> So, it adds less than 200 million dollars per GW of storage. This is not large. It's also misleading to portray retrofitting plants as an expense that new nuclear builds would require: it's a lot harder and more expensive to do a retrofit than it is to incorporate these changes in the initial construction.
$200 in 1983 is 600 in 2022. So why are you claiming that it's the reason the plants finished in the 80s and 90s were more expensive then? A much cheaper version of a quarter of an insignificant amount can't double the price. There must be a different explanation like a negative learning rate.
> And again, three mile island was contained. Secondary storage worked. If these retrofits are expensive, they were evidently not necessary.
It still wiped out the plant and cost billions to clean up. And these are all changes related to the countless minor incidents like fires and pipe burst *before* TMI. The changes due to TMI before 1985 were not counted and were smaller. 40% of these modifications were initiated by the utilities to improve reliability and weren't even due to regulation. This was the cost of improving the early extremely simple reactors to the same safety and reliability standards as TMI.
> Good thing nuclear power averages a capacity factor of over 90%! By comparison what's the capacity factor for solar and wind? 25% depending on geography.
Not the machines you are saying to build. If you want to build a machine with 1/3rd of the material, a quarter of the regulation, a sixth of the labour many fewer redundancies, and less QA? You get one that performs like it. More regulation and more expensive designs and another 40 years of upgrades improved the reliability.
The nuclear industry learnt by doing, and what they learnt is if you half ass things your reactor catches fire or starts leaking and needs repairs like Browns Ferry or Rancho Seco or any if the N4 reactors in France which were built and operated at similarly slapdash rates.
> Restrict the query to reactors completed before three mile island and there's no increase in cost. The chart I posted handily put those in a different color, but this is apparently not obvious enough for you.
In the primary source from the DOE, the prices increase. Same with the Phung paper. The retrofit costs I included are precisely and only the ones unrelated to TMI. Excluding a small fraction of FOAK plants, they went up in price the entire time for plants that opened from 1969 to 1979. Every year they got bigger and more cimplex and added more redundancies because that was what was needed to keep them running more than half the time.
Every year the very first commercial plants were running, more problems were found that needed monkey patching and required adding complexity to subsequent and in progress designs. This necessarily can't have started before the first plant of each manufacturer was running.
The price per gigawatt dropped precipitously in plants with construction starting in 1965, and remained flat until three mile island. They got bigger and more complex, but produced more power and the cost per watt was the same. Only until after three mile island did cost start to balloon. Costs were almost entirely under $2 billion per GW until three mile island. Your sources do not contradict this, I have checked.
Which you keep citing parts of or citing directly shows costs increasing 23% year on year after the opening of the first large commercial reactor. This increase then slowed after TMI according to that paper. The only cost decreases were demo reactors, and small turnkey reactors most of which were shut down not very long after. The countries where costs did not escalate all had far worse reliability than the US program after the 80s. You get what you pay for.
In 2022 dollars the overnight cost for reactors coming online just prior to TMI is over $3000/kW for capacity factors that didn't exceed 58% until many more upgrades and repairs had been made over the course of years or decades.
Here is a simple model in the arctic for a renewable mix of 100MW with higher capacity than those plants at an all in cost that is lower than the overnight cost in your fantasy scenario. It uses a capacity factor about 2% lower than the median for new wind and a solar panel angle that is off optimal by 20 degrees for the latitude.
You're mixing up construction start dates and end dates. It's the color that distinguishes which plants were completed before and after Three Mile Island. The red is before. The brown is after.
Cost exploded after three mile island, your idea that cost increases slowed after is the complete opposite. Can you really not see how the brown data points shoot up?
> for capacity factors that didn't exceed 58% until many more upgrades and repairs had been made over the course of years or decades.
I looked into your claim that earlier plants had lower capacity factors. This is true for demonstration plants in the 50s and early 60s, but not the 800+ MW production facilities that were built during the nuclear boom.
> You're mixing up construction start dates and end dates. It's the color that distinguishes which plants were completed before and after Three Mile Island. The red is before. The brown is after.
I am and always have been talking only about the bright red dots. I'm indulging in your fantasy and demonstrating that the result of it is the opposite of what you claim. Yet again, the first large commercial reactor that didn't shutdown after a handful of years was San Onofre opening in 1968. This is the start point.
Every year in which nuclear reactors were being operated commercially, costs increased due to the discovery of a the ways it's really hard. Reactors which were under construction after 1968 and completed before 1979 were more expensive every year at a rate of 23% as per your own source. Your red cluster is an increasing function of time. The growth rate (as in ratio of costs from year to year) actually slowed after TMI. This is the conclusion of the paper this image is from.
The top end of the line representing reactors started just before TMI. The reactors you claim are the cheapest of all time. When adjusted for 2022 dollars. Cost over $3000/kW.
92% is the capacity for US plants after decades of operation including the costs incurred by TMI and chernobyl and fukuhsima. It also includes survivorship bias as the reactors which were destroyed or were too unreliable and shut down early are excluded. World average EAF according to IAEA is 79%. You want a cut rate nuclear program, you get the performance of a cut rate nuclear program. France and South Korea are barely better than the early US program. Japan was much worse. The only outlier with a large sample where reports are even approaching reality is China, and the prices China reports for every major project are a tiny fraction of what anyone else does.
The Phung paper has a list of plants and capacity factors up until 1985. The average is 58% and many are far below. Every reactor that wasn't cancelled or closed and didn't have an accident which destroyed an integral part of it has had substantial upgrades and repairs since then.
If we were being honest, then of the 16 reactors finished between 1976 and 1979, we'd include the price of the 3 that failed or were closed decades early in the accounting as well as their cleanup and decomissioning prices, but I'm letting you have that one along with all the other unaccounted subsidies.
$200 in 1983 is 600 in 2022. So why are you claiming that it's the reason the plants finished in the 80s and 90s were more expensive then? A much cheaper version of a quarter of an insignificant amount can't double the price. There must be a different explanation like a negative learning rate.
> And again, three mile island was contained. Secondary storage worked. If these retrofits are expensive, they were evidently not necessary.
It still wiped out the plant and cost billions to clean up. And these are all changes related to the countless minor incidents like fires and pipe burst *before* TMI. The changes due to TMI before 1985 were not counted and were smaller. 40% of these modifications were initiated by the utilities to improve reliability and weren't even due to regulation. This was the cost of improving the early extremely simple reactors to the same safety and reliability standards as TMI.
> Good thing nuclear power averages a capacity factor of over 90%! By comparison what's the capacity factor for solar and wind? 25% depending on geography.
Not the machines you are saying to build. If you want to build a machine with 1/3rd of the material, a quarter of the regulation, a sixth of the labour many fewer redundancies, and less QA? You get one that performs like it. More regulation and more expensive designs and another 40 years of upgrades improved the reliability.
The nuclear industry learnt by doing, and what they learnt is if you half ass things your reactor catches fire or starts leaking and needs repairs like Browns Ferry or Rancho Seco or any if the N4 reactors in France which were built and operated at similarly slapdash rates.
> Restrict the query to reactors completed before three mile island and there's no increase in cost. The chart I posted handily put those in a different color, but this is apparently not obvious enough for you.
In the primary source from the DOE, the prices increase. Same with the Phung paper. The retrofit costs I included are precisely and only the ones unrelated to TMI. Excluding a small fraction of FOAK plants, they went up in price the entire time for plants that opened from 1969 to 1979. Every year they got bigger and more cimplex and added more redundancies because that was what was needed to keep them running more than half the time.
Every year the very first commercial plants were running, more problems were found that needed monkey patching and required adding complexity to subsequent and in progress designs. This necessarily can't have started before the first plant of each manufacturer was running.