Turkey is set to get 10% of its grid electricity from the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant [1]

The build cost has been 22B (excluding loans) and it will have a capacity of 4456MW meaning it's about 20 cents per Watt.

On average the cost per Watt for solar is 27 cents (excluding loans and costs for storage) [2]

I guess nuclear is more expensive than coal or natural gas, but it does seem competitive on the surface. I am not pro or against nuclear, I just want to see us rapidly adopt the most pragmatic approach to the climate crisis, whatever it is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

That project isn’t finished they are targeting 2026 and hope it’s only ~10% over budget.

Your solar numbers are wildly inflated because that’s per watt not per watt hour. Over 2/3 of nuclear power plants costs occur after you build the things. It would be comparable if 22B was the total cost and if nuclear didn’t need ~1,000 full time employees, fuel, decommissioning etc. Those costs delay how quickly you can pay back loans which then drives up how much interest nuclear pays over the plants lifetime.

Companies have signed solar power purchase contracts at 2c/kWh. Adding solar redundancy and batteries for 24/7 power is actually more flexible and cheaper than nuclear because you can cheaply follow the demand curve. Meanwhile nuclear power plants need to go offline for multiple weeks every ~2 years and really want to sit at 100% the rest of the time.

PS: Even just looking at construction costs is misleading because solar starts producing power so much sooner. You’re paying interest from day 1 of construction not day 1 of operations. So if you take 6 years to build that’s 5 years of interest on the first years construction costs without any revenue. Meanwhile solar’s been producing power for ~5 years and paying down debt.

1.5 cents per kilowatt hour even

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/28/record-low-solar-ppas...

these are great numbers, thanks

keep in mind that almost all the cost of pv plants is construction (capex), while most of the cost of nuclear is during operation and decommissioning (opex)

so 20 cents per watt capex is close to 60 cents per watt total, twice the price of pv

as emmaengineer pointed out, though, you did the division backwards: it's 0.20 watts per dollar, not 0.20 dollars per watt. the correct quotient is 490¢ per watt, or maybe closer to 15 dollars per watt including opex

$22B / 4.456B = $4.9/W, about 20x more expensive than your number for PV.

Oh you're right! Did it backwards. Correcting my post

thank you for posting this correction; i had missed that obvious error

i just noticed that you're linking a page about panel prices

two problems

one, pv modules are typically about a third of the cost of a utility-scale solar farm; things like installation labor and power electronics are also part of the cost. so roughly we should expect solar projects to cost about 80 cents per peak watt based on that number

two, that page ends in 02021, but pv module prices have fallen by about a third to half since the beginning of this year https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...

in particular solarserver's 'mainstream' category was about 25 euro-cents throughout 02021 and is now at 19, 24% lower, and the lowest it's ever been

it seems like the price-fixing cartel announced at the beginning of 02019 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl-i... has finally collapsed

solarserver's 'low-cost' category is at the staggeringly low price of 11 euro-cents per peak watt; if the other costs didn't change, that would lower the solar plant cost from 80 cents to 65 cents or so per peak watt, though in fact they tend to increase somewhat because of the larger area of solar cells required to reach the same wattage (that's why the mainstream pv modules are more expensive)

a third problem is the capacity factor, tho; nuke plants typically run at about 90% capacity, while solar farms run at closer to 20%, because of problems such as night. in very polar countries like germany it's 10%. so 70 cents per nameplate watt works out to more like 3.5 dollars per delivered watt

which is still cheaper than 4.9 (or 5.4 dollars per delivered watt assuming that 90% capacity factor) but not implausibly cheaper anymore

German solar policies are insane. Nation wide capacity factor was 11.6% in 2018. The numbers are so low because they keep building solar in the northern parts of the country which are absolutely terrible for solar.

Brandenburg has a stupidly large amount of solar compared to a terrible amount of sunlight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#/media/...

Meanwhile the best location in Germany the south southern tip of Baden-Württemberg only has a relatively small fraction of their total installed solar. I haven’t worked out the exact numbers but they are something like 20+% less efficient than they could be. Granted they would need to build more power transmission lines but it’s a small county so such projects would be fairly cheap compared to the efficiency gain.

PS: May solar power plants on the US are over 30% capacity factor and the average is ~25%. We’re a long way from the equator. In a perfect location solar tracking PV should get around 40% capacity factor. You beat 1/pi because over the day an angled panel casts a wider shadow than the width of the panel.

i've often wondered why germany's pv capacity factor is so terrible, thanks

prc's pv capacity factor is also around 10% last i checked, which is also absurdly low and suggests that they maybe aren't as capitalist as they seem in important respects (i'd be interested in updates)

by 'may' do you mean 'many'

it was easier to justify solar tracking (and concentrating solar, and nuclear) fifteen years ago when solar panels are expensive. but now you have to trade off twenty dollars in mechanical parts for tracking against 180 more peak watts of solar panels. with maintenance costs it's easy for the balance to come out in favor of a simpler system without tracking

Grid scale tracking systems keep getting cheaper but neither always wins.

Solar tracking makes more sense when you look at wholesale rates over a day. Peak demand prices start right as static solar production falls off so you would need batteries not just more solar panels to sell at those rates. On top of this costs like land, inverters, and wiring gets amaorterised across more hours of production.

Wholesale prices get influenced by the deployed solar power including rooftop solar. Which adds yet another dimension to these models.

if peak demand prices are so predictable maybe you could just angle the panels a bit to the west when you install them instead of maintaining a bunch of motors

It’s important to remember that research and commercial funding for nuclear reactors has basically frozen for the better part of 60 years, which means that fission tech hasn’t been following Wright’s law and we’re still stuck with designs from 60 years ago. Things have heated up a bit more recently but this stuff has a long lead time (+ think of all the people who didn’t go into nuclear because of the lack of funding).

There’s actually lines of research to do direct conversion of energy instead of boiling water which gets efficiency up to ~90% instead of 40%. But the challenge with fission isn’t fuel conversion efficiency but manufacturing and maintenance costs. I wonder if getting rid of the water requirements for fission reactors would meaningfully alter the costs involved. Would be neat if it would.

But ultimately fission is still price competitive with renewables and that’s when you ignore the need for batteries and the fact that it’s taken a lot of investment in renewables paired with underinvestment in fission.

All the major world powers dumped tons of money into researching light water fission, precisely because it is dual use technology for making weapons.

What has not had billions of government dollars in finding were renewables.

Forced labor in solar-grade polysilicon production is effectively in the billions of dollars of government subsidies club. Let’s not kid ourselves.

hmm, i hadn't heard of this before

https://www.csis.org/analysis/addressing-forced-labor-concer...

> (...) there is mounting evidence that the polysilicon produced in Xinjiang, the first step in the supply chain for solar photovoltaics, possibly uses forced labor. (...)

> Another major problem is that there is limited visibility into the actual conditions under which polysilicon is produced. In part, this is because Xinjiang is inaccessible, so it is hard to get verifiable facts on the working conditions inside factories. Much of the incredible research that has brought this topic to the surface has involved inference and triangulation.

this was two years ago; is there more reliable information since then?

Lots was dumped into known low-effectiveness light water fission precisely because it is not a viable path for making weapons.

There are many more efficient ways of running nuclear power, especially ones that do not involve either needing enrichement of fuel nor throwing away majority of still usable fuel - but despite NPT, they are blocked politically by nuclear-haves.

Can't edit anymore, but for reference for those who probably downvote out of misunderstanding.

Light water moderated reactors aren't a pathway to making nuclear weapons, because they require that you have the ability to enrich uranium separately just to start.

I.e. a light-water moderated reactor is dependant either on capability to enrich fuel and/or use unenriched fuel (for enrichment or plutonium production) - which are core capabilities for making fission weapons.

This is why they have been favoured on non-proliferation (and often "control") grounds - they are dependant on fuel from groups that do have fission weapon production pipeline or at least parts of it.

To work from natural uranium, without artificial enrichment, you need to use either heavy-water moderation or graphite moderation, or more exotic designs - but then you can both use unenriched uranium to produce power as well as produce plutonium or other useful things, and a distillation pipeline provides for both light-water reactor fuel and weapon fissile material.

Details of how subsidies went are way more complex, and both renewables and nuclear and fossil fuels had areas heavily subsidized.

It's true that light water reactors are not a good way to make plutonium for weapons. I disagree that designs that can run on natural uranium fuel (moderated by graphite or heavy water) are more efficient. Even countries that already have nuclear weapons and are beyond non-proliferation fears, like China, Russia, and the UK, don't build new power reactors moderated with heavy water or graphite.

Reactors using unenriched uranium can be more fuel-efficient in terms of electrical output per ton of natural uranium consumed, but they're not more cost-efficient. High project cost is the number one problem that impedes nuclear construction while fuel cost is almost negligible. Keep in mind that Canada's newest CANDU, Darlington 4, started construction in 1986; if you're comparing its costs to a light water reactor then you should also use mid-1980s costs for those and not e.g. the high costs for more recent EPR or AP1000 reactors. Building a new CANDU in Canada today would also cost more than it did in the 1980s.

My point was more specifically about push to use only light water moderated reactors, and yes for various reasons those were generally done even among nuclear armed states (because you want to keep certain things close and because an LWR can be sold elsewhere).

However I'd argue that in terms of total lifespan costs the increased waste production of LWRs is considerable portion of perceived costs - essentially the long-term storage fears vs burn down in fast reactors etc. Plus the focus on LWRs ensured that research in more capable designs was stiffled.

Do not take this "rah rah nuclear best renewables suck" though. Though I'd be very interested in how costs would go if we taxed/penalized emissions do the max - essentially, I consider every new fossil fuel plant, including gas backup for renewables, to be a policy failure. My personal dream is overprovisioning with nuclear and renewables and instead of curtailment try to funnel extra power into other, previously uneconomical things (replacement of coal in smelting with actual green hydrogen, stuff like that)

Fast reactors can theoretically reduce the amount of waste that needs to go to long term disposal, but those are even rarer than graphite or heavy water moderated reactors. They're also even more expensive. I believe that there are currently only two fast power reactors in operation, both Russian (BN-600 and BN-800).

I agree with you that it would have been (still would be) better to have emissions taxes penalizing pollution from fossil fuels instead of technology-specific incentives and subsidies for the various kinds of fossil alternatives. I live near a nuclear power plant and I have no problem with its track record of safety or emissions. I do think nuclear power has a major cost and scheduling problem for new projects and I'm not sure how that can be overcome. SMR projects like this one that Utah just canceled were the latest great hope for taming those issues.

Renewables R&D has been also subsidized

In 1951 the Hanford reactors were making plutonium, not power. Only one of the Hanford reactors sold electricity, and not until the middle of the 1960s. That one went over budget to construct but operating costs were well under predictions. I'm not sure Mr. Suits had enough information in 1951 to make his claim authoritative seventy years later.

The Internet Archive has many old issues of Nucleonics available. Here's the full article you reference:

"Power from the Atom - An Appraisal"

https://archive.org/details/sim_nucleonics_1951-02_8_2/page/...