Might save you a click:
Too many investors pulled out of the project, at least in part due to rapidly falling prices of renewables.
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Interest rates too, I’d imagine. Investing in new nuclear and expecting a decent ROI would be a dumb move now.
I am surprised they got any investors. From what I see the only way to get investment money is to say you are making a new social media app or building a condo.
Hear me out ... nuclear powered AI NFTs.
Does it support blockchain?
You know it does.
Oh man this is great. Hold on let me go get the sack of money labeled "pensions" and the other labeled "Covid relief funds".
Yeah the same reason nuclear is being rejected everywhere, it's economically unfeasible and a huge liability - no one wants to end up with a hugely expensive powerstation that no one wants to buy power from because it's a thousand times more expensive per kWh than any other option.
It is time
I remember so many nuclear stans on lemmy a bit ago refusing to acknowledge that renewables are getting so good and cheap that they are more important to solving climate change than nuclear. I wonder how they feel seeing investors pull out in favor of renewables?
Like crap? Renewables are good in places where they work. Nuclear works everywhere and is more reliable.
Investors pulling out of a nuclear project like this just looks like a, really dumb kneejerk reaction. "Oh! New shiny thing!"
Nope, the writing was on the wall for almost a year on this one. The whole nuclear industry in general is a long history of cost and schedule overruns. This is more of the same. Investors are not dumb.
You can invest in a solar or wind deployment and have it running and producing revenue in six to twelve months. You can invest in nuclear with a stated schedule of five years, have it blow past that mark, needing more money to keep it going (or write the whole thing off), and then start actually getting revenue at the ten year mark. This isn't mere speculation, it's exactly what happens. Oh, and it's producing at least half the MWh per invested dollar as that solar or wind farm.
It's amazing anyone is putting any money into nuclear at this point. For the most part, they aren't. The federal government has shown willingness to sign new licenses for plants. Nobody is buying.
SMRs do not appear to change any of this.
Now, something I think we should do is subsidize reactors that process old waste. Lots better than the current plan of letting it sit around, and probably better than storing it in a cave for millenia, too.
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This. Green energy works best when complimented with nuclear energy. Then, we can ween away from big oil.
It’s the opposite. Nuclear outputs as close to 24/7 as possible, you can’t ramp it up and down to accommodate variable output from renewables for practical and economic reasons.
I mean you can vary it pretty significantly depending on the reactor type, but even if you couldn't you can still put the energy to work in alternative ways, such as pumping water up into reservoirs/damns to generate energy at other points, or using the excess energy to split water. There are many ways to use excess energy.
So your solution to excess nuclear is to store it. The solution to shortfalls of renewables is also to store it.
Why do we need nuclear?
But storage without inpacting available energy requires an excess, and the current shortfall of renewables is that there isn't enough energy produced for a significant excess (same goes for nuclear). Either way I was addressing the literal aspect of energy generation being 24/7 with nuclear.
Not to mention I could see viable uses for nuclear still, especially in processes that are effectively 24/7 hot water production via heat exchangers for providing heating to literal cities, energy production for large arc furnaces.
And don't mistake my view of nuclear as not seeing the benefits of renewable, my father lived on a boat where the heating and appliances were all run via solar panels and forklift batteries for more than 10 years of his life.
It's relatively easy to get to 95% renewables. We have tons of historical weather data on wind and sun patterns. You can then calculate the extent of the lull when you won't have either one. Pad that number, then put in enough storage to cover it. Natural gas may be needed for that last 5% (it's a lot more difficult to get renewables to 100% than 95%), but that's minimal.
This is all achievable by 2030, the time when we want to drastically cut emissions. In contrast, there is no plan that gets nuclear in place by 2030. If you had all the permits signed and dirt starting to be dug today, you couldn't make that time line.
Nuclear does not help us reach these goals. It takes too long, is too expensive, and doesn't synergize with renewables well at all.
You can do the same with excess power from renewables though. My point was that you need something to fill in the gaps when renewable output is low, whether that be from batteries, pumped storage, peaker plants, etc.
Nuclear doesn’t fit in here, there are no nuclear peaker plants.
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I’m in both camps. We need massive amount of renewable energy installed and we should keep going.
But there comes a point where the last 20% will be extremely expensive to do via renewables. We will do the last 20% much cheaper if we keep our nuclear expertise and plants going.
I’m not saying “build only nuclear”. I’m saying “keep it going”.
I agree with this. I like nuclear, I think it's neat, but I think it will be a minor player in solving climate change and meeting energy demands (unless there is some miracle breakthrough in fusion). It is perfect for specific locations/contexts.
I'm just bothered by:
People who think nuclear everywhere is the only possible solution to getting off fossil fuels, and have unrealistic expectations about its ease of building and price
and
People who trash talk solar and wind while being wholly uninformed about how effective and cheap those things are, and how fast they are getting cheaper and more effective.
For some reason, these people are often the same people.
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Eh, classic problem. By the time we all realize something was actually a good solution and should be used, it's time to move on. And some people don't get that memo as quickly.
Might be easier to get people's opinions if you don't insult them in the first sentence.
"stan" is a common word for excessive fanatic. It isn't always purely an insult. I also was specifically referring to people that were pretty rude in their behavior before. Feel free to assume I'm not talking about you, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with people who like nuclear.
Think of me as a solar stan if it makes things simpler
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It was such a unnecessary opinion that turned up so often on social media that I have to imagine it was seeded by mining companies.
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Damn
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nuclear power provides energy that is largely free of carbon emissions and can play a significant role in helping deal with climate change.
One hope for changing that has been the use of small, modular nuclear reactors, which can be built in a centralized production facility and then shipped to the site of their installation.
Their smaller size makes it easier for passive cooling systems to take over in the case of power losses (some designs simply keep their reactors in a pond).
The government's Idaho National Lab was working to help construct the first NuScale installation, the Carbon Free Power Project.
Under the plan, the national lab would maintain a few of the first reactors at the site, and a number of nearby utilities would purchase power from the remaining ones.
NuScale CEO John Hopkins tried to put a positive spin on the event, saying, "Our work with Carbon Free Power Project over the past ten years has advanced NuScale technology to the stage of commercial deployment; reaching that milestone is a tremendous success which we will continue to build on with future customers."
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