Some key insights from the article:
Basically, what they did was to look at how much batteries would be needed in a given area to provide constant power supply at least 97% of the time, and the calculate the costs of that solar+battery setup compared to coal and nuclear.
That is the main criticism of nuclear, it should hopefully get better with Westinghouse’s AP1000 receiving full approval and being built all across China so as long as we continue to use the same design it can start to be mass produced instead of making all the parts as one offs that are much more expensive and time consuming
Vogtle added 2 AP1000 reactors for $35 billion. Future deployments might be cheaper, but there’s a long way to go before it can compete with pretty much any other type of power generation.
They had to switch halfway through which is what added the cost that’s not a realistic cost per reactor
Ok, current projections are still for the next two AP1000s at Vogtle to be something like $10 billion. That’s just not cost competitive with solar/wind. And it’s also not very realistic to assume that there won’t be cost overruns on the next one, either. Complex engineering projects tend to run over.
Next two? After you mentioned it I tried googling and can’t find anything about current projections for new AP1000s at vogtle.