3 ms·

China and India are building nuclear power plants pretty cheaply.

• pfdietz 3y ago
  China's nuclear plans are consistently not being met. India's nuclear output is quite small, and is already exceeded by a factor of 2 by their PV output.
  • jupp0r 3y ago
    My point was that both are finishing several plants per year, with reasonable cost ($3k per kW compared to $8-12k per kW in the US) and within reasonable time frames of 5-10 years of construction. This is competitive with renewables if you take the cost of storage into account.
    • pfdietz 3y ago
      They are not competitive with renewables, which is why China and India are building so much more renewable capacity than they are nuclear capacity. Ultimately, storage will be needed. But at that point, nuclear becomes even less desirable in those countries, because renewables are creating long periods where there's no demand to soak up the nuclear plants' output. You might object that this is a renewable problem, but I'd retort it's a nuclear problem -- they can't save much money by curtailing output, and this inflexibility is a blemish on nuclear. With reasonable projections of the cost of storage, PV will end up much cheaper than nuclear in India, btw. India's a great place for PV; they could go full renewable with just PV and batteries, not needing wind or hydrogen.
      • megaman821 3y ago
        Even with nuclear, ultimately storage will be needed. Throttling production of such an expensive piece of capital with low operational costs doesn't make much sense, it better to build to the average power needed and smooth out the peaks and valleys with a battery.
        • pfdietz 3y ago
          But if you have a battery, it makes more sense to fill it with low LCOE renewables rather than nuclear. So adding a battery cannot provide much revenue to the nuclear plant.
          • megaman821 3y ago
            I agree, I just think it is funny when you have a large majority of your power coming from renewables or nuclear, you face similar looking problems. You are faced with the choice of artificially lowering a nuclear plants capacity factor by throttling down, or using batteries to keep the capacity factor high. The price of grid batteries in the future will basically fully determine what power generation technologies we use.
    • philipkglass 3y ago
      China completes multiple reactors per year, but India does not. Here are the power reactor statistics for both countries from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Power Reactor Information System (sort by date of first grid connection): India has connected 3 reactors to the grid since 2013-01-01: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=IN https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.... China has connected 39 in the same time period: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
• ViewTrick1002 3y ago
  China is barely building nuclear anymore. China added more wind and solar the past nine months than all of its nuclear reactors under construction will provide. Yes, that includes capacity factor. https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718 https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718