Submitted by EnergyTransitionNews t3_zy8f24 in Futurology
Reply to comment by Salt-Artichoke5347 in Renewable energy will dominate the future energy landscape and the growth of nuclear will be limited by the fact that only 12% of historical nuclear power programs were not part of a weapons program. (History article) by EnergyTransitionNews
I worked nuke in the midwest. I'm an electrical power engineer. It's not misinformation.
Want sources?
On overruns: let's look at the last two construction jobs in the US: watts bar 2 and Vogtle 3&4.
Watts bar 2 (from the Wiki):
>Unit 2 construction started in the 1970s.[3] Unit 2 was 80% complete when construction on both units was stopped in 1985 due in part to a projected decrease in power demand.[4] In 2007, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Board approved completion of Unit 2 on August 1, and construction resumed on October 15.[5] The project was expected to cost $2.5 billion, and employ around 2,300 contractor workers. Once finished, it was expected to employ 250 people in permanent jobs.[6] The final cost of the plant is estimated at $6.1 billion.[3]
So, it cost 244% of what it was supposed to cost and took 42 years to build.
Vogtle 3&4:
https://www.powermag.com/vogtle-expansion-cost-jumps-again-in-service-dates-set-for-2023/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant
Groundbreaking began in 2009, permit submitted in 2006. Original cost was expected to be 14 billion. The original ISDs (in-service dates) were 2016 and 2017. As of today, neither are online, though unit 3 has had fuel loaded and testing is in progress.
The most recent updates on cost show it now at $30.34 billion or 217% of the original specced cost.
https://www.gpb.org/news/2022/05/09/georgia-nuclear-plants-cost-now-forecast-top-30-billion
Or we could talk about FE divesting their nuclear into a separate company. They don't want it on their books.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/05/28/167951/why-dont-we-have-more-nuclear-power/
Here's MIT talking about how much more expensive it is than even unsubsidized wind and solar.
Why? Because of the personnel. In the watts bar wiki above, it talks about how reactor two alone would produce 250 permanent jobs. To run, defend, maintain, licence and provide engineering support. Most of those jobs are engineering jobs. Many of those are contracted. Those guys pull like $300 an hour.
In contrast, a solar farm creates about 12 permanent jobs in maintenance and operations. Most of those workers clean the panels. Some of them do electrical work. Maybe a person or two in operations is an engineer. The cost of labor isn't even close. Even though nuclear has a capacity factor of 90% and solar's is just 25%, the cost of the power coming out of the nuke plant is more than double after subsidies. It's easily 50% more without them.
Nuke is dying because the economics of it are terrible. Everyone in power understands this. Now go ahead and back up your claim that I'm spreading misinformation.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx
How is 10 000 acres of solar panels cheaper then what is used on an aircraft carrier as they produce the same amount of power
Go on.
Aircraft carrier nuclear power is a funny one because they have been built for many years but never once used as a commercial source of electricity, I wonder why that is?
Actually the whole SMR thing is kind of funny. In the last ten fifteen years France and Finland as well as the UK have been building much larger next generation plants, and suffering huge cost overruns and delays (thinks tens of billions and decades late in France and Finland). The nuclear industry wanted everyone to believe these huge complicated plants were the answer to making nuclear cost competitive in the future by getting economies of scale, stranglely that never worked out ... so now the nuclear industry wants us to think the exact opposite - much smaller and easier to build plants are the future of making nuclear competitive. Obviously this is a joke, the fact that after maybe 50 years of fission power, the industry has not figured out whether bigger or smaller plants offer better value for money just points to the industry basically just being a massive graft which will never be economically competitive. The simple answer is that if they offered value for money people would build them but it's wind, solar and batteries that are actually being built at scale.
Go ahead and look up CD Howe institute's funding. You might get a sense of why they come out pro-nuclear. But let pretend they don't have a financial incentive to publish bullshit.
How many SMRs are in service in Canada today?
https://www.power-technology.com/features/where-will-the-first-small-modular-nuclear-reactors-be/
Oh yeah, fucking ZERO. And in my last comment, we saw how well nuclear prices are forecasted. By that I mean, they aren't. At all. Ever. So your first link is a rosy little dream number made up by a for-profit think tank that's funded by just about every fossil fuel company in Canada.
Check your sources, brojob.
As long as we are talking sources, world nuclear association is a outlet comprised of the all the biggest nuclear companies from mining to refining to power to reprocessing to storage. Everything you read on that website should be cross checked against another source. Some of their info is good. A lot of it is half truths and outright lies.
BTW, I love how you just post a long ass article and then say nothing about the contents of it. Did you even read it? You also didn't even address anything I said.
You're actually throwing out an LCOE argument for nuclear? Lol.
Lazard is the industry standard analysis on LCOE.
Utility scale solar: $28-41/kWh
Wind: $26-50/kWh
Nuke: $131-204/kWh
And that's the unsubsidized cost! Nuke is looking pretty shit for investors and consumers, guy. Subsidized wind is about $9/kWh. Fucking ouch.
And guess what else?! As a bonus, we'll throw in that nuclear is getting MORE expensive over time. Wind and solar are getting CHEAPER with every passing year.
Better build them nukes fast. Oh shit. You can't. It takes at least a DECADE to build one reactor in the US.
And then there's the water consumption. One cooling tower consumes more water than the entire residential population of Los Angeles annually. Guess that leaves out the entire American southwest. Oh, 💩!
Dude, I'm done here. I'm an engineer. I do this for a living. You're just an internet nuke fanatic that doesn't know the difference between then and than.
>How is 10 000 acres of solar panels cheaper then what is used on an aircraft carrier
And as for the answer to that question:
Why do you think a million pencils are cheaper than a Tesla? Because they're easier to make. Derp. Idk if you know this, but nuke plants take up a LOT of space.
Yeah, actually on a per megawatt basis, nuke is less than 4 times more efficient than solar, but the difference is that solar can exist in a multipurpose space. You can grow plants under them, you can let animals feed under them. You can park cars under them. Can't do that with nuke.
And as long as we are talking about land use, nuclear, in the overwhelming majority of cases, must be built on a body of water. Solar and wind can be built anywhere, even in the remotest parts of the world. Nuke can't do that either. So the land costs for nuclear are significantly higher than they are for a larger solar job, because solar can be sited where land is cheap and waterfront is never cheap.
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