[HN Gopher] Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
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Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?
Author : spekcular
Score : 31 points
Date : 2022-05-21 21:47 UTC (1 hours ago)
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| missedthecue wrote:
| Probably for the same reason we don't see massively expanding
| horse carriage industry. Nuclear is on the way out despite
| enormous government subsidies. Just fundamentally too burdensome,
| expensive, and outcompeted by modern tech.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| Actually that "modern tech" of yours is the subsidized one.
| President Obama was basically trumpeting how many new and
| awesome futuristic jobs those solar parks will create when the
| government unleashes the cash flood.
|
| Nothing competes with nuclear. It's just pure physics - atom is
| the biggest source of energy on this planet according to
| current physics. Whoever can't agree with that reality fact
| should see a psychiatrist.
|
| Despite all the obstacles, nuclear constantly develops and will
| continue to do so, because market.
|
| Industries can't run on calculator batteries. Sorry.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Not sure what you mean by "nothing competes with them". There
| are fewer nuclear power stations in the world than there were
| five years ago, and there will be fewer in five years than
| there are today. Hardly anyone wants to build them anymore.
| They just don't make sense.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I think you would benefit from reading TFA. It looks at the
| actual operating costs of current designs and the dropping
| price of renewables and points out that the fundamental
| economics of the nuclear industry are not great right now,
| and points out that most of the high-priced daytime usage is
| about to be scooped up by renewables. This may or may not be
| fatal to the nuclear industry, but it points to the need for
| substantial innovation or subsidies.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| Sorry. Largest power density is still in the atom. Can't
| work your magic around this. The only reasonable and sane
| strategy is to R&D around nuclear. Whoever gets it right
| will rule, the others will be ruled. Not single bubble kept
| its integrity; renewables will burst as well.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Wishing doesn't work.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Running only at night makes each kWh twice as costly,
| because a nuke costs almost the same, producing or not.
|
| Same is true of renewables, but the cost is enormously
| lower.
| neonsunset wrote:
| "Modern tech" is still vastly inferior to nuclear power. Think
| of it as humanity scoring a roll of the dice to discover 22nd
| century technology in the 20th.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Depends what you mean by "inferior". A horse-drawn carriage
| has less carbon emissions than an automobile, doesn't it?
| However, that's not the sole criteria.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Energy crises are caused by cheap energy. When energy is cheap
| people use a lot and stop investing in new sources. The resulting
| crisis causes high energy prices which causes people to be more
| efficient and to invest in new energy sources. It takes 20 or 30
| years for this to play out. (mid 1970s, early 2000s, current
| 2022)
|
| Each cycle leaves behind a tranche of books that reprise the last
| crisis, with the interesting effect that the literature often
| looks like a stopped clock.
|
| One bit of stoppage is that people still compare nuclear to coal,
| although coal has been uneconomical in North America since the
| 1980s. One issue is that a coal burning plant (like a current
| nuclear plant) has a huge steam turbine that's more than 10 times
| the size of gas turbines used for aircraft engines and for
| generating power from natural gas.
|
| It's no accident therefore that we stopped building coal and
| nuclear plants _at the same time._ The Amory Lovins "soft energy
| path" was not a transition to renewables but rather a transition
| to methane.
|
| There's not just the capital cost of the steam turbine but also
| the cost of the heat exchangers, if you look here
|
| https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/pwrs.html
|
| the image is roughly to scale and you see that there are multiple
| "steam generators" that individually are as large as the reactor
| vessel and are every bit as safety critical as the reactor vessel
| because a breakage could lead to a loss of coolant accident.
|
| The cost of the heat handling parts is substantial enough that
| even if the cost of the core was zero and the heat was free the
| LWR would still struggle to compete.
|
| A reactor that runs at higher temperature using liquid metal,
| liquid salt, or a gas coolant like helium, could drive a Brayton
| cycle gas turbine powerset which would fit inside the employee
| break room of the turbine house of an LWR.
|
| Of course it's tricky: we have quite a bit of experience with
| liquid metal reactors, and a little bit with other types. The
| closed-cycle gas turbine however is a work in progress
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-cycle_gas_turbine
| ncmncm wrote:
| This is why geothermal has not taken off. Anything that needs a
| steam turbine needs very expensive periodic maintenance.
|
| All the other nuke expenses just add to that.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| Because it hasn't yet heard about Nitinol
| version_five wrote:
| I don't think it's stagnant. I continue to see stuff like small
| modular reactors making progress. The obvious reason why it
| doesn't get more play is because it doesn't serve anybody's
| political goals. Renewables and carbon taxes or other measures to
| try and reduce quality of life (or opposition to those) get
| attention because they have good political value. Actually
| spending money and generating sustainable power, not much you can
| do with that, it doesn't match an ideology. Same with carbon
| capture and storage. There are good technical motivations to
| climate change, they just don't have a political champion.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Carbon taxes are something separate from the technology. In
| fact, carbon taxes would drive adoption of better technology.
|
| For instance it is completely practical to run the output of a
| fossil fuel power plant through
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine_gas_treating
|
| compress the CO2 to 1500 psi and inject it underground into a
| saline aquifer. Hardly anybody does it because it's expensive
| and nobody pays them to do it.
|
| If there was a carbon tax that made it uneconomical to not do
| that, or if there was a subsidy for pumping carbon underground
| then people would do it.
|
| It is all the same for nuclear power, extensions of renewables
| and other technologies that aren't profitable on their own.
|
| It is a deal with the devil however to do so because it is a
| withdrawl from the government's legitimacy bank account. It's
| certain that any carbon trading system is going to lead to a
| few carbon traders getting rich and them feeding back 1% of
| their profits to politicians to keep their privileges. It's
| less certain that the planet gets saved.
|
| It seems to be a more realistic plan to develop a technological
| revolution that really is cheaper than the alternatives...
| Because then you've saved the planet and the job is done
|
| https://www.moltexenergy.com/
| Retric wrote:
| Small modular reactors don't actually solve any significant
| issues for the nuclear industry. Construction costs are dwarfed
| by operating costs and the idea that N small reactors with N
| times as many parts will somehow require less maintenance is
| wishful thinking.
|
| They very well could be slightly cheaper over the first 15
| years, but nuclear reactors are designed for ~50 year lifespans
| and are really expensive to decommission.
|
| Look at say Palo Verde it's close to 4GW with a 82.80% lifetime
| capacity factor, but needs 2,055 full-time employees and that's
| the best case.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That's totally wrong about operating vs construction costs.
|
| Nuclear plants are cheap to run once you have them built, but
| they are expensive to build when everything goes right and
| frequently they don't.
|
| There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the costs of the
| nuclear fuel cycle and frankly it's a bit ridiculous. For
| instance, they were expecting Yucca Mountain to cost $100
| billion to run back when they were planning to run it.
|
| People look at that and think "that's a lot of money" but a
| nuclear reactor makes about $500 million worth of electricity
| a year so that is 2 years worth of electricity from the 100
| reactors that operate in the US.
|
| (It's more absurd that we'd bury nuclear waste in Yucca
| Mountain when 98% of the energy content of the fuel remains
| in the waste! A reprocessing cycle would cost "more" but not
| much compared to the capital cost of building the reactors.)
| Retric wrote:
| > cheap to run
|
| 2000 staff represents well over 10 billion dollars in just
| salary over 50 years. Add in replaced equipment, fuel,
| insurance, etc and it's a _long_ way from cheap.
|
| The assumption they are cheap to operate simply doesn't
| hold up even the most basic investigation.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 4 GW * 50 years is about $100 billion worth of
| electricity.
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| Nuclear is not popular because the fossil fuel industry co-opt
| the environmentalist to fight on their behalf. We should have
| better developed nuclear for the last few decades and we would be
| in a much better energy posture. Especially for an EV future.
| nimbius wrote:
| investment cost and payoff. a gas turbine plant can deliver
| returns in as little as six years and requires minimal oversight.
| a nuclear plant may take as long as 30 years before it returns a
| profit, and it lives under a government regulatory and security
| magnifying glass.
|
| personal opinion but the modern american investor has no patience
| for anything but instant profits. nuclear could be great but the
| executives you have to convince are all well familiar with and
| scarred by their 60 year old reactors.
| mjfl wrote:
| no one ever mentions nuclear proliferation risk associated with
| the production of plutonium.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://whatisnuclear.com/non-proliferation.html
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| it does get mentioned, and you can have nuclear power without
| producing plutonium.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| Russophobia aside, the next-gen russian nuclear model (first
| exporter in the world, of nuclear plants) is built in 3.5 years,
| which is state of the art. And at the same time has a high
| throughput (1300MWe) (much higher than the billion dollar mini-
| reactor fad) and state of the art longevity. It's very difficult
| for me to find the actual prices, of the different nuclear plants
| models competitors, but since most of the cost is construction
| cost and 3.5 year is SOTA, I assume, if Russia price them
| reasonably that this will shift the balance of nuclear energy
| competitivity worldwide. (china nuclear is already price
| competitive however they don't export (yet?))
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#VVER-TOI If anyone has
| more info on those seemingly disruptive VVER-TOI, please share
| likecarter wrote:
| No EU or CANZAUKUS country would import a Russian design in the
| current environment or foreseeable future, as the Russians will
| be the ones to have the expertise to maintain it.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| It's too expensive to build anything nuclear. Especially these
| days. Also NIMBYism and fossil fuel interests and antinuclear
| activists.
| ncmncm wrote:
| By the time anything could be finished, much cheaper renewables
| will render any such plant redundant. Spending $billions on a
| plant that will be cancelled partway is unappealing. None of
| the money is ever given back.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Nuclear engineer here. If you want a deep dive into US reactor
| development, I wrote this up on a vacation.
|
| https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html
|
| My take on the economics is here
|
| https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
|
| And waste here https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| Do you have news on Westinghouse? Is had filled bankruptcy, did
| they survive? how? Are they in maintenance mode or do they
| pursue evoltution of their models? China has bought their
| patent and is in the process of upscaling the original
| Westinghouse design, is westinghouse still collaborating with
| china? Have they abandoned their own models? It seems according
| to their website they are joining the small reactor fad..
| sb057 wrote:
| The fact that nuclear power regulators are routinely anti-nuclear
| power probably isn't helping things.
|
| https://www.powermag.com/blog/former-nuclear-leaders-say-no-...
|
| >Dr. Greg Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
| Commission Prof. Wolfgang Renneberg, former Head of the Reactor
| Safety, Radiation Protection and Nuclear Waste, Federal
| Environment Ministry, Germany Dr. Bernard Laponche, former
| Director General, French Agency for Energy Management, former
| Advisor to French Minister of Environment, Energy and Nuclear
| Safety
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| It's a tragedy
| ncmncm wrote:
| I.e., the more you know about nukes, the less you like them.
| evolve2k wrote:
| Storing nuclear waste for 10,000+ years is also unpopular and no-
| one wants it stored in their backyard and further does it add up
| to put aside proper funds to steward waste for 10,000 years.
| planetsprite wrote:
| All nuclear waste ever produced in the US could be stored in an
| area the size of a football field
| ben_w wrote:
| While true, this does not make it popular or lead to NIMBYs
| changing their mind. How important this is varies by nation,
| but it's not nothing in most places.
| planetsprite wrote:
| Nuclear power is unpopular because of media messaging. Coal
| releases more radiation into the environment on average,
| even accounting for Chernobyl and Fukushima.
| 6581 wrote:
| That's a rather meaningless assertion without stating how
| high you'd need to stack it.
| planetsprite wrote:
| 30 feet
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Most of the waste is Uranium which can be put back into
| reactors, the most dangerous long-lived element in the waste is
| Plutonium which is also a good nuclear fuel.
|
| Remove those elements plus the higher actinides (Neptunium,
| Americium, Curium, ...) and almost all of the radioactivity in
| the fission products has decayed by 500 years... It's less
| radioactive at that point than the Uranium ore was when it was
| mined.
|
| Burying the fuel rods was a half-baked idea that was come up
| with in a hurry in the 1970s because of racist fears that brown
| people would learn to reprocess nuclear fuel and develop
| nuclear weapons. Now we are facing the certain danger of get
| fried by global warming as opposed to a hypothetical threat of
| nuclear war.
| civilized wrote:
| Society has chosen not to meaningfully incentivize addressing
| climate change. From that perspective, why not just continue
| taking the free energy from the ground? (Or use solar and other
| renewables, but only if cheaper.) Why bother with scary,
| expensive nuclear?
| jmyeet wrote:
| This is a solid write-up. I particularly like this part:
|
| > Most fusion concepts are just a more complicated way to heat
| water.
|
| It's kind of wild that our means of power production do
| ultimately mostly boil down (pun intended) to turning a turbine
| with steam and, as the article notes, this is an inherent cost
| problem whereas solar is a direct form of energy. I hadn't really
| thought about it in those terms but it's true.
|
| It's also kind of wild to consider that we want to heat up
| hydrogen to a 100 million degrees... to boil water and turn a
| turbine.
|
| I'll also highlight this:
|
| > As we've seen, traditional LWRs have a cost problem. That is
| why the PR ignores costs or focuses only on operating costs.
|
| My own view:
|
| 1. There are several hundred nuclear power plants in the world.
| Not one of them has been built without government assistance.
| This goes to the capital cost issue;
|
| 2. Nuclear power plants take too long to plan, build and bring
| online. IIRC it's at least 11 years;
|
| 3. We still don't have a good long-term plan for dealing with
| processing waste at scale;
|
| 4. We still don't have a good long-term plan for dealing with
| fuel waste at scale; and
|
| 5. I just don't trust humans, particularly within the corporate
| structure, to build and operate nuclear power plants safely. The
| temptation is simply too high to increase profits by cutting
| costs.
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