Cost of nuclear power/Debate Guide

Nuclear is too expensive

Quotes from Amory Lovins, Bloomberg, 17 Dec 2021:
"Nuclear power is ... now stagnant. In 2020, its global capacity additions minus retirements totaled only 0.4 GW (billion watts). Renewables in contrast added 278.3 GW ... Game over."
"New plants cost 3–8x or 5–13x more per kWh than unsubsidized new solar or windpower,"
"'Small Modular' or 'Advanced' reactors can’t change the outcome. Their smaller units cost less but output falls even more ... Mass production can’t bridge that huge cost gap - nor could SMRs scale before renewables have decarbonized the US grid."
"Even free reactors couldn’t compete: their non-nuclear parts cost too much."
"SMRs’ novel safety and proliferation issues threaten threadbare schedules and budgets, so promoters are attacking bedrock safety regulations. NRC’s proposed Part 53 would perfect long-evolving regulatory capture, shifting its expert staff’s end-to-end process from specific prescriptive standards, rigorous quality control, and verified technical performance to unsupported claims, proprietary data, and political appointees’ subjective risk estimates."
"Germany replaced both nuclear and coal generation with efficiency and renewables: in 2010–20, generation from lignite fell 37%, hard coal 64%, oil 52%, and nuclear 54%; gas power rose 3%; GDP rose 11% (17% pre-pandemic); power-sector CO₂ fell 41%, meeting its target a year early with five percentage points to spare."

Replies:
These critiques apply to the old Pressurized Water Reactor designs. Newer designs avoid the high pressures that require massive containment structures and expensive safety systems. See for example this cost estimate of a plant using molten salt reactors. Reactor designers are also frustrated with what they believe to be unnecessary costs, not "bedrock safety regulations". See for example the 30 million dollar pipe brace or this article on ALARA.

Here is a point by point rebuttal of Lovins' comments, from Dr. Al Scott - The Rational View

• "Nuclear power is ... now stagnant. In 2020, its global capacity additions minus retirements totaled only 0.4 GW (billion watts). Renewables in contrast added 278.3 GW ... Game over."

This logical fallacy I shall name as argumentum ad momentum. One need only look at recent polling data to find that public opinion has changed in favour of nuclear energy, and governments are listening.

• "New plants cost 3–8x or 5–13x more per kWh than unsubsidized new solar or windpower,"

This is cherry picking to some extent. Certainly recent first-of-a-kind builds in the US and UK have been very expensive, with Fukushima-motivated regulation updates requiring costly design charges mid-build. The median overnight pre-Fukushima cost of New Nuclear globally was around $2000/kW (Lovering et al. 2016), or about 25% of what [Lazard’s LCOE] quotes.

“The 2020 edition of “Projected Costs of Generating Electricity”, released every five years by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) under the oversight of the Expert Group on Electricity Generating Costs (EGC Expert Group), examines data from 243 plants across 24 countries… The “Projected Costs” report, in an effort to complement the LCOE metric, for the first time introduces a more system specific cost comparison, value-adjusted LCOE (VALCOE), which modifies LCOE of a particular technology in a specific electricity system according to its contribution to enabling all aspects of securely operating the system… LCOE, [on which Lovins based his claim], neglects the system contribution of different technologies, which depend on variability, dispatchability, response time, cost structure and place in the merit order, but also on system configuration and flexibility resources.” (Reuters 2021, ‘New Nuclear, LTO among cheapest low carbon options, report shows’).

Most studies that investigate the full system cost of electricity sources conclude that new Nuclear is the cheapest low carbon option at the grid level. See Nuclear power for Poland, 2020 and the possible role of Nuclear in the Dutch energy mix in the future, 2020.

• "'Small Modular' or 'Advanced' reactors can’t change the outcome. Their smaller units cost less but output falls even more ... Mass production can’t bridge that huge cost gap - nor could SMRs scale before renewables have decarbonized the US grid."

This is pure speculation. It is clear that Germany’s 15 year Energiewende experiment, including the world’s largest investment in renewable energy, has failed to decrease that country’s carbon intensity below 300 gCO₂/KWh. Suggesting that renewables alone are capable of decarbonizing a major grid is not supported by evidence. Fortunately there is evidence from both France and Ontario that a nuclear-based grid can consistently achieve <100gCO₂/KWh, and for less investment (The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World, MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) 2018).

• "Even free reactors couldn’t compete: their non-nuclear parts cost too much."

This is nonsense. One need only notice that renewables need to significantly overproduce energy if they are only on 30% of the time, in order to charge whatever storage medium is hypothesized to cover the gaps. During this period, when energy sources are all over producing, electricity prices often go negative. In effect a renewables-only grid cannibalizes its returns for investors.

• "SMRs’ novel safety and proliferation issues threaten threadbare schedules and budgets, so promoters are attacking bedrock safety regulations. NRC’s proposed Part 53 would perfect long-evolving regulatory capture, shifting its expert staff’s end-to-end process from specific prescriptive standards, rigorous quality control, and verified technical performance to unsupported claims, proprietary data, and political appointees’ subjective risk estimates."

We need to level the regulatory playing field to rationally decarbonize. Nuclear is the only energy source that is held to these demanding safety requirements, and society has reaped the benefits. Unfortunately, this asymmetric regulatory burden based on the ALARA principle, has also increased the cost of Nuclear relative to all other power sources. If we could apply NRC-like standards to all energy sources we wouldn’t have to worry about train derailments and particulate emissions killing millions every year, and we would likely not be faced with a climate crisis.

• "Germany replaced both nuclear and coal generation with efficiency and renewables: in 2010–20, generation from lignite fell 37%, hard coal 64%, oil 52%, and nuclear 54%; gas power rose 3%; GDP rose 11% (17% pre-pandemic); power-sector CO₂ fell 41%, meeting its target a year early with five percentage points to spare."

Since that pandemic-induced low, Germanys CO₂ intensity has climbed substantially to around 400 gCO₂/KWh (electricitymap.org) with no likelihood of approaching the success that France has achieved since the 1980’s using nuclear (<100 gCO₂/KWh). Due to shortages of Russian gas, and the reliability problems of renewable energy, Germany has been restarting coal plants. The direct impact of Germany’s choice to sideline its low carbon nuclear fleet is expected to be over 20,000 avoidable premature deaths from increased coal burning until their hypothesized and seemingly overly optimistic 2035 phaseout (Kharecha & Sato 2019, Implications of energy and CO₂ emission changes in Japan and Germany after the Fukushima accident, Energy Policy).