Uranium is $128.30/kg
After enrichment, conversion and fabrication that’s $3400/kg for 4.95% fuel.
At 36-45MWd/kg and a net thermal efficiency of 25% or $12.5/MWh up front.
With a 90 month lead time (72 month fuel cycle and 18 months inventory) at 3% this is $16.2/MWh
Don’t like facts getting in the way of juicy greenwashing lies hey.
Renewables can’t be used without the same amount of storage full stop. 3 days is the standard minimum. Their isn’t enough lithium in the world let alone money to make it feasible.
So back on planet earth. Storage is an inescapable necessity for renewables conveniently left out.
Let’s assume that wasn’t at least two different lies (here is an example of an irder of magnitude less) and take it at face value that there isn’t enough lithium.
The current scale of the battery industry is roughly 1TWh/yr of production (with 3TWh/yr where the contracts are already dry).
A 72 hour storage means feeding the load the batteries supply takes at least 14GW (much more if it’s non-uniform).
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/reactors.html#tab=status;status=C;grid--prevStart=2023,2024
Looks like whatever the batteries are being used for, the current nuclear industry can neither replace them nor can it charge them.
Now onto the assertion that the current largest-growing technology is the only possible thing that can be used, and no new resource can be found.
~22 million tonnes of lithium each kg good for a ~10kWh battery, or enough for 220TWh of batteries or 0.8EJ
6-8 million tonnes of uranium 100-140GJ of electricity per kg of natural uranium.
All of the uranium can charge batteries made from all of the lithium roughly 1000 times! So a whole 8 years of doing whatever the batteries are for.
On a 6 year fuel cycle (normal for a Gen III reactor) each kg of uranium outputs rougjly 750W over its life so there’s 4.5-6TW. That’s enough for a 72 hour cycle, but not much shorter, and not if there’s any variation from average load.
Current retail price of consumer ready batteries is $280/kWh for a plug and play unit or $20/W for 72 hour storage (same as vogtle or ol3). Commodity price is $110.
Oh look, the idea that storage is being ignored or is not up to some task that can be achieved with LWRs is another fatuous lie.