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by preisschild 85 days ago
> Australia elected a government that listened to reports battery+solar is great for grid reliability and nuclear was always going to be more expensive

The report you mean (csiro) was wildly biased though. They based their nuclear power cost estimate on a nuclear reactor that was never deployed anywhere (Nuscale) instead of "normal" nuclear power plants that have been deployed for decades.

3 comments

The CSIRO report appears to have cost estimates for "normal" nuclear power plants too.

    Large scale nuclear $155-$252/MWh.
    Solar PV and wind with storage $100-150/MWh.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-22/nuclear-power-double-...
The NuScale cost was what the project itself announced. And they hadn’t even started building yet. The latest reports also include large scale nuclear power.

I find it funny when people get outraged because all CSIRO does is use real world construction costs easily proving how unfathomably expensive new built nuclear power is.

And people might not know what the CSIRO is. They are the Australian governments research body, separated from the current political party. They aren’t some private company or political group. I don’t think you could have a more neutral and unbiased viewpoint.
Exactly. And they have well established methodology publishing a consultation draft asking for review. Then following that review publish a final version half a year later.

Followed by updating the methods for the next iteration to cover any gaps discovered, like only including SMR and not large scale nuclear.

Was the Nuscale cost estimate somehow worse than AP1000 or EPR(2)? That seems very unlikely to me given the history of those programs.