"requires voters who understand the energy market..." Well shoot, there goes the future.

I'm an I&C Engineer at a nuclear plant. You covered things very well (as I would expect from you!). There are a couple points that weren't covered. 1) Nuclear plants can only run as long as they have the "social capital" required. If the population decided they are uncomfortable with nuclear, the plant will end up shutting down. 2) Instead of spending money on fuel (possibly imported), a Nuclear plant spends it on salaries for well paid professionals. That money stays in the community. Purely commercial plants don't fully take this into account, but government owned/supported plants recognize the benefits.

Our rejection of Nuclear power was a massive mistake, and the environment has payed dearly for it as we continue to rely on fossil fuels for our electricity

13:20 Keep in mind that variable renewables produce additional costs due to the necessity of building up overcapacity, backup, introduction of smart grids, and so on. While it is quite cheap to produce a unit of energy using renewables, it is much more expensive to provide an average unit of energy to a consumer, that, depending on the time of the day and the weather, may come from a cheap renewable source, or from an expensive backup like hydrogen or batteries.

Short term thinking is what got us here in the first place.

I work at a nuclear power plant, and honestly it's the most amazing piece of engineering I have ever seen.

The arguments on both sides are complex and I feel that just by discussing them, it makes a difference. The conclusion that you have drawn may or may not be very accurate, but it makes us think and thats all that is needed. Just people being more aware of stuff affects their behaviour positively. Thank You for making these videos.

Awesome to see you referring to the Illinois Energy Professor. His videos are really good, and taught me loads about energy production and the economics thereof.

10:05 That's a saddening truth. Politicians only think in 5 years, as it's about them not us

0:48 France produces 71 percent of its electric energy needs from nuclear, not 61. Anyway, nice video. Please make a video on pros and cons of nuclear energy, gen 4 nuclear reactors and thorium powered nuclear reactors

Fist of all, great video! I'm always amazed by the quality of your videos, they're astonishing! Aslo, I'd like to point out that in France many reactors can throttle down their power up to 50%, as they have developed a technology that let them control the power production. So, these nuclear plants are not base station power plants, as they cover the power consuption peaks too.

Everytime again I'm impressed at how competent and with missing almost nothing or nothing important these display videos show data

"... Requires a Voter to understand..." - Oh sh***t

The Illinois EnergyProf is a criminally under-rated channel, hopefully he sees a lot of love from the community from that shout-out.

Superb narration, graphics, animations and research. Thank you.

When you realize how just how insanely complex the things that we take for granted are, and originally think is very simple

feels like a line graph with profit/loss on the y axis and years in the x axis is easier to read.

"It's competing with larger, baseload plants" Nuclear is the gold standard for baseload

I agree with part of your presentation. The French proved the small reactor factory built concept in the 1960's when they built their very successful nuclear power station grid from this type of small reactor. You mentioned how well their system works then totally ignored their model and only analyzed the bloated; HUGE one off nuclear teakettle designs they have been building here and elsewhere. These designs are kind of like redesigning a jumbo jet from scratch every time you build one: REALLY STUPID. Small modular, factory built is WAY cheaper. Small modular reactors: Liquid Fueled Thorium Molten Salt is orders of magnitude better yet. There are a number of fundamental problems of any solid fueled nuclear reactor. Nuclear fuel ALWAYS swells due to the intense radiation, reaction byproducts quickly contaminate the reaction and cannot be remove from the solid fuel, unless the fuel is recycled. Also it only allows utilization of a very small portion of the energy in the nuclear fuel (about 1-3%), requiring fuel bundle replacement in about 18 months. When the core is decommissioned you still need to store the highly radioactive waste for thousands of years. Spent fuel MUST be continuously covered in highly purified water for at least centuries to keep the fuel bundles below melting temperature. The continuous heat from the fuel, evaporates the water quickly (hundreds of gallons in a short period of time) ALL spent fuel is currently stored in pools, on site at the nuclear plant and there are no plans to recycle it as it is expensive and hard to do conventionally. Uranium is somewhat water soluble (Thorium is not), so there is a groundwater contamination concern. I used to oppose nuclear energy, mainly due to high pressure steam explosions (3 times so far) and long term storage of highly radioactive fuel for 10k+ years. I have changed my mind, but only if we build Thorium liquid fueled, Molten Salt reactors (such as LFTR) instead of the boiling water conventional reactors we have now. Currently Thorium is a waste product of a number of mining operations, is orders of magnitude more plentiful than uranium and is basically as safe as dirt (it needs conversion inside the reactor to become useful fuel, conversion takes 30 days and is free). Molten salt solves ALL of the fundamental problems of boiling water reactors, as part of their nature. They also cheaply and easily burn current stocks of used fuel rods leaving only a small residue that is safe in about 300 years. They effectively use about 95+% of the nuclear energy in the fuel. No expensive explosion proof containment structure needed, as it cannot explode (it operates at ambient air pressure). They are walk away safe (Oak Ridge Tennessee ran a molten salt reactor safely for 6,000 hours and performed walk away safe tests on it at full power in the 1960's). In fact they shut it down every weekend because no one wanted to stay. They are well suited to the SMR form factor and easily allow continuous removal of very valuable medical isotopes on an ongoing basis. These medical isotopes are impossible to remove from boiling water reactors. They also provide high temperature waste heat that can be used in many high temperature processes now, such as steel, fertilizer or concrete making, just to name a few. Desalinization of sea water on a huge scale is easy and cheap. The only remaining hurdles are some slight metals compatibility proving needed. Chemical separation is a far superior and cheaper process. The inventor of the nuclear tea kettle reactor (Alvin Weinberg) said it was fine for military use but was a very poor choice for commercial reactors, as we have seen 3 times. For many years he strongly promoted the Thorium, liquid fueled reactor as a far superior choice. Thorium is useless for making bombs which is one of the main reasons they used uranium instead back in the 1950’s. See Thorium Alliance you tube videos for a good overview. An excellent boiling water reactor problems review is a 1hr You Tube video: Nuclear Disasters & Coolants ukposts.info/have/v-deo/cICqpW6iepuauqc.html

"it takes 6 years to construct" That explains a lot right from the get-go.

It's great when CO2 production adds nothing to costs...

"Nuclear is being replaced by Renewables" Let me fix that... "Nuclear is being replaced by *Natural Gas* "

0:59 This is because Germany wont stop using coal for energy production until 2038. Hopefully this will change in the next few years.

The one sentence that makes it is: "Politicians will not build NPPs, because they can't use it to reelect themselves."

It's also amazing how much the set-up to deal with renewables varies by region. I live in a northern area with lots of hydro but almost no solar investment. For us the challenge isn't day-night fluctuation in energy; it's that hydro is insanely productive during the spring run-off in Feb-May. We have to spill over the dams because we can't use all of the electricity. But the challenge is could we store say an entire extra month of power and release it over the other months? The thinking now is that batteries wouldn't be effective at seasonal storage, and more effort is going into the production of hydrogen or synthetic methane for long term storage.

Why do people often talk about natural gas like its a renewable source of energy? I thought the plan was to rid the world of all nonrenewable energy.

People: Nuclear bad, it makes radioactive waste. Also people: setting the Earth on fire by putting a fat blanket of carbon dioxide around it.

The single biggest issue with nuclear is still, IMO, a lack of public understanding. People look at anything to do with “nuclear” or “atomic” the same way a young child looks at shadows in a dark room: They don’t understand it, and it scares them because of that.

Why did the two nuclear physcisists die? They had an odd number of uranium atoms and decided to split it even

*Economics Explained intensifies*

thanks for the video great source of information regarding economics of Nuclear Energy

thank you brother your videos are very informative:)

The most expensive part of nuclear energy is convincing the public that it is worth far more than the cost of building.

They have to decided to close down Diablo Canyon? Reason: That's Complicated = Politics

Well done evaluating the costs between the energy sources. But one thing that should be to be included is, that nuclear power plants can produce way much more than just electricity for the grid. It can produce heat for manufacturing several other products which would cut down the years to profit. A fact that is not available for gas, solar, or wind. Power generation.

2:58-3:25 you make the nuclear plant cheaper by taking a lower value instead of the average or maximum (which would also make sense because if you look at recent projects the costs are clearly increasing more rapidly than general inflation) and make the gas plant more expensive by rounding up.

Hope these smaller, modular nuclear reactors from startups pull through. That’ll make it competitive. Nuclear is still better for the environment than natural gas.

Actually, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) - the owner of Diablo Canyon - is in bankruptcy. The primary reason for this is that PG&E was found to be the cause for many of the wildfires in California in 2017, 2018, and 2019. There is a video (ukposts.info/have/v-deo/qJaGhIuNbWOHpoE.html) of this fire starting near the Geyserville Geothermal Plant that was online and transmitting power even though much of Northern California was in a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS). PG&E has publicly acknowledged that it has massively under invested in its infrastructure resulting in a dangerous environment that will take a decade or more to fix. So, using PG&E as a model for investing or making good decisions (see San Bruno pipeline explosion as another example) is a serious mistake. I am not saying that a serious company might not have made the same decision, but using PG&E as your example undermines the video.

every episode of real engineering is brought to you by Brilliant

13:17 if this factors in the far higher standard of regulation that delays and increases the cost of getting nuclear plant accepted, then it logically follows that if nuclear was more accepted and less politically toxic for illogical reasons then nuclear is actually more competitive on an even playing field. If it doesn’t then I’m just spewing hot air

I thought this was a Wendover video based off of the thumbnail.

Very important to realize there are newer reactor designs and modular designs that are much smaller and cheaper to build, and the more we build the faster and cheaper they would get. Nuclear reactor development is still in it's infancy. Looking forward to the future video on modern reactor designs. Renewables with a nuclear backbone is clearly the right choice if we are just willing to put in the work.

The video CLEARLY states it is about the Economics of Nuclear Energy, not a debate about climate impact comparisons. I feel like it handled that fairly well. They even brought up the point that these figures are based on old technology and that many more promising ones are in the pipe.

Great brief although I would suggest some key factors that seperate out renewables from energy dense plants should be acknowledged. 1) renewables require vastly more land per kilowatt of energy produced. That finite land that may otherwise be used for farming/housing/wild areas etc. In many cases the most productive land for solar and wind is also very productive for food production. Energy dense plants like nuclear use far less land, on order of magnitudes that can instead be used for economic output or returned to wild areas. 2) Renewables require vast amounts transmission lines and additional network assets like battery back up and rotating mass condensors or the like to maintain network frequency amongst many other things. These enormous costs to install, maintain and upgrade are rarely acknowledged when claiming renewables result in the cheapest power bills. 3) Network size renewable plants are often quoted by there maximum possible generation capacity. This total capacity is rarely ever reached and may only do so for 10-15% of the day. As a general rule for ever kilowatt of reliable energy production (nuclear, fossil fuel) you remove from a grid you need to replace it with 1.7 times that capacity in renewables.

Making Nuclear Reactors more standard would reduce the costs in the long run.

Real Engineering: "A nuclear power plant takes 6 years to be built" Brazilians: cry in Angra 3

Thank you for this great content

12:26 This previous Summer, CA Gov. Newsom mandated energy restrictions with respect to running air conditioners, charging electric vehicles, etc. It doesn't sound like those batteries provide a whole lot of excess (or even sufficient) energy when it's needed most.

I watched that professors lectures on the economics of nuclear energy some months ago and I’m glad that you mentioned him

"A Clean Energy Future Without Nuclear, and Other Fairy Tales for Children"

imagine what the economics of nuclear fusion would look like and you quickly realize why it will remain a pipedream

Nuclear doesn't necessarily need the ability to throttle up and down. It needs a constructive use of excess power.

Hi found a small error, time 4:35 you dollar amount had an extra zero. Your block has $56,7000,000. Great video nonetheless.

I would love to see a spot on Moltex Energy’s specific nuclear plant design in one of your future videos.

I came to this video because AsapSCIENCE mentioned it, and linked to it in their "The Biggest Lie About Nuclear Energy" video. I thought you might like to know that, as well as the fact that I am now also subscribed to your channel, and about to binge-watch every video you've posted in the past one year.

Nice to find a site discussing nuclear that isn't just pedaling propaganda for the nuclear power industry. You didn't mention that Diablo Canyon is being abandoned because it would not be profitable even though the taxpayer is assuming all costs associated with the waste problem.

Btw French Nuclear energy that was at 6gCO2/kWH dropped to 4gCO2/kWh thanks to new methods of purification ! Yay Vive la France ! 🇫🇷 🇫🇷 🇫🇷 🇫🇷 🇫🇷

0:56 in germany there has been much anti-nuclear "propaganda" and nuclear powerplants got shut down so coal was used again for some reason, saying that nuclear wasn't directly substituted with wind and solar but with a history lesson on ancient powerplant types instead Edit: please take the discussion easy, both sides are kinda right imo, even though I think nuclear is the better solution until we have fusion powerplants.

The Investment analysis is extremely simplistic. It does not state what type of Gas Plant is installed. Open Cycle or Closed Cycle. More importantly it places no value on the 60 to 80 year life time of a nuclear plant. It does not tell us the lifetime emissions of CO2 from both plants. This is very important.

Another amazing quality video

Make a video about thorium reactors and their engineering challenges

As someone that works in the energy sector, I have a few comments. One thing missing in the natural gas turbine (CT's) calculation is what is referred to as "equivalent hours of loss of life". What this is, every time you shut a CT down, and then start it up again, it suffers severe loss of life due to the heating dynamic. After a certain amount of loss of life hours, these units need to be taken out of service for inspection, this is no small feat, as the turbine needs to be exposed and inspected. Also, renewables (which include biomass, literally burning trees, which is another matter altogether) only constitutes about 11% of all installed capacity with in North America. At any one time only about 2.5% of all energy produced in North America is renewable (DOE). in the video, they mention Fukushima and show a picture of Chernobyl, but what they don't mention is the thousands of reactors that have run without incident their entire life. Thorium reactors are now being developed and are far safer than current installations and have the ability to produce more energy. I love the environment, but, am a realist, until the ability to store energy, Solar (which takes up MASSIVE amounts of real estate, and is hugely subsidized, that is why the costs look so low) and Wind (same problems as solar, not to mention the resources required to make and install them) they are not feasible. So, if you like the dark and want to go back in time, the choice is yours.

*looks at current gas prices* THIS TAKE AGED WELL!

Curious to see the simulations redone if it considers the waste handling and waste storage cost for both natural gas and nuclear. It should have some significance. Also the decomisioning and cleanup cost for a retired plant, according to their respective average ages.

Silly prejudices, anybody who excludes nuclear as an option is not serious about stopping climate change.

Help, I spilled some Economics Explained into my Real Engineering!

Well made video. Would be interesting to do a follow up on how the economics has changed with current Gas Prices, Ukraine war etc. I wonder if the economics would change if the price of electricity was calculated at the point of consumption rather than at the at the point of generation. LCOE doesn't seem to factor in grid cost. The difference being that Nuclear is part of a centralised grid and Renewables are much more widely distributed. They require much more wires and transmission lines. Where I live the cost of grid maintenance alone is 45% of my electricity cost. If you build more grid you basically guarantee me a higher price. Decentralised grids seem to be attractive to the public but consumption is not decentralised the way renewable grids are. It should also be stated that rooftop solar is double the price of utility scale solar (although again grid cost often seems to be omitted).

There is an increasing amount of attention being put towards LFTRs (Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors), a molten salt design that uses Thorium-232; as opposed to current PWRs that use Uranium-235. I hope it gets enough attention so that the distinction is made in the global discussion.

When you look at costs you have to keep in mind where that money goes... Building and maintaining a nuclear power plant is mainly going to be done by the local population [EDIT: it was rightly pointed out below that this isn't really the case in many countries, my bad, I have a fairly frenco-centric POV on the subject], and therefore will directly benefit the local economy. Whereas for gas most of the cost comes from buying the gas, and if we're not talking about a big gas producing country that money will just leave the country, and negatively affect our commercial balance. Same thing for solar, where you get those cheap prices by buying from / relocating production to countries like china where the panels are much cheaper to produce. At 13:41 you say that the reactors should be dispatchable to fit in modern grids with lots of renewables. It's already the case in France where nuclear reactors can raise and lower their load to follow the electricity demands. However that also greatly diminishes nuclear's profitability, as you produce less electricity over the life of the reactor and therefore hurt it's ability to pay itself back. As you explained a nuclear plant costs a ton to build but the fuel is cheap, so unlike gas when you lower the load you don't "save" on fuel, ideally a nuclear reactor would always be running at 100%. Nuclear and solar / wind are not a good match.

I thought I clicked on "The Economics of Nuclear War"

The output of nuclear power stations is so much more consistent than wind and solar, the sheer volume of battery storage required to guarantee renewables to power everything is ridiculously huge.

Great fact presentation. Thank you.

Real engineering had absolutely mind blowing detail in his videos. Deserves credit for the amount of research in each video! Love ya and your adorable Irish accent.

"No one size fits all approach can be used" Fusion Advocates: Just wait 25 years!

Would love to see a video discussing liquid fluoride thorium reactor. "L.F.T.R" would change the game, the investment to re establish this technology for today would be expensive but in the long run I think it is a much safer and cheaper solution to today's power needs.

Would love to see this video updated to add in Wind/Solar/Battery using Tesla's MegaPacks as basis for financial cost of storage. Also the calculation needs to include cost to decommission facilities at End Of Life and cost of pollution plus cost of military support required to ensure gas supply if you as a country don't have a domestic supply. After writing that sentence I realized the scope of work so I understand if it would not be updated. Great video though, thanks.

For nuclear to be more economic it needs bigger economies of scale: smaller reactors, standardised design, and more of them. There are a variety of situations where solar wont work and wind is fickle.

Fun fact : Solar energy is actually nuclear energy from safe distance 😆😆

I want to say that this video was great, something that I think everyone and I do mean everyone should watch. I wrote a ridiculously long reply to your Tesla battery video but one of the points i was making is how people are being influenced through politics, media, tribalism, and the "hacks" that people in power use to trick good people into doing bad things. Nuclear boogeymen, fear of meltdowns, fear of the waste, etc... while are indeed scary but with just how much promise nuclear has absolutely DEMANDS that we put our best and brightest on solving the issues as well as continue to develop world class renewable energy such as solar and wind. There are indeed some absolutely amazing new ideas in nuclear addressing all of this and more such as SMR's and other fuel technologies. Also i can't remember at the moment but there was some tech developed to deal with spent fuel in a novel and super effective way. I would love to hear what others think. Nuclear should not be abandoned, it is perhaps the single most important energy technology for humanity going forward save the holy grail of Fusion energy (good luck with that), period. Cheers!

Returning to this excellent episode after a couple of years is interesting. The small, cheaper and faster to build modular reactors developed mainly by Rolls Royce from its maritime designs will be installed in the UK far sooner than was anticipated. RR and other companies have also come a long way on even more compact modular reactors specifically designed to share sites with electricity storage facilities connected with the success of renewables. Old coal mines are being researched for these dual purpose hubs. Because lithium batteries have a cycle limit advances in molten metal, TPV, pumped hydro towers underground, hot graphite and magnesium appear to be gaining speed in tackling the abiding smooth base load problem. Further, as molten salt reactors overcome 'plumbing issues' some have expressed the idea of SMR sites possibly being used to replace the SMR modules with molten salt cores as the original SMR components wear out. The goal is to always to have enough stored energy (not necessarily as current electricity) to ensure consistent base load and fast top-up technologies can be location appropriate.

After the Megaprojects video, a video on why the Hyperloop is actually completely unfeasible would be awesome.

I still have hope for Thorium Liquid Salt Reactors

1:35 "Wind is intermittent...Needs to be propped up, and natural gas is the perfect solution for that." I disagree. Peaker plants are inefficient and very expensive. Battery storage is not only shown to be much cheaper, but the market shows it being more profitable this year in the U.S. The cost of battery storage fell to half cost this year, and is forecasted to again next year. 81% of new power generation in the U.S. is made of solar and battery storage.

It's such a pleasure to read the comments on this channel. Intelligent measured responses.

Please do a video that includes Thorium MSRs; there's been good activity in that sector for awhile

Yes my two favorite things, economics and nuclear power

Germany went with the Natural Gas option thus giving Russia their main Natural Gas supplier huge political leverage over Germany.

12:32 "That's because California is producing so much excess solar energy that buying it and storing it in batteries to sell later makes economic sense" California just got hit with a huge round of blackouts because the power grid wasn't able to meet peak demand. Evidently whatever they're doing isn't making enough economic sense to keep the power on for everyone at all times...

The case of the Diablo Canyon plant is a bit special: The mentioned improvements necessary for a license renewal are basically replacing half of the power plant and still work on the other half. The cooling system is one of the most integrated and most expensive parts of a nuclear plant and earthquake protection starts at the foundation's size and robustness of the power plant and continues from there to the reactor vessel, its supports and all pipes connecting to it or its containment. So they basically have to rebuild most of the plant without improving the efficiency for a license renewal of 20 years in a state that is not exactly friendly to nuclear power. This is an investment with almost sure loss, as it's quite uncertain to be actually running those 20 years. By the way, Rosatom does build a 1200 MW plant for 3.8 billion $ (Novovoronezh II) and a Framatome N4 is capable to change its load at a rate of 10% maximum power output per minute, outrunning the 6% of the efficient natural gas plants with exhaust heat usage by far. The german nuclear plants do follow the grid's load and Isar/Ohu 2 for example runs in frequency stabilization mode, the king of fast load-changes. The levelized costs of energy do show that nuclear is in the upper middle range of costs and that's only the case if you won't count any costs of the intermittency of solar and wind in their costs, as Lazard admits in the pdf-file of this study: www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2018/ You will find the costs of storage there, too. Storage needs for Germany are at about 77% of the energy of wind and about 90% of solar. The german electricity prices are the highest in the world and that's mainly because of the subsidies tax for renewables (EEG-Umlage) and the costs of major grid changes to account for the intermittency of renewables. These costs are excluded in the LCOE while nuclear has to pay for all it's costs, eg. disposal of toxic waste, that renewable's production dumps somewhere in the landscape.

A very important fact that is forgotten here is indeed: the electricity market. When capacities (gas, nuclear, coal, wind) have been built, the plants that can produce electricity against the lowest marginal costs will actually supply to the grid. Currently, due to the low fuel costs of nuclear it has the lowest marginal costs. But wind and solar have almost no marginal costs (no fuel or other variable costs), so this means that when the sun shines or wind blows (=in most countries often) nuclear plants will be outcompeted in electricity mixes with high penetration of solar and wind (which a lot of countries have planned in the future) and their revenues (based on running hours) will be way lower than in this video and payback period around 40-60 years. Thats why no commercial party wants to invest in those plants, only governments themselves could. Further: - interest rate of 3% is very low for such riskful investments (which has a lot of impact on such a long payback period, thats why building plants is only possible with large help of the government) - after the lifetime of the plant a lot of costs are involved to dismantle the plant

This is really excellent analysis for an estimate. Well done!

11:20 *pg&e balks at the cost of infrastructure modernization* californians: _"hey, i've seen this one!"_

The Levelized Cost of Electricity metric is skewed in favor of methods like solar as it doesn’t take into account the storage infrastructure needed to make solar and wind viable. Like mentioned in the start of the video, the ability of sources like natural gas to generate on-demand electricity and operate when demand and prices are higher makes it preferable in many ways.

Well done.Exellent explanation

3:29 I know that place! It's just a few miles from my house! That's Mount Timpanogos in the background!

You forgot to talk about the decommission cost, which is very high for nuclear power plants.

Been watching your videos for a while now. Thank you for all the effort. It's certainly making the world a better place, one mind at a time.

Great work Sir thank you

I think you need to look into SMRs (Small Modular Reactor) which is one of the ways they have planed to reduce cost. These much smaller reactors are much easier and cheaper to build and are their own closed systems that can be put inside a bigger pool of water. These reactors might not be as effective as the normal ones but they are way much cheaper and more secure. The control rods will be hung up over the reactor by electro-magnets so in the event of a power loss they will be automatically lowered to stop the nuclear fission. Theses power plants can be built in the same time as the nattural gas plant can and can even be uppscalled easily if more effect is needed.

This might be hard to include in the calculations, but you also have to take into account the environmental impact. It is great that nuclear is used closed-system water, but natural gas is far from being a closed system without side-effects to the open nature.