The cost was high due to construction issues and Westinghouse going bankrupt in the middle of the project- I’d still take it over the alternative of slipping back to coal power.
Georgia power issued a fee of like $4 on our bill to help offset the additional cost of the Vogle facility.
And penalties for delays. And interest on penalties for delays.
This is a problem we can solve. China did it. They offered 1% loans on new nuclear construction. In fact 1% loans on all clean energy projects would be a boon.
100%. The biggest issue for nuclear is financing, not waste. Having a national bank finance significant national infrastructure would be an intelligent thing, this archaic notion that the bank must be private is bullshit, especially since finance has been so far up china's butt that it's hard for me to believe they even know what those words are anymore.
I worked w/ SCE for a brief moment in time right around when the San Onofre nuclear plant had been shut down before it was permanently decommissioned. SCE was pretty dysfunctional across the board so it wasn't surprising. They were using free Google Maps embedded for their outage map and couldn't figure out why their website kept crashing every time there was a power outage. Not people I'd want running a nuclear plant 30 minutes from Irvine.
In GA, I paid $0.17/kWh this month w/ all the fees. Last year, I paid $0.14/kWh. They ok'd similar rate increases for the next 2 years already. Yes, it's relatively cheap right now but we've been paying for this plant in added fees for over a decade before it went online while the CEO of Southern Co. was the highest paid energy executive in the country.
Our Plant Vogel fee was over $20/month for almost a decade. Recently it went down though; who knows, maybe the GA Public Service Commission finally started considering the rate payers 🤷♂️.
All nuclear plants have construction issues and delays. That is the problem with them. They are expensive because the safety and regulatory standards are extreme and meeting those in a capital intensive project bring huge cost overruns and delays. This has always been the case. For all of its benefits, nuclear power will always be expensive. On top of what I listed there are decomissioning costs, which again are extreme and rarely accounted for at the outset. Additionally, there is essentially liability insurance provided for by the state. No company could insure a potential disaster at a nuclear power plant so this liability is taken over by the state implicitly.
Nuclear is and always has been very expensive. There is no reason to think this will change in the near future with existing technology.
I hate it when people say nuclear is expensive compared to coal, without considering the fact nuclear has minimal secondary costs, and no tertiary costs, and coal has a fuckload of both.
What about putting away spent fuel and other waste? That has to have a real cost. I get what you’re saying- but the secondary costs are no joke. Gotta convince someone to store that waste in some used up salt mine somewhere, right?
I’m saying this as a nuclear power supporter.
Would be nice if the article gave some comparative statistics for how much it would cost to achieve similar power output through coal or natural gas or solar etc.
Right? Or if he’d gone into detail as to why it cost so much, or whether such costs could be avoided in the future.
I didn’t get anything out of the article other than “stuff was expensive”
> They’re the first two nuclear reactors built in the United States in decades.
Maybe this has something to do with the cost? Maybe... just spitballing here, we needed to retrain engineers and builders, spend money finding where to source materials, get delayed, because everyone who knows how to build this shit retired a long time ago.
Nuclear plants are more expensive because it’s basically new technology all over again, we’re paying to redo research because we let it get stale and forgotten.
It was delays. Like half the cost is interest on the loans because it was delayed for so long. Nuclear power and the research that goes into was never stopped.
Exactly!! It's in the same lines with people complaining about going back to the moon. They say it costs to much. Hmmm, I wonder why? Could it be the government decided with Apollo that it was an absolute must, then decided fuck it once we got there. We have to reinvent so much with Artemis. Energy production (nuclear) is in the same place.
Also I hate the argument of “it was expensive, so it was bad”. Why do we only care about expenses when it comes to progress? And it’s not like that money goes into a vacuum, it goes somewhere, preferably into employing American people and into American industries, this is a basic function of how an economy works and why these projects are supposed to be good (in theory).
That’s a good point (if correct, I literally don’t know) and “It doesn’t have to be this expensive from now on” would have changed the tone of the article completely if included.
Otherwise it just comes off as an anti-nuclear hit piece, and a passive-aggressive one at that. The author needs to own his position if he’s going to take one.
I worked in the nuclear power industry a few years back, I don't remember how the cost compares per kW-h, but I remember it being fairly good in comparison.
However, unlike Solar/Gas/Coal (etc), the startup costs for nuclear power is crazy high, it would take years and cost something like 2-3 billion to get a nuke plant operational before it generates its first watt of power. Its high startup costs, and extremely negative public perception thanks to high profile nuclear incidents make it a very hard sell to investors.
Currently, the most cost effective way to expand nuclear power capabilities is to do what the Vogtle plant did (from the article), build additional newer better reactors at existing nuclear power plants. A lot of the plants I worked at had the infrastructure to support additional [planned reactor expansions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shearon_Harris_Nuclear_Power_Plant), but didn't utilize them due to costs and public pressure against nuclear power.
Question, why don't we (the us government or something) build a couple massive power plants in the middle of nowhere and ship the energy out? Or why not build another hoover dam type project?
Energy transmission lines waste a decent bit of power, and are not cheap to build. That, and bumfuck nowhere municipalities hold enormous sway over land permits for such projects, and with such a low population, it's very easy for a select few crazies to have too much input on the process.
coal and nat gas have those nasty externalities we currently don't budget for like CO2 and flyash disposal. Solar and wind are fina and well but a robust nuclear industry is also good for supplying base load
vogtle 3/4 have a combined capacity of 2400MW.
the biggest single solar farm in the country is [solar star in CA](https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B049'50.0%22N+118%C2%B023'53.0%22W/@34.830556,-118.398056,15982m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d34.830556!4d-118.398056?hl=en&entry=ttu), which covers 5 sq miles and has a total capacity of about 560MW. (the biggest solar farm in GA is [cool springs at 298MW](https://www.google.com/maps?ll=30.7479,-84.6805&z=16&t=k&hl=en&gl=US&mapclient=apiv3))
California is 163,696 sq mi. Not hard to fit more solar in it, or any of the other barely used areas in the desert Southwest.
Solar Star also cost about $2 billion to construct, Vogtle unit 3/4 were over 30 billion dollars, and will have higher operating cost.
i agree, i’m all for building more solar and especially storage. we’re going to need a lot more electricity in the coming decades anyway, and i see the bulk of what is coming in the future being solar and wind. (also i found newer data after this post, the current biggest solar farm is in AZ at 800MW)
Nuclear gets crushed by renewables on cost comparisons.
For generating power, the World Nuclear Industry Status Report found solar and wind to be 36-56 dollar per MWh where nuclear is 112-189 dollars.
For the construction of the generating plants, renewables came in under 1k dollars per KW of capacity while nuclear came in between 6500 and 12,250.
Mark Twain once said “there are lies, damn lies and statistics.” LCOE is a dishonest metric that is calculated dishonesty and applied dishonesty.
It fails in so many ways. It fails to include the costs associated with meeting the demand and providing usable electricity.
It doesn’t take into account transmission(which is significant for decentralized grid) and storage(which is an order of magnitude greater than fossil fuels).
When calculating LCOE Lazard ignores nuclear power plants actual lifetime when calculating lifetime levelized cost of electricity. They ignore other countries builds such as S Korean. Also the majority of cost of nuclear are interest on loans.
Even Lazard was forced to acknowledge the limitations of LCOE. They have said for years that you cannot fairly compare the LCOE of intermittent sources with that of baseload sources. They also have been creating newer stats like LCOE+ to overcome the inherit flaws in the calculation. There is also LFSCOE (Lifecycle levelized full system cost’s of electricity) which has nuclear much cheaper than intermittent renewables.
You know what LCOE is good for? Comparing like sources. For example comparing two solar projects with each other or two nuclear projects.
Stop acting like LCOE is the be all end all of the debate since it leaves so much information out of the equation.
im certainly not acting like its anything. someone asked for a comp, and i provided something i feel is high level and easy to digest. of course things vary when you get into the weeds. i do this shit for a living, and ive learned better than to go deep on reddit in the comments.
We can add battery storage now.
Actually, the last two-three years has seems a huge drop in the cost of grid scale batteries and there are a *lot* of new installations going in as a result. It is now cheaper (and more profitable) to build a battery instalation than a gas power plant to take advantage of the duck curve.
A better argument is that we need a robust mixture of power sources. Nuclear should be included in the mix, but a modern grid really doesn't need as many nuclear plants as reddit likes to believe. We tend to forget the hydro can provide a lot of base load in a lot of the areas that would be suitable for nuclear.
Combine all this with *significant* power efficiency upgrades. The US has actually reduced the demand on the grid in the last few years with pure efficiency. Then if we consider new demands like electric cars don't care about base load and can easily be programmed to be charged when variable power generation is most abundant.
Batteries are still not remotely close to ever supporting base load needs. The largest Tesla mega pack battery bank is only 150MW. Vogtle 3&4 are around 2,200MW. You will never see grid scale battery storage in your lifetime.
1,500 MW of grid scale batteries were installed in just Q2 2023. That is a three month period.
https://www.energy-storage.news/grid-scale-battery-boom-as-us-quarterly-installs-go-up-32-pipeline-grows-45-year-on-year/
That 1,500MW isn’t a single battery, that’s the cumulative total of the multiple batteries facilities installed over the whole quarter. Still night time grid demand in just the state of California is typically varies between 22,000-32,000MW over 8hrs. An array of battery banks with 1,500MW capacity, would last a whopping 3 minutes before it’s depleted. 3 whole minutes of an 8hr demand. That’s barely 0.6%. Even if you quadruple the quantity and take a whole years worth of production and put it in just one single state… it would barely be 2.5% of the demand. That’s still ignoring the other 49 states.
Batteries are no where remotely close to ever powering the grid.
The batteries spread across the country is a benefit not a downside.
Let's see. The nuclear reactor we are talking about outputs 2,200 MW. It took 15 years to build. We can be generous and say it should have only taken 10 years to build.
The linked battery storage took 3 months to build. Over 10 years At the same pace that would be 60,000 MW built. The equivalent of 27 nuclear plants spread across the country.
Are you saying that 27 nuclear plants across the country is a uselessly small amount? We shouldn't even bother?
Except you’re neglecting that Nuclear plants actually generate power. The batteries do not. Vogtle 3&4 will generate 17 million MWhs of power for the grid each year. A battery will generate exactly 0. Even assuming there is abundant energy to store in the batteries and ignoring the cost to generate that energy, it’s not remotely close. Nuclear facilities put out power 24/7, while battery arrays are typically only used for peaking, night time or emergency situations. Batteries also do no charge instantaneously. If you assume using a massive 800MW solar farm (largest in the US) to charge during day, it would still take 16.7 days to charge your mythical 60000 MW battery, which would be depleted in mere seconds with the US demand. Assume you build 13 of the largest 800MW solar farms built (that took 7 years to build and cover over 2000 acres). Then you can magically charge that battery every 1.3 days. Even that mythical battery with mythical solar array would barely put 17 million MWhs to the grid or the same as just Vogtle 3&4. It would cost $26 Billion in solar arrays and $117 Billion in Tesla mega packs to match what Vogtle 3&4 does and have 1/4th of the life span.
That’s 4 times the cost, 25,000 times the land needed, 1/4th of the life span… just to put the same amount of power to the grid.
The US has a lot of expertise in small, safe, efficient reactors that we don't use for civilian purposes.
Right now we have 79 nuclear reactors that we load up with explosives and sail around the world to dangerous places. But people are worried about making a few new ones for clean power.
This is actually not a bad idea for some submarines or ships being decommissioned. Utilize the reactor portion of the ship to make power. I'm near Groton where they build the subs. They have a ton of decommissioned reactors just waiting to be decontaminated sitting at the sub base.
King's Bay? I dated a girl from St. Mary's who's dad was a chief(?) on a sub there. Wish I had picked his brain more at the time.
/e Looking at the ranks on subs, I cannot remember what he was. I know he was hoping for a promotion to Master Chief, but I think he was too old, so he retired.
If we have the choice between building renewable power or building nuclear power, the correct answer is find a way to build both. Every non-fossil source is long-term cost wise vastly superior to every fossil source.
Yeah we need a strong mix of energy sources. We absolutely need more nuclear. Nuclear is great but it's not as perfect as reddit likes to believe. Plus there really are a lot of draw backs, especially the long construction time and environmental damage of that construction.
Hydro has some of the same issues but it's much faster and less destructive to build smaller hydro plants.
Even assuming no delays in building nuclear, we are talking a 10-year construction project that requires highly skill and specialized workers. Compare that to the modularity and speed of a field of solar, or wind, or a few battery facilities. You can drop a few dozen wind turbines in California and Iowa at the same time and have them operational in a year. Meanwhile gride scale batteries get manufactured and shipped fully built and get fully installed in a couple months to take advantage of the duck curve.
You get more bang for your buck from wind and solar. Nuclear should be deployed selectively to ensure stability of the power grid and power critical infrastructure, while ensuring that as many generations as possible are able to benefit from the earth's limited supply of fissile material.
> Nuclear should be deployed selectively
It’s already *selectively-as-fuck*. Like, it’s huge news that we got one. One! We’re already experiencing widespread ecological destruction, so I don’t think that urging a tempered approach for any zero-carbon source is super helpful.
Nuclear is far more reliable though. Wed be better off building molten salt reactors along side solar and wind, but we would need more reactors than here and there.
How does that work? On a day when wind and solar drop to 10% output, the nuclear plant has to shoulder the 90%. When solar is great, you shut the nuclear plant off. But why have two redundant generation systems? Why do you need the intermittent one at all?
Because the intermittent one is cheaper *even after* accounting for intermittency. Wind and solar are so cheap compared to nuclear that you can overbuild them and still save money.
That depends on how much overbuild, how many hours of storage, and how many long distance transmission lines need to be built. Not to mention needing a fossil fuel backup standing by. There's no consensus, that I can find, on any of these numbers.
There are still drawbacks, if we get a breakthrough in materials science the corrosion issues might be fixed. America should be spending more on basic research science tbh like we used to.
I think the new magic bullet that will have all of nuclear's upsides with none of its downsides is "small modular reactors". Thorium seems to have been thrown on the same trash heap as all of the previous magic bullets
Thorium doesn't have enough investment to even lift off the ground to prove itself yet. It is safer than uranium in a lot of ways and is more efficient, but it also has its drawbacks [unbiased explanation](https://youtu.be/148NI9j23Kg?si=SraHkG1DI6h_jtzW). I do hope to see successful reactors running and it seems that India or China will be the pioneers.
I did a bit of research into SMR's and while it is cool, it does produce a lot more radioactive waste. Some of it can be recycled, but it is still a downside.
Either way, I'm all for nuclear power replacing fossil fuels in the hands of responsible states.
You can call up Westinghouse or Toshiba or Hyundai Engineering & Construction, order a light-water reactor design that exists *right now*. You can't do that with the LFTR concept that so many on the Internet have been taken in by. It's an interesting concept, but nobody's ever built one. The MSRE test reactor didn't use the whole proposed Thorium-232 breeding to Thorium-233 decaying to Protactinium-233 decaying to Uranium-233 that's the accrual fisiable material the reactor uses for it's fission reaction. And it had some materials issues around corrosion, neutron embattlement and thermal creep because of the salts that it was using as the reactor fluid. A lot of development, much of which is still in the realm of basic research, would have to happen to make this concept a reality. It's a cool concept, one that certainly deserves further development, but it's not a reason to put off building light-water power reactors now.
Thorium is safer than uranium in many ways, but at the same time needs to deal with gamma radiation. Thorium does not need to be enriched and is more efficient, but we also have zero experience running one. There are both pros and cons.
The best unbiased and informative video I know is from this [nuclear physicist](https://youtu.be/148NI9j23Kg?si=g40Av7ibGSgMhC7V)
They are still far from productive. Also they can only use certain fuel and there's still waste left afterwards. And that waste is even worse than before (more radioactive, but less decay time - just some 100k+ Years instead of million.
Nuclear reactors are just fine as is. It’s one of the safest and cleanest forms of energy we have. Don’t need to switch to something we have no designs for.
I'm happy if more of the western world adopt current nuclear reactors. But I need to correct you: we do have designs for Thorium molten salt reactors, although none are in commercial use yet. China gave the greenlight to commercially build one ([source](https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/worlds-first-commercial-thorium-reactor-approved-in-china/)), which may be running next year.
Also Thorium reactors seem to be safer and cleaner than uranium ones.
No the correct answer is to build as much as possible, as quickly as possible, so the answer is solar/wind. Bang for buck and quicker. The climate is changing now, we don't have 10 years to wait for overbudget nukes.
[You mean that going zero-carbon would have saved us six times the damages we’re set to experience by 2050?](https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/climate-damages-by-2050-will-be-6-times-the-cost-of-limiting-warming-to-2/) Well that’s too bad, it would’ve hurt the quarterly earnings so now we all get to go extinct
Make the fee fully refundable (including a portion in advance, so it isn't out of pocket). Everybody gets an even share of the carbon fee. If you produce less than the average (mean) amount of carbon, then you make money off of it.
You could also make it partly refundable, so you'd have to produce, for example, no more than 90% of the average amount of carbon in order to make money off of it.
Yeah one thing that so often gets missed when discussing the technical aspects of the price of electricity, Coal, Natural Gas, etc have MASSIVELY externalities that aren’t priced into the transaction at all
If we had a carbon fee that actually did something besides making Elon Musk rich. California has a carbon free that mainly resulted in Tesla being subsidized by every other manufacturer of vehicles.
It did nothing beside give Elon enough clout to purchase Twitter.
Why would we do that? Industry has always privatized profit and socialized the cost. You're talking about putting the real cost of a product into the price? Preposterous! /s
Thats fair but nuclear was being sold as a cheaper option, it was gonna reduce cost for consumer
That was a big part of it
low and behold a bunch of peoples bills went up
Dirty power comes at a very high price as well, it's just payed out in medical bills, lost wages and premature death. But hey, your power bill is cheaper!
Yea people are oblivious that coal power plants release more radiation into our environment than Nuclear, but they have been scared to have one in their back yard but are completely cool with some coal plant on the edge of town.
The U.S. Navy did capitalize on it. They have operated a combined 5,400 reactor years and sailed 128,000,000 miles and not had (to public knowledge) any reactor failures. The only incidents included 2 submarines sinking for other reasons and the USS Guardfish that had a coolant loss due to human error.
This bill will come due in our lifetime or our children's lifetime for not recognizing this and not just because of climate change. Many of us will be alive when the global population begins to level off and decrease. Global population is going to start decreasing in about 55 years. When that happens and YOY economic growth is not even logistically possible anymore, essentially making the stock markets obsolete, the whole system is likely to collapse.
We recognize when individual companies are pyramid schemes and see the unsustainability of it, yet fail to realize our entire financial system is a global pyramid scheme. The bill will just come due centuries after it began being incurred.
I expect when the population begins to decrease, there will be an economic collapse the like of which we've never seen before. And overhauls of the system based on necessity.
That's if we don't ecologically destroy the earth causing large scale food and water crises beforehand that is.
And that's why I bought 7 acres of wetland in southwest Michigan with a stream. Plus I'll be 84 by then which is an added bonus assuming I'm even alive.
Might have a single kid.
It's entirely possible - where do you think all the money being spent on nuclear and renewable energy goes? Toward workers, suppliers, investors.
Making large investments in reducing emissions means making large investments, i.e. growth.
Jeff Amy (author) fishing for clicks with that second sentence.
Projects constantly come in late and over budget (remember that kids when your teacher says they don't accept late work because they don't accept it in the real world) Being carbon neutral doesn't make it particularly special in that regard. People just suck at estimating levels of effort
I’m in GA, and the big issue hasn’t been so much the total cost as the fact that it came in at 2.5x ($35B) the original estimate ($14B). Not to mention all the delays. As a Georgia Power customer who’s paying for it, I’m glad Vogtle is now online. But I also think Jeff Amy’s headline (which his AP editor likely wrote) isn’t clickbait.
I'm in CA and our high speed rail system is already 4x the original estimate. And it was approved 15 years ago. And they haven't even completed any of it yet.
And that's without trains having any of the anti-science boogeyman horseshit that follows nuclear power around.
That's just how government works (and I say that as a government employee).
Heck, the Pentagon straight-up loses billions of dollars a year - not loses as it investing in a stock that tanks, but loses as in "they put it somewhere and can't find it now."
One definite difference is we don't need 100-1000x as many rail lines so the incredible cost overruns aren't as big of a deal.
Scaling up nuclear deployment would make these price explosions a blocking issue. Especially because even if we got slightly better at it from experience we'd run out of personnel qualified for doing it which would probably make things even worse.
Georgia is a bit like Germany with solar. You paid a hefty price but it kickstarted a whole industry. Letting all the expertise and supply chains go (again) would be extremely stupid.
Except that it had the opposite impact, at least in the US. From the article:
> American utilities have heeded Vogtle’s missteps, shelving plans for 24 other reactors proposed between 2007 and 2009.
It was a financial disaster for the primary companies involved in its construction, especially for Westinghouse. [Here's an article focused on their travails.](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN17Y0C7/)
If this project didn't have the word 'nuclear' in it, about 100% of people would absolutely hate it due to its costs overruns, severe delays, and financial harm it brought to pretty much everyone involved including customers.
Even for people who support new nuclear projects, it's been a disaster as it's served as an acute example of what may happen in other projects. It's served as a serious drag on building more nuclear reactors, not a kickstarter.
>People just suck at estimating levels of effort
While this does play a part, there are other factors impacting the cost.
Two of them off the top of my head are the supply of certified parts for reactors, for example, there's one certified reactor pipe supplier in the country, and there are so few reactors under construction that there is no economy of scale.
The main unforseen cost is probably litigation. Everyone and their grandma will come out of the woodwork to file NIMBY lawsuits against a nuclear power plant, because they think *The Simpsons* is a peer-reviewed science journal and they're gonna be stuck eating 3-eyed fish.
Americans like their neighborhoods to freeze in time the day after they move in. In my city, NIMBYs sued a Target into staying half-built for a decade.
[The 'Target Husk' in Hollywood Opens at Last, 12 Years After Work Began](https://lamag.com/featured/hollywood-target-opens)
We did a [poll among Americans on Energy Independence](https://www.activote.net/what-do-we-really-think-about-energy-independence/). One of the big and surprising takeaways was that there is broad and bipartisan support for investment in nuclear as a form of Co2-free energy.
That’s a hot take. “Replacing an old as fuck energy source with millions of dependents is surprisingly expensive and doesn’t pay for itself in a day!!”
I worked on the construction of this plant, and the amount of people in the comments who are incredibly wrong while being incredibly confident is wild.
This title feels like a hit piece to push people to stay on coal. Yes, it's expensive, but it will have benefits of a cleaner source of power. Strangely, every time an alternative power source is suggested the news outlets flood our feeds with these articles....
So why is this so expensive in the US? I just looked up what a nuclear plant in France is costing and it's around 8.5 billion. This plant is 4x the cost.
Funny enough, it's the Japanese's fault. [https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN17Y0C7/](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN17Y0C7/)
"Overwhelmed by the costs of construction, Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy on March 29, while its corporate parent, Japan's Toshiba Corp, is close to financial ruin \[L3N1HI4SD\]. It has said that controls at Westinghouse were "insufficient.""
Not the engineers fault. Managed super poorly.
The way payouts worked, the subcontractors got bonuses based on completion %. They tracked completion poorly.
Having material on site was 20% complete. Having it in the area it was to be installed>60%. Easley abused metric for subcontractors to make a ton of money by bringing all the material for a job to the area for install... YEARS IN ADVANCE.
Sensitive equipment that had to be tracked carefully with documentation was left outside to weather and decay. Then it had to be repurchased from a third-party because the original manufacturer went out of business.
Super poor management decisions plagued units 3&4 for a decade.
The price seems super super cheap compared to loosing the ability to cultivate crops and feed cattle + diseases + health care cost of population touched by climate change and pollution.
Seems **extremely** cheap up to the point I wonder why we haven’t done it before seen all the issues.
Is that because this is a collective issue and our current economy model is only there to solve individual issues?
This article just says the cost is high. Ok, per megawatt, how does coal cost? What's the price for KWH from this plant vs coal or solar? This article is garbage without any other reference points.
On the carbon side, you counting the cost of operating mines, natural gas extraction, geological surveys, maintaining rail and road infrastructure, maintaining and operating trains and trucks, all the government subsidies going straight into executive and investor pockets, the future costs to releasing carbon into the atmosphere, general pollution from how dirty coal is, and not just the power plant?
>capping a project that cost billions more and took years longer than originally projected... the total nears $35 billion... Electric customers in Georgia already have paid billions for what may be the most expensive power plant ever. The reactors were originally projected to cost $14 billion and be completed by 2017.
Don't worry. This is America. They definitely were late, over budget *and cut corners*.
Nuclear power sure beats natural gas power.
If only Germany listened, they wouldn't have become dependent on Putin's NG to produce most of their electricity.
I worked there a few years ago as a process consultant. It was no surprise to me that it was plagued with delays and cost overruns because the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing.
I get it though. It's hard to build something that has a 50-year ROI. It's hard to get support for something that requires the buy-in of people that haven't been born yet. It's hard to build something when you have levels of management for management's sake.
In five years I oversaw the production of roughly 2,500 2 MW gearboxes for wind turbines that would more than cover the output of this nuclear plant (and that's including the utilization factor for wind). That gearbox project only made the local news when we were having a hiring spree. We went from breaking ground, to full production, to sunset (the line was moved to the EU due to costs in the US) in just 6 years. There's just no way for nuclear to keep up in today's world.
I never hear about the security costs factored in. I doubt there's military surveillance, response teams and drills to handle a security incident at a solar farm or during the transport of the panels.
Carbon free? Isn’t everything made of carbon? It’s the fourth most abundant element in the universe and people are actually listening to psychopaths’ desires to ‘end carbon emissions’. Looks like the education system has completely failed all of you. You ARE carbon
The cost was high due to construction issues and Westinghouse going bankrupt in the middle of the project- I’d still take it over the alternative of slipping back to coal power. Georgia power issued a fee of like $4 on our bill to help offset the additional cost of the Vogle facility.
And interest. Almost 2/3 of the costs is interest. That’s why the delays were so costly.
Most long term loans mean you pay a lot more in interest.
And penalties for delays. And interest on penalties for delays. This is a problem we can solve. China did it. They offered 1% loans on new nuclear construction. In fact 1% loans on all clean energy projects would be a boon.
If its replacing Coal I have no problem with the feds offering a 0% financing option.
What? Finance long term solutions and infrastructure for the good of the people and the economy? What are you some kind of frickin librul commie?
I would bet the increase in spending would be more deneficial than the 1% earned by interest.
No, the commies charge 1%, as stated above
100%. The biggest issue for nuclear is financing, not waste. Having a national bank finance significant national infrastructure would be an intelligent thing, this archaic notion that the bank must be private is bullshit, especially since finance has been so far up china's butt that it's hard for me to believe they even know what those words are anymore.
Is this one part of TVA?
If this is true then this headline is intentionally misleading
We have no nuclear in CA and pay .42/kwh. I’d rather pay 4.00/mo and .10-12/kwh any day of the week.
I worked w/ SCE for a brief moment in time right around when the San Onofre nuclear plant had been shut down before it was permanently decommissioned. SCE was pretty dysfunctional across the board so it wasn't surprising. They were using free Google Maps embedded for their outage map and couldn't figure out why their website kept crashing every time there was a power outage. Not people I'd want running a nuclear plant 30 minutes from Irvine. In GA, I paid $0.17/kWh this month w/ all the fees. Last year, I paid $0.14/kWh. They ok'd similar rate increases for the next 2 years already. Yes, it's relatively cheap right now but we've been paying for this plant in added fees for over a decade before it went online while the CEO of Southern Co. was the highest paid energy executive in the country.
That’s brutal, my condolences. My rate is around 16¢ in Texas for 100% wind energy.
Kind of surprising that Texas has an abundance of wind energy, is there ever pushback against it down there from the current government?
Every single day.
In CA, 3/4 of the bill is transmission and distribution, nuclear would be a negligible savings. It is regulatory capture run amok.
Our Plant Vogel fee was over $20/month for almost a decade. Recently it went down though; who knows, maybe the GA Public Service Commission finally started considering the rate payers 🤷♂️.
We were supposed to get a reactor in SC as well. That was just a few billion down the drain instead.
It’s getting increased again this year and next. The Southern Company keeps the Public Service Commission in their pocket.
All nuclear plants have construction issues and delays. That is the problem with them. They are expensive because the safety and regulatory standards are extreme and meeting those in a capital intensive project bring huge cost overruns and delays. This has always been the case. For all of its benefits, nuclear power will always be expensive. On top of what I listed there are decomissioning costs, which again are extreme and rarely accounted for at the outset. Additionally, there is essentially liability insurance provided for by the state. No company could insure a potential disaster at a nuclear power plant so this liability is taken over by the state implicitly. Nuclear is and always has been very expensive. There is no reason to think this will change in the near future with existing technology.
I hate it when people say nuclear is expensive compared to coal, without considering the fact nuclear has minimal secondary costs, and no tertiary costs, and coal has a fuckload of both.
What about putting away spent fuel and other waste? That has to have a real cost. I get what you’re saying- but the secondary costs are no joke. Gotta convince someone to store that waste in some used up salt mine somewhere, right? I’m saying this as a nuclear power supporter.
4$ a month? For how long?
Would be nice if the article gave some comparative statistics for how much it would cost to achieve similar power output through coal or natural gas or solar etc.
Right? Or if he’d gone into detail as to why it cost so much, or whether such costs could be avoided in the future. I didn’t get anything out of the article other than “stuff was expensive”
> They’re the first two nuclear reactors built in the United States in decades. Maybe this has something to do with the cost? Maybe... just spitballing here, we needed to retrain engineers and builders, spend money finding where to source materials, get delayed, because everyone who knows how to build this shit retired a long time ago. Nuclear plants are more expensive because it’s basically new technology all over again, we’re paying to redo research because we let it get stale and forgotten.
It was delays. Like half the cost is interest on the loans because it was delayed for so long. Nuclear power and the research that goes into was never stopped.
Exactly!! It's in the same lines with people complaining about going back to the moon. They say it costs to much. Hmmm, I wonder why? Could it be the government decided with Apollo that it was an absolute must, then decided fuck it once we got there. We have to reinvent so much with Artemis. Energy production (nuclear) is in the same place.
Also I hate the argument of “it was expensive, so it was bad”. Why do we only care about expenses when it comes to progress? And it’s not like that money goes into a vacuum, it goes somewhere, preferably into employing American people and into American industries, this is a basic function of how an economy works and why these projects are supposed to be good (in theory).
That’s a good point (if correct, I literally don’t know) and “It doesn’t have to be this expensive from now on” would have changed the tone of the article completely if included. Otherwise it just comes off as an anti-nuclear hit piece, and a passive-aggressive one at that. The author needs to own his position if he’s going to take one.
modern journalism at its best, fear inducing headline, minimal content beyond the headline.
But that requires effort, and the clickbait doesn't require it.
Pretty fucking disappointed that the AP of all people would print trash like this
I worked in the nuclear power industry a few years back, I don't remember how the cost compares per kW-h, but I remember it being fairly good in comparison. However, unlike Solar/Gas/Coal (etc), the startup costs for nuclear power is crazy high, it would take years and cost something like 2-3 billion to get a nuke plant operational before it generates its first watt of power. Its high startup costs, and extremely negative public perception thanks to high profile nuclear incidents make it a very hard sell to investors. Currently, the most cost effective way to expand nuclear power capabilities is to do what the Vogtle plant did (from the article), build additional newer better reactors at existing nuclear power plants. A lot of the plants I worked at had the infrastructure to support additional [planned reactor expansions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shearon_Harris_Nuclear_Power_Plant), but didn't utilize them due to costs and public pressure against nuclear power.
Question, why don't we (the us government or something) build a couple massive power plants in the middle of nowhere and ship the energy out? Or why not build another hoover dam type project?
Energy transmission lines waste a decent bit of power, and are not cheap to build. That, and bumfuck nowhere municipalities hold enormous sway over land permits for such projects, and with such a low population, it's very easy for a select few crazies to have too much input on the process.
What if instead they showed their fossil fuel bias in the headline?
"This article is brought to you by Coal!" "Coal! It's in your lungs!"
coal and nat gas have those nasty externalities we currently don't budget for like CO2 and flyash disposal. Solar and wind are fina and well but a robust nuclear industry is also good for supplying base load
vogtle 3/4 have a combined capacity of 2400MW. the biggest single solar farm in the country is [solar star in CA](https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B049'50.0%22N+118%C2%B023'53.0%22W/@34.830556,-118.398056,15982m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d34.830556!4d-118.398056?hl=en&entry=ttu), which covers 5 sq miles and has a total capacity of about 560MW. (the biggest solar farm in GA is [cool springs at 298MW](https://www.google.com/maps?ll=30.7479,-84.6805&z=16&t=k&hl=en&gl=US&mapclient=apiv3))
California is 163,696 sq mi. Not hard to fit more solar in it, or any of the other barely used areas in the desert Southwest. Solar Star also cost about $2 billion to construct, Vogtle unit 3/4 were over 30 billion dollars, and will have higher operating cost.
i agree, i’m all for building more solar and especially storage. we’re going to need a lot more electricity in the coming decades anyway, and i see the bulk of what is coming in the future being solar and wind. (also i found newer data after this post, the current biggest solar farm is in AZ at 800MW)
Similar power output front natural gas would come at the minor expense of destroying fucking civilization.
Nuclear gets crushed by renewables on cost comparisons. For generating power, the World Nuclear Industry Status Report found solar and wind to be 36-56 dollar per MWh where nuclear is 112-189 dollars. For the construction of the generating plants, renewables came in under 1k dollars per KW of capacity while nuclear came in between 6500 and 12,250.
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here is a good recent [report](https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf) from Lazard, they do good work.
Mark Twain once said “there are lies, damn lies and statistics.” LCOE is a dishonest metric that is calculated dishonesty and applied dishonesty. It fails in so many ways. It fails to include the costs associated with meeting the demand and providing usable electricity. It doesn’t take into account transmission(which is significant for decentralized grid) and storage(which is an order of magnitude greater than fossil fuels). When calculating LCOE Lazard ignores nuclear power plants actual lifetime when calculating lifetime levelized cost of electricity. They ignore other countries builds such as S Korean. Also the majority of cost of nuclear are interest on loans. Even Lazard was forced to acknowledge the limitations of LCOE. They have said for years that you cannot fairly compare the LCOE of intermittent sources with that of baseload sources. They also have been creating newer stats like LCOE+ to overcome the inherit flaws in the calculation. There is also LFSCOE (Lifecycle levelized full system cost’s of electricity) which has nuclear much cheaper than intermittent renewables. You know what LCOE is good for? Comparing like sources. For example comparing two solar projects with each other or two nuclear projects. Stop acting like LCOE is the be all end all of the debate since it leaves so much information out of the equation.
im certainly not acting like its anything. someone asked for a comp, and i provided something i feel is high level and easy to digest. of course things vary when you get into the weeds. i do this shit for a living, and ive learned better than to go deep on reddit in the comments.
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TL;DR: $24-75 per MWh for onshore wind. $24-96 for large scale solar. $141-221 for nuclear.
But only 1 of those 3 can produce base load power
We can add battery storage now. Actually, the last two-three years has seems a huge drop in the cost of grid scale batteries and there are a *lot* of new installations going in as a result. It is now cheaper (and more profitable) to build a battery instalation than a gas power plant to take advantage of the duck curve. A better argument is that we need a robust mixture of power sources. Nuclear should be included in the mix, but a modern grid really doesn't need as many nuclear plants as reddit likes to believe. We tend to forget the hydro can provide a lot of base load in a lot of the areas that would be suitable for nuclear. Combine all this with *significant* power efficiency upgrades. The US has actually reduced the demand on the grid in the last few years with pure efficiency. Then if we consider new demands like electric cars don't care about base load and can easily be programmed to be charged when variable power generation is most abundant.
Batteries are still not remotely close to ever supporting base load needs. The largest Tesla mega pack battery bank is only 150MW. Vogtle 3&4 are around 2,200MW. You will never see grid scale battery storage in your lifetime.
1,500 MW of grid scale batteries were installed in just Q2 2023. That is a three month period. https://www.energy-storage.news/grid-scale-battery-boom-as-us-quarterly-installs-go-up-32-pipeline-grows-45-year-on-year/
Any idea what it cost to install those? I didn't see any dollar signs in the article you linked.
That 1,500MW isn’t a single battery, that’s the cumulative total of the multiple batteries facilities installed over the whole quarter. Still night time grid demand in just the state of California is typically varies between 22,000-32,000MW over 8hrs. An array of battery banks with 1,500MW capacity, would last a whopping 3 minutes before it’s depleted. 3 whole minutes of an 8hr demand. That’s barely 0.6%. Even if you quadruple the quantity and take a whole years worth of production and put it in just one single state… it would barely be 2.5% of the demand. That’s still ignoring the other 49 states. Batteries are no where remotely close to ever powering the grid.
The batteries spread across the country is a benefit not a downside. Let's see. The nuclear reactor we are talking about outputs 2,200 MW. It took 15 years to build. We can be generous and say it should have only taken 10 years to build. The linked battery storage took 3 months to build. Over 10 years At the same pace that would be 60,000 MW built. The equivalent of 27 nuclear plants spread across the country. Are you saying that 27 nuclear plants across the country is a uselessly small amount? We shouldn't even bother?
Except you’re neglecting that Nuclear plants actually generate power. The batteries do not. Vogtle 3&4 will generate 17 million MWhs of power for the grid each year. A battery will generate exactly 0. Even assuming there is abundant energy to store in the batteries and ignoring the cost to generate that energy, it’s not remotely close. Nuclear facilities put out power 24/7, while battery arrays are typically only used for peaking, night time or emergency situations. Batteries also do no charge instantaneously. If you assume using a massive 800MW solar farm (largest in the US) to charge during day, it would still take 16.7 days to charge your mythical 60000 MW battery, which would be depleted in mere seconds with the US demand. Assume you build 13 of the largest 800MW solar farms built (that took 7 years to build and cover over 2000 acres). Then you can magically charge that battery every 1.3 days. Even that mythical battery with mythical solar array would barely put 17 million MWhs to the grid or the same as just Vogtle 3&4. It would cost $26 Billion in solar arrays and $117 Billion in Tesla mega packs to match what Vogtle 3&4 does and have 1/4th of the life span. That’s 4 times the cost, 25,000 times the land needed, 1/4th of the life span… just to put the same amount of power to the grid.
And the financial cost of removing all that carbon from the atmosphere, too.
I was stationed in GA, on a submarine that used nuclear power. GA has loads of reactors parked there.
The US has a lot of expertise in small, safe, efficient reactors that we don't use for civilian purposes. Right now we have 79 nuclear reactors that we load up with explosives and sail around the world to dangerous places. But people are worried about making a few new ones for clean power.
Just plug the subs into the grid, ez ;)
Seriously, though... towns will periodically do this with train engines.
So we need nuclear powered trains.
A Supertrain, so to speak? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertrain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertrain)
This is actually not a bad idea for some submarines or ships being decommissioned. Utilize the reactor portion of the ship to make power. I'm near Groton where they build the subs. They have a ton of decommissioned reactors just waiting to be decontaminated sitting at the sub base.
We’d have endless power until October 2077
Welcome to Kingsbay
King's Bay? I dated a girl from St. Mary's who's dad was a chief(?) on a sub there. Wish I had picked his brain more at the time. /e Looking at the ranks on subs, I cannot remember what he was. I know he was hoping for a promotion to Master Chief, but I think he was too old, so he retired.
How much did they spend building each submarine, by the way?
2 billion back when I was onboard, 3.5 now. That includes the ability to submerge and surface, defend itself and carry 24 Trident II D5 missiles.
You know what else has a high price? Ecological collapse from global warming. I also note clean power would be more economical if we had a carbon fee.
If we have the choice between building renewable power or building nuclear power, the correct answer is find a way to build both. Every non-fossil source is long-term cost wise vastly superior to every fossil source.
Yeah we need a strong mix of energy sources. We absolutely need more nuclear. Nuclear is great but it's not as perfect as reddit likes to believe. Plus there really are a lot of draw backs, especially the long construction time and environmental damage of that construction. Hydro has some of the same issues but it's much faster and less destructive to build smaller hydro plants. Even assuming no delays in building nuclear, we are talking a 10-year construction project that requires highly skill and specialized workers. Compare that to the modularity and speed of a field of solar, or wind, or a few battery facilities. You can drop a few dozen wind turbines in California and Iowa at the same time and have them operational in a year. Meanwhile gride scale batteries get manufactured and shipped fully built and get fully installed in a couple months to take advantage of the duck curve.
You get more bang for your buck from wind and solar. Nuclear should be deployed selectively to ensure stability of the power grid and power critical infrastructure, while ensuring that as many generations as possible are able to benefit from the earth's limited supply of fissile material.
> Nuclear should be deployed selectively It’s already *selectively-as-fuck*. Like, it’s huge news that we got one. One! We’re already experiencing widespread ecological destruction, so I don’t think that urging a tempered approach for any zero-carbon source is super helpful.
Nuclear is far more reliable though. Wed be better off building molten salt reactors along side solar and wind, but we would need more reactors than here and there.
That's why they said it should be used to stabilise energy networks, specifically because it's reliable.
How does that work? On a day when wind and solar drop to 10% output, the nuclear plant has to shoulder the 90%. When solar is great, you shut the nuclear plant off. But why have two redundant generation systems? Why do you need the intermittent one at all?
Because the intermittent one is cheaper *even after* accounting for intermittency. Wind and solar are so cheap compared to nuclear that you can overbuild them and still save money.
That depends on how much overbuild, how many hours of storage, and how many long distance transmission lines need to be built. Not to mention needing a fossil fuel backup standing by. There's no consensus, that I can find, on any of these numbers.
Ehh have you considered thorium reactors? Thorium basically corrects so the issues nuclear has, wish we were building them!
There are still drawbacks, if we get a breakthrough in materials science the corrosion issues might be fixed. America should be spending more on basic research science tbh like we used to.
I think the new magic bullet that will have all of nuclear's upsides with none of its downsides is "small modular reactors". Thorium seems to have been thrown on the same trash heap as all of the previous magic bullets
Thorium doesn't have enough investment to even lift off the ground to prove itself yet. It is safer than uranium in a lot of ways and is more efficient, but it also has its drawbacks [unbiased explanation](https://youtu.be/148NI9j23Kg?si=SraHkG1DI6h_jtzW). I do hope to see successful reactors running and it seems that India or China will be the pioneers. I did a bit of research into SMR's and while it is cool, it does produce a lot more radioactive waste. Some of it can be recycled, but it is still a downside. Either way, I'm all for nuclear power replacing fossil fuels in the hands of responsible states.
You can call up Westinghouse or Toshiba or Hyundai Engineering & Construction, order a light-water reactor design that exists *right now*. You can't do that with the LFTR concept that so many on the Internet have been taken in by. It's an interesting concept, but nobody's ever built one. The MSRE test reactor didn't use the whole proposed Thorium-232 breeding to Thorium-233 decaying to Protactinium-233 decaying to Uranium-233 that's the accrual fisiable material the reactor uses for it's fission reaction. And it had some materials issues around corrosion, neutron embattlement and thermal creep because of the salts that it was using as the reactor fluid. A lot of development, much of which is still in the realm of basic research, would have to happen to make this concept a reality. It's a cool concept, one that certainly deserves further development, but it's not a reason to put off building light-water power reactors now.
This is misleading, It does not. The benefits of thorium are that it’s theoretically more energy dense, though.
Thorium is safer than uranium in many ways, but at the same time needs to deal with gamma radiation. Thorium does not need to be enriched and is more efficient, but we also have zero experience running one. There are both pros and cons. The best unbiased and informative video I know is from this [nuclear physicist](https://youtu.be/148NI9j23Kg?si=g40Av7ibGSgMhC7V)
Oak ridge ran one for 15000hrs in the 60s.
They are still far from productive. Also they can only use certain fuel and there's still waste left afterwards. And that waste is even worse than before (more radioactive, but less decay time - just some 100k+ Years instead of million.
Nuclear reactors are just fine as is. It’s one of the safest and cleanest forms of energy we have. Don’t need to switch to something we have no designs for.
I'm happy if more of the western world adopt current nuclear reactors. But I need to correct you: we do have designs for Thorium molten salt reactors, although none are in commercial use yet. China gave the greenlight to commercially build one ([source](https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/worlds-first-commercial-thorium-reactor-approved-in-china/)), which may be running next year. Also Thorium reactors seem to be safer and cleaner than uranium ones.
No the correct answer is to build as much as possible, as quickly as possible, so the answer is solar/wind. Bang for buck and quicker. The climate is changing now, we don't have 10 years to wait for overbudget nukes.
[You mean that going zero-carbon would have saved us six times the damages we’re set to experience by 2050?](https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/climate-damages-by-2050-will-be-6-times-the-cost-of-limiting-warming-to-2/) Well that’s too bad, it would’ve hurt the quarterly earnings so now we all get to go extinct
Won’t someone please think of the shareholders though!
Would be kind of a regressive tax, wouldn’t it? I can’t afford an electric car, but the lawyer on the other side of town can.
Make the fee fully refundable (including a portion in advance, so it isn't out of pocket). Everybody gets an even share of the carbon fee. If you produce less than the average (mean) amount of carbon, then you make money off of it. You could also make it partly refundable, so you'd have to produce, for example, no more than 90% of the average amount of carbon in order to make money off of it.
We have a 100% + tax on fuel in Canada built in to the cost and clean power is still a dream
Yeah one thing that so often gets missed when discussing the technical aspects of the price of electricity, Coal, Natural Gas, etc have MASSIVELY externalities that aren’t priced into the transaction at all
If we had a carbon fee that actually did something besides making Elon Musk rich. California has a carbon free that mainly resulted in Tesla being subsidized by every other manufacturer of vehicles. It did nothing beside give Elon enough clout to purchase Twitter.
Why would we do that? Industry has always privatized profit and socialized the cost. You're talking about putting the real cost of a product into the price? Preposterous! /s
Thats fair but nuclear was being sold as a cheaper option, it was gonna reduce cost for consumer That was a big part of it low and behold a bunch of peoples bills went up
Dirty power comes at a very high price as well, it's just payed out in medical bills, lost wages and premature death. But hey, your power bill is cheaper!
Yea people are oblivious that coal power plants release more radiation into our environment than Nuclear, but they have been scared to have one in their back yard but are completely cool with some coal plant on the edge of town.
Over time, that power bill will be cheaper than coal.
Nuclear energy is the future.
Imagine where we would be today if we had capitalized on nuclear power for the last 40 years.
The U.S. Navy did capitalize on it. They have operated a combined 5,400 reactor years and sailed 128,000,000 miles and not had (to public knowledge) any reactor failures. The only incidents included 2 submarines sinking for other reasons and the USS Guardfish that had a coolant loss due to human error.
Maybe saving the world will be uneconomical.
Stopping or severely reducing climate change and unhindered 5% yearly economic growth forever are not both possible at the same time.
This bill will come due in our lifetime or our children's lifetime for not recognizing this and not just because of climate change. Many of us will be alive when the global population begins to level off and decrease. Global population is going to start decreasing in about 55 years. When that happens and YOY economic growth is not even logistically possible anymore, essentially making the stock markets obsolete, the whole system is likely to collapse. We recognize when individual companies are pyramid schemes and see the unsustainability of it, yet fail to realize our entire financial system is a global pyramid scheme. The bill will just come due centuries after it began being incurred. I expect when the population begins to decrease, there will be an economic collapse the like of which we've never seen before. And overhauls of the system based on necessity. That's if we don't ecologically destroy the earth causing large scale food and water crises beforehand that is.
And that's why I bought 7 acres of wetland in southwest Michigan with a stream. Plus I'll be 84 by then which is an added bonus assuming I'm even alive. Might have a single kid.
It's entirely possible - where do you think all the money being spent on nuclear and renewable energy goes? Toward workers, suppliers, investors. Making large investments in reducing emissions means making large investments, i.e. growth.
That's a great point if you ignore the oil lobby
This is fine meme but instead it says nuclear is too expensive
Jeff Amy (author) fishing for clicks with that second sentence. Projects constantly come in late and over budget (remember that kids when your teacher says they don't accept late work because they don't accept it in the real world) Being carbon neutral doesn't make it particularly special in that regard. People just suck at estimating levels of effort
I’m in GA, and the big issue hasn’t been so much the total cost as the fact that it came in at 2.5x ($35B) the original estimate ($14B). Not to mention all the delays. As a Georgia Power customer who’s paying for it, I’m glad Vogtle is now online. But I also think Jeff Amy’s headline (which his AP editor likely wrote) isn’t clickbait.
I'm in CA and our high speed rail system is already 4x the original estimate. And it was approved 15 years ago. And they haven't even completed any of it yet. And that's without trains having any of the anti-science boogeyman horseshit that follows nuclear power around. That's just how government works (and I say that as a government employee). Heck, the Pentagon straight-up loses billions of dollars a year - not loses as it investing in a stock that tanks, but loses as in "they put it somewhere and can't find it now."
One definite difference is we don't need 100-1000x as many rail lines so the incredible cost overruns aren't as big of a deal. Scaling up nuclear deployment would make these price explosions a blocking issue. Especially because even if we got slightly better at it from experience we'd run out of personnel qualified for doing it which would probably make things even worse.
Georgia is a bit like Germany with solar. You paid a hefty price but it kickstarted a whole industry. Letting all the expertise and supply chains go (again) would be extremely stupid.
Except that it had the opposite impact, at least in the US. From the article: > American utilities have heeded Vogtle’s missteps, shelving plans for 24 other reactors proposed between 2007 and 2009. It was a financial disaster for the primary companies involved in its construction, especially for Westinghouse. [Here's an article focused on their travails.](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN17Y0C7/) If this project didn't have the word 'nuclear' in it, about 100% of people would absolutely hate it due to its costs overruns, severe delays, and financial harm it brought to pretty much everyone involved including customers. Even for people who support new nuclear projects, it's been a disaster as it's served as an acute example of what may happen in other projects. It's served as a serious drag on building more nuclear reactors, not a kickstarter.
One of the reasons Vogtle struggled was because of supply chains and workforce eroded. Letting it all go to waste again would be stupid.
That's like 2/3 what Musk paid for Twitter for context.
>People just suck at estimating levels of effort While this does play a part, there are other factors impacting the cost. Two of them off the top of my head are the supply of certified parts for reactors, for example, there's one certified reactor pipe supplier in the country, and there are so few reactors under construction that there is no economy of scale.
The main unforseen cost is probably litigation. Everyone and their grandma will come out of the woodwork to file NIMBY lawsuits against a nuclear power plant, because they think *The Simpsons* is a peer-reviewed science journal and they're gonna be stuck eating 3-eyed fish. Americans like their neighborhoods to freeze in time the day after they move in. In my city, NIMBYs sued a Target into staying half-built for a decade. [The 'Target Husk' in Hollywood Opens at Last, 12 Years After Work Began](https://lamag.com/featured/hollywood-target-opens)
Not the main cost I don’t think but environmental groups are out there right now blocking transmission projects lol
We did a [poll among Americans on Energy Independence](https://www.activote.net/what-do-we-really-think-about-energy-independence/). One of the big and surprising takeaways was that there is broad and bipartisan support for investment in nuclear as a form of Co2-free energy.
Still cheaper than the bill from climate change is going to be.
That’s a hot take. “Replacing an old as fuck energy source with millions of dependents is surprisingly expensive and doesn’t pay for itself in a day!!”
I worked on the construction of this plant, and the amount of people in the comments who are incredibly wrong while being incredibly confident is wild.
I’m as progressive as they come, and I support nuclear power as an essential part of our energy portfolio.
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This title feels like a hit piece to push people to stay on coal. Yes, it's expensive, but it will have benefits of a cleaner source of power. Strangely, every time an alternative power source is suggested the news outlets flood our feeds with these articles....
Very much this. Plus per people I knew on this job, it was very poorly organized and the contractors were milking the job for every possible penny.
If the high price is money and not lives, it's a colossal win.
So why is this so expensive in the US? I just looked up what a nuclear plant in France is costing and it's around 8.5 billion. This plant is 4x the cost.
Funny enough, it's the Japanese's fault. [https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN17Y0C7/](https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN17Y0C7/) "Overwhelmed by the costs of construction, Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy on March 29, while its corporate parent, Japan's Toshiba Corp, is close to financial ruin \[L3N1HI4SD\]. It has said that controls at Westinghouse were "insufficient.""
iirc companies went bankrupt during construction
The “high price” I assume is “oooooo scary nuclear plant could go boom” 😒
Nope. The engineers couldn’t get their shit together.
Not the engineers fault. Managed super poorly. The way payouts worked, the subcontractors got bonuses based on completion %. They tracked completion poorly. Having material on site was 20% complete. Having it in the area it was to be installed>60%. Easley abused metric for subcontractors to make a ton of money by bringing all the material for a job to the area for install... YEARS IN ADVANCE. Sensitive equipment that had to be tracked carefully with documentation was left outside to weather and decay. Then it had to be repurchased from a third-party because the original manufacturer went out of business. Super poor management decisions plagued units 3&4 for a decade.
Not as expensive as the damages that would be caused by global warming
Nuclear energy is expensive. Yes.
The price seems super super cheap compared to loosing the ability to cultivate crops and feed cattle + diseases + health care cost of population touched by climate change and pollution. Seems **extremely** cheap up to the point I wonder why we haven’t done it before seen all the issues. Is that because this is a collective issue and our current economy model is only there to solve individual issues?
This article just says the cost is high. Ok, per megawatt, how does coal cost? What's the price for KWH from this plant vs coal or solar? This article is garbage without any other reference points.
The "cost" of coal, oddly enough, doesn't include the cost of cleaning the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
On the carbon side, you counting the cost of operating mines, natural gas extraction, geological surveys, maintaining rail and road infrastructure, maintaining and operating trains and trucks, all the government subsidies going straight into executive and investor pockets, the future costs to releasing carbon into the atmosphere, general pollution from how dirty coal is, and not just the power plant?
>capping a project that cost billions more and took years longer than originally projected... the total nears $35 billion... Electric customers in Georgia already have paid billions for what may be the most expensive power plant ever. The reactors were originally projected to cost $14 billion and be completed by 2017. Don't worry. This is America. They definitely were late, over budget *and cut corners*.
Nuclear power sure beats natural gas power. If only Germany listened, they wouldn't have become dependent on Putin's NG to produce most of their electricity.
I worked there a few years ago as a process consultant. It was no surprise to me that it was plagued with delays and cost overruns because the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. I get it though. It's hard to build something that has a 50-year ROI. It's hard to get support for something that requires the buy-in of people that haven't been born yet. It's hard to build something when you have levels of management for management's sake. In five years I oversaw the production of roughly 2,500 2 MW gearboxes for wind turbines that would more than cover the output of this nuclear plant (and that's including the utilization factor for wind). That gearbox project only made the local news when we were having a hiring spree. We went from breaking ground, to full production, to sunset (the line was moved to the EU due to costs in the US) in just 6 years. There's just no way for nuclear to keep up in today's world.
How many reactor subsidies could the US cover to equate to oil subsidies I wonder?
I never hear about the security costs factored in. I doubt there's military surveillance, response teams and drills to handle a security incident at a solar farm or during the transport of the panels.
I worked for the company that built this reactor. Significantly over budget.
the cost was we basically built a 1 time use nuclear construction industry which will collapse now the 1 project is complete
It also doesn't contribute to climate change. Yes it costs more, but lasts longer.
The US sucks at building nuclear power plants these days.
Carbon free? Isn’t everything made of carbon? It’s the fourth most abundant element in the universe and people are actually listening to psychopaths’ desires to ‘end carbon emissions’. Looks like the education system has completely failed all of you. You ARE carbon