Westinghouse/Bechtel Consortium Agreement: First Nuclear Power Plant in Poland
info.westinghousenuclear.com
info.westinghousenuclear.com
Wait... they could sum up the combined experience of all their employees, that would sound even more impressive! Millennia of experience, wow! I should become a PR copywriter...
Theyre certainly not doing it for economic reasons (5x the cost of solar or wind) or for the environment. They burn more coal per capita than anybody else in the EU and will likely continue to do so for the 15 or so years until this project is completed, while solar and wind farms take 1-3 years to build, pumped storage ~10.
I don't see any real 'proof there, especially about everyone not being eager to...
Moreover whenever a weapon is used there is a risk of hitting a non-target.
You can load a 747 with explosives and hit AP1000 and would still not destroy it.
Russia could fire 1000+ rockets, drones and cruise missles and it would not cause the next Chernobyl.
I think you missed some news https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/un-nuclear-watchdogs-safe... While they managed to avoid shooting directly at one of them, shelling the area wasn't uncommon and it's a bit up to luck that there were no mistakes.
* regular artillery shells, bunker busing is a different story
* as long as materials behave as expected, there are no existing cracks, ...
** ignoring secondary problems like vibrations misaligning elements, damage to other materials resulting in controller failures, damage to cooling system, injuries to staff not being able to respond to emergencies, ...
Sure, they should not be affected. They're also designed not to fail, and yet.
The fuck you're sniffing
Thanks for editing you comment with some substance...
You do realize that cost and especially viability of wind and solar varies dramatically geographically? Renewables are not as easy to deploy in Poland and the fact that we're going with nuclear is precisely to address the coal situation. (Which is what you're attacking btw...)
Not to mention nuclear is also the safest technology out there so far (read up stats on the deaths per each technology, per megawatt)
Let's remove all laws where the public bear the cost of accidents then? Should be fine since it's the safest!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
That is for the U.S., but equivalent laws exist in all countries with nuclear power plants.
Safety of nuclear is confirmed by death stats and bills like the one you mentioned don't prove otherwise. In fact I'd say they encourage lesser safety measures if anything...
It is all as hilarious as Korean tanks purchase - we learned that Poland is going to borrow money from Korea only when Korean media announced it. No one knows actual financing conditions. But it still might turn better than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawron-class_corvette
And Iran was planning to do it safely in cooperation with the French under full view of the IAEA. However the US then came in and destroyed this plan.
And your repeated claims about the economics are based on very bad oversimplified math. Please stop spamming the same nonsense in ever post, you are simply acting like an anti-nuclear advocate rather then debating.
Yeah sure, solar and wind farms ... in Poland, probably the worst country in the EU in terms of wind potential and low solar potential. Like that's going to work.
And using which backup tech exactly? Certainly not Russian gas.
Your nuclear power plant can work alone, the wind and solar farms just can't.
The construction of the nuclear plant is effectively backed up with 100% coal. Thus you could have a 75/25% renewables/coal split for the next 40 years and do less damage.
We need to stop thinking short term which is the reason why we're in trouble in the first place.
What we know from the past is that nuclear in 70 years hasn't done squat to eliminate the dependency on fossil fuels. This is simply a fact.
What we need short-term is decarbonization, and renewables are the cheapest and fastest way to do that. If you can't get rid of coal completely, you can then pick the slowest and most expensive solution that is nuclear. But it needs to be the last, not the first thing you do.
You can't bet the future on unknown tech which might never exist. That's just R&D. Otherwise we can talk about nuclear fusion which unlike the magical battery tech, we actually know that it exists
> What we know from the past is that nuclear in 70 years hasn't done squat to eliminate the dependency on fossil fuels. This is simply a fact.
France is the most decarbonized developed country in the world thanks to that. The country is already half way there. Nobody came even close, that's a fact.
Talking is cheap, the results regarding renewables just aren't there.
> What we need short-term is decarbonization, and renewables are the cheapest and fastest way to do that.
Running the coal and gas plants full speed like Germany does in winter isn't a viable decarbonization strategy.
They are even worse than nothing because they require tremendous investment upfront and then you are locked up with fossil fuels. There's a reason why the gas producers are lobbying for renewables.
Germany does not run coal and gas plants full speed in the winter. Wind energy ticked over coal for the first quarter of 2023 [1].
Even if it did, Poland is currently backing up their nuclear with 100% coal, in the winter and summer, for the next 10 years at least. It will continue to pump co2 into the atmosphere and do as much damage as Germany will do for the next ~30 years, if Germany's coal use does not go down. But it will go down, it's on pace to reach 80% renewables in 2030. Poland is on pace to reach 30% coal in 2040. The damage done by spending money on nuclear first can never be recovered from. It might even be too late for the world by then. Think about that.
The world will deploy 400GW of solar this year alone, and the growth will not decelerate any time soon. That is about 60 1GW reactors worth of electricity. Talk really is cheap.
[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2023/06...
Exactly, the proof is in the pudding and right now well, it's not there. Those magic storage solution don't exist, not even in theory.
> Germany does not run coal and gas plants full speed in the winter. Wind energy ticked over coal for the first quarter of 2023 [1].
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/news/2022/publi...
Germany went from 300TWh of fossil fuel production to 200TWh of fossil fuel production which is only a third of the way there.
This relatively small decrease has costed around 2x the French nuclear plants in its totality already and took 15 years. Let's just say that the numbers aren't great.
And ironically, that's just the start of their problems, since the new renewables have a pretty low durability, they are 0% of the way of their 2050 goals. Everything they installed already will have to be reinstalled again, they will understand the meaning of an exponential curve pretty soon. What they spent is chump change compared to what's coming ahead.
There's a reason they are pushing so hard for dodgy financing in the EU, they see themselves the curve ahead.
To add even more to this bleak results, they only have 5% electricity heating whereas it's 40% in neighboring France. If they really wanted to catch this up, they would have to make the exponential curve even steeper.
> The world will deploy 400GW of solar this year alone, and the growth will not decelerate any time soon. That is about 60 1GW reactors worth of electricity. Talk really is cheap.
Well no that isn't because those panels require dirty backups and will only last 1/4 of the lifetime of the plant and I'm being generous. Not to mention the issue of China being close to the single producer, see what happened with Russia, maybe we should learn lessons from the past.
Talk is cheap indeed, the results just aren't there.
> The damage done by spending money on nuclear first can never be recovered from
The damage one by spending money on renewables can never be recovered, the country is then locked to fossil fuels to smooth out the load. Fossil fuels and renewables are two sides of the same coin and go together.
That's the reason why all the major gas producers are onto it, it's the same story everywhere.
The renewables industry is on an astronomic trajectory. From zero to saving the world, and it will succeed where nuclear has failed for 70 years. Precisely the reason why fossil fuels and nuclear are two sides of the same coin: highly dependant on lobbying and corruption. Nuclear failed even before carbon emissions were an issue and this green relabeling is its last lifeline. But because it already failed, it won't suddenly miraculously succeed. All of the former climate deniers are now on the nuclear bandwagon because they know this will buy the most time for fossil fuels. Here is one: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/09/renewable-energy...
I am an engineer he says, nuclear is the only option. Ten years ago he was a high member of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition that sued the government to prevent it from claiming climate change is dangerous.
Nuclear requires dirty backup during construction which is always very long. I don't understand why this is so difficult to understand. It's doubtful if it can ever make up for that delay between deploying renewables and nuclear. So it's a net negative.
The lock in to fossil fuel in Germany and other renewable heavy countries is pretty clear and nobody can deny that. The Russian war was a slap in that fossil fuel oriented strategy, it's time to learn some lessons about past failures.
> The renewables industry is on an astronomic trajectory. From zero to saving the world, and it will succeed where nuclear has failed for 70 years. Precisely the reason why fossil fuels and nuclear are two sides of the same coin: highly dependant on lobbying and corruption.
Haha, may I remind you what happened in Germany and France? The Russian government financed renewable lobbying to keep the dependency on the Russian gas, and unfortunately for us, that worked. Even Greenpeace themselves sold Russian gas as part of their renewable strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Planet_Energy.
> But because it already failed, it won't suddenly miraculously succeed.
Germany's renewable strategy failed multiple times already, and every time it fails, they double down financially. We're pretty deep into sunken cost fallacy and I hope other countries aren't stupid enough to follow them in the hole they dug themselves in.
Last time they even wanted to build some new gas pipeline covering southern Europe (but it's only temporarily transporting gas, we swear again), that's what the lock-in of renewable does. https://www.offshore-technology.com/news/germany-italy-suppo...
> Nuclear requires dirty backup during construction which is always very long.
And renewable require dirty backups as long as they exist, easy to see why it's worse and why gas producers are pushing for it instead of nuclear plants.
The Energiewende has brought real change not only to Germany, but to the whole world. It's pretty much the reason all developed countries deploy only renewables and do that for the last couple years. Considering it's the only real chance the world has right now, it was a huge success.
What's crazy though is that smart people predicted this would happen before it happened [2]. I am not that smart, but it takes also a certain talent to live in the present and not realize what is happening. You will wake up in a very different world a few years from now.
[1] https://www.pv-tech.org/eu-to-add-69gw-renewables-capacity-i... [2] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/putins-war...
I was thinking that the full gas+renewable strategy was over but indeed maybe not yet...
I guess the visit of Von Der Leyen to the Azerbaijani dictator also sets up the tone of the strategy for the future, swapping one dicatatorship to the other to keep the gas running.
Construction begin:
Unit 1: 19 July 2012 Unit 2: 16 April 2013 Unit 3: 24 September 2014 Unit 4: 30 July 2015
Commission: Unit 1: 3 August 2020 Unit 2: 14 September 2021 Unit 3: 10 October 2022
And that is in a country with no infrastructure or knowledge. A large country like Poland could do this far better and faster with more plants. France started like that and then became faster and faster, until idiot politicians ruined it.
If you are finishing 1-2 nuclear plants every year, you can deploy green energy quickly.
Finland build 1 nuclear plant, even delayed and went from pretty bad carbon efficiency to very good. Denmark spend longer and more money on wind and its not nearly as effective and reliable a backbone for their network.
Right now Finland nuclear is outproducing Denmark Wind and Solar combined. And the Finish investment will run for 80 years, non of the wind or solar will survive that long.
I worked at Jebel Ali power plant(worlds largest gas plant) just outside Dubai for two years installing and commissioning high voltage switchgear.
The Emiratis(and their army of Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani/misc./ engineers and laborers) truly knows how to build large scale industries. I doubt they have taken any shortcut whatsoever.
In my experience, they require everything to be 110% perfect.
> “And what’s particularly worrying is the lack of a core catcher, which in the event of a failure of the emergency reactor core systems, would retain the nuclear fuel once it breached the reactor pressure vessel. On top of that, concrete cracking in all four reactor containment buildings hasn’t helped, nor has installation of faulty pilot-operated safety relief valves.”
https://www.power-technology.com/features/divided-opinion-in...
Do you have a less biased source?
On top of that, the Polish plant will begin construction 2026, so the build time is planned to be even faster than the UAE plant. I think this is highly unrealistic.
Yes it takes time to build up an nuclear industry but Poland will also not go from mostly coal to all solar and wind anytime soon.
Germany started its transition in the 90s and they are not close 30 years later. Had Germany in the 90s decided to go nuclear they would be green by now and not in an energy crisis.
Poland in 10 years can finish a plant a year and 2-3 years after 2 plant a year and 2-3 years after that 3 plants a year. That how turn a full coal to a fully green grid.
No need for costly grid rebuild, just nuclear plant in the same places coal plants are now mostly.
Edit: And in terms of lost time, if anything not going with nuclear is lost time. By the Koyoto protocol France already had a green grid. We literally had a solution and the anti nuclear movement prevented that solution.
Poland as all European countries is sadly moving to slowly. After 40 years of anti nuclear domiance the energy crisis has shifted perseptions and we are now finally getting back into gear.
What matters is not how long the first one takes but what the yearly completion rate is. Europe should standardize on single reactor and plan to build 150-200 plants. That can easly be done before 2050 and would have lots of energy left over for green jet fuel as well.
Cheap is really relative: I've found very little information on the original build out of french nuclear and how much it cost so let's assume it was cheap. Do you factor in the cost of decommissioning and nuclear waste storage? This will cost literally hundreds of billions. And actually for how long? I did find an interview with the recently deceased chairman of the EDF from that time, who claims the plants were designed to last just over 30 years [1]. To paraphrase: the steel used will develop cracks but this is not a real problem because if will happen after the plants' lifetime of just over 30 years. France tried to build replacements 20 years ago with the EPR, but they were unable to finish the prototype in Flamanville, so they are stuck pretending the current plants can be extended infinitely. They are just kicking the bucket down the road, eventually it will come to an end.
Switzerland does not have some of the oldest reactors it has the oldest reactor, Beznau, which went online 54 years ago, the others are from late 70s and early 80s. Speaking of cracks, it was reported in 2015 there were a thousand holes near the reactor [2]. The operator denied it, but the plant was shut down for a while and the operator said there were 2.5 billion Francs (roughly dollars) used to increase safety [3]. This should give everyone pause to audacious claims that nuclear plants can run for 80 years no problem, and once you've built them they are cheap to run. In the US, it was lobbied hard to prevent Diablo Canyon from shutting down, and when it was approved, they said: but now we need a billion dollars to be able to even run [4].
Germany's energy transition started just over 20 years ago, not 30 years ago. During this time, the renewable industry was basically invented, the feed-in tariff system was invented, and it's been a huge success worldwide. This year alone around 400GW of solar will be deployed [5], non of that would've happened without Germany's decision. Since the last nuclear plants in Germany were shut down, coal use has been at a historic low. Poland's plan that you are in favor will have Poland end up with 30% coal in 2040, if all goes well. So a bit better than where Germany is basically at now, which is pretty bad for something that will happen 20 years from now at best. Poland's wind energy increased to 10% of the electricity mix in the last decade, so the german energy transition has done more to curb Poland's coal use than anything else thus far. And a lot faster than 20 years.
There is no special energy crisis in Germany that did not affect the whole Europe last year. France has pumped in 100 billion euros in the energy sector in the last three years to protect consumers and curb inflation [6], and was one of the first countries to do that. Germany only did it this year and much less (e.g. price caps at 40kw/h but only for 80% of your previous usage to promote saving). The countries are bickering now because Germany has a free market and no state company to pump money into, and it has a problem competing with "electricity" that is heavily subsidized [7].
Those are the facts.
The rest on how nuclear plants should be built, how long it will take etc. it's mostly just wishful thinking. You don't know any of that, so there's nothing to comment on.
[1] (in french) https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/president-edf-risque-fis...
[2] https://lenews.ch/2015/10/13/concerns-raised-about-switzerla...
[3] https://www.axpo.com/ba/en/about-us/magazine.detail.html/mag...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-approves-conditio...
[5] https://about.bnef.com/blog/3q-2023-global-pv-market-outlook...
[6] (in french) https://www.latribune.fr/economie/france/crise-energetique-l...
[7] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-18/france-an...
With Bechtel ? Maybe 2043.
But as the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree…
And no, solar power is equal to nuclear power. Where is my solar power night time?
It took a lot less than the 10 years best case we'll get here.
The recent nuclear plants constructed in the west requires something like $5-15B above the market price in subsidies, of course depending on size. Would be interesting to know how they intend to solve that.
Inflation...
Scholz is a meme.
>The recent nuclear plants constructed in the west requires something like $5-15B above the market price in subsidies, of course depending on size, EPR at 1600 MWe or AP1000 at 1000 MWe. Would be interesting to know how they intend to solve that.
I'm not really clear what this means? All power plants require financing for their construction cost which is pretty definitionally the market cost of construction. If you mean how this will will interface with the Polish electricity wholesale market, well that market is already pretty dominated by a few large vertically integrated players settling trades with themselves. Presumably PGE will buy the electricity and treat it the same as their other electricity, they may receive a subsidy per MWh as well or maybe just avoiding the ETS costs of their current coal emissions will be enough to make the economics stack-up.
It is hard to finance a plant when you will on average sell the power at a loss. The money has to come from somewhere.
Take for example Hinkley Point C, that costs €0.15 per kWh for the consumers. How does that compare?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_powe...
I am not saying there are better options right now but still!
AFAIK Austria was also suing Hungary and Slovenia for going nuclear.
The only reasons to build nuclear power plants are military. The international community is clear on the reasons when it's Iran building PWRs but it's equally as true for every other country that does it (thats why we can be sure of Iran's motive).
Those are facts, not religious beliefs.
[citation needed] Who's exactly the "international community" and where's the data to that claim?
Cheap bait...
> It's 5x the cost of solar and wind.
Do you have a citation for that? In France, the EPR which is absurdly late and out of the initial budget, and the poster child of how if you don't train highly-skilled people you can't just pick it back up when you want, is estimated to produce electricity at an all-in cost that is a little less than twice that of solar, and twice that of terrestrial wind. Wind installed in the sea is pricier than the EPR. The already-built NPPs are the second-cheapest of the lot, behind geothermal.
Source, in French: https://prix-elec.com/energie/production
The same argument according to which solar panels and such will become cheaper as demand increases (because of economies of scale and technical improvements) also applies to nuclear power plants.
> The same argument according to which solar panels and such will become cheaper as demand increases (because of economies of scale and technical improvements) also applies to nuclear power plants.
The French nuclear scale-up famously did negative learning by doing. Economics of scale is not something you can assume. This is from before Flamanvile 3 started, that is even more negative learning.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
It is very interesting to see the viewpoint shift happen here. I see people saying that oil companies/Russia were funding/pushing talking points to the green organizations.
It's the ultimate NIMBY.
German greens would hate it, but I doubt it'd arouse the same anti-nuclear rabble with the general public as a plant on German soil.
Iran wants to move itself closer to being able to build a nuke in a hurry if necessary, which is why the west is publicly freaked out and angry about their PWRs.
Germany isnt bothered.
Like everyone else who builds nuclear power plants it certainly wasnt doing it because it was a cost effective way of going green because at 5x the cost of solar and wind, and more expensive than hydrogen+solar+wind thats the last thing it'll ever be. Even the lack of intermittency doesn't come within a mile of making up for a 5x cost difference: https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
The "nuclear is the new green jesus" movement makes no sense.
How do you account for the cost of power intermittency?
The 2021 Texas blackout is estimated at 80 ~ 130 Billion, with 246 deaths. https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2021/0415 https://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/HSEM/2...
Nuclear is cleaner than Nat. Gas is cleaner than coal.
The West wasn't freaked out. In fact, France had agree to provide the technology and help built the plant. They would also do fuel management.
Then the US came in guns blazing killed the deal and started a 20 year idiotic trade war on Iran because of it.
> Like everyone else who builds nuclear power plants it certainly wasnt doing it because it was a cost effective way of going green
If we compare the cost it took France to go Green and what Germany now spends without even being Green, this is simply inaccurate statement. The complete cost of the whole French nuclear fleet is less then the emergency money Germany deployed during the energy crisis. And French consumers had low energy pricing during the crisis while Germany had very high energy prices.
Nuclear is incredibly cost efficient and proven to work as soon as you built large numbers in a short time period.
And Wind and Solar alone are simply not a solution, you have to take into account the cost of upgrades to the grid and you have to take into account storage.
> The "nuclear is the new green jesus" movement makes no sense.
Look at how well it worked for the UAE. Its not that expensive per plant, these plants will work for the next 80-100 years and even only building for the per plant cost goes down.
Nuclear is stellar at replacing fossil fuels and that's basically why it got developed in the first place.
We technically could have switched substantial amounts of power generation to nuclear, safely, at reasonable cost, with a spent fuel storage solution... by the 1980s.
Ironically, the stars were aligned by the mid-80s, if Reagan hadn't punted post-Chernobyl and had instead used it to crow about the superiority of modern, safer Western reactor designs and put serious federal money behind construction programs.
Per unit costs are dominated by volume.
Why politicians can't understand this boggles the mind.
Just the dream of staying lazily in luxury.. so have pardon please.
> build a nuke in a hurry .. everyone else who builds nuclear power plants it certainly wasnt doing it because it was a cost effective way
While easily confirmed that's the last thing people want to hear ;)
> AFAIK Austria was also suing Hungary and Slovenia for going nuclear.
---
> Did my point fly so high above peoples' heads? The question was whether Germany will sue Poland the same way Austria does to it's neighbors, not whether Austria will sue Poland.
It did, yes, because based on what you wrote, you assumed most people on HN know that:
1. Germany has a large anti-nuclear presence
2. Austria is not bordering Poland.
Well you put too much assumptions there.
The French a probably the most upset, seeing as the Polish went with a US contractor.
Westinghouse is also in both games.