More solar asap is definitely a good thing, but we also need to plan for what happens 30-40 years from now when this wave of equipment starts failing.
Municipalities often have bonkers cost structures and imposed limits on tax increases (limits in state laws and such). Here they are redoing lead service lines, rebuilding substandard water mains and repaving streets. State and Federal grants are paying for a lot of it, along with increases to water rates (to maybe 5-10% above the national average, enough to make people unhappy, but not out of control).
At a certain point it just becomes cheaper to build a brand-new one right next to it and decommission the old one, even with a nuclear reactor.
There are nuclear plants built in the 60s and 70s that are not only still operating but in the process of extending their operating licenses in order to keep operating for decades more. The period of time it takes before this makes "keep operating it" unviable is evidently pushing 80 years without actually hitting the limit.
Control rooms and reactor vessels are themselves made of modular components and a lot of maintenance to those things happens during refueling.
> On top of that it locks you in to an old reactor design, which might be very undesirable for safety reasons.
That can't be the argument against building new ones. It's the argument that what you want is to build the newer, safer designs and then operate those for a long time.
That's a common claim but it's not really correct.
Firstly, the average plant in the US spends it's construction costs every 2-3 years, I assume the situation is similar in the EU. New power plants are much more expensive of course, because the old ones were built before Chernobyl, Fukushima, 9/11 and other incidents that revealed horrible security flaws in existing plants and procedures.
Secondly, the costs of handling Chernobyl are way, way higher than the total cost of construction for all nuclear plants in the EU combined. Similarly the cost of managing Fukushima is way higher than the cost of constructing all the nuclear plants in Japan. These costs are of course never added to the cost of nuclear power, since nobody operating nuclear plants has any chance of paying such sums. But they are in fact a larger factor than the construction costs were.
These experiences did have some effect, thankfully, in that made new power plants more expensive, because we know that we must take any conceivable measure to prevent more Chernobyls and Fukushimas from happening.
And thirdly, the reason why Sweden closed the two most recent reactors was cost, despite them being paid off a long time ago. Meaning there is significant cost even after the construction is paid.
So it seems that the claim that "construction is the main cost" comes from the operator's point of view. Basically "the construction is the largest part WE have to pay, because taxpayers cover the rest".
It's a common claim because it's correct.
> the average plant in the US spends it's construction costs every 2-3 years
That includes paying principal and interest on the construction loans, right?
> New power plants are much more expensive of course, because the old ones were built before Chernobyl, Fukushima, 9/11 and other incidents that revealed horrible security flaws in existing plants and procedures.
The modern cost increases have nothing to do with actual deficiencies in older US plants. Chernobyl had no containment building and a positive void coefficient. Even the US nuclear power plants build in the 1960s have a containment building and a negative void coefficient.
> Secondly, the costs of handling Chernobyl are way, way higher than the total cost of construction for all nuclear plants in the EU combined.
It's a good thing none of the US nuclear plants have ever been Soviet RBMKs then.
> And thirdly, the reason why Sweden closed the two most recent reactors was cost
The reason was that their electricity prices were very low at the time from a combination of having a large amount of hydro and the then-price of natural gas being low. Most places have no ability to control either of those things. Meanwhile how is the decision to close those reactors looking given how prices are now?
One would think! But no, all US plants except Vogtle and Watts are paid off long ago.
Now, why did you just throw that out there without checking? Are you not interested in knowing the truth, you just want to argue for nuclear no matter what the facts say?
If so, let me assure you that neither one of us will enjoy a continued discourse on the topic.
Just have to say though - that the Swedish reactors were closed because electricity was cheap is the point. Sweden basically stated that even when paid off, nuclear can't survive if electricity is cheap. But surely we, the taxpayers and businesses and industries, want it to be cheap?
Because it can't possibly be (and isn't) an accurate claim for the recent plants with modern construction costs. Whereas if you're comparing the 1970s construction costs to the modern day operating costs to imply that the operating costs are high, that's obviously not a useful comparison to begin with.
> But surely we, the taxpayers and businesses and industries, want it to be cheap?
We might want it to be free, but we also want some other things, like "doesn't burn carbon" and "can reliably heat your house on a cloudy winter night". And then the question is, what's the most economical way to get those things?
If we learn that even if we make new nuclear as cheap as old nuclear, it's is still not cheap enough, surely it is a very useful comparison?
It's not useful if the goal is to defend nuclear at all costs, I'll give you that, but that's not a worthy goal.
>And then the question is, what's the most economical way to get those things?
Absolutely, and that's why finding out the real, actual truth of the costs is very important.
If you add the true cost to society from things like Sellafield, Asse II, the interest-free loans, the army personnel and national labs handling waste, the decades of countermeasures for Chernobyl in dozens of countries and so on - if you add upp all that, perhaps generating e-fuel is actually cheaper than nuclear?
If not already, the Chinese have taught us that once you get the wheels rolling, prices decimate pretty rapidly. They made solar and batteries viable, maybe we could do e-fuels?
Synthetic fuel, batteries everywhere, pumped storage, geothermal, gravity, pressurized air, heated salt - maybe all of those are actually cheaper than nuclear, if we really add up ALL the costs of nuclear?
Also one correction: It was Germany that get the wheels rolling regarding renewables, although China then took over.
Only that's not what you're showing at all, because then you're comparing the existing operating costs to a construction cost that was very low. I mean we don't have to try to measure this in hotdogs per football field, the operating cost of US nuclear plants is a published number:
https://www.nei.org/getContentAsset/47fa8caa-9b0d-4029-932c-...
US nuclear plant 2025 operating costs (20.82/MWh) + fuel costs (5.95/MWh) together 26.77/MWh, i.e. 0.02677/kWh. Where would this measure as too high?
> If not already, the Chinese have taught us that once you get the wheels rolling, prices decimate pretty rapidly. They made solar and batteries viable, maybe we could do e-fuels?
They made solar viable during the day and batteries viable during the price spike at the early evening misalignment between demand and solar output. That's actually very useful, but it doesn't get you "how do you reliably power heat pumps to heat your house at night in winter". Proposing e-fuels is basically saying we should use a battery with higher conversion losses. That's inherently going to be complicated and expensive. On top of that it doesn't get you out of solar output being much lower in the winter.
> if we really add up ALL the costs of nuclear?
This is the traditional isolated demand for rigor. Add up all the cost for one thing, don't do it for any of the others.
Solar panels are semiconductors, so if you want to count things like Sellafield or Asse II (neither of which is in the US) against nuclear, don't you then have to count all the Superfund sites left behind from semiconductor manufacturing in Silicon Valley against solar?
And do we even need to enumerate the fossil fuel industries? They're the ones whose pictures are in the dictionary when you look up externalized costs and pollution.
If you want to account for all the costs then account for all the costs.
Well, there are a few plants in the US (for example Kewaunee, rancho seco) that were closed for not being profitable. In one instance the owner took an over 300M usd write-off instead of continuing operations. So it measured too high there.
The explanation is likely that the 0.02677 is not the actual total costs of operations. In fact the report states it plainly on page 2: "not the full cost of owning and operating a nuclear plant."
I fully support your idea to identify ALL the costs not just for nuclear, but let's start with nuclear, since that's clearly where the largest misconception exists today.
>Proposing e-fuels is basically saying we should use a battery with higher conversion losses.
Thats dismissive, it is also a basically limitless capacity battery. We already have periods of 0 electricity costs, more electricity than we know what we can do with. This will increase, and having it generate e-fuel would be a nice option for it.
I'm genuinely interested, can you share the numbers you're referencing? It's surprising to me that a massive project like a nuclear reactor costs 1/3 of the inflation-adjusted total construction cost per year in upkeep. I'm not saying you're wrong, just the easy way to prove your point would be to provide some numbers.
Lazard suggests the low end for new nuclear in the US is 131 per MWH (over a 60-80 year life at 97% capacity factor).
So, assuming that old nuclear cost the same amount as new nuclear that's about 23%. If you assume nuclear is more expensive today, which everyone appears to agree on, then you easily get to 1/3rd of the cost being the marginal cost of running nuclear when the original build is paid off (more if a substantial refit is needed, see France).
My statement was based on findings from a few of the plants on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_nuclear_po...
Assembling operating costs is tricky, you will have to do some work. I arrived at around 400M USD/year but there is a big span depending on the size of the plant and other things. I also didn't check most of the plants, so I could be way off when all of them are considered but I don't think so. The figure is in the ballpark for some of the EU plants as well.
I did not inflation-adjust the construction costs, since they are not affected by inflation. They were paid "back then", not now. Construction costs are of course affected by interest on the loans, but that's a separate thing from both inflation and the construction costs, and it stops when the loan is paid. Makes sense?
You may feel this is unfair and that the construction costs should be inflation adjusted, but it actually doesn't matter because we have several examples of plants where construction was long-since paid still being closed.
Which means that even with construction costs being 0, plants close because they are too expensive. So why are we thinking construction costs are the key to making nuclear viable?
The best current plants from a running costs perspective are the ones that have several large reactors that produce lots of electricity with shared overhead in staffing etc.
Which makes the current chase for cheaper production by making many small reactors seem particularly misguided. It's not only solving the wrong problem but actually worsening the more important problem.
Your concern would be valid for a nuclear thermal power station, a Goldberg machine with millions of moving parts. It is not really applicable to semiconductors.
For solar PV it is ~30 years.
While the cell may continue to generate power, it may have diminished so greatly as to no longer justify its physical footprint
So, as a rule of thumb, the solar panel loses approximately 1% per year. So after 30 years it's generating around 70% of rated capacity.
At that (or any earlier or later) point one could replace the panels. That's really cheap to do, and can be done with more-or-less unskilled labor.
If you are space-constrained (like your residential roof) then you'll likely do it earlier.
If you are a commercial producer, sitting in a desert somewhere, it'll likely be better to just "plant another field" next door. Keep the 70% (it's free), and bolster capacity by adding more panels, not replacing old ones.
And this is before we take into account places where the ecology under the panels has changed and become more valuable in its own right.
So 25 years from now, or maybe 10 years from now, it might pay to replace panels. Which may in turn lead to very cheap 75% 2nd hand panels becoming widely available.
That 1% finger in the air estimate is what installers or sales people tend to use to give people a vague idea what to expect. Your panels will not make as much power in 25 years as they do today. But because weather happens the hypothetical input power - sunlight falling on the panels, can vary maybe 5% from one year to the next, larger than the degradation in any single year no question. So it's very possible a solar PV roof has its "best" year in year two or three even though that's not intuitive.
This house of cards obviously falls down when expansion ever slows down. The only solution is to raise the property taxes per yard of road, but that means low-density housing becomes unaffordable, which would force towns to increase density by building things like row houses and apartment buildings.
Solar is in a completely different position, as the solar itself is profitable. There will be no shortage of cash to replace it, only perhaps a shortage of labor. But solar doesn't really have a fixed lifetime and will happily operate a few years longer, and due to its highly distributed nature it doesn't require a risky all-at-once replacement like the Boston Big Dig either.
The global solar rollout is going slow enough that it won't be finished before the first units will reach the end of their economical lifespan. I reckon it'll just shift into ongoing maintenance as time goes on.
If you don't spend the profits on other things, which people are liable to do. The point is for there to be some awareness of oncoming costs.