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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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Jesus, it went from $14bn to over $30bn in cost overruns? That's embarrassing.
That's the engineering knowledge lost over the last 30 years costed out.
Making 2 reactors since 95 has some side effects, a lot of the senior engineers since then have retired, standards have changed, and new engineers need to learn.
Exactly what I was thinking
It like those highspeed rail projects that are finally getting going in the US, they're over budget because a lot of people now have to be trained on how to work on such a project due to either lost knowledge or new stuff they're learning during the process
Another factor in the trains, at least for California, is that the project was put on hold for a while because of the hyper loop crap. Now they need to resume buying land for the track and prices are where they are
Honestly they should just specify the project as a public works project, would give them eminent domain rights and skip the whole 9 yards of land pricing. It would force it to be done based off fair market price instead of the inflated BS all land is currently at. Least if I understand eminent domain right.
I don't know for certain but I expect they used eminent domain.
I think you're right. I'm from Canada, so laws might be different, but AFAIK, eminent domain means the owner can't say, "No, I'm not selling" to the government, not that the government has total control over the price. Landowners can also argue that losing that portion of land will negatively affect the remaining property and argue in court to be compensated.
And since California has Prop 13, i wonder if landowners can sue for the future tax increases for the replacement property? Afterall, that is a direct consequence of the forced sale of the land.
"You are increasing my property taxes forever. So you should be responsible for that increase... forever."
Good Point!
Site Note: A family member who lives in California recently explained how their property taxes are calculated, and that system is crazy! That system encourages people to never move, which probably contributes to housing issues because seniors are dis-incentivized from down-sizing, etc.
Yep.
We used to have the problem of senior citizens having their property taxes jacked up every year to the point that the taxes are almost as high as the original purchase price. Bunch of seniors were ending up losing their houses.
Prop 13 was designed to fix that; and it did, but it also caused a bunch of 'unintended consequences'.
Eminent domain is subjected to legal challenges. Both to the authority (there must be a purpose) and also to the FMV assessment. Which costs money. And time.
If it was as easy as snapping their fingers, it would've happened.
Nah they are over budget because there is no incentive to keep under budget, it was sub contracted out so much that there is either no communication/miscommunication/or willfully not listening, sales pretended they were engineers, and bad engineers were promoted to project management.
I work in infrastructure.
Me three weeks ago on email to main contractor: hello, your spec is calling for some parts that are no longer manufactured which means we will have to buy used. Leading to more money now and higher replacement part costs in the future for the government. Plus these parts are on the border of safe.
This morning: your exception list was rejected, follow spec.
So a small city in California is getting a brand new system made of used parts. No this isn't a direct quote this is a summary.
can the maintenance department who will be eventually responsible start working on fabricating those so you'll have new-made even if not off the shelf? rapid prototyping and small runs....
Nah. I deal with the electronics and city maintenance departments arent going to sit there and clone a touch screen from the late 90s. Even if they somehow could it wouldn't matter because the spec calls for products by brand name.
This is why there are cost overruns. It's crap like this.
The paying to train is one thing. The bigger problem is people who aren't super experienced in these projects doing estimates and costings.
You're always going to have some overruns, and if you're lucky, some underruns too. But if your estimates are out of wack... well. Good luck. Combine that with Parkinson's law and you are in for a world of hurt.
It's a big job to train all those train trainers.
Yep. The failed dual reactor project in SC that also used the AP1000s was a gigantic clusterfuck. Most of the major contractors had essentially no experience on projects of the scale and it resulted in massive cost overruns, delays, and a compounding web of fraud and lies to shareholders and regulators that wound up in utility executives in prison and the eventual sale of the entire utility SCANA to Dominion Energy.
Cost overruns in the nuclear industry are nothing new. It's been the norm. The AP1000 design used here was supposed to solve some of those issues, but it's been more of the same.
Welders and other tradesmen too. I met a guy from the NRC that said that there were few if any welders certified and knowledgeable enough to work on reactor construction. And this was 15 yrs ago.
Haha, this is insightful, but I worry an incorrect conclusion re: cost and overruns. Yes, lots of extremely experienced engineers have retired; but, the pace even in the 70s, 80s and 90s was oft beset by slowdowns and overruns. See: 9 mile, river bend, rancho seco, comanche peak, and those are just the ones I know off the top of my head.
We need more, but it's a nuclear-and-renewables, not nuclear instead of renewables. I hope smr and other designs get a better shake this time, because climate change doesn't bode well for coastal installations, and frankly, building many more large PWRs isn't going to happen quickly.
Frankly I hope we can turn the experience debt to our advantage - rigorous investigation of all the many options disregarding the established dogma of large PWRs would be good in my view. YMMV.
Tax payers subsidize the power plants, pay for the electricity and the corporation gets to keep the profits
This is one of the many reasons that I think nuclear plants should not be corporate owned
I think a lot of stuff that's currently corporate owned shouldn't be but that's a conversation for another time
Edit: Should to shouldn't
The people with money to invest in the energy sector don't seem interested in nuclear. They're looking at the history of cost and schedule overruns, and then putting their money in solar and wind. Regulators do seem willing to greenlight new nuclear projects, but nobody is buying.
If the public were to finance a nuclear power, we have to ask why there's a good reason to do so when private investment is already rejecting it. There has to be some reason outside of cost effectiveness. One answer to that is recycling all the nuclear waste we already have.
That's because private companies are incapable of large scale engineering. They want fast profits, not stable infrastructure.
Need some smaller, shipping crate sized nuclear generators that can be rented. If smaller set ups end up helping with knowledge and new tech then awesome. If not, it's still pretty fucking cool.
TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, has the same belief. The the first one to be built is already underway in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
Yup I think a lot of this stuff should be nationalized and that the energy market should be used or simulated to determine the operation of it.
Ta payers also subsidize banks, pay for the housing price crisis twice, and the corporatation gets to keep the profits.
Neither is great but at least electricity is something that can keep you alive. Next time power goes out and your food/insulin is about to spoil and there is no heat in your home are you going to yell out "please Warren Buffet fix it!" Or are you going to be very happy to see those line workers doing their jobs?
Specifically rate-payers at least in most places, and the cost for these projects is added to some sort of Global Adjustment applied on top of the KWh price. GA is usually capital projects like those, plus making sure the price is high enough to cover the cost of actually distributing the power. Sometimes electricity can be "free" or even in the negatives in the market for example especially at night, especially if you just commissioned nukes in preparation for something else being decommissioned and now have an overnight surplus that you're trying to incentivize consumption of or give to your neighbors.
Cost-plus contracts are a Hell of a drug.
The whole project has been a huge unjust wealth transfer directly from ratepayers to shareholders, and the regulatory-captured Georgia Public Service Commission just let it happen.
(If I sound bitter, it's because I'm one of the ratepayers getting screwed.)
Shitty as that is, at least you're getting a reactor out of it all. I still support renewables over nuclear, primarily for cost-benefit reasons, but it's always good to have some diversity in the generation mix.
The big demand right now is a replacement for the capabilities of fossil fuels. There's a lot going on with energy storage tech right now.
We already had nuclear. This project was building reactors #3 and #4 on a site that already had two, and between that and Plant Hatch, nuclear was apparently already 23% of GA Power's energy mix even before these new ones came online.
Frankly, renewables would've been superior for energy mix diversity reasons, too. The fact that it would've also just been flat-out cheaper for Georgia Power to pay to install solar on my (and everybody else's) house just adds insult to injury.
(Okay, that last bit might be hyperbole -- I haven't done the math. But still...!)
Solar + battery would work for people who have houses but not industry or mid-high rises. The transmission grid doesn't just function as a means to get energy places but it connects everything in to one system as a means to stabilize everything. So when that electric arc furnace is turned on there isn't a brownout because the huge demand has been scheduled and generation can be dispatched accordingly. At the distribution grid which is the lower voltage lines connecting homes you can be a lot more creative with microgrid and feed-in-tariffs, in a lot of places these distribution lines are managed by local distribution companies/LDCs which operate separate from the Independent System Operator/ISO which operates the transmission grid and an energy market if there is one.
10 million people. $15k per solar installation. Eh, not too far off.
More than one person lives in a building generally. It's more like $15,000 to install 1kW of solar, so like $15B to install 1000MW, so you literally could have just about installed the solar capacity with just the cost overrun.
There's some hidden assumptions in there that aren't quite warrented.
First, when quoting output, solar tend to state their peak output at full sunlight. How much they actually put out depends on the area, but reducing the number to 20% is a good rule of thumb.
Second, you seem to be thinking of rooftop residential installs. Those are the most expensive way to do solar. In fact, levelized cost of energy studies show it's almost as bad as nuclear. Home installs have trouble taking advantage of the economics of mass production. Making a dedicated solar field is far more cost efficient. So much so that nuclear looks pathetic on those same levelized cost studies.
Gee, really? I never would have guessed /s
More seriously: It's very quick to search "population of GA", so that's what I did. If you have a different figure you'd prefer to use, feel free to post it.
Uh, what? $15,000 = $15k which is what I wrote. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.
The project started 10 years ago. Renewables were about to burst open and hit some incredible cost reductions.
This project looked good at the time.
The cost overruns helped tank an engineering company.
Why Construction Projects Always Go Over Budget
Engineering projects going past their deadlines and 100% over budget is normal.
Yes, normal.
I'll watch the video later, but that's poor project management compounded by active underestimation.
As an engineer, it's my ass if my project estimates were so widely off the mark, especially if it were consistent.
No, that's typical.
I’m sure someone will get a bonus.