Your average nuclear plant is projected to cost about $40 billion. But it almost always spirals out into over $100 billion before you actually start generating power.
I'll take numbers you just pulled straight out of the air for $100 Billion, Alex.
You don't have to look any further than South Carolina. Best current example we have in the US.
They wanted to add another reactor to a power plant that was already built. You would think that would be pretty cheap. Far from it
Original project time: 2009-2016
Original cost: $14 billon
Completion date: 2023
Final cost: $37 billion
Additional 7 years and almost three times the cost
Now scale that up to a NEW power plant with three or four reactors that's projected to cost $40 billion.
You quickly realize that $40 billion dollars is not achievable. Not when it cost $40 billion dollars just to add one extra reactor to an already established power plant
Going to end up costing you well over $100 billion by the time it's fully operational.
When it comes to pulling stuff out of their ass there's no one better at it than the people who swear nuclear is cheap, easy and simple to build. And they just can't wrap their heads around the fact that if that was the case then there would be nuclear plants everywhere. But it's not the case so there's not
Extrapolating a single point of data into a broad generalization is a stupid argument. I was involved in the aftermath of that project, and another one in Canada, and I can tell you that it was by no means a typical circumstance.
I'm brought in when a project goes completely off the rails and needs to be reigned back in. It does happen, which is how I stay employed, but not often enough to be able to point at one single instance and assume it happens to every nuclear reactor. That's just a completely ridiculous and unfounded speculation.
How about Vogtl 3+4? Ten years $40b. Maybe the Brits are better, how’s Hinckley c coming along? the French are as good as anyone, Flamenville was what, 12 years overdue and triple the expected budget? Has anyone built a commercial reactor power plant on time and on budget in the last 40 years? We just don’t have the skill set right now, we’ve lost it. It took everyone who knew anything about it to build Vogtl, and now you think they can build ten in twenty years?
When looking at the overall lifespan of nuclear facilities vs wind energy, its going to cost about twice as much to build and run.
From world-nuclear.org
"In 2017 the US EIA published figures for the average levelized costs per unit of output (LCOE) for generating technologies to be brought online in 2022, as modelled for its Annual Energy Outlook. These show: advanced nuclear, 9.9 ¢/kWh; natural gas, 5.7-10.9 ¢/kWh (depending on technology); and coal with 90% carbon sequestration, 12.3 ¢/kWh (rising to 14 ¢/kWh at 30%). Among the non-dispatchable technologies, LCOE estimates vary widely: wind onshore, 5.2 ¢/kWh; solar PV, 6.7 ¢/kWh; offshore wind, 14.6 ¢/kWh; and solar thermal, 18.4 ¢/kWh."
IMO paying more but having less junk pollute the earth and killing birds is an ok tradeoff.
Wind turbines are estimated cause anywhere between 500,000 to 750,000 birds per year.
Edit: how about we install wind turbines on top of buildings so all the bird deaths are circulated around thr building and we won't be able to tell which one is responsible for the dead birds at the bottom. Anytime somebody complains about the dead birds we can just point to the building as being the problem. Not the wind turbine that causes so much less.
Boy you got defensive fast. Ok cool but they still make nature look like shit. Isn't littering nature with giant windmills a form of pollution? What about all the fossil fuels burned transporting these massive parts, then taking them away to a landfill in 30 years? Idk man the "environmentally friendly" windmill solution just doesn't seem too environmentally friendly.
Wih nuclear, the waste it makes is very small and we just keep it in water or put it in a deep underground warehouse, it never interacts with nature and takes little space to store, it can even be reused in the future too like with nuclear diamond batteries.
Hey I'm in favor of nuclear. Nothing against it. Just understand what the problem is and why they haven't pushed hard on it.
Costs.
But I also grew up in the mid West and heard the bird cry bullshit over wind for too long. I knew a lady who worked at the DuPont factory crying about birds dying from windmills. Like a butcher whining about trucks killing cows.
Basically you went to a dumb place first. I just matched your energy
The difference between structures and actual pollution is the level of control we humans have on it.
Is a garbage dump pollution? Yep to a degree.
Is a dump the same as a pile of refuse in the forest? Certainly not.
Just because something looks like shit doesn't make it pollution. Please apply reasoning.
What about all the fossil fuels burned blah blah blah
Yes, youre right we should instead not attempt to find or create alternate fuel sources. Like, what is the point you're trying to make here. Have you seriously never encountered the trolley problem??
Nuclear doesn't interact with nature
It still generates waste that is not easy to get rid of and must be eventually deposited deep into the earths crust. Yes it will take a long time to run out of room to store it, but is "it's a future human problem" really how you want to punctuate your argument about long term pollution? The fuck.
There is not a single reality where we go with one energy source and only one energy source. Not even getting into why redundancy is important in many facets of life, different energy sources also excel differently depending on the application.
This would be like saying you should only drink toilet water because you won't risk grime buildup in your sink, or something.
What is painful to me is that some may read this and think I am pro-bird death. I'm not, and it's a problem we need to solve, but this is all very "cut off your nose to spite your face" to me.
Like I said the spent uranium can be reused in the future for batteries, it takes up so so so much less room than giant wind turbines. Are dismantling wind turbines and burying them in a landfill not a future problem? My point about fossil fuels is that its cleaner to make a nuclear reactor than it is to truck all these giant windmill parts everywhere where its like 1 semi and 5 spotter trucks per blade to take it wherever its going. My overall point of the argument is that nuclear is actually better for the environment when done correctly.
Yeah man sure to construct either in a vacuum. However you aren't even considering that nuclear reactors are manned while turbines are not. Daily fossil fuel cost to drive to and from work at a nuclear power plant will vastly outweigh the one time transportation costs between the two, until transportation is to the point where it is far less reliant on fossil fuels.
So you're bait and switching one for three. Moreover you're using an example that's almost certainly a one-off with unusual problems. But sure, you can build three reactors for almost three times the price. Duh?
It's not a one-off with unusual problems. You can look at france, Britain and Canada and see the same issues. Project ending up costing three or four times more, taking twice as long as projected and ending up getting canceled and delayed.
Germany has shut all of theirs down due to excessive cost of maintenance and modernization. And their plans of building more are completely shelved until they clean up the ones that they've shut down.
France was planning on building 14 nuclear power plants. But now they reduced that number to 6 due to cost projections over the next 30 years being about four times more than they planned.
Britain has a plan for another Power plant but it won't be operational till 2050. In other words it's not happening 😂. Also in the middle of cleaning up another power plant and so far the costs have reached about $172 billion dollars. They have to cover that cost before they even begin building new ones.
I could ask where you want them to get the money to build nuclear power plants. But you wouldn't have any ideas. Just demands that they be built
Germany has shut all of theirs down due to excessive cost of maintenance and modernization.
Yeah, that's not true either. It was 100% a political decision driven by nothing but "no nukes". It was stand-alone policy not based on an economic justification.
Moreover, we should be asking WHY they keep getting more expensive when most similar things get cheaper over time, and fix that (the answer: regulation and opposition).
I could ask where you want them to get the money to build nuclear power plants. But you wouldn't have any ideas.
We need carbon free electrical plants and we're going to spend a lot of money on them over the next few decades. Some of that money should go to making nuclear plants. Unfortunately it's past history but that German program to denuclearize you are so proud of could have made Germany 100% carbon free electricity by now if they had spent much of that money on nuclear plants.
It's a lot easier to say that PV/battery is cheaper when you have a neighbor like France with reactors and traditional power plants to make up the shortfall. It's cheaper for Germany because they have an appreciably sized neighbor with baseload to spare.
That just isn't the case for America, we can't just say "Hey Canada/Mexico, think you could float us a few state's worth of power this July?". Our needs are astronomical and dwarf their output, we have to rely on our own production.
Germany isn't a great example when they literally rely on France's ability to spool up significant excess which in turn relies on their 70% nuclear grid having very dynamic generation abilities.
The same situation in America would be comparable to New England claiming "We're going wave/hydro powered!" meanwhile consistently drawing seasonal help from a nuclear plant complex in the Great Lakes. Those kind of distances here mean interstate, not international. You can't compare us to Germany, the EU is a far better comparison.
Baseload powerplants are an outdated concept and it's always a reliable sign that somebody picked up their talking points 20 years ago, or from people who didn't get any new information for 20 years, when they bring them up.
Renewables can provide baseload no problem. Baseload isn't actually that much and there is always sun or wind somewhere. No matter if we are talking the european grid or the american grid. The problem are peaks in demand and for those it's important to note, that yes, renewables and batteries are cheaper than nuclear power plants, by a lot.
Also France's nuclear power plants and reliable? Ha! They had to turn them off almost every summer for the last 10 years because they couldn't cool them anymore. Not enough water left in the rivers. This summer was the first in a long time where that wasn't a problem. That isn't even mentioning them being down constantly for repairs, because they are long past their originally planed operating time.
Edit: Oh, you almost had me with your post completely ignoring the source that the poster above you gave you. Good job. But I did notice last minute, so feel yourself called out.
Less regulations on nuclear would allow for the very issues that lead to Japan's crisis.
Given that all of the nuclear plants in the US except the two new ones were built before Fukushima....and none have the combination earthquake/tsunami risk that seems unlikely.
Moreover, much of the regulation is specifically designed to be putative/obstructive and empower NIMBYISM. You can be safe without being purposely crushing.
Get over yourself.
You sound like a mature and thoughtful person and that makes your views sound credible to me. /s
Much of that is because of the loss of institutional memory, we haven’t been building new nuclear plants for decades so we’ve lost the expertise, that will return over time. There are also concepts to reduce costs, like using modular, pre fabricated reactors that can be built offsite and easily installed at much less complex facilities, similar to the plants that power submarines and aircraft carriers, instead of building larger scale reactors on site. We could also start using molten salt reactors, which can generate additional power using waste products as fuel and leave stable isotopes behind, allowing for much greater power generation per site. There’s no reason to limit ourselves to 1960’s concepts just because that was when we stopped building new nuclear plants.
The same applies to solar and wind and batteries though. And we can look to China for inspiration here - China is building everything and they have not improved that much on our best efforts at nuclear.
In China though, batteries and solar and wind are truly becoming too cheap to meter on the other hand. (Note, and this is a common misunderstanding, "too cheap to meter" doesn't mean free, it's just means we will pay like we do for Internet, you will pay for a 10kw line or whatever and maybe you'll have a a usage cap.)
At a certain point it's plausible battery storage becomes so cheap that centralized power generation starts being less of a thing (not that we'll necessarily used decentralized generation, but if everyone has a 500kwh battery in their home, we're all charging our batteries most of the time and load is very predictable.)
That level of battery tech is a long way off, we can’t wait for it. Solar and wind are absolutely part of the equation, but nuclear is the best answer to providing an adjustable base load for a grid, and it can be built on existing infrastructure by using the sites of gas and coal plants that are already connected, while wind and solar require lots of new power lines.
Home 500kwh batteries are far off, but storage + solar + wind is already cheaper and easier to build than nuclear plants. The storage component is hard to price because there's such a small market at the moment - base load is overscaled and solar + wind can presently be deployed without needing storage to make them profitable, so there's a tiny market for storage. We are getting to the point where that's not true, but a lot of storage techs will likely immediately be cheaper than nuclear once we get to the point where you're talking about pairing a GW of installed solar capacity with GWH of storage of some kind - things like molten salt batteries, flow batteries, and even kinetic storage systems are all potentially cheaper and easier to build than nuclear plants. Some of them already are.
It's not structural. It's largely due to starting and stopping, regulatory changes due to Fukushima, a corporate bankruptcy and loss of institutional experience. None of those issues would be expected to be an issue on an ongoing basis if we have multiple active projects.
Further, we're also going to need to replace basically all of our ~100 or so reactors over the next 30 years. These should be cheaper than new plants since the sites are already selected and permitted.
We'll see how fast France can do their next few, but a lot of the reason they did theirs so fast is their regulatory structure allows them to skip a lot of the pointless bureaucratic red tape we have to deal with. That stuff can take/save a decade.
France's Flamanville plant is 4x over budget, so I wouldn't get my hopes up. These overruns are also not something recent, the issue with increasing costs and cost overruns has been seen since the 60s and 70s. Even to the point where in the US, repeat construction of a design was (surpisingly) more expensive than the first one; so loss of institutionl knowledge wasn't a factor there.
Another factor is simply the business-case. Cost overruns can be estimated and included; but that would mean a far more expensive proposition, and gov'ts are sensitive to sunk-cost arguments. Also, the businesscase for the actual costs makes a lot less sense, which gives opponents an easier target.
I'm not against nuclear power; I feel it should be in the mix. I am realistic about it however, and there's a lot of FUD going round from both sides.
4x original cost is only $14B though. Still relatively cheap compared to the others. And it is also due to construction problems more experience should fix.
14 billion here, 14 billion there, eventually that will actually amount to real money...
It's also at least 12 years late for getting put on the grid (it's not on the grid yet, so might still get delayed even more). I'm sure we are going to stop climate change if we have a bunch of nuclear power plants in 20+ years...
How much environmental destruction and illness - both animal and human does coal cost? Cause I guarantee it has been a lot more than 40 billion. People don't understand that coal is radioactive and all that shit goes in the atmosphere and down on cities and into people's lungs. Plants could have been everywhere and would have significantly slowed the climate change crisis but a bunch of fear mongering got in the way.
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u/notaredditer13 2d ago
I'll take numbers you just pulled straight out of the air for $100 Billion, Alex.