They took the cost to build Vogtle, which is one of the most or even the most expensive outlier in terms of time/cost overruns of all time, and decided to make that the baseline for "the cost of nuclear power".
When the average time to build a nuclear reactor in the world has consistently been around 7.5 years. For the last 50 years, and also for the ones that came online in 2022, lest you think these were just the bygone good old days.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
Time to construct a nuclear plant takes on average 7.5 years, a number that hasn't really budged in the last 50 years.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
And since financing (i.e. interest) is the primary cost of nuclear (~50%), time is money.
Hinkley and Flamanville are examples of the EPR, a brand new reactor type that is both at the start of its learning curve, always problematic, and also apparently a design that is particularly difficult to build. And both Europe and the US haven't really built any nuclear plants for quite a long time, so the know-how to build them is just not there. Oh, and the regulators sometimes change regulations after parts of the plants have been built so they have to tear down what they have built and start again.
These are obviously all solvable problems, and mostly solvable by just building more. The problem is that we didn't build enough. Just build more.
So what better estimate would you suggest? What nuclear power plants where built in the last decade or so, for how much do they sell their power? How big will their decomissioning costs be per MWh?
Please support your claim.
We were talking about cost, and cost is directly proportional to construction time because financing (interest) is the primary cost of nuclear power plant construction.
I’m still waiting for better cost estimates than what Lazard gives.
Take the Vogtle-3 time, divide by average time to construct a nuclear reactor.
Apply factor to Lazard "estimate".
Vogtle was only delayed by 25%, 2.5 years? I thought it was such a disaster and this proved nuclear doesn't work?
Now it's all good?
This says the delay was 7 years:
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtl...
Oh, and the plant will still be cost effective, apparently, even with those delays.
Oh, and the solar numbers include sufficient batter storage? I saw something about 4h for half the capacity on some of the graphs. Most didn't explain at all.
https://web.mit.edu/kshirvan/www/research/ANP193%20TR%20CANE...
https://www.enr.com/articles/55774-oxford-professors-latest-...
In contrast, the only real alternative to air travel for high speed transportation between Northern and Southern CA is high speed rail. The "Hyperloop" has been exposed (charitably) as a failed concept, and personal vehicle travel (even electrified) is not an equivalent to HSR in a state as big as CA.
None of that is to say that the CA HSR project has been well planned/executed or that the costs have been well estimated. But that doesn't obviate the need for high speed ground transport in the state.
1. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... (pages 2 and 31)