“NuScale’s estimated ‘levelized cost of energy’ (LCOE) … jumped by one-half last December (to $89/MWh from $58/WMh). The total cost for the project is estimated at a bit over $9 billion, but $1.4 billion is offset by DOE funding, which could increase in the future.”
More news, more problems regarding the live projects being counted on as the beginning of a new era of nuclear power. Back in the 1950s/1960s, the expectation was that learning-by-doing and scale economies would bring parity with fossil-fuel plants. Today, that same goal seems distant.
NuScale
NuScale Power’s small modular reactor project, designed to provide electricity to Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, a joint action agency serving 50 municipal utilities in Utah, Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming, has survived another near-death experience. Facing a vote by the participants in its project for six light-water pressurized reactors, totaling 462-MW on the grounds of the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls.…
“The failure of the uncompleted V.C. Summer Units #2 and #3 ($10 billion), and the continuing woes at Vogtle, have marked the complete failure of Congress to create a ‘nuclear renaissance’ through the 2005 Energy Policy Act. The act provided for up to $8 billion each in ‘loan guarantees’ for new nuclear plants.”
“Nuclear ‘loan guarantees,’ it turns out, is a politically constructed term to cover the fact that the ‘guarantees’ are actually Treasury funds, and loan payments are made to the Treasury.”
The sun rises in the East and sets in the West. And Southern Company announces further delays in the startup of Georgia Power’s Vogtle Units 3 and 4, the only nuclear power plant under construction in the U.S.
In its annual financial report issued Feb. 16, Southern said it will push back the startup date for Unit 3 of the two-unit, Westinghouse AP-1000 reactor project to May or June of this year. …
“Waste-to-energy had a 15-year heyday, driven in part by the 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA). The law essentially created the non-utility generating industry.”
“Many local governments had long incinerated garbage to reduce volumes flowing to landfills, but that provoked public opposition due to air pollution. With PURPA, developers began seeing a way to incinerate garbage in a technologically and environmentally sound fashion, generate electricity, and use the new law to force electric utilities to, reluctantly, buy the output.”
Waste-to-energy (WTE) plants turn the combustible content of waste to energy, capturing and recycling metals and other noncombustible waste. The biomass (“biogenic”) component—aka garbage—is made up of paper, cardboard, food waste, grass clippings, leaves, wood, and leather. Non-biogenic waste is composed of plastics, metals, and petroleum-based materials.
According to the the U.S.…