Pretty much a roundabout way of supporting my big picture take.
Wish ’em all the luck in the world, meanwhile, deploy the hell out of solar and wind and we’ll take a look when they actually have one of these machines up and running.
Pretty much a roundabout way of supporting my big picture take.
Wish ’em all the luck in the world, meanwhile, deploy the hell out of solar and wind and we’ll take a look when they actually have one of these machines up and running.
Nuscale had to raise its target power price ‘from an originally quite competitive $58 per megawatt hour to a somewhat prohibitive $89.’
Prohibitive for the Utah power commissioners (who have a lot of cheap, un-carbon-priced coal to fall back on), but not for the New York State government.
‘In October 2023, developers of Empire Wind proposed raising the “strike price” for Empire Wind 1 from $118.38 per megawatt-hour (MWh) to $159.64/MWh, according to filings then from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority…“ After baulking at first, State Governor Kathy Hochul opened the chequebook.
‘The weighted average all-in development cost of the awarded offshore wind projects over the life of the contracts is $150.15 per megawatt-hour which is on-par with the latest market prices.” Maybe they figure that since offshore wind has about half the capacity factor of nuclear, they won’t have to pay those rates so often.
One cost magnifier for Nuscale is that, while its basic power module is fairly compact and self-contained, it’s designed to sit in a pool of water – and being nuclear, that pool has to be triple-redundant safe, 80 feet below grade for fear of aircraft impact, seismic strengthened enough to be built across the San Andreas fault, etc etc.. There’s a proposal to just put it in an ocean inlet. The reactor containment is normally cool, with a vacuum around the pressure vessel. The vacuum’s only vented for unplanned shutdowns in a power blackout, after which decay heat to about 6% max of the preceding thermal output would have to be removed. Being small, the surface to volume ratio makes emergency cooling much simpler than for a gigawatt-scale reactor.
I thought the Utah utility people were eyeballing geothermal as a clean energy alternative to the increasingly costly new SMR tech.
Hadn’t heard that – Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet’s company, is involved in that, and also owns a huge wind project in Wyoming, with more planned. Buffet has money in Bill Gates’s Natrium reactor, planned for Wyoming, as well. That might better complement renewables, with its inbuilt molten salt energy storage.