That drives up costs because you have to maintain many gigawatts of backup capacity sitting idle most of the year. It's better to have more flexible solutions that provide value the whole year. That's either baseload (fission, fusion) or grid-scale, seasonal storage (unsolved problem).

The backup capacity is cheap compared to nuclear providing the same output. Like, an order of magnitude cheaper. Combustion turbines are remarkably compact and inexpensive for their power output (this is why they power our aircraft). It's wonderful what happens to machinery when you can reduce the need to transfer heat across fluid-solid boundaries.

> Like, an order of magnitude cheaper.

Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant cost $6 per Watt of installed capacity over the projected 50 years of lifetime. Simple natural gas turbines (not combined cycle) cost around $3 per Watt over 50 years in just capital costs. This doesn't take into account the cost of the fuel, or the magic infrastructure to produce, store, and deliver hydrogen.

I'm taking Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant as the base for comparison because it's an example of what you can do, when you have a "mass produced" design that you can just quickly build.

That's funded by a loan from the Russian government, not from private financial markets, so we can assume the rate is below market. The actual cost when real risk penalties are included (as they must be for an accurate cost) would be higher.

I also doubt anyone is going to be buying Russian nuclear power plants in Europe anytime soon. The strategic risk and associated cost (as seen with importing natural gas from Russia) would be far too high.

> That's funded by a loan from the Russian government, not from private financial markets, so we can assume the rate is below market. The actual cost when real risk penalties are included (as they must be for an accurate cost) would be higher.

Not much higher, though. Russia makes money on these contracts. South Korea has

> I also doubt anyone is going to be buying Russian nuclear power plants in Europe anytime soon. The strategic risk and associated cost (as seen with importing natural gas from Russia) would be far too high.

Of course. I'm not suggesting that Russia should be relied upon for ANYTHING at this point. It should be as isolated economically as possible.

I'm just using this as an example of what you can do with a streamlined construction pipeline for plain old PWRs. No fancy new technology, no breakthroughs, just regular old good project management.

First, backup generation is expensive. Right now Germany needs about 200GW, and this value will go _up_ when Germany switches from natural gas to heat pumps for heating, and expands the EV fleet.

That's a lot. Even cheap gas turbine power plants will cost around $100B to build.

And while the one-month Dunkelflaute is exceptional, the shorter versions lasting a couple of days happen basically every year. As a result, you probably need about 2-3 weeks a year of various levels of backup utilization every year.

This is how it looks in practice: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&... - look at the period from 18th Jan to 25th Jan. The renewable generation fell to around 8% of the nameplate capacity during that period.

I have not seen any real plans to fix this. My prediction is that Germany will just continue to burn gas and coal well into 2030-s.