You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap
A Florida regulatory agency, the Public Service Commission, has unanimously endorsed Progress Energy's proposal to build two new nuclear reactors on a site in Levy County. If approved by state and federal regulators, the two reactors could begin operations by 2016-2017.
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http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E08-01_AmbioNucIllusion.pdf
Since the Keystone findings, new nuclear plants’ uniquely rapid capital-cost escalation,
far from abating, has accelerated. The same top trade journal summarizes how the latest analyses,
including one by Keystone coauthor Jim Harding (former director of strategic planning at
Seattle City Light), have found the Keystone report’s lower cost range of $3,600/kW “no longer
believable” and its upper range of $4,000/kW “probably low.”27 Harding’s estimate of total current
construction costs (2007 $ including interest during construction) of ~$4,300–4,550/kW
matches prospective customer Constellation’s published, then redacted, estimate of
~$4,300/kW.28 That’s slightly above Standard & Poor’s (S&P’s) May 200729 and American Electric
Power’s August 2007 estimates of ~$4,000/kW, but well below Moody’s October 2007 estimate30
of ~$5,000–6,000/kW—which Moody’s called admittedly “only marginally better than a
guess” but still solid grounds for caution.
By early 2008, industry estimates were creeping even above Moody’s dismaying range.
In September 2007, Lew Hay, CEO of FPL Group, said the total cost of a new nuclear plant (all
in mixed future dollars as-spent) could be ~$5,000–7,000/kW, or “on the order of magnitude of
$13 to $14 billion” for a two-unit plant. Yet just five months later, FPL31 filed formal cost estimates
up to nearly twice that high—$12–24 billion (again in mixed future dollars) for a 2.2–
3.04-GW two-unit plant, equivalent to ~$4,200–6,100/kW in 2007.
AmbioNucIllusion.pdf
Try again :>)
Anon, no doubt nuclear plants are expensive to build. Many utilities, however, have found that all electricity technologies have become substantially more expensive as well and that new nuclear plants are still economical.
I'm doing research for a paper. Could someone tell me whether these plants are the earliest new plants to come on line in the U.S.? How about worldwide?
Is there an official report on this somewhere.
thanks,
Here's a link for online dates of U.S. plants and here's a link for the same dates for world plants.