Illinois EnergyProf
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 14 months, 2020–2025
23:10 · 921K views · May 14, 2019
A professor from Illinois compares the cost of building, fueling and operating a nuclear plant against a natural gas plant, using visual charts. It shows how construction time and interest rates dominate, when the investment pays off and when costs cross over.
It is the go-to short primer HN commenters cite to explain why nuclear is expensive upfront but cheap to run once the construction debt is paid.
17 comments from Hacker News
You should watch this video (and several others) of this professor, David Ruzic from Uni of Illinois This video he talks about the economics of nuclear plant. this video This video, he talks about modular micro-nuclear reactor [LINK] His videos are great. Worth your time.
For anyone interested in the economics of fission reactors, Illinois Energy Prof did a GREAT video a while back: this video
> is it going to be the catalyst that will enable humanity to accelerate wreaking havoc on what's left of our ecosystems? The question is how cheap can it get, can the energy production scale up vs cost, and how much does maintenance cost. This is a good video about fission energy production economics this video If one of these fusion reactor projects results in a competitively priced power plant, ok, we can reduce fossil fuel energy production towards zero in a few decades. That's pretty good for the environment but nothing really "new" is possible. If one of these fusion reactor projects results in a 10x reduction in the cost of electricity... then we have something new. Things that people didn't imagine being possible before become possible. Things like desalination instead of taking water from rivers or aquifers because it's cheaper. Tearing down dams because the power isn't needed. "Farms" in skyscrapers packed with artificial light where food can be produced without pesticides or herbicides because it's a controlled environment. Using landfills like mines, extracting tiny amounts of useful materials so ordinary mining becomes much less needed. You can also think of plenty of things cheap plentiful energy could make happen that are destructive too... it is difficult to project and I assume will go in both directions.
That turns out not to be true. Here a short primer on the economics of nuclear reactors: this video Intermittent renewables on the other hand require massive subsidies.
> I have the same feeling but opposite. The problem is that this is just a feeling. The bigger problem is that this feeling is still extremely widespread, completely contrary to the facts. For example... > Nuclear energy has never been profitable anywhere in the world to date This is completely false. Nuclear energy is profitable pretty much everywhere it is used. Almost obscenely profitable, if you are allowed to run the plants. I ran the numbers for Hinkley Point C. At the rate they negotiated (14,8 Cents/kWh...or was it pence?) the profits are almost obscene. A modern EPR will generate 1040 TWh of electricity over its lifetime, assuming 80 years operation and 90% capacity factor. Assuming the EDF-negotiated price is 14,8 cents, that's a cool € 150 billion worth of electricity. But that's just one reactor, whereas HPC is two. So € 300 billion. Puts even the completely ridiculous cost overruns for those two reactors into perspective, doesn't it? China built their two EPRs for a total of $7.5 billion, and with the EPR2, EDF is pretty certain to get construction times and costs. Here's an explainer of the economics. this video The annual reports for one of the Swiss plants are online. They produce electricity for 3-5 cents. Profitably. In Switzerland. And they have expenses like...oh...a new administrative building in one year. Switzerland is not cheap. > has entirely disproportionate downsides What are those "entirely disproportionate downsides", in your opinion? If you subtract