We should have built more nuclear 20 years ago, but it seems it's too late now. The design of reactors that are actually built is extremely conservative, it still takes forever to plan them and get appropriate permissions, and then they take nearly a decade to build. Meanwhile the price of wind+storage is dropping. If you were to start planning a new reactor now, by the time it's operational it might be uneconomical to even turn on. And even if it isn't, it's extremely unlikely that you make your investment back over the lifespan of the plant, especially once you add the decommissioning (which is more expensive than the construction of the plant, because a lot of the structure turns slightly radioactive).
We had our chance, we wasted it by never moving beyond 1970s reactor designs. Now the economics of those designs no longer make sense for new plants, and nobody is going to risk a fortune on building unproven large-scale reactor designs. There's some opportunity with reactors sized like those on ships, but that's it.
> we wasted it by never moving beyond 1970s reactor designs
There's this popular idea that the reason nuclear never moved beyond 60s tech is because some evil conspiracy, too stupid populace, or both.
In reality, billions were poured in research especially during the 80s for more advanced designs, but it is a classic hard problem. It is both a physics and an engineering problem, with plenty of unknown unknowns.
Breeder reactors were already built 30 years ago and they spent more time under repair than delivering energy, after building costs have already been overrun many times over. To make the case that we should build more of the same, better arguments are needed.
We were unable to build more nuclear power twenty years ago for the same reason we can't do it now, and it's never too late: it's only against someone's interests
And the interests are purely financial, at least in the US. We can achieve carbon free electricity far cheaper by using renewables and storage. Nuclear construction is suuuuuuuper expensive, and perhaps more importantly, incredibly financially risky. The chances of completing a build are very low, and the chance of spending billions of dollars and having nothing to show are unacceptably high.
If nuclear were our only option, we would have to go for it. But we now have better, cheaper, faster, more economically efficient carbon free energy sources.
Many parts of the world will not be serviceable by solar. Too much darkness over extended periods. Storage is also still a huge issue that has its own particular environmental consequences. If nuclear could be made safe and affordable, it would make energy widely available everywhere. Why wouldn't we want to try and make that viable? I doubt there is anything that raises standards of living quicker than abundant energy.
Old style reactors are "suuuuuuuper expensive", but several modern designs may be much less expensive. Older designs were inherently unstable and needed many layers of safety systems to "guarantee" safety. This of course also needed many layers of regulation and validation to make sure it would actually work. The rest of your concerns about completing builds hinge on these same factors.
A modern design that is inherently stable and safe should require a much simpler overall system design. We just have to have the courage to let go of our preconceived ideas about nuclear and allow decisions to be driven by data rather than emotion. Time will tell if we can do that.
> If nuclear could be made safe and affordable, it would make energy widely available everywhere. Why wouldn't we want to try and make that viable?
We have tried, and we have failed to make it affordable. And I think that it's unlikely that it will ever be affordable, because no matter how advanced the nuclear side of it is, it's still going to be used to boil water and drive a steam turbine for the business end of making electricity.
The thing about renewables and storage is that they cut our the Carnot cycle. All those steam turbines have been super optimized over the past centuries, and our materials science isn't making that process any cheaper any more.
Renewables and storage cut out that thermal process, and therefor have the ability to severely undercut the costs of all thermal process electricity generation. And from the way that cost curves are still falling like a rock, it really looks like they will be cheaper than just the thermal turbines and cooling systems that are required for thermal electricity generation. Which means that no matter how cheap and affordable nuclear becomes (lets say it's absolutely free), the 20th century tech of using steam to make electricity will be too expensive to compete with renewables and storage.
There are very few areas that won't be serviceable by some mixture of renewables, and those that aren't will liked be serviceable by fuels that are generated from renewables (hydrogen, methanol, methane, whatever ends up having the best properties.)
> We just have to have the courage to let go of our preconceived ideas about nuclear and allow decisions to be driven by data rather than emotion. Time will tell if we can do that.
It's funny, because I 100% agree with the words in the sentence, but in the sense that nuclear is only advocated for because of emotional, tribal, and political connections to it (not necessarily all at the same time). When looking at our current technological capabilities, and construction abilities, nuclear is just not a very desirable technology due to its high degree of complexity. It requires high levels of skills that we no longer are very good at: managing extremely
complex construction and physical design of large structures, extremely skilled welding, concrete pours, etc. Stuff that we were good at in the 20th century, but no longer.
But we all grew up with the idea that nuclear was the "next" technology on a hierarchy of progression. And then we'd have fusion. And then space travel likely powered by fusion. But when reevaluating that "hierarchy" with actual technological development, I think that the futurists is the past got it wrong, and that all the sci-fi and video games we grew up on missed this one particular aspect of which technologies would win out.
I agree with you that renewables are cheaper and getting cheaper still in the future. As an example, in California there's 27 GW installed solar power right now with an additional 16 GW to be installed in the next 5 years [1].
However, while nuclear power is super expensive, it doesn't have to be that way. The problem is that nuclear power costs are not linear with the output. If the only thing you build is 1GW reactors, they will essentially all be one-of-a-kind. They will all run into production issues, the construction will happen so rarely that you won't build an experienced workforce, you will never enter a virtuous cycle to allow for ever decreasing costs.
Contrast that with the naval nuclear reactors. They are being built in New York State [2], at a pace of about 2 per year, using a very static design. The whole thing is so uneventful that most people in New York State are not even aware of that. Each of these reactors produces 210 MW [3]. The cost is classified, but it appears to be of the order of $100MM [4].
So, how can you enter the virtuous cycle? By reducing scale. And this is exactly what this project is about. I for one am rooting for it.
The types of reactors in this article may work out economically, and for the health of the world, having more carbon free options would be fantastic. However I'm extremely skeptical on this actually working out in practice; only time will tell!
As for naval reactors in particular, that's the first analysis that I have ever seen that puts them at such a low cost, so that's very valuable info, thank! Most of the time people say that nuclear reactors are far more expensive than civilian reactors, but I've never seen numbers out to it. (I'm not a nuclear expert, but try to listen to as many as I can, and naval reactors are most often referred to as super expensive). The other challenges with the naval design is that it uses highly enriched uranium which is 1) extremely expensive, and 2) not likely to ever be in civilian hands. I think that the highly enriched fuel also shifts some of the cost from construction to fuel costs, in that the higher energy density has benefits. Also, I think that the cooling system could potentially be far cheaper for these systems, as they are sitting in coolant, and don't need to worry about overheating local ecosystems. The high cost of modernizing the cooling system for Diablo Canyon is what stopped its owner from pursuing a license extension.
I found a more reliable source for the cost of naval nuclear reactors: the Congressional Budget Office [1]. They investigated what it would cost to switch some surface ships from conventional to nuclear power. The main result:
"CBO estimated that the acquisition-cost premium for a nuclear ship would be about $1.1 billion per destroyer, $0.8 billion per LSD(X), and $0.9 billion per LH(X)".
In particular for the last class LH(X) (helicopter carriers, similar to the Wasp class), the reactors would be two A1B used in the Gerald Ford class of aircraft carriers, which generate about 700 MW.
Carbon free renewables will always be a partial solution. People aren't willing to endure rolling brownouts because of low winds or long stretches of overcast weather, and the storage required to solve those issues are never baked into the cost estimates under which these technologies are considered competitive.
People have been saying we would have rolling brownouts once we got to 5% renewables. Then when that happened without any ill effects, they said it would happen at 10%. Then 15%. It doesn't matter, because it has always been a false talking point, without any basis in fact. It simply doesn't make sense unless one can only imagine large thermally driven plants and you don't want to have to change grid management from what you were doing in the 1960.
We can do 90% renewable energy, and even 100%, with storage and curtailment. How much we need of each is simply a cost trade off. If we could build nuclear now for less than $100/MWh, it may have a place in this cost optimization problem, but we can't, so it doesn't have a place until nuclear technology catches up to the 21st century.
>...People have been saying we would have rolling brownouts once we got to 5% renewables.
Who ever claimed that?
>...We can do 90% renewable energy, and even 100%, with storage and curtailment.
That would not be very difficult with current technology. Trying to rely only on intermittent power sources has huge storage requirements due to weather along with daily/seasonal variation. If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades ago.
For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity:
>...Based on German hourly feed-in and consumption data for electric power, this paper studies the storage and buffering needs resulting from the volatility of wind and solar energy. It shows that joint buffers for wind and solar energy require less storage capacity than would be necessary to buffer wind or solar energy alone. The storage requirement of over 6,000 pumped storage plants, which is 183 times Germany’s current capacity, would nevertheless be huge.
I disagree. Renewables will be able to supply 100% of the world's energy needs, more cheaply than nuclear ever could. A nd yes, this includes the cost of storage.
Claims that renewables cannot handle things typically make the stupid assumption that long term variations in demand/supply are to be covered with batteries.
When one studies renewable energy, inevitably one will come across people who think that Tesla's (or someone more obscure's) greatest invention had been 'suppressed' by monied interests that don't want us to have nice things. Of course, it's invariably the same story, it might have worked but wasn't profitable to build.
It's peculiar how similar a sentiment the pro-nuclear crowd expresses. I wonder whether there's an overlap in patterns of thought between the communities.
> If nuclear were our only option, we would have to go for it. But we now have better, cheaper, faster, more economically efficient carbon free energy sources.
Based on first principle analysis nuclear fuel is basically free, and the actual materials contained in a nuclear reactor is very small and cheap compared to wind or solar of equal power output.
Eventually it will be too late, and arguably it is already too late. Once climate change hits critical points like permafrost thawing or the loss of substantial parts of the Greenland ice sheet it doesn't matter anymore what we do. I doubt that we can build a sufficient number of nuclear plants in the next twenty years or so to prevent that from happening.
Your pessimism now is not helpful in the future. I also expect irreversible climate change and I certainly don't welcome it but to paraphrase: I'd rather die on my feet than surrender and die on my knees.
It is possible we need to emerge into a lower power intensity world.
I think that renewable energy has a much larger chance of effecting change: It requires a much lower up front investment and has almost immediate benefits. A couple of solar cells and batteries can be financed by every middle class person. And additionally the construction doesn't take 10+ years, a small renewable installation delivers power basically immediately. In contrast nuclear power plants take years just for planning and have mind boggling up front costs.
A steady buildup of renewables is much more likely to be sustainable politically than a crash program of building nuclear that costs a fortune today and only shows its benefits in more than a decade.
You're ignoring one of the largest problems with renewables: they're not actually replacing fossil fuels, they're replacing nuclear power which was almost carbon neutral to begin with. The intermittency of wind and solar means the profitability of nuclear plants goes down (because the capital costs are enormous, they should be run close to max capacity 24/7).
Baseload power is still needed, just as before, but the new source replacing nuclear seems to be gas. This means, unfortunately, that the current trend prioritizing wind and solar power will mean a larger net carbon footprint when we need to reduce it. This is really bad for the future.
The whole way the regulatory system was changed basically made making new designs impossible.
In the 60s literally 100s of nuclear reactors were build and tested. Many with pretty small budget, and amazing innovation were achieved. But then the government started to turn against nuclear, defended all but a few projects, made access to nuclear material basically impossible, put in a regulatory system that made it 99.9999999% impossible for any new reactor to be ever licensed.
I do not think it is to late, nuclear is still the most efficient method based on a first principle analysis. The question is just can we develop a commercial product.
We had our chance, we wasted it by never moving beyond 1970s reactor designs. Now the economics of those designs no longer make sense for new plants, and nobody is going to risk a fortune on building unproven large-scale reactor designs. There's some opportunity with reactors sized like those on ships, but that's it.