Thread

NRC issues first U.S. construction permit for a BWRX-300 small modular reactor

151 points · 191 comments · papa-whisky

testing22321 · 1790741363 · focus · HN ↗
Place your bets now.
Time until first power generated, and actual final total cost.
I’ll go 15 years and $10 Billion.
1. jacquesm · 1790759454 · focus · HN ↗
  Profitable power or just power?
  If the former: it might never happen.
  1. mpweiher · 1790762135 · focus · HN ↗
    Nuclear reactors are highly profitable:
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
    Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".
    <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-electricity-2020" rel="nofollow">https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
    Yes, the plants are big and expensive, but once built, they are cheap to run and last pretty much forever.
    SMRs lower the up-front cost, the time to build, the risk, and the financing costs, which are the biggest component of the construction costs.
    Initially at somewhat higher cost per kWh, but there is plenty of headroom there. And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
    jacquesm · 1790763680 · focus · HN ↗
    They are highly profitable when subsidized and you ignore decommissioning costs.
    1 cent / kWh cost is fantasy land.
    mpweiher · 1790786516 · focus · HN ↗
    This is incorrect.
    jacquesm · 1790845270 · focus · HN ↗
    You will need to do better than that. All of the public figures support my position, if you are unable or unwilling to document your assertions which you make with great conviction and which contradict the evidence you will need to bring some of your own. Nuclear power has its uses but it isn't cheap unless you start picking your figures very selectively. That's fine if you want to convince yourself that you are right but it doesn't really help: it makes you look like a rabid supporter of something without an eye towards the realities and in the long run that works against your cause, not for it.
    Finally, if there is one thing the war in Ukraine has shown it is that nuclear power plants in times of war are an immediate risk and that any future nuclear power installations should take this risk into account during the construction and operational phases.
    mpweiher · 1790849840 · focus · HN ↗
    That is incorrect.
    What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. -- Hitchen's Razor, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
    You made a claim that you did not support with any evidence whatsoever. Twice, actually.
    So it is you has to "do better than that", not me.
    In fact, I actually did go to the trouble of disproving your first unproven claim with actual data, which was more than I had to do. A simple "wrong" would have sufficed there as well.
    You just wiped that away with another completely unsupported and also wrong assertion.
    And if "all of the public figures" support your position, it would be trivial to actually cite that evidence. [Narrator: it won't, because they don't].
    Nuclear power is cheap, as the IEA data clearly shows, in addition to all the real-world evidence.
    And your point on the Ukraine war is also the exact opposite of the truth: if you actually look at the evidence, or ask the Ukrainians, you will find that nuclear power is what is keeping the country afloat, energy-wise.
    Which is why Ukraine has started construction of at least two more nuclear reactors during this war:
    <a href="https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/work-under-way-for-first-westinghouse-ap1000-in-uk" rel="nofollow">https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/work-under-way-f...
    And has ordered a total of nine AP-1000s
    <a href="https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/interview/1169371.html" rel="nofollow">https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/interview/1169371.html
    But hey, what do the Ukrainians know about nuclear power in Ukraine?
    hvb2 · 1790767030 · focus · HN ↗
    > Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".
    That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
    It also says: "The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
    So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem. Which is especially interesting since the fossil plants will get a heavy hit due to their CO2 footprint.
    Because of how hazardous it is, every country treats that as a national issue thus offloading the cost to taxpayers. Besides, I'm only aware of a single country (Finland I believe) who is far along on an actual permanent storage location. The US for example still doesn't have one, until that exists the real cost simply isn't known.
    > And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
    Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something. I'm sure SMRs will soon be reality and we can see how much of it is actually true. Until then, take everything you read with a grain of salt.
    mpweiher · 1790786501 · focus · HN ↗
    > That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
    Please identify the cherry picking.
    > The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
    Absolutely! When you consider full system costs, nuclear gets much, much better.
    With fossils, you have the minor externalities of climate change and other emissions, which are not taken into account.
    With intermittent renewables, you have the costs of their intermittency. Those system costs tend to rise with penetration, and dwarf the LCOE.
    For details in a model, see:
    <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544222018035" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
    And this also plays out in real life: electricity prices are highest in countries with high intermittent renewables penetration. The correlation is quite strong. And the inverse correlation, from high penetration to low electricity costs simply does not exist. There are no countries (or states) with high penetration of intermittent renewables and low electricity prices.
    > So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem.
    The opposite is true. Nuclear is actually the only power source that has to account for its waste already in the LCOE cost. And it also turns out that the waste is one of the benefits of nuclear, at least compared to other sources of electricity: there is very, very little of it, we know how to store it safely without problems, it actually goes away by itself and it is valuable fuel.
    [Costs from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent]
    > Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something.
    Nope. Those numbers are usually the sorts of things they have to present investors to make their business case. People tend to vet those numbers pretty carefully before investing millions or billions of dollars. Also, if you lie in those numbers that turns out to be fraud and you can go to jail.
    In other news: "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" -- Yogi Berra.
    kphorn · 1790777594 · focus · HN ↗
    Agree that if you run them for 40 or 60 years (1 renewal + 1 extension) it gets very affordable. Similar to data center, the economics are great if you take out construction costs. The problem is 40-60 years has proven to be a very long time in political and economic contexts, so on a practical basis many many plants are shut down prematurely and dont fulfill that useful life, increasing the cost of capital (bonds etc) to build the new plants and therefore LCOE.
    Totally agree that if you get a stable, reliable operating reactor it's very cheap. When people, politics, and the rest get in the way the actual costs drastically increase.

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