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Comment by cute_boi | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand why government aren't considering nuclear energy. The main problem of energy is batteries. Solar, Wind all have issues that they can't give constant energy.

For me I still think Nuclear and Hydro are the best green energy.

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In the UK there is a nuclear power plant under construction [1], and two more plants with the same reactor type are planned to be built in France and Finland. The plant will cost around £23 billion to build, mostly financed by the owners, EDF (state owned by France) and CGN (state owned by China), with a little funding from the taxpayer.

However they have negotiated a "strike price" of £92.50/MWh - how much they can sell the electricity for. In 2019, auctions for offshore wind were sold at a strike price of £39.65/MWh [2], so that's nearly 3x the price. Somebody is getting a good deal out of it, but definately not UK electricity consumers :D

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

[2] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/prices-tumble-a...

Just to be clear, the plant in Finland isn't just "planned". They started construction in 2005, and it was supposed to be operational in 2009. They've just loaded the fuel for final verification tests, so it should finally go online next year.

The delays and budget overruns for that project have been quite something.

The overruns bankrupted the French prime contractor, so there's that. I suspected they underbid the job, never suspecting the Finnish regulatory authorities would as strict as they are.

We as humanity need base load capacity, and getting enough battery capacity for even just the West is a pie in the sky. Hydro is very localized. So then the choice falls to coal or nuclear. Coal is more polluting, and it even has more (indirect) radioactive spillout than nuclear.

I'd happily pay a few cents/watt more if that means turning most energy production green. It also has the knock-on effect of making driving electric more green.

Is it bad to pay more for more consistent energy?

When you factor in cost of storage, I doubt the multiple is still 3.

It’s a bit weird to have fixed prices for some players while other players in the same market need to compete. If a new tech comes along in 10 years which offers basal power like nuclear plants do, then there won’t be any incentive to invest there because they are stuck with the much higher price.

Cost. Have a look at the numbers and then it should make sense. Don’t get caught up in silly internet debates about safety and politics. It might soon be cheaper to install new wind and solar than to operate some existing nuclear plants.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020

Cost is high because there is no mass production. Every new nuclear plant starts from scratch. France built almost all their nuclear power plants in one decade with tech from the seventies. They have 56 reactors. There’s no reason we couldn’t do it again.

> Cost is high because there is no mass production.

Aside from reactor, everything else is shared with all other thermal powerplants. And think, "other thermal powerplants" also cost a ton to build, run, maintain, and decomission.

Reactors themselves are the most expensive single part in the nuclear powerplant, but they are far from being the deciding factor.

You cannot do much about the cost of reactors, with mass production, or without:

- Without mass production, you have to forge one giant pressure vessel to extremely high standard

- With mass production, you have to forge few dozen giant pressure vessels to extremely high standard

The capital cost of the reactor is considerable, but take just any reactor technology, it will not make much difference to the fact of reactors being giant, expensive pressure vessels.

Union's RBMK reactor design (one which blew up in Czernobil) tried to work around that by turning the pressure vessel into a huge pipe network, without much success:

- Such piping network still needed to be fabricated to an extremely high standard

- Such piping network still was gigantic

- Such piping network still had to use super expensive superalloys

- This giant pipe network was requiring even more inspection, and maintenance than one big boiler

- This giant pipe network obviously leaked way more than one big boiler

- Fixing the above leaks was taking enormous amounts of time, money, and manpower, and opportunity cost in lost generation hours

Mass production means experienced teams so no costly delays because of inexperience. It also means the flaws in the design have been corrected after a couple iterations. An EU wide team working to build 100 nuclear plants in Europe in 10 years will be a lot faster and cost a lot less than each country going at it alone with different designs.

The problem isn’t technological or cost, it’s political. There is no political willingness to even try.

> Mass production means experienced teams so no costly delays because of inexperience.

How can experience change anything about the costs of forging a 10 meter tall piece of superalloy?

Experience curves / Wright's law have been observed in a lot (most?) of manufacturing industries. Why would this be different?

1. It will not do anything about material costs — reactor superalloy use will still be dwarfed by superalloy use by the rest of power generation industry, and marine

2. It will not do anything to the extremely expensive tooling needed to forge reactor vessels. If you want 10x production, you basically need 10x of these huge forging plants.

3. It will not do much about capital cost, as anything of this scale is never done for cash.

4. The extreme high quality standard needed can't be worked around. If you got a single cavity in the whole 10 meter piece, you scrap that whole 10 meter piece. This is unavoidable as the underlying physics.

5. The extreme level of defectoscopy, and manpower needed. It may be cheapened, and automated, but it wouldn't be much of a reduction of already small part of cost.

6. Logistic costs of the whole reactor vessel delivery can't go down by much either. Road closures are expensive.

7. Insurance cost for the reactor in transit... may go down, but it also is not much.

> Reactors themselves are the most expensive single part in the nuclear powerplant

Do you have a recommended source for this? My impression was the vast majority of cost was outside the "nuclear island" of the plant.

Yes, you are right, most of the cost is still outside of nuclear island.

But the single costliest part would still be a reactor, despite it itself being a small part of the plant cost.

Turbines may've been more expensive than reactors for gigawatt scale plants decades ago, but large steam turbines went down in price considerably exactly because of mass manufacturing.

Have you been able to find reliable pricing information for large steam turbines? I've been looking for quite a while and haven't managed to find a good source, especially for historical data.

Unfortunately not except of "tens of megabucks" range

Have you been able to find reliable pricing information about the turbines in the tens of megabucks range? Those are the ones that matter for the cost of grid power, I think.

Isn't there a new generation of reactor designs that operate under low pressure?

Lower pressure == bigger turbines

If you believe economies of scale are truly the key to success, then certainly wind, solar and battery power will be the long term winners. We can scale up to put solar panels on every roof in the world, and batteries in every car. Do you envisage a realistic scenario of having billions of tiny nuclear reactors in every home and car, to achieve similar economies of scale?

EPR was supposed to be the way forward for the EU and instead has been a costly disaster. There's no way dozens of those are getting built.

Costs aren't static though, have we reached the limits of how much we can improve on nuclear tech? If we were having this discussion a couple of decades ago, this reasoning would lead you to believe solar and wind have insurmountable costs compared to nuclear.

Cost is a non-answer. The cost of nuclear plants has gone up about 5x since the 70's due to regulation, which is entirely in the hands of the government.

If your generator technology isn’t cost effective because of safety regulation, the problem is not regulation, it’s your generator technology.

China recently had a reactor that nearly had a radiological release from damaged fuel rods. Even recently built reactors from newer designs have significant challenges.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/business/china-nuclear-re...

In what universe does this viewpoint square with regulatory capture where you saddle your competition with requirements under the guise of safety, environmentalism (or some other feel good thing it's easy to peddle to the useful idiots)?

We can all imagine a case where some locale that has a big steam turbine manufacturer who has successfully lobbied to get extraneous safety requirements slapped on windmills. Or some locale where oil is big so they regulate solar excessively. Remember, energy and other commodities have razor thin margins and make it up at scale. A handicap of a percent that's masquerading as Safety(TM) can massively affect adoption.

Regulation isn't the only problem. The steam turbine of a nuclear plant by itself is more expensive than solar today. This is a similar turbine to that in a coal plant. So if coal plants are more expensive than solar, so is nuclear, even if there are no regulations.

The problem isn't regulation, it's that any large infrastructure project in America is crazy expensive. Nuclear power plants are expensive because of regulation, but ev even more so for the same reason that bridges and subways are crazy expensive to build.

Solar & wind are built in factories and so don't have this problem. People are trying to build nuclear plants in factories, which might be the solution.

“Sorry kids. We had the solution to limitless clean energy but it was just a bit more expensive than others, so we passed. Too bad about the devastation. Lol.“

Renewables backed by storage are cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear in most of the world. Even with a lower cost it’s taking too long to roll out, but some of that is incumbent inertia. The change will come.

https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

http://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/US-Power-Sector-...

You can say the same thing about renewables. Gas and coal are just a tiny bit cheaper than renewables because of subsidies.

The above was meant to be pro nuclear. Though I see how someone could take it either way.

Point being, saying one energy source is too expensive Vs another is an idiotic argument should one lead to decarbonization.

But sure guys, go ahead and throw trillions on economic bailouts every several years but wring your hands at moderately more expensive energy.

> The main problem of energy is batteries.

The main problem of energy is cost, NREs, capex, and long term support.

The Big Energy (gigawatt scale powerplants,) works well on big scales. But 9 out of 10 countries don't have that.

Big economy, big population, big industry, big infrastructure — you need all 4, or it doesn't work.

Solar is extremely efficient at small scales if you think of capital costs. A single panel atop of a tent in the desert is just few percents behind a gigawatt scale solar powerplant in efficiency.

Now think of any 2 stroke generator you see in a 3rd world country. Costs many times more for the power if you look at ones capable of 24/7 operation. Heavy duty diesel ones are even more so.

In India, nuclear power is part of the country's energy policy. A decade or two after independence, India was one of the few countries that focused on nuclear energy with the support of the US, and went on to build nuclear power plants. In fact, after the US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement in 2005, and the subsequent NSG waiver to India in 2008, India also signed deals with many countries to build new, safeguarded nuclear power plants. Currently India has 22 nuclear reactors in 7 nuclear power plants - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_India

I guess the reason it is not popular is because once you master the technology to build a nuclear reactor, you are one more step closer to build a nuclear bomb. And the powers be do not want any more country to have nuclear bombs.

And you are absolutely right - the weak point in home solar power generation is the battery. They are a huge recurring expense.

I believe India recieved a lot of technology from Russia for it's nuclear plants. Agreements with US were mostly about "allowing" them to import nuclear fuel and not be subjected to sanctions, which India was subjected to after they tested nuclear bombs (in a race with Pakistan).

Of late there has been a lot of local resistance to build nuclear plants and there's been accusations of protest organizers being US funded to prevent more contracts going out to Russia.

Also heard similar accusations for why thorium reactors aren't being developed properly even through India has massive reserves - foreign interference.

So yeah, the main reason nuclear isn't all that attractive is that it invites a lot of interference from powerful countries with interests in controlling the technology and fuel - military dominance is threatened.

Solar, wind power and battery technology do not face these issues.

You can see similar dynamics play out in aviation, especially jet engine tech.

Russia did help India a lot in developing its nuclear capabilities - both for peaceful purposes and for its military. From what I remember reading on the subject, the US actively helped us in the beginning, in the 60's, and even gave us some nuclear reactors. However, after we used and processed the Uranium from it for our nuclear weapons program, they were pissed and were in the forefront in imposing sanctions on us. They blocked access to a lot of science and tech to hamper our nuclear program, for decades.

That is when the Russians increased collaboration on nuclear tech with us. They went even further than the US and even helped us develop nuclear tech for the military - for example, by leasing us a nuclear submarine to our navy (which helped us to build our own nuclear submarines).

So yes, Russia has definitely contributed more to India than the US. (And they have done so in a lot of other fields too - India does owe a lot to Russia).

In general, I would agree with you. However, I would prefer the developed countries to put this into action first. That's because I don't trust the Indian government. The government here has an odd combination of instilling too many regulatory hurdles, and very lax enforcement of safety policies. By that, I mean, the company pays a little bribe, and the government looks the other way.

We have plenty of arid, otherwise unusable land within easy reach, and solar farms don't interfere with the environment in such places.

But you trust Indian government with 100+ nuclear weapons.

If I am not wrong, India has about 6 new nuclear reactors in works using a mix of Russian and American firms.

Merely having nuclear weapons does not produce daily barrels of nuclear waste. The comparison is ridiculously silly.

And I would like India to get its regulatory framework fixed before it allows more nuclear plants.

How long do you think is the shelf life of a uranium core weapon? Of a plutonium core weapon?

Feel free to look it up. You're in for a surprise.

I know what it is. That was my point: old weapons need to be retired and replaced, thus generating waste.

My understanding is that governments consider nuclear disasters as eventualities - reducible but not truly preventable, and in the event of a disaster you have to create a functionally permanent exclusion zone.

Not unlike a hydroelectric dam and reservoir.

Perhaps because of "been there, done that", a couple of catastrophes and the afaik still unsolved issue of storing the waste for a couple of thousand years.

For all practical intents and purposes, nuclear waste is a solved problem. About 96% of spent nuclear fuel is recycled [0] and of the remainder, there's so little high level waste that so far most countries haven't found it cost effective to even build long-term storage facilities yet [1]: there's only one worldwide. There are ongoing projects to build more though, and the general approach is deep geological burial.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#High-level_w...

First thing: it's not being recycled. It's being reprocessed. A very expensive process which not everybody does. The US doesn't even have a plant for it and there isn't even a plan to do it because it makes no sense at all since you still need fresh fuel (which is cheaper) and can mix MOX to it and you end up with even more less radioactive waste you still have to store on site.

So no not 96% of spend fuel is recycled. It's 96% of the reprocessed fuel is being reprocessed.

And no, the main amount of the waste is still radioactive for generations and needs to be kept safe and watched over for a very long time. The reason almost all countries haven't been able to find a hole deep enough is nothing to be proud of. This stuff is and remains to be dangerous. It will fall to generations to keep it safe. No matter what and just think about it. Just a decade ago nobody would have taken you seriously if you'd say that Donald Trump would become the president of the USA. We don't know what will happen in the next decade or century. Meanwhile this dangerous dirt is out there. Most of the times on site.

Those "ongoing projects" are a wide understatement. Germany has been looking for decades and the one they've found turned out to be not so good after all because water started leaking into it only a few decades later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

And that's just nature issues. Human issues didn't come into play....yet.

Waste is far from being a "solved problem" and it will remain so as long as this lie is being kept alive by the radioactive Astro-Turf.

perhaps both of these are pretty non-issues

I'm from Poland - Chernobyl was not as bad as it looked I dont know about Fukushima much

storing the waste? lol it's so small amount and the planet is gigantic. Meanwhile coal, smog cancer, oil and wars behind it, saudi arabia killing people; yemeni genocide happening now - '2021 holocaust' as I could even call it

all above is much better than small amount of radioactive trash

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