I think a pervasive theme in US infrastructure (and why it's expensive) is that we've gotten out of practice of building. I think it's the deeper "why" to this issue.
We no longer have a broad reservoir/cadre/pool of practitioners of engineers, construction crews, experts, designers (except for a very concentrated few) who do this week in, week out. Every job now seems custom. Only Parsons or whoever has the ability to do it, and even they have to scrounge around for the project manager.
Other countries are in their building phase and have thousands of engineers who are practiced in standardizing designs and squeezing out inefficiencies. They have graduating classes full of highway engineers. For gods sake, they even have graduating classes full of engineers specializing in the tooling for highway / railroad engineering machinery.
Our building phase was post-war construction-crazy economic expansion era. Now we're in the maintenance phase, where big new projects are the exception. Not to denigrate the great importance of doing great maintenance, but in practice you can't keep (or attract) a large pool of well paid expert engineers going on that level of activity. They go where the projects go.
And as a result, as the report points out, when everything is "for the first time again" and custom because you do it once per decade, the particular factors of a given site are allowed to dictate what the system design should be. (Maybe also not insignificant: the environmental considerations allowed to creep in, just to point that out, as grateful as I am for the protection that we give these matters). Rather than (for better or worse, probably a bit worse) in other countries, they're stamping out highways, railroad, power plants by the week, and the environment is made to fit the construction.
It's choices we made, over time, that caused us to atrophy our capabilities here. It could be brought back with investment.
I'll give the benefit of the doubt to the parent post here, and add, that in the construction industry in California over the last thirty+ years, the pressure on middle-tier contractors combined with human nature, made a blatant game of taking away the pay from anyone who could not defend themselves in a transaction. That sometimes is the workers, sometimes the suppliers of materials, sometimes the contract holder.. Theft escalated and wages stayed stagnant or actually fell. "Illegal" labor is ordinary and expected.
I would welcome some case studies from the commentors here, because "reasons" given in comments are not explaining what I have seen with my own eyes.
This is exactly the reason I think Richard Nixon’s 1973 plan for “1000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000” would have been so impactful for us. It’s hard to get good at only building a handful of something.
Maybe the answer is (a) Green New Deal. Basically just rebuild the whole infrastructure - no tinkering around the edges, just replace the lot.
Start with engineering courses, bringing on new talent.
Spin up hundreds of solar farms, battery factories etc
My question is are there real innovations to be made - do we need to rely on concrete and steel ? Are new homes possible in flat packs?
I would rather packet it into small parcels (10-100M) that explore the phase space of possible than think a quick government report can define infrastructure for a century
On top of which we should heed the strong town lesson - only build what we need, and cost in the car externalities in our cities.
> I think a pervasive theme in US infrastructure (and why it's expensive) is that we've gotten out of practice of building. I think it's the deeper "why" to this issue.
When it comes to nuclear, that's a problem the world over. Out of practice of designing as well. Look no further than the mess that is the EPR. On its face it seems like a boondoggle, but it makes a lot more sense when you look back at the history of nuclear construction: from 1971 to 1993, France was continuously building plants, first the 34 900MW CP-series (1971 to 1988) then the 20 1300MW P-series (1978 to 1993). The CP-series took 5-6 years to build and the P-series a bit more (6-7). From the mid-70s to the mid 80s, there were a dozen plans being built at any time, and they were being completed.
Then came the N4, that thing had serious teething issues, the first model started construction in 1985 but took 12 years to complete. By the time the 4th was completed, it was down to 7 years. But the 4th was the last N4 to be built. It's unclear to me whether the N4 slowdown was intended all along or whether the teething issues made them take a look at construction and pump the brakes, but in the space of 5 years the country went from building 12 plants at a time to building 5, then 4, then 3, then 2, then 1.
N4 at least overlapped some with the tail end of the CP-series and the middle of the P-series, but the first EPR construction was started in 2007, 5 years after the last N4 (Civaux 2) was completed. I can't even imagine the loss in institutional knowledge over that span.
I think another important factor is that to the extent we have people with lots of daily experience, they're not in charge. We've shifted from work-focused to plan-focused behavior. To the extent that we don't even know there's another option.
It turns out the Empire State Building was created on time and under budget, and against a very hard deadline. They did not have a complete plan when they started; they were designing the top floors as they were building the bottom ones.
In software, we've become familiar with how over-planning creates a lot of waste. But I was still surprised how broadly that lesson applies.
Luckily for the nuclear industry, the engineering capability still exists in the US to design a whole plant, and a lot of the manufacturing base still exists. Big US nuclear players have had a base load of domestic upgrades and international new plant jobs that have kept these capabilities alive.
But for construction, we really are awfully thin on specialized trades. Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply.
The issue is mostly political and not financial or knowledge problems. How you accomplish that is government spending, and there's a certain subsection of the population that has been convinced that government spending is universally bad.
There are vested interests waging a war against the US building infrastructure because its ideologically against the narrative developed.
"Starve the beast" has turned any kind of fiscal spending into a huge political battle. It used to be, funding basic things was just a given. Now it's a fight over every little dollar.
So where do they go now? Are American trained Mech/Civil/Industrial/etc Engineers really going overseas in large numbers? We all know the cost of schooling is now exorbitant in the US and engineering salaries (certainly for software but I'd guess other disciplines as well) are generally higher here than anywhere else in the world. Where could they even go to make enough to pay off their student loans?
"We no longer have a broad reservoir/cadre/pool of practitioners of engineers, construction crews, experts, designers (except for a very concentrated few) who do this week in, week out. "
No, we definitely have those people.
Thinks are more complicated across the board, safety practices are higher, contrary to public opinion wages are higher in this sector and I think there's a soft kind of pervasive corruption going on at the government and contractor layer, where there's just padding, waste, overbidding, back-scratching etc..
Montreal had some serious problems with corruption and was able to make progress on it, states and municipalities need to do the same.
I would vote for the first person that wanted to make these things more efficient and transparent.
I feel critical of approaches that make generalization using "we" when talking about a serious of actions by some very specific institutions.
The US has a complex state and a number of private corporations with a relationship to the state and each other. Who are you talking about in particular?
Edit: I should add. It's not just the problem of having trouble building things but companies that get a lot of money out of failure and those companies symbiotic attachment to the government - consider the X billion dollar California rail planing process. Whoever did that didn't even have to create more than minimally to still leave with truckloads of cash. And they'll be on call for next time. Even that is just an example.
> building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
Unless building a nuke plant is a common thing where the crew that built a plant in Georgia can then go build one just like it in Alabama then one in Tennessee, then in Ohio, etc, then I don't see how building two plants with identical layouts can leverage economies of scale. For example: Wolf Creek NGS in Kansas and Calloway NGS in Missouri were apparently the first two plants in the US to be built using the same blueprints. If two more plants were built today with those same blueprints but by different construction crews who don't have any of the tribal knowledge from the construction of Wolf Creek and Calloway then what you have are four essentially bespoke plants that just happen to use the same blueprints.
I’ve been involved with large scale nuclear construction projects of different designs in multiple different countries and different regulatory schemes. I have a hard time squaring what I’ve seen on the ground with the summary of this study.
To respond to your exact point, big parts of the nuclear-qualified workforce in most places really do move from large job to large job (assuming relatively static demand), so you do get that transfer of knowledge on sequential jobs.
Also, don’t forget the design and manufacturing that happens off-site, which can be significant and often is a huge driver of risk and cost. (10 MW vertical motors! Big safety-related pumps! Mega-sized forged components! Specialized custom fabrications!) The back office engineers and subcontractors and factory floor people who make them remain pretty static as long as there is work to be done. By the Nth unit, there is know-how and known problems are worked out; some of this is translatable into drawing updates and schedule resequencing but really a lot of it is expertise that stays in peoples’ heads. Once everybody is demobed and scatters, that is all lost.
The crew is only a small part of the price. The first plant has a lot of costs which shouldn't impact as much the next ones: r&d which gets amortized on more and more units, sourcing parts and certifying providers, eventual blueprint adjustments at building, certification and safety assessments.
This is also true of aircraft carriers. The head of Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock once told Congress that if they'd order two at once, instead of one at a time, he'd throw in a third carrier for free.
But if subsequent plants are built with same drawings, you don't have a design engineering firm having to create that work from scratch. Should that alone not save money?
I have no experience in nuclear but have worked on infrastructure projects that have restarted. I think people have a new set of biases that are not present in the first project. They are optimistic which is a risky state of mind.
Also...
* Often the starting point is a poorly organized mess that needs to be unpicked and understood.
* People conduct "reviews" of existing work that consumes budget and leads to new issues being found.
* You are continuing an existing chain of communication, but with a loss of continuity. The people you need to ask can't remember, or are not available to ask.
* Overly optimistic budgets lead to corner cutting and mistakes.
The Callaway plant cost ratepayers so much that a state ballot proposition outlawing that accounting trick passed with 66% of the vote. The last time Ameren tried to remove that protection was 2015. Even they've noticed how cheap renewables are now.
That's why you don't build two plants you build 20 or 30. France's nuclear project built 34 and 20 plants of 900 MWe and 1300 MWe classes of plants respectively which make up the bulk of its reactor fleet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Techni...
I guess I have to read the full paper, because reading the link does nothing to clear up what is going on.
From reading the link I get, change orders cost money (duh!) and that there are a lot of change orders, particularly to older designs due to "changing regulation". Cause presumably before starting construction the older design has been mitigated to deal with newer regulations.
Which from my own biases, seems to mean that courts/etc are stepping in and modifying the regulations during construction and that costs a sh*tload. Otherwise the builders are negligent, or simply that it took 30 years to get approval for the plans, but now its a catch 22 because they are outdated.
All large systems are, in a sense, obsolete as soon as construction begins. The longer construction takes, the more out-of-date the finished product. And then there are the decades of operation.
Consider, for example, that one year into construction of a new power plant a completely unrelated investigation into fires concludes with the finding that a certain kind of electrical wire, when installed incorrectly, can short and cause a fire. The power plant has already installed miles of the exact same wire. The wire manufacturer has a new product that prevents incorrect installation, but the plant designs call for the old wire. What to do?
* Pause construction while they adjust the plant designs with the new wiring?
* Continue construction, but inspect the existing wiring, and reinstall if necessary?
* Leave the wiring in place, but install a fire-remediation solution for the already-installed wiring?
All large systems have to deal with these kinds of changes. (It’s interesting to look at the changes in a “class” of ships over them as they build each one, for example.)
> building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
> if more components of the plant, or even the entire plant, could be built offsite under controlled factory conditions, such extra costs could be substantially cut.
Wait what? France builds with relative similarity and it's cheaper. The problem is with US regulation, politics and CYA hand-wringing, imo.
The principal author, Philip Eash-Gates, presented his master's thesis last year: Modeling barriers to cost change in solar and nuclear energy technologies [1]
Even if they can reduce costs a bit, the economics are still not in favor of nuclear energy, and renewable energy has become incredibly cheap. Between 2010 to 2019 wind energy become 70% cheaper and solar became 89% cheaper[1] -- and they're still getting cheaper. We are now in a situation where we can build 3x as much renewables for the same price as nuclear[2] - nuclear has a serious cost problem. I'm very skeptical of any claimed nuclear energy cost reductions because time and again the industry has promised lower costs and failed to deliver; for example the new AP1000 and EPR reactors in the US and Europe have all vastly overrun their budgets and run years behind schedule.
I am very hopeful about renewable but I am also aware of their intrinsic weakness: They can't be provide base power (unless we build battery farms able to cover our needs).
Renewables are exciting. Jumping too fast into it like Germany did (and is now polluting as much as 8X France with 450g CO2 / kWh) is much less exciting.
I wish there was a bit more expert involvement in the way we choose our energy policies (and much less tribalism and populism).
I appreciate that someone has "done the math" on the soft costs for nuclear plants. One of the arguments against nuclear has always been "but it's so expensive" and yet the engineering of the plant itself is not particularly expensive relative to similar capacity coal or gas plants[1]. When we were discussing the "Ultra Safe Nuclear" (www.usnc.com) [2] I commented [3] that expense was more soft costs than engineering from my own experience of looking into the cost of nuclear. This paper just does the math and makes it more explicit.
[1] Yes, that is multiple plants to create the equivalent amount of capacity.
I feel like large multi-year construction costs have a tendency to increase significantly (outside of the normal increases in year-of-expenditure costs), and I wonder if this is because construction firms know something needs to be built and will behave accordingly.
This is in contrast to smaller projects, especially during recessions, where construction firms may be more likely to need the work (lower bids) and also don't have the expectation that the project will have to be completed (they can wait it out to extract more money from a contract).
Not quite this scale, but talking to people on large projects, I have been told that to bid what it's actually going to cost simply guarantees someone else gets the job. To stay in business, knowing how much to underbid is a crucial piece of unwritten knowledge.
I'm sure it's hard to shift these norms. As the buyer, it's hard to credibly threaten a hard limit. Everyone knows that, in 10 years time with an 80% done plant, and a construction company in bankruptcy proceedings, of course more money will be found.
>Is there a field of study/practice that deals with such changes to large scale system? It does sound like a very useful thing to systematically study, if possible.
"Analysis points to ways engineering strategies could be reimagined to minimize delays and other unanticipated expenses."
(from comments below).
The two quoted authors in the press release are a prof in energy studies and a nuclear engineer.
What I notice is that MIT does not have a Systems Engineering undergraduate department, but numerous specialties.
In a large design/build project such as a nuclear power plant, the systems engineering group (there must be exactly one) keeps track of the performance and function of each of the subsystems (civil works like containment, basements, buildings; electrical; controls; HVAC; the nuclear bits; and so on). In addition, it is the system engineering group that responds (or directs responses) to a change order request, and the overall impact on expense, on functionality/reliability/safety, and schedule.
It seems these are responsibilities that are not identified here with a known role; instead the authors reinvent system engineering for themselves.
There is a lot of SE work done in numerous industries (Elon Musk is what I would call a systems engineer, based on how he identifies things to do and how he gets them done. His degree is not in SE though).
A short list of US universities offer SE or related disciplines; in California/New York/Illinois. MIT is not one: it has a research group not a degree-granting program.
References:
https://www.incose.org/ The International Council of System Engineering. Has published a handbook in numerous editions over the years.
Nuclear power plants are insanely complex. It’s just a massive water boiler. The problem is that all that steam and water is radioactive. So you have to design in all these reinforcements to ensure that the steam and liquids do not leak out.
It’s easy to say that your design is airtight, but the reality is far different, with the laws of entropy taking over after decades of operation. This is when your parts starts to fail. Seals starts to leak. Things just wear out and fall apart.
This is why the thing is so complex.
Then, you have to deal with the radioactive waste byproduct which lasts for 10,000+ years. How do you even deal with this, when no government in human history has lasted longer than a few hundred years.
As much as nuclear is a necessary evil to maintain baseload, since solar and wind doesn’t always function, I think we need a new energy paradigm.
I’m thinking we need to go with solar space power generation, and beam the energy down via microwave or laser. Maybe laser is a good candidate. Beam the laser down, and collect it with photovoltaics. And the laser can run 24/7, even at night.
Asking a friend: Maybe someone can run the efficiency numbers on this. But even if it’s less efficient than nuclear, this is probably far safer than nuclear ever will be.
Does water itself become activated? Or the problem is that something leaks into the water even during normal operating? Plus everything is designed to maintain containment, which makes the coolant loops a lot more complicated, right?
Putting a giant laser in space doesn't seems _that_ safe.
The proposed space based energy things are very low efficiency. After all, you can collect enough solar power on Earth already, the problem is efficient distribution. (And if you put a big laser/maser in space that still would not be able to provide baseload if it's not always in line of sight.)
And launch costs are prohibitively expensive right now. First we'd need to bootstrap a cislunar economy (eg mine and manufacture stuff in space, so we don't need to pay the launch costs from deep within Earth's gravity well): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOr-Gd58zu8
Where is the Elon Musk of Nuclear Reactors? Where are the robotic assembly lines that crank out highly modular, efficient, miniature "assemble-yourself" nuclear power plants that any construction team could snap together and seat into a preformed foundation in 48 hours? Why doesn't this exist yet? I'm talking on the scale of 1 reactor to 1 neighborhood or 1 large business. Perhaps geothermal cooling.
Once enough money is sunk, no amount more can kill the project. (Rare exception, Californian "hi-speed" rail! But that was politics.) Thing is, none of the money is wasted, as such: somebody gets every single dollar. The higher the costs, the more they get. So long as that somebody spreads enough of it around, everybody actually involved (the paying public not among them) benefits.
That model applies to any big-enough multi-year construction project, whether it's a nuke plant, a subway line, or a fleet of bombers. So, it's nothing to do with nukes, as such, except that for nukes there are always enough pigeons convinced that the next one will be cheap, for sure! And around we go.
> At a large bank where I worked, I analyzed the previous $600 million in IT projects. $350 million of that $600m was on compliance projects.
We live in a complex world. "Traffic laws," to keep people from inadvertently interfering with — or harming — each other, are necessarily more complex than they were, say, 200 years ago.
[+] [-] supernova87a|5 years ago|reply
We no longer have a broad reservoir/cadre/pool of practitioners of engineers, construction crews, experts, designers (except for a very concentrated few) who do this week in, week out. Every job now seems custom. Only Parsons or whoever has the ability to do it, and even they have to scrounge around for the project manager.
Other countries are in their building phase and have thousands of engineers who are practiced in standardizing designs and squeezing out inefficiencies. They have graduating classes full of highway engineers. For gods sake, they even have graduating classes full of engineers specializing in the tooling for highway / railroad engineering machinery.
Our building phase was post-war construction-crazy economic expansion era. Now we're in the maintenance phase, where big new projects are the exception. Not to denigrate the great importance of doing great maintenance, but in practice you can't keep (or attract) a large pool of well paid expert engineers going on that level of activity. They go where the projects go.
And as a result, as the report points out, when everything is "for the first time again" and custom because you do it once per decade, the particular factors of a given site are allowed to dictate what the system design should be. (Maybe also not insignificant: the environmental considerations allowed to creep in, just to point that out, as grateful as I am for the protection that we give these matters). Rather than (for better or worse, probably a bit worse) in other countries, they're stamping out highways, railroad, power plants by the week, and the environment is made to fit the construction.
It's choices we made, over time, that caused us to atrophy our capabilities here. It could be brought back with investment.
[+] [-] mistrial9|5 years ago|reply
I would welcome some case studies from the commentors here, because "reasons" given in comments are not explaining what I have seen with my own eyes.
[+] [-] Lammy|5 years ago|reply
e: I misremembered; it was actually 1000 by 1980
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
Start with engineering courses, bringing on new talent. Spin up hundreds of solar farms, battery factories etc
My question is are there real innovations to be made - do we need to rely on concrete and steel ? Are new homes possible in flat packs?
I would rather packet it into small parcels (10-100M) that explore the phase space of possible than think a quick government report can define infrastructure for a century
On top of which we should heed the strong town lesson - only build what we need, and cost in the car externalities in our cities.
Just thinking out loud ...
[+] [-] masklinn|5 years ago|reply
When it comes to nuclear, that's a problem the world over. Out of practice of designing as well. Look no further than the mess that is the EPR. On its face it seems like a boondoggle, but it makes a lot more sense when you look back at the history of nuclear construction: from 1971 to 1993, France was continuously building plants, first the 34 900MW CP-series (1971 to 1988) then the 20 1300MW P-series (1978 to 1993). The CP-series took 5-6 years to build and the P-series a bit more (6-7). From the mid-70s to the mid 80s, there were a dozen plans being built at any time, and they were being completed.
Then came the N4, that thing had serious teething issues, the first model started construction in 1985 but took 12 years to complete. By the time the 4th was completed, it was down to 7 years. But the 4th was the last N4 to be built. It's unclear to me whether the N4 slowdown was intended all along or whether the teething issues made them take a look at construction and pump the brakes, but in the space of 5 years the country went from building 12 plants at a time to building 5, then 4, then 3, then 2, then 1.
N4 at least overlapped some with the tail end of the CP-series and the middle of the P-series, but the first EPR construction was started in 2007, 5 years after the last N4 (Civaux 2) was completed. I can't even imagine the loss in institutional knowledge over that span.
[+] [-] mymythisisthis|5 years ago|reply
i)getting people trained, ii)having a kind-of minimum wage accessible to many people.
[+] [-] wpietri|5 years ago|reply
A talk that really opened my eyes was Mary Poppendieck's "Tyranny of the Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...
It turns out the Empire State Building was created on time and under budget, and against a very hard deadline. They did not have a complete plan when they started; they were designing the top floors as they were building the bottom ones.
In software, we've become familiar with how over-planning creates a lot of waste. But I was still surprised how broadly that lesson applies.
[+] [-] _n_b_|5 years ago|reply
Luckily for the nuclear industry, the engineering capability still exists in the US to design a whole plant, and a lot of the manufacturing base still exists. Big US nuclear players have had a base load of domestic upgrades and international new plant jobs that have kept these capabilities alive.
But for construction, we really are awfully thin on specialized trades. Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply.
[+] [-] jorblumesea|5 years ago|reply
There are vested interests waging a war against the US building infrastructure because its ideologically against the narrative developed.
"Starve the beast" has turned any kind of fiscal spending into a huge political battle. It used to be, funding basic things was just a given. Now it's a fight over every little dollar.
[+] [-] deeeeplearning|5 years ago|reply
So where do they go now? Are American trained Mech/Civil/Industrial/etc Engineers really going overseas in large numbers? We all know the cost of schooling is now exorbitant in the US and engineering salaries (certainly for software but I'd guess other disciplines as well) are generally higher here than anywhere else in the world. Where could they even go to make enough to pay off their student loans?
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
No, we definitely have those people.
Thinks are more complicated across the board, safety practices are higher, contrary to public opinion wages are higher in this sector and I think there's a soft kind of pervasive corruption going on at the government and contractor layer, where there's just padding, waste, overbidding, back-scratching etc..
Montreal had some serious problems with corruption and was able to make progress on it, states and municipalities need to do the same.
I would vote for the first person that wanted to make these things more efficient and transparent.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|5 years ago|reply
The US has a complex state and a number of private corporations with a relationship to the state and each other. Who are you talking about in particular?
Edit: I should add. It's not just the problem of having trouble building things but companies that get a lot of money out of failure and those companies symbiotic attachment to the government - consider the X billion dollar California rail planing process. Whoever did that didn't even have to create more than minimally to still leave with truckloads of cash. And they'll be on call for next time. Even that is just an example.
[+] [-] oropolo|5 years ago|reply
Unless building a nuke plant is a common thing where the crew that built a plant in Georgia can then go build one just like it in Alabama then one in Tennessee, then in Ohio, etc, then I don't see how building two plants with identical layouts can leverage economies of scale. For example: Wolf Creek NGS in Kansas and Calloway NGS in Missouri were apparently the first two plants in the US to be built using the same blueprints. If two more plants were built today with those same blueprints but by different construction crews who don't have any of the tribal knowledge from the construction of Wolf Creek and Calloway then what you have are four essentially bespoke plants that just happen to use the same blueprints.
[+] [-] _n_b_|5 years ago|reply
To respond to your exact point, big parts of the nuclear-qualified workforce in most places really do move from large job to large job (assuming relatively static demand), so you do get that transfer of knowledge on sequential jobs.
Also, don’t forget the design and manufacturing that happens off-site, which can be significant and often is a huge driver of risk and cost. (10 MW vertical motors! Big safety-related pumps! Mega-sized forged components! Specialized custom fabrications!) The back office engineers and subcontractors and factory floor people who make them remain pretty static as long as there is work to be done. By the Nth unit, there is know-how and known problems are worked out; some of this is translatable into drawing updates and schedule resequencing but really a lot of it is expertise that stays in peoples’ heads. Once everybody is demobed and scatters, that is all lost.
[+] [-] brmgb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giarc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DennisP|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7952|5 years ago|reply
Also...
* Often the starting point is a poorly organized mess that needs to be unpicked and understood.
* People conduct "reviews" of existing work that consumes budget and leads to new issues being found.
* You are continuing an existing chain of communication, but with a loss of continuity. The people you need to ask can't remember, or are not available to ask.
* Overly optimistic budgets lead to corner cutting and mistakes.
[+] [-] jessaustin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon|5 years ago|reply
I assume we'd lose power during the transformer steps, but would it preclude building the plants away from people and groundwater reservoirs?
[+] [-] manfredo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bazooka_penguin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StillBored|5 years ago|reply
From reading the link I get, change orders cost money (duh!) and that there are a lot of change orders, particularly to older designs due to "changing regulation". Cause presumably before starting construction the older design has been mitigated to deal with newer regulations.
Which from my own biases, seems to mean that courts/etc are stepping in and modifying the regulations during construction and that costs a sh*tload. Otherwise the builders are negligent, or simply that it took 30 years to get approval for the plans, but now its a catch 22 because they are outdated.
[+] [-] jt2190|5 years ago|reply
Consider, for example, that one year into construction of a new power plant a completely unrelated investigation into fires concludes with the finding that a certain kind of electrical wire, when installed incorrectly, can short and cause a fire. The power plant has already installed miles of the exact same wire. The wire manufacturer has a new product that prevents incorrect installation, but the plant designs call for the old wire. What to do?
* Pause construction while they adjust the plant designs with the new wiring? * Continue construction, but inspect the existing wiring, and reinstall if necessary? * Leave the wiring in place, but install a fire-remediation solution for the already-installed wiring?
All large systems have to deal with these kinds of changes. (It’s interesting to look at the changes in a “class” of ships over them as they build each one, for example.)
[+] [-] Supermancho|5 years ago|reply
> if more components of the plant, or even the entire plant, could be built offsite under controlled factory conditions, such extra costs could be substantially cut.
Wait what? France builds with relative similarity and it's cheaper. The problem is with US regulation, politics and CYA hand-wringing, imo.
[+] [-] alricb|5 years ago|reply
[1]: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/122160
[+] [-] CogentHedgehog|5 years ago|reply
1. https://www.lazard.com/media/451082/lcoe-8.png 2. https://www.lazard.com/media/451081/lcoe-2.png
[+] [-] ninja3925|5 years ago|reply
Renewables are exciting. Jumping too fast into it like Germany did (and is now polluting as much as 8X France with 450g CO2 / kWh) is much less exciting.
I wish there was a bit more expert involvement in the way we choose our energy policies (and much less tribalism and populism).
source: https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|5 years ago|reply
[1] Yes, that is multiple plants to create the equivalent amount of capacity.
[2] Ultra Safe Nuclear -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505727
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24511751
[+] [-] omgwtfbyobbq|5 years ago|reply
This is in contrast to smaller projects, especially during recessions, where construction firms may be more likely to need the work (lower bids) and also don't have the expectation that the project will have to be completed (they can wait it out to extract more money from a contract).
[+] [-] iguy|5 years ago|reply
I'm sure it's hard to shift these norms. As the buyer, it's hard to credibly threaten a hard limit. Everyone knows that, in 10 years time with an 80% done plant, and a construction company in bankruptcy proceedings, of course more money will be found.
[+] [-] bitminer|5 years ago|reply
"Analysis points to ways engineering strategies could be reimagined to minimize delays and other unanticipated expenses."
(from comments below).
The two quoted authors in the press release are a prof in energy studies and a nuclear engineer.
What I notice is that MIT does not have a Systems Engineering undergraduate department, but numerous specialties.
In a large design/build project such as a nuclear power plant, the systems engineering group (there must be exactly one) keeps track of the performance and function of each of the subsystems (civil works like containment, basements, buildings; electrical; controls; HVAC; the nuclear bits; and so on). In addition, it is the system engineering group that responds (or directs responses) to a change order request, and the overall impact on expense, on functionality/reliability/safety, and schedule.
It seems these are responsibilities that are not identified here with a known role; instead the authors reinvent system engineering for themselves.
There is a lot of SE work done in numerous industries (Elon Musk is what I would call a systems engineer, based on how he identifies things to do and how he gets them done. His degree is not in SE though).
A short list of US universities offer SE or related disciplines; in California/New York/Illinois. MIT is not one: it has a research group not a degree-granting program.
References:
https://www.incose.org/ The International Council of System Engineering. Has published a handbook in numerous editions over the years.
https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/nasa-systems-engineering... First published 1995, based on other reports published in the 1960s.
MILSTD 499, 1970s, very dated by today's standards
[+] [-] blackrock|5 years ago|reply
It’s easy to say that your design is airtight, but the reality is far different, with the laws of entropy taking over after decades of operation. This is when your parts starts to fail. Seals starts to leak. Things just wear out and fall apart.
This is why the thing is so complex.
Then, you have to deal with the radioactive waste byproduct which lasts for 10,000+ years. How do you even deal with this, when no government in human history has lasted longer than a few hundred years.
As much as nuclear is a necessary evil to maintain baseload, since solar and wind doesn’t always function, I think we need a new energy paradigm.
I’m thinking we need to go with solar space power generation, and beam the energy down via microwave or laser. Maybe laser is a good candidate. Beam the laser down, and collect it with photovoltaics. And the laser can run 24/7, even at night.
Asking a friend: Maybe someone can run the efficiency numbers on this. But even if it’s less efficient than nuclear, this is probably far safer than nuclear ever will be.
[+] [-] pas|5 years ago|reply
Putting a giant laser in space doesn't seems _that_ safe.
The proposed space based energy things are very low efficiency. After all, you can collect enough solar power on Earth already, the problem is efficient distribution. (And if you put a big laser/maser in space that still would not be able to provide baseload if it's not always in line of sight.)
And launch costs are prohibitively expensive right now. First we'd need to bootstrap a cislunar economy (eg mine and manufacture stuff in space, so we don't need to pay the launch costs from deep within Earth's gravity well): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOr-Gd58zu8
[+] [-] LinuxBender|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncmncm|5 years ago|reply
Once enough money is sunk, no amount more can kill the project. (Rare exception, Californian "hi-speed" rail! But that was politics.) Thing is, none of the money is wasted, as such: somebody gets every single dollar. The higher the costs, the more they get. So long as that somebody spreads enough of it around, everybody actually involved (the paying public not among them) benefits.
That model applies to any big-enough multi-year construction project, whether it's a nuke plant, a subway line, or a fleet of bombers. So, it's nothing to do with nukes, as such, except that for nukes there are always enough pigeons convinced that the next one will be cheap, for sure! And around we go.
[+] [-] wavegeek|5 years ago|reply
One thing I have noticed is the incredible increase in the cost of regulatory compliance over the years.
It can take years to get the dozens to hundreds of approvals needed. Vast armies of people are needed to document and monitor compliance.
At a large bank where I worked, I analyzed the previous $600 million in IT projects. $350 million of that $600m was on compliance projects.
[+] [-] dctoedt|5 years ago|reply
We live in a complex world. "Traffic laws," to keep people from inadvertently interfering with — or harming — each other, are necessarily more complex than they were, say, 200 years ago.
[+] [-] pas|5 years ago|reply
the current state of the argument, pretty interesting.
[+] [-] hokkos|5 years ago|reply
https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] TheRealPomax|5 years ago|reply
Ah, okay, reimagined. Phew.
[+] [-] Agathos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ultra_nick|5 years ago|reply
https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small...
[+] [-] NiceWayToDoIT|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aussiegreenie|5 years ago|reply
Show me the reward structure and I will show you the outcome.