[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.

[Schroedingersat]

The retrofits are reliability and safety upgrades excluding those that happened as a result of TMI. P920 in the Phung paper I linked. This adds about $120/kW or $200/kW net in 1983 dollars.

You don't get to use the price excluding 40 years of reliability and safety upgrades since TMI in one of the strictest nuclear regulatory regimes with tens of billions of tax money spent on the public share of enforcement, and the performance including those upgrades. A Ford Pinto isn't a 2022 Lambourghini.

The prices are costs pre-tmi. The 58% is the lifetime capacity pre-tmi. If you want to use 92%, then find and source the cost of retrofits and interruptions between 1979 and 2022, as well as the cost of replacing all the plants that closed early and the cost of abandoned plants.

At 58% capacity factor with ~20% forced outage rates you are going to have many, long, correlated outages. The renewable blend isn't as reliable as the modern fleet, but the 1979 fleet needs more storage, more backup, and more transmission to distribute the overprovision to where it is needed.

If you don't want to prevent more TMI incidents by adding all the stuff that happened after, you're also going to have to throw in a billion every 20 years or so to pay for cleanup and replacing the lost generation capacity.

Alsk keep in mind that on the list of reactor prices from 1968 to 1979, the prices went up the entire time. Your learning rate is negative even in the Nuclear boom. This alone is enough to disprove your assertion that the cost difference is due to lesser construction.