Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 205 posts

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#81

Post by Krasnol »

mandevil wrote: post #13
OrwellianChild wrote: post #3

As much as I'd love more nuclear power on the grid, this project cost over double its initial bid and is actually raising rates for GA utility customers... I can't tell from the story whether "nuclear is hard" or if "contractors are idiots" here. Reactor was supposed to open in 2016 - it's very hard to cheer for a 7-year delay and a 140% cost overrun.

Basically, you can look at [the list of nuclear plants under construction]( https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu... ) and see that the Russians VVER series are still going up around the word (over 20), the Chinese are building a bunch (of many different international and domestic designs, I don't think they've built one for another country yet), the South Koreans have 4 under construction arou…

The overall number of operating reactors doesn't go up much though: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263945/number-of-nuclear...

Supplied energy seems to have leveled out also: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...

Time to say goodbye and maybe think hard why those Russian and Chinese reactors come up so fast and cheap, and prepare for the fallout...

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#82

Post by seatac76 »

miguelazo wrote: post #37

So glad we finally designated the permanent repository for nuclear waste in the United State. /s Since the waste will almost certainly not be accepted by another state, I would like to know where it will be stored in Georgia. I have some guesses, based on the demographics of adjacent populations, but perhaps the many HN nuclear boosters have some specifics?

Waste is typically stored on site after it has been entombed in concrete. So it will be stored on-site not in a secondary spot. That is until if ever they are able to get Yucca mountain going again.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#83

Post by parineum »

hefferbub wrote: post #40
OrwellianChild wrote: post #3

As much as I'd love more nuclear power on the grid, this project cost over double its initial bid and is actually raising rates for GA utility customers... I can't tell from the story whether "nuclear is hard" or if "contractors are idiots" here. Reactor was supposed to open in 2016 - it's very hard to cheer for a 7-year delay and a 140% cost overrun.

And don’t forget, this was the “revolutionary” AP1 design that was supposed to fix all the bad things about the previous revolutionary designs.

I don't see how that's related.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#84

Post by credit_guy »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #23
burlesona wrote: post #9

I feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's current form of large central power plants[1]. By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nat…

Georgia Power customers have been paying extra for this plant for something like a decade. Rate payers absorbed much of the risk instead of investors in the company. This was pushed as a way to save on financing costs by getting the money from customers upfront but saving them more long term with lower rates. But it appears the customers, despite prepaying for the plant, aren't going to see those savings. The investo…

Did you check what you are saying?

I did that for you: [1] has the average electricity prices in different regions of the US as published by the EIA. As of December 22 (latest data available), the average price for residential use in the whole of the US was 14.96 cents/kWh. In Georgia it was 11.96 cents/kWh. The report also has December 21, and also other sectors (commercial, industrial, transportation, overall). As far as I can see the price in Georgia was systematically below the nationwide average.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#85

Post by js2 »

kansface wrote: post #62
burlesona wrote: post #9

I feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's current form of large central power plants[1]. By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nat…

> I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc., Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it. If the US we…

[deleted]

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#86

Post by parineum »

woeirua wrote: post #21

How much solar could they have built for the same price? Just doing some very rough calculations, they could have built enough panels to output several times as much peak power as they can with the nuclear reactors. Even including storage costs, they still could have probably built a system with more productive capacity than the nuclear reactors. This project is almost certainly the last conventional fission reactor…

> Even including storage costs

How much storage is required for solar(+wind if you're not a masochist) to reliably supply a consistent 2234 MW for 50 years?

Nuclear Plants aren't about peak power, they're about baseline. If you want to replace Nuclear with solar, you have to replace the baseline.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#87

Post by Animats »

Krasnol wrote: post #10
Province1108 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We lost much of our nuclear engineering capability in the US, so in many ways contractors are "idiots" here and made many costly mistakes during construction. Many articles on this and how it lead to the Westinghouse bankruptcy. Sadly, there's only a handful of western-friendly firms in the world that can build a reactor, so hoping the expertise and lessons learned will be worthwhile for future projects. Nuclear isn'…

This "loss of nuclear engineering capability" doesn't hold up when you see reactors build by the French having the same problems: overdue and over budget. The French never stopped building reactors all over the world. "Base generation" is an outdated concept. It can be replaced by storage and grid size for example.

France built most of their reactors to one design in the 1980s. That worked out well, but those reactors are nearing end of life. More recently, reactor projects in France have been taking far too long and going far over budget.[1]

You have to make multiples of something to get production efficiencies, and you have to keep building on a regular basis to keep the production line alive. Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock was once so fed up with the Navy's intermittent aircraft carrier orders that they said that if Congress would order two at once, they'd throw in a third carrier for free.

[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a33499619/fr...

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#88

Post by fnordpiglet »

credit_guy wrote: post #18
burlesona wrote: post #9

I feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's current form of large central power plants[1]. By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nat…

> fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity Do you have some links? All I could find was [1], where it says the rates will be raised by 2.6% in 2023 and 4.5% in the next two years, which is not unreasonable given the current inflation rate. The justification for the increase does not mention Vogtle at all, instead it mentions strengthening the grid, investments in renewables, imp…

It’s in the originally posted article.

“Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers are already paying part of the financing cost, and state regulators have approved a monthly rate increase of $3.78 a month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. The elected Georgia Public Service Commission will decide later who pays for the remainder of the costs.”

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#89

Post by fnordpiglet »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #23
burlesona wrote: post #9

I feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's current form of large central power plants[1]. By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nat…

Georgia Power customers have been paying extra for this plant for something like a decade. Rate payers absorbed much of the risk instead of investors in the company. This was pushed as a way to save on financing costs by getting the money from customers upfront but saving them more long term with lower rates. But it appears the customers, despite prepaying for the plant, aren't going to see those savings. The investo…

Utilities are generally paid for by the users regardless of their cost. Investors are typically insulated in so far as the project completes, which is completely normal. It’s not like there’s some sort of call provision on a bond that asks for more money from the bond holder if the project costs more. Typically you would simply issue more bonds. Instead of issuing bonds and paying interest on those out of utility bills, they decided to just pay up front (which was likely a bad deal given how low interest rates have been). But in the end the utility users pay everything in every situation. Where else would the money come from? The charity investors who give money to mega projects out of benevolence? There aren’t many of those. It generally comes out of a mixture of taxes and utility users. Even investors are just loaning capital and their primary risk is the project outright fails.

I feel like in reading these comments people feel like there’s some other third party that foots the bill

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#90

Post by scythe »

coldpie wrote: post #15
burlesona wrote: post #9

I feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's current form of large central power plants[1]. By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nat…

You can't get around the fact that you need baseload and/or storage. Both are hard problems. Some locations have regional baseload solutions like hydroelectricity, but many don't. Nuclear is a solution that works anywhere, but like you say, it's expensive. Storage is similar: there are some regional solutions (pumped hydro), or a difficult and expensive general solution (chemical batteries). There's no single answer…

I've been pleasantly surprised by the impressive recent results that multiple groups have gotten with potassium-based dual-ion batteries. The dual-ion battery stores both positive (in the anode) and negative (in the cathode) ions, which means that both electrodes can be made of carbon rather than metals. Storing negative ions in the cathode also eliminates the major hurdle with sodium-ion: the large Na+ ion doesn't like to be yanked out of the metal-oxide cathode's crystal lattice. I'm not sure why the best stability results I've seen have been with potassium, but anyway:

1500 cycles, 95% capacity retention: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/ee/c7ee0...

2000 cycles, "100%" capacity retention (degradation below measurement limits): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202001...

It's rare that I see a battery that meets the triple criterion of high stability (>>1000 cycles), cheap materials and high current efficiency (which in a large installation is also related to heat dissipation), but these seem to do it. The density is too low for vehicles, but fine for grids.

Post reply on HN