Oilprice
- Nuclear is still one of the most controversial sources of energy on the planet, but it does have some key upsides, especially in the global push to tackle emissions.
- The European Union stands completely divided on the issue of nuclear power as Scotland hosts the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow.
- China is betting big on a nuclear future, aiming to bring over 150 new reactors online over the next 15 years.
China Could Kickstart A New Nuclear Energy Revolution
Haley Zaremba
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/China-Could-Kickstart-A-New-Nuclear-Energy-Revolution.html
4 comments:
The rule of thumb is to take the projected cost of a nuclear power plant and multiply it by 2.5. Here's a quote:
The researchers start out with a historic analysis of plant construction in the US. The basic numbers are grim. The typical plant built after 1970 had a cost overrun of 241 percent—and that's not considering the financing costs of the construction delays.
Many in the nuclear industry view this as, at least in part, a failure to standardize designs. There's an extensive literature about the expectation that building additional plants based on a single design will mean lower costs due to the production of standardized parts, as well as management and worker experience with the construction process. That sort of standardization is also a large part of the motivation behind small, modular nuclear designs, which envision a reactor assembly line that then ships finished products to installations.
But many of the US' nuclear plants were in fact built around the same design, with obvious site-specific aspects like different foundation needs. The researchers track each of the designs used separately, and they calculate a "learning rate"—the drop in cost that's associated with each successful completion of a plant based on that design. If things went as expected, the learning rate should be positive, with each sequential plant costing less. Instead, it's -115 percent.
source: Why are nuclear plants so expensive? Safety’s only part of the story
China needs energy. If they can build up nuclear power they will do so, regardless of cost or negative externalities.
“ The typical plant built after 1970 had a cost overrun of 241 percent”
Oh no! Out of munnie!
The rule of thumb is that a nation deploys its human and physical resources to achieve the public good. It doesn't need to do bean counting.
The question is what else where the people building bespoke nuclear power plants doing that would have been so much more important than supplying the base energy upon which the whole of advanced society depends.
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