[Areading314]

This doesnt take into account capacity factors. A "800MW" solar plant would be expected to actually product 10-25% of that after day/night and seasons are taken into account. Nuclear plants are more of a 90+% capacity factor.

[lambda]

Yes, it's an over-simplification. But this is an area of the country where capacity factors are in the 25-30% range: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39832 (the Ute Mountain Reservation is in the very Southwestern corner of Colorado, a little bit of New Mexico, and a little bit of Utah: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ute+Mountain+Reservation,+...)

So even if you discount the capacity by a 25% capacity factor, and use the lower cost per reactor that I originally quoted, this is still cheaper than nuclear. And that's just the up-front investment. Operating costs are much cheaper for solar as well, the majority of the cost is in the initial build.

Given that transmission isn't free, there are areas of the country where solar has a lower capacity factor than this, and solar and wind take more land, there are still cases where nuclear may be a better investment. I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of simple, economic reasons why solar and wind are growing at a much faster rate than nuclear; it's cheaper overall, it requires less up-front capital, etc. Nuclear is likely to fill niches for a long time, but investment in nuclear is not going to be the major way to decarbonize.

[belorn]

Building nuclear in a desert feel a bit like building hydropower dams in a desert. It does not really make sense and whatever the capacity factor is, being in a desert should increase it.

The only real drawback to building solar power in a desert is sand storms. That means the capacity factor is less relevant but life span and repair costs is a different matter. It is a bit similar to ocean wind farms. The capacity naturally goes up, but the salt water and transportation (as well as increased risks to engineers) makes life span and repair a bit more of an issue (it should be noted that most ocean based wind farms tend to use shallows and nature reserves near large cities).

But again, this project is built in a desert. The very definition of a place with consistent amount of sun. I hope the project works out.

[SoftwareMaven]

There is an ecological cost to miles and miles of solar panels. Desert ecosystems are extremely fragile, and these kinds of projects can be very damaging. It’s not just wasteland. (Said as a desert Southwest denizen and lover who gets the impression that many people think, “oh, there’s no trees? It’s unimportant land.”)

I want the Utes to have success in this, but I don’t want the general attitude to be “trash the desert because there is sun there”.

[usrusr]

The ecosystem will change, no doubt about that. Just like it changes when we start agriculture somewhere, or pastoralism. Even if we consider that the new ecosystem of desert with a lot of shade might affect neighboring pristine desert within quite a radius, there will still be a lot left in the foreseeable future. Very much unlike agriculture and pastoralism, which have been pushed into almost every corner even remotely viable for millennia.

It might be worthwhile to exclude certain areas of particularly rare variations of the ecosystem to be built in. But it's easy to end up with too much red tape that will be abused for NIMBY and by people who hide a fossil yolo attitude behind a facade of conservationism.

Perhaps there could be some mechanism for operating some veto quota, "pick the project you want most desperately to be stopped"? That scheme would probably end getting gamed in the ugliest ways, with sacrificial decoy projects getting proposed, not vetoed and then getting built to keep up appearances. Better not, heh.

[krupan]

Exactly. And a nuclear plant does not change the ecosystem like all those other things you mentioned.

[usrusr]

Good luck finding a spare river or two to evaporate for cooling. And not changing ecosystems in the process.

An that's before even mentioning the other thing. Would you be interested in talking about uranium mines? Oh, not the other thing you expected?

[codersfocus]

There is the concept of "agrivoltaics" where solar and agriculture can be colocated. Apparently, certain fruits and veggies grow better with a bit of shade provided by solar panels.

[krupan]

That's not a desert anymore

[AtlasBarfed]

The LCOE cost advantage of alternative energy vs ... everything ... at this point is well known and calculated in Lazard's yearly LCOE study.

Nuke advocates do themselves no favors playing shell games and weasel words with the economics. Nuclear is expensive. The nuclear industry needs to figure out how to make it a lot cheaper. And no, it's not just the NIMBY regulation.

The legacy nuke industry has a ton of deeply embedded lobbying and relationships with the regulatory agencies and congress, including ancillary groups that do fuel rod reprocessing and waste transport, cushy high-cost satellite industries.

Nuclear is stuck in a rut. Economically viable nuclear needs a clean-slate redesign and all the old players need to be thrown out. Computer designs, modern software and sensors, materials, etc. Research LFTR to the wazoo.

One of the big pushes IMO should be the US Navy, which should start using nuclear power for all its fleet ships not just subs/carriers.

[cornholio]

Solar is cheaper when you have a flexible and well interconnected grid capable of smoothing out, say, a cloud passing over Ute nation land and abruptly pulling 1GW out of the grid. That kind of grid costs money and we have no idea how much and how achievable it is. The alternative, grid scale storage for the full rated power, is still insanely expensive and makes renewables completely uncompetitive.

Yes, nuclear is getting buried on price, but you make out the total cost of solar much lower and much more certain than it is in reality. Nobody really knows how much will renewables end up costing when they start to make up the majority of production.

[ZeroGravitas]

Australian research on this suggests renewables will still be cheapest as the grid moves to fully carbon free, includin the cost to integrate with the grid:

https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2023/october/genco...

> Even with this extra VRE cost in 2030, the answer to whether renewables are the cheapest form of energy is still yes. And it remains so when VRE is at 90 percent of the energy system

[AtlasBarfed]

Considering that full economies of scale and technology has not yet been matured in solar certainly, and possibly wind, and certainly in battery storage...

Look, you're treating the current LCOE numbers and making the (mistaken or disingenuous) implication that solar/wind won't fall EVEN FURTHER, but they almost certainly will.

With solar, there is perovskites and many other avenues of improvement in the core technology. Both wind and solar will still drop in price from increased economies of scale. And battery storage is going to plummet with sodium ion in the near term, and hopefuly sodium-sulfur techs in the future in addition to whatever grid-specific use cases are developed.

So it's true! Nobody know how much renewables will cost... or HOW LITTLE they will cost... in the long run.

Existing already-built nuclear is woefully noncompetitive, but I'll take it for grid levelling over gas turbine and (ugh) coal, so keep the lights on.

But NEW nuclear? What price are you targeting? I would guess in the timespan of a new nuke plant construction (10 years), solar will drop by 50%-60% in costs (inflation adjusted), and I think wind still has 33% drops coming. I mean, how does a sensible person approve a nuclear project with this degree of uncertainty/evolution/revolution in power costs?

And if you want to talk uncertainty in cost of electricity, the unreliable final construction and operation costs of nuclear are much more unreliable from that standpoint.

[cornholio]

Again, this is not about the production price of renewables, which is low and falling quite predictably, but the unknown long term costs of integrating substantial intermittent production into the grid.

Believable models of achieving that goal call for setting up capacity markets where traditional suppliers are paid to not emit, and stand by to intervene when required by weather conditions, achieving close to net zero year round emissions (¹. Nobody really knows how this will end up costing because no such grid exists today.

Grid scale battery storage is still very far from competing with traditional baseload production, even when supplied with free renewables. Sodium has been the next big thing for the last decade, but its only deployments are in the experimental, MWh range. It's still far from a mature, proven technology, let alone one that can disrupt lithium in the gridscale storage space.

Perhaps you are handwaving substantial technical and economic details away and making too bold claims insufficiently supported by data. Not unlike the nuclear fanboys who are seeing thorium fast breeders just around every corner.

(¹ Btw, this is just another nail in the nuclear coffin - coal too - because they can't play nice with a fast moving grid.

[worik]

> The nuclear industry needs to figure out how to make it a lot cheaper. And no, it's not just the NIMBY regulation.

It is very expensive, there is no way around the extreme engineering costs of nuclear reactors. Even before trying to make then safe from threats extant and possible.

That is before the unknown costs of handling long term waste using technology that has not been proven, or invented, yet