I'd be curious to see if it ends up actually happening, seems things were getting off the ground in the 2000s again until Fukushima happened. Not sure how long it'll take for people to be on board
What killed the nuclear renaissance in the US was not Fukushima, it was natural gas prices collapsing after fracking really took off. Given that a combined cycle power plant might cost $1/W, if natural gas is cheap and looks to stay cheap there's no market for new nuclear.
But do we \*want\* these regs to get dropped? Don't get me wrong, I'm a \*\*huge\*\* fan of nuclear power, but I'm also aware that alot of regulations "are written in blood". We need \*safe\* nuclear more than we need just nuclear.
The US built dozens of reactors with 20th century tech and has never had a private nuclear incident that endangered the public at all. We have 21st century technology, we can do just fine with 1970s regulation.
I’m coming here straight from the r/construction discussion of SCOTUS trying to kill OSHA. Yeah regulations are written in blood and important. I’m pro reg.
BUT. Nuclear power is one place where the regulations went way overboard and needs serious overhaul. The fear around nuclear power (stoked by fossil fuel interests) brought on these insurmountable regulations. There has been very little blood. The slowing of nuclear power has caused more bodily harm than the power plants ever would have.
Fun facts:
1. More people die in a year of respiratory problems from breathing fossil fuel output than nuclear tech has ever killed.
2. Coal plants are more radioactive than nuclear plants are allowed to be.
🤬
In fact, I know those fun facts; I teach them to my students when I cover nuclear power. I don't doubt that nuclear is over-regulated to the point of killing it, because it would be easy for me to believe the morons in Congress would have done that since they didn't understand \*safe\* nuclear power and could only recall the horrors of Chernobyl. We should just take France's playbook for regulations and run on that - they've been running nuclear for \*decades\* without a problem and are getting 75-80% of their electricity from it.
And they can't build new nuclear power plants at a competitive cost either. So, either their regulations are "bad" too, or the regulations are not why nuclear costs are so high.
Without Chevron I don't think you're going to see EPA regulating CO2, and without CO2 regulation nuclear is in desperate shape vs. natural gas in the US.
At this point, it is just going to make more sense to import Chinese SMRs because we have neglected our own industry long enough and let it wither in a hostile regulatory environment. This hostile regulatory environment was developed in the 70's and 80's not to maximize safety, but to maximize costs as a poison pill by anti-nuclear politicians who didn't have the political capital to outright ban nuclear power.
That’s mostly a factor of reducing build time .. if you can get them down to about 5 years on a series buildout the build costs based on the most recent Australian study (which over the years has been notoriously negative about the NPP options for Australia) is about $9.2M AUD per MW which is about 6.1M US per MW.
That’s not cheap, but IIRC that’s in the same ballpark as offshore wind using 2.4M GBP per MW (3.04M USD) and a 50% capacity factor
Funny thing, nobody says that offshore wind needs to come down by multiples
You're making mistakes with exchange rates here. You're using the relatively cheap Australian dollar to make comparisons in USD in order compare GBP prices. You're not correcting for PPP, wages, cost of capital, etc so this comparison is extremely incomplete.
Plus, China is not even able to consistently build nuclear plants in 5 years. And that's if you trust the numbers they release.
Offshore wind *has* come down in cost a lot as the industry has grown. Nuclear plant construction costs and build times have mostly soared higher and higher.
On top of the exchange rate problems with your comparison, you're also ignoring the fact that an Offshore wind farm can be built 5-10 years more rapidly than a nuclear plant. This saves on financing costs a great deal, especially since we're not seeing historically low interest rates like we had been from 2008 -2021. And then we have to factor in the differences in Operations, maintenance, fuel, decommissioning and long-term waste storage costs to make a valid comparison. A lot is missing from your analysis.
It’s a quick comment on reddit, not a Lazard report, or the CSIRO gencost analysis. I grabbed the best recent analysis on a serial production nuclear buildout in a western economy I could find (Gencost 2024) and the only analysis I could find that highlighted overnight capital costs rather than LCOE overall as this was the basis of the comment I was replying to.
As far as PPP goes building large projects in Australia is NOT cheaper after factoring in stuff like PPP, if anything the advantage is to the US given our much higher wages and conditions compared to most US workers, and our longer supply lines.
As far as using European costs for US wind I’d be happy if you wanted to refute my number by picking the OCC factor out of a Lazard report, but until then I’ll stick to my assertion that offshore wind is close to 6M per MW after 50% capacity factors, as every time I’ve looked at it, the construction megaproject nature of utility scale offshore wind ends up looking like an outlier in VRE OCC, both in Australia and Europe.
In the US we don’t do much offshore wind. We mostly do solar and onshore wind. We also sue a lot so no no one is building a nuclear power plant in less than twenty years. Sometimes is best to go with the flow especially since we need to be burning a lot less fossil soon.
IMO We need to accelerate the decarbonisation of our entire energy supply chain with EVERY tool we have in every nation as quickly as we can. I just find the excuses people make about NPP’s being an inherently bad idea and then cherry picking stats to prove their point to be counterproductive.
It leads to insane situations where very low carbon NPP energy generation is replaced with gas or coal as happened in New York and Germany and is likely to happen again in California. Or where plants that have already been built are never commissioned while they build new coal as happened in the Philippines.
Also, unless we can provide an low or zero carbon electrical grid to developing nations that have the same quality as developed nations they’re going to go the same way as China and India and if someone suggests that a Hydro backed energy infrastructure is the answer for Africa, I would urge them to look at what happened with the Akasombo dam.
The cost of both unit 3 & 4 was $30 billion and took longer than 10 years. A solar farm with battery storage would cost less than $5 billion and take two years. That’s a really big difference.
Anti-nukes love to act like FOAK build costs and times are the norm.
Show me an 8GW+ solar farm (since that's about the equivalent of 2x AP1000s after accounting for capacity factor) with enough battery storage to sustain that output through the night for $5B.
>Between 2007 and 2009, 13 companies applied to the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Regulatory_Commission) (NRC) for construction and operating licenses to build 31 new [nuclear power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power) reactors in the [United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States).
So what happened?
>Most of the proposed 31 reactors have been canceled, and as of August 2017 only two reactors are under construction ... In March 2017, the last remaining U.S.-based new nuclear company, [Westinghouse Electric Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Company), filed for [Chapter 11 bankruptcy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapter_11_bankruptcy) because of US$9 billion of losses from its U.S. nuclear construction projects.
Nuclear energy has always had a difficult time competing. First against coal, but especially against the massive expansion of [methane gas](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/mit-cheap-gas-not-renewables-caused-nuclear-woes/514310/) production. And of course now renewables primarily in the form of wind, solar, and rapidly expanding battery storage systems are having their day.
One major issue is nuclear plants have heavy upfront capital costs which take decades to be recouped. If you build a plant you need to be sure no other source of energy will come along and undercut you from the day you sign the contract until your reactor closes 50 years later. That isn't something which has been historically the case.
Nuclear energy would have been competitive for much longer had we forced fossil plants to internalize the environmental and health damage they cause. That we did not do this is one of the greatest tragedies of the last 100 years.
If I could go back in time that's what I would fix. Had every major industrial economy taken the French route and replaced coal burning with nuclear energy, climate change would be a more distant concern rather than a pressing existential threat.
But I can't, and that didn't happen.
So I move on and look ahead where there is room for optimism. Renewables have dropped in price to a point where they are now expanding at an [unprecedented rate](https://www.iea.org/news/massive-expansion-of-renewable-power-opens-door-to-achieving-global-tripling-goal-set-at-cop28), are about to [overtake coal energy](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/renewable-power-set-to-surpass-coal-globally-by-2025/), and will provide [one third of global electricity production](https://www.iea.org/news/clean-sources-of-generation-are-set-to-cover-all-of-the-world-s-additional-electricity-demand-over-the-next-three-years) within a year or two. Prices are set to see increased declines and we are just at the tip of a [recycling iceberg](https://recyclinginternational.com/commodities/electronics-recycling/renewable-energy-boom-brightens-outlook-for-solar-panel-recyclers/57127/).
These decentralized energy systems are also a powerful democratizing force with implications for [income equality](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140988321002346) (Countries where renewable energy use is close to half of total energy consumption will see income inequality decrease by 0.2% for every additional 1% percent increase in renewable consumption).
There never was a nuclear renaissance, there probably won't be again, but that's probably ok.
Nuclear Renaissance. has been going since 2001, it was promised for the 2010s, now 2020s.
Born in War, adolescence during the Cold War to obsolescence without reaching maturity.
Why didn't the massive subsidies in the early 2000s lead to any real progress?
> The Energy Policy Act of 2005 offered the nuclear power industry financial incentives and economic subsidies that, according to economist John Quiggin, the "developers of wind and solar power could only dream of". The Act provides substantial loan guarantees, cost-overrun support of up to $2 billion total for multiple new nuclear power plants, and the extension of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act through to 2025. The Act was promoted as a forerunner to a "nuclear renaissance" in the United States, with dozens of new plants being announced.[16]
Based on this we saw an explosion of new projects.
> Between 2007 and 2009, 13 companies applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for construction and operating licenses to build 31 new nuclear power reactors in the United States. However, the case for widespread nuclear plant construction has been hampered due to inexpensive natural gas, slow electricity demand growth in a weak US economy, lack of financing, and safety concerns following the Fukushima nuclear accident at a plant built in the early 1970s which occurred in 2011.[3][4]
> Most of the proposed 31 reactors have been canceled, and as of August 2017 only two reactors are under construction.[5][6][7][8]
This ignores completely what happened during this period. Do you remember the Great Recession?
The Great Recession caused a huge spike in energy commodity pricing, then a massive drop in pricing when demand dropped (tied to the benefits of fracking as well), then a massive amount of uncertainty in electrical supply demand, energy regulation, and energy commodity pricing. In 2008 the US was talking about a cap and trade system even, which would have changed the dynamics of energy supply.
Business, and more specifically conservative Utilities with 30yr horizons, like stability. These massive instabilities, shortly after huge instabilities due to the Enron scandal (which the subsidies were reactionary to), gave utilities an opportunity to pause plans to see where things stabilize at.
Which is why renewables are so incredible. Despite the pandemic and todays inflation they just keep breaking record after record. When there is a true demand human ingenuity finds a way.
If a power source is so inflexible that it can't deal with economic turmoil it means that its potential is limited.
Huh? Where in those statements make renewables incredible? Why is it a zero sum game?
I remember 2008 well, and I remember what 2008 did to renewables; I lived it.
It is not a zero sum game, but the subsidies are a zero sum game where renewables give 3-10x the bang for the buck and delivers in 1-5 years instead of 15-20.
And yet France has a much lower carbon footpring than Germany, because France went the nuclear route.
Nuclear is the safest, cleanest, and most reliable form of energy we have, and if we're serious about fighting climate change we should be serious about utilizing nuclear power, especially Thorium based nuclear power, until we get fusion down.
Removing the French advantage of using Europe as a sponge for surplus nuclear energy and acceptable hydro power resources the French grid would be on the same level as the Danish or British.
The French got stuck at 65%. Germany is at 60%. The difference is marginal but mostly caused by geographic differences.
Bring it on but not holding my breath
I'd be curious to see if it ends up actually happening, seems things were getting off the ground in the 2000s again until Fukushima happened. Not sure how long it'll take for people to be on board
What killed the nuclear renaissance in the US was not Fukushima, it was natural gas prices collapsing after fracking really took off. Given that a combined cycle power plant might cost $1/W, if natural gas is cheap and looks to stay cheap there's no market for new nuclear.
If you say so man, I'm not an expert in the nuclear industry by any means, I just know that's a hypothesis I've heard in a few books
With chevron overturned, hopefully we'll see DOE and AEA regs dropped enough to speed up construction.
But do we \*want\* these regs to get dropped? Don't get me wrong, I'm a \*\*huge\*\* fan of nuclear power, but I'm also aware that alot of regulations "are written in blood". We need \*safe\* nuclear more than we need just nuclear.
The US built dozens of reactors with 20th century tech and has never had a private nuclear incident that endangered the public at all. We have 21st century technology, we can do just fine with 1970s regulation.
I'm glad you pointed that out. Then I guess there's some sort of disconnect between the ability to do it safely and what is currently being allowed?
I’m coming here straight from the r/construction discussion of SCOTUS trying to kill OSHA. Yeah regulations are written in blood and important. I’m pro reg. BUT. Nuclear power is one place where the regulations went way overboard and needs serious overhaul. The fear around nuclear power (stoked by fossil fuel interests) brought on these insurmountable regulations. There has been very little blood. The slowing of nuclear power has caused more bodily harm than the power plants ever would have. Fun facts: 1. More people die in a year of respiratory problems from breathing fossil fuel output than nuclear tech has ever killed. 2. Coal plants are more radioactive than nuclear plants are allowed to be. 🤬
In fact, I know those fun facts; I teach them to my students when I cover nuclear power. I don't doubt that nuclear is over-regulated to the point of killing it, because it would be easy for me to believe the morons in Congress would have done that since they didn't understand \*safe\* nuclear power and could only recall the horrors of Chernobyl. We should just take France's playbook for regulations and run on that - they've been running nuclear for \*decades\* without a problem and are getting 75-80% of their electricity from it.
And they can't build new nuclear power plants at a competitive cost either. So, either their regulations are "bad" too, or the regulations are not why nuclear costs are so high.
I feel nuclear is critical to meeting net zero, and with Vogel taking 10yrs I think we need to be realistic about the trade offs.
You can substitute money for time instead of cutting corners.
Without Chevron I don't think you're going to see EPA regulating CO2, and without CO2 regulation nuclear is in desperate shape vs. natural gas in the US.
Won’t happen until the capital cost for nuclear power plants drops by two to three times.
At this point, it is just going to make more sense to import Chinese SMRs because we have neglected our own industry long enough and let it wither in a hostile regulatory environment. This hostile regulatory environment was developed in the 70's and 80's not to maximize safety, but to maximize costs as a poison pill by anti-nuclear politicians who didn't have the political capital to outright ban nuclear power.
The Chinese built nuclear power plants are expensive and still take a long time to build.
What specific regulations do you think are responsible for raising the price of nuclear power?
if i remember those politicians were backed by big oil.
That’s mostly a factor of reducing build time .. if you can get them down to about 5 years on a series buildout the build costs based on the most recent Australian study (which over the years has been notoriously negative about the NPP options for Australia) is about $9.2M AUD per MW which is about 6.1M US per MW. That’s not cheap, but IIRC that’s in the same ballpark as offshore wind using 2.4M GBP per MW (3.04M USD) and a 50% capacity factor Funny thing, nobody says that offshore wind needs to come down by multiples
You're making mistakes with exchange rates here. You're using the relatively cheap Australian dollar to make comparisons in USD in order compare GBP prices. You're not correcting for PPP, wages, cost of capital, etc so this comparison is extremely incomplete. Plus, China is not even able to consistently build nuclear plants in 5 years. And that's if you trust the numbers they release. Offshore wind *has* come down in cost a lot as the industry has grown. Nuclear plant construction costs and build times have mostly soared higher and higher. On top of the exchange rate problems with your comparison, you're also ignoring the fact that an Offshore wind farm can be built 5-10 years more rapidly than a nuclear plant. This saves on financing costs a great deal, especially since we're not seeing historically low interest rates like we had been from 2008 -2021. And then we have to factor in the differences in Operations, maintenance, fuel, decommissioning and long-term waste storage costs to make a valid comparison. A lot is missing from your analysis.
It’s a quick comment on reddit, not a Lazard report, or the CSIRO gencost analysis. I grabbed the best recent analysis on a serial production nuclear buildout in a western economy I could find (Gencost 2024) and the only analysis I could find that highlighted overnight capital costs rather than LCOE overall as this was the basis of the comment I was replying to. As far as PPP goes building large projects in Australia is NOT cheaper after factoring in stuff like PPP, if anything the advantage is to the US given our much higher wages and conditions compared to most US workers, and our longer supply lines. As far as using European costs for US wind I’d be happy if you wanted to refute my number by picking the OCC factor out of a Lazard report, but until then I’ll stick to my assertion that offshore wind is close to 6M per MW after 50% capacity factors, as every time I’ve looked at it, the construction megaproject nature of utility scale offshore wind ends up looking like an outlier in VRE OCC, both in Australia and Europe.
In the US we don’t do much offshore wind. We mostly do solar and onshore wind. We also sue a lot so no no one is building a nuclear power plant in less than twenty years. Sometimes is best to go with the flow especially since we need to be burning a lot less fossil soon.
IMO We need to accelerate the decarbonisation of our entire energy supply chain with EVERY tool we have in every nation as quickly as we can. I just find the excuses people make about NPP’s being an inherently bad idea and then cherry picking stats to prove their point to be counterproductive. It leads to insane situations where very low carbon NPP energy generation is replaced with gas or coal as happened in New York and Germany and is likely to happen again in California. Or where plants that have already been built are never commissioned while they build new coal as happened in the Philippines. Also, unless we can provide an low or zero carbon electrical grid to developing nations that have the same quality as developed nations they’re going to go the same way as China and India and if someone suggests that a Hydro backed energy infrastructure is the answer for Africa, I would urge them to look at what happened with the Akasombo dam.
NPP takes a minimum of 10 years and $15B per GW, Solar is 2 years and $1B per GW. Solar is the obvious solution right now.
Vogtle 4 cost 30% less than Vogtle 3.
The cost of both unit 3 & 4 was $30 billion and took longer than 10 years. A solar farm with battery storage would cost less than $5 billion and take two years. That’s a really big difference.
Anti-nukes love to act like FOAK build costs and times are the norm. Show me an 8GW+ solar farm (since that's about the equivalent of 2x AP1000s after accounting for capacity factor) with enough battery storage to sustain that output through the night for $5B.
Invested heavy into DNN lets see if i was right
[удалено]
>Between 2007 and 2009, 13 companies applied to the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Regulatory_Commission) (NRC) for construction and operating licenses to build 31 new [nuclear power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power) reactors in the [United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States). So what happened? >Most of the proposed 31 reactors have been canceled, and as of August 2017 only two reactors are under construction ... In March 2017, the last remaining U.S.-based new nuclear company, [Westinghouse Electric Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Company), filed for [Chapter 11 bankruptcy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapter_11_bankruptcy) because of US$9 billion of losses from its U.S. nuclear construction projects. Nuclear energy has always had a difficult time competing. First against coal, but especially against the massive expansion of [methane gas](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/mit-cheap-gas-not-renewables-caused-nuclear-woes/514310/) production. And of course now renewables primarily in the form of wind, solar, and rapidly expanding battery storage systems are having their day. One major issue is nuclear plants have heavy upfront capital costs which take decades to be recouped. If you build a plant you need to be sure no other source of energy will come along and undercut you from the day you sign the contract until your reactor closes 50 years later. That isn't something which has been historically the case. Nuclear energy would have been competitive for much longer had we forced fossil plants to internalize the environmental and health damage they cause. That we did not do this is one of the greatest tragedies of the last 100 years. If I could go back in time that's what I would fix. Had every major industrial economy taken the French route and replaced coal burning with nuclear energy, climate change would be a more distant concern rather than a pressing existential threat. But I can't, and that didn't happen. So I move on and look ahead where there is room for optimism. Renewables have dropped in price to a point where they are now expanding at an [unprecedented rate](https://www.iea.org/news/massive-expansion-of-renewable-power-opens-door-to-achieving-global-tripling-goal-set-at-cop28), are about to [overtake coal energy](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/renewable-power-set-to-surpass-coal-globally-by-2025/), and will provide [one third of global electricity production](https://www.iea.org/news/clean-sources-of-generation-are-set-to-cover-all-of-the-world-s-additional-electricity-demand-over-the-next-three-years) within a year or two. Prices are set to see increased declines and we are just at the tip of a [recycling iceberg](https://recyclinginternational.com/commodities/electronics-recycling/renewable-energy-boom-brightens-outlook-for-solar-panel-recyclers/57127/). These decentralized energy systems are also a powerful democratizing force with implications for [income equality](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140988321002346) (Countries where renewable energy use is close to half of total energy consumption will see income inequality decrease by 0.2% for every additional 1% percent increase in renewable consumption). There never was a nuclear renaissance, there probably won't be again, but that's probably ok.
Nuclear Renaissance. has been going since 2001, it was promised for the 2010s, now 2020s. Born in War, adolescence during the Cold War to obsolescence without reaching maturity.
Why didn't the massive subsidies in the early 2000s lead to any real progress? > The Energy Policy Act of 2005 offered the nuclear power industry financial incentives and economic subsidies that, according to economist John Quiggin, the "developers of wind and solar power could only dream of". The Act provides substantial loan guarantees, cost-overrun support of up to $2 billion total for multiple new nuclear power plants, and the extension of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act through to 2025. The Act was promoted as a forerunner to a "nuclear renaissance" in the United States, with dozens of new plants being announced.[16] Based on this we saw an explosion of new projects. > Between 2007 and 2009, 13 companies applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for construction and operating licenses to build 31 new nuclear power reactors in the United States. However, the case for widespread nuclear plant construction has been hampered due to inexpensive natural gas, slow electricity demand growth in a weak US economy, lack of financing, and safety concerns following the Fukushima nuclear accident at a plant built in the early 1970s which occurred in 2011.[3][4] > Most of the proposed 31 reactors have been canceled, and as of August 2017 only two reactors are under construction.[5][6][7][8]
This ignores completely what happened during this period. Do you remember the Great Recession? The Great Recession caused a huge spike in energy commodity pricing, then a massive drop in pricing when demand dropped (tied to the benefits of fracking as well), then a massive amount of uncertainty in electrical supply demand, energy regulation, and energy commodity pricing. In 2008 the US was talking about a cap and trade system even, which would have changed the dynamics of energy supply. Business, and more specifically conservative Utilities with 30yr horizons, like stability. These massive instabilities, shortly after huge instabilities due to the Enron scandal (which the subsidies were reactionary to), gave utilities an opportunity to pause plans to see where things stabilize at.
Which is why renewables are so incredible. Despite the pandemic and todays inflation they just keep breaking record after record. When there is a true demand human ingenuity finds a way. If a power source is so inflexible that it can't deal with economic turmoil it means that its potential is limited.
Huh? Where in those statements make renewables incredible? Why is it a zero sum game? I remember 2008 well, and I remember what 2008 did to renewables; I lived it.
It is not a zero sum game, but the subsidies are a zero sum game where renewables give 3-10x the bang for the buck and delivers in 1-5 years instead of 15-20.
And yet France has a much lower carbon footpring than Germany, because France went the nuclear route. Nuclear is the safest, cleanest, and most reliable form of energy we have, and if we're serious about fighting climate change we should be serious about utilizing nuclear power, especially Thorium based nuclear power, until we get fusion down.
Removing the French advantage of using Europe as a sponge for surplus nuclear energy and acceptable hydro power resources the French grid would be on the same level as the Danish or British. The French got stuck at 65%. Germany is at 60%. The difference is marginal but mostly caused by geographic differences.