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Comment by lionkor | Hacker News Reader

Running an electrical space heater would maybe not cost more than a flight to a warm country if we had any kind of (long term) cheap electricity generation like nuclear. I'm German and I visited Russia recently, and their energy is dirt cheap due to it all being nuclear—it's crazy how you can just run a space heater and now worry about being bankrupted by it.

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nuclear energy generation is "cheap"? Are you sure? According to e.g. [1], it's the most expensive power source and getting more expensive each year. It's probably "cheap" due to all the subsidies and the conditions on the subsidies setting certain prices.

Sure, it didn't help shutting down nuclear reactors prematurely but building new ones certainly is not the cheapest strategy.

[1] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-hr.pdf (Page 280, Figure 52)

That's a great graph, thanks. But there is a whole lot factored in to those numbers. Check out this paragraph in the next page:

>The running of aging nuclear power plants generally leads to higher operating and maintenance costs. Only in the U.S., the nuclear industry has claimed a cost reduction of 35 percent since 2012 to US$29.4/MWh in 2020—the lowest since the collection of industry-wide data in 2002—in particular due to a 57 percent drop in capital expenditures over the period.

Here's the source they use - it explains this much better: https://www.nei.org/resources/reports-briefs/nuclear-costs-i...

So, what's the difference? Nuclear is different because it costs the same to run per hour no matter how much power is generated. So, when demand is down, costs remain the same - while coal and gas can just use less fuel, which is their major cost. The risk that nuclear won't be able to run at higher loads increases costs overall. If market forces could guarantee usage, then costs would lower.

There's definitely a lot to explore here... power pricing is complicated!

"Market forces" by definition do not guarantee usage, as they would use the cheapest form of electricity.

As it turns out, the industry is willing to build new nuclear if and only if 1) the government guarantees 100% usage of the offered capacity 2) the government is willing to pay for the difference between the market price of electricity and a (higher) fixed fee.

The fixed pricing of nuclear is often way higher than the market price - even with 100% capacity usage. It is simply not able to compete with dirt-cheap solar and wind energy. The free market is aware of this, so they are unwilling to take the risk without guaranteed government subsidies.

There are a lot of hidden costs with nuclear energy. For example, I don't know of any country where the insurance costs for nuclear power plants are not capped. This means that in the event of a disaster, the costs have to be borne by the taxpayer. The same applies to the costs of final storage. No one knows how much this will cost over the next million years or so. If all these costs were included in the calculation, it would become clear that nuclear energy is extraordinarily expensive. Of course, this is not in the interest of the nuclear companies (the same ones that run fossil power plants, by the way), because the lower the more optimistic their believers are, the more money the companies make.

> due to it all being nuclear

Not sure where you got this - nuclear gives only about 20% of electricity in Russia. 60% of electricity is produced from natural gas, and the rest 20% is from hydro stations.

Nuclear is the most expensive way of generating electricity atm.

So why is electricity cheap in France and expensive in Denmark? Denmark has the most expensive electricity in Europe and they are mostly wind and they often have to import from Sweden and Norway (which is also why electricity is expensive in southern Sweden). If we look at countries nuclear does not seem very expensive. Not the cheapest (that is probably Russian gas followed by hydro) but certainly less expensive than wind power.

France guarantees its citizens a price by subsidizing the difference to market price with state funds.

The day-ahead price for Denmark seems to be very close to the price in Germany. Much of the high price is taxes.

(I don't know how much of the tax went to subsidising earlier wind power construction.)

https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-...

https://countryeconomy.com/energy-and-environment/electricit...

Are you sure their energy isn't cheap because they sit on a crap ton of natural gas and other fossil fuels?

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