Ballooning costs for Nuclear Reactors and those reactors being built up to 12 years later than scheduled are simply facts. There is a decision to either build smaller solar and wind and decentralize power generation and invest into the power grid or waiting decades for new Nuclear Plants to get built.
Solar and wind can’t replace nuclear energy. You can’t get 24/7 output from renewable sources, and you can’t store extra energy when you produce it (and you can’t just beam energy thousands of kilometers when there’s overproduction somewhere but underproduction somewhere else), so you need a source with a stable output alongside sources that sometimes don’t produce anything.
Right now Sweden has adequate baseload, they are well positioned to go with more renewable.
UHVDC and HVDC links can be used to transmit power over thousands of kms. I think the longest line currently is in China a 1100kVDC line that stretches over 3300kms.
Even with conventional AC transmission, power generated in Churchill Falls and James Bay eventually ends up in population centres in Southern Canada and New England.
Losses are a lot lower with DC transmission, but it has been traditionally more expensive. Costs are coming down now as more research and better power electronics are becoming available.
Edit. Here’s a pretty well know one in the US, the Pacific Intertie
You can store electricity pretty well either with Pumped-storage hydroelectric plants or with batteries (that recently got way cheaper and more efficient. If you start adding batteries to buildings with solar panels, the buildings can provide electricity for themselves for longer periods of times which will lower energy costs for households.
If you build more Nuclear Power Plants, it is big corporations that profit and not the regular people. I prefer to help regular people.
Far as I know current battery technology just isn’t up to it because it relies on rare earth materials that are extracted with processes that are absolutely terrible for the environment and are, well, rare.
That’s true for batteries that have to be lightweight. There are salt water batteries that do not require any (or a lot) rare earth materials. They are about twice as heavy if I remember correctly, but for a house that doesn’t matter a lot. And the good thing is that the more batteries are used in houses, the better and more efficient they get.
Salt batteries?! Huh, that’s neat, I learnded a thing today thanks to you.
Dug up some info on them. Apparently their problem is that they don’t have high discharge or charge currents and they need some energy to keep their temperature, but in cases where those are OK they definitely seem promising.
Spoiler, most of it has been inflicted by regulatory sabotage.
Here are some deep dives by a guy who’s been researching this shit for years. There are dozens of articles about how fossil fuel lobbyists have constantly attacked nuclear power.
“Regulatory sabotage” is the latest talking point put out by the nuclear lobby. It’s a fabrication. Regulations were built based on incidents and accidents in the past. Building nukes on the cheap would be like building deep-sea submersibles without certifications. It’ll work fine, until it doesn’t.
Certification and licensing only make-up a tiny percentage of a plant’s upfront costs. Typically it’ll be dumped in with engineering/design costs and those would be down around 15% of capital costs, depending a lot on the project.
The French government has traditionally been very pro-nuclear, and the industry has broad support from the population aside from the Green movement. They have had extensive incentive programs for the industry, both domestic and for export. And yet, they have had no better luck in building plants on time and budgets. Flamanville-3 is the poster child for overbudget nuclear projects. Construction started in 2007, was supposed to be on-line in 2012, but is currently projected to be completed in 2024. The budget went from €3.3B to an estimated €20B as of a 2019 French court audit.
The “oil industry” doesn’t care about nuclear at all. Oil fired generators haven’t been a thing since the oil shocks of the 1970s. The few that are still around are typically used as backup or peakers, as they’re ridiculously expensive to run.
The coal industry would be so inclined, but in the US, coal plants have dropped from ~65% of generation to less than 20% of generation over the last 30 years. New plants are almost as expensive to build as nuclear, and as the plants get to end of life, they’re being decommissioned rather than refurbished. The writing is on the wall.
Of the fossil fuel industries, only natural gas is competitive, and the plants are far, far cheaper to build than about anything else. They are the preferred type of new generation for utilities that have access to gas. Only regulation or government mandates really slow down new gas plants.
If regulatory sabotage isn’t real, what do you call the prohibition against multiplexing? Or the requirement for a contingency plan for a Double-Ended-Guillotine-Break of the primary loop piping? That second one cannot actually be simulated in reality because steel doesn’t break like that. And yet, it’s one of the most expensive design requirements that nuclear power plants must comply with. It also comes at the expense of safety standards that would actually work, because you cannot design for reality and this fiction on the same page.
Then there are stories like this one
A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained.
The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial.
Another type of sabotage is called “backfitting”;
The new rules would be imposed on plants already under construction. A 1974 study by the General Accountability Office of the Sequoyah plant documented 23 changes “where a structure or component had to be torn out and rebuilt or added because of required changes.” The Sequoyah plant began construction in 1968, with a scheduled completion date of 1973 at a cost of $300 million. It actually went into operation in 1981 and cost $1700 million. This was a typical experience.
And one final bit of regulatory sabotage, but one that I think was accidental, every nuclear plant has the exact same annual licensing fees regardless of power capacity. This means that there’s an incentive to build the largest, most complex plant possible, because you can put out more power for the same regulatory fee. The problem lies in the trap of thinking bigger and bigger, you suddenly have a reactor with parts that need special infrastructure to produce those parts, which is expensive, then you need special equipment to transport them, which is expensive, and special equipment to install them, which is expensive. And then, when the plant is built, it has way more capacity than is actually needed by the surrounding communities.
It only takes 7 years to build a nuclear plant, and “ballooning costs” only arise due to people being afraid of and simultaneously dependant upon nuclear power once it’s built. There wouldn’t be ballooning costs if the power plants were built and then decommissioned according to schedule. The increased costs come from maintaining plants for far longer than necessary.
Ballooning costs for Nuclear Reactors and those reactors being built up to 12 years later than scheduled are simply facts. There is a decision to either build smaller solar and wind and decentralize power generation and invest into the power grid or waiting decades for new Nuclear Plants to get built.
Solar and wind can’t replace nuclear energy. You can’t get 24/7 output from renewable sources, and you can’t store extra energy when you produce it (and you can’t just beam energy thousands of kilometers when there’s overproduction somewhere but underproduction somewhere else), so you need a source with a stable output alongside sources that sometimes don’t produce anything.
Right now Sweden has adequate baseload, they are well positioned to go with more renewable.
UHVDC and HVDC links can be used to transmit power over thousands of kms. I think the longest line currently is in China a 1100kVDC line that stretches over 3300kms.
Even with conventional AC transmission, power generated in Churchill Falls and James Bay eventually ends up in population centres in Southern Canada and New England.
Huh, interesting, I was under the impression that losses at distances like that would make it impractical
Losses are a lot lower with DC transmission, but it has been traditionally more expensive. Costs are coming down now as more research and better power electronics are becoming available.
Edit. Here’s a pretty well know one in the US, the Pacific Intertie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
You can store electricity pretty well either with Pumped-storage hydroelectric plants or with batteries (that recently got way cheaper and more efficient. If you start adding batteries to buildings with solar panels, the buildings can provide electricity for themselves for longer periods of times which will lower energy costs for households.
If you build more Nuclear Power Plants, it is big corporations that profit and not the regular people. I prefer to help regular people.
Far as I know current battery technology just isn’t up to it because it relies on rare earth materials that are extracted with processes that are absolutely terrible for the environment and are, well, rare.
That’s true for batteries that have to be lightweight. There are salt water batteries that do not require any (or a lot) rare earth materials. They are about twice as heavy if I remember correctly, but for a house that doesn’t matter a lot. And the good thing is that the more batteries are used in houses, the better and more efficient they get.
Salt batteries?! Huh, that’s neat, I learnded a thing today thanks to you.
Dug up some info on them. Apparently their problem is that they don’t have high discharge or charge currents and they need some energy to keep their temperature, but in cases where those are OK they definitely seem promising.
I just figured out that they are called “Aqueous Hybrid Ion Battery” in English, so they are not the molten ones.
I didn’t find a lot about them, but this website seems to have an overview about them (although they are the main manufacturer of the batteries, so they are probably biased): https://www.aquionenergy.com/technology/aqueous-hybrid-ion-ahi/#What_Are_Saltwater_Batteries_and_How_Are_They_Different
This talks about those ballooning costs.
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
Spoiler, most of it has been inflicted by regulatory sabotage.
Here are some deep dives by a guy who’s been researching this shit for years. There are dozens of articles about how fossil fuel lobbyists have constantly attacked nuclear power.
https://atomicinsights.com/how-did-leaders-of-the-hydrocarbon-establishment-build-the-foundation-for-radiation-fears/
https://atomicinsights.com/how-did-an-oil-shale-investor-hamstring-his-atomic-energy-competition-ancient-but-impactful-smoking-gun/
A great write-up about the oil industry funding the anti-nuclear environmental movement
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement/
“Regulatory sabotage” is the latest talking point put out by the nuclear lobby. It’s a fabrication. Regulations were built based on incidents and accidents in the past. Building nukes on the cheap would be like building deep-sea submersibles without certifications. It’ll work fine, until it doesn’t.
Certification and licensing only make-up a tiny percentage of a plant’s upfront costs. Typically it’ll be dumped in with engineering/design costs and those would be down around 15% of capital costs, depending a lot on the project.
The French government has traditionally been very pro-nuclear, and the industry has broad support from the population aside from the Green movement. They have had extensive incentive programs for the industry, both domestic and for export. And yet, they have had no better luck in building plants on time and budgets. Flamanville-3 is the poster child for overbudget nuclear projects. Construction started in 2007, was supposed to be on-line in 2012, but is currently projected to be completed in 2024. The budget went from €3.3B to an estimated €20B as of a 2019 French court audit.
The “oil industry” doesn’t care about nuclear at all. Oil fired generators haven’t been a thing since the oil shocks of the 1970s. The few that are still around are typically used as backup or peakers, as they’re ridiculously expensive to run.
The coal industry would be so inclined, but in the US, coal plants have dropped from ~65% of generation to less than 20% of generation over the last 30 years. New plants are almost as expensive to build as nuclear, and as the plants get to end of life, they’re being decommissioned rather than refurbished. The writing is on the wall.
Of the fossil fuel industries, only natural gas is competitive, and the plants are far, far cheaper to build than about anything else. They are the preferred type of new generation for utilities that have access to gas. Only regulation or government mandates really slow down new gas plants.
If regulatory sabotage isn’t real, what do you call the prohibition against multiplexing? Or the requirement for a contingency plan for a Double-Ended-Guillotine-Break of the primary loop piping? That second one cannot actually be simulated in reality because steel doesn’t break like that. And yet, it’s one of the most expensive design requirements that nuclear power plants must comply with. It also comes at the expense of safety standards that would actually work, because you cannot design for reality and this fiction on the same page.
Then there are stories like this one
Another type of sabotage is called “backfitting”;
And one final bit of regulatory sabotage, but one that I think was accidental, every nuclear plant has the exact same annual licensing fees regardless of power capacity. This means that there’s an incentive to build the largest, most complex plant possible, because you can put out more power for the same regulatory fee. The problem lies in the trap of thinking bigger and bigger, you suddenly have a reactor with parts that need special infrastructure to produce those parts, which is expensive, then you need special equipment to transport them, which is expensive, and special equipment to install them, which is expensive. And then, when the plant is built, it has way more capacity than is actually needed by the surrounding communities.
It only takes 7 years to build a nuclear plant, and “ballooning costs” only arise due to people being afraid of and simultaneously dependant upon nuclear power once it’s built. There wouldn’t be ballooning costs if the power plants were built and then decommissioned according to schedule. The increased costs come from maintaining plants for far longer than necessary.
Just below Sir_Osis_of_Liver posted an overview of new Nuclear Power Plants that went way over budget and schedule. The additional costs are massiv.
The cost of not creating new nuclear plants is building more coal and natural gas plants.