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Price for nuclear includes the cost of all externalities typically, whereas fossil fuel power assumes CO2 can be dumped for free (or cheap CO2 credits). Quotin

Price for nuclear includes the cost of all externalities typically, whereas fossil fuel power assumes CO2 can be dumped for free (or cheap CO2 credits). Quoting solar costs in UAE as representative for general solar production is clearly wrong. What about countries with seasons and clouds? And it’s nice to have cheap energy when the sun doth shine and the wind doth blow, but it doesn’t always. Maybe we’ll develop battery technology that lets renewables take us to 100%, but we’re not there yet. And if you include even modest storage costs in renewables, you don’t end up with fractions of a penny per kWh anymore, either.

jillesvangurp 5y ago
Your assumption is that storage is expensive. Where expensive is unspecified. That's long term simply wrong and even short term, electricity companies are already some relatively expensive options to save money relative to using gas/coal powered peaker plants. Because it saves them money. So, never mind nuclear here: this is cheaper than gas powered plants already. But again, a simple question of expressing the requirement in $/kwh. It's a good measure of cost for batteries too. You pay for MWH of storage and GW delivery capacity. Lithium Ion hits the sweet spot of lots of capacity (GW) with modest amounts of storage (GWH). Other storage options store more but are less able to deliver quickly. There's a nice tradeoff here. Combining the different options gives you the best of both worlds. E.g. thermal mass is dirt cheap, because it can literally be made of dirt (well sand or rocks). Takes relatively long to charge but it can deliver power for weeks or months. Lithium ION is the opposite but it only lasts a few hours. The dirty little secret with base load is that a few hours is all that is needed mostly to deal with, again, the typically unspecified intermittency. It's a simple matter of how much GWH you need to mitigate against e.g. a few clouds or windless days. There are many solutions and it all boils down to $/kwh. I'd say long term fractions of a penny is exactly what this will be. And by long term I mean less than the lifetime of the nuclear plants that we're debating here that have yet to be planned and built; and possibly even their construction phase (this could take decades).

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Your assumption is that storage is expensive. Where expensive is unspecified. That's long term simply wrong and even short term, electricity companies are already some relatively expensive options to save money relative to using gas/coal powered peaker plants. Because it saves them money. So, never mind nuclear here: this is cheaper than gas powered plants already. But again, a simple question of expressing the requirement in $/kwh. It's a good measure of cost for batteries too. You pay for MWH of storage and GW delivery capacity. Lithium Ion hits the sweet spot of lots of capacity (GW) with modest amounts of storage (GWH). Other storage options store more but are less able to deliver quickly. There's a nice tradeoff here. Combining the different options gives you the best of both worlds. E.g. thermal mass is dirt cheap, because it can literally be made of dirt (well sand or rocks). Takes relatively long to charge but it can deliver power for weeks or months. Lithium ION is the opposite but it only lasts a few hours. The dirty little secret with base load is that a few hours is all that is needed mostly to deal with, again, the typically unspecified intermittency. It's a simple matter of how much GWH you need to mitigate against e.g. a few clouds or windless days. There are many solutions and it all boils down to $/kwh. I'd say long term fractions of a penny is exactly what this will be. And by long term I mean less than the lifetime of the nuclear plants that we're debating here that have yet to be planned and built; and possibly even their construction phase (this could take decades).