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First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

arstechnica.com

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Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#11

Post by apatheticonion »

8bitsrule wrote: post #5

Nothing has changed since the early days. A helluva complicated and expensive way to boil water. "At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy … This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe." — C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951. ( Ref: Power from the Atom - An Appra…

Turkey is set to get 10% of its grid electricity from the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant [1]

The build cost has been 22B (excluding loans) and it will have a capacity of 4456MW meaning it's $4.9/W.

On average the cost per Watt for solar is 27 cents (excluding loans and costs for storage) [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

EDIT: incorrect calculation

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#14

Post by vlovich123 »

8bitsrule wrote: post #5

Nothing has changed since the early days. A helluva complicated and expensive way to boil water. "At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy … This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe." — C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951. ( Ref: Power from the Atom - An Appra…

It’s important to remember that research and commercial funding for nuclear reactors has basically frozen for the better part of 60 years, which means that fission tech hasn’t been following Wright’s law and we’re still stuck with designs from 60 years ago. Things have heated up a bit more recently but this stuff has a long lead time (+ think of all the people who didn’t go into nuclear because of the lack of funding).

There’s actually lines of research to do direct conversion of energy instead of boiling water which gets efficiency up to ~90% instead of 40%. But the challenge with fission isn’t fuel conversion efficiency but manufacturing and maintenance costs. I wonder if getting rid of the water requirements for fission reactors would meaningfully alter the costs involved. Would be neat if it would.

But ultimately fission is still price competitive with renewables and that’s when you ignore the need for batteries and the fact that it’s taken a lot of investment in renewables paired with underinvestment in fission.

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#15

Post by Retric »

apatheticonion wrote: post #11
8bitsrule wrote: post #5

Nothing has changed since the early days. A helluva complicated and expensive way to boil water. "At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy … This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe." — C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951. ( Ref: Power from the Atom - An Appra…

Turkey is set to get 10% of its grid electricity from the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant [1] The build cost has been 22B (excluding loans) and it will have a capacity of 4456MW meaning it's $4.9/W. On average the cost per Watt for solar is 27 cents (excluding loans and costs for storage) [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices EDIT: incorrect…

That project isn’t finished they are targeting 2026 and hope it’s only ~10% over budget.

Your solar numbers are wildly inflated because that’s per watt not per watt hour. Over 2/3 of nuclear power plants costs occur after you build the things. It would be comparable if 22B was the total cost and if nuclear didn’t need ~1,000 full time employees, fuel, decommissioning etc. Those costs delay how quickly you can pay back loans which then drives up how much interest nuclear pays over the plants lifetime.

Companies have signed solar power purchase contracts at 2c/kWh. Adding solar redundancy and batteries for 24/7 power is actually more flexible and cheaper than nuclear because you can cheaply follow the demand curve. Meanwhile nuclear power plants need to go offline for multiple weeks every ~2 years and really want to sit at 100% the rest of the time.

PS: Even just looking at construction costs is misleading because solar starts producing power so much sooner. You’re paying interest from day 1 of construction not day 1 of operations. So if you take 6 years to build that’s 5 years of interest on the first years construction costs without any revenue. Meanwhile solar’s been producing power for ~5 years and paying down debt.

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#16

Post by jmclnx »

>The final straw came on Wednesday, when NuScale and the primary utility partner, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, announced that the Carbon Free Power Project no longer had enough additional utility partners

I cannot help but to think the Fossil Fuel Industry had their hands in this.

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#17

Post by [deleted] »

jmclnx wrote: post #16

>The final straw came on Wednesday, when NuScale and the primary utility partner, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, announced that the Carbon Free Power Project no longer had enough additional utility partners I cannot help but to think the Fossil Fuel Industry had their hands in this.

[deleted]

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#18

Post by gravitronic »

scythe wrote: post #2

>With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however, the project's economics have worsened, and backers started pulling out of the project. I would expect this to continue limiting investment in nuclear, since the outlook for renewables just keeps getting better, and the stumbling blocks are increasingly jejune, like we can't build powerlines fast enough.

A harder stumbling block compared to nuclear is land mass requirements per Mwh:

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#19

Post by [deleted] »

monero-xmr wrote: post #8
bradbot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to transport wind / solar energy across the country via high powered transmission lines?

No, because of physics you lose more power the longer distance it travels. It is also very expensive and difficult to build a network that can move power great distances to where it's needed given how dense the areas that need it are (major cities).

[deleted]

Re: First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

#20

Post by threeseed »

bradbot wrote: post #6
monero-xmr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still very confused how power will be generated cleanly on cloudy, no-wind days with solar and wind. I am hopeful that hydrogen can be generated in the desert and moved by hydrogen-truck. Or grid-scale batteries actually exist someday. But if we write off nuclear, a lot of coal and natural gas will be burned.

Is it possible to transport wind / solar energy across the country via high powered transmission lines?

Sun Cable, formerly known as PowerLink, is an ambitious idea that involves sending solar power via an undersea cable 4,200 kilometers (2,610 miles) from Darwin, Australia, to Singapore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

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