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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

Regulation is not a problem, and even the construction costs are not terrible. We can take the Rooppur NPP as a base, it produces reliable energy at 6-7 cents per kWh. The reason for cost overruns is simply because NPPs are one-off products, the Western countries don't have a pipeline for NPP production.

For comparison, utility-scale solar with 16 hours of storage is 21 cents: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/higher-renewable-energy-cos...

Just raw solar without storage can be as low as 2-3 cents per kWh.

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If I understand correctly, the cost/year of an engineer in India is maybe 1/3rd that in the US, and for general labor the disparity is even larger. So it shouldn't be too surprising NPP construction in India is cheaper than in the US. India doesn't have a large NPP pipeline, they just have cheaper labor.

(Bangladesh, not India)

Yes, but solar power panels are also mostly produced in China, where engineers still get less than 1/3 of the US/Europe salary.

European power plants will be more expensive, but even with the LCOE of 12 (twice that of Rooppur) it's still going to be way cheaper than storage for areas that get cold weather (Midwest, Germany, most of China).

Anything south of California? Yeah, just get solar+wind, no need to bother with nuclear.

As we pointed out, PV is still trouncing nuclear in China. So if the difference is smaller there, it's still in favor of solar.

Storage is another matter here, but even there costs for batteries have simply collapsed. Understand that massive storage is needed even in a nuclear-powered economy. If all the 283 million cars and trucks in the US were replaced with 70 kWh BEVs, the storage would be enough to power the US grid (at its current average consumption) for 40 hours. That's a lot of batteries. So the demand is there to continue to drive them down their experience curves. In China, they're already around $50/kWh for installed grid storage systems (not just cell price).

The final storage problem, the only reed that nuclear can be clinging to at this point, is long term/seasonal storage. That's needed either to smooth wind variability (~ week scale) or to move solar from summer to winter (~6 months). There are at least two different ways this could be solved: hydrogen and heat. As mentioned elsewhere in these threads, the latter is very promising, with capex as little as $1/kWh of storage capacity and a RTE of about 40%. Should that work out anywhere close to that nuclear would be in a hopeless position anywhere in the world, even at very high latitudes.

> As we pointed out, PV is still trouncing nuclear in China. So if the difference is smaller there, it's still in favor of solar.

Sure. Solar is easy to scale when you don't care about reliability, nobody is arguing with that. But it's another issue entirely when you need a stable grid.

I'm not aware of any countries (even tropical ones) that managed anything close to 100% renewables with solar. E.g. Hawaii has to pay for extremely expensive diesel generation even though they have plenty of solar potential.

And nuclear is scalable if you force other sources off the grid in favor of nuclear (and force customers to not use renewables "behind the meter").

In a fair grid, solar and wind get built out, and the residual demand has no baseload component. Unless nuclear is given the right to force other sources off the grid it becomes inappropriate.

In Texas now there is no chance of new nuclear construction. ERCOT is a competitive market and new nuclear simply doesn't make sense.

> And nuclear is scalable if you force other sources off the grid in favor of nuclear (and force customers to not use renewables "behind the meter").

Not really? Nuclear is not any different from coal. And plenty of countries have coal generation in the mix. France also is majority-nuclear.

And so far, nuclear is the second known technology (after hydro) that actually demonstrated close to 100% fossil-free grid.

So far, there is nothing similar for solar. Even though it's supposed to be oh-so-cheap.

> In Texas now there is no chance of new nuclear construction. ERCOT is a competitive market and new nuclear simply doesn't make sense.

Well, yeah. Because they can just allow the grid to die during the next Arctic air blast.

Nuclear is quite different from coal.

First, coal has a much larger share of its cost as variable cost which is avoided if you don't run the plant. 40% for coal, only 10% for nuclear. This makes integrated a coal fired plant into a renewable grid easier than a nuclear plant. China is increasingly doing this with its coal plants.

Second, coal is much more forgiving of maintenance sloppiness, and even in the event of catastrophic malfunction the plant remains repairable.

Nuclear has been available in its current (and no longer competitive) state longer than solar/wind have been in their current economic state, so if you look at historical data you might conclude nuclear is better. But that's backward looking and says little about what's better in the future.

You are aware that a nuclear plant tripping offline was part of the cause of ERCOT's last winter cold problem?

Oh, and even in the US, a coal power plant might cost $1400/kW; nuclear is at least a factor of 5 higher.

The nuclear power plant wear-and-tear is roughly proportional to the number of hours it runs at full power. By not running the plant, you can extend its service life (probably to more than 100 years, with periodic annealing). The main limiting factor is the reactor vessel, its steel walls can only tolerate so much neutron bombardment before becoming too brittle for service.

Nuclear power plants have similar behavior to coal plants in another regard, they take approximately the same time to ramp up/down.

> You are aware that a nuclear plant tripping offline was part of the cause of ERCOT's last winter cold problem?

They just need to build more of them. Problem solved.

Anyway, nuclear power plants went from 0% to 70% generation in France within 20 years in 70-s. We don't see anything like this happening with solar, even in smaller island countries. Solar is successful only when it's backed by fossil fuels and government subsidies to keep that fossil fuel generation running.

Sure, you can save some maintenance cost by operating at low capacity factor. But this is a minor part of the cost of nuclear energy, so you don't save much. Nuclear simply isn't constituted to be useful as a dispatchable source.

The technical ability to ramp up/down is beside the point; it's the financial ability to do so that matters.

What nuclear did in France half a century ago is irrelevant. What matters is if nuclear makes sense today. It doesn't, even if it could be done.

Nuclear can be made flexible, that's my point. It works best as a constant baseload, but it's mostly because the current plants were not designed for dispatchable use (except for some plants in France).

Nuclear plants do not degrade at a constant rate, regardless of their power. By idling the plant, you extend its service life, essentially amortizing the capital cost over a longer period of time. And the capital cost is the main driver in the cost of the nuclear power, as you're pointing out yourself.

You ignore the counterargument I already gave you to what you're saying there.

Nuclear can be made technically flexible. It can't be made economically flexible. The large fixed costs prevent the technical ability you are describing there from being useful. It's pyrrhic engineering, straining to achieve an outcome that's useless. Even France depends largely on the rest of Europe to deal with variations in demand rather than spooling their power plants up and down.

I think I replied to your counter-argument, but I think I did not explain my argument properly.

In the case of nuclear power plants, the expenses are front-loaded in the construction (and the future major maintenance, like reactor vessel annealing). The _running_ expenses are trivial by comparison. So a nuclear power plant saves a much smaller percentage of its cost on a per-month basis when it's not running.

Honestly, I looked at nuclear energy in a lot of details. It absolutely is a viable and economic path forward, but it stymied by the lack of political will. Nuclear projects take at least 8-10 years to complete, so politicians are less interested in pushing them. And commercial companies are hesitant to invest with such long repayment periods.

> The reason for cost overruns is simply because NPPs are one-off products

But there's no fundamental reason they _have_ to be one-off products. They just historically have been for at least partly regulatorily motivated reasons: because each reactor's approval process starts afresh (or rather, did until quite-recent NRC reforms), there's little advantage in reuse, and because many compliance costs are both high and fixed, there's an incentive to build fewer huge reactors rather than more small ones, which makes factory construction difficult to achieve and economies of scale hard to realize.

Civil engineering involves adapting any design to the local geology. This has to be custom for each site.

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