Investment Risk Is Highest for Nuclear Power Plants, Lowest for Solar
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bu.edu
For one, the immediate economic profit does not reflect long term economic utility. There's factors such as availability, sovereignty, security etc. which are not reflected in hourly electricity prices.
Similarly, we don't look at immediate RoI of other key infrastructure investments: roads, hospitals, military. You sort of can of course, but the calculation isn't as simple as immediate economic benefit. You may finance some expensive preventative treatments which aren't strictly necessary (thus "loss making") but which prevent more expensive treatments down the line.
Finally, the environment is, effectively, gamified. Wholesale prices, retail prices, base load, storage... And it's all interacting with each other. A sceptical take would be that solar compete for a relatively fixed-sized pie of power generation (what they can displace from dispatchable power). But if battery storage doesn't become cheap enough, this will get saturated, and more solar will simply compete for the same finite demand, whereas a dispatchable or base load power plant, like nuclear, will continue to have marketable "goods". Maybe. Maybe not. But my point is, immediate RoI of solar tells you nothing about it.
You may of course arrive at the same conclusion with a better metric (I'm not sure) but that's a separate question. I'm saying the metric is flawed instead.
Can't access the article without some other browser, however keep in mind that business risk is in essence a completely different factor than potential return on investment, or what turns out to be actual return. Three fundamentally different things each composed of way different variables.
Regardless, they go hand-in-hand when investment is involved, the attitude at one extreme is to avoid risk as much as possible, while the other extreme will tolerate or even seek out the riskiest of ventures when they feel they will have good fortune in pursuit of unpredictably better returns which sometimes can not be achieved any other way.
One thing that influences relative cost that doesn't seem to be well-represented by those using equations, is what is the source of the energy to begin with?
It's too obvious.
In one respect, nuclear and solar are at the same end of the spectrum where the "fuel" is so long-lasting that it virtually drops out of the equations compared to so many other things.
But virtually zero may not be close enough to true zero when you consider the cost of the fuel itself plus costs to get that fuel ready for harvesting the energy it has to offer.
Once everything else is in place except for actually getting the fuel into a state of readiness from how it is found in nature, few other options compare to the zero cost that solar, wind and a few others will always have in their equations. This number for solar will never go up regardless of scale, and fuel is such a major consideration it is completely tied to production as strongly as anything can be.
IIRC, zero is quite a number.
In a simplified way there are a lot of businesses that don't actually make money until after the initial capital expenditure has been recovered, a point of zero debt is achieved, and until another capital expenditure occurs, performance results from profits in excess of ongoing expenses.
Surely the most convincing financial structures would be dependent on the most dis-similar accounting tactics, since diverse fuel sources can be nothing like each other even though they will always be tied to production, so it must not become possible to do anything but compare apples to oranges :\
Nuclear hasnt been marketable for a long time without massive indirect and direct subsidies.
The reason it gets built in spite of its demand for lavish subsidies is because it shares a supply chain and skills base with the military industrial complex.
Countries that have a nuclear military want to share some of the costs with the civilian sector although they typically arent up front about it, preferring to declare that it's because they're environmentalists.
NPT signatories that dont have nuclear weapons but take a strong interest in building civilian nuclear power typically see some sort of potential existential risk on the horizon. Again, officially it's because theyre green hippies.
In unrelated news, after decades of being by far the most coal addicted country in Europe: https://apnews.com/article/poland-us-nuclear-energy-power-pl...
Your link to Poland is one of my key counterexamples to a full renewables grid. Northern Europe absolutely sees long periods with little sunshine and wind, and that's also when its energy requirements are highest (winter heating). Much of it is flat, too, and seasonal battery storage exists nowhere right now.
So... If not solar or wind or hydro, and want it to be low-CO2, then you're short on options. So exorcising nuclear seems a bad idea.
Intermittency is not "solved" with nuclear power. When French nuclear plants get shut down for months at a time for maintenance what happens? Lots and lots and lots of peaker gas.
When you combine the extreme cost, the non negligible risks of it going boom and the fact its a horrible peaker (no substitute for gas), and its only slightly lower reliance on peakers it becomes apparent that it's a terrible deal.
The reason why batteries and pumped storage and syngas arent popular is because they cant beat the economics of gas for peaking capacity. However, they can easily beat the economics of nuclear power+gas when combined with solar and wind.
So yeah, exorcising nuclear seems like a pretty fantastic idea, for cost, environmental and pacifist reasons.
You reconsider your life choices and hire the Finnish to run your nuclear power plants instead.
> The reason why batteries and pumped storage and syngas arent popular is because they cant beat the economics of gas for peaking capacity.
It’s not even just the economics that rule out batteries and pumped storage. Where are you going to put all that pumped storage? Where are you going to get all the batteries you need? Not that many batteries are produced compared to the world’s energy needs.
The jury is still out on syngas. So far it’s expensive and inefficient. But it’s still early days.
> the fact its a horrible peaker
Why on earth would you run a nuclear power plant as a peaker? That’s inefficient and wasteful. You run a nuclear power plant at full tilt, all the time. Then you divy up any excess demand to other sources of power.
> So yeah, exorcising nuclear seems like a pretty fantastic idea, for cost, environmental and pacifist reasons.
This seems to be a wonderful idea, as long as you assume nobody lives above the 60th parallel and don’t mind on relying on CO2 producing power sources.
The French made Finnish plant or the Moscow made Finnish plant?
It would be a cool party trick if Finland tried building its own nuclear power plants instead of just suing the French for cost overruns.
>It’s not even just the economics that rule out batteries and pumped storage
The economics dont rule them out - not unless you treat the environment as disposable.
They're much more cost effective when paired with solar and wind than nuclear power, they just dont get the subsidies.
>Where are you going to put all that pumped storage?
You might be confusing it with river dams for which the geography is actually scarce. There was actually a paper that identified a truly enormous number of potential sites globally for pumped storage. Google can easily find it for you if you have an ounce of curiosity about this.
>Where are you going to get all the batteries you need?
Make them? Did you think theyd fall out of the sky?
>The jury is still out on syngas
Syngas only makes economic sense once natural gas is banned/made cost prohibitive and solar+wind are regularly overproducing what can be otherwise stored or used.
It'd still be cheaper to only use syngas made with solar and wind than to use nuclear energy just coz nuclear energy is that absurdly, fantastically, stupidly expensive.
>Why on earth would you run a nuclear power plant as a peaker? That’s inefficient and wasteful.
You wouldnt it's even more economically hemmoraging than using it for baseload but some people think it's a substitute for natural gas because technically it can peak.
Nuclear almost always pairs itself with natgas for peaking just like solar and wind currently do during dark, windless days.
>This seems to be a wonderful idea, as long as you assume nobody lives above the 60th parallel
A) Not many do live up there and B) there is NO shortage of available wind and hydro power options up there.
So I guess you admit it is a wonderful idea.
Of all of your critiques this is the oddest.
>don’t mind on relying on CO2 producing power sources.
Did you read the link I posted at the top? It was written before you responded to me but it was meant for you.
The straw man I referred to in that post was the one you just made.
When solar is producing, it's at a faction of the cost of nuclear. So when you say "you run it a full tilt", who is going to voluntarily pay the nuclear price for power when it costs far more?
You see that play out in countries with lots of solar now. Where I live the wholesale price goes negative most days [0]. I think driver behind this is coal makes it's money overnight, but can't ramp down quickly. Consequently when the sun comes up they have to dump power onto the grid while ramping down, forcing the other suppliers (solar, wind) off. The coal generators end up paying for the privilege of doing that. It's even worse than it seems because by the time that dumped power arrives at the consumers, it's had transmission and other changes added to it - which means the consumer is still paying something for it. Therefore any consumer that has solar doesn't take it, which reduces the market still further. That mechanism has sent a number of coal generators into early retirement here.
Nuclears ramping is worse than coals, so if the invisible market forces are left to operate freely, if the are going to have to pay someone for the privilege of running full tilt as you suggest. That can only work if governments artificially subsidise the price, or force consumers to pay more.
It is getting worse for coal here as batteries get cheaper. Coal makes most of it's money between 4PM and 9PM - which is both peak consumption and there is no solar. So they charge like a wounded bull. But batteries have halved in price over the last 5 years or so, and 5kWh battery will get you through that high price period. Because the price is so high, the battery prices have just crossed the line - it's now break even to install a small battery. In a couple of years, it will become a "no brainer". And with that coal will lose it's major market.
I have no idea what the end game is. May the price coal charges for 9PM .. 8AM goes through the roof - but that will just make a 20kWh battery cost effective. So then what? Does coal shut down completely? How does that work for industries that need a lot of power overnight? I don't know - maybe it becomes cost effective to build pumped storage at that point. I know for me personally coal shutting down won't not matter. We have a 25kWh battery (and once V2G becomes a thing we will have a gob smacking 150kWh of storage for the house), we have over provisioned solar that means even on dim days we make enough power to get by is we are careful.
I have no idea what happens for everyone else - but I'm pretty sure whatever it is, it won't be nuclear. It's too expensive, and too inflexible. So inflexible the nation with most pumped storage per unit generation was ... Japan. Because it used mostly nuclear, can't even ramp well enough to cope with the day / night transition.
[0] Download a month from here to see negative prices in the RRP column: https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-elec...
Nuclear have high fixed cost, but very small marginal cost. So once you have a nuclear power plant, the more you produce, the cheaper it is.
In Sweden they generally start to shut down if the price is below ~€10-15/MWh for a longer period of time.
The total cost is what matters and the total cost is absurdly expensive.
If you used a nuclear plant during its entire lifetime as a peaker at, say, an average of 50% of max capacity, the average kilowatt hour would be TEN times the cost of the average kilowatt hour sourced directly from solar panels or a wind turbine, ~7-8x the cost of the average kilowatt hour generated from gas and probably about 4-5x the cost of the average kilowatt hour sourced from solar/wind via battery/pumped storage and over 2x the cost of the average kilowatt hour from solar/wind via syngas.
And if you compare the total cost, you also need to compare to the total revenue. Nuclear can produce a lot of power at the time where power is the most expensive when there is no sun and no wind.
I did count and compare those things. That was my entire point. Even on the darkest most windless night it cant match the cost of solar and wind and storage.
Those ongoing costs are not so low anyway. France spent an absolute fortune on maintenance.
Because you have no choice. There simply are not takers for your expensive energy when competing against zero marginal cost renewables.
In Australia there are grids which sometimes are met to 107% with rooftop solar alone. [1] All utility scale renewables are curtailed, let alone expensive thermal plants.
In these grids what was previously "base load" plants running at full tilt 24/7 are forced to become peakers or shut down. [2]
[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/rooftop-solar-meets-107-5-pct-of...
[2]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
It's worth keeping in mind that solar and wind farms start generating revenue as soon as the first panel or turbine is connected. This make financing much easier and derisks the whole project. Nuclear has to wait the whole ~10 years for the entire station to be finished before the investors get anything back.
rationalise it then
Lets make the playing field equal and have all nuclear plants cover their entire accident liability with their own money rather than the tax purse.
If modern new plants are safe as houses as you say then there is NO problem relying upon ONLY sophisticated private insurers who know the risks well to cover any potential future Fukushima-level clean up costs (only ~$800 billion or so).
Until the act is killed though, it's very easy to believe that it exists SOLELY because sophisticated private insurers would take one look at the risks of nuclear kaboom and the costs of cleanup in the event it happens and go "fuck THAT".
Makes me feel really safe, knowing that as a taxpayer Im forced to be on the hook for all clean up costs over $300 million.
If it's any consolation, you're already on the hook for oil/gas cleanup, which is significantly more expensive.
Texas has an estimated 1 Trillion dollars in damages from our Oil craze. Whoops... And, certainly the likes of Chevron won't be paying that.
Like the construction costs in the article the cleanup costs estimates rise over time.
We do take issue with that though.
They're just as keen on nuclear power for military reasons as they are keen on supporting carbon industries because of money and lobbyists.
It is not even close. Deepwater horizon cost ~65B to clean up. The estimate from 2016 for Fukushima is $200B with organizations producing estimates up in the trillions.
So it is great that we phase out both oil/gas and nuclear and only rely on technologies which pay for the externalities and accidents.
A Solar plant is (very crudely) just purchasing panels from a factory that's already produced millions of them and installing them in a frame so they're pointing at the sun.
No one wants to invest the capital to get a manufacturing plant up and running if regulators aren’t willing to allow completed reactors to be commissioned and begin producing energy at a rate that matches the manufacturing rate. The insistence on treating every nuclear site as a unique project subject to years of environmental surveys and extensive, bespoke planning makes modular reactor designs moot as a technology. This is why every reactor gets a new design: they have to go through the process anyway so they might as well try to max out the production they can achieve at that site.
Solar panel costs have fallen 3 orders of magnitude since the 1970s [1]. SMRs wouldn’t need that dramatic of a production cost improvement to become viable for commercial energy production. The main barrier remains regulatory.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-...
Not dismissing SMR for commercial use, but don't see how military subs / ships are relevant
There are already-approved designs that are pre-approved can can be constructed without review:
* https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/design-c...
AIUI, one can get approval from the NRC (under Part 52?) by building a plant as-drawn with a pre-approved design:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Construction_and_Oper...
* https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part052/f...
If you deviate from the plan then you have to get approval for that deviation. Apparently this was part of the problem with Vogtle (Unit 3): they had a design and got it approved, but because the hands-on knowledge of building had atrophied, they found complications in construction in the drawings, and wanted to make change to simplify things. These changes then had to be approved, which add to delays.
There is another regulatory process where you get approval in phases, and this would have been better for Vogtle. The Decouple podcast has a four-part series on Vogtle that goes into a lot of detail about Vogtle:
* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyouH0mkPJXHR0hKW_iLk...
One can get an initial site license without actually picking a particular design, so the process can start with decisions are being made:
* https://wyoleg.gov/InterimCommittee/2023/09-2023071715-03Nuc...
They unfortunately haven't held that promise up.
If you look at ROI, which looks at the demand side risk as well (perhaps transient demand, need for quick build out), and assume utilities are in the business of profit maximization, natural gas wins.
Assessing the right amount of tax is non-trivial, but approximations for the costs of carbon emissions exist, and even conservative estimates push natural gas out of the profitability zone.
I disagree. The "right amount" is pretty trivial. Structuring it such that it's politically favorable, precise, and robust is the actual issue.
There's a general tension between precision and robustness in law, and finding that tradeoff is often the difficult part once public opinion is secured.
On what timeframe? Put it too soon and you risk social upheaval crashing the whole project. Put it too late and you cause unnecessary damage to the climate.
Also, "net emissions" that include CO2 being absorbed into the oceans must take into account that oceanic absorption declines as surface waters become more saturated with dissolved CO2 and the pH declines. The rate of carbon flux to the deep ocean (from descending organic detritus) is just a few percent of annual emissions.
Well kinda compared to nuclear yes, but compared to coal/oil/incinerator it wins still.
Natural gas is just too cheap as a battery (i.e. peaking).
Nuclear power, batteries and pumped storage all require subsidies to be cost competitive and while nuclear power has a powerful champion in the military industrial complex to offset its ridiculous expense, storage tech has no such champion.
"For Sovacool, the evidence is clear: “Low-carbon sources of energy such as wind and solar not only have huge climatic and energy security benefits, but also financial advantages related to less construction risk and less chance of delays,” he says"
Of course, when you compare electric transportation with nuclear plant, the results are not the same ..
This paper is green washing;
I think TFA just reiterates that we can no longer build complex stuff within a reasonable timeframe and budget. Nuclear reactors just happen to be super complex. Nothing nefarious going on.
Also the failure modes of Nuclear involve some sort of "real time response". In a classic reactor when the power goes off unexpectedly, one needs to make sure that it receives cooling to not risk a meltdown.
The only open problem is storage but I guess there are also reasonably low complexity options like hydrogen or water pumps.
You're comparing a nuclear plant to e.g. an electric car? Why? Aren't we comparing power generation methods?
The article spoke of the grid;
> By contrast, solar energy and electricity grid transmission projects have the best construction track record and are often completed ahead of schedule or below expected cost
That doesn't seem to comport with your post, so maybe you can elaborate? Intuitively, a redundant, resilient, distributed grid is far better than a centralized one. For an example of why, see how usa's texas has fared in adverse conditions [0]
The article does not have anything about transportation.
Also, his data is from 2013.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
(warning: the graph on that wikipedia page has a really poorly cut Y-axis.)
The grid investments are sizeable. You not only need to add a lot of batteries, you also have to make other investments, for example to add moment to the grid, because unlike big turbines like nuclear, water or gas, solar or small wind turbines have almost no moment of inertia, which was one of the problems behind Spain's power outage.
This isn't new stuff, it's all solvable and countries already do this; the power outage of Spain would've been impossible in Germany for example. It's just important to highlight that with old-school power plants, you don't need a lot of that stuff to stabilise the grid. You need to include the grid costs when calculating the true LCOE, which most of these charts, including the Wikipedia one, don't do. Wikipedia isn't lying about that; they outline this very fact as one of the key weaknesses of the LCOE metric.
" with old-school power plants, you don't need a lot of that stuff to stabilise the grid."
you just need proper sizing of renewables inverters + firmware update...... so no you do not need to have inertia of huge mass in turbines. also 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of all problems stem of peoples need to regulate grid to flat line for nonsensical reasons, IF you have slight artificially made "fluctuations in grid" which are generated by all inverter synchronized and planned ahead, there is no problem. grid has to have "pulse". THAT is decentralized / new grid. what you are describing is Stanley/Westinghouse grid. so mixing is resulting in nonsense.
It was an over voltage issue coming from reactive power causing trips.
https://minener.com/spains-power-crisis-deepens-renewables-c...
On the other hand Nuclear LCOE generally assume they can sell a high proportion of their power for the next 40 years.
So really the big hidden assumption is that solar won't eat half their market in that timeframe. And then solar plus batteries eats into it further. Which would drive up their cost, letting solar plus batteries win more business in a vicious cycle.
With the recent Iberian power situation half their nuclear was offline because they were already in a huff because they weren't being paid enough money.
also chemical industry needs big investment because they have to change mindset about procuring carbon and other inputs in net zero economy.
(similar thing as what some datacenter companies say they do with buying nuclear capacity)
i think most people do not want to understand, they want socialized grid payed by citizens instead of putting real energy price into pricing for goods/services.
hydrogen as energy carrier, not as transportable comodity. hydrogen as MEANS not as a goal. we need iron + water to have from 20 sec up to seasonal storage of energy in megawatts per meter cubed...
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2024/08/iro...
https://www.tue.nl/en/research/institutes/eindhoven-institut...
but yes, LCOE of PV+12hour battery was lower then nuclear, even before 2020/2019 saga...
I see this sort of thing so much. Renewable and storage costs have changed so fast that using numbers from even a few years ago gives misleading results. Going back 12 years you might as well be using numbers from another world.
Nuclear makes sense for grid power, solar makes sense for distributed/point power.
At more equatorial latitudes you could definitely rely on it more. And it's not really an issue for grid solar yet because we're far from the point where there's more solar power than we need, even in the middle of summer. But eventually winter will be an issue.
Having to ration power like that is part of the reason I don't think grid solar makes sense anywhere. To get the behavior you need You'd have expose consumers to the fluctuating prices and most people find that extremely unpleasant (many probably more than just maintaining their own array and infrastructure.)
London here, energy independent march-october, with peak grid dependecy in january of about 50ish percent.
If I doubled the array from 5 to 10 kwhr, I _probably_ could remain independent most of the year.
Of course! but I'm not after total independence, just extending the usable time I _am_ independent.
If it was sunny all winter I could easily go off-grid.
I have bought one for land and am planning on setting up a separate system with it.
Neither of those is a good alternative on ours, so we are looking for a rigging-suspended option like the old Ampair and Windbugger setups.
This is quite a lot if we consider that net zero expenditures until 2050 only are expected to amount to 100 trillion.
World GDP was 105 trillion USD in 2024.
Which would make the year over year investment about 3.8%.
so you're saying that 4% of gdp every year until 2050... it is peanuts.
so for example if every household ! ! ! !ONLY IN USA ! ! ! lives in passive house, that alone will save more on utility bills, insurance, then your net zero expenditure requires to add. so im not sure if that net zero expenditure is world wide or just USAs, but USA can pay it by themselves, if they were not scammed by building bad buildings for last 20 years.... just for comparison.
also previous powerplants price has to be converted to today's dollars, and inflation metric basket is flawed because it does not consist of building materials, which powerplants are build from. but it contains bread, clothing etc.
so 1.358 T is not todays money that means comparation / ratio is better then you/them suggest.
also NET zero expenditures means, less inputs afterwards, i.e. no/less money sent to canada, mexico, venezuela, africa, persian gulf for oil...... so more money for homeland. which most people forget about to even calculate impact of... positive for usa.
so yes we can do this, but every smartass in TV is saying we can not....
What’s a passive house?
but sure, try it out. :)
most of US lives like caveman burning wood (which is not ecological nor health safe activity) and spreading nonsense about ondemand water heaters.
while there are multiple billionaires who earn insane amounts on "predicting energy market" i.e. scamming residential customers / citizens thru taxes.
it is like insane asylum.
It's convenient to only count the input.
> In March, Finland successfully completed the first test of its encapsulation plant, which, if finished, will become the world's first permanent underground storage facility for radioactive waste.
https://www.wired.com/story/finland-is-developing-a-permanen...
So far, after 70 years of nuclear power, not even 1 country is doing this.
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 can make it even clearer. Not having to the spend O&M costs from operating a nuclear plant for ~20 years and instead saving it is enough to rebuild the renewable plant with equivalent output in TWh of the nuclear plant.
Between "base load isn't real" to "lifespan of nuclear reactors don't matter" anti-nuclear types have some really bad takes.
In any case the federal government can just make money out of thin air which it actually should do for investing in very expensive long term ROI things.
What you are saying is that we should waste money on enormous handouts to the nuclear industry today to get a tiny bit back in 60 years time. Making us poorer for generations.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/082703.asp
Base load exists on the consumer/demand side. Base load power plants has always been an economic construct. Inflexible coal and nuclear power used to have the lowest marginal costs and high fixed costs and therefore could expect to run at 100% 24/7.
That is not the case anymore since zero marginal cost renewables have entered the market.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/there-is-no-going-back-aemo-bids...
And "nuclear is worthwhile because we can cause inflation" is literally the least logical argument I have heard in a long time.
You seem to be working backwards from having decided that we need to handout untold trillions to the nuclear industry and is now trying to rationalize your position.
The discount rate argument cuts both ways. While future revenues are discounted, so are future costs including decommissioning, waste storage, and replacement generation capacity. When you properly account for the full system costs of replacing ~90% capacity factor nuclear with variable renewables plus storage/transmission/backup, the economics shift considerably
On baseload the grid still requires inertia, frequency regulation, and firm capacity. While renewables provide energy, they don't inherently provide these grid services. The costs of synthetic inertia, grid-forming inverters, and massive overbuild/curtailment to achieve reliable capacity aren't captured in simple LCOE comparisons.
The CSIRO report's 10% figure assumes a specific discount rate and doesn't account for carbon pricing, grid stability services, or land use constraints that become critical at high renewable penetrations. Real-world grids like France (70% nuclear) demonstrate sustained low electricity costs over decades, while high-renewable grids like Germany and California show increasing costs and reliability challenges.
The government regularly funds long-term infrastructure with decades-long payback periods - highways, bridges, airports. Nuclear reactors are strategic energy infrastructure with 60-80 year lifespans no different to a bridge.
You complain about "handouts" to the nuclear industry but renewable subsidies per MWh have been substantial, and nuclear provides energy security benefits that pure market calculations don't capture.
The operational costs are actually quite high for nuclear power. Generally around $32/MWh. [1] That is equivalent to the all-in cost for a new built solar plant.
The solar plant will then produce zero marginal cost electricity. Meaning, the nuclear plant can't rely on operating at 100% 24/7 anymore since they are outcompeted.
We already see this happening in Australia, Germany etc. where previous "baseload" coal plants are forced to become peakers. Shutting down daily because there are no takers for their electricity when zero marginal cost renewables deliver. [2]
This is also starting to happen across Europe. When the Iberian blackout happened 1 reactor was out for scheduled maintenance and the equivalent to the capacity from two more was voluntarily withdrawn from the grid due to "market conditions.
> Currently operating US reactors average over 40 years and many are getting 20-year license extensions to 60+ years.
So if we exclude all reactors which were decommissioned due to technical issues, economical issues etc. we can cherry pick the ones which survived. You went straight into survivorship bias.
Please bring back the logic to this discussion. You seem to have left it at the door.
> When you properly account for the full system costs of replacing ~90% capacity factor nuclear with variable renewables plus storage/transmission/backup, the economics shift considerably
They don't. Storage is absolutely plummeting in price with the latest auctions in China landing on $63/kWh serviced for 20 years. [3]
Then we have comprehensive grid modeling:
See the recent study [4] 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.
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". Including transmission, synchronous condensers and firming. [5]
> land use constraints
Which is already included in the price for renewables. The day we have land use constraints in a location that isn't a city state lets solve it.
> The government regularly funds long-term infrastructure with decades-long payback periods - highways, bridges, airports. Nuclear reactors are strategic energy infrastructure with 60-80 year lifespans no different to a bridge.
You are trying to equate nuclear power to infrastructure because it simply does not make sense compared to renewables and storage. You can make the exact same calculation for renewables, pick solar panels with 40 year lifetimes, batteries optimized for cycle count if "lifetime" is the most central metric.
We don't because it doesn't make sense, and you know it.
> You complain about "handouts" to the nuclear industry but renewable subsidies per MWh have been substantial, and nuclear provides energy security benefits that pure market calculations don't capture.
Yes. We kickstarted the renewable industry, at the same time as we gave absolutely bonkers large handouts to the nuclear industry kicking off Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer and the host of plants cancelled during planning.
Today we are phasing out renewable subsidies because they aren't needed anymore. Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels and will thus over time replace them in our global energy grid.
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/gjyffoqd/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
[2]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
[3]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...
[4]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
[5]: https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
Regarding "survivorship bias" - the U.S. fleet average capacity factor has increased from 56% in 1980 to >92% today. Plants closed primarily due to broken electricity markets that don't value capacity or carbon-free baseload, not technical issues. Meanwhile, early solar farms are already seeing 30%+ degradation after 15 years.
The Denmark study you cite assumes 100% renewable basecase then adds nuclear - that's methodologically backwards. Nuclear-heavy grids (France, Ontario) consistently deliver lower costs than renewable-heavy ones (Germany, Denmark). The study also uses 8760-hour modeling which undersamples extreme weather events that drive real grid planning.
On storage costs - $63/kWh for 4-hour batteries doesn't solve multi-day renewable droughts. The capacity factor of batteries in CAISO is <10% because they're energy-limited. To match nuclear's reliability, you need 100+ hours of storage, making the math completely different.
The Australia CSIRO study uses LCOE comparisons which explicitly exclude grid integration costs, while assuming nuclear costs 3x higher than global benchmarks. Their own sensitivity analysis shows nuclear becomes competitive at international pricing levels.
Your market-based argument ignores that current markets are designed for marginal cost dispatch, not system reliability. Texas ERCOT demonstrates what happens when you optimize for cheap energy without capacity - rolling blackouts when wind unexpectedly drops.
The technical reality: grids need inertia, voltage support, and firm capacity. Nuclear provides all three inherently. Renewables require synthetic alternatives that aren't captured in simple cost comparisons.
Yes. You need to invest in your plant to keep it running.
> Plants closed primarily due to broken electricity markets that don't value capacity or carbon-free baseload
So now you're shifting the goalposts. It wasn't the nuclear plants fault that they couldn't produce cheap electricity. The market should subsidize them even more!
> Meanwhile, early solar farms are already seeing 30%+ degradation after 15 years.
And you completely skipped over the solar panels with 40 year warranties you can get if you value liftetime above all else.
Not that anyone truly does it.
> Nuclear-heavy grids (France, Ontario) consistently deliver lower costs than renewable-heavy ones (Germany, Denmark).
Which is why the recent SMRs in Ontario comes in at a cool $150/MWh. They haven't even started building yet.
The French is wholly incapable of building new nuclear power as given by Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles. The EDF CEO is currently on his hands and knees begging the French government for handouts so their side of the costs will be at most €100/MWh. Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026 and the first reactor online by 2038.
You seem to always be looking backward. We don't live half a century ago. We live in 2025 and make decisions based on outcomes we see today.
> The study also uses 8760-hour modeling which undersamples extreme weather events that drive real grid planning.
Keep a stash of fossil gas for the 10 year grid emergency? Who cares what you burn in year emergency reserves for a few days when the 10 year emergency hits.
We need to reduce the area under the curve ASAP. Not some imaginary "perfect" that never happens.
> On storage costs - $63/kWh for 4-hour batteries doesn't solve multi-day renewable droughts. The capacity factor of batteries in CAISO is <10% because they're energy-limited. To match nuclear's reliability, you need 100+ hours of storage, making the math completely different.
I love how you just keep shifting the goalposts into ever more insane positions because you have to accept that storage is here. A simplified simulation of the Australian grid with a tiny bit of overbuilding and 5 hours of storage leads to 99% renewable penetration.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr...
You can also ask the French how that "nuclear reliability" went when half their fleet was offline and they literally had to beg Germany to reopen mothballed coal plants so their grid wouldn't collapse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
> The Australia CSIRO study uses LCOE comparisons which explicitly exclude grid integration costs, while assuming nuclear costs 3x higher than global benchmarks. Their own sensitivity analysis shows nuclear becomes competitive at international pricing levels.
Since this is a common complaint from people who detract from renewables they do include it. Both transmission, grid strength through synchronous condensers, batteries and firming from gas peakers.
They also assume nth of a kind South Korean costs to not fall for your "3x bias". And it still turns out to be twice as expensive compared to the renewable option. Now try inserting western new built nuclear power costs and the comparison simply becomes stupid.
Maybe you should read the study before continuing to make a fool of yourself because you can't deal with how horrifically expensive nuclear power is?
> Your market-based argument ignores that current markets are designed for marginal cost dispatch, not system reliability. Texas ERCOT demonstrates what happens when you optimize for cheap energy without capacity - rolling blackouts when wind unexpectedly drops.
Which is why about all other marginal cost grids also include ancillary services like capacity markets, power reserves etc. to ensure the that enough reserves are available based on their modeling.
The problem nuclear power has is that it is so horrifically expensive that these markets are a drop in the bucket compared to the price. It also doesn't solve the reserve problem since it needs to run at 100% 24/7 to just be horrifically expensive.
Calculating Vogtles $190/MWh to run at a gas peaker 10-15% capacity factor leads to $1000-$1500/MWh or $1-1.5/kWh. That is Texas grid meltdown prices, whenever the nuclear plant runs.
> The technical reality: grids need inertia, voltage support, and firm capacity. Nuclear provides all three inherently. Renewables require synthetic alternatives that aren't captured in simple cost comparisons.
Which is why the CSIRO modeling included all this? But you seem to just pull the blinders ever tighter as you confront reality. Just pretend it doesn't exist.
Without any data or science backing your claims.
This is really quite sad. You’ve entwined your identity with an energy source and can’t look objectively at what problems we need to solve and what those tools costs to use.
What this could mean, Ryu explains, is that smaller, modular renewable projects might not only bring environmental benefits, but also potentially reduce financial risk and offer better budget predictability."
The diseconomy of scale is something I don't read very often. Interesting!
I would take it even further, and say that storage, as well as generation, should be down-scaled as much as possible.
On-building scale generation, and per building storage, being the ultimate embodiment.
This also minimizes large scale distribution infrastructure needs.
Like with other comments regarding why nuclear is still built in spite of its extreme cost and schedule overruns: utilities want the infrastructure to be organized in a way that can only be operated and maintained by large utilities.
We should put our subsidies into individual building storage, and the technology to distribute the energy in that storage onto the local grid. What we're seeing is the exact opposite, very large scale solar and storage projects that are specifically architected to produce profit, not power.
Building a nuclear power plant incurs in a massive set up stage with a lot of unknowns unknowns and requiring impressive material engineering and QC.
Solar is much more "incremental", you can almost start producing electricity and recouping costs immediately.
But a nuclear reactor is an extremely dense power generator compared to a solar panel plant by orders of magnitude. I'm not really sure why are they compared this way.
Or min project cost $20k, takes a day to build and pays off in ten years?
The biggest payoff I’ve seen in solar is that it basically locks in the price of power for the ten years it takes to pay off so it’s inflation proof.
Very few people are falling for this stuff anymore. You can only go so far destroying the landscape in southern Europe replacing thousands of olive trees by “green” solar panels, before the population calls out the insanity and vote for parties that are against it, no matter how bad are some of their other policies.
We're the end stage of utilitarianism: getting rid of centuries old C3 energy producers of alkanes because the grove is "inefficient" and loudly extolling the beauty of pieces of black glass.
The solutions to the energy problems are largely solved and have been since the 70s, conservation.
Meanwhile, guys like Gates have been bemoaning cow's rectal emissions while AI (ie Microsoft, of which he is a major shareholder) is becoming the larger consumer of energy to train AI.
That was the argument you were going to make, right? I mean, why subsidize the winner?
/s
The thing is, you will be one of the first complaining about how undemocratic our governments are, when the Western world turns completely right.
Now, that is be good sarcasm. People like you explaining that the the will of the majority is undemocratic.
Sometimes the desired outcome (less of the countryside being covered in solar panels, wind farms, or giant pit mines, in this case) isn't most economically efficient. It's up to the people whether it's worth spending tax money to achieve this. I personally don't mind wind and solar farms (or nuclear, for that matter), but my region isn't what anyone would consider "scenic."
You can choose not to subsidize nuclear, in which case you'll get more windmills and solar farms. This is exactly what the person you originally replied to doesn't want.
You can remove the subsidies of nuclear and solar, in which case solar is still profitable.
If you remove the subsidies of mass transit and individual transit, neither is profitable anymore.
So if you're running a solar park you have production costs of about 5ct/kWh. But if there's also a gas plant running you get maybe 20ct/kWh. Instaprofit.
Let's go back to my original claim: The economy of scale brought PV prices down substantially. This is easy to verify. Agreed?
A fully green energy grid would most cost effectively comprise of:
* Solar (generally strongest when wind is low, ~5x cheaper per kwh than nuclear power)
* Wind (generally strongest when sun is low, ~5x cheaper than nuclear power)
* Large scale interconnected grids to offset intermittency.
* Batteries and pumped storage for short term storage (~90% roundtrip efficiency but expensive to store long term)
* Syngas for seasonal storage (~50% roundtrip efficiency but cheap to store long term).
But now you've changed the economics by adding a big, inefficient (0.95*0.95%), and expensive piece of equipment.
Flywheels are batteries. If your model is predicated on a particular chemistry of battery, it’s overfitted.
Riddle me this, what instantaneous voltage should an inverter target if the grid's at a fault condition? Stated another way, how do you define the frequency of a non-sinuoid?
Careful, get the wrong answer and you get a short and you help melt millions of dollars of equipment, some with year old lead times.
you can island and not island at same time. decentralized grid means DECENTRALIZED grid.
every renewable needs battery next to it.
The trick is measuring a frequency in the 60s of Hz of a non-sinusoid within a thousandth of a second.
Otherwise you get a short.
Watching the enormous progress we’re making on upgrading our energy infrastructure is definitely one of the most exciting things happening in tech. People seem determined to stick to old ideas.
(One of ) the problem with inverter the angular velocity of a spinning rotor is trivially easy to define and measure. The operating frequency of the grid that an inverter needs to target is hard to define under the realtime constraints of a failing grid.
Which is what brought Spain down. It wasnt the panels and windmills, it was the inverters.
And the root cause of the blackout in Spain is still mostly the subject of speculation. AFAIK there has is no official report yet into the details of how things went wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource#Grid-f...
Bit surprised countries aren't just legislating this away. For every MW you put on the grid that doesn't have rotational inertia you need to contribute X money to a fund that builds stabilization capacity.
At protests against the use of fossil hydrocarbons for transport an often heard claim is that the true costs of this practice are not paid for by the taxes put on fuel and vehicles. The claim is that there are many other costs which are paid for by society, from costs related to pollution and related health problems to costs related to international conflicts which stem from the presence of hydrocarbon sources in conflict-ridden regions.
The same claims can be made for non-continuous power sources like solar and wind: these power sources are only viable just as long as there is a backup power supply with the same capacity while the costs for those backup power supplies are not factored in the claims for investment risks. Just like cars and trucks depend on an infrastructure which is only partly paid for by their users non-continuous power sources depend on an infrastructure which is paid for by others, in this case those who invest in reliable base load power generation capacity like nuclear power.
I have a 14 kW solar array on the barn roof feeding a 10 kW 3-phase inverter which currently provides enough power to feed our farm and our neighbours - we export about 8 MWh yearly. There's a big cloud getting close to the sun, once it moves over it power output will drop to 2 kW or lower in an instant. The slack is taken up by 'the grid', the costs of which were not factored in when I bought the panels + mounting hardware, inverter, cables, over-current protection, switches and other bits and bobs I used when I installed the array. Of course I did pay for the grid in other ways, mostly through decades of taxation. An investor in a solar farm will not pay for that grid though, he'll only see the costs for the hardware and the grid hookup which leads to the claim made in this article: 'investment risk lowest for solar'. This may be true but it is not the whole story and using only investment risk as a guideline for building a power grid will lead to dark power-less winter nights because investing in base load generation capacity was deemed to be too risky.
Plenty of industries operate in highly regulated spaces all the time - but there's a difference between regulation and unpredictability.
Those proposing to reduce the regulatory burden on nuclear are in fact proposing moving nuclear to this regime where we learn from meltdowns.
The evidence of actual meltdowns doesn’t support this hypothesis. (Also, modern designs don’t melt down.)
Note that I'm not talking only about objective damage or loss of life. Economic or political fallout is also a real constraint.
Nothing in nuclear is allowed to be shrugged off.
> Economic or political fallout is also a real constraint
That would be like counting people wrongly blaming solar for Spain’s grid collapse as a cost of solar power.
Sure. Which is why modern designs don't melt down.