This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Ah, i remember studying the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design when I was at Uni. It had just been approved, and numerous plants were expected, with the first expected to be online from around 2010.
It’s 2023, and this is the first one to go live in the US.
Vogtle was a massive shitshow of corruption and delays, never thought it would actually be finished. Ironically, the price of electricity is set to go up, so that promise of lower bills has gone out the window.
The nameplate cost of this plant is $32 per watt. Even at smaller scales, utility-scale solar plants are $1 per watt. Do you know how many grid storage batteries you could buy with the extra $31 per watt? (6 hour storage is around $2.50 per watt or $.40/Wh.) You could build a solar plant 4x the nameplate capacity of the nuke (in order to match the capacity factor), and add 24 hours of storage to make it fully dispatchable, and still have enough money left over to build 2 more of the same thing. This doesn't even include the fact the nuclear has fuel costs, waste disposal, higher continued operational costs, and unaccounted publicly involuntarily subsidized disaster insurance.
This is awesome to see, but I wonder if an array of Small Modular Reactors would be the way to do it in the future. Nuclear is a fantastic and safe source of clean energy, so I hope it can compete better on the economic side.
I'm just guessing here, but due to the expensive safety, security, disposaal, and political requirements, big reactors are likely going to be the most cost effective for a long time.
Yay! Nuclear is the best!
Everything is a stopgap until fusion is available
We can't let that hinder progress toward implementing the most responsible forms of power generation.
With today's contractors? Good luck with that.
About fucking time.
We had tried this in SC in expanding one of our sites from one to three. It did not go terribly well.
Outstanding!
