[b]The Other Shoe Just Dropped, Dooming the U.S. Nuclear Revival[/b]
By David Fessler
Nuclear power plants continue to get more expensive over time. Saddled with massive cost overruns and huge delays, nuclear has a “negative learning curve.”
The Vogtle power plant is a classic example. Construction began on Vogtle units 1 and 2 in 1971. The project took 18 years to complete and was a decade behind schedule. The final price was $9 billion for the two plants. That was 10 times the estimated price.
Cheap shale gas, abundant here in the U.S., is slowly spelling the end for nuclear power. Nuclear power plants can take a decade to permit and another decade or two to build.
There’s not a utility in business that can plan with numbers like that… Especially when huge cost overruns are the norm rather than the exception.
In contrast, the permitting and construction time for a natural gas-fired power plant is as little as 18 months. And you can build five to 10 natural gas-fired plants for the cost of one nuclear plant.
With 66 reactors under construction, 158 more planned and as many as 330 more proposed, the demand for uranium could grow by 48% between now and 2030.
Of course, I don’t believe utilities will build even 25% of those reactors. Solar and wind, along with cheap battery storage and natural gas, trump the cost of nuclear by orders of magnitude.
Source: The Oxford Club
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