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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

#121

Post by epistasis »

aschearer wrote: post #47
ryan93 wrote: post #18

So to power every home in the USA would roughly cost 3 trillion at these prices. if they reused the same teams and designs maybe they could get it somewhat cheaper. plus we have increasing renewable plus existing hydro and nuclear. for the price of a year or two of national debt we could go full renewable in this country.

What if climage change is a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?[1] [1]: 2009 - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1e/What_if_it%27...

The alternative isn't carbon emission, the alternative is far cheaper wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, battery storage (both lithium and many others)

The only question is if nuclear can offer something compelling to keep it in the mix. We have roughly 100 1GW of nuclear reactors in the US that are reaching end of life, and 90% of those communities would like to see replacements to keep the jobs in town. However, nobody will ever invest in a project that looks like Vogtle, due to the cost. Unfortunately, recent projects in France, Finland, and the UK all look quite similar in cost of dollars and time.

Which is to say, that nuclear will not be able to provide a climate solution at all. It's too late, we can not even build 100 rectors in the next 15 years to replace what needs to be retired!

If nuclear advocates want more nuclear, they need to focus on the details and the engineering and the management, not merely rah-rah for the tech. The devil is in the details, and projects like Vogtle have virtually guaranteed that nuclear will not be built in the US in quantity for at least a generation.

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

#122

Post by forrestthewoods »

switchbak wrote: post #66
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.

Canada's energy mix is roughly 60% hydro, and some provinces are well past 90%. You ought to check your numbers.

No offense, but Canada isn’t relevant on the global scale.

Hydro use is growing, especially in developing countries. However it’s a shrinking percentage of total energy generation. There is an absolute cap on theoretical hydro energy production, and it isn’t enough.

Hydro is low carbon and renewable. But it isn’t green, and it’s not enough.

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

#123

Post by belorn »

pfdietz wrote: post #78
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.

> Nuclear is the only hope we have to do to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Nuclear would be entirely unsuited for this task. Nuclear provides baseload, it doesn't fill in gaps. If you try to run the reactor intermittently to counterbalance an intermittent source the cost of its output increases massively.

That is true when the market price is fairly static and doesn't change much. This is how it used to be when fossil fueled power dominated the grid, since the biggest cost is the fuel and that could scale based on demand.

For EU this is no longer the case. The difference in market price between low and high can be above 100x. In theory a power plant could earn as much in 4 days as an other plant earn in a year worth of power generation. This is why all those nations started to bailout the power bills of businesses and citizens last winter. A single month for some people costed more than a years worth of power. For companies with contract obligations, paying what ever the market demanded was the lesser evil.

The US is not in the same situation, but the energy grid there is still a market based one. There is also other technologies that could in theory compete in such volatile market.

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

#124

Post by KptMarchewa »

switchbak wrote: post #66
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.

Canada's energy mix is roughly 60% hydro, and some provinces are well past 90%. You ought to check your numbers.

Canada is second-largest country by area, occupying around 6.5% of Earth's land surface. It's only 37th by population, with 0.5% of world's population. It's very non-representative example.

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

#125

Post by coldpie »

Retric wrote: post #106
coldpie wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like the root of the pro/against nuclear debate comes down to your outlook on storage :) I'm skeptical that storage can meet our needs (would love to be wrong! haven't seen a convincing analysis, yet), so I think we need a reliable form of continuous power. The only option currently on the table for that is nuclear, so, I boost nuclear. I dislike the nuclear nay-saying, because it further delays an already slow process. When (IMO) the optimistic plan for storage doesn't pan out, we're really going to regret not having started building those nukes ~14 years ago... so why not hedge our bets and get 'em started right now? In the grand scheme of climate change costs, they are absolutely dirt cheap.

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

#126

Post by KptMarchewa »

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…

It's not exactly relevant how much solar produces per year - it's very important _when_ the energy can be produced and how much you can control that.

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

#127

Post by KptMarchewa »

ethbr0 wrote: post #61
mywittyname wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But hydro sucks more than most people realize. There's a reason Russia blew up the Kakhovka hydro dam. The down-stream impacts of the flooding were more devastating than what they could reasonably accomplish with conventional weapons.

No. It killed They blew up the dam because it was also a bridge and removing it allowed them to redeploy troops to the east.

I'm as far from russia apologist as can be - but they blew the bridge part few months earlier, in November. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxHLImMbnAw

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

#128

Post by Retric »

Manuel_D wrote: post #112
Retric wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-s…

Sure, but those battery backed solar plants usually only have 2-4 hours worth of storage. They're not actually producing full output throughout the night. The cost of batteries would skyrocket if countries actually tried to provision 12 hours of battery storage. Because the US alone uses 500 GWh of electricity each hour. This is greater than the global battery production figures in 2022 [1]. 1. https://www.spglobal.c…

You’re calculating that storage number as if the solar power plant would have produced power for 24 hours.

To simplify if you have 8 hours of power and you store 1/2 of it you need 4h of storage. So our hypothetical 4GW solar power plant produces 2GW for 8 hours and 1 GW for 16. That already batter fits the demand curve than steady state output.

However things get better if you instead consider real world demand and the actual production of solar panels being spread across the entire day a 4 hour of storage is close to perfect. Except, the real world isn’t a hypothetical 100% solar grid so 2h ends up working fine in most areas.

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

#129

Post by epistasis »

mikece wrote: post #8

> ...seven years late and $17 billion over budget... And how much of that was a result of red tape from the NRC, DOE, and EPA?

It's easy to find detailed retrospectives of the multitude of failures here.

I haven't found a single one that said excess regulation was a problem, but I have found a huge number that showed project management, bad design, bad communication between engineers and EPC, etc. were all to blame.

Here's one I was reading recently from 2017, about the welding issues. Every other aspect, such as concrete, exhibited similar failures.

https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of...

But if you have an idea of which regulations to change, or how to fix project management, you can pick up a half-completed pair of reactors in South Carolina on the cheap. That boondoggle often gets forgotten when examining Vogtle.

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

#130

Post by Raphaellll »

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…

Tell me more about that coal burning record in Germany.
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