it would be a perfectly competitive form of power by 01970s standards, but naval nuclear reactors, chinese nuclear reactors, and russian nuclear reactors are not regulated into oblivion and have not had their economics wrecked by lobbying. nevertheless, they remain more expensive and less economical than even fossil-fuel plants in both warships and china. conceivably capitalism could solve that problem (us defense contractors and chinese power plant builders are pretty tightly state-linked rather than free-market actors) but we don't have strong reasons for believing so
crawford here talks optimistically about building nuclear plants for 250¢ per (nameplate) watt. europe and india are already building solar farms for 60¢ per (peak, nameplate) watt, a cost that is dropping dramatically year by year. he does plot some plants being built that cheaply in the 01960s in the us, in inflation-adjusted 02010 dollars, but for some reason he doesn't comment on that, and he doesn't find anyone able to do anything like that in recent years; the 'building cheaply' he cites in south korea and india is 190¢–250¢ per watt. this suggests that perhaps either the inflation adjustment or the original cost figures are incorrect
solar does of course have a lower capacity factor than nuclear, but there are numerous countries where it's 30% or better, so 60¢ per peak watt is still less than 200¢ per long-term average watt. also 60¢ today is 41¢ in the 02010 dollars crawford is using: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60&year1=20240...
i sympathize with crawford's leanings but even the most generous reading of his claims doesn't support the contention that nuclear can be built cheaply enough to compete with solar
None of those watts are dispatchable though. A solar plant can't look ahead a month and bid a block of kWh on any given day with any confidence.
Solar and Wind in "price per watt" are meaningless when storage is not accounted for. In fact a huge chunk of their actual cost of power has to be buying contracts for the backup plants to provide the kWh they want to promise but may not be able to deliver (hence the true cost of a kWh from a solar plant is basically whatever it would cost a gas plant to produce it).
The quality isn't the same, but price is its own reward. We'll learn how to shift a lot of industrial production around if the price goes low enough.
Watt-for-watt dispatchable is superior, but for half price there are probably a lot of uses that will turn out to be quite flexible. The energy markets don't appear to have quite gotten to the point where they handle that flexibility (prices keep dipping negative, which is unfortunate if you understand what that implies), but it is reasonable to expect that it is coming.
>We'll learn how to shift a lot of industrial production around if the price goes low enough.
Are you going to send everyone home on overcast days? What if production needs to run 24/7? Solar is a whole solution if and only if storage is solved on a massive scale. Even with adequate storage, it still isn't going to work in some parts of the world or during certain seasons.
In the end, I think we need a mix of energy sources and working to make nuclear cost effective is part of a practical low carbon energy future. I just don't understand the confrontational nature of the solar vs. nuclear argument. Solar is absolutely going to be a huge part of our energy future. Supplementation by cost-effective nuclear would be a great complement to solar. Nuclear costs might not ever get low enough, but we'll never know if we don't put serious effort behind the goal.
yeah, negative lmps with solar is 100% perverse bureaucratic incentives. solar panels aren't like coal plants (or conventional nuclear) where they overheat if you stop drawing power from them, and take hours to heat back up if you ramp down their burn rate; they're perfectly happy to be left in the sun either open-circuited or (more safely) short-circuited, and can return to supplying grid power in literally nanoseconds
you'd think it would turn out to be a huge chunk, but it turns out to be relatively marginal. also power producers bid on day-ahead markets generally, not month-ahead markets
crawford here talks optimistically about building nuclear plants for 250¢ per (nameplate) watt. europe and india are already building solar farms for 60¢ per (peak, nameplate) watt, a cost that is dropping dramatically year by year. he does plot some plants being built that cheaply in the 01960s in the us, in inflation-adjusted 02010 dollars, but for some reason he doesn't comment on that, and he doesn't find anyone able to do anything like that in recent years; the 'building cheaply' he cites in south korea and india is 190¢–250¢ per watt. this suggests that perhaps either the inflation adjustment or the original cost figures are incorrect
solar does of course have a lower capacity factor than nuclear, but there are numerous countries where it's 30% or better, so 60¢ per peak watt is still less than 200¢ per long-term average watt. also 60¢ today is 41¢ in the 02010 dollars crawford is using: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60&year1=20240...
i sympathize with crawford's leanings but even the most generous reading of his claims doesn't support the contention that nuclear can be built cheaply enough to compete with solar