If you look back at the history of nuclear construction, at least in the US, late and massively over budget is the norm. Late and over budget are closely tied together, of course, as it's all about project management and that's not trivial at this scale. This sort of typical overrun is why US utilities stopped building more nuclear in the 80s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
Another utility canceled a project that was underway in South Carolina.
If the average software project is over budget, late and doesn’t do all the things it was supposed to do on design stage, just think how much more complex these things are.
Thats some revisionist history to fit the current zeitgeist, right there.
What stopped nuclear construction in the United States was the complete overreaction to Three Mile Island and the disaster at Chernobyl
Stop blaming Chernobyl when the truth is clear: the costs of retrofitting most reactor designs to absolve fault tolerance make them inherent unprofitable compared to wind, geothermal, and solar.
http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2016/02/16/nuclear-plant-cost-esca...
The major regulatory hit that that first wave of US nuclear plants took wasn't specific to nuclear: the Calvert Cliffs decision held that the National Environmental Policy Act applied broadly, including to the regulatory process of the AEC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs_Coordinating_Co...
As you and siblings pointed out, nuclear seems to have been frought with problems for a long time.
Wikipedia, if it is to be believed, paints an even more dire picture than you say:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_...
I find this so counterintuitive having safely operated naval nuclear reactors. More research is needed from me!
Curiously, these sorts of high nuclear costs are not experienced by every country. France's electricity (70-80% nuclear) is a fraction of the cost of Germany's electricity production, while simultaneously emitting less carbon. Countries like South Korea, and Japan (until they cancelled nuclear plants following the tsunami) had cost effective nuclear industries. Cost overruns happened, but not as large as compared to the US. The main explanations for this that I have encountered is that US nuclear plants have tended to be one-off projects, whereas other countries implemented serialized production of a handful of designs. Building 10 instances of the same plant is easier than building 10 different plants.
At the same time, France has tried to get its nuclear industry going again with new reactors, to disastrous result.
So if you want to build energy infrastructure in 1980, sure, go ahead and choose nuclear over renewables. If you want to do it now, that choice would be crazy.
> So if you want to build energy infrastructure in 1980, sure, go ahead and choose nuclear over renewables. If you want to do it now, that choice would be crazy.
Did technology magically get worse from 1980? Did the French somehow forget how to build power plants? Nuclear energy projects were cheap during the 1980s because France built a large number of a handful of plant designs. Modern plants are usually one-off projects with a single digit number of plants built of a given design. Building a dozen of the same reactors, turbines, etc. is much cheaper than building one. Political opposition has meant that only small allocations of funds have been dedicated towards nuclear power, so serialized production has not been done recently.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
> Did technology magically get worse from 1980?
Nothing magic about what happened. Did you expect the relative rankings of technologies to remain fixed and unchanging across the decades?
Nuclear is now a clear loser technology, far more expensive than renewables. Why would anyone want to invest now in the loser technology? What weird psychological phenomenon is driving this fixation?
People keep saying that intermittent sources are winners and that nuclear is a losing technology. Real world experience says otherwise. The only way intermittent sources are feasible is with cheap high capacity energy storage, which has never been built. In fact, Germany has had to build more fossil fuel plants following the closure of nuclear facilities. If we want to replace all electricity generation with carbon free sources nuclear is the only known way to do that (besides geography-dependent sources like hydroelectricity and geothermal power). If there's some psychological fixation at hand here, it's the aversion to nuclear power and draw to intermittent sources despite the unsolved fundamental limitations of the latter.
1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity
The first is Levelized Cost of Energy (total cost, divided by total energy generated.) For solar and wind this is current 3-4x better than new nuclear construction. This is an enormous difference.
The second is time to market. Renewables can be brought online much faster than a nuclear plant. This (along with staged introduction) allows renewables to track actual demand rather than needing to be able to predict future demand. Failure to do that was the cause of much utility pain in the first nuclear era, including the bankruptcy of the WPPSS ("Whoops"). Demand for electricity suddenly stopped growing. The same dynamic occurred more recently as the "nuclear renaissance" collided with suddenly cheap natural gas.
The final metric by which renewables are destroying nuclear is rate of improvement. Renewables have shown strong and consistent experience effects. Solar improves in cost by ~20% for each doubling of cumulative installed capacity. Nuclear, on the other hand, has not consistently shown any experience effects. This is likely related to the fundamental complexity of large, integrated nuclear systems, vs. the improvement trends seen in design and manufacture of small, highly replicated systems (a phenomenon well known in Silicon Valley).
> The second is time to market. Renewables can be brought online much faster than a nuclear plant. This (along with staged introduction) allows renewables to track actual demand rather than needing to be able to predict future demand. Failure to do that was the cause of much utility pain in the first nuclear era, including the bankruptcy of the WPPSS ("Whoops"). Demand for electricity suddenly stopped growing. The same dynamic occurred more recently as the "nuclear renaissance" collided with suddenly cheap natural gas.
You're hand-waving away the fact that intermittent sources are exactly that: intermittent. And what happens when the demand for energy occurs when the renewable supply of energy is not available? Germany and California both encountered the same problem, and they both used the same solution: use fossil fuels. That is why Germany's carbon emissions have remained flat for the last decade [1] despite renewable power generation doubling in the same period of time[2]. It doesn't matter how much energy wind and solar produces if you need to revert to hydrocarbons in the evening.
The levels of energy storage necessary to run an electrical entirely on renewable energy remain the stuff of science fiction. Batteries are possible, but using those would cause the price of electric vehicles to increase considerably and ensure that hydrocarbons remain the primary fuel for cars. California uses hydroelectric storage, but the efficiency is extremely low (over 70% energy lost).
By comparison, nuclear plants provide continuous output throughout the day. You paint this as a negative, when it's really not. If excess power is generated, then use that excess power to sequester carbon. Too much energy is an easy problem to solve, too little energy is not.
> The final metric by which renewables are destroying nuclear is rate of improvement. Renewables have shown strong and consistent experience effects. Solar improves in cost by ~20% for each doubling of cumulative installed capacity. Nuclear, on the other hand, has not consistently shown any experience effects. This is likely related to the fundamental complexity of large, integrated nuclear systems, vs. the improvement trends seen in design and manufacture of small, highly replicated systems (a phenomenon well known in Silicon Valley).
This is exactly that I explained in my comment above. Most nuclear power in the United States has been one-off projects to the public's unwillingness to see widespread adoption. By comparison, countries that used serialized plant designs (most famously, France) saw much cheaper nuclear power construction. Yes, replicated designs are much cheaper to build than unique designs. That is why nuclear power was so cost-effective in France while so much more expensive in the United States.
The reality is that there are only two proven methods of powering nations with carbon-free energy: Geographically dependent solutions like hydroelectric power and geothermal power. And nuclear power.
1. https://www.economist.com/europe/2017/11/09/germany-is-missi...
2. https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/128...
Intermittency has a cost, but the enormous levelized cost advantage of renewables is already dooming nuclear. There's a reason no merchant nuclear plants are being built -- it would be economically ludicrous to do so. I'll believe what the selfish investors who want to make money are doing before I believe what you think they should be doing.
First of all, your claim that countries aren't building new nuclear plants is factually incorrect. China, Korea, and other countries are continuing to build nuclear plants. What you really mean to say is that few Western countries are building nuclear plants, and that's primarily due to an unwillingness to build nuclear plants at any significant scale. Nuclear loses not because it is uncompetitive with solar and wind, but because it is uncompetitive with fossil fuels and because of irrational nuclear phobia that leads to intense opposition to nuclear power construction.
The levelized cost of intermittent sources may be low for the first 20-30% of electricity generation. But every country hits a wall around that figure, because there isn't any cost effective storage solution. If the levelized costs were altered to include energy storage costs to deliver power when power is in demand, intermittent sources would have terrible costs for providing power outside of its peak production time. This is why Germany, California, and every other countries that tries to use solar and wind energy ends up building the same amount of capacity with natural gas plants to fulfill peak demand. Politicians sell the dream of intermittent energy production, then turn around and build gas plants when they realize it's a fantasy.
The intermittency argument you are giving is quite flawed. Solar and wind can go far past 20-30% and still be cheaper than new nuclear. If they are not going higher now it's because of sunk costs in existing generating capacity, the slow growth of demand, and the slow turnover of existing generating capacity.
I'll believe it when I see it. History so far has demonstrated otherwise. In the meantime, the French are laughing at all of us as they enjoy their cheap, carbon free energy with enough surplus to export 3 billion euros of it.
The French are also not laughing, since their attempts to build new nuclear plants have gone disastrously wrong. Their nuclear construction industry is in a shambles, losing billions, and had to be bailed out by the government.
But that's all water under the bridge. Their attempts NOW to build nuclear capacity have demonstrated that they cannot build nukes competitively. The facts on the ground trump what you think should be true.
And Germany clear would have the chops to pull of a nuclear build up if that was their focus.
Had Germany done so they might now be close to done rather then still decades away from carbon-free energy.
https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-...
Or look at when new projects were started, and you see nuclear starts dramatically fall even before we had TMI and Chernobyl.
The revisionist history is to say that we stopped building nuclear because we are scared of it. The reality is that economics and bad management make it extremely unattractive to build, then and now.