That... doesn't seem true?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY

Here's an Illinois professor going through the economics compared to a gas plant.

Nuclear power can become dramatically cheaper than other energy sources in the long run.

rstuart4133 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

He mixed some units there, mostly by translating Chinese costs into OECD/USA costs. China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor. That's what happens when you build a couple a year for decades. After 20 years, that might be true in the OECD/USA too, but for now you are looking at over 10 years, $10B/GW, and over 8% interest.

None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money.

If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage.

But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel.

The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap.

[0] https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and...

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jasonwatkinspdx 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Which should we expect will find more cost reductions in the next couple decades? Nuclear or battery storage?

Looked at it that way, I'm skeptical of all these new nuclear projects. No one has made SMRs work economically, yet we're seeing incredible improvements in batteries, and there's enough unexplored chemistry possibilities we don't have a reason to think we're near the end of the road on that.

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filleokus 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This must at least partly be region-dependent right?

In the darker northern parts of Europe, the German transition to renewable haven't really been a cost-saving success story (right?).

From my (very) casual Swedish vantage point, the wind build out here was a very government subsided race to zero marginal prices that barely helped anything?

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dalyons an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This really should be a top level comment. It accurately explains the broken economics of nuclear, and is the real reason effectively no nukes will be built going forward. Not the usual tired points about regulations and safety fears and Chernobyl or whatever

	▲	hylaride 27 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Precisely. France built out its current nuclear fleet over decades. The first reactors were expensive, but then costs came down. Of course, then they stopped and are now trying to restart again with new reactor models. It's been expensive and it's not clear they'll start building en-mass again.
	▲	dukeyukey 43 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		To be fair South Australia is: * Incredibly sunny * Incredibly sparely populated * Functionally winterless Like it's the perfect setup for solar. Somewhere like Denmark, Japan, even the US Northeast does not have those.

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epistasis an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some people have irrational exuberance around nuclear technologies, and the numbers in that overly long explanation are an example of that. $5B for 1GW of nuclear?! HAH!

There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.

Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."

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red75prime an hour ago | parent [-]

Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.

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epistasis 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want...

The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.

Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.

And the skepticism of batteries is similar. I can't tell you how many nuclear advocates have said in past years that grid-scale batteries are impossible because of "physics." Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.

It's just a continual shifting of goal posts as people's systematic bias against batteries are again and again disproven by actual deployments and costs.

	▲	red75prime 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I've seen "just slap a battery onto a steel mill to make it work with solar." So what? People on every side are saying dumb things. The required restructuring of the grid makes wind + storage + peaker plants + solar not so dominant as you picture it. Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some can't.

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looofooo0 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, thank you. Eroi ist the only thing which matters from a hard physics stand point.

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rgmerk 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s just not true.

An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.

	▲	micromacrofoot an hour ago \| parent [-]
		30 years is generally the guarantee for some minimum output so it's the floor too... could still be outputting 60-70% of original spec for 50 years

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epistasis an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.