

Post by stormbrew » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 11:06 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #283

stormbrew wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please point to me saying anything about "powering the world" with nukes. What a ridiculous strawman. This isn't Mortal Kombat: Energy Edition.

This is all about moving off fossil fuels because of induced climate change. That requires changing what powers the world. If nuclear is not going to power the world, then it's basically irrelevant, and the issues raised against renewables will not block their widespread adoption.

No one thing is going to power the whole world. Even "renewables" isn't one thing, and it can't and won't be deployed the same way in every climate or environment. It, as a blanket set of things, should be deployed everywhere however it can be. But there is no reason to exclude nuclear a priori as a blanket thing. And especially not in favor of waiting for promised improvements in storage or synthetic fuels that have not yet been proven.

Again, this is not a duel to the death. The only thing that should be dismissed out of hand is carbon emitting fuels.

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

#285

Post by epistasis » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 11:49 PM UTC

towaway15463 wrote: post #259

labcomputer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, like, why don't you try to calculate this for yourself? As a pedagogical exercise, I think you'll get much more out of it if you compute the numbers for yourself and play through a bunch of "what if" scenarios. Just to get you started with some ballpark numbers: The solar irradiance at ground level on a sunny day is greater than 1kW/m^2 for about 6 hours per day (google for "AM1.5"). Typical commercial panels hav…

I didn’t say that I think it’s impossible. I’m asking for the reasoning behind the belief that it would be the optimal solution. In this context a lot of details are being talked about to argue for or against the viability of nuclear but I don’t see the same critical process being applied to the assertions that we can run everything on solar and batteries. I’ve put forward many of the same questions that have been an…

It's safe to assume that most nuclear propositions are based upon unrealistic best case scenarios that won't stand up to the scrutiny of reality, and that all solar propositions have been treated incredibly harshly and conservatively and the solar solution will be completely underestimated.

There is a massive bias in the field in favor of nuclear and against solar, and this shows in every single prediction made over the past 15-20 years. The EIA would uncritically put out numbers for "advanced nuclear" that were unbeliever rosy for a tech that had never been built. And at the same time, use out of date costs for solar, and the assumption that solar would stay at the old prices and never improve in price.

Or you will see peer reviewed papers in nuclear that assume ridiculous rosy solutions, that make it all the way through to publication without those rosy assumptions being challenged. For example, using nuclear in remote areas, but it using the actual capacity factor of that sort of system, 40-50%, and instead assuming that the price is coming from using every last bit of electricity at all time. In contrast all the modeling around solar always picks the most conservative estimates, because of the unrealistic hyper criticism of solar, which leads to even the most rosy of solar predictions being underestimated of solar.

Similarly, "concerns" about land or energy density are not realistic concerns, but mere political talk used to delay delay delay as long as possible the obvious solution that solar will be a cornerstone of our energy future, from 40%-70% of most countries' energy.

But if you actually are interested in the land usage, it's a question that has been studied to death. NREL is usually a good source, but one caution is to look at the date of any publication, and realize that if it's more than a year old, a lot of the data will be out of date. Here's a 2013 report on land use:

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56290.pdf

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

#286

Post by robfig » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 12:52 AM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #236

tomcam wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where? Oklo or Radiant?

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

#287

Post by lambdatronics » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 1:15 AM UTC

md2020 wrote: post #282

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.

Recently on a podcast John Carmack said somebody should look into building small fission fragment direct energy conversion reactors, since despite their lower efficiency, they’re apparently much cheaper to build. Since Carmack is a software guy (albeit a very good one) I’m somewhat skeptical, since it seems like if it’s not that complicated a design somebody would have tried it already and found good reasons why it d…

Good question. I think historical designs supported the fuel elements on material structures that ended up absorbing a large fraction of the fragments, leading to inefficiency & overheating the fuel. Here's an outside-of-the-box idea, using a dusty plasma cloud. [0] In this case, I'd be concerned about a criticality accident if the fuel dust containment failed & all the dust landed in a pile.

[0] www.rbsp.info/rbs/PDF/aiaa05.pdf

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

#288

Post by aidenn0 » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 2:33 AM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #146

aidenn0 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One comment on your sustainability argument, now that I know you are the author: Calculating "years of energy" based off of current usage seems silly to me given that global energy usage has been rising exponentially for centuries. For example, if you assume a 3% per-year increase in global energy usage, 12 billion years becomes a bit less than 1000 years.

Today we use about 600 exajoules of primary energy per year. The sun hits us with about 3.8 million exajoules per year. 1.03^1000 is a factor of 7e12. So under that assumption, the earth would be making 1 billion times more power than we receive from the sun. I can pretty much guarantee that we won't be scaling at 3%/yr for the next 1000 years. And if we do, that's an argument for lots more nuclear fission, and a lot…

Yes, every exponential curve is really a logistic curve in disguise, but using today's energy is picking an arbitrary point along that curve.

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

#289

Post by coryrc » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 2:33 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #253

coryrc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At today's prices, thay $12B could instead buy 6GW of solar at 20% capacity factor, and 24GWh of batteries. I don't think that can actually be done. The world's largest battery installation is less than 1 GWh AFAICT. OTOH we're not doing great at nuclear either.

What do you mean by "can't be done"? If we can build a 500MWh battery we can build a 1GWh battery by doing the 500MWh battery two times. Similarly if we can build a 1GWh battery we can build also a 24 GWh battery.

That's the same argument for building nuclear -- we've done projects before, just do it more/bigger.

Yet we can't and aren't.

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

#290

Post by rstuart4133 » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 3:05 AM UTC

Schroedingersat wrote: post #162

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.

A jumbo jet has countless failure modes that are completely fine where something analogous happening in a nuclear plant would wipe a city off the map. Their core backup safety feature of being roughly bird shaped requires only a few moving parts, none of which are operating at extreme temperature or require cooling.

> A jumbo jet has countless failure modes that are completely fine where something analogous happening in a nuclear plant would wipe a city off the map.

No, the first post is correct - safety is not the issue. We build keep building dams, and dam failures have killed far, far more people than nuclear. Other comments about nimby are also off the mark. People whose properties are flooded hate dams, nimby's force delays measuring decades, yet we keep building dams.

The comment you are responding contains the answer to the riddle it posed:

> a thousand of them are in the air right this second.

If the one factory could build 1000 nuclear reactors, complexity would not be an issue there either. And I'm sure after building 1000 of them, the price would not so much as drop as plummet. Which is why small nuclear reactors built in factories are such a common meme.

But the first 100 of those small nuclear reactors will be hideously expensive based on the quotes we have from people who've actually tried to do it - far more than a couple of big plants generating the same output. And the big plants already being crushed by cost overruns.

Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them. That seems to be the only way it could happen, because after decades of refusals I think we can safely say the banks aren't interested in funding a technology that turns out energy 100% more expensive than current competitors.