Nuclear isn't profitable. Renewables have plummeted in cost making nuclear cost prohibitive, and let's face it, if they're ever built it'll probably be too little too late.
Second of all, renewables are incredibly cheap when they're a minority of the grid. The problem is that if there's a shortfall of electricity, things get real expensive real fast. To make realistic grid-scale comparisons between renewables and nuclear power, you need to compare the cost of renewables-plus-storage against the cost of nuclear, and at that point things get a lot more nuanced and hard to compare.
For instance, solar PV is the cheapest electricity you can get, but in places with a lot of preexisting solar installation it's also some of the lowest value electricity. During the middle of a sunny summer day in Germany, electricity spot prices can go negative because so much solar is being produced, but then that same night, prices shoot up because suddenly all those PVs stop producing any electricity at all. It's a bit of a race to the bottom if you don't have storage to offset those swings.
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All that said, I'm of course a big fan of renewables and I'm glad Germany is investing in them, and I think there's a bright future ahead with them. But using the low cost of solar modules and wind turbines as an argument against keeping nuclear power stations online is silly -- especially when there's still coal plants operating in Germany.
We haven’t bothered with economies of scale with nuclear for decades.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Source? Because they sure as hell pan out in the American military and Chinese civil fleets.
> How many more hundreds of billions in of subsidies do you want to add
Zero.
Instead, make permitting—particularly for new, safer plant types—faster. Not less rigorous. Faster.
> The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing
> Drawing on largely unknown public records, the paper reveals for the first time both absolute as well as yearly and specific reactor costs and their evolution over time. Its most significant finding is that even this most successful nuclear scale-up was characterized by a substantial escalation of real-term construction costs.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
There's a more exhaustive paper (by Lovering, maybe?) where it finds a few cases of economies of scale, e.g. South Korea, but the savings are really tiny compared to a tech with a real learning curve, like battery storage.
If you have any numbers showing that US military reactors have economies of scale, I would love to see it. Not that we could use HEU in civilian reactors, but the construction lessons might be useful. I have never found a fan of US military reactors that could cite the cost numbers, and I have not been successful finding them either.
As for China, I don't know anybody that trusts their cost numbers. I prefer to look at where they are actually spending their money, and their planned nuclear build is absolutely a tiny tiny fraction of what their solar and wind numbers. And the plans for wind and solar are increasing year after year, whereas nuclear plans are staying steady.
(“Operating costs have remained remarkably flat” because those are experiencing scale effects.)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/graphics/EUROPE-ENERGY/NUCLEARPOWER/...
I would like to see the data that in the US that a series of reactors saw economies of scale, and to what degree, and if that can overcome the initial underestimates of 2x-3x that are used to secure an initial decision to build.
Selling to the world's least price sensitive customer does not translate into competitive products on cutthroat markets.
> Zero.
Let's abolish the Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act as well so nuclear plants have to pay the true cost of their insurance?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
Doesn’t change that the Nth reactor is (in real dollars) cheaper than the (N - 1)th.
And civil nuclear reactors have had economies of scale demonstrated for decades [1]. The problem is we realise these at the scale of individual plants instead of across the production system.
Neither are things like public transportation and healthcare either?
This sort of cynical, tribal behaviour among people who claim to just want to stop climate change is pretty disappointing.
Now, in the year 2023, when batteries plus solar are cheaper than new nuclear, IMHO the only same thing to do is to deploy massive amounts of solar wind and batteries, and cheer on nuclear trying to get cheaper.
Demanding that we deploy a ton of expensive nuclear when we can't even reliably complete construction in the US is a fool's game. We don't have time to waste on nuclear, today.
Which is to say, there is definitely some tribalism, but nuclear advocates are the most tribal people I encounter in energy discussions. There doesn't even seem to be much understanding of current and past projects among nuclear's advocates.
Nowhere in my post did I say Germany should be be abandoning renewables or that they should be heavily focusing on nuclear power. I just said that I think it's a shame that they threw out perfectly good reactors long before they reached the end of their lifetime out of irrational fears.
Agreed that existing nuclear should stick around as long as maintenance doesn't get more costly than replacing with other options.
Be sure to send Biden a card thanking him.
> Be sure to send Biden a card thanking him.
That'd be a particularly weird thing for me to do given that, as I said already in this very comment chain, I'm a Canadian living in Germany...
I mean, it's great that the USA might invest more in nuclear power, but throwing some peanuts towards new reactors doesn't really fix the fact that they're a massive laggard when it comes to reducing emissions.
There's a ton more work to be done than just building nuclear power plants.
Groups change you know.
If we are talking about building a zero-carbon energy system, we should be talking about the lowest cost method of doing that, over times, taking into account externalities.
All the modeling of zero carbon energy systems finds that massive amounts of solar and wind are the backbone of energy generation. The amount of nuclear varies based on cost assumptions, and in particular if they use current battery costs and if they model the ever decreasing battery costs, but nuclear plays a very small role in the lowest cost zero-carbon grids of the future. A smaller role than it does today.