Technology

59587 readers

5370 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Small modular nuclear reactors get a reality check in new report (newatlas.com)

submitted 5 months ago by machinin@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

68 comments fedilink hide all child comments

[T]he report's executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.

"The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs," says the report. "But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Lichtblitz@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Extremely cheap per kilowatt? Every statistic out there that I've seen and that includes government funding, as well as construction and deconstruction costs, paints a different picture. Nuclear is only competitive with coal or the relatively underdeveloped solar thermal.

In 2017 the US EIA published figures for the average levelized costs per unit of output (LCOE) for generating technologies to be brought online in 2022, as modelled for its Annual Energy Outlook. These show: advanced nuclear, 9.9 ¢/kWh; natural gas, 5.7-10.9 ¢/kWh (depending on technology); and coal with 90% carbon sequestration, 12.3 ¢/kWh (rising to 14 ¢/kWh at 30%). Among the non-dispatchable technologies, LCOE estimates vary widely: wind onshore, 5.2 ¢/kWh; solar PV, 6.7 ¢/kWh; offshore wind, 14.6 ¢/kWh; and solar thermal, 18.4 ¢/kWh.

Emphasis mine, source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power

[–] Rnet1234@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

If you scroll down literally like. A paragraph past that you will see a very nice table showing the spread of nuclear costs. Some (including in the US, which is used for the EIA figures) are quite expensive, but others (notably South Korea) are very much cost-competitive or better than renewables. Also worth noting, the renewable estimates have spread themselves, and do not include overinstallation/storage required to behave as firm power.

Which is to say:

A - there certainly are quite a few places that nuclear doesn't make sense, at least currently. Including the US

B - equally, there are a lot of places around the world where nuclear is competitive

C - we should perhaps look at why the US is so expensive relative to other countries; it's not some law of nature, we can change it. And it's probably not just because other countries under-regulate them (I'd buy that for some of the countries listed)

[–] Lichtblitz@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 5 months ago

I specifically picked the statistic that claimed to have included the full cost of installing something new. Most other statistics only include prolonging the life of existing plants, thus ignoring the installation costs completely. You can just quote the paragraphs that prove your point the same way I have and then we can discuss further. Maybe I made a mistake, who knows.