Why does nuclear not deliver closer to its ideal power output? Are nuclear plants really down 10% of the time?

Not an expert, but it's my impression that it's common to have reactors shut down about one month per year for refueling and maintenance. Of course, this can be planned so it's not a big deal.

The plants do have a worse correlated failure mode which is when something bad is discovered in one plant, it can shut down multiple plants because the safety is based on making sure to an extremely high degree that nothing can go wrong - like grounded air planes. Something like Fukushima can shut down plants all over the world temporarily until plans have been revisited and extra precautions possibly put in place.

Nuclear plants, like any facility or service, need downtime for maintenance

Over their lifecycle they are down more like 20-25%.

Only if the operator is criminally incompetent.

90%+ capacity factor/uptime is pretty much standard and the better ones reach ~95%

For example TVO in Finland has 93% to 97% depending on the reactor since the early 1990s. Fortum has very similar numbers for their reactors.

This is the definition of cherry-picking data points.

I would say cherry-picking data points is better then providing 0 data points.

edit:

Basically competent operators hit ~90%.

US is around 93%.

Sweden 84%

Switzerland 90%

France would hit that if they could run their plants at 100% when they are on but they run theirs in load following mode due to having so many of them. So they run at around 80%.

World average is 83%.

https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/891c0cd8-2beb-4acf-bb4b-5...

And yes I know best the numbers about the market I live in because I live here and this stuff effects the price I have to pay for electricity.

If the world average is 83% and his claim included 80%, he wasn't as far off as you made him out to be with the criminal negligence business, was he?

Refueling and maintenance are the "normal" things and both are planned to the time of year with least consumption/lowest electricity prices.

Then you have the rare non planned outages but once a new reactor has been running for a year or two and all the kinks have been worked out they should be very rare.

Scheduled maintenance. Refueling, replacing worn-out components, that sort of thing. One nine of uptime is pretty good in the "continuously running power plants" business.

Emphasis on scheduled. Wind operators get no choice at all in when they're generating power, and this is true of solar as well, although the fluctuation is easier to predict, especially in very sunny climates.

A fleet of nuclear reactors can be taken offline on a schedule, with advance notice, so they alternate being out of commission. This makes it easier to supply reliable baseline power.

In the US, PV solar capacity factor is about 0.24 (partly because lots of people live near very sunny regions like California and Texas). The National Renewable Energy Laboratory claims that in some parts of the US utility-scale solar capacity factors are 0.33 [0]. Wind is about 0.36, Hydro also 0.36, Nuclear about 0.93 [1]. If you apply these capacity factors to the nameplate capacities (ignoring batteries), you get 58.5% solar, 19.7% wind, 15.1% natural gas, and 6.6% nuclear.

[0]: https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/utility-scale_pv

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

US nuclear averages below 0.9, individual plants can break 0.93 for a single year, but long term maintenance and refueling cycles lower the average. Ex: 95.73% (2017) 80.25% (lifetime) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Valley_Nuclear_Power_St...

94.43% (2017) 75.20% (lifetime) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_Nuclear_Generating_S...

96.04% (2017) 78.07% (lifetime) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browns_Ferry_Nuclear_Plant

So you can cherry pick a few numbers from the best years, but the lifetime averages tell a different story.

Nuclear had much lower capacity factors in the past, which brings the lifetime capacity factor down. But the relevant point is that the capacity factor of nuclear plants running today is >90%

US Nuclear had a capacity factor of 86.1% as recently as 2012, it just varies through time and over a 40+ year lifetime you don’t have outstanding results every single year. So sure you can argue 71.1% in 1997 no longer applies, but it was almost exactly the same fleet of reactors in use back then.

Yet the person I was replying to said “about 93%” when averaging over 93% has been achieved exactly once in 2019. That kind of nonsense is actively harmful when people hear something and then later realize it’s simply incorrect.

Effective advocacy requires accuracy including technology specific issues and how to mitigate them.

Planned or unplanned is the question.

The larger question is what capacity factors would look like if you tried to double the amount of nuclear as many advocates wish. And what that would do to profitability / the need for subsidies.

Or as the industry has been concerned with for a decade, what happens when renewable energy is regularly sending wholesale prices near zero for hours a day.

Is a 15% difference that much of a different story?

Look at your paycheck, and imagine the number is 15% lower. Should answer the question.

If alternate pay is 90% lower, not big of a difference. i.e. If I lose job, I would prefer new one to pay 85% than 10%.

It does. And no, it's not that significant.

I'm not a nuclear fanboy (well, I wish I made sense since I like the idea of free energy, but renewables are just as good), but I think it's important to make accurate arguments.

An accurate argument would include the financial aspects of +/- 15% in generated output and the impact that has on grid capacity....

With such a small difference, the burden of proof in this case is probably on the person arguing that it is a big difference, since you'd generally expect a roughly linear relationship between these.

In fact, I think I'd suspect that downtime is less relevant for nuclear, since I believe most of it will be schedulable, as opposed to renewables where downtime is random and based on conditions. Since it's schedulable, it could be done in the off season, or different plants could be planned to be out at difference periods.

You actually have no idea about electricity transmission. For long term problems, look no further than France. Short term, look up how electricity generation, transmission, markets and grid stability are linked. Wikipedia is a good start. Followed by studies about 100% renewable grids, those explain why baseload is much less of an issue than people think. And too much inflexible capacity, aka baseload, can actually be a problem itself.

While I'm not a practicing economist, I have a bachelor's degree in economics and took multiple classes on the economics of electricity markets.

While all of those are certainly relevant if you're comparing nuclear and other sources of power, I fail to see how that's relevant to the question of whether there's a significant difference between 80 and 95% capacity factor over a year.

Now imagine you are working in controlling at a power plant operator, and your yearly generated output is 5% lower that whatever plan has before. What do you think would happen?

- investors, management and board saying "no biggy, 5% is not relevant"

- something else

Companies are doing restructuring and mass lay-offs to save less than 5% on bottom line costs, they are incredibly happy when the top line grows by 5% and worried, if not in crisis mode, if the top line declines by 5%. And for the financing part of a new power plant, those 5% are the difference between the investment being a good or a bad one...

Hold on you are an economist and are telling me the difference between a capacity factor of 95 and 85% is not relevant? What do you think the ROIs and margins are for nuclear investments? Considering that nuclear is almost completely dominated by upfront investment, I'd be surprised if the that difference is not the difference between comfortably making a profit on your investment and loosing a large amount of money.

Of course those capacity factors hide one important bit, the dispatchability. While the capacity factor is the same in this list for wind and hydro, the wind and solar generation are naturally capped by nature. When demand exceeds the natural availability of these, you need to dispatch some extra generation. Hydro and natural gas are well suited for this, coal can do it even if dirtily. Nuclear generation could be made dispatchable, but due to the essentially zero marginal cost of running it all the time instead of limiting generation, it seldom is used in this fashion.

Electricity demand could be elastic too, but there's a limit to that. It's not always feasible to limit or shut down industrial processes for the few hours of expensive power. And home consumers are loath to not use their stoves when they want. There's potential in elastic demand though.

The problem with running nuclear in a dispatchable fashion (apart from technical problems) is not the marginal cost, but the upfront capital cost. Dispatchable capacity needs to have relatively low upfront cost, because it's seldomly used. The marginal cost is less important.

Nuclear has a high capital cost, it's a really complex tech.

Take a close look at the title again, second word after "solar", you have to pass by "and" to get there.

I guess I earned the snark for not mentioning the batteries.

Weirdly the news item doesn't tell what sort of energy storage capacity these battery installation have, only the peak power output of 14.3 GW for this year's addition. While that is certainly a gigantic addition no matter what the energy capacity of these battery installations is going to be, running the whole grid on batteries over the periods of low renewable generation is going to require still orders of magnitude more batteries. I suppose there's enough lithium in the ground for this, but elastic demand and dispatchable generation are probably going to be part of the equation for economical reasons.

A misconception I often read on YouTube, Reddit, HackerNews is that everyone equates batteries with lithium ion batteries. A battery is a chemical storage device for energy and there are already many different types.

1. There are also functioning batteries without lithium, for example with salt, which are now already being tested in Swiss and German households and bring some advantages compared to lithium batteries. Not least the price. One should always remember that the lower energy density is a problem for an electric vehicle, but it doesn't matter if we install a battery in a cellar. Here, the energy density plays a subordinate role because there is enough space.

2. Would it make more sense to talk about *energy storage* in general instead of just batteries (which are by definition chemical energy storage) Kinetic, chemical, thermal and so on. Lithium ion batteries should not be considered for back-up alone. We definitely need more choices and we have them, mostly with today's technology and definitely easier and faster to develop and install than any new nuclear reactor technology.

3. You need different types of batteries short term storage, medium term storage and long term storage. There are different concepts for each use. Batteries, compressed air storage, pumped storage, thermal storage as well as power-to-x systems are able to absorb the increasing summer power from solar, autumn wind, etc. and make the energy available again in the short term, medium term or seasonally shifted. Examples:

    1. https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/445597

    2. https://tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/newsportal/news/meilenstein-in-der-energy-transition-scientists-at-the-tu-dresden-build-unique-energy-storage (German)

    3. https://www.siemensgamesa.com/products-and-services/hybrid-and-storage/thermal-energy-storage-with-etes-switch

4.The best approach, however, is to build a decentralised grid, which is also intercontinently connected. This is the perfect way to compensate for any "dark lulls". There is research on this at some universities around the world that is already out of laboratory status.

Very good points. I do think the grid battery capacity being added this year is going to be mostly li-ion.

Thats (sadly) true! I think the transition to a diverse heat and electricity storage landscape will take time. Citing from "Handbook Energy Storage SCCER" https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000445597:

"The SCCER has proven in numerous demonstra- tions that storage technologies are essentially available and usable. Now it is necessary, above all, for political decisions to be taken in the inter- ests of a coherent energy policy in order to re- duce the regulatory obstacles that currently im- pede or make impossible the economical use of energy storage. This can guide business models and investment decisions necessary to advance the technologies developed in the SCCER and bring them from the laboratory into the ultimate energy system of the Energy Strategy 2050."

is [2] offline?

maybe you meant this one?: https://tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/newsportal/news/meilenstein...

... did you use a tool to translate your text from German -> English and the tool did also translate the url...?

However, sb. tried to access this url in Nov 2021, but it did not exist back then aswell: https://web.archive.org/web/20240216101723/https://tu-dresde...

Yes this one: https://tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/newsportal/news/meilenstein...

Many of my texts and links are from the years 2019-2022 when I was researching for various publications on renewable energy. Most of them, unfortunately, without DOI links. I didn't check them before I uploaded them here. And I would have so much more that it would be enough for an entire book.

in industry here in europe I usually see it written as ESS/BESS (energy storage system or battery energy storage system). For new plants we usually simulate each of five or six technologies, however in a lot of cases yes lithium ion has many advantages.

Plenty of batteries in the US are built out of water. They pump the water up during the day and it generates electricity at night. No lithium involved.

> Pumped storage is by far the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of 2020, the United States Department of Energy Global Energy Storage Database reports that PSH accounts for around 95% of all active tracked storage installations worldwide, with a total installed throughput capacity of over 181 GW, of which about 29 GW are in the United States, and a total installed storage capacity of over 1.6 TWh, of which about 250 GWh are in the United States.

I recently visited this one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianelli_Power_Plant

Pumped storage is a type of grid storage, but I don't think TFA includes it in battery storage. Pumped storage is a fine technology, but is there a lot of build potential left for it?

> Pumped storage is a fine technology, but is there a lot of build potential left for it?

"A lot" is probably subjective, but the two best known global estimates are Hunt et al. (2020) [1] from IIASA and Stocks et al. from ANU re100 (who incidentally also have some interactive maps [3]) which with different cost targets put potential at 17.3 and 23 PWh respectively, which works out to about 2 MWh per person. For comparison, for the past decade, the US ahs consumed about 13 MWh of electricity per person per year, down from a peak of slightly under 14 in 2000 and 2005. With very high levels of electrification, that could potentially rise to 24 to 28 MWh per person per year, or 8 or 9 PWh/yr for the whole country. Total primary energy use is a lot higher, around 90 MWh per person–year or 30 PWh total, this is because both not everything could be practically electrified and the things that could easily be electrified tend to be much more efficient when done electrically. Energy efficiency is also usually assumed to increase slightly in general.

The US specifically is actually above the world average at about 4.5 MWh per capita according to the ANU team's estimates. That's 1.5 PWh per year roughly. In any case, I would expect that there is likely to very likely sufficient potential in most (if not all) grids for pumped hydro to be a significant part of medium duration energy storage (if not all of it), though whether it actually would depends on the costs of other technologies as well.

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14555-y

[2]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2020.11.015

[3]: https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/

There have been some concepts proposed for gravity based pumped storage that do not rely on existing terrain.

I find the concept compelling as it is incredibly simple but it hasn't yet been proven at scale.

https://gravity-storage.com

> no matter what the energy capacity of these battery installations is going to be, running the whole grid on batteries over the periods of low renewable generation is going to require still orders of magnitude more batteries.

I live in CA (Bay Area) the solar people just wandered up to my front door to "sell me" the other day. I do want to go solar in light of my PGE bill.

The sales guy was super sharp and addressed one of the concerns I had (I have an unusual roof) and we got very nerdy.

Because PGE has time dependent pricing, their model is to use battery to not only power the house in these windows but dump back to the grid during them too (and charge off solar when power is cheap).

SO an independent installer is pitching a system to me (the end consumer) in response to the market price conditions that are going to push "more battery" for "peak demand" into the market.

Now do the economics of that system and their sales pitch make sense? I dont know, Im still crunching those numbers (and they are some hard numbers to figure out), but at first blush im inclined to say "yes" cause fuck giving money to PGE.

At least a rooftop PV installation breaks even* here in Finland with scarce sun and cheap power. Batteries are not there yet. If you don't need the battery as a UPS, I would wait still a few years before going for a home battery.

*: Easily half of the cost is the installation labor. If you can DIY at least parts of it, you can get decent ROI.

Here (bay area), the power prices are so obscene that I almost makes sense to install batteries first.

Those with homes with solar are going to end up saturating the grid (duck curve) to the point where renters can buy batteries and "coast", through the peaks of power cost.

Are spot electricity contracts available, so that you can do it like that? Makes sense then. And of course the installation cost of battery is way smaller than for a PV plant as no roof work is required.

AFAIK, there is no residential spot market with PG&E. Just different seasonal and hour-by-hour rate schedules with published rates.

There is an "electric home" rate plan that has three periods per day: off-peak, partial-peak, and peak with three rates. This can apply to a home with batteries, where you can shift your load to different periods. The spread can be up to $0.22 per kWh in summer and up to $0.04 per kWh in winter.

There is another rate plan with two periods per day: off-peak and peak. The spread here can be up to $0.09 per kWh in summer and up to $0.03 per kWh in winter. This is a typical plan for homes without solar nor batteries and with moderate consumption. This plan has two pricing tiers. A lower rate for consumption up to a "baseline allowance" and then a higher price after that. This allowance is summed over a whole billing period, in contrast to the time of use variations each day.

The above discussion do not include any net-metering, so you never sell power back to the grid. You just optimize your load during different hours of the day. With a currently available net-metering plan, PG&E will pay for excess power only around $0.02 to $0.04 per kWh.

Also, it seems PG&E distinguishes a "paired storage" net metering system, and requires special metering to track the solar generation that goes into the battery versus recharging from the grid. They will only credit solar production delivered back to the grid, and not off-peak grid energy reflected back during peak hours. So, I'm not sure why some posters seem to be talking about this arbitrage scenario.

For context, the actual per kWh rates are around $0.36 to $0.65 in the different seasons and rate plans. So these peak price differences may range around 5% to 25%. There isn't any of the wild fluctuation or negative numbers we've heard from other energy markets.

> Weirdly the news item doesn't tell what sort of energy storage capacity these battery installation have, only the peak power output of 14.3 GW for this year's addition.

As a rule of thumb, the capacity will be a few hours worth. So if the power rating is 14 GW, maybe that will be 60 GWh of capacity.

That's almost enough to smooth over the most regular fluctuations in solar power: the day-night cycle (especially when you remember that demand drops at night). Not close to being economical for storing power from summer through to winter.

A source [0]: > The most common grid-scale battery solutions today are rated to provide either 2, 4, or 6 hours of electricity at their rated capacity

[0] https://www.energysage.com/business-solutions/utility-scale-...

Please say what you mean.

Technically, solar and wind are dispatchable as well, and much better than even natural gas at that. Grids were both are regulated on the sub-second scale are much more even than is otherwise possible. The thing is just that we consider that as lost energy, even though it is simply the same as running any other power plant at full power. If wind were three times cheaper than natural gas and we hence build three times as much of it, the achievable capacity factor would not look that bad.

More on-site batteries can fix the need for dispatchable power on the grid side, and the cheaper batteries get, the more attractive such solutions start to look.

It is also resilient to grid failures. Even better if you add on-site generation.

I've been out of the industry for a few years, but it used to take 9 hours to turn a coal generator on.

The German energy market and therefore me as a consumer had to pay billions for dispatch operations.

The energy market got plenty of inefficiency through the fast build out of renewable that the battery projects, calculating with this excess are getting build but not fast enough.

There are already a few projects at old coal plants were they have connectivity.

And with the ev batteries alone there will be used but still very good batteries hitting this market very soon. Equivalent to the whole water energy storage of Germany

This discussion makes me realize we could have a 100% renewable energy grid and discussion will still be pushed with the same old “arguments” against renewable being feasible. Ridiculous.

I do not understand your math. How did you go from .36 for wind, apply it to nameplate capacity and get 15.1%? And percent of what? I thought applying the capacity factor to nameplate would result in some measure of energy produced, not a percentage.

Your range is wildly off for PV systems, concentrating solar thermal can be that low but it’s been abandoned for good reason. Utility scale PV solar in the US averages 0.246 with several solar farms in the US having over 0.32 capacity factors.

Ex: 0.328 from 2017 - 2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star While a nearby PV farm is only 0.275 (average 2015-2018) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm and another in the middle: 29.7%(average 2015–2017, MS1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar

The discrepancy around PV solar is largely the degree of tracking and location. Fixed panels have the same maximum, but even 1 axis tracking significantly extends how long a panel is producing the maximum power. 2 axis tracking allows even better capacity factor assuming nothing breaks, but at higher cost per kWh.

PS: Of note low capacity factor Solar installs are generally far smaller. It’s viable to install a little solar in Maine, but not at the same scale. https://spectrumlocalnews.com/me/maine/news/2022/11/17/const...

That’s not why it is done, it’s because this is reporting in capacity and that is the physical capacity being installed. That phrasing makes it sound nefarious, then you end with a fairly low solar range (which varies substantially and exceeds that in sunnier parts of the US).

Bit of an odd take. You could say the same, or lower, of capacity factors on peaking oil or gas plants in some areas that run for only a couple percent of the year. Nameplate and utilization are just different things.

Maybe worth noting that despite lower capacity factors and despite it being mid-winter, Texas (ERCOT) keeps setting solar output records because they’re installing so much nameplate[1]. It’s not like it does nothing.

[1] https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Sol...

Why report on capacity instead of energy? Why would capacity matter at all?

Because energy generated is an after the fact number in any sort of power generation, and doesn't help with any sort of prediction.

Considering nameplate capacity without capacity factor would be bad a prediction?? If I need 1GW of extra energy getting 1GW of solar would be a bad bet. Same if I am calculating the pollution generated next year.

Yes, because load factor are long time averages while electricity generation and consumption are almost real time.

Kind of like 4D checkers or something.

You are really asking after the explanation above?

Yes, correcting for capacity factor is essential if you want to compare potential energy generated over a year (which is perhaps not the most common use of these numbers). Gas generators are typically less than 50% capacity factor, and batteries should have course have a 0% capacity factor for comparison of energy created over a year

However, your capacity factors for solar are far too low, average CF is above 20%. There are roughly as many installs with CF>30% as there are with CF<15%.:

https://emp.lbl.gov/pv-capacity-factors

Also omitted from this view is the cost per MWh delivered to the grid. A great overview of the current state of the technology, including costs ($40/MWh), is here:

https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/utility_scale_solar_...

There's also a great overview of the state of batters here, where conservative estimates of lifetime cost of stored energy results in about $88/MWh:

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf

For the new nuclear cost, it's actually really hard to dig up, because it's a bit too embarrassing to the industry. But by taking the factors from this slide deck:

https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/

And scaling the slide 14 numbers for $9k/kW overnight cost to the real cost of $15/kW at Vogtle, and we get nuclear costs north of $180/MWh for nuclear when including the new subsidies from Biden's IRA legislation (north of $200/MWh unsubsidized).

Somehow, that is the latest pro-niclear / anti-renewables talking point. Not tgat people in field learn the principle of load factor in one of the first days of 101 lectures on the subject...

It least it is an evolution up from "solar isn't working at night" and similar deep and hot takes on the subject.

Pro-nuclear doesn't make one anti-renewables. They're complementary technologies, the rivalry is entirely one-sided. Not to mention incredibly aggravating to those of us who would like power to be reliable, with no emissions.

The arguments against renewables from your side since at least the '70s when I came across them first, have been persistent and loud, for half a century! You're gonna just pretend that never happened, walk away from it. The parent mentioned the "duh, sun don't shine at night" line because that's some shit your side was for real pushing, for fucking decades. You don't get to sidestep half a lifetime of that garbage and claim some high ground now.

I'm not on whatever side you're having this imaginary argument with. But keep yelling at a cloud if it brings you pleasure.

Keep in mind that looking at the capacity factor for nuclear vs solar/wind can be misleading as well if you don't take into account even more factors.

Renewables are composed of a wide mix of thousands of power plants. And these days the construction of renewables goes along with construction of energy storage and grid upgrades (even taking into account those costs, renewables are now competitive). So any failures/downtimes is smoothed out over both time and space.

That ~10% of the time that nuclear is down, you get 100s of MWs going down in a single region. France recently had several nuclear power plants go down at the same time, making them dependent on imports for a long stretch of time.

In terms of energy I think it's worth looking at the total net energy added.

The largest rate that nuclear ever grew was around ~200TWh for some years in the 80s.

Solar grew by ~300TWh from 2021 to 2022. Wind grew by ~200TWh. And the growth rate is still increasing exponentially.

For reference the world population grew from ~5 to ~8billion from the 80s until now, if you want to take that into account when comparing the growth rates.

I don't think there can be any doubt anymore that renewables will completely dominate the energy production in the future.

Here in Finland, the national power grid operator provides a live graph of how much that each source is outputting. Its kind of funny how solar produces almost no energy during the winter this far north. I'm very happy that we have that new 1,600 MW nuclear plant, so we no longer have to get that energy from coal.

https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/

People want a one-size-fits-all solution, nuclear makes the most sense for the high northern latitudes. Depending on the geography; wind, geothermal and hydro are viable too. Now if you are talking about Egypt, building nuclear over solar/batteries makes absolutely no sense.

Yeah, I just don't like how people here are providing a false dichotomy of "renewables vs nuclear" instead of "renewables+nuclear vs fossil fuels". We should put solar panels on every rooftop so we're not throwing away that free* energy, while having nuclear plants as baseload power to smooth out the duck curve. Polar regions need to slide the scale more toward nuclear, while the equatorial regions can go mostly solar.

*free as in beer

The main reason for me that your scenario isn't ideal is that if we can pull it off, renewables remove significant risk compared to nuclear. When football field of batteries goes up in smoke, some battery money is lost. When a Fukushima happens, an economy can be lost, and a nontrivial number of lives. Thousands or tens of thousands of lives, hundreds of billions or trillions in damages, nah, I'd like to opt out and instead do the extra work to make renewable and safer sources happen. That's how I vote. If you live above the arctic circle you'll likely vote differently and hopefully your next meltdown doesn't reach my shores.

The LCOE of nuclear is very sensitive to its capacity factor.

Nuclear costs are set to skyrocket because for a larger and larger part of the day they will not be profitable as renewables undercut the price of power.

With a lower and lower capacity factor, new nuclear plants will never pay for themselves.

https://youtu.be/udJJ7n_Ryjg?si=m-F4DNn5MpNvycPA