The cost of nuclear energy seems seriously understated. Nuclear waste storage costs the US $6B per year and we still don’t have a long-term storage plan. We’ll incur this cost for hundreds or thousands of years. https://earth.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us... There’s also a cost to secure the nuclear infrastructure. https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/nuclear-generation... Can anyone find a cost…
Overwhelmingly the biggest problem is wholly legal corruption, as cost and schedule are allowed to balloon without limit. For everyone involved, the gravy train stops when a plant is delivered, which no one actually involved wants ever to happen. (If it must end anyway, there is some incentive to actually deliver, as happened at Olkiluoto, but not at Vogtle.) No one has offered any plausible suggestion for how to contain corruption costs for nuke construction, at least in the US, never mind who should apply such containment.
No such dynamic is apparent in solar and wind projects, where expected cost is easy to estimate as a multiple of generating units -- panels and turbines.
We may expect that SMRs will not find traction specifically because they do not seem to offer the conduit for graft that bespoke nuke construction guarantees.
After corruption costs, we have numerous operating costs, some noted above, plus steam turbine maintenance, which each individually exceed the sum of operating costs of renewables. So capex is radically more and opex is radically more than for current cost of renewables, with no reasonable prospect for any reductions, never mind matching exponential decline of renewables costs.
There is also decommissioning cost, always omitted from reported capex. And, disaster insurance, always 100% subsidized by taxpayers, so omitted from reported opex.
As renewable generating capacity approaches and exceeds fossil generation, we will need to begin building out storage to provide base load. Cost for storage, in numerous forms, is falling even faster than for renewable generation. By the time we need any -- after we have enough renewable capacity to charge it -- storage will be very cheap indeed. Only a tiny fraction of it will be batteries, mostly for load smoothing (as now), as batteries will remain more expensive than alternatives.
Cheap storage will cost per W added or extracted, not per Wh stored, like batteries. Synthetic fuel -- ammonia and hydrogen, while costlier than others, have the advantage that surplus may be exported for direct revenue.