Where have you seen nuclear is the cheapest solution for electrity production? Nuclear has some benefits, but price does seem to be one of them (and actually one of the reasons for preferring renewable)
Most nuclear projects outside of China basically turned into exercises in endless planning churn and endless delays for no rational reason to appease anti-progress political factions long ago. For an example of a similar money pit/tarpit playing out in a similar way, check out “High Speed” Rail in California.
(The Macron -- Le Pen culture war politics might be even more depressing than here, too. At least I think the right side is winning here in that arena.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
You can make the case that regulation inflates the cost of nuclear power plants, and that's somewhat true, but the deep problem is the cost of the steam turbine and other facilities (e.g. heat exchangers) to accept energy at the low temperatures that the LWR works at.
All of that is so big and expensive it would be hard to make the economics work even if you got the heat for free.
A liquid metal fast reactor or a molten salt reactor or a high temperature gas cooled reactor could power a closed-cycle gas turbine
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1221819
which would fit in the employee break room of the turbine house at a nuclear plant. Such a "fourth-generation" nuclear power plant might have compelling economics to build, but it's hard to believe anybody is going to start and finish an LWR outside of China.
It's little appreciated that the cost of the steam turbine is what killed coal circa 1980. Once GE adapted aerospace turbines for low-capital cost power plants on the ground, it made no sense to build more thermal coal plants.
In the late 1970s you see various attempts to save the coal industry, plausibly you could have gotten better capital costs pyrolyzing the coal and running the gas through a gas turbine. This kind of technology is making a comeback because it can be coupled with carbon storage to make CO2 free or CO2 negative energy.
Fourth-generation reactors won't be easy, but the motivation to develop them is strong.
Arguably there is a lot of experience with liquid metal fast reactors, many of the problems like sodium fires and problems with inspection are probably solved. Think
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Flux_Test_Facility
as opposed to
And now, instead of it taking a couple years to build with predictable timelines and approvals, you end up in decades long and impossible to predict legal fights that drag out construction; ruin any sort of economies of scale; and put everyone into a ‘meh’ state when it comes to actually getting anything done on a timeline. I know folks in Nuclear Engineering for some of the plants that literally have spent a decade plus generating paperwork and going in circles. Very, very, very well paid folks I might add.
A steam turbine doesn’t cost $5 billion dollars and 5 years per plant like these things do.
(1) If you could build a nuclear reactor for the sticker price, there's the problem that other energy sources got cheaper, specifically natural gas fired Brayton cycle turbines. To justify nuclear power at the sticker price you need to price carbon emissions.
(2) Nuclear power plants cost many more times to build than the sticker price. Some people blame delays on opposition to nuclear power, but the delays seem intrinsic to the process in industry. AP1000 construction was hung up in the U.S. because it was hung up in China (where environmentalists get shot) and it was hung up there because the factory had trouble make a pump that was supposed to be easier to make.
On one hand you could make the case for a real accounting of the type (2) problem (which I suspect is a game of "Poker" where suppliers quote a lowball price because they know buyers will keep putting chips in the pot.) But I think a more radical approach to the type (1) problem is necessary.
There is no engineering reason for those reactors to cost $10bln. Literally zero.
There are lots and lots of other reasons why they will probably cost even more than $10bln/ea though.
Just like there is literally zero engineering reason for the ‘high speed’ rail in California to cost the insane sums it is currently consuming, and will continue to consume.
The reason why the old ones are ‘better’ is because they already are operating under existing approvals, so the tarpits don’t work on them.
If we wanted to build cost effective and safe reactors, we could, and have many times in the past. Near as I can tell, almost no one does (compared to some cool new idea, or what becomes a one off, or ends up going back to the drawing board 50 times - all while getting paid), so we don't.
Same with high speed rail (and a bunch of other pork projects in CA), same with subways in many big cities, etc.
Because in this thread someone was claiming steam turbine costs were why nuclear was ‘expensive’, which is about as legit. Also in these nearby threads have been discussions about waste disposal (similar levels of not actually a problem), etc.
You’re similarly ignoring and seem to want to pretend that these costs are somehow fundamental to nuclear, despite me providing evidence it’s a general problem we have with building several types of things now, and is more political BS than anything fundamental to do with nuclear as a technology.
If the same thing happens to building roads, is it because ‘roads are expensive’? Or because ‘we screwed ourselves up even more so now we can’t build roads without going bankrupt’?
Like "where are you going to put the waste?" and "I don't want my property values to go to zero when an accident occurs"? :-)
If one were suitably cynical, one might suggest China does not have that kind of problem.
Currently, spent fuel just stays at the nuclear plants because there is so little of it and it's not a problem. You just put them in sealed casks and they sit there. You don't really want to lose access to the spent fuel either because if you develop breeder reactors that spent fuel is now just 'fuel'.
What happens instead is 1) a set of requirements is made, 2) someone spends years figuring it out. 3) it gets approved, 4) before it finishes getting built (or started to be built in some case), someone files a lawsuit causing it to stop or changes the rules, 5) rinse and repeat, or;
Someone gets the bright idea to try something new and unproven, and then they pay all the R&D time, and then the first thing starts happening, and then you’re tarpitted again.
In California it even appears to be part of the plan for high speed rail; as the engineering firms get paid every time the plan needs to get redrawn, and they can keep juking between plans forever until the funds are gone. This happened with Caltrain electrification for a decade. Billions spent for literally a 45 miles’ish stretch of track to electrify it, with zero progress over that time.
If folks are being paid to make plans instead of make a project, that’s usually what they are going to do.
After years of planning and millions spent on their side, the numbers don’t pencil out anymore because of this, so the developers go ‘wtf’, and buy a plot on the other side of the street that is in City B (more expensive, but still cheaper than running 5 miles of large diameter water pipe), cut and paste the plans, and are going to build next year after 3+ years of wasted time and millions in cash wasted.
And this is for a private, for profit project that they want to actually happen ASAP. When the taxpayers are footing the bill, the shenanigans get way worse. When no one seems to notice when the schedule keeps sleeping year after year? Even worse.
However, it is true that the maintenance cost increases as the power plants get older.
[1] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/le-vrai-du-faux/le-... (in French)
[2] https://www.ccomptes.fr/fr/publications/le-cout-de-productio... (in French)
By comparison, any plan for a renewable grid requires massive storage capacity. Most hand-wave this away by assuming some new technology will effectively make storage free.
Does that mean a grid relying heavily on nuclear needs massive amounts of storage?
No - it means you need to have redundant capacity which is the solution also used for wind and solar. The benefit of nuclear in this regard isn't that it's "non-intermittent" - it's that the most common failure modes for a nuclear nuclear are statistically independent (except when it's not like in a natural catastrophe situation - like Fukushima).
But as a grid operator trying to match supply and demand, it's just a variant of the same problem.
The solution preferred by grids heavily dependent on wind for example is simply to over-provision wind and use de-rating while maintaining natural gas capacity reserve (which is relatively cheap). This approach is relatively proven at this stage with some European countries deriving around half their electricity from "intermittent" renewables.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183680/us-average-capaci...
Storage and distribution works the same as for fossil methane (pressurized in cave systems/old gas wells).
Production is simple, and we yes, the efficiency is around 20-30% round-trip. But that's enough to handle up to ~30% of electricity supply with less than 2x overcapacity.
And that's assuming you don't just slap carbon capture on a gas turbine you feed with fractionally distilled oxygen (>99% should be easily enough) and enough exhaust back-feed to not melt the turbine blades. A diesel would probably deal better with the combustion temperatures, though.
And Fischer–Tropsch can turn captured carbon into piston-engine-suitable liquid fuel, if you'd need to.
IIRC, for Poland, we're talking about needing to build 10GW worth of solar generation to get 1GW into grid on average, or 4GW of wind. Assuming ~24GWh of storage to make it capable of providing that 1GW continuously.