And in “tell Us Something we Didn’t Already Know” news.
Nuclear is expensive because we’ve made it expensive. The most expensive part is bureaucracy. Running nuclear plants is cheap. Even still, the price of nuclear around the world is competitive. If you scroll down to the regional studies, nuclear looks even better. In every place except the US that has nuclear, nuclear is the second cheapest, with large-scale PV the only one higher (which doesn’t price in solutions to provide baseline power, which nuclear has built in). The US has (purposefully) made nuclear appear expensive because laws have been paid for by dirty oil companies.
Nuclear is also one of the safest and cleanest energy sources. If you include negative externalities into the cost (which is never done but should be) nuclear is amazing.
Yes, AND, Nuclear is also cheaper in cost of human lives per gigawatt hour!
EVEN SOLAR AND WIND KILL MORE PEOPLE PER GIGAWATT HOUR THAN NUCLEAR.
(Hydro admittedly kills less people per GWh than nuclear, though - but not every place has that option.)
Hydro causes a whole host of other issues though. It requires changing the environment in a very direct way. There are methods to reduce the issues, like fish ladders and things like that, but it’s an immediate shift of an area from a running river to essentially a lake with a waterfall.
And in order for hydro’s effects to be most easy to curtail, you need very specific terrain topology - such as where I live, in the Springfield area of Massachusetts, there’s a hydroelectric dam on the Connecticut River in South Hadley/Holyoke (the two sides of the river at that section):
The dam was built where there were natural falls. So the dam leveraged the fact that the change in water elevation was natural and already extant prior to the dam’s existence. They’ve had a fish elevator system for longer than I’ve been alive, too. Rather than changing how the hydrological system worked in the area, the dam stabilized it upstream such that the water level up the Connecticut River from there is more consistent than it used to be before - whenever there’s more water than usual, the dam can increase spill rate.
The city of chicopee, across the river from holyoke and just north of springfield, also has a hydroelectric dam, also built where there were natural falls. This region is pretty good for stuff like that, and our electrical supply is much hardier as a result!
Nah, even the wikipage shows double the price compared to solar or wind. Which isn’t surprising when you look at the basic technology of each energy type. And they all have to deal with a lot of bureaucracy.
Stop lying. No it doesn’t. Unless you can’t read the graph, it’s very similarly priced to the rest. Solar is significantly more expensive at low capacity but cheaper at high capacity. It’s approximately equal to coal and wind, depending on capacity. Nuclear can be cheaper than even the cheapest offshore wind.
The graph showing nuclear getting more expensive at higher capacity does show something interesting though. I can’t say what causes that, but I assume larger plants have more bureaucracy to deal with, which artificially increases their cost. (Edit: I even read it wrong I think. It shows as more are installed they got more expensive, which implies a temporal relation. More laws restricting nuclear make it more expensive, which is not surprising. Nuclear would be very cheap if it stayed at the same cost as the minimum was.) It may be something else. It’s hard to say. Nuclear is basically right on the middle of the cost axis though.
