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- Hacker News
- I always get touchy when someone compares the cost of nuclear MWh to the ones of solar and wind turbines, because they are essentially NOT the same MWh.
Nuclear works 24x7 on its own. Intermittent energies don't.
Intermittent energies need a whole infrastructure on their side (usually gas / coal power plants) to guarantee 24x7 electricity. This cost should be factored in.
If you are not convinced, think about your cell phone service: would you pay the same for a network that works only when it is sunny ? No. Not the same.
NB: don't even mention batteries, when the largest scale projects, very expensive, can only supply power for a few minutes at grid scale.
by harrouet - Nuclear is also intermittent - ask Europeans.
During January this year, nuclear contributed about 62TWh of the electricity generated in the EU while in June this had fallen to 43.7TWh - about a 30% decrease. The deficit was largely filled by a surge of solar generation as well as burning more gas.
The drop was due to both scheduled and unscheduled downtime. There is no such thing as a non-intermittent source - even without unscheduled outages, a typical nuclear plant spends over 4 weeks offline a year. You need to be able to handle that also - i.e. with redundancy and backup.
Also because nuclear (like coal - the other thermal steam generation tech) requires huge scale to be profitable, it requires huge transmission investment. Contrast this with solar, for example, which is economic to scale down and can deployed in a more distributed pattern.
by derriz - Nuclear's great until you have a natural disaster or war. Then every single reactor is a potential Chernobyl. The less of those around, the better.
- And the waste, and the environmental impact on fuel mining, and the deconstruction, and the inherent risks, but otherwise yes, it’s great!by 0bytes
- Nuclear power, as actually implemented in most human societies, is obviously not so great. If it was, we'd have far more of it.
And while the combination of natural disasters & war with nuclear power is great for pushing people's emotional buttons, the reality isn't particularly bad. What % of the casualties from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami were related to the Fukushima plant? What % of the casualties in the Ukraine war have been related to the nuclear plants there? Yes, Putin can talk big about doing all sorts of creepy-scary things related to those nuclear plants. Especially if his doing so gets the sorts of reactions that he wants. But Putin can also talk big about using nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in Ukraine. Or just order the destruction of a hydroelectric dam - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakhovka_Dam - which caused plenty of death and destruction.
by bell-cot - This is absolutely not true.
Actually, nuclear is safer than, say, hydraulic power.
With that said, it requires a country with good governance and an independent safety regulator (like in France).
by harrouet - Current operating reactors don't have the design, constructions and operational flaws of Chernobyl. Current reactors don't have large positive void coefficient, instabilities at low power levels, manual controlling, slow control rods movements, computers from the 1960s.
Your mobile phone can do more computation in a milisecond that Chernobyl could do in minutes.
" SKALA (Russian: СКАЛА, система контроля аппарата Ленинградской Атомной; sistema kontrolya apparata Leningradskoj Atomnoj, "Control system of the device of the Leningrad Nuclear [Power Plant]", lit. "rock") was the process computer for the RBMK nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant prior to October 1995. Dating to the 1960s, it used magnetic-core memory, magnetic tape data storage, and punched tape for loading software.
SKALA monitored and recorded reactor conditions and control board inputs. It was wired to accept 7200 analog signals and 6500 digital signals. The system continuously monitored the plant and displayed this information to operators. Additionally, a program called PRIZMA (Russian: ПРИЗМА, программа измерения мощности аппарата; programma izmereniya moshchnosti apparata, "Device power measurement program", lit. "prism") processed plant conditions and made recommendations to guide plant operators. This program took 5 to 10 minutes to run, and could not directly control the reactor" "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant
As a side note, there are currently still 7 RBMK reactors in operation, in Russia. But they use modern computers, modern instrumentation and control, different composition of nuclear fuel.
by leonidasrup - ... cracks .... cracking ... cracked .. cracks..
there's a remarkable similarity to the life of these units.
They worked, until they didn't.
"ah, but we're much wiser now" is of course in this too.
by ggm - How much wiser do we need to be to build a large number of nuclear reactors? How much safer is each one compared to a larger one to justify the risk of building more items that can end in a disaster? And aren’t large reactors quite uneconomical already? How much worse do small ones operate, given the economy of scale. Nuclear power just didn’t deliver what it promised.
The uranium mines of the GDR resulted in 311 million cubic meters of mine waste. In 2005 for the the remediation 13.75 million liters of Diesel fuel were used. The costs so far have been 7.4 billion €. About 20 Billion € were invested in nuclear plants that never produced any power (or in one case was shut down after 100 days) in Germany. Add the costs of deconstruction of the existing plants. The whole narrative of cheap power is nothing but a house of cards.
by 0bytes - We are much wiser now, because the nuclear industry learns and improves. Similar evolution can be seen for example in aircraft industry, flying in 1970s was much more dangerous with many more incidents then flying now.
https://www.voronoiapp.com/travel/Airplane-Safety-Timeline-1...
by leonidasrup - Seems there's no mention of Russia in the article, but they seem to have a rich tradition of small reactors[0].
My understanding is there's still ongoing research/commercialization work but the fabled "many and cheap" production state hasn't been reached there either
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_small_nuclear_...
by riffraff - The list of installed VVER-440 reactors (slightly larger then the official definition of SMR - rated electrical power of less than 300 megawatts (MWe)) is long:
WWER-440 V-230 reactor
WWER-440 V-213 reactor plantB179 - Units 3 and 4 of the Novovoronezh NPP (Russia) B230 - 1, 2 units of the Kola NPP (Russia) 1, 2, 3, 4 units of the Kozloduy NPP (Bulgaria) Units 1, 2, 3, 4 of the Greifswald NPP (Germany) 1, 2 units of Bohunice NPP (Slovakia)
WWER-440 V-270 reactor plant3, 4 blocks of the Kola NPP (Russia) Units 1, 2, 3, 4 of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant (Hungary) Units 1, 2, 3, 4 of the Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant (Czech Republic) Units 1 and 2 of the Loviisa NPP (Finland); 3, 4 units of the Bohunice NPP (Slovakia) 1, 2 units of Rivne NPP (Ukraine) Units 5, 6, 7, 8 of the Greifswald Nuclear Power Plant (Germany)
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%92%D0%AD%D0%A0-440B-270 — 1, 2 blocks of the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant ( Armenia )by leonidasrup - Look, I prefer nuclear over fossil fuel every day of the week. It's the great hope of the non-carbon electricity sources.
In practice it is expensive to build, expensive to run, and really expensive to clean up. And that's before we add the risk of meltdowns.
Economically it makes no sense, not at the returns level, not at the timescale level, and certainly not at the political level. (If a US president can shutter an offshore wind farm unilaterally, imagine the risk to a nuclear plant that is 50% complete, and not yet fueled.)
There's a reason they're mostly run by govts. Govts are the only providers who don't have a money motive.
Personally I think research into storage, coupled with "wider" grids geographically, make solar and wind far more financially attractive.
Private capital has no appetite for nuclear, and few govts are left with both financial ability, and political will, for 30 year projects.
And if you think fission is expensive, wait till you find out what fusion-on-earth costs...
by bruce511 - I think the political-risk point is underrated. Even if you somehow get the engineering and construction costs under control, you're still asking investors to commit capital for decades while permitting rules, subsidies, electricity markets, and governments can all change underneath themby Honali
- Nuke fanboys hate this one weird trick (economics)by dalyons
- > In practice it is expensive to build, expensive to run, and really expensive to clean up.
That turns out not to be the case.
Nuclear power plants are expensive, but that's because they are big. For the amount of electricity they generate, they are cheap.
They are also quite cheap to run. As far as I know, there is no cheaper source of electricity than a nuclear power plant that has paid off its construction costs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
And they run for a long time, if you don't do stupid shit like ban nuclear power. The US has so far extended the operating license of every nuclear plant that has applied to 80 years, and they now thin 100 years is a realistic option.
> There's a reason they're mostly run by govts.
Most nuclear power plants in the US are privately run, last I checked. So were the nuclear power plants in Germany. In Germany, the Greens tried to force nuclear power to become uneconomical by ever stricter regulations. They failed. Nuclear power had to be outlawed.
> Private capital has no appetite for nuclear
This turns out not to be the case.
https://world-nuclear.org/net-zero-nuclear/news/internationa...
https://www.nucnet.org/news/polish-billionaire-to-invest-gbp...
Also, the hyperscalars, for example, have all invested in nuclear. The biggest risk to nuclear is governments, which is why private investors want assurances or the government on board.
> wait till you find out what fusion-on-earth costs...
What does it cost?
by mpweiher - Nationalize all power utilities and use their capital to build new plants. That costs the government nothing, and power will get cheaper even if the nuclear plans fail because their profit margins would be limited by law. It's also the best way to enforce a transition away from fossil fuels.by tancop
- If we all agree that we prefer nuclear over fossil fuel, then the solutions is extremely simple. Ban construction of new combustion based energy production in the national grid. Let the economy and market forces compete to find the cheapest alternative when there is no fallback to burning fuels for electricity.
Take Sweden, since that is the country where I live in and which has an ongoing election right now. We are not building any new nuclear. We are building a bit more wind and solar, but both is close to 100% capacity and interest for overcapacity is low. New production is located in areas which has yet to reach 100% capacity. Hydro capacity is already at maximum capacity and need to be decrease in order to follow environmental rulings from EU and prevent extinctions of multiple species.
Thermal power plants however is seeing an increase with new plants being planned to burn fuel for electricity and heat. Private capital has great appetite for thermal power plants since those has great financial ability to extract rent from the government as part of the reserve grid and providing readiness to stabilizing the gird, and when they produce energy they can extract the highest price since periods of low wind and low solar create the absolute highest market price. The energy crisis a few years ago demonstrated that a single month can create market prices that exceed that of a whole year if the weather produce non-optimal conditions during the winter.
So the solution is really that simple. Do not build power plants that burn fuels. The economics will push the next cheapest solution to the top.
by belorn - Feels like there is a "too small" range where fixed costs make a reactor design uneconomic, and perhaps a "too big" range where they cost so much that they are rare strategic investments without the benefit of a production line.
Is there a happy medium? Some of the modern SMR proposals aren't all that small. There's a 470MW Rolls Royce unit, for example.
by jl6 - The existing "big" nuclear reactors are already more or less in the "happy" range. The problem is irregular building schedule (you can have 10 reactors in works today and 0 for the next 50 years) and extreme regulatory overhead.
Ideally, you need a "pipeline" with one reactor being built every 2-5 years and streamlined regulatory environment where you can use the same project "template" with minimal adjustments. This way building expertise is not lost (i.e. the industry does not need to re-learn everything for every project, which is very costly) and even can be accumulated to reduce costs further. It applies not only to the building part, but also to regulatory bodies.
The problem is that you need to operate ~100 reactors for this, so it can work only for large economies able to provide the "baseline" demand. China and to a lesser extent Russia do this, which does result in significantly lower nuclear plant building costs for them. Europe, SK, and US have dropped the ball hard here.
by fuoqi - What I find interesting is how little the sales pitch seems to have changed. "Yes, smaller reactors lose economies of scale, but we'll make it up through factory production, standardization and repetition" apparently sounded plausible in the 1950s tooby Honali
- > but we'll make it up through factory production, standardization and repetition"
Those are economies of scale, for what it is worth.
by roenxi - > "Yes, smaller reactors lose economies of scale, but we'll make it up through factory production, standardization and repetition"
Why not both? Large Modular Reactors (LMR). You can produce standardized modules in a factory and ship them via barges to their final destination.
See for example: https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html
by preisschild - The author of the article "M. V. Ramana" is long-time opponent of nuclear energy , mostly because of nuclear weapon proliferation concerns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._V._Ramana
See for example:
"Bombing Bombay? Effects of Nuclear Weapons and a Case Study of a Hypothetical Explosion", 1999 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)
https://www.ippnw.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Bombing-Bom...
"Costing plutonium: economics of reprocessing in India", M.V. Ramana, J.Y. Suchitra, 2007
https://www.geocities.ws/m_v_ramana/nucleararticles/IJGEI_Vo...
"India, Pakistan and the Bomb", Scientific American, 2001
by leonidasrup - Perhaps he took the Vancouver "nuclear weapons free zone" signs a little too seriously.
https://www.google.com/search?num=10&client=firefox-b-d&hs=d...
by walrus01 - Not sure this takes away from his arguments? If anything the Wikipedia article sets him up as an expert on the subject?by som