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by pydry 377 days ago
It doesn't matter if the running costs are minimal if the capex is sky high, the site clean up costs are sky high, the insurance costs are sky high and the lifetime is fixed.

The total cost is what matters and the total cost is absurdly expensive.

If you used a nuclear plant during its entire lifetime as a peaker at, say, an average of 50% of max capacity, the average kilowatt hour would be TEN times the cost of the average kilowatt hour sourced directly from solar panels or a wind turbine, ~7-8x the cost of the average kilowatt hour generated from gas and probably about 4-5x the cost of the average kilowatt hour sourced from solar/wind via battery/pumped storage and over 2x the cost of the average kilowatt hour from solar/wind via syngas.

1 comments

The fixed cost might be sky high, but the marginal cost are not. And so it doesn't matter if it also produce when electricity is cheap. (To a certain limit)

And if you compare the total cost, you also need to compare to the total revenue. Nuclear can produce a lot of power at the time where power is the most expensive when there is no sun and no wind.

"Revenue" is electricity.

I did count and compare those things. That was my entire point. Even on the darkest most windless night it cant match the cost of solar and wind and storage.

Those ongoing costs are not so low anyway. France spent an absolute fortune on maintenance.