So yes, there were new power plants coming online, but after budget overruns and missed timelines.
Anyway, nuclear is still great baseline source of energy, so pity we don't build it better.
In the UK, the Hinkley Point C project is over-budget and late, partly because they had problems with their initial concrete pours that necessitated exceptionally costly and time-consuming rebuilds. But as Hinkley gets closer to completion, the lessons learned are being transferred to Sizewell C, another EDF plant. [1]
The world needs these large nuclear plants and we can’t just give up because the first few constructed went over budget and took too long.
[1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/06/23/energy-securit...
The world is notably worse for these projects diverting money away from renewables that would have already been displacing carbon emissions for a decade by now.
In what way? For the price that they actually cost after construction you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar, and a CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over.
All so you can make your energy infrastructure beholden to one fuel supplier where your country is not allowed to produce any yourself. Then you have to find somewhere to put the waste for millenia.
And that only if you're on the short list of countries that the US, China, or France will even sell fuel to.
That's a lofty claim and I have heard CAES storage at economic scales is still unsolved, else we'd see a rocketship company in the space. If you do know of a stealthy rocketship here, who is it?
Production increased from 2.3 TWH in 2015 to 7.8 TWH in 2020, and capacity keeps increasing jumping from 2.3GW in 2020 to 3.3GW in 2021. And that recent growth has been without subsides.
Wind really scales best with hydro as you only get so much rain per year, but you have a great deal of flexibility when you release it. As Finland has a great deal of hydro they can make use of plenty of wind.
If I can choose the time and place for when to do the trade, I would make a huge profit trading 2 units of energy and getting 1 unit back later at my specified time and place. The top price is around 40cent per kwh when the wind is still and demand is at its peak, compared to ~3c kwh when the wind is at the maximum production and demand is at the lowest. paying 6c worth of wind power and getting 40c when I specific it would be massive profit.
Green hydrogen if burned for energy would cost about 3-10 times that of nuclear per kwh. In the future that cost might go down but for now that is a bit (which is why no one are producing green hydrogen in order to produce energy). Again, if you are willing to sell green hydrogen for the price of nuclear, eating the loss, then sign me up. I will happy buy that and sell it for minimum 3x of what I pay for it since there are plenty of industries that want energy when demand is high and supply is low.
The cost of energy is not determined by how much it cost to produce. It is determined by the time and place it is delivered. 1 unit of energy produced today is not fungible for 1 unit of energy produced tomorrow. Only energy produced at the same time can be evaluated based on how much they cost to produce.
Think a high-altitude reservoir where water is pumped up all night and then released all day when it's required.
The biggest problem is getting permission to move that much water around. I live next to a lake and shudder at the regulatory hurdles I'd encounter building something like this. There'd be at least 4 government agencies before I even negotiated to sell to the public utility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
Wind power doesn't work like that. Instead of a daily pattern of high and low supply, you get random amount of weeks and days of high supply followed by random amount of weeks and days of low supply.
Storage need to discharge in order to generate profits. If you get 30-50 discharge cycles each year, then those periods need to provide profits for the cost of 365 days of operations and it also need to repay the original investment.
One way to get around this is with subsidies. This is how some fossil fuel plants operate, called "reserve energy". When the wind blow they don't run the generator, but they still get paid through tax money. Then they start the engines when the wind isn't blowing and demand exceed supply. This scheme helps to reduce the peak price in northern Europe, through obviously it isn't really that cheap. It mostly just hide the true price behind subsidies.
And the capacity factor of wind is ~33%, which means you need ~3 times as much wind as nuclear. The capacity factor of solar is ~25%, so you need four times as much:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States
It's also with noting that nuclear has a higher capacity factor, but it's not 100%.
And then LCOE isn't even the right metric, because what matters is the CO2 produced by 2040, not the CO2 produced between 2040 and 2100 as we have to solve this now, or the world will be too unstable to finish a nuc.ear reactor, let alone run one until decomissioning. This makes the LCOE of renewables a little higher, but for nuclear it is between 10x and infinity times the cost per unit carbon.
None of this have ever happened beyond "research" projects at extremely small scale. You can't take nuclear "actually cost after construction" - which in some countries like Korea or China is maybe 20% more than original estimations - and apply assumption that anything of this is actually able to scale, not even talking about cost of this.
you are aware that you are posting on an article about Ontario and Saskatchewan, correct?
How about you go review the tables showing how little solar energy these provinces receive in the winter?
So when we need energy to heat our homes and power our lights, our solar output is also greatly reduced?
Solar may be great further south, where it is sunny all year round, but in the north we need reliable power all year long, including our cold and dark winters.
It doesn't get cold and snow here for no reason, it is caused by the reduction in solar energy we receive.
Other significant projects to check is the building by KEPCO and ENEC, I think BARAKAH-1 was the first unit connected: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....
There are a lot of teams working on this issue, like Oklo: https://oklo.com
[0] https://www.french-nuclear-safety.fr/asn-informs/news-releas...
One more thing though that makes this calculation even more ridiculous: They're comparing today's wind+solar prices with a tech that's supposed to be available in the 2030s. Like, they're assuming wind+solar won't progress in the next 10 years. That's... a very unrealistic thing to assume.
Renewable prices are computed as : "I put $XXX and got this much electricity during the year, so price per watt is $YYY -> renewable is cheap"
That calculation is not reflective of the reality of the needs. People - and anyone in charge of maintaining a power grid - think like so :
"I need YYY watts of electricity now, how much $XXX do I need to put down to get it ?"
That amount is massively higher in price per watt with renewable, because renewable can sometime works at >90% of their potential, and provide cheap and abundant electricity or they can decide to work at < 1% and be completely useless. And I have never seen anyone advocating for renewable that is willing to say "Please do cut my home line to save electricity when it's dark and windless - even in November - if batteries are low. I think it's better than building reliable backup supply".
Nuclear is the preferred choice here because you are going to get electricity in those situation at the push of a button. Maybe prices will be higher than the price per watt of renewable, but it will provide electricity when no amount of wind farms and solar panels are going to do the job. Meaning when prices of renewable are approaching infinity. In that case, expensive nuclear is still cheaper than failing renewable. Batteries can help renewable, but no one in anywhere near the ability to store energy for a whole country for weeks in cold countries, when days are very short and wind can just decide to stop blowing. There are other options than nuclear - like the usual coal, gas and oil, but they have their own problems - like CO2 emission. Other options include geothermal and hydro but they have ecological aspects as well, and tend to be more expensive than nuclear.
And it's STILL cheaper than nuclear watt for watt.
That being said, I think nuclear power is a necessary part of a sustainable energy mix, because it is much easier to satisfy ground load with it, and you don't have storage issues. (But this article is stupid at best and disingenuous at worst)
Fascinating that we've managed to get solar panel working at 40% capacity at night.
Sure they do, the storage is just called hydroelectricity. There are parts of the world (eg Tasmania) with months of energy storage.
For the realised cost of nuclear and construction timeframe of nuclear, you could build a resilient supply with a distributed transmission grid and a mix of batteries and pumped hydro.
We need energy at a specific place and time. Renewables don't meet those needs. We get them where the weather permits when the weather permits.
This is not fine, for multiple reasons:
1. Nuclear is probably not the lowest number. See Lazard's analysis of levelized energy costs: https://www.lazard.com/media/451881/lazards-levelized-cost-o... on the whole / on the average, Nuclear in 20221 is $167 / MWh while solar is $36 and wind is $38. Now, granted, maybe these mini-reactors are cheaper than the average, and maybe solar and wind are effectively more expensive etc. - but I doubt it's that much of a difference; and the figures quoted are not "levelized costs", so they may be neglecting various factors, such as maintenance of older reactors or waste storage (which needs to happen for hunderds or thousands of years).
2. The reason you yourself gave - "over schedule, over budget" : Even if you want to choose what's cheapest, it can't be what's cheapest as proposed, but what's cheapest as projected to cost.
3. Price is not everything. On the one hand, there's the question of availability of the renewables (e.g. you might need some storage as well); and on the other, there are the grave safety concerns from nuclear reactors.
4. Price is not everything. II : Greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear is not "emission-free", since you need to count emissions due to Uranium-mining and processing, not just the electricity generating reaction. IIANM, there are significant emissions to take into account as well relative to solar, wind, geothermal etc.