Re:The $1.5B Mammoth Solar Farm Will Be the Largest in the US
by Arnt on Thursday November 18, 2021 @04:49AM
(#29263789)
When you say compare you seem to mean cost-wise. My answer is that its cost is known, with no large downsides or unknown costs to be dealt with later.
Vogtle 3&4 are American plants. I don't follow the news there closely. The last I read was that the long-term storage facility at Yucca Mountain was cancelled. No no replacement or alternative in the reports I read. Did I miss anything? Has a plan for how to store the waste been formulated, perhaps even a cost estimated? How are insurance costs to cover liability costs in case of accident estimated?
Re:The $1.5B Mammoth Solar Farm Will Be the Largest in the US
by credit_guy on Thursday November 18, 2021 @08:10AM
(#29264982)
Waste: on site storage. After the plant decommission, the Department of Energy has the responsibility of finding a long-term solution. The cost for the long term solution was prepaid in the form of the Nuclear Waste Fund [1], which currently has about $45 BN. The Yucca Mountain was indeed de facto cancelled, but in May this year (2021) the Biden administration stated that it will announce a new disposal plan in the coming months [2].
Insurance: currently nuclear power plants are obligated by law to buy insurance. The current scheme covers liabilities up to $13 BN [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act#Nucle...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/escape-from-yucca-mountain-bide...
[3] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
Re:The $1.5B Mammoth Solar Farm Will Be the Largest in the US
by barbacoa on Thursday November 18, 2021 @12:02AM
(#29262128)
Something people always forget when factoring solar is the cost of having the standby natural gas plant capacity that has to be ready to take over that 1 GW when the sun stops shining. Having a plant sit idle isn't much cheaper than having it running.
The total power is going to be 1.65 GW, and the total cost $1.5 BN. That would be about $0.9 BN per GW.
Meanwhile Vogtle 3 and 4 will make about 2.3 GW together for a total cost of $25 BN, so a bit more than $11 BN per GW, or about 12 times more.
But that's not quite apples to apples. Solar power has an average capacity factor of about 30%, while nuclear about 90%.
What is then the cost of 1000 GWh annual net output? I picked out 4 more or less random large solar farms in the US from wikipedia [1] (Solar Star, Mount Signal, Springbok and Copper Mountain) and on average a 1 GW (DC current) farm produces about 1800 GWh annual net output. Assuming this new farm is similar to those other 4 large solar farms (which are all fairly new, commissioned between 2015 and 2020), then the cost of 1000 GWh is about $0.5 BN.
Meanwhile, Vogtle 3&4 have about 19000 GWh annual net output, for a nominal power of 2.3 GW, so if we scale to 1 GW, we get about 8.2 GWh per year. We get a cost of about $1.3 BN for 1000 GWh annual net output.
So each GWh produced by a modern solar farm is about 2.6 times cheaper than a GWh produced by an equally modern nuclear power plant.
Can nuclear become cheaper? NuScale claims to be able to deliver nuclear power plants at a cost of about $2.85 BN per GW [2], which is 3.8 times cheaper than Vogtle 3&4. If they are able to deliver, then they should be quite cost competitive with modern solar.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_sta...
[2] https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/cost-competitive