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Nice to see one in operation. Anyone know if they move the LCOE needle? For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar a

• AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > For baseload the gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear. Not if you price carbon. > For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping. That's cost per MWh generated not accounting for when you need it. Renewables need both short-term storage and long-term storage. If you generate with solar, what do you do at night? You'd need 12 hours of storage. Maybe that's economical in some contexts but it definitely raises the cost. Now what do you do if it's cloudy or still for a week, or a month? 720 hours of storage would be crazy expensive. You could use natural gas plants or similar, but then you have to pay the cost of maintaining natural gas plants and the associated infrastructure that you only use 2% of the time. 1GW nuclear plant vs 1GW (average) of solar + 12GWh of storage + 1GW natural gas plant + rarely used gas pipelines or 720GWh of on-site reserves, which costs more?
  • stubish 3y ago
    > Not if you price carbon. That is just adding an arbitrary cost, so you can get any result you like. You can also put an arbitrary cost on land usage to make nuclear cheaper that wind or solar. Just a government doing its job, putting its thumbs on the scale to get the result we want.
    • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      The result we want is "stop burning carbon" so yeah.