The reduced operating emissions take 10+ years to outweigh the enormous construction emissions of nuclear. (Compared to gas.)

Nuclear is still fossil fuel, just not combustion. But I agree, this is good news because it helps reduce coal and gas usage.

Edit: I get it, I'm wrong. No need to repeat the same comments over and over.

Unfortunately, there's still that one guy in the comments trying to say that hypothetical, largely unproven solutions are better for baseload than something that's worked for decades.

The nuclear lobby is alive and well on social media. Never before has the internet apparently agreed on something so controversial with some of the most cookie cutter, copy and paste, AI generated comments on the subject I've ever seen.

The talking points seem to gloss over the fact that nuclear storage always fails, meltdowns happen, and you still have to mine uranium out of the ground. It's far from a clean source of energy.

That's the downside of nuclear. Cost and build time. Upside is it's reliable and carbon-clean.

This encapsulates the public response to building nuclear. I guess that is why it is the first in decades.

It's Georgia, though. This is a positive development but it barely begins to make up for how much other ass-backwards stuff there is.

This is the state that elected Marjorie Taylor Greene, keep in mind.

To be fair we have seen multiple disasters in the past including Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, which have serious and long lasting effects. I'm not against nuclear power but we can't pretend the downsides are just made up or blown out of proportion.

I mean, it's obvious.

Also historically some of Soviet-friendly left would present "capitalist" nuclear energy as apocalyptic-level dangerous and related to nuclear weaponry etc (cause USSR was, after discovery of reserves, selling oil and gas just like Russia does now, actually that was the reason for Brezhnev's time improvement in level of life and simultaneously rapid growth of corruption, also loss of hope of anything like the Thaw happening again).

The good news - it's online, generating clean power, and hopefully demonstrating the safety and benefits of modern nuclear plants.

The bad news - it's $17B over budget (+120%) and 7 years behind schedule (+100%). Those kind of overages aren't super promising for investors, but perhaps there are enough lessons learned on this one that will help the next one sail a little smoother.

Either way, good to see it can still be done in the US.

Fission and fusion reactors are really more like in-between renewable and non-renewable. Sure, it relies on materials that are finite, but there is way, way more of that material available in comparison to how much we need.

Making this distinction is necessary to un-spook people who have gone along with the panic induced by bad media and lazy engineering of the past.

Too bad the energy companies essentially never dispose of the waste properly, because it's too expensive if they want to give the huge bonuses to their CEOs and buyback thie stock. Even when doing it "properly" it's basically just making it the problem of future generations once the concrete cracks.

And to reprocess the waste and make it actually safe energy would mean no profit at all plus the tech doesn't exist yet to actually build the reactors to reprocess the waste. I mean we understand the theory, but it would take at least a decade to engineer and build a prototype.

Compare that to investing in battery tech which would have far reaching benefits. And combining that with renewables is much more profitable.

Renewables and nuclear are in the same team. It's true that nuclear requires a greater investment of money and time but the returns are greater than renewables. I recommend checking this video about the economics of nuclear energy.

Renewables and nuclear play different sports.

Renewables are better for most of our needs but there is a backbone need of base power. Nuclear is an expensive but clean way to provide that.

France was able to output 2 reactors per year at 1,5 billion of euros per 1000MW for more than 2 decades during the 70's to 90's. The whole French nuclear industry has cost around 130-150 billions between 1960 and 2010, including researches, build and maintenance of France's whole nuclear fleet.

A 1000MW reactor, at current French electricity price and for a 80% capacity factor, generates 1,4 billion of euros worth of electricity per year, for a minimum of 60 years.

Nuclear is not costly, and can absolutely compete by itself, if you don't sabotage it and plan it right.

Base load my friend. We also need steady, reliable, clean power when it's dark and calm. Until we can accomplish seasonal grid storage of renewables, this is the less expensive option.

There’s also a reliability element too. Nuclear can reliably output a given amount of energy, at the cost of being slow to alter. Many renewable sources have sporadic amounts of power throughout each day. Either is better than fossil fuels at least.

The issue is that right now renewables energy don't reduce CO2 emissions by much. (Except for hydro)

Sure if we look at the energy produced it's very clean. The issue is intermittence. As a society we decided to continue using electrical equipment even when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. So we use fossil fuel to compensate and overall the electricity production still enjoy a lot of CO2. We could use batteries, but utility scale battery are not very developed yet.

Same issue with the price. Sure solar energy is very cheap, when it's sunny. But what if I want to turn on the light at night ? The solar panel are not producing, the wind is not blowing, price is irrelevant if I can't get power when I need it.

Nuclear can produce a reliable amount of energy all the time.

I hope we will see the development of utility scale energy storage because this is what we really need for the development of renewable energy.

it would generate similar or greater energy and would start doing so within a year.

That's not really accurate. There are endless lawsuits when it comes to getting windfarms going because people claim it will ruin their view or the rare redheaded blue-eyed pigeon will be hurt or some other bogus nonsense. These lawsuits can go on and on for ages.

The nuclear lobby kids never seem to accept going renewable over nuclear as a possible reality. They refused to acknowledge it in the online circles of the mid to late 90s on News Groups, early 00s on Slashdot, didn't want to see it in the 00s on Digg, attacked any questioning nuclear the 10s and early 20s on reddit. It has been a consistent online turf protection war in comment sections for decades.

Every nuclear post turns into a circle jerk and a handful of people trying to 'in before renewables' to make sure to drown out anything that isn't waving the nuclear flag with little reservation.

We need both in some respects to maintain current electrical needs, but money and time to deploy is quantifiably much more efficient with renewables in practice vs nuclear on paper. Having a much larger renewable system spread all across the country would be of a greater short and long term benefit. Solar on every home, a small solar cell on every light pole along with low wattage monitoring systems for power distribution optimization, large desert solar installations, agrivoltaic farming (if it's not just bullshit), wind farms in strategic areas with low impact to birds, etc.

Nuclear is a waste of time and money.

Im going to guess it means that it uses a new design of nuclear reactor because I doubt theyre repurposing an old building and slapping uranium in it

What's the deal with it? The story also said Westinghouse had to pay billions to walk away from the project. I didn't really understand that part...

Let's play around with the thought of powering all of America with renewables. America’s coal, gas, petroleum and nuclear plants generate a combined baseload power of 405 GWavg, or “gigawatts average.” (Remember, a gigawatt is a thousand megawatts.) Let’s replace all of them with a 50 / 50 mix of onshore wind and CSP (solar), and since our energy needs are constantly growing, let’s round up the total to 500 GWs, which is likely what we’ll need by the time we finish. Some folks say that we should level off or reduce our consumption by conserving and using more efficient devices, which is true in principle. But in practice, human nature is such that whatever energy we save, we just gobble up with more gadgets. So we’d better figure on 500 GWs.

To generate this much energy with 1,000 of our 500 MW renewables farms, we’ll put 500 wind farms in the Midwest (and hope the wind patterns don’t change…) and we’ll put 500 CSP farms in the southwest deserts—all of it on free federal land and hooked into the grid. Aside from whatever branch transmission lines we’ll need (which will be chump change), here’s the lowdown:

Powering the U.S. with 500 wind and 500 CSP farms, at 500 MWavg apiece.

        Steel ………………..  503 Million tonnes (5.6 times annual U.S. production)
    Concrete …………..  1.57 Billion t (3.2 times annual U.S. production)
    CO2 ………………….  3.3 Billion t (all U.S. passenger cars  for 2.5 years)
    Land …………………  91,000 km2 (302 km / side)


  

35,135 sq. miles (169 mi / side)

(the size of Indiana)

60-year cost ……… $29.25 Trillion

That’s 29 times the 2014 discretionary federal budget.

If we can convince the wind lobby that they’re outclassed by CSP, we could do the entire project for a lot less, and put the whole enchilada in the desert:

Powering the U.S. with 1,000 CSP farms, producing 500 MWavg apiece.

        Steel ……………….   787 Million t (1.6 times annual U.S. production)
    Concrete ………….  2.52 Billion t (5.14 times annual U.S. production)
    CO2 …………………  3.02 Billion t (all U.S. passenger cars for 2.3 years)
    Land ………………..  63,000 km2 (251 km / side)


  

24,234 sq. miles (105.8 mi / side)

(the size of West Virginia)

60-year cost ……. $18.45 Trillion

#That’s to 18 times the 2014 federal budget.

Or, we could power the U.S. with 500 AP-1000 reactors.

Rated at 1,117 MWp, and with a reactor’s typical uptime of 90%, an AP-1000 will deliver 1,005 MWav. Five hundred APs will produce 502.5 GWav, replacing all existing U.S. electrical power plants, including our aging fleet of reactors.

The AP-1000 uses 5,800 tonnes of steel, 90,000 tonnes of concrete, with a combined carbon karma of 115,000 t of CO2 that can be paid down in less than 5 days. The entire plant requires 0.04km2, a patch of land just 200 meters on a side, next to an ample body of water for cooling. (Remember, it’s a Gen-3+ reactor. Most Gen-4 reactors won’t need external cooling.) Here’s the digits:

        Steel ……….  2.9 Million t (0.5% of W  &  CSP / 0.36% of CSP)
    Concrete …  46.5 Million t (3.3% of W  & CSP / 1.8% of CSP)
    CO2 ………..  59.8 Million tonnes (2% of W & CSP / 1.5% of CSP)
    Land ……….  20.8 km2 (4.56 km / side) (0.028% W & CSP / 0.07% of CSP)


  

1.95 sq. miles (1.39 miles / side)

(1.5 times the size of Central Park)

60-year cost ……… $2.94 Trillion

#That’s 2.9 times the 2014 federal budget.

Small Modular Reactors may cost a quarter or half again as much, but the buy-in is significantly less, the build-out is much faster (picture jetliners rolling off the assembly line), the resources and CO2 are just as minuscule, and they can be more widely distributed, ensuring the resiliency of the grid with multiple nodes.

And this is without even mentioning MSRs.

Was this project a complete shitshow of sheldon before seen-proportions?

Yes.

Does this mean that we should make the move towards powering the US from 100% renewables instead?

Well if you hate math and logic enough to even consider it, sure. Go ahead.

Even at smaller scales, utility-scale solar plants are $1 per watt.

Solar is being built at 100% speed. We're utilizing all the solar panel manufacturing capacity in the world building and deploying solar right now. There's simply not enough rare earth metals to increase production more. Wind, Hydro, Nuclear and Geothermal are all needed of we want to replace coal and LNG power plants.

Where are you getting this "$32 per watt" number from?From googling I cannot find anything even close to that ballpark

SMR's are even worse than the big ones. With no breeding and small, lower temperature steam generators they'd be undsr half as efficient as a traditional LWR. The fuel costs (which will only go up as the easy uranium is tapped out) alone would exceed the current all-in cost of renewables (which are still dropping rapidly).

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. A large portion of Georgia's power comes from natural gas; anything we can do to move away from that is a step in the right direction. Except, like, coal obviously.