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