alt Hacker NewsThe economics of new nuclear plants don't make sense. They take too long to build and cost too much. By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.
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How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.
Build times and costs of long-distance HVDC is comparable to build times and costs of nuclear power plants.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-starts-construc...
I think that's what Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are hoping to improve? At least the time to build.
> They take too long to build and cost too much
Not in China apparently
“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish”, as my old gaffer used to say.
But they work at night
> They take too long to build and cost too much.
The global average to build one is ~7 years. People have been saying they take too long to build as an excuse for not building them for what, two decades or more? It seems to be taking longer to not build them than to build them.
> By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.
Neither of those have the same purpose. Solar + battery lets you generate power with solar at noon and then use it after sunset. It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January. More than a third of US energy consumption is for heating which is a terrible match for solar because the demand is nearly the exact inverse of solar's generation profile both in terms of time of day and seasonally.
HVDC is pretty overrated in general. It does nothing for the seasonal problem and it's expensive for something that only provides a significant benefit a small minority of the time, i.e. the two days out of the year when the entire local grid has a shortage but a far away one has a surplus. It's also hard to secure because it inherently spans long distances so you can't have anything like a containment building around it and you end up with an infrastructure where multiple GW of grid capacity is susceptible to accidental or purposeful disruption by any idiot with a shovel or a mylar balloon.