Listening to Jigar Shah, head of the DOE loans program, indicated part of the reason it's so expensive to build NPPs is that each nuclear power plant is a bespoke operation and requires a ton of custom work, planning and certification, etc. The suggestion he made was to create a basic design that you can just copy-paste where suitable, allowing you to leverage economics of scale. This would seem at least at first glance to align with the recommendations in the article.
France has sort of done this - they have 56 reactors in operation all based on the same 3 basic designs[1]. It's pretty incredible how quickly the plants were designed, tested, and built. Over a span of 15 years they brought 56 reactors online[2] - in the US we'd be lucky to build and commission a single reactor in that time span.
It was more like 30 years. '70-'85 was only the CP0-1-2 part, which was about 34 reactors. P and N models were built from '78 to 2000.
Also that doesn't include design. French design was done in the 60's, and resulted in UNGG prototypes which were abandoned in favor of buying a Westinghouse PWR license. All french reactors are based on that license.
Still an amazing feat, considering it's what provides power to France to this day.
Many claim that France’s 1974 Messmer plan resulted in the building of its 58 reactors in 15 years. This is not true. The planning for several of these nuclear reactors began long before. For example, the Fessenheim reactor obtained its construction permit in 1967 and was planned starting years before. In addition, 10 of the reactors were completed between 1991-2000. As such, the whole planning-to-operation time for these reactors was at least 32 years, not 15. That of any individual reactor was 10 to 19 years.
Lets add Flamanville 3 to the "experience" graph in the article. The only reason it gets pushed through is for France to have an industrial base enabling nuclear submarines, carriers and weapons.
> Lets add Flamanville 3 to the "experience" graph in the article. The only reason it gets pushed through is for France to have an industrial base enabling nuclear submarines, carriers and weapons.
That's garbage.
- The reason Flamanville 3 takes so much time is precisely because it is a prototype on a new design that never have been produces in series, nor even tested. That supports 100% what is said here: If you want to reduce cost, mass produce.
- Submarines and carrier nuclear reactors are completely different beast that have nothing to do with either Flammanville 3 or the existing nuclear park.
> Submarines and carrier nuclear reactors are completely different beast that have nothing to do with either Flammanville 3 or the existing nuclear park.
To be completely fair, the french nuclear industry is a small world. DCNS (now called Naval Group) did design and manufacture thermal exchanger for civilian nuclear reactors. On the other hand, if I remember correctly, they do work with Areva (now Orano) for some part of the nuclear submarine.
Company that can produce parts (even things like tubing or screws) for nuclear reactors are very few, so they often end up working for civilian and military application.
All of this to say that the civilian and military nuclear industry are very much intertwined, feed each other and in many ways, keep each other alive.
From the link it looks like it had many changes implemented to improve safety:
The EPR is a so-called “evolutionary” reactor, that is to say that its design is based on that of existing reactors, the French N4 type nuclear reactors and the German Konvoi . It thus benefits from proven technologies and operating feedback from its predecessors.
It is a powerful reactor with a production capacity of 1,600 megawatts (MWe) compared to 1,450 MWe for the latest reactors built in France (type N4). It is designed for a service life of 60 years .
Significant changes have however been introduced compared to existing reactors
Perhaps more importantly, there's a pretty long engineering history of assuming that "similar" means "don't need to test as much" not working out. Any time you make a change, you can and should be testing the parts as though they were a new design. I mean the most recent example of that was the Boeing MCAS.
I wouldn't call Ariane 5 an evolution of Ariane IV.
Code and digital system re-use in aerospace systems is not uncommon. After all, the fly-by-wire computer system on board the Space Shuttle was derived from the original Apollo flight computer, and they are two very different space vehicles..
Right but the point is it doesn't let you make assumptions that tests aren't needed, just that you expect them to be likely to pass. The design still has to be tested as though its a new system, it's just the re-use hopefully saved some development time and the testing hopefully finds fewer issues.
A new system requiring extensive testing would have alerted the FAA that something was off, and possibly led to a more costly re-certification they were trying to avoid.
That aircraft should never have been allowed to fly.
It doesn't matter if it's an evolution or a revolution - a change of any sort means new tooling to produce the components, new procedures to assemble them, new analysis to certify that they will all work together, and new training for everyone involved to do all the above.
All this was known before starting the building process, and the builder planned to deliver the reactor in 2012. It is late (right now: not delivered) mainly because project management and quality insurance were abysmal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
That article neglects that the plants built by the end of the program were not the same as the plants built in the beginning. Within each "pallier", a speedup can clearly be observed. Likewise, costs can hardly be compared if you don't look at the same models.
I have no idea how a speedup appears to you. On the graph it is quite clear that, with time (and therefore experience), the average amount of time needed to build one is raising.
That's 2-3rds of the builds showing a speedup. The results are even more striking if you calculate the correlation between start date and build time for any 2 reactors of the same model.
Yes, I considered the long-term experience gain (columns, not lines: from 65 to 151 and from 60 to 104).
The first nuclear plants were theoretically the most difficult to build as the local industry was less adjusted to building such things, especially specific components.
As those reactor 'models' were very similar (there is no quantum leap) pertinent experience (processes, tooling...) accumulated.
However there was no reduction of 'intensity' (investments, amount of simultaneous building projects, foreseeable projects...) as all this was encompassed by a huge national programme (the 'Plan Messmer').
Therefore it seems that both min and max time to completion should diminish with time.
> Yes, I considered the long-term experience gain (columns, not lines: from 65 to 151 and from 60 to 104). [...] As those reactor 'models' were very similar [...]
They're not the same buildings. A N4 is much larger than a CP0, uses different technologies, has more safety features, produces much more power, etc.
To compare with another tech topic, that's like expecting SpaceX to design or build their spaceship faster or cheaper than they designed their falcon. That's unlikely, even though falcon knowledge definitely benefited the design of their new craft.
Not exactly the same but same generation, architecture and design (Westinghouse), slightly (not fundamentally) enhanced. Stating that new features add such a large amount of work (relatively to the total amount) that it compensates for the knowledge gained thanks to previous projects is debatable.
Between the oldest (CP0) and newest (N4) aren't the key differences limited to a same machine and command room shared (CP0) or not (N4) between reactors, scale (CP0's nominal power being lower), and details related to fuel rods and pipes? In which way are they dissimilar to the point of absorbing the effect of gained knowledge and adding such delays?
Even the shiny new EPR is a mere enhancement of the core design dating back ~1970.
Sorry, I don't know enough about SpaceX to have an opinion.
> Even the shiny new EPR is a mere enhancement of the core design dating back ~1970.
If you push this logic to its end, even a tesla car is a mere enhancement of the electric cars produced in 1900. There is no breaking change like wings, the ability to teleport or supersonic speed.
If you look in details what changed between CP0's and N4's though, there's quite some change [1]: N4's have a double containment enclosure while CPO's have a single one, the vessel contains 400m3 vs. 270m3 and weights almost 50% more, sustains 15 mor bars and 15 more °Cs, and it produces almost 60% more power.
Enough progress for Westinghouse to value Framatome's experience to the point that they became a partner, stopped paying license fees and earned the right to export their design[2].
The N4 double containment is a mainly quantitative change, as are all the other changes you mentioned: the very architecture remains the same, as do the associated exploitation processes.
Those modifications were big enough to justify seeing the N4 as a "new design" because the French worked hard to master this design, and since 1981 (Nuclear Technical Cooperation Agreement, NTCA) Westinghouse & the French formally exchanged know-how. Moreover Westinghouse didn't work on the N4 and it escaped the Westinghouse license (which expired in 1992). However the very design isn't disruptive.
As for this approach efficiency the note #17 seems pertinent.
Negative learning by doing is very easy to explain: as you go, you realise many perils and dangers of this thing that you were not aware of in the beginning, and those result in a lot of safety precautions added in subsequent projects, increasing the costs.
I begin to understand the logic behind the US derailings.
The idea here is that maintenance is much, much cheaper than rescue operations. If 100 more pumps let you run for years without a scram, go along and order them.
Genuine question. What is the stopping the US from paying every experienced French Nuclear Engineer x 2 x Usual US cost Adjustment --> and letting them build here in the US ? France and US are allies, and likely aligned on climate goals. France has similar climate as many of the planned regions and has fairly high building standards.
The US has no lack of relevant engineers, after all, it does maintain a large fleet of nuclear powered vessels. As is usual with most of America's problems, there's just a lack of sufficiently concentrated political will to get things done.
That's probably the biggest single contributor to the lack of political will. Not just the company bosses, though - a lot of the employees will have similar interests. Say there's an "oil town" or a "coal town", that's a lot of voters.
Certainly. It's an odd dynamic because the same people who want to eliminate fossils also hate nuclear. The trending political position is energy austerity, while at the same time electrifying everything. But that's just not going to happen. (Well, I guess it does in California with the rolling blackouts.)
Yes, after all, the reason that Texas is currently working on laws to block renewable power generation in favor of fossil fuel power is because their power grid is _too_ reliable.
> there's just a lack of sufficiently concentrated political will to get things done.
Ideally it shouldn't be the case that something like building a power plant to produce electricity shouldn't require political will; just willing investors and operators who desire to make a profit.
Well, surely the government can’t allow anyone to just build a nuclear power plant, so some policies are required. I can’t judge how reasonable or unreasonable the current ones are. But I can imagine for reasonable policies to be unprofitable without government subsidies, and that would require political will.
If a political will is needed to do X, we need to look again at whether we really need it. Normally stuff that's needed, happens by itself as market forces push it.
Which is why healthcare, housing and education is super affordable, big tech companies are respecting people's privacy and freedom and climate change has been averted.
Exactly! They all lack some of the properties that make markets efficient, or form a market at all.
- Healthcare cannot be an efficient free market, where those who can pay most receive the best, and those who cannot pay get nothing. The reasons are pretty obvious. It sort-of-works as an insurance scheme, but currently in the US it's more like a payment scheme (and prices blow up), and in most of the EU is like a redistribution scheme (and amount of care is highly minimized until your condition is really serious).
- Housing in desired areas is heavily influenced administratively by zoning and other stifling norms (hello, SF), and also lack of land in desirable areas (hello, Manhattan). If you agree to live far from bustling megacities or posh suburbs, houses are relatively affordable. (But how are you going to earn the money then?)
- Privacy is not something you want to sell on the market; the whole point is to prevent it. So market forces can't solve it directly. You can buy e.g. an iPhone that gives you more privacy, or use a paid search engine and, a paid email provider, a VPN, etc if you agree to pay more for preserving your privacy; here the markets work well.
- Climate change is again not about trading and competition, because its downsides were not priced into any goods, and mostly are not yet still. Make carbon emission expensive, and the market forces will do their job. E.g. a lot of datacenters are carbon-neutral and powered by solar / wind / hydro just because otherwise the electricity ends up being pretty expensive.
Lobbyists don't stop this. Government chooses to listen to lobbyists. I don't understand why people don't blame the government for government failings.
Giving them free money from taxes and expecting them to not be bribed is not too much to ask.
Sure, it's a government failing. Or looking wider, perhaps a system failing that the only governments who succeed in getting in are the ones that are cozy with lobbyists who either make big donations to their campaigns, or wield influence with the electorate in other ways.
I don't know how to fix that, but I imagine it's going to require political will from somewhere.
> I don't understand why people don't blame the government for government failings.
In the end we get the politicians we deserve. If we're too lazy to find the uncorruptable ones, or even run ourselves if all are corrupt, we get corrupt politicians.
Most of those things are being caused by political will.
Healthcare is paralysed by over-regulation. There are lots of easy ways to bring down costs in healthcare that the average entreprenure would love to fix. They don't fix the problems because most of those ways have been made illegal because regulators who adopt a do-no-harm approach that ironically causes more harm than good. In every country I can read the laws of, a doctor and a patient trying to make decisions about healthcare are going to discover that the regulator is in the room 2nd guessing them.
Housing and education, assuming we are talking the US, have been flooded with credit by the government. That happens to be why costs are so high. There is no way the levels of money there are the market-optimal amounts. Every so often the housing market tries to shed debt and force people to buy the things they enjoy and the regulators step in with money printing. I'm pretty sure the US even has such a thing as a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage which is insane. I see figures as high as trillions [0] in the things.
Big tech the reason we need privacy is because sooner or later there will be authoritarians in charge with a lot of political will, using that data. There is a conversation to be had there; the Europeans have crippled their tech sector and privacy legislation was a part of that. Maybe the upside is worth the costs.
Climate change I give you the market would ignore. For the same reason it is ignored politically - nearly nobody thinks it is worth spending real money on to try and fix it.
The biggest problem with healthcare is that doctors are sued if they don't provide state of the art care. So there's an incentive to produce more and more expensive drugs and technologies, and no (or at least insufficient) ability to trade off cost vs. effectiveness.
But that is caused by nothing but zoning! That's the only reason. Sure, in a token few places like NYC, probably prices would be sky high even without the zoning, but in the absolute majority of places, not at all. Zoning is a politically pushed limitation of construction for the benefit of incumbents - local property owners who want their housing values to go sky high, and they achieve it. It's example of conseqences of government action.
Permissive zoning doesn't make cheap/affordable housing more profitable than mcmansions.
It's easier and more profitable for a developer to work with a single rich individual to sell them a big overpriced house instead of working hard to make a lot of housing with a small margin (because the purchasers CANNOT AFFORD a high margin).
You know what finally got builders to put up new, affordable housing in my area? Rent control (well, "stabilization"). It means they can only "capture" the cash looking for property in the area by building new property, because otherwise they are limited in the price they can charge. It has caused many area landlords to start huge housing projects because the alternative is a 5% max increase in rent income every year.
I would have imagined an apartment block would be by far the most valuable thing a developer could put on a property if permitted and in the right area.
At worst, usually you'll do better with 4-6 units on a single block than a single high-value dwelling. People value having anywhere at all to live quite highly, and further amenties than that significantly less (ie. a 4bd house with 2x the space is not worth 2x a single house with half the space)
I'm not talking total income, I'm talking profit per effort. Does a developer really want to take the big risk of hoping they can find a property management client to take the large apartment building off their hands for a probably minimal profit since they are also a business with strong connections looking to earn maximum profit off minimum work?
It's so much easier for the average development group or individual to just build a single mcmansion, where the profit margin can be easily raised with stupid water fixtures or other pointless things, and with clients that are not at all price sensitive. A single moderately expensive mcmansion is probably also easier to get financing for than a competitively priced apartment building where you basically have to hope you keep a good market position for 15 years to start actually making money.
Absolutely so. Zoning rules prohibit construction of more units per plot exactly because this is what customers want to buy and developers want to build and what makes the most money to everyone - everyone except the incumbents who own other places because that would increase housing supply in their area and lower valuations of their existing properties. If developers wanted to build a smaller number of bigger houses and customers wanted to buy those, zoning rules won't exist, they won't be necessary.
I did consider that a little after posting - my conclusion was that people who don't have access to credit will be pushed out of the market and forced to rent.
> Climate change I give you the market would ignore. For the same reason it is ignored politically - nearly nobody thinks it is worth spending real money on to try and fix it.
Some of us feel that you can literally wipe the US off the map and it wouldn’t make a single degree’s worth of difference to climate. Some of us also feel that the climate movement is not about climate but about resource redistribution and thus suspect in its real intent.
To solve the problem which an organization was created to solve means to show that the organization is no longer needed. But this means no more work to be paid for!
The same reason that France is utterly failing at building flamaville 3 - it's not a technical problem but of regulation, government and public support.
And yet, EDF successfully built Taishan 1 and Taishan 2 in China, pretty much in time and in budget. There were a couple of teething issues (as expected given these were the first two EPRs to enter service), but they are now running great.
According to Yves Bréchet [1], former head of the French Atomic Energy Commission, the main difference is not regulation, government or public support. It's something that should speak a lot to the engineers on HN, but is almost always absent in public debates: the lack of technical expertise. Think expert welders, pipe-fitters, boiler makers, etc. The expertise required when making a nuclear power plant is very high, including and especially when it comes to welding, quality of steel, etc.
Costly mistakes were made while welding critical parts of Flamanville 3 for instance, requiring expansive and expensive rework. I don't think Hinkley Point C is faring much better. On the other side of the world China has been building nuclear power plants relentlessly: they have all the expertise needed. If you allow me a slight exaggeration, given France and UK massive de-industrialization over the last few decades, we are now amateurs compared to China.
Again, it's not an issue of regulation. It's just that when you don't build things the know-how gets lost very very quickly. Something that should get hammered in the head of all CEOs/managers/decision maker...
Yves Bréchet point in the linked video is that it’s first and foremost technical expertise, rather than political/regulatory landscape that explains why Taishan has fared better than the other EPR projects.
It’s not something we (I’m European) want to hear.
It doesn’t mean that public support doesn’t impact projects in Europe (or democracies in general), but it should not be used as an excuse to refuse to look further.
For instance Flamanville got a massive delay because of welding issues. That’s not a regulatory or public opinion issue. That’s an issue with the (lack of) expertise of French welders.
I don’t remember if it is for this one, or for repairs in other French nuclear power plants, but Canadian welders were called to the rescue…
I think it was for other nuclear plants that had been operating. Foreign welders were needed because there was only so much welding one worker could do before they reached their radiation exposure limit.
US compliance & regulation, which would take three committees and five years to approve each metric BOM item or certified acceptable substitute?.
You don't even need to oay the engineers more, not only because you have engineers, but because EDF for example can be given attractive enough terms to build and operate overseas, as it has in the UK.
Hard to be sure because of the population difference, but India's got to be well up there. US border control is a paramilitary operation; India's is a bureaucratic one.
Look, the elephant in the room is that if a power company wants to invest a billion dollars in power generation, they are going to do it with solar/wind. The project scales out, the cost is dropping constantly, and they get power generation early in the project.
A nuclear power plant is:
- a 10 year investment delay (with no return until completed)
- could be cancelled at any moment (high risk)
- with a very uncertain price target (solar/wind + grid storage will probably be half the cost or less of what it is today)
- can't be expanded
- very likely to balloon in cost and be a total financial quagmire
Solar/wind can be scalably purchased, installed, and expanded as needed. The costs will drop continuously, replacement and maintenance is easy, there's no nuclear waste to get rid of, and can very reliably be specced in terms of cost for generation.
Power companies that wants to invest a billion dollars in power generation will also invest into fossil fueled power delivery. Solar and wind produce a lot of cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but when the weather change and demand exceeds supply, the market price of energy goes to the roof. Last winter in Europe we saw prices spikes well over 100x of what the average market cost, which primarily went pay for fossil fueled power generation. Fossil fueled power delivery also get a lot of subsidizes in order to provide reserve energy, so they get the advantage of being paid twice.
Solar and wind is excellent investment for those wanting to compete when supply in the grid is high and prices are low. Nuclear, hydro, storage and fossil fuels are there to compete with supply is low and prices high.
But not the ones who underestimated decommissioning costs by a factor of 4 vs. Germany's estimates, and about a factor of 10 vs. UK. France is not the paragon of nuclear efficiency it is commonly portrayed as being.
It's not just that NPPs are expensive to build, and unpredictably priced in ways that make the price of power generated uncompetitive. They are also a large and hard to predict liability after they stop generating power and the income from selling that power.
There is no example of "this is how to do it." New designs have to emerge and be proven before it is possible to build new NPPs with as much cost certainty as other kinds of power generation.
France still hasn't built a reactor in several decades. Latest started in 91 and finished in 02. The problem is that the parent missed some parts of the story.
I don't think this is an issue of engineer competency. If you gave it to a French company, even they would be bogged down by the US regulatory agency and simply fail.
I am a Czech, so no dog in this particular fight barks for me.
But the French train company SNCF abandoned the Californian high-speed rail project, citing local political dysfunctionality and comparing it unfavorably to ... Morocco.
Made perfect sense. Uncomfortable length to drive, and end to end trip time would be shorter (and more comfy) on a highspeed train than on a plane (getting to the airport early, security, baggage collection, taxi to the city, etc).
Like any transportation projects it won't make economic sense if you ignore wider societal impacts. Highway expansion or airport expansion would neither ever make any economic sense at all if you'd apply the same narrow model. Now if you include climate impacts and the true cost of the climate catastrophe HSR is really the only transit project on this corridor that does make sense.
Ridiculous compared to what? Freeway expansion? Airport expansion? Do nothing?
Freeway expansion is not that much cheaper, and if you factor in the cost of 6 hour drives (or 8 hour bus) over the entire users, I’m not sure freeway expansion comes out in favor.
Airport expansion is also ridiculously expensive. The airspace between San Fransisco and Los Angeles is already super congested. You will probably need to build whole new airports to offer the same capacity as high speed rail. Airport expansion also fails to service the Central Valley, which leads to further economic depression of the millions of people who live there, making this option even more economically ridiculous.
This leave us with do nothing. Sure people can take the 9 hour bus or the 12 hour train and save the carbon footprint, or they can ignore the climate crisis and drive the 6 hours or navigate the dozens of airport combinations. This is by far the cheapest option, but only if you ignore the economic impacts of people choosing not to travel between between population centers in California. Given the cost of travel in California, both in time and carbon emissions, than keeping the travel options as is, is also a ridiculous option.
Perhaps high speed rail is economically ridiculous, but given the options we have, it is still the most sane option.
Probably the same problems that are making (rail) infrastructure building 10x more expensive in the US than in Europe.
It's not that the knowledge is inaccessible, the problem is that the not-invented-here syndrome compounded by administrative red-tape, powerful counter lobbies and greedy actors make those projects prohibitively expensive.
If you mean the public, I'd expect a lot of people, if it were presented right, considering how often the cost of energy comes up in political discussion
If you mean congress, I think the more important questions are
- who would lobby for it?
- who would lobby against it?
GreenPeace has a lot of content on their website[0] with questionable anti-nuclear power content. They have been a force for decades for anti-nuclear content, when renewables were in a hilariously worse state than they are today.
That's a story from 2008. The case for nuclear had not so completely fallen apart at that point. But since then PV has become an order of magnitude less expensive, and the "nuclear renaissance" has so spectacularly flamed out in the US.
Moore's claim that replacement of fossil fuels would require nuclear is at this point objectively wrong. I mean, it was unproven then and disproven now.
It would be good to hear some evidence of why you think it's disproven.
And the topic of this thread is what lobbying has prevented said nuclear renaissance. You can't use the result of lobbying to prove that the assumptions behind the lobbying were correct.
Renewables and storage are cheap enough that a 100% renewably powered world economy is possible. And they would be cheaper than nuclear in most places.
The objections to this now are mostly "but it hasn't been done yet", which is the last ditch stand of the passive-aggressive denialist (and hypocrite, if that person says nuclear could do it.)
> Renewables and storage are cheap enough that a 100% renewably powered world economy is possible. And they would be cheaper than nuclear in most places.
How do you know this? Other than for new designs, nuclear/coal/gas costs and performance are well understood in because we've done them for 50+ years.
> The objections to this now are mostly "but it hasn't been done yet", which is the last ditch stand of the passive-aggressive denialist (and hypocrite, if that person says nuclear could do it.)
This just seems to be ad hominem stuff. Claiming something that hasn't been done as fact is an obvious problem. Attacking the people who say it rather than what's said is, well. Ad hominem, as I say.
They had no idea if they were correct, and if more nuclear power had been built then we would be in a much better place globally than we are in now.
Only France, being the archetype of the unmitigated Gaul, actually pushed ahead despite all this Greenpeace pressure and established a great example of lowering CO2 emissions without burning a load of gas. Which to me implies that they weren't correct.
And no one is forgiving them or not. I'm just stating another large force that has been a nuclear power trip hazard for the last 50 years and prevented the economies of scale for nuclear that all forms of power generation need to lower their costs. The question was "who would lobby against?" which I was answering.
Hard to say. The public is divided. Even environmentalists are divided. Some follow the old misinformed guard led by ms. Fonda and you have some more new throwback environmentalists behind nuclear.
It really sticks is my craw that a misinformed but activist actress can torpedo an industry for half a century.
The industry and governments of the time torpedoed itself by insisting on secrecy and, especially in the case of the UK, doing stupid things like building the reactors on SSSIs (sites of special scientific interest, for instance Torness) instead of building them near where the power was needed.
As someone else said in this discussion: presented properly many people would vote for nuclear power. However, you need to have some substance to the presentation too.
One of the core problems with nuclear is the size and scale of risk posed by cost cutting and neglect over its lifetime, especially the waste. People neither trust for-profit enterprises or present/future governments with that sort of responsibility (and with empirically justifiable reasons). I’m aware newer models are stated to be significantly safer, but assurances mean little when these institutions have repeatedly lied and failed in the past.
Either way, US carriers are probably one of the safest places for nuclear, as they’re mission critical for the life of the carrier and most likely to receive the utmost care… Plus the US has a long history of rubber stamping virtually unlimited funds to solve any military problem, whether the people approve or not. The handling of the waste is still a major concern, but what about the consequences of a torpedo compromising the reactor in warfare?
> in the US we'd be lucky to build and commission a single reactor in that time span
Most countries, including the US and France, did a build out in the 70's/80's and then basically stopped. France a bit later than the US, but both essentially did the same thing. Checking the wiki list[0] and sorting by operation year you can see 4 things. 1) the vast majority of reactors were built in the 70's, 2) the newest reactor was built in the 90's (operational 2001), 3) the most recent reactors took longer to go into operation (including a few at 16 years, where the 70's build out was typically 6-7 years), 4) almost all 70s/80's reactors are of the same type and same power level (CP1, CP2, P4 REP 1300). We actually see the exact same story in the US (see Watts Bar, ouch).
On the other hand, South Korea didn't do their build out till the mid 80's and continued into the 90's. Then we see the wall hit in the 2000's with the APR 1400. Japan did a bit better and strangely looks like the big success story, especially considering how many reactors such a small country built. Interestingly only Mitsubishi reactors are still operational... Canada is also a good success story but also hasn't built anything since the late 80's (but last reactor was still <10yrs).
Countries like Sweden, started their build out but then there was a hard stop. Sweden had nothing past '85. Germany isn't too far off, but it is also a different story. Ditto for UK.
I intentionally left out China and Russia because different economic structures and because the stories are a bit different even though might appear similar to what I'm discussing at face value (note that my comments are vastly oversimplified, with some things only being alluded to), but it is worth paying attention to the above patterns and think about how the economic structure might reinforce some of those aspects, then think about the western countries different styles during their build out phases (how it actually worked).
The nuclear story is long and complicated. Even this wall of text is oversimplified. This is part of the problem: we like our simple talking points but as speakers are often unwilling to admit that these are only part of the stories or as listeners rebut the speaker as if they are only considering a single factor. It makes real conversation almost impossible and both play a role and build over time. Which is not too dissimilar to a few problems that happened in the nuclear industry.
The regulatory ratchet, headline fear and a complete refusal to consider having a $/QALY number is the reason for the insane costs. Nuclear power is the most over regulated industry in the world, with many safety measures giving returns of less than a single quality adjusted life year per billion dollars! (You can get this number simply by comparing the accident rate and QALY costs of 1970s reactors to modern ones)
The clean up was absolutely over the top and not guided by objective measures. The government effectively already absorbs all costs involving the externalities of coal, oil and other dirty sources of energy, which add up to way more than 150 billion.
Renewables are great but they don't provide a good base capacity capability. That means you still need hydro, geothermal (both limited), coal, gas, oil or nuclear in your grid, with enough capacity to provide energy in case it's not sunny or windy. Large scale storage using batteries is simply not feasible at this point, which is why nuclear is still a good bridge technology until we figure that out.
Unfortunately your misconception is very popular, and I think a large part of why a lot of people don't support nuclear.
Actually, no, you're the one stuck on a misconception.
Renewables + storage can provide "synthetic baseload" at a cost that will likely be lower than nuclear in most places, especially for a new nuclear plant whose construction has not started yet (it will compete with renewables + storage of the future, since they are installed much faster and don't have to start now to be done at the same time.)
An important reminder is to not use just batteries for storage. Many bogus attempts to show renewables can't do it assume batteries are used for long term storage. This is a technological strawman argument. Use e-fuels instead. With renewables and electrolysers crashing in price, green hydrogen will become remarkably cheap.
> Renewables + storage can provide "synthetic baseload" at a cost that will likely be lower than nuclear in most places,
Try actually calculating this. Last I did I got around $100 billion per year needed for storage+renewable for the UK, which was triple the wholesale electricity annual revenue.
Got the numbers for hydrogen (energy conversion loss, storage costs per kwh, drain, cycle numbers, costs per kw)? The 2019 US department of energy storage costs paper I used didn't include it and I suspect this was because the numbers are atrocious. Compressed air storage seems like the best for day+ energy storage with batteries for hourly storage.
What do you mean by "storage"? Short term storage only, like batteries? This would lead to an overly large renewable installation to power the country in the winter.
The round trip efficiency of hydrogen is indeed bad, but for long term storage that's is overwhelmed by the much lower cost of hydrogen storage capacity, vs. batteries.
The round-trip efficiency isn't actually that bad once you realize that we're dealing with large installations here. For instance, heat can be used to make hydrogen, which is why you sometimes hear about nuclear power making hydrogen. Large installations can recapture heat, either as co-generation or use it to drive a gas turbine.
You can look at the assumptions under https://model.energy/ which were based on cost data in Europe (I believe there's a link to the source).
Per-kW cost of electrolysers is already 1/2 of the total per-kW cost given there in the 2030 assumptions (but that may include other equipment).
Cost of storage caverns is well known from natural gas, as little as $1/kWh of capacity. Cost of combined cycle plants to convert the hydrogen back to power is also well known, as these will be nearly identical to natural gas fired CC plants (just the details of the combustors will change.)
Can you point me to a country that can store even 1% of their energy needs currently? If not, you're talking about unproven technologies that may or may not fix this problem. I hope they do, but until then we are in a world where closing a nuclear plant means opening up a carbon-intensive one. Renewables are not currently a replacement for nuclear, and this is not a misconception, it is a fact.
Pretty much all of them? That's because they burn fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are also storage. There's no sense making a synthetic fuel for storage when you're still burning a natural fuel.
Care to show me a country with a breeder-based nuclear cycle? Oh gosh, by your logic nuclear cannot use breeders, since it hasn't been done yet. I guess nuclear is ruled out so we're totally doomed. Fortunately, your logic is entirely specious.
There is no easy way to economically produce a synthetic fuel at scale as you suggest. It is irrelevant whether breeder reactors work or not, I can point to dozens of countries with a significant impact of nuclear in their mix, but you cannot provide a single country that uses synthetic fuels or any other type of storage at scale (>0.1% would probably still be challenging).
My logic is that we are currently shutting down or creating regulatory hurdles for the cleanest base load technology, which is proven safe and reliable, in favor of pipe dreams such as that renewables plus storage is all we need.
Hydrogen can be produced and stored on a massive scale. Electrolysers are now below $300/kW.
"Economically"? Compared to current hydrogen from methane, sure that would be hard. But compared to electrical power from nuclear? Much easier. Exelon stated in 2005 that nuclear could be competitive if natural gas (with a $25/ton CO2 tax) were around $14/MMBtu (note that natural gas at the Henry Hub is a bit over $2/MMBtu right now). That's about $.05/kWh(thermal). Electrolysis could pretty easily make hydrogen at that cost, given today's cheap renewable energy. Given that those 2005 nuclear cost estimates were optimistic, I doubt existing nuclear could compete with combined cycle plants burning green hydrogen. Of course, on a renewable grid, a great deal of the energy will go directly from the renewable sources to the grid, not through hydrogen, so nuclear will do even more poorly.
Why don't you answer my question? Can you point to a country that uses electrolysis and hydrogen at scale currently? Because if we are going by estimates and projections, I can also talk about fusion and other pipe dreams on the nuclear side. Not to mention a lot of electrolysis is currently done with fossil fuels.
I don't answer obviously bad faith questions. It doesn't matter whether hydrogen is being done at scale right now. What matters is whether it could be done at scale when fossil fuels are out of the picture. And the answer to that is clearly that it can.
Indeed. And yet, there's the stubborn idea that the prices of electrolysers will not continue to decline along an experience curve. The same blindness occurred with critics of solar and wind.
Sorry but your source is bad - no details whatsoever about which storage solution they are aiming for. Regardless, we know for a fact that not a single country has storage capabilities for even 1% of their energy needs. Lots of initiatives want to change that, such as the one you posted, but there is absolutely no large scale solution for this issue at all. Once you accept that fact, you realize renewables are not a replacement for nuclear at this point.
I greatly appreciate your second link and will have a look at it later. I'm very curious how they got such a high figure for the nuclear cost given a look at even more expensive modern nuclear reactors costs gives a number of around $0.07/kWh.
$0.07/kWh is not even close to reality in the west. $0.12 - 0.2/kWh is the reality. This is whole sale prices, so you can not compare it to your power bill.
I think you is the one blinded by the industries promises rather than the reality it produces.
Take IEA and their special report on Nuclear power. They generally are super conservative and in favor of traditional methods.
> As an established large-scale low emissions energy source, nuclear is well placed to help decarbonise electricity supply. In the IEA’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario (NZE), energy sector emissions fall by about 40% from 2020 to 2030, and then decline to zero on a net basis by 2050. While renewable sources dominate and rise to nearly 90% of electricity supply in the NZE, nuclear energy plays a significant role. This narrow but achievable pathway requires rigorous and immediate policy action by governments around the world to reshape energy systems on many fronts.
> Nuclear has to up its game in order to play its part
> The industry has to deliver projects on time and on budget to fulfil its role. This means completing nuclear projects in advanced economies at around USD 5 000/kW by 2030, compared with the reported capital costs of around USD 9 000/kW (excluding financing costs) for first-of-a kind projects. There are some proven methods to reduce costs including finalising designs before starting construction, sticking with the same design for subsequent units, and building multiple units at the same site. Stable regulatory frameworks throughout construction would also help avoid delays.
Essentially - Nuclear as it exists today is dead, if it can get it costs down to less than half it may play a tiny role.
It looks like you've been posting overwhelmingly on one topic. Single-purpose accounts are not allowed here, regardless of their purpose or topic, because they go against the spirit of intellectual curiosity that we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). We therefore ban this sort of account.
I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please stop doing this on HN, we'd appreciate it.
Actually model it. Go look at gridwatch and use the graphs to calculate total storage needs if using a wind-solar mix, then check out the US department of energy 2019 report on energy storage solution characteristics.
Calculated total cost when I did it would have tripled UK electricity prices.
Pure French nuclear, on the other hand, resulted in a mere 30% increase in electricity prices.
Yes, over regulation leads to massively spiraling costs as delays lead to financing issues (both interest and uncertainty), knowledge loss, project management timing issues, etc etc
And yet even with that you're getting 400 billion kWh over its 40 year lifespan for €13 billion construction costs (multiply by 1.5 for lifetime costs), for electricity production price of €0.05 per kWh. Which is honestly decent.
Btw: did you actually do the calculation before posting?
Go ahead as long you don't use hydro or fossil fuels to fill in demand when renewables are not producing.
This is one of those areas where an technology neutral law should be applied. Rather than have the government pay for insurance, move that to a tax on the consumer based on how much energy is consumed and the cost of accidents and environmental impact. For energy produced by fossil fuels that would be any costs associated with global warming (including any accidents and extreme weather), for hydro it would be flooding, and for nuclear it would be nuclear accidents. Base the insurance cost on the historical accident rate and the predicted rate in the future.
That would make renewable energy even cheaper in optimal weather, energy produced from fossil fuel a few order of magnitudes more expensive for every watt consumed, and nuclear and hydro would increase by a modest sum.
Yeah, that's what TFA is about. People thought about it, but it turns out it doesn't matter, because regulatory requirements were a moving target and were applied retroactively to any project not yet finished.
This quote sums it up nicely:
> It doesn’t matter how standardized your design is if you end up needing to change it on every project to meet new requirements.
Yeah, but how can that happen in a changing regulatory environment? From the article it seems to me that even if you had built a plant and loved the design, it probably wouldn't be legal to build another one just like it a few years down the road. The author says that part of the reason for cost overruns is that the rules change even after construction has begun.
I worked in commercial nuclear operations for 23 years. It was a two unit site with unit one built first. It was designed as two identical units. By the time unit 2 was finished the regulations had changed so much that final reactor required operators to get a seperate license for each unit.
If DoE provided the regulations then they could update the template design as they update the regulations - if the build of the plant needed to change because of a change in regulations then they could account for that in the design.
The way to build standardized nuclear plants is for the reactor maker to build merchant plants, operate them, and sell the output into competitive power markets. It's like SpaceX building and operating their own vehicles, and how many renewable and natural gas power plants work.
It's just that no such merchant nuclear plant has ever been built anywhere. There's a serious lack of dog food here.
Of all of the things to entrust to the invisible hand of the private sector, I would put nuclear power generation dead fucking last on the list.
If you thought Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were bad, wait until some CEO decides to juice The Atomic Corporation's Q4 earnings by skipping a few safety inspections and half the Eastern seaboard no longer needs streetlights because everyone's tumors glow in the dark.
> If you thought Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were bad, wait until some CEO decides to juice The Atomic Corporation's Q4 earnings by skipping a few safety inspections
Perhaps things are different now, but when I was going through the Navy's cram course for the [chief] engineer exam after two years of pretty-intensive sea duty, we worked through some what-if scenarios that they hadn't exposed us to in the year-long basic nuclear-propulsion course. That experience was a real eye-opener — especially coupled with having seen shipyard workers in "action" during my ship's in-port maintenance periods.
I still remember the exact moment in the cram course — sitting in a conference room at a Navy base on a gorgeous San Diego day — when I thought, oh, s__t, civilian workers shouldn't be running nuclear-power plants that are located anywhere near civilization. This was about a year before Three Mile Island and about eight years before Chernobyl.
To be clear, I was comfortable with the Navy's operating practices, which — thanks to the Rickover culture — were ferociously focused on safety and on second-checking everything in sight.
Supposedly there are inherently-safer civilian reactor designs out there now that are less vulnerable to human f*-ups; I haven't kept up and wouldn't be competent to judge.
> thanks to the Rickover culture — were ferociously focused on safety and on second-checking everything in sight.
So true. This also explains why France never had any major mishap degenerating into a severe accident.
There is an old joke: "1 worker opens some valve, 10 workers check that the valve is indeed open, 30 engineers study causes, consequences and ways to cope with this process".
However nothing is perfect, and a major accident may also be triggered by some terrorist/desperate mind/military/... action.
There are other parameters: hot waste, geo-strategic challenges tied to uranium, lowering ore grades inducing more and more polluting extraction processes...
Moreover we don't know how to build reactors anymore upon a decent schedule and budget: 9 out 10 of those built since the 2000's are late and overbudget, and most other ones are opaque projects.
Three Mile Island however was probably in part caused by the operations team on duty at the time being former Navy nukes: their instincts for what they needed to prevent going wrong were completely mismatched to the difference of design and scale - a 50MW navy reactor has basically no decay heat, whereas a 1GW electricity station is still putting out about that much in thermal energy even after its "shutdown" - which is proposed as an explanation for why they were so willing to keep overriding various automatic reactor cooling systems, since they just didn't internalize how much heat was actually still being produced.
Not necessarily: It depends on the power level the reactor was run at, and for what period of time. [0]
> they just didn't internalize how much heat was actually still being produced
It's not apparent that this was actually the case. I found this explanation, which makes sense to me (although I stress I have no particular knowledge of the incident): "... the [TMI] plant crew’s response was guided by wisdom received from another domain [i.e., Navy submarine plants]. ... They were under strict guidelines to never let the pressurizer go solid [which can be catastrophic in a submarine], and yet it was. The internal stress to meet this guideline was so severe, they left the rails and violated another guideline (shutting down the ECCS)." [1]
This actually reinforces my basic point above about the undesirability of putting pressurized-water reactors near civilian population centers: Human error is inevitable, and it's undesirable to have a system where such errors would be catastrophic if compounded — and human error can indeed come in multiples, with each error compounding the effects of earlier ones.
Here's a follow-up piece from the same author, about the effect confirmation bias at TMI and Fukushima (quoting another person): "Every reading that was true and really bad, they thought of as erroneous. Every reading that was erroneous but really good, they relied upon. That’s a trend that I always see in emergency response. Operators want to believe the instruments that lead them to the conclusion they want to get to." [2]
> Not necessarily: It depends on the power level the reactor was run at, and for what period of time. [0]
Yes it does - but the TMI plant was producing about 6% of its output power when it was put into shutdown, which is about 50MW - i.e. the full power of a much smaller Navy reactor.
> the TMI plant was producing about 6% of its output power when it was put into shutdown, which is about 50MW - i.e. the full power of a much smaller Navy reactor.
Are you taking heat density into account? An analogy comes to mind from summer outdoor-grilling season: A tiny chunk of glowing-hot charcoal doesn't produce nearly as much heat as does a bonfire, but the chunk of charcoal will still burn your hand pretty catastrophically.
Oh, I don't mean these merchant plants would be unregulated. It's just that if they were such great ideas, why aren't the power plant builders just going ahead and doing it themselves? According to the nuclear proponents, there's so much potential profit just going uncollected.
> why aren't the power plant builders just going ahead and doing it themselves?
Because they would still have to build the plants somewhere, and the legal environment in the US is such that anywhere you build your project will be snowed under by NIMBY Lawsuits and your investment will never pay back anything. So nobody wants to try.
Here's a timeline for what happened at Vogtle. No NIMBY lawsuits in there; plenty of screw ups and back and forth lawsuits among the participants though.
This looks like adding reactors to an already existing site. That kind of project won't have the same exposure to NIMBY lawsuits because the site is already there. The kind of project I had in mind was standing up a new site that had not previously had any reactors located there.
That said, I did not mean to imply that such lawsuits are the only issue that drives up costs for nuclear plants. From the article you reference it seems like various forms of government meddling in the process is a major factor, not to mention corporations being more interested in jockeying for position than getting a job done.
The answer is that companies have limited cash reserves and need external capital to do anything. Particularly when you are looking to build something hugely expensive that cannot generate revenue for years. The real "plant builder" is not the organisation with the technical expertise. It is the one that can pursuade banks and investors to take the risk.
I don't think you are disagreeing with parent. As you are explaining, "the market" thinks nuclear power plants to be too risky and too expensive compared to other power sources, which is exactly the reason why they shouldn't be build by public agencies anymore either.
> CR-3 went offline in September 2009 for RFO-16. While the reactor was down, the old steam generators were to be replaced. There are 426 steel tendons within the concrete walls of the reactor containment dome which reinforce the dome. Plan developer Sargent & Lundy specified that 97 tendons be loosened. Progress rejected that number as excessive. The next proposal was to loosen 74 tendons, which was typical of other nuclear plants doing the procedure. According to a Progress employee, "de-tensioning the tendons is a very expensive and time-consuming effort", so the number was further reduced to 65. Progress engaged Bechtel to provide a 3rd party review, which agreed that 65 was appropriate. However, when the work was performed, only 27 tendons were loosened, and a foreman and supervisor sent emails questioning the way the tendons were loosened.
Yet there will be people still calling for private profit-motivated companies to run everything and this will be dismissed as a one-off, never-happen-again sort of event.
edit: I think it's worth including this quote too:
Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, stated, "That's a multi-billion dollar asset that had to be shut down because of improper work planning, improper understanding of how to properly do this containment retrofit".
It already is in private hands; Government leases from, or contracts out to corporations after all; Which means the nuclear arsenal is in private hands. Technically.
Bhopal failures were at least as much Indian politics (e.g. restrictions on safety automation out of fear it’d reduce constituent/patronage jobs) as it was the evil hands of capitalism.
...then you have learned a valuable lesson, not about failures of the private sector, but about failures of government regulation. Of all the things to entrust to government regulation, I would put critical infrastructure of any sort last on the list. The reason our infrastructure is such a mess is that governments insist on regulating it up one side and down the other, and regulatory capture is a thing. It's much easier for nefarious private companies to buy government regulations that allow them to cut corners, than it would be if they had to actually sell their wares in a true competitive free market with actual liability for any damage done.
Uh, why? Why is “buying government regulations” that allow you to cut corners easier than just cutting corners where no regulations exist. Like, if there’s a true competitive free market, are consumers of petroleum products going to choose to pay a premium for ethically sourced petroleum? No, right? Otherwise they’d be doing that now. So how would it be better with fewer regulations? There’s no logic or analysis presented in your comment, just a series of assertions. I’d love it if you could unpack your argument a little bit about how deregulating (eg: the oil and gas sector) might make disasters like Exxon Valdez less likely.
> Why is “buying government regulations” that allow you to cut corners easier than just cutting corners where no regulations exist.
Because of competition. If you have regulatory capture you avoid competition that then allows the cutting of corners. Without that regulatory capture you have, in your straw man example, no regulations, and hence zero barrier to entry which actually should prevent at least some cutting of corners. Though I'd go for regulation that doesn't prevent competition, but that's just me.
I guess the bit I don’t understand is why zero barrier to entry should prevent some cutting of corners. I’m not really sure I understand the logical link there, and I haven’t really noticed that effect in industries where barriers to entry have been removed (eg: media with the internet).
I also didn’t mean to strawman you about zero regulation. It sounds like you want some regulations, but just ones that don’t prevent competition. Is there a specific aspect you think should be regulated? Because the position “we should have good regulations and not bad ones” wouldn’t be controversial, even in government circles.
> I also didn’t mean to strawman you about zero regulation.
Fair enough, mainly because I'm not the person you were originally discussing with :)
Going backwards, “we should have good regulations and not bad ones” is a very general, to the point of meaningless opinion (as you point out) but the actual opinion is "regulations tend to increase their ill effects as their limits on competition increase" i.e. lack of competition correlates with things like bad corner cutting, to the point that I would posit that it's a cause.
So, if we take that and steel man that case - zero regulation means you and I can both start touting our nuclear power station designs, and that would be bad. On the other hand, no one is going to employ either of us because there is competition that is clearly better. Still, I'm sure there are some health/work/environmental regulations that would/should be introduced that would also limit competition and kick us out of the market *but* wouldn't limit it to a monopoly or an effective cartel.
Contrasting that with regulatory capture that does produce a monopoly or an effective cartel (or more likely, is the result of regulations, shall we say… encouraged by incumbents to protect or produce a monopoly or cartel), we end up with say 2 or 3 giant companies that no one can compete with because of their size and the regulations protecting them, then they can do what they want and the kind of good regulations that you and I might both agree on are actually cut or ignored.
Banking, might be a good example. They do something wrong, who bails them out? Why not let them die? Why is it so hard to even enter the market? Why do we see so many financial giants engage in wrongdoing and yet so few receive punishment?
We can't turn to anyone else, that's why. 1 doctor on a ship who's a murderer, lock them in their cabin, but what do you do when someone needs surgery? You let them out. 100 doctors on a ship and 1 is a murderer… you lock them up and then pick the best doctor.
> Unregulated, privately built and owned nuclear power plant fails catastrophically, killing thousands and making large swaths of land uninhabitable for generations.
"Good thing the free market will step in to build another one!"
> if there’s a true competitive free market, are consumers of petroleum products going to choose to pay a premium for ethically sourced petroleum?
If there's a true competitive free market, first, consumers won't even buy petroleum products unless those are the most cost effective for what they're doing. And in a true competitive free market, the huge infrastructure we have that gives a huge advantage to petroleum-based fuels might not even exist, certainly not in the form it currently exists, which is a product of constant government intervention and subsidies.
Second, in a true competitive free market, an oil company that contaminates thousands of miles of beaches with a spill can't get shielded from meaningful liability by courts that interpret the law to favor corporations, on the grounds that, after all, they were following the regulations, so it couldn't have been wilful mismanagement or intentional cutting of corners with disregard for safety, it must have been just an unlucky accident. (For example, look at the various lawsuits against Exxon after the Valdez spill and the rulings and long term outcome of those.) In our current regulatory environment, paying some fines now and then or having to defend a few lawsuits is just the cost of doing business. In a true competitive free market, such companies would be out of business, because they would have to literally make whole every person harmed by a spill, just like an ordinary person does when they commit a tort.
Thanks for spelling it out, I appreciate it. For what it’s worth, I agree that more accountability (maybe even to the point of piercing the corporate veil) is critical. But I’m not sure how to get that done without more regulation. Lawyers and accountants are so creative, and in a multinational environment have so many options, it’s hard for me to see how this sort of enforcement can happen without strong government intervention. But anyway, I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective, thank you
Most renewable, utility scale, operations are not run by the equipment OEMs, same as airlines aren't run by Boeing or Airbus. X-as-a-service works fine for software, but stops scaling well, or working at all, with hardware. Especially when capital isn't free anymore.
Getting the design certified and using that again is certainly a way of saving cost. Any regulator worth their salt would however still have to do the on the ground checks (e.g. if the right materials are used etc).
I think every HN user who programs knows that the process of copy-pasting comes with it's own danger. You are not automatically getting a working thing if the context you are pasting into differs ever so slightly.
If one plans to build a lot of nuclear plants that context might be something you can control. One of the things I would worry about is water and how to cool it.
Last summer most of France's nuclear power plants were switched off because the rivers they use for cooling were dried out. And the presidictions on the climate catastrophe have gotten worse.
In fact, there are a lot of standard designs. There's just not A standard design.
The issue is we build 1 or 2 plants at a time with a given design and by the time those plants are finished (10+ years) new regulations and new standards are in practice (see Gen II vs Gen III vs Gen III+ vs Gen IV reactors).
The good news is that Gen IV reactors, if approved, are much cheaper to build than Gen III/III+. The bad news is nobody wants to build them.
Generation III reactors were also promoted as more affordable than Gen II before they had actually been built. Anyone can build a great reactor on paper. I would evaluate Gen IV cost and schedule numbers after they start generating power.
In 2014 Westinghouse still touted high confidence in affordable, predictable construction for its Generation III AP1000 design:
From the outset, the AP1000 PWR was designed to reduce capital costs and to be economically competitive with contemporary fossil-fueled plants. This requires lower overnight construction costs and higher confidence in the construction schedule.
The AP1000 plant reduces the amount of safety-grade equipment required by using passive safety systems. Consequently, less Seismic Category I building volume is required to house the safety equipment (approximately 45 percent less than a typical reactor). The AP1000 plant’s modular construction design further reduces the construction schedule and the construction risks, with work shifted to factories with their better quality and cost control as well as labor costs that are less than those at the construction site.
This also allows more work to be done in parallel. The use of heavy lift cranes enables an “open top” construction approach, which is effective in reducing construction time.
With new computer-modeling capabilities, Westinghouse is able to optimize and choreograph the construction plan of an AP1000 unit in advance by simulation. The result is a very high confidence in the construction schedule.
In actuality, AP1000 construction went so far over budget and behind schedule that it bankrupted Westinghouse 3 years later:
No. How could you even think there is any logic in such a question?
Nuclear plants are vastly different from PV plants. PV involves a large number of loosely coupled modules with very large amounts of redundancy. Malfunctions in individual components do not affect the system as a whole. Contrast this to a nuclear plant, where redundancy when it exists is on a much smaller scale. The parts in a nuclear plant must be constructed with much higher reliability in order for the plant to operate. The consequences of failure are much higher.
The difference is a solar farm consists of 4 million identical modules and a quarter billion identical cells. If a cell is faulty, it decreases output of that module by 2%. If a module is faulty it either decreases the string output by 5% or costs $80 and 15 minutes to replace. If many modules are found to have a long term fault later, repowering comes at a cost penalty of about 1c/kWh. Building terawatts of solar involves trillions of identical cells, and trillions of trials to practise making them cheaply with zero penalty for iteration.
A nuclear reactor consists of many thousands of bespoke parts. If one is faulty, at the very least the whole thing is shut down while millions are spent replacing it, or possibly it kills a lot of people. Building terawatts of nuclear involves making each part thousands of times, and the penalty for iteration is thousands of man hours for validation as well as potentially shutting down every power plant with that part. If there is a major systematic flaw you are out 5-20c/kWh and years of output.
You mean maybe like a shipping container sized reactor that is simply stacked (and replaced / defueled for maintenance)?
Like one that can have its liquid fuel removed by just piping?
That's very development was done using a closet-sized reactor that could be easily powered up and powered down so it CAN scale with demand?
Whose design is inherently meltdown-proof?
Which uses almost all its fuel so there's no nuclear waste to transport?
That can breed its fuel from Thorium?
The time to invest in this was 20 years ago. Certainly the viability of nuclear missed the boat 10 years ago.
Nuclear will have to wait for solar/wind/battery and other grid levelling alternatives (home solar + storage, EVs-as-grid-batteries) to mature and develop before they have a stable economic target.
Then nuclear needs to figure out how to make that target. I think it is a LFTR, but who knows. I don't think solid fuel rods are the way. Too much waste, too much danger inherent to the fuel packaging.
And seriously, "the institute for progress"? The nuclear industry is so out of touch their marketing and lobbying is 30 years out of date.
That accounts for part of it, but there's a lot of litigation and environmental redtape that slows these things down. Before you can build a nuclear plant, you have to do an environmental impact report. Then somebody can complain, or sue, to stop over something in that environmental impact report. The ability of interest groups to halt nuclear, even green energy, is a bit ridiculous.
I have no problem with this personally. But I fear that nuclear fearmongers would capitalize on this as a possible "worst-case scenario" if we tried to deploy such a plan. Is this thought misguided?
Or perhaps the cost overruns are not accidents, but are the whole point. Nuclear power plants are a way to monetize the quirks of regulated monopolies. Get the plant approved and then shovel on the "oh gosh, who could have predicted this" cost increases. I mean, it's not like the people involved don't realize what's going to happen when they start building something that isn't even fully designed yet. As long the state regulators keep going along, each increase in capital cost is an increase in the earnings of the regulated utility. The perverse incentive is to balloon the costs as much as the regulators can bear. That the reactors are first of a kind is a feature, not a bug, since it lets that first foot-in-the-door lowballed estimate get approved.
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/jigar-shah-on-the-does...