Submitted 8 months ago by schroedingershat@lemmy.world to energy@slrpnk.net
https://energy-utilities.com/masdar-awarded-bid-to-construct-and-operate-1-news121979.html
Uranium is $128.30/kg
After enrichment, conversion and fabrication that’s $3400/kg for 4.95% fuel.
At 36-45MWd/kg and a net thermal efficiency of 25% or $12.5/MWh up front.
With a 90 month lead time (72 month fuel cycle and 18 months inventory) at 3% this is $16.2/MWh
Why is it always comparing solar vs nuclear. What we need to compare them against is fossil fuels. Nuclear and renewables should be used together if we want to phase out fossil fuel in a timely manner.
The two are compared because money is not infinite and there’s an opportunity cost to picking either one
It’s Dubai we’re talking about here, money is infinite as far as they’re concerned. The alternative to nuclear for a baseline will always be fossil fuels until we can store the surplus of renewables efficiently, which is arguably further away than SMRs.
This comparison is whether you should build current gen solar in a good location instead of running proposed cheap nuclear plants during the day even after building it.
“let’s do both” is just a delay tactic when only one works.
How is it that only one works? Nuclear seems more expensive based on this but does it take into account the cost of land, the fact that solar is intermittent, or that electricity from huge solar farms will need to be brought to where the demand is (cities) while nuclear can be much closer to limit losses. Both nuclear and solar have their place and are vital tools in the fight against climate change. The comparison is for the local utilities to decide and trying to compare directly and saying one is always better than the other is ignorant at best.
Let’s do both works when the alternative is fossil fuels and when we shouldn’t invest a dime more into them as energy sources.
Don’t like facts getting in the way of juicy greenwashing lies hey.
Renewables can’t be used without the same amount of storage full stop. 3 days is the standard minimum. Their isn’t enough lithium in the world let alone money to make it feasible.
So back on planet earth. Storage is an inescapable necessity for renewables conveniently left out.
Yeah, if you only want meaningful power on a sunny day in daylight hours.
Where’s all this paradigm changing battery tech I keep hearing is on the way for 20 years?
They still generate power even on overcast days. Think about the difference between the middle of the night and an overcast day. It’s still a considerable amount of light.
From experience, I’m aware that they do.
A small fraction of what they generate in direct sunlight.
You just don’t need that much storage and at the same time battery storage is already being installed at an exponential rate, much like PV started to some 15 years ago. We also already have hydro and gas peaker plants that aren’t going anywhere for the next 10ish years.
It arrived over the last 5 years
Good
Uranium3006@kbin.social 8 months ago
Are we talking just nameplate capacity or including the energy storage needs in the price? It's not really apples to apples unless you compare the costs of running each 24/7
MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
It is comparing the cost of nuclear fuel to generate a kWh of electricity vs the cost of a solar to generate a kWh of electricity in what is a great location.
So it excludes the entire construction cost of the nuclear plant as well as operating the nuclear plant. It also excludes any sort of storage costs for running the grid with solar. However we are talking about the UAE for solar, so cloudy days without sunshine are basicly not a thing. So you really only need a nights worth of batterie storage. Most consumption happens during the day, so we are talking maybe a third of total generation would need to be stored. So for a MWh of daily use and $333/kWh. Given that you need 333.3kWh of storage, which costs $111,000 total.
Since this is only fuel costs thou and the nuclear plant has to be built as well, which is not included in fuel costs. So lets look at what 1MWh a day would cost in terms of nuclear power plant. Olkiluoto3 was just finished for $12billion for 1,600MW or $312,500 for a MWh per day.
So in this case you are basicly betting that a nuclear power plant lasts three times longer then the battery storage and battery storage costs are not falling, which is propably not going to be the case. Also a bunch of technologies do not care too much about when they get power. If you for example have super cheap electrolysis to produce hydrogen during the day, that is an intressting use case. Also grids propably have more then just one power source, so stuff like wind power, hydro and so forth might also be options in some grids and solar prices are falling over time.
schroedingershat@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This particular pearl clutch is even stupider than usual when it was already explicitly not apples to apples. For a time-dependent load you have the other 90% of the budget for the nuclear reactor to figure out storage.
If the marginal cost of the SMR is higher than the all-in cost of solar, then it is always optimal to build the PV array even if you already have surplus nuclear. So the much bigger portion of the SMR cost (the reactor and fixed O&M) has to justify itself just on the loads that solar cannot feed.
Of course this is not true everywhere yet (and this does not apply to more efficient large reactors), but the niche for SMRs is smaller than traditional reactors and shrinking.