> $5.6B actually sounds like a good deal. It outputs 2GW+ of power. 

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.

Unfortunately France can no longer build nuclear plants cheaply either. All of the recent nuclear plants built by the French state owned company EDF in France, Finland, and the UK have seen enormous cost and time overruns.

Cumulative emissions matter. We simply don’t have the time to wait the 20 years it takes to build new nuclear plants.

Source please? The numbers I have seen of real opex paint a different picture. In general, nuclear plants close because of cost.

You 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 :)

Or solar / wind (which mostly anticorrelate) + biomass + storage + interconnectors + smart demand.

The amount of baseload we technically need can be pretty slim.

Take Denmark: fossil powers just 9% of their electricity generation, the majority of it is wind and solar. Wind is strong in evenings/nights, solar during the day.

Then they have biomass (indirect solar) as a form of baseload, more sustainable than coal/gas.

Then there's interconnectors, they're close to Norway which can pump hydro, and Sweden, each day about 25% of the electricity is exchanged between these two countries, and that's a growing figure.

With more east/west interconnectors you could move surplus solar between countries. Import from the east in the morning before your own solar ramps up, export your midday surplus west before theirs peaks, and import from the west in the late afternoon as yours fades.

With interconnectors you can also share rather than independently build peaker capacity. Because a lot of peaker plants only run a small amount of time and therefore much of the cost is in the construction/maintenance, not the fuel.

And of course there's storage, which will take a while to build out but the trendlines are extremely strong. Just a fleet of EVs alone, an average EV has a 60 kWh battery, an average EU household uses 12 kWh per day so an average car holds 5 days worth of power a home uses.

And then finally there's smart demand. An average car is parked for more than 95% of the day, and driven 5% of the time. Further, the average car drives just 40km a day which you can charge in 3 minutes on say a Tesla. Given these numbers (EVs store 5 days of household use, can sit at a charger for 23 hours a day, and can smartly plan the 3 minutes a day of charging it actually needs to do) just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years.

Given this, baseload coal/gas can really be minimised the coming decades. It's not going to go away as a need, but I don't think it requires gas/coal or nuclear long-term going forward.

it actually is a choice between nuclear and PV, because base load supply is an obsolete concept. Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear. You cannot make them work without massive state subsidies.

Gas is far better suited economically to backstop a variable grid. I wish it werent true, because i dont hate nukes, but it is just economics.

I will also point out that california is down to 25% fossil sourced power in 2025, from 45% in 2022. Due to renewables and batteries, and there's far more coming. The amount left to backstop on gas in a few years could plausibly be 10%! which is amazing.

A requirement for base load is a fallacy promulgated by fossil fuel preservation lobbying

Power distribution is a natural monopoly, power production is commodified/competitive business.

It 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.

And $ 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.

Because 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.

> 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.