[jamesrom]

> Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait.

This is a fallacy in two ways:

1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale.

2. The opportunity cost of not starting nuclear projects now will surely be worse than attempting 100% renewables. The point is that we can invest in both.

[cycomanic]

> > Construction time - average is 10 years, we don’t have that long to wait.

> This is a fallacy in two ways:

> 1. Scaling up nuclear projects will decrease construction time and cost. Efficiencies are found by with scale.

More than half of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any large scale power plant (goal, gas...). The opportunity for reducing cost through economies of scales is low. Economies of scales work for things build in factories, much less so for construction projects. That is true in general, not just for power plants.

> 2. The opportunity cost of not starting nuclear projects now will surely be worse than attempting 100% renewables. The point is that we can invest in both.

Why? It's the other way around, the actual cost of building nuclear instead of much cheaper and faster renewables causes an opportunity cost, because we can replace fossil fuels much faster building up renewables.

[ascar]

> It's the other way around, the actual cost of building nuclear instead of much cheaper and faster renewables causes an opportunity cost

That's under the assumption the available money, hardware and labor of ramping up solar and building nuclear plants directly competes with each other. That's a pretty strong assumption and I highly doubt there is a strong enough link between any of those three for your argument to have significant impact.

E.g. We should be able to drive rapid solar expansion with government money and subsidies while incentivcing big energy carriers to build nuclear plants.

[cycomanic]

No that's under the assumption that we have limited funding.

[ascar]

That's a non-answer to my comment. Limited funding and a available money is the same thing. The point is the funding isn't so limited that we couldn't do both as we run in other bottlenecks.

[ciphol]

> More than half of a nuclear plant is essentially the same as any large scale power plant (goal, gas...).

Presumably that's the cheap half of the nuclear plant, because coal/gas plants are pretty cheap to build.

[pfdietz]

Coal plants are actually not that cheap to build.

Combined cycle gas plants are cheap because 2/3rds of the power output is from the combustion turbine, which needs no heat exchangers. The steam bottoming part needs two: the boiler running off the exhaust from the combustion turbine, and the condenser to transfer heat to the environment.