First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia
First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia
Nuclear power now makes up about 25% of the generation of Georgia Power, the largest unit of Atlanta-based Southern Co.
First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.
Yeah, after literally bankrupting Westinghouse and costing us Georgians billions of dollars. I'm all for more nuclear power but this project was a colossal shitshow.
Georgia also has some shiny new solar factories so I'm interested to see how deep into renewables we can get in the next decade.
14 years and 35 billion (combined with #4 which has not been finished) and didn't generate a single kWh in anger until now. Put the same investment into renewables and it would generate similar or greater energy and would start doing so within a year.
The argument against nuclear now is not about safety. It is about money. Nuclear simply cannot compete without massive subsidies.
Just in time for openheimer in IMAX!
I'm all for investing in other forms of energy beyond fossil fuels, this is good news to me.
I'm just stoked that lemmy as a whole and I agree on. Go team.
Hey wow, it's great to see we are still persuing this avenue for energy, I hate how stigmatized nuclear became (with some good reasons). Like any technology, we just rushed to using it without understanding the full consequences when shit goes wrong. Hopefully we're better prepared now.
The nameplate cost of this plant is $32 per watt. Even at smaller scales, utility-scale solar plants are $1 per watt. Do you know how many grid storage batteries you could buy with the extra $31 per watt? (6 hour storage is around $2.50 per watt or $.40/Wh.) You could build a solar plant 4x the nameplate capacity of the nuke (in order to match the capacity factor), and add 24 hours of storage to make it fully dispatchable, and still have enough money left over to build 2 more of the same thing. This doesn't even include the fact the nuclear has fuel costs, waste disposal, higher continued operational costs, and unaccounted publicly involuntarily subsidized disaster insurance.
Good to see industrial self sufficiency coming back to the US
Vogtle was a massive shitshow of corruption and delays, never thought it would actually be finished. Ironically, the price of electricity is set to go up, so that promise of lower bills has gone out the window.
Outstanding!
Yay! Nuclear is the best!
We had tried this in SC in expanding one of our sites from one to three. It did not go terribly well.
About fucking time.
This is great.
Yes! More of this please!
Currently, the owners are projected to pay $31 billion in capital and financing costs, Associated Press calculations show. Japan’s Toshiba Corp., which then owned Westinghouse, paid $3.7 billion to the Vogtle owners to walk away from a guarantee to build the reactors at a fixed price after overruns forced electric industry pioneer Westinghouse into bankruptcy in 2017. Add that to Vogtle’s price and the total nears $35 billion.
Does this seem strange to include the 3.7 billion in here? I guess when you're used to costs meaning what it cost the purchaser of said product or service it seems weird. Like, if I was the group paying for this I might even think to reduce the reported cost by 3.7 billion.
That's copied from the AP news article the post's nbcnews article links to. Similar statement in the nbcnews one, but....they don't let you highlight any text? Lame.
Kind of looks like de_nuke...
YAY
Nice!
Here's another interesting idea for nuclear: small modular plants.
You can't live without nuclear? The downsides are more than the upsides
I understand the need for nuclear. We HAVE to stop using carbon emitting forms of energy.
But I have never supported nuclear in the United States. Time and time and time again, history shows that corporations will water down the regulations around an industry. To the point of collapse. The problem is, when nuclear goes bad, its REALLY bad.
We can't even get our fucking TRAINS to their destination without greed derailing them.
how many fucking oil spills have we had because of lax safety? remember the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? that was due to lax safety regulations, all in the name of profit.
Please, tell me:
Why in the flying fuck should I trust the regulations around nuclear energy to hold?
Whatever you say, I'm not going to believe you. Not until the fucking lawyers of the corporations stop writing the laws for the congressmen to sign without reading or understanding.
What the FUCK is going to stop 'big nuclear' from re-writing regulations?
I want the regulations around nuclear to be so tight, no capitalist will want to operate under it. I want several rubber bands and a vice around the balls of whoever is running it.
I even think maybe corporations can't be trusted with it, and all nuclear energy should fall exclusively under the management of the DoD.
$35 Billion dollars. That could have been used to place solar arrays and batteries on approximately 1.5 million houses. If they did that, they wouldn't need all the reactors at all. With investments in promising storage innovations, it makes more and more sense to decentralize and give power to the people. The boys at the top don't like that idea though. They want to keep you under their thumb.
People will kill me for it but to all the disgusting idiots in the comment section here just know that nuclear power isn't renewable, that we can't even cover a fraction of the energy we need with it, that there isn't a single proofen way to actually store the waste (just temporary facilities) and that the cost of building them (especially in the west) is far to high to stop any timw soon!!!