For example, they claim the sole reason nuclear is declining in the West is because of capital. This is straightforwardly not true. Politics have played a huge role, most notably in Germany.
Eg, suppose for a second we make a nuclear power plant that can profitably sell power for half the price that anything else on the market does. Well, you're a smart business person, so you don't price yourself at 50% of the competition. You price yourself at say, 90% of the competition, so you're still the cheapest, but now have a crazy profit margin.
And with that huge profit margin you can do things like having elaborate security systems to reassure people, donate to politicians, run PR campaigns, build cool stuff to buy people's love, etc. You'd have a very straightforward comeback of "shut us down and everything gets more expensive".
There's a reason why oil despite being a nasty, dirty and accident prone business isn't going anywhere.
Neither is true.
Wind and solar were the choices solution BEFORE they became cheap and profitable. The became cheap and profitable because of a sustained demand from society and politics, both domestic and international to make it so.
Jimmy Carter banned nuclear fuel processioning, killed nuclear research projects and much more, and partly justified this by putting up solar collectors on the white house. The republicans of that period were all in on fossil and no longer had ideas like 'Atoms for Peace'.
So to act as if wind and solar just happened to be cheap and profitable and nuclear just happened to be expensive is simply a misreading of history.
Certainly not! But money helps, a lot.
> So to act as if wind and solar just happened to be cheap and profitable and nuclear just happened to be expensive is simply a misreading of history.
Nuclear is inherently expensive, when done well. You don't exactly find a company making nuclear reactor vessels in your local neighborhood. Yeah, you can do it "on the cheap" without say, a containment building, but that turns out not to be a great idea. So got to make one of those, at a considerable expense renewables get to miss on. Plus a few other safety technologies.
Solar and wind aren't inherently expensive. They're both made of common components and are extremely amenable to mass manufacturing. Long term, nuclear was always sure to lose. Even the USSR-style, dangerous designs aren't cheap enough.
Wind is a generator with some blades attached, on a stick.
Nuclear is a generator with a nuclear reactor feeding it.
Exactly how do you expect "nuclear reactor" to be cheaper than "blades + stick"?
A pebble bed reactor is basically just a ball pit full of very expensive balls that will "get cheaper with scale bro we swear" that gets hot and needs stirring from time to time.
The steam generator part, even if you're not using one that already exists, is about the same cost and upkeep as a wind turbine as the added maintenance from the temperature and steam is roughly offset by the smaller size.
So it comes down to whether the ball pit once it gets all the indirect and hidden subsidies that nuclear gets can be about the same price again, then the slightly higher load factor makes up the difference.
My money is on we get a few shoved down our throats whether we like it or not at prices about comparable with wind (lower up front but more expensive once it's obvious that O&M is 5x the estimate), then the IAEA and NRC will be all shocked pikachu when they start dispersing a not-immediately-provably-fatal amount of fission products as if it's a surprise and not inevitable. Then the limits will be raised during some energy crisis pointing to the failure of wind after a large storm knocks out a bunch of power lines and one wind turbine.
Not building a containment building would never happen, and if you have small high power density reactor, the containment building is not actually the expensive part.
This is an example of a modern pebble bed reactor: https://kairospower.com/technology/
Building containment about a reactor like that isn't expensive. Containment is expensive if you have to build it around a gigantic PWR reactor with steam heat exchangers.
Also I'll believe the inexpensive molten salt cooled reactor when I see one.
> Solar and wind aren't inherently expensive.
Wind requires a gigantic amount of resources. A single super large wind power plant that produces 4MW at low utilization and has to be replaced every 30 years requires as many resources as a comparative 200MWe nuclear reactor.
If you go from first principle, and you really look, at what goes into these things, fission nuclear is clearly the cheapest. This goes for land use, general resource use and for the environment.
> Even the USSR-style, dangerous designs aren't cheap enough.
In fact making safer nuclear plants is CHEAPER not more expensive. Building inherently safe air cooled plants makes it massively cheaper.
[1] https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/nuclear-po... [2] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Too_much_money_for...
Oh, you mean that he refers to actual business costs where no one else does?
Even in Germany the decision to shutdown the reactors was partly economical. 10 years ago assumption about using cheap Russian gas until renewables catches up was not entering unreasonable.
They call that "the internet".
To be fair politics are a factor in the economics. Looking at the US the politics. Especially in California, make building or expanding nuclear power much lore expe since than it really should be.
To contribute to the discussion you could have maybe brought some evidence if it was so clear cut.
Nuclear was and is often excluded from renewable subsidies. France just had to pay 500M Euro because they missed their 'renewables' target, all while being green. The same thing in the US when they favored solar. There are lots of example.
CDU isn't business friendly, they are Russia and Fossil friendly. They knew it was a popular choice that would be supported by the anti nuclear left. It was a populist choice.
All that said, even some old nuclear plants that currently exist do sell long term electricity at quite good prices. Germany was actually pretty good at operating them and given their security, base load capabilities, being green and long term viability, turning them off because of per kWh pricing was basically an insanely delusional populist choice based on fear mongering and incomplete estimation of the pros and cons.
But I guess the Germans are now breathing the dirty air that this has produce (sadly blasting it all over central Europe and Western Europe). The South of France at the same time had nice clean air since 40 years.
Nuclear power plants have typical design lifetimes of 40 years. France nuclear power plants are suffering from increasing maintenance costs and outages because they are getting so old and they are nowhere close to 60-100 years. If you mean that markets favor cheaper solutions and that this is not good for nuclear you are correct.
> Nuclear was and is often excluded from renewable subsidies. France just had to pay 500M Euro because they missed their 'renewables' target, all while being green. The same thing in the US when they favored solar. There are lots of example.
Nuclear has received more subsidies than solar and wind combined (see my citations in a different post).
There are lots of nuclear plants older then 40 years.
Benznau in Switzerland has been operating since 1972 and will continue to do so for quite a while.
There are a number of PWR plants that are currently being re-certified for 80 years. And many, many more could be. And that is not the end, likely they could be re-certified for even long live.
I don't see your evidnece:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much...
This is a bad graph, measure from 1974 makes little sense, solar and wind were not really relevant for most of that. It makes absolute sense to support nuclear if your alternative is coal.
And I also question how in measures like this, the value of base-power is measured.
Because if you think of it as a level of society, and not spot price electricity, things look quite different.