That is if you ignore experience curve effects.
In the US only one nuclear power plant came online in the last 25 years. For plants like Vogtle, the majority of the workers on site have never built another nuclear plant in their career before, and will never build after. That is a very good way to keep construction cost astronomical.
Compare with the reactors for nuclear submarines. They are being built at a rate of about 1 per year. Most workers have participated in building numerous reactors in the past, all of the same design. New workers can learn from experienced peers, and use their learning in building lots more reactors during the rest of their career.
In the last 25 years, the US brought online only one civilian nuclear power plant, but 23 nuclear submarines and 4 aircraft carriers (those have 2 reactors each). The cost of naval reactors is classified, but I’ve seen non-classified information that indicates that a submarine reactor costs in the lew hundreds of millions, and a carrier reactor about one billion ([1] page 10).
The idea of SMR’s is to replicate the success story of naval reactors in the civilian sphere.
[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/112th-congress-2011-...
The promise of the small reactors is lego like building blocks that are very safe, idiot proof, can be carried on a train, and you return them to the factory for maintenance or refueling. Site integration is literally a cement pad, water in/out, steam in/out, data connection, and some power. If any of those in/outs fail the reactor shuts down. That way the factory builds 1000s, becomes an expert on them, and you get the efficiency of higher volumes. That way you don't need 24/7 coverage by a large team of PhDs just to produce power.
That's the dream anyways, will be interesting to see if anyone can get it to work.
By comparison, when plants of the same design are built in series they're much cheaper. Nuclear plants that started construction in the late 1960s and early 1970s were some of the most effective clean energy investments, delivered at a cost of $1-2 billion per gigawatt. Check out the costs in the historical list and there's a large stretch of plants that were built at this price point [2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
I think you meant "co2-emission-free-while-operating"
1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage#/media/File:N...
That's always been a paradox with nuclear power. On one hand, of all electric power generation technologies, nuclear power has the most toxic waste; on the other hand, that toxic waste is completely contained under normal operation, so that looking from the outside, it's one of the cleanest. That's why in these discussions you always have people talking past each other: depending on how you look at it, nuclear power can be very clean or very dirty.
They probably could be made more cheaply than they have been. Making them cheap enough to be economically competitive will be very hard and and very uncertain of success. And, trying will take time we cannot afford, because you get no power out until it is all finished, and you burn coal until then. Renewables start producing and displacing coal almost instantly.
The demand curve is lumpy on a daily, weekly and yearly cycle. Nuclear is flat and predictable, renewables are (like demand) predictable to a reasonable degree but variable (weather and energy demand are linked too).
Nuclear (and coals) difficulty meeting peaky demand is a big reason for pumped hydro to exist for decades. It is still the biggest source of energy storage we have. Why should renewables pay for storage built for nuclear?
And note that's averaged across 4 years, across the whole US across multiple time zones and doesn't include energy for heat currently not sourced from electricity.
Cold places use more energy in winter and in cold years, the opposite in hot places that need a lot of cooling.
But, let's put that all to one side, on that graph what amount of energy are you intending to generate with nuclear and what are you intending to do with the excess (if you aim high) or with the peaks (if you aim low). Because whatever you do, is almost certainly going to be the same things renewables would do when demand and supply don't meet exactly. Like pumped hydro or off peak pricing which already exists and is therefore included in your "flat" graph.
Excesses of energy are easily solved: use it to desalinate water, create hydrogen fuel, or some other energy intensive things. And as stated previously, nuclear power plants can reduce their output if needed by more aggressively cooling the reactor. Nuclear plants want to operate at 100% load as much as they can, but they don't need to.
Renewables have the opposite problem: they don't produce energy when we need it. No amount of solar panels will produce energy when the sun is down. Peak pricing is not going to help us here. This is why renewable advocates assume that there's going to be some magic storage solution that offers effectively free and unlimited storage.
> Like pumped hydro or off peak pricing which already exists and is therefore included in your "flat" graph.
The USA has 20 GWh of pumped hydro storage. That's 2.4 minutes of electricity supply at an average hourly consumption of 500 GW.
This is called "overprovisioning" and it's exactly what renewables intend to do. In both cases it's more expensive than having magical demand matching production.
Or your going to use it to desalinate when power is abundant. This is "demand response" and again, it's exactly what renewables grids are going to do.
I see you also want to create Hydrogen, another great idea that renewables also plan to do, except nuclear generated is called Pink Hydrogen and renewable powered is called Green Hydrogen for some reason. Same basic idea though.
So, I don't understand why you're so angry about renewables when you already know all the solutions a fossil free grid needs.
> No amount of solar panels will produce energy when the sun is down.
Did you happen to notice where the bottom of the lumps in your graph were? Nighttime. So we'll need some wind power and/or storage and/or HVDC lines.
But if you have to pretend you've never heard of wind power in order to justify nuclear power, maybe that's a sign that it's not as good an idea as you think.
And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy.
I'm fairly chill about storage because cheap solar that lets you turn off gas during the day and cheap wind that lets you turn gas off another half of the time is the quickest and cheapest way to stop burning fossil fuels. We only need to come up with crazy solutions once we try to get rid of the last few bits of fossil fuels. And you already listed them for a fully nuclear grid so we don't need to go over that again.
Some people try to act all appalled about that, as if burning 80% less fossil fuels easily at an overall cost saving in a short period of time is some big conspiracy by fossil fuel companies to undermine nuclear. It doesn't really pencil out though. Not even if you pretend wind power doesn't exist.
> And finally, the reason we don't have much storage on the grid today, is because we burn fossil fuels for a great deal of power and turning them off actually saves money (and lives) so that's what we do rather than store energy.
No, the reason why we don't have storage on the grid is because we have no feasible way of storing energy at grid scale. Hawaii, California, and parts of Germany all produce excesses of electricity during peak solar and wind generation. We were promised that people would take this energy off the grid, store it, and release it later when energy is in greater demand. But these promises have not panned out, because storage remains infeasible. So instead, we keep burning fossil fuels. And we'll continue to keep burning fossil fuels until we either adopt nuclear power or some massive breakthrough in storage is found.
It'll still take significant amounts of storage even to drive fossil fuel use down to 20%. Estimates say 12 hours of storage [2]. That's an incredible amount of storage, hundreds of times greater than what we have now.
1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112
2. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
The second link also doesnt say what you claim. It says 12 hours of storage or HVDC connections would be required. 12 hours storage being half an EV per American household, which isnt particulalry massive and is explicitly an upper bound, ignoring hydro and nuclear and biomass and demand response etc.
Their solar only model suggests 1.5x overprovision. How much cheaper does solar need to be for a purely solar grid to beat nuclear using your number? 1.2/1.5 suggest 20% cheaper is all they need in this extreme solar only model. But in reality solar (and wind) are 20% of the cost of new nuclear (80% cheaper) and predicted to fall further.
So even your entirely unsubstantiated claim about needing 3-4x wind overprovision means it would be cheaper than nuclear.
Overproduction without storage results in diminishing returns, as most of the excess energy is wasted.
"New nuclear" is 4-8x more expensive than nuclear power built at scale. When multiple copies of the same plant design built in series, costs in the range of $1-2 billion per GW is typical. And remember, that's a GW of generation with >90% capacitor factor, as compared to 25-35% for most renewables.
Wasted nuke overcapacity is very, very expensive.
To see what later copies of existing nukes cost, we need look no further than Vogtle.
Except we have no way of building grid scale storage. Again, we have a few minutes of storage. Until then, wind and solar is really wind, solar, and fossil fuels. We have no plan to get rid of the fossil fuels until a storage breakthrough occurs.
> To see what later copies of existing nukes cost, we need look no further than Vogtle.
Like I said: building one power plant of a given design is way more expensive than building repeated copies of the same design. There were dozens of nuclear projects that had a cost to energy production ratio of less than a fifth of Vogtle.
It just isn't built out yet. Building out storage will be premature until after there is enough extra renewable generating capacity to charge it from.
If lots of projects would have been cheaper than Vogtle, we may reasonably conclude that they didn't want one cheaper than Vogtle: it would have left too little scope for corruption and graft. Corruption is the ever-present companion of all nuke projects. Any nuke project without a ready conduit for graft will not be funded.
If you use more energy in the winter, and wind power works better in the winter, you've got a positive correlation.
You don't just assume you need an average output equal to the max demand.
And the price for solar is based on generation, not capacity.
> The LCOE "represents the average revenue per unit of electricity generated that would be required to recover the costs of building and operating a generating plant during an assumed financial life and duty cycle", and is calculated as the ratio between all the discounted costs over the lifetime of an electricity generating plant divided by a discounted sum of the actual energy amounts delivered.
Unfortunately for the US, energy use is highest in the summer when wind is producing the least amount of energy. And then there's the hour-by hour variations on top of that.
Wind production: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112
Energy use: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
You are replying to a post that provides historical evidence and geuine argument, and your only counter argument is a Tautology and outright dismissal?
Back in the '50s, the promise was that power from nukes would be "too cheap to meter". They knew they were lying when they promised that, as we now know from internal memos. Cost estimates published have never matched actual costs. Delivery schedules published have never matched actual delivery, when anything is delivered; and when not, none of the money is ever returned.
So, the first and most important lesson about nukes is that what promoters estimate bears no resemblance to what might be delivered, and relying on such estimates puts you in a bottomless moneypit.