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

First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 361 posts

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#81

Post by epistasis »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #75
epistasis wrote: post #69

This project is what killed nuclear in the US. Not regulations, not the NRC, just plain old incompetence, bad planning, bad EPC, bad design. The AP1000 was supposed to be a "modular" design, where most of the difficult welding could be done off site and delivered complete, with paperwork. And failure in this modularity is what caused the project to be such a flop, and essentially kill all new large nuclear in the US…

In regards to the story about the weld length, that is the process working as intended. As a constructor you don't just decide that something can be a different dimension. And as a engineer you don't just stand "right there" saying "That's no problem". That is how people get killed.

I 100% agree that such changes need to be checked, but that's not the point of the anecdote. The point is that this process took months rather than being streamlined.

It is a management failure to make common necessary things, like signing off on small changes, a month long process.

This sort of bad management is endemic throughout the entire build.

Which is to say, the problem isn't the regulation requiring that things are build as designed, the problem is the management structure that makes such changes so uneconomical, combined with the frequency of such changes due to miscommunication between designers and builders.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#82

Post by Manuel_D »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #62
Manuel_D wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 MWh is a trivial amount of storage. That's less than 10 seconds of this plant's output. To put this in perspective, the USA uses 11.5 TWh of electricity each day. That's just under 500 GWh per hour. You'd need a lot of megapacks to provision 8 hours of storage. The Eland project you mention has 4 hours of storage, it's not a 24 hour production system. The reality is that renewables are currently only viable to supp…

It's a trivial amount of storage for a trivial amount of money. Do the math, don't hand wave. The Eland project provides 24 hour power with only 4hr of storage. That's the demand curve in action.

> It's a trivial amount of storage for a trivial amount of money. Do the math, don't hand wave.

Sure thing! Right now we have an annual battery production rate of 500 GWh globally [1]. If we're going to use global battery production figures, we need to use global electricity consumption, which is about 70 TWh per day [2]. How much storage we'll need varies, depending on the mix of solar and wind. Estimates I can find say 12 hours on the low end, 3 weeks on the high end [3].

So even with the optimistic estimates of 12 hours, that means we'd need 35,000 GWh of storage. This is 70 years of global production at our current rate, for the optimistic storage estimates. And of course we can't dedicate all battery production to grid storage - we need them for electric vehicles, and electrical devices

Production of batteries may grow in the future, but then again so will electricity demand as countries develop and transportation becomes more electrified. Furthermore, we're not counting the fact that batteries have limited lifetimes. It depends on depth of discharge, but we're usually looking at 1,500 to 3,000 cycles before they're substantially degraded.

As your can see, the scale of battery production and the scale of energy storage required to make intermittent sources variable are totally mismatched. The reality is there is no amount of money that will provision the battery storage required, because if countries across the world start trying to buy terawatt hours of batteries when only 500GWh of batteries are produced then the cost of batteries will skyrocket. Cathode material already

> The Eland project provides 24 hour power with only 4hr of storage. That's the demand curve in action.

The "demand curve" means Eland doesn't provide 24 hours of power at its rated output. It provides a fraction of its rated power at night and tells customers not to use as much electricity. This may work for some consumers, but not others. The pumps powering your sewage system can't demand shift if you want to flush your toilet at night. The reality is that peak energy demand happens at night [4], when storage isn't producing electricity. Eland can do this demand shift because other producers are picking up the slack.

When you read about storage projects you need to be on the lookout for weasel-words like this. Demand curve means they produce a fraction of the rated power output during periods of non-production. If I have a plant that produces 1,000 MW during the date and 100=MW at night, that's technically 24 hours of production. But clearly this is not the same thing as a nuclear plant that produces 1n000 MW at all hours.

1. https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/growt...

2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/280704/world-power-consu...

3. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

4. https://reneweconomy.com.au/california-duck-curve-now-a-cany...

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#83

Post by llsf »

mlsu wrote: post #42
toomuchtodo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone lost an incredible amount of money on this project. All roads lead to Ratepayers (electrical customers). > Georgia Power’s residential customers are projected to pay more than $926 apiece as part of an ongoing finance charge and elected public service commissioners have approved a rate increase. Residential customers will pay $4 more per month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. That could hi…

I would argue that ratepayers would lose significantly more, in the form of iq decreases, cancer, early death from air pollution, and ongoing, worsening weather damage from climate change were this plant not constructed and the grid powered from natgas or coal instead. I hate these discussions about power, because in every case the quoted price of alternatives does not factor in the huge and obvious externalities.

I would add to the list of externalities if we do not build more nuclear power plants: CHAOS

chaos that will ensue when we will reach peak oil/gas/coal, as we extract and consume faster than earth produce them. When the price to extract oil/gas/coal would be too high, chaos will result of our economies addiction to fossil fuel.

The sooner we use alternatives the better.

Housing: So, yes, it is annoying to have new house built with only electricity (i.e. without a gas line) but unless energy becomes super abundant and cheap so we can create gas (out of CO2 and water), electricity is the best bet long run.

Transportation: Same, the sooner we can electrify transportation the better starting with trucks and trains. Boats and planes might get the last drop of oil.

Industry: Should get incentives to move to electricity.

And all electricity should be eventually non-fossil (nuclear + solar + wind + hydro).

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#84

Post by pfdietz »

weaksauce wrote: post #71
chris222 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not so sure with overprovisioning, batteries and controllable load. Also pumped hydro and other gravity batteries. We barely have any storage on the grid right now.

> Also pumped hydro and other gravity batteries pumped hydro is not a winner. the locations that could be used are few and far between and require massive amounts of water and wreak ecological nightmare on a wide area.

The locations where pumped hydro could be used are extremely abundant. Remember, it doesn't have to be on a river. It can be out in a desert! Here's an example of a project being built in Nevada. Basin and Range geography, more vertical relief than you can shake a stick at. Look how small this thing is for the capacity!

https://www.cityofelynv.gov/pdf/CityCouncil2021/cc1-28-21/Wh...

https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/

(the whole thing could be sped up; that's a general problem in the US)

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#85

Post by xyzzyz »

jakewins wrote: post #52
forrestthewoods wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydro isn’t clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down stream); and if we dammed every river it’s a drop in the bucket of what we need. I don’t know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks more than most people realize.

True but PV+wind make our existing dams go much further - recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense that energy over the dry season. Adding PV means hydro can save much more of its water, just dispensing to “fill in the gaps”. This is already how the hydro in Norway and Sweden operates, you can see it daily if you look at the hourly power break…

> recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense that energy over the dry season

That’s not quite how it works.

Consider the biggest hydro project in US, the Columbia river, with its 14 dams.

The system does fill up in the rainy season, but the crucial thing is that it’s not the dams that do fill up, but rather the whole watershed, meaning things like snowfall and ground water. This means that we have very limited amount of control over when we let the water through. We can’t just dam the river for an extended period: if we don’t use it for generating power, we must spill (waste) it. This means in practice that the dams are not batteries: to a large degree, it‘s use-it-or-lose-it.

To make these into batteries, we’d need to somehow refurbish the dams to tremendously increase the power generating capacity on each dam, so that instead of assumption of continuous flow (either through turbines or spillways), we make the flow more intermittent, so that we can make up for closed times by pushing more water through during open times.

This is tremendously difficult in practice: dams are simply not designed to allow for refurbishing with many more turbines or much more flow through them than they were originally designed for, the upstream reservoirs are not designed for quickly varying water levels, etc.

Point is, we can’t just “save the water”.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#86

Post by rhaway84773 »

glimshe wrote: post #21

One project in 30 years doesn't benefit from economies of scale. Nuclear is the only hope we have to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Solar and Wind should be used whenever possible, but they are not 100% of our solution mix, even if they are the majority. If we want to mitigate the impact of climate change, we need to invest in decreasing Nuclear costs and building many more plants in the US.

Until we’re willing to let Iran, Pakistan, the Talibani Afghanistan build nuclear power plants, nuclear is no hope of anything other than an energy apartheid.

And that’s the optimistic scenario where it actually works well, scales, can be built out rapidly, and is not extremely expensive.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#87

Post by Retric »

Manuel_D wrote: post #44
Retric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-interment kilowatt hours are actually less valuable. Demand dips at night, the weekend, spring and fall etc. So when negotiating power purchase agreements grid operators are pricing most of that production when it’s least valuable. Battery backed solar is becoming really popular with grid operators because you get the upsides of load following without the overhead of mostly idle production. The economics get inte…

Incorrect, demand peaks right as night starts and the sun goes down. See that peak [1] at 9pm? Battery backed solar is not even remotely feasible. To put this in perspective, the USA alone uses ~11.5 TWh of electricty each day. A battery to last through the night is over 5,000 GWh. 1. https://b698061.smushcdn.com/698061/wp-content/uploads/2023/...

There are several battery backed solar power plants in the US already built.

Collocated Solar with batteries increases efficiency as DC from solar is used to directly charge batteries without the cost or losses associated with DC>AC>DC you would see if these where separate. LCOE is already below 60$/MWh because you only need batteries for a fraction of total production.

https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2022/utility-scale_pv-plus-...

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#88

Post by yodelshady »

Retric wrote: post #4

“seven years late and $17 billion over budget. At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity” Ignoring interest for those 7 years and all other costs just the overage is insane. 17 billion / ( 1,100,000 kW * 90% capacity factor * 24 hour * 365 days * 50 years) = 4 cents per kWh. Add interest etc and someone lost an incredible amount of money on this project.

If you ever doubt that the US has a simply fucking insane advantage in primary resource extraction and consumption, consider your comment. You think $40 per MWh is expensive.

Wholesale rates in Europe hit SIX HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE EUROS PER MWh last year because of gas supply issues and unfavorable weather. Spot prices have gone higher still, over one order of magnitude higher actually, those were futures contracts for a useful period of time. Because THAT'S WHAT PEOPLE WILL PAY WHEN THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE.

Consumer rates of 30 cents per kWh are perfectly normal. 100 not unheard of.

Oh, fun fact; the largest producer of nuclear power in Europe is suing its government because it was forbidden from selling at that market rate. It had to sell at 40 cents per kWh. Not to consumers of course, to the fucking glorious private sector, aka resellers, who did sell it to consumers at market rate. The ones who hadn't gone bankrupt and fucked off earlier when market conditions were against them, that is. Although they did spend a lot arguing, successfully, they didn't need to pay producers then, either. Because the glorious efficient private sector can't have competition.

Yes, I'm bitter. Going to an industry conference and seeing no one able to run plants properly because of unreliable power, whilst neighouring Germany sets a new coal-burning record, in unnatural heat, does that.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#89

Post by nicpottier »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #59
forrestthewoods wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydro isn’t clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down stream); and if we dammed every river it’s a drop in the bucket of what we need. I don’t know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks more than most people realize.

Absolute nonsense. Your attitude is actively harmful to decarbonization. Ecosystem change =/= ecosystem destruction. The lake produced by a dam is a far more beneficial ecosystem to a much broader range of life than the river that preceded it

Source?

I like hydro but this is not at all what people I know working in this field believe to be true.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#90

Post by dyno12345 »

glimshe wrote: post #21

One project in 30 years doesn't benefit from economies of scale. Nuclear is the only hope we have to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Solar and Wind should be used whenever possible, but they are not 100% of our solution mix, even if they are the majority. If we want to mitigate the impact of climate change, we need to invest in decreasing Nuclear costs and building many more plants in the US.

The US Navy seems to be able to do it
Post reply on HN