One-off projects are usually incredibly expensive because you have to make everything custom. I don't think this argument "scaling up must be expensive because our one-off project is expensive" goes. Doesn't one usually expect to pay 5-10× as much to have something made custom as opposed to a common product?
There's on the order of 500 of them in the world if I remember wikipedia correctly. I wonder if any country built enough shortly after reach other / in parallel / same company building in multiple countries at the same time to see an effect of scaling (materials, knowledge, experience, navigating the legislation, ...).
Furthermore, energy being X% more expensive for the next hundred years might just be the reality we have to live with in order to reach net zero realistically. (Looks like this is happening due to gas prices right now anyway, so we might as well have gone nuclear... ten years ago it was obvious that we would want to stop burning gas some time soon, but not that solar panels would become so cheap so fast, so it would have made sense, and yet...) The alternative to spending a bit extra on your energy bill is spending way more on climate adaptation, from growing food to relocating people to building sea walls in many if not most countries.
South korea is by far the biggest producer of nuclear plants. Their prices have gone down slightly after building dozens of plants, but nuclear is still more expensive than solar for them. Until we get a legitimate fission innovation plus the political will for deregulation nuclear prices will remain sky high.
Also more expensive than climate change adaptation?
I know it's a big and, truth be told, unanswerable question I'm asking. I just mean to say: can we really afford to pinch pennies here, comparing the cheapest forms of energy we have today (like solar) as a benchmark which it must beat before we consider a low-carbon low-landuse low-risk* base load to be a good addition to the grid?
So long as it's not prohibitively expensive, at least.
* near-negligible chance but a fairly large impact (not in death/cancer toll, at least not compared to gas/coal even if you scale it per kWh, but in evacuation and cleanup costs), at least when not considering that we might build better reactors than we did in the 60s (even if we probably would) (Fukushima and Chernobyl were designed before my parents were born and I'm not a teenager anymore). I can see how people find this not danger-free, even if most of it is misguided, especially when you're not near the biggest fault line of this planet
There's on the order of 500 of them in the world if I remember wikipedia correctly. I wonder if any country built enough shortly after reach other / in parallel / same company building in multiple countries at the same time to see an effect of scaling (materials, knowledge, experience, navigating the legislation, ...).
Furthermore, energy being X% more expensive for the next hundred years might just be the reality we have to live with in order to reach net zero realistically. (Looks like this is happening due to gas prices right now anyway, so we might as well have gone nuclear... ten years ago it was obvious that we would want to stop burning gas some time soon, but not that solar panels would become so cheap so fast, so it would have made sense, and yet...) The alternative to spending a bit extra on your energy bill is spending way more on climate adaptation, from growing food to relocating people to building sea walls in many if not most countries.