Assume the US wanted to switch to nuclear power as our baseload power. What is the cost of building new nuclear power plants vs expanding existing plants?
Can you just add reactors to existing plants so you could turn a 1GW plant into a 2GW plant, how much does that cost vs building a brand new 1GW plant from scratch?
There isn’t a whole lot of shared equipment between units in a nuclear power plant facility. You save a bit on land costs, assuming that the company already owns the land where the new unit is to be built. You also get to share the storage facility for the spent fuel. Each reactor and each steam turbine, generator, cooling tower, etc. are all separate though, so there’s no cost savings there from having them close by each other.
It’s a difference between “ungodly expensive” and “slightly less but still ungodly expensive”.
Of course, there is also the fact that it’s much easier from a political point of view to expand an existing plant compared to building a new plant in someone’s back yard.
As a practical matter, if the U.S. chose to switch the majority of its power to nuclear, you could expect everyone’s electric bill to rise rather dramatically. Nuke plants can’t compete with other alternatives these days from a cost point of view. You also have stiff political opposition to nuke plants. The only advantage nuke plants have is carbon footprint, and the nuclear fuel problem and chances of radiation release are also both significant environmental concerns. Between costs and politics, the chances of the U.S. switching to nuke power is pretty close to nil.
Switching all the fossil fuels in the grid to nuclear would require building about 300 new nuclear plants. I wasn’t sure what the cost would be for a new nuclear plant vs expanding the existing plants.
The chance of radiation release is significantly greater for a coal plant than for a nuclear plant. Of course, the real problem is the perceived chance of radiation release.
Yeah, a coal plant might kill more people from cancer than a Nuclear plant, but that’s the worst it’s going to do. It isn’t going to render a city uninhabitable or provide materials for a dirty bomb, like the Nuke plant might.
I realize there are risks of nuclear plants both from terrorism and natural disasters, however I’m more just wondering what the price is of expanding a plant vs building a new one.
OK, Wikipedia says the one 3.5 GW CANDU plant had $5.1 billion in overnight costs, $14.3 billion total capital costs. Do you have any data on the cost of expanding an existing plant, or renovating one to work for a few more decades?
ETA the Ontario government cancelled proposed expansion there because it would cost too much…
I’ve noticed that when they talk about expanding a power plant of any kind, it means adding a complete new set of boilers, steam turbines, and generators, at the same location, thus taking advantage of existing access, land, and fuel and electrical network infrastructure.
I think I’ve heard of rebuilding power plants, where the old gen-set is discarded, but that’s not an “expansion” as such, just what happens when a power plant gets to end-of-life.
Wouldn’t the “grid” have to be updated to handle the additional distribution? And if the intended expansion is to cover additional electrical consumaption, and said consumption is far away, the cost of transmission might exceed the reduced cost of expanding/retrofitting an existing plant.
I’m not a nuclear engineer, nor do I know anything about utility size power generation. But I imagine they are rather efficient as they are usually run like a business. Sure, an older and larger plant might have some residual cost savings with older technology. But with expected wear/tear and other maintenance costs I’d imagine an update every 30 years or so. That’s totally a guess though.
It would totally make sense that those turbines are super efficient at converting steam to mechanical. Unless some break through technology comes along there actually might not be much different in a 50 year old turbine versus a new one. It’s be interesting to know if there is and what it was? As in, we knew of better designs but the technology to make said design exceeded ROI?
You can compare the two in Finland.
There is the completed (almost commissioned) new Olkiluoto 3 which was built on the grounds of two existing units.
Then they just started Hanhikivi on an entirely new site.
I see very little difference in the work or fundamental costs involved.
Separate units share practically nothing in the way of equipment or buildings. Just consider the very expensive containment building. No two units share one. No two nuclear units share a turbine hall, either.
The savings in expanding an existing grid connection vs. building new are a tiny part of the total cost.
Some data from Plant Vogtle in Georgia might be informative.
There’s the original two reactors from the 90s* and there are two new reactors being added. Each reactor requires it’s own control, cooling, etc. systems. Not a lot of overlap and the parts that do are not exactly the costliest components.
The new reactors projected cost was $14 billion. A couple years ago they admitted the cost was going to be at least $25 billion. And that’s going to be far short. The backruptcy of Westinghouse who is making the reactors isn’t helping.
Most of the additional costs are being passed on to rate payers (not stockholders). This makes a lot of people unhappy. There are also Federally ensured funds that can be spent and the chances of those being paid back are looking dimmer and dimmer.
Things got interesting during the last PSC hearing to approve the cost overruns (and stick the rate payers with them). Lots of examples of sunk cost fallacy.
Addendum, I googled “nuclear shared turbine hall” and of course the situation is not that black and white.
This IAEA report (PDF) says the “original VVER-440 PWR concept” consisted of two reactors sharing a turbine hall.
Nuclear aircraft carriers have shared reactors and turbines. Future plants based on SMR reactors might share turbines.
I am still quite sure that current generation large PWRs do not share turbines and can’t save costs that way.
Fukushima had six reactors, and each had its own spent fuel pools. I don’t know about other storage.
Japan put lots of reactors together to solve the NIMBY problem, but we can now see the drawbacks to that strategy.
Depends what you mean by ‘expanding existing’. Both recent nuclear projects* in the US Sumner in SC and Vogtle in GA were additional separate units built on sites already approved to have nuclear power plants. It’s basically considered prohibitive in time, cost and risk to try to get new sites approved in the US. Both those projects were still cost disasters, Sumner probably will never be completed, Vogtle is still supposed to be completed I believe but the cost per Kwh to recover the capital cost would be ridiculously noncompetitive with a new gas fired plant.
Anyway that’s where the cost saving is, in not having to go through as long and risky a process of getting a new site approved (time and risk=money). It’s not that it’s much cheaper to build the plants on the same site once it’s approved. It could even be more expensive where the location and operation of the existing plant would complicate construction of the new one compared to a ‘green field’. But the NIMBY barrier is often prohibitive for a green field.
It’s interesting to me how common ‘what about nuclear?’ threads are here compared to have far it is from reality based on recent experience, at least in the US which is the generally assumed ‘we’ on this forum. In certain other countries nuclear will have a limited role in new generation capacity, but in the US it’s pretty clear ‘we’ simply can’t build nuclear plants at a cost that makes them feasible. People keep assuming ‘we’ can, actual practice keeps demonstrating ‘we’ can’t.
*you might also count the completion of the TVA’s Watts Bar Unit 2 plant in 2015, construction of which had been suspended since 1985, but obviously again the site was already approved.
If there had been only one reactor there, it would have been just as bad: The radiation release would still have been negligible, and the public reaction would still have been just as panicked.
Negligible? Um, read this.
Note that it is a quite lengthy article for “negligible” radiation. All sorts of things I could point to, including the ongoing ban of certain agricultural products from the area. Eight years later.
When you finally scroll down through several pages of projected health effects, to how much material was released, the wiki claims anywhere from 538.1-800 PBq, mostly I-131, Cs-134 and Cs-137. No Xenon mentioned, which is really peculiar.
Compare to Chernobyl where about 8500 PBq of material was released. I wouldn’t have guessed the two were so comparable, given one was an open air core fire, and the other a meltdown without completely breaching containment, but that’s what the wikis for both claim.
Yup, the public reaction was panicked, just like I said.
Umm, wasn’t there in fact a substantial containment breach at fukishima? And small leaks continuing to this day? Specifically, the cores melted down, on 3 separate reactors, and the mess of radioactive slag in the basement underneath the cores has cracked the concrete. Water has to be continuously pumped in to keep the hot debris cool, and that water in turn leaks out.
There’s various dams and underground barriers and at this point the leak is probably just a trickle. Last I heard, the problem was that the radioactive water can’t be cleansed of tritium and thus can’t be released into the ocean.
Although, to be fair, poison’s in the dose - if you dilute tritium laced water in enough oceanwater, such as by loading the water onto a ship, sending the ship into the middle of the pacific, and dumping it, the health effects would be zero.