Slashdot Mirror
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.
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."
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.
Solar provides about 100w / square meter. So 35GW would need 350Million Square meters (350 Square killometers....).. About the size of the isle of white! Maybe we can make a floating island, full of solar panels....
Facts don't matter when bashing nuclear. Not even the fact that this is two plants, not just one.
TFA is about the most expensive object on earth, it's the summary that is wrong.
The real issue here is that the new Hinkley Point C nuclear plant is insanely expensive and is costing UK citizens a ridiculous amount of money. As well as the usual generous subsidies and incentives from our government, the French government is helping EDF out too, and it will be part Chinese owned, and the energy it eventually generates will be sold at a guaranteed price that is way over the odds.
It's a scandal that we are wasting so much money on this thing that could be better spent on cheaper, more sustainable electricity generation.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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".
Nope. The opposition group organized a couple of fairly small protests over a few days, which were managed by the police and cost the site owners, EDF, basically nothing as at the time they were still organizing permits to build the thing. There was no legal challenge and the permits were evaluated and handled by the government, at no cost to EDF beyond preparing the paperwork and negotiating emissions limits (i.e. normal stuff).
The site already has a nuclear plant on, which is simply being extended. Some land might have been bought for £50m, it's not clear if that was for the nuclear plant or a wind farm. Anyway, it was priced normally.
There has been no major union involvement. While there is a union for nuclear plant workers, they welcomed the extra jobs and increased safety from a newer plant, especially as older plants are closing.
The extreme cost is mostly due to problems financing the plant (investors don't see much of a future for nuclear in the EU, even after the government guaranteed way above market rate for the energy produced for the 60 year lifetime of the plant) and the fact that modern reactors simply cost a lot of money. All that safety technology, which has been found to be necessary due to numerous accidents in the past, isn't cheap. Plus we know that these things will go on for 60 years now, so more is spent up-front on construction instead of maintenance down the road, which also reduces the probability of unforeseen problems causing a premature shut-down.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'd say the F-35 pretty much qualifies for being 'on earth'. Most of the time anyway.
Have gnu, will travel.
Oversimplifying it by calling it "sand" is highly misleading. A Xeon E5-2697 V4 is ultimately produced from a few cents worth of "sand" (silicon,actually), but it will set you back $2700. Silica is a major constituent of sand; it is not sand. First, you must reduce the silica to 99% pure silicon in an electric arc furnace. Then you must further purify it chemically to less than one part per BILLION of impurities (for ICs; somewhat less for solar cells). Then you must dip a seed crystal into a melted pool. Then you carefully withdraw the seed crystal, resulting in a cylindrical ingot of a single crystal of silicon.
Then you must diamond-saw the cylinder into wafers. About 1/2 of the cylinder is turned into dust by this process, and must be recycled. Then you might polish the wafers to remove the machining marks from the sawing, or for solar cells (not ICs) you can just leave them there. Then you must dope the material with highly pure boron and phosphorous. Then you heat treat very carefully it to get the doping to migrate properly. Then you must deposit very very thin patterns of palladium/silver, nickel, or copper electrodes to the front. Then you want to carefully apply a titanium dioxide or silicon oxide anti-reflective coating, to reduce reflective losses. Finally you encapsulate the cell in silicone rubber or ethylene vinyl acetate. Finally you mount the cells on a backsheet, interconnect them, install the sheet in a frame, and cover it with glass.
All of these steps are highly exacting, and require a constant high level of knowledge and QC.
I'm sure I have vastly oversimplified a lot of the steps, and glossed over some, but perhaps I have a, just a bit, shown a glimpse of why it costs such a huge amount to "just throw some sand on your roof".
P.S. - silicon (and the boron dopant also) is a metalloid - a "not quite" metal. Metalloids have a metallic appearance, but they are brittle and not very conductive. Sometimes aluminum is classified as a metalloid, so the distinction is obviously pretty vague.