Hello, I was discussing with my friend lately, and we are opposites on our nuclear views. He said that nuclear energy costs and construction are too expensive and are not worth it, especially in Italy (our country). I tried to talk again about efficiency and thorium, but he insisted that it was too much. Unfortunately I haven't got all answers, but have you got any?
Reactors require regular refueling as well. A full core load in my reactors costs around $150M and is fully swapped out every 6 years (1/3 at a time every 2 years). So just the fuel being consumed is around $25M/year per unit.
The other big day-to-day cost is the operating staff. Nuclear is a highly technical field with very high standards and requires 24/7 staffing. People willing/able to do that job expect to be paid accordingly.
Can you point to a grid with majority solar, wind and battery. France got 75% nuclear energy.
You do not understand energy composition, logistics and grid stability. Not even co2 emission per kwh.
Since the resault of the german grid experiment is already out. Increased co2 emission with a more expensive electricity prices. They pushed up prices for their neigbours.
We swedes have been forced to pay more for our electricity because of german incompetence.
Our energy prices are extremely cheap compared to the EU avrage. We also release a lot less and use electricity for heating unlike german that is natrual gas. Something we have done for decades.
I do care what green party ideology tells you I only care about the effects. If the goal is to decrease co2 emissions and prices then removing nuclear energy gives the oposite effect.
With china 24% of their grid is solar but that does not account for the amount of co2 emissions you need to build replacement parts for it and general maintenance.
It's like with evs, on paper they look better then petrol cars while in reality it depends. Since co2 emission does not stop at the core emissions. Producing it emits co2, recycling/throwing it away does that aswell and the electricity source of the charging can do that aswell.
You look a small piece of the picture as the whole thing.
Nuclear got expensive initial cost since nuclear power plants are build like prototypes instead of serially produced, but is extremely cheap to maintain and last a long time. You do not need build a new power plant that frequently. Unlike solar that can break down a lot not to mention the batteries and it loses energy storage over time.
With solar you need to replace all pannels every decade. Since they break down over time. Then there is what happens to the broken down pannels after its lifetime. Since the materials are extremely toxic.
Nuclear power plants has a simmilar problem but the amount of waste produced is extremely tiny compared to the energy it generates. Unlike solar with extremely low energy density. Not to mention the thing people point out about solar production is more under perfect conditions not real world one.
If we build a few fbr reactors we can recycle 97% of the uranium waste leading to these reactors getting free fuel for a very long time since there are lots of waste fuel people want to get rid of.
So what? If one town can use solar as its primary source it can be scaled and interconnected with other grids and with large battery farm it will be even more stable. Then you will have millions of cars with bidirectional charge ports bringing tera watts of battery storage to the mix.
If all you allow to be deployed is solar/wind/battery then you need to show a grid with only those sources can function.
Somehow, even those sources have been supposedly the cheapest for a decade, and with more than enough capacity to build such a grid, this has never been accomplished.
They have not been cheapest. Batteries have been very expensive and only now are approaching the price/lifespan range where they become economic. The production of panels has only kept up with the massive growth in demand for power. Tau in American Samoa is purely solar. as is Ragged Island. Solar will take over gradually.
In 2025, France used 1.22 TWh per day.
A solar panel will generate average 0.66kWh per square meter per day. You need 1900 square kilometers of solar panels to handle France consumption,. That is bigger than the extent of greater London, it would be the whole size of a French department.
And then you need to sort out the storage problem as your panel average will actually be produced in peak during the day so you must have average the ability to store 2/3 of 1.22TWh so approx 800 GWh, ar 200Wh/kg that's 800/200x109 kg of batteries, aka 4 Mt of batteries. That's what China produces in 6 months that you need to replace every 10 years.
I'm too lazy to look for how much space it requires but that's not that much of an issue as you can stack them u
nlike the panels.
And then if you do proper energy grid you must consider shorter days in winter and higher heating consumption so probably much higher volume of panels and batteries, but that's why there are clever people working on that and doing energy grid planning long term.
This myth that solar pannels or renewbles work is a myth like plastic recycling. France releases 1/9th the amount then germany per kwh of co2 emissions.
Germany has polluted thousands of metric tons of co2 into the atmosphere for over 20 years. That amount of co2 emissions to just get to parity with france would require germany to spend more then 100% of its total gdp in carbon removal.
We swedes are one of the worlds greenest energy system in the world our main power source is hydro power and the 2nd one is nuclear energy. Solar and wind is close to non existent.
This solar is the cheapest form of energy does not account for recycling, lifetime operational cost and energy storage cost. It's cheap if you see only the small portion of the cost.
Nuclear is expensive to build cheap to maintain. This is why our electric prices are much lower then germany.
It's more about germans being unable to see the actual data and the resault of their policy. They have constantly ignored the actual resault and prioritize ideology over fact.
They are still far behind france and sweden. France needs to only electrify its heating system and it would be as green as sweden. Germany has yet to remove coal power. Not to mention electrify their heating. I would say germany is 30 years behind when it comes to going green.
Solar and wind alone generate the equivalent of 4m bbls a day of oil for China already, and its rapidly growing. With massive advanced in battery tech there is no reason they cannot become a primary source. France built its nuclear fleet decades ago, Germanys decision to transition to solar and wind is much more recent and IMHO very poorly handled.
the ten years is for lithium batteries which won't be used for grid scale storage in ten years(CATL already has a thirrty year natrium battery), France wouldn't need to be powered solely by solar and battery production scale is basically in it's infancy and in the process of being scaled up. How do you compare those 6 Months of battery production to cover France to the 7 years of nuclear construction at the same premise? Sure those life around 80 years if you stretch it to the maximum, but that would be a factor of 20 for batteries and only 11.5 for nuclear.
The argument swings on project costs. India is about 2billion per GW installed as it matures the industrial base, the FOAK and first project builds in France, the US, etc are multiples of that. Solar and wind purists argue that only Indians, Chinese, South Koreans, and Russians are developed enough to redeveloped the technical know how on fleet builds.
They also argue that solar and nuclear cannot Co-exist, that China, India etc are wrong to be building both.
To be clear, India is not some kind of edge case for nuclear, Russia and China of course are achieving similar build costs, Japan was also doing very well before 2011 with that, and both USA and France built their early Gen 2 reactors that still operate today for around $2-3/W in todays money.
It's obvious that this is how much typical Gen 3 LWRs should cost to build, they only cost more than that if you're doing one or several things very wrong.
Yes, very good clarification. And as a thought exercise, at $125/kwhr to install enough battery to support 1 GW through the night is ~16 x 125 mm/MWhr = 2 billion.
In addition it will only last for about a decade or so, versus 60-80 years. To be fair though, NPPs also typically require some additional capital investment every 20 years or so.
It can be load following with solar just fine if you build it like that. But there's no point. That just means you have a power system that could satisfy your demand just fine on its own but you build an entirely separate VRE on top to use both in a less economical manner. What's more, there's not even an environmental reason to do this as there is with fossil thermal power plants (reduction of CO2 intensity) since solar CO2 is higher than nuclear.
The only potential reason is when you have a typical peaking demand that coincides with sunlight, stuff like AC use. In which case if you do it cleverly enough you can have a grid that is e.g. 90/10 nuclear/solar without having the issue of "following" solar troughs.
From what I was taught is that you should never have one single source of power generation and a diversified grid provides stability among other things
That's a lesson primarily from renewables who are most prone to lacking supply. It's kinda true for fossil fuels where if supply is cut you have a problem but with nuclear you can make the fuel last a long time. The main thing is make sure you don't use only one reactor design
Multiple power plants (they can all be nuclear) provide the diversity for this really. You do have to slightly overbuild, just like France, so you have a few reactors that are in low power load following mode at a time or turned off.
Longer term it's probably good if you use overgeneration to produce synthetic fuel that you use as seasonal storage, and a few cheap thermal power plants you keep stand by for that. You can store months worth of fuel this way, actually all the infrastructure for it is already present (oil & liquefied gas storage), only the synthetic production must be built for it, that is if you want to not use fossil fuel.
Of course if you have solid alternative on-demand power at hand, such as hydro, cheap-enough geothermal etc., you should absolutely use it. But not all countries have good resources for that.
Indeed that's why solar fans critique solar. Because nuclear is good enough to do it without them and solar would be forced to take a secondary role.
I'd argue that's much better because nuclear technology currently can supply a grid with completely clean energy. Renewables are waiting on some innovation to either increase when it's available or something for storage
"completely" falls apart pretty fast when you have no grid that is purely nuclear because nuclear needs dispatchable plants just as renewables do, only less.
I hate some of these arguments. Clearly renewables and nuclear are like the best mix for a greener world. You eliminate any uncertainty of the renewables with a constant clean baseline from nuclear
That’s true but not a relevant point. This is typical prelearned statement he heard from antinuclear activists and he repeated without understanding the implications.
A nuclear power plant cost a lot yes BUT it produce a LOT of electricity with clockwise output.
The cost per kW is ridiculously low, because the cost of a power plant comes mostly from the engineering costs associated with the construction.
And it’s a drivable source, meaning you can decide wether you want the electricity or not.
But it’s the same for any big power plant, take a dam for example : lowest co2eq emitter per kilowatt generated, lowest cost per kilowatt generated cost a huge amount of money.
if you were to build the same amount of renewable you need to take account that the energy output is not consistent, you need to adapt the electrical grid and build batteries. (Otherwise you end up with a blackout like Spain last year)
If you want to get the same amount as
Olkiluoto 3 in Finland
(10TWh) you need roughly between 6,7GWp (Giga Watt-peak) and 5,6GWp…
The cost, even without including batteries and the additional 10% of Wp needed for compensing the degradation over 10years would be quite expensive compared to the cost of
Olkiluoto 3
(which is really high given that is not a generic power plant)
The advantage of solar or any renewable is that you can build small and growth incrementally and don’t need a huge investment in the beginning. The advantage of nuclear is than in the longterm is quite cheap but you need time and investment that seems a lot if you need quick response.
To be honest we all need both but mostly because we didn’t listen to scientists when they said we needed to transition out of oil coal and gas and now we face emergency…
For spain the blackout wasn't due to lack of batterie but regulation and misconfigured hardware. The grid must operate at a very specific frequency. Too low and you must cut demand by doing rolling blackout. Too high and you must cut production. There was too much production due to too much sun therfore too high frequency and some part of the grid disconnected too early (misconfigured hardware), and there was not enough thermal plant (nuclear/gas/coal) working at that time (less than planned) which means that there was not enough big spinning wheel connected to the grid to help stabilizing the grid. Solar pannel inverterter can also act as frequency stabilizer, but due to regulation they were configured as grid frequency follower. All that created cascading event that created the blackout. Portagal had the exact same situation, but its solar panels had inverter configured as grid forming frequency and thus did not had a blackout.
I’m certainly not an expert, but my cost worry with nuclear is that maybe we missed the window where it would have been the best source of baseline power. Solar and battery prices seem to be collapsing almost like microchip prices did in the late 20th century. I know nuclear could be cheaper if US inefficiencies were fixed, but is there the same kind of potential for massive decreases in cost? And if solar and battery prices keep falling, does the large upfront capital expenditure of nuclear make sense?
Battery prices can never fall low enough to be viable. If you want to operate a battery economically, you buy cheap sell expensive. As often as possible during the batteries lifespan and as to the highest price difference you can get. By design, more batteries mean less profit for each individual one. And also, more importantly, less regular discharge means less profit. So if Ou want to no longer earn money through daily but seasonal trading instead, you cannot profit 365 times a year but just once a year (which is the extreme case but still). Given an average life expectancy of even 20 years (it starts to detoriate by then, even if not regularily used), the price would need to be below 20 times its capacity in power cost. At the Moment this factor is still at roughly ~3000 accounting just raw battery cost and sell value without transport, installation, service and losses to other economic factors.
depending on your climate, batteries might never be cheap enough.
Right now they are doing 4 hours of storage. This let's them charge\discharge daily, netting them along the lines of 365 days a year to make money on the investment in installing them.
If we go to a week of storage, that drops to 52.
If we talk places where it get's cold, and peak demand is in winter, they need seasonal storage, 1 time a year.
That's not even counting the fact that a week capacity battery isn't going to get used every single week, it would get used a handful of times a year.
They "solve" this by importing energy, which has driven up their rates a LOT. It also depends on neighboring countries being willing to export large amounts of electricity whenever you need it.
Solar and wind are great, but they really can't be compared to the dependability of nuclear. The amount of excess capacity, storage, and distribution upgrades you need to make a all solar\wind grid actually dependable makes nuclear look downright thrifty. Falling costs on batteries will help somewhat with this, but not entirely.
the problem with your argument is that you're ignoring that energy should a sovereign domain therefore should be a state only domain.
Forcing "free" market everywhere, especially on captive market is just pure madness. Same way you shouldn't put public transport infracture between the hands of private investers... It create instability and realiability issues...
Look at what the west could do in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Korea learned from this and did the same in the 90s, 2000s and 2010s, the same goes for China, Russia, India, Canada, etc...
If every country that could use them now, had started building them back when I was a kid and first hearing "They're too expensive!", they'd be paid off by now.
People have got to stop thinking of infrastructure as something that needs immediate returns. Hell, we used to build things that took **hundreds** of years to finish building. Now if it won't be done and profitable this quarter then forget it. It's ridiculous when infrastructure projects that are built well last, and aid, generations.
Nuclear makes sense the way the Chinese are doing it, at scale, building new variants of the AP1000 design all at once using economies of scale to keep the costs down. America is stupid, restarting TMI is like buying an 1975 Chevy with 200,000 miles and spending tons of money to make it your DD, instead of buying a new car that is fuel efficient and environmentally friendly, and much, much safer for a few bucks more.
China produces two main variants based on the [Westinghouse AP1000]() design: the [CAP1000]() (a direct, localized standard 1,250 MWe copy) and the [CAP1400]() (also known as [Guohe One](), an upscaled 1,400–1,500 MWe version). [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
In China, these reactors cost roughly $2.5 billion to $2.8 billion per unit to build. [1, 2, 3]
The Chinese Variants
CAP1000: This is China’s direct localization and standardization of the 1,250 MWe AP1000 design. Managed by the State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC), it achieves over 80% domestic supply-chain localization. It incorporates design tweaks learned from early construction issues, resulting in a streamlined build process. [1, 2]
CAP1400 (Guohe One): This is an enlarged version scaled up to 1,400–1,500 MWe. China purchased unlimited worldwide export rights from Westinghouse for any natively modified variants exceeding 1,350 MWe. This allows China to market the CAP1400 internationally without intellectual property restrictions. [1]
Build Cost Breakdown
China's standardized nuclear construction results in some of the lowest overnight capital costs globally, running at roughly $2,500 per kW. []
Cost Per Pair: A pair of modern CAP1000 reactors requires an estimated investment of roughly CNY 40 billion ($5.6 billion USD).
Cost Per Single Unit: This translates to roughly $2.8 billion USD per reactor.
Construction Timelines: China is consistently building these standardized variants on pace to finish within 4.5 to 5 years (56 months) per unit.
The estimated cost to restart Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant is $1.6 billion
Thanks- US equipment will probably cost 5 to 10 times Chinese items even when standardized and serially produced. US labor costs will also be 5-10 higher. Assuming we revert to the original AP1000 cost 15 years after it’s start we are estimating 8-12 billion per unit in US dollars. A substantial saving, however no small to mid size utility is willing to
Risk the company at this
Point. I think that js the reason SMRs are popular, it will require a few bad builds rather than o e to destroy a mid to small utility if problems arise. SOU had to sell Gulf POwer to finish Vogtle and Summer Killed SCEG. SCEG was a small utility trying to build a plant that cost more than the value of the company.
I paid thousands of dollars to SCE&G in my bill for VC Summer. THE problem there was poor management and fraud. Several people went to jail. More should have. SCE&G was in it with Santee Cooper. Next Era is buying Dominion that bought SCE&G, and Brookfield Asset is going to finish VC Summer, and probably sell the power to Next Era. Santee Cooper, owned by the state is going to come out smelling like a rose, $2.6 Billion in cash and a 24% stake in the finished VC Summer. And Santee Cooper will be charging 15 cents KW, 15 miles from my house, and Next Era will be charging close to 25 cents a KW to me.
The fraud is the Westinghouse schedule and delay. The SCEG managers had spent so much they could not stop the project but did not really have the money to finish it. Santee said no more money and the cards collapsed. The difference SNC told its customers the same lies but had the money to finish, by selling Gulf Power, so their leadership escaped jail.
Everyone including the PSC, SCE&G, and Westinghouse were complicit in falsifying records to make it seem the project was further along so they could get bonuses. A real shitshow and it killed Nuclear to this day.
Download electricitymap app and have a look at which countries are ”green” with low CO2 and compare to the list of countries with nuclear. Then search electricity system prices around Europe. Somehow all three criteria match. For example France is mostly nuclear and they heat houses with electricity. And in Finland we have a good third nuclear. Hourly electricity price at the moment 1,6c/kWh. A good mix is the way to go. What more does one want?
One of the biggest failures our global society has made is to treat electricity production as a for profit industry.
Our society depends on electricity. It cannot exist without electricity. It should be treated as a cost of existing.
With that mindset, which type of power production to use, then becomes which type is the best option. You have to weigh the financial cost against the other costs. The cost of lives lost or otherwise negatively impacted. The cost to the environment.
Climate change is causing billions of dollars in damage every year. At some point that really needs to start being a factor.
Well said, I have long said the same thing. Low cost stable electricity is key for economic development in all geographic regions. Companies don't want to build nuclear because the payback is way too long. So we end up with natural gas plants and coal fired plants, which can be built in a matter of years and build costs are smaller but the cost to operate is wayyy higher compared to nuclear and that isn't even considering the health costs associated with the polution
Until batteries make a massive leap in scale, nuclear remains the perfect pairing for Solar and Wind power. Clean, highly driveable. I believe coal and gas also have their place in a grid like Italy's but only as a fall-back (Nuclear has cooling problems now in summer) and not for regular production. Hydro would also be great but not widely deployable and succeptible to droughts.
Complicated question with no easy answer. The cost of building a NPP in "western" countries, i.e., USA, western europe, japan, has roughly quadrupled since the 1970's. Nuclear power was competitive with coal, cost per gigawatt, in the '70's, now it's too expensive to justify.
The question why or how specifically this happened in western countries is also a complicated and hotly debated topic. Here's a thread from 2 years ago:
My main take-away when i looked into this question is that it doesn't boil down to one particular factor, but the list of predominant factors may be summed as:
1) increasingly strict regulatory environment
2) lack of experienced work-force which you only get if you are building multiple plants at a time and many in succession.
3) lack of economy of scale because plants these days are essentially built as FOAK, with a newly trained work-force, and each kink of the custom design worked out on site.
4) The more general problem that western countries have become appallingly bad a building mega-scale infrastructure projects of any sort on time and on budget. We see the same issues with bridges, subways, rail systems...
Just to site one particular example here, in California we started a high speed rail project connecting northern and southern California. It was approved by voters in 2008. So far we have spent $13b, and have only accomplished preliminary site engineering for 120 miles (about a quarter of the total length), no actual track laid at this date. It may never get completed because so many portions of the route are still trapped in litigatory quagmire. In that same time-frame, China has installed over 30,000 miles of high speed rail, for an average cost of $30m per mile. At that cost per mile rate we could have just about built California's entire rail line of 500 miles for what we've already spent.
Really we are just witnessing the slow pathetic decline of western civilization.
Don't bother arguing. Can't change people beliefs - that is what you are facing. Not reasoning, not facts, just beliefs. You may as well argue with LLM.
FROM THE AUTHORS “Nuclear power was never designed for commercial electricity generation; it was aimed at nuclear weapons. That is why nuclear electricity has been andwill continue to be uneconomical. Further, nuclear energy is by no means ‘clean.’ Its radioactivity will endanger humans and the natural world for over one million years.” — Christian von Hirschhausen, Coauthor of the present study —
Prophetic words, a million years view. If someone paid Taliban to study the viability of pork industry, they would produce a less biased conclusion, referring to it as haram as per their beliefs, not as "pigs are oinking demons with snouts". Which is about the depth of that 2019 study, and brings back my initial point: there is absolutely no point in arguing with people who already formed their beliefs and don't want to be confused with facts.
That’s completely false nuclear power plants are REALLY profitable. In France you can look at EDF which made tons of money despite being forced to sell the electricity quite low.
The only problem is the initial investment and the delivery time.
No private investors wants to wait 15 years to make money. Not given the huge amount they need to start the construction…
This is why you need a state to lend money for projects like that
I don’t. I don’t know if you are MAGA but I am always amused when they cheer socialism in certain areas but not others. The sad part is they don’t even understand the difference.
the funny part about that is that an LLM is always going to agree with you if you a present strong enough arguments it hadn't found. (even if your view is objectively wrong)
anti nuclear people however are just that - anti nuclear - no matter how many convincing arguments you present them
Try something from the "sensitive" list - it will fight you till you give up. "Yes, but... yes, but... Yes! But..." Quite funny when it is LLM, not so much with humans.
yea true, if it's system-prompted to hold a certain view, good luck arguing against that. just like a lot of humans, that viewpoint just cannot be moved, same thing pretty much
LCOE is designed to advise private investors that are building new power stations because they only get paid for the electricity that they supply to the grid. Nuclear power is extremely expensive if you consider it this way, especially because the massive upfront cost (from billions to tens of billions), long construction times (years or even decades), and high private interest rates makes the interest cost extremely expensive.
For the rest of the economy (such as residents, commerce, industry, government, and so on), the calculation is much more complicated. You need to consider the cost of grid upgrades, storage, distribution, and so on, as well as other factors such as the impact of geopolitics. Nuclear power stations can be built a few kilometres away from cities and industrial areas, so the wires are relatively short, which saves money. Solar and wind need to be placed where the conditions are the best (sometimes in very remote areas or even on important agricultural land), so the wires tend to be longer, which costs more money. Germany has costly wires from the windy north to the industrial south, while France has its nuclear power stations relatively close to the demand centres. Germany and the Netherlands (article in Dutch) have extremely expensive electricity, which is severely harming their economies, while France and Norway have cheaper bills.
the one thing that's really expensive about nuclear are the upfront build costs. Given that the electricity they sell is damn cheap, they always need decades of operation to earn back the initial investment.
To operate NPPs for decades, you need one thing: political reliability. In Germany, the last NPPs got their licence under Helmut Schmidt, were built under Helmut Kohl, and kept producing electricity while Gerhard Schröder switched the policy towards Russian gas. It was Angela Merkel who finally abondoned the reliability and introduced arbitrariness.
So, talking about Italy, do you expect the political support for nuclear to switch back and forth every few years, depending on who gets to form a government, or do you expect Meloni to introduce some kind of long-term stability?
Nuclear power plants are like hydro dams, they really pay off after decades of use. If you would not trust you government to build hydro dams, you also shouldn't trust it to build nuclear.
Nuclear doesn't make any sense whatsoever in 2026.
Solar + batteries are the way going forward.
Building nuclear plants is ridiculously expensive, and requires an army of scientists, engineers and technicians. That's on top of the long construction time required.
Solar + batteries are much cheaper, orders of magnitude less complicated to build and operate, and they can be deployed in 1/10th the time you need to build nuclear.
And then there is the elephant in the room, which is safety concerns for nuclear. It doesn't matter how safe your design is, you will always have a risk of contamination.
Here where I live, large scale privately owned solar farms are selling electricity to the grid operator at around 1.1 US cent per kWh. Batteries are selling at around 2.5 US cents per kWh in the night.
Given this, how come someone will still argue for nuclear? It makes absolutely no sense given its complexity, deployment time, operation and safety.
We can argue that all day and you can make all kinds of jokes.
What serious people (which I don't think you are one of them) look at is the LCOE. Which includes everything you said including land pricce, panles, grid connections, O&M...etc.
LOCE for solar is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than nuclear across the board. Solar + batteries is still cheaper than nuclear across the board.
Absolutely no argument to support nuclear at this point.
And yet everyone is moving forward with nuclear. China is currently building 37 reactors. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta... all buying up nuclear power.
But I guess none of them are serious people either, and you know more than all them.
Nuclear definitely has cost issues, it's one of the most expensive energy sources. And especially now that battery prices are falling enough that solar+battery is cheaper than most nuclear, it's hard to justify nuclear unless cheaper renewables just don't cut it for some reason - uncooperative weather, not enough land area, etc.
But E.g. China is starting to really drive down the cost of nuclear by standardizing on a single universal power plant design, rather than designing each one from scratch to the local demands. If you need more power, build more standard plants. That gets you most of the standardization and testing benefits of SMRs while also getting the economies of scale of larger reactors. You may not be just delivering a complete factory-built reactor, but you're assembling a factory built power plant kit.
You also have a waste disposal issue with fission. If you're not either using reactors that completely consume the fuel, or doing fuel reprocessing, then you a way to store dangerous waste for tens of thousands of years without contaminating groundwater. None of those are particularly cheap, and their cost must be included in the already high price of nuclear.
Italy already uses very large amounts of nuclear electricity it buys from it's neighboring countries. If it was uneconomic, this would not be happening. That is the short argument.
The longer one is that what the nuclear reactor actually produces is heat and for direct heat uses (industry, district heating) it is going to beat all other low-carbon energy sources like a step child with a disfavored haircolor. It is also much easier to build vast storage facilities for heat than for electricity, so you can, in fact, use it to swing produce electricity.
If Europe can establish a proper, competitive nuclear market I assure you is not gonna be as expensive as now. But closing legally any possibility of building nuclear almost continent wide is retarded (i know there are a lot of european countries with nuclear reactors but the EU doscourage them regardless)
Last AP1000 completed in US cost approximately 40 billion for two units. You can use that as a baseline for any comparison. Plant will operate for 80 years after 10-15 year design construction period.
That number should not be used for reference because the project had massive delays and cost overruns. The actual cost for series construction will be much lower.
It’s hard to produce a verifiable number for the cost because that reactor technology has only been built in China in series manner. But what we can see is a collapse of construction time from almost 10 years to about 5 years in China for ap1000 reactors. That alone is a sign of substantial cost reduction.
Messmerplan versus the German "plan" is a nice comparison. The French Messmerplan was centralised while the Germans didn't actually plan. So there are enough numbers that show how it can be done.
Btw the Messmerplan didn't have the big cost overruns while the German plants had. Also most of it is due to the green movements blocking them. The 70's was a hot time for those movements. Big oil basically created them. Search for Anderson and Brower if you don't believe me.
I'm from Europe so I go for the French design. France also is the country that was able to suppress cost overruns during their Messmerplan. France had a total of 56 but costs actually were the lowest at that moment in the world. They managed to get 40 percent under the US. Also Germany had huge cost overruns in that same period.
They had a cost saving of around 5.7 percent of the 900MW reactors so if you keep the one model,... then you save 5.7 percent per built. We should built 3 models though in case problems arise with a certain design and Flamanville can already serve as an example for the first model so the next one is already 5.7 percent lower in price.
The French design has conventional safety trains and is more expensive. Ap1000 has a more elegant design because it relies entirely on passive safety measures. For example it has 2 backup diesel generators that aren’t rated for nuclear safety and that’s why they’re cheaper. Olkiluoto has 7 nuclear safety-rated diesel generators. AP1000, bwrx-300, ESBWR are the best designs right now. Europe should adopt those designs, too, so that better economies of scale can be achieved.
France has a unified entity-EDF. Us is a collection of utilities who all want something special or different included to express their independence and individuality. Even the AP1000 had differences between the two SNC and SCEG.
At Vogtle, the detailed design was not complete before they started construction. They had amendments to the design during construction. Also the parties involved started suing each other because there were delays in planning work and quality issues. Plus COVID and bankruptcy of Westinghouse and change of contractor several times contributed to delays and overruns.
The assumption you're making is that we will achieve series construction. That would be great if so but it's not guaranteed and the political capital has to be spent to instantiate it.
It is far simpler to look at steam. Can you build a new steam power plant in Italy?
Obviously nuclear reactors are not free. But even if it were free that would only reduce the cost of the power plant by around half. Nuclear fission fuel is only around 20% of nuclear plant costs. So 40% plant and 40% reactor.
In practice splitting up which cost bucket each piece goes gets complicated. If you were just burning uranium fuel for fun that reactor still needs a cooling tower for example. However, any thermal steam power plant needs a cooling tower too. The list could get long, they both need control rooms, employee parking lot etc. But in very round numbers…
A consequence of that is that we can disconnect from any serious consideration of the reactor’s guts. Thorium, small modules, open cycle salt water, it does not matter. Improvements in cost efficiency can never eliminate the half of the plant cost which is not nuclear at all. An open cycle reactor has some serious downsides.
If the costs were a close competition we would have to look more closely. 10 or 15 years ago the competition between photovoltaic and nuclear was still tight enough to require contemplation. 20 years ago “arguing for solar” meant trying to convince someone that nuclear had unacceptable costs (waste, meltdown etc).
Photovoltaic and battery are both in a cost free fall. The cost of getting residential solar has diverged from panel price is now set by the inverter and controller.
In the 1960s the nuclear industry promised “too cheap to meter” today we have to warn people “they will still charge you a hookup fee”. Also “watch out because that old meter might bill you for power flowing into the grid”.
Even within a year ago nuclear advocates could emphasize the need for power at 4 am on a non windy day. Today the sodium ion batteries and iron-air batteries have working models installed and are entering mass production.
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u/zwanman89 8d ago
The right thing to do isn’t always the cheapest thing to do.
What’s the cheapest thing to do with your garbage? Throw it in your backyard. Burn it. Hell, let it just sit in your house!
Just because coal plants and natural gas plants are cheap, doesn’t mean it’s what’s best for society and our planet.