I agonized over this one. The Gordian Knot News needs to avoid pushing any particular design. But ThorCon's experience in Korea has important wider implications, so I bent that rule into a pretzel in this piece. This piece also introduces the naive LCOE terminology. Naive LCOE is just the standard Levelized Cost of Electricity, a metric which made some sense when you are comparing two dispatchable sources. But naive LCOE is almost meaningless in evaluating intermittent sources. Therefore, we need a warning adjective when people start throwing around LCOE's.
Great article. Even more detail than ThorCon's website. We don't have to guess at the cost less than $1500 / kW. From the ThorCon website: "The shipyard estimate supports our estimates that ThorCon power plants can be mass produced by shipyards at costs of $800/kW to $1000/kW." This is a bit lower than the $1200 / kW on their spec sheet, but I assume the former is ThorCon's cost, and the latter is what they would like a power company to pay. I wish all companies would be this transparent. The silly debate over cost seems now to be the main sticking point for anti-nukers. I used to say "If a vendor offers a product you want at a price you like, don't argue, place an order." Now, I have to provide links to ThorCon's page on economics, and they still argue. I say "Show me where is the error in their estimate.", and that ends the discussion, for a week or two until it is forgotten, then the same anti-nuker is back with the same argument. FaceBook forums are a game of whack-a-mole.
As editor at Citizendium, I also want to avoid pushing any one design, but ThorCon is the only company that has provided details on their design, enough to write a good article answering all the questions in our parent article Nuclear Power Reconsidered. ThorCon is actually not my personal favorite, but I can't get details on the one I think will win the prize.
This is the should cost- very relevant for the here and now. For the future I am more interested in the “could” cost. How low can we go? If we can get to 0.5 ¢/kWh then we open up so many new avenues for cost effective energy that would really give us flying cars and all of the awesome future things sci-fi promised us.
Fantastic piece. Yet Germany has closed its nukes while literally buldozing towns to mine more coal.
Great article. Even more detail than ThorCon's website. We don't have to guess at the cost less than $1500 / kW. From the ThorCon website: "The shipyard estimate supports our estimates that ThorCon power plants can be mass produced by shipyards at costs of $800/kW to $1000/kW." This is a bit lower than the $1200 / kW on their spec sheet, but I assume the former is ThorCon's cost, and the latter is what they would like a power company to pay. I wish all companies would be this transparent. The silly debate over cost seems now to be the main sticking point for anti-nukers. I used to say "If a vendor offers a product you want at a price you like, don't argue, place an order." Now, I have to provide links to ThorCon's page on economics, and they still argue. I say "Show me where is the error in their estimate.", and that ends the discussion, for a week or two until it is forgotten, then the same anti-nuker is back with the same argument. FaceBook forums are a game of whack-a-mole.
As editor at Citizendium, I also want to avoid pushing any one design, but ThorCon is the only company that has provided details on their design, enough to write a good article answering all the questions in our parent article Nuclear Power Reconsidered. ThorCon is actually not my personal favorite, but I can't get details on the one I think will win the prize.
This is the should cost- very relevant for the here and now. For the future I am more interested in the “could” cost. How low can we go? If we can get to 0.5 ¢/kWh then we open up so many new avenues for cost effective energy that would really give us flying cars and all of the awesome future things sci-fi promised us.