Idiotic reasons such as that nuke always turned out, on examination, to cost much more than alternatives.
Much of that high cost is often wholly-legal corruption that attaches to almost any large, centralized, hard-to-account public-money expenditure. Knowing this does not help. Thus far, solar and wind projects have mostly avoided the corruption tax by their simple accounting framework: N generating units x $C per unit = $CxN; and by their clear value proposition: $CxN is lately, and still increasingly, much less than alternatives whether those are figured with corruption tax included or not.
At this time it is cheaper to build out a new solar-and-wind farm and operate it than to continue just to operate a comparable nuke, wholly neglecting construction and decommissioning cost. We finally got the ramshackle Diablo Canyon and Indian Point contraptions shut down, but it will still cost a $billion to take them apart; or, likely, more, according to the degree of corruption tolerated.
That's why France has cheapest electricity in Europe?
Furthemore, once you take into account damage from climate change for fossil fuels or cost of backup for renewables, their cost triples.
For example Scotland generated 100% of it's energy needs cumulatively in a year from renewables, but in reality the renewables only covered ~30% of demand because it was generating loads when none was needed, and generation little when loads was needed.
From the cost estimates I’ve seen, PV with battery backups are cost competitive with oil and better than coal, even with pessimistic battery cycle-lifetimes. And we are building battery factories essentially as fast as we can, and batteries are still getting cheaper.
French nuclear is not just about subsidies: they actually designed a national system, where all reactors are the same, parts were mass produced, repairs were easy and workers are trained on the same thing. Nuclear fuel is reprocessed instead of being left in casts near the reactor, like is done in US.
US and many other countries have a random of assortment of one-off reactors with different safety issues and operational requirements, fuel requirements, making this very expensive to operate. This "free market" approach doesn't work for nuclear.
Regarding batteries, we will have a massive shortage for cars, let allone grid from all the forecasts I've seen.
Australia and India will be fine with solar, but Siberia has no sunlight half the year and wind is not great there either
Battery storage for utilities will be the high-cost alternative. Other methods are being proven at scale, and will ultimately eliminate the competition for batteries.
The most mature of these is "stored hydro", in which water is pumped up to a dam reservoir. Obviously this depends on having a dam not too far away, a ready source of water below it, and enough spare generating capacity there to take up the load when needed. Ramp-up is near instantaneous.
In places with deep mine shafts, a similar gravitational storage method is practical: suspend a heavy weight (hundreds or even thousands of tons) at the top of the shaft, attached to cables that turn a motor-generator as they unwind. This has the advantage that it may ramp up to full power in seconds, and the available energy is limited only by the depth of the shaft. Obviously this depends on availability of long vertical mineshafts, but there are very many of these worldwide. The tech involved is all 19th-century, so these only need construction. When excess / cheap power is available, the weight is hoisted back up.
Another is underground compressed air. (This may be combined with the above, pumping air into the same mineshaft, as is being done in one pilot installation.) This, also, relies only on 19th-century technology. Roughly half of the energy stored in compressed air becomes heat, so efficient use requires good heat insulation. Earth serves as excellent insulation. Power is extracted by exhaust through a turbine; existing turbines from older generation schemes may be repurposed. Ramp-up is fast. The reservoir must be charged up for some time in advance to be able to get maximum power out at sudden need. Several examples of this are being demonstrated.
Air liquification is a perhaps surprising alternative. It relies on mature 20th-century technology; there have long been numerous industrial uses for liquified air. For maximum full-cycle efficiency, heat extracted from the air is also banked. A GW-scale plant is under construction in Scotland, and a 50 MW demonstrator is breaking ground in Chile. An advantage of air liquification is that the storage capacity is limited only by the number of cheap insulated tanks built, which may be added to at leisure.
The above are the immediately available alternatives. Efficient hydrolysis of water to produce hydrogen has obvious industrial importance, and it may eventually displace other methods, as there is no upper limit to the useful amount of hydrogen that may be usefully produced from surplus generating capacity, even after local tankage is full.
> Idiotic reasons such as that nuke always turned out, on examination, to cost much more than alternatives.
Nonsense. In the 60 they literally developed 100 of different types of nuclear reactor often for a tiny amounts of money. Any coherent strategy over the last 50 years clearly shows that if would been cheaper to reach basically zero carbon and it could have been done far earlier and earlier with nuclear.
Navy ships in lifetime analysis show that over the ship lifetime its very cost effective. Not to mention that you can do many things you simply couldn't do otherwise.
Real private innovation and capital were never unleashed for nuclear innovation after the early explosion in the 60s. The extreme restrictions on the materials, government picking winners early and shutting out everything else. At least at that point some research was still going on, but no real effort to go beyond. After the government lost interest in the technology almost every single project was shut down and a nuclear became basically no-go when asking for funding inside the government.
And of course if you have incredibly low volume systems, with a tiny base of educated people, based on technology that is essentially from the 60s you are not gone have an effective system.
Like everything else, nuclear plants, even incredibly sub-optimal PWR designs when built in large numbers will get significantly cheaper. This is clearly evident in any analysis on nuclear economics. If you can build essentially the same reactor with many of the same project leader and teams over and again the costs go down massively. Even outside the actual parts production getting cheaper.
The cost per reactor that France achieved during their expansion is actually very low and they did it with pretty old technology that was really not at all optimized to be effectively built.
There is a gigantic design space that has not been explored that could massively reduce both the build cost and the operation cost and even decommissioning cost. Alternative reactor designs can be far smaller, far safer and require less human operation in fact a properly built reactor should have almost no human interaction ever.
This was all known in the 60s and the foundations were clear put down. In the 70s some amazing stuff was shown but at that point budget had already gone down government had already picked the commercial winners.
A design of that size would have been possible with 70 technology. Had they actually tried to innovate on technology and attempted different designs or had given real advantages to CO2 free technology at the time and let private investors take care of it, designed like this would have happened.
These main reactor vessels are literally not much bigger then a tiny ship, and could easily be manufactured in a single factory on a assembly line, transported to location and dropped into a hole filled with concrete.
Current cost actually are a result of the massively complex large civil engineering, more then the actual nuclear part themselves. That is high cost construction over a long period that has major disadvantage in financing. Having 10x smaller vessels with 100x simpler cooling system absolutely would make building reactors far cheaper and if you build many of them and have teams that are not doing for the very first time there is no reason why a nuclear plant can be build at cheaper rates then coal plant, more comparable to modern gas plants.
If you have an energy source that has that much advantage in energy density. Not taking advantage of such a dense and easy to obtain energy source is insane. Thorium mining for the whole US could have been done in one small mine for all US needs for the next 100 years or thorium extract Throium from the waste product of other mining operations. The reactor above could run on thorium that was dissolved very simply, you don't even need complex fuel production (not that that fuel production currently matters that much for overall cost of plant operation).
So you have basically zero cost of fuel, basically zero CO2, almost no mining, could have been done in the 70s, for sure in the 80s and 90s.
This is what I am talking about when I say its a missed opportunity. Even the incredibly sub-optimal route France took, lead to results that were far, far better then the route anybody else took and France did the world a huge service.
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Much of that high cost is often wholly-legal corruption that attaches to almost any large, centralized, hard-to-account public-money expenditure. Knowing this does not help. Thus far, solar and wind projects have mostly avoided the corruption tax by their simple accounting framework: N generating units x $C per unit = $CxN; and by their clear value proposition: $CxN is lately, and still increasingly, much less than alternatives whether those are figured with corruption tax included or not.
At this time it is cheaper to build out a new solar-and-wind farm and operate it than to continue just to operate a comparable nuke, wholly neglecting construction and decommissioning cost. We finally got the ramshackle Diablo Canyon and Indian Point contraptions shut down, but it will still cost a $billion to take them apart; or, likely, more, according to the degree of corruption tolerated.