Uranium is $128.30/kg
After enrichment, conversion and fabrication that’s $3400/kg for 4.95% fuel.
At 36-45MWd/kg and a net thermal efficiency of 25% or $12.5/MWh up front.
With a 90 month lead time (72 month fuel cycle and 18 months inventory) at 3% this is $16.2/MWh
Yeah, if you only want meaningful power on a sunny day in daylight hours.
Where’s all this paradigm changing battery tech I keep hearing is on the way for 20 years?
They still generate power even on overcast days. Think about the difference between the middle of the night and an overcast day. It’s still a considerable amount of light.
From experience, I’m aware that they do.
A small fraction of what they generate in direct sunlight.
It’s not a small fraction it’s less but it’s not a small fraction.
Overcast days typically generate about 40% of what they would generate on a sunny day. Remember temperature isn’t relevant, in fact they don’t actually like being too hot, so weirdly solar panels might actually not work very well in the Sahara desert.
So unless you regularly have to deal with San Francisco style fog, and basically only San Francisco has fog like that because it’s quite a weird microclimate, you’ll be alright with solar pretty much anywhere in the world that isn’t inside the Arctic circle.
If the alternative to 50c/W solar is paying $20/W, you only need it to run at 2.5% of nameplate to come out ahead.
No It’s not the fallacy you describe
You just don’t need that much storage and at the same time battery storage is already being installed at an exponential rate, much like PV started to some 15 years ago. We also already have hydro and gas peaker plants that aren’t going anywhere for the next 10ish years.
It arrived over the last 5 years.
Additionally diurnal storage is required for nuclear to meet a variable load anyway (as an 8hr battery is $2.5/W vs $20/W for additional reactor capacity). So the comparison then becomes building the nuclear reactor to run at <25% load factor vs. filling the rest of the load with any other method.