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