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

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

#91

Post by llsf »

krasin wrote: post #27
SilasX wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to make sure no one misunderstands (not saying you did, just that this is easy to misread): The 4 cent/kWh figure is the additional cost it would have to charge, over the life of the plant, to make up for the budget overage, and would go on top of whatever ratepayers would have to pay for its "regular" energy output. Further pedantry: you'd have to factor in time value, so that kind of understates it, as the ent…

Thanks. I can now see how my comment could be misunderstood. My point is that while 4 cents per kWh for 50 years is a very big number in terms of cost overruns and the taxpayers in Georgia will have to eat it, I as a California resident, somehow pay through the nose despite abundant and cheap solar energy, especially during the daytime.

Nuclear power plants now run more than 50 years. We are pushing some to 80 years already.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...

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

#92

Post by dv_dt »

Manuel_D wrote: post #58
dv_dt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many smaller intermittent sources with non-correlated outages is better for availability than a single dominant source even with preplanned maintenance intermittency. What is the emergency and disaster planning impact if the nuclear plant goes down in the middle of a summer heatwave?

Smaller intermittent sources don't really help since they're still subject to the same weather patterns and earth rotation. Distributing generation across continents would involve massive costs in energy transmission. People like to tout that intermittent sources are more distributed and less centralized. But that's negative facet of renewables, since demand is centralized in population centers, and distributed produ…

Instead of proposing cross-continent distribution lines, just build more small regional renewable sources... unlike nuclear, their costs keep going down. Smaller renewable solar and wind sources with battery storage are perfectly fine, and the correlation in heat with sun works to reduce the need for storage capacity.

Capacity factor does not address reliability or emergency planning...

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

#94

Post by fluxem »

chroma wrote: post #50

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975. Since then, no plant license that was initially submitted to the NRC has started operations. Plant Vogtle was approved by the Atomic Energy Commission (the predecessor to the NRC). Their license was grandfathered in. Building this reactor required a new reactor license (not plant license). Shortly after the reactor design was approved and construction started…

It’s brings a lot confidence that a nuclear power was built through a legal loophole.

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

#95

Post by breckenedge »

mywittyname wrote: post #60
laiewjrliawej wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why I left the nuclear industry. Nuclear power is the safest form of power production we've ever produced (more people are killed per MWh installing and repairing wind turbines than in the nuclear industry) but it has never been anywhere near cost effective and no nuclear project has ever been completed anywhere near on-schedule. Every time I hear someone talk about how the world needs tons of new nuclear…

The sad part is, this is a solvable problem. If the nation really wanted to build a large number of safe, effective nuclear power plant, we could, and probably in a time frame of months, not years. But entrenched interest from natural gas and coal producers combined with anti-nuclear sentiment practically guarantee that will never happen. Nuclear power is held to too high of a standard to really be a viable source of…

> Nuclear power is held to too high of a standard to really be a viable source of power, especially in a democracy

Don’t tell that to France.

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

#96

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #57
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.

Looking this up. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html > Hoover Dam generates, on average, about 4 billion kilowatt-hours. And the lake covers an area of 1,495,806 acres Rough estimate, 2GW worth of solar produces that much in a year. And requires I think 12000 acres of land. (Open to have phat fingered the calcs) My take away is it's not even economic anymore and requires flooding 100 times more land…

Dams still get built for non-power reasons, to manage water supplies, so adding turbines (and floating solar PV) to them might make sense, but yes I think we're now at the point where new hydro purely for energy production is going to struggle to make a case for itself against just deploying renewables and batteries and interconnects.

edit: to add some context re the Hoover dam:

> Upon becoming Secretary of Commerce in 1921, Hoover proposed the construction of a dam on the Colorado River. In addition to flood control and irrigation, it would provide a dependable supply of water for Los Angeles and Southern California.

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

#97

Post by gweinberg »

krasin wrote: post #12
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.

> 4 cents per kWh. For comparison: I live in SF Bay Area and pay 42 cents per kWh.

We are getting ripped off.

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

#98

Post by glimshe »

KerrAvon wrote: post #63
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.

Counterpoint just because someone has to go against the pro-nuclear orthodoxy here: economy of scale won't fix nuclear power. You will never get the cost (or risk) down far enough with existing technology, and none of the advanced technologies have panned out so far. And large scale renewables + battery storage are good enough.

The problem is that you are comparing a hypothetical with a proven system. Nuclear works, and works in large scale in a lot of places - heavy users include France, Lithuania, Sweden and Belgium.

One can argue about costs, but costs are at least low enough to be viable, otherwise these countries couldn't exist as they do. You can say that the costs are being externalized to taxes or some other place, but these societies are being able to absorb these costs in aggregate. Nuclear might not be cheaper than gas and oil, but it's possible to build a modern industrial society with nuclear.

Now contrast with green hydrogen generation and battery storage, for instance. These approaches aren't working in country-level scales anywhere. We compare hypotheticals with systems that, despite problems, costs and limitations, are known to work.

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

#99

Post by Retric »

yodelshady wrote: post #88
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 contra…

Texas spot prices recently peaked at 9,000$/MWh briefly that’s in no way what I am talking about.

4c/KWh is the minimum additional cost across 50 years ignoring interest not the total cost of this power. In other words if inflation adjusted electricity would have been X$/kWh in 2070 it’s now at least X + 4c / kWh whatever the baseline would have been. Europes average electricity prices for the year aren’t that far above average, across 50 years it’s a tiny blip by comparison.

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

#100

Post by ZeroGravitas »

chris222 wrote: post #41
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.

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.

All the coal and gas storage currently exists. We need to stop using that for non-storage uses, replacing with solar and wind, before we need to replace its storage function once we get down to the last 15% or so of grid electricity being fossil based.
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