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

341–350 of 512 posts

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#341

Post by g8oz »

trashtester wrote: post #273
Krasnol wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you're ignoring my reality example. Germany is part of a EU wide market and it just works. Also it's not like you put all your wind on one spot. There is always wind somewhere for example. The idea that it's an "political, environmental and special interest" problem while we're watching several nuclear plants being FAR over budget and over due being constructed in pro-nuclear countries proves that yo…

> There is always wind somewhere for example. There is always wind somewhere. But grid capacity is not free, in fact it is quite expensive. Let's say, on a given day, the only place in Europe with reasonable winds would be west of Cadiz, transporting all that power through Spain, Portugal and France to cover the needs of all of Europe, would require immensive grid capacity expansion. And even with super-high-voltage,…

>>Seen from the outside, it surely looks like the German population has been seriously misled.

And yet their sacrifice essentially kick-started the global solar industry. The world owes a round of applause to the German tax payer.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#342

Post by elihu »

xyzzyz wrote: post #195
Kon5ole wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a few: https://www.energy-storage.news/department-of-energy-confirm... https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-at-worlds-largest-... https://www.energy-storage.news/energy-dome-launches-4mwh-de...

That’s not cheaper. Run the numbers and you’ll see. Solar by itself is indeed pretty cheap per kWh if you don’t care about matching supply with demand, but storage very much is not. If it was, you’d see investors build standalone storage, to buy cheap electricity, store it, and resell when demand goes up. This is not what’s happening: instead, existing projects are based either on heavy government subsidies, or on va…

How much of that is just sensitivity to the cost of battery cells? If most of the world can buy lithium iron phosphate cells at $100 a kw/h, would battery storage be cost effective in ways it isn't at $300 a kw/h?

(I'm not sure what the actually LFP cell wholesale costs are these days; I get the impression that historically they've been a lot cheaper in China due to patents, but the last of the major patents expired about a month ago so maybe low cost cells will show up everywhere if production can keep up with demand. As a retail customer though in the U.S. it's really hard to find anything under about $300 a kw/h -- if utilities are paying a similar price, I can understand them not wanting to go all-in on battery storage. There's no reason for them to continue to be that expensive.)

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#343

Post by ncmncm »

otter-rock wrote: post #213
jacquesm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it disconcerting that a defective critical piece ended up being used anyway, regardless of the economies involved. That might mean you have no reactor, but you can't just go an substitute broken or out of spec parts for good ones.

Out-of-spec doesn't mean it can't work. It just means you have to redo the design using what's effectively a different part than you originally planned on.

What you are talking about here is called "normalizing deviance". We have had very bad experience with how that process plays out. It is particularly pernicious around safety.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#344

Post by jacquesm »

otter-rock wrote: post #334
jacquesm wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requirements changes are not driven by one-off material defects in critical pieces of hardware. That's simply a bending of the rules for economic reasons. And it is one of the main reasons for me to oppose nuclear: the fact that people will be people and that at the root of every one of those disaster and near disasters there was someone who thought they could get away with something. We are ill equipped to deal with…

I see your concerns, and I think you're probably just unaware that they're addressed better than you know, but in a different way than you'd expect. When they accept an expensive out-of-spec part, it's because they can safely redesign the less expensive parts. The only thing that hurts is their long-term profitability because it'll be less efficient than they hoped. Big, expensive parts are always treated as one-of-a…

I'm sorry, I don't believe in magic or appeals to authority, I believe in physics and once you start bending the rules for one part who is to tell where it will stop. Having one leg too short won't be fixed by making the other one a little longer. The materials science requirements on nuclear reactor vessels are such that if the safety margins are so narrow that the specs are going to be even possible to be violated by a manufacturing defect that you have a problem anyway, either in the selection of your manufacturing partners, your design process, your risk assessment, your QA or all of the above. For me that breaks trust at a level that I'm not going to buy the 'we'll fix it by using better parts somewhere else' argument.

The stated defect has effects that can only be properly ascertained by destructive testing and since the whole point was that there was only one of these that leaves a large part of the end result in the realm of 'hope' and 'belief', neither of which are part of any materials science course that I'm familiar with. The knock on effect of changing the vessel specs would essentially require a complete rework unless the reactor were de-rated in either safety, generation capacity or lifespan. And because 'safety' is the only one that doesn't show up in the books that's where my worry would be.

'special teams' don't amount to much, we've had special teams all along and a long series of fuck ups. This is exactly the problem.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#345

Post by ncmncm »

freemint wrote: post #269
belorn wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a massive war and shortage of natural gas in Europe so if there exist cheap electrolyzers + wind power combinations that can solve that issue today then people should rush to invest before next winter where prices are predicted to sky rock. I recall that the study did say that existing natural gas power plants could cheaply and easily be converted to run on hydrogen. Hydrogen prices has also gone up a lot si…

Hydrogen needs an complete overhaul to the pipeline system. Burning natural gas for energy is a fraction of it's use. More important are heating (where it can't be transported too), steel making and chemistry (CoViD vaccine ingredients are made using natural gas by BASF).

Hydrogen can be added to dilute NG, during the transition.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#346

Post by pmoriarty »

photochemsyn wrote: post #117
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…

Construction costs are only part of the picture and utility operators are well aware that they need to look at lifecycle costs. This includes everything from costs of fuel rods (look at the historically volatile uranium market), availability of large volumes of cooling water (see more frequent droughts), maintenance costs (maintenance being a major factor in the retirement of California's nuclear power plants), secur…

Also the insurance costs are so high as to make operating the plant unprofitable... which is where the taxpayer comes in, to foot the bill.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#347

Post by pfdietz »

trashtester wrote: post #339
pfdietz wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Edited to actually look at the link) Looking at that first link, it appears to cost/kWh is the cost for just the seasonal power that is being produced from hydrogen. It is not the average cost/kWh over all the energy being consumed off the grid. Comparing this to nuclear is to compare apples and oranges. Nuclear supplies baseload, not additional seasonal power. If you tried to use nuclear to supply seasonal power th…

> Looking at that first link, it appears to cost/kWh is the cost for just the seasonal power that is being produced from hydrogen. I interpreted those numbers as average LCOE for the electricy supply, but I could be wrong. Let's assume that you're right, and this only applies to maybe 25% of total energy needs. The averge price would still be increased by $1000/MWh, on top of the renewable costs themselves, grid cost…

If you go to https://model.energy/ and solve for California, 2011 weather data, 2030 cost assumptions, hydrogen is contributing just 5.9 euro/MWh to the average cost of electricity (less than 10% of the total cost of 68.1 euro/MWh). This is for supplying "synthetic baseload", the best case for nuclear (for varying demand, renewables could only do better, since one could always just swap out the nuclear source with this synthetic source, providing an upper bound on the cost.)

Nuclear will do best in more northerly places that are away from coasts. Poland, for example. For extremely northerly places, like Alaska, the total demand is so small that nuclear is not a good fit.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#348

Post by cratermoon »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #296
coredog64 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The largest nuclear plant in the United States (Palo Verde) is in the middle of the Sonoran Desert and uses treated sewage output for cooling. People probably won’t stop urinating during a drought.

oh thats cool. I imagine all the pathogens are effectively killed for free

killed, or mutated?

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#349

Post by MertsA »

spoonjim wrote: post #227
photochemsyn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Construction costs are only part of the picture and utility operators are well aware that they need to look at lifecycle costs. This includes everything from costs of fuel rods (look at the historically volatile uranium market), availability of large volumes of cooling water (see more frequent droughts), maintenance costs (maintenance being a major factor in the retirement of California's nuclear power plants), secur…

Can’t you just dump radioactive uranium into the bottom of the ocean? Can’t imagine it would do much damage with all of the water around it.

If you vitrified it first honestly it'd probably be totally fine. An arguably better plan is just get serious about reprocessing and work towards cleaner processes than PUREX. Not even necessarily a completely new process, just better controls around handling waste and making sure there's no massive liquid tanks just waiting to leak into the ground like the Hanford site. Most spent fuel is depleted uranium and not exceptionally dangerous to be around. If you can separate out the fission products and transuranics then you could drastically reduce the amount of waste needed to be stored, store it for less time, and potentially recycle some and get some actual use out of what is currently considered waste.

Just dumping fuel pellets into the deep ocean would be a pretty terrible idea though. All the fission products and impurities that build up as the fuel is burned lead to the pellets starting to crack apart. Any cesium or iodine would leach into the water quickly, it would not be a good day for Shamu.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#350

Post by ncmncm »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #337
theptip wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like gravity storage. Pumping water up a hill, or pumping air into an underwater tank to displace water. Seems that you can get quite good efficiency with these approaches.

AFAIK though only pumped water and batteries have been done at anything approaching utility scale. Anything else and you're probably looking at several decades to reach maturity, and then another several decades to roll it out.

All but chemical methods rely only on trivial physics used industrially billions of times worldwide every day. The only open question is which will have become cheapest, in each place, at the time that conditions become favorable to build it.

That time will arrive after we have brought enough renewable generating capacity online that storage would not need to be charged by burning fossil fuel.

Post reply on HN