[shakow]

> You can build a single wind turbine for what, $100K? Even a basic nuclear power plant is now around $50B

A modern wind turbine will typically feature a 20 years lifetime and cost a few million dollars to produce a handful of MWs.

On the other hand, we see nuclear power plants happily going over 50 years of service while producing power in the magnitude of a few GWs -- and they do not cost $50B to build, but somewhere in the ballpark of a few $B.

Taking the very very rough estimate of twice 1000 wind turbines vs. one nuclear power plant to produce a few GWs over half a century, we arrive at $2B for the wind turbines vs. e.g. $5B for the nuclear plants. Of course, this does not take into account the fact that the wind turbines must be supported by another power source for when there is no wind, that maintaining a nuclear plant is much more expensive than maintaining wind turbines, that 1000 WT require manifold more ground space than a NPP, etc.; but we are still very far away from $100K vs. $50B. And that is also without taking into account the commonly cited load factors of 0.25-0.4 for WTs vs. 0.85-0.95 for NPPs, which would require building at least twice as many WTs in locations complementary w.r.t. exposition to winds to be palliated.

Windmills can be very nifty ancillary power sources, but they do not hold a candle to NPPs in the context of a(n) (inter)national power grid.

[calcifer]

> they do not cost $50B to build, but somewhere in the ballpark of a few $B

Which reactors are those? Hinkley Point C in the UK is £22.9 billion so far and is years away from completion. Likewise, Olkiluoto Unit 3 in Finland is up to €11 billion so far and also years from completion.

[shakow]

Those two examples are innovative sister projects (the EPRs) which are infamous in the nuclear community for having gone far overboard regarding both delays and over budget, and are much more representative of France fucking up its industrial know-how than anything else. Prices of more conventional designs (https://www.synapse-energy.com/sites/default/files/SynapsePa...) stand in the aforementioned mentioned ballpark.

[google234123]

The reactor we stopped building 30 years ago didn't cost near that.

[Retric]

Nuclear is just as bad in terms of following demand the capacity factor is at best 90% but involves weeks of downtime for refueling etc. Worse the economics only work out when production is kept close to 100% when available limiting adoption in a wider electric grid. France dealt with sub 70% capacity factors even with massive exports that’s roughly a 0.9/0.7 = 30% price hike per kWh.

You can use batteries to level our wind but you really need multiple nuclear power plants operating in concert which gets you back into the 10’s of billion dollar range for dependable nuclear power. However, even that few billion dollars is still massively excessive for a small island. The European grid is large enough that the unit cost isn’t a big deal, but the minimal scale of nuclear still results in various inefficiencies from transmission losses etc.

A much larger problem is simply the cost per GWh, building nuclear today means estimating it’s still going to be cost competitive in 40 years which really doesn’t seem to be the case. Even back in 2000 people where looking at various long term estimates and the required subsidies to make Nuclear cost competitive didn’t seem worth it.

[cbmuser]

All nuclear power plants in Germany are capable to be operated in load-follow mode, see:

> https://www.ktg.org/ktg-wAssets/docs/fg-bet-rph-lastfolgebet...

Also, nuclear power was never subsidized in Germany:

> https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/14/080/1408084.pdf (page 16, answer 27)

[chefkoch]

>Also, nuclear power was never subsidized in Germany:

Haha, that's a good joke.

>Direct and indirect German government subsidies alone, including research grants and tax credits, since the mid-1950s have added up to €287bn, FÖS has calculated. Another €9bn were spent on other costs for the state, such as police operations during anti-nuclear protests, or follow-up costs from nuclear operations in former Eastern Germany.

“Great part of these costs never had been included in the electricity price, which is why atomic energy wrongly was considered as a cheap power source,”

https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/no-higher-cost-energ...

[Retric]

Nuclear “Load following“ doesn’t reduce the number of workers needed, capital investment etc. It’s like turning off wind turbines you don’t really save money, it’s just useful to help balance the grid. In effect every time you do this with Nuclear, Wind, or Solar you end up increasing the cost per kWh produced.

In 1998 the Atomic Energy Act established the maximum insurance liability of nuclear insurer at about €2.5 billion; for damages above that cap the Federal Government is liable according to § 34 of the Atomic Energy Act. That’s a German nuclear subsidy, they have a few.

[oezi]

> Also, nuclear power was never subsidized in Germany

The German government took over responsibility for managing final storage of nuclear waste for something like 20bn EUR from the industry but is already projecting that it might cost more like 50bn EUR to actually find such a place.

Nuclear's price will still haunt tax payers long down the road.