Here in the UK it would be super convenient if cost-effective nuclear power plants could be built.
After all, to decarbonise the economy we need to replace petrol cars with EVs, and gas-fired central heating with heat pumps - which will mean a big increase in demand for electricity. A lot of that heat demand will be in winter, when solar output is at its lowest. And a lot of our existing power plants are past the end of their designed life.
The problem is we're trying to build one nuclear power plant, and it's going pretty badly.
It's an extra reactor on an existing site - that should make things easy, right? And it's being built by the French who operate loads of nuclear power plants - should be experienced specialists building a cookie-cutter replica of a proven design, right? And it's using private-sector finance with the government just guaranteeing an electricity purchase price - should remove the incentive for delays and cost over-runs that plague cost-plus contracts used in things like defence procurement, right?
But it turns out none of these tricks was able to overcome the curse of large infrastructure projects, and it's going to be delayed and expensive. And all the time the cost of the project has been going up, the cost of renewables has been falling.
I can understand the argument for building fewer and larger nuclear power plants - you only have to get one set of locals to support you, do all the impact assessment paperwork once and so on - but I can't help but wonder what would have happened if we'd instead set out to build ten nuclear power plants, each one tenth the size, so there weren't so many things being done for the first time in a generation.
> And all the time the cost of the project has been going up, the cost of renewables has been falling.
This is the #1 reason why I'm a bit more pessimistic on nuclear than I used to be.
I still think it has a place in a modern power grid and probably increasingly so as available sites for renewables go down. However, we simply aren't there yet. Both renewables and batteries have seen precipitous drops in pricing which ultimately means they make more sense as they are both cheaper and faster to deploy.
After all, to decarbonise the economy we need to replace petrol cars with EVs, and gas-fired central heating with heat pumps - which will mean a big increase in demand for electricity. A lot of that heat demand will be in winter, when solar output is at its lowest. And a lot of our existing power plants are past the end of their designed life.
The problem is we're trying to build one nuclear power plant, and it's going pretty badly.
It's an extra reactor on an existing site - that should make things easy, right? And it's being built by the French who operate loads of nuclear power plants - should be experienced specialists building a cookie-cutter replica of a proven design, right? And it's using private-sector finance with the government just guaranteeing an electricity purchase price - should remove the incentive for delays and cost over-runs that plague cost-plus contracts used in things like defence procurement, right?
But it turns out none of these tricks was able to overcome the curse of large infrastructure projects, and it's going to be delayed and expensive. And all the time the cost of the project has been going up, the cost of renewables has been falling.
I can understand the argument for building fewer and larger nuclear power plants - you only have to get one set of locals to support you, do all the impact assessment paperwork once and so on - but I can't help but wonder what would have happened if we'd instead set out to build ten nuclear power plants, each one tenth the size, so there weren't so many things being done for the first time in a generation.