“But the biggest hurdles nuclear power faces are all economic, rather than regulatory, and the bill provides very little in the way of direct funding that could help overcome those barriers.”
All sounded rosy till I read this part 😞
I’ve never heard that because not an engineer.
But can affirm the arch nemesis of the sales guy is legal.
Maybe the accountant in this case needs to be able to input costs other sources of power externalize,
Yes it’s a huge problem. Solar is intermittent and PV is not very power dense. We need low carbon/pollution baseline power.
Solar could not be more than 40% or so of our demand without either storage or massively expensive transmission.
Where do you get 40%?
No one cares about “power density” (I presume you mean W/m^2 ).
You mean a base *load* power source. But to be classically “base load”, you have to be cheap. Cheapness compensates for being slow to ramp.
Yes, you need storage. Solar is still cheaper if you include battery storage. And that ramps instantly.
Unless something changes nuclear is relegated to special cases like aircraft carriers.
I get it from over a decade in the industry from government/commercial, utility scale and residential.
People do care about power density because you need to either use land at utility scale (or transmit far) or you need to put it on a roof.
Rooftop- You can power a Walmart on solar because there’s a lot of roof space. You can’t even begin to touch a factory, You can’t cover 100% of a home either unless it’s both a mild and sunny climate.
Utility scale- please enlighten me how you cheaply solve intermittent nature or storage. Storage is not cheap at utility scale. Then you’d have to deal with land use too. A 1GW coal plant requires 1,000 acres and can generate 8.7 billion kWh a year. To generate that with solar you’d need over 21,000 acres covered with panels. Then transmit it from wherever you found 21,000 acres.
To my point, best action is to raise the price of coal because it kills people and the planet or subsidize nuclear which is emission free so it becomes viable.
The coal plant just eats land somewhere else. Almost all coal is strip mined these days. Underground mining is too labor intensive to be cost effective.
I mean, you pay for the land, right? That’s part of the price. That’s why density doesn’t matter - it’s already in the price. Maybe it’ll eventually raise the price of solar but not as of now. Even then, the price of the panels is still dropping fast whereas the price of nuclear has been rising.
So is the 40% from some study somewhere that you can link to? What’s the source of the limit?
Not so. The purpose of an engineer is to design economical solutions. Factoring in cost is fundamental to their purpose. An engineer's true nemesis is the business major. Those shit holes fuck everything up.
Honestly, I think baby steps here makes sense. Neither party really champions nuclear energy at this point, and the general population still has some lingering uneasiness around the concept.
Cracking open the door for technology research without directly funding new plants is a good way to start the conversation without tripping over any latent fears people have. Easing into it gives time for people to become more informed and maybe lose that fear.
Need proof of concepts to start getting out there and better education instead of fear mongers.
Nearly all the reactors in the United States are significantly past their design lifetimes. We urgently need to get replacements going because they won’t just pop up overnight. Besides the fact that all the fear most people have are related to the reactor generations that we are currently running. The new generations have solved most of the issues of the gen 1/2 we are mainly running.
Or just let them reach EOL and replace them with cheaper renewables. No point subsidizing nuclear based on some sentimental value when it doesn't provide energy at costs the customers expect.
Which renewable can provide base load all the time no matter the weather? There is a place for Nuclear in emission free power generation. Brown outs and black outs because it is cloudy/not windy/nighttime are not acceptable. Unless your proposal is to use natural gas power plants instead, I don’t see how you don’t have some sort of power generation that doesn’t care about the weather.
Sentimentality doesn't figure into it, it's pure utilitarianism. There is simply no path to reducing CO2 output while meeting our energy needs that doesn't include a sizable chunk of nuclear energy.
[The research disagrees with you](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910). So, it is feeling based on nuclear being cool?
Because you displace [3-10 times as much fossil fuels when investing in renewables depending on the source?](https://www.lazard.com/media/gjyffoqd/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2024.pdf)
Lets have a thought experiment. We need to solve climate change between the 2030s and 2040s.
Nuclear reactors usually take ~20 years from being announced until commercial operation given all examples we have in the 2000s.
Nuclear power **literally can't** have any impact on climate change.
**Edit: Love when you get the block by the responder, then you know the argument are thin, and the person knows it.**
Base power load would like a word with your statement. Good luck building enough large and massive solar/wind farms to accomplish what can be done with nuclear power.
Stop being so afraid of one of the universes best renewables, nuclear.
> I think baby steps here makes sense.
[they have been taking worthless "baby steps" since the 2000s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Power_2010_Program)
The economic problems are caused by excessive regulation.
We want the safety regulations, those are good. The problem is that the regulations go far beyond safety to the point of being impossible to comply with, and then any projects get stuck for decades battling bad faith lawsuits intended only to delay and bankrupt the project.
Physically building a nuclear power plant only takes a few years. Fighting court battles is what takes 20+ years.
True but those are issues they've created themselves! They decided to go with the current concept - instead of one of several alternatives, some of which had already been proven viable - because they had invested money in it and saw no reason to try something different.
That's an attitude that is all too common. Especially when your business is essentially guaranteed by the government. Once times change, you are stuck with a bad design and now it's almost impossible to change course.
It's obviously an oversimplification but there was plenty of arrogance and stupidity going around when nuclear energy was the next big thing. (Again, you can see the same in many industries.)
Yeah, but we can do something about that.
We *can't* do anything about the fact that they always end up being much more expensive to build than claimed and have much worse uptime than anticipated, which is noted later in the article.
People always demand to know why we don't use "cheap, clean nuclear," but the answer is that it isn't cheap, and when something goes wrong, it sure as hell ain't clean.
I'm pretty pessimistic about all of it, TBH. "Renewables" only seem cheap when you play accounting games, and they fail frequently, in addition to taking up insane amounts of land. Nuclear has the problems stated above. Of course fossil fuels pump out carbon.
I think things are going to start falling apart soon.
I have such little faith that congress is capable of doing anything that doesn’t end up fucking the rest of us in the ass, but we’re so desperately in need of nuclear and updating our power grids / infrastructure. Hoping for the best.
Just build small plants across the states, it’s happening everywhere else but here. Stop trying to build mega plants for 50x the cost slowed bureaucratic hurdles. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
It’s hard because there’s certain requirements. It needs a lot of water, there can’t be natural disasters like tsunamis earthquakes tornados etc, and it has to be somewhere that has low risk of violent terrorists hiding nearby
VSMR and MMR's are safe and reliable as far as I can tell. Their clean and they don't melt-down when the cooling fails. Why more US cities don't switch to them is beyond me.
Because huge beefy reactors may have gargantuan upfront costs, but at least over their lifetime their size allows for some decent energetic economy of scale.
SMRs may cost 10 times less instead (numbers pulled entirely out of my ass, but the scale should be correct) but they also produce 20-100 times less power.
Sure, maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but you’re the one that’s admits to pulling numbers out of your ass. Seems to me they’re incorrect, no matter which price metric you choose.
The estimates on the price of SMR’s that you’re repeating are decade old propaganda. They cost far more than you’re suggesting.
***I AM*** suggesting that they suck royally. This is what I'm telling you you are failing to appreciate.
Just because I said they cost less on per-unit basis than a full ass GW reactor (an obvious fact of reality that *necessarily* must be true when you are building a potato a tenth if not a hundredth of the size) it doesn't mean that they get you more of a return on investment.
I am sorry for the confusion, we are on the same side here.
What I wanted you to know was that while it appears to be an obvious fact that they’d be cheaper - that’s what their proponents are shouting from the rooftops for sure - it’s not true once the numbers are crunched. They’re not cheaper, they’re just smaller..
They are cheaper on a per unit sense, which is what the proponents are shouting. And ***if*** the problem was just about some kind of an exponential difficulty in getting the upfront capital, that *even in isolation* wouldn't be wrong to promote.
Thing is, the real issue is that almost nobody gives a damn about the "availability premium", right until the day that baseload stations have gone out of business because during half of the day electricity is so cheap to almost be in the negative.
And those who does, certainly don't care about CO2 emissions.
So let’s try a different tack here, I don’t feel like you’re hearing me.
> They are cheaper on a per unit sense
Why do you believe that? Can you show me an installed SMR that came in at a lower unit cost than a gargantuan plant? Cause I haven’t seen one.
Everything else you said in that last statement is irrelevant to the point I have made.
Overall, my desire would be for those deciding to simply ignore these prototype SMRs and just build the gargantuan nuclear plant.
> Why do you believe that?
Because some of the dumb solutions proposed here are like, I don't know, even 50 times smaller?
Unless you want to classify even the hypothetical Nuscale 500MW design as "small".
> Can you show me an installed SMR that came in at a lower unit cost than a gargantuan plant?
A gargantuan plant can cost dozens of billions of dollars.
> Everything else you said in that last statement is irrelevant to the point I have made.
No, it's absolutely relevant. If you lived on a tidal locked planet (with no clouds too, just because) where it's always, solar panels would be an absolute uncontested no brainier.
Similarly, if you lived on a planet with mountains and valleys and rivers everywhere (or well, Norway) you could just build dams and live happily thereafter.
But we don't, and the problem is that we place a massive premium on constant availability.
> Overall, my desire would be for those deciding to simply ignore these prototype SMRs and just build the gargantuan nuclear plant.
Total agree.
Because they do not exist. [Small reactors have always been more expensive than large scale ones](https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuclear-reactors), and large scales reactors are horribly uncompetitive based on their current prices.
The SMR industry just need to:
1. Build prototype
2. Iterate on prototype.
3. In conjunction start standardizing and automating processes.
4. Achieve large enough scale to amortize the factory and process optimization costs over enough units to actually gain anything.
The “SMR hype industry” seems to be perpetually stuck at 1, not even being able to deliver a single prototype.
All the while talking like the factory already exists and SMRs are solved.
Somehow it doesn’t add up.
Ya know, I had just assumed they had a working prototype. It blows my mind we don't have a working small scale reactor....considering a boyscout nearly built one is his garage one time lol
VSMR = Very Small Modular Reactor
MMR = Micro Modular Reactor
You can fit one in your basement. They still cost millions though.
[https://im-mining.com/2021/06/24/vsmrs-solve-decarbonisation-challenges-canadas-remote-northern-mines-study/](https://im-mining.com/2021/06/24/vsmrs-solve-decarbonisation-challenges-canadas-remote-northern-mines-study/)
Not sure why people given Biden so much shit. I've at least seen forward movement with this administration, even if it's not as fast as people like, at least it's in the right direction.
Eh who really cares about that, most people just care about what happens in their own country and forget about major events in the span of a couple weeks or months after it happens.
You should care really, morality and logic don't exist in a vacuum.
On the other hand, when he seems to be actually caring way more than half of the country.. These kind of complaints seems detached from reality.
It is quite unfortunate that people don't care as much as they should. But something else always comes up that takes people's attention and then the thing that people did care about or was in the media goes out of their brains, or well, pushed to the side.
I don't believe the US is capable of this anymore. I want nuclear power, and America should be using nuclear power, but the industrial base for this doesn't exist anymore. The men, knowledge and experience to build these was put into dumpsters and destroyed. This is not a competitive industry and the US government will not subsidize it as it does with gas. Just look at California ending solar subsidies; we as a nation do not have an economy that can support advanced sources of electric energy. Russia and China do because they don't care about capital costs and if environmentalists complain they are jailed.
A much bigger bill is needed. Congress can't even force Nevada to accept our nuclear waste, with the only backup site in New Mexico where it's dumped off on brown people. Congress refuses to push nearby California or Arizona on this, Congress refuses to underwrite plants with national security loans, and Congress refuses to outright buy last-gen plans so the US govt itself can operate them as the TVA has done successfully for fifty years. We need TVAs for the San Joaquin, Pecos and South Platte rivers amongst others. This is the only way the US govt can reliably build NPPs now. It'd also let us stop giving farmers our water for free, encouraging more sustainable agriculture and killing mcdonalds.
With the severe individualism rooted in the culture of this country, I'm worried that the future of our climate initiatives will just be a continuation of giving incentives for individuals to buy their own solar panels.
Forget the people living in cities who can't get them or the fact that you still need to be connected to an outdated grid even if you install them. Those are problems for the peasants.
Nuclear is ***always*** over budget and years late. The technology may be great... but the execution of nuclear plant construction ends up making the business case horrible. If the planners were actually honest about how much a plant would cost and how late it would be delivered during the initial planning phase we wouldn't see all this resurgence in interest in nuclear.
Prove me wrong. You won't be able to.
Latest example: [https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3935dd551be9115e88a64](https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3935dd551be9115e88a64)
My favorite quote from the above article: "Calculations show Vogtle’s electricity will never be cheaper than other sources Georgia Power could have chosen, even after the federal government reduced borrowing costs by [guaranteeing repayment of $12 billion](https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-perry-announces-conditional-commitment-support-continued-construction-vogtle) in loans."
Background article: [https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/)
> Nuclear is always over budget and years late.
No it isn't. Just ask the south koreans, or even china.
> Prove me wrong. You won't be able to.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106
> Latest example: https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3935dd551be9115e88a64
Thank you for making me aware of the [one time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant#Construction), the NRC mandating an almost complete redesign of the reactor caused billions in overruns.
> My favorite quote from the above article: "Calculations show Vogtle’s electricity will never be cheaper than other sources Georgia Power could have chosen
If I had a cent for every time disingenuous people compared the LCOE of intermittent electricity sources, with baseload ones.. I'd be rich.
> even after the federal government reduced borrowing costs by guaranteeing repayment of $12 billion in loans."
And it's always ironic seeing people comparing a nuclear power plant (which can last for almost a century) with others forms of generation that you probably wouldn't keep for more than 30 years.
> Background article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/
When they mention "regulatory changes", they mean "R&D expenses". I.e. bureaucratic/engineering/design costs.
But on the field, that would look a lot like the "construction procedures [changing] in the middle of the build" problem that they were complaining was responsible for the bigger chunk of budget issues.
> No it isn't. Just ask the south koreans, or even china.
Just add some corruption scandals and no real transparency on the accounting! Perfect! Then nuclear is economical!
**[How greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry
](https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed-and-corruption-blew-up-south-koreas-nuclear-industry/)**
> If I had a cent for every time disingenuous people compared the LCOE of intermittent electricity sources, with baseload ones.. I'd be rich.
Because baseload does not exist anymore. Heck, even French reactors are being shut down over weekends because they get crowded out of the market by cheap renewables.
> And it's always ironic seeing people comparing a nuclear power plant (which can last for almost a century) with others forms of generation that you probably wouldn't keep for more than 30 years.
How about you learn about the [time value of money](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp)? Energy generated in 80 years have about zero value today. You are trying to use a logical fallacy which sounds good because the numbers do not add up.
We can build wind turbines with 80 year lifespans, we do not do it because it is more energy and economically efficient to replace them earlier with new designs available at that time.
> How greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry
Both things can be true at the same time, you know?
Not that I have hard numbers to quantify how much that influenced costs (I guess we may only see it when they start to build in poland?) but I don't like how they so casually dismiss the political element. The president which stopped nukes was [definitively](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-nuclear-idUSKBN1CP06F/) ideologically compromised.
EDIT: also, it's not exactly clear how much safety was compromised as a result either. Like, concrete quality is of course important. But if the bribe was just to pocket the money of public contracts (like in the case of the turbines) it is beside the point.
> Because baseload does not exist anymore.
Baseload as in "we need something always running" doesn't exist.
Baseload as in "we need at least some portion of the mix not being up in the air on any given day" is very much still required.
> Heck, even French reactors are being shut down over weekends because they get crowded out of the market by cheap renewables.
You mean [this](https://fortune.com/2024/06/16/electricity-prices-france-negative-renewable-energy-supply-solar-power-wind-turbines/) (also [happening](https://research.sebgroup.com/macro-ficc/reports/49776) in germany btw)? Putting aside that powering down is not shutting down, I don't think you appreciate how much of a self-own that is.
That means that we are leading to a future where you can pretty much just separate the market in two. Hours where there's so much overproduction that you get paid pennies (good luck recouping your investments) and hours were solar and/or wind are down and you suck it up.
> How about you learn about the time value of money?
Yes, that's why LCOE is usually assumed over 20 years. Investors don't have a century to recoup their money.
But we are looking at societal costs here ffs.
> and economically efficient to replace them earlier with new designs available at that time.
The biggest efficiencies increase in wind power, just came from building bigger sizes. Nothing else.
The most recent trend in Nuclear power generation is small modular reactors...unfortunately recent cost estimates blow them out of the water too.
[https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-released-nuscale-small-modular-reactor](https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-released-nuscale-small-modular-reactor)
The most recent trend is that, because they are sufficiently small that they don't require state backing for financing. Not because they were supposed to be better economically per se.
I'll believe that nuclear cost is controllable when the first company signs a fixed-cost contract with penalties for delays to build a nuclear generation facility. And to do that without government guarantees.
Yeah yeah yeah...regulation, blah blah blah. You didn't read the article - the cost over runs aren't due to safety costs its a lot more complicated than that. Which is why Nuclear is such a poor investment.
> I'll believe that nuclear cost is controllable when the first company signs a fixed-cost contract
Hinkley is fixed-cost, and yet costs balooned. Not sure what logic you are arguing about here.
> penalties for delays to build a nuclear generation facility
Penalties like what? They already get fucked up massively for every single month of delay by interests over the money they get lended.
Westinghouse most famously went bankrupted over stuff like this.
> Yeah yeah yeah...regulation, blah blah blah. You didn't read the article - the cost over runs aren't due to safety costs its a lot more complicated than that.
The cost overruns are due to the lack of know-how, every single reactor being its own cathedral in the desert (this is true even of the older reactors) and yes, even regulatory harassment. This isn't a secret anywhere.
Certain designs (like EPR) also being awful to begin with, explains a lot of the high original costs too.
> Which is why Nuclear is such a poor investment.
Didn't you just linked me an article with all the weight of supposed evidence, and you are now brushing this off like you were shitposting on 4chan?
You significantly underestimate the sheer output and capacity of a nuclear power plant compared to solar.
It’s also not an argument of one over another- BOTH are needed and should be used TOGETHER in the electrical grid.
Fucking morons, mostly GOP to be specifically.
Solar and Wind is the way to go, and it's actually cheaper and faster to solve the power demand problem. We don't need more nuclear wastes.
In any war, be it coal, gas or nuclear you go for infrastructure. It’s really irrelevant the type, you still want it offline to cripple your enemy. Putin isn’t going to avoid a power plant because it’s not Nuclear.
No they didn't? It just so happen that the biggest nuclear power plant in europe, sits on the southern side of the biggest ukrainian river. Which (not) coincidentally also serves as the unofficial border with the occupied zone.
Maybe private companies should build reactors offshore and then have undersea power cables to the US. I don’t know if it’s possible to convince regular people that nuclear power is safe and effective, it might need to be done in places outside democratic control.
Nuclear power plants are far safer than deep sea oil drilling.
I do see your point though, maybe I kind of just made that comment in a moment of frustration, there should be some government oversight, as much as I hate how the government fails miserably at oversight for every industry, especially nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy scares people that don’t understand nuclear energy because they dont understand the word “nuclear”, relax its not going to melt your face off if you live in its vicinity
[It's been getting cheaper per kwh since 2002](https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources/reports-and-briefs/2023-Costs-in-Context_r1.pdf)
Not really. The only bad thing is running reactors that are getting close to double their designed lives. Those are more expensive than necessary but we can’t get new replacements going because of fear.
“But the biggest hurdles nuclear power faces are all economic, rather than regulatory, and the bill provides very little in the way of direct funding that could help overcome those barriers.” All sounded rosy till I read this part 😞
The accountant is the arch enemy of the engineer.
[удалено]
They easily destroyed that reputation over one or two decades. It just only shows when it's already along too far.
I’ve never heard that because not an engineer. But can affirm the arch nemesis of the sales guy is legal. Maybe the accountant in this case needs to be able to input costs other sources of power externalize,
That is not the problem at all. Solar is cheaper than nuclear in general.
Yes it’s a huge problem. Solar is intermittent and PV is not very power dense. We need low carbon/pollution baseline power. Solar could not be more than 40% or so of our demand without either storage or massively expensive transmission.
Where do you get 40%? No one cares about “power density” (I presume you mean W/m^2 ). You mean a base *load* power source. But to be classically “base load”, you have to be cheap. Cheapness compensates for being slow to ramp. Yes, you need storage. Solar is still cheaper if you include battery storage. And that ramps instantly. Unless something changes nuclear is relegated to special cases like aircraft carriers.
I get it from over a decade in the industry from government/commercial, utility scale and residential. People do care about power density because you need to either use land at utility scale (or transmit far) or you need to put it on a roof. Rooftop- You can power a Walmart on solar because there’s a lot of roof space. You can’t even begin to touch a factory, You can’t cover 100% of a home either unless it’s both a mild and sunny climate. Utility scale- please enlighten me how you cheaply solve intermittent nature or storage. Storage is not cheap at utility scale. Then you’d have to deal with land use too. A 1GW coal plant requires 1,000 acres and can generate 8.7 billion kWh a year. To generate that with solar you’d need over 21,000 acres covered with panels. Then transmit it from wherever you found 21,000 acres. To my point, best action is to raise the price of coal because it kills people and the planet or subsidize nuclear which is emission free so it becomes viable.
The coal plant just eats land somewhere else. Almost all coal is strip mined these days. Underground mining is too labor intensive to be cost effective.
I mean, you pay for the land, right? That’s part of the price. That’s why density doesn’t matter - it’s already in the price. Maybe it’ll eventually raise the price of solar but not as of now. Even then, the price of the panels is still dropping fast whereas the price of nuclear has been rising. So is the 40% from some study somewhere that you can link to? What’s the source of the limit?
Not so. The purpose of an engineer is to design economical solutions. Factoring in cost is fundamental to their purpose. An engineer's true nemesis is the business major. Those shit holes fuck everything up.
The trick: one must become both
It's like one guy being a prosecutor and a defense attorney
Heresy! Abomination! j/k
The engineer must become the artist and vice versa 😛
Honestly, I think baby steps here makes sense. Neither party really champions nuclear energy at this point, and the general population still has some lingering uneasiness around the concept. Cracking open the door for technology research without directly funding new plants is a good way to start the conversation without tripping over any latent fears people have. Easing into it gives time for people to become more informed and maybe lose that fear.
Need proof of concepts to start getting out there and better education instead of fear mongers. Nearly all the reactors in the United States are significantly past their design lifetimes. We urgently need to get replacements going because they won’t just pop up overnight. Besides the fact that all the fear most people have are related to the reactor generations that we are currently running. The new generations have solved most of the issues of the gen 1/2 we are mainly running.
Or just let them reach EOL and replace them with cheaper renewables. No point subsidizing nuclear based on some sentimental value when it doesn't provide energy at costs the customers expect.
Which renewable can provide base load all the time no matter the weather? There is a place for Nuclear in emission free power generation. Brown outs and black outs because it is cloudy/not windy/nighttime are not acceptable. Unless your proposal is to use natural gas power plants instead, I don’t see how you don’t have some sort of power generation that doesn’t care about the weather.
Sentimentality doesn't figure into it, it's pure utilitarianism. There is simply no path to reducing CO2 output while meeting our energy needs that doesn't include a sizable chunk of nuclear energy.
[The research disagrees with you](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910). So, it is feeling based on nuclear being cool? Because you displace [3-10 times as much fossil fuels when investing in renewables depending on the source?](https://www.lazard.com/media/gjyffoqd/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2024.pdf) Lets have a thought experiment. We need to solve climate change between the 2030s and 2040s. Nuclear reactors usually take ~20 years from being announced until commercial operation given all examples we have in the 2000s. Nuclear power **literally can't** have any impact on climate change. **Edit: Love when you get the block by the responder, then you know the argument are thin, and the person knows it.**
Base power load would like a word with your statement. Good luck building enough large and massive solar/wind farms to accomplish what can be done with nuclear power. Stop being so afraid of one of the universes best renewables, nuclear.
> I think baby steps here makes sense. [they have been taking worthless "baby steps" since the 2000s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Power_2010_Program)
The economic problems are caused by excessive regulation. We want the safety regulations, those are good. The problem is that the regulations go far beyond safety to the point of being impossible to comply with, and then any projects get stuck for decades battling bad faith lawsuits intended only to delay and bankrupt the project. Physically building a nuclear power plant only takes a few years. Fighting court battles is what takes 20+ years.
Please point to which regulations that should be repealed then. Should by easy given how strongly you suggest it is excessive regulation.
The reporter is just wrong about this. The economic hurdles are very much a direct result of the NRC being... kind of a caricature of a regulator.
The reporter is wrong because Congress already passed a bill for funding nuclear. It was the IRA.
For profit power generators can’t possibly understand “high upfront cost, net profit benefit”. Line must go up!
True but those are issues they've created themselves! They decided to go with the current concept - instead of one of several alternatives, some of which had already been proven viable - because they had invested money in it and saw no reason to try something different. That's an attitude that is all too common. Especially when your business is essentially guaranteed by the government. Once times change, you are stuck with a bad design and now it's almost impossible to change course. It's obviously an oversimplification but there was plenty of arrogance and stupidity going around when nuclear energy was the next big thing. (Again, you can see the same in many industries.)
We should stop giving bailouts to big corporations like Boeing and cut military funds a little in exchange for funding this
Just look at the high speed internet program. Money isn’t the barrier
Yeah, but we can do something about that. We *can't* do anything about the fact that they always end up being much more expensive to build than claimed and have much worse uptime than anticipated, which is noted later in the article. People always demand to know why we don't use "cheap, clean nuclear," but the answer is that it isn't cheap, and when something goes wrong, it sure as hell ain't clean. I'm pretty pessimistic about all of it, TBH. "Renewables" only seem cheap when you play accounting games, and they fail frequently, in addition to taking up insane amounts of land. Nuclear has the problems stated above. Of course fossil fuels pump out carbon. I think things are going to start falling apart soon.
I have such little faith that congress is capable of doing anything that doesn’t end up fucking the rest of us in the ass, but we’re so desperately in need of nuclear and updating our power grids / infrastructure. Hoping for the best.
Just build small plants across the states, it’s happening everywhere else but here. Stop trying to build mega plants for 50x the cost slowed bureaucratic hurdles. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
It’s hard because there’s certain requirements. It needs a lot of water, there can’t be natural disasters like tsunamis earthquakes tornados etc, and it has to be somewhere that has low risk of violent terrorists hiding nearby
Boomshakalaka! Gen V Incoming!
Damn, is Vought International getting into the industrial power industry? Edit: ®
VSMR and MMR's are safe and reliable as far as I can tell. Their clean and they don't melt-down when the cooling fails. Why more US cities don't switch to them is beyond me.
Because huge beefy reactors may have gargantuan upfront costs, but at least over their lifetime their size allows for some decent energetic economy of scale. SMRs may cost 10 times less instead (numbers pulled entirely out of my ass, but the scale should be correct) but they also produce 20-100 times less power.
FYI SMR’s don’t actually appear to be any cheaper. https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-released-nuscale-small-modular-reactor
FYI you appear to have some understanding problem between unit costs and per-megawatt costs.
Sure, maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but you’re the one that’s admits to pulling numbers out of your ass. Seems to me they’re incorrect, no matter which price metric you choose. The estimates on the price of SMR’s that you’re repeating are decade old propaganda. They cost far more than you’re suggesting.
***I AM*** suggesting that they suck royally. This is what I'm telling you you are failing to appreciate. Just because I said they cost less on per-unit basis than a full ass GW reactor (an obvious fact of reality that *necessarily* must be true when you are building a potato a tenth if not a hundredth of the size) it doesn't mean that they get you more of a return on investment.
I am sorry for the confusion, we are on the same side here. What I wanted you to know was that while it appears to be an obvious fact that they’d be cheaper - that’s what their proponents are shouting from the rooftops for sure - it’s not true once the numbers are crunched. They’re not cheaper, they’re just smaller..
They are cheaper on a per unit sense, which is what the proponents are shouting. And ***if*** the problem was just about some kind of an exponential difficulty in getting the upfront capital, that *even in isolation* wouldn't be wrong to promote. Thing is, the real issue is that almost nobody gives a damn about the "availability premium", right until the day that baseload stations have gone out of business because during half of the day electricity is so cheap to almost be in the negative. And those who does, certainly don't care about CO2 emissions.
So let’s try a different tack here, I don’t feel like you’re hearing me. > They are cheaper on a per unit sense Why do you believe that? Can you show me an installed SMR that came in at a lower unit cost than a gargantuan plant? Cause I haven’t seen one. Everything else you said in that last statement is irrelevant to the point I have made. Overall, my desire would be for those deciding to simply ignore these prototype SMRs and just build the gargantuan nuclear plant.
> Why do you believe that? Because some of the dumb solutions proposed here are like, I don't know, even 50 times smaller? Unless you want to classify even the hypothetical Nuscale 500MW design as "small". > Can you show me an installed SMR that came in at a lower unit cost than a gargantuan plant? A gargantuan plant can cost dozens of billions of dollars. > Everything else you said in that last statement is irrelevant to the point I have made. No, it's absolutely relevant. If you lived on a tidal locked planet (with no clouds too, just because) where it's always, solar panels would be an absolute uncontested no brainier. Similarly, if you lived on a planet with mountains and valleys and rivers everywhere (or well, Norway) you could just build dams and live happily thereafter. But we don't, and the problem is that we place a massive premium on constant availability. > Overall, my desire would be for those deciding to simply ignore these prototype SMRs and just build the gargantuan nuclear plant. Total agree.
Money and uncertainty is why unfortunately.
Because they do not exist. [Small reactors have always been more expensive than large scale ones](https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuclear-reactors), and large scales reactors are horribly uncompetitive based on their current prices. The SMR industry just need to: 1. Build prototype 2. Iterate on prototype. 3. In conjunction start standardizing and automating processes. 4. Achieve large enough scale to amortize the factory and process optimization costs over enough units to actually gain anything. The “SMR hype industry” seems to be perpetually stuck at 1, not even being able to deliver a single prototype. All the while talking like the factory already exists and SMRs are solved. Somehow it doesn’t add up.
Ya know, I had just assumed they had a working prototype. It blows my mind we don't have a working small scale reactor....considering a boyscout nearly built one is his garage one time lol
VSMR? This is not a thing lol
VSMR = Very Small Modular Reactor MMR = Micro Modular Reactor You can fit one in your basement. They still cost millions though. [https://im-mining.com/2021/06/24/vsmrs-solve-decarbonisation-challenges-canadas-remote-northern-mines-study/](https://im-mining.com/2021/06/24/vsmrs-solve-decarbonisation-challenges-canadas-remote-northern-mines-study/)
Let's go fast
Not sure why people given Biden so much shit. I've at least seen forward movement with this administration, even if it's not as fast as people like, at least it's in the right direction.
His support of Palestinian genocide is kind of worth giving him shit for. So there's that at least.
Eh who really cares about that, most people just care about what happens in their own country and forget about major events in the span of a couple weeks or months after it happens.
You should care really, morality and logic don't exist in a vacuum. On the other hand, when he seems to be actually caring way more than half of the country.. These kind of complaints seems detached from reality.
It is quite unfortunate that people don't care as much as they should. But something else always comes up that takes people's attention and then the thing that people did care about or was in the media goes out of their brains, or well, pushed to the side.
Even if you think that's the root of the problem, it's still just one specific demographics to be living of a constant outrage cycle.
I wish that were less true. Most people can only be upset about 1 thing at a time.
It's quite unfortunate
Whoever’s job it is to come up with all these amazing acronyms, I want that job.
Those AI data centers aren't going to power themselves... Not will the build out of all the industry that's going on
Ok NuScale, get crackin.
I don't believe the US is capable of this anymore. I want nuclear power, and America should be using nuclear power, but the industrial base for this doesn't exist anymore. The men, knowledge and experience to build these was put into dumpsters and destroyed. This is not a competitive industry and the US government will not subsidize it as it does with gas. Just look at California ending solar subsidies; we as a nation do not have an economy that can support advanced sources of electric energy. Russia and China do because they don't care about capital costs and if environmentalists complain they are jailed. A much bigger bill is needed. Congress can't even force Nevada to accept our nuclear waste, with the only backup site in New Mexico where it's dumped off on brown people. Congress refuses to push nearby California or Arizona on this, Congress refuses to underwrite plants with national security loans, and Congress refuses to outright buy last-gen plans so the US govt itself can operate them as the TVA has done successfully for fifty years. We need TVAs for the San Joaquin, Pecos and South Platte rivers amongst others. This is the only way the US govt can reliably build NPPs now. It'd also let us stop giving farmers our water for free, encouraging more sustainable agriculture and killing mcdonalds.
But we **should** care about capital costs. Those are real costs.
The real cost is the TCO when the plant hits it's end-of-life and is dismantled. The final cost includes all human health impacts too.
We have nuclear subs and nuclear aircraft carriers... We can build nuclear just fine.
And don’t forget that is also people trained and experienced to operate and maintain it too, not just build.
With the severe individualism rooted in the culture of this country, I'm worried that the future of our climate initiatives will just be a continuation of giving incentives for individuals to buy their own solar panels. Forget the people living in cities who can't get them or the fact that you still need to be connected to an outdated grid even if you install them. Those are problems for the peasants.
Nuclear is ***always*** over budget and years late. The technology may be great... but the execution of nuclear plant construction ends up making the business case horrible. If the planners were actually honest about how much a plant would cost and how late it would be delivered during the initial planning phase we wouldn't see all this resurgence in interest in nuclear. Prove me wrong. You won't be able to. Latest example: [https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3935dd551be9115e88a64](https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3935dd551be9115e88a64) My favorite quote from the above article: "Calculations show Vogtle’s electricity will never be cheaper than other sources Georgia Power could have chosen, even after the federal government reduced borrowing costs by [guaranteeing repayment of $12 billion](https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-perry-announces-conditional-commitment-support-continued-construction-vogtle) in loans." Background article: [https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/)
> Nuclear is always over budget and years late. No it isn't. Just ask the south koreans, or even china. > Prove me wrong. You won't be able to. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 > Latest example: https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3935dd551be9115e88a64 Thank you for making me aware of the [one time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant#Construction), the NRC mandating an almost complete redesign of the reactor caused billions in overruns. > My favorite quote from the above article: "Calculations show Vogtle’s electricity will never be cheaper than other sources Georgia Power could have chosen If I had a cent for every time disingenuous people compared the LCOE of intermittent electricity sources, with baseload ones.. I'd be rich. > even after the federal government reduced borrowing costs by guaranteeing repayment of $12 billion in loans." And it's always ironic seeing people comparing a nuclear power plant (which can last for almost a century) with others forms of generation that you probably wouldn't keep for more than 30 years. > Background article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/ When they mention "regulatory changes", they mean "R&D expenses". I.e. bureaucratic/engineering/design costs. But on the field, that would look a lot like the "construction procedures [changing] in the middle of the build" problem that they were complaining was responsible for the bigger chunk of budget issues.
> No it isn't. Just ask the south koreans, or even china. Just add some corruption scandals and no real transparency on the accounting! Perfect! Then nuclear is economical! **[How greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry ](https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed-and-corruption-blew-up-south-koreas-nuclear-industry/)** > If I had a cent for every time disingenuous people compared the LCOE of intermittent electricity sources, with baseload ones.. I'd be rich. Because baseload does not exist anymore. Heck, even French reactors are being shut down over weekends because they get crowded out of the market by cheap renewables. > And it's always ironic seeing people comparing a nuclear power plant (which can last for almost a century) with others forms of generation that you probably wouldn't keep for more than 30 years. How about you learn about the [time value of money](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp)? Energy generated in 80 years have about zero value today. You are trying to use a logical fallacy which sounds good because the numbers do not add up. We can build wind turbines with 80 year lifespans, we do not do it because it is more energy and economically efficient to replace them earlier with new designs available at that time.
> How greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry Both things can be true at the same time, you know? Not that I have hard numbers to quantify how much that influenced costs (I guess we may only see it when they start to build in poland?) but I don't like how they so casually dismiss the political element. The president which stopped nukes was [definitively](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-nuclear-idUSKBN1CP06F/) ideologically compromised. EDIT: also, it's not exactly clear how much safety was compromised as a result either. Like, concrete quality is of course important. But if the bribe was just to pocket the money of public contracts (like in the case of the turbines) it is beside the point. > Because baseload does not exist anymore. Baseload as in "we need something always running" doesn't exist. Baseload as in "we need at least some portion of the mix not being up in the air on any given day" is very much still required. > Heck, even French reactors are being shut down over weekends because they get crowded out of the market by cheap renewables. You mean [this](https://fortune.com/2024/06/16/electricity-prices-france-negative-renewable-energy-supply-solar-power-wind-turbines/) (also [happening](https://research.sebgroup.com/macro-ficc/reports/49776) in germany btw)? Putting aside that powering down is not shutting down, I don't think you appreciate how much of a self-own that is. That means that we are leading to a future where you can pretty much just separate the market in two. Hours where there's so much overproduction that you get paid pennies (good luck recouping your investments) and hours were solar and/or wind are down and you suck it up. > How about you learn about the time value of money? Yes, that's why LCOE is usually assumed over 20 years. Investors don't have a century to recoup their money. But we are looking at societal costs here ffs. > and economically efficient to replace them earlier with new designs available at that time. The biggest efficiencies increase in wind power, just came from building bigger sizes. Nothing else.
The most recent trend in Nuclear power generation is small modular reactors...unfortunately recent cost estimates blow them out of the water too. [https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-released-nuscale-small-modular-reactor](https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-released-nuscale-small-modular-reactor)
The most recent trend is that, because they are sufficiently small that they don't require state backing for financing. Not because they were supposed to be better economically per se.
I'll believe that nuclear cost is controllable when the first company signs a fixed-cost contract with penalties for delays to build a nuclear generation facility. And to do that without government guarantees. Yeah yeah yeah...regulation, blah blah blah. You didn't read the article - the cost over runs aren't due to safety costs its a lot more complicated than that. Which is why Nuclear is such a poor investment.
> I'll believe that nuclear cost is controllable when the first company signs a fixed-cost contract Hinkley is fixed-cost, and yet costs balooned. Not sure what logic you are arguing about here. > penalties for delays to build a nuclear generation facility Penalties like what? They already get fucked up massively for every single month of delay by interests over the money they get lended. Westinghouse most famously went bankrupted over stuff like this. > Yeah yeah yeah...regulation, blah blah blah. You didn't read the article - the cost over runs aren't due to safety costs its a lot more complicated than that. The cost overruns are due to the lack of know-how, every single reactor being its own cathedral in the desert (this is true even of the older reactors) and yes, even regulatory harassment. This isn't a secret anywhere. Certain designs (like EPR) also being awful to begin with, explains a lot of the high original costs too. > Which is why Nuclear is such a poor investment. Didn't you just linked me an article with all the weight of supposed evidence, and you are now brushing this off like you were shitposting on 4chan?
Nuclear’s time has past. Solar + battery is winning the day every year. Passing this bill is not gonna do much if anything IMO.
You significantly underestimate the sheer output and capacity of a nuclear power plant compared to solar. It’s also not an argument of one over another- BOTH are needed and should be used TOGETHER in the electrical grid.
Battery farms on that large of a scale would be very expensive.
> Solar + battery is winning the day every year. According to whom? Batteries alone would cost you like a nuke.
Fucking morons, mostly GOP to be specifically. Solar and Wind is the way to go, and it's actually cheaper and faster to solve the power demand problem. We don't need more nuclear wastes.
Repeat of 3 mile island incoming
Of course even almost 50 years of continuous flawless operation isn't enough of a high bar for certain people
The same could be said for Boeing, but look at what's happening 🤓
It's paradoxically ***not*** their older planes that are falling apart.
Nuclear is a great solution to help terrorist attack plans. Putin went straight for Ukraine’s plants.
In any war, be it coal, gas or nuclear you go for infrastructure. It’s really irrelevant the type, you still want it offline to cripple your enemy. Putin isn’t going to avoid a power plant because it’s not Nuclear.
No they didn't? It just so happen that the biggest nuclear power plant in europe, sits on the southern side of the biggest ukrainian river. Which (not) coincidentally also serves as the unofficial border with the occupied zone.
Putin had access to high-end military technology and fielded a military that could operate sufficiently undisturbed in Ukrainian airspace.
Maybe private companies should build reactors offshore and then have undersea power cables to the US. I don’t know if it’s possible to convince regular people that nuclear power is safe and effective, it might need to be done in places outside democratic control.
Oh so we get another Deepwater Horizon someday
Nuclear power plants are far safer than deep sea oil drilling. I do see your point though, maybe I kind of just made that comment in a moment of frustration, there should be some government oversight, as much as I hate how the government fails miserably at oversight for every industry, especially nuclear energy.
Terrible idea The most impactful move would be to stop all subsidies for fossil fuels and give them only to green renewables.
[удалено]
Yup, lots of carbon free power and good paying jobs!
So is fossil energy.
Nuclear energy scares people that don’t understand nuclear energy because they dont understand the word “nuclear”, relax its not going to melt your face off if you live in its vicinity
That’s not the real problem. The expense is the bigger issue. If it was cheaper than solar, it would be easier to get over the fears.
[It's been getting cheaper per kwh since 2002](https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources/reports-and-briefs/2023-Costs-in-Context_r1.pdf)
Yes! We have technology that was used in the 70’s that recycled nuclear waste, we fucking banned it due to paranoia.
So is everything else.
And fossil fuel is better, right??? /s
Not really. The only bad thing is running reactors that are getting close to double their designed lives. Those are more expensive than necessary but we can’t get new replacements going because of fear.
Power plants that get their lifetime extended get a lot of retrofitting improvements.