Jesus, it went from $14bn to over $30bn in cost overruns? That’s embarrassing.
Let’s make 100 more!
That’s America baby
That’s nuclear energy baby
Tax payers subsidize the power plants, pay for the electricity and the corporation gets to keep the profits
Ta payers also subsidize banks, pay for the housing price crisis twice, and the corporatation gets to keep the profits.
Neither is great but at least electricity is something that can keep you alive. Next time power goes out and your food/insulin is about to spoil and there is no heat in your home are you going to yell out “please Warren Buffet fix it!” Or are you going to be very happy to see those line workers doing their jobs?
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 should be but that’s a conversation for another time
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.
That’s because private companies are incapable of large scale engineering. They want fast profits, not stable infrastructure.
Nuclear is not going to help that. It doesn’t synergize well with wind and solar. You want something that can scale up when wind and solar drop off. Nuclear only makes sense if you can run it at the same level all the time.
There’s no reason you can’t run it at the same level all the time?
There is. Clouds come in, and all that cheap solar goes away. You want something else to ramp up. Clouds go away, solar is dumpling dirt cheap power to the grid, and those other things ramp down.
Nuclear is not the solution to that.
What do you mean it doesnt scale up? It sure does. What do you think the control room operators are doing? Nukes turn water to steam and run that steam through turbines much like any other steam driven plant. Using control rods you can adjust the energy output of the plant. Could a single nuke cover a whole state covered in solar? Not likely. But neither can a single battery.
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.
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 cost overruns helped tank an engineering company.
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.
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.
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
Nah they are over budget because there is no incentive to keep under budget, it was sub contracted out so much that there is either no communication/miscommunication/or willfully not listening, sales pretended they were engineers, and bad engineers were promoted to project management.
I work in infrastructure.
Me three weeks ago on email to main contractor: hello, your spec is calling for some parts that are no longer manufactured which means we will have to buy used. Leading to more money now and higher replacement part costs in the future for the government. Plus these parts are on the border of safe.
This morning: your exception list was rejected, follow spec.
So a small city in California is getting a brand new system made of used parts. No this isn’t a direct quote this is a summary.
can the maintenance department who will be eventually responsible start working on fabricating those so you’ll have new-made even if not off the shelf? rapid prototyping and small runs…
Nah. I deal with the electronics and city maintenance departments arent going to sit there and clone a touch screen from the late 90s. Even if they somehow could it wouldn’t matter because the spec calls for products by brand name.
This is why there are cost overruns. It’s crap like this.
Another factor in the trains, at least for California, is that the project was put on hold for a while because of the hyper loop crap. Now they need to resume buying land for the track and prices are where they are
Honestly they should just specify the project as a public works project, would give them eminent domain rights and skip the whole 9 yards of land pricing. It would force it to be done based off fair market price instead of the inflated BS all land is currently at. Least if I understand eminent domain right.
Eminent domain is subjected to legal challenges. Both to the authority (there must be a purpose) and also to the FMV assessment. Which costs money. And time.
If it was as easy as snapping their fingers, it would’ve happened.
The paying to train is one thing. The bigger problem is people who aren’t super experienced in these projects doing estimates and costings.
You’re always going to have some overruns, and if you’re lucky, some underruns too. But if your estimates are out of wack… well. Good luck. Combine that with Parkinson’s law and you are in for a world of hurt.
It’s a big job to train all those train trainers.
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.
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.
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.
Welders and other tradesmen too. I met a guy from the NRC that said that there were few if any welders certified and knowledgeable enough to work on reactor construction. And this was 15 yrs ago.
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.)
I’m sure someone will get a bonus.
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.
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.
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.
Cool. Maybe the rational scientific view of the world still has a chance.
- 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?
Are others being built now, this one started construction in 2009.
- 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.
