Real Engineering
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2020–2023
16:11 · 2M views · Jun 6, 2020
Real Engineering looks at why nuclear power plants are expensive and how their economics compare with fossil and renewable alternatives. It is based on a video from the Illinois Energy Professors.
Recommended as a clear walkthrough of nuclear plant economics and why incentives favor other generation.
6 comments from Hacker News
this video always comes to mind. this video The economic incentives (in a sort of basic example) are in favor of fossil fuel plants. It takes too long for traditional nuclear plants to have a return. Energy generation is sadly more complicated than I had hoped as a laymen. The sources have to compete on variable demand basis along with amortized costs over years. Nuclear needs novel designs with better economic returns, or to be given assistance by government to be more competitive on this amortized basis.
This excellent video delves into the economics of nuclear power plants and compares them with the alternatives. this video Although nuclear energy is profitable of the LONG term, it is financially infeasible over the short-to-medium term.
I'm not sure why you think that Exelon didn't consider regulatory risk as one of the things that made it not make sense for them. It was certainly a large factor. The idea that existing nuclear power plants are losing money because they aren't operationally competitive with oil and gas does not square with the facts. The total cost of running a nuclear plant is 30% less than oil and gas per kilowatt-hour. And if all our nuclear plants weren't 50 years old and saddled with massive overregulation, the operation and maintenance of a nuclear plant would probably be equivalent to running a fossil fueled power plant, which would cut ANOTHER 30% off the cost of nuclear because fuel costs of fossil fueled power plants are 4 times the cost of nuclear fuel per kwh. [LINK] And as for construction costs, you can see that the massive increase in construction costs in the early 60s and 70s was because regulation required enormous increases in staffing, which ballooned labor costs. [LINK] And even so a nuclear plant should be expected to be profitable as long as you can manage to operate it for long enough without the government shutting you down (one of the major regulatory risks I mentioned). Nuclear power plants in the past generally took 7 years to build and pay off in 16-24 years. While a natural gas plant can be built in 2 years and pay off in 8 years. Nuclear power plants are so cost effective tho, that if you can manage to run it for 17 years, you'll make more money than running a n
From what I've seen [1] the long-term investment a nuclear reactor is massive and ROI is often measured in centuries. Also we still don't have a good solution for power spike handling with renewables + energy storage. A windless night is the scenario we're talking about here. So most of this discussion is probably addressing nuclear vs. coal / gas [1] this video
It does catch up, of course it does. It takes some time, but there is ROI, and it’s not even that far in time. It’s just that you have to spend more time in debt. this video