Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already at highest possible capacity factors (running 90% of the time).

If they get undercut by renewables most of the time, there is simply no way they can stay competitive.

Nuclear peaker plants are not ever gonna be a thing, because that makes no sense economically: High capex is the last thing you want for that usecase, and it implies that the economics for your plant have to stay decent for the next 30 years. Meanwhile batteries, solar and wind are still getting cheaper every year right now. This is the worst bet you could ever make as an investor.

> nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.

This argument does not help nuclear power if the equivalent number of gas plants is still cheaper than a single nuclear reactor (and built much faster).

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throw0101a 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already at highest possible capacity factors (running 90% of the time).

In Ontario, Canada they are the third-cheapest (after hydro, and nat/methane gas); see Table 2:

* https://oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20241018...

In previous years they have often been second-cheapest (after hydro): their 'ranking' depends on methane gas commodity prices.

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natmaka 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Nuclear can be apparently cheap (its TCO is difficult to establish because gov funding, hot waste potentially breaking havoc in a distant future...) but never is when load-following, because load-following reduces the load factor, and a low load factor bumps up production costs.

Moreover nuclear's aptitude to load-following is vastly over-stated because it has too much inertia (even hot). Even France (shock-full of reactors) always needs to produce approximately 10% ( https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+... ) of its juice thanks to fossil fuel, for a non-negligible part ensuring load-following.

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throw0101a 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Moreover nuclear's aptitude to load-following is vastly over-stated because it has too much inertia (even hot).

There is load-following thermally and load-following electrically. Newer nuclear designs allow for the steam to be diverted and quenched so they don't reach the generators.

Of course this is inefficient, but as you can see in the following link:

* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply

the Ontario nuclear plants basically run at full-tilt 24/7 to provide base load.

Hydro-electric is also supplying a bunch of base load, so if more nuclear can be built so that it takes up more of that hydro is doing, hydro can then be used in a more variable fashion (so perhaps (nat/methane) gas can be reduced and we have fewer GHGs released).

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ViewTrick1002 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Which is a quirk of hindering renewable deployment.

All over Europe nuclear reactors are throttled down or even shut down for days/weeks because renewables lead to too low prices for the reactors to even cover wear and tear and fuel costs.

Given that renewables are the cheapest energy source in human history this will happen in every grid that is based on a free market principle.

In the monopolized markets the distributed aspects of renewables will mean that rooftop solar and storage enables home owners to largely disconnect from the grid if the monopoly starts to force new built nuclear power costs on the ratepayers.

In other words: Nuclear power is fucked unless it can either get the marginal cost to zero like a solar panel, i.e. impossible or get CAPEX low enough to act like a fossil gas peaker which again seems near impossible given the past 70 years of nuclear powers history and commercialization.

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throw0101a 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Given that renewables are the cheapest energy source in human history

Not according to the energy contracts in Ontario as shown in the OEB report linked above.

	▲	ViewTrick1002 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, the OEB report is for a paid off fleet. Sure, some investment in recent years but not even close to a new build. The cost for the Darlington SMR is somewhere in the 25-35 cents/kWh range with the calculation assuming large learning effects to subsequent reactors and that the entire project goes on time and on budget. Does that sound cheap to you?

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natmaka 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Indeed!

Experts (International Energy Agency, McKinsey, etc.) are clear: renewables will produce the majority of electricity by 2050.

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/tripling-renewable-power-ca...

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/energy-and-materials/our...

This is inevitable (no other possibility is realistic), and this applies to France, where RTE (EDF's subsidiary that manages the electricity grid) has emphasized that 100% nuclear power is out of the question, and that more than 60% nuclear power would be utopian.

This trend is already clearly visible and welcomed by investors.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...

The cost of producing renewable electricity is increasingly lower than that of nuclear power.

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

During their operation, they do not consume fuel, produce waste, or expose people to a major accident, and are therefore and will be preferred.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-09/european-...

The surplus electricity sometimes produced by renewables will be leveraged by increasing storage capacity (electric vehicles, hydro pumped storage, etc.) as well as green hydrogen. It will gradually replace nuclear electricity, which is supposed to compensate for their variability, especially since the latter cannot adjust its production quickly and frequently enough ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41796580 ).

All of this will reduce the nuclear load factor and therefore increase its production cost (it is only profitable with a high load factor), with strong feedback (the higher the load factor, the more likely it will be).

This will increasingly favor the deployment of a system based primarily on renewables, meaning that nuclear electricity will become less and less useful and more and more expensive, making its fate (and therefore the profitability of the heavy investments required for its infrastructure) easy to predict.

A renewable-nuclear mix will doom the latter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg

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natmaka 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, there are two types of load-following: "bump up the power", or "lower it". This also applies do renewables: not producing (many wind turbines are equipped with a braking system) or wasting an excess of power isn't as challenging as quickly producing more power, then less, then more... fine-tuning and for extended periods of time.

Yes, running at full-tilt 24/7 is way easier for a nuclear reactor than doing the load-following game (on every account: total cost, maintenance, risk...). They are built for it!

Hydro: yes, to an extent because load-following hydro is mainly done by pumped-storage, many dams are of the "run-of-the-river" type and cannot always load-follow: if there is no incoming (upstream) water they cannot produce any power.

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pfdietz 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The figures you give don't appear to reflect the fully loaded cost of providing power from new nuclear power plants. It looks to me like they just reflect operating costs on assets that are already paid for, or mostly paid for.

	▲	throw0101a 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It looks to me like they just reflect operating costs on assets that are already paid for, or mostly paid for. In Ontario there used to be a government-owned utility, Ontario Hydro. They built all the nuclear plants (and everything else). But at some point things were re-jigged so parts of Ontario Hydro could be privatized (the government still owns shares), but because of how it was broken up its debt could not be split up or given to any of the resulting components. * https://www.oefc.on.ca/debtmanage.html So a separate legal entity was created where the debt is now held, and rate payers give money to that corporation to pay off old debt (both nuclear and non-nuclear) as part of their rate. Also worth noting that the nuclear plants in Ontario are going through a refit currently, so it's not like the plants were built and nothing has done with them except for OpEx; there's a whole bunch of CapEx happening right now (and has been for the last few years): * https://www.brucepower.com/life-extension-program-mcr-projec... * https://www.ans.org/news/article-6280/bruce-power-refurbishm... * https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/darli...

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bryanlarsen 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, nuclear can be cost competitive if you ignore the bulk of the costs: aka construction and decomissioning.

Ontario is now planning on building another plant. Their own document says it won't pay for itself for 50 years, and that's assuming there are no cost overruns, which is a laughable assumption.

	▲	throw0101a 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Ontario is now planning on building another plant. Their own document says it won't pay for itself for 50 years, and that's assuming there are no cost overruns, which is a laughable assumption. Well the current plants have been running for 4-5 decades and are in the middle of being refurbished to run for another 4-5 decades. Only paying for itself for the life of the plant is actually a good thing: it means that it is basically being run at-cost with minimal profits being extracted from the public.

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AtlasBarfed 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

No wind? In Canada? With or without subsidies?

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weregiraffe 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>Nuclear power plants struggle with economics already

Because they are over-regulated. Why? Because of nucleophobia, which is fueled by fossil fuel producers.

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epistasis 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's simply untrue and focusing on it will continue to result in nuclear failure after nuclear failure.

Nobody has some sort of proposal of a different regulatory scheme that is somehow cheaper. Even France, which built a ton decades ago, has completely failed for more than a decade at building. South Korea has been somewhat successful at building, but also sends execs to jail for faking parts approvals. But perhaps that would be cheap to fix.

What has changed since the mid 20th century is that construction labor is far more expensive in comparison to other things that can be done with that labor. Construction productivity has remained roughly constant over time, as manufacturing and other productivity has gone through the roof.

Nuclear is fundamentally a big construction project. SMRs weresypposed to be an attempt to make nuclear power a manufacturing project, not a construction project. But it turns out that construction projects like the BWRX300 are the only real SMRs that can be produced, after a decade of hype. Manufacturing SMRs like 747s is not any more real today than it was when the nuclear PR machine turned to it in the wake of the financial and construction disaster of the AP1000s at Summer and Vogtle.

The real story of nuclear is the need for super cheap labor, and excellent high-tech construction capacity. These two requirements are at odds with each other, because in societies with high tech construction skills, labor quickly becomes expensive.

Even places like China with lots of successful nuclear projects is only building a tiny tiny amount of nuclear when compared to their wind, solar, and batteries. China does everything, and they won't abandon nuclear completely because a nuclear workforce is essential for a country with superpower ambitions, but the nuclear power is there for the superpower ambitions, not the electricity generation.

	▲	seec 15 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's funny you say that. Renewables are "cheap" precisely because a lot of the labor cost is offloaded to cheap labor countries with low regulations. There is basically no solar panel market outside of China, and that says something. It's a very messy process and benefits largely from China's willingness to not care. Every single big renewable project is heavily backed by government and subsidies. Wind is big in Germany, because gov pushed it very hard, not because it's naturally competitive. So far, I see a lot of ideologues pushing the "cheaper" argument even though it hasn't been true at all, and the long-term prospect don't look very good compared to nuclear. But it has more political support, so it is made to be more "competitive" and that's basically all there is to it. Even residential solar only makes sense when people who install it get paid a lot more than the bulk electricity actually cost, if people had to pay themselves for both panels and storage it is largely a loss compared to regulated market price for electricity in many places in Europe.
	▲	AtlasBarfed 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I just don't think smrs work without figuring out Lftrs. Because lifters can use almost all the fuel, are inherently meltdown proof, you basically take away the two worst dangers of nuclear. The issue with degradation of the piping and everything from the molten salts can probably be solved by a replacement cycle. But to be fair, I have no idea how China's MSR is going
	▲	pas 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If the EU and US would each commit to build, fund 100+ NPPs over the next years then it would make sense to gear up for a scheme. Unfortunately each plant is a fucking special snowflake. Due to new sites somehow requiring changes which is absurd, since the containment and everything under it should be 1:1 copy, right? Yes, because the NRC doesn't work like that. Designs are tweaked. Anyway as you said it's a very expensive bespoke weld and pour festival.

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SoftTalker 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They are also built and run by public or quasi-public utilities. I don't think we have a lot of examples of the private sector building nuclear generating plants. Maybe they can do it better, when it's their own money on the line, and they don't have a legally granted monopoly protecting them.

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two_handfuls 3 days ago | parent [-]

Privatizing electricity in California resulted in massive underinvestment and forest fires as a result of poor maintenance.

Privatization only saves money if you ignore the price paid by surrounding communities.

I would not like to see a fully private nuclear plant.

	▲	ViewTrick1002 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Depends on how you do it. The electrical supply and demand markets can be privatized and that works quite well with few ancillary services needed. Privatizing the grid is a shit show since it is a natural monopoly.
	▲	AtlasBarfed 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Privatization of electricity hands a company a monopoly