Comment by grecy
12 days ago
> average construction timeline for each reactor about seven years
China have 27 in construction right now, can someone knowledgeable explain why it still takes 7 years to build a single reactor?
I've always read that if we were building more reactors we would get economies of scale, and things would happen quickly.. but that doesn't seem to be the case.
7 years is still pretty quick compared to many nuclear projects.
It's also an average over a bunch of different reactor technology, not all of which takes the same time to build.
The main designs they are employing are from the Hualong One, soon to be Hualong Two line. Hualong One takes around 5 years, Hualong Two is a revised design intended to reduce costs and construction time to only 4 years. Which is still a long time in absolute sense but is practically instant in nuclear reactor timescales.
I understand it is much faster than the rest of the world, but my question is why 7 years? Are they simply pouring so much concrete it takes that long for it to all cure.
I mean, massive bridges and skyscrapers get built in 2-4 years, they seem to be a similar complexity.
Actually, if you're building 27 at the same time surely it's easier than building a one off massive building or bridge.
Large buildings almost always take a long time to build; nuclear reactors are large buildings. Authoritarianism allows outside reviews to be skipped, but it doesn't make concrete cure faster. And you've also got to build out grid connections and what not too, which isn't fast.
In theory, Small Modular Reactors are supposed to be something that can be built in a factory setting, and then installed at locations with a smaller construction project; if that works out, that's when you'd get faster construction times.
> In theory, Small Modular Reactors are supposed to be something that can be built in a factory setting, and then installed at locations with a smaller construction project;
IIRC, SMRs have a larger output per KwH of waste, compared to LWRs. I assume that this waste is going to be stored on sight for long periods of time, that will require a decent sized construction project on location as well, won't it?
Also, after 9/11 we required nuclear plants to withstand a direct hit from a 737. Will the factory build SMRs to that spec, or will that be onsite as well (underground?)
You don't really need to have the onsite waste storage built before the reactor goes online.
> Also, after 9/11 we required nuclear plants to withstand a direct hit from a 737. Will the factory build SMRs to that spec, or will that be onsite as well (underground?)
Depends on who 'we' is. IMHO, SMR isn't going to make large numbers of reactors nuclear viable in the US; the problem in the US isn't really the cost of construction although that's not great, it's the cost of delays from the many levels of review and regulations; that ship sailed on March 28, 1979; and I don't think nuclear be viable again in the US until the generation of environmentalists brought up in the shadow of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are gone, which is going to take quite some time; maybe renewables plus storage will be more than sufficient by the time the US is ready to consider nuclear again, at which point it will be moot.
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Of those being built, most of them began construction in the last 2 years[0]. If you look at the timelines, China is doing much better than others on timelines. For the economies of scale, one needs to only look at the historical example of France (same link).
This issue here is that when you infrequently build reactors you have to reinvent all the tooling to build the sub-components. This is actually what caused the Westinghouse bankruptcy. But your question is about 7 years being a long time. China seems to be pushing that down to 5, but how much time are you expecting? There's always a trade-off here and frankly big projects take time.
I suspect you have an incorrect mental model where you think other energy systems are constructed much faster. I pulled a random US example from the list of photovoltaic systems[1] and so let's look at Westlands Solar Park which is a 2GW facility[2]. We can see planning began before 2014 (since that's when a real estate company was involved), initial demonstrations in 2014 (2MW), construction began in 2020, took another 1-2 years to get 250MW online, another year (2023) to get another 420MW online, and the facility isn't expected to be finished until 2025. So we can say that the time takes is at least 5 years. For reference let's look at Yangjiang, China is doing about 6 on their reactors which are around the 1GW scale. And you'll notice that while staggered, these are often parallel so the whole facility is going online in roughly 10 years, but that's 6GW where past the initial first 8 years, one is going online every year. This example was even slowed down by Fukushima. But you can see they've done that a few times and can tell that that was their foray into building nuclear power, and after success you do more. As long as they have good construction (and we should expect these to be higher quality than many other things in China because there are international inspectors and overseers), then I expect them to even get a bit faster. But the overall timeframe for building isn't significantly worse than building a solar plant of a much smaller capacity.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_sta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westlands_Solar_Park#Phases