Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

constructionphysics.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 512 posts

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#181

Post by krylon »

epistasis wrote: post #21
lelag wrote: post #15

The article misses another important aspect: loss of nuclear competency. Between the 60s and 80s, there were many nuclear reactors projects which allowed an industry to develop and get better at it. But since the 80s, there was comparatively very few new reactors built for over 20-30 years. The workforce that had the skills and knowledge related to actually building nuclear plants had mostly retired and their replace…

The recent US nuclear construction projects have been plagued with similar incompetence, such as trying to build plans that were unconstructable, and then having to get regulatory approval for the changes. I would like to see comparisons to other large construction projects too. The US is really really bad at large construction projects, but European construction seems a lot better.

> European construction seems a lot better

Unless the situation in the US is really, really REALLY horrible, I doubt that. I don't remember where, but one country is in the process of building a nuclear power plant, that is AFAIK unfinished, but already took way more time and money than originally planned.

Doesn't even have to be nuclear - ask the Internet about Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie or Stuttgart's train station. Having public construction projects overrun their schedules and budgets is a well-honored tradition, at least in Germany, but I suspect our neighbors have similar customs.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#182

Post by brandmeyer »

lelag wrote: post #15

The article misses another important aspect: loss of nuclear competency. Between the 60s and 80s, there were many nuclear reactors projects which allowed an industry to develop and get better at it. But since the 80s, there was comparatively very few new reactors built for over 20-30 years. The workforce that had the skills and knowledge related to actually building nuclear plants had mostly retired and their replace…

This is one of the reasons for continuing to incrementally design and build new submarine and aircraft carrier reactors. If the expertise is to re-emerge in the US commercial sector, it may require another cross-pollination effort from the military.

The difficulty is that both military reactors and commercial power reactors have evolved considerably since their initial branch point. Commercial power reactors provide base load (run at full power) for a year or two and then get refueled. Military reactors now last the life of the ship without refueling at all, but are optimized for propulsion's variable demands.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#183

Post by avianlyric »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #175
theptip wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

35x of a small problem is not necessarily a big problem. You need to quantify that objection. Nuclear waste can be reprocessed (see Fast Breeder reactors); the concern raised here is usually proliferation risk. Given a binary choice, I'd rather have to deal with some nuclear waste than climate change, and I don't even think that climate change is an existential risk for humanity (just likely to cause large and uneven…

> Does this technology make a good cost/benefit trade-off now, or not? Specifically, compared to the other options we actually have available to us now. That is the conversation I think we should be having. Then why are you making so many arguments about how we must find ways to make it cheaper? That doesn't seem very committed to the idea of discussing the current cost benefit trade-off.

> Then why are you making so many arguments about how we must find ways to make it cheaper?

They don’t appear to be making those arguments at all. Just stating that Nuclear regulations sets safety standards substantially higher than safety stands for other power sources.

It quite reasonable to include a question about “how safe is safe enough” when talking about trade offs. It’s easy to change safety standards, and they’re constantly evolving in all industries, so it’s hardly disingenuous to consider as part of the current cost benefit trade-off.

However to insist that Nuclear energy can only be evaluated in strict unchanging state, or to suggest that GP was suggesting such an evaluation, is somewhat disingenuous, and substantially undermines the authenticity of your argument.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#184

Post by MisterTea »

samstave wrote: post #109
jason-phillips wrote: post #19

Last year I did a fair amount of consulting work for the GAIN initiative at Idaho National Lab [0]. They're doing so much good work with micro and modular reactors that can basically be "dropped in" decommissioned coal-burning sites because the infrastructure to tie into the electric grid already exists. It was expressed to me that selling this idea to the private-sector energy industry was an uphill battle and uptak…

That sounds like a brilliant idea. However, the tooling and staffing requirements of a Coal Plant arent going to suffice for a nuke. How do they propose training for existing employees of a coal plant. We think of Coal folks as "dirty stupid miners from kentucky" and we think of people that work at nuke sites as "white lab coat wearing scientists" The only dirty stupid person from Kentucky is Mitch.

> However, the tooling and staffing requirements of a Coal Plant arent going to suffice for a nuke.

I am not sure what you mean by Tooling but I am sure these retrofit reactors aren't going to be dropped off by UPS and someone on site has to figure out how to plug it in.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#185

Post by thow-58d4e8b »

mandevil wrote: post #160
epistasis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent US nuclear construction projects have been plagued with similar incompetence, such as trying to build plans that were unconstructable, and then having to get regulatory approval for the changes. I would like to see comparisons to other large construction projects too. The US is really really bad at large construction projects, but European construction seems a lot better.

Unfortunately, when it comes to nuclear Europe's (excluding Russia) basically in the same boat as the US. Consulting the current list of nuclear power plants under construction around the world by a pro-nuclear power group here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu... I see the following as the only ones still under construction in all of Europe (not counting Belarus and Russia): 1) Mochovce 3…

To add one more data point - Olkiluoto 3, started 2005, was expected to finish in 2009. Completed late 2021, 12 years late

Cherry on top - after producing electricity for about a week, it had to shut down for another 3 months. Then, after ramping up to about 30% of the capacity, it encountered another problem, delaying it for another 5 months. Here we are in June 2022, 17 years later, Olkiluoto 3 provides exactly 0 MW to the Finnish grid

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#186

Post by nixonpjoshua1 »

brandmeyer wrote: post #182
lelag wrote: post #15

The article misses another important aspect: loss of nuclear competency. Between the 60s and 80s, there were many nuclear reactors projects which allowed an industry to develop and get better at it. But since the 80s, there was comparatively very few new reactors built for over 20-30 years. The workforce that had the skills and knowledge related to actually building nuclear plants had mostly retired and their replace…

This is one of the reasons for continuing to incrementally design and build new submarine and aircraft carrier reactors. If the expertise is to re-emerge in the US commercial sector, it may require another cross-pollination effort from the military. The difficulty is that both military reactors and commercial power reactors have evolved considerably since their initial branch point. Commercial power reactors provide…

Perhaps military style reactors designed for propulsion loads would be a good match for balancing renewables on the grid as an alternative to natural gas peaker plants

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#187

Post by mschuster91 »

logifail wrote: post #116
ak217 wrote: post #93

> Nuclear is sometimes praised for having lower fuel costs, but all else being equal (ie: assuming total production cost stays constant), it’s better to have a larger fraction of your electricity costs be variable, so that if demand drops then production cost drops as well. This is not obviously true. I could make an argument that base load generation capacity (nuclear and hydro in particular) should be state-owned o…

> base load generation capacity What's the consensus on the meaning of 'base load generation capacity'? There are those who'd say it's an archaic term often used to defend power sources that can't ramp up and down to meet demand, and nuclear would be top of that list. If - for instance - there are times when it's windy and sunny, why should consumers have to pay more than the market rate to nuclear generators, just b…

> More broadly: what's the actual use case for 'base load generation capacity' over the coming decades?

The use case is that there should be enough capacity under governmental control to ensure that even in a case of crisis (such as, say, an oil price hike, a war or import blockades) the base load of the citizenry is still accounted for - big industries might be temporarily restricted, but no citizen should freeze in winter because the forces of the market deem it more profitable to have some large company buy their way out.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#188

Post by masklinn »

orangeoxidation wrote: post #153
logifail wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> base load generation capacity What's the consensus on the meaning of 'base load generation capacity'? There are those who'd say it's an archaic term often used to defend power sources that can't ramp up and down to meet demand, and nuclear would be top of that list. If - for instance - there are times when it's windy and sunny, why should consumers have to pay more than the market rate to nuclear generators, just b…

Yup, that seems a strange argument. Power usage varies during the day, but it doesn't really go below some "base load". Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load. We need peaker plants to get the rest. Gas plants are the popular (cheap) choice for this. Carbon free alternatives are pumped hydro or…

> Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load.

That's not exactly true, you can build nuclear plants for load following which provides some amount of flexibility, at the cost of some efficiency (about 1% I think).

IIRC French plants can operate between 30 and 100% rated power, and ramp rates can reach 5% per minute (though normal rates are 1 to 3). French nukes regularly have to ramp up and down quickly to compensate for wind variation and monday pickup (electricity consumptions goes way down over the weekend, especially nice spring weekends, then back way up on week start).

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#189

Post by SiempreViernes »

orangeoxidation wrote: post #153
logifail wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> base load generation capacity What's the consensus on the meaning of 'base load generation capacity'? There are those who'd say it's an archaic term often used to defend power sources that can't ramp up and down to meet demand, and nuclear would be top of that list. If - for instance - there are times when it's windy and sunny, why should consumers have to pay more than the market rate to nuclear generators, just b…

Yup, that seems a strange argument. Power usage varies during the day, but it doesn't really go below some "base load". Nuclear can run basically 24/7, but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand. So nuclear power is only good for base load. We need peaker plants to get the rest. Gas plants are the popular (cheap) choice for this. Carbon free alternatives are pumped hydro or…

> but you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand

To be precise, it cannot stop consuming fuel quick enough that there's any important savings, and so nuclear power plants always want to run at full capacity because otherwise they are wasting fuel.

But more than that, fuel consumption is simply not a very big part of the running cost of a nuclear power plant, most is fixed cost so that even if they could change the fuel consumption quickly there's just not enough savings to really bother with it.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#190

Post by throwaway23234 »

theptip wrote: post #147
logifail wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> micro and modular reactors Umm, are these the ones that - relatively speaking - produce significantly more radioactive waste than traditional designs? "The next generation of small nuclear reactors will be big on producing radioactive waste"[0] "Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants"[1] Sorry for the scepticism, but the nuclear lobby were the ones that brought us the phrase "too cheap to m…

35x of a small problem is not necessarily a big problem. You need to quantify that objection. Nuclear waste can be reprocessed (see Fast Breeder reactors); the concern raised here is usually proliferation risk. Given a binary choice, I'd rather have to deal with some nuclear waste than climate change, and I don't even think that climate change is an existential risk for humanity (just likely to cause large and uneven…

> In practice perhaps a major push for solar/wind/geothermal would be a higher-ROI solution to our problems, but that's politically much harder to get consensus on.

The most awesome thing you get from Solar is that it's going to move forward no matter what. It's just something you can do to lower your bill, or even disconnect from the grid altogether. Personally I am off grid with no propane. Almost unheard of in CA. Solar is now THAT cheap if you are willing to put the up-front investment instead of paying PGE $600 a month. And if you don't have the space - buy a solar panel on a business from that other company they are starting - it was on here a week or so ago.

Post reply on HN