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Comment by fyrn_ | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear can work, it works really well for France, whose power costs about half of what UK power does. You can't just build onw reactor every ten years though, you have to build as many as you can as close to each other in time as you can, otherwise you'll drown in learning and fixed costs.

It does not compete well with north sea wind, on a cost per kilowatt basis, but The UK will need some quanity of base load to help normalize varibility (this does not replace the increasing need for energy storage). Nuclear is perhaps better than natural gas for that?

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Nuclear is not working well for the French. Flamanville 3 is five times over budget and their fleet is nearing EOL.

Expecting hundreds of billions in subsidies to again try make nuclear economical is lunacy in a world where renewables are undercutting every single energy source available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

FLA3 is a first of a kind and is a bad example. Nuclear is working very well for France at the moment, we are back to high-availability and making a lot of money through exports.

It is always someone else's fault when nuclear projects does not match expectations.

I don't see much difference with Hinkley Point C started 10 years after Flamanville 3. Timelines and costs are about equal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

> It is always someone else's fault when nuclear projects does not match expectations.

...as opposed to wind, solar, biofuel, tidal and other similar technologies failing at large scale projects?

Solar and wind are among the most predictable large scale projects. Almost certainly coming in on time and budget.

There are plenty of examples of large-scale wind projects failing due to budget overruns, here's two of the more well-known examples:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/20/giant-windf...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/01/rsted-ca...

Large-scale solar is less susceptible to these budget problems as the technology is more mature. The problems here mostly centre around power distribution and the unpredictable nature of (PV) solar power where production can go from close to zero to maximum in the span of a few seconds only to drop down to close to zero again after a few more seconds. Roof-top solar has become so popular that the distribution networks are getting overloaded on sunny days. In e.g. the Netherlands those who have roof-top solar power installations are starting to get billed for delivering power back to the network [1,2]. These problems can be solved by installing local energy storage - 'home batteries' - but these are as it stands too expensive to be economically feasible.

I live in Sweden and have a 14.5 kW solar installation on a barn roof. When I installed this I signed a 5-year contract which enables us to sell power back to the network at market rates. I do not expect us to be able to sign a similar contract once this one runs out and will have to consider adding energy storage to the system - this is why I installed a hybrid inverter when I built the system.

[1] https://www.centraalbeheer.nl/artikelen/betalen-voor-terugle...

[2] https://www.energievergelijk.nl/nieuws/bij-deze-3-energielev...

You are not making the point you think you are. The market conditions changed from zero interest rates to escalating material prices and the highest interest rates in decades.

Since the projects are so predictable the developers called it quits. In a perfect world they would have hedged their costs but here we are.

Have a look at Bent Flyvbjergs work. Nuclear power is only beaten by the Olympics and nuclear waste storage in risk of cost and schedule escalations. Solar and wind occupy the other end of the spectrum.

A hunch would say that the first large scale off shore wind projects in the US falls in the middle of the spectrum, but nowhere near nuclear power. As evidenced by the developers having such good grasp of the costs that they canceled the projects the instant they stopped being viable instead of continuing down a path of sunk cost fallacies.

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why...

I'm waiting on a small piece of solar park to be delivered and assigned to me and it is late by more than a year. When the planners are morons, anything can be late.

A significant part of the reason prices in the UK are so high is that our approach to spot pricing grossly overpays renewable generators when gas prices go up.

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