Cycle costs aren't a fair metric unless/until we know what refurbishment really costs.
Given that we amortize other bits of electrical infrastructure over 30-40 years, amortizing a new bit over 20 years when A) it has a wear component inside, and B) we don't have 40 years of experience with it seems fair.
> Will we just keep polluting for decades while waiting on this nuclear plant? Is that what you propose?
Right now our intercept involves us polluting for decades beyond that nuclear power showing up. I propose doing more of everything low-carbon, including more nuclear.
> I love how you pounced on a figure
I said $100-200 13 hours ago. You said a different, similar number, so I used your number.
> The people with EVs and hourly contracts are literally the ones watching the electricity prices like the weather and timing their charging to perfect.
Most charging happens overnight. Lots of transport loads will be forced to charge overnight, too. Yes, they have some flexibility to dispatch load, but not enough to substantially hold up a truck for cheaper electricity or shift the time in the day when it is driving.
My big issue talking to you: you're engaging in a lot of hyperbole, don't really seem to be responding to my arguments, and you're continually being abrasive:
> I suppose you don't have an answer.
> when you need to paint
> Ahh sorry. I love how you
> But you desperately want
> if you had knowledge on the topic.
I don't think I'm talking to you like that (if I am, please point it out so that I can stop). If your objective is to just chase me away by making discussion unpleasant, you're having some success.
Why should we care what refurbishment costs? We know the installation cost. We know the cycle life as per the chosen depth of discharge. We also know the cost of capital.
What we are seeing today is many renewable projects built 20 years ago nearing the of their expected economic life as per their financing are seeing life extensions. They keep producing a valuable product and their loans are paid off making it pure profit.
Renewables don't stop working after 20 years. Just like old nuclear plants don't stop working after 20 years.
Nuclear powers problem is that it takes 20 years to get built. Then it needs to pay off its loans, and recent plants have hade insanely expensive 40 year PPAs attached to them.
Meaning for a project started today we will be paying for the boondoggle until 2085.
Why do you want to make us poorer by wasting money?
> Right now our intercept involves us polluting for decades beyond that nuclear power showing up. I propose doing more of everything low-carbon, including more nuclear.
Why waste money on the option costing 5-10x as much per kWh decarbonized if you truly care about decarbonization?
> Most charging happens overnight. Lots of transport loads will be forced to charge overnight, too. Yes, they have some flexibility to dispatch load, but not enough to substantially hold up a truck for cheaper electricity or shift the time in the day when it is driving.
Until you know, charging wherever you can stop essentially becomes standard? Or just let your home battery charge the car from your daytime rooftop solar?
With battery costs coming down to $50-100/kWh adding a sizeable battery to a house is a trivial cost. We are starting to enter an economic reality where the work done by professional installers is more expensive than the battery itself.
BEV transport and public transport is generally modeled as an inflexible load. But all in all their demand is quite small compared to the rest of society.
In California storage has already brought down fossil gas usage by 43%. But you say we should instead have kept the fossil gas, invested in nuclear power and waited until the 2040s.
It literally does not make sense to waste money on a dead-end technology like nuclear power.
> Why should we care what refurbishment costs? We know the installation cost. We know the cycle life as per the chosen depth of discharge.
Because if we're making an argument purely based on the cost of a cycle on a battery, that's not reasonable. New batteries do not appear in the system for the cost of buying them. Old batteries do not disappear, perfectly recycled for free.
> Renewables don't stop working after 20 years.
I wasn't talking about renewables. Maybe we can extend renewable amortization times as we gain experience.
Amortization is an imperfect tool, but a crucial one to know what stuff really costs. Amortizing batteries over 20 years seems reasonable (many people advocate for 10).
> Nuclear powers problem is that it takes 20 years to get built.
Yes, and if we'd listened to me 25 years ago when I was making this same argument, we'd have more zero-carbon electricity on the grid today. ;) "It'll show up too late" is an argument that's false until it's true.
> Why do you want to make us poorer by wasting money?
OK, and now we have reached another of the kind of comments that I find problematic, so I've stopped reading here.
> Because if we're making an argument purely based on the cost of a cycle on a battery, that's not reasonable. New batteries do not appear in the system for the cost of buying them. Old batteries do not disappear, perfectly recycled for free.
So lets include the costs for decommissioning nuclear plants, dealing with the waste and that the public is on the hook for essentially the entire accident insurance?
> Yes, and if we'd listened to me 25 years ago when I was making this same argument, we'd have more zero-carbon electricity on the grid today. ;)
You seem to not be caught up with what happened 25 years ago? Or are projecting because you can't accept reality?
There was a massive push to build nuclear power alongside a tiny one to build renewables.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 was a massive handout to the nuclear industry. That is the act that spawned Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer and another 15 now cancelled reactors.
In the meantime Vogtle required handout after handout to get pushed over the finish line and we all know how Virgil C. Summer went. The ratepayers saddled with hiked bills for decades to pay for the boondoggle.
You seem to be living in some completely made up reality were we didn't subsidize the absolute shit out of nuclear power? Because that is what we did.
Everyone is against nuclear power and if only everyone hade listen to you had given even more subsidies 20 years ago it would have gotten built! We need trillions in subsidies!
> OK, and now we have reached another of the kind of comments that I find problematic, so I've stopped reading here.
Love the dodge. If you don't read it doesn't exist. Due to the well known costs of nuclear power what you propose will make us poorer for generations.
What you say is that it is fine to add multiples to our electricity costs because you can't let go of a dead-end technology.
> So lets include the costs for decommissioning nuclear plants, dealing with the waste and that the public is on the hook for essentially the entire accident insurance?
Yes. All nuclear power plants pay into trust funds for decommissioning and waste disposal, and that's included in the LCOE.
And re: history: yes, deciding to build nuclear power and then chickening out is even worse than not building nuclear power. I agree.
> Pure insanity.
Are you really upset and that's why you're lashing out? Or is this just your normal way to treat another human you're discussing something with?
Because I would be happy to discuss more with you if you can restrain yourself from doing this. But otherwise, these just lead me to nope out quickly.
Again you are wrong. Why do you make stuff up when you are in over your head?
The $190/MWh figure for Vogtle does not include decommissioning, waste disposal or the 99% subsidized accident insurance.
I love how you call it "chickening out" when what happened was that despite the absolutely massive handouts they couldn't work out a business case. But just keep throwing trillions at an industry experiencing negative learning by doing and hope for another outcome.
I love how you resorted to inventing new costs for storage when even you realized you couldn't dodge reality anymore.
Thank you for confirming that storage is undeniable here and that new built nuclear power is a completely unreasonable proposition in 2025.
"Reflects the average of the high and low LCOE marginal cost of operating fully depreciated gas peaking, gas combined cycle, coal and nuclear facilities, inclusive of decommissioning costs for nuclear facilities. Analysis assumes that the
salvage value for a decommissioned gas or coal asset is equivalent to its decommissioning and site restoration costs. Inputs are derived from a benchmark of operating gas, coal and nuclear assets across the U.S. Capacity factors, fuel,
variable and fixed operating expenses are based on upper- and lower-quartile estimates derived from Lazard’s research"
Reactors in the US are required to prefund decommissioning and to pay into a government-run waste disposal program. They also pay for the first $450M of accident insurance and pay into a secondary $12B liability pool.
No US accident has ever tapped the secondary liability pool.
These are all ordinary operating costs.
> I love how you resorted to inventing new costs for storage when even you realized you couldn't dodge reality anymore.
Again loaded language. No, I'm saying using the amortized as-built capital costs-- like Lazard does-- to figure LCOE is reasonable. There's reasons it's pessimistic (we may have some useful life left in batteries; we may be able to keep using components and infrastructure even if we replace batteries). There's reasons it's optimistic (e.g. battery recycling and disposal costs; possible obsolescence or changes in patterns of need; etc). In the end, until we have experience we have to use something in the ballpark, and as-built costs amortized over design life is reasonable.
Ah sorry. The previous versions of Lazard didn't include that. Final waste storage nor accident insurance are included though.
> (4) Unless otherwise indicated, the analysis herein does not reflect decommissioning costs, ongoing maintenance-related capital expenditures or the potential economic impacts of federal loan guarantees or other subsidies.
Even when including the entire fleet the pool is nothing compared to the $200B cleanup bill for Fukushima, last updated in 2016, with recent estimates going up to trillions.
Lets just phase out the Price-Anderson act and force the nuclear companies to buy insurance for a Fukushima scale accident from commercial insurers?
But the nuclear industry is just handout after handout and it still costs a horrifying $190/MWh to build and doesn't deliver until the mid 2040s.
> No US accident has ever tapped the secondary liability pool.
No Japanese accident ever tapped the "secondary liability pool" until Fukushima. No Soviet accident ever tapped the "secondary liability pool" until Chernobyl.
Sounds like you just want to bury your head in the sand and pretend that nuclear accidents can't happen.
Just slice every industry into a tiny enough sliver and pretend it is not affected. Just like people complaining that we can't do anything about our emissions "because China".
It was not noted. Therefore not included in those previous figures.
Still no final storage in sight. 0.1 cents per kWh sounds like it is wildly underfunded.
In Sweden, which has started to build its final waste storage, the cost is 1 cent per kWh for the existing fleet to have all its waste stored.
1 cent per kWh is massive when your competition in renewables comes in at 3-5 cents per kWh for their total all in costs.
I also love how you completely skipped over the accident insurance. Why don't you want to privatize the nuclear accident insurance? Because you know that the entire industry would shut down over night or run without insurance?
> It was not noted. Therefore not included in those previous figures.
I understand your comment now. I thought the quote was intended to support what you were saying previously, not to illustrate the previous version of the report that you relied upon.
> 0.1 cents per kWh sounds like it is wildly underfunded.
We need a big final waste storage facility for the US no matter what, and the commercial waste doesn't make it too much bigger. A cent per kilowatt-hour is plausible for the marginal cost of storing more waste.
> I also love...
I'm choosing to talk about one thing at a time.
I notice that you're trying to talk a little more respectfully and I appreciate it-- but phrasing like this still grates a little bit. You don't need to address me (and indeed, I don't need to address you other than asking you to be nice)-- just address the facts.
> I also love how you completely skipped over the accident insurance. Why don't you want to privatize the nuclear accident insurance? Because you know that the entire industry would shut down over night or run without insurance?
The federal government is the insurer of last resort in basically any industry that can create outsized losses (water projects/hydroelectric, aviation, hazmat, etc.) And bounds that risk in a couple of ways: first requiring insurance and risk pools in those industries, and second by regulating those industries to reduce the chance of an accident. I think we could have a safer industry with a lower LCOE with some regulatory requirements lowered and with insurance requirements raised, but this is the operating point that our society has chosen.
Or you know. We can just build renewables and storage without any of that risk? Where regular bog-standard commercial insurance is good enough to cover the risk.
We want to phase out oil both for the carbon emissions, and because how nasty it is to deal with in terms of spills. You do know that the oil industry is one of few other industries that also has liability caps due to the potential damage?
Why are you so hellbent on wasting risk and money on a dead-end technology that does not provide anything valuable to a modern grid?
You still haven't answered:
Why should South Australia build a nuclear plant?
They have a grid swinging between a weekly average of 65-85% renewables in the midst of winter with almost every day hitting at least a portion of 100% renewable electricity in the mix.
That is where all grids globally are headed, and will be long before a single new built nuclear reactor project started today would come online in the 2040s.
If you can't answer that question for South Australia then you agree that nuclear power is entirely unfit to be built today.
Given that we amortize other bits of electrical infrastructure over 30-40 years, amortizing a new bit over 20 years when A) it has a wear component inside, and B) we don't have 40 years of experience with it seems fair.
> Will we just keep polluting for decades while waiting on this nuclear plant? Is that what you propose?
Right now our intercept involves us polluting for decades beyond that nuclear power showing up. I propose doing more of everything low-carbon, including more nuclear.
> I love how you pounced on a figure
I said $100-200 13 hours ago. You said a different, similar number, so I used your number.
> The people with EVs and hourly contracts are literally the ones watching the electricity prices like the weather and timing their charging to perfect.
Most charging happens overnight. Lots of transport loads will be forced to charge overnight, too. Yes, they have some flexibility to dispatch load, but not enough to substantially hold up a truck for cheaper electricity or shift the time in the day when it is driving.
My big issue talking to you: you're engaging in a lot of hyperbole, don't really seem to be responding to my arguments, and you're continually being abrasive:
> I suppose you don't have an answer.
> when you need to paint
> Ahh sorry. I love how you
> But you desperately want
> if you had knowledge on the topic.
I don't think I'm talking to you like that (if I am, please point it out so that I can stop). If your objective is to just chase me away by making discussion unpleasant, you're having some success.