5 ms·
The difference is that there are many cheaper viable alternatives to the firm power that nuclear provides, including renewables+batteries ($60/MWh and dropping)
by danans 3y ago
The difference is that there are many cheaper viable alternatives to the firm power that nuclear provides, including renewables+batteries ($60/MWh and dropping) and enhanced geothermal ($80/MWh and dropping). Heck, even natural gas combined-cycle + carbon capture/storage is cheaper on an LCOE basis (~$60/MWh) than nuclear ($180/MWh and rising) [1]. It would be great if nuclear could be cost competitive for equivalently firm power, but its costs are increasing, not decreasing.
In contrast, the only real alternative to air travel for high speed transportation between Northern and Southern CA is high speed rail. The "Hyperloop" has been exposed (charitably) as a failure, and personal vehicle travel (even electrified) is not an equivalent to HSR in a state as big as CA.
None of that is to say that the CA HSR project has been well planned/executed or that the costs have been well estimated. But that doesn't obviate the need for high speed ground transport in the state.
1. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... (pages 2 and 31)
- mpweiher 3y agoOh good grief, not that Lazard "study" again. They took the cost to build Vogtle, which is one of the most or even the most expensive outlier in terms of time/cost overruns of all time, and decided to make that the baseline for "the cost of nuclear power". When the average time to build a nuclear reactor in the world has consistently been around 7.5 years. For the last 50 years, and also for the ones that came online in 2022, lest you think these were just the bygone good old days. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-construction-time https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
- adrianN 3y agoWhich new nuclear would you suggest instead? Hinkley C will cost about $160/MWh, right in the range given by Lazard.
- mpweiher 3y agoI would suggest we look at overall stats instead of isolated examples. Time to construct a nuclear plant takes on average 7.5 years, a number that hasn't really budged in the last 50 years. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-construction-time https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi... And since financing (i.e. interest) is the primary cost of nuclear (~50%), time is money. Hinkley and Flamanville are examples of the EPR, a brand new reactor type that is both at the start of its learning curve, always problematic, and also apparently a design that is particularly difficult to build. And both Europe and the US haven't really built any nuclear plants for quite a long time, so the know-how to build them is just not there. Oh, and the regulators sometimes change regulations after parts of the plants have been built so they have to tear down what they have built and start again. These are obviously all solvable problems, and mostly solvable by just building more. The problem is that we didn't build enough. Just build more.
- adrianN 3y agoConstruction time is misleading. It takes a few days to a couple of weeks to build a wind turbine, but at least in Germany a wind turbine construction project takes more than five years. So what better estimate would you suggest? What nuclear power plants where built in the last decade or so, for how much do they sell their power? How big will their decomissioning costs be per MWh?
- mpweiher 3y ago> Construction time is misleading. Please support your claim. We were talking about cost, and cost is directly proportional to construction time because financing (interest) is the primary cost of nuclear power plant construction.
- adrianN 3y agoIt’sa lot harder to find investors for a project that takes 20+ years from planning to first income than for a project that takes seven and a half years. I’m still waiting for better cost estimates than what Lazard gives.