3 ms·
- Time. This one took over a decade and a half to build, and that's pretty normal - Cost. Literally billions of dollars, all upfront. This one was budgeted at
by crote 5y ago
- Time. This one took over a decade and a half to build, and that's pretty normal
- Cost. Literally billions of dollars, all upfront. This one was budgeted at $3B and ended up costing $10B+.
- Inflexibility. Almost all of the cost is in building one, so if you aren't running it basically 100% of the time at 100% capacity you are losing money.
When it comes to $/MWh, nuclear simply can't compete with fossil or renewable when demand is low. And you can't run it to pick up high demand because it gets even more expensive. The private market is simply not interested in them, unless they get a government guarantee that forces their production to be bought at a fixed price.
And there's of course the whole safety and waste argument, but I consider that to be secondary. All in all, nuclear is a could-have-been and mostly a side-effect of nuclear arms development. Neat technology, but there are way better options.
- fsflover 5y agoAll these arguments are moot, see the research: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/fukushima.html https://whatisnuclear.com/fukushima.html ...etc.
- freemint 5y agoSee this nuclear positive website that doesn't have an imprint (I can find on mobile). I wouldn't bcall it research either. Summary would probably be fair.
- fsflover 5y agoIt contains links to the research.
- Krasnol 5y agoYeah but only where it fits the narrative which in the question of cost for example leads to this: 1) If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better 2) Multiple hypothetical approaches to reduce nuclear costs are ongoing. No one knows for sure if any of them will work, or which one will work best 3) Factory-produced large reactors on floating platforms is a surprisingly intriguing idea to make reactors cheap or: 1) make everything else more expensive so we look better 2) let me consult the magic orb because I have nothing in my hands 3) I have a nice idea Meanwhile we have HERE just another example of hilariously expensive reactor. Actual facts. Waved away with theories like "we don't have the people with experience anymore" which leaves you with the thought: should inexperienced people build nuclear reactors at all?
- CRConrad 5y ago> See this nuclear positive website that doesn't have an imprint You mean an "Impressum"? That's just some weird thing that AFAIK (almost?) only German Web sites have, because they're required to by German law. The vast majority of sites on the World Wide Web get by just fine without it; it's not like that's some kind of minimum requirement for a reputable site.
- freemint 5y agoI want to see who is behind an advocacy group. If it is a letterbox address and if so what other letter boxes are at this address.
- CRConrad 5y agoMany, probably most, Web sites the world over have "About Us" or "Contact" pages. It's just that they're not universally called "Impressum" ("Imprint"); that's a Germany-only thing. So saying "a Web site without an imprint" as if that in itself somehow showed the site were somehow bad is, if it's about a non-German site, just stupid. HTH.
- threeseed 5y agoNo the arguments are still the same. We have to build lots of bigger, standardised reactors which will then reduce the cost due to experience and economies of scale. But then of course someone has to subsidise the tens/hundreds of billions in upfront investment to get to that point. Where as with renewables this was all done decades ago. And we are now at the point where it is orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear. And getting cheaper by the day.
- ncmncm 5y agoRenewable+storage is not an order of magnitude cheaper yet, thus far it is just "a lot" cheaper. But that is a predictable outcome, because nobody is predicting when those costs will bottom out. (They will have to, at some point, as incidental cost becomes an increasing fraction of the total. But we are not close to that point yet, except on residential rooftops.)