CSIRO reaffirms nuclear power likely to cost twice as much as renewables

6 comments

1. The Gencost report now takes into account long term operations for nuclear plants, and unsurprisingly does not find that it lowers the cost per kWh.

   It also reaffirms that baseload on the power producer side is dead. Sure you can technically run nuclear plants at 90% capacity factor like how it is done in the US.

   But as the article reports:

   > What’s more, Mr Graham said that while Australia didn’t have any nuclear plants, it had plenty of black coal generators, which were analogous in many ways because they were designed to run full throttle most of the time.

   > And Australia’s black coal generators, he said, were operating at ever lower capacity factors as cheap renewable energy — particularly solar power — flooded into the market and squeezed out conventional sources.

   > “But we continue to also use a range which recognises that some base-load generation can operate down closer to 50-53 per cent.”

   What is incredible is that renewables deliver. From a nascent industry 20 years ago to today making up 2/3 of global energy investment due to simply being cheaper and better.

   We are now starting to work out the large grid scale models including storage, transmission, ancillary services and firming and for every passing year the calculations become easier and cheaper.

   We have an interesting decade ahead of us as renewables disrupt sector by sector allowing us to decarbonize without lowering living standards.

   Full report: https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25ConsultDraft_20241205.pdf

2. The sad issue is this is largely only true in Australia, where space for solar is over abundant, there is a very high sunshine duration per year, one of the largest even, and the demand for baseload power is quite low as most of the population lives with vast expanses of lands very close. I don’t see the same findings applicable to, for example, central Europe.

3. And one more upside, renewables create no deadly by-products that have to be sequestered in the ground somewhere for a thousand years.

4. 2050: “yeh, we knew we could have done better, but we choose the cheapest option”.

5. Nice to see some sensible talk about nuclear energy. I suspect that much of pro-nuclear enthusiasm that generally plagues Reddit is “encouraged” by the AI industry, which sees new plants as a means of quickly scaling production to keep up with the demands of their hungry follies.

6. Is that renewables including energy storage?

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