It compared the cost of building the nuclear reactors in France to the cost of building Solar, Wind and biomass in Germany. It also looked at the cost and amount of energy produced from the last five years of construction in Germany. So the newer and cheaper solar and wind. 160 billion euros for 70 TWh per year. France built 400 Terawatt hours per year from 290 billion euros. France has run them for over 30 years.
China's more recent nuclear construction was also cited. $150 billion for 300 TWh per year.
80% of the world's new nuclear reactors are being built in China, India, Russia and South Korea. Those are coming in at a price of $2000-3000 per KW. A gigawatt nuclear reactor at $2-3 billion each built in 4-6 years. A gigawatt nuclear reactor can generate 8 Terawatt hours per year.
French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices. France produces one-tenth the carbon pollution from electricity compared to Germany.
If nuclear plants really do generate at about 2 cents per kWh, how come the most established and respected power industry pricing analysis finds that it costs over six times that - between 12 cents and 19 cents per kWh ?[1]
Where does the 2 cents figure come from? - A website commissioned explicitly to promote nuclear power industry. Have some discernment, please.
> French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices
what now, costs or prices? These things are hard to compare: what is the actual energy bill of a household? A typical German household will consume less electricity and have a higher income.
They are doing less sorting. They just get a bigger cave and put the entire facility into it. There is room in the large cave for all US nuclear plants.
96% of the mass of nuclear "waste" is uranium 238. This can be fissioned when neutron are 1000 times faster. This occurs in fast reactors.
Uranium 238 is unused fuel.
Coal, oil, natural gas waste sit in the air you breath and in pools or dumps on land. Plus there is the CO2.
Solar and Wind use ten times the cement and steel to generate the same power as nuclear. Cement and steel generate pollution and CO2 in their production.
> Solar and Wind use ten times the cement and steel to generate the same power as nuclear.
I'd be interested in a reference for this. My intuition goes like this:
I can see wind using a lot of steel and cement for the towers (though masts built incorporating other materials do exist) and solar using just a small amount of cement and steel -- but solar doesn't produce much power for the same area compared to a nuclear power plant, so I can see that amounting to a lot of steel and cement if you build a bunch of solar in the same way you'd build nuclear power plants.
However, solar power plants and some wind power are often not far away from where the power will be used, which means that less steel is used for the electrical masts and power lines. And solar is often mounted on roofs, which means that very little structural cement is needed.
Plus... while the article says that solar and wind power needs to be replaced every 20-25 years (note: there are turbines in operation that are older than that), when you replace a wind turbine, you'll often keep the tower and just replace the turbine on the top, so it's not like you need to scrap the whole thing every 20-25 years.
Germany spending will be three times higher on solar, wind and biomass will be more than three times higher than a nuclear build-out. Germany needs 1.5 times the power of France's nuclear. Estimates are that Germany will spend over 3 trillion euros through 2050. They will have to rebuild the solar and wind twice because they last 15-25 years vs nuclear lasting 40-80+ years. That is a lot of cost savings even if there were accidents or accident cleanups. There are lot of certain increased costs on the solar and wind side of the ledger.
France completed construction on 76% of its current 58 reactors at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330 billion (€290 billion). The complete buildout of the 58 reactors was less €400 billion. Germany has spent about €500 billion over the last 20 years to get to 35% renewables. 7% of this is burning biomass. France gets more than double the TWh from nuclear than Germany gets from renewables (solar, wind, biomass, hydro).
Germany would need 50% more nuclear energy than France to completely replace all other power generation. This would cost €600 billion if Germany could match France’s build from the 1980s. Costs and safety regulations have increased even though France’s nuclear power has operated without incident for over 30 years. 80 nuclear reactors would now cost €1600 billion euros for Germany. This would still be cheaper than the estimated costs for the solar and wind buildout that is underway.
Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German countryside.
Der Spiegel cites a recent estimate that it would cost Germany “€3.4 trillion ($3.8 trillion),” or seven times more than it spent from 2000 to 2019, to increase solar and wind three to five-fold by 2050.
Between 2000 and 2019, Germany grew renewables from 7% to 35% of its electricity. And as much of Germany's renewable electricity comes from biomass, which scientists view as polluting and environmentally degrading, as from solar.
Germany gets 33% of its electricity from solar and wind.
> Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually...
The reason why this is so expensive for Germany is the political decision to subsidise renewable energy generation by guaranteeing energy purchase prices for 20 years via the EEG law. This led to a lot of the non-competitive inefficient early-gen solar and wind being installed in Germany, which will continue to receive subsidies for another 5-10 years; for new generation being installed, the subsidies reduce every year.
One of the intended effects was that the solar and wind industries had income that they could invest in research to improving the cost and efficiency of solar and wind generation. IIRC an article that I'm sadly unable to find now claimed that this accelerated the development such that today's very competitive costs would only be achieved 6-7 years later if there had never been an EEG, which I find a remarkable achievement. Of course if you're installing solar or wind in your country today you'll benefit from these improvements.
> Der Spiegel cites a recent estimate that it would cost Germany “€3.4 trillion ($3.8 trillion),” or seven times more than it spent from 2000 to 2019, to increase solar and wind three to five-fold by 2050.
According to ESYS, [...] by 2050, the costs would add up to 2 to 3.4 trillion euros, depending on the scenario. Other forecasts fluctuate between 500 million and about 2 trillion euros.
I'm thinking 500 million has to be a typo and should be 500 billion; still that's quite a range of estimates.
Tesla Powerwall:
$14.5K for 27 kwh and $2.5-4.5k installation.
$6.8K for each 13.5 kwh of Powerwall.
Batteries by themselves not enough. Need inverters etc... You cannot get to the cost of the car by only adding up the cost of gasoline used over its lifetime.
China's and south Korea and Russia have nuclear build costs in the $2k-2.5K per KW range. They make 70% of the world's nuclear reactors.
Nobody was talking about Tesla Powerwall. We're talking grid scale energy production and storage, not at the level of individual houses. You can't remotely compare a nuclear reactor to a house-level battery setup.
China, South Korea are $2K-2.5K per kilowatt of baseload.
A Nuclear kilowatt generates 70-95% of the time. A solar kilowatt generates 10-20% of the time. A Gigawatt of solar generates 1 Terawatt hour per year. A gigawatt of nuclear generates 6 to 8 terawatt hours per year. So nuclear generates an average of 7 times more. Solar lasts 15 years. Nuclear lasts 40-80 years. Solar needs to be rebuilt 3 to 5 times versus nuclear. There is no supply chain for matching battery storage at scale. They are just starting to build batteries for cars at the 200 gigawatt-hour levels. Solar and wind in California and many other places has only 10% of the generation during winter. There is no 90-day power storage and building one would be insanely expensive.
if 20 milliseverts per year is the correct level for evacuation then why do we not evacuate Kerela in India, Ramsdar in Iran. Kerela has radiation levels 3 times higher than 20 milliseverts per year. Denver has higher background radiation than most places in the US. Higher altitude and higher radon levels. They are not quite to 20 milliseverts per year unless they have more radon in their house which some do.
Flight crews get 3.1 milliseverts per year. About 50 days worth of Fukushima exposure.
Air pollution causes 7 million deaths per year. 4 million from outdoor air pollution. The hospitalization rate increases on the bad air days. The effect is immediate for many elderly and asthmatics. Air pollution levels in some cities in India, China and other parts of Asia is like forcing everyone (including babies and the elderly or asthmatics) to smoke 6+ cigarettes a day.
Being barely able to breath is very unpleasant and scary.
12,000 people died over 2 weeks in 1952 during the London Fog air pollution event. Atmospheric inversion trapped air pollution. People dropped dead with blue lips and their last few minutes to hours were spent gasping for breath.
144 people were killed in 1966. During the Aberfan disaster. Millions of tons of coal mine waste were left in piles on a mountain. A heavy rain caused the mine waste to slide down the mountain and into the town of Aberfan. It buried a school. 117 children dead.
Multiple incidents where over 100 people get burned alive in oil tanker spills. 150+ in Pakistan in 2017. Poor people ran towards on oil tanker spill to scoop up oil from a leak. Then it caught fire and they were burned alive.
8 billion tons of coal is moved every year. 1000+ die mining it. Many die underground slowly when they are trapped in collapsed coal mines. 40% of freight trains and trucks move coal. So almost all freight train and truck accidents in certain areas are people being hit by a vehicle loaded with coal.
5 billion tons of oil per year.
Norway is big into oil and gas.
$62 billion for the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The radiation levels around Fukushima would not have caused prompt death. Cancer takes many years to develop. Elderly people do not have enough lifespan left to develop radiation related cancer to die from radiation.
On 4 April 2011, radiation levels of 0.06 mSv/day were recorded in Fukushima city, 65 km northwest of the plant, about 60 times higher than normal but posing no health risk according to authorities.
Would you have ordered the evacuation of thousands of sick and elderly hospitalized people if they were all going to get an X-ray? a CT scan?
The amount of radiation from one adult chest x-ray (0.1 mSv). A chest CT delivers 7 mSv — 70 times as much.
I wrote the second article (nextbigfuture) referenced in the nuclear safety citations.
It is irrelevant that the recent nuclear reactor projects in the USA and Europe are expensive. A weighted average of cost and completion times for global nuclear reactor construction would be dominated by the 90% of the nuclear reactors built by China, Russia, South Korea and India.
Do you based your analysis on the price cars based upon the price of a Rolls Royce? Do you price bridges based upon the cost of the Bay Bridge? Tunnels based upon the Big Dig? Rockets based upon the Space Launch System?
Also, nuclear got expensive because constantly increasing regulations and bureaucracy drove up costs in the USA. Reactors without accidents built in China and South Korea for 4 times less. Also, the systemic failure of large construction projects in the US. Skycrapers, bridges, subways and highway costs went up. High-speed rail in California versus China for costs and completions.
China generates as much electricity this year as USA and Europe combined. China will double again within 20 years. Natural gas will dominate US energy mix.
The solar and wind will not scale well beyond 10%. The US will need massive buildout of energy storage and massive energy grid modifications. This will run into the big project incompetence of the USA.
China builds all of it's large infrastructure projects like high speed rail for about a third of what it costs in the States. It might be regulations and bureaucracy accounting for that difference, but it's not specific to nuclear.
I wouldn't call it "incompetence". The US is clearly able to build large projects when it really has to. It's simple third-world style corruption that gets in the way. That's how congresspeople become multimillionaires on $170k/yr in a super high CoL area. Someone should look into that, and it's sure as hell not going to be Congress itself.
China's more recent nuclear construction was also cited. $150 billion for 300 TWh per year.
80% of the world's new nuclear reactors are being built in China, India, Russia and South Korea. Those are coming in at a price of $2000-3000 per KW. A gigawatt nuclear reactor at $2-3 billion each built in 4-6 years. A gigawatt nuclear reactor can generate 8 Terawatt hours per year.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-a...
A fully amortized nuclear power plant generates power at about 2 cents per kwh. http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedFiles/org/info/pdf/Econ...
Germany, between 2006 and 2017, increased the cost of electricity for households by 50%. (per OECD)
http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2019/7299-system-costs.pdf
French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices. France produces one-tenth the carbon pollution from electricity compared to Germany.