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Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power (2017)

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Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power (2017)

#71

Post by api »

magicsmoke wrote: post #24
api wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is superior in some ways, but battery and renewable is small, can be incrementally built, simple, safe, and is experiencing exponential cost reductions due to mass production scaling. It reminds me of TSMC leapfrogging Intel because of mobile volume or PCs vs custom Unix workstations.

The incremental build is probably a big part of it. More volume and minor failures = more practice time and experience. How does someone "practice" building a nuclear power plant when failure can be so catastrophic?

Oh yeah... it's hard to get industrial scaling of expertise, production tech, and hands on experience when you're building a few monuments.

If we do make nuclear fission work it will be with modular reactors and standardized fuel form factors, etc.

Fusion won't fly even if we get over unity fusion unless we adopt a similar approach. Fusion reactors like to be big, but I can see them being composed of mass producible smaller modules and parts. Settling on a standard design that can be mass produced could make it work.

Thing is: as the nuclear people work to try to make anything above a reality, we are experiencing iterative rapid development in solar, wind, and batteries, with all of these getting geometrically cheaper until they approach the naked cost of the materials and the energy required to refine them... and the latter cost (energy) will drop as we get better at making these things.

In the long term I would not be surprised if Earth is almost 100% solar/wind/hydro/geothermal powered. You might see nuclear used in niche markets that combine high population density with low insolation and insufficient other resources and where geopolitical concerns make reliance on long distance power transport problematic. Earth is pretty close to a giant free fusion reactor that we don't need to worry about maintaining for at least two billion years. Nuclear power will be for space settlements further from the sun and deep space travel.

I could see Mars eventually relying on fusion in the far future. Mars is further from the sun, and most people who talk about settling there drastically underestimate the massive amounts of energy that will be needed to refine and purify literally every single material all the way down to the air and the water. The total energy footprint of your average Martian will be at least 10-20X your average Texan with a giant raised pickup and a 4000 square foot house.

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power (2017)

#72

Post by philipkglass »

irontinkerer wrote: post #58
brandmeyer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the problem is that basic competency in design and construction logistics have been lost I don't think this is just a nuclear problem. This is a civil engineering problem more broadly. IMO, the exact same forces which make nuclear impractical now are also responsible for the horrific budget explosions and overruns in big projects all over the US.

I am not really familiar with the space, so please pardon the stupid question.. Why can't we use an affordable safe/competent reactor design from 30-40 years ago, and stamp that out at scale, rather than building a "new" model that results in failure?

If you look at the reactors that were completed 30 years ago, it looks like there are some affordable, safe, predictably-built reactors among them. But when you look at all the reactors that were under construction in the years prior to that, you will find that a lot of them were also late, over budget, and/or never completed. Even in the 1980s there was a large variation in cost and schedule between reactor projects. Some of the projects -- in hindsight -- were plagued by bad reactor designs. In other cases there's nothing obviously better/worse about the design-on-paper, but there was a significant difference in the quality of project management and execution.

You can't examine the differences in project management and execution while the project is still on paper. You have to commit years and billions of dollars to determine if a project is going to adhere to the original plan or blow out on time and/or money.

Right now South Korea has the best track record of rapidly, affordably building reactors. Some American nuclear proponents think that we should just have South Koreans build Korean reactor designs here, to bypass the apparently irremediable problems in the domestic nuclear industry.

But even the smooth progress of South Korean reactor builders is not assured when they are building outside of Korea.

The Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, built by Koreans with Korean reactors, just powered up its first reactor days ago.

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

The timeline from construction start to operation was originally 5 years. It has actually taken 8 years. It's 60% over the time originally scheduled, even though it is using a standard reactor design built by the most competent reactor builders currently available.

(In addition to what pjc50 said.)

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power (2017)

#73

Post by credit_guy »

LanguageGamer wrote: post #4

Somewhat tangential, but wikipedia has good article on the cost of different energy sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source The cost of nuclear energy has been flat for decades, but the cost of sources like solar has been plummeting. Nuclear doesn't have much of change without some technological break through.

The technological breakthrough may be possible.

As other people mentioned here, it looks like the problem now is that the experience of building nuclear reactors was lost, so we are in a Catch-22 situation right now: if you want to build experience you need to just build reactors, but they are not economically viable without experienced builders.

The problem is that all current reactors are of the 1 GW size. For the last few decades the world has been building about 1 or 2 per year outside of China.

The solution is small nuclear reactors. For very large machines there is a dis-economy of scales. It was more expensive to build a Saturn V rocket than to build 20 rockets that are 20 times smaller each. In fact it was 3 times more expensive (about $180MM/ launch for Saturn V vs $3MM for Titan II)

Similarly, it's quite likely that it will be much cheaper to build 20 reactors of 50 MW each than it is to build a 1 GW reactor. And this is exactly what small nuclear reactors hope to achieve. For example NuScale estimates it will cost them $3 BN to build a 600 MW power plant [1] using small modular reactors.

[1] https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/cost-competitive

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power (2017)

#74

Post by epistasis »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #70
epistasis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your calculations don't agree with the majority of what gets published in peer reviewed literature. Many different groups have come up with tunable models to match current energy consumption with renewable build from 80% to 100%, with tunable parameters to cost optimize. General consensus is that nuclear at a small percentage would help greatly. However these models tend to use cost curve estimates from 5 years ago,…

Can you provide a link to some of that research, I'm not familiar with it, but am interested in reading it. Edit: I think solar/wind prices are artificially low because they exist in a system with peaker plants. When you remove the peaker plants the solar/wind utilities have to internalize the cost of storage, which is currently being externalized on natural gas peaker plants.

I'm having trouble finding the time for a proper literature cull (this is now area of research so I don't keep these articles in my bibliography...), but here's a few:

Very old article about using HVDC to drop prices (still assumes coal is viable, because it uses old tech prices) https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/making-a-single-us-e...

The more publicized papers are those from Clack and Jacobson in PNAS arguing about whether nuclear/storage would be needed or not; both situations assumed that renewables would be far above 50%. There was a really silly lawsuit even, which is pretty awful:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/100-percent-ren...

So even in the case of bad modeling for 100% renewables, the critics are mostly people who think that 80% renewables is quite achievable with our current tech curves, and with building more nuclear.

Apologies again for not being more specific, but hopefully the papers in these press articles will help follow the citation chain to even better modeling. Both spatial and temporal modeling are important for both weather and electricity demand, so it's not an easy thing to get right. And I suspect that the market will find minimums that are quite different than anything these programs will find, due to political and other social factors nor modeled. But the models do show that a different future is possible, at least.

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power (2017)

#75

Post by brandmeyer »

twojacobtwo wrote: post #67
brandmeyer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the problem is that basic competency in design and construction logistics have been lost I don't think this is just a nuclear problem. This is a civil engineering problem more broadly. IMO, the exact same forces which make nuclear impractical now are also responsible for the horrific budget explosions and overruns in big projects all over the US.

As someone who left the field of Civil Engineering out of frustration with the state of the industry, I largely agree, but for a different reason. I have noticed that there is something like "regulatory capture" in the construction industry now, but not by the same methods as most other industries. With giant, multi-national corps handling most large construction projects now, the QA/QC engineers are either incorpora…

Its possible. I've managed to work in a couple of organizations with strong QA/QC. In both cases, the team responsible for QC had autonomy with respect to product delivery.

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power (2017)

#76

Post by ldiracdelta »

enaaem wrote: post #23
CydeWeys wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. For all the people boosting nuclear power, the reality on the ground seems to be that it just does not work anymore. It's way too expensive and never gets done, and this problem is global, not just in the US; see e.g. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a33499619/fr... At some point the results have to speak for themselves, and solar/wind plus battery storage is actually working and being built. That…

People have been saying for 30 years that solar/wind are going to take off and that we don't need nuclear. We are now in a climate crisis, and solar/wind is still a fraction of the energy portfolio. We als can't build nuclear anymore, because we have lost decades of experience. I really hope you are correct this time.

The economics are changing though. An idealized stock market return is (used to be) 11.8%/year. This interest, compounded, doubles your position every 7 years. Once solar has a break even period of less than 7 years, the investment in solar beats a rosy, idealized stock market. When the payoff period drops to 4 years, you'd be an idiot _not_to do solar, because you're looking at an investment returning numbers in the credit card interest rate range.

I bought my current system for $45k four years ago. I only did it because the investment math worked in my case. (Yes, yes yes. It was for sure subsidized and the investment math _didn't_ work without the subsidies.) Now, however, that same system would cost me ~$20k. I checked when my coworker was looking into solar and wanted to run the numbers. The economics of solar are approaching beat-the-[idealized]-stock market investment. 4 years is a rule-of-thumb number for many businesses for investing in capital. That is, if a capital investment breaks even in 4 years, you pull the trigger. Once the economics hits 4 years for break even, you'll see a lot of CFO's start pulling the trigger, not to mention the encouragement from the marketing department for the optics.

Anyways, I think it is coming and for many of us, it is already here.

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power (2017)

#77

Post by ericcumbee »

epistasis wrote: post #3

This article is more than three years old, but the story hasn't changed much. VC Summer was abandoned, leaving utility customers with massive bills. Vogtle soldiers on, but seems to be unlikely to finish. Nucleae's problems are not the politics, the problem is that basic competency in design and construction logistics have been lost. Plans get delivered to construction that are "unconstructable," but construction sol…

I live with in about 40 miles of Plant Vogtle and thats not really an accurate assessment. They have had to reshuffle some of the work due to COVID-19. but last I saw all of the major construction milestones on unit 3 are complete. its just down to ancillaries. Cold Hydro testing is slated to be conducted this fall and initial fuel loading by end of year. They are still on track for production to start Nov 2021 and 2022 for unit 4.

https://allongeorgia.com/georgia-business/georgia-power-anno...

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power (2017)

#78

Post by jeffreyrogers »

epistasis wrote: post #74
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide a link to some of that research, I'm not familiar with it, but am interested in reading it. Edit: I think solar/wind prices are artificially low because they exist in a system with peaker plants. When you remove the peaker plants the solar/wind utilities have to internalize the cost of storage, which is currently being externalized on natural gas peaker plants.

I'm having trouble finding the time for a proper literature cull (this is now area of research so I don't keep these articles in my bibliography...), but here's a few: Very old article about using HVDC to drop prices (still assumes coal is viable, because it uses old tech prices) https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/making-a-single-us-e... The more publicized papers are those from Clack and Jacobson in PNAS arguin…

Thanks, this is causing me to re-evaluate my views a bit. I am still skeptical that renewables can replace existing electricity generation without peaker plants because of the large cost of storage in those scenarios, but it may be less of a problem than I thought.

Re: Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power (2017)

#79

Post by manicdee »

kurthr wrote: post #22
CydeWeys wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. For all the people boosting nuclear power, the reality on the ground seems to be that it just does not work anymore. It's way too expensive and never gets done, and this problem is global, not just in the US; see e.g. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a33499619/fr... At some point the results have to speak for themselves, and solar/wind plus battery storage is actually working and being built. That…

Yes, but what will we do if/when wind and solar just "doesn't work anymore". In the US trains "don't work anymore"... but they do in other countries. This gradual erosion of technical capability is a generic problem the US needs to solve. Nuclear is a case study of what is wrong and where the problems are (political, business, education).

The way the US chose to address accidents in rail was to armour plate their rail cars. In Europe they worked on better processes to ensure trains don’t run into each other in the first place. The erosion of technical capability in rail is driven by the legislature. You have many states that will need to work together to completely abandon the US regulations on rail, adopt European regulations, and replace every piece of rolling stock to comply with the new regulations. That’s quite the undertaking, but achievable since the required expertise still exists outside the USA.

The erosion of technical capability in nuclear power is likely unsolvable. There is no brains trust outside the USA from which to borrow the knowledge of metallurgy, concrete, site preparation, building design, or even design for manufacture. This is rebooting the entire industry from scratch to produce an unprofitable product.

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