But that ceases to make any sense the second you have renewables cheaper than nuclear. Then renewables start cutting into that base load as well, whenever they can.
Cost is extremely important, though. Energy costs propagate everywhere. Want to make some aluminium? That costs a lot of electricity. Want to serve some data? Got to power the servers with something.
If your electricity cost is too much, industry will move elsewhere.
If you try to subsidize it, that money will have to come out of somewhere.
Nuclear electricity is really cheap, building the plants is the expensive part. And yeah, I'm fine with reallocating the $5T in fossil fuel subsidies from 2010-2021 towards constructing said plants. [1] Then hopefully we'll also recognize some economies of scale.
Nuclear will never win the economy of scale war with renewables.
Solar is extremely amenable to mass manufacturing. You can pump out solar panels by the millions. Then it all goes together with various metal brackets, wiring, and electronics, all of which have long been mass manufactured. They're made in many places and have uses in multiple industries, and there's plenty competition.
Wind is very amenable to mass manufacturing. Generators, gears, various nuts and bolts can all be mass made. The actual towers and windmills are definitely more specialized though.
And trailing way behind that is nuclear. You need to deal with radiation, use exotic alloys, and have a bunch of very specific tooling and instrumentation with lots of regulations and certifications. Plus lots of redundancy to make sure nothing bad happens.
And they have exactly the same "cheap electricity". A solar panel just sits there and makes power, only it comes for cheap from a factory in China and you don't need various backup systems. You can just build more solar instead, which produces more money.
That depends on how you set up your electricity market. Since these markets are necessarily designed from the top down, we can set the rules however we like.
You can also determine, by optimization, what the most cost effective energy system would look like. If you do this you will discover that nuclear may not have a place in it.
Of course you can set up a market system where nuclear is favored, but that would be a market system that would likely not be delivering the lowest overall cost solution to the optimization problem.
"May." I haven't seen anyone actually do that, have you? All I see are researchers ignoring nuclear and proving that an all-renewables grid is possible, not that it's cheaper than a grid including nuclear.
At one point MIT had a US grid simulator online and I played around with it for a while. The cheapest fossil-free combination I found was solar and nuclear. Basically enough nuclear for nighttime demand, and enough solar for extra daytime demand. Wind+solar+storage was a good bit costlier.
And that was with conventional nuclear cost. We should probably find out whether, in practice, it's cheaper to mass-produce passively-safe small modular reactors in factories.
It models minimum cost combinations of renewables, batteries, and hydrogen to supply synthetic baseload given historical weather data (insolation, wind) in various places. It can also include nuclear (enable option "Dispatchable 2", which is based on EPR.) Twiddle the cost assumptions as you like to see what dominates.
Passively safe small reactors are the latest in nuclear magical thinking. Yes, this time, the it-will-be-cheaper promise will be real, unlike all the other times it was a lie. At some point Charlie Brown the Nuclear Stan needs to realize Lucy is going to pull away the football again.
Edit: From some initial attempts, using their EPR costs does leave nuclear out entirely, in both the US and China. However, cutting the nuclear capital cost in half results in a grid that is completely nuclear.
And it's not all or nothing. Reducing nuclear capital cost to 2/3 of the EPR value, the US gets a mix of sources with 63% nuclear.
Whether such cost reductions are feasible, we'll see. You may be right, but I'll note that we have never actually tried mass-producing lots of small passively-safe reactors, or done more than early experiments with MSRs. I'm glad there are companies and countries giving it a shot.
Edit2: Actually, even current production nuclear technology can get us there, if we follow the lead of the most effective countries. See figure 12 in this study of global nuclear cost curves: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
> However, cutting the nuclear capital cost in half results in a grid that is completely nuclear.
With the 2020 assumptions? Do that with the 2030 numbers and renewables will still be on top. 2030 is probably what you want to use right now, since any nuclear plant started now isn't going to be in operation before about then.
Note that some assumptions for 2030 have already been superseded. For example, it assumes hydrogen electrolysers cost 600 EUR/kW; China is already selling them (domestically and for export) for half that.
The EPR numbers are rather optimistic. Flamanville 3 and Vogtle 3 and 4 are now costing around 11,000 EUR/kW, nearly twice what was assumed (and four times the capital cost after we halve that number.) Yes, things went wrong in those projects. That tends to happen with nuclear and cannot be ignored. Renewables usually come in within 10% of promised cost.
Also, remember this is for synthetic baseload, not a grid with variable demand. The latter will favor renewables since that means some of the energy from nuclear will now be going into storage, just like from renewables. The synthetic baseload case is the best case for nuclear.
Can you provide a source for hydrogen electrolyzer cost? My quick google didn't show obvious results, though there's plenty to dig into.
Certainly nuclear looks bad if you use the worst costs available. My claim is that South Korea, for example, has achieved much lower costs in production, so our issues are more with mismanagement than the technology itself.
If I plug your hydrogen cost into the scenarios in my other new comment, it lowers the cost at which nuclear starts to appear on the US grid, but there's still a point within the range of the world's production nuclear costs where nuclear takes over.
South Korea's costs seem to have been related to corruption. That will work until the first accident, and as long as people aren't going to jail (as they did in S. Korea.)
South Korea isn't the only country with decent nuclear costs. See the study I linked.
US nuclear costs are related to the fact that we build reactors as occasional one-offs, throw in long political delays, and sometimes change regulations in the middle of construction. We're probably not going to change any of that, so it's good we do so well with wind and solar. But our situation is not the situation everywhere.
Most of the other ones in Figure 12 there are France. But now France can't replicate what it did before (the EPR cost overruns have been frightful) so the validity of those earlier points is called into question. As I understand it, the accounting of those cost of that earlier buildout is sketchy, with military nuclear rolled in in a way that can't be untangled.
Also, their default nuclear lifetime is 25 years, and we have many reactors older than that running right now. In my tests above I changed the lifetime to 60 years. Justification for that here: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...
For some countries, even the original capital cost of 6000 is viable with a 60-year lifetime. Two I tried are Thailand and, ironically, Germany, both of which went 100% nuclear that way.
Assuming a 40 year lifetime in an environment of rapidly declining costs (for the competition) is dubious. Note that we're already seeing some nuclear plants in the US that can't compete just based on their operating costs. TMI's remaining reactor was cash flow negative for six years before it was shut down. It still worked fine, it just didn't make sense to keep running it. Plenty of other plants are cash flow positive but aren't selling their output at a price that would justify their replacement with a new NPP.
One can view the strong position of gas-fired generating capacity in the US not just as a consequence of the low cost of natural gas, but also the low capital cost, which limits the downside risk of future competition. A combined cycle power plant might cost 10% or less the capital cost of a NPP, per unit power output.
Nuclear today is competing against cheap, dispatchable natural gas. That's not relevant to a model of a carbon-free grid, where nuclear could displace the higher costs required to get dispatchable power from wind/solar.
Nuclear's main cost is capital, so using an artificially low lifetime biases heavily against nuclear. The model accounts for operating costs separately. Whether other tech will make nuclear uncompetitive is what we're trying to find out with this model; if we start by assuming that, and limit nuclear lifetime accordingly, then we're making a circular argument.
I did notice that fixed O&M costs are expressed as a percentage of capital cost, so if I take them at face value and halve the capital cost, to be conservative perhaps I should double the O&M from 3% to 6%, which I hadn't done before. That doesn't change the German and Thai results, since for those I only changed lifetime. But in the US, it means capital cost of 3000 still results in a grid without nuclear.
That's only 2.1% of 6000. If we lower capital cost without lowering O&M, we get 4.2% of 3000. That puts a small amount of nuclear back in the US market.
However, they default to a discount rate of 10 for nuclear, and only 5 for wind/solar/battery. I don't see any reason to use different numbers here. Setting nuclear to 5, with the above changes, gets us back to a 100% nuclear US grid. Even if we take O&M back up to 6%, a capital cost of 3000 and discount rate of 5% means a 100% nuclear US.
Comparing overall grid cost of two examples: With no nuclear (due to 10% discount), the US average grid cost is 53.7 EUR/MWh. With 100% nuclear (due to 5% discount and 3000 capital cost), the US grid cost is 48.6 EUR/MWh.
In any case, this has changed my view somewhat. I'd thought that nuclear was a clear winner over storage, but it looks like nuclear's place is at least marginal in the US. We have copious wind and solar, and nuclear only lowers overall grid cost if we can manage the sort of nuclear costs they've achieved in South Korea. But in countries less favorable to wind/solar, nuclear dominates.
Yes. I've been saying that for nuclear to survive in the US, up front costs have to be cut at least by a factor of 3. This is going to be tough. NuScale's SMR doesn't appear to be able to do this.
If we start seeing CO2 taxes here, the way forward will be displacing gas using increased renewables, and if there are enough times where gas goes to zero then adding storage to serve that. Getting to 100% will require additional storage (and likely hydrogen), but even before that the environment will become quite hostile to new NPPs.
You can, but why would you set up the market backwards?
The whole idea of base load was that nuclear is very cheap, but inflexible. So you optimize, generating as much as possible with nuclear, then filling in the variable bits with more expensive to run, but more flexible generation.
Cheap renewables have completely wrecked that model though.
You set up the market to get the lowest possible total energy cost. If the lowest system design is to have nuclear as part of the mix instead of massive amounts of storage, then there's nothing backwards about setting up the market to support that.
Right now we have a market where wind/solar don't have to pay for the externalities imposed by their intermittency. That is backwards.
Well, if you're going to account for all externalities, that sounds like a good idea, but I don't think nuclear would fare well under such a model.
Fukushima cost around $200 billion to clean up. I don't think that got factored into the cost of the power it sold.
Now I guess the answer here is insurance, but any insurance company that signs up for a potential payout of $200 billion is going to charge quite the premium, which won't make the already expensive nuclear power any more attractive.
And how do you even calculate the premium here? It's not a house or a vehicle with an easy to determine cost. We're talking about evacuating an area of unknown size for however long might be necessary.
The reactor in the article would have been completely unaffected by the events at Fukushima.
In any case, my point is a different one: energy that's available on demand is more valuable than energy that is not, and we should price it as such. If we don't, we end up doing things like backing up our wind/solar with fossil...which also doesn't have its externalities priced in.
Well either nuclear is cheaper than renewables+backup (for peak load), then you want to use 100% nuclear, or renewables+backup are cheaper, then you want to use 100% that. I don't see a scenario where you run nuclear for baseload and renewables+backup for peaks, but maybe I'm wrong.
Well, if the renewables in question were hydro, I'd say you're wrong, because hydro is fantastic for scaling up and down on demand.
But since we're mostly talking about solar, that doesn't apply. What may apply is that solar will have highest output when it's sunny, whereas in a hot climate, demand will peak when it's sunny — which aren't quite the same thing, but strongly correlated.
That said, you need to be able to handle hot, cloudy days, and for that reason you may be right that you're best off going entirely with one or the other.
I’d choose both if the difference is small. Don’t want to risk geopolitical issues with either one, so mix them. How big a cost gap between them is worth the security benefit is not something I can even guess at, to the extent that I can believe I may even be wrong to suggest it can ever happen.
