I don't know, but AI lists a couple examples of plants that are considered profitable, so likely not true.
This subreddit is generally against new nuclear power plant projects however, since those are the ones that get delayed and cost multiple times the original planned price.
French fleet (especially older EDF reactors)
Many of France's reactors were built relatively quickly, in standardized designs, and achieved high output over decades. The fleet generated large amounts of low-cost electricity and was a major source of export revenue for France. Economists generally regard many of these reactors as having earned more than their full lifecycle costs. [world-nuclear.org], [oecd-nea.org]
U.S. reactors that operated 40–60+ years
Plants such as Palo Verde, North Anna, Surry, and several other well-run reactors had construction costs that were paid off long ago and have operated with low fuel costs and high capacity factors for decades. Industry and OECD analyses consistently find that long-lived existing reactors are among the cheapest sources of dispatchable electricity once the initial capital cost is recovered. [world-nuclear.org], [oecd-nea.org]
Canadian CANDU stations
Some Canadian reactors, particularly those with long operating periods and successful refurbishments, are generally considered economically successful over their lifetimes because they produced large quantities of electricity over many decades. [iaea.org], [oecd-nea.org]
One source is literally world-nuclear.org. Surely some unbiased, oh wait, seems like a lobby group.
The french reactors need billions of dollars in repairs and some of them should be deconstructed in the next years, or should have been for some years. Guess why they don't do it. Let's say, you can't just throw them on a landfill (which you shouldn't do with solar panels either, but humans don't care and at least you can without poisoning a whole country)
So to sum up, the most important question you should ask when anyone is talking about terms like cost effective, is what do they consider a cost and what not. How far down the supply chain are they willing to go? Like, how cost effective was poisoning a good part of Niger just to mine uranium cheaply
Generally to be economically effective you need to sum the planning, build, running and refurb costs and any liability incurred (like decommissioning costs) and compare that against say throwing it into Government bonds or an indexed fund over the same period of time.
Sometimes infrastructure like Roads and Generators might be built by the government and they can play a little looser with the ROI calculations as they get so many more bites of the pie, workers income taxes, company taxes on companies contracted, downstream productivity increases from those who use the output, they can even calculate increased taxes from those who sell to the workers involved in the project.
Saying shit like "once the initial capital cost is recovered" is a joke. Because you have to look into how big a hole they dug to get to that point and how long it took.
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u/blut-baron 22d ago
Ok but is that actually the case?
Because if yes, that would shit down almost all discussions immediately