[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