dalyons

except it cant do that without going bankrupt. Nuke power costs too much, you have to be selling it at 100% 24x7 to have any chance of paying back the capex.

or, you put a bunch of these small plants in one physical location and you get even more efficiency out of the workforce - only one facilties management crew, only one security team. And you'd even save money on just having one grid connection. Oh wait...

all cost modeling for nuclear takes this into account into the $/mwh of power. Fuel is cheap, but you have to pay back the enormous construction capex over time through power sales. Plus, staffing, security, insurance and maintaince are massive ongoing costs. Nukes remain the most expensive way to generate power.

The only cheap nuclear watts come from facilities built a long time ago in a completely different cost environment, and had construction and insurance subsidized by the state.

> they still need base load generation

nit pick, but this isnt true at all. "Base load generation" refers to fixed capacity generators (coal, nukes) that run at 100%, matched to the lowest point of the demand curve overnight. This is an obsolete concept in a modern grid where batteries, wind, solar etc have destroyed that economic niche.

what you mean is likely "backup capacity". And yes heavily renewable grids will likely need some standin / backup generation for exceptional circumstances, for the foreseeable future. The economics and sizing of this backup is almost entirely unrelated to the economics and sizing of "base load generation". (for eg, there will never be a time when a diversified grid is at zero. The amount of backup needed is a function of how frequent these exceptional events are, the mix of your grid, and how much you're willing to pay backup generators to avoid load shedding in these situation)

And yet their % share of nuclear is declining and will continue to decline every year. Because nukes are too expensive, even for a single party state

Too early to say. they seem to be getting their rest if world market eaten by BYD etc. but it will take some years to play out

Yeah they were a bridging technology that no longer makes sense as EVs have improved

Byd is

Have you owned a full EV? I have never once wanted a PHEV since owning one. Full EV is better for me.

Toyotas in car software and UX is atrocious

But they have the resources to build nuke plants?

I don’t understand the point

Six words: base load generation is economically obsolete

An awful lot more countries in the world have the potential to sovereign manufacture relatively simple renewables than the massive engineering in reactors

This really should be a top level comment. It accurately explains the broken economics of nuclear, and is the real reason effectively no nukes will be built going forward. Not the usual tired points about regulations and safety fears and Chernobyl or whatever

Countries just can pretty easily make solar economically themselves, it’s no great secret. But they don’t because china makes them a bit cheaper , you keep them forever and we’re not in a war. You think all the billions of parts and steel in a nuke will all be locally built too? For eg Go look up who owns almost all the foundries in the world that are required to build large pressure vessels for reactors.

So, option a sounds great to me, but you clearly have some kind of agenda here, that maybe you could make clearer

Those things you pay for indirectly via taxes. Electricity you pay for directly. you can build unprofitable economically uncompetitive power, like nukes, and your rates will go up. People tend not to like that, but you can do it.

A theory with a lot of leaps that is in no way guaranteed. But it’s a nice idea

Yes no real cons if we exclude the small con of being completely economically unviable.

It is actually an enemy of nuclear, economically. Solar is so cheap, it will naturally grow until it satisfies 100% of the daytime load. This pushes nuclear off the grid during the day - it’s power costs too much. But nukes need to be running and selling at 100% 24/7 to have any chance of breaking even.

This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.

so what if theyre made in china?

coal usage has declined there the last two years. Would have declined even more this year, except for a certain very smart war.

physical 2fa should be an option, but i can never agree that we should force billions of regular people to use a harder to use and more inconvenient system that they have already indicated they dont want to use, for some mild security benefits

It’s because we have effective biometrics now, so the need to carry around an inconvenient limiting physical 2nd factor is obsolete (for the vast majority of regular use cases)

The r2 is right on the median price for new cars in the US, believe it or not. Crazy. But yeah, an Outback is still cheaper

For them maybe - rich enough and or old enough to avoid the problem. Big problem for the rest of us

As in scientifically proven to be biologically ideal, proven to have the best sleep outcomes. You can have different preferences of course, doesn’t change what’s ideal.

and thats fine by me! if we covered just the average daily cycle with batteries (like cali is closing in on) then you're talking like a 95% non-fossil production for the year. We've effectively won the climate crisis at that point. Or at least, can spend our efforts in other sectors while technology keeps giving us more options for the last 5%

is is often repeated in these threads, baseload generation is an obsolete term. Base load itself is real - the minimum demand on the grid, usually in the early am. Base load generation was a term given to a class of generators (mainly coal) that were cheap but inflexible, so you built them to match the base load and had more expensive variable output generation on top. That economic setup no longer exists, variable generation exists 24x7. So base load exists, base load generators do not. And yeah, thats why nukes are no longer economical, their base load generation role is economically obsolete.

Do you think in the current situation they are more or less likely to try for a nuke than before?

Then why is California down to 25% fossil generation from 60% a few years ago? And still dropping fast as more and more batteries and renewables come on line. Tell me again how baseload generation is still a relevant concept