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

arstechnica.com

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

#311

Post by credit_guy »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #299
credit_guy wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case you are right. I don't know what NuScale's economic argument was, and there's a (pretty good) chance that it will not work out. But, imagine that whenever you want a new car, the car company sent a crew to your house and builds the car in your backyard. All the parts needed will be shipped to your address, and workbenches, tools, machinery, too. They put the car together, paint it, dry it, and voila, the…

Again, I am not disagreeing with you, building nuclear plants on a conveyer belt would allow you to decrease the per unit price as you make more of it. My issue with the approach is that the prices for those first (100) units, even before the inevitable order of magnitude cost overruns, results in more expensive electricity than the one off projects they aim to replace. This is coupled by the twin problems of a) alte…

You keep mentioning Wright's law, but SMRs are not about that. Changing the location of the manufacturing from on site to inside a factory will not have an impact of 10-20% on the cost, but rather a reduction by a factor of 10 or 20. Wright's law is about subsequent reductions.

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

#313

Post by Eggpants »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #268
credit_guy wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I am not disagreeing with the idea of Wright's law. The US Navy very likely benefits from it, but NuScale does not, and possibly never will. However, a) this does include other prices such site licenses and e…

The Navy did try smaller modules but it turned out to be a major staffing and space issue. Having 30 modules/reactors on an aircraft carrier would require quite a bit more Nuclear trained sailors than 2 large modules/reactors. The oil storage space on old carriers turned into jet fuel storage. Having 30 reactors on the ship would definitely eat into that.

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

#314

Post by credit_guy »

natmaka wrote: post #303
credit_guy wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This way of estimating the real total cost isn't realistic, in such a (military) context accounting is difficult. In France the supreme court of audit (Cour des comptes) simply dropped the ball on it and used ballpark figures. The real total cost of exploitation of a marine (think: cooling) military (think: many hands available, and a quite specific way to manage dangerous equipment) reactor is also very difficult to…

Fair enough. And what were the ballpark figures?

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

#315

Post by _aavaa_ »

credit_guy wrote: post #311
_aavaa_ wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I am not disagreeing with you, building nuclear plants on a conveyer belt would allow you to decrease the per unit price as you make more of it. My issue with the approach is that the prices for those first (100) units, even before the inevitable order of magnitude cost overruns, results in more expensive electricity than the one off projects they aim to replace. This is coupled by the twin problems of a) alte…

You keep mentioning Wright's law, but SMRs are not about that. Changing the location of the manufacturing from on site to inside a factory will not have an impact of 10-20% on the cost, but rather a reduction by a factor of 10 or 20. Wright's law is about subsequent reductions.

Let me even grant you that it works that way in theory. By what factor has this project gone over budget, 10x? What’s the next project we can look at to see how it fares?

My other points still stand, especially the one about competition.

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

#316

Post by Eggpants »

credit_guy wrote: post #287
_aavaa_ wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I am not disagreeing with the idea of Wright's law. The US Navy very likely benefits from it, but NuScale does not, and possibly never will. However, a) this does include other prices such site licenses and e…

> Why does the Navy not build 3 smaller modules and get even better scaling? That's a good point. Actually the Navy does build such smaller modules. The Navy uses 2 types of naval reactors, one for Virginia-class submarines, the S9G, which is very close to one NuScale module, and one for Ford-class carriers, the A1B, about 3 times larger. Each Ford-class carrier uses 2 A1B reactors. Why not 6 S9G? I don't know. But t…

One A1B is enough to power/propel a carrier. They have 2 A1B in case one engine faults/maintenance, they have another one available. Most ships have backups for major systems.

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

#317

Post by credit_guy »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #315
credit_guy wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep mentioning Wright's law, but SMRs are not about that. Changing the location of the manufacturing from on site to inside a factory will not have an impact of 10-20% on the cost, but rather a reduction by a factor of 10 or 20. Wright's law is about subsequent reductions.

Let me even grant you that it works that way in theory. By what factor has this project gone over budget, 10x? What’s the next project we can look at to see how it fares? My other points still stand, especially the one about competition.

I don't know the factor, I think it was about 3x.

But, NuScale has no experience building anything. It's just a startup. It's a miracle they got their reactor design approved.

BWXT however is the company that builds the Navy's naval nuclear reactors. They are cooperating with GE and Hitachi [1] to build a 300 MWe SMR. All 3 of these companies have plenty of experience delivering on numerous types of projects, including nuclear ones. I do think they have a chance.

[1] https://www.bwxt.com/news/2023/03/21/BWXT-Awarded-Engineerin...

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

#318

Post by natmaka »

credit_guy wrote: post #314
natmaka wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This way of estimating the real total cost isn't realistic, in such a (military) context accounting is difficult. In France the supreme court of audit (Cour des comptes) simply dropped the ball on it and used ballpark figures. The real total cost of exploitation of a marine (think: cooling) military (think: many hands available, and a quite specific way to manage dangerous equipment) reactor is also very difficult to…

Fair enough. And what were the ballpark figures?

They dropped the ball on military investments (which were MASSIVE), see their report ( https://www.ccomptes.fr/en/documents/1134 ), page 35: «Le champ d’analyse ne couvre pas les dépenses de recherche relevant du domaine militaire, ni celles se rattachant à la recherche fondamentale».

Even the cost of civilian research (from the 50's to 2012) is very difficult to assess («les données recueillies ne sont pas toutes homogènes et leur fiabilité n’est pas totale.»).

Ballpark figures (page 270): 288 billions euros (value: 2010) invested, 118 of them being directly production-related investments (maintenance is not accounted for), with severe methodological restrictions («Il est difficile aujourd’hui de 'reconstruire' l'histoire du financement»), tackled by using conventions inherited from the nuclear industry.

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

#319

Post by cykros »

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?

OSHA was established in 1970. It didn't exist prior, and it took some time for rules to get more stringent, and for the risks and liabilities it represented to be realized as additional costs.

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

#320

Post by cykros »

cushpush wrote: post #300
pembrook wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, however nearly every single point was also true 50 years ago, when we built many of these things around the globe (and many are still going, pumping out the cleanest energy the world has ever seen). The real difference between then and now, is willingness to take on risk. Developed countries of today are essentially victims of the innovators dilemma. We're fat and happy and complacent, and that's why we…

the cleanest energy the world has ever seen I think this is false now thanks to fusion demonstrations, and maybe false because of things like solar and wind, although those do cost petroleum investment in equipment.

And rare earth minerals. And God help you if you're trying to use it to replace a steady source of energy with them, because the battery requirements go parabolic. Though, we are seeing some innovation in the battery space that replaces some of those rare earth minerals with more abundant and less hard to mine materials, such as zinc.
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