3 ms·
Nuclear simply is too expensive. France is a good example: Most of the energy in the country is created by nuclear plants, which are old now and have to be deco
by bildung 7y ago
Nuclear simply is too expensive. France is a good example: Most of the energy in the country is created by nuclear plants, which are old now and have to be decomissioned. Compared to other countries nuclear has an ok image in France, yet they don't plan to build new plants.
The Flamanville site is in the process of building an EPR unit, and already has 300% cost overruns [0].
The official prognosis for 6 new plants (to replace the old ones) has put the sticker price at $51 billion [1] - without any cost overruns, without waste disposal and without decomissioning of the plants - each of which adding billions per plant. Including these costs, utility scale wind turbines are roughly the same price, at about $15-20 billion per 1000MW.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
[1] 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...
[2] http://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost http://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost
- wrkronmiller 7y agoWind turbines don’t solve the base load problem though...
- bildung 7y agoActually, they do: "In this study, benefits of interconnecting wind farms were evaluated for 19 sites, located in the Midwestern United States, with annual average wind speeds at 80 m above ground, the hub height of modern wind turbines, greater than 6.9 m/s (class 3 or greater). We found that an average of 33 % and a maximum of 47 % of yearly-averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable, baseload electric power."[0] The more turbines, the higher that percentage becomes. (For comparison, French nuclear plants also only produced power a bit over 70% in 2016/7) [0] = https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.475.4620 https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.475...
- AstralStorm 7y agoUnited States is somewhat bigger than France, which is why it somewhat works. Somewhat because the base load achievable by such balancing is rather small. And by adding more plants you make the crest factor in this estimate higher...
- bildung 7y agoEurope is actually better in this regard because of grid connections between the countries. So lack of wind could be compensated by imports from Spain or Germany, for example. Germany and Norway also currently work on a project for a direct connection between their respective grids, called NordLink. Base load in a renewable-only world is an essentially solved problem, see for example the following link: https://skepticalscience.com/detailed-look-at-renewable-baseload-energy.html https://skepticalscience.com/detailed-look-at-renewable-base...