I'd place the bet: never going to happend. Reductions in price for wind and solar power is going to kill any black bottom line for this project.
1: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/smaller-safer-cheape...
Tend to agree.
Wind and (especially) solar were heavily subsidized by government over the last few years, but that allowed for economies of scale to kick in and the price to drop. There would need to be a few governments willing to 'subsidize' building nukes to kick-start the industry.
It would also be helpful if there weren't a bajillion different designs: if (say) ≤3 nuclear designs could be fixed upon (to not have a complete monoculture), then that would help things as well.
Right now it's basically bespoke construction every time.
That's a pity because nuclear could be competitive if economies of scale and innovation occur in that space.
Edit: I'm getting down voted, maybe because I didn't provide a source. But neither do the people who disagree. I stand by it.
We have a solution to end coal, oil and gas fired power plants, and end a tremendous amount of pollution. But it's somewhat more expensive to run a nuke plant... Is money the only thing we are looking at here?
We keep fiddling around with solar and wind, and while it's great, we're still running goddamn fossil-fuel based plants for a huge percentage of our power. If solar and wind are cheaper, and price is what dictates this market, then we should have much more transitioned away by now. Solar and wind will get better and better, but we need to dump all this carbon-based power right now. We should be building nukes right now to replace the fossil-fuel based plants and then phase them out once wind and solar, and other, better tech gets developed.
We have a huge problem solved right now. It's nothing but politics and bullshit getting in the way.
If the government could do the smart thing and enact a carbon tax so the true cost of carbon based fuels could be accounted for, this problem would naturally go away with no need to convince anybody of anything else. Nuclear would maybe be viable, but at the very least building new solar and wind would become cheaper than just operating existing coal plants.
Maybe it's not politically popular? I don't know. Taxes automatically reduce the thing being taxed, but we tax good things like income, rather than bad things like illegal drugs, gambling, pollution, garbage, etc. It makes no sense, but that's why I'm a programmer and not a politician.
For nuclear in the US, CO2 taxes would have to be $300-400/ton for nuclear to compete with natural gas combined cycle. This number is from the president of Exelon, which operates 20 or so power reactors in the US. Exelon has given up even planning for new nuclear power plants; they are too far out of the running.
You can't do that overnight, that'd be a huge shock to the economy. But you can implement it over ten to twenty years, ramping it up gradually.
I see these types of comments over and over and over.
Wind doesn't always blow. Sun doesn't always shine. We don't have economical grid-scale electrical energy storage technology. Therefore, we can't actually shut down the fossil generation plants, and we end up paying for both.
What is so hard to understand about this?
Because I will invest all my money into it.
But it doesn't exist yet.
It certainly can be done. The economics aren't there against natural gas, without subsidies or carbon taxes.
Nuclear is so expensive to build, that it doesn't make sense to 'turn off' a nuclear plant. We can do it with control rods, but the economic fallout of leaving nuclear off is bad. (Nuclear will need to be retired after 50 years. Every minute it is turned off is a minute wasted of it's limited lifespan)
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Natural gas is the opposite. High ongoing costs but very low capex. So it makes economic sense to cycle natural gas on and off.
Also note that there is 'turning off/down' thermally and electrically.
Once the steam is created, all of it is usually sent to the turbines. But if a nuclear plant need to dial back output, it is possible to route the steam to some place else where it's dissipated and not used to spin a turbine.
You can see this in some of the generator numbers for the Ontario grid, specifically for today (2021-04-24), DARLINGTON-G1 had reduced output: