Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of the opex is in maintenance, staffing, safety and reliability, and that cost is low per MWH.

> Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind

There's also the aspect of "how much sun is there?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy_in_Finland

There are a number of issues with photovoltaic solar cells that close to the Arctic Circle.

> There are a number of issues with photovoltaic solar cells that close to the Arctic Circle.

What they need up there is a way to generate electricity from darkness.

Grid solar is statistically significantly safer than Nuclear. Climbing on rooftops can be dangerous, but solar is much better in a dessert than on top of a roof.

Nuclear takes longer, is more expensive, has lower ROI, and higher risks. Solar has a lower capacity factor, but having 1/3 the availability at 1/15th the cost is a net win. Especially as we need vastly more power in the daytime and idling Nuclear is really expensive.

Currently 3% of global electricity comes from Solar and 16% from hydro with Nuclear only proving 10%. Scaling Nuclear to a significantly on a global scale take not just massive construction and new regulations, but also training etc, we simply don’t have the time.

Nuclear is over 4x safer than solar [1]. As far as "not having the time", we'd still be using natural gas to accommodate wind and solar's intermittency unless some breakthrough in storage technology happens. Batteries are mostly going to go to vehicles, not grid scale plants. Other storage solutions like thermal batteries, compressed air, or giant flywheels remain in the prototyping phase and aren't even proven to be viable at scale.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

Your looking at “Rooftop solar” not grid solar.

Which is misleading in several ways, both because it ignores the majority of solar power and ignores how safe that power will be over time.

Solar works great in some countries, but Finland? I just don't see it working out there.

Yea, though apparently they get 0.3% of their electricity from solar which seems crazy to me.

Actually you need to go southern france northern italy that you get higher solar potential https://www.researchgate.net/figure/PV-solar-electricity-pot... big problem is that when you need most electricity(winter) solar is basically 0.

There's sunlight around the clock furing summer. Many summer cottages are off-grid and get all elecricity using solar.

Not for the people who would have liked to drink the water used to clean the panels (cf the projects in deserts). Everything has some drawbacks and it s useful to diversify.

Your off by orders of magnitude. Nuclear uses vastly more water than solar power per kWh.

“Nuclear Energy consuming roughly 400 gallons of water per megawatt-hour, 320 billion gallons of water were consumed by United States nuclear power plant electricity generation in 2015.” And that’s direct consumption in cooling towers, nuclear indirectly uses power in other ways.

By comparison the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project in Riverside County estimated 2/3 cup of water per megawatt hour.

Most of the water used by nuclear is used to run the heat exchangers, and gets dumped straight back into the river it's drawn from. This looks like it's the source you're quoting [1]. It's pretty clear that nuclear power is a tiny fraction of water usage [2]. Furthermore, in water-constrained areas nuclear plants can be cooled with wastewater [3]. And lastly, plenty of nuclear plants are cooled with ocean water, which obviously has zero shortage.

The notion that nuclear power is going to significant affect water supplies is without merit.

1. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/styles2/#:~:tex....

2. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/styles2/images/...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

I agree it’s a trivial amount of water and both can go without using water, the point was solar is on average vastly less.

However, wastewater is just water. Look at a long river and towns upstream dump their wastewater into rivers that towns and cities downstream collect as municipal water.

> All of the opex is in maintenance, staffing, safety and reliability

Does this include the higher security needs around nuclear facilities?

I left out the construction costs, the Arkwright Summit farm, $125 million.

The Solar Star project was $2 billion.

This Finnish Nuclear site appears to have cost $12 billion.

That makes wind look really good, and solar at least on the same order (and still safer).

There are a couple of things to consider. The solar and wind need to be overprovisioned, to feed the grid scale batteries to provide baseload. Those batteries are currently not cost effective, which is why there are very few such batteries in use. If you add in the price of battery, wind and solar look rather pricey. Without the batteries, they are helping us reduce the use of fossil fuel plants, but not helping shut them down.

The other thing is the land. Solar and wind each need a substantial % of landmass to have 100% of our power come from those sources.

The ongoing costs of running nuclear are also way higher than solar or wind, which matters.

No one uses batteries for large scale (eg overnight) storage. They are used for grid stability (eg, 1/2 hour supply).

Reliability comes from solar and wind power redundancy and geographic distribution. If your collection area is over a few thousand square kilometres it is very rare for there to be no wind and no sun. Make it a few tens of thousand square kms (which modern high voltage transmission achieves) and your reliability is higher than coal.

Except when the North Sea wind was weaker than usual in 2021, triggering an energy crisis that has persisted to this day. This impacted almost the entirety of Europe and led to a spike in gas prices, since, surprise, all the backup plants rely on gas and coal.

Evidently you failed to read "redundancy and geographic distribution".

That there is North Sea wind power, howsoever intermittent, is a pure good. Tying it into a larger network makes it better. The solution to local deficits is more localities.

There is not infinite transmission capacity in all directions. It is difficult to get permission to build new transmission lines, which are also expensive.

Build. More. Transmission. Lines.

Transmission lines are not expensive at all compared to nuclear power. This nuclear plant cost $12B and it is a cheap one!

Compare that to the SunCable is budgetted at $14B, (AU $20B in the article = US$20B) which is an undersea(!) HVAC cable all the way from Australia to Singapore (3,800km!) AND a 3GW(!) solar farm[1].

By comparison, the distance from Spain to Scotland is 2400km. And when the wind stopped in the North Sea, Spain was setting records in terms of the amount of power generated from wind farms[2]

[1] https://www.intelligentliving.co/australian-undersea-sun-cab...

[2] https://www.evwind.es/2021/12/03/27-8-of-electricity-came-fr...

Look at Latvia. >45% hydro, plenty of space for wind, both on shore and off shore, and hardly any of that potential realised with only 2.2% active wind energy production.

Significant public investment in wind energy announced to start construction in... 2026. That is a glacial pace in the face of an ecological and geopolitical crisis situation.

4 years planning, That is normal before for starting construction. There are environmental studies to be done first to ensure any damage to the environment the work would cause can be mitigated. There are permits to be issued which must include the mitigation measures. Some design work must be done to get the permits so they know what they are permitting. Land must be purchased, transmission right of ways granted. Enough design work must be done to place the order for long lead time equipment, such as wind turbines. How many, how big, where do they go for best ROI? Some of these permitting steps face opposition and negotiations must take place. This is the process real world infrastructure projects face.

Latvia is still climbing out from under Soviet domination. Rich countries should lead.

You cannot depend on nuclear 24x7x365 as we’ve been able to see in France and Germany the last few years. Hot temperatures in summer cause the temperature of the rivers to increase so much that the water cannot be used for cooling and so these plants have to be shut down. That’s only going to become worse.

That seems like a problem that can be accounted for in the initial design. I’m sure you can design a plant to be cooled down by even 99C water, and if the river is that hot we have other problems.

I.e., by increasing cost. But nukes are already not competitive. Increasing cost makes them less so. Their competitiveness is already in sharp decline as alternatives get ever cheaper.

> so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is.

It does insofar as it matters for capital. Who wants to invest in a plant that will take at least ten years (but probably more with cost overruns in the billions) before they see a ROI? Especially when the cost per MWH from a renewable project that will be online in 2 years with less risk is already comparable if not more competitive.

    Who wants to invest in a plant that will take at least ten years

This points out one of the sad flaws of the human race and ultimately, it's probably the one that will lead to our downfall.

We're absolute crap at thinking long-term.

Look at you, talking about ten years as if it's eons. You're not wrong, of course! Capital doesn't like to invest in projects ten+ years before ROI.

But ten years is not a long time. We should be thinking about many, many things at least ten years in the future. Hell, forget ten years. We should be plotting our energy strategy with an eye to the next hundreds of years.

Of course, we won't, because we're humans and we really struggle to think past next week. And those of us in democracies have designed a system that literally punishes politicians for thinking beyond the next election cycle.

The future is not that predictable.

Who in 2000 would have guessed solar and wind would be radically cheaper than coal? No 100-year plan would have mentioned them.

If small-scale hydrogen-boron aneutronic fusion becomes unexpectedly practical in 20 years, all the other plans go out the window.

Shit, we didn't even understand the implications of improvements in fracking and other improvements in extraction efficiencies from 'dirty' hydrocarbon sources would have, in the mid-oughts peak oil was on the horizon with nothing feasible that could fill the coming gap.

but is a renewable project that matches the capabilities of a nuclear project (to the same degree of reliability and availability) really the same cost?

you gotta compare like-for-like. If the solar project that takes 2 years only provide power half the time, then you need double the size to provide the same amortized level of power at night. You also need some form of storage. And that's if you don't have a spate of bad weather preventing it from working - so to amortize that problem you'd need to build yet larger...

The South Australian grid is a great example of how well this approach works.

It's mostly (>60%) a mix of solar and wind power, with some gas that fills in the gaps - as well as batteries for grid stability. Still importing some coal power from interstate, but that is decreasing too.

The investment has been incremental - so much smaller amounts, with much less risk and therefor more attractive to investors.

A large part of this (since 2018) has been done by a conservative state government, who have been highly supportive of the renewable transition.

https://theconversation.com/against-the-odds-south-australia...

No point comparing like for like. The end game is a stabile balanced grid. If that is fulfilled by 100% intermittent or 100% deterministically dispatchable does not affect anything in regards to the end user. All they want is reliably the cheapest power at the time of consumption.

That follows if you are playing Sim-City, or I suppose if you think giving the government absolute control over energy production and you want to leave the market completely out of it. I'm just talking the world we live in.

To answer more directly though, yeah the power is the same cost. Perhaps when renewable penetration into the energy market is saturated, there will be a greater demand for base load at all those times renewables aren't producing at peak, and that will be reflected in those nuclear MWHs becoming very profitable even at a higher unit cost.

You have a great point. Who is funding the building new nuclear plants these days? I imagine it is mostly governments or government backed utilities.

I would absolutely never invest in a nuclear project but I sure am glad they are there to keep the lights on when the weather doesn’t cooperate for wind and solar.

A mix of different sources is the key to a robust grid, and nuclear is a great part of that mix.

As a side note on British Columbia site C 1000 MW a hydro dam is currently looking like it will cost 16 billion and take about 10 years to build, those numbers could easily be for a nuclear plant.

I reckon that's a reasonable way to think about it. I often see people blaming irrational nuclear fear or environmentalists for the lack of nuclear development, but really if they want to see it be optimized as part of the solution in the future, they should be advocating for expanded government subsidies or direct funding because right now that's the obstacle, the fact that nuclear isn't part of a purely market solution.

If you look at the electricity market in Ontario, zero development of new plants is part of a market based solution. They had to form a new government agency the Ontario power authority to sign long term contracts so that companies can secure loans to build infrastructure. The market price was politically influenced with many charges being hidden outside of the hourly price in an “uplift” charge and nobody had confidence that prices would be high enough for long enough to get their ROI.

Markets are interesting for economic dispatch based on marginal cost, but then real world constraints such as rivers that must flow and a lack of infinite transmission capacity in all directions kick in and it starts to look a lot like what it replaced. I guess it works where it works

>statistically the safest

The worst case of nuclear, it is worse than the worst case of solar/wind. So even if it were rational for humanity, it might not be rational for a country.

I'm having trouble picturing how it is safer than solar though.

The statistics wrap rooftop solar into the “solar” mix so all those DIY/fly-by-night installers who don’t use safety equipment while working at heights and end up killings themselves make solar by far the deadliest energy source in terms of deaths per MW capacity installed.

Bullshit. Coal and petroleum are way deadlier than rooftop solar, even without diluting it with industrial solar installations.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...

Nuclear isn't (historically) "statistically the safest", and any major accident or hot-waste-related problem may worsen its case.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Fuel costs are "not brought up" because they are so much smaller than construction and operation cost, not because they are small.

Nuke fuel cost is huge compared to operating cost of solar and wind.

In a word, reliability. Nuclear is /by far/ the most reliable energy source.

Nuclear power plants produce maximum power 92.5% of the time. Compare that to other energy sources:

- Geothermal: 74.3%

- Nat gas: 56.6%

- Hydropower: 41.5%

- Coal: 40.2%

- Wind: 35.4%

- Solar: 24.9%

Batteries are a joke. Consider the 409MW / 900MWh battery at Florida Power & Light: this is only enough to power 329,000 homes just over two hours. What happens after the juice runs out? In a day the RE Ginna Nuclear Plant in New York operates at 582 MW--in 24 hours thats 13,968MWh guaranteed! [3] That's powering over 329,000 or more homes without fear of outages. Battery systems in conjunction with renewables brings the capital cost per kwh of nuclear vs renewable to closer to 2:1 (6k $/kW vs 3k $/kW) too. So you're essentially getting 3x the reliability for 2x the cost when using nuclear and outages that exceed a few hours are a non issue. [4]

[1]: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliab...

[2]: https://www.energy-storage.news/worlds-biggest-solar-charged...

[3]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3

[4]: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... page 28

The other sources produce less because they can. Since nuclear has a high capital cost and low variable cost it bids low.

Coal and gas sure, but renewables are obviously dependent on weather. Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can". When there is significant oversupply of energy from solar, it gets sold for pennies on the dollar to neighbouring regions, and when the sun doesn't shine, you're sol.

>Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can"

Energy prices can be negative when there's not enough load but too much supply. Not every power source can be just switched off.

That's not what this is about. Negative electricity prices are rare, and do not account for the massive difference in utilization between renewables and nuclear. By the way nuclear power output can be ramped up and down by a lot, and in a matter of minutes in case of unplanned problems, even if it can't (really shouldn't) go to dead zero.

The person I responded to claimed that nuclear plants run at close to 100% because they bid low because the marginal cost of their electricity production is low, but the same is true for renewables like wind and solar. Yet these renewables run at much lower utilization rates - because of weather and daylight cycle, not "because they can", except in rare cases of negative prices as you mentioned.

Nuclear can produce less too, it's just kind of pointless since as you say fuel is cheap.

It's a lack of imagination. People look at established systems that took generations to implement and take for granted all of the developments and revelations that emerged from that generations-long effort to make that system work the way it does today. Then they look at an emerging system, like renewable energy, and see only the flaws and shortcomings, completely forgetting that a historically-massive investment of time and money is the only way to make any new system feasible on that scale.

Olkiluoto 3 suffered significant delays and cost overruns. My impressions, based on recollection I got reading the newspapers during these two decades, are:

1. Bad management of construction project, almost near corruption level stupidity. Many constructions tasks outsourced to contractors who outsourced them to contractors who outsourced them to contractors, making it easy to take "cost-saving" shortcuts and difficult to supervise.

2. Failure of corruption to speed things up: Finnish nuclear safety authorities are not easily bribed, so when issues with bad quality of welds, concrete, boiler valves and safety electronics were identified (all this from memory, these were separate incidents), the issues could not be smoothed over and ignored with well-placed thick envelopes. The authorities would demand the construction crew to tear stuff apart and do again, properly. And if it didn't pass, then again. And again.

Most of the issues I have read about do not sound like "nuclear technology" failures, more about failures in building a big pressurized boiler power plant. The nuclear part comes in by authorities requiring high quality. They couldn't make good enough concrete bed on a first try, that isn't some super novel space technology.

It mostly reminds me of similar kind of mismanagement that plagues many big construction projects run by big corps managed by suits. During same time frame city of Helsinki wasted amazing amount of money in a "automated metro car" subway upgrade project they bought from Siemens, which ultimately didn't work and had to be scrapped.

(edit. City of Helsinki decided to "automate" city subway metro system in 2006, contract signed with Siemens in 2008, originally planned to be completed in 2011. Project was postponed several times and effectively scrapped in 2016. Tried googling most recent news, the lower district court had given judgement in 2021, parties likely to appeal.)

Olkiluoto 3 was the first-ever EPR to start construction back in 2005. It was supposed to go live in 2009, but basically everything that could have gone wrong did, which is why it was so massively delayed.

Funnily enough, the 2nd and 3rd EPRs in China both opened before this one, taking "only" 9 years from start to production. They're also the world's largest reactors now.

Those reactors in China (at the Taishan powerplant) were completed at a (officially) 60% overcosts, and were 5 years late.

One of them is shut down since mid-2021 after an incident (leak).

I've read that the startup process of building new or subsequent nuclear plants will be considerably shorter due to the groundwork for the Finnish reactor paving the way.

Which seems to topple most of your argument.

As for wind turbines on land, they require a lot more space for the same yield, space which is stolen or irreversibly destroyed for the local fauna. Here in Norway, wind turbines near settlements are also forced to run on diminished capacity at night because of the health problems people associate with the 24/7 humming and whoosh noises (not kidding).

Area.

To produce 1 gigawatt of power you need 1000 square kilometers of wind turbines or 300 sq km of solar elements or 3 sq km of nuclear power plants. How much land do you have in your country that you are ready to deforestate in order to build renewables?

Predictability.

Renewables depend on weather. They only work when the wind blows or the sun shines. Are you ready to be able to heat your house only when the weather forecast is good?

The wind farm linked above is installed in a forested area. The turbines are above the tree line, and didn't require a significant amount of deforestation. In addition to that, in CA at least, and I'm sure elsewhere, wind farms can still have farm land underneath, definitely grazing land.

On top of that, some solar installations are actually compatible with some foods, here's one article on that: https://www.dw.com/en/farmers-reap-double-benefits-with-sola...

Point being, land use doesn't need to be single purpose in your example.

In terms of the weather, this is why it important to have balanced installations and associated battery storage.

Solar installation is compatible with many, even most food crops, most trivially pasture, and increases yield while cutting water need.

There is absolutely no need for single-use solar or wind area, anywhere.

Area: offshore wind is by far the most promising renewable (excellent aggregated power and load factor).

Predictability: spreading out production units, using a mix (wind, solar...) and storage are key. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

While 23 years to build the thing are already bad, it now needs to operate continuously for at least some 30 years selling electricity at a price that is even today not competitive with renewables to make financial sense.

Essentially, building a nuclear power plant in 2022 means you are betting we won't have workable storage for renewables by 2052.

Today, what are the alternatives?

If you add in batteries with todays technology the nuclear plants are competituve with solar or wind.

So the alternative is coal or natural gas plants. Which then have their own drawbacks.

Solutions that are built today need to use technology available today.

Nuclear is fine, especially when you are not buying the first reactor of its kind from a vendor who has never fully built a plant on its own. Areva got a tad too greedy and cut out the middleman in the form of doing 100% of the work themselves instead of the usual 30% and contracting out the rest. They ware not helped by the fameously strict Finnish regulatory authority (STUK).

Renewables are only competitive because you are not pricing in either storage or the cost of building and running fossil fuel plants as backups.

Add that in and the equation looks substantially different.

You can run power to gas and then burn the hydrogen and still come out ahead of nuclear plants today. They are completely irrelevant.

Germany's new gas (methane...) powerplants are retrofitable in order to burn hydrogen.

https://global.kawasaki.com/news_211209-2e.pdf

Agreed, though solar tech has gotten a lot better and cheaper in the last 20 years, so it's not completely fair to compare. Power storage is still an issue, but this is getting better and better each year with the prices of lithium iron phosphate batteries coming way down.

Lithium batteries will not be used for utility-scale storage, beyond load-leveling. Overwhelmingly cheaper alternatives will be used instead.

What's their waste disposal plan? Apparently the way the USA does it is a nightmare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

This is the company doing the disposal, they start the disposal operations in a few years: https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html

The method is Swedish, they seem to have good pictures of it here: https://www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repositor...

Renewables are fair-weather energy sources, both literally and geopolitically. Hopefully it never comes to that, but off-shore wind is a trivially easy target in a war. Solar too is not very defendable. Power plants are a bit better (in a sub-apocalypse war at least).

Renewables are more sparsely deployed (no real way to take them all in a quick sweep), and don't create risk whenever exposed to battles/missiles/...

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/11/1085427380/ukraine-nuclear-po...

Without significantly more information, it doesn't really point out nuclear being uneconomical. It points out artificial roadblocks, regulatory and otherwise, imposed on nuclear generation that aren't imposed on other forms of generation.

Other forms of generation that require GHG-emitting backup generation.