Comment by credit_guy
5 months ago
I'm a nuclear supporter. I think we might be able to satisfy our energy needs with renewables. I am not entirely sure, because I'm not in the field. But, if it's true that renewables are so much cheaper, then self-interested individuals will invest in them. There is no need to be anti-nuclear.
People like me, who are pro-nuclear, do it because they believe that nuclear technology, like all technologies, could become much cheaper. Elon Musk was saying about rockets that in the end, with enough learning, the cost of building a rocket is only limited from below by the cost of the raw materials, so he though there is room to make rockets cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. I think nuclear technology is the same; we can make it cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. After all, we did that with solar and wind, didn't we?
Solar and wind are extremely simple machines and are thus much more amenable to manufacturing economies of scale than fundamentally complicated nuke plants. I very much doubt we’d get to 10x , 100x seems impossible.
A 10x reduction is very doable. Consider this: the Vogtle units 3-4 cost about $37 BN [1]. The similar size Karachi units 2-3 cost about $10 BN [2]. The difference is that the Karachi units were built by China. The design used at Karachi is called Hualong One [3], and since China built the 2 Karachi units, it has built 5 more, and has 15 more under construction and 9 more approved for construction. The cost of the reactors that China builds for itself is not known, but it's very likely lower than the ones that China built for Pakistan.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachi_Nuclear_Power_Complex
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One