Re:Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has ...
by pydry on Thursday March 24, 2022 @07:50AM
(#30788583)
I've never actually seen numbers which take into account pumped storage, grid interconnects, actual weather, low-hanging-fruit demand shaping and the anticorrelation of wind and solar but I wish somebody would produce some.
There's a lot of very shallow analysis out there though that cheerleads some approach with some very trivially refuted assumptions.
My sense is that the price of all of those things combined is currently about 90% of the cost of nuclear power official and about 60-75% of the cost of nuclear power that pays for its own disaster insurance.
While my own model is most assuredly flawed, I havent really seen a good alternative.
Re:Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has ...
by regularfry on Thursday March 24, 2022 @08:18AM
(#30788777)
It's been a while since I read it to know if the specifics you're after are in there, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a directionally-correct reading from https://www.withouthotair.com/. Provisos obviously include changes in costs since it was published, but it would give you a starting point.
That's why interconnecting grids is so important. We can have Norwegian hydro and Moroccan solar picking up the slack. Plugin all those nice new EVs with vehicle to grid capability built in (Ford, Kia, and a few other manufacturers produce these already) and we're talking a few GWH of standby battery capacity ready to balance the grids as well.
That 5% base load is what we need to secure long term. But given that we essentially have that right now, there's no urgency for that. Maybe it's 10%.
Before anyone asks, I'm basing my numbers on what Michael Liebreich cited in his podcast a while back. Interesting person. He's a british conservative with a technical and economic background. Not your usually hippy environmentalist. Founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance; generally seems to be extremely solid on his numbers. The economics in this area are quite fascinating. If you have better numbers and sources, please share. Base load without numbers is just people waffling.