Nuclear power has always been a relatively contentious issue, but the climate crisis has given it new salience. Supporters of nuclear blame environmentalist concerns about safety or pollution as the biggest roadblock to adopting this zero-carbon source of power. However, a new report shows that regardless of one’s concerns about radiation or the climate, it doesn’t make sense to sink a ton of money into nuclear power, because it’s expensive, and renewables are cheap.
The recently released 2019 World Nuclear Industry Status Report is a very lengthy examination of the industry--admittedly written by those opposed to it. The nuclear industry itself wasn’t thrilled with the report and contested some of the details. But ultimately, there’s no skewing the economic realities the report lays out.
The report covers a lot of ground, but we’ll skip to the climate change chapter. Really, it all boils down to figure 51, which compares the cost of generating nuclear power with the average wholesale power price of wind and solar.
Since 2012, wind power purchase agreements have been cheaper than keeping a nuclear plant running. And as of mid-2017, utility-scale solar has become cheaper than nuclear. This means that over the past decade, the cost of solar has dropped 88%, the cost of wind power has dropped 69%, and the cost of nuclear has risen by 23%, based on Lazard’s levelized cost of energy analysis.
In other words, building new wind and solar is cheaper than keeping existing nuclear plants running!
And as far as building new nuclear power plants, well, they too are incredibly expensive. Between 2005 and 2015, the cost of building new nuclear rose by 130 percent in France, by 29 percent in Japan, and by 75 percent in the US. That rise, combined with the price drop in solar and wind, means that new nuclear is 5 to 10 times more expensive than new renewables.
If we’re looking for the most cost-effective ways to cut emissions, nuclear is not the answer. As the report explains, “it buys many times less climate solution per dollar, than...major low-carbon competitors.” And the free market, in so much as energy markets are free, bears this out, as forecasters expect the next few years to bring 45GW of renewable additions, versus a net 7GW loss of nuclear power due to plant retirements.
The report also addresses the “current fashion in nuclear advocacy” to acknowledge that the reactors aren’t cost-effective but insist that new systems will be. But that claim “is tempered by an awkward fact” that the capital cost of building these plants is astronomical, so “even free steam from any kind of fuel, fission, or fusion, is not good enough, because the rest of the plant costs too much.” Even if next-gen, Small Modular Reactor plants get cheaper as we figure out how to make them work and scale them up, the fact that the price of wind and solar is already lower and still falling, “renewables will become another twofold cheaper by the time” these new small reactors can come online en masse.
The argument that nuclear power can be a reliable baseload for renewables is also debunked in the report by explaining how with sufficient wind, solar, storage and efficiency, there’s no need for baseload power at all. And even if there were, the fact that nuclear power can’t exactly be quickly and easily switched on and off in response to swings in electricity supply or demand means that their baseload characteristics “have thus become a handicap, complicating least-cost and stable grid operation.”
And then of course there’s the fact that, in practice, nuclear plants aren’t actually all that reliable. Of the 259 nuclear power plants that operated in the US between 1955 and 2016, only 28 “remained competitive in their wholesale markets and had not yet suffered a year-plus safety-related outage.”
So only 28 of the US’s 259 nuclear plants have made sense economically and not been shut down for over a year because of safety concerns. Remember that next time you hear that if climate concerns were genuine, we’d be building more nuclear instead of wind and solar.