First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.
14 years and 35 billion (combined with #4 which has not been finished) and didn’t generate a single kWh in anger until now. Put the same investment into renewables and it would generate similar or greater energy and would start doing so within a year.
The argument against nuclear now is not about safety. It is about money. Nuclear simply cannot compete without massive subsidies.
The issue is that right now renewables energy don’t reduce CO2 emissions by much. (Except for hydro)
Sure if we look at the energy produced it’s very clean. The issue is intermittence. As a society we decided to continue using electrical equipment even when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. So we use fossil fuel to compensate and overall the electricity production still enjoy a lot of CO2. We could use batteries, but utility scale battery are not very developed yet.
Same issue with the price. Sure solar energy is very cheap, when it’s sunny. But what if I want to turn on the light at night ? The solar panel are not producing, the wind is not blowing, price is irrelevant if I can’t get power when I need it.
Nuclear can produce a reliable amount of energy all the time.
I hope we will see the development of utility scale energy storage because this is what we really need for the development of renewable energy.
The issue is intermittence. As a society we decided to continue using electrical equipment even when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.
And a lot of that can simply be solved with a larger grid.
Yes, in a small geographic area, you might run into a situation where the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. On the other hand, on a global scale, the sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing.
A realistic solution right now are therefore continent-wide grids that combine hydro, solar, wind and pumped hydro storage.
We don’t necessarily have to use batteries. In mountainous regions we already have stations that use surplus power to pump water up a mountain and then drop it down to generate energy when needed. Its basically a potential energy battery. But this is usually location limited and more expensive to set up.
You’re describing dams, and basically all the good locations are taken already.
His username checks out!
That said, you might share his opinion if you were a Georgia Power ratepayer who’s been paying extra on their power bill for years and years now even though it’s only now just come online (and while the Georgia Public Service Commission has allowed the high profit margins for Georgia Power stockholders to be maintained even despite all the cost overruns).
Renewables and nuclear are in the same team. It’s true that nuclear requires a greater investment of money and time but the returns are greater than renewables. I recommend checking this video about the economics of nuclear energy.
That video completely ignores decommissioning costs for nuclear power plants and long-term nuclear waste storage costs in its calculation. Only in the levelized cost of electricity comparison does it show that nuclear is by far the most expensive way of generating electricity, and that it simply can’t compete with renewables on cost.
People love to look at nuclear power plants that are up and running and calculate electricity generation costs based just on operating costs - while ignoring construction costs, decommissioning costs, and waste disposal costs.
Does that video talk about how wind turbine blades aren’t recyclable at all so they end up in landfills? Solar panels are 75% recyclable which is excellent but that still means 25% is going into the ground. Nuclear is the only way forward.
The cost of storing nuclear waste for a running plant is only a few hundred thousand a year; basically just just salary for a few people to transport it to a big hole in the ground.
Decommissioning costs a few hundred million, which sounds like a lot, but for a project that lasts for decades it’s basically nothing.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/UC_BCz0pzMw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
The nuclear lobby kids never seem to accept going renewable over nuclear as a possible reality. They refused to acknowledge it in the online circles of the mid to late 90s on News Groups, early 00s on Slashdot, didn’t want to see it in the 00s on Digg, attacked any questioning nuclear the 10s and early 20s on reddit. It has been a consistent online turf protection war in comment sections for decades.
Every nuclear post turns into a circle jerk and a handful of people trying to ‘in before renewables’ to make sure to drown out anything that isn’t waving the nuclear flag with little reservation.
We need both in some respects to maintain current electrical needs, but money and time to deploy is quantifiably much more efficient with renewables in practice vs nuclear on paper. Having a much larger renewable system spread all across the country would be of a greater short and long term benefit. Solar on every home, a small solar cell on every light pole along with low wattage monitoring systems for power distribution optimization, large desert solar installations, agrivoltaic farming (if it’s not just bullshit), wind farms in strategic areas with low impact to birds, etc.
Doing all those things would cost hundreds of times what it costs to build a reactor. There are reactors already engineered and that exist elsewhere in the world capable of powering entire cities for over a hundred years that are easily decomissionable unlike the older 1970s reactors that we have. Also renewables are unable to produce power on demand when load demands spike suddenly. U need fossil fuel for that currently. Not to mention the process of creating solar panels is one of the most environmentally damaging manufacture processes and the only country that possesses the materials to make them is China… Oil receives metric assloads of government subsidy. Why should nuclear not get the same? Nuclear power is the only thing we know of that has rhw ability to fill all of the functions that fossil fuel power plants have.Idf theres actually other options then cool but iv looked at every alternate energy source and rhw big thing that sticks out is a couple things. If the weather gets too cold, or too hot, theres a natural disaster or other condition that necessitates a very sudden and high increase in kilowatt hour demand renewable energy sources buckle. And then your left having to fire coal to meet the energy need.
France was able to output 2 reactors per year at 1,5 billion of euros per 1000MW for more than 2 decades during the 70’s to 90’s. The whole French nuclear industry has cost around 130-150 billions between 1960 and 2010, including researches, build and maintenance of France’s whole nuclear fleet.
A 1000MW reactor, at current French electricity price and for a 80% capacity factor, generates 1,4 billion of euros worth of electricity per year, for a minimum of 60 years.
Nuclear is not costly, and can absolutely compete by itself, if you don’t sabotage it and plan it right.
Except those reactors are off 30-50% of the time due to shoddy construction, €1.5/W in 2023 money is pure fiction, and overnight costs with free capital aren’t real costs once you adjust for inflation and stop cherry picking the first reactors before negative learning rates kicked in.
Except those reactors are off 30-50% of the time due to shoddy construction
For French nuclear power, the lowest load factor ever recorded is 54% in 2022. The cause is the number of maintenance operations postponed because of COVID, plus a corrosion problem detected on several reactors of the same generation, which have since been repaired.
- This is an extremely unlikely combination of circumstances, on the one hand
- On the other hand, it wouldn’t have had any consequences if we’d had more redundancy, and hadn’t suddenly stopped building reactors for 25 years.
- Despite this, nuclear power still has a load factor 2x higher than French wind or solar power.
The rest of the time, the load factor of French nuclear power hovers around 70-75%, and that’s not due to bad design, it’s a strategy. I’ll let you read this link to learn more.
€1.5/W in 2023 money is pure fiction
Of course it does. But the fact is that french nuclear power has paid for itself dozens of times over. It’s factual, it’s historical.
and overnight costs with free capital aren’t real costs once you adjust for inflation and stop cherry picking the first reactors before negative learning rates kicked in.
I would be very interested to know why the trend has moved away from building reactors in time and within a reasonable budget. It seems that most projects after the turn of the millennium haven’t been cost effective.
Why did we manage to build reactors well before but not now?
Chernobyl and Fukushima. These two events, which between them account for a few thousand deaths at most (compared with the tens of thousands of deaths caused by coal in Europe alone, for example), triggered a panic fear of nuclear power.
For decades, the nuclear industry has been abandoned and sabotaged, with projects such as Phénix, Superphénix and Astrid in France, and virtually all new reactor projects, cancelled due to anti-nuclear opposition.
Competent nuclear engineers and technicians have retired without being able to pass on their know-how, and cutting-edge nuclear-related industries have disappeared or been converted.
We can also thank the Germans for sabotaging the EPR. We started the project together, they forced us to add a lot of totally unjustified redundancies and safety features that made the prototype very complex and therefore costly to build, and then they slammed the door on us.
Every year a reactor operates is a year of experiencing new ways they suck. The fixes and added complexities are rolled into the next reactor.
Thr grifters running the show also learn new ways to grift, so the small new delays and costs are amplified.
For older reactors the costs this imposes are rolled into operational budgets (and more often than not reactors are closed as unprofitable and the public or ratepayers are left holding the bag).
Additionally regulatory agencies keep finding new instances of fraud, stopping these adds costs to the regulator and regulatee.
This has happened since well before three mile island, so all misdirections to “scare mongering about meltdowns” are lies (the rate of cost escalation actually slowed significantly after three mile island).
it would generate similar or greater energy and would start doing so within a year.
That’s not really accurate. There are endless lawsuits when it comes to getting windfarms going because people claim it will ruin their view or the rare redheaded blue-eyed pigeon will be hurt or some other bogus nonsense. These lawsuits can go on and on for ages.
To your point:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/30/its-got-nasty-the-battle-to-build-the-uss-biggest-solar-power-farm
https://vaenergyconsumer.com/lawsuit-aims-to-stop-massive-solar-array/
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/energy-water-summit/2017/04/21/environmentalist-just-killed-wind-farm-near-las-vegas/305796001/
https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politics-environment-and-nature-las-vegas-nevada-9bf3640dfefbc6f7f45a97c6810f5ff7
Wind and Solar struggle greatly with “not in my backyard”. Of course, so too with Nuclear, and even more extreme with Nuclear, but you are correct that solar and wind have challenges with getting going.
These days EVERYTHING has like 10 lawsuits attached to it before anything can happen. Then we wonder why everything is always at a stand-still. We had a local brwery and pub in a perfect location get sued because the restuarant next door (which is kind of run down) was afraid of the competition. Now the Brewery is actually considering pulling out. Such BS especially the influx of people coming to the area would probably end up helping both businesses.
Base load my friend. We also need steady, reliable, clean power when it’s dark and calm. Until we can accomplish seasonal grid storage of renewables, this is the less expensive option.
There are plenty of firming options (battery, pumped hydro, flywheels etc) which deliver reliability for a fraction of the price of this boondoggle. Not to mention a diverse portfolio of renewable technologies spread over a large geographical area is actually quite stable. When the sun isn’t shining in one area, the wind may be blowing or the sun shining in another area.
Those can only hold enough power for minutes or hours.
We need to be able to store power from the summer until the winter. Months. We need to store energy from when the sun is shining in July until it’s not in December.
The only possible way to do that now is to store it as hydrogen or hydrocarbons. That infrastructure is currently very lossy, expensive, and only hypothetical.
Renewables and nuclear play different sports.
Renewables are better for most of our needs but there is a backbone need of base power. Nuclear is an expensive but clean way to provide that.
By my very very very rough calculations, you could build a large scale solar farm with 3x power output and have enough money left over to build a 33GWh battery. That would more than cover a continuous supply of 1GW.
Remember that blanketing the world with solar panels isn’t exactly great for the environment. Rooftops makes a lot of sense, but the cost goes way up, an maintenance becomes a nightmare. The footprint of nuclear is much smaller
Absolutely, and we should. We should have both. Nuclear has a very long lifespan and very consistent power. Ideal battery setups do to buy long term lithium battery storage is less of a thing, but it’s growing. There are some other battery techs that use other chemistries which are also attractive.
Multiple eggs in multiple baskets.
There’s also a reliability element too. Nuclear can reliably output a given amount of energy, at the cost of being slow to alter. Many renewable sources have sporadic amounts of power throughout each day. Either is better than fossil fuels at least.
Nuclear isn’t entirely reliable though. During the big heatwave last year at least 1 and iirc at leat a few French reactors had to be shut down because the water levels in the rivers they were on were not high enough to get sufficient water to cool them. Which is a problem that’s only going to get worse as climate change progresses.
I don’t recall them being shut down (that would be a drastic step). They were forced to reduce output, though (making the energy more expensive).
That’s a limitation of the secondary power conversion side and is true for any power generation methodology that relies on steam generation. That said, there’s alternatives to the traditional Rankine cycle that could be deployed without modifying the nuclear side of the plant.
Good point but that is not insurmountable. There are many ways to achieve predictability (batteries, hydro, tidal) that also come on stream much quicker than any nuclear plant.
Yea you’re right.
People make stupid arguments about base load (nuclear doesn’t match supply demand so it’s meaningless argument) or renewables only being built out for maximum output = highest demand (in reality you need to build minimum output as a function of highest demand. Highest total power will far exceed highest demand and still be cheaper than fossil or nuclear. But people can’t grasp that).
Finally. Huge interconnectors like what China and Europe are doing/ done never come up.
It’s just the same old. We built 10% of renewables we need yet we are still using gas. Proof renewables don’t work!
The nameplate cost of this plant is $32 per watt. Even at smaller scales, utility-scale solar plants are $1 per watt. Do you know how many grid storage batteries you could buy with the extra $31 per watt? (6 hour storage is around $2.50 per watt or $.40/Wh.) You could build a solar plant 4x the nameplate capacity of the nuke (in order to match the capacity factor), and add 24 hours of storage to make it fully dispatchable, and still have enough money left over to build 2 more of the same thing. This doesn’t even include the fact the nuclear has fuel costs, waste disposal, higher continued operational costs, and unaccounted publicly involuntarily subsidized disaster insurance.
Let’s play around with the thought of powering all of America with renewables. America’s coal, gas, petroleum and nuclear plants generate a combined baseload power of 405 GWavg, or “gigawatts average.” (Remember, a gigawatt is a thousand megawatts.) Let’s replace all of them with a 50 / 50 mix of onshore wind and CSP (solar), and since our energy needs are constantly growing, let’s round up the total to 500 GWs, which is likely what we’ll need by the time we finish. Some folks say that we should level off or reduce our consumption by conserving and using more efficient devices, which is true in principle. But in practice, human nature is such that whatever energy we save, we just gobble up with more gadgets. So we’d better figure on 500 GWs.
To generate this much energy with 1,000 of our 500 MW renewables farms, we’ll put 500 wind farms in the Midwest (and hope the wind patterns don’t change…) and we’ll put 500 CSP farms in the southwest deserts—all of it on free federal land and hooked into the grid. Aside from whatever branch transmission lines we’ll need (which will be chump change), here’s the lowdown:
Powering the U.S. with 500 wind and 500 CSP farms, at 500 MWavg apiece.
Steel ……………….. 503 Million tonnes (5.6 times annual U.S. production)
Concrete ………….. 1.57 Billion t (3.2 times annual U.S. production)
CO2 …………………. 3.3 Billion t (all U.S. passenger cars for 2.5 years)
Land ………………… 91,000 km2 (302 km / side)
35,135 sq. miles (169 mi / side)
(the size of Indiana)
60-year cost ……… $29.25 Trillion
That’s 29 times the 2014 discretionary federal budget.
If we can convince the wind lobby that they’re outclassed by CSP, we could do the entire project for a lot less, and put the whole enchilada in the desert:
Powering the U.S. with 1,000 CSP farms, producing 500 MWavg apiece.
Steel ………………. 787 Million t (1.6 times annual U.S. production)
Concrete …………. 2.52 Billion t (5.14 times annual U.S. production)
CO2 ………………… 3.02 Billion t (all U.S. passenger cars for 2.3 years)
Land ……………….. 63,000 km2 (251 km / side)
24,234 sq. miles (105.8 mi / side)
(the size of West Virginia)
60-year cost ……. $18.45 Trillion
#That’s to 18 times the 2014 federal budget.
Or, we could power the U.S. with 500 AP-1000 reactors.
Rated at 1,117 MWp, and with a reactor’s typical uptime of 90%, an AP-1000 will deliver 1,005 MWav. Five hundred APs will produce 502.5 GWav, replacing all existing U.S. electrical power plants, including our aging fleet of reactors.
The AP-1000 uses 5,800 tonnes of steel, 90,000 tonnes of concrete, with a combined carbon karma of 115,000 t of CO2 that can be paid down in less than 5 days. The entire plant requires 0.04km2, a patch of land just 200 meters on a side, next to an ample body of water for cooling. (Remember, it’s a Gen-3+ reactor. Most Gen-4 reactors won’t need external cooling.) Here’s the digits:
Steel ………. 2.9 Million t (0.5% of W & CSP / 0.36% of CSP)
Concrete … 46.5 Million t (3.3% of W & CSP / 1.8% of CSP)
CO2 ……….. 59.8 Million tonnes (2% of W & CSP / 1.5% of CSP)
Land ………. 20.8 km2 (4.56 km / side) (0.028% W & CSP / 0.07% of CSP)
1.95 sq. miles (1.39 miles / side)
(1.5 times the size of Central Park)
60-year cost ……… $2.94 Trillion
#That’s 2.9 times the 2014 federal budget.
Small Modular Reactors may cost a quarter or half again as much, but the buy-in is significantly less, the build-out is much faster (picture jetliners rolling off the assembly line), the resources and CO2 are just as minuscule, and they can be more widely distributed, ensuring the resiliency of the grid with multiple nodes.
And this is without even mentioning MSRs.
Was this project a complete shitshow of sheldon before seen-proportions?
Yes.
Does this mean that we should make the move towards powering the US from 100% renewables instead?
Well if you hate math and logic enough to even consider it, sure. Go ahead.
Uh.
The nuke plant is expensive. Renewables aren’t. And your argument ist essentially “but based on made up numbers that illustrate how inexpensive nuke plants could be, nuke plants could be much less expensive! Duh!”
Yeah, no. Build renewables.
I’m not quite why the argument is “nuclear or renewables.” It should be nuclear AND renewables.
Renewable energy generators have improved significantly in the last two decades. I’m sure they will continue to improve.
Nuclear power is a hell of a lot cleaner than coal. And it seems nuclear power plants have improved tremendously. We should use them.
Why are your only considerations concentrated solar farms and wind farms? What about hydro power, geothermal, and scattered solar installations?
Why do your numbers assume we would be building everything at once nationwide?
Why don’t you include the costs of building and running the equivalent coal plants?
It seems your comment boils down to “if we limit ourselves to implementing the most expensive options for renewables and do it on an accelerated timeframe, it’s going to cost more than if we didn’t do anything.” Not a very helpful analysis.
If you take a look at the comment that I was replying to, you will have your answer for the first question.
Because it was the scenario I chose. You are more than welcome to submit your own analysis with your own scenario and eventual limitations etc.
I didn’t include coal plants because we weren’t talking about coal plants. You are more than welcome to submit your own rundown including coal plants.
Solar is not one of the “most expensive” forms of renewable.
If you didn’t find the analysis helpful, you are once again, more than welcome to submit your own. The analysis is very helpful in the context of the comment I replied too.
The fact that you are even considering CSP shows you know nothing about the current state of renewables. What’s more likely is you’re parroting or copy-pasting some bullshit talking points from a right wing think tank. Nukes have ALWAYS gotten more expensive. I’m waiting for any production plant SMR, MSR whatever to buck this trend but it hasn’t happened.
Maybe you should try reading the comment I was replying too?
Very funny how everything that you don’t agree with suddenly becomes “right wing”. But please prove me wrong, provide me with said “right wing think tank” that I supposedly copied from. Shouldn’t be hard to find if that’s the case.
Solar doesn’t perform at its nameplate capacity, so you have to overbuild the capacity by about 200% in order to achieve the same baseload as a constant output thermal plant.
And that doesn’t even touch on the fact that solar doesn’t work at night, and the capacity is much lower during the different seasons in Northern latitudes.
So you either build a shitton of batteries, provide backup power sources, or tell people not to use energy during the winter. According to Tesla, they sell their Megapack batteries for around $1/watt-hour of storage. Still, lets figure a 1 Ghwr battery for every 1 GW of installed capacity of solar. That should give the system a few hours of runtime after it gets dark.
So instead of your 500 GW solar capacity, we need 1,000 GW. And 1,000 Gwhr of batteries. $68.50 Trillion worth of solar + $1 Trillion for batteries.
However, I’m a little skeptical on your solar costs. Utility scale solar is typically cited as between $1-$2/watt installed. So for 1,000 GW that gives you $1 Trillion installed. Which is a lot of money, but less than Biden’s student load forgiveness plan.
I personally believe, after spending 3 years listening to the Energy Gang podcast, that decarbonizing the energy system is an ‘all-hands on deck’ emergency that will require every trick in the book to tackle. We will likely max out every type of cheap and readily financeable energy system on this road.
Even at smaller scales, utility-scale solar plants are $1 per watt.
Solar is being built at 100% speed. We’re utilizing all the solar panel manufacturing capacity in the world building and deploying solar right now. There’s simply not enough rare earth metals to increase production more. Wind, Hydro, Nuclear and Geothermal are all needed of we want to replace coal and LNG power plants.
Monocrystalline solar doesn’t involve rare earths at all, idiot.
If you want to pearl clutch about them, pearl clutch about gadolinium in nuclear plants.
They aren’t pearl clutching, they’re stating the obvious fact that humanity is pumping out solar panels as fast as macroeconomic (or perhaps geographic) forces will allow.
Monocrystalline panels take quite a lot of pure silicon, which may not technically be rare earth, but it is in quite high demand right now.
oyo
You can build entirely new solar supply chains from mining through manufacturing faster than a single new nuclear plant.
But solar panels take up a lot more space for the energy they give out than a nuclear plant iirc
Speaking of geothermal did you hear about the brrak through in drilling using mocrowaves. It radially speeds up driving
Where are you getting this “$32 per watt” number from?From googling I cannot find anything even close to that ballpark
It’s from this article: $35 billion spent / 1.1GW output = $31.8/watt
I think $31 billion would have been the more accurate number to use. There wouldn’t the same contractor buyout thing for every reactor.
Ooh a lot of people here seem very pro-nuclear-power. That’s cool!
Unfortunately, there’s still that one guy in the comments trying to say that hypothetical, largely unproven solutions are better for baseload than something that’s worked for decades.
If you mean renewables by that, it’s hardly hypothetical or unproven. I’m in Australia and south Australia and Tasmania (two of our states) have fully renewable grids, Tasmania for the past 7 years. South Australia does still occasionally pull from an interconnect but most of the time they’re exporting a bunch of power.
Renewables with storage are cheaper and faster to build than nuclear and that’s from real world costs. Nuclear would be fine if it wasn’t so stupidly expensive.
Tasmania
Generates nearly all its power using hydro electric, which is great but pretty dependent on geography.
South Australia
Wiki says a pretty big hunk of that is still gas
In Ontario Canada where I am from it would take > 4000 wind turbines all working at once (not including the batteries) to supplant our nuclear capacity. Even the largest battery storage are in the hundreds of mega watts and only for a few hours at the cost of about half a billion dollars.
I think it is more productive to approach these technologies as complementary as any proper grid should have both for the near future if we want to reduce global warming.
South Australia is 70% renewables, as per their own official energy site.
Batteries are the limiting factor for renewables. Building battery storage that can supply a large city is expensive. Even the battery South Australia had Elon Musk build can only supply a town for about an hour. I’m hoping battery tech improves soon, but it seems to have stagnated for a while.
That or the fear-mongering talking points. That’s what caused our local power plant to be decommissioned, and now those same people are complaining about how much their electrics cost now.
The old soviet legacy. And a bit of actual disasters and from the 2 significant ones (hiroshima and chernobyl) half are beacuse of the soviets.
The nuclear lobby is alive and well on social media. Never before has the internet apparently agreed on something so controversial with some of the most cookie cutter, copy and paste, AI generated comments on the subject I’ve ever seen.
The talking points seem to gloss over the fact that nuclear storage always fails, meltdowns happen, and you still have to mine uranium out of the ground. It’s far from a clean source of energy.
That the “nuclear lobby” is paying people to post stuff on Lemmy, a social media platform that accounts for a small part of single percent of all social media users, is a hot take I haven’t heard yet. Congrats, you’ve definitely imagined a scenario that nobody else in history has ever thought of. A true original thought.
Pity it’s an absolutely fucking brain dead take masquerading as something more than nonsensical blithering from a total nincompoop, but you should bask in this moment nonetheless.
Everything is a stopgap until fusion is available
There never has been a fusion reaction which created energy so I guess we’ll have to wait some time
You are technically wrong, the worst kind of wrong :)
DT and DD fusion reactions release energy. More energy than is put in. It’s the whole system that hasn’t been energy positive. We’re close to breakeven in terms of plasma (heating power vs fusion power, and it’s not like heating power is lost from the system it still heats the reactor) but to be useful fusion power needs to be >10x heating power so the whole system is more than self-sufficient.
There never has been a fusion reaction which created energy
Technically, this part is correct as far as I understand the laws of thermodynamics
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. A large portion of Georgia’s power comes from natural gas; anything we can do to move away from that is a step in the right direction. Except, like, coal obviously.
Yay! Nuclear is the best!
