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

constructionphysics.substack.com

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

#291

Post by HPsquared »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #153
robmsmt wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link, what are your thoughts on the position that France is in with a number of reactors out of action and requiring repairs? From an outsiders perspective, I am curious if it is really as simple as the French not keeping up with maintenance and it catching them at a bad time or are there issues with the reactor type or other influencing factors.

They're experiencing the flip side of the argument of picking one standard reactor and building lots of them identically. If an issue is identified, it can affect your whole fleet. In this case, they were doing an inspection and found unexpected corrosion in a safety system. They checked another similar reactor and found it too. The more they started checking the more they found. So they have to go down for extended…

Kind of like those Takata airbag recalls, I suppose.

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

#292

Post by Schroedingersat »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #290
Schroedingersat wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A jumbo jet has countless failure modes that are completely fine where something analogous happening in a nuclear plant would wipe a city off the map. Their core backup safety feature of being roughly bird shaped requires only a few moving parts, none of which are operating at extreme temperature or require cooling.

> A jumbo jet has countless failure modes that are completely fine where something analogous happening in a nuclear plant would wipe a city off the map. No, the first post is correct - safety is not the issue. We build keep building dams, and dam failures have killed far, far more people than nuclear. Other comments about nimby are also off the mark. People whose properties are flooded hate dams, nimby's force delays…

Dam disasters don't render the entire region indefinitely uninhabitable. Nuclear accidents have only been so small and infrequent because of the constant vigilance against allowing them to gamble with millions of lives.

> Maybe if all these people promoting nuclear put their money where their mouth is, it could happen. There seem to be an awful lot of them.

The thing is none of these people actually want nuclear power. They either want to redirect resources which would make fossil fuels irrelevant or feast forever off of the public teat whilst pretending to build a power plant.

The forces stopping nuclear power have very little to do with safety or greens or nimbys. It's a combination of their cost and of the power fossil fuels have. It just so happens that the fossil fuel interests are inadverently on the side of continuing to have human habitable land by virtue of leveraging the safety issue for their own greed.

Ironically they've probably hastened their own demise because if they hadn't forced the regulation we'd probably be too busy cleaning up nuclear disasters to think about weaning off of coal.

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

#293

Post by acidburnNSA »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #217
godelski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give context to who acidburn is, he's been a long time HN user, has a PhD in nuclear engineering, has worked in fission and fusion for over a decade, and has blogged about it for years. The take here is the take of an expert and not just a nuclear bro.

His take on nuclear is that of a nuclear expert. His take on nuclear's competitors and hence its relative competitiveness as an electricity source is substantially more nuclear bro / Fox News viewer.

We need a new pejorative to mirror "nuclear bro" for people who take any mention or discussion of any downside of wind and solar and blanket categorize them as a Fox News viewer.

There are a lot of anti-100%-renewable nuclear proponents. There are fewer and fewer full-on anti-renewable nuclear proponents.

Most of us support everything that can make low-carbon energy.

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

#294

Post by acidburnNSA »

pfdietz wrote: post #242
pstuart wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't solve the problems that are actually holding back nuclear.

Yeah, that's a succinct summary that I do agree with, thanks.

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

#295

Post by Galaxeblaffer »

pfdietz wrote: post #272
Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and wind is not being anything as long as we haven't got a solution for storage. As it is now wind and solar are backed up by dirty sources like gas, coal and biomass and that isn't about to change any time soon.

The difficulty of solving the storage problem is greatly overstated. The big issue with storage will be which of the many possible approaches comes out on top. It's an embarrassment of possibilities, not an unsolvable problem. BTW, nuclear isn't going to power the world with current thermal reactors (there's not enough uranium), so hand wringing over storage should be matched by that for the more difficult problem of…

Could you point to a source claiming there's not enough uranium ? As far as i can find uranium is not considered rare https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

Also could you point me to any meaningful and scalable storage implemented or being implemented anywhere in the world? Also what about materials used for solar and wind? Both requires insane amounts of material where a very significant part of that is rare earth.

As far as I've seen the best bet for wind so far is power to x . X because we haven't figured out of it should be hydrogen, ammonia or something else, both of which would be very impractical as we've got no infrastructure to support it and it's also very inefficient in reality you'd loose like 80% of the energy generated so you'd have to build so much more capacity.

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

#296

Post by pfdietz »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #295
pfdietz wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty of solving the storage problem is greatly overstated. The big issue with storage will be which of the many possible approaches comes out on top. It's an embarrassment of possibilities, not an unsolvable problem. BTW, nuclear isn't going to power the world with current thermal reactors (there's not enough uranium), so hand wringing over storage should be matched by that for the more difficult problem of…

Could you point to a source claiming there's not enough uranium ? As far as i can find uranium is not considered rare https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... Also could you point me to any meaningful and scalable storage implemented or being implemented anywhere in the world? Also what about materials used for solar and wind? Both requires insane amounts of material where a very significant pa…

That page lists uranium resources at 6,147,000 tonnes.

Operating a 3 GW(th) LWR requires about 200 tonnes/year of natural uranium.

6000 such reactors (needed to produce the 18 TW of primary energy currently used by the global economy) would therefore consume 1.2 million tonnes of U per year. The resource listed on that page would last five years.

So, either much larger uranium resource would be needed, or breeding would be needed, or both.

As for your other questions:

The first skates close to the position that no storage solution can ever be built unless it has already been built. This sort of reactionary attitude is just mindlessly obstructive, and does not reflect an attitude of constructive discussion. One can look at various storage technologies and see they scale very well.

As for materials in solar/wind systems: they are materials that are used in general society at much larger scale. The world makes 2 billion tonnes/year of steel, for example. If global industrial society can produce these materials, it can produce them for the renewable energy systems needed to power it. If it can't, then not even nuclear can save it.

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

#297

Post by Galaxeblaffer »

pfdietz wrote: post #296
Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you point to a source claiming there's not enough uranium ? As far as i can find uranium is not considered rare https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... Also could you point me to any meaningful and scalable storage implemented or being implemented anywhere in the world? Also what about materials used for solar and wind? Both requires insane amounts of material where a very significant pa…

That page lists uranium resources at 6,147,000 tonnes. Operating a 3 GW(th) LWR requires about 200 tonnes/year of natural uranium. 6000 such reactors (needed to produce the 18 TW of primary energy currently used by the global economy) would therefore consume 1.2 million tonnes of U per year. The resource listed on that page would last five years. So, either much larger uranium resource would be needed, or breeding wo…

Of course we need new types of reactors, we already have reactors that can use the waste from old reactors types like CANDU. Most reactors in use today are ancient and inefficient using only 4% or so of the potential in the fuel. Your back of a napkin calculation is disingenuous and misleading, for example it's estimated that sea water contains 4.5 billion tons tons of uranium. At the very least we have plenty of uranium to last until thorium reactors are ready.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium

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

#298

Post by pfdietz »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #297
pfdietz wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That page lists uranium resources at 6,147,000 tonnes. Operating a 3 GW(th) LWR requires about 200 tonnes/year of natural uranium. 6000 such reactors (needed to produce the 18 TW of primary energy currently used by the global economy) would therefore consume 1.2 million tonnes of U per year. The resource listed on that page would last five years. So, either much larger uranium resource would be needed, or breeding wo…

Of course we need new types of reactors, we already have reactors that can use the waste from old reactors types like CANDU. Most reactors in use today are ancient and inefficient using only 4% or so of the potential in the fuel. Your back of a napkin calculation is disingenuous and misleading, for example it's estimated that sea water contains 4.5 billion tons tons of uranium. At the very least we have plenty of ura…

We do not have breeder reactors in a commercialized form. Rejecting solar/wind because technologies are not yet in widespread use, but accepting breeders with nuclear, is hypocritical.

Recycling fuel from LWRs to make MOX is not the same thing. It would only extend that 5 years by a couple of additional years.

Seawater uranium extraction has been demonstrated at the gram scale. It would have to be scaled up by something close to a factor of a trillion to power the world. Also, powering a single 1 GW(e) reactor would require a collector field on 170 square kilometers of continental shelf, in an area with good ocean currents. The levelized power/area would be considerably worse than PV.

I will add that running a reactor on bred isotopes (233U, various Pu isotopes) presents an additional problem. All of these have considerably lower delayed neutron fraction than 235U. This means the reactors will be operating much closer to prompt criticality. One could resort to subcritical reactors, but that means adding a 100 MW (or so) 1 GeV linac to each to add the needed extra neutrons. And of course no such accelerator driven reactors have ever been built.

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