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"LCOE of less than $30/MWhre for 40-60 years" https://web.mit.edu/kshirvan/www/research/ANP193%20TR%20CANE...
After costing about three to four times that much for the first 40 years of operating, if the assumptions in the paper are met…
Still the same reactor chugging away…
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You can still build new homes on that land once it's dry. It's not contaminated with radioactivity. Imagine one of the old French reactors "going nuclear" right in the middle of dense populated Europe. It looks like a derailment and OPs argument still stands, imho. The only thing is that you can add results of radiation throughout generations, where people develop mutations and/or die early. None of those cases are i…
Chernobyl was a very special case. The reactor had no containment vessel -- we don't build that kind of reactors anymore (and the "old French reactors" do have containment vessels). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building Your "results of radiation throughout generations" line doesn't really make sense. Don't go into the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. That's it. You don't get much radiation from other nu…
The west never built reactors that dangerous, and nobody operates reactors that dangerous (that type was fixed).
Anti-nukies have this feeling that anything nuclear is categorically more dangerous than anything non-nuclear.
They imagine the exclusion zone around Chernobyl to be a liefeless wasteland out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, when in reality it is a thriving wild-life reserve where you might have a slightly higher statistical risk of cancer.
And you are absolutely right: they evacuated way too much. In Chernobyl as well.
In both cases the negative health effects of the evacuation were far more severe than the negative health effects of the radiation.
Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have evacuated at all, but a whole lot less.
Numbers don’t lie.
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Can we start with corporate welfare of fossil fuel companies? Fossil fuel companies take in welfare of trillions of dollars per year and cause 10 million deaths/year from air pollution. Deaths per TWH is negligible from nuclear or renewables, compared to fossil fuels.[1-5] And then ethanol subsidies. 40m acres are subsidies to grow corn for ethanol, which is a net energy loss. [6,7] 1) https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fo…
I'm not sure I understand. Of course we should cut corporate welfare to fossil fuel companies. Does that somehow mean we should supply it to nuclear power companies?
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Take Hinkley Point C, a Nth of a kind nuclear powerplant under construction in the UK. After much turmoil the government negotiated a fixed strike price for £127/MWh = $160/MWh for 35 years after construction. That is simply insane costs to pay for electricity. Those costs are expected and is why the only projects that ever gets going have government backing. On top of this we subsidize the accident insurance. In the…
That's about $0.16/KWh which is the average electricity rate across the whole US and significantly less than the price in the Northeast. I haven't dug into whether that's apples to apples - whether the country average is (generation + delivery) or just generation, while the rate bing paid to the plant is presumably just generation. But either way just the cost of electricity generation ignoring delivery on my bill is…
Add another 10 - 20 cents for delivery depending on if it's a city or rural.
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After costing about three to four times that much for the first 40 years of operating, if the assumptions in the paper are met…
At that time, you’ll be at least on your second and likely on your third set of panels. Still the same reactor chugging away…
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>That’s almost an argument for nuclear power I suppose. That depends how much against the NPT you are and how big a fan of extinction inducing weapons you are I guess. I wouldnt exactly treat the maintenance and construction of nukes as a sunk cost. It is possible to reduce our collective stocks through diplomacy. We've done it before. >Solar and wind + storage, in the long run, is currently not cost competitive It's…
> depends how much against the NPT you are It depends on how realistic you are. > possible to reduce our collective stocks through diplomacy Sure. But the world is currently sprinting in the opposite direction, with belligerence proliferating. And coupling an entirely separate coördination problem to the already labyrinthian onr of climate change is conceding the game at the opening. > it needs to be lavished with su…
What is it about historic strategic arms limitations treaties that you find so unrealistic exaxtly?
>Nope. Gen III+ reactors are competitive with solar within a few years.
Vaporware is always competitive with reality.
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Chernobyl was a very special case. The reactor had no containment vessel -- we don't build that kind of reactors anymore (and the "old French reactors" do have containment vessels). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building Your "results of radiation throughout generations" line doesn't really make sense. Don't go into the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. That's it. You don't get much radiation from other nu…
Not just did it not have containment, it was intrinsically unstable. The west never built reactors that dangerous, and nobody operates reactors that dangerous (that type was fixed). Anti-nukies have this feeling that anything nuclear is categorically more dangerous than anything non-nuclear. They imagine the exclusion zone around Chernobyl to be a liefeless wasteland out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, when in reality i…
I know. It is incredibly dishonest to use Chernobyl as an argument against nuclear power.
> thriving wild-life reserve
I know.
> where you might have a slightly higher statistical risk of cancer.
I know.
> In Chernobyl as well.
I know.
> In both cases the negative health effects of the evacuation were far more severe than the negative health effects of the radiation.
I know.
> Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have evacuated at all, but a whole lot less.
Absolutely agreed.
> Numbers don’t lie.
I never really trusted 7.
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> Is it that hard to substantiate your claims that a 60 year amortization + 15 year construction = 75 years is reasonable What do you mean reasonable? It’s real. We amortise over long time horizons in project finance all the time. Also, look up residual value. (And dams.) And yes, I’m contesting both 60 and 15; they’re 80 and 10 and could be 80 and 5 with permitting reform. And within that latter envelope, it works w…
> What do you mean reasonable? It’s real. We amortise over long time horizons in project finance all the time. Also, look up residual value. (And dams.) Residual value for nuclear power plants are negative. The plant is EOL and now it is time to decommission the entire site. Now you try to equate nuclear power with infrastructure, even though we have cheaper alternatives which the public don't even have to finance. S…
Not what residual value means.
> you try to equate nuclear power with infrastructure, even though we have cheaper alternatives which the public don't even have to finance
Infrastructure isn’t dependent on source of financing. Neither do ROI calculations, though you might scope them differently for public benefit. We are doing none of that here.
> risk premium for the expected returns year 60 are ludicrous which is why no one suggests it
Plenty of large projects model residuals and terminal value over the long term. Bankers typically stop modelling when the financing has to be rolled over for practical reasons; it’s unnecessary to be precise.
I’m genuinely curious what your background in this is.
> Please calculate it
Lots of people at federal agencies, banks and private companies are; their work is cited across these threads. But if you’re arguing about the definition of time value and infrastructure, I don’t think that’s a productive place to start. There is seldom substitute for fundamentals.
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> depends how much against the NPT you are It depends on how realistic you are. > possible to reduce our collective stocks through diplomacy Sure. But the world is currently sprinting in the opposite direction, with belligerence proliferating. And coupling an entirely separate coördination problem to the already labyrinthian onr of climate change is conceding the game at the opening. > it needs to be lavished with su…
>It depends on how realistic you are. What is it about historic strategic arms limitations treaties that you find so unrealistic exaxtly? >Nope. Gen III+ reactors are competitive with solar within a few years. Vaporware is always competitive with reality.
Nothing. Just that they’re about arms reduction, not elimination. You’ll still have a military nuclear sector. Also, there is zero chance this makes headway in the near term; we’re in a phase of great power competition.
> Vaporware is always competitive with reality
We’re dealing with unknowns across the board. For solar and wind, it’s deployment bandwidth and storage. For nuclear, it’s AP100 economies of scale. We aren’t talking SMRs, just as with solar we aren’t talking space-based or whatever.