4 ms·

it's insanely costly _to build bring a plant online initially_ once you're up and running, it's cheap as dirt, just takes decades to pay off the initial invest

• jacquesm 5y ago
  10MW is insanely costly, regardless. That's so small that it isn't enough to justify even the overhead of running a plant. 1GW or so is the smallest size where it starts to make sense to design a nuclear plant that has a hope of delivering electricity at a price that matches the market (and even then: usually only by subtracting decommissioning and construction costs from the equation).
  • _dain_ 5y ago
    for the plants that are being decomissioned, those costs had already been paid off! that's the whole point; the ongoing costs for these plants were low, so it is the height of derangement to shut them down at the very moment germany needs reliable low-carbon locally-sourced energy. decomissioning them is monumentally expensive and amounts to civilization-scale vandalism.
• Schlaefer 5y ago
  It's dirt cheap because it's heavily subsidized by the public. For example no commercial entity in the world insures a nuclear power plant. These costs are completely hidden.