Nuclear Power Won’t Survive Without A Government Handout

Re:Nuclear Power Won’t Survive Without A Government Handout by bilbo0s on Thursday June 14, 2018 @03:49PM (#17314781)

Not really certain of the top line numbers here but you have to consider the fact that a nuclear plant always has to run at a certain baseload even when the utilities purchasing power from it are somewhere else in their dispatch stacks.

I'm a technical guy, and not a cost accountant, but even I realize that SOMEONE has to pay for that. And it would probably end up being those utilities. Which MIGHT impact the position of that nuclear resource in the dispatch stacks of those utilities? (I'm not sure how close all of these sources would be to one another in terms of price when operational costs like that are factored in.)

In any case, nuclear would still only make sense in certain places. For instance, if there is a giant hydroelectric resource nearby, you probably don't want to invest in a long term nuclear resource in that area. So the number of places that could potentially take advantage of nuclear is going down too.

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Re:Nuclear Power Won’t Survive Without A Government Handout by AngryData on Friday June 15, 2018 @05:56PM (#17323964)

Well we do already need storage solutions for balancing renewable power, I don't see why we couldn't add a little more so the nuclear plants can offload power in down times. If we use for example water storage up on a mountain or hill.

Plus cheap power is like THE factor in bringing material refinement industries to the area. Aluminum, iron, fertilizer, clean water, and all sorts of other chemical reagents require massive amounts of power, which is why they are done in foreign countries without pollution laws because they have cheap power. If we started overproducing nuclear power I would expect local growth of many other industries.

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