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

Post by natmaka » Sat, Nov 11, 2023, 4:44 AM UTC

trenchgun wrote: post #243

mytailorisrich wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Olkiluoto-3's budget also overran a lot to reach 11b. It's also an extra reactor at an existing nuclear plant so perhaps that somehow reduces costs, and it's built by a very established company. Now, on the other hand, as far as I know NuScale never built a commercial reactor before... so we'll see how many of their current projects actually come to life.

Olkiluoto 3 was a first of a kind project too. Was built by an established company, but one that had been on a decades long hiatus in building nuclear power plants.

Post by natmaka » Sat, Nov 11, 2023, 5:01 AM UTC

credit_guy wrote: post #263

_aavaa_ wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of either ignoring, willfully or otherwise, scaling laws. The relationship between price and size of most plants takes the form of: Price(size) = fixed + K*size^b Where b is almost always less than 1, can go as low as 0.6. So building 6 small reactors will be more expensive than building a single reactor 6 times the size. This is the difference between vertically scaling (bigger thing) vs horizontal scaling (…

Your equation is correct except when it's not. We build so few gigawatt-size reactors. In the US only 4 came online since 1990. For most of the construction crew of such a reactor, that job is the first of that type in their career, and the last. They get trained on the job, and that (ultra-expensive) training is then never used again. Contrast that with the building of naval reactors, which are essentially SMRs. The…

Post by kragen » Sat, Nov 11, 2023, 5:10 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #167

kragen wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've often wondered why germany's pv capacity factor is so terrible, thanks prc's pv capacity factor is also around 10% last i checked, which is also absurdly low and suggests that they maybe aren't as capitalist as they seem in important respects (i'd be interested in updates) by 'may' do you mean 'many' it was easier to justify solar tracking (and concentrating solar, and nuclear) fifteen years ago when solar panel…

Grid scale tracking systems keep getting cheaper but neither always wins. Solar tracking makes more sense when you look at wholesale rates over a day. Peak demand prices start right as static solar production falls off so you would need batteries not just more solar panels to sell at those rates. On top of this costs like land, inverters, and wiring gets amaorterised across more hours of production. Wholesale prices…

Post by natmaka » Sat, Nov 11, 2023, 5:42 AM UTC

Nickersf wrote: post #110

Laaas wrote: post #103

> The decision to cancel the project followed an update from NuScale this year regarding the cost of building the reactors, which had soared to $9.3 billion from $5.3 billion because of rising interest rates and inflation. Even $5.3B seems very expensive. For reference, (the new Finnish) Olkiluoto-3 was €11 billion, for 1600 MW. The article says 6 * 77 MW = 539 MW! How is it that we've become so bad at building?

It depends on what needs to be built. If the regulators 'like' what needs to be built it'll pop up fast, look at the wind turbine expansion in Europe and parts of the USA. In terms of material input that dwarves what building one nuclear power plant or blast furnace requires.

Post by renewiltord » Sat, Nov 11, 2023, 8:21 AM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #135

pradn wrote: post #131

It looks like the biggest problem with nuclear is not the safety or whatnot, it's just that as a civilization, we just can't build them without cost overruns and massive delays. And this is a loss, because we need non-variable energy sources to augment wind/solar/tidal. Perhaps the other way to solve the energy transition is to lean heavily into mass storage of variable energy sources. If you have enough energy stora…

Wonder if it's worth digging into why that's the case. It seems like it's a lot more than just the cost of materials + labour that's the problem.