I thought this in the mid-2000s, but the landscape has changed drastically since then in two ways: 1) solar wind and storage are decreasing in cost exponentially, and have crossed the inflection point where solar+storage is a firm energy source cheaper than building new fossil fuel infrastructure, and definitely cheaper than nuclear. 2) Attempts at building nuclear in the West over the past decade have revealed that our economic strengths no longer mean that nuclear construction is efficient or even reliably able to be completed. Since the 1970s, economic productivity overall has soared, but our construction productivity has barely improved. So, large construction projects that might have made sense in the 1970s are no longer economically efficient.
Nuclear has proven to be very unreliable to build due to massive complexity compounded by the need for extreme accuracy in construction, since we don't want to need to go in to fix core components after they've been turned on. This is precisely what advanced economies are not good at.
For places that can rely on exclusively solar, solar and battery start to make more sense than nuclear. Currently it is profitable to have around 3-4 hours of 80% of capacity, which is economical if you get a daily charge cycle it where in the day you charge them and during the night you get paid by discharging almost 100%.
Wind is a very different beast in term of charge cycles and capacity requirements. We are nowhere near having it economical to install batteries with multiple weeks long capacity that get a charge cycle of a few times a year. For that you need stored energy technology like reverse hydro or hydrogen production, and they are are quire bit away from being economical sustainable. Reverse hydro has many issues and has resulted in a declining optimism in the last decade, and using wind to produce hydrogen cost about 6 times as much as any other hydrogen production method. And we don't currently burn hydrogen for power as it is already prohibitively expensive. Still it seems as our best bet for storage, which should give a hint how the economics are between nuclear and storage.
I agree America has lost its ability to build big complex things but maybe that’s just a challenge we need to overcome. Certainly other nations like China aren’t having trouble building new generation nuclear plants. There is mounting political will across the spectrum to invest in nuclear (https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/finally-they-adm...), and maybe we can use that as a route to reinvigorate American construction and manufacturing industries.
China is also having difficulty building nuclear reactors. Though they still complete in seemingly reasonable timelines to Western ears, it's still up to two times as the schedule completion.
Michael Shellenberger is not a reliable source in my experience, he's far more invested in ideology and pushing cultural wedge issues than the technology and providing real solutions.
Yes the boiling water nuclear plants designed in the 1950s are massive, complicated, and expensive to build. I don't think anyone is suggesting that we start building more of those.
Got any evidence that nobody wants to build the same style of big reactors we currently have in our fleet? Because more than half of the people that I talk to that support nuclear want exactly that. There are two reasons that I hear in support of this: 1) we did it before, so people think it's a good idea still, and 2) that's the only type of reactor that we have designed and could start deploying today. It's the type of reactor that Rosatom will build, it's the type of reactor that China is building.
Other reactor types are far far far out on the design schedule, and more speculative in terms of technological success than any of the many new types of battery chemistries that have been announced this year.
The new Summer plant reactors in SC were abandoned during construction after spending 9B. The units were nameplate rated at 2200 MW. Even at the point of abandonment, the cost of a MW was over 4 million. Solar is 700k to 1MM per MW. Wind is about 1.3MM per MW. Even adjusting for capacity factors nukes are more than twice as expensive per unit of capacity. Neither solar nor wind require difficult to produce fuel, produce nuclear waste, require waste heat reservoirs, or require years long complex and expensive decommissioning (which in the US is paid as a surcharge on electricity used). Solar or wind do have subsidies but nuclear gets a subsidy in the form of the Gov backstopping meltdown insurance (the current pooled industry meltdown insurance fund is like 20B, Japan has spent 200B+ cleaning up Fukushima). You don’t have to be anti-nuclear to think these huge projects that we can’t build don’t make a ton of economic sense at the outset (even factoring in the more desirable production characteristics which can be offset by more storage and/or overbuilding wind and solar capacity). In theory modular nuclear will solve some of these issues but in theory practice and theory are the same thing but in practice they aren’t.
Definitely. Solar and wind take it on that metric too (though I don’t have those in front of me). Add to that it isn’t a trivial calculation if you include project risk. What is the LCOE of the Summer reactors? Does that HUgE failure impact the LCOE of the class?
Tbh the math is changing - largely due to the cost and complexity of nuclear projects.
If your spinning up a new GW of generating capacity, it’s easier to find spare room that no one fights over with solar/wind than it is to find a spot for nuclear.
Could we have faster permitting of nuclear plants and apartment buildings? Sure, will we? Almost certainly not.
I'm not against nuclear but I am against the old style reactors. You put in tens of billions into a single plant. The sunk cost fallacy is huge. People will cut corner because it means saving a billion here and there. We can't even update them. If the original design is flawed we'll have to keep running them.
It would be better if they were like cars or solar panels. Good for 20 years and then you replace them. With something as dangerous as nuclear the benefits of longevity are strongly outweighed by the downsides of keeping immature technology around.
To keep it short. Nuclear is not an attractive product. Change that.
Nuclear has proven to be very unreliable to build due to massive complexity compounded by the need for extreme accuracy in construction, since we don't want to need to go in to fix core components after they've been turned on. This is precisely what advanced economies are not good at.