If it was a matter of half the price then nuclear would be the clear winner. Paying double to get stable power rather than variable power is currently a clear win.
Nuclear has a lot of baggage on top of being more costly (eg public fears, taking a lot longer to get running, building up big debts before producing anything, and having a higher cost risk due to such limited recent production), if it was just a simple “pay twice the price and you never need to worry about the grid scale storage” then nuclear would be everywhere.
It’s been a while since I looked it up, but back then the projected price of SMR energy was about double the cost of current solar.
I’m not sure, if that changed much over the last month.
Anyway, wind, solar and hydro combined can produce energy pretty inexpensively. The power grid isn’t exactly simple with nuclear reactors either, so it’s not like you’re winning that much from this perceived reduction of complexity.
I’m certainly not arguing nuclear is a panacea that everyone in all the governments have somehow missed (even ignoring the risks mentioned its only a potential fit for a small subset of the grid these days, there’s no way building a 100% nuclear grid would make sense today).
The point I’m making is that currently there are energy production needs we effectively can’t fulfil with renewables because the costs would be impractical (eg the last 10% of usage on dark windless nights at the wrong time of year). Some cases do fit nuclear better currently (not all, nuclear usually wants constant usage, can’t help with surges).
Nobody really cares about that though for 2 reasons: 1. There’s plenty of opportunities that renewables still can fill and 2. The cost of storage is projected to drop a lot over time, which should fill in the gaps and squeeze out many of the last opportunities for nuclear.
Quite possibly by the end the remaining slice where nuclear could fit will be so thin it can’t actually sustain an industry (and given the industry has been half dead for decades, it’d take a big win to justify reviving it), so yeah, at the moment it looks like lots of risks and questionable rewards. Nonetheless the current prices aren’t really the problem, it’s just that things are risky, and projected to get worse over time, so why invest?
Ironically it’s not that different to the fossil fuel industry, just with a lot less existing infrastructure.
Yeah, one justification I’d heard was that it was a cheap and low risk way to revive the industry enough for bigger projects, but I’m not sure that’s particularly compelling.
Yes, but also literally every industry starts that way. Start small and scale up. Nuclear’s special because we did it once and then almost completely stopped building them globally for so long that the capability faded away.
The tech shifted in the meantime, so even the knowledge that was preserved is for designs we wouldn’t want to build today.
Yes, especially right now. To be fair that’s mostly because solar is doing great as far as scale goes right now. Nuclear has near zero scale and lost all experience, so it’s more expensive than ever.
If it was a matter of half the price then nuclear would be the clear winner. Paying double to get stable power rather than variable power is currently a clear win.
Nuclear has a lot of baggage on top of being more costly (eg public fears, taking a lot longer to get running, building up big debts before producing anything, and having a higher cost risk due to such limited recent production), if it was just a simple “pay twice the price and you never need to worry about the grid scale storage” then nuclear would be everywhere.
It’s been a while since I looked it up, but back then the projected price of SMR energy was about double the cost of current solar.
I’m not sure, if that changed much over the last month.
Anyway, wind, solar and hydro combined can produce energy pretty inexpensively. The power grid isn’t exactly simple with nuclear reactors either, so it’s not like you’re winning that much from this perceived reduction of complexity.
I’m certainly not arguing nuclear is a panacea that everyone in all the governments have somehow missed (even ignoring the risks mentioned its only a potential fit for a small subset of the grid these days, there’s no way building a 100% nuclear grid would make sense today).
The point I’m making is that currently there are energy production needs we effectively can’t fulfil with renewables because the costs would be impractical (eg the last 10% of usage on dark windless nights at the wrong time of year). Some cases do fit nuclear better currently (not all, nuclear usually wants constant usage, can’t help with surges).
Nobody really cares about that though for 2 reasons: 1. There’s plenty of opportunities that renewables still can fill and 2. The cost of storage is projected to drop a lot over time, which should fill in the gaps and squeeze out many of the last opportunities for nuclear.
Quite possibly by the end the remaining slice where nuclear could fit will be so thin it can’t actually sustain an industry (and given the industry has been half dead for decades, it’d take a big win to justify reviving it), so yeah, at the moment it looks like lots of risks and questionable rewards. Nonetheless the current prices aren’t really the problem, it’s just that things are risky, and projected to get worse over time, so why invest?
Ironically it’s not that different to the fossil fuel industry, just with a lot less existing infrastructure.
The SMNR format suffers from being small and therefore difficult to be cost effective and that renewables are 4 times as cheap. Not easy to make money in this environment. https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/06/nuclear-energy-free-market-capitalism-arent-compatible/
Yeah, one justification I’d heard was that it was a cheap and low risk way to revive the industry enough for bigger projects, but I’m not sure that’s particularly compelling.
Sounds like a very expensive argument to invest billions on the hope that something might happen 😬. Hope it’s not my money.
Yes, but also literally every industry starts that way. Start small and scale up. Nuclear’s special because we did it once and then almost completely stopped building them globally for so long that the capability faded away.
The tech shifted in the meantime, so even the knowledge that was preserved is for designs we wouldn’t want to build today.
It’s a weird situation.
The last US nuclear plant built went seven years behind schedule and seventeen billion over budget.
That sets a large amount of weariness in everyone to commit to making another, unfortunately.
Yeah the poster above you is wrong. Solar is WAY less than half the price.
Yes, especially right now. To be fair that’s mostly because solar is doing great as far as scale goes right now. Nuclear has near zero scale and lost all experience, so it’s more expensive than ever.