Re:Michigan could provide $300M to reopen nuclear power plant
by Maursault on Thursday April 20, 2023 @12:35PM
(#35642544)
> > And you're missing a data point: nuclear is also the most expensive form of energy ever conceived.
> Again, not accurate.
But it is.
The generation of electricity through nuclear power plants in the United States cost 29.13 U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour in 2021.[1]
Oh, but there certainly is. The historically high cost of nuclear power electricity is largely due to capital costs (that you would be paying for whether the plants produced electricity or not), and because plants in the US have often not been designed to ramp up and down easily, they tend to be operated continuously. It takes $10B before the first watt of electricity is generated. Uranium costs a fortune. Waste storage is astoundingly expensive due to amount of time it must be stored, not to mention the cost of security for that storage.
Meanwhile,
a typical solar system in the U.S. can produce electricity at the cost of $0.06 to $0.08 per kilowatt-hour.[2]
[2] https://www.electricrate.com/solar-energy/price-per-kwh/
Re:Michigan could provide $300M to reopen nuclear power plant
by Schroedingersat on Thursday April 20, 2023 @09:39PM
(#35648866)
Cool. So when the nuclear industry offers a 40 year contract for all the energy a 1GW nuclear plant produces with no liability cap, fully funded decomissioning insured against bankruptcy, and fully funded cleanup of mines payable in full after it has been operating for 1 year at >92% CF for $3 billion we'll know you're telling the truth about it costing <$30/MWh.
Until then it's just lies and whining to demand handouts.
I would consider them equally safe, and both the safest form of energy. If you really want to get technical this graph excludes rooftop solar which has about 20X the fatality rate of industrial solar in terms of deaths per TWh. [2] But I don't really care, they're equally the safest form of energy.
> The fact that nuclear requires so much concrete also means solar and wind use less carbon.
This is factored into the calculations I linked and no, they don't.
> And you're missing a data point: nuclear is also the most expensive form of energy ever conceived.
Again, not accurate. Solar and wind are bursty and sometimes just drop to zero. Solar at night or when it's cloudy, and wind when it's not windy.
If you actually want a 100% renewable grid you need storage. And adding this storage makes wind + solar + storage combo significantly more expensive than nuclear. In fact even a 90-something% renewable grid with storage is more expensive than nuclear. [1]
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/what-energy-storage-would-have-to-...
[2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...