=economics =construction =energy
Why has nuclear power gotten more
expensive since 1970? Mostly, because matching inflation requires
technological improvements.
Inflation-adjusted retail electricity
prices in the US
have gone
down since 1960. Not only that, but after the increase from initial
power line construction finishing, the fraction of electricity costs going
to generation has decreased, with more going to transmission. Perhaps that's
because generation has more competition than transmission - California and
New York have unusually high electricity prices, and you can thank
corruption
for some of that.
LCOE (levelized cost of energy) for combined cycle
natural gas in the US
was estimated to
be ~$0.04/kWh going forwards. In Germany, electric generation in 2021
was ~$0.08/kWh;
half the
total
cost
was taxes/fees.
Inflation-adjusted cost per ft^2 of building a house
in the US
has been about flat. Median real wages have also been about flat, with a
decrease for people without college degrees and more time spent in school
for those with them. And construction costs are the
biggest
issue
overall, so the housing affordability crisis in the US is mostly about
increased income inequality.
Inflation rate is a combination of several things combined into 1 number:
- change in
money supply
- tech progress
- returns to scale
- resource
depletion
- capital accumulation/depreciation
- institutional
improvement/decline
The average inflation for the
whole economy includes a lot of tech progress. Prices being flat when
adjusted by (CPI) inflation doesn't mean "there was no progress", it means
"as much progress as home construction".
Which has had more tech
progress, home construction or nuclear plant construction? I'd argue for the
former: electric nailguns and screw guns, and automated lumber production.
Plus, US home construction has had less increase in average wages, because
you can't take your truck to a Home Depot parking lot to pick up Mexican
guys to make a nuclear plant.
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Let's look at the cost growth of
some other things as reference points.
Concrete products
increased
about 3.9% a year since 1960, a little higher than the CPI inflation
rate. Highway construction costs
are
up
>5%/year over the past 20 years.
If you want to cancel out the
technological progress component of the inflation rate, looking at the cost
growth of fighter jets seems reasonable, since ~100% of the tech progress on
those goes into improved performance instead of reduced cost. And they've
gotten a lot more expensive: a 1975 F-16 was ~$6.4M and 2021 F-16 was ~$64M,
which is ~5.1% cost growth, despite some learning from continued production.
Comparing that to the CPI, that would mean ~1.5% average annual cost
reduction from topic-specific tech progress, which seems about right to me.
Hinkley Point
C is
an ongoing nuclear power project in the UK, which has seen massive cost
overruns and delays. But if you take prices for electricity generation in
1960, and increase them as much as concrete has, you're not far off from the
current estimated cost per kwh of Hinkley Point C, or some other recent
projects considered too expensive.
Yes, at this point some companies
have lost their knowledgeable people and forgotten how to build nuclear
power plants competently, which means you should applaud the NRC not letting
them cut corners, but even the economically disastrous
Plant
Vogtle
reactor project is only 5% inflation since the glory days of nuclear power.
Anyway, to whatever extent capabilities have been lost, relative cost
increases came first and drove that.
US electricity costs decreased
thanks to progress on gas turbines, fracking, solar panels, and wind
turbines. Gas turbines got better alloys and shapes. Solar panels got
thinner thanks to diamond-studded wire saws. Wind turbines got
fiberglass. Nuclear power didn't have proportionate technological progress.
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"What about China? They're
building nuclear power."
The PPP/nominal GDP of China is almost 2x
that of the USA. China can construct stuff more cheaply than the US. Also,
those plants are heavily subsidized in opaque ways involving government
loans, perhaps because the Chinese government has also been rapidly
expanding its nuclear weapon arsenal for better deterrence when it goes for
Taiwan. If their nuclear power was actually cheaper than coal they wouldn't
be building mostly coal plants, would they?
"What about the cheap
Kakrapar
IPHWR-700
plants?"
That project was
reported
earlier this year as being ~$1.70/W with current cost overruns, which is
weird because that's half the cost of earlier Indian nuclear plants. You
should adjust costs ~3x for PPP, but also, that number is fake; the project
isn't done and costs were shifted to the final reactor with accounting
tricks.
"What about US Navy nuclear
reactors for ships?"
The A1Bs used for Ford-class carriers may well
be cheaper than the new Vogtle reactor, but the US Navy has never estimated
that its nuclear ships were cheaper than using oil, which is more expensive
than natural gas from a pipeline. You also can't use them for commercial
power, because they use highly enriched fuel and don't have a secondary
containment structure, plus most places don't have seawater for cooling.
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OK, so for cheap nuclear power we
need some sort of better technology, right? Wasn't that what the billions of
dollars the US government spent researching
Gen IV
reactors for?
No, not really. There's no reason to expect any of those to be cheaper
than current PWR and BWR reactors. The focus of that was making
fast
reactors more
practical. Current nuclear plants are very inefficient with fuel, and if
they were used for most human energy needs, current fuel supplies would run
out in a couple decades, before natural gas.
Somebody reading this
probably wants to say: "But there's plenty of uranium in seawater!"
Maybe you read something about that only being 6x or so as expensive, but
whatever number you read is fake. I don't want to see a comment from you
unless you look into how that number was calculated and think real hard
about whether it would be the only cost involved. The uranium in a cubic
meter of seawater, used in current reactors, produces electricity (~0.1 kWh)
worth less than even simple processing of a cubic meter of seawater costs.
If seawater processing cost as much as desalination, and fuel was half the
electricity cost, that'd be $10/kWh. Well, at least I guess it's less dumb
than mining He3 from the moon.
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I expect solar + wind + 1-day
storage from Hydrostor-type systems or metal chelate flow batteries to be
cheaper than nuclear power in the US and Europe. That might seem attractive
in Europe vs shipping LNG from the US, but seasonal energy storage is a lot
more expensive than that; hydrogen can be stored cheaply in underground
caverns, but hydrogen from electrolysis is
much too
expensive
for power. I also expect biomass power to be cheaper than nuclear, but
Europe and Japan don't have enough land for that, and land use would be a
big issue even in the US.
Current nuclear power is too expensive and
doesn't have enough fuel to be the main source of energy. Breeder reactors
would be even more expensive and less safe. And yet...
Let's suppose
war breaks out over Taiwan and LNG carriers to Europe and Japan aren't able
to operate safely due to threats from submarines and long-range missiles,
and seasonal energy storage is too expensive, so they have no choice but to
use nuclear power. Or, if you prefer, suppose that it's 50 years from now,
AI hasn't taken over, no unexpected technologies have come up, and the US
has run out of natural gas but people don't want to go back to coal.
Cheaper nuclear plants would then be important, which as I've
explained above, requires technological improvements to match those that
other energy sources got. As for how to do that, as I
previously
said, I think CO2 cooled heavy water moderated reactors with uranium
carbide fuel are reasonable, mostly because you can avoid steam turbines,
and TerraPower's design is terrible and unsafe, which I guess is what
happens when investors who
don't understand
physics start picking technology. TerraPower's design actually offends me
personally on an aesthetic level; it's like
this when it
should be like this. If you must build fast
reactors, maybe I'd try to couple a fast neutron area to a thermal reactor
area to make control easier by getting some neutron lifetime and some
reactivity loss when moderator heats up - but I'm not a nuclear power
specialist, I don't like nuclear reactors, I'm only better than clowns like
Kirk Sorensen or the TerraPower people.
I guess you could hope for
fusion power too, but it's not as if that's a cheaper or less-radioactive
way to generate heat than fission. Helion has been in the news lately and
hopes for direct conversion from plasma, but they're going nowhere; here's a
non-technical
explanation of why, some
semi-technical
explanations,
and I guess you can message me if those somehow aren't technical enough for
you.
If you're going to work on some new technology, it's a lot
easier to improve a basic type of thing that's used now or at least already
close to viability. Nuclear power currently isn't. If Bill Gates or somebody
wanted to, for some reason, give *me* a billion dollars to make a nuclear
reactor, I guess I'd do that, but I'd certainly rather work on flow
batteries.