A very remarkable thing is the decline in the cost of renewables just in the last 10 years.
The cost number have completely flipped in that time, not even counting the cost risk from delays, underestimated decommissioning costs for nuclear, the uninsurability of decommissioning costs, and the uninsurability of of nuclear accident risk. Solar and wind are cheapest now, by a multiple.
If you made up your mind on this issue ten or fifteen years ago then it is probably wrong now, because things have changed.
The cost of PV solar farms dropped by 90% from 2010 to 2020. The cost of lithium ion batteries also dropped 89% in a decade.
The cost of wind has also fallen (though not as spectacularly, something like 30%) and new wind turbines produce electricity much more reliably and consistently than they used to because the new turbines are taller and access steadier winds.
Meanwhile the cost of building new nuclear has doubled in the past decade (at least in the West, for plants like Vogtle 3&4 and Flamanville and Olkiluoto).
The result is that, although imho it makes sense from a "minimize atmospheric CO2" perspective to continue using existing nuclear power plants (or to restart ones that have recently been shut down like in Japan or Germany), the quickest and most cost-effective path to decarbonization now runs through wind and solar. That is why the US built 17 GW of wind capacity last year and is building 21 GW of solar capacity this year, along with 5 GW of battery storage capacity.
Solar prices have been decreasing at a staggering pace. 20 years ago, solar was certainly infeasible. That's not the case today and certainly won't be in 20 years.
> Anti-nuclear "environmentalists" are just about the best friends the fossil fuel industry has ever had.
Agreed, and that was mostly by design of the fossil fuel industry. Initial anti-nuclear rhetoric came from them.
That said, the numbers are different today than they were 20 years ago. Solar and wind cost less and has less regulatory barriers to jump over to get deployed than nuclear. That will be true right up until land becomes a premium (which it isn't).
20 years ago, solar and wind were FAR more expensive than nuclear. Now, they are nearly the cheapest form of power generation (I think existing hydro still holds that crown).
This is strange considering nuclear continues to be the most expensive new form of fuel and has only been getting more expensive with every passing decade.
There is new research in nuclear which if successful would bring costs down but it’s hard to see how maxing out on nuclear reduces average costs.
Edit: I see now. The original data is at least over 5 years old, at which point it’s possible that wind/solar may still have been more expensive than nuclear.
Editx2: The original book on which the original site is based was published in 2008/2009.
It’s not clear how much of the data on this new site has been updated.
Except we have been saying the same thing for 20-30 years. And when you actually look at the costs of wind/solar (although maybe solar thermal might be useful, but for various reasons its been abandoned) they aren't as cheap as the cost to install them because they have external costs which never get accounted for. Starting with the fact that the cheapest way to build them is to build a KW of wind/solar and match it with a KW of natural gas.
When you start looking at overbuilding them to supply some kind of energy storage, or to meet even their nameplate capacity 100% of the time on average they suddenly become a lot more expensive. I posted elsewhere (and was downvoted) for posting one of the many studies of how much it actually costs to build a KW of energy using particular technologies in various countries, and it turns out that those numbers, can be summarized as: Nuke plants are expensive because we want them to be, they aren't as expensive in countries (South Korea, China, etc) where random people don't (or cant) sue to stop construction even when the reactors are the exact same technology being proposed in the US/Europe (because they parent company doing the design and construction is frequently US/European)
Followed by, wind farm's aren't cheap, and the prices only go up when you start talking about offshore and on the tops of mountain ranges.
So, its no supprise that people who just want cheap energy will continue to pick carbon sources.
Some people look at this differently, There are fundamental laws around energy density which tend to inform the economics (aka dig a ton a uranium and process it, or dig 10T to extract Neodymium, Lithium, etc and then built something that has 1/1000000th the energy density).
So, one can claim wind/solar are cheaper and getting cheaper, but its like comparing apples to oranges, there is a reason places like TX, which have a world leading level of wind installed, also has some of the dirtiest power around.
Sorta the computer equivalent of building ones datacenter around the raw price/perf of a given CPU/SoC, while ignoring every other variable. Then wondering why the HW ends up costing more per unit perf (cause maybe the motherboards cost more) and why the energy bill is eating your lunch (cause the cores are running at some extreme clock rate, and burning power).
Finally, to summarize, you simply cannot hand wave the largest problem with wind/solar away, which is the fact that they are not on demand dispatchable. To get reliable power of of them easily adds a good 10x cost multiplier or more if your not willing to use a carbon source as a backup. So, basically standing around yelling wind and solar, is the same as asking for more carbon. And using wind+solar+NG is cleaner than just NG along, but it actually costs just as much as Nukes built in countries without regulatory bodies setup to stop the construction of Nuke plants. Despite the fact that even plants built 50 years ago are the safest form of energy production in existence (safer than wind for sure) when measured by deaths per MWh.
What do you think nuclear costs? I think you are probably unintentionally operating on a fallacy in this article, which is using decade-old costs. Renewables and storage have fallen in price massively. Nuclear was a great idea a decade ago but when you look at the costs there's no reason anymore. It's just too expensive.
I've never seen that anyone has been able to document this claim. Meanwhile it's pretty easy to show that nuclear today is too expensive. LCoE studies shows wind power being cheaper, and attempts at building nuclear reactors in Europe has repeatedly led to economic disasters.
You could argue that you could get the cost down if you make a huge push for nuclear. But the last time we did that it was a combined push for nuclear weapons and energy, which made it easier to get support and funding for education and research. Now the only major application is energy.
And though you could probably get the cost down to where it was before, the cost of renewables and storage is dropping very rapidly. It seems likely that renewables will reach a price point that nuclear could never catch up to, way before the cost of nuclear will be reasonable again. And since renewables will be so cheap, most countries will want at least 50% of energy to be renewable. And that will make covering the remaining 50% with nuclear more expensive, since you'd need more advanced and expensive load balancing power plants to support the renewables.
I also think that the fact that renewables give us an increasing amount of days with overproduction, i.e. extremely cheap electricity, might be a very good thing when we'll want to create more hydrogen and synthetic fuels.
Remember that those unit costs only recently came true. 5 years ago nuclear was still cheaper than renewables. Large utilities do not switch strategies very quickly.
What do you mean? 10 years ago all the nuclear proponents were arguing against renewables because they are too expensive supposedly. Now they are cheaper they make up new bogus arguments. Nuclear has had 70 years of massive subsidies (even excluding military spending) is still more expensive with lots of unsolved problems, but you say its the solution because renewables&storage are not reducing prices fast enough? Have a look at the price curves for solar, wind and batteries I can tell you only 3 of them are exponential price reduction curves and nuclear is not one of them.
Warning this book is quite old now. While the discussion of theoretical limits should probably still hold up, all the economics has been turned upside down since then.
Solar and wind costs dropped faster and further than most people's best case estimates, while nuclear costs and timescales just keep going up.
Yes, nuclear power has gotten more expensive with time but even still, today, in absolute terms, $/khw is competitive.
> Grid-level system costs for intermittent renewables are large ($8-$50/MWh) but depend on country, context and technology (onshore wind < offshore wind < solar PV). Nuclear system costs are $1-3/MWh.
Or https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45436 which shows that nuclear remains cheaper than wind and waaay cheaper than solar in California. And wind/solar prices AFAIK don’t factor in the additional cost of storage since we don’t pair wind/solar generation capacity with matching storage requirements.
And in terms of why it’s gotten more expensive, part of that is naturally inflation. The other part is that nuclear keeps getting more regulations and we disinvest from building more. It’s the opposite of the Wright effect - when you build less of something and disinvest it gets more expensive to make. Some of the regulations are legit costs (e.g. making sure the plants remain safe and don’t melt down) but you’d be surprised at how much of it is BS driven by FUD (a not insignificant portion powered by FUD from fossil fuel companies who benefit from nuclear taking as long as possible).
It’s also amusing to me the overlap between “renewables need more investment to replace grid fossil fuels” and “fusion instead of fission” camps. Like yes, fusion is exciting and I hope we get there some day. And we criminally underfund investment into it at government scale in the same way as we do with fission. But fusion’s road is even harder and longer out. Like we still don’t know how to generate more energy than we consume. It’s strictly in the pure research phase and is many many decades away from starting production and will take an even longer time to build out large amounts of capacity.
I think nuclear might have been the cheapest in the past, but it needs to be compared to modern technologies again and reassessed if it's going to have that crown now. It never got as cheap as it was claimed it would be, accounting for loan interest or not. And now we have just experienced a decade where intermittent renewables have plummeted in cost to below that of fuel-base energy. And storage is on that trend too, with storage being added to most solar and wind projects these days to increase profitability.
Nuclear is characterized by very low opex compared to capex, but that ratio is even higher with renewables. If we are going to give nuclear the benefit of low capital costs, we should also give renewables that same cheap capital when comparing to nuclear.
Far too expensive compared to other non-fossil alternatives.
For a long time, nuclear supporters just ignored the cost issue, since they felt they were the only real non-fossil alternative. Yes, they'd be expensive, but society had no choice. In the last decade this changed. Renewables are now far cheaper on a levelized basis, cheap enough that even with the cost of dealing with intermittency they are likely to come out cheaper than nuclear.
This is why so much new capacity in the world (and in the US) is renewables. It's not because of green mind control, it's because of brute economics. Nuclear is in dire shape competitively, in comparison.
A very remarkable thing is the decline in the cost of renewables just in the last 10 years.
The cost number have completely flipped in that time, not even counting the cost risk from delays, underestimated decommissioning costs for nuclear, the uninsurability of decommissioning costs, and the uninsurability of of nuclear accident risk. Solar and wind are cheapest now, by a multiple.
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