ADDED: And you get an upvote if for no other reason than that you're doing the math. I wish a lot more people would do that.

4.5 billion capex is a really good number for nuclear in a competent regulatory environment. Still its double the estimated project cost when started.

Funnily enough nuclear and renewables really compete hard because of this. Extra power production is nearly nothing for both compared to opex and capex, so if you can produce you shall until returns hit 0. Both love energy storage for that reason. Nuclear is more dependable i.e. less peakers on because of supply issues. But capex for wind and solar are trending too be lower, as is time to market. Leading to less risks, which affects project planning a lot.

CSPs with inbuilt storage tend to go to lower generator capacity factors so that they can take a share of the peak shaving market, due to their relative good dispatch ability (send power to the market when wanted, instead of when you can).

Wind and solar projects tend to be online and producing quickly in time measured from first concrete poured to power send to market, certainly relative to nuclear in practice. Projects also tend to be smaller scale and in independent phases. Nuclear is added a GW at a time to the market, solar and wind in smaller 50-100mw projects. i.e. wind&solar are project wise much more agile.

Capacity factor is % utility of your max generating power output.% utility is lower if you can't produce or no one is willing to buy so you don't produce max.

If you produce min deman load with nuclear at 90% capacity. The it's all good.Once you are above that demand slack means production capacity is wastes. Currently nuclear is the last to stop producing as it's variable costs are so low. If nuclear is a larger part of your grid it will tend to have a capacity factor that is equal to the average demand.

Is France one, and does anyone know what their's is?

Sure these are supposed by GenIII, but are currently not competitive in any way with other power sources in economic terms. 10.5 billion buys you about the same in offshore wind e.g. 3 london array installations ( 2 billion per 600 MW * 50% capacity, compared to 10.5 billion per 1600mw * 90% capacity) = 10/(1.6*.9). Big difference is london arrays take 1 year to build instead of 10 for nuclear. That alone gives a mayor difference in real project costs.

The, unfortunate, reality is nuclear reactors are not build in serial production. Therefore learning costs do not decrease as much as you might expect. Main reasons are distance between sites, meaning many construction workers do not work on all sites. You see at most 10 units for one design. Time between forgings for mayor means parts are not made in large series so relatively little is learned. All 4 EPR sites seem to have suffered from the same issues with concrete pouring so even there learning might not have happened.

Economically nuclear is in a real bind: for regulatory reasons you want big plants (1gw+), but for economic reasons you want many small ones (about 100mw). The current 1.6GW units are in many ways to big and smaller reactors would be much better project/knowledge wise. Yet the regulatory overhead for each new unit means that the firms went towards designing larger units.

Bechtel marine nuclear powerplants could actually be produced in series as they are small enough to be build off site and could be made economically viable. Yet I don't expect that Bechtel ever will.

But lest assume Arreva learns how to build EPRs for 5 billion and in 5 years. Which gives you

EPR done right 5 billion / (1.6 GW * .7 historic capacity factor) = 4.4 to 5 billion / (1.6 GW * .9 best capacity factor) = 3.2 London array 2 billion / (.63 GW * .50 historic capacity factor) = 6/2

Even in this very optimistic scenario, offshore wind is between 100% and 60% more expensive on construction costs. Offshore wind however, still has lower opex and a much better learning curve. i.e. if ordering a london array today costs will be less than 2 billion. (big difference in reporting is that wind projects include interconnect costs which current nuclear projects do not due to sitting next to existing plants).

Wind farms, also have positive decommissioning costs (those steel towers have real economic value at end of life).

Both types of projects have issues with nimbys.

I don't believe them that the cost of decommissioning is built in. Especially since the financiers who pay during construction aim to sell their equity. Also in the UK, recently had to pay 4 billion worth of tax payer funds to decommission. That puts the whole thing at a loss.

Also, wind, solar and other renewable are able to be produced with a much smaller capital cost, and are only getting cheaper. Many of the tech issues are being fixed. For example, critical steam is now possible with CSP and mass production is making the systems cheaper.

The production risks for nuclear are really high, because of the high capital costs. As demonstrated by this project stalling for over a decade.

Also, uranium costs are not fixed. Over the last 18 years have changed a number of times. The price difference has been 3x (not even adjusting for inflation).

Finally, many nuclear power plants have been closed down early to fix up (14% have been closed for more than a year). Including of course Fukushima, but also other ones around the world and in the USA. There was a report of 14 plants in the USA which will likely close early. That is around 14% of plants (so far) closing earlier than planned. (There are 99 plants in the USA).

If there is a problem because the high capital costs, it seems many of the plants get closed. 100 orders for plants in the USA were cancelled, bankrupting companies.

Only if you're counting the decommissioning costs for nuclear but not for anything else. By the time a mine is exhausted it's generally a Superfund site, whether they're mining coal or neodymium. And what do you do with fifty million decommissioned solar panels?

> Also, uranium costs are not fixed.

The amount uranium price fluctuations contribute to operating costs is negligible.

Last I read none of the closed plants in the USA had been completely decommissioned. Which is why I think the estimates for decommissioning are wrong. But perhaps there are cheaper ways to do it in the future... I don't know.

Yes, fuel cost isn't that much... apparently 0.52 ¢/kWh. But that could still impact the bottom line if costs were 3x as much. But with 70 years of uranium left, I'm not sure prices will stay at similar prices over the life time of a new reactor.

That's more than 95% processing, not raw material cost.

> But with 70 years of uranium left, I'm not sure prices will stay at similar prices over the life time of a new reactor.

That's not true at all. The total accessible uranium resources are near inexhaustible. The 70 years you hear bandied about is proven reserves/consumption, which is completely braindead, because proven reserves do not mean what you think they mean.

If the market price of uranium rose by two orders of magnitude, it still wouldn't materially impact the economics of nuclear fuel plants, and it would make thousands of years worth of uranium reserves economically extractable.

The Trojan Nuclear Power Plant[1] in Oregon comes "close" to being decommissioned. E.g. the reactor vessel itself was barged up the Columbia River and dumped into a big pit in the ground.

Of course, the spent nuclear fuel remains on site. But that's a political issue, not a technical one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Much, if not a lot of this has to do with the simple fact that after you mothball the plany, it's easiest and cheapest to wait a while for various radioactive isotopes to decay to less hazardous stuff. As long as you mothball it properly, and maintain that, there's no hurry.

Are you including the energy storage systems they require to provide either baseline or peaking power? Outside of perhaps some very special locations (i.e. cover deserts with solar cells if you can get that past the BANANAs, and that still doesn't cover nighttime to, e.g., recharge electric cars) they don't, you know, actually produce the two types of electrical production the system actually needs....

Got data? Seems that most of the renewable energy is being used ok. Smarter energy management, and using salt/aluminium/steel aluminium molten lakes allows for storage/adjustment. In many places aluminium factories use up a LOT of power. They can be used as batteries of sorts. CSP solar can hold power for over 8 hours. Wind farms over provision to allow for baseload generation. Then there is storing energy in car batteries. Biomass solutions offer different power generation abilities too. All this is being done today, and systems are continually being enhanced.

The point I was making though, is that you can have power generation (including batteries) at a much smaller cost for it to be useful. For example, even installing solar on a factory roof and installing batteries can be done for way under $100,000.

Working nuclear plants have to close 38 days every 17 months for refuelling and maintenance. How good are they at generating baseload then?

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2013.08.27/supplyreq...

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=12711

[1] http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/de...

With that in mind I honestly don't believe the "few hundred million $".

The reactor vessel is long gone. What remains on site is spent fuel, but there's nowhere to move that to. Cost was perhaps $0.23 billion but that's an approximate figure. Still, nowhere near the $3.5 billion per plant that German utilities have set aside.

Definitely a long term investment, which is why only large utilities are really interested in them. I think the direction for power generation in the US is solar/wind/hydro, but supported by nuclear in areas where solar and wind are much less attractive (like the Southeast). That's discounting the possibility of clean fusion energy (or other novel tech), which is likely inevitable but still a long way off.

You have to remember that it's a very long-term investment -- considering that well run nuclear reactors have expected life spans of 50+ years, and the price of carbon-free electricity probably isn't going to go down anytime soon, it's starting to look pretty good. After the capex is paid off, you have a 250mm/year cash cow.

Uranium extraction, waste management, construction, and decommissioning being the biggest offenders in the whole process.

http://www.nei.org/Issues-Policy/Protecting-the-Environment/...

But anyway, even at the high end of the estimates, that is still way lower than coal.

These are often confused in articles, do you happen to know if that was the case in this article? Did they mean 1180 MWH or 1180 MW as stated? Otherwise your yearly production calculation is very off. 1180 MW (j/s) would produce 10^7 MHW per hour.

Don't confuse the bat-shit crazy regulatory regime for this in the US with anything rational or useful. We're wealthy enough for now to indulge in it, we'll see when things get tighter.

It's stuck with me (though I merely presume it to be true).

Potassium-40 is pretty fierce stuff, enough to, in this context, get people to be call for the outlawing more than two people sleeping together. If, you know, they really cared about the level of one kind of safety they insist on, as opposed to shutting down US nuclear activities for their various reasons, and used ludicrous methods like the linear no-threshold model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model which due to common sense and radiation hormesishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis we can even say is unscientific.