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Have they announced an estimate of how much a reactor/cost of energy production will be? That’s kind of the most important factor, isn’t it?

• foxyv 6y ago
  $0.24 per kwh is a rough estimate I've seen for NuScale. Typically initial costs for microreactors right now are around $0.25 to $0.30/kwh which is about the cost of energy created by diesel generators. Natural gas is much lower. However they hope that as we make a lot of them the cost will drop.
  • mikeyouse 6y ago
    Wow. That’s substantially more expensive than I was expecting. It’s been years but we always assumed ~$0.08/KWh for on-site natural gas generated electricity on US based projects.
    • therealdrag0 6y ago
      I wonder how much more would that be if the median carbon-tax proposal was added?
      • mikeyouse 6y ago
        We did some calcs to that effect since we were operating in Australia, and they had a $25/ton carbon tax at the time. If my memory serves, it would increase natural gas costs by ~25%. So it'd likely still be right around $0.10/KWh. Actually I take that back - our calcs were all based on ~$4/mmBTU gas but I just looked and gas prices have been below $3/mmBTU for years. So $0.08/KWh is probably a worst case even if we had a reasonable carbon tax.
    • foxyv 6y ago
      Right now they are bespoke reactors so that means that they will cost a ton. But if they are turning them out like Toyotas then the cost will drop really fast. The hope is that it will be similar to the drop in cost for solar that we've seen in the past ten years. Solar originally cost about $0.28/kwh and now it's around 6 cents.