Korea has started a new 1350 MWe Shin Kori 4 reactor and will connect it to the electricity grid at the end of this month. It is the second APR-1400 reactor to start up of a planned global fleet of at least 10. Two other APR1400 are under construction at the Shin Kori location and are scheduled for completion in early and late 2022. Two further APR-1400 units are under construction in South Korea as units 1 and 2 of the Shin Hanul site.
Four APR-1400s are under construction at Barakah in the United Arab Emirates.
China Completed Its First Nuclear Power Uprate
China has uprated its oldest power reactor, Qinshan 1, to 350 MWe (net) from its original 300 MWe. This was China’s first nuclear power uprate.
SOURCE- World Nuclear News
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Thanks for the links. They were very informative.
Unskilled labour is cheaper in UAE, but skilled labour is more expensive. Logistics is problematic.
In fact, i have seen much lower calculations for South Korea:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Construction-cost-of-APR1400_tbl3_308939383
This is about $2B per GW.
In this article there is a chart where you can see how the cost went down from $4000/kW in the 1970s to some $2400/kW now:
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us-france-korea
Im actually glad you made me look that up.
At the same time, South Korea is also starting to invest in a Global Decommissioning Industry. Like the US, money is being made on both ends of nuclear energy. Holtec International Decommissioning Division has acquired several scheduled decommission sites.
It depends on where the land is. I assume they will only place renewable where it is economically viable.
The price of labor will be much higher in Japan than in the Middle East. I am willing to split the difference and say $44 billion.
4 ABWR reactors bought in bulk would cost $30-$40 billion and provide 5.3GWe.
As for the cost of land i’d wager that the land that could produce 5.3GWe using solar PV would cost several hundred times more than the cost of the land for a nuclear station.
Frances electricity prices are competitive though.
South Korea never stopped building NPPs, so they don’t get as much in their own way like i.e. EDF does.
The Barakah Nuclear Plant will cost some $25 Billion for 5.38 GWe (4*APR-1400). Accordingly, replacing the Fukushima site’s 4,7GW, as you mention below, would be $22 Billion, not $60B.
Everyone forget the loss of six nuclear reactors at a replacement cost of $60 billion. The cost of the land around the site and the continuing cost of removing the nuclear fuel and returning the site to normal.
If it was coal fired power plants, all it would have taken to return them to production would be six months and a $billion.
The “Fukushima disaster” was that 16,000 people were killed by a giant wave. Worse yet, 1600 more were killed by bad policy which led to unneeded evacuations (including hospitals). Dozens more excess deaths are caused each year by air pollution from Japan’s increased coal use to offset the misguided nuke closures.
Still zero radiation deaths.
Most “Modern” nuclear power plants are not modern. Even this Korean plant is a refinement of a Gen III plant.
Consider the nature of the loose safety practices that contributed to the Fukushima disaster I would not say the shutdowns were premature. The shutdown were done to give the nuclear power plants time to review their safety practices and to remedy short comings.
And that is the point. Only France gets more than 25% of their electricity from nuclear power and they do so with load following nuclear power plants. Modern nuclear power plants are so expensive that it only make sense to run them full bore 24/7. So nuclear can only be part of the solution and not the entire solution.
On this website you can follow the real time and daily power generation in South Korea, and also in the Japanese island of Kyushu, which is very close, and presumably gets fairly similar weather. Both have enough nuclear to make a good proportion of their power – today at minimum demand, nuclear was 40% of Korea’s power, and 54% in Kyushu. Kyushu also has enough solar to make 5 GW at midday, but peak demand was a bit later. Since nuclear is on steadily 24 hours a day, and solar about 10 hrs, with a steep bell curve, nuclear makes much more of the power there. It would be more yet, but two reactors were permanently closed after Fukushima, and the former Japanese Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, was with the demonstrators protesting outside one of the ones they did reopen. Hopefully, the current President of Korea, Moon Jae-in, will be ouside waving banners in few years, when they restart some of the reactors he’s closed prematurely.
https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&countryCode=KR&remote=true
I will concede that sometimes conservation does not happen because of a separation of costs and control.
eg. A sufficiently large organisation (government or private, but government organisations are rarely small enough to avoid this) will have the people making operational decisions (do I turn these lights off?) unconnected with the budget decisions (how do I reduce the power bill?). Under such conditions the lights are not getting turned off if they interfere with something that DOES matter to the person making the decision (does this make it easier for me to walk through this area?).
Conservation happens by itself if the cost makes sense.
” The total electrical generation capacity of the nuclear power plants of South Korea is 20.5 GWe from 23 reactors. This is 22% of South Korea’s total electrical generation capacity and 29% of total electrical consumption.”
Since it is unlikely that they are importing from the north, it must be somewhat mixed.
Much easier to achieve with a mix of energy resources and conservation than just going with one solution.
Congratulations to Korea and the Arab Emirates. Just think south Korea can become energy independent their economy should boom and their quality of life should improve.