NuScale Lays off 40% of its Staff
huffpost.com
huffpost.com
https://neutronbytes.com/2023/01/24/nuscales-smr-costs-hit-h...
More likely is they were always lowballing the cost, hoping for a miracle. We'll see what comes up in the shareholder lawsuit.
They could always sell the power for less.
Edit: pretty sure I’ve misunderstood your initial point. They were going to have to sell the power for a lot. It wasn’t that the market price rose.
The OP doesn't cite a high selling price for the generated electricity, they are citing the high cost of materials to build the plant.
Someone funded it, and subsidized it, and now solar panels are cheap and plentiful.
And that someone now owns the global market for solar panels.
It moved to slightly less tiny markets, like ocean buoys, remote radio repeaters, and eventually off-grid homes.
At each point, there were small markets for which it made sense.
During this time, PV started showing it had good experience effects, with costs declining about 20% per doubling of cumulative production. This empirical experience curve (which has actually gotten better recently) was the basis for additional funding, to drive the technology down the curve.
Nuclear has not shown good experience effects. There is no small niche market for NuScale's reactors. There's nothing to drive it down some supposed experience curve, and no reason to think the curve would be favorable.
Over 500GW-600GW of solar will be built and deployed this year, and that rate is accelerating. This would never happen with nuclear, we are simply not capable of managing this technology at that scale based on all available evidence.
> The IEA now projects that to meet global climate goals, approximately 633 GW per year will be needed [solar PV] by 2030, a target that could be achieved as soon as next year.
Hope is not a strategy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502924 (citations)
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/12/25/all-i-want-for-christ...
That strategy might work in other Asia. It probably won't catch in the US.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ThvvCE2HsLohJYd7b/why-has-nu...
With our latest round of nuclear failures, there was a new combined licensing approach taken at the behest of industry. It did not seem to work. The article cites "hundreds of millions for licensing" which is a tiny percentage of reactor cost, and frankly insignificant. For costs to be lower, there has to be a huge, 50%+ drop in construction costs. The latest nuclear failures in the US used a new design, the AP1000, which used something like an order of magnitude less concrete and steel, and that was not enough to pull down costs. Where is the money going? Labor.
The French regulatory regime is presumably OK, as it oversaw a large buildout in the 1970s, and I've never heard anybody complain about it, but it has still resulted in economic failures at Flamanville and Olkiluoto.
Eliminate ALARA, and what construction or design cost savings are there? I'm not sure and it's not really clear. What construction site savings are there? Ignore the containment? People all agreed that after Chernobyl is was a bad idea, what engineer is going to sign off on that? Maybe they are OK with it, but I haven't heard any engineer brave enough to cite a lessening of safety that would drive down construction costs.
Also, all large construction projects, the heart of nuclear, have gotten expensive in the US, even without the NRC. It's just a hard problem to build big things with complicated logistics.
Look at construction productivity trends over the past 50 years, and they have been stagnant compared to manufacturing and other types of productivity. And as productivity increases in an economy, overall wages increase, even for the less productive construction sector, because workers have the choice to work in more productive fields, and must be paid to compensate for the low productivity of working in construction. The places closest to having low costs on nuclear are economies with cheap labor: Russia and China. It's going to be hard for us to outsource construction labor to cheap countries when the reactors need to be sites in high labor cost countries.
Even if regulation is a major factor, this labor cost of construction is also a major factor. And it's unclear to me why nuclear should ever be cheap. It's a huge huge construction project, and in advanced economies, those are still very expensive.
The space industry funded early development, Japan and then Germany funded early-mid adoption, and then China saw an opportunity to take leadership in the transition away from fossil fuels. So it goes.
1. Well, so far, only tens of gigawatts at the upper end in commercial operation, but it's just a matter of time before we get to hundreds. There are no engineering or regulatory problems.
It's the reason why there has been such a huge pro nuclear PR offensive in the last 10 years. Consent needs to be manufactured for lavishing nuclear power with subsidies. E.g. in order to justify giving Bill Gates's startup a dumptruck full of taxpayer money people have to be positively predisposed to nuclear power.
The most ironic and fucked up part of the nuclear-military industrial complex's PR offensive was when they tried to shame environmentalists for being anti nuclear power and tried to shame Germany for trailblazing a highly effective green energy policy. The environment is of no concern to them.
> NuScale’s CEO said last November it had about $200 million in cash reserves but some of the funds are allocated to specific work for customers and can’t be used generally to revitalize the firm.
300 employees, plus unknown amounts of pre-allocated work, no chance of revenue before the runway runs out, and a terrible environment for high-risk capital, make this look extremely grim.
The 300 employees currently on the job market, it's not that grim for them. It's better to have some clarity, rather than live a half life. They can now focus on getting another job. My guess is that most of them won't have problems landing a new, and potentially better paying job. They participated in a project that resulted in the first NRC reactor certification in a very, very long time. Literally nobody else can put this on their resume. There are lots of nuclear startups out there, and they probably have troubles finding qualified people. They'll jump at the opportunity to get some ex-NuScale engineers.
As for NuScale itself, they'll be fine. Their most important asset is their reactor certification. They don't have experience actually delivering even a single operating reactor. But that certification is gold. For many other companies that want to get into the SMR game, it would probably be much easier to license the NuScale design than to go through the decade long process of getting their own design certified.
Just because A is better than B doesn’t mean both A and B can’t be grim.
> For many other companies that want to get into the SMR game, it would probably be much easier to license the NuScale design than to go through the decade long process of getting their own design certified.
Is anyone going to want to do that after watching NuScalr crash and burn?
Who's hiring nuclear reactor design engineers?
NuScale got too expensive even before they broke ground for the prototype. Who knows what it would have cost by the time it started up.
If you want nuclear in the near term, build more AP1000 reactors, like Vogtle. They work. If someone ordered ten of them, they would be much less expensive.
It is a pretty exciting time for that division, so if anyone is interested, definitely look into their openings.
https://jobs.gecareers.com/power/global/en/ge-hitachi-nuclea...
https://www.gevernova.com/nuclear/carbon-free-power/bwrx-300...
There's only a single "someone" who could put in a $150B order for electricity generation, but they also take the stance that they won't ever do that, since they are not in the business of picking winners and losers. That is, of course, the US government, and they do pick winners and losers all the time through tax policy, and they did incentivize nuclear quite a bit in the IRA. Still not enough.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/China-approves-c...
Why would some other company want to build it, if there aren't enough customers?
Not sure if that was intentional, but nice.
I didn't even know there could be such a thing as a nuclear startup. How do you think they will succeed if NuScale didn't/couldn't? Or was NuScale mismanaged?
The core of the business was executing on cheaper, more reliable buildouts. SMRs might even be more expensive per watt than larger reactors, and that could be OK as long as it was cheap enough, and led to project sizes that were smaller than $20B and had much smaller chance of project failure.
Certification is useless for a design that's too expensive, as that was half of the core value proposition. (With the other half of the value proposition being smaller risk.)
Right now it looks like a core gamble of the company has not paid off. It's unclear if they can learn any lessons from the cost increase that would let them come up with a cheaper second design. But I'd suspect that the founders were just wearing rose colored glasses for their first cost estimates, with the hope that some future innovation would let them meet unrealistic starting targets, and it hasn't happened yet.
I think the attitude of "we're being held back by public opinion, because the greens have convinced them nuclear is dangerous" did not do nuclear any good.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit now that the link has changed, the new article makes this much more clear.
Currently, I'm very enthusiastic about fervoenergy.com. It presents an outstanding alternative to gas and coal for district heating, and it may even have potential for electricity generation.
Fervo's first demonstration project is for electricity generation, not district heating [1].
Electricity is much more valuable (in terms of money) than heat.
1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/outreach-initiative...
> In 2019, GEH expected construction to start in 2024/2025 in the US or Canada, entering commercial operation in 2027/2028, and for the first unit to cost less than $1 billion to build. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BWRX-300
I can only think that they are completely over promising and committing themselves to under delivering. Three years to build at $3300/kW seems like exactly the same fantasy land that the nuclear industry has been failing to deliver for far too long. Just once they should try a realistic estimate and deliver what they promise. That would have an amazing positive effect for whoever did that.
Agreed on Fervo. For the 5% of countries with the worst sun and wind resources, something like that will be essential. And it will undoubtedly help the countries in the top 95% of wind and solar resources too.
5% is also the fraction of human population living poleward of 50 degrees N/S.
That was the promise of BWRX-300. Nothing Novel, Nothing New. No Breakthroughs. Just use old and tired design techniques and shrink it to fit the definition of SMR.
As far as energy goes, the more the merrier. Non-carbon baseload energy that is "guaranteed" would be nice to have in our back pocket.
The geography to support it is, according to the scientific literature, very common (citation: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/05/sustainable-pumped-hy... ). We'd need about ~7 hours of storage to get a 95-97% carbon free grid, according to current models (citation : https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... ). Australia could reach roughly that level by building a 2nd snowy 2.
It doesnt indirectly support the nuclear-military industrial complex though, so the government will never be as keen on using taxpayer cash to subsidize it.
Promising alternatives to mitigate solar and wind variability, aside from pumped storage and nuclear, include advanced geothermal, load management, thermal storage, long-distance transmission, storing clean hydrogen or clean methane (made from electrolysis and captured CO2), and possibly long-term battery technologies (not lithium, that'll mostly be for overnight or shorter). In no particular order.
I've seen quite a lot of contradictory messaging about the availability of locations but it never seems to come linked to any evidence I've seen. It wouldn't be the first time the carbon/nuclear industry successfully spread FUD about science that threatened their bottom line.
For a long time the carbon industry's position was that the only thing capable of accommodating renewable intermittency was ~3 weeks' worth of lithium ion batteries. This is obviously nonsense, but I still see it repeated a lot.
Clean hydrogen / methane would suffice as storage if the goal was to supply green electricity cheaper than nuclear power (not because it's cheap, but because nuclear power is that expensive), but we should be able do better than that - they're both quite inefficient.