[rurban]

nuclear vs wind energy maybe. just look at it. which do you think is 30x cheaper?

the more interesting question is why the oil and water-energy exporter Norway got so much more expensive domestic energy prizes since it joined the European energy market.

[natmaka]

When it comes to production costs renewables (wind included) are cheaper than nuclear: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020

The gap is growing.

When it comes to complete costs of reliable gridpower an adequately spread-out mix of renewables may also be cheaper. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

[reacharavindh]

I know it is tiring to see this comment. But, the cost of nuclear power quoted everywhere does NOT include the cost of safely handling the waste from it for hundreds of years right? Until it is included it is like Saudi Arabia claiming that oil is the best thing in the world because it costs €1/barrel because they only need to factor the cost of digging for it.

[adhesive_wombat]

Nuclear power strike prices usually do include much of the long term costs, and money has to be committed into a trust (or some similar scheme) as part of getting approval in the first place.

And it would be more like Saudi Arabia claiming that oil only costs $100 per barrel because they don't need to pay for pollution remediation, healthcare costs, spill cleanup and their share of all climate change effects from the time they sold the oil until the time that oil's effects have been removed from the system. Which they don't.

[renox]

> Nuclear power strike prices usually do include much of the long term costs

In theory yes, but given that they aren't able to predict correctly the cost of building a nuclear station, I don't see why we should trust them on predicting the real cost of dismantling them..

[JohnHaugeland]

It's very easy to accurately predict the building costs of a nuclear reactor.

The overruns you're talking about come from politicians showing up halfway through the project and changing the rules to show their voters that they are involved

[renox]

In France the new nuclear reactors have been plagued by hardware issue, delays.. So no, it isn't 'easy' to predict the building costs, it's easy only when you're replicating an already existing reactor and only if it was built recently!

[JohnHaugeland]

> In France the new nuclear reactors have been plagued by hardware issue, delays

That's odd, can you show me some evidence of that?

[pydry]

Or insurance. If another fukushima strikes it's taxpayers on the hook for the $800 billion cleanup bill.

Makes all the propaganda about how safe it truly is ring a bit hollow when they dont pay for their own damn insurance.

[JohnHaugeland]

The Fukushima cleanup, unique in history and resulting from radically unlikely natural disasters, cost less than half what the fuel it replaced that decade would have

This is without considering the cost of climate change or all those prevented deaths

[natmaka]

The tsunami was the secondary cause, and believing that no-one could predict such a tsunami is misleading.

Proof: another nuclear plant was less distant from the tsunami and survived, because someone (Y. Hirai) foresaw it and could impose his views: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...

The hard truth is: even a predictable cause can trigger a disaster. And many aren't predictable.

Fukushima is by many criteria a "lucky" case, as many reactors were properly shutdown when the wave came, operators reacted globally adequately...

The question isn't "is a disaster possible?" but "when, and of which magnitude?".

This patently insufficient ability to foresee also sheds a light towards the "we know that dangerous nuclear waste will not be a problem for anyone during the next 100000 years or so".

Renewables can do the trick without all those threats.

[JohnHaugeland]

Your stories notwithstanding, every renewable deployment in history has failed to reach zero carbon.

 

> The question isn't "is a disaster possible?" but "when, and of which magnitude?".

Yeah. And solar out-kills nuclear by a factor of nearly 20.

Your problem is that you're trying to consider nuclear in isolation, with no null hypothesis.

Every single replacement causes more death and more radioactive waste, no exceptions, even when you fold in the worst nuclear disasters in history.

.

> Fukushima is by many criteria a "lucky" case

This is an absurd and incorrect viewpoint. Please do not hold yourself forwards as knowledgeable in these matters.

The Fukushima design was well known to be flawed, and the United States had been suing Japan to shut it down for ten years before this happened.

The seawall did not meet Japan's national standards.

You might as well call Union Carbide lucky. Go be an apologist on someone else's time.

[pydry]

Every nuclear disaster is unique yet nobody is willing to bet on any of them being the last. Fukushima was also unique in that it caused coal usage to skyrocket in Japan - a problem Germany is not currently suffering from.

To me, the way to prove that something ISNT safe is to shout loudly about how safe it is and to absolutely refuse to shoulder the costs of anything going wrong.

This is what the nuclear industry does and the government backs them.

[JohnHaugeland]

> Every nuclear disaster is unique

No nuclear disaster in history has added up to a bad single bus accident.

.

> and to absolutely refuse to shoulder the costs of anything going wrong. \n This is what the nuclear industry does

This is, of course, the exact opposite of true. Nuclear power is the only kind of power expected to carry full disaster insurance (not even dams, which have death counts in the six digits.)

[krageon]

> radically unlikely

It's an island nation, and we're calling a tsunami "radically unlikely"? Given the time frames involved in cleaning up an event like what happened in Fukushima, once every 100 years is not very unlikely.

[imtringued]

You could have replaced all nuclear power plants with new ones for the cost of the fukushima cleanup.

As always your theoretical modern designs that are safe are useless if you are still running power plants that are older than chernobyl.

[JohnHaugeland]

Digging miles into the ground with a 4 story mechanized oil rig is much more complicated than putting some dirt into a barrel and walking past it with a Geiger counter monthly, buddy

[IMTDb]

How much does renewable energy cost on a windless November night, when I need to heat my home and cook my dinner ?

[pydry]

A bit less than nuclear energy if there's a good mix of pumped storage + wind + solar.

It all gets built way quicker too. No 15 year lead times setting up solar panel farms can be done in 6 months. Pumped storage projects can be done in a couple of years. Each small scale quick and cheap project takes a chunk out of our reliance on natgas.

People way underestimate just how fantastically expensive nuclear power is and how unviable it is without lavish subsidies that other renewables dont need.

It'll keep getting built in countries with nuclear arsenals though coz it can share some of those costs. Thats ultimately why we get barraged with so much pro nuclear power propaganda. It aint about reliability, it's about the military industrial complex foisting costs off on to rate and taxpayers.

Obviously when Iran does this we are made aware of how awful and wrong it is but it's greenwashed under the carpet 100% of the rest of the time.

[Manuel_D]

Does that cost figure for wind include storage? If not, then you're comparing apples to oranges.