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.
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
Do you have a recommended source for this? My impression was the vast majority of cost was outside the "nuclear island" of the plant.
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.
The problem isn’t technological or cost, it’s political. There is no political willingness to even try.
How can experience change anything about the costs of forging a 10 meter tall piece of superalloy?
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.
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...
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.
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.
https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
http://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/US-Power-Sector-...
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.