First, the Wiki page[1] for this reactor design has so little technical information. Frankly, it is a disappointing. For example, no where on the page does it explain that "300" means 300MW nameplate capacity. I had to Google for that info.
The canary in the coal mine is already happening in Canada.
> On December 1, 2021, Ontario Power Generation (OPG) selected the BWRX-300 SMR for use at the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station. The final investment decision in May 2025 to proceed with the build of a BWRX-300 was based on a forecast cost of Canadian $7.7 billion (US$5.6 billion), with an estimated cost of Canadian $13.2 billion (US$9.6 billion) for the three further units on the same site.
Yikes. Estimated cost of 15.2B USD for 1200MW of capacity. I am taking bets: How much will this project overrun its estimates? My guess: 25-50%. I don't get it. Why are these better than just building one big reactor with 1000MW+ of capacity?
Also, it looks like Darlington Nuclear Generating Station originally planned to build 4x 1200MV Advanced CANDU reactors. These were cancelled and replaced with a plan to build 4x BWRX-300 reactors.
> Yikes. Estimated cost of 15.2B USD for 1200MW of capacity. I am taking bets: How much will this project overrun its estimates? My guess: 25-50%. I don't get it. Why are these better than just building one big reactor with 1000MW+ of capacity?
It's my understanding that they want to be able to mass produce these kinds of smaller reactors, to drive the cost down over time.
So, the 1st one isn't competitive. But, hopefully, the 100th or 1,000th will be.
I agree. For their entire history of building and operating commercial reactors, they have only built CANDU variants. In this regard, yes, they are spectacular. However, this is a brand new non-CANDU design.
When I read about how CANDU (heavy water moderated reactor) works I started wondering why we ever build any other kind of large scale reactor.
Runs on natural uranium. Can burn waste too, and plutonium, and even thorium (mixed in, not pure, but still). It’s like a flex fuel reactor. It’s very safe and reliable.
Why do we bother with any other design? Except maybe fast breeders or fission fusion hybrids but those are whole new directions.
The logic for a "small" reactor is that it's one that can rely on passive cooling in the event of a shutdown so that it doesn't have to be actively cooled to avoid a meltdown.
The "modular" part is the idea that you then produce more of them lowering unit cost and install many more than is typical at a site.
This also potentially allows you to have more control of plant energy output and respond faster to grid needs.
Recall that the fukushima meltdown was caused after the cooling failed. The reactor building survived the tsunami and the reactors were shutdown. The problem is the diesel backup generators used to run the coolant pumps were flooded.
I don't think that the footprint is the key factor. Likely the total construction cost is. A large reactor may have a better cost per kWh, averaged over decades of its lifetime, but a smaller reactor likely has a more affordable upfront cost.
The key point with small modular reactors vs. reactors like this is that construction happens in factories rather than on site. Theoretically, you might get some economies of scale from series production in a factory that is much harder to get doing bespoke construction projects. Which is why historically, nuclear projects tend to blow through their cost estimates and why having larger reactors makes that a bit more tolerable. Of course until somebody actually does this and scales to hundreds/thousands of reactors production, this is all theoretical.
This particular reactor is already estimated at over 5 billion $ I think. That's a lot of money for just 300MW and it probably could end up being a wildly optimistic estimate as well. I think effectively much of the construction is still on site and not in a factory. Hence the need for a construction permit. So, you get all of the downsides of complex on site construction such as including high cost, permitting overhead, lots of bureaucracy, associated delays & uncertainty, etc. without the upside of actually delivering a lot of power like you would with a larger reaction. Calling it "modular" might be overstating things a bit.
Probably cheaper, faster, and easier to just plonk down 5GW of solar, wind, or battery (or combinations of those). Especially if you calculate in the 200-300% time and dollar budget that many nuclear projects seem to end up having. Maybe this one will be different. A lot of people have a lot riding on Nuclear projects breaking this trend. But then that has been the case for decades.
If the argument is, in part, about footprint then enough solar and battery capacity to output 300MW around the clock with the same uptime/reliability as a nuclear plant is surely going to cover a lot more ground.
I only bring that up because footprint was a point further up the thread.
There's still a fair amount of site work that has to happen here in the small modular concept, but I think when parts of it happen continuously in a factory you're largely immune from a lot of the jobsite nonsense that happened from contractors milking the job for every dollar they could get, plus economies of scale that you do get in a factory setting (citation: industrial revolution).
Nuclear reactor uptime is gonna be 90% at most, which is rather easy (battery capacity for several days) to beat even with just solar + batteries (in equatorial and most mid-latitude regions, at least).
And this BWRX design is based on ABWR which turned out to be only 70% in practice.
You don't get much useful notice for unplanned nuclear outages either, whereas both wind and solar output can be forecast with reasonable accuracy 24h in advance.
Five billion is just not all that much money. One guy spent eight times that to change the moderation policies of one social media website. Microsoft spent 14 times that to buy a video game company that they've largely mismanaged. Those two purchases alone could've paid for 20 of these reactors, maybe more if economies of scale kick in. Don't even ask how much Facebook is flushing down the toilet on VR or how much we're spending every single day in Iran. We could choose to spend our money on things like clean energy, but we choose other things instead.
I mean it is, there is a project in Georgia for a new 1.4GW natural gas plant that has a $3.3 billion budget
But, the $5 billion here isn't purely an investment in 300 MW of capacity, it's an investment in starting up the nuclear reactor factory that can start churning these things out at $1-2 billion or whatever their goal may be
Also, have to take into consideration the overall operating costs. Nuclear costs significantly more up front but over time costs much less to operate (and is much more predictable) because you don't have to buy and burn natural gas forever
Those projected future savings are to be greeted with considerable skepticism. They are not locked in by contracts. They are the kinds of projections we've seen all too often fall apart in nuclear.
The underlying mechanic here is that cost projections are being used to sell a technology. As such, there is very strong incentive to underestimate the costs. This applies to FOAK plants and to projected experience rates.
The one thing that low carbon grids around the world share is high portion of nuclear (or hydro, which you can't build unless it naturally exists). Therefore, the only thing a SMR cost should be compared to is other nuclear reactors. Natural Gas may be cheaper (startup cost), may be more expensive (ongoing fuel), or will definitely be more expensive (carbon in the atmosphere doesn't go away), but regardless there is no reason to compare nuclear to natgas.
> The one thing that low carbon grids around the world share is high portion of nuclear (or hydro, which you can't build unless it naturally exists).
This is an historical artifact. When that generating capacity was built, nuclear was the alternative to fossil fuels. It isn't today; renewables are now cheaper and faster to install.
Your argument can be seen as a way to ignore the cost decline of renewables without at first glance doing so.
(As you say, there are hydro-dominated grids with no nuclear, for example Costa Rica, which gets 98% of its electrical energy from renewables.)
I was responding to the thread, which is comparing nuclear to natural gas.
Comparing to renewables is a different story - it can be done but it's much more complex (not dispatchable, seasonally variable) but certainly renewables makes sense in some or many places, (and in all places for a portion of the supply). I'm all in favour as long as it is actually done with the intent of getting to zero CO2, and doesn't just stall when it gets to the more difficult part of the transition. So many places get to 50% annual generation as renewable and throw up their hands about the remainder and leave it on coal/oil/natural gas
> I was responding to the thread, which is comparing nuclear to natural gas.
It's comparing nuclear to alternatives, one of which is natural gas. Others are renewables. One cannot make or justify a decision on nuclear without considering all the alternatives.
all cost modeling for nuclear takes this into account into the $/mwh of power. Fuel is cheap, but you have to pay back the enormous construction capex over time through power sales. Plus, staffing, security, insurance and maintaince are massive ongoing costs. Nukes remain the most expensive way to generate power.
The only cheap nuclear watts come from facilities built a long time ago in a completely different cost environment, and had construction and insurance subsidized by the state.
Natural gas plants all have security, insurance, maintenance, and staffing. Of course there are different levels of those but those costs are not unique to nuclear plants
imagine how that number can be decreased as the plants are smaller, standardized, and more numerous. you can likely get a lot more efficiency out of the workforce when an engineer or operator can work across a dozen of these in a 200 mile radius instead of just one in the whole country. plus you need fewer training staff etc
Making plants smaller increases the number of employees per MW. Standardized might reduce the cost of construction, but how would it reduce the number of employees needed?
>but how would it reduce the number of employees needed?
A standardized reactor design that doesn't need a bespoke training control room at every single site means fewer training staff. It means the same maintenance workers and compliance workers and everyone else can be utilized more because they can cover more facilities instead of just the single site they are certified on and work at
or, you put a bunch of these small plants in one physical location and you get even more efficiency out of the workforce - only one facilties management crew, only one security team. And you'd even save money on just having one grid connection. Oh wait...
Trying to minmax for the most cost effective renewable energy is fretting over spending nickles and dimes, while billionaires and megacorps are setting hundred dollar bills on fire. It's just not a productive place to be focusing your energy. We can afford both types of renewable energy, easily, we're just choosing to let others waste that money on garbage instead.
The rat, having been caught by the rat catcher, complains there are other, bigger rats. But he's still a rat.
The uneconomical project, having been called out, complains there are other, even more expensive activities. But that doesn't change that the project is too expensive.
Nah. Groups of people spending hours and hours debating whether it is smarter to buy the $1.95 or the $1.99 can of beans at the store is being silly. Just pick one. Or buy both! It's only two bucks and we spent $2,000 on flights to Europe last week.
What an absurd analogy. Of course it's worth spending time when deciding if billions of dollars are worth spending on something. It's worth entire individual lifetimes of effort if one can save that much money.
I just think it's silly to focus your efforts complaining about $5B being arguably somewhat inefficiently spent, versus hundreds of billions of dollars going straight into the garbage. There's far better things to focus on if you're concerned about money going to waste.
I thought this was a sarcastic reply, so I checked the facts myself. I was stunned. You are spot on.
For those unaware, the submarine is Virginia-class[1] and is powered by a 210MW nuclear reactor called the "S9G"[2]. And yes, as of 2019 prices, each boat cost 2.8B USD. There are 28 of these subs active in the US Navy. This isn't some new, experimental reactor design. The US is pumping these out of their shipyards. Sheesh. 5B+ USD for a measly 300MW reactor... (without the nuclear sub!) looks way too expensive. What am I missing?
In China you get the economy of scale for building nuclear power plants precisely because they are standardized. Thus, pivoting to SMR is unnecessary, since they produce significantly less energy.
> In China you get the economy of scale for building nuclear power plants precisely because they are standardized.
Is this really true? Or how can we know it is true? For example: Why is the reason not explained by incredibly cheap construction labor costs compared to other rich countries?
Related: UAE had zero nuclear power plants before the Barakah nuclear power plant[1] opened starting in 2020. They built 4x Korean APR-1400s for only 32B USD. That seems incredibly cheap. How did they do it? I assume (near) slave labour prices for construction workers, like most other stuff built in that country.
This assumes learning rates never seen by nuclear energy. Within generations we've seen small learnings, and between generations the nuclear energy has been all negative learning by doing.
But that is literally why they want to get to assembly line levels of throughput. Dozens of identical reactors instead of dozens of bespoke reactors that can't use learnings from the last one
Also not said is the fact that going into more standardized designs you lower the operational cost because operations can be standardized. Today every single facility has different training from the next. Even at the same facility, if it's got new + old reactors, operators can't move between them without training on both
This is the biggest anticipated benefit of SMR. The US has 30+ licensed reactor designs. France has 3. Korea has 3. The economics of French and Korean reactors, built repeatably, are drastically improved over US reactors. If the NRC does its job and actually says "we know more about nuclear power than the local state energy commission and operator" then we the US can achieve those levels of repeatability and cost. We want safe reactors, we dont want infinitely customized reactors that are tailored to every state and operator's preference for how they want to polish fittings and lay out the pipes etc etc.
One issue here is that the structures containing the "nuclear island" are just as expensive as that island. Containment buildings are civil construction and are not cheap.
This suggests one should move to reactor concepts that don't need such large structures. The containment building size is dictated by the need to contain a certain volume of pressurized steam in an accident (and the requirement to contain the pressure of that steam dictates the mass of the building's structure). This is perhaps the strongest motivation for reactors cooled with molten salt.
Alternately, allow steam to escape in an accident, after filtering. Most of the radioactivity could be captured. But this violates current rules that require no release of radioactivity for 24 hours in an accident.
The expensive part is not assembly, it is validation and documentation of that design and the lack of ability to spread those costs over multiple units. Site built units are fine so long as the design is sufficiently decoupled from site conditions that it can be exactly reproduced.
> A large reactor may have a better cost per kWh, averaged over decades of its lifetime, but a smaller reactor likely has a more affordable upfront cost.
What are the civil works costs for a small(er) reactor versus a large(r) reactor?
From thier website: "The BWRX-300 power block is small enough to fit within two international football pitches."
And after some digging, the core alone is 4.2m INNER diameter and over 27m tall. That is smaller than average but this is a far cry from the sales pitch of reactor modules being mass produced in a factory to be delivered to site by truck.
The label SMR applies to a wide range of reactors.
The BWRX-300 is at the upper end of that range and I don't think claims of factory-production of the whole unit were ever made for this reactor.
That said, even the much larger AP-1000 had fairly large modules made in a factory. In fact as far as I understand that was one of the problems with the Vogtle builds, because doing that only really makes sense for a larger number of units, not for just two unites.
Yes, exactly. But even the sub 5 MWe microreactors that are often shown in those truck demos require lots of shielding that has to be done on-site beforehand.
The reactor vessel is technically always factory made, and the containment building (pit?) structures are built as separate prefabricated modules that are just lowered into the containment building, like a prefabricated building is assembled on site
That discusses 'superloads', I hadn't heard it called that before but it's accurate in the sense that things like self-propelled modular transporters (or towed equivalents) can move just about anything just about anywhere IF the road infrastructure all along the route is amenable to it.
Pictures don't do them justice, they're amazing to see in person. I think a typical SMR is on the small end of what's possible to move by road.
How certain are you of your prediction? What odds would you give me if I bet against you?
10:1?
100:1?
Background:
The BWRX predecessor, the ABWR, holds the record for the fastest construction time of a commercial nuclear power plant ever: just slightly over 3 years to first criticality, 4 years total to commercial operation.
Fun fact: it was the success of this first Gen III reactor that caused EDF to predict the EPRs would also only take 3 years to build. Which proved...optimistic. For the EPR. But proven for the ABWR.
Sadly, the ABWR has also proven to be unreliable and uneconomic.
Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment) but eventually pulled out after 12 years with £2bn spent and nothing built.
Maybe the BWRX will have better luck - but I'd not want to stake any money on it myself.
> Sadly, the ABWR has also proven to be unreliable and uneconomic.
Citation needed.
> Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK
That's not evidence of them being uneconomic or unreliable.
> (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment)
Excuse me? The regulatory environment that is responsible for the 7000 design changes at Hinkley Point C and thus most of the eye-watering delays and cost overruns? The regulatory environment that required the £ 700 million "fish disco" that will save a few salmon at a cost of around £ 280000 per fish?
A series of "radical, root-cause solutions" is required to simplify the UK's nuclear regulatory system in order to speed up the construction of new nuclear projects at a lower cost and on time, an independent taskforce has concluded.
I think that when people casually pronounce a bet like that, they generally mean even odds. If they meant something else they'd likely say so explicitly.
My apologies, I left out a step, or more precisely, folded two steps into one.
The way it usually goes with anti-nuclear activists when they make pronouncements like this is as follows:
1. It will take at least 15 years and cost 100 gazillion dollars
2. Are you sure?
3. Yes, this is 100% what will happen. It is 100% certain, because nuclear does not and cannot work.
4. OK, then let's put some money where our mouths are. Your 100% certainty means you should be willing to give me infinite odds, because any money I put up is automatically yours. Completely risk free income for you. But I am happy to reduce those odds to just 100:1, so I put up $100 and you put up $10.000.
Sure but the ABWR was built in Japan, and the largest impediment to safe and profitable nuclear reactors is regulatory. The Trump admin have made substantial efforts to simplify the process to approve nuclear reactors however we have yet to see whether that's enough, or whether they'll be able to hit their 12-18 month licensing approval goals.
> the largest impediment to safe and profitable nuclear reactors is regulatory
I don't know any evidence of that. My understanding is that it's a highly complex technology, many components unavoidably take a long time to construct, and it may be fundamentally uneconomic.
Has anyone, anywhere in the world profitably (subtracting subsidies) constructed one?
This meme that nuclear power plants are unprofitable and require subsidies has been spread wide and far by the anti-nuclear lobby, but is still false.
As an example, when the Greens started to come into government in Germany, they tried to force nuclear operators out of business by creating onerous safety rules just for the purpose of forcing them out of business.
It didn't work.
The plants were so profitable that they could afford even the most ridiculous additional safety requirements. So they had to make them illegal.
Furthermore, you can look at France. EDF has been immensely profitable, despite having to sell a large amount of electricity at discounted rates.
Your comment is interesting: It fits well enough in one group's political talking points - anti-regulation, anti-liberal, revisionist information, absolute and not weighing costs and benefits - that it makes me quite skeptical. Add a YouTube video as a source and it crosses a threshold for me.
That doesn't make it wrong!
> Do you have any evidence for your claim?
No; you agree it's a well-known claim. I've never heard what you say (that I recall). Including the GGP claim that most aren't subsidized.
And yes, misinformation about nuclear energy is widely disseminated and thus "well known". Are we really at the point that Trump's "people are saying" is the standard for evidence?
I'm not who you responded to but my recollection is that most reactors are decades old. The old ones do well. but the new ones are unprofitable/have issues. ABWR, for instance, is unprofitable.
The point of small modular reactors is not the cost of the first one, but that the cost goes down with each subsequent one. The cost of the first one is expected to be high. IMHO this is very well explained in "How Big Things Get Done" by Bent Flyvbjerg.
Id want to see who’s funding it before betting. If it’s all private capital, that sounds fair. If its backed by direct government investment or better yet, rate payer increases, my money is they fart around for a decade or so and then the project goes belly up due to poor planning and ballooning costs. and the execs walk away much richer.
Yes, the plants are big and expensive, but once built, they are cheap to run and last pretty much forever.
SMRs lower the up-front cost, the time to build, the risk, and the financing costs, which are the biggest component of the construction costs.
Initially at somewhat higher cost per kWh, but there is plenty of headroom there. And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
> Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".
That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
It also says:
"The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem. Which is especially interesting since the fossil plants will get a heavy hit due to their CO2 footprint.
Because of how hazardous it is, every country treats that as a national issue thus offloading the cost to taxpayers. Besides, I'm only aware of a single country (Finland I believe) who is far along on an actual permanent storage location. The US for example still doesn't have one, until that exists the real cost simply isn't known.
> And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something. I'm sure SMRs will soon be reality and we can see how much of it is actually true. Until then, take everything you read with a grain of salt.
> That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
Please identify the cherry picking.
> The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
Absolutely! When you consider full system costs, nuclear gets much, much better.
With fossils, you have the minor externalities of climate change and other emissions, which are not taken into account.
With intermittent renewables, you have the costs of their intermittency. Those system costs tend to rise with penetration, and dwarf the LCOE.
And this also plays out in real life: electricity prices are highest in countries with high intermittent renewables penetration. The correlation is quite strong. And the inverse correlation, from high penetration to low electricity costs simply does not exist. There are no countries (or states) with high penetration of intermittent renewables and low electricity prices.
> So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem.
The opposite is true. Nuclear is actually the only power source that has to account for its waste already in the LCOE cost. And it also turns out that the waste is one of the benefits of nuclear, at least compared to other sources of electricity: there is very, very little of it, we know how to store it safely without problems, it actually goes away by itself and it is valuable fuel.
[Costs from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent]
> Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something.
Nope. Those numbers are usually the sorts of things they have to present investors to make their business case. People tend to vet those numbers pretty carefully before investing millions or billions of dollars. Also, if you lie in those numbers that turns out to be fraud and you can go to jail.
In other news: "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" -- Yogi Berra.
Agree that if you run them for 40 or 60 years (1 renewal + 1 extension) it gets very affordable. Similar to data center, the economics are great if you take out construction costs. The problem is 40-60 years has proven to be a very long time in political and economic contexts, so on a practical basis many many plants are shut down prematurely and dont fulfill that useful life, increasing the cost of capital (bonds etc) to build the new plants and therefore LCOE.
Totally agree that if you get a stable, reliable operating reactor it's very cheap. When people, politics, and the rest get in the way the actual costs drastically increase.
I'm not anti nuclear or anything like that. It's just the financial comparison one has to make. Currently competing with solar + batteries is hard since unlike SMRs which hypothetically will get cheaper, they are getting cheaper at a quick rate and don't have the history of cost overruns that nuclear does.
I understand. My point simply is that the relevant price comparison is nuclear versus solar + enough batteries to make the solar plant equivalent to a nuclear plant. The battery system is the lynchpin of efforts to substitute solar for nuclear, and the cost/timeline of that should be factored in. But usually we just see an apples-to-oranges comparison of nuclear by itself and solar by itself.
4 hours at full tilt is pretty good, assuming that for the same volume you can store double the power in the next 15 years that means that you can replace those cells at end of service life and end up with 8 years ect.
A nuclear power plant is essentially a coal power plant with free fuel.
Today, if you literally built a coal power plant with free fuel it would not be cheaper than solar.
My question: If you built a small modular coal power plant, would that be cheaper than solar? It necessarily has to be cheaper than nuclear.
Modular nuclear is a great idea, sadly right now and in the foreseeable future solar is absolutely king in terms of cost/kWH, we should build what makes sense for our needs with regards to power in the USA then worry about other tech later considering the state of our grid.
Solar gives power in the wrong time, making the duck curve a thing, and requiring conflict prone minerals storing dangerous amount of powers to smooth out. On net, this is probably worth it, but solar isn't free as you claim.
Pumped hydro is fantastically expensive, not all that efficient, and only works with extremely specific (and rare, aiui) geography. It also comes with the same ecological disasters as dams, displacing entire ecosystems or towns and producing a ton of methane emissions from the now-submerged and decaying plant life.
It can provide power when solar and wind are not generating, and while doing so also provide base generation that allows the grid to be robust against fluctuations in solar and wind.
except it cant do that without going bankrupt. Nuke power costs too much, you have to be selling it at 100% 24x7 to have any chance of paying back the capex.
The comparison to solar is incomplete, because nuclear and coal aren't sunlight-dependent. You need to compare solar + energy storage. I know that solar generation is cheaper. Is it still cheaper with storage?
Uranium mining, milling, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication are all not free.
Because of protection from radioactive radiation, you have higher costs handling anything in a nuclear reactor compared to a coal plant. Then you have the issue of runaway nuclear reactions, hydrogen buildup etc.
By "free" I mean that you need so little fuel over the lifetime of the reactor the cost is negligible compared to all the other extensive costs of building and managing the plant.
There are between 6 to 9 orders of magnitude difference between coal energy and nuclear energy... and between 4 to 5 orders of magnitude difference on waste generation
When I google "what percent of a coal plant operations is cost of fuel" the response is:
> The cost of fuel typically accounts for 70% to 75% of a running coal-fired power plant's variable operating expenses.
I'm not going to do deep research here but it sounds pretty right. And I don't think solar is 4x cheaper than coal yet, especially solar + battery to spread out the load over non producing hours.
Nuclear is a dead end. The technology is dangerous, a terrorist/war target, extremely expensive, makes you dependant of uranium producers and enriching facilities (or, facility as we are not buying from China or Russia), requires a source of water to cool the exit steam back to water to be pumped into the reactor so you are also dependent on the weather, and leaves you with nuclear waste in custody for centuries.
For the same money you can install solar and storage for more than twice the power, way lower maintenance, no nuclear waste left after the business and can produce power from dawn till dusk without needing the favor of uranium exporters or a river nearby.
Rather than comparing construction bills directly, levelized cost of energy (LCOE) incorporates construction, financing, operating expenses, fuel, and the amount of electricity produced.
Lazard's 2026 estimates are approximately:
Utility solar: $40–$88/MWh
Utility solar + storage: $61–$105/MWh
Nuclear: $141–$276/MWh
These are unsubsidized estimates and represent a range of project assumptions rather than guaranteed costs. Lazard specifically notes that its nuclear estimate is based on the publicly available costs of Vogtle 3 and 4, while its solar-plus-storage figure incorporates both generation and storage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BWRX-300
https://www.gevernova.com/nuclear/carbon-free-power/bwrx-300...
Interesting point: no pumps; convection flow for 100% of the operational envelope.
The canary in the coal mine is already happening in Canada.
From Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BWRX-300#Canada
Yikes. Estimated cost of 15.2B USD for 1200MW of capacity. I am taking bets: How much will this project overrun its estimates? My guess: 25-50%. I don't get it. Why are these better than just building one big reactor with 1000MW+ of capacity?Also, it looks like Darlington Nuclear Generating Station originally planned to build 4x 1200MV Advanced CANDU reactors. These were cancelled and replaced with a plan to build 4x BWRX-300 reactors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BWRX-300
It's my understanding that they want to be able to mass produce these kinds of smaller reactors, to drive the cost down over time.
So, the 1st one isn't competitive. But, hopefully, the 100th or 1,000th will be.
Canadian nuclear industry is very good.
Runs on natural uranium. Can burn waste too, and plutonium, and even thorium (mixed in, not pure, but still). It’s like a flex fuel reactor. It’s very safe and reliable.
Why do we bother with any other design? Except maybe fast breeders or fission fusion hybrids but those are whole new directions.
The "modular" part is the idea that you then produce more of them lowering unit cost and install many more than is typical at a site.
This also potentially allows you to have more control of plant energy output and respond faster to grid needs.
Recall that the fukushima meltdown was caused after the cooling failed. The reactor building survived the tsunami and the reactors were shutdown. The problem is the diesel backup generators used to run the coolant pumps were flooded.
This particular reactor is already estimated at over 5 billion $ I think. That's a lot of money for just 300MW and it probably could end up being a wildly optimistic estimate as well. I think effectively much of the construction is still on site and not in a factory. Hence the need for a construction permit. So, you get all of the downsides of complex on site construction such as including high cost, permitting overhead, lots of bureaucracy, associated delays & uncertainty, etc. without the upside of actually delivering a lot of power like you would with a larger reaction. Calling it "modular" might be overstating things a bit.
Probably cheaper, faster, and easier to just plonk down 5GW of solar, wind, or battery (or combinations of those). Especially if you calculate in the 200-300% time and dollar budget that many nuclear projects seem to end up having. Maybe this one will be different. A lot of people have a lot riding on Nuclear projects breaking this trend. But then that has been the case for decades.
I only bring that up because footprint was a point further up the thread.
There's still a fair amount of site work that has to happen here in the small modular concept, but I think when parts of it happen continuously in a factory you're largely immune from a lot of the jobsite nonsense that happened from contractors milking the job for every dollar they could get, plus economies of scale that you do get in a factory setting (citation: industrial revolution).
You don't get much useful notice for unplanned nuclear outages either, whereas both wind and solar output can be forecast with reasonable accuracy 24h in advance.
That guy wanted a particular US president elected; in this regard, the investment has likely already paid off.
With a nuclear power plant, the stakes are way lower, and the payoff is much, much more distant.
But, the $5 billion here isn't purely an investment in 300 MW of capacity, it's an investment in starting up the nuclear reactor factory that can start churning these things out at $1-2 billion or whatever their goal may be
Also, have to take into consideration the overall operating costs. Nuclear costs significantly more up front but over time costs much less to operate (and is much more predictable) because you don't have to buy and burn natural gas forever
The underlying mechanic here is that cost projections are being used to sell a technology. As such, there is very strong incentive to underestimate the costs. This applies to FOAK plants and to projected experience rates.
This is an historical artifact. When that generating capacity was built, nuclear was the alternative to fossil fuels. It isn't today; renewables are now cheaper and faster to install.
Your argument can be seen as a way to ignore the cost decline of renewables without at first glance doing so.
(As you say, there are hydro-dominated grids with no nuclear, for example Costa Rica, which gets 98% of its electrical energy from renewables.)
Comparing to renewables is a different story - it can be done but it's much more complex (not dispatchable, seasonally variable) but certainly renewables makes sense in some or many places, (and in all places for a portion of the supply). I'm all in favour as long as it is actually done with the intent of getting to zero CO2, and doesn't just stall when it gets to the more difficult part of the transition. So many places get to 50% annual generation as renewable and throw up their hands about the remainder and leave it on coal/oil/natural gas
It's comparing nuclear to alternatives, one of which is natural gas. Others are renewables. One cannot make or justify a decision on nuclear without considering all the alternatives.
The only cheap nuclear watts come from facilities built a long time ago in a completely different cost environment, and had construction and insurance subsidized by the state.
A standardized reactor design that doesn't need a bespoke training control room at every single site means fewer training staff. It means the same maintenance workers and compliance workers and everyone else can be utilized more because they can cover more facilities instead of just the single site they are certified on and work at
Yes it is. So far, we've flushed enough money down the Iran war toilet to pay for ten of these, and there's no end in sight.
The rat, having been caught by the rat catcher, complains there are other, bigger rats. But he's still a rat.
The uneconomical project, having been called out, complains there are other, even more expensive activities. But that doesn't change that the project is too expensive.
One could bring in modules and link them together. But then they tried that on the AP1000 to famously disastrous effect, at least at first.
For those unaware, the submarine is Virginia-class[1] and is powered by a 210MW nuclear reactor called the "S9G"[2]. And yes, as of 2019 prices, each boat cost 2.8B USD. There are 28 of these subs active in the US Navy. This isn't some new, experimental reactor design. The US is pumping these out of their shipyards. Sheesh. 5B+ USD for a measly 300MW reactor... (without the nuclear sub!) looks way too expensive. What am I missing?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S9G_reactor
Related: UAE had zero nuclear power plants before the Barakah nuclear power plant[1] opened starting in 2020. They built 4x Korean APR-1400s for only 32B USD. That seems incredibly cheap. How did they do it? I assume (near) slave labour prices for construction workers, like most other stuff built in that country.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
Part of the point of these projects in particular is to get the machine spinning. Once it's running you start getting some of the economies of scale
Also not said is the fact that going into more standardized designs you lower the operational cost because operations can be standardized. Today every single facility has different training from the next. Even at the same facility, if it's got new + old reactors, operators can't move between them without training on both
And many parts of large (+1GWe) reactors have also been manufactured at off-site factories and then shipped on-site by barges in the past.
This suggests one should move to reactor concepts that don't need such large structures. The containment building size is dictated by the need to contain a certain volume of pressurized steam in an accident (and the requirement to contain the pressure of that steam dictates the mass of the building's structure). This is perhaps the strongest motivation for reactors cooled with molten salt.
Alternately, allow steam to escape in an accident, after filtering. Most of the radioactivity could be captured. But this violates current rules that require no release of radioactivity for 24 hours in an accident.
What are the civil works costs for a small(er) reactor versus a large(r) reactor?
And after some digging, the core alone is 4.2m INNER diameter and over 27m tall. That is smaller than average but this is a far cry from the sales pitch of reactor modules being mass produced in a factory to be delivered to site by truck.
https://www.gevernova.com/content/dam/gevernova-nuclear/glob...
The BWRX-300 is at the upper end of that range and I don't think claims of factory-production of the whole unit were ever made for this reactor.
That said, even the much larger AP-1000 had fairly large modules made in a factory. In fact as far as I understand that was one of the problems with the Vogtle builds, because doing that only really makes sense for a larger number of units, not for just two unites.
https://www.icetransport.com/blog/what-are-the-maximum-overs...
("Oversize/Overweight Permit Limits by State (Standard Freight Loads") that should be deliverable by truck with a permit.
Pictures don't do them justice, they're amazing to see in person. I think a typical SMR is on the small end of what's possible to move by road.
Time until first power generated, and actual final total cost.
I’ll go 15 years and $10 Billion.
10:1?
100:1?
Background:
The BWRX predecessor, the ABWR, holds the record for the fastest construction time of a commercial nuclear power plant ever: just slightly over 3 years to first criticality, 4 years total to commercial operation.
Fun fact: it was the success of this first Gen III reactor that caused EDF to predict the EPRs would also only take 3 years to build. Which proved...optimistic. For the EPR. But proven for the ABWR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_boiling_water_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Pow...
https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-ti...
The BWRX is also passively safe: cooling occurs via natural circulation, no pumps needed.
So if it takes 15 years I give you $100, if it takes less you give me $10000?
Deal?
Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment) but eventually pulled out after 12 years with £2bn spent and nothing built.
Maybe the BWRX will have better luck - but I'd not want to stake any money on it myself.
Citation needed.
> Hitachi spent most of the 2010s trying to get a couple of them underway in the UK
That's not evidence of them being uneconomic or unreliable.
> (which has a generally favourable regulatory environment)
Excuse me? The regulatory environment that is responsible for the 7000 design changes at Hinkley Point C and thus most of the eye-watering delays and cost overruns? The regulatory environment that required the £ 700 million "fish disco" that will save a few salmon at a cost of around £ 280000 per fish?
A series of "radical, root-cause solutions" is required to simplify the UK's nuclear regulatory system in order to speed up the construction of new nuclear projects at a lower cost and on time, an independent taskforce has concluded.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/radical_reforms_...
The way it usually goes with anti-nuclear activists when they make pronouncements like this is as follows:
1. It will take at least 15 years and cost 100 gazillion dollars
2. Are you sure?
3. Yes, this is 100% what will happen. It is 100% certain, because nuclear does not and cannot work.
4. OK, then let's put some money where our mouths are. Your 100% certainty means you should be willing to give me infinite odds, because any money I put up is automatically yours. Completely risk free income for you. But I am happy to reduce those odds to just 100:1, so I put up $100 and you put up $10.000.
6. <crickets>
I don't know any evidence of that. My understanding is that it's a highly complex technology, many components unavoidably take a long time to construct, and it may be fundamentally uneconomic.
Has anyone, anywhere in the world profitably (subtracting subsidies) constructed one?
Do you have any evidence for your claim?
This meme that nuclear power plants are unprofitable and require subsidies has been spread wide and far by the anti-nuclear lobby, but is still false.
As an example, when the Greens started to come into government in Germany, they tried to force nuclear operators out of business by creating onerous safety rules just for the purpose of forcing them out of business.
It didn't work.
The plants were so profitable that they could afford even the most ridiculous additional safety requirements. So they had to make them illegal.
Furthermore, you can look at France. EDF has been immensely profitable, despite having to sell a large amount of electricity at discounted rates.
Here's an explainer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
That doesn't make it wrong!
> Do you have any evidence for your claim?
No; you agree it's a well-known claim. I've never heard what you say (that I recall). Including the GGP claim that most aren't subsidized.
I note that you have no actual information to counter it. Nor do you have, by your own admission, any information to back up your claims.
The "YouTube video" is by a professor for nuclear science from the University of Illinois.
https://cpmi.illinois.edu
Professor David Ruzic, head of that department, to be precise.
https://npre.illinois.edu/people/profile/druzic
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Hv__SVAAAAAJ&hl=en
And yes, misinformation about nuclear energy is widely disseminated and thus "well known". Are we really at the point that Trump's "people are saying" is the standard for evidence?
I think we can do better.
More reactors = riding the cost curve more quickly.
If the former: it might never happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
Yes, the plants are big and expensive, but once built, they are cheap to run and last pretty much forever.
SMRs lower the up-front cost, the time to build, the risk, and the financing costs, which are the biggest component of the construction costs.
Initially at somewhat higher cost per kWh, but there is plenty of headroom there. And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
It also says: "The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem. Which is especially interesting since the fossil plants will get a heavy hit due to their CO2 footprint.
Because of how hazardous it is, every country treats that as a national issue thus offloading the cost to taxpayers. Besides, I'm only aware of a single country (Finland I believe) who is far along on an actual permanent storage location. The US for example still doesn't have one, until that exists the real cost simply isn't known.
> And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something. I'm sure SMRs will soon be reality and we can see how much of it is actually true. Until then, take everything you read with a grain of salt.
Please identify the cherry picking.
> The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
Absolutely! When you consider full system costs, nuclear gets much, much better.
With fossils, you have the minor externalities of climate change and other emissions, which are not taken into account.
With intermittent renewables, you have the costs of their intermittency. Those system costs tend to rise with penetration, and dwarf the LCOE.
For details in a model, see:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
And this also plays out in real life: electricity prices are highest in countries with high intermittent renewables penetration. The correlation is quite strong. And the inverse correlation, from high penetration to low electricity costs simply does not exist. There are no countries (or states) with high penetration of intermittent renewables and low electricity prices.
> So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem.
The opposite is true. Nuclear is actually the only power source that has to account for its waste already in the LCOE cost. And it also turns out that the waste is one of the benefits of nuclear, at least compared to other sources of electricity: there is very, very little of it, we know how to store it safely without problems, it actually goes away by itself and it is valuable fuel.
[Costs from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent]
> Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something.
Nope. Those numbers are usually the sorts of things they have to present investors to make their business case. People tend to vet those numbers pretty carefully before investing millions or billions of dollars. Also, if you lie in those numbers that turns out to be fraud and you can go to jail.
In other news: "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" -- Yogi Berra.
Totally agree that if you get a stable, reliable operating reactor it's very cheap. When people, politics, and the rest get in the way the actual costs drastically increase.
1 cent / kWh cost is fantasy land.
That number will decrease every month too.
It has incredibly strict requirements for safety, we are talking SOP & Risk assesment for climbing up a 3ft ladder
There is a requirement for literally thousands of pounds of concrete to shield the reactor
The employees have to be highly qualified and trained.
The construction materials have to be validated, tested certified and then tested again during install to ensure conformance.
You must deal with spent fuel
They are not the same and cannot be retrofitted eitherways
Can modular coal (which doesn't need all of that) beat solar? If not, then I don't know why modular nuclear would be able to.
One of my favorites is pumped storage hydro.
https://www.energy.gov/cmei/water/pumped-storage-hydropower
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
yes solar+storage is cheaper than new coal
maybe solar+storage is cheaper than existing coal, they are similar, depends where you are
yes solar+storage is (much) cheaper than new nukes
no solar+storage is cheaper than old paid off nukes
Because of protection from radioactive radiation, you have higher costs handling anything in a nuclear reactor compared to a coal plant. Then you have the issue of runaway nuclear reactions, hydrogen buildup etc.
By "free" I mean that you need so little fuel over the lifetime of the reactor the cost is negligible compared to all the other extensive costs of building and managing the plant.
> The cost of fuel typically accounts for 70% to 75% of a running coal-fired power plant's variable operating expenses.
I'm not going to do deep research here but it sounds pretty right. And I don't think solar is 4x cheaper than coal yet, especially solar + battery to spread out the load over non producing hours.
For the same money you can install solar and storage for more than twice the power, way lower maintenance, no nuclear waste left after the business and can produce power from dawn till dusk without needing the favor of uranium exporters or a river nearby.
The most useful comparison: cost per MWh
Rather than comparing construction bills directly, levelized cost of energy (LCOE) incorporates construction, financing, operating expenses, fuel, and the amount of electricity produced.
Lazard's 2026 estimates are approximately:
These are unsubsidized estimates and represent a range of project assumptions rather than guaranteed costs. Lazard specifically notes that its nuclear estimate is based on the publicly available costs of Vogtle 3 and 4, while its solar-plus-storage figure incorporates both generation and storage.Are you confusing "uses solar power" with "could rely solely on solar power"?
And norther areas of what, exactly? I mean that there are areas where nuclear power would be useful (as it can displace coal/natgas).