AFAIK the cost of nuclear is building it, but not running it. If you have enough nuclear to provide enough energy when there is no wind, then why do you need to build wind energy at all?
One immediate reason is its going to take another decade (conservatively) to even build one of these modular reactors. Another is the vast cost of nuclear compared to wind. We're deploying wind farms in large numbers right now (and even sometimes connecting them to the grid).
This slow buildout will logically limit nuclear power to a minor role in the UK. By the time we could possibly build out large amounts of nuclear it seems likely we will already have built out large amounts of cheap wind power. With some battery storage and solar this can cover us for 90-95% of the year. For the remainder we will need dispatchable backup power. That will be gas and maybe at some point green hydrogen or its derivatives.
I suspect we will always keep around a little nuclear to maintain expertise for strategic national security reasons but it is hard to see nuclear power making sense in an energy market dominated by intermittent renewables like the UK.
> its going to take another decade (conservatively) to even build one of these modular reactors.
So nuclear reactors can be built to supply the energy and power as the offshore wind farms get decommissioned. The rise and fall.
> Another is the vast cost of nuclear compared to wind.
What do you mean by cost? Capital expenditure per kW of nominal capacity, or by total energy generated? Plus should we consider other costs (backup, transmission, curtailment)?
A big part of the cost is design. China has built a lot of nuclear capacity at a low cost by essentially copying and pasting the same design, something that should be even easier with SMRs.
Relatively low cost. The cost of PV has dropped much faster and they’re building much more of it, even compared to their plans from a decade ago. SMRs are supposed to be the design that solves this, essentially moving nuclear into the same “build it at mass scale in a factory” footing that solar PV is on. But solar is deep down the production curve and SMRs are just beginning it.
Suppose you need 10GW of power for an absolute baseline. Enough to heat homes to a temperature that people don't freeze to death on a cold day, to keep power to hospitals and other critical services, etc. Then you need another 10GW on top of that to run aluminum smelters and heat homes to 80°F instead of 60°F and things like that.
If you have 20GW (average) of wind but you get an extended period of low generation and the batteries run down, people die. If you have 10GW (average) of wind and 10GW of nuclear and you get an extended period of low wind generation, the price of electricity goes up that week and people turn off their aluminum smelters and things but nobody dies. If you have 20GW of nuclear you can run the aluminum smelter 52 weeks a year instead of 51 but then people are paying more for electricity than they would with renewables in the mix, which isn't worth it.
Because it's not that simple. If you want 100% availability year-round then you need about 2X overproduction and quite a lot of storage, not just the four hours normally paired with solar today. That could end up being more expensive than nuclear.
But that doesn't change the fact that solar on the margins, without the availability requirement, is quite a bit cheaper than nuclear. So going 100% nuclear probably isn't the cheapest option either. The optimum is a mix in the middle somewhere.
Take California. The minimum demand is 15 GW and peak demand 52 GW.
What you’re saying is they they should use extremely expensive nuclear power to cover the easy portion and then have renewables when they are the most strained supply 37 GW.
Why not just cheap renewables for everything?
New built power literally does not make sense when real constraints are added.
The cost of nuclear is two fold - government bureaucracy, and the lack of commercialization due to decades of misinformation from the eco-groups.
The plans just to build a tunnel under the Thames in the UK in 2025 is over 2 million pages at the moment, imagine what it is for the Sizewell C reactor - the environmental assessment on its own was 44,000 pages.
SMRs are a good middle ground because they can be commercialized and cost can be driven down once the government gets out of the way.
