Comment by Saline9515

> This may be an accurate description for fully-depreciated nuclear plants, but it doesn't reflect the economics of new-build nuclear at all.

I'm talking about the wholesale market, which works as an auction, where producers give their price for units of capacity, and the clearing price is set by the marginal producer. Typically, nuclear reactors will give their marginal cost, near 0, and let the more expensive producers set the clearing price. Given that capital cost is a sunk cost, it doesn't matter to nuclear plants as long as the market price is above the marginal one. So called "renewables" do this as well, but have to account for the risk that mother nature doesn't provide, and therefore factor in the risk of having to buy coal or gas-produced electricity on the spot.

> Net demand on CAISO can go from about 2 MW to 30 MW in the summer.

Well if this is the case this is not a "nuclear sized" market then and other ways of supplying capacity are better. But remember that it's estimated that blackouts are much,much more costly society-wise than whatever marginal price you could pay for electricity, so having a baseload and some excess capacity is always good. This is also why many electricity producers are nationalized. It's not a market like the others.

> Flamanville

France has the strictest regulator of the world, which adds a lot of costs, and Flamanville required to re-learn many things after losing the expertise from the 70's. For the record, an airliner should be able to fall on Flamanville without any problem, due to regulations.

> Curtailements

Excess electricity is sold in Germany, which lacks a much-needed baseload, especially since they have a big industry. Most people ignore that electricity consumption follows Pareto's law, with around 1k industrial plants consuming around 50% of the electricity (sorry no source for this, my econ teacher said in a class a few years ago!).

> SMR

Yes, still in development, many different designs so costs estimates are difficult to make. I'm citing Wikipedia's[0]. The good thing is that the possibility to build them serially should decrease a lot the costs as demand ramps up.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_SMR