Figured this out because I was curious- This would makeup about .17% of total US electricity consumption in 2022.
Assuming 4 trillion kWh. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect....
Assuming 4 trillion kWh. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect....
edit: Oh, and that $6.8 billion looks optimistic. This project with two AP1000s looks like it costs $30 billion. https://www.ans.org/news/article-3949/vogtle-project-update-...
A lot of the nuclear risk is already included in that cost; we have fairly robust nuclear regulation and safety engineering these days. I have pretty high confidence in the safety of modern nuclear reactors, because there has been the engineering needed to ensure it, and there's fairly strong regulatory oversight. Of course, that all gets factored into the price tag, which is part of why the price tag for nuclear is so high.
I'm just saying that I see a lot of discussion of more nuclear investment as the solution to decarbonization, but it's hard to make the economics work out; nuclear has gotten more expensive over time, while renewables have been dropping in price dramatically.
I'm sure there is some room for nuclear in the market, but it's hard to see it providing more than a fraction of what renewables do, just due to the massive cost difference.
Plz bro, just 10 more years and the next design will finally solve all the probs.
I don’t like solutions that don’t ever make real progress. Solar is getting cheaper in real-time, as are batteries. Nuclear is getting comparatively more expensive every year.
And remember, nuclear generally needs some form of storage or supplementation with on-demand generation (generally via fossil fuels). Nuclear reactors are very slow to increase or decrease their output; they're best providing a constant base power output, but to account for periodic changes in demand across the day, you need either grid-scale storage or to supplement them with things like gas turbines that can quickly spin up and down. Many of our existing grid-scale energy storage systems are there to support nuclear. For example: https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/12/02/northfield-mountain-hyd...
But if you're already going to be building the grid-scale storage, supplying it with renewable energy can be a lot cheaper than supplying it with nuclear.
I'm not saying that nuclear will have no place in the energy grid as we decarbonize. But the economics are hard to justify as renewables and storage become cheaper.
Somewhere like Kansas, wind power and battery based storage may be more effective.
Here's a map of pumped storage hydro potential; note how dense the potential is throughout most of the Western US. https://maps.nrel.gov/psh
Depending on how you measure, lots of states are flatter than Kansas. Florida is the flattest state by nearly all measures. Illinois is crazy flat as well.
Plus, when the hydro storage fails and floods a town, that’s still pretty bad.
Nuclear will continue to be viable in denser areas, with lower solar resources, and when you want to get a lot of production closer to large population.
There's a reason there are so many nuclear plants in the Northeast Corridor (Boston to Washington area), and so many fewer in the southwest, and I imagine that this trend will continue.
So even if you discount the capacity by a 25% capacity factor, and use the lower cost per reactor that I originally quoted, this is still cheaper than nuclear. And that's just the up-front investment. Operating costs are much cheaper for solar as well, the majority of the cost is in the initial build.
Given that transmission isn't free, there are areas of the country where solar has a lower capacity factor than this, and solar and wind take more land, there are still cases where nuclear may be a better investment. I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of simple, economic reasons why solar and wind are growing at a much faster rate than nuclear; it's cheaper overall, it requires less up-front capital, etc. Nuclear is likely to fill niches for a long time, but investment in nuclear is not going to be the major way to decarbonize.
The only real drawback to building solar power in a desert is sand storms. That means the capacity factor is less relevant but life span and repair costs is a different matter. It is a bit similar to ocean wind farms. The capacity naturally goes up, but the salt water and transportation (as well as increased risks to engineers) makes life span and repair a bit more of an issue (it should be noted that most ocean based wind farms tend to use shallows and nature reserves near large cities).
But again, this project is built in a desert. The very definition of a place with consistent amount of sun. I hope the project works out.
I want the Utes to have success in this, but I don’t want the general attitude to be “trash the desert because there is sun there”.
It might be worthwhile to exclude certain areas of particularly rare variations of the ecosystem to be built in. But it's easy to end up with too much red tape that will be abused for NIMBY and by people who hide a fossil yolo attitude behind a facade of conservationism.
Perhaps there could be some mechanism for operating some veto quota, "pick the project you want most desperately to be stopped"? That scheme would probably end getting gamed in the ugliest ways, with sacrificial decoy projects getting proposed, not vetoed and then getting built to keep up appearances. Better not, heh.
An that's before even mentioning the other thing. Would you be interested in talking about uranium mines? Oh, not the other thing you expected?
Nuke advocates do themselves no favors playing shell games and weasel words with the economics. Nuclear is expensive. The nuclear industry needs to figure out how to make it a lot cheaper. And no, it's not just the NIMBY regulation.
The legacy nuke industry has a ton of deeply embedded lobbying and relationships with the regulatory agencies and congress, including ancillary groups that do fuel rod reprocessing and waste transport, cushy high-cost satellite industries.
Nuclear is stuck in a rut. Economically viable nuclear needs a clean-slate redesign and all the old players need to be thrown out. Computer designs, modern software and sensors, materials, etc. Research LFTR to the wazoo.
One of the big pushes IMO should be the US Navy, which should start using nuclear power for all its fleet ships not just subs/carriers.
Yes, nuclear is getting buried on price, but you make out the total cost of solar much lower and much more certain than it is in reality. Nobody really knows how much will renewables end up costing when they start to make up the majority of production.
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2023/october/genco...
> Even with this extra VRE cost in 2030, the answer to whether renewables are the cheapest form of energy is still yes. And it remains so when VRE is at 90 percent of the energy system
Look, you're treating the current LCOE numbers and making the (mistaken or disingenuous) implication that solar/wind won't fall EVEN FURTHER, but they almost certainly will.
With solar, there is perovskites and many other avenues of improvement in the core technology. Both wind and solar will still drop in price from increased economies of scale. And battery storage is going to plummet with sodium ion in the near term, and hopefuly sodium-sulfur techs in the future in addition to whatever grid-specific use cases are developed.
So it's true! Nobody know how much renewables will cost... or HOW LITTLE they will cost... in the long run.
Existing already-built nuclear is woefully noncompetitive, but I'll take it for grid levelling over gas turbine and (ugh) coal, so keep the lights on.
But NEW nuclear? What price are you targeting? I would guess in the timespan of a new nuke plant construction (10 years), solar will drop by 50%-60% in costs (inflation adjusted), and I think wind still has 33% drops coming. I mean, how does a sensible person approve a nuclear project with this degree of uncertainty/evolution/revolution in power costs?
And if you want to talk uncertainty in cost of electricity, the unreliable final construction and operation costs of nuclear are much more unreliable from that standpoint.
Believable models of achieving that goal call for setting up capacity markets where traditional suppliers are paid to not emit, and stand by to intervene when required by weather conditions, achieving close to net zero year round emissions (¹. Nobody really knows how this will end up costing because no such grid exists today.
Grid scale battery storage is still very far from competing with traditional baseload production, even when supplied with free renewables. Sodium has been the next big thing for the last decade, but its only deployments are in the experimental, MWh range. It's still far from a mature, proven technology, let alone one that can disrupt lithium in the gridscale storage space.
Perhaps you are handwaving substantial technical and economic details away and making too bold claims insufficiently supported by data. Not unlike the nuclear fanboys who are seeing thorium fast breeders just around every corner.
(¹ Btw, this is just another nail in the nuclear coffin - coal too - because they can't play nice with a fast moving grid.
It is very expensive, there is no way around the extreme engineering costs of nuclear reactors. Even before trying to make then safe from threats extant and possible.
That is before the unknown costs of handling long term waste using technology that has not been proven, or invented, yet
This might still make solar cheaper but difference will be smaller than headline numbers.
The basic point is that nuclear is just really, really expensive, and it has been getting more expensive over time, while solar and wind have been getting cheaper.
No, that is a red herring. That exact comparison would be only for greenfield projects disconnected from everything else. When connecting to an existing network, the existing (and future) generation on it is also important. For instance, if the network already has a high enough amount of gas generation, 10MW of solar or 10MW of nuclear would reduce the use of fossil fuel by the same amount; the same applies to reducing the use of water stored in hydroelectric dams.
This might still make solar cheaper but difference will be smaller than headline numbers (and you might retort that for nuclear we then need to include dismantling costs as well).
There are probably studies that have done an analysis of this kind for the entire U.S. and calculated various scenarios. I know that these have been done for Germany and other European countries. A 100% renewable system usually comes out cheaper than including nuclear in the mix to any large extend (though Germany has no remaining old reactors which could get their lifetime enhanced relatively cheaply).
You don't get to say "oh well it'll be 1GW of solar if we also build 1GW of wind" because that's not the project.
This is all an excuse to talk around Solar's god awful capacity factors which take the shine off those $/MW headlines.
I don't like it. I do like renewable power, but this kind of puffery makes people think that we're right on the verge of building an all-renewable electrical grid. Which we are not.
We could have a zero-emissions electrical grid in ten years, by embracing a nuclear baseline, putting in a bunch of solar and wind where it makes sense, and adding some battery storage to soak up the intermittency of the latter. But when people read solar by the nameplate, they think it's 7x cheaper than it is, and try to compare that number to nuclear, rather than the actual one.