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Your comment above was not entirely wrong. The majority of nuclear energy's costs are overhead costs of plant construction. If a plant is not operated for its i

Your comment above was not entirely wrong. The majority of nuclear energy's costs are overhead costs of plant construction. If a plant is not operated for its intended service life, $/MWH will skyrocket. Opposition to nuclear power (which existed prior to Three Mile Island, and increased thereafter) caused plants to be closed prematurely. This drove up the effective cost of nuclear energy, fueling the push for more closures on the basis of higher costs, and so on. Curiously, these sorts of high nuclear costs are not experienced by every country. France's electricity (70-80% nuclear) is a fraction of the cost of Germany's electricity production, while simultaneously emitting less carbon. Countries like South Korea, and Japan (until they cancelled nuclear plants following the tsunami) had cost effective nuclear industries. Cost overruns happened, but not as large as compared to the US. The main explanations for this that I have encountered is that US nuclear plants have tended to be one-off projects, whereas other countries implemented serialized production of a handful of designs. Building 10 instances of the same plant is easier than building 10 different plants.

pfdietz 7y ago
Germany decided, as an act of global charity, to buy renewables when they were much more expensive (they were the top global market for PV ten years ago, when PV was far more expensive than it is now), to drive them down their learning curves. This was spectacularly successful, but they are still paying for that. It says nothing about what someone else would have to pay NOW to install the same renewable capacity. At the same time, France has tried to get its nuclear industry going again with new reactors, to disastrous result. So if you want to build energy infrastructure in 1980, sure, go ahead and choose nuclear over renewables. If you want to do it now, that choice would be crazy.
- manfredo 7y ago
  It was not spectacularly successful. Germany continues to pollute more than France, with roughly 65% of its electricity generation coming from fossil fuels [1]. In France, nuclear power generates 72% of electricity and fossil fuels account for 9% [2]. And yet, Germans pay twice the rate of France for electricity. It is the worst of both worlds: higher costs and higher carbon emissions. > So if you want to build energy infrastructure in 1980, sure, go ahead and choose nuclear over renewables. If you want to do it now, that choice would be crazy. Did technology magically get worse from 1980? Did the French somehow forget how to build power plants? Nuclear energy projects were cheap during the 1980s because France built a large number of a handful of plant designs. Modern plants are usually one-off projects with a single digit number of plants built of a given design. Building a dozen of the same reactors, turbines, etc. is much cheaper than building one. Political opposition has meant that only small allocations of funds have been dedicated towards nuclear power, so serialized production has not been done recently. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    It was spectacularly successful in driving down the cost of PV. > Did technology magically get worse from 1980? Nothing magic about what happened. Did you expect the relative rankings of technologies to remain fixed and unchanging across the decades? Nuclear is now a clear loser technology, far more expensive than renewables. Why would anyone want to invest now in the loser technology? What weird psychological phenomenon is driving this fixation?
    - manfredo 7y ago
      The only measures in which intermittent sources beat nuclear is nameplate capacity. Net generation is a fraction of that for intermittent sources. The capacity factor (as in, what percentage of it's nameplate capacity is actually generates in real world use cases) of intermittent sources is low,1/4 and 1/3 for solar and wind. For nuclear it's over 90% [1]. People keep saying that intermittent sources are winners and that nuclear is a losing technology. Real world experience says otherwise. The only way intermittent sources are feasible is with cheap high capacity energy storage, which has never been built. In fact, Germany has had to build more fossil fuel plants following the closure of nuclear facilities. If we want to replace all electricity generation with carbon free sources nuclear is the only known way to do that (besides geography-dependent sources like hydroelectricity and geothermal power). If there's some psychological fixation at hand here, it's the aversion to nuclear power and draw to intermittent sources despite the unsolved fundamental limitations of the latter. 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity
      - pfdietz 7y ago
        Not sure what you mean by "nameplate capacity there", but renewables beat nuclear in at least three ways: The first is Levelized Cost of Energy (total cost, divided by total energy generated.) For solar and wind this is current 3-4x better than new nuclear construction. This is an enormous difference. The second is time to market. Renewables can be brought online much faster than a nuclear plant. This (along with staged introduction) allows renewables to track actual demand rather than needing to be able to predict future demand. Failure to do that was the cause of much utility pain in the first nuclear era, including the bankruptcy of the WPPSS ("Whoops"). Demand for electricity suddenly stopped growing. The same dynamic occurred more recently as the "nuclear renaissance" collided with suddenly cheap natural gas. The final metric by which renewables are destroying nuclear is rate of improvement. Renewables have shown strong and consistent experience effects. Solar improves in cost by ~20% for each doubling of cumulative installed capacity. Nuclear, on the other hand, has not consistently shown any experience effects. This is likely related to the fundamental complexity of large, integrated nuclear systems, vs. the improvement trends seen in design and manufacture of small, highly replicated systems (a phenomenon well known in Silicon Valley).
- nickik 7y ago
  Calling the German policy a success when they burned coal for 30 years while France produced carbon-free power for all this time is really rich. And Germany clear would have the chops to pull of a nuclear build up if that was their focus. Had Germany done so they might now be close to done rather then still decades away from carbon-free energy.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    It was a success at driving down the cost of PV. Do please try to read what I actually wrote.

pfdietz 7y ago

Germany decided, as an act of global charity, to buy renewables when they were much more expensive (they were the top global market for PV ten years ago, when PV was far more expensive than it is now), to drive them down their learning curves. This was spectacularly successful, but they are still paying for that. It says nothing about what someone else would have to pay NOW to install the same renewable capacity. At the same time, France has tried to get its nuclear industry going again with new reactors, to disastrous result. So if you want to build energy infrastructure in 1980, sure, go ahead and choose nuclear over renewables. If you want to do it now, that choice would be crazy.

manfredo 7y ago
It was not spectacularly successful. Germany continues to pollute more than France, with roughly 65% of its electricity generation coming from fossil fuels [1]. In France, nuclear power generates 72% of electricity and fossil fuels account for 9% [2]. And yet, Germans pay twice the rate of France for electricity. It is the worst of both worlds: higher costs and higher carbon emissions. > So if you want to build energy infrastructure in 1980, sure, go ahead and choose nuclear over renewables. If you want to do it now, that choice would be crazy. Did technology magically get worse from 1980? Did the French somehow forget how to build power plants? Nuclear energy projects were cheap during the 1980s because France built a large number of a handful of plant designs. Modern plants are usually one-off projects with a single digit number of plants built of a given design. Building a dozen of the same reactors, turbines, etc. is much cheaper than building one. Political opposition has meant that only small allocations of funds have been dedicated towards nuclear power, so serialized production has not been done recently. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
- pfdietz 7y ago
  It was spectacularly successful in driving down the cost of PV. > Did technology magically get worse from 1980? Nothing magic about what happened. Did you expect the relative rankings of technologies to remain fixed and unchanging across the decades? Nuclear is now a clear loser technology, far more expensive than renewables. Why would anyone want to invest now in the loser technology? What weird psychological phenomenon is driving this fixation?
  - manfredo 7y ago
    The only measures in which intermittent sources beat nuclear is nameplate capacity. Net generation is a fraction of that for intermittent sources. The capacity factor (as in, what percentage of it's nameplate capacity is actually generates in real world use cases) of intermittent sources is low,1/4 and 1/3 for solar and wind. For nuclear it's over 90% [1]. People keep saying that intermittent sources are winners and that nuclear is a losing technology. Real world experience says otherwise. The only way intermittent sources are feasible is with cheap high capacity energy storage, which has never been built. In fact, Germany has had to build more fossil fuel plants following the closure of nuclear facilities. If we want to replace all electricity generation with carbon free sources nuclear is the only known way to do that (besides geography-dependent sources like hydroelectricity and geothermal power). If there's some psychological fixation at hand here, it's the aversion to nuclear power and draw to intermittent sources despite the unsolved fundamental limitations of the latter. 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      Not sure what you mean by "nameplate capacity there", but renewables beat nuclear in at least three ways: The first is Levelized Cost of Energy (total cost, divided by total energy generated.) For solar and wind this is current 3-4x better than new nuclear construction. This is an enormous difference. The second is time to market. Renewables can be brought online much faster than a nuclear plant. This (along with staged introduction) allows renewables to track actual demand rather than needing to be able to predict future demand. Failure to do that was the cause of much utility pain in the first nuclear era, including the bankruptcy of the WPPSS ("Whoops"). Demand for electricity suddenly stopped growing. The same dynamic occurred more recently as the "nuclear renaissance" collided with suddenly cheap natural gas. The final metric by which renewables are destroying nuclear is rate of improvement. Renewables have shown strong and consistent experience effects. Solar improves in cost by ~20% for each doubling of cumulative installed capacity. Nuclear, on the other hand, has not consistently shown any experience effects. This is likely related to the fundamental complexity of large, integrated nuclear systems, vs. the improvement trends seen in design and manufacture of small, highly replicated systems (a phenomenon well known in Silicon Valley).
nickik 7y ago
Calling the German policy a success when they burned coal for 30 years while France produced carbon-free power for all this time is really rich. And Germany clear would have the chops to pull of a nuclear build up if that was their focus. Had Germany done so they might now be close to done rather then still decades away from carbon-free energy.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  It was a success at driving down the cost of PV. Do please try to read what I actually wrote.