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There are several problems with fission (probably fusion too) as I understand it: 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in th

There are several problems with fission (probably fusion too) as I understand it: 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable. 2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait. 3. Decommissioning is expensive and a long way in the future. Is that cost built into the cost per MW? How can we be sure the money will be protected, and will be enough to cover it? 4. Spent fuel. The project you mentioned isn’t complete yet, but even then it’s a huge liability to leave for future generations to manage indefinitely. Meanwhile, renewables don’t have these problems and are available immediately. We should be building huge factories to produce wind and solar en masse. Source for the figures: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSKBN1W909J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSK...

jamesrom 4y ago
> Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait. This is a fallacy in two ways: 1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale. 2. The opportunity cost of not starting nuclear projects now will surely be worse than attempting 100% renewables. The point is that we can invest in both.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > > Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait. > This is a fallacy in two ways: > 1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale. More than half of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any large scale power plant (goal, gas...). The opportunity for reducing cost through economies of scales is low. Economies of scales work for things build in factories, much less so for construction projects. That is true in general, not just for power plants. > 2. The opportunity cost of not starting nuclear projects now will surely be worse than attempting 100% renewables. The point is that we can invest in both. Why? It's the other way around, the actual cost of building nuclear instead of much cheaper and faster renewables causes an opportunity cost, because we can replace fossil fuels much faster building up renewables.
  - ciphol 4y ago
    > More than half of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any large scale power plant (goal, gas...). Presumably that's the cheap half of the nuclear plant, because coal/gas plants are pretty cheap to build.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Coal plants are actually not that cheap to build. Combined cycle gas plants are cheap because 2/3rds of the power output is from the combustion turbine, which needs no heat exchangers. The steam bottoming part needs two: the boiler running off the exhaust from the combustion turbine, and the condenser to transfer heat to the environment.
  - ascar 4y ago
    > It's the other way around, the actual cost of building nuclear instead of much cheaper and faster renewables causes an opportunity cost That's under the assumption the available money, hardware and labor of ramping up solar and building nuclear plants directly competes with each other. That's a pretty strong assumption and I highly doubt there is a strong enough link between any of those three for your argument to have significant impact. E.g. We should be able to drive rapid solar expansion with government money and subsidies while incentivcing big energy carriers to build nuclear plants.
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      No that's under the assumption that we have limited funding.
      - ascar 4y ago
        That's a non-answer to my comment. Limited funding and a available money is the same thing. The point is the funding isn't so limited that we couldn't do both as we run in other bottlenecks.
bratbag 4y ago
Cost factor isn't as relevant as you think, as this is an apple's to oranges comparison. Renewables are too unreliable to act as baseline generation for a country. In the UK last year for example we had very little wind, so we had to ramp up our gas power output to make up for our shortages in renewables. We burned through much of our gas reserves before the Ukraine war started, because of Renewable power unreliability. Fission is the replacement for that baseline role that hydrocarbons currently fill, not the unpredictable-but-clean role that renewables fill. The ideal future has both, with renewables producing as much power as possible and fission running on low capacity and ready to ramp up when renewables fall short.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Just repeating the baseline myth does not make it true. Nuclear does not compete with gas it competes with coal and renewables. It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers. Moreover nuclear is not the beacon of reliability, Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly). Guess who was picking up the shortfall... German renewables and gas. Finally, cost is absolutely the main measure: if the cost of nuclear is 3x wind/solar (and the cost of solar is falling exponentially) and you want to replace fossil fuels as quickly as possible the obvious way is to build renewables, you can overbuild 300% at the same cost. At that point you're close to being able to run your grid if you are sufficiently geographically distributed (even without batteries). Moreover in 10 years when your nuclear plant is finished building the price differential is like >5x due to the cost decreases.
  - toxik 4y ago
    Calling it a myth doesn’t make it a myth. Power companies have been saying exactly this for years: they need PLANNABLE power generation. Building 3x solar or wind plants means 3x volatility.
    - 4y ago
formerly_proven 4y ago
> 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable. You can't directly compare cost per generating capacity, because nuclear, gas, coal etc. are available according to schedule, while most renewables aren't. Adding storage around renewables to make them schedulable raises costs.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Raises cost, but it is still way below cost of nukes.
- dfjklseldklk 4y ago
  This is oft repeated, but once the cost of renewables is low enough it would have (usually un-modelled) second order effects on end users which may make this less important. Some industries literally can't turn off production without damaging plant, but if some can then where energy cost is ~30% of fossil/nuclear than it might make sense to over-provision industrial capacity and only run it when the sun is shining.
- bakuninsbart 4y ago
  You can however price this in, and I doubt it accounts for 110$/MW. Furthermore, nuclear energy specifically only runs according to schedule. Reducing or raising output is expensive and slow.
  - belorn 4y ago
    For simplicity, lets use the cost of for every $ that a KG of green hydrogen costs, this mean that the cost per MW will be 30x of that. So if green hydrogen cost $1/KG you the cost in term of MW will be $30. The current cost of green hydrogen is somewhere between $2 -> $12. That is the production cost. The market price for green hydrogen sits around $4-$20, since there are multiple industries that demands hydrogen. For 110 to break even the hydrogen need to cost $3.5/kg, and in order to really displace natural gas, it is estimated that it need to reach $1/kg. Now I noticed that those $150/MW is not a range, so I took a look. Projected nuclear LCOE costs for plants built 2020-2025 places nuclear around $27/MW to $147/MW depending on financing and country (source: OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s (NEA's) calculation). Russia has the lowest cost and Slovakia or Japan (depending on financing method) has the highest. So in summery, it can definitively cost more than $110/MW to produce viable green storage solution, especially in northern countries where low duration lithium batteries is not a working solution for long winter periods with low wind production and the sun is only up for a max few hours per day. Nuclear can also be much cheaper depending on where it is built and how it is financed.
troorl 4y ago
> Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Do you count in all the subsidies the renewables get from governments, including the production of the solar panels/wind mills, land ownership, utilities and all kinds of tax cuts and preferential treatment? In my country billionaires own massive solar farms and make tons of money at the expense of everyone else.
- legulere 4y ago
  Generally speaking the costs in those comparisons are usually without subsidies. However some subsidies are difficult to disentangle from the costs. For instance it’s difficult for nuclear power plants to get insurance, so often states take that responsibility. Can you tell where you are from?
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Oil has way more subsidies than renewables. By far I'm rooting for billionaires to own more and more solar farms please. Let them buy more newspapers and "think-tanks" Because I'd really like to live on that world where oil has no subsidies, occupies no land and it gets magically transported throught the country
rmbyrro 4y ago
> Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable. Doesn't make it cheaper, only hides the cost. Subsidies are many times perversive. Prices are communicating something. When Gov messes with it, people and organizations tend to make bad decisions for themselves, society, environment or everything.
- 7952 4y ago
  The UK government system is more nuanced than that. The operator bids for a strike price and communicate something with the bid they offer. That price is then locked in. We will never pay less than that, but we will never pay more either. In successive rounds the strike price is lower. They are setting the price up front to give stability. And that makes sense when most of the cost is upfront. Otherwise renewable prices would just track oil prices.
nixass 4y ago
> 2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait You've been saying that for last 20 years. It's pathetic by this point. Best time to start doing things (anything) was 30 years ago. Second best time is now

jamesrom 4y ago

> Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait. This is a fallacy in two ways: 1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale. 2. The opportunity cost of not starting nuclear projects now will surely be worse than attempting 100% renewables. The point is that we can invest in both.

cycomanic 4y ago
> > Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait. > This is a fallacy in two ways: > 1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale. More than half of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any large scale power plant (goal, gas...). The opportunity for reducing cost through economies of scales is low. Economies of scales work for things build in factories, much less so for construction projects. That is true in general, not just for power plants. > 2. The opportunity cost of not starting nuclear projects now will surely be worse than attempting 100% renewables. The point is that we can invest in both. Why? It's the other way around, the actual cost of building nuclear instead of much cheaper and faster renewables causes an opportunity cost, because we can replace fossil fuels much faster building up renewables.
- ciphol 4y ago
  > More than half of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any large scale power plant (goal, gas...). Presumably that's the cheap half of the nuclear plant, because coal/gas plants are pretty cheap to build.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Coal plants are actually not that cheap to build. Combined cycle gas plants are cheap because 2/3rds of the power output is from the combustion turbine, which needs no heat exchangers. The steam bottoming part needs two: the boiler running off the exhaust from the combustion turbine, and the condenser to transfer heat to the environment.
- ascar 4y ago
  > It's the other way around, the actual cost of building nuclear instead of much cheaper and faster renewables causes an opportunity cost That's under the assumption the available money, hardware and labor of ramping up solar and building nuclear plants directly competes with each other. That's a pretty strong assumption and I highly doubt there is a strong enough link between any of those three for your argument to have significant impact. E.g. We should be able to drive rapid solar expansion with government money and subsidies while incentivcing big energy carriers to build nuclear plants.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    No that's under the assumption that we have limited funding.
    - ascar 4y ago
      That's a non-answer to my comment. Limited funding and a available money is the same thing. The point is the funding isn't so limited that we couldn't do both as we run in other bottlenecks.

bratbag 4y ago

Cost factor isn't as relevant as you think, as this is an apple's to oranges comparison. Renewables are too unreliable to act as baseline generation for a country. In the UK last year for example we had very little wind, so we had to ramp up our gas power output to make up for our shortages in renewables. We burned through much of our gas reserves before the Ukraine war started, because of Renewable power unreliability. Fission is the replacement for that baseline role that hydrocarbons currently fill, not the unpredictable-but-clean role that renewables fill. The ideal future has both, with renewables producing as much power as possible and fission running on low capacity and ready to ramp up when renewables fall short.

cycomanic 4y ago
Just repeating the baseline myth does not make it true. Nuclear does not compete with gas it competes with coal and renewables. It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers. Moreover nuclear is not the beacon of reliability, Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly). Guess who was picking up the shortfall... German renewables and gas. Finally, cost is absolutely the main measure: if the cost of nuclear is 3x wind/solar (and the cost of solar is falling exponentially) and you want to replace fossil fuels as quickly as possible the obvious way is to build renewables, you can overbuild 300% at the same cost. At that point you're close to being able to run your grid if you are sufficiently geographically distributed (even without batteries). Moreover in 10 years when your nuclear plant is finished building the price differential is like >5x due to the cost decreases.
- toxik 4y ago
  Calling it a myth doesn’t make it a myth. Power companies have been saying exactly this for years: they need PLANNABLE power generation. Building 3x solar or wind plants means 3x volatility.
  - 4y ago

formerly_proven 4y ago

> 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable. You can't directly compare cost per generating capacity, because nuclear, gas, coal etc. are available according to schedule, while most renewables aren't. Adding storage around renewables to make them schedulable raises costs.

ncmncm 4y ago
Raises cost, but it is still way below cost of nukes.
dfjklseldklk 4y ago
This is oft repeated, but once the cost of renewables is low enough it would have (usually un-modelled) second order effects on end users which may make this less important. Some industries literally can't turn off production without damaging plant, but if some can then where energy cost is ~30% of fossil/nuclear than it might make sense to over-provision industrial capacity and only run it when the sun is shining.
bakuninsbart 4y ago
You can however price this in, and I doubt it accounts for 110$/MW. Furthermore, nuclear energy specifically only runs according to schedule. Reducing or raising output is expensive and slow.
- belorn 4y ago
  For simplicity, lets use the cost of for every $ that a KG of green hydrogen costs, this mean that the cost per MW will be 30x of that. So if green hydrogen cost $1/KG you the cost in term of MW will be $30. The current cost of green hydrogen is somewhere between $2 -> $12. That is the production cost. The market price for green hydrogen sits around $4-$20, since there are multiple industries that demands hydrogen. For 110 to break even the hydrogen need to cost $3.5/kg, and in order to really displace natural gas, it is estimated that it need to reach $1/kg. Now I noticed that those $150/MW is not a range, so I took a look. Projected nuclear LCOE costs for plants built 2020-2025 places nuclear around $27/MW to $147/MW depending on financing and country (source: OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s (NEA's) calculation). Russia has the lowest cost and Slovakia or Japan (depending on financing method) has the highest. So in summery, it can definitively cost more than $110/MW to produce viable green storage solution, especially in northern countries where low duration lithium batteries is not a working solution for long winter periods with low wind production and the sun is only up for a max few hours per day. Nuclear can also be much cheaper depending on where it is built and how it is financed.

troorl 4y ago

> Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Do you count in all the subsidies the renewables get from governments, including the production of the solar panels/wind mills, land ownership, utilities and all kinds of tax cuts and preferential treatment? In my country billionaires own massive solar farms and make tons of money at the expense of everyone else.

legulere 4y ago
Generally speaking the costs in those comparisons are usually without subsidies. However some subsidies are difficult to disentangle from the costs. For instance it’s difficult for nuclear power plants to get insurance, so often states take that responsibility. Can you tell where you are from?
raverbashing 4y ago
Oil has way more subsidies than renewables. By far I'm rooting for billionaires to own more and more solar farms please. Let them buy more newspapers and "think-tanks" Because I'd really like to live on that world where oil has no subsidies, occupies no land and it gets magically transported throught the country

rmbyrro 4y ago

> Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable. Doesn't make it cheaper, only hides the cost. Subsidies are many times perversive. Prices are communicating something. When Gov messes with it, people and organizations tend to make bad decisions for themselves, society, environment or everything.

7952 4y ago
The UK government system is more nuanced than that. The operator bids for a strike price and communicate something with the bid they offer. That price is then locked in. We will never pay less than that, but we will never pay more either. In successive rounds the strike price is lower. They are setting the price up front to give stability. And that makes sense when most of the cost is upfront. Otherwise renewable prices would just track oil prices.

nixass 4y ago

> 2. Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait You've been saying that for last 20 years. It's pathetic by this point. Best time to start doing things (anything) was 30 years ago. Second best time is now