Re:Nuclear should be considered part of clean energy standar...
by kragen on Friday April 02, 2021 @05:43PM
(#26676299)
> there is no reason as a nation a standardized design could not be created and installed with good speed and low costs.
There is, actually, if by "low costs" we mean lower than solar. If you take a nuclear plant and remove the nuclear reactor from it, what you have left is a steam-driven generator and a firebox where the reactor used to be. That's what a coal power plant is. Coal power plants cost about twice as much per watt to build as current solar power plants, and solar power keeps getting cheaper. So it's unlikely that nuclear power plants will start costing less—to build—per watt than coal plants.
(They could of course cost less to operate per watt, since they don't have to buy fuel by the trainload or dispose of fly ash. But just the cost to build a coal plant makes it uncompetitive with solar in most of the world, unless you make very pessimistic assumptions about intermittency and the cost of utility-scale energy storage, which is, however, still an unknown.)
So, it's even more unlikely that nuclear power will get cheaper than solar power. Unless you're in, like, Svalbard or something. Or there's a revolutionary new way to build supercritical steam turbines that makes them much cheaper per watt and isn't also applicable to making solar panels. Steam turbines were invented 137 years ago and have been a big business central to the economy of every developed country for decades, so I'm not holding my breath.
There is, actually, if by "low costs" we mean lower than solar. If you take a nuclear plant and remove the nuclear reactor from it, what you have left is a steam-driven generator and a firebox where the reactor used to be. That's what a coal power plant is. Coal power plants cost about twice as much per watt to build as current solar power plants, and solar power keeps getting cheaper. So it's unlikely that nuclear power plants will start costing less—to build—per watt than coal plants.
(They could of course cost less to operate per watt, since they don't have to buy fuel by the trainload or dispose of fly ash. But just the cost to build a coal plant makes it uncompetitive with solar in most of the world, unless you make very pessimistic assumptions about intermittency and the cost of utility-scale energy storage, which is, however, still an unknown.)
So, it's even more unlikely that nuclear power will get cheaper than solar power. Unless you're in, like, Svalbard or something. Or there's a revolutionary new way to build supercritical steam turbines that makes them much cheaper per watt and isn't also applicable to making solar panels. Steam turbines were invented 137 years ago and have been a big business central to the economy of every developed country for decades, so I'm not holding my breath.