Interesting point: no pumps; convection flow for 100% of the operational envelope.
rainworld 7 hours ago [-]
No recirculation pumps. Feedwater is pumped as usual.
idontwantthis 4 hours ago [-]
A nuclear power plant is essentially a coal power plant with free fuel.
Today, if you literally built a coal power plant with free fuel it would not be cheaper than solar.
My question: If you built a small modular coal power plant, would that be cheaper than solar? It necessarily has to be cheaper than nuclear.
vablings 3 hours ago [-]
A nuclear power plant is a coal power plant except.
It has incredibly strict requirements for safety, we are talking SOP & Risk assesment for climbing up a 3ft ladder
There is a requirement for literally thousands of pounds of concrete to shield the reactor
The employees have to be highly qualified and trained.
The construction materials have to be validated, tested certified and then tested again during install to ensure conformance.
You must deal with spent fuel
They are not the same and cannot be retrofitted eitherways
idontwantthis 3 hours ago [-]
That's my point I'm trying to find a good argument for why modular nuclear is a good idea.
Can modular coal (which doesn't need all of that) beat solar? If not, then I don't know why modular nuclear would be able to.
kayfox 1 hours ago [-]
It can provide power when solar and wind are not generating, and while doing so also provide base generation that allows the grid to be robust against fluctuations in solar and wind.
vablings 3 hours ago [-]
Modular nuclear is a great idea, sadly right now and in the foreseeable future solar is absolutely king in terms of cost/kWH, we should build what makes sense for our needs with regards to power in the USA then worry about other tech later considering the state of our grid.
idontwantthis 3 hours ago [-]
But why is it a great idea if solar provides more power, more cheaply without any danger whatsoever?
bobthebuilders 3 hours ago [-]
Solar gives power in the wrong time, making the duck curve a thing, and requiring conflict prone minerals storing dangerous amount of powers to smooth out. On net, this is probably worth it, but solar isn't free as you claim.
jonah 3 hours ago [-]
There are so many other methods aside from lithium batteries for grid scale energy storage.
Pumped hydro is fantastically expensive, not all that efficient, and only works with extremely specific (and rare, aiui) geography. It also comes with the same ecological disasters as dams, displacing entire ecosystems or towns and producing a ton of methane emissions from the now-submerged and decaying plant life.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
legulere 3 hours ago [-]
Uranium mining, milling, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication are all not free.
Because of protection from radioactive radiation, you have higher costs handling anything in a nuclear reactor compared to a coal plant. Then you have the issue of runaway nuclear reactions, hydrogen buildup etc.
idontwantthis 3 hours ago [-]
See reply above. That's my point.
By "free" I mean that you need so little fuel over the lifetime of the reactor the cost is negligible compared to all the other extensive costs of building and managing the plant.
GeoAtreides 3 hours ago [-]
There are between 6 to 9 orders of magnitude difference between coal energy and nuclear energy... and between 4 to 5 orders of magnitude difference on waste generation
bpodgursky 3 hours ago [-]
When I google "what percent of a coal plant operations is cost of fuel" the response is:
> The cost of fuel typically accounts for 70% to 75% of a running coal-fired power plant's variable operating expenses.
I'm not going to do deep research here but it sounds pretty right. And I don't think solar is 4x cheaper than coal yet, especially solar + battery to spread out the load over non producing hours.
3 hours ago [-]
exabrial 5 hours ago [-]
Hell yes!
preisschild 13 hours ago [-]
The BWRX-300 footprint is so large they might as well just build large nuclear power units again and get 3-4x the power
jordanb 3 hours ago [-]
The logic for a "small" reactor is that it's one that can rely on passive cooling in the event of a shutdown so that it doesn't have to be actively cooled to avoid a meltdown.
The "modular" part is the idea that you then produce more of them lowering unit cost and install many more than is typical at a site.
This also potentially allows you to have more control of plant energy output and respond faster to grid needs.
Recall that the fukushima meltdown was caused after the cooling failed. The reactor building survived the tsunami and the reactors were shutdown. The problem is the diesel backup generators used to run the coolant pumps were flooded.
nine_k 12 hours ago [-]
I don't think that the footprint is the key factor. Likely the total construction cost is. A large reactor may have a better cost per kWh, averaged over decades of its lifetime, but a smaller reactor likely has a more affordable upfront cost.
jillesvangurp 10 hours ago [-]
The key point with small modular reactors vs. reactors like this is that construction happens in factories rather than on site. Theoretically, you might get some economies of scale from series production in a factory that is much harder to get doing bespoke construction projects. Which is why historically, nuclear projects tend to blow through their cost estimates and why having larger reactors makes that a bit more tolerable. Of course until somebody actually does this and scales to hundreds/thousands of reactors production, this is all theoretical.
This particular reactor is already estimated at over 5 billion $ I think. That's a lot of money for just 300MW and it probably could end up being a wildly optimistic estimate as well. I think effectively much of the construction is still on site and not in a factory. Hence the need for a construction permit. So, you get all of the downsides of complex on site construction such as including high cost, permitting overhead, lots of bureaucracy, associated delays & uncertainty, etc. without the upside of actually delivering a lot of power like you would with a larger reaction. Calling it "modular" might be overstating things a bit.
Probably cheaper, faster, and easier to just plonk down 5GW of solar, wind, or battery (or combinations of those). Especially if you calculate in the 200-300% time and dollar budget that many nuclear projects seem to end up having. Maybe this one will be different. A lot of people have a lot riding on Nuclear projects breaking this trend. But then that has been the case for decades.
coldpie 6 hours ago [-]
Five billion is just not all that much money. One guy spent eight times that to change the moderation policies of one social media website. Microsoft spent 14 times that to buy a video game company that they've largely mismanaged. Those two purchases alone could've paid for 20 of these reactors, maybe more if economies of scale kick in. Don't even ask how much Facebook is flushing down the toilet on VR or how much we're spending every single day in Iran. We could choose to spend our money on things like clean energy, but we choose other things instead.
nine_k 4 hours ago [-]
> to change the moderation policies of one social media website
That guy wanted a particular US president elected; in this regard, the investment has likely already paid off.
With a nuclear power plant, the stakes are way lower, and the payoff is much, much more distant.
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
It is for 300MW.
mixdup 5 hours ago [-]
I mean it is, there is a project in Georgia for a new 1.4GW natural gas plant that has a $3.3 billion budget
But, the $5 billion here isn't purely an investment in 300 MW of capacity, it's an investment in starting up the nuclear reactor factory that can start churning these things out at $1-2 billion or whatever their goal may be
Also, have to take into consideration the overall operating costs. Nuclear costs significantly more up front but over time costs much less to operate (and is much more predictable) because you don't have to buy and burn natural gas forever
pfdietz 3 hours ago [-]
Those projected future savings are to be greeted with considerable skepticism. They are not locked in by contracts. They are the kinds of projections we've seen all too often fall apart in nuclear.
The underlying mechanic here is that cost projections are being used to sell a technology. As such, there is very strong incentive to underestimate the costs. This applies to FOAK plants and to projected experience rates.
SECProto 3 hours ago [-]
The one thing that low carbon grids around the world share is high portion of nuclear (or hydro, which you can't build unless it naturally exists). Therefore, the only thing a SMR cost should be compared to is other nuclear reactors. Natural Gas may be cheaper (startup cost), may be more expensive (ongoing fuel), or will definitely be more expensive (carbon in the atmosphere doesn't go away), but regardless there is no reason to compare nuclear to natgas.
pfdietz 2 hours ago [-]
> The one thing that low carbon grids around the world share is high portion of nuclear (or hydro, which you can't build unless it naturally exists).
This is an historical artifact. When that generating capacity was built, nuclear was the alternative to fossil fuels. It isn't today; renewables are now cheaper and faster to install.
Your argument can be seen as a way to ignore the cost decline of renewables without at first glance doing so.
(As you say, there are hydro-dominated grids with no nuclear, for example Costa Rica, which gets 98% of its electrical energy from renewables.)
SECProto 2 hours ago [-]
I was responding to the thread, which is comparing nuclear to natural gas.
Comparing to renewables is a different story - it can be done but it's much more complex (not dispatchable, seasonally variable) but certainly renewables makes sense in some or many places, (and in all places for a portion of the supply). I'm all in favour as long as it is actually done with the intent of getting to zero CO2, and doesn't just stall when it gets to the more difficult part of the transition. So many places get to 50% annual generation as renewable and throw up their hands about the remainder and leave it on coal/oil/natural gas
pfdietz 7 minutes ago [-]
> I was responding to the thread, which is comparing nuclear to natural gas.
It's comparing nuclear to alternatives, one of which is natural gas. Others are renewables. One cannot make or justify a decision on nuclear without considering all the alternatives.
dalyons 3 hours ago [-]
all cost modeling for nuclear takes this into account into the $/mwh of power. Fuel is cheap, but you have to pay back the enormous construction capex over time through power sales. Plus, staffing, security, insurance and maintaince are massive ongoing costs. Nukes remain the most expensive way to generate power.
The only cheap nuclear watts come from facilities built a long time ago in a completely different cost environment, and had construction and insurance subsidized by the state.
mixdup 1 hours ago [-]
Natural gas plants all have security, insurance, maintenance, and staffing. Of course there are different levels of those but those costs are not unique to nuclear plants
pfdietz 5 minutes ago [-]
Large natural gas plants have about 0.05 employees per MW. Nuclear plants have 0.5 to 1.0 employees per MW.
coldpie 5 hours ago [-]
Trying to minmax for the most cost effective renewable energy is fretting over spending nickles and dimes, while billionaires and megacorps are setting hundred dollar bills on fire. It's just not a productive place to be focusing your energy. We can afford both types of renewable energy, easily, we're just choosing to let others waste that money on garbage instead.
IncreasePosts 5 hours ago [-]
It's not nickles and dimes. It's 5x more expensive than a conservative estimate on 700mw of wind or solar
coldpie 5 hours ago [-]
> It's not nickles and dimes
Yes it is. So far, we've flushed enough money down the Iran war toilet to pay for ten of these, and there's no end in sight.
pfdietz 4 hours ago [-]
I call this the "bigger rat" argument.
The rat, having been caught by the rat catcher, complains there are other, bigger rats. But he's still a rat.
The uneconomical project, having been called out, complains there are other, even more expensive activities. But that doesn't change that the project is too expensive.
coldpie 4 hours ago [-]
Nah. Groups of people spending hours and hours debating whether it is smarter to buy the $1.95 or the $1.99 can of beans at the store is being silly. Just pick one. Or buy both! It's only two bucks and we spent $2,000 on flights to Europe last week.
pfdietz 4 hours ago [-]
What an absurd analogy. Of course it's worth spending time when deciding if billions of dollars are worth spending on something. It's worth entire individual lifetimes of effort if one can save that much money.
coldpie 4 hours ago [-]
I identified ways to save 30 times that much money in this thread. It is more productive for you to focus your efforts there.
pfdietz 4 hours ago [-]
So, it's not going to cost $5B? Better inform those building it.
coldpie 4 hours ago [-]
I just think it's silly to focus your efforts complaining about $5B being arguably somewhat inefficiently spent, versus hundreds of billions of dollars going straight into the garbage. There's far better things to focus on if you're concerned about money going to waste.
boxed 4 hours ago [-]
Sure. But the comment you replied to was that we spend more on things that remove Watts from the system.
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
They're gonna throw in the factory that makes it for free tho.
pfdietz 4 hours ago [-]
No factory for civil construction projects. Nor I suspect for 300 MW (1000 MW-thermal) reactors. That puppy is getting constructed on site.
One could bring in modules and link them together. But then they tried that on the AP1000 to famously disastrous effect, at least at first.
LgWoodenBadger 3 hours ago [-]
It is when you can get a 210MW S9G, along with an entire state-of-the-art fast attack submarine for 2.8 billion
mrngld 8 hours ago [-]
If the argument is, in part, about footprint then enough solar and battery capacity to output 300MW around the clock with the same uptime/reliability as a nuclear plant is surely going to cover a lot more ground.
I only bring that up because footprint was a point further up the thread.
There's still a fair amount of site work that has to happen here in the small modular concept, but I think when parts of it happen continuously in a factory you're largely immune from a lot of the jobsite nonsense that happened from contractors milking the job for every dollar they could get, plus economies of scale that you do get in a factory setting (citation: industrial revolution).
myrmidon 7 hours ago [-]
Nuclear reactor uptime is gonna be 90% at most, which is rather easy (battery capacity for several days) to beat even with just solar + batteries (in equatorial and most mid-latitude regions, at least).
roryirvine 4 hours ago [-]
And this BWRX design is based on ABWR which turned out to be only 70% in practice.
You don't get much useful notice for unplanned nuclear outages either, whereas both wind and solar output can be forecast with reasonable accuracy 24h in advance.
xvilka 7 hours ago [-]
In China you get the economy of scale for building nuclear power plants precisely because they are standardized. Thus, pivoting to SMR is unnecessary, since they produce significantly less energy.
mixdup 7 hours ago [-]
This one may be $5 billion, but the next one will probably be (made up number) $3 billion, and the next one $1 billion
Part of the point of these projects in particular is to get the machine spinning. Once it's running you start getting some of the economies of scale
ViewTrick1002 6 hours ago [-]
This assumes learning rates never seen by nuclear energy. Within generations we've seen small learnings, and between generations the nuclear energy has been all negative learning by doing.
mixdup 6 hours ago [-]
But that is literally why they want to get to assembly line levels of throughput. Dozens of identical reactors instead of dozens of bespoke reactors that can't use learnings from the last one
Also not said is the fact that going into more standardized designs you lower the operational cost because operations can be standardized. Today every single facility has different training from the next. Even at the same facility, if it's got new + old reactors, operators can't move between them without training on both
kphorn 5 hours ago [-]
This is the biggest anticipated benefit of SMR. The US has 30+ licensed reactor designs. France has 3. Korea has 3. The economics of French and Korean reactors, built repeatably, are drastically improved over US reactors. If the NRC does its job and actually says "we know more about nuclear power than the local state energy commission and operator" then we the US can achieve those levels of repeatability and cost. We want safe reactors, we dont want infinitely customized reactors that are tailored to every state and operator's preference for how they want to polish fittings and lay out the pipes etc etc.
preisschild 7 hours ago [-]
You cant make every part in the factory anyways. You need lots of on-site civil engineering, which accounts for a large chunk of the total cost.
And many parts of large (+1GWe) reactors have also been manufactured at off-site factories and then shipped on-site by barges in the past.
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
One issue here is that the structures containing the "nuclear island" are just as expensive as that island. Containment buildings are civil construction and are not cheap.
This suggests one should move to reactor concepts that don't need such large structures. The containment building size is dictated by the need to contain a certain volume of pressurized steam in an accident (and the requirement to contain the pressure of that steam dictates the mass of the building's structure). This is perhaps the strongest motivation for reactors cooled with molten salt.
Alternately, allow steam to escape in an accident, after filtering. Most of the radioactivity could be captured. But this violates current rules that require no release of radioactivity for 24 hours in an accident.
idiotsecant 7 hours ago [-]
The expensive part is not assembly, it is validation and documentation of that design and the lack of ability to spread those costs over multiple units. Site built units are fine so long as the design is sufficiently decoupled from site conditions that it can be exactly reproduced.
throw0101a 8 hours ago [-]
> A large reactor may have a better cost per kWh, averaged over decades of its lifetime, but a smaller reactor likely has a more affordable upfront cost.
What are the civil works costs for a small(er) reactor versus a large(r) reactor?
UltraSane 11 hours ago [-]
Land is very cheap compared to how much normal reactors cost to build.
sandworm101 11 hours ago [-]
From thier website: "The BWRX-300 power block is small enough to fit within two international football pitches."
And after some digging, the core alone is 4.2m INNER diameter and over 27m tall. That is smaller than average but this is a far cry from the sales pitch of reactor modules being mass produced in a factory to be delivered to site by truck.
The label SMR applies to a wide range of reactors.
The BWRX-300 is at the upper end of that range and I don't think claims of factory-production of the whole unit were ever made for this reactor.
That said, even the much larger AP-1000 had fairly large modules made in a factory. In fact as far as I understand that was one of the problems with the Vogtle builds, because doing that only really makes sense for a larger number of units, not for just two unites.
preisschild 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, exactly. But even the sub 5 MWe microreactors that are often shown in those truck demos require lots of shielding that has to be done on-site beforehand.
alightsoul 4 hours ago [-]
The reactor vessel is technically always factory made, and the containment building (pit?) structures are built as separate prefabricated modules that are just lowered into the containment building, like a prefabricated building is assembled on site
("Oversize/Overweight Permit Limits by State (Standard Freight Loads") that should be deliverable by truck with a permit.
mrngld 7 hours ago [-]
That discusses 'superloads', I hadn't heard it called that before but it's accurate in the sense that things like self-propelled modular transporters (or towed equivalents) can move just about anything just about anywhere IF the road infrastructure all along the route is amenable to it.
Pictures don't do them justice, they're amazing to see in person. I think a typical SMR is on the small end of what's possible to move by road.
bpodgursky 5 hours ago [-]
The footprint is irrelevant compared to the top competitor (solar).
testing22321 15 hours ago [-]
Place your bets now.
Time until first power generated, and actual final total cost.
I’ll go 15 years and $10 Billion.
mpweiher 12 hours ago [-]
How certain are you of your prediction? What odds would you give me if I bet against you?
10:1?
100:1?
Background:
The BWRX predecessor, the ABWR, holds the record for the fastest construction time of a commercial nuclear power plant ever: just slightly over 3 years to first criticality, 4 years total to commercial operation.
Fun fact: it was the success of this first Gen III reactor that caused EDF to predict the EPRs would also only take 3 years to build. Which proved...optimistic. For the EPR. But proven for the ABWR.
The BWRX is also passively safe: cooling occurs via natural circulation, no pumps needed.
So if it takes 15 years I give you $100, if it takes less you give me $10000?
Deal?
roryirvine 9 hours ago [-]
Sadly, the ABWR has also proven to be unreliable and uneconomic.
Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment) but eventually pulled out after 12 years with £2bn spent and nothing built.
Maybe the BWRX will have better luck - but I'd not want to stake any money on it myself.
mpweiher 3 hours ago [-]
> Sadly, the ABWR has also proven to be unreliable and uneconomic.
Citation needed.
> Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK
That's not evidence of them being uneconomic or unreliable.
> (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment)
Excuse me? The regulatory environment that is responsible for the 7000 design changes at Hinkley Point C and thus most of the eye-watering delays and cost overruns? The regulatory environment that required the £ 700 million "fish disco" that will save a few salmon at a cost of around £ 280000 per fish?
A series of "radical, root-cause solutions" is required to simplify the UK's nuclear regulatory system in order to speed up the construction of new nuclear projects at a lower cost and on time, an independent taskforce has concluded.
I think that when people casually pronounce a bet like that, they generally mean even odds. If they meant something else they'd likely say so explicitly.
guywithahat 5 hours ago [-]
Sure but the ABWR was built in Japan, and the largest impediment to safe and profitable nuclear reactors is regulatory. The Trump admin have made substantial efforts to simplify the process to approve nuclear reactors however we have yet to see whether that's enough, or whether they'll be able to hit their 12-18 month licensing approval goals.
mmooss 3 hours ago [-]
> the largest impediment to safe and profitable nuclear reactors is regulatory
I don't know any evidence of that. My understanding is that it's a highly complex technology, many components unavoidably take a long time to construct, and it may be fundamentally uneconomic.
Has anyone, anywhere in the world profitably (subtracting subsidies) constructed one?
mpweiher 3 hours ago [-]
Yes. Most nuclear power plants are (highly) profitable and not subsidized.
mmooss 3 hours ago [-]
That's counter to everything I've read. Any evidence?
guywithahat 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not who you responded to but my recollection is that most reactors are decades old. The old ones do well. but the new ones are unprofitable/have issues. ABWR, for instance, is unprofitable.
mmooss 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks. Do you know if that that includes initial costs like construction - have they paid for themselves?
moring 11 hours ago [-]
The point of small modular reactors is not the cost of the first one, but that the cost goes down with each subsequent one. The cost of the first one is expected to be high. IMHO this is very well explained in "How Big Things Get Done" by Bent Flyvbjerg.
mpweiher 10 hours ago [-]
Smaller reactors = more reactors.
More reactors = riding the cost curve more quickly.
m4ck_ 4 hours ago [-]
Id want to see who’s funding it before betting. If it’s all private capital, that sounds fair. If its backed by direct government investment or better yet, rate payer increases, my money is they fart around for a decade or so and then the project goes belly up due to poor planning and ballooning costs. and the execs walk away much richer.
Yes, the plants are big and expensive, but once built, they are cheap to run and last pretty much forever.
SMRs lower the up-front cost, the time to build, the risk, and the financing costs, which are the biggest component of the construction costs.
Initially at somewhat higher cost per kWh, but there is plenty of headroom there. And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
kphorn 5 hours ago [-]
Agree that if you run them for 40 or 60 years (1 renewal + 1 extension) it gets very affordable. Similar to data center, the economics are great if you take out construction costs. The problem is 40-60 years has proven to be a very long time in political and economic contexts, so on a practical basis many many plants are shut down prematurely and dont fulfill that useful life, increasing the cost of capital (bonds etc) to build the new plants and therefore LCOE.
Totally agree that if you get a stable, reliable operating reactor it's very cheap. When people, politics, and the rest get in the way the actual costs drastically increase.
hvb2 8 hours ago [-]
> Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".
That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
It also says:
"The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem. Which is especially interesting since the fossil plants will get a heavy hit due to their CO2 footprint.
Because of how hazardous it is, every country treats that as a national issue thus offloading the cost to taxpayers. Besides, I'm only aware of a single country (Finland I believe) who is far along on an actual permanent storage location. The US for example still doesn't have one, until that exists the real cost simply isn't known.
> And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something. I'm sure SMRs will soon be reality and we can see how much of it is actually true. Until then, take everything you read with a grain of salt.
mpweiher 3 hours ago [-]
> That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
Please identify the cherry picking.
> The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
Absolutely! When you consider full system costs, nuclear gets much, much better.
With fossils, you have the minor externalities of climate change and other emissions, which are not taken into account.
With intermittent renewables, you have the costs of their intermittency. Those system costs tend to rise with penetration, and dwarf the LCOE.
And this also plays out in real life: electricity prices are highest in countries with high intermittent renewables penetration. The correlation is quite strong. And the inverse correlation, from high penetration to low electricity costs simply does not exist. There are no countries (or states) with high penetration of intermittent renewables and low electricity prices.
> So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem.
The opposite is true. Nuclear is actually the only power source that has to account for its waste already in the LCOE cost. And it also turns out that the waste is one of the benefits of nuclear, at least compared to other sources of electricity: there is very, very little of it, we know how to store it safely without problems, it actually goes away by itself and it is valuable fuel.
[Costs from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent]
> Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something.
Nope. Those numbers are usually the sorts of things they have to present investors to make their business case. People tend to vet those numbers pretty carefully before investing millions or billions of dollars. Also, if you lie in those numbers that turns out to be fraud and you can go to jail.
In other news: "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" -- Yogi Berra.
jacquesm 9 hours ago [-]
They are highly profitable when subsidized and you ignore decommissioning costs.
1 cent / kWh cost is fantasy land.
mpweiher 3 hours ago [-]
This is incorrect.
rayiner 7 hours ago [-]
what is the timeline and cost for 300 MW of solar plus the battery back up to make it 24/7?
testing22321 6 hours ago [-]
For fun, Gemini says between 1.1 and 3.8 billion, and 3-5 years.
That number will decrease every month too.
borodi 5 hours ago [-]
The gemini solar project in Nevada is 700 MW power + 4 hours of batteries at 380MW and cost 1.9 billion. Took 2 years and that was in 2022
rayiner 5 hours ago [-]
Is 4 hours of battery an equivalent comparison to a nuclear plant?
vablings 3 hours ago [-]
4 hours at full tilt is pretty good, assuming that for the same volume you can store double the power in the next 15 years that means that you can replace those cells at end of service life and end up with 8 years ect.
boelboel 4 hours ago [-]
Somewhere like Arizona/Nevada I would say it's getting pretty equivalent, In PNW or midwest region it's not equivalent at all.
borodi 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not anti nuclear or anything like that. It's just the financial comparison one has to make. Currently competing with solar + batteries is hard since unlike SMRs which hypothetically will get cheaper, they are getting cheaper at a quick rate and don't have the history of cost overruns that nuclear does.
rayiner 4 hours ago [-]
I understand. My point simply is that the relevant price comparison is nuclear versus solar + enough batteries to make the solar plant equivalent to a nuclear plant. The battery system is the lynchpin of efforts to substitute solar for nuclear, and the cost/timeline of that should be factored in. But usually we just see an apples-to-oranges comparison of nuclear by itself and solar by itself.
idiotsecant 7 hours ago [-]
I'll take that bet. Care to formalize?
amanaplanacanal 5 hours ago [-]
Probably the best way would be for you to pick your numbers, and payout to whoever gets closest.
PowerElectronix 5 hours ago [-]
What a waste of money, manpower and space.
nsxwolf 5 hours ago [-]
Why do you say so?
allears 4 hours ago [-]
Here's a quote from everybody's favorite AI:
The most useful comparison: cost per MWh
Rather than comparing construction bills directly, levelized cost of energy (LCOE) incorporates construction, financing, operating expenses, fuel, and the amount of electricity produced.
Lazard's 2026 estimates are approximately:
Utility solar: $40–$88/MWh
Utility solar + storage: $61–$105/MWh
Nuclear: $141–$276/MWh
These are unsubsidized estimates and represent a range of project assumptions rather than guaranteed costs. Lazard specifically notes that its nuclear estimate is based on the publicly available costs of Vogtle 3 and 4, while its solar-plus-storage figure incorporates both generation and storage.
killerstorm 3 hours ago [-]
There's not much sun in the northern areas in winter. Storage might cover 12 hours worth of usage, not 6 months of usage, including all the heating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BWRX-300
https://www.gevernova.com/nuclear/carbon-free-power/bwrx-300...
Interesting point: no pumps; convection flow for 100% of the operational envelope.
It has incredibly strict requirements for safety, we are talking SOP & Risk assesment for climbing up a 3ft ladder
There is a requirement for literally thousands of pounds of concrete to shield the reactor
The employees have to be highly qualified and trained.
The construction materials have to be validated, tested certified and then tested again during install to ensure conformance.
You must deal with spent fuel
They are not the same and cannot be retrofitted eitherways
Can modular coal (which doesn't need all of that) beat solar? If not, then I don't know why modular nuclear would be able to.
One of my favorites is pumped storage hydro.
https://www.energy.gov/cmei/water/pumped-storage-hydropower
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Because of protection from radioactive radiation, you have higher costs handling anything in a nuclear reactor compared to a coal plant. Then you have the issue of runaway nuclear reactions, hydrogen buildup etc.
By "free" I mean that you need so little fuel over the lifetime of the reactor the cost is negligible compared to all the other extensive costs of building and managing the plant.
> The cost of fuel typically accounts for 70% to 75% of a running coal-fired power plant's variable operating expenses.
I'm not going to do deep research here but it sounds pretty right. And I don't think solar is 4x cheaper than coal yet, especially solar + battery to spread out the load over non producing hours.
The "modular" part is the idea that you then produce more of them lowering unit cost and install many more than is typical at a site.
This also potentially allows you to have more control of plant energy output and respond faster to grid needs.
Recall that the fukushima meltdown was caused after the cooling failed. The reactor building survived the tsunami and the reactors were shutdown. The problem is the diesel backup generators used to run the coolant pumps were flooded.
This particular reactor is already estimated at over 5 billion $ I think. That's a lot of money for just 300MW and it probably could end up being a wildly optimistic estimate as well. I think effectively much of the construction is still on site and not in a factory. Hence the need for a construction permit. So, you get all of the downsides of complex on site construction such as including high cost, permitting overhead, lots of bureaucracy, associated delays & uncertainty, etc. without the upside of actually delivering a lot of power like you would with a larger reaction. Calling it "modular" might be overstating things a bit.
Probably cheaper, faster, and easier to just plonk down 5GW of solar, wind, or battery (or combinations of those). Especially if you calculate in the 200-300% time and dollar budget that many nuclear projects seem to end up having. Maybe this one will be different. A lot of people have a lot riding on Nuclear projects breaking this trend. But then that has been the case for decades.
That guy wanted a particular US president elected; in this regard, the investment has likely already paid off.
With a nuclear power plant, the stakes are way lower, and the payoff is much, much more distant.
But, the $5 billion here isn't purely an investment in 300 MW of capacity, it's an investment in starting up the nuclear reactor factory that can start churning these things out at $1-2 billion or whatever their goal may be
Also, have to take into consideration the overall operating costs. Nuclear costs significantly more up front but over time costs much less to operate (and is much more predictable) because you don't have to buy and burn natural gas forever
The underlying mechanic here is that cost projections are being used to sell a technology. As such, there is very strong incentive to underestimate the costs. This applies to FOAK plants and to projected experience rates.
This is an historical artifact. When that generating capacity was built, nuclear was the alternative to fossil fuels. It isn't today; renewables are now cheaper and faster to install.
Your argument can be seen as a way to ignore the cost decline of renewables without at first glance doing so.
(As you say, there are hydro-dominated grids with no nuclear, for example Costa Rica, which gets 98% of its electrical energy from renewables.)
Comparing to renewables is a different story - it can be done but it's much more complex (not dispatchable, seasonally variable) but certainly renewables makes sense in some or many places, (and in all places for a portion of the supply). I'm all in favour as long as it is actually done with the intent of getting to zero CO2, and doesn't just stall when it gets to the more difficult part of the transition. So many places get to 50% annual generation as renewable and throw up their hands about the remainder and leave it on coal/oil/natural gas
It's comparing nuclear to alternatives, one of which is natural gas. Others are renewables. One cannot make or justify a decision on nuclear without considering all the alternatives.
The only cheap nuclear watts come from facilities built a long time ago in a completely different cost environment, and had construction and insurance subsidized by the state.
Yes it is. So far, we've flushed enough money down the Iran war toilet to pay for ten of these, and there's no end in sight.
The rat, having been caught by the rat catcher, complains there are other, bigger rats. But he's still a rat.
The uneconomical project, having been called out, complains there are other, even more expensive activities. But that doesn't change that the project is too expensive.
One could bring in modules and link them together. But then they tried that on the AP1000 to famously disastrous effect, at least at first.
I only bring that up because footprint was a point further up the thread.
There's still a fair amount of site work that has to happen here in the small modular concept, but I think when parts of it happen continuously in a factory you're largely immune from a lot of the jobsite nonsense that happened from contractors milking the job for every dollar they could get, plus economies of scale that you do get in a factory setting (citation: industrial revolution).
You don't get much useful notice for unplanned nuclear outages either, whereas both wind and solar output can be forecast with reasonable accuracy 24h in advance.
Part of the point of these projects in particular is to get the machine spinning. Once it's running you start getting some of the economies of scale
Also not said is the fact that going into more standardized designs you lower the operational cost because operations can be standardized. Today every single facility has different training from the next. Even at the same facility, if it's got new + old reactors, operators can't move between them without training on both
And many parts of large (+1GWe) reactors have also been manufactured at off-site factories and then shipped on-site by barges in the past.
This suggests one should move to reactor concepts that don't need such large structures. The containment building size is dictated by the need to contain a certain volume of pressurized steam in an accident (and the requirement to contain the pressure of that steam dictates the mass of the building's structure). This is perhaps the strongest motivation for reactors cooled with molten salt.
Alternately, allow steam to escape in an accident, after filtering. Most of the radioactivity could be captured. But this violates current rules that require no release of radioactivity for 24 hours in an accident.
What are the civil works costs for a small(er) reactor versus a large(r) reactor?
And after some digging, the core alone is 4.2m INNER diameter and over 27m tall. That is smaller than average but this is a far cry from the sales pitch of reactor modules being mass produced in a factory to be delivered to site by truck.
https://www.gevernova.com/content/dam/gevernova-nuclear/glob...
The BWRX-300 is at the upper end of that range and I don't think claims of factory-production of the whole unit were ever made for this reactor.
That said, even the much larger AP-1000 had fairly large modules made in a factory. In fact as far as I understand that was one of the problems with the Vogtle builds, because doing that only really makes sense for a larger number of units, not for just two unites.
https://www.icetransport.com/blog/what-are-the-maximum-overs...
("Oversize/Overweight Permit Limits by State (Standard Freight Loads") that should be deliverable by truck with a permit.
Pictures don't do them justice, they're amazing to see in person. I think a typical SMR is on the small end of what's possible to move by road.
Time until first power generated, and actual final total cost.
I’ll go 15 years and $10 Billion.
10:1?
100:1?
Background:
The BWRX predecessor, the ABWR, holds the record for the fastest construction time of a commercial nuclear power plant ever: just slightly over 3 years to first criticality, 4 years total to commercial operation.
Fun fact: it was the success of this first Gen III reactor that caused EDF to predict the EPRs would also only take 3 years to build. Which proved...optimistic. For the EPR. But proven for the ABWR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_boiling_water_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Pow...
https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-ti...
The BWRX is also passively safe: cooling occurs via natural circulation, no pumps needed.
So if it takes 15 years I give you $100, if it takes less you give me $10000?
Deal?
Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment) but eventually pulled out after 12 years with £2bn spent and nothing built.
Maybe the BWRX will have better luck - but I'd not want to stake any money on it myself.
Citation needed.
> Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK
That's not evidence of them being uneconomic or unreliable.
> (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment)
Excuse me? The regulatory environment that is responsible for the 7000 design changes at Hinkley Point C and thus most of the eye-watering delays and cost overruns? The regulatory environment that required the £ 700 million "fish disco" that will save a few salmon at a cost of around £ 280000 per fish?
A series of "radical, root-cause solutions" is required to simplify the UK's nuclear regulatory system in order to speed up the construction of new nuclear projects at a lower cost and on time, an independent taskforce has concluded.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/radical_reforms_...
I don't know any evidence of that. My understanding is that it's a highly complex technology, many components unavoidably take a long time to construct, and it may be fundamentally uneconomic.
Has anyone, anywhere in the world profitably (subtracting subsidies) constructed one?
More reactors = riding the cost curve more quickly.
If the former: it might never happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
Yes, the plants are big and expensive, but once built, they are cheap to run and last pretty much forever.
SMRs lower the up-front cost, the time to build, the risk, and the financing costs, which are the biggest component of the construction costs.
Initially at somewhat higher cost per kWh, but there is plenty of headroom there. And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
Totally agree that if you get a stable, reliable operating reactor it's very cheap. When people, politics, and the rest get in the way the actual costs drastically increase.
That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
It also says: "The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem. Which is especially interesting since the fossil plants will get a heavy hit due to their CO2 footprint.
Because of how hazardous it is, every country treats that as a national issue thus offloading the cost to taxpayers. Besides, I'm only aware of a single country (Finland I believe) who is far along on an actual permanent storage location. The US for example still doesn't have one, until that exists the real cost simply isn't known.
> And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something. I'm sure SMRs will soon be reality and we can see how much of it is actually true. Until then, take everything you read with a grain of salt.
Please identify the cherry picking.
> The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
Absolutely! When you consider full system costs, nuclear gets much, much better.
With fossils, you have the minor externalities of climate change and other emissions, which are not taken into account.
With intermittent renewables, you have the costs of their intermittency. Those system costs tend to rise with penetration, and dwarf the LCOE.
For details in a model, see:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
And this also plays out in real life: electricity prices are highest in countries with high intermittent renewables penetration. The correlation is quite strong. And the inverse correlation, from high penetration to low electricity costs simply does not exist. There are no countries (or states) with high penetration of intermittent renewables and low electricity prices.
> So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem.
The opposite is true. Nuclear is actually the only power source that has to account for its waste already in the LCOE cost. And it also turns out that the waste is one of the benefits of nuclear, at least compared to other sources of electricity: there is very, very little of it, we know how to store it safely without problems, it actually goes away by itself and it is valuable fuel.
[Costs from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent]
> Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something.
Nope. Those numbers are usually the sorts of things they have to present investors to make their business case. People tend to vet those numbers pretty carefully before investing millions or billions of dollars. Also, if you lie in those numbers that turns out to be fraud and you can go to jail.
In other news: "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" -- Yogi Berra.
1 cent / kWh cost is fantasy land.
That number will decrease every month too.
The most useful comparison: cost per MWh
Rather than comparing construction bills directly, levelized cost of energy (LCOE) incorporates construction, financing, operating expenses, fuel, and the amount of electricity produced.
Lazard's 2026 estimates are approximately:
These are unsubsidized estimates and represent a range of project assumptions rather than guaranteed costs. Lazard specifically notes that its nuclear estimate is based on the publicly available costs of Vogtle 3 and 4, while its solar-plus-storage figure incorporates both generation and storage.