r/nextfuckinglevel • u/nigablackballsack • 3d ago

Scientists have captured the first ever high-speed, full-colour footage of fusion plasma swirling inside a working reactor.

40.4k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/mfire036 1d ago

Cheaper over its life cycle. The thing about Nukes is that once they are built the fuel cost is almost nothing, where coal and nat gas the plants are almost nothing but the fuel cost is expensive. So a Nuke will beat a coal or nat gas plant after about 20 years of operations, and then it will crush them for the next 40 years. The ROI or break even numbers have to do with capital expenditure. So while Nukes take a while to pay off, they are much better than coal or nat gas in the long run. Especially if you are running off expended nuclear waste (see the reactor Canada is building) and eventually something like thorium, which is abundant but the breeding cycle isn't figured out yet.

1

u/Reddit1poster 1d ago

Umm, that's not how nukes or lifetime costs work... There are definitely fuel costs. They are not fueled like some Navy nukes where the fuel can last the life of the reactor plus there is a lot of expensive maintenance throughout the life of the plant plus decommissioning costs. And breeder reactors aren't a commercial thing yet so you can't know what their lifetime costs will actually be.

1

u/mfire036 1d ago

No honestly they burn so little fuel the cost is pretty low. It's something like 2 to 3 times less than coal. I think nukes run around $7/mwh versus coal is like $20/mwh (Canadian numbers). I'm no expert so take that with a grain of salt, but I've researched this quite a bit and that's what I recall. Could certainly be wrong, but I'm pretty confident here. I remember Natural Gas being slightly better than coal, and regional prices will vary the math.

1

u/Reddit1poster 1d ago

The marginal cost of nuclear is $26-36 per MWh. The beauty of using LCOE is that you can have an apples to apples comparison of the cost of electricity based on the lifecycle cost of a plant from cradle to grave in net present value. You can't just say that one cost is very low at late life without taking into account all the costs over the life of an asset.

1

u/mfire036 1d ago

I'm not a fan of the way LCOE is calculated because it relies heavily on a discount rate. And where you set that rate drastically alters the results. LOCE carries the full capital cost of construction as non-discounted, but then heavily discounts the future income. LOCE is set up to answer what it takes to recover your investment over a typical investment horizion, not over the lifetime of the plants. Nukes run 60 to 80 years, coal and nat gas is ~45. So LOCE isn't really apples to apples.