The problem with nuclear is that while we need base-load, base-load doesn't pay.
Let's say I have a $billion to invest. My goal is return on investment. Why would I pick nuclear over solar?
Solar is cheap, quick to build, low maintainence, requires a small amount of "cheap" labor, and "worst case" stops working.
Nuclear takes 15 years of planning, costs a fortune just to get started, will guarantee endless fights with pretty much everyone, has long-term clean up questions, requires lots of very expensive engineers to keep running. (And worst case is pretty much as bad as you can imagine).
Oh right, nuclear makes electricity at night. When it's cheapest.
I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward.
When you're so far down the rabbit hole that cheap virtually unlimited clean electricity is bad because it cannot make you rich...
If killing children was profitable and somehow legal we'd find people like you investing billions in it I assume
I doubt you understand how many solar panels you'd need to replace nuclear, I also doubt you understand how some countries cannot live on solar power for size and geographical reasons alone
When things are not profitable-- meaning people who expend resources in it are constantly having to add external resources just to stay involved-- those situations result in shrinking engagement and resources. You can have all the passion and altruism in the world, but hypothetically if you make an investment with -10% annual return, let's say, you will eventually be unable despite your best efforts, to expand this investment or even to maintain it in its original condition. Contrast this with a +10% annual return, it will be self-sustaining and someone who believes in it will have the resources over time to do a lot more of it.
Ok then I guess it's time to cancel roads and schools in most Europe, they cost too much. And health too, that's not profitable, ah and trains too ...
Did we collectively lost our minds ? What's going on ? The economy is here to serve the people, not the other way, it's fine to lose money here and there for _critical_ infrastructure
We would have if we deliberately chose to build roads that are 5x more expensive and took 10x longer to build with taxpayer money. Thats where the pro nuclear movement is right now though.
Nuclear power is stupidly expensive. It only gets built because the industrial base shares costs with the nuclear-military industrial complex.
They realize that it's harder to rally concerned citizens around keeping nuclear weapons and subs cheap so instead they tell you that it's green and try to gloss over the fact that it's eye wateringly expensive even when the very expensive disaster insurance is almost exclusively covered by joe taxpayer.
Roads and schools are chronically underfunded, for this reason. In my area for decades one highway was self-sustaining by tolls and was immaculately maintained, pristine pavement, excellent, dedicated maintenance teams, fresh paint. The rest were on a public budget and looked mostly forlorn and forgotten. Same with many schools, probably more, and that's despite public-minded altruists like yourself.
I make this point as someone who poured my time for years into public-minded pursuits like that. And, the roads, or schools, or transit ecosystems gradually deplete the resources of the people making those contributions until they have less, or no more to give. It is the antithesis of a flywheel. It is not something to have an opinion about or downvote, it just is. It's math. Do you see people down voting posts relevantly pointing out `1 + 1 = 2`? No, you don't.
The United States is not the only country in the world. Roads and schools are underfunded by choice. Mostly by small-government advocates who believe everything should be privately funded so taxes can be as low as possible.
Other countries successfully fund their public schools and my country of the Netherlands has extremely well-maintained public roads. We pay more in taxes, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
It's not about greed. Even if you're the government would you rather spend the same amount of money for 1 GW in 20 years with a ton of difficult environmental and other questions or for 0.7 GW right now?
Look, I love nuclear as a cool concept, and admit that the regulatory barriers are unfair, but the industry simply is not cost competitive. Is regulatory barriers entirely responsible for being 6x as expensive? I doubt it. I'm guessing at best you can get down to 3x as expensive with more rational policy.
Then MAYBE the next gen reactors will bring it down another 50%, but by the time anything new gen rolls out to a substantive degree, guess what solar and wind will probably drop again. Solar has perovskites on the horizon, wind has the usual economies of scale improvements, and battery storage has sodium ion in the immediate future and sulfur techs in the medium term.
I say keep the current plants operating as best they can (otherwise coal will be used, or gas). And keep investing in scalable reactor technology. Best that can be done for nuclear now.
Because France already has a ton of installed nuclear capacity and Germany stupidly got rid of it. But as alternatives get better and better it makes less sense to start a 20 year process to install new nuclear.
Call me when Germany's electricity is clean and cheap then, I bet we'll be in the same place in 25 years, in the meantime it's reality VS sci-fi, and so far reality is harsh
The major factors are: France was massively less industrial than Germany, its industrial sector is way less developed than 30 years ago (not emitting is easy when you buy more imported goods), its GDP is quite lower, its climate warmer.
Why do I pay eye watering rents to live in a shoebox while my parents pay 0 rent to live in a massive house?
France's electricity prices will either sky rocket when their paid off 70s nuclear plants finally age out or they will keep running them and open up an exciting new world of nuclear disaster risks.
Germany, meanwhile, will be sitting pretty once it has paid off the capex on its far cheaper green energy.
The renewables they have right now of course count towards their 2050 goals, that they need to get replaced eventually is a given but doesn't zero out their current contribution towards that goal.
The data is going the exact same way as I'm saying, they are planning an exponential install curve to counter the low lifespan effect. Next year, they double the solar installation rate compared to last year, then by 2025, they almost double it again.
The install curve has been exponential since the beginning.
The thing I responded to wasn't really that though, it was your peculiar conclusion they had come nowhere, 0% as you called it, towards their 2050 goals. And the reason for that was the EOL renewables that needed to be reinstalled.
The projected lifetime of these assets is baked into the LCOE and the LCOE is still 5x lower.
Theres also very little risk to continuing to run solar panels or wind turbines past their projected lifespans whereas if you do that with a nuclear plant the risks of disaster start increasing exponentially. Germany will probably find that a lot of their green energy built today will last a lot longer than projected and this will reduce their electricity prices.
That debate is moot, the renewables cant sustain the load by itself unlike nuclear anyways. So you need both, you need to replace them as they break down every year AND build additional backups, in case of Germany they chose gas and coal.
> Oh right, nuclear makes electricity at night. When it's cheapest.
Applying naive market logic to this, as solar becomes a larger share of the energy supply mix, the price of energy at night will increase, making baseload supply more attractive. There's probably other effects that could complicate this, but it seems like a problem that could solve itself over time.
It will solve itself. But I don't think the solution is nuclear. The solution will be storage.
Again, the issue is cost, and externalities. On the one hand the cost of nuclear electricity is low, but the externalities are extremely high. Time, public opinion, and long-term liability are all against it (and that's assuming it goes as planned.)
Sure, optimal storage has yet to be figured out. Batteries and pumped-water-schemes are working in some cases, but are not necessarily grid-scalable [1].
But work in this area has potential, and we've not reached any maxima here yet.
Technologies like compressed air, hydrogen and so on are sll in their infancy.
I should note that I am pro-nuclear. It's a lot cleaner than coal or gas. I'm just not sure it'll ever be economically attractive.
[1] on a household level, batteries that can store over-night amounts of power exist, send are easily available. This provides a cap on how expensive night electricity can be.
Storage will never work. Quote me on this.
Nuclear or a mix of nuclear and renewables will be the only way to seriously get away from fossil fuels.
Also, even if storage works some day, hoping we manage to discover how, scale and implement it across human civilization in time is a crazy bet to make. Even if we seriously go all in on nuclear and renewables tomorrow - it might already be too late, so betting on some miracle tech to be found, scaled and implemented in time is not only unwise, it would require several miracles to have any hope.
The storage plan for the EU is a mix of battery and hydrogen storage. It has a timeline that will take a while, but so does nuclear. There is a roadmap for converting europe’s gas transport and storage infrastructure over to hydrogen as part of the EU hydrogen strategy. I know there are people who don’t believe in the feasibility of the hydrogen strategy, but the people actually in the field working as experts seem to believe in it, so I remain unconvinced by the critics.
It already does work though, and it growing exponentially without any tedious political debates since just about anyone can do it at any time, at any cost and any scale. Companies store their own energy, counties store their own energy, private individuals store their own energy.
I see no way of stopping it unless corruption somehow manages to make private power production and storage illegal. There certainly are no technical or economical showstoppers.
if I had to bet on the grid storage solution, I'm going with a mix of hydro and molten sodium batteries. for grid storage the only variable is price per joule, and when the system gets big thermal loses get way easier to manage.
IMO you are only partly right. It will have to be a mix until storage can scale to the level nuclear can provide cleanly.
I say this because there is a category of power consumers that is often forgotten by us mere mortals: industry. To produce the things we consume, all kinds of industrial plants and operations exist that we know little about, but that have gigantic power needs. Just one example (out of many more): metal processing. Or industrial fans, where one fan could need 5MW at a time.
All I‘m saying is, if you dig deeper and discover what power needs our society has, it is not straightforward. Peak demand, baseload demand, time of day, distribution networks to get it where its needed, location of primary sources (wind/solar/nuclear), etc. It is a difficult optimization problem.
> It will have to be a mix until storage can scale to the level nuclear can provide cleanly.
It would, if it were easy and quick to scale up nuclear power. The story for scaling storage is much clearer, simpler, faster, and cheaper than building new nuclear supply.
Industry demand is massively overblown (although still a very real problem), because AIUI ~75% of the demand is for heat.
Heat can be stored directly, without need for batteries - get a giant (like, 20ish metre diameter) tank of sand (or other thermal mass, but any crappy asbestos-riddled sand will work just fine), wrap it in a metre or two of insulation, and the cube-square law will ensure it stays heated for months when heated.
This has drawbacks such as not working well with heat pumps (if you need 1000C temps then heat pumps flat-out don't work, and if you cap your heat at lower then your construction costs go way up, not to mention giant heat pumps are expensive compared to resistive heating, so electricity prices had better be high enough to justify the investment), but they let you turn surplus intermittent renewables into on-demand heating for literally dirt-cheap.
If there's any sort of battery crunch, then direct heat storage will win by virtue of being available and trivially deployed wherever there's a construction industry. It's very boring 20th-century (or 19th-century?) tech, and that's an absolute blessing, logistically.
I completely agree that fossil fuels don't price in external costs, while nuclear is expected to.
But this is not nuclear vs coal. Both are (imo) effectively dead, killed by economics, not politics. Solar is cheap. Storage has a lot of potential winners. Put together the long-term outlook for fossil or nuclear is not great.
i dont see lithium-ion batteries be economical for grid level storage, since grid level storage is very different from a car, which require portability and the car buyer pays a premium for portability.
The biggest criteria for grid level storage is price to energy ratio. Cheap cost beats all, since size is not really a problem.
So i want to see molten sodium, or heat based storage, which uses cheap materials. Or have cheap electricity produce green fuels for storage and use long term (e.g., synthetic "natural gas" from CO2 capture).
I do believe nuclear has a place tho - diversification is security, but this might have to be subsidized rather than be naturally economically competitive.
Nuclear energy is partially funded by weapons requirements. That’s why nuclear-armed states have a lot of nuclear power plants. It’s like the space program — partially funded by military ballistic missile requirements.
For a few countries, the reward is many people not freezing to death mid-winter.
If your goal is pure ROI, you may not be interested, but since we can't not have electricity at night, the cost of providing it will raise until the ROI makes sense to someone.
> I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward.
That's why we aren't getting nuclear right now. Once the regulatory hurdles come down and all of these questions get answers it'll be clear how to make a return on nuclear investment and that will attract investors.
Also, solar (and all other "renewables") are only quick to build assuming you have raw materials. We are probably going to be hitting a raw materials crunch soon because virtually all new technology is pulling from the same resource pool (copper, molybdenum, nickel) and cheap extraction is effectively gone.
Also, from an investment point of view, I'm not sure why you'd prefer a more volatile commodity. All commodity markets were set up to reduce volatility and base-load power is a huge reduction of electric grid volatility. You are telling me you'd prefer a world where you have intermittent failures because you could set it up more quickly than have reliable, constant, always-on base power for cooling/heating, food, hospitals, etc. Most people think that's a bad trade-off, hence the desire to have nuclear become the base-load provider fuel of choice.
Also, the more the personal transportation fleet electrifies, the more electricity we will need during the night/evening: everyone will want their car/bike/scooter/autogyro ready for commuting in the morning.
Transportation charging at night will be a drop in the ocean, something like 10-15% of our total energy needs, much of it happening during the day time. If half of vehicles are charging for a few hours of the night night, that's a couple percent of night time demand coming from transportation. A couple percent, maybe maxing at 3-5%, will be far less of a worry than the double digits required by home heating and electricity or industry or agricultural needs.
The regulatory hurdles are already low enough and nuclear is usually lavished with subsidies and good PR as well. This is because it shares a lot of the costs of running a nuclear-military industrial complex.
Baseload with 5x the LCOE of intermittent sources that takes 10-15x as long to build just isnt valuable to civvies when there are plenty of cheap enough storage options.
It's not 5x, it's more like double AFAICT. Which isn't great, but compares reasonably to fossil fuels once you factor in greenhouse emissions.
It shouldn't be the default, but it has plenty of niches where it's clearly the best choice - for instance, in Japan/Korea/etc where the bulk of their energy is imported liquefied natural gas. There's very little space to build solar/wind and so nuclear makes a lot of sense there.
Countries should build nuclear power as public infrastructure.
National freeways were not built as private projects because it was deemed important for the economy to provide access to base traffic infrastructure, even if it wouldn't be profitable for a commercial operator. Why shouldn't the same apply to base-load power?
The political right, typically for free markets, small governments and against state owned companies, is rooting for an energy supply that is the most regulated, government ran and government depending, of all alternatives.
Yet the political left, is against this system, which is the most socialist of all. And is rooting for an energy system that is the most decentralized and least government depending of all (every person with a solar panel an individual producer).
The only Western countries that seems to have got this “right” (in the logical sense you describe, not necessarily as an absolute value judgement) are France and Finland where mostly left-leaning governments built a lot of nuclear over the decades.
Yes, the mythical cloudy days with no wind over large extensions that basically never happen.
Right now where I live, we are "enduring" our third week without seeing the sun. Cloudy day after cloudy day, non stop rain (i.e. more hydro). But to nobody surprise, we are also enjoying our third week with continuous wind, and the electricity is often at 0.03 the kWh: virtually free.
I'm not saying that an occasional day cloudy but without wind cannot happen. But in real world, cloudy almost always means windy where the turbines are.
It happens regularly in winter in Europe, there were several instances just last winter where wind power was under 10% capacity for over a week. Good luck building that much storage for that long.
It takes anyone one minute to check ElectricityMap or an equivalent historical data source to debunk your disinformation about grid balancing and aggregation.
It's not rare for Europe to have no wind throughout vast land areas for days, affecting most countries at once. Same for solar.
Securing a low-carbon base load is critical and nuclear is basically the only option in most places. I'm saddened by the fact we're still arguing about this in 2023, while Germany casually unloads megatons of CO₂eq each month burning coal and gas, and actively slows down the development of cleaner energy through its EU seat.
> It takes anyone one minute to check ElectricityMap or an equivalent historical data source
Those data are about the current fleet of wind turbines production, not sufficient when it comes to determine whether a continental-scale fleet (which doesn't exist yet) could reduce the resources needed to solve this challenge.
Storage (V2G, hydro...) and clean backup (green hydrogen produced during overproduction periods and burnt in turbo-alternators during under-production periods...) will complete this approach.
Storage will not complete anything in time to be useful. Hydro storage is dependent on geography, and most locations are already tapped. Battery storage is much more expensive than nuclear, and requires astronomical amounts of precious mined resources.
> Storage will not complete anything in time to be useful
You have a case here, however this is even truer for nuclear reactors, especially considering the known uranium reserves (max 2 hundred years for the existing fleet).
Hydro: yes, it is not negligible (robust, vasts amounts of energy, low inertia, flexible...), especially as continental grids are quickly progressing.
Battery storage is a prerequisite for transport (Electrical Vehicles), this considerably reduces public investments. About mined resources the challenge is to ramp up mining, moreover substitutes and recycling will reduce the pressure.
Case: https://twitter.com/_HannahRitchie/status/161094857979065549...
It was running properly when it was shut down. Development had it issues, but they were mostly sorted out when the entirely political decision to shut it down was taken.
Any time there is a high pressure weather system in winter, you have cold still weather. Solar of course doesn't produce much either in that case, as it's winter.
Virtually everyone is replacing fossil with solar and wind. In Spain or UK coal is gone. In Europe coal went from 30% to 15% since 2000, wind + solar went from 0% to 25% in the same timespan. All of it while nuclear is also falling.
But of course you bring up the only one case in the world that net replaced nuclear with coal. And you "support" your claim with a graph that shows coal and nuclear falling and being replaced with solar and eolic, and Germany using less absolute dirty energy than 20 years ago despite doubling production.
You've moved, at least, from literally nobody to virtually nobody.
On the nobody side there's South Australia which has had long periods of fully renewable energy supply to residents with excess energy being exported to neighbouriong states, and currently stands at fully 70% renewable supply (including to heavy industry) which isn't too bad given they have alumina smelters and other massive power sucks.
Remind me what's the population density australia ? And how much sunlight do they get ?
Of course if your country is a literal flat desert getting 2-4x the sun it's a bit easier to make it work, for anything north of Maghreb it's game over, too many people, too energy dense, not enough sun.
* Australia's population is seriously urban, to the point of ridicule by Jack Davis[1] who referred to the european descedents as "fringedwellers" for their habit of clinging to the fringes of the continent in a few very large cities - you'd be wanting to look to the population density figures for Sydney / Melbourne to get a sense of how the majority of Australians live
* More importantly the energy demands of Australia, the country, are quite different to the energy demands of the Australian people - as a bulk exporter of raw materials the bulk of energy used in Australia goes towards goods used by an very large number of others in the world poplation. By way of example, W.Australia a single state with a population of 2 million exports 16x more iron ore every year than than the USofA ever achieved in a single year - this goes towards a being a major percentage of the global demand for steel.
* You're looking more for the kind of figure that relates to the energy demands for the size of the market served and less to the energy demands of the few individuals that happen to live nearby.
> And how much sunlight do they get ?
This is, of course, irrelevant for the question of the example I gave, Adelaide in South Australia. They do not use the total sunlight that falls on the total area of the country of Australia. That project uses the sunlight that falls just outside a city on the 35th parallel south which gets the same amount of sunlight as a city on the 35th parallel north.
That said, I think this misses the parent comment's point: Australia has a bunch more empty land than Europe. Which is true but not that important, as Europe has plenty of land to build renewables on, and quite often the reason for "lack of land" in Europe is political, not geographic - Germany is a particularly famous example, with absurdly restrictive zoning restrictions on wind turbines, based on pseudoscience.
> That said, I think this misses the parent comment's point
My answer might appear to have but I knew what they were attempting to convey under their attitude. I chose to address a few other important considerations.
Leaving that aside, Australia might be back on track to export sunlight via cable to Singapore.
The distance and the technology don't concern me nearly as much as the route; it's a hotbed of faults, a few deep trenches, and prone to earthquakes and volcanoes.
I also question the implied snub of Indonesia - they have a very large population and might appreciate some power, Australia may also benefit from the diplomacy aspects also.
On the one hand I agree on the other hand I think this is an issue with nuclear, not markets.
For example, the market may complement cheap solar with cheap storage. Certainly cracking grid-level storage coupled with cheap solar, will change the game. (And be very profitable)
If you start a new nuclear plan today you're betting the storage problem won't be solved for 15 years (until nuclear operational) or 40 odd years after that (payback period.) That's a bold bet.
All it takes us for compressed-air-in-old-mines (or whatever) to work well, and you're out of luck.
The private market will exhaust storage ideas before investing in new nuclear. Which is your point. Which means a govt betting on storage failure. That's a bet I'm not sure govt wants to make.
There's no cheap storage being able to sustain grid loads, that doesn't exist regardless of what the futuristic articles will tell you on the internet.
That might happen for sure but if we go that route of non existing tech, there's even better than the magical storage, there's fusion and unlike the magical storage tech, we know for sure that it exists.
> If you start a new nuclear plan today you're betting the storage problem won't be solved for 15 years (until nuclear operational) or 40 odd years after that (payback period.) That's a bold bet.
If you bet on a full renewable grid, you're betting that some unknown tech will appear in the next decade to solve all your problems, yeah no thanks, that's not how you plan infrastructure on the long term. R&D and deployment are two very different things. And while you are waiting, any cost to sustain the load (like gas plant) is unrecoverable.
> The private market will exhaust storage ideas before investing in new nuclear. Which is your point.
Hence why I'm saying we don't need the private market which is creating more problems than solutions here.
The private market solution was to use more gas which is bad for climate change and bad for the diplomatic relationships as seen in the EU during the Russian war.
We're on the same page here. Grid level storage does not exist. Then again 20 years ago grid level solar didn't exist.
All infrastructure investment involves some degree of fore-sight, and good luck (in picking the winner.) Private markets will tend to favor the most likely winners, leaving govt to support the outsiders. And govt may get lucky. But more likely they'll just do nothing. Politically no choice is better than the wrong choice.
We could observe models from public-monopoly places. That frees up long-term planning while locking in fixed prices. That approach can be very effective and efficient. It can also go badly wrong.
I'm not discounting any possibility here. Anything could still win. But the odds for nuclear are not looking great to me.
> Private markets will tend to favor the most likely winners, leaving govt to support the outsider
I don't really agree, private market favors tend to favor not the winners but the most profitable part of the grid and let the state or other people manage with the rest.
Electricity is one of the worst place to get private markets, it's hard to divide (natural monopoly), critically need 100% uptime regardless of the costs and the only reason we're even switching generation tech at all is because of bad externalities which private market are also bad at. Then there's also the diplomatic angle, we can't depend from Russia or China from our energy either, regardless if it's cheaper or not.
Sure there's other issues with the public model of electricity but at least it can work if done well whereas I'm betting on a 100% failure rate with a private one, like we're heading right now since we opened up the markets in the EU (and elsewhere)
By picking gas as the backup solution and solar (+ some wind) as the main source of electricity, Europe has picked the most likely overall winners of the energy transition. Many countries in Europe are rapidly approaching 100% solar electricity and the plans are looking to vastly overprovision today's demand because we need to reduce the non-electricity fossil consumption next.
This market has very different needs than the 100% grid stability of today's electricity usage. We might for instance not be able to charge cars in winter nights if there is no wind.
Gas peaking plants will be there but their consumption of gas will become much less.
it sounds like a parallel universe, in todays Europe (the reality), the grid got almost shut down by the Russian war in Ukraine and its gas dependency. The only salvation went from some even dirtier gas imported from the US and there's further talks with Algeria, Qatar and Azerbaidjan to increase gas imports (all great democracies aligned with the EU that won't cause any issue I'm sure).
The renewable policies in the EU were a diplomatic and an environmental failure.
And for now it's "only" the gas dependencies causing issues, everybody can just pray that China doesn't block panel exports to make the situation even more explosive than it already is.
> We might for instance not be able to charge cars in winter nights if there is no wind.
The issue with wind is that when it's down, it's really really down to single digits. It's not just about charging electric cars or not but bringing something else to stabilize the grid.
You're confusing so much that I don't even know where to start. Maybe with "rapidly approaching 100% solar electricity". In reality, it's news when some country, in perfect weather, runs on renewables for few hours in a day. Then coal plants start.
This is more of an argument for how pure economic thinking and the current constraints/processes have poor correlation to actual impact and desired outcomes.
It's similar to how Enron would make the most money when California had rolling blackouts - by operating right at the edge of the network crashing, they would make the most money because reserves were low, so they intentionally shut power stations down and caused small grid crashes.
If you really believe in renewables, if anything, we need to go all in on nuclear for the base load, but no one seems to be headed in that direction other than China and India, because the don't have the same market failures we do.
Solar is by far my favourite _personal_ power source, but nuclear is a bit more resilient. Suppose a volcano erupts and ash block the sun for a year - which happened before - then solar is pretty much bust. Also there are climates where you dont get sun throughout the year, so it’s not just nights that are the issue. But i do agree that solar, and wind, need to play an important role.
So we should plan our daily lives for events that happen maybe once per thousand years. And at the same time ignore events like Chernobyl or Funushima that will never happen again... until they do.
Not our daily lives, but our critical infrastructure such as that which provides energy. I am not saying _every_ source should be nuclear. All I am saying is we should plan contingency. And yes, chernobyl and fukushima are at the back of my mind. The risk is very real and even if the probability is low the likelihood increases as we increase the quantity of nuclear reactors.
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." --US Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss, in a 1954 address to science writers[1]
Moreover decommissioning a nuclear plant often is a nightmare (check U.-K.'s current program), and storing electricity needed during the night (for example in the car's battery) is easy and costs less and less.
Utilities don't invest on ROI the way someone does investing in equities. Usually a utility gets a fixed return based on capex. The incentive, outside of the return on capex, is to provide clean base load power to stabilize the grid.
I get that in different places utilities would have different mandates. And would potentially have different mechanisms to calculate costs and prices.
A govt funded utility could of course then focus on things that are not good (financial) investments. In which case sure, I can see that in play. (Not sure the US is leaning in that direction though.)
>> Usually a utility gets a fixed return based on capex
This would imply that funding is from sources other than consumers right? Because as a consumer I'm billed on usage, not on utility-capex.
> funding is from sources other than consumers right?
funding is never going to be from the end consumers. It will be from long term financiers such as large pension funds, PE or some other long term funding sources.
The consumer is the other end - they are the 'returns', rather than the funding.
Let's say I have a $billion to invest. My goal is return on investment. Why would I pick nuclear over solar?
Solar is cheap, quick to build, low maintainence, requires a small amount of "cheap" labor, and "worst case" stops working.
Nuclear takes 15 years of planning, costs a fortune just to get started, will guarantee endless fights with pretty much everyone, has long-term clean up questions, requires lots of very expensive engineers to keep running. (And worst case is pretty much as bad as you can imagine).
Oh right, nuclear makes electricity at night. When it's cheapest.
I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward.