Comment by JumpCrisscross
3 months ago
> it is now even more expensive than solar/wind, at least in the Western world
Correct with that caveat.
China is able to build it cheaply enough that it rivals solar/wind + gas, which is what the West is doing. (Solar/wind + battery is cute, but it's been crowded out by the quicker-deploying gas infrastructure, as well as the higher prices EV manufacturers are willing to pay for supply. The threat to gas was nuclear baseload, which could support a smaller battery footprint, but the gas lobbyists seem to have successfully dispatched it.)
What knifed new nuclear in the US was not natural gas lobbyists, but natural gas prices. Quote from December 2018:
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/71/12/26/904707/US...
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
(The Henry Hub natural gas price on 6/11/2024 was $2.71/MMBtu, or $2.17/MMBtu in Dec. 2018 dollars.)
Interest in the US "nuclear renaissance" evaporated once it became clear fracking would make natural gas cheap for the foreseeable future. What's interesting about renewables in the US is they are plowing ahead with large deployments even in the face of cheap natural gas.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...
Sure. They're maxing out production of renewables and supplementing with nuclear. As renewable production ramps, it displaces more nuclear. We're doing the same thing, except with natural gas. If we could deploy infinite renewable energy instantly, that would obviously be preferable. But we can't. So China gets nukes and we get gas. Almost certainly for the next 50 years. (Good luck to whoever has to fight natural gas's lobbyists in ten years when they think the brand-new LNG terminals are going to go down without a fight.)
Nuclear doesn’t provide the kind of dispatchable power you need to supplement a renewable grid. Nuke plants of the type China is building can’t be spun up and down fast enough. China is currently planning to build a renewable grid backed by fossil fuels just like the US, except they’re using modern coal plants (and paying them not to generate) and we’re using gas. Ultimately it seems likely that coal will be replaced with pumped hydro and battery storage as prices drop, and the nuclear plants will have fewer and fewer profitable applications.
But there’s nothing wrong with all that. China conducted a natural experiment with multiple technologies and renewables and storage appear to have won big. The important thing is that those of us outside of China can learn the lessons without having to repeat the experiment.
We (and the Chinese) can deploy renewables (and storage) much faster than nuclear.
I suspect the only reason China is continuing to build NPPs is inertia, and a desire to not amputate that part of their industrial sector. The grandiose plans have been scaled way back. But that can continue for only so long before it's written off.