How much solar could they have built for the same price? Just doing some very rough calculations, they could have built enough panels to output several times as much peak power as they can with the nuclear reactors. Even including storage costs, they still could have probably built a system with more productive capacity than the nuclear reactors. This project is almost certainly the last conventional fission reactor that will ever be built in the US.
Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms
21–30 of 205 posts
Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't get around the fact that you need baseload and/or storage. Both are hard problems. Some locations have regional baseload solutions like hydroelectricity, but many don't. Nuclear is a solution that works anywhere, but like you say, it's expensive. Storage is similar: there are some regional solutions (pumped hydro), or a difficult and expensive general solution (chemical batteries). There's no single answer…
Renewables with batteries are cheaper than new nuclear or even new natural gas.
Does that price include enough storage to heat the entire Twin Cities area (~4M people) for six continuous weeks of average -20C weather with overcast skies, where power failure means widespread death and property damage (broken pipes)? It might do, I don't know, but I'm skeptical. That's a lot of power! My gut feeling is a baseload solution is better for that kind of situation, though what I'm really advocating for is for every option to be on the table for the real experts (not me!) to decide.
Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms
#23I feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's current form of large central power plants[1]. By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nat…
Georgia Power customers have been paying extra for this plant for something like a decade. Rate payers absorbed much of the risk instead of investors in the company. This was pushed as a way to save on financing costs by getting the money from customers upfront but saving them more long term with lower rates. But it appears the customers, despite prepaying for the plant, aren't going to see those savings. The investors however were insulated from much of the cost overruns.
Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms
#24How much solar could they have built for the same price? Just doing some very rough calculations, they could have built enough panels to output several times as much peak power as they can with the nuclear reactors. Even including storage costs, they still could have probably built a system with more productive capacity than the nuclear reactors. This project is almost certainly the last conventional fission reactor…
I think that some small modular reactors will get built. Whether more SMRs get built after the initial test deployments will depend on their own achieved cost/schedule numbers.
The Georgia reactors can't compete on price with solar projects backed by 4-8 hours of battery storage at current prices. However, the project started developing in 2010:
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/02/vogtle-20100217.htm...
At then-current prices for solar and especially battery storage, Vogtle 3 & 4 were economically rational decarbonization projects. Or at least they would have been if they had actually met their initially announced schedule and cost numbers.
The unpredictability of scheduling/budgeting for nuclear power projects is IMO their most unattractive characteristic. In 2010 costs for solar farms were much higher, but they were at least predictable. If a project developer said that a solar farm would be generating by November 2010, it would be generating by November 2010. The predictability enabled projects to gradually increase in size and number with high confidence that none of them would snowball into a financial catastrophe like Vogtle did. Iterative development with predictable characteristics brought solar project costs down dramatically since 2010.
Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Renewables with batteries are cheaper than new nuclear or even new natural gas.
Batteries in their current form are incredibly harmful to the environment, and I think would need to be replaced more than nuclear fuel sources.
Exactly, and the reason why they're cheaper now is because it's easier to dump their externalities on developing countries with lax environmental policy, whereas nuclear has unreasonably strict safety requirements which drive up costs substantially, along with the lost expertise in the work force by pausing it for so long.
Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't get around the fact that you need baseload and/or storage. Both are hard problems. Some locations have regional baseload solutions like hydroelectricity, but many don't. Nuclear is a solution that works anywhere, but like you say, it's expensive. Storage is similar: there are some regional solutions (pumped hydro), or a difficult and expensive general solution (chemical batteries). There's no single answer…
Renewables with batteries are cheaper than new nuclear or even new natural gas.
Right, does it survive week with bad weather and max load ? Coz that's called "a winter"
Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Renewables with batteries are cheaper than new nuclear or even new natural gas.
Does that price include enough storage to heat the entire Twin Cities area (~4M people) for six continuous weeks of average -20C weather with overcast skies, where power failure means widespread death and property damage (broken pipes)? It might do, I don't know, but I'm skeptical. That's a lot of power! My gut feeling is a baseload solution is better for that kind of situation, though what I'm really advocating for…
Pump water uphill on sunny & windy days. One thing that MN doesn't lack is water.
Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
We lost much of our nuclear engineering capability in the US, so in many ways contractors are "idiots" here and made many costly mistakes during construction. Many articles on this and how it lead to the Westinghouse bankruptcy. Sadly, there's only a handful of western-friendly firms in the world that can build a reactor, so hoping the expertise and lessons learned will be worthwhile for future projects. Nuclear isn'…
This "loss of nuclear engineering capability" doesn't hold up when you see reactors build by the French having the same problems: overdue and over budget. The French never stopped building reactors all over the world. "Base generation" is an outdated concept. It can be replaced by storage and grid size for example.
I thought "overdue and over budget" is natural state of any big project
Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms
#29I feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's current form of large central power plants[1]. By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nat…
One further point to add on decentralization: a nuclear power plant necessarily requires a powerful state to protect the plant and supply chain and avoid proliferation risks. This powerful state has other side effects. From a libertarian perspective you cannot have a weak state and safe nuclear power (or rather, this is uncertain), while wind and solar present no such risk.
I looked at the numbers for this Georgia plant extension. It cost something like $22B and took over 15 years to build. If such a new plant was started today it would not go online until 2037. Meanwhile you can generate as much total power (accounting for only daytime exposure) with $11B in solar panels, and if you spend the other $11B on battery and grid tied EV storage, you can both make the public happy by giving them discounted stuff while also meeting all of your overnight and weather related storage needs. And best of all that decision can be made tomorrow and you can see customers starting to feed energy back to the grid next month, not in 15 years when climate change is significantly worse.
I’m not inherently opposed to nuclear, but it’s hard to see the benefits of a single centralized plant versus a distributed system that can begin build out and operation immediately.
Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Renewables with batteries are cheaper than new nuclear or even new natural gas.
Batteries in their current form are incredibly harmful to the environment, and I think would need to be replaced more than nuclear fuel sources.
Batteries, if recycled, have less environmental impact than the massive amounts of concrete used in a nuclear facility.