Very timely article for Australia, which is just beginning another debate about whether they should go Nuclear (there is currently no Nuclear power in Australia).
Seems Australia has dodged a bullet by NOT having Nuclear, now some are trying to catch that bullet for political points.
It probably would have been nice to have one build now or even better 10 years ago. It's a good base of stable green energy to have during the transition. But planning to build a new one now seems purely political. It doesn't make sense when it takes 10 years to build at best. Every recent plant build in the west has had huge cost and time overruns. But then to make those costs back the plant has to compete with solar/wind/batteries for a good 20 years, STARTING IN 2035-2040. That's never going to work out financially. Solar is already cheaper and you will have to make those investments in the grid either way before the nuclear plant comes online.
It's bad because of Australia's unique situation. They are uniquely well suited for solar while being uniquely unsuited for new nuclear.
Australia has 2x the sunshine of Europe, more spare land for panels, and less seasonal variability.
Australia has no existing nuclear plant experience. No experienced regulator or legal regime. High labor costs and little relevant local labor. And a track record of project cost blowouts and time overruns on large projects.
Australia's small energy needs are also an issue. The marginal cost of new nuclear drops after you build the first few plants but Australia has such small energy needs that it won't reap the fruits of scale benefits.
Australia has large community opposition to nuclear but not to solar. About 35% of the electorate approve of nuclear, with almost all state premiers publicly stating opposition, while 80% approve of solar. This will lead to social licensing risks like what Germany, Japan, Taiwan and California face with planning and legislative delays, and potential early plant closures leading to wasted capex and higher energy costs.
Australia's peak scientific body, the CSIRO, estimates that a mostly decarbonized grid will be 2x more expensive with nuclear than pure renewables with transmission and storage. The above local factors contribute to that conclusion.
In other words, Australia is not China. And even in China, solar is beating nuclear.
FTA: "The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them."
are there limits to the growth (other than the obvious land limitations which only exists in certain parts and the dark winters for some places)? like certain expensive materials that will get harder to find, or where production is limited and can't easily scale up?
In some senses, everything is finite, but the reason crystalline Si cells have beaten all the other fancier technologies in the market is the raw simplicity. Pure boule silicon, phosphorous and boron dopants in very small quantities, then wiring (silver/copper/aluminium). Then a glass/upvc frame structure.
The low kerf diamond wire saw is also a critical technology for this, but the powdered diamond required can be synthetic.
That isn’t the relevant bit. If decarbonisation is your aim, you build both as quickly as you can.
The fact that “the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today” is what sinks nukes. Burn fossil fuels longer, be judicious in adding gas so batteries have a chance to take hold (we’ve already fucked this up in Europe and America), and accept that while the transition will be dirtier you’ll have a cheaper grid in the end.
That said, just as decarbonisation isn’t the only variable, LCOE isn’t either. Australia will have to maintain a nuclear fleet for military purposes. Taking into account that sunk cost, a civilian fleet’s math might change. (I’m doubtful, but maybe.)
Considering it's lifespan and low external costs (like grid extension and energy storage for renewables) - it is cheap. What makes it expensive is politics.
that's because the cost of nuclear includes every possible cost, while for everything else we only include the immediate costs. for example, oil and gas have only been so cheap for so long because we didn't include the cost of climate adaptation, mass migration, geoengineering, etc.
I don't know what you base this on. Nuclear is heavily subsidized and cannot survive on its own. The price of nuclear waste storage is usually not included and even when money is put aside it's not enough. Germany's plant operators paid 23 billion to wash their hands of the mess and the tax payers will cover the rest (estimates go over 100 billion). Sellafield in the UK will cost over 200 billion to clean up. The French government is perpetually bailing out EDF and doing so as we speak because the EDF can't fund maintenance and building of its own planta. Etc. Etc.
> price of nuclear waste storage is usually not included
We don’t include the cost of disposing of spent panels and turbines either. Nuclear waste’s risks are hyped beyond reason. What kills nuclear is the capital cost of building it.
In the end, it’s fine. We’ll do gas + wind + solar and that will take us through 2050.
i should have said, "the cost of nuclear in any conversation". because the moment you give a cost for nuclear, some very smart person will slam their hand on the table and start talking about the cost of waste disposal (which is pretty small), but they never seem to even try to quantify how much it'll cost to remove carbon from the atmosphere for the coal that's getting burnt instead (e.g. Germany).
Even this is wrong as that number you will give will end up being just a fraction of the actual cost to build it. The cost of waste disposal is not small either, it is easily in the trillions for the waste we have now. E.g. Sellafield is estimated to be in the 250B pound range, and that's just one country. It also doesn't include the reactor decommissioning costs which end up in the billions per reactor range also. And it doesn't include the cleanup of a meltdown. Fukushima cost 200 billion to clean up, a massive effort that in the end mostly failed. People are still measuring high levels of radiation.
It's interesting you mention carbon costs. It's a fair point but also does not end up in nuclear's favor. Germany has been deploying more than a 1GW of solar per month this and last year. This will produce as much as two reactors worth of electricity (actually more but ok). If they were trying to shutdown coal plants with nuclear it would take around 15 years for those two reactors, likely more. So instead of their coal plants running for decades as they build out nuclear, they are sitting idly because solar deployment is quick. This matters too.
If you are talking about eliminating carbon you are currently producing this doesn't matter at all. If you deploy 6GW of solar in a year, you eliminate as much carbon as a 1GW reactor would, only it would take you 15 years of further carbon emissions to get there. You talked about hidden costs of removing carbon, and this is a good example of something that you will need to remove.
And that's the situation we are in. The discussion changes once you saturate the market with solar but even advanced economies are far away from that and the world as whole especially.
Seems Australia has dodged a bullet by NOT having Nuclear, now some are trying to catch that bullet for political points.