[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.

[Manuel_D]

> Capacity weighted new solar in germany is about $3.80/W or new onshore wind is about $3/W.

This alone is more expensive than nuclear power built during the nuclear boom.

> New 4 hour battery is around $2/W.

So 12 hours of battery, which is a minimum estimate of what we'll need is $6/W. Also, this price is rising: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/battery-prices-to-rise-for-...

Combined these sources make for $9-10 per watt. Furthermore, they have life spans lasting far less than nuclear power, meaning they'll have to be replaced more frequently. By comparison, your own source found that nuclear was built for $2-3 per watt during the nuclear boom. Again: your own sources contradict you.

[Schroedingersat]

You're cherry picking the data I cherry picked to help you again. P919 says the average cost was $589/kW in 1983 dollars with $120/kW of non-TMI retrofits and costs rose with time rather than going down. In the hypothetical where this is in some way related to somethint that could happen now this is $3600/kW vs a renewable blend in germany of $3400/kW. If we take the last few from each manufacturer that opened before 1979 and don't add retrofit costs it's about the same. Your argument about positive learning rates doesn't fit the data even slightly.

Your absolute best argument if I shuffle the goalposts all the way along for you and ignore the guaranteed money, the abandoned plants, the shutdowns that occured under a decade after opening (all of which were paid for on the public dime) the military and govt involvement and the lack of liability is that undoing 37 years of safety and efficiency improvements and reproducing reactor designs with similar capacity to wind and a much higher correlated forced outage rate to a renewable blend sans storage will allow you to come in at only 7% over the cost and only 4-6 years later?

Then even after all that, operating it for two decades will cost more than the total cost of the renewable system.

All this in a country with mediocre wind and worse solar resource than Alberta, Canada. This is your argument?

[Manuel_D]

Whatever "TMI retrofits" which you keep referring to (yet never actually backing it up with a source) are likely not necessary: 3 mile island's secondary containment worked and prevented any significant amount of radiation release.

Estimates you're giving for renewables are excluding the cost of storage, or using fanciful figures of 4 hours worth of storage, as well as excluding costs of transmission and load shifting.

> In the hypothetical where this is in some way related to somethint that could happen now this is $3600/kW vs a renewable blend in germany of $3400/kW. If we take the last few from each manufacturer that opened before 1979 and don't add retrofit costs it's about the same.

No, it doesn't. It comes out to $1600/kW. Average capacity factor of nuclear power is over 90%, not the 50% you claimed earlier. And again, your "renewable blend" omits the cost of storage, which will be immense if we're even able to build storage at the scale required at all.