Nuclear's Failure is the Contractors' Fault

If the machinations of Big Oil are not the reason that nuclear power failed to live up to its promise, perhaps it is the Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) contractors. Look at the mess they made of Vogtle and Summer and Flamanville and Olkioluto! They can't even make a feedpump that runs for more than a month or two. They don't have the skills to design, plan, and build a nuclear power plant. If they would just do a better job, nuclear would not be the tragic failure it is.

But from a purely technical point of view, the skills required to construct a nuclear power plant are the skills required to build a coal plant. And in fact the EPC contractors are the same, and their vendors are the same. In many respects, a coal plant is tougher and more complicated. The temperatures are higher. The pressures are higher. You must handle a 100,000 times as much fuel. And for every unit of fuel, you have more than 10 times as much pollutant laden stack gas. Technically, the nuclear plant is the simpler problem.

In 2015, the Dutch utility RWE commissioned their Eemshaven plant in the northeast corner of Holland at a cost of 2.2 billion euros. This is a little under $1500/kW for a 2 by 800 MW plant. This is for the latest and greatest ultra-super-critical plant meeting stringent EU pollution limits. And they are so sure of their feedpump reliability, they provide only one per plant, despite the high cost of downtime.

Figure 1: Eemshaven: 2 by 800 MW USC coal plant, 46.2% efficiency

But the same people who have no problem throwing up a coal plant on a fixed price, turn key basis, all of a sudden turn into incompetents when they are faced with a nuclear plant. The same people who built nuclear plants in the late 1960's for less than 3 cents per kWh in current dollars can't complete a plant in 2022 for triple that, despite all the technical advances we have had in the last 60 years. What turns these smoothly functioning coal plant engineers into hopeless bumblers when they try and do a nuclear plant? Whatever that disease is, it wasn't around in the 1960's.

Maybe it's the reactor vendors. These idiots keep changing their design! If they had only stuck with a single, standard design, then the explosion in cost and build times would have been avoided.

This argument holds less water than an upside down colander. The first American reactors were entirely new designs, and they were also the cheapest in real terms. One country that was successful in holding its build times constant is Japan, Figure 2. Between 1965 and 2009, Japan built 60 reactors. Excluding experimental reactors, the Japaneses fleet comprises 9 different designs, and 28 different combinations of design and ratings. Improvements reduce cost and built times. They do not increase them.

Figure 2. Japanese NPP build times. Graph courtesy Geoff Russell. Data from IAEA PRIS database.

In 1960, coal plants were a mature, reliable technology. But the same incompetents, who have become progressively worse at building nuclear plants since 1960, have improved coal plant efficiency by close to 70% over the same period, Figure 3. while sulfur and particulate emissions have been reduced by better than a factor of 20. Why did they not stick with their standard 1960 design?

Figure 3. Coal plant thermal efficiency, 1950-2020.

The lousy EPC contractor/vendor argument is nonsense. Something is preventing these guys from using their demonstrated skills. Once again we must look elsewhere for the reason for nuclear's abject failure to live up to its promethean promise.