[Schroedingersat]

The costs you quoted were from a source linked on wiki talking about the first reactor on your list.

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.

[Manuel_D]

> With capacity factor that's $1700/kW net

So $1.7 billion per GW. This is an exceptionally good price for a system of generation that is geographically independent, is non-intermittent, and is energy dense (and so does not have to involve long transmission lines moving electricity from solar fields and wind farms to cities).

The US averages ~500 GW of electricity generation, 25% of which already comes from nuclear or hydro. At a cost of $1.7 billion per GW the remaining 375 GW could be replaced with nuclear for just under $640 billion dollars.

> 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.

So solar panels' cost has to include all the military and communications satellites that pioneered solar panel tech? Most renewable systems also use electronic computers to some degree. This technology was originally pioneered for military encryption and firing computers. You could apply this kind of broken logic to anything. Military and civilian reactor designs are vastly different: the latter are usually mobile, use highly enriched uranium, and are relatively small.

> 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

Except the construction wasn't at its peak in 1982. Construction was at its peak during the early 1970s, and lurched to a halt after 3 mile island and nuclear panic took hold.

> or if you want to claim TMI as a boogeyman, then reactors finished just before it.

Yes, this is exactly what's happened! Do you not see this big cluster of cheap plants built before 3 mile island and then plants got a lot more expensive afterward? Do you see how when the color shifts to dark brown they get a lot more expensive? The plants built just before 3 mile island were some of the cheapest forms of decarbonized energy we have ever deployed.

I'll draw this in MS paint to make it easier for you: https://i.imgur.com/VD34Zhi.jpeg

[Schroedingersat]

> Except the construction wasn't at its peak in 1982. Construction was at its peak during the early 1970s, and lurched to a halt after 3 mile island and nuclear panic took hold.

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/reactors.html#tab=iso;reg...

>So $1.7 billion per GW. This is an exceptionally good price for a system of generation that is geographically independent, is non-intermittent, and is energy dense (and so does not have to involve long transmission lines moving electricity from solar fields and wind farms to cities).

You're really stretching here. That's a single pilot plant in an industry with a massive negative learning rate without necessary safety features which is the all-time outlier. I had to go out of my way to find it, and it is not the same metric as you're judging renewables on. You've picked the single ripest possoble cherry. It was also the first turnkey plant so it being the cheap directly contradicts your hypothesis.

> So solar panels' cost has to include all the military and communications satellites that pioneered solar panel tech? Most renewable systems also use electronic computers to some degree. This technology was originally pioneered for military encryption and firing computers. You could apply this kind of broken logic to anything. Military and civilian reactor designs are vastly different: the latter are usually mobile, use highly enriched uranium, and are relatively small.

If the PV on Jim Doe's roof was required to power the satellite, and the government sold the polysilicon and sent experts to Jinko to help design the manufacturing facility, and provided the funding then yeah.

> Except the construction wasn't at its peak in 1982. Construction was at its peak during the early 1970s, and lurched to a halt after 3 mile island and nuclear panic took hold.

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/reactors.html#tab=iso;reg...

You appear to be struggling with the difference between start and finish. The largest capacity of plants ever finished in the US was '82. The Arkansaw plant I picked as an example was the last one finished before TMI and was wholly consistent with $6/W (or higher including cost of finance) and a negative learning rate since Paliside.

> Do you not see this big cluster of cheap plants built before 3 mile island and then plants got a lot more expensive afterward? I'll draw this in MS paint to make it easier for you: https://i.imgur.com/VD34Zhi.jpeg

I've pointed out a primary source which contradicts the numbers that graph is based on and posited a causal mechanism for the disparity. Refute the primary source, demonstrate that my understanding of their use of the term 'nominal dollars' is wrong, or find another primary source (or the primary source the paper uses).

[Manuel_D]

> You're really stretching here. That's a single pilot plant in an industry with a massive negative learning rate without necessary safety features which is the all-time outlier. I had to go out of my way to find it, and it is not the same metric as you're judging renewables on.

If I were cherry picking I could pick even cheaper plants. Zion 1 and 2 were built for less, as was Oconee 1 and 2.

> You appear to be struggling with the difference between start and finish. The largest capacity of plants ever finished in the US was '82.

Most of which were delayed after the 3 mile island incident, and correspondingly experienced greater costs. Sure, if you want to get pedantic the peak number of plants under construction at any one time peaked just after three mile island. But that's because so many plants were delayed, and this led to higher costs.

> I've pointed out a primary source which contradicts the numbers that graph is based on and posited a causal mechanism for the disparity. Refute the primary source, demonstrate that my understanding of their use of the term 'nominal dollars' is wrong, or find another primary source (or the primary source the paper uses).

I'm looking over the OSTI report and calculating the inflation adjusted numbers line by line. They match the costs listed in my source. It doesn't look like there's anything to refute: both of our sources show that nuclear plants built during the nuclear boom were some of the cheapest forms of decarbonized energy there is.

I don't have anything refute, because your source agrees with my point. Your own source's data reinforces the claim that nuclear built during the nuclear boom (plants started after 1965 and built before three mile island) were often delivered between 1 and 2 billion dollars (2010 adjusted) per GW of capacity, and some even less than 1 billion.

[Schroedingersat]

Zion 1 and 2 were 276 million each at 58% CF or between $3 and $4.2 per net Watt. Better than the last plant to open before TMI, which supports a negative learning rate.

And again. This doesn't include safety retrofits, and it doesn't include O&M which is higher than new renewables.

Even after retrofit, it was destroyed due to a design and management failure in 1998.

All of those early plants are more expensive than you are saying, they had state controlled funding. They were inefficient, and they were unsafe when they opened.

Additionally they all had abysmal capacity factors in the 70s and 80s, around the 50-60% range so using lifetime CF is incredibly biased towards making them look good.

The cost of retrofits which was almost entirely unrelated to TMI was about 40c/Watt https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/036054... or about 80c per net watt just for the retrofit to meet 1980s standards.

Include all the failed reactors, and stop looking at just the lowest cost ones, include the cost of the free loans, and you're back up around $6/W

[Manuel_D]

If we're counting capacity factor, then the cost of solar and wind increase by ~4x since they have capacity factors of ~25%, which is a lot less than nuclear's typical ~90% capacity factor [1]. Oconee's capacity factor is 81% over its life and 97% in a typical year. It's actually the opposite: focusing on lifetime capacity makes most nuclear plants look worse than in a typical year.

For all their supposed lack of safety, nuclear power - including these early and supposedly unsafe designs - safer than most renewables [2]. There's an immense double standard between renewable safety (nobody seems to care about the tens of thousands of people killed by dams) and nuclear power.

1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity#....

2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

[Schroedingersat]

Lifetime capacities up to TMI are fair for a proposal to build what was built before TMI. Including reliability improvements deployed over cumulative decades of downtime at costs of billions per reactor isn't comparing the thing that was purchased before TMI.

Of course renewables should be capacity weighted. Noone is saying they shouldn't. Capacity weighted new solar in germany is about $3.80/W or new onshore wind is about $3/W. These are both dropping 10-20% YoY. New 4 hour battery is around $2/W. The up front cost is about the same, but the operating costs of NPP exceed what many wind and solar projects are able to bid for. Even if we assume unrealistically short construction times of the 70s for a new Gen III+ reactor the extra 6 years of operation will have the solar park half paid off by the time it opens.

Those early designs were safe enough to mostly keep operating thanks to the exorbitantly expensive upgrades. This is an engineering feat, and a testament to the care and excellence of the US NRC, but it came at a cost which you are trying to pretend does not need paying. Gen III+ reactors are far more complex and so cost more on top of the additional costs incurred by not operating in the unique environment of the 60s.