The US government and the owners of Westinghouse, Brookfield Asset Management and Cameco, have struck an $80 billion deal to build a fleet of nuclear reactors, using funding from a trade agreement with Japan.
They had formed a new partnership to provide the reactor technology for the plants, which would help reach the US goal to quadruple US nuclear capacity to 400 Gigawatts by 2050.
They will build eight Westinghouse AP1000 power plants or a mix of larger facilities and small modular reactors. Each two-unit Westinghouse AP1000 project creates or sustains 45,000 manufacturing and engineering jobs in 43 states, and a national deployment will create more than 100,000 construction jobs.
The AP1000 reactor is a gen 3.5 advanced reactor, with fully passive safety systems, modular construction design and the smallest footprint per MWe on the market. There are six AP1000 reactors currently setting operational performance and availability records worldwide with 14 additional reactors under construction and five more under contract. The AP1000 technology has been selected for nuclear energy programs in Poland, Ukraine and Bulgaria.
China purchased some AP1000 reactors and then made their own similar designs.
Brookfield and Cameco formed a strategic partnership to acquire Westinghouse in October 2022.
If the US spends the full $80bn on Westinghouse reactors, it would hold rights to 20 per cent of Westinghouse profits once it distributes $17.5bn to its current owners.
The US government can also require Westinghouse to go public if its value exceeds $30 billion by 2029 and then convert its profit share into an equity stake in the company of up to 20 per cent.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Someone please explain why nuclear is better than solar plus batteries. It is more expensive and will remain so, even before the eventual cost overruns. It will take at least 10 years to build a single one.
The only downside to solar is the equivalent amount of land required.
The answer is, it’s not more expensive once you pile on enough storage and excess capacity to render solar reliable.
To produce 1kW day of power in GOOD weather, you need 5kW nameplate capacity. And about 16kWh of storage.
But, in bad weather solar panels can produce as little as 10% of their nameplate capacity.
So, to RELIABLY produce 1kW 24 hours a day, pure solar, you need 50kW nameplate capacity, and 16 kW hours of battery. And somewhere to dump the excess power on sunny days.
Or 1kW worth of nuclear.
Solar advocates price out their systems assuming they can freeload on reliable conventional or nuclear sources during the night and bad weather, and not pay for idling them when the sun is shining.
If a Democrat president did this, everyone would be accusing him of being a communist taking over the means of production. Partially state owned enterprises may be a good idea but only when there are competent engineers in government to understand what they’re getting into. Do we have that anymore in the current administration?
Answer: democrat president would never do this. They would fund Solyndra. Not that Mr. Trump is good republican. I wonder how much to equip many homes with solar roofs and batteries for supplement to nuclear? Cui bono publico? Rich get richer, the rest are left behind.
So, all these instances of the federal government taking partial ownership of Intel or Westinghouse is like US Title Code 16 – which created TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority)?
Wiki: “Title 16 of the United States Code outlines the role of conservation in the United States Code.”
Are we becoming like France or something? Where the government owns businesses (like Framatome)?
I can’t complain. If they get eight AP1000s under construction before the current administration is over, then we’ll get up the learning curve and figure it out. Might not ever be cheap, but certainly should be able to cut the costs in half relative to Vogtle.