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Engineers Plan The Most Expensive Object Ever Built (bbc.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Ed Davey has an interesting story at BBC about the proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth. For that sum you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas -- the world's tallest building, in Dubai, which each cost $1.5 billion. You could build almost six Large Hadron Colliders, built under the border between France and Switzerland to unlock the secrets of the universe, and at a cost a mere $5.8 billion. Or you could build five Oakland Bay Bridges in San Francisco, designed to withstand the strongest earthquake seismologists would expect within the next 1,500 years at a cost of $6.5 billion...
But what about historical buildings like the the pyramids. Although working out the cost of something built more than 4,500 years ago presents numerous challenges, in 2012 the Turner Construction Company estimated it could build the Great Pyramid of Giza for $5 billion. That includes about $730 million for stone and $58 million for 12 cranes. Labor is a minor cost as it is projected that a mere staff of 600 would be necessary. In contrast, it took 20,000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days' labor. Using the current Egyptian minimum wage of $5.73 a day, that gives a labor cost of $445 million. But whatever the most expensive object on Earth is, up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110 billion.
But what about historical buildings like the the pyramids. Although working out the cost of something built more than 4,500 years ago presents numerous challenges, in 2012 the Turner Construction Company estimated it could build the Great Pyramid of Giza for $5 billion. That includes about $730 million for stone and $58 million for 12 cranes. Labor is a minor cost as it is projected that a mere staff of 600 would be necessary. In contrast, it took 20,000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days' labor. Using the current Egyptian minimum wage of $5.73 a day, that gives a labor cost of $445 million. But whatever the most expensive object on Earth is, up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110 billion.
For that sum you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas -- the world's tallest building, in Dubai, which each cost $1.5 billion.
At 23 trees that IS a very small forest.
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No mention of the great train project in California?
That will be a budget buster for sure. especially by the time all the bonds and loans are paid off......
And the Bay Bridge is falling apart!
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- as the summary states itself, the (long ago) planned International Space Station was much more expensive than this new power plant. And the ISS is more like "one object" than the new power plant is.
Just as they said, you could throw away all this nuclear plant construction money on completely worthless projects.
The ISS link takes me to the Firefox download page. WTF?
Include details on the actual object besides "nuke plant"?
Imagine how much the mice had to pay Magreia to build the Earth.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
What a load of rubbish. Slashdot posters repeatedly inform me that nuclear is cheap and widely scalable while renewables are way too expensive.
They've also kindly let me know that the reason that nuclear power plants go so ridiculously over budget is because of NIMBYs, nothing to do with the cost of engineering, construction difficulties, etc.
"I know you have questions." "That would be why I just asked them."
23 towers are probably cheaper than the price of 1 times 23.
Contract it to GE or Mitsubishi instead.
They've built these things before, and a hell of a lot more cheaply than that.
We just received 10 billion Euro loan from Russia to extend our nuclear plant. And the final price is usually double or triple of the original, that's about the same...
Is it just the building permit that cost so much?
Or are they going to build the entire thing out of platinum?
At about $1 watt (about current prices), 35 billion could buy 35GW of power. The UK is currently using 31GW of power! Ok, lets say that this price is negociable....as this is HUGE amount of solar panels.... So, lets say we can get it down to $15 billion, spending the other $20 billion on power storage for when its not sunny. And we need to space to put it, but how many houses in the UK still havent got solar on their roofs? isn't this a better idea?
It took me exactly 30 seconds;
http://money.cnn.com/gallery/n...
A lot of that money has little to do with building a nuclear power plant, and much more with the cost of massive regulations and legal challenges, as well as paying off corporations, unions, and "non profits".
Of course, nuclear power economics is also different from other sources, in that most of the cost of nuclear power is in construction, not fuel or maintenance. When all is said and done, nuclear power is cost competitive even at current fossil fuel prices, and if people are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear is pretty much the only option.
to demonstrate relative "expensiveness" this plant, by using current cost of production ( using current everyday technology and cheap labor, ) of a new pyramid is nonsense, given ancient cost of great pyramid (with then much scarce labor in then most advanced country with then most advanced technology )
absurdity of this approach can be demonstrated by comparing hypothetical selling prices(if they can be sold) of a newly constructed pyramid, with that of actual great pyramid.
it is the current valuation of the object that should matter not its construction cost when determining its "expensiveness".
Would you mind telling me anything important about the "object?" Like maybe what the fuck it's for? Is it fission or fusion? Production or research? Why does it cost so much? God damn.
The the pyramids? Are those where you put a layer of Soul Mining, and then a slightly smaller layer of Infected and so on?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Try 1 TRILLION dollars!
Yes, it is an object: WAR! ugh!
In Newfoundland it looks like we are going to spend 9.6 billion for a hydro plant that puts out 824 megawatts.........it is going to be 4.6 billion over budget..... All of a sudden that nuclear plant doesn't look so bad. Of course the problem could be that our current minister of finance is a part owner of a company that is subcontracted to the province............
Seems like we want to build a wall that extends over a thousand miles and maintain it. This will surely be many billions. And you can't force another country to give you money unless you threaten them with military force. Who wants more socialized programs to help the poor when we can just employ them creating one big wall, and patrol it afterwards?
seems not to be what the author of this news piece actually intended. Mr. HughPickens.com, what did you really mean?
>> up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110 billion.
They're trying to become popular again like Reddit... but failing spectacularly... looks more like AOL news now.
If this thing would really cost 35 billion, there is no way in hell it would be built! It makes no sense at all.
For that amount of money, you could cover the entire Sahara desert in Solar cells. You could build loads of gas plants and wind farms which would generate massively more energy than one nuclear plant.
You could launch a bunch of cells into space and transmit the power back to earth for less money than that.
You could build a wall at the Mexico / USA border and cover it with solar cells for less money.
You could install gas bags on the ass of every cow on the planet to catch the methane gas to power a gas turbine plant than it would cost to build that thing.
It make NO damn sense.
Olympic Stadium?
Mostly random stuff.
Why is there a sneaky link to install Firefox included in the article summary? WTF? Does slashdot do paid text links now?
I wonder why it's not mentioned. From Wikipedia, "the BAM's costs were estimated at $14 billion" at 1991 prices, and considering inflation, that would be 14*1.75 = $24.5 billions in today's prices. Other websites mention up to 2.35 ratio which will increase the cost to $33 billion.
I believe the f-35 has that beat. 1.5 trillion and climbing [unlike the jet itself]. You Brits get back with us Americans when you want to really throw money at something. It would take an entire forest of paper money to pay for that!
Why is the last link directing me to a Firefox download page?
You really allow this link in story? What's next, ransomware exe links?
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/?utm_campaign=firefox-update-redirect&utm_medium=firefox-browser&utm_source=firefox-browser
It's pocket shrapnel compared to maintaining the US Banking edifice over the last few years.
USB, USB, USB!
This is nothing. Coming soon to America(tm) a yuuuuge expensive wall. Really really yuuuuuge!
How much electricity could be generated by a network of solar panels built for the same cost?
(Genuinely don't know the answer, but curious if it would be more or less than the electricity generated by this project.)
Reality has a liberal bias
with enough money left over for troubleshooting and design improvements sufficient to improve their economy, be left with a much safer power system and have enough fuel for the next thousand years or so until fusion becomes something other than a boondoggle.
But thorium plants just don't make nuclear weapons grade material. They just solve the energy problem. So, clearly, this won't happen.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Since we are actually comparing programs, ie power plant verses aircraft program. You Brits have got a lot to learn about wasting money. The F-35 is 1.5 trillion and climbing.[unlike the plane itself] We have the leadership in stupidity and God willing we aim to keep it.The program is so big that it will take a forest of money just to pay for it.
The $35 billion appears to include financing costs. Wikipedia says the plant will have a nameplate capacity of 3200 MW. Nuclear has a 0.9 capacity factor. Estimate wholesale electricity prices at $50/MWh (they actually estimate it could rise up to about $90/MWh - environmentalists scoff, but I think it's very likely given inflation), and a operational lifespan of 35 years, and you get:
(3200 MW) * 0.9 * (8766 hours/year) * (35 years) * ($50 / MWh) = $44.16 billion revenue.
If you figure 750 employees at the plant making an average $100,000/yr, over 35 years that adds $2.625 billion in costs. Toss in a few billion for maintenance, and you're at $40 billion in costs vs a minimum $44 billion in revenue, or a healthy 10% profit margin.
Of course it carries with it all the risk that comes with a 35 year bet. (Note that other power generation infrastructure makes the same bet, since they're usually designed to remain in operation for ~30 years. Yeah the total dollar amount per installation is lower. But if you're pushing, say, a national solar program, the total installed cost could easily exceed $35 billion worth of installed panels.)
So, ultimately, this project is going to cost around $100B.
> at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006).[6] However, the project was completed only in December 2007, at a cost of over $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
Judging from the headline, Apple's about to announce a new product.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What material shall we use for the roof of the plant's bike shed. At a tight budget of £350, this item ought to get our foremost attention today.
To the cost of the Opera houses of old let alone the pyramids if we did an apples to apples comparison based off current GDP of the society. I remember reading that new Opera houses don't sound as good because you can't get society to throw that much money at something so trivial anymore.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
We need to kick nuclear to the curb. The true cost of nuclear energy to society is infinite because we have no safe way to dispose of the waste these plants create for the length of time required, on the scale of thousands to millions of years.
Nuclear waste disposal is never included in cost estimates for nuclear energy, and as a result we have it just sitting around all over the United States. We can't even contain waste safely for a few decades. How do we have any hope to contain it for 100 years, or 1,000 years, or 10,000 years? The answer is we will never be able to do it.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should be doing it. Adding more nuclear capacity just makes the waste problem worse. Who bears the brunt of the waste problem? It won't cause much harm in our lifetimes. Our descendants are the ones we're hurting.
If you want to read a more detailed technical analysis, feel free to search for my previous posts on the subject.
So we now have a ten years planing phase.
Then a ten years approval phase.
Then a price increase by a factor of 4 to 10.
Then someone who calculates that terms of current value of dollars it is only a price increase by a factor of 2 or 3.
And then the cheapest bidder wins the contract and we have a price increase by a factor of 20.
Why not buying the whole population of a small country, put up big mouse wheels and let them walk inside for power?
Oh, they would breath and produce CO2 ...
Oh, we only would need 10% of the population of countries like Austria or emirates. Erm, oki that was based on GDP ... that probably makes even less sense than planning a 35 billion construction project.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The kind that doesn't work very good?
since in Nuclear 80% of all costs are bureaucracy..
I'd say the Bay Bridge cost more.
Especially with all the graft and cost overruns.
And the eventual outsourcing of the whole thing to China.
Title: Engineers Plan The Most Expensive Object Ever Built
!= to
The linked article "...the most expensive object on Earth"
and is in fact contradicted by its own summary:
" up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110 billion"
So it's self-evidently NOT the most expensive thing ever built.
-Styopa
... with the most expensive objects in the world. It was never completed or taken into service. It's now a them-park or something.
Maybe the UK should look at that project before blowing 35 Billion $ on something that might be very stupid? ... Just saying.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Everything pales in comparison to large military contracts.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
We were able confirm the irrefutable truth:
If you put a big enough engine on it, you can make anything fly.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If you include R&D costs the F35 has at 1.508 trillion probably takes the prize.
On British indebtedness.
"it took 20,000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days' labor. "
That would be MAN days.
I'm pretty sure that at the surface of the Earth the umbra of the International Space Station is too small to eclipse anything.
The pyramids were far most expensive to build. It's not even close.
It may have cost $5B to duplicate today but that's using far more efficient modern technology. It would probably cost trillions to build the pyramids today using the same manual labor methods and primitive tools as ancient Egyptians.
No Gorgon ($55 billion) or Kashagan ($116 billion)? Oil megaprojects have already surpassed this
For those looking to actually crunch some basic numbers regarding the size of this project when compared to other renewable projects, here are some sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Highest output renewable option in existence - a 1.5gW onshore wind farm already 90% built for $2B (Alta Wind Energy Center).
Most expensive option in existence - a 3.2gW nuclear station being built for $35B.
Seems fairly clear cut - for $35B you could build something like 25gW of wind farms. So why are these alternatives - and others - not a smart financial option?
Even assuming failed efficiencies etc, renewable systems would have to operate at only 10% of expected efficiency to fall as low as the expected returns for this nuclear plan. What am I doing wrong here?
The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways: $511 billion, adjusted for inflation.
invasion and other foreign policy boondoggles that's nothing.
Get up!
Stop with the bespoken power plants.
Henry Ford Showed how to do it 100 years ago.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_dollar_coin
A tree hugger was heard of saying ...
Can't help to wonder what kind of 'sustainable electricity generation' option(s) that you have in mind, that would both cost less and more friendlier to the environment?
Care to elaborate?
Burj Khalifa is only 1.5B because of, well, practicly speaking, Slave labour.
Just last week there was some guy trying to mislead everyone here with a "nuclear is cheap" lie. Where is he now?
If he really meant that nuclear is cost effective and just was not able to phrase it in any other way he'd better work on his English to get it to grade school level.
Two reactors in the same plant. Two units in the same plant. Two plants? No.
A lot of California is unpopulated desert so those density numbers are very misleading - laughably so. You should have a word with whoever misled you with such an argument and a laugh at yourself for falling for it.
What really matters is the population density in areas where you want to put a station or terminal. It may still be far too low, I do not know, but the numbers above are totally irrelevant and just make people using them look silly.
An amusing thing the kids today don't know is the nuclear safety regulations at the time of three mile island were more lax than for a fertilizer works - hence things like not having a clue what was really going on for a week due to inadequate monitoring equipment. A week of media hype due to little real information had a lasting impression on attitudes to nuclear power. The regulations then went the other way, to more restrictive than other industries and some pretty nasty industry lobbying to add extra barriers of entry to new players filled in the rest.
Westinghouse etc LIKE the regulations as they are and WROTE most of them FFS! It keeps the Germans, French, Chinese and all the rest out of the US nuclear industry.
Also there are not many built because there are not many orgs with a lot of money that want to build them - simple as that. China want them and are putting up the money so they are getting built in China.
I think there was a summary of the total cost of the Apollo program posted online several months ago and the cost of everything was in the range of 300 billion dollars (by today's standards).
Honestly the EPR design strikes me as being rather costly for a 2 unit design..... (Chevron's Gorgon LNG project is supposed to be 3 LNG 'trains' if I recall correctly)
If I were to build a new reactor today, I would not choose the French design. You've got GE (ESBWR and ABWR), Westinghouse (AP1000), KEPCO (APR1400), Rosatmo (VVER)
I think the current AP1000 are in the range of 7-10 billion USD per unit. APR1400 and the VVER in the same ball park range.... (Then again UAE and South Korea's labor rates are low so building an APR1400 in the first world might be quite higher.)
17 billion per unit seems absurdly high. Even if it is 1400 MWe
I think the newer BWR design (particularly ESBWR) should offer a degree of cost savings since you no longer have to pay for a pressurizer or for four RCPs that may not work the first time. (The latter is one of the reasons China's AP1000 are behind schedule....)
California's rail project, the Hinkley plant, the great wall of China... They've got nothing compared to my basement remodel. I budgeted 2 weekends and $500, turned into 2 years and way more than $500. All because I'm terrible at accurately estimating projects.
What's the worst that can happen when you over-budget? You'll either be right, or pleasantly surprised when its under-budget.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
$110 billion....probably could have had a Moon Base for that much money...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Here is all the facts you need to know in two quotes and a formula. Start with a quote from this article:
"proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth"
and now from the Wiki:
"Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is a project to construct a 3,200 MWe nuclear power station"
And now it's time for our formula. In the power industry, we are very very interested in the CAPEX, expressed in terms of dollar-per-watt. In this case:
CAPEX = 35 billion / 3.2 billion = $11/W
Why is that everything you need to know? Well I lied, it's *almost* everything. The other bit is this:
Commercial PV: $1.50
Commercial wind: $1.40
Gas co-gen: $1.15
All numbers up-to-date within about 6 months, taken from real-world projects and summarized on page 11 here:
https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf
And that's basically that. If you consider a modern wind turbine with a CF of 32%, and the Hinkley reactors with a CF of 90%, then you get relative LCoE's of:
Hinkley : 11 / 0.9 = 12.2
Wind: 1.40 / 0.32 = 4.38
Which means wind is about three times cheaper than nuclear. It's actually more than that because there's no fuel cost and OPEX is lower.
And that, dear reader, is why nuclear is dead.
A Scam then, A Scam now.
if the most modern nuclear reactor under construction is still using decades-old designs and still produces substantial nuclear waste, and there are much newer, cheaper, cleaner, safer designs that EXIST NOW that could be used...
then yeah. that seems like a pretty reasonable request to me! why are we not building them again?
At an estimated $10 billion each, we could make 3.5 missions to Mars. Of course the Iraq War, at $3 trillion, would have funded 300 manned Mars missions. Bush just pissed it up against the wall.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Daming rivers is always cheap for power. There must be another big one hiding in those British hills somewhere...
My post was very short.
You have no excuse.
If it's all too hard try just reading the "Two units at one plant = two units at one site" bit.
Any more of this stupidity and I'm going to start rolling out the moonshine and banjo insults.