Advice across the board is that nuclear power plants take a really long time and cost a lot of money. They almost always go far over time and budget. And they’re expensive to operate. Why is that so?
In: Engineering
There’s a lot of different factors.
Some of them are inherent to the design and operation of nuclear plants. A nuclear plant is complicated and the design needs to be adapted to the specifics of the site. Then, once it’s built, you need to pay nuclear engineers to run it, who don’t exactly come cheap. The one thing that is cheap is the fuel, because you need so little of it compared to other power sources. There are also other considerations like security and disaster preparedness which have special concerns with nuclear power. Compare this to something like a field of solar panels: they’re modular, simple to install, and don’t need a team of engineers monitoring them around the clock.
However, extrinsic factors may be the biggest contributor to cost. In most countries, fossil fuels are heavily subsidized by the government because almost everybody needs them currently, and cheap fuel is good for the economy. This makes it cheaper to run fossil fuel plants than it otherwise would be, making nuclear less attractive. Moreover, nuclear faces regulatory and political challenges because people are afraid of it. Nuclear plants very rarely break, but when they do, they do so in a way that is very expensive to fix and clean up (this is a valid concern to some extent) and that people think will kill everyone (this is less a valid concern but it is a very persuasive one).
Finally there’s another issue: economy of scale. Things become cheaper to build as more of them get built, because it becomes more profitable for designers and builders and parts manufacturers to specialize in those things. Solar is quite cheap right now because lots of solar is getting built right now, and the inverse is also true, nuclear plants are more expensive to design and build because western countries haven’t designed and built very many lately
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