2y ago

Solar energy now overlaps in cost with nuclear fuel alone for "cheap" modular reactors

energy-utilities.com

Masdar awarded bid to construct and operate 1,800MW Phase 6 of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park

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

Which some solar projects are now matching

86 comments

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
- And are we taking into account safe storage of nuclear waste for thousands of years (which we as civilization still don't even have) or not?
  Today's journalists are really superficial.
  
  Fun fact, That "thousands of years" of storage is entirely a man made limitation.
  95% of nuclear waste is unspent fuel. That's the source of the "thousands of years" waiting for the more energetic parts of the unspent fuel to decay.
  There are a couple of nasty decay side products that last a long time in there, but those can also be fed into a reactor to be burned away. That's about 1% of waste. (mostly plutonium)
  Pretty much everything else, the remaining 4% or so of waste, is only really super dangerous for about 60-90 years, and only radioactive for about 300.
  Another fun fact, a lot of that 4% is actually valuable in various industry, including nuclear medicine.
  I always point to this video on the subject.
  Sadly, Jimmy Carter signed a ban on refining waste, and then got it incorporated into some international agreements. He thought we would just bury the waste again, it came out of the Earth, it could go back in until we were ready to refine it and move on. Sadly, Nymbyism killed that plan.
  
  This is just the marginal cost of the front end of the cycle ignoring the back end and all other fixed or marginal costs.
  Ie. If you already have bought an SMR in a high-solar-resource region, is it cheaper to buy fuel to run it during the day or to buy solar panels instead and turn it off. The answer being it's a wash right now, but uranium is going up for the moment and solar is going down for now.
  
  Safe storage of nuclear waste hasn’t been an issue for decades. You see it comes from this place called the ground, and goes back into this place called the ground. I know, it’s like science fiction.
- 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.
- 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 (or to meet daytime loads or flexible loads).
  This comparison is fuelling an SMR you already have vs. turning it off but continuing to staff it and pay for the back end of the fuel cycle as if it were running when it's sunny and running solar instead.
  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 (so long as the grid is not saturated with solar) 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.
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.
- 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 and both time and resources are limited.
  If your resources aren't limited and you can afford to pay 20c to abate a kg of CO2 even after saturating the renewable pipeline, then buy solar for anyone in the sunny parts of the global south and abate 15kg of CO2 with the same cost (as well as making their country, health and economy more stable). If you've funded all of that, then it's worth comparing the nuclear reactor to other methods for filling the gaps.
  Nobody has committed to step 1 yet, so it's moot.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.
Good
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.
- It arrived over the last 5 years.
  Additionally diurnal storage is required for nuclear to meet a variable load anyway (as an 8hr battery is $2.5/W vs $20/W for additional reactor capacity). So the comparison then becomes building the nuclear reactor to run at <25% load factor vs. filling the rest of the load with any other method.
- 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.

86 comments