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.

  • Giddy@aussie.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Problem-based person@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • paintbucketholder@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • icydefiance@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          The cost of storing nuclear waste for a running plant is only a few hundred thousand a year; basically just just salary for a few people to transport it to a big hole in the ground.

          Decommissioning costs a few hundred million, which sounds like a lot, but for a project that lasts for decades it’s basically nothing.

            • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              The Department estimates that continued operation of the current fleet of nuclear power reactors could ~70,000 metric tons of uranium * increase the total inventory of spent fuel from 70,000 metric tons of uranium to 140,000 metric tons of uranium. Nearly all of this spent fuel is being stored at the reactor sites where it was generated, either submerged in pools of water (wet storage) or in shielded casks (dry storage). The Dept of Energy

              Those must be some big fucking trucks. And as far as I know, only Finland has actually developed any long-term storage which could be considered safe.

              Nuclear is fine, but nuclear fanboi takes are similar to weed fanbois, it’s not a perfect solution.

    • Waryle@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • schroedingershat@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Waryle@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Except those reactors are off 30-50% of the time due to shoddy construction

          For French nuclear power, the lowest load factor ever recorded is 54% in 2022. The cause is the number of maintenance operations postponed because of COVID, plus a corrosion problem detected on several reactors of the same generation, which have since been repaired.

          • This is an extremely unlikely combination of circumstances, on the one hand
          • On the other hand, it wouldn’t have had any consequences if we’d had more redundancy, and hadn’t suddenly stopped building reactors for 25 years.
          • Despite this, nuclear power still has a load factor 2x higher than French wind or solar power.

          The rest of the time, the load factor of French nuclear power hovers around 70-75%, and that’s not due to bad design, it’s a strategy. I’ll let you read this link to learn more.

          €1.5/W in 2023 money is pure fiction

          Of course it does. But the fact is that french nuclear power has paid for itself dozens of times over. It’s factual, it’s historical.

          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.

          Go argue with the Cour des Comptes, not me

          • schroedingershat@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Yes it was a “strategy” for EDF to go tens of billions into debt, and the other 30-50% of french power infrastructure is there just for fun. These mental gymnastics are incredibly tiresome.

            • Waryle@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              Responding to sarcastic, disrespectful and immature one-liners from someone obviously ignorant on the subject is neither exciting nor productive, so I’ll just throw out a few points in response to your last comment without bothering to expand on them and then move on.

              • schroedingershat@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                More deranged doublethink.

                ARENH can’t be causing losses if the price it sets is profitable (so by citing it you are claiming that the french nuclear fleet has never broken even).

                It also can’t be causing a production shortfall requiring buying expensive hydro if the reactors are off because of a “strategy”.

                Your debt doesn’t go up every year if you’re making a profit.

                Deferring maintenance doesn’t make costs magically vanish.

                Decomissioning, waste management and hundreds of billions for license extensions are also completely unfunded. So the french people were just bilked another €10 billion for taking on a larger share of a half trillion dollar liability.

      • cryball@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        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?

        • schroedingershat@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Every year a reactor operates is a year of experiencing new ways they suck. The fixes and added complexities are rolled into the next reactor.

          Thr grifters running the show also learn new ways to grift, so the small new delays and costs are amplified.

          For older reactors the costs this imposes are rolled into operational budgets (and more often than not reactors are closed as unprofitable and the public or ratepayers are left holding the bag).

          Additionally regulatory agencies keep finding new instances of fraud, stopping these adds costs to the regulator and regulatee.

          This has happened since well before three mile island, so all misdirections to “scare mongering about meltdowns” are lies (the rate of cost escalation actually slowed significantly after three mile island).

        • Waryle@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Chernobyl and Fukushima. These two events, which between them account for a few thousand deaths at most (compared with the tens of thousands of deaths caused by coal in Europe alone, for example), triggered a panic fear of nuclear power.

          For decades, the nuclear industry has been abandoned and sabotaged, with projects such as Phénix, Superphénix and Astrid in France, and virtually all new reactor projects, cancelled due to anti-nuclear opposition.

          Competent nuclear engineers and technicians have retired without being able to pass on their know-how, and cutting-edge nuclear-related industries have disappeared or been converted.

          We can also thank the Germans for sabotaging the EPR. We started the project together, they forced us to add a lot of totally unjustified redundancies and safety features that made the prototype very complex and therefore costly to build, and then they slammed the door on us.

          • cryball@sopuli.xyz
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Competent nuclear engineers and technicians have retired without being able to pass on their know-how, and cutting-edge nuclear-related industries have disappeared or been converted.

            This same fear has been enough to fund SLS and Ariane programs. Basically to avoid the loss of a capability in case it’s needed later on. For some reason it doesn’t seem to apply to nuclear. And now people are complaining that building new reactors is expensive, arguably at least partially due to the supply chains no longer existing in the same scale as before.

            • schroedingershat@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              If loss of expertise were the cause, then there would have been a cost minimum in the late 80s when the maximum number of engineers had 5-15 years of experience.

              Instead costs rose for each new reactor (including repeat builds of each model).

              This theory has no explanatory power over reality and predicts the opposite of what happened.

              • cryball@sopuli.xyz
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                Should the delays and subsequent costs overruns then be simply attributed to increased regulatory complexity or corporate greed?

                I’m looking at the list of reactors in France, most of the builds during the last millennium were completed in more or less 10 years. Then there was a gap, and the new one is taking way longer than previous ones.

                Same thing has happened in many other countries. Including finland, where at first we got 4 reactors in 6-10 years, and then after a gap of 25 years the next reactor was a clusterfuck that took almost 20years to build.

                Both of these reactors are of the same design, and the issues are at least partially attributed to the company having forgot how to manage such large projects due to the years long gap in construction.

                • schroedingershat@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Part is the neoliberal economic model is really really bad at big projects. Part is the regulations and engineering complexity involved in not having them all shut down because they caught fire or the steam generators corroded (almost every program has “cheap” reactors at the beginning which have massive maintenance issues and leaks 10-30 years later, followed by expensive ones with massive delays). Part is corporate greed. Part is revealing and stopping rampant fraud and finding safety-compromising cost-cutting measures. Part is the lack of pressure from the military to make it happen as there is no longer a need for as much Plutonium. Part is that there actually are some semblance of environmental laws. Part is the fossil fuel industry interfering (as they do with all non-fossil-fuels).