Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable. However, when evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, SMRs will actually be more expensive than large reactors.
That's not what affordable means. People are building smaller reactors because it's more likely that a project will be completed, not because of unit costs.
And because if you build a lot of reactors, then you get a learning curve where they get cheaper over time, just like any other mass-produced item. Some of the SMR designs can even be built in factories.
The article ignores this, and in fact complains about the cost of the first six reactors proposed by NuScale (which, fwiw, is just a smaller LWR, not one of the more innovative designs).
Before anyone talks about the negative learning curve of large reactors in the US, bear in mind that we mostly build those as one-offs, so no learning curve exists. We don't build many, regulations change pretty frequently, and sometimes the NRC requires design changes after construction starts.
Economies of scale don't work for infrastructure. I mean if it would work for nuclear plants why have people not done it for coal plants? There have been many of them build, and a nuclear power plant is 70% the same as a coal power plant (which incidentally also explains much of the cost for nuclear power generation, it's essentially a thermal plant with added complexity, so can't really be significantly cheaper than a coal plant).
Economies of scale are working great for solar. I suspect economies of scale don't work specifically for coal, because people don't want a bunch of pollution machines scattered everywhere. It's better to centralize and regulate pollution capturing, etc.
The fact that something hasn't been done is not necessarily evidence that it won't work. A few years ago you could have asked why everybody was still using disposable rockets, if reusables would be so great.
And coal is not exactly fertile ground for innovation, given that we'd like to stop burning coal entirely.
Matching the price of coal, with clean dispatchable power, is not such a bad outcome. There's a bit of wiggle room for extra complexity since coal pays 2 cents/kWh for fuel, and has to handle large amounts of incoming fuel and outgoing ash.
For a reliable zero-carbon grid of only wind/solar/battery, we need about 2X overproduction and 4 days of battery storage[1]. Maybe that still ends up the cheapest option, but it's not so obvious that a backup plan isn't worth considering.
I did mention batteries above, but that's a lot of battery. Hydro is great but not available everywhere. Gas turbines have substantial carbon emissions. Curtailment is fine but doesn't help on windless nights; what we need is power on demand, not just power available sometimes that we have the option to switch off.
How dispatchable nuclear is depends on the specific design, which is important given our context of small reactors with new designs.
According to the DOE, "Certain designs, like DOE-supported NuScale Power, LLC, can vary their energy output over days, hours and even minutes."[1]
According to NuScale, "The NuScale Power Module is capable of a ramp rate of 40% per hour in reactor power change, which aligns with specifications set by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). For even quicker responses to electricity demand, the NuScale SMR can rapidly lower its electric power output up to 10% per minute and return to full output at the same rate utilizing turbine bypass. This is significantly faster than conventional nuclear power."[2]
There’s clearly some value to consistent power sources producing clean energy but if SMRs are in the $0.15/kwh wholesale range, they’re DOA.
Solar+battery gets you there today, is getting cheaper every day, and there’s almost zero project risk. If the install is small enough, you could likely beat the realistic costs for SMRs with solar + battery + diesel generators if you need a guarantee of 100% uptime.
That enormous solar price is obtained by a not very well described adjustment procedure for variance in supply. It is not the usually described levelized cost of energy (LCoE). The adjustment would depend on system design, and should be much lower than that in a cost optimized renewable system.
If I go to https://model.energy/ and ask it to solve for a cost optimized renewable + storage system for Ontario, I get a cost out of 55 Euro/MWh for providing synthetic baseload (2030 cost assumptions). That solution doesn't include using hydro to deal with variance in supply and demand; Canada has large amounts of hydro.
The model at the site I linked uses real historical weather data, so it takes into account "supply going to zero". Renewables still win and come in much cheaper than $0.50/kWh.
And this very article is about how SMRs by their nature are going to be more expensive than traditional nuclear so seems pretty silly to make any comparison to the costs of production for reactors that were built 40 years ago. A better comparison would be how much are we expecting wholesale costs for Hinkley’s new reactor to be? Don’t want to ruin the surprise but people will be shocked if they look up what they’re charging in a sub-$0.10/kwh world.
Most of Europe is more northern than the inhabited places of Canada[1], so it's far from insignificant either.
[1] Yes, really: the populated places of Canada are comparable to northern Italy in terms of latitude. The Gulf Stream really does an unbelievable job hiding that fact.
> Canada plus all of Europe is only 1 in 10 people.
A bit less actually. But you cannot dismiss a technology that works for 10% of people. And we still weight more than this in terms of CO2.
> Global problems need global solutions
No, global problems need custom solutions suited to all the different situations. Thinking there exist one technology to rule them all that will solve the problem everywhere is not helpful to anyone.
> That's why every prediction has solar accelerating past nuclear deployment and heading for multiples of nuclear output.
This isn't a race! Stop thinking of technologies as if it was sport teams.
You are dismissing someone who (rightly) dismisses the tech for Ontario. I don't think anyone in this thread who dismisses solar (+ battery) for California or Texas, but dismissing nuclear because it's not helpful for California is just missing that not everyone live in a sunny places: Canadians and the majority of Europeans live farther north than Maine!
Please stop acting as if we don't exist.
SMR are a huge opportunity for 300+M people to dramatically reduce C02 emissions from electricity generation, for which there is no credible alternative.
And, in doing so, propelling both solar and batteries further down their well-demonstrated experience curves. Given this, it's very late in the day for nuclear. The competition is pulling away.
Ontario gives hope to the nuclear dreams. Being able to deliver projects on-budget gives decision-makers cause to believe project plans.
Lets hope that another 4-pack of CANDU reactors will be built, to further the soverign industry.
> Solar+battery gets you there today, is getting cheaper every day
Solar + battery cannot be sufficient for most Europe except Mediterranean countries, it's not a matter of cost, there's just not enough sun in Winter and you need months of electricity worth of storage which isn't happening in our lifetime.
In general, talking about energy price ($/kWh) only make sense when you have fossil fuel as a near majority of your mix (because you have practically unlimited power as long as you spend money on fuel), but cease to make sense without it, because nobody cares about energy (Wh), what you (and the grid) need is power (W). With either nuclear or renewable, energy is practically free, but power is what costs money, and as we move towards a decarbonized mix, we'll need to change how the economics work to adapt to the underlying changes (including how we price electricity to consumers and businesses), because when you don't align the economics with the how the supply works the system collapses (like it did in Texas as few winters ago).
Europe would use hydrogen for seasonal leveling, not batteries. Vastly superior, even with the much lower round trip efficiency. Europe has petawatt-hours of hydrogen storage capacity in salt formations.
In science fiction books, yes. But in the real world Germany has spent hundreds of billions over a decade in renewables while phasing out nuclear, and yet they are still very far from full renewable (they haven't even over the “easy” phase of the transition)
Ah, so "it hasn't been done yet, therefore it can't be done" is a valid argument? We might as well stop talking about SMRs then.
Germany has not tried to roll out hydrogen yet. CO2 charges are not yet at the point where natural gas must stop being used for long period leveling.
Also, a big part of Germany's large expenditure was in 2009-2012 when solar (in particular) was far more expensive. Funny how you didn't mention that, isn't it.
> CO2 charges are not yet at the point where natural gas must stop being used for long period leveling.
During that period, Germany has emitted more CO2 than hundreds of millions of peoole, and we're way past the moment where we should have stopped using coal and gas really.
> Also, a big part of Germany's large expenditure was in 2009-2012 when solar (in particular) was far more expensive. Funny how you didn't mention that, isn't it.
And why hasn't Germany completed the transition now that “solar is dirt cheap” for years now, then? Solar makes no sense in Europe, period. Wind, hydro and nuclear, yes, but every solar panel installed in non-mediteranean European country has been a tragic waste of taxpayer's money (giving the panels to Greece or Arab/African countries would have been a much better investment, by an order of magnitude)
Germany's problem is they are hopelessly tied to fossil fuels. Any replacement (nuclear or renewable) would crater their heavy industry. Northern Europe is not a place for heavy industry in a post-fossil fuel world economy; they are at a grave disadvantage compared to sunnier locations closer to the equator.
That's why nuclear is interesting there. Unless you're asking Europe to just accept being phased out of industrial economy without doing anything to avoid that…
The point I was making was that nuclear doesn't help. Germany is dependent on fossil fuels, and nuclear is not a drop-in, equal cost replacement for fossil fuels.
For Germany to be saved from this fate by nuclear, nuclear has to be as cheap as solar is in the best locations in the world, not just better than solar in Germany.
Germany (and Europe) should probably be putting more money into CO2 sequestration, so they can keep burning fossil fuels.
Large, utility-scale solar is much cheaper than California rooftop solar. That California has so much rooftop solar is problematic; it's a symptom of market distortion.
Solar + battery: will there be enough raw material available to make it a viable alternative at world scale? I am hearing that we won't be able to extract enough metals for a world transition based on renewables. Cost is secondary when physics gets in your way.
The batteries would not be Li-ion NMC cells, but more likely Li-ion LFP cells. The latter use iron and phosphate, both of which are available in very large amounts. Availability of other chemistries (like Na-ion) would only ease any constraints.
Batteries would best be used for diurnal leveling; don't overestimate demand by assuming they are used for (say) seasonal leveling.
The batteries used by electrified motor vehicles would exceed those needed for the grid.
In terms of cost per ton moved, trains and semi-trucks outperform taxis. And yet taxis still exist. Turns out cost per vehicle (or per reactor) is important in some situations.
Yes. Also, there really aren't any such niche areas save some military naval applications. Even there, most ships in the US navy are not nuclear, because burning liquid hydrocarbons is cheaper.
Indeed, the selling point is probably that a single entity can build an SMR without risk of going bankrupt.
Perhaps this speaks to the problem of building consortia of like-minded companies. Currently EDF are being stung for a large chunk of money now that CGN are refusing to put any more cash into Hinkley Point C construction.
A site that contained a single NuScale reactor would have unacceptable fixed costs per MW. The UAMPS/NuScale CFPP was planned to have six reactors to amortize those fixed costs (like personnel) over more output.
Note also that the cost figures NuScale gave for that was the cost after 40-50 reactors had been built (and with federal subsidy), not FOAK costs.
This needs to be recognized as an indictment of our society. An inability to accomplish anything in a collective and intentional manner is only one of the many disasterous outcomes of the wretched individualism promoted by the neoliberal agenda. And make no mistake; this is not a result of a so-called "free market". It is the result of top-down privatization. The US government, for example, has a much larger budget than ever before, accounting for inflation and so on. It's just being delivered to private firms for profit instead of on building big things or maintaining the big things we used to build. This lack of cooperation across society is also the primary source of cultural breakdown and the sense of "division" felt by all of us, both rich and poor.
There is no market in the regular sense when it comes to large-scale enterprises, especially one that is so government-entangled as the energy and infrastructure sectors.
There are plenty of markets in the electrical power sector. In addition to the market for energy sources, selling generating assets to utilities, there are markets in the power itself in many places, for example ERCOT in Texas.
No one has ever built a nuclear plant to sell into a competitive power market. One can trace the downfall of nuclear in the US to the time when markets were opened to competition, with PURPA.
Nonsense. PURPA was just more regulation, regardless of how it was sold. It had nothing to do with "markets being opened to competition".
One can trace the downfall of nuclear in the US to the end of the New Deal coalition and the divestment of public infrastructure, which meant short-term planning only. It has nothing to do with "markets". Markets in energy don't exist now and did not exist then.
> The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA) triggered a restructuring of the previously monolithic utility sector, stipulating in particular that electricity produced by independent power producers must be purchased by utilities at "avoided cost." The new power from independent producers, combined with lack of demand for electricity, further eroded utilities' need for new nuclear plants. In large part owing to the provisions of PURPA, nonutility generation rose steadily from 71 billion kilowatt-hours per year in 1979 to almost 400 billion kilowatt-hours per year by 1995 -- this new, nonutility generation was the equivalent of adding more than 50 typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear plants (Energy Information Administration, 1996). As Peter Bradford (2011), a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, argued in the Wall Street Journal:
> "Nuclear-plant construction in this country came to a halt because a law passed in 1978 [PURPA] created competitive markets for power. These markets required investors rather than utility customers to assume the risk of cost overruns, plant cancellations, and poor operation. Today, private investors still shun the risks of building new reactors in all nations that employ power markets."
The so-called "market" isn't telling anybody anything here. The financiers are the only ones speaking and all they're saying is they can't turn as much profit in their own individual lifetimes. It is a total disregard for society as a whole, which is why we're in this mess.
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
What is your point? Cost is not a problem when near-term profit is high, and nuclear energy has an unbeatable track record with long-term ROI. Saying "it's expensive" is meaningless nonsense. There is absolutely no excuse besides the time to ROI.
Source? France's investments in nuclear energy are very well known as being incomparably successful, both in terms of return on capital investment and emissions. There is literally nothing to compare it to because nothing comes close. The only downside is literally upfront cost. Even the US has had great ROI in long term nuclear investments, especially if you discount the losses of all the prematurely decommissioned plants.
The idea that nuclear is struggling because people are "scared" is a form of denial from nuclear advocates. Nuclear is struggling because it's much too expensive, not because people are "scared".
That is simply not true and repeating it all the time does not make it more true. There have been several analysis posted here on HN which showed that compliance with regulations is not a major cost factor for nuclear power. In fact nuclear power operators have often lobbied to be exempt from regulations that apply to other power generation schemes. Solar and wind often have significantly higher compliance costs as percentage of their budget than nuclear.
I'm not sure that nuclear is that expensive per unit of energy delivered, compared to rooftop solar for instance.
In Europe (UK and Germany) one might get 1000 kWh/year from 1kW of panels. Last year I helped a family member install 6.4kW of solar for around £7000 (VAT free), so £1.2 per kWh/year = 1.4 USD/kWh/year.
Vogtle 3 & 4 cost around 30bn USD but has a 90% capacity factor on 2 x 1117MW = 17612856000 kWh/year = 1.7 USD/kWh/year. I believe the AP1000 reactors have a 60 year design life. In addition the reactor design (lacking at the start of the project, and cause of many delays) plus underlying skill-base now exists to construct more.
In addition nuclear power now attracts the Inflation Reduction Act Investment Tax Credits for up to a 50% rebate once a reactor comes online. Which puts nuclear at 0.85 USD/kWh/year before we account for reduced construction cost and time now that the AP1000 is Nth of a kind.
You need to include interest rates, not just divide the cost over 60 years.
One way to subsidize nuclear is to artificially reduce the interest rate on its financing, but market rates for nuclear financing would make a 60 year lifespan almost irrelevant. The NPV of the out year revenue would be very low.
Put another way: for nuclear to pay out over 60 years, it also has to compete with the cheaper energy sources that will be discovered and improved over those generations. This obsolescence risk cannot be ignored, and gets reflected in interest rates charged. Now that wind/solar are becoming dominant, their inherent rapid evolution has pulled in the time horizons for all other energy sources. I sometimes think this has kept natural gas going longer than it otherwise might have, since the uncertainty adds incentive for sources with more operating cost and lower investment cost, as these have less obsolescence risk.
Expecting AP1000 to show NOAK improvements is optimistic.
It’s expensive because environmentalists put in too many barriers to building nuclear power plants because they’re scared (in addition to being innumerate). If we had started building out nuclear power in the 1960s the same as the French, we would have much more runway today to address climate change.
It's failing pretty much everywhere (even in China it's struggling, falling far short of plans). Your explanation presents environmentalists as so globally omnipotent it would be senseless to fight them. Unfortunately, environmentalists are not this powerful.
It worked great in France, which had a majority renewable grid back in the early 1990s. If the rest of the developed world had invested in nuclear power during that same time frame we would have much more developed nuclear technology today. More importantly, we would’ve started emissions reductions decades ago instead of waiting for solar to become viable. We are still waiting for fundamental breakthroughs in grid-scale battery technology that will likely come too late to avoid 4C warming.
I’m not presenting environmentalists as powerful. I’m presenting them as innumerate feelers. Unfortunately that’s contagious.
Did it work great in France? The financing was so opaque it cannot be audited.
What we do know is that France can no longer do what they once maybe did. Their recent attempts to build nuclear plants have been disastrous. They've also given up on fast reactors, which is a clear tell they do not expect the world to go nuclear anytime soon (if the world did, it would quickly need breeders).
The "environmentalists did it" argument is not a good one. It falls apart when examined closely. If they were so powerful as to suppress nuclear worldwide, why can't they (for example) stop oil pipelines? Or coal combustion? The argument has all the signs of something cooked up to save a tenuous position, not because the evidence actually supports it.
Because the big coal & big oil lobbies are massively more powerful than the very meagre lobbying efforts of the nuclear industry. And yes, the greens are of course going for choking off the nuclear opponent, instead of Big Oily, not forgetting that part of the green movement does receive money from the hydrocarbon industry; the Sierra Club in the US has been funded by Cheasapeake Energy from which it receives 25 million bucks between 2007 and 2010.
For example, Greenpeace has recently successfully lobbied the Phillipne government to ban golden rice despite its obvious advantages:
That's false. The manufactured nulear scare is a leftover from the Cold War where communists in the West did everything to equate nuclear energy with nuclear weapons and/or ticking time bombs that they advocated the abolition of (at the same time as most East-bloc nations had operating nuclear power plants). The cold war ended but the seeds of angst had been sown and to this day is the bedrock of the "green" anti-nuclear policies in pretty much every "green" movement on the planet, with a notable exception of the Finnish Greens. The Green parties, fx. In Germany have actively used hyper-regulation of the nuclear power sector as tripwires to make nuclear energy operation in the West extremely expensive to do.
Only the massive onesare absurdly expensive, we build plenty of cheap small safe ones for the military to power aircraft carriers and submarines. why dont we build the same thing for power.
their cheap compared to the cost of a civilian nuclear power plant. A whole aircraft carrier which has two reactors costs $4.5 billion of which about 1 billion goes to each reactor, a civilian nuclear power station cost on the other hand cost on the low end around 5.4 billion minimum. civilian reactors are cost over 5x as much.
Naval reactors are so economical that it's cheaper to burn expensive liquid fuels instead. Most naval ships are not nuclear, you know. Yeah, that's a ringing endorsement. /s
The observation isn't that ships don't need nuclear reactors, it's that it's usually cheaper to use liquid hydrocarbons instead. Or do you think the USN is deliberately wasting money by constructing all these ships with conventional power plants?
That's not what affordable means. People are building smaller reactors because it's more likely that a project will be completed, not because of unit costs.