Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III

Re:Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part II... by coryrc on Friday September 30, 2022 @09:48PM (#33042990)

> At today's prices, thay $12B could instead buy 6GW of solar at 20% capacity factor, and 24GWh of batteries.

I don't think that can actually be done. The world's largest battery installation is less than 1 GWh AFAICT. OTOH we're not doing great at nuclear either.

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Re:Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part II... by pfdietz on Friday September 30, 2022 @10:31PM (#33043229)

It doesn't have to all be one giant stack of batteries. Your argument is like saying that we can't add more than (say) 2 GW of nuclear, because that's the size of the largest nuclear power plant.

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Re:Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part II... by epistasis on Saturday October 01, 2022 @08:53AM (#33046231)

What do you mean by "can't be done"? If we can build a 500MWh battery we can build a 1GWh battery by doing the 500MWh battery two times.

Similarly if we can build a 1GWh battery we can build also a 24 GWh battery.

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Re:Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part II... by coryrc on Saturday October 01, 2022 @10:33PM (#33052272)

That's the same argument for building nuclear -- we've done projects before, just do it more/bigger.

Yet we can't and aren't.

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