Posted by leonidasrup 7 hours ago
Honestly, so long as the water table isn't too close, that's not a terrible place to put a nuclear reactor.
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Switzerland also studied nuclear weapons production until 1988:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_and_weapons_of_mas...
If the Swiss thought it was in the national interest to exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and crash-develop a nuclear deterrent, I think that they could achieve nuclear breakout quickly.
Nuclear is vastly more expensive per MWh than renewables. It's better than pumping stuff out the ground sure, but that's about it.
It can't cope with peaks. It has to generate the same power 24/7 to be anywhere near economical at two-three times the cost of solar+storage, so it either needs massive storage or massive overprovision
Lets say you have a peak demand of say 40GW but average demand of 600GWh a day (25GW), or 219TWh a year
Lets also say you have to shut down a plant for a week a year for maintenence
You need to build five, 10GW plants to meet your demand.
They provide 5 * 10GW * 24 hours * 7 days * 51 weeks or 428TWh.
If nuclear is $110 per MWh, that means it's going to cost you $47b a year to generate your power requirement, or $215 per MWh
So you're needing to roll out storage, same as you do for wind and solar, or spend twice as much on overproducing.
Switzerland, unlike the USA, seems capable of safely operating these plants, and with advances in breeder technology new plants doesn't nessecarily mean new mining operations, which often are quite harsh on the surrounding area.
I would have said that about the Japanese as well…