TVA's report is pretty damning. Assuming they refer to the BWRX-300 for SMRs, at this FOAK/NOAK cost it keeps none of its promises. Pretty disheartening, really. This puts a ? over the European BWRX-300 plans for me as well.
Oy! I hear ya! On the other hand my source in GE says that the TVA numbers are « totally crazy ». Of course now why would TVA sandbag their own project like that? We can speculate maybe that TVA wants the actual quotes to be very positive compared to the « estimate ».
Of course, that’s like saying in a dating profile that you weigh 300lbs in order they should be pleasantly surprised you show up at 250lbs…
At this point it’s all speculation! But we shall see. Btw, again according to my source, GE is more likely to make a « big » bwrx-300 than go back to an ABWR. I don’t know what their reasons are for doing that but it seems they’re determined to go through the BWRX 300 whatever it is they decide to do
The BWRX-300 doesn't have pumps for shutdown cooling (via isolation condensers) or for normal operation circulation.
I believe the ABWR has pumpsnfor both (hence not passive shutdown cooling) but having normal operation circulation pumps would be fine if they can do passive shutdown cooling.
Quote: "While most of the interest centers around the AP1000 for good reason — it’s an excellent design and validated by the Vogtle builds"
Lets see : Vogtle: $30 Billion in cost, $14 Billion in cost overruns hardly validates the future of nuclear energy in any way. Of course we hear all sorts of justifications and finger pointing at NRC etc. etc. but the simple fact is that it was a huge failure that is only being kept alive by simply massive rate payer subsidies.
SMR? Another pipe dream that was over promised as being cost effective and has now shown NOT to be the case.
The other thing is that after something like 60 years and Billions of dollars spent the US still does NOT have an repository for the used reactor fuel, nor any realistic plan as to how to cover the insane long term costs related to the monitoring and safeguarding of the repository for the next (choose a number you like) few thousand years.
If Yucca mountain had gone ahead we would have already exceeded its design capacity of ~77,000 metric tons.
So as of right now and going forward to any conceivable future ( ie between now and the year 2100?) we have nowhere to store the waste and it is accumulating at about 2,000 metric tons per year which will put the waste accumulation at about 243,000 metric tons or there about (this assumes we keep producing as much waste per year as we currently do which I think is somewhat unrealistic but is at least based on current facts).
This does not even begin to deal with the issues of safety getting the stuff to the repository and nuclear proliferation.
Until these issues are resolved for our it is frankly insane to talk about any nuclear fission future. We simply cannot base our non-fossil fuel future on wishful thinking.
* Yes I know ( and understand) about nuclear fuel reprocessing but that has been another uneconomic boondoggle and failure in its own right. It simply trades one problem for another.
Dude, it’s happening and your tired talking points need to take a rest. Be assured the industry has problems and we might falter still. But we’re not not building nuclear because yucca mountain didn’t pass. That era has passed.
I don't think so. Facts are NOT a popularity contest. They do come back to haunt you.
I have been following nuclear power since my undergraduate days in the mid 1970s (undergraduate degree atomic and nuclear physics and material science). That loooooong time frame gives one perspective. There is a reason I didn't get a job or get an advanced degree in the nuclear power industry. The nuclear power industry has been selling fairy dust since I was aware.....and then reality comes back and bites them in the rear. Because of their self-inflicted damage to their credibility they have very little trust with the public. Vogtle and NuScale are just the latest rev of fairy dust! To paraphrase an old joke: How do you make a small fortune in the nuclear power industry...simple start with a large fortune.
To be sure if the nuclear power industry hasn't fixed one of its most basic problems in over 60 years and billions of dollars spent I rather think that it is not "fixable" in any economic sense.
Sadly most pro-nuclear people I have engaged with online are woefully ignorant about even the most basic nuclear science ( the worst in my experience are the pro-Thorium crowd!) . In my world view unless one, off the top of one's head, can say what delayed neutrons are, or what a Barn is etc. etc. (that is but two teeny, tiny examples - there are literally a thousand more) one really should NOT be commenting. I don't know your technical background so I am not sure if that hat fits or not but by your comments I would wager it does. I am happy to be proved wrong.
Storing HMW on site in casks IS going to literally blow up in somebody's face.
The design requirements for the casks make all sorts of assumptions......which (may?) not be true.
No, it's not "insane" to talk of a nuclear fission future. The problems you've brought up are all being addressed. And if we put the money that's wasted on renewables into building nuclear power plants, we would have a secure power grid, 100 year lifetimes to amortize the capital expenses, satisfy those who are so worried about CO2 emissions, amazingly smaller land footprints, and amazingly smaller amount of waste to manage.
These problems have been "being addressed" for at least 60 years and still there are no solutions so I would not bet in the next 60 years to be much different!
I would love to see some of the solutions to the problems that are meaningfully beyond a PowerPoint presentation.
Vogtle and NuScale certainly do not show any real progress of the issues being addressed on the generation side. Nor is there ANY real work being done on a long term repository in the US.
BTW there are currently NO nuclear reactors licensed for 100 year lifetimes.....maybe in the future...but maybe not. Possibly yet another nuclear industry pipe dream.
Realistically to get to where we need to we need to build somewhere between 1,000
and 3,000 nuclear reactors. Even taking the lower number that seems highly unlikely and it represents, simplistically, about one new 1GWe reactor every week.
Meanwhile we have to get the transition to non-fossil fuel energy done, and unlike what you claim renewables - solar and wind are making actual progress and are now the lowest cost unsubsidized energy providers.
The very sober The Economist magazine recently ran a very detailed article on the future of power and there analysis show that solar has won the race. See:
I'll refer you to someone who has more technical expertise than I do - I suggest you read the work of Jack DeVaney. His substack is "The Gordian Knot News"
I just read a few of his posts especially "President's speech on the power grid". My opinion is that he analysis is way, way too simplistic I would like to see some real modeling to support his strongly state conclusions. At the Powerpoint presentation level everything is magic and doable.
As HL Mencken once said : "For every complex issue there is a solution that is simple, understandable, and wrong"
A sample of this magical thinking about nuclear is the statement "producing nil pollution". That is clearly false. Currently as I have stated early in this thread the US is sitting on about 91,000 tons of heavy metal waste with nowhere to store it for basically forever and that does not include the pollution from the mining, refining and manufacturing the fuel assemblies (BTW the US is sitting on a large stockpile of depleted Uranium of about 765,000 tons. Not a lot of uses for it except for making armour piercing bullets. It is pretty toxic. )
Devanney also seems to put a lot of stock on a realistic carbon tax. I agree that would be a great thing to do and would lead to the best method of reducing CO2 emissions. But again realistically sadly it is not going to happen. The best I have seen is a carbon tax dividend scheme (see https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5744?s=1&r=1) but again getting implemented is a long long shot the the mechanics of a border cost adjustment to protect US industry has lots of complexities to it!
Also he does not deal with the waste nor proliferation risk issue at all.
It is very unclear to me ( and others) how we would get anywhere near the number of reactors built. ( probably 1,000+). Even at 1,000 that is an average of 20 per state but in a number of highly populated states presumably the number would , using his "coop" model, need to be significantly higher. It could be that a state such as NJ would need at least 30 1GWe reactors under his model. I just cannot see that happening even from a physical location perspective.
On the other hand I do agree with him that the whole Microsoft thing with TMI looks a little off from the numbers but I have not spent much time on that
Yes, getting 1000 reactors built would take a long, long time - maybe in 100 years or so if we got moving on it? On the other hand, getting to ‘net zero’ will take a long, long time too - if ever - so the 2 concepts might gradually increase together. I think the net zero by 2050 idea is not feasible.
Sadly most of what you write is factually incorrect and highly biased. The biggest issue right now with renewables is a regulatory regime based on fossil fuels. This regime is being staunchly defended by the fossil fuel industry because it keeps them in business.
To say that solar panels are much cheaper than they were 10 years ago is the understatement of the year. From the Economist article on solar power: "Since the 1960s what analysts call the levelised cost of solar energy—the break-even price a project needs to get paid in order to recoup its financing for a fixed rate of return—has dropped by a factor of more than 1,000, and the trend is continuing".
As for environmental impacts showing open pit mines for metal extraction and NOT showing the devastation caused by Tar Sands extraction which is way worse his highly misleading. The big difference is that the metals used for batteries, turbines etc are VERY recyclable and in fact battery materials are one of the most recycled materials in the world with something like 95% of the heavy metal in a lead acid battery these day is from a recycled source. We are rapidly starting to recycle EV batteries (to date there are not a lot of EV batteries to recycle or even repurpose as they are still providing service in their initial vehicle (Tesla is experiencing battery life that exceeds the life of the rest of the car, somewhere north of 300,000 miles, which, for the average driver, represents 20 year of use, and effectively there were zero electric cars in 2004)). On the other hand oil (tar sands or from oil wells) is one and done... except for the CO2 it leaves behind.
You raise the issue with bird strikes and wind farms where in fact way more birds are lost to fossil fuel extraction than with wind turbines (off-shore wind farms are designed NOT to be in the migratory flight paths!). There is zero actual evidence that off-shore wind turbines are doing anything to whales- just another Fossil fuel fed propaganda NOT based on the actual facts.
I don't believe undersea power cables use mostly copper - it is an expensive way to go. Aluminium is about 61% as efficient in transporting electricity but that can be easily made up by making the cable bigger. Copper costs about $10,000 per ton, Aluminium costs around $2,500 per ton so for the same current carrying capacity Aluminium cable will be half as expensive! A lot of current copper use in industry is just legacy.
As for not knowing how Turbines stand up to hurricanes well that is wrong too, Lots of turbines have withstood hurricanes without problems (yes some have been under designed in the past but if studied a lot of that is due to the changes in expected vs actual wind velocities.
Energy payback times for Wind turbines is measured in months not years so your comment about wind being "polluting" needs to be measured against other sources of energy, and on that measure they are just about one of the cleanest.
The changes to "grid reliability" have almost nothing to do with renewables. The biggest issue in most locations is events created or worsened by climate change which takes out the powerlines.... and any other infrastructure in the way.
I could go on and on about other factual and or misleading errors in your post but this post is way too long already.
So sadly your "two cents" is just rather missing the point and if just full of misleading scare items rather than factual analysis of the situation.
Nice summary article, Angelica
Thanks Jon!
TVA's report is pretty damning. Assuming they refer to the BWRX-300 for SMRs, at this FOAK/NOAK cost it keeps none of its promises. Pretty disheartening, really. This puts a ? over the European BWRX-300 plans for me as well.
Oy! I hear ya! On the other hand my source in GE says that the TVA numbers are « totally crazy ». Of course now why would TVA sandbag their own project like that? We can speculate maybe that TVA wants the actual quotes to be very positive compared to the « estimate ».
Of course, that’s like saying in a dating profile that you weigh 300lbs in order they should be pleasantly surprised you show up at 250lbs…
This is good to hear! Yeah, could be they are setting themselves up for some "better than expected, under budget" news.
The BWRX-300 needs a lot of excavation work, so it is quite site dependent. Perhaps this inflates the cost for TVA sites? Just guessing.
At this point it’s all speculation! But we shall see. Btw, again according to my source, GE is more likely to make a « big » bwrx-300 than go back to an ABWR. I don’t know what their reasons are for doing that but it seems they’re determined to go through the BWRX 300 whatever it is they decide to do
Does the ABWR have the ability to have a full passive shutdown cooling mode?
That seems like the most likely reason to me.
A big BWRX-300 sounds like an ESBWR II (with the name change depending non marketing requirements…)
I think they would add pumps in which case is it that similar to bwrx300?
The BWRX-300 doesn't have pumps for shutdown cooling (via isolation condensers) or for normal operation circulation.
I believe the ABWR has pumpsnfor both (hence not passive shutdown cooling) but having normal operation circulation pumps would be fine if they can do passive shutdown cooling.
Thanks - great article. And I agree with your last sentence - that we should go for full size nuclear reactors except niche situations.
Quote: "While most of the interest centers around the AP1000 for good reason — it’s an excellent design and validated by the Vogtle builds"
Lets see : Vogtle: $30 Billion in cost, $14 Billion in cost overruns hardly validates the future of nuclear energy in any way. Of course we hear all sorts of justifications and finger pointing at NRC etc. etc. but the simple fact is that it was a huge failure that is only being kept alive by simply massive rate payer subsidies.
SMR? Another pipe dream that was over promised as being cost effective and has now shown NOT to be the case.
The other thing is that after something like 60 years and Billions of dollars spent the US still does NOT have an repository for the used reactor fuel, nor any realistic plan as to how to cover the insane long term costs related to the monitoring and safeguarding of the repository for the next (choose a number you like) few thousand years.
If Yucca mountain had gone ahead we would have already exceeded its design capacity of ~77,000 metric tons.
(see : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository)
as we have about 91,000 metric tons of heavy metal already need to be stored.
(see https://www.pnnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_reports/PNNL-33938.pdf )
So as of right now and going forward to any conceivable future ( ie between now and the year 2100?) we have nowhere to store the waste and it is accumulating at about 2,000 metric tons per year which will put the waste accumulation at about 243,000 metric tons or there about (this assumes we keep producing as much waste per year as we currently do which I think is somewhat unrealistic but is at least based on current facts).
This does not even begin to deal with the issues of safety getting the stuff to the repository and nuclear proliferation.
Until these issues are resolved for our it is frankly insane to talk about any nuclear fission future. We simply cannot base our non-fossil fuel future on wishful thinking.
* Yes I know ( and understand) about nuclear fuel reprocessing but that has been another uneconomic boondoggle and failure in its own right. It simply trades one problem for another.
Dude, it’s happening and your tired talking points need to take a rest. Be assured the industry has problems and we might falter still. But we’re not not building nuclear because yucca mountain didn’t pass. That era has passed.
I don't think so. Facts are NOT a popularity contest. They do come back to haunt you.
I have been following nuclear power since my undergraduate days in the mid 1970s (undergraduate degree atomic and nuclear physics and material science). That loooooong time frame gives one perspective. There is a reason I didn't get a job or get an advanced degree in the nuclear power industry. The nuclear power industry has been selling fairy dust since I was aware.....and then reality comes back and bites them in the rear. Because of their self-inflicted damage to their credibility they have very little trust with the public. Vogtle and NuScale are just the latest rev of fairy dust! To paraphrase an old joke: How do you make a small fortune in the nuclear power industry...simple start with a large fortune.
To be sure if the nuclear power industry hasn't fixed one of its most basic problems in over 60 years and billions of dollars spent I rather think that it is not "fixable" in any economic sense.
Sadly most pro-nuclear people I have engaged with online are woefully ignorant about even the most basic nuclear science ( the worst in my experience are the pro-Thorium crowd!) . In my world view unless one, off the top of one's head, can say what delayed neutrons are, or what a Barn is etc. etc. (that is but two teeny, tiny examples - there are literally a thousand more) one really should NOT be commenting. I don't know your technical background so I am not sure if that hat fits or not but by your comments I would wager it does. I am happy to be proved wrong.
Storing HMW on site in casks IS going to literally blow up in somebody's face.
The design requirements for the casks make all sorts of assumptions......which (may?) not be true.
No, it's not "insane" to talk of a nuclear fission future. The problems you've brought up are all being addressed. And if we put the money that's wasted on renewables into building nuclear power plants, we would have a secure power grid, 100 year lifetimes to amortize the capital expenses, satisfy those who are so worried about CO2 emissions, amazingly smaller land footprints, and amazingly smaller amount of waste to manage.
These problems have been "being addressed" for at least 60 years and still there are no solutions so I would not bet in the next 60 years to be much different!
I would love to see some of the solutions to the problems that are meaningfully beyond a PowerPoint presentation.
Vogtle and NuScale certainly do not show any real progress of the issues being addressed on the generation side. Nor is there ANY real work being done on a long term repository in the US.
BTW there are currently NO nuclear reactors licensed for 100 year lifetimes.....maybe in the future...but maybe not. Possibly yet another nuclear industry pipe dream.
Realistically to get to where we need to we need to build somewhere between 1,000
and 3,000 nuclear reactors. Even taking the lower number that seems highly unlikely and it represents, simplistically, about one new 1GWe reactor every week.
Meanwhile we have to get the transition to non-fossil fuel energy done, and unlike what you claim renewables - solar and wind are making actual progress and are now the lowest cost unsubsidized energy providers.
See actual numbers see Lazards LCOE analysis : https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2024-_vf.pdf
The very sober The Economist magazine recently ran a very detailed article on the future of power and there analysis show that solar has won the race. See:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential-growth-of-solar-power-will-change-the-world?utm_medium=cpc.adword.pd&utm_source=google&ppccampaignID=17210591673&ppcadID=&utm_campaign=a.22brand_pmax&utm_content=conversion.direct-response.anonymous&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwu-63BhC9ARIsAMMTLXRT2pjeTqZbRepGoXAOML-Dzaa4d96UEj0Z7qhx0ttOF7Vcfvd9DjcaApjCEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds
I'll refer you to someone who has more technical expertise than I do - I suggest you read the work of Jack DeVaney. His substack is "The Gordian Knot News"
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/
I just read a few of his posts especially "President's speech on the power grid". My opinion is that he analysis is way, way too simplistic I would like to see some real modeling to support his strongly state conclusions. At the Powerpoint presentation level everything is magic and doable.
As HL Mencken once said : "For every complex issue there is a solution that is simple, understandable, and wrong"
A sample of this magical thinking about nuclear is the statement "producing nil pollution". That is clearly false. Currently as I have stated early in this thread the US is sitting on about 91,000 tons of heavy metal waste with nowhere to store it for basically forever and that does not include the pollution from the mining, refining and manufacturing the fuel assemblies (BTW the US is sitting on a large stockpile of depleted Uranium of about 765,000 tons. Not a lot of uses for it except for making armour piercing bullets. It is pretty toxic. )
Devanney also seems to put a lot of stock on a realistic carbon tax. I agree that would be a great thing to do and would lead to the best method of reducing CO2 emissions. But again realistically sadly it is not going to happen. The best I have seen is a carbon tax dividend scheme (see https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5744?s=1&r=1) but again getting implemented is a long long shot the the mechanics of a border cost adjustment to protect US industry has lots of complexities to it!
Also he does not deal with the waste nor proliferation risk issue at all.
It is very unclear to me ( and others) how we would get anywhere near the number of reactors built. ( probably 1,000+). Even at 1,000 that is an average of 20 per state but in a number of highly populated states presumably the number would , using his "coop" model, need to be significantly higher. It could be that a state such as NJ would need at least 30 1GWe reactors under his model. I just cannot see that happening even from a physical location perspective.
On the other hand I do agree with him that the whole Microsoft thing with TMI looks a little off from the numbers but I have not spent much time on that
Yes, getting 1000 reactors built would take a long, long time - maybe in 100 years or so if we got moving on it? On the other hand, getting to ‘net zero’ will take a long, long time too - if ever - so the 2 concepts might gradually increase together. I think the net zero by 2050 idea is not feasible.
On solar, I recently wrote a short non technical piece - https://alchristie.substack.com/p/solar-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly
and on wind - https://alchristie.substack.com/p/summary-of-offshore-wind-turbine?utm_source=publication-search
Sadly most of what you write is factually incorrect and highly biased. The biggest issue right now with renewables is a regulatory regime based on fossil fuels. This regime is being staunchly defended by the fossil fuel industry because it keeps them in business.
To say that solar panels are much cheaper than they were 10 years ago is the understatement of the year. From the Economist article on solar power: "Since the 1960s what analysts call the levelised cost of solar energy—the break-even price a project needs to get paid in order to recoup its financing for a fixed rate of return—has dropped by a factor of more than 1,000, and the trend is continuing".
As for environmental impacts showing open pit mines for metal extraction and NOT showing the devastation caused by Tar Sands extraction which is way worse his highly misleading. The big difference is that the metals used for batteries, turbines etc are VERY recyclable and in fact battery materials are one of the most recycled materials in the world with something like 95% of the heavy metal in a lead acid battery these day is from a recycled source. We are rapidly starting to recycle EV batteries (to date there are not a lot of EV batteries to recycle or even repurpose as they are still providing service in their initial vehicle (Tesla is experiencing battery life that exceeds the life of the rest of the car, somewhere north of 300,000 miles, which, for the average driver, represents 20 year of use, and effectively there were zero electric cars in 2004)). On the other hand oil (tar sands or from oil wells) is one and done... except for the CO2 it leaves behind.
You raise the issue with bird strikes and wind farms where in fact way more birds are lost to fossil fuel extraction than with wind turbines (off-shore wind farms are designed NOT to be in the migratory flight paths!). There is zero actual evidence that off-shore wind turbines are doing anything to whales- just another Fossil fuel fed propaganda NOT based on the actual facts.
I don't believe undersea power cables use mostly copper - it is an expensive way to go. Aluminium is about 61% as efficient in transporting electricity but that can be easily made up by making the cable bigger. Copper costs about $10,000 per ton, Aluminium costs around $2,500 per ton so for the same current carrying capacity Aluminium cable will be half as expensive! A lot of current copper use in industry is just legacy.
As for not knowing how Turbines stand up to hurricanes well that is wrong too, Lots of turbines have withstood hurricanes without problems (yes some have been under designed in the past but if studied a lot of that is due to the changes in expected vs actual wind velocities.
Energy payback times for Wind turbines is measured in months not years so your comment about wind being "polluting" needs to be measured against other sources of energy, and on that measure they are just about one of the cleanest.
The changes to "grid reliability" have almost nothing to do with renewables. The biggest issue in most locations is events created or worsened by climate change which takes out the powerlines.... and any other infrastructure in the way.
I could go on and on about other factual and or misleading errors in your post but this post is way too long already.
So sadly your "two cents" is just rather missing the point and if just full of misleading scare items rather than factual analysis of the situation.