Why is the nuclear industry plagued with cost and schedule overruns? And shouldn’t they have thought by now, “hey our estimates are always off so let’s double them”?
I think people undereatimate how bleak the short term future (50-100 years) is looking right now. We've forgotten how to properly build many of the things we once touted as the pinnacles of modern civilization and the current societal status quo is too fractured and stressed to ever pursue the kind of learning process needed to reaquire that knowledge. This is but one example among many.
And the risk ? "You cannot blame me for that !"
(especially since this is taxpayer funds, ie. everyone, decided by democratic vote, at least in France and the US. The democratic contract ought to mean that since we collectively decided to do this, we are also collectively responsible for the results, and yes, even if you voted for the other guy)
Nuclear power plants have been safer and more reliable than other forms of power.
In terms of reliability, nuclear has had the highest capacity factor of any source of power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
In terms of accidents, nuclear has had a much better safety record than any other form of power up this point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
(They don’t cover ground based solar which I would think would actually be the safest. Why do people keep wanting to subsidize roof top solar?)
Some other links on deaths due to energy production: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener... https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than other sources of power. What if the Alison Canyon was a nuclear storage site (instead of a natural gas storage site) and 11,000 people had to be evacuated - how much would the media have covered that? Another recent example would be the evacuation at the Oroville dam - almost 200,000 (YES 200 thousand!) people were forcibly evacuated since the worst case failure scenario would have have been a tidal wave of water 30 feet high rushing down stream. This made the news for maybe a day. I can't blame some for being afraid of nuclear power, but there are many who should know better.
Ground-based solar has a cost in terms of the land being unavailable for other purposes, such as agriculture or housing or even just maintaining ecosystems in their natural state.
But roof-top solar is making use of a resource that is otherwise unproductive space anyway. There are also benefits to having energy production right at the point of use, since you avoid grid losses and are offsetting the retail cost of energy rather than selling into the grid at wholesale prices.
True, but I was mostly comparing the safety record. The death rate for rooftop solar is probably at least an order of magnitude worse than ground based solar. Even with subsidies it is also much more expensive.
>...There are also benefits to having energy production right at the point of use, since you avoid grid losses and are offsetting the retail cost of energy rather than selling into the grid at wholesale prices.
Very little of rooftop solar is used on site - it is just added to the grid.
Decommissioning nuclear plants is hugely expensive and a problem all over the world. It’s one of the main reasons why nuclear is now so expensive.
One hope is that it may be cheaper in future with advances in robotics, etc, which can operate safely in contaminated environments.
Reality is that you cut costs, and keep cutting costs more and more as long as that thing doesn't blow up, and if you have problems or minor leakage that you would have to report but can cover up, you do so.
And we didn't even get started with nuclear waste. What could and should be done and what is currently being done is again miles apart in many instances.
ahhhh the marvels of competition...
Just check out Berlin's new airport:
Fifteen years planning phase, construction start 2006 with initial estimates of five years construction time. Initial cost estimate ~700 million Euros. Cost estimate at the start of construction 2400 million Euros. Cost estimate five years into the construction 4200 million. Cost estimate nine years into the construction nearly 6000 million Euros... now we're 12 years into construction and still don't have a reliable estimate when it's going to open.
And it's not like we haven't been building new airports for decades like with nuclear power plants.
The focus on paperwork as opposed to real engineering work is something to be in awe at. Process drains competence, but even under ideal scenarios, these are large, complicated machines, and the base incentives for all layers of management are to underestimate the time and cost to complete a project. For many nuclear projects, cost overruns do not hurt the people who made the initial estimates, and the estimates are impossible to do correctly anyway due to the vast complexity.
EDIT: One thing I will also add is that as time goes on, the corpus of knowledge you need to know in order to effectively engineer the parts we supply only grows, as the nuclear fleet ages, documentation rots, and more code editions are released. This means that young engineers face a steeper learning while the graybeards (70 year old engineers, not 35 years old, aka graybeard in software years) face retirement.
And although those costs aren't unknown, if you do state all those extra costs straight out people will just assume its going to cost even more on top of that anyways and deny the project from the start.
The initial estimate for the Vogtle expansion in Georgia was $11.5 billion total with first power coming in 2016 and 2017 for the two reactors. The cost was repeatedly revised upwards with the latest estimate at $27 billion and they aren't expecting power before 2022. The entire project might still be cancelled and rate payers will just lose ten billion+ dollars.
Can you imagine a project that is over 100% over budget in time and money when the scale is billions of dollars and a decade?
Anyone with the background should try and pencil out a financial forecast to make money off tying up tens of billions of dollars for 15 years before you see a penny of revenue.
Do you know what is the total surface area of currently installed solar panels by SolarCity?
Alternatively the largest total area solar panels operated by a single entity?
(it's for an astronomy idea I have)
I've read claims that in the US, unfortunately there are no commodity reactors, with commensurately commodity costs in licensing, environmental and regulatory approvals. Each reactor is effectively a one-off effort, with a minority of transferable capital equipment, skills, etc. I've also read that France's reactors are far more uniform, and they reap many benefits from it.
I wish more research and engineering could be justified into ultra-small reactors like described in this Quora response [1]. Not really sure what he meant by a magneto-hydrodynamic power conversion because I didn't picture a conductive fluid involved from his description, but I wonder if the reaction can be scaled down even smaller than the proposed 100 GJ burst (I somehow suspect battery chemistries don't take kindly to those scales of bursts).
[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-micro-nuclear-reactor-that-...
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), which could be manufactured in factories rather than in bespoke, on-site builds, are regarded as a technology that could bring down the cost of nuclear builds in future.
I suspect submarine reactors are expensive because of their unique design constraints, relatively small production runs, and the fact that they are contracted/built on military budgets rather than in competitive commercial environments.
Lets take a statement like this: "Nuclear reactor fuel can be low-enriched uranium, with a concentration of less than 20% of fissile 235 U. This low quantity, non-weapons-grade uranium makes the fuel less desirable for weapons production."
20% enrichment is far higher than what is typically used in commercial power reactors. Because of the exponential behavior of uranium enrichment, 20% is almost all the way up to weapon's-grade material. Its part of why Iran's stockpile of 20-40% material was so concerning - they could have very quickly converted that into bombs.
If you have the technology to crank out 20% U-235 in quantity, then you also have the technology to make weapons in quantity.
Here's another concerning statement, "Many SMRs are fast reactors..." Fast reactors are inherently capable of being used for mass-production of plutonium. Plutonium production from fast breeder reactors is far less expensive than uranium enrichment, and an even higher proliferation risk.
Honestly, I think that the only reason small modular reactors have some traction because they appear to require less capital investment than full-scale reactors, thus drawing VC slush money.
Basically we're building so few of them so seldom, that every time it's a FOAK and we start the learning process from scratch.
If you want an order of magnitude of how huge the drifts are, have a look at the construction of the EPR of Flamanville in France[1]: started in 2007 with an initial timeline of 5 years and budget of €3.3bn, it is still not completed as of today (they just announced targeting the end of 2018) and the current budget is over €10.5bn.
In the end, the complexity, criticality and sheer scale of these projects make them extremely hard to lead properly and any setback can have gigantic impacts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
There, fixed that for ya. :P
Software projects often suffer from exponential variations in specs, implementation, testing, environment, etc.
Nuclear projects often suffer from inflexible and pre-defined specs and constraints.
Solar thermal, yes, that's a startup industry.
Distributed generation and smart loads were invented to add enough complexity (technical, regulatory) to allow them to achieve massive system failure :-)