3 ms·

Intermittent renewables paired with dispatchable batteries, pumped storage or syngas are cheaper than baseload nuclear. Nuclear is only "dispatchable" if you a

by pydry 2y ago

Intermittent renewables paired with dispatchable batteries, pumped storage or syngas are cheaper than baseload nuclear. Nuclear is only "dispatchable" if you are willing to burn epic, titanic, gargantuan stupid amounts of money. The only reason to build civilian nuclear power is to aid the provision of skills and an industrial supply chain for the nuclear-military industrial complex. Not the climate. Not cheap, clean power. DEFINITELY not dispatchability.

mpweiher 2y ago
All patently non true. Nuclear is cheap. According to the Court of Accounts in France in 2012, the whole nuclear industry had cost € 228 billion by that time and produced 11000 TWh of electricity. 2.07 Cents/kWh. Renewables are expensive, in particular if you want a 100% renewable grid. There is very little overlap between nuclear and civilian nuclear programs. Lots of countries operate power plants without nuclear weapons, and Israel for example has a military reactor yet does not use nuclear power commercially.
- pydry 2y ago
  Most of the cost of nuclear power is building the thing. France built most of theirs in the 1970s and is now sitting on a paid off asset. Of course, their plants are aging out in the meaning that those costs are spiking immensely. 2012 is the absolute sweet spot. The LCOE of nuclear power is ~5x solar and wind. As a client state of the US, Israel can rely upon and tap the US's nuclear supply chain and skills base. Its main "not nuclear but not far off it" rival Iran does have nuclear power though, precisely in order to be able to build a nuclear weapon.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    > The LCOE of nuclear power is ~5x solar and wind. Only if you do something insane like the infamous Lazard study that was used to come to this "conclusion": they took a single power plant and used that as "the cost of nuclear". That alone is enough to disqualify those numbers, but it gets worse. As their one single data point for nuclear, they didn't pick a random sample, but instead they hand-picked the most expensive commercial nuclear power plant in the world: Vogtle-3. That one screwup is their entire dataset for nuclear. And of course LCOE doesn't actually cover the full cost. When you look at system cost, the renewable get even worse, at least when you try to 100% renewable. As you approach 100% renewables, the costs rise almost asymptotically, "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets.7". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544222018035 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
    - pydry 2y ago
      >As their one single data point for nuclear, they didn't pick a random sample, but instead they hand-picked the most expensive commercial nuclear power plant in the world: Vogtle-3. Citation? As far as I know they come out with new numbers every year and they dont just base it on one nuclear power plant. >And of course LCOE doesn't actually cover the full cost. It doesnt count the cost of load following, but neither the LCOE for nuclear power. Gas plants are generally used in France to supplement nuclear power when it isn't sufficient to cover their power needs or when they are taken down. And of course, 5x cheaper = 2-3x cheaper when paired with storage under conservative assumptions. >As you approach 100% renewables, the costs rise almost asymptotically If you make some really bad assumptions about how storage will be handled (e.g. assuming you need 2 weeks of lithium ion batteries) sure.
      - mpweiher 2y ago
        [Lazard is BS based exclusively on Vogtle-3/4] >Citation? This is v16, April 2023, the most recent I could find, https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... Page 5, Footnote (3) "Given the limited public and/or observable data set available for new-build nuclear projects and the emerging range of new nuclear generation strategies, the LCOE presented herein represents Lazard’s LCOE v15.0 results adjusted for inflation (results are based on then-estimated costs of the Vogtle Plant and are U.S.-focused)" So v15 is the same. v14 has been withdrawn. What's really funny is that this footnote has always been there, in plain sight. Yet everyone quotes the Lazard figures as if they were gospel. And if they don't name the source, it's always Lazard anyway. > [LCOE] doesnt count the cost of load following, Maybe that as well, but more significantly, it doesn't count system costs, which rise dramatically as more and more of your power generation capacity becomes intermittent. I don't see exactly where the cutoff is, but most of the industrialized nations seem to betting it's around 80%. The number will obviously vary depending on how willing you are to take on risk. Germany is currently going all-in on that, so I guess the other countries can wait and see how that experiment works out.

by pydry 2y ago

mpweiher 2y ago

All patently non true. Nuclear is cheap. According to the Court of Accounts in France in 2012, the whole nuclear industry had cost € 228 billion by that time and produced 11000 TWh of electricity. 2.07 Cents/kWh. Renewables are expensive, in particular if you want a 100% renewable grid. There is very little overlap between nuclear and civilian nuclear programs. Lots of countries operate power plants without nuclear weapons, and Israel for example has a military reactor yet does not use nuclear power commercially.

pydry 2y ago
Most of the cost of nuclear power is building the thing. France built most of theirs in the 1970s and is now sitting on a paid off asset. Of course, their plants are aging out in the meaning that those costs are spiking immensely. 2012 is the absolute sweet spot. The LCOE of nuclear power is ~5x solar and wind. As a client state of the US, Israel can rely upon and tap the US's nuclear supply chain and skills base. Its main "not nuclear but not far off it" rival Iran does have nuclear power though, precisely in order to be able to build a nuclear weapon.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  > The LCOE of nuclear power is ~5x solar and wind. Only if you do something insane like the infamous Lazard study that was used to come to this "conclusion": they took a single power plant and used that as "the cost of nuclear". That alone is enough to disqualify those numbers, but it gets worse. As their one single data point for nuclear, they didn't pick a random sample, but instead they hand-picked the most expensive commercial nuclear power plant in the world: Vogtle-3. That one screwup is their entire dataset for nuclear. And of course LCOE doesn't actually cover the full cost. When you look at system cost, the renewable get even worse, at least when you try to 100% renewable. As you approach 100% renewables, the costs rise almost asymptotically, "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets.7". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544222018035 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
  - pydry 2y ago
    >As their one single data point for nuclear, they didn't pick a random sample, but instead they hand-picked the most expensive commercial nuclear power plant in the world: Vogtle-3. Citation? As far as I know they come out with new numbers every year and they dont just base it on one nuclear power plant. >And of course LCOE doesn't actually cover the full cost. It doesnt count the cost of load following, but neither the LCOE for nuclear power. Gas plants are generally used in France to supplement nuclear power when it isn't sufficient to cover their power needs or when they are taken down. And of course, 5x cheaper = 2-3x cheaper when paired with storage under conservative assumptions. >As you approach 100% renewables, the costs rise almost asymptotically If you make some really bad assumptions about how storage will be handled (e.g. assuming you need 2 weeks of lithium ion batteries) sure.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      [Lazard is BS based exclusively on Vogtle-3/4] >Citation? This is v16, April 2023, the most recent I could find, https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... Page 5, Footnote (3) "Given the limited public and/or observable data set available for new-build nuclear projects and the emerging range of new nuclear generation strategies, the LCOE presented herein represents Lazard’s LCOE v15.0 results adjusted for inflation (results are based on then-estimated costs of the Vogtle Plant and are U.S.-focused)" So v15 is the same. v14 has been withdrawn. What's really funny is that this footnote has always been there, in plain sight. Yet everyone quotes the Lazard figures as if they were gospel. And if they don't name the source, it's always Lazard anyway. > [LCOE] doesnt count the cost of load following, Maybe that as well, but more significantly, it doesn't count system costs, which rise dramatically as more and more of your power generation capacity becomes intermittent. I don't see exactly where the cutoff is, but most of the industrialized nations seem to betting it's around 80%. The number will obviously vary depending on how willing you are to take on risk. Germany is currently going all-in on that, so I guess the other countries can wait and see how that experiment works out.