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Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

constructionphysics.substack.com

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Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#401

Post by natmaka »

mayama wrote: post #390
justinsb wrote: post #246

The only nuclear plant under construction in the US is at Plant Vogtle, in Georgia. Regulators set up a system (CWIP) whereby the companies building the plant earn a 10% return on their costs, until the plants come online. I think it's not surprising therefore that costs keep increasing and the delays keep coming. I don't think we can infer that nuclear power plants cannot be built at reasonable cost, rather that we…

Can anyone compare this to new EPR nuclear plant being built in France, that project also ballooned to almost twice the estimated price and a decade late. Do they use cost+profit accounting too?

In France the budgeted total cost of building the EPR reactor (at Flamanville) was 3.3 billions €. Work began in 2007 for a 2012 delivery

It is not yet completed and the cost is already 19.7 billions €.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#402

Post by maccolgan »

trashtester wrote: post #135
jandrese wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything this seems to support the position that the only way to reduce costs is to increase volume. A classic economies of scale example. Instead the experts want to disregard the data for vague reasons.

The cost of flying has come down by 50% since 1980, and while an airplane is a simpler machine than a nuclear plant, the two industries also have a lot in common (such as the perception of risk not being in their favour). By doing international standardization and coordination in ways similar to the aircraft industry, the same should be possible for the nuclear power industry. It should be possible to consolidate mos…

>handful of companies (like Boing and Airbus)

Why yes everyone should consolidate global production of _nuclear power plants_ to a handful of companies probably based in the Western world.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#403

Post by natmaka »

alex_young wrote: post #47
ImHereToVote wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article they have

From the article: > The only country where the costs of nuclear plant construction seem to have steadily decreased is South Korea: > The fact that South Korea is the only country to exhibit this trend has led some experts to speculate that the cost data (which comes directly from the utility and hasn’t been independently audited) has been manipulated and we shouldn’t draw conclusions from it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#404

Post by ncmncm »

otter-rock wrote: post #368
ncmncm wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point is that it is arbitrarily hard to tell whether a response is adaptive. Maladaptive responses are much cheaper than (unmentioned) alternatives, so are systematically more attractive to management.

So nuclear engineers just aren't allowed to do their jobs, and the safety requirements were never good enough to begin with.

They certainly were not good enough at Fukushima, in a half-dozen particulars.

The next pile of reactors down the coast did not melt down, solely on the strength of a single engineer who succeeded, with enormous difficulty, in upholding standards management objected to, but that he knew were essential. Without him, there would now be two major uninhabitable areas there. He must have known Fukushima would melt down, and must have wanted it held to the same standard as his, but lacked authority to extend his standard so far.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#405

Post by ncmncm »

pfdietz wrote: post #211
colinmhayes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is undoubtedly true, but south korea has now been building nuclear plants for decades, and their costs haven't really dropped at all.

They've built four NPPs in the UAE that may end up producing at $0.08/kWh. Unfortunately, UAE is also building PV that will be producing at $0.013/kWh. And since they're still burning gas for most of their power, every kWh from solar goes straight to reducing the overall cost and CO2 emission, five times cheaper than the NPPs will.

I.e., spending the NPP money on PV instead would displace 5 times the CO2 emission.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#406

Post by ncmncm »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #367
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the green movement was ultimately correct. They didn't know why and had nonsense arguments, but the fact is that "old nuclear" was developed with insufficient long-term safety. Fukushima showed that. What also seems true is that you can't trust a company to run them properly, no matter the regulations and audits. TEPCO showed that. From people I know who've dealt with the nuclear industry, there is a strong conte…

I think it stands to reason that nuclear power plant design and construction efficiency would have progressed far more quickly with continued construction of nuclear plants. And the amount of fossil fuel usage that greater energy production from nuclear sources would have curbed would have saved thousands of lives via reduced air pollution, particularly from coal usage, without coming at the expense of high energy pr…

Denial is always strong. Meltdowns prove the same thing as non-meltdowns.

What we do know is that if solar PV had got the subsidies in the '80s it finally got from China the '00s, PV prices in the '90s would have been where they are now, and we would today be well along toward a fully renewable and radically cheaper energy infrastructure today without looming imminent climate catastrophe. Nobody would be hyping dodgy super-expensive nukes. We probably would have avoided the whole Iraq fiasco besides.

But here we are.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#407

Post by ncmncm »

xroche wrote: post #10

> Because nuclear plants are expensive, and they take a long time to build, financing their construction can also be a significant fraction of their cost, typically around 15-20% of the cost of the plant. For plants that have severe construction delays and/or have high financing costs (such as the Vogtle 3 and 4 plants in Georgia), this can be 50% of the cost or more. This is why nuclear power plants should be state-…

Maybe if they had to be state-sponsored, we could manage to do entirely without them, instead.

But it didn:t save France from needing to spend tens of $billions decommissioning old junk reactors.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#408

Post by ncmncm »

epistasis wrote: post #129
outworlder wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So why waste more money on an obsolete technology It is not obsolete. At all. You can argue that some reactor designs should not be used and I would agree. But fission is the only answer we currently have for baseline power that doesn't involve burning things. It will become obsolete if we can ever make fusion work. We should be deploying more reactors. There are small reactors (shipping container-sized) that could…

> There's not enough time to do so with batteries alone. I suggest you run the numbers on this, because I think you have them exactly reversed. We are increasing battery production capacity 10x every five years. This could be accelerated if there was government investment as is done for every single nuclear reactor. At current rates we expect to produce 20-30TWh/year of lithium ion batteries, not including other chem…

Anyway only the tiniest fraction of utility storage will ever be batteries.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#409

Post by ncmncm »

samstave wrote: post #118
outworlder wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So why waste more money on an obsolete technology It is not obsolete. At all. You can argue that some reactor designs should not be used and I would agree. But fission is the only answer we currently have for baseline power that doesn't involve burning things. It will become obsolete if we can ever make fusion work. We should be deploying more reactors. There are small reactors (shipping container-sized) that could…

I have long thought there should be a global nuclear consortium and have that organization build and run and manage and secure all the nuclear power plants in the world. Earth/Humanity needs electricity FOREVER. Its bizarre that we cant come together over this expressly universal need. This and water.

A global nuclear consortium would have as its first goal its own continuance and its continued hegemony over energy policy. It would be catastrophic. Fortunately there is no such possibility.

Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?

#410

Post by fulafel »

trashtester wrote: post #256
7952 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. But I don't think rapid growth of the battery industry is far fetched at all. It has already experienced massive growth and is ridiculously mass producable. And we will need batteries anyway for electric cars.

The battery capacity needed to replace all cars with electric ones is about two orders of magnitude lower than the battery capacity needed to replace all fossil fuels with wind and solar, at least in temperate regions, where you need heating during the winter. According to this MIT study, the cost (LCOE) of doing this today, would be $3000/MWH: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021/08/20210829-mitei.html Even if the…

That link is summarizing a nonpublic paper from a research group making the case for hydrogen as grid storage for California, not a very strong cite for this.

Generally keeping houses warm with low evergy is solved, well insulated passive houses need little heating energy even in places with long cold winters.

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