| > $200/kW net in 1983 dollars. So, it adds less than 200 million dollars per GW of storage. This is not large. It's also misleading to portray retrofitting plants as an expense that new nuclear builds would require: it's a lot harder and more expensive to do a retrofit than it is to incorporate these changes in the initial construction. And again, three mile island was contained. Secondary storage worked. If these retrofits are expensive, they were evidently not necessary. > At 58% capacity factor with ~20% forced outage rates you are going to have many, long, correlated outages. Good thing nuclear power averages a capacity factor of over 90%! By comparison what's the capacity factor for solar and wind? 25% depending on geography. > Alsk [sic] 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. And again, you skew the timelines to fit your narrative. The nuclear boom started in 1965, and saw large price decreases from plants starting construction before then. That's the price drops brought about by the nuclear boom. Reactors continued to be cheap until three mile occurred and reactors that had started construction in the mid 70s had to deal with a whole ton of nuclear obstructionism. That's why price increases among reactors that started construction in the mid 1970s and later. Restrict the query to reactors completed before three mile island and there's no increase in cost. The chart I posted handily put those in a different color, but this is apparently not obvious enough for you. |
$200 in 1983 is 600 in 2022. So why are you claiming that it's the reason the plants finished in the 80s and 90s were more expensive then? A much cheaper version of a quarter of an insignificant amount can't double the price. There must be a different explanation like a negative learning rate.
> And again, three mile island was contained. Secondary storage worked. If these retrofits are expensive, they were evidently not necessary.
It still wiped out the plant and cost billions to clean up. And these are all changes related to the countless minor incidents like fires and pipe burst *before* TMI. The changes due to TMI before 1985 were not counted and were smaller. 40% of these modifications were initiated by the utilities to improve reliability and weren't even due to regulation. This was the cost of improving the early extremely simple reactors to the same safety and reliability standards as TMI.
> Good thing nuclear power averages a capacity factor of over 90%! By comparison what's the capacity factor for solar and wind? 25% depending on geography.
Not the machines you are saying to build. If you want to build a machine with 1/3rd of the material, a quarter of the regulation, a sixth of the labour many fewer redundancies, and less QA? You get one that performs like it. More regulation and more expensive designs and another 40 years of upgrades improved the reliability.
The nuclear industry learnt by doing, and what they learnt is if you half ass things your reactor catches fire or starts leaking and needs repairs like Browns Ferry or Rancho Seco or any if the N4 reactors in France which were built and operated at similarly slapdash rates.
> Restrict the query to reactors completed before three mile island and there's no increase in cost. The chart I posted handily put those in a different color, but this is apparently not obvious enough for you.
In the primary source from the DOE, the prices increase. Same with the Phung paper. The retrofit costs I included are precisely and only the ones unrelated to TMI. Excluding a small fraction of FOAK plants, they went up in price the entire time for plants that opened from 1969 to 1979. Every year they got bigger and more cimplex and added more redundancies because that was what was needed to keep them running more than half the time.
Every year the very first commercial plants were running, more problems were found that needed monkey patching and required adding complexity to subsequent and in progress designs. This necessarily can't have started before the first plant of each manufacturer was running.