Comment by ViewTrick1002
16 hours ago
”If we compare apples to oranges nuclear power is cheap”.
You can finance the competition in the same way and get similarly cheaper prices.
Hinkley Point C just got a loan at a 7% interest rate to finish the plant. That is after about all uncertainty should already have been discovered.
Now add making a profit and factor in the risk on top and you’ll end up with electricity costing $400 per MWh
HPC is 2 EPR reactors. At their design CF they will produce 25 TWh per year. Over the expected operating life of 80 years that will be 2000 TWh.
At the $400/MWh you are postulating, that would be €800 billion of income.
Although I am sure the operators wouldn't mind (15% ROI per year over 80 years is...nice) I am going to go with "your numbers are BS".
If risk and disposal is factored into coal, gas, solar power, what would be cheaper? Nuclear has recyclable fuel processes and fail safe systems available.
That cost doesn’t even factor in disposal because no one knows the true cost yet.
Not sure what risk you think come from renewables and storage?
> That cost doesn’t even factor in disposal because no one knows the true cost yet
There's still some cost factored in, unlike any other industry where the government is expected to clean up after the fact.
> Not sure what risk you think come from renewables
The grid collapse risk (See what happened in Spain last year, which caused 8 deaths, more than every nuclear power plant accidents in the Western world combined…). Grid operators are currently investing a trillion Euro in the EU alone in order to adapt the grid to the new challenges caused by intermittent and distributed energy sources, and this will never be accounted for in renewable electricity prices… (hence the paradox: the more “cheap energy” is being deployed in Europe, the more expensive the electricity prices become).
> and storage
"Storage" doesn't exist yet as a most people imagine it. Batteries can help ease a few hours of peak load/low supply but that's pretty much it, pumped storage is very situational with limited deployment capabilities. So the risk is that the technology simply never materialize.
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