there's usually a long lag between a drop in the price of an input and the eventual impact on the price of the outputs, because part of the effect is mediated by the adoption of innovations that use more of the newly-cheaper inputs and less of the still-expensive inputs
to take one example, the last time we got access to a major new source of energy was something like watt's steam-engine in 01776. one of the effects of this was the widespread replacement of steel cans (which hadn't been invented in 01776) and glass bottles with aluminum cans in the 01970s, 200 years later. another was the replacement of travel by ship with travel by air, also about 200 years later. the delay is because many intermediating innovations were required, for example, in the aluminum-can case:
- the discovery of electrolysis;
- the discovery of aluminum;
- the discovery of canning;
- the hall–héroult process;
- improved aluminum alloys that permitted the use of 100μm-thick cans;
- the invention of deep drawing;
- epoxy liners that made aluminum cans chemically stable to acidic contents such as coca-cola;
- long-distance trucking which increased the cost imposed by heavier glass bottles.
the issue with nuclear power is that the humans don't yet have the technology to exploit it economically; at their current primitive level it's uncompetitive with other sources of energy. like printing 1000 years ago or heron's aeolipile
but 1.1 gigawatts of mainstream solar panels is 0.14 billion usd. $130 per kilowatt of capacity. even at the dismal 10% solar capacity factor achieved in very northerly countries like germany, the reactor is twice the price per average watt, and it needs to be installed far from the point of use—you can't buy a 440-watt nuclear reactor, so you need transmission, distribution, and transformers, all of which incur energy losses, capital investment, and safety hazards you can avoid with photovoltaic
that large grid also needs regulation, billing, and political stability. (a reactor is an appealing target for both russian glide bombs and enron-style scams.) and the reactor is not dispatchable over timescales of less than a day, while you can short out a solar panel in microseconds
fundamentally the reactor can't compete economically because it's shackled to a pricey steam engine. the reactor itself is a triviality, just a pile of fuel larger than the critical mass. some of them formed naturally at oklo billions of years ago. what's hard is integrating that energy release mechanism into a machine, and that's because the humans are still terrible at making machines
> but 1.1 gigawatts of mainstream solar panels is 0.14 billion usd
A solar farm is more than just solar panels. This 3.5GW solar farm cost 2.13B USD, so by your estimates the panels make up just 1/5 of the cost of the farm. I'd expect the load factor of the nuclear power station to offset the solar farm's nameplate capacity advantage, and lead to steadier prices/fewer storage requirements etc etc.
> and it needs to be installed far from the point of use
Note that this is a problem for solar farms in China; they are installed where land is not valuable. Hence all the HVDC transmission records being broken in China. Plus nuclear power stations can be close to populations. For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daya_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant is 50km from Hong Kong.
> the reactor is not dispatchable over timescales of less than a day
Modern reactors have load following capabilities, e.g. the AP1000 can ramp up 5% a minute within the 15%-100% band.
One larger cost you might think of with solar is land - but even in the U.K. where land isn’t exactly cheap leasing prices are about £1k an acre per year, and an acre will generate about 350MWh a year, so that’s well under 1 cent per kWh, so it’s lost in the noise.
to take one example, the last time we got access to a major new source of energy was something like watt's steam-engine in 01776. one of the effects of this was the widespread replacement of steel cans (which hadn't been invented in 01776) and glass bottles with aluminum cans in the 01970s, 200 years later. another was the replacement of travel by ship with travel by air, also about 200 years later. the delay is because many intermediating innovations were required, for example, in the aluminum-can case:
- the discovery of electrolysis;
- the discovery of aluminum;
- the discovery of canning;
- the hall–héroult process;
- improved aluminum alloys that permitted the use of 100μm-thick cans;
- the invention of deep drawing;
- epoxy liners that made aluminum cans chemically stable to acidic contents such as coca-cola;
- long-distance trucking which increased the cost imposed by heavier glass bottles.