Nuclear Power Learning and Deployment Rates
mdpi.com
mdpi.com
It isnt clear why this happened and beyond "we just didnt build enough" the paper doesnt seem to advance any ideas. I suspect there is a more to it than that (e.g. a focus on safety, extreme capital intensity, subsidies being wound down, corruption).
The idea that the price could be 10% of what it is now is founded upon the idea that maybe if prices kept going down instead of up in 1970 we wouldnt be where we are. I think a study that actually attacked the "why it went up" would do a better job of clarifying whether that is possible. Im very dubious.
Meanwhile, a combo solar/wind/pumped storage is already ~60-65% the cost of nuclear power and has been on a consistent downward trend for many years. This seems like a better use of our money than drenching nuclear power in even more taxpayer subsidies in the hope that it'll one day pay off.
A big explanation for "why it (cost of nuclear) went up" in EU is that in the 1970, the energy sector went through several major changes. Utilization of hydro energy reached 100% and few new plants got built. Fossil fueled power plants became massively more effective and cheaper to build, and prices for fuel were initially very high but then began to free fall. Nuclear power paid off very well when fossil fuels costed a lot and nations were rationing the worlds supply of oil, but when that oil became cheap and plenty then those nuclear power plants started to look expensive to build and people opted to build fossil fueled power plants instead.
The best use of our money right now is to break off from the fossil fuel dependency that previous decades built up. Energy prices are already in EU way beyond that of the most expensively built nuclear plant that anyone can imagine, with prices expecting to rise around $2-3 per kw/h later this winter. Solar/wind/hydro/storage/nuclear/anything-not-fossil-fuels is currently operating on a massive profit margin compared to the costs of producing energy.
> "This paper presents evidence of the disruption of a transition from fossil fuels to nuclear power, and finds the benefits forgone as a consequence are substantial. Learning rates are presented for nuclear power in seven countries, comprising 58% of all power reactors ever built globally. Learning rates and deployment rates changed in the late-1960s and 1970s from rapidly falling costs and accelerating deployment to rapidly rising costs and stalled deployment. Historical nuclear global capacity, electricity generation and overnight construction costs are compared with the counterfactual that pre-disruption learning and deployment rates had continued to 2015. Had the early rates continued, nuclear power could now be around 10% of its current cost. The additional nuclear power could have substituted for 69,000–186,000 TWh of coal and gas generation, thereby avoiding up to 9.5 million deaths and 174 Gt CO2 emissions. In 2015 alone, nuclear power could have replaced up to 100% of coal-generated and 76% of gas-generated electricity, thereby avoiding up to 540,000 deaths and 11 Gt CO2. Rapid progress was achieved in the past and could be again, with appropriate policies. Research is needed to identify impediments to progress, and policy is needed to remove them."