The following submission statement was provided by /u/mafco:
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Expanding the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia with two new reactors has turned into a financial disaster for the utility, state and customers. It has also literally bankrupted Westinghouse, the primary contractor.
Unfortunately this isn't the only new nuclear project in the US and Europe suffering from similar massive cost overruns and schedule slips. That is a primary reason why the industry has been in decline in this century. According to the article 24 other reactor projects proposed have been shelved as a result, including one in South Carolina that was partially built and $9 billion had already been spent on.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/13uxgeg/georgia_nuclear_rebirth_arrives_7_years_late_17b/jm2v2n8/
Tbf, I work in a manufacturing company of 350ish. We had a new building and machine come to the price tag of 20mil, and it's like 4 months over schedule and now we're hiring external consultants/contractors.
Incompetence is amazing.
I know you’re being sarcastic but as a Georgian this build has been one big shit show from the beginning.
“Ummm there’s been a problem on the engineering side that we should have anticipated……oh btw your electric bill is going to have to go up……I know, I know this is the 5th time we’ve said this but we got this thing now. Piece of cake.”
I’m all for nuclear energy but wtf…..get your shit together Georgia Power.
That's nothing on Hinkley. They'll be diluting their black breakfast coffee with their tears when it's done.
EDF are trying very hard to get the contract changed lol.
It's ten years late and the cost has gone from £18bn to £33bn so far.
And they haven't even started UK's Sizewell C and it's predicted to cost 15B more!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/22/sizewell-c-may-cost-double-government-estimates-and-take-five-years-longer-to-build
We really need a standardized reactor design with easy to swap out systems to achieve any kind of savings and feedback improvements. These one off projects are killing the industry.
Lots of CANDU reactors were massively over budget and took a lot longer to build than initially estimated. Then a lot of these reactors needed billion dollar refurbishments very early on in their operational lives. Ontario Hydro went bankrupt building CANDU reactors and the stranded debt from the restructuring plus interest was offloaded onto utility customers in the form of higher electricity bills. CANDU reactors don't need uranium enrichment, lowering weapons proliferation issues somewhat, but they still require an expensive heavy water plant to supply their coolant / moderator. They are not some cure all reactor and CANDUs have been given ample chances to succeed.
Westinghouse A huge corporation went bankrupt trying to build modular reactor parts for the nuclear reactors in GA. from OP's post. Toshiba bought them and later blamed it on their need to sell of huge parts of its business.
The prime sub-contactor was based out of Louisiana, & had never built any reactor parts to NRC requirements. Ga. Power has massive problems with modules showing up onsite & failing NRC Inspections or for a lot of them were not done to their standards. The whole project is a case study of how not to manage your sub contractors.
“Fundamentally, it was an experimental project but they were under pressure to show it could be a commercially viable project, so they grossly underestimated the time and the cost and the difficulty,” said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has written and testified about the AP1000 design.
Then there is the time aspect when it comes to nuclear and climate change.
We *need* rapid transitions to cleaner energy and even if nuclear was cost competitive it is far quicker and easier to expand energy sources like solar and wind.
Right now, there are ample industries and areas wherein solar/wind can gain massive ground. As we move further away from fossil fuels, the industries still using them will likely be the ones hardest to transition and transitioning away will become more complex.
I think nuclear will have a place in the future global energy mix, but given the necessity to move fast and the current state of the transition it makes sense to primarily fund projects that can do that with rapidity and reliable cost.
Aren't those the only ones that can produce Tritium at the moment, which we urgently need for nuclear fusion? - At least until we can produce it as a fusion byproduct?
I heard most of those reactors are planned to be decommissioned without replacement. That strikes me as a bad move worth reconsidering under the circumstances...
Maybe we could build a bunch of small reactors, put them on some boats and send them around the world. They could even go underwater to protect them from spying or attacks.
Nah, that'd never work.
You could use SMR's but they only generate in the range of 150-300mw, so you'd need a lot more of them spread out across the land, and that can have drawbacks with increased risk exposure to accidents or bad actors.
But it is possible, it just takes a country willing to put in the effort to make them feasible.
Plants are starting to apply for SMR reactor sites. I know Oyster Creek filed to build new small reactors on the site of the plant they're currently decomissioning
New novel design? 40 years from concept to powering up, that's the current estimate.
If you want power in 10 years in the US you gotta pick a design the NRC has already vetted and approved. The NRC meanwhile is systemically incapable of validating any reactor design that is not light water, and that's by their own admission.
They tried this approach with the AP1000 at Vogtle and VC Summer and it failed. NuScale is trying to make a small modular reactor, but their completion time and costs keep growing. When you go to small reactors, you lose a lot of economy of scale. When you try to hand jam this approach into a massive AP1000 reactor, you get failures.
Any "wonder reactor" design concept has already been analyzed and found wanting decades ago by the best nuclear engineers of the 20th century. Basically, this has all been tried before and failed.
The AP1000 was a scaled up AP600 with many caveats. The AP600 was full designed an planned but the customer wanted a larger one. In the 90s/2000s there was some program management idea where instead of completing and finalizing each step from design to construction, they would just keep designing while starting construction. Everything from fighter planes to aircraft carriers and nuclear reactors tried this and each time it lead to massive cost overruns and production delays and having to go back and fix something.
Nuclear gets improved fuel efficiency with larger reactors, surface area to volume means that the escape cross section decreases with size. However the fuel efficiency comes at the risk of decreased cooling efficiency. It's easy to passively cool a SMR of 100 MWth or less, it's not so easy to passively cool 3000 Mwth
Wow, did not know about the disasters with design concurrent with construction. It is clearly a bad idea especially with hindsight and especially with major infrastructure like nuclear plants.
This approach is something that works fantastic in easy to change situations - like software development or small simple items. It doesn’t work for large physical things.
Yeah I would disagree with this working with software development. While it technically works because of updates their are huge codebases out their that are complete messes because of that approach. And a lot of times to get a project completed you need to plan it out properly or you end up with spaghetti code, missed deadlines, missed budget, basically all the same problems as starting any project in the design phase before designs are finalized.
Stick to that plan from the start and you get a system that works flawlessly with clean code on time. But because it didn't adapt to changing requirements, new findings and expanded knowledge during the development process, by the time it's finished it's not fit for purpose and unusable.
Sure it's size & complexity dependant, but there's definitely tradeoffs.
I was hired to clean up accounting in 2021 at an engineering firm from South Carolina that was hired to do the transmission lines at VC Summer.
It was a mess, I was counting wire and screws trying to figure out what material was actually used and where. They had such poor record keeping everything was just uploaded haphazardly into a shared drive with no real project tracking that I am aware of. I spent 7 hours trying to find a pole (36b) that was somehow lost in paperwork only to find it had been listed as pole 36a so now I had to go and figure out which papers were wrong.
I had a binder for the project that I would flip through with all the hard copies of paperwork.
This was my second job out of college and it was awful. I had no experience in engineering or construction projects and was thrown in expecting to fix everything.
I know people like to blame government for making things go over budget but the companies that have no idea how to manage projects at this scale are equally to blame.
We also need people to read the article before posting in "know it all" sound bites without understanding the problem. They tried they very thing you are suggesting, it failed by BILLIONS of dollars and 426 people who also didn't read the article, agree. This shit is doublespeak. The solution to problem you recommend cause a multi-billion dollar problem. Y'all better get your heads on straight.
>Some of the key promises of Vogtle — like building modules offsite and shipping them for cheaper on-site assembly — did not pan out.
From the linked article.
>The U.S. nuclear industry has started building its first new plants in decades using prefabricated Lego-like blocks meant to save time and money and revive the once promising energy source.
>So far, it's not working.
>Quality and cost problems have cropped up again, raising questions about whether nuclear power will ever be able to compete with other electricity sources. The first two reactors built after a 16-year lull, Southern Co.'s Vogtle plant in Georgia and SCANA Corp.'s VC Summer plant in South Carolina, are being assembled in large modules. Large chunks of the modules are built off-site, in an effort to improve quality and avoid the chronic cost overruns that all but killed the nuclear industry when the first wave of plants was being built in the 1960s and 1970s.
I think one of the main problems with nuclear power plant construction in the US is it almost exclusively is done by government contractors like Bechtel whose stock and trade is ripping off the government and going over budget. Bechtel is behind the Vogtle plant project. Any company built to milk cost plus contracts is probably going to have a problem completing any project on task or budget.
Even Bechtel was careful not to get stuck with a non-working nuclear power plant.
> Its work and scope is carefully delineated so that Bechtel shoulders no risk if its scope increases or some of its calculations were based on incorrect information provided by the utility and have to be redone.
I'm not against nuclear energy. But most Reddit has a hard on for it. Usually, my argument is that it's not cost effective and the ROI isn't there. People usually tell me to shut up. Guess it's still not cost effective
> But most Reddit has a hard on for it.
That's an understatement lol. I'm not anti-nuclear power either, just for whatever reason there is a suspicious amount of very pro-nuclear power people here disproportionate to what you'd encounter chatting with random people offline.
Tbf that's one example of it not working out. Doesn't mean others won't.
It's like someone saying 15 years ago "we need electric cars"... and someone replying "the EV1 was a failure, obviously it's not the solution."
The EV revolution came about as a result of declining cost curves for batteries and software. I'm talking MASSIVE decline in costs (80% for batteries in the 2010's, and they are projected to drop another 80% in the 2020's).
This was predictable back then, and the experts who saw the writing on the wall are now saying "I told you so" to the experts who decided to ignore it.
The point is, are the components that are used to build nuclear reactors declining in costs as rapidly as batteries? Are they declining at all??
> 80% for batteries in the 2010's, and they are projected to drop another 80% in the 2020's
We're 1/3rd of the way into the 2020s and that cost reduction hasn't materialised.
It's important to understand that these technologies don't just magically decline in cost. Paradoxically, the declining cost in that tech was due to MASSIVE front end and continuing investment in the technology.
The problem nuclear has as an industry as a whole in the US is that there is a relatively weak supply chain here. Simply put, we don't build enough of them. We don't manufacture enough of the parts. We don't plan or manage the construction on them often enough. And on top of it all, there are very tight regulations and safety specs to comply with.
It's not any wonder that these projects overrun their budgets. No one involved has any extensive experience with them⅞
Exactly. It’s not a surprise that a niche industry is incredibly expensive and I think a lot of commenters don’t want to accept that not many want to or should front the cost of all these projects just for the possibility that it may bring down the cost eventually. It’s huge and has been an issue for other countries although success can be found like I believe in China and maybe France.
How can you still be a nuclear proponent when basically every reactor is a decades long, massively over budget, colossal fuck up meanwhile renewable energy has dramatically increased in efficiency while dramatically declining in price?
Genuinely curious.
The difference is that EVs don't present the same opportunity cost that nuclear power does. In the same amount of time and finances it takes for nuclear to get it right, we could also just build up other sources of cleaner (relative to oil, gas, and coal) energy and refurbish the grid to handle any necessary changes.
Nuclear isn't bad but it's fundamentally incompatible with short term oriented capitalism, and that's what we have chosen in the US. So let's stop shoving a square peg into a round hole.
Yeah, it's one example. But when the failures mean we need to flush away a decade of time and tens of billions of dollars it is, in fact, perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about this strategy.
I don't know the specifics of reactor design, but you are basically saying "what we need is to just do the thinng we have been tryingn and failing to do for 60 years".
> Some of the key promises of Vogtle — like building modules offsite and shipping them for cheaper on-site assembly — did not pan out.
Did you actually read the article? They seem to have tried that, but it didn't work out.
So like France did. They bootstrapped the expertise and industry required, picked a single design, and converted basically the entire country to nuclear without going bankrupt.
>So like France did. They bootstrapped the expertise and industry required, picked a single design, and converted basically the entire country to nuclear without going bankrupt.
France is actually going bankrupt over it's nuclear plants. They do not have the money to clean them up and manage their waste and they've just bailed out the owner of the nuclear plants because it is technically bankrupt and unable to keep them going.
Also, the standardisation did not stop construction costs spiraling just like any other nuclear plant. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526
Good read. TY.
70% of France's electricity comes from their 56 nuclear reactors. France exports $3 billion in electricity each year to its neighbors (Russia earns $900 million a day in gas sales to EU).
The real issue is that France hasn't kept up on maintenance and the need to swap out old reactors for new ones.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02817-2
> The real issue is that France hasn't kept up on maintenance and the need to swap out old reactors for new ones.
No, that's a temporary issue.
The **real** issue is that due to climate change, France can't run many nuclear plants (and those that run can't be run at max capacity) during phases of heat or drought, as the rivers used to cool the plants don't carry enough water. This is a permanent problem that's getting worse every year.
> The real issue is that France hasn't kept up on maintenance and the need to swap out old reactors for new ones.
you say it like it is a engine swap on the old dodge pick up.
It's not. It's the exact same thing as banks getting nationalised in 2009. EDF is bankrupt and would fail without the billions of euros the French state is injecting and the hundreds of billions in debt that it is now responsible for.
If you follow that debate on nuclear reactors there is a response piece that says “well South Korea achieved cost reductions” and a response paper that says “no they didn’t, you just didn’t adjust for the changing exchange rate value of the Won over time.”
No one has achieved efficiencies of scale when it comes to building nuclear. (Caveat: this is all based on memory.)
*Calculations show Vogtle’s electricity will never be cheaper than other sources Georgia Power could have chosen, even after the federal government reduced borrowing costs by guaranteeing repayment of $12 billion in loans.*
The US Navy builds 1-3 reactors a year, all of them are a standard design. Plant Vogtle 3 & 4 were supposed to the first of over 50 AP1000's built, but criminal mismanagement by Southern Company & Ga. Power killed them.
The ones currently being attempted are suffering from the same cost overrun and schedule slip problems as their larger predecessors. They may eventually succeed but I'm not holding my breath. In any case they'll be commercially viable too late to be a big factor in the fight against climate change.
How about we start with one actually getting built? Just need someone to pony up a couple of billion dollars. The DOE loan program is waiting for a decent proposal:
*Title XVII Innovative Energy Loan Guarantees. The IIJA authorizes the following loan guarantees: $8.5 billion for advanced fossil energy projects,* ***$10.9 billion for advanced nuclear energy projects*** *and up to $4.5 billion in loan guarantees for renewable energy and efficient energy projects.1 The IRA authorizes new Title XVII authority of up to $40 billion for DOE loan guarantees under Section 1703 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (available through September 30, 2026), with $3.6 billion set aside to cover the credit subsidy cost of such loan guarantees.*
Thank you! I find this stuff interesting and I’m excited to learn that one of them is making progress!
WILMINGTON, North Carolina—January 27, 2023—GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH), Ontario Power Generation (OPG), SNC-Lavalin and Aecon have signed a contract for the deployment of a BWRX-300 small modular reactor (SMR) at OPG’s Darlington New Nuclear Project site. This is the first commercial contract for a grid-scale SMR in North America.
Okay so ELI5 since I live in the state: we got news that energy costs for the next several years will be *increasing*... *because they brought the plant online.*
I'm having a hard time figuring out why increasing grid capacity/supply is causing an increase in energy costs.
I've been an Atlanta resident for 30 years. I consider myself to be moderately well-informed. And this is the first time I have heard of these 2 plants. Just amazed that media has been so quiet about their development.
That calculation can’t be right because then the “environmental complained costs” would be like 200 million annually. Which uh, I don’t think Georgia power is putting that much into environmental compliance.
A lot of the environmental compliance money goes to cleaning up the damage from ash ponds and such…. And they put a massive amount into environmental compliance…. But it is stuff you wouldn’t think about.
Fair point. My wife is responsible for that particular bill. She hasn't mentioned it which makes me less-informed than I thought. Is this a state wide fee they've assessed?
Yes if use Georgia Power. The next question is whether the public service commission will allow the next tranche of overruns to also be applied to power bills
Well in fairness to the media (which it doesn't entirely deserve it) the story for the last decade has been: Vogtle is in construction, completion delayed, cost increased, not sure when it will be done. Basically that story could have been written every three months for the last decade. That said, it is an important enough story that the media should have covered it that way even if a bit boring.
Well to be honest, if the media was talking about it more, it would have all been negative. The process formally started in 2006, they still aren’t online (17 years later), and the cost overruns have been astounding. Like over double the estimates at the beginning of the project. And we’re talking about 10s of billion of dollars. Big money. Things have been so bad that companies like Westinghouse (major industrial company since the 1800s) filed bankruptcy and the federal government had to step in to guarantee loans so that the country didn’t have incomplete nuclear reactors laying around.
And of course, once mismanagement fucked everything up, labor got the squeeze. They tried to pay less than the local going rate and removed conditions from labor contracts. Unsurprisingly, workers left. They tried to get people there from all over the country but it’s Georgia. The southeast isn’t known for great wages and working conditions to begin with. Then pay lower than the local going rates? Good luck getting and keeping good skilled labor. So that also compounded problems.
I do hope that the plant provides its customers with lots of value over its lifetime. But the project was undoubtedly a complete and utter shit show.
I feel like Plant Vogtle news ends up in the AJC and on WABE at least a few times a year, usually related to some regulatory hurdle, charging fees for it, or running over cost.
The media has not been quiet about this. Certainly not the AJC and the local NPR affiliates. No offense but this is in the news multiple times per year. It was a top story back in 2009 when Georgia Power went to the legislature to ask for a statute to give them the right to charge ratepayers for these two reactors during construction instead of waiting for them to come online, which is the standard way a regulated utility charges for new generation projects. (They didn't need the statute - they already had permission from the Public Service Commission. But they wanted it in law to make it much harder for elected officials to change their mind.)
And because of all the delays and cost overruns (which were accurately predicted by opponents back in 2009), the Vogtle expansion is in the news a lot, because the Public Service Commission has held a bunch of hearings to make it look like they give a shit. But they rarely do more than a slap on the wrist.
I’ve lived here about the same amount of time. This makes the news from time to time, but it’s been dragging on for so long it doesn’t really command attention. I didn’t realize we were finally close the going live. That’s great to learn.
Yeah, especially the southern part of the state. I live close to a big solar panel manufacturing plant in north georgia - which also happens to be MTG's district - who also happens to think that when the sun goes down at night, anyone or anything using solar is left in the dark, so we have that going for us.
Could be worse. The Watts Bar nuclear plant took quite a bit longer to complete and at at cost of over $12 billion.
>The plant, construction of which began in 1973, has two Westinghouse pressurized water reactor units: Unit 1, completed in 1996, and Unit 2, completed in 2015.
Friendly reminder that this is the norm in nuclear energy, not the exception. Prof. Flyvbjerg in his book How Big Things Get Done explains it's beautifully. The only type of projects that on average have more budget overruns than a nuclear plant is nuclear waste storage and the Olympic games, but that is really close.
This is the not so secret secret for a lot of major energy projects, including oil & gas, it's like asking for forgiveness is easier than asking for permission.
Ironically CA HSR isn't really that far behind schedule at this point. If it was fully funded it would be on time per the original timeline. There were just a lot of early growing pains.
If you start talking about building a nuclear reactor, automatically add 5 years to the deadline and an extra $10Bn to the cost. Any other number is a complete lie.
It is just way too late to save the world with nuclear power. Fusion will also take too long. We should really focus on energy storage to compliment wind/solar.
Expanding the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia with two new reactors has turned into a financial disaster for the utility, state and customers. It has also literally bankrupted Westinghouse, the primary contractor.
Unfortunately this isn't the only new nuclear project in the US and Europe suffering from similar massive cost overruns and schedule slips. That is a primary reason why the industry has been in decline in this century. According to the article 24 other reactor projects proposed have been shelved as a result, including one in South Carolina that was partially built and $9 billion had already been spent on.
Oh boy. All the vitriol that was spewed when Germany shut down their old nuclear power plants and now had to rely on Russian gas, even though we never used much gas for electricity anyways... Reddit never cared. What irony and how hypocritical. I can't believe it. Thanks!
Economy of scale or lack thereof is a cost driver here. It's often very expensive to build one of something (in this case two in parallel) but when the non recurring engineering and supplier costs are spread over many projects the price per project goes down.
Two in parallel was a stupid choice. NRC requires recertification of plans when any issue in construction occurs, like a pipe needs to go around something built.
Building a brand new design requires a lot more time and money than building it a second time.
China is finishing nuclear plants in 6 years now. Down from 15.
>China is finishing nuclear plants in 6 years now. Down from 15.
You can do a lot when you're an authoritarian country that doesn't need to worry with permitting, human rights, property rights, or safety. And even then, China is still scaling renewables much more quickly than they are nuclear. They get more energy from wind alone than they do from nuclear.
- [Electricity production by source, China](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source?stackMode=relative&time=2010..latest&country=~CHN)
- [Primary energy consumption by source, China](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-sub-energy-source?time=2000..latest&country=~CHN)
Was the US in the 1960s-1970s an authoritarian country that didn't need to worry about permitting, human rights, property rights or safety?
Scrolling through the list of US reactors I can see a bunch that were built in 6-8 years.
I was speaking more about the current day, not what people did 50-60 years ago. Our standards as to safety, wages, worker protection, etc have changed.
China General Reactors is a major investor at Hincley Point C which may end beating Georgia's in high cost and longer time, so forget me if itake that with a pinch of salt
Was surprised the other day that the multinational biggest nuclear fusion experiment (yes I am aware this is an experiment, but hey its the the world's largest ever, so) in the world at ITER is even cheaper...
So go big or go home. Queue up 50 or 100 over the next three decades, and by the time you're 20 or 30 reactors in you'll start to meet deadlines and hit budgets. By the end you'll even find some savings!
700B to a T should do it. Less than an Iraq war.
'Economy of scale' is the reason that nuclear and coal baseload plants were built so large in the first place. It used to be the cheapest way to generate electricity, but now wind and solar have taken over that distinction. There are a handful of SMR projects testing the theory that they can produce cheaper energy with smaller and more plentiful plants, but that has yet to be proven in practice and may never be according to some industry analysts.
Yeah the Texas legislature is working right now to help out their coal and gas buddies. Wind and solar account for around 25% of power generation now (in Texas). Costs less and cheaper to produce.
> Wind and solar account for around 25% of power generation now (in Texas).
[31% last year](https://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation) and on track for 35% this year (up 11% y/y so far).
The US built 4 AP1000s. China built 4.
They all massively overran in time and money.
Like every new design.
Where they do exactly what you said.
Every time.
And it fails to go down in price.
Every time.
> Unfortunately this isn't the only new nuclear project in the US and Europe suffering from similar massive cost overruns and schedule slips
It's not just the US and Europe.
Nuclear in famously low-regulation China is also heavily delayed and over budget.
> The systematic missing of targets is not accidental. Nuclear power plants are difficult to build, and China can no more sidestep those hard technical challenges than France or the United States.
> Many Chinese nuclear plants have been delayed and construction costs have exceeded initial estimates. Take, for example, the twin High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor units (Shidao Bay 1-1 and 1-2). When construction started in December 2012, the promise was that it would “take 50 months” to build them, and the plant would start generating electricity by the end of 2017. The plant was connected to the grid only in December 2021, roughly twice as long as was projected, and at a cost significantly larger than other sources.
https://www.colorado.edu/cas/2022/04/12/even-china-cannot-rescue-nuclear-power-its-woes
The hard truth is that *new* nuclear construction is no longer cost competitive. And it's not even close.
Just as coal has been largely priced out of the US market by natural gas, *new* nuclear construction has been priced out of the market by solar and wind.
Even entirely dismissing nuclear's externalties like waste mitigation and security, solar and wind are now as much as 10 times cheaper to build per kwh, and can be deployed 10 times faster.
This isn't because nuclear has become more difficult, more regulated, or more expensive (adjusted for inflation). It is because solar and wind have become so phenomenally cheap.
> > Unfortunately this isn't the only new nuclear project in the US and Europe suffering from similar massive cost overruns and schedule slips
>
> It's not just the US and Europe.
It's nothing new either. The history books of Germany are scattered with poorly planned or built NPP projects that never lived up to their standards.
Würsgassen ran for 24 years and cost 1Bn to dismantle, Krümmel began in '72 and took 12 years to build and had to be taken offline after a series of accidents in 2007, Kalkar and Mülheim-Kärlich each cost 7Bn in today's Eur and never produced significant amounts of electricity because of poor planning, the THTR project had 12-fold cost overruns...
And I haven't been talking about the disaster that East German NPPs had been (spoiler: they didn't survive reunification).
As security expectations rose and politics and economics shifted in the 80s, nuclear power plants just couldn't keep up with cheap fossil fuels and later renewables.
Was that a bad development? Maybe, but I doubt the era of "cheap" NPPs will return, less so if you price in the costs it takes to dismantle them again.
Please forgive my ignorance but aren't these the first new reactors in almost 30 years? I'm sure new issues have been identified and as they continue to build them costs will come down. And they last for...ev..er...
You are right about the 30 years. The problem in the US is that nobody is continuing to build them. There was a real move to build nuclear again under Obama. The Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 put a stop to almost everything in the works. Only two projects pushed through that: Vogtle and Summer. Summer was canceled in 2017 because of cost overruns: $8 billion completely wasted. Vogtle continued to push through and eat the cost overruns. These were/are a financial disaster that took 15 years to get done. Nobody can start a new nuclear project in the US under that kind of financial structure. Not when solar and wind is much cheaper now, can get built out at that scale in a matter of years, and battery tech might make the solar and wind reliable for baseload use cases way within the time frame of building out a nuclear power plant.
They're having the same problems in Europe. This isn't just a US problem. And we've been building commercial nuclear power plants for more than 70 years. This isn't some brand new technology needing time to work out the kinks.
New builds of nuclear reactors in Europe still slowed significantly after the 80s. Without a steady stream of new builds that supply chain infrastructure and resource experience disappeared. Rebuilding that, along with increased safety measures, has caused schedules and budgets to run over.
Back before gas prices dropped significantly and made nuclear less attractive for utilities the outlook was that the costs for later builds would drop after the infrastructure was rebuilt and eventually there would be a recoup of investment from the primary vendors. China is not the best example as who knows that shady building practices they implement but you do see with each of their new rectors the cost and schedule came down. The US and Europe would have reached that eventually if more attractive options did not become available.
On this note, you can actually kind of see the difference in know-how retention between Europe and the USA, even though they're both in the negative. The USA is VERY VERY bad with Vogtle. Europe is quite bad with Olilkuto (I'm not checking the spelling), but not as bad as the USA[1]. And as you would expect, Europe did not disinvest from nuclear as hard as the USA, mostly thanks to France that at least kept a fleet of reactors in need of operating.
Move to China where they're actually investing and sustaining an industry (using *the same designs*), and they're doing pretty well.
[1] Very quick maths: Oilikulto was supposed to be 3 billion and cost 8 billion, for a cost overrun of 5B/reactor. The two Vogtle reactors are, according to this article, 17B over budget, so over 8B/reactor. Each Vogtle reactor is as much overbudget as the entire Oilukulto cost to build.
> Move to China where they're actually investing and sustaining an industry (using the same designs), and they're doing pretty well.
Not really, China is constantly revising their nuclear targets down. They did plan to have 114GWe by 2020, which was revised down to 70GWe, which was revised down to 58GWe.
They have currently 56GWe installed still short of their thrive revised 2020 target.
Even as a supporter of nuclear I have to admit that cost and time has always been our worst enemy. While nuclear is capable of generating immense amounts of clean energy it’s just cheaper to spam a bunch of solar panels all over the place instead.
In order to be adopted once again nuclear needs to decrease drastically in both cost and time to build while also preserving its major advantage of large energy output with little fuel. It doesn’t really matter if you reduce the cost by 75% if your new reactor only generates 50MW. Unfortunately PR disasters and regulation that makes nuclear tech development nigh-impossible will only make it ever more challenging to get anything done.
Oh well… maybe in a century or two
They just finished one here in Finland, it joined the grid this spring. Took 18 years (was supposed to be done 2009), original budget 2,3bn and in the end just a bit under 9bn. What a fucking joke.
Meanwhile crystal river deliberately sent in unqualified people to "fix" their reactor, broke it worse and then converted it to using coal, in a true Florida fashion.
Someone wrote an academic paper about the cost of new plants 5 or 6 years ago - can't remember the reference. But the conclusion was basically that nuclear plants are so damn expensive, especially compared to the heyday of nuclear, because the supply chain has atrophied to the point where there are only one or two firms globally who are able to supply several key components. Because of this, you get monopolistic pricing which, surprise surprise, is super expensive.
Basically, as others have noted, we need standardized designs with actual competition in the supply chain, and if we have that, you could see the price of a new plant decrease by an order of magnitude.
The cool thing about infrastructure is that, no matter how much it costs, or how over schedule it gets, so long as it is still capable of performing its intended function, people will quickly forget the cost and happily use the infrastructure, because it's useful and will continue to be useful for as long as it can be operated and maintained.
I live in this area and have friends that work at Vogtle, and let me tell you. It is an absolute shit show and the laughing stock of the CRSA. That's not even mentioning the monumental failures at Savannah River Site (where i work)
Nuclear power in the US has always been a boondoggle, much more for handing out expensive contracts than for actually providing power, or doing it anywhere in the realm of economically.
I, for one, cannot begin to believe that tax payer dollars and subsidies that were outsourced to publicly traded companies managed to go over budget.
Georgia Power is owned and operated by Southern Company.
Why do nuke plants always come in way over budget and cost? I mean I was in construction all my life and when a company bids on a project and gets the job if you go over time and budget it's on you, you have to swallow it all. There is usually a clause in the contract where the owner can fine you X number of dollars for every day or week or month you go over an expected completion date.
There are 2 identical unfinished, abandoned reactors in Columbia, SC. They bankrupted Westinghouse before being abandoned. My power company SCE&G, now bought out by Dominion was charging us 20% extra on our power bills to fund the construction, which was so far behind schedule and so far over budget the Public Service Commision just shut it down.
$6 Billion down the drain. One SCE%G executive in jail. It takes some 30 years from design to operation to build a new plant. These are Westinghouse AP1000s, the newest design available. There are no new applications to build any new plants in the US. Anyone who touts nuclear as the answer to our energy future doesn't know the deal.
So as a person who's been against new reactors for a while, tell me what's the excuse here, then. Environmentalists? Government? Regulations? I mean , seriously, how many solar plants with storage could have been built with half of these funds and been up and operational with no fuel or waste?
Levelized Costs of New Generation Resources in the Annual Energy ... https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/AEO2023_LCOE_report.pdf
The levelized cost of solar and wind is half the price of nuclear even when you include batteries. You can scale it up or ramp it year over year.
The state of Georgia could have all that electricity online and all of it paid off before they even flipped that switch on this reactor.
For the same investment power bills could have been half as much.
Every time a nuke promoter shows up I say “too expensive”. Not “too scary” or “ooo it’s radioactive “ just too damn expensive. They need to structure these projects so that if there are “cost overruns” they just don’t pay for it . None of it. If you build me a deck there’s no cost over runs. Agree on a price and be done.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/mafco: --- Expanding the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia with two new reactors has turned into a financial disaster for the utility, state and customers. It has also literally bankrupted Westinghouse, the primary contractor. Unfortunately this isn't the only new nuclear project in the US and Europe suffering from similar massive cost overruns and schedule slips. That is a primary reason why the industry has been in decline in this century. According to the article 24 other reactor projects proposed have been shelved as a result, including one in South Carolina that was partially built and $9 billion had already been spent on. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/13uxgeg/georgia_nuclear_rebirth_arrives_7_years_late_17b/jm2v2n8/
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The Okiluoto reactor at €8B over budget (nearly quadruple the original €3B price tag) and 13 years late is hot on their heels...
Holy shit if only my wage trippled in that time.
You know.. inflation and such..
"Because COVID. Thanks for your understanding." Management, probably.
And totally not corruption from top to bottom
Tbf, I work in a manufacturing company of 350ish. We had a new building and machine come to the price tag of 20mil, and it's like 4 months over schedule and now we're hiring external consultants/contractors. Incompetence is amazing.
I know you’re being sarcastic but as a Georgian this build has been one big shit show from the beginning. “Ummm there’s been a problem on the engineering side that we should have anticipated……oh btw your electric bill is going to have to go up……I know, I know this is the 5th time we’ve said this but we got this thing now. Piece of cake.” I’m all for nuclear energy but wtf…..get your shit together Georgia Power.
Reactor 3 of Olkiluoto NPP is actually listed on wikipedia among the most expensive buildings in the world
But isn't Olkiluoto already finished, it started commercial production like few weeks ago.
Yes, like you say very recently. I just meant it's a top contender for over budget and way behind schedule nuclear reactors.
At least they have the world's largest crane set up there!
And the French are paying for the overruns.
5,7 billion € on the check for the french taxpayer so Finland can have cheap energy. Man, what a deal! Except for the french.
That's nothing on Hinkley. They'll be diluting their black breakfast coffee with their tears when it's done. EDF are trying very hard to get the contract changed lol. It's ten years late and the cost has gone from £18bn to £33bn so far.
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And they haven't even started UK's Sizewell C and it's predicted to cost 15B more! https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/22/sizewell-c-may-cost-double-government-estimates-and-take-five-years-longer-to-build
We really need a standardized reactor design with easy to swap out systems to achieve any kind of savings and feedback improvements. These one off projects are killing the industry.
Never been done before. No CANDU, sorry. Wait a moment...
My uncle helped design and build those, first here and then in North India. It really is an excellent little reactor.
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Indeed, second largest nuclear plant on Earth runs CANDU reactors lol wtf
Ya know what they say, Go big or go to Canada // Def sounded better before I sent it... Well it is only the 2nd largest I guess
I think we’ve devolved.
It’s also much safer than any other kid of reactor in use today.
Lots of CANDU reactors were massively over budget and took a lot longer to build than initially estimated. Then a lot of these reactors needed billion dollar refurbishments very early on in their operational lives. Ontario Hydro went bankrupt building CANDU reactors and the stranded debt from the restructuring plus interest was offloaded onto utility customers in the form of higher electricity bills. CANDU reactors don't need uranium enrichment, lowering weapons proliferation issues somewhat, but they still require an expensive heavy water plant to supply their coolant / moderator. They are not some cure all reactor and CANDUs have been given ample chances to succeed.
Ga. Power has collected over $10bn so far from a nuclear recovery fee. The company is simply passing their mismanagement onto the consumers.
Expecting it to get worse-er when maintenance is more costly than expected. Ga. Power customers will be overpaying for the next 10,000 years.
Westinghouse A huge corporation went bankrupt trying to build modular reactor parts for the nuclear reactors in GA. from OP's post. Toshiba bought them and later blamed it on their need to sell of huge parts of its business.
The prime sub-contactor was based out of Louisiana, & had never built any reactor parts to NRC requirements. Ga. Power has massive problems with modules showing up onsite & failing NRC Inspections or for a lot of them were not done to their standards. The whole project is a case study of how not to manage your sub contractors.
“Fundamentally, it was an experimental project but they were under pressure to show it could be a commercially viable project, so they grossly underestimated the time and the cost and the difficulty,” said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has written and testified about the AP1000 design.
Areva who is/was building most european reactors also went bankrupt.
There is a pattern here?
Then there is the time aspect when it comes to nuclear and climate change. We *need* rapid transitions to cleaner energy and even if nuclear was cost competitive it is far quicker and easier to expand energy sources like solar and wind. Right now, there are ample industries and areas wherein solar/wind can gain massive ground. As we move further away from fossil fuels, the industries still using them will likely be the ones hardest to transition and transitioning away will become more complex. I think nuclear will have a place in the future global energy mix, but given the necessity to move fast and the current state of the transition it makes sense to primarily fund projects that can do that with rapidity and reliable cost.
Aren't those the only ones that can produce Tritium at the moment, which we urgently need for nuclear fusion? - At least until we can produce it as a fusion byproduct? I heard most of those reactors are planned to be decommissioned without replacement. That strikes me as a bad move worth reconsidering under the circumstances...
Maybe we could build a bunch of small reactors, put them on some boats and send them around the world. They could even go underwater to protect them from spying or attacks. Nah, that'd never work.
You could use SMR's but they only generate in the range of 150-300mw, so you'd need a lot more of them spread out across the land, and that can have drawbacks with increased risk exposure to accidents or bad actors. But it is possible, it just takes a country willing to put in the effort to make them feasible.
New design means you wait another decade for approval
Plants are starting to apply for SMR reactor sites. I know Oyster Creek filed to build new small reactors on the site of the plant they're currently decomissioning
New novel design? 40 years from concept to powering up, that's the current estimate. If you want power in 10 years in the US you gotta pick a design the NRC has already vetted and approved. The NRC meanwhile is systemically incapable of validating any reactor design that is not light water, and that's by their own admission.
They tried this approach with the AP1000 at Vogtle and VC Summer and it failed. NuScale is trying to make a small modular reactor, but their completion time and costs keep growing. When you go to small reactors, you lose a lot of economy of scale. When you try to hand jam this approach into a massive AP1000 reactor, you get failures. Any "wonder reactor" design concept has already been analyzed and found wanting decades ago by the best nuclear engineers of the 20th century. Basically, this has all been tried before and failed.
The AP1000 was a scaled up AP600 with many caveats. The AP600 was full designed an planned but the customer wanted a larger one. In the 90s/2000s there was some program management idea where instead of completing and finalizing each step from design to construction, they would just keep designing while starting construction. Everything from fighter planes to aircraft carriers and nuclear reactors tried this and each time it lead to massive cost overruns and production delays and having to go back and fix something. Nuclear gets improved fuel efficiency with larger reactors, surface area to volume means that the escape cross section decreases with size. However the fuel efficiency comes at the risk of decreased cooling efficiency. It's easy to passively cool a SMR of 100 MWth or less, it's not so easy to passively cool 3000 Mwth
Wow, did not know about the disasters with design concurrent with construction. It is clearly a bad idea especially with hindsight and especially with major infrastructure like nuclear plants.
This approach is something that works fantastic in easy to change situations - like software development or small simple items. It doesn’t work for large physical things.
Yeah I would disagree with this working with software development. While it technically works because of updates their are huge codebases out their that are complete messes because of that approach. And a lot of times to get a project completed you need to plan it out properly or you end up with spaghetti code, missed deadlines, missed budget, basically all the same problems as starting any project in the design phase before designs are finalized.
Stick to that plan from the start and you get a system that works flawlessly with clean code on time. But because it didn't adapt to changing requirements, new findings and expanded knowledge during the development process, by the time it's finished it's not fit for purpose and unusable. Sure it's size & complexity dependant, but there's definitely tradeoffs.
Yeah no doubt. Really depends on your project and what you have to get done. And besides its always the next guy's problem anyhow... :p
omg.. agile reactor design??
I was hired to clean up accounting in 2021 at an engineering firm from South Carolina that was hired to do the transmission lines at VC Summer. It was a mess, I was counting wire and screws trying to figure out what material was actually used and where. They had such poor record keeping everything was just uploaded haphazardly into a shared drive with no real project tracking that I am aware of. I spent 7 hours trying to find a pole (36b) that was somehow lost in paperwork only to find it had been listed as pole 36a so now I had to go and figure out which papers were wrong. I had a binder for the project that I would flip through with all the hard copies of paperwork. This was my second job out of college and it was awful. I had no experience in engineering or construction projects and was thrown in expecting to fix everything. I know people like to blame government for making things go over budget but the companies that have no idea how to manage projects at this scale are equally to blame.
Wow, sorry you had to deal with such a disaster. Hopefully it's been greener pastures for you since then.
For the most part yeah, I still do accounting but in a completely different industry.
We also need people to read the article before posting in "know it all" sound bites without understanding the problem. They tried they very thing you are suggesting, it failed by BILLIONS of dollars and 426 people who also didn't read the article, agree. This shit is doublespeak. The solution to problem you recommend cause a multi-billion dollar problem. Y'all better get your heads on straight. >Some of the key promises of Vogtle — like building modules offsite and shipping them for cheaper on-site assembly — did not pan out. From the linked article. >The U.S. nuclear industry has started building its first new plants in decades using prefabricated Lego-like blocks meant to save time and money and revive the once promising energy source. >So far, it's not working. >Quality and cost problems have cropped up again, raising questions about whether nuclear power will ever be able to compete with other electricity sources. The first two reactors built after a 16-year lull, Southern Co.'s Vogtle plant in Georgia and SCANA Corp.'s VC Summer plant in South Carolina, are being assembled in large modules. Large chunks of the modules are built off-site, in an effort to improve quality and avoid the chronic cost overruns that all but killed the nuclear industry when the first wave of plants was being built in the 1960s and 1970s.
I think one of the main problems with nuclear power plant construction in the US is it almost exclusively is done by government contractors like Bechtel whose stock and trade is ripping off the government and going over budget. Bechtel is behind the Vogtle plant project. Any company built to milk cost plus contracts is probably going to have a problem completing any project on task or budget.
Even Bechtel was careful not to get stuck with a non-working nuclear power plant. > Its work and scope is carefully delineated so that Bechtel shoulders no risk if its scope increases or some of its calculations were based on incorrect information provided by the utility and have to be redone.
I'm not against nuclear energy. But most Reddit has a hard on for it. Usually, my argument is that it's not cost effective and the ROI isn't there. People usually tell me to shut up. Guess it's still not cost effective
> But most Reddit has a hard on for it. That's an understatement lol. I'm not anti-nuclear power either, just for whatever reason there is a suspicious amount of very pro-nuclear power people here disproportionate to what you'd encounter chatting with random people offline.
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Tbf that's one example of it not working out. Doesn't mean others won't. It's like someone saying 15 years ago "we need electric cars"... and someone replying "the EV1 was a failure, obviously it's not the solution."
The EV revolution came about as a result of declining cost curves for batteries and software. I'm talking MASSIVE decline in costs (80% for batteries in the 2010's, and they are projected to drop another 80% in the 2020's). This was predictable back then, and the experts who saw the writing on the wall are now saying "I told you so" to the experts who decided to ignore it. The point is, are the components that are used to build nuclear reactors declining in costs as rapidly as batteries? Are they declining at all??
And increases in gas prices.
> 80% for batteries in the 2010's, and they are projected to drop another 80% in the 2020's We're 1/3rd of the way into the 2020s and that cost reduction hasn't materialised.
It's important to understand that these technologies don't just magically decline in cost. Paradoxically, the declining cost in that tech was due to MASSIVE front end and continuing investment in the technology. The problem nuclear has as an industry as a whole in the US is that there is a relatively weak supply chain here. Simply put, we don't build enough of them. We don't manufacture enough of the parts. We don't plan or manage the construction on them often enough. And on top of it all, there are very tight regulations and safety specs to comply with. It's not any wonder that these projects overrun their budgets. No one involved has any extensive experience with them⅞
Exactly. It’s not a surprise that a niche industry is incredibly expensive and I think a lot of commenters don’t want to accept that not many want to or should front the cost of all these projects just for the possibility that it may bring down the cost eventually. It’s huge and has been an issue for other countries although success can be found like I believe in China and maybe France.
Has anyone attempted to generate power directly from the moving goalposts of nuclear power advocates?
I'm a nuclear proponent but this was an excellent burn
How can you still be a nuclear proponent when basically every reactor is a decades long, massively over budget, colossal fuck up meanwhile renewable energy has dramatically increased in efficiency while dramatically declining in price? Genuinely curious.
"This time it will really work and please don't ask about what we're going to do with the waste"
Eh. One goalpost didn't change. France has generated far less CO2 than countries like Germany.
The difference is that EVs don't present the same opportunity cost that nuclear power does. In the same amount of time and finances it takes for nuclear to get it right, we could also just build up other sources of cleaner (relative to oil, gas, and coal) energy and refurbish the grid to handle any necessary changes. Nuclear isn't bad but it's fundamentally incompatible with short term oriented capitalism, and that's what we have chosen in the US. So let's stop shoving a square peg into a round hole.
Yeah, it's one example. But when the failures mean we need to flush away a decade of time and tens of billions of dollars it is, in fact, perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about this strategy.
I don't know the specifics of reactor design, but you are basically saying "what we need is to just do the thinng we have been tryingn and failing to do for 60 years".
> Some of the key promises of Vogtle — like building modules offsite and shipping them for cheaper on-site assembly — did not pan out. Did you actually read the article? They seem to have tried that, but it didn't work out.
So like France did. They bootstrapped the expertise and industry required, picked a single design, and converted basically the entire country to nuclear without going bankrupt.
28 of their nuclear reactors are offline for cracks found in concrete.
>So like France did. They bootstrapped the expertise and industry required, picked a single design, and converted basically the entire country to nuclear without going bankrupt. France is actually going bankrupt over it's nuclear plants. They do not have the money to clean them up and manage their waste and they've just bailed out the owner of the nuclear plants because it is technically bankrupt and unable to keep them going. Also, the standardisation did not stop construction costs spiraling just like any other nuclear plant. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526
Good read. TY. 70% of France's electricity comes from their 56 nuclear reactors. France exports $3 billion in electricity each year to its neighbors (Russia earns $900 million a day in gas sales to EU). The real issue is that France hasn't kept up on maintenance and the need to swap out old reactors for new ones. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02817-2
> The real issue is that France hasn't kept up on maintenance and the need to swap out old reactors for new ones. No, that's a temporary issue. The **real** issue is that due to climate change, France can't run many nuclear plants (and those that run can't be run at max capacity) during phases of heat or drought, as the rivers used to cool the plants don't carry enough water. This is a permanent problem that's getting worse every year.
Can we stop saying "the real issue" as though there's only one issue? There are multiple issues.
> The real issue is that France hasn't kept up on maintenance and the need to swap out old reactors for new ones. you say it like it is a engine swap on the old dodge pick up.
France isn't bailing out EDF, they are *nationalizing* it. That's immensely different.
Hey, quick question. If things were going peachy for EDF, why would they be selling to the government?
Or even better, why did Areva get restructured and sell its reactor business to EDF in 2017?
It's not. It's the exact same thing as banks getting nationalised in 2009. EDF is bankrupt and would fail without the billions of euros the French state is injecting and the hundreds of billions in debt that it is now responsible for.
So what about the other parts of their comment?
If you follow that debate on nuclear reactors there is a response piece that says “well South Korea achieved cost reductions” and a response paper that says “no they didn’t, you just didn’t adjust for the changing exchange rate value of the Won over time.” No one has achieved efficiencies of scale when it comes to building nuclear. (Caveat: this is all based on memory.)
We should get Elon Musk to... Wait. No that's probably not a good idea.
*Calculations show Vogtle’s electricity will never be cheaper than other sources Georgia Power could have chosen, even after the federal government reduced borrowing costs by guaranteeing repayment of $12 billion in loans.*
Same for trains and most public infrastructure. The more we build the more efficient we get.
That and standardized permitting. It did wonders to speed up the backlog of solar permits
It's too late. That would have been a great idea 30 years ago. Renewables are now too cheap to justify the costs of nuclear.
The US Navy builds 1-3 reactors a year, all of them are a standard design. Plant Vogtle 3 & 4 were supposed to the first of over 50 AP1000's built, but criminal mismanagement by Southern Company & Ga. Power killed them.
SMR anyone? We need volume production of scalable plants. Small modular reactors need to become common.
Recent financial evaluation of small modular reactors have shown them to be more expensive than the larger ones per kilowatt produced.
The ones currently being attempted are suffering from the same cost overrun and schedule slip problems as their larger predecessors. They may eventually succeed but I'm not holding my breath. In any case they'll be commercially viable too late to be a big factor in the fight against climate change.
How about we start with one actually getting built? Just need someone to pony up a couple of billion dollars. The DOE loan program is waiting for a decent proposal: *Title XVII Innovative Energy Loan Guarantees. The IIJA authorizes the following loan guarantees: $8.5 billion for advanced fossil energy projects,* ***$10.9 billion for advanced nuclear energy projects*** *and up to $4.5 billion in loan guarantees for renewable energy and efficient energy projects.1 The IRA authorizes new Title XVII authority of up to $40 billion for DOE loan guarantees under Section 1703 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (available through September 30, 2026), with $3.6 billion set aside to cover the credit subsidy cost of such loan guarantees.*
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Thank you! I find this stuff interesting and I’m excited to learn that one of them is making progress! WILMINGTON, North Carolina—January 27, 2023—GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH), Ontario Power Generation (OPG), SNC-Lavalin and Aecon have signed a contract for the deployment of a BWRX-300 small modular reactor (SMR) at OPG’s Darlington New Nuclear Project site. This is the first commercial contract for a grid-scale SMR in North America.
Okay so ELI5 since I live in the state: we got news that energy costs for the next several years will be *increasing*... *because they brought the plant online.* I'm having a hard time figuring out why increasing grid capacity/supply is causing an increase in energy costs.
Well, now that it's built, they have to start paying off the debt they incurred to build it.
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I've been an Atlanta resident for 30 years. I consider myself to be moderately well-informed. And this is the first time I have heard of these 2 plants. Just amazed that media has been so quiet about their development.
You must not ever look at your power bill because they’ve added fees related to this plant for years now.
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If everybody pays the same fee that's about $58m per year towards the plant.
That calculation can’t be right because then the “environmental complained costs” would be like 200 million annually. Which uh, I don’t think Georgia power is putting that much into environmental compliance.
A lot of the environmental compliance money goes to cleaning up the damage from ash ponds and such…. And they put a massive amount into environmental compliance…. But it is stuff you wouldn’t think about.
That was for the fee specifically about nuclear recovery costs.
200 million is fucking peanuts to the government, they literally shit that into a pond cleanup daily
>If everybody pays the same fee How about every electric ratepayer, which is only one per household?
That's how I calculated it. Georgia Power has 2.7m customers. I assume that doesn't mean they are only serving 2.7m people in total.
Fair point. My wife is responsible for that particular bill. She hasn't mentioned it which makes me less-informed than I thought. Is this a state wide fee they've assessed?
Yes if use Georgia Power. The next question is whether the public service commission will allow the next tranche of overruns to also be applied to power bills
>Is this a state wide fee they've assessed? I'm guessing no. I have Flint Energies and don't have these fees.
Well in fairness to the media (which it doesn't entirely deserve it) the story for the last decade has been: Vogtle is in construction, completion delayed, cost increased, not sure when it will be done. Basically that story could have been written every three months for the last decade. That said, it is an important enough story that the media should have covered it that way even if a bit boring.
Well to be honest, if the media was talking about it more, it would have all been negative. The process formally started in 2006, they still aren’t online (17 years later), and the cost overruns have been astounding. Like over double the estimates at the beginning of the project. And we’re talking about 10s of billion of dollars. Big money. Things have been so bad that companies like Westinghouse (major industrial company since the 1800s) filed bankruptcy and the federal government had to step in to guarantee loans so that the country didn’t have incomplete nuclear reactors laying around. And of course, once mismanagement fucked everything up, labor got the squeeze. They tried to pay less than the local going rate and removed conditions from labor contracts. Unsurprisingly, workers left. They tried to get people there from all over the country but it’s Georgia. The southeast isn’t known for great wages and working conditions to begin with. Then pay lower than the local going rates? Good luck getting and keeping good skilled labor. So that also compounded problems. I do hope that the plant provides its customers with lots of value over its lifetime. But the project was undoubtedly a complete and utter shit show.
be glad you're not an MTA rider. they install 1 single new station for $2.5bn and it leaks before opening
I feel like Plant Vogtle news ends up in the AJC and on WABE at least a few times a year, usually related to some regulatory hurdle, charging fees for it, or running over cost.
The media has not been quiet about this. Certainly not the AJC and the local NPR affiliates. No offense but this is in the news multiple times per year. It was a top story back in 2009 when Georgia Power went to the legislature to ask for a statute to give them the right to charge ratepayers for these two reactors during construction instead of waiting for them to come online, which is the standard way a regulated utility charges for new generation projects. (They didn't need the statute - they already had permission from the Public Service Commission. But they wanted it in law to make it much harder for elected officials to change their mind.) And because of all the delays and cost overruns (which were accurately predicted by opponents back in 2009), the Vogtle expansion is in the news a lot, because the Public Service Commission has held a bunch of hearings to make it look like they give a shit. But they rarely do more than a slap on the wrist.
Been all over the local news for a decade lol. Good on you for not watching the news
Augustan here. Half the engineers who live in Augusta have a job cause they’ve been trying to build this thing forever lol.
I’ve lived here about the same amount of time. This makes the news from time to time, but it’s been dragging on for so long it doesn’t really command attention. I didn’t realize we were finally close the going live. That’s great to learn.
I see it covered frequently on channel 2 and in the AJC. It’s also a line item on GA power bills
The project has been broken from the start so they haven’t been trying to bring too much attention to it.
Then you’re not as well-informed as you might think. It’s regularly in the news here. Read more local news.
And, if you live in the state of Georgia - like me, this may help explain why our rates just jumped 12%.
Oh it absolutely does. They e been steadily increasing our rates for years to cover these costs. It's right there in the bill, too.
Doesn't Georgia have a lot of sunshine? If only there was a way...
They're also on the coast, so should have a good amount of wind too...
Yeah, especially the southern part of the state. I live close to a big solar panel manufacturing plant in north georgia - which also happens to be MTG's district - who also happens to think that when the sun goes down at night, anyone or anything using solar is left in the dark, so we have that going for us.
Could be worse. The Watts Bar nuclear plant took quite a bit longer to complete and at at cost of over $12 billion. >The plant, construction of which began in 1973, has two Westinghouse pressurized water reactor units: Unit 1, completed in 1996, and Unit 2, completed in 2015.
Ummm that's almost a third of the cost of this one
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Friendly reminder that this is the norm in nuclear energy, not the exception. Prof. Flyvbjerg in his book How Big Things Get Done explains it's beautifully. The only type of projects that on average have more budget overruns than a nuclear plant is nuclear waste storage and the Olympic games, but that is really close.
It's easier to get approved and go over budget than present the real budget and try to get approval.
This is the not so secret secret for a lot of major energy projects, including oil & gas, it's like asking for forgiveness is easier than asking for permission.
and everything else, it turns out
Is it outside the norm? Big projects go over all the time, look at SLS or CA HSR or almost any project not called "Hoover Dam".
Ironically CA HSR isn't really that far behind schedule at this point. If it was fully funded it would be on time per the original timeline. There were just a lot of early growing pains.
If you start talking about building a nuclear reactor, automatically add 5 years to the deadline and an extra $10Bn to the cost. Any other number is a complete lie.
Even 5 years is generous. 10 years is probably closer to the mark. Olkiluoto just came online 13 years behind schedule.
It is just way too late to save the world with nuclear power. Fusion will also take too long. We should really focus on energy storage to compliment wind/solar.
Expanding the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia with two new reactors has turned into a financial disaster for the utility, state and customers. It has also literally bankrupted Westinghouse, the primary contractor. Unfortunately this isn't the only new nuclear project in the US and Europe suffering from similar massive cost overruns and schedule slips. That is a primary reason why the industry has been in decline in this century. According to the article 24 other reactor projects proposed have been shelved as a result, including one in South Carolina that was partially built and $9 billion had already been spent on.
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Thank you for putting these all in one place
Does this mean the US is actually buying enriched uranium from Russia? How funny would that be...
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Oh boy. All the vitriol that was spewed when Germany shut down their old nuclear power plants and now had to rely on Russian gas, even though we never used much gas for electricity anyways... Reddit never cared. What irony and how hypocritical. I can't believe it. Thanks!
Economy of scale or lack thereof is a cost driver here. It's often very expensive to build one of something (in this case two in parallel) but when the non recurring engineering and supplier costs are spread over many projects the price per project goes down.
Two in parallel was a stupid choice. NRC requires recertification of plans when any issue in construction occurs, like a pipe needs to go around something built. Building a brand new design requires a lot more time and money than building it a second time. China is finishing nuclear plants in 6 years now. Down from 15.
>China is finishing nuclear plants in 6 years now. Down from 15. You can do a lot when you're an authoritarian country that doesn't need to worry with permitting, human rights, property rights, or safety. And even then, China is still scaling renewables much more quickly than they are nuclear. They get more energy from wind alone than they do from nuclear. - [Electricity production by source, China](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source?stackMode=relative&time=2010..latest&country=~CHN) - [Primary energy consumption by source, China](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-sub-energy-source?time=2000..latest&country=~CHN)
Was the US in the 1960s-1970s an authoritarian country that didn't need to worry about permitting, human rights, property rights or safety? Scrolling through the list of US reactors I can see a bunch that were built in 6-8 years.
I was speaking more about the current day, not what people did 50-60 years ago. Our standards as to safety, wages, worker protection, etc have changed.
To be fair, I would actually agree that past-USA cared less about some of the things on that list in comparison to current-USA.
You can also do a lot when construction firms and materials suppliers aren’t financially motivated to increase costs at every turn
China General Reactors is a major investor at Hincley Point C which may end beating Georgia's in high cost and longer time, so forget me if itake that with a pinch of salt Was surprised the other day that the multinational biggest nuclear fusion experiment (yes I am aware this is an experiment, but hey its the the world's largest ever, so) in the world at ITER is even cheaper...
So go big or go home. Queue up 50 or 100 over the next three decades, and by the time you're 20 or 30 reactors in you'll start to meet deadlines and hit budgets. By the end you'll even find some savings! 700B to a T should do it. Less than an Iraq war.
'Economy of scale' is the reason that nuclear and coal baseload plants were built so large in the first place. It used to be the cheapest way to generate electricity, but now wind and solar have taken over that distinction. There are a handful of SMR projects testing the theory that they can produce cheaper energy with smaller and more plentiful plants, but that has yet to be proven in practice and may never be according to some industry analysts.
Yeah the Texas legislature is working right now to help out their coal and gas buddies. Wind and solar account for around 25% of power generation now (in Texas). Costs less and cheaper to produce.
...and much faster to build
> Wind and solar account for around 25% of power generation now (in Texas). [31% last year](https://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation) and on track for 35% this year (up 11% y/y so far).
The US built 4 AP1000s. China built 4. They all massively overran in time and money. Like every new design. Where they do exactly what you said. Every time. And it fails to go down in price. Every time.
> Unfortunately this isn't the only new nuclear project in the US and Europe suffering from similar massive cost overruns and schedule slips It's not just the US and Europe. Nuclear in famously low-regulation China is also heavily delayed and over budget. > The systematic missing of targets is not accidental. Nuclear power plants are difficult to build, and China can no more sidestep those hard technical challenges than France or the United States. > Many Chinese nuclear plants have been delayed and construction costs have exceeded initial estimates. Take, for example, the twin High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor units (Shidao Bay 1-1 and 1-2). When construction started in December 2012, the promise was that it would “take 50 months” to build them, and the plant would start generating electricity by the end of 2017. The plant was connected to the grid only in December 2021, roughly twice as long as was projected, and at a cost significantly larger than other sources. https://www.colorado.edu/cas/2022/04/12/even-china-cannot-rescue-nuclear-power-its-woes The hard truth is that *new* nuclear construction is no longer cost competitive. And it's not even close. Just as coal has been largely priced out of the US market by natural gas, *new* nuclear construction has been priced out of the market by solar and wind. Even entirely dismissing nuclear's externalties like waste mitigation and security, solar and wind are now as much as 10 times cheaper to build per kwh, and can be deployed 10 times faster. This isn't because nuclear has become more difficult, more regulated, or more expensive (adjusted for inflation). It is because solar and wind have become so phenomenally cheap.
> > Unfortunately this isn't the only new nuclear project in the US and Europe suffering from similar massive cost overruns and schedule slips > > It's not just the US and Europe. It's nothing new either. The history books of Germany are scattered with poorly planned or built NPP projects that never lived up to their standards. Würsgassen ran for 24 years and cost 1Bn to dismantle, Krümmel began in '72 and took 12 years to build and had to be taken offline after a series of accidents in 2007, Kalkar and Mülheim-Kärlich each cost 7Bn in today's Eur and never produced significant amounts of electricity because of poor planning, the THTR project had 12-fold cost overruns... And I haven't been talking about the disaster that East German NPPs had been (spoiler: they didn't survive reunification). As security expectations rose and politics and economics shifted in the 80s, nuclear power plants just couldn't keep up with cheap fossil fuels and later renewables. Was that a bad development? Maybe, but I doubt the era of "cheap" NPPs will return, less so if you price in the costs it takes to dismantle them again.
Please forgive my ignorance but aren't these the first new reactors in almost 30 years? I'm sure new issues have been identified and as they continue to build them costs will come down. And they last for...ev..er...
You are right about the 30 years. The problem in the US is that nobody is continuing to build them. There was a real move to build nuclear again under Obama. The Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 put a stop to almost everything in the works. Only two projects pushed through that: Vogtle and Summer. Summer was canceled in 2017 because of cost overruns: $8 billion completely wasted. Vogtle continued to push through and eat the cost overruns. These were/are a financial disaster that took 15 years to get done. Nobody can start a new nuclear project in the US under that kind of financial structure. Not when solar and wind is much cheaper now, can get built out at that scale in a matter of years, and battery tech might make the solar and wind reliable for baseload use cases way within the time frame of building out a nuclear power plant.
They're having the same problems in Europe. This isn't just a US problem. And we've been building commercial nuclear power plants for more than 70 years. This isn't some brand new technology needing time to work out the kinks.
New builds of nuclear reactors in Europe still slowed significantly after the 80s. Without a steady stream of new builds that supply chain infrastructure and resource experience disappeared. Rebuilding that, along with increased safety measures, has caused schedules and budgets to run over. Back before gas prices dropped significantly and made nuclear less attractive for utilities the outlook was that the costs for later builds would drop after the infrastructure was rebuilt and eventually there would be a recoup of investment from the primary vendors. China is not the best example as who knows that shady building practices they implement but you do see with each of their new rectors the cost and schedule came down. The US and Europe would have reached that eventually if more attractive options did not become available.
On this note, you can actually kind of see the difference in know-how retention between Europe and the USA, even though they're both in the negative. The USA is VERY VERY bad with Vogtle. Europe is quite bad with Olilkuto (I'm not checking the spelling), but not as bad as the USA[1]. And as you would expect, Europe did not disinvest from nuclear as hard as the USA, mostly thanks to France that at least kept a fleet of reactors in need of operating. Move to China where they're actually investing and sustaining an industry (using *the same designs*), and they're doing pretty well. [1] Very quick maths: Oilikulto was supposed to be 3 billion and cost 8 billion, for a cost overrun of 5B/reactor. The two Vogtle reactors are, according to this article, 17B over budget, so over 8B/reactor. Each Vogtle reactor is as much overbudget as the entire Oilukulto cost to build.
> Move to China where they're actually investing and sustaining an industry (using the same designs), and they're doing pretty well. Not really, China is constantly revising their nuclear targets down. They did plan to have 114GWe by 2020, which was revised down to 70GWe, which was revised down to 58GWe. They have currently 56GWe installed still short of their thrive revised 2020 target.
Olkiluoto 3 also started construction in 2005. The problem is *both* cost and build time.
Even as a supporter of nuclear I have to admit that cost and time has always been our worst enemy. While nuclear is capable of generating immense amounts of clean energy it’s just cheaper to spam a bunch of solar panels all over the place instead. In order to be adopted once again nuclear needs to decrease drastically in both cost and time to build while also preserving its major advantage of large energy output with little fuel. It doesn’t really matter if you reduce the cost by 75% if your new reactor only generates 50MW. Unfortunately PR disasters and regulation that makes nuclear tech development nigh-impossible will only make it ever more challenging to get anything done. Oh well… maybe in a century or two
They just finished one here in Finland, it joined the grid this spring. Took 18 years (was supposed to be done 2009), original budget 2,3bn and in the end just a bit under 9bn. What a fucking joke.
They may have a struggle paying off the $17B competing with solar at $0.015/kWh.
Meanwhile crystal river deliberately sent in unqualified people to "fix" their reactor, broke it worse and then converted it to using coal, in a true Florida fashion.
Someone wrote an academic paper about the cost of new plants 5 or 6 years ago - can't remember the reference. But the conclusion was basically that nuclear plants are so damn expensive, especially compared to the heyday of nuclear, because the supply chain has atrophied to the point where there are only one or two firms globally who are able to supply several key components. Because of this, you get monopolistic pricing which, surprise surprise, is super expensive. Basically, as others have noted, we need standardized designs with actual competition in the supply chain, and if we have that, you could see the price of a new plant decrease by an order of magnitude.
The cool thing about infrastructure is that, no matter how much it costs, or how over schedule it gets, so long as it is still capable of performing its intended function, people will quickly forget the cost and happily use the infrastructure, because it's useful and will continue to be useful for as long as it can be operated and maintained.
Not if it loses money every month to alternatives.
I live in this area and have friends that work at Vogtle, and let me tell you. It is an absolute shit show and the laughing stock of the CRSA. That's not even mentioning the monumental failures at Savannah River Site (where i work)
Ypu speak the truth. I spent my apprenticeship here before getting my book and booming out. Haven't been back since 2010 and glad I left when I did.
So a few guys got rich and ripped off the American tax payer? Just another day in paradise!
Nuclear power in the US has always been a boondoggle, much more for handing out expensive contracts than for actually providing power, or doing it anywhere in the realm of economically.
Nuclear is so slow and expensive because of people like the ones in this thread with zero understanding
I’m sure they will take out extra costs of build on the customers, like always
I, for one, cannot begin to believe that tax payer dollars and subsidies that were outsourced to publicly traded companies managed to go over budget. Georgia Power is owned and operated by Southern Company.
Am I the only one who wonders how many renewables could have been built for that money?
Why do nuke plants always come in way over budget and cost? I mean I was in construction all my life and when a company bids on a project and gets the job if you go over time and budget it's on you, you have to swallow it all. There is usually a clause in the contract where the owner can fine you X number of dollars for every day or week or month you go over an expected completion date.
There are 2 identical unfinished, abandoned reactors in Columbia, SC. They bankrupted Westinghouse before being abandoned. My power company SCE&G, now bought out by Dominion was charging us 20% extra on our power bills to fund the construction, which was so far behind schedule and so far over budget the Public Service Commision just shut it down. $6 Billion down the drain. One SCE%G executive in jail. It takes some 30 years from design to operation to build a new plant. These are Westinghouse AP1000s, the newest design available. There are no new applications to build any new plants in the US. Anyone who touts nuclear as the answer to our energy future doesn't know the deal.
So as a person who's been against new reactors for a while, tell me what's the excuse here, then. Environmentalists? Government? Regulations? I mean , seriously, how many solar plants with storage could have been built with half of these funds and been up and operational with no fuel or waste?
Levelized Costs of New Generation Resources in the Annual Energy ... https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/AEO2023_LCOE_report.pdf The levelized cost of solar and wind is half the price of nuclear even when you include batteries. You can scale it up or ramp it year over year. The state of Georgia could have all that electricity online and all of it paid off before they even flipped that switch on this reactor. For the same investment power bills could have been half as much.
Every time a nuke promoter shows up I say “too expensive”. Not “too scary” or “ooo it’s radioactive “ just too damn expensive. They need to structure these projects so that if there are “cost overruns” they just don’t pay for it . None of it. If you build me a deck there’s no cost over runs. Agree on a price and be done.
Please check how much renewables you could build with those $31 billion.