Why is Nuclear Energy So Expensive?

ilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and risks are untenable a nd the tax payers are picking up the tab for the overruns. From a recent a rticle about US nuclear power.

ower to compete with other energy options in the United States, particularl y natural gas. The high cost of nuclear power has led to a significant decl ine in the construction of new plants?with just one plant, Watts B ar 2, entering commercial operation in the past 20 years.

use AP1000 reactors due to difficulties in equipment manufacturing, signifi cant construction delays, and cost overruns?leaving just two other AP1000 reactors under construction, in the state of Georgia. These reactors have also faced delays and cost overruns. The original cost estimate of $1

by the plant is expected to cost about US$200/MWh, with the high cost due t o large staffing requirements, high fuel costs, and resources required to m aintain the barge and coastal infrastructure."

last estimates and is running the risk of further delays.

Finland and at Flamanville in France, where costs have also spiralled by b illions of euros."

ant, not the rate payers... so they say. But in the future...

nuclear reactors before they are built, and for taxpayers to pay a share o f any cost overruns or construction delays."

and New Energy Technology at Tsinghua University expects the cost of a 655 MWe HTGR to be 15-20% more than the cost of a conventional 600 MWe PWR.3

tration HTGR is about US$5,000/kW ? about twice the initial cost es timates."

HTGR is US$6,000/kW."

more than expected.

an't control the costs? It is much cheaper to just build wind or solar and provide for backup generation.

Uranium energy production uses a process that is not stable. The conditions for the core of the reactor are on a knife-edge. Millisecond bursts of neutrons need some moderation. Mechanical breaks and thermal hot spots take that knife- edge and point it at us. That is why it costs so much: the control room and its people are the very finest that money can persuade to be there. Expensive dumping of exhaust is soon to be allowed. Get on the gravy train, today.

As long as there are countries trying to get or substain their nuclear weapon arsenal, there will be nuclear (power) reactors.

acilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab for the overruns. From a recent article about US nuclear power.

power to compete with other energy options in the United States, particula rly natural gas. The high cost of nuclear power has led to a significant de cline in the construction of new plants?with just one plant, Watts Bar 2, entering commercial operation in the past 20 years.

house AP1000 reactors due to difficulties in equipment manufacturing, signi ficant construction delays, and cost overruns?leaving just two othe r AP1000 reactors under construction, in the state of Georgia. These reacto rs have also faced delays and cost overruns. The original cost estimate of $14 billion has risen to $23 billion, but construction is proceeding, given the promise of government financial support for these reactors?the first of their kind in the United States."

d by the plant is expected to cost about US$200/MWh, with the high cost due to large staffing requirements, high fuel costs, and resources required to maintain the barge and coastal infrastructure."

s last estimates and is running the risk of further delays.

in Finland and at Flamanville in France, where costs have also spiralled by billions of euros."

plant, not the rate payers... so they say. But in the future...

ew nuclear reactors before they are built, and for taxpayers to pay a share of any cost overruns or construction delays."

ar and New Energy Technology at Tsinghua University expects the cost of a 6

nstration HTGR is about US$5,000/kW ? about twice the initial cost estimates."

n HTGR is US$6,000/kW."

ot more than expected.

can't control the costs? It is much cheaper to just build wind or solar a nd provide for backup generation.

That's total and pure BS.

I thought a lot of it was overcoming the lawsuits from people trying to stop the nuclear plants. Mikek

I suppose the huge permitting process and liability insurance is large part of the cost.

Really? You think that years into construction people are filing law suits the cost the companies billions of dollars to deal with? Man, I knew lawy ers made good money, but that is amazing!

We've already had that discussion and the law suits are brushed aside like a fly. Dominion spent half a billion dollars getting approval for a new re actor which was mostly the design process. Now they will need to spend ano ther $19 billion if they decide to actually build it... at least that's the current estimate. So you think most of this will be spent fighting law su its in court???

Personally I have no problem what so ever letting utilities build whatever they want. My problem is when they require the consumers to pay for it, li ke the half billion they spent on a reactor they may never build. The cons umers are already paying for that in their bills as approved by the VA stat e legislature.

In South Carolina consumers are paying for reactors that ended up being so over budget they had to cancel the project since no one could pay to finish it. Westinghouse went bankrupt trying to make it happen. It wasn't becau se of any lawsuits. It was because no one in the entire world seems to be able to properly plan and budget to construct nuclear reactors. No one. N ot even the French who get something like 85% of their electrical power fro m nuclear facilities. They designed three nukes that are presently all way over budget and have blown the schedules by years. One has been under con struction for years and even now is not expected to be producing power unti l 2025.

acilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and risks are untenable and the tax payers are picking up the tab for the overruns. From a recent article about US nuclear power.

power to compete with other energy options in the United States, particula rly natural gas. The high cost of nuclear power has led to a significant de cline in the construction of new plants?with just one plant, Watts Bar 2, entering commercial operation in the past 20 years.

house AP1000 reactors due to difficulties in equipment manufacturing, signi ficant construction delays, and cost overruns?leaving just two othe r AP1000 reactors under construction, in the state of Georgia. These reacto rs have also faced delays and cost overruns. The original cost estimate of $14 billion has risen to $23 billion, but construction is proceeding, given the promise of government financial support for these reactors?the first of their kind in the United States."

d by the plant is expected to cost about US$200/MWh, with the high cost due to large staffing requirements, high fuel costs, and resources required to maintain the barge and coastal infrastructure."

s last estimates and is running the risk of further delays.

in Finland and at Flamanville in France, where costs have also spiralled by billions of euros."

plant, not the rate payers... so they say. But in the future...

ew nuclear reactors before they are built, and for taxpayers to pay a share of any cost overruns or construction delays."

ar and New Energy Technology at Tsinghua University expects the cost of a 6

nstration HTGR is about US$5,000/kW ? about twice the initial cost estimates."

n HTGR is US$6,000/kW."

ot more than expected.

can't control the costs? It is much cheaper to just build wind or solar a nd provide for backup generation.

But that is the very first thing they have to do... So why do facilities t hat are only partly built suddenly develop schedule and budgetary problems?

The plant at Hinkley Point in England (using the French design) is so very late and overbudget because "The nuclear developer blamed challenging groun d conditions". Ground conditions??? They can't even understand DIRT???

If you have a construction company who feels dirt is a challenge, I'm think ing the problem is not the "permitting process".

Civilian power reactors don't product military plutonium. In theory they can, but it takes a LOT longer to produce enough to make a bomb, more than a year to do what a military reactor can do in a day.

Not necessarily. It's my understanding that bombs have been demonstrated from Pu244 (the common byproduct in commercial "spent" fuel) and even higher (curium, americium? I forget which isotopes).

"Nice" thing is, because they're more active, the critical mass is smaller too. Think the main difference is it needs to be "assembled" more quickly? So, precision explosives, probably the implosion type rather than the gun type?, and a better neutron activator are called for, I suppose. All of which are solved problems in the development of higher-yielding vanilla-flavor bombs.

I don't know that the military, or at least our military, has any interest in those isotopes, or certainly no need. Probably the research was done (short of demonstrating a device, or maybe they did?) for proliferation reasons.

Tim

ey

han

her

y?

The reactor at Ft. Greely was used as a small breeder. It has only been par tially declassified, so I don't know which isotopes it produced. It ran thr ough part of the 60' and it was shut down for the last time in 1973. It was about a block from my barracks, and it contaminated our drinking water.

e:

we can't control the costs? It is much cheaper to just build wind or solar and provide for backup generation.

The claim about nuclear energy production using a process that isn't stable isn't BS. Nuclear reactors have to be controlled - with control rods - to keep neutron production high enough to sustain the nuclear reaction at the desired level. If it starts speeding up, the control rods have to be pushed in further to soak up more neutrons. If it slows down - as it does as the fission products build up in the reactor - the rods have to be pulled out t o let more neutons fission more uranium nuclei.

The preceding claim - that nuclear reactor construction is prone to cost ov er-runs - is well documented.

If Trader4 wanted to argue that that was BS, he'd have to find counter-exam ples, which seems to be well above his pay grade.

The last time he's tried to support one of his claims by a link to a web-ac cessible document, the link he'd found agreed with his proposition that lot s of homeless people had mental health problems, but in fact asserted that being homeless caused a lot of the mental health problems, so the proper co urse of action was to stop them getting homeless in the first place, rather than writing off the homeless as unsalvageable, as he was trying to do.

Trader4 is remarkably stupid.

And overcoming piles and piles of regulations placed on the industry by lefists who are hell bent on bankrupting the industry and moving civilization back into caves (everyone else, not them, of course).

Of course not. We will thrive on our wind and solar power while the rest of you retreat to your nuclear caves like the Morlocks you really are! Yes, the plan is working beautifully!!! Eloi rise up and take the world!

Looking at it from a slightly more rational point of view, the regulations were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

Quite how making nuclear power slightly more expensive would have moved civ ilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of caves long before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us out o f the caves in future.

Krw's read only memory seems to have programmed with a lot of misinformatio n back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denialist prop aganda of a particularly silly sort.

ilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and risks are untenable

Almost any 'seems like' scenario can be created as an exercise in spin.

tration HTGR is about US$5,000/kW ? about twice the initial cost es timates."

If it produces for 20 years, 250 days/year, that amounts to $5000 for 1.2x

n't control the costs?

Every nuclear submarine comes online according to contract, though, so why are you so sure 'we' cannot control (and who, exactly, is 'we'?) costs for nucl ear?

The public in the US pretty accurately recognized that the nuclear power industry was staffed by ex-DOD people, "Neon Johns", Enron-style predatory executives, and various fashions of megalomaniacs who habitually underrepresented the real-life risks and would gladly tell any lie and regularly sweep any safety issues short of a catastrophic failure under the rug to get to play with their nuke-toys and make a quick buck in the process, if left to their own devices.

acilities much longer. It just seems like the cost and risks are untenable

If you don't like my evaluation, why not respond to the many facts provided ?

nstration HTGR is about US$5,000/kW ? about twice the initial cost estimates."

e is available cheaper.

That's the point. While you say $40 per MWh isn't a show stopper, that's o n top of the many other expenses and right now power is going for more like $100 per MWh. I believe I read a number that was $200 per MWh for nuclear delivered.

The worst part of it is that these numbers are far above what was expected when the projects were started. It gets to be hard to find investors who w ill be willing to put money into such a risky investment. That is the reas on why nuclear investment is all but dead in the US and is starting to look very bad to other parts of the world. Britain is looked to make the rate payers subsidize the construction of the next generation of nukes given the way Hinkley is going.

can't control the costs?

y are

clear?

Huh? What do the relatively small military reactors on subs have to do wit h civilian power plants? I'm "sure" that we have failed miserably based on the evidence. Do you not understand that an entire nuclear reactor compan y no longer exists because of a massively overrun project in South Carolina ? There is no longer a Westinghouse nuclear reactor company.

It's not like I'm making this stuff up. Go out and look for yourself. Com mercial nuclear in the US is all but dead. The EU is doing very badly as w ell.

e:

ar

ons were put in place by essentially a-political people who were interested in avoiding more Chernobyls, Fukushima's and Three Mile Islands.

civilisation back into caves isn't entirely clear. We moved out of caves l ong before nuclear power was an option, and wind and solar power - and fair bit of grid-scale battery storage - seem perfectly capable of keeping us o ut of the caves in future.

ation back whenever it got programmed, but this is fairly recent denialist propaganda of a particularly silly sort.

This isn't even about the risk which is not as trivial as some would like y ou to believe. I was amazed when I ran the numbers and found the risk of c ore damage with a release of radiation was 1 in 10 across the US industry o ver the lifetime of the reactors FROM EARTHQUAKE ALONE! That isn't even th e largest of the different sources of risk.

The practical engineering problems of developing fission nuclear power infrastructure to the point it's considered as solid an investment as coal, oil, and natural gas are like the classic three-legged stool but the stool is in four-dimensional space and you can only adjust the legs via manipulating its "shadow" or projection in three-dimensional space. nobody really has any idea what it is. or what "it" would look like. and anyone who says "well we'll just eyeball that as we go" is nuts.

Physics of PN junctions is complex, but not complicated. You can fairly well imagine what a much larger solar-based infrastructure would look like.