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Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

reuters.com

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Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#371

Post by chii »

acchow wrote: post #261
rdsubhas wrote: post #27

What I find incredible is: Once this fully ramps up, this one power plant is expected to satisfy 14% of the entire country's electricity needs. 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7.

This is because Finland has a population of 5.5M Luxembourg has 1/7th the population and could run off ONE of these. The USA has 60x the population so would need about 420 of these?

420 isn't an insurmountably large a number - it's 8.4 per state (lets' round it up to 10 for redundency).

at an average cost of $10 billion per plant, that's 4.2 trillion dollars. I think the US has spent more than that on the iraq war and the afganistan war - 8 trillion according to https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar - which could've paid for these 420 plants twice over.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#372

Post by clusterfish »

wbl wrote: post #344
fny wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a word, reliability. Nuclear is /by far/ the most reliable energy source. Nuclear power plants produce maximum power 92.5% of the time. Compare that to other energy sources: - Geothermal: 74.3% - Nat gas: 56.6% - Hydropower: 41.5% - Coal: 40.2% - Wind: 35.4% - Solar: 24.9% Batteries are a joke. Consider the 409MW / 900MWh battery at Florida Power & Light: this is only enough to power 329,000 homes just over two ho…

The other sources produce less because they can. Since nuclear has a high capital cost and low variable cost it bids low.

Coal and gas sure, but renewables are obviously dependent on weather. Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can". When there is significant oversupply of energy from solar, it gets sold for pennies on the dollar to neighbouring regions, and when the sun doesn't shine, you're sol.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#373

Post by Gwypaas »

chii wrote: post #367
kuhewa wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. It does insofar as it matters for capital. Who wants to invest in a plant that will take at least ten years (but probably more with cost overruns in the billions) before they see a ROI? Especially when the cost per MWH from a renewable project that will be online in 2 years with less risk is already comparable if not more competitive.

but is a renewable project that matches the capabilities of a nuclear project (to the same degree of reliability and availability) really the same cost? you gotta compare like-for-like. If the solar project that takes 2 years only provide power half the time, then you need double the size to provide the same amortized level of power at night. You also need some form of storage. And that's if you don't have a spate of…

No point comparing like for like. The end game is a stabile balanced grid. If that is fulfilled by 100% intermittent or 100% deterministically dispatchable does not affect anything in regards to the end user. All they want is reliably the cheapest power at the time of consumption.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#374

Post by Retric »

liketochill wrote: post #328
bluejekyll wrote: post #321

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of…

Grid solar is statistically significantly safer than Nuclear. Climbing on rooftops can be dangerous, but solar is much better in a dessert than on top of a roof.

Nuclear takes longer, is more expensive, has lower ROI, and higher risks. Solar has a lower capacity factor, but having 1/3 the availability at 1/15th the cost is a net win. Especially as we need vastly more power in the daytime and idling Nuclear is really expensive.

Currently 3% of global electricity comes from Solar and 16% from hydro with Nuclear only proving 10%. Scaling Nuclear to a significantly on a global scale take not just massive construction and new regulations, but also training etc, we simply don’t have the time.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#375

Post by Gwypaas »

zdragnar wrote: post #355
stefan_ wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While 23 years to build the thing are already bad, it now needs to operate continuously for at least some 30 years selling electricity at a price that is even today not competitive with renewables to make financial sense. Essentially, building a nuclear power plant in 2022 means you are betting we won't have workable storage for renewables by 2052.

Renewables are only competitive because you are not pricing in either storage or the cost of building and running fossil fuel plants as backups. Add that in and the equation looks substantially different.

You can run power to gas and then burn the hydrogen and still come out ahead of nuclear plants today. They are completely irrelevant.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#376

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Retric wrote: post #374
liketochill wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of…

Grid solar is statistically significantly safer than Nuclear. Climbing on rooftops can be dangerous, but solar is much better in a dessert than on top of a roof. Nuclear takes longer, is more expensive, has lower ROI, and higher risks. Solar has a lower capacity factor, but having 1/3 the availability at 1/15th the cost is a net win. Especially as we need vastly more power in the daytime and idling Nuclear is really…

Solar works great in some countries, but Finland? I just don't see it working out there.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#377

Post by mcronce »

bluejekyll wrote: post #321

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

Without significantly more information, it doesn't really point out nuclear being uneconomical. It points out artificial roadblocks, regulatory and otherwise, imposed on nuclear generation that aren't imposed on other forms of generation.

Other forms of generation that require GHG-emitting backup generation.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#378

Post by kuhewa »

chii wrote: post #367
kuhewa wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. It does insofar as it matters for capital. Who wants to invest in a plant that will take at least ten years (but probably more with cost overruns in the billions) before they see a ROI? Especially when the cost per MWH from a renewable project that will be online in 2 years with less risk is already comparable if not more competitive.

but is a renewable project that matches the capabilities of a nuclear project (to the same degree of reliability and availability) really the same cost? you gotta compare like-for-like. If the solar project that takes 2 years only provide power half the time, then you need double the size to provide the same amortized level of power at night. You also need some form of storage. And that's if you don't have a spate of…

That follows if you are playing Sim-City, or I suppose if you think giving the government absolute control over energy production and you want to leave the market completely out of it. I'm just talking the world we live in.

To answer more directly though, yeah the power is the same cost. Perhaps when renewable penetration into the energy market is saturated, there will be a greater demand for base load at all those times renewables aren't producing at peak, and that will be reflected in those nuclear MWHs becoming very profitable even at a higher unit cost.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#379

Post by secondaryacct »

Retric wrote: post #374
liketochill wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of…

Grid solar is statistically significantly safer than Nuclear. Climbing on rooftops can be dangerous, but solar is much better in a dessert than on top of a roof. Nuclear takes longer, is more expensive, has lower ROI, and higher risks. Solar has a lower capacity factor, but having 1/3 the availability at 1/15th the cost is a net win. Especially as we need vastly more power in the daytime and idling Nuclear is really…

Not for the people who would have liked to drink the water used to clean the panels (cf the projects in deserts). Everything has some drawbacks and it s useful to diversify.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#380

Post by Gwypaas »

pasiaj wrote: post #281
tuukkah wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear won't solve the climate crisis as it's too slow to build.

Wind turbines work on average at 18-30% efficiency in Finland. The nadir efficiency is roughly at 6%. You'd need to build 1300+ 3MW wind turbines to match the average production of Olkiluoto 3, or 7000+ turbines to guarantee the same level of constant output that this plant puts out reliably. We had this "too slow to build" -argument 15 years ago, but no other renewables have delivered. We built 67 new windmills in 2…

3 MW is tiny. Today we build ~15 MW ones with capacity factors at 60-64%.

https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...

https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW

> Modern regulation and the scarcity of new builds has made building slower, but it should be expected that Areva, the builder of Olkiluoto 3, should be able to pump out new facilities and significantly faster rate compared to the last decade.

Went so swimmingly that Areva went into bankruptcy a couple of years ago. The company only exists to shield EDF and the French state from any remaining risk they still can from Olkilouto 3.

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