[Maursault]

That just isn't the case. Nuclear (fission) has always been the single most expensive way to generate electricity, and the expense has only increased. Uranium is crazy expensive. Security is very expensive. Spent fuel storage effectively never stops costing, and it isn't ever cheap. If nuclear was simply expensive because of regulations, investors would find a way, and you could not beat them away from building nuclear power plants. But that just isn't where the expense lies. Today it costs $20B to build a nuclear power plant, and that does not include the cost of spent fuel storage or decommissioning. Investors are actually pretty shrewd to stay away from that kind of an investment that always loses. The idea of "electricity too cheap to meter" simply never materialized. Today, electricity generated from solar power is cheaper than electricity generated from nuclear power. The main reason the 110 or so commercial nuclear plants were ever built is that the US military vastly overestimated its need for fuel for bombs.

[ClumsyPilot]

Thats not accurate at all, Uranium itself is much cheaper than coal / any fuel per unit energy. Some contries have permanent, final storage for nuclear waste, it does not cost any more once created.

Furthermore, not only was solar power borderline non existent when those reactors were built, it is also still intermittent. You are just glossing over the biggest challenge of energy - balancing the powe grid. No-one needs energy if it's only avaliable at the wrong time. Energy storage multiplies cost of renewable electriciry several times over, and no country-scale grid has ever operated on wind and solar.

Lastly, energy is actually cheap - you can see that because we can afford transporting a pair of jeans 4 times across the world in the process of manufacture. We could have had zero-carbon grid since the 70s with nuclear - and France did. Even though France has cheapest energy in EU, suppose energy would be 30% more expensive. So what? We would be so much better off in terms of climate change.

[Retric]

Nuclear has the opposite problem as solar in that it needs high uptime 24/7 to stay reasonably economical. You can easily design a grid following reactor as seen with nuclear subs etc, it just doesn’t save you any money.

24/7 365 grid scale battery backed and thus load following solar runs about 8c/kWh* which is cheaper than nuclear at high utilization. Sure, France’s model of importing and exporting significant chunks of electricity allowed them to ramp up nuclear, but they where exporting power at a loss and utilization still fell into the 80% range.

*Excluding the most northern and southern areas.

[MagnumOpus]

Excluding the most northern areas is a pretty big issue. Most of Europe is north of 45 degrees north... Yes, Hawai'i and California can be supplied with solar panels cheaply; the UK can't.

[Retric]

Can’t is really just a cost question. 8.2 percent of Germany‘a gross-electricity generation comes from PV solar and their southernmost point is 47°17'N. IMO, that was an over investment, but that’s their choice. Most people in Canada live south of that so we are not talking about that many people.

We are really talking about a handful of countries. The Nordic countries have cheap alternatives in hydroelectric, wind and geothermal energy. Nuclear may have a few niche applications for northern islands etc, but that’s not really significant globally.

PS: 4% of the UK’s electricity comes from solar and their southern tip is a actually quite decent for solar.

[Maursault]

I'll respond to your straw man. It isn't about the energy within the thing, the exorbitant cost of Uranium is in mining and refining. No one said anything about coal, but it doesn't need refined, and is cheaply mined... but you've also made a false equivalency, because coal isn't the only competition to nuclear. The sun just shines, wind just blows, water just flows, and the geothermals just produce heat, without any investment or refinement.

If just 10% of the resources poured into nuclear development, which is a cost no one that is pro nuclear wants to tally into the bill, were instead invested into solar energy, nuclear power would not have been able to compete with solar power by 1980.

Nuclear power isn't cheap, unless you ignore the insane R&D that was paid for by tax payers by government mandate and never paid back, unless you ignore the massive cost of construction long before one watt of power is produced, and unless you ignore the massive cost of decommissioning, and unless you ignore the never ending cost of spent fuel storage. It is entirely absurd that you believe once a spent fuel storage facility is built, the costs just disappear. The costs never go away. Maintenance. Security. Testing. It isn't free and it isn't cheap.

[ClumsyPilot]

Two questions:

You keep repeating this idea thay uranium is expensive, by what metric? Where do you get the idea that its expensive?

If nuclear is so expencive, why does France have cheapest elecrticity in EU? And Denmark /Germany have invested in renewables have expensive electricity.

[Maursault]

Looks like I was simplifying. Uranium prices peaked around 2010 for $135/lb., and today is only $35/lb. The break even point for mining uranium is about $50/lb. So the problem in 2010 was that uranium was crazy expensive, but the problem today is it is so cheap, it can't be mined for profit.

But you raise a decent point about what metric we should choose... I meant the cost of the stuff, but there are other metrics, such as clean up costs, because mining uranium is not clean. There is also a human health cost to populations within the proximity of the uranium mine.

French electricity is likely cheap because the French tax payers already picked up the cost of constructing spent fuel storage facilities and power plant construction, and they will ultimately shoulder the burden of the cost of decommissioning. This is just an educated guess, because that is usually how nuclear economics work. Otherwise, the investors that run the plants and sell the electricity would not be interested.

[cromwellian]

4 words: Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (LIFTR)

[justatdotin]

> Uranium itself is much cheaper than coal / any fuel per unit energy.

well, that's silly: sunlight is cheaper than uranium.

[Retric]

Uranium and even enriched uranium is still reasonably cheap. Fuel rods get expensive, and more critically only using up ~5% of a fuel rod before you need to replace it gets even more expensive. Other reactor designs can use a higher percentage of uranium without reprocessing, but they have other issues. In the end fuel including waste disposal represents about 10% of nuclear reactors operating costs or ~1c/kWh. It’s a significant but hardly gamebreaking cost.