The first hit for "france nuclear power production cost" comes up with this:
https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/fran...
> The full cost of existing nuclear power calculated by the CRE amounts to respectively €60.7/MWh over the period 2026-2030
And the first hit for "wind power cost europe mwhr" shows just how subsidized nuclear is:
https://windeurope.org/policy/topics/economics/
At its cheapest wind is half the cost of nuclear and at its worst is the same cost as nuclear - with none of the massive headaches.
> > The full cost of existing nuclear power calculated by the CRE amounts to respectively €60.7/MWh over the period 2026-2030
Assuming that price is with a 77% capacity factor there is an easy way to reduce the cost per MWh; get them to run with a higher capacity factor. Finland has achieved 94% over the last few years, and the US is up at 93% I believe. https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Assuming that this is mainly fixed costs the price could be down to 60.7*.77/.94 = 50 EUR/MWh; fuel is a minor input and might bump the price up to perhaps 53 EUR/MWh.
> The full cost of existing nuclear power calculated by the CRE amounts to respectively €60.7/MWh over the period 2026-2030
Which is 6 euro cents per KWh. Fully in line with what I said.
French consumers are paying less for their electricity than, for example, Californians (https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/heres-the-ave...) where electricity largely comes from natural gas (https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...).
>And the first hit for "wind power cost europe mwhr" shows just how subsidized nuclear is:
This source makes a vague claim about LCOE estimations not taking subsidies into account. It says nothing to establish the amount of those subsidies, or even to quantify the cost of any power source besides wind.
>with none of the massive headaches.
Onshore wind generation has plenty of drawbacks. Much of what's commonly said against nuclear is baseless fearmongering.
Wind has huge headaches.. bird deaths, littering the landscape with ugly windmills. Offshore wind farms also harm whales. The turbine blades end up in landfills.
> bird deaths
Ugh how long will it take for this to die?
Should operators be exempted from fines and liability when endangered birds are killed?
If the answer is no, then the myth can die.
If the answer is yes, then it will survive until wind farms operators no longer seek to be exempted.
Why should they not be exempted when we today understand how and why it’s happening and they are following the environmental rules set forth for their operating permit?
For example ensuring plants don’t get built in endangered bird habitats and rules concerning operation during endangered birds migratory periods.
Seems like you want wind power to fail, like nuclear is, and are attempting to sling any potential mud you can find.
> Why should they not be exempted when we today understand how and why it’s happening and they are following the environmental rules set forth for their operating permit?
So we should allow companies to operate unhindered within (evidence based) rules. Seems like an idea. Let us use that approach for all activities, including nuclear power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model is a model with scant evidence in the range relevant to operating a power station. Having said that the ICRP will be updating their model within a decade or so, so perhaps that barrier will disappear.
Let’s remove the Price Anderson act as well and have the nuclear plants insure for Fukushima level accident costs rather than relying on the tax payers to pick up the tab.
The entire industry would shut down tomorrow if they had to pay the true insurance cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
> have the nuclear plants insure for Fukushima level accident costs
The flip-side of the Price Anderson act is that the NRC is deeply involved in the operations of nuclear power stations.
Why stop at nuclear; why not aircraft, social networks or unvaccinated people? Also make all companies unlimited liability so their shareholders are accountable when something goes wrong.
Now you managed to pinpoint the issue with nuclear power.
Criticism is met with “don’t you dare question the subsidies” and then a stream of whataboutism across completely different industries rather than daring to compare with the alternative: renewables.
Because you already know that comparison makes the nuclear case even worse than it already is.
Renewables don’t have capped liability, at worst if regular insurance coverage is not enough the company will be bankrupted and the assets sold to pay for the damages.
For renewables it is already baked into the price because the risks are near zero.
> For renewables it is already baked into the price because the risks are near zero.
Remind me how much each eagle is worth? How about power cuts caused by wind farms tripping incorrectly? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49309691 How about disruption caused by failure to provide power in low wind conditions, or is that just a societal risk rather than investor risk?
So now eagles worth hundreds of billions.
Then more whataboutism. Typical.
How about the disruption caused by half the French nuclear fleet being offline at the height of the energy crisis?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
A recent study 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. > 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.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
> So now eagles worth hundreds of billions.
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/06/1091250692/esi-energy-bald-ea... around 30k USD per eagle. That's the cost of doing business, I guess.
> A recent study 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
Per paper you've linked to :-
They state that for nuclear to be cost competitive with (per table 2) onshore wind (1.03 MEUR/MW, 0.37 capacity factor), offshore wind (1.90 MEUR/MW, 0.51 capacity factor) and solar (0.6 MEUR/MW, 0.14 capacity factor) it has to have a price between offshore and onshore wind. One also has to wonder why the high nuclear scenario has 9GW of intermittent energy sources in the mix.Supplementary material chart S1 reveals that the nuclear power is a small part of the overall cost of the energy system. "Transport costs", "remaining investments" and "Operations and maintenance" are over 20B of the 25B EUR cost per year. Figure 6 of the paper needs to be viewed with these totals in mind.
Supplementary material chart S3 shows they model nuclear's availability factor by smoothing outages across the year, only ever producing 6,686MW. EDIT :- actually it goes up to 6,823MW for part of the year, averaging out to 6,743MW.
Overall the paper is rather poor.
EDIT :- Looking at the S3 data again, it appears that heating and unflexible demand add up to at most 9,770MW, so only another 2 nuclear power stations would cover that peak.
Because Denmark already have intermittent sources covering over half their demand? It is not like those will disappear?
Then you try to justify enormous nuclear costs because "it is not too bad" when comparing to what we already need to do.
You know there are similar costs today in the transportation system. Add up what we pay for fossil fueled ICEs and "it's not too bad!!!".
This is quite typical, a complete inability to accept reality calling anything not mindlessly promoting your precious nuclear power "poor".
> Because Denmark already have intermittent sources covering over half their demand?
So Denmark can not change its energy system from intermittents to nuclear because that's impossible, but it can change from fossil fuels to intermittents because it must be done? Given a 20 year lifetime for intermittents it should be possible to manage their phase-out.
> Then you try to justify enormous nuclear costs because "it is not too bad"
I did point out that the nuclear "is a small part of the overall cost of the energy system"; it is unclear how the authors have justified 80% of the system cost and how that varies with intermittency of energy supply and demand (e.g. reduced transmission cost, scope in the summer to use a excess electricity).
> a complete inability to accept reality
It is unfortunate that the model behind this is not available for peer study; https://www.energyplan.eu/atomkraft is not a live link and the archive.org version of this does not hold a copy of the scenario files. The results depend critically on the model used (and software used to solve it) so in the absence of further information all I can do is look at the results in the paper and point out obvious issues.
I've just spotted the cost modelling of the intermittents; rather than using IAEA LCOE data (or state LCOE directly), table 2 states costs in terms of capital, O&M as a percentage of investment and lifetime. Crunching their numbers (with a 3% interest rate) I come to offshore wind LCOE being 29.75 EUR/MWh, onshore wind 24.41 EUR/MWh and solar 33.44 EUR/MWh. This seems on the low side.
Do you believe that this paper is a good example of energy modelling?