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Nuclear versus Renewables: The only cost that matters is the one the customers pay

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rangerrebew:
Nuclear versus Renewables: The only cost that matters is the one the customers pay
By Jo Nova

Games with levelized guesses don’t take all the hidden costs into account
Prize of the day for national policy research goes to Nick Cater, who managed to ridicule our billion dollar national science agency, the CSIRO, with a newspaper column.

The CSIRO put out a report proclaiming that nuclear power would be impossible before 2040 and cost “twice as much” as renewables. But Nick Cater just compared electricity in New South Wales to Finland to prove their 129 pages of modeled costs were wrong:

Finland’s clean, Green nuclear power a lesson for Labor
On Saturday….  Electricity generation in NSW was releasing 750g of carbon into the atmosphere per megawatt hour of electricity. In Finland, it was 35g.

If the CSIRO’s GenCost report is to be believed, Finnish electricity prices should have gone through the roof a year ago when its newest reactor was turned on. They did not. The retail price of electricity in Finland, which is indexed to the spot market, came down almost immediately.

https://joannenova.com.au/2024/05/nuclear-versus-renewables-the-only-cost-that-matters-is-the-one-the-customers-pay/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=nuclear-versus-renewables-the-only-cost-that-matters-is-the-one-the-customers-pay

Smokin Joe:
But they were gonna be so cheap it wouldn't pay to bill for electricity...

The_Reader_David:

--- Quote from: Smokin Joe on May 23, 2024, 09:47:18 pm ---But they were gonna be so cheap it wouldn't pay to bill for electricity...

--- End quote ---

And had we made a standardized design, mass produced them, not built them on earthquake faults and with fail-safe shut down mechanisms, that prediction might well have come true.  Instead, each nuclear reactor was custom built, required its own separate permitting process, and the Soviet-backed anti-nuclear "greens" managed to use the non-event at Three Mile Island to gin up enough opposition that building reactors ground to a halt.

We should still do that, come up with a standard design (or three -- say a standard large uranium base reactor, a standard thorium reactor and a small modular uranium based reactor) and mass-produce them.  The climate change alarmists are deluded, but they have pointed out correctly that we cannot assume the earth's climate will remain at a climate optimum.  Whether it gets a lot hotter, or a lot colder, we'll need more energy to adapt should there be a radical change, and nuclear is the only realistic source.  (Heck, if we insist on building lots of AI, we'll need more energy even if the climate settles into something like the Medieval Climate Optimum for the next three centuries, and again nuclear is the only realistic source.)

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