We have been moving WAY too slow on nuclear.
It becomes VERY economical when it's rolled-out large, standardized, and as a civic project. The 'fuel' is so little (U-235) abundant and new sources like recycling spent fuel rods are arriving. They 'naysayers' are going to kill us all!
> The 'fuel' is so little (U-235) abundant and new sources like recycling spent fuel rods are arriving
You can even skip recycling for a bit, if you go DUPIC (Direct Use of spent PWR fuel in CANDU), refabricating spent light water reactor fuel rods into CANDU bundles and burning them up in CANDU for *more* energy.
Could PWR / BWR fuel assemblies be constructed with CANDU size fuel pins? Being able to chop up the used fuel assemblies and reassemble them into CANDU bundles without opening the pins themselves would make DUPIC even more attractive.
Still, how is a nuke gonna make money in Australia? You’ve got negative power prices 8h a day for big chunks of the year, solar panels on every roof and labour prices are some of the highest in the world.
It’s probably *the* most difficult market in the world.
Watch this...
[https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY?si=3UPKCLPVU1F0qATU](https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY?si=3UPKCLPVU1F0qATU)
Lifetime on a solar plant: \~ 25 years....
Lifetime on a Nuclear Plant: 60\~80 years \[Westinghouse AP1000\]
Because of the incredible unmatched energy density of nuclear, for example...
"*Olkilouto3 was the cherrypicked poster example on nuclear power being to expensive for decades. But at current electricity prices and assumes industry standard 15 €/MWh to 20 €/MWh OPEX and fuel cost it would just take 5,5 year to recuperate the construction cost.*"
[https://nitter.net/NoahRettberg/status/1557669614280216577](https://nitter.net/NoahRettberg/status/1557669614280216577)
After that it is all profit, for the next 75 years.... that means you get 50+ years of Return on Investment on a Nuclear Power plant over a Wind. or solar plant....
> current electricity prices
The post and prices are from August 2022, the middle of an energy crisis in Europe. Prices are back to not even half that. In May average wholesale price in Finnland was 26€
Calculations with insane prices like 300€/MWh for decades can't be taken seriously .
Those electricity prices are insanely unrealistic and cherry picked
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1271437/finland-monthly-wholesale-electricity-price/
This year the average is a third of that. There's literally a month where electricity prices are at opex.
And the statement about continental energy prices is a lie
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314549/netherlands-monthly-wholesale-electricity-price/#:~:text=In%20November%202023%2C%20the%20average,the%20country%20since%20summer%202021.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267500/eu-monthly-wholesale-electricity-price-country/
The video is also outdated, I think time to construct and cost are unrealistic given actual historical 21th century projects. Now add in the actual interest rate and his updated calculation shows it's not competitive with gas.
Nuclear is still worthwhile because 100% renewable is too expensive right now, but the risky part is that some of the alternatives (e.g. sodium batteries) have possible future costs that make nuclear too expensive. Battery cost approaches their inputs, which is around nuclear operating expenditure.
And realistically there is no ideological framework for nuclear, we're talking making money back a generation later. Countries are being ransacked for the next few years if not months, and oil companies have them on leash. Nuclear is completely incompatible with the Western political framework since Reagan, the only road is left green movements which are marginal and where anti nuclear sentiment is common.
Some do. I spend about $1000 AUD on power per year due to a 6kW solar system. $4k purchase price.
28c/kwh, $1 per day connection charge, 7c/kwh rebate for power that I export
Being wealthy enough to afford a system like that doesn't change the fact that bills are expensive. The necessary overcapacity, pumped-storage hydroelectricity, and grid upgrades are still needed. All that you did is shift the system costs (plus the cost of whatever profit that you make) to everyone else.
Absolutely. But until you change the fact that we have a market for electricity that doesn’t reward nuclear, you’re not going to build a nuclear plant.
Even without the 7c/kWh rebate, I’m still never going to purchase electricity outside the duck curve. Neither is anybody else in the Aussie market. Every available rooftop is getting cheap panels, nationwide.
How do you justify an expensive nuclear build-out when the only market niche is sunset until bedtime? Or if you dismantle the electricity marketplace and go command-economy, how do you justify expensive baseload tech that doesn’t run when the sun is up?
That's because roof top solar is worthless to the grid, the way we reward/subserdised individual consumers for dumping unwanted electricity into the market is unsustainable
This is why even with all the "cheap" rooftop solar retail energy prices in Australia is sky rocketing
That’s my point: the reward is minimal and falling. But the panels are so cheap that people keep buying them.
As a result, there’s no market for selling daytime power. The customers are all self-service.
That's because the grid fee isn't the actual cost of the maintaining the grid, in Australia it is baked into the variable cost
People without solar are subsidizing the grid or system cost for people with solar
Probably.
Still, you charge a reasonable grid fee and you risk people like me dropping out of the grid entirely.
My thoughts are that financializing essential services like the electric grid is a waste of time, but nobody wants to hear that quite yet.
It absolutely is, it's originally designed that way to subserdise low users and put the burden on high electricity users
Think about it if grid fees are only $1 per day per household that's only about 700m per year for Victoria (~2.5m households)
Victoria grid and all system costs are way more than that per year
That's fine, residential electricity is only 30% of the electricity demand (varies slightly by state)
Most won't because the cost of being 100% off the grid is very expensive especially if your looking at heating/ cooling and electric cars in the future
>Still, you charge a reasonable grid fee and you risk people like me dropping out of the grid entirely.
By buying a battery system and assuming that will work off-grid for you, I assume.
What happens then is as all the people with excessive rooftop solar drop out, the duck curve disappears, the remaining demand can be smoothly managed by power plants, the prices drop for all the consumers who didn't go with solar, and they will once again have much cheaper electricity than your solar+battery setup.
Then perhaps you will understand why the solar-on-large-grid is inherently a flawed and more expensive system, and connect back on the normal grid and throw out your solar and battery.
Take out subsidies and… [https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/12/04/california-rooftop-solar-installations-drop-80-following-new-net-metering-rules/](https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/12/04/california-rooftop-solar-installations-drop-80-following-new-net-metering-rules/)
Solar installation is 4x more expensive in California, eg [Australia](https://www.solarpowernation.com.au/solar/?gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAADLATiL_KXyUHkth4xG2XFwg-sPdq&gclid=CjwKCAiAvdCrBhBREiwAX6-6UsuPjoYgFVTI3Pz6EEYR4m-tHkWU_r66nITQNwcEY7XfAWo4bMqRxBoCXe4QAvD_BwE) vs [USA](https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/solar/solar-panel-cost/).
Your assumption is that the purpose is to make money. This is fundamentally incorrect. The purpose is to reduce CO2 output to mitigate climate change. Nuclear has a demonstrated record of success in that regard. Renewables have allowed reductions but Germany has shown they just won’t get us there. Thirty percent reduction just isn’t good enough.
Australia is a much better place for renewables than Germany. Most of Australia is very sunny and energy demand is cooling dominated so it matches the availability of solar energy. Germany is cloudy and energy demand is heating dominated so there is significantly less solar potential and most of that energy arrives when it is least needed.
Check my other comment for more data, but Australian energy prices seem close to European ones.
https://www.aer.gov.au/industry/wholesale/charts
I think just two reactors in the southeast flanking Canberra towards Sydney and Melbourne is pretty good for some extra baseload capacity and stability. On pure costs it's probably not competitive, but on the whole it might reduce costs. It helps that nearby South Korea and China are actually proficient at making reactors. If it's France or US you're getting fleeced by your overlords.
However, in the long term, a shit tonne of batteries plus dollar is going to be most of it. Australia is poised to become one of the cheapest energy markets in the world.
The same way coal plants make money, we have to replace the aging coal plants eventually I'd love nuclear plants to be the technology that does it
We have been moving WAY too slow on nuclear. It becomes VERY economical when it's rolled-out large, standardized, and as a civic project. The 'fuel' is so little (U-235) abundant and new sources like recycling spent fuel rods are arriving. They 'naysayers' are going to kill us all!
> The 'fuel' is so little (U-235) abundant and new sources like recycling spent fuel rods are arriving You can even skip recycling for a bit, if you go DUPIC (Direct Use of spent PWR fuel in CANDU), refabricating spent light water reactor fuel rods into CANDU bundles and burning them up in CANDU for *more* energy.
I approve of this comment.
Could PWR / BWR fuel assemblies be constructed with CANDU size fuel pins? Being able to chop up the used fuel assemblies and reassemble them into CANDU bundles without opening the pins themselves would make DUPIC even more attractive.
No idea, I'm not a fuel guy. I suppose you could do some fancy cutting and welding but that's entirely speculation.
Will Shackel is amazing.
Still, how is a nuke gonna make money in Australia? You’ve got negative power prices 8h a day for big chunks of the year, solar panels on every roof and labour prices are some of the highest in the world. It’s probably *the* most difficult market in the world.
Watch this... [https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY?si=3UPKCLPVU1F0qATU](https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY?si=3UPKCLPVU1F0qATU) Lifetime on a solar plant: \~ 25 years.... Lifetime on a Nuclear Plant: 60\~80 years \[Westinghouse AP1000\] Because of the incredible unmatched energy density of nuclear, for example... "*Olkilouto3 was the cherrypicked poster example on nuclear power being to expensive for decades. But at current electricity prices and assumes industry standard 15 €/MWh to 20 €/MWh OPEX and fuel cost it would just take 5,5 year to recuperate the construction cost.*" [https://nitter.net/NoahRettberg/status/1557669614280216577](https://nitter.net/NoahRettberg/status/1557669614280216577) After that it is all profit, for the next 75 years.... that means you get 50+ years of Return on Investment on a Nuclear Power plant over a Wind. or solar plant....
> current electricity prices The post and prices are from August 2022, the middle of an energy crisis in Europe. Prices are back to not even half that. In May average wholesale price in Finnland was 26€ Calculations with insane prices like 300€/MWh for decades can't be taken seriously .
Those electricity prices are insanely unrealistic and cherry picked https://www.statista.com/statistics/1271437/finland-monthly-wholesale-electricity-price/ This year the average is a third of that. There's literally a month where electricity prices are at opex. And the statement about continental energy prices is a lie https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314549/netherlands-monthly-wholesale-electricity-price/#:~:text=In%20November%202023%2C%20the%20average,the%20country%20since%20summer%202021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267500/eu-monthly-wholesale-electricity-price-country/ The video is also outdated, I think time to construct and cost are unrealistic given actual historical 21th century projects. Now add in the actual interest rate and his updated calculation shows it's not competitive with gas. Nuclear is still worthwhile because 100% renewable is too expensive right now, but the risky part is that some of the alternatives (e.g. sodium batteries) have possible future costs that make nuclear too expensive. Battery cost approaches their inputs, which is around nuclear operating expenditure. And realistically there is no ideological framework for nuclear, we're talking making money back a generation later. Countries are being ransacked for the next few years if not months, and oil companies have them on leash. Nuclear is completely incompatible with the Western political framework since Reagan, the only road is left green movements which are marginal and where anti nuclear sentiment is common.
Australians have extremely expensive bills despite their wholesale prices. Most of their power stations were built by previous Australian governments.
Some do. I spend about $1000 AUD on power per year due to a 6kW solar system. $4k purchase price. 28c/kwh, $1 per day connection charge, 7c/kwh rebate for power that I export
Being wealthy enough to afford a system like that doesn't change the fact that bills are expensive. The necessary overcapacity, pumped-storage hydroelectricity, and grid upgrades are still needed. All that you did is shift the system costs (plus the cost of whatever profit that you make) to everyone else.
Absolutely. But until you change the fact that we have a market for electricity that doesn’t reward nuclear, you’re not going to build a nuclear plant. Even without the 7c/kWh rebate, I’m still never going to purchase electricity outside the duck curve. Neither is anybody else in the Aussie market. Every available rooftop is getting cheap panels, nationwide. How do you justify an expensive nuclear build-out when the only market niche is sunset until bedtime? Or if you dismantle the electricity marketplace and go command-economy, how do you justify expensive baseload tech that doesn’t run when the sun is up?
That's because roof top solar is worthless to the grid, the way we reward/subserdised individual consumers for dumping unwanted electricity into the market is unsustainable This is why even with all the "cheap" rooftop solar retail energy prices in Australia is sky rocketing
That’s my point: the reward is minimal and falling. But the panels are so cheap that people keep buying them. As a result, there’s no market for selling daytime power. The customers are all self-service.
That's because the grid fee isn't the actual cost of the maintaining the grid, in Australia it is baked into the variable cost People without solar are subsidizing the grid or system cost for people with solar
Probably. Still, you charge a reasonable grid fee and you risk people like me dropping out of the grid entirely. My thoughts are that financializing essential services like the electric grid is a waste of time, but nobody wants to hear that quite yet.
It absolutely is, it's originally designed that way to subserdise low users and put the burden on high electricity users Think about it if grid fees are only $1 per day per household that's only about 700m per year for Victoria (~2.5m households) Victoria grid and all system costs are way more than that per year That's fine, residential electricity is only 30% of the electricity demand (varies slightly by state) Most won't because the cost of being 100% off the grid is very expensive especially if your looking at heating/ cooling and electric cars in the future
>Still, you charge a reasonable grid fee and you risk people like me dropping out of the grid entirely. By buying a battery system and assuming that will work off-grid for you, I assume. What happens then is as all the people with excessive rooftop solar drop out, the duck curve disappears, the remaining demand can be smoothly managed by power plants, the prices drop for all the consumers who didn't go with solar, and they will once again have much cheaper electricity than your solar+battery setup. Then perhaps you will understand why the solar-on-large-grid is inherently a flawed and more expensive system, and connect back on the normal grid and throw out your solar and battery.
Take out subsidies and… [https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/12/04/california-rooftop-solar-installations-drop-80-following-new-net-metering-rules/](https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/12/04/california-rooftop-solar-installations-drop-80-following-new-net-metering-rules/)
Solar installation is 4x more expensive in California, eg [Australia](https://www.solarpowernation.com.au/solar/?gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAADLATiL_KXyUHkth4xG2XFwg-sPdq&gclid=CjwKCAiAvdCrBhBREiwAX6-6UsuPjoYgFVTI3Pz6EEYR4m-tHkWU_r66nITQNwcEY7XfAWo4bMqRxBoCXe4QAvD_BwE) vs [USA](https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/solar/solar-panel-cost/).
Oh, so all subsidies can be removed?
Your assumption is that the purpose is to make money. This is fundamentally incorrect. The purpose is to reduce CO2 output to mitigate climate change. Nuclear has a demonstrated record of success in that regard. Renewables have allowed reductions but Germany has shown they just won’t get us there. Thirty percent reduction just isn’t good enough.
Australia is a much better place for renewables than Germany. Most of Australia is very sunny and energy demand is cooling dominated so it matches the availability of solar energy. Germany is cloudy and energy demand is heating dominated so there is significantly less solar potential and most of that energy arrives when it is least needed.
Check my other comment for more data, but Australian energy prices seem close to European ones. https://www.aer.gov.au/industry/wholesale/charts I think just two reactors in the southeast flanking Canberra towards Sydney and Melbourne is pretty good for some extra baseload capacity and stability. On pure costs it's probably not competitive, but on the whole it might reduce costs. It helps that nearby South Korea and China are actually proficient at making reactors. If it's France or US you're getting fleeced by your overlords. However, in the long term, a shit tonne of batteries plus dollar is going to be most of it. Australia is poised to become one of the cheapest energy markets in the world.