<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/free-solar-nuclear-cost-blowouts-and-deadly-negligence-on-climate-a-heady-mix-for-the-coalition/>
"The Coalition’s favoured energy technology is quite clearly nuclear – perhaps
for no other reason than it is not wind or solar.
The Coalition no longer pretends that nuclear is the best option to address
climate change, because they are tearing up their agreement on net zero, the
softest of climate targets. That may be an admission that nuclear is very slow
to build, particularly for a country that has never done so, and is still built
on democratic principles.
Nor can they pretend that nuclear is the best technology on economics. Real
world examples continue to defy the carefully constructed modelling
commissioned by the Coalition.
In the UK, financing has finally been landed for the planned Sizewell C nuclear
plant – and it turns out to be £38 billion, or around $A76 billion, for a 3.2
gigawatt facility. That translates to around $24 million a megawatt capacity
cost, which is more than twice as much as the Coalition modelling would have
you believe.
Sizewell C is expected to be a replica of Hinkley Point C, whose costs are now
estimated at up to $A94 billion, and it seems that Sizewell kept its capital
costs under control, because the UK government had to step in to take a 44 per
cent stake. (The builder, the French government owned EDF, only wanted 12 per
cent, because of the cost risks.)
It also changed the nature of the funding game – turning the new nuclear plant
into a regulated asset (like Australia’s electricity networks), which will
require consumers to start paying for the nuclear plant more than a decade
before it is actually built.
Remember, this is the 5th or 6th plant to be built using the French EPR
technology – and yet there is no sign of it getting any cheaper. And we haven’t
see the inevitable delays and cost blowouts yet. Civil construction costs are
blowing up projects all over the world, and nuclear is about as big as they
come."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
