Interesting, much cheaper than solar.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
"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).
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.
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.