First New US Nuclear Reactor Since 2016 is Now in Operation (eia.gov) 161
U.S. Energy Information Administration, in a press release: A new reactor at Georgia's Vogtle nuclear power plant is now in commercial operation, according to an announcement from Georgia Power, one of the plant's owners. It is the first new nuclear reactor to start up in the United States since the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar 2 was commissioned in 2016. The new 1,114 megawatt (MW) Unit 3 reactor joins two existing reactors at Plant Vogtle, which is jointly owned by Georgia Power and three other electric utility companies. The plant's first two reactors, with a combined 2,430 MW of nameplate capacity, came online in the late 1980s.
Georgia Power expects another similar-sized fourth reactor, Vogtle Unit 4, to begin operation sometime between November 2023 and March 2024. The two new reactors will make Plant Vogtle the largest nuclear power plant in the country, surpassing the 4,210 MW Palo Verde plant in Arizona. Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. The total cost of the project is now estimated at more than $30 billion.
Georgia Power expects another similar-sized fourth reactor, Vogtle Unit 4, to begin operation sometime between November 2023 and March 2024. The two new reactors will make Plant Vogtle the largest nuclear power plant in the country, surpassing the 4,210 MW Palo Verde plant in Arizona. Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. The total cost of the project is now estimated at more than $30 billion.
So close, yet... (Score:2)
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They couldn't scale up to 1.21 gigawatts?
They probably could but then they'd have to decide whether it's the Plant itself that gets to travel in time, all the homes connected to it that do, or perhaps both?
That'd be an interesting film or TV series actually, reactor mishap causes an entire modern town circa 2023 and their power plant to travel back to the US Mid-West circa 1700s around the time of America's founding.
Re: So close, yet... (Score:2)
Impressive but (Score:2)
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JW? you mean: J^2 / second?
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The poster is probably pronouncing "Giga" with a soft-g (as in the Greek, and the movie referred to), and then messing up the spelling and quantity.
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To be fair, in the movie script it is spelled jigowatt
For Scale (Score:2)
Old news (Score:2)
Vogtle 3 has been operational for several months.
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Yes, this news release is dated Dec. 26, but the link in the first sentence "A new reactor at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear power plant is now in commercial operation, according to an announcement from Georgia Power, one of the plant’s owners" is https://www.georgiapower.com/c... [georgiapower.com] , dated July 31, 2023.
How much of those delays and overruns (Score:5, Insightful)
was fighting off greenie lawsuits and extrajudicial agitation?
Pretty fucking dishonest when the supposed environtmental experts telling you nuclear is cost-prohibitive are also the ones driving up the costs of nuclear by agitating against it at the state and municipal level.
And who benefits? The Saudis, the Chinese, the Russians, the Venezuelans, and everyone else whose sitting on oil and gas and coal and doesn't give a flying fuck about emissions or pollution if it means their electricity stays cheap and their factories keep running while ours close.
Charge them all as saboteurs and traitors.
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Near where I live, there is a Native American tribe and their entire tribal income comes from griefer lawsuits. Want to build something? You are going to pay one way or another.
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"was fighting off greenie lawsuits and extrajudicial agitation?"
None of it was, dimwit. This additional nuke plant was built alongside two others that have been running for many years.
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Not much, apparently. Hardly surprising, given that this site already had reactors, so all the environmental issues would have been resolved for those.
From Wikipedia:
"Two additional units utilizing Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were under construction since 2009, with Unit 3 being completed in July 2023.[9][10][11] This last report blames the latest increase in costs on the contractor not completing work as scheduled. Another complicating factor in the construction process is the bankruptcy of Westinghouse i
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was fighting off greenie lawsuits and extrajudicial agitation?
Few. This was an expansion project on an existing site. There's little additional costs from external "agitation". Don't underestimate how much the industry can and has fucked itself.
- Expertise is non-existent. Most people in the nuclear industry left to go to industries that actually still operated and built things. Many of the expert services companies were bought and sold multiple times and are now in the hands of investment bankers (like Westinghouse was), in the case of the licensor of Vogtle 3 it is
how much damage did Homer Simpson do to nuclear? (Score:2)
how much damage did Homer Simpson do to nuclear?
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CO2 emissions and their impact on climate have a far bigger impact on property than nuclear power. The fact that you are too short-sighted to realize that doesn't make it less true.
Just look it up: how much property loss was caused by Fukushima? Now, how much property loss was actually caused by the fracking Tsunami that destroyed every house in a far far bigger perimeter? And do you have any idea how much property loss (not even talking about loss of lives) was caused by the opposition to nuclear, and the
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Its even worse than that, air pollution kills around 7 million people per year.
Even if every nuclear reactor of the planet had a catastrophe of the level of Chernobyl, it would still kill a lot less people than our regular gas and coal engines.
It's an ongoing constant catastrophe.
Re: Greenies aren't the problem (Score:2)
This is why I don't take environmentalists seriously. If decarbonization is the goal, fixed and centralized installations like power plants are the lowest hanging fruit *and* have ready proven reliable solutions: nuclear and hydroelectric. Technologies that are 70 and 130+ years old, respectively.
Instead, they focus on the hardest stuff first: mobile equipment and distributed home heating systems, with fewer proven scalable alternatives, and marginal lowering of emissions if the tailpipe and furnace emissio
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You can do all the what about ISM you want. You cannot have nuclear power plants until you fix the social issues barring a miracle of technology that makes them magically safe for private for profit corporations to run.
Re: Greenies aren't the problem (Score:2)
So your reason for opposing a technology that many who believe the AOC doomsday clock is ticking down to zero fast would call life-saving, is that you're scared of a disaster which has literally never happened, and the closest one to it that did, happened in a communist country where the locals got fucked over worse despite it being the workers' paradise.
Are you also afraid of witches, and fighting tooth-and-nail against official recognition of Halloween?
Over and over and over again (Score:2)
That argument doesn't work. It doesn't get you out of fixing the social problems if you want to put out nuclear plants. So for the love of God stop wasting your time and effort on that argument because it does not work.
I don't know if you're on the right or the left but either way you're continuously using an argument that
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One thing for sure, they'd have had no excuse for not knowing how high tsunamis can get in Hawai'i. There, it's not that unusual to see lines painted along the sides of buildings and display windows with a date, showing how far inland and how high a tsunami was with the date (year only unless there was more than one) to identify which one it refers to. The hawai'ians tend to be proud of such things, just as the local airline
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The other thing. It was NOT a reactor in the US.
To expand on that, the Fukushima reactor did not implement retrofits that the US NRC had forced down to U.S. reactors of the same design that specifically addressed the issue of a hydrogen gas build up within the containment vessel, automatically venting it if necessary. TEPCO knew of the design upgrade and refused?/chose not to/failed to implement it. And that was the single most catastrophic mistake. If the hydrogen gas hadn't exploded in the containment vessel, Fukashima would likely be a different story
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And coal/oil generation probably killed as much people in the same day, while "operating normally", if we low ball and say that only 1 million of the 7 million casualities of air pollution were due power generation.
LCOE isn't a good metric (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people think that LCOE is good metric. But not all power is equal, what people want is dispatchable power which nuclear provides. Most Nuclear plants have capacity factors or over 90%.
Wind and Solar may or may not be there when you flick a switch, so you either have to move it through time with a battery, or space with transmission grids. They are intermittent and have low capacity factors.
Also intermittency creates extra costs, it's like driving a car in a steady state or driving stop/go fashion, stop/go uses way more fuel.
So firmed Wind and Solar actually means Wind + Solar + battery backup + fossil gas + extra transmission. This is far more expensive.
And by the way the gas turbines need to be kept idling so they can spool up to take the load if required. This means extra CO2 emissions.
And your reserve power need to be much larger as all of the solar and wind might disappear for an extended period, this is unlike nuclear or coal where you might lose a reactor.
Even worse all the gas turbines are fed by common pipelines, when these lack capacity it takes out multiple sources of generation. Nuclear plants go two years without refuelling so they have power on site. This is what happened to the Texas grid.
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Nuclear plants have multiple vulnerabilities and can shut down for many reasons. Just like the South Texas Project Unit 1, which failed during Snowmageddon. And on top of that, "Approximately 35 GWe of installed thermal generating capacity was not producing electricity".
https://atomicinsights.com/sou... [atomicinsights.com]
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Gas turbines absolutely do NOT need to be kept at idle for peaking. This is why they are used for peaking - because they don't have the multi-hour startup time of thermal power plants. To wit: companies operating natgas peaking plants in "open cycle" sell 10 minute reserve service to grid operators, meaning they can be spun up and synchronized to the grid in under 10 minutes when called upon.
"Combined Cycle" turbines are more fuel efficient and have a longer startup time, so the play is to start both type
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See the green line in the graph. That is solar plus wind. There are only 138 MW of solar installed, so it's mostly wind. Wind installed capacity is 2800 MW.
I posted previously in another article that wind capacity in November was just ove 17% of rating, including a three day run of dead calm.
https://transmission.bpa.gov/b... [bpa.gov]
Solar (Score:2)
Another way to look at it - you need about an acre of solar panels to generate a megawatt of power, conservatively. So this one power plant produces a combined total of over 3,000 acres worth of solar power. That's about a fifth of Manhattan.
Missed it by THAT much... (Score:3, Funny)
Interested in Nuclear Accidents (Score:2)
Massively expensive, and late (Score:2)
The owners are projected to pay $31 billion in capital and financing costs. There is no way this nuke plant can generate electricity at competitive prices and that's unfortunate, because nuke plants have to run full time at maximum capacity just to have any hope of earning enough money to pay off the debt.
This thing will have to be heavily subsidized by Georgia ratepayers.
"Calculations show Vogtle’s electricity will never be cheaper than other sources Georgia Power could have chosen, even after the fe
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Carbon taxes will fix the low cost of other sources quickly. Also you might want to look at a map of wind power availability for Georgia, and a cloud cover map. They are not exactly overwhelmed with alternatives.
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Carbon taxes will fix the low cost of other sources quickly. .
Coal, yes, but wind has about the sane g/CO2e per kWh
Re:Wow 30 billion USD (Score:4, Insightful)
You know I get that /. Has a 1996 UI (Score:2)
You can do a quick Google search for the phrase debunk sometimes the wind doesn't blow and find no shortage of information concerning why wind is a perfectly viable solution for electricity. Mix in a little solar and you're all set.
Meanwhile
Re:You know I get that /. Has a 1996 UI (Score:5, Informative)
Modern wind farms don't have any issue with base load
Of course they don't. They simply don't provide it reliably. Problem solved.
There are a variety of ways to store the energy
Yes, and it benefits all sources of electricity: nuclear, solar, wind... Actually, it benefits nuclear even more, as it is easier to size the storage size to actually match the needed capacity all year round.
modern windmills are so efficient that you need surprisingly little wind to keep them going.
And guess what? Power output is proportional to the wind blowing. Less wind, less electricity.
You can do a quick Google search for the phrase debunk sometimes the wind doesn't blow and find no shortage of information concerning why wind is a perfectly viable solution for electricity. Mix in a little solar and you're all set.
True. We have so many examples of countries which have done that actually. Oh wait. There aren't any. The closest we have is... Germany, which after 30 years and 500 billion spent on solar/wind, still emits 9x more CO2eq/kWh than France. So much for "you're all set" I guess.
Meanwhile I don't have to worry about a wind farm being privatized and required maintenance being skipped resulting in a large scale disaster.
And I don't have to worry about my neighbor skipping maintenance on his car. The relation between my assertion and yours? Both won't help solve climate change, and will just lead to continuing increasing CO2 emissions.
Saying "of course they don't" (Score:2)
Yes, less wind, less power. On the other hand the UK had to shut down farms because they were putting out more power then their grid could handle...
As for your neighbor, if he skips his car maintenance the worst that happens is he kills you or one of your kids in a crash. It doesn't cause your entire block to be evacuated for 9 years like the city of Fukushima had to be...
Oh, and you ready to build walkable cities and give up your car
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You want nuke? Fix the social problems. I'm pretty sure you don't wanna though. So no nukes.
You can't fix stupid though.
And that's the long and short of the "social" problem.
You have a host of emotional infants who have been terrified by horror movies and sensationalism based on said horror movies.
You absolutely can fix stupid (Score:2)
For the parents you can do PSAs on critical thinking that you run through focus groups and multi-million dollar marketing firms so that they have an effect. Again though if you're going to start teaching p
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> It doesn't cause your entire block to be evacuated for 9 years like the city of Fukushima had to be...
It didn't HAVE to be. People just didn't WANT to go back because they were scared due to not understanding radiation. Like most of the general population of the world.
A quick wipe down of hard surfaces and wash of soft after the initial cleanup around daiichi would have sufficed days or weeks after the initial site cleanup. Background levels of radiation weren't that elevated through all of the testing
The government is the one that evacuated (Score:2)
You're not going to get out of this if you want nuclear power you need to figure out how to solve the social issues. Unless and until you d
I'm absolutely making the decisions (Score:2)
I don't think you're having a bit of fun I think a genuinely frustrates you that you can't have nuclear power. You put way too much effort into your comments for it to just be a little bit of fun.
My kid will be just fine. Climate change will have little or no impact on
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I don't think you're having a bit of fun I think a genuinely frustrates you that you can't have nuclear power. You put way too much effort into your comments for it to just be a little bit of fun.
I don't live in the same country as you, and mine actually enjoys a better quality of life (assuming you are from the US, sorry if that's not the case). One of the reason, amongst others, for that is nuclear.
Your country is losing its competitive edge partly because of its energy policy. So yes, I am having a little bit of fun answering you on slashdot, knowing my country is getting better, while yours is getting worse. Winners only exist if there are losers.
My kid will be just fine. Climate change will have little or no impact on their quality of life because they live in a wealthy country with an advanced education. On the other hand I would worry about them being next to a nuclear power plant that went into meltdown and caused them to lose all of their possessions in a country like America with virtually no social safety net.
You fail to answer my question. It seems like you
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Germany is doing fine power wise
They are in recession, energy prices are going up, they keep postponing and opposing actual climate measures at the EU level(e.g.: heatpumps, ban of ICE), and their industries are fleeing. Even the industries actually related to wind turbines (Siemens Energy) are struggling and need government bailout [fortune.com].
Not exactly the definition of "doing fine".
they import renewable power from other countries
No, they import electricity from neighboring countries. They don't chose if it's renewable or not.
And as a matter of fact, they mainly import nuclear electricity from
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"Modern wind FARMS"
Meaning you are using tens of thousands of acres and thousands of turbines just to approximate one mid-sized reactor.
The nearest big farm to me is Fowler Ridge in Indiana.
Nameplate capoacity is 600MW.
Capacity factor means only, MAYBE producing less than 1/3rd of that (CF is 27.8%)
And your clam about baseload is both laughable AND shows, even after all these years, you STILL haven't learned what base load actually is.
And please, you keep humiping up on that FUD knob. Please show us again
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What I don't like about wind farms is that the blades are completely unrecyclable. At most, they can be carved up and used as oddball benches. Recycling them would take a lot of energy. The ideal way to recycle plastics would be thermal depolymerization, but that requires a lot of energy to "boil" the fiberglass and turn the epoxy into short chain mineral oil, separating out the glass. The only real feasible energy source for this... nuclear.
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No.
Your response is a "I can't intelligently manage the distribution of extant power and have no clue how to manage peaking technologies as an ancillary"
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You actually have those "deaths per TWH" figures?
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what would you say would be the worst safety hazard with a Triso-ball-fueled, molten-salt-cooled nuclear power plant?
I would say that the worst safety hazard is that one of these plants doesn't yet exist, and thus hasn't been put through the paces to find out what safety hazards exist.
However I can say that all other attempts at a "pebble bed" reactor has failed, because the fuel "pebbles" would jam up in the exit chute and the whole thing would have to be taken offline and cooled so they could fix the jam.
I'm not sure I really like the idea of a nuclear reactor being as reliable as a shitty laser printer with worn roller
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I would say that the worst safety hazard is that one of these plants doesn't yet exist, and thus hasn't been put through the paces to find out what safety hazards exist.
That's not how we establish safety. Running a test reactor and not having a problem with it would not establish that it is safe under all circumstances, and there's no way we could subject a test reactor to all the hazard circumstances which might affect it in operation. Nobody is going to crash an airliner into a demo reactor just to see what happens, for example. The safety case is built on science, engineering, and now, computer modeling and simulations. You can't go to the NRC and ask for a build pe
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You can't have the NRC run the plant.
You can definitely have the NRC certify the plant and license the plant operators and regulate and inspect plant operations. Even with the current push to modernize and rationalize the NRC, nobody is proposing to eliminate NRC oversight.
Sooner or later somebody like the monorail guy from the Simpsons comes along and convinces 51% of voters to privatize the plant
Most of the next-gen reactors will be private to begin with.
and we're right back to one bad quarter and some cutbacks away from disaster.
You were originally talking about required maintenance being skipped resulting in a large scale disaster. Are you backing away from the "large scale" part of that? Because even wind turbines can suffer smal
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What do you see as being the worst large-scale disaster scenario for a reactor that uses Triso-fuel balls in molten-salt coolant? Feel free to assume the worst imaginable case of maintenance neglect.
Is Vogtle an MSR? Is Watts Bar an MSR? Is there a commercial MSR operating anywhere on the planet? It's a pretty bad faith question when we are discussing PWR and LWR reactors here.
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Just FYI, I'm not the OP.
I know we can build and operate safe LWR and PWR reactors because we have but also acknowledge they have rare, controllable but still possible absolutely catastrophic failure modes. We had one of the worst imaginable cases in '85 (unique to Russia as it was). I don't think there are really any unknown safety issues with them today, it's just requires a fuckload of diligence, the problems are as solved as they can be.
The social problem is all based around the idea that taking that
Taking the profit motive out is the social problem (Score:2)
Taking the profit motive out of something as potentially profitable as power generation wo
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There is an argument to be made that such catastrophic potential is not "safe".
Neither is driving, or flying or several other industrial processes. One could argue Bhopal was worse than Chernobyl, nuclear is not totally outside of a manageable risk profile and as proof we have 440 reactors operating currently with overall a pretty good safety record, these things are proven, it just takes diligence in construction, maintenance and operation. The thing is, you can't cut corners.
Nuclear power was originally developed on the government-lab model. That did not go well.
You kindof need to justify that statement because the only reason we have nuclear power today is from the r
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Totally agree and the thing with just about everyone in America is we accept and work with "government" operated services on a daily basis, whether from your local state or federal flavor. Outside of the an-caps most people would agree with the regulatory agencies not being private entities for obvious reasons or the justice system. Everyone likes to crow about regulatory capture but if it's two private companies colluding, well, that's just all fair capitalist game sir!
I like to say markets are good for
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Look I certainly would have liked more commitment to nuclear from the government but a couple things I question about the first paragraph:
1. I cant find really anything about the "destroyed" research, only that funding was cut.
2. The Oak Ridge MSR was neat, and a good step but it was riddled with problems in terms of reliability, power scaling and other issues. It was a mixed bag.
3. For even those projects cut short, in that time period was the private industry picking up the slack?
What is their incentive to do anything quickly?
Because it's their job a
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When was the last time the wind stopped blowing everywhere within a day's drive?
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About 50-100h per period of 3 months over and surrounding the North and Baltic Sea areas [tudelft.nl]. Interconnection between the 11 countries impacted make the mean frequency of Dunkelflaute (the name of those events) drops from 3–9% for the individual countries to approximately 3.5% for the combined region.
Better, however it is still not just likely to happen, but actually sure to happen.
Next question?
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Re:Roads Should be Private (Score:2)
A day's drive from central Texas (let's say Abilene) gets you to New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas Louisiana, and possibly into Mississippi. When the wind stopped blowing all across Texas, did it also stop blowing in those states?
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Nobody asked you for such inane trivia, but thank you for sharing anyway. Maybe somebody will find it useful.
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When was the last time the wind stopped blowing everywhere within a day's drive?
Indeed, all you really need is transmission lines to everywhere within a days drive.
Re: Wow 30 billion USD (Score:2)
Even if there weren't larger wind zones that completely undermine the idea of a "day's drive", every wind farm would also need to be built to a capacity to handle all the electricity needs within a day's drive.
Since these types of wind farms don't exist, wind cannot provide base load. And pretending it can just means you're not actually having a big boy conversation with the rest of us.
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Since these types of wind farms don't exist, wind cannot provide base load. And pretending it can just means you're not actually having a big boy conversation with the rest of us.
Hopefully my sarcasm was evident. Lots of people seem to think " the wind is always blowing or the sun is always shining somewhere", as if that is a solution. That they don't think it through any further than that is evident, but there is no reasoning with them. .
Re:Wow 30 billion USD (Score:5, Interesting)
With wind turbines scratching at 5mw per, and most hitting 2mw easy, how does it make sense to fund nuclear? Is there some math Iâ(TM)m missing here?
Winds cost per kWh is infinite when the wind doesn't blow. If we did wind plus some sort of pumped hydro or battery then the cost of wind when the wind isn't blowing will come in at 2 to 3 dollars per kWh. Nuclear from this plant will be under 10 cents. Wind is great if we could match our consumption to the supply but we don't. We all want to run our AC in the late afternoon when the wind is often the lowest and solar is a almost zero. Our factories and businesses need continuous reliable power. If you install unreliable wind and solar you have to also install some sort of back up for it like gas. Nuclear is cheaper and far more green for baseload than any other alternative.
Re:Wow 30 billion USD (Score:5, Informative)
...Nuclear from this plant will be under 10 cents....
Not even close. Vogtle was a very expensive plant-- 35 billion dollars [apnews.com]. This cost is being passed on to the utility customers. They had a surcharge to pay for it in 2011, 12 years before it was even built (that is, they were already paying for twelve years even though they were getting zero electricity), and when it went into operation, their rates went up in July, when it became operational, because it was more expensive, and then their rates were increased again in December, to cover more of the construction costs. This means that the company will be responsible for only 2 billion dollars of the cost overrun; the rest is paid by the customers.
https://www.ajc.com/news/psc-r... [ajc.com]
So, your number is off by roughly a factor of two.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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Check your math. Vogtle energy will run $0.25/kWh wholesale, minimum. Much more likely to come in at $0.35/kWh, although some of the costs have been buried in customer bills for a decade which might make it appear somewhat lower when looking at a narrow picture. Nothing close to 10 cents though.
I am by no means anti-nuclear, but at this cost level it makes no sense. Batteries can do 90% of the work, and for the balance you need to use hydro more efficiently... and resort to gas for extreme events.
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Check your math. Vogtle energy will run $0.25/kWh wholesale, minimum.
Interesting. Each of the new reactors at 90% capacity factor will put out roughly a gigawatt of electric power on average, or 8766 million kWh per year. At $0.25/kWh, that would be $2.191 billion per year revenue per reactor. So over, say, 40 years, that would be $87 .7 billion in revenue per reactor, and only one extension to 60 years would take that to over $131 billion per reactor--when each reactor had a build cost of around $17.5 billion. So the math suggests the build cost represents only a small
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You're also only comparing to building the plant, not actually running the plant.
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Wind doesn't always blow. You need reliable base load power plants (like coal, natural gas or nuclear) or large energy storage.
Also nuclear plants last much much longer. They do need updates and recertifications but can legally operate for 80 years (in the US at least). That 80 years value was recently increased from 60 and we will probably see it raised again.
https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/o... [nrc.gov]
We honestly have a lost knowledge problem with building new nuclear plants. Costs will lower if we keep building mor
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Yes.
You would need ~5000 wind turbines to match Vogtle nuclear power plant output. That's about a quarter of what China deployed last year, and they are already going full steam on renewables deployment. Plus they own the mining, the manufacturing, and don't have to deal with NIMBY crowd.
If the focus is CO2 emissions reduction in the shortest time possible, the best course of action is to maximize both deployments: solar/wind and nuclear. They both tap into different resource pools (materials, mining, manuf
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> most hitting 2mw easy
It's easy to throw around a number but how do you define that?
Wind turbines are measured in generation per year.
And the billed capacity is before efficiency ratios, which are usually 0.3.
And they're characterized for 24/7 30+MPH wind.
Nuclear is characterized normally - a gigawatt plant will produce 1GWH per hour to the grid.
Inconsistent measuring sticks make people believe things that are not true. I blame the people not using Joules per year to the grid.
Soon we'll be guessing abo
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If run as baseload power, the nuclear plants have an LCOE of around $250/MWh wholesale. Onshore wind without storage has an LCOE of about $30/MWh. Storage adds about $70/MWh. Natural gas (combined cycle) is about $40/MWh.
If you make a nuclear power plant 80% baseload power and 20% load following via batteries you get $265/MWh. It is pretty hard to compete with natural gas for load following power once you look beyond a diurnal cycle.
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It's not just "the left" who carries that attitude, it's unfortunately a majority of the voting public and even then most conservative support of nuclear is half hearted or a front to still feel like they hold some sort of superiority over the left after getting climate change so wrong for so long, they don't actually have a plan to implement or would even consider what is actually needed imo (massive government spending and a takeover of the industry) so the pro nuclear stance from many feels like an empty
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Sure but the the greens outside the US are not immune to the same decades of media influences, even in Switzerland, i mean if 58% of your population voted against nuclear power you've got a real uphill fight, or is almost 60% of the citizenry Green party?
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Yeah here in the US due to our two party system our Green Party (who is also astroturfed and pretty useless or even bad at times) is fairly irrelevant but nuclear get's it bad over here on multiple fronts:
Democrats are kinda milquetoast about it since they also capture the environmentalists who are biased against it but also the liberals who are generally in support of it and it ends up as inaction.
A lot of Republicans do support it but don't actually want to do anything besides vague allusions to deregulat
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I will never understand the left's obsession with "nuclear is bad".
Like so much stupidity, there are people pushing that narrative with various campaigns... I'll bet you can guess the industry behind that in one try. Plenty of info about it online if you know what to search for, e.g. https://atomicinsights.com/smo... [atomicinsights.com]
Re: Atomkraft ja bitte. (Score:2)
Because the green parties of the world are religious nuts before they are politicians. And religions operate from received wisdom of prophets. Overturning doctrine requires new prophets.
When the prophet of Green Peace issued a fatwa against nuclear, he was speaking from a place of religious authority. But there is no corresponding leader of the faith today who demands the respect of the faithful and who supports nuclear.
Overturning doctrine requires someone charismatic and immune to cries of "heretic!"
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Memes change and update.
Trump On Presidency: ‘I Want To Close The Border And I Want To Drill, Drill, Drill’
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Trump Derangement Syndrome does not.
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Care to explain how NUCLEAR compromises emissions?
And in what ways is it compromising safety?
Seriously.
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Care to explain how NUCLEAR compromises emissions?
And in what ways is it compromising safety?
No. Google it, we are not here to hold your hand. Or your dick.
Seriously.
Yes, seriously.
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Meh, I read your comment wrong and replied too fast, sorry.
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Yes, fight amongst yourselves and prove once again that you don't read comments before replying to them.
Thanks for letting everyone know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are not acting in good faith.
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Thanks for making me laugh, can't say I am surprised to see you jump at that. Grasping at straws I guess.
Don't forget to bookmark the link to this comment so you can refer to it next time you have nothing to say.
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Quote from article
How climate-friendly is nuclear compared to other energies?
If the entire life cycle of a nuclear plant is included in the calculation, nuclear energy certainly comes out ahead of fossil fuels like coal or natural gas. But the picture is drastically different when compared with renewable energy.
According to new but still unpublished data from the state-run German Environment Agency (UBA) as well as the WISE figures, nuclear power rel
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The article isn't the best. But it's conceivable at this plant that they could have done that, since they built units 3 and 4 right next to pre-existing units 1 and 2 - they could have begun obtaining and clearing land, etc. well before any construction that requires the license began.