[iknowstuff]

seeing how 2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia, why would Google waste $120B when they can get the same output for at most half the price (and realistically more like 1/10th) using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades.

edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B. Build 3GW for overcapacity and you’re still at just 17% of the cost of 1GW of nuclear, and you technically have 3x more capacity. Now figure out how many megapacks you can buy for the $14B/GW you saved https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design (answer: 16GW/68GWh)

[JumpCrisscross]

> using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades

We have nothing close to the battery fabrication pipeline to make that timeline true, certainly not at scale. If this move works, Google will have cemented its power needs and economics for decades to come.

[matthewdgreen]

Global battery manufacturing capacity was 2,600GWh in 2023 [1], and has probably already exceeded that this year. The IEA projects closer to 4TWh by 2025, and nearly 7TWh by 2030 [2].

You need to pay attention because this is happening fast.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... [2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b...

[JumpCrisscross]

> nearly 7TWh by 2030

That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today. (You obviously don't need 1:1 coverage. But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge.)

Now consider EVs. Then add the tens of TWh of annual power demand AI is expected to add to power demand [2]. (And I'm assuming a free market for battery cells, which obviously isn't where we're heading. So add local production bottlenecks to the mix.)

Battery numbers are going up. But they aren't going up fast enough and never could have, not unless we ditch electrifying transportation. Nukes or gas. Anyone pretending there is a third way is defaulting to one or the other.

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...

[2] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...

[ViewTrick1002]

5 hours of storage and a 98.6% renewables system.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr...

Investing in nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed.

In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.

This will only worsen the nuclear business case as renewable expansion continues, today being a bonanza fueled by finally finding an energy source cheaper than fossil fuel.

Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns.

[chickenbig]

> In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.

This is happening because of subsidies given to renewables (renewable energy certificates, net metering, guaranteed feed in prices, CFD) plus policies at the national and EU level (EU Renewable Energy Directive). Take away these policies and you are left with a low quality (intermittent) energy source that requires far more expensive storage to produce power when it is needed.

[ViewTrick1002]

A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.

Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.

Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.

> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

Which is confirmed by Sweden continuing its renewable buildout with both the cheapest electricity prices in Europe and no subsidies on the books for new renewable production.

[xbmcuser]

Even without subsidies solar and battery are cheaper than nuclear and are getting cheaper by 15-20% a year. So no nuclear is unlikely to be cost competitive any time soon unless they get some new tech for nuclear

[JumpCrisscross]

> nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed

We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift. Again, excluding EVs and AI. That’s why we’re reänimating coal plants and building new gas turbines.

I’d also love to see the numbers on that simulation going from 98.6% coverage to what we expect from a modern grid. (And if the balance is provided by gas or something else.) It should surprise nobody that going from 1 sigma to 2 can cost as much as 2 to 3, even if the percentage gap is much smaller.

> Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy

Europe has invested €1.5tn into new gas infrastructure. That doesn’t go poor without a fight and collateral damage.

[matthewdgreen]

> We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift.

A decade to have significant amounts of battery storage is actually a pretty optimistic timeline compared to nuclear. Nuclear plant construction times are on the order of a decade or (realistically) two decades in the West, if you include planning. In China they're managing 7 years, but their nuclear buildouts, while impressive, aren't trending an upward path when compared to renewables (see chart here [1].) SMRs might change this, but they're years from leaving "research" status and entering the mass-production/learning curves that could make them cost competitive.

This doesn't make me happy. If I thought nuclear was viable on the timelines we have to dampen climate change, I'd be 100% in favor of it. If we could assemble the political will to raise taxes and build nuclear at "wartime" speeds, I'd say go for it. I'm also very much in favor of SMR development, just not willing to bet the house on it.

As it stands, there isn't anywhere near enough nuclear power in the planning pipeline for nuclear to matter much on a 20 year timeline.

In any case, we are not going to a 100% renewable/battery grid in 10 years. The first goal is to get renewables to 90-95% or more of power generation, massively overbuilt with short-term battery storage backed by intermittent fossil fuels for the remaining 5-10%. This will represent a massive reduction in emissions. The last 5-10% will have to be completed over the next couple of decades, and the increasing battery production trend gives hope that it can be.

The worst problem with existing nuclear is that with a 15-20 year planning/construction timeline and the current molasses build rate, new nuclear plants will arrive right at the moment when cheap storage is eating the economic use-cases that make them financially viable.

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/China-r...

[ViewTrick1002]

A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.

Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.

Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.

  The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

[ckdarby]

In this context, what is a "modern grid"?

[Moldoteck]

In eu France is the biggest net exporter in the EU while Germany with huge renewable capacity net imported 20+TWh this year. Look how Germany's generation was yesterday to get a sneak peek

[atwrk]

This is only because it is profitable for Germany to do so, not because of lack of capacity. Germany imports energy when there is low demand (and price) and exports when there is high demand (and price). Look at this chart: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_trading/chart.htm?l=...

[robbiep]

I had to check the numbers because it grabbed my attention.

No issue with your quoted figure of 30,000 TWh (annual) global electricity consumption.

But we only need to do 7TWh of battery supply in year 1 (or say only 1-2 of that makes it to grid storage).

30,000/365 is 82 TWh daily. So that’s the number to crack, surely? Because a significant percentage of storage will be to make up for wind and solar, which generally approximately follows some sort of diurnal cycle?

If we will be closing in on a couple TWh annual storage capacity in 6 years (leaving aside any real synchronised attempt to get vehicles to be part of large scale distributed grids) then only a few years on from 2030 we’re going to be able to store a significant percentage of our daily energy demands

[Vvector]

"But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge."

How much battery storage do you think we need? Surely not a year's worth.

For solar, we'd likely need 10-16 hours of storage to power stuff overnight. Maybe a little more to cover a few cloudy days. Sounds like we are about 5% of that now?

[bluGill]

Generally the worst case is two weeks. In the middle of winter you often get cloudy low wind days for that long. Of course how you handle those worse cases are days need not be how you handle typical. If you can handle 16 hours of no input this will over the typical cases this will be enough to max a massive dent in carbon emissions and we can fall back to existing gas (or even coal) plants for the rest. Plus a lot of power use can turn off when needed - give my company a discount and we can turn the factory off.

[sudosysgen]

10-16 hours is not enough at all. On a cloudy day, solar output will only be 15-20%. On top of that, your panels really only generate for 8 hours on a very good day - the sun is a lot dimmer in the early morning and late evening. Really, you need 2x storage for a good day, if you want to deal with two cloudy days you'd want 50-60 hours of storage.

[ckdarby]

Could you possibly read the article you're replying to again?

Even skimming through it discusses the coverage of wind and a not 50/50 system particularly to cover winter & night time. There is also discussion of a ~2% from "other" and how much storage capacity is required.

The article even goes into using wind & solar data for the simulation and reducing further the output to be conservative.

[pfdietz]

It's likely enough battery capacity if you combine batteries with e-fuels for longer term storage.

Assuming batteries are used for all storage use cases is one of the classic errors of energy system analysis.

[amluto]

> That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today.

I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting powering a portion of the grid with batteries that are cycled once per year. One can optimistically cycle one or even twice a day (if wind peaks when the sun is down). Or you can try to ride through a week of bad weather, but natural gas is not actually a terrible solution for that. And those batteries last for a lot longer than a year.

So I think your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years.

[JumpCrisscross]

> natural gas is not actually a terrible solution

Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.

> your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years

The former is calculated from projected 2030 battery production to present energy levels. An essential component of strategy is knowing on whose side time is. Battery production won't reach 1/10 for at least a few decades. That's the point. We need an intermediate solution, and if that's going to be gas, we have to live with the fact that (a) emissions will continue and (b) we perpetuate trillions of dollars of capital infrastructure that will be as difficult to take down in the future as coal has been today.

[amluto]

> Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.

If you come up with some combination of carbon-free energy sources and storage that covers 90% of grid energy needs, and you need to fill in the gap, and that gap is a whole lot of power but only for a handful of days a year, then I don’t think nuclear is a good option at all to fill in the gap. The capital expense would be absurd.

Decarbonization is great, but in the real world, decarbonization per dollar spent is what matters. Instead of spending a zillion dollars on nuclear peaker plants, spend a lot fewer dollars on gas peaker plants and the the rest for more effective environmental improvements.

[Dylan16807]

> Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.

There's a crossover point. If you use natural gas to provide <1% of yearly electricity needs, and you save a zillion dollars while doing so, you can find cheaper ways to decarbonize by the same amount.

[Workaccount2]

We'll figure it out. There is too much at stake and there are already a gazillion engineers out there going to bed every night thinking about how to solve this problem.

Innovation is the grim reaper of analyst reports. No one at my company notifies an investment bank when we have a breakthrough internally (lol).

[reitzensteinm]

Why are you comparing the rate of change of battery storage capacity, the vast majority of which if grid connected will be used for at most diurnal storage, to yearly energy consumption?

Holy mother of all type errors there.

Multiply it by 365, and it implies that in 2030 alone, we will create enough battery storage to time shift almost 10% of our total electricity use today.

This is not a stat that should inspire pessimism.

[lukeschlather]

> and never could have

I could just as easily assert the same of nuclear or gas. It doesn't make it true, although there seems to be evidence that nuclear cannot scale as fast as batteries/solar/wind.

[countvonbalzac]

That's per year right?

[iknowstuff]

frequently asserted but not true.

https://x.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1843840160842350779

[JumpCrisscross]

Nobody claims renewables + battery doesn't work long term. (And not only work, but do so at rock-bottom costs.)

The problem is the timeline. Time out building that additional infrastructure, including expected demand growth, and you always need more power in the interim. Particularly if you're planning on taking coal offline.

If there is an arugment that we can ramp up battery production even faster than we are, the math changes. But we're already in a Herculean effort to mass produce more batteries faster.

[iknowstuff]

nuclear literally takes 10x the time to build as renewables+batteries. That's like the whole reason why it doesn't get built.

[sien]

During the Messmer plan the French installed 56 reactors in 15 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...

So you're saying that in 1.5 years the same thing can now be done with renewables and batteries?

In 2027 it will easily have been done in a bunch of places ?

[throw0101d]

> During the Messmer plan the French installed 56 reactors in 15 years.

Canada (mostly Ontario) built 25 reactors in 35 years:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Canada#Power_...

From the 1980s to the 2000s, it took Japan roughly 4-5 years between start of construction and commercial operation for a number of reactors:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

[pfdietz]

And now that's not realistic, given their track record on EPR.

[pfdietz]

Battery manufacturing capacity is greatly underutilized in China. That was battery cell prices there fell by nearly 1/2 in the last year. There is tremendous room for expansion of production.

[ckdarby]

Based upon?

Looked through the thread and it looks asserted but I don't see the counter not true point.

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.is/DklaA ("Bloomberg: China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")

[slashdave]

Maybe you just found a great place for a company like Google to invest in.

[throw0101d]

> seeing how 2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia

Vogtle 4 was (IIRC) 30% cheaper than Vogtle 3.

The problem with nuclear in Georgia, and in the US, was that no one remembers/ed how to do it, and so all the lessons of yore had to be relearned, and the supply chain had to be stood up.

If you put in an order for several reactors, the very first one (especially of a new model, like Vogtle 3 was) will be expensive AF. The second will be expensive. All models after that will be at a more 'reasonable' cost.

Nuclear reactors are just like any other widget: the cost goes down with economies of scale. If you order 4 or 8 reactors at one sites they'll get progressively get cheaper (there is a floor of course). If you then put in an order at a second site, and move the workforce (or a portion) there, the lower costs will still be present.

If you start and stop construction, or order a whole bunch of different models/types, then there economies of scale goes out the window.

[dalyons]

Sort of - nuke plants are fundamentally phenomenally complicated compared to true economies of scale technologies like solar. You won’t reap 100x cost savings in nukes, no matter how many you build

[throw0101d]

Every widget has a price floor since there's parts/materials and labour costs. This is even true for solar.

One simply has to be careful about what something "costs" when you look at the first unit versus the nth unit.

[iknowstuff]

did you see France raising their cost estimate for 5 reactors to $73B? France, the shining beacon of nuclear energy.

by the time they build it, the cost of renewables will halve, and their actual cost of nuclear will have doubled again.

[cyberax]

> edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B.

No, it's not. Right now it's probably more than $10B a GW if you want the same level of reliability as nuclear.

[atwrk]

You can't just invent a number because you like it more. Solar and Wind are cheaper than nuclear even if you go beyond LCOE and include system costs. Even the nuclear lobby acknowledges this nowadays and has switched to other arguments.

[cyberax]

No.

Not even close. Wind and solar are cheap _only_ if you don't depend on them. In particular, for the wind the adequacy rating is about 10% in most places. It means that you can expect 10% of the nameplate capacity to be available at all times system-wide. So multiply the wind energy costs by 10x, and suddenly they are quite more expensive than nuclear.

It's not even a question for the solar, it simply can't provide power during a day without storage.

> Even the nuclear lobby acknowledges this nowadays and has switched to other arguments.

Nope.

[atwrk]

First, capacity factor is a silly metric to use for this. The industry uses LCOE or system LCOE, because this is about dollars per actual TWh produced, not capacity. In other words: A capacity factor of 10% doesn't matter if building 10x the amount is still cheaper.

With that said, the wind capacity factor in Germany is 20% for onshore and 40% for offshore, so even that was wrong by a factor of 2-4.

[preisschild]

Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.

And new AP1000s in the US would cost significantly less, because there are already experienced workers & supply chains from Vogtle and getting a license requires less work too, because you can copy much of Vogtle.

The median build time for nuclear reactors is 7 years. This is archivable if you continue building and not just build 1 or 2 every few decades.

[p1necone]

> Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.

Hence the batteries.

[rtkwe]

The scale just isn't there. A single nuclear power plant near me, McGuire Nuclear Power Plant, produced 17,514 GW·h in 2005. The entire potential output of the Tesla (cough Panasonic) Gigafactories in California and China have a combined output of ~50 GWh per year. [0] Nuclear power is amazing at producing a reliable base load of power that massively outstrips our ability to produce and store solar power. Say our load is well aligned with the cycle of solar power and we're ignoring weather so we can derate the amount we want to store to 30% that's 105 years of production out of what I think is the two largest batter plants in existence to store the power produced continuously by a single large nuclear power plant.

[0] https://www.fuld.com/tesla-energy-massive-growth-in-megapack...

[ZeroGravitas]

I don't follow your sums. 50GWh of battery cycled once a day for a year is: 18,250 GWh

So you seem out by around 100x.

[rtkwe]

...sometimes the brain is smoothed by meetings...

[toomuchtodo]

Global stationary storage deployed for 2024 will be ~150GWh, and this is accelerating. Batteries are easy, nuclear appears to be impossible (economically speaking).

[rtkwe]

So 35 years then to store the power generated 24/7 by McGuire at that rate of production which ignores that the huge spike of AI loads will want 24/7 power, if we're looking at that kind of load I'd rate it at 50% for starters (low to be honest because it doesn't account for how solar ramps up during the day) which is around 60 years. Plus that's giving full capacity to those batteries when ideally we'd only use the middle 60% to avoid deep cycling the batteries daily unless they've completely solved that problem.

[toomuchtodo]

The nuclear ain't getting built, these are facts. Even if one breaks ground today, you won't push your first kwh to the grid for a decade, at which point another ~10TW of clean energy will have come online globally.

If AI is using too much power in the short term, destroy demand with policy and economics. We are not beholden to the robot trainers, we just don't provide utility access to the load. Unlimited demand of industrial scales of electrical power isn't a right of some sort.

[toomuchtodo]

Citation for my sibling comment and that which you replied to:

https://www.energy-storage.news/arizonas-biggest-battery-sto... (“Arizona’s biggest battery storage system goes online to feed Meta data centre demand”)

https://orsted.com/en/media/news/2024/10/orsted-has-complete... (“With a 300 MW solar PV capacity, Ørsted’s Eleven Mile Solar Center will produce enough renewable energy to power 65,000 US homes while the battery can store 1200 MWh of power.”)

(~2 years from planning to commissioning)

[Moldoteck]

look at germany's yesterday output and tell me how much batteries they'd need to cover such a drop in generation

[preisschild]

Having enough battery capacity to back up enough energy for a few minutes let alone days would require a lot of resources.

I think scaling nuclear power would be cheaper and more environmentally friendly.

[slashdave]

Cheaper? No, not even close. Environmentally friendly? Debatable, but wait for new tech.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/iron-air-battery-renew...

[Moldoteck]

yes it'll be cheaper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/

[preisschild]

note the word "could"

We have heard better and better batteries being just around the corner for decades at this point.

Sure, maybe a few percent better, but nothing ground breaking.

[mindslight]

So using your numbers, it is solidly a little less than half the cost, not one tenth (26GWh seems around the necessarily amount for riding out ~14 hours of darkness. I'm assuming your factor of 3 makes up for seasonal variation and cloudy days). The panels take up 9 acres of land area, and need to be kept clean of snow and dust. The battery lifetime is small compared to expected life of a nuclear reactor, but the battery lifecycle is more straightforward. This seems like the territory of having a reasonable tradeoff between the two, not some unequivocal win for an Internet smackdown about how we should avoid one approach.

[edm0nd]

That is seemingly such an absurdly high number to get a nuclear planet up and running.

Is the majority of that cost dealing with regulatory and legal nonsense that stems from the anti-nuclear hippy groups and laws they got passed in the 60s and 70s?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Is that majority of that cost dealing with regulatory and legal nonsense that stems from the anti-nuclear hippy groups and laws they got passed in the 60s and 70s?

One part this, two parts the economics of a novel technology platform being deployed in a large size, three parts American labor costs and inexperience with megaprojects.

Similar to why we can't build ships [1]: high input costs, notably materials and labour, and a coddled industry that is internationally uncompetitive. With ships, it's the Jones Act and shipyard protectionism; with civilian nukes, it's misguided greenies. (Would note that we're perfectly capable of nuclear production if it happens under the military.)

[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/constructionphysics/p/why-cant...

[matthewdgreen]

Nuclear is still much more expensive than renewables in China, where there aren't too many "misguided greenies" setting policy. Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable, not the other way around.

The faster people can internalize this lesson, the sooner we'll get to economically-viable nuclear power.

[mbivert]

> Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable

As far as Europe is concerned, there seems to have been various political move and lobbying to affect energy independence (e.g. France): economy is transformed energy, so by nuking (…) energy independence, you're suffocating countries. The military role of nuclear is furthermore crucial; civil & nuclear must be correlated.

That's to say, giving up nuclear is not something a sane, well-driven country should do lightly, regardless of ideologies.

It's a tricky topic; what I regularly hear from economists is that wind & solar are still far from being able to compete with nuclear. And because of the previous two points, people can't but frown upon "green" arguments, even if the underlying intentions are honest and well-intended.

(China may not have misguided greenies, but it has a strong incentive to sell whatever it's offering).

[bobthepanda]

If China had a super cheap nuclear design they would be very happy to export that the same way they export their other technologies like EVs, high speed trains, solar panels, batteries, etc. But it simply does not exist.

[JumpCrisscross]

> If China had a super cheap nuclear design they would be very happy to export that

China "plans to export nuclear power reactors in the future" [1]. It's early stages, but being done through Belt & Road [2].

[1] https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/how-china-has-become-the-world...

[2] https://www.cipe.org/resources/chinas-nuclear-dragon-goes-ab...

[Moldoteck]

china has a super cheap design called hualong and they plan to export it the way russia is exporting their designs. Another plan is finishing local adaptations of ap1000 that can be reselled without licensing problems

[pfdietz]

This is why China installed 217 GW of solar last year, but only 1.2 GW of nuclear.

[JumpCrisscross]

> why China installed 217 GW of solar last year, but only 1.2 GW of nuclear

And 114 GW of coal [1]. Don't do nuclear, and that becomes 115 GW of coal. Nuclear and renewables aren't competing for market share.

Everyone is putting down renewables as quickly as possible. But we need more power, so we fill the gap with one of gas, nuclear or coal.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...

[golli]

> > why China installed 217 GW of solar last year, but only 1.2 GW of nuclear > > And 114 GW of coal [1]. Don't do nuclear, and that becomes 115 GW of coal. Nuclear and renewables aren't competing for market share.

That is true for China, since their overall energy demand is growing massively. But is that also true for other parts of the world like the US or EU? Because looking at the electricity production [1] this doesn't seem to be the case. So in those markets they would compete for replacing existing fossil power plants. I think we can expect some growth, but not on a level even close to China.

[1] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/world-electricity-...

[matthewdgreen]

The current analysis is that China's emissions peak this year [1,2] and will enter a structural decline. This is because new renewables are being deployed faster than growth in energy demand. The new coal construction is mostly "dispatchable" production that will be used to backstop the fast-growing renewable grid, with payments going to coal plants in exchange for not generating (and built-in expectations that these payments will rise over the next few years as renewables and storage serve more of the demand.)

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02877-6

[Moldoteck]

is it? New plants cost 3-3.5bn for a stable 1gw output. For renewables - much more needs to be built to provide same reliability or compensate with fossils

[rtkwe]

IMO they only continue to exist because of the Jones Act not the way I think you're implying where Jones Act protectionism prevents them from flourishing. High material and labor alone are enough to explain why people wouldn't build ships in the US. What special capabilities could Us shipbuilders bring that would make the cost of labor here competitive with China or South Korea? Gone are the days when the US dominates on skill or capacity, and that's not because the US has lost something the rest of the world just caught up with us.

Whenever we're looking at the 1900s and wondering why the US used to be so dominant as an industrial power I think it's incredibly important to remember our industry got all the upside (an absolute torrent of money and demand) and none of the downside (bombing) of two world wars. IMO the US industrial base was riding high on that easily into the 80s and people mistake that dominance for skill and prowess rather than the waning boon of WW2's mobilization and destruction of every other extant industrial power.

[JumpCrisscross]

The point is there are downstream costs to our moribund shipping industry. We have a internally-navigable waterways we barely use, offshore wind power gets stalled due to lack of ships, et cetera.

Post-WWII effects are one component. But another is that we want a protected shipbuilding industry for its own purposes, which is fine, but that curtails a lot of other production.

> What special capabilities could Us shipbuilders bring that would make the cost of labor here competitive with China or South Korea?

Energy. Our energy costs are much lower than theirs.

[rtkwe]

China's average energy cost for businesses is 10c and the US is 13c according to a quick search I did so I'm still not following.

[WalterBright]

The rise of the US as an industrial power started in 1800. The US was already dominant before WW1.

[msabalau]

There is a huge difference between the US accounting for 20% of Global GDP and merely being "in first place" at the end of WWI and the USA having half of global GDP (and 80% of the world's hard currency reserves) at the end of WW2. While also say, having a Navy easily more powerful than the rest of the world combined, and being able to to focus on an upcoming surge in consumer consumption as opposed to desperately struggling to stabilize food production and rebuild cities and industries that had been ravaged by war.

Britain, a victor that had never been occupied, wasn't able to lift many significant food rationing schemes until the 1950s. Bread, which wasn't rationed during the war, had to be rationed from '46 to '48.

There is a meaningful distinction between being the leading industrial power and being the overwhelmingly dominant economic power.

[WalterBright]

When the German soldiers first encountered the US doughboys, they were struck by their height, their excellent food, and their supplies. That was when Germany knew they had lost WW1.

And this was despite having to ship all that stuff across an ocean.

The US was an industrial powerhouse then.

[slashdave]

The NRC is many things, but a front for "anti-nuclear hippy groups" is not one of them.

[iknowstuff]

France, with all their nuclear base, just raised their estimate for new reactors (I'm so shocked!):

> State-owned Electricite de France SA has raised its estimate for the future construction costs of six new atomic reactors in France by 30% to €67.4 billion ($73 billion)

6 reactors, 1650MW each, $7B per 1GW vs Vogtle's $17B. Planned. In 2 decades, after it's finally built, it will have doubled of course lmao.

[jimjimjim]

That right, blame the hippies. Nothing at all to do with nuclear power plants being the one thing that you really do want to be engineered well. But no, regulations are of course to blame!

[edm0nd]

The anti-nuclear hippy movements of the 60s and 70s are pretty directly responsible for a lot of the slow down in expansion of nuclear power.

>Between 1975 and 1980, a total of 63 nuclear units were canceled in the United States. Anti-nuclear activities were among the reasons, but the primary motivations were the overestimation of future demand for electricity and steadily increasing capital costs, which made the economics of new plants unfavorable.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement#Impact_o...

There was a lot scares and FUD about it at the time. To note, I am pro-nuclear.

[jonas21]

That says pretty much the opposite of what you claim.

[dogma1138]

Can Google get 2GW for $34B anywhere in the world? This is the value proposition of modular small reactors.

The cost of nuclear in Georgia today is essentially subsidized by decades and decades of past investments.

And as much as some people might like that you can’t simply move Georgia and place it next to your data centers.

[Moldoteck]

because 1 - 1gw of solar capacity isn't the same as nuclear, even 3gw of solar isn't the same as 1gw of nuclear (to get a proper perspective, look at germany's grid yesterday& how much overcapacity of solar/wind they have and how much was actually generated/imported). 2 - vogtle unit 4 was 30% cheaper than unit 3, proving positive learning curve, meaning (in theory, according to https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/ ) new builds should be significantly cheaper

[s1artibartfast]

That wont work because the tesla webpage has a maximum order quantity of 1,000 units... /s