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[deleted] t1_j5d6zok wrote

Reply to comment by Prinzka in 1st small modular nuclear reactor certified for use in US by sunflowerastronaut

Investing money in nuclear instead of solar/wind is literally a gift to the fossil fuel industry. Solar/wind are cheaper per MWh output (4x cheaper unsubsidized than NuScales pre-construction claimed price estimate) and faster to construct, so for the same amount invested you phase out far more fossil fuels.

Plus you can't even use nuclear plants as economically viable dispatchable power: cost per MWh directly scales upwards as capacity factor drops, because basically all the costs are fixed not variable depending on how often you run it. So if at 90% capacity factor it's $120/MWh (as the Utah NuScale is, pre-sunsidy), at 60% capacity factor it's $180/MWh. Compare to wind and solar at around $30-40/MWh and it's just a bad look.

There's a reason the initial pumped-hydro energy storage plants were built in the US to allow dispatchability of nuclear power... And now that same kind of storage idea can more cheaply be applied to solar/wind. ie, nuclear doesn't actually solve the storage issue in the way that proponents like to claim, so it doesn't even have that going for it.

And nuclear plants have never shown a positive learning curve, where repeated builds decreased costs over time.

It's not even small amounts we are talking about investing, that could be seen as OK for initial demonstrator plants. The Utah project cost estimate is now over $9 billion.

The nuclear industry needs to be allowed to die due to its lack of economic competitiveness.

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Plastic-Wear-3576 t1_j5fetpx wrote

Not to say you're wrong, but, https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/nuclear-wasted-why-the-cost-of-nuclear-energy-is-misunderstood

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[deleted] t1_j5fiip1 wrote

So on those notes I'd say:

  1. The cost of SMRs isn't one being presented by critics here, it's directly the cost the NuScale company is stating the project will have. They should be the ones giving the MOST optimistic.picture, not the least.

  2. The NuScale costs are are still (without subsidy) worse than the "solar/wind plus imposed costs" number in that article.

  3. Arguing against regulations on the nuclear industry, while at the same time arguing that nuclear is a great safe energy source, when the safety is largely produced by those same regulations, always feels problematic to me. I'm sure there are some regulations that can be changed, but in general... Issue.

  4. If we want to bring up the Japan issue, then it seems completely fair to tally in the independently estimated $800 billion total cleanup cost of Fukushima. Split across the approximately 10,000 TWh of electricity Japan has produced with nuclear plants since the first one came online in the 60s, that's an added $80/MWh of cost produced by using nuclear power, which is roundabout the entire "solar/wind plus imposed costs" number on its own. Even if you use lower estimates of $400 billion. It's still a huge cost added.

  5. That article somewhat disingenuously claims that wind would "use up" 17,800 acres for a plant that produces a TWh /year of electricity. That number is actually the land area that wind turbines would be spaced out across; wind installed capacity is around 5 MW/km^2 (20 kW/acre). So at 35% capacity factor, 16,000 acres of spacing needed to install the 320 MW of wind that would produce 1 TWh of electricity a year (Their numbers assume a slightly lower capacity factor which isn't a big deal). However, the direct land footprint of wind power (land actually taken up and unavailable for other use) is more like 0.75 acre / MW. So that 320 MW wind farm only "uses up" 240 acres of space, or about 2.5x what nuclear needs. Not 178x as the article tries to claim.

Solar definitely uses significant land, and their number is near enough correct there.

I'd note however than land constraints aren't actually particularly significant right now (particularly in the US context with millions of acres devoted to wasteful corn-ethanol-fuel production), so these larger land footprints should not be a primary concern at this time. If they DO become a concern, note that a significant portion of solar can be installed on rooftops or parking lots with zero new land use (possibly 1/2 the current electricity demand of the US can be covered in this way), and the land use of field-solar can be mitigated using agrivoltaics. Where mixed agriculture and solar land use ends up being more efficient than just having two different fields dedicated to each one.

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