Besides maybe coal
Comment on 40% of US electricity is now emissions-free
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 6 months agoPlus much of the cost of nuclear is tied with the construction of the plant not the operating costs, so a paid off plant isn’t particularly expensive.
I wish that were true. Nuclear plants built in the 60s and 70s (but still operating today) was losing money in Ohio. So the power companies bribed the Republican Ohio Speaker of the House $60 million dollars to pass a law that citizens have to pay extra fees totally over $1 billion dollars to power plants so that power companies can make a profit on nuclear. The bill was passed, and signed into law by the governor of Ohio, and years passed before the investigation found the bribery scandal.
That former Ohio Speaker of the House was sentenced to 20 years in prison finally.
The bad bribed-passed law is still on the books in Ohio and citizens are still paying extra to artificially make nuclear profitable for the power company. Here’s just a small source for the whole sorted story..
So no, even old built nuclear power plants are still more expensive that nearly all other electricity sources in the USA.
DanglingFury@lemmy.world 6 months ago
ironeagl@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
They’ve had to keep upgrading them - the percentage of nuclear is the same, but no new plants have been built, so that extra power has come from research on how close to the red line they can actually run.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 5 months ago
New reactors just came online in Georgia this year. A $15 billion dollar planned project that cost $30 billion with overruns.
So new or old, nuclear is really expensive electricity.
ironeagl@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
A coal power plant is rougly the same cost per GW as solar or wind, doesn’t mean we should build more of them. I agree it’s expensive, but so were solar and wind a couple decades ago. Government investment helped research, development, scaling up - imagine if that had been done in the '80s, we wouldn’t be building natural gas plants right now.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Incorrect.
source
The first commercial nuclear power plant in the USA came online in 1958. source That’s 66 years ago. If time was going to make it cheaper we would have seen that by now. Instead the most recent reactors to come online, which occurred just this year, were projected to cost $14 billion and instead are cost $31 billion! Even worst, this isn’t an entirely new nuclear power plant, its just two additional reactors at an existing operational plant. source
Nuclear just costs too much for what you get at the end.