Point ONE: nuclear is more expensive CURRENTLY that solar/wind. SOlar/Wind is currently the cheapest by far, and here's the scary thing for gas turbine: solar + storage is very close to druopping under gas combined cycle generation. Look up Lazard 2023 LCOE study. Solar/Wind have dropped to 24$ per MWHr. The cheapest nuclear produces is $141/MWHr. That's right, nuclear is almost 600% more expensive.
Point TWO: Say you miraculously got 100 billion dollars through congress for new plants to start immediate projects. Not a single reactor will come online for 10 years. Now, look at the cost improvement rate of solar, wind, and storage for the last 10 years. 10% year-on-year improvements or more. Even if we had half of that for the next 10 years (and there will be 10 more years of cost improvement), solar / wind very likely will be HALF the current cost.
So you'd have 100s of nuclear plants come online in 10 years generating electricity that costs 10-20x more than electricity from wind/solar. That simply is not a viable national power strategy.
If we had these plants already because construction started in the year 2000, that would probably be a different story.
The only hope for nuclear is probably in about 15-20 years where the cost improvement curves finally stabilize for wind/solar, and then a stable price point can be targeted with new nuclear designs. I personally think that only something like a novel MSR/LFTR which can scale down to mass producable sizes, uses all the fuel, breeds. doesn't have solid fuel rod reprocessing and waste transport/storage, and can use the Brayton cycle for more efficiency has a chance of competing with mature solar/wind.
Puff pieces like this are really about the current nuclear plants and keeping them on funding life support, which I generally support for now. The industry sees that Lazard LCOE curve just like any other person would: do you want to pay solar/wind costs for electricity, or 6x that for nuclear?
The existing nuclear industry can't survive without subsidies.
1. "Cost estimates" are more expensive than solar/wind. You know what they are also more expensive than? The historical costs of ACTUAL 50-year-old plants.
2. Average construction time for a nuclear plant is 6-8 years, with many built in half that time. [1] You can build over half a dozen generations of nuclear power plants before my 401(k) matures.
[1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
From your own source, the Lazard 2023 LCOE study: "Most LDES (long duration energy storage) technologies have not yet reached commercialization due to technology immaturity and, with limited deployments, seemingly none of the emerging LDES technologies have achieved the track record for performance required to be fully bankable."
Ideally we'd have a combined approach - nuclear base load, renewables and grid scale storage to reduce the number of expensive nukes we need. That way you'll always have at least some power. But we don't have grid storage yet. And without storage, there's not much point in offsetting the output of nuclear plants, since fuel costs are so minimal - you might as well run all the nukes full tilt, all the time. So really, the only sensible thing to do is build primarily nuclear, and renewables in proportion to our ability to deal with wildly fluctuating energy supply.
Nuclear simply needs a reset to figure out how to make it economical. I love nuclear power in theory, there is simply so many more orders of magnitude of energy density and long life that it has to be viable somehow.
Again, I'm in favor of keeping the current nuclear plants operational. But build out a substantial new build of nuclear plants? Absolutely not. Research reactors, long term R&D / national laboratory projects on advanced nuclear? 100% support it, to the tune of a billion per year or more.
It's all very well saying you think that "synthfuels" and "hydrogen stuff" WILL outperform nuclear, but the practical upshot is that you are arguing in favor of sitting around twiddling our thumbs hoping some new technology will save us, when we could be building nuclear plants. What do you suggest we do now that will substantially eat into fossil consumption?
That is honestly unhinged, and if nuclear proponents thing grid storage is some far off technology, they are more divorced from th economic reality than I thought.
Nuclear is 141$ per mwhr. Solar +storage is $45. Solar/wind are $24.
This pattern of improvement isn't some new phenomenon, and you can't pretend these are made up figures. Is storage pricing new? Yeah. Is the cost of battery backup going to drop? Virtually guaranteed with new sodium ion techs and the other stuff in the pipeline.
Attitudes like this frankly just validate that the entire current generation of the nuclear industry simply has a flawed and obsolete structure and outlook. They are simply ossified in a huge regulatory capture wall.
You can easily be accused of Silicon Valley style innovation delusion. As if something being older or more "regulated" means it is bad. It is the same delusion that got Uber to lose billions until they changed the same per ride as any taxi company. In reality, facts don't care about how you think the world works.
How do the costs compare when you factor in enough storage and overbuilding to reliably cover the inherently unpredicable generation downtimes?
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today."
I assure you people 20 years from now will be posting the exact same sentiment - "we should have started building nuclear reactors in 2023".