> While the reliability and 24-hour availability of power from a reactor is part of their appeal, the fact that the plants cannot easily be shut down and restarted means that they sometimes operate at a loss when there is ample supply on the market. That, he said, makes the DOE support program one of the only ways to keep some nuclear plants online as a carbon-free resource.<p>This is an interesting economic quirk I hadn’t thought about.<p>Solar energy is inherently variable as the sun rises and sets but also with weather changes. Nuclear is the opposite of variable, as it can’t be turned up or down quickly. Energy storage continues to be one of the big gaps in our clean energy strategy.
The problem nuclear has is that if you build something that can last literally half a century and more, the operational environment has changed so much.<p>People consider 'nuclear' to be nuclear built many decades ago with technology principles from even a few decades earlier.<p>Building something that has such long term aspirations is inherently problematic.<p>At the same time, if you turn them off, how much of the replacement will be fossil?<p>If you actually had a carbon price, would they still not be competitive?<p>Nuclear is truly in a sad state. And those reactors if turned down can't easily be replaced with any next generation designs because they don't exist as a practical product right now.<p>I think in 100 years people will laugh at as saying things like 'They had all the technology needed back then, why did they use it so badly'? I think that future will be nuclear fission powered, and not sun and solar powered.
"The only one currently under construction – the Vogtle plant in Georgia – is years behind schedule and roughly $14 billion over the original budget."
How does this happen, it is incredible to me how government contracts are allowed to overrun like this, where is the punishment for the original bidder. Same question applies to things like the F-35, the whole contract bidding process to government entities appears to be a grift.
Interesting side note. There is a new reactor coming online in the next year or two close to Savannah, GA (Plant Vogtle)...which has resulted in the air quality of Carroll County, GA getting much cleaner. Yates and Wansley have burned through coal stockpiles, one is now moth balled, the other is on nat gas and will be fully decommissioned when Vogtle 3? comes on line.
Vogtle 3-4
<a href="https://www.georgiapower.com/company/plant-vogtle.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.georgiapower.com/company/plant-vogtle.html</a>
Meanwhile the entirety of fusion energy sciences is ~450 M USD, which is about 1% of DoE's entire budget. Inertial confinement fusion (listed under nuclear weapons stockpile maintenance) is 530 M USD.<p><a href="https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-06/fy-22-budget-stat-by-appropriation-v3.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-06/fy-22-bud...</a>
You can have reliable power or cheap power.<p>The problem with current regulation is that power is treated like a fungible commodity when it is not.<p>Base load should be priced separately from peak and intermittent generation.
Establishing a modest carbon tax and reinvestment by DOE (or even a new department of clean energy) would produce billions of dollars every year for clean nuclear and wind/solar. Yet we keep doing the same old thing and expecting a different result. We don't need bandaids, we need a plan.
Pretty sad that the solar lobby is trying to destroy the credibility of nuclear. I hope we one day see a resurgence of nuclear, the drama and fear around it really shouldn't exist in 2022.