That fact alone that nuclear power is so much more expensive compared especially to renewables is it's last nail in the coffin.
Edit: fixed idiom, thanks raverbashing
If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better
https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
> c) the Swiss population voted against new nuclear plants in 2017, so this topic is moot anyway.
This topic is not moot. This is the only realistic way to save humanity from the climate catastrophe, even if there are many fear mongers.
that can change if big governments focus on that
> potentially dangerous
the safest energy production per kWh hands down
> radioactive waste we have no way of dealing with
not true, we deal with it since 40's and we are doing fine.
In that context, nuclear has very much seen way more focus and support than probably any other modern form of energy generation.
So, why didn't that pan out and we apparently need another round of "big government focus"?
The focus is needed to double down to get rid of all coal/gas plants.
There are projects of cheaper nuclear power plants, which I agree is the main issue. You have to put 10, 15 years into building this massive thing instead of doing modular, smaller projects.
Obviously costs come down when you start mass producing things, which we've done with solar but have not even really tried to do with nuclear.
It doesn't matter anyway: Only what is, not what could have been will have an impact on the decision makers.
For costs to go down on nuclear, you need to stop building giant one-off projects which are bespoke down to the rivets. It's like expecting a hand-made suit to ever be price-competitive with something you buy off the rack at Brooks Brothers.
> It doesn't matter anyway
Luckily, it's not what could have been because unlike the cynics on HN, some[1] people[2] are actually having a go at solving this problem.
Maybe small modular reactors will do better. That would be great! But at this point I'll believe cost/schedule numbers only after a new reactor enters commercial operation. The numerous reactors that exist only in PowerPoint form belong in the same bin as the Battery Breakthrough of the Week.
Did you want to wait for Solar to be price-competitive with gas before we started using it? That doesn't make any sense. The reason solar is so competitive these days is because we invested massively while it was still expensive. This has not happened with nuclear in its entire history, because we lack the political will (mostly thanks to anti-nuclear FUDders) to do so.
The AP1000 units under construction at Vogtle started construction in 2013. That was 56 years after Shippingport Atomic Power Station and Vallecitos Nuclear Center started operation in Pennsylvania and California.
As of February 2013, the 2 AP1000 units at Vogtle were supposed to cost $15.3 billion. As of December 2017 the estimate had increased to $23 billion. The big mystery is why the costs were so badly under-estimated only 4 years earlier. Construction started after Three Mile Island, after Chernobyl, after Fukushima, after 50+ years of commercial power reactors in the US, and after regulatory requirements had changed to address prior nuclear incidents. The initial cost estimate should have accounted for all those factors. Will the next nuclear project account for them better?
"How the Vogtle Nuclear Expansion’s Costs Escalated"
https://www.powermag.com/how-the-vogtle-nuclear-expansions-c...
[1] Summing column "Reference unit power" from IAEA Power Reactor Information System https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat...
Iterate on nuclear like we have with basically everything else and I guarantee the prices come down significantly. Why do I know this? Because this is what has happened every time we have iterated on anything in human history. Nuclear is not the magical exception to this rule, it's just harder to iterate on because the initial investment is so high.
https://www.nuscalepower.com/about-us
A big wind turbine generates up to 6 megawatts [1]. A big solar panel generates up to 0.00067 megawatts [2]. If nuclear reactors can't progress much faster per iteration, that's another way to say that they won't catch up at all.
[1] https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/...
[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/11/trina-launches-670-w-...
Europe and the N.America are 34% of the entire electricity consumption. Even If they miraculously reduced their carbon pollution to zero not only would 2/3 of the problem remain, but - and here is the kicker - the growth in consumption is coming from the poor and poorest countries with enormous populations.
They are going to use the cheapest energy available: brown coal.
Its not a simple simple cost argument: we have to find a scalable, safe, clean, base-load source of energy that is cheaper than coal.
And then give it away.
The only possibility is nuclear fission - preferably not one that boils water in a pressure cooker.
The same is true for your scenario, though: Why should the rich countries export one of the most expensive energy sources to the poor countries, when e.g. onshore wind is right now already on par with brown coal?[0]
[0] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p... page 2
LCOE isn't a very thorough standard which you quickly realize once you dig into it.
Furthermore renewables are unreliable and thus require backup energy from reliable sources such as coal, oil, gas or nuclear. Because renewables are forced into use when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, they basically make the reliable sources more expensive.
I could go on with all sorts of ways this provides a completely skewed comparison structure.
Comparing the cost of nuclear vs. and wind and solar is like comparing the cost of construction and upkeep of a Boing 747 and a Cessna based on their ability to fly.
All of these, including decomission, are part of the LCOE formula, just as they are for renewables or coal or gas: https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/e049...
That problem with renewables can easily be fixed with storage, which can be batteries, generating green hydrogen trough electrolysis or a number of many other ways.
While on summer days where a lot of sun shines nuclear reactors have their very own problem: They produce too much heat and need to be throttled/shut down [0] [1] or else they would start heating up their cooling medium too much, which are usually nearby waterbodies/river systems.
With global warming being a thing, we can expect this problem to occur much more frequently, and even more so if we decided to build even more reactors.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nucle...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Coal $112/MWh vs. utility solar $48/MWh.
I wouldn't underestimate the appeal renewables have in terms of "we get free energy as long as we can keep the facility running" if you don't have much money. It's a rather "obvious" investment.
Here are some of the very valid questions a poor country would have to ask.
“Do we really want America’s unreliable foreign policy to effectively control our ability to generate electricity? What if we piss off the wrong diplomat, hire the wrong leader, or if our people believe in the wrong god? What if they decide to destroy our economy via embargoes? Where will we get our fissionable materials? Will they pull a stuxnet on us ? Will they assassinate our top nuclear engineers?”
Unless of course a military coup happens and contracts are nullified, or riots, or conflict or etc..
And even worse, how can you ensure someone will be around willing to put in the effort to safely decommission something that has no more value? Even in the most developed and stable nations this is and will be a challenge. Who wants to put in the effort to clean up the previous generations mess.
The economics of electricity generation have been transformed in the last couple of years - for example, the LCOE from on-shore wind and solar has dropped 80-90% in less than 10 years. Prices for renewables and even grid-scale batteries are falling so fast that you cannot even trust financial analysis of electricity generation from a year ago.
Burning coal is now 2 to 3 times as expensive as on-shore wind, for example. Nuclear is over times as expensive. Where governments aren't forcing the market to use coal, nobody is building new coal generators.
This price shift has had a very visible effect on coal generation for example - you can see it in graphs of global electricity sources - after a long period of growth, coal generation (as a share of the total) has been dropping since 2013.
The fact that wind and solar are not dispatchable unlike coal and nuclear turns out to not actually be a deal-breaking problem for expanding renewable generation considerably.
Quite a few European countries which now generate nearly 50% of their electricity through renewables. None have grid-scale batteries and many don't have nuclear. As a whole Europe gets about a third of their electricity from renewables. And even the US is at about 20-25%?
You can achieve these sort of percentages with a low-tech approach. You over-provision wind/solar generation and use derating in the case of wind to cut generation if demand is very low. This is feasible because of the cheapness of these power sources.
In tandem with NG peaker plants and a small amount of storage (hydro and some batteries for stabilization) and/or interconnectors, we have seen countries achieved 40%+ renewable electricity without any effect on the reliability of domestic supply. This share is still rising, so the limits of this approach are not yet apparent.