New York to Build One of First U.S. Nuclear-Power Plants in Generation

I thought that they were quite throttleable, and it was because they needed to run near full power to pencil out economically/amortize their huge capex - that their fuel costs are relatively insignificant by comparison. Is that not the case?

You need continuous baseband generation to keep an electrical grid stable.

If not nuclear, then it's going to be coal, gas, hydro, etc. Of the list, nuclear is the cleanest and least ecologicially destructive (by far).

Can you clarify? I thought the idea was to run nuclear 24/7 to provide a steady, base rate of power while solar and wind provide complementary power that can be quickly ramped up or down.

> you need dispatchable power to supply power while the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing

Fair. What do you suggest instead?

I have yet to see a convincing analysis that renewables+storage can cost-effectively power all the homes in Minnesota, where I live, through our 4+ month-long winters. The days get very short, the Earth tilts away from the sun, cloud-cover and snowfall is frequent, and going 24+ hours without power for heat can be fatal, not just inconvenient.

I'd welcome someone to try to run the numbers on this. I tried myself, but I just don't have the expertise. Don't forget to account for almost all of our current heating coming from natural gas burned on-premise. Then, expand your analysis to include all buildings in all northern climes. Is there even enough materials on the planet to build all those batteries? Do batteries even work at -40 degrees? And that's just one set of challenges, every area has similar but different problems for renewables to tackle.

The answer is both: put huge money into renewables and into nuclear. Nuclear is a proven tech. It works. We understand it. We stupidly threw away all of our skill to build it, and put up huge regulatory roadblocks. But those are solvable human problems, if we care to do it.

Storage for renewables is still a huge question mark, which we should also dump a ton of money into, but we need a solution today. Nuclear is here.

I think solar plus storage will likely be the better play.

I think nuclear is a thing we should have done fifty years ago in spades.

I'm not sure it's a thing we should do today when the economics behind solar are just so, so much stronger.

I'd really love to see this investment go to storage projects instead.

Battery tech finally seems to be moving, and I'd like to see the US be able to make plays on the LFP/Sodium battery fronts far more than I want overpriced power from nuclear.

It is always good to look at current grids and prices to see how things are. In Sweden, the sunny days around may-juli have made those months almost free. Solar and the reduced need for heating, in combination of very limited use of AC, means that you don't need much beyond solar, wind and some base load from nuclear/hydro power. I contrast, 75% of the yearly energy bill comes from the 3 winter months, where solar has around 10% (and often less) of the generative capacity. This mean that the energy bill is very variable, and bad weather during those few critical months will results in unreasonable bills (as in bankruptcies and voters that ask the government for bailout).

Under market forces, the electric company have no quarrel in sending people a bill that is 12 times the average month for a single month. There is also very luke warm interest in reducing the cost for the consumer by building out storage. The economics has so far not been that great outside of using government subsidizes, and as northvolt demonstrated, not that interested in using loans when the subsidizes run out.

That said, the Finish project of storing hot water for district heating looks like one of the more interesting storage solution. They are also investing into nuclear, so it seems like time will show how the economics will pan out. Heat exchangers are very effective at generating heat for district heating, so the heat storage has some steep competition.

If one were cynical one would wonder why the push for directing resources towards nuclear energy right when solar and wind are not just significantly cheaper than nuclear but also cheaper than fossil fuels.

If one were not being cynical it makes sense to some degree in order to simply diversify our non fossil fuel energy sources.

An all of the above approach to decarbonizing makes sense, and nuclear will be a useful part of that.

I'm not an expert, but I suspect there will be a few driving use cases. Electrifying places far from the equator means heat pumps and/or district heating and providing for their power demand in the dark. In some places wind can do that, but not everywhere.

There are also loads that want very large, high-availability power and/or process heat. Reactors would pair well with things like metal refining or electrolysis to get the hydrogen for ammonia production.

At the end of the day, there's never one source of energy which is a silver bullet for everything and the best approach is probably a diverse mix of supply.

The unsolved problem with solar and wind is storage. You still need electricity at night or when the wind isn't blowing.

> Let's hope the plan incorporates cutting-edge advancements, like molten salt and liquid thorium designs..

Let's hope not. At least not for the first few new nuclear plants.

There is a lot of operating experience with 'traditional' designs and lessons learned over the decade. There are also new lessons learned with the Vogtle AP1000s. Any new construction (in the US) should be AP1000s to take advantage of those lessons.

Once people are familiar nuclear again then perhaps look at different designs. But you should learn to crawl and walk before trying to run.

(A lot of nuclear construction is the civil works, and is the same for any type of design, and getting that down to cookie cutter output would help any different designs as well.)

People forget that we quit building coal burning power plants at the same time we quit building nukes... For the same reason. The capital cost of the steam turbine is atrocious.

Molten salt, HTGR and LMFBR designs could all be coupled to a supercritical-CO2 powerset which would fit in the employee break room of the turbine hall of an LWR. The steam generators for a PWR are larger than the reactor vessel itself, but a higher temperature reactor could miniaturize them [1].

You still see old literature that claims the LMFBR has a higher capital cost than the LWR but a lot of that comes from the expensive powerset and heat exchangers which have to be doubled to prevent a water-sodium reaction in the primary loop.

So yeah, 4th generation reactors could be a revolution but they are not a bird in the hand and it won't be a matter of "we'll write a check to build a 1 GW reactor" whether you are New York State or Google, it will be matter of "we'll build a test reactor" and it could be another 15 years at least before we get to the TRL 7 stage.

[1] https://www.precisionmicro.com/understanding-printed-circuit...

It's kinda the opposite. Submarine reactors burn like a cigarette which is great from the viewpoint of rapidly changing power output and dealing with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit

but terribly uneconomical. Optimizing economics is about optimizing power output from a given volume of pressure vessel. The power of a nuclear reactor is limited by the ability to get heat out of the fuel rods and into the coolant so good economics requires producing energy evenly throughout the whole core, which commercial reactors do and submarine reactors do not.

Submarine reactors are worth it, however, because being able to go around the world over and over again without surfacing is of great military value. It's insane how fast a nuclear aircraft carrier can travel, there's enough uncertainty over where it will be in 15 minutes that an attack with a reasonably sized nuclear warhead could fail to kill it so, so china developed maneuverable hypersonic weapons that could punch a hole in the deck with a conventional weapon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21#DF-21D_(CSS-5_Mod-4)_Ant...

The concrete benefit I see for the small LWR is this: it is possible to build a pressure vessel by welding segments together but most economical to build one in a superheavy forge that can pound one out of a single piece of steel. There are no superheavy forges in North America (although there are many in various Asian and European countries) although the BWRX300 is small enough that it can be made in Canada.

As for simpler construction it has to be proven. The AP1000 was a "modular reactor" in that they tried to make it out of large modules that could be built in a factory and stuck together on site. The factories struggled to make those modules and when they arrived they often needed major rework. The ACP100 was recently completed in China

https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/INPRO/df13/Presentations/011_...

and press releases boasted that it was one of the most complex construction projects of all time -- what I wanted to hear was "this is one of the most simple construction projects of all time!"

Additionally, renewables have their own drawbacks - their volatility makes reliability more challenging and thus brings energy prices higher. Nuclear has the benefit of providing consistent base load, something that's needed more now than ever. That kind of thing might be worth the investment, but until now no one has wanted to put up the kind of money needed for that level of reliability.

Perhaps, but we don't need to and shouldn't pay more for green energy.

In 2025 the cheapest 24/7 energy grid is 90% green, up to 97% green in sunny locations.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

No. Lower energy costs saves lives. Energy is the life blood of civilization.

no,nuclear-power is much more expensive but it gets subvention on company level. That's why the end-user pay less for now.

You might, or you might not. You might end up with tidal or wave, or wind+batteries, or something else. Tying yourself to something that's going to take decades and almost certainly include big cost overruns seems like a terrible idea.

I keep hearing that solar and wind are the cheapest sources of new energy. Why would it be natural gas?

And for that matter, if you are worried about CO2 emissions, you could make that be part of the requirements.

Ill admit I am saying this out of only regional loyalty and have no idea about the status of other plants in upstate NY. I am also not sure on how much the power generated in Upstate NY goes to say Toronto vs NYC, and how much that reactor being in Buffalo or Rochester would even matter for that vs Oswego being 100 miles closer to NYC.