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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…!)
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.
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.
Why Construction Projects Always Go Over Budget
Engineering projects going past their deadlines and 100% over budget is normal.
Yes, normal.
How much of that cost can be attributed to COVID? I’m guessing quite a bit just judging from how the cost of everything has skyrocketed.
- I thought it had been longer than that since we commissioned a nuclear power plant, and
- Does one every eight years or so feel like a decent rate for building these things?
From December 18 to January 1, Today in Energy will feature some of our favorite articles from 2023. Today’s article was originally published on August 1.
It’s been online for several months.
Cool. Maybe the rational scientific view of the world still has a chance.
