Profitable power or just power?
If the former: it might never happen.
If the former: it might never happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Lowest LCOE by far is "nuclear LTO (Long Term Operation)".
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
Yes, the plants are big and expensive, but once built, they are cheap to run and last pretty much forever.
SMRs lower the up-front cost, the time to build, the risk, and the financing costs, which are the biggest component of the construction costs.
Initially at somewhat higher cost per kWh, but there is plenty of headroom there. And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
1 cent / kWh cost is fantasy land.
That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
It also says: "The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem. Which is especially interesting since the fossil plants will get a heavy hit due to their CO2 footprint.
Because of how hazardous it is, every country treats that as a national issue thus offloading the cost to taxpayers. Besides, I'm only aware of a single country (Finland I believe) who is far along on an actual permanent storage location. The US for example still doesn't have one, until that exists the real cost simply isn't known.
> And the various nuclear startups have cost projections that range from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent / kWh.
Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something. I'm sure SMRs will soon be reality and we can see how much of it is actually true. Until then, take everything you read with a grain of salt.
Please identify the cherry picking.
> The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
Absolutely! When you consider full system costs, nuclear gets much, much better.
With fossils, you have the minor externalities of climate change and other emissions, which are not taken into account.
With intermittent renewables, you have the costs of their intermittency. Those system costs tend to rise with penetration, and dwarf the LCOE.
For details in a model, see:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
And this also plays out in real life: electricity prices are highest in countries with high intermittent renewables penetration. The correlation is quite strong. And the inverse correlation, from high penetration to low electricity costs simply does not exist. There are no countries (or states) with high penetration of intermittent renewables and low electricity prices.
> So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem.
The opposite is true. Nuclear is actually the only power source that has to account for its waste already in the LCOE cost. And it also turns out that the waste is one of the benefits of nuclear, at least compared to other sources of electricity: there is very, very little of it, we know how to store it safely without problems, it actually goes away by itself and it is valuable fuel.
[Costs from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent]
> Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something.
Nope. Those numbers are usually the sorts of things they have to present investors to make their business case. People tend to vet those numbers pretty carefully before investing millions or billions of dollars. Also, if you lie in those numbers that turns out to be fraud and you can go to jail.
In other news: "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" -- Yogi Berra.
Totally agree that if you get a stable, reliable operating reactor it's very cheap. When people, politics, and the rest get in the way the actual costs drastically increase.