Most people do not understand this and think that we can reall talk about nuclear vs solar when we really need to talk about an energy mix where you pick one point (for example you pick nuclear or solar) and the rest depends on this choice.
Energy mix is key: the cost of 100% dependency on intermittent renewables is extremely high.
Going for 95% dependency on intermittent renewables with the remainder being filled in by low-cost dispatchable generation halves system costs (see table 6, pg. 21).
So you've managed to cherry pick the one study showing nuclear power in any kind of possible light. Typical.
You do know that the study is only applicable to running your off-grid cabin from a sole source and battery storage based on 2020 costs. The study also assumes 100% uptime for nuclear power.
It does not deal with demand shifts, it does not deal with transmission, it does not deal with backup power.
It also managed to finds a nuclear LFSCOE of $106/MWh. Even though it doesn't adapt to peaks or breakdowns when Hinkley Point C sits at $170/MWh when running at full tilt for 35 years.
Whenever we do quality research on the subject the results end up being that nuclear power is horrifically expensive.
See for example:
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
> 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.
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
I think you misinterpreted my comment. I'm advocating for an energy mix where the majority of energy is supplied by intermittent renewables with a small amount of low-cost (i.e. not nuclear) dispatchable generation. This avoids the extortionate "last mile" of costs when utilising 100% intermittent renewables.
>Isn’t this a pretty much solved problem though? Just add a battery to your house?
In winter the days are short, the sky can be covered in clouds for an entire week, the solar panels can be covered in snow also.
I have solar panels but I do not have a way to export my data to show you the summer vs winter GIANT difference.
So people like me with solar need the other people in the area not to all go for solar, then we will need to find a way to burn the excess. Is the same with a country, we can't store the energy from summer for winter and also resist for say 2 weeks of snow and clouds. The EU market might be so in demand that the rich countries will bid for the energy and the poor will have to burn their things to survive.
I am wondering if it would happen that with so many solar roofs we will either have to pay for people to use my energy or I will need to actually throw the excess in the ground safely somehow.
> In winter the days are short, the sky can be covered in clouds for an entire week, the solar panels can be covered in snow also. I have solar panels but I do not have a way to export my data to show you the summer vs winter GIANT difference.
> we can't store the energy from summer for winter and also resist for say 2 weeks of snow and clouds
You, personally, can't store 2 weeks of energy (though it's closer than you may expect, 1 person-week of Italian average electrical consumption is ~= 1 EV battery*). But you personally don't have to, transmission to another part of the country (or continent) has a huge impact on how much storage you need.
Basically, this problem is known, it's not all that difficult to work around — everything on the scale of "national power supply" is expensive and has pros and cons, PV isn't particularly remarkable in the scale or cost of those pros and cons even with current solutions and assuming no R&D effort can improve the trade-offs, they're just different than the pros and cons of the other options.
The real life is not as simple as you wish
The energy I produce can only go to my neighbors,
it can't be sent to a different region in the same village
it is a grid limitation.
Also when the weather is bad it is bad in a big chunk of Europe, sure in the South they will probably have nicer weather.
What about the issue when everyone has solar? then who buys my extra production?
Or if there is someone that can buy it because of too much solar the prices would be close to zero then the solar panels investment will not be worth it since you could be cheap energy from the people with solar panels when the weather is good.
My gut feeling is that 100% solar is stupid, it is like the 20-80 problem
we see now a lot of growth since it is very profitable, when more grid investment is needed and profits will go down this growth will stop.
> The real life is not as simple as you wish The energy I produce can only go to my neighbors, it can't be sent to a different region in the same village it is a grid limitation.
I would need to write something the size of a PhD thesis, not a comment, to fully describe the various possibilities and their trade-offs for even just the Italian grid, let alone the whole of Europe's.
But to keep it simple, I can say that limits of your grid can be re-engineered, and even for unrelated age and capacity reasons people are already planning to spend more on upgrading the European grid anyway, than it would cost for the material to build a global high-power DC backbone that would let the EU be lit in the middle of night, in the middle of winter, without any batteries at all, by panels in the Australian outback — and I have in fact done the maths on that.
(Only China is actually making enough aluminium, there's geopolitics even before Trump happened, but the price tag to get a single ohm of resistance around the entire planet is actually fine).
> Or if there is someone that can buy it because of too much solar the prices would be close to zero then the solar panels investment will not be worth it since you could be cheap energy from the people with solar panels when the weather is good.
Such investment is still generally worth it, because you don't need to actually sell anything when the price is low (or even negative), and even if it was zero the whole time forever, you've saved 100% of the current cost of supplying yourself with electricity.
> My gut feeling is that 100% solar is stupid, it is like the 20-80 problem we see now a lot of growth since it is very profitable, when more grid investment is needed and profits will go down this growth will stop.
So are you expert in grids?
is it cheap to make it possible to get the electricity from homes, and resue or add new transformers to raise the voltage to medium then high voltage and use the same high voltage lines and whatever they use to get the energy from homes in Italy to homes in Romania ?
About costs, if the solar panels will cost me 20 years of paying my bills but they will maybe break in 10 years then it is a waste of my money, I can buy the energy directly and lose less money.
I bought the panels because they were subsidized otherwise there would be more profitable to buy the energy, without subsidies and if energy will be cheaper or I would get paid to use it then solar panels would make no sense .
Imagine then a country that needs to over build solar panels, why would private sector accept this?
These nuclear cost arguments always gloss over the fact that nuclear has no insurance or cleanup costs. Developers will only build plants if the government assumes both of those costs.
Add to that the uncertainty over fuel and the disposal of used fuel, and there's literally no valid cost argument for nuclear.
I'm not anti-nuclear, but the fiscal realities seem insurmountable.
No they don't. The energy you get from your battery costs 10x as much as directly from the panels, but you only get a fraction of your energy from storage.
Than you can calculate the price.