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> Does it though, Yes. See France, for example. > or does it just distract from real solutions and prop up coal and gas for another decade? Nuclear is the re

> Does it though, Yes. See France, for example. > or does it just distract from real solutions and prop up coal and gas for another decade? Nuclear is the real solution. The past 40 years of people alleging nuclear is too late and there are magical other solutions that should be employed instead is what has been propping up fossil fuels for decades.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
The Hinkley C is a real project which is under construction in the west right now. It's prpjected to take 19 years since approval and 10 years since construction began and cost 26 billion pounds for a nameplate 3200MW capacity. Taking the ratio between nameplate and net for its predecessor of about 62%, we can expect around 11.8 pounds per watt. This does not include operating costs or the decommissioning when the taxpayer gets left holding the ball, or any of the other hidden costs such as the externalised costs of security and publicly funded administration overhead. Nuclear has a zero or even negative economic learning rate so there is no reason to believe any additional plants will be cheaper. You personally can go buy a 1kW net system for less money per watt right now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxUgX3MLWYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxUgX3MLWYI It will pay itself off before any nuclear project started now even opens. By that time batteries will be a third of the price and solar panels will have halved. Wind is anti-correlated with sun and you can purchase a 10kW wind turbine right now for around 6000 pounds. Put 5kW of nameplate wind capacity into a copy of the same storage system and you have another 2kW average with lower price and even less downtime. A hydrogen electrolyzer you can purchase right now costs $1000/kW, a 1kW fuel cell is around $4000 and low pressure hydrogen tanks are on the order of $20/kWh. These make weeks or even months of storage possible. Nuclear is so expensive that even the fudged numbers of a gigawatt scale project with outcomes over a decade away do not compare favourably to end user retail prices of a system you can install in a month. Any argument about the fission plant running longer are invalid, because the system outlined only has to make 9p/kWh (the same 9p that Hinkley C is being guaranteed via taxpayer funds even when electricity predictably falls below 4p/kwh wholesale) to pay itself back with enough left over for replacement in the two decades before it opens. So to answer my question for you: money spent on a nuclear project will have a net increase in CO2 before 2040 because it will require concrete and steel and produce no power. The same money spent on renewables and storage will produce net-zero carbon energy for at least 10 years of that timeframe. It is only when we have enough renewables that the gas backup stays off even when there is 10% of the average solar or wind that we should consider diverting funds to nuclear.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

The Hinkley C is a real project which is under construction in the west right now. It's prpjected to take 19 years since approval and 10 years since construction began and cost 26 billion pounds for a nameplate 3200MW capacity. Taking the ratio between nameplate and net for its predecessor of about 62%, we can expect around 11.8 pounds per watt. This does not include operating costs or the decommissioning when the taxpayer gets left holding the ball, or any of the other hidden costs such as the externalised costs of security and publicly funded administration overhead. Nuclear has a zero or even negative economic learning rate so there is no reason to believe any additional plants will be cheaper. You personally can go buy a 1kW net system for less money per watt right now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxUgX3MLWYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxUgX3MLWYI It will pay itself off before any nuclear project started now even opens. By that time batteries will be a third of the price and solar panels will have halved. Wind is anti-correlated with sun and you can purchase a 10kW wind turbine right now for around 6000 pounds. Put 5kW of nameplate wind capacity into a copy of the same storage system and you have another 2kW average with lower price and even less downtime. A hydrogen electrolyzer you can purchase right now costs $1000/kW, a 1kW fuel cell is around $4000 and low pressure hydrogen tanks are on the order of $20/kWh. These make weeks or even months of storage possible. Nuclear is so expensive that even the fudged numbers of a gigawatt scale project with outcomes over a decade away do not compare favourably to end user retail prices of a system you can install in a month. Any argument about the fission plant running longer are invalid, because the system outlined only has to make 9p/kWh (the same 9p that Hinkley C is being guaranteed via taxpayer funds even when electricity predictably falls below 4p/kwh wholesale) to pay itself back with enough left over for replacement in the two decades before it opens. So to answer my question for you: money spent on a nuclear project will have a net increase in CO2 before 2040 because it will require concrete and steel and produce no power. The same money spent on renewables and storage will produce net-zero carbon energy for at least 10 years of that timeframe. It is only when we have enough renewables that the gas backup stays off even when there is 10% of the average solar or wind that we should consider diverting funds to nuclear.