South Carolina To Reboot Giant Nuclear Project to Meet AI Demand (msn.com) 67
Santee Cooper, the big power provider in South Carolina, has tapped financial advisers to look for buyers that can restart construction on a pair of nuclear reactors that were mothballed years ago. From a report: The state-owned utility is betting interest will be strong, with tech giants such as Amazon.com and Microsoft in need of clean energy to fuel data centers for artificial-intelligence capabilities. The details Santee Cooper announced Wednesday it is seeking proposals for buyers to complete the project at South Carolina's sprawling V.C. Summer Nuclear Station, confirming an earlier report from The Wall Street Journal.
The utility is working with bankers at Centerview Partners, which will accept proposals until May 5. Santee Cooper will likely look to tap a consortium that could include a construction firm, a tech company that will use the power and an additional partner for capital, according to people familiar with the matter. It is also looking for another power company partner because it doesn't plan to own or operate the units once they are up and running.
The utility is working with bankers at Centerview Partners, which will accept proposals until May 5. Santee Cooper will likely look to tap a consortium that could include a construction firm, a tech company that will use the power and an additional partner for capital, according to people familiar with the matter. It is also looking for another power company partner because it doesn't plan to own or operate the units once they are up and running.
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This site, https://www.power-technology.c... [power-technology.com] says 40TWh a year, which if my math is right, equals 40 million MWh, over 3 magnitudes lower then what you stated. Assuming your other numbers are correct, that's closer to 30 years to pay for the initial cost. Add interest, maintenance, fuel, waste disposal, and decommissioning, not to mention insurance and it might pay for itself before decommissioning. Throw in expenses like paying market prices for labour instead of basically slave labour it would be more exp
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There's also Trump and his desire to see more fossil fuel use. Granted these plants won't be finished during what is theoretically his term in office, but they must still be gambling that both fossil fuels and renewables don't expand fast enough to make this plant uneconomical.
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The obvious downside is that now they have a nuclear plant in their country. It needs fuel, it needs waste storage, it will need decommissioning. It needs defending against hostile neighbours.
It probably made some kind of sense at the time, and of course is useful for their nuclear weapons programme, but now, with solar and battery prices so low, in that country...
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Kuwait is part of the area known as "Greater Israel", so is under threat of invasion by Zionists.
Nuclear apocalypse, then (Score:3)
If there's one thing we've learned to trust, it's that an American company won't ignore safety concerns in the name of higher profit margins, right?
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Trump is cutting back on regulations to help that along. Let's hope that it does not go up with a bang!
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Reactors don't typically go 'boom'; there's more of a 'woosh' if radioactive material escapes.
Re:Yeah, that didn't happen. Stop lying. (Score:5, Insightful)
No Kennedy signed the "Community Mental Health Act" into law that dismantled the old psychiatric hospitals which kept patients for life in favor of some grand utopia system of mental health clinics that would spring up to help them but was never funded let alone built out.
What Reagan did was to remove Kennedy's system that was a complete failure. To be fair it was the last thing Kennedy ever did as it was days before his assassination. The sad thing is since then the largest federal mental health system is the prison system.
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It's pretty funny your so frothy without actually knowing anything about US politics.
For instance did you know that the Democrats has had a unified congress (holding both branches) 14 sessions to the Republicans 13 out of the last 50 years? You have to go back to 1857 to get more Republican years than Democrats and at 25 R's to 23 D's.
https://history.house.gov/Inst... [house.gov]
That's even a stretch as the 'Party of Lincoln' was the liberal party verses the Wig's until the progressives split off to create the Democra
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Weird how for decades, the Regressive-Fuck Republicans were screaming no to nuclear power
Republicans are more likely than Democrats to support nuclear: 67% to 49% in a recent Pew Research Poll [pewresearch.org].
All recent reactors were built in red states.
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That was the old idea. First Chernobyl (steam explosion), then the fine nuclear engineers in Japan (Hydrogen explosion) demonstrated that nukes can indeed go "boom". Just not as a nuclear explosion, which was clear all along.
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That was not a steam explosion, but an graphite fire/explosion.
But that does not change much, I guess.
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Better nuclear than coal. Since no one seems to be interested in turning off the data centers at sunset you need to get the power from somewhere.
Does the utility have a graph like this one? If so you can see where the power is coming from. BPA has 2800 MW of installed wind capacity and 138 MW of solar, so the green line is really mostly wind.
https://transmission.bpa.gov/b... [bpa.gov]
Re: Nuclear apocalypse, then (Score:3)
If only we could drive power from false dichotomies espoused by nuclear fanboys.
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Yep. With the amount of hot air they generate, all energy problems could be solved immediately. Unfortunately, it is hot air without any real substance.
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When do you intend to charge the batteries? Clouds cut your PV output to under 10% of nameplate. 7% (1/14 of nameplate rating) is a good number based on actual data.
Go ahead, do the math.
How many solar panels to run a 50 MW data center? 1200 MW-Hr per day.
Assume a 9 hour winter day, and 400 watt solar panels. Each panel will put out 3.6 kw-hr per day or 0.0036 MW-hr per day, which is optimistic because the first and last hours will not be at full power even with trackers. Even optimistic you need 333,333 so
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As you can see in the graph, nuclear isn't following the load very well. Hydro does, and solar + battery could follow it even better.
Re:Nuclear apocalypse, then (Score:5, Interesting)
However the AP-1000 is engineering for extreme safety compared to other reactors. It can have all of it's generators wiped out for it's cooling systems, and it still passively cools the reactor for at least 3 days, when most Gen 1 and Gen 2 reactors can only cool for about 8 hours before losing control of a meltdown. There are currently 8 active reactors in China with 4 more under construction and 70 planned for the long term for China, mostly of a scaled up size called the CAP-1400.
I've worked for Westinghouse before. The problem with the company is that it has very good designs but doesn't know how to build them without cost overruns, which shut down this reactor in the first place. But for managing baseload, AP1000s are some incredibly safe systems and are proving their utility in many countries.
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The problem with the company is that it has very good designs but doesn't know how to build them without cost overruns...
The American system of "lowest bidder" encourages companies to under-bid and under-estimate costs. Every public construction project in existence [practical.engineering] has "gone over budget" for this reason.
Re: Nuclear apocalypse, then (Score:5, Interesting)
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Here is the problem: _Nobody_ knows how to build nukes without massive cost overruns. Why? Because that is not actually possible. (Some hide the real cost better than others though...) This tech never would have a chance if it had to compete fairly. The only reason it got big was the possibility of the Bomb. Which is not possible without a rather large nuclear industry. Which, incidentally, is why the UK is willing to pay a totally insane price for Hinkley point.
Oh, and because the nuclear fanbois like to l
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I wouldn't say nobody, China seems to know how to build them without cost overruns.
Without "the bomb" we might have gone more into molten salt reactors, which promise to be much better for power generation than generation of bomb materials.
What it sounds like we need is a program where we start a new nuclear plant project like every 2 months, aiming for 6 new stations/year. This would actually build a crew used to dealing with what needs to happen for them, with the necessary knowledge, shake down the NRC
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I wouldn't say nobody, China seems to know how to build them without cost overruns.
You trust numbers from China? Seriously? Oh, wait, they have not actually published any...
Also, this is a english language site. Why are you linking a french language article? That merely covers Macron's stance, which favors military sector over the nuclear? That doesn't cover anything for Hinkley point?
That is the best source. The deniers are always trying to find ways to lie, hence...
Incidentally, it shows a stance and Marcon, unlike others, is not above stating the truth publicly and Le Monde is not going to print a lie on that level.
If you got any equivalent source from the UK, I am all ears. Oh, wait, they are not admitting what they are doing.
Incidentally, Hinkley point is built mostly by (70%) by EDF (rest is C
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The problem being, even through translation, I don't know what you were trying to say with it. It doesn't seem to link in with your text otherwise.
If somebody checking your source is scratching their head even after reading it, wondering what your point is, you didn't explain it well enough.
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The problem with starting a new plant every 2 months are things like not being able to forge more then one containment dome a year or more. There's a whole supply chain that needs to ramp up and really the nukes would have to be more standardized.
Look at China and how long it has taken them to get to the point where they can have 4 under construction at the same time and only now after ramping up for decades are they looking at large increases in how many are being constructed in parallel.
While it would be
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You're thinking reactor vessels, not the containment dome. The containment dome is the great big mass of concrete and steel on the outside, and is relatively easy to build, it just takes a huge amount of concrete and rebar.
The reactor vessel is the great big pressure vessel that the reactor rods and such are contained within, needs to be basically one piece, of specific alloys to resist the radioactivity, withstand a couple hundred atmospheres, etc...
And yes, we'd need to scale that up. Heck, have the abi
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Yes, you're right, the reactor vessels.
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If the US could commit to 5+ in a series of runs, then the workforce would come up to speed and be predictable. So while you're right, I don't think it's because of the designs of these things, and I think it's a solvable problem to get them to be built consistently, on time and on
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China isn't going to build 70 reactors. They thought about it, but at this point it's clear that the future is renewable energy and storage. The rate at which it is growing is so fast, and it's so cheap, that nothing else can complete. In the short term some fossil fuel plants can be built fast enough to work for some years, but not nuclear plants.
And even if they were, unless you want a Chinese built plant, you have to deal with the shit-show that is Western nuclear development.
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China is a leader in battery technology too. They know you can't build any sort of industrial scale storage that makes renewables viable when they're generating during off-peak demand. Nuclear is the best way for base-load.
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They aren't going to build them. They had planned even more coal plants, but cancelled most of them and mothballed some that were built because of renewables and storage.
And even if they did built then, it wouldn't help us at all.
Summer was mothballed for good reasons (Score:2)
The Summer reactors in South Carolina are AP1000s, the same designed used at Vogtle in Georgia.
The Vogtle plant had massive cost overruns, decades of delay, and eventually cost over $30B, three times the original budget.
After spending $3B on Summer and experiencing many of the same patterns of dysfunction that led to the Vogtle debacle, SC decided it was better to pull the plug and eat the sunk costs.
So what has changed? Nothing that I can see, except all the engineers are now employed elsewhere or retired.
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CANDU MONARCH FTW.
Of course, now it'll you cost 25% more.
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I am so close to smashing this stupid phone and it's on screen 'predictive text is better than a physical keyboard anyway' keyboard.
I'll gladly give up a third of my screen to get a proper QWERTY and an optical pointer. BlackBerry did a few things right.
Re: Summer was mothballed for good reasons (Score:2)
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Check out HeliBoard for its spiritual successor.
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Check out HeliBoard for its spiritual successor.
I got all excited - despite having zero issues with Hacker's Keyboard - only to discover "Heliboard is a revamped fork of Openboard, the privacy-conscious and customizable open-source keyboard, based on AOSP, and it has finally released 1.0 after months of unstable development releases."
Not the same at all.
This is what I was talking about: https://play.google.com/store/... [google.com] I couldn't find any screenshots of HeliBoard even slightly like this.
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From what I understand one reactor is likely relatively low-risk completion; major long-lead items are placed. Still likely a $15B effort though for the one unit.
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So what has changed? Nothing that I can see, except all the engineers are now employed elsewhere or retired.
Which just will make things even more expensive and the delays even longer. Oh, and safety will be worse, but who cares.
Hmm. Maybe we could have an AI-based nuclear safety system on top? That will fixt things! Right? Right?
Re: Summer was mothballed for good reasons (Score:2)
The big change is the cost of stable energy is now a pittance compared to the potential profit from AI and datacenters. But it's a race, and to the winner go the spoils. These partial projects offer a massive time savings over starting from square one on an energy project. And Nuclear has the side benefit of being low carbon.
Aside from getting the jump on competitors, these massive data facilities really need 24/7 reliability. If we take, for example, the total US installed solar capacity in 2023 of about 3
[L]oquaciously [L]ying [M]achinery (Score:2)
Has no one ever considered (Score:2)
Adding more generating capacity so the cost is lower for consumers?
Re: Has no one ever considered (Score:2)
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Don't worry, they have that covered [scdailygazette.com]. No way they'll let that happen.
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Yes nothing lowers cost more than spending money to build something (this nuclear plant needs a lot of money to be injected into it, and the operators will want to make a profit). That's the reason it was never completed in the first place.
So who is taking the risk? (Score:2)
Microsoft&Amazon&co could do Mankala financing ... ie. shoulder all cost overrun risk and the risk of other round the clock electricity sources becoming cheaper. Will they? Or will taxpayer take all the risk and a private company all the profit? (A private company which is friendly with the board of Santee Cooper.)
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when reliable power is needed (Score:2)
Too bad it will cost a lot. Maybe study just how China manages to build the same thing for $9billion: https://www.neimagazine.com/ne... [neimagazine.com] And no, they did not cut corners, this design was approved by the European Utility Requirements (EUR) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Who have they found to finance it?
clean energy, eye roll (Score:2)
"...with tech giants such as Amazon.com and Microsoft in need of clean energy to fuel data centers..."
Low carbon, but its not clean.
Scrub those lies with a Silkwood shower from the vernuclear vernacular.
How do you reboot a nuclear power plant? (Score:2)
I know how to reboot my computer, and my phone, but I'd never thought of trying to reboot a nuclear power plant before. Does it even have a keyboard? I just hope it doesn't come back up with a BSOD!
Go nuclear! (Score:1)
Pretty sure customers should own that plant by now (Score:2)