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First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.
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Just in time for openheimer in IMAX!
“If you wish to make a nuclear reactor from scratch, you must first invent the universe”
Hey wow, it’s great to see we are still persuing this avenue for energy, I hate how stigmatized nuclear became (with some good reasons). Like any technology, we just rushed to using it without understanding the full consequences when shit goes wrong. Hopefully we’re better prepared now.
Goated energy source, hope the stigma lessens over time
Not sure the stigma will ever go away as long as we are using Uranium as the basis. If we could ever get Thorium based reactors to work and economical I think the public perception would sway considerably when weapon grade material is no longer a possibly byproduct and the worst case scenario drops from a quarantine zone several square miles to power plant just going into lockdown for a few weeks would be a huge step towards public acceptance.
I think the public perception would sway considerably when weapon grade material is no longer a possibly byproduct
This is unfortunately something that a layperson who’s unfamiliar with the tech will always have a hard time understanding. I don’t think any reactor built in the US for power generation could ever be used to make weapons grade plutonium. From what I’ve read we only build light water reactors here, which aren’t good for such things. But how many regular folks take the time to learn about all the different types of reactors and how they work and what they’re good for? I only did it because the history of nuclear tech intrigues me.
and the worst case scenario drops from a quarantine zone several square miles to power plant just going into lockdown for a few weeks
Similar to above. These new reactors coming online are Gen III reactors, and have passive cooling features, so Fukushima-like events shouldn’t be able to happen anymore. But again, few people I think take the time to learn about this stuff at all.
It doesn’t help either that regulatory capture has caused old Gen II designs without the passive cooling backups continue to get their licenses extended. Accidents will continue to be bad until we retire the ancient reactors, and start replacing the with new ones that have the benefit of half a century of operational experience and manufacturing advancements to inform their designs to be safer.
Nice!
YAY
People will kill me for it but to all the disgusting idiots in the comment section here just know that nuclear power isn’t renewable, that we can’t even cover a fraction of the energy we need with it, that there isn’t a single proofen way to actually store the waste (just temporary facilities) and that the cost of building them (especially in the west) is far to high to stop any timw soon!!!
well on a long enough scale the whole of earth is temporary. That said yeah we can store it in container that survive a train crashing into them. At that point how much more safer can you be.
All solutions taht go byond theory manage one or maybe two hundread years, the rest is pure fiction and possibly won’t ever work…
not from what I have read on it.
Because people like to pretend that we can dispose of it in old mines and it will bind to the correct materials but that’s the theory part because rn we store it in very temporary containers that are desinged for decades not centuries
not from what I’ve read.
I really liked the part when you linked a source in your comments. Oh, wait
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- Yes but there also is a lot lesa of it on eath
- No that’s just wrong, the global supply of usable Uranium couldn’t even supply the current world energy consumption for more than a few years
- All of that isn’t wrong except that the concret isn’t actually proper storage, it’s desinged to hold the material for a few decates and the proper storage solutions (stuff it’s supposed to bind to long term in old mines) is in a pure theory stage and hasn’t been done before
- The initial costs are high but a joke in comparison with disposal and deconstruction costs so they aren’t the actual issue in the cost factor and unlike the later actually funded by the company operating a plant
Currently, the owners are projected to pay $31 billion in capital and financing costs, Associated Press calculations show. Japan’s Toshiba Corp., which then owned Westinghouse, paid $3.7 billion to the Vogtle owners to walk away from a guarantee to build the reactors at a fixed price after overruns forced electric industry pioneer Westinghouse into bankruptcy in 2017. Add that to Vogtle’s price and the total nears $35 billion.
Does this seem strange to include the 3.7 billion in here? I guess when you’re used to costs meaning what it cost the purchaser of said product or service it seems weird. Like, if I was the group paying for this I might even think to reduce the reported cost by 3.7 billion.
That’s copied from the AP news article the post’s nbcnews article links to. Similar statement in the nbcnews one, but…they don’t let you highlight any text? Lame.
Yeah, for sure thats a cost savings if your contractor pays you back $3.7 billion to walk away. Thats almost 15% of the total cost for the project, which is:
$35B - $3.7B = $27.3B
Either the journalist can’t add and subtract, or they printed that intentionally to make it seem worse. As if a 100% cost escalation wasn’t bad enough, lol. Although that was probably inevitable due to inflation.
Good news. Anything but fossil fuels at this point.
The reduced operating emissions take 10+ years to outweigh the enormous construction emissions of nuclear. (Compared to gas.)
So you’re saying the construction effort requires at least a decade of nuclear powered energy to be achieved?
That could be up to 3.652 TWh. That’s more than my entire nation consumes in three years and we’re one of the world’s biggest suppliers of natural resources, including nuclear.
You’re mathing wrong.
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I literally studied this exact nuclear design at University - the Westinghouse AP1000. You can look up the WNISR (World Nuclear Industry Status Report) if you don’t want to take my word for it.
Don’t forget, mining and enriching uranium still has a significant carbon footprint, far higher per tonne than any fossil fuel. Yes, it’s lower over time, but we need to be reducing emissions now, not in 50 years time.
Why are you comparing fossil fuels and nuclear “per tonne” that makes no sense. You replace tens of tones of nuclear fuel per year any you burn millions of tones in a comparable fosil fuel plant.
And regarding the carbon emissions from enrichment… Just use nuclear to power your enrichment plants. This way your emissions are extremely low because you don’t need much fuel and you use nuclear energy to produce nuclear fuel. French example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricastin_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Yeah I hate how laxness about fixing this in a timely manner has somehow convinced some people that shit like “carbon nuetral by 2070” is ok and helpful. And I’m just remembering when that study came out that said the climate as we know it is probably gone forever if we aren’t totally carbon nuetral by at least 2030
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Why compare per ton of fuel when per kWh would be the more meaningful metric?
What are the cradle-to-grave emissions of a nuclear plant, vs a fossil fuel plant, per kWh generated. That is a far more honest question, and I’m inclined to err on the side of nuclear.
Let’s not forget radiation caused by the power plant. Nuclear produces far less radiation than a coal plant.
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Fortunately the nuclear reactor can be operated for >50 years :)
Sure. But do you think Nuclear reactors will still be cheaper than renewables + storage in the 2070s? Nuclear is far more expensive per kWh than renewables, and the cost of storage is falling fast.
It was started a decade ago and finished now, not in the 2070s
Good question, that one can only speculate on. IMO it’s a two part question.
First is that newly built nuclear plants are expensive. So the question depends on if we bite the bullet (build the reactor) today or in 2070. One built today will produce cheap power in 50 years.
For example in Finland we have reactors from 1980, that make up the backbone of stable energy production in our country. Those are going to be kept online till the 2050s. I’d argue at that point the cost per kwh will be mostly dependent on maintenance and fuel, so relatively small.
Wind and solar cannot reap the same benefits if you have to replace the plant every 20 years.
Storage is a completely separate question that is not taken into account when new wind farms and such are being built. If one was to account for storage today, the cost of renewables would be much closer to that of other means of production.
Also in the future, if storage costs keep falling due to billions of R&D money, similar effects could be achieved in nuclear via serial production and scale.
EDIT: Just read you have studied this stuff for real. Then ignore most of what I said, as you might know better :D
You can’t amortise your capital if just the variable operating and maintenance is more than replacing the reactor with firmed renewables. This is not the case yet, but betting that renewables won’t halve in price one more time in 30 years is a pretty stupid bet.
The cost of the power it generates in 50 years aren’t lower than the day it opens. If you amortise the cost of the plant over its life nuclear is stupid expensive per watt produced. It’s expensive enough that renewables + storage is cheaper. Renewables + storage is also a lot quicker to build than nuclear.
Even after the uptick in cost of renewables in the last year (which was dramatic) they’re still the cheapest new build power (even accounting for the integration costs). As an example here’s the most recent annual csiro report on energy costs by type. It doesn’t include full scale nuclear today because it’s known to be unviable, but even 2030 projections on “if smrs are commonly deployed at scale” they’re predicted to be a lot more expensive than renewables with integration costs.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/energy-data-modelling/gencost
I would say it’s not the BEST solution but in areas in the extreme north/south, where solar/hydro aren’t options (and I legit have no idea how well wind would do with freezing weather/snow etc) it would be better to have nuclear there than to try and transmit long distance to those areas. At least until we get some more breakthroughs in energy storage.
Mean and median lifetime of a nuclear reactor is well under 30 years. Closer to 20 if you count all the ones that produced for 0 years.
Nuclear is still fossil fuel, just not combustion. But I agree, this is good news because it helps reduce coal and gas usage.
Edit: I get it, I’m wrong. No need to repeat the same comments over and over.
I’m confused by your definition of fossil fuels.
It’s the fossils of stars.
What’s your favorite dinosaur? Mine is the Plutonidon
Natural predator of the laser raptor
Nuclear is Non-renewable, but it’s not a Fossil fuel:
A hydrocarbon-based fuel, such as petroleum, coal, or natural gas, derived from living matter of a previous geologic time.
We have plenty of nuclear fuel and waste is a drop in an ocean compared to that of fossil fuels.
I’d prefer it if my nuclear waste doesn’t drip into the ocean, please /s
I asked for that. In a manner-of-speaking, if you compared by the football field filled in area with barrels of waste. It would be about one for all the annual nuclear waste where turning the byproduct of combustible fossil fuels into just the vapor and ash equivalent would fill thousands. It arguably wouldn’t win from a toxicity perspective. For all the waste in the ocean from Fukushima, the only outcome were that the marine life seemed to have thrived off the low-level radiation.
Yep. This is why I’m annoyed the UK is dumping its money into oil and coal fuel sources. We need more Nuclear plants and we should have started building these yesterday.
The best time to
plant a treebuild a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.Tory government investing in nuclear energy?
Nah boris and his lot would rather get bungs from the local lads and keep us in the dark ages.
Labour aren’t exactly gonna do it either with Tory lite candidates atm. We are well and truly proper fucked.
Outstanding!
Yes! More of this please!
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At first I was wondering why you were downvoted, then I read your second paragraph.
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We should be investing in this amazing science!
Oh but fuck that other amazing science over there that everybody is into.
Oh wow really? Hope it kicks off some good news for other plants in the future.
The good news - it’s online, generating clean power, and hopefully demonstrating the safety and benefits of modern nuclear plants.
The bad news - it’s $17B over budget (+120%) and 7 years behind schedule (+100%). Those kind of overages aren’t super promising for investors, but perhaps there are enough lessons learned on this one that will help the next one sail a little smoother.
Either way, good to see it can still be done in the US.
What’s the normal amount of over budget and behind schedule?
Those amounts there. For comparison for example another recent plant Olkiluoto 3 in Finland was 13 years late on a 5 year original construction timeline (18 years total construction time) and
108 billion euros over budget on original budget of 3 billion euros. (Final estimate it cost constructor13-1411 billion euros to build. Technically its fixed price contract so customer price is still 3 billion. However it did bankrupt the builder Areva and litigations are ongoing about, if the French can extract more money from he customer TVO)So doubling the price budget and doubling the build time is not at all unreasonable first estimate on the announced numbers of the builder and customers at start of project.
Ideally zero? But given this is the first US reactor in decades, it is by definition normal I suppose.
That would be ideal, but people always underestimate the cost and difficulty of things.
I wouldn’t call it “clean power”. We still don’t have a good solution for the nuclear waste.
Edit: Downvotes because I am not religiously defending a technology and pointing out that there are downsides (EVERYTHING HAS DOWNSIDES!). Too many people from reddit here already.
Nuclear power plant waste doesn’t significantly contribute to climate change or pollution? So it’s “clean” by most metrics.
Nuclear waste can generally be stored on-site without issue. Reprocessing would be nice, but not even necessary. Just because you don’t understand the problem, doesn’t mean others are “religiously defending a technology.”
Coal was also considered clean in the beginning because they didn’t have to sacrifice forests anymore.
We may not consider the waste a problem now, but that may very well look differently in 50 or 100 years.
Again: I am completely fine considering nuclear power as one of the best options we have. I am not so fine pretending it’s without tradeoffs, because that would ignore how any other form of energy generation in the past/ever finally turned out.
Coal was also considered clean in the beginning because they didn’t have to sacrifice forests anymore.
False analogy fallacy
We may not consider the waste a problem now, but that may very well look differently in 50 or 100 years.
Argument from ignorance fallacy
I am not so fine pretending it’s without tradeoffs
No one is saying it’s free energy or perfect energy. I myself would argue it’s clean and solves some of our current energy problems, while renewables still can’t. Unfortunately it suffers from a bad reputation and misinformation.
Yes, we do. Burying it works just fine.
That’s not a solution. That’s a workaround.
And why is that exactly? Decay means the problem will solve itself, all we need to do is keep the waste away from the outside world until then.
This would be a great solution if nuclear waste was a one-time non-reoccurring problem. More waste will be produced continually, and if more nuclear power plants are built to match energy demand, a lot more waste, multiple times more. Eventually we will run out of places to put it, and then of course also deal with the fact that every abandoned old mine or cave in the world is full of radioactive material.
The closest “bury it in a hole” can come to a permanent solution is if the hole is on the moon or something. Even then there are downsides. Do you know how expensive it is to dig giant holes?
You are vastly overestimating the amount of waste a reactor produces. Look up some figures on the internet. There is no way we will ever run out of space to put it.
Compared to the downsides of virtually every alternative energy source, the downsides of nuclear are peanuts.
Yeah, this is one of those topics where any mention of the downside of storing spent fuel safely for 50-100,000 years gets you bombed on. Just like reddit.
Sure we do, put it in the holes we took the other stuff out of. Soon our whole planet will be nuclear powered.
In finland we have this big hole that goes half a kilometer into stable bedrock. The storage solution is engineered to withstand the next ice age.
It’s Finland, haven’t you been in an ice age for the last 1000 years?
I guess this is a joke, but regardless. The current climate is quite different from having an ice sheet 3km thick on the ground. This summer we were nearing 30°C/85°F on some days.
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The plan, called Cigéo, would involve placing the waste 500 metres (1,640 ft) below ground in a clay formation in eastern France.
Construction is expected in 2027 if it gets approval. Among those opposed to it are residents of the nearby village of Bure and anti-nuclear campaigners.
Burrying waste is not exactly clean. Yes, they reduce the waste. But they are also hitting limits and have challenges in increasing capacities.
In spite of the war in Ukraine, which has made many in the West avoid doing business with Russia, EDF is expected to resume sending uranium to Russia this year as the only country able to process it. It declined to confirm to Reuters it would do so.
That is also not really cool. I also find it a bit shady that something is only doable in Russia. That sounds a bit like it’s only possible there, because they ignore safety rules any other country would have in place and we don’t care because “now it’s their problem”.
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Every atom has energy in it, regardless of whether it is radioactive or not. Radioactiveness just makes it relatively easy to extract that energy. But even then, it’s not that simple, not every radioactive material is good for a nuclear reactor. If the fuel absorbs too many neutrons without fission, or produces elements that do, then it can become poison for the reactor. And if it, or the elements it produces, emit very few delayed neutrons and very quickly then it makes it harder to keep the reactor in a sub-critical state (i.e. it makes it harder to not make it explore). Often for these reasons you can’t fully use reprocessed fuel, and instead you have to mix it in low percentages with normal fuel. Reprocessed fuel is also harder (thus cost more) to produce since you have to work with highly radioactive materials.
But we don’t have that solution yet (see above). That’s like hanging on the idea of having nuclear fusion available. Yes, theoretically nice, but until they are practical, we shouldn’t count on it.
Yes, theoretically the “waste” of current reactors still has energy to be harvested. But practically we can’t use them to a degree where there is no waste afterwards.
For the past decades and sitll ongoing, fission reactors are not clean (also decomissioning them leaves a lot of unusable waste; and they have to be decomissioned at some point).
Also from what I know, extracting the nuclear material from the earth and preparing it for use in a fission reactor is not very environmentally friendly either.
Is nuclear better than coal? Very likely. But it’s not clean.
Reprocessing already exists and it’s been done for decades. I can’t imagine reprocessing fuel for recycling the usable components is that compelling in the US and it would be more geared to waste reduction. 99% of spent fuel by mass could be reused or otherwise treated differently for disposal as it’s radioactivity is much much smaller than the portion that has been transmuted during power production.
Let it run 5 months and the money is back in.
Not really. All costs considered, nuclear is one of the most expensive energy sources.
Yes nuclear power plants are very expensive. But the energy density is phenomenal.
Energetic armortisation is far quicker on a nuclear plant than on solar panels.
And the argument of subsidies is usually a fake one, since governments also pour millions into renewable energies.
Broken down to lifetime cost to the cost of comparable technologies, nuclear is still on the same level as solar and wind.
Since I am from Germany, and German sources might not be ideal to share, let me explain it this way: People are not stupid. They will never choose the financially unwise option, if the other one would seriously be the better one.
Can you find any recent analysis that supports your claim that nuclear costs are at the same level as solar?
The only one I’ve seen suggest this was from a nuclear industry lobby group, and it inflated the costs or solar by insane amounts.
In Australia this is a bit of a hot topic and all impartial estimates suggest that nuclear will not get close to renewables in any way, even taking into account storage and grid costs.
In the 10 years since this single reactor was built, one of our states has transitioned to almost 100% renewables. Wholesale costs have plummeted, but renewable projects are still profitable in the market. I was involved in a reactor project in a western nation some time ago (it’s still being completed unsurprisingly), and the lock-in wholesale price to support that project was simply extortionate. Solar generation prices are a whole magnitude smaller.
This is a German source that incorporates many studies and presents their results. Some agree with my statement, some with yours. But fact is, that the financial difference is very small.
Page 23 for example suggests my statement.
On page 32 you can see the development that suggests that you are right.
But considering the costs for the expansion of the energy grid, battery storage systems, and the rising production costs of everything, I believe Nuclear to be the cheaper option and the far more reliable one.
People are not stupid. They will never choose the financially unwise option
I see you’ve never been to the U.S.
Ok. Valid argument.
But while Germany quit nuclear power, the rest reinforced their standpoint.
Thousands of scientists from different countries all agreed upon nuclear power to be a reasonable source of energy. Even a Japan is still going forward with nuclear power. It is only Germany, which made an emotional choice, Merkel wanted to please the masses. And here we are now. Burning coal, as if we were thrown back into the industrial time, forced to use primitive methods to produce energy.
People do often act stupid, but you are seeing it from what I consider to be an incomplete perspective. Nuclear could be financially unwise overall, but someone would still get a payday. That 17B over budget wasn’t burned and unmade, it went into the pockets of the people organizing and building the power plant.
All this to say, the huge majority of the people involved in making the power plant a reality weren’t motivated by the efficiency of the power production on a cost basis. Most of them were probably making more money while it was still being subsidized, planned, and built. And while I think subsidies are generally useful and good, they can be a vector of financial abuse when it comes to unprofitable industries.
Lastly “lifetime cost” is a bit of a useless metric when the majority of that lifetime comes too late. No point to a power source that will cleanly produce power after it has meaningfully contributed to pushing us over the edge and past the breaking point for a climate that can support agriculture as we know it. There isn’t enough time or margin for error in emissions left available to build all the nuclear plants needed to meet energy demands.
Darn all those superfluous safety regulations. If only we could make them cheap and fast and not worry about radioactive contamination like the coal industry.
Seriously though, start enforcing adequate regulation on the other sources of life threatening power generation and watch the costs even out.
Coal isn’t the cheapest though. For new build power renewables + storage are. That is to say, the incremental cost of running a coal plant isn’t that massive, but cost to build + fuel one amortised over the lifetime is more than renewables + storage.
So yes, you can enforce “adequate regulation” and nuclear will still be the most expensive.
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Oh I think we should shut down coal as soon as possible. But if energy prices can go down by having the cheaper energy production of renewables instead of up because of nuclear the transition can happen faster.
Yes, but nuclear scales the best, requires lower geological footprint than renuables, and is safer than fossil fuels. Price is not the only metric of value.
This is really only one facet and not even the main driver in cost. MIT did a study a few years ago looking at this (https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118). Turns out it’s complicated.
In short, in the US, lacked of skilled labor and large scale project management are big drivers also, not just regulations.
Also, according to the story, power costs will go up as a result of this reactor coming online.
True, BUT the cost increase was relatively small (~$3.50/mo) - can’t speak for everyone as I know people’s budgets can be quite tight right now, but that’s a price I’d be willing to pay for more nuclear on my grid.
I want to do more research in Thorium reactors. They are much safer than uranium.
Yay! Nuclear is the best!
