Cost for nukes is not falling. Cost for renewables is still falling very fast. If nukes ever were honestly competitive, they get less so every day.
Ukrainians are as subject to irrationality as any population, and had recently been perceived as suffering a corruption problem. It is the role of economic analysis to recommend action based on facts. Drawing recommendations from what people choose without, particularly where corruption prevails, produces pathological outcomes.
When Ukraine is next in a position to invest in infrastructure, we may expect a bias for lower-cost, less-central infrastructure, thus favoring renewables. Erecting solar sharing fields with crops would be a good choice. Siting ammonia synthesis adjacent, for fuel, fertilizer, storage, and sale of surplus would be another.
They might be motivated to equip themselves to produce their own nuclear weapons, for quite understandable reasons.
This is not a law of nature. Nukes are technology. The cost of technology goes down in times as people make progress in that area. But if people stop building new stuff, they stop making progress, and they even regress.
America and the West stopped building nuclear power plants 30 years ago. Except for the naval nuclear reactors. America still churns them at a steady pace. Roughly new Virginia-class submarine is being commissioned every year, and a new Gerald Ford class aircraft carrier every 4 years. Columbia class submarines will be build at a pace of about one every 4 years too, the first one is being built now. All in all, the US is manufacturing between 1 and 2 nuclear reactors per year. The costs are classified, but you can infer indirectly that they are around $2-3 BN / GW. That compares quite well with the more than $10 BN / GW for civilian reactors. It is even cheaper than the capital cost for a state of the art coal power plant.
If we just increase the manufacturing of naval reactors from 1-2/year to 10-20/year, then why would we not see a decrease in cost?
That's the whole idea of the Small Modular Reactors. NuScale estimates that their levelized cost of energy will be $40-65/MWh. The average price paid by the US consumers last year was about $140/ MWh. In New York State, the average price was $220/ MWh.
You could say that the levelized cost of energy for solar is only $30/MWh. But that is based on the existing plants, and guess what, there are lots of plants in sunny California and few in New York State. If you want to build a new solar plant in NY State, then the levelized cost of energy will be higher. That cost cannot continue to decrease indefinitely, for the simple fact that the price of solar panels can only go to zero, but not less. After that, you're still left with the cost of land acquisition, of hooking to the network, with the maintenance, labor, etc, etc. Those costs won't significantly go down. The cost of land acquisition will actually go up, as you built on cheap land first, and then you need to move to more expensive one.
Nukes have had more than enough time to mature and develop any economies of scale they might have got.
There is no method known or conceived to get power out of nukes other than via heat engine, such as boiling steam and running that through a turbine. So, on top of all the other operating costs -- mining, refining, handling fuel, disaster insurance (always subsidized by taxes), decommissioning cost, spent fuel handling, security -- there is the cost of maintaining ye old steam turbines.
Thus, there is no conceivable prospect for nukes ever to get as cheap as (e.g.) geothermal, which expenses are mostly just the steam turbines. But rewables are undercutting geothermal, now, because they don't need to maintain any of those. I.e., maintenance cost of renewables is also extremely low.
Land acquisition is not an issue, because solar and wind both coexist nicely with agricultural and many other uses, often synergistically. Agricultural yields increase; crop, reservoir, and canal evaporation loss decreases; roofs last longer.
The comparison with geothermal is flawed for 2 reasons. 1. Geothermal turbines spin at whatever temperature the geothermal steam comes out of the ground. According to the EIA, that's between 150 and 370 Celsius [1]. This is lower than the steam coming from a nuclear reactor. Lower steam temperature means lower thermodynamic efficiency (the ideal Carnot cycle has an efficiency of 1-T_cold/T_hot and all other cycles have an efficiency that is monotonic in T_hot). The second problem with geothermal is the cost of digging the holes, putting the pipes in place, etc.
Here's a better comparison. The legendary General Electric turbine LM2500 [2]. GE has built more than 2300 such engines, which operate lots of civilian and military ships and also function as electricity generators in various places.
The top of the line such engine is LM2500+G4, which can generate 35 MW and costs about $12 MM. That comes at about $350 MM/GW. That's absolutely negligible compared to the cost of a nuclear power plant, and it is a third of the cost of a solar power plant (see the EIA report [3], page 179, where they estimate a 150 MW such plant to cost - only the components - $172 MM, which translate to $1.15 BN/GW).
Thank you for snagging capital cost figures. $350M/GW is a substantial chunk of what you should hope to pay for a nuke, even though in the US they always cost much more when official, wholly-legal corruption has taken its cut. Solar cap-ex is lately half your figure, but the plummeting price is hard to keep up with.
My point was about operating cost, which for a steam turbine includes regular periodic maintenance. Where geothermal operates them at a lower temperature than a nuke, one might expect to need less frequent maintenance, so geo remains a conservative standard of comparison. Of course both nuke and geo have lots of piping to maintain.
The point was that solar incurs no such operating cost, besides dusting off the panels once in a while, and inspecting and replacing failed units.
> no such operating cost, besides dusting off the panels once in a while, and inspecting and replacing failed units.
These things add up.
Here's a study by NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory), which is very unlikely to be biased against solar [1]. On page 31 they estimate the annual costs O&M (operating and maintenance) costs for a 10 MW solar plant at $144k. That comes at $14 MM/GW, or about $350 MM over a lifetime of 25 years.
Just so we're clear, I read Austin Vernon's piece about why nukes cannot be economical [2]. It's just not convincing. He compares the thermal part of a nuke with a coal power plant. A coal power plant is much more complex, since it needs to move around millions of tons of coal every year. A better comparison is with natural gas power plants.
Luckily, we can check the EIE study I liked to before [3]. I normalize all the costs to 1 GW.
Coal (no CO2 capture): $3.7 BN
Natural Gas (no CO2 caputure): $0.7 BN (yes, you read that right, it's on page 77)
Fuel cells: $6.7 BN
Nuclear: $6 BN
Geothermal: $2.5 BN
Hydro: $5.3 BN
Offshore wind: $1.2 BN
Onshore wind: $1.7 BN
Solar: $1.3 BN
So, Austin Vernon's argument that turbines can't be competitive because we've had coal power plants for hundreds of years is simply flawed. Natural gas power plants can be extremely competitive from the CAPEX point of view (of course, they burn gas that costs money, so overall they are not that economical compared to solar). But if you pair the turbine from a state of the art natgas power plant with the steam coming from an inexpensive SMR, there's no reason to not be competitive.
Ukrainians are as subject to irrationality as any population, and had recently been perceived as suffering a corruption problem. It is the role of economic analysis to recommend action based on facts. Drawing recommendations from what people choose without, particularly where corruption prevails, produces pathological outcomes.
When Ukraine is next in a position to invest in infrastructure, we may expect a bias for lower-cost, less-central infrastructure, thus favoring renewables. Erecting solar sharing fields with crops would be a good choice. Siting ammonia synthesis adjacent, for fuel, fertilizer, storage, and sale of surplus would be another.
They might be motivated to equip themselves to produce their own nuclear weapons, for quite understandable reasons.