"Nuclear is super expensive!" they keep screaming as I've been living in places with primarily nuclear power for the vast majority of my life. The only 3 years when I didn't, I really felt the price of dinosaur-fuel even though it was at rock-bottom prices for all 3 years. Illinois is majority nuclear and is one of the cheapest stats in the USA when it comes to electricity rates all because of nuclear. And I grew up in Cleveland which was also primarily nuclear and electricity was so cheap there, the power and gas company was paying people to switch their entire homes from LNG heating to electric heating for about 3 decades.
> An empirical survey of the 674 nuclear power plants that have ever been built showed that private economic motives never played a role. Instead military interests have
always been the driving force behind their construction. Even ignoring the expense of dismantling nuclear power plants and the long-term storage of nuclear waste, private economy-only investment in nuclear power plant would result in high losses— an average of five billion euros per nuclear power plant, as one financial simulation revealed.
Hard to buy that conclusion. 35 countries with existing or under construction nuclear power. But only 9 countries with nuclear weapons, 2 of which do not even have any nuclear power. And when you go through the history countries seeking nuclear weapons don't start by building nuclear power, they tend to go straight to fit for purpose reactors dedicated to producing plutonium (e.g. Dimona or Hanford or the French and English equivalents) or to enrichment plants (e.g. as Pakistan did long before it ever had a civilian power plant).
How does that explain countries with a lot of nuclear power plants that been operating for several decades, and yet no military application.
To take an specific example, the Swedish nuclear weapon program was decommissioned 1968 and official ended 1972. Sweden first commercial operated nuclear plant was built 1972. Sweden has shown no military interests in nuclear weapons for as long the power plants has existed, and nuclear power was built up to 50% of Swedish energy demands by around 1985, and kept nuclear power plants operated since then. 4 nuclear plants, 12 reactors, and 0 bombs, all built between 1972 and 1985.
Anchored in the previous weapons program. Sold as the energy source of the future. Which as we know today did not pan out without huge subsidies. It's like renewables from 1990-2010, the difference being they entered escape velocity and now stand on their own legs.
The ones still investing all have nuclear military ambitions and want to share the costs and industry with the civilian side.
Anchored in what way? The military did many concepts during the 1960s, like training pinniped to attack military subs. They didn't pan out. The plants that were built, especially those during the 1980, had nothing to do with the failed projects for nuclear weapons 2 decades earlier.
> Which as we know today did not pan out without huge subsidies.
Feel free to look up Swedish subsidies in the energy sector. Renewables get much more each year, as does fossil fuel. Nuclear power is currently the energy source in Sweden that get taxed highest per watt produced. Considering that those plants been operating for 40-50 years non-stop delivering consistently energy without releasing greenhouse gases, is taxed more than any other energy source, the claim of "huge subsidies" is plainly false in context of Swedish nuclear plants.
No nuclear bombs, less subsidies than any other energy source, no greenhouse gases. The military did not help fund the construction for them, nor are they using any aspect of the operation to research or build weapons. Sweden signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1968, 4 years before the first commercial nuclear plant. Sweden has been an active advocate for the Non-Proliferation Treaty for 50 years now.
Countries that combine nuclear power and nuclear weapons are those who refuses to sign the treaty, like the US, UK, France, China, Russia, India, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea. Sweden is not on that list.
Nuclear is competing against solar, wind, gas, coal and oil which all get massive subsidies. Why should nuclear be the only one left out that does not?
Exelon was going to shut down the plants (instead of refueling them) if they didn't get subsidies from Illinois. They got subsidies from Ohio and New Jersey. They didn't get subsidies from Pennsylvania and shut down TMI 1. If existing, fully paid off nuclear power plants are uneconomic to run without subsidies, that really undercuts the narrative the narrative that "construction is expensive and operation is cheap".
And given that construction is so expensive, it ruins the economic case for building new nuclear plants (imho).
Operation is cheaper, but it is not cheap. The steam based thermodynamic cycle is very expensive compared to CCGT and even worse compared to gearbox into generator for wind power and solid state for solar.
In this graph you have the marginal cost of traditional generation compared to total cost of new built renewables.
I had believed that "nuclear construction is expensive, nuclear operation is cheap" got decades, and I spent a few months of pandemic downtime trying to figure out why that isn't true.
I didn't find all that much to go on. Aside from a French Court of Audit report in 2012, this information seems to be mostly non-public? Anyway, it looks like the answer is staffing and maintenance. It seems to be common for nuclear power plants to employ 500 to 1000 people. Fessenheim in France employed 700 people at the time of its closure, plus an additional 600 to 2000 during maintenance (per Wikipedia).
Meanwhile, nuclear seems to be very technically complicated with a bunch of weird Advanced Physics-y shit that can go wrong. Like, water pipes exploding because the nuclear radiation caused water molecules to split up by radiolysis and a design flaw allowed the hydrogen to collect somewhere. Or borated water eating through steel.
And now that I type this, it occurs to me that you can't just turn off the plant for safe maintenance work -- inside the dome is always going to be irradiated and probably require hazmat suits.
And, as you alluded to, nuclear plants use the steam based thermodynamic cycle but run cold because they have to maintain water in a liquid state while absorbing heat from the reactor. The power achievable from the Carnot cycle depends on the magnitude of the temperature difference: nuclear plants run at 300° C, coal plants about 570° C, and CCGT at 1000° C up to 1500° C.
From table ES3 we can see that steam based plants are expensive in pure equipment costs. Which makes sense comparing a tiny gas turbine giving direct mechanical force. Then you can use the waste heat for steam generation if that makes sense in your location.
Comparing this to coal and nuclear plants huge boiler and turbine setup with about the same output. Nuclear adding even more complexity of different loops and safety requirements.
Haven't dug deeper into that report than the executive summary though.
Nor does it include the cost of storage for nuclear. It's no accident Japan has the most pumped storage per unit of generation on the planet - it's because it has the most nuclear. Nuclear can't vary it's generation fast enough to match the daily variation in load.
Admittedly you need much less storage (until a tsunami comes along). But pumped storage only costs around $1/watt. (The unit of $/watt rather than $/kWh because the dam is only a minor fraction of the cost of pumped storage, and it drops quadratically with size.) Storage + renewable generation still costs less than 1/2 of nuclear.
> While historically large power grids used unvarying power plants to meet the base load, there is no specific technical requirement for this to be so. The base load can equally well be met by the appropriate quantity of intermittent power sources and dispatchable generation.[3][4]
Wind and solar don't anymore. They are completely self sustaining industries. In New York for example there was a bidding war to get the rights to develop off shore power.
> After three days and 64 rounds of bidding, the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Offshore Energy Management (BOEM) on Friday concluded the nation’s highest-grossing offshore energy lease sale ever, with winning bids from six companies totaling approximately $4.37 billion.
> Not only does the amount raised in the New York Bight lease sale far exceed the more than $400 million raised during the previous offshore wind sale in 2018, it even surpasses the highest amount raised during any offshore oil and gas lease sale ever in U.S. history.
> The results are a major milestone in the Biden-Harris administration’s goal of reaching 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030.
Clarification, nuclear is used for baseload power generation. It would compete with fossil fuels and hydro. Not solar and in most areas, not wind either. Offshore wind farms may be able to provide baseload power generation, but there are major maintenance issues with them right now.
Since there seems to be a lot of interest in Illinois energy subsidies, maybe we could get a tally on how much they spend each year and whom the benefactors are.
I got one news article that said they gave nuclear $130 millions each year in 2019, but then other sources say it is a number between $19 and $52 millions. Then in 2021 I find an article that they increased subsidies for renewables by an additional $350 millions per year. In one article that the total subsidies to build new solar and wind has a total of $600 millions per year. An other said that the total of subsidies for renewables are well above $1 billion per year. I couldn't find an article that estimates Illinois fossil fuel subsidies, but one said that the US spend around $20 billions per year.
Naturally each article want to either inflate or deflate those numbers to drive a political point, so it would be nice if anyone could bring some authoritative numbers that give the exact number of what Illinois actually spend in terms of energy subsidies.
