12.95 ¢/kWh to 13.60 ¢/kWh.
I think that’s a fair price for cleaner air
I also think there are proven better reactor designs that are far cheaper.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=table_5_06_a
Sadly not. There are unproven ones which might be, but the US nuclear industry has a substantial history of coming in really really expensive.
The reason electricity in most places is cheaper are:
- Nuclear was built a long time ago, so the reactors are paid for already
- Electricity is generated using methods other than nuclear
The US Navy has had functional Small modular reactor designs mostly PWR designs since the 1960s in the 5mw to 500mw range with no major failures yet.
That’s thanks to the training (started with Rickover) and discipline and no shareholders. Commercial nukes don’t measure up, e.g. when it comes to leakages and knowing what to do in case.
Yes. Operated on a military budget. There’s a reason they’re not used for civilian use.
The problem is that none of these designs have ever been used to power the grid. Every nuclear project in the recent past has blown by cost and time estimates. Wind and solar are not only cheaper than nukes, they can also be installed much quicker and predictably. Nukes have a place, but we need clean energy now.
It’s also for reasons with nothing to do with nuclear in particular. The US is just terrible at executing large civil projects. It costs more to build at large scales here than virtually anywhere else, for a confluence of reasons – highly decentralized project management (state, county, federal, city governments all fighting for authority), lack of sustainable learning curves, NEPA being weaponized by NIMBYs to kill every project including environmentalist ones, plain dumb politics… you know you have a problem when you look onto the efficiency of Italian bureaucracy with envy, but meanwhile they can build e.g., rail projects at something like a third to sixth the budget the US can.
A big part of the problem is that we insist on fully custom and experimental projects. Every fucking time. We never just use the catalog builds. We never set and stick to a standard. Not even in road design, where the AASHTO green book is treated like a fucking Holy Bible – we follow its (largely dumb and dangerous requirements while still bespoking every fucking project.
You know what cost they never factor in? The cost of climate change. If they actually factored in the cost of emissions then nuclear power would be one of the cheapest forms of energy alongside solar.
Another thing a lot of people fail to mention about nuclear power, is the lifespan of a reactor. We have reactors from the 70s still running at full power, it’s pretty insane. I’m wondering what the TCO per kWh is for a nuclear reactor compared to other sources of energy.
I don’t remember, but nuclear is the highest operating cost of electricity, until the reactor is paid off by rates, in which it becomes very cheap. Natural gas is the cheapest starting and maintaining and is reaching better efficiencies. However, it’s killing the environment.
A solar farm in Switzerland from 1982 is also still providing power at 80% of original spec. Even today solar companies give 25 year warranty on new panels.
So this is not really an advantage of nuclear. In fact after 50 years a lot of them become a lot less reliable. We recently saw that in France.
I just wanted to point out that Georgia has consistently had a budget surplus for quite a while now, mostly because Republicans keep cutting critical gov’t services. Seem to me like Republicans could pay for a new plant using all of the excess taxes that they’ve been saving for a rainy day.
If Republicans want to elect Republicans that force them to pay extra for their preferred (marginal) carbon free power source, fine I guess? The rate increases aren’t great for the other 48% of the state though.
Georgia has every reason to be a solar powerhouse. They have sunlight to spare and every reason to want to build it. Batteries are finally getting cheap enough to outcompete fossil generation, too.
And they ARE building it, so they even are achieving learning curves on it. There are even Republicans on the PSC (Tim Echols) that are highly, highly pro-solar.
Meanwhile Georgia Power is currently planning more fossil gas plants and extending the life of a handful of coal plants because they think they have a shortfall in energy forecasts for future demands. Because, among other things, so many huge tech datacenters are moving to the state (which of course many were doing on the promise of the quite green grid Georgia has to offer, which was the bait that is now being switched on them).
Why? Because they’re lazy, super conservative, and they get guaranteed profits off of capital investments. The Southern Company is one of the most powerful forces of great evil in the country and goes largely unnoticed. They are actively incentivized to fuck their own ratepayers in order to increase their profitability by the agreements and statutes that allow them to be the utility.
The reality is that Vogtle was built and we should be glad for it and use it. It’s spun up and producing gobs of power, and will continue to do so for a damn long time. Great. But in a state where fossil production is still being actively expanded, putting money towards ultra-expensive nuclear over incredibly cheap solar and storage, betraying your own potential “customers” in the process, is just idiotic.