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Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by eqvinox on Saturday November 09, 2019 @01:29PM (#21493259)
> No one knows the actual cost of French Nuclear. France has yet to dismantle one of its end of life reactor.

This.

The sad thing is that the article is probably right about nuclear being preferrable over fossil fuels due to relative priorities of global warming vs. nuclear accidents and garbage disposal.

But this cost comparison against renewables is just comically miscalculated.

Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by rndgermandude on Saturday November 09, 2019 @08:37PM (#21495819)
In 1995 Germany estimated 3 - 5 billion Euro to dismantle one of the old DDR nuclear plants that was decommissioned in 1990 by 2012. The work has not finished yet. About 1000 people work on this project.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald

Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by natmaka on Sunday November 10, 2019 @02:06AM (#21496839)
Decommissioning costs, often neglected, are a ticking bomb.

UK discounted provision for decommission costs: £100+ billion in 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-...

£161 billion in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170516093449/https://www.gov.u...

£234 billion in 2018. Costs were so quickly exploding there is a new way to forecast, which dissimulates... err... is more... well... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision...

Long-term waste management is another ticking bomb.

Moreover if there is a serious glitch (Chernobyl, Fukushima...), are bets are off. You can obtain an insurance policy for anything, AFAIK even for a space trip, but no insurance company covers such nuke risk.

Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by ClumsyPilot on Sunday November 10, 2019 @12:31AM (#21496566)
Bad project management does not equate bad technology. German government also messed up Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport, it's 7 years late and massively over budget. In UK it takes us 30 years to build a train line.

Those cases don't prove that trains and plains are uneconomical.

Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by NeedMoreTea on Sunday November 10, 2019 @02:25AM (#21496896)
There's a common feature of massive complex projects the world over - they pretty much always come late and massively over budget. Then as infrastructure mostly end up sticking around for a century or more, sometimes limiting future choices.

Rail, tube and tram lines will still be there and graded 100 years later - after track replacements, roads are not dissimilar, reservoirs and storage caverns far longer with a turbine replacement or two. Nuclear on the other hand has a much more limited life in which to absorb those overruns.

Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by rndgermandude on Sunday November 10, 2019 @09:44AM (#21498095)
What has this to do with bad project management? I do not see anything particularly bad happening in this project, while the BER is indeed a clusterfuck that keeps giving.

They are still within their financial budget for this project, will maybe overshoot it by a bit in the end. But that's OK, since such a dismantling had no precedence whatsoever, and it was just an estimate and everybody knew that. They will exceed their time budget by a lot, which is also OK, since again such a dismantling had no precedence whatsoever, it doesn't really matter if this thing takes a decade longer to dismantle, and the reason they take longer than initially estimated is that they had to overcome a ton of problems nobody could have known about before and went about their work carefully and systematically. There were a lot of lessons learned from this, which should help with being faster when dismantling other nuclear plants, but and a bit cheaper (maybe at 2/3rds the cost in the future).

With BER on the other hand the date of completion did matter, both politically and economically, and the exploding time and financial budgets were a result of gross incompetence in particular from the politicians that personally kept meddling in the project (it was "prestige" project), complete failure in contractor oversight (which resulted in a ton of defects and also some corruption and embezzlement) and a completely useless project leadership (of mostly political appointments, aside from the politicians themselves, that e.g. resulted in them building that thing without working fire safety).

Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by adrianN on Sunday November 10, 2019 @12:48AM (#21496616)
But they should increase your bayesian estimate of typical project costs for these types of projects. If we had a way of reliably preventing bad project management such things wouldn't happen.
Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by lispm on Sunday November 10, 2019 @12:39AM (#21496591)
That some other projects were late does not mean much for dismantling a nuclear power plant, which is a very different/ unique problem with different actors.
Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by jdjdjjsjs on Sunday November 10, 2019 @04:14PM (#21500246)
Wind and solar projects are not coming in at 3-4x their costs anywhere.

So the fact that they are simply simpler projects which rarely (never?) have massive overruns due to "bad project management" is a huge financial point in their favor that is rarely factored in.

Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by natmaka on Sunday November 10, 2019 @08:22PM (#21501398)
Indeed. A huge and complicated project is a much wonderful playground for involved people (from the planners to the decommissioners). They benefit from it (on all accounts, including intellectual, financial, reputation, tolerance for error...) much more than they would with simple and transparent ways.
Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by mattrp on Saturday November 09, 2019 @10:44PM (#21496268)
Agreed - the lifespan argument is really not portrayed in an accurate way. Besides, France is basically screwed - it hasn’t been able to expand its energy supply beyond population demands (ie it doesn’t and couldn’t support a data center economy). More than likely they will be buying energy rather than generating it in the future — unless of course someone can get the salt reactor commercialized.
Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by namdnay on Sunday November 10, 2019 @04:31AM (#21497252)
Huh? France exports energy, and it has a massive nuclear and hydroelectric industry. Why on earth would it be more screwed than anywhere else in Europe?
Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by natmaka on Sunday November 10, 2019 @08:36PM (#21501456)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

Tally: Germany 1, France 28

There are many causes, one being that during hot seasons many French atomic plants cannot run at full speed (thermal pollution).

Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by mattrp on Monday November 11, 2019 @05:08PM (#21509422)
Germany is number 1 because of the wind... there are days when they generate more than they can take. Exporting is not really a good measure of energy security — for example, how much do you think Germany can charge for the wind it cannot use? Hint: it’s a negative number. I am a proponent of nuclear - but I wish to see newer more efficient and safer designs (ie salt). When I look at France through the same lens I look at Norway, I see one country electrifying it’s entire car fleet, all of its homes, its entire North Sea oil production, is investing in massive hectare size data centers and still has plenty left over and then I see France who will be lucky to replace its aging nuclear infrastructure just get back to what it has today. I would love to see them continue to invest in nuclear but it’s own stated goal is to drop nuclear to 50% of the overall rather than the current 75%. If the article’s author is correct, that aging nuclear designs are superior to other forms of energy, why then isn’t France keeping its production at 75%?
Re:German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nucle... by mattrp on Sunday November 10, 2019 @09:36AM (#21498071)
Today they produce a lot of subsidized power that when everything operating correctly produces an excess of power. However we are not talking about today, we are talking about the future. The average plant age is 30 years. Some plants are so old that frances neighbors accuse it of risking another Fukushima incident.. Germany closed its plants for precisely that reason. It will like cost close to 100b if not more to decommission and untold amounts to replace whatever they take offline. My point is that just for France to unwind it’s aging nuclear it’s going to have to build and spend a lot and that is just to get back to even... much less expand to cover new sources of electricity like electrification of the car fleet. Germany in contrast has been building new transmission lines and production for a decade and still has a decade to go. Norway actually has a true surplus which is expected to be a multiple of france’s entire output, etc etc. My point was that the author was saying nuclear has an expected age of 40-80 years... I call bs on that lifespan and point to France as an example: there’s just no way we see them continue their existing plants for 80 years when their existing plants are already showing signs they may be at risk or not be able to operate much past 35-40...