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Nuclear's economy of scale is not at all "basically zero" even with traditional PWR reactors. Here's a graph of nuclear plant cost relative to construction year
by sir_bearington 6y ago
Nuclear's economy of scale is not at all "basically zero" even with traditional PWR reactors. Here's a graph of nuclear plant cost relative to construction year: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0301421516300106-gr2.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001... [1]
There's a big cluster of plants built for 1-2 billion per GW during the late 60s and early 70s. That's nuclear's economy of scale.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
- fastball 6y agoThat is definitely not what I would call "scale".
- sir_bearington 6y agoWhat do you mean? Over the course of a decade and a half we brought the share of nuclear generation to 20%. That's way more impressive than what intermittent sources have achieved.
- ben_w 6y agoPersistently near-exponential growth over multiple decades isn’t impressive to you? If this carries on, peak PV output alone will exceed 100% of current total power demand by 2030. (Naturally this means I think the growth seen since 1992 won’t last until 2030, but the point remains)
- sir_bearington 6y agoAssuming that exponential growth will be steady is a very risky assumption. Where's my single-core 100 GHz CPU? Moore's law says we should have that by now.
- ben_w 6y agoHence second paragraph
- ben_w 6y ago> https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0301421516300106-gr2.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001... Your link appears to show cost going up since ‘65, not down.
- sir_bearington 6y agoYes, cost goes up as the number of reactors being constructed goes down. Lower economy of scale.
- fastball 6y agoRight, and currently we are barely building any nuclear reactors, so the prices people are quoting as the $/MWh are the prices when you have zero economies of scale. Meanwhile the prices people are quoting for solar are with massive economies of scale at this point. We need economies of scale, and I'm not talking about 1970s scale, I'm talking about scale.
- sir_bearington 6y agoI'm not sure what you're talking about. Nuclear gets cheaper when it's built at scale. The price history for nuclear demonstrates this: it was considerably cheaper when many plants were built in parallel. It's expensive now, because it's being built at very small scales. 1970s scales work fine. It was built at a cost of 1-2 billion dollars per GW, which is very competitive versus solar and wind + storage.
- fastball 6y agoYes, that is my point. Not sure why you disagreed with me in your first comment that currently quoted prices for nuclear are with effectively no economies of scale. Maybe you misunderstood and thought I was saying that you can't have economies of scale with nuclear? If so, that is pretty much the opposite of my intended meaning.