According to [1] high prices are produced by, mainly, a tax hike on CO2 emission and secondly by the high gas price.
In fact nuclear power (which is the cheapest and safest) has been in decline the last decades, which is shameful since it has prompted burning more fossil fuels and many more thousands of indirect deaths. We should go from nuclear straight to renewable, not to fossil fuels as we are (or buying nuclear from France).
Nuclear is crazy expensive, which is a big part of why it’s in decline globally. Even with serious subsidies it just can’t compete with other sources. Just look at what unsubsidized insurance would cost to cover the full amount of any possible nuclear disaster. Realize nobody forces them to pay that and they still can’t compete on the open market.
There is plenty of talk around lowering cost of construction, but even if you got a new reactor for build free it still wouldn’t be cost effective to operate and decommission it without subsidies if you’re only paid market rates for power.
It is expensive, but so are the only viable alternatives when externalities are properly added ( fossil fuels). Renewables are unsuitable for base load without significant storage, which is only barely starting to get somewhat realistic ( pumped up hydro requires earthworks that destroy existing ecosystems, and large scale battery storage is IMHO a waste of precious battery manufacturing capacity that is better used elsewhere). Build nuclear, subsidise it, and run it for decades.
Base load isn’t an advantage it’s simply the term for inflexible power delivery. “4h” batteries are being built at a lot of solar power plants which sounds minimal except they are only producing the equivalent of about 8h of power per day at maximum output and daytime demand is much higher.
So those 4h batteries + solar actually covers grid demand much better than a similar nuclear reactor producing similar MWh per year at vastly lower prices.
It isn't in decline [0]. The world has mostly recovered from Fukushima-induced panic. Only Europe is holding the number back from being actual growth.
> Nuclear is crazy expensive
People say that like it is a law of nature. It isn't. Prior to COVID I was regularly moaning that the government was destroying lives with their overzealous safety standards.
The suddenly COVID comes along and "this vaccine shouldn't be mandatory" it isn't even the safest opinion for an extremely hastily developed vaccine. Previously the record was something like 4 years, typically longer [1]. Turns out almost all that time is safety testing.
Nuclear will be similar. The majority of the cost will be government regulation rather than any sort of intrinsic difficulty, and we'll have the technology to do it cheaply. It is simply unbelievable that the cost of this specific technology would go up over time, given that every other new technology we know of has the cost going down and usually radically.
Global electricity production has been increasing by ~3% per year over the last 20 years. So that nearly flat graph represents a 1/3 drop in relative supply.
A drop in relative supply isn't a decline. 2019 saw the most electricity produced from nuclear energy in all of recorded history.
The technical term for a thing which is getting bigger is "growth". And realistically looking at the chart the term for nuclear power should be "steady".
That’s actually a sign of a dying industry. Capacity factor increases as you lower the percentage of the grid from inflexible base load Nuclear and Coal.
In 2018 there where 449 nuclear reactors world wide, in 2019 there where 442, in 2020 441. Sure that’s up from 438 in 1996, but this isn’t a growing industry. At best the output has been improving slightly per reactor over time, except again most of that is moving away from base load power plants.
This looks like wishful thinking on your part. I got curious about how much nuclear construction was going on [0] and new plants are being built at a rate that far outweighs capital depreciation.
Capital depreciation is something like a lifetime of 50 years ~= 2% per annum, but new supply is being bought on line at ~12% of global capacity.
And they claim there are 443 reactors, so your precipitous decline might be overstated by 33%. 6 instead of 8 :)
First you ignored the direct evidence that being a dying industry is why capacity factors have been increasing. Total installed capacity of nuclear reactors in 2018: 402.04 GW total installed capacity worldwide in 2020: 397.78 GW that’s the opposite of growth. https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/WorldTrendNuclear...
Next your comparing a single year process with a multi year construction process. Even China takes over 5 years on average to construct a reactor. So your 12% is under 2.4% per year and in practice looking at when things are coming online it’s below 2%.
Personally I don’t have an issue with Nuclear. I was looking to go into the industry so I started trying to predict the market, and things look bleak outside of China.
>People say that like it is a law of nature. It isn't. Prior to COVID I was regularly moaning that the government was destroying lives with their overzealous safety standards.
Given how friendly nuclear with safety standards has been, nuclear with those pesky "overzealous safety standards" would be a hoot.
I’m not qualified to say whether Nuclear is a viable option or not, but the level of regulation is ridiculous compared to other energy sources. For instance, every Coal plant releases more radiation than any nuclear plant is permitted to. That’s far from a level playing field.
However the potential maximum release from a coal plant is… something. The maximum accidental release from a nuclear plant is one that can cause absolute devastation of a country or entire region.
That’s substantially only true of the designs we stopped building in the 1970s (outside the USSR, where safety standards mixed “overbuilt” with “crucial details not addressed due to internal politicking”, resulting in disaster). Chernobyl could have been so much worse.
That said, when comparing planetwide, the mean outcome is more important than the worst case. Eg: on average, over it’s lifetime, including the explosion, Fukushima was less polluting than a brown coal plant.
Modern are only passive safe in the sort term, these designs still need active cooling in the long term. So if humans disappeared tomorrow these reactors would eventually release a great deal of radioactivity into the environment. It’s not a serious concern outside of wide scale natural disasters, but over hyping modern designs isn’t a good idea as it eventually harms perceptions of the industry.
Yes. Idk about Spain, but most countries provision the full decommissioning and cleanup costs upfront when building, which is part of the reasons why nuclear is expensive. Nobody does that for any of the alternatives ( of course the risk and costs there are quite lower, but still)
In fact nuclear power (which is the cheapest and safest) has been in decline the last decades, which is shameful since it has prompted burning more fossil fuels and many more thousands of indirect deaths. We should go from nuclear straight to renewable, not to fossil fuels as we are (or buying nuclear from France).
[1] https://www.eleconomista.es/empresas-finanzas/noticias/11355...