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In complete fairness here, wind does have to pay "not just ... up-front capital costs but long-term environmental remediation, accident insurance, and so on". Farmers and the various states' departments of natural resources don't just hand over their land for free with no strings attached, and insurance on those windmills is not cheap.

Even so, it still comes in orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear.



People keep saying nuclear is really expensive.

https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/electri...

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf

Moreover, "orders of magnitude cheaper" means hundreds of times cheaper. You would have to be doing something silly like comparing one 3MW wind turbine to one 3000MW nuclear reactor.


If you look at what nuclear power plants actually end up costing, they are very expensive. Paper studies that promise us otherwise don't make up for that. It's been the consistent history of nuclear power that those promises aren't worth the paper they're printed on.


Nuclear proponents: This should be cost effective.

Nuclear opponents: [Change laws/rules during construction to drive up costs on purpose; cost is now more than projected but still less than coal]

Nuclear opponents: Look at all these cost overruns. It now costs more than solar would if we solved the nighttime problem with hypothetical cheaper storage technology that doesn't currently exist, therefore nuclear is unviable and we should never attempt it again.


No, what actually happened was the nuclear vendors lowballed their bids, confident they could either reduce costs or get the customers to pony up more later. Regulation is just the excuse they gave when the inevitable happened.


That also happens, but that part happens with all construction projects from bridges to fiber rollouts -- including the construction of other types of power plants:

http://schlissel-technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf


Utility scale PV typically comes in within 10% of estimates.




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