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But also in terms of cost? Nuclear power plants are not exactly cheap.
by adrianN 5y ago
But also in terms of cost? Nuclear power plants are not exactly cheap.
- pfdietz 5y agoA NPP is an order of magnitude more expensive than a combined cycle power plant of the same power output. So even if electricity prices are high now because of gas constraints, that doesn't mean a NPP would have been a good idea. Europe should perhaps have diversified their gas suppliers, with more LNG.
- me_me_me 5y agoIts more expensive to build because you know... a nuclear meltdown is a thing to avoid.
- pfdietz 5y agoAnd also because combustion turbines are a seriously nice technology. Heat exchangers are expensive. A NPP transmits heat across many fluid/solid interfaces: fuel rods to coolant, primary to second coolant heat exchanger, secondary loop to steam generators, and steam to cooling water in the condenser after the turbines. A simple cycle combustion turbine avoids all that. Even a combined cycle power plant puts much less heat through its steam bottoming cycle for a given power output.
- pfdietz 5y agoCorrection: I added an extra loop there. Silly -- the primary loop drives the steam generators. I may have been thinking of MSRs, which have a sterile salt loop between the steam generator and the fuel bearing salt.
- retzkek 5y agoAlso worth noting that Boiling Water Reactors (about half the current fleet) eliminate the steam generators and secondary loop, at the cost of increased nuclear and mechanical complexity in the reactor.
- cbmuser 5y agoRussia’s brand-new Novovoronezh II NPP with 2x1200 MW costs $4 billion to build. Germany is paying 24 billion Euros of renewable energy subsidies through its electricity prices - every year. Nuclear can be cheap if you don’t mess it up.
- Scoundreller 5y agoLNG gets expensive because it’s a globalize market. Cheaper to use pipelined Russian gas and try not to think too hard about the repercussions.
- pfdietz 5y agoThe price of NG in Europe is now well above the price of LNG.
- foepys 5y agoConsidering what the US and Australia did to France a few days ago, the EU might not want to depend on LNG from the US. With Russia they know with whom they are dealing. France and Germany are the EU's most influential countries and the US is continuing to meddle in EU matters even after Trump left. From the EU point of view there is next to no change since Biden took office and now even France is questioning NATO.
- pfdietz 5y agoLNG is a global market now, so one is not locked into LNG from just one supplier. It used to be that LNG required long term contracts, but there's enough sloshing around now that the market is more like oil.
- jabl 5y ago> Europe should perhaps have diversified their gas suppliers, with more LNG. If climate change is supposed to be an existential threat, we shouldn't be doing major investments into fossil infrastructure. Anyway, if we spend all that money to build LNG infrastructure, like terminals, ships, and having contracts with suppliers etc. just for the few and far between situations where the price of LNG drops below Russian gas, the price/kWh is going to be pretty high as well due to all that capital sitting idle most of the time. A bit like this, per se sensible, argument someone in this thread made that keeping a nuclear plant around just to balance wind/solar output is pretty expensive.
- PeterisP 5y agoOne of considerations for LNG is that it's not purely an economic concern as from a country perspective energy independence might be considered just as important as climate change (in the short term) and it's worth paying some premium to secure it. Just as Europe has farming subsidy policies that essentially result in Europe paying a premium for food over what would be a "global market price" (importing more food from e.g. Africa and exporting less food), mostly in order to ensure long-term food supply independence.
- jabl 5y agoI fully agree. Energy, particularly gas, is certainly seen as geopolitics in the Kremlin. That being said, I think the focus should be on (massively!) building out wind/solar/nuclear/transmission/storage, allowing Europe to tackle both climate change and dependency on a not-entirely friendly Russia at the same time.
- cbmuser 5y agoNuclear doesn’t need any backup plants or grid extension. The capital costs are high, but the electricity production is almost a 100% planable and reliable. I mean, Germany’s electricity situation is basically proving you wrong. We have the highest electricity prices, worldwide.
- mem0r1 5y ago(Some) Advantages of nuclear power in comparison to 'renewables': - EROI (energy return on energy invested) - ratio of land required / energy produced - much lower flow of materials (rare earth etc.) - constant and very high power output (no storage needed)
- adrianN 5y agoWell yes, but I'm a bit skeptical that nuclear is also cheaper.
- ben_w 5y agoIIRC nuclear is cheaper than the batteries, if that’s the limit, but land use of PV is a bit of a red herring: it can scale up or down, fit in spaces other things don’t. Rooftops, waste land, mounted on top of road noise barriers… There’s no reason that I’m aware of not to cover the grounds of nuclear power plants in PV.
- bcrosby95 5y agoSome companies are buying up old farmland in California's central valley and turning them into solar farms. Seems like a great transition of land use, especially if water is going to be a continual problem over here.
- ben_w 5y agoHuh, I’d have assumed they’d do that in Nevada rather than in Central Valley. But yeah, it can go anywhere that’s otherwise unused.
- Enginerrrd 5y agoCentral Valley is a lot closer to large population centers.
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
- bcrosby95 5y agoAt this point nuclear is the most expensive per mw. And the vast majority of that expense is upfront. So almost no one wants to invest in these things because they're incredibly risky.
- brabel 5y ago> they're incredibly risky. Nuclear is risky?? I've heard the opposite, nuclear power plants tend to be extremely safe. You probably think it's risky because of 2 or 3 large scale accidents in the last 50 years or so. While those have a large impact, I don't think I would consider nuclear "extremely risky" just because of those.
- bcrosby95 5y agoI mean financially risky.
- cbmuser 5y agoActually, it’s the opposite. It’s absolutely low risk because the electricity production can be sold years in advance if you want. Nuclear electricity has the highest of all capacity factors and is therefore almost 100% planable, so there is virtually zero risk.
- omgwtfbyobbq 5y agoVery little in electricity generation has virtually zero risk. Nuclear tends to have a higher capacity factor than most other baseload generators, but it also has unplanned outages. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45176 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45176 The biggest risk I've seen is that unanticipated events (including financial events) will completely shutter a unit, like San Onofre and Indian Point 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station#Shutdown,_2012_and_closure,_2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...
- jhgb 5y ago
- google234123 5y agoIt was cheaper 30 years ago when we stopped building…