33 ms·

German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nuclear, last half as long

318 points by garyclarke27 7y ago

brmgb 7y ago
No one knows the actual cost of French Nuclear. France has yet to dismantle one of its end of life reactor. Everyone know that the provisioned costs don't make sense. It was pointed by the national court of auditors in 2012 and 2014 [1] and again in a report from the national assembly in 2017 [2]. We are not even taking about puny mistakes. Even the actualisation ratio used is garbage. [1] https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/20140527_rapport_cout_production_electricite_nucleaire.pdf https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/201405... [2] http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/documents/notice/14/rap-info/i4428/(index)/depots http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/documents/notice/14/rap-i...
- eqvinox 7y ago
  > No one knows the actual cost of French Nuclear. France has yet to dismantle one of its end of life reactor. This. The sad thing is that the article is probably right about nuclear being preferrable over fossil fuels due to relative priorities of global warming vs. nuclear accidents and garbage disposal. But this cost comparison against renewables is just comically miscalculated.
  - rndgermandude 7y ago
    In 1995 Germany estimated 3 - 5 billion Euro to dismantle one of the old DDR nuclear plants that was decommissioned in 1990 by 2012. The work has not finished yet. About 1000 people work on this project. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      Bad project management does not equate bad technology. German government also messed up Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport, it's 7 years late and massively over budget. In UK it takes us 30 years to build a train line. Those cases don't prove that trains and plains are uneconomical.
      - lispm 7y ago
        That some other projects were late does not mean much for dismantling a nuclear power plant, which is a very different/ unique problem with different actors.
      - adrianN 7y ago
        But they should increase your bayesian estimate of typical project costs for these types of projects. If we had a way of reliably preventing bad project management such things wouldn't happen.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        There's a common feature of massive complex projects the world over - they pretty much always come late and massively over budget. Then as infrastructure mostly end up sticking around for a century or more, sometimes limiting future choices. Rail, tube and tram lines will still be there and graded 100 years later - after track replacements, roads are not dissimilar, reservoirs and storage caverns far longer with a turbine replacement or two. Nuclear on the other hand has a much more limited life in which to absorb those overruns.
      - rndgermandude 7y ago
        What has this to do with bad project management? I do not see anything particularly bad happening in this project, while the BER is indeed a clusterfuck that keeps giving. They are still within their financial budget for this project, will maybe overshoot it by a bit in the end. But that's OK, since such a dismantling had no precedence whatsoever, and it was just an estimate and everybody knew that. They will exceed their time budget by a lot, which is also OK, since again such a dismantling had no precedence whatsoever, it doesn't really matter if this thing takes a decade longer to dismantle, and the reason they take longer than initially estimated is that they had to overcome a ton of problems nobody could have known about before and went about their work carefully and systematically. There were a lot of lessons learned from this, which should help with being faster when dismantling other nuclear plants, but and a bit cheaper (maybe at 2/3rds the cost in the future). With BER on the other hand the date of completion did matter, both politically and economically, and the exploding time and financial budgets were a result of gross incompetence in particular from the politicians that personally kept meddling in the project (it was "prestige" project), complete failure in contractor oversight (which resulted in a ton of defects and also some corruption and embezzlement) and a completely useless project leadership (of mostly political appointments, aside from the politicians themselves, that e.g. resulted in them building that thing without working fire safety).
    - natmaka 7y ago
      Decommissioning costs, often neglected, are a ticking bomb. UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-nuclear-atomic-clean-up-decommissioning https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-... £161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u... £234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision... Long-term waste management is another ticking bomb. Moreover if there is a serious glitch (Chernobyl, Fukushima...), are bets are off. You can obtain an insurance policy for anything, AFAIK even for a space trip, but no insurance company covers such nuke risk.
  - mattrp 7y ago
    Agreed - the lifespan argument is really not portrayed in an accurate way. Besides, France is basically screwed - it hasn’t been able to expand its energy supply beyond population demands (ie it doesn’t and couldn’t support a data center economy). More than likely they will be buying energy rather than generating it in the future — unless of course someone can get the salt reactor commercialized.
    - namdnay 7y ago
      Huh? France exports energy, and it has a massive nuclear and hydroelectric industry. Why on earth would it be more screwed than anywhere else in Europe?
      - mattrp 7y ago
        Today they produce a lot of subsidized power that when everything operating correctly produces an excess of power. However we are not talking about today, we are talking about the future. The average plant age is 30 years. Some plants are so old that frances neighbors accuse it of risking another Fukushima incident.. Germany closed its plants for precisely that reason. It will like cost close to 100b if not more to decommission and untold amounts to replace whatever they take offline. My point is that just for France to unwind it’s aging nuclear it’s going to have to build and spend a lot and that is just to get back to even... much less expand to cover new sources of electricity like electrification of the car fleet. Germany in contrast has been building new transmission lines and production for a decade and still has a decade to go. Norway actually has a true surplus which is expected to be a multiple of france’s entire output, etc etc. My point was that the author was saying nuclear has an expected age of 40-80 years... I call bs on that lifespan and point to France as an example: there’s just no way we see them continue their existing plants for 80 years when their existing plants are already showing signs they may be at risk or not be able to operate much past 35-40...
      - natmaka 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_exports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici... Tally: Germany 1, France 28 There are many causes, one being that during hot seasons many French atomic plants cannot run at full speed (thermal pollution).
- adventured 7y ago
  I'm a very big fan of nuclear and I believe it should be subsidized at high cost as necessary. However, it is clear that even France has extreme inbound cost problems related to its nuclear industry - "French power utility EDF estimates it would cost at least 46 billion euros ($51 billion) to build six of its latest generation EPR nuclear reactors if the government decides to build them" "the Flamanville EPR reactor under construction in northern France has been plagued by cost overruns and a series of technical problems resulting in years of delays. EDF, in which the state has an 84% stake, said in October the project which began in 2006 would cost 1.5 billion euros more than previously expected, raising the total cost to 12.4 billion euros." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-edf-expects-six-new-nuclear-reactors-to-cost-46-billion-euros-le-monde-idUSKBN1XJ074 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-e...
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    What EDF estimates is meaningless without a strike price and decommissioning cost. The UK's National Audit Office puts the price of one EDF reactor around that once you include the excess price paid on every MWh over the 50 year projected life, and the decommissioning (which is supposedly built into that MWh price). It remains to be seen if it will be correct. From Wikipedia: The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion, which "will continue to vary as the outlook for wholesale market prices shifts" That's $64bn on top of £20bn ($25bn) latest build estimate. A build with such poor worker conditions that it has gained a reputation for suicides. $89bn would build a ton of pumped storage to underpin offshore wind at a quarter the MWh price.
    - walshemj 7y ago
      That is assuming you have the suitable terrain and don't have a problem with forcibly moving the inhabitants - its not the 50/60's the locals might not just pack up and move.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
- agumonkey 7y ago
  Jean Marc Jancovici quoted 10-15% of the total cost in an interview last week.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    A quote is of no value. Actual costs and time spent must be determined by dismantling a reactor successfully.
    - dmix 7y ago
      Quotes don't matter when it doesn't help the argument I'm making on the internet.* Meanwhile projections are used extensively in major engineering projects. The fact error rates exist in probabilities doesn't make them useless.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - angry_octet 7y ago
        The parents point is sound in that estimates only have validity if they are about well understood or frequently undertaken activities. There is no basis for certainty about decommissioning of nuclear; older plants especially have unique problems. There have been enormous cost overruns for any plant that has had an incident, and many plants will have problems only discovered upon disassembly.
        AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        Problems unique to older plants have no relevance to the estimates for newer plants. They're not even relevant to the choice whether to keep existing plants in operation, except insofar as pushing the decommissioning date further into the future lowers its net present cost due to the time value of money.
        angry_octet 7y ago
- littlestymaar 7y ago
  This is true but people tend to forget one thing: decommissioning doesn't necessarily means dismantling. Dismantling is a tough challenge (mainly because of the civil engineering part btw, which becomes difficult to manage when you add the constraints from nuclear: “What do you mean when you say we can't use dynamite? oO”) but it's only a legal obligation not an absolute one. With government support to change the law, EDF could just unload the fuel (price is well known, they do it all the time), and pickle the primary circuit in place (the price is also known, they did it a few times already) and now you have a place where all contamination (which comes from neutronic activation) is trapped inside the structure (Co60 in the rebar of the structure mostly) and the biggest risk is asbestos… (like your nearest decommissionined building in your neighborhood, even houses). This option leaves you with a few ugly buildings in the middle of nowhere, but the cost unbeatable (even way less than decommissioning thousands of wind turbines).
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    Why isn't this just the default choice?
    - littlestymaar 7y ago
      Good question. The dismantling narrative probably comes from a mix between wishful thinking from politicians and bad habits of lying all the time from the nuclear industry… I mean, the nuclear story is even brighter if we can promise we'll clean up after us right?
  - eqvinox 7y ago
    > This option leaves you with a few ugly buildings in the middle of nowhere, but the cost unbeatable (even way less than decommissioning thousands of wind turbines). Aren't you forgetting something? Buildings slowly deteriorate, even if not used. So now you have to maintain the disused reactor, for ... how long exactly? (Amendment: wind, rain, sunlight, rodents, ... idiots with power tools ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident )
- briwang2050 7y ago
  the Decommissioning of the Zion reactors. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1909/ML19092A270.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1909/ML19092A270.pdf About $650 million budget. In 2016, They say it is on schedule and under budget. https://www.energysolutions.com/zion-nuclear-power-plant-decommissioning-project-on-budget-and-ahead-of-schedule-six-years-after-the-project-started/ https://www.energysolutions.com/zion-nuclear-power-plant-dec... They are doing less sorting. They just get a bigger cave and put the entire facility into it. There is room in the large cave for all US nuclear plants.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
  And waste is far from a solved problem. "This is the €25bn deep geological storage facility for France’s high and medium-level radioactive waste... [France] produces enough toxic radioactive waste every year to fill 120 double-decker buses (about 13,000 cubic metres worth, or 2kg a year for every French person)." [0] [0] 2016: "Nuclear waste: keep out for 100,000 years" https://www.ft.com/content/db87c16c-4947-11e6-b387-64ab0a67014c https://www.ft.com/content/db87c16c-4947-11e6-b387-64ab0a670...
  - roenxi 7y ago
    Which is much less waste than solar produces. We barely even try to keep the waste from solar panels segregated from the environment because it is impossible with volumes that high. It is impossible to try to keep it to the same standards as nuclear but the damage is probably about the same. https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-...
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      I missed the part about solar panels and radioactive waste that require containment. End of life PV panels are one of a million waste products that end up in landfills.
      - roenxi 7y ago
        The EOL PV products are just as dangerous as radiation; lead and cadmium poisoning are nasty businesses. If they were held to the same safety standards as nuclear waste it would require containment; the risk of harm is greater (especially after accounting for volume). PV waste isn't held to that silly standard because then it would be impossible to produce solar panels. If nuclear waste were contained using the same standard of acceptable harm as solar panels the cost would be a rounding error.
      - arcticbull 7y ago
        They've got large quantities of Cadmium Telluride and Cadmium Sulfide, the Cadmium portion of which is quite toxic. Not to mention that burning coal releases a ton of radiation into the air also. This isn't whataboutism, far from it, in an ideal world there'd be no waste. But in the real world we have to reduce harm and balance options against each other. Nuclear waste can be quite effectively dropped into long-term geological storage facilities.
- Iv 7y ago
  Plants have been dismantled in the past, not in France though. I think closing Fessenheim is a bad decision, but at least it could shut down this bad argument by showing that costs of decommisioning a nuclear power plants are not 3 years of GDP.
- afterburner 7y ago
  Exactly. The real costs of France's national nuclear program can be hidden inside of the accounting of the entire nation, and fudged beyond belief. It's a point of national pride at this point, they would definitely lie and take to the grave anything that might suggest it's not an overwhelming success. And given how fudged financing can be easy to do and compound into massive errors, it could take a massive team of financial forensic analysts to uncover it.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  Not to mention the cost of permanently evacuating an area when the impossible event of a meltdown manages to happen anyway. There's a reason why countries like to put their reactors near the border, that way part of that area is someone else's problem.
anoncake 7y ago
Does this take into account the risk of making a huge part of the country uninhabitable? Please note that: - The average number of deaths caused by a nuclear each year is neither "risk" (for a country) nor "of making a huge part of the country uninhabitable". - Past accidents may have been caused by human error. Unfortunately we have run out of übermenschen that don't make errors so that doesn't help.
- felixfbecker 7y ago
  The worst part is, we can become as green as you can get in Germany, if our direct neighbor country France has one of their so-low-carbon nuclear plants blow up, we are just as inhabitable, for eternity.
  - plextoria 7y ago
    > if our direct neighbor country France has one of their so-low-carbon nuclear plants blow up, we are just as inhabitable, for eternity Do you have a verifiable source for this? The impact sounds greatly exaggerated to me.
    - felixfbecker 7y ago
      Just look at how habitable Chernobyl still is.
      - yorwba 7y ago
        Yup, it's brimming with wildlife: https://theconversation.com/chernobyl-has-become-a-refuge-for-wildlife-33-years-after-the-nuclear-accident-116303 https://theconversation.com/chernobyl-has-become-a-refuge-fo...
        _ph_ 7y ago
        Most wildlife has not long enough living spans to be affected by radiation as humans are (who have the expectancy to live longer than 70 years). And even those who will be affected by radiation wouldn't know it. Of course, absence of humans is a huge boost for any kind of wild life.
deeviant 7y ago
This just in, the cost of new green energy is more expensive than mostly amortized, entrenched nuclear power that has yet to enter it's least profitable period.
- belorn 7y ago
  That is not what the article claim. The argument is that Germany spend more money for a solution that results in 46% green energy and 56% dirty energy than France that get 92% green energy and 8% dirty energy. If they are correct is up to debate, and one worthy to have considered the political aspect of the claims. It is also important to note that they are defining green energy based on green house emissions. Still, if we are to have any meaningful discussion it is important to discuss the claims they make.
just_steve_h 7y ago
Fascinating that an article with so much detailed information doesn't include a discussion of waste and the costs associated with handling and storing it safely for [checks notes] 10,000 years.
- markdown 7y ago
  It doesn't take up much space so I imagine the cost is just as much as it would cost to dig a very deep hole in the ground in a location unlikely to be exposed even if all record of its location was lost... perhaps under the ocean.
  - droithomme 7y ago
    All of it needs to be processed in a breeder reactor before storage. Processing in a breeder reactor is illegal under US law.
  - loeg 7y ago
    Just dump it in the Marianas Trench. > a crescent-shaped trough in the Earth's crust averaging about 2,550 km long and 69 km wide. It's still better for humans and the environment than burning fossil fuels (and arguably better than solar/wind).
- CptFribble 7y ago
  All the nuclear waste we've ever made in the USA stacks about 3 barrels high on a single football field, about .002 square miles. One of USA's deserts is around 190,000 square miles. I'm sure we can find someplace to store it all.
  - giomasce 7y ago
    If it is so simple, I wonder why the problem takes so much discussion to be solved...
    - grumpydba 7y ago
      Because of the irrational fear of nuclear.
roenxi 7y ago
Without any particular rancour, this sort of thing is why the environmentalists keep experiencing a mysterious and conspiracy-like resistance to their plans. Their plans are ineffective and expensive. France has cheaper, more technically excellent, safer and cleaner energy than Germany for military reasons. That is a massive egg on the face of the German environmentalists. And it turns out the people saying solar was very cheap were not being straightforward; although hopefully the march of research will prove them right in time. My personal belief is that the people complaining about nuclear waste are struggling to tell which of two numbers is bigger - I'm happy to guess that waste from solar panels is more damaging due to the large scale they are produced at. Lead-acid battaries too.
ajross 7y ago
This is comparing the cost of building new power capacity in Germany to the cost of operating existing plants in France! You can't get any more spun than that. That is, renewables are new technology and being built out rapidly. Nuclear capacity is 3-4 decades old and the build-out investment was recouped long ago. France absolutely cannot build new reactors 3x cheaper than Germany can put up equivalent windmills, and to argue that is absolutely laughable. This is a ridiculous article.
- briwang2050 7y ago
  It compared the cost of building the nuclear reactors in France to the cost of building Solar, Wind and biomass in Germany. It also looked at the cost and amount of energy produced from the last five years of construction in Germany. So the newer and cheaper solar and wind. 160 billion euros for 70 TWh per year. France built 400 Terawatt hours per year from 290 billion euros. France has run them for over 30 years. China's more recent nuclear construction was also cited. $150 billion for 300 TWh per year. 80% of the world's new nuclear reactors are being built in China, India, Russia and South Korea. Those are coming in at a price of $2000-3000 per KW. A gigawatt nuclear reactor at $2-3 billion each built in 4-6 years. A gigawatt nuclear reactor can generate 8 Terawatt hours per year. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-a... A fully amortized nuclear power plant generates power at about 2 cents per kwh. http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedFiles/org/info/pdf/EconomicsNP.pdf http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedFiles/org/info/pdf/Econ... Germany, between 2006 and 2017, increased the cost of electricity for households by 50%. (per OECD) http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2019/7299-system-costs.pdf http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2019/7299-system-costs.pdf French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices. France produces one-tenth the carbon pollution from electricity compared to Germany.
  - strainer 7y ago
    If nuclear plants really do generate at about 2 cents per kWh, how come the most established and respected power industry pricing analysis finds that it costs over six times that - between 12 cents and 19 cents per kWh ?[1] Where does the 2 cents figure come from? - A website commissioned explicitly to promote nuclear power industry. Have some discernment, please. [1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
lispm 7y ago
> Nuclear plants can last 40-80+ years French nuclear power plants will need >>$100 billion investments in the near future to keep them running. Many of them will reach their projected life time in the coming 2020 decade. Let's see how France will replace them or keep them running. My bet is that they keep them running, because they have little chance to replace them in the 20-30 decade. For the French government, which owns most of the plants though EDF, the problem to replace them is greater than the perceived security problem. If France would NOW start to plan (plan -> build -> operate) for additional nuclear plants, then it would take at least 15-20 years until a new one is operational. (edit) France may want to decide in the early 20s about six new EPR 2 with 15 years construction time... Thus the current nuclear landscape has to be kept running until the end 30s. > 80 nuclear reactors would now cost €1600 billion euros for Germany. This would still be cheaper than the estimated costs for the solar and wind buildout that is underway. It's difficult to set up the renewable energy landscape in Germany, but it comes with decentralized lower-risk technologies. Stuff a less state-oriented economy can built. Germany by far has not a centralized state controlled economy like France. Thus the German Energiewende is also a way to decentralize energy production and to get away from a state controlled oligopoly for energy production - currently the electricity production is still largely controlled by four large companies which have their own regions. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_großen_Vier_(Energieversorgung) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_großen_Vier_(Energieversor... For several years none of these big four companies has really invested in and supported the Energiewende - because they surely want to keep their monopoly in their region. Which is the opposite of an open market for energy production. For 80 new nuclear power plants there is no space in a relatively densely populated country like Germany with a short coast. The local acceptance in the population of new and large-scale nuclear is around zero. Null. Nothing. Every new nuclear will face much longer delays in court than any wind turbine ever will. Nuclear is a technology that's dead in Germany. If we look at the US, there hasn't been much progress on nuclear power plants either - even though the country is much larger, less dense populated AND has a need for nuclear technology in the military. Nuclear worked better in a centralized France which needs nuclear technology for its military or in more authoritarian countries like China where independent control does not exist. > 80 nuclear reactors would now cost €1600 billion euros for Germany. and would take >4 decades to be rolled out. By then Germany is 90% renewable for electricity production. But with a decentralized modern grid. France is currently struggling to build ONE new nuclear power plant: Flamanville. A technical design of the early 90s. Four times more expensive than projected and going online maybe in 2023 - with a construction start from 2007. Largely state financed and state controlled. http://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-warns-of-added-costs-of-Flamanville-EPR-weld-r http://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-warns-of-added-co...
aussiegreenie 7y ago
What total bullshit. No country would commit to any new nuclear plants unless it is a cover for a weapons program. (UK) Here is a simple test, would any privately-owned utility buy a new nuclear power plant without a government guarantee? No. A nuclear plant if ever finished as half are abandoned takes about 20 yrs to build (eg Flamanville / Olkiluoto) A 1G PV plant with storage with 25% utilisation would be built in a year. With a capital cost of 7%-10% of nuclear or about 1/3 adjusting for utilisation. There are three costs for a powerplant: 1. Capital costs - most are 20%- 30% equity and the rest debt. 2. Fuel costs - How much is the coal, gas or other fuels used to create the power. 3. Operations and Maintenance (O&M) - All thermal plants (solar thermal, nuclear, gas or coal etc) use high-pressure steam. The O&M on steam is about USD 20 per MW-h. So, if you had a solar thermal plant (Ivanpah) the steam O&M is about the same price as total generation from PV. Based on the average of Flamanville, Olkiluoto and Hinkley Point here are some reasonable guesses. Capital Cost: USD 15 per watt (pv with storage USD 0.50) O&M - USD 40 per MW-h (Ops 10 + steam 20 + closure 10) Fuel - USD 10 per MW-h
- mc32 7y ago
  Taiwan, Japan have nuclear power plants and do not have weapons programs.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Japan has a deniable weapons program. They've accumulated a very large stockpile of reactor grade Pu. This would require some effort to turn into adequately efficient weapons, but with modern designs it should be possible.
  - lispm 7y ago
    Japan is said to be a always a few years away from a nuclear weapons program, in case they need it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_program#De_facto_nuclear_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_progra...
  - buzzkillington 7y ago
    Also: Belgium, Spain, Holland, Switzerland, Chehia, Sovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, and others: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Nuclear_power_percentage.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Nuclear_... OP is wrong, and wrong on every sub claim.
greatpatton 7y ago
Strange that the article is not talking about the latest french reactor Flamanville 3. This EPR reactor is already 10 years late and will cost more than 13b€ For 160MW. And this just for construction cost and not for running/dismantling it. Then I wonder what practical exemple would support that after 15 years a solar PV installation has to be rebuilt.
- grumpydba 7y ago
  It's the first of its generation and is quite a failure on many aspects. It's not representative of all the nuclear reactors in France, far from it. Thus it is quite insignificant.
  - maweki 7y ago
    But solar failure rate and cost will never go down?
  - lispm 7y ago
    > It's the first of its generation and is quite a failure on many aspects. It's not representative of all the nuclear reactors in France, far from it. It's the only new one, based on designs of early 90s and earlier. The others are mostly all old and many with completely outdated designs from the 70s. Many wouldn't survive the crash of a larger airbus or boeing aircraft.
    - grumpydba 7y ago
      I don't judge a software on an alpha release.
      - lispm 7y ago
        Alpha release software is not for production.
      - draw_down 7y ago
        It isn’t software
pfdietz 7y ago
Germany pushed PV ten years ago to help drive it down its experience curve. This was spectacularly successful. PV modules are now nearly an order of magnitude cheaper than they were then, and PV is delivering at a fraction of the levelized cost per kWh of new nuclear plants.
- patfla 7y ago
  I think China played a much more important role in driving down PV module costs than Germany. Germany was one source of demand - China has amounted to about all of the supply. Germany has an important coal industry and lobby and remains a large user of coal.
  - lispm 7y ago
    Germany invested a lot very early into technology building for mass production of efficient PV. The cheap mass production in China came later...
    - chess_buster 7y ago
      And our building capacity got destroyed by the government, so china took over. We were on track to be number one producers, but yeah. Same is done to wind now.
    - patfla 7y ago
      Actually if one looks it up (I have many times), as the Chinese industry was developing (meaning a while ago now), a large part of the key cell technology that China used came from a research group at the University of New South Wales in Australia. There's useful research done around the world. I think where German companies felt they might maintain a manufacturing presence was in machinery infrastructure - whether the machines that populate the factory floors that manufacture either cells of modules or machines (say, inverters) or that are used downstream of electrical production in a module. I was last in this space some yrs ago but it's not clear to me just how much of a presence German companies have been able to keep in either. One industry web site is here: https://www.pv-tech.org/ https://www.pv-tech.org/ and if I wanted to ascertain German presence in the industry (including some aspects of research) I might look through this site.
pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
"half as long" better than waiting out half lives for hundreds of years of fallout.
acd 7y ago
But the nuclear waste lasts for thousands of years. Unless we feed the nuclear waste into breeder reactors which can utilize the waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste "High-level waste" Solar panels needs to be designed to be recycled.
barney54 7y ago
This article is an interesting thought exercise and it makes some good points about how expensive Germany’s renewable build out has been. However, these are all sunk costs and don’t matter going forward. What matters is the cost today. Also, the total terawatt hours isn’t nearly as important as keeping the lights on. Nukes are great and renewables are great, but this isn’t a contest to see which generates the most electricity over the course of a year, but rather we need to keeps the lights on by using the sources that make the best sense to do that at lower cost or lower co2 emissions.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  > However, these are all sunk costs and don’t matter going forward. What matters is the cost today. one of the major points from the article is that Germany's renewable build out is not a one time capital cost. according to the article, the German power infrastructure is more expensive and has half the expected lifetime compared to France. unless solar and wind decrease in cost much faster than nuclear, there's no way it ends up being cheaper in the long run for Germany. I'm not knowledgeable enough to say whether the figures quoted in the article are actually correct/complete, but if you accept them, it seems France is getting a lot more bang for its buck.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    The short lifespan of renewables is deliberate and correct. When technology is changing rapidly, optimizing for long lifespan is stupid. The long life of a nuclear reactor is an illusion now, since solar and wind are improving so fast that they would not operate their full 40+ years.
    - lispm 7y ago
      France sits on a lot of nuclear power plants with very old standards. But upgrading them is technically and/or economically impossible.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      Once a new plant is already constructed, shutting it down early would only make sense if the average generation price fell below the operating cost, excluding the construction and decommissioning costs which by that point are already historical costs. Solar panels could be free and not be able to match that price, because they still require land and energy storage and labor to install and maintain, so the nuclear plant would still operate the full 40+ years and have that long to amortize the construction.
thawaway1837 7y ago
Germany basically started the shift to renewable energy. As a result, theirs is probably amongst the most expensive solar/wind build outs ever. Solar and wind energy costs have dropped exponentially since a decade ago, to the point where even if the author is correct about the German costs being 3 times more expensive than the French costs, wind and solar will be cheaper than nuclear today, since their costs have reduced dramatically in the last decade. Utility scale solar, for example, is about 90% cheaper today than it was in 2009 when Germany started building out the bulk of its solar energy infrastructure. In other words, with no other differences, simply the drop in prices of wind and solar means that wind/solar built out today would be about 2-3 times cheaper than France’s nuclear buildout. Of course, other things have indeed changed since France started building out its nuclear infrastructure. Primarily, nuclear’s negative learning curve has kicked in to the point that even after adjusting for inflation, nuclear today is far more expensive than nuclear when France built out the bulk of its nuclear energy. Finally, Germany is not even close to the best candidates for solar and wind energy, whereas France is one of the best candidates for nuclear (by definition, it’s one of 10 or so possible candidates, and any new state is likely to be worse at nuclear than France was).
- unstrafed 7y ago
  Solar and wind require a huge geographic footprint to generate significant energy. Because of this constraint, the cost of wind and solar is almost entirely opportunity cost, not the mere accounting cost of producing an extra panel/turbine. The basic problem is twofold: First, as you keep adding solar/wind capacity, you inevitably get diminishing returns from worse wind/sunshine conditions, so additional installation is less productive. (Think about solar panels in valleys or windmills in low-wind areas.) Second, as wind and solar cannibalize land area to provide energy, the price of that land increases substantially as other uses are displaced. For example, let's say that a country had to displace 40% of its productive arable land in order to install wind & solar. Then the price of its farmland would skyrocket as the country continued to deploy wind & solar. In both cases, solar and wind become much more expensive per deployed panel than simply the cost per panel, which is indeed pretty inexpensive. FWIW, the article attempts to make this point, but it frankly isn't very well written, and so the point is a bit hard to understand. As to your point about countries situated for nuclear vs wind+solar, what do you mean? Do you have any metrics? If I were to guess, wind and solar are extremely sensitive to the geography of a country (including physical and political-economic); I'd guess nuclear is mildly sensitive to political geography. Splitting the atom is not significantly harder in Indonesia or Peru than it is in France. The fact that much of French land area is rural might make nuclear marginally more useful there than in a place like e.g. Germany or the UK, with several major cities dotted across the relatively densely populated landscape. (Based on this inference, I'd imagine that the US, China, Canada and Russia would be the top four countries for nuclear, and Monaco or Luxembourg might be the worst?)
chiefalchemist 7y ago
To be clear, this is cost to build and maintain. But with nuclear there's also the cost of shut down and storage. To say nothing of a nuclear accident somewhere along the line.
typeformer 7y ago
Thank God there are a few smart folks on HN to push back on all the mediocre pro-nucleur weak arguments and propaganda here as of late.
ClumsyPilot 7y ago
Nuclear lives or dies by Project Management and some countries just suck at it. When you need a reactor, it's a controversial big-ticket item/government project. Countries with strong central planning can handle that (France and China). In UK our government can't build a train line without fucking it up[1]. If we had open-source Fusion reactors tomorrow, they would commission it, then cancel it, then privatise it, then find out it was built upside-down. There would be a chain of 15 contractors involved and they would all be suing each-other. Then the taxpayer would cover the cost anyway. We really need SMRs [small modular reactors]. Those would be ~100 ton devices built at a factory, and all quality controls would be done there. They are subject to normal market mechanisms. Nuclear would become more like solar and wind. When you need them, you just buy them, get them delivered and follow instructions to install them. You don't need to create a 20-year old political football for party politics. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/27ab2f5c-a976-11e9-984c-fac8325aaa04 https://www.ft.com/content/27ab2f5c-a976-11e9-984c-fac8325aa...
danielharan 7y ago
"France completed construction on 76% of its current 58 reactors at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330 billion (€290 billion). The complete buildout of the 58 reactors was less €400 billion." Whoever managed to build plants in the past must have retired. "Flamanville is just one of three projects being built in Europe using the next-generation EPR technology. The other two are the Olkiluoto project in Finland, which is more than a decade late, and the UK’s Hinkley Point, which is also delayed and mired in controversy over its high costs." https://www.ft.com/content/877eedae-f987-11e9-a354-36acbbb0d9b6?fbclid=IwAR39vkPiK-TEBF5gmzoTe5gc9r6xXez8uFpbjMPwGCfF5NOCadq4BEsYcpY https://www.ft.com/content/877eedae-f987-11e9-a354-36acbbb0d... Yes, in theory new nuclear plants could be small, modular and safe. In practice, the biggest challenge is political rather than technical. How do you set up institutions that can deliver these projects on time and on budget? In the time these plants have been delayed, solar prices have dropped more than 80%. By the time they're scheduled to be finished, solar should cost 50% less than today. Germany overpaid by a lot, which is the price for building a local industry and being pioneers in a new technology. I hope it works out for them. Either way, humanity will owe them a debt for this.
- reedx8 7y ago
  I so happen to disagree, but well reasoned point. However, please abstain from using theory in that context. What you mean is a conjecture, or hypothesis. Anything substantiated by evidence is in fact a theory. Those that are not are hypotheses. In fact, theories work in practice. That’s why they are theories - quantum theory, germ theory, general and special relativity theory. Etc..
  - therealdrag0 7y ago
    Words have multiple meanings. This use of "theory" exists in all dictionaries and is well used and accepted. Instead of trying to control language, we should encourage appropriate interpretation of context and meaning.
- natmaka 7y ago
  Many (mostly indirect) costs related to nuke plants construction in France were not published and therefore cannot be taken into account. Some were military programs aiming at producing weapon-grade plutonium (=> opaque budgets), part of them necessary to the plants. In fact it was the main political reason behind the French nuclear program, and the inherited opacity remains. Part of this are R&D paid for by the taxpayer under other programs, many not financially linked to nuke plants, mainly done by a huge and very costly monster named CEA (its current yearly budget is 4.7 billion euros). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Alternative_Energies_and_Atomic_Energy_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Alternative_Energies_an...
foxylad 7y ago
One massive differentiator that is often ignored is scalability - as in can it be scaled DOWN? Nuclear has to be done in massive scale, which causes all sorts of problems: project complexity and cost; security; security of supply; transmission costs. Renewables are very attractive in that light.
- x220 7y ago
  Has human electricity consumption scaled down? >Renewables are very attractive in that light Yes, and only in the light. Once the sun goes down and the wind dies down, you'll have to turn off your heaters and turn off your televisions.
  - chess_buster 7y ago
    Yeah, which does not happen on grid scale.
simonCGN 7y ago
What a terrible article. We have a liberalised energy market in Europe. Therefore energy prices in this market are not that different between Germany and France. Also, the writer is missing the costs of disposal of nuclear waste.
hannob 7y ago
There's a major flaw in the argument of this article. They calculate what Germany has payed in the past decades, including the very early phase of solar+wind development. You can of course compare any number of things, whether it makes sense or not. But for the question how to proceed with future energy it's completely irrelevant what solar+wind costed in 2005. We only care what it costs now and in the future. "Solar was super expensive in 2005, so we shouldn't build cheap solar in 2019" is not a useful or logical argument. The key thing about the german renewable subsidies (and a few other countries, but particularly for solar it was mostly germany) is that they brought wind+solar from being overly expensive exotic technologies to cheap mass technologies.
- _0ffh 7y ago
  >They calculate what Germany has payed in the past decades, including the very early phase of solar+wind development Yeah, while also ignoring the untold Billions in subsidies from the early stages of nuclear power. It's rather hypocritical.
  - a2800276 7y ago
    Or the untold gazillions in indirect subsidies from not requiring nuclear power plants to be insured for damages arising from catastrophic incidents...
    - whalebird 7y ago
      The issue is that you won't find an insurance company willing to insure a risk that they can't calculate. There's too little data to find a price here. In the end, the government always bears the cost, because any catastrophic event will likely bankrupt the operator involved. I think it's fair to count these catastrophic costs as subsidies, but they're not "untold gazillions". Estimates for the Fukushima disaster go up to about a trillion[1]. At the other side, the costs for Germany's "Energiewende" will run up over half a trillion[2], with relatively little to show for it[3]. [1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/how-much-does-germanys-energy-transition-cost https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/how-much-does-ger... [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-will-approach-one-trillion-dollars-just-for-nuclear-disaster/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-... [3] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/energiewende-scores-mixed-results-mckinsey-index https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/energiewende-scores-mix...
mncolinlee 7y ago
It's worth noting that Germany has less solar energy potential anywhere in their country than in any single state in the USA, including Alaska. Yet they had more solar deployed in watts than the entire USA for a long time.
- therealdrag0 7y ago
  Ya I was gonna 'complain' about solar being constrained by geography, but then I saw this map https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/solarwa/pages/93/attachments/original/1466049471/NREL-pv-map-us-germany-spain.jpg?1466049471 https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/solarwa/pages/93/attac...
Johnny555 7y ago
Germany’s solar farms will have to be rebuilt every 15-25 years Why is that? Do solar panels really degrade to the point where they are unprofitable to run after 15 - 25 years?
- Wildgoose 7y ago
  Basically, yes. The same is true for anything electro-mechanical. Things wear out. Plus you have to keep the panels clean - a dirty solar panel doesn't generate the same output as a clean one.
- jillesvangurp 7y ago
  No they don't. The reason they get replaced is because of technical obsolescence. Newer panels are just so much better that at some point you replace them to get much better yields. Same with wind. Technical progress has increased the efficiency. Better still, it has vastly decreased the amount of maintenance needed. Modern ceramics vastly reduce the amount of wear and tear that happens due to friction.
- pgeorgi 7y ago
  There are multiple factors at work: There's ongoing maintenance as with everything, and you can probably accumulate its costs into it meaning "you're paying for a new one every 40 years through maintenance alone". Yield is going down over time (solar panels are sold with guarantees like "80% efficiency after 20 years"). And finally, technology is improving: replacing these 2006 solar panels in 2020 not only gives you back the base yield of a 2006 panel, but the base yield of a 2020 panel (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/CellPVeff%28rev191101%29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/CellPVef... for a research level comparison over time. That won't translate directly into industrial use though, but the direction should be evident) So the situation is less that is "has to be rebuilt" but that it's economical to rebuild every 20-ish years (factoring in the maintenance costs: a panel that you replaced due to physical damange 10 years in needn't be scrapped just 10 years later) rather than letting the stuff hang around for arbitrarily long times. With a proper recycling chain that shouldn't be too bad (there's little reason why the silicon can't be purified, and the doting material be refurbished), and ongoing maintenance is a concern with all types of power plant.
paule89 7y ago
What about the costs of a broken solar or wind turbine. Easy replaceable. But calculate the cost of a nuclear fallout...
meor 7y ago
# France (population: 66,89 million) - 76,5% nuclear 8% non hydro renewables 10% hydro 3,7% natural gas 1,9% coal 0,4% oil - CO2 emmisions: 124 milion tones # Germany (population: 82,79 million) - 34,9% renewables (hydro and non hydro) 22,5% lignite 12,9% natural gas 12,9% hard coal 11,8% nuclear 4,2% others 0,8% mineral oil - CO2 emmisions: 725,7 milion tones
tyzerdak 7y ago
The people who chose not to build nuclear plants are either retarded or get money from russian natural gas exporters for doing so shit decisions. Maybe both.
downrightmike 7y ago
Somewhat of a tangent: With the much longer half-lifes of heavier elements, given their decay is longer than human history, would it be the best long term solution to put them in a literal vault made of precious metals like gold or titanium? Burying them in the ground isn't working especially since the early sites were largely just cement or housed in wood supported tunnels and those are already a huge problem we can't deal with.
franzmafka 7y ago
Does this factor for the potential cost of a disaster though, or the environmental costs of uranium mining?

318 points by garyclarke27 7y ago

No one knows the actual cost of French Nuclear. France has yet to dismantle one of its end of life reactor. Everyone know that the provisioned costs don't make sense. It was pointed by the national court of auditors in 2012 and 2014 [1] and again in a report from the national assembly in 2017 [2]. We are not even taking about puny mistakes. Even the actualisation ratio used is garbage. [1] https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/20140527_rapport_cout_production_electricite_nucleaire.pdf https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/201405... [2] http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/documents/notice/14/rap-info/i4428/(index)/depots http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/documents/notice/14/rap-i...

eqvinox 7y ago
> No one knows the actual cost of French Nuclear. France has yet to dismantle one of its end of life reactor. This. The sad thing is that the article is probably right about nuclear being preferrable over fossil fuels due to relative priorities of global warming vs. nuclear accidents and garbage disposal. But this cost comparison against renewables is just comically miscalculated.
- rndgermandude 7y ago
  In 1995 Germany estimated 3 - 5 billion Euro to dismantle one of the old DDR nuclear plants that was decommissioned in 1990 by 2012. The work has not finished yet. About 1000 people work on this project. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    Bad project management does not equate bad technology. German government also messed up Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport, it's 7 years late and massively over budget. In UK it takes us 30 years to build a train line. Those cases don't prove that trains and plains are uneconomical.
    - lispm 7y ago
      That some other projects were late does not mean much for dismantling a nuclear power plant, which is a very different/ unique problem with different actors.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      But they should increase your bayesian estimate of typical project costs for these types of projects. If we had a way of reliably preventing bad project management such things wouldn't happen.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      There's a common feature of massive complex projects the world over - they pretty much always come late and massively over budget. Then as infrastructure mostly end up sticking around for a century or more, sometimes limiting future choices. Rail, tube and tram lines will still be there and graded 100 years later - after track replacements, roads are not dissimilar, reservoirs and storage caverns far longer with a turbine replacement or two. Nuclear on the other hand has a much more limited life in which to absorb those overruns.
    - rndgermandude 7y ago
      What has this to do with bad project management? I do not see anything particularly bad happening in this project, while the BER is indeed a clusterfuck that keeps giving. They are still within their financial budget for this project, will maybe overshoot it by a bit in the end. But that's OK, since such a dismantling had no precedence whatsoever, and it was just an estimate and everybody knew that. They will exceed their time budget by a lot, which is also OK, since again such a dismantling had no precedence whatsoever, it doesn't really matter if this thing takes a decade longer to dismantle, and the reason they take longer than initially estimated is that they had to overcome a ton of problems nobody could have known about before and went about their work carefully and systematically. There were a lot of lessons learned from this, which should help with being faster when dismantling other nuclear plants, but and a bit cheaper (maybe at 2/3rds the cost in the future). With BER on the other hand the date of completion did matter, both politically and economically, and the exploding time and financial budgets were a result of gross incompetence in particular from the politicians that personally kept meddling in the project (it was "prestige" project), complete failure in contractor oversight (which resulted in a ton of defects and also some corruption and embezzlement) and a completely useless project leadership (of mostly political appointments, aside from the politicians themselves, that e.g. resulted in them building that thing without working fire safety).
  - natmaka 7y ago
    Decommissioning costs, often neglected, are a ticking bomb. UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-nuclear-atomic-clean-up-decommissioning https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-... £161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u... £234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision... Long-term waste management is another ticking bomb. Moreover if there is a serious glitch (Chernobyl, Fukushima...), are bets are off. You can obtain an insurance policy for anything, AFAIK even for a space trip, but no insurance company covers such nuke risk.
- mattrp 7y ago
  Agreed - the lifespan argument is really not portrayed in an accurate way. Besides, France is basically screwed - it hasn’t been able to expand its energy supply beyond population demands (ie it doesn’t and couldn’t support a data center economy). More than likely they will be buying energy rather than generating it in the future — unless of course someone can get the salt reactor commercialized.
  - namdnay 7y ago
    Huh? France exports energy, and it has a massive nuclear and hydroelectric industry. Why on earth would it be more screwed than anywhere else in Europe?
    - mattrp 7y ago
      Today they produce a lot of subsidized power that when everything operating correctly produces an excess of power. However we are not talking about today, we are talking about the future. The average plant age is 30 years. Some plants are so old that frances neighbors accuse it of risking another Fukushima incident.. Germany closed its plants for precisely that reason. It will like cost close to 100b if not more to decommission and untold amounts to replace whatever they take offline. My point is that just for France to unwind it’s aging nuclear it’s going to have to build and spend a lot and that is just to get back to even... much less expand to cover new sources of electricity like electrification of the car fleet. Germany in contrast has been building new transmission lines and production for a decade and still has a decade to go. Norway actually has a true surplus which is expected to be a multiple of france’s entire output, etc etc. My point was that the author was saying nuclear has an expected age of 40-80 years... I call bs on that lifespan and point to France as an example: there’s just no way we see them continue their existing plants for 80 years when their existing plants are already showing signs they may be at risk or not be able to operate much past 35-40...
    - natmaka 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_exports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici... Tally: Germany 1, France 28 There are many causes, one being that during hot seasons many French atomic plants cannot run at full speed (thermal pollution).
adventured 7y ago
I'm a very big fan of nuclear and I believe it should be subsidized at high cost as necessary. However, it is clear that even France has extreme inbound cost problems related to its nuclear industry - "French power utility EDF estimates it would cost at least 46 billion euros ($51 billion) to build six of its latest generation EPR nuclear reactors if the government decides to build them" "the Flamanville EPR reactor under construction in northern France has been plagued by cost overruns and a series of technical problems resulting in years of delays. EDF, in which the state has an 84% stake, said in October the project which began in 2006 would cost 1.5 billion euros more than previously expected, raising the total cost to 12.4 billion euros." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-edf-expects-six-new-nuclear-reactors-to-cost-46-billion-euros-le-monde-idUSKBN1XJ074 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-edf-nuclear-epr/frances-e...
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  What EDF estimates is meaningless without a strike price and decommissioning cost. The UK's National Audit Office puts the price of one EDF reactor around that once you include the excess price paid on every MWh over the 50 year projected life, and the decommissioning (which is supposedly built into that MWh price). It remains to be seen if it will be correct. From Wikipedia: The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion, which "will continue to vary as the outlook for wholesale market prices shifts" That's $64bn on top of £20bn ($25bn) latest build estimate. A build with such poor worker conditions that it has gained a reputation for suicides. $89bn would build a ton of pumped storage to underpin offshore wind at a quarter the MWh price.
  - walshemj 7y ago
    That is assuming you have the suitable terrain and don't have a problem with forcibly moving the inhabitants - its not the 50/60's the locals might not just pack up and move.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
agumonkey 7y ago
Jean Marc Jancovici quoted 10-15% of the total cost in an interview last week.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  A quote is of no value. Actual costs and time spent must be determined by dismantling a reactor successfully.
  - dmix 7y ago
    Quotes don't matter when it doesn't help the argument I'm making on the internet.* Meanwhile projections are used extensively in major engineering projects. The fact error rates exist in probabilities doesn't make them useless.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - angry_octet 7y ago
      The parents point is sound in that estimates only have validity if they are about well understood or frequently undertaken activities. There is no basis for certainty about decommissioning of nuclear; older plants especially have unique problems. There have been enormous cost overruns for any plant that has had an incident, and many plants will have problems only discovered upon disassembly.
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        Problems unique to older plants have no relevance to the estimates for newer plants. They're not even relevant to the choice whether to keep existing plants in operation, except insofar as pushing the decommissioning date further into the future lowers its net present cost due to the time value of money.
        angry_octet 7y ago
littlestymaar 7y ago
This is true but people tend to forget one thing: decommissioning doesn't necessarily means dismantling. Dismantling is a tough challenge (mainly because of the civil engineering part btw, which becomes difficult to manage when you add the constraints from nuclear: “What do you mean when you say we can't use dynamite? oO”) but it's only a legal obligation not an absolute one. With government support to change the law, EDF could just unload the fuel (price is well known, they do it all the time), and pickle the primary circuit in place (the price is also known, they did it a few times already) and now you have a place where all contamination (which comes from neutronic activation) is trapped inside the structure (Co60 in the rebar of the structure mostly) and the biggest risk is asbestos… (like your nearest decommissionined building in your neighborhood, even houses). This option leaves you with a few ugly buildings in the middle of nowhere, but the cost unbeatable (even way less than decommissioning thousands of wind turbines).
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Why isn't this just the default choice?
  - littlestymaar 7y ago
    Good question. The dismantling narrative probably comes from a mix between wishful thinking from politicians and bad habits of lying all the time from the nuclear industry… I mean, the nuclear story is even brighter if we can promise we'll clean up after us right?
- eqvinox 7y ago
  > This option leaves you with a few ugly buildings in the middle of nowhere, but the cost unbeatable (even way less than decommissioning thousands of wind turbines). Aren't you forgetting something? Buildings slowly deteriorate, even if not used. So now you have to maintain the disused reactor, for ... how long exactly? (Amendment: wind, rain, sunlight, rodents, ... idiots with power tools ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident )
briwang2050 7y ago
the Decommissioning of the Zion reactors. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1909/ML19092A270.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1909/ML19092A270.pdf About $650 million budget. In 2016, They say it is on schedule and under budget. https://www.energysolutions.com/zion-nuclear-power-plant-decommissioning-project-on-budget-and-ahead-of-schedule-six-years-after-the-project-started/ https://www.energysolutions.com/zion-nuclear-power-plant-dec... They are doing less sorting. They just get a bigger cave and put the entire facility into it. There is room in the large cave for all US nuclear plants.
8bitsrule 7y ago
And waste is far from a solved problem. "This is the €25bn deep geological storage facility for France’s high and medium-level radioactive waste... [France] produces enough toxic radioactive waste every year to fill 120 double-decker buses (about 13,000 cubic metres worth, or 2kg a year for every French person)." [0] [0] 2016: "Nuclear waste: keep out for 100,000 years" https://www.ft.com/content/db87c16c-4947-11e6-b387-64ab0a67014c https://www.ft.com/content/db87c16c-4947-11e6-b387-64ab0a670...
- roenxi 7y ago
  Which is much less waste than solar produces. We barely even try to keep the waste from solar panels segregated from the environment because it is impossible with volumes that high. It is impossible to try to keep it to the same standards as nuclear but the damage is probably about the same. https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-...
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    I missed the part about solar panels and radioactive waste that require containment. End of life PV panels are one of a million waste products that end up in landfills.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      The EOL PV products are just as dangerous as radiation; lead and cadmium poisoning are nasty businesses. If they were held to the same safety standards as nuclear waste it would require containment; the risk of harm is greater (especially after accounting for volume). PV waste isn't held to that silly standard because then it would be impossible to produce solar panels. If nuclear waste were contained using the same standard of acceptable harm as solar panels the cost would be a rounding error.
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      They've got large quantities of Cadmium Telluride and Cadmium Sulfide, the Cadmium portion of which is quite toxic. Not to mention that burning coal releases a ton of radiation into the air also. This isn't whataboutism, far from it, in an ideal world there'd be no waste. But in the real world we have to reduce harm and balance options against each other. Nuclear waste can be quite effectively dropped into long-term geological storage facilities.
Iv 7y ago
Plants have been dismantled in the past, not in France though. I think closing Fessenheim is a bad decision, but at least it could shut down this bad argument by showing that costs of decommisioning a nuclear power plants are not 3 years of GDP.
afterburner 7y ago
Exactly. The real costs of France's national nuclear program can be hidden inside of the accounting of the entire nation, and fudged beyond belief. It's a point of national pride at this point, they would definitely lie and take to the grave anything that might suggest it's not an overwhelming success. And given how fudged financing can be easy to do and compound into massive errors, it could take a massive team of financial forensic analysts to uncover it.
tinus_hn 7y ago
Not to mention the cost of permanently evacuating an area when the impossible event of a meltdown manages to happen anyway. There's a reason why countries like to put their reactors near the border, that way part of that area is someone else's problem.

anoncake 7y ago

Does this take into account the risk of making a huge part of the country uninhabitable? Please note that: - The average number of deaths caused by a nuclear each year is neither "risk" (for a country) nor "of making a huge part of the country uninhabitable". - Past accidents may have been caused by human error. Unfortunately we have run out of übermenschen that don't make errors so that doesn't help.

felixfbecker 7y ago
The worst part is, we can become as green as you can get in Germany, if our direct neighbor country France has one of their so-low-carbon nuclear plants blow up, we are just as inhabitable, for eternity.
- plextoria 7y ago
  > if our direct neighbor country France has one of their so-low-carbon nuclear plants blow up, we are just as inhabitable, for eternity Do you have a verifiable source for this? The impact sounds greatly exaggerated to me.
  - felixfbecker 7y ago
    Just look at how habitable Chernobyl still is.
    - yorwba 7y ago
      Yup, it's brimming with wildlife: https://theconversation.com/chernobyl-has-become-a-refuge-for-wildlife-33-years-after-the-nuclear-accident-116303 https://theconversation.com/chernobyl-has-become-a-refuge-fo...
      - _ph_ 7y ago
        Most wildlife has not long enough living spans to be affected by radiation as humans are (who have the expectancy to live longer than 70 years). And even those who will be affected by radiation wouldn't know it. Of course, absence of humans is a huge boost for any kind of wild life.

deeviant 7y ago

This just in, the cost of new green energy is more expensive than mostly amortized, entrenched nuclear power that has yet to enter it's least profitable period.

belorn 7y ago
That is not what the article claim. The argument is that Germany spend more money for a solution that results in 46% green energy and 56% dirty energy than France that get 92% green energy and 8% dirty energy. If they are correct is up to debate, and one worthy to have considered the political aspect of the claims. It is also important to note that they are defining green energy based on green house emissions. Still, if we are to have any meaningful discussion it is important to discuss the claims they make.

just_steve_h 7y ago

Fascinating that an article with so much detailed information doesn't include a discussion of waste and the costs associated with handling and storing it safely for [checks notes] 10,000 years.

markdown 7y ago
It doesn't take up much space so I imagine the cost is just as much as it would cost to dig a very deep hole in the ground in a location unlikely to be exposed even if all record of its location was lost... perhaps under the ocean.
- droithomme 7y ago
  All of it needs to be processed in a breeder reactor before storage. Processing in a breeder reactor is illegal under US law.
- loeg 7y ago
  Just dump it in the Marianas Trench. > a crescent-shaped trough in the Earth's crust averaging about 2,550 km long and 69 km wide. It's still better for humans and the environment than burning fossil fuels (and arguably better than solar/wind).
CptFribble 7y ago
All the nuclear waste we've ever made in the USA stacks about 3 barrels high on a single football field, about .002 square miles. One of USA's deserts is around 190,000 square miles. I'm sure we can find someplace to store it all.
- giomasce 7y ago
  If it is so simple, I wonder why the problem takes so much discussion to be solved...
  - grumpydba 7y ago
    Because of the irrational fear of nuclear.

roenxi 7y ago

Without any particular rancour, this sort of thing is why the environmentalists keep experiencing a mysterious and conspiracy-like resistance to their plans. Their plans are ineffective and expensive. France has cheaper, more technically excellent, safer and cleaner energy than Germany for military reasons. That is a massive egg on the face of the German environmentalists. And it turns out the people saying solar was very cheap were not being straightforward; although hopefully the march of research will prove them right in time. My personal belief is that the people complaining about nuclear waste are struggling to tell which of two numbers is bigger - I'm happy to guess that waste from solar panels is more damaging due to the large scale they are produced at. Lead-acid battaries too.

ajross 7y ago

This is comparing the cost of building new power capacity in Germany to the cost of operating existing plants in France! You can't get any more spun than that. That is, renewables are new technology and being built out rapidly. Nuclear capacity is 3-4 decades old and the build-out investment was recouped long ago. France absolutely cannot build new reactors 3x cheaper than Germany can put up equivalent windmills, and to argue that is absolutely laughable. This is a ridiculous article.

briwang2050 7y ago
It compared the cost of building the nuclear reactors in France to the cost of building Solar, Wind and biomass in Germany. It also looked at the cost and amount of energy produced from the last five years of construction in Germany. So the newer and cheaper solar and wind. 160 billion euros for 70 TWh per year. France built 400 Terawatt hours per year from 290 billion euros. France has run them for over 30 years. China's more recent nuclear construction was also cited. $150 billion for 300 TWh per year. 80% of the world's new nuclear reactors are being built in China, India, Russia and South Korea. Those are coming in at a price of $2000-3000 per KW. A gigawatt nuclear reactor at $2-3 billion each built in 4-6 years. A gigawatt nuclear reactor can generate 8 Terawatt hours per year. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-a... A fully amortized nuclear power plant generates power at about 2 cents per kwh. http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedFiles/org/info/pdf/EconomicsNP.pdf http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedFiles/org/info/pdf/Econ... Germany, between 2006 and 2017, increased the cost of electricity for households by 50%. (per OECD) http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2019/7299-system-costs.pdf http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2019/7299-system-costs.pdf French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices. France produces one-tenth the carbon pollution from electricity compared to Germany.
- strainer 7y ago
  If nuclear plants really do generate at about 2 cents per kWh, how come the most established and respected power industry pricing analysis finds that it costs over six times that - between 12 cents and 19 cents per kWh ?[1] Where does the 2 cents figure come from? - A website commissioned explicitly to promote nuclear power industry. Have some discernment, please. [1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

lispm 7y ago

> Nuclear plants can last 40-80+ years French nuclear power plants will need >>$100 billion investments in the near future to keep them running. Many of them will reach their projected life time in the coming 2020 decade. Let's see how France will replace them or keep them running. My bet is that they keep them running, because they have little chance to replace them in the 20-30 decade. For the French government, which owns most of the plants though EDF, the problem to replace them is greater than the perceived security problem. If France would NOW start to plan (plan -> build -> operate) for additional nuclear plants, then it would take at least 15-20 years until a new one is operational. (edit) France may want to decide in the early 20s about six new EPR 2 with 15 years construction time... Thus the current nuclear landscape has to be kept running until the end 30s. > 80 nuclear reactors would now cost €1600 billion euros for Germany. This would still be cheaper than the estimated costs for the solar and wind buildout that is underway. It's difficult to set up the renewable energy landscape in Germany, but it comes with decentralized lower-risk technologies. Stuff a less state-oriented economy can built. Germany by far has not a centralized state controlled economy like France. Thus the German Energiewende is also a way to decentralize energy production and to get away from a state controlled oligopoly for energy production - currently the electricity production is still largely controlled by four large companies which have their own regions. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_großen_Vier_(Energieversorgung) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_großen_Vier_(Energieversor... For several years none of these big four companies has really invested in and supported the Energiewende - because they surely want to keep their monopoly in their region. Which is the opposite of an open market for energy production. For 80 new nuclear power plants there is no space in a relatively densely populated country like Germany with a short coast. The local acceptance in the population of new and large-scale nuclear is around zero. Null. Nothing. Every new nuclear will face much longer delays in court than any wind turbine ever will. Nuclear is a technology that's dead in Germany. If we look at the US, there hasn't been much progress on nuclear power plants either - even though the country is much larger, less dense populated AND has a need for nuclear technology in the military. Nuclear worked better in a centralized France which needs nuclear technology for its military or in more authoritarian countries like China where independent control does not exist. > 80 nuclear reactors would now cost €1600 billion euros for Germany. and would take >4 decades to be rolled out. By then Germany is 90% renewable for electricity production. But with a decentralized modern grid. France is currently struggling to build ONE new nuclear power plant: Flamanville. A technical design of the early 90s. Four times more expensive than projected and going online maybe in 2023 - with a construction start from 2007. Largely state financed and state controlled. http://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-warns-of-added-costs-of-Flamanville-EPR-weld-r http://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-warns-of-added-co...

aussiegreenie 7y ago

What total bullshit. No country would commit to any new nuclear plants unless it is a cover for a weapons program. (UK) Here is a simple test, would any privately-owned utility buy a new nuclear power plant without a government guarantee? No. A nuclear plant if ever finished as half are abandoned takes about 20 yrs to build (eg Flamanville / Olkiluoto) A 1G PV plant with storage with 25% utilisation would be built in a year. With a capital cost of 7%-10% of nuclear or about 1/3 adjusting for utilisation. There are three costs for a powerplant: 1. Capital costs - most are 20%- 30% equity and the rest debt. 2. Fuel costs - How much is the coal, gas or other fuels used to create the power. 3. Operations and Maintenance (O&M) - All thermal plants (solar thermal, nuclear, gas or coal etc) use high-pressure steam. The O&M on steam is about USD 20 per MW-h. So, if you had a solar thermal plant (Ivanpah) the steam O&M is about the same price as total generation from PV. Based on the average of Flamanville, Olkiluoto and Hinkley Point here are some reasonable guesses. Capital Cost: USD 15 per watt (pv with storage USD 0.50) O&M - USD 40 per MW-h (Ops 10 + steam 20 + closure 10) Fuel - USD 10 per MW-h

mc32 7y ago
Taiwan, Japan have nuclear power plants and do not have weapons programs.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  Japan has a deniable weapons program. They've accumulated a very large stockpile of reactor grade Pu. This would require some effort to turn into adequately efficient weapons, but with modern designs it should be possible.
- lispm 7y ago
  Japan is said to be a always a few years away from a nuclear weapons program, in case they need it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_program#De_facto_nuclear_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_progra...
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  Also: Belgium, Spain, Holland, Switzerland, Chehia, Sovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, and others: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Nuclear_power_percentage.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Nuclear_... OP is wrong, and wrong on every sub claim.

greatpatton 7y ago

Strange that the article is not talking about the latest french reactor Flamanville 3. This EPR reactor is already 10 years late and will cost more than 13b€ For 160MW. And this just for construction cost and not for running/dismantling it. Then I wonder what practical exemple would support that after 15 years a solar PV installation has to be rebuilt.

grumpydba 7y ago
It's the first of its generation and is quite a failure on many aspects. It's not representative of all the nuclear reactors in France, far from it. Thus it is quite insignificant.
- maweki 7y ago
  But solar failure rate and cost will never go down?
- lispm 7y ago
  > It's the first of its generation and is quite a failure on many aspects. It's not representative of all the nuclear reactors in France, far from it. It's the only new one, based on designs of early 90s and earlier. The others are mostly all old and many with completely outdated designs from the 70s. Many wouldn't survive the crash of a larger airbus or boeing aircraft.
  - grumpydba 7y ago
    I don't judge a software on an alpha release.
    - lispm 7y ago
      Alpha release software is not for production.
    - draw_down 7y ago
      It isn’t software

pfdietz 7y ago

Germany pushed PV ten years ago to help drive it down its experience curve. This was spectacularly successful. PV modules are now nearly an order of magnitude cheaper than they were then, and PV is delivering at a fraction of the levelized cost per kWh of new nuclear plants.

patfla 7y ago
I think China played a much more important role in driving down PV module costs than Germany. Germany was one source of demand - China has amounted to about all of the supply. Germany has an important coal industry and lobby and remains a large user of coal.
- lispm 7y ago
  Germany invested a lot very early into technology building for mass production of efficient PV. The cheap mass production in China came later...
  - chess_buster 7y ago
    And our building capacity got destroyed by the government, so china took over. We were on track to be number one producers, but yeah. Same is done to wind now.
  - patfla 7y ago
    Actually if one looks it up (I have many times), as the Chinese industry was developing (meaning a while ago now), a large part of the key cell technology that China used came from a research group at the University of New South Wales in Australia. There's useful research done around the world. I think where German companies felt they might maintain a manufacturing presence was in machinery infrastructure - whether the machines that populate the factory floors that manufacture either cells of modules or machines (say, inverters) or that are used downstream of electrical production in a module. I was last in this space some yrs ago but it's not clear to me just how much of a presence German companies have been able to keep in either. One industry web site is here: https://www.pv-tech.org/ https://www.pv-tech.org/ and if I wanted to ascertain German presence in the industry (including some aspects of research) I might look through this site.

pg_is_a_butt 7y ago

"half as long" better than waiting out half lives for hundreds of years of fallout.

acd 7y ago

But the nuclear waste lasts for thousands of years. Unless we feed the nuclear waste into breeder reactors which can utilize the waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste "High-level waste" Solar panels needs to be designed to be recycled.

barney54 7y ago

This article is an interesting thought exercise and it makes some good points about how expensive Germany’s renewable build out has been. However, these are all sunk costs and don’t matter going forward. What matters is the cost today. Also, the total terawatt hours isn’t nearly as important as keeping the lights on. Nukes are great and renewables are great, but this isn’t a contest to see which generates the most electricity over the course of a year, but rather we need to keeps the lights on by using the sources that make the best sense to do that at lower cost or lower co2 emissions.

leetcrew 7y ago
> However, these are all sunk costs and don’t matter going forward. What matters is the cost today. one of the major points from the article is that Germany's renewable build out is not a one time capital cost. according to the article, the German power infrastructure is more expensive and has half the expected lifetime compared to France. unless solar and wind decrease in cost much faster than nuclear, there's no way it ends up being cheaper in the long run for Germany. I'm not knowledgeable enough to say whether the figures quoted in the article are actually correct/complete, but if you accept them, it seems France is getting a lot more bang for its buck.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  The short lifespan of renewables is deliberate and correct. When technology is changing rapidly, optimizing for long lifespan is stupid. The long life of a nuclear reactor is an illusion now, since solar and wind are improving so fast that they would not operate their full 40+ years.
  - lispm 7y ago
    France sits on a lot of nuclear power plants with very old standards. But upgrading them is technically and/or economically impossible.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    Once a new plant is already constructed, shutting it down early would only make sense if the average generation price fell below the operating cost, excluding the construction and decommissioning costs which by that point are already historical costs. Solar panels could be free and not be able to match that price, because they still require land and energy storage and labor to install and maintain, so the nuclear plant would still operate the full 40+ years and have that long to amortize the construction.

thawaway1837 7y ago

Germany basically started the shift to renewable energy. As a result, theirs is probably amongst the most expensive solar/wind build outs ever. Solar and wind energy costs have dropped exponentially since a decade ago, to the point where even if the author is correct about the German costs being 3 times more expensive than the French costs, wind and solar will be cheaper than nuclear today, since their costs have reduced dramatically in the last decade. Utility scale solar, for example, is about 90% cheaper today than it was in 2009 when Germany started building out the bulk of its solar energy infrastructure. In other words, with no other differences, simply the drop in prices of wind and solar means that wind/solar built out today would be about 2-3 times cheaper than France’s nuclear buildout. Of course, other things have indeed changed since France started building out its nuclear infrastructure. Primarily, nuclear’s negative learning curve has kicked in to the point that even after adjusting for inflation, nuclear today is far more expensive than nuclear when France built out the bulk of its nuclear energy. Finally, Germany is not even close to the best candidates for solar and wind energy, whereas France is one of the best candidates for nuclear (by definition, it’s one of 10 or so possible candidates, and any new state is likely to be worse at nuclear than France was).

unstrafed 7y ago
Solar and wind require a huge geographic footprint to generate significant energy. Because of this constraint, the cost of wind and solar is almost entirely opportunity cost, not the mere accounting cost of producing an extra panel/turbine. The basic problem is twofold: First, as you keep adding solar/wind capacity, you inevitably get diminishing returns from worse wind/sunshine conditions, so additional installation is less productive. (Think about solar panels in valleys or windmills in low-wind areas.) Second, as wind and solar cannibalize land area to provide energy, the price of that land increases substantially as other uses are displaced. For example, let's say that a country had to displace 40% of its productive arable land in order to install wind & solar. Then the price of its farmland would skyrocket as the country continued to deploy wind & solar. In both cases, solar and wind become much more expensive per deployed panel than simply the cost per panel, which is indeed pretty inexpensive. FWIW, the article attempts to make this point, but it frankly isn't very well written, and so the point is a bit hard to understand. As to your point about countries situated for nuclear vs wind+solar, what do you mean? Do you have any metrics? If I were to guess, wind and solar are extremely sensitive to the geography of a country (including physical and political-economic); I'd guess nuclear is mildly sensitive to political geography. Splitting the atom is not significantly harder in Indonesia or Peru than it is in France. The fact that much of French land area is rural might make nuclear marginally more useful there than in a place like e.g. Germany or the UK, with several major cities dotted across the relatively densely populated landscape. (Based on this inference, I'd imagine that the US, China, Canada and Russia would be the top four countries for nuclear, and Monaco or Luxembourg might be the worst?)

chiefalchemist 7y ago

To be clear, this is cost to build and maintain. But with nuclear there's also the cost of shut down and storage. To say nothing of a nuclear accident somewhere along the line.

typeformer 7y ago

Thank God there are a few smart folks on HN to push back on all the mediocre pro-nucleur weak arguments and propaganda here as of late.

ClumsyPilot 7y ago

Nuclear lives or dies by Project Management and some countries just suck at it. When you need a reactor, it's a controversial big-ticket item/government project. Countries with strong central planning can handle that (France and China). In UK our government can't build a train line without fucking it up[1]. If we had open-source Fusion reactors tomorrow, they would commission it, then cancel it, then privatise it, then find out it was built upside-down. There would be a chain of 15 contractors involved and they would all be suing each-other. Then the taxpayer would cover the cost anyway. We really need SMRs [small modular reactors]. Those would be ~100 ton devices built at a factory, and all quality controls would be done there. They are subject to normal market mechanisms. Nuclear would become more like solar and wind. When you need them, you just buy them, get them delivered and follow instructions to install them. You don't need to create a 20-year old political football for party politics. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/27ab2f5c-a976-11e9-984c-fac8325aaa04 https://www.ft.com/content/27ab2f5c-a976-11e9-984c-fac8325aa...

danielharan 7y ago

"France completed construction on 76% of its current 58 reactors at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330 billion (€290 billion). The complete buildout of the 58 reactors was less €400 billion." Whoever managed to build plants in the past must have retired. "Flamanville is just one of three projects being built in Europe using the next-generation EPR technology. The other two are the Olkiluoto project in Finland, which is more than a decade late, and the UK’s Hinkley Point, which is also delayed and mired in controversy over its high costs." https://www.ft.com/content/877eedae-f987-11e9-a354-36acbbb0d9b6?fbclid=IwAR39vkPiK-TEBF5gmzoTe5gc9r6xXez8uFpbjMPwGCfF5NOCadq4BEsYcpY https://www.ft.com/content/877eedae-f987-11e9-a354-36acbbb0d... Yes, in theory new nuclear plants could be small, modular and safe. In practice, the biggest challenge is political rather than technical. How do you set up institutions that can deliver these projects on time and on budget? In the time these plants have been delayed, solar prices have dropped more than 80%. By the time they're scheduled to be finished, solar should cost 50% less than today. Germany overpaid by a lot, which is the price for building a local industry and being pioneers in a new technology. I hope it works out for them. Either way, humanity will owe them a debt for this.

reedx8 7y ago
I so happen to disagree, but well reasoned point. However, please abstain from using theory in that context. What you mean is a conjecture, or hypothesis. Anything substantiated by evidence is in fact a theory. Those that are not are hypotheses. In fact, theories work in practice. That’s why they are theories - quantum theory, germ theory, general and special relativity theory. Etc..
- therealdrag0 7y ago
  Words have multiple meanings. This use of "theory" exists in all dictionaries and is well used and accepted. Instead of trying to control language, we should encourage appropriate interpretation of context and meaning.
natmaka 7y ago
Many (mostly indirect) costs related to nuke plants construction in France were not published and therefore cannot be taken into account. Some were military programs aiming at producing weapon-grade plutonium (=> opaque budgets), part of them necessary to the plants. In fact it was the main political reason behind the French nuclear program, and the inherited opacity remains. Part of this are R&D paid for by the taxpayer under other programs, many not financially linked to nuke plants, mainly done by a huge and very costly monster named CEA (its current yearly budget is 4.7 billion euros). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Alternative_Energies_and_Atomic_Energy_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Alternative_Energies_an...

foxylad 7y ago

One massive differentiator that is often ignored is scalability - as in can it be scaled DOWN? Nuclear has to be done in massive scale, which causes all sorts of problems: project complexity and cost; security; security of supply; transmission costs. Renewables are very attractive in that light.

x220 7y ago
Has human electricity consumption scaled down? >Renewables are very attractive in that light Yes, and only in the light. Once the sun goes down and the wind dies down, you'll have to turn off your heaters and turn off your televisions.
- chess_buster 7y ago
  Yeah, which does not happen on grid scale.

simonCGN 7y ago

What a terrible article. We have a liberalised energy market in Europe. Therefore energy prices in this market are not that different between Germany and France. Also, the writer is missing the costs of disposal of nuclear waste.

hannob 7y ago

There's a major flaw in the argument of this article. They calculate what Germany has payed in the past decades, including the very early phase of solar+wind development. You can of course compare any number of things, whether it makes sense or not. But for the question how to proceed with future energy it's completely irrelevant what solar+wind costed in 2005. We only care what it costs now and in the future. "Solar was super expensive in 2005, so we shouldn't build cheap solar in 2019" is not a useful or logical argument. The key thing about the german renewable subsidies (and a few other countries, but particularly for solar it was mostly germany) is that they brought wind+solar from being overly expensive exotic technologies to cheap mass technologies.

_0ffh 7y ago
>They calculate what Germany has payed in the past decades, including the very early phase of solar+wind development Yeah, while also ignoring the untold Billions in subsidies from the early stages of nuclear power. It's rather hypocritical.
- a2800276 7y ago
  Or the untold gazillions in indirect subsidies from not requiring nuclear power plants to be insured for damages arising from catastrophic incidents...
  - whalebird 7y ago
    The issue is that you won't find an insurance company willing to insure a risk that they can't calculate. There's too little data to find a price here. In the end, the government always bears the cost, because any catastrophic event will likely bankrupt the operator involved. I think it's fair to count these catastrophic costs as subsidies, but they're not "untold gazillions". Estimates for the Fukushima disaster go up to about a trillion[1]. At the other side, the costs for Germany's "Energiewende" will run up over half a trillion[2], with relatively little to show for it[3]. [1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/how-much-does-germanys-energy-transition-cost https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/how-much-does-ger... [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-will-approach-one-trillion-dollars-just-for-nuclear-disaster/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-... [3] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/energiewende-scores-mixed-results-mckinsey-index https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/energiewende-scores-mix...

mncolinlee 7y ago

It's worth noting that Germany has less solar energy potential anywhere in their country than in any single state in the USA, including Alaska. Yet they had more solar deployed in watts than the entire USA for a long time.

therealdrag0 7y ago
Ya I was gonna 'complain' about solar being constrained by geography, but then I saw this map https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/solarwa/pages/93/attachments/original/1466049471/NREL-pv-map-us-germany-spain.jpg?1466049471 https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/solarwa/pages/93/attac...

Johnny555 7y ago

Germany’s solar farms will have to be rebuilt every 15-25 years Why is that? Do solar panels really degrade to the point where they are unprofitable to run after 15 - 25 years?

Wildgoose 7y ago
Basically, yes. The same is true for anything electro-mechanical. Things wear out. Plus you have to keep the panels clean - a dirty solar panel doesn't generate the same output as a clean one.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
No they don't. The reason they get replaced is because of technical obsolescence. Newer panels are just so much better that at some point you replace them to get much better yields. Same with wind. Technical progress has increased the efficiency. Better still, it has vastly decreased the amount of maintenance needed. Modern ceramics vastly reduce the amount of wear and tear that happens due to friction.
pgeorgi 7y ago
There are multiple factors at work: There's ongoing maintenance as with everything, and you can probably accumulate its costs into it meaning "you're paying for a new one every 40 years through maintenance alone". Yield is going down over time (solar panels are sold with guarantees like "80% efficiency after 20 years"). And finally, technology is improving: replacing these 2006 solar panels in 2020 not only gives you back the base yield of a 2006 panel, but the base yield of a 2020 panel (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/CellPVeff%28rev191101%29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/CellPVef... for a research level comparison over time. That won't translate directly into industrial use though, but the direction should be evident) So the situation is less that is "has to be rebuilt" but that it's economical to rebuild every 20-ish years (factoring in the maintenance costs: a panel that you replaced due to physical damange 10 years in needn't be scrapped just 10 years later) rather than letting the stuff hang around for arbitrarily long times. With a proper recycling chain that shouldn't be too bad (there's little reason why the silicon can't be purified, and the doting material be refurbished), and ongoing maintenance is a concern with all types of power plant.

paule89 7y ago

What about the costs of a broken solar or wind turbine. Easy replaceable. But calculate the cost of a nuclear fallout...

meor 7y ago

# France (population: 66,89 million) - 76,5% nuclear 8% non hydro renewables 10% hydro 3,7% natural gas 1,9% coal 0,4% oil - CO2 emmisions: 124 milion tones # Germany (population: 82,79 million) - 34,9% renewables (hydro and non hydro) 22,5% lignite 12,9% natural gas 12,9% hard coal 11,8% nuclear 4,2% others 0,8% mineral oil - CO2 emmisions: 725,7 milion tones

tyzerdak 7y ago

The people who chose not to build nuclear plants are either retarded or get money from russian natural gas exporters for doing so shit decisions. Maybe both.

downrightmike 7y ago

Somewhat of a tangent: With the much longer half-lifes of heavier elements, given their decay is longer than human history, would it be the best long term solution to put them in a literal vault made of precious metals like gold or titanium? Burying them in the ground isn't working especially since the early sites were largely just cement or housed in wood supported tunnels and those are already a huge problem we can't deal with.

franzmafka 7y ago

Does this factor for the potential cost of a disaster though, or the environmental costs of uranium mining?