We should use that money to build more nuclear reactors and develop new designs. It’s a proven, reliable and inexhaustible source of energy.
Hell, if you used wind turbines to synthesize gas at ~50% efficiency and burn that to generate electricity at ~60% efficiency it would still be about 10-20% cheaper than nuclear power.
https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
Nuclear is expensive because of politics.
You're not making a great argument for your trustworthiness "not letting us poison the world and directly kill millions is unfair and political" is at least a rare piece of honesty, but hardly a compelling argument.
Fukushima cost ~$800 billion, so they are essentially subsidized by the general public to the tune of 99.97% of what is probably their "real" insurance costs.
So no, we are measurably on the hook for more negative externalities than we are for solar/wind.
Free insurance is a subsidy. Pretending that it isnt is dishonest.
Japan paid $0 in 2010 and by 2012 an $800 billion bill came due.
Recent nuclear legislation has focused on extending the legal life of aging plants. Nuclear power is getting more dangerous in America not safer.
It ought to be a moot point anyway given the extreme cost of nuclear power without the subsidy.
My guess is the next one will involve at least one set of forged documents about components and some manager pushing past a boundary to meet ever tightening cost targets.
That you think it would be possible to forge documents under managerial pressure shows that you Don know the first thing about nuclear power in the US.
Probably not a coincidence that it happened in the place with the lowest (unaudited) costs.
The US nuclear program is first class when it comes to accountability, reliability, and safety but this is also the reason that it costs upwards of $12/W excluding the publicly funded portions of the NRC's budget (which is one of the moredirect places the trillion dollar free insurance manifests) and various other subsidies. You either get the safety or you get rid of the red tape driving up costs.
And the thousands of people constantly shouting to get rid of all the red tape are why I think the next INES 7 incident will involve forgery.
I always thought waste disposal was not accounted for. Could you point me to any information indicating otherwise?
Usually localities fight for federal money, this is one case where that appears to not be the case.
That article is a great read in any case.
https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Awakening-History-Future-Nucle...
1: Commenters don’t compare like-for-like energy production, instead they often compare using the nameplate capacity e.g. compare construction cost of a 1GW nuclear plant with a 1GW solar plant. The right thing to compare is GWh produced. Capacity factor converts GW to GWh, and the capacity factor for nuclear is about 90% and for solar is about 15%[1]. Therefore the equivalent of a 1GW nuclear plant is 6GW of installed solar.
2: Commenters ignore the cost of systems needed to provide power in winter on windless dark nights. The real cost of wind/solar needs to include the necessary energy storage (batteries or pumped hydro or stored chemical energy or whatever). Some of that can be overcome by installing overcapacity (e.g. install 3x as much GW solar to cover aircon usage in early evening in Texas). Nuclear is very good at providing power at all times. Storage is very expensive - usually doubles or triples the cost of the wind/solar installation. The need for storage goes up as our dependency on wind/solar power increases.
By ignoring the above, solar/wind can look 5x to 10x cheaper than a fair comparison with nuclear. Many commenters are not interested in facts or numbers - they pick heavily biased numbers to make the argument they want to (usually that nuclear = bad).
A worked example of wind versus nuclear using chemical storage that shows 10% difference in cost: https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea... even with their obvious biases towards wind, and comparing against the crappy Hinkley-C, they are really struggling to show wind is cheaper.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/799330/global-solar-pv-i...
This is captured by net capacity and LCOE.
LCOE of new solar is rapidly approaching MCOE of existing nuclear.
> Commenters ignore the cost of systems needed to provide power in winter on windless dark nights. The real cost of wind/solar needs to include the necessary energy storage (batteries or pumped hydro or stored chemical energy or whatever). Some of that can be overcome by installing overcapacity (e.g. install 3x as much GW solar to cover aircon usage in early evening in Texas). Nuclear is very good at providing power at all times. Storage is very expensive - usually doubles or triples the cost of the wind/solar installation. The need for storage goes up as our dependency on wind/solar power increases.
This is captured by total system cost. While they're about on par (or favouring nuclear in europe) right now, today's optimistic renewable price is tomorrow's pessimistic.
Storage is about to do what PV did in the 2010s, and anyone being forced to pay for a half working AP-1000 or EPR in 2030 rather than 2x the net production in PV panels made of sand and a battery array made of rust all hooked together with aluminum for their utility money is rightfully going to be extremely angry.
No, because that usually completely ignores point 2. For example the commonly used Lazard data on LCOE ignores storage and has zero cost component to allow for time shifting over short or long periods. You need more than LCOE to make a fair comparison of costs of different energy sources.
Yes, there are solutions to correctly costing externalities, and delivering required power to load over time. My point is that too many commenters wilfully ignore the details, and they write specious cost comparisons.
I feel your comment is not helping because it contains half-truths. LCOE is useful, but not valid. Optimism is nice, but just another opinion.
For example, let’s look at https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... and compare the cost of solar they give, against a storage system that delivers the stored power over 10 hours of night (completely ignoring the bigger issues like seasonal requirements and peak power at noon). 1MWh of utility PV costs $28. Wholesale storage costs $131/MWh which is $1310 for 10 hours. The storage costs totally dominate the costs so tomorrow’s cost of wind or solar generation is completely irrelevant for a fair comparison. Currently, solar and wind can be cheap when comparing on LCOE MWh, because we have existing nuclear and gas plants providing power when they can’t. It is not intellectually honest to make dollar comparisons without trying to make the comparisons have some basis of equality. The cost of storage is dropping, but it has to drop a hell of a long way further over many years before it can compete with baseload generation.
I am not pro-nuclear. I am anti-misinformation.
Yes, you need to compare total system cost.
Which, as I said before you attempted to derail the point again, currently favours nuclear for a 30 year timescale -- but only barely.
You're also presently mixing up units of LCOS with units of capacity ($130 per MWh would be 0.05% of current costs).
> The storage costs totally dominate the costs so tomorrow’s cost of wind or solar generation is completely irrelevant for a fair comparison
Luckily I was comparing tomorrow'scost of storage. Storage is about to do what PV did in the 2010s. There are at least three separate battery technologies presently scaling production that need no scarce materials and have an extremely compelling case for a 5-fold reduction in price.
But even ignoring storage entirely, each dollar on renewables can remove more emissions than a dollar of nuclear. It's only when you have funded maximum penetration with ~4h storage that you should consider adding more.
Then there's the fuel issue. In all of the mines and all of the spent fuel and all of the enrichment tailings, there is not enough U235 and Pu for a single load of fuel to provide more than about 60% of primary energy. Adding more than ahout 200GW of nuclear is scifi.
The figure had a terrible smell when I was writing it, and is orders of magnitude out - that is an embarrassing mistake.
I am not denying that battery costs are falling drastically.
I am decrying that numbers are thrown around with no meaning, and then I go and do that. Fuck.
Thank you for your careful reply.
I guess it is probably just as frustrating seeing people claim a square mile of pv modules in a shipping container and nothing else is somehow a drop-in replacement for an AP-1000 for 1% of the price.
Cheers.
In general there's no point, it's just an illustrative example of the horrendous economics of nuclear power.
It might be a good idea to generate some gas if we one day have wind/solar producing >100% of consumption and all the batteries/pumped storage are fully charged. That'd be a nice problem to have, truth be told.
Currently, wind and solar rarely produce more than current demand, ever. Natural gas averages about 40% of our electricity supply and rarely if ever goes to zero even on the sunniest windiest days. Every MWh produced by wind or solar is just another MWh where we dont have to burn gas.
But right now, even though I learned about this over 22 years ago in my GCSEs, I think most people only even know about the Sabatier process because Musk wants to use it on Mars for ISRU.
> Unfortunately nuclear is regulated to death in the U.S. so it is extremeley expensive
These are the same fact. The second the regulators relax is the same second that corners get cut and limits get pushed because 'reactor designs are in essence "meltdown proof"'. That attitude is exactly how the five colossally stupid things that have to happen all at once to cause a meltdown start individually becoming regular occurrences -- after that it's just a matter of reactor hours before enough of them coincide with some other improbable event.
See the shutdown of Korea's fleet while forged documents were investigated for one of many examples. Or Fukushima.