$60/MWh for advanced nuclear electricity is achievable: GE Hitachi Executive
utilitydive.com
utilitydive.com
https://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/NuScales-Small-...
> As currently structured, those project risks will be borne by the buying entities (participants), not NuScale or Fluor, its lead investor. In other words, potential participants need to understand that they would be responsible for footing the bill for construction delays and cost overruns, as well as being bound by the terms of an expensive, decades-long power purchase contract.
> These compelling risks, coupled with the availability of cheaper and readily available renewable and storage resources, further weaken the rationale for the NuScale SMR.
I am a big fan of nuke as the generation source that is mostly environmentally benign right now today full stop. It's well known, though, that the main problem with nuke is that it's very expensive to build because we're quite worried about the safety so we have a lot of process and regulatory approval built into the design and construction. That extra process and regulatory approval is quite expensive.
Of course it's a lot cheaper if you just disregard those things.
...if you ignore storage.
Solar and wind will continue to be the most expensive, difficult to scale method until the issue of energy storage is resolved.
Batteries are getting cheaper, but they're not being produced on the scale necessary to supplant base load power. Until then, you need to calculate the full cost of base load into the cost of solar and wind if you want to consider them a substitute, rather than a compliment.
Counter example. South Australia hit 80% of it's electricity production from renewables in the last two quarters:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-enjoys-80-1-pct-wind-and-solar-share-in-blackout-free-summer/
https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/sa_fact_pack.pdf
https://reneweconomy.com.au/five-years-after-blackout-south-australia-now-only-state-with-no-supply-shortfalls/Indeed, if you use solar and wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that for electricity (a process that is ~40% efficient) it's still cheaper.
https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
This means that even on the darkest most windless winter days when the grid has to eat into long term seasonal storage, solar and wind energy is currently still cheaper than an MWh of nuclear power is on the sunniest, windiest days.
Nuclear is compact, and can really be built anywhere (may be consider earthquakes and don't build near tsunami zones). Therefore, a country that does not have suitable solar or win terrain would necessarily have to consider nuclear. A place like South Korea.
But of course, countries like australia (and to some extend the USA, and many other countries that's not in europe) would have the land, and it's just political and financial reasons that these power sources aren't more invested in.
Maybe nuclear isn't a great alternative to natural gas. I'm down with that. I'm not going to ignore the fact that wind and solar are at best complimentary, and that we can talk about pricing them without also talking about pricing in the base load that they're supplementing.
What's the price of the Ukraine war?
Nuclear reactors connected to the grid in 2021 had a median construction time of 88 months. (7.3 years) [1]
According to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) study, Tuesday, 15 countries have built a total of 83 nuclear plants over the last 20 years among the 31 countries with nuclear power. It took on average 190 months to build each plant.
During that period, Korea has built a total of 13 nuclear power plants. The average construction period for each plant was only 56 months (4.6 years), more than three times faster than other countries building nuclear plants. [2]
In France, [ ... ] taking an average of 126 months to build each plant, nearly three times as long as Japan. [2]
The United States has a total of 100 nuclear power plants, taking on average 272 months to complete one. [2]
[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...
Japan, which has built a total of eight nuclear power plants since 1996, was the fastest, taking only 46 months to build each plant, while China ranked third, building 28 nuclear power plants during that period and averaging 68 months to complete each one.
Japan’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant Unit 6 is the world’s fastest-built nuclear power plant, taking only 39 months for completion, while of Korea’s Wolseong Nuclear Power Plant Reactor 3 took 49 months to build.Looks like one or two plants never finished.
Most of the cost of nuclear power is in building and demolishing the plant, not in operating it. So if you plan a plant now to go operational in 10 years and run for the next 50, you are locked in to producing electricity for (amortized) $60/MWh for the next decades. Or shut it down early and eat a giant loss, if the projections for solar, wind and storage costs become true. That's a hard sell when you also have the option to build a wind farm in 5 years or a solar installation in two, decommission them after 20 years and repeat with whatever is the most cost effective then.
Time will tell if that hypothesis remains true, but inflation is a thing. What you build now with an amortizing cost over decades may weight much cheaper on your debt than you thought.
In that aspect, if you're a state actor, paying more to get lower maintenance costs is usually a good choice.
Nuclear makes a lot of sense if we want to be off coal and natural gas in the next 5-10 years. If we want to burn fossil fuels until 2060 then solar and wind are okay I guess. There is a reason that fossil fuel companies lobby heavily against nuclear and fund immense campaigns against it. It's a direct competitor. Solar and battery on the other hand are just barely off the ground right now.
1. https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-ti...
This is one problem I have with anti-nuclear propaganda. It uses the fact that it's been so successful at destroying nuclear power, as evidence that it's right in the first place.
It's a false dichotomy anyway, because I wouldn't put _any_ money into nuclear stocks.
I also expect a lot more hydro to be built eventually, it's not as dependent on geography if you just build two ponds at different elevations for pumped hydro, or repurpose old mineshafts to get the elevation difference on flat ground.
What's your calculation on the amount of batteries needed for a nuclear grid to meet all peak needs?
Once you've done the sums you'll almost certainly say something like, "well we can just overbuild nuclear and find uses for the excess, including timeshifting".
It's the exact same problem (matching demand and supply), with the same solutions but one gets hyperfocus at the same time the other is totally ignored.
If you want to have all the power generated by renewable, you would need big enough storage to hold all the power consumption during the highest peaks - like really hot summer nights where everyone is running AC at maximum. And it tends to cost quite a lot to have a giant UPS. And, because we need power 24/7, you need to have that in a redundant fashion, which basically boils down to two giant UPS systems in the gigawatt range. And I have this feeling that doing this is very dirty and very expensive to build and maintain.
The cheapest low-end estimate for sodium-ion batteries is $40 per kw/h of capacity. The Texas grid at any point had about 85 gigawatts of available generation capacity in 2021 (100% would be around 115, but solar and wind aren't always producing, plants are sometimes offline for maintenance, etc).
So, with no nuclear or fossil fuel production, you're looking at $27 billion just to buy the batteries (not counting installation or maintenance costs) to keep the lights on for 8 hours in Texas on a windless night.
That's at the cheapest option, so you can figure that you'll need to pay roughly 1/4 of that a year making up for batteries that have lost capacity. If you double it, that drops to 1/5 to 1/6 the total cost, unless a miracle occurs in anode tech or the weather is wonderful and they don't cycle as frequently.
Of course, three days of mild, cloudy weather means brownouts or blackouts, because 8 hours of storage is not very much at all. If it were connected to other grids, they could import excess energy from across the continent, but that means those places won't be recharging their own batteries, and you now need to factor in more HVDC lines, and over-provisioning to cover transmission losses into your base price.
Snowy 2. Fengning.
For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.
0. https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/12/20/poland-has-installed-...
1. https://www.world-nuclear.org/world-nuclear-performance-repo...
With less than 30 hours of sunshine in December it contributes to the grid amount known as "fuck all": https://i.imgur.com/QVNpl06.png Capacity was over 10GW at this point.
It was installed only because of net metering policies, so you generate energy in summer when it does not really matter, and receive it in winter where there's lack of it. Bad policy.
Even wind generally fares better: https://i.imgur.com/2R2nfF2.png 1,3 GW out of ~8GW capacity.
On the other hand, the 5,3GW of nuclear capacity displaces 10x more fossils, because it's actually 5,3GW you can generally count on.
>For many years, this has been a debate about nuclear’s supposedly huge potential in the face of actually existing solar and wind capacity running circles around actually existing nuclear.
Yet, we install tens or hundreds of solar "capacity" that end up not generating any power or overgenerating when we have too much of it. It's pointless, especially in our climate.
edit: checked your source and it in fact says global operating nuclear comes to around 370GW which makes more sense. Not making a comment on your point, the numbers just seemed off in my experience
This will not extrapolate linearly into the future though. The grid is already being destabilized by all the local generation of solar (most of the installations are on roofs of people's homes). This caused the government to change the law on how much it's paying the individual producers who sell their excess electricity to the grid and now, you're getting paid the actual, momentary price of kWh (which means that, on sunny days, you'll be paid hardly anything at all), instead of a fixed sum that was paid out before. This decreases the profitability of new solar installations by a lot.
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
32% solar and 60% wind, with an overbuild of 2.5x peak demand each (so 5x peak combined) is the cheapest option, according to the above analysis, filling the remaining 8% with other low carbon options.
There's zero chance, just politically, that anyone in this country will agree on additional gas dependency. Does this "cheapest option" actually includes cost of 30GW gas plants anyway?
Anyway I don't see any actual numbers on this page so it's hard for me to treat this seriously. "Cost comparison" only talks about whether "could POLAND run by only building new solar, wind and batteries?" which is very not interesting to me compared to having 30-50% of nuclear generation.
The model has several conservative assumptions that mean no power is imported as fuel or via cross border wires.
Thats fine, its just a model, the main point is that even with those constraints, renewables can provide 92% of power directly, and provide the power to meet the other 8% too. In Poland! (many other countries are more blessed with renewables).
Trees are great: solar-powered, recursive, self-assembling, carbon sequestration tech.
Forests can't be the only solution to carbon, because of the scale of emissions, but they can be a fraction of the solution.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444...
https://ember-climate.org/app/uploads/2022/02/Global-Electri...
I'd gladly take expensive nuclear power that exists over non-existing cheap renewables. (Of course, renewables are great, I'm totally rooting for them. I just wish that they are actually, you know, available, instead of being only theoretically available and being used as a rhetorical device against nuclear power.)
Also you omitted some relevant details on South Korean politics: the previous president Moon (2017-2022) and his party was staunchly anti-nuclear and tried hard to phase it out, for the sake of the "environment." Which predictably resulted in continued usage of fossil fuels, which these idiots see as a lesser evil.
(Sadly, his successor, the sitting president Yoon, is a raging buffoon. I mean, he muttered "Wouldn't it be fucking embarrassing for Biden" in front of reporters, what more do you want. Being pro-nuclear is probably the only positive thing I can say of him, but I'm not really counting on that - Yoon being such an idiot, there's a very good chance his policies would be put in reverse by whoever succeeds him.)
They are actually available, maybe Korea just doesn't want to build them? They don't play that well with constant output systems like nuclear so it would make nuclear unprofitable in the longer run. Although this obviously depends on the energy mix, maybe up until a certain percentage renewables would be fine for example.
They also intend to make 10% of their power from hydrogen/ammonia which is presumably going to be generated from some combination of nuclear and renewables when demand isn't peaking.
If this were the / a major factor in cost competitiveness, we'd expect to see much higher uptake of nuclear fission power plants in places where, as you might say, those things are disregarded (to varying degrees).
I don't believe that's the case, but can't find convincing data one way or the other.
I wonder if there are examples of massive cost overrun / delayed commissioning nuclear fission plants - say Hinkley in the UK - that could be pointed at to substantiate the 'process and regulatory approval' costs, where those process and regulations changed after the initial cost calculations.
Even taking into account all OL3 construction delays the long term LCOE target for all three plants is 30 EUR/MWh. LCOE for the OL3 reactor alone is estimated at 42 EUR/MWh.
The main Wiki article includes a long list of reasons for delays and cost overruns.
The construction project also included very long term, underground storage. On YouTube, you can find a great, if slightly creepy, documentary about it called "Into Eternity".
edit: less than half
Definitely cheap, if you make someone else pay.
I know, my point is that EDF is not related to that.
> EDF bought the bankrupt carcass of Areva to preserve the French nuclear industry.
Some parts were sent in other entities, like Framatome.
Historically NPT treaty prevented a lot of those countries from pursuing peaceful nuclear energy.
I'll reiterate my earlier two claims slightly more succinctly:
a) we should see a strong correlation between nation states with laxer attitudes towards safety AND more fission nuclear power plants brought online on budget and on time.
b) absent regulation changes through the life of any given project, we should expect to see any given plant brought online on budget and on time.
I don't believe we have a wealth of examples of the latter, and for the former the semi-obvious candidate would be China, however:
" ... China’s government has become more cautious about nuclear power [...]. The target in the 13th five year plan was only 58 gigawatts by 2020, and, as of April 2022, China is yet to reach that capacity target. Judging by what is under construction, China will miss the target of 70 gigawatts by 2025 as well.
"Many Chinese nuclear plants have been delayed and construction costs have exceeded initial estimates."
Citing: https://www.colorado.edu/cas/2022/04/12/even-china-cannot-re...
Important to note reasons for targets being unmet, apart from safety reevaluation delays due to Fukushima Daiichi (PRC laxer but not that lax on nuclear safety), delays and over cost can be attributed to foreign nuclear tech - french EPR underperforming, US AP1000s trouble with Westinghouse and sanctions against China General Nuclear as part of tech war. Recent indigenous CPR1000 plants post above drama have rolled out according to expectations. A lot can be explained by nuclear simply being hard, and domestic regulation around nuclear power in western countries capable of infra exports led to them consistently underdeliver. NPT and moat around nuclear tech also prevents many countries from indigenous nuclear power development. Few countries have the resources and expertise regardless of NPT to pursue indigenous nuclear power programs at all, but so far PRC plants with indigenous tech is performing alright. Other consideration is simpler and scalable renewable tech costs coming way down. Renewables are over performing while nuclear now performing at about expectations.
Aircraft carriers and submarines.
The economics of nuclear powered subs is quite different from a commercial product. But it’s interesting to consider.
(And just for fun: imagine what effect a “right to repair” law would have…)
In addition, military spend capabilities will more readily compensate for the other two sides of the project management triangle. And AIUI a lot of those systems, once initial development occurred, were cookie-cutter / evolutionary designs.
I also understand the mini-reactors for seafaring vessels are much less efficient - but they don't need to be hugely efficient, primarily for the reason you mention.
In any case, I expect the regulatory-driven quality of those devices is ridiculously high. Well the USA systems at least -- obviously Russia had a much less pleasant experience with small reactors on submarines.
That's where the original argument fails to compel.
There's ~ 50 countries with nuclear reactors, and about 30 with nuclear power plants. (Australia's an example of having one reactor, for research, but not wanting any for power production.)
Anyway, it's unlikely those 32 countries that have nuclear fission power plant, which presumably is a subset of countries that could build them today, all have near-identical regulatory / process requirements that in turn are the reason they're uneconomical to build there.
Few projects means little standardization and shaky forecasts.
Ore is cheap, natural uranium is still cheap, enriched uranium isn’t, and making fuel rods isn’t. Insurance, land, replacement equipment, decommissioning, etc it all adds up.
People love to talk about how cheap various aspects of nuclear power are compared to other types of energy, but it’s the total costs that matter not just individual parts in isolation. Small modular reactors still need cooling, they still need turbines, workers, spent fuel cooling ponds and processing, security, etc etc.
Jobs for 500 people vs cheaper electricity for 1 million people which allows them to spend more money elsewhere and thus also creates jobs. The second option might seem roughly equal, except those new jobs are creating value and thus society is better off with increased efficiency.
Of course those benefits aren’t spread equally, but being poor today is still better than being poor 500 years ago. Hopefully being poor in 500 years will be a similar improvement.
Actually it applies even more, because renewables are decentralised and small scale, so there's a wide range of jobs from house-level local installations to international infrastructure.
This is what France tried to do with the reactor they built for Finland. There was a budget hole of a few billion and an argument/lawsuit over who would pay for it.
Nuclear costs are a hot potato.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant supply.
Contrast that to the Al Dhafra PV project also in the UAE - $1 billion for 2 GW of nameplate capacity. One can apply whatever discount is wanted to account for solar's shortcomings and it still comes out ahead when planning an energy generation portfolio. Further away from the equator a similar case can be made for wind.
The Barakah reactors will be generating 5.3 GWh from 6 pm to 8am which of course solar can't do. In that time it will deliver 14 hours X 5.3 GW ~= 75 GWh of electricity.
Capital costs for 4 hour utility scale lithium storage are expected to be $250 million per GWh by 2025. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf
75 GWh x $250 million = ~$19 billion to get those gigawatt hours from storage.
The nameplate capacity of the solar plant to generate 75 GWh for night time use in the hours from 8 am to 6pm is 7.5 GW. To prove my point let's double that to 15 GW.
The cost of that 15 GW solar plant, based on the Al Dhafra PV plant would be $7.5 billion. Another 5 GW solar plant to deliver the same day time GWh that the reactors do...let's double that to 10 GW so another $5 billion.
So my back of the napkin calculations say that the cost to replace the Barakah reactors with solar + storage are: - $19 billion for Li-ion storage - $7.5 billion for a solar plant to charge that storage for nighttime use. - $5 billion for a solar plant to deliver (more than) equivalent daytime use.
$31.5 billion in total. Very much competitive with the nuclear option taking into account a) time to completion / general project risk b) the falling cost of storage plus the development of new options like sodium ion storage c) radioactive waste risks, solvable as they are d) security concerns - Houthi rebels fired a few missiles at the Barakah site a while back. e) construction and operational workforce skill requirements
Based on the lifetimes of these South Korean plants(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea), I'm just going to use 40 years as the lifetime for these calculations as I couldn't find any numbers for how long the UAE expects that plant to be operating regarding that operational costs of $20 billion which gives us:
Maintenance costs for solar of: 40 years x $23 billion x 2.5% = $23 billion
So now we're at a total current cost of $46 +7.5 = $53.5 billion for Solar vs. $45 billion for Nuclear.
Edit: Forgot the actual cost of the solar array that G80z said was $7.5 billion
It isnt just a matter of getting 2GW of solar and getting enough batteries to supply 2GW through the night.
Even leaving out better battery chemistries for the moment, you can use pumped hydro (even with seawater - some of the UAE’s highest mountains are near the coast) and thermal storage (you might think you don’t need it in such a hot place but you’ve still got to bake bread etc etc).
I'd have to imagine not. And that it might take as long to get all the batteries built and installed as it does to build a nuke plant.
If I want enough solar panels and batteries to make my house off grid I can just write a check and the stuff shows up in a few weeks. But that doesn't scale upwards without limit. Eventually the limits on global supply kick in no matter how much you want it.
Sadly, I had one months ago but I can't find it again.
The EPR have a double containement layer where EPR2 have a single one. The EPR was also an industrial demonstrator.
> supposed to be able to withstand a passenger jet collision.
Our autorithy of nuclear safety says any regular nuclear plants should be able to whistand an passanger jet collision, but added extra protection on the EPR for it: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/le-vrai-du-faux/seg...
> Even if "they are not built to withstand such a shock without damage, nuclear power plants would offer a good resistance capacity", assures the Nuclear Safety Authority. But no evaluation exists because this type of accident was considered at the time as totally improbable.
That said, after the authorities and EDF claim to have made arrangements for the construction of the future Flamanville EPR. "The specific protection against falling aircraft called aircraft hull is a reinforced concrete structure covering the following buildings: the reactor building, two divisions of the safeguard auxiliaries building and the fuel building".
The fact remains that zero risk does not exist, as Jacques Repussard, Director General of IRSN, affirmed during his hearing before a parliamentary commission of inquiry last February: "I could not affirm under oath that in the event crash of a very large aircraft, loaded with tens of tons of fuel, the consequences of the fire would be brought under control"
Some might proclaim that's not fair competitively. I have no interest in being fair about the matter, I don't want my government to be either.
It is astonishing the amount of red-tape when it comes to nuclear power, just because of all the FUD pushed by environmental groups, when it is the cleanest form of energy in the world.
Is waste. The main problem is waste, we need to store it somewhere and it’s never in my backyard
Here's a source (also check the sourced on the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU3kLBo_ruo
The problem is more likely PERCEPTION of nuclear waste.
It came out of the ground, if we put it back there then how have we made things worse than they were? There are natural nuclear reactors in places untouched by humans.
> Solar panels are highly recyclable.
Really? At what energy cost?
> We are figuring out how to recycle the composite materials used for windmill blades.
Which is a fancy way of saying we can't and don't currently recycle them. There are reasonably advanced plans for reprocessing nuclear waste too.
> We need to move to a circular economy.
Fundamentally impossible. We need to keep pollution at manageable levels and expand into the universe. The environmental impact of nuclear waste is tiny in comparison to virtually everything else we do in everyday life; it should be a long long way down the list of concerns.
This is facile. Plutonium 240 isn't uranium 238. Nor is Cs, Tc, Pu241 etc.
You can just say you're not remotely interested in truth or reality. It's simpler for everyone.
Personally I would really like to see ambitious high tech safe nuclear options be a thing, and to have thoughtful long term handling plans.
The Integral Fast Reactor getting canceled (1994) seems a real shame to me. A safe cheap transuranic-burning-capable low-proliferation-concern breeder sodium fast reactor could help us greatly deal with waste, could be gamechanger. But perhaps it was too soon, that it would have only been another mark against ambitious nuclear. GE Hitachi has kept the plans updated & moving along, which is interesting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
And TerraPower has recently reached out expressing interest in working together towards an IFR inspired design. https://neutronbytes.com/2022/02/03/terrapower-teams-up-with...
But given costs as is, focus on being extremely cheap not advanced makes some sense, albeit it sort of also feels like it limits the potential, & keeps us from addressing actual real total costs.
That's primarily a political issue rather than a technical one.
The US may be fucked & awful here, but I cannot imagine the rest of the world is particularly less fucked or less awful. I'm sure some folks have not gotten quite so tied up in this question, but I also don't have high confidence they have been paranoid & political enough about how properly they ought to be dealing with waste that will live for hundreds of thousand of years. If they have to come deal with really awful problems in 20k years, at enormous expense, well, that factors against the advantage of nuclear power too.
Heritage Foundation (!) agrees: https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...
So far breeder reactors have been some of the least economic energy-generation systems on the planet. We also attempted them only in the most limited window of time, long ago, when nuclear was so young, and have never tried again. It seems unlikely cost will really come down (unless we actually factor in the network-externalities of dealing with the waste, which so far no one has ever had to face). I think a lot on the sharp-as-a-tack Charles Stross's Nothing like this will be built again, which isn't a breeder reactor but speaks to a more ambitious & open ended time. And I semi-weap for a humanity that cannot experiment, cannot try great things, that is market driven, risk-averse, & rational to a fault, at the cost of ignoring so much potential. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-l...
"Never been tried again"
There has barely been a break and all of them failed just as abysmally.
The paper you link to is a joke.
They claim a cost of utility scale solar as $17 / MWh and then claim a cost of utility scale solar with battery as $22 / MWh.
How much battery backup does that $5 / MWh provide? it doesn't say, but the answer is only a few minutes.
Look at the chart of page 28 of planned installations where it shows 22 GW standalone storage being added for 60 GW of solar and wind. That means the standalone storage being installed can provide 20 minutes of backup power for the renewable resources being installed.
The cost of a renewable system with battery backup that can guarantee power for even 24 hours would probably be at least 10X the cost of bare solar, so in the neighborhood of $200 / MWh, or quadruple the target cost of NuScale (based on the chart in this paper).
Guaranteeing power for 24 hours is not acceptable though. A system like that would have regular blackouts given the normal variability in solar and wind.
Unless someone is quoting a price on guaranteed sustained power delivery they are not serious. Try selling your electricity to a data center or any other commercial buyer and see how far you get.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-t...
Or alternatively we could acknowledge that using the existing fossil fuel infrastructure for 8000 hours over the next century for the tiny minority of countries without enough hydro even in the unlikely case storage never improves is preferable to using them for 80,000 hours while waiting for nuclear plants to be built.
Not even 24 hours of storage is necessary in the vast majority of the world: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/utility-scale_pv-plus-...
> The utility-scale PV-plus-battery technology represents a DC-coupled system (defined in the figure below), in which one-axis tracking PV and 4-hour lithium-ion battery storage share a single bidirectional inverter. The PV-plus-battery technology is represented as having a 130-MWDC PV array, a 50-MWAC battery (with 4-hour duration), and a shared 100-MWAC inverter. Therefore, the PV component has a DC-to-AC ratio (or inverter loading ratio [ILR]) of 1.3, which is the same as for utility-scale PV in the 2021 ATB. The assumed relative sizing is consistent with existing (but limited) data for online and proposed utility-scale PV-plus-battery systems—whose inverter characteristics (shared vs. separate) are not well known.
That very closely matches the ratio in the rollout they provide from the Berkley interconnection queue research. You don't just keep adding batteries, you add more renewable generation at the same time to maximize cost effectiveness.
This ratio is sometimes called "near firm" as it provides power when it is needed by the grid.
NuScale got an approval for an SMR that produces 50 MW of electricity (see [1], published by NRC in the Federal Register)
> The NuScale reactor building is designed to hold up to 12 power modules. Each power module has a rated thermal output of 160 megawatt thermal (MWt) and electrical output of 50 megawatt electric (MWe), yielding a total capacity of 600 MWe for 12 power modules
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/01/19/2023-00...
[2] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-acti...
The linked article doesn't say if any of these properties are affected by the change, so I have no way of assessing it.
But if you claim you can reduce costs by building something you call a small modular reactor, and it keeps getting less small and less modular, questions do arise as to whether the initial costs will similarly become more like traditional fission.
EDIT: the link to the Texas winter crisis of 2021 was here, but it's unrelated.
Wikipedia has higher numbers, but still comparable. And "technology proponent says technology can achieve X" is a really bad selling point if another technology already delivers X, especially if the new technology is going to face social hurdles.
Building enough nuclear for baseload demand, and enough solar+storage for the extra daytime demand, seems ideal to me until we get much cheaper scalable storage.
The electricity demand in the winter is much lower than the summer demand, especially in California due to residential AC.
> Actually this gave me an idea, it would be really neat to have an comprehensive simulator of power grids that incorporated weather, demand spikes etc. to play around with different energy source mix to get an idea of what actually works and when it fails as well as total cost, environmental impact etc.
There's a gentleman in Australia who does ~this for their market -- 5 hours of storage is enough to get to a 99% renewable grid there;
It's hard to make a reliable cost prediction comparing nuclear vs. wind/solar + batteries since we don't know how to build nuclear any more.
Vogtle 3/4 are going to cost maybe $40 billion when all's said and done? With OpEx, you get to something like $0.18/kwh. That's more than 5x the cost of unsubsidized wind or solar installations which would buy you a bunch of storage.
So we still have to pay for dispatchable generation if we want to have power on a calm cloudy day week. We can add that cost to the cost of the storage and overbuilding of capacity that allows solar or wind to deliver rated power overnight. Or live with blackouts
5 Hours of electricity is something like 13 TWh, so if we get to 5,500 GWh annual production by 2030, it would take ~2.5 years to provide 5 hours of global electricity storage. Handicap it all and double the electricity requirement and halve the annual production figures and it's still only 10 years' capacity to go to a 99% carbon-free grid.
Yes there is pumped storage, but I wonder how much more of that there really is to develop? Plus damns are environmental disasters of their own. The other storage methods are speculative at best. I just wanted to push back a bit on the idea that "just" need solar + storage as many people seem to believe. It is a big ask, and I think we will need more. If we don't want gas plants, then nuclear could be a good option.
The advantage of the batteries is specifically in power density, which makes them suited for mobility and consumer convenience. But the more you get into seriously optimizing electrical storage for scale, the less it's going to be about one specific mode.
My mom's house doesn't need A/C but it does need a lot of heat in the winter. We looked at moving her to solar/battery and an electric heat pump instead of her gas furnace. With even a tiny bit of trees nearby and otherwise pretty good exposure we were told it was going to be hard to make it worth it. Her demand in the winter would be pretty high.
We typically generate 800kW - 1300kW per month (more in the summer). Our panels are angled at 30 degrees to slightly preference winter generation.
so when you design a utility solar system with "+4" storage, what you're really doing is creating a "one days worth of full production" buffer. that can be used to run the output at a fixed rate while the buffer builds and empties every day (its never that simple but thats the basic principle). for example a 100MW farm with 400MWH of storage can in the simplest sense produce 16MW constantly (all through the day and night). in practice there's plenty of other stuff on most grids so they don't do a full battery cycle every night, but rather use the buffer to be able to meet day ahead and dispatchability contracts for a very cloudy day or a lightly cloudy week.
now don't get me wrong, obviously that still doesn't put it in the same reliability category as nuclear, but it closes like 80% of the gap in practice. its not better, but it is clearly on track to be 'good enough'.
[1] https://www.nrel.gov/gis/assets/images/solar-annual-ghi-2018...
Then again people freezing to death is certainly effective way to lower co2 emissions, maybe this is their hidden agenda.
Variable and uncertain power generation creates a problem on the electricity grid and the source of the problem does not pay for the solution. Everyone else does. Those energy costs you quote imply that variable generation (wind, solar) do not set the price of energy, which they do not.
The problem with computing a solution is that it depends on where you are, which season you are in and what the rest of the power grid looks like.
If you know anyone selling that (installed, with solar panels) for $4500, I’d like to hear about it.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio...
https://signaturesolar.com/complete-all-in-one-off-grid-sola...
of course utility scale beats that handily.
I agree that it doesn't make economic sense in an ideal world with twice as much space per capita and/or a lot more time to find and purchase ideal nooks and crannies and wire them up, but that would require moving to planet B. Note I'm not talking about nearly-empty USA, Australia, northern Africa, etc. here; rather, take 2-3 random European countries (highest emissions per capita after north america, so you know, the place that needs to get change happening) and you're very unlikely to hit only ones where not most/all of the land already is already allocated to some purpose.
I also agree it's likely already too late to get started on new nuclear plants, like, it's nearly so late that we might as well just go solar and wind for the rest of the way. But I don't think it's quite at that point yet, considering for example that regions in southern germany with big-ish distance requirements for wind turbines are placing nearly none (and germany is not even one of the countries that I would count among those that are out of space), it's apparently that full already and they've got like 80% of the way to go in phasing out fossil fuels.
Honestly the main hope I have these days is solar panels on crop fields becoming a real thing. That would grant a level of scale (and somewhat protects from crop failure causes like hail and drought) that would make me see this energy transition as feasible without nuclear (pushing the recycling problem onto the next generation, but better to deal with a billion worn panels than a billion displaced people (both figures are figurative)), but so far there's little adoption.
Thats is the wrong problem - numerous farmers in Britain want wind turbines, they want extra source of income and they are willing to put in their own money. They know the turbines dont take any land away from farming - only fraction of a percent.
They are not allowed to install wind turbines on their own land from their own money, because the british government has banned turbines over a certain, non-viable height, on land.
Even when you want a small turbines installed, it takes 4 years of planning permissions and legal battles.
If we allowed every farmer to install windfarm of their land without interference, we'd solve half the problem.
We are dooming ourselved to disaster out of purely aesthetic concerns.
Farmers are being told they need to diversity but they can't have wind turbines, they can't have businesses that need any kind of premises, they can't build housing on their less productive land. Something has to give at some point.
Everyone agrees they need to do something but many governments are intent on doing nothing
For western europe at least, off shore wind is a great alternative, as are smaller wind turbines on farms. Much of western europe is in the path of the trade winds and so is a great place for wind power.
It is not too late for nuclear. Nuclear is an excellent stop-gap measure while we figure out how to transition to large-scale renewables.
So, in the first 2 months of 2023 the average American paid $0.17 per kWh [1], up from $0.15 one year before. Overall, a lot of people would be happy to pay $0.06/kWh. You are saying solar and wind could come at $0.045 and $0.03. That's great, but 2 cents per kWh is not really something people pay attention too all that much.
[1]https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
Let's consider a few technologies that already exist (in addition to wind and solar) and work at scale or can be made to work at scale that can be freely combined with wind and solar.
- Pumped hydro. As of yet one of the most widely used energy storage on grids in e.g. the US. There's about 22 GW and about 0.5TWH of it on the grid. A lot of it was, ironically, installed decades ago when nuclear plants started coming online and something had to be done with the massive amounts of energy that they produced. It's relatively expensive and it can't be done everywhere. But it's proven technology and its there already. There are lots of smaller scale trials with all sorts of gravity batteries. Not all of them practical of course. Though using e.g. mine shafts seems like it should work.
- Cables. We can use cables to move power around by the GW. It's an old technology. Has been around for as long as we've had electricity. This can be done over thousands of kilometers using modern technology. Examples: cables are already running between Norway, Germany, and the UK and more are being planned between e.g. Morocco and the UK, Australia and Singapore. A single cable can provide roughly the capacity of a largish nuclear reactor. I think the Moroccon cables are going to be 1.8GW each for example. The current plan is to have four of those. Cables aren't cheap. But they are probably comparable to largish nuclear plants in terms of the amount of power they can move and in cost. And they last for a very long time once you have them. Great argument if you hear people make the point that the wind doesn't blow all the time and the sun doesn't come out in the winter. True locally but cables fix the locality problem. Cloudy UK can rely on sunny Morocco. Wind starved central Europe can use off shore wind.
- Geothermal. There are lots of places where people are already exploiting geothermal energy. It seems more interesting to use for heating than for electricity but both are a thing. Digging deep for higher temperature gradients is expensive. But there also are a few newer projects involving heat pumps that don't require that.
- Grid batteries. These are currently being deployed by the gwh and probably soon twh. This is a rapidly growing market. Mostly this seems to be with relatively expensive batteries that provide hours, not weeks of storage. But interest in much cheaper but more voluminous battery chemistries that might be used for longer term storage is picking up as well. Too early to pick any winners here but there's simply too much of this stuff going on to dismiss it.
- Domestic batteries and EV batteries. Love them or hate them, these are being mass produced and installed as well. Tens of millions of EVs are going to require batteries to be produced by the twh per year and that's going to be a reality within a decade. The volume of batteries on the road is soon going to exceed the yearly energy consumption in a lot of places. That would be a problem if those vehicles would be moving 100% of the time. Which of course they don't. Domestic batteries are not far behind this but those too are starting to add up as their cost is going down. So despite there being so much battery on the road, we may not actually have much of a case for vehicle to grid technology to actually tap into that reserve. Because we'll have plenty of other batteries permanently connected to the grid. Either way, hard to dismiss any storage that is going to measured in many twh.
None of thesse things of course are free and relying on them exclusively is not a solution. Especially considering that some of these are actually quite expensive. But the reality is we are already doing those at gw scale and soon at tw scale. And it's all happening on the same interconnected grid.
Cost is not a constant and there's a trend for mass production to get cost down for a lot of these things. This is true for nuclear as well. At least hypothetically because our current nuclear production capacity is too low to show any signs of a learning effect so far (if anything it seems to have gotten more expensive over time). But hypothetically cost would come down if we did more of it.
But the simple fact is that by virtue of people installing solar and wind at break neck speed there's going to be no shortage of vast amounts of excess power peaks that can be moved around and stored. Which does raise the question what the point is of focusing on expensive nuclear projects in a lot of places.
System thinking is the notion that we can use all of these solutions, and more, to create a highly resilient and robust, interconnected grid. Nuclear can certainly play a role in that and it looks like it will. But it's probably going to be a much smaller one than some people would like us to think.
Here in the UK, our solar output varies hugely between summer and winter, and due to our climate we use a lot of heating during the winter. Currently in the form of gas heating, in the future presumably heat pumps.
And while batteries are workable to store daytime solar power for evening use, cycling the battery 365 times a year, summer-to-winter battery storage would only cycle once per year - making the capital cost 365x higher.
It's a shame nuclear is as expensive as it is, as a year-round zero-carbon power source would be a very convenient thing to have!
I'm a big fan of the SMR concept, but this line about having to throw everything away for solar after 20 years is just wrong.
Efficiency went from 8.55% to 8.2%
You don’t need anything else (e.g., a river to dump waste heat).
Is it 12 years? 15? 20? no one knows. But since most warranties are 10 years, its safe to assume they easily get there, or it would become too expensive for the manufacturer
I guess you don't need permits for upgrading to newer components.
And because thus is an economic pressure/incentive, its really the opposite of what the original quote was suggesting. In 20 years we throw it all away because there has been amazing improvements doesn't gel well with their "this will last 60 years" statement.
1. https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html - high resolution at https://www.nrel.gov/pv/assets/pdfs/best-research-cell-effic...
See: https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2022/aging-gracefully-how...
"A major question in the solar energy industry is exactly how much we should expect solar modules to degrade each year...and when they will eventually degrade so much that they no longer produce adequate power...For modules built today, it is probably 30 years."
Except a quarter of the cost.
1: https://energy.mit.edu/news/study-even-short-lived-solar-pan...
As the article rightly points out, it often just makes more economic sense to replace them earlier due to improvements in panel technology. There isn't really a technical reason to replace them.
PV "lifetime" is overblown fossil industry propaganda. It does not factor into any economic decision.
This is even formalized in international agreements. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Civil_Lia...)
This means that any and all estimates of prices per MWh are, and can never be anything but, fictional. Including this one.
That's true for any kind of power and, more generally, for any kind of human activity.
You don't pay the real cost when you wear a pfc coat. You don't pay the real cost for the plastic-wrapped takeout you buy. You don't pay the real cost for the co2-emitting taxi you hail. You don't pay the real cost for the industrial agriculture you rely on. You don't pay the real cost for the water you drink.
Accounting is not meant to measure "real costs, it's just a short-term measure of human activity.
You're thinking philosophically perhaps? :)
I mean what you have to pay, financially, to be clear. In the sense that when you don't want to pay for more solar power, you close the plant and stop paying.
That's not an option for nuclear power plants. All closed nuclear power plants are still costing money.
I'm using the very same definition you used.
If we take one example I gave, there is $0 in the cost a taxi ride provisioned to pay for insurance losses related to climate change, current or future.
>If we take one example I gave, there is $0 in the cost a taxi ride provisioned to pay for insurance losses related to climate change, current or future.
That is not the same definition. To continue the metaphor, I'm talking only about the money you have to pay to the taxi driver according to the meter. :)
Nobody knows how to turn off the meter on a "nuclear taxi". Someone has to pay it even after the taxi has been demolished, the driver has retired, and the passenger is dead.
The same is true for a regular taxi. No one is going to put carbon back into the ground when you kick the bucket, and no one can put a price on the actual cost.
No, for "regular taxis" you just stop paying after you have closed the plant.
Meaning, again, that if a normal power plant operator goes belly up, you can just leave the power plants in place. Nobody has to pay anything. When the same happens for nuclear, taxpayers have to pay.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/07/climate-change-is-making-som...
It actually does, the forests in the US alone absorb carbon equivalent to the emissions from over 100 average coal plants per year. The lifetime emissions from a plant operating for 50 years is gone in 6 months after closing, one might say.
Power plants only account for 1/4 of emissions so the blame for global warming will mainly land on other sources.
Unlike the trillion dollars and counting that are currently being caused by only two nuclear plants and nothing but them.
Once your solar panel reaches its end of life, who will collect it for recycling? How efficient is the recycling? How much power does that recycling cost, and how is it produced? Are there parts that are deemed uneconomical to reprocess into new solar panels and used for other activities?
Looking at the current state of e-waste, I'm not sure the outlook 100 years from now is great.
It’s a concept that was created for nuclear, because it has a very similar problem as renewables: the cost lies in building the generating capacity, not in using it. For nuclear to be cheap it needs to get used 100% also in the night and during the weekend. In a purely nuclear power net you also need overcapacity to be able to generate maximum load.
Citation needed. Large energy grids have plenty of capacity to transfer electricity across countries if not whole continents and balance out production and usage. Industrial loads (and various consumer loads) have been adaptive for decades.
You don't force hundreds of generations to pay for the decision, which is what we are actually doing with nuclear.
It is an "always on" source?
Why does a particular fuel type need to be always on?
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsmilestone-for-chinas-ac...
https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/INPRO/df13/Presentations/011_...
Like Nuscale’s reactor is is a PWR with the steam generators built into the pressure vessel.
Site preparation is underway in Ontario for a BWRX-300
https://www.ans.org/news/article-4697/contract-for-darlingto...
NuScale can build them.
The line is almost no one.
It needs to be a lot cheaper.
Solar/wind is already cheap. Makes sense to focus efforts on storage and intelligent live balancing
e.g. Discharge EV batteries into the ~1 hour peak per day
Much can be gained from just smoothing things out
you miss the bigger picture
we must continue innovate to keep shrinking it further so we could:
- use the tech on the moon
- use the tech on a spaceship for space exploration
- use it to deploy quick energy stations on foreign planets
Also immediate uses:
- useful for regions in the world with poor infrastructure, no need generation/storage, you got it ready to deploy all in one
Of course i am clueless and dreaming, but that's the point of human evolution, keep dreaming and never stagnate, push forward, ascend the collective, wherever we end up going
The survival of humankind
there is no purpose behind human evolution, or any natural evolutionary process. There are selection pressures, and there are outcomes.
Superimposed on top of that are purposes that we define for ourselves, collectively and individually. Kennedy may have said "We choose to go to the moon", but we are also free to choose not to.
so that's suicide to decide to not engage with space exploration
>that's a selfish way of thinking
OK...
which time?
what about the timeline after your existence?
> The average installed cost of wind projects in 2021 was $1,500/kW, down more than 40% since the peak in 2010. Lower installation costs lead to energy produced at a lower cost, with the average levelized cost of energy for utility-scale wind power down to $32/MW-hours in 2021.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/land-based-wind-ma....
Double the price of wind energy.
You really have to be foolish to believe in nuclear power ...
https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/AverageEnergyPrices...
Since I've been muzzled again, let me respond to those below here.
Yeah, that's what "residential cost" means.
And?
The $60/MWh quoted above is the price the utility would buy electricity.
Much different prices.
Try installing a nuclear power plant on your roof. Solar PV is a bit easier to get accepted, and quicker to do.
https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2022/04/05/feds-wan...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
There are unaccounted for external costs in renewables, which are not accounted for in those numbers. Nuclear is the only energy source with all-in, full-lifecycle accounting.
And all the talk about panels and wind turbine blades ending up in landfills sounds alarming, but these "big" numbers they spout need to be put in context. I'm betting it is just a tiny percentage on the total landfill generated by society, and the costs mentioned in those linked articles don't seem "unaccounted for", they seem pretty reasonable at a few dollars per panel.
And they are not being reused or recycled.
If we're going to start counting CO2 emissions in the production of these things, surely every single energy generation technique looks pretty crummy as well.
Btw: I really want SMR to succeed. A mix of solar, wind, SMRs, and a smart grid seems like a great way to go.
(Veolia and Siemens are the biggest players in this space, but there are many others who have established end of life supply chains for these products)
I had not heard that yet; was still under the impression that the blades and foundation (for wind turbines) and basically the entire solar panel are waste products. I'd be very happy to learn otherwise. Do you have a link, or can you quantify what 'almost fully' means, like it makes me think of >=90%, is that the case for both, including any required elements that we don't have in abundance on earth (ignoring the necessary batteries whose tech seems to be in flux anyway)?
no, most of it is in dry storage casks, ambient air cooling
https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/diagram-typical...
Normally this would be the kind of a situation where insurance is the right solution. But because the potential magnitude of the catastrophe is too great, the insurance sector is incapable of handling it. No one is willing to provide a sufficient insurance policy on a commercial basis.
Because the assets of the company operating the reactor are also insufficient in the worst case, that leaves the government as the ultimate insurer. And as with any insurer, they require you to take various steps to mitigate the risks.
The nuclear industry has a history of creating plants which are "totally safe, really, you can trust me!" and ending up with really expensive accidents. If they can't get their shit together and get basically unlimited insurance for whatever accident might still happen, the government has to enforce safety rules for them so the taxpayers don't end up having to pay for their whoopsies over and over again.
Lets not forget the helicopter crews at Chernobyl knew they were flying to a certain, slow, painful death and did so without a complaint. Absent those heroes nuclear's mortality record would be much worse.
I agree that the people who stepped up are heroes. I don’t agree that Chernobyl’s failure has any place in the discussion about the safety of modern nuclear plants.
as mentioned, everything fossil fuel related has a massively higher death and injury cost than nuclear.
the california wildfires caused by the criminally negligent failure to maintain power distribution systems killed more people and cost more money that Chernobyl (look it up).
Any citation for that? It's a convenient villain to blame, but absent any proof regulators are deliberately trying to make nuclear less competitive, it seems much more plausible that regulations are driven by concern over accidents. If a wind turbine fails it doesn't make the entire region uninhabitable for decades.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/alara.html
Ultimately, it isn’t the sole reason for nuclear construction issues. All large infrastructure is prone to cost overruns, and in combination with a stringent regulatory environment that makes it even more likely to encounter schedule and budget problems.
Nuclear is a fantastic base load. It is, done right, clean and safe. The weird pro-nuclear cult that spreads manufactured nonsense is just noise, however.
How exactly is nuclear safer than solar or wind? Solar panels in particular are about as dangerous as an inert rock.
The only two others that even come close: Fukushima - one death, TMI - 0 deaths.
So that's at most a few thousand deaths for something like 100 Million reactor hours (napkin math, don't cite).
There is plenty of data and the data says it's safe.
Sounds about right, but when you factor in current designs and requirements it's 100x better.
LRF (large release frequencies) are required to be less than 1 in 1 000 000 per year of reactor operation [1], so roughly 10 billion reactor hours. The calculation of this considers at least 1 in 10 000 year levels of high winds and earthquakes [2].
Since the typical reactor is 1GW, so ~8TWh per year, and global energy consumption is ~23 000 TWh per year, we could use roughly 3000 reactors globally to meet most of our needs, which would put an event like this roughly every 100-1000 years.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0909/ML090910608.pdf
[2] https://archive.opg.com/pdf_archive/Nuclear%20Licencing%20Do...
For Chernobyl the number is 4,000 deaths as the total number of projected deaths caused by the accident over the long term.
For Fukushima it's one direct death, and 2000 deaths due to evacuation.
Had we approached dams the way we approach nuclear power, not a single dam would be built in the world.
Nuclear has this same issue too, although almost entirely from the concrete poured for the containment building. Small modular reactors should mitigate this.
Regardless it’s apples to oranges. You are comparing your solar output to the mix of fossil fuel power the grid supplies. But a small modular reactor would be a carbon-zero power source.
Nuclear is also a very risky business (not in the sense of safety but in the sense of project delivery/nimby). So solar and wind are derisking weaning off fossil fuels.
just wait until they are abandoned by bankrupt companies and start to break down and all of the highly toxic substances they are made of leech into the ground water.
It is not, the main costs are simply not included in the calculations. Operators are legally protected from most liabilities, and even setting liabilities aside they get bailed out if they fail to be profitable. You have to bail them out, there is no option not to. You can't simply turn off a nuclear power plant and leave it.
France recently had to bail out their nuclear operator to at least 50 bn euros. We reached the point where we're "the future" that had to pay for the energy that our parents got from nuclear. Our children will be the next to pay for it, and so on for centuries.
This means that even in a country that has had no disasters, nuclear power has operated under a cost model that was severely underestimated.
The cold truth is that nuclear power is not cheap even in a best-case scenario, and "not cheap" is the most precise estimate we are able to give.
It is safer, yes, but only once a lot of resources is spent on safety. So nuclear power generation is very inexpensive and expensive at the same time, depending on amount of effort put into its safety (with modern scientific knowledge on fission, I'd say like 90% of a reactor cost is ensuring its safety).
I honestly hoped that NuScale production could reduce some significant fraction of that safety costs by "commoditizing" the production. Kinda like airplanes are very safe in a big part because their production and maintenance processes are streamlined and actively practiced ("economy of scale").
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1610/ML16105A136.pdf
ALARA, in practice, has been interpreted by the NRC as to mean "radiation levels as low as can be achievable while still being competitive with alternative energy sources." Which means that the cost of nuclear goes up until it matches or exceeds traditional baseloads (coal, gas, etc.).
It would be even more expensive if it didnt get a free ride on insurance - through disaster liability caps set at ~0.05% of the costs of one Fukushima.
IMHO it's a bit premature to talk about deregulating it without first making sure it shoulders full liability for the damage it would cause by neglecting important safety.
Nuclear is the only 'energy source' that is required to capture pretty much any of its externalities at all, so arguments that they don't capture all of them are a bit odd.
Nuclear power never pays for disaster cleanup and still can't compete with renewables.
"Utility-scale solar-plus-storage costs are about $45/MWh; wind power costs are $30/MWh; and stand-alone utility-scale solar costs are at $32/MWh, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis."
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. Inputs to LCOE are chosen by the estimator. They can include the cost of capital, decommissioning, fuel costs, fixed and variable operations and maintenance costs, financing costs, and an assumed utilization rate
I think solar should be a major part of any future energy generation regime, but I've also never seen an LCOE for solar that I actually believe. They also ignore the timing mismatch between generation and consumption (batteries help there, but even then, it's still a challenge to maintain an on-demand grid with solar).
However, nuclear power is available 24 hours a day every day, rain or shine, summer or winter. To reach this level of availability a PV system would need to have battery back up. Let's be conservative and say 10 hours of battery is enough. This won't be enough during a hurricane or harsh winter weather with no sun for days, but let's assume 10 hours of battery is enough.
Now how much does the PV system's battery cost? I don't have figures for a 10 hour battery system. I do have an estimate based on a review of research literature for 6 hours of battery storage. According to [2], a 6 hour system in 2030 may cost under $180/Kwh. However, we've been talking Mwh not Kwh so this is $180,000/Mwh.
Unless you don't care about electricity when the sun isn't shining, nuclear is much cheaper.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
If you go to system-level energy cost with the constraint that it has to cover demand all the time then of course you end up with different numbers.
For me, I have a battery system. With the LCOE of about 65EUR/MWh. It's good for 6h in the winter and combined with solar probably good for the entire summer.
Your numbers for battery cost are for installed capacity, but you are not using the battery one time, you cycle it thousands of times and therefore need to divide that 180k number by a number between 1000 and 10000 most likely.
Problem for people in my latitude is seasonal storage, I don't believe batteries will ever be an efficient solution for that.
I do get spot market feed in pricing + a very generous feed-in subsidy, but this only accounts for making my payback period shorter and was not included in the cost of energy calculation mentioned.
If GE equipment can deliver more efficiently than competitors, GE willexpand marketshare, and applications will expand based on the cheap energy. Also, GE is highly diversified, most of its businesses (like most businesses that aren’t selling energy, really) benefit from cheap energy.