7 ms·

And an AP1000 reactor costs about $6.8 billion to build, and substantially higher operating costs. 68% of the power for 14% of the price seems like a pretty goo

• NegativeK 3y ago
  Comparing just on W/$ feels like it's missing a bunch of additional problems with the power generation, such as nuclear risk or needing more than solar to cover a full year's electrical demand.
  • lambda 3y ago
    Yeah, it's definitely a simplification. A lot of the nuclear risk is already included in that cost; we have fairly robust nuclear regulation and safety engineering these days. I have pretty high confidence in the safety of modern nuclear reactors, because there has been the engineering needed to ensure it, and there's fairly strong regulatory oversight. Of course, that all gets factored into the price tag, which is part of why the price tag for nuclear is so high. I'm just saying that I see a lot of discussion of more nuclear investment as the solution to decarbonization, but it's hard to make the economics work out; nuclear has gotten more expensive over time, while renewables have been dropping in price dramatically. I'm sure there is some room for nuclear in the market, but it's hard to see it providing more than a fraction of what renewables do, just due to the massive cost difference.
    • thehappypm 3y ago
      Idk. Plz bro, just 10 more years and the next design will finally solve all the probs. I don’t like solutions that don’t ever make real progress. Solar is getting cheaper in real-time, as are batteries. Nuclear is getting comparatively more expensive every year.
• photonbeam 3y ago
  You pay a higher price for power that works in darkness
  • lambda 3y ago
    Yeah, but even renewables + storage is likely to be cheaper than nuclear. Right now pumped hydro is one of the best for grid-scale storage, but with the the reduction in cost of batteries, it may be that grid-scale battery storage becomes viable not too far in the future. And remember, nuclear generally needs some form of storage or supplementation with on-demand generation (generally via fossil fuels). Nuclear reactors are very slow to increase or decrease their output; they're best providing a constant base power output, but to account for periodic changes in demand across the day, you need either grid-scale storage or to supplement them with things like gas turbines that can quickly spin up and down. Many of our existing grid-scale energy storage systems are there to support nuclear. For example: https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/12/02/northfield-mountain-hydroelectric-station https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/12/02/northfield-mountain-hyd... But if you're already going to be building the grid-scale storage, supplying it with renewable energy can be a lot cheaper than supplying it with nuclear. I'm not saying that nuclear will have no place in the energy grid as we decarbonize. But the economics are hard to justify as renewables and storage become cheaper.
    • adrianN 3y ago
      Reactors can load follow reasonably quickly, but the economics look terrible when the utilization drops, so you don’t want to load follow if you can about it. That’s also why nuclear and renewables don’t mix well.
      • bobthepanda 3y ago
        IIRC the French are more aggressive about using nuclear for load follow, which is also why a lot of their plants went down for maintenance, because it’s harsher on them as well.
  • tfourb 3y ago
    Like wind turbines? ;-)
• op00to 3y ago
  What about at night? Or when it’s cloudy?
  • lambda 3y ago
    Wind, hydro, and storage. Pumped hydro has already existed for a long time for helping nuclear with load following https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/12/02/northfield-mountain-hydroelectric-station https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/12/02/northfield-mountain-hyd... and as battery prices fall and production ramps up, even battery based storage is likely to become feasible for grid-scale storage.
    • dralley 3y ago
      Pumped hydro is very dependent on geography. Good luck doing pumped hydro in Kansas.
      • lambda 3y ago
        Sure. No solution is one size fits all. This particular solar installation happens to be in Colorado, very close to a lot of area where pumped hydro would be extremely cost effective. Somewhere like Kansas, wind power and battery based storage may be more effective. Here's a map of pumped storage hydro potential; note how dense the potential is throughout most of the Western US. https://maps.nrel.gov/psh https://maps.nrel.gov/psh
        • op00to 3y ago
          Pumped storage requires creating new lakes, destroying existing ecosystems.
          • HDThoreaun 3y ago
            And creating new ones. Why are the existing ones more valuable?
            • 3y ago
• chris222 3y ago
  It doesnt even seem like it will utilize that much more land either. How much land does a Nuclear site take with all of the zones around it?
  • lambda 3y ago
    It does require a lot more land; but we have a lot of land available. Nuclear will continue to be viable in denser areas, with lower solar resources, and when you want to get a lot of production closer to large population. There's a reason there are so many nuclear plants in the Northeast Corridor (Boston to Washington area), and so many fewer in the southwest, and I imagine that this trend will continue.
• Areading314 3y ago
  This doesnt take into account capacity factors. A "800MW" solar plant would be expected to actually product 10-25% of that after day/night and seasons are taken into account. Nuclear plants are more of a 90+% capacity factor.
  • lambda 3y ago
    Yes, it's an over-simplification. But this is an area of the country where capacity factors are in the 25-30% range: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39832 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39832 (the Ute Mountain Reservation is in the very Southwestern corner of Colorado, a little bit of New Mexico, and a little bit of Utah: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ute+Mountain+Reservation,+Ute+Mountain,+CO/@36.9860355,-110.0175149,7.38z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x873bd7158d6a46d3:0xdee57e72390f2dd0!8m2!3d37.1874945!4d-108.688151!16s%2Fm%2F025_s_k?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ute+Mountain+Reservation,+...) So even if you discount the capacity by a 25% capacity factor, and use the lower cost per reactor that I originally quoted, this is still cheaper than nuclear. And that's just the up-front investment. Operating costs are much cheaper for solar as well, the majority of the cost is in the initial build. Given that transmission isn't free, there are areas of the country where solar has a lower capacity factor than this, and solar and wind take more land, there are still cases where nuclear may be a better investment. I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of simple, economic reasons why solar and wind are growing at a much faster rate than nuclear; it's cheaper overall, it requires less up-front capital, etc. Nuclear is likely to fill niches for a long time, but investment in nuclear is not going to be the major way to decarbonize.
    • belorn 3y ago
      Building nuclear in a desert feel a bit like building hydropower dams in a desert. It does not really make sense and whatever the capacity factor is, being in a desert should increase it. The only real drawback to building solar power in a desert is sand storms. That means the capacity factor is less relevant but life span and repair costs is a different matter. It is a bit similar to ocean wind farms. The capacity naturally goes up, but the salt water and transportation (as well as increased risks to engineers) makes life span and repair a bit more of an issue (it should be noted that most ocean based wind farms tend to use shallows and nature reserves near large cities). But again, this project is built in a desert. The very definition of a place with consistent amount of sun. I hope the project works out.
• mytailorisrich 3y ago
  When comparing solar to nuclear we also need to include storage and dimensioning to get an equivalent 24/7 output. This might still make solar cheaper but difference will be smaller than headline numbers.
  • lambda 3y ago
    True. This happens to be in a region of the country that gets a 25-30% capacity factor on solar; in the northeast or northwest, you'd see much worse results. The basic point is that nuclear is just really, really expensive, and it has been getting more expensive over time, while solar and wind have been getting cheaper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
  • cesarb 3y ago
    > When comparing solar to nuclear we also need to include storage and dimensioning to get an equivalent 24/7 output. No, that is a red herring. That exact comparison would be only for greenfield projects disconnected from everything else. When connecting to an existing network, the existing (and future) generation on it is also important. For instance, if the network already has a high enough amount of gas generation, 10MW of solar or 10MW of nuclear would reduce the use of fossil fuel by the same amount; the same applies to reducing the use of water stored in hydroelectric dams.
• mytailorisrich 3y ago
  When comparing solar to nuclear we also need to include storage and dimensioning to get an equivalent guaranteed 24/7 output. This might still make solar cheaper but difference will be smaller than headline numbers (and you might retort that for nuclear we then need to include dismantling costs as well).
  • tfourb 3y ago
    In that case you'd also need to model how the cost changes if you combine solar with wind and other renewables. Wind and solar are to some extend complementary (there is statistically more wind when there is little sun and vice versa). You'd also need to account for distributing solar and wind across large geographic areas (i.e. the U.S. is so wide that there are a few hours difference between the sun setting on the east coast and on the west coast, somewhere wind is always blowing, etc.) There are probably studies that have done an analysis of this kind for the entire U.S. and calculated various scenarios. I know that these have been done for Germany and other European countries. A 100% renewable system usually comes out cheaper than including nuclear in the mix to any large extend (though Germany has no remaining old reactors which could get their lifetime enhanced relatively cheaply).
    • XorNot 3y ago
      Thats still building 2x the power generation (and you've got storage in there too). Those wind turbines aren't free. They have different maintenance costs too. You don't get to say "oh well it'll be 1GW of solar if we also build 1GW of wind" because that's not the project. This is all an excuse to talk around Solar's god awful capacity factors which take the shine off those $/MW headlines.
      • thehappypm 3y ago
        Yeah, but peaker plants exist. 2 GW of wind + solar will actually reduce 2 GW of peaker plant usage.
      • tfourb 3y ago
        All the proper "whole system" studies I know account for capacity factor and renewables come out ahead anyway.