Lately nuclear has been getting a lot of press here in Ontario. To be clear, we have nothing against Nuclear, provided it can deliver on the original promisse of abundand, clean and most notably cheap electricity. As we go through the math, looking at recent funding announcements and the expected generation from these nuclear facilities, one is justifiably concerned that public money is being wasted. Factor in the falling price of solar-wind and batteries, Not only that, but given the rapidly falling cost of solar-wind and batteries, renewables might be 12 times cheaper in the future.
How does one distill $20.9 B, for 4 x 300 MW small modular reactors (source) into cents per kilowatt-hour that might show up on my electricity bill? Well, we need to make a few assumptions, primarily around how long our nuclear plant operates for, how many kilowatthours it produces during that time, how much does it cost to keep the plant running, and since a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, we need an interest rate.
- How many years do we operate our nuclear plant for? Lets say 40 years before one wants to do a refurbishment project, (according to wikipedia, Bruce nuclear station went operational in the 1970’s, with a refurbishment project starting in 1995, with a more serious effort sarting in 2016, with completion scheduled in the near future (source). Darlington nuclear station went operational in the 1980s, with a refurbishment project started in 2016, which was recently completed on time and budget (source) in 2026.
- A Nuclear reactor is best kept running, as much as possible, so if we kept a 300 MW reactor going for 365 days/24 hrs a day it will produce 2.6 TWh a year, over 40 years, that gets us to 105 TWh.
- Apparently, the four SMRs will create 2500 jobs once construction is complete, that allows us to guestimate the approximate operating cost on an annual basis, we make a rather ugly assumption of 100k per person per year, to get somehwere. Naturally not all of that is salary and benefits, but also supplies, parts etc. We arrive at a $250 M/year opearing cost (source).
- As to interest rates, let us assume 3%/year, which seems to be the average mortage rate for the past 20 years (source), we treat the initial $20.9 B constuction bill as a mortage, and we also assume a similar growth in our annual operating costs.
The total bill for 40 years of operating our “excel nuclear plant” comes to $55 B over 40 years. During that time, we can expect to generate 420 TWh. Those two numbers together give us an averaged cost of 13c/kWh. As we assumed a “interest-rate” rise of 3%/year of our operating costs, the actual cost ranges from 11 c/kWh in the beginning, rising to 16 c/kWh.
This is not exactly cheap. In fact, using similar assumptions, my rooftop solar arrives at 20 c/kWh for a 20 year solar system life. Adjusting my excel nuclear plant, to 20 years gets us to 16 c/kWh for nuclear. This puts solar on par with nuclear, in particular as solar is generated on my roof, very close to where it is needed, allowing us to skip transmission infrastructure, which can be expensive (source).
We also made absolutely no allowance for disaster (source). The world has seen a few nuclear disasters (source). Fukushima and Chernobil for example, both created a 30 km exclusion zone. Should that occur in Darlington, the exclusion zone would require evacuating Bowmanville, Oshawa, Ajax and perhaps some of Pickering. Yes we have awesome nuclear engineers, and the likelyhood of an accident is very small, but the astronomical sums involved in vacating several million people warrant some considderation.
Solar, wind and batteries just keep getting cheaper, in the last decade by about 90% (source). If that happens again next decade, my 20 c/kWh today, might become 2 c/kWh in 10 years time. Why pay a 16 c/kWh power-bill if you can generate your own for 8 times less?
Fancy operaing your own Excel nuclear power plant? Have a go at the attached and report back in the comments.
Electric car adventures 