$60/MWh for advanced nuclear electricity is achievable: GE Hitachi Executive

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/advanced-nuclear-ge-hitachi-mwh-nuscale-smr-small-modular-reactor/630154/

by PaulHoule • 3 years ago

170 366 3 years ago

johnea• 3 years ago

Well sure, once you dump the construction and clean up costs on we-the-idiot-herd it makes a really convincing economic argument...

adastra2216• 3 years ago

Same goes for solar and wind...

toomuchtodo2• 3 years ago

Please. There are no insurance issues, no proliferation issues, no clean up issues. Everything fails gracefully. Nuclear, outside of edge cases, is a scam compared to battery firmed renewables.

wahern• 3 years ago

The major difference is that nuclear waste ends up in rich countries' backyards, whereas heavy metals from construction and disposal of solar panels contaminate communities thousands of miles away. Out of sight, out of mind.

todd82• 3 years ago

Interesting, much cheaper than solar.

Traubenfuchs• 3 years ago

The article states the opposite?

"Utility-scale solar-plus-storage costs are about $45/MWh; wind power costs are $30/MWh; and stand-alone utility-scale solar costs are at $32/MWh, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis."

RC_ITR• 3 years ago

a levelized cost

The LCOE "represents the average revenue per unit of electricity generated that would be required to recover the costs of building and operating a generating plant during an assumed financial life and duty cycle", and is calculated as the ratio between all the discounted costs over the lifetime of an electricity generating plant divided by a discounted sum of the actual energy amounts delivered. Inputs to LCOE are chosen by the estimator. They can include the cost of capital, decommissioning, fuel costs, fixed and variable operations and maintenance costs, financing costs, and an assumed utilization rate

I think solar should be a major part of any future energy generation regime, but I've also never seen an LCOE for solar that I actually believe. They also ignore the timing mismatch between generation and consumption (batteries help there, but even then, it's still a challenge to maintain an on-demand grid with solar).

adastra2216• 3 years ago

Nuclear is fundamentally cheaper than nearly any other energy source. However our laws are backwards: regulators are required to increase safety standards for nuclear so long as it is cheaper, until the costs are brought up to par with other energy sources. As a result, nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than anything else, and burdens costs that other energy sources don't have to account for, yet it is perpetually no cheaper than coal or natural gas. It's blatant regulatory capture by fossil fuel in the name of "environmentalism."

pydry10• 3 years ago

It isnt the law making it expensive. It's capital costs.

It would be even more expensive if it didnt get a free ride on insurance - through disaster liability caps set at ~0.05% of the costs of one Fukushima.

jltsiren• 3 years ago

The real issue is the risk profile. When you build a new reactor, it's almost certainly going to be safe. But there is a small risk of a catastrophic outcome, where most of the damage is local or at most regional.

Normally this would be the kind of a situation where insurance is the right solution. But because the potential magnitude of the catastrophe is too great, the insurance sector is incapable of handling it. No one is willing to provide a sufficient insurance policy on a commercial basis.

Because the assets of the company operating the reactor are also insufficient in the worst case, that leaves the government as the ultimate insurer. And as with any insurer, they require you to take various steps to mitigate the risks.

rainsford• 3 years ago

However our laws are backwards: regulators are required to increase safety standards for nuclear so long as it is cheaper, until the costs are brought up to par with other energy sources.

Any citation for that? It's a convenient villain to blame, but absent any proof regulators are deliberately trying to make nuclear less competitive, it seems much more plausible that regulations are driven by concern over accidents. If a wind turbine fails it doesn't make the entire region uninhabitable for decades.

nicoburns4• 3 years ago

As a result, nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than anything else

How exactly is nuclear safer than solar or wind? Solar panels in particular are about as dangerous as an inert rock.

crote3• 3 years ago

Nuclear has to be orders of magnitude safer because nuclear incidents have a way bigger economic impact. A gas plant or solar farm blowing up will be in the hundreds of millions of $, but Fukushima is counting in the hundreds of billions of $.

The nuclear industry has a history of creating plants which are "totally safe, really, you can trust me!" and ending up with really expensive accidents. If they can't get their shit together and get basically unlimited insurance for whatever accident might still happen, the government has to enforce safety rules for them so the taxpayers don't end up having to pay for their whoopsies over and over again.

deepsun• 3 years ago

There's no conspiracy here -- the nuclear safety is just so darn expensive, and for rational reasons.

It is safer, yes, but only once a lot of resources is spent on safety. So nuclear power generation is very inexpensive and expensive at the same time, depending on amount of effort put into its safety (with modern scientific knowledge on fission, I'd say like 90% of a reactor cost is ensuring its safety).

I honestly hoped that NuScale production could reduce some significant fraction of that safety costs by "commoditizing" the production. Kinda like airplanes are very safe in a big part because their production and maintenance processes are streamlined and actively practiced ("economy of scale").

Kon5ole7• 3 years ago

Nuclear is fundamentally cheaper than nearly any other energy source.

It is not, the main costs are simply not included in the calculations. Operators are legally protected from most liabilities, and even setting liabilities aside they get bailed out if they fail to be profitable. You have to bail them out, there is no option not to. You can't simply turn off a nuclear power plant and leave it.

France recently had to bail out their nuclear operator to at least 50 bn euros. We reached the point where we're "the future" that had to pay for the energy that our parents got from nuclear. Our children will be the next to pay for it, and so on for centuries.

This means that even in a country that has had no disasters, nuclear power has operated under a cost model that was severely underestimated.

The cold truth is that nuclear power is not cheap even in a best-case scenario, and "not cheap" is the most precise estimate we are able to give.

jnsaff26• 3 years ago

I don’t know what your comparison is. Here solar is about half that. I even managed to install solar on my roof for about 35EUR/MWh.

4wsn• 3 years ago

I assume you mean with subsidies and grants.

todd82• 3 years ago

Solar power isn't available 24 hours per day so the LCOE (levelized cost of energy) for solar is claimed be be between $59 to $91 per MWh, see [1], lets say $75/MWh, already higher than the article's $60/MWh cost for nuclear.

However, nuclear power is available 24 hours a day every day, rain or shine, summer or winter. To reach this level of availability a PV system would need to have battery back up. Let's be conservative and say 10 hours of battery is enough. This won't be enough during a hurricane or harsh winter weather with no sun for days, but let's assume 10 hours of battery is enough.

Now how much does the PV system's battery cost? I don't have figures for a 10 hour battery system. I do have an estimate based on a review of research literature for 6 hours of battery storage. According to [2], a 6 hour system in 2030 may cost under $180/Kwh. However, we've been talking Mwh not Kwh so this is $180,000/Mwh.

Unless you don't care about electricity when the sun isn't shining, nuclear is much cheaper.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...

[2] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf

ZeroGravitas10• 3 years ago

The independent review of costs for nuscale they link is brutal:

https://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/NuScales-Small-...

As currently structured, those project risks will be borne by the buying entities (participants), not NuScale or Fluor, its lead investor. In other words, potential participants need to understand that they would be responsible for footing the bill for construction delays and cost overruns, as well as being bound by the terms of an expensive, decades-long power purchase contract.
These compelling risks, coupled with the availability of cheaper and readily available renewable and storage resources, further weaken the rationale for the NuScale SMR.

adastra2216• 3 years ago

He seems to be complaining that NuScale keeps increasing the energy output of its modules. Am I reading that right?

idiotsecant2• 3 years ago

Nuscale is moving the goalposts - they started off with lots of modules with small power output on each and slowly approached few modules with lots of power each. A few more iterations and they will be indistinguishable from a regular nuke plant.

ZeroGravitas10• 3 years ago

Yes, out of context that is the least damning of the many issues raised.

But if you claim you can reduce costs by building something you call a small modular reactor, and it keeps getting less small and less modular, questions do arise as to whether the initial costs will similarly become more like traditional fission.

idiotsecant2• 3 years ago

nuke generation is cheap if you push all the risks for construction cost overruns onto someone else.

I am a big fan of nuke as the generation source that is mostly environmentally benign right now today full stop. It's well known, though, that the main problem with nuke is that it's very expensive to build because we're quite worried about the safety so we have a lot of process and regulatory approval built into the design and construction. That extra process and regulatory approval is quite expensive.

Of course it's a lot cheaper if you just disregard those things.

pydry10• 3 years ago

nuke generation is cheap if you push all the risks for construction cost overruns onto someone else.

This is what France tried to do with the reactor they built for Finland. There was a budget hole of a few billion and an argument/lawsuit over who would pay for it.

Nuclear costs are a hot potato.

adventured• 3 years ago

We should disregard the cost and aggressively subsidize a massive expansion of nuclear power, guaranteeing the price for consumers (matching something reasonable re the market).

Some might proclaim that's not fair competitively. I have no interest in being fair about the matter, I don't want my government to be either.

HDThoreaun4• 3 years ago

There are certainly a lot of excuses for why nuclear is so expensive. As far as I can tell they are all just that, excuses. Korea is by far the largest producer of nuclear power plants today. They have the scale that people claim is necessary to reduce cost. They have the pro nuclear regulatory environment that would never be politically possible in the states. Nuclear still costs them more than solar and wind.

Jedd4• 3 years ago

Nuclear fission power apologists frequently make a claim like this when trying to establish why costs are so high (it doesn't necessarily explain why cost overruns are so high, as presumably the regulation set is known at the time of project initiation).

If this were the / a major factor in cost competitiveness, we'd expect to see much higher uptake of nuclear fission power plants in places where, as you might say, those things are disregarded (to varying degrees).

I don't believe that's the case, but can't find convincing data one way or the other.

I wonder if there are examples of massive cost overrun / delayed commissioning nuclear fission plants - say Hinkley in the UK - that could be pointed at to substantiate the 'process and regulatory approval' costs, where those process and regulations changed after the initial cost calculations.

grepfru_it• 3 years ago

main problem with nuke

Is waste. The main problem is waste, we need to store it somewhere and it’s never in my backyard

Retric2• 3 years ago

It’s really not build costs alone that make nuclear expensive. Just as an example, you’re looking at roughly 500 employees per GW of capacity. Assuming they cost 100k/y including benefits that’s ~50 million per year or roughly 0.6c/kWh. Multiply that by * 50 years and your talking 2.5 billion over the plants lifetime just for the workers.

Ore is cheap, natural uranium is still cheap, enriched uranium isn’t, and making fuel rods isn’t. Insurance, land, replacement equipment, decommissioning, etc it all adds up.

People love to talk about how cheap various aspects of nuclear power are compared to other types of energy, but it’s the total costs that matter not just individual parts in isolation. Small modular reactors still need cooling, they still need turbines, workers, spent fuel cooling ponds and processing, security, etc etc.

ExoticPearTree4• 3 years ago

I really hope the mini nuclear reactors that are planned take off and you can just order them for residential power generation.

It is astonishing the amount of red-tape when it comes to nuclear power, just because of all the FUD pushed by environmental groups, when it is the cleanest form of energy in the world.

rektide3• 3 years ago

This doesn't even begin to get into the cost of handling the waste. Which 70 years latter, the US still has seemingly never once found a long term answer to, as far as I am aware.

Personally I would really like to see ambitious high tech safe nuclear options be a thing, and to have thoughtful long term handling plans.

The Integral Fast Reactor getting canceled (1994) seems a real shame to me. A safe cheap transuranic-burning-capable low-proliferation-concern breeder sodium fast reactor could help us greatly deal with waste, could be gamechanger. But perhaps it was too soon, that it would have only been another mark against ambitious nuclear. GE Hitachi has kept the plans updated & moving along, which is interesting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

And TerraPower has recently reached out expressing interest in working together towards an IFR inspired design. https://neutronbytes.com/2022/02/03/terrapower-teams-up-with...

But given costs as is, focus on being extremely cheap not advanced makes some sense, albeit it sort of also feels like it limits the potential, & keeps us from addressing actual real total costs.

postingawayonhn2• 3 years ago

Which 70 years latter, the US still has seemingly never once found a long term answer to, as far as I am aware.

That's primarily a political issue rather than a technical one.

r00fus2• 3 years ago

Nuclear waste? Why not reprocess like France?

Heritage Foundation (!) agrees: https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...

nine_k• 3 years ago

Renewables are not readily available when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing.

EDIT: the link to the Texas winter crisis of 2021 was here, but it's unrelated.

doubleg72• 3 years ago

Yet the first paragraph states that lack of winter preparedness was the cause and not renewable as initially claimed by some. I'm not sure what your point is here..

metalspot3• 3 years ago

IEEFA is neither independent nor a serious research organization. The fact that they pretend to be only undermines their credibility.

The paper you link to is a joke.

They claim a cost of utility scale solar as $17 / MWh and then claim a cost of utility scale solar with battery as $22 / MWh.

How much battery backup does that $5 / MWh provide? it doesn't say, but the answer is only a few minutes.

Look at the chart of page 28 of planned installations where it shows 22 GW standalone storage being added for 60 GW of solar and wind. That means the standalone storage being installed can provide 20 minutes of backup power for the renewable resources being installed.

The cost of a renewable system with battery backup that can guarantee power for even 24 hours would probably be at least 10X the cost of bare solar, so in the neighborhood of $200 / MWh, or quadruple the target cost of NuScale (based on the chart in this paper).

Guaranteeing power for 24 hours is not acceptable though. A system like that would have regular blackouts given the normal variability in solar and wind.

Unless someone is quoting a price on guaranteed sustained power delivery they are not serious. Try selling your electricity to a data center or any other commercial buyer and see how far you get.

ZeroGravitas10• 3 years ago

You appear to be disagreeing with the numbers they cite from NREL.

https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/utility-scale_pv-plus-...

The utility-scale PV-plus-battery technology represents a DC-coupled system (defined in the figure below), in which one-axis tracking PV and 4-hour lithium-ion battery storage share a single bidirectional inverter. The PV-plus-battery technology is represented as having a 130-MWDC PV array, a 50-MWAC battery (with 4-hour duration), and a shared 100-MWAC inverter. Therefore, the PV component has a DC-to-AC ratio (or inverter loading ratio [ILR]) of 1.3, which is the same as for utility-scale PV in the 2021 ATB. The assumed relative sizing is consistent with existing (but limited) data for online and proposed utility-scale PV-plus-battery systems—whose inverter characteristics (shared vs. separate) are not well known.

That very closely matches the ratio in the rollout they provide from the Berkley interconnection queue research. You don't just keep adding batteries, you add more renewable generation at the same time to maximize cost effectiveness.

This ratio is sometimes called "near firm" as it provides power when it is needed by the grid.

Schroedingersat9• 3 years ago

Well we'll just include an entire summer worth of storage for nuclear then, shall we?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-t...

Or alternatively we could acknowledge that using the existing fossil fuel infrastructure for 8000 hours over the next century for the tiny minority of countries without enough hydro even in the unlikely case storage never improves is preferable to using them for 80,000 hours while waiting for nuclear plants to be built.

Not even 24 hours of storage is necessary in the vast majority of the world: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

zizee4• 3 years ago

"A small modular reactor should last a minimum of 60 years. Probably more, up to 100, frankly, if maintained properly. Wind and solar, after about 20 years you have to replace everything.”

I'm a big fan of the SMR concept, but this line about having to throw everything away for solar after 20 years is just wrong.

cyberpunk• 3 years ago

Can you elaborate? Is there a solar farm in prod right now older than 20 years that you know of? Im all for solar, and honestly didn't consider this angle..

bryanlarsen• 3 years ago

The main reason why solar farms are replaced before 20 years are up is because modern panels are much more efficient than they were 20 years ago. By replacing the panels you can get 2-4x as much power in the same footprint and using the same infrastructure.

sbierwagen• 3 years ago

There's a panel in Germany that was in use for 36 years: https://www.presse.uni-oldenburg.de/einblicke/54/files/asset...

Efficiency went from 8.55% to 8.2%

dpierce9• 3 years ago

The panels are often warrantied for 20-25 years. Most things outlast their warranty period. Inverters are less reliable, warranties are half that for residential stuff but commercial stuff will come with a service contract. Wires and racks can last quite a long time.

You don’t need anything else (e.g., a river to dump waste heat).

asynchronous• 3 years ago

Windmill technician IS the largest growing job in the US this year

blacksmith_tb• 3 years ago

That does seem exaggerated, though people throw around 25yr as a standard lifetime for PV[1] (with an approx. degradation of 1% output per year). 20-25yr for a wind turbine also looks believable (pretty good given that's not solid state like the PV).

1: https://energy.mit.edu/news/study-even-short-lived-solar-pan...

crote3• 3 years ago

PV is now being sold with a 25-year warranty - it'll still have at least 80% capacity after that time.

As the article rightly points out, it often just makes more economic sense to replace them earlier due to improvements in panel technology. There isn't really a technical reason to replace them.

jeffbee3• 3 years ago

There are panels in NREL's PV Lifetime Project that are on pace to have 80% rated output after 200 years. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81172.pdf

PV "lifetime" is overblown fossil industry propaganda. It does not factor into any economic decision.

Turing_Machine2• 3 years ago

Well, maybe 30 years rather than 20, but they do degrade.

See: https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2022/aging-gracefully-how...

"A major question in the solar energy industry is exactly how much we should expect solar modules to degrade each year...and when they will eventually degrade so much that they no longer produce adequate power...For modules built today, it is probably 30 years."

jeffbee3• 3 years ago

I wonder if those guys have ever met the people from the other side of the NREL office who are running the PV Lifetime project. They have commercial, non-research panels in the field that are aging much less than 0.5% per year.

ZeroGravitas10• 3 years ago

That stat is when they think it'll drop below 80% of original production, not when it needs scrapped.

Schroedingersat9• 3 years ago

..same way as the steam generator, turbines, bearings, etc. etc. in a thermal generator need replacing.

Except a quarter of the cost.

bullfightonmars• 3 years ago

It's also irrelevant. Cost of maintenance and service lifetime are built into the price/MWh.

hathawsh• 3 years ago

If nuclear technology improves in efficiency as much as solar has, we'll want to replace the SMRs also in 20 years. Check out this amazing graph [1] of solar efficiency improvements from 1976 to the present. I wonder which kind of cells are on typical roofs.

1. https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html - high resolution at https://www.nrel.gov/pv/assets/pdfs/best-research-cell-effic...

tastyfreeze2• 3 years ago

Every time I read about SMRs the idea sounds fantastic. But, until a company actually starts building SMRs it is just a grift. The first company to actually build a usable SMR will have customers lined up at the door. No need to advertise to the public how neat your plans for SMRs are. Save that for investors. Just start building and testing. This technology is like landing and reusing rockets. It will completely change the calculus for choosing fission.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 3 years ago

You need to be able to build them for a reasonable price.

NuScale can build them.

The line is almost no one.

It needs to be a lot cheaper.

tastyfreeze2• 3 years ago

NuScale hasn't built anything.

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

They are building one in China

https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsmilestone-for-chinas-ac...

https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/INPRO/df13/Presentations/011_...

Like Nuscale’s reactor is is a PWR with the steam generators built into the pressure vessel.

Site preparation is underway in Ontario for a BWRX-300

https://www.ans.org/news/article-4697/contract-for-darlingto...

Turing_Machine2• 3 years ago

For perspective, the current average residential price for electricity in the United States is about $0.168/kWh, or $168/MWh.

https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/AverageEnergyPrices...

Since I've been muzzled again, let me respond to those below here.

Yeah, that's what "residential cost" means.

And?

onlyrealcuzzo2• 3 years ago

That's the price the consumer pays.

The $60/MWh quoted above is the price the utility would buy electricity.

Much different prices.

loeg• 3 years ago

That's the price consumers pay, but not the cost of the utility's supply.

ClumsyPilot2• 3 years ago

stull a valid point

tuatoru2• 3 years ago

Residential consumer price is made up of: generator cost and profit, transmission operator cost and profit, local distribution company cost and profit, retailer cost and profit if in a region that has virtual electricity resellers, and taxes. The "$60/MWh" refers only to generator cost.

Try installing a nuclear power plant on your roof. Solar PV is a bit easier to get accepted, and quicker to do.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 3 years ago

Also in the article: "Utility-scale solar-plus-storage costs are about $45/MWh; wind power costs are $30/MWh; and stand-alone utility-scale solar costs are at $32/MWh"

Wikipedia has higher numbers, but still comparable. And "technology proponent says technology can achieve X" is a really bad selling point if another technology already delivers X, especially if the new technology is going to face social hurdles.

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

i don’t know if i believe the $45/MWh figure for solar+storage just yet. Maybe someday, maybe not far in the future, but grid scale storage isn’t scaled out that far in 2023 so far as i know.

hedora2• 3 years ago

Yeah; a home sized battery is about 33kWh. Assuming 3000 cycles, that’s 100MWh, lifetime.

If you know anyone selling that (installed, with solar panels) for $4500, I’d like to hear about it.

DennisP2• 3 years ago

I see a lot of solar+storage quotes that don't bother saying how much storage. Usually it's four hours of storage at most. That's enough to smooth out the duck curve and get your daytime demand covered, but not enough to get through a windless night.

Building enough nuclear for baseload demand, and enough solar+storage for the extra daytime demand, seems ideal to me until we get much cheaper scalable storage.

seiferteric5• 3 years ago

It's a great point. Even in my spot in northern California this winter, it's been so cloudy this year, I can't imaging an all solar+storage grid would have worked out well this year. In this case having electricity that costs 45% more when it's cloudy is a lot better than none at all. Actually this gave me an idea, it would be really neat to have an comprehensive simulator of power grids that incorporated weather, demand spikes etc. to play around with different energy source mix to get an idea of what actually works and when it fails as well as total cost, environmental impact etc.

tcfhgj• 3 years ago

there aren't windless night's when you increase the area you are looking at

cagenut3• 3 years ago

you misunderstand how the "+4" storage design works for solar. a 1MW solar plant nameplate capacity will only produce 1M for an hour or two a day, the hours before and after that peak will be some fraction, the sum total off the area under the curve works out to between 3 and 5 hours depending on latitude and weather[1].

so when you design a utility solar system with "+4" storage, what you're really doing is creating a "one days worth of full production" buffer. that can be used to run the output at a fixed rate while the buffer builds and empties every day (its never that simple but thats the basic principle). for example a 100MW farm with 400MWH of storage can in the simplest sense produce 16MW constantly (all through the day and night). in practice there's plenty of other stuff on most grids so they don't do a full battery cycle every night, but rather use the buffer to be able to meet day ahead and dispatchability contracts for a very cloudy day or a lightly cloudy week.

now don't get me wrong, obviously that still doesn't put it in the same reliability category as nuclear, but it closes like 80% of the gap in practice. its not better, but it is clearly on track to be 'good enough'.

[1] https://www.nrel.gov/gis/assets/images/solar-annual-ghi-2018...

Ekaros• 3 years ago

Anyone who don't include cost of seasonal storage in renewable pricing is malicious or stupid. That is what really matters, not the spot price. We use power in winters and nights.

Then again people freezing to death is certainly effective way to lower co2 emissions, maybe this is their hidden agenda.

tomatocracy• 3 years ago

Most battery storage being built (at least in the UK, which is the market I'm most aware of) isn't even 4 hours - it's generally 1 hour, moving towards 2. A lot was built to target the "dynamic containment" (frequency response) market primarily and not the daily peak/off-peak cycle.

lucb1e3• 3 years ago

It does seem a lot simpler to plop down a bunch of concrete in roughly the same area as today's fossil fuel plants take, compared to rewiring and repurposing a third of a country to get enough solar panels and wind turbines in place (the latter while keeping residence distance requirements in mind). Not sure if that is factored into the feasibility when people talk about how expensive it is.

I agree that it doesn't make economic sense in an ideal world with twice as much space per capita and/or a lot more time to find and purchase ideal nooks and crannies and wire them up, but that would require moving to planet B. Note I'm not talking about nearly-empty USA, Australia, northern Africa, etc. here; rather, take 2-3 random European countries (highest emissions per capita after north america, so you know, the place that needs to get change happening) and you're very unlikely to hit only ones where not most/all of the land already is already allocated to some purpose.

I also agree it's likely already too late to get started on new nuclear plants, like, it's nearly so late that we might as well just go solar and wind for the rest of the way. But I don't think it's quite at that point yet, considering for example that regions in southern germany with big-ish distance requirements for wind turbines are placing nearly none (and germany is not even one of the countries that I would count among those that are out of space), it's apparently that full already and they've got like 80% of the way to go in phasing out fossil fuels.

Honestly the main hope I have these days is solar panels on crop fields becoming a real thing. That would grant a level of scale (and somewhat protects from crop failure causes like hail and drought) that would make me see this energy transition as feasible without nuclear (pushing the recycling problem onto the next generation, but better to deal with a billion worn panels than a billion displaced people (both figures are figurative)), but so far there's little adoption.

eldaisfish2• 3 years ago

We need a combination of the two. A single point of failure is not ideal design. One increasingly common weather event and your power grid loses a massive source of energy. Distributed energy is good because it allows life to continue, in a limited fashion.

For western europe at least, off shore wind is a great alternative, as are smaller wind turbines on farms. Much of western europe is in the path of the trade winds and so is a great place for wind power.

It is not too late for nuclear. Nuclear is an excellent stop-gap measure while we figure out how to transition to large-scale renewables.

ClumsyPilot2• 3 years ago

you're very unlikely to hit only ones where not most/all of the land already is already allocated to some purpose

Thats is the wrong problem - numerous farmers in Britain want wind turbines, they want extra source of income and they are willing to put in their own money. They know the turbines dont take any land away from farming - only fraction of a percent.

They are not allowed to install wind turbines on their own land from their own money, because the british government has banned turbines over a certain, non-viable height, on land.

Even when you want a small turbines installed, it takes 4 years of planning permissions and legal battles.

If we allowed every farmer to install windfarm of their land without interference, we'd solve half the problem.

We are dooming ourselved to disaster out of purely aesthetic concerns.

eldaisfish2• 3 years ago

The major caveat with those numbers is that they ignore time and the knock-on costs from ignoring time.

Variable and uncertain power generation creates a problem on the electricity grid and the source of the problem does not pay for the solution. Everyone else does. Those energy costs you quote imply that variable generation (wind, solar) do not set the price of energy, which they do not.

The problem with computing a solution is that it depends on where you are, which season you are in and what the rest of the power grid looks like.

stefan_• 3 years ago

Indeed they ignore time; to build a nuclear power plant today means committing to a power generation price for 30 years or not making back your investment. You can see why no one is making that bet against solar + storage.

credit_guy2• 3 years ago

Let's look at cost per kWh. I know it's a trivial division by 1000, but people pay their utility bill by the kWh, not by the MWh.

So, in the first 2 months of 2023 the average American paid $0.17 per kWh [1], up from $0.15 one year before. Overall, a lot of people would be happy to pay $0.06/kWh. You are saying solar and wind could come at $0.045 and $0.03. That's great, but 2 cents per kWh is not really something people pay attention too all that much.

[1]https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...

jillesvangurp• 3 years ago

Discussions about this topic tend to get a bit hand wavy very quickly and few people seem to be able to apply any rational system thinking to the whole debate. That's true for proponents and opponents. I've been reading through, and occasionally commenting on threads on this topic on hacker news for a while now. So, I've seen all the arguments. From both sides. There are usually a few bright people commenting but a lot of others seem to lose the ability to do math or conveniently reason under some closed world assumptions. Or just dismiss the notion of math entirely. Basically, anyone focusing on a single technology as a holy grail tpye solution is probably barking up the wrong tree. The notion of system thinking is having a mix of everything that's already being done and evolving that in a direction where less of it is going to involve fossil fuels.

Let's consider a few technologies that already exist (in addition to wind and solar) and work at scale or can be made to work at scale that can be freely combined with wind and solar.

- Pumped hydro. As of yet one of the most widely used energy storage on grids in e.g. the US. There's about 22 GW and about 0.5TWH of it on the grid. A lot of it was, ironically, installed decades ago when nuclear plants started coming online and something had to be done with the massive amounts of energy that they produced. It's relatively expensive and it can't be done everywhere. But it's proven technology and its there already. There are lots of smaller scale trials with all sorts of gravity batteries. Not all of them practical of course. Though using e.g. mine shafts seems like it should work.

- Cables. We can use cables to move power around by the GW. It's an old technology. Has been around for as long as we've had electricity. This can be done over thousands of kilometers using modern technology. Examples: cables are already running between Norway, Germany, and the UK and more are being planned between e.g. Morocco and the UK, Australia and Singapore. A single cable can provide roughly the capacity of a largish nuclear reactor. I think the Moroccon cables are going to be 1.8GW each for example. The current plan is to have four of those. Cables aren't cheap. But they are probably comparable to largish nuclear plants in terms of the amount of power they can move and in cost. And they last for a very long time once you have them. Great argument if you hear people make the point that the wind doesn't blow all the time and the sun doesn't come out in the winter. True locally but cables fix the locality problem. Cloudy UK can rely on sunny Morocco. Wind starved central Europe can use off shore wind.

- Geothermal. There are lots of places where people are already exploiting geothermal energy. It seems more interesting to use for heating than for electricity but both are a thing. Digging deep for higher temperature gradients is expensive. But there also are a few newer projects involving heat pumps that don't require that.

- Grid batteries. These are currently being deployed by the gwh and probably soon twh. This is a rapidly growing market. Mostly this seems to be with relatively expensive batteries that provide hours, not weeks of storage. But interest in much cheaper but more voluminous battery chemistries that might be used for longer term storage is picking up as well. Too early to pick any winners here but there's simply too much of this stuff going on to dismiss it.

- Domestic batteries and EV batteries. Love them or hate them, these are being mass produced and installed as well. Tens of millions of EVs are going to require batteries to be produced by the twh per year and that's going to be a reality within a decade. The volume of batteries on the road is soon going to exceed the yearly energy consumption in a lot of places. That would be a problem if those vehicles would be moving 100% of the time. Which of course they don't. Domestic batteries are not far behind this but those too are starting to add up as their cost is going down. So despite there being so much battery on the road, we may not actually have much of a case for vehicle to grid technology to actually tap into that reserve. Because we'll have plenty of other batteries permanently connected to the grid. Either way, hard to dismiss any storage that is going to measured in many twh.

None of thesse things of course are free and relying on them exclusively is not a solution. Especially considering that some of these are actually quite expensive. But the reality is we are already doing those at gw scale and soon at tw scale. And it's all happening on the same interconnected grid.

Cost is not a constant and there's a trend for mass production to get cost down for a lot of these things. This is true for nuclear as well. At least hypothetically because our current nuclear production capacity is too low to show any signs of a learning effect so far (if anything it seems to have gotten more expensive over time). But hypothetically cost would come down if we did more of it.

But the simple fact is that by virtue of people installing solar and wind at break neck speed there's going to be no shortage of vast amounts of excess power peaks that can be moved around and stored. Which does raise the question what the point is of focusing on expensive nuclear projects in a lot of places.

System thinking is the notion that we can use all of these solutions, and more, to create a highly resilient and robust, interconnected grid. Nuclear can certainly play a role in that and it looks like it will. But it's probably going to be a much smaller one than some people would like us to think.

michaelt• 3 years ago

But the simple fact is that by virtue of people installing solar and wind at break neck speed there's going to be no shortage of vast amounts of excess power peaks that can be moved around and stored. Which does raise the question what the point is of focusing on expensive nuclear projects in a lot of places.

Here in the UK, our solar output varies hugely between summer and winter, and due to our climate we use a lot of heating during the winter. Currently in the form of gas heating, in the future presumably heat pumps.

And while batteries are workable to store daytime solar power for evening use, cycling the battery 365 times a year, summer-to-winter battery storage would only cycle once per year - making the capital cost 365x higher.

It's a shame nuclear is as expensive as it is, as a year-round zero-carbon power source would be a very convenient thing to have!

Havoc2• 3 years ago

Seems like a giant waste of time.

Solar/wind is already cheap. Makes sense to focus efforts on storage and intelligent live balancing

e.g. Discharge EV batteries into the ~1 hour peak per day

Much can be gained from just smoothing things out

WhereIsTheTruth3• 3 years ago

that's a selfish way of thinking

you miss the bigger picture

we must continue innovate to keep shrinking it further so we could:

- use the tech on the moon

- use the tech on a spaceship for space exploration

- use it to deploy quick energy stations on foreign planets

Also immediate uses:

- useful for regions in the world with poor infrastructure, no need generation/storage, you got it ready to deploy all in one

Of course i am clueless and dreaming, but that's the point of human evolution, keep dreaming and never stagnate, push forward, ascend the collective, wherever we end up going

The survival of humankind

PaulDavisThe1st4• 3 years ago

the point of human evolution

there is no purpose behind human evolution, or any natural evolutionary process. There are selection pressures, and there are outcomes.

Superimposed on top of that are purposes that we define for ourselves, collectively and individually. Kennedy may have said "We choose to go to the moon", but we are also free to choose not to.

Havoc2• 3 years ago

Not convinced making decisions about what to put on the grid today based on moon and and foreign plants power is sensible.

that's a selfish way of thinking

OK...

ChancyChance2• 3 years ago

GE is a multibillion dollar company. Something doesn't seem right if they are claiming they can deliver radically cheap energy. I mean, what shareholder or board member in the right mind is going to say, "Sure, let's kill our profits!" Or did I miss something obvious?

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

GE is a multibillion dollar company. Something doesn’t seem right if they are claiming they can deliver radically cheap energy. I mean, what shareholder or board member in the right mind is going to say, “Sure, let’s kill our profits!” Or did I miss something obvious?

If GE equipment can deliver more efficiently than competitors, GE willexpand marketshare, and applications will expand based on the cheap energy. Also, GE is highly diversified, most of its businesses (like most businesses that aren’t selling energy, really) benefit from cheap energy.

ChancyChance2• 3 years ago

Thank you for kindly explaining that I missed something obvious. :)

williamDafoe• 3 years ago

These foolish projections never account for accidents, destroyed uninhabitable lands, or nuclear waste disposal which currently costs infinity in the USA since all waste is stored at reactors and guarded, forever.

You really have to be foolish to believe in nuclear power ...

Kon5ole7• 3 years ago

All estimates for the cost of nuclear power are based on limiting what you actually pay for to a small fragment of the true cost and leaving the unknown to future taxpayers.

This is even formalized in international agreements. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Civil_Lia...)

This means that any and all estimates of prices per MWh are, and can never be anything but, fictional. Including this one.

TheOtherHobbes5• 3 years ago

Even then, it's still far more expensive than renewables.

FartyMcFarter• 3 years ago

If you had to use renewables for base load power generation, they'd be a lot more expensive, as you'd need massive overcapacity (and probably batteries / pumped storage too) to compensate for periods of low generation.

pyrale12• 3 years ago

All estimates for the cost of nuclear power are based on [...] leaving the unknown to future taxpayers.

That's true for any kind of power and, more generally, for any kind of human activity.

You don't pay the real cost when you wear a pfc coat. You don't pay the real cost for the plastic-wrapped takeout you buy. You don't pay the real cost for the co2-emitting taxi you hail. You don't pay the real cost for the industrial agriculture you rely on. You don't pay the real cost for the water you drink.

Accounting is not meant to measure "real costs, it's just a short-term measure of human activity.

quonn• 3 years ago

So what's the real future cost of a photovoltaic panel then? Will there be people alive in 100 years that need to spend money on my panel or something really bad happens?

Kon5ole7• 3 years ago

That's true for any kind of power and, more generally, for any kind of human activity.

You're thinking philosophically perhaps? :)

I mean what you have to pay, financially, to be clear. In the sense that when you don't want to pay for more solar power, you close the plant and stop paying.

That's not an option for nuclear power plants. All closed nuclear power plants are still costing money.

goodpoint3• 3 years ago

I'm positively surprised you are not being downvoted to hell in this place.

h4kor• 3 years ago

To put this number into perspective:

The average installed cost of wind projects in 2021 was $1,500/kW, down more than 40% since the peak in 2010. Lower installation costs lead to energy produced at a lower cost, with the average levelized cost of energy for utility-scale wind power down to $32/MW-hours in 2021.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/land-based-wind-ma....

Double the price of wind energy.

nightski• 3 years ago

Double the price at any location and any time? Or is that not an honest analysis.

ksec2• 3 years ago

Thank You HN. I had BWRX-300 research term on my list for weeks but never got around to it. It is also interesting there are other people with similar Interest on BWRX-300.

$60/MWh for advanced nuclear electricity is achievable: GE Hitachi Executive

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