Comment by leonidasrup

5 days ago

I thought you talked about the impression of solar energy being simple and nuclear energy being, in comparison with solar, complicated.

Solar power, wind power, hydro power, nuclear power are all heavy on capital costs and light on operational costs. The capital costs to build a nuclear power plant are about the same as the total operational costs of the nuclear power plant over it's entire lifetime (60 - 80 year).

The turbine blades for a water cooled nuclear power plant are similar technology to turbine blades in coal power plant. (Newest coal power plant turbines are even more demanding, because the newest coal power plant utilize ultra-supercritical steam cycles, with temperatures and pressures much higher than conventional nuclear power plants). Turbine blades for turbines in gas power plants, operating at even higher temperatures than coal power plants, are examples of the most advanced metallurgy.

https://www.gem.wiki/Coal_power_technologies

We are burning ancient organism, with every year increasing amounts.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

Because most of the worlds population lives with lot less energy than developed countries, we can assume that total energy demand will increase a lot in future.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-stacked

"Cost" is only one metric, but many other many externalized costs connected to energy generation are hard to quantify and compare. Like impacts of nickel mining in Indonesia, lithium extraction in Chile, rare earth refining in China.

"In 2024, nickel mining and processing was one of the main causes of deforestation in Indonesia"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_mining_in_Indonesia

https://ttfpower.com/chiles-lithium-mine-powering-the-future...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/business/china-rare-earth...

7 comments

leonidasrup

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bruce511  5 days ago

>> Solar power, wind power, hydro power, nuclear power are all heavy on capital costs and light on operational costs

I'm not sure I agree. Firstly, I can get solar panels without building a solar panel factory. Hence the capital cost of a solar farm is cheap. I can't buy a nuclear power plant off the shelf.

Equally on the running cost, solar costs pretty much nothing to run. I'd argue that the costs to run a nuclear plant are substantial. Plus I need highly skilled people on-site permanently. With solar I need skilled people to install (skills easily taught) but I don't need permanent engineers on site.

  • IAmBroom  5 days ago

    > I can't buy a nuclear power plant off the shelf.

    China will build it for you, and has. Not OTS, but still something you write a check and a spec for, and you get it made.

  • leonidasrup  5 days ago

    How much of your yearly electricity amount can you get from the installed solar panels?

    How much do you need get from electric grid, from non-solar power plants?

    Try to scale this to a whole country.

    • bruce511  5 days ago

      Currently I generate about 66% of my annual power requirements with solar alone. If I had even a small 10kw battery I'd be moving that closer to 80%.

      But demand for base load is irrelevant to my thesis. My point is that financially it makes no sense. So private capital aren't interested. [1]

      So that leaves govt. They could decide (especially in regulated markets) to ignore Financials and build it anyway. Which is great, except govts are typically really bad at large capital projects that span multiple administrations.

      [1] private capital cam get involved if the govt signs guaranteed income contracts. It's a model that puts the bad Financials on the govt (hence the people) while the govt avoids the pain of building. This model typically works as well as you might suspect.

      Ultimately what we (the customer) want or need is irrelevant. The real world revolves around the money. And the only way to make the money work is to make the customer pay a lot.

      The base-load question is solved with better, cheaper, storage. Not expensive power stations.

      1 reply →

pstuart  5 days ago

My hope was that we could get SMRs in play to replace every coal power plant's furnace with a couple SMRs to leverage the existing infra (turbine/generator/grid hookup) and stop burning coal. Now.

I know the numbers aren't the best for SMRs as far as efficiency or LCOE, but it would give us baseline power and an ability to cut away from fossil fuels for the grid much faster than building bespoke plants (which have a horrible record in the US).