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Originally Posted by D as in David
I have a friend who is an executive at a large O&G company and is in charge of a project looking into developing a nuclear power facility in western Canada. He says their estimates currently are showing a 10+ year time frame and over $12B to complete a SMR facility. If they're right, nuclear is ways off from being a solution.
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Yeah, there's a reason why new nuclear is barely happening outside of countries with very low labor costs. If you add up all the nuclear generating capacity that's currently under construction or planned in first world countries (EU, North America, advanced economies in Asia, etc.) it's only about 35,000 MW of generating capacity. And a good chunk of that is adding reactors to existing facilities, which is obviously simpler and cheaper than building entirely new facilities. So that's a pretty good idea of the amount of nuclear capacity coming down the pipeline in industrialized countries over the next 10-15 years and it's a drop in the bucket.
Nuclear is a great solution if people are OK with much higher energy prices, but based on peoples' reaction to the carbon tax, I'm not sure that's realistic.