Odds are, the Vogtle Nuclear Plant will produce mostly reliable and carbon free power for a long time, if it ever gets started.
There’s the rub. Like so many large nuclear projects around the world, it’s been extremely slow and terribly expensive to bring on line, and that streak has continued this summer, despite continued promises of imminent startup.
Yeah, I get it, nuclear waste. Well, we have a shit-ton of nuclear waste sitting on pads around the country, that we’re going to have to deal with somehow, so this is just more of the same. And yeah, that will be expensive.
That horse is out of the barn, and the barn’s on fire..
Commercial operation of a new reactor at a Georgia nuclear power plant has been delayed for at least another month.
Georgia Power Co. said Friday that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, has a problem in the hydrogen system that is used to cool its main electrical generator. The company now estimates the reactor will begin reliably sending electricity to the grid in July, missing the most recent deadline of June.
The generator is not part of the reactor itself. It’s located in a separate building, where steam from the heat created by fission in the nuclear reactor is piped to spin a turbine, generating up to 1,100 megawatts of electricity.
The unit of Atlanta-based Southern Co. said the problem was a degraded seal. The reactor has been shut down while repairs are made.
Georgia Public Radio July 24, 2023:
On Friday, Georgia Power announced that a new nuclear reactor at Plant Vogtle is on its way to becoming fully operational in the coming months, news that comes several days before the utility faces another showdown over the project’s ballooning costs brought on by years of delays.
Georgia Power announced on Friday that the Waynesboro’s nuclear energy facility operators, Southern Nuclear, has turned over to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the 364 inspections, tests and analyses required for regulatory approval to assure that Vogtle’s final reactor meets strict nuclear safety and quality standards prior to completion. The development comes just weeks after Georgia Power revealed that Vogtle’s third reactor unit was delayed for another month before becoming the first new reactor to produce electricity in the country in 40 years when it came online in July.
Georgia Power is awaiting the nuclear commission’s formal approval to start loading fuel into Unit 4, which is expected to be completed by this fall or early 2024. It is the last planned expansion of the nuclear plant started in the late 1980s with the completion of two reactors.
“The new Vogtle units are an essential part of Georgia Power’s commitment to delivering clean, safe, reliable and affordable energy to its 2.7 million customers,” the utility company said in a press release. “Once operating, each of the new units can produce enough electricity to power an estimated 500,000 homes and businesses.”
The latest setback to Vogtle’s Unit 3 was caused by a malfunction of the hydrogen system that supports the generator that converts the turbine’s mechanical power into electricity. It was just another of many delays stemming from the early project’s stages when its contractor Westinghouse Electric declared bankruptcy, to technical and regulatory problems throughout construction as well as periodic worker shortages during the pandemic.
On Thursday, Georgia’s Public Service Commission is scheduled to hold another hearing to review the progress of a project with costs that have more than doubled to north of $31 billion after taking seven years longer to complete than projected. A number of utilities analysts and consumer and clean energy groups have expressed concern about how much more ratepayers will have to pay for a project that its supporters argue will provide a reliable, cleaner source of energy for decades to come.
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The continued frustrations of deploying nuclear energy have a lot of people rightfully concerned that it can not be scaled fast enough to meet the challenge that is obviously, with us today.
Meanwhile, we have some technologies, solar, wind, and storage, that can quickly and reliably be brought on line, if they get permitted. Seems like we should be racing to get that done.
Twenty years in the making and a cost of over $30 billion. For 2.2 gigawatts of power.
How many gigawatts of power could we build today with PV for that much money?
One megawatt of PV costs a bit less than one million dollars. One gigawatt would therefore cost less than one billion dollars. So, $30 billion dollars worth of PV would produce 30 gigawatts of power.
Basically, 15 times more bang for the buck.
Don’t forget to add in the time-shifting storage, which is getting cheaper all of the time.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory gives $350 per kWh for four-hour battery storage, which would equate to about $5 billion to cover one night’s output for an AP1000 reactor. (Might pay to double that for lithium-ion, which age fast when repeatedly filled and drained.) Lifespan of batteries is estimated at 10-15 years or 3,000 cycles. NREL projects battery price reductions as steep at first, but leveling off by 2050, so the cost of buying the batteries would have to be repeated at least four times over the 60 years the reactor should last. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency has been licencing similar pressurised water reactors to eighty years.
PV panels should last longer, maybe 40 years, so you’d only need to replace them once. You would need to install about four Gigawatt’s worth to match the output of a one Gigawatt reactor.
Even with twelve hours storage, though, there would be plenty of times, especially in winter, when for multiple days there wouldn’t be enough sun to recharge the batteries, or even keep the grid adequately supplied during the day. You could cross your fingers that there was adequate supply from afar – maybe Great Plains wind – to keep the lights on. If you were a conscientious grid manager, though, or a politician who valued his hide, you’d make damn sure there was enough gas, coal, or worst case oil, to get through.
Oneill has been told the answers to most of these bullshit “objections” half a dozen times but just can’t come up with any new lies that sound even remotely convincing, so s/he goes with the same old unconvincing ones over and over and over.
There’s not a single commercial nuke in the world that’s 60 years old and still running. (There are solar panels, though.) 40% of the French nukes failed at what—40 years old? And 5 more should have been shut down for destroying aquatic ecosystems but weren’t, cause you know, who cares? It’s only the ecological basis for all our lives. Licensing something for 80 years that’s going to be increasingly unsafe—even more unsafe than usual, that is—after 35…does that make sense to anyone but psychopaths? Especially when there are alternatives that are more reliable and don’t risk catastrophic failure. So the truth is, wind turbines last as long as nukes run even remotely safely, and solar panels last longer than any nuke. In fact the only thing about nukes that last as long as either solar, wind or the multiple lives of batteries is the nukes’ deadly serious ewigkeitsaufgabe problems.
Likes the models when they’re suitably pessimistic. But even NREL has grossly underestimated the price drops and capacity increases of wind, solar, and batteries, for decades. Not as ludicrously as IEA and EIA but how could anyone be that bad?
Nope, lithium batteries last a long time. Then they can be recycled. (Where they’re not it’s because far right loons wouldn’t let it happen.)
Hey, you see the pieces about radioactive tritium releases from Fukushima into the Pacific, and into the Hudson from a nuke that’s not even running any more?
I’m guessing being called on your lies is upsetting. So go ahead John, and point out how another grid without any renewables on it isn’t producing any renewable energy at the moment. Or suck your thumb, whichever is more comforting.
“PV panels should last longer, maybe 40 years, so you’d only need to replace them once”
You know they are making PV panels with 40-year => warranties <= now, John? And the degradation rates of modern PV panels is 0.2%, which works out to a 100-year lifespan?
And you know replacing solar panels is sooo time-consuming and expensive.
“National Renewable Energy Laboratory gives $350 per kWh for four-hour battery storage”. The report you reference “Cost Projections for Utility-Scale Battery Storage: 2023 Update” says “Figure ES-2 shows the overall capital cost for a 4-hour battery system based on those projections, with storage costs of $245/kWh, $326/kWh, and $403/kWh in 2030 and $159/kWh, $226/kWh, and $348/kWh in 2050.”
When you only provide the high estimate and don’t point out that it is the high estimate, you lose credibility. Do you understand that?
National Renewable Energy Laboratory gives $350 per kWh for four-hour battery storage, which would equate to about $5 billion to cover one night’s output for an AP1000 reactor.
That’s nice, but depends on early-generation technology that’s irrelevant in the longer term, as with Fe‘s 30-year* iron-air battery to fill in the longer-scale backup. It’s much like the classic design of putting fast-response expensive front ends (retail shops, RAM) in front of slower, cheaper capacity (warehouses, discs).
Great. Let’s get out our checkbooks and our stopwatches and see how fast we can get PV/wind/storage vs. nuclear power online. Better put your NPP further north where the winter overnight demand is higher, since they’re better at flat 24-hour supply “curve”, unless you want to add time-shifting batteries with the NPPs.
_________
*Not that the swapping out of old iron-air batteries is a high maintenance cost compared to plumbing in thermal plants. And you can do “turnaround” while the rest of the site is still live.
see today’s post on the “15 years’ lifespan.
I spoke to Heather Mirletz at NREL because she has done the most recent work in this area.
Vogtle reactors 1, 2 and 3 are currently running at respectively 100, 100, and 98 % of capacity, so it’s not hard to believe that V4 will be sorted out. The plant has an overall 91.25% lifetime capacity factor. Southern Company’s Georgia area grid has been getting about 25% of its power overnight from nuclear, with basically all the rest from coal and gas; even at midday, in summer, solar only makes 1.7% of the power.
The adjacent Tennessee Valley Authority grid has very close to double the percentage of nuclear and half the percentage of solar, year round, as the Georgia grid has. Last year its emissions per kWh were about 20% lower than Georgia’s. Since nuclear fills the same baseload role as coal, and solar doesn’t, it’s a safe bet that Vogtle 3 will do more to reduce emissions in the region than solar. (If you don’t think baseload is a viable concept any more, have a look at the graph.) https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-TEN-TVA
It’s been getting all its energy from nukes, coal and gas because the psychopaths running the place (grid, state, region…) refuse to allow renewables, which could have been producing all the power for years already, for less than half the price. Why aren’t they interested in that? Are they convinced by their own lies or do they know and just not care?
Oneill is playing with everyone. Well, deceiving by cherry picking would be more accurate. And using the Projective Blaming Fallacy. The insane far right does everything it can to delay renewables—lies, manipulates with racism, misogyny, and the usual divisive issues, steals elections, abuses power, destroys democracy, etc—then it whines about there not being enough renewables to meet some bogus made-up goal, and blames renewable technology so people won’t trust it.
What the hell does Oneill think use of renewables over the whole range, all the way from 1% of the grid to 2% proves about using renewables to reduce greenhouse emissions? What does s/he think s/he, or anyone, can demonstrate about using renewables by not using any?
So Oneill proves once again by using bad arguments that s/he has no good ones.
Baseload isn’t a viable concept any more.
Wow, they built a nuclear power plant in the sunbelt on a grid with little solar and now the nuclear power available is greater than the solar power!
The plant’s 3,100-acre site along the Savannah River became the largest construction project ever undertaken in Georgia. At the peak of construction, more than 14,000 people worked to build the two electric generating units at Plant Vogtle.
Approximately 900 people – including engineers, mechanics, control room operators, lab technicians, instrument and control technicians, electricians, security officers and others – oversee the plant’s operation 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Full-time on-site inspectors from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) monitor the plant to ensure it is maintained and operated safely, efficiently and in accordance with established nuclear operating procedures.
I have to admit, it’s quite a jobs program.
With the water temps warming, how can nuclear even be an option. They need cool water to operate.
an increasing problem
Barakah Dubai, four nukes in eleven years, $24.4B, produces 5380MW even at night and when the wind doesn’t blow.
This self congratulating crowing about a failure, in a society that takes 1100 days to hook up personal PV and $1,700,00 to install a one holer shit house, does nothing to save the world. In fact it is disgusting!
“1100 days to hook up personal PV” What is this? 3 years for home rooftop solar to hook up?
Om his show, comedian Bill Maher counted counted up over 1100 days bureaucratic delay to hook up his PV set,
Oh, brother. And now anybody that hears that knows that everyone else’s PV experience will be exactly the same.
What’s disgusting is so misrepresenting the nature & intent of comments and the facts about energy.
Chill J4, these are postmortem twitches of a dead climate activist.
Fiat governments can do whatever they want. They pay for it, too.
In the US and most of Europe, power plants are paid for by private investors with guaranteed backup of cost overruns paid for by ratepayers (or taxpayers). Any pro-NPP commenter that doesn’t acknowledge that is being disingenuous or dumb.
BTW, I’ll bet the supply curve from that massive NPP looks like:
______________________________________________________
Yep!
A solution, go 100% renewable and suffer power shortages any time the gods get bored. I could live with that to save the exosphere.
Your solution.
The four days we were without power during the 2021 Texas Big Freeze was not about power shortages but about system failures (including a nuclear reactor that shut down because its cooling system froze up). The six days our neighborhood was without power after an ice storm this February was local transmission failures. The five hour power outage in our neighborhood this July was because of a wind squall (and power workers were concentrating to the north of us which got the major hail and rain).
Meanwhile, this heat dome we’ve been under has been well supplied during the record demand peaks at the heat of the day because Texas spent billions to build in-state transmission lines to provide power.
If there are no long-distance transmission lines or geothermal or hydropower in some high-latitude region with no diurnal wind, then I guess someone might find it more cost-effective to build a nuclear power plant there. (Not to worry, cheaper mass-produced SMRs will come to the rescue eventually.)
Germany, Australia, UK, Texas, the US midwest and many other places have made their grids more reliable by adding renewable energy—wind and solar mostly. VRE.
The Insane Lies About The Texas Blackouts
Climate Town, youtub
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmYvkCXXI4E
Melting In The Sun: How Fossil Fuel Generators Failed In Summer Heat-Wave
Cleantechnica April 14, 2017
Texas is an interesting case in point. Since roughly 2010 it has increased wind and solar from around 0% to around 18% of its generation. During the same period, it’s gone from last to 34th in grid stability among the US states. [It would be even better if it connected to the rest of the country.]
“Economics favor an all-renewable grid: Jobs and health lead to all renewables not mixed generation as the best choice”
Michael Barnard, Medium, March 20, 2019
Since 2006, Germany’s renewable share of electricity generation has nearly quadrupled, while its power outage rate was nearly halved. Similarly, the Texas grid became more stable as its wind capacity sextupled from 2007 to 2020.
“Three Myths About Renewable Energy and the Grid, Debunked”,
Amory Lovins, M.V. Ramana, Yale, Dec. 9, 2021
2008
In May, the UK is hit by its worst blackouts for a decade after unexpected shutdowns including Sizewell B nuclear plant in Suffolk and the coal-fired Longannet in Scotland. Business secretary John Hutton tells that year’s Labour conference that new coal and nuclear plants are needed to “keep the lights on”. [The following month Hutton is reshuffled.]
“How the UK transformed its electricity supply in just a decade” Carbonbrief
Researchers see stronger electric grid in regions with large amounts of renewables
Thinkprogress archive
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/study-coal-nuclear-not-needed-for-reliability-c9d6f37c8907/
Report: “Electricity Markets, Reliability and the Evolving U.S. Power System,” consulting firm Analysis Group
“Scientific American: Wind Power to Stabilize Grid”
Climate crocks September 18, 2014
The most reliable thing about fossil & fissile fuels is that their pushers blame every disaster-related outage they cause on renewables.
“Germany, Australia, UK, Texas, the US midwest and many other places have made their grids more reliable by adding renewable energy—wind and solar mostly.”
The ultimate question is how reliable would a 100% RE+storage grid be (and on what part of the planet)? Of course, it’s not a question we’ll have to answer soon. 🫤
12
It’s been explained to Brent before, which is why s/he now refuses to understand. If s/he didn’t know, maybe awareness could sink in before s/he could will it to stop. Then s/he would stop.
Renewable energy sources come as a set. They peak at opposite times and places, covering all 3 peaks in place-time:
PV: summer afternoons toward the equator;
Interior continent wind: winter nights toward the poles;
Offshore & near-shore wind: the duck curve, everywhere, along with solar plus ~4 hours storage. The sources only peak then, however; they also produce lots at other place-times. The sun always shines and the wind always blows.
The Sky’s the Limit study looked at ability to supply domestic energy needs with renewables, considering resources and current energy use. It found Germany will be the 3rd hardest country in the world to renewablize. But there they are, 50% RE electricity and increasing, even though it’s also electrifying primary energy.
Solar PV and offshore wind are likely to provide 70-80% of the world’s energy with electrification, then clothesline paradox energy gradually making a significant part of the grid disappear over decades, if we decarbonize & detoxify fast enough that civilization survives. Onshore wind will help, and hydro, micro-hydro, run-of-river hydro, pumped hydro storage, can be saved to be used as needed; tidal is predictable years in advance & with a little storage can be a significant help, even dominant in local areas—like Scotland and Alaska.
Geothermal has a higher capacity factor than most of the world’s nukes. We can build as much of it as we want. CSP is pretty much 24/7/365. Even tiny amounts of bioenergy are dispatchable; like gas peakers only without fossil emissions.
(Note that as renewable energy takes over, energy in general will get cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, until even the poorest (who we have to help, btw, to become unpoor if we expect to survive this crisis) can afford to live like Germans, with half the per capita energy use of USers, and probably less over time.)
What J4 can not grasp is the variability of weather, and the fact that all transmission lines don’t lead to him. February 2022, near all western Europe, a massive user of power, suffered 14 days of ‘no’ wind. Wild guess, didn’t get a lot of sun either. In the scenario of 100% renewables, even colossal storage would run out and have trouble recharging. External power is only available if there is EXCESS, and the infrastructure to transport it. Note, such expensive infrastructure is a good idea.
Have worked in geothermal and that egg has not hatched.
I am pro renewable, these posts are circular solving nothing.
Like being insulting solves nothing.
your point about our society not being able to get shit done is well taken, but my long time position
on nuclear is not “crowing” , it’s constantly been to reality-check the assumptions that building
nuclear plants in a free market democratic economy is easy, cheap, and gets done quickly. Worth reviewing
former NRC Commissioner Greg Jaczko’s talk
https://climatecrocks.com/2023/06/03/the-weekend-wonk-former-nrc-commissioner-can-nuclear-solve-climate-change/
Be assured it was not directed at thee Greenperson. Absolutely stand by my assertion, that difficulties with nukes are welcomed as excuses for inaction rather than difficulties to be solved. Cost? We are the only society to fck itself because it was not cost effective to save itself. (ref I forget).
Two consecutive former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairpersons – Greg Jaczko and Alison MacFarlane – have come out publicly, after the end of their tenures, as believing that the nuclear industry should be ended. Opponents of nuclear take that as confirming their misgivings. I’d say it’s more a case of the NRC getting the wrong leadership – it’s supposed to regulate the industry, not strangle it.
Jaczko’s background was first in academia, in theoretical particle physics, and then for many years as an aide to Senators Harry Reid and Ed Markey, both nuclear sceptics. Harry Reid, as Democratic Senate majority leader, put Jaczko on the NRC to make sure that the Yucca Mountain waste repository, in his home state of Nevada, would never be commissioned.
Alison MacFarlane also had a background in research on nuclear waste, arguably the biggest boondoggle in US history. Despite nobody having ever been harmed by civilian spent fuel in 70 years, it seems you can’t spend too much to make it even safer. (Rod Adams, former Navy submarine officer, reckons the safest place for spent fuel is in a fast reactor, making power – it’s very hard to make a weapon out of while it’s in there, and impossible afterwards, because the plutonium is irreversibly degraded isotopically.)
Building reactors is clearly not easy, or everyone would be doing it, but it’s definitely worth doing.
Obviously people are going to keep trying to build reactors, whether it’s a good idea or not. I wish them luck, because we are out of time, and I want every initiative at decarbonization to succeed.
I attend meetings however, where people speak up and say “well, why don’t we just build nuclear?” as if it’s some kind of light walk in the park, and history does not support that view.
Whether you are pro or anti nuclear, I think it’s clear that there is no decarbonizing scenario that does not include a lot of wind, solar, storage, and enhanced transmission. That’s all stuff that is on the table right now that we can get to work on, so that is where I’m directing my attention and energy.
It is not an either renewables or nuke question. Renewables are the god damn answer. They also have gaps, like seasons, and those that the gods warped whims WILL (guaranteed will) take advantage of. The gaps need to be filled, and if anyone has a realistic dispatchable low carbon power source other than nuke speak now or forever hold your peace.
Look for solutions to problems, and if it costs a lot of money, the ecosphere is bluddy well worth it!
also, if you listen to this discussion that includes Greg Jaczko answer the question about whether it was onerous regulation that was the problem with US nuclear programs.
https://www.youtube.com/live/uyRH6cbnkOI?feature=share
He points out that a review of the regulatory process was done chaired by very conservative, pro nuclear Republican, retired Senator Pete Domenici, and the regulatory process was not found to be at fault. (relevant quote starts at 1:12:39)
A discussion moderated by somebody from ‘Beyond Nuclear’, and featuring MV Ramana and Mark Jacobson as two of its experts, and Greg Jaczko as the third, is hardly impartial.
From a piece on Pete Domenici I trawled off the net, dated 2007 -‘He came to believe, he later wrote, that “irrational fear,” “deliberate misinformation” and “propaganda” from foes of nuclear power and the actions of an overzealous Nuclear Regulatory Commission were keeping the nation from reaping the benefits of a safe electricity source that could also dramatically reduce air pollution.’ https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15922365
Presumably, Domenici’s assessment preceded the NRC’s ruling on aircraft impact, which came into effect eight years after 9/11. This was not as strict as Jaczko had pressed for, and was not supposed to apply to already-consented reactors – which the Vogtle and Summer reactors were. ‘However, companies that ask the NRC to new approve reactor designs would have to “assess how the design, to the extent practicable, can have greater built-in protections to avoid or mitigate the effects of a large commercial aircraft impact.” ‘
Although actual construction of the four AP1000s had not yet started, Westinghouse deemed it prudent to keep the all-powerful NRC happy, and diverted its engineers to a total redesign of the containment structure – the most expensive single item in a project, one that has to be rated for earthquakes orders of magnitude stronger than any ever experienced in the area, and in this case, also with an emergency pool of water on top of it weighing many hundreds of tons. This is part of the ‘passive safety’ design, intended to ensure no release of radiation in case of a major pressure breach, even with no operator action, and in the absence of offsite power or diesel backup. (The dome also used a double-sandwich stainless steel construction, to be filled with concrete, after previous cases where pre-tensioned reinforcing rods did not meet exact NRC specifications, and the concrete had to be smashed out and repoured, or where the rods were so close together that contractors used to ‘normal’ building standards couldn’t get the concrete mix to flow in.) That redesign is reckoned to have delayed both projects by about a year, which in lost output alone would be worth about three million dollars per day, per plant. Increased interest payments on the billions borrowed would be another blow.
I sincerely regret that the 9/11 highjackers, instead of targeting the World Trade Center, didn’t aim for Indian Point’s two reactors, as it seems they had planned to at one stage. The only part of an aircraft that might conceivably penetrate the four-foot thick containment, even at maximum speed, are the engine turbine shafts. More likely, those too would just disintegrate, as did the Phantom fighter ‘flown’ into a test section of reactor at 500 miles an hour, in 1998. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4wDqSnBJ-k&t=0s&ab_channel=WhatYouHaven%27tSeen
In addition to the thousands of lives lost that day, the subsequent wars not only cost the US, its allies, and the people of Afghanistan and Iraq thousands more lives, but also likely diverted world attention from dealing with climate change at a time when that was much less politically charged. The supposed ‘nuclear renaissance’ was on the verge of getting underway. A practical demonstration of how tough the plants are might have helped with that. Instead fracking and ‘clean gas’ made a play for coal’s place on the grid.
Domenici’s 2007 opinion was rendered before he actually studied the issue in depth in 2012.
Climate denying delayalism and anti-renewable fanaticism were as integral a part of the US-&-beyond’s far right’s fascist SlowCoup as the global war of terror. They use all parts of the cow.