World's Biggest Banks Pledge Support For Nuclear Power
- Reference: 0175123827
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/09/24/188243/worlds-biggest-banks-pledge-support-for-nuclear-power
- Source link:
[2]non-paywalled link
, a move that governments and the industry hope will unlock finance for a new wave of nuclear power plants. FT:> At an event on Monday in New York with White House climate policy adviser John Podesta, institutions including Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will say they support a goal first set out at the COP28 climate negotiations last year to triple the world's nuclear energy capacity by 2050.
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> They will not spell out exactly what they would do, but nuclear experts said the public show of support was a long-awaited recognition that the sector had a critical role to play in the transition to low-carbon energy. The difficulty and high cost of financing nuclear projects has been an obstacle to new plants and contributed to a significant slowdown in western countries since a wave of reactors was built in the 1970s and 1980s.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/96aa8d1a-bbf1-4b35-8680-d1fef36ef067
[2] https://www.businessinsider.in/finance/news/wall-street-warms-to-nuclear-power-as-banks-including-goldman-sachs-reportedly-back-new-push/articleshow/113600799.cms
Batteries would have been a better play (Score:2, Insightful)
Access to energy isn't a huge problem. Wind and solar are pretty cheap these days and don't require huge over-budget engineering projects and deep government backing. The real problem is how and where to store the extra energy you produce to smooth out power availability. With CATL, Samsung, and others working on far more powerful solid state batteries that are slated for availability in 2028, maybe those batteries are a better pipe dream than the thought that any of these nuclear plants would come online?
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Data centers are not going to decrease in popularity any time soon and they have fairly fixed power requirements around the clock. Nuclear makes far more sense for any scenario where there is a relatively constant demand for power as it can produce that fixed demand. There are forms of renewable energy like geothermal that also work well in these situations, but wind and solar are going to need batteries to store excess for the times when they aren't operating at sufficient levels to supply the needed power
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We'll see. Oracle is looking around obtaining 3 SMRs to power its new AI data center.
[1]https://www.tomshardware.com/t... [tomshardware.com]
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/oracle-will-use-three-small-nuclear-reactors-to-power-new-1-gigawatt-ai-data-center
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It can be a combination of both. The problem with wind and solar is if you get over reliance on them and you have unusual conditions, low wind mid winter with overcast conditions. The most important thing for a grid is resilience. Nuclear is a valuable asset to a power grid.
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Solid state batteries are a great fit for electric vehicles and other electrified forms of transportation. But there are other battery chemistries that trade weight and power density for lower costs, greater longevity, and greater thermal tolerance that would be a better fit for stationary utility-scale energy storage.
Ars Technicia just had an article the other day on the subject: [1]link [arstechnica.com].
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/grid-scale-batteries-theyre-not-just-lithium/
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Pumped Storage Hydroelectricity (PSH) seems to be a very efficient option to solve intermittent source problem.
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Very location dependent, however.
Lip service (Score:4, Interesting)
Pledging support means nothing. If they don't treat investment in nuclear more than just a number on a profit vs risk statement then it is meaningless. They need to carve out nuclear and treat it as special case or it won't get any investment. At present the investment risk is huge, the payback is tiny, the profits are barely existent and that's before you get into the insurance issue.
Nuclear is a dead end if you treat it as a number which banks almost universally do.
Re: Lip service (Score:1)
The issues holding-back nuclear power plant construction have very little to do with access to financing, and have much more to do with political, environmental and regulatory issues.
If a power company announced it wanted to build a nuclear power plant, the environmentalists would start suing, and keep suing, the power company for the next two decades to prevent it. The politicians would cow-tow to the environmentalists, and the regulators would slow-walk the application approval process to suit their prefe
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Environmental review reform is something that is needed for every construction project in the US not just nuclear. Solar plants, highways, rail systems, tunnels, everything gets bogged down these days. I support regulations in general but there is plenty of space for reform and important reforms in there. .
It was an old episode i'll see if I can find it but on Ezra Klein's podcast he was interviewing Jerusalem Demsas who writes on this topic a lot and osmethign I blieve I am recalling is that in a lot of
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Another issue with nuclear is that after 3mi island the regulations put in place for new sites made the cost extremely high, plus any new site is bespoke. France got around this by choosing a “standard” site design used and locations specifically chosen to work with that design vs the other way around. If the US can revise regulations to make nuclear possible and come up with a strategy to leverage re-usable site design, it can come back. Anything is possible to reduce the cost while we all w
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Maybe you should provide evidence for your speculations.
Nuclear reactors simply aren't economically competitive, they generate electricity that is more expensive than almost anything. Even existing nuke plants are requiring $billions in federal subsidies just to keep running. Meanwhile a number licenses for new plants have been granted, mostly at places where there already are existing nuke plants so the environmental concerns have been sorted. Quite a few applications were withdrawn, probably because they
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Then why can both S. Korea and China do it? Even though they are using US technology? What's different there from here? Oh right, different government.
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Do you have anything to back up your claims of Nuclear cost being the highest? The EIA seems to claim otherwise. [1]https://www.eia.gov/electricit... [eia.gov] This is just a quick chart I saw, but I also saw data that I would be less confident of my interpretation on. Data seems to show that nuclear is most costly than hydro renewable, but is cheaper than fossil fuel generation.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_04.html
Re: (Score:1)
There was a study from MIT a few years back that investigated the rise in nuclear reactor building costs since the 1970s. Safety and regulatory costs accounted for around a third of the rise. Meanwhile, engineering, purchasing, planning, scheduling, supervision, and labor costs all rose significantly. Also mentioned in the study was a rise in inefficiencies, as project participants fumbled with increased complexity of such mega-projects.
Here is an article that summarized the study: [1]link [arstechnica.com]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/
Re:Lip service (Score:4, Insightful)
There is Big Tech money behind this. The banks want a bite of that apple. That's where this is coming from.
Big Tech is serious about spinning up nukes for data centers. Lunduke [1]did a video [youtube.com] about this a few days ago. The most recent big news on this is Microsoft aiming to restart the TMI-1 reactor in Pennsylvania. Oracle wants to build SMRs somewhere. Ellison hasn't said where.
Big Tech is Big Tech: highly lucrative. Nothing moves the needle like trucks full of money.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmW8eOv3Wi0
Banks aren't the problem. (Score:2, Insightful)
I know that everyone loves it when people come out and answer questions that nobody asked, but getting the financing doesn't seem to be the problem with building nuclear power.
Insurance, NIMBYs, lawsuits, government regulators; and of course the stratospheric cost are the problems.
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All the reasons you mentioned are things that makes the project take a lot of time, and this is where banks can help. A major drawback of building a Nuclear Powerplant is the cost of running interests on the debt that accumulates between the beginning of the project and the time the plant actually starts pushing power to the grid. Sabine Hossenfelder made a great YouTube video essay about the problems for building nuclear power plants in the US titled "Is nuclear power really that slow and expensive."
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> I know that everyone loves it when people come out and answer questions that nobody asked, but getting the financing doesn't seem to be the problem with building nuclear power..of course the stratospheric cost are the problems.
When laying out those challenges, try not to contradict Greed right out of the equation.
Theres a reason banks are even pledging a headline. A stratospheric fuckton of money, is often financed.
In related news, 5 or 6 slashdotters hardest hit (Score:1)
Asses chapped and egos bruised
Re: they are just protecting their stranded assets (Score:2)
And yet, he's right! It just comes down to what will earn them more. They're banks! It's about money. Nuclear will cost more and does cost more with long running guaranteed returns.
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You are both wrong. You assume that somehow the world can get by on just renewables. The laws of physics say otherwise. You can't even make solar panels without fossil fuels currently. The only way you could requires nuclear power. You think this is renewables vs ff. That's nonsense. FF uses renewables to prevent its actual competition which is nuclear. You can't make required fertilizers or anything that requires industrial heat without either FF or nuclear. And without those things, we can't supp
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> As these banks are heavily invested in fossil assets, they know that if they support the nuclear dream they will sustain our reliance on fossil. At least for another 20-30 years. As the building of nuclear power plants is so slow and usually gets delayed by more than 200% (read Flyvberg's book how big things get done) the banks know they can hold on to their fossil assets. Now, if we move to renewables, batteries included, the movement from fossil going to happen must faster. The US is a bit slow but in many other countries the growth of EV is replacing oil consumption already quickly. In order that not to happen, these banks want to pour (our not their) money into slowly built nuclear power plants and delay the energy transition. That is what they are promoting. Let's see if that is going to work. Nuclear power can not compete with the cheap and yearly getting cheaper solar, wind and batteries.
I applaud your combination of conjecture, rumor, and old-world style thought toward anyone rich being in cahoots with one another. Have you thought about writing fiction, rather than claptrap nonsense on the web? You could probably come up with a terrific alt-history take on this situation, and sell it as fiction. Probably pays better than shitposting too. Well, maybe. Selling books is hard.
Re: (Score:2)
How about reading the WNA's own assessment of nuclear power economics as it pertains to nuclear's inability to compete with renewables?
[1]https://world-nuclear.org/info... [world-nuclear.org]
I mean, as opposed to just your average, everyday ad hominem attacks...
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power