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Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

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Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#141

Post by kragen »

thenewwazoo wrote: post #139
cmarschner wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do you prefix years with 0?

It’s an affectation relating to The Long Now. https://longnow.org/ It’s, as I understand it, to draw attention to the briefness of our lives and contextualize the decisions we make that have effects long beyond “now”. Personally, I think it’s kind of weird to base it upon the supposed birth year of a religious figure who may not have even lived, but standards are useful, I suppose.

Yeah, if I say it's 03188 YOLD even less people will understand me. On the other hand they might think 02022 is octal...

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#142

Post by acidburnNSA »

pstuart wrote: post #54
acidburnNSA wrote: post #7

I wrote a similar take here on the topic: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

Thoughts on LFTR? The presentation that made the rounds many years ago made it seem like it was a solved problem (1965!). That made me rethink the value of nuclear and I'm curious if it's legit.

The thorium molten salt breeder reactor idea is interesting, but not a major game changer at this time, in my opinion.

See details I wrote in links from the other comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33041985

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#143

Post by pfdietz »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #124
ncmncm wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage is not, in fact, hard. Its efficiency is not important beyond a few hours' worth, because it is rarely needed. For those few hours, battery efficiency is very good.

Storage emits a lot more co2/kwh though, and that's a big problem. Even when you remove cost from the equation. There's also no grid in the world that runs on wind/solar+storage, it's obvious from looking at California that it would take 20+ years to arrive there.

Storage needn't emit any CO2 at all. In a world that has transitioned entirely to non-fossil energy sources, where are you thinking this CO2 is coming from? Cement production? Batteries aren't made of cement.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#144

Post by ncmncm »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #124
ncmncm wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage is not, in fact, hard. Its efficiency is not important beyond a few hours' worth, because it is rarely needed. For those few hours, battery efficiency is very good.

Storage emits a lot more co2/kwh though, and that's a big problem. Even when you remove cost from the equation. There's also no grid in the world that runs on wind/solar+storage, it's obvious from looking at California that it would take 20+ years to arrive there.

Storage emits CO2... Really, you think so?

Before you have built a thing, you have to build it. After you build it, you have it. Building will be a big job, but nowhere near as big as building nukes instead would have been.

The good news is that renewables start displacing CO2 emission almost immediately after ground is broken.

It would be stupid to build storage without renewable capacity to charge it from. You spend on that first.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#145

Post by pfdietz »

anton96 wrote: post #120
oliwary wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the fact is that we did go years without building any, leading to nuclear power plants being more expensive. It is the path we chose (rightly or wrongly) and today solar and wind is cheaper in the western world. Even if continuing to invest in nuclear in the 1970s was the right choice, it may no longer be the case today that we have those. (see Path Dependence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence ) In m…

>> today solar and wind is cheaper in the western world. I’m afraid this is only true for the US, let’s not forget almost all of Europe is as north as Canada or north US. In order to compare the cost we cannot just compare the price to install a certain capacity. You must also factor in how much extra capacity you need to build. When we look at the Germany[1], on the best month, their solar produce half of the instal…

The extra capacity is taken into account with "levelized cost". Levelized cost of wind and solar are just a fraction of the levelized cost of energy from new nuclear power plants.

We can estimate the cost of storage to deal with intermittency and seasonality, and renewables will likely come in cheaper than nuclear by the time any nuclear plant whose construction was started today would come on line.

https://model.energy/

As modeling gets better, renewables look better, as there are more and more ways found to work around the seasonality and intermittency problems.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=983...

> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#146

Post by acidburnNSA »

aidenn0 wrote: post #68
acidburnNSA wrote: post #7

I wrote a similar take here on the topic: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

One comment on your sustainability argument, now that I know you are the author: Calculating "years of energy" based off of current usage seems silly to me given that global energy usage has been rising exponentially for centuries. For example, if you assume a 3% per-year increase in global energy usage, 12 billion years becomes a bit less than 1000 years.

Today we use about 600 exajoules of primary energy per year. The sun hits us with about 3.8 million exajoules per year. 1.03^1000 is a factor of 7e12. So under that assumption, the earth would be making 1 billion times more power than we receive from the sun.

I can pretty much guarantee that we won't be scaling at 3%/yr for the next 1000 years. And if we do, that's an argument for lots more nuclear fission, and a lot of fusion too. Because the solar-derived flows (wind, solar, hydro, biofuel, fossil fuel) won't be able to keep up even if we covered 100% of the earth with solar panels!

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#147

Post by pfdietz »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #82
oliwary wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the fact is that we did go years without building any, leading to nuclear power plants being more expensive. It is the path we chose (rightly or wrongly) and today solar and wind is cheaper in the western world. Even if continuing to invest in nuclear in the 1970s was the right choice, it may no longer be the case today that we have those. (see Path Dependence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence ) In m…

How is wind and solar in any way close to achieve what nuclear has already has? Solar and wind is not a mature technology at all, you would know if you lived in a country that has invested heavily in it. Where i live people has to use an app to see when they can afford to wash their clothes, run the dishwasher, charge the car at any given time of the week and and hour. The government is praying to the weather gods fo…

If solar and wind are not mature, that just means there's even more room for them to improve. And they're already beating the pants off nuclear globally for new generating capacity.

If you extend the demonstrated empirical experience curve for solar assuming PV dominates world energy production, cost might decline to just $0.01/kWh.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#148

Post by ncmncm »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #129
tuatoru wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost is indeed the issue for commercial power generation. So let's look at costs. Especially, let's look at cost trends . My sources are: Lazard's 2022 levelized cost of energy estimates; NREL's Spring 2022 Solar Industry Update: the Global Wind Energy Council's Global Wind Report 2022 highlights; and especially the 2022 report in Cell (Cell's "Joule" sub-publication) called "Empirically Grounded Energy Forecasts and…

So what is supposed to replace all of these obsolete technologies that currently account for the vast majority of energy generation? Lithium batteries, solar power, and offshore wind power? There are so many problems with this scheme, not least of which is that you have pretty much no base load and batteries can't be manufactured at anywhere near enough scale to successfully do this "transition" for at least the next…

Most storage will not be batteries, unless a new battery chemistry proves radically cheaper (which might happen).

Right now the overwhelming majority of storage is pumped hydro, almost as dispatchable as batteries. There are plenty of alternatives.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#149

Post by pfdietz »

moonchrome wrote: post #113
tomComb wrote: post #34

Yes, cost is the issue. Everyone assumes that anyone hesitant about Nuclear power is focussed on the environmental or safety concerns, but that is wrong. The costs (and cost overruns) of the construction and maintenance of Nuclear reactors have been enough reason on their own to be bearish on Nuclear. I'm hopeful that new technologies, such as small nuclear reactions that can be built in a factory, will address this.

I think the cost argument is disingenuous - solar camp likes to tout how it took a decade of subsides before economies of scale kicked in - no reason to believe nuclear wouldn't come down with same kind of subsides - on a longer scale due to longer iteration cycle.

Nuclear already had those subsidies, in spades. Costs didn't come down.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy

#150

Post by dragonwriter »

moonchrome wrote: post #113
tomComb wrote: post #34

Yes, cost is the issue. Everyone assumes that anyone hesitant about Nuclear power is focussed on the environmental or safety concerns, but that is wrong. The costs (and cost overruns) of the construction and maintenance of Nuclear reactors have been enough reason on their own to be bearish on Nuclear. I'm hopeful that new technologies, such as small nuclear reactions that can be built in a factory, will address this.

I think the cost argument is disingenuous - solar camp likes to tout how it took a decade of subsides before economies of scale kicked in - no reason to believe nuclear wouldn't come down with same kind of subsides - on a longer scale due to longer iteration cycle.

> solar camp likes to tout how it took a decade of subsides before economies of scale kicked in - no reason to believe nuclear wouldn’t come down with same kind of subsides - on a longer scale due to longer iteration cycle.

There is: nuclear has been subsidized on a much longer scale than solar already.

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