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

How to get new nuclear built faster

samdumitriu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 52 posts

Re: How to get new nuclear built faster

#31

Post by realusername »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #30
realusername wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's already what happens, that's why it's so expensive. You usually have an all included costs on one side and whatever minimum the private company could get away with legally on the other side.

You think the price of nuclear in France includes the environmental damage caused by the gas plants they use to balance the grid? Where did you get this idea from?

The French gas plants got built to smooth out renewables, there's only a single gas plant built before 2010 and it wasn't even connected to the pipelines, it was a factory gas reuse.

I do think it was an environmental and diplomatic (as seen now in the Russian war) mistake.

Re: How to get new nuclear built faster

#32

Post by iknowstuff »

realusername wrote: post #27
iknowstuff wrote: post #19

The newest AP1000s in Georgia cost 34B (and counting) for 2.2GWe. As usual, horrible ROI and massive cost overruns: > During the construction of Vogtle's first two units, capital investment required jumped from an estimated $660 million to $8.87 billion.[7] ($18.3 billion in 2022 dollars[8]) > Two additional units utilizing Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were under construction since 2009, with Unit 3 being completed i…

> And you don’t need to store 12h of solar. No you don't need 12h of storage but 3 to 4 months to sustain the attrocious winter production where the highest load actually is. And this is why the battery packs are uneconomical to smooth out renewables, it doesn't even get you 1% of the way with 5B.

Thankfully you can built 4GW of renewables for the price of 1GW of nuclear lol. Don’t need to store the energy, just build more generation capacity to offset lower winter production.

Still cheaper, and getting cheaper. Don’t ignore wind power too.

Re: How to get new nuclear built faster

#33

Post by eightysixfour »

iknowstuff wrote: post #18
nocoiner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that really struck me recently was an article about the commencement of a massive solar and transmission project in the American Southwest. Total cost for the panels and the transmission lines to deliver the power was something like $11 billion for (I think) around 3 GW of nameplate capacity. Assuming you could site a new nuclear plant somewhat closer to an interconnection point, it seems to me like even mo…

Huh? The newest AP1000s in Georgia cost 34B (and counting) for 2237MWe. That’s like 4x the cost per GW in the numbers you quotes for the solar installation. But wait, there’s more! horrible ROI and massive cost overruns: > During the construction of Vogtle's first two units, capital investment required jumped from an estimated $660 million to $8.87 billion.[7] ($18.3 billion in 2022 dollars[8]) > Two additional units…

There are two key points of contention I have with your argument, which you have posted multiple times verbatim.

1. The whole point is Nuclear does not have to cost this much, thus your comparisons are irrelevant. China’s build costs are substantially lower so it can be done.

2. For a not-insignificant percentage of the global population that can consider mega projects of this scale neither wind nor solar are reliable enough during peak energy season - the winter - to use even massive battery packs like you have described.

Re: How to get new nuclear built faster

#34

Post by pydry »

Maxion wrote: post #24
iknowstuff wrote: post #19

The newest AP1000s in Georgia cost 34B (and counting) for 2.2GWe. As usual, horrible ROI and massive cost overruns: > During the construction of Vogtle's first two units, capital investment required jumped from an estimated $660 million to $8.87 billion.[7] ($18.3 billion in 2022 dollars[8]) > Two additional units utilizing Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were under construction since 2009, with Unit 3 being completed i…

Depends on where you are, up here in Finland we have no solar in the winter when our power consumption peaks. Wind is unreliable and can be too low for over a week.

Wind energy is the fastest growing form of power in Finland.

Plenty of hydro too. Enough to push electricity prices below zero in may 2023.

Luckily youve also got a choice of nuclear reactors built by Russia or reactors where you get the privilege to fight with France over whose responsibility it is to pay for the billions of euros in cost overruns.

Re: How to get new nuclear built faster

#35

Post by alalbertson »

sofixa wrote: post #2

Okay, I didn't know that: > One major driver of Hinkley Point C’s costs is that EDF were effectively forced to build a first-of-its-kind reactor design by the Office for Nuclear Regulation. To win regulatory approval in the UK, EDF had to make roughly 7,000 design changes from the reactor design they use in France. Not only do the design changes mean that 25% more concrete and 35% more steel is needed during construc…

Meanwhile, the article touches on "if it's good enough for one regulator, it's good for the next."

That's quite a difference between two first-world regulatory agencies.

Re: How to get new nuclear built faster

#36

Post by wolrah »

scherlock wrote: post #14

How about this, why don't SK, UK, French and US regulators get together and agree on a common set of regulations for reactor design. Then they can focus on the site specific regulations unique to each installation.

> How about this, why don't SK, UK, French and US regulators get together and agree on a common set of regulations for reactor design. Then they can focus on the site specific regulations unique to each installation.

How does that benefit the groups funding major candidates in the US? I don't know about the other countries but you can be confident that the amount of red tape involved in reactor construction in the US is not a bug but a feature to many of those responsible for it.

Nuclear power is generally stable and predictable which reduces potential peak prices, but it doesn't scale down well so having a lot of it during times of low load means off peak prices will fall. Expansion of nuclear power thus threatens the profit margins of a lot of powerful organizations.

---

See also: Cars. It is not technically possible to produce a single light passenger vehicle that can be legally registered without modification anywhere in the world.

The US's Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and the UNECE Global Technical Regulations that apply in much of the rest of the world are incompatible in a few ways that mostly relate to lighting/reflectors and crash structures. As a result, every "world car" offered in all major markets in fact has at least two and usually three variants, typically UNECE LHD, UNECE RHD, and FMVSS LHD.

This wouldn't be particularly hard to solve by either updating one or the other to be compatible or by the US accepting UNECE LHD vehicles, but the existing automakers that sell around the world have no interest in making it easier for others to compete.

Re: How to get new nuclear built faster

#37

Post by _w1tm »

Maxion wrote: post #24
iknowstuff wrote: post #19

The newest AP1000s in Georgia cost 34B (and counting) for 2.2GWe. As usual, horrible ROI and massive cost overruns: > During the construction of Vogtle's first two units, capital investment required jumped from an estimated $660 million to $8.87 billion.[7] ($18.3 billion in 2022 dollars[8]) > Two additional units utilizing Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were under construction since 2009, with Unit 3 being completed i…

Depends on where you are, up here in Finland we have no solar in the winter when our power consumption peaks. Wind is unreliable and can be too low for over a week.

And every time some minor issue puts our biggest reactor offline the price of electricity spikes. Large nuclear reactors are huge single points of failure.

Re: How to get new nuclear built faster

#38

Post by realusername »

iknowstuff wrote: post #32
realusername wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And you don’t need to store 12h of solar. No you don't need 12h of storage but 3 to 4 months to sustain the attrocious winter production where the highest load actually is. And this is why the battery packs are uneconomical to smooth out renewables, it doesn't even get you 1% of the way with 5B.

Thankfully you can built 4GW of renewables for the price of 1GW of nuclear lol. Don’t need to store the energy, just build more generation capacity to offset lower winter production. Still cheaper, and getting cheaper. Don’t ignore wind power too.

"Just build more" would work better if the production wasn't so unbalanced. 70% of the production is done during 6 months and it's 3% in December and January. Being mere 4 times cheaper than nuclear (in the short term) isn't nearly enough to counterbalance that. If it would be 20 times cheaper it would start to make more sense for a winter load.

> Still cheaper, and getting cheaper. Don’t ignore wind power too.

Wind is even worse than solar in this aspect, it can be down unpredictability and unlike solar, is closed to the maximum theoretical efficiency already anyways which means the only thing you can do is count on the economy of scale.

And before people tell me that it usually produces more in winter, yes it does, until it doesn't like the 3 weeks wind anomaly we had two years ago in the EU with close to no production.

I'm not predicting future tech of course, it's possible that "just build more" will work in the future, for now it doesn't though and from a large margin.

Re: How to get new nuclear built faster

#39

Post by lazide »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #16
sofixa wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't but I'm going to go on a limb and say that if a reactor design is fine for north France, southeastern Finland, south China... it's probably fine for south England.

Just build it in Northern France then and add capacity to the UK interconnector, versus building it in the UK. Ship the electrons if you can't ship the tech. https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-ventures/intercon...

That way France can put the screws to England even harder the next time they have their typical spats.

Re: How to get new nuclear built faster

#40

Post by Krssst »

_w1tm wrote: post #37
Maxion wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on where you are, up here in Finland we have no solar in the winter when our power consumption peaks. Wind is unreliable and can be too low for over a week.

And every time some minor issue puts our biggest reactor offline the price of electricity spikes. Large nuclear reactors are huge single points of failure.

Large reactor not generating is a failure (so it does not happen often and steps are supposed to be taken to limit the risk). NREs not generating is normal behavior (it happens often because that's how it is).
Post reply on HN