Comment on A fossil-fuel plant seeing nuclear coming...

• sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  The costs associated with nuclear are so overwhelmingly everything other than fuel that selling fuel isn’t going to be a big business, nowhere near the global markets for fossil fuels in actual dollars, even if the market one day approaches the same amount of useful energy in joules or kWh.

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  • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You forget another cost: hard dependency (= “Soft Power”). Sure, selling uranium rods might not be as lucrative as other things. But e.g. France is completely dependent on uranium rods for their grid not to go dark, so the very few countries who sell those have a lot of political influence over them. Like Russia.

    Russia had Europe at their balls with energy almost completely (Uranium, Oil, Gas) which is one reason why they thought they could get away with even starting the invasion of Ukraine. The price shock for energy in Europe was brutal in 2022, one of my best friends here in Germany had their heating bill quadruple because it was Gas, thereby lost their home and “temporarily” lived on my couch (for 2.5 years). Meanwhile France ALSO had to scramble finding another provider of Uranium rods, which are quite rare. This caused them having even more issues than Germany over a longer period of time, which sounds absurd given Germany famously made themselves almost completely dependent from Russian gas.

    Right now nuclear only goes up in price, running cost and thereby electricity costs. The idea of building some new ones can really only be justified in terms of CO² output in a combined strategy with renewables, nothing else. And at least in regards to the awful dependency thing and crystal clear cost calculations every politician of any country should be on the same boat. Unfortunately a lot of them replaced their brain with various other stuff.

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    • Redjard@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      From memory, the issue with France is specifically that they use a russian design for the fuel rods that only russia makes.
      I wanna say that is hexagonal rods, vs the us standard of round.

      There are projects running to make these hexagonal ones in western supply chains, but that is at least 10 years away, and there are not enough rods in storage to bridge that.

      And for new plants you’ll see initial prospects for the cheap russian format, and then either the plant sees a massive cost overrun when they build the way more expensive more available rod design, or it’s dependent right from the start.

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    • DeadDigger@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Last month I read somewhere, that having solar and batteriecapacity of same proportions are cheaper then nuclear

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  • Redjard@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Russia has a lot of control over all layers of nuclear power, so this gives them political leverage.

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