[formerly_proven]

> 1. Cost per MW compared to renewables (~$150 vs ~$40 and falling). Here in the UK the government is promising to subsidise this to make it viable.

You can't directly compare cost per generating capacity, because nuclear, gas, coal etc. are available according to schedule, while most renewables aren't. Adding storage around renewables to make them schedulable raises costs.

[Schroedingersat]

Nuclear in the UK has a capacity factor of around 60%. Availability is in the 70-80% range.

Yeah it's (usually) planned, but it's a decently long time in which you need those gas plants.

Why not just build solar instead and fuel those same gas plants with hydrogen or methane you plucked from the air with your $20-30/MWh unscheduled electricity?

Plus, you can get solar and storage as an off the shelf item today as a retail customer for less per watt than recent reactors in UK/France or even USA. 8kW nameplate solar and 16kWh storage capacity is about $10k which matches 1kW of net from eg UK projects of around 2.5GW net for 26 billion pounds fairly closely.

Yeah if you live far north or have a long cloudy month in winter you'll be relying on that gas plant, but so does the nuclear reactor. Plus you'll be dumping 10-20kWh/day into the grid on the good days. Provides a decent incentive to figure out how to store it, and even if you're only getting 5c/kWh for it, it'll pay for replacement in 7-10 years or so when prices have dropped another 50-80% without sacrificing your kilowatt.

[neilwilson]

Solar requires land area. Storage requires land area. Britain isn't that sunny - particularly not in winter.

Nuclear has a very small footprint on a crowded island.

Plus we have Rolls Royce SMRs who have been building nuclear reactors for a while.

[Schroedingersat]

That is the admitted cost of Hinkley C and lower bound on the cost of Sizewell (it will go up, they always do). Sizewell is a rolls royce smr. Matching end user retail cost of solar. Right now. By the time sizewell comes online it'll be a fraction. It's also calculated with a 12.5% capacity factor which is winter in the UK. Add in overnight costs and it's extremely one sided.

You could add as much net capacity as the UK has in nuclear in just above the space used for parking cars.

You could add twice to four times that again just on detached house rooftops.

Even as a commercial installation with no other purpose, a 4km square is hardly an insurmountable barrier.

The initial capital budget of sizewell and hinkley alone could provide 30-80GW of nameplate solar or a rooftop system on every building in the country.

If there are trillions in the pot, by all means go ham with fission, but when low carbon sources are fighting for the scraps left over after subsidizing fossil fuels we have to do the thing that is effective first.

[neilwilson]

"If there are trillions in the pot"

There are always trillions in the pot, because the UK is a sovereign country with its own currency. Money is never the issue.

Therefore it's only overnight costs that matter in a build (and hitting the deadline). The real issue is one of manpower and stuff. We don't make solar panels in the UK. We will make SMRs. Therefore we're not reliant on Chinese manufacture, or the whims of export markets to fund them. A problem we're currently having with gas and oil.

To have security of energy supply over time you have to be as decoupled from world markets as possible. We don't want to be in the situation where we're relying on China for replacement advanced manufactures to keep the lights on.

Solar has no reliable capacity in winter in the UK unfortunately. You wouldn't want to rely on solar with several weeks of grey miserable UK winter weather even with storage. The same with wind, which is still suffering from a degradation in capacity due to the as yet unexplained overall reduction in wind speeds - which may itself be a result of climate change.

[Schroedingersat]

Commenting about fiat currency is a pointless distraction when the purpose of using it is as a proxy for labour and materials. 'Trillions in the pot' is just a proxy for a certain amount of access to raw materials, trading ability and labour power, all of which are finite and don't really increase if you sink your country into hyperinflation.

> Therefore it's only overnight costs that matter in a build (and hitting the deadline). The real issue is one of manpower and stuff. We don't make solar panels in the UK. We will make SMRs. Therefore we're not reliant on Chinese manufacture, or the whims of export markets to fund them. A problem we're currently having with gas and oil.

> To have security of energy supply over time you have to be as decoupled from world markets as possible. We don't want to be in the situation where we're relying on China for replacement advanced manufactures to keep the lights on.

Spending an amount on computers and steel and exotic alloys and uranium ore and then also spending 10x as much on labour is no better than spending that first amount on foreign solar panels. Far better to overpay for solar panels by developing a local industry, or overpay for solar thermal systems (which are still vastly cheaper than fission).

> Solar has no reliable capacity in winter in the UK unfortunately. You wouldn't want to rely on solar with several weeks of grey miserable UK winter weather even with storage. The same with wind, which is still suffering from a degradation in capacity due to the as yet unexplained overall reduction in wind speeds - which may itself be a result of climate change.

Renewable-derived hydrogen is already at cost-parity with fossil-fuel-methane derived hydrogen in some markets. Renewable-derived methane isn't much further off and is one of many ways of solving the storage issue. When a gas plant (which you need anyway) and the renewables to provide enough net power in winter and a massive overprovision during summer cost a fraction of nuclear there's no point.

Plus your argument about energy security completely precludes nuclear as an option for over 50% of the world as they're not allowed to make their own fuel. There are also about as many countries with a credible manufacturing base for solar panels than countries with viable uranium reserves, and there is more than one chemistry that you can make solar cells with.

Finally being entirely beholden to one of four or five corporations worldwide is no better than being entirely beholden to one of four or five countries with the cheapest solar.

[dfjklseldklk]

Given the scale of investment we are talking about, it's also plausible that EU based manufacturing of solar panels could emerge given the right incentives.

[pfdietz]

The land area required for most forms of storage is inconsequential.

[dfjklseldklk]

This is oft repeated, but once the cost of renewables is low enough it would have (usually un-modelled) second order effects on end users which may make this less important.

Some industries literally can't turn off production without damaging plant, but if some can then where energy cost is ~30% of fossil/nuclear than it might make sense to over-provision industrial capacity and only run it when the sun is shining.

[legulere]

Scheduling also raises costs though. Costs don’t go down much for nuclear power plants if you let them run at reduced output. Nuclear also isn’t as reliable as it seems as it can be seen in France.

Renewables even have the advantage that they produce electricity mostly when it’s needed. Photovoltaics during the day and wind during winter when heating is most needed.

[fredestine]

macron removed investment and focus on nuclear in his last mandate before realising that being woke made france broke (luckily not like germany broke - you know like in a way that when there is no sun or wind they need to call Putin to send some energy) now he reverted his thinking because money and energy is more important than beliefs when you needs them. just like usa or germany reactivated coal and biden is selling fracked gas to europe at gold price.

[Krasnol]

> macron removed investment and focus on nuclear in his last mandate before realising that being woke made france broke

None of those problems OP described have anything to do with that overblown statement. Investment may have been removed for FUTURE projects but not for current operation which is highly subsidised by the French taxpayer guaranteeing the fixed price the Government decides on.

Also Germany reactivated those dirty plants also to help France out. The whole European grid is helping the nuclear nation out and will continue to do so until France diversifies its power generation infrastructure.

[fredestine]

the investments included maintenance of existing infrastructure. france has more than half its reactor being off right now. guess what? invest more 5 years before and we wouldnt be there today. so yes. it is not overblown it is factual

[Krasnol]

Show me some useful source which says that there have been investments missed 5 years ago and which is why that lead to the current problem. French is ok too.

[dignick]

I’m a firm believer in distributed generation and storage, i.e. solar on the roof and battery on premises. This has the added benefits of reducing load on the grid and increasing resiliency. It should be required for all new buildings in regulations.

[dfjklseldklk]

In fact, solar on roof often loads the local grid in unhelpful ways (they were designed for asymmetric loads).

I'm in favour of renewables, but done in the way that actually makes most economic and environmental sense. In the Uk we threw money at rich people with £15k to install 4kwh solar rigs on their houses. That money would have been much better spent subsidising large industrial installations.

[bakuninsbart]

You can however price this in, and I doubt it accounts for 110$/MW. Furthermore, nuclear energy specifically only runs according to schedule. Reducing or raising output is expensive and slow.

[belorn]

For simplicity, lets use the cost of for every $ that a KG of green hydrogen costs, this mean that the cost per MW will be 30x of that. So if green hydrogen cost $1/KG you the cost in term of MW will be $30.

The current cost of green hydrogen is somewhere between $2 -> $12. That is the production cost. The market price for green hydrogen sits around $4-$20, since there are multiple industries that demands hydrogen.

For 110 to break even the hydrogen need to cost $3.5/kg, and in order to really displace natural gas, it is estimated that it need to reach $1/kg.

Now I noticed that those $150/MW is not a range, so I took a look. Projected nuclear LCOE costs for plants built 2020-2025 places nuclear around $27/MW to $147/MW depending on financing and country (source: OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s (NEA's) calculation). Russia has the lowest cost and Slovakia or Japan (depending on financing method) has the highest.

So in summery, it can definitively cost more than $110/MW to produce viable green storage solution, especially in northern countries where low duration lithium batteries is not a working solution for long winter periods with low wind production and the sun is only up for a max few hours per day. Nuclear can also be much cheaper depending on where it is built and how it is financed.

[Schroedingersat]

Why would opex and amortised capital scale with fuel price?

[belorn]

The report is likely this one: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2019-12...

The $147 figure is basically the worst case scenario.

[illiac786]

EDF has published a paper stating they can scale 80% down and then up again, every day, within 30min.

In practice, they have done something like 20% within an hour. It was early 2019, there was such a crazy wind that they had to reduce nuclear production also (after already reducing coal, gas etc. to the min).

I think what they really can do is somewhere in between.

sources, it was on l’energeek, but in French.

[jules]

> You can however price this in, and I doubt it accounts for 110$/MW.

What do you base this on?

[ncmncm]

Raises cost, but it is still way below cost of nukes.