Merz Called It a Mistake. Then He Called It Irreversible
garryslist.org
garryslist.org
So what's going on here? Why intentionally avoid those topics?
Because they are cheap, and nuclear is expensive?
Because they are being shut down politically in the US (and threatened in Germany by Merz) which makes their argument that nuclear is the test of pragmatic government ridiculous?
Do they have investments that mean this is them in sales mode and so lying (not just by omission) is considered okay?
What is cheap is nuclear, what is expensive (and requiring massive subsidies) are intermittent renewables.
And the article is about the mistake of getting out of nuclear.
Not about the mistake of going all-in on intermittent renewables, although those two mistakes are linked.
Mind you: intermittent renewables are not a mistake. Going all-in on them is.
And if the author believes the non-mainstream claim that nuclear is cheaper than renewables then they could have stated that rather than mysteriously avoid the topic.
Germany is still all-in on the failed Energiewende. Last I checked, this is due to the coalition agreement with the SPD, who have not yet managed to come to terms with their mistake.
The problems of the intermittent renewables wind power and solar are inherent, they have nothing to do with being "for" or "against" it. Stating simple facts is not being "against" something.
Well, unless you are such a blind-eyed partisan that any criticism of your religion, no matter how justified, is viewed as heresy. We don't have such blind partisanship here, do we? I mean apart from the crucial topics of vi vs emacs and static vs dynamic typing?
And nuclear being cheaper is not a "non-mainstream view". It is a simple, easily checkable fact.
Still in that case, it's kind of weird to attack a pro-nuclear politician for not replacing deadly coal fast enough without even mentioning that he is against wind as well.
Or to avoid any reference the exact same thing happening in your own country.
Adding more intermittent renewables at this point is useless. Last year we installed significant new wind capacity and output from wind for that year actually dropped.
Although the weather did play a role (which is bad enough by itself!), this is not an anomaly: we have reached a point where we have way more intermittent renewable capacity than demand, so when the sun shines and the wind blows it already needs to be curtailed. Added capacity does not add output here, it just adds to the curtailment.
And when the existing intermittent renewables don't produce, the newly installed capacity also does not produce.
Capacity factors for both wind and PV have dropped, and will continue to drop even faster. And they still need full backup with fossil fuels, because the guaranteed production is either exactly zero or close to zero.
This has not been the case for a while now.
Specifically German source to avoid questions about regional variation, from 2024; only "small rooftop" PV (both with and without batteries) even has an overlap with nuclear, and even then at the low end of the cost range for nuclear:
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
I suspect we're still going to get new nuclear reactors, but for the radioisotopes and not because of any questions about cost or supply diversity or dunkelflaute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity#...
Those system costs rise dramatically with the share of intermittent renewables in a grid, making LCOE almost completely meaningless and downright misleading for such a grid. Full Levelized System Cost of Electricity is a better measure.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
The discrepancy can also be seen in the real world, where despite falling generating costs for intermittent renewables, electricty prices correlated extremely strongly with the share of intermittent renewables in a grid.
The check against the Real World™ is also another item where this Fraunhofer piece of disinformation fails. They claim costs of 13-49 cents for nuclear.
However, in the Real World™, nuclear power plants profitably produce for 3-5 cents in Switzerland (world-renowned for its low, lower, lowest prices!).
So something very obviously does not add up.
When you look at the model more closely, you see exactly what doesn't add up: all their assumptions going into the model are lopsided, to the point of being absurd:
1. For construction costs, they take as the baseline not the average of current construction costs, nor the median either. They take the highest construction costs seen up to that point. As the baseline. And then increase it. This statistical malpractice even without knowing any details. And the details make it even more ridiculous: their baseline is a FOAK build (prototype), the reactor design (EPR) has been discontinued by the manufacturer, because it was too hard to build, and the country (Finland) had to rebuild its nuclear construction know how.
2. For the lifetime of the plant, they assume 40 years. Nuclear reactors in the US, for example, are all being extended to 80 years, which is also the design lifetime of modern reactors. This obviously doubles the Capex per kWh produced.
3. They assume comically low utilization down to only 20% capacity factor. For references, the US nuclear fleet has a capacity factor of over 90%, as did the German fleet. The reasoning they give is that they want nuclear to run only as a backup to the intermittent renewables. Which is ridiculous, because it allows the intermittent renewables to shift the cost for their intermittency onto nuclear.
4. They also assume much higher capital costs than they do for intermittent renewables. Not sure how they justify this, possibly with the fact that the guaranteed subsidies for intermittent renewables make them a low risk.
5. To balance things out, they assume higher utilization rates for wind and solar than have ever been achieved in the Real World™. And those utilization rates are decreasing, not increasing.
Put those components together, and you get around a factor 10. So this "study" makes assumptions that result in nuclear looking around 10x more expensive than it should be. Which, surprise surprise, pretty much matches the discrepancy between what this study shows and the evidence from the real world.
Just for LCOE.
You then have to add the system costs.
Pretty much the entire rest of the industrialized world are getting into nuclear, expanding their nuclear programs or even ditching their nuclear exits (the most recent: Belgium and Taiwan, with Switzerland on the cusp). There is a pledge to triple nuclear power endorsed by essentially all the economic powers in the world, and they are also following through.
Germany will get there in the end, but we have always been more stubborn in insisting on our mistakes. The longer it takes, the more expensive it will be.