Let's do some math. You can build a 3 MW wind turbine for around £2 million. Which means you could build around 11,500 wind turbines with the amount of money spent on HPC. Which in turn means a maximum production of 34,500 MW. So even under the assumption that these will run at below 10% of their capacity you're still producing more electricity than HPC. Now in reality this number averages around 30% actually. So the price per MWh is orders of magnitudes lower compared to nuclear.
This is still not equivalent because we haven't solved storage (peaky energy is not as valuable as constant energy) [and because you've compared build costs to total costs].
Yes, there needs to be more storage or backing by gas plants. But nuclear power needs the same gas plants as you cannot change the output levels quickly enough to drive the grid. In a sense, constant output is almost as bad for the grid as peak energy, which can easily be throttled.
In both cases you need additional flexible plants or storage. In the moment, when there is true surplus renewable energy production, storage buildup will increase quickly.
Side note: electric cars will be a large part of the grid balancing in the future.
> Side note: electric cars will be a large part of the grid balancing in the future.
Do you have any good reading for this?
In my naive mind, it’s doomed by the fact that we drive to work in the day, then all come home, together, in the evenings, when the sun is on its way down. Or is the plan to have two way power chargers at businesses too? Otherwise, all these batteries are disconnected when you need them.
Considering how much storage capacity becomes available when connecting cars to the grid - even if the part used for grid storage is only 10kWh/car (typical batteries have 70 or more kWh) - I would assume there will be a huge push by utility companies to get as much cars connected as possible.
Sure, but assuming all of the office buildings of the world don't retrofit their parking structure with grid connections, these cars will only be connected to the grid in the evenings. I suppose this would be great for taming the dinner time spike, but it seems to put the availability, for them to store excess, where it's needed least: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/California-daily-utility...
Why would you assume that no office building would retrofit their parking structure when there are huge incentives to do so?
For sure not all of them might, but if enough do, it will be a major benefit.
But yes, if a car isn't connected to the grid it cannot participate.
I'm definitely not assuming that none will, I'm just assuming it will be a some smallish fraction for the foreseeable future. Nearly 50% of California's working population works for small business. It's not just the cost of the equipment, but also cost up upgrading the panels and, almost certainly, service lines.
Where I am (a city in California), you have to pay for replacing the service lines/conduits, including digging it up/repairing the street and sidewalk, even if they run 1 city block.
Using a pessimistic $150/kWh (it's already under that) I get 70,000,000 kWh or 70 gWh, enough to run the entire state of California for a little over an hour. So you could build over 10GW of wind power capacity and 70 gWh storage for the cost of one nuclear plant.
Nuclear isn't dying because of hippies. It's dying because it's expensive. You're right that the safety concerns are over-inflated, but failure to deliver on its cost promises are the major failure of nuclear (fission) power.
If we make fusion work and can scale it, that's a totally different ballgame... but it won't happen fast enough to impact climate change.
I really don't think this isn't about maths with money. People are constantly working on this as-yet unsolved problem. Those batteries aren't suitable. Perhaps some will be one day, and that will be the fix.
Though falling prices would be intuitive, with nuclear that's been found to be false, both in the US and in France. Building subsequent versions of the same design increase in cost, rather than staying the same price or going down.
This is truly remarkable phenomenon that occurs with almost no other technology. And this happening in France rules out the possibility that it's merely increasing regulatory burden that causes increasing costs.
Those who want us to build new nuclear need to grapple with the issue of their cost if they want it to happen, yet I have not found a single nuclear advocate on HN that will acknowledge that these issues even exist, much less bother to propose some solution.
At least for the "safety" issues, we can have a discussion about how designs can mitigate that. But there also needs to be discussion on how design, workforce training, logistical management, or something can improve the construction issues.
If you build 11,500 nuclear plants they will have to be breeder reactors (or, we'd have to deploy 2 million square miles of uranium collector fields in the ocean if that could be made cheap enough to supply U for burner reactors.) We don't use breeders because they've proven to be more expensive than LWRs, not less expensive.
> £23 billion for ~3.000 MW which is completely insane
3000MW almost constantly, for what, 60-80 years? How much would the equivalent wind+ grid scale storage(multi-day) that would need to be replaced multiple times over that same lifespan cost?
Well, might be. The question is though if it's worth a price orders of magnitude higher than competing energy sources. And most countries on this planet seem to have come to the conclusion that it is actually not worth the price. Now I am actually not particularly for or against nuclear power - just making the argument that it's not an economic source of energy anymore.
The already build reactors are the cheapest energy source. If you close reactor stupidly early, like 20-30 years after build, you're throwing out next 30-50 years of generation that cost basically nothing.
And unfortunately, of that £23bn, something massive percentage will be government "bureaucracy" for want of a better word. If nuclear power were properly commercialised it would be cheaper. The only analogy I can think of is cost of launches for SpaceX vs NASA or ESA. SpaceX had to be efficient and make a profit, they innovated, and now are the cheapest launches available by a huge margin. Governments are always interested in nuclear for "security" reasons.
The article indeed mentions modular commercial reactors.
When finished the UKs Hinkley Point C nuclear plant will probably have cost around £23 billion for ~3.000 MW which is completely insane.