5 ms·

> The costs of solar, wind and batteries are dropping exponentially but the costs of nuclear are not improving. So where can I see a cost comparison that fact

> The costs of solar, wind and batteries are dropping exponentially but the costs of nuclear are not improving. So where can I see a cost comparison that factors in the cost of storage? I've probably seen 20 people say this exact same thing and have never been able to find an actual cost breakdown that supports it.

readams 4y ago
Nobody knows what storage would cost because there is no technology that currently exists to make storage possible. Battery technology helps a lot to stabilize the grid over seconds to minutes or even hours, but the kind of storage that would be needed to be 100% solar and wind just doesn't exist. Pumped hydro is great but there are not many places where it is feasible. So the reality of the current situation is that solar and wind are cheap now since when they are a relatively small percentage of the power and you can fall back on gas and coal storage isn't really needed. But in the future the costs of solar and wind will skyrocket since you'll need to overbuild the capacity by a huge amount, plus build lots of expensive transmission infrastructure, to work around the fact that storage technology at the appropriate scale doesn't exist yet.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Storage is trivial. It will be built after there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from.
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    Ask anyone with an off-grid solar installation how trivial it is. Hint: The storage costs more than the power. Considerably more last time I looked at the numbers.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Off-grid power has no choice but batteries. Utilities have others.
      - LorenPechtel 4y ago
        Not without emitting carbon.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        You wish.
tshaddox 4y ago
You obviously need to factor in the cost of storage if you want to abruptly replace all electricity generation with solar and wind, but I’m also interested in the question “how much non-renewable power generation can we replace with solar and wind before we even have to start worrying about storage?”
- nl 4y ago
  This paper does much of the modelling for that: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9 (although it's from 2019 so renewnables costs have dropped significantly). Basically if you have 5% of electricity generation from non-renewable sources (eg gas fired peaker plants) then electricity costs fall and you only need storage at $150/kWh (which is available now).
- ncmncm 4y ago
  You only build storage after you have renewable generating capacity to charge it from. By the time it is needed, its cost will have fallen to a trivial amount.
nl 4y ago
> So where can I see a cost comparison that factors in the cost of storage? There are plenty around. This is probably the best: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... (make sure you scroll down to "Levelized Cost of Storage")
cycomanic 4y ago
The cost comparisons also don't include the cost of waste storage for nuclear. But it is also irrelevant, nuclear also needs storage or overcapacity. France is currently only operating to 60% capacity due to heat and maintance (although I saw some other news that they took all their plants offline for maintanance which I found hard to believe) so you need to overbuild of get storage for nuclear as well. On top of that nuclear cost estimates are based on running the reactors 100% 24/7 with minimal downtime. If you actually want to make them load following to eliminate gas peakers or storage, the cost for nuclear would go up significantly, because they are so strongly CAPEX determined.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  And, when they are mothballed early, unable to compete even on OPEx alone, even neglecting CAPEX, the cost of every kWh ever delivered will skyrocket as the CAPEX then has to be amortized over the total finally produced.
kriro 4y ago
I have also not been able to find relyable datapoints on the total insurance cost of a nuclear fascility. I'd love to talk to someone in the insurance industry how they calculate this because that'll probably be a decent indicator of the risk involved.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  It is not possible to insure a nuclear power plant. The Fukushima cleanup is currently estimated to be somewhere in the range of $200B - $1T. [1] For US the insurance is capped at $450M per site and $131M per reactor because that's what been decided that the market can bear. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup [2]: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    Fukushima is an exercise in politics. They've already killed several hundred people in the name of politics, I haven't seen data on what the cleanup entails but I suspect it's as stupid as the evacuation. (Hint: The expected death toll from staying put was zero.) The problem is nuke plants generally produce no hazard and rarely make a mess--and we go insane about said mess. We don't do much of anything about the much greater deaths from the other sources because they're more distributed and thus not noticed. Instead of obsessing about maximum safety and cleanup etc, what we should be doing is saying nuke plants must have a better safety profile than their closest competitor--note that that is natural gas which currently has 100x the death rate. (Wind and solar are intermittent, until you count the storage systems you don't have a number at all. Hydro is capacity-limited. Biomass is limited.) And I think the chart in the article is allocating the Fukushima evacuation deaths to nuclear rather than to the politicians.

readams 4y ago

Nobody knows what storage would cost because there is no technology that currently exists to make storage possible. Battery technology helps a lot to stabilize the grid over seconds to minutes or even hours, but the kind of storage that would be needed to be 100% solar and wind just doesn't exist. Pumped hydro is great but there are not many places where it is feasible. So the reality of the current situation is that solar and wind are cheap now since when they are a relatively small percentage of the power and you can fall back on gas and coal storage isn't really needed. But in the future the costs of solar and wind will skyrocket since you'll need to overbuild the capacity by a huge amount, plus build lots of expensive transmission infrastructure, to work around the fact that storage technology at the appropriate scale doesn't exist yet.

ncmncm 4y ago
Storage is trivial. It will be built after there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  Ask anyone with an off-grid solar installation how trivial it is. Hint: The storage costs more than the power. Considerably more last time I looked at the numbers.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Off-grid power has no choice but batteries. Utilities have others.
    - LorenPechtel 4y ago
      Not without emitting carbon.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        You wish.

tshaddox 4y ago

You obviously need to factor in the cost of storage if you want to abruptly replace all electricity generation with solar and wind, but I’m also interested in the question “how much non-renewable power generation can we replace with solar and wind before we even have to start worrying about storage?”

nl 4y ago
This paper does much of the modelling for that: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9 (although it's from 2019 so renewnables costs have dropped significantly). Basically if you have 5% of electricity generation from non-renewable sources (eg gas fired peaker plants) then electricity costs fall and you only need storage at $150/kWh (which is available now).
ncmncm 4y ago
You only build storage after you have renewable generating capacity to charge it from. By the time it is needed, its cost will have fallen to a trivial amount.

nl 4y ago

> So where can I see a cost comparison that factors in the cost of storage? There are plenty around. This is probably the best: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... (make sure you scroll down to "Levelized Cost of Storage")

cycomanic 4y ago

The cost comparisons also don't include the cost of waste storage for nuclear. But it is also irrelevant, nuclear also needs storage or overcapacity. France is currently only operating to 60% capacity due to heat and maintance (although I saw some other news that they took all their plants offline for maintanance which I found hard to believe) so you need to overbuild of get storage for nuclear as well. On top of that nuclear cost estimates are based on running the reactors 100% 24/7 with minimal downtime. If you actually want to make them load following to eliminate gas peakers or storage, the cost for nuclear would go up significantly, because they are so strongly CAPEX determined.

ncmncm 4y ago
And, when they are mothballed early, unable to compete even on OPEx alone, even neglecting CAPEX, the cost of every kWh ever delivered will skyrocket as the CAPEX then has to be amortized over the total finally produced.

kriro 4y ago

I have also not been able to find relyable datapoints on the total insurance cost of a nuclear fascility. I'd love to talk to someone in the insurance industry how they calculate this because that'll probably be a decent indicator of the risk involved.

Gwypaas 4y ago
It is not possible to insure a nuclear power plant. The Fukushima cleanup is currently estimated to be somewhere in the range of $200B - $1T. [1] For US the insurance is capped at $450M per site and $131M per reactor because that's what been decided that the market can bear. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup [2]: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  Fukushima is an exercise in politics. They've already killed several hundred people in the name of politics, I haven't seen data on what the cleanup entails but I suspect it's as stupid as the evacuation. (Hint: The expected death toll from staying put was zero.) The problem is nuke plants generally produce no hazard and rarely make a mess--and we go insane about said mess. We don't do much of anything about the much greater deaths from the other sources because they're more distributed and thus not noticed. Instead of obsessing about maximum safety and cleanup etc, what we should be doing is saying nuke plants must have a better safety profile than their closest competitor--note that that is natural gas which currently has 100x the death rate. (Wind and solar are intermittent, until you count the storage systems you don't have a number at all. Hydro is capacity-limited. Biomass is limited.) And I think the chart in the article is allocating the Fukushima evacuation deaths to nuclear rather than to the politicians.