I'm a brit and would be in favour of nuclear if it was cheap and safe but the progress of our Hinkley C reactor has not been promising on the 'cheap' bit.
>construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion.[7][8] The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion,
Economics of nuclear will only be found with serial mass production, as in Korean APR-1400s, Japanese ABWRs, Russian VVERs, etc. One-off builds with inexperienced construction/management teams are guaranteed to be expensive.
We can still build many tens of GW of carbon-free nuclear per year if we ramp up a serial production capability, e.g. in a shipyard.
Batteries, wind, solar have high costs at deep decarbonization. The low prices you see today are almost entirely when wind is blowing and sun is shining. Intermittency adds $30-$50/MWh at deep decarb, according to numerous EIA, NREL, OECD/NEA studies.
It's hard to see how nuclear, especially large nuclear, can compete with wind, solar and batteries into the future. All three of these technologies benefit from continuing cost reduction combined with incremental deployment. The "solar at night" problem is elegantly solved by recruiting electric vehicle batteries to pitch in at night and the dominance of EV's is pretty much assured at this point. So in a sense the batteries will come for free.
Further more, the wider the geographical spread of the wind/solar network the more the "lumps and bumps" of generation are averaged out. And making such large networks is also becoming cheaper and cheaper due to improvements in DC high voltage networks. Again these can be deployed incrementally.
Nuclear on the other hand is deployed in large and hugely expensive lumps of one nuclear plant at a time. Also the technology tends to be "frozen in time" at the point the design is made and there is a strong tendency of then keeping that design for decades at a time.
I'm not against nuclear per se. If wind/solar was not such a viable option nuclear would be good enough. Wind/solar from both a technological and financial perspective is just a much better choice. It's not a coincidence that we see Berkshire Hathaway up to their armpits in wind/solar these days, they know which side their bread is buttered on.
> The low prices you see today are almost entirely when wind is blowing and sun is shining.
Yes and don't forget all the different subsidies and government grants renewable sources still get. All other sources of power, including nuclear, are generally hit with extra tax in a lot of countries.
Removing all the subsidies and pricing in the external factors shows why nuclear is not even a consideration today. Comparing LCOE (Levelized cost of energy), solar $32-42, wind $28-54, nuclear 118$-192.[0]
New construction of renewables are even competitive compared to the marginal cost of running already existing nuclear plants.
Try to make a business calculation based on that with both renewables and storage trending even lower, solar averaging 13% and on shore wind 7%. Every year.
Get the LCOE for nuclear down to $20-30 while maintaining the same, or presumably even better safety, and I'm all for building nuclear.
Those numbers simply don't make sense for several reasons. They are with subsidies (not without) as the web page itself states. The numbers for nuclear are likely based on the failed European projects as China and Russia are building a lot of new nuclear power plants cheaper than that.
The biggest issue, though, is LCOE completely ignores the costs associated with the intermittency of wind and solar power. The LCOE is artifically low for intermittent sources and vice-versa for baseload power sources (coal, nuclear, hydro, etc.). When the conditions are right, wind and solar produce a lot of power, but this is not correlated with power demand, and the market price per kWh goes down so much during that time that baseload power is not profitable. Baseload power production is reduced, but the total installed base must remain the same (because you need power when the sun doesn't shine), so LCOE goes up.
LCOE is, conversely, too low for intermittent sources because it only cares about total accumulated production, not if the power was produced when it was actually needed.
I don't know what you're reading but it clearly states unsubsidized wind in the second graph (which has the same value as the first graph).
Regarding subsididies while it does not receive the most subsidies now nuclear has received 66% of the R&D and demonstration subsidies from 1974-2007 in the EU. It still receives about half of what solar receives [1]. So despite it having received much more subsidies previously its still not viable.
I'm sorry, I have misread your source. It clearly states "unsubsidized". My bad.
I think my points about the LCOE still stand, though. The LCOE is not a good measurement for comparing intermittent and baseload power sources. Nuclear in particular suffers here since the capital costs are very high compared to operating costs. A nuclear power plant needs to run close to maximum power all the time for maximum profitability. This artifically inflates the numbers for nuclear while lowering the apparent cost for intermittent sources.
Regarding your second paragraph, I'm not sure if you're arguing that the EU spends half the amount on nuclear power R&D as solar power R&D, or if you're talking about subsidies for the plants themselves. I'd argue grants for R&D projects would be very hard to count in a meaningful way, and I don't think e.g. a research grant that results in more efficient solar voltaic cells should count as a subsidy towards solar power, nor nuclear fission research as a subsidy towards nuclear power.
The EU provides grants for constructing e.g. wind power farms. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with every country, but in Sweden, renewables are given a large cashback grant per kWh generated ("elcertifikat"). Nuclear power here has been profitable since the 70s, and didn't turn unprofitable until taxes on nuclear power were increased substantially a few years ago.
Thank you. This is why I think the real debate is 'nuclear vs renewables' instead of 'nuclear vs coal'. Because renewables and nuclear are both chasing the same limited subsidies to compete with technology that doesn't price in negative externalities.
>construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion.[7][8] The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion,
As a result I say go batteries, wind, solar!