They’ve had to keep upgrading them - the percentage of nuclear is the same, but no new plants have been built, so that extra power has come from research on how close to the red line they can actually run.
New reactors just came online in Georgia this year. A $15 billion dollar planned project that cost $30 billion with overruns.
So new or old, nuclear is really expensive electricity.
A coal power plant is rougly the same cost per GW as solar or wind, doesn’t mean we should build more of them. I agree it’s expensive, but so were solar and wind a couple decades ago. Government investment helped research, development, scaling up - imagine if that had been done in the '80s, we wouldn’t be building natural gas plants right now.
A coal power plant is rougly the same cost per GW as solar or wind
Incorrect. Costs listed per KW of generation:
- Coal power $4,074 (3.07 x the cost of solar PV and 2.37x the cost of onshore wind)
- Wind power (onshore) $1,718
- Solar photovoltaic $1,327
I agree it’s expensive, but so were solar and wind a couple decades ago. Government investment helped research, development, scaling up - imagine if that had been done in the '80s
The first commercial nuclear power plant in the USA came online in 1958. source That’s 66 years ago. If time was going to make it cheaper we would have seen that by now. Instead the most recent reactors to come online, which occurred just this year, were projected to cost $14 billion and instead are cost $31 billion! Even worst, this isn’t an entirely new nuclear power plant, its just two additional reactors at an existing operational plant. source
Nuclear just costs too much for what you get at the end.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Different methods of electricity generation can incur a variety of different costs, which can be divided into three general categories: 1) wholesale costs, or all costs paid by utilities associated with acquiring and distributing electricity to consumers, 2) retail costs paid by consumers, and 3) external costs, or externalities, imposed on society. Wholesale costs include initial capital, operations & maintenance (O&M), transmission, and costs of decommissioning. Depending on the local regulatory environment, some or all wholesale costs may be passed through to consumers. These are costs per unit of energy, typically represented as dollars/megawatt hour (wholesale). The calculations also assist governments in making decisions regarding energy policy. On average the levelized cost of electricity from utility scale solar power and onshore wind power is less than from coal and gas-fired power stations,: TS-25 but this varies a lot depending on location.: 6–65Ah, perhaps my source was off. Thanks for the additional data.
But looking at it another way, nuclear is less than twice coal. Estimating the cost of that georgia plant would put it at $16-17B, so those overruns would be atypical.
But my main point on cost is that government investment has been lacking in nuclear compared to renewables: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2021/12/27/why-is-solar-energy-getting-250-times-more-in-federal-tax-credits-than-nuclear/?sh=4a783c3221cf
Without investment, it’s going to stay just as expensive. And the main regulating body not having a mandate to develop the technology has just been holding us back.