Why investing in new nuclear plants is bad for the climate -ScienceDirect

[Caribbeans]

Why investing in new nuclear plants is bad for the climate -ScienceDirect

ScienceDirect | Luke Haywood, Marion Leroutier, Robert Pietzcker | 16 August 2023

There has been a strong push to promote increased investments in new nuclear power as a strategy to decarbonize economies, especially in the European Union (EU) and the United States (US). The evidence base for these initiatives is poor. Investments in new nuclear power plants are bad for the climate due to high costs and long construction times. Given the urgency of climate change mitigation, which requires reducing emissions from the EU electricity grid to almost zero in the 2030s (Pietzcker et al.1), preference should be given to the cheapest technology that can be deployed fastest. On both costs and speed, renewable energy sources beat nuclear. Every euro invested in new nuclear plants thus delays decarbonization compared to investments in renewable power. In a decarbonizing world, delays increase CO2 emissions.

Our thoughts focus on new nuclear power plants (not phasing out existing plants) in the US and Europe. In Europe, new nuclear power plants are planned or seriously discussed in France, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. We do not focus on China, where government-set electricity prices and subsidized capital costs make it more difficult to contrast the profitability of different types of energy sources.

Nuclear energy is expensive

The cost overruns on recent nuclear projects are dramatic. In an international comparative assessment of construction cost overruns for electricity infrastructure, Sovacool et al.2 find that nuclear reactors are the investment type with the most frequent and largest cost overruns, alongside hydroelectric dams. 97% of the 180 nuclear reactor investment projects included in their analysis suffered cost overruns, with an average cost increase of 117% per project. More recently, the current estimate of the construction costs of the French Flamanville project stands at €13.2 billion up from an initial €3.3 billion (figures that do not even include financing costs, which the French audit office estimated at €4.2 billion up from an initial €1.2 billion) and those of the recently opened Finish Olkiluoto at €11 billion instead of €3 billion. “Construction costs are high enough that it becomes difficult to make an economic argument for nuclear,” Davis3 finds. Similarly, Wealer et al.4 conclude that “investing into a Gen III/III+ nuclear power plant ... would very likely generate significant losses.”

Beyond construction costs, the cost of capital is a critical parameter for evaluating the viability of nuclear power. First, the very long construction times and delays generate particularly large financing costs for a given interest rate. Portugal-Pereira et al.6 report an escalation of capital costs worldwide due to increasing construction delays for the last generation of nuclear reactors constructed since the 2010s. The French court of auditors estimates that the cost of the French nuclear power plant Flamanville will increase from €13.2 billion to €20 billion once financing costs and delays are taken into account. Second, the historically high risk of default translates into higher interest rates. These two factors make the profitability of nuclear projects very dependent on financing conditions...more
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435123002817


RELATED:



Atomic age is over in Germany, Chancellor Scholz insists

GABRIEL GAVIN | SEPTEMBER 2, 2023

Germany will not leave the door open for a possible return to using nuclear power now or in the future, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Saturday.

Responding to a suggestion from members of his own governing coalition that the country should not rule out restarting its shuttered reactors, Scholz told radio station Deutschlandfunk that "nuclear energy is over" and the issue is "a dead horse" in Germany.

"The fact is that with the end of the use of nuclear power, dismantling has also begun” at the power stations that have been closed down, he said. "Any talk of resuming the use of atomic energy would imply building new power stations," Scholz argued.

"Anyone who wanted to build new nuclear power plants would need 15 years and would have to spend €15-€20 billion each," he went on...more
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-nuclear-energy-climate-change-olaf-scholz-atomic-age-is-over/

Talk about a boondoggle!

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

1. Maybe in Europe

but this is absolutely NOT true elsewhere.

The Westinghouse AP1000 reactor can go from ground breaking to fuel loading in 36 months, and has already been proven with four plants in China, two in the Carolinas, and Poland and three other locations - all in the past 5 years.

[Think. Again.]

4. Yes, here in the U.S. too...

...the first nuclear plant built from scratch in America in decades is finally online this year after a cost of $31 billion and a construction period of 14 years.

https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3935dd551be9115e88a64

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

14. But that is not what is available now

they started that plant without an approved reactor design, was a cost-plus contract (think DoD grifting), and didn't incorporate the new designs now being sold and built today.

[Think. Again.]

16. Itcs the most recent construction of a nuclear plant...

I have high hopes that the nuclear industry will get it's act together becuase we need all the non-CO2 energy generation we can get.

But on the list of fast and cheap ways to displace fossil fuels, nuclear is at the bottom.

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

17. It's encouraging, though

That reactor design already has precedent just in the past 5-7 years for going from ground breaking to fuel charging in 3 years - with the output to provide for 1.2 million homes with zero carbon. 10 plants since the Carolina plant's debacle.
They also have a 300 MW version that is very small and pretty cheap (as power generation goes).

I'm hopeful

[Think. Again.]

19. I'm very interested...

...in the 'Small Modular Reactor' technology.

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

20. This was from May

There's so much to unpack, maybe someone could make it's own post

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/04/westinghouse-announces-a-small-nuclear-reactor.html

[OKIsItJustMe]

23. Stanford-led research finds small modular reactors will exacerbate challenges of highly radioactive...

MAY 30, 2022
Stanford-led research finds small modular reactors will exacerbate challenges of highly radioactive nuclear waste
Small modular reactors, long touted as the future of nuclear energy, will actually generate more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants, according to research from Stanford and the University of British Columbia.

BY MARK SHWARTZ
Nuclear reactors generate reliable supplies of electricity with limited greenhouse gas emissions. But a nuclear power plant that generates 1,000 megawatts of electric power also produces radioactive waste that must be isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Furthermore, the cost of building a large nuclear power plant can be tens of billions of dollars.

To address these challenges, the nuclear industry is developing small modular reactors that generate less than 300 megawatts of electric power and can be assembled in factories. Industry analysts say these advanced modular designs will be cheaper and produce fewer radioactive byproducts than conventional large-scale reactors.

But a study published May 31 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has reached the opposite conclusion.

“Our results show that most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 for the reactors in our case study,” said study lead author Lindsay Krall, a former MacArthur Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). “These findings stand in sharp contrast to the cost and waste reduction benefits that advocates have claimed for advanced nuclear technologies.”

…

[LiberaBlueDem]

2. Banks are making loans on renewables

Last edited Sat Sep 2, 2023, 06:50 PM - Edit history (1)

Making loans because that is a good investment

Bankers do not make loans for nuclear because that has been a bad investment. Only time they do loan for nukes is when government guarantees the loan.

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

18. respectufully disagree

"Making loans because that is a good investment "

No, it's not, knowing first hand. It's 100% political

[Think. Again.]

3. Oh yes...

...the higher costs and increased construction times, along with the questions of how to safely handle the radioactive waste, make nuclear one of the least-best options we have in the transitition away from fossil fuels.

As the article says, we DO need to make that transition as quickly as possible.

Which is the only reason I say YES, let's start building nuke plants, AND solar, AND wind, AND anything else non-CO2 emitting that we can think of, NOW, build them as quickly as possible, and when we are safely away from CO2 emissions and the fossil fuel industry is dead beyond repair, we can decommission whichever plants we want to as we continue to improve our technology in less of an emergency situation.

[LiberaBlueDem]

5. There is a reason Africa is going solar

Last edited Sat Sep 2, 2023, 08:27 PM - Edit history (1)

It is because nuclear is too expensive, and relies on a huge grid to light a bulb just miles away. Solar panel and a car battery and there is a nightlight in every hut.

[Finishline42]

6. Nuclear requires a large grid to power and distribute it's power

As you point out, mini grids powered by solar brings power to rural areas that are too expensive to run power lines to.

https://www.irena.org/news/articles/2022/May/The-Big-Impact-of-Mini-Grids-in-Malis-Rural-Areas

[NNadir]

11. Antinuke complaints on power lines is rather like Ron DeSantis complaining about White Supremacy.

Distributed energy is the answer? Really? How is then, that half a century of this distributed energy rhetoric resulted in the rise by nearly 100 ppm over the same period.

In the week beginning August 29, 1975, the weekly average concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere was 329.24 ppm. 1975 was the year that "back to nature" antinuke reactionaries started to rise in influence. I was there. I remember it well.

Today's figures:

Week beginning on August 27, 2023: 419.27 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 416.42 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 394.45 ppm
Last updated: September 03, 2023

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

Assholes in California are talking about running power lines from Wyoming to California, precisely at at a time when powerlines are resulting in huge fires. The fact is that the scam hyping unreliable and fossil fuel dependent so called "renewable energy," while destroying wilderness and the planetary atmosphere, has always hyped transmission lines. In fact, California is over wired precisely because it has integrated unreliable power plants, the wind and solar junk, with its gas driven reliable energy.

Build begins on Wyoming-to-California power line amid growing wind power opposition (LA Times 6/21/23.)

Opposition to the wind industry is rising precisely because there are people who care about the environment, land use, sustainability and, indeed, climate change, who recognize that the wind industry, like the solar industry, after 50 years of calling for "distributed energy" which ends up as distributed pollution is useless.

It would be interesting if antinukes handing out this particular line of bullshit could provide some numbers about the climate impact of rural areas as compared to the climate impact of urban, and suburban grids.

Numbers don't lie. People lie, to themselves and to each other, but numbers don't lie.

We're nearly half a century since the world class ignoramus Amory Lovins began advocated among the bourgeoisie for distributed energy in the social science journal Foreign Affairs. The disgusting reactionary is still proud of this bit of deadly crap.

Antinukes mathematical ability is actually lower than their very, very, very low level of ethics, but perhaps I can propose a quiz to test the point.

419.27 ppm- 329.24 ppm = ?

Answer: 90.03 ppm.

My son's Ph.D research will involve printed nuclear reactor cores, small cores, and it is possible that these cores will provide reliable clean energy with very low mass impact, resulting in minimal mining, and the ability to handle all of the energy needs of a community with a single truck load.

No sense of decency. None.

[Finishline42]

12. I guess this is another anti-nuke criticism - GA users of Plant Vogtle will pay another $9/mon

to cover cost overruns.

Residential customers of Georgia’s largest electrical utility could see their bills rise $9 more a month to pay for a new nuclear power plant under a deal announced Wednesday.

Georgia Power Co. said customers would pay $7.56 billion more for Plant Vogtle construction costs under the agreement with utility regulatory staff.

snip

Vogtle’s Unit 3 and Unit 4 are the first new American reactors built from scratch in decades. Each reactor can power 500,000 homes and businesses without releasing any carbon. But even as government officials and some utilities are again looking to nuclear power to alleviate climate change, the cost of Vogtle could discourage utilities from pursuing nuclear power.

snip

The project’s overall cost, including financing, is currently $31 billion for Georgia Power and three other owners, Associated Press calculations show. Add in $3.7 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid the Vogtle owners to walk away from construction, and the total nears $35 billion. The reactors are seven years late and $17 billion over budget.

edit to add link to story

https://apnews.com/article/georgia-power-vogtle-nuclear-plant-bills-rates-9b9481bc44f6a4c985ab7702a553e21e

[NNadir]

13. And of course, antinukes don't give a rat's ass about the cost of climate change or air pollution.

I'd gladly pay an extra nine dollars a month for clean air, but I'm an environmentalist, not a penny pinching bourgeois airhead of the Ayn Rand variety who thinks it's OK to burn fossil fuels indefinitely while waiting for the much advertised so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come.

It's called "ethics," and of course is a stranger to antinukes in general.

The ethical paucity of antinukes beggars description.

In 60 years, when all the wind and solar crap distributed all over one time wilderness will be rotting garbage, the future generations who will still be benefitting from the Vogtle reactors' power, won't give a flying fuck about us paying an extra $108 bucks a year - the cost of a bourgeois asshole's dinner - to have saved human lives and to have given the long term gift of sustainable energy to future generations.

History will record those who opposed Vogtle, and whined insipidly about it, for what they were.

I note that the fossil fuel people sales people and sales bots here like to quote dumb German economists, who also don't give a rat's ass about the cost of climate change, representing their ignorant bull in an obscure journal as "science."

I consider all antinukes, who are similarly ignorant of science, to be fossil fuel sales people.

And what great sales people they are!

Here's what they're leaving future generations, with the success of their penny pinching sales pitch, not that they give a shit:

Week beginning on August 27, 2023: 419.27 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 416.42 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 394.45 ppm
Last updated: September 04, 2023

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa.

I am glad that Steven Chu as Obama's first Secretary of Energy pushed for Vogtle. It's a gift to future generations that goes some small way to ameliorating the intense moral stain sold here and elsewhere by fossil fuel sales people and salesbots, those rebranding fossil fuels as "hydrogen" and those fighting to maintain the use of fossil fuels by opposing the only sustainable option, nuclear energy.

Have a happy Labor Day.

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

15. The overuns were because

they started that plant without an approved reactor design, was a cost-plus contract (think DoD grifting), and didn't incorporate the new designs now being sold and built today.

[NNadir]

22. I see it somewhat differently.

The cost of building the Vogtle was the result of the deliberate destruction of nuclear manufacturing infrastructure by people who, with selective attention, elevated the risks of nuclear power above all other forms of energy, all of which were actually worse.

When this light of brain people carry on about the cost of Vogtle - which will be saving lives for the next 80 years - they are behaving like arsonists complaining about forest fires.

The United States, using technology developed in the third quarter of the 20th century, from 1950 through around 1975, built more than 100 nuclear reactors, through the 1980s while providing the lowest electricity prices in the industrial world. Many of those reactors are still operating.

Specious reasoning, raised by hysterical antinukes - including the set here who want to offer the dubious and obviously fallacious nonsense that "they're not antinukes" while dragging out very stupid immoral objection to nuclear energy, no matter how stupid, no matter how criminal, since nuclear energy saves lives - were enthusiastically supported, if not openly, by fossil fuel interests.

I note that here at DU, fossil fuel interests, the salespeople and salesbots selling fossil fuels as "hydrogen" are opposed to nuclear energy, raising those same stupid points of selective attention, because it's in their interest to do so.

They have neither the moral or intellectual depth to recognize or to care that fossil fuels have left the planet in flames, which is of course, an extra impetus for describing them as "arsonists."

[Duppers]

7. Bookmarking.

+ K & R

[eppur_se_muova]

8. The bolded sentence in the first para is simply declared to be true, without argument.

Basically, assume the conclusion to be true, then shape the argument to fit.

In fact, the "best" approach is EXTREMELY context-dependent, as other responses have point out.

[NNadir]

10. Many fossil fuel sales people and sales bots pretend to appeal to science without knowing any of it.

The article relies very heavily on a very stupid politician from a country that phased out nuclear energy to burn coal.

Shultz is not a scientist, he's a lawyer, and in my view, a man who enthusiastically sent oodles of money to Russia to fund Putin, who in turn, used the money to fund a criminal war that offends humanity.

I regard German antinukes as indirect war criminals.

This ignorance, Shultz's, differs little from people who buy stupid marketing efforts to sell fossil fuels by rebranding them as "hydrogen," is unsurprising.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

Sholtz is a coal advocate. His country often features the second highest carbon intensity in Europe, after Poland, although Poland is not buying into continuing this crime against humanity, but is planning to go nuclear against climate change, which all decent people should choose to do.

Actions speak louder than bullshit.

We have here, sales people and salesbots who hype hydrogen in China with cheap advertising videos featuring misleading Potemkin facilities that obscure reality:

The bulk of hydrogen in China is made from coal, overwhelmingly.

Hyping hydrogen in China is selling coal.

As for costs, I note with due disgust, that the assholes like Shultz complaining about the cost of nuclear energy are completely disinterested in the vast medical costs of air pollution and the much greater costs of climate change. Being ignorant of history, as well as science, they cannot explain how it is, that with mid 20th century technology, the United States once built more than 100 nuclear reactors while providing the lowest priced electricity on the planet.

Fossil fuel salespeople and sales bots, including those marketing fossil fuels as "hydrogen" do not qualify, in my view, as decent people.

I personally read thousands upon thousands of scientific papers per year, and I find it appalling that climate deniers, which is what 100% of antinukes are to my mind, attempt to abuse the scientific literature by cherry picking. There are many published peer reviewed papers that are wrong, as scientifically literate people know.

There is, at long last, no sense of decency among fossil fuel apologists. None.

The planet is in flames. People like my son, a rising nuclear engineer, are working, along with increasing enthusiasm from young people all around the world, to fight the fossil fuel apologists, Shultz, fossil fuel sales people and salesbots who market fossil fuels as "hydrogen" and every other person who has set the planet so.

I assure you, that as these fine young people work to save the world from reactionary ignoramuses hyping trivial and useless forms of energy.

They really don't give a fuck about dumb cherry picking fossil fuel salespeople and salesbots quoting equally dumb political figures as if they were scientists.

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

21. Just a thought and source of support

I posted this above, and it's easy reading with sources:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/04/westinghouse-announces-a-small-nuclear-reactor.html