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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

But also in terms of cost? Nuclear power plants are not exactly cheap.

A NPP is an order of magnitude more expensive than a combined cycle power plant of the same power output. So even if electricity prices are high now because of gas constraints, that doesn't mean a NPP would have been a good idea.

Europe should perhaps have diversified their gas suppliers, with more LNG.

> Europe should perhaps have diversified their gas suppliers, with more LNG.

If climate change is supposed to be an existential threat, we shouldn't be doing major investments into fossil infrastructure.

Anyway, if we spend all that money to build LNG infrastructure, like terminals, ships, and having contracts with suppliers etc. just for the few and far between situations where the price of LNG drops below Russian gas, the price/kWh is going to be pretty high as well due to all that capital sitting idle most of the time.

A bit like this, per se sensible, argument someone in this thread made that keeping a nuclear plant around just to balance wind/solar output is pretty expensive.

One of considerations for LNG is that it's not purely an economic concern as from a country perspective energy independence might be considered just as important as climate change (in the short term) and it's worth paying some premium to secure it. Just as Europe has farming subsidy policies that essentially result in Europe paying a premium for food over what would be a "global market price" (importing more food from e.g. Africa and exporting less food), mostly in order to ensure long-term food supply independence.

I fully agree. Energy, particularly gas, is certainly seen as geopolitics in the Kremlin.

That being said, I think the focus should be on (massively!) building out wind/solar/nuclear/transmission/storage, allowing Europe to tackle both climate change and dependency on a not-entirely friendly Russia at the same time.

Its more expensive to build because you know... a nuclear meltdown is a thing to avoid.

And also because combustion turbines are a seriously nice technology. Heat exchangers are expensive. A NPP transmits heat across many fluid/solid interfaces: fuel rods to coolant, primary to second coolant heat exchanger, secondary loop to steam generators, and steam to cooling water in the condenser after the turbines. A simple cycle combustion turbine avoids all that. Even a combined cycle power plant puts much less heat through its steam bottoming cycle for a given power output.

Correction: I added an extra loop there. Silly -- the primary loop drives the steam generators. I may have been thinking of MSRs, which have a sterile salt loop between the steam generator and the fuel bearing salt.

Also worth noting that Boiling Water Reactors (about half the current fleet) eliminate the steam generators and secondary loop, at the cost of increased nuclear and mechanical complexity in the reactor.

Russia’s brand-new Novovoronezh II NPP with 2x1200 MW costs $4 billion to build.

Germany is paying 24 billion Euros of renewable energy subsidies through its electricity prices - every year.

Nuclear can be cheap if you don’t mess it up.

LNG gets expensive because it’s a globalize market. Cheaper to use pipelined Russian gas and try not to think too hard about the repercussions.

The price of NG in Europe is now well above the price of LNG.

Considering what the US and Australia did to France a few days ago, the EU might not want to depend on LNG from the US. With Russia they know with whom they are dealing.

France and Germany are the EU's most influential countries and the US is continuing to meddle in EU matters even after Trump left. From the EU point of view there is next to no change since Biden took office and now even France is questioning NATO.

LNG is a global market now, so one is not locked into LNG from just one supplier. It used to be that LNG required long term contracts, but there's enough sloshing around now that the market is more like oil.

Nuclear doesn’t need any backup plants or grid extension. The capital costs are high, but the electricity production is almost a 100% planable and reliable.

I mean, Germany’s electricity situation is basically proving you wrong. We have the highest electricity prices, worldwide.

At this point nuclear is the most expensive per mw. And the vast majority of that expense is upfront. So almost no one wants to invest in these things because they're incredibly risky.

Cost should always be a consideration, but when you see people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid and it isn't clear what they are really trying to accomplish.

The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is about as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates and they continue to strongly support subsidizing it.

The potential costs for renewables + storage is about the cost of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it decades ago.)

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020

Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously at least a direct cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap, simple or easy to protect against terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amigas super station hasn’t been completed yet. The potential costs here don't seem to matter to some advocates.

Some advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on natural gas peaker plants where necessary to get around the costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent GHG in the short term. (There are lots of atmospheric losses in the capture and distribution of natural gas.) No one concerned about climate change seriously thinks that burning natural gas is a long term answer.

> they're incredibly risky.

Nuclear is risky?? I've heard the opposite, nuclear power plants tend to be extremely safe. You probably think it's risky because of 2 or 3 large scale accidents in the last 50 years or so. While those have a large impact, I don't think I would consider nuclear "extremely risky" just because of those.

I think they mean from the standpoint of it being a major financial investment with a non-negligible risk of project-failure subject to political whims and a high likelihood of significant cost overruns. I'd love to see some subsidies to address those issues though.

I mean financially risky.

Actually, it’s the opposite. It’s absolutely low risk because the electricity production can be sold years in advance if you want.

Nuclear electricity has the highest of all capacity factors and is therefore almost 100% planable, so there is virtually zero risk.

Very little in electricity generation has virtually zero risk.

Nuclear tends to have a higher capacity factor than most other baseload generators, but it also has unplanned outages.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45176

The biggest risk I've seen is that unanticipated events (including financial events) will completely shutter a unit, like San Onofre and Indian Point 2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...

If your average cost overrun is around 100%, then it absolutely is financially risky. And selling years in advance is not just possible but necessary for nuclear plants - people would never agree on such prices 10-20 years from now so the have to be locked in even as the plant is being built.

Some real costs are hardly predictable: hot waste long-term management, decommission (see the UK case) and especially any boo-boo (Fukushima cleanup costs will be in the ~500bn USD range) do threaten the financial model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/uks-nucl...

By all means go to current financial markets and ask for huge loans in this low-interest-rate high-inflation market. It isn't even about risk (though risks caused by regulation/government oversight are manifold). It's about return, or the lack thereof.

The fixed priced negotiated for Hinkley Point C is something like 90 GBP per MWh for the next 35 years.

The market spot price in the UK is at 150-200 GBP per MWh now.

> is something like 90 GBP per MWh

...in 2012 value of GBP. Right now the inflation-adjusted value is something like 112 GBP per MWh or so. You'll have to do the math yourself for future inflation.

Also the spot price remaining like this for the next 35 years is obviously out of question. These levels of prices will attract investments in generator technologies that can be scaled up very quickly.

(Some) Advantages of nuclear power in comparison to 'renewables': - EROI (energy return on energy invested) - ratio of land required / energy produced - much lower flow of materials (rare earth etc.) - constant and very high power output (no storage needed)

Well yes, but I'm a bit skeptical that nuclear is also cheaper.

IIRC nuclear is cheaper than the batteries, if that’s the limit, but land use of PV is a bit of a red herring: it can scale up or down, fit in spaces other things don’t. Rooftops, waste land, mounted on top of road noise barriers…

There’s no reason that I’m aware of not to cover the grounds of nuclear power plants in PV.

Some companies are buying up old farmland in California's central valley and turning them into solar farms. Seems like a great transition of land use, especially if water is going to be a continual problem over here.

Huh, I’d have assumed they’d do that in Nevada rather than in Central Valley. But yeah, it can go anywhere that’s otherwise unused.

Central Valley is a lot closer to large population centers.

>There’s no reason that I’m aware of not to cover the grounds of nuclear power plants in PV.

I'd be hesitant to impede access to various parts of the facility for safety reasons. Also, until a permanent storage solution is developed, reserving space for onsite storage is a very sensible thing to do.

It is cheaper as long as you don’t ignore the necessary backup power plants that solar and wind need.

It's cheaper even if you don't ignore that.

It was cheaper 30 years ago when we stopped building…

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