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Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

Well, those are paradoxes of renewables. When the sun shines bright and the wind is blowing strong grid operators has to pay producers to stop producing, unless they can find someone who will take this energy for less money that they would have to pay to the renewables producers to stop windmills (this is that "price below zero").

When the sun is not shining and wind is not blowing and your country invested heavily into renewables (like United Kingdom) then you have basically two options. Build a lot of gas power plants, as only they have sufficiently quick cold start time (about 1h) or buy electricity paying (very high) spot prices.

Building gas power plants sounds good, but it costs money and you need a lot of them, plus, they emit CO2, defeating the whole purpose of this green transformation. So UK went with the second option, that's why they have the greenest energy on the World... and the most expensive one.

As a result, outside areas with predictable weather (that is deserts) it is much better to simply use technology that came into use 70 years ago (indeed in June this year it will be exactly 70 years) with great success: nuclear power plants.

And be done with all the paradoxes.

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You do know that Hinkley Point C will require €170/MWh 24/7 excluding transmission costs for 35 years.

Forcing new built nuclear power on the ratepayers would today lead to a self inflicted energy crisis.

The question is also how do you match said nuclear plant with the grid load?

In California it swings between 15 GW and 50 GW over a year.

Or do you suggest that we build peaking nuclear plants?

> You do know that Hinkley Point C will require €170/MWh 24/7 excluding transmission costs for 35 years.

£92.50/MWh 2012 prices = 153 EUR/MWh in 2024 prices and current GBP/EUR exchange rate. If Sizewell C goes ahead then this reduces to under 150 EUR/MWh.

Transmission costs will be less than for renewables given the line's higher utilisation and proximity to load, unlike offshore wind up in Scotland.

> The question is also how do you match said nuclear plant with the grid load?

The UK wholesale market, BETTA, allows bilateral trades. EDF will sell the electricity to their retail arm and will just bypass the wholesale market. A similar arrangement will probably be made for Sizewell C and British Gas, for instance.

> Or do you suggest that we build peaking nuclear plants?

Perhaps the cheap renewables can be curtailed instead.

Sorry. $170/MWh. In the end so horrifically expensive that it doesn’t really matter.

I see a whole lot of talk about how to force the consumers to pat for it.

Why do you want everyone’s energy bills to massively rise to fund horrifically expensive nuclear power?

It will simply become a race where everyone tries to the utmost degree to decouple themselves from your nuclear grid and you leave the poor to shoulder the cost.

It seems like you are working backwards from having decided that we must build horrifically expensive new built nuclear power and now are diving into one more insane argument steer the other trying to justify it.

Rather than starting from the problem: we need cheap power to decarbonize society.

> I see a whole lot of talk about how to force the consumers to pat for it.

I don't see a whole lot of talk about how consumers are being forced to pay for solar and wind. For instance, Hornsea is attracting £194.31/MWh = $252.70/MWh. https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/INV-HOR-001/

> It will simply become a race where everyone tries to the utmost degree to decouple themselves from your nuclear grid and you leave the poor to shoulder the cost.

Strangely that is the game being played with solar panels on houses. Self consume and then feed into the grid as much as possible on sunny days to try and offset the expense of long winter nights. Let the poor who don't own their own house or can not afford panels shoulder the cost.

> we need cheap power to decarbonize society

Agreed, but where is the evidence that wind and solar leads to cheap power in the winter? When times are easy prices may be low, but when wind and solar don't produce the system falls back on natural gas.

I love when the nukebro squad brings 10 year old off shore wind to the table like it has any bearing today.

Why didn’t you bring the most recent allocation from the same area?

Because you would have to accept £47/MWh as the viable price in 2025?

https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/AR4-HRN-010/

I love that instead of having cheap prices almost all year around and falling back to backups a few days or weeks a year we should instead have horrifically expensive nuclear power filling the grid at the height of summer. Logic or prices be dammed.

Pure insanity.

> Because you would have to accept £47/MWh as the viable price in 2025? > https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/AR4-HRN-010/

This is the same Hornsea 3 which got a price increase for 3 * 360MW chunks of this power station up to £54.23/MWh 2012 = £75.46/MWh = 97.84 USD/MWh. These are due to be delivered in another 3 years.

https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/AR6-HPT-010/ https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/AR6-HPR-010/ https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/AR6-HOP-010/

The AR6 strike price for new wind farms is £58.87/MWh (2012 prices) or £81.92/MWh or 106.24 USD/MWh current prices, which are due to be connected in 2030.

> falling back to backups a few days or weeks a year ... Logic or prices be dammed.

The devil is in the details. How much backup is needed depends on how much the wind/solar is overbuilt ... overbuilding leads to cannibalisation and eventually curtailment. Out-of-wholesale-market capacity payments are needed to keep the backup gas plants from shutting down.

Gosh, German solar got € 500/MWh for 20 years, and some providers are still getting that today. The average fixed reimbursement was well over €200 just a few years ago.

And UK off-shore wind projects are being offered at £150/MWh even now.

And of course you don't prioritize the variable/random suppliers over the ones that can provide stable base load. Speaking of California: highest electricity prices in the continental United States. Georgia, where those "catastrophic" Vogtle-3/4 reactors were built has less than half that. Including the rate increase for the Vogtles.

Same story in Europe: Germany has the highest electricity prices in the EU. And that's without the extra subsidy that used to be paid for via the electricity price and is now paid for via taxation. (Fun exercise: form the intersection of the set of taxpayers and the set of electricity users)

Note: the absolutely worst, most catastrophic nuclear power builds (which for some reason the only ones anti-nuclear lobbyists ever cite) are more effective than the best renewables.

I love when the nukebro squad brings 10-15 year old data to the table like it has any bearing today. Is it because you know the 2025 prices and can’t bring yourself to accept them?

Because you would have to accept £47/MWh as the viable price for offshore wind in 2025?

https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/AR4-HRN-010/

And there we are seeing solar contracts at $10-30/MWh depending on labor costs.

But of course. The solution is of course horrifically expensive nuclear power coming online in the 2040s to fix this massive problems you say we have today. Logic be damned.

The UK decided to build a nuclear power station as well in 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

It is still not operational. Nuclear is too slow. As well as not especially cheap either.

There's also a lot of market stupidity in the UK: the marginal price for the most expensive generation sets the price for all generation. In some cases this results in weird situations like wind farms paying back the government because the electricity price was too high for their CFD.

Nuclear power plants can be built much faster. 6 years from the first concrete to completion is possible.

The key is to not design each reactor as a unique snowflake.

Churn out more nothing-special AP1000s.

How many of these have been built?

Twelve AP1000s are in operation or are in the final construction steps. 20 more are in the planning stages.

Russia's Rosatomexport is building roughly similar VVER-1200 power plants within about ~6 years from the first concrete. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooppur_Nuclear_Power_Plant

They are indeed "nothing special" plants.

Also the Chinese CAP1000 design is largely just an AP1000, and China plans to go from shovels down to operation in five years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lianjiang_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Nuclear is not too slow, bureaucracy and political ill will is.

How many nuclear power plants has china built during a similar period? How many did France when they were building out their grid?

This isn't a technical problem.

France is currently wholly unable to build new nuclear power.

Their latest plant is 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.

The EPR2 program is continuously being delayed, with the most recent news being a absolutely massive subsidy program and hopefully final investment decision in mid 2026. With the current target date being the first reactor finished by 2038.

China is also massively scaling back their nuclear power ambitions. Since 2020 they have been averaging 4-5 construction starts a year leading to something like a 3% nuclear share of the grid at saturation.

Compare with 15 years ago when they were targeting a French like 70%.

> How many nuclear power plants has china built during a similar period?

About 1/40th of the amount of renewables they built in the same period.

Hinkley Point is the premier example of how badly slow a nuclear development can be. Reactors are often built in 5-7 years.

Which modern western reactor was built in 5-7 years?

It feels quite strange to base our data on half a century old data because you don’t like the recent data experience.

And also the ruinous planning regulations in the UK, which thankfully the current Labour government have signalled they're going to reform (which hopefully means gutting a lot of them).

Vogtle 3/4 (USA): 10 years.

Shin-Hanul (Korea): 12 years.

Olkiluoto (Finland): 18 years.

Flamanville (France): 17 years.

I did not even need to cherry pick those. Your estimates are wildly unrealistic.

Also note: Those times are from begin of construction, not start of planning (!!).

This sort of numerical deception is endemic in nuclear advocacy dicsussions. I don't know if it's intentional, the best explanation I have is that somebody proposes an (unrealistic) number as a goal, and then it's accepted by advocates as the reality. But if reality was known, the person probably would not be an advocate.

I have not yet met an advocate that will talk about the real, existing, challenges to nuclear the same way that renewable energy advocates talk about the challenges. Go and listen to a podcast on renewables, and it's all about what's not working, what's working, where the opportunities are, and what needs to be changed with the tech. Go listen to a nuclear energy podcast and all you get is wishful thinking, rose-colored glasses, and papering over the real problems that face the real projects.

Edit: for example of the podcasts, here's Jigar Shah on Decouple https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwN1MCtBkVk giving the hosts a dose of reality. And Shah is far more optimistic than nearly any realistic person on nuclear, the Liftoff plan (https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear-2/) that his department produced starts from an unrealistic current position and then assumes massive gains somehow to get to a competitive position. It's rose-colored glasses in itself, but at least it shows a plan of how to make nuclear realistic.

This is a pretty bad faith comment.

There are lots of wind and solar advocates completely glossing over the difference between nameplate generation capacity (maximum capacity) and intermittency and the value of an intermittent source in the market (marginal rate payment schemes vastly overvalue intermittent sources). That doesn't make it ok for nuclear advocates to do the same, but your portrayal of nuclear advocates as uniquely biased is inaccurate.

I agree with you that Jigar Shah knows what he's talking about and is worth listening to, but disagree that he is some magical thinker wishful optimist about nuclear in particular. He would say that basically, by the time you include the cost of additional gas generation (which is like, fully supply-chain constrained through 2030+) and battery storage, everything costs more than $100/MWh and nuclear looks competitive, even at Vogtle 3/4 prices and especially with some experience curve effects.

Now add that nuclear power has famously had a negative learning curve. It doesn’t even take the latest boondoggles into account.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

At the same time storage is absolutely plummeting in price with the latest auctions in China landing on $63/kWh serviced for 20 years.

Then we have comprehensive grid modeling:

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...

My personal theory is that a lot of nuclear advocates are pro-nuclear first (possibly to be contrarian, or because they think the tech is cool), then look for favorable facts/data second.

Meaning the advocacy is not driven by best-effort current estimates of efficiency/cost/benefits-- its the other way around, leading to such a high number of overoptimistic takes on it.

Pretty much all of the dozens (56!) of reactors France built in the 70s took 5-6 years between construction and operation. How much weight do you give those dozens of builds, vs a couple one-offs? Yes, the fact that we've waited 40 years to build another single reactor is part of the problem. But it gets faster if you don't do crazy one-off designs and you get some experience building more than, you know, one.

If your hypothesis was true (cost overruns and delays are caused by lack of recent build experience in every western nation, and would immediately vanish if we started building more reactors) then we would expect to see the same clear trend of decreasing build time with experience in the past.

But in fact early reactors (e.g. Marcoule, or Tricastin) got built faster than the later ones (=> possibly because Chernobyl happened, and everyone reevaluated risk). So that hypothesis is clearly wrong.

And even if build times of under a decade were a realistic target for US/Europe (which I see no indication for)-- how many plants would we need to build first to hit those improvements, in your opinion? If we needed just a single full planning/construction iteration, then we could expect those miraculous 5-year-on-budget-reactors to come online in like 2050. Thats basically the best case scenario (!!). Might as well wait for fusion reactors then (that was sarcasm; fusion reactors are gonna be irrelevant in fighting climate change for exactly the same reasons; too much complexity, too expensive, too slow).

Vogtle actual costs are already competitive with actual renewables costs, and build times are vastly better than the 25 year timeline you're calling a "best case scenario" here.

> Vogtle actual costs are already competitive with actual renewables costs

No. At $160/MWh? Maybe competitive with renewable costs 15 years ago. Most certainly not with renewable cost now (and those still trend down).

> build times are vastly better than the 25 year timeline you're calling a "best case scenario" here

That timeline is for finishing one plant at currently speed, and then planning and finishing a ton of new reactors within 5 year buildtimes directly after. But I see zero confidence that this is actually realistic, not even from the the companies that just finished building Vogtle...

Fully loaded renewable costs (with sufficient storage or gas generation to achieve firm production) is over $100/MWh, yes.

There is some market (and regulatory) stupidity but both your cited ones have reasonable cases to be made for them.

If you order the bids low to high then pay the highest bid then a) you encourage honest (i.e. lower) priced bids and drive expensive/inefficient plants out the market while encouraging new low price entrants who can guarantee they'll get used (because low bid) and make money, driving the market price lower.

The problem is the expensive gas caused by Russian invasions and planning a market pricing mechanism around such events is kind of silly when you can just windfall tax to fix the problem quickly and easily if the energy companies aren't all run by your mates from private school.

But also generation ain't the whole cost, there's the grid fees and taxes. The latter made sense when burning coal and now are looking likely to be shifted to gas.

Collar prices on wind farms are actually a genius bit of financial engineering, guaranteeing minimum funding in a volatile market at low cost by capping the profits.

It is cheaper to build out a large (continent wide) network of renewable energy generation with the necessary surplus production and storage than it is to build sufficient nuclear power to adequately provide power. Not to mention much faster and less political contentious (most people like nuclear power in the abstract but are vehemently opposed to power plants or long-term storage close to their home).

The UK's problem is not too much green energy. It is the insufficient integration of the European power grid and less than ideal investments into green energy on the part of other European governments.

Even if you ignore safety concerns and political resistance, nuclear will always loose on the economics.

You are interpreting the entire story from the perspective of the utility and ISO (which are distributors, neither a maker of energy nor a net consumer of it). They're Edison-era inventions, borne of the lumbering size, toxicity, noise, and poor capacity factor of mechanical engines.

Why don't you interpret it from the perspective of companies (which need to buy energy to do stuff) and consumers (who need to buy energy to be comfortable)? These are the actual buyers.

Then you'll see why solar and batteries win all, and utilities, with their badly potholed power highways with massive tolls to consumers, slowly reduce in importance.

Your conclusion makes absolutely zero sense.

You are against gas peaker plants (for renewables) because they are expensive/produce CO2, but as a solution you suggest building nuclear reactors (which are much more expensive) and then ALSO need the very same peaker plants on top (or buying electricity, or massively overprovisioning nuclear power, which would be ruinous)?!

Running gas turbines on H2 is absolutely possible (there are already operational plants made to run it), and thats a perfectly viable longer term contingency in case the battery approach stops improving.

You don't eliminate the paradoxes. You substitute new ones. The question with nuclear power plants is, what do you do when the consumption is below what is produced? You need to find a power sink. In days past, utility companies gave away nighttime lighting such as streetlights, security lights, etc., because it was way to sell electricity that otherwise would be wasted. The downside is we now have a massive light pollution problem.

A better answer is to deploy more storage technology, such as better and distributed batteries, in communities. In addition to sucking up the excess power from the solar wind, it also makes local grids more resilient because the power is held near where it is needed and not dependent on a centralized power plant.

https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/grants/neighbourhood-batteries

1. You use nuclear power plants for base load. Which they can provide, unlike renewables.

2. Nuclear power plants can load-follow. Unlike renewables.

There is no base load to provide for a nuclear plant if the marginal cost of electricity is close to zero whenever wind/sun is on.

Building nuclear plants to then operate them in load following mode is just stupid. If the things can't even compete economically when you build them at pre-existing sites and run them at >90% capacity factor, how would you ever justify building new ones as basically glorified peakers plants, that run barely half the time!? Why would anyone pay for that?

That turns out to not be the case.

First, the fact that there absolutely is base load is completely independent of how you supply that load. Now you can try to supply it with intermittent renewables, but you will fail, and you will fail with huge costs.

"While the LFSCOE-95 are only slightly lower than the LFSCOE for dispatchable technologies, they are about 50% lower for intermittent sources, which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...

Also, the cost of intermittent renewables isn't zero. The price becomes zero and even negative (and that makes it clear that it's the price, not the cost, because cost can't go negative like that), because the electricity becomes worthless or downright harmful.

Cost is going to continue to go up as you require ever more overcapacity that cannibalizes itself more and more. And it cannibalizes itself even more than it cannibalizes reliable suppliers.

Anyway: just look at what the vast majority of industrial nations are doing. They are combining nuclear for reliable and controllable base-load with intermittent renewables for variable load.

Or look at the DOE's "liftoff" documents: nuclear lowers the cost of decarbonization.

https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/LIFTOF...

You are barely touching on my point, which is that availability of cheap intermittent sources is really bad for nuclear power economics.

Yes going "full solar" or "full wind" is expensive, but thats a strawman; the "obvious" solution in my view is a bunch of storage capacity, a lot of gas turbines (in GW, but run at very low capacity factor) and a sprinkle of better grid connectivity on top. Let the market figure out the best ratio (thats what it is best at).

> Anyway: just look at what the vast majority of industrial nations are doing. They are combining nuclear for reliable and controllable base-load with intermittent renewables for variable load.

My perspective is almost everyone who tried nuclear recently basically failed except China (think Olkiluoto, Vogtle, Flamanville, Hinkley C), and in China its ~5% of the grid, they lately install literally 5 times as much renewable power per year (which is already assuming a 20% capacity factor, so extremely conservative estimate) and no trend reversal in sight.

PS: That liftoff document is comically biased:

That page 1 comparison table contains a proxy for "dispatchability" where nuclear is ahead of gas, a column for "direct heat application" where nuclear is ahead of geothermal (and coal/gas), and the maintenance/operating costs are "concentrated local economic benefits" instead. Admittedly had to chuckle at that.

Actually, I fully addressed that point: intermittent sources are not bad for nuclear, they are bad for everyone and everything, including other intermittent sources, because of their intermittency. This is a problem of the intermittent sources, not of the sources they interfere with.

Economically, they only get to be bad for nuclear power economics if you put silly laws in place that unreasonably favor the intermittents. There is nothing inherent about this. The fix is easy: don't put silly laws in place. If you have them, remove them.

Pretty much the entire world is doing nuclear + (intermittent) renewables.

Are you seriously claiming that all of them haven't figured out the economics of this?

Your "perspective" on new build nuclear is noted, but it does not have much perspective. Myopic would be more accurate. All the projects you mention except one were EPRs. The EPR that its manufacturer discontinued, because it was too difficult to build. Hmm...

All of these projects were FOAK builds, aka "prototypes". FOAK builds are well known to be more difficult to build than regular NOAK builds. Because they are prototypes. With the Vogtles, they started building before some of the plans were fully finished and it turned out those plans weren't actually buildable. Ooops. This is obviously not going the happen on the 2nd build. Because you now have something that actually was built, so it is very obviously buildable.

Furthermore, all of these reactors were (or are being) built in countries that had not built nuclear reactors for some time and thus had little to no institutional knowledge, skilled personnel, or experience.

And no, these projects did not "fail". Finnland is very satisfied with its new reactor, which has already lowered electricity prices and achieved 88% capacity factor in its first year. (Although IMHO it is a bit too large for such a small country).

The EPR as a design has failed. China, for example, has also built two of them, and decided against building more units of the type, opting instead to standardize on a variant of the Westinghouse AP-1000 and a home-grown type, the Hualong One. Again, EDF itself has also discontinued the model, opting instead for the vastly simplified EPR2 for future builds.

The Vogtles are now producing electricity. The prices had to be raised in Georgia to pay for these problematic builds. To now just below 15 cents / kWh. Which is still less than half of the price of electricity in California at over 30 cents / kWh.

(See: https://poweroutage.us/electricity-rates )

Note: the worst-run nuclear projects are still better than the best renewable projects.

And the Vogtles went so "badly" that they are now looking to finish the VC Summer plant that was abandoned (two more AP-1000s). Poland is also building AP-1000s, as is Ukraine.

And yes, China now does a pretty good job of building. Because they have experience. Their first two AP-1000 reactors also took around 10 years, not that much better than the Vogtles. But now they have learned how to do it and are building their adapted and up-rated CAP-1400 in 5 years for $3.5 billion. Same modern, passively safe reactors. And the red-tape is apparently worse than in the West.

And of course, when Germany was still actually building reactors, it built them in the same sort of time-frame, for similar amount of money. The clue is to build a proven design, build a bunch of them and overlap the builds.

We know how to build nuclear reactors quickly and cheaply. We just have to start doing it again.

And no, the liftoff document is quite accurate. "Comically biased" just means that Reality™ does not conform to your prejudices.

Isn't there a third options of building long term energy storage, or is that not feasible at current tech levels?

There is, but making that work is complicated. Math gets easy if you can for example buy power for free during day and then sell it night. 365.25 cycles a year. Say 10-30 years. 4000 to 10000, times your storage capacity. Even cents for each might be reasonable.

Now cut this at worst case to 10-30 that is purely storing power in summer for winter. And you really start to need very very very cheap per unit storage. Even multiply couple a times and it is still very tough.

Remember we are talking about cents per kwh here. Margin just isn't big.

I read online 10+ years ago the same comment that you’re writing right now. Wind and solar energy didn’t get widely implemented for good reasons that we can debate between citizens, they’re a scam here to profit some specific industry, to please the media and reduce feeling of ecologic guilt among some people

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