In fact this is one of the biggest reasons why nuclear is failing. Building even just a single power plant is a project that is so large no single company can do it.
Yes. And the fact we don’t build nuclear at scale. All projects have been essentially one-offs, built and managed by inexperienced teams working on custom designs. If we build the same type of plant hundreds of times by experienced teams, the cost per unit will plummet.
That's the problem. Nuclear reactors are huge undertakings and obviously producing only one is going to be incredibly expensive, just like building only one wind turbine of a design. That's why countries should cooperate to build more continuously and more efficiently.
Because nuclear power projects are never finished on time and within budget. Partly for political reasons (as in: People really don't like it), partly because engineers suck at estimating large projects.
In the US, there was one nuclear plant that went online in this century: it is the second unit of the plant in Tennessee whose construction started in 1973. It was finished in 2016, after 43 years. There is also a construction in progress in Georgia, currently approaching 20 years of development.
The problem with government inefficiency and nuclear is that the governments are the only ones that dare spend money on it. An example of a private investment was the plant in South Carolina that was halted after 9 billion spent. The reason was that they realized they would not make it in time to cash in on a subsidy, and without that the project would never ever be profitable. And normally you could say it happens, it's the company's money, but the debt is being paid by the utility's customers. They're paying for electricity from a power plant that does not exist.
I don't understand the people that think this is a rational solution.
Problem is that we don't build the damn things anymore, so each one is bespoke and expensive. Ideally we'd keep building them and develop the expertise and make it a more repeatable scalable process.
I worry instead that the lesson taken from this will be "nuclear is too expensive and ineffective".
Part of the problem with Nuclear is tax payer exhaustion. Every time they build a plant it take 10-20 years longer and cost over runs are in the billions. And then you have costly refurbishment that runs into the billions and takes half a decade longer than anticipated. It's a shit show from day one until they finally shut it down 20 billion $$$ later...
The big problem is the lack of knowlage and experienced. Simply put almost nobody has experience with building reactors, and specially not that one. And outside of it being nuclear, its also an incredible large civil engineering project with incredibly high specification. The US is not exactly known for being great at executing large civil engineering projects.
The reality is if you want cheap nuclear you need to mass produce it, just like with everything else. But that requires large scale state action and planning.
Or alternatively having a competitive market for smaller nuclear. But for that to happen regulatory approval processes and many other problems are in the way.
Nuclear plants take 15-20 years to build in practice, cost double, triple or more of initial estimates just for construction, more billions for teardown, and even more for storing all the waste. On top of that they're at real risk for natural disasters (of which no US state is secure - either it's hurricanes or earthquakes) and accidents due to mismanagement and corner-cutting. And no one wants to live near one either, which means a shitton more cost in construction because you have to build them in the desert, or the project gets boggled down for years by NIMBYs.
In contrast, you can build a solar or wind plant in less than a year. And the profits for these end up in the local community where they stand instead of investment funds owning the nuclear plant operators.
Can you explain this a bit more? I don't see how these things could have helped any of the construction failures that have plagued all nuclear attempts.
Operating costs are low for nuclear, it's the construction that is the problem.
Building new nuclear is slow and expensive because we stopped doing it for a looong time.
Way too many power plants are from the 80's and before. Maybe they've had a few upgrades, but they're mostly at the end of their lifespan or even over their recommended life.
That's because its a bit of a bait and switch. When people pull that out, it's about keeping existing plants running- extending them to run for 60+ years. That's pretty cheap, since the cost of fuel is tiny and you just need to pay for the ~1000 people onsite. The issue there is risk- you can't just open up all the valves to check how worn out they are, or if all the computers still have nice transistors and clean relays. You can do some basic stuff like looking for cracks, but the system is ancient. Who knows if that is okay or not.
Then, if you talk about new construction, the issue is cost but the conversation is entirely about risk. There's very, very little danger even for many decades. Cost is another matter. The best estimates are that nuclear costs as much as the most expensive other technologies to build, but the actual end figure has just gotten higher and higher over time. Manufacturing is not what it used to be and these huge plants have been outpaced by smaller plants and different technologies.
You build them for 50+ years. People retire and now you have no clue how they built them that cheap.
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