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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

#61

Post by jillesvangurp »

pfdietz wrote: post #3

This was entirely foreseeable. Notes from the Feb. 2023 meeting of the Idaho Falls Power Board (one of the utilities in UAMPS, and the place where the reactors would have been built.) https://www.idahofallsidaho.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Minute ... NuScale still needed to get costs down by $700 M to reach the promised $89/MWh. Without that, it would be $105/MWh. This is also after federal subsidies. "GM Prairie said…

Exactly. All these numbers are based on the current/past market and a very broken assumption that LCOE of competing technology (renewables + storage) won't continue to drop further. Which of course they are projected to do; and not just a little. And of course that already actually happened and was widely predicted to happen years ago.

Also the numbers of these plants would need to be massively higher to be significant. 40-50 plants is tiny a feasibility study. That study has now been cancelled for cost reasons.

You'd need many thousands to make these start contributing significant percentages of market share to overall energy production. Tens of thousands really. Which of course at a high LCOE is never going to be competitive. Basically the "value" proposition to investors is to be selling these things at a massive loss using government subsidies to make that tolerable for whomever is buying. This has to be sustained until the learning effects drive the LCOE low enough that making them actually stands a chance of turning a profit. And of course there are no guarantees that the LCOE will actually ever catch up with renewables. Small chance of success & high chance of failure that requires decades of sustained massive investments and massive subsidies. All with a high degree of uncertainty.

That's not a great investor pitch of course. Which is why they are bailing. There seem to be a few other projects still going. But they'll have to face the same realities eventually.

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

#62

Post by kragen »

D_Alex wrote: post #57
kragen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no because even though pv uses orders of magnitude more land per megawatt (not per megawatt hour; please get your units straight) it still uses two orders of magnitude less land than is available please do the math instead of posting random bullshit without any regard to whether or not it is true i did https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html

>pv uses orders of magnitude more land per megawatt (not per megawatt hour; please get your units straight) "Per MWhr" is a better measure when comparing intermittent-power generation such as wind and solar. >posting random bullshit ^^

you can and should use 'per megawatt produced' rather than 'per megawatt nameplate capacity' when comparing things like solar to things like nuclear

but intermittency is irrelevant to basic incommensurability of units; neither nuclear nor solar uses more and more land over time to produce a constant amount of power, which is what 'land per megawatt hour' implies

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

#63

Post by donny2018 »

kragen wrote: post #46
donny2018 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear tech hasn't had a luxury of having renewables-like subsidies though. Who knows what the prices could have been had nuclear got the same level of subsidies. Nuclear energy (especially fast neutron tech that can use the abundant U-238 and nuclear waste from existing NPPs) isn't getting attention it deserves. Only Russia, China and India are investing in it, but it's neglected in the West because there is no imm…

nuclear tech had the biggeet subsidies program in human history in the 01940s and 50s, continuing to a significant extent into the 80s, which is how the humans got it in the first place some historians argue that subsidizing nuclear tech too heavily was a major factor in the collapse of the ussr

And after those subsidies stopped, the progress of nuclear power also stopped, naturally. If the subsidies continued, we could have had scalable, sustainable and affordable nuclear.

I believe that Renewables should be subsidized, and current progress is great, but total decarbonization is easier to realistically achieve together with nuclear energy.

If you support renewables, you don’t have to be anti-nuclear at all.

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

#64

Post by [deleted] »

kragen wrote: post #62
D_Alex wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>pv uses orders of magnitude more land per megawatt (not per megawatt hour; please get your units straight) "Per MWhr" is a better measure when comparing intermittent-power generation such as wind and solar. >posting random bullshit ^^

you can and should use 'per megawatt produced' rather than 'per megawatt nameplate capacity' when comparing things like solar to things like nuclear but intermittency is irrelevant to basic incommensurability of units; neither nuclear nor solar uses more and more land over time to produce a constant amount of power, which is what 'land per megawatt hour' implies

[deleted]

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

#65

Post by kragen »

EmmaEngineer wrote: post #60
apatheticonion wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turkey is set to get 10% of its grid electricity from the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant [1] The build cost has been 22B (excluding loans) and it will have a capacity of 4456MW meaning it's $4.9/W. On average the cost per Watt for solar is 27 cents (excluding loans and costs for storage) [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices EDIT: incorrect…

$22B / 4.456B = $4.9/W, about 20x more expensive than your number for PV.

thank you for posting this correction; i had missed that obvious error

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

#66

Post by jillesvangurp »

gravitronic wrote: post #18
scythe wrote: post #2

>With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however, the project's economics have worsened, and backers started pulling out of the project. I would expect this to continue limiting investment in nuclear, since the outlook for renewables just keeps getting better, and the stumbling blocks are increasingly jejune, like we can't build powerlines fast enough.

A harder stumbling block compared to nuclear is land mass requirements per Mwh: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source

I would call that a minor hurdle. There's actually no shortage of unused land. Or roofs. And agrivoltaics (combining solar with farming) is a thing. And wind turbines and farms are a common combination as well. And we have off shore wind, and floating offshore wind. Which you can combine with solar. Floating solar to limit evaporation in hydro basins is also a thing.

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

#67

Post by gravitronic »

kragen wrote: post #33
gravitronic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A harder stumbling block compared to nuclear is land mass requirements per Mwh: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source

no because even though pv uses orders of magnitude more land per megawatt (not per megawatt hour; please get your units straight) it still uses two orders of magnitude less land than is available please do the math instead of posting random bullshit without any regard to whether or not it is true i did https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html

> pv uses orders of magnitude more land per megawatt

Glad we agree

If anyone's reading this and wants a decent resource I suggest Bill Gates's book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

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

#68

Post by vegetablepotpie »

monero-xmr wrote: post #4
scythe wrote: post #2

>With the price of renewables dropping precipitously, however, the project's economics have worsened, and backers started pulling out of the project. I would expect this to continue limiting investment in nuclear, since the outlook for renewables just keeps getting better, and the stumbling blocks are increasingly jejune, like we can't build powerlines fast enough.

I am still very confused how power will be generated cleanly on cloudy, no-wind days with solar and wind. I am hopeful that hydrogen can be generated in the desert and moved by hydrogen-truck. Or grid-scale batteries actually exist someday. But if we write off nuclear, a lot of coal and natural gas will be burned.

It’s possible to build mostly renewable grids today with existing technology without nuclear. For example Marin Clean Energy generates over 90% of its energy from carbon free sources [1].

Storage and batteries are the key. Although lithium ion has limitations in the use case of long term discharge and storage, new chemistries are becoming commercially available that are appropriate for grid scale power. Iron Air batteries are made out of cheap, common materials, can discharge for up to 100 hours and can store power for long periods of time. Form Energy is building a plant in West Virginia that will produce these batteries and will open in 2024 [2].

Renewables are getting increasingly cheaper. Storage is increasingly more available. The writing is on the wall. Renewables are going to win out and it’s going to happen much sooner than conventional wisdom says.

[1] https://www.mcecleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/20...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/form-energy-build-lo...

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

#69

Post by kragen »

monero-xmr wrote: post #9
NikkiA wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never 'not windy' everywhere, plus gravity batteries can store power for days/weeks. Geothermal is also an 'always on' renewable.

If it was this easy, gravity batteries and geothermal would be everywhere and widely used, but they remain niche.

gravity batteries and geothermal are too expensive to be competitive, except in the niches of pumped hydro, district heating, very polar regions, and stranded assets from before pv and wind got so cheap

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

#70

Post by apatheticonion »

EmmaEngineer wrote: post #60
apatheticonion wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turkey is set to get 10% of its grid electricity from the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant [1] The build cost has been 22B (excluding loans) and it will have a capacity of 4456MW meaning it's $4.9/W. On average the cost per Watt for solar is 27 cents (excluding loans and costs for storage) [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices EDIT: incorrect…

$22B / 4.456B = $4.9/W, about 20x more expensive than your number for PV.

Oh you're right! Did it backwards. Correcting my post
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