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0 pointsenergy12310mo ago0 comments

Yeah, if we went back in time and built nuclear then we'd have nuclear today, and the fixed costs would have been paid by a previous generation. Is that surprising?

But that doesn't inform us on what the optimal policy decision is in the current year of 2025 given 2025 prices and time-to-build of the various options.

In Australia renewables have the perfect confluence of multiple factors:

- low seasonable variability of insolation in the north

- high wind speeds in the south

- land availability for solar

- high statistical diversification of renewables due to size

- higher than normal costs of nuclear due to first-of-a-kind costs dominating the total build-out costs due to the small energy needs of the country, and higher labor costs

The CSIRO studied this for Australia and released a report about it. Even when you factor in storage and transmission costs, renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear.

0 comments

nandomrumber10mo ago

The whole argument is like going back 40 years and claiming there’s no point thinking about deploying nor researching & developing solar / wind because we don’t have the expertise nor technology.

We still don’t. Australia doesn’t manufacture solar panels, and other than building the wind turbine masts locally, we don’t manufacture wind turbines either.

Refusing to commit to developing a domestic nuclear power industry commits future generations from having that knowledge and skill base.

And I struggle to understand how anyone can, with a straight face, claim nuclear is too expensive, as though more solar and wind is going make retail electricity prices in Australia cheaper.

AU$0.325 per kWh is ridiculous. We export more coal to China than we use locally, and their electricity is cheaper (around half the cost) and dominated by coal, hydro, and nuclear.

CSIRO perfidy.

ZeroGravitas10mo ago

How did nuclear slip into your list of power sources that dominate the Chinese grid? You skipped over two other sources that generate double what nuclear does and are growing faster:

Coal 58.2%

Hydro 13%

Wind 9.8%

Solar 8.3%

Nuclear 4.4%

https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/

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