Comment by morcheeba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morcheeba | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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