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Comment by guepe | Hacker News Reader

That’s interesting. The quotes for the nuclear power plant are really low though. France, which has a lot of knowledge and trained workforce for nuclear, is slowly building a reactor of 1.2gwe for like 20B euros. If you use those numbers… it looks very different. And that’s at least not idealistic price since it’s they are completing the construction.

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Yeah, I'm really curious to see how the SMR thing shakes out over time. It does make sense to me that the costs between large bespoke reactors and smaller modular reactors would not necessarily be a linear scaling by MWe. Another factor that affects the price significantly is whether or not the reactor is being built at an existing site that is already licensed or whether it's a scratch-build at a new site.

https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/8... talks about the Shin Kori 3 and 4 reactors (brought online in 2016 and 2019) costing $6.4B USD for the pair (after a 32% cost overrun), if I'm reading correctly. Those ones are 1416MW and 1418MW, or $2258/kW which is right in line with GE's estimate of a next-of-a-kind SMR build (spec sheet says $2250/kW)

Plugging the numbers using France latest EPR: 20B for 1.2GW is 16M per MW Batteries mentioned : 1.7B for 300MW for 16hr is 5.3M per MW for 16hr

So compared to EPR, we could spend another 10M per MW for production…. I saw a relatively conservative price of 2000$/kw AC at https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2023/utility-scale_pv

That’s 2M per MW. We can spend 10, an over capacity of 5x ! And that is not accounting for the price of money, it takes very long time to build a nuclear power plant, and you will have your PV plant in the year, probably a couple for mega pack due to demand.

To me, nuclear is not the future.

I’m assuming you’re looking at the Flamanville Unit 3? Reading through the history of that build is pretty bad for sure. I’m maybe jaded enough now to expect construction projects to go over budget by maybe 20-30% but lol 580% over budget is not normal at all.

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