The cost of the power it generates in 50 years aren’t lower than the day it opens. If you amortise the cost of the plant over its life nuclear is stupid expensive per watt produced. It’s expensive enough that renewables + storage is cheaper. Renewables + storage is also a lot quicker to build than nuclear.

Even after the uptick in cost of renewables in the last year (which was dramatic) they’re still the cheapest new build power (even accounting for the integration costs). As an example here’s the most recent annual csiro report on energy costs by type. It doesn’t include full scale nuclear today because it’s known to be unviable, but even 2030 projections on “if smrs are commonly deployed at scale” they’re predicted to be a lot more expensive than renewables with integration costs.

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/energy-data-modelling/gencost

You can’t amortise your capital if just the variable operating and maintenance is more than replacing the reactor with firmed renewables. This is not the case yet, but betting that renewables won’t halve in price one more time in 30 years is a pretty stupid bet.

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Let’s not forget radiation caused by the power plant. Nuclear produces far less radiation than a coal plant.

The best time to plant a tree build a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

Tory government investing in nuclear energy?

Nah boris and his lot would rather get bungs from the local lads and keep us in the dark ages.

Labour aren’t exactly gonna do it either with Tory lite candidates atm. We are well and truly proper fucked.

I asked for that. In a manner-of-speaking, if you compared by the football field filled in area with barrels of waste. It would be about one for all the annual nuclear waste where turning the byproduct of combustible fossil fuels into just the vapor and ash equivalent would fill thousands. It arguably wouldn’t win from a toxicity perspective. For all the waste in the ocean from Fukushima, the only outcome were that the marine life seemed to have thrived off the low-level radiation.

on a side notw how people have dies from fukushima in the years since and how many have died from coal? Also you can compare the number of long term health problems

That’s interesting, I’m an EE but in industry atm. I’d like to look into that whole scenario one day and see how much storage we’d need to go fully renewable.

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So far the problem, if I understand correctly, is all thorium reactors are molten salt reactors. The issue there is, we still haven’t solved the metallurgy problems of dealing with the corrosive salt. It destroys all the pipes. We have slowed it down, but not enough to go production with.

By that time I’m hoping we’d be using Deuterium-Tritium fusion for all our needs. Or go full scale megaengineering and Dyson Sphere some star somewhere.

Because renewable depends on the weather, while nuclear doesn’t.

A mix of renewable is absolutely a good thing to do, but still, having a constant source of energy mixed with that ensure stability.

The storage problem is the limiting factor. Batteries are wildly too expensive, pumped storage takes a huge amount of space and isn’t feasible in most places due to geography, and hydrogen is not nearly there yet technologically.

If we switched entirely to wind and solar we would need to accept total shutdowns when we had a bad run of weather.

last time I checked the renewables being installed didn’t even offset the new energy demands being created, let alone making a dent in starting to decarbonize existing demand.

and the main reason is, that we need to tackle climate change from as many angles as possible and not eliminate a fine energy source just because something else is cheaper.

I mean for now renewables are cheaper, do you think we have enough raw materials to cover all of earths energy needs?

what happens when the raw materials will start to run dry but we still need to cover a bunch of energy needs, is that when we dust off the good ol Nuclear plants?

not to mention Nuclear plants provide a stable base load, no need for smart electronic devices that use power when it’s most abundant etc. it’s just power, that runs, constantly.

I think the issue is batteries, which are expensive and require rare earth metals which often have environmentally costly acquisition methods. Perhaps an optimal solution would be a baseline of nuclear power, and then enough renewables to meet peaks in demand. That way we have plenty of stable energy while minimizing nuclear risks.

Adding to what others have said here, nuclear is great for base load consumption. Use the renewables to supplement during peak hours where load variability is the greatest.

Sure, you could connect renewables to batteries / accumulators for times when they are not available (i.e. no wind, no sun) but this doesn’t give a very good consistent base load. A nuclear plant that is 1 MWe will always give 1MWe if it is up all the time. I’m not saying here that batteries aren’t a good option, just that they aren’t the optimal solution.

Another thing to consider is resistive transmission losses. Connecting long cables from, say offshore wind farms or areas of high wind density, to electrical substations long distances away makes delivering the electricity more inefficient. Granted, having it is better than not (nobody likes brownouts). But engineers try to take all of these into consideration when working on the regional power grid.

What lie am I spreading? Conventional Light Water Reactor Nuclear Fuel (5-6% U-235 w/t%) can be recycled. This can be done even without using breeder reactors which operate through fast fission of U-235

Yes the plutonium can be stripped out along with the other transuranics, and it does pose a proliferation risk (separate issue), but it definitely can be recycled. France reprocesses their fuel.

Edit: typo correction

I guess this is a joke, but regardless. The current climate is quite different from having an ice sheet 3km thick on the ground. This summer we were nearing 30°C/85°F on some days.

Coal was also considered clean in the beginning because they didn’t have to sacrifice forests anymore.

False analogy fallacy

We may not consider the waste a problem now, but that may very well look differently in 50 or 100 years.

Argument from ignorance fallacy

I am not so fine pretending it’s without tradeoffs

No one is saying it’s free energy or perfect energy. I myself would argue it’s clean and solves some of our current energy problems, while renewables still can’t. Unfortunately it suffers from a bad reputation and misinformation.

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And why is that exactly? Decay means the problem will solve itself, all we need to do is keep the waste away from the outside world until then.

Coal isn’t the cheapest though. For new build power renewables + storage are. That is to say, the incremental cost of running a coal plant isn’t that massive, but cost to build + fuel one amortised over the lifetime is more than renewables + storage.

So yes, you can enforce “adequate regulation” and nuclear will still be the most expensive.

People are not stupid. They will never choose the financially unwise option

I see you’ve never been to the U.S.

People do often act stupid, but you are seeing it from what I consider to be an incomplete perspective. Nuclear could be financially unwise overall, but someone would still get a payday. That 17B over budget wasn’t burned and unmade, it went into the pockets of the people organizing and building the power plant.

All this to say, the huge majority of the people involved in making the power plant a reality weren’t motivated by the efficiency of the power production on a cost basis. Most of them were probably making more money while it was still being subsidized, planned, and built. And while I think subsidies are generally useful and good, they can be a vector of financial abuse when it comes to unprofitable industries.

Lastly “lifetime cost” is a bit of a useless metric when the majority of that lifetime comes too late. No point to a power source that will cleanly produce power after it has meaningfully contributed to pushing us over the edge and past the breaking point for a climate that can support agriculture as we know it. There isn’t enough time or margin for error in emissions left available to build all the nuclear plants needed to meet energy demands.

Can you find any recent analysis that supports your claim that nuclear costs are at the same level as solar?

The only one I’ve seen suggest this was from a nuclear industry lobby group, and it inflated the costs or solar by insane amounts.

In Australia this is a bit of a hot topic and all impartial estimates suggest that nuclear will not get close to renewables in any way, even taking into account storage and grid costs.

In the 10 years since this single reactor was built, one of our states has transitioned to almost 100% renewables. Wholesale costs have plummeted, but renewable projects are still profitable in the market. I was involved in a reactor project in a western nation some time ago (it’s still being completed unsurprisingly), and the lock-in wholesale price to support that project was simply extortionate. Solar generation prices are a whole magnitude smaller.

Or even less if we – gasp, shock, horror! – reprocessed it.

(We don’t do that because of overblown fears about nuclear weapons proliferation.)

The Department estimates that continued operation of the current fleet of nuclear power reactors could ~70,000 metric tons of uranium * increase the total inventory of spent fuel from 70,000 metric tons of uranium to 140,000 metric tons of uranium. Nearly all of this spent fuel is being stored at the reactor sites where it was generated, either submerged in pools of water (wet storage) or in shielded casks (dry storage). The Dept of Energy

Those must be some big fucking trucks. And as far as I know, only Finland has actually developed any long-term storage which could be considered safe.

Nuclear is fine, but nuclear fanboi takes are similar to weed fanbois, it’s not a perfect solution.

Estimated total cost of decommissioning in the UK is £120bn.

That’s for way more than just one plant, and there’s a lot more going on that resulted in such a high price tag. That isn’t normal.

The nuclear waste storage facility cost 53bn to build, let alone run

It’s a reinforced hole in the ground, designed to last a long, long time after humans forget it exists. Of course it cost money to build, but now it’s just there. It doesn’t cost anything for it to continue to exist. Maybe there’s a little security or staff for some purpose, but I don’t know what they would even do.