In the US, the equivalent to 1GW nuclear would be something like 4GW solar + 18GWh storage. Though it's not fully equivalent because solar + storage is far more flexible and would make a lot more money on the grid, since it can shift power to when it's needed rather than being a constant base of power.
At old NREL prices that would be $4.3B for the solar, and $7.4B for the storage, but the lifetimes don't match up with nuclear either. You'd need to replace the storage after 15-20 years, and the solar after 30 years, if the nuclear plant is going to get a lifetime extension to 50 or 60 years. But 15 years from now, prices for batteries and solar will be far far far lower, we just have no clue how much.
> In the US, the equivalent to 1GW nuclear would be something like 4GW solar + 18GWh storage.
Are you speaking about the precision location of this planned project, or generally about the United States? Really, the US is way too big to generalise about solar efficiency. Compare New England to Southwest US will have massively different solar coefficients. The same is true in Europe: Compare Scotland to Central Spain. Wildly different solar coefficients.
In addition to this, the nuclear plant also needs both major component replacements and refurbishments over it's life, and then decommissioning at end of life, neither of which are cheap or accounted for in the sticker price.
Do you know if there's enough of a market yet for battery recycling at utility scale, and if they pay you to get the old battery?
I know that there are several battery recycling startups, and their biggest hurdle is lack of batteries to recycle. Also that the amount recovered is high enough, and manufacturing progress a fast enough, that a recycled battery will have greater capacity than the original battery.
Not much, but thankfully we've invented wind turbine, batteries, hydro, and a sleep cycle that means our overnight energy usage is much lower than when the sun and us are up.
> You do know that Hinkley Point C will require €170/MWh 24/7 excluding transmission costs for 35 years.
£92.50/MWh 2012 prices = 153 EUR/MWh in 2024 prices and current GBP/EUR exchange rate. If Sizewell C goes ahead then this reduces to under 150 EUR/MWh.
Transmission costs will be less than for renewables given the line's higher utilisation and proximity to load, unlike offshore wind up in Scotland.
> The question is also how do you match said nuclear plant with the grid load?
The UK wholesale market, BETTA, allows bilateral trades. EDF will sell the electricity to their retail arm and will just bypass the wholesale market. A similar arrangement will probably be made for Sizewell C and British Gas, for instance.
> Or do you suggest that we build peaking nuclear plants?
Perhaps the cheap renewables can be curtailed instead.
Sorry. $170/MWh. In the end so horrifically expensive that it doesn’t really matter.
I see a whole lot of talk about how to force the consumers to pat for it.
Why do you want everyone’s energy bills to massively rise to fund horrifically expensive nuclear power?
It will simply become a race where everyone tries to the utmost degree to decouple themselves from your nuclear grid and you leave the poor to shoulder the cost.
It seems like you are working backwards from having decided that we must build horrifically expensive new built nuclear power and now are diving into one more insane argument steer the other trying to justify it.
Rather than starting from the problem: we need cheap power to decarbonize society.
> I see a whole lot of talk about how to force the consumers to pat for it.
I don't see a whole lot of talk about how consumers are being forced to pay for solar and wind. For instance, Hornsea is attracting £194.31/MWh = $252.70/MWh. https://register.lowcarboncontracts.uk/INV-HOR-001/
> It will simply become a race where everyone tries to the utmost degree to decouple themselves from your nuclear grid and you leave the poor to shoulder the cost.
Strangely that is the game being played with solar panels on houses. Self consume and then feed into the grid as much as possible on sunny days to try and offset the expense of long winter nights. Let the poor who don't own their own house or can not afford panels shoulder the cost.
> we need cheap power to decarbonize society
Agreed, but where is the evidence that wind and solar leads to cheap power in the winter? When times are easy prices may be low, but when wind and solar don't produce the system falls back on natural gas.
I love that instead of having cheap prices almost all year around and falling back to backups a few days or weeks a year we should instead have horrifically expensive nuclear power filling the grid at the height of summer. Logic or prices be dammed.
This is the same Hornsea 3 which got a price increase for 3 * 360MW chunks of this power station up to £54.23/MWh 2012 = £75.46/MWh = 97.84 USD/MWh. These are due to be delivered in another 3 years.
The AR6 strike price for new wind farms is £58.87/MWh (2012 prices) or £81.92/MWh or 106.24 USD/MWh current prices, which are due to be connected in 2030.
> falling back to backups a few days or weeks a year ... Logic or prices be dammed.
The devil is in the details. How much backup is needed depends on how much the wind/solar is overbuilt ... overbuilding leads to cannibalisation and eventually curtailment. Out-of-wholesale-market capacity payments are needed to keep the backup gas plants from shutting down.
Exactly. And then OP goes and talks about ”baseload nuclear” like they can force us consumers to buy horrifically expensive nuclear power when renewables deliver said ”baseload”.
Which is why I said ”traditional baseload”. In other words: our need for 100% uptime coal or nuclear plants.
> Including around the potential "intentionality" of the human testing
The wikipedia link mentions allegations, but not what (I feel) counts as evidence. Note that I'm not denying that the US Government engaged in radiation test programmes (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens), nor that these were covered up and are ethically questionable. But can such a rumour be falsified?
It will be interesting to see how AWS responds. Jump on board, or offer up a competing vision otherwise their cloud risks being perceived as being left behind in terms of computing power.
Estimated 20B CAD for 4 x 300MW power stations.
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