Comment by mullingitover
13 hours ago
I read somewhere that old coal plants would in theory be trivial to drop-in upgrade to nuclear: you just need to replace the heat source with a nuclear one, but the rest of the infrastructure can continue to be used.
The problem is that coal plants are sprinkled with a whole bunch of radioactive fly ash, and normal radiation level for a coal plant would violate the hell out of regulations for a nuclear plant.
Also that trivial issue of actually building a nuke plant for under $15 billion and in under 10 years, which hasn’t been done in “the west” for decades.
15b over 10 years is small money these days in terms of public infrastructure.
It’s more of an opportunity cost issue than anything else. That $15B nuke plant will need to sell power at $0.15 wholesale or some such figure to break even. You need to give them $15B today for the promise of power generation revenue in 10+ years — or you could spend $1.5B/year building all sorts of other generation and earn commiserate revenue within months after groundbreaking.
New nuke power is something like 5x more expensive than wind or solar — which buys a lot of storage. Existing nuke power is ~about the same cost as renewables so it’s obvious we should keep them running but the case for building new ones is really hard to make.
The public is generally not allowed to finance nuclear. I don't know about your state but a lot of them don't allow for rate payers to finance new construction so the interest payments need to be covered by the profit margin until the plant is operational and then you can start using the electric rate to pay off the principal of the loan.
This is a giant issue with nuclear as you're going to be financing it for decades while solar/natural gas will be producing in a year or two.
This is currently being attempted in Wyoming, but required both state and federal reg changes. Currently timeline is for it to be online by 2030. https://wyofile.com/natrium-advanced-nuclear-power-plant-win...
There's also a good case for geothermal plants at these sites, if the geology permits it. There has been a good deal of development, and more sites are usable.