> they have been forced to sell up to 100TWh are prices as low as €40/MWh.
Should be plenty. The Swedish paid off nuclear plants operate around €25/MWh. Lazard similarly puts the range for paid-off nuclear plants at $24-$33/MWh.
It's easy to underpay nuclear power then realize heavy investments are needed after a while to either keep the plants alive with modern safety norms or to dismantle them (we have done that a lot here, electricity used to be cheap).
Also EDF has been trying to build the EPR in England, Finland and France, and it costed much more to build than budgeted. And someone has to pay the difference. And it seems that this someone is us :) (French tax payers and consumers)
> Also EDF has been trying to build the EPR in England, Finland and France, and it costed much more to build than budgeted. And someone has to pay the difference. And it seems that this someone is us :) (French tax payers and consumers)
My view is that it is a subsidy for the naval nuclear reactors and weapons programs in UK and France that they choose to pay from a national security perspective. The French and UK public simply gets to eat the costs with barely any say in the matter.
How do you get that? In the UK our nuclear weapons are US bought so we don't use any fissile materials we make, and my understanding was submarine reactors are very different to traditional utility scale reactors, to the point that different companies produce them.
It is all about creating the industrial base with people going through university specializing in it. This is from last time I googled the topic:
In 2017 this angle was up in the news in the UK. Take the responses as you like.
> The government is using the “extremely expensive” Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to cross-subsidise Britain’s nuclear weapon arsenal, according to senior scientists.
> In evidence submitted to the influential public accounts committee (PAC), which is currently investigating the nuclear plant deal, scientists from Sussex University state that the costs of the Trident programme [1] could be “unsupportable” without “an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure”.
> [...]
> This week, the Green MP Caroline Lucas asked the government about the Ministry of Defence and the business department discussing the “relevance of UK civil nuclear industry skills and supply chains to the maintaining of UK nuclear submarine and wider nuclear weapons capabilities”.
> Harriett Baldwin, the defence procurement minister, answered that “it is fully understood that civil and defence sectors must work together to make sure resource is prioritised appropriately for the protection and prosperity of the United Kingdom”.
> [...]
> At the PAC hearing, the Labour MP Meg Hillier asked whether “Hinkley is a great opportunity to maintain our nuclear skills base”.
> Lovegrove answered: “We are completing the build of the nuclear submarines which carry conventional weaponry. So somehow there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills. I don’t think that’s going to happen by accident. It is going to require concerted government action to make that happen.”
> Andrew Stirling believes that there was a crucial, largely unspoken, reason for the government’s rediscovered passion for nuclear: without a civil nuclear industry, a nation cannot sustain military nuclear capabilities. In other words, no new nuclear power plants would spell the end of Trident. “The only countries in the world that are currently looking at large-scale civil power newbuild programmes are countries that have nuclear submarines, or have an expressed aim of acquiring them,” Stirling told me.
> Building nuclear submarines is a ferociously complicated business. It requires the kind of institutional memory and technical expertise that can easily disappear without practice. This, in theory, is where the civil nuclear industry comes in. If new nuclear power plants are being built, then the skills and capacity required by the military will be maintained. “It looks to be the case that the government is knowingly engineering an environment in which electricity consumers cross-subsidise this branch of military security,” Stirling told me.
It’s “simply mismanagement” is a trivial tautology that can be applied to any situation.
Team didn’t deliver? Mismanaged the team. Team failed to deliver because they didn’t do any work? Mismanaged the hiring process. Massive wild fire? Mismanaged forests. Asteroid wipes out all life on Earth? Mismanaged the planetary defense systems. Andor escapes from Narkina 5? Mismanaged imperial prison complex.
Given that nuclear power plants are known entities and the list of "unknown unknowns" should be non-existent given their safety critical nature it simply is mismanagement.
If your nuclear plant costs more than $33/MWh to operate then you are doing something wrong and stop trying to blame "the green movement", "privatization" or whatever.
so costs to build operate and maintain something never changes and is the exact same everywhere and in every country and if it’s different then what you think it’s “mismanagement”?
Because I’m pretty sure it’s going to be different from France to America to poland
> The LCOE figures for existing Generation II nuclear power plants integrating post-Fukushima stress tests safety upgrades following refurbishment for extended operation (10-20 years on average): (in 2012 euros) €23/MWh to €26/MWh (5% and 10% discount rate).
There, from a source extremely positively biased towards nuclear.
Should be plenty. The Swedish paid off nuclear plants operate around €25/MWh. Lazard similarly puts the range for paid-off nuclear plants at $24-$33/MWh.
It's simply mismanagement of a golden goose.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...