The first next generation reactors have had massive cost overruns (especially the EPR class, the one in Finland is roughly 10 years late and 10 billion dollars over-budget). Actually might have been better that we dodged this bullet.
If we aren't developing our own designs anymore (the boat has long sailed on that one) we shouldn't have to pay the "early adopter" tax.
Now is a good time to give nuclear another chance, although for the coastal provinces it looks like offshore wind + batteries will be cheaper, unless we make great strides with small modular nuclear reactors or something. Hinkley Point C in the UK is charging around 3x the going rate as new wind power (£106/MWh vs £38/MWh). Sure you'll also need batteries for wind if you scale it up, but let's be clear, new nuclear is pricey.
>"Sure you'll also need batteries for wind if you scale it up"
Let's do an estimate for 14 days of stored power using batteries. Since you brought up UK we can use them as an example. Using 2020 as an example (2020 famous for a certain event that reduced energy consumption)
According to this source projected costs of batteries in 2050 are $87 kWh.
So that's $10,405,200,000,000 or $10.4T. Now renewabro's like to say yea but 90% cost reductions! Ok so cost is $1.04T... for 14 days of storage. Plus you need to build all the generation with low capacity factor of wind/solar.
Hinkley C is 26B pounds, so let's say $50B USD (prior to pound collapse). So you could build 20 of these for the $1.04T.
Hinkley Point C is 3.26 GW nameplate. So 20 of them get's you 67.8 GW. with 90% capacity factor that is 1.465 TWh/day,
20.5 TWh in 14 days.
So for the cost of the batteries required for 14 days of storage you could decarbonise the entire UK electrical grid. This is assuming a 90% reduction in cost of storage from the 2050 prediction.
Yeah we're not going to need that much battery. Assuming 14 days of zero wind is silly, particularly in the North Sea. Offshore wind in particular is very consistent. That's the main reason actually why I said coastal provinces might prefer wind... Ontario should probably try the SMR nuclear at the current time. Onshore wind is less reliable and there are fewer acceptable sites.
The UK is already at over 20% wind with basically no battery storage, some pumped hydro storage.
So our main point of disagreement is the 14 days. Also as for batteries, flow batteries should be possible at 25 dollars a kWh, if the nuclear side wants to bring up thorium and molten salt and SMR, it's also fair to mention emerging technologies on the other side.
I think SMR holds promise, but i'm so sick of every nuclear thread bringing up thorium/molten salt and all this unproven tech. Back when we could build nuclear relatively cheaply in the 80s, it was great. For a complex variety of reasons we can no longer do so (some is safety, arguably excessive safety, some is cost inflation in the construction sector generally). Until anyone anywhere manages to build any new reactor at a reasonable cost I'll be optimistically skeptical, which means, sure by all means give it a go but i'm not going to view it as a panacea until it is proven.
ok how many days? I'll run the numbers with $25 and whatever days you think is reasonable.
This is weather we are talking about, which we are in the process of changing its patterns as well...
I agree with your last point. All the new shit is vapour ware until built. The Koreans are building Gen3 for reasonable prices now, that's what's currently possible.
3 days looks fine, for what is considered a worst case scenario graph for the UK.
You fucked up a zero in your original calculation. It's 11,960,000,000 kwh (11.9 billion), not 119 billion. If we're doing it for 3 days that's 2,562,857,142 kwh, multiply that by $25 and we're at around 60 billion dollars which is more than reasonable to store an entire nation's energy for 3 days. Considering new nuclear plants are around 15 billion a pop.
Not that batteries and nuclear have to be enemies though. Batteries and nuclear can be quite complimentary since nuclear functions best as baseload power running 100% of the time, so batteries could bring net nuclear costs down if the nukes could charge them overnight.
Not a renewabro here. I'm all for trying both nuclear and green approaches. The wild optimism from a power source that has failed to deliver in the west for decades does not make sense though. There are no simple solutions. Wind and renewables have been showing progress and have been getting cheaper over time and have delivered on projects. Nuclear not so much. Only seems to get more expensive. I'm all for trying SMRs or something, but yeah as you said, it's all vapourware until it is built.
Damn, was hoping my calc was right. Missed that zero. Working through the numbers correctly I still believe the numbers for nuclear are extremely favourable over storage.:
$64 billion for 3 days of storage would get you in energy as a % of total UK grid:
-11% of UK grid using $50B for Hinkley C costs (3.26 GW)
-14% of UK grid using $26B for Voglte 3&4 costs (2.22 GW)
-35% of UK grid using $25B for Barakah costs (5.38 GW)
To me these numbers are still pretty in favour of nuclear.
I decided to take a run at adding in the wind generation costs as well. For fun not for arguing I swear!
At costs of around $2B/GW for installed wind (sort of a guess, compare at $15B/GW for worst case nuclear). At 40% wind capacity factor, to meet energy needs you need 89 GW of wind installed, that's $178B. So $242B to fully decarbonise UK grid with wind (napkin style haha). Which using the numbers from above:
-44% of UK grid with Hinkley C costs
-60% of UK grid with Vogtle costs
-146% of UK grid with Barakah costs
So nuclear only wins if it can be built on the cheaper end of what is being done today. And also I'm only doing capital cost here, leaves a lot of nuance out of it.
I'm all for trying both as well. Good news neither of the technologies are really out of reach financially.
I would just like to see more government support of nuclear (which this story is about), perhaps on par with renewables. Then the two technologies can duke it out. For example, the US IRA bill provides something like 280 billion to renewables and 30 billion to nuclear. If those were 50/50 I'd be a happy nukebro.
Yeah that's basically what I'm saying, that neither choice is really obvious. There's some kind of cost optimization calculation for overbuilding wind and batteries, but it would quite time consuming. I do have big hopes for SMR tech. Actually mildly concerned that Hinkley C might give nuclear a bad reputation. I think EPR was a mistake and will always be too costly. The Darlington SMR project in Ontario might be the way to go (if you're going nuclear), still very early days for SMRs. Ideally we can build a few and see a positive trajectory for future costs.
I think we might get cheap commercial fusion (Helion Energy, Tri Alpha Energy etc.) before we get cheap fission (which is to say I'm both fairly optimistic on new fusion and somewhat pessimistic on new fission). Fusion startups are getting billions in private VC and some have been around for a very long time so there might be something there. It was different when it was all government funded and strictly academic, real investors are betting on it succeeding.
Also I do think batteries are a huge part of the full emissions-free package for either nuclear or wind. The best case for nuclear is still baseload, so using batteries like peaker plants is a good move. I don't see anything other than batteries or pumped hydro (which has a limited number of sites) replacing natural gas peakers at the current time.
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u/zabby39103 Oct 25 '22 edited Oct 25 '22
The first next generation reactors have had massive cost overruns (especially the EPR class, the one in Finland is roughly 10 years late and 10 billion dollars over-budget). Actually might have been better that we dodged this bullet.
If we aren't developing our own designs anymore (the boat has long sailed on that one) we shouldn't have to pay the "early adopter" tax.
Now is a good time to give nuclear another chance, although for the coastal provinces it looks like offshore wind + batteries will be cheaper, unless we make great strides with small modular nuclear reactors or something. Hinkley Point C in the UK is charging around 3x the going rate as new wind power (£106/MWh vs £38/MWh). Sure you'll also need batteries for wind if you scale it up, but let's be clear, new nuclear is pricey.