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Yes, cost goes up as the number of reactors being constructed goes down. Lower economy of scale.
by sir_bearington 6y ago
Yes, 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.