[florkbork]

That seems to be deliberately obtuse.

It is more like being a firefighter and being opposed to airlifting icebergs to drop on fires.

Sure, you'll get water eventually and you might even extinguish a fire; but how long does it take to organise and deliver, what can go wrong in the process, what are the consequences of a mistake like dropping it prematurely, and why are we ignoring the honking great big cheap river right next to the house fire we are fighting?

[UltraSane]

The time to build nuclear reactors is a completely pointless argument because humanity is going to need low CO2 power forever. Without nuclear wind and solar will ALWAYS require gas turbines for backup.

[ViewTrick1002]

Even with Danish insolation and weather and tilting the study heavily towards nuclear power by assuming that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive renewables come out to vastly cheaper when doing system analyses.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

[UltraSane]

This paper is very heavily biased against nuclear power and is only valid for Denmark

It uses 8% discount rate for nuclear vs 5% for VRE

It uses the most expensive nuclear reactor costs instead of Korean and Chinese reactors delivered at 3,500–5,000 USD/kW

80% capacity factor for nuclear is very low and should be over 90% for new reactors.

It's least cost mix intentionally excludes nuclear power which is absurd. Standard practice would let the optimizer choose nuclear's share in a hybrid mix. Sepulveda et al. (MIT, Joule 2018; Nature Energy 2021) using exactly this approach repeatedly find firm low-carbon resources (including nuclear) reduce total system cost under deep decarbonization. https://www.eavor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-role-of... "Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases"

They intentionally ignore inter-annual variability which is where dispatchable nuclear is most needed.

It generalizes based on Denmark's unique situation of having some of the best off-shore wind in the world and access to cheap hydro power and storage in Norway and no domestic nuclear supply chain.

The authors are editors of the journal this was published in.

Lund is the creator of EnergyPLAN and cites himself a lot.

This paper just repeats Aalborg group and Breyer's LUT group's anti-nuclear opposition.

[ViewTrick1002]

Hinkley Point C and EDF just got a 7% interest rate to finish the project. That is after nearly 20 years of project work and 10 years of construction, so about all risk should already have been found.

Like I said. The costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C.

Imaginary cheap and fast to build nuclear power is amazing. It also does not exist. In South Korea those costs are from before the corruption scandal.

In China they are barely building nuclear power. It peaked at 4.7% of their grid mix in 2021 and is now down to 4.3%. For every plan they release the nuclear portion shrinks and is pushed further into the future.

Then I just see you trying to handwave the study away. The entire point is literally to prove that Denmark does not need to rely on its neighbors, and still get a cheaper result.

And like I said. Denmark is the hard case due to the winter sun being awful. As soon as you go south in latitude the problem becomes vastly easier. We’re talking like 99% of the worlds population having more sunlight than Denmark.

[UltraSane]

"Imaginary cheap and fast to build nuclear power is amazing."

It isn't imaginary. Korea and China prove it is possible to build nuclear reactors for reasonable cost when you don't have endless irrational legal opposition that makes them take much longer to build. What IS imaginary is multi-day grid scale storage. All BES are designed with at most 4 hour capacity.

I didn't handwaved away the study I carefully pointed out how it is systematically biased against nuclear which isn't surprising considering how anti-nuclear the authors are.

Denmark isn't nearly as hard of a case as you think because it has some of the most reliable off shore wind power available.

And it's conclusion about Denmark, if correct, cannot be generalized to the rest of the world. You have to have dispatchable power in an electrical grid and that has to come from gas, coal, or nuclear.

[sehansen]

Grandparent's report uses a nuclear LCOE of 110 USD/MWh which is pretty close to the Korean nuclear plant in Abu Dhabi. The (AFAIK) only plant they've built outside Korea.

The French nuclear plants have an average capacity factor of ~70%, the Swedish plants around 80%. It seems most prudent to assume a nuclear plant in Denmark would be at a similar level.

And if you want to use the plant in a dispatchable pattern, you'll be turning it off a lot when the sun is out and the wind is blowing, further decreasing capacity factor and increasing the LCOE.

[UltraSane]

In 2024, the U.S. nuclear fleet maintained a 92% capacity factor. 80% is very bad.

[tcfhgj]

> Without nuclear wind and solar will ALWAYS require gas turbines for backup.

So this myth is what you need to tell yourself we need nuclear?

[UltraSane]

What else would we use for backup when wind and solar aren't producing enough power? Gas, coal, and nuclear are the only real options.

[amanaplanacanal]

Are you pretending batteries don't exist? And long distance interconnects? And not even talking about hydro, geothermal, wave, and who knows what else.

[UltraSane]

grid scale batteries longer than 4 hours don't exist. You can't design a reliable electrical grid based on vibes. You have to design it on what cost effective technologies actually exist where you need them.

[amanaplanacanal]

Of course! Are you a grid designer? What does your model of solar and wind look like for your location?

[tcfhgj]

Id say this is plainly wrong.

Additionally, there are more storage technologies than batteries in the classical sense.

[stretchwithme]

so only do things that yield results fast.