I wonder what hinders us to replace the roofs of all houses with solar panels and put batteries in all cellars?
It might still be useful to build out nuclear power plants. But the solar+battery approach seems like an easier first step to increase the available power, doesn't it?
Solar with battery backup is about that, globally, on average.
But: the averages have sufficiently broad variance that there's places where one wins, and places where the other wins.
PV+battery is between 75-140 USD/MWh; whereas new nuclear is, depending on who I ask, any of 81-82, 65, or 141–221 USD/MWh.
SMRs might, possibly, change that — we shall have to see. I have nothing against SMRs, but they're novel, and I've seen a lot of novel ideas that seem interesting, go nowhere.
(Unless new ones are SMR, which is why there's now business interest in SMRs. They may well have numbers large enough to cut costs).
R&D is high-variance.
You just keep making empty promises that never work out in reality. Just look at Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
You want more of that?!?
Enough for a long cold winter night in northern Europe?
Enough for a longer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute ?
From your link:
"Events that last more than two days over most of Europe happen about once every five years."
I belive that for the EU as a whole, enough for two days works out as about 32 kWh per person. More or less for specific nations.
So, think in terms of what you'd repurpose used EV batteries for prior to fully recycling them.
As far as I am concerned, self sufficiency comes before price concerns. Nuclear is very safe and reliable.
By all means, EU countries should keep investing in Solar, Wind, Geotermal, etc. but that should be done alongside Nuclear.
How do we stop fukushima-like disasters?
Nuclear power is extremely cost effective, even with the current plants.
The individual plants are currently expensive, because they are large and produce huge amounts of power. Since that means you only have a fairly small number of plants, that means the risk is higher than preferable.
However, even with existing designs, building a common design multiple times and overlapping the build times brings down risk, build-time and costs tremendously.
The German Konvois were built for DM 5.8 billion in less than 6 years, and we were just getting started.
China is currently building their version of the passively safe Westinghouse AP-1000, the CAP-1400, in 5 years for $ 3.5 billion.
Even in China, two orders of magnitude more PV comes online each year compared to nuclear (nameplate power, adjust by a factor of maybe 4 for levelized power).
Nuclear advocates defending the fantasy you are espousing here have to resort to universal conspiracy theories to explain away this unpleasant reality. But how are supposedly omnipotent greens and public fear supposed to be hindering nuclear's rollout in China?
Nuclear may benefit from experience, but that means that as rollouts are scaled back, experience decays away and nuclear gets more expensive. Below a certain (and probably pretty large) rate of installs, nuclear just regresses. It's not clear even China can avoid this at the current install rate.
First, you need to compare actual output, not installed capacity. Once you take into account capacity factors, it's not looking so good any longer.
Second, if it were true that nuclear is being "out-competed", then nobody in their right mind would expand their nuclear capacity. Yet almost everyone except a few crazies and countries that are too small are doing exactly that: expanding their nuclear capacity.
Let's see who has decided to get into nuclear / reverse exits / expand capacity:
1. Italy just decided to reverse their exit.
2. Japan had decided to exit, and actually shut down their plants. They are now restarting those plants.
3. South Korea had also decided to exit, but not shut down any plants yet. They have reversed that exit. And are expanding.
4. Poland has decided to start a nuclear program, first 3 reactors are ordered, budgeted and construction has started at the site. There are a lot more planned. The vote for financing the new projects was nearly unanimous in parliament.
5. The UK is so incredibly unhappy with Hinkley Point C that they have just started work on 2 more reactors at Sizewell C, have sited another 2 in Wales and have a policy of expanding nuclear capacity by a factor of 4.
6. The US effectively built no new new plants since the TMI accident. They are now reactivating everything possible, are even planning to finish the two AP-1000s at Virgil C. Summer and have a goal of tripling their nuclear capacity by adding another 200 GW.
7. Sweden has reversed their exit and wants to build 10 new plants
8. The new government in Belgium has reversed their exit, has extended at least one (or was it two?) plant by another 10 years, is trying to save a few more that are/were due to be decommissioned and is looking to build more.
9. France had a ban on expanding their nuclear generating capacity beyond the currently installed capacity. This was lifted in March of 2023 with > 2/3 majority in parliament.
10. The Netherlands originally wanted two new nuclear reactors. They have now decided on 4 large reactors, in addition to the single small one they currently operate. This will be a 10x expansion of their nuclear capacity.
11. India is on track to triple their capacity by 2031.
12. China is currently starting 10 new reactors a year, and the rate is still increasing. Why aren't they doing more? Well, one reason is that nuclear power plants last for a really long time, currently estimated at least 80-100 years for most of the well-maintained plants. If you build 10 per year and they last 100 years, that implies a fleet of 1000 reactors. That's a lot of reactors!
France made this mistake, they built around 50 reactors in only 15 years, due to vastly overestimating electricity demand. The result was that they the nuclear industry they built up had essentially no plants to build for a good number of decades, and so that know-how and capability was lost and had to be re-acquired at great cost (see Flamanville 3).
Countries have learned from this and are pacing themselves. No need to rush.
13. The Czech Republic is betting on both large reactors from South Korea (the APR-1400, IIRC) as well as SMRs from Rolls Royce. In fact, they took a 20% in Rolls Royce.
14. Switzerland has begun the process of undoing their exit decision
15. Even Norway and Denmark are considering nuclear
16. The UAE, with ideal conditions for solar (desert), has recently completed a 4 reactor power plant, and is considering adding more.
... and so on and so forth ...
Why are all these countries expanding nuclear? Is the entire rest of the world stupid? Crazy? Only Germany knows what they're doing?
No.
What they know is that a nuclear + renewable mix is significantly cheaper and more reliably than any attempt to do 100% intermittent renewables, even if that were feasible, which is more than uncertain.
It is only (mostly?) in Germany where this crazy notion that nuclear and renewables are mutually exclusive has taken hold. They are not. They complement each other.
As soon as the bill hits the political discussions tend to turn.
See for example the Polish example:
> Poland plans to support this investment through:
> - (i) an equity injection of approximately €14 billion covering 30% of the project's costs;
> - (ii) State guarantees covering 100% of debt taken by PEJ to finance the investment project;
> - (iii) a two-way contract for difference (‘CfD') providing revenue stability over the entire lifetime of the power plant of 60 years.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
The subsidies to get a single reactor starting construction are absolutely bisarre.
The first Polish plant is not a "single reactor". It is 3 reactors.
The poles haven’t spent money, that is an application for the EU commission to review the subsidies.
Not a single final investment decision is taken.
Even the French are postponing the EPR2 program due to the horrific costs. Now it might begin in 2026, if they can politically agree to the mindbogglingly large subsidies.
https://www.power-technology.com/news/poland-14-7bn-nuclear-...
Of course they haven't spent the money yet.
> Even the French are postponing the EPR2 program due to the horrific costs
Completely untrue.
And French nuclear is not subsidized. Unlike renewables.
It is a program championed by the previous hard right authoritarian government with not as enthusiastic interest by the current polish government.
> And French nuclear is not subsidized. Unlike renewables.
Why do you keep making stuff up which is easily findable? Is accepting reality that hard?
The EPR2 program hinges on absolutely massive subsidies. The French auditing agency said that even assuming insanely low capital costs and profit margins it makes a large loss.
Taking real figures it just becomes stupid.
The French auditing agency recommended to postpone the EPR2 program due to the low value and incredibly high costs.
https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2025-01/20250114...
What they said about EPR2 is that they were refused the information to even make an estimate of its profitability. Translation (using DocLingo) from page 25:
"In its 2020 report on the EPR sector, the Court recommended that EDF 'calculate the projected profitability of the Flamanville 3 reactor and the EPR2 and ensure its monitoring' (recommendation no. 6). EDF has deliberately and persistently refused to provide the Court with information on the projected profitability and production costs, which leads to considering this recommendation as not implemented. work.
Based on the information at its disposal, the Court's calculation predicts a poor profitability for Flamanville 3. For its part, the EPR2 program is still characterized by the absence of a finalized estimate and a financing plan."
Any claims of profitability of EPR/EPR2 should be taken with heavy skepticism, given that the official auditors have been stonewalled.
The French auditors said that Flamannville 3, the solitary EPR prototype, will be "marginally" profitable. This is one of the most catastrophic builds in recent history. And it will still be more profitable than any of the intermittent renewable projects in Europe.
EDF does in fact, receive subsidies from the French government. For their renewables projects. Not for their nuclear projects. Which pay for all this nonsense.
Compared to the EPR, the EPR2 is vastly simplified, for better buildability. The complaint there was that they were moving too quickly for the auditors, as they didn't have all the documentation they would like to have.
Compare this with the absolutely devastating report of the Bundesrechnungshof, the German auditors, on the failed German Energiewende.
You can see online, nuclear power is actually one of the safest methods of energy generation, behind solar and ahead of wind, because sometimes dudes fall from the tops of the windmills.
Could you start looking at the second-order effects of the meltdown to get a higher death toll? Probably, but you could probably also look at all of the pollutants generated by solar panels, and the fact that they get shipped to Africa and crushed up and thrown in the ground to make solar's death toll look higher too.
And with Fukushima we were kinda lucky. It was still a double meltdown with several hydrogen explosions and could have been much worse.
The WHO says there will be no detectable health effects.
Anyway, let me steelman what you're aiming at here. I think you want to argue not that hundreds of deaths won't occur, but that hundreds of deaths don't matter that much. These are statistical deaths, so it's appropriate to treat them using the "statistical value of a human life". This is the value of a life to be used for policy purposes (like deciding if a safety measure is needed, if spending on a medical treatment is appropriate, etc.) In the US, it's around $12M per life. So, 200 (say) deaths would have a value of $2.4B. This is not enormous compared to overall cost of the accident, even to the utility. It could be reasonable to treat radiation releases as at Fukushima by fining the polluter by an amount related to this value.
Under this sort of regulatory regime, the purpose of regulations is not to avoid all releases, but to keep the releases small enough that the utilities would have the resources to pay the fines. So, no 100,000 death accidents. Nuclear power plants designed to this concept could allow some small radiation release in accidents.
It's a lot like trusting your private data to a company. Sure, Google in 2007 is pretty great, but maybe you have some doubts about their integrity in 2025. Too late, they have what they have, forever.
Is this guaranteed to work? The Chernobyl disaster was caused by grossly-improper maintenance, so… :shrug:. No matter how many physical safety mechanisms you have, a determined mechanic could remove them – but at that point, it becomes deliberate sabotage, which is rare, detectable, and not unique to nuclear power plants. (You could probably kill more people by destroying the right dam in the middle of the night.)
At scale, in the long run, you will get grossly improper maintenance. I feel comfortable asserting that without feeling like a total cynic.
It's not just nuclear either, this is also a problem with dams.
And that's before you take into account second order risks like people dying because they can't afford to heat properly during winter.
The damage from Fukushima has been so small that it wouldn't make it past regional headlines if it didn't involve the scary word "nuclear".
One solution is to house government officials and their families close-by so they're incentivized to never cheap out.
How many times did this happen in 80 years? according to [1] not many times.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
And this is including very early technology and government (e.g. the Russian one) that I wouldn't trust with anything.
The consequences of a nuclear incident are very high, and can be more or less permanent for an area. It's a lot to ask for a technology to be absolutely resilient to mismanagement or even sabotage.
Now apply this logic to many other power sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident#Pri...
Your link shows a deeper root cause
> TEPCO admitted that it had failed to take necessary measures for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants
Scientific and engineering reports don’t solve that one
No tell me why we are still building hydroelectric plants?
Hint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Improving continuously, having strict but not restrictive regulation, addressing risks before they become a problem.
And climate change can have very sudden and unpredictable results too as we've seen all over the world in recent years.
Look at what happened here in Spain in Valencia only a few months ago. Unprecedented in the region's recorded history. Yet it keeps happening more and more.
But I can see how the way I worded it suggests I meant that yes. I should have been clearer. What I did mean to say is that recorded history is like a microsecond in geological time and I wouldn't put too much confidence in predicting based on that short period.
But they are two different risks. Over exacerbated by climate change, the other indeed not.
In the case of Fukishima, only one person died directly because of it. About 2000 more deaths can be related to the nuclear accident, for example because they were displaced and living in worse conditions [2]. Since this is the kind of event that every few decades (we have to go back to Chernobyl for something similar) I would say that it is not a reason for worrying.
For comparison, that is 1/10 of people that died in Japan because of the Tsunami that caused it, and it is less than the number of people that die every year for traffic accidents in Italy, so if I was Italian (wait, I am!) I would be more worried about the road traffic than a nuclear accident.
[1] https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2024/07/two-engineers-h...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUnik4gxrtM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor
> MSRs eliminate the nuclear meltdown scenario present in water-cooled reactors because the fuel mixture is kept in a molten state. The fuel mixture is designed to drain without pumping from the core to a containment vessel in emergency scenarios, where the fuel solidifies, quenching the reaction.
As one of the worst Nuclear accidents in history (caused by one of the largest earthquakes to hit Japan along with a tsunami), an awfully small amount of people died.
If anything, Fukushima shows how safe Nuclear actually is.
Solar, wind and batteries have no fuel concerns, and they are inherently decentralized.
I know the soviets dug up half the Czech Republic for uranium deposits though. There's still some left there, not sure how much though. I have a feeling that the reliance on Africa and Russia is more price and environmental regulation driven.
With some work and investment European nuclear fuel supply could be 100% free from Russia, which anyway is peanuts compared to billions spent on Russian LNG. Uranium ore can come from Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia, not only African countries.
They will keep working for years as you find new suppliers for spare parts. When the reach EOL you need to find a new supplier.
In the meantime the already existing required firming capacity might be run a bit harder to manage any shortfall.
But in the nuclear cult that is equivalent to still not being able to decouple Europe from the Russian nuclear industry 3 years into the war.
Australia, Kazakhstan and Canada are main suppliers.
It's not taboo, the answer is just extremely simple: mining needs people willing to work in a dangerous and exhausting field, so when practical, rich countries tend to prefer outsourcing this (capitalism does not tend to reward ethics). It's very practical for uranium because nuclear reactors need a tiny volume which is trivial to ship and to store. Most countries with a nuclear program keep a stockpile of multiple years.
Mining uranium in other places is very feasible, as are other more expensive options like extracting it out of the ocean. After all, with nuclear the cost of the fuel is a tiny amount of the actual cost of power generation. This is not happening because there's really no need to. In the past, there have been uranium mines in pretty much every european country, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country#Euro...
(Refining/processing is a different story. But that's more obviously a "money/care" problem - there's no possible physical constraint for refining/processing as there could be for mining.)
Denmark also have 3700 tons of uranium ore just laying around, not sure how much actual uranium you can extract from that, very little I suspect.
Look at the energy crisis. Did we have a lack of energy? No, the pricing mechanism made sure we had no rolling blackouts.
Did we have expensive energy? Yes, that was the whole crisis.
You want to lock in another energy crisis because you are completely locked into trying to justify building nuclear power.
There are also new plants in the making [2]
Being tuscanian, I visited the museum or geothermal energy in larderello once, the area of larderello is quite uncanny, in some parts the ground is literally fuming steam. There's also a smell of rotten eggs lol
https://www.enelgreenpower.com/stories/articles/2024/10/geot...
https://www.lanazione.it/cronaca/geotermia-patto-regione-ene...
https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali...
There'd also be less overbuilding of solar as you have to build for winter weather and day length instead of summer if solar is supposed to cover everything
But this shouldn’t even be a requirement as long as you can feed it into the grid.
In the unlikely event that they do catch fire, they are extinguishable with water.
Nothing has zero risk, but there are much more stable chemistries available than those that formed this (rational) opinion.
I would still skip this step and let it be the power company's problem though, simply because at ~400 USD / kWh they don't seem very cost efficient for off-peak storage (at least in my country).
As for off-peak storage, these would allow you to replace a Tesla powerwall for ~$600-750 US. I don't know your country, or its peaks (or valleys) but on my sailboat, off-peak is night time or cloudy days, and in sunny climes, 600ah gets me nigh infinite power. Without clear skies, I'm limited to ~4-5 days of normal consumption.
(Not trying to nudge you off your position at all, just sort of reflecting/remarking at how practicable this all is at the moment.)
Solar panels are down to something like $0.20/W, a factor of 50 cheaper than a nuclear power plant. Solar panels are only a fraction of the cost of a solar installation though. Utility-scale solar is around $1/W, a factor of 10 below nuclear. Adjusting for capacity factor, solar is still several times cheaper than nuclear (and has lower operating cost).
Panels today. Batteries as available. Nuclear eventually - maybe.
(people will respond with "what about SMRs", to which I will ask "what's the shortest time from decision to online that a SMR project has achieved?")
Batteries are just going to get better - especially over a 10y time span
In winter the days are short, the sky can be covered in clouds for an entire week, the solar panels can be covered in snow also. I have solar panels but I do not have a way to export my data to show you the summer vs winter GIANT difference.
So people like me with solar need the other people in the area not to all go for solar, then we will need to find a way to burn the excess. Is the same with a country, we can't store the energy from summer for winter and also resist for say 2 weeks of snow and clouds. The EU market might be so in demand that the rich countries will bid for the energy and the poor will have to burn their things to survive.
I am wondering if it would happen that with so many solar roofs we will either have to pay for people to use my energy or I will need to actually throw the excess in the ground safely somehow.
Short days, but still enough to make a lot of juice in Italy. Scotland and Scandinavia get issues, but Italy's basically OK for winter: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28sunrise%2C+Rome%2C+2...
And: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
> we can't store the energy from summer for winter and also resist for say 2 weeks of snow and clouds
You, personally, can't store 2 weeks of energy (though it's closer than you may expect, 1 person-week of Italian average electrical consumption is ~= 1 EV battery*). But you personally don't have to, transmission to another part of the country (or continent) has a huge impact on how much storage you need.
Basically, this problem is known, it's not all that difficult to work around — everything on the scale of "national power supply" is expensive and has pros and cons, PV isn't particularly remarkable in the scale or cost of those pros and cons even with current solutions and assuming no R&D effort can improve the trade-offs, they're just different than the pros and cons of the other options.
* https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28%28300+terawatt-h...
Also when the weather is bad it is bad in a big chunk of Europe, sure in the South they will probably have nicer weather.
What about the issue when everyone has solar? then who buys my extra production? Or if there is someone that can buy it because of too much solar the prices would be close to zero then the solar panels investment will not be worth it since you could be cheap energy from the people with solar panels when the weather is good.
My gut feeling is that 100% solar is stupid, it is like the 20-80 problem we see now a lot of growth since it is very profitable, when more grid investment is needed and profits will go down this growth will stop.
I would need to write something the size of a PhD thesis, not a comment, to fully describe the various possibilities and their trade-offs for even just the Italian grid, let alone the whole of Europe's.
But to keep it simple, I can say that limits of your grid can be re-engineered, and even for unrelated age and capacity reasons people are already planning to spend more on upgrading the European grid anyway, than it would cost for the material to build a global high-power DC backbone that would let the EU be lit in the middle of night, in the middle of winter, without any batteries at all, by panels in the Australian outback — and I have in fact done the maths on that.
(Only China is actually making enough aluminium, there's geopolitics even before Trump happened, but the price tag to get a single ohm of resistance around the entire planet is actually fine).
> Or if there is someone that can buy it because of too much solar the prices would be close to zero then the solar panels investment will not be worth it since you could be cheap energy from the people with solar panels when the weather is good.
Such investment is still generally worth it, because you don't need to actually sell anything when the price is low (or even negative), and even if it was zero the whole time forever, you've saved 100% of the current cost of supplying yourself with electricity.
> My gut feeling is that 100% solar is stupid, it is like the 20-80 problem we see now a lot of growth since it is very profitable, when more grid investment is needed and profits will go down this growth will stop.
100% anything leads to correlated failures.
But there's several other renewables.
About costs, if the solar panels will cost me 20 years of paying my bills but they will maybe break in 10 years then it is a waste of my money, I can buy the energy directly and lose less money.
I bought the panels because they were subsidized otherwise there would be more profitable to buy the energy, without subsidies and if energy will be cheaper or I would get paid to use it then solar panels would make no sense .
Imagine then a country that needs to over build solar panels, why would private sector accept this?
Interested amateur. I skim read the actual government and industrial reports, and know enough to be able to roughly estimate the effort required to construct precise answers.
> is it cheap to make it possible to get the electricity from homes, and resue or add new transformers to raise the voltage to medium then high voltage and use the same high voltage lines and whatever they use to get the energy from homes in Italy to homes in Romania ?
"Cheap" is already the wrong question: on this scale, energy is measured in percentage points of the economy, opportunity loss from what else can be done with the same resources, geopolitical exposure, not pure €, and that means questions like "is it cheap?" can only be considered against everything else the governments can do with the same resources — not even just other energy projects, absolutely everything, and how everything interacts with everything else, has to be taken into consideration.
Consider this: https://eepublicdownloads.blob.core.windows.net/public-cdn-c...
If you limit yourself to just €, the scenarios on page 7 say that improving the grid would:
• 2030: reduce wasted power by 2 GW while saving €5 billion per year in wasted energy
• 2040: reduce wasted power by 4.8 GW while saving €9 billion per year in wasted energy
While another pair of options on page 22 shows:
• €5.6 billion per year invested, returns of €9.4 billion per year
• €3.6 billion per year invested, returns of €8.6 billion per year
But! The report is also has a section header titled "Does the study consider the EU’s goal to reduce dependency on gas imports?" with several specific mentions of Russia throughout.
> About costs, if the solar panels will cost me 20 years of paying my bills but they will maybe break in 10 years then it is a waste of my money, I can buy the energy directly and lose less money.
When did you buy?
I think you're over-estimating the current price of PV by a factor of about 15-25 — here's one of my local supermarkets, this price pays for itself in about *one* year: https://www.kaufland.de/product/456527791/?search_value=phot...
I believe Italian electricity (you are in Italy, right?) is slightly cheaper than German electricity, but that's more than compensated for by having more sun.
This is already the case - Germany ends up paying for both electricity exports and imports.
How about large nuclear plants, what are the probabilities of cost overruns and who is insuring that?
Add to that the uncertainty over fuel and the disposal of used fuel, and there's literally no valid cost argument for nuclear.
I'm not anti-nuclear, but the fiscal realities seem insurmountable.
Than you can calculate the price.
Energy mix is key: the cost of 100% dependency on intermittent renewables is extremely high.
Going for 95% dependency on intermittent renewables with the remainder being filled in by low-cost dispatchable generation halves system costs (see table 6, pg. 21).
You do know that the study is only applicable to running your off-grid cabin from a sole source and battery storage based on 2020 costs. The study also assumes 100% uptime for nuclear power.
It does not deal with demand shifts, it does not deal with transmission, it does not deal with backup power.
It also managed to finds a nuclear LFSCOE of $106/MWh. Even though it doesn't adapt to peaks or breakdowns when Hinkley Point C sits at $170/MWh when running at full tilt for 35 years.
Whenever we do quality research on the subject the results end up being that nuclear power is horrifically expensive.
See for example:
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.
> However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
The Clean Power 2030 report from NESO came to a similar conclusion. See Insights from our clean power sensitivities, pg 53: https://www.neso.energy/document/346651/download
Nuclear isn’t a bad option too. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
Only thinking in terms of cost is short vision IMO. What happens if in 20/30 years you need to dramatically ramp up the energy generation (maybe everyone will drive electric, maybe house heating will be electric, maybe someone will come up with a new tech that requires a huge amount of energy, ...) and you already covered most of the roofs? or panels and batteries are at their end of life and you need massive investments just to keep up with the status quo?
I woulnd't go in a fight with a fist tied behing my back, and global warming is one of the biggest fights we must face.
Another great move would be to stop the warmongering and to start buying gas from Russia, while we work on solar and nuclear.
This means you have to build other energy sources into the grid like gas turbines to be able to control the grid. So if you really want to compare energy prices than you have to look into the TCO.
https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/11q58pe/price_trend...
Solar panels last 20-25 years. Nuclear power plants last for 50+ years and use fraction of the space that solar. It is hard to believe that the TCO is lower. Usually people just looking at the price in the short term and comparing that. Batteries are a whole different can of worms. Super toxic and you need a high volume of those because the energy density is much lower.
Besides, if the Netherlands can have solar then Italy can too. It's much less densely populated.
And nuclear lasts 50+ years with constant maintenance, which is really expensive.
And what's the cost of building on a mountainside, and how much is maintenance?
> Besides, if the Netherlands can have solar then Italy can too
How much solar are they building in comparison to other sources?
> And nuclear lasts 50+ years with constant maintenance, which is really expensive.
Unlike solar panels built on mountainsides which are not suitable for other types of buildings?
Batteries would need to be cheaper, that is all that is needed for italy. In the south, they have sun all year around.
Which would be: there is not really a need for stationary batteries to be expensive.
It's a very common tactic by renewables maximalists, and I'm very familiar with it
"And what's the cost of building on a mountainside, and how much is maintenance?"
Why should I feel it as my duty to answer that specific question to you? Seriously curious.
So the conversation, in context, is literally this:
---
Someone: we should build panels on mountainsides
Me: how much more expensive will building and maintaining them will be?
You: Maintaining solar panels will be always way, way, waaay cheaper than maintaining nuclear. Also batteries will need to become cheaper
Me: Erm... That doesn't answer my question, and on top of that you're admitting batteries are not cheap either
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But, again, this is on par with what I expect in such discussions
Citization needed. Actually we do not know and we are figuring this out.
Few examples:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpJKM65tsCo
- https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/weather/worlds-largest-float...
Batteries would need to be safer, less toxic and less prone to be mined by children in Africa, also orders of magnitude more energy dense.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...
If 50 years we need to build a single nuclear plant while you have to build twice the solar capacity I doubt that solar come out cheaper.
CSIRO with GenCost included it in this year's report.
Because capital loses so much value over 80 years ("60 years + construction time) the only people who refer to the potential lifespan are people who don't understand economics. In this, we of course forget that the average nuclear power plant was in operation for 26 years before it closed.
Table 2.1:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
The difference a completely absurd lifespan makes is a 10% cost reduction. When each plant requires tens of billions in subsidies a 10% cost reduction is still... tens of billions in subsidies.
We are off grid, just purchased solar + batteries that will supply all power needs, including running aircon and hot water at night. That's the purchase price, amortised over 10 years assuming our current daily usage.
The reality is our anticipated power usage will go up with electric cars and the system is speced to cope, and parts will last over twice the 10 years.
I suspect your question was purely retorical. You weren't fishing for an answer is effectively "cheaper than I can buy electricity from the local coal fired utility", but that is the reality. Nuclear costs about twice that.
Notice I'm paying retail. If you are going to compare wholesale prices to the $0.20 you typically have to multiply them by 3.
It's not a universal answer.