Investment Risk Is Highest for Nuclear Power Plants, Lowest for Solar

>or base load power plant, like nuclear, will continue to have marketable "goods".

Nuclear hasnt been marketable for a long time without massive indirect and direct subsidies.

The reason it gets built in spite of its demand for lavish subsidies is because it shares a supply chain and skills base with the military industrial complex.

Countries that have a nuclear military want to share some of the costs with the civilian sector although they typically arent up front about it, preferring to declare that it's because they're environmentalists.

NPT signatories that dont have nuclear weapons but take a strong interest in building civilian nuclear power typically see some sort of potential existential risk on the horizon. Again, officially it's because theyre green hippies.

In unrelated news, after decades of being by far the most coal addicted country in Europe: https://apnews.com/article/poland-us-nuclear-energy-power-pl...

Roger.

Can't access the article without some other browser, however keep in mind that business risk is in essence a completely different factor than potential return on investment, or what turns out to be actual return. Three fundamentally different things each composed of way different variables.

Regardless, they go hand-in-hand when investment is involved, the attitude at one extreme is to avoid risk as much as possible, while the other extreme will tolerate or even seek out the riskiest of ventures when they feel they will have good fortune in pursuit of unpredictably better returns which sometimes can not be achieved any other way.

One thing that influences relative cost that doesn't seem to be well-represented by those using equations, is what is the source of the energy to begin with?

It's too obvious.

In one respect, nuclear and solar are at the same end of the spectrum where the "fuel" is so long-lasting that it virtually drops out of the equations compared to so many other things.

But virtually zero may not be close enough to true zero when you consider the cost of the fuel itself plus costs to get that fuel ready for harvesting the energy it has to offer.

Once everything else is in place except for actually getting the fuel into a state of readiness from how it is found in nature, few other options compare to the zero cost that solar, wind and a few others will always have in their equations. This number for solar will never go up regardless of scale, and fuel is such a major consideration it is completely tied to production as strongly as anything can be.

IIRC, zero is quite a number.

In a simplified way there are a lot of businesses that don't actually make money until after the initial capital expenditure has been recovered, a point of zero debt is achieved, and until another capital expenditure occurs, performance results from profits in excess of ongoing expenses.

Surely the most convincing financial structures would be dependent on the most dis-similar accounting tactics, since diverse fuel sources can be nothing like each other even though they will always be tied to production, so it must not become possible to do anything but compare apples to oranges :\

Social licensing risk is a big one that gets swept under the rug. While both solar and nuclear has to face off NIMBYs, once those NIMBYs are defeated then the solar project is in the clear basically forever. But nuclear has no such assurances that there won't be an irrational fear-based anti-nuclear craze like what happened in Germany which leads to early plant closures.

I suppose, as a nuclear fan, if someone messes up solar panels really badly, the societal impact is low. If you mess up a nuclear power plant, it's pretty bad.

Not really, but each new reactor is treated like a completely new design which makes regulations incredibly expensive. It is actually very stupid.

This is why carbon tax is so important. The moment you tax carbon emissions, natural gas no longer wins.

Assessing the right amount of tax is non-trivial, but approximations for the costs of carbon emissions exist, and even conservative estimates push natural gas out of the profitability zone.

The relative cheapness (as opposed to feasibility) of storage tech vs natgas is the main reason why storage tech hasnt really taken off.

Natural gas is just too cheap as a battery (i.e. peaking).

Nuclear power, batteries and pumped storage all require subsidies to be cost competitive and while nuclear power has a powerful champion in the military industrial complex to offset its ridiculous expense, storage tech has no such champion.

No need to green-wash what is already green. You could label it "hippie propaganda" or something the like though.

I think TFA just reiterates that we can no longer build complex stuff within a reasonable timeframe and budget. Nuclear reactors just happen to be super complex. Nothing nefarious going on.

> when you compare electric transportation with nuclear plant

The article does not have anything about transportation.

> Of course, when you compare electric transportation with nuclear plant, the results are not the same

You're comparing a nuclear plant to e.g. an electric car? Why? Aren't we comparing power generation methods?

For context, nuclear and peaker natural gas are the two most expensive sources of electricity in overall lifetime cost per energy output nowadays. It's not clear what exactly he's comparing there on the natural gas side.

Also, his data is from 2013.

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

(warning: the graph on that wikipedia page has a really poorly cut Y-axis.)

What about the winter? I have solar on my house in the UK and it generates enough power to be off-grid from about March to October, but November - February it would be impossible. There are way too many cloudy days. There was a whole week in February where it didn't generate more than 2 kWh on any day.

At more equatorial latitudes you could definitely rely on it more. And it's not really an issue for grid solar yet because we're far from the point where there's more solar power than we need, even in the middle of summer. But eventually winter will be an issue.

In Wales I've seen things like speed warning signs have a combined small solar panel and wind turbine -- I'm assuming they also have a small battery as well. This makes sense as it is expensive running power to remote areas, whereas these are self-contained.

GDP is PER year metric. so world generates 105T every year...

so you're saying that 4% of gdp every year until 2050... it is peanuts.

so for example if every household ! ! ! !ONLY IN USA ! ! ! lives in passive house, that alone will save more on utility bills, insurance, then your net zero expenditure requires to add. so im not sure if that net zero expenditure is world wide or just USAs, but USA can pay it by themselves, if they were not scammed by building bad buildings for last 20 years.... just for comparison.

also previous powerplants price has to be converted to today's dollars, and inflation metric basket is flawed because it does not consist of building materials, which powerplants are build from. but it contains bread, clothing etc.

so 1.358 T is not todays money that means comparation / ratio is better then you/them suggest.

also NET zero expenditures means, less inputs afterwards, i.e. no/less money sent to canada, mexico, venezuela, africa, persian gulf for oil...... so more money for homeland. which most people forget about to even calculate impact of... positive for usa.

so yes we can do this, but every smartass in TV is saying we can not....

And over the next 25 years assuming absolutely no growth, that would be repeated 25 times for a total of 2625 trillion USD total.

Which would make the year over year investment about 3.8%.

I agree that smaller is better.

I would take it even further, and say that storage, as well as generation, should be down-scaled as much as possible.

On-building scale generation, and per building storage, being the ultimate embodiment.

This also minimizes large scale distribution infrastructure needs.

Like with other comments regarding why nuclear is still built in spite of its extreme cost and schedule overruns: utilities want the infrastructure to be organized in a way that can only be operated and maintained by large utilities.

We should put our subsidies into individual building storage, and the technology to distribute the energy in that storage onto the local grid. What we're seeing is the exact opposite, very large scale solar and storage projects that are specifically architected to produce profit, not power.

Fast response battery systems largely solve the frequency issue. Unfortunately there is a lot of incentive to put solar on the grid by individual players, while the cost to do the frequency response is collectivized so tends to lag behind what is needed.

Bit surprised countries aren't just legislating this away. For every MW you put on the grid that doesn't have rotational inertia you need to contribute X money to a fund that builds stabilization capacity.

Why would anyone build a solar-only grid?

My understanding is that this is mostly a technology problem. Current solar does a lot of grid-following. If solar instead did some sort of "grid driving" with an external synchronizer I would expect this to be a fairly solvable problem.