Jesus, it went from $14bn to over $30bn in cost overruns? That's embarrassing.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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That's the engineering knowledge lost over the last 30 years costed out.
Making 2 reactors since 95 has some side effects, a lot of the senior engineers since then have retired, standards have changed, and new engineers need to learn.
Exactly what I was thinking
It like those highspeed rail projects that are finally getting going in the US, they're over budget because a lot of people now have to be trained on how to work on such a project due to either lost knowledge or new stuff they're learning during the process
It's a big job to train all those train trainers.
Yep. The failed dual reactor project in SC that also used the AP1000s was a gigantic clusterfuck. Most of the major contractors had essentially no experience on projects of the scale and it resulted in massive cost overruns, delays, and a compounding web of fraud and lies to shareholders and regulators that wound up in utility executives in prison and the eventual sale of the entire utility SCANA to Dominion Energy.
Cost overruns in the nuclear industry are nothing new. It's been the norm. The AP1000 design used here was supposed to solve some of those issues, but it's been more of the same.
Haha, this is insightful, but I worry an incorrect conclusion re: cost and overruns. Yes, lots of extremely experienced engineers have retired; but, the pace even in the 70s, 80s and 90s was oft beset by slowdowns and overruns. See: 9 mile, river bend, rancho seco, comanche peak, and those are just the ones I know off the top of my head.
We need more, but it's a nuclear-and-renewables, not nuclear instead of renewables. I hope smr and other designs get a better shake this time, because climate change doesn't bode well for coastal installations, and frankly, building many more large PWRs isn't going to happen quickly.
Frankly I hope we can turn the experience debt to our advantage - rigorous investigation of all the many options disregarding the established dogma of large PWRs would be good in my view. YMMV.
This is more than a cost issue. It's a knowledge issue. Countries can't lost this type of knowledge otherwise they lost independence as well.
Tax payers subsidize the power plants, pay for the electricity and the corporation gets to keep the profits
This is one of the many reasons that I think nuclear plants should not be corporate owned
I think a lot of stuff that's currently corporate owned shouldn't be but that's a conversation for another time
Edit: Should to shouldn't
The people with money to invest in the energy sector don't seem interested in nuclear. They're looking at the history of cost and schedule overruns, and then putting their money in solar and wind. Regulators do seem willing to greenlight new nuclear projects, but nobody is buying.
If the public were to finance a nuclear power, we have to ask why there's a good reason to do so when private investment is already rejecting it. There has to be some reason outside of cost effectiveness. One answer to that is recycling all the nuclear waste we already have.
Need some smaller, shipping crate sized nuclear generators that can be rented. If smaller set ups end up helping with knowledge and new tech then awesome. If not, it's still pretty fucking cool.
TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, has the same belief. The the first one to be built is already underway in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
Fuck yeah.
The good reason is cost externalities. Nuclear is the only power source that deals with its own waste. No one demands the solar industry recycle their stuff for free or that they pay a carbon tax for the trees that don't exist because of the panels in the space. Same for wind but add on the birds killed. Same for hydro but the fish killed. Same for coal but add all of us killed.
We all subsidize the waste disposal of the other power sources. Coal gets to dump all that stuff in the air and our collective resource is that much lowered in quality.
Change the market conditions to reflect the true cost and nuclear comes out on top. Even the CO2 used to make the plants is laughably small when you consider that the plants can last over 50 years while solar has to be almost completely replaced in 15.
Who do you think is paying for the Yucca Mountain facility?
What facility?
Who do you think paid the banks all that money to keep housing artificially high? Who do you think have GM all that money to make oversized trucks?
Noticed you didn't mention all the costs inside of the plant to deal with the waste nor the transportation costs to Yucca.
It deals with its own waste by leaving it sitting in a big pit. That's not a viable long term strategy. It needs to go to a central facility to be buried for 100k years, or (my preference) recycled in other reactors designed to do that. Neither is being done right now in the US, and both would almost certainly require public subsidies.
Yup I think a lot of this stuff should be nationalized and that the energy market should be used or simulated to determine the operation of it.
Specifically rate-payers at least in most places, and the cost for these projects is added to some sort of Global Adjustment applied on top of the KWh price. GA is usually capital projects like those, plus making sure the price is high enough to cover the cost of actually distributing the power. Sometimes electricity can be "free" or even in the negatives in the market for example especially at night, especially if you just commissioned nukes in preparation for something else being decommissioned and now have an overnight surplus that you're trying to incentivize consumption of or give to your neighbors.
Cost-plus contracts are a Hell of a drug.
The whole project has been a huge unjust wealth transfer directly from ratepayers to shareholders, and the regulatory-captured Georgia Public Service Commission just let it happen.
(If I sound bitter, it's because I'm one of the ratepayers getting screwed.)
Shitty as that is, at least you're getting a reactor out of it all. I still support renewables over nuclear, primarily for cost-benefit reasons, but it's always good to have some diversity in the generation mix.
The big demand right now is a replacement for the capabilities of fossil fuels. There's a lot going on with energy storage tech right now.
We already had nuclear. This project was building reactors #3 and #4 on a site that already had two, and between that and Plant Hatch, nuclear was apparently already 23% of GA Power's energy mix even before these new ones came online.
Frankly, renewables would've been superior for energy mix diversity reasons, too. The fact that it would've also just been flat-out cheaper for Georgia Power to pay to install solar on my (and everybody else's) house just adds insult to injury.
(Okay, that last bit might be hyperbole -- I haven't done the math. But still...!)
Solar + battery would work for people who have houses but not industry or mid-high rises. The transmission grid doesn't just function as a means to get energy places but it connects everything in to one system as a means to stabilize everything. So when that electric arc furnace is turned on there isn't a brownout because the huge demand has been scheduled and generation can be dispatched accordingly. At the distribution grid which is the lower voltage lines connecting homes you can be a lot more creative with microgrid and feed-in-tariffs, in a lot of places these distribution lines are managed by local distribution companies/LDCs which operate separate from the Independent System Operator/ISO which operates the transmission grid and an energy market if there is one.
10 million people. $15k per solar installation. Eh, not too far off.
More than one person lives in a building generally. It's more like $15,000 to install 1kW of solar, so like $15B to install 1000MW, so you literally could have just about installed the solar capacity with just the cost overrun.
There's some hidden assumptions in there that aren't quite warrented.
First, when quoting output, solar tend to state their peak output at full sunlight. How much they actually put out depends on the area, but reducing the number to 20% is a good rule of thumb.
Second, you seem to be thinking of rooftop residential installs. Those are the most expensive way to do solar. In fact, levelized cost of energy studies show it's almost as bad as nuclear. Home installs have trouble taking advantage of the economics of mass production. Making a dedicated solar field is far more cost efficient. So much so that nuclear looks pathetic on those same levelized cost studies.
The project started 10 years ago. Renewables were about to burst open and hit some incredible cost reductions.
This project looked good at the time.
The cost overruns helped tank an engineering company.
Why Construction Projects Always Go Over Budget
Engineering projects going past their deadlines and 100% over budget is normal.
Yes, normal.
I'll watch the video later, but that's poor project management compounded by active underestimation.
As an engineer, it's my ass if my project estimates were so widely off the mark, especially if it were consistent.
I’m sure someone will get a bonus.
No, that's typical.
How much of that cost can be attributed to COVID? I'm guessing quite a bit just judging from how the cost of everything has skyrocketed.
Good point, a timeline of capital expenditures would answer where a lot of the money went, though undoubtedly create a few more questions as well.
That's America baby
Let's make 100 more!
- I thought it had been longer than that since we commissioned a nuclear power plant, and
- Does one every eight years or so feel like a decent rate for building these things?
- Depends on how much you care about fossil fuel profits. From an environmental perspective, one could be built every year and it wouldn't do much at this point.
Are others being built now, this one started construction in 2009.
From December 18 to January 1, Today in Energy will feature some of our favorite articles from 2023. Today’s article was originally published on August 1.
It's been online for several months.