Comment by fastball
2 days ago
Where are you getting a LCOE diff of 5x? The latest Lazard's is 2x.
Transmission costs will require more than "wiggle room" if you are sending power from some cornfield in middle America to Seattle.
Also a big question in my mind is "where can the price go from here". I don't imagine there is a huge amount of room left for optimization of solar, where as with nuclear I think almost everyone agrees that it is about as expensive as it could be. There is infinite room to improve the economies of scale and unit economics of nuclear; not so much for solar.
Lazard says utility solar and onshore wind is ~$40 per MWh while nuclear power is ~$200.
Offshore wind is more like $70, but also has double the capacity factor, so requires less matching storage.
We've been told for about 3 decades that any day soon microreactors/thorium/fusion will lead to cheaper, safer nuclear power and no doubt for the next 3 decades some people will continue to believe.
I'm seeing those numbers, but as the low end (without storage) for solar and at the high end for nuclear... so not a reasonable comparison. Not sure where you're looking, but from here your numbers are way off base.
To be more concrete: the first chart from this report[1] is showing "Solar PV + Storage—Utility" at $50-130 (mid-range: $90) and "U.S. Nuclear" at $141-220 (mid-range: $180).
I don't think we've had serious capitalized work on micro-reactors for 3 decades, it's a much more recent phenomenon. And China (who is massively outperforming the US in solar deployment) is also deploying Thorium reactors. Kinda strange for them to do that since they're so good at solar and nuclear is such a lost cause, esp since Thorium reactors are generally worse for the military/weapons case (which you claim is the only reason nuclear energy programs exist).
[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...