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 9 minutes 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.

	▲	epistasis 3 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.