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First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

eia.gov

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Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#941

Post by katbyte »

Retric wrote: post #862
katbyte wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still burning O&G - the goal is to not which means you need that base load which means nuclear where hydro/pumped storage is not an option.

Only in the short term. It’s taking 10-15+ years to get nuclear online. Looking at the ramping up of battery production by you can build solar today, add batteries in 10 years and be much better off financially and environmentally. Even China regularly spends 7+ years to build nuclear from the point where construction actually starts and even longer when you include planning.

Hand waving the cost there both financially and environmentally as well a “well we assume things will work out” - there will need to be battery storage in the 100s of gigawatt hours and it needs to be cheap reliable and durable

What if they don’t? There’s no assurances there will be magic battery tech

There is a reason China India Russia and others are still building nuclear plants

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#942

Post by katbyte »

_ph_ wrote: post #868
katbyte wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still burning O&G - the goal is to not which means you need that base load which means nuclear where hydro/pumped storage is not an option.

Base load is a term from the fossil/nuclear time. It is a pure statistical amount which designated how much "slow" sources (coal, nuclear) could be used because there is never less demand than the base load. And everything was done to push the base load up. But it never meant that it was sufficient to deliver the "base load". The power generation still hat to match any demand at any time. So everything else was done…

Call it what you want you still need an always available always there source of power to ensure demand is met. In the PNW hydro fills this role, elsewhere you will need something else and only nuclear really can fulfil that need

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#944

Post by Retric »

katbyte wrote: post #941
Retric wrote: post #862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the short term. It’s taking 10-15+ years to get nuclear online. Looking at the ramping up of battery production by you can build solar today, add batteries in 10 years and be much better off financially and environmentally. Even China regularly spends 7+ years to build nuclear from the point where construction actually starts and even longer when you include planning.

Hand waving the cost there both financially and environmentally as well a “well we assume things will work out” - there will need to be battery storage in the 100s of gigawatt hours and it needs to be cheap reliable and durable What if they don’t? There’s no assurances there will be magic battery tech There is a reason China India Russia and others are still building nuclear plants

We don’t need magic battery tech. Current PV + Batteries can already 24/7 power cheaper than nuclear. It’s only vs fossil fuels where batteries have trouble.

China is building nuclear because they are building everything, but they are effectively building 3x as much solar and 7x as much wind because nuclear just costs more than any other option.

From 2020-2022 China increased generation power by:

   51,600 GWh/year Nuclear
  156,600 GWh/year Solar 
  357,500 GWh/year Wind
Currently they get as much power from solar as nuclear and twice as much from wind. In total they are 34% renewable vs 5% from nuclear. It’s the US that’s heavily invested in Nuclear not China.

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#945

Post by billytetrud »

katbyte wrote: post #833
billytetrud wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nationalized industries are great for like 5-10 years, after which it becomes clear they have no ability to make effective plans or react to a changing market.

The Goverment power company here (bc Canada) is one of the best run in the world, with some of the cheapest rates (10c cad) and has been a public utility for over 60 years despite a previous conservative Goverment saddling it with 16 billion of extra costs due to grift Norway also does great with its nationalized O&G Nationalize industries can be fantastic with the public benefiting directly rather then a few select…

Pointing to the best run government power company says nothing about the average government run power company. And I don't know why you think cheap rates for a government power company are particularly special. The rates are subsidized by your taxes. What's the real cost? I bet its hard to even find out.

> a previous conservative Goverment saddling it with 16 billion of extra costs due to grift

Oh really? A government run monopoly being involved in grift? How surprising. Guess what? That's what happens with government run companies. You can't simply wish away the opposing party. And I bet the party you like best also does awful crap you conveniently ignore.

For every great nationalized business you can point out, I could point out 100 that are awful wastes of money.

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#946

Post by billytetrud »

pfdietz wrote: post #893
billytetrud wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear projects don't get funded because of regulatory risk, not because they're "too expensive".

Let's hear what the then-President of Exelon, at the time one of the largest nuclear operators in the US, had to say about that. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088 “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that pric…

I'm not sure why you think that Exelon didn't consider regulatory risk as one of the things that made it not make sense for them. It was certainly a large factor.

The idea that existing nuclear power plants are losing money because they aren't operationally competitive with oil and gas does not square with the facts. The total cost of running a nuclear plant is 30% less than oil and gas per kilowatt-hour. And if all our nuclear plants weren't 50 years old and saddled with massive overregulation, the operation and maintenance of a nuclear plant would probably be equivalent to running a fossil fueled power plant, which would cut ANOTHER 30% off the cost of nuclear because fuel costs of fossil fueled power plants are 4 times the cost of nuclear fuel per kwh.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_04.html

And as for construction costs, you can see that the massive increase in construction costs in the early 60s and 70s was because regulation required enormous increases in staffing, which ballooned labor costs.

https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/

And even so a nuclear plant should be expected to be profitable as long as you can manage to operate it for long enough without the government shutting you down (one of the major regulatory risks I mentioned).

Nuclear power plants in the past generally took 7 years to build and pay off in 16-24 years. While a natural gas plant can be built in 2 years and pay off in 8 years. Nuclear power plants are so cost effective tho, that if you can manage to run it for 17 years, you'll make more money than running a natural gas plant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC_BCz0pzMw

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#947

Post by belorn »

pydry wrote: post #883
andsoitis wrote: post #837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the idea that renewables have to be paired with large amounts of energy storage is not correct. In Ireland dispatchable power is used when wind is low. Natural gas, hydroelectric, HVDC, pumped storage. Natural gas is neither renewable nor emission-free when burning, albeit less than burning coal, for instance. About 117 pounds of CO2 are produced per million British thermal units (MMBtu) equivalent of natur…

We cant switch overnight. It takes about 1/10 or 1/20th the amount of time and 1/5th the cost to build equivalent solar production. It's better to start with that and let pumped storage, batteries and hydrogen play catch up than pay 5x more and wait 10-20x longer for equivalent levels of nuclear power production. Right now we use so much natural gas that a GWh of solar or nuclear produced energy is essentially just a…

Let say a natural gas power plant has a life time expectancy of 20 years. If we say that in 20 years we can abandon natural gas with nuclear, then lets put that as a deadline for when the last natural gas power plant will be demolished.

We need to stop building new natural gas power plants and existing ones need to have a planned obsolescence so that investors know when their investment will no longer be worth anything.

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#948

Post by natmaka »

philwelch wrote: post #929
natmaka wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such dysfunctions of the Mega-Central-Omniscient-Organization are common to all political regimes, as shown by the Fukushima nuclear disaster: Japan isn't exactly a communist nation, and the Oganawa nuclear plant, closer to the tsunami, did not trigger a disaster thanks to a sole guy acting against the whole local Mega-Central-Omniscient-Organization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20... No…

Then you have to count the Banqiao disaster after all.

No, because:

- there was no one really in charge of such matters during most of the pertinent decades (first leg of Mao's regime): politics were the sole concern, leading to well-known disasters such as the Great Leap Forward ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward ) and disdain (or worse) towards whistle-blowers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#Whistle-blower )

- the (Soviet) designers had no skin in the game

A nuclear reactor built and used in such a context may trigger some bad events in way less than 23 years, as a mere few seconds are sufficient for it to do so.

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#949

Post by natmaka »

LunaSea wrote: post #914
natmaka wrote: post #871

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The architecture I described does not imply that those batteries will be loaded by locally-installed solar panels. There will be a grid, as usual, carrying electricity produced by the described mix, mostly by industrial sites (in many geographical areas a large part of it will be offshore wind turbines fleets).

So electric car owners are in effect sponsoring electricity storage?

No: they are benefiting from it as they (most of the time) load their batteries when electricity is cheap, and discharge it into the grid when it is rare and therefore expensive.

On average the car autonomy already is way above the daily commute, and this margin is quickly growing.

There are more and more parking places (private and public) connected to the grid.

A bit of intelligence ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid ) will orchestrate.

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#950

Post by natmaka »

wolverine876 wrote: post #526
wolverine876 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I understand, but I don't have numbers. Do you happen to know where we can find some?

From another thread: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-C...

"The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing" (2010, A. Grubler): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
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