221–230 of 276 posts
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Why does nuclear not deliver closer to its ideal power output? Are nuclear plants really down 10% of the time?
Over their lifecycle they are down more like 20-25%.
90%+ capacity factor/uptime is pretty much standard and the better ones reach ~95%
For example TVO in Finland has 93% to 97% depending on the reactor since the early 1990s. Fortum has very similar numbers for their reactors.
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My hunch is evaporative cooling uses not very much water. You could also fill a small dam when the water flow is higher. All means higher cost, of course.
It generally helps to no use hunches when it comes to hard technical questions.
My back of the envelope calculations say it's about 10 times less water to evaporate.
This is nameplate capacity: the power a generator can deliver, full on, under ideal conditions. Solar and wind always look great when measured in nameplate capacity, which is why this is done. If you want to know how much electricity they will generate, you have to multiply by the capacity factor. Nuclear, for instance has a capacity factor of 0.9 in the US: it delivers 90% of its nameplate capacity in a given year.…
Why does nuclear not deliver closer to its ideal power output? Are nuclear plants really down 10% of the time?
Then you have the rare non planned outages but once a new reactor has been running for a year or two and all the kinks have been worked out they should be very rare.
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That number does include the cost of land for the solar, which is fairly insignificant. For the cost of batteries, NREL published this review of reviews, and lands at ~480/kWh of capacity: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf So split the $35B (there's a recent $3B that hasn't made it wikipedia, as I understand it) half and half, and you get 17GW of solar, and 36GWh of storage. As far as translating this into…
Lifetime of panels and batteries vs modern nuclear plant? I guess also do the nuclear numbers use the real liability and disposal costs, or subsidized ones?
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That number does include the cost of land for the solar, which is fairly insignificant. For the cost of batteries, NREL published this review of reviews, and lands at ~480/kWh of capacity: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf So split the $35B (there's a recent $3B that hasn't made it wikipedia, as I understand it) half and half, and you get 17GW of solar, and 36GWh of storage. As far as translating this into…
Lifetime of panels and batteries vs modern nuclear plant? I guess also do the nuclear numbers use the real liability and disposal costs, or subsidized ones?
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> "French nuclear power has a levelized cost of about $70/MWh" That may be true for the existing nuclear fleet, but the cost of new-build nuclear is significantly higher. Flamanville 3, which is expected to finally come online in mid-2024 after 17 years of construction, was estimated at €125/MWh in 2022.
This is in large part because they are not building a bit over 2 reactors per year anymore.
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> which is about the same cost as the levelized cost of solar or wind in France As of 2024. Remember that solar and wind are still on a downward price trajectory and the reduced investment in Nuclear has meant that the prices to up. So if you have a figure for example of $70/MWh for PV and wind in mind from a couple of years ago, then this figure might be slightly outdated now and more slightly outdated tomorrow. PV…
>Nobody will be able to compete with that. Coal does. According to this IEA table, India and China achieved under $10/MWH https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/levelised...
> Nuclear. Start-up of the fourth reactor (1.1 GW) at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear power plant I checked the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... > Two additional units utilizing Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were under construction since 2009, with Unit 3 being completed in July 2023.[9][10][11] This last report blames the latest increase in costs on the contractor not completing wor…
> Nuclear. Start-up of the fourth reactor (1.1 GW) at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear power plant I checked the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... > Two additional units utilizing Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were under construction since 2009, with Unit 3 being completed in July 2023.[9][10][11] This last report blames the latest increase in costs on the contractor not completing wor…
> How much solar/wind/battery capacity can 34B USD buy!? According to How Big Things Get Done, at least 30B worth. Nuclear plants have some of the worst cost and time overruns for large projects, wind and solar some of the lowest (beaten only by roads). And his theory as to why this happens, is that wind, solar, and roads are self-similar. Building the first 10% directly informs you on how to build the next 10%. Ever…
And reactors are inherently too big and complicated. A wind farm, solar farm, or a road is intrinsically much simpler.
And reactors will suffer from decision makers sitting around a table and changing designs for the next one because engineers have thought up new failure modes of the last design and nobody wants to be the person who says "no" and then has a failure. Along with the natural tendency of US management to increase the spending of their departments in order to increase the size of their own personal kingdom. You'll never manage to stamp out reactor after reactor all of the same design.
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Lots of energy companies across the globe seem to be disagreeing with you and are installing massive amounts of battery storage. Gas peaker plants are getting used a lot less on grids where this happens. Reason: your numbers and assumptions are probably wrong.
One could have said the same thing 2 or 3 years ago about companies active in the renewable energy space like Orsted. I mean, they were one of the biggest producers of wind-turbines, what was there not to like in this ESG-focused investment environment? Until the numbers suddenly stopped making sense for them a few weeks ago [1]. Which is to say that the investment numbers may look "right" for a good few years until…