[setopt]

It makes economic sense because they require a large initial investment (CAPEX), but low cost per year to keep functioning for many decades (OPEX). In contrast to say wind or solar, which are smaller CAPEX but higher OPEX.

So when you compare average cost per year over the complete expected lifetime of the plants, nuclear is good, but when you compare the up-front cost to build it, yeah it looks bad.

Another thing is that nuclear in the US is far more costly than in e.g. France. The key is that France standardized a few reactor designs that they kept building again and again, which made both construction and maintenance cheaper over time. While in the US, each nuclear plant is a unicorn, which can perhaps result in better individual designs but ends up more expensive.

[laurencerowe]

Unfortunately France can no longer build nuclear plants cheaply either. All of the recent nuclear plants built by the French state owned company EDF in France, Finland, and the UK have seen enormous cost and time overruns.

Cumulative emissions matter. We simply don’t have the time to wait the 20 years it takes to build new nuclear plants.

[olau]

Source please? The numbers I have seen of real opex paint a different picture. In general, nuclear plants close because of cost.

[laurencerowe]

Googling I see numbers like $11/MWh for onshore wind [1] and $5-$10/MWh for solar [2] while nuclear is around $25/MWh [3].

[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-wind-power-ope...

[2] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-utility-scale-...

[3] https://www.nei.org/getContentAsset/47fa8caa-9b0d-4029-932c-...

[tialaramex]

Also wow, for Solar the property taxes are OpEx. So if there's more sunlight because of good weather these "Operating expenses" decrease because they're based on taking fixed costs like property taxes and just dividing them by power output that's unrelated.

I assume property taxes for a gas turbine are likewise OpEx but they just disappear in the noise of buying enormous amounts of methane as fuel.