First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by dv_dt » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 9:47 PM UTC

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.

We have our own nuclear albatrosses that we are overpaying for in California.

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

#102

Post by lamontcg » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 9:47 PM UTC

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…

None of that is the root problem. Nuclear plants are too big, and we can't build big things cheaply in this country.

The idle corruption of middle managers is what kills these kinds of projects.

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

#103

Post by Manuel_D » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 9:48 PM UTC

dv_dt wrote: post #92

Manuel_D wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> 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.

Again, peak electricity demand does not happen at noon. It happens at around 9pm, when the sun either has set or is about to set. Unfortunately, solar's production does not match demand patterns.

> Instead of proposing cross-continent distribution lines, just build more small regional renewable sources...

Again, all the renewable sources in the same region are subject to the same weather patterns and and day/night cycles. Sure multiple solar farms gives you redundancy against some sort of mechanical failure that causes one specific solar farm to go down. But the most common failure mode in intermittent sources is cloud cover or lower-than-expected wind speeds. A backup solar plant a mile away isn't going to give you redundancy against weather patterns. This is why a lot of plans for renewable grids are contingent on thousands of miles of HVDC lines to move energy across continents.

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

Capacity factor describes the uptime of a power plant. Nuclear power has the highest uptime. The point is it's less likely to go down than all alternatives.

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

#104

Post by pfdietz » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 9:49 PM UTC

breckenedge wrote: post #95

mywittyname wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

France can't do it these days either. Look at the fiasco of the EPR; it drove their nuclear corporation to insolvency.

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

#105

Post by jtc331 » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 9:51 PM UTC

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.

Nuclear and renewables/batteries actually have the same biggest problem: the vast majority of the cost of future energy is up front capital costs. That’s what makes natural gas so attractive: the vast majority of costs are fuel amortized over the lifetime of power generation.

That’s the thing we need to fix regardless of the power source.

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

#106

Post by Retric » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 9:51 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #65

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…

Interesting to hear an inside perspective! While they definitely aren't cheap, do you feel they're not worth the price, given the urgency and rapidly rising costs of climate change? It seems like they'd be competitive with, or even cheaper than, fossil fuel plants if we priced in their externalities, and nuclear can shore up the areas where renewables have difficult to solve gaps. Any thoughts?

It’s hard to see projects that take ~14 years to produce the first kWh urgent solutions to anything.

Spend the same money starting in the same year and the first solar project makes enough money to fund a second which then also comes online before your nuclear power plant is ready.

Which doesn’t make nuclear useless, but it’s really disappointing if you’re in the industry.

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

#107

Post by dv_dt » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 9:51 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #103

dv_dt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> 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. Again, peak electricity demand does not happen at noon. It happens at around 9pm, when the sun either has set or is about to set. Unfortunately, solar's production does not match demand patterns. > Instead of proposing cross-continent distribution line…

Cloud cover doesn't stop all production, it just reduces it. Just build more solar and more storage and it will still be a fraction of the cost of nuclear. I could answer point by point but all of your "failures" are artificially constrained.

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

#108

Post by Arrath » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 9:53 PM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #85

jakewins wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

> That’s not quite how it works.

Yeah in reality there are two forms of hydropower: the classic reservoir dam, and 'run of the river' powerplants. You're absolutely right, even reservoir dams don't really fulfill the 'annual battery' idea, since they must maintain some minimum outflow for downstream consumers and can't shut it off entirely if it better suits the power generation goal.

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

#109

Post by pfdietz » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 9:53 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #10

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.

Those are non-intermittent kilowatt hours, though (and the maintenance that does need to happen is known in advance). One energy demand at peak production is saturated, intermittent sources become a lot more expensive since storage needs to be provisioned. Some markets are fast approaching this scenario: https://reneweconomy.com.au/california-duck-curve-now-a-cany...

Once cheap intermittent sources have in the moment saturated the market, nuclear cannot charge what it needs to pay off the very large capital cost. Nuclear is then dependent on making that money during brief spikes, but storage and demand dispatch will be flattening those spikes. Nuclear will have nowhere to hide.

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

#110

Post by _hypx » Mon, Jul 31, 2023, 9:53 PM UTC

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.

Your own math points out that this is a cost effective technology. 4 cents per kWh is quite cheap electricity.