[noogle]

We need to shift from thinking of solar/wind as "electricity sources" to thinking of them as "fuel sources". The marginal cost of producing a transferrable fuel from solar/wind is already lower than current electricity prices. The challenge is the capital expenses on equipment (hydrolyzers, fuel cell etc.)

[AtlasBarfed]

Of course the article is just a puff public opinion piece. It doesn't change the economics:

Point ONE: nuclear is more expensive CURRENTLY that solar/wind. SOlar/Wind is currently the cheapest by far, and here's the scary thing for gas turbine: solar + storage is very close to druopping under gas combined cycle generation. Look up Lazard 2023 LCOE study. Solar/Wind have dropped to 24$ per MWHr. The cheapest nuclear produces is $141/MWHr. That's right, nuclear is almost 600% more expensive.

Point TWO: Say you miraculously got 100 billion dollars through congress for new plants to start immediate projects. Not a single reactor will come online for 10 years. Now, look at the cost improvement rate of solar, wind, and storage for the last 10 years. 10% year-on-year improvements or more. Even if we had half of that for the next 10 years (and there will be 10 more years of cost improvement), solar / wind very likely will be HALF the current cost.

So you'd have 100s of nuclear plants come online in 10 years generating electricity that costs 10-20x more than electricity from wind/solar. That simply is not a viable national power strategy.

If we had these plants already because construction started in the year 2000, that would probably be a different story.

The only hope for nuclear is probably in about 15-20 years where the cost improvement curves finally stabilize for wind/solar, and then a stable price point can be targeted with new nuclear designs. I personally think that only something like a novel MSR/LFTR which can scale down to mass producable sizes, uses all the fuel, breeds. doesn't have solid fuel rod reprocessing and waste transport/storage, and can use the Brayton cycle for more efficiency has a chance of competing with mature solar/wind.

Puff pieces like this are really about the current nuclear plants and keeping them on funding life support, which I generally support for now. The industry sees that Lazard LCOE curve just like any other person would: do you want to pay solar/wind costs for electricity, or 6x that for nuclear?

The existing nuclear industry can't survive without subsidies.

[dTal]

Your cost comparison does not factor in the grid storage required to convert unreliable solar+wind into 24/7 power. You can only directly compare $/MWHr when the proportion of unreliable energy is small, and offsetting reliable sources (i.e. when the cost of electricity is roughly constant). When all generation is unreliable, there's a huge question mark - how long can the grid weather dark, windless days? What's an appropriate safety margin, and what happens when you breach it?

From your own source, the Lazard 2023 LCOE study: "Most LDES (long duration energy storage) technologies have not yet reached commercialization due to technology immaturity and, with limited deployments, seemingly none of the emerging LDES technologies have achieved the track record for performance required to be fully bankable."

Ideally we'd have a combined approach - nuclear base load, renewables and grid scale storage to reduce the number of expensive nukes we need. That way you'll always have at least some power. But we don't have grid storage yet. And without storage, there's not much point in offsetting the output of nuclear plants, since fuel costs are so minimal - you might as well run all the nukes full tilt, all the time. So really, the only sensible thing to do is build primarily nuclear, and renewables in proportion to our ability to deal with wildly fluctuating energy supply.

[paulddraper]

Typical FUD numbers.

1. "Cost estimates" are more expensive than solar/wind. You know what they are also more expensive than? The historical costs of ACTUAL 50-year-old plants.

2. Average construction time for a nuclear plant is 6-8 years, with many built in half that time. [1] You can build over half a dozen generations of nuclear power plants before my 401(k) matures.

[1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...

[frafra]

The final price does not depend only on the production price. You cited Lazard 2023: if you read the firming intermittency price estimations, you figure out that solar and wind in the California grid costs 2/3 times more than when just considering the LCOE. Solar and wind production can be cheaper, but the final price is way higher, and it further increases when renewables take a larger share of the energy production.

[Mawr]

> If we had these plants already because construction started in the year 2000, that would probably be a different story.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today."

I assure you people 20 years from now will be posting the exact same sentiment - "we should have started building nuclear reactors in 2023".

[Mawr]

How much of the current low cost is due to the currently low storage requirements? As the share of energy production from the unreliable renewables increases, the demand for storage will increase as well.

How do the costs compare when you factor in enough storage and overbuilding to reliably cover the inherently unpredicable generation downtimes?

[ftth_finland]

Lazard only does LCOE for short term storage, since there is little to none long term storage.