3 ms·

Check the link I posted, it has storage cost curves, too, Your second link has prices, not generation costs which is a much more difficult thing to compare. In

Check the link I posted, it has storage cost curves, too, Your second link has prices, not generation costs which is a much more difficult thing to compare. Inflation isn't specific to nuclear and regulations will continue to be part of nuclear. Over time, cheaper generation should win out - absent interventions - so nuclear isn't in a great place to start.

vlovich123 3y ago
> Your second link has prices, not generation costs which is a much more difficult thing to compare What is your distinction of "generation costs" vs prices? > Inflation isn't specific to nuclear and regulations will continue to be part of nuclear. Inflation is a bit relevant in that the average nuclear power plant age is 42. Solar installations by comparisons are a lot more recent. That means that inflation has operated on a longer time period than for solar. And again, I said that's a small part. The primary driver is we've divested from building nuclear because of overblown fears around safety of operation or security or whatever other fear you may associate with nuclear. As for "regulations will continue to be part of nuclear", that's why I'm saying. Part of investing in nuclear means organizing politically to remove the BS regulations and calling BS on things like security concerns which seem to be purely hypothetical. > Over time, cheaper generation should win out - absent interventions - so nuclear isn't in a great place to start. Huh? Like you're shifting the goal posts. It matters very little right now if the cost curve is better for solar. That's for 5-20 years from now and comparing it against a technology we've divested from is a false comparison. It's even more BS considering nuclear remains cheaper today even with effectively 0 investment (most funds have been going to maintenance only) and still remains cheaper than wind & solar. Nuclear can even outperform fossil fuels on price in some cases. But again. Cost to generate the energy is ultimately a very myopic view because fossil fuels externalize the true cost substantially and literally anything is better. It's estimated to cost $200 trillion dollars to zero out human carbon emissions by 2050 & if we fail it'll cost the US alone ~14.5 trillion dollars in the next 50 years (which again involves on externalizing and ignoring the impact of climate change since the biggest impact to the US is illegal immigration but the biggest direct financial impact is not to the US). Climate-related disasters already cost the world ~$650 billion dollars anually. By comparison the costs associated with building and cleaning up a nuclear power plant and cleaning it up seem quite trivial. Sure at some point solar may get cheaper in absolute dollars to. But it all doesn't matter because the thing we need to get to is negative carbon emissions. Oh and btw. Solar won't be able to solve that. The energy required to start pulling carbon out of the air en masse will require huge energy production that really only a nuclear power plant can scale sufficiently well to handle.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Prices is typically meant to indicate where the market clears (if there is a market, if there are subsidies etc. it gets messy), but that is different from the cost of production (for example, from supply and demand). If you believe regulations will be substantially reduced, fair enough, but is there legislation to that effect in the pipelines? You continue to claim nuclear is cheaper, but that is certainly not how it plays out in places like France (or on average) - Californian prices are not the right measure there, nor hypothetical costs of nuclear. You can allege that there will huge cost improvements on nuclear, but my point is that on other energy generation the costs are already down (without tinkering with discount factors because a lot went into operation with funding) and that technologies that are stagnant in costs tend to fail on that front. Changes to the technology as such (e.g., building different reactor types) could change that, but we don't know. And, of course, solar could generate huge amounts of energy by, for example, plastering some large desert with it. That said, no-one is seeing solar as the only solution: wind, tidal, hydro, eventually fusion to name few. Some fission will be in the mix, too, because it is around or being build.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Because solar advocates have made nuclear so toxic that many politicians completely avoid it because their base and people like you claim that it’s unsafe, or it’s too expensive, and we should invest in solar instead. But solar doesn’t need government investment anymore - it had enough subsidies to get the market started & it’s self-sufficient (or it’s not & it’s been 20 years of wasted subsidies). That doesn’t change the calculus that nuclear has not seem a similar investment and we need bold government intervention to do something similar. But nuclear reactors can’t be subsidized in the sneaky way that solar panels were (using rooftop solar to seed demand for lots of panels until they got cheap enough for industrial applications). And people seem to really be against the government spending large sums of money on R&D. Of the DOE’s 148B budget: ~25B on nuclear weapons (likely maintaining our military arsenal) ~5B on nuclear energy ~27B on renewables And nuclear requires waaaaaay more for R&D because it’s a more difficult energy source than solar which is scientifically more straightforward & more of an engineering problem that industry is well suited to solving. No you can’t just plaster solar cells in the middle of some desert because while HVDC has gotten cheaper, it’s still quite expensive and even harder than nuclear tech in some ways to cost reduce. You want to minimize the distance between where you produce energy and where you consume it.

vlovich123 3y ago

> Your second link has prices, not generation costs which is a much more difficult thing to compare What is your distinction of "generation costs" vs prices? > Inflation isn't specific to nuclear and regulations will continue to be part of nuclear. Inflation is a bit relevant in that the average nuclear power plant age is 42. Solar installations by comparisons are a lot more recent. That means that inflation has operated on a longer time period than for solar. And again, I said that's a small part. The primary driver is we've divested from building nuclear because of overblown fears around safety of operation or security or whatever other fear you may associate with nuclear. As for "regulations will continue to be part of nuclear", that's why I'm saying. Part of investing in nuclear means organizing politically to remove the BS regulations and calling BS on things like security concerns which seem to be purely hypothetical. > Over time, cheaper generation should win out - absent interventions - so nuclear isn't in a great place to start. Huh? Like you're shifting the goal posts. It matters very little right now if the cost curve is better for solar. That's for 5-20 years from now and comparing it against a technology we've divested from is a false comparison. It's even more BS considering nuclear remains cheaper today even with effectively 0 investment (most funds have been going to maintenance only) and still remains cheaper than wind & solar. Nuclear can even outperform fossil fuels on price in some cases. But again. Cost to generate the energy is ultimately a very myopic view because fossil fuels externalize the true cost substantially and literally anything is better. It's estimated to cost $200 trillion dollars to zero out human carbon emissions by 2050 & if we fail it'll cost the US alone ~14.5 trillion dollars in the next 50 years (which again involves on externalizing and ignoring the impact of climate change since the biggest impact to the US is illegal immigration but the biggest direct financial impact is not to the US). Climate-related disasters already cost the world ~$650 billion dollars anually. By comparison the costs associated with building and cleaning up a nuclear power plant and cleaning it up seem quite trivial. Sure at some point solar may get cheaper in absolute dollars to. But it all doesn't matter because the thing we need to get to is negative carbon emissions. Oh and btw. Solar won't be able to solve that. The energy required to start pulling carbon out of the air en masse will require huge energy production that really only a nuclear power plant can scale sufficiently well to handle.

RandomLensman 3y ago
Prices is typically meant to indicate where the market clears (if there is a market, if there are subsidies etc. it gets messy), but that is different from the cost of production (for example, from supply and demand). If you believe regulations will be substantially reduced, fair enough, but is there legislation to that effect in the pipelines? You continue to claim nuclear is cheaper, but that is certainly not how it plays out in places like France (or on average) - Californian prices are not the right measure there, nor hypothetical costs of nuclear. You can allege that there will huge cost improvements on nuclear, but my point is that on other energy generation the costs are already down (without tinkering with discount factors because a lot went into operation with funding) and that technologies that are stagnant in costs tend to fail on that front. Changes to the technology as such (e.g., building different reactor types) could change that, but we don't know. And, of course, solar could generate huge amounts of energy by, for example, plastering some large desert with it. That said, no-one is seeing solar as the only solution: wind, tidal, hydro, eventually fusion to name few. Some fission will be in the mix, too, because it is around or being build.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Because solar advocates have made nuclear so toxic that many politicians completely avoid it because their base and people like you claim that it’s unsafe, or it’s too expensive, and we should invest in solar instead. But solar doesn’t need government investment anymore - it had enough subsidies to get the market started & it’s self-sufficient (or it’s not & it’s been 20 years of wasted subsidies). That doesn’t change the calculus that nuclear has not seem a similar investment and we need bold government intervention to do something similar. But nuclear reactors can’t be subsidized in the sneaky way that solar panels were (using rooftop solar to seed demand for lots of panels until they got cheap enough for industrial applications). And people seem to really be against the government spending large sums of money on R&D. Of the DOE’s 148B budget: ~25B on nuclear weapons (likely maintaining our military arsenal) ~5B on nuclear energy ~27B on renewables And nuclear requires waaaaaay more for R&D because it’s a more difficult energy source than solar which is scientifically more straightforward & more of an engineering problem that industry is well suited to solving. No you can’t just plaster solar cells in the middle of some desert because while HVDC has gotten cheaper, it’s still quite expensive and even harder than nuclear tech in some ways to cost reduce. You want to minimize the distance between where you produce energy and where you consume it.