We don't actually know what most decommissionings will cost. $300M is just a lower bound.
Nukes' fuel cost seems low only in comparison to their other very high costs.
Nukes' fuel cost seems low only in comparison to their other very high costs.
Of course we do, we've decommissioned plants before. About 200 commercial and 500 research reactors. That's a sufficient sample size. [1]
> Nukes' fuel cost seems low only in comparison to their other very high costs.
$0.0015/kWh is objectively cheap on an absolute scale. I don't know if you noticed, but California pays about $0.19/kWh, so this would be 0.78% of the delivered cost.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
That’s ~7% of the total cost for solar per kWh and doesn’t even get you to fuel rods.
> That’s ~7% of the total cost for solar per kWh and doesn’t even get you to fuel rods.
Which again doesn't matter because it's still objectively and on an absolute scale very cheap. About 0.8% of the cost you pay for electricity.
Solar is great, nobody, certainly not me, is trying to tell you not to build solar.
The reality is the future of the grid is going to be a mix of generation sources. That's going to include solar. It should, in my opinion, also include nuclear due to their different generation characteristics.
> The only thing that matters in economics is the relative scale. Nuclear being more expensive compared to the alternatives is a deal killer even if it’s not that expensive per kWh in absolute terms.
I disagree because it has different supply characteristics. One supplies a constant amount over a long period of time and is difficult to adjust. The other varies massively over the course of a day and zeroes out at night. Solar alone isn't going to meet needs, you need either or both of base load plus storage in addition.
It's disingenuous to compare the price of a kWh of solar by itself to nuclear when one works at night. If you want power at night, which I think many of us do, then you need to price into the $/kWh rate the cost of storage. You need to compare like for like.
[edit] In 2021, utility scale solar-plus-storage with a capacity of 50 MW/200 MWh is estimated to reach $0.085-$0.158/kWh. Nuclear is $0.131-$0.204/kWh. [1] They're actually quite comparable, and we have line of sight to making nuclear cheaper. Again, nobody is advocating for a 100% nuclear grid, it's not possible, because it's only suited to providing base load. A 100% solar grid is impossible because of the night time.
[edit2] Are you not reading what I'm saying? Nobody is advocating for a 100% nuclear grid. I am advocating for a mixed grid of renewables and nuclear where each operates according to its optimal utility function.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/05/utility-scale-solar-r...
Again if 7% represented a total fuel costs that might be helpful benchmark, but Nuclear’s actual fuel costs are higher than Solar’s total costs.
Yes, that’s right even if the only costs where fuel rods nuclear would already be more expensive than Solar per kWh.
Edit: In response to your edit unsubsidized Nuclear is currently more expensive than unsubsidized solar + batteries which can not only provide 24/7/365 power but actually respond to changing grid demand. Base load power isn’t a benefit it’s a major limitation to adoption because demand isn’t constant.
A true apples to apples comparison shows a 100% Nuclear grid would required vast price increase, while a 100% solar grid is roughly the same price as what we pay today.
Edit2: “Nuclear is $0.131-$0.204/kWh” that’s only for base load nuclear costs skyrocket if you want to respond to changing grid demand on a 100% nuclear grid. Rough estimates are close to 50c/kWh for a pure nuclear grid which is why nobody did so and even France was forced to import and export a large fraction of their generation and useage.
What you need in backup generation is cheap construction. Storage cost is falling even faster than solar and wind.
We already have the combined-cycle gas turbines. Their opex falls with duty cycle. Duty cycle falls with renewable generation buildout and, eventually, storage buildout.
The point was illustrative. We already have nuclear, the only point of advocating nuclear is if you want to increase it. Unfortunately, a 35% nuclear grid costs more per kWh than a 30% nuclear grid, and I don’t think most nuclear advocates understand why.
Your 50 MW/200 MWh numbers are basically what it costs for a 100% solar grid. So it’s not even clear if any nuclear would be cost effective in most areas. Alaska and Russia clearly can benefit from nuclear power, it’s not obvious if California, Texas etc will.
Solar has got so cheap that idling them half the year is no big deal.
Rare earths: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
Copper: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/09/copper-minin...
Mining both have a devastating impact on their local environments.
Copper is used heavily in all electric power systems, so does not count against any. Likewise, all industrial energy infrastructures depend heavily on mining, less-electric ones most of all. So, please do not throw up this irrelevant canard again.
While you are actually underestimating the cost of Indian Point decommissioning (the scale of which was a surprise to me too - but likely attributable to there being 3 reactors), it has a $2.4B fund that's already been collected and held in trust for its clean-up. But of course Indian Point is in New York, home of the most expensive subway track on earth - $3.9B per mile for the Q line extension. So decommissioning a 67 year old 3-reactor NPP costs the same as 0.58 miles of Q line extension.
Since commissioning, it generated 777TWh based on a 73% lifetime capacity factor (src: Wikipedia). About 1/4 of NYC's entire energy needs for 60 years. Decommissioning cost $0.0029/kWh generated. Why are we still pretending this is expensive?
On the other hand you know who isn't responsible for collecting the cost of recycling during operation? Solar and wind operators.
I don't know why people saying that nuclear has a waste problem when even cursory research will show you it simply doesn't due to the sheer energy density of the fuel. Further, fast neutron reactors produce two orders of magnitude less waste, and with incredibly short half lives.
The reality is we've been okay with the quantity of waste in large part because the input uranium is just so cheap it hasn't been economically effective to reprocess and reuse it, and nuclear has been such a whipping boy of the so-called environmentalist movement that we just haven't meaningfully invested in developing the technology in decades. The outcome of this so-called environmentalism in the 60s though was 60 years of coal and oil plants.
We've had a renewable, effectively-unlimited source of clean zero-carbon energy for decades now. We've simply elected not to pursue it.
We know the biggest cost of nuclear is the up-front expenditure and there was a really good interview recently with the head of the DOE loan program, Jigar Shah.* He talked about how a ton of the cost was simply that each NPP is a one-off snowflake, and that there were huge savings to be realized by standardizing designs and copy-pasting them onto favorable spots. There are tons of low hanging fruit that we can actually invest in addressing that would dramatically reduce the cost. We just lack the motivation. Stop mistaking the current state with the potential.
* I believe this was on Odd Lots.