3 ms·
Building it makes it affordable. Giant one-off projects have endemic problems with perverse bidding incentives, cost overruns, and engineering problems. Economy
by reincarnate0x14 6y ago
Building it makes it affordable. Giant one-off projects have endemic problems with perverse bidding incentives, cost overruns, and engineering problems. Economy of scale production absolutely dominates most industrial supply chains and engineering.
The US and other modern economies got the political will together to subsidize solar when it rarely made sense on a MW/$ basis and now it's dropped to by far the cheapest source (if you can live with intermittent power).
- legulere 6y agoWhat drives nuclear costs is generally rising construction costs. You can’t bring that down with building more nuclear power plants. PV got so much cheaper because it’s a mass producible product.
- Ericson2314 6y agoIf all the designs were the same you could start prefabbing components, that will do just fine for construction costs.
- corty 6y agoPV is also cheaper because the possibly polluting production is outsourced to china.
- imtringued 6y agoThe reality is that there is an entire supporting industry that needs to be built to make nuclear power plants economical. Nuclear power plants have special requirements that are rarely met by conventional industry. A lot of nuclear power plant designs involve manufacturing via the largest hydraulic presses we have ever built. There are not many of them and building more of them is expensive so it will raise costs in the short term (10-20 years). The design philosophies have to change considerably if nuclear power wants to be cost effective. The monolithic nuclear power plant is a dead end.