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by Manuel_D
1292 days ago
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Your article studies plants built after the nuclear boom, which of course leads to higher prices. See the cluster of plants built cheaply starting in the mid 60s [1]? That's the nuclear boom. Your article studies plants still in construction at the end of 1986, which is when the nuclear boom tapered off following thee mile island. Deliberately or not you're pulling a slight of hand here by shifting the time frame. But in the end, this helps reinforce my point: nuclear is expensive when built in small numbers as your study demonstrates, and cheaper when built at scale as the study I'll link below explains. Finance liability is a fancy word for debt: this has nothing to do with construction costs, and everything to do with financing models. You're right, nuclear would be even cheaper if better financing was done. Upstream supply chain is accounted for by the downstream purchase costs. This is like saying wind turbine costs don't include the costs of mining copper for the dynamos. That cost is in included when the wind turbine manufacturer pays for copper coils. Research on nuclear's cost history overwhelmingly finds that costs are lower when built at scale: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... 1. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001... > Every pro nuclear claim turns out to be a lie when examined even with the slightest scrutiny. All of them. Well, you sound like you're engaging with this topic in well-adjusted and unbiased manner! |
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My source is a primary source from the DOE for that source.
It included every reactor built before 1986 including Palisades which your article lists as $650/kWe, but it has down as $118 million or $1300/kWe in 2022 $ excluding retrofit for subsequent safety standards. With capacity factor that's $1700/kW net for an inefficient and unsafe design before major safety standards were written.
If your downstream product is a byproduct of a military project that was built for a different purpose then you cannot claim it includes costs. If the US military needed a supply of worn out giant bearings, provided wind turbine designs that cost trillions for free, and was selling turbine blades and nacelles at low prices it would also be a subsidy.
Whatever your opinion on finance, it is included in renewable projects which are fully privately funded.
If your hypothesis about construction booms was true, then the price minimum would be either reactors started in 1982 when construction was at its peak, or if you want to claim TMI as a boogeyman, then reactors finished just before it.
More likely it is:
a) an artefact of whatever part of your chain of references didn't catch the bit in the DOE report that says it is in nominal dollars which depresses prices of early reactors by a factor of two, and
b) The fact that nuclear has a strong causal mechanism for negative learning rate. Each new reactor teaches you new things that can go wrong which you then have to retrofit to old reactors. This only appears in the sticker price if they are still under construction.
Taking arkansas one unit 2. It was $577m for 858MW at 80% CF.
Inflation was quite substantial, so we can't answer without knowing what rate it was disbursed and at what interest during construction, but it is between $4500 and $6500 per kW net. Right inline with new reactors once cost of finance is included.
US nuclear costs and always has cost around $10-12/W using modern accounting terminology with a few outliers and a few early plants before the negative learning kicked in. You just taught me this by having me cursorially examine your lie. Thankyou.
Edit: actually it might have gone down a bit with after TMI. As there might be different accounting on later reports.