Great news! Nuclear is a critical component for the non-carbon energy infrastructure we're building. Yes, it's expensive, but the only way to make it cheaper is to invest in rebuilding the expertise we stupidly threw away over the past 5 decades. Paying for past mistakes always sucks, but it's better than not doing it and digging the hole even deeper.
If you think climate change caused by CO2 emissions is a real problem and you oppose nuclear energy you are like a fire fighter who opposed using water to put out fires.
Or a firefighter who has decided to wait 10 years for better water to arrive because he believed a lot of lies he read on the internet about what has been the two cheapest sources of water for a decade now.
Is it critical these days? I am by no means against nuclear energy, and if we had been building reactors these last 50 years the world would be a better place. With things like solar, wind, geo-thermal, etc... is it still smart to invest this much money into nuclear power? Wouldn't it be better to invest in solar at this point?
I have yet to see a convincing analysis that renewables+storage can cost-effectively power all the homes in Minnesota, where I live, through our 4+ month-long winters. The days get very short, the Earth tilts away from the sun, cloud-cover and snowfall is frequent, and going 24+ hours without power for heat can be fatal, not just inconvenient.
I'd welcome someone to try to run the numbers on this. I tried myself, but I just don't have the expertise. Don't forget to account for almost all of our current heating coming from natural gas burned on-premise. Then, expand your analysis to include all buildings in all northern climes. Is there even enough materials on the planet to build all those batteries? Do batteries even work at -40 degrees? And that's just one set of challenges, every area has similar but different problems for renewables to tackle.
The answer is both: put huge money into renewables and into nuclear. Nuclear is a proven tech. It works. We understand it. We stupidly threw away all of our skill to build it, and put up huge regulatory roadblocks. But those are solvable human problems, if we care to do it.
Storage for renewables is still a huge question mark, which we should also dump a ton of money into, but we need a solution today. Nuclear is here.
Why would you model Minnesota specifically when that state is part of a larger region that can tradeoff power over time? Canada's hydro is much more "here" than the hypothetical new nuclear plants Minnesota would have to build.
Splitting up the world in areas and then claiming you need to solve a different problem in each is throwing away probably the most cost effective way to get cheaper energy, more grid interconnection and more price mechanisms to shape supply and demand.
I admit this is a poor and hand-wavey response, but I'll try anyway. If we agree that solar+storage is off the table, then the question is what should we build instead? And I would guess that the people who make these decisions do consider hydro and importing power, but still decide that nuclear is the right answer. Given they're the experts and have all the info, and I don't, I'd defer to them in deciding what the best option is given all the inputs. As an example of downsides for Canadian hydro power, I would be thinking about our current geopolitical nonsense, and also transmission losses. Perhaps nuclear is the winner when you account for those? But like I said, I don't know.
Solar + storage has to buffer three kinds of variation:
(1) Diurnal. You need to store maybe 12 hours of production to get through the night. It's believable that this could be affordable with batteries.
(2) Seasonal. In a place like Minnesota you either need to overbuild solar panels by a factor of 3 or so, or you need a lot of storage, probably not batteries, but maybe some kind of chemical or thermal storage. Casey Handmer would point out that you could use excess energy in the summer for industrial activities but that could be easier said than done because the capital cost of a factory that runs 1/3 of the time is 3x that of one that runs all the time.
(3) Dunkelflaut. Sometimes you have a rough patch of cloudy weather and little wind, so the requirements are worse than (1).
It's rare to see credible analysis of the grid-scale cost of a solar + storage system because of (3) -- you can quote a reasonable price for batteries that will supply power "almost" all the time, but costs rise explosively as you increase "almost". With different requirements for reliability the cost of a storage-based system could be "a bit less" than "nuclear power plants built without bungling" or it could be much more. It also has to vary with your location though people talking about the subject don't seem to talk about that which contributes to people talking past each other. (In upstate NY I could care less about Arizona)
I'm confused. Who has agreed that solar+wind is off the table? Approximately no one has effectively decided nuclear is the right answer for a long time. If the proof is in what the market is actually building, solar and wind are the winners by huge margins.
What's commonly done in these arguments, and you did some of that, is declare that from first principles nuclear is the solution and we aren't only doing it for other reasons. Yet while there are plenty of simulations of doing full grids with only solar, wind and batteries there's never one where a full nuclear roll-out actually makes sense economically.
> I'm confused. Who has agreed that solar+wind is off the table?
Ah okay! That's our disconnect. Do go run the numbers on how much natural gas we're burning up here. It's a lot, like seriously a lot. How many batteries will we need to ensure that amount of energy is available for (say) 2 weeks of continuous cloud cover at -10 ~ -40 degrees F? Keep in mind that if it fails, people will die. I don't feel confident enough in my own analysis to share it, but do try it out yourself for an exercise. It's pretty eye-opening.
> Yet while there are plenty of simulations of doing full grids with only solar, wind and batteries
I would love to see this! Can you share some? Do they account for converting Minnesota's heating needs from natural gas?
You're again talking about simulating only Minnesota I suspect. If you want a realistic simulation there are others in the thread and RethinkX has had a whole-US simulation for a long time. What I've never seen is a nuclear roll-out simulation that argues that's a good option. Do you have one of those?
> What I've never seen is a nuclear roll-out simulation that argues that's a good option. Do you have one of those?
I don't know what a "nuclear roll-out simulation" is, exactly. As stated earlier, my position is that we should be building both nuclear and renewables. We should build whatever makes sense for the area in question. If renewable+storage can solve all of an area's needs, then that's fantastic and we should absolutely do that.
If I understand right, you are arguing we should not be building any nuclear, even in Minnesota. I'm unconvinced that renewables+storage alone can solve the Minnesota winter problem. I'm asking if you can provide a link to an analysis showing that we can feasibly and cost-effectively solve the Minnesota winter problem without any nuclear power. Can you please link to one?
> I don't know what a "nuclear roll-out simulation" is, exactly.
Any simulation where building nuclear power plants makes economic sense would do.
> I'm unconvinced that renewables+storage alone can solve the Minnesota winter problem.
You're again asking for simulations about Minnesota specifically which doesn't make sense. Unless you're thinking of seceding from the union and closing the borders to energy trade, as long as the US as a whole can do it Minnesota in particular can be a net energy importer in winter if that's what's needed. Here's the RethinkX simulation of that:
"Our analysis makes severely constraining assumptions, and by extrapolating our results from California, Texas, and New England to the entire country we find that the continental United States as
a whole could achieve 100% clean electricity from solar PV, onshore wind power, and lithium-ion batteries by 2030 for a capital investment
of less than $2 trillion, with an average system electricity cost
nationwide of under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour if 50% or more of the
system’s super power is utilized."
This is almost 5 years old at this point. Others have linked other such analysis. At this point asking people to show them simulations for renewables while trying to argue for nuclear is disingenuous. Renewables are the ones being built out at scale all over the world while nuclear struggles to deliver new projects and doesn't seem to have a viable path to being cheap.
> You're again asking for simulations about Minnesota specifically which doesn't make sense.
No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.
> Here's the RethinkX simulation of that
Thanks for the link. I focused on the New England scenario, as it's the most similar to Minnesota of the 3 scenarios. It doesn't seem to account for heating. This is the problem I keep coming to in these analyses. See page 25:
> Our model takes as inputs each region’s historical hourly electricity demand ... For the New England region, our analysis applies to the ISO New England (ISO-NE) service area which provides 100% of grid-scale electricity generation for the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Our heating is not supplied by electricity. I definitely believe that our current electricity demand may be met by renewables in a feasible timescale, but that leaves out the massive hole of heating our buildings.
The only reference I could find to New England's heating is this little note at the bottom of page 46:
> If New England chose to invest in an additional 20% in its 100% SWB system, for example, then the super power output could be used to replace most fossil fuel use in the residential and road transportation sectors combined (assuming electrification of vehicles and heating).
But I don't see any actual numerical analysis backing this up. Given their analysis earlier only spoke about electricity usage, I'm not super convinced by this one sentence.
Additionally, the New England scenario suggests they need 1,232 GWh of storage to supply only 89 hours of electricity for the area. Even if we agree that's a sufficient amount of time, the currently largest energy storage facility on the planet is only 3 GWh[1]. We would need 410 such facilities for New England alone. Can we really scale battery tech up that much, especially given resource constraints like Lithium and copper? Maybe! Hopefully! But it's a big question. Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.
> No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.
If that's your assumption then this is a non issue. Minnesota is currently less than 2% of total winter electricity demand in the US. Lets be pessimistic and assume that because it needs more heating in winter than average those 2% become 5% with electrification of heating nationwide. Even if 100% of that electricity needed to be imported from other states that's still a very small amount of the total. You could import all that solar and wind energy from other states if you can't produce any at all locally. The scenario is obviously much better than that, you'd only need to cover the shortfall which is what already naturally happens in joint grids all over the world.
> Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.
I'm still waiting for a link that shows that nuclear can be built at anything approaching reasonable cost. In all these discussions that's always presented as a given and then all the discussion is on the shortfalls of renewables. Meanwhile the actual reality on the ground is that the renewable roll-out is rising exponentially and nuclear projects are practically non existant.
Please double-check my math here. Minnesota delivers about 70,000 million cubic feet of natural gas to customers in the coldest months[1]. 70,000,000,000 cf of NG is about 72,730,000,000,000 BTUs[2]. That's equivalent to 21,315 GWh[3] of energy created by NG per month. Divide that by 31 days and you're looking at 687 GWh of natural gas per day or 29 GW of continuous generation. Minnesota's current entire electricity generation capacity is 17 GW[4], so we're looking at roughly tripling our current capacity. Nearby states are about on the same order, so we would be sucking down a whole lot of their power during low-generation periods. If we want to prepare for 7 days of no electricity generation, we would need 4,809 GWh of energy storage solely for heating, which is about 1600 instances of the currently largest battery-storage system on the planet, just for heating Minnesota.
Some combination of nuclear and solar/wind feels much more realistic to me to meet this demand, than building out that many batteries.
This is all napkin-math-y, so feel free to fudge it up and down a bit. But I just can't get the numbers to feel reasonable to me.
You've now ignored the simulations others have done, after insisting on those repeatedly, and have started making your own to again conclude solar and wind must not be viable and nuclear necessary. Meanwhile I'm still waiting on any kind of study that says nuclear can be built at anything approaching a viable cost. This is not a reasonable way to discuss something.
Fair enough, agree to disagree. I do want to say thanks for engaging me on this, and for digging up that study link. This was the most productive conversation I've had about the topic on HN.
Canada isn't small, it produces almost 10x the electrical energy that Minnesota does. But I wasn't even giving it as an example of total capacity just of a neighbor that has a bunch of hydro that can be useful in some moments. And it works both ways too. When Minnesota has excess wind Canada can benefit. The same exercise needs to be modelled with all demand and capacity within viable transmission range. And with the advancements in HVDC that range keeps increasing.
Yeah, it's pretty eye opening to see how much more power our home's solar array puts out during the summer vs. the winter. It's like 3-4x, on average, while our power demand is actually highest in winter, due to the higher deltas between outdoor temps and reasonable indoor temps. As we shift more and more heating to electric heat pump, base load power capability is going to become more and more important.
The minnesota problem always comes up in this discussion and realistically if we replaced all viable capacity outside of cold dark areas of the world it would be fine to continue burning gas there, we're not even close to renewable saturation to even think about minnesota
So, the entire nation of Canada gets a free pass to burn all the gas they want?
And Russia? And the northern EU? And many parts of China, Japan, northern US (NYC!? Buffalo?). Northern Italy, Germany, Switzerland? Does everyone who dips below 0 deg F get to burn gas? -10F? If the infra remains in place with that kind of demand, don't you see the costs being low enough that people elsewhere will want to do that rather than transition to carbon-free for the fun of it?
It's hand waved away like this, but did anyone do the analysis as suggested? My guess is the results will not be as easy to wave away as you suggest. But OTOH, maybe heat pumps + overcapacity solar arrays will do it. Who knows?
I'm not sure why I have to repeat myself, but yes, if we had 100% capacity for renewables in non-cold areas (which we're not even close to, even 80% would be miraculous) we would have decades of more time to solve these issues in cold areas. They don't have to be of equal priority.
We could ignore them completely and focus on the most viable areas and have years and years of work to be done. We are not building nearly as fast as we should.
Minnesota, Russia, Buffalo, et al are not a reason to delay significantly ramping up renewables in other places.
This is not a worthwhile subject to discuss in this context. It's rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
ignore vs delay is irrelevant, if saying "lets ignore it forever" lets us build capacity in other areas faster then let's say "lets ignore it forever"
the point is that it's not a problem that should slow down adoption of renewables everywhere else, we don't need to debate nuclear vs renewables because of cold while non-cold areas are still burning tons of fossil fuels constantly
saying "but what about cold!" only serves to add further fuel to the constant drag created by the fossil fuel industry, they love these arguments because it sows consumer doubt — they go as far as to fund anti-renewable activism under the guise of environmentalism to a similar effect
Is your argument that new generation capacity in cold climates should be built with fossil fuel plants because it's cheaper, and the saved funds should be directed to areas that are more friendly to renewables?
Well, our power needs are going up, and so we have to build new capacity. The question is what to build? These make for interesting discussions because there are many options on the table for places like Minnesota. No one's discussing the article about Texas's 500th successful solar farm deployment :)
LWRs don't need weapons grade uranium and don't produce weapons grade plutonium. Iran could have civil nuclear energy and not have a nuclear weapons program.
Huh? This seems like a non-sequitur, but if you want the answer I guess you'd want to ask someone familiar with Iranian weather patterns, which ain't me.
I think solar plus storage will likely be the better play.
I think nuclear is a thing we should have done fifty years ago in spades.
I'm not sure it's a thing we should do today when the economics behind solar are just so, so much stronger.
I'd really love to see this investment go to storage projects instead.
Battery tech finally seems to be moving, and I'd like to see the US be able to make plays on the LFP/Sodium battery fronts far more than I want overpriced power from nuclear.
I suspect solar + batteries will be dominant (but should not be the exclusive source) in places which get relatively good sun even in the winter. California and Hawaii, for example, will do pretty well with a mix that is heavy on those technologies. But if you're in North Dakota or Alaska and want to electrify your grid, you might not have a good time in December and January.
There's arguments to be made about having more transmission so you can move electricity from one place to another, but that's also expensive and difficult to build and comes with downsides like vulnerability to natural disasters and attack along a much longer path. Or, as in California, the transmission is its own latent source of disaster that can immolate the state.
Solar and wind are wrongly designated as renewable. They aren't and need to be replaced every 25 years. Wind turbines aren't easily recyclable, the current solution is to...just discard them in massive landfills. Hydro is the only "real" renewable energy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/climate/wind-turbine-recy...
For whatever reason, utilities don't have a ton of storage. Presumably it's not profitable with their business models. So in California where I live you'll run into issues when the sun isn't shining (or it's 4pm and sunny but solar panels are less effective because the sun is more oblique) and it's not windy. Right now they make up the gap by spinning up a bunch of natty gas generators in the afternoon. If nuclear helps take some of the load off, seems like a step in the right direction. Especially since I imagine the weather in NY is less consistent than CA
> In the figure above, what was previously a defined peak in natural gas generation each evening has eroded into a plateau in 2024. That is because batteries are assisting with the predictable, but large, swings in solar output each day. These rapid ramps have been largely managed by natural gas units to date, but now batteries are taking on much of that responsibility.
Which is of course the answer. How much battery storage + renewables can you build for the cost of a nuclear plant? Especially given that prices are dropping.
That's not even looking at solutions like pumped water, thermal storage, and others which have barely started ramping up to scale.
These are all being built and used in Northern Europe. There's no magic here - just solid engineering and financing.
It is always good to look at current grids and prices to see how things are. In Sweden, the sunny days around may-juli have made those months almost free. Solar and the reduced need for heating, in combination of very limited use of AC, means that you don't need much beyond solar, wind and some base load from nuclear/hydro power. I contrast, 75% of the yearly energy bill comes from the 3 winter months, where solar has around 10% (and often less) of the generative capacity. This mean that the energy bill is very variable, and bad weather during those few critical months will results in unreasonable bills (as in bankruptcies and voters that ask the government for bailout).
Under market forces, the electric company have no quarrel in sending people a bill that is 12 times the average month for a single month. There is also very luke warm interest in reducing the cost for the consumer by building out storage. The economics has so far not been that great outside of using government subsidizes, and as northvolt demonstrated, not that interested in using loans when the subsidizes run out.
That said, the Finish project of storing hot water for district heating looks like one of the more interesting storage solution. They are also investing into nuclear, so it seems like time will show how the economics will pan out. Heat exchangers are very effective at generating heat for district heating, so the heat storage has some steep competition.
Side consideration - my local utility has a program (targeted at lower income households - but there is no restriction on who can enroll) that average out the annual costs. For the first year they look at your total annual cost and divide by 12 for a flat monthly. Every year after that, they also true it up with cred/debit on the difference. For example if they overcharged by $120, they will take the average and then subtract $10 for the new, adjusted monthly bill that resets annually. I still look at the bills since I'm interested in their benchmarking data on how much power I'm using relative to the community - but I don't really need to care about seasonal fluctuation.
If one were cynical one would wonder why the push for directing resources towards nuclear energy right when solar and wind are not just significantly cheaper than nuclear but also cheaper than fossil fuels.
If one were not being cynical it makes sense to some degree in order to simply diversify our non fossil fuel energy sources.
An all of the above approach to decarbonizing makes sense, and nuclear will be a useful part of that.
I'm not an expert, but I suspect there will be a few driving use cases. Electrifying places far from the equator means heat pumps and/or district heating and providing for their power demand in the dark. In some places wind can do that, but not everywhere.
There are also loads that want very large, high-availability power and/or process heat. Reactors would pair well with things like metal refining or electrolysis to get the hydrogen for ammonia production.
At the end of the day, there's never one source of energy which is a silver bullet for everything and the best approach is probably a diverse mix of supply.
Electrifying heat far away from the equator is challenging. My area is largely heated by natural gas furnaces. During a cycle called a polar vortex, the utility company sent out a call to people to lower their thermostats because they were struggling to keep the lines pressurized with how much demand there was.
The wind chill would drop below -40 most nights, sometimes significantly lower. Wind power won't help much because they need to shut down at the worst times- either too windy or icy.
As much as I love heat pumps, having thousands upon thousands of homes switching to resistive heating because the pumps can't keep up in the evening is going to get ugly.
District heating won't save you; the metro doesn't actually burn enough stuff to heat the cities and a significant part of the population is in semi or very rural areas that wouldn't benefit anyway.
Edit: that same metro just put together a fund to renovate a few blocks of an underserved area. It's in the millions of dollars. I can't imagine the cost of converting the entire area to district heating; it would surely eclipse the entire government budget. This is the sort of thing that will only happen if you have the kind of fiat power of an imaginary wand.
Nuclear is a very poor complement for solar & wind. To complement solar & wind, you need dispatchable power to supply power while the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
Most nuclear plants can't do that, they need to run 24/7. Some can, but they're horrendously inefficient and expensive to run that way.
The largest battery storage system in use today is 2 orders of magnitude too small to even handle it's local baseband, covers 22 acres, and has already caught fire once. Batteries are decades away from large scale usage.
The entire world's supply of lithium batteries in 2024 was (rounding up) 4TWh.
In 2024, the USA used 30,000TWh.
In December of 2024, we used about 2,500TWh.
The entire planet's production capacity of batteries in 2024 would store enough energy to power the USA for 70 minutes. Being generous, this would occupy 3.5 million cubic meters, or (conveniently) 3.5 empire state buildings. For an hour of electricity.
Hydro is the most ecologically damaging for the site (it tends to wipe out an entire ecosystem for many miles).
As long as you don't care about proliferation danger (by militarizing staff and the site), you can reprocess and burn spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors/reprocessors.
I thought that they were quite throttleable, and it was because they needed to run near full power to pencil out economically/amortize their huge capex - that their fuel costs are relatively insignificant by comparison. Is that not the case?
Ya, fuel (uranium) is cheap, capital expenditures are not, so it makes sense to just run it at full bore all the time, even if you could bring it up and down quickly (which you really can’t).
Can you clarify? I thought the idea was to run nuclear 24/7 to provide a steady, base rate of power while solar and wind provide complementary power that can be quickly ramped up or down.
If you need something to supply power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, you need it to supply peak power needs, not base power needs. And if nuclear can supply peak power needs, then you might as well just have a grid that is 100% nuclear.
If nuclear can't supply peak power needs, then you need batteries or something else to do that. And if you're using batteries, it's a lot cheaper to charge them with solar than with nuclear.
France has been doing this for a long time and balances the unreliable loads of the solar and wind productions from Spain and Germany using pilotable nuclear production.
https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix
If just running nuclear power plants 24/7 is cheaper than running Solar/Wind when the weather is perfect and backup/storage when not, then why should we scale solar/wind up that much to begin with?
Sorry, that's not true. France, which has the most stringent and costly regulations, produces nuclear electricity at around 70€/MWh[0] on average. And this production is intermittent, pilotable, and more importantly, at a very large scale, for a small carbon and spacial footprint, which isn't possible to do with batteries at the moment.
Compare battery costs from 1990 to today. Don't you think that if we actually did some investment in nuclear, that we could bring the cost of that down significantly as well?
France didn't experience cost reduction in their flurry in the 1980's. China didn't experience cost reduction in their flurry in the 2010's. So if there is some sort of volume effect available, it'd need to be a number significantly greater than a few dozen. And nobody is proposing building in that sort of quantity.
10s of billions of dollars of costs have been uploaded from the electricity wholesalers to taxpayers in Ontario. Excluding those makes Ontario numbers misleading.
Talk to Mike Harris about privatizing stuff in Ontario: there's no reason why Ontario Hydro could not have been kept 100% in public hands and the debt serviced 'internally' instead of being assigned to OEFC.
At the end of the day it's still electrical rate payers paying the bill. (Just like ratepayers are paying for the failed experiment of McGuinty's Energy Green Act: what's the cost of that?)
As it stands all current nuclear refurbishments are being done with commercial rates, as is dealing with nuclear waste (per the NFWA).
For New York State, right next door to the Hydro electricity abundant Quebec, and with access to trade winds in the Atlantic Ocean? Solar, Wind & Batteries for 97% of power, send the excess to Quebec so they can idle their Hydro while the sun is shining, and then use Quebec Hydro for the last 3%.
Idling a hydro plant doesn't save them money, though. They're designed for efficient operation, and idling will actually induce more strain on the equipment.
There's just no motivation for them to take the excess energy by throttling their own.
> Idling a hydro plant doesn't save them money, though.
When you're running you more create wear-and-tear and increase the depreciation rate: this can be costed. There's also probably increased staffing costs during higher levels of operations; also costable.
Depending on the prices offered to the hydro-plant, it may or may not be profitable to run.
Is this true, or are you just assuming here? There are a lot of mechanical things that work better when they are running and used consistency. Sometimes shutting them down and starting them back up, or throttling them actually causes more wear.
Even my lawnmower runs more efficiently and has less wear at full throttle. It says right in the manual to run it at full throttle all the time.
The two Western designs built in the last generation are the EPR and the AP1000. The EPR is so unconstructable that it could have been designed by Amory Lovins to put the nails in the coffin of nuclear power. The supply chain for the AP1000 is centered in China. If it wasn't for problems of war and peace the rational thing to do might be ask the Russians to come in and built a VVER.
GE is pushing the BWRX300 which might get some cost reductions because it doesn't need a steam generator, but the small size doesn't help the economics and the cost numbers they are talking about are amazingly low.
> Let's hope the plan incorporates cutting-edge advancements, like molten salt and liquid thorium designs..
Let's hope not. At least not for the first few new nuclear plants.
There is a lot of operating experience with 'traditional' designs and lessons learned over the decade. There are also new lessons learned with the Vogtle AP1000s. Any new construction (in the US) should be AP1000s to take advantage of those lessons.
Once people are familiar nuclear again then perhaps look at different designs. But you should learn to crawl and walk before trying to run.
(A lot of nuclear construction is the civil works, and is the same for any type of design, and getting that down to cookie cutter output would help any different designs as well.)
People forget that we quit building coal burning power plants at the same time we quit building nukes... For the same reason. The capital cost of the steam turbine is atrocious.
Molten salt, HTGR and LMFBR designs could all be coupled to a supercritical-CO2 powerset which would fit in the employee break room of the turbine hall of an LWR. The steam generators for a PWR are larger than the reactor vessel itself, but a higher temperature reactor could miniaturize them [1].
You still see old literature that claims the LMFBR has a higher capital cost than the LWR but a lot of that comes from the expensive powerset and heat exchangers which have to be doubled to prevent a water-sodium reaction in the primary loop.
So yeah, 4th generation reactors could be a revolution but they are not a bird in the hand and it won't be a matter of "we'll write a check to build a 1 GW reactor" whether you are New York State or Google, it will be matter of "we'll build a test reactor" and it could be another 15 years at least before we get to the TRL 7 stage.
This is caused by the (overly) stringent regulations asked by the French authorities, and the loss of skill around building modern nuclear reactors. For instance, the EPR can withstand an airliner crash.
Besides, the EPR is very powerful and can produce clean, constant and pilotable electricity at the largest scale for a very low footprint. No other tech currently matches nuclear, especially for uses that require high and predictable loads, such as AI or smelting.
> The supply chain for the AP1000 is centered in China.
Vogtle Units 3 and 4 started a supply chain in the US. Especially Unit 3, which is one of the reasons it was so expensive: a lot of things had to be learned. Unit 4 was (IIRC) 30% cheaper than Unit 3 because a bit of a workflow was developed.
Any future US AP1000 units should be better than Vogtle—if people don't try to re-invent the wheel and use the same trail used in that project.
Smaller scale can make construction more practical though, even if the economics are worse than the theoretical best. Billions have been lost on unfinished large-scale nuke plants more than once, because they take too long, are too complex, and get more and more mired in politics as the years drag out. A small plant that could be online in months or at most a year or two from start of construction is way more pragmatic.
The concrete benefit I see for the small LWR is this: it is possible to build a pressure vessel by welding segments together but most economical to build one in a superheavy forge that can pound one out of a single piece of steel. There are no superheavy forges in North America (although there are many in various Asian and European countries) although the BWRX300 is small enough that it can be made in Canada.
As for simpler construction it has to be proven. The AP1000 was a "modular reactor" in that they tried to make it out of large modules that could be built in a factory and stuck together on site. The factories struggled to make those modules and when they arrived they often needed major rework. The ACP100 was recently completed in China
and press releases boasted that it was one of the most complex construction projects of all time -- what I wanted to hear was "this is one of the most simple construction projects of all time!"
but terribly uneconomical. Optimizing economics is about optimizing power output from a given volume of pressure vessel. The power of a nuclear reactor is limited by the ability to get heat out of the fuel rods and into the coolant so good economics requires producing energy evenly throughout the whole core, which commercial reactors do and submarine reactors do not.
Submarine reactors are worth it, however, because being able to go around the world over and over again without surfacing is of great military value. It's insane how fast a nuclear aircraft carrier can travel, there's enough uncertainty over where it will be in 15 minutes that an attack with a reasonably sized nuclear warhead could fail to kill it so, so china developed maneuverable hypersonic weapons that could punch a hole in the deck with a conventional weapon
If nuclear is going to work, it cannot be commercial. The economics won't work out. It has to be federally owned and operated (preferably by military staff so they are under UCMJ) and run as a public good and not for profit.
Finland tried the VVER option as well, and it was even worse than EPR. Between 2013 and 2022, the Russians proved incapable of providing sufficient documentation that a construction permit could be issued.
There is almost no way this doesn't end up wasting an enormous amount of money, while only having a slim chance of ever coming online, while only having a slim chance of actually lowering energy costs.
If you are gonna blow $10 Billion on a 10 year nightmare project, just buy a ton of solar, wind, and batteries to get 2GW in 5 years.
Additionally, renewables have their own drawbacks - their volatility makes reliability more challenging and thus brings energy prices higher. Nuclear has the benefit of providing consistent base load, something that's needed more now than ever. That kind of thing might be worth the investment, but until now no one has wanted to put up the kind of money needed for that level of reliability.
In a state the size of New York, the sun is always shining or the wind always blowing somewhere in the state. You then use battery back-up to fill the gaps and gas to fill the gaps of the filled gaps.
The latest nuclear plant in the US was the completion of the Vogtle plant in Georgia, which ran a staggering $22B over budget. Twenty Two Billion Dollars over budget!
$22B, is enough to build the largest solar plant in the US 10 times over (total 5GW). Or about 7 of the largest wind farm (total 10.5GW). Or 33 of the largest battery storage plant. With $2B left over for logistics.
And $14B left over for anything else because the total cost was $36B!
The current state of nuclear doesn't make sense anyway you cut it.
> The latest nuclear plant in the US was the completion of the Vogtle plant in Georgia, which ran a staggering $22B over budget. Twenty Two Billion Dollars over budget!
And Unit 4 was (IIRC) 30% cheaper than Unit 3. Because with Unit 3 they had to learn everything about building a nuclear power plant from scratch (from a practical, steel-toed boots on the ground perspective).
Now that there's (a) an actual supply chain (brought up from scratch), and (b) people with a workflow on how to build AP1000s, future units will decrease costs over time. During the 1990s and into the 2000s Japan was bringing up nuclear plants in 4-5 years like clockwork:
I think that you need to consider the cost of a blackout due to unreliable electricity production. This is the wealthiest area of the world, so any blackout or even threat that it may happen would be very costly, which is why you need redundancy and can't rely on one power source.
One of the really tedious types of comment I keep seeing on HN whenever someone posts about some possible or new nuclear power project can be summed up as "But nuclear is no good/too expensive because it just can't do X and Y, so why bother?!".
Sure, maybe, right now some of these kinds of criticisms apply, but we're talking about a technology that's barely been given much room to develop seriously in most cases. In others, where it has been allowed a bit more leeway for development, it's shown itself to be remarkably useful. For example, in the reactors aboard military vessels, or with RTGs.
These sorts of of criticisms such as above seem absurd, especially when you imagine there were indeed people saying roughly similar things about technologies like solar power back in the 70s, or powered flight close to the turn of the 20th century.
It's foolish to shun the entire scope of a technology if its present state of development is the only one you know anything about. This applies so especially to nuclear power, which so very obviously has considerably more potential, without even going into more exotic territories like sustainable fusion energy.
> The New York Power Authority—created nearly a century ago by then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt to manage hydropower production on behalf of the public
This is rich considering that NYPA’s current customers are exclusively government entities. I found this out when researching why I pay among the highest cost per KWh in the country despite having the largest non profit publicly owned power utility in the country.
tl;dr it was commissioned, constructed, and closed due to local safety concerns in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident.
Interesting excerpt from the wiki:
In 2004, the Long Island Power Authority erected two 100-foot, 50 kW wind turbines at the Shoreham Energy Center site,[18] as part of a renewable-energy program.[19][20] At a ceremony, chairman Kessel stated, "We stand in the shadow of a modern-day Stonehenge, a multibillion-dollar monument to a failed energy policy, to formally commission the operation of a renewable energy technology that will harness the power of the wind for the benefit of Long Island's environment." The turbines generate 200 MWh per year, or 1/35,000th of the energy the nuclear plant would have produced.[21]
Why wouldn't the governor solicit bids for energy, and let the companies that actually build and run generation capacity decide the cheapest way to do that? Having the governor choose seems weird to me.
Technology neutrality is fairly important. The role of the government should be in controlling the requirements which has a collective/social cost, like emissions, grid stability and price variability (as those are things that voters will demand from the government, as has been demonstrated in EU during the energy crisis). As long any company is willing to provide similar services under similar requirements, what technology they choose to use may be better determined by market forces rather than political choices.
What they should not do however is to simply look at potential generation capacity and have that be the only important criteria. Voters has clearly demonstrated that they will vote for politicians that can promise stable grid and stable pricing, rather than having those being controlled by the market.
The market is famously terrible at pricing in externalities and accounting for long-term needs. I think if you used the government to force bidders to account for those, you'd just end up in the same place.
You might, or you might not. You might end up with tidal or wave, or wind+batteries, or something else. Tying yourself to something that's going to take decades and almost certainly include big cost overruns seems like a terrible idea.
Not an unreasonable choice if externalities such as carbon (and mining, etc. in the case of nuclear) are taken into account. And suppose you price carbon in, how do you actually produce a real carbon sink at the assumed cost and scale if nat gas wins the bid?
Are you suggesting letting private companies whose entire purpose is to make the most amount of profit for their shareholders to be the ones that decide what is best for the people of the state?
NYPA does build and run generation capacity, it's just the state owned utility. Besides, this is a policy and strategy push instead of a lowest-bidder ask.
Solar and wind are cheapest when installed in ideal locations with ideal parts.
Gas is a bit more expensive than the ideal green model, but cheaper on average. It also can be built anywhere on a comparatively small land parcel, and can provide easily scalable energy 24/7/365.
I am hoping they build this in Oswego on top of the other reactors being built in 9 mile. Lake Ontario has an inexhaustible amount of cold water, and there's plenty of space up there.
This needs to be in Western New York. The existing plant for the region is operating on an an extension that expires the earliest of the bunch in 2029. When it goes, electricity rates are going to skyrocket without a replacement.
Ill admit I am saying this out of only regional loyalty and have no idea about the status of other plants in upstate NY. I am also not sure on how much the power generated in Upstate NY goes to say Toronto vs NYC, and how much that reactor being in Buffalo or Rochester would even matter for that vs Oswego being 100 miles closer to NYC.
Love it or hate it, the AI hype has at least lit a fire on nuclear power. If AI winter comes, we at least get to keep the powerplants and receive clean power for decades.
> If AI winter comes, we at least get to keep the powerplants and receive clean power for decades.
When the AI winter comes, it’s not going to mean the energy devoted to AI applications decreases, it’ll mean the perception of rapid future expansion in profits fueling VC interest in AI goes away. It’s not like we cut back the aggregate energy cohsumption of systems running, say, rule-based expert systems during the last AI winter.
We will see. It's unfortunate but there is a long list of attempted nuke construction that ends up billions of dollars in the hole before the first mwh is made.
And if companies were obliged to insure their power plants properly, it would cost many, many billions more. It is the same old story: socialise risks and privatise profits.
The same far-sighted leaders who permanently shuttered 2 GW of nuclear power, in a time of low electricity prices, would like credit, please, for their aspirational concept of a plan for building 1 GW of nuclear. To alleviate high electricity prices.
"New York City's greenhouse gas emissions from electricity have increased from approximately 500 to 900 tons of CO2 per MWh from 2019 to 2022 as a result of the closure."
https://archive.ph/0UZ1W
Great news! Nuclear is a critical component for the non-carbon energy infrastructure we're building. Yes, it's expensive, but the only way to make it cheaper is to invest in rebuilding the expertise we stupidly threw away over the past 5 decades. Paying for past mistakes always sucks, but it's better than not doing it and digging the hole even deeper.
If you think climate change caused by CO2 emissions is a real problem and you oppose nuclear energy you are like a fire fighter who opposed using water to put out fires.
Or a firefighter who has decided to wait 10 years for better water to arrive because he believed a lot of lies he read on the internet about what has been the two cheapest sources of water for a decade now.
It was never cheap even with the expertise and such a kind of centralized energy generation is a bad idea.
Is it critical these days? I am by no means against nuclear energy, and if we had been building reactors these last 50 years the world would be a better place. With things like solar, wind, geo-thermal, etc... is it still smart to invest this much money into nuclear power? Wouldn't it be better to invest in solar at this point?
I have yet to see a convincing analysis that renewables+storage can cost-effectively power all the homes in Minnesota, where I live, through our 4+ month-long winters. The days get very short, the Earth tilts away from the sun, cloud-cover and snowfall is frequent, and going 24+ hours without power for heat can be fatal, not just inconvenient.
I'd welcome someone to try to run the numbers on this. I tried myself, but I just don't have the expertise. Don't forget to account for almost all of our current heating coming from natural gas burned on-premise. Then, expand your analysis to include all buildings in all northern climes. Is there even enough materials on the planet to build all those batteries? Do batteries even work at -40 degrees? And that's just one set of challenges, every area has similar but different problems for renewables to tackle.
The answer is both: put huge money into renewables and into nuclear. Nuclear is a proven tech. It works. We understand it. We stupidly threw away all of our skill to build it, and put up huge regulatory roadblocks. But those are solvable human problems, if we care to do it.
Storage for renewables is still a huge question mark, which we should also dump a ton of money into, but we need a solution today. Nuclear is here.
Why would you model Minnesota specifically when that state is part of a larger region that can tradeoff power over time? Canada's hydro is much more "here" than the hypothetical new nuclear plants Minnesota would have to build.
Splitting up the world in areas and then claiming you need to solve a different problem in each is throwing away probably the most cost effective way to get cheaper energy, more grid interconnection and more price mechanisms to shape supply and demand.
I admit this is a poor and hand-wavey response, but I'll try anyway. If we agree that solar+storage is off the table, then the question is what should we build instead? And I would guess that the people who make these decisions do consider hydro and importing power, but still decide that nuclear is the right answer. Given they're the experts and have all the info, and I don't, I'd defer to them in deciding what the best option is given all the inputs. As an example of downsides for Canadian hydro power, I would be thinking about our current geopolitical nonsense, and also transmission losses. Perhaps nuclear is the winner when you account for those? But like I said, I don't know.
Solar + storage has to buffer three kinds of variation:
(1) Diurnal. You need to store maybe 12 hours of production to get through the night. It's believable that this could be affordable with batteries.
(2) Seasonal. In a place like Minnesota you either need to overbuild solar panels by a factor of 3 or so, or you need a lot of storage, probably not batteries, but maybe some kind of chemical or thermal storage. Casey Handmer would point out that you could use excess energy in the summer for industrial activities but that could be easier said than done because the capital cost of a factory that runs 1/3 of the time is 3x that of one that runs all the time.
(3) Dunkelflaut. Sometimes you have a rough patch of cloudy weather and little wind, so the requirements are worse than (1).
It's rare to see credible analysis of the grid-scale cost of a solar + storage system because of (3) -- you can quote a reasonable price for batteries that will supply power "almost" all the time, but costs rise explosively as you increase "almost". With different requirements for reliability the cost of a storage-based system could be "a bit less" than "nuclear power plants built without bungling" or it could be much more. It also has to vary with your location though people talking about the subject don't seem to talk about that which contributes to people talking past each other. (In upstate NY I could care less about Arizona)
Credible analysis doesn't go to 100%.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
The cheapest grid is 90-97% renewable (depending on location) in 2025. As battery prices go down, that number gets higher.
I'm confused. Who has agreed that solar+wind is off the table? Approximately no one has effectively decided nuclear is the right answer for a long time. If the proof is in what the market is actually building, solar and wind are the winners by huge margins.
What's commonly done in these arguments, and you did some of that, is declare that from first principles nuclear is the solution and we aren't only doing it for other reasons. Yet while there are plenty of simulations of doing full grids with only solar, wind and batteries there's never one where a full nuclear roll-out actually makes sense economically.
> I'm confused. Who has agreed that solar+wind is off the table?
Ah okay! That's our disconnect. Do go run the numbers on how much natural gas we're burning up here. It's a lot, like seriously a lot. How many batteries will we need to ensure that amount of energy is available for (say) 2 weeks of continuous cloud cover at -10 ~ -40 degrees F? Keep in mind that if it fails, people will die. I don't feel confident enough in my own analysis to share it, but do try it out yourself for an exercise. It's pretty eye-opening.
> Yet while there are plenty of simulations of doing full grids with only solar, wind and batteries
I would love to see this! Can you share some? Do they account for converting Minnesota's heating needs from natural gas?
You're again talking about simulating only Minnesota I suspect. If you want a realistic simulation there are others in the thread and RethinkX has had a whole-US simulation for a long time. What I've never seen is a nuclear roll-out simulation that argues that's a good option. Do you have one of those?
> What I've never seen is a nuclear roll-out simulation that argues that's a good option. Do you have one of those?
I don't know what a "nuclear roll-out simulation" is, exactly. As stated earlier, my position is that we should be building both nuclear and renewables. We should build whatever makes sense for the area in question. If renewable+storage can solve all of an area's needs, then that's fantastic and we should absolutely do that.
If I understand right, you are arguing we should not be building any nuclear, even in Minnesota. I'm unconvinced that renewables+storage alone can solve the Minnesota winter problem. I'm asking if you can provide a link to an analysis showing that we can feasibly and cost-effectively solve the Minnesota winter problem without any nuclear power. Can you please link to one?
> I don't know what a "nuclear roll-out simulation" is, exactly.
Any simulation where building nuclear power plants makes economic sense would do.
> I'm unconvinced that renewables+storage alone can solve the Minnesota winter problem.
You're again asking for simulations about Minnesota specifically which doesn't make sense. Unless you're thinking of seceding from the union and closing the borders to energy trade, as long as the US as a whole can do it Minnesota in particular can be a net energy importer in winter if that's what's needed. Here's the RethinkX simulation of that:
https://www.tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Rethinki...
"Our analysis makes severely constraining assumptions, and by extrapolating our results from California, Texas, and New England to the entire country we find that the continental United States as a whole could achieve 100% clean electricity from solar PV, onshore wind power, and lithium-ion batteries by 2030 for a capital investment of less than $2 trillion, with an average system electricity cost nationwide of under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour if 50% or more of the system’s super power is utilized."
This is almost 5 years old at this point. Others have linked other such analysis. At this point asking people to show them simulations for renewables while trying to argue for nuclear is disingenuous. Renewables are the ones being built out at scale all over the world while nuclear struggles to deliver new projects and doesn't seem to have a viable path to being cheap.
> You're again asking for simulations about Minnesota specifically which doesn't make sense.
No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.
> Here's the RethinkX simulation of that
Thanks for the link. I focused on the New England scenario, as it's the most similar to Minnesota of the 3 scenarios. It doesn't seem to account for heating. This is the problem I keep coming to in these analyses. See page 25:
> Our model takes as inputs each region’s historical hourly electricity demand ... For the New England region, our analysis applies to the ISO New England (ISO-NE) service area which provides 100% of grid-scale electricity generation for the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Our heating is not supplied by electricity. I definitely believe that our current electricity demand may be met by renewables in a feasible timescale, but that leaves out the massive hole of heating our buildings.
The only reference I could find to New England's heating is this little note at the bottom of page 46:
> If New England chose to invest in an additional 20% in its 100% SWB system, for example, then the super power output could be used to replace most fossil fuel use in the residential and road transportation sectors combined (assuming electrification of vehicles and heating).
But I don't see any actual numerical analysis backing this up. Given their analysis earlier only spoke about electricity usage, I'm not super convinced by this one sentence.
Additionally, the New England scenario suggests they need 1,232 GWh of storage to supply only 89 hours of electricity for the area. Even if we agree that's a sufficient amount of time, the currently largest energy storage facility on the planet is only 3 GWh[1]. We would need 410 such facilities for New England alone. Can we really scale battery tech up that much, especially given resource constraints like Lithium and copper? Maybe! Hopefully! But it's a big question. Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.
[1] https://electrek.co/2023/08/03/worlds-largest-battery-storag...
> No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.
If that's your assumption then this is a non issue. Minnesota is currently less than 2% of total winter electricity demand in the US. Lets be pessimistic and assume that because it needs more heating in winter than average those 2% become 5% with electrification of heating nationwide. Even if 100% of that electricity needed to be imported from other states that's still a very small amount of the total. You could import all that solar and wind energy from other states if you can't produce any at all locally. The scenario is obviously much better than that, you'd only need to cover the shortfall which is what already naturally happens in joint grids all over the world.
> Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.
I'm still waiting for a link that shows that nuclear can be built at anything approaching reasonable cost. In all these discussions that's always presented as a given and then all the discussion is on the shortfalls of renewables. Meanwhile the actual reality on the ground is that the renewable roll-out is rising exponentially and nuclear projects are practically non existant.
Please double-check my math here. Minnesota delivers about 70,000 million cubic feet of natural gas to customers in the coldest months[1]. 70,000,000,000 cf of NG is about 72,730,000,000,000 BTUs[2]. That's equivalent to 21,315 GWh[3] of energy created by NG per month. Divide that by 31 days and you're looking at 687 GWh of natural gas per day or 29 GW of continuous generation. Minnesota's current entire electricity generation capacity is 17 GW[4], so we're looking at roughly tripling our current capacity. Nearby states are about on the same order, so we would be sucking down a whole lot of their power during low-generation periods. If we want to prepare for 7 days of no electricity generation, we would need 4,809 GWh of energy storage solely for heating, which is about 1600 instances of the currently largest battery-storage system on the planet, just for heating Minnesota.
Some combination of nuclear and solar/wind feels much more realistic to me to meet this demand, than building out that many batteries.
This is all napkin-math-y, so feel free to fudge it up and down a bit. But I just can't get the numbers to feel reasonable to me.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3060mn2m.htm
[2] 1 cf ng = 1039 btu https://www.nrg.com/resources/energy-tools/energy-conversion...
[3] https://www.convertunits.com/from/British+thermal+unit/to/gi...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Minn...
You've now ignored the simulations others have done, after insisting on those repeatedly, and have started making your own to again conclude solar and wind must not be viable and nuclear necessary. Meanwhile I'm still waiting on any kind of study that says nuclear can be built at anything approaching a viable cost. This is not a reasonable way to discuss something.
Fair enough, agree to disagree. I do want to say thanks for engaging me on this, and for digging up that study link. This was the most productive conversation I've had about the topic on HN.
Minnesota has 8 hydro plants already... in addition to 2 nuclear plants and a host of coal, gas, solar, wind, etc.
They generate 57 Twh right now. That's about 10% of the current production of the entire nation of Canada just for one US state.
I think you are greatly underestimating the scale of the United States compared to Canada.
Canada isn't small, it produces almost 10x the electrical energy that Minnesota does. But I wasn't even giving it as an example of total capacity just of a neighbor that has a bunch of hydro that can be useful in some moments. And it works both ways too. When Minnesota has excess wind Canada can benefit. The same exercise needs to be modelled with all demand and capacity within viable transmission range. And with the advancements in HVDC that range keeps increasing.
Expand the analysis to anyone above 40deg latitude with wintertime average temperature below freezing. Show your work. That's fine.
40deg lat includes a _lot_ of the world.
How do you handle growth in demand over time? Anywhere with good economics to build hydro has been done before.
Yeah, it's pretty eye opening to see how much more power our home's solar array puts out during the summer vs. the winter. It's like 3-4x, on average, while our power demand is actually highest in winter, due to the higher deltas between outdoor temps and reasonable indoor temps. As we shift more and more heating to electric heat pump, base load power capability is going to become more and more important.
And yeah, we need to decarbonize ASAP.
The minnesota problem always comes up in this discussion and realistically if we replaced all viable capacity outside of cold dark areas of the world it would be fine to continue burning gas there, we're not even close to renewable saturation to even think about minnesota
So, the entire nation of Canada gets a free pass to burn all the gas they want?
And Russia? And the northern EU? And many parts of China, Japan, northern US (NYC!? Buffalo?). Northern Italy, Germany, Switzerland? Does everyone who dips below 0 deg F get to burn gas? -10F? If the infra remains in place with that kind of demand, don't you see the costs being low enough that people elsewhere will want to do that rather than transition to carbon-free for the fun of it?
It's hand waved away like this, but did anyone do the analysis as suggested? My guess is the results will not be as easy to wave away as you suggest. But OTOH, maybe heat pumps + overcapacity solar arrays will do it. Who knows?
I'm not sure why I have to repeat myself, but yes, if we had 100% capacity for renewables in non-cold areas (which we're not even close to, even 80% would be miraculous) we would have decades of more time to solve these issues in cold areas. They don't have to be of equal priority.
We could ignore them completely and focus on the most viable areas and have years and years of work to be done. We are not building nearly as fast as we should.
Minnesota, Russia, Buffalo, et al are not a reason to delay significantly ramping up renewables in other places.
This is not a worthwhile subject to discuss in this context. It's rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
You have to repeat yourself because you're adding information when you state it again. Compare:
> if we replaced all viable capacity outside of cold dark areas of the world it would be fine to continue burning gas there
with
> we would have decades of more time to solve these issues in cold areas
As in: Ignore vs Delay. It's clear in hindsight, but wasn't on first reading.
ignore vs delay is irrelevant, if saying "lets ignore it forever" lets us build capacity in other areas faster then let's say "lets ignore it forever"
the point is that it's not a problem that should slow down adoption of renewables everywhere else, we don't need to debate nuclear vs renewables because of cold while non-cold areas are still burning tons of fossil fuels constantly
saying "but what about cold!" only serves to add further fuel to the constant drag created by the fossil fuel industry, they love these arguments because it sows consumer doubt — they go as far as to fund anti-renewable activism under the guise of environmentalism to a similar effect
> Minnesota, Russia, Buffalo, et al are not a reason to delay significantly ramping up renewables in other places.
Wait, what? Who in this discussion suggested it was?
Nobody did. GP is dodging the question of what to do in MN by saying it's not important and might require future tech.
Edit: it's less important to worry about that at the moment.
it's not important right now and if we accelerate building renewables elsewhere we may find that it's never important
Is your argument that new generation capacity in cold climates should be built with fossil fuel plants because it's cheaper, and the saved funds should be directed to areas that are more friendly to renewables?
It makes sense but triggers false dichotomy antibodies and dodges the question OP had, that's all.
Well, our power needs are going up, and so we have to build new capacity. The question is what to build? These make for interesting discussions because there are many options on the table for places like Minnesota. No one's discussing the article about Texas's 500th successful solar farm deployment :)
I'd like to reverse the location specific question and ask: what is the correct number of nuclear reactors for Iran to have?
LWRs don't need weapons grade uranium and don't produce weapons grade plutonium. Iran could have civil nuclear energy and not have a nuclear weapons program.
Huh? This seems like a non-sequitur, but if you want the answer I guess you'd want to ask someone familiar with Iranian weather patterns, which ain't me.
I think solar plus storage will likely be the better play.
I think nuclear is a thing we should have done fifty years ago in spades.
I'm not sure it's a thing we should do today when the economics behind solar are just so, so much stronger.
I'd really love to see this investment go to storage projects instead.
Battery tech finally seems to be moving, and I'd like to see the US be able to make plays on the LFP/Sodium battery fronts far more than I want overpriced power from nuclear.
I suspect solar + batteries will be dominant (but should not be the exclusive source) in places which get relatively good sun even in the winter. California and Hawaii, for example, will do pretty well with a mix that is heavy on those technologies. But if you're in North Dakota or Alaska and want to electrify your grid, you might not have a good time in December and January.
There's arguments to be made about having more transmission so you can move electricity from one place to another, but that's also expensive and difficult to build and comes with downsides like vulnerability to natural disasters and attack along a much longer path. Or, as in California, the transmission is its own latent source of disaster that can immolate the state.
Solar and wind are wrongly designated as renewable. They aren't and need to be replaced every 25 years. Wind turbines aren't easily recyclable, the current solution is to...just discard them in massive landfills. Hydro is the only "real" renewable energy. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/climate/wind-turbine-recy...
For whatever reason, utilities don't have a ton of storage. Presumably it's not profitable with their business models. So in California where I live you'll run into issues when the sun isn't shining (or it's 4pm and sunny but solar panels are less effective because the sun is more oblique) and it's not windy. Right now they make up the gap by spinning up a bunch of natty gas generators in the afternoon. If nuclear helps take some of the load off, seems like a step in the right direction. Especially since I imagine the weather in NY is less consistent than CA
Battery rollout in California has changed this situation over the last few years
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/
> In the figure above, what was previously a defined peak in natural gas generation each evening has eroded into a plateau in 2024. That is because batteries are assisting with the predictable, but large, swings in solar output each day. These rapid ramps have been largely managed by natural gas units to date, but now batteries are taking on much of that responsibility.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/
Which is of course the answer. How much battery storage + renewables can you build for the cost of a nuclear plant? Especially given that prices are dropping.
That's not even looking at solutions like pumped water, thermal storage, and others which have barely started ramping up to scale.
These are all being built and used in Northern Europe. There's no magic here - just solid engineering and financing.
> How much battery storage + renewables can you build for the cost of a nuclear plant?
Which is the topic of this recent study (though they limit themselves to solar and battery):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44336988
It is always good to look at current grids and prices to see how things are. In Sweden, the sunny days around may-juli have made those months almost free. Solar and the reduced need for heating, in combination of very limited use of AC, means that you don't need much beyond solar, wind and some base load from nuclear/hydro power. I contrast, 75% of the yearly energy bill comes from the 3 winter months, where solar has around 10% (and often less) of the generative capacity. This mean that the energy bill is very variable, and bad weather during those few critical months will results in unreasonable bills (as in bankruptcies and voters that ask the government for bailout).
Under market forces, the electric company have no quarrel in sending people a bill that is 12 times the average month for a single month. There is also very luke warm interest in reducing the cost for the consumer by building out storage. The economics has so far not been that great outside of using government subsidizes, and as northvolt demonstrated, not that interested in using loans when the subsidizes run out.
That said, the Finish project of storing hot water for district heating looks like one of the more interesting storage solution. They are also investing into nuclear, so it seems like time will show how the economics will pan out. Heat exchangers are very effective at generating heat for district heating, so the heat storage has some steep competition.
Side consideration - my local utility has a program (targeted at lower income households - but there is no restriction on who can enroll) that average out the annual costs. For the first year they look at your total annual cost and divide by 12 for a flat monthly. Every year after that, they also true it up with cred/debit on the difference. For example if they overcharged by $120, they will take the average and then subtract $10 for the new, adjusted monthly bill that resets annually. I still look at the bills since I'm interested in their benchmarking data on how much power I'm using relative to the community - but I don't really need to care about seasonal fluctuation.
If one were cynical one would wonder why the push for directing resources towards nuclear energy right when solar and wind are not just significantly cheaper than nuclear but also cheaper than fossil fuels.
If one were not being cynical it makes sense to some degree in order to simply diversify our non fossil fuel energy sources.
An all of the above approach to decarbonizing makes sense, and nuclear will be a useful part of that.
I'm not an expert, but I suspect there will be a few driving use cases. Electrifying places far from the equator means heat pumps and/or district heating and providing for their power demand in the dark. In some places wind can do that, but not everywhere.
There are also loads that want very large, high-availability power and/or process heat. Reactors would pair well with things like metal refining or electrolysis to get the hydrogen for ammonia production.
At the end of the day, there's never one source of energy which is a silver bullet for everything and the best approach is probably a diverse mix of supply.
Electrifying heat far away from the equator is challenging. My area is largely heated by natural gas furnaces. During a cycle called a polar vortex, the utility company sent out a call to people to lower their thermostats because they were struggling to keep the lines pressurized with how much demand there was.
The wind chill would drop below -40 most nights, sometimes significantly lower. Wind power won't help much because they need to shut down at the worst times- either too windy or icy.
As much as I love heat pumps, having thousands upon thousands of homes switching to resistive heating because the pumps can't keep up in the evening is going to get ugly.
District heating won't save you; the metro doesn't actually burn enough stuff to heat the cities and a significant part of the population is in semi or very rural areas that wouldn't benefit anyway.
Edit: that same metro just put together a fund to renovate a few blocks of an underserved area. It's in the millions of dollars. I can't imagine the cost of converting the entire area to district heating; it would surely eclipse the entire government budget. This is the sort of thing that will only happen if you have the kind of fiat power of an imaginary wand.
The unsolved problem with solar and wind is storage. You still need electricity at night or when the wind isn't blowing.
Nuclear is a very poor complement for solar & wind. To complement solar & wind, you need dispatchable power to supply power while the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
Most nuclear plants can't do that, they need to run 24/7. Some can, but they're horrendously inefficient and expensive to run that way.
You need continuous baseband generation to keep an electrical grid stable.
If not nuclear, then it's going to be coal, gas, hydro, etc. Of the list, nuclear is the cleanest and least ecologicially destructive (by far).
DC power sources (aka batteries) with smart inverters are the cheapest and fastest sources of grid stability in 2025t.
The largest battery storage system in use today is 2 orders of magnitude too small to even handle it's local baseband, covers 22 acres, and has already caught fire once. Batteries are decades away from large scale usage.
Scale is what will nail you... every time.
And with "large scale usage" I'm more worried about battery fires than nuclear meltdowns.
How large a volume of battery is needed to power nyc if the wind and sun are out for 5 hours?
In units of Walmart parking lots please :)
(Answer: 10)
The entire world's supply of lithium batteries in 2024 was (rounding up) 4TWh.
In 2024, the USA used 30,000TWh.
In December of 2024, we used about 2,500TWh.
The entire planet's production capacity of batteries in 2024 would store enough energy to power the USA for 70 minutes. Being generous, this would occupy 3.5 million cubic meters, or (conveniently) 3.5 empire state buildings. For an hour of electricity.
That's not very large. It's a tiny fraction of the size of the Hoover dam reservoir, for instance.
We need about four hours worth of batteries by 2050 or so, and production capacity is increasing 50% per year.
Not necessarily true if you have enough storage AND your renewables have grid-forming inverters. That may be quite a lot of storage.
> least ecologicially destructive (by far)
On average. The long tail doesn't look so great.
Hydro is the most ecologically damaging for the site (it tends to wipe out an entire ecosystem for many miles).
As long as you don't care about proliferation danger (by militarizing staff and the site), you can reprocess and burn spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors/reprocessors.
I thought that they were quite throttleable, and it was because they needed to run near full power to pencil out economically/amortize their huge capex - that their fuel costs are relatively insignificant by comparison. Is that not the case?
Yes, that's what I meant by "but they're horrendously inefficient and expensive to run that way."
Ah ok, sounded to me like there was some big ongoing inefficiency/inability, more than an opportunity cost thing.
Ya, fuel (uranium) is cheap, capital expenditures are not, so it makes sense to just run it at full bore all the time, even if you could bring it up and down quickly (which you really can’t).
Yes, they definitely can do load following.
Can you clarify? I thought the idea was to run nuclear 24/7 to provide a steady, base rate of power while solar and wind provide complementary power that can be quickly ramped up or down.
If you need something to supply power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, you need it to supply peak power needs, not base power needs. And if nuclear can supply peak power needs, then you might as well just have a grid that is 100% nuclear.
If nuclear can't supply peak power needs, then you need batteries or something else to do that. And if you're using batteries, it's a lot cheaper to charge them with solar than with nuclear.
France has been doing this for a long time and balances the unreliable loads of the solar and wind productions from Spain and Germany using pilotable nuclear production. https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix
You are not thinking about the big picture.
If just running nuclear power plants 24/7 is cheaper than running Solar/Wind when the weather is perfect and backup/storage when not, then why should we scale solar/wind up that much to begin with?
> If just running nuclear power plants 24/7 is cheaper
It's not cheaper, it's about 20x as expensive. Running nuclear intermittently is more than 20x as expensive.
Sorry, that's not true. France, which has the most stringent and costly regulations, produces nuclear electricity at around 70€/MWh[0] on average. And this production is intermittent, pilotable, and more importantly, at a very large scale, for a small carbon and spacial footprint, which isn't possible to do with batteries at the moment.
[0]https://www.vie-publique.fr/en-bref/291910-energie-un-nouvel...
Compare battery costs from 1990 to today. Don't you think that if we actually did some investment in nuclear, that we could bring the cost of that down significantly as well?
France didn't experience cost reduction in their flurry in the 1980's. China didn't experience cost reduction in their flurry in the 2010's. So if there is some sort of volume effect available, it'd need to be a number significantly greater than a few dozen. And nobody is proposing building in that sort of quantity.
> It's not cheaper, it's about 20x as expensive.
Not according to the Ontario Energy Board, which sets wholesale rates; see Table 2:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2024...
10s of billions of dollars of costs have been uploaded from the electricity wholesalers to taxpayers in Ontario. Excluding those makes Ontario numbers misleading.
Talk to Mike Harris about privatizing stuff in Ontario: there's no reason why Ontario Hydro could not have been kept 100% in public hands and the debt serviced 'internally' instead of being assigned to OEFC.
At the end of the day it's still electrical rate payers paying the bill. (Just like ratepayers are paying for the failed experiment of McGuinty's Energy Green Act: what's the cost of that?)
As it stands all current nuclear refurbishments are being done with commercial rates, as is dealing with nuclear waste (per the NFWA).
> you need dispatchable power to supply power while the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing
Fair. What do you suggest instead?
For New York State, right next door to the Hydro electricity abundant Quebec, and with access to trade winds in the Atlantic Ocean? Solar, Wind & Batteries for 97% of power, send the excess to Quebec so they can idle their Hydro while the sun is shining, and then use Quebec Hydro for the last 3%.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
What benefit does Quebec get from idling their hydro power?
They idle it while the sun is shining and power is almost worthless, and sell it while it isn't and prices are high.
Idling a hydro plant doesn't save them money, though. They're designed for efficient operation, and idling will actually induce more strain on the equipment.
There's just no motivation for them to take the excess energy by throttling their own.
We're comparing to nuclear here. Yes, it might cost more money to run a hydro plant intermittently. It'll still be cheaper than nuclear.
> Idling a hydro plant doesn't save them money, though.
When you're running you more create wear-and-tear and increase the depreciation rate: this can be costed. There's also probably increased staffing costs during higher levels of operations; also costable.
Depending on the prices offered to the hydro-plant, it may or may not be profitable to run.
Is this true, or are you just assuming here? There are a lot of mechanical things that work better when they are running and used consistency. Sometimes shutting them down and starting them back up, or throttling them actually causes more wear.
Even my lawnmower runs more efficiently and has less wear at full throttle. It says right in the manual to run it at full throttle all the time.
It's easy to say but not so easy to do.
The two Western designs built in the last generation are the EPR and the AP1000. The EPR is so unconstructable that it could have been designed by Amory Lovins to put the nails in the coffin of nuclear power. The supply chain for the AP1000 is centered in China. If it wasn't for problems of war and peace the rational thing to do might be ask the Russians to come in and built a VVER.
GE is pushing the BWRX300 which might get some cost reductions because it doesn't need a steam generator, but the small size doesn't help the economics and the cost numbers they are talking about are amazingly low.
Let's hope the plan incorporates cutting-edge advancements, like molten salt and liquid thorium designs..
https://www.livescience.com/technology/engineering/chinese-s...
I'm also hopeful there's a resurgence of interest in Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
> Let's hope the plan incorporates cutting-edge advancements, like molten salt and liquid thorium designs..
Let's hope not. At least not for the first few new nuclear plants.
There is a lot of operating experience with 'traditional' designs and lessons learned over the decade. There are also new lessons learned with the Vogtle AP1000s. Any new construction (in the US) should be AP1000s to take advantage of those lessons.
Once people are familiar nuclear again then perhaps look at different designs. But you should learn to crawl and walk before trying to run.
(A lot of nuclear construction is the civil works, and is the same for any type of design, and getting that down to cookie cutter output would help any different designs as well.)
People forget that we quit building coal burning power plants at the same time we quit building nukes... For the same reason. The capital cost of the steam turbine is atrocious.
Molten salt, HTGR and LMFBR designs could all be coupled to a supercritical-CO2 powerset which would fit in the employee break room of the turbine hall of an LWR. The steam generators for a PWR are larger than the reactor vessel itself, but a higher temperature reactor could miniaturize them [1].
You still see old literature that claims the LMFBR has a higher capital cost than the LWR but a lot of that comes from the expensive powerset and heat exchangers which have to be doubled to prevent a water-sodium reaction in the primary loop.
So yeah, 4th generation reactors could be a revolution but they are not a bird in the hand and it won't be a matter of "we'll write a check to build a 1 GW reactor" whether you are New York State or Google, it will be matter of "we'll build a test reactor" and it could be another 15 years at least before we get to the TRL 7 stage.
[1] https://www.precisionmicro.com/understanding-printed-circuit...
This is caused by the (overly) stringent regulations asked by the French authorities, and the loss of skill around building modern nuclear reactors. For instance, the EPR can withstand an airliner crash.
Besides, the EPR is very powerful and can produce clean, constant and pilotable electricity at the largest scale for a very low footprint. No other tech currently matches nuclear, especially for uses that require high and predictable loads, such as AI or smelting.
> The supply chain for the AP1000 is centered in China.
Vogtle Units 3 and 4 started a supply chain in the US. Especially Unit 3, which is one of the reasons it was so expensive: a lot of things had to be learned. Unit 4 was (IIRC) 30% cheaper than Unit 3 because a bit of a workflow was developed.
Any future US AP1000 units should be better than Vogtle—if people don't try to re-invent the wheel and use the same trail used in that project.
Smaller scale can make construction more practical though, even if the economics are worse than the theoretical best. Billions have been lost on unfinished large-scale nuke plants more than once, because they take too long, are too complex, and get more and more mired in politics as the years drag out. A small plant that could be online in months or at most a year or two from start of construction is way more pragmatic.
The concrete benefit I see for the small LWR is this: it is possible to build a pressure vessel by welding segments together but most economical to build one in a superheavy forge that can pound one out of a single piece of steel. There are no superheavy forges in North America (although there are many in various Asian and European countries) although the BWRX300 is small enough that it can be made in Canada.
As for simpler construction it has to be proven. The AP1000 was a "modular reactor" in that they tried to make it out of large modules that could be built in a factory and stuck together on site. The factories struggled to make those modules and when they arrived they often needed major rework. The ACP100 was recently completed in China
https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/INPRO/df13/Presentations/011_...
and press releases boasted that it was one of the most complex construction projects of all time -- what I wanted to hear was "this is one of the most simple construction projects of all time!"
There's also the incredible cheap and easy to mass produce submarine and shipboard reactor designs.
Going smaller and build lots more brings costs down tremendously. Combined with breeder reactors plus reprocessing to deal with waste.
You'd have to miltarize all staff to deal with profilieration risks and then license out delivery to private corps (utility companies).
It's kinda the opposite. Submarine reactors burn like a cigarette which is great from the viewpoint of rapidly changing power output and dealing with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit
but terribly uneconomical. Optimizing economics is about optimizing power output from a given volume of pressure vessel. The power of a nuclear reactor is limited by the ability to get heat out of the fuel rods and into the coolant so good economics requires producing energy evenly throughout the whole core, which commercial reactors do and submarine reactors do not.
Submarine reactors are worth it, however, because being able to go around the world over and over again without surfacing is of great military value. It's insane how fast a nuclear aircraft carrier can travel, there's enough uncertainty over where it will be in 15 minutes that an attack with a reasonably sized nuclear warhead could fail to kill it so, so china developed maneuverable hypersonic weapons that could punch a hole in the deck with a conventional weapon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21#DF-21D_(CSS-5_Mod-4)_Ant...
If nuclear is going to work, it cannot be commercial. The economics won't work out. It has to be federally owned and operated (preferably by military staff so they are under UCMJ) and run as a public good and not for profit.
Finland tried the VVER option as well, and it was even worse than EPR. Between 2013 and 2022, the Russians proved incapable of providing sufficient documentation that a construction permit could be issued.
There is almost no way this doesn't end up wasting an enormous amount of money, while only having a slim chance of ever coming online, while only having a slim chance of actually lowering energy costs.
If you are gonna blow $10 Billion on a 10 year nightmare project, just buy a ton of solar, wind, and batteries to get 2GW in 5 years.
>actually lowering energy costs
isn't green energy worth higher energy costs?
Additionally, renewables have their own drawbacks - their volatility makes reliability more challenging and thus brings energy prices higher. Nuclear has the benefit of providing consistent base load, something that's needed more now than ever. That kind of thing might be worth the investment, but until now no one has wanted to put up the kind of money needed for that level of reliability.
In a state the size of New York, the sun is always shining or the wind always blowing somewhere in the state. You then use battery back-up to fill the gaps and gas to fill the gaps of the filled gaps.
The latest nuclear plant in the US was the completion of the Vogtle plant in Georgia, which ran a staggering $22B over budget. Twenty Two Billion Dollars over budget!
$22B, is enough to build the largest solar plant in the US 10 times over (total 5GW). Or about 7 of the largest wind farm (total 10.5GW). Or 33 of the largest battery storage plant. With $2B left over for logistics.
And $14B left over for anything else because the total cost was $36B!
The current state of nuclear doesn't make sense anyway you cut it.
> The latest nuclear plant in the US was the completion of the Vogtle plant in Georgia, which ran a staggering $22B over budget. Twenty Two Billion Dollars over budget!
And Unit 4 was (IIRC) 30% cheaper than Unit 3. Because with Unit 3 they had to learn everything about building a nuclear power plant from scratch (from a practical, steel-toed boots on the ground perspective).
Now that there's (a) an actual supply chain (brought up from scratch), and (b) people with a workflow on how to build AP1000s, future units will decrease costs over time. During the 1990s and into the 2000s Japan was bringing up nuclear plants in 4-5 years like clockwork:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
Turns economies of scale work as well for 900MW power plants as for $9 widgets.
The Decouple podcast has a four-part series on Vogtle and what they did wrong (and right):
* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyouH0mkPJXHR0hKW_iLk...
I think that you need to consider the cost of a blackout due to unreliable electricity production. This is the wealthiest area of the world, so any blackout or even threat that it may happen would be very costly, which is why you need redundancy and can't rely on one power source.
No. Lower energy costs saves lives. Energy is the life blood of civilization.
Perhaps, but we don't need to and shouldn't pay more for green energy.
In 2025 the cheapest 24/7 energy grid is 90% green, up to 97% green in sunny locations.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
no,nuclear-power is much more expensive but it gets subvention on company level. That's why the end-user pay less for now.
[flagged]
Wrong
One of the really tedious types of comment I keep seeing on HN whenever someone posts about some possible or new nuclear power project can be summed up as "But nuclear is no good/too expensive because it just can't do X and Y, so why bother?!".
Sure, maybe, right now some of these kinds of criticisms apply, but we're talking about a technology that's barely been given much room to develop seriously in most cases. In others, where it has been allowed a bit more leeway for development, it's shown itself to be remarkably useful. For example, in the reactors aboard military vessels, or with RTGs.
These sorts of of criticisms such as above seem absurd, especially when you imagine there were indeed people saying roughly similar things about technologies like solar power back in the 70s, or powered flight close to the turn of the 20th century.
It's foolish to shun the entire scope of a technology if its present state of development is the only one you know anything about. This applies so especially to nuclear power, which so very obviously has considerably more potential, without even going into more exotic territories like sustainable fusion energy.
> The New York Power Authority—created nearly a century ago by then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt to manage hydropower production on behalf of the public
This is rich considering that NYPA’s current customers are exclusively government entities. I found this out when researching why I pay among the highest cost per KWh in the country despite having the largest non profit publicly owned power utility in the country.
Previous Attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreham_Nuclear_Power_Plant
tl;dr it was commissioned, constructed, and closed due to local safety concerns in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident.
Interesting excerpt from the wiki:
In 2004, the Long Island Power Authority erected two 100-foot, 50 kW wind turbines at the Shoreham Energy Center site,[18] as part of a renewable-energy program.[19][20] At a ceremony, chairman Kessel stated, "We stand in the shadow of a modern-day Stonehenge, a multibillion-dollar monument to a failed energy policy, to formally commission the operation of a renewable energy technology that will harness the power of the wind for the benefit of Long Island's environment." The turbines generate 200 MWh per year, or 1/35,000th of the energy the nuclear plant would have produced.[21]
Why wouldn't the governor solicit bids for energy, and let the companies that actually build and run generation capacity decide the cheapest way to do that? Having the governor choose seems weird to me.
Technology neutrality is fairly important. The role of the government should be in controlling the requirements which has a collective/social cost, like emissions, grid stability and price variability (as those are things that voters will demand from the government, as has been demonstrated in EU during the energy crisis). As long any company is willing to provide similar services under similar requirements, what technology they choose to use may be better determined by market forces rather than political choices.
What they should not do however is to simply look at potential generation capacity and have that be the only important criteria. Voters has clearly demonstrated that they will vote for politicians that can promise stable grid and stable pricing, rather than having those being controlled by the market.
The market is famously terrible at pricing in externalities and accounting for long-term needs. I think if you used the government to force bidders to account for those, you'd just end up in the same place.
You might, or you might not. You might end up with tidal or wave, or wind+batteries, or something else. Tying yourself to something that's going to take decades and almost certainly include big cost overruns seems like a terrible idea.
Not an unreasonable choice if externalities such as carbon (and mining, etc. in the case of nuclear) are taken into account. And suppose you price carbon in, how do you actually produce a real carbon sink at the assumed cost and scale if nat gas wins the bid?
Are you suggesting letting private companies whose entire purpose is to make the most amount of profit for their shareholders to be the ones that decide what is best for the people of the state?
NYPA does build and run generation capacity, it's just the state owned utility. Besides, this is a policy and strategy push instead of a lowest-bidder ask.
Because it would be natural gas.
I keep hearing that solar and wind are the cheapest sources of new energy. Why would it be natural gas?
And for that matter, if you are worried about CO2 emissions, you could make that be part of the requirements.
Solar and wind are cheapest when installed in ideal locations with ideal parts.
Gas is a bit more expensive than the ideal green model, but cheaper on average. It also can be built anywhere on a comparatively small land parcel, and can provide easily scalable energy 24/7/365.
I am hoping they build this in Oswego on top of the other reactors being built in 9 mile. Lake Ontario has an inexhaustible amount of cold water, and there's plenty of space up there.
This needs to be in Western New York. The existing plant for the region is operating on an an extension that expires the earliest of the bunch in 2029. When it goes, electricity rates are going to skyrocket without a replacement.
Ill admit I am saying this out of only regional loyalty and have no idea about the status of other plants in upstate NY. I am also not sure on how much the power generated in Upstate NY goes to say Toronto vs NYC, and how much that reactor being in Buffalo or Rochester would even matter for that vs Oswego being 100 miles closer to NYC.
... because AI.
Love it or hate it, the AI hype has at least lit a fire on nuclear power. If AI winter comes, we at least get to keep the powerplants and receive clean power for decades.
> If AI winter comes, we at least get to keep the powerplants and receive clean power for decades.
When the AI winter comes, it’s not going to mean the energy devoted to AI applications decreases, it’ll mean the perception of rapid future expansion in profits fueling VC interest in AI goes away. It’s not like we cut back the aggregate energy cohsumption of systems running, say, rule-based expert systems during the last AI winter.
> If AI winter comes
But what happens to the AI in the nuclear winter?
We will see. It's unfortunate but there is a long list of attempted nuke construction that ends up billions of dollars in the hole before the first mwh is made.
And, funny enough, often the utility company can raise rates to cover these losses! Easy money and you don't have to build a thing.
And if companies were obliged to insure their power plants properly, it would cost many, many billions more. It is the same old story: socialise risks and privatise profits.
“Bowing to anti-nuclear fears, New York chose to shut down a reliable and safe source of energy—and now burns more fossil fuels than before.”
The same far-sighted leaders who permanently shuttered 2 GW of nuclear power, in a time of low electricity prices, would like credit, please, for their aspirational concept of a plan for building 1 GW of nuclear. To alleviate high electricity prices.
To be fair, that was mostly Cuomo. Who knows why he was so dead-set on its closure.
The article is paywalled, presumably the reactor they're referring to is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center
"New York City's greenhouse gas emissions from electricity have increased from approximately 500 to 900 tons of CO2 per MWh from 2019 to 2022 as a result of the closure."
my grandma lived by the old plant, there were sort of endless signs around to get rid of it. now we get another one.
I love that nuclear is just far too dangerous when it comes to powering peoples homes. Obsoleting workers with AI however.....
Could you elaborate with sources?
I suspect much of the perception of nuclear being too dangerous comes from the fossil fuel energy lobby.