First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia
nbcnews.com
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.
Good news. Anything but fossil fuels at this point.
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.
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.
*Fukushima
Hiroshima was the freedom bombing disaster
on a side notw how people have dies from fukushima in the years since and how many have died from coal? Also you can compare the number of long term health problems
Doesn't matter. Bad news at the time was enough to scare people for the next 30 years.
Heck, even my college Sociology textbook from OpenStax basically has nuclear fear-mongering baked into one of the later sections.
some people can't help but cut their nose to spit their face
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.
Generates nearly all its power using hydro electric, which is great but pretty dependent on geography.
Wiki says a pretty big hunk of that is still gas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Australia#/media/File:Electricity_generation_SA_2015-2021.svg
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.
Ah sorry, my mistake on that one. Despite how many wind turbines working at once it may take, the power from the is cheaper by a long shot than nuclear.
The reason I don't think nuclear is the main solution is just cost + build time. It's horrendously expensive. Much more so than the cost of renewables with proper grid integration (transmission, storage etc.) that has been modelled.
Maybe in a while the small nuclear reactors may come close, but currently the full sized reactors are too expensive and smr's aren't really a thing yet because of cost.
If power prices can come down instead of go up it's going to be a lot easier to convince everyone to transition away from fossil fuels, and from modelling that's been done (e.g. by csiro) that can be the reality
I think you mean hypothetical technology that hasn't been invented yet, but he expected will be in widespread use 50 years from now.
About damn time! As a Georgia Power ratepayer, I've only already been paying extra for it for what, around a decade now?
That's the downside of nuclear. Cost and build time. Upside is it's reliable and carbon-clean.
The best time to build a nuclear power plant was thirty years ago. The second best time is now.
They took the average of that and built it 10 years ago
The 1.3th best time to build a nuclear power plant was 10 years ago
Whoa. Finally a state in the US that isn’t doing something completely ass backwards. We need more of this.
It's Georgia, though. This is a positive development but it barely begins to make up for how much other ass-backwards stuff there is.
This is the state that elected Marjorie Taylor Greene, keep in mind.
A single congressional district within that state elected Marjorie Taylor Greene lol
This is the state that brought you Biden in 2020. And two democratic senators. Granted there's a lot of back ass districts here, but we're working on it I promise.
Hopefully Georgia steps up and sticks to their guns with prosecuting people who attempt to convince election officials "to find 11,780 votes".
That seems completely forgivable when compared to Florida and the men they keep electing governor of that state.
@Stovetop
I highly, highly recommend the Oliver Stone documentary Nuclear Now from earlier this year. Completely changed my perspective. I had no idea that the oil industry was behind so much of the fear mongering around nuclear.
To be fair we have seen multiple disasters in the past including Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, which have serious and long lasting effects. I'm not against nuclear power but we can't pretend the downsides are just made up or blown out of proportion.
They are sort of blown out of proportion when you take into account modern safety protocols.
Chernobyl and three mile island were user error, fukushima was force majeure.
Since then they've been piloted widely. France has about 50 reactors and a laundry list of smaller errors that we've since learned from.
Have you ever compared the impact of Fukushima compared to the tsunami that caused it?
Other than that, even if we assume rectors keep being old tech from the 60s, never using newer generations of rectors that can be inherently safe: Who cares about a bit of contaminated area, very localized, every few dozen years, when the alternative is a global climate crisis?
I'd agree if our only two options were nuclear or coal/oil plants but we have many options that don't require everything be powered from centralized power plants.
I'm sure all the people and companies that exist in these areas. Land is finite and hospitable land is even more finite. Destroying these areas for decades to come isn't any more preferable that the occasional natural disaster rolling through over a few day period.
As I said I'm not against nuclear power and I would love to see more advancements come to fruition, but it doesn't need to be our main source of energy nor is it accurate to claim that the potential issues that come with it are solely overblown conspiracy theories pushed by oil/coal companies.
More people died in the evacuation of Fukushima than died fighting the meltdown, which was arguably 1.
The tsunami killed over 15,000 people. Awful disaster.
However, Japanese people are very anti-nuclear so their media made it seem that the impact was horrific when, aside from the exclusion zone, wasn’t all THAT bad. However, losing that land was a big hit to a small country.
Oh, neat. My state did something not completely stupid. I've got some reservations about nuke power as opposed to renewable, but this is definitely better than continuing fossil fuels.
Fission and fusion reactors are really more like in-between renewable and non-renewable. Sure, it relies on materials that are finite, but there is way, way more of that material available in comparison to how much we need.
Making this distinction is necessary to un-spook people who have gone along with the panic induced by bad media and lazy engineering of the past.
Fusion and fission are quite different. A practical fusion reactor does not exist. It's outside our technological capability right now. Current fusion reactors are only experimental and can not maintain a reaction more than a small fraction of a second. The problem is plasma containment. If that can be solved, it would be possible to build a practical fusion reactor.
The fuel for a working fusion reactor would likely be deuterium/tritium which is in effect unlimited since it can be extracted from seawater. Also the amount of fuel required is small because of the enormous amounts of energy produced in converting mass to energy. Fusion converts about 1% of mass to energy. Output would be that converted mass times the speed of light squared which is a very, very large number, in the neighborhood of consumed fuel mass times 10^15^.
Fusion is far less toxic to to the environment. With deuterium/tritium fusion the waste product is helium. All of the particle radiation comes from neutrons which only require shielding. Once the kinetic energy of the particles is absorbed, it's gone. There's no fissile waste that lingers for some half life.
I was just future proofing my comment for things like this: https://youtu.be/_bDXXWQxK38
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Your info is a little out of date - some fusion experiments have been able to maintain fusion for almost a minute. However, your point still stands. We are decades away at a minimum untill a viable fusion reactor.
My guess is that fusion will be too expensive for commercial use unless they can get a super compact stellarator design to produce huge amounts of energy, and make them cheap to build (HA!).
Or we will see them in spaceships. :P
LWR fuel is incredibly limited without a massive fleet of breeders (and no breeder has ever run a full fuel cycle, nor has second generation MOX ever been used. First generation MOX is also incredibly polluting and expensive to produce).
The industry is already on to tapping uranium ore sources that are less energy dense than coal, and this is to provide a few % of world energy for a handful of decades.
Not trying to be "difficult," but isn't that what people thought about coal/oil at first? I understand that the scale is different, but it still needs to be a stop gap as opposed to a long term plan.
Spent Nuclear Fuel, unlike coal or oil, can be recycled to a certain extent (this is done in places like France but not the US). If we recycled all of the spent fuel, we'd potentially have a thousand years (give or take) of fissionable fuel. Plenty of time for us to get fusion running so we can completely wean ourselves off petroleum energy generation.
billions if we start using thorium
So far the problem, if I understand correctly, is all thorium reactors are molten salt reactors. The issue there is, we still haven't solved the metallurgy problems of dealing with the corrosive salt. It destroys all the pipes. We have slowed it down, but not enough to go production with.
How fast are talking. Like replace the pipes evety year or they breakbdown in months
I don't have an answer for that question unfortunately
By that time I'm hoping we'd be using Deuterium-Tritium fusion for all our needs. Or go full scale megaengineering and Dyson Sphere some star somewhere.
Why do you think we need nuclear to transition fully off petroleum? Renewables with storage are cheaper today for new build power, let alone in another 20 years. They continue to get cheaper and more efficient quite rapidly.
Because renewable depends on the weather, while nuclear doesn't.
A mix of renewable is absolutely a good thing to do, but still, having a constant source of energy mixed with that ensure stability.
The storage problem is the limiting factor. Batteries are wildly too expensive, pumped storage takes a huge amount of space and isn’t feasible in most places due to geography, and hydrogen is not nearly there yet technologically.
If we switched entirely to wind and solar we would need to accept total shutdowns when we had a bad run of weather.
last time I checked the renewables being installed didn't even offset the new energy demands being created, let alone making a dent in starting to decarbonize existing demand.
and the main reason is, that we need to tackle climate change from as many angles as possible and not eliminate a fine energy source just because something else is cheaper.
I mean for now renewables are cheaper, do you think we have enough raw materials to cover all of earths energy needs?
what happens when the raw materials will start to run dry but we still need to cover a bunch of energy needs, is that when we dust off the good ol Nuclear plants?
not to mention Nuclear plants provide a stable base load, no need for smart electronic devices that use power when it's most abundant etc. it's just power, that runs, constantly.
I think the issue is batteries, which are expensive and require rare earth metals which often have environmentally costly acquisition methods. Perhaps an optimal solution would be a baseline of nuclear power, and then enough renewables to meet peaks in demand. That way we have plenty of stable energy while minimizing nuclear risks.
When you get into power say a whole large city the batteries cost more then the solar panels. Especially in more polar places like Juno Alaska where you need to store a surplus of power for months. plus batteries degrade over time so they would have to be replaced. That's part of the reason why ion flow batteries are being researched, you can just drain them and replace the fluid*.
I didn't know about those. I'll have to look more into it. Thanks!
If we can pull off hydrogen fusion without crazy radioactive isotopes I reckon we can go on for a little while without having to worry about running out of hydrogen in the solar system / galaxy
We don’t even know if fusion will ever be functionally able to produce more energy than it consumes, and on top of that it will need to be less expensive than natural gas or solar in order to compete. Which it will never do. Do you have any idea how much ITER has cost?
$22 billion, or $16 billion “over budget.” And this is a test reactor that will never produce commercial power. They still have 2 years of construction left so… it could hit $30 billion. At least at Vogtle they are getting two reactors.
We can still categorize a concept, even if the technology doesn't exist in a useful state yet.
Too bad the energy companies essentially never dispose of the waste properly, because it's too expensive if they want to give the huge bonuses to their CEOs and buyback thie stock. Even when doing it "properly" it's basically just making it the problem of future generations once the concrete cracks.
And to reprocess the waste and make it actually safe energy would mean no profit at all plus the tech doesn't exist yet to actually build the reactors to reprocess the waste. I mean we understand the theory, but it would take at least a decade to engineer and build a prototype.
Compare that to investing in battery tech which would have far reaching benefits. And combining that with renewables is much more profitable.
To be fair, nuclear waste tends to be disposed of much more properly than coal waste.
There's also orders of magnitudes less.
Oh wow really? Hope it kicks off some good news for other plants in the future.
The good news - it's online, generating clean power, and hopefully demonstrating the safety and benefits of modern nuclear plants.
The bad news - it's $17B over budget (+120%) and 7 years behind schedule (+100%). Those kind of overages aren't super promising for investors, but perhaps there are enough lessons learned on this one that will help the next one sail a little smoother.
Either way, good to see it can still be done in the US.
What's the normal amount of over budget and behind schedule?
Ideally zero? But given this is the first US reactor in decades, it is by definition normal I suppose.
That would be ideal, but people always underestimate the cost and difficulty of things.
Those amounts there. For comparison for example another recent plant Olkiluoto 3 in Finland was 13 years late on a 5 year original construction timeline (18 years total construction time) and
108 billion euros over budget on original budget of 3 billion euros. (Final estimate it cost constructor13-1411 billion euros to build. Technically its fixed price contract so customer price is still 3 billion. However it did bankrupt the builder Areva and litigations are ongoing about, if the French can extract more money from he customer TVO)So doubling the price budget and doubling the build time is not at all unreasonable first estimate on the announced numbers of the builder and customers at start of project.
Also, according to the story, power costs will go up as a result of this reactor coming online.
True, BUT the cost increase was relatively small (~$3.50/mo) - can't speak for everyone as I know people's budgets can be quite tight right now, but that's a price I'd be willing to pay for more nuclear on my grid.
Yeah, after literally bankrupting Westinghouse and costing us Georgians billions of dollars. I'm all for more nuclear power but this project was a colossal shitshow.
Georgia also has some shiny new solar factories so I'm interested to see how deep into renewables we can get in the next decade.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Not the guy you responded to but I totally agree. Plus I think countries like Canada, with lots of snow and less direct sunlight, would appreciate an energy source they can rely on in the winter
Unless there are a few cloudy days in a row... My panels produce a lot less than normal during cloudy days.
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
The footprint of solar is significant, but still nothing compared to agriculture. E.g. The area used to grow corn to make ethanol in the US is ~ 3x what you'd need to fully power the US on solar.
~96000000 acres used for corn, ~40% of that is used for ethanol. That makes 38.3e6 acres. First estimate I found for area of solar panels to fully power the US on solar alone was 14.08e6. That makes corn for ethanol 2.7 times the area of solar panels if all that was used was solar.
What price per kw generation are you using?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Ah I’d not consider these! That gives some hope too then :) I hope we get the battery advances we need asap, the urgency from the climate crisis is strong lately.
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.
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.
Yes, Pump Storage Hydroelectricity is a great option for storage. It's not the most efficient but it allows to store massive amount of energy.
I think today it's the main utility scale storage solution in the world.
There's also compressed air and flywheels for energy storage.
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.
“If you wish to make a nuclear reactor from scratch, you must first invent the universe”
Inventing the universe is only a small part of it, you have to get regulatory permission first!
(Joking aside, I support regulated nuclear power plants.)
And Apple pie. You need that before you make a nuclear reactor.
Just in time for openheimer in IMAX!
Very good news. Nuclear power simply has way more benefits over fossil fuels. Not to mention it's statistically safer, despite what decades of anti-nuclear sentiment has taught the public.
It's pronounced NOOK-YOU-LERRR
Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste.
I'm all for investing in other forms of energy beyond fossil fuels, this is good news to me.
what does built "from scratch" mean? Just a more emphatic way of saying "built?" Or that it wasn't repurposed out of some already built building?
Im going to guess it means that it uses a new design of nuclear reactor because I doubt theyre repurposing an old building and slapping uranium in it
Oh. I thought like they had to roll and mill all the metal components, that they forged themselves out of ore they dug up in Georgia.
“If you wish to make a nuclear reactor from scratch, you must first invent the universe” -carl sagan
I suspect they mean it's not just continuing a project that protestors managed to get suspended after Chernobyl or Three-Mile Island or Fukushima.
A new project with a new reactor design that was actually seen through to the point of producing electricity has been more challenging in the USA than it should ever have been.
@Uno
Hey wow, it's great to see we are still persuing this avenue for energy, I hate how stigmatized nuclear became (with some good reasons). Like any technology, we just rushed to using it without understanding the full consequences when shit goes wrong. Hopefully we're better prepared now.
Wait... is this the USA's first Gen III+ reactor?
It looks like it!
Looks like the only completed Gen 3 nuclear reactors are in Asia, at Kashiwazaki (Japan), Kori (South Korea), Yangjiang, Fangchenggang, Tianwan (China), and Kudankulam (India).
Edit: I missed the Gen III+ part of that Wikipedia page. The other currently operation or under construction Gen 3+ reactors are in Sanmen, Shidao Bay, Taishan (China), Novovoronezh II, Leningrad II, Kursk (Russia), Akkuyu (Turkey), Rooppur (Bangladesh).
Not sure, this isn't super easy to research, but an identical reactor is being built along side this one, so if it is our only 3+ it hopefully won't be for long
Good to see industrial self sufficiency coming back to the US
Ah, i remember studying the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design when I was at Uni. It had just been approved, and numerous plants were expected, with the first expected to be online from around 2010.
It’s 2023, and this is the first one to go live in the US.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
You can build entirely new solar supply chains from mining through manufacturing faster than a single new nuclear plant.
That probably depends on how well connected and moneyed you are. Though, in fairness, it took nearly 15 years for this reactor to come online.
Speaking of geothermal did you hear about the brrak through in drilling using mocrowaves. It radially speeds up driving
I didn't, have a link?
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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.
It was actually $27.3 billion because the journalist was an idiot and couldn’t do math.
Sorry, what article?
The article this post is about did you read the link?
Utility scale PV is currently around $1 to $2 a watt installed, depending on your region. Some projects have come under $1/watt.
But, you still need batteries and a solution for winter and clouds. So pumped storage, nuclear, hydrogen etc are all options.
Thanks I posted something similar and now I can't find the post idk if it's the app or what but this crowd has a hard on for wasting money and taking forever to do it.
Vogtle was a massive shitshow of corruption and delays, never thought it would actually be finished. Ironically, the price of electricity is set to go up, so that promise of lower bills has gone out the window.
"Nuclear power - too cheap to meter!!"
I'm still waiting for that to happen.
This is awesome to see, but I wonder if an array of Small Modular Reactors would be the way to do it in the future. Nuclear is a fantastic and safe source of clean energy, so I hope it can compete better on the economic side.
I'm just guessing here, but due to the expensive safety, security, disposaal, and political requirements, big reactors are likely going to be the most cost effective for a long time.
SMR's are even worse than the big ones. With no breeding and small, lower temperature steam generators they'd be undsr half as efficient as a traditional LWR. The fuel costs (which will only go up as the easy uranium is tapped out) alone would exceed the current all-in cost of renewables (which are still dropping rapidly).
Outstanding!
With today's contractors? Good luck with that.
At this time of year? Localized entirely in your kitchen?
Can I have a look?
No.
Everything is a stopgap until fusion is available
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.
For sure, I more meant that fission works just fine for clean power until then.
We can't let that hinder progress toward implementing the most responsible forms of power generation.
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.
Technically, this part is correct as far as I understand the laws of thermodynamics
Hehe, I walked right into this one. You're right. I totally failed at trying to be a smartass.
With energy positive here I mean useful energy positive, so electricity or high temperature heat.
What counts is the whole system. You need to get more output energy than input. Right now this was never done.
And the input energy includes the energy lost by for examples lasers because they are inefficient.
Yay! Nuclear is the best!
Goated energy source, hope the stigma lessens over time
Not sure the stigma will ever go away as long as we are using Uranium as the basis. If we could ever get Thorium based reactors to work and economical I think the public perception would sway considerably when weapon grade material is no longer a possibly byproduct and the worst case scenario drops from a quarantine zone several square miles to power plant just going into lockdown for a few weeks would be a huge step towards public acceptance.
This is unfortunately something that a layperson who's unfamiliar with the tech will always have a hard time understanding. I don't think any reactor built in the US for power generation could ever be used to make weapons grade plutonium. From what I've read we only build light water reactors here, which aren't good for such things. But how many regular folks take the time to learn about all the different types of reactors and how they work and what they're good for? I only did it because the history of nuclear tech intrigues me.
Similar to above. These new reactors coming online are Gen III reactors, and have passive cooling features, so Fukushima-like events shouldn't be able to happen anymore. But again, few people I think take the time to learn about this stuff at all.
It doesn't help either that regulatory capture has caused old Gen II designs without the passive cooling backups continue to get their licenses extended. Accidents will continue to be bad until we retire the ancient reactors, and start replacing the with new ones that have the benefit of half a century of operational experience and manufacturing advancements to inform their designs to be safer.
We had tried this in SC in expanding one of our sites from one to three. It did not go terribly well.
About fucking time.
Yes! More of this please!
Does this seem strange to include the 3.7 billion in here? I guess when you're used to costs meaning what it cost the purchaser of said product or service it seems weird. Like, if I was the group paying for this I might even think to reduce the reported cost by 3.7 billion.
That's copied from the AP news article the post's nbcnews article links to. Similar statement in the nbcnews one, but....they don't let you highlight any text? Lame.
Yeah, for sure thats a cost savings if your contractor pays you back $3.7 billion to walk away. Thats almost 15% of the total cost for the project, which is:
$35B - $3.7B = $27.3B
Either the journalist can’t add and subtract, or they printed that intentionally to make it seem worse. As if a 100% cost escalation wasn’t bad enough, lol. Although that was probably inevitable due to inflation.
This is great.
YAY
Kind of looks like de_nuke...
Nice!
Here's another interesting idea for nuclear: small modular plants.