Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors. Running a nuclear power plant with a 40% capacity factor more than doubles the cost per kWh.
You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the normal ~92% CF, and every plant after that was at lower capacity factors until the final power plant was costing ~3X as much per kWh.
And that’s with them having largely non nuclear countries to export power to on nights and weekends. The economics look even worse if every country try’s to scale nuclear power.
PS: I respect Frances investment in subsidizing nuclear power, but it’s important to understand the underlying economics if you want to scale nuclear power. The best option for a cheap nuclear grid is massive amounts of cheap storage.
"Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors."
So Swedish electricity generation used to be about 50% hydro and 50% nuclear. It worked really well for decades and made/kept us rich, despite our high salary costs due to the welfare state. Our industries had the benefits of very cheap and clean energy. The envy of the world!
Then our stupid politicans shut down half of the nuclear capacity and tried to replace with wind. I honestly think that the root cause is that the individuals responsible for this did not understand the difference between power and energy. It obviously didn't work.
I largely agree. Sweden is close to a best case for nuclear as hydroelectric power can easily solve the dispatchable generation and solar isn’t viable. It’s still going to need significant subsides to hit 50%, but nowhere near what counties with less Hydro would need.
They even have cold temperatures to boost power plant efficiency and make district heating very useful.
> You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant.
Insufficient detail.
You'd need to compare levelised costs, and work out whether government subsidies for this-or-that technology resulted in gains and loses that were better or worse than whatever else governments might have spent money on.
There's a good argument to be made that cheap-to-the-end-user electricity is a net good for society, because they can then spend that money elsewhere rather than on boring old electricity.
Besides all that, nuclear needs a lot of cooling capacity, and that's typically come from rivers / oceans, which, if I recall correctly, some rivers in France where recently too warm / insufficient flow to meet nuclear cooling demands.
So nuclear isn't always a good fit for many reasons, but may be a good fit for many other reasons.
A county can’t subsidize it’s own power, it’s got to pay what it costs. Producers, distributors, and consumers of electricity within a county can receive subsides, but that runs into all the usual issues with planned economies.
Arguing about how efficient subsides are vs other spending ignores the option to not spend the money and have consumers directly pay the bill. This normally results in greater efficiency because consumers can chose to say lower the thermostat and spend money on something else etc. People will argue for subsidies to deal with externalities, but markets can equally respond to simply taxing those externalities.
> runs into all the usual issues with planned economies.
Oh, and the war in Ukraine does not show the glaring weakness of 'Unplanned economy' and just choosing the cheapest supplier?
Subsidies and incentives do not a planned economy make.
Folks in the west seem to have taken the failure of hofhly corrupt planning system of USSR as an indication that they dont need to do any thinking or planning at all.
The point of subsidies and incentives is to plan an economy.
There are many different levels of panned economies. With say US food subsides and tariffs as a less extreme than Maoist China or the USSR, but they still have huge and well known problems. Messing with Food production has resulted in inefficiency, waste, pollution, corruption, etc but also overconsumption with it’s extremely negative health impacts.
It’s just really hard to improve on the feedback loops of market economies without running into diminishing returns.
Markets aren’t governments, but they have raised the global standard of living vastly beyond our ancestors. They all happily do long term planning, just look at VC funding for risky investments that won’t see returns for years.
Markets existed for six thousand years, they predate ancient egypt. It is scientists and engineers who raised our standars of living, and they appeared recently. It is absolutely perserve for proponents of markets to take credit they do not deserve.
Take the invention of Penicilin, Alexander Flemming raised our standards of living while working at a public hospital. It was british and US governments who established mads manufacturing of it, not markets. The inventor never became a billionaire.
Most inventors never do.
Years mean nothing, you have to invest in decades.
And you still haven't addressed the issue of western co.panies selling weapons to regimes that want to see us dead - that's quite a critical flaw, don't you think?
So you don’t actually know how ancient or medieval markets worked. That explains the confusion.
Generally people couldn’t arbitrarily start a business without permission. Rulers would limit who could say sell salt and permission it’s self was quite valuable. Think Arrakis being handed over in Dune, only one house had the right to mine spice and that would change based on politics not just competence.
And that’s just the start as slavery, guilds, gender, etc all limited markets.
Throughout history you can track a huge wealth boom whenever places opened up their markets. England’s wealth traces back before the industrial revolution to the early dissolution of serfdom relative to most places. It was actually far more influential than inventions like the early steam engine.
As to penicillin, invention is onky part of the story having a society where people had free time and resources to do research was it’s self a major hurdle. As would having surplus labor to manufacture such complex medicine.
> England’s wealth traces back before the industrial revolution to the early dissolution of serfdom relative to most places.
So let me get this argument straight:
1. Slavery and serfdom are bad for the economy. We are talking pure economics, not morality
2. Markets have freely sold and bought slaves for thousands of years
3. Slavery predates the concept of a government, it predates writing and predates ancient egypt
4. Abolition of slavery required intervention of government and violence
5. Therefore you have just made a pro-regulation argument while arguing against government.
You cannot claim that unregulated markets magically and efficiently organise economy towards it's most efficient state.
The same situation applies to child labour. The exact same situation arised with health and safety. The exact same situation arises with our markets selling precision weapons to bloody dictators that use our weapons against us.
So we have 4 spesific cases of markets delivering rettible outcome and not a single counterexample from you for marktes delivering optimal outcome.
Abolishment of serfdom as a general practice in a England didn’t require government intervention it was actually outcompeted as strange as it sounds. By the time the law changed relatively few people where directly impacted.
This is part of a long term global trend which relates to the overhead of slavery and then serfdom. Serfdom outcompeted slavery in Europe because it was simply more efficient, and Serfdom in turn failed for the same reason.
Child labor was more an outgrowth of the industrial revolution which initially reduced the need for complex skills or physical strength. Kids going back thousands of years would help with harvesting etc, but it was also common practice to pay tradesmen to take on apprentices because child labor was effectively worth nothing when averaged across a year.
It was only when jobs got ultra specialized that child labor became valued. Though eventually flipped back where collage students are talking unpaid internships because Google etc has no use for their services. Obviously collage students can do some forms productive labor, but ignoring the law what can 10 year olds do? Acting and here it’s surprise surprise perfectly legal in western countries for 10 year olds to actually work. Suggesting it’s more a question of economics than morality.
> which, if I recall correctly, some rivers in France where recently too warm / insufficient flow to meet nuclear cooling demands
There was no problem with nuclear cooling demands, the problem was if the nuclear plants put more heat into the rivers, it would be bad for the wildlife living there.
Honestly what we really need is something that we can pump that power into (not a battery - something productive I mean) so we can keep those reactors at higher efficiency levels. I do not know what that is but surely vast amounts of extra power could be used for something useful no? Research? Cleaning the air? Hot tubs for Walruses?
Excess power is most usefully applied capturing CO2 and desalinating water. But nukes' operating cost is too high for that. Spending a single year's operating cost on solar, and then using solar to do that work,leaves you with all subsequent years' opex available to use building out more solar.
You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the normal ~92% CF, and every plant after that was at lower capacity factors until the final power plant was costing ~3X as much per kWh.
And that’s with them having largely non nuclear countries to export power to on nights and weekends. The economics look even worse if every country try’s to scale nuclear power.
PS: I respect Frances investment in subsidizing nuclear power, but it’s important to understand the underlying economics if you want to scale nuclear power. The best option for a cheap nuclear grid is massive amounts of cheap storage.