4 ms·

Nuclear has a far lower LCOE than renewables, when you mass produce them rather than do ad-hoc bespoke builds. For example, the Gen II+ plants built in the 90'

Nuclear has a far lower LCOE than renewables, when you mass produce them rather than do ad-hoc bespoke builds. For example, the Gen II+ plants built in the 90's had an (inflation adjusted) price of about $500 million per GWe. Whereas, the cost of the recent Vogtl build was $15 billion per GWe! Renewables proponents point to the cost of Vogtl (or similar) when they say that Nuclear has a higher cost than renewables, which is dishonest. The incremental cost of new reactors is far lower when you build many of them. The recent projects are mostly learning curve costs because of how long it's been. The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. It needs baseload power, and for solar that means adding batteries, and also downrating the nameplate capacity to it's wintertime capacity. These factors increase the real world cost of renewable power significantly. Don't get me wrong, I think we should be investing in renewable as well, but it's still a substantially more expensive way to generate power than a serious roll out of nuclear would be.

drysine 2y ago
>The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. It needs baseload power Why not? Just have the excess of computational capacity in many different regions and compute where the sun is shining bright now.
- scarab92 2y ago
  Because amortised capital cost > operational (power) cost It's cheaper to build a 1 GW baseload power plant to sit beside your existing GPUs, than to buy another 1 GW of GPUs to place on the other side of the planet. Also, latency. Also, a large scale roll out of nuclear would be cheaper than solar regardless. Most of the cost of recent nuclear builds is learning cost. We build them so infrequently that people retire or move on before the next one is built, so we have to learn how to build them from scratch, and develop the supply chains from scratch each time.
  - drysine 2y ago
    But is it cheaper? Building 1GW nuclear power unit costs about 4 billion dollars [0] [0] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Белорусская_АЭС#Стоимость_проекта https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Белорусская_АЭС#Стоимость_прое...
    - drysine 2y ago
      Ok, it's indeed much cheaper. Unless, of course, it's the Vogtle plant or similar Western-built one, which cost about 17 billions per GW and took 10 years to construct. In this case, the price is comparable if you factor in the cost of money.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  This is actually a very good and creative idea, but doesn't account for the cost of the computational capacity (specifically the chips). In the future, if chips become commoditized, your solution could work, but not in the current chip environment.
myrmidon 2y ago
> For example, the Gen II+ plants built in the 90's had an (inflation adjusted) price of about $500 million per GWe. Whereas, the cost of the recent Vogtl build was $15 billion per GWe! I fully agree that nuclear plants are cheaper in bulk (and when you can guarantee that there will be continuous future demand!). But your numbers are extremely unrealistic. US GDP has basically quintupled since 1990-- we'll never be able to build nuclear plants for so cheap again. Vogtle (and also current European and Korean reactors) give a much more realistic baseline for cost estimates than just inflation adjusting the price of old reactors that were built when everyone was poor (=> Baumol effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect). > It needs baseload power, and for solar that means adding batteries, and also downrating the nameplate capacity to it's wintertime capacity. These factors increase the real world cost of renewable power significantly. Yes, but this is somewhat disingenuous framing; no consumer needs a baseload provider. Providing baseload is a privilege you get to enjoy when your marginal cost is much lower than anyone elses all the time. This is increasingly less the case for e.g. coal power in China, but even for nuclear plants in countries like France (mainly because renewables). Nuclear power plants thus pair very poorly with renewables, because those eat into nuclear profits whenever they are available. It is highly doubtful to me that you could get nuclear plants price-competitive with renewables even if you committed massive amounts of money immediately, and the situation grows worse for nuclear basically every year. Companies like Neoen show that with renewables/batteries, you can just install the things at scale while turning a profit, right now. My conclusion is that any tax-funded investment into nuclear power is questionable/wasteful at best (and this also holds for fusion, but you can write that off as science, at least).

drysine 2y ago

>The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. It needs baseload power Why not? Just have the excess of computational capacity in many different regions and compute where the sun is shining bright now.

scarab92 2y ago
Because amortised capital cost > operational (power) cost It's cheaper to build a 1 GW baseload power plant to sit beside your existing GPUs, than to buy another 1 GW of GPUs to place on the other side of the planet. Also, latency. Also, a large scale roll out of nuclear would be cheaper than solar regardless. Most of the cost of recent nuclear builds is learning cost. We build them so infrequently that people retire or move on before the next one is built, so we have to learn how to build them from scratch, and develop the supply chains from scratch each time.
- drysine 2y ago
  But is it cheaper? Building 1GW nuclear power unit costs about 4 billion dollars [0] [0] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Белорусская_АЭС#Стоимость_проекта https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Белорусская_АЭС#Стоимость_прое...
  - drysine 2y ago
    Ok, it's indeed much cheaper. Unless, of course, it's the Vogtle plant or similar Western-built one, which cost about 17 billions per GW and took 10 years to construct. In this case, the price is comparable if you factor in the cost of money.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
This is actually a very good and creative idea, but doesn't account for the cost of the computational capacity (specifically the chips). In the future, if chips become commoditized, your solution could work, but not in the current chip environment.

myrmidon 2y ago

> For example, the Gen II+ plants built in the 90's had an (inflation adjusted) price of about $500 million per GWe. Whereas, the cost of the recent Vogtl build was $15 billion per GWe! I fully agree that nuclear plants are cheaper in bulk (and when you can guarantee that there will be continuous future demand!). But your numbers are extremely unrealistic. US GDP has basically quintupled since 1990-- we'll never be able to build nuclear plants for so cheap again. Vogtle (and also current European and Korean reactors) give a much more realistic baseline for cost estimates than just inflation adjusting the price of old reactors that were built when everyone was poor (=> Baumol effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect). > It needs baseload power, and for solar that means adding batteries, and also downrating the nameplate capacity to it's wintertime capacity. These factors increase the real world cost of renewable power significantly. Yes, but this is somewhat disingenuous framing; no consumer needs a baseload provider. Providing baseload is a privilege you get to enjoy when your marginal cost is much lower than anyone elses all the time. This is increasingly less the case for e.g. coal power in China, but even for nuclear plants in countries like France (mainly because renewables). Nuclear power plants thus pair very poorly with renewables, because those eat into nuclear profits whenever they are available. It is highly doubtful to me that you could get nuclear plants price-competitive with renewables even if you committed massive amounts of money immediately, and the situation grows worse for nuclear basically every year. Companies like Neoen show that with renewables/batteries, you can just install the things at scale while turning a profit, right now. My conclusion is that any tax-funded investment into nuclear power is questionable/wasteful at best (and this also holds for fusion, but you can write that off as science, at least).