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

91–100 of 205 posts

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#91

Post by Gwypaas »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #79
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Setting aside the relative investment risk issues, perhaps customers are happy that they are getting a reliable source of power that is carbon free? Is zero cost the right threshold when looking at the larger benefits, nuclear or solar? That being said, I personally think we are headed to a combination of some always on nuclear combined with a lot of solar. Look to Texas for recent lessons on lack of robustness in po…

> Look to Texas for recent lessons on lack of robustness in power generation capability.

When they had not winterized the grid and an abnormal amount of gas, coal and nuclear power went offline.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#92

Post by canadianfella »

causi wrote: post #38
SequoiaHope wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One further point to add on decentralization: a nuclear power plant necessarily requires a powerful state to protect the plant and supply chain and avoid proliferation risks. This powerful state has other side effects. From a libertarian perspective you cannot have a weak state and safe nuclear power (or rather, this is uncertain), while wind and solar present no such risk. I looked at the numbers for this Georgia pl…

avoid proliferation risks Proliferation risks seem like something we pretend to care about much more than we actually do. India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea all developed nuclear weapons with little more than complaining from the US.

[dead]

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#93

Post by coryrc »

coldpie wrote: post #22
jeffbee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables with batteries are cheaper than new nuclear or even new natural gas.

Does that price include enough storage to heat the entire Twin Cities area (~4M people) for six continuous weeks of average -20C weather with overcast skies, where power failure means widespread death and property damage (broken pipes)? It might do, I don't know, but I'm skeptical. That's a lot of power! My gut feeling is a baseload solution is better for that kind of situation, though what I'm really advocating for…

We need a New Deal-type mobilization to build https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Communit... everywhere across the country. Like building the Hoover Dam, it will generate massive amounts of carbon-free energy for a long time and with a relatively short ROI. It's embarrassing parallelizable. We could be off fossil fuels for heating in fifteen years across all homes, saving thousands of dollars a household per year.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#94

Post by syntheweave »

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…

Nearly all of the cell phone/broadband network came up in the last generation. A lot of highway projects have completed. Many cities have had substantial light rail projects and extensions. We've done very well with certain kinds of infrastructure, it's just a question of whether we allocated the effort to the right stuff.

The main issue we have in our built environment comes down to massively prioritizing automobile tech and privatized sprawl development at every turn, when we've known for some time that it's a money pit and doesn't produce the equitable outcomes promised. That's only shifted recently with changes in demographics(Boomers, the biggest block of homeowners, fading, immigration from places with different standards), and new direction from the higher levels of government(e.g. Biden admin infrastructure packages and policy-setting, or California's move to address housing by pressuring cities to build denser).

There's a definite correlation going on between "housing cost increase" and "infrastructure cost increase", which I believe has the causation mostly on the end of housing, and the trend towards financialization that set in at the end of the 70's and consolidated the homeowner demographic into voting towards asset inflation. The 2nd Ave subway was expensive because New York's land is expensive, not because the tunnel itself was a uniquely nefarious technical problem. But New York's land is expensive in a speculative sense: the structure of the tax policy and valuation is such that a rational move is to leave a building vacant and try to sell it for more, rather than set rent at a lower price and record a valuation in line with what tenants can afford.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#95

Post by justatdotin »

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…

now do the list of plants slated for decommissioning

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#96

Post by coryrc »

Gwypaas wrote: post #61
audunw wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the cost of renewables + energy storage + smarter flexible loads will just become lower than nuclear all-in-all. Seems to me that, now that both transportation and grid management is pouring bucketloads of money into energy storage technology, they'll just continue to improve and come down. I mean, just as some countries are hitting 50%+ of renewables, and the variability is becoming a significant challenge, we're…

> Not that I mind nuclear.. just not sure where it'll fit in in the future. Just used in some key industrial areas maybe? Nuclear submarines, and that is about it.

Process heat for industrial use?

Desalinization?

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#97

Post by Gwypaas »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #89
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bil…

Depends on if you have a regulated or open electricity market. You describe a regulated market.

On the other hand, Europe by and large operates on a marginal pricing open market with utilities providing the transmission grid and stabilization services.

In that market the investors take the losses. Unless huge state subsidies are brought out like Hinkley Point C leading to the government guaranteeing a strike price of $150/MWh over 35 years.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#98

Post by exabrial »

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?

Step 1. Build a swimming pool somewhere in the US

Step...

There is no other steps. Don't overthink it. A couple of hot bricks every 5 years isn't something to freak out about.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#99

Post by canadianfella »

hefferbub wrote: post #46
coldpie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only half of a Twitter. That sounds like a joke, but honestly, it's not. $20B is absolutely nothing compared to the costs of not taking immediate action on climate change.

13 years is immediate? Let’s please not have our future depend on building giant, fragile things that are obsolete technologically and financially before they are even completed. Wind and PV have some challenges, but they get online fast. Plus they are both riding down a steep cost S-curve, so (for the foreseeable future) the more you build, the cheaper the next one gets. No one could say that about Nuclear with a st…

[dead]

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#100

Post by adamsmith143 »

jfengel wrote: post #32
coldpie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Gas peaker plants solve the problem, with no additional costs. We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions. At that point it would be much cheaper to look elsewhere for more improvements. There's no need to invent a reason for massive new energy infrastructure. The gas pl…

>We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions.

Not just wrong but backwards, we in fact need to REMOVE gigatons of carbon to avoid dangerous, possibly catastrophic warming of the planet.

Post reply on HN