I'm detecting a consistent theme with certain kinds of large, publicly-funded infrastructure projects: when we stop building them, we lose the supply chains and institutional knowledge on how to build them and have to redevelop them from scratch. The US is also like this with high-speed rail. Turns out if you keep on churning out new rail or new nuclear or new whatever, you build up a lot of supply chains and institutional knowledge for how to build them on-time and on-budget. The solution to these issues is to just keep building them so we don't keep on having to learn from scratch how to build these things.
The problem of cost & time overruns isn't limited to projects that don't happen frequently. Skyscrapers are being built daily around the world, yet these overrun too. Even something like a train station, highway construction, subway development, ... The supply chain is one part of the problem and definitely applies to those one of items like the reacter itself, certain components needed for X or Y, but the majority in delays and cost overruns lies in the complexity. When a project is planned, you look at it on paper and thus can only see part of the issues that will arise in the future. Even with modern BIM modelling not every problem can be foreseen. A LOT of information also just gets lost in these complex construction projects because humans are unreliable, forget, mislay, take too long, ...
@@JBDazen Reality really is that simple. I work in the Nuclear Industry and I have witnessed countless examples of significant problems resulting from a lack of continuous development of the industry. People retire, skills are lost, the supply chain gives up on the industry and moves elsewhere. Starting again from scratch is incredibly wasteful in all metrics.
We've actually built plenty of nuclear reactors in the U.S. - every submarine and aircraft carrier we've sent out for the last 30 years. If we approached our national grid the same way we approach our national defense then we'd have plenty of capacity with the best safety record in the world.
That's right, but of course, the defense industry and the armed forces are very keen on maintaining secrecy. Military reactors are completely different from civilian reactors. Very little is known about the reactors used on nuclear powered aircraft carriers or submarines, because the technology is obviously highly classified. A quick Google search doesn't even return any pictures of them. The men and women who built these machines and service them will probably take their knowledge with them to their graves.
when all the Dictators have nuclear industries the extra nuclear deterrence submarines can be built more quickly so that they can be close to the new threats. And act rapidly. 150,000 SMRs, Small modular reactors like BWRX300 from GE Hitachi and Rolls Royce. No more CO2 in the world. $TRILLIONS in national grids to disperse the concentrated central electric power to the dispersed ends of the grid and the dispersed EVs.
You could say the same about all aspects of American infrastructure and sectors dependent on government spending . If the US invested as much as they do in defence spending across all other areas they wouldn’t be facing half the challenges they are.
When the USA built nuclear weapons the Dictators stole the info. If the USA builds a nuclear powered national grid the Dictators will, and use the cash flow and nuclear industry to build their ultimate weapons. More military defence will be needed, budgets will explode.
Calling Three Mile Island one of the worst nuclear accidents in history is like a quadriplegic coming in third in a foot race: it happened because there were only three contestants
Very little radiation released . Not significant to ban all construction for decades because of such. Big oil coal gas pushed no nuke propaganda to crush competition. I worked in that field.
Plus the issue is upper management, overworked workers, stress, and work ethic in ALL THREE nuclear incidents (TMI, Fukushima, and Chernobyl). Saying that we as a species should quit all because the lack of improving is rather frustrating to hear >~
@@TrebleSketch for TMI it was also incorrect institutional legacy brought over from the navy, the people running the reactor were operating with the mindset of running a nuclear reactor on a submarine at sea, which is a bit difficult and has a set of unique circumstances when compared to running a land based nuclear power plant. for Fukushima it was basically corporate greed. They were repeatedly notified that a tsunami of that scale could happen, and what the results of that could be, but they dismissed it because something of that magnitude is unlikely and the risk was deemed too low to mitigate. They knew adapting flood defensed was necessary but they kept kicking the ball down the road. as for Chernobyl, that was gross incompetence.
Three mile island is a very good example of how safe nuclear power is. Almost everything was done wrong and operators basically tried to blow it up. They bypassed and disabled numerous safety systems and it still didn't fail catastrophically.
Didn't FAIL HUH. So a meltdown apparently doesn't count as a fail in your estimation. By that logic, Chernobyl was ONLY a minor oopsy! FFS... TMI resulted in the entire facility required to be shutdown! It was only a year old, and rates as one of 3 WORST NUKE ACCIDENTS! UNACCEPTABLE COMMENTS LIKE THESE SHOULD BE REMOVED. 😮😮😮
Great video as always. As a Georgia resident and a big nuclear advocate I've been split on this project as I've had to pay a lot for the overruns (in terms of extra fees added to my power bill) but also happy that we are leading nation in a new age of nuclear
@@paxundpeace9970 Solar and Wind are are not sustainable. Fact. Solar and Wind at our present day tech could never meet the demands of our Country. Fact.
@@paxundpeace9970 , that mathematics tend to change when a power plant is expected to run for +60 years with "small" running costs. But it's a difficult mathematics, how do you measure the cost of air pollution burning fossil fuels for instance. Right now quite a few countries in Europe (Europe has more nuclear plants together than the USA) wish they had built more or at least not started to cut down. Right this afternoon France got at best 75% of its energy production from nuclear, best in the EU in that respect.
Many states have no plans on building any new nuclear plants but are going all in for the Green way, which means no fossil fuels after a rather short time line. (like 8-12 years) I believe at some point, we will have to wake up and realize that wind turbines and solar panels are not going to be 100 percent. Politics has much to do with it, and the media will have to get real, which they aren't at the moment. People I talk with about nuclear are 100 percent against it, mostly because all they see is the the media tells them.
I find it a bit sad that this channel can't even correct the common misconception about the Texas Blackout: It wasn't because of renewables are unreliable, or NPPs can deliver. Even with more NPPs the same would've happened, because the problem wasn't energy production, it was the grid. Back in 2011, Texas experienced something similar and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation made suggestions to better prepare the infrastructure to be better suited for cold weather, these recommendations were ignored by ERCOT (as they were in 1989 when this also happened). Furthermore: The Texas grid doesn't have a safety margin beyond expected draw and the grid isn't even able to meet peak summer demand when needed. The Texas government then cancelled a contract with the Texas Reliability Entity and disbanded the Oversight and Enforcement Division, reducing oversight further and dropping cases that aimed to improve reliability. Another thing, that's very peculiar to Texas apparently: Normally you'd expect, that an underperforming company should lose money, right? Well if you're a natural gas supplier, you make money from underperforming. So basically the grid operator didn't bother to spend the money to keep their equipment from freezing, the politics let them do as they pleased.
Where did the video say the Texas blackout was caused by renewables? Around 2:10 the expert talks about the cold causing gas supply issues, which it absolutely did and caused CCGT plants to go offline. You are correct about ERCOT and the rest though, Texas refuses to cold harden their infrastructure and won't connect to either of North America's grid interconnections.
@@ChristinaK1024 Solar and wind are heavily subsidized. This reduces the profit margins for competitors, with entirely predictable results. It’s either cut costs or go out of business.
@@ChristinaK1024 I didn't say the video, i said "common misconceptions", which are only thinly veiled spoken about by the "expert", who should be called "lobbyist", as Radiant Energy Fund is a lobby organization aiming to influence politics fore more NPPs. In fact here in Germany the "expert" linked to a petition about reversing our nuclear phase-out -- completely, which would mean, old and insecure reactors would come back online and not help energy prices or the grid stability in any way. Basically what the "expert" is trying to say, and B1M never corrected is: More NPPs would have saved Texas from a blackout and kept NG prices low. Because more power from NPPs would have meant less gas to gas power stations and thus more gas for consumers or less consumption overall. However, this still wouldn't have prevented the grid from simply freezing to death. His Twitter is also... very questionable, where he tries to uses memes to bash any energy source that's not nuclear. B1M simply adopting the "advising governments" speak from a lobby organization, without further questioning is really bad journalism on their part.
Why not direct your dissatisfaction with this channel's video on the matter into producing your own video to correct all of the errors you seem to have found in Fred's.
No wind=no power. No sun=no power. No water in the reservoir=no power. No waves= no power. Geothermal is great but doesn't work everywhere. Nuclear works everywhere and it's scalable to suit every need.
3:32 People need to STOP saying 3 mile island was one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. It does not even compare to Chernobyl, Kysthtym, and Fukushima. No one was killed or even seriously injured. The amount of radiation released was miniscule. Key safety systems worked as intended. The harm from abandoning nuclear power in the US is out of all proportion to the TMI accident.
I don't think Fukushima is anywhere near comparable to Chernobyl, but it is true that it was "suprisingly bad", given that it happened in an OECD-country (and people would stereotypically assume that the Japanese are very thorough on such stuff).
Hey thanks for the shout out to Watts Bar! I only worked there for a few months in 2015-16 for construction of the haul path and spent fuel pad, but I remember Unit 2 was finally getting finished at that time. It had started construction way back in the ‘70s but stopped for a long time and was essentially being used for spare parts for the in-service Unit 1. If there’s anything I learned at the nuclear plant is that it is an extremely regulated and safety-oriented industry with virtually no tolerance for the slightest error. Heck, I remember seeing a plant-wide email about a safety incident where someone had been injured, but it was literally a cut to a finger. Another thing I learned is just how serious they take security of these power plants. Just to be able to enter the protected area required a background check with multiple references, a safety course, a palm vein scan, and a 500+ question psychology test, among other things. If anyone was ever dumb enough to try to jump the fences into the protected area (not even able to get to a reactor, as that is even further guarded inside), instead of entering through a (heavily guarded) portal, lethal force would be authorized. And hearing the frequent gunshots coming from the nearby on-site shooting range was a constant reminder that the guards in the lookout towers were well-trained and ready for anything. I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over cyber security of a US nuclear plant having seen all this in just 4 months time.
Lethal force its the norm in nuclear plants when it comes to dealing with unauthorized access, and it's pretty clear with large signs clearly stating that if you cross the line there will be no warning shots.
Delay and overbudget doesn't really matter. I'm a nuclear expert, and they tend to pay back after 3-5 years. The Olkiluoto plant in Finland was very behind schedule and overbudget, however, it has been a great success and will be paid back in just 3 years, and then there will be tremendous profits.
I think I doesn't really matter if it's delayed or overbudget, it's our only easily way of reaching a fossil fuel free future, so we need to build it anyway. Put the earth before profits
But as was alluded to in the video, much of the delay and cost blowout was simply due to the fact that none had been built domestically in 40+ years. Its like when they started ramping up construction of the Virginia class submarines, it started off terribly, but once they got a few out of drydock they worked out the construction kinks and now they roll out ahead of schedule and under budget on a regular basis. If they get to work on the next soon, that knowledge of how to do it, and what problems to look for will transfer, speed will pick up, and price will fall more in line with whats expected.
@@mmeade9402 and when all the Dictators have nuclear industries the extra nuclear deterrence submarines can be built more quickly so that they can be close to the new threats. And act rapidly. 150,000 SMRs, Small modular reactors like BWRX300 from GE Hitachi and Rolls Royce. No more CO2 in the world. $TRILLIONS in national grids to disperse the concentrated central electric power to the dispersed ends of the grid and the dispersed EVs.
@@eannamcnamara9338 As much as I care for our planet, I have to disagree with a "overbudget doesn't matter" sentiment. Money is useful, it abstracts sth as complex as building a nuclear plant to single number that can be compared to some other complex thing e.g. medical expenses. We have finite resources, we have finite productive capacity and finite work hours at our disposal. Building a sustainable future means we have to be extra vigilant in how we manage those. The different between a vanity project and an investment is that the former ignores any cost effectiveness. Let's not make that mistake and be critical of ourselves even when we are doing the right thing :)
5:40: That's untrue. Flamanville NPP block 3 was expected to cost 3.4billion euros and should have been completed 2012. Ten years later it's still not online and costs are expected to be around 12.7billion euros. The 300million you are talking about are only the latest price increase for the delay from end of 22 to Q2/23!!!
Fun fact. If that amount had been invested into solar and wind you'd have about 4 times the power generation it's supposed to have and it would likely have been ready much faster.
@@dickmelsonlupot7697 Then only put 40% of that money in solar/wind and the other 60% into batteries or some other storage facility. Would work as well and you would not end up with waste that literally kills you for the next million years.
@@TorteInYourFace says the toxic heavy metals present in the batteries that just goes to landfills and leaches into groundwater. There are also new designs that are orders of magnitude safer, as in zero percent chance of meltdown, that will also be cheaper once the first couple are done. Why arent they being built already? Institutional inertia. Its like the big aerospace companies and rockets - The regulatory environment is not friendly to new designs, and it takes time to train up a workforce to use new processes and techniques.
I live in Georgia and am looking forward to Vogtle's completion. I feel like a shareholder because Southern Company/Georgia Power have hiked up my power bill to help pay for the new additions. Bring on the POWER!!!
Newsom had to scrap taking Diablo Canyon offline because (just like Germany) California is coming to a breaking point with its "green" solar and wind fantasies.
Having worked at Hanford #2 in the 80's, there are few more issues with building nukes. I'm all for it, but nobody has addressed the endless paperwork required. Of course this was before smart phones and such but I had to complete a one foot stack of paperwork (yes, 12" high) before grouting back a (non-critical) pipe penetration. That times the thousands of non-critical tasks and it's a mountain of forms. How can we build a 777 or a SpaceX rocket and yet a nuke is beyond our capabilities?
Loved the video. I live in Georgia and I cannot be happier that my state is the first to make substantial clean energy progress. I hope many follow GA in this. Glow blue to go green, I say!
My electric rate increased 29% due to Vogtle according to my Ga power bill and will double if and when Vogtle ever goes on line. Nuclear is green going out of my wallet
@@clarkkent9080 That sucks to hear. At least you have that rather then spend the same or similar amount on wind or solar which isn't an efficient source like nuclear.
@@42luke93 After Vogtle and the VC Summer failures no U.S. utility is even considering new nuclear but I see solar farms being built all over. I was mistaken, my bill increased 19% during the Vogtle construction but will double one=ce they go on line.
My thoughts are that we should be building nuclear plants that are scaled back in output so that reasonably sized construction equipment can be used. At the same time, settle in on a design that can be repeated throughout the country in order that the operators that are trained at one plant can easily slip into the same position at another plant.
The older designs require a certain size for economy of scale to kick in, basically the red tape for a 1GW reactor is no more than for a 250MW reactor.
@@AnimeHumanCoherence There are a whole bunch of companies and countries working on these, the first one actually under construction is probably the ACP100 in China.
Loved the video - however you didn’t include SMRs (small modular reactors) which are the future reactor technology not just for the USA, but for the entire world.
It's good to see people finally coming back to reality, and getting out of the "no nukes" mentality. I'd like to see you do a video on Canada's nuclear vision (despite being an early leader in CANDU reactor technology), with the country going "all in" on the new SMR (small modular reactor) variants. These cost a small fraction of a larger reactor, are much faster to build, and can be put practically anywhere (including remote towns like in the far north for countries that need them).
Hope Energy Northwest gets the SMRs they are proposing built. Columbia Generation Station at Hanford came in handy during the 2021 heat wave, but we almost didn’t have it. It is refueled in odd years, but usually scheduled for late spring when Hydro is at it’s peak.
nuclear energy isn't carbon neutral. mining the uranium and building the reactors results in anywhere between 12 and 114 grams of CO2 per kWh. That's significant.
So amazing that in the intro shots of the new nuclear power plant being built had a shot of the containment vessel having a ring hoisted into place and the pick of one of the reactor vessels. I’ve worked on both of those jobs as a young man. I’m retired now and my last job before retirement was building a coal cleaning facility at a coal powered thermal power plant.
It’s surreal to here you mention the reactor being built in wanyesboro. I moved up there for senior year of high school and to see the impact and growth it has on that community is quite amazing. I’m not saying it doesn’t have negative impacts on other variables but just so crazy I stumbled upon this video and happened to hear it being mentioned
But there is more. Please don’t assume that YT videos are factual. If you live in the U.S. here is the reality for the last 4 state of the art Westinghouse AP1000 ADVANCED passive safety features new nuclear power projects and spent fuel reprocessing and in the U.S. over the last 20 years. You decide if this YT video was presenting the truth. The Southeastern U.S. is super pro-nuclear MAGA, has zero anti-nukes, and 100% media and political support. The MOX facility (South Carolina) was a U.S. government nuclear reprocessing facility that was supposed to mix pure weapon grade Pu239 with U238 to make reactor fuel assemblies. It was canceled (2017) in the U.S. After spending $10 billion for a plant that was originally estimated to cost $1 billion and an independent report that estimated it would cost $100 billion to complete the plant and process all the Pu239, Trump canceled the project in 2017. VC Summer (South Carolina) new nuclear units 2&3 were canceled in 2017 after spending $17 billion on the project (original estimate of $14 billion and 2016 completion date) with no clear end in sight for costs or schedule. Vogtle (Georgia) new nuclear units 3 &4 currently 110% over budget and schedule (currently over $30 billion) and still not operating. Mid way into the build, the utility stated that had they known about the many costly delays they would never have chosen nuclear. They are now delayed another year because according to the project management, thousands of build documents are missing. Please google any of this to confirm. If you can’t build new nuclear in the MAGA super pro-nuclear southeast U.S. then where can you build it?
I work as an engineer in the largest offshore wind farm projects in the world, over 1GW both in execution and planned. I can tell you that we would not be able to build at such at such low costs without a continuous pipeline of projects, with lessons learned, workers chaining projects, etc. So I totally understand why nuclear is expensive and why the problem is not the technology itself.
We need offshore wind in America. But so many people don't want to see it. Maybe they have investments in coal, or they left Holland to get away from windmills?
Even with a continuous pipeline of projects it wouldn't be the same. Small modules like solar or (somewhat larger) wind turbines simply scale better in terms of learning curve. That's the problem when a single nuclear plant takes 10+ years to build.
@@MattnesssSMR's don't take 10 years to build. I live in a Renewable Energy Zone and just one wind/solar project here is estimated to be completed in three years. At halfway through the planning they are up to 32 projects of solar and or wind and there are 800 wind turbines included in those figures so far. They want to install 69 turbines in our beautiful valley, each one at 7MW and standing at 280m high and 200m wide (918ft high X 656ft wide). It's bloody devastating. We have 19 endangered species of birds identified in our region alone, as well as endangered bats and Koala habitat. This part of the project will utilise 73 square kilometres (7,300 hectares) and the solar will utilise 17 square kilometres (1,700 hectares). A total of 90 square kilometres for a form of energy that is capable of producing a fraction of the output of coal, gas or nuclear. This is just one project! The cumulative effect of all these projects being built around the same time will be horrendous. The wildlife will be decimated and by the time they complete the projects that are
I posted the above response accidentally and the edit function isn't working for some reason. Just to conclude, by the time they complete the planned projects it will be time to start all over again. They are destroying the environment for a form of energy that isn't fit for purpose.
Nah, the biggest hurdle is wiping out any chance of gaining institutional knowledge by underpaying and firing the people doing the actual work after every contract and hiring cheap amateurs for the next one.
I wouldn't worry about accidents like three mile island anymore, printers have gotten a lot faster since then. Also computers have gotten fast enough to be able to fix the problem themselves instead of flashing a red light on a large wall of flashing lights to signal something has broken.
That wasn't the problem. Computers can just do stupid things faster. Everything else around the equipment has been completely changed as well as the equipment itself.
@@nathanwahl9224 That wasn't the only problem but it was a major factor in making the disaster worse. If they had up to date accurate information on what was happening, they easily could have stopped the disaster from getting worse or possibly from happening at all. The printer that printed errors was several hours behind withen 5 minutes of the disaster sequence starting, how does that not have an effect?
@@nathanwahl9224 What Luke said. You cannot follow the decision tree of correcting an error if the system that tells you the error is incapable of doing so effectively.
Americans, now that this project is almost completed, please construct more! You cannot let the nuclear plant building knowhow get forgotten. We have the same problem here in EU. Most of the reactors are decades old... The Olkiluoto 3 reactor which is in it's final testing phase saved our asses here in Finland. If it wasn't completed before winter, we would have been totally fucked with the energy prices and would have had to use rolling blackouts to keep the grid stable.
In Poland they also construct one. On the other hand france´s NPPs are not running so well, they import lots of power from neighboring countries like germany.
@@stroll-and-roll France's nuclear plants were a huge success until the environmental extremists predictably started forcing them to shut down or operate under onerous regulations. That led to France planning to decommission ALL of its nuclear plants and letting maintenance slack, which in turn put the French in their current situation. They inexplicably followed Germany's example and made themselves dependent on importing dirty and/or expensive foreign energy over creating the only actual green energy at home.
Great video, I have been working on a similarly massive nuclear site for some years and the comments about lessons learned/shared between similar projects is familiar. Very long shot but given the popularity of this channel, if any Surveyors/Geospatial professionals working in Nuclear anywhere in the world see this and want to reach out I'd love to chat.
There's been many other incidents and accidents involving nuclear materials, including power generation, radiological medical waste, nuclear material processing facilities, and nuclear-powered transport (submarines and ships).
@@Mattihacker nuclear waste can be recycled and what can’t be recycled can be stored deep beneath the ground on the site it’s produced, Solar and wind produce a lot more waste that ends up in dump polluting the environment Given that population will grow and human energy consumption keeps increasing we need reliable source of energy
@@ManOfSteel1 yeah have an actual research and see how much rubbish ends up in dumps from solar panels and wind turbines, plus nuclear energy is what will be needed to power cities of tomorrow as populations grow and our consumption of energy grows as well, it far more sustainable and cleaner than you think. Nuclear waste can be literally stored on the site deep underground and Most now will be possible to recycle anyways And the reactors of today already are built with a lot more precautions than the ones building 10years ago.
I'd echo your sentiment with the caveate that they come out with a clear and understandable plan to deal with the waste that doesn't involve burying it in poor rural people's back yard combined with actively ignoring said poor people's elevated cancer rates.
@@mh3535 not to dismiss your point, but there is little to no increase in cancer near storage facilities since they are so deep (900 feet) . Hell the risk of cancer is shown to be higher if you live near a coal plant than near a nuclear plant.
I've never understood the description of Three Mile Island as being one of the worst nuclear accidents. The contingency plans were carried out. Every emergency procedure worked. No one was hurt.
I recommend doing a video on Ottawa’s light rail system expansion like you did about Seattle’s, which isn’t talked about enough and is one of the biggest transit expansions if not the biggest in North America
Yes, shine a light to investigate how terrible the whole project is and what the city repeat mistakes when the second phase opens. Or perhaps they'll just make a set of new ones. No matter what I'm sure that the riders will be blamed for all of the problems of Watson's Folly.
The problem with the main forms of “clean” energy like nuclear, hydro, solar, wind is that we cannot ramp those up or down as demand increases and decreases. Nuclear plants can take days to ramp up and slow down. Solar and wind are at the mercy of natural forces. Until we can find a way to store excess energy at a utility scale, “clean” energy will be very difficult to fully implement. Natural gas plants can be ramped up and down to balance demand and production in real time.
Nuclear doesn't take days to ramp up or down, otherwise they wouldn't be used in naval ships like carriers and submarines. I think you may be confusing that with the time it takes to Start Up or Shutdown a reactor which only happens for refueling.
@@STFdud you are correct, technically we can ramp up power on nuclear quickly, but it is seldomly done. In the US we like to ease in and ease off on nuclear power plants so that tests can be run. On the way up and down. Typically I don’t think you will see much faster ramp up/ramp down than about 1-2 MW per minute in normal operation, so you’re talking a few hours, not a few days like I said. We also typically run our nuclear at 100% to cover base load so it doesn’t have to ramp up and ramp down. Since they are so expensive, let those babies run full throttle 24/7! Naval ships may be allowed to go up and down more quickly, and I am sure MUCH quicker in an emergency, but typically run at a fairly steady speed.
Even factoring the three worst nuclear disasters in history -- Windscale, Chernobyl and Fukushima Daichi -- into the mix, the total number of people who have died from nuclear accidents in 70+ years of reactor operation wouldn't fill a college basketball arena. From 50,000 to 80,000 die annually from fossil fuel power generation pollution, the 1975 Banqiao dam collapse in China killed 100,000, the 1979 Machchu dam collapse in India killed 25,000, and the 1986 Bhopal chemical disaster in India killed 50,000. A bit over 9300 a year die within Louisiana's Cancer Alley, the 85 mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where the state's petrochemical industry -- 200 chemical plants and oil refineries -- is located. Three Mile Island didn't even reach the level of a full meltdown and there was no breach of the reactor vessel. So in comparison, yeah, nuclear is "pretty damn safe".
@@LordZontar People talk about the irradiated area that should have never happened in the first place in chernobyl, but what about the oil spills straight into the ocean? like tf?
I remember learning about this project way back in like 2013 and I was like oh my God. finally, we're getting some new nuclear but then of course delayed delayed delay. I'm so happy this is finally getting completed. we need more of this stuff, power our country into the future and beyond
@@clarkkent9080 yes, but at some point we’re gonna run out of natural gas. And nuclear power plants produce at maximum capacity over 90 percent of the time, marking it a more reliable source than natural gas and coal. Plus, as time goes on and the more we build, it will become cheaper like everything else.
90% of these delays and cost overruns is because people in america forgot how to build. There isn't even a workforce capable of doing it anymore. People had to be trained on the job leading to delays. Things get done and have to be redone because people didn't do it right. If nuclear reactors are built more, these inefficiencies will get ironed out because economies of scale.
@@SourDonut99 I don't think it is quite as simplistic as that but you are not too far off the truth. But how many utilities are willing to build grossly cost inefficient plants hoping that things will get better in the future?
Saying TMI was the worst accident in US history is a good thing considering people can still live in the area and not be affected by radiation in any harmful way.
It just destroyed a multi-billion dollar brand new plant, cost $1 billion just to clean up the melted fuel, and containment so contaminated that there are no plans to ever clean it up. A success story if ever there was one
I think he needs to rephrase that! The AP1000 that were built in China aren’t up to quality standards and regulatory standards in the US. Source former employee on the AP1000
Big mistake on the Flamanville reactor in France. You said it was going to be 300 million over. That's the latest added cost, but there has been numerous budget corrections since the beginning of the project... In reality, the project was first estimated to cost around 4 billion, and now it's gonna cost 19 billion... Not exactly the same thing...
the flamanville reactor is a fucking shitshow right now, continual building errors and idiotic mistakes that shouldnt be made but keep getting made. Gotta love stagnation in industry.
I just wanted to say that in the Focushima nuclear disaster many people died ... 1 person to be exact Not 1 thousand or 1 million. Just a single worker
well, a 3 month old multi billion dollar nuclear plant was trashed, never ran again, cost $1 billion to just clean up the melted fuel and the containment is so contaminated that it is not even scheduled to be cleaned up till 2039, 60 years after the accident. NOW do you understand?
B1M made a very big omission. TerraPower is building a new type reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming at a coal fired power plant site. It is scheduled to come online 2028. I’m looking forward to driving or flying down for the opening from Cody, Wyoming. It will be the first of new design nuclear plants. These reactors can make use of “spent” rods stored in existing rector sites.
That’s all false. Nobody is currently “building” a power reactor in WY. There is no license to build a TP reactor design in WY or anywhere else in the US, and certainly not online in 6 years. All of that is physically possible, but none of it is allowed politically. If you want that changed insist on reform from the people who get your vote.
Sorry but Russia was going to make their fuel and you know the problem with that. Now the whole project is on hold until the U.S. taxpayer builds a plant to make their fuel here. They will not break ground for at least 10 years
I was a Sr. Safety Specialist on the Vogtle Project for over 8 years. It had it's challenges but I am very proud of it's success. Bechtel made it happen.
I worked in the nuclear industry for 40+ years at 5 different facilities and am very pro-nuclear. I believe it was 2016 when then DOE Secretary Moniz was asked about the future of nuclear power in America. He stated that the future of nuclear power was playing out at VC Summer in SC. and Vogtle in Ga. and if they were successful, then nuclear power had a bright future in America. That simple statement says it all. Until the issues with the U.S. construction industry are addressed, nothing will change. Vogtle and VC Summer project management and construction crafts have doomed new nuclear in the U.S. No one that EVER worked on either of these projects in a exempt role should EVER be allowed on any future nuclear project. The problem was not with anti-nukes, the media, greenies, politicians, or the NRC. The problem was with the people that worked there and yes I am mad as h3ll
So three miles island is one of the worst nuclear accident in history, an accident with no casualties and no impact outside the plant. This tell a lot about the safety of nuclear energy.
Same story, here in Europe we forgot how to build NPPs, similarly building Olkiluoto 3 and Mochovce 3 and 4 way over budget and delayed. Whats crazy, Mochovce NPP in Slovakia was continuation of frozen project, with almost all structural work already done. Thanks god, Olkiluoto is running and Mochovce 3 just few days ago started chain reaction at minimum power level and next milestone is first grid sync and energetic startup.
Not surprised about the issues with building new Nuclear Power Plants. My Dad worked on several. First one was in Rowe Mass. Designed in 1955 and built and on line by 1960. 3 & 1/2 years from ground breaking to online . No issues with the reactor system ever. Everyone needs to remember it's just an electric power plant with a reactor heating the water (one of 3 water systems).
@@clarkkent9080 Not really. All a reactor is, is a way to make steam. Last part of the cycle is exactly the same for any power plant. You can really up "the cost figures" if you want to but remember the turbines etc would be the same cost no matter the source of the steam. Comparison cost should only be the reactor vs the other steam source. BTW cooling towers were never really required and should be removed. They were never required by any other type of power plant.
The construction of "smaller" modular nuclear plants is still to happen commercially. As the UK showed, if you don't build new nuclear for ages, then you lose talent and muscle memory. Meanwhile Europe needs big plants and even the French have not built new plants for ages. We are still awaiting more self-compensating "cheaper" nuclear that can attract private capital, avoid massive over-runs in cost and meeting time schedule plus avoid chronic time delay in planning. Meanwhile many existing plants need to be refurbished just to remain working safely. Upgrading existing plants to extend their lifetime and boost efficiency from what was on offer in the 1970's will be as big a project as any new ones plus the old ones exist, work and not everything would need to be upgraded to extend their power generation lifetime. However retrofitting will cost as much if not more
Three Mile Island cost a lot of money, but no one was hurt. The radiation released was equivalent of a few airline trips. Cost over runs come largely from political delays.
Can you do an episode on the Childrens Hospital in Dublin, Ireland? It's an absolute shambles and is the most expensive hospital in the world. Nothing but delays and over budget.
5:40 Flamanville will not cost 300 million more as mentioned, the costs will be over 10bn instead 3.3bn, with a delay of over 10years! Same problems in Europe as in the US (Hinkley Point C in the UK is the same reactor, also built by EDF, time will show if they can sort out the problems of Flamanville, which was kind of a prototype with a cracy amount of problems and delays, similar than the Vogtle project…)
@@brian2440 People don't remember the actual reasons and only focus on the supposed "disaster" itself without even knowing the actual truth behind the incident. And this mostly because of media who were the main culprits in the misinformation about the incident and nuclear power in general
I appreciate the segway to Nord VPN and way you said it is fine. But the security of VPN is to IT security of a power plant is like a pet door is to home security. I really wish channels stop equating VPN with other topics.
uhhh three mile island was caused by HUMAN error. "oh. we got a problem. ok turn off the water for a WATER cooled reactor. that'll fix it." sheer brilliance there.
I read a book about it, it’s called “Meltdown: A Race Against Nuclear Disaster at Three Mile Island” by Willborn Hampton. From what I could understand it was due to a lot of stupid mistakes, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that Met-Ed (the operator of the plant) wasn’t very transparent during the whole thing.
I've got to think one of the reasons why the projects are behind schedule and have cost overruns is because no reactor has been built in 30 or 40 years. All of the skilled workers have either retired or died. If more of these are built, companies and their workers will have the experience and things will be streamlined.
Exactly. Now that we have a team that has relearned the nuclear power plant construction process use them again and I guarantee they won't make the same mistakes.
Hate to tell you, bub, but we're still around and kicking, still know all that stuff, have passed it down, and will gladly consult several hours a week for way too much $$$$. And just why you'd want to build a plant with obsolete methods is beyond me. They're just large amounts of concrete and (special) steel, oh and copper; nothing magic or mysterious about them.
Baseload of a city of mega city is really huge. If we are pushing ev charging it will be even more so. There is going to be certain amount of electricity consumption by this area all the time, day and night. Nuclear power is by far the only solution we known that can provide this stability of supply. So it is either we change how we live or we found out solution that are even more stable.
Off-shore wind. Geothermal. Both capable of baseload power. Investments haven't been made in these technologies either in the last 30 years in America.
@@sandal_thong8631 geothermal is great if you live on Iceland. It is next to useless in most places. Moreover, as someone who lives in Denmark: your belief in offshore wind is unwarranted. Sometimes the wind actually doesn’t blow much, even out there on the sea.
@@peterfireflylund I hadn't heard of "wind droughts" before today. But I guess that's another consequence of global warming, likely related to "jetstream stalling".
Excellent presentation, as always. I would like to see you delve into Liquid fluoride thorium reactor projects going on around the world and give us your unique perspective. Pros, cons? Who is leading research? etc.
Not much for LFTR. Loads of people talking about it, not much actual activity. The only serious player is China who have apparently completed construction on a test reactor. No idea how well their tests are going (or if its even been started up yet) however. All of the other potential competitors are either still in R&D phase, still trying to gather funding, or have already folded. I'm not sure anyone aside from China even has a test plant under construction at the moment never mind operating. Of course that's just from easily available information. Always possible there's some companies out there operating in dark mode that are way closer than anyone outside of their employees knows. Suppose it still would be nice for an actual investigative journalist to go do a review of the industry as opposed to some rando on a TH-cam comment with knowledge gleaned entirely from a few minutes on Google :D.
warning, nuclear physicist talking. Anything you watch or read when they talk about Thorium, do the Protactinium test: Ctrl+F "Protactinium". If you've heard about Thorium, you might remember that 232Th is not a nuclear fuel per se, it must be turn into the good stuff 233U; thats the one that will fission and give you your energy from fission, to turn into heat, steam, etc. Think of it like a recipe, you have butter and flower, you mix them to get the shortbread that you want. See how easy it is for everybody to get some shortbread? Except everybody also like to gloss over that between the "butter/flower" step and the "shortbread" step, there's a "white phosphorous neurotoxic napalm" step that might make things a bit more complicated the kitchen. That's your 233Pa. So it goes 232Th+n -> 233Pa -> 233U. This is when you say: "but wait 233c, this is just like 239Pu is produced from 238U: 238U+n -> 239Np -> 239Pu, this is happening all the time in normal nuclear power plants. What's the difference?". The difference is the same as between 2 and 27. 239Np (the step between Uranium 238 and Plutonium 239) has a half life of 2 days, while 233Pa (the thing between Thorium and Uranium 233) has one of 27 days. If you leave 239Np in the core it will quickly turn into 239Pu, but you can't leave 233Pa in the core for a month or it will capture more neutrons and turn into something else than 233U. (there's also a matter of cross section: 233Pa has a much higher probability of capturing neutrons than 239Np). If you leave your butter and flower too long in the over you'll get a brick rather than a shortbread. If you want to use Thorium, you must: expose your Th; extract your 233Pu; let it decay into 233U; feed the 233U back to your reactor. By now you should understand why liquifying the fuel make so much more sense for Th than for U. It's not "MSR work so well with Thorium", it "if you want to continuously extract your 233Pa, you'd better do it with a liquid fuel". this is where you say "Ok, but still don't see the issue, you just pump and filter your fuel to recover the 233Pa, and let it decay in a tank, and pump/filter the 233U back in for it to fission". I'm going to assume that you know what a Becquerel and a Sievert are. Remember the 27 days? with the density of 233Pa, that translates into 769TBq/g (Tera is for 1012 , that's a lot), and because of the high energy gamma from our friend 233Pa, that also means a dose rate at 1m from a 1g teardrop of 233Pa of 20,800mSv/h. Starting to get a picture? Notice how all the numbers I've use are not "engineering limits" that few millions in R&D can bend, those are hardwired physical constants of Nature: half life, density, neutron capture cross section, gamma energy. Good luck changing those by throwing $ at them. Now try to imagine technicians working in those plants, like doing some maintenance, replacing a pump (I haven't even touched the complex chemical separation system you need to extract your 233Pa from your fuel or 233U from your 233Pa, which will definitely need maintenance). Let's put it this way: if there is 1mg of 233Pa left in the component they are working on, they'll reach their annual dose limit in 1h. Now try to imagine the operating company of those plant, if you have the tiniest leak, like a tiny poodle, you can't send anybody in for months, meaning you are loosing month of revenue because of a tiny leaky seal failure, what would be a trivial event anywhere else (did I mention that molten salts also have corrosion issues). When they say "Thorium has been used in research MSR", they mean "we've injected some Thorium and detected 233U" or maybe even just "we've injected 233U in the fuel". So my humble opinion is that playing with it in the lab is one thing, turning it into actual power plants is slightly more problematic. here are more numbers trying to imagine an industrial scale Thorium reactor. TL;DR: Thorium will probably never leave the labs to reach industrial, electricity production scale. The physics is sound, the engineering and actual practical operating constrains just kill the concept.
Loved the video, just one minor issue. What happened at Three Mile Island wasn't a nuclear disaster, it was purely a PR disaster. Nobody involved was ever in any real danger.
Multi billion dollar brand new plant suffers partial fuel meltdown. $1 billion to just clean up the fuel. Containment so contaminated that there is no plans of ever cleaning it up. Yea, that is only a PR issue just like 911
I live next to Darlington Nuclear Plant in Canada, it KICKS ASS!!! Our power is always on 24/7, super stable, and when it does go out, the Power crews are lightning fast at restoring service :) Ontario Nuclear Power is the shizznit.
What, modifying your plant to current standards (which would have addressed the issues) would be admitting that you had made a mistake in the past!!! Culturally a very bad thing, hari kari and all that fall on your sword crap! So you just ignore all that stuff, recommended improvements are not allowed. Tada, Fukushima, via traditional culture stigma.
It might sound nice,but you never reach the point of "mass assembly" with this to bring down the cost. Every reactor is different because you have new designs that take advantage of new developments in technology. Really the only cost savings you would achieve with an assembly line aka build more reactors the same way is less planning, not in part production. The reality is you might only be building them in the 10s not the tens of thousends... and also for this to be practical you would need to start the process of new reactors in a close timeframe of oneanother, ideally all at the same time after the first "test" build.
@@MrMcMind It'll never be mass manufacture but when every new reactor is a one-off then no wonder it gets expensive. The talent pool goes away to do other things if there is not a constant stream of new builds being started. Maybe Small Modular Reactors can solve that, if someone actually starts building them...
You should make a video of the nuclear power plant OL3 here in Finland. It's become a common joke to speak from it. It was supposed to finnish in 2009 and cost 3,2 B€ but it's still going through final testing and has cost more than 3x the original budget.
Those cost overruns and decade long construction delays are such tragedies. They are the reasons why the utilities have made resolutions to never, ever again order a new nuclear power plant to be built. So sad. 😢
Not sure where you got your number for the Flamanville reactor in France but it's not $300M over budget. Based on wikipedia, it's $9B over budget with an initial estimated cost of $3.3B. Similar issues for that reactor and the one in the US: loss of expertise on how to build these things.
One thing the nuclear industry really should do more of is standardizing and modularizing things. Thats why i love small modular reactors (SMR). They are exactly the kind of thing the industry needs. A one size fits all, easy to operate reactor design that you can just plonk down wherever you need.
There was a short period where lots of the videos started all feeling like ads for the projects or software used by them and the videos got a bit too forced almost. Happy to say that recently that seems to have mostly disappeared, and the videos feel great and organic - not like there's an ad being forced onto me. Thanks for the good content :)
The world needs nuclear power. Renewable energy is inadequate to meet the world's energy requirement. Nuclear energy is most tangible resource we have available to address, effectively, the threat of global warming.
Get a huge discount on NordVPN and an extra four months free - nordvpn.com/theb1m
2022(G) “Respect and dignity.” Furthermore:
What does you channel name mean?
I find it hard to take a guy with a 70's pornstache and black turtleneck seriously... 😆
Every streaming service bans IPs from popular VPNs. You can't really advertise bypassing region block in good faith.
@@ivy_47 Just use silent VPNs instead.
I'm detecting a consistent theme with certain kinds of large, publicly-funded infrastructure projects: when we stop building them, we lose the supply chains and institutional knowledge on how to build them and have to redevelop them from scratch. The US is also like this with high-speed rail. Turns out if you keep on churning out new rail or new nuclear or new whatever, you build up a lot of supply chains and institutional knowledge for how to build them on-time and on-budget. The solution to these issues is to just keep building them so we don't keep on having to learn from scratch how to build these things.
The problem of cost & time overruns isn't limited to projects that don't happen frequently. Skyscrapers are being built daily around the world, yet these overrun too. Even something like a train station, highway construction, subway development, ... The supply chain is one part of the problem and definitely applies to those one of items like the reacter itself, certain components needed for X or Y, but the majority in delays and cost overruns lies in the complexity. When a project is planned, you look at it on paper and thus can only see part of the issues that will arise in the future. Even with modern BIM modelling not every problem can be foreseen. A LOT of information also just gets lost in these complex construction projects because humans are unreliable, forget, mislay, take too long, ...
Thank you and I agree.
Too bad reality isn't that simple :)
@B Babbich its way easier to innovate when you have the base knowledge already.
@@JBDazen Reality really is that simple. I work in the Nuclear Industry and I have witnessed countless examples of significant problems resulting from a lack of continuous development of the industry. People retire, skills are lost, the supply chain gives up on the industry and moves elsewhere.
Starting again from scratch is incredibly wasteful in all metrics.
We've actually built plenty of nuclear reactors in the U.S. - every submarine and aircraft carrier we've sent out for the last 30 years. If we approached our national grid the same way we approach our national defense then we'd have plenty of capacity with the best safety record in the world.
That's right, but of course, the defense industry and the armed forces are very keen on maintaining secrecy. Military reactors are completely different from civilian reactors. Very little is known about the reactors used on nuclear powered aircraft carriers or submarines, because the technology is obviously highly classified. A quick Google search doesn't even return any pictures of them. The men and women who built these machines and service them will probably take their knowledge with them to their graves.
You might even say building our national grid is literally a national defense / security issue.
when all the Dictators have nuclear industries the extra nuclear deterrence submarines can be built more quickly so that they can be close to the new threats. And act rapidly.
150,000 SMRs, Small modular reactors like BWRX300 from GE Hitachi and Rolls Royce.
No more CO2 in the world.
$TRILLIONS in national grids to disperse the concentrated central electric power to the dispersed ends of the grid and the dispersed EVs.
You could say the same about all aspects of American infrastructure and sectors dependent on government spending . If the US invested as much as they do in defence spending across all other areas they wouldn’t be facing half the challenges they are.
When the USA built nuclear weapons the Dictators stole the info.
If the USA builds a nuclear powered national grid the Dictators will, and use the cash flow and nuclear industry to build their ultimate weapons.
More military defence will be needed, budgets will explode.
I don't know why the advocate for nuclear energy dresses like a super villain
Henry Cavel in Mission Impossible?
I had the same thought and that mustache to complete the look
Someone get this man a white Persian cat & a tall black leather chair asap!
Same thought here !
Guy's clearly auditioning to be the next Bond villain
Jim Carrey's Robotnik is now a nuclear engineer.
Here in Ontario, the grid is over 50% nuclear. Very stable and cheap electricity
Hopefully they continue to invest in it. Reactors are extremely powerful.
I didn't find anything in Toronto Cheap. 12% tax on goods and services hurts a bit
Now it’s at 60%.
All these megaprojects are amazing. But we all know that Fred's biceps are the most impressive megaproject of them all...
We need a case study on how hes built
Fred is a very hot guy indeed
🤔 Yes, I must admit that this is true... 💪😆
Who's fred
@@justaguyfromreddit - The voice over guy on these videos who looks as if he can easily lift a bus over his head... 😆
Freddie Mercury as Nuclear Engineer very impressive
Mamaaaa!!!!
He wants to break free .
Frankie Uranium
It's a kind of magic...
You are the losers 'cause we are the champions...OF THE WORLD!
Calling Three Mile Island one of the worst nuclear accidents in history is like a quadriplegic coming in third in a foot race: it happened because there were only three contestants
Very little radiation released .
Not significant to ban all construction for decades because of such.
Big oil coal gas pushed no nuke propaganda to crush competition.
I worked in that field.
Plus the issue is upper management, overworked workers, stress, and work ethic in ALL THREE nuclear incidents (TMI, Fukushima, and Chernobyl).
Saying that we as a species should quit all because the lack of improving is rather frustrating to hear >~
@@Nudnik1 If it was so inconsequential, then why did the IAEA rate it as 5 on the INES scale?
"Hiroshima was one of the worst nuclear attacks in history"
@@TrebleSketch for TMI it was also incorrect institutional legacy brought over from the navy, the people running the reactor were operating with the mindset of running a nuclear reactor on a submarine at sea, which is a bit difficult and has a set of unique circumstances when compared to running a land based nuclear power plant.
for Fukushima it was basically corporate greed. They were repeatedly notified that a tsunami of that scale could happen, and what the results of that could be, but they dismissed it because something of that magnitude is unlikely and the risk was deemed too low to mitigate. They knew adapting flood defensed was necessary but they kept kicking the ball down the road.
as for Chernobyl, that was gross incompetence.
Three mile island is a very good example of how safe nuclear power is. Almost everything was done wrong and operators basically tried to blow it up. They bypassed and disabled numerous safety systems and it still didn't fail catastrophically.
Exactly thank you
yeah if nuclear fails, it's very much a human failure
Not to mention it was quite a while ago, and modern power plants are even safer.
Didn't FAIL HUH. So a meltdown apparently doesn't count as a fail in your estimation. By that logic, Chernobyl was ONLY a minor oopsy!
FFS... TMI resulted in the entire facility required to be shutdown! It was only a year old, and rates as one of 3 WORST NUKE ACCIDENTS!
UNACCEPTABLE COMMENTS LIKE THESE SHOULD BE REMOVED. 😮😮😮
Great video as always. As a Georgia resident and a big nuclear advocate I've been split on this project as I've had to pay a lot for the overruns (in terms of extra fees added to my power bill) but also happy that we are leading nation in a new age of nuclear
@Zaydan Naufal Georgia, USA
Nuclear is really expensive 3 to 4 times as much as solar and wind per produced kwh of electricity.
It is also 5 times more expensive to build.
@@paxundpeace9970 Solar and Wind are are not sustainable. Fact. Solar and Wind at our present day tech could never meet the demands of our Country. Fact.
@@paxundpeace9970 , that mathematics tend to change when a power plant is expected to run for +60 years with "small" running costs.
But it's a difficult mathematics, how do you measure the cost of air pollution burning fossil fuels for instance. Right now quite a few countries in Europe (Europe has more nuclear plants together than the USA) wish they had built more or at least not started to cut down.
Right this afternoon France got at best 75% of its energy production from nuclear, best in the EU in that respect.
Many states have no plans on building any new nuclear plants but are going all in for the Green way, which means no fossil fuels after a rather short time line. (like 8-12 years) I believe at some point, we will have to wake up and realize that wind turbines and solar panels are not going to be 100 percent. Politics has much to do with it, and the media will have to get real, which they aren't at the moment. People I talk with about nuclear are 100 percent against it, mostly because all they see is the the media tells them.
Love these docuseries on construction with the B1M. Narration with Fred is the best 👌
Wonderful name as well. Fred, or maybe Freddy, Mills. Sounds somewhat rakish and cheeky
Toady lickspittle sycophant.
@@MyBelch you OK kiddo?
I find it a bit sad that this channel can't even correct the common misconception about the Texas Blackout: It wasn't because of renewables are unreliable, or NPPs can deliver. Even with more NPPs the same would've happened, because the problem wasn't energy production, it was the grid.
Back in 2011, Texas experienced something similar and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation made suggestions to better prepare the infrastructure to be better suited for cold weather, these recommendations were ignored by ERCOT (as they were in 1989 when this also happened).
Furthermore: The Texas grid doesn't have a safety margin beyond expected draw and the grid isn't even able to meet peak summer demand when needed.
The Texas government then cancelled a contract with the Texas Reliability Entity and disbanded the Oversight and Enforcement Division, reducing oversight further and dropping cases that aimed to improve reliability.
Another thing, that's very peculiar to Texas apparently: Normally you'd expect, that an underperforming company should lose money, right? Well if you're a natural gas supplier, you make money from underperforming.
So basically the grid operator didn't bother to spend the money to keep their equipment from freezing, the politics let them do as they pleased.
Where did the video say the Texas blackout was caused by renewables? Around 2:10 the expert talks about the cold causing gas supply issues, which it absolutely did and caused CCGT plants to go offline.
You are correct about ERCOT and the rest though, Texas refuses to cold harden their infrastructure and won't connect to either of North America's grid interconnections.
@@ChristinaK1024
Solar and wind are heavily subsidized. This reduces the profit margins for competitors, with entirely predictable results. It’s either cut costs or go out of business.
@@ChristinaK1024 I didn't say the video, i said "common misconceptions", which are only thinly veiled spoken about by the "expert", who should be called "lobbyist", as Radiant Energy Fund is a lobby organization aiming to influence politics fore more NPPs. In fact here in Germany the "expert" linked to a petition about reversing our nuclear phase-out -- completely, which would mean, old and insecure reactors would come back online and not help energy prices or the grid stability in any way.
Basically what the "expert" is trying to say, and B1M never corrected is: More NPPs would have saved Texas from a blackout and kept NG prices low. Because more power from NPPs would have meant less gas to gas power stations and thus more gas for consumers or less consumption overall.
However, this still wouldn't have prevented the grid from simply freezing to death.
His Twitter is also... very questionable, where he tries to uses memes to bash any energy source that's not nuclear.
B1M simply adopting the "advising governments" speak from a lobby organization, without further questioning is really bad journalism on their part.
Why not direct your dissatisfaction with this channel's video on the matter into producing your own video to correct all of the errors you seem to have found in Fred's.
No wind=no power.
No sun=no power.
No water in the reservoir=no power.
No waves= no power.
Geothermal is great but doesn't work everywhere.
Nuclear works everywhere and it's scalable to suit every need.
3:32 People need to STOP saying 3 mile island was one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. It does not even compare to Chernobyl, Kysthtym, and Fukushima. No one was killed or even seriously injured. The amount of radiation released was miniscule. Key safety systems worked as intended.
The harm from abandoning nuclear power in the US is out of all proportion to the TMI accident.
I don't think Fukushima is anywhere near comparable to Chernobyl, but it is true that it was "suprisingly bad", given that it happened in an OECD-country (and people would stereotypically assume that the Japanese are very thorough on such stuff).
Hey thanks for the shout out to Watts Bar! I only worked there for a few months in 2015-16 for construction of the haul path and spent fuel pad, but I remember Unit 2 was finally getting finished at that time. It had started construction way back in the ‘70s but stopped for a long time and was essentially being used for spare parts for the in-service Unit 1. If there’s anything I learned at the nuclear plant is that it is an extremely regulated and safety-oriented industry with virtually no tolerance for the slightest error. Heck, I remember seeing a plant-wide email about a safety incident where someone had been injured, but it was literally a cut to a finger.
Another thing I learned is just how serious they take security of these power plants. Just to be able to enter the protected area required a background check with multiple references, a safety course, a palm vein scan, and a 500+ question psychology test, among other things. If anyone was ever dumb enough to try to jump the fences into the protected area (not even able to get to a reactor, as that is even further guarded inside), instead of entering through a (heavily guarded) portal, lethal force would be authorized. And hearing the frequent gunshots coming from the nearby on-site shooting range was a constant reminder that the guards in the lookout towers were well-trained and ready for anything. I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over cyber security of a US nuclear plant having seen all this in just 4 months time.
Lethal force its the norm in nuclear plants when it comes to dealing with unauthorized access, and it's pretty clear with large signs clearly stating that if you cross the line there will be no warning shots.
Thanks!
Delay and overbudget doesn't really matter. I'm a nuclear expert, and they tend to pay back after 3-5 years. The Olkiluoto plant in Finland was very behind schedule and overbudget, however, it has been a great success and will be paid back in just 3 years, and then there will be tremendous profits.
That is not true at all. Massive overruns, wasting both time and money. Finances and waste-disposal problems will kill off nuclear.
I think I doesn't really matter if it's delayed or overbudget, it's our only easily way of reaching a fossil fuel free future, so we need to build it anyway. Put the earth before profits
But as was alluded to in the video, much of the delay and cost blowout was simply due to the fact that none had been built domestically in 40+ years. Its like when they started ramping up construction of the Virginia class submarines, it started off terribly, but once they got a few out of drydock they worked out the construction kinks and now they roll out ahead of schedule and under budget on a regular basis.
If they get to work on the next soon, that knowledge of how to do it, and what problems to look for will transfer, speed will pick up, and price will fall more in line with whats expected.
@@mmeade9402 and when all the Dictators have nuclear industries the extra nuclear deterrence submarines can be built more quickly so that they can be close to the new threats. And act rapidly.
150,000 SMRs, Small modular reactors like BWRX300 from GE Hitachi and Rolls Royce.
No more CO2 in the world.
$TRILLIONS in national grids to disperse the concentrated central electric power to the dispersed ends of the grid and the dispersed EVs.
@@eannamcnamara9338 As much as I care for our planet, I have to disagree with a "overbudget doesn't matter" sentiment.
Money is useful, it abstracts sth as complex as building a nuclear plant to single number that can be compared to some other complex thing e.g. medical expenses. We have finite resources, we have finite productive capacity and finite work hours at our disposal. Building a sustainable future means we have to be extra vigilant in how we manage those.
The different between a vanity project and an investment is that the former ignores any cost effectiveness. Let's not make that mistake and be critical of ourselves even when we are doing the right thing :)
5:40: That's untrue. Flamanville NPP block 3 was expected to cost 3.4billion euros and should have been completed 2012. Ten years later it's still not online and costs are expected to be around 12.7billion euros. The 300million you are talking about are only the latest price increase for the delay from end of 22 to Q2/23!!!
Fun fact. If that amount had been invested into solar and wind you'd have about 4 times the power generation it's supposed to have and it would likely have been ready much faster.
@@XMysticHerox
yes but the power generation won't be as reliable as nuclear and it can't be "on demand".
@@dickmelsonlupot7697
Then only put 40% of that money in solar/wind and the other 60% into batteries or some other storage facility. Would work as well and you would not end up with waste that literally kills you for the next million years.
@@TorteInYourFace says the toxic heavy metals present in the batteries that just goes to landfills and leaches into groundwater. There are also new designs that are orders of magnitude safer, as in zero percent chance of meltdown, that will also be cheaper once the first couple are done. Why arent they being built already? Institutional inertia. Its like the big aerospace companies and rockets - The regulatory environment is not friendly to new designs, and it takes time to train up a workforce to use new processes and techniques.
@@TorteInYourFace How does nuclear waste kill people? Wtf. If solar and batteries are that good, maybe you shouldn't resort to fear mongering.
I live in Georgia and am looking forward to Vogtle's completion. I feel like a shareholder because Southern Company/Georgia Power have hiked up my power bill to help pay for the new additions. Bring on the POWER!!!
Newsom had to scrap taking Diablo Canyon offline because (just like Germany) California is coming to a breaking point with its "green" solar and wind fantasies.
It should have been on in 2016...yet we have been paying for it close to 10 years
Having worked at Hanford #2 in the 80's, there are few more issues with building nukes. I'm all for it, but nobody has addressed the endless paperwork required. Of course this was before smart phones and such but I had to complete a one foot stack of paperwork (yes, 12" high) before grouting back a (non-critical) pipe penetration. That times the thousands of non-critical tasks and it's a mountain of forms. How can we build a 777 or a SpaceX rocket and yet a nuke is beyond our capabilities?
Loved the video. I live in Georgia and I cannot be happier that my state is the first to make substantial clean energy progress. I hope many follow GA in this. Glow blue to go green, I say!
My electric rate increased 29% due to Vogtle according to my Ga power bill and will double if and when Vogtle ever goes on line. Nuclear is green going out of my wallet
@@clarkkent9080 That sucks to hear. At least you have that rather then spend the same or similar amount on wind or solar which isn't an efficient source like nuclear.
@@42luke93 After Vogtle and the VC Summer failures no U.S. utility is even considering new nuclear but I see solar farms being built all over.
I was mistaken, my bill increased 19% during the Vogtle construction but will double one=ce they go on line.
My thoughts are that we should be building nuclear plants that are scaled back in output so that reasonably sized construction equipment can be used. At the same time, settle in on a design that can be repeated throughout the country in order that the operators that are trained at one plant can easily slip into the same position at another plant.
The older designs require a certain size for economy of scale to kick in, basically the red tape for a 1GW reactor is no more than for a 250MW reactor.
Basically thats what France did with EPR and Canada with CANDU have done.
It's coming. I heard Rolls Royce has started on this.
I believe they're called SMRs, or small modular reactors. I think one design is in the approval process!
@@AnimeHumanCoherence There are a whole bunch of companies and countries working on these, the first one actually under construction is probably the ACP100 in China.
Hoping the public begins to accept nuclear more
Loved the video - however you didn’t include SMRs (small modular reactors) which are the future reactor technology not just for the USA, but for the entire world.
We did do a dedicated video on them on our sister channel - th-cam.com/video/BrN_SRzsEF4/w-d-xo.html
I suppose the main focus of this video was the current state of the nuclear industry though and SMRs are some way off actually being constructed.
@@TheB1M wow. Beautiful work. I had no idea you had another channel - thanks for all you do.
Nuclear power is the most reliable and cleanest technology we currently have.
It's good to see people finally coming back to reality, and getting out of the "no nukes" mentality. I'd like to see you do a video on Canada's nuclear vision (despite being an early leader in CANDU reactor technology), with the country going "all in" on the new SMR (small modular reactor) variants. These cost a small fraction of a larger reactor, are much faster to build, and can be put practically anywhere (including remote towns like in the far north for countries that need them).
As an American who’s not a fan of carbon emissions, I’m very pro nuclear and I hope we see more!
Hope Energy Northwest gets the SMRs they are proposing built. Columbia Generation Station at Hanford came in handy during the 2021 heat wave, but we almost didn’t have it. It is refueled in odd years, but usually scheduled for late spring when Hydro is at it’s peak.
See how pro nuclear you are when they tack on a $15 surcharge to your bill every month before the construction even starts to pay for for it.
@@scpatl4now OMG. California closed down all of its plants and now burns natural gas, which kills people through air pollution.
nuclear energy isn't carbon neutral. mining the uranium and building the reactors results in anywhere between 12 and 114 grams of CO2 per kWh. That's significant.
@@SebastianPeitsch nuclear doesnt need to be carbon neutral, it needs to be sustainable (which it is)
So amazing that in the intro shots of the new nuclear power plant being built had a shot of the containment vessel having a ring hoisted into place and the pick of one of the reactor vessels. I’ve worked on both of those jobs as a young man. I’m retired now and my last job before retirement was building a coal cleaning facility at a coal powered thermal power plant.
It’s surreal to here you mention the reactor being built in wanyesboro. I moved up there for senior year of high school and to see the impact and growth it has on that community is quite amazing. I’m not saying it doesn’t have negative impacts on other variables but just so crazy I stumbled upon this video and happened to hear it being mentioned
But there is more.
Please don’t assume that YT videos are factual. If you live in the U.S. here is the reality for the last 4 state of the art Westinghouse AP1000 ADVANCED passive safety features new nuclear power projects and spent fuel reprocessing and in the U.S. over the last 20 years. You decide if this YT video was presenting the truth.
The Southeastern U.S. is super pro-nuclear MAGA, has zero anti-nukes, and 100% media and political support.
The MOX facility (South Carolina) was a U.S. government nuclear reprocessing facility that was supposed to mix pure weapon grade Pu239 with U238 to make reactor fuel assemblies. It was canceled (2017) in the U.S. After spending $10 billion for a plant that was originally estimated to cost $1 billion and an independent report that estimated it would cost $100 billion to complete the plant and process all the Pu239, Trump canceled the project in 2017.
VC Summer (South Carolina) new nuclear units 2&3 were canceled in 2017 after spending $17 billion on the project (original estimate of $14 billion and 2016 completion date) with no clear end in sight for costs or schedule.
Vogtle (Georgia) new nuclear units 3 &4 currently 110% over budget and schedule (currently over $30 billion) and still not operating. Mid way into the build, the utility stated that had they known about the many costly delays they would never have chosen nuclear. They are now delayed another year because according to the project management, thousands of build documents are missing.
Please google any of this to confirm.
If you can’t build new nuclear in the MAGA super pro-nuclear southeast U.S. then where can you build it?
Perhaps you could have mentioned one bit of trivia about Three-Mile Island, "one of the worst nuclear accidents in history": *nobody died*.
With delays spanning decades, it seems like in the US, one can spend his/her whole career on a single project without any worries lolz 😄
Wow, Dr. Eggman went through a redemption arc, and now is a Nuclear Speciallyst.
I work as an engineer in the largest offshore wind farm projects in the world, over 1GW both in execution and planned. I can tell you that we would not be able to build at such at such low costs without a continuous pipeline of projects, with lessons learned, workers chaining projects, etc. So I totally understand why nuclear is expensive and why the problem is not the technology itself.
We need offshore wind in America. But so many people don't want to see it. Maybe they have investments in coal, or they left Holland to get away from windmills?
Even with a continuous pipeline of projects it wouldn't be the same. Small modules like solar or (somewhat larger) wind turbines simply scale better in terms of learning curve. That's the problem when a single nuclear plant takes 10+ years to build.
@@MattnesssSMR's don't take 10 years to build. I live in a Renewable Energy Zone and just one wind/solar project here is estimated to be completed in three years. At halfway through the planning they are up to 32 projects of solar and or wind and there are 800 wind turbines included in those figures so far. They want to install 69 turbines in our beautiful valley, each one at 7MW and standing at 280m high and 200m wide (918ft high X 656ft wide). It's bloody devastating. We have 19 endangered species of birds identified in our region alone, as well as endangered bats and Koala habitat. This part of the project will utilise 73 square kilometres (7,300 hectares) and the solar will utilise 17 square kilometres (1,700 hectares). A total of 90 square kilometres for a form of energy that is capable of producing a fraction of the output of coal, gas or nuclear. This is just one project! The cumulative effect of all these projects being built around the same time will be horrendous. The wildlife will be decimated and by the time they complete the projects that are
I posted the above response accidentally and the edit function isn't working for some reason. Just to conclude, by the time they complete the planned projects it will be time to start all over again. They are destroying the environment for a form of energy that isn't fit for purpose.
Regularly changing construction code/regulations would be the biggest hurdle when it comes to building nuclear plant proposed budget and time.
Nah, the biggest hurdle is wiping out any chance of gaining institutional knowledge by underpaying and firing the people doing the actual work after every contract and hiring cheap amateurs for the next one.
I wouldn't worry about accidents like three mile island anymore, printers have gotten a lot faster since then. Also computers have gotten fast enough to be able to fix the problem themselves instead of flashing a red light on a large wall of flashing lights to signal something has broken.
That wasn't the problem. Computers can just do stupid things faster. Everything else around the equipment has been completely changed as well as the equipment itself.
@@nathanwahl9224 That wasn't the only problem but it was a major factor in making the disaster worse. If they had up to date accurate information on what was happening, they easily could have stopped the disaster from getting worse or possibly from happening at all.
The printer that printed errors was several hours behind withen 5 minutes of the disaster sequence starting, how does that not have an effect?
@@nathanwahl9224 Computers are significantly less prone to errors than humans.
@@nathanwahl9224 What Luke said. You cannot follow the decision tree of correcting an error if the system that tells you the error is incapable of doing so effectively.
Would love more insight into the various "assembly line" Small Modular Reactor designs that are floating around. One was recently approved by the NRC.
This guys stache can probably produce more energy than american wind turbines combined
I like the 70's porn-stache
Americans, now that this project is almost completed, please construct more! You cannot let the nuclear plant building knowhow get forgotten. We have the same problem here in EU. Most of the reactors are decades old... The Olkiluoto 3 reactor which is in it's final testing phase saved our asses here in Finland. If it wasn't completed before winter, we would have been totally fucked with the energy prices and would have had to use rolling blackouts to keep the grid stable.
In Poland they also construct one. On the other hand france´s NPPs are not running so well, they import lots of power from neighboring countries like germany.
see.......The Great Global Warming Swindle - Full Documentary HD....TH-cam
@@johnl5316 which is why it's time to go back to nuclear.
@@stroll-and-roll France's nuclear plants were a huge success until the environmental extremists predictably started forcing them to shut down or operate under onerous regulations. That led to France planning to decommission ALL of its nuclear plants and letting maintenance slack, which in turn put the French in their current situation. They inexplicably followed Germany's example and made themselves dependent on importing dirty and/or expensive foreign energy over creating the only actual green energy at home.
Great video, I have been working on a similarly massive nuclear site for some years and the comments about lessons learned/shared between similar projects is familiar. Very long shot but given the popularity of this channel, if any Surveyors/Geospatial professionals working in Nuclear anywhere in the world see this and want to reach out I'd love to chat.
Nuclear is the true renewable green energy source
There's been many other incidents and accidents involving nuclear materials, including power generation, radiological medical waste, nuclear material processing facilities, and nuclear-powered transport (submarines and ships).
Giant Iron Nitride Permanent Magnet Motor Can Spin Another Giant Electric Generator 100% Clean Energy, Thausands Gw Is Possible Depends On Size.
You might want to try Reddit to find other professionals to chat with. :)
@@AshleyEllwood Reddit has passed me by but I’ll give it a shot thanks 🙏
We need to find a way to penalise companies that dont hold to budgets. 300million over budget for that French nnuclear reactor is ridiculous.
Glad to see nuclear power making a comeback as it is far more important to our future than people understand.
Hippies ruined the nuclear, imagine if the US had enough nuclear to be fossil fuel free in the national grid.
Yes, because of all the useless waste. There is literally no use for it, its just expensive.
the aftermath is unimaginable but who cares what you leave behind for coming generations because american dream is about you not the world.
@@Mattihacker nuclear waste can be recycled and what can’t be recycled can be stored deep beneath the ground on the site it’s produced,
Solar and wind produce a lot more waste that ends up in dump polluting the environment
Given that population will grow and human energy consumption keeps increasing we need reliable source of energy
@@ManOfSteel1 yeah have an actual research and see how much rubbish ends up in dumps from solar panels and wind turbines, plus nuclear energy is what will be needed to power cities of tomorrow as populations grow and our consumption of energy grows as well, it far more sustainable and cleaner than you think.
Nuclear waste can be literally stored on the site deep underground and
Most now will be possible to recycle anyways
And the reactors of today already are built with a lot more precautions than the ones building 10years ago.
I really hope that nuclear makes a bigger comeback in the US
I'd echo your sentiment with the caveate that they come out with a clear and understandable plan to deal with the waste that doesn't involve burying it in poor rural people's back yard combined with actively ignoring said poor people's elevated cancer rates.
@@mh3535 If safely contained and sealed in barrels, it shouldn’t be a problem.
@@mh3535 not to dismiss your point, but there is little to no increase in cancer near storage facilities since they are so deep (900 feet) . Hell the risk of cancer is shown to be higher if you live near a coal plant than near a nuclear plant.
@@eannamcnamara9338 Tell Kevin D Blanch that. PHD nuclear Scientist. Go to his youtube page and find the real truth.
You don't need to bury the vast majority of it anywhere. 95% of fuel rods can be recycled.
LOVE your videos, HATE the ads in the middle, LOVE my fast-forward buttons on the computer.
I've never understood the description of Three Mile Island as being one of the worst nuclear accidents.
The contingency plans were carried out. Every emergency procedure worked. No one was hurt.
That is kind of the point. It was one of the worse (nuclear) accidents; much smaller than RE accidents.
Shhhh, how are you going to spread fear and hate if everyone finds that out??? Sensationalism sells. Unfortunately.
So that's the point. If lightning strikes and nothing happens, everyone will still crap.
I recommend doing a video on Ottawa’s light rail system expansion like you did about Seattle’s, which isn’t talked about enough and is one of the biggest transit expansions if not the biggest in North America
Yes, shine a light to investigate how terrible the whole project is and what the city repeat mistakes when the second phase opens. Or perhaps they'll just make a set of new ones. No matter what I'm sure that the riders will be blamed for all of the problems of Watson's Folly.
The problem with the main forms of “clean” energy like nuclear, hydro, solar, wind is that we cannot ramp those up or down as demand increases and decreases. Nuclear plants can take days to ramp up and slow down. Solar and wind are at the mercy of natural forces. Until we can find a way to store excess energy at a utility scale, “clean” energy will be very difficult to fully implement. Natural gas plants can be ramped up and down to balance demand and production in real time.
Nuclear doesn't take days to ramp up or down, otherwise they wouldn't be used in naval ships like carriers and submarines. I think you may be confusing that with the time it takes to Start Up or Shutdown a reactor which only happens for refueling.
@@STFdud you are correct, technically we can ramp up power on nuclear quickly, but it is seldomly done. In the US we like to ease in and ease off on nuclear power plants so that tests can be run. On the way up and down. Typically I don’t think you will see much faster ramp up/ramp down than about 1-2 MW per minute in normal operation, so you’re talking a few hours, not a few days like I said. We also typically run our nuclear at 100% to cover base load so it doesn’t have to ramp up and ramp down. Since they are so expensive, let those babies run full throttle 24/7! Naval ships may be allowed to go up and down more quickly, and I am sure MUCH quicker in an emergency, but typically run at a fairly steady speed.
Nuclear must be pretty damn safe if the Three Mile Island is considered "one of the worst nuclear disasters ever"
Not a single person died. Something even hydroelectric cannot claim.
And does not kill birds like windmills.
Right up there with that time I left the oven on.
Even factoring the three worst nuclear disasters in history -- Windscale, Chernobyl and Fukushima Daichi -- into the mix, the total number of people who have died from nuclear accidents in 70+ years of reactor operation wouldn't fill a college basketball arena. From 50,000 to 80,000 die annually from fossil fuel power generation pollution, the 1975 Banqiao dam collapse in China killed 100,000, the 1979 Machchu dam collapse in India killed 25,000, and the 1986 Bhopal chemical disaster in India killed 50,000. A bit over 9300 a year die within Louisiana's Cancer Alley, the 85 mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where the state's petrochemical industry -- 200 chemical plants and oil refineries -- is located. Three Mile Island didn't even reach the level of a full meltdown and there was no breach of the reactor vessel. So in comparison, yeah, nuclear is "pretty damn safe".
@@LordZontar People talk about the irradiated area that should have never happened in the first place in chernobyl, but what about the oil spills straight into the ocean? like tf?
@@jackman5840 Or the BP Deep Horizon oil platform spill in the Gulf of Mexico back in 2010.
I remember learning about this project way back in like 2013 and I was like oh my God. finally, we're getting some new nuclear but then of course delayed delayed delay. I'm so happy this is finally getting completed. we need more of this stuff, power our country into the future and beyond
Dude, at $15 billion each, these plants produce power at 3 times the cost of a natural gas plant
@@clarkkent9080 yes, but at some point we’re gonna run out of natural gas. And nuclear power plants produce at maximum capacity over 90 percent of the time, marking it a more reliable source than natural gas and coal. Plus, as time goes on and the more we build, it will become cheaper like everything else.
@@clarkkent9080 With over 6 times the power output.
90% of these delays and cost overruns is because people in america forgot how to build. There isn't even a workforce capable of doing it anymore. People had to be trained on the job leading to delays. Things get done and have to be redone because people didn't do it right.
If nuclear reactors are built more, these inefficiencies will get ironed out because economies of scale.
@@SourDonut99 I don't think it is quite as simplistic as that but you are not too far off the truth. But how many utilities are willing to build grossly cost inefficient plants hoping that things will get better in the future?
I can finally mark being involved in a project that the B1M does a video on off my bucket list Plant vogtle ftw!
Saying TMI was the worst accident in US history is a good thing considering people can still live in the area and not be affected by radiation in any harmful way.
It just destroyed a multi-billion dollar brand new plant, cost $1 billion just to clean up the melted fuel, and containment so contaminated that there are no plans to ever clean it up. A success story if ever there was one
It's almost like the more you learn about it, the less scary and divisive it should be
American politics summed up "why deal with the opposition when you can just not build anything."
It’s been there for years now
I think he needs to rephrase that! The AP1000 that were built in China aren’t up to quality standards and regulatory standards in the US. Source former employee on the AP1000
Imagine that.
Big mistake on the Flamanville reactor in France. You said it was going to be 300 million over. That's the latest added cost, but there has been numerous budget corrections since the beginning of the project... In reality, the project was first estimated to cost around 4 billion, and now it's gonna cost 19 billion... Not exactly the same thing...
the flamanville reactor is a fucking shitshow right now, continual building errors and idiotic mistakes that shouldnt be made but keep getting made. Gotta love stagnation in industry.
I just wanted to say that in the Focushima nuclear disaster many people died ...
1 person to be exact
Not 1 thousand or 1 million. Just a single worker
Nope, not even one death. You didn't research enough.
Nobody died in 3-mile island from radiation, i don’t understand why it’s considered such a horrendous disaster. The meltdown was well contained
well, a 3 month old multi billion dollar nuclear plant was trashed, never ran again, cost $1 billion to just clean up the melted fuel and the containment is so contaminated that it is not even scheduled to be cleaned up till 2039, 60 years after the accident.
NOW do you understand?
No one died from Fukushima radiation either, yet the Greenies always want to try to kill nuclear.
@klerkcant9080 When all factors are considered, nuclear is cheaper, cleaner, safer and more reliable than ruinables.
NOW do you understand?
@@clarkkent9080 No.
@@Cobbido yes
It’s crazy how I’m interested in nuclear energy and live in the US but didn’t know any of this. Thanks! 👏
You're not alone. Followed by Hollyweird the industry is it's own worst enemy when it comes to PR, and our education system is equally to blame.
I really enjoy your videos and always look forward to a new one. GREAT Job!
Excellent documentary well done✓
The real matatan.🤔.
1:54 Mark Nelson really nails the "Supervillain mugshot" here, amazing mustache & attire
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While cost overruns are not good news, I still prefer that they do it right.
B1M made a very big omission. TerraPower is building a new type reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming at a coal fired power plant site. It is scheduled to come online 2028. I’m looking forward to driving or flying down for the opening from Cody, Wyoming. It will be the first of new design nuclear plants. These reactors can make use of “spent” rods stored in existing rector sites.
Wyoming does not exist, what are you talking about?
@@Anverse-14 you won a giveaway text me on telegram to claim your prize
That’s all false. Nobody is currently “building” a power reactor in WY. There is no license to build a TP reactor design in WY or anywhere else in the US, and certainly not online in 6 years.
All of that is physically possible, but none of it is allowed politically. If you want that changed insist on reform from the people who get your vote.
Sorry but Russia was going to make their fuel and you know the problem with that. Now the whole project is on hold until the U.S. taxpayer builds a plant to make their fuel here. They will not break ground for at least 10 years
Would be great to see a video on the TerraPower nuclear plant project in Wyoming. Idea for a future video.
I was a Sr. Safety Specialist on the Vogtle Project for over 8 years. It had it's challenges but I am very proud of it's success. Bechtel made it happen.
I worked in the nuclear industry for 40+ years at 5 different facilities and am very pro-nuclear.
I believe it was 2016 when then DOE Secretary Moniz was asked about the future of nuclear power in America. He stated that the future of nuclear power was playing out at VC Summer in SC. and Vogtle in Ga. and if they were successful, then nuclear power had a bright future in America. That simple statement says it all. Until the issues with the U.S. construction industry are addressed, nothing will change.
Vogtle and VC Summer project management and construction crafts have doomed new nuclear in the U.S.
No one that EVER worked on either of these projects in a exempt role should EVER be allowed on any future nuclear project. The problem was not with anti-nukes, the media, greenies, politicians, or the NRC. The problem was with the people that worked there and yes I am mad as h3ll
@@clarkkent9080 so funny that joseph never replied
@@ibrahim-sj2cr These people in management positions at those two nuclear projects have killed new nuclear in the U.S. and need to held accountable
So three miles island is one of the worst nuclear accident in history, an accident with no casualties and no impact outside the plant. This tell a lot about the safety of nuclear energy.
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Looking forward to how this turns out. Nice video. Keep up the good work.
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Great video! You could do your investigation as well in France, and tell us why the EPR is taking much more time and money than what has been told!
Same story, here in Europe we forgot how to build NPPs, similarly building Olkiluoto 3 and Mochovce 3 and 4 way over budget and delayed. Whats crazy, Mochovce NPP in Slovakia was continuation of frozen project, with almost all structural work already done. Thanks god, Olkiluoto is running and Mochovce 3 just few days ago started chain reaction at minimum power level and next milestone is first grid sync and energetic startup.
"There goes Albany!"
-Carl, the simpsons...
LOVE IT
That’s Lenny.
Fascinating, it always comes down to a guy with a tape measure at 6:53.
Not surprised about the issues with building new Nuclear Power Plants. My Dad worked on several. First one was in Rowe Mass. Designed in 1955 and built and on line by 1960. 3 & 1/2 years from ground breaking to online . No issues with the reactor system ever. Everyone needs to remember it's just an electric power plant with a reactor heating the water (one of 3 water systems).
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But today, it has been proven to be too expensive
@@clarkkent9080 Not really. All a reactor is, is a way to make steam. Last part of the cycle is exactly the same for any power plant. You can really up "the cost figures" if you want to but remember the turbines etc would be the same cost no matter the source of the steam. Comparison cost should only be the reactor vs the other steam source. BTW cooling towers were never really required and should be removed. They were never required by any other type of power plant.
The construction of "smaller" modular nuclear plants is still to happen commercially. As the UK showed, if you don't build new nuclear for ages, then you lose talent and muscle memory. Meanwhile Europe needs big plants and even the French have not built new plants for ages. We are still awaiting more self-compensating "cheaper" nuclear that can attract private capital, avoid massive over-runs in cost and meeting time schedule plus avoid chronic time delay in planning. Meanwhile many existing plants need to be refurbished just to remain working safely. Upgrading existing plants to extend their lifetime and boost efficiency from what was on offer in the 1970's will be as big a project as any new ones plus the old ones exist, work and not everything would need to be upgraded to extend their power generation lifetime. However retrofitting will cost as much if not more
OL3 is going start on December here in Finland. The most expensive building in the world.
It's up and running but not at full capacity till December.
Three Mile Island cost a lot of money, but no one was hurt. The radiation released was equivalent of a few airline trips. Cost over runs come largely from political delays.
Well. The oil industry will spend every dime they have to prevent this.
Great timing finally ! Optimistic.
We'd probably be significantly closer to fusion power if we hadn't started dropping nuclear decades ago when it was cheaper to invest into nuclear.
Can you do an episode on the Childrens Hospital in Dublin, Ireland? It's an absolute shambles and is the most expensive hospital in the world. Nothing but delays and over budget.
5:40 Flamanville will not cost 300 million more as mentioned, the costs will be over 10bn instead 3.3bn, with a delay of over 10years! Same problems in Europe as in the US (Hinkley Point C in the UK is the same reactor, also built by EDF, time will show if they can sort out the problems of Flamanville, which was kind of a prototype with a cracy amount of problems and delays, similar than the Vogtle project…)
Three mile island was not the disaster you made it out to be, it was blown way out of proportion.
it wasn't even a disaster and more like a oopsie.
It only got a bad rap due to dumb media being dumb
Didn't kill anyone with radiation but it did kill the nuclear industry... so, quite the disaster in a way...
@@dickmelsonlupot7697 really im sure the towns many cancer survivors and victims would take issue there if they could.
Yet a lot of people still don’t appreciate all the factors that led to the disaster despite it being a great learning opportunity
@@brian2440
People don't remember the actual reasons and only focus on the supposed "disaster" itself without even knowing the actual truth behind the incident.
And this mostly because of media who were the main culprits in the misinformation about the incident and nuclear power in general
5:36 wasnt Flamville 3 planned for 2012 with ~3 billion € and now is not even finished in 2022 after ~12 billion €?
Cus there is no other way. Renewable tech needs too much copper / lithium to be considered green at all
I appreciate the segway to Nord VPN and way you said it is fine. But the security of VPN is to IT security of a power plant is like a pet door is to home security. I really wish channels stop equating VPN with other topics.
uhhh three mile island was caused by HUMAN error. "oh. we got a problem. ok turn off the water for a WATER cooled reactor. that'll fix it." sheer brilliance there.
I read a book about it, it’s called “Meltdown: A Race Against Nuclear Disaster at Three Mile Island” by Willborn Hampton. From what I could understand it was due to a lot of stupid mistakes, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that Met-Ed (the operator of the plant) wasn’t very transparent during the whole thing.
But imagine how many jobs this creates as well as how long PROPER power supply will be provided.
Splitting atoms can be done safely and reliably, let's get building more plants!!Vogtle has the right idea and drive.
It’s depressing that politicians let paranoia dictate policy while ignoring science.
I've got to think one of the reasons why the projects are behind schedule and have cost overruns is because no reactor has been built in 30 or 40 years. All of the skilled workers have either retired or died. If more of these are built, companies and their workers will have the experience and things will be streamlined.
These delays were also common in the 70s.
Exactly. Now that we have a team that has relearned the nuclear power plant construction process use them again and I guarantee they won't make the same mistakes.
@@keeganbrown9967 Yeh... tell that to the French and Finns... they thought that and still cannot keep any project to budget.
Hate to tell you, bub, but we're still around and kicking, still know all that stuff, have passed it down, and will gladly consult several hours a week for way too much $$$$. And just why you'd want to build a plant with obsolete methods is beyond me. They're just large amounts of concrete and (special) steel, oh and copper; nothing magic or mysterious about them.
Baseload of a city of mega city is really huge. If we are pushing ev charging it will be even more so. There is going to be certain amount of electricity consumption by this area all the time, day and night. Nuclear power is by far the only solution we known that can provide this stability of supply. So it is either we change how we live or we found out solution that are even more stable.
Off-shore wind. Geothermal. Both capable of baseload power. Investments haven't been made in these technologies either in the last 30 years in America.
@@sandal_thong8631 geothermal is great if you live on Iceland. It is next to useless in most places. Moreover, as someone who lives in Denmark: your belief in offshore wind is unwarranted. Sometimes the wind actually doesn’t blow much, even out there on the sea.
@@peterfireflylund I hadn't heard of "wind droughts" before today. But I guess that's another consequence of global warming, likely related to "jetstream stalling".
Excellent presentation, as always. I would like to see you delve into Liquid fluoride thorium reactor projects going on around the world and give us your unique perspective. Pros, cons? Who is leading research? etc.
Not much for LFTR. Loads of people talking about it, not much actual activity. The only serious player is China who have apparently completed construction on a test reactor. No idea how well their tests are going (or if its even been started up yet) however.
All of the other potential competitors are either still in R&D phase, still trying to gather funding, or have already folded. I'm not sure anyone aside from China even has a test plant under construction at the moment never mind operating.
Of course that's just from easily available information. Always possible there's some companies out there operating in dark mode that are way closer than anyone outside of their employees knows. Suppose it still would be nice for an actual investigative journalist to go do a review of the industry as opposed to some rando on a TH-cam comment with knowledge gleaned entirely from a few minutes on Google :D.
I read an interesting comment by someone who explained very well why a thorium reactor would never work. I'll see if I can find it.
warning, nuclear physicist talking.
Anything you watch or read when they talk about Thorium, do the Protactinium test: Ctrl+F "Protactinium".
If you've heard about Thorium, you might remember that 232Th is not a nuclear fuel per se, it must be turn into the good stuff 233U; thats the one that will fission and give you your energy from fission, to turn into heat, steam, etc. Think of it like a recipe, you have butter and flower, you mix them to get the shortbread that you want. See how easy it is for everybody to get some shortbread?
Except everybody also like to gloss over that between the "butter/flower" step and the "shortbread" step, there's a "white phosphorous neurotoxic napalm" step that might make things a bit more complicated the kitchen. That's your 233Pa.
So it goes 232Th+n -> 233Pa -> 233U.
This is when you say: "but wait 233c, this is just like 239Pu is produced from 238U: 238U+n -> 239Np -> 239Pu, this is happening all the time in normal nuclear power plants. What's the difference?". The difference is the same as between 2 and 27.
239Np (the step between Uranium 238 and Plutonium 239) has a half life of 2 days, while 233Pa (the thing between Thorium and Uranium 233) has one of 27 days. If you leave 239Np in the core it will quickly turn into 239Pu, but you can't leave 233Pa in the core for a month or it will capture more neutrons and turn into something else than 233U. (there's also a matter of cross section: 233Pa has a much higher probability of capturing neutrons than 239Np). If you leave your butter and flower too long in the over you'll get a brick rather than a shortbread.
If you want to use Thorium, you must: expose your Th; extract your 233Pu; let it decay into 233U; feed the 233U back to your reactor.
By now you should understand why liquifying the fuel make so much more sense for Th than for U. It's not "MSR work so well with Thorium", it "if you want to continuously extract your 233Pa, you'd better do it with a liquid fuel".
this is where you say "Ok, but still don't see the issue, you just pump and filter your fuel to recover the 233Pa, and let it decay in a tank, and pump/filter the 233U back in for it to fission".
I'm going to assume that you know what a Becquerel and a Sievert are.
Remember the 27 days? with the density of 233Pa, that translates into 769TBq/g (Tera is for 1012 , that's a lot), and because of the high energy gamma from our friend 233Pa, that also means a dose rate at 1m from a 1g teardrop of 233Pa of 20,800mSv/h. Starting to get a picture?
Notice how all the numbers I've use are not "engineering limits" that few millions in R&D can bend, those are hardwired physical constants of Nature: half life, density, neutron capture cross section, gamma energy. Good luck changing those by throwing $ at them.
Now try to imagine technicians working in those plants, like doing some maintenance, replacing a pump (I haven't even touched the complex chemical separation system you need to extract your 233Pa from your fuel or 233U from your 233Pa, which will definitely need maintenance). Let's put it this way: if there is 1mg of 233Pa left in the component they are working on, they'll reach their annual dose limit in 1h.
Now try to imagine the operating company of those plant, if you have the tiniest leak, like a tiny poodle, you can't send anybody in for months, meaning you are loosing month of revenue because of a tiny leaky seal failure, what would be a trivial event anywhere else (did I mention that molten salts also have corrosion issues).
When they say "Thorium has been used in research MSR", they mean "we've injected some Thorium and detected 233U" or maybe even just "we've injected 233U in the fuel".
So my humble opinion is that playing with it in the lab is one thing, turning it into actual power plants is slightly more problematic.
here are more numbers trying to imagine an industrial scale Thorium reactor.
TL;DR: Thorium will probably never leave the labs to reach industrial, electricity production scale. The physics is sound, the engineering and actual practical operating constrains just kill the concept.
@@tonyadler1319 And I have read many scientific papers on how one does work. So don't waste your time.
@@Watchyn_Yarwood I was just presenting information not trying to change your mind, something I could care less about.
Loved the video, just one minor issue. What happened at Three Mile Island wasn't a nuclear disaster, it was purely a PR disaster. Nobody involved was ever in any real danger.
Multi billion dollar brand new plant suffers partial fuel meltdown. $1 billion to just clean up the fuel. Containment so contaminated that there is no plans of ever cleaning it up. Yea, that is only a PR issue just like 911
I live next to Darlington Nuclear Plant in Canada, it KICKS ASS!!! Our power is always on 24/7, super stable, and when it does go out, the Power crews are lightning fast at restoring service :) Ontario Nuclear Power is the shizznit.
How could a country that invented the word "tsunami," not take it into account when building a nuclear reactor by the beach?
What, modifying your plant to current standards (which would have addressed the issues) would be admitting that you had made a mistake in the past!!! Culturally a very bad thing, hari kari and all that fall on your sword crap! So you just ignore all that stuff, recommended improvements are not allowed. Tada, Fukushima, via traditional culture stigma.
Hi Fred, another great video. I’d love to see you make a video on the construction of Hinkley point. Massive, and similarly complex to this one
We need a bit of a building boom to replace the current old power plants, hopefully a bit more assembly line construction brings down the cost.
It might sound nice,but you never reach the point of "mass assembly" with this to bring down the cost.
Every reactor is different because you have new designs that take advantage of new developments in technology.
Really the only cost savings you would achieve with an assembly line aka build more reactors the same way is less planning, not in part production. The reality is you might only be building them in the 10s not the tens of thousends...
and also for this to be practical you would need to start the process of new reactors in a close timeframe of oneanother, ideally all at the same time after the first "test" build.
@@MrMcMind It'll never be mass manufacture but when every new reactor is a one-off then no wonder it gets expensive. The talent pool goes away to do other things if there is not a constant stream of new builds being started. Maybe Small Modular Reactors can solve that, if someone actually starts building them...
7:38 'Well a lot and... no.' Lost it hahaha
Thanks for watching and commenting. You have been selected in my draw✨Winners should text on telegram to claim prize. (Only Winners). 🧭🧭
You should make a video of the nuclear power plant OL3 here in Finland. It's become a common joke to speak from it. It was supposed to finnish in 2009 and cost 3,2 B€ but it's still going through final testing and has cost more than 3x the original budget.
Those cost overruns and decade long construction delays are such tragedies. They are the reasons why the utilities have made resolutions to never, ever again order a new nuclear power plant to be built. So sad. 😢
Not sure where you got your number for the Flamanville reactor in France but it's not $300M over budget. Based on wikipedia, it's $9B over budget with an initial estimated cost of $3.3B. Similar issues for that reactor and the one in the US: loss of expertise on how to build these things.
And massive overregulation for “safety”… it’s not “just” the loss of the supply chain and expertise.
One thing the nuclear industry really should do more of is standardizing and modularizing things. Thats why i love small modular reactors (SMR). They are exactly the kind of thing the industry needs. A one size fits all, easy to operate reactor design that you can just plonk down wherever you need.
There was a short period where lots of the videos started all feeling like ads for the projects or software used by them and the videos got a bit too forced almost. Happy to say that recently that seems to have mostly disappeared, and the videos feel great and organic - not like there's an ad being forced onto me. Thanks for the good content :)
I noticed that, as well. Felt like I was watching the AutoCAD Teams Collaboration channel there for a while.
The world needs nuclear power. Renewable energy is inadequate to meet the world's energy requirement. Nuclear energy is most tangible resource we have available to address, effectively, the threat of global warming.