Environment & Energy

I think I've had this argument with you before.

The most recently built and operating nuclear power plant is the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, which produces about 4.5 gigawatts of electricity. Total cost as far as I can tell was $48B just to construct it. I don't have much of an estimate of how much yearly costs are but considering the Limerick Nuclear Power Plant near me has 600 full time workers and another 1000+ workers onsite when the plant is refueled, I'd say day to day operations are expensive. And I'd add there's no real storage place for the waste. Most nuclear plants have "temporary" storage places. I guess there must be someplace to store the spent fuel but I suspect that aspect isn't cheap and has lots of public opposition.

The only way nuclear becomes economical (ability to pay for the cost of construction and operation) is if the plant runs half a century.

So the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW-C) project has the potential to generate 2.6 gigawatts and has an estimated cost of $10B. I'm not sure how much a wind farm costs to run once its operating but I'd guess it's not cheap to do maintenance and repairs compared to land-based wind mills. Estimated lifetime of the wind turbines is 30 years. And there are a lot of advances in turbine development. CVOW-C's pilot turbines installed about a decade ago produce 30-40% less than the ones being installed in the lease area now.

On construction cost alone, nuclear by my math is $32B/gigawatt versus $4B/gigawatt for CVOW-C.

I don't know how we'd finance a shift to nuclear given the costs. The Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant took almost 2 decades to construct. The CVOW-C project should be up and running in about 2 years. That's just construction time. I'm assuming the permit process for a nuclear plant is much longer than the one for CVOW-C, which probably took about 1-2 years to complete. I'd think its pretty safe to say that it would be many decades before a fleet of nuclear plants would be operational.