3 ms·
While 23 years to build the thing are already bad, it now needs to operate continuously for at least some 30 years selling electricity at a price that is even t
by stefan_ 5y ago
While 23 years to build the thing are already bad, it now needs to operate continuously for at least some 30 years selling electricity at a price that is even today not competitive with renewables to make financial sense.
Essentially, building a nuclear power plant in 2022 means you are betting we won't have workable storage for renewables by 2052.
- zdragnar 5y agoRenewables are only competitive because you are not pricing in either storage or the cost of building and running fossil fuel plants as backups. Add that in and the equation looks substantially different.
- Gwypaas 5y agoYou can run power to gas and then burn the hydrogen and still come out ahead of nuclear plants today. They are completely irrelevant.
- natmaka 5y agoGermany's new gas (methane...) powerplants are retrofitable in order to burn hydrogen. https://global.kawasaki.com/news_211209-2e.pdf https://global.kawasaki.com/news_211209-2e.pdf
- RF_Savage 5y agoToday, what are the alternatives? If you add in batteries with todays technology the nuclear plants are competituve with solar or wind. So the alternative is coal or natural gas plants. Which then have their own drawbacks. Solutions that are built today need to use technology available today. Nuclear is fine, especially when you are not buying the first reactor of its kind from a vendor who has never fully built a plant on its own. Areva got a tad too greedy and cut out the middleman in the form of doing 100% of the work themselves instead of the usual 30% and contracting out the rest. They ware not helped by the fameously strict Finnish regulatory authority (STUK).