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> It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build. Hardly, coa

> It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build. Hardly, coal is much more expensive if you price in the externalities. We just pretend they don't exist for coal, and we staple anything that moves to nuclear. Coal kills 25 people per TWh generated, and the actuarial cost of a death is about $10M as used by the nuclear industry, not to mention the environmental costs. That means the all-in cost of coal is much much higher than the LCOE - about 16c/kWh according to the Government of Canada. [1] The 2019 US EIA LCOE for nuclear is about 7.7c/kWh. [2] Nuclear is cheaper than coal and costs around the same as solar/wind + storage - less, depending on the desired level of equivalence between the two. It has high up-front capital costs and a long payback period so the cost depends primarily on cost of capital. Fuel costs are $0.015/kWh to $0.00015/kWh in uranium. There are places that get lots of cheap, reliable no-carbon power from nuclear. For instance Ontario, at about $0.10CAD/kWh ($0.075USD/kWh), delivered. [3] [1] https://natural-resources.canada.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/energy/energy-resources/Why_Account_for_the_Full_Costs_of_Energy2.pdf https://natural-resources.canada.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/fi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla... [3] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-ontario.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

olddustytrail 3y ago
Can you give me an example of a nuclear power station that was built entirely without taxpayer subsidy by a private company, and manages to sell electricity to the grid cheaply and make a profit?
- arcticbull 3y ago
  > Can you give me an example of a nuclear power station that was built entirely without taxpayer subsidy by a private company, and manages to sell electricity to the grid cheaply and make a profit? Why is that a goal? Zero-carbon electricity is a goal, so that we don't all sink. Profit isn't. If ever there were a job for taxpayer dollars, IMO, this is it. "Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    You were just talking about how cheap nuclear was. That's a rapid backtrack.
    - arcticbull 3y ago
      Not at all. I quoted the US EIA in that 7.7c/kWh figure on the pre-subsidy LCOE of plants coming online in 2023. It was listed in my [2]. "In 2019 the US EIA revised the levelized cost of electricity from new advanced nuclear power plants going online in 2023 to be $0.0775/kWh before government subsidies, using a regulated industry 4.3% cost of capital (WACC - pre-tax 6.6%) over a 30-year cost recovery period" [old 2, sourced from new 1] The response to you was a separate opinion on the role of government in the energy sector. After all, we've put trillions of subsidies into fossil fuels the least we could do is put money into something that solves problems instead of creating new ones. I also said I don't care whether it's public or private funds that are used to construct it. Really nothing at that scale is built without subsidies, but the 7.7c/kWh rate was before subsidies. Did I miss something? I thought I answered your question with that figure and its origin, it sounds like exactly what you wanted to know. I don't know which precise power plants they included but it's probably in [1]. [edit] I guess it's weird that we're so stuck on this one specific technology. What's the un-subsidized cost of oil power when the price of oil is set by OPEC, externalities aren't factored in, and every time it goes up we unload the Strategic Oil Reserve? How do you price in drilling in ANWR? Coal, I mean, it's all unpriced externalities - death, environmental toll. Solar 90% of the panels come from China, how much does the PRC subsidize the plants and materials that go into making the panels for their own geopolitical goals? Rare earths for wind? They all come from China too. Lithium for storage? My question is sort of more "can anyone name any utility scale power project of any type that was built by a private entity without government subsidies of any sort? Why would they do that if they didn't have to? What does that even mean? And really, does that even matter?" [1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....

olddustytrail 3y ago

Can you give me an example of a nuclear power station that was built entirely without taxpayer subsidy by a private company, and manages to sell electricity to the grid cheaply and make a profit?

arcticbull 3y ago
> Can you give me an example of a nuclear power station that was built entirely without taxpayer subsidy by a private company, and manages to sell electricity to the grid cheaply and make a profit? Why is that a goal? Zero-carbon electricity is a goal, so that we don't all sink. Profit isn't. If ever there were a job for taxpayer dollars, IMO, this is it. "Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  You were just talking about how cheap nuclear was. That's a rapid backtrack.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    Not at all. I quoted the US EIA in that 7.7c/kWh figure on the pre-subsidy LCOE of plants coming online in 2023. It was listed in my [2]. "In 2019 the US EIA revised the levelized cost of electricity from new advanced nuclear power plants going online in 2023 to be $0.0775/kWh before government subsidies, using a regulated industry 4.3% cost of capital (WACC - pre-tax 6.6%) over a 30-year cost recovery period" [old 2, sourced from new 1] The response to you was a separate opinion on the role of government in the energy sector. After all, we've put trillions of subsidies into fossil fuels the least we could do is put money into something that solves problems instead of creating new ones. I also said I don't care whether it's public or private funds that are used to construct it. Really nothing at that scale is built without subsidies, but the 7.7c/kWh rate was before subsidies. Did I miss something? I thought I answered your question with that figure and its origin, it sounds like exactly what you wanted to know. I don't know which precise power plants they included but it's probably in [1]. [edit] I guess it's weird that we're so stuck on this one specific technology. What's the un-subsidized cost of oil power when the price of oil is set by OPEC, externalities aren't factored in, and every time it goes up we unload the Strategic Oil Reserve? How do you price in drilling in ANWR? Coal, I mean, it's all unpriced externalities - death, environmental toll. Solar 90% of the panels come from China, how much does the PRC subsidize the plants and materials that go into making the panels for their own geopolitical goals? Rare earths for wind? They all come from China too. Lithium for storage? My question is sort of more "can anyone name any utility scale power project of any type that was built by a private entity without government subsidies of any sort? Why would they do that if they didn't have to? What does that even mean? And really, does that even matter?" [1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....