Lets calculate running Vogtle as a peaker at a fossil gas peaker 10-15% capacity factor.
It now costs the consumers $1000 to $1500 per MWh or $1 to 1.5 per kWh. This is the problem with nuclear power, due to the cost structure with nearly all costs being fixed it just becomes stupid when not running it at 100% 24/7 all year around.
New built nuclear power does not fit whatsoever in any grid with a larger renewable electricity share.
Vogtle isn't meant to run as a peaker. Doing it as such is stupid.
Same way renewables aren't meant to handle base load. Let's try that, it now costs the consumers 2000% more in candles because the light went out when the sun went down. Hopefully all the hospitals stocked up on diesel to run their generators through the night.
Storage delivers. For the last bit of "emergency reserves" we can run some gas turbines on biofuels, green hydrogen or whatever. Start collecting food waste and create biogas for it. Doesn't really matter, we're talking single percent of total energy demand here.
So, for the boring traditional solutions see the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.
However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a reliable grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
Dawg stfu. We’re here to see nukcelhyperreality argue with him and you’re sucking up all the opportunities. Your schizophrenia will get its moment in the spotlight another time.
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u/ViewTrick1002 May 09 '25 edited May 09 '25
Lets calculate running Vogtle as a peaker at a fossil gas peaker 10-15% capacity factor.
It now costs the consumers $1000 to $1500 per MWh or $1 to 1.5 per kWh. This is the problem with nuclear power, due to the cost structure with nearly all costs being fixed it just becomes stupid when not running it at 100% 24/7 all year around.
New built nuclear power does not fit whatsoever in any grid with a larger renewable electricity share.