You also need to build a secondary containment vessel for the reactor, which is a significant expense. Because the cost of this containment is a function of surface area and generating capacity is a function of volume it's better to increase size. You also need to build steam turbines, heat exchangers, transformers, etc. The cost of the reactor is only a portion of the cost of the whole nuclear plant.
> Palo Verde was brought online more than 30 years ago. If you look at Vogtle 3-4 (to be brought online in the next 2 years... if we are lucky) or Hinkley Point C, you'll see projected costs of respectively $25 BN for 2.5 GW and $32 BN for 3.2 GW. In both cases that comes at $10 BN/ GW. That is 5 times more expensive than the naval reactor.
And by comparison you have the Taishan plant built for $7.5B with 3.5 GW generating capacity. If we want to go around cherry-picking examples we can also cherry-pick the cheap plants.
We have already tried using maritime nuclear reactors for grid generation. The first nuclear plants brought online for grid generation were maritime reactors repurposed for grid production. Larger purpose-built reactors won out.
Vogtle and Hinckley aren't cherry picking expensive plants, it's cherry picking middle of the road.
VC Summer is expensive, many billions spent and nothing to come of it ever.
Where do your cost numbers from Taishan come from? How do you come to costs that are believable from massive Chinese construction, or at least a cost that might be transferable at all to the rest of the world?
The history of nuclear is very clear: keep on increasing costs throughout construction, just enough that, taking into account the sunk cost fallacy, it makes sense to soldier on. VC Summer overshot that, and had massive corruption in the auditing of all parts of the project. Somehow Vogtle continues.
We literally do not know how to build nuclear in a cost effective manner any more. We can't structure contracts in the right way, we can't perform engineering to a high enough degree to make constructive plans. At Vogtle they literally poured the wrong concrete, and had to go back and get the design recertified with the NRC, because the original design was impossible to build, and on site they just plowed ahead with what they thought they could build. This is the level of incompetence, ball dropping, and bad contract structure.
Perhaps this sort of thing is fixable, but not on any reasonable timeline. The management is rotten from the top, so there's nobody that we can even order a nuclear reactor from.
Suppose you had $7.5B and wanted 3GW of nuclear at one of the many sites in the US that would welcome nuclear and its jobs. Who do you even bring that money to in order to build it? Rosatom? Are they going to meet NRC standards?
> Palo Verde was brought online more than 30 years ago. If you look at Vogtle 3-4 (to be brought online in the next 2 years... if we are lucky) or Hinkley Point C, you'll see projected costs of respectively $25 BN for 2.5 GW and $32 BN for 3.2 GW. In both cases that comes at $10 BN/ GW. That is 5 times more expensive than the naval reactor.
And by comparison you have the Taishan plant built for $7.5B with 3.5 GW generating capacity. If we want to go around cherry-picking examples we can also cherry-pick the cheap plants.
We have already tried using maritime nuclear reactors for grid generation. The first nuclear plants brought online for grid generation were maritime reactors repurposed for grid production. Larger purpose-built reactors won out.