3 ms·

Nuclear energy is regularly significantly (usually more than an order of magnitude, from what I've seen) cheaper for electricity than any other source in compar

Nuclear energy is regularly significantly (usually more than an order of magnitude, from what I've seen) cheaper for electricity than any other source in comparable countries (e.g. nuclear electricity in Toronto >10x cheaper than coal/solar electricity in Berlin) Nuclear energy is and always has been inherently competitive on total profitability over the course of a plant's lifetime. The main issue is the time it takes to get a plant built, and the heavy upfront investment. Both of these extend painfully the time before investors reach nonnegative ROI, which is (imo) part of why despite the actual profitability being much better human investors with inherently limited lifetimes opt for, for example, natural gas or solar installations. + Also of course, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than other sources of energy, which leads to good things like reduced accident deaths, but also heavily increases cost and time to build.

chjdev 6y ago
do you have a source for the >10x? because that was my assumption as well, but after reading through [0-3] i'm pretty amazed how cheap solar and wind have become over the last years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [1] https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/solar-power-cost-decrease-2018-5 https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/solar-power-cost-decrease-... [2] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/
- johnmorrison 6y ago
  The average price I paid for electricity in Ontario over a couple years vs. the average of a number of sources I found for cost of electricity across Germany. I don't have any links saved, but yeah it was like ~0.05 CAD vs 0.55 CAD per kWh iirc. You're right that solar has become very price competitive. We're pushing that at Tesla & I do think as the current regulatory environment around nuclear continues to stay roughly the same, solar will be much cheaper in the coming decade. It should be noted that subsidies, regulatory fees, and economies of scale play a MUCH larger role in the LCOE of energy sources today than the fundamental physics, efficiency, material costs etc do. Therefore it is wiser to look at the options from a first principles perspective and consider the potential costs of sources after equally large effort is put into scaling and optimization, and ignoring political factors. When you analyze the options in this way, nuclear wins every single time.
pfdietz 6y ago
Nuclear is possibly cheaper if your power plant was gifted to you by the Nuclear Fairy. If you have to pay to have it built, and then service the debt, not so much.
- johnmorrison 6y ago
  They're extremely cheap to build by LCOE if you take away the extra regulatatory fees. Fission has several orders of magnitude less levelized material throughput per unit power than any other source of electricity. If the world got to the point where corporations could successfully scale up mass production of reactors, this could drop by a further order or two of magnitude.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Regulatory fees? Nonsense. You mean cost of work required by regulation? Tell me how we make NPPs safe without regulation, or how we find sufficiently omniscient Regulator Philosopher Kings who can tell the necessary from unnecessary regulations beforehand.

chjdev 6y ago

do you have a source for the >10x? because that was my assumption as well, but after reading through [0-3] i'm pretty amazed how cheap solar and wind have become over the last years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [1] https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/solar-power-cost-decrease-2018-5 https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/solar-power-cost-decrease-... [2] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/

johnmorrison 6y ago
The average price I paid for electricity in Ontario over a couple years vs. the average of a number of sources I found for cost of electricity across Germany. I don't have any links saved, but yeah it was like ~0.05 CAD vs 0.55 CAD per kWh iirc. You're right that solar has become very price competitive. We're pushing that at Tesla & I do think as the current regulatory environment around nuclear continues to stay roughly the same, solar will be much cheaper in the coming decade. It should be noted that subsidies, regulatory fees, and economies of scale play a MUCH larger role in the LCOE of energy sources today than the fundamental physics, efficiency, material costs etc do. Therefore it is wiser to look at the options from a first principles perspective and consider the potential costs of sources after equally large effort is put into scaling and optimization, and ignoring political factors. When you analyze the options in this way, nuclear wins every single time.

pfdietz 6y ago

Nuclear is possibly cheaper if your power plant was gifted to you by the Nuclear Fairy. If you have to pay to have it built, and then service the debt, not so much.

johnmorrison 6y ago
They're extremely cheap to build by LCOE if you take away the extra regulatatory fees. Fission has several orders of magnitude less levelized material throughput per unit power than any other source of electricity. If the world got to the point where corporations could successfully scale up mass production of reactors, this could drop by a further order or two of magnitude.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Regulatory fees? Nonsense. You mean cost of work required by regulation? Tell me how we make NPPs safe without regulation, or how we find sufficiently omniscient Regulator Philosopher Kings who can tell the necessary from unnecessary regulations beforehand.