* Natural gas supplemented by renewables like solar and wind is cheaper, but it's still emitting carbon (plus fostering dependency on natural gas exporters like Russia).
* Hydroelectricity and geothermal are excellent carbon-free and controllable energy sources. But they are geographically dependent. If you don't have a river flowing through a dam-able valley, or access to a seismic fault line you're not going to be building any of these.
* Renewables plus storage can hypothetically delivery cheaper power. But storage at anywhere near the required capacities remain hypothetical. The few solutions that do seem to deliver good storage costs are geographically limited, like hydroelectric reservoirs.
Nuclear remains the only non-intermittent, geographically independent source of carbon-free energy.
Also, when you offer nuclear as an option, you need to remember that nuclear can't do the job without storage either - unless you're willing to pay out of your nose for something that sits idle most of the time.
Also, in your incomplete list, you're missing biomass, biogas, thermal-electric storage, thermal storage (in the UK, a lot of the energy required could be stored and used as heat) and grid interconnections.
Thermal and thermal-electric are still not widely deployed. But biomass and biogas are.
The disparity between peak electricity consumption and minimum electricity consumption is not so great as most people make it out to be [1], and base load still accounts for the majority of electricity demand.
Furthermore, nuclear plants can module their electrical output by more aggressively cooling the reactor. Your claim that nuclear requires storage is demonstrably false: France operates a grid over 70% nuclear (over 80% at its peak) without energy storage.
> biomass, biogas, thermal-electric storage, thermal storage
What do you mean by biomass and biogas? Burning wood and capturing methane from landfills has been done, but not on a relevant scale.
Thermal and thermal electric storage remain in the prototyping stage. If they prove to be cheap and scalable then great. But that's still in the world of hypotheticals, it may or may not pan out.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
Hydro will always have a problem with methane emissions.
The goal is to make something smaller enough that one can make it enough times to make the production process more efficient. Then they export them to every fucking country and make money one off. And then no more global warming world peace or whatever.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Also the costs at the output of the generator is one thing, but what counts is actually the cost of the useful power used. And renewables puts a lot of extra cost on the grid.
https://www.lazard.com/media/451885/grphx_lcoe-07.png
The right side has one magical word in the title: "marginal".
New built renewables have a lower cost than your paid off traditional plants. In other words, to get a more efficient capital allocation you would close your existing nuclear plant and build new renewables. That is where we are today.
In the same fashion nuclear puts a lot of cost on the grid since you need to plan for the largest producer cutting out at any time. That can be phased out with renewables.
Battery storage is also starting catch on due to lowered costs. For 2022 10 GW is planned to be added to the US grid.
> "Battery storage. In the next two years, power plant developers and operators expect to add 10 GW of battery storage capacity; more than 60% of this capacity will be paired with solar facilities. In 2021, 3.1 GW of battery storage capacity was added in the United States, a 200% increase. Declining costs for battery storage applications, along with favorable economics when deployed with renewable energy (predominantly wind and solar PV), have driven the expansion of battery storage."
Assume we get good at both. Surely society with the energy output of nuclear is going to be much richer than one that is clearing its farms and forests for solar? (Wind is at least better on that front I suppose.)
One one hand, there is unit costs, on the other hand, there is the efficiency of big infra. Trains are better than cars, for example, no matter how efficient the production of cars gets. I don't actually want small nuclear reactors, I just want small reactors to iron out the production process, overcome the regulatory hurdles, and generally dispell the FUD.
Once that is gone, we should just crank out bigger and bigger prefab PPs, until no more global warming or fusion or whatever.
- Very hard regulations
- Each nuclear power plant was so good, that there wasn't enough economic pressure to stop special-snowflaking them, simply because they were built only one at a time.
It's a lot like NASA rockets getting more and more expensive, because no one wants to crank out single-use rockets. Reusable rockets is the analog to smaller nuclear reactors, which allows one to refine the production process through repetition without loosing tons of money.
To be fair, I do expect storage and solar panels to get cheaper and cheaper too. But the energy density challenges for storage are still really hard! With "electrify everything", we will need a hell of a lot of electricity. Solar and storage feels like energy austerity regardless of the price because the shear physical challenges of what's needed.
And then there are the grid coordination issues. America seems too decrepit to run such a fancy grid, I do not trust it to pull that off at scale without a huge culture shift. Decentralization here is more problems, not fewer.
Simply put, I am bullish on everything getting cheaper but am bearish on solar and storage getting better. Nuclear is already good enough! Just need to get rid of the price bullshitary.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.p...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
Anyhow if that's somehow correct and the price is $29.04 for a solar MWh and $121.84 for battery storage, then taking night into account for a 1MW installation you need 2x the solar capacity to make up the night draw during the day and a 12 MWh battery bank, so in total that would be $58.08 for the panels and $1462.08 for storage. Not exactly feasible by itself still. That's simplified of course, as you don't get as much draw at night, but you also have to consider that in winter you'll basically get nothing from the panels, so you may need even more than just 2x.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
This is utter bollocks. Solar is amazingly cheap today, per kWh produced. In the best places, it's around $0.013/kWh. Nuclear can't even meet that if you totally discount all capital and financing costs.
With all due respect, that's a pretty bullshit metric. Most of the world's population does not live where solar works best, so you'll get only fractional output and much higher price to performance.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a30266828/worlds-ch...
https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/defence/su...
The reason that the British government is interested in subsidizing nuclear is that they want to maintain their nuclear capability and want to stay credible as a nuclear power. That, and the French are also investing. Either way, that makes it interesting for the likes of Rolls Royce to get involved. There's government money to be had. And maybe Rolls Royce stumbles on something useful; like a cost reduction that makes nuclear a bit less expensive. I wouldn't count on that happening quickly though or in any amounts that really matter.