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Really? China has been building plants quite steadfastly. Fukushima seemed to have put the breaks on that but still, there are plants being built. Yet Western c
by tekkk 6y ago
Really? China has been building plants quite steadfastly. Fukushima seemed to have put the breaks on that but still, there are plants being built. Yet Western companies, like Areva, seemed to have completely lost their game in making the plants and nobody's willing to buy them from China or Russia. And sure, there's a high capital cost but putting the solar panels or wind turbines to match the capacity of one modern nuclear plant isn't exactly cheap either.
- jillesvangurp 6y agoBuying solar or wind gets you about 3x the capacity for the same price in about 6-12 months. It's a lot cheaper and a lot less risk. And that's excluding operational cost. If you want capacity on a budget in a hurry, wind is your best bet right now. Nuclear is for the opposite scenario where you have decades time and are not in a hurry to get capacity online and don't mind paying an order of magnitude more. The Chinese hedged their bets a few decades ago and wind + solar won there as well. China is breaking records in terms of growth of their renewable capacity and are a key technology supplier in that space and also a big part of why it got so cheap.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoYeah, it's this, combined with how cheap and effective gas turbines are, co2 be damned. It's really hard to argue for several billion dollars on a 10 year min delay until revenue vs renewables plus gas that builds out in under a year and is net positive ROI within a shockingly short time. Even though I'm generally pro nuclear, I've come to the conclusion that absent some innovation that changes the cost structure, it's an increasingly dead option. I was hopeful NuScale's approach would do that, but it's pretty clear now they're missing their needed numbers.