You know what cost they never factor in? The cost of climate change. If they actually factored in the cost of emissions then nuclear power would be one of the cheapest forms of energy alongside solar.
this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
51 points (96.4% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5289 readers
554 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Another thing a lot of people fail to mention about nuclear power, is the lifespan of a reactor. We have reactors from the 70s still running at full power, it's pretty insane. I'm wondering what the TCO per kWh is for a nuclear reactor compared to other sources of energy.
A solar farm in Switzerland from 1982 is also still providing power at 80% of original spec. Even today solar companies give 25 year warranty on new panels.
So this is not really an advantage of nuclear. In fact after 50 years a lot of them become a lot less reliable. We recently saw that in France.
I don't remember, but nuclear is the highest operating cost of electricity, until the reactor is paid off by rates, in which it becomes very cheap. Natural gas is the cheapest starting and maintaining and is reaching better efficiencies. However, it's killing the environment.
Methane (natural gas) is cheap because they don't factor in the cost of climate change caused by methane emissions. Methane would be one of the most expensive if they factored in the leaks and its strong ability to trap heat in the atmosphere.
12.95 ¢/kWh to 13.60 ¢/kWh.
I think that's a fair price for cleaner air
I also think there are proven better reactor designs that are far cheaper.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=table_5_06_a
Sadly not. There are unproven ones which might be, but the US nuclear industry has a substantial history of coming in really really expensive.
The reason electricity in most places is cheaper are:
- Nuclear was built a long time ago, so the reactors are paid for already
- Electricity is generated using methods other than nuclear
It's also for reasons with nothing to do with nuclear in particular. The US is just terrible at executing large civil projects. It costs more to build at large scales here than virtually anywhere else, for a confluence of reasons -- highly decentralized project management (state, county, federal, city governments all fighting for authority), lack of sustainable learning curves, NEPA being weaponized by NIMBYs to kill every project including environmentalist ones, plain dumb politics... you know you have a problem when you look onto the efficiency of Italian bureaucracy with envy, but meanwhile they can build e.g., rail projects at something like a third to sixth the budget the US can.
A big part of the problem is that we insist on fully custom and experimental projects. Every fucking time. We never just use the catalog builds. We never set and stick to a standard. Not even in road design, where the AASHTO green book is treated like a fucking Holy Bible -- we follow its (largely dumb and dangerous requirements while still bespoking every fucking project.
The US Navy has had functional Small modular reactor designs mostly PWR designs since the 1960s in the 5mw to 500mw range with no major failures yet.
The problem is that none of these designs have ever been used to power the grid. Every nuclear project in the recent past has blown by cost and time estimates. Wind and solar are not only cheaper than nukes, they can also be installed much quicker and predictably. Nukes have a place, but we need clean energy now.
Wind and solar are great, but they cannot provide consistent 24 hours base load production. Even with massive battery farms, they cannot replace bas load consistently.
That's where nuclear needs to be, replacing the base load production currently being handled via coal and natural gas.
The US at least already has enough nuclear to handle base loads when solar and wind are unavailable. Nukes in some contexts are needed, but I believe we have 30% or so nukes in the US. Diverting resources to new nukes is a waste when we could be making carbon fuels unprofitable soon by investing in solar and wind.
But are they in the right places? There's always loss in power transmission, so you can't use reactors that are in, say, Illinois, to make up for grid deficits in Alabama (or, not directly). And Texas, being a special snowflake, isn't tied into the national grid, so they always need their own systems.
Yes. Operated on a military budget. There's a reason they're not used for civilian use.
That's thanks to the training (started with Rickover) and discipline and no shareholders. Commercial nukes don't measure up, e.g. when it comes to leakages and knowing what to do in case.
Now you're just being disingenuous. I am certain that qualified individuals from the private sector and qualified individuals from the military both receive adequate training to operate their facilities
What's funny about this is that most of the qualified private sector individuals are former Navy personnel. The civilian nuclear industry loves to hire people with nuclear training from the Navy because they're already trained and experienced.
The Navy does operate a lot of nuclear reactors, and quite safely overall, but they also spend DoD money on building and maintaining them and training personnel for them.
Way to start out with an ad hominem. Cheap too. Since you're 'certain' (and I know very well that's hard to come by for this sacred cow), your #1 reference?
If I called you stupid that would have been an ad hominem attack, I'm saying you're misrepresenting facts which would require intelligence. Therefore, disingenuous.
Poor governor of Georgia, one more in a long, long line.
I learned much of what I know about how facts are misrepresented by reading advertisements by the industry. Like the full-page regional newspaper ad along the lines of "One myth about nuclear power is ... instead the fact is this ... " back in the 1970s. Or my all-time favorite fact, one of the earliest: Safe, clean, 'too cheap to meter', said AEC chairman Lewis Strauss, in 1954.
Maybe it was catching? But the facts, like those countless millions of escaped curies, were invisible. Convenient.
This 14-year-old Fermi story might help: https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-detroit-nuclear-20161003-snap-story.html
If Republicans want to elect Republicans that force them to pay extra for their preferred (marginal) carbon free power source, fine I guess? The rate increases aren't great for the other 48% of the state though.
If you're only looking from a financial perspective, sure. But given the slow construction times, these decisions are an issue for absolutely everyone, given that decarbonization is a worldwide project.
Georgia has every reason to be a solar powerhouse. They have sunlight to spare and every reason to want to build it. Batteries are finally getting cheap enough to outcompete fossil generation, too.
And they ARE building it, so they even are achieving learning curves on it. There are even Republicans on the PSC (Tim Echols) that are highly, highly pro-solar.
Meanwhile Georgia Power is currently planning more fossil gas plants and extending the life of a handful of coal plants because they think they have a shortfall in energy forecasts for future demands. Because, among other things, so many huge tech datacenters are moving to the state (which of course many were doing on the promise of the quite green grid Georgia has to offer, which was the bait that is now being switched on them).
Why? Because they're lazy, super conservative, and they get guaranteed profits off of capital investments. The Southern Company is one of the most powerful forces of great evil in the country and goes largely unnoticed. They are actively incentivized to fuck their own ratepayers in order to increase their profitability by the agreements and statutes that allow them to be the utility.
The reality is that Vogtle was built and we should be glad for it and use it. It's spun up and producing gobs of power, and will continue to do so for a damn long time. Great. But in a state where fossil production is still being actively expanded, putting money towards ultra-expensive nuclear over incredibly cheap solar and storage, betraying your own potential "customers" in the process, is just idiotic.
I just wanted to point out that Georgia has consistently had a budget surplus for quite a while now, mostly because Republicans keep cutting critical gov't services. Seem to me like Republicans could pay for a new plant using all of the excess taxes that they've been saving for a rainy day.