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by epistasis 3537 days ago
I really like Lazard's summaries of LCOE (levelized cost of energy), which includes the cost throughout the lifetime of a generation source:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

They also have a separate analysis for the cost of energy storage by various means, which is also awesome.

Given the long lifetime of nuclear plants, the huge upfront costs for a single project, and the rapidly plunging costs for renewables and storage, nuclear seems like a risky financial proposition, personally, and I think most utilities and investors appear to agree. I think that by 2030, PV solar and storage will be cheaper than nuclear, as well as being far more dispatchable and decentralized.

I wish we had built a lot more back in the 80s, as that would have cut off so much of our emissions over the past 30 years.

1 comments

I agree, there was a window when building lots of Nuclear reactors would have been a good idea and it's a shame that we didn't take advantage of it. But with the rapid fall in solar I think that window has closed.