California’s last nuclear power plant gets $1B funding to extend life | Hacker News Reader

California’s last nuclear power plant gets $1B funding to extend life

theguardian.com

21 pointspseudolus10 comments

That seems good news. From what Wikipedia says, the power plant should generate 16'166 GWh per year. The investment should keep the power plant operating during 5 more years. That is

  220 M USD / 16'166 GWh = 0.013 USD / KWh

On top of that, it comes production cost, which I don't know. For comparison, the cost of electricity is about 0.16 USD / KWh.

I think we should retire nuclear power plants, only after we have replaced other non-renewable carbon-emitting power sources.

I think nuclear is one of those things that will never go away.

While a fully renewable future would be nice, it's highly variable. Sure you can offset dark nights with wind power, or cold winters with hydro power. But no matter how good the storage, I think there's always going to be a scenario where we need on-demand power and there's only so much power you can reserve thermally/potentially/etc.

I think it's likely that there will always be some amount of nuclear/fossil/coal for on-demand power for surges when everyone switches their kettles on during the adverts

Unless nuclear gets drastically cheaper, it'll never be good for on-demand generation. Because fuel is a small cost relative to capital repayments, operations and other fixed costs, operators run them flat out 24/7. You're paying to run the plant and you're paying your debts off anyway, so you might as well sell energy at any price since the marginal cost is minimal.

They also don't start quickly.

If you look at https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/, you can see nuclear runs at more or less the same output day in, day out.

If we use natural gas to cover the occasional demand-supply gaps, we can end up needing only 10% of the natural gas we need today. If that's all the emissions we produce, we are well into negative net emissions territory.

Neither nuclear nor coal are good for when people switch on their kettles. You want hydro (storage or generation), OCGT, and battery for that. And you can already run a low capacity OCGT off of hydrogen for less than a nuclear plant at similarly low capacity.

I'm not so sure about that. If storage gets cheap enough and can be made of sustainable materials, everyone will have a MWh sized battery in the basement.

This one plant supplies 8% of California's power, with no CO2 emissions. This is great news for the environment.

Whow! Diablo was high risk when they built it, now it's even more. On the fault, only 6m above sea level.

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