3 ms·
> 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
by 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).