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I did some research about that nuclear power plant. In 1985 dollars, the total construction cost was 5.6B USD. That is an astonishing amount of money. That i
by throwaway2037 6mo ago
I did some research about that nuclear power plant. In 1985 dollars, the total construction cost was 5.6B USD. That is an astonishing amount of money. That is at least 16B USD in 2026 money. If you also include decomissioning costs of about 4-5B USD... how the fuck does nuclear power make any economic sense? PV solar plus batteries: ALL THE WAY. To be clear, I am not anti-nuclear power by any means. I think it is a terrific way to power our countries, but the ship has sailed. PV solar has won, and now we can add batteries (and some wind) to get reliability.
- panja 6mo agoMaybe there is a discussion to be had about WHY it needs to make economic sense? Power is a natural monopoly, maybe it doesn't need to be a part of the economy?
- ineedasername 6mo agoAnd $ cost is a poor metric to chase when what you really care about includes a lot more-- exposure to the whims of geopolitical forces you can't foresee or control, which have both $ cost and more.
- dalyons 6mo agoI agree to an extent… but a state forcing a nuclear share and locking the populace into higher power prices for 30+ years is going to politically very unpopular. Short term economic concerns dominate today.
- macintux 6mo agoTough luck. That's the point of representative government: look out for the interests of the nation and sell it to your populace. If you can't sell it, be prepared to be voted out, but do the right thing.
- dalyons 6mo agoyou're talking about "should". Im talking about the world we live in. They are unfortunately not the same.
- jopsen 6mo agoHigher energy prices is something the population notices when they come. But when higher prices stick around industries close or never opened.
- dalyons 6mo agoYes, and pursing state sponsored nuclear means higher prices are guaranteed to stick around
- peterfirefly 6mo agoIt was not a good idea for Germany (and certain other parts of the EU) to be so dependent on Russian gas. It was also not a good idea to become dependent on LNG from Qatar or the US. Spain uses natural gas from Algeria (via Morocco), also not great. Italy also gets some from Algeria/Tunesia, still not great. Inside of Europe, we are far too dependent on Norway. Not because Norway is likely to turn on us (or we on them), but because the pipelines are relatively easy to disrupt. The transition from coal to gas gave us cleaner air (and less CO2) but it definitely also had costs, some of them in the form of many thousands of dead Ukrainians, some of them in the form of concessions to the US.
- appreciatorBus 6mo agoBecause if a thing is valued by thing-consumers at x and you set the price to <x, then you are incentivizing people to use more of the thing than they need, even to waste the thing. This thus requires more infra than is actually needed or wanted. This doesn't go away under socialism/communism/collectivism. If you set the price too low, you either have to build far more production capacity at public expense than needed, or you cope with regular blackouts.
- zajio1am 6mo agoPower distribution is a natural monopoly, power production is commodified/competitive business.
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- graeme 6mo agoIt doesn't generate power by burning carbon and is a grid replacement for carbon sources. Grid cost rise sharply on 100% solar. Taking china as an example they currently build solar, coal and nuclear. No country is building only solar/batteries. Further if we build more nuclear we'd be better at it and it would be cheaper.
- zekrioca 6mo agoYou are talking only about the operations of the nuclear, and ignoring all the high energy process required to mine and process uranium before it can be used as a fuel, and after as waste. But let’s pass this problem to the next generation, they will know what to do :)
- peterfirefly 6mo agoThat's still essentially zero relative to the amount of energy we can get out of the uranium.
- zekrioca 6mo agoYes, but at what cost? The sun is free. Nuclear means dependence.
- wortelefant 6mo agoYou underetimate the energy density of nuclear power. Yes. Uranium needs to be mined - slightly more 3xpensive if you extract it from sea water or recycle the fuel - but you need just one bathtub of fuel pellets to power a plant for 2 years. Solar and wind require more mining. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- zekrioca 6mo agoYes, but at what cost? The sun is free. Nuclear means dependence.
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- rayiner 6mo agoIt’s not a choice between nuclear and PV. It’s a choice between nuclear and the other things that provide base load: gas and coal.
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- dv_dt 6mo agoA requirement for base load is a fallacy promulgated by fossil fuel preservation lobbying
- projct 6mo agoThis is a confusing thing to say, can you explain?
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- gpm 6mo agoWhat you need - the only thing you need - is dispatchable power. That is power supply that can rise and fall to meet demand. That is not what baseload is. It's also not what wind/solar provide. What baseload is is electricity supply which is only economical if you use it all the time. Nuclear falls into this category because of its very high capital cost and low op-ex. If it's cheaper than dispatchable power (nuclear isn't) it's nice to have as much of it as the minimum demand that you see on the grid, to lower costs. If it's as expensive, or more expensive, than dispatchable power, that's fine, you just don't need it at all and can replace it entirely with dispatchable power. It's similar to wind and solar in this, which also aren't dispatchable (though there supply curve looks different than the constant supply curve which "base load" is used to mean). Except wind and solar actually are cheaper than dispatchable power so they make economic sense. The term is half marketing term and half a theory that constant supply non-dispatchable power would be significantly cheaper than dispatchable power so we should organize the grid around it. That theory didn't really pan out (apart from some places with non-storable hydro, and a few with geothermal).
- matkoniecz 6mo ago> PV solar plus batteries: ALL THE WAY. how much this would cost for the same guaranteed power output? would it be more or less than 21B? how it would look like in areas that have winter with snow?
- Moldoteck 6mo agodecomissioning is embedded in opex cost and fairly cheap www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte.html The complexity now is doing it without delays. China shows that it can be built very cheap and fast with good supply chain
- Ray20 6mo ago> China shows that it can be built very cheap and fast with good supply chain I mean, thank you, the USSR already showed this, no more is needed.
- Moldoteck 6mo agoit's not about ussr, what a nonsense. It's about having good supply chain. Like France had during messmer or Korea now (albeit far from china). China is building the same ap1000 copycat much faster and cheaper
- booi 6mo ago$5.6B actually sounds like a good deal. It outputs 2GW+ of power. While solar is definitely cheaper for 2GW of power, you still need batteries for when the sun is down. So you probably need approximately 30GWh of batteries to just replace this one power plant. The batteries alone would cost nearly $7B of grid-scale batteries that must be replaced every 20 years. Ignoring the fact that the nuclear plant already exists, this still seems like the right way to go mostly because it's impossible to build this nuclear power plant for $16B in the US anymore (or so it seems).
- throwaway2037 6mo ago> $5.6B actually sounds like a good deal. It outputs 2GW+ of power. I don't understand. Are you talking about 1985 dollars of 2026 dollars? After some research, I learned that thermal powerplants (coal/gas/oil) completed in 1985 cost about 0.8B to 1.2B USD per GW. 5.6B USD in 1985 for 2GW sounds like a terrible price -- at least twice the cost.
- connicpu 6mo agoNuclear is high capex low opex. It needs such a miniscule amount of fissile material per year, whereas purchasing coal is an eternal ongoing cost. Just to put some numbers on it, a 1GW conventional reactor consumes about 25 tonnes of enriched uranium per year, while a 1GW coal plant goes through 3.3 million tonnes of coal.
- Chico75 6mo agoPrice is not the only factor, paying double for energy that does not contribute to global warming and other health issues seems more reasonable.
- lucb1e 6mo ago> a terrible price -- at least twice the cost I'd double my electricity bill if that means saving somewhere between 3 and 9 million lives per year[1], better health for myself and the people around me, and that's completely ignoring climate change benefits where prevention both saves money and reduces deaths/displacement/poverty in the long term Either short-term solution is fine (nuclear or full renewable), but we're currently doing everything piecemeal. Plopping down a few big reactors in 20 years while people (in countries without salt planes, at least) are still trying to get permits for the remaining reasonable wind turbine and pumped hydro locations... it just feels like seven-mile boots for the energy transition If we can make seven-mile steps by plopping down wind/solar plus the required storage in gigawatt quantities, all the better, but that hasn't been happening. We'll run out of uranium eventually but, for now, such reactors buy time. Of course, this discussion has been happening for so long that the "it takes too long to build" naysayers will get their way soon, even at the slow pace we're currently going full renewable at. It's now or never, we need to commit to an option, no matter which one [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution#/media/File:How-many-people-die-from-air-pollution-1-1.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution#/media/File:How-...
- setopt 6mo agoIt makes economic sense because they require a large initial investment (CAPEX), but low cost per year to keep functioning for many decades (OPEX). In contrast to say wind or solar, which are smaller CAPEX but higher OPEX. So when you compare average cost per year over the complete expected lifetime of the plants, nuclear is good, but when you compare the up-front cost to build it, yeah it looks bad. Another thing is that nuclear in the US is far more costly than in e.g. France. The key is that France standardized a few reactor designs that they kept building again and again, which made both construction and maintenance cheaper over time. While in the US, each nuclear plant is a unicorn, which can perhaps result in better individual designs but ends up more expensive.
- olau 6mo agoSource please? The numbers I have seen of real opex paint a different picture. In general, nuclear plants close because of cost.
- laurencerowe 6mo agoGoogling I see numbers like $11/MWh for onshore wind [1] and $5-$10/MWh for solar [2] while nuclear is around $25/MWh [3]. [1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-wind-power-operating https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-wind-power-ope... [2] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-utility-scale-pv https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-utility-scale-... [3] https://www.nei.org/getContentAsset/47fa8caa-9b0d-4029-932c-07f902e82f4f/8d8ff8d6-b2ae-401b-a63c-f6b108e809d2/2024-Costs-in-Context-final.pdf https://www.nei.org/getContentAsset/47fa8caa-9b0d-4029-932c-...
- tialaramex 6mo agoAlso wow, for Solar the property taxes are OpEx. So if there's more sunlight because of good weather these "Operating expenses" decrease because they're based on taking fixed costs like property taxes and just dividing them by power output that's unrelated. I assume property taxes for a gas turbine are likewise OpEx but they just disappear in the noise of buying enormous amounts of methane as fuel.
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- Manuel_D 6mo agoIt's a large amount of money, but the plants have a long service life. And once a nuclear plant is built, it's operational costs are much lower than other forms of electricity generation. Simply saying "use PV plus batteries" really does not engage with the scale of storage required. The US uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day. The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. Annual global battery production is around 1,500 GWh, and only ~300 GWh of that production is used for grid storage. Even just provisioning enough batteries to satisfy the requirements for diurnal fluctuations of solar is far beyond the scale of what battery production can provide. Let alone fluctuations due to weather and seasonal output changes.
- selfmodruntime 6mo ago> how the fuck does nuclear power make any economic sense Because these plants run for 80+ years (some countries are now considering 100) while most renewables run for 25 at most. And also because `plus batteries` doesn't exist. The world battery capacity isn't enough to power California for a single week. Large scale battery technology isn't even in its infancy, it just doesn't exist. Don't forget, you've paid for the nuclear power plant once. You will pay for a new set of renewable capabilities every 25 years in <current-year + 25> dollars.
- dalyons 6mo ago25 year replacement for solar is a myth. [1] . They may degrade to ~80% but they keep on working and producing, so far it seems almost indefinitely. [1] https://www.ecoticias.com/en/goodbye-to-the-idea-that-solar-panels-die-after-25-years-a-new-study-says-the-warranty-does-not-mark-the-end-and-real-world-performance-can-last-for-decades/26007/#google_vignette https://www.ecoticias.com/en/goodbye-to-the-idea-that-solar-...
- selfmodruntime 6mo agoSo in essence they studied all of six (6) panels in a non-dusty region with a mild climate and without notable saline corrosion AND the article even mentions that most other studies are well in the 25-30 year range. Also the study clearly outlines that older silicone panels can't be compared against modern mass produced variants. Finally the study only examines modules that are still working, failed or removed systems are not in the dataset so you have heavy hidden distortion. The sample size is extremely limited. Six systems are not at all robust enough for global conclusions. This popsci article of yours doesn't hold up to scrutiny and neither it nor the study are enough to make sweeping generalizations like declaring the common 25 year lifecycle a myth.
- dalyons 6mo agoThe “common 25 year lifecycle” was never a drop dead expectation. That’s usually just what they’re warrantied for. It’s always been a common misunderstanding Edit: If you don’t trust my source , please show one of your own that proves they need to be replaced at 25yrs
- Nifty3929 6mo agoWow - nearly 20% of the California bullet train! Almost double the wildlife crossing!
- tim333 6mo agoIt no doubt made sense in 1985 - solar was rubbish then.