[ljf]

Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables)

Some figures on running costs: Coal costs about £62 per MWh - (£31 for the coal and £31 for the CO2 premium we already charge the energy producers).

As a fossil fuel comparison, Gas costs about £114 per MWh.

Nuclear - Hinkley C will cost about £128 per MWh - but likely to be even higher when it comes online. And we will be on the hook for this price as long as it runs, no matter how cheap renewables are.

[AnthonyMouse]

> As a fossil fuel comparison, Gas costs about £114 per MWh.

You're comparing the cost for coal as baseload to the cost for natural gas as a peaker plant. When using both for baseload, natural gas is cheaper than coal and emits less CO2.

Meanwhile renewables are cheaper than both until they represent enough of the grid that you have to contend with intermittency:

https://www.ourworldofenergy.com/images/electrical-power-gen...

Which doesn't happen until it gets close to being a majority of generation, and which most countries aren't at yet so can add more without incurring significant costs for firming.

In other words, the currently cheapest way to operate a power grid, if that's all you care about, is to have something like half renewables and half natural gas. Add some nuclear -- even just, don't remove any -- and CO2 goes down by a lot because then you're only using natural gas for peaking/firming instead of baseload, while still having costs in line with historical norms.

The obviously bad thing many places are doing is shutting down older power plants without building enough new capacity in anything else to meet existing demand, and then prices go up. But that's not because you're using e.g. solar instead of coal, it's because you're trying to use demand suppression through higher prices instead of coal. It's easy to get rid of coal as long as you actually build something else.

[idiotsecant]

>Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables)

Yes, all three. Building a nuke plant without the additional concern for outcome that we put on nuke would be relatively inexpensive. It's just concrete, pumps, and a turbine. It's a ismilar level of complexity to a coal plant. Same with running cost, same with decommissioning costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

Suppose we designed, operated, and budgeted every coal plant to make accidents like this a statistical impossibility. Not very unlikely, that's not the standard we hold nuke to. An impossiblity. Imagine what that would cost.

[TheOtherHobbes]

A nuke plant is concrete, pumps, fuel storage and (re)processing, a huge pressure vessel, some very complex moderator machinery, and some of the most complex industrial plant control on the planet.

Even if you ramped down the safety, it still wouldn't be cheap or simple.

[AnthonyMouse]

"Fuel storage and reprocessing" isn't that much of the cost and a significant proportion of that is compliance costs and extreme safety measures. The pressure vessel is likewise a small minority of the cost.

Industrial control systems are fundamentally sensors, actuators and a computer. None of those is actually that expensive. Nobody should be paying a billion dollars for a valve.

Older reactors have somewhat high operating costs because they're so old, many of them were built more than half a century ago. Newer reactors often have higher costs because of the lack of scale. If you only build one or two of something you have to amortize the development costs over that many units, mistakes that require redoing work are being made for the first time, etc. Build more of them and the unit cost goes down.

[pydry]

Fuel storage and reprocessing isnt where vast majority of of the cost is for nuclear power, construction and decommissioning are.

These are what makes it cost 5x solar or wind.

[AnthonyMouse]

"Decommissioning costs" are essentially bad math. Here's this again:

https://www.ourworldofenergy.com/images/electrical-power-gen...

Nuclear, inclusive of construction costs: ~$181/MWh, only better than natural gas because no CO2. Nuclear, cost of continuing to operate an existing reactor once it's already built: $31/MWh, basically the cheapest thing on the market, half the cost of continuing to operate an existing natural gas plant (because you need so much less fuel).

What this implies is that if you build a nuclear plant you're going to want to continue operating it for 80 years, and even then you probably want to just modernize it again instead of actually decommissioning it.

The long-term average returns from ordinary investments (e.g. S&P 500) are ~10%/year, implying that even if you require decommissioning to be prefunded (unlike any competing form of power generation), the amount of money you need is less than 0.05% of what the cost will be in 80 years. Adding $500 million in decommissioning costs isn't $500M in net present costs, it's only $250 thousand in net present costs, because you take the $250k and add 80 years worth of interest (1.10^80) which multiplies your starting capital by more than a factor of 2000.

It's really just the construction, and that's in significant part because you have to build more of them to get economies of scale for building them.

[pydry]

>Decommissioning costs" are essentially bad math.

This is disingenuous. Bad math is focusing on the one part of nuclear power which is relatively cheap (fuel) and ignoring the rest where the majority of the cost is, which is what you did.

I wasnt comparing nuclear power to gas anyway I was comparing it to solar and wind which produce no CO2. FIVE times cheaper LCOE.

Nuclear power needs anyway to be paired with dispatchable energy source like batteries or gas just as solar and wind do.

It isnt a competitor with gas or batteries it is a complement to gas and batteries, just like solar and wind.

[idiotsecant]

Are you implying that a coal plant doesn't have literally every single one of these? I have done industrial controls engineering for both and coal plants are actually quite complex. Take my word for it, they're well within spitting distance of one another, at the most basic level. The only difference is the enormous level of surety provided in a nuke plant design.