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> I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last

> I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage combination will be left very far behind in costs and efficiency.

colinmhayes 4y ago
South Korea has been constantly building nuclear for decades. The price has come down marginally, renewables are still far cheaper. Yes, the problem is largely political, I don't see a solution to that though.
- q1w2 4y ago
  This is like saying that the solution to climate change is largely political and you don't see that changing, so you don't think you need to be part of solving that. In fact, it's quite exactly like saying that, because nuclear is the fastest path to solving climate change.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    No, nukes are the slowest, and worst performing. Starting a nuke, we get no power out for a decade or more, and get much less power at the end than building renewables with the same money, which furthermore start displacing carbon immediately.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
      You are missing the point. With continued investment and improvements to technology nuclear will be much cheaper and faster to deploy. Compare wind/solar prices from the year 2000, and imagine we've spent the last 22 years giving nuclear the same level of attention and promotion as them.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Investment and improvement in nukes are falling, not rising. For reasons. There is no reasonable expectation for substantially better costs for nukes. Anywhere they have to compete with $0 opex renewables, they will run at well under 50% capacity, thus more than doubling their per-kWh cost, making them even less competitive.
        Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
        Renewables are far from $0 opex, and your statement about 'no reasonable expectation' are somewhat unbased.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Nukes are concrete, steel, pumps, steam turbines, liability subsidy, decommissioning subsidy. None of those get cheaper.
        Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
        Concrete and steel costs are negligible in the full costs of the nuclear plant. Complex machinery like turbines, reactors, etc have huge costs that fall of rapidly when you start mass producing them. If you make 2 plants/year the cost per item is X, if you make 100 plants/year the cost per item is X/10 or X/20. Huge part of costs goes into machinery that allows to build the thing. Once you have it, producing more parts becomes way easier.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Steam turbines are mature tech whose capex and opex are large and will not change. Likewise, high-pressure plumbing. Thus, costs are not falling, and new starts are negligible. Even China, which asserts they will build 220 of them, has only started 10. The rest will be cancelled as their price is undercut, unless politics forces the matter. China is not cost- or value- driven. (Cf. "Ghost cities".)
- DennisP 4y ago
  Renewables are far cheaper on the margins but not necessarily if you want them to provide all your power needs. Nuclear cost in South Korea, Japan, and India is generally under $3000/kW, according to this peer-reviewed study. See Figure 12: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... Now let's model overall grid costs, here: https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ Pick a country and "fetch wind and solar." By default the modeler doesn't include nuclear, so click "show advanced assumption settings." Check "dispatchable technology 2." This defaults to a nuclear cost of $6000/kW. Leave it there or try $3000. It assumes a nuclear plant lifespan of only 25 years; the average plant age in the US is 40 years and expected lifespan for many plants is 60 years, so set it to whatever you think is more realistic. The default also sets the discount rate for nuclear to twice what it has for everything else, so fix that. Run the model. With any reasonable assumptions, many countries end up with at least some nuclear on their grid, and some get their lowest grid cost with all nuclear. The US has some of the best wind and solar resources and relatively high nuclear costs (for now anyway), but the US situation doesn't generalize to the whole world.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    That's overnight cost, not included in model.energy. You also have to add in the financing cost during construction. If we are talking about Korean export NPPs, the Barakh NPP has four reactors for a total of 24.4B$, producing 5.6GW(e). THis is about $4B/GW. If I plug in 4000 per MW (its euros, not $, but they're not too different right now) for the capital cost of nuclear in model.energy, increase the NPP lifetime to 40 years, and use US 2011 weather data, nuclear optimizes to zero. I'll add that model.energy is looking at the best case for nuclear: providing baseload. Handling variability will incentivize storage, which means renewables will be at an increased advantage. Dispatchable demand of any kind, even slightly dispatchable (allowed to be off 10% of the time, say) also tilts the game toward renewables. The 25 year lifespan for nuclear there may reflect economic obsolescence rather than technical lifespan. Energy technology is evolving quickly now, so investors may simply refuse to credit the promise of such long lifespans. Even in the US, there have been existing NPPs that shut down because they could not recoup their operating costs (granted, much of that was due to gas and also renewable subsidies, but with solar having dropped in cost by nearly an order of magnitude in the last decade it's a bold move to assume it won't keep falling.)
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Renewables are only cheaper if you ignore the challenges of using an intermittent energy source. There's no real cost estimate for storing and re-distributing electricity, because there's no feasible plan to build an energy storage system at relevant scales. Attempting to build just one hour of storage via lithium ion batteries would case the cost of batteries to skyrocket because 1 hour of global electricity use equates to 2,500 GWh. And annual battery output is only around 300 GWh. Supply shock would immediately drive up the cost of batteries.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Annual battery production for EVs is estimated to grow from 160 gigawatt-hours (GWh) today to 6 600 GWh in 2030 – the equivalent of adding almost 20 gigafactories each year for the next ten years. So we're building those batteries anyway, because EVs are cheaper and better than ICE. It's just a bonus that they'll help roll out renewables too.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Estimates are not the same thing as real production figures. People estimated we'd have 10Ghz single threaded cpu performance by now back in the 90s. Batteries are already approaching supply shortages for input materials: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev-materials-lithium-cobalt-2021-07-01/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev... And as you correctly point out, most of these batteries are going to go to EVs rather than grid storage.
      - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
        Yes, no-one can predict the future, maybe we'll all be riding horses. But if, as basically everyone acklowledges, we'll all be driving EVs, then we will charge them from the grid. So they'll be better than grid storage, they'll be responsive demand (with grid storage you need to send the electricity back to the grid, which incurs another efficiency loss).
        4y ago
cycomanic 4y ago
> > I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. > Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage combination will be left very far behind in costs and efficiency. And your sources are? Nuclear power has received significantly more subsidies than solar and wind combined [1] (note you can find similar numbers for Europe) . The myth that somehow solar and wind received more subsidies is just propaganda. [1] https://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i51/Long-History-US-Energy-Subsidies.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i51/Long-History-US-Energy-S...
- cthor 4y ago
  GP refers to "last decades" but that source is from 2011 with data ending at 2009. Do you have data for the last decade?
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    There is no way that any renewable subsidies in the past decade could match the many decades prior. And, those subsidies are still running.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    Why would we not look at the total subsidies over time? Here's the spending for Europe until 2007 [1], how much subsidies would have to be given to renewables to make up that difference? Here is some more data on hidden subsidies for later dates going to fossils and nuclear [2], but is not a comprehensive comparison of subsidies. [1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much_money_for_dirty_energy.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much... [2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/greenpeace-study-throws-light-on-europes-hidden-energy-subsidies/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/greenpeace...

colinmhayes 4y ago

South Korea has been constantly building nuclear for decades. The price has come down marginally, renewables are still far cheaper. Yes, the problem is largely political, I don't see a solution to that though.

q1w2 4y ago
This is like saying that the solution to climate change is largely political and you don't see that changing, so you don't think you need to be part of solving that. In fact, it's quite exactly like saying that, because nuclear is the fastest path to solving climate change.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  No, nukes are the slowest, and worst performing. Starting a nuke, we get no power out for a decade or more, and get much less power at the end than building renewables with the same money, which furthermore start displacing carbon immediately.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    You are missing the point. With continued investment and improvements to technology nuclear will be much cheaper and faster to deploy. Compare wind/solar prices from the year 2000, and imagine we've spent the last 22 years giving nuclear the same level of attention and promotion as them.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Investment and improvement in nukes are falling, not rising. For reasons. There is no reasonable expectation for substantially better costs for nukes. Anywhere they have to compete with $0 opex renewables, they will run at well under 50% capacity, thus more than doubling their per-kWh cost, making them even less competitive.
      - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
        Renewables are far from $0 opex, and your statement about 'no reasonable expectation' are somewhat unbased.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Nukes are concrete, steel, pumps, steam turbines, liability subsidy, decommissioning subsidy. None of those get cheaper.
        Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
        Concrete and steel costs are negligible in the full costs of the nuclear plant. Complex machinery like turbines, reactors, etc have huge costs that fall of rapidly when you start mass producing them. If you make 2 plants/year the cost per item is X, if you make 100 plants/year the cost per item is X/10 or X/20. Huge part of costs goes into machinery that allows to build the thing. Once you have it, producing more parts becomes way easier.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Steam turbines are mature tech whose capex and opex are large and will not change. Likewise, high-pressure plumbing. Thus, costs are not falling, and new starts are negligible. Even China, which asserts they will build 220 of them, has only started 10. The rest will be cancelled as their price is undercut, unless politics forces the matter. China is not cost- or value- driven. (Cf. "Ghost cities".)
DennisP 4y ago
Renewables are far cheaper on the margins but not necessarily if you want them to provide all your power needs. Nuclear cost in South Korea, Japan, and India is generally under $3000/kW, according to this peer-reviewed study. See Figure 12: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... Now let's model overall grid costs, here: https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ Pick a country and "fetch wind and solar." By default the modeler doesn't include nuclear, so click "show advanced assumption settings." Check "dispatchable technology 2." This defaults to a nuclear cost of $6000/kW. Leave it there or try $3000. It assumes a nuclear plant lifespan of only 25 years; the average plant age in the US is 40 years and expected lifespan for many plants is 60 years, so set it to whatever you think is more realistic. The default also sets the discount rate for nuclear to twice what it has for everything else, so fix that. Run the model. With any reasonable assumptions, many countries end up with at least some nuclear on their grid, and some get their lowest grid cost with all nuclear. The US has some of the best wind and solar resources and relatively high nuclear costs (for now anyway), but the US situation doesn't generalize to the whole world.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  That's overnight cost, not included in model.energy. You also have to add in the financing cost during construction. If we are talking about Korean export NPPs, the Barakh NPP has four reactors for a total of 24.4B$, producing 5.6GW(e). THis is about $4B/GW. If I plug in 4000 per MW (its euros, not $, but they're not too different right now) for the capital cost of nuclear in model.energy, increase the NPP lifetime to 40 years, and use US 2011 weather data, nuclear optimizes to zero. I'll add that model.energy is looking at the best case for nuclear: providing baseload. Handling variability will incentivize storage, which means renewables will be at an increased advantage. Dispatchable demand of any kind, even slightly dispatchable (allowed to be off 10% of the time, say) also tilts the game toward renewables. The 25 year lifespan for nuclear there may reflect economic obsolescence rather than technical lifespan. Energy technology is evolving quickly now, so investors may simply refuse to credit the promise of such long lifespans. Even in the US, there have been existing NPPs that shut down because they could not recoup their operating costs (granted, much of that was due to gas and also renewable subsidies, but with solar having dropped in cost by nearly an order of magnitude in the last decade it's a bold move to assume it won't keep falling.)
Manuel_D 4y ago
Renewables are only cheaper if you ignore the challenges of using an intermittent energy source. There's no real cost estimate for storing and re-distributing electricity, because there's no feasible plan to build an energy storage system at relevant scales. Attempting to build just one hour of storage via lithium ion batteries would case the cost of batteries to skyrocket because 1 hour of global electricity use equates to 2,500 GWh. And annual battery output is only around 300 GWh. Supply shock would immediately drive up the cost of batteries.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Annual battery production for EVs is estimated to grow from 160 gigawatt-hours (GWh) today to 6 600 GWh in 2030 – the equivalent of adding almost 20 gigafactories each year for the next ten years. So we're building those batteries anyway, because EVs are cheaper and better than ICE. It's just a bonus that they'll help roll out renewables too.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Estimates are not the same thing as real production figures. People estimated we'd have 10Ghz single threaded cpu performance by now back in the 90s. Batteries are already approaching supply shortages for input materials: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev-materials-lithium-cobalt-2021-07-01/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev... And as you correctly point out, most of these batteries are going to go to EVs rather than grid storage.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Yes, no-one can predict the future, maybe we'll all be riding horses. But if, as basically everyone acklowledges, we'll all be driving EVs, then we will charge them from the grid. So they'll be better than grid storage, they'll be responsive demand (with grid storage you need to send the electricity back to the grid, which incurs another efficiency loss).
      - 4y ago

cycomanic 4y ago

> > I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. > Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremongering, and wind/solar/storage combination will be left very far behind in costs and efficiency. And your sources are? Nuclear power has received significantly more subsidies than solar and wind combined [1] (note you can find similar numbers for Europe) . The myth that somehow solar and wind received more subsidies is just propaganda. [1] https://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i51/Long-History-US-Energy-Subsidies.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i51/Long-History-US-Energy-S...

cthor 4y ago
GP refers to "last decades" but that source is from 2011 with data ending at 2009. Do you have data for the last decade?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  There is no way that any renewable subsidies in the past decade could match the many decades prior. And, those subsidies are still running.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Why would we not look at the total subsidies over time? Here's the spending for Europe until 2007 [1], how much subsidies would have to be given to renewables to make up that difference? Here is some more data on hidden subsidies for later dates going to fossils and nuclear [2], but is not a comprehensive comparison of subsidies. [1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much_money_for_dirty_energy.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much... [2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/greenpeace-study-throws-light-on-europes-hidden-energy-subsidies/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/greenpeace...