The improvement in IC technology more or less dealt with marginal price reduction.
The price of nuclear power is the price of a lot of nickel alloy parts, and huge pressure vessel, and huge containment structures.
If you want to build huge reactors. If you want to build small modular reactors, not so much. For example, the US navy is not flitting around in giant concrete domes.
Yes, power levels make difference there, but there is no inherent advantage of smaller sizes in this context.
If reactor explosion happens even with small reactor sizes, containment building makes no difference unless you size it to contain even an explosion, which will make it even more expensive. And you will still have to deal with meltdown products in the end.
If you have enormous amounts of coolant at hand, you can equally well cool a bigger reactor too.
Man, any reactor is critical, by the definition.
You have a few gigawatt water heater, and an extremely large pressure vessel.
Modern reactors physically can explode, with, or without positive void reactivity coefficient.
I urge you to disable the control system on any working PWR reactor, and stand by to test your hypothesis.
Rapid power excursions with, or without coolant inside come from many phenomena, not just void reactivity coefficients.
What is factual is that the nuclear industry has been around for many decades and has not been able to solve this problem, despite there being lots of pretty clever people involved in it.
A contributing factor to making the learning curve negative is that the security guarantees underlying the plant designs are built on what we know can go wrong. As we learn more about the problem, we also learn of more weird failure modes, complicating the design of future plants.
I've seen people handwave this away with paper designs. Paper designs are comparatively easy to make safe. Real reactors are much, much harder. If you think this is bullshit, try looking up a certain admiral Rickover and see what he has to say about this.
Meanwhile, renewables keep falling in price.
You might want to take your own advice. You did the exact same ting, make an assertion without supporting evidence, in your previous comment.
> What sort of logic can you provide to back up your assertion? Any such reasoning must also include actual numbers and costs
Nuclear power was built with an average cost of $2-3 billion dollars per GWe of capacity when nuclear was built at scale during the late 1960s through much of the 1980s [1]. The US was building nuclear plants at a rate of several plants per year, rather than several plants per decade. The same pattern holds true in France. During the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, plants of the same design were built in serial production. Now, when they're building plants one or two at a time it's more expensive.
There's a clear pattern of cheaper plants when built at scale, and this pattern holds true across the two main nuclear power producers.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
You seem to be backing up my point with your claims. Nuclear has consistently gotten more expensive over time. The designs you point to from the 1970s will never be built again, because nuclear engineers realized their flaws and don't want to build them again.
With each new generation of nuclear, it gets more expensive, not less. As we refine the designs, we spend more per GW, not less. And not just a little bit more, but massively more. Even if we build the AP1000 serially, do you think it could reach $3B/GW? That's a huge hike in reasoning, and I'm not sure where in the long long Wikipedia article for nuclear power it states that serially production of the same design could drop costs by a factor or 4 (or more).
Everywhere it has been studied, nuclear has a negative learning rate. See, for example, Figure 1 and the many articles it cites:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
And we're also building fewer nuclear plants over time. Let's revisit your point:
> Even worse, nuclear very clearly gets more expensive the more if it we build, not less expensive.
This is not only untrue, it is the opposite of true. The more of it is built, the less expensive it is. The less of it is built, the more expensive it is.
You're right that nuclear has gotten more expensive. But that's because we're building less of it. If what you said were true - that nuclear get more expensive the more we build it - then today's nuclear plants should be cheaper than the ones built in the 1970s and 1980s during the nuclear boom.
> Even if we build the AP1000 serially, do you think it could reach $3B/GW? That's a huge hike in reasoning, and I'm not sure where in the long long Wikipedia article for nuclear power it states that serially production of the same design could drop costs by a factor or 4 (or more).
It's not a huge hike in reasoning. It's based on the price history of previous plant construction. Click on those plants built in the 1970s and early 80s. Many were built at a cost of only $2B. AP1000s are fundamentally not much different than previous PWR designs. Iterative improvements extend life and generate a bit more power, but the overall layout is the same.
In short we did build nuclear plants at scale, and it was 4-5x cheaper. This is a claim based on demonstrable patterns in price history.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
> nuclear very clearly gets more expensive the more if it we build, not less expensive.
We've been building less nuclear not more. So if what you say is true, costs should have been going down over time. The reality is that nuclear is cheaper when built at scale. The larger number of plants being built together was cheaper than a handful of plants.
Your own source shows this. Look at this graph [1]. You see that cluster of plants around 1970? When we built a lot of nuclear, it was a lot less expensive. $1-2,000 per KW of capacity, or $1-2B per GW. This was actually cheaper than the figures I originally cited, thanks for the source I'll be sure to use it to demonstrate how nuclear is cheaper when built at scale in the future.
1. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...
Increased nuclear safety. Proponents often tout nuclear's relative safety. Good, but that safety is hard won through regulation. Compliance is costly, and improved safety has been subject to diminishing returns.
Economies of scale. Building a nuclear power plant is a massive undertaking, so the world simply hasn't been building a lot of nuclear power plants. Supply chains (parts, know how) are getting smaller and more uncompetitive with every passing year as other forms of energy production have become more attractive.
Likewise with lithium batteries. It just takes use, iteration and scale nuclear energy can easily be cheaper than everything else out there.